Allegory of Waterloo (sketch)

James Ward's Allegory of Waterloo of 1822 is a preparatory sketch for his ambitious project to commemorate Britain's great victory over Napoleon in 1815 with a monumental allegorical painting. Ward was commissioned to produce an enormous canvas — ultimately over twenty feet wide — that would stand as a permanent national memorial to the battle and its dead. The project occupied him for years and the full painting was never fully completed to his satisfaction, but the surviving sketch documents his grand ambitions and his approach to historical allegory. Ward was primarily known as an animal painter of genius, but he aspired to the elevated genre of history painting and Waterloo gave him the opportunity to attempt it at heroic scale. The Royal Hospital Chelsea's sketch is a document of one of the most ambitious unrealized projects in British Romantic art.

As a sketch, the work shows Ward's compositional thinking in relatively free, expressive form: allegorical figures, horses, and symbolic elements are roughed in with energetic brushwork rather than finished precision. The animal passages — horses in particular — already show the authority of his mature handling. The color is warm and agitated, appropriate to the battle subject.