Artists have always strewn the paths of Empire with their offerings, revealing and representing its possessions and possessors. However, they have also questioned and disrupted it. Only when the visitor reaches the final room of this exhibition do the threads binding the vast and unwieldy past of the British Empire to the artistic engagements of the present become apparent, and the curatorial agenda makes sense. Tate Britain, one of the many British cultural institutions funded by sugar merchant and philanthropist Henry Tate (1819-1899), is an eminently suitable location for this exhibition. Britannia with her lion and unicorn gaze out across the Thames from its pediment, nation and Empire in command of the art collection within. Though Tate was not involved in the slave-owning and plantations which bolstered his wealth, he was implicated and we benefit from the trade which created it. The exhibition invites us to ‘face’ the past, somewhat defensively and apologetically and fully aware of the baggage that could trip it up at any moment. The power of art to ‘foster and enrich the new assessments [..] that are so urgently required’ (Catalogue, Foreword, p.9) is the assertion we are invited to consider. It is the Empire as ‘archive’ which the assembled work explores. The hesitant and negative language in the catalogue’s introductory essays (‘ambivalence’, ‘unstable’, ‘ephemeral’, ‘awkward’, ‘unresolved’, etc.) anticipates the disquiet of the visitor, and acknowledges current legacies of Empire. At the time of printing, this was exemplified in the issues of the Scottish referendum as a ‘moment of crisis’ (Cat. p.13). At the time of writing now, these legacies are still sharp, excoriating and in the public arena, and centre on the statue of a benefactor above an Oxford college entrance. The political power of art and representation could not be more self-evident. Attitudes to Empire are not always predictable however. A conference which accompanied the opening of the exhibition revealed that post-Empire independence could invoke a sense of what was lost as much as what had been newly gained for individuals who had lived through these events.
Eighteenth-century scholars are generally spared the necessity of considering in detail the complicated and dark developments of Empire during its nineteenth-century apogee, and I will pass swiftly by examples of Victorian military confrontation and sentiment for this reason. Febrile collecting of artefacts both natural and man-made can be studied through the prism of Enlightenment, demonstrating piecemeal private motivation rather than as evidence of wholesale cultural appropriation. The exhibition catalogue points out that in this respect, British collecting contrasts with officially sponsored French expeditions under Napoleon, sent to furnish the salons of the Louvre (p.42). The eighteenth-century encounters we are shown between indigenous populations and delegations, travellers or artists tend to be between individuals. Even in depictions of treaties or ‘heroic’ action, the ‘particular’ rather than the ‘universal’ response is celebrated and leaders or chiefs scrutinise each other, manipulate and manoeuvre, cheat or concede. Importantly, artistic response by both the British and their Imperial subjects features in the exhibition. Wood sculptures of British royals made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Yoruba artists in Nigeria are particularly interesting, as they fuse the familiar artistic traditions of both cultures into something entirely new.
The first room focuses on maps and flags, symbols of territorial claims, national pride and identity, hopes and dreams. The ‘redundant’ map is highlighted, one which was quickly superseded due to political and economic changes. Attempts to fix, order and contain place through an imposed set of visual techniques and dimensions proved so often to be chimeras and remain to mock the ambitions that prompted them. A delicate watercolour of The Settlement at Whitby by Wenceslaus Hollar (c.1669, The British Museum) shows a very English type of coastal scene at Tangier, a settlement which was later destroyed and abandoned as a failed project in 1683. Nearby, the five large elegant sections of Henry Popple’s Map of the British Empire in North America, (1733, J. and E. Gleave) invite close examination. The map shows the thirteen British colonies there in relation to those owned by the French, Dutch and Spanish, and copies were owned by Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, although it is another example of redundant maps. At eye-level on the wall is the section showing Cuba and the Bahamas. The names of Hispaniola and Porto Rico suggest eighteenth-century pirate tales told from experience we imagine by voyagers in the ships depicted plying the hazardous coasts. Jamaica bristles with names such as Mangrove Bay, Devil’s Point and Aligator Pond, but there are few names on Florida. The northern part is simply labelled ‘Full of swamps’.
Many subtle visual connections jump across this room. Augustus Earle’s Life in the Ocean Representing the Usual Occupations of the Young Officers in the Steerage of a British Frigate at Sea (exhib.1857, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) is thought to include the artist’s self-portrait. His open portfolio displays wide topographical watercolours similar to the Hollar picture mentioned above. This painting is full of interesting details which compare with written accounts of midshipmen’s education, such as Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (London, 1824). James Brandard’s lithograph of Ikmallik and Apelagliu, Interviewed aboard Victory (1835, Royal Geographic Society) shows two Inuits advising the explorer John Ross who attempted to find an Arctic north-west passage in 1829-30. They point to a map perhaps similar to the one on the table in John Everett Millais’ famous 1874 painting The North-West Passage (Tate) which is nearby. Here the old sea captain’s spyglass echoes the piece of essential equipment recorded in Earle’s painting. British flags drape across various trophies and corners of rooms. They fly above Mumbai harbour and flutter on masts in George Lambert and Samuel Scott’s Bombay (1731, The British Library), but the flags hanging from the ceiling in this room are twentieth-century Asafo flags from the Gold Coast which signified complex alliances and trade agreements with the British. Trade was at the heart of Empire.
