Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art by Philip Shaw (review)

This interdisciplinary study develops themes emerging from Philip Shaw’s two earlier books on a subject to which he is a major contributor: the imaginative effect of war in the Romantic period. Following his Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002) and his editing of Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (2000), Shaw’s new study seeks to examine how the suffering of war impacted emotionally on soldiers and non-combatants alike, and how it was represented to them through art of various kinds.

Unlike the civilians of other countries involved in the wars of this period, British non-fighting men, woman and children did not directly experience the horrors of warfare in their own fields, streets and homes. The opportunity this presented for the authorities to propagandise and maintain civilian support for war, despite the desperate human cost, was exploited, amongst other ways, through commissions and competitions to produce huge, classically-inspired, ‘historical’ paintings of battle scenes. These panoramas were often specially exhibited in exclusive, dramatised contexts, and ‘delighted’ large audiences by displaying military and naval commanders in noble postures. Sometimes, as Shaw demonstrates, a painting would also show how the artist imagined the effects of the fighting on traumatised women, children and other victims caught up in the action, and some commanders were shown displaying heroic (because unexpected) humanity to defeated foes. However, at this stage (a century and more before Wilfred Owen’s declaration that his subject was ‘War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity’) the official focus of ‘war’ art was very much on military glory, not on the cost in terms of human suffering.

After discussing the effects of some of these ‘official’ works, therefore, Shaw moves on to explore how the suffering and sentiment of war came to be presented through other, less formal or less prestigious, kinds of art (verbal as well as visual), such as caricatures, newspaper reports, verse, prints, ‘genre’ paintings, photographs and sketches. Shaw’s contention is that attitudes changed from mid-eighteenth century ambivalence to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concepts of moral sentiment, and that images of death and wounding facilitated and queried these shifts in the perception of war, qualifying as well as consolidating ideas of individual and national unanimity. Particular attention is given to David Wilkie’s oil painting, Chelsea Pensioners receiving the London Gazette Extraordinary of Thursday June 22nd, 1815, Announcing the Battle of Waterloo!!!, and to drawings of wounded and dying soldiers made from life (and near death) by the surgeon Charles Bell.

Wilkie’s 1822 painting was commissioned by Wellington after Waterloo when the Duke was seeking a ‘great national work’ that would memorialise the sacrifices of the ordinary soldier. Faced with the difficult task of celebrating a hugely-significant military victory, but one which had been bought at the price of enormous numbers of dead and wounded and a level of unprecedented suffering, Wilkie cleverly chose as his subject not the actual battlefield or the fighting, or the soldiers concerned, but the effect of the news of the victory, in the form of the publication of Wellington’s famous despatch, on a diverse group of men, woman and children at Chelsea Hospital in London. This treatment enabled the artist, as Shaw points out, to inspire collective feelings of joy while ensuring at the same time that excessive or dissident sentiment was kept at bay, and (with reference to Bakhtin) to ‘enforce […] a monological account of the victory under the guise of dialogical openness’.

Thus, even though the scene initially appears to be one of relief, celebration, excitement and patriotic pride, Shaw illustrates how it was also ‘read’ as being at odds with the ‘dominant ideology’ by some contemporaries. He quotes, for example, a review from the General Weekly Register which drew attention to the figure, immediately next to the main speaker, of a distraught mother with her baby, who is represented as...