The Field of Waterloo

The harrowing scenes depicted here show the battlefield on the morning of 19 June as imagined by John Heaviside Clark, a Scottish painter and draughtsman who worked in London from 1802–32. No British soldier or civilian had seen anything like it. The battlefield was very small and in places such as the farm called La Haye Sainte, corpses intermingled with wounded men lay in piles. The density of killing was significantly greater than in First World War battles such as the Somme (1 July–13 November 1916).