The Romans cause a wall to be built by William Bell Scott, 1811-90

The Romans cause a wall to be built

William Bell Scott

1857

Wallington, Northumbria

Courtesy Wallington, the National Trust.

According to John Batchelor, Scott painted this part of the series at Wallington "very fast and with great enthusiasm, finishing it by June 1857." For the setting of this picture of the Roman occupation of Britain, he chose "Housesteads and the crag and loch beyond it" painted accurately enough that "any modern visitor to Housesteads and Craig Lough would recognise it. The painting of the landscape and sky is confident and spacious." Ruskin had recommended that painters of historical and religious subjects base the figures in their works on portraits of real people, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood took this advice very much to heart, as we can see in works as different as Millais's Lorenzo and Isabella, Rossetti's The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and all of Hunt's works throughout his career.

Bell Scott here shows this Ruskinian and Pre-Raphaelite influence by making the figures in the painting

all carefully faithful portraits of contemporary people. A centurion, who occupies much of the central space of the painting, is rebuking an idle British workman who is taking time out to play at dice. The centurion is a lean, stern young figure, a convincing embodiment of authority in detailed Roman armour. He was modelled from John Clayton, of Chesters, who was Town Clerk of Newcastle. Behind him another dark-haired Roman officer was based on a celebrated antiquarian, Dr John Collingwood Bruce, who was the contemporary authority on the Wall. The Wall divides England from Scotland, and the Caledonians on the right of the painting are attacking the Wall with slingshot and rough spears. [Batchelor 134-35]

Although major Victorian painters, such as Alma-Tadema, Leighton, and Poynter made scenes with Roman subjects extremely popular in later decades, they generally set them in Rome itself, in part because they often sought to imply similarities between imperial Britain and imperial Rome. The Romans cause a wall to be built therefore has double importance, since it is not only a compararative rare choice of subject by a Pre-Raphaelite associate — Millais painted one, too — but Scott has clearly placed his British ancestors in an inferior position, using the Hogarthian touch of the dice players familiar from The Idle Apprentice at Play. In fact Scott's arrangement of the Roman officer holding a weapon and the gambler is almost an exact mirror of Hogarth's! — Jacqueline Banerjee and George P. Landow

Related Material

Looking to Rome: Empire or Occupier? — the British Problem

Bibliography

Batchelor, John. Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006. [review by JB]

Last modified 12 November 2006