A studio was taken in London, and the “Roll-Call” (calling the roll after an engagement,—­Crimea) was begun.  She put life into the faces and the attitudes of the men, as she worked with eager heart and careful labor.  In the spring of 1874 it was sent to the Royal Academy, with, we may suppose, not very enthusiastic hopes.

The stirring battle piece pleased the committee, and they cheered when it was received.  Then it began to be talked at the clubs that a woman had painted a battle scene!  Some had even heard that it was a great picture.  When the Academy banquet was held, prior to the opening, the speeches of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge, both gave high praise to the “Roll-Call.”

Such an honor was unusual.  Everybody was eager to see the painting.  It was the talk at the clubs, on the railway trains, and on the crowded thoroughfares.  All day long crowds gathered before it, a policeman keeping guard over the painting, that it be not injured by its eager admirers.  The Queen sent for it, and it was carried, for a few hours, to Buckingham Palace, for her to gaze upon.  So much was she pleased that she desired to purchase it, and the person who had ordered it gave way to Her Majesty.  The copyright was bought for fifteen times the original sum agreed upon as its value, and a steel-plate engraving made from it at a cost of nearly ten thousand dollars.  After thirty-five hundred impressions, the plate was destroyed, that there might be no inferior engravings of the picture.  The “Roll-Call” was for some time retained by the Fine Art Society, where it was seen by a quarter of a million persons.  Besides this, it was shown in all the large towns of England.  It is now at Windsor Castle.

Elizabeth Thompson had become famous in a day, but she was not elated over it; for, young as she was, she did not forget that she had been working diligently for twenty years.  The newspapers teemed with descriptions of her, and incidents of her life, many of which were, of course, purely imaginative.  Whenever she appeared in society, people crowded to look at her.

Many a head would have been turned by all this praise; not so the well-bred student.  She at once set to work on a more difficult subject, “The Twenty-eighth Regiment at Quatre Bras.”  When this appeared, in 1875, it drew an enormous crowd.  The true critics praised heartily, but there were some persons who thought a woman could not possibly know about the smoke of a battle, or how men would act under fire.  That she studied every detail of her work is shown by Mr. W. H. Davenport Adams, in his Woman’s Work and Worth. “The choice of subject,” he says, “though some people called it a ’very shocking one for a young lady,’ engaged the sympathy of military men, and she was generously aided in obtaining material and all kinds of data for the work.  Infantry officers sent her photographs of ‘squares.’  But these would not do, the men were not in earnest; they would kneel in such positions as they found easiest for themselves; indeed, but for the help of a worthy sergeant-major, who saw that each individual assumed and maintained the attitude proper for the situation at whatever inconvenience, the artist could not possibly have impressed upon her picture that verisimilitude which it now presents.