The Battle of Waterloo: The British Squares Receiving the Charge of the French Cuirassiers by Félix Philippoteaux

This painting is by Felix Philippoteaux (1815-1884) s called 'The Battle of Waterloo: The British Squares Receiving the Charge of the French Cuirassiers'. I had a postcard of this when I was a boy, which my father bought me on a visit to Apsley House (where it is displayed) in about 1971. I loved it, of course, because it showed those Airfix Napoleonic favourites; Cuirassiers and Highlanders. Philippoteaux was only born in 1815 and this painting wasn't completed until 1874, many years after the battle of which it captures the quintessence.

Philippoteaux collaborated with his son Paul on a vast (more than a hundred yards long) cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg . Since lost, several more copies were made including the one in the Gettysburg visitors centre

The The 2nd Prussian Infantry Regiment assaulting Plancenoit by Carl Röchling

This is one of my favourite Napoleonic Wars subject paintings, by German artist Carl Röchling (1855 – 1920). It depicts the 2nd Prussian Infantry Regiment, the 1st Pommeranian, assaulting Plancenoit during the Battle of Waterloo. Born in Saarbrücken, he studied from 1875 to 1880 in the Karlsruhe Academy of Arts  and later in the Prussian Academy of Arts.  He specialised in military paintings, especially those featuring the Prussian Army, and the Franco-Prussian war in particular, but also did some paintings of  American Civil War battles.

I first saw this painting on the cover of my copy of Albert Nofi’s The Waterloo Campaign and it had a lot to do with my buying a box of Perry plastic Prussians!