18. The Field of Waterloo (1818) by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1755-1851)

Continued from https://peaceatsalemchapelbudleigh.blogspot.com/2022/10/17-field-of-waterloo-le-champ-de.html




The Field of Waterloo, exhibited 1818, Joseph Mallord William Turner.  Presented as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. © Tate. Photo: Tate

If there is a pacifist note in John Heaviside Clark’s work it is surely echoed in Turner’s painting The Field of Waterloo which was exhibited in 1818.

 

The artist visited the battlefield in 1817. He filled a sketchbook with drawings and notes, and later made studies of soldier’s uniforms in preparation for the painting.

 

There are some similarities to Clark’s painting: we see an angry sky lit up by lightning, but the focus is on one particular scene where what seems to be a family group are lit up by a torch held by one member.

The picture is dominated by a group of grieving women who are searching for their partners among the pile of dead and dying bodies.

A distraught woman has collapsed, only just holding on to her baby. Another woman seems to be embracing the body of a dead soldier. All around are huddled corpses, stretching into the gloom as far as the eye can see. Turner’s use of light emphasises both the destruction of the battle and the poignancy of a human tragedy, stressing war’s tragic consequences for all its victims.

With the painting Turner quoted from the third canto of Byron’s poem ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, lamenting ‘friend, foe, in one red burial blent!’





© Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge 


In the above small watercolour of 1817, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Turner conveyed the message that in human terms, Waterloo was a disaster for all the armies that took part. 


'There is no sense here that the painter is glorifying his country's victory,’ writes a museum curator. ‘War is shown to be a leveller. One is left to reflect upon violence and loss rather than heroism and victory. In the foreground the corpses of both French and Allied troops lie heaped on top of one another. Their uniforms are scarlet and blue, but the blood that flows from them is the same deep red.' 


To the right a cannon has been overturned. Both the monograms 'GR III' and 'N', representing respectively King George III and the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, have been crushed in the confusion of war.


Again, as in Turner’s other painting and in Clark’s depiction of the battlefield, an enormous storm rages in the sky, echoing the violence that has taken place below. ‘As so often in Turner's art, the elements seem to belittle man and his work,’ continues the Fitzwilliam Museum’s commentary. ‘In this scene, while the earth is flat and lifeless, the sky is a mass of movement and shades of colour. A flash of white lightning cuts through the heavy clouds on the left. Elsewhere, a great swirl of cloud mirrors the road heading off into the distance. There is something almost biblical about this tempest, and the crowd of dead in the foreground further adds to the sense of a Day of Wrath.’


The bleak view of war expressed by such artists and writers is in stark contrast to the glorification of the military as expressed in late Victorian England by painters such as Richard Caton Woodville.  

‘Waterloo Clark’ joined others of his time in their shock at the waste of human life. Along with Byron and especially along with Turner, he is ‘appalled by the violence of the battle’ as  Philip Shaw, Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Leicester, writes in his study of ‘The Field of Waterloo’. ‘To this end his painting focuses not on the romance of war, but on its ghastly consequences.’   

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