A naval officer and two well-dressed ladies enjoy the sunset of a summer’s evening from a vantage point overlooking a busy Victorian port. The curved frame of the windows and the slanted nature of the railings strongly suggest the location as the stern of a wooden warship. The young lieutenant looks admiringly towards the woman on the right, who, conscious of his attentions covers her face coyly with a paper fan. The Gallery of HMS Calcutta was painted in 1876 by the French émigré Jacques Tissot, one of several ‘naughty nauticals’ he produced in the period that juxtaposes alluring women aboard ship or close to water.
The painting’s title places this scene in Portsmouth, where the old ship-of-the-line Calcutta formed part of the Royal Navy’s gunnery school HMS Excellent alongside another old ‘wooden wall’, HMS Windsor Castle. The Calcutta had been launched in Bombay in 1831, one of an increasing number of British warships of the period built in India using teakwood as a substitute for traditional oak. The Calcutta was a one-off design, although she was similar in dimensions to contemporary 2nd rate warships of the Formidable Class, several units of which were also constructed in India. The 2,300t warship’s fighting complement of 720 included 38 officers, 69 petty officers, 150 marines and 60 boys [1].
Commissioned in a time of relative peace, it was almost 20 years before the Calcutta saw any real action. In 1856, she was made flagship of Admiral Sir Edward Seymour, commanding the squadron sent out to prosecute the first phase of what would later become known as the 2nd Opium War. Calcutta was one of the last sailing ships-of-the-line to undertake the 15,500 mile journey to the Far East, one which with an average speed of 5.5kts took a laborious 121 days [1]. Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal, this voyage was still too impractical for large steam warships, although Seymour’s squadron did contain a number of small paddle steamers such as HMS Coromandel, which played tender to the flagship.
With 84 guns Calcutta was by far the most powerful vessel in Seymour’s squadron, and her firepower was to prove of great value against Chinese river defences. She had a major hand in the destruction of the Bogue Forts about 25 miles below Canton, but her role in other operations was constrained by her size which prevented her from travelling far upstream. Her crew and small boats were however very active in naval brigade operations against other forts and junk fleets along the Pearl River in November 1856 and June of the following year.
At the conclusion of the war in China, Calcutta sailed to Nagasaki, arriving there on 10th August 1858. It was later in this month that the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Amity and Commerce would be signed, a deal similar to the one that had formally ended the 2nd Opium War, opening the country up to trade and granting British merchants low import tariffs and extra-territoriality.
Calcutta was laid up at Devonport Dockyard on her return. In 1865, she was moved to Portsmouth to become part of HMS Excellent, and it was in this role that she was serving when she became a subject for several of Tissot’s nautical canvases. In the mid-1870s, many former ships-of-the-line could still be seen in major British ports, serving as receiving ships for cadets, store-ships, guard-ships or training schools. Although the practice of using such vessels as prison hulks had by this time been discontinued, they were still seen as a cost-effective alternative to shore barracks and perhaps a means of giving sailors a taste of the old navy. A good number survived into the 20th century, Calcutta being finally disposed of in 1908, outliving the artist by half a dozen years.
Jacques Joseph Tissot had been born in Nantes in 1836, and it was in this bustling port on the Loire River that Tissot had first tried his hand at painting ships and the sea. The other interest apparent in his paintings, women’s fashion, was undoubtedly acquired from his parent’s working backgrounds. His father was a seller of dress fabric, his mother ran a milliners. A contemporary of Edgar Degas, Tissot had attended L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and had already established himself as a successful artist by 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Joining the National Guard as a Franc Tireur, or sharpshooter, Tissot saw action alongside other young artists defending Paris, prior to its capitulation, most notably at the Battle of Malmaison [2]. In 1871, he fled to London, evidently fearing for his life, having been implicated in the revolutionary activities of the Paris Commune.
Once in London, Tissot had to rebuild his artistic reputation all over again. However, owing to his friendship with Tommy Bowles, the editor of Vanity Fair, for which he worked as an illustrator, and an innate commercial instinct, he soon rose to become one of the most sought-after artists in the capital, making more than £1,000 a picture. His works were repeatedly exhibited at the Royal Academy alongside those of John Everett Millais and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Tissot was good friends with James Whistler, from whom he adopted his English name, but did not share his revolutionary outlook on art. Similarly In 1874, Tissot had turned down the opportunity to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition, fearing that his good standing with the conservative Paris Salon might suffer. His reactionary instincts helped him to commercial success in his own lifetime but consigned him to relative obscurity in terms of art history.
