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Victorian Visions of War & Peace. Aesthetics, Sovereignty & Violence in the
British Empire, c. 1851-1900
Sean Willcock
New Haven and London: The Paul Mellon
Centre for Studies in British Art Distributed by Yale University Press, 2021
Hardback. 278 pp., 106 colourillustrations. ISBN 978-1913107246. $65 / £40
Reviewed by Laurent Bury Université Lumière–Lyon 2
Though printed in smaller characters, subtitles are often more
informative than titles about the actual contents of books. Such is once again
the case with Victorian Visions of War
and Peace, which seems to convey the almost metaphysical promise of an
extremely wide scope for a volume which is much more appositely described by a
subtitle including the phrase “in the British Empire”. In these our post-colonial,
decolonising times, adjectives like “colonial” or even “imperial” may have been
judged too dangerous to be included in a title, and the author himself does address
the issue in his Conclusion: what is needed is a ‘recolonisation’ of art history, a problematisation
of insular national canons through a more sustained critical engagement with
the visual archives of empire and a greater appreciation of the diverse
cultural agencies that have constituted British artistic traditions. [236] Indeed, Sean Willcock’s book concerns more specifically the relations
between the conquerors and conquered as depicted by artists (at least one of
them belonging to the second group) in a period characterised by the apparition
of new modes of popular visual imagery: the focus is not on “high art”, except
in the last chapter, but rather on journalistic illustration and even more on
amateur or professional photography, generally of documentary nature. Willcock
studies the Victorian era’s three key modes of visual spectacle: an ethnographic complex, in which
the Other and their objects were documented and displayed according to colonial
taxonomies; a diplomatic complex, in which international sovereignties were
composed according to aesthetic criteria; and a military complex, whereby
warfare was waged and consumed with an eye to its dramatic impact. [232-234] Through their representations, artists were “instrumental in
constituting the colonial encounter” [2] and could make the empire
intelligible. The book starts with the Crystal Palace Exhibition, marked by a
new “pictorial grasping” of the world [7], and ends just before the Scramble
for Africa, when new technologies like handheld cameras and cinema turned the
artist into “an inconvenient witness to imperial atrocities” [240].
Geographically, Willcock’s eight chapters do not extend much beyond an area
going from India to Burma, the main event being what should apparently no
longer be called the Mutiny but the Indian Uprising. The first chapter is a survey of mid-Victorian cultural consumption of
the arts of peace and war. While they were taken as incontrovertible evidence, Roger
Fenton’s pictures from Crimea only offered a clean, dignified vision of the
conflict, as the photographer had arrived in the final stage of the conflict.
Strangely enough, Dr John Murray’s work was also perceived as a source of
reliable information, though he exhibited photographs taken in India before the uprising: it was considered
in England that his mainly architectural views could be scrutinised “as the
privileged means of comprehending warfare” [41]. Photographic realism, just
like artistic naturalism, was the right answer to the “bestiality” of the
rebels: in a speech delivered at the South Kensington Museum in January 1858,
Ruskin denounced Indian art as abstract, cut off from nature and therefore from
God. Sean Willcock then focuses on the interesting case of Ahmad Ali Khan,
from Lucknow, an Indian architect and amateur photographer who was accused of providing
military help to the insurgents with his pictures of buildings. The mastery of
a sophisticated technology by a native appeared as a form of “epistemic
disobedience” [50], turning the British into objects rather than subjects and
challenging the “racist hierarchy of vision” which defined the Indians as an
anti-modern and optically challenged people [56-57]. After the Uprising, the
Photographic Society of Bengal was purged of one of its Indian founders: all
Indian members resigned in protest, and were only readmitted in 1862, the first
to be readmitted being Ahmad Ali Khan. Though eschewed by some as inacceptable, graphic violence was not
totally absent from the photographs taken in India in 1857: Felice Beato
captured some of the “exemplary executions” staged as part of the new “colonial
military doctrine of counter-insurgency that relied on spectacular displays of
‘demonstrative’ violence” [236]. While the codes of the picturesque allowed him
to situate the horrors of war within a familiar aesthetic register, explicit
pictures of atrocities are relatively rare in archives: faced with photographs
of hangings, Victorian reactions varied “from malevolent thrill to censorious
distaste” [74], such an “indecent” practice amounting to psychological
terrorism. The second half of the nineteenth century was also a time of “special
war artists”, “embedded” draughtsmen who could operate under fire much more
easily than photographers, as they did not need any cumbersome apparatus, but
simply some paper and pencils. Sketches had another superiority over snapshots:
they offered an insight rather than a mere sight, they gave sense to a picture,
by eliminating superfluous details. And they participated in a culture of
masculine bravado, asserting the heroism of those journalists who shared the
hardships endured by soldiers. Diplomacy was another kind of imperial spectacle that could be
commemorated, either through paintings, as had been the case in the previous
century, or through photographs and engravings, as part of “the illustrated
press’s ‘regime of visibility’” [136]. Often equated with the cannon, the
camera could also be an instrument of coronation, the fact of accepting
photographic capture being perceived as the sign of a more advanced degree of
civilisation than the resistance sometimes manifested by Asian monarchs. The
locals, who were the objects of the imperial gaze, often knew photography as a
process rather than a final product, the prints being reserved for the European
consumers of “ethnographic surveillance”. Dr John Nicholas Tresidder’s private album is a fascinating instance of post-war
reconciliation: it was assembled between 1858 and 1864 in Cawnpore, the town
which remained associated with the massacre of hundreds of British prisoners by
Sepoys (or rather by butchers wielding meat cleavers, the soldiers having
refused to kill the women and children imprisoned in a bungalow). By gathering
portraits of natives and colonial administrators, Tresidder created a “virtual
reconstruction of Anglo-Indian society” [187-188], in a healing, inclusive
approach. Another gathering was represented by painter Val Prinsep on his huge
canvas of The Imperial Assemblage held at
Delhi, 1 January 1877, which was denounced as an “aggressive ocular
assault” [202] when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1880. Aesthetic
failure was considered inevitable, as if this reunion of Indian monarchs in
their garishly coloured finery reflected the impossibility for the British “to
envision (and perhaps even administer) their multiracial empire as a viable
political entity” [207].
☞ Illustrated version on The Victorian Web : https://victorianweb.org/painting/reviews/willcock.html
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