Abstract
Anthony Smith says that ‘the germ of this book was a study of the English and French historical revival 1750–1800, submitted for a PhD in the University of London in 1987’ (Acknowledgments). Now an emeritus professor, he has at last been able to bring together his ‘parallel interests in the sociology of nations and nationalism and the history of eighteenth and nineteenth-century art’ (Acknowledgments). The Nation Made Real is about national art, more precisely about works of art that were ‘pertinent to the visualisation of the nation’ (p. 1) among the educated classes of the Netherlands, France and ‘England-turned-Britain’ (p. 173) between 1600 and 1850. Smith also offers some comment on Switzerland and on Germany and Italy before German and Italian unification. He begins by setting out the sociological characterizations of nation, nationalism and national identity that inform all subsequent discussion. That discussion is organized around four themes: celebrating the nation, evoking the homeland, rediscovering the past, and commemorating the fallen. Development of these themes proceeds by examination of the 137 paintings, sculptures and reliefs I counted in the index. Seven are illustrated by colour plates and nine more by monochrome figures. For the rest, words alone must suffice. This can make for tough going but it is worth persisting. Smith disavows any pretensions to art criticism but he has a formidable understanding of what his selected works of art represent.
The educated classes of which Smith speaks knew their Latin and Greek. Most of his readers today will have only a perfunctory knowledge of the classics. Smith does not disclose that he graduated in classics from Oxford and studied at the College of Europe in Bruges before turning to postgraduate study in sociology at LSE. This intellectual formation has enabled him to explain the significance of the classical origins of the allegories, scenes and poses that feature in so much early national art. To give just one example, Gavin Hamilton, a Scot working in Rome, painted Andromache Bewailing the Death of Hector in 1761. It does more, according to Smith, than just illustrate a scene in Homer’s Iliad. It conveys ‘a political message of duty to the fatherland, with the hero sacrificing his life and family to the defence of the commonwealth’ (p. 17). Hector serves as nothing less than ‘a patriotic prototype’ (p. 112) – but whether for England, Scotland, or England-turned-Britain, is not made clear. (England-turned-Britain calls to mind Linda Colley, who also makes use of visual evidence in her Britons (1992), but Smith never cites it.)
Depictions of the particular landscape of a nation, and of buildings and life within it, remain more widely accessible than anything with a classical cast. Acknowledging that Simon Schama (1995) has also alerted us to matters of landscape and memory, Smith adds his own contribution. He is interesting, for example, on Constable’s two versions of England, one about a receding rural harmony, the other, ‘more elemental’, about the castles, churches and cathedrals, the heathland, woodland and monuments, that survive in changing times. But if Constable and Turner are worthy of his attention, why not also Gainsborough?
Smith emphasizes that ‘When it came … to the imaginative recreation of national pasts, it was Britain and France that took the lead, as one might expect of states whose elites and urban middle classes had already developed strong national ideas and sentiments’ (p. 120). Britain and France also dominate discussion of commemoration of the fallen. It is in these contexts that Smith distinguishes between a painting such as Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1770) that is national insofar as it invites a sense of belonging to a national community and a painting such as Delacroix’s bare-breasted tricolour-carrying Liberty Guiding the People (1830) that is nationalist in that it lends support to a political movement for a new national dispensation. Smith is also very interesting on the revolutionaries’ Pantheon in Paris, but misses an opportunity for an instructive comparison by offering nothing on William Kent’s Temple of British Worthies constructed in the 1730s at Stowe in Buckinghamshire
The Nation Made Real has a cut-off date of 1850 to spare its author from having to address the issue in other European countries, America and beyond. But in his attention to the classics, to sociological definitions, and to the themes of celebrating the nation, evoking the homeland, rediscovering history, and commemoration of the fallen, Smith has provided prompts with which to address the visualization of nation in countless other times and places. Think only of works like The Apotheosis of Washington (1865) in the rotunda of the US Capitol or the Germania (1883) monument above the Rhine near Rüdesheim to see the possibilities. Add a further prompt, reinvention of the nation, and one can even accommodate Danny Boyle’s Isles of Wonder opening ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics. It is to be hoped, however, that sociologists who follow on from Smith do not confine their attention to the supply side of artworks as he does. Critical reception and public understanding are inseparable from the assessment of national art and imagery in today’s world.