Lady Butler: Painting a Man’s World, Writing Her Own

Lady Butler’s autobiography is full of humorous anecdotes and illustrations for her meticulous preparations for the ‘oil on canvas’. Lady Butler specialised in military paintings and is best known for these, yet before she published her autobiography her first book Letters from the Holy Land (1903) was surprisingly successful. The talk starts at the end of her autobiography when she visited her son Patrick in the New Forest before he was posted to the Front in 1914. You will see the watercolour of Patrick’s horses used in the frontispiece of his book A Galloper at Ypres (1920).