DANIELA BLEICHMAR AND VANESSA R. SCHWARTZ Visual History: The Past in Pictures Introduction I N 1770, A PAINTING RECORDED history and in doing so made history (fig. 1). The Death of General Wolfe, by the Anglo-American artist Benjamin West (1738–1820), portrayed events that had taken place eleven years earlier: Major-General James Wolfe’s death in September 1759 after having led the British forces to victory over the French at the Battle of Quebec. By the time West created his painting, the events and the man were well known to publics on both sides of the Atlantic. Wolfe had become a hero whose military victory and tragic demise had been copiously com- memorated through poems, songs, painted and sculpted portraits, memo- rial monuments, numerous prints, and paintings. Though West’s painting did not tell a new story—the anecdote’s very familiarity was what drove him to portray the subject—it did tell that story in a new way. 1 West’s large canvas outdid previous representations of the event and became a sensation, largely for something that would today be utterly unre- markable: it depicted the military hero in contemporary dress rather than in the classicizing garb then considered appropriate for the portrayal of great men and great deeds. While West adhered to many of the conventions of history painting—the large format, the battle condensed into symbols of its start and finish, the improbably melodramatic scene of the senior officers gathered around Wolfe positioned as if he were a Christ in lamentation— the depiction also departed from tradition in showing Wolfe as a contempo- rary man dressed in a recognizable scarlet military uniform, his red hair tousled. Such elements provided an eyewitness and reportorial dimension to the depiction, with explicit details of time and place, as did the inclusion of a Native American man kneeling in the foreground gazing at the dying general. West declared that his intention had been to act as a ‘‘historian,’’ recording ‘‘the facts of the transaction’’ and marking ‘‘the date, the place, abstract This essay defines the category of ‘‘visual history’’ and introduces its operations across the essays included in this special issue. It proposes that such narratives accelerated time in cultures where it became increasingly common to traverse spatial distances. In this way, visual histories are not simply guides to the times, but guides to time itself. Representations 145. Winter 2019  The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 1–31. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1525/REP.2019.145.1.1. 1 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/representations/article-pdf/145/1/1/237465/rep_2019_145_1_1.pdf by guest on 30 July 2022