Wellington and Blücher in the Battle of Waterloo

Painted in 1858 and held in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, 'Wellington and Blücher in the Battle of Waterloo' engages with the great Allied victory over Napoleon in 1815 — an event that had concluded the Napoleonic wars that dominated European memory through much of the nineteenth century. The meeting of the British commander Wellington and the Prussian field marshal Blücher on the battlefield after the decisive victory was one of the iconic moments of the campaign, immortalised in numerous images. For Menzel as a Prussian painter, the celebration of Blücher's decisive intervention was a matter of national pride alongside the broader Allied triumph. He would have been familiar with the established iconography of the event and worked to create his own interpretation. Menzel's engagement with the Waterloo subject reflects his interest in early nineteenth-century military history as context for the Prussian state whose present he was simultaneously documenting.

Menzel organises the battlefield encounter between the two commanders with his characteristic attention to military costume and the specific physical conditions of a late-afternoon battlefield after engagement.