Not today - but on Thursday when I went to the conference, the day's activities included a guided tour of the Waterloo exhibition at the Leeds Royal Armouries. It was very good. I always love the Armouries but getting a tour of the artwork by a guy who really knows his stuff was great fun. Very powerful stuff too.
I'd only ever seen Maclise's Waterloo cartoon in books - seeing it full scale was breathtaking. It was the preparatory drawing he did for what would become his mural painting,
The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher. But the cartoon is much bigger than the mural - it's enormous - made up of panels set next to each other across a long wall - done in chalks (I think). I've never seen anything like it. The detail was staggering. I could have just stood there looking at it for hours.
There's a fairly decent pic of it here - but the scale really doesn't come across:
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhi...clisewaterloo#
As well as the art, there were many fascinating artifacts. One of the most compelling and disturbing things to see was the breastplate of a young cavalry man (I think) with a hole ripped right through the front and back out the other side. They'd set it up on display with the cannon ball (the small canon shot type) at the position it would have been as it exited.