This moving portrait of Sergeant Thomas Dawson of the Grenadier Guards with his daughter was one of many photographs of wounded Crimean veterans acquired by Queen Victoria in the 1850s. Dawson, who lost his left arm at the Battle of of Inkerman, was one of the injured Guardsmen met by the Queen at Buckingham Palace on 20 February 1855.

Photographs such as this were influential in focusing public attention onto the impact of war on the individual and the family.