Peinture navale et image de la nation en Angleterre (1660-1815)

Peinture navale et image de la nation en Angleterre (1660-1815)

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Marine painting should be better used by historians as a source of information.This article is mainly devoted to the pictures illustrating battles at sea, as illustrations of national patriotism.It was at the end of the 17th century that the English became conscious of their own power at Bowl Neck Ring Spring sea, faced with two of their main enemies, France and the Netherlands, two powerful maritime powers, also rich in marine paintings.Willem van de Velde Senior and Junior were certainly the models of the English painter Samuel Scott, the author of a vast quantity of marine paintings.Among the subject matters of such works, there were the Man of War, the whole Fleet with its flags, its tactics and power, its symbolism, and of course the battle itself.

Such battles at sea were meant to embody the basic values of the English nation : courage and stubbornness, the willing sacrifice of seamen for their mother country.Such were the themes of all marine paintings during the gigantic Anglo-French wars at the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815).The supreme hero was of course Nelson, the symbol of all values to be Gloves stamped in the collective memory.Many pictures were devoted to him, whose mutilated body, at Trafalgar, was represented as the ultimate sacrifice to his mother country, for the preservation of its greatness and nobility.