The Revolution of History Painting

Abstract

The commemoration of contemporary events in a monumental style of painting, combining a pretentious display of heroic grandeur with a claim for truthfulness in costume and portraiture, was censured by the Academies of the 18th century as an offence against good taste. There can be no doubt that the much abused Academicians had Reason and Nature on their side when they declared that the grand style and the faithful portrait manner are incompatible with one another, and that artists ambitious to paint heroes should take care not to make them look too much like themselves or their neighbours, or like the soldiers they saw walking about in the streets. If it is true that familiarity breeds contempt, the advice was sound that the hero should not be represented as a familiar figure. Yet the advice ran counter to the i8th century trend of historical literature, to the technique of enlightened criticism, which made a point of approaching traditional heroes with an air of familiarity. Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon were bent upon destroying the exaggerated reputations of heroes, saints and other pretenders to supernatural glories.' By exposing what Swift called "the mechanical operations of the spirit," they advocated a view of life which would seek its glory in humane simplicity and reject as ridiculous the pretence that men can play the r6les of demi-gods. In substance, this view would seem to coincide with the academic warning that the grand style and the intimate manner should be kept apart. But the conclusion drawn from this distinction was the reverse. While the Academicians refused to depict ordinary men as heroes, the new historians refused to believe in heroes who could not be depicted as ordinary men. When Benjamin West supplied the controversy with a test case by painting in 1771 the 'Death of General Wolfe' in contemporary costume and setting, he explicitly appealed to the "law of the historian" :-"The event to be commemorated happened in the year 1759, in a region of the world unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and at a period of time when no warriors who wore such costume existed. The subject I have to represent is a great battle fought and won, and the same truth which gives law to the historian should rule the painter." It is recorded that Reynolds tried to dissuade West from committing so flagrant a breach of academic rules, and that to give due weight to his argument he enlisted the support of the Archbishop of York. But on seeing West's painting he admitted that West had won his point and had managed to treat a contemporary subject in the grand style without offending the sense of decorum. It is curious, however, that neither Reynolds nor even