Arms & the Men

“DO YOU THINK that war is any less terrible and heroic in its reality,” Bernard Shaw charged to William Archer (23 April 1894), “than it is in the visions … of the critics who know it from the engravings of Elizabeth Thompson’s in the Regent St. shop windows?” Catherine Wynne does not quote this, but Lady Butler (Elizabeth Thompson) was at the peak of her prestige in the early 1890s for her detailed and colorful canvases of British feats of arms from the Napoleonic era onward. She was accomplished at managing horses, visited troop maneuvers and scenes of past battles abroad and in galleries, and “flatly” told a friendly artist that she had “no intention of becoming an animal painter.” Elizabeth Thompson was intent on depicting soldiery in action. Early on, the godlike John Ruskin came to see her artillery watercolor The Crest of the Hill and “knelt down before where it hung low and held a candle before it the better to see it.” He exclaimed, she recalled, “Wonderful!” and praised its “immense power.”

Rather than illustrating actual combat, she portrayed the crowded rush toward the viewer—thus facing the unseen foe—or, as an alternative, the costly military closure, as in the Crimean War canvas, Calling the Roll after an Engagement. Crimea (1874). There, wounded and weary Grenadier Guards after the Battle of Inkerman cluster in the snow to respond as a red-bearded sergeant records in his roll the names of the survivors. Although destined for another buyer, the Manchester industrialist Charles Galloway, Queen Victoria overruled him and bought the painting, establishing Miss Thompson’s reputation.

The Prince of Wales, not much of a critic, loyally praised Roll Call as by “a young lady” who “I am sure . . . has before her a great future as an artist.” But she was a lady. The Royal Academy would never elect her to its motley ranks.

At least one canvas, perhaps her finest achievement, Scotland Forever! (1881), displaying her command of equine movement, suggests Captain Bluntschli’s lines in Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1894). The dramatic canvas, in the waning age of colorful uniforms, pictures cavalrymen charging headlong at the viewer, closely pawing flank to flank. Bluntschli describes such horsemanship cynically as “slinging a handful of peas against a window pane”—and the aftermath of such human “projectiles” who gallop onward as wounded by “broken knees from the horses cannoning together.”

Like her future husband, General Sir William Butler, an Irishman loyal to his home soil, Lady Butler, as she became, was a political as well as a military realist, largely eschewing jingoism in the Victorian decades of adventurism, exploitation and imperial expansion. Rather than heroic uplift, she would portray its cost, as in Balaclava (1876), where the remnants of the misled Light Brigade are gathered in dazed and bewildered disorganization. And, even more striking from her brushes is the weary, haggard army surgeon, the lone Dr. William Brydon, believed at the time to be the only survivor of the bitter seven-day, mismanaged retreat of thousands from Kabul in Afghanistan to reach safety. The single figure in the desolate landscape, reeling in his saddle, Brydon is astride an equally malnourished and exhausted horse, barely able to continue on. The Remnants of an Army. Jellabad, January 1842 was praised for its “painfulness” but there was no rush of purchasers. Patriotism required a positive outcome to war.

When she did illustrate colorful cavalrymen seemingly leaping out of the frame at the viewer, a strategic ingredient for popular success, as in Floeat Etona! (1882), often the figures in the background reversed the outlook, destined to become the debris of war. Similarly, her Franco-Prussian war canvas, To the Front. French Cavalry Leaving a Breton City on the Declaration of War (1888–1889), shows soldiers leaving home with only a few in a crowd of villagers cheering them on. Lady Butler’s onlookers knew that in 1870, not long before, what the muted departure disclosed (one lone male waves his...