 Hi, I'm Mark Hallett and welcome to the fifth talk in the PMC's special lockdown lecture series. My talk is entitled, Displaying the Hero, John Singleton Coppola's Death of Major Pearson of 1784. In late 18th century England, there flourished a type of publication that was geared to female consumers, and that, small in scale and relatively short in length, was designed to be tucked into one's pocket. These publications were called Ladies' Pocket Books, and they regularly featured articles and illustrations providing information on the latest metropolitan fashions and cultural events. One of these little books was entitled, Feel Things Ladies' Pocket Book, and in 1785 it featured a frontispiece depicting an exhibition that had been mounted in the previous year by the American-born painter John Singleton Coppola. This exhibition was primarily devoted to the painting that is pictured at the centre of the illustration and described in its caption, the death of Major Pearson, who was shot by the French on their landing at Jersey in the year 1781. In the illustration we can see that the painting, which is adorned with an elaborate decorative surround, is being approached and inspected by a gathering of elegantly dressed men and women. Some lean against a barrier or shelf erected in front of the picture and look at it from close up. Others stand back and enjoy the painting from afar. Today the same painting hangs in Tate Britain. Over the next half hour or so, we too will spend some time with muted in close up. This will give us the chance to appreciate its extraordinary complexity and dynamism. But, like some of the viewers in the Pocket Book engraving, we will also step back a little and place it in relation to the wider artistic and political contexts of Lake George and Britain and to debates that are currently coursing through our own troubled culture. Coppola's painting is an image of martial sacrifice and victory, in this case one that was based on an actual military encounter that had taken place in the town of St Helier, the capital of the Channel Island of Jersey, in the very first days of 1781. Interestingly, the event was vividly recorded in the print released that same year. This was a period when Britain was once again at war with its longtime enemy France, which was supporting the rebellious American colonists in their increasingly successful fight for independence. In early January 1781, a small force of French soldiers had invaded Jersey with the intention of capturing the strategically important island, and initially, it seemed that they might have succeeded. The island's military governor, Colonel Moiser Corbett, surprised in his bed, quickly capitulated to the invaders. However, a more junior officer, majored Francis Pearson, directly contravening Corbett's orders to surrender, proceeded to rally the British troops gathered in the island and to lead them into battle with the French. The two forces met each other in St Helier's town square, where, in a brief but decisive exchange, the British troops overwhelmed their opponents. Before doing so, however, Pearson himself was caught in the exchange of gunfire and shot in the chest. He died soon afterwards, a short distance from the battlefield, in the arms of his fellow officer, Adjutant Harrison. Coppola's monumental painting, some eight feet high and 12 feet long, weaved together the depiction of this recent military victory with a tragic storyline of Pearson's death. Prompted by the ripple of bayonets that pour into the scene from the left, our eyes are invited to sweep across the canvas from left to right, and in doing so, to trace the victorious visual arc that incorporates the forward tilt of the pictured Union Jack flag and that culminates on the far right-hand side of the painting, in the image of British troops firing point-blank into a chaotic huddle of French soldiers, whose flailing arms and bayonets tell of panic and defeat. As well as offering us a panoramic view of the battle, however, Coppola also invites us to pause at the image's centre and to dwell on the stilled figure of the fallen major in foreground, who's shown being cradled in the arms of his fellow officers. These men include Adjutant Harrison, the figure who looks directly down at Pearson's upturned face, and whose sword arm supports his lolling head. Knitting this central scene of mourning together with the imagery of action, Coppola shows Pearson's black servant dressed in extravagant livery and directed by the pointing figure of a white army officer shooting his master's killer, a French officer who is himself shown falling into the arms of his companions. Finally, on either side of the painting, Coppola includes the image of a wounded soldier who ignores his own pain and reaches out to his leader. And a depiction of two women and children who, horrified by the violence, are shown fleeing the scene. To start understanding this dramatic depiction of victory, tragedy and retribution, it would be helpful to turn briefly to a painting that served as an important pictorial template for Coppola's work. This is Benjamin West's famous picture of the death of General Wolfe, which was painted in 1770, and exhibited to acclaim that the recently founded Royal Academy in the following year. In this instance, West paints, or pictures, the last moments of General