'Oorlogsleed', woman and child at the Battle of Waterloo

The painting "Wartime Suffering" symbolizes and recalls the suffering that war brings. J.J. Eeckhout painted it in 1826. It is a classical, romanticized depiction in which the suffering of war is personified in a market woman. She mourns her fallen husband who lies at her feet. This soldier is a flanker from a Battalion of Infantry of Line of the Dutch force, which took part in the battle of Waterloo (1815). The drama is heightened by their child and by her skyward gaze. Her suffering is said to be based on the diary of one sergeant Jan Willem van Wetering who fought at Waterloo. It tells of a market girl who, shortly after giving birth to her child, searches desperately and in vain for her husband. According to his captain, he was still alive, but she did not believe him and insisted that her husband had perished.
This motif can be found, either centrally or as a detail, in the romanticized pictorial expressions of Napoleonic battles in the first half of the 19th century.