Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

In portraits and prints of the Napoleonic era, heroes cannot be amputees and amputees cannot be heroes—except for Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson. Nelson’s iconography confronts the observer with a full-frontal view of the bodily mutilation of a military hero. Although amputation was widely represented in the eighteenth century, Nelson’s portraits are unusual in incorporating it into images of heroic masculinity and national identity. Why did heroic portraits generally render amputation invisible, and what are we to make of the departure from this practice seen in Nelson’s portraits? More broadly, how does physical disability relate to portraiture’s claim that in delineating how people look, the painter’s eye and hand can make visible what they truly are? Answering these questions requires us to consider how disability or “defect” relates to key conventions of eighteenth-century portraiture. As Marcia Pointon remarks, portraiture “makes graspable the elusive body” by bringing together “the conscious and the unconscious, the historical and the actual, the real and the imagined.¹ When the elusive body that the portraitist seeks to capture is disabled, then the representational choices made call attention to certain larger ways of thinking that give meaning to a likeness. The portraits examined here reveal the complexity of the visual codes through which bodies signify as particular kinds of people—as national heroes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. [End Page 17]

Lord St. Vincent’s complaint that “that foolish little fellow has sat to every painter in London” is an exaggeration, but Nelson did get his portrait painted often. Despite frequently being unwell or at sea and dying at the age of forty-seven, he is the subject of more formal portraits than any military hero except the Duke of Wellington.² Nelson was also a popular subject for caricatures, in addition to commemorative consumer goods such as mugs and decanters, fans, and fabrics.³ And the body that all of these images sought to represent was conspicuously disabled: shattered by musket ball as he led a raid at Santa Cruz de Tenerife on July 25, 1797, Nelson’s right arm was amputated immediately below the shoulder.

As a highly visible amputee, Nelson was part of a trend. After long being suspect as a presumptuous act that, among other things, disfigured the image of God, elective limb amputation had become fairly widely accepted by the end of the 17^th century, largely due to the rise of gunpowder and the particular kinds of damage that gunpowder inflicts on human tissue and bones.⁴ Moreover, in Nelson’s own time, medical advances in amputation combined with the wars of 1793–1815 greatly increased the number of disabled veterans in England, who often appeared as stock figures occasioning laughter or pity in popular print and literary and visual arts.⁵ However, Nelson’s social class and professional status were less typical among military amputees: he was not a disabled and discharged soldier or sailor, but rather a disabled officer on active duty. He lost his right arm early in his career and lost the sight in one eye even earlier. He fought and won his three great battles, the Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801), and Trafalgar (1805), as a disabled active-duty officer—as a one-armed, half-blind Admiral who was working at the very peak of his administrative genius, technical expertise, and charismatic leadership.

“Disabled active-duty officer” is a less familiar category than “disabled veteran.”⁶ Nelson was wounded more often than any other senior officer of his day, but he was not alone in returning to duty after amputation.⁷ Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Pasley, a friend of Nelson’s, provides a useful comparison. At the age of sixty, Pasley lost his left leg below the knee in the Battle of the First of June, 1794.⁸ Although Pasley did not command at sea again, he continued to serve and to be promoted, first as Commander-in-Chief (the Nore) then Commander-in-Chief (Plymouth). He retired in 1801 as a full admiral. We should note that among sailors rather than officers the familiar rank “Able-Bodied...