James Wolfe, who, in 1759, had died on the battlefield of Quebec and Canada, just as victory against the French had been won. In a bold initiative, the artist deploy the Victorian conventions associated with the most elevated kinds of historical and religious painting to animate and inflect its contemporary depiction of a heroic military death. To see how West's pictures draws on such conventions, we only have to compare his image to an engraving after Anthony Van Dyke's lamentation over the dead Christ. Through gesturing to such precedents, West lent artistic and emotional gravitas to his depiction of the dying General. At the same time, in choosing to focus on the death of a famous modern hero and on a recent celebrated military event, the details of which are distributed across the pictorial background, he ensured that his work enjoyed a powerful legibility and relevancy for contemporary audiences. Coppola's painting follows West in a number of respects. It too has echoes of older images of fallen saints and battlefield heroes. And intriguingly, it seems closely related to a sketch that Coppola himself had produced during a stay in Italy during the 1770s of the classical warrior Patroclus from Homer's Iliad being carried away from the battlefield. More obviously, the death of Major Pearson once again, like West's picture, fuses a depiction of a military leader's death with that of victory against the French. Once again shows a hero's dying body being cradled by a circle of attentive male companions. Once again includes a single figure of colour amongst his protagonists. And once again pictures a hero's body lying directly underneath the patriotic symbol of a Union Jack. While West's image can now be seen to have offered an important pictorial precedent for the death of Major Pearson, we can also suggest that two of Coppola's own earlier pictures played a vital role in paving the way for his 1784 painting of Pearson's Battlefield Sacrifice. The first was a painting now known as Watson and the Shark, which Coppola exhibited at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1778, three years after having settled in London. This picture was astonishingly original and seems to have had the kind of impact on its contemporary audiences that I remember the film Jaws having on me as a boy. That is something that was not only thrilling to encounter, but a work the like of which I'd never quite seen before. Coppola's canvas is one that again fuses the pictorial conventions of history painting with a dramatic modern storyline. But it is a storyline that is both more obscure and more startling than the somber death of a general on a battlefield. The painting, which is based on an event that had taken place in 1749, depicts a 14-year-old English boy named Brooke Watson being attacked by a shark in the harbour at Havana, Cuba, at a moment immediately prior to his actual rescue. But soon after he had experienced the horror of having part of his right leg bitten off. Commissioned by Watson himself, who by the 1770s was a successful London merchant, the painting was described by one critic as, quote, one of the most striking pictures in the 1778 exhibition. In it, we already see Coppola experimenting with a thrilling kind of contemporary history painting. And one that, in an intriguing foreshadowing of his later picture of Pearson, centers upon the dynamic interplay between a single young, blonde-haired and violently threatened male figure in the cluster of intertwined and overlapping men who variously reach out to and look down at this figure from above and in turn act out a form of retribution on its assailant. It is worth pausing for a moment and noting that up until this point, exhibitions of contemporary painting, like those of Coppola's, were typically collective affairs, featuring numerous works by scores of different artists. Furthermore, in Britain, these exhibitions have become dominated by the annual displays of the Royal Academy, which, though providing a crucial means through which artists could advertise their practice, did not provide them with any of the revenue from the thousands of ticket sales generated by each show. Having caused something of a sensation at the Academy with his painting of Watson and the Shark and having been elected as an academician the following year, 1779, Coppola now decided the time was right to reap the potential, financial and reputational rewards of exhibiting a similarly compelling canvas outside the Royal Academy and on his own. Thus, in 1781, in a one-man show that took place in a rented room in the centre of London and to which he charged admission, he exhibited his painting The Death of the Earl of Chatham, which transplanted the kind of heroic demise that had been pictured by West a decade before into the political environment of the House of Lords. The canvas depicts the moment in 1778 when the venerable and much celebrated Earl of Chatham, Prime Minister during the victorious Seven Years' War with the French of mid-century, collapsed during a parliamentary debate about the rebellious American colonies. He was to die soon afterwards. Significantly, Coppola once again shown his stricken protagonist surrounded by a circle of attentive, caring male figures, this time dominated by Chatham's three sons and his son-in-law. In this instance, however, Coppola