ART & WAR IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

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With Dr Sean Willcock, Fellow at Kellogg College and Course Director for the History of Art Diploma in Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education

The genre of battle painting and depictions of warfare clashed with the Victorians whose self-perception as a peaceful people lacked the militarist sentiments ascribed to nations like France.

Yet war art began entrenching itself as a national staple in the 1870s. By the time of the South African War in 1899, the Art Annual could write of a jingoistic fervour that had ‘quivered from end to end of the British Empire on the outbreak of hostilities’ and ‘once and for all disillusioned us of the idea that we are not a military nation… [or that we] cannot produce a school of battle painters.’

Sean's talk explores the rise of war art in Britain, considering how artists navigated the tension between Victorian ideals and the realities of war in an era marked by rapid imperial expansion and increasingly lethal forms of weaponry.

Sean Willcock is the author of Victorian Visions of War & Peace: Aesthetics, Sovereignty, and Violence in the British Empire, c. 1851-1900

BOOKING

This event has been cancelled. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.