The Consuming Subject and the Visual Culture of War

Perhaps, like me, you have found yourself from time to time in a sleepy provincial museum or small church, confronted by military art that seems opaque, incoherent, or deadly dull. Highly detailed prints of long-forgotten naval battles, topographical views of hallowed battlefields, or overwrought memorial sculpture—none of these is easily accessible to the ironic and sensation-loving postmodern viewer. One of the chief achievements of John Bonehill and Geoff Quilley's volume on war art is that it animates these relics of eighteenth-century culture, giving them rich, precise histories. Even more than this, it explains the changes that caused us to turn from the cool, appraising gaze that the topographical print was created to satisfy, to the longing for an authentic connection to the past that currently fuels our consumption of objects. While a few of the essays, such as Quilley's on Copley's Watson and the Shark and Julie Ann Plax's on Watteau, deal with objects made by aesthetic masters, the majority of the chapters take up with care and seriousness material that does not simply grab us by its aesthetic power alone. Instead, what makes the book fascinating is these authors' careful studies, revealing both the immediate intentions of the artists and patrons, and the larger cultural work done by these objects.

One complaint must be registered at the outset: the reproductions in this volume, clustered at the end of each chapter, are often tiny and ineffectual. The publisher has placed all the images across the short dimension of the page, even though—as is not surprising in a volume on war art—many of the artworks are in long, landscape format. This reduces their overall size to such a degree that the images become almost useless, marooned at the top of an otherwise blank page. It is most egregious in Sarah Monks's essay; her sensitive discussion of topographical naval prints would have been better served by simply turning the images the long way, allowing for them to be considerably larger. The worst single example is in John Bonehill's essay, in which a print of the Relief of Gibraltar, a sweeping depiction of a great naval battle, is literally an inch tall. Such treatment ill accords with the careful attention the writers have given to these objects.

All the authors share an attention to the ways these artworks represent particular and evolving ideologies of warfare, heroism, and imperialism. Seven of the essays concern British artworks, and here one can discern an overall narrative in which Britain is transformed from a weary and ineffectual wager of war in the early eighteenth century, to a grandiose and successful empire, with several important turning points along the way: the battle for Havana in 1762; the crisis of the American War of Independence in the 1770s; and the victory at Waterloo in 1815. There is a consistent effort to reframe conflict in terms of multipolar (and multivalent) empire, rather than simply as bipolar strife. This results in some rich and provocative new interpretations that center on complex questions of identity and power.

Two of the essays address British military monuments. Both Matthew Craske and Joan Coutu note how these monuments change over the eighteenth century from privately funded promotions of particular families and political factions, to state commissions intended to promote imperial glory. Craske tracks the changing ideology of heroism that these monuments reveal. Earlier in the century, British heroes were portrayed as transcending, rather than exemplifying, the spirit of their age, warring not only against national enemies, but also against the poor leadership of their own country. By the late 1750s, though, as the new ideology of empire began to take hold, heroes were represented as sentimental cult figures, and Britannia as martial and aggressive. Both authors mark the General Wolfe monument as a crucial turning point in this narrative. As we shall see, this focus on military art...