look closer

The officer in the middle has his sabre up and his mouth open. He is shouting the words that gave the painting its name. At Waterloo those bearskin caps were covered in black oilskin, and Butler paints them bare.

Just after half past one at Waterloo, the French infantry columns of d'Erlon's corps were grinding up the ridge and into the Allied line. The British heavy cavalry was let loose at them. Among the regiments was the Royal North British Dragoons, known to everyone by their horses as the Scots Greys. They came through their own infantry shouting Now, my boys, Scotland forever, and fell on the columns downhill. For ten minutes it was slaughter, and the leading French brigades broke. Sergeant Charles Ewart of the Greys took the eagle standard of the 45th of the Line in a hacking fight he later described with a butcher's precision. The eagle stands in Edinburgh Castle now. Then the charge did what heavy charges did: it kept going. Blown horses, blood up, deep in the French position among the guns, the brigade was caught by fresh lancers and cut apart on the way home. The Greys lost 104 men dead and 97 wounded. Of their 416 horses, 228 did not come back. Ponsonby, who commanded the brigade, was killed in the mud. Whether Napoleon really muttered about those terrible grey horses is past proving and past dislodging. The charge entered the language as both glory and warning, the finest and least repeatable ten minutes the British cavalry ever had. The painting is by a woman who was never allowed near a battle. Elizabeth Thompson became famous in 1874 with The Roll Call, a Crimean picture so mobbed at the Academy that a policeman had to be posted beside it. Queen Victoria bought it out of the exhibition. In 1879 Thompson missed election to the Royal Academy by 2 votes. No woman was elected until 1922. She worked from other people's eyes: she talked to veterans, and she stood in front of her husband's regiment on maneuvers while it charged at her, so she could see horses coming head-on. That is the radical fact of Scotland Forever: the viewer is placed in front of the charge, where the French stood, watching the wall of grey horses arrive at gallop with no intention of stopping. She finished it in 1881 and showed it at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Colonel Thomas Walter Harding gave the canvas to Leeds in 1888, and it has hung there since.