provides the central cluster of figures within a far larger, extremely crowded group portrait that encompasses the likenesses of more than 50 members of the Lords and it shows these men variously reacting to, mulling upon and talking about the shocking event that has just taken place in front of their eyes. Coppola's one-man, one-picture exhibition was a great success, as is indicated by this pocketbook engraving of the exhibition. With some 20,000 visitors coming through his doors over his first few weeks, a good number of whom were also subscribed to an engraving after the painting. And given the impact it enjoyed, it is no surprise that Coppola soon began planning a successor or sequel to the death of the Earl of Chatham, this time in collaboration with the print publisher John Boydell, who, a decade earlier, had made a fortune through the engraving he'd commissioned of West's Death of Wolf. Together, the two men agreed that the story of Major Francis Pearson's heroic sacrifice and his successful defeat of the French invaders in Jersey would provide a promising topic for a new painting and for a subsequent engraving. More particularly, I think that Coppola must have seen the subject of Pearson's death as one that gave him the opportunity of producing a work that would combine the patriotism and the solemnity embodied by his Chatham painting with the type of excitement and drama that had helped Watson and the Sharp make such an impact in 1778. Now, as was his practice, whenever it came to such complex projects, Coppola spent an enormous amount of time organising his new composition and thinking about where he should place the scores of protagonists who were to feature in his pictorial drama. This preparation is nicely suggested by looking at just six of the many drawings he used to develop his ideas for the death of Major Pearson. This is one of the very earliest in which, following academic conventions in such matters, we can see that he uses new figures to map out an initial draft of the scene. At this stage Coppola has the beginnings of his central group and a rough outline of a fallen figure of Pearson whose pose with his arm flung downwards directly echoes that of Petroclus in that earlier study we mentioned. Here too, we already have indications of smoke and flags and a ghostly prefiguration of the women and children who, in the final painting, run out of the scene on the right. On the left meanwhile, we see a figure brandishing a sword over his head and directly behind him and shooting a rifle. Someone who already seems to fulfil a retaliatory role that is eventually performed by the black servant. In a second slightly later drawing of the cluster of figures, this figure of revenge has been moved to the right of the group and his actions are shown being directed by a newly added protagonist. Then, in another drawing of Pearson and his closest companions, Coppola reverses direction and blocks in a fresh configuration of figures in which the rifleman and his military superior are placed on the left and in which the heads of two further protagonists are shown looking back with the officer with a raised sword on the left and, in a swirl of pencil strokes, further animates the running woman on the right. And a more detailed fifth drawing in turn contains written notes identifying the figures in this central group and adds the imagery of the fallen Frenchman and his companions in the distance. A final testament to the kinds of care and preparation Coppola devoted to the choreography of his protagonists is provided by a sixth drawing in which the three Frenchmen are squared up for transfer to the painted canvas but were in which, even at this very late stage, we still find the artists exploring a pose of a sword-ranging officer and thinking about how best to depict the prone figures of the dead. Alongside his campaign, his extended campaign of drawing a second crucial aspect of Coppola's planning for the death of Major Pearson involved his exploration of the resources of portraiture which seemed to have proved of special importance in the gestation of the central group of figures in his painting. Though for obvious reasons Pearson himself or someone Coppola couldn't portray in the flesh, it seems clear from contemporary accounts that the artists painted the portraits of the majority of the officers who gather around the fallen Major and he did so from the life in his studio. In doing so, we can imagine that he would have asked these men not only to talk about the battle and their roles in the conflict but also to assume particular expressions or gestures, even poses telling at least in part the roles that had just been assigned within the developing picture itself. Sitting for such portraits was thus a kind of acting. For Coppola, the process of orchestrating this central group must have been very similar to that of producing the kinds of family portraits in which he also excelled which would also see him placing his sitters in a variety of carefully chosen poses and asking him to perform particular pictorial roles. And tellingly, these group portraits once again see the artist entwining his subjects' bodies into intricate, multi-figural combinations which are often characterized by a striking focus on the touch of bodies and hands and on the gestures of the outstretch