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There was a feeling of jubilation when Britain and France declared war on Russia in 1854 and began their campaign in the crimes in defense of the Ottoman Turks. At last, thought Tennyson, a chance to shown Britain's manliness to the world. Britain had fought no European conflicts since the Battle of Waterloo had ended the Kpolonic Wars forty years earlier. The intervening years of peace had seen the British army stagnate and And left its generals desperately short of real experi. eace. When Wellington died in 1852, he was the last general to have actually commanded a major military campaign. Not one of the generals dispatched to fight in the Crimea had ever led British troops into action, despite all being veterans of the Napoleonic age. The results were catastrophic. Twenty seven thousand British lives were lost before the allies secured peace with Russia in 1856. The British contingent was led by Lord Raglan, who won an initial victory if the Battle of Alma but failed to push on to capture Sebastopol, forcing the allied forces into a protracted and costly siege. Supply lines to the British-held port of Balaclava were cut in November 1854, leaving the siege hopelessly undersupplied. In January and February 1855, the British were losing an average of one regiment a week - not to fighting but to camp diseases like typhoid, cholera, and dysentery. What made this campaign unusual was that the public back home could follow its progress closely in the press. The Times published daily bulletins from their special correspondent, William Russell; The Illustrated London News dispatched artists to send home sketches from the front; and William Simpson was employed by Colnaghi and Sons to make drawings at twenty-five guineas each for lithographic reproduction to satisfy public curiosity about the war.
Simpson had come to London from Glasgow in 1851 and found work with the lithographers Dayi and Sons, illustrating anything newsworthy from new buildings and boats, to politicians and public events. It was Days who recommended Simpson to Colnaghi's, who were then looking for an artist to send to the front line in the Crimea. Simpson's Mine in the Bastion du Mat, Sebastopol was made from sketches taken shortly after the fall of Sebastopol in September 1855. Back in London, the sketches were worked up into finished watercolors, which were published by Colnaghi in Simpson's Seat of War in the East. The Bastion du Mät was the Russians' most advanced defensive position at Sebastopol and took heavy bombardment from French forces. Simpson's watercolor depicts one of the cramped chambers lying off the trenches behind the bastion's defensive walls. One eye-witness described them: "Along the entire length of these were inserted in the inner side an innumerable series of holes, forming small cottages of the width of the earthen wall, and serving as receptacles tor men and ammunition... no art could have devised a spot more safe, and yet combining the advantage of such close proximity to the bastions themselves." Simpson described "the darkness, the fleas and the uncertainty" on entering them: "It was dismal in the extreme, and smelt very disagreeably; and however used one may get to dead Russians it is not pleasant to stumble at every step over their festering remains amidst the mazes of a dark and intricate labyrinth." Simpson has sanitized this view, for he shows the mine still occupied by live Russian soldiers before the fall of the city. Here, a Russian soldier sits nonchalantly smoking a pipe, presumably now impervious to the terrible conditions that shocked Simpson.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, p. 197, no. 87