Loyd Grossman makes a valuable contribution to British art studies with his book about Benjamin West’s ‘game-changer’, The Death of General Wolfe (1770). By placing the painting in the contexts of West’s career, academic theory, philosophical history, empire, social change and new attitudes to war, Grossman makes a convincing case for the picture as a ‘modern’ work of art in the Foucauldian sense of ‘heroizing the present’.

Following an introductory chapter that sets out the argument and considers West’s gamble in choosing his subject, Grossman investigates the background to the painting with chapters on the artist’s early education in Pennsylvania (Chapter Two) and his development in Italy (Chapter Three). Chapters Four and Five place Wolfe in the contexts of various intellectual developments to show how the artist developed a new, more democratic form of exemplum virtutis (p 128). West’s turn to contemporary subject matter is seen as a symptom of the new ‘historical consciousness’ also witnessed in the writing of ‘philosophical history’. The picture challenged established expectations of history painting, which was undergoing a ‘crisis of representation’ in the period. By depicting his heroes in modern dress and adapting the iconography of a Lamentation, West was involved in the ‘sacralization of the everyday’ (p 112): proclaiming the present to have equal value to the ancient past. This also provided a solution to the problematic concept of heroism (brought about by changing British attitudes to war) by engaging spectators in a shared emotional experience (p 128). This idea is developed in Chapter Six, in which Grossman argues that Wolfe celebrated the ‘collective effort’ of victory (p 167). Both as a large oil painting at Buckingham House, and in printed form, the picture is found to speak to patriotic sentiments. Grossman rejects various ‘coded messages’ about politics, colonialism, gender and sexuality identified by previous art historians, arguing instead that, in their admiration, both elite and aspiring-elite spectators were ‘validating beliefs and behaviours to which they already subscribed’ (p 171). The final chapter concludes with a consideration of Wolfe’s influence on later paintings of contemporary events. While acknowledging that the revolution in history painting would have happened without West, Grossman nevertheless asserts that the artist ‘put something vital and persistent into the bloodstream of art’ by encouraging a tendency to combine ‘an insistence on the importance of the present with the need to satisfy the immemorial human demand for epic narrative’ (p 201).

Grossman makes a good case for the modernity of Wolfe, not only by linking it to developments in thought, culture and society in a period of rapid change, but also by adopting Foucault’s concept of ‘modernity as an attitude’: ‘the will to “heroize” the present’ (Foucault Reference Foucault1991, 40). While this idea is central to his argument, he delays elaborating upon it until the final chapter, by which point the discussion of Baudelaire and Marx is perhaps unnecessary, Grossman having already made a convincing case. A little more interrogation of Foucault’s text in the opening chapter might have added theoretical weight.

The temporal and geographical scope of this book is wide-ranging. While Grossman’s focus is on Wolfe’s background and reception in the London of the 1770s, he has laid the groundwork for further investigation into its changing status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into its reception in America, Canada and France, three countries that are all implicated in the subject matter. A particular strength of this book is the breadth of contextual evidence. A wide range of writings from the period is drawn upon in order to analyse West’s work in relation to the intellectual climate of the period, which has the additional benefit of providing a useful introduction to several topics, especially history painting and the rise of historical consciousness.

The author has a knack for well-chosen visual comparisons and tends to let his illustrations do the talking. It is a shame, however, that some of these works are not discussed at greater length, as Grossman’s visual analysis is consistently illuminating and enjoyable. One picture that I felt deserved more attention was Gillray’s The Death of the Great Wolf (1795), a print that not only attests to how familiar Wolfe was by the 1790s, but might also suggest the possibility of more sceptical interpretations of West’s picture. Might not the depiction of the general as a dying Christ have struck some viewers as a little ridiculous?

A consideration of print culture also brings us to the question of Wolfe’s audience. Grossman’s estimation that those who saw the painting and bought the print consisted of some 4,000 to 5,000 of the nation’s wealthiest families (p 162) is perhaps over cautious, at least in terms of the print, which would have been prominently displayed in print-shop windows as well as being available in cheaper pirated versions. While there is no written evidence about what members of this wider class of spectators might have thought about the image, an acknowledgement of their existence would nevertheless have opened up the possibility for the coexistence of a less stable, perhaps less sentimental and loyalist reading of the picture than the one that Grossman argues would have been typical among elite and aspiring-elite spectators.

This is the first book-length study of The Death of General Wolfe since that of Ann Uhry Abrams (Abrams Reference Abrams1985). Grossman covers some of the same ground, and even follows a similar chapter structure to Abrams. However, with a greater appreciation of social factors in the art world and a multidisciplinary understanding of the period, Grossman is aligned to a more recent historiographical approach (for which see, most recently, Solkin Reference Solkin2015). With his concern for the modern, Grossman is aligned to this approach. His discussion of history painting and British imperial history also contributes to a revival of interest in these areas, exemplified by recent exhibitions at Tate Britain (Fighting History, and Artists and Empire, both 2015), while his transatlantic perspective is in keeping with recent scholarly trends (eg Hemingway and Wallach Reference Hemingway and Wallach2015). West is a subject of several recently completed PhD theses (Caffey Reference Caffey2008; Weber Reference Weber2013; Gilroy-Ware Reference Gilroy-Ware2013; Fox Reference Fox2014; Grossman Reference Grossman2014; Ardill Reference Ardill2016), but this book, with its engaging narrative and pacey style, is likely to introduce the artist to a wider readership beyond academia.