and developing arm in painting his central group of officers I'd like to suggest probably not only exploited the kinds of studio role play associated with portraiture but extended into a battle painting intimate, tender and expressive kinds of emotional and physical interaction found in his family portraits. Here we can note the tenderness as well as the strength in which the officers cradle the former nature's body the proximity and the concern of the looks they direct down and the eloquence of Pearson's own outstretched arm and hand rendered inanimate by death but shown as if still reaching out to the soul that has just fallen to the ground. Having spent many months honing such details and assembling his crowded pictorial cast Copley finally completed his painting in the spring of 1784. The artist then ensured that the exhibition in which it was to feature which opened at the end of May was intensively promoted in the London press. In the newspaper advertisements he issued in the run-up to the exhibition Copley whetted the appetite of readers by offering a detailed account of the battle itself together with an extended and sometimes highly colourful description of the painting that was going to be on display. This description promoted the picture status as at least in part an ambitious and faithful exercise in portraiture in which the central group including the avenging servant of the portraits of the officers of the 95th regiment an officer of the militia artillery and of the said black servant but the advertisement also offered the promise of such shocking and affecting scenes an English sergeant mortally wounded on the ground endeavouring with his handkerchief to stop the effusion of blood but greatly affected at the site of the body of Major Pearson and on the other side of the picture the depiction of women and children flying with terror and distress from their scene of blood on the eve of the opening Copley issued a further set of advertisements which noted that the exhibition will be open from eight in the morning right through to the evening and that admittance would be one shilling per person and in a final piece of marketing he declared that quote an explanation of the picture with the names of the officers whose portraits are contained in it will be offered gratis to all paying visitors here is a surviving copy of this pamphlet which as we can see also includes a diagrammatic key to the group portrait of the painting centre complete with a listing of the pictured officer's names and if we return to the pocketbook illustration with which we started we can see this pamphlet being carried by a number of the visitors to Copley's exhibition this is a reminder of the experience of attending the theatre in our own day when we will often find ourselves purchasing a programme summarising the play's plot and illustrating its factors this is not as fanciful as it might seem for Copley's exhibition was an urban entertainment that competed not only with such events as the Royal Academy exhibition which was being staged at the same time but with the scores of theatrical performances that were daily taking place in the capital's playhouses indeed, the death of Major Pearson provided a form of visual spectacle that in its multiplicity of scenes its thrilling special effects its cast of leading men and supporting women and children and its combination of patriotic action and melodramatic pathos offered many parallels to those on offer in the 18th century playhouse no wonder perhaps that one critic declared rather hyperbolically of the painting that the performance is truly dramatic it excites pity and horror in the mind of the spectator like the tragedies of Shakespeare or Ottway this same gushing critic also alluded to the painting's artist-lorical pedigree declaring that such figures as the major the dying sergeant and the fleeing woman are equal to the productions of Correggio or the most eminent artists in Italian school if visitors were thus encouraged to align the painting in their mind's eye with the works of the old masters they were also given the opportunity of placing the death of Major Pearson in relation to Coppola's own earlier painting of the death of the Earl of Chatham the latter of which the artist decided to put on display once more and to hang immediately to the right of his new painting as you may already have noticed you can just see its left edge on the right of the pocket of the illustration moving from the one picture to the other as a number of the visitors now engraving a sheen doing provided spectators with a chance to enjoy meditate upon the complex forms of interaction that operate between the two works their shared interest in telling the stories of modern history in painted form and in exploring the possibilities of group portraiture in doing so their shared concern with examples of heroic sacrifice distributed across very different environments and generations and their shared invocation of war and rebellion at a moment 1784 when Britain had just endured a terrible defeat in the American War of Independence intriguingly though the artist's advertisements make no mention of the fact it seems possible even likely that visitors to Coppola's exhibition were also given the chance to look at the death of Major Pearson alongside a version of another of the