Dead Soldiers: Suffering in British Military Art, 1783–1789

This essay’s concern with the representation of suffering in military art of the 1780s is hampered from the outset by a fundamental problem; the lack, certainly in ‘high art’ of the period, of any significant interest in the effects of war on ordinary soldiers and civilians. We can offer a number of explanations for the absence of common suffering in such works. The first explanation is political. In war, as the social philosopher Adam Ferguson proclaimed in 1767, ‘he who has not learned to resign his personal freedom in the field [with] the same magnanimity with which he maintains it in the political deliberations of his country, has yet to learn the most important lesson of civil society, and is only fit to occupy a place in a rude, or in a corrupted state’. We do not see the sufferings of individuals in military art because individuals, as such, no longer matter. The second explanation is socio-cultural. As the art historian Peter Harrington observes