Research in the Collection: "Council of War," ca. 1904, by Hermanus Willem Koekkoek

Over the past few months, I have been researching a painting in the Museum of Art’s collection, Hermanus Willem Koekkoek’s Council of War from around 1904. The work ostensibly depicts a moment from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, a conflict that brought an end to France’s Second Empire following a stunning defeat by Prussia and other German states and the abdication of Emperor Napoleon III. We witness a group of French military officers on horseback conferring on the battle that evidently unfolds in the background. Smoke from cannon-fire joins roiling clouds, transforming the upper-half of the canvas into a turbid gray sky. We cannot discern the opposing army from the visual information Koekkoek (1867–1929) gave us, but we readily infer that German troops are nearby.

The painting drew me in part because of my own research interests in French and British martial culture of the period. But my curiosity was also sparked by a set of questions: First, how—and perhaps why—did a depiction of the Franco-Prussian War, created by a Dutch artist active in London, end up in the collection of an academic art museum in Maine? Of course, we know that Council of War entered the collection of the Museum of Art in 1904 as part of a bequest by Mary Sophia Walker (1839–1904). That Walker bequeathed it to the Museum raises the question of what prompted her to acquire a representation of the conflict painted decades later and why she then considered it fit for Bowdoin’s collection. In turn, what lessons did Bowdoin College faculty and Museum staff believe the image would convey to undergraduates in early twentieth-century New England? Currently, I’m still ascertaining details about the work and how it fits into the artist’s larger career. In this essay, I present a few contexts against which we might begin to read it.

The Franco-Prussian War resulted in a major shift in European if not global politics and attracted artists from well outside the combatant nations, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, and the United States. In the decades that followed, artists increasingly focused on the motif of the common soldier. Painters’ investments in the figure of the common soldier are seen first in France, where the defeat by Prussia in 1870 made untenable a long-standing tradition of state-sponsored battle painting that dated to the Napoleonic Empire and typically glorified French military prowess. Artists including Alphonse-Marie de Neuville (1835–1885) and Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Detaille (1848–1912) reconfigured the genre through canvases, exhibited at the Paris Salons, which celebrated the humanity and professionalism of rank-and-file troops over the heroism of a commander and the drama of combat. This mode of “military painting” sparked an international phenomenon, taking hold even in rival Britain. There, Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler (1846–1933), adapted the new focus on the common soldier in her acclaimed paintings, exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, which commemorated the “pathos and glory of the soldier’s calling.” Her work roused public and critical enthusiasm for battle painting, which until this time did not enjoy the same high status in Britain as in France. Significantly, these artists had focused on the low- and mid-ranking soldiers of the rank and file and rarely if ever depicted military commanders. This already marks Koekkoek’s painting as different, as Council of War imagines an unnamed battle from the perspective of army leadership.

That Koekkoek established a career in picturing past wars runs counter to what we thought we knew about the waning of military painting in the early twentieth century. The overarching narrative is that the naturalistic mode of depicting military themes was decreasingly considered an innovative form of modern art, both in France and in Britain. The genre of military painting (la peinture militaire) quickly faded from the Paris Salons after 1900 and came to be written out of histories of French art. Military artists in Britain experienced a similar fall from grace: several continued to exhibit depictions of imperial adventures at the Royal Academy exhibitions and other galleries in the years leading up to World War I (1914–1918) though mostly to mediocre reviews, and military artists frequently struggled to make a living through painting alone. The highly researched literalness along with the understated heroism that had helped works by Detaille, Neuville, and Butler cause sensations at the major exhibitions of the 1870s had by the early 1900s largely come to be considered traditional and institutional.

When Mary Sophia Walker bequeathed the painting to the Museum of Art in 1904, tensions were once again rising between France and Germany. Koekkoek’s visual reference to the French military defeat in 1870 entered the collection at a time of faltering confidence in France’s strategic position on the world stage and a renewed German threat. The nation’s position had been partially strengthened by aggressive imperial expansion across Africa and Southeast Asia, renewed economic growth after years of recession, and both a mutual-protection alliance with Russia in 1891 and the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904, which ended decades of hostilities with Britain. However, the Entente Cordiale was by no means a military alliance. Additionally, Russia was experiencing its own humiliating military defeat by Japan. By 1904, the French Army had been reeling from the immense scandal now known as the Dreyfus Affair, which lasted nearly a decade and involved courts martial, public trials, conspiracies, cover ups, assassinations, and suicides, and which polarized French society around the turn of the century. The trial and conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus had brought to the surface extreme antisemitism prompted by anxieties around France’s perceived military power and racial and religious purity. In this light, a scene of a conflict thirty years earlier may have read to viewers as evoking a simpler time. 

The Walker sisters donated numerous martial objects to the Museum between their 1894 gift and Sophia Walker’s bequest in 1904. Koekkoek’s Council of War is the only oil-on-canvas military scene, but the collection also includes portraits of significant military figures from yesteryear, including seventeenth-century Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, French Revolutionary figure Joseph Barra, English general Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and American general and president George Washington, among others. Sophia Walker’s bequest also included a depiction of Joan of Arc made by her sister, Harriet Sarah Walker, out of ink and watercolor on porcelain. By the early twentieth century, artists were crafting representations of Joan of Arc not just out of fanciful interest in France’s medieval past. Joan of Arc was celebrated for her leadership during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) in which she turned the tide for the French forces against the English, who would eventually burn her at the stake. She had become by this time integral to French militarized nationalism, although she would only achieve sainthood following World War I, a conflict during which she played variously ceremonial, morale-boosting, and propagandistic roles. Whether Harriet Sarah Walker had these connotations in mind is not altogether clear. Still, her taking up of the subject of Joan of Arc suggests that she, too, had some interest in historical French battles.   

My investigation into the questions and issues presented above remains ongoing. In closing, I want to offer some directions for future research. First, one wonders what Koekkoek’s contemporaries thought of his work. Was there robust critical engagement with his images? Where were they exhibited and reviewed? The artist has received interest from scholars working in the Netherlands but has remained little studied by Francophone and Anglophone historians of military painting during this period, even though the artist was active in Britain and internationally. Examples like Koekkoek’s require historians to ask new questions about the wide appeal of military art and history and its remarkable staying power for artists and audiences not just in combatant nations but also across Europe and North America. I’m also curious to know to what extent Mary Sophia Walker was intellectually invested in French military history and current events. Surely, she would have been aware of the Dreyfus Affair; of the rivalries among France, Germany, and Britain; and of the scramble for territories and resources propelled by these rivalries. These were frequent subjects in the international press. But what did she think of them? What sides of the issues did she take? This takes us to the last and most elusive question: what did early twentieth-century Bowdoin students make of the painting? These questions animate my continued research on the painting.

Sean Kramer, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow
Bowdoin College Museum of Art