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.
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.




