Painting History
‘All That Was Left of Them’: The 17 th Lancers at Modderfontein. Painting by Richard Caton Woodville (1856-1927). The artist depicted the event as a classic colonial ‘last stand’ with officers and men standing back to back and surrounded during this 1901 battle of the Boer War. It’s been pointed out that in fact the battle was fought out among the rocks and stone kraals of the Modderfontein farm, and that the lances and helmets shown in the painting had been abandoned by this stage of the war ‘History painting’ – a genre which includes depicting an event or a moment in history, or a historical figure embodying a clear message – has a long and diverse tradition It covers Italian Renaissance artists showing the Adoration of the Magi to Picasso’s 1937 anti-war painting of the bombing of Guernica pictured above. It’s no longer fashionable of course, as speaker Brian Portch showed the audience at one of Fairlynch Museum’s C...