ART & WAR IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

Wed 4 Jun 2025, 3.30–4.30pm

At the Museum and Online

This event is exclusive to Members of the Ashmolean

The in-person talk takes place in the Headley Lecture Theatre and online via Zoom

Light refreshments will be served in the Lecture theatre from 3pm, when the Museum doors open before the talk at 3.30pm

Booking is required, tickets are £15 for in-person and £10 for online. Book below

With Dr Sean Willcock, Fellow at Kellogg College and Course Director for the History of Art Diploma in Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education

The genre of battle painting and depictions of warfare clashed with the Victorians whose self-perception as a peaceful people lacked the militarist sentiments ascribed to nations like France.

Yet war art began entrenching itself as a national staple in the 1870s. By the time of the South African War in 1899, the Art Annual could write of a jingoistic fervour that had ‘quivered from end to end of the British Empire on the outbreak of hostilities’ and ‘once and for all disillusioned us of the idea that we are not a military nation… [or that we] cannot produce a school of battle painters.’

Balaclava war scene painting by Elizabeth Southerden Butler, 1876

Battle scene at Balaclava, depicting the return of survivors of the charge of the Light Brigade, Elizabeth Southerden Butler, 1876 © Image courtesy of Manchester City Galleries

Sean's talk explores the rise of war art in Britain, considering how artists navigated the tension between Victorian ideals and the realities of war in an era marked by rapid imperial expansion and increasingly lethal forms of weaponry.

Sean Willcock is the author of Victorian Visions of War & Peace: Aesthetics, Sovereignty, and Violence in the British Empire, c. 1851-1900