The modest three-room Porter Gallery at the National Portrait Gallery must concentrate the minds of curators wonderfully: how to tell a story or represent a life within such limited space. As a contribution to the Waterloo bicentennial this restrained yet revealing exhibition contributes more than its title suggests. Overshadowed by the larger Sargent exhibition running concurrently, but perhaps with free entry because of this, it is a perfect complement to the larger Bonaparte and the British, Prints and Propaganda in the Age of Napoleon, at the British Museum. Any temptation to overcrowd the rooms has been admirably resisted. For example, the 1812-14 portrait of The Duke of Wellington by Goya from the National Gallery is given an exclusive wall, appropriately coloured in gun-metal grey.

Portraits from the NPG collection are the core of the display, but significant loans from the Wellington Collection at Stratfield Saye House and from The National Army Museum in particular have enriched the visual evidence of Wellington’s personal life and military role. There has been an effort to convey interconnected personal, national and historical narratives, bookending the display with John Hoppner’s c.1795 portrait of the young Arthur Wellesley and an 1844 daguerreotype of the aged man at seventy-five, ‘a tangible sense of an elderly man at ease with himself, after a life time of achievement’, as the label suggests. We can look across to compare the two, encouraged perhaps to feel that we have just experienced an insight into a life which spanned and connected the Georgian and Victorian eras. The enlarged A Wellington Boot or The Head of the Army by William Heath (etching, 1827, published by Thomas Mclean, BM Satires 15430), who we meet again in the exhibition, confronts us at the entrance and provides the closing image. It is presented as a neat cypher for the national hero as he is known today and who we suppose will emerge as a rounded character by the end of our visit. However, the exhibition also contains several strands of subtext, and these are subtly signposted in labels or in the selection of juxtaposed images. My impression is that the deeper social and artistic insights these allow were actually of more interest to the curators, and result in a more complex exhibition than a simple ‘life in pictures’ might have been.

Portraits of Wellington as war hero are soon side-lined in favour of the larger picture of the ‘ordinary soldier’s’ experiences. This shift seems to be partly because he does not appear comfortable in his portraits; rather he is wary and fatigued. Goya had to update the medals and honours as Wellington’s successes accumulated, but the same very Spanish face haunts the canvas. Whether the face was also updated to reflect the stresses developing over time is not mentioned. Lady Jersey chose to keep her commissioned portrait of him unfinished after Sir Thomas Lawrence died before its completion in 1830, and the rough spontaneity seems more in keeping with the military man. His soldiers are represented by the illustrated diary of Edmund Wheatley from 1812-17 from a private collection, accompanied in a case by a skilled self-portrait and highlighted by a digitised selection from the diary. Enlarged details suggest that he was a competent draughtsman, employing formal cross-hatching techniques and recording lively first-hand observations. We are given a brief description of his fortunes, pointedly including his death from pneumonia in 1841, aggravated by poverty and poor health as a result of his military career. However, it is the more professional Denis Dighton’s 1815 watercolour sketch of the Chateau de Hougemont or the Field of Waterloo (watercolour, 1815, Royal Collection Trust) and his large finished watercolour of the Defence of the Chateau de Hougemont, (watercolour, 1815, National Army Museum), employing details from the sketch, which are most poignant. His sketch shows stripped bodies being tipped into a mass grave, their uniforms and equipment neatly laid alongside. It is a detail similarly highlighted in the British Museum exhibition, which also features a private sketch book showing naked figures stripped and abandoned on the field of battle, albeit minor details in a topographical landscape. The NPG label for Dighton’s sketch points out that it is ‘a reminder of the reality of war often effaced by the commemoration and celebration of military victory in art’, though we read it in the area of the second room which is titled Waterloo and its Commemoration. Wheatley’s modest and well-thumbed diary sits tellingly opposite the ranks of fifteen exquisitely fine individual portrait sketches of Wellington and his officers, made by Thomas Heaphy from 1813 to 1814, in preparation for a large group portrait. Officers were desperate to be included, with the result that the final composition has the collage-effect of disconnected ranks of heads, more appropriate perhaps for cutting out and ‘grangerising’ in a regimental history memoir. Only the engraving is known now, the painting unsuccessfully offered to George IV, though it is unclear whether it actually survives somewhere in a dusty corridor.

This leads to two other intriguing subtexts, the variety of commemorative material and the fortunes of artists producing them. The prints and memorabilia generated by the Waterloo victory are exemplified in the second room, both by expensive porcelain tableware and cheaper commercial items, in contrast to The British Museum offering of items gleaned from the battlefield by Lord Byron. The artists employed are carefully named, such as William Heath, whose fine hand-painting on a Prussian porcelain service ice pail is labelled along with the information that he later became a caricaturist. His The Field of Battersea (published by Thomas Mclean, 1829, BM Satires 15697), in which Wellington appears with a monstrous lobster-claw head is on the wall nearby. Satirical prints are used sparingly, and effectively convey the key political issues which marked Wellington’s less than glittering later political life, summarised here on one small wall.

The artists’ career opportunities opened by the rush to memorialise Waterloo are evident, but luck favoured only a few. James Ward’s complex allegorical composition The Triumph of Arthur 1st Duke of Wellington and the Allies (oil on canvas, 1816, National Army Museum) won first prize in a competition by the British Institute, but its full-size version was too difficult to accommodate at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and has now disappeared. A second prize winner however, George Jones, depicted Wellington ordering the pursuit of the defeated French troops, and this still hangs at Chelsea. Jones effectively forged a career from his dramatic visual narratives. Benjamin Robert Haydon was unable to capitalise on his enthusiasm for Wellington and Napoleon, and his 1844 retrospective portrayal of George IV being given a tour of the battlefield was not able to deliver the success he felt was his due. One of his small, hastily finished images of Napoleon on St. Helena features in the British Museum exhibition. It is ironic that his minor work has found a fitting context which his major canvases never do. The battlefield of Waterloo thus emerges as an artistic site for victory or defeat. Portraits of the heroes of the day preside over the struggle in Room Two. We are reminded of Wellington transformed into the iconic image on the £5 note, the gradual downplaying of Blücher’s contribution, and the description of the Earl of Uxbridge’s amputated leg given its own tombstone near the battlefield, which all subtly question the uses and meanings of memorialising iconic national events and their participants, the manipulations and unintended outcomes.

The final room, exploring the ‘Passions’ of the exhibition title, is necessarily selective. Any passions are set against Wellington’s ‘unhappy domestic life’, and the fact that he ‘also had a number of platonic friendships with women, especially in later life’. The delicate drawing of his wife which ‘suggests nervousness’ (quoted from exhibition labels) is unfortunately shown in a case with Cruickshank’s satirical print of the ‘publish-and-be-damned’ Harriette Wilson. None of his relationships appear satisfactory. The restless soldier was never really domesticated. A mention of Frances Lady Shelley would have been less predictable, since their connection is still unclear, and her memoirs boast of Wellington’s admiration for her horsemanship and a degree of equality in their friendship.

Wellington emerges from this exhibition as a flawed but still admirable national hero. The catalogue is a manageable size, expanding the themes but reordering the narrative, and including an introduction by William Hague MP. The spotlight thus thrown on the less successful political phase of Wellington’s life is a little unfortunate, since those old enough may remember that a particular choice of headwear was satirised during William Hague’s tenure as leader of the Tory party, one conveying a quite different message from the dashing cocked hat traditionally associated with Wellington at the height of his fame.

Wellington: Triumphs, Politics and Passions is at The National Portrait Gallery, from 12th March to 7th June, 2015.