Les Restes d'une armée

The exhausted rider is Doctor William Brydon, and the moment is January 1842, at the gates of the fortress town of Jalalabad in Afghanistan. A British army and its followers, around 16,000 people, had tried to retreat from Kabul through the winter passes, and were destroyed almost entirely along the way. Brydon reached Jalalabad barely alive on a dying horse, and for a time he was believed to be the only one to make it, carrying the first news of what had happened. Elizabeth Butler painted the scene in 1879, decades after the event, and showed it at the Royal Academy. She was one of the few women of her day to build a reputation on large battle pictures, and she kept this one almost bare, a single figure against an empty plain below the wall.