'Myth and Reality: Military Art in the Age of Victoria' (National Army Museum until Nov 1 2026): More Myth Than Reality

Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler,  'Dawn of Waterloo'. The 'Reveille' in the bivouac of the Scots Greys on the morning of the battle, 1815 1895, National Army Museum

Victorian military art can be the stuff of cliche: the Thin Red Line, the Charge of the Light Brigade. It is, in reality, varied and complex, from the first photographs of war and on the spot battlefield sketches to mass marketed prints, stock portraits and nostalgic forays into past glories. It also has a surprising superstar in the form of Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler, whose representations of conflicts past and present were blockbusting crowd-pleasers in their day. The National Army Museum tries to convey all this is a compact exhibition, hampered slightly by their Victoriana styling. In trying to do too much, they end up scratching the surface itch without really exploring either the myth or the reality, but they do make you want to know more.

The first section of the exhibition is devoted, supposedly to women in general, but largely to Thompson in particular. Sadly, some of her most famous works are represented only in print reproduction (a testament perhaps to her pulling power which makes other institutions now reluctant to lend). The NAM have pulled off the coup of getting Roll Call from the Royal Collection - maybe the King is not fond of it, having also parted with the painting for last year's Now You See Us exhibition at Tate Britain. Thompson's works that are here, are variable. The Defence of Rorke's Drift is as preposterously stagey as a 1970s film poster, luridly coloured and overloaded with emotive details. In contrast, Patient Heroes, showing a team of artillery horses literally on their last legs, has the observational attention to detail and the emotional pull which is so potently displayed in Roll Call, and an empathy which reminds one of Lucy Kemp-Welch.

Thompson's sketch books and a preparatory works like the study of a Wounded Guardsman attest to her determination to get things right but the works on show also highlight one of the problems with the exhibition as a whole. She was as comfortable producing the Dawn of Waterloo, an eerie and counterintuitively ominous scene, as she was illustrating contemporary conflicts like the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir, in which he husband was directly involved. The same was true of other military specialists like Thomas Jones Barker who went straight from Napoleonic scenes to the Crimea. Myth and reality become increasingly difficult to separate when past and present collide so easily and this concertina-ing of time muddies the exhibition, making it difficult to get a handle not just on the chronology, but on the ways in which Victorian representations of war changed. There is a lot of ground to cover between Barker's picturesque Wellington at Sorauren and Georges Bertin Scott's Buller's Final Crossing of the Tugela with its bright, impressionistic palette.

John Dalbiac Luard, A Welcome Arrival, c.1855, National Army Museum

Another major focus of the show is the Crimean War, the first conflict to be photographed - by Roger Fenton in his mobile dark room - and the first to be marketised as art. Fenton's trip was actually sponsored by the art dealer, Agnews', who put on an exhibition of his photographs in Pall Mall and the firm also had a contract with Barker whose huge panoramas were mass reproduced in print form, complete with labeled keys to the figures. At the same time Jerry Barrett was portraying Florence Nightingale at Scutari with an eye to the print market and William Simpson was producing battlefield scenes to be reproduced as lithographs for Colnaghi. Alongside all this John Dalbiac Luard's A Welcome Arrival injects a personal narrative, albeit one reserved for the officer classes with their cosy hut and parcels from home. Luard, a former soldier, was visiting his brother serving in the Crimea and records witnessing the scene, yet his work reads like carefully constructed propaganda, especially given press criticism of poor equipment and accomodation in the early stages of the war. Myth and Reality are hard to disentangle 

Much of the rest of the exhibition is taken up with what might be called second-rate art, and it is too easy to dismiss with a cursory glance paintings which ultimately tell a powerful story. Louis Desanges' representations of Victoria Cross recipients are a best laughable and at worst deeply problematic, yet the strength of narrative they contain is incontestable. Many of the portraits derive their strength not from artistic prowess, but from biography, from Emily Ormsby's careful tribute to her father which he may never have lived to see, to the portrait of Frederick Roberts which hangs alongside the telegram announcing his death and a photograph showing the painting in the family home.  Vereker Hamilton was a noted military artist, but his swagger portrait of his brother, stalwartly facing toward the light with the slash of red from the cape over his shoulder, has the added strength of fraternal affection, and more than a nod to Sargent and Whistler.

