Narrative and Atmosphere: War by Other Media in Wilkie, Clausewitz and Turner

Abstract

David Wilkie’s painting Chelsea Pensioners Receiving the London Gazette Extraordinary of Thursday, June 22d, 1815, Announcing the Battle of Waterloo!!! was the hit of the Royal Academy’s Exhibition of 1822 — the most viewed and celebrated painting of the year (see Illustration 9.1). Contemporary accounts devoted as many words to the popular reception of Chelsea Pensioners as they did to the painting itself, as if the audience were as much a spectacle or object of critical interest as the artwork. A guard-rail had to be erected to keep the canvas at a safe distance from the crowd clustered around it. And the crowd was not only larger, but also seen as more diverse, democratic, and vulgar than had been the case for previous exhibitions at Somerset House: ‘One might imagine that all Cockney-land was peopled by connoisseurs’, the Literary Gazette commented.1 For many observers, this encroachment into the Academy by a broader urban public incited a generalised aesthetic disruption, overturning conventional modes of reception and scrambling standard distributions of the sensible. ‘The pressure to see it was prodigious;’ the bibliographer Thomas Dibdin later wrote, ‘and the picture being placed on a level with the eye, every body chose to exercise the nose too’ — suggesting that Wilkie’s canvas was sniffed as much as it was seen.2