A Prussian soldier offers items to a mounted hussar, while a woman sells battlefield relics to a highlander and some tourists. In the centre of the painting, a coach with basketwork panniers is possibly about to return visitors to Brussels, just as a cartload of red-coated British soldiers’ bodies arrives in the village. Mounted Lancers wait outside the public house, while one cavalryman on crutches hobbles towards the group.

The artist, George Jones, one of the most prolific battle painters of the nineteenth century, studied at the Royal Academy Schools before obtaining a Captaincy in the South Devon Militia. He visited the field of Waterloo immediately after the battle and made drawings on the spot. The scene depicted here may be taken as an eyewitness record of the immediate local trade in small relics as souvenirs, which had probably been stripped from the dead on the field.