The Battle of Trafalgar (1825 Dighton painting)

It's the last post of the month, which means looking at another work of art created outside of the 1790-1820 time period.

Since I'm still on a bit of a Trafalgar kick I'm looking at another painting of the Battle of Trafalgar, this one from 1825. Last month I looked at JMW Turner's return to the events of October 21, 1805 in a painting from 1824, a topic he originally visited in oils in 1806.

Turner also made extensive sketches of Victory and her sailors when he visited Portsmouth in 1805, so while his 1824 painting was criticized by naval men for compressing the events of more than one day into a single scene, he was familiar with the original state of Victory and what her sailors were wearing in 1805.

The Fall of Nelson, Battle of Trafalgar, 21 Oct. 1805. Royal Museums Greenwich.

Denis Dighton's 1825 oil painting, on the other hand, feels more like a product of the 1820s. As the Royal Museums Greenwich catalog entry notes, "The artist has mistakenly shown the high solid gunwales and round bow of the 'Victory', modifications made some years after Trafalgar. Their introduction was influenced by the heavy casualties suffered in the battle."

Different, too, are the clothes Dighton's sailors wear. Several of them are painted wearing only Guernsey frocks with nothing underneath. Sailors wearing frocks appear in more contemporary paintings (such as this one from 1815), but they're often portrayed as a garment worn over shirts and neck-cloths.

Several sailors have huge sideburns that verge on muttonchops and long, thick queues, in contrast to more contemporaneous images of the events of October 21, 1805 that are more likely to show sailors with short, curly hair, and nearly clean-shaven.

Detail from JMW Turner's The Battle of Trafalgar... 
© Tate Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), 
The original can be at the Tate viewed by clicking here.

This painting is an interesting contrast to other paintings about the events of October 21, 1805 done in the years immediately after the battle, which I hope to look at in subsequent posts, particularly the two famous paintings of the Death of Nelson: Benjamin West's 1806 painting and Arthur William Devis's 1807 painting.

A Witness, 1825

"A Witness" - Isaac Cruiskshank, 1825.
Royal Museums Greenwich.

This is the last post of the month, which means it's time for another image of sailors created outside of the 1790-1820 time period. Today's image is an engraving from 1825, created by prolific caricaturist George Cruickshank (1792-1878). George was the son of caricaturist Isaac Cruickshank, and continued his father's artistic and satirical legacy well into the 19th century. I've featured several I. Cruickshank prints before, most recently "That Accounts for It" (1799).


It's fascinating for me to see how portrayals of sailors' clothing start to evolve in the mid-1810s, and are well on their way to being something quite different of turn-of-the-century clothing by the mid 1820s. The sailors in this print have all shed the breeches, petticoat breeches, and buckled shoes that they were commonly portrayed wearing from the early 18th century to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in favor of long, broad-legged white trousers and black pumps. Their neck-cloths (all black) are very loosely tied around their necks with the knot around their breastbone and the ends hanging down well below the waistbands of their trousers, which sit closer to the natural waist than the extremely high waistline of civilian menswear of the 1810s.

One sailor has a tall white shirt collar, a harbinger of longer shirt collars to come that will eventually be decorated with embroidery. He wears the yet-eternal blue jacket with mariner's cuffs worn open, but another sailor wears a striped blue and white guernsey frock (a knit sweater worn over a shirt) instead of a jacket. Several sailors carry hats; two of them are both white straw decorated with black ribbons, and have a lower crown than the oversized blue rosette-bedecked "squashy" black hats sailors are often show wearing in caricatures from 1790-1810. Several of the sailors have impressive sideburns.


This print and other artwork I'll feature from the 1820s to 50s is a good reminder to not extrapolate sailor fashions of the 1820s and 30s backwards, and to be cautious about using artwork that depicts a previous time period.