The Art of War in Two Short Videos

As long as I’m linking to videos, here are two from museums about eighteenth-century military art.

The British National Gallery is restoring Joshua Reynolds’s portrait (shown here) of Capt. Robert Orme, one of Gen. Edward Braddock’s aides during the ill-fated expedition west. 

Reynolds didn’t make cleaning easy, as conservator Hayley Tomlinson explains in this behind-the-scenes video. Reynolds’s technique of mixing resin into his paints, especially later in his career, makes it hard for a cleaner to distinguish the original colors from varnishes overlaid in the decades since and now misting the intended view.

On this side of the ocean, the American Revolution Institute at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., shared a short video of collections manager Paul Newman showing off a powder horn carved for Capt. Thomas Kempton.

As Newman shows, this horn was made in Roxbury during the siege of Boston and includes simple images of some local landmarks, such as Castle William.

In 2013 I researched Capt. Kempton and spoke about the horn at Anderson House, as I discussed back then. (I keep meaning to write up my notes in a more presentable form.)

One curious aspect of this horn is that it was originally carved to say “carved by” Kempton. That was changed to “carved for,” with the alteration still visible. There were professonal horn-carvers plying their wares along the provincial lines, and apparently this one thought Kempton would like full credit for the horn, but the captain preferred otherwise.