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(1/10) Photographed this weeks ago and completely forgot to post it. The grave of Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler at Stamullen Cemetery in Co. Meath. Born in Lausanne in 1846, Butler was a prolific painter specialising in British military scenes.
(2/10) Butler first came to fame with ‘The Roll Call’, exhibited to acclaim at the Royal Academy’s 1874 Summer Exhibition. The painting depicts weary Grenadier Guardsmen during the Crimean War with a realism and attention to detail that were to become hallmarks of her work.
(3/10) ‘The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras’ (1875) remains an iconic image of the British army of the Napoleonic Wars. Researched with typical thoroughness, Butler’s preparations included having men of the Royal Engineers pose in square for her.
(4/10) In 1877 she married Sir William Francis Butler, an Irish Catholic officer of the British army from Co. Tipperary. Much of the subsequent decades were spent travelling with him to different imperial stations until his retirement in 1905 and their return to Tipperary.
(5/10) Sketched on her honeymoon in Co. Kerry in 1877, ‘Listed for the Connaught Rangers’ shows two new Irish recruits to the British Army striding out of a glen along with a NCO and a trio of musicians resplendent in scarlet.
(6/10) ‘The Defence of Rorke’s Drift’ (1880) was another painting which benefited from her military connections in its scrupulous research. Butler sketched survivors of the Anglo-Zulu War battle and heard their eyewitness accounts.
(7/10) ‘Scotland Forever!’ (1881), far and away her most famous work, shows the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo with a scrambling dynamism seldom matched. (Yes, yes, yes: the horses are on a collision course. Still doesn’t detract from the impact.)
(8/10) ‘Scots Guards Saving the Colours at Alma, 1854’ (1899) was even recreated by the contemporary @scots_guards in 2017. (
= Alan Murphy / Wimborne Photography.)
= Alan Murphy / Wimborne Photography.)
(9/10) Butler lived until 1933, long enough to paint more modern scenes like this depiction of the London Irish Rifles kicking a football forward at German lines during the Battle of Loos in 1915.
(10/10) She died in October 1933 living with her youngest daughter, Viscountess Gormanston, at Gormanston Castle in Co. Meath and was buried at nearby Stamullen. Her grave is worth a visit if you’re ever in the area.
