Allegory of Waterloo [SEP] creator
Allegory of Waterloo
Allegory of Waterloo, also known as Triumph of the Duke of Wellington or the Triumph of Great Britain after the Battle of Waterloo, was a monumental painting by British artist James Ward, completed in 1821, and now lost.
Ward won a competition organised by the British Institution in 1816 to create an artwork to celebrate the final victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo the previous year. He was commissioned to create a full-size painting, and paid 1,000 guineas.
Rather than painting portraits
; slightly later, he turned to very large-scale landscapes, of which "Gordale Scar" (Tate, London), completed in 1814 or 1815 and depicting Gordale Scar (Yorkshire) as an example of the sublime, is considered his masterpiece and a masterpiece of English Romantic painting.
Ward devoted much of the period 1815-21 to the painting of a gigantic work titled "Allegory of Waterloo" (now lost); this neither was much praised nor brought in the revenue Ward had hoped for. The