From Heroic to Romantic: Reynolds’s Captain the Honourable Augustus Keppel (1753) and its Legacy

Joshua Reynolds’s second portrait of Augustus Keppel (1752-53) – which masterfully blended portrait and history painting, as well as heroic and pre-Romantic mood – contributed to the construction of a semantically fluid pictorial identity, a type of dominant masculinity that could assume a multiplic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInterfaces (Dijon. En ligne) Vol. 51
Main Author Ibata, Hélène
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Interfaces 20.07.2024
Université de Bourgogne
Subjects
Cook (James)
Keppel (Augustus)
Lord Byron
Millais (John Everett)
naval portrait
Reynolds (Joshua)
naval portrait
Reynolds (Joshua)
portrait naval
portrait romantique
romantic portrait
Millais (John Everett)
Keppel (Augustus)
Lord Byron
heroic portrait
Cook (James)
portrait héroïque
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Summary:Joshua Reynolds’s second portrait of Augustus Keppel (1752-53) – which masterfully blended portrait and history painting, as well as heroic and pre-Romantic mood – contributed to the construction of a semantically fluid pictorial identity, a type of dominant masculinity that could assume a multiplicity of roles, not only in the context of Britain’s imperial expansion, but also in an age of social and intellectual transition. This paper examines its influence on naval portraiture, focusing on John Hamilton Mortimer’s group portrait of Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Dr Daniel Solander and Dr John Hawkesworth (1771) as well as depictions of Horatio Nelson. Further transformations of the paradigm are analyzed, with an emphasis on its ability to depict new types of national celebrities in its Romantic adaptations, as suggested by portraits of Lord Byron, to conclude with John Everett Millais’s ultimate revisitation of the iconography of the naval portrait in his 1874 North-West Passage.
ISSN:1164-6225
2647-6754
DOI:10.4000/122dl