The National Army Museum has always made good use of its art collection in its permanent mixed displays, and it is worth visiting these to augment your appreciation of Myth and Reality, for instance, comparing Charles Fripp's Battle of Insandlwana with Thompson's Rourke's Drift. Ultimately, however, this adds to the bittiness, a sense that you are not really getting a full story. An exhibition of Thompson's work; a show about representations of the Crimean War or the long shadow cast by Waterloo; or a focus on the impact of war on those left behind, touched on here by Henry O'Neill's Home Again, these would all be strong themes in their own right. The reality is that Victoria reigned for a long time and most visitors' knowledge of British military campaigns of the period is likely to be sketchy - we need more space and more information. Perhaps in these circumstances, it is inevitable that myth wins out, but perhaps that is the reality of war art. The success of this exhibition is that I left wanting to find out more. 

 

'Kiefer / Van Gogh' (Royal Academy until October 26 2025): Sometimes you don't have to shout

Vincent van Gogh, Snow Covered Field with Harrow, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

There is no doubting the sincerity of Anselm Kiefer's enthusiasm for Vincent van Gogh: the small exhibition hand-out traces his 'pilgrimage' to Arles as a young man through diary entries. Somehow, though, this genuine respect, affection, perhaps even hero-worship doesn't really resonate through the Royal Academy's Kiefer / Van Gogh. Partly, this is a problem with curation. Three rooms, especially when you are exhibiting works as big as Kiefer's, is not a great deal of space, and this is a truncated iteration of a much larger presentation shown across two venues in Amsterdam earlier this year. Equally, the curators seem surprisingly reluctant to offer the works in dialogue, so van Gogh's Piles of French Novels is not shown in the same space as Kiefer's Danaë in which an elongated sunflower sheds golden seeds on a pile of crumpled books. Similarly, a line of Kiefer's drawings which so clearly speak to van Gogh's Arles quill and ink sketches are shown next to much earlier examples of the Dutchman's draughtsmanship. Was there a failure of nerve, as if the two artists might appear too close, as if Kiefer might be reduced to a mere copyist?

The problem is not just curatorial. The canvases Kiefer shows hover between brilliance and  kitsch. Nevermore slathers reference on reference, with the same abandon that the artist applies his mixed media: Edgar Allen Poe, Gauguin, Hitchcock, van Gogh, even, as my companion wickedly suggested, Brian Blessed's birdmen in Flash Gordon. The tarry flock of vampiric black shadows feels like overkill, not just unnecessary but self-destructive. In the same room Hortus Conclusus carries echoes of the woodcuts which were recently on show in the Ashmolean, messily complex, layered and inconclusive but nevertheless retaining subtlety. Under the Lime Tree on the Heather presents a rococo respite, floral and delicate, lyrical and evocative. Poetry is never far from Kiefer's art, sometimes even physically present as text, but he is often at his best when it is spoken softly.

The dilemma of the exhibition is summed up by the two most heavily influenced van Gogh pieces, The Crows and The Starry Night. The former takes the viewer into the wheatfield, through projecting stalks and perspectivally exaggerated path. The scale is such that you feel you could literally walk in, like an illusionistic painted backcloth in the Wizard of Oz, and, like that, simultaneously hyper-real and otherworldly. The sky glitters with flaking gold like a distressed altarpiece as the canon crumbles. Crows hover through the gilded mist like dark clouds. This is full-on Kiefer overload, but it works. In contrast, The Starry Night tips over the brink, the over-familiar swirls have none of the anxious brushstrokes which animate the original, and instead rely, rather like an immersive extravaganza, on shock and awe scale. Sometimes more is just too much.

