In early 1854, The Illustrated London News sent three correspondents to Crimea - Edward Goodall, Joseph Archer Crowe and Constantin Guys - to report as direct observers of the war. They also commissioned serving officers to send them drawings. These images were engraved for the paper, and helped them to double their readership from 100,000 to 200,000 per week. By November 1854, it had become the most popular newspaper in Britain. It was clear that here was great interest from home in the first major war that Britain had entered since Napoleon. The Times sent the reporter Willy Russell ‘embedded’ with the Brigade of Guards in February 1854, but there was also a strong demand for authentic images and in the autumn of 1854 the print publishers Agnew sent the photographer Roger Fenton, and Colnaghi, also print publishers, sent the Glaswegian watercolourist William Simpson.

It took three weeks minimum for pictures to be sent back to London from the front. Fenton’s photographs were shown at Agnew’s in September 1855, but did not sell well. Some of Simpson’s originals were shown at the Graphic Society by Colnaghi in February 1855, and Colnaghi’s published 2,000 copies of a complete set of lithographs by Day and Son of his watercolours across two large portfolios entitled The Seat of the War in the East. They sold well, and the artist became famous as ‘Crimean’ Simpson.

This self-portrait dates from 1855 and was made on the spot in the Crimea. Simpson is wearing the same greatcoat as he is in the dated Roger Fenton photograph of him on Cathcart Hill, before the siege of Sevastopol, and his beard is the same length. As he explained in his 1903 autobiography, 'On starting for the Crimean War, my upper lip and chin were in the ordinary style of the period, but as my razors were left behind intentionally, I returned with a very long brown beard'.

This watercolour is a recent rediscovery of this early war artist’s work, direct from the theatre of war where he earned his great fame - he was often referred to as the ‘doyen’, the ‘prince’ and the ‘very paladin’ of pictorial correspondents. It has never been reproduced and is unknown to scholars.