War paintings were long made for the winners. The twelve pictures here show what those canvases left out, from a roll call in the snow to a hill of skulls. One was carried to a queen's palace at night so she could look at it. Another went on show under a strip of brown paper marked "censored."
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How These Were Chosen
The grandest war painting used to be a battle ordered by the winner: a general on horseback, troops in good order, a victory fit for a palace. Painters prized the subject because one canvas could hold dozens of figures, horses and smoke around a date everyone knew.
The twelve works here turn their back on that tradition. None of them shows a battle being won. They show what surrounds the fighting: the count of the survivors, a retreat, a flight, the wounded, the dead left in the mud.
At least half of them were painted by men who had seen their war up close, as soldiers, orderlies or civilians. The list runs from the Thirty Years' War to the First World War, and from the least known picture to the most famous.
12. Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), The Roll Call (1874)
In front of a long line of Guardsmen standing in the snow after a battle, one soldier lies face down, and the comrade beside him bends to touch his back. Behind them the battalion waits in gray greatcoats and black bearskins while a sergeant reads its names from a roll book.
The regiment is the Grenadier Guards, during the Crimean War, and the moment is usually identified as the aftermath of the Battle of Inkerman, fought on November 5, 1854. Elizabeth Thompson painted it twenty years later, over the winter of 1873 to 1874. Where a battle painter would have shown the charge, she left the fighting out of the frame and painted the count.
That count needed men who looked the part. Thompson worked from models who were mostly former soldiers, and the one who posed for the sergeant had served in the Crimea.
The canvas already had an owner before anyone saw it. Charles Galloway, a Manchester industrialist, had commissioned it through an agent for £100. Thompson sent it to the Royal Academy at the end of March 1874 expecting a rejection, and the Academy hung it at eye level.
Once it was on the wall, the offers began. The Prince of Wales asked to have the picture, and Galloway refused him.
Queen Victoria was the one buyer Galloway could not turn down, and he ceded the canvas to her. On the night of May 5, she had it carried to Buckingham Palace to look at it, and later that month visitors to the Academy found a placard in its place: "temporarily removed by command of Her Majesty."
From the palace, the Queen sent it on to Windsor, to see it again before leaving for Scotland and to show it to a visitor, the Russian emperor Alexander II. Twenty years earlier, at Inkerman, the men in the picture had been fighting his father's army.
At a Glance
Artist: Elizabeth Southerden Thompson, Lady Butler (1846 to 1933)
Painted: 1873 to 1874
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 93.3 × 183.5 cm (36.7 × 72.2 in)
Where to see it: Royal Collection Trust, United Kingdom
11. Eugène Delacroix, Scenes from the Massacres of Chios (1824)
A baby crawls across the chest of a dead young woman, in the foreground of a canvas more than four meters tall. Beside them an old woman stares upward, and behind them a horseman in a turban drags off a naked woman roped to his horse. The killing had happened two years earlier, far from Paris, where the painter was about to start work. On the very day he began the canvas, he met a man just back from Greece.