Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century

Laura Brandon is curator of war art at the Canadian War Museum.

In 1991, cultural historian Simon Schama published Dead Certainties
(Unwarranted Speculations). Using both fact and fiction, he outlined
several conflicting accounts of General Wolfe’s last days. More than
anything else, this critical volume exposed history and popular culture
as capable of straying far from fact—if, indeed, fact can ever be
determined. Alan McNairn confirms Schama’s reading when he writes in
his conclusion, “How we perceive [Wolfe’s] death and the meaning we
find in it is limited only by our imaginations.”

The bulk of his book supports this interpretation as he details the
many ways in which Wolfe’s last hours were described by a vast array
of artists and writers in the decades following the hero’s death.
Central, of course, is Benjamin West’s famous painting of the subject
dating from 1770, now in the National Gallery of Canada. The author
comments rightly on the irony that has seen this work feted for its
historical accuracy (the use of contemporary dress in particular), when
many of the figures depicted cannot be confirmed as having been present.


McNairn gives little credence to the veracity of any of the other
likenesses of the dead hero. He describes how the earliest posthumous
portrait was ultimately based on a substitute sitter, Wolfe’s own
visage being too badly decomposed by the time the corpse landed in
England. Furthermore, he casts doubt on the reliability of most of the
depictions apparently completed in the general’s lifetime.

The story McNairn tells is engaging, and for the historian of Wolfe,
invaluable in its detail. However, he does not explore too deeply his
own suggestion that the endless heroic portrayals of Wolfe were in some
way necessary to the Britain of the time. Was the hero worship an
example of some kind of naturally occurring popular phenomenon, or was
it government-initiated and manipulated for reasons of political
expediency? In either case, it probably didn’t matter what Wolfe had
ever looked like.