Abstract
Gretton analyses the late Victorian visual representations of conflict and colonization to investigate the construction, circulation and sometimes subversion of visual stereotypes of European encounters in North Africa and the Balkans. This chapter focuses on a selection of images by the prominent painter of military scenes, Richard Caton Woodville, for the widely read Illustrated London News. Gretton argues that collaboratively constructed pictures in influential illustrated magazines like this provided their audiences with readily available visual frames and stereotypes through which the encounter between European armies and indigenous populations was filtered and formed.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauung ohne Begriffe sind blind’ (KrV B 75.16). Modern cognitive neuroscience says more absolutely: no percept without concept; for example, Robert Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Mass, 1996), esp. pp. 110–22.
- 2.
P. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot, 1998) mostly discusses the first decade of the ILN’s existence. See the essay on the ILN in L. Brake and M. Demoor eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (London and Ghent, 2009).
- 3.
For the effect of repetition on the convincingness of propositions, the foundational study is L. Hasher, D. Goldstein, T. Toppino, ‘Frequency and the conference of referential validity’, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16 (1977), pp. 107–112. For ‘confirmation bias’, see D. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London, 2012), esp. pp. 80–1; for cognitive schemas J. Piaget, trans. M. Cook, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (New York, 1952), pp. 210–46.
- 4.
A. Wallach, et al. ‘What is an apex predator?’, Oikos, 124 (2015), pp. 1453–61.
- 5.
P. Hogarth The Artist as Reporter (London, 1967); P. Hodgson The War Illustrators (London, 1977); P. Johnson Front Line Artists (London, 1978). On Woodville’s life, see R. Stearn, ‘Richard Caton Woodville 1856–1927’, ODNB.
- 6.
L’Illustration, 5 January 1895, p. 8.
- 7.
T. Gretton, ‘Richard Caton Woodville (1856–1927) at the Illustrated London News ’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48 (2015), pp. 87–120, esp. pp. 94–98.
- 8.
M. Meisel discusses the ‘realistic’ in Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton NJ, 1983).
- 9.
R. T. Stearn, ‘Boer War image-maker: Richard Caton Woodville’, in J. Gooch ed., The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image (Abingdon, Oxon 2013), pp. 213–223, p. 223.
- 10.
E. Panofsky, ‘History of art as a humanistic discipline’ (1940), in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), pp. 1–25, esp. pp. 8–11.
- 11.
The Duke of Clarence (1864–1892) was the Prince of Wales’s eldest son.
- 12.
P. Fox, ‘An unprecedented wartime practice: Kodaking the Egyptian Sudan’ forthcoming in Media, War and Conflict, T. Gervais, ‘L’Illustration photographique: naissance du spectacle de l’information (1843–1914)’ (unpublished thèse de Doctorat, Paris, 2007), esp. pp. 105–93.
- 13.
ILN, 1 October 1898, front page.
- 14.
G. Beegan, The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London (Basingstoke, 2008), esp. pp. 72–98.
- 15.
P. Bourdieu, Distinction, A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, R. Nice, trans. (London, 1984), pp. 318–345.
- 16.
L. Nochlin, ‘The imaginary orient’, in Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York, 1989) pp. 33–59, esp. pp. 36–7. For a different view, see J. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995).
- 17.
T. Gretton, ‘Industrialised graphic technologies in symbiosis with the world of art: the Illustrated London News and the Graphic c.1870–90’, in K. Nichols, R. Wade and G. Williams eds., Art Versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Vultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 2016), pp. 140–57, esp. pp. 151–5.
- 18.
See, for example, ILN, 22 April 1882, p. 380, and ILN, 16 January 1886, p. 61.
- 19.
See, for example, his pictures of the Balkans on 8 May 1880, p. 449 ‘Sketches in Albania: A street scene in Scutari’, or 5 December 1885, unpaginated, ‘On the castle at Scutari, Albania’, and of Morocco on 7 February 1892, front page ‘The revolt in Morocco: reading dispatches in the Kasba’, or 27 June 1891, p. 849 ‘Morocco slave traders returning from Timbuctoo’; of India, 4 April 1891, p. 445 ‘A nautch girl dancing’, 19 December 1891, p. 809, ‘The morning dew: watering the maharajah’s garden in Mysore’; of Egypt, 1 March 1890, p. 272 ‘In the desert’.
- 20.
After Woodville’s death, no sketchbooks were found (Tony Woodville, personal communication 2014); sketches, many ‘camera-ready’ and many with dedications from the artist, turn up in the art market, but they do not permit us to reconstruct Woodville’s working methods.
- 21.
Gérardin, ‘Le dépouillement de la momie de Sésostris (Rhamsès II)… en presence du Khédive’, Monde illustré, 10 July 1886, p. 28.
- 22.
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, A. Sheridan, trans. (New York 1977), pp. 202–203.
- 23.
K. Retford, ‘From the Interior to Interiority: The Conversation Piece in Georgian England’, Journal of Design History, 20 (2007) pp. 291–307, and The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in 18th-Century Britain (London and New Haven, 2017).
- 24.
ILN, 17 October 1903, pp. 566 and 577.
- 25.
William Simpson, ‘The war: Bashi-bazouks burning a village, from a drawing by Mr. William Simpson’, ILN, 19 August 1876, pp. 176–77.
- 26.
ILN, ‘Bashi-bazouks on the March: A Halt for Prayer’, 12 December 1883, p. 577.
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Gretton, T. (2018). Edgy Encounters in North Africa and the Balkans: R. C. Woodville’s Pictures of Conflict-Zone Life for the Illustrated London News, 1880–1903. In: Clarke, J., Horne, J. (eds) Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century. War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78229-4_10
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