Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain, 1768–1829, by Geoff Quilley

Abstract

In 1768, Joshua Reynolds became the first president of the newly-founded Royal Academy, and Captain James Cook’s first expedition to the Pacific set sail. The two events are not directly related, but Geoff Quilley uses them as a framework for his dense but rewarding thematic exploration of six decades of British visual culture. He argues that British art retreated from imperial influences and subject-matters in the face of the threat of revolutionary France. In keeping with the title, the book’s three parts begin in the furthest reaches of Britain’s first empire and converge slowly back to the heart of the maritime nation at Greenwich: Cook’s voyages feature heavily in the essays in Part One; the Atlantic world is the subject of Part Two; and Part Three focuses on images of sailors and naval battles during and after the wars of 1793–1815. Quilley is at his most effective and innovative when closely analysing a painting or following themes through an individual artist’s work. The second half of Chapter Three, for example, provides a lucid explanation of why William Hodges chose particular subjects in a series of paintings of Pacific islands from the 1770s. Quilley also effectively contrasts the artistic motivations and shipboard roles of Hodges, the artist on Cook’s second voyage, and John Webber, the artist on Cook’s third voyage. His analysis of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark in Chapter Four is multidimensional and thorough, incorporating the significance of the racial, imperial and allusive elements of that remarkable painting. The last chapter, in which J.M.W. Turner’s Battle of Trafalgar is installed in the Naval Gallery in Greenwich Hospital, creatively uses the various competing paintings of the battle as an introduction to the historiographical and commercial competition between William James and Edward Pelham Brenton in the 1820s.