In 1956 Kathleen Fenwick wrote in Canadian Art that the National Gallery of Canada had “acquired a group of 20 water colours of unusual historical and artistic interest” by the military artist Thomas Davies. These works, likely finished in England, would show scenes from the Seven Years War (1756-63), which would determine the fate of this new land under British rule. In one sense these works might be viewed as the founding of the future dominion as overseas interests fought for control of sections of the North American continent. This purchase, from the Earl of Derby collection, would add a significant record of the country’s military history and identify one example of how the war artist promoted contemporary cultural ideas through the military picture. Literature and art have shown us that the romantic impulse is a part of the character of the individual and to deny it exists is to ignore what it means to be human. It is also to misread information that the war pictures can reveal to see them as only images of warmongering. Some of the nation’s best painters have become war artists and it is in their works that the most current and cherished values of contemporary society can be carried forward. It is in this vein that the military picture becomes a signifier of the cultural interests of the day. In an effort to balance those who would see war art as a negative exercise, I would make the claim that these pictures do as much to promote the merits of peace as they do to record the disasters of war. It is in the war art of Thomas Davies from the mid eighteenth century that the developing interest in British landscape painting is transmitted through the military picture. Thomas Davies entered the military academy at Woolwich, England in 1755 where officers were introduced to drawing and water colour painting for purposes of making topographical records of “landscape features.” The biographical material on Davies does not indicate any predilection for art training, the Royal Academy would not be founded until 1768, but like so many young men of the eighteenth century, he sought to make a career as an officer in the British military. The cadet’s instructor appears to have been Gamaliel Massiot, of whom little is known in terms of the master’s art, but the tradition of training at Woolwich would appear to have been first-class as the next instructor of note was the celebrated water colourist Paul Sandby. Davies was trained as a Royal artilleryman, where the practice of drawing topographical views of battle terrain for application to firing guns in the field. Davies arrived in Halifax in 1757 and spent the next two years recording attacks against the French from the Bay of Fundy to Montreal. His account of the siege of Fort Louisbourg is more than an annotation of the French forces, but a completed water colour of a distant view of the siege of the naval attack against the fort (see Illustration 1 below). The officer-artist puts us in the British garrison; perhaps we view a self-portrait of Davies’ drawing the scene from behind the fortifications, as the ships put the settlement to fire. It is here that one may make the observation that this scene is more than a military record of the attack but, indeed, we have the artist making the event into a picturesque vision of the fort under blooms of smoke. Perhaps Davies had used preliminary drawings of the enemy position to complete his finished water colour, which works either as a complete landscape scene …