Yale Center for British Art Photo.
“Shipping in the English Channel,” 1755, oil on canvas, YCBA, Paul Mellon Collection.
“Make me standing about the 3[rd] rowlock and three men in the bow wounded and one killed. One fellow striking me with oar, another trying to bayonet me.”
That’s how one young officer in His Majesty’s Navy — who later became arctic explorer Sir John Ross — asked artist Nicholas Pocock to portray him in a sketch for a painting illustrating the 1805 battle in which he had been wounded.
True? False? Or somewhere in between, in the self-aggrandizing manner of a constructed story?
That’s one of the questions that tantalizingly recurs as a theme in “Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting,” which opens on Sept. 15 at the newly renovated Yale Center for British Art.
Curator Ellie Hughes
Even if you’re not an aficionado of Patrick O’Brien novels, or a lover of images of graceful ships of sail, the roiling sea, vast cumulus formations, and balls of lethal lead being shot off in reddish swirls of glory, this show is still very much worth a cruise. The show is rich in drawings, wooden models, and correspondence and other reports that painters used to construct their images.
And you can still delve into interesting questions of politics and propaganda. How did British marine painters of the 1700s enhance the truth of naval victories, and mitigate the disasters, as they lent an artistic hand to the building of the British Empire through depicting the power of Britain at sea?
The ships of the Royal Navy and the ports and docks and crews that built and manned them were the 18th-century British government’s single biggest investment, said show curator Eleanor Hughes during a press tour on Tuesday morning.
As such, the images of them and the battles and voyages of discovery in which they participated also “evoked the splendor of the state that built them,” she said.
YCBA Photo.
“The Ranger, Private Ship of War, with her Prizes,” by Nicholas pocock, 1780, pen and black ink, YCBA, Mellon Collection.
As she stood in front of a rare contemporary wooden model of the HMS Coronation, Hughes, who clearly loves her material and wrote her dissertation on these marine paintings, termed them, paraphrasing a colleague, full of “power, magnificence, and the latent aggression.”
In that, she said, they are the marine version of the swaggering human portraits by Anthony Van Dyke, the premier painter of the English court in the generation before the ships’ “portraits” began to emerge.
Van Dyke, perhaps ironically, was not even English but Flemish. Similarly, English ship and naval battle portraiture began among the talented Dutch painters Willem van de Velde elder and younger; they were a father-son team installed in the 1680s in royal residencies in Greenwich.
Never mind that Holland was perhaps England’s greatest maritime rival at this time. During a lull in one of the several Anglo-Dutch wars, the van de Veldes were lured to the British side where they, according to their contract, were given “100 pounds for the taking and making of sea fights.”
Their time in Britain had an effect; Hughes contends that, within a generation or two, all the distant coastal windmills and other traces of Dutch influence disappeared or were incorporated into what became a distinct English version of the Dutch maritime or seascape.
Allan Appel Photo
“HMS Coronation,” unknow model maker, 1677, boxwood, gold leaf, The Kriegstein Collection.
One of the pleasures of looking at the paintings is to admire the detail of the ships’ construction, or identify the hostile harbor or coast of the continent that the British men o’ war are about to conquer. Hughes cautioned, however, that the genre’s practitioners’ insistence on a convincing level of detail should not be construed as straining for accuracy.
In the gallery she named “The Hero Scrupulously Directs,” Hughes said that the growing demand for accuracy in depiction went hand in hand with a desire to “ratchet up the heroism.”
In the documentary material — drafts of letters and preparatory drawings between officers who often commissioned works, or the correspondence of their wives eager to aid the careers of their husbands — you see the requests for colors to be displayed, re-positioning of the enemy in a more threatening pose, and other, well, elaborations.
In the gallery entitled “As Much Canvas as Possible,” Hughes has created an eerie corner where an illustration in the catalogue of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1784 shows two marine paintings — they had become a regular feature of the academy’s annual offerings — framing a doorway.
Hughes just happened to have nabbed both those paintings and displayed them, also around a doorway in the corner of the YCBA gallery.
In that corner of “accuracy” that she had created, Hughes emphasized how the marine painters were challenged “to depict action from far away and over time,” often relying on participants’ limited and biased reports.
YCBA Photo
Detail from Sea Battle of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, by Willem van de VElde the Yunger, 1700, YCBA, Mellon Collection.
To try for the truth, they often compressed an hours- or days-long battle into a single canvas, or created “before and after” works.
Viewers who are familiar with engagements like the Battle of the First of June — now mostly forgotten, but in 18th-century England, the first conflict with revolutionary France and on the level of our 1944 D‑Day — can have the pleasure of figuring out what’s true and what’s not.
“These [paintings] are not reportage. They’re stories and constructed works of art,” Hughes said.
The exhibition ends with both a change in era and style in the emerging romanticism of J.M.W. Turner, exemplified in The Victory Returning from Trafalgar, in Three Positions.
In addition to an opening lecture by Hughes on Sept.14 at 5:30 p.m., the exhibition’s public programming includes three fine films. On Sept. 17 at 2:00 p.m., Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty, from 1984; on Sept. 24 at 2:00 p.m., Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr. Turner; and on Oct. 1 at 2:00 p.m., Peter Weir’s Master and Commander; The Far Side of the World, from 2003.
“Spreading Canvas,” one of the the top ten most perfectly titled exhibitions of all time, runs at the YCBA through Dec. 4, 2016.
In the article concerning "The Truthiness of Cannon Fire," Ms. Hughes, the curator of the Yale Center for British Art, is reported as claiming that marine drawings and paintings "were not reportage" and that they "depict action from far away and over time." This might be true of most marine artists but it is NOT true of the two Willem Van de Veldes of the 17th century. Both, but especially Van de Velde the Elder, frequently accompanied the Dutch fleet to sea before 1673, and the English fleet thereafter. They drew battles as they developed, employing techniques of remarkably rapid drawing. For many engagements, numerous drawings survive, numbered and with notes of what was happening. Flecked with salt spray, these are frequently better sources for what took place than the often confused memories of the participants; indeed, Dutch admiralties sometimes sought the Elder's testimony after the actions to resolve disputed matters of fact. The Van de Veldes were in fact the first professional war artists, and their works were high-quality "reportage." The glorious paintings by the Younger that often resulted were not mere propaganda, but often reproduced the eye-witness views by the Elder. Because of these artists' accuracy and attention to detail in hundreds of ship portraits, specialists today know more about the appearance of specific ships between 1640 and 1700 than for any other period of the age of sail. For instance, the prominent vessel in a painting reproduced with the article, called "Sea Battle of the Anglo-Dutch Wars," can be confidently identified from the flags and other ship portraits as the English 2nd-rate St. Michael in the Smyrna Convoy battle of 1672 under Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Holmes -- the probable customer. That the customer had an eye to self glorification does not diminish the historical and archaeological significance. Frank L. Fox, author of The Four Days' Battle of 1666: The Greatest Sea Fight of the Age of Sail (2009)