Anselm Kiefer, The Crows (Die Krähen), 2019. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, straw and clay on canvas, 280 x 760 cm. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube. Photo: Georges Poncet. © Anselm Kiefer

Pummelled by the weight of these huge creations, van Gogh seems to barely be given a chance to speak. In comparison with the National Gallery's wonderful Poets and Lovers exhibition, the paintings here seem ill-chosen (or hardly chosen at all). The exception is Snow Covered Field with Harrow, one of the many Millet-inspired landscapes which van Gogh produced in St Remy. Here the thread of inspiration leads back another generation, the same furrows and high horizon and bleakness which are visible in Kiefer's Last Load, yet with each iteration life, hope and a future spring seems to recede further until the sky is reduced to a slice of black and agricultural land becomes an apocalyptic morass. At his best, Kiefer can leave you devastated, hollowed out in the face of such physical, literal rawness and this is Kiefer at his best.

In the end, though, this uneven, unsatisfying exhibition fails to do either artist real justice. The draw of van Gogh for Kiefer is hinted at rather than fully explained and you are left wondering if the young enthusiast is really still present in these big showstoppers, or if the older artist is grasping at long lost straws. Because the image that lingers is not grandiose and declamatory but comes with the quiet creak of old leather: van Gogh's Shoes on their eighteen-inch, near monochrome canvas. Sometimes you don't have to go big to hit home. 

'Radical Harmony. Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists' (National Gallery until February 8, 2026): Dot the Eyes

 

Georges Seurat, Le Chahut, 1889–1890, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

The title of the National Gallery's new exhibition, with its overt reference to the Kröller-Müller collection gives a misleading sense that the curators have shipped in an almost ready-made show. The Kröller-Müller has the best Neo-Impressionist collection in the world, as well as an extensive selection of van Goghs which barely get a look in here, but the curators have gone out of their way to source beyond Otterlo, to plug gaps and tell new stories, notably that of Anna Boch. The result is a pretty comprehensive survey of core Neo-Impressionism, although the exhibition's stated aim, to underline the radical politics of the movement, is perhaps less successfully achieved. 

The work of Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Paul Signac (1863–1935) is often labeled as Pointillism, a dismissive term coined by critics who thought they had reduced painting to a series of dots. The artists themselves preferred the term Divisionism or Neo-Impressionism to describe their new, more scientific approach to Impressionist subjects, which centred on the colour theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul. The Impressionists had exploited his ideas of complementary colours, but the Neo-Impressionists wanted to do so more rigorously, using small, regular dots and making the viewer’s eye do the work of mixing and contrasting the pure colours. 

The opening room of the Radical Harmony sets this context and gently acclimatises visitors to Neo-Impressionism with a series of landscapes and seascapes. There are obvious links back to Impressionist subjects and locations but the paintings themselves deliberately avoid the immediacy and naturalism of the earlier works. This is partly an inevitable result of the Pointillist technique which creates a structure and rigidity, and close-up gives an element of abstraction to the picture surface. Flags do not flutter in the breeze; waves seem frozen; time stands still. However, the artists also make compositional choices. Seurat deliberately emphasized that these are constructed images with his inclusion of painted borders. Signac numbered his works like musical compositions. Both focused on flattened geometry, strong lines, and angles which accentuate the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and sometimes create almost surrealist oddness. Signac's Portrieux, the Lighthouse, Opus 183, reimagines the central structure as a baton wielding bandmaster on a harbour stage. 

