woman artist — Blog posts analysing famous paintings.

Go On, Go On, Thou Glorious Girl

I’m not usually a fan of paintings of battles. For me, they nearly always look like the least believable pieces on the museum wall. Yet since antiquity, artists have been bashing away at them energetically. For understandable reasons. Nowhere is life more precariously or vividly lived than on a battlefield. From Apelles in the 4th century BC through to Renaissance heavyweights like Leonardo and Michelangelo and on in to modernity, countless painters have tried to turn out compositions that do justice to the maelstrom, scale and energy of raw war. Most attempt it only once and never go back. That’s because it never works out so good. Battles are just too chaotic to lend themselves well to naturalistic art. It’s impossible to fit their turbulent physicality, their ugliness, their peculiarly mundane realities and their mind-warping horror into a design that’s going to appeal to the human eye. For that reason, the best war artists, you’ll notice, tend to do the befores and afters. They skip the noisy, nasty bit in the middle. We can’t blame them either. But from time to time someone comes along who gives the cage a really good rattle. One such person was called Elizabeth Thompson or Mimi as she sometimes preferred. This hell for leather charge across the battlefield of Waterloo painted in 1881 is her best known work. It’s called ‘Scotland Forever’ and can be found in the Leeds Art Gallery in Yorkshire.

Elizabeth, Mimi, or Lady Butler as she became upon her marriage, is a fascinating figure. During the 1870s she was in the front rank of English painters. She was in her twenties and had taken the London art scene by storm. In 1874, over the course of a couple of months, she went from being known by hardly anyone to superstar artist. In an age that long predated the insane investment driven art markets we have now, she was commanding sky-high prices equal to several hundred thousand pounds per picture today. Engravers wrote cheques for similar sums to get the right to print her works. The prints were sought and bought across the nation in huge numbers. Newspapers noted how Elizabeth could pull unprecedented crowds to a Royal Academy show with a single painting. These pieces were often purchased beforehand on the strength of preparatory sketches, without her even picking up a brush. Her face was known to all. Photographers, keen to cash in on her popularity, had her sit for publicity shots like this one. A quarter of a million of these sold. They could be seen everywhere: in shop windows and, as Elizabeth dryly observed in her memoirs, amongst the bananas on street sellers’ carts. She was a forerunner of the modern overnight celebrity. She was a phenomenon. And, boy, did she have talent.

These days, however, if you Google ‘famous female painters’, Elizabeth is somewhere towards the back of the list of fifty who are suggested in the strap-line of thumbnails at the top of the search results. Try ‘famous female artists’ and you’ll draw a blank, even though seven or eight contemporaries she towered over are there. Worse, on Wikipedia’s ‘List of British Painters’ she makes no appearance among the 400 or so indexed names (today’s date being 15/10/2018). We expect the internet to be a patchy source, so perhaps there’s not much to be read into these omissions. But the truth is she barely features in the art history books that chronicle her time. Even academically minded feminists, who are usually so energetic in their efforts to rehabilitate the standing of forgotten female artists, have practically nothing to say when it comes to Elizabeth. There are two exceptions of note in modernity, who have each tried to bring her artistry to the general public’s attention. The first is Germaine Greer, who gave Thompson a brief albeit thoughtful three page bump in her 1979 account of women painters, The Obstacle Race. The second is the excellent Jo Devereux who put together a strong and meaty chapter on Elizabeth in her 2016 book on women artists in Victorian England. That’s it. Otherwise, on the rare occasions she gets a mention in a journal or article, she’s inevitably being press-ganged into the service of axe-grinders who use the fact she was rejected for membership of the Royal Academy to flesh out criticisms of society’s treatment of women in the 1800s. They rarely bother to consider her paintings. If we dip into Elizabeth’s memoirs to get a flavour of her character, it is clear that being treated as a political football like this would have distressed her much more than being forgotten.

