This is the first biography of Victorian Britain's famous war artist, Elizabeth Thompson Butler. She was born in Lausanne in 1846, where her family had gone to join their friend, Charles Dickens. As Elizabeth Thompson, she became a celebrity after exhibiting her Crimean War painting, The roll call, in 1874. She transformed war art by depicting conflict trauma, decades before its designation as a medical condition. Yet, by 1914, her reputation was in decline. Married to William Butler, an Irish Catholic officer in the British army, her life in art was a life spent in travel with her husband's...