Overall: 39.5cm x 34.4cm
Oil on canvas. Half-length portrait of the Captain Stewart in the uniform of the 3rd (East Kent) Regiment of Foot, comprising scarlet tunic with buff facings, holding his 1827 pattern sword and wearing a miniature Waterloo medal. Canvas 30.5cm x 25.0cm. Contained in Edwardian frame.
At the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815 Second Lieutenant Allen Stewart, ‘a giant of a Scotsman’, was with 1/95th Rifles, in the centre of of the Allied line on the Wavre road, a little way behind the farm of La Haye Sainte. Here at about 2pm the French attacked with some 10,000 infantry, and at this point that Allen Stewart made his mark on the battle, as related in Charles Dalton’s ‘Waterloo Roll Call’ (1904) - viz. [Allen Stewart] ‘A chivalrous and daring Highlander. Singled out a French officer at Waterloo and had a duel with him.’ When Stewart's sword broke off at the hilt he instantly closed with the Frenchman, ‘whom he finished in an instant’. Stewart received a sword cut to the arm in the encounter and later in the day, took a musket ball to his shoulder. Cope’s history of the ‘Rifle Brigade, relates that Stewart ‘after long suffering at Brussels where he experienced as did many Riflemen, very great attention and kindness from the inhabitants on whom they were billeted, he returned to England with George Simmons who had also been long detained at Brussels by his dangerous wound.’
Captain Allen Stewart was born at Kilchattan, Argyllshire in 1791. He was a scion of the Appin Stewarts - a West Highland branch of Clan Stewart aka ‘The Loyal Clan’. As such he was a kinsman of the Jacobite hero Allan Breck Stewart immortalised in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Allen Stewart joined the 95th Rifles as a Gentleman Volunteer in 1812 and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Peninsula in December of that year. He was subsequently present at the actions of San Millan, Vittoria, Pyrenees, Bidossa, Nivelle, Nive, Tarbes, and Toulouse. In 1825 he exchanged from half-pay in the Rifle Brigade to the active list with a lieutenantcy in the 34th Foot. He later transferred to the 3rd Foot, as confirmed by Dalton, and evinced by the uniform worn in the present portrait. He married on 4 November 1828, Miss Anna Fortune, daughter of Arthur Fortune Esq of Edinburgh. He went on half-pay again in 1836 and died in the Norwich Military Lunatic Asylum on 6 July 1847.
Ref: Dalton, C. (1904) ‘The Waterloo roll call. With biographical notes and anecdotes’.