98
DEBATING THE PAST
Do Artists Depict Historical
Subjects Accurately?
B
enjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe(1770), depicts
the British commander’s demise at the Battle of Québec
in 1759. Over 300,000 prints of that image were sold, making
it arguably the most popular painting of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Observers were struck by the painting’s juxtaposition of
the Indian, naked and virile, with the British officer, resplen-
dently uniformed and dying. West’s symbolism evoked a new
world’s confrontation with the old.
The details of the painting, a critic observed at the time,
are “so natural that no one would hardly expect them to be
otherwise than they appear, and yet not one of them is true
in fact.” The most serious is that only a handful of officers—
and no Indian—witnessed Wolfe’s death.
Several years later, artist James Barry resolved to paint
the scene more accurately. After researching the circum-
stances of Wolfe’s death, Barry exhibited his version in 1776.
Nearly everyone, however, preferred West’s symbol-laden fic-
tion to Barry’s more dutiful reporting of the event. Today
West’s painting appears in countless textbooks; Barry’s is
mostly forgotten.
Two centuries after Wolfe’s death, Roy Lichtenstein revis-
ited the subject in his abstract Death of the General(1951).
Where West invented characters in order to make a symbolic
statement, Lichtenstein arranged colors and shapes to con-
vey meanings of a purely aesthetic character.
Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe(1770)
Source: Benjamin West (1738–1820), The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. Oil on canvas, 152.6 214.5 cm.
Transfer from the Canadian War Memorials, 1921 (Gift of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, England, 1918).
Photo © National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.Artists have always asserted a right to adjust reality to
suit their own purposes. In his Poetics, Aristotle, the ancient
Greek philosopher, distinguished between the dusty factu-
ality of history “a thing that has been”—and the “higher
thing” of the storyteller’s art—a “kind of thing that might
be.” Modern novelists and filmmakers, when challenged by
historian-critics, invoke this “poetic license.” When director
Darryl F. Zanuck was criticized for changing history in The
Longest Day, a film about World War II’s Normandy invasion,
he replied,“There is nothing duller on the screen than
being accurate but not dramatic.”
Today the line between “art” and “history” has blurred.
Television producers routinely enhance the news with reen-
actments and “docudramas.” Historians, though among the
first to pounce on historical miscues, often enliven their
books with dramatic paintings such as West’s fiction.
Whatever its defects in depicting Wolfe’s death, West's
painting has assumed a prominent place in the history of art.
History paintings also provide a vivid reminder that all render-
ings of the past—in pictures or words—are interpretations.Source: Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in
American Culture(2006); Mark C. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect: History According to
the Movies(1995); Mark C. Carnes, Novel History: Historians and Novelists
Confront America’s Past(2001).