The Death of Nelson by Daniel Maclise (c.1860-63)Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
On the day after the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, the chosen picture is Daniel Maclise’s panoramic Death of Nelson. The work was painted in the early 1860s following a commission to decorate the brand-new Houses of Parliament (the old ones, as readers of last Sunday’s column will know, having burned down in 1834). Few subjects could have been better calculated to stir patriotic pride. Even half a century after his death most British people felt profoundly indebted to Admiral Horatio Nelson. Had it not been for his fleet’s famous victory over the numerically superior French and Spanish forces at Trafalgar on October 21, 1805, Britannia could never have ruled the waves; and Britons might well have been slaves.
Nelson’s contemporaries saw him as a secular Christ, a sacrificial hero who had died to save his people from the yoke of Napoleonic conquest. Maclise placed his pale and stricken hero at the centre of the scene of battle, surrounding him with the grieving figures of his fellow officers and men. This group recalls traditional depictions of the Lamentation over the dead Christ. The ship’s first lieutenant, Thomas Hardy, a seadog version of the Madonna, cradles Nelson in his arms with maternal tenderness. In the background, where battle rages, shattered masts faintly recall the crosses of the Crucifixion: another subliminal suggestion that the scene of the battle is also a sort of Golgotha. Small wonder that the reviewer for the Art Journal of 1866 interpreted the picture as half battle painting, half altarpiece, and thought he saw the promise of transcendence in the little window of blue sky above Nelson’s head: “The blanket of thick smoke is rolled away, the gates of the future, into which so many spirits are flying from their mortal tenements, are thrown open, and light brightens, as with hope, in the face of the victor of Trafalgar.”
The painting’s title is misleading, since what Maclise seems to have depicted is not Nelson’s death – which happened below deck – but the moment after his mortal wounding by a French sniper. Behind him a black sailor points up into the rigging of the enemy ship, the Redoubtable, from where the shot has just come. The painter included more than one black crewmember on the deck of The Victory (as indeed there had been), which suggests his determination to recognise the contribution of people often only grudgingly allowed their sense of national identity. Maclise knew what that could feel like, being himself an Irishman. “No blacks or Irish”, as the signs used to say.
The artist spared no effort in his attempt to reconstruct an early nineteenth-century ship of the line. A journalist visiting his studio at the time found “a small museum of man of war requisites” including quantities of rope “from the thinnest lines to the most substantial stayropes; and these he paints from, strand by strand, with a conscientiousness that must satisfy the most querulous martinet in the Navy List.” Maclise tracked down several survivors from the Victory, including one Lieutenant Pollard, then in his eighties and living “in much reduced circumstances” in Greenwich Naval Hospital, who claimed to have shot the sniper who killed Nelson (he is the left-hand of the two British marksmen firing from the steps). The artist also found a gun of the type used in Nelson’s time and acquainted himself with its old-fashioned mechanism, “a flint-lock discharged by a sharp pull on its lanyard”, as demonstrated by a gunner under the poop-deck. He included a woman tending the sick, which scandalised some of his contemporaries; but despite the Admiralty's strenuous claims to the contrary it seems that it had been common practice in Nelson’s day to include a few women aboard each ship.
One of the painting’s many admirers said that he felt as if he had been transported back in time, to the scene of battle itself. But of course Maclise did not really show his audience the truth. Having Nelson and his retinue compose themselves into a modern pieta was just one of his adjustments of reality. He concealed the dreadful, disfiguring nature of his hero’s injury, which smashed a gaping hole in his left shoulder and shattered his spine. Likewise, the dead and wounded men whose bodies have been so carefully –almost tastefully – arranged on the deck are plainly idealisations. Stripped to the waist, they call to mind the nudes of Michelangelo or of ancient Greek art, lending the picture something of the character of a classical frieze.
But despite its abstractions and omissions Maclise’s painting does not glorify war and certainly expresses at least some of its ugly truth. Blood stains the deck of the Victory. The crowdedness and confusion of the composition conveys very well the messy and turbulent nature of combat – the disorientation often described by fighting men, the sense they have, in the heat of battle, that they do not quite know what is going on. The scale relationships are eloquent too. How much bigger the bodies of the dying and wounded seem than those of their living counterparts. The whole painting is anchored, by their dead weight, in a deep morbidity.
The death of Nelson and his comrades is commemorated solemnly but not jingoistically. There are no caricature French or Spanish villains and it is easy to imagine other scenes, much like this one, taking place on the decks of the enemy ships. As an Irishman Maclise might well have been somewhat suspicious of British triumphalism. Whatever his personal reasons, he was not prepared to trivialise war by making it seem exciting. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in the 1860s, when reconstructing Napoleon’s death-dealing Russian campaigns in War and Peace: “War is not a recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern and serious.”
Daniel Maclise’s The Death of Nelson, c.1860-63, is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, open weekends only 10am-5pm. To see Maclise’s full-scale version in the House of Lords contact your local MP who will arrange a tour.
Andrew Graham Dixon
22-10-2000
