Military Manhood: Visualizing the Common Soldier in French and British Art and Culture, 1871-1914

In the decades between the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and World War I (1914-1918), military artists in France and Britain increasingly focused on the motif of the common soldier. At once an individual subject, figural type, and nationalist leitmotif, the common soldier functioned as a cultural touchstone of ideal manhood during a time marked by social and political upheaval, sweeping military reforms, and intensifying globalization through colonial expansion. As investigated in the five chapters, painters reworked academic pictorial traditions, including those of the male nude and the allegorical figure or program, to convey and sometimes contest new martial ideals of health, cleanliness, and moral and racial purity as well as disease in the barracks and on campaign. Others engaged with the theme of martial suffering to express the "sorrow" of war while covering over European imperial aggression. Certain works under consideration integrate Indigenous soldiers recruited from the colonies into celebrations of European heroism. And, as discussed in the last chapter, some artists revealed the tensions between ideals of martial virility and the deterioration of the body due to aging and the effects of incarceration. Across this varied and complex body of imagery, artists exposed prevalent concerns over shifting norms of masculinity and femininity, racial difference, class hierarchies, and forms of intimacy between men paradoxically fostered and policed by military institutions. Painters' investments in the figure of the common soldier are seen first in France, where the defeat by Prussia in 1870 made untenable a long-standing tradition of state-sponsored battle painting that dated to the Napoleonic Empire and typically glorified French military prowess. Artists including Alphonse-Marie de Neuville (1835-1885) and Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Detaille (1848-1912) reconfigured the genre through canvases, exhibited at the Paris Salons, which celebrated the humanity and professionalism of rank-and-file troops over the heroism of a commander and the drama of combat. This mode of "military painting" sparked an international phenomenon, taking hold even in rival Britain. There, Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler (1846-1933), adapted the new focus on the common soldier in her acclaimed paintings, exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, which commemorated the "pathos and glory of the soldier's calling." Her work roused public and critical enthusiasm for battle painting, which until this time did not enjoy the same high status in Britain as in France. Artists on both sides of the Channel addressed diverse publics with often conflicting political views through their paintings of military subjects and through the many print reproductions, book illustrations, postcards, panoramas, museums, songs, games, and films that their works inspired. This dissertation highlights the many entanglements between oil paintings and popular forms of visual culture, showing these to have been shaped by the military histories of both nations and to have had a major impact on broader political and public discourse. There is a recurring focus on the physicality and sensuality of the specifically male-coded martial body, a key component and one that gave military paintings an enduring attraction yet remains little discussed by art historians. This study foregrounds these issues, analyzing them in formal and phenomenological terms. The ways that artists visualized prevailing concepts of manhood, diverse and shifting over time, are uncovered through object-based analyses of key works of art that help anchor the ideas within broad historical trends.