Naval Gazing: Portraiture and the Royal Navy

19 June 2024
Research Seminar
Speakers - Katherine Gazzard, Sara Caputo
This talk is part of a series entitled 'Out to Sea', which focuses on the influence of oceans and their coasts, in relation to Britain and its global empire, on visual and architectural imagination and production.
Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of naval officer George Edgcumbe (1749, National Maritime Museum) can be split into two zones: a maritime zone on the left, containing the young captain’s warship afloat in Plymouth Sound; and an architectural zone on the right, where ivy-covered columns evoke his Cornish country estate. Edgcumbe’s body straddles the divide, symbolising his ability to move between the worlds of naval service and aristocratic society. He wears the Royal Navy’s first-ever official uniform, introduced only months before. Perched above his shoulder is an African long-tailed paradise whydah bird, a souvenir from his travels.
Positioning its sitter at the intersection of social, institutional, sartorial, local, national and global concerns, this portrait serves as an introduction to the complex currents that have shaped the representation of naval personnel in British art. To what extent can naval portraiture be understood as a distinctive genre? What were its conventions, and how did they emerge?
In answering these questions, this talk will chart a visual and conceptual journey from the beach to the boardroom. Naval portraiture emerged in the eighteenth century as a genre that looked “out to sea”, employing coastal settings to symbolise colonial expansion, maritime trade and even the transgression of social norms. Through public display and reproduction, many portraits became known outside of naval circles, sometimes assuming immense cultural or political significance. Yet, over time, the focus of naval portraiture turned inward. Displayed in mess rooms and Admiralty corridors, portraits legitimised particular manifestations of authority within the Royal Navy and visually reinforced the service’s institutional and bureaucratic structures. This journey through the history of “naval-gazing” invites us to reflect on how portraits can cross between private, public and institutional realms and what happens when they do.
Respondent: Sara Caputo, Senior Research Fellow and Director of Studies at Magdalene College, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge