Der Tod des Majors Peirson, 6. Januar 1781

On 6 January 1781, a French force landed on Jersey in a last attempt to seize the island, and a 24-year-old officer named Francis Peirson refused the order to surrender. He organised a counter-attack and was killed by a French shot in the streets of St Helier. Copley painted the scene two years later, in 1783, for the London publisher John Boydell. He took a liberty with the facts. Peirson actually fell early in the fighting, but here he is shown dying at the centre of the final, victorious charge, under a great Union flag, so that his death reads as the moment of triumph. To the left, his Black servant, recorded as Pompey, raises a musket at the man who fired the fatal shot. The canvas is nearly 12 feet wide, a public history painting built to be read across a crowded room.