The Field of Waterloo

Three years after the battle, in 1818, Turner exhibited its aftermath instead of its glory. Waterloo had been fought in June 1815, and Britain had spent the years since celebrating it. Turner went to the battlefield himself in 1817, walked the ground near the farm of Hougoumont, and came back with something bleak. His painting is a night scene of the field after the fighting, lit by a single flare, with women moving among the fallen by torchlight, searching for husbands and sons. When he hung it at the Royal Academy he added a line from Byron: rider and horse, friend and foe, in one red burial blent. In that light the dead of both armies lie mixed together, impossible to tell apart.