"War News from Mexico and The Chelsea Pensioners: Richard Caton Woodville and the Democratized Reception of War News," co-written with the Americanist Jason Weems, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85 (2022) 520-549. (original) (raw)

2022, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85 (2022) 520-549

Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 painting War News from Mexico made while a student at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, is one of the most iconic American images from before the Civil War (1861-1865). Traditionally, it has been seen as little more than a genre painting of American life by the noted genre painter, an idealized depiction of the American "middling sort" (an extended, upwardly mobile version of the middle class today). But what has gone completely unnoticed is that Woodville systematically adapted every single figure and the basic composition from an even better known painting from a more noted genre painter to produce his work, the 1822 Chelsea Pensioners (receiving war news from Waterloo) by David Wilkie. What has also gone unnoticed is that War News from Mexico is not at all an idealized depiction of the American middling sort, but rather a rigorous critique of explosive social and political situation in the United States on the verge of the American Civil War. Whereas Chelsea presents an idealized depiction of the British "common sort," one that acts to "reinforce an hierarchical status quo," according to the British scholar David H. Solkin, War News, perhaps because of Woodville's perspective from the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany, presents a critical, even edgy view of American democracy and its middling sort. If Woodville's adaptation of Chelsea for an American context (reception of the war news of the Mexican-American War) meant Americanizing it, Americanizing it meant "democratizing" it. However, in general, far from simply being a question of "celebrating" the right of each adult white male to express his own political opinion through the democratic process, War News presents American democracy in all of its complexity with respect to the crossroads at which the nation found itself as a result of the imminent impact of the Mexican-American War (the admission of new Southern states) on that inherent contradiction within American democracy: slavery. Specifically with regard to Chelsea, the democratization of War News meant a replacement of the British common sort (none of whom in Chelsea would have had the right to vote until 1918) with the American middling sort (all of whom, except the African American and the woman, would have had the right to vote in national elections by the time of War News). It meant the distinct absence of a universal affirmation of the war news that is the ostensible subject of the image, completely contrary to its source, Chelsea. And it meant a representation that was not only not idealizing like Chelsea but that was explicitly self-critical, from the implication of an impending national crisis brought about by a failure of true democratic ideals to unsophisticated behavior and tobacco juice spit out on the floor. It was an unsettling tale for those of Woodville's contemporaries who cared to read closely, one in which serious challenges to American democracy--old political ideals versus new expansionism, human rights versus states' rights, freedom versus slavery--were not hidden under the glad tidings of victorious war news from afar. Rather, brought to a head by the Mexican-American War, these smoldering political issues were deftly phrased in the tale told by Woodville of the democratized reception of war news from Mexico, a tale whose conclusion could be contemplated by understanding contemporaries only with the greatest foreboding.