But it gets worse. In most quarters, Elizabeth doesn’t even get credit for her own thoughts and passions. Many of the brief biographical snippets out there inform us that she became a war painter thanks to a visit to Paris in her mid twenties during which she was influenced by the works of French artists in that genre. Some cook up even greater fabrications. They suggest she took up this kind of painting less out of personal preference and more as a ruse to gain acceptance in an art world teeming with Jurassic chauvinists. Both of these claims are rubbish. The evidence against them can be found in abundance in Elizabeth’s autobiography and her teenage sketch books. It’s quite clear the young Miss Thompson was brimming with interest in war, men and soldiers from her earliest days. Her account of a visit she made in her late teens to the 50 year old battlefield at Waterloo borders on the spiritual. She speaks of walking ‘through ghosts with agonised faces and distorted bodies, crying noiselessly’. She goes on to write: ‘Oh! This place of slaughter, of burning, of burying alive, this place of concentrated horror! It was there that I most felt the sickening terror of war, and that I looked upon it from the dark side, a thing I have seldom had so strong an impulse to do before.’ Anyone who thinks these are the words of a woman whose focus on war was a wearisome pretence intended to mollify white-whiskered misogynists needs their head examined. This is as sincere and deeply held a passion as we could hope to see. Elizabeth expressed it best when she described herself as impregnated with ‘the warrior spirit in art’. I don’t doubt her for a second. It’s a pity others do.

Artists’ biographies are secondary in these posts. My focus when I write is on individual paintings, not the people behind them. I try to rummage through their meanings with you, and point out that there are usually interesting messages lurking in plain view, if we just spend some time looking for them. We check in on the artist’s life only when it clarifies incidents on the canvas. But Lady Elizabeth Thompson Butler is a special case. It’s not right that she’s been forgotten like this. She deserves better. So I thought we’d get to grips with a few of her paintings rather than one. This should help her artistic voice to emerge more fully. Most of you will not have seen these before. But they’re well worth a look. For me, each of them has been superbly handled, even if they’re not always to my taste. We won’t go for our usual deep dive approach. We’ll instead cover just enough to get a sense of Elizabeth’s strengths. Hopefully, by the time we end, you’ll feel this is an artist worthy of some admiration. You’ll also, I suspect, see why she’s an awkward fit for the cookie cutter gender politics that scholars these days often like to apply to female artists of the past. Elizabeth is a square peg in a landscape of round holes. Sadly, it seems unlikely to me she’ll be rescued from obscurity by the people who do the landscaping.

‘The Roll Call’ - 1874 - Royal Collection St James Palace - Oil on Canvas

The painting that first pushed Elizabeth into the limelight was The Roll Call. These days it can be found in the Royal Collection in St James Palace. It was exhibited in the Royal Academy’s 1874 show and was a revelation. The scene is set in the Crimea twenty years before. A colonel in a ragged great coat clops along a line of Grenadier Guards. Both man and beast look worn out. So do the troops. They don’t form a parade ground straight line. Far from it. They’re utterly spent. They have been pushed to the point of total physical and spiritual exhaustion. It’s clear they’ve been in a fight. Most are nursing injuries. One has collapsed. A sergeant to the left of centre is taking the roll, and we have to assume there will be names that can’t be accounted for. There is a solitary visual reference to the enemy: a Russian ‘pickelhaube’ helmet lying askew on some bloodstained snow with its ball shaped finial broken off. In the background, on their flag-staffs, the Grenadiers’ colours are just visible against a gloomy, cold sky. They are not fluttering proudly on the winds of heroism. Instead, they, like the men, are grimy, limp and lifeless. In the background on the right, we can see in the distance what looks like the drab wreckage of battle. Much more ominous is the flock of birds in the sky; the carrion that inevitably follow in the wake of slaughter. Elizabeth used this motif in a few of her paintings and it never fails to impress me. When she’s on song, she has an extraordinary knack for showing without telling.

Here are some of the things we don’t see. There is no dashing captain leading his devoted followers. There is no dynamic motion. There is no pomp or splendour. No plumes stream, no eyes glint with resolve, no muscles coil. But for the horse, hardly a figure stirs more than an inch. She achieves this stillness in a very straightforward fashion. A few minor horizontal features in the background and foreground play second fiddle to the much bigger horizontal arrangement of men. It gives the impression of everything being settled and fixed firmly to the spot. However, all these undisturbed left to rights and right to lefts are well outside the normal conventions of design. 99% of decent painters wouldn’t go near them. Without a clear diagonal somewhere, they can too easily make a picture look lifeless, dull and rigid, as if painted by an amateur.

