Overall: 38cm (15in) x 49.5cm (19.5in)
Watercolour on paper. An officer, trooper and trumpeter of the Hampshire Carabineers on manoeuvres in a rolling landscape. Signed lower left ‘B.Granville Barker’ and titled across the image ‘Hampshire Yeomanry Carabineers’. Framed and glazed.
Lieutenant-Colonel Bernard Granville Baker DSO (1870-1957) was born in British India. He was educated at Winchester College and a military cadet school at Dresden between 1883-86. He then enlisted into the 3rd Battalion, Middlesex Regiment. In 1889 he transferred to the 21st Hussars and was detached for duty with the Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General's Department, Upper Burma for intelligence and survey work after which he was recommended for commission in 1894. He returned to the 3rd Bn Middlesex Regiment as a Lieutenant in November 1894, but promptly wrote to the German Emperor requesting commission in the Prussian 9.Husaren-Regiment which was approved. When the Boer War broke out in 1899, Baker was preparing to enter the German Army Staff College, so resigned the Kaiser’s commission in favour of a Queen’s commission in the Imperial Yeomanry in February 1900. He was appointed Adjutant of the 14th Battalion, Imperial Yeomanry and was promoted Captain by June that same year. However, he was invalided home after a horse fractured ribs, collar bone and shoulder blade. By January 1901 he had recovered enough to return to South Africa and was appointed to command the 1st Company, East Kent Imperial Yeomanry. However he was invalided home and in January 1902 and resigned his Yeomanry commission altogether.
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In 1912 he joined the Reserve and participated in the Balkan War on the Turkish side. On the outbreak of the First World War he was commissioned Captain in the intelligence branch of the Indian Corps on the Western Front. In July 1916 he was appointed to command the 13th (Service) Bn Yorkshire Regiment (Green Howards) - a Bantam Battalion that accepted men who were shorter than the standard army height requirements. Granville Baker was wounded in action at Gouzeacourt Wood on in April 1917 but recovered to become British Commissioner for Propaganda on the Italian and Salonika Fronts. He was mentioned in despatches (LG 25.5.1917) and in July 1918 was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. In 1919 he was appointed to the Supreme Economic Council's Mission to Central Europe.
He was a prolific author and a talented artist known for his illustrations and watercolour paintings of military subjects, such as ‘Sir John Moore at Corunna, January 16th 1809’. He exhibited at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery and the London Salon between 1914 and 1930. Baker was a Teutonophile and, when the time came, he stood surety for refugees fleeing the Nazis. He was a Justice of the Peace for Suffolk, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Royal Historical Society. During the Second World War he was a member of the 1st Battalion, Suffolk Local Defence Volunteers. He married in 1897 and lived latterly in the Suffolk market town of Beccles in a house named ‘The Cage’.