‘A Splendid Body of Men’: Fishermen as Model Males in Late-Nineteenth-Century British Imagery

O’Neill, Mary

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77946-7_4

Mary O’Neill⁷

Part of the book series: Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History ((GSSCMH))

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Abstract

The fisherman as represented subject is absent from Kestner’s pantheon of Victorian imperial masculinity. Less martial, he appears most in his natural element when at sea. Consequently, art-historical readings have stressed the appeal of the primitive, neglecting contemporary links with British maritime nationalism. This chapter shifts the focus from makers and markets to consider fisherman imagery more broadly. It reveals how artists and critics contributed to discourses shaping contemporary concepts of manliness, according the fisherman a heightened value in this period of intensified naval visibility. It analyses the ways that painted fishermen—dubbed ‘sailors’ in reviews yet contrasted with Jack Tar ashore—were vehicles for an exemplary manliness, whether as seasoned hunters and ‘bona fide seamen’ or stoic breadwinners and sober family men.

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Notes

1.
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2.
Lübbren, ‘Toilers of the Sea,’ 42.
3.
Geoff Quilley, “Missing the Boat: The place of the Maritime in the History of British Visual Culture,” Visual Culture in Britain 1, no. 2 (2000): 79–92; Kenneth McConkey, Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Christiana Payne, Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth Century Britain (Bristol: Sansom, 2007); Mary O’Neill, Cornwall’s “Fisherfolk”: Art & Artifice (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2014).
4.
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5.
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6.
See also Joseph Kestner, Masculinities in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Scolar Press; Vermont: Ashgate, 1995).
7.
Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 34.
8.
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9.
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12.
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13.
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14.
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15.
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16.
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17.
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18.
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19.
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31.
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46.
Andrew Lanyon, The Rooks of Trelawne (London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1976).
47.
Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 38–39. A good example of the fisherman’s courtship is Edwin Harris’s Mending the Nets, 1903 (Private collection), reproduced in O’Neill, Cornwall’s “Fisherfolk”: Art & Artifice, 33.
48.
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49.
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56.
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57.
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63.
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64.
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65.
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66.
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67.
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68.
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69.
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70.
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71.
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74.
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75.
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76.
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77.
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78.
Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 16.
79.
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80.
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81.
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82.
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89.
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Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Mary O’Neill

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Mary O’Neill
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School of History, Australian National University School of History, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Karen Downing
Queens College, CUNY, Queens, NY, USA
Johnathan Thayer
School of History Philosophy & Culture, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Joanne Begiato

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O’Neill, M. (2021). ‘A Splendid Body of Men’: Fishermen as Model Males in Late-Nineteenth-Century British Imagery. In: Downing, K., Thayer, J., Begiato, J. (eds) Negotiating Masculinities and Modernity in the Maritime World, 1815–1940. Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77946-7_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77946-7_4
Published: 16 January 2022
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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