But Elizabeth escapes this fate. She uses her horizontals to leech all the movement from the composition, but then includes just enough variety and rhythm to bring it back from the brink. Bearskins tilt on heads, the colonel breaks the horizon, an outstretched hand pats the back of a shattered young man’s head, and so on. She breaks up the monolithic look with a few well chosen variations. The same approach is taken with her colours. The blacks, greys and dirty whites she uses, dominate so uniformly that they threaten to suck the life out of the canvas. But she deploys some restrained splashes of red here and there to keep things from going too far. There’s tremendous balance and poise here. There’s a clear sense of purpose and some very simple, intelligent and unorthodox design. It’s a great piece of painting. For an artists in their mid twenties, it’s exceptional.

A surprisingly large portion of the colossal audience that turned up to see this piece at the RA, would have spotted her clever innovations. The Victorians were strong on understanding art. But what really grabbed everyone was Elizabeth’s fidelity to life and her focus on the ordinary soldier. This was a painting of tremendous realism that was concerned with the lowest on the ladder not the highest, that recorded the difficulty of war not the glory, that valued the vulnerable just as much as the heroic. These sentiments happened to overlap with an attitude in Britain that the men of the army had been let down and poorly led in Crimea. Elizabeth’s timing was impeccable. Her finger was on the pulse. But she was no cynical opportunist. In preparing for the painting she had researched her subject matter in much the same way the best historical writers do. Every detail on the canvas had been checked and double checked with veterans of the Crimean war. She was determined to be true to their experience.

Only one mistake was made. The helmet she first painted in the right foreground was Prussian, not Russian. But on varnishing day in the RA, a week before the public were admitted to the annual show, she got her brushes out and fixed the error. Absolutely nothing had been left to chance. Her immersion was so complete that she had imagined a back story for every man she painted. The Royal Academy knew this was a firecracker of a picture. They gave it an excellent position in an excellent room. The Roll Call was hung ‘on the line’, which is to say at eye level where people could get close, rather than somewhere near the ceiling. Soldiers who saw the work were bowled over. Others found themselves in tears before it. In no time at all, a tug of war broke out between the man who had commissioned the piece and Queen Victoria as to who might keep it after the show. The winner of that brawl was never in doubt.

‘Quatre Bras’ - 1875 - National Gallery of Victoria, Australia - Oil on Canvas

The Roll Call was one of those war paintings that falls into the ‘afters’ category I mentioned at the start. But now, with a serious reputation cemented and money to burn, Elizabeth could try another approach. She started designing this picture. It’s called ‘Quatre Bras’ after the battlefield where it’s set. You can see it in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in Oz. It depicts a scene from one of two preliminary battles that led into the apocalyptic showdown at Waterloo a couple of days later between Napoleon and Wellington. I have to be honest here. There are some elements in this picture that don’t tally with my tastes. There’s just a bit too much illustration for me to feel entirely at ease – think of the look of a movie poster from the 40s or 50s. A lot of this is probably down to the unbelievable difficulties Elizabeth faced in trying to make this sort of subject matter work plausibly on a canvas. Nonetheless, her ambition and her ability to design her way out of an impossible situation are staggeringly brilliant. I’m careful not to deal in ultimates in these threads, but I’ve a strong hunch this is the best painting ever done of a group of soldiers in action. I certainly can’t think of one that tops it.

What we are looking at is the corner of an infantry square. This strange looking arrangement was considered the best way for men on foot to defend themselves against much speedier, heavier cavalry. The idea was to form an impregnable perimeter with four sides. The front ranks would kneel and plant their bayonet capped muskets like spears towards the enemy while those behind them would fire. Rigid discipline and granite nerves were required for this configuration to do its work. If anyone lost their resolve or hesitated, it could easily allow a gap to open in the wall. Experienced cavalry would be through that in the blink of an eye. Whenever a square was opened in this way, it had been curtains for almost everyone involved.

It didn’t help that once you settled 500 men in this formation, they made an easy target for enemy cannons. Squares were regularly shredded to smithereens in this fashion while the cavalry kept the unfortunate men rooted to the spot by menacing them from nearby. It was eyeball to eyeball, gruesome stuff. Hands would shake so much that many struggled to load their muskets. In their panic, soldiers would leave the ramming rods in the barrel of their weapon after loading it, and fire them like clumsy harpoons. But not on this occasion. It’s a summer evening in 1816 in Belgium. The men of the 28th Regiment of Foot are out of the cannons’ sight, hidden in the tall rye that grows in the field they occupy. For the last two hours they’ve been mercilessly hounded and hunted by the French heavy cavalry. They’ve withstood a hurricane of charging steel. Now they are seeing off the last assault. The end is in sight.

