Staging Grounds: Loutherbourg and Warley

Abstract

In 1778, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg began work on a pair of companion pictures marking George III's attendance at a spectacular military review on the broad expanse of Essex wasteland that was Warley Common. Scholars of the painter's art have largely overlooked these ambitious, large-scale landscapes, but their commission and subsequent display at the Royal Academy played a key role in advancing Loutherbourg's career. Strikingly novel, the paintings attracted a good deal of critical attention for their curious mix of the patriotic and the satirical, the topographic and the scenographic. Taking its cue from this latter stage set-like quality, this essay situates Loutherbourg’s Warley scenes in relation to a series of dramatic spaces, moving from the ‘battlefield’ depicted to the London stage to the Academy exhibition room, highlighting a series of connections and interactions that shed new light on the performativity of Georgian art, culture and spaces of display.