Born in the English colony of Pennsylvania, Benjamin West set up in London in 1763 after having spent a time in Italy, where he had discovered nascent Neo-classicism. A founding member of the Royal Academy and its president for thirty years, West was George III’s official artist and protégé, not to mention covered with honours. In 1807 he participated in the glorification of England’s most popular hero of the period, Horatio Nelson, who had recently died at the Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October, 1805. Nelson was considered a model of patriotic duty, and he was celebrated as such by British painters and poets alike – his funeral, January 1806, at St Paul’s cathedral in London was remarkable for its pomp and show.
The painting here takes its double inspiration from antiquity (the apotheosis of a Roman Emperor) and Christianity (the deposition of Christ from the cross and his subsequent ascension). Neptune, assisted by Victory, bears the mortal remains of the celebrated admiral towards Britannia, the personification of the British nation. Here, the juxtaposition of Britannia and Neptune not only recalls Nelson’s career on the sea but also the recently composed patriotic song (1740) ‘Rule Britannia’. Distancing himself from Classicism, West has here created a very jumbled composition in which family members, horses, cupids and sea divinities are inextricably mixed. There are also many inscriptions, not all readable, referring to Nelson’s naval exploits, the most important (and legible) of which is a parchment on the hero’s body bearing the famous Trafalgar signal command: “England expects that every man will do his duty”.
The work evokes another well-known apotheosis, that of the French heroes painted by Girodet on a commission from Bonaparte. The two compositions are based on the same theme of the apotheosis/immortality of the warrior hero. They both present the same profusion of real and allegorical figures arranged in a celestial setting, indeed a completely pagan paradise. But where Girodet excels in presenting a misty/mystical atmosphere, West let himself down, with clumsy difference in scale of the figures, the disordered agitation of the ensemble, and his excessively violent chiaroscuro. The Immortality of Nelson cannot match the magical atmosphere of Girodet’s Apotheosis of the French Heroes.
Karine Huguenaud (tr. P.H.)
October 2002