Elizabeth was very clear about what she wanted to achieve with this painting. She explained to an artist friend that her idea was to depict ‘the hot blackened faces, the set teeth or gasping mouths, the bloodshot eyes, and the mocking laughter, the stern, cool, calculating look here and there; the unimpressionable, dogged stare.’ She had always been plain that it was her intention not to glorify war, but to ‘portray its pathos and heroism.’ An important distinction, for sure. This is an unfashionable sentiment these days. But it’s easy for us to be dismissive. We aren’t used to our towns and fields being emptied as swathes of neighbours and acquaintances are conscripted and sent abroad to face the most terrifying military machine of the age and the most relentless general in history. The odds weren’t looking great for these chaps when they set off to face Napoleon and the Grande Armée. But they set off nonetheless. For someone of Elizabeth’s temperament, their bravery demanded a generous response. Her thoughts, once more, turned to the nameless man who made up the ranks. She was determined she would do justice to him. No small challenge. But Elizabeth was no small artist.

Research came first. She read Napier’s two thousand page history of The Peninsular War from start to finish. Then came hand studies. She wanted to master the white knuckle grip with which men clung to their muskets in a fight. To help her in this, she was taught how to load and handle the heavy ‘Brown Bess’ musket. Thanks to her new reputation, Elizabeth had the unstinting co-operation of the army. 300 men of the Royal Engineers were posed for her in square and shot volleys so that she could study them in the smoke of gunfire. From these men, the Scots Fusilier Guards and the police, she picked out models to come to her studio. The correct uniforms which had long since been ditched, were re-commissioned from army outfitters, and dyes which had fallen out of use were recreated to keep everything as authentic as possible.

She bought a patch of un-harvested rye in a field and with some help flattened it underfoot to get an accurate sense of the surface on which the 28th had knelt in Belgium. Then it was off to the circus, where specially trained horses mimicked for her the motions of foundering as if shot. She tore through this preparatory phase with the energy and zeal of a woman possessed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was left unexamined. All the time, she developed a preliminary cartoon that was to be her guide when she began to paint. As this phase came to an end, she disappeared for a fortnight to Paris for a change of scene. Returning refreshed, she looked with a new eye at the cartoon. She was disheartened at how much work remained if she was to make the composition work. But an admiring letter was waiting for her too. It’s opening line couldn’t have been more appropriate: ‘Go on, go on, thou glorious girl!’ Elizabeth tells us she found this ‘very cheering.’

There are so many emotions on display here, it’s hard to know where to start. Look closely and you’ll see it all: firmness, resolve, focus, urgency, uncertainty, startlement and strangely out of place humour. This last is perhaps the most striking of the lot. The boy throwing his head back in laughter and the smirking character behind his shoulder look like they’d be better suited to a scene in a pub. But Elizabeth’s research was spot on. The overwhelming relief upon sensing the turn of the tide was often expressed by goading and jeering the enemy. She painted these emotions on the faces of the three youngest characters in the picture. The more experienced heads, tellingly, aren’t taking anything for granted.

Once again, she gave each figure a name and built in her mind a personal back-story for everyone present. One of the youngsters, she tells us, she called ‘Gamin’. It’s an antiquated word for a street orphan that has long since fallen out of use. Elizabeth was well aware of the miserable circumstances that pushed these kids into battle. But they weren’t the only ones to be treated harshly by fortune. Bodies are scattered at the blood-spattered boots of the kneeling men. Some are their own, some are the enemy. Two Cuirassiers of the French heavy cavalry frame the composition right and left. One has just been shot point blank from his saddle by four redcoats whose muskets spit fire. His lance tipped with the colours of France flies from his hand. The other is pinned under his horse. No one spares him so much as a glance. Without a mount, he’s no threat to the square. Save the shot for something more pressing.

There are buckets of details like these spread across the picture that are the result of Elizabeth’s tireless investigations into the exact nature of how soldiers were expected to perform in battle. She writes of how she agonised over the fashion in which the front rank would kneel to present their bayonets. She undertook big revisions to ensure knees and feet were arranged accurately. Then she studied how they would grip their firearms. Look at how the lower hand of each man rests behind his trigger guard, and how the trigger always faces sideways to the soldier’s right. There is only one exception: left of the centre, a pale, wounded chap who pulls himself back into the line. Elsewhere, we can see on the right a figure biting through his powder cartridge as he prepares to reload – a very authentic observation. Then there is the precise, controlled form of the standing soldier at the near corner of the square. His lips curl with stubborn resolve as he tamps a new load with his ramrod, calm in the turmoil. Behind him an officer points out with his sword something off-picture to a seasoned sergeant. The sergeant looks an unflappable type; the sort of personality you wanted at the corner of a square where things were most likely to go badly wrong.

