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- Title
The Newspaper as Nationalist Icon, or How to Paint 'Imagined Communities'.
- Authors
Winkenweder, Brian
- Abstract
Through a careful examination of the conditions under which Sir David Wilkie painted and exhibited his most well-received painting, Chelsea Pensioners Receiving the London Gazette Extraordinary of Thursday, June 22nd, 1815, Announcing the Battle at Waterloo!!! (1822), this paper asserts that Wilkie established the primary iconographic conventions for newspapers in the nineteenth century. Commissioned by the Duke of Wellington, the painting was both the first to require a barrier to protect it from the adoring crowds who flocked to see it at the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy and commanded the highest price ever paid for a painting in Britain at that time. However, since then, Chelsea Pensioners has received little attention by art historians; this paper seeks to rectify this dearth of scholarship by detailing its historical and political significance. I argue that Chelsea Pensioners typifies Benedict Anderson's theory of modern nations as 'imagined communities'.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; SYMBOLISM in art; NEWSPAPERS &; society; NATIONALISM; WELLINGTON, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 1769-1852; SOCIAL conditions in Great Britain; WILKIE, David, 1785-1841; NINETEENTH century
- Publication
Limina, 2008, Vol 14, p85
- ISSN
1324-4558
- Publication type
Article