Marengo, Napoleon's Barb charger

Marengo was the famous charger ridden by Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battles of Marengo (after which he was named), Austerlitz, Jena-Auerstedt, Wagram and Waterloo. Originally imported to France from Egypt, although small, he was famously steady and courageous. He was wounded eight times and, among other feats, survived the retreat from Moscow in 1812. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Marengo was captured by William, 11^th Lord Petre, and sold to Lieutenant-Colonel Angerstein of the Grenadier Guards. He died in 1831 at the age of 38, and his skeleton is displayed at the National Army Museum, London.

The present work is the only known version painted by Ward of a slightly larger (32 x 43 in.) work, dated 1824 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1826. The earlier picture was doubtless intended as a counterpart to Ward’s portrait of Copenhagen, the charger ridden by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, dated 1824 and exhibited at the Academy the same year. These two pictures were among six portraits of celebrated horses acquired from the artist between 1820 and 1826 by Hugh Percy, 3^rd Duke of Northumberland. In the Northumberland version of Marengo, a setting sun to the right of the composition – where the horse gazes – is seemingly a metaphor for the end of his master’s twelve years of military campaigns.

Included in the artist’s posthumous sale at Christie’s in 1829, the present work was acquired by John Rushout, 2^nd Lord Northwick, a remarkable collector of paintings by Old Masters and contemporary artists, prints, coins, miniatures, enamels and other objects. His vast collection was dispersed in a series of sales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Marengo appearing in one of the last, held at Christie’s in 1965.