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Description:
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'When victory … was announced to him, he expressed his pious acknowledgements thereof … delivered his last orders with his usual precision, and in a few minutes afterwards expired without a struggle.'
William Beatty
This is the most famous representation of Nelson’s death, in the cockpit of ‘Victory’ at about 4.30 pm on 21 October 1805. In painting it Devis was responding to a press advertisement of 22 November 1805 from the publisher Josiah Boydell that he would pay 500 guineas for the best ‘Death of Nelson’ painting, for engraving.
Devis may have boarded ‘Victory’ off Portsmouth with the aid of Nelson’s banker, Alexander Davison (one of his patrons), and told her officers that he had been freed from the rules of the King’s Bench to attempt the subject to pay his debts. He worked aboard for a week making notes, sketches and portrait studies before sailing with her for the Nore on 11 December, the day he drew Nelson’s body (and the fatal bullet) during Dr Beatty’s sea-borne autopsy to prepare it for lying-in-state. From this, Beatty commissioned a Nelson portrait – of which Devis made several versions, one shown at the Royal Academy in 1807 – and obtained the illustrations for his own published Narratives. Devis’s care for accuracy also included making a model of the scene to work from.
The group around Nelson are the Revd Scott, his chaplain, rubbing his chest to help relieve the pain, and the purser Walter Burke, supporting the pillow. Nelson’s steward, Chevalier, looks towards Beatty, who feels Nelson’s pulse and is about to pronounce him dead. Captain Hardy was not present when Nelson died but is shown standing behind him, one of a number of liberties that Devis took to make the work more than a documentary record and a worthy historical celebration of Nelson’s patriotic sacrifice. The ’tween-deck height (in which Hardy, over six feet tall, could not stand upright) is exaggerated and the darkness and long outer shadows make Nelson the main source of light – real and symbolic – rather than the three flickering lanterns. Wrapped in a shroud-like white sheet, the wound in his left shoulder covered, he lies at point of death against a massive lodging knee, in a grouping recalling Old Masters paintings of Christ’s deposition from the Cross. The implication is that the light of this world is dimming and the glory of the next already shining on the hero, with the glitter of earthly rewards redundant at his feet, in the decorations and braid of his discarded uniform coat (see UNI0024).
Those present show a range of emotions – concern, sorrow, resignation, distraction and despair. By contrast, Midshipman Collingwood and Lieutenant Yule (rear left and left), with a pile of captured enemy flags being brought in by a seaman, look alertly away, as if towards outer light and the victorious battle just ending above. Guitano, Nelson’s valet, stands in right profile in front of Collingwood, holding a glass from which Nelson took his last sips of water, though it may also imply symbolic meaning. ‘Victory’s’ carpenter, Mr Bunce, stands on the far right above the dazed and wounded figure of Lieutenant George Miller Bligh, with Assistant Surgeon Neil Smith seated far right.
In 1777 Benjamin West’s painting of the death of Nelson’s personal idol General Wolfe at Quebec in 1759 set a model for those of modern heroes and was best known, including to Nelson, from the print engraved for Josiah Boydell’s uncle, John. At the same time as Devis, West began his own ‘The Death of Lord Nelson’ on the Wolfe pattern and for a print to match it, honouring (so he said) an earlier undertaking to Nelson: the print was to be engraved by James Heath and jointly published with West, who finished his picture by May 1806 and immediately displayed it in his own gallery. His version showed Nelson dying where he had fallen, in an ‘Epic Composition’ on ‘Victory’s’ quarterdeck. In June 1807 he conceded that Devis’s version had ‘much merit’ but thought his factual approach insufficient ‘to excite awe and veneration’, even though he did an inferior below-decks version himself at that time for Clarke and McArthur’s 1809 ‘Life of Nelson’. ‘Wolfe,’ he said, ‘must not die like a common soldier under a Bush; neither should Nelson be represented dying in the gloomy hold of a ship, like a sick man in a Prison Hole. ... All should be proportionate to the highest idea conceived of the Hero. … A mere matter of fact will never produce this effect.’ Devis, however, gained Boydell’s patronage and by August 1806 his version was well advanced with 800 subscribers enrolled for the print, though William Bromley was only appointed in December to engrave it – for £800 and in two years. Boydell had the painting shown at the British Institution in 1809, but lost the ‘print race’ with West, since Bromley’s plate was only issued in 1812. Heath’s after West was finished and a proof shown at the Royal Academy in 1811, with the original painting, to help promote sales. Both prints were highly successful but Devis’s painting became the better known after 1825, when it was presented to the Naval Gallery at Greenwich Hospital by Nicholas Vansittart, Lord Bexley, who had been envoy to the Danes in the events surrounding the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. (The Hospital had already declined to buy it from Boydell and later declined an offer from West’s heirs for his 1806 ‘Epic’ version, now in the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool.)
By the late 19th century Devis’s painting was a central image in the Painted Hall’s role as a major Nelsonic and naval shrine, which the National Maritime Museum’s Nelson displays inevitably inherited with care of the Naval Gallery paintings from 1936. Millions more people came to know the composition from the waxwork tableau based on it that, with some renewals, was a feature of Madame Tussaud’s for at least a century up to 1992. Queen Victoria paid 500 guineas for Devis’s large oil sketch when offered it in 1852 and a smaller replica version has also been shown on ‘Victory’ at Portsmouth, near the spot where Nelson died, since the ship was restored in the 1920s.
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