The Battle of Waterloo

Nearly every face around the Duke of Wellington is a portrait. Pieneman worked from studies of officers who had been there, and the museum can still name many of them, among them Lord Uxbridge, who led the allied cavalry, Sir Rowland Hill and the staff officer Sir William De Lancey. De Lancey was hit by a cannonball near Wellington and died of the wound eight days later. Uxbridge had his leg shattered by one of the last shots of the battle and lost it. Far to the left, troopers of two British regiments, the Royal Dragoons and the Scots Greys, hold up French imperial eagles, the standards they had captured in a charge early that afternoon, hours before the moment at the centre. Across the right foreground lie the dead and the wounded, and far behind them, under the smoke, the fighting goes on.