NAM.1958-08-18-1

A Welcome Arrival, 1855 Oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right ‘J D Luard 1857’, by John Dalbiac Luard (1830-1860), 1857, exhibited at the Royal Academy 1857 No. 133. Born into a military family, the artist John Dalbiac Luard had passed through Sandhurst and served with the 63rd (The West Suffolk) Regiment of Foot and then the 82nd (The Prince of Wales’s Volunteers) Regiment of Foot before selling his commission as a lieutenant in January 1854 in order to take up painting as his profession. In the winter of 1855-1856 Luard travelled to the Crimea in order to produce sketches of the war and to visit his brother, Captain Richard Amherst Luard (b. 1827) of the 77th (The East Middlesex) Regiment of Foot, who is believed to be the central figure in the painting. The figure on the right has never been positively identified, but may be a self-portrait of the artist, who in a letter to his father recounted how he had witnessed the unpacking of a box of supplies while visiting his former regiment, the 82nd Regiment of Foot. For officers at least, the arrival of parcels from home was a welcome relief from the monotony and privations of life in camp. Those depicted here can be seen unpacking bottles and tins as well as articles of warm clothing. The walls of their hut are decorated with pages from The Illustrated London News, an indication of an attempt to make it more homely. In the centre of the painting, asleep on a table behind the stove, is a cat, long popularly identified as ‘Crimean Tom’, the pet rescued from the ruins of Sevastopol and brought back to England by Deputy Assistant Commissary William Gair. Extrapolating from the uncertain to the unknown, it was posited in turn that Gair was the officer on the left of the painting examining a miniature or photographic image of loved-ones at home. However, there is no evidence to substantiate either of these claims.

Crimean War (1854-1856)