This off-picture focus is everywhere we look. It helps us to grasp there are dangers all around. It’s typical of the show not tell approach Elizabeth favoured at this stage of her career. Many of the men stare out over us. This is a well considered device that helps to put us right there in the thick of it. The battle is not safely contained on the canvas, it’s rolling around us too. Yet as we look on, the most powerful impression we’re given is the togetherness of these men. No one looks nervously to the guys on either side to make sure they’re doing their job. Everyone is in unison. A small pocket of human beings bonded with each other and performing as one in terrible danger and chaos. It is not for no reason that we are shown them in the tricky collaborative form of the square. There is a lot more we could say about how the painting was designed. But we have to move on. We shall leave it there and simply point out that when Quatre Bras went on show at the RA, just like The Roll Call, it drew massive crowds. Elizabeth was touching a chord deep in Britain’s psyche.

‘Balaclava’ - 1876 - City of Manchester Art Gallery - Oil on Canvas

The next canvas we’re going to look at is this one. It’s called ‘Balaclava’. It can be found in the Manchester Art Gallery. It was exhibited privately a year after Quatre Bras as Elizabeth missed the deadline for the RA’s annual show by a month. This painting had a very different emphasis to what she had done before. By now we know not to expect triumph or glory in Elizabeth’s work. But here, there isn’t even a spark of the defiant spirit we see in Quatre Bras. This is plain wreckage, shock and pain. Many people thought it Elizabeth’s finest work. She had dived headlong into a controversial incident that took place twenty years before during the Crimean War. It was an event that stunned and saddened the nation in equal measure. The memory of it was still vivid. You’ve possibly heard of the charge of the Light Brigade, or the six hundred, or Tennyson’s poem with its grim phrase, ‘Into The Valley of Death.’ This is the aftermath of that episode. It’s the moment where those who escaped with their lives scrambled off that same valley floor into the safety of the surrounding heights. These are the survivors of a massacre brought about by incompetence.

In a nutshell, the Light Brigade had charged the wrong enemies, in the wrong place and in the wrong way. In fact, what they did was so spectacularly wrong that the Russian gunners they set out to attack couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Six hundred men and horses attempted a preposterous frontal assault on half the Russian army. As they covered the mile that lay between them and their enemy, their opponents thought they must be a mob of deranged alcoholics who’d been at the bottle all morning. It was the only explanation that seemed to make sense of their behaviour. The Light Brigade had plunged into a valley lined with enemy cannons on either side and in front. As they went, the whole fireworks show exploded murderously at them. A survivor described it as riding through the mouth of a volcano. By the time they got to their target, they were in a very bad way and were surrounded. They fought desperately in the expectation that a friendly back up wave would arrive in moments and bolster them. But it never came. Their goose was cooked. The only way out was to take the same unpleasant route back. It was a disaster. And a scandal. What on earth had happened?

Poorly phrased and unclear written orders were given to the Light Brigade. Personal grudges between two cavalry commanders (neither of whom had a reputation for their intellectual machinery) didn’t help. As they sat hesitating in a state of mutual ill will and passive aggression, a new and clumsier verbal order was barked at them by an arriving messenger keen to get things moving. This man, it transpired, was a hothead. When asked – not unreasonably - where exactly they were supposed to attack, he gestured impatiently at the strongest Russian position on the field, not the much weaker one that was actually intended. Eyebrows were raised and mutterings emerged from unyielding Victorian moustaches. But orders were orders. ‘Theirs not to reason why; Theirs but to do and die.’ And die they did. Within twenty minutes, forty percent of the Light Brigade were casualties. This catastrophe did wonders for the reputation of the ordinary British cavalry man - there could be no doubting his suicidal bravery. It did rather less for the reputation of those in charge, all of whom had an excuse as to why it wasn’t their fault. The general public was aghast. Newspapers wouldn’t let the issue drop. Many felt the calamity was emblematic of shoddy leadership. Two decades later, the issue was still alive. It was inevitable that Elizabeth would turn her hand to it.

