Prints for Peace

The exhibition looks at the summer of 1814, when Europe celebrated peace after the Treaty of Paris following the fall of Napoleon.

Among the pieces in the exhibition are ceramics, jewellery and fashion items, with the prints displayed in a small satellite show in the gallery’s Breakfast room.

We love the pink of Laura Knight’s Waterloo 1815 print – the result of an exploration into the uniforms worn by soldiers fighting the Battle of Waterloo.

Knight says, ‘The Napoleonic period is a huge subject of which I have only touched the surface, but the uniforms stood out immediately for me as highly decorative, theatrical and impractical, reflecting the many ways in which these wars were choreographed, staged and played out’.

Alice Pattulo’s work is similarly bright, showing a mixture of trinkets and objects from around the time of the end of the war that acted as celebratory souvenirs to mark the outbreak of peace.

She says, ‘I thought it would be interesting to record these as a print, which in itself can become a souvenir of this exhibition.’

The Modus Vivendi print (shown at the top of the story) was created by Adam Dant and Jean-Baptiste Marot, and features images inspired by modern stereotypes of England and France.

The prints are available to buy online at http://shop.soane.org/ or from the Sir John Soane’s Museum, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3BP.