Gillray and De Loutherburg in Valenciennes

In the late summer of 1793, the Swiss artist, Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) was commissioned by the publishing brothers, Valentine and Rupert Green, and the Swiss printseller, Mechel, to paint a scene of the grand attack on Valenciennes, France, on July 26, 1793. He was paid £500. The siege of Valenciennes was the main action in the Duke of York’s campaign in the Low Countries against the French and it aroused a lot of interest in Britain. The artist invited the celebrated caricaturist, James Gillray (1756-1815) to accompany him and they obtained special passes to enable them to travel to France and Flanders to make the necessary preparatory sketches of the various commanders and studies of the soldiers engaged in the siege. The writer, Thomas Holcroft noted in his diary that Gillray was ‘a man of talents, however, and uncommonly apt at sketching a hasty likeness’. According to Thomas Wright in his work on Gillray, upon their return to England, the various drawings were shown to King George III who praised Loutherbourg’s sketches of buildings and landscapes but barely looked at Gillray’s attempts (not surprisingly since Gillray often poked fun at the royal family in his caricatures. A number of these sketches survive in the Military Collection, the British Museum and the Royal Collection. The seven sketches at Brown depict mainly Hessian and Austrian troops from 1793.