William Simpson was born on 28 October 1823 in Glasgow. Following a seven-year apprenticeship with a specialist lithographic firm, he moved to London in February 1851 and found employment with the publishing firm of William Day and Son. In 1859 the firm commissioned Simpson to visit India and make drawings for a book illustrating well-known places associated with the 1857 uprising of the Indian army against their British officers.

Thus began Simpson’s long association with India and the first of four visits over the next 25 years. During these journeys he made numerous rapid pencil drawings in sketchbooks, often heightened with colour washes. Many formed preparatory studies for finished watercolours, most of which he worked up after returning to London. The plan was for Day and Son to select 250 of these finished watercolours to be lithographed as illustrations in the projected volume. While Simpson was away in India, however, Day and Son drifted into debt and in 1867 it went into liquidation. As Simpson expressed it, ‘the great work on India, on which I bestowed so much time and labour, never came into existence’. Two years later, Simpson’s collection of 250 watercolours was sold off as bankrupt stock: ‘This was the big disaster of my life’, he ruefully remarked.

This painting shows soldiers and sailors looting the Kaiser Bagh Palace in Lucknow in northern India during the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857 (known in India as the First War of Indian Independence). The scene is an imaginary one and was painted three years after the events depicted.