Scenes and Traces of the English Civil War

Stephen Bann is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol. He is author of many books including Romanticism and the Rise of History (1995), Paul Delaroche: History Painted (Reaktion, 1997) and Jannis Kounellis (Reaktion, 2003).

• Introduction1 Speaking Stones: Inscriptions of Identity from Civil War Monuments2 A Kentish Family in Wartime: The Bargraves of Bifrons3 Kings on Horseback: Charles I's Statue at Charing Cross and its Afterlife4 Whig Views of the Past: Horace Walpole and Co.5 Illustrating History: Visual Narratives from the Restoration to Hume's History of England6 Boots and All: Cromwell Evoked by James Ward and Paul Delaroche7 French Genre for English Patrons: Paul Delaroche's Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers of Cromwell8 A Sense of an Ending: Problems of English History Painting in the Nineteenth CenturyChronologyBibliographyAcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsIndex

n the din of traffic around Trafalgar Square, it is easy to miss the statue in the middle of the road that flanks it. Tiny in comparison with Nelson’s Column, and often obscured by passing buses, the brass sculpture of a king on horseback is in fact one of the most divisive works of public art in British history. Though America still wrestles with the artistic (and political) legacy of its civil war, the arguments that once raged in Britain about the 'Equestrian Statue of Charles I' have quieted. In Scenes and Traces of the English Civil War, Bann, an art historian, dredges up those old discordances and, in so doing, expects to shed a little light on the country’s 'contemporary political divisions.