Tissot’s works were not popular with art critics at the time of their unveiling, especially the influential John Ruskin. They were attacked for being showy and devoid of meaning, and for being too ‘French’; this being a pejorative implying lewdness. The Gallery of HMS Calcutta is a case in point. Firstly, this is one of several Tissot paintings featuring a ménage a trois. Another titled ‘The Thames’, which shows an officer reclining in close proximity to two young women aboard a champagne-stocked rowboat, had been judged ‘questionable material’ and ‘hardly nice in its suggestions’ when exhibited the previous year. In the above painting, the officer’s attentions are clearly towards the woman covering her face with a fan; the third ostensibly playing chaperone, but the question of their exact relationships is still unresolved. Secondly, the focus of this painting is as much the ‘derriere’ of the woman as it is the stern of the ship. At the very least, as one critic remarked; ‘The heads are quite subordinate to the turbulent mass of millinery which occupies the principle part of the canvas.’ Another risqué aspect of the woman in the foreground is her back, semi-exposed under her muslin dress, a gossamer effect beautifully executed by the artist.
The licentiousness of this painting is above all subjective; it is not the officer who is looking at the woman’s thrustingly advertised bustle, it is we the viewer. There is nothing scandalous about this picture; it’s hardly on a par with his friend Manet’s nudes of the previous decade – ‘The Luncheon on the Grass’ and ‘Olympia’ had both been painted in 1863 – but there is something ‘borderline inappropriate’ about it. Henry James dismissed the painting as ‘hard, vulgar and banal’, but it was also praised for its ‘manual dexterity’.
Interestingly, the same yellow-ribboned white dress can be seen in other Tissot paintings of the period such as ‘Seaside’ and ‘Portrait of Miss Lloyd’. The artist evidently had only a limited wardrobe for his models, for in ‘The Ball on Shipboard’, which depicts the Calcutta’s main deck possibly on the same social occasion, several women can be seen wearing dresses of the same style and colour. However, this sartorial recurrence may have been deliberate. Tissot’s clients were primarily the nouveau riche. His subjects reflected this rise of new money, and what greater faux-pas could a social ingénue make than to wear the same dress worn by another party-goer. (This kind of social ineptitude had been illustrated by Tissot in ‘Too Early’, a painting showing the premature arrival of a group to a ball.) The ladies aboard HMS Calcutta are noticeably modern in their languorous sensuality. This is the Victorian equivalent of a modern nightclub balcony, with two young women dressed, not dissimilarly, to the nines, on the proverbial pull! For many critics this modernity, with its undertones of sexual empowerment, was another reason to reject Tissot’s oeuvre.
The Gallery of HMS Calcutta was exhibited at the Grosvenor Exhibition of 1876. By this time, Tissot’s personal life had become as controversial as his paintings. In 1874, he had set up home with a divorced Irish mother of two, Kathleen Newton, who would be his muse until her untimely death from consumption in 1882. Tissot turned away from high society in later life and focused on religious paintings. By the time of his own death, art had been revolutionised just as by the time of the Calcutta’s demise, had warship design.
The painting now resides in the collection of Tate Britain but is not on permanent display. What is on public view is the ship’s 4-metre tall figurehead. It had been presented to Admiral John Fisher after her scrapping; the Calcutta had been the future First Sea Lord’s first ship when he’d entered service in 1854, and he had served aboard her a second time at Portsmouth while he was gunnery instructor with HMS Excellent in the late 1860s. The figurehead, a wildly-staring, moustachioed gentleman in a turban, was passed on to the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth in 2012 [3].
Works cited
| [1] | “HMS CALCUTTA – PASSAGES BETWEEN PLYMOUTH AND HONG KONG – 1856 and 1859,” 31st October 2008. [Online]. Available: http://kinghallconnections.jottit.com/4130-w-uk-far_east_passage_under_sail. |
| [2] | L. Paquette, The Hammock, 2012. |
| [3] | “Restored figurehead from the HMS Calcutta begins its journey to the National Museum of the Royal Navy,” 30th October 2013. [Online]. Available: http://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2013-10-30/restored-figurehead-from-the-hms-calcutta-begins-its-journey-to-the-national-museum-of-the-royal-navy/. |
Bow Creek to Anatahan 