The Battle of Vittoria

George Jones's The Battle of Vittoria of 1822 commemorates Wellington's decisive victory of 21 June 1813 over Joseph Bonaparte's French forces in northern Spain, a battle that effectively ended French control of the Iberian Peninsula and triggered the final collapse of Napoleon's empire in the west. Vittoria was one of the most significant British military victories of the Napoleonic Wars, and its commemoration by Jones — who was a friend of Wellington and had access to the victor's own recollections — gave the painting an authority that pure historical reconstruction could not claim. The Royal Collection holds the picture as part of its extensive Wellingtonian documentation. Jones devoted much of his career to painting Napoleonic battles from the British perspective, and Vittoria represented the most unambiguous British triumph of the entire campaign.

Jones captures the climactic phase of the battle with the atmospheric turbulence — smoke, motion, the confusion of large forces in combat — that characterized his battle painting. The composition manages multiple simultaneous actions across a broad landscape. Wellington and his staff are identifiable at center. The palette combines the warm dust of a Spanish summer with the blue-grey of gunsmoke.