Overall: 52cm (20.5in) x 68cm (26in)
Provenance: Parker Gallery, Albermarle Street, London
Watercolour on paper with unusual air frost effect to the sky. Inscribed on the mount ‘Field Day, Dublin 1857 The Grenadier Guards under command of Colonel Hon. Robert Bruce’. Image 33cm (13in) x 48cm (19in). Signed lower middle. Framed and glazed.
The early part of 1857 found Colonel Hon. Robert Bruce (1813-1862) with the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards in Dublin and when required in attendance at Viceregal Lodge. He is the mounted officer on the right of the present watercolour. In 1858 he was appointed governor to the seventeen-year-old Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), following the dismissal of the Prince's tutor Frederick Waymouth Gibbs. He attended the Prince during his time at Christ Church, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge, and accompanied him on his trips to Rome in 1859 and Canada and the United States in 1860. Bruce was promoted major-general in 1859 and in 1862 he went with the Prince of Wales on a tour of the Near East, where he caught a fever. He died at St James's Palace in the rooms of his sister Lady Augusta Bruce.
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Orlando Norie (1832-1901) belonged to a branch of the well-known family of Scottish painters, active in artistic life since the time of James Norie the Elder in the early eighteenth century. He is thought to have been taught by his father, Robert, a prosperous manufacturer and amateur artist who left Scotland for the continent in 1821, staying first in France and then for a long period in Belgium. The family returned to France in 1851 in much reduced circumstances, settling in Dunkirk, where Orlando was to remain. Although Norie was known in France as a painter of everyday scenes and genre works, he is best remembered as a military illustrator working primarily in watercolour. His output was published widely and appeared on postcards, in magazines and regimental histories. His talent was first recognised in the autumn of 1854 when the London printmaking firm of Rudolf Ackermann published his picture of the Battle of the Alma. This was followed by prints of the Crimean battles of Inkermann and Balaclava, and later episodes of the Indian Mutiny. Ackermann’s Eclipse Sporting and Military Gallery served as the main outlet for many of Norrie’s original works. He was viewed as the natural successor to Henry Martens (fl.1825-1865) and received royal patronage of Queen Victoria.