There are, in my opinion, some very moving dramas in this painting. No one within it is unscathed. Take a few moments to look at the horses. In the background, one is collapsing under its rider. Another looks to be dying while a soldier tries to comfort it. Those closer to us look terrorised. Their ears are back, heads are down, tongues loll, eyes bulge, hooves drip blood. What’s happened to them is awful. The men aren’t doing very well either. One of them has been blinded. Others are shell-shocked, or being tended to by friends – the pair on the worn out chestnut horse are especially poignant. On the right, a dead soldier lies on the ground. He clutches his gut while his other hand is balled into a tight fist. This is someone who has died in agony. Hints of chaos and carnage are there in smaller details too. Look closely at the mounted figure on the left. He’s lost a boot. There are also the ominous battlefield birds who make an encore appearance to remind us of what is lying out of sight. But it is the solitary figure a little off centre in the picture who Elizabeth really wants us to notice. Everyone else forms a clearing around him. He is isolated in a way that others in the painting are not. He is called to by his companions who hold out helping hands. Their efforts are pointless though. No words can reach him. His wide-eyed vacant stare is utterly harrowing. He has the rigid posture of a human being trapped in a moment they can’t escape. We are seeing a broken mind here. Elizabeth is showing us the survivor who hasn’t really survived. He is the universal casualty of all wars in all ages. It is a powerful piece of painting.

‘Balaclava’ was the darkest thing Elizabeth ever did. If there was any heroism to it, it was the fragile heroism of people trying to endure the consequences of the unendurable. Not for the first time, a picture of hers drew tears from some of those who attended the show. A Crimean veteran remarked that he wouldn’t have come to see it if he had known beforehand how close to reality it was. Another described how once, after a battle, a devastated soldier had leant against his horse just as a figure on the left in the painting does. Given what we know of her meticulous research, I’m sure Elizabeth would have taken these remarks as evidence of a job well done. But I sense she also felt she had gone as deep as she could go. She never again explored the hurt and misery of battle with the same intensity. I think this painting exhausted that reservoir. She was soon married to an officer from Ireland. A new life involving six children and a great deal of travel inevitably left less time for the easel. The canvases she produced over the next few years didn’t have the concentrated power of before. She had never been a cheerleader for the empire, but her attitudes towards it began to grow much more ambivalent. Britain was at war again. Her soldiers marched against Zulus, Xhosa, Egyptians, Afghans and Boers. The public wanted – perhaps needed - to see pictures of them triumphing not suffering. Elizabeth’s work began to fall out of fashion. She would remain active, off and on, until 1929. But her last great canvas, for me at least, was done in 1881, five years after ‘Balaclava’.

‘Scotland Forever’ - 1881 - Leeds Art Gallery - Oil on Canvas

‘Scotland Forever’ is the most energetic of Elizabeth’s paintings. She tells us it was begun in a fit of annoyance. She had been to an exhibition of the ‘Aesthetes’. This was a group who prioritised Beauty in a way that was, in Elizabeth’s view, too trivial and decorative; a collective of pretentious twits producing pretty work that had no weight. She made her way around the show in a state of vexed exasperation until she could take no more. She stormed off to her studio, pinned up a 7ft length of butcher’s paper, and started hammering out a vigorous drawing that became the basis for the painting. The idea had been in her mind for some time. In fact, it’s hard not to see its central elements in a drawing she did of a riderless horse race in Rome as a teenager ten years before. This event was called the ‘Barberi’. It made quite an impression on the young Elizabeth. The description she penned of it is filled with wildness and violence. She was struck by the raw kinetic power the animals unleashed in their crazed sprint. Even after sixty years, she tells us how vividly she can recall the colour and movement of the spectacle. The latter of these qualities was something that had always interested her artistically. In this picture, she set out to give it its fullest expression.

In her memoirs, Elizabeth describes a couple of occasions where she stood in front of a mock charge of cavalry. Most were at military pageants or displays. But one or two were arranged privately so as to be more up close and personal. The first of these put the fear of God into her. She dashed to the side convinced she was about to be pulped. The second saw her stand her ground until the horses skidded to a halt two yards away, spraying her with slewed up debris. Now, with a new painting in mind, she could refer to her memories of those charges and her Barberi sketch for some guidance. As ever, Elizabeth was determined to get as close as possible to stepping into the shoes of the men who had to face these spectacles in war. As she did with Quatre Bras, she set up the picture so that its action reaches out towards the viewer. The angled furrows in the ploughed field over which the charge takes place make it seem that the painting is spilling out onto us – a neat use of perspective. The thrust of the furrows is loosely echoed by most of the brandished swords. The horses roughly follow these lines, although not so strictly as to look contrived. This has the effect of placing us right up close to everything.

