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The large number of battle paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy during the period 1874-1914 makes it impossible to account here for the genesis of more than a few. This chapter examines the paintings inspired by the Zulu war of 1879-1880. The Zulu war was regarded as the most important of the colonial wars up to the Sudan campaign in 1883-1884. Frederick Villiers exhibited two battle paintings at the Royal Academy, in 1882 and 1883, so far as is known his only excursions into academic art, both now lost. The first was based on the Afghan war of 1878-1880, which he had covered for The Graphic. The second seems, however, to have been a battle scene, Fighting Arabi with his own Weapons: Tel-el-Kebir. Villiers became a well known personality in the late Victorian newspaper industry. Late Victorian battle painters manipulated a number of stock characters.
In an age when engraving and photography were making artistic images available to a much wider public, artists were able to influence public attitudes more powerfully than ever before. This book examines works of art on military themes in relation to ruling-class ideologies about the army, war and the empire. The first part of the book is devoted to a chronological survey of battle painting, integrated with a study of contemporary military and political history. The chapters link the debate over the status and importance of battle painting to contemporary debates over the role of the army and its function at home and abroad. The second part discusses the intersection of ideologies about the army and military art, but is concerned with an examination of genre representations of soldiers. Another important theme which runs through the book is the relation of English to French military art. During the first eighty years of the period under review France was the cynosure of military artists, the school against which British critics measured their own, and the place from which innovations were imported and modified. In every generation after Waterloo battle painters visited France and often trained there. The book shows that military art, or the 'absence' of it, was one of the ways in which nationalist commentators articulated Britain's moral superiority. The final theme which underlies much of the book is the shifts which took place in the perception of heroes and hero-worship.
The period 1885-1914 was the most prolific time for the production of battle paintings and other celebrations of the military glory of the empire. Despite the large numbers of 'eye-witness' artists who were rushed to the front to 'record' the Boer War, the battle pictures which resulted were traditional in their selection of subject and method of representation. The Boer war can be considered the final break between the 'sporting', self-confident attitude of the early imperial era and the growing sense of grim struggle. During the Boer war Elizabeth Butler turned back for her subject matter to the Crimea, the last time the British had fought a full-scale war against an army of the same race. It is usual to see the second Boer war as the point at which British attitudes hardened into the jingoism that led to the First World War.
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book. The book explores in greater detail the issue of soldier settlement. It examines two parallel but complementary themes: the settlement of British soldiers in the overseas or 'white' dominions between 1915 and 1930. The war galvanised the British government into committing itself to a large-scale free passage scheme for its ex-service personnel between 1914 and 1922. The book focuses on the resettlement of British ex-servicemen overseas in the post-World War I era. The internal tensions and debates within the higher echelons of the respective bureaucracies and the changes in attitude and policy formulation that resulted have attracted equally sparse attention. The book addresses the issues and reveals how soldier settlement became a vehicle for a new era in empire co-operation and economic development.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines oil paintings on military subjects exhibited at public metropolitan venues in the century 1815-1916. It also examines works of art on military themes in relation to ruling-class ideologies about the army, war and the empire. The book also presents a chronological survey of battle painting, integrated with a study of contemporary military and political history. It discusses the intersection of ideologies about the army and military art and concerns with an examination of genre representations of soldiers. The book describes the relation of English to French military art. It attempts to chart the process of transformation in the images of the army and its soldiers from Waterloo to the eve of the Great War.
Soldier settlement remained an important supplement to the dominion government's predominant and traditional role in settling and developing the agricultural resources of western Canada. The urgency with which Canadian politicians and civil servants viewed the problem of continuing rural depopulation, and the seriousness with which they viewed soldier settlement as a partial solution, was echoed by Henry Scammell. Rider Haggard's tour captured the public's imagination and turned what was simply a fact finding mission into a tremendous public relations victory for the Royal Colonial Institute (RCI) over an intransigent British government. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) took the opportunity of Haggard's visit to disclose its plans to provide agriculture farms on its extensive holdings in western Canada for returning veterans from Canada and Britain. Ontario became the first province to respond with a land settlement scheme for returned soldiers in February 1917.
The Crimean war was used as evidence of the aristocracy's 'unfitness' to rule the army. The British painter Louis William Desanges was important, as Thomas Jones Barker had been, in assimilating French military art into British subject matter. Desanges working for a middle-class audience, transformed middle class gentlemen into 'god-like' military heroes. Desanges' intention was to depict the incidents which had won the Victoria Cross for its holders. The inability of either Barker or Desanges to gain admittance to the Royal Academy suggests that there was still resistance to their genre at a number of levels. Desanges was an aspirant History painter, competing unsuccessfully in the Westminster Hall competition. The deficiencies of various strands of battle painting had been identified in the context of the Palace of Westminster competitions. In Academic art, representations of the rebellion in genre scenes outnumbered battle paintings.
This chapter focuses on to the colonial and imperial soldier settlement programmes in Canada and South Africa prior to 1914, since their experiences provide the most numerous and detailed accounts of soldier settlement policy. The seigneurial system provided a systematic approach to colonisation in New France along feudal guidelines imposed from Versailles. In the years prior to the War of 1812 a large number of Americans, other than Loyalists, migrated north and settled in southern Ontario. The increasing interest in the welfare of the ex-soldier, army pensioner and reservist evident in Britain between 1900 and 1914 stemmed from the experience of the second Anglo-Boer War. The Naval and Military Emigration League (NMEL), founded in November 1909, was the only British emigration society which dealt exclusively with former military personnel. The general aim of the NMEL was to furnish ex-servicemen with information about employment and settlement opportunities in the dominions.
This chapter discusses four pictures which represents the ruling-class attitudes to different aspects of the topic. The pictures include the entrapment of a young innocent into the ranks, the impact upon his family, the reasons for enlistment and its impact upon a love affair. The occurrence of recruitment pictures at the Royal Academy shows that they were, as might have been expected, most likely to appear at times of intense military activity. Unlike recruitment pictures, the deserter pictures occurrence, prior to 1870, does not tie in with surges of military activity. Post-Crimean/Reform era treatment of desertion had to accommodate the new mythology of the soldiers as hero, the deserter must be shown as delinquent in some way or as driven by reasons which overrode military law. The William Henry Gore's picture Listed was deliberately anachronistic: enlistment is denoted by ribbons in his hat.
Artists who painted veterans for Academy pictures in the nineteenth century followed the lead of civil and military authorities in giving the Chelsea Hospital pensioners undue prominence. Duke of Wellington's selection of Chelsea veterans was crucial in focusing on a group who were 'known' to be patriotic and loyal. In the aftermath of the Crimean war, with the Volunteer movement, the common soldier had become a humble hero rather than a social outcast in bourgeois mythology. Military commentators writing in the last decades of the century were unanimous that the change which had taken place in civil-military relations after 1860 could be attributed to the Volunteer movement. Post-Crimean representations of veterans away from the Chelsea Hospital were for the most part very positive, showing the old soldier enjoying domestic prosperity and happiness.