Montagu Frederick O'Reilly

This lieutenant in a British artillery regiment spent his free hours with a paintbox instead of a deck of cards. He sketched the Crimean guns and Turkish forts where he wasn’t firing them, recording the exact minute the Russian fleet slid past Sevastopol. His watercolours feel like field notes rather than decorations—every hatch mark on the brass barrel is where he stood. You can still walk the same shore at Çanakkale and squint at the same fort he titled in 1849.