Noteworthy for its absence is a dedicated section on the slave trade. However, it casts an inescapable shadow throughout the exhibition. It is represented in Nicholas Pocock’s modest A View of the Jason Privateer (c.1760, Bristol Museum and Art gallery). The ship dominates this pen and ink drawing, but the unobtrusive and chilling inclusion of a line of passive shackled slaves on the shore overseen by the captain and the trader summarises the fundamental truth of early Imperial wealth. The Bristol connection is picked up in the final room of the exhibition, where Hew Locke’s photographs (from Restoration, 2006; Hales Gallery, London) show Bristol statues of wealthy slave-trader Edward Colston (1636-1721) and controversial politician Edmund Burke (1774-1780) covered in garish gold trinkets and chains. The chains suggest triumphant display and conspicuous adornment but also signify condemnation. The chains of slavery have appeared surreptitiously in different contexts throughout the exhibition. It is another example of the complicated power of statues when they publicly and insistently commemorate a past which, like the maps, can be characterised as redundant.
The second room ‘Trophies of Empire’ contains much that would be familiar to eighteenth-century scholars of material culture and museum studies. Benjamin West’s 1771 painting of Sir Joseph Banks (Usher Gallery, Lincoln) dominates the room. Banks steps towards us, pointing to the Maori flax cloak which he is wearing and has gathered up for our inspection like a Royal Exchange merchant declaring ‘feel the quality!’ He is the gentleman collector surrounded not by antiquities but by artefacts from the South Seas, meticulously painted. The Maori quarterstaff and paddle have actually stepped out of the painting, since almost exact examples accompany it on the wall. However, the swathe of red damask curtain and classical pillar in the background are conventions from traditional aristocratic portraiture. The setting and composition add an uncomfortable dissonance to the array of accoutrements, and perhaps encapsulate the problems of display and context which still confront curators of ethnographic collections. They are indisputably trophies but unashamedly so in Banks’ case. We are being lectured by him as he stands surrounded by his Imperial visual aids. The room includes a sumptuous array of natural history studies from various Institutions and Societies in Britain, some bearing the names of their ‘discoverers’, such as Banksia Ericifolia or Rafflesia Arnoldii.
The incongruence found in Banks’ portrait is more starkly demonstrated in two small Mughal watercolours, made at around the same time, probably in Lucknow. To accommodate English collectors, the group picnicking in A Prince Seated with Ladies in a Landscape (Francesca Galloway, London) has been cut out and pasted onto an oddly vertiginous approximation of an English landscape background, and Haji Nasir Listening to a Prince Reading (c.1650, landscape added 1770’s, Francesca Galloway, London) can survey an English coastal scene, reminiscent of Hollar’s coast in the first room of the exhibition. Similar unsatisfactory attempts to please English clients by incorporating unfamiliar artistic conventions can be found in Cantonese portraits of visiting merchants (not in the exhibition). It is hard to understand how the hybrid results contented their buyers, but the exchange and compromise of such mutual transactions highlight the endeavours of local artists across the Empire to adapt and adjust for a new market. Artists had to make a living.
The largest room is titled ‘Face to Face’ and examines how travelling artists portrayed the people they encountered across the Empire. Sir Joshua Reynolds’ well-known portrait of Omai (1776, private collection) is usually mentioned in studies of eighteenth-century response to ‘other’ or ‘the exotic’ though it does not feature here. An equally fascinating portrait, albeit not of the same quality, by John Webber of Poedua, the Daughter of Orio (1784, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) serves to highlight similar issues. Unlike Reynolds, Webber travelled with Captain James Cook on his third voyage to the Pacific, one purpose of which was to return Omai to Tahiti. Poedua was drawn while temporarily held hostage on the ship and the resulting portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1785. The catalogue characterises her as a ‘South Sea Eve or Venus’. She is ‘poised between individual personality and ideal type’ (p.161). There is no trace of her pregnant state at the time, and she stands enigmatically smiling in bare-breasted classical contrapposto, wrapped in white fabric and in luminous light before a lowering tropical landscape. She does not have the dramatic romantic presence of Omai, but Webber has utilised elements of typical gendered portraiture of his time to suggest seductive compliance but virginal inviolability. We could detect in her portrait a range of assumptions, manipulations and inconsistencies which characterised British relations with its Imperial subjects, in addition to the particular artistic strategies employed by Webber to enchant the viewer and further his own ambitions.
An exhibition with this name could not neglect the witty and distinctive work of Johan Zoffany (1733-1810). His Colonel Blair with his Family and an Indian Girl (1786) and Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Fight (1784-6) are both owned by the Tate. Ronald Paulson’s Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth-century (Harvard University Press, 1975) discusses Zoffany as William Hogarth’s successor in terms of the symbolic complexity of his iconography. There are many discreet and also provocative details in both the paintings on show. They incorporate portraiture and narrative, many alternative possible readings and a far from complacent and unproblematic display of Imperial relationships. These and other paintings in the exhibition suggest that the awkward military men who had to sweat in their uniforms as they undertook diplomatic duties or attended ‘exotic’ ceremonies were never as sure of their success as we might assume.
The ambition of the curators to encompass the whole period of the British Empire means that there is little opportunity to examine and appreciate the different attitudes and perspectives of the many artists represented, and the profound changes over the six centuries covered by the exhibition have to be largely glossed over. Nevertheless, the uncluttered presentation and carefully selected items on show interact in many satisfying ways and set up new and surprising conversations which have their own logic. The contemporary work in the final rooms draws together the themes of the preceding ones. The art provides commentary on Empire and judgements on its consequences. It also demonstrates that there is much to inspire creative positive outcomes as we come to terms with its legacy.
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past is at the Tate Britain until 10th April 2016.