| Elizabeth Thompson | |||||||
| Birth Date: | 3 November 1846 | ||||||
| Birth Place: | Lausanne, Switzerland | ||||||
| Death Place: | Gormanston Castle, County Meath, Ireland | ||||||
| Nationality: | British | ||||||
| Field: | Painting | ||||||
| Movement: | History painting, military art | ||||||
| Works: | The Roll Call, 1874 The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras, 1875 The Defence of Rorke's Drift, 1880 Scotland Forever!, 1881 | ||||||
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Elizabeth Southerden Thompson (3 November 1846 – 2 October 1933), later known as Lady Butler,[1] was a British painter who specialised in painting scenes from British military campaigns and battles, including the Crimean War and the Napoleonic Wars. Her notable works include The Roll Call (purchased by Queen Victoria), The Defence of Rorke's Drift, and Scotland Forever! (showing the Scots Greys at Waterloo). She wrote about her military paintings in an autobiography published in 1922: "I never painted for the glory of war, but to portray its pathos and heroism."[2] [3] [4]
She married British Army officer William Butler, becoming Lady Butler after he was knighted.[1]
Born at the Villa Claremont in Lausanne, Switzerland, Butler was the daughter of Thomas James Thompson (1812–1881) and his second wife, Christiana Weller (1825–1910). Her sister was the noted essayist and poet Alice Meynell. Elizabeth began receiving art instruction in 1862, while growing up in Italy. In 1866, she entered the Female School of Art in South Kensington in London. She began exhibiting her artwork, usually watercolours, as a student. In 1867, one watercolour, Bavarian Artillery Going into Action, was shown at the Dudley Gallery, one of the galleries preferred by women artists. The same year, she exhibited an oil painting, Horses in Sunshine, at the Society of Female Artists.
She became a Roman Catholic along with the rest of her family after they moved to Florence in 1869. While in Florence, under the tutelage of the artist Giuseppe Bellucci (1827–1882), she attended the Accademia di Belle Arti. She signed her works as E.B. (post-1877), Elizth. Thompson, or Mimi Thompson (she was called "Mimi" from her childhood).
Initially concentrating on religious subjects like The Magnificat (1872), upon going to Paris in 1870, she was exposed to battle scenes from Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier and Édouard Detaille, and switched her focus to war paintings. With the painting Missing (1873), a Franco-Prussian War battle scene depicting the common soldiers' suffering and heroism, she earned her first submission to the Royal Academy. Her painting The Roll Call, which depicted a line of soldiers worn out with conflict, was shown in 1874 at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and became so popular that a policeman had to be stationed next to the painting in order to regulate the crowds that came to see it.[5] Butler later wrote that after the opening of the Summer Exhibition, she awoke to find herself famous.
Her fame increased as the paintings toured Europe, along with photographs of Elizabeth. She gained even more notice because people found out that she was both young and pretty, something normally not associated with painters of battle scenes. It also helped that during this time, there was a huge swell of Victorian pride and romanticism for the growing British Empire. While Lady Butler's topics reflected such romanticism, her paintings were generally realistic in detail, with aspects such as confusion, mud and exhaustion being accurately portrayed. Her works tend to focus on British troops shown in action, or shortly after it, but avoiding scenes of hand-to-hand combat. The troops are often shown as their opponents might have seen them, but relatively few of the opponents themselves are shown.In 1879, Butler came within two votes of becoming the first woman to be elected as an Associate Member of the Royal Academy (apart from two founder Members, Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman; ultimately, the first female Associate Member was Annie Swynnerton, elected in 1922, and the first full Member was Laura Knight in 1936).
After her marriage in 1877 to William Francis Butler, a distinguished British Army officer, from County Tipperary, Ireland, she travelled to the far reaches of the Empire with her husband and raised their six children. Butler also produced some black and white illustrations, including of poems by her sister, Alice Meynell, and of works by Thackeray. Lady Butler exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.[6] Her elder daughter, Elizabeth, married Lt.-Col. Randolph Albert Fitzhardinge Kingscote (6 Feb 18678 Dec 1940) on 24 July 1903 and her younger daughter, Eileen, married Viscount Gormanston (16 July 18797 November 1925) on 26 October 1911.
On her husband's retirement from the Army, she moved to Ireland, where they lived at Bansha Castle, County Tipperary. Lady Butler showed pictures at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1892. Among the paintings that she took with her to County Tipperary was a set of water-colours that she had painted while stationed with her husband in Palestine. During the Irish Civil War these were transferred to her daughter for safekeeping at Gormanston Castle, then Viscount Gormanston's London townhouse, where almost all were destroyed during the Second World War.
Widowed in 1910, Lady Butler lived at Bansha Castle until 1922, when she took up residence with the youngest of her six children, Eileen, Viscountess Gormanston, at Gormanston Castle, County Meath. She died there in 1933 shortly before her 87th birthday being interred at nearby Stamullen churchyard.
Butler was included in the 2018 exhibit Women in Paris 1850–1900,[7] whilst the 2023 play Modest covered her life from Roll Call to her rejection as an Associate of the Royal Academy.[8]