ABSTRACT
In his representation of the nation’s soldiers and their personal experience of warfare, Robert Ker Porter’s work both reflected and helped to shape an emergent modern culture of war. Military effectiveness was seen to rely on soldiers who possessed, as John Levi Martin suggests, ‘subjective motivations’ to fight, just as the citizen was being called upon to volunteer his or her services for the nation. Offering an individuated soldier’s subjectivity to the middle-class civilian viewer, Porter’s painting could interpellate the citizen into a nationalist framework as just such a citizen-soldier, helping to make the home a site for bloody dreams of military glory. A sentimental approach to war could lead the reader to identify with the soldier as a private man, as simply a suffering individual, rather than with the soldier as an idealised and sacrificial representative of the nation.