But it doesn’t stop there. Elizabeth has a very unusual trick up her sleeve to cement our proximity to the charge. While the men look past us at an enemy we can sense but not see, many of the horses are instead staring at us. There’s no mistaking the direction of those straining equine eyes. This is one of the most unusual innovations I’ve ever seen from a top end painter. We’re used to people making direct eye contact with us from within a picture, but not a group of animals at full pelt. Once you’ve noticed it, you can’t look away. The central horse in particular grabs our attention. Its ears are pricked forward and its head is slightly turned and up as though it’s just spotted us. For me, this visceral animal connection is a great help in joining us with what’s unfolding. These horses are aware of us; they’re coming for us. We are no longer observers looking on from a safe distance as is the case with many paintings of war. We’re right there, about to be overrun by a panicky looking stampede. Elizabeth’s so very good at this stuff.

Very few battles have been written about as much as Waterloo. Maybe none. Something about the whole gruesome affair made it stick in the cultural memory like no other. Perhaps this is because Napoleon and Wellington often seem like the last of history’s Promethean generals, and this was the day where they met and traded blows. Perhaps it’s because the small two and a half mile front of the battle compressed and intensified the drama of their desperate fight. Maybe it’s more to do with the stakes: two titanic heavyweights fight for the fate of a continent, one expertly probing, the other expertly parrying, with no advantage gained until, at last, Fortune plucks a name from a hat and Europe changes direction forever. Whatever the reasons of others, it is clear why Elizabeth was fascinated by that day: ‘We see through its blood-red veil of smoke Napoleon fall. There will never be a fall like that again: it is he who makes Waterloo colossal.’

She picked for her subject one of the most famous events in a jam packed story: the totemic charge of the Scots Greys. These 400 men and horses set out well enough, wading destructively through a vast body of French foot soldiers that had been sent across the field in attack. But, as Wellington was known to grumble, discipline was a mystifying concept to British cavalry. Instead of returning in good order with the job well done, they pressed on with the scent of blood in their nostrils. Their advance culminated in an ill-conceived gallop that took them right into the face of Napoleon’s main force. It was a rout. Half the men and horses were killed or badly injured. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. This is the second time Elizabeth decided to get to grips with a cavalry attack gone horribly wrong. Something about these scenarios had a potent grip on her imagination. This time, however, she set out to show us the bonkers pace and energy of the charge, not the harrowing aftermath that we see in Balaclava.

In many ways, the picture speaks for itself. It is, I think, one of the most furiously energetic paintings of the last five centuries. It bursts with life. A lot of this is achieved through striking foreshortening across the centre of the painting. This is where you compress an object in space to give the impression it’s receding backwards or coming forward very strongly. Look at the heads of those horses that are stretched out straight towards us or the legs - particularly those just right of centre - and you should see what I mean. Most artists dread doing this. Foreshortening can be an absolute pain in the backside. It often ends up looking clumsy and unconvincing too, like something you might see in a well drawn but exaggerated comic book. That’s not the case here though. Elizabeth’s too good. And she has other ruses besides foreshortening. There are thirty or so hooves visible in this painting. An argument could be made that two, possibly three, touch the ground. The rest are airborne. This may not seem too interesting. But for the realist painters out there, this is a staggering piece of information. To paint such a weighty mass of men and animals without rooting them to a surface is asking for trouble. It should look weird. It shouldn’t work. But it does. Speed and power surge out of the canvas. Once again, Elizabeth breaks the rules and wins.

She did make some uncharacteristic mistakes. There are details of the uniforms that aren’t quite right. Many of the Scots Greys’ horses at Waterloo that day were in fact chestnuts or bays. Was she losing her Hermione Granger dedication to homework? Perhaps. But not so much that she didn’t take the trouble to discover that cannonballs rip clear trails through smoke, and that exploding overhead canister punches holes through to the clear sky. She may not have been as exact as usual but she was near enough. We should also allow for the fact that sticking too rigidly to events sometimes doesn’t serve a picture so well. Consider that unified churning wall of grey horses. Would it have the same power if it was instead a mishmash of bays and chestnuts? I think not. We could also sniff a little at her drawing. It’s quite brilliant still, but not at her usual level. It’s less precise, a little more ragged. There are elements which, if taken in isolation, don’t quite convince: a face here, a gesture there. But again, we have to step back and see how they serve the whole. When we do that, she’s hitting all the right notes.

