olan's History was probably published shortly after the desperate events of 1857 in India.

The frontispiece faithfully reproduces Wilkie's great canvas of 'General Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Sultan Tippoo Sahib after Having Captured Seringapatam on the 4th May, 1799,' completed some twenty years earlier. The choice of this image, instead of one associated with the campaigns of Lord Clive or the Duke of Wellington in India, is an indication of the popular impact of Wilkie's portrait. Wilkie himself had written in 1837 'The interest of the subject I find grows as I proceed,' and his rendering of the scene has remained one of the icons of the Mysore Wars, not just as a "domestic memorial", but also as a statement of Scottish identity. One modern Art historian, in a convincing assessment of this subject and its development in portraits after 1745, proposes the following interpretation of Wilkie's composition : "The scene that the Highlander (bearing the torch) illuminates is not the private celebration of a deceased husband, but the representation of a new found universality ; a member of the Scottish elite is offered to us in the format of a baroque, post-Reformation altarpiece ….. just as the risen Jesus causes the heavens to open and terrifies the soldiers in the foreground." (One modern Art Historian, Fintan Cullen: The Art of Assimilation Scotland and its Heros; Art History vol. 16, No. 4, Dec. 1993)