A Study for 'The Battle of Waterloo', with the Duke of Wellington and his staff officers to the left, the battlefield extending to the right oil on canvas 29 x 40cm Footnote: Provenance: By descent in the artist's family to the present owner The present work belongs to the series of depictions of the Battle of Waterloo by George Jones, for which he earned the nickname ‘Waterloo Jones’. Jones previously served under the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War, but it was the Waterloo campaign which captivated him more than any other military event. The Duke of Wellington reportedly approved of Jones’s style, commenting that it was “very good – not too much smoke” (H. Ottley, Biographical and Critical Dictionary of Recent and Living Painters and Engravers, 1866, vol. I, p. 98). Jones served as a Captain in the Royal Montgomery Regiment of Militia and was part of the Army of Occupation in Paris in 1815 after Waterloo. Although he did not fight at Waterloo, he had ample opportunity to visit the battlefield and record numerous sketches of its topography, providing the models for his full-scale works. Some of these sketches were engraved and published in The Battle of Waterloo […] by a Near Observer, in 1817. From 1816 onwards, Jones exhibited five paintings of the battle at the Royal Academy and six at the British Institution alongside other scenes peripheral to the battle, such as the village of Waterloo (see Peter Harrington, ‘The Battle Paintings of George Jones, RA (1786-1869)’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, vol. LXVII, no. 272, Winter 1989, pp. 239-252). All these paintings depict a sweeping panoramic view of the battlefield and attest to Jones’ technical accuracy and understanding of the topography of the terrain. Amongst these depictions, the largest are in the Royal Hospital Chelsea (304 x 421cm) and in the Royal Collection (238 x 320cm). The latter was commissioned by George IV in 1822 for the Throne Room in St James’s Palace, where it still hangs. It is to this full-scale work that the present oil study appears to be most closely related. Although the composition is reversed, with the Duke of Wellington mounted on Copenhagen in the left foreground in the study, both works depict Wellington pointing to the sunken lane in the middle distance and having just replaced his hat (unlike in the Chelsea picture and other compositions which have come to the auction market in recent years, where Wellington points his hat towards the enemy to signal the advance following the repulse of Napoleon's Imperial Guard). In addition, Jones also uses the motif of a white horse, which anchors the composition in the left foreground. However, with the smoke rising behind Wellington, the present study is also reminiscent of the scene depicted in the ‘Final Defeat of the French at Waterloo’ (47 x 68.6cm) exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1816 as the first of the series of Waterloo related works by Jones, and sold at Bonhams, London, on 1st April 2015, lot 148, for £29,000. Condition report: Oil on canvas which has been lined. The paint layers are thinly applied in some areas and has suffered from wear. The paint is stable overall. There is extensive overpaint in the sky covering wear and old cracks.