With the loss of the American colonies looming, the successful British defense of Gibraltar in 1782, besieged for three years by Spain and its French allies, was a much needed morale booster to British military affairs. After a continuous barrage of fire, the British troops defeated the Spanish floating batteries, a turning point in the siege, which ended one month later when Admiral Howe broke the last vestiges of the blockade. To commemorate the victory at Gibraltar, the city of London awarded Copley the most important commission of his career: a large painting for the Court of Common Council Room at Guildhall, a project that would take eight arduous years to complete.

Contemporary history painting, as defined by Benjamin West and Copley, required the artist to be a diligent researcher by gathering firsthand accounts of the event, making life studies of the officers present at the battle, documenting uniforms, and arranging fortress and ship models in the studio to re-create the correct positions of the battlements and vessels. Copley made over eighty preparatory studies on paper for The Siege of Gibraltar (1791, Guildhall Art Gallery, London). The majority of the artist’s drawings concentrate on the depiction of struggling survivors at left rather than the commemorative officer group at right. This drawing, however, contains figures from both sides of the final painting.

Related examples: This sketch is one of two of the Honorable Lieutenant Colonel Lindsay, the Highland officer at the far right of the painting; the other sketch of Lindsay belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The rope pullers are part of the rescue team at left in the final version of the painting. They are related to similarly oriented figures appearing in two other sketches: another Bayou Bend drawing (see B.54.29) and one in a private collection in New York (1966). Sketches of a rope puller in the bow of the gunboat belong to the British Museum, London; Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York; and the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.