The Plundering of Basing House

Charles Landseer painted The Plundering of Basing House in 1836, depicting Cromwell's Parliamentary forces sacking the Royalist stronghold in Hampshire in 1645. The siege of Basing House, defended by the Marquess of Winchester for three years, was one of the most dramatic episodes of the English Civil War, and its violent conclusion made it a natural subject for Victorian historical painters seeking drama and moral complexity in domestic history. Charles Landseer, brother of the more celebrated Edwin, was a competent history and genre painter whose work occupied the mainstream of British Victorian historical painting. The English Civil War provided particularly rich material for nineteenth-century painters because it pitted English against English and involved conflicts of loyalty, religion, and political principle that resonated with Victorian anxieties about reform and revolution. The painting is now held at the National Gallery, which preserves this as an example of the Victorian historical genre at a characteristic moment in its development.

Landseer renders the chaotic sacking scene with dramatic lighting and careful attention to 17th-century military equipment and costume. The dynamic composition captures the confusion and violence of the assault with theatrical intensity.