Victorian Visions of War and Peace: Aesthetics and Violence in the British Empire, 1851-1900

Historian Sean Willcock considers how Victorian artists sought to portray warfare during a period of rapid cultural and technological change.

Representing war was a sensitive issue for the British. In 1861, the art critic William Michael Rossetti had proudly claimed that his nation’s painters 'have never fully grappled with military art, they have only hovered around its outskirts'. The British people apparently lacked the taste for a genre consisting of 'bayonet-thrusts, gashes, blood, agonised and distorted features and widespread slaughter'.

Yet, even as these claims were being made, Victorian society was undergoing a profound transformation regarding the nature and extent of violent themes across various forms of visual media, from the fine arts to photography and the engravings of the illustrated press.

In this talk, Sean Willcock will examine how Victorian artists sought to visualise warfare. He will discuss the artistic conventions that made violence palatable to the Victorians, and the cultural anxieties that arose as the changing face of modern warfare made old romantic notions of battle increasingly difficult to sustain.

About the speaker

Dr Sean Willcock is departmental lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Oxford. He was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and has been awarded research funding from the Art and Humanities Research Council, the Yale Centre for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.