artist's most celebrated works that is Watson and the Shark which a newspaper review declared had also been added to the display if this was indeed the case it may be that the mysterious objects seen hanging on the left hand wall now pocketbook engraving was a duplicate of Watson and the Shark be that as it may thinking about these two pictures in relation to each other opens up as has already been indicated another set of interesting parallels one more of which is provided by their shared focus on individual black protagonists I speak at a time when the representation of race and the racist underpinnings of so many of our institutions, traditions and cultural practices are properly the subject of renewed and highly charged scrutiny at such a moment it seems especially important when talking of Coppola's the death of Major Pearson to train our gaze on the black servant to play such a pivotal role in a painting's composition and narratives the discrimination faced by such figures in the period is confirmed with brutal starkness by the fact that in the diagrammatic image printed in his pamphlet for the 1784 exhibition the avenging rifleman is the only figure denied a dignity of a name of his own and his identity is subsumed under the name of another he is simply and separately Major Pearson's black servant and in the painting itself as we have seen this form of subordination is doubled he's shown not only avenging his white master but following the orders of another white officer in doing so and this narrative of loyalty is easily read outward in including him in this manner Coppola can be seen to allegorize the widest subservient owed by its black subjects both at home and abroad at a time when the empire itself had been thrown into profound crisis in a recent book however the Harvard historian Jane Kamensky following some extensive detective work in the archives has offered a rather different reading of this figure first of all she gives him a name that of Isaac Burton who actually served in the retinue of another officer based in Jersey in the period Captain James Christie who happened to be away from the island at the time of the battle a participant in the encounter described the major as having been avenged by quote a black servant of Captain Christie's and Kamensky persuasively identifies this figure with Burton indeed she suggests quite plausibly that Coppola decided to describe Burton as a Pearson servant in order to simplify and strengthen his painting's narrative of retribution Christie then goes on to stress the extent to which Burton's depiction is a figure of action departs from conventional representations of people of colour in this period and even from Coppola's own earlier depiction of the black figure in Watson and the Shark whom she describes as a quote mute observer in her words Pearson's servant does not mug bend or beseech he acts violently instantly as battle demands but also acts reasonably precisely he is armed and trained he carries his own rifle and his own casings and powder he loads and sights aims and fires passionate and dispassionate at once he lands his shot his target dies in all of these ways Kamensky argues quote Burton's depiction in the death of Major Pearson marks a striking departure from the figuration of black bodies in European painting not only that she suggests that the agency and status he is granted in the painting foretells something even more significant though Kamensky is careful to acknowledge Coppola's complicity in the racist ideologies of the day she also declares that quote the progression from Watson in 1778 to Pearson in 1784 gestures however partially in the direction of black freedom such arguments are certainly over the challenge they are useful in signalling the complexity and the contradictions of Coppola's depiction of race in the death of Major Pearson and in turn the fraught and tension ridden character of the picture as a whole indeed I'd like to end by suggesting that this is a painting that despite its seemingly smooth running pictorial machinery and its ostensibly deaf fusion of patriotic narratives and heroic imagery can also be interpreted as a strained and tangled mixture of contradictory elements this is particularly the case in its fundamental twin focus on victory and death yes the exhilarating tale of martial victory found in the canvas can be understood as complementing its tragic iconography of a young officer's death but these two aspects of the painting can also be seen as enjoying a fundamental incongruity with each other and as pulling the image in entirely contrary directions towards both rejoicing and grief public pride and private sorrow action and reflection this dialectic is most eloquently expressed I think by the clogged movements and split preoccupations of the central group of officers themselves they are simultaneously pulled forward in the direction of the adrenaline fuel battle and pulled back to care for their fallen leader like us perhaps they seem uncertain about which way to turn and which way to look Coppola's painting you can conclude tries to be both uplifting and melancholy exciting and tragic all at the same time it is not so surprising then that the death of a major person can sometimes seem to be at cross purposes with itself and to buckle under the strain of its own ambitions thank you