Invalide de la Marine anglaise dans le Parc de Greenwich

This painting shows a Greenwich Pensioner (a naval veteran resident in the Royal Hospital for poor and injured seamen at Greenwich) sitting on a bench under a tree at the top of One Tree Hill in Greenwich Park. He holds a long clay pipe and wears the Hospital uniform, which consists of a blue coat and a tricorn hat. A young woman in a white dress and green bonnet with pink ribbons serves the pensioner ginger beer from a basket of bottles in her left hand. The western dome of Greenwich Hospital (now the Old Royal Naval College) is visible in the lower left with the River Thames beyond, leading to Deptford Reach and London in the distance. The painting is signed ‘Duval L. C.’ in the lower right.

The painting is characteristic of the sentimental work of Pierre Duval Le Camus (1790–1854), a successful French painter of the Romantic period who specialised in genre scenes. Duval Le Camus received enthusiastic patronage from members of the French royal family, including King Louis-Philippe and the Duchesse du Berry, both of whom were influential tastemakers in the 1820s and 30s. Many of Duval Le Camus’s paintings were reproduced as popular lithographs.

The present painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1837 in Paris under the title ‘Invalide de la Marine anglaise recevant du ginger beer dans le parc de Greenwich’ [‘An invalid of the English Navy being served ginger beer in Greenwich Park’]. A lithograph after the painting by Adolphe Lafosse was published in the same year. The following year, Duval Le Camus exhibited a painting titled ‘La Bohémienne’ [‘The Gypsy’] at the Valenciennes Salon, the exhibition catalogue for which stated that the scene had been painted in England at “Blackitte” (probably a misspelling of “Blackheath”) near Greenwich. This suggests that the artist came to England and visited Greenwich at some point in the mid-1830s. Presumably the present painting was produced during the same trip. It is painted on an English canvas bearing the stamp of the famous art suppliers Roberson & Miller, who were in partnership at 51 Long Acre, London, between 1828 and 1839.

The painting exemplifies the rich cross-Channel influences that linked British art and French art in the Romantic period. Following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the restoration of peace, French and English civilians, including many artists, connoisseurs and collectors, flocked across Channel to rediscover and explore the culture of their erstwhile enemies. Living with his family at 7 rue du Coq-Saint-Honoré in Paris, Duval Le Camus was embedded in an Anglo-French artistic milieu. His landlord was the leading artists’ supplier Alphonse Giroux, who stocked canvases from the London colourman James Newman and sold paintings by young English artists then in fashion, including Richard Parkes Bonington and John Constable.

Greenwich would have been an attractive destination for a foreign artist visiting London in the 1830s, being home to what was at the time one of the nation’s largest public art galleries – the National Gallery of Naval Art (opened 1824) in the Painted Hall at the Royal Hospital for Seamen. This gallery celebrated Britain’s naval achievements through the display of portraits, marine paintings and battle scenes. Visiting Greenwich also afforded an opportunity to explore the scenery of the Park, the architecture of Royal Hospital and the lives of its Pensioners, subjects which were popular with British artists of the time and frequently featured in London’s annual art exhibitions.

Duval Le Camus was sensitive to the condition of veterans, having first gained public attention at the Paris Salon of 1819 with Game of Piquet between Two Invalids (Detroit Institute of Art). However, whereas the Game of Piquet highlighted the plight of destitute former soldiers from the defeated French army in the years immediately following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Greenwich painting was produced many years later and depicted a veteran from the winning side of the conflict enjoying a happy and contended retirement. Unlike the drunken and dishevelled Greenwich Pensioners often depicted in nineteenth-century British caricatures, the individual in Duval Le Camus’s painting is imbued with a sense of dignity in his polished sartorial appearance and attitude. The young woman who serves him ginger beer displays the caring characteristics associated with stereotypical femininity, as well as personifying a younger generation allowed to flourish thanks to the heroic wartime service of the aging man. In its evocation of gender roles and intergenerational exchange, the painting resembles John Burnet’s Greenwich Pensioners Commemorating Trafalgar (Apsley House), which was engraved in 1836 (see PAI598). However, Duval Le Camus’s scene is more quietly sentimental than Burnet’s raucous celebration.