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MATERIAL/MEDIUM three in pen and brown ink and oils on paper, varnished; seven in brush and brown ink and brown wash over graphite PROVENANCE Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852), 1st Duke of Wellington and by descent through the family Sold, Sotheby's, London, Architectural Watercolors asnd Drawings Related to the Life and Residences of the 1st Duke of Wellington, December 11, 1980, part of lot 11 Lodewijk Houthakker, Amsterdam Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London Acquired from the above, 1991 EXHIBITED Oberlin, Ohio, The Allen Memorial Art Museum, A New World. Neo-Classical Drawings from the Collection of Lodewijk Houthakker, 1986, cat. no. 105 LITERATURE P. Fuhring, Design into Art: Drawings for Architecture and Ornament. The Lodewijck Houthakker Collection, pp. 402-405, cat. no. 646. CATALOGUE NOTE The present drawings are designs for nine of the ten panels on the Wellington Shield, a large silver-gilt presentation piece intended for display on a sideboard. The shield, now at Apsley House, was commissioned in 1814 by the Merchants and Bankers of the City of London as a gift to the Duke of Wellington. Sideboard dishes in the Mannerist and Baroque style were extremely popular by about 1810. Stothard himself adapted a monumental antique cameo for a dish showing Bacchus and Ariadne in a chariot drawn by satyrs, the drawing for which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The success of this slightly earlier design may have helped him obtain the commission for the Wellington Shield. In designing the Wellington Shield Stothard was undoubtedly inspired by the shield of Achilles, which is described in great detail in the Iliad. It was round with the twelve signs of the zodiac filling the outer compartments and the firmament the central portion. Stothard himself had made illustrations of Homer's works and also would have been familiar with 18th century engravings depicting the shield (see Fuhring, Op. cit., p. 403). He would probably have also known John Flaxman's designs for a Shield of Achilles, commissioned by the Royal Goldsmiths Rundell, Bridge and Rundell in 1810. A preliminary drawing for the Wellington Shield (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) shows a shield with twelve outer compartments, but in his final design Stothard reduced this to ten. Within the compartments are major events in Wellington's career from the Battle of Assaye in 1803 to his being made duke on May 11, 1814. The final designs must date from after the creation of the Dukedom of Wellington, but before the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815. The silver-gilt shield itself, 40 inches in diameter, was not finished until 1822 when it was presented to the Duke and installed in the plate room at Apsley House. The shield was actually executed by the silversmiths Benjamin Smith II and his son Benjamin Smith III, working for the retail jewelers Green, Ward and Green. Working with Stothard was apparently a mixed blessing for although the drawings show a great deal of ingenuity and spirit, his clay models were so bad that they were virtually unusable. The drawings here are for nine of the ten compartments, the tenth drawing being a variant of The Passage of the Douro. The missing scene The Battle of Salamanca is the Victoria and Albert Museum, which also has a second set of drawings for the shield, lacking only the Entrance into Toulouse. It is not clear how that two different sets of drawings relate to each other or to the finished plate. Another puzzling question is Stothard's choice of different media for the various designs. Fuhring Op. cit., p. 403, suggests that the use of oil and varnish in three drawings from this group may have been a means of giving a better sense of the relief work on the finished shield. In addition to the drawings in the V & A, two further versions of the Battle of Douro were sold in 1980, one of which was owned by Lodewijck Houthakker (as were the present drawings), but was not part of the Blass collection. A variant of The Victory at Assaye was sold at Sotheby's London, July 10, 1997, lot 25. The ten drawings are as follows: The Battle of Assaye, September 23, 1803 pen and brown ink and oils, varnished Fuhring 646a The Battle of Vimeiro, August 21, 1808 brush and brown ink and brown wash over graphite Fuhring 646b The Battle of the Douro, Oporto Liberated, May 12, 1809 brush and brown ink and brown wash over graphite Fuhring 646c The Battle of the Douro, Oporto Liberated, May 12, 1809 - variant brush and brown ink and brown wash over graphite under Fuhring 646c The Lines of Torres Vedras, March 6, 1811 pen and brown ink and oils, varnished Fuhring 646d Badajoz Assaulted and Taken, April 6, 1812 pen and brown ink and oils, varnished Fuhring 646e The Battle of Vittoria, June 21, 1813 brush and brown ink and brown wash over graphite Fuhring 646f The Battle of the Pyrenees, Bordeaux Delivered, October 9, 1813 and January 12-13, 1814 brush and brown ink and brown wash over graphite Fuhring 646g The Entrance into Toulouse, April 12, 1814 brush and brown ink and brown wash over graphite Fuhring 646h Dukedom of Wellington Conferred, 1814 brush and brown ink and brown wash over graphite Fuhring 646i