WOMAN IN ART
born, and where "Scotland Forever!" was painted; or at Dover, where her studio was in the constable's tower of the old Castle; at Rome, Alexandria, or a thousand miles up the Nile in a dahabiyeh, or at Aldershot, her brain and hands were busy with art, yet her diary was not neglected, and from its records and those of her sketch books she has compiled delightful volumes which, according to her pen, are dedicated to her children. In the summer of 1913 and the following winter, at Glencar, Lady Butler painted "Dawn at Waterloo," and her own description of the beginnings of that painting, in far-away Ireland, an hundred years after the battle, is extremely interesting. Her treatment of the subject makes it a picture of almost heart-breaking pathos. She had been on the field of that decisive battle years before, with her parents, and knew the lay of the land where those war-worn soldiers bivouacked all the night. At the first sound of the reveille the very earth seems to come slowly to life, as the weary men stir with a seeming sense of not knowing where they are. Two men on dappled grays dominate the center of the picture as they did the whole army at dawn of that fateful day. The cavalry horses at the left seem more alert at the bugle-horn than the weary soldiers who cover the ground away to the distant hills. In the foreground a soldier risen to a sitting position reaches toward the heart of his comrade who will never again rise to an earthly bugle-call. An officer faces the dawn, his attitude an unspoken question—"How many of us will see another dawn?"
Every inch of the eight-foot canvas speaks of Life, Death, War, Tragedy, Pathos, Suffering, and over all bends the tender sky, that the garish light of coming day waken not rudely those who may never see another dawn.
Since the death of her husband, Sir William Butler, in 1910, Lady Butler has spent much time in her beloved home at Glencar; and there as elsewhere her brush has been busy recording scenes and incidents of the late war in which three of her sons served. This from her diary: "First my soldier son went off, and then Benedictine donned the khaki as chaplain of the forces. He went, one may say, from the cloister to the cannon. I had to pass the ordeal which became the lot of so many mothers of sons throughout the Empire."
As time goes on Lady Butler's record and sketches of the World War will become of historic value.
If art has a national value, surely the art of Elizabeth Thompson-Butler, which has depicted the great military achievements of the British Army, through the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth centuries, has entitled the artist to full and honorable membership in the Royal Academy of England.
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