Overall: 29cm (11.5n) x 35cm (14in)
Oil on board. A view of Napoleon Bonaparte’s tomb in the Valley of the Willows. Period label to the reverse, inscribed ‘Buonaparte’s Tomb / At St. Helena / by Captain Stones / 13th Light Dragoons. / Passenger on Board the Lady Holland. / Captain Snell March 1827 / and given by Him to Lt. Col / Bayly 98th Regt. Passenger from / The Cape of Good Hope’. Board: 19.5cm (7.5in) x 25.5cm (10in). Contained in period gilt slip and rosewood veneered frame.
In the second quarter of the 19th century the Valley of the Willows exerted a powerful draw on travellers returning from the East via the south Atlantic island of St Helena - the island being the East India Company’s longstanding staging post for homeward bound shipping. In the age of Romanticism, it was for many an unmissable, if somewhat inaccessible tourist attraction, laced with fashionable melancholia and a frisson of contained horror as the resting place of the ogre who a few short years before had held all Europe in his thrall. The knowledge that Napoleon had chosen the place as his burial site for its tranquility and water source added to its allure and made it a magnet for souvenir hunters. In the couple of decades Napoleon was buried there, the willows were all but stripped bare.
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Captain Henry Stones was commissioned Cornet eighteen months after his regiment’s heroics at Waterloo and perhaps felt the anti-climax of the post-Napoleonic era more than many. After a post-war period of harassing political agitators at the behest of mayors and magistrates in the north of England, Stones and the 13th Light Dragoons departed English shores on a twenty year posting to India, with only occasional leave to Europe. In 1827, he was homeward bound aboard the merchant ship Lady Holland, named ironically for one of the most vociferous opponents of Napoleon’s exile and imprisonment, giving him the chance to make the pilgrimage to the Vallée du Tombeau. Here, as depicted in his oil sketch, he found the tomb in its final configuration, surrounded by the iron railing in a wooded enclosure. The sentry box, for the guard detailed to ward off Napoleonic supporters and souvenir hunters, however, stands empty.
As attested verso the present picture was gifted by Stones to a fellow passenger, an officer of the 98th Foot, long stationed at Cape Town, South Africa, also homeward bound. Just three years later Captain Snell’s merchantman struck a reef west of the Cape and was wrecked. Stones was eventually promoted to Major and was one only five officers to survive the regiment’s twenty year Indian tour. During that time no less than 15 officers and 1051 men of the13th Light Dragoons died. In 1838 the Waterford Mail reported that ‘Major Stones narrowly escaped from a wild elephant at a hunt in Bengal that killed two of his attendants’.