'Evicted' by Elizabeth Thompson
Elizabeth Thompson was born in Lausanne, Switzerland
on 3 November 1846 – the daughter of Thomas James Thompson and his second wife
Christiana Weller She grew up in Italy
where she first received training in art. Returning to England she
attended the Royal Female School of Art in Kensington in 1866. In 1869 whilst
in Florence she became a Roman Catholic and received further training under the
auspices of Giuseppe Bellucci and attended the Accademia di Bella Arti. Initially
as an artist she painted religious subjects but after 1870 she focused on painting
scenes from British military campaigns and battles with her work showing an empathy for the individual
soldier, which perhaps reflected the particular concern for the individual that
her husband, Lieutenant General William Butler showed.
Her first military painting was ‘Missing’ showing a
scene from the Franco-Prussian War. The first painting to be nationally
recognised was The Roll Call which depicted a scene from the Crimean War
in which the infantry are worn out. The Roll Call, exhibited in 1874, established her reputation and over the
next eight years she produced paintings which together recorded the lives of
ordinary soldiers fighting to establish and maintain the British Empire in
different parts of the world. She did not attempt to glorify what soldiers did
but to elicit pity and sympathy for their plight. It was said that by focusing
on the individual, she did in painting what Kipling did in words. People
noticed her work because she was was one of the few women painting that kind of
subject and doing it at a time when there was a resurgence in interest in the
British Empire, as Britain had new economic and military rivals and the Empire
was seen as a way of promoting out selves around the world.
Marriage to General William Butler
She married Sir William Francis Butler in 1877. He was
a young ambitious officer and part of the so-called Wolseley Ring of officers.
Elizabeth’s paintings reflected the new romanticism for the British Empire and
her paintings depicted famous scenes in the military history of the time, often
scenes of confusion either depicting battle action or just after it. Her
paintings almost gave a view the enemy would have had facing the British massed
ranks of infantry. Elizabeth travelled with her husband around the world to the
furthest reaches of the Empire and in doing so came to believe, like her
husband, that colonial expansion was not in the best interests of native
peoples.
General Butler died in 1910 and Elizabeth remained in
Ireland where the couple had made their home, until she died at the age of 86.
Many of her own paintings were destroyed by German bombing in WW2
Evicted
Evicted was painted in 1890 and shows an Irish tenant farming family being
stripped of their land and livelihood. Such scenes that showed the ugly side of
colonialism were not popular and Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister, said of it There
is such an air of breezy cheerfulness and beauty about the landscape which is
painted, that it makes me long to take part in an eviction myself. The
1890s was a period of massive agricultural dislocation, the result of
increasing competition from North and South America, Australia and New Zealand
brought about by the coming of refrigerated ships and large scale farming.