Evening of waterloo by Ernest Crofts, The French army is in a route, and Napoleon is urged to leave the
Battle Field, while the Old Guards protect his carriage.
Morning of Waterloo by Ernest Crofts Napoleon on the morning of Waterloo surrounded by the Imperial Guard.
In fact, all the French Infantry would have been wearing their capotes
(greatcoats)
Wellingtons March From Quatre Bras to Waterloo by Ernest
Crofts Depicting Wellingtons withdrawal on 17th June 1815, the day before
Waterloo, when the Prussian retreat to Wavre had left the British position
dangerously exposed. There are a lot of similarities between this painting
and Meissoniers Friedland 1807, but from a British perspective.
ERNEST CROFTS
B. Leeds 1847; D. London 1911.
Crofts was one of the leading military-historical painters of the late Victorian
and Edwardian periods, exhibiting well over 40 paintings at the Royal Academy
and numerous scenes at other exhibitions depicting soldiers in battle or on
campaign. And, unlike many of his contemporaries, he had had the luxury of
actually witnessing soldiers in battle during the Franco-Prussian War.
After his early schooling at Rugby, the young Yorkshireman moved to Dusseldorf
in 1870 to study art with the German military artist, Emile Hunten (1827-1902),
and spent almost ten years there before returning to England to study with the
historical genre painter, Alfred Barron Clay. During his stay in Germany, he
accompanied Hunten to various battlefields during the war with France and was
present at the battle of Gravelotte, but not being a war correspondent, had to
remain on the other side of the Moselle River. He did witness the battles around
Saarbruck and Borny, and these experiences helped to mould the young man's ideas
with the result that his early paintings represented scenes from the war. One
such painting entitled One touch of nature makes the whole world kin represented
a Prussian soldier offering water to a wounded Frenchman, and won for the artist
a silver medal at the Crystal Palace in 1874. At the Royal Academy in the same
year he showed a scene depicting the French retreat from Gravelotte. However, in
the following year, he turned his attention to a more historical military scene
with his representation of the battle of Ligny in 1815, showing Napoleon
surrounded by his staff surveying the battlefield while columns of infantry
advance to the front. This was to be the first of no fewer than twelve paintings
shown at the Royal Academy by the artist between 1875 and 1906 representing the
events surrounding the Waterloo campaign, the one exception being his 1887
rendition, Napoleon leaving Moscow.
For whatever reason, Crofts produced a series of accurate retrospective scenes
of the Waterloo campaign right down to the minutest detail. Gone were the
sweeping panoramic battle scenes of the early 19th century. The focus now was on
the incident. Crofts had the skill and eye to produce these masterpieces of late
Victorian battle art equaled only by Lady Butler. He himself built up a large
collection of original uniforms and accessories, many of which were exhibited at
the Royal Military Exhibition held at Chelsea Hospital in 1890. Many of his
surviving sketches of figure studies attest to his fine draughtsmanship. It is
quite probable that Crofts visited the battlefield of Waterloo and vicinity to
gather sketches of the various locales he intended to depict. Other places were
visited in order to obtain particular information such as details of Napoleon's
coach at Madame Tussaud's for his 1879 work, On the Evening of the Battle of
Waterloo. In this painting, Napoleon, bareheaded and forlorn, escapes from his
carriage just before it becomes the booty of the Prussians. His troops are being
routed an are in an utter state of confusion although several ranks of the old
guard vainly attempt to present a hasty line of retreat. Two paintings dating
from 1876 and 1878 represent the events before the battle. In the scene entitled
On the morning of the battle of Waterloo, Crofts depicted the centre of the
French position at break of day on June 18, 1815, under a dull sky laden with
rain. Napoleon, surrounded by several marshals makes preparations for the final
inevitable struggle. The Emperor, pale but undaunted, sits at a table near a
farmhouse consulting a map while questioning a local farmer named Decoster. All
around, the French army nervously awaits its fate. The painting of 1878 was
entitled Wellington's March from Quatre Bras to Waterloo and featured a group of
French prisoners being escorted by soldiers of the 79h Highlanders at the moment
when the Duke of Wellington salutes a troop of passing Royal Scots Greys,
Wellington appears in other paintings by Crofts including At the Farm of Mont
St. Jean painted in 1882. Other paintings of the battle represented the fighting
around Hougoumont, the capture of a French Battery by the 52nd Regiment (1896),
and Napoleon's Last Grand Attack (1895).
While Crofts represented scenes from the wars of Wallenstein, Marlborough, and
even a painting of the Sikh War, Charge of the 3rd King's Own Light Dragoons,
Moodkee, it was the events of the English Civil War which, like Waterloo,
captured the artist's imagination. In fact it was his Royal Academy picture of
1877 - Oliver Cromwell at Marston Moor - that brought the artist to the
attention of many art critics. Similarly it was another Civil War scene, his
1898 painting To the rescue: an episode of the Civil War, which he painted on
election to the Academy itself, the only late nineteenth century military artist
to achieve this honour. Most of the major battles of the war such as Edgehill,
Marston Moor and Naseby were painted by the artist as well as siege related
scenes, i.e. Oliver Cromwell at the Storming of Basing House, painted in 1900,
The Surrender of Donnington Castle, painted three years later, and The surrender
of the city of York to the Roundheads, exhibited only three years before the
artist's death. Crofts painted a trilogy of canvases surrounding the execution
of Charles 1 as well as scenes representing the campaigning at Worcester such as
Charles 11 at Whiteladies (1898) and The Boscobel Oak (1889).
Crofts died on March 19, 1911 at Burlington House where he had lived as Keeper
of the Royal Academy. Three years later and almost a century after Waterloo,
Europe went to war again on a scale unimagined by the artist. The Great War
inspired a vastly different type of art focusing on the horrors rather than the
glory of war. While Crofts' pictures had been popular in the 1870's and 1880's,
the public lost its appetite for war pictures in the early years of the 20th
century and during the hideous war in South Africa. While Crofts continued to
paint scenes of war within the confines of the Royal Academy exhibitions, the
public lost interest in his work and today, with the exception of a handful of
canvases in public galleries, his paintings are more or less forgotten but they
deserve greater attention if only for their wealth of detail and as windows on
late Victorian attitudes to war and history.
(c) Peter Harrington 1991
