Britannia’s Palette: The Arts of Naval Victory (review)

As Nicholas Tracy astutely demonstrates in this volume, naval subjects presented a complex challenge to artists in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain. On the one hand, painters with any kind of aspirations to high art were required by Academic discourse to transcend the depictions of precise details of nature and history. On the other, the presence of so many sailors in the midst of a well-informed public, eager for details about far-off events, meant that artists were held to rigorous standards of accuracy in the details of ships and actions. As Tracy also notes, the problem is much the same for the historians of these images: art historians often lack the detailed technical nautical knowledge needed to evaluate narrative details, while naval historians are untrained in the close analysis of works of art. Tracy’s book attempts to bridge this disciplinary gap, with mixed success.

Though he does not say so, Tracy’s approach is best understood in terms of ‘visual culture.’ By considering the more familiar, large-scale academic paintings by major artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Philippe de Loutherbourg, alongside more traditionally marginalized material like topographical prints and drawings commissioned by the Royal Navy itself, Tracy significantly broadens our understanding of the scope and importance of naval imagery in this period. While the book is structured primarily around discussions of specific battles or events, within these chapters Tracy proceeds by a series of biographical sketches of individual artists. At its best, this approach yields a rich picture of the complex interpenetration of the artistic and naval communities, as well as between the creators, patrons, and audiences for a hugely diverse set of visual materials. Tracy’s citation of a newly sensitive mode of describing the sea in naval publications around the turn of the century, for instance, convincingly introduces another important facet to the development of nineteenth-century naturalism.

But Tracy’s clearly stated preference for biography rather than the study of specific pictures also limits the effectiveness of this undertheorized study and places it in uncertain territory within art history. In the first place, given Tracy’s enviable knowledge of nautical history, it is surprising that he declines to engage in extended discussions of the many pictures that are reproduced here. This means that while Tracy’s account produces fascinating sketches of figures such as John Thomas Serres, struggling for a livelihood while caught between the demands of high- and low-art audiences, in cases like Turner’s, where the biography is much more familiar, the contribution of this study is less clear. Indeed, this, combined with Tracy’s reliance on an outdated idea of Turner as an ‘impressionistic’ painter ahead of his time (the term is used much too loosely here), yields a very standard account of this key figure.

Tracy’s organizing principle, of a kind of collective biography of ‘the artists of naval victory,’ also raises as many questions as it answers. While the author often refers to this undefined group as a ‘band of brothers,’ his idea of a collective effort is dependent upon a simplified notion of a less competitive pre-modern art market: ‘Before the invention of photography it was not a winner-take-all world, because there was a tremendous demand for handmade images.’ But Tracy’s own discussions of the struggles of so many of these very same artists to survive reveal the inadequacy of this formation. Thus, one also feels throughout the book that the reactions of contemporary critics and viewers are not mined fully enough for their implications beyond biographical information. William James’s condemnation of Turner’s second picture of the Battle of Trafalgar (1824), for instance, chastises the artist not merely for a want of naval accuracy, but for not finding sufficient ‘pictorial materials’ in Nelson’s sacrifice and concludes by seeking ‘some public-spirited individual’ who might do so. The artist is not caught just between aesthetic poles of accuracy and invention...