Alongside this, the exhibition introduces Helene Kröller-Müller, the German-born collector whose works form the basis of Radical Harmony. The daughter of a wealthy industrialist, who married a Dutch entrepreneur, Kröller-Müller became one of the richest women in the Netherlands and used her huge spending power to become a pioneering female collector. She increasingly bought directly from the artists she admired, and eventually amassed over 12,000 items including furniture and ceramics, as well as paintings. All of this sits slightly uneasily alongside the curators’ central argument that these painters were political as well as artistic radicals. There seems more than a little irony in the fact that Maximilien Luce's The Foundry hung for many years in the offices of the Kröller-Müller's iron ore business. 

Yes, many of these artists had anarchist friends and sympathies, but plenty of people did in the last years of the nineteenth century. It is a lot harder to see any such ideas carried through to their art, whether in Signac's sketch for In the Time of Harmony which could just as easily show a family picnic as a bucolic pre-industrial idyll, or in restrictive interiors, which seem more like a bridge between Caillebotte's uptight bourgeoisie and the Nabis rather than a call to arms. Jan Toorop‘s (1858–1928) Morning (After the Strike)  and Evening (Before the Strike) are an exception, forming melodramatic contrast where the beauty of the colours seems strangely at odds with the subject matter.  In fact, these so-called radicals were often surprisingly reluctant to actually show urban workers: their cityscapes and port scenes are more often almost devoid of figures.  Many seemed to retreat to the countryside. The sole example of Van Gogh’s work, The Sower, is a timeless, almost Biblical subject with a deeply symbolic sun radiating across the sky. Anna Boch‘s (1848–1936) During the Elevation is a conservative religious scene of an overflowing church and traditionally dressed congregation.

Anna Boch, During the Elevation, 1892, Stadsmuseum Oostende, Ostend, Belgium.

The next sections are dominated by a series of very middle-class portraits and scenes of domesticity: well-dressed figures in well-furnished rooms. Théo van Rysselberghe‘s (1862–1926) In July, Before Noon is Impressionism in all but name, with its snapshot-like composition of leisured ladies, sunlight dappled like Renoiresque powder puffs on their dresses. In contrast, Toorop, who emerges as the real start of the show, gives his Portrait of Marie Jeannette de Lange a combination of delicate naturalism in his representation of the sitter and a background so packed with objects and pattern that it becomes a Symbolist representation of her character. His use of a restricted tonal range and heavily impastoed dots creates an almost sequin-like effect as the paint catches the light. 

Strutting through these and given top billing against a dramatic, deep purple wall, although it hardly needs such theatrics, is Seurat's La Chahut, not seen in the UK since the 1950s. Seurat’s monumental can-can dancers high-kicking with fixed smiles and watched by leering figures, as the orchestra plays, rejig the compositional tricks of Degas and  Toulouse-Lautrec. Now we are not part of the mayhem but, like the performers themselves, alienated and detached, frozen in an unreality of sleazy sepia. Life is a cabaret, but it doesn’t look much fun.

Increasingly Chevreul's complementary colour contrasts are rejected in favour of tonal uniformity. Rysselberghe’s Coastal Scene  is a study in blue, and van de Velde’s  Twilight  is dominated by violet hues. The curators choose to end the exhibition with a series of landscapes which emphasize this sense of peaceful harmony, although works like Johan Thorn Prikker’s (1886–1932)  Basse Hermalle, Sun at Noon  hint at the possibility of something more radical. His sparse pastel dashes, which hark back to van Gogh’s brushwork, create a simplified, flattened abstraction in which the landscape seems almost incidental.  This is the point at this the exhibition could look forward, joining the dots between these artists and Henri Matisse (who gets only a mention), Piet Mondrian or other groups like the Italian Futurists who used pointillism. That it doesn't feels like a missed opportunity. 

Ultimately, then, there is less “radical” and more “harmony,” but that is no bad thing. This is a Zen-like exhibition which encourages you to take your time, breathe deeply, and appreciate the deceptive complexity and inherent beauty of the works. Neo Impressionism can often be represented as scientifically cold and dull, here is it inventive, lyrical and genuinely enthralling. 

This is a version of the review published in DailyArt Magazine