Painters picked up the same theme. In John Gilbert’s Her Majesty the Queen Inspecting the Wounded Coldstream Guards in the Hall of Buckingham Palace (1856), a painting (sadly lost) that was popular enough to be reproduced as a coloured lithograph as late as 1903, there is a touching poignancy in the meeting between the Queen and the wounded heroes of the Crimea which suggests the prospect of post-war unity between the highest and the lowest of the land. Jerry Barrett’s large painting Queen Victoria’s First Visit to Her Wounded Soldiers (1856) played on this emotion too. This sentimental picture of the royal family visiting Crimean invalids at the Chatham army hospital was such a success when it was first shown at Thomas Agnew’s gallery in Piccadilly that several thousand prints were subsequently sold to the public in various editions costing between three and ten guineas.17
The Queen herself was a collector of photographic souvenirs of Crimean veterans. She commissioned commercial photographers like Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett to make a series of commemorative portraits of maimed and wounded soldiers in various military hospitals, including Chatham, for the royal collection at Windsor. Cundall and Howlett’s striking photographs reached beyond their patroness’s hands. Through photographic exhibitions and their reproduction in the illustrated press, they brought home to the public in explicit terms the suffering of the soldiers and the human costs of war. These pioneering photographs were very different from Fenton’s genteel images. In Cundall and Howlett’s Three Crimean Invalids (1855), for example, the wounded infantrymen are seated on a hospital bed displaying their loss of limbs. There is no emotion in their expressions, no romanticism or sentimentality in their representation, only the documentary evidence in black and white of the impact made by iron shot and frostbite on the body. In their notes in the royal archives, Cundall and Howlett identified the men as William Young of the 23rd Regiment, wounded at the Redan on 18 June 1855; Henry Burland of the 34th, both legs lost to frostbite in the trenches before Sevastopol; and John Connery of the 49th, his left leg lost to frostbite in the trenches.18
Memories of the Crimean War continued to provide a winning subject for British artists well into the 1870s. The best known of these Crimean pictures was Calling the Roll after an Engagement, Crimea (1874) by Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), which caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. So great were the crowds that came to see it that a policeman was put on guard to provide protection. Already known for her earlier paintings on military themes, Thompson had conceived The Roll Call (as it became popularly known) in the immediate aftermath of the Cardwell reforms, when army matters were prominent in public life. From detailed sketches of Crimean veterans, she created a striking composition, in which the remnants of the Grenadiers, wounded, cold and utterly exhausted, assemble after a battle to be counted by their mounted officer. The painting was completely different from conventional depictions of war that focused on the glorious deeds of gallant officers: apart from the mounted officer, the 2-metre-high canvas was entirely dominated by the suffering of the rank and file. It stripped away the heroics and let the viewer look into the face of war. After its showing at the Royal Academy The Roll Call went on national tour, drawing immense crowds. In Newcastle, it was advertised by men with sandwich boards which simply read ‘The Roll Call is Coming!’ In Liverpool, 20,000 people saw the picture in three weeks – a huge number for the time. People came away profoundly moved by the painting, which had clearly touched the nation’s heart. The Queen purchased The Roll Call from its original buyer, a Manchester industrialist, but a printing company retained the right to reproduce it in a popular edition of engravings. Thompson herself became a national heroine overnight. A quarter of a million cartes-de-visite photographs of the artist were sold to the public, who put her on a par with Florence Nightingale.19
What will they say in England
When the story there is told
Of deeds of might, on Alma’s height,
Done by the brave and bold?
Of Russia, proud at noontide,
Humbled ere set of sun?
They’ll say ‘’Twas like Old England!’
They’ll say ‘’Twas noble done!’
What will they say in England
When, hushed in awe and dread,
Fond hearts, through all our happy homes
Think of the mighty dead,
And muse, in speechless anguish,
On father – brother – son?
They’ll say in dear Old England
‘God’s holy will be done.’
What will they say in England?
Our names, both night and day
