Christopher Teesdale

Teesdale carried a pocket sketchbook everywhere, even into battle, scribbling quick lines between shells and tents. In 1854 he landed in Crimea with British troops, drawing what bullets couldn’t hit—the mud, the mules, the makeshift hospitals. One page shows a soldier sleeping upright against a wall; another captures a battered bandage drying on a bayonet like laundry. Why bother? He once wrote that bullets leave holes, but sketches leave memories. Hunt his “Sketches made during the Campaign of 1854-55” and you’ll find the war stripped of heroics, just the quiet, smudged truth.