Charge of the Scots Greys - ‘Waterloo’ (1970)

Over the years, there have been many who have found this picture compelling. It turns up in illustrated military histories of the period over and over again. In an unlikely twist during the First World War, German propagandists made prints of the painting to buoy up morale having adjusted the uniforms to depict charging Prussians. No one, however, has paid tribute to Elizabeth’s painting quite so spectacularly as the film director Sergei Bondarchuk. In 1969, in his native Ukraine, Bondarchuk shot an epic film version of Waterloo. All the stops were pulled out. 17,000 Soviet soldiers were hired as extras, 2000 of whom were horsemen who drilled for months in advance of shooting. The film is quietly famous for many things, not least the performances of Christopher Plummer and Rod Steiger as Wellington and Napoleon. But for a lot of people it is the beautifully shot sequences that follow the gallop of the Scots Greys that steal the show. They amount to a stunning set piece. (Keep an eye out for the tumbling riders and horses in this clip. No CGI.) The source the film drew on is obvious. And it’s all there, right down to the obscuring smoke and explosions in the background of the charge. Elizabeth, with her lifelong love of a mock battle or pageant, would have loved it.

There are so many things to dwell on in this painting. Every time I come back to it, I spy something new. Yet when I take the time to really reflect, there is one thing that comes across to me more powerfully than anything else. It is the sense that these men are willingly catapulted along by forces far greater than themselves. They’ve stumped up the ticket money to board a runaway train. Look at how they are passengers. Look at how insubstantial they are when compared to the elemental animals that carry them. How many appear to be in control? One? Two? This is not normal in paintings of men at war. Usually we see some composure in the chaos. In fact, that’s the central point of most paintings of war: a hopeful suggestion that somehow in the horror, some of us might just about control our fate. But Scotland Forever is very different. There’s no steering wheel and no brakes. It’s a primal, open-mouthed gallop into the jaws of destruction. Exhilarating and selfless, yes. But also terrifying, brutal, mindless. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, cleansing. What young man hasn’t at some point wanted– on that deepest and most contradictory level - to purge all his guilty shortcomings in an orgasm of fatal heroism from which there’s no escape? Voluntarily strapped to a galloping rocket, the irreversible decision to commit is long past. Cowardice can find no foothold. There’ll be no backing down. It’s a great big middle finger to the terror of death. This is, of course, exactly what swept over the Greys when they flooded across the field, far beyond the objective they’d been given and into oblivion. Elizabeth, I think, had an instinctive grasp of the whirlwind that can swallow people when they travel to those remote places at the edge of human experience. There’s something very telling about the reactions her pictures prodded from those veterans we mentioned earlier. This was a painter who had an uncanny knack for understanding men in conflict.

These days, that deep and empathetic understanding of blokes in war is more of a hindrance to Elizabeth’s reputation than it is a help. She does not fit the narratives desired by those who write with the greatest dedication about female artists. Certainly not the narratives that emerge from academia. It doesn’t help that she was no suffragette. When she speaks of those occasions on which she felt uncomfortable or hampered by society as a young woman finding her feet in Victorian London, it was invariably on account of her Catholicism, not her sex. That just doesn’t cut the mustard these days. Nor had she any interest in discarding the realist language of visual art and trying to replace it with something else, as a progressive might. I think it’s a spurious and trivial basis on which to judge a painter’s worth, but there are many contributors to art history who need their female artists to be socially, sexually or politically radical before they’ll take them seriously. Elizabeth scores zero points on these criteria. Yet, surely this shouldn’t be grounds for being so badly sidelined. Over the centuries, there haven’t been a great many painters, never mind women painters, who could hold a candle to Elizabeth’s understanding of groups of human beings enduring conflict. Few come close to emulating the artistic innovations with which she depicted them either. She was a painter who reconciled war with art better than any other we’ve seen. And yet, she never once saw a fight. This, much more so than her sex, is what makes her nuanced understanding of it all so mysterious and impressive. I think she was a species of genius. It’s not much, but I hope this brief effort, here in this small corner of the internet will introduce a few people to a Glorious Girl whose talents deserve to be better remembered.