War News from Mexico and The Chelsea Pensioners: Richard Caton Woodville and the Democratized Reception of War News
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Conrad Rudolph
Conrad Rudolph is Distinguished Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of California, Riverside. He has received awards from Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, Kress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the author of numerous books and articles, most recently, “The Tour Guide in the Middle Ages: Guide Culture and the Mediation of Public Art” (
Art Bulletin ) and “Oliva and Gaulli’s Program at the Gesù and the Jesuit Conception of the End of the History of Salvation” (Artibus et Historiae ).Jason Weems is Associate Professor of American Art at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of
Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), winner of the Fred. B. Kniffen Book Award and the John Gjerde Book Prize. His current research projects examine archaeological visualization in the Americas circa 1900, photography of and by Native Americans during the New Deal era, and tropes of soil and land connectedness in art.
Abstract
Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 painting War News from Mexico, made during his studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, is among the most iconic American images from before the Civil War (1861–1865). Traditionally, it has been seen as a sentimentalized and politically ambiguous representation of the American “middling sort.” What has gone completely unnoticed is that Woodville systematically adapted every single figure and the basic composition from an even better-known painting by another noted genre painter, the 1822 Chelsea Pensioners by David Wilkie. But whereas Wilke presented an idealized depiction of the British “common sort,” Woodville – perhaps because of his perspective from the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany – constructed a critical, declarative, and even edgy view of American democracy compromised by the inherent contradiction of slavery. Such a claim of a direct political message for War News goes against a preponderance of scholarship that positions the artist (and to a degree all antebellum genre painting) as non-committal.
About the authors
Conrad Rudolph is Distinguished Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of California, Riverside. He has received awards from Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, Kress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the author of numerous books and articles, most recently, “The Tour Guide in the Middle Ages: Guide Culture and the Mediation of Public Art” (Art Bulletin) and “Oliva and Gaulli’s Program at the Gesù and the Jesuit Conception of the End of the History of Salvation” (Artibus et Historiae).
Jason Weems is Associate Professor of American Art at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), winner of the Fred. B. Kniffen Book Award and the John Gjerde Book Prize. His current research projects examine archaeological visualization in the Americas circa 1900, photography of and by Native Americans during the New Deal era, and tropes of soil and land connectedness in art.
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Photo Credits: 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14a, 17a Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (photography by Edward C. Robison III). — 2, 6, 16, 18 Apsley House, London. — 3, 4 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. — 13 Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. — 14b, 17b Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art, affiliated with Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem. — 15 Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Engagierte Kunstgeschichte
- Der ökologische Imperativ als Paradigma einer engagierten Kunstgeschichte
- Aufsätze
- Paolo Veneziano’s arbor crucis in Dubrovnik and the Rhetoric of the Frame in the Mid-Trecento
- Boschini, Tintoretto, der ›malerische Akt‹ (atto pittoresco) und die ›Erfindung‹ des ästhetischen Genusses in Venedig
- La première œuvre collective de l’Académie de France à Rome : un apparat éphémère pour la guérison de Louis XIV*
- War News from Mexico and The Chelsea Pensioners: Richard Caton Woodville and the Democratized Reception of War News
- Buchbesprechungen
- Drei Bellini-Bücher
- Ein »geistreicher Grashüpfer«
- Refugium Ostseestrand
- Ukrainian Women Artists in Revolutionary Times
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Engagierte Kunstgeschichte
- Der ökologische Imperativ als Paradigma einer engagierten Kunstgeschichte
- Aufsätze
- Paolo Veneziano’s arbor crucis in Dubrovnik and the Rhetoric of the Frame in the Mid-Trecento
- Boschini, Tintoretto, der ›malerische Akt‹ (atto pittoresco) und die ›Erfindung‹ des ästhetischen Genusses in Venedig
- La première œuvre collective de l’Académie de France à Rome : un apparat éphémère pour la guérison de Louis XIV*
- War News from Mexico and The Chelsea Pensioners: Richard Caton Woodville and the Democratized Reception of War News
- Buchbesprechungen
- Drei Bellini-Bücher
- Ein »geistreicher Grashüpfer«
- Refugium Ostseestrand
- Ukrainian Women Artists in Revolutionary Times
