Battle Painting and Agency: A Study of the Art of Elizabeth Thompson Butler, 1859 to 1919

The thesis aims to shed light on counter-intuitive facts about late Victorian battle paintings that have been neglected by the framework of social history of art. It achieves this, through examining works of Elizabeth Thompson Butler (1846-1933), the foremost artist of the genre, employing the anthropological theory of Alfred Gell (1945-1997). The social history of art’s semiotic readings have neglected the individual context of Victorian battle paintings, as they reduce artworks to representations of the general and collective ideologies of the society. In response to this problem, this thesis deploys the investigative method proposed in Gell’s Art and Agency (1998). This method focuses on the matter of agency, which is concerned with specific factors that have consequence for the immediate social relations around art objects. This thesis discusses Victorian battle art in terms of such matters as effect, agency, working conditions, and eye-witnessing. The results reveal that Butler’s battle paintings were not coherent representations of abstract mindsets. The artist’s remarkable success with The Roll Call (1874) was more related to its technological ingenuity, which attracted people’s attention, than to its ethical implications in contemporary politics. The Colours (1898), which has been considered a methodical painting in Butler’s oeuvre, is found out to be a genuine artwork that involves unique factors on art-historical and personal levels. The recognition of the agency of working conditions discloses an overlooked affinity between Butler’s Scotland for Ever! (1881) and Aesthetic landscape paintings by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903): both artists deployed an analogous mode of observation. Eye-witnessing, in contrast to popular conception, was not a requisite practice for good paintings of war, as its efficacy is questioned by examining Butler’s Evicted (1890), war correspondent artists’ pictures, and her Great-War pictures.