Surgeon Captain W.E.A. Armstrong (fl.1895-1946) was Assistant British Resident in Kathmandu, and in June 1899 he submitted an official report on the ‘Moral and Material Progress of Nepal’ to the Secretary of the Foreign Department, Government of India (report housed in the National Archives of India, New Delhi). Nothing further is known about him, but in 1946, as Lieutenant Colonel Armstrong, he donated nine paintings to the V&A. They are signed E. Armstrong or E.W.A. (rather than W.E.A.) but the artist and the donor seem to have been the same person since the Keeper of the Indian Section noted at the time: ‘We should take some of his very able water-colours and I selected nine’. The pictures all depict places in the Kathmandu valley and are dated between 1895 and 1901. Since some of them were exhibited at an ‘Institute’ in London during 1900 and 1901, it is possible that they were worked up specially from earlier sketches made on the spot; this seems to be confirmed by the inscription on one of them, in which [18]97-98 has been replaced by 1895, suggesting that the artist dated the picture retrospectively. The painting shown here depicts the public shrine of Bhairava in Bhaktapur, Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, flanked by guardian winged lions and with a bell on the left.