“Storm'd at with Shot and Shell”

The lingering trauma of the Vietnam War has led recent scholarship to describe the Crimean campaign as a principally unpopular venture, one uniformly marked by defeat and suffering in the army and by protest and discontent at home. As Matthew Lalumia sees it, for example, the domestic shock-waves of the Crimean bloodshed deeply affected contemporary artists, causing them to abandon the “heroicizing modes of traditional battle art,” as well as the pertinent “iconographic and formal devices.” In sum, “romanticism and idealization” allegedly gave way to “realism,” with the themes of “destruction and human suffering” taking precedence over the traditional pictorial eulogies of lords and generals in fancy uniforms. Socially, Lalumia claims, all this was directly related to the rise of the Victorian middle class putting an end to traditional aristocratic art patronage, rather than just supplementing it, as seems more plausible. ¹¹³