LONDON.- Concurrent with the Battle of Waterloo 200th Anniversary Commemorations on 18 June 2015, this summer Sotheby’s will offer at auction the campaign cloak said to have been worn by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, two portraits which capture the powerful persona of the ‘Iron Duke’, J.M.W. Turner’s moving depiction of the symbolic battle scene at Waterloo, as well as a group of letters written during the Waterloo campaign, and a rare battle order hand-written by Wellington.

English Literature, History, Children’s Books & Illustrations, 14 July 2015
On 14 July 2015, Sotheby’s will offer at auction the campaign cloak said to have been worn by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. Estimated at £20,000-30,000, the mud-spattered garment can convincingly be traced back to Lady Caroline Lamb, who had an affair with Wellington in the summer of 1815 in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Now best remembered for her affair with the poet Lord Byron, Lady Caroline made a conquest of Wellington in Brussels and it is easy to imagine the Duke giving her the cloak as a memento. The first documented owner was Grosvenor Charles Bedford, an extremely well-connected man about town who worked as a civil servant in the exchequer and was given the cloak just eight years after Waterloo. In his diary entry for 14 May 1823, Bedford recounts how he and a close friend were shown around the Hunterian collection at the Royal College of Surgeons by their mutual friend the surgeon and anatomist Anthony Carlisle, who presented Bedford with the cloak, informing its new owner that it has been given to him by Lady Caroline, who had received it from the Duke. The cloak has passed down by family descent since that time and has never been sold or publically exhibited.

The appearance and characteristics of this cloak, together with its provenance, leave little doubt that it was a campaign cloak used by Wellington during the Waterloo campaign, although it is not possible to be certain that he was wearing this particular cloak on 18 June 1815. This cloak is the best documented item of Wellington’s costume from the Waterloo campaign ever likely to come to auction. At least one other campaign cloak once existed in the hands of a friend of Wellington, although that cloak has been lost since 1824. Wellington himself was entirely unsentimental about this relic of his greatest victory – commenting that one cloak was as good as another – so it may well be that he made gifts of two campaign cloaks and may not even have remembered which one he was wearing on the day of Waterloo. Sir Thomas Lawrence painted two portraits of Wellington in his Waterloo cloak, and both depict a cloak of a very similar design to the current example.

Old Master & British Drawings, 8 July 2015
The first of the portraits of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) is an intimate, yet imposing work in watercolour, showing the ‘Iron Duke’ against a stormy sky wearing a scarlet uniform, decorated with the Order of the Fleece. Painted by celebrated French artist Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767-1855) and dated 1816, the portrait has a well-documented provenance. According to a letter dated 1895 – the original of which will be included with this lot – the Duke gave the portrait to Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, with whom he had a liaison at the time of the battle of Waterloo. Lady Frances was the glamorous daughter of the 1st Earl of Mountmorris, who, in 1813, had also had a passionate affair with Lord Byron. Upon her death in 1839, the work passed to her husband Sir James Webster Wedderburn. In need of funds, Sir James arranged to borrow money from Richard Roy, his family's solicitor, and deposited the portrait as a form of security. This loan was never repaid and upon Richard Roy's death, he gave the work to his own wife, who in turn, bequeathed it, at her death in 1895, to her brother Thomas Broadbent Cartwright. The work has remained in that family ever since and Sotheby’s sale marks its first appearance on the market. Estimated at £15,000-25,000, it is the earliest fully finished watercolour of the Duke by Isabey and forms part of a small group of portraits of Wellington that the artist produced between 1814 and 1821.

The second portrait of the Duke of Wellington is dated 1817 and was made in enamel by William Grimaldi (1751-1830), a successful and fashionable painter of enamels and portrait miniatures. Wellington first sat for him in circa 1805 and Grimaldi’s records reveal that in total he created eleven enamels and fourteen watercolours of the Duke. This piece is characterised by its sophisticated trompe-l’oeil effect, derived from Joseph Nollekens’ marble bust of 1809. Estimated at £6,000-8,000, it was first owned by Stacey Grimaldi, the artist’s son, and remained in the same family by descent until 2010.

Belying expectation and artistic tradition on every conceivable level, J.M.W. Turner’s exquisitely drawn and painted landscape showing the vast and undulating fields of Waterloo reveals how moved the artist was at the sight which befell him post-battle. Turner visited Waterloo in August 1817 and completed an extensive investigation of the battlefields on horseback, annotating his sketches with the graphic calculations of the number of men killed at specific sights. He was only seventeen when war with France was declared in 1793 and forty when it finally concluded in 1815 at the battle of Waterloo with the defeat of Napoleon, Emperor of the French. One of four scenes Turner painted of Waterloo, close observation of the intricate detail reveals the significance of this deceptively pastoral landscape. He deploys the most powerful and sublime representation of nature, a lightning storm, to ensure an awe-inspiring impact on the viewer, with the telling detail of the charred remains of the Picton tree in the foreground. The foreign site of this British victory had become a kind of pilgrimage for those like Turner long confined to British shores. Drawn in 1833, eighteen years after the battle, and engraved for the frontispiece of Sir Walter Scott’s 1835 publication, The Life of Napoleon, Turner offers a view of the aftermath of the war-torn battlefields. Estimated at £150,000-250,000, The Field of Waterloo, From the Picton Tree provides a stark contrast to the large-scale battle paintings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which were vehicles for representing the most valiant and heroic British actions.

English Literature, History, Children’s Books & Illustrations, 14 July 2015
A group of letters written to Lady Georgina Bathurst from Brussels at the time of the Waterloo campaign evoke the atmosphere in the city immediately before Napoleon's invasion. The Duchess of Richmond's ball on the eve of the Battle of Quatre Bras has attained legendary historic status, and an eyewitness account describes the effect the news of Napoleon's impending attack had on the ball's attendees when it was received mid-flow, resulting in 'seeing all one's friends fly to the left & to the right' in preparation for the fight. One of the letters references Lady Caroline Lamb's arrival to tend to her seriously wounded brother, Colonel Frederic Ponsonby ('the surgeon told her the best thing she could do would be to hold her tongue'), whilst an anonymous but apparently eyewitness account tells of the meeting between Sir Henry Bunbury, Lord Keith, and Napoleon, at Torbay, at which Napoleon was informed that he would be exiled to St. Helena. The Bathurst family correspondence, comprising three other volumes, is estimated at £3,000-5,000.

The auction also provides an exceptional opportunity to acquire a battle order hand-written by the Duke of Wellington during the Waterloo campaign. There are no records of similar battle orders by Wellington having been sold at auction in recent decades. In this autograph manuscript – estimated at £4,000-6,000 – Wellington sends an unnamed officer from Cambrai to Peronné on the banks of the Somme, captured on 26 June 1815 during the Allied advance on Paris following the victory at Waterloo.