By the middle of the 18th century, the British navy was the largest military-industrial complex in the world, the greatest focus of state investment, the glue that held the British empire together and the greatest pride of the British people. Victorious military sea captains were the reigning celebrities of their day, none moreso than Horatio Nelson, the hero of the Napoleonic Wars.
Every empire needs a propaganda machine. The British empire had a cadre of highly skilled marine painters. These men, commissioned by public officials or by ship captains themselves, created stirring images of battles on the ocean, turning men into myths, persuading impressionable youths to go down to the sea in ships and showcasing to the world the unparalleled and terrifying scope of British sea power.
Yale Center for British Art in New Haven is remembering those days with the new exhibit “Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting.” A companion exhibit features work by Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare, who plays with the Admiral Nelson mythos to provoke viewers to reconsider the official story.
‘Spreading Canvas’
British marine art didn’t spring into life on its own. It needed help from abroad. At first, British renderings paled in comparison to seascapes made in Holland, Britain’s military rival. Then in 1672 Willem van de Velde the Elder, who had been the official artist of the Dutch fleet, and his son, Willem van de Velde the Younger, emigrated from Holland, taking up residence in Greenwich.
There, in the service of Charles II of England, the van de Veldes established the standards for what would develop into the golden age of English maritime painting, defining “how the country perceived itself,” curator Eleanor Hughes said. The elder was tasked with “taking and making draughts of sea-fights” and the younger with taking those preliminary studies and turning them into paintings.
Hughes compared 18th-century British marine paintings to the trend of “grand swagger” portraits of prominent people created by Antony van Dyck and others, “in their power, their magnificence, their latent aggression.” Even the more peaceful scenes in the exhibit reflect this air of splendor, but that air is magnified in the battle paintings, which show British ships gloriously overwhelming their Dutch, Spanish, French or Barbary foes.
That’s not to say the scenes depicted the battles with journalistic accuracy. While early drafts by van de Velde the Elder and other painters focused on fleshing out the real story, paintings that resulted were more interested in promoting the Navy’s preferred story.
“Do we want to show it like it really happened, or do we want to make a better picture?” Hughes said. “They’re not reportage. They’re stories and constructed art objects.” She said the need for accuracy had to be balanced with the artistry of the composition as well as the “can we ratchet up the heroism?” factor.
Samuel Scott’s 1749 “Vice Admiral Sir George Anson’s Victory off Cape Finisterre,” which depicts the capture of 10 ships during the War of Austrian Succession, tells a story of chase, attack and surrender in one image dominated by a glorious ship overshadowed by the billows of cannon-fire. That painting, in the gallery, is almost overshadowed by its spectacular frame, which incorporates imagery of a sea captain, guns, cannon and a globe.
A 10-day bombardment of a Bengal port between imperialist English and French ships is depicted in Dominic Serres’ 1771 “The Taking of Chandernagore by the Admirals Watson and Pocock, March 1757.” The British victory in that battle helped to lay the groundwork for control of the province by the British East India Company.
Often, the accuracy factor is covered by artworks’ titles, which could be lengthy to describe all that happened during an hourslong battle, or in extended text elements underneath engravings. “L’Amazone of 36 Guns, 301 Men, after an Hour and a Quarter’s Engagement, striking to His Majesty’s Frigate Santa Margarita of 36 Guns, 255 Men, Elliot Salter Commander, on the Evening of the 29th July, 1782,” is the title of a 1783 work by Robert Dodd which shows badly damaged French ships beset by a plucky British ship, its guns still firing.
The battles depicted in the exhibit end at Nelson’s victory and death at Trafalgar, depicted by J.M.W. Turner in the 1806 “The Victory Returning from Trafalgar, In Three Positions.”
‘Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA)’
Shonibare is being provocatively playful when he uses his honors — “MBE” denotes Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and “RA” his membership in the Royal Academy — in the title of his exhibit. His acceptance into the hallowed institutions of the British cultural infrastructure doesn’t necessarily mean he accepts the traditional English historical narrative, which glorifies the might of the empire over the rights of those it oppressed, and puts on a pedestal those who helped maintain that supremacy.
Shonibare tweaks the cult of Admiral Nelson by recreating Nelson’s ship and putting it in a bottle, its sails made of the wildly patterned and colorful batik fabrics symbolic of Africa (but which ironically are made in Europe and exported to Africa). A maquette of that ship — the full-size piece was an outdoor installation in London’s Trafalgar Square, a public gathering place named after Nelson’s last battle — is on exhibit in the gallery. Shonibare’s creation transforms the symbol of Nelson’s greatness into a trifle, reimagined using an aesthetic associated with a continent subjected to British occupation.
By the side of the maquette are two costumes, made of similiar multicolored fabrics, representing Nelson and his wife Frances Nisbet, whom Nelson cruelly rebuffed in favor of his mistress Emma Hamilton. This depiction of Frances by Horatio’s side flies in the face of generations of writers, composers, playwrights and filmmakers, who have followed Nelson’s lead in glorifying Hamilton and ignoring Nisbet.
Nearby hang three pieces from Shonibare’s “Fake Death Pictures” series. In the photographs, Shonibare has re-created the compositions of three classic paintings — Henry Wallis’ “The Death of Chatterton,” Manet’s “Le Suicidé” and Leonardo Alenza’s “Satire of the Romantic Suicide” — using the same actor in each, who wears a powdered wig and Shonibare’s Nelson costume. Nelson’s legendary death at the Battle of Trafalgar is reimagined by Shonibare in three different self-inflicted ways, all either ignoble or comical.
“SPREADING CANVAS: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH MARINE PAINTING” is at Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St. in New Haven, until Dec. 4. “Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA)” will be on view until Dec . 11. Shonibare will give a lecture on Oct. 25 at 5:30 p.m. Three short films by Shonibare will be shown every Tuesday at 2:30 p.m., every Friday at 11 a.m. and Sept. 17 and 24 and Oct. 1 and 29 at 11:30 a.m. britishart.yale.edu.
