What, then, becomes of Wind’s famous thesis? Wind’s focus on distance is valuable, but both empirical observation and theoretical reflection suggest the need for a more comprehensive analysis. Even a cursory description of The Death of General Wolfe reveals a wide range of devices that contribute to our sense of witnessing a moment of high importance—one worthy of memorialization with the dignity and elevated vocabulary traditional to history painting. Most obvious is the formal design, which depicts the dying general after the pattern of the dying Christ, including the pyramidal structure, the circle of grief-stricken witnesses, the slumping body supported by a merciful hand (in this case
As I have argued elsewhere (On Historical Distance, 2013) these observations on the problem of distance can be given a form that is both more systematic and less prescriptive. Beyond temporality, we need to consider at least four basic dimensions of representation as they relate to the problem of mediating distance: the work’s formal structures of representation, its emotional claims, its implications for action, and its modes of understanding. These overlapping but distinctive distances—formal, affective, summoning, and conceptual—provide an analytic framework for examining changing practices of historical representation.
After its examination of West and of John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), Wind’s essay abandons questions of distance, focusing instead on growing “realism.” By contrast, a nonprescriptive idea of distance might look beyond neoclassicism to embrace other types of distance as well as other degrees of engagement. The result is a more nuanced understanding that allows us to examine the hybridities of David Wilkie (1785–1841) or J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) as they seek ways to modify and renew the history painting tradition. Wilkie’s Gazette of Waterloo (1822) does not turn away from history; it only brings it closer by placing it in a more familiar and democratized setting. So too Turner’s Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore (1834) and its pendant, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835), dramatize the rise and fall of commercial empires not in remote Carthage, but in the familiar settings of the tourist’s Venice and of Tyneside in the unlovely age of coal.
Members' Research Report Archive
Distance and History Painting
Mark Salber Phillips, Carleton University
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, December 3, 2012–January 31, 2013
In his classic essay, Edgar Wind (1900–1971) argued that in The Death of General Wolfe Benjamin West (1738–1820) achieved the elevation necessary to history painting by substituting distance in space (North America) for distance in time (antiquity). Thus West’s “revolution in history painting” endowed this prestigious genre with a new, more contemporary focus and moved it toward realism. Wind’s recognition that distance was essential to neoclassical history painting provides an important point of departure. With respect to distance, however, I would argue that Wind’s focus on contemporaneity obscures a more profound
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, 1835, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.86
- Turner, Joseph Mallord William
- British, 1775 - 1851
- Joseph Mallord William Turner
- Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight
- 1835