Capture at Sea in the British Imagination

The first known mention of Arellano’s Christmas Eve Celebrations in Mexico City places the painting in Hampshire in 1833. In his Select Illustrations of Hampshire, the artist and printer George Frederick Prosser observed that Breamore House, the seat of the Hulse baronets, contained a “large picture of the night fair, as held in the Great Square at Mexico, in the year 1720.” He also noted the Hulse family’s unusual collection of casta paintings—a distinctive genre of Spanish American paintings depicting imaginary biracial families, which were produced almost uniquely in eighteenth-century Mexico. The Breamore casta paintings are by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, a highly regarded Mexican artist credited with creating the genre.Footnote ⁸ Prosser did not explain how the Hulse family acquired these Mexican paintings, but the Victorian art historian Louisa Mary Portman did. She stated that the paintings had been “taken many years ago on their voyage from Mexico to Spain.”Footnote ⁹ When Breamore’s casta paintings were exhibited at the 1912 International Congress of Americanists, held that year in London, Edith Maude Webster Levy-Lawson Hulse offered more details. Lady Hulse explained that the paintings were intended for the king of Spain, but that “Admiral Wasbrow or Westrow” had captured them at sea in the mid-seventeenth century. According to Lady Hulse, the admiral gave them to his sister Dorothy Westrow, the mother of the first baronet.Footnote ¹⁰

A similar provenance was offered for other colonial Mexican paintings circulating through eighteenth-century England. Like the Hulse family of Breamore House, the Skottowe family of Chesham owned a set of casta paintings, also by Juan Rodríguez Juárez. The Skottowe family’s set are perhaps the very earliest exemplars of what was to become a popular genre. They were first mentioned as being in the family’s collection in the 1770s. A few decades later, when John Skottowe (1774–1820) resolved to sell the paintings, the auction catalogue stated that they were intended for the king of Spain but had been “taken by an English privateer.”Footnote ¹¹

Capture at sea was likewise the declared origin of the set of paintings depicting the conquest of Mexico belonging to the Cholmley (or Cholmeley) family, wealthy landowners based in Yorkshire (Figure 3). The eight pictures were painted in Mexico in the second half of the seventeenth century, and are the earliest known cycle of paintings illustrating Spain’s defeat of the Mexica empire.Footnote ¹² Until 1948 they hung in the Cholmley estate at Howsham Hall, Yorkshire.Footnote ¹³ During the same International Congress at which Lady Hulse recounted how the Breamore paintings had been captured at sea, a member of the Cholmley family reported that their pictures had been acquired around 1670, when Sir Hugh Cholmley (1632–1689) was returning from Tangiers. She explained that his ship captured a Dutch vessel that had previously seized a Spanish ship whose cargo included these paintings. Sir Hugh took them first to White Manor, in Yorkshire, and then to Howsham Hall. Like the Skottowe family’s Mexican paintings, this set was said to have been destined for “the king of Spain.”Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 3.

Anon., The Conquest of Tenochtitlán by Cortés, second half of seventeenth century, 122 x 199cm, previously Howsham Hall, now Kislak Collection, Library of Congress, No. N8214.5.A45 C65 1750.0007. This painting forms part of a set depicting the overthrow of the Aztec empire by Spanish forces. Like Manuel de Arellano’s Christmas Eve Celebrations in Mexico City, they were said to have reached Britain through capture at sea in the seventeenth century.

Figure 3 Long description

The painting shows a large group of people on horses and on foot. The people on horses are in the foreground and the people on foot are in the background. There are buildings on the left side of the painting and a pyramid in the center. The text at the bottom reads, CONQVISTA DE MEXICO POR CORTES 7.

From the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, in other words, English owners of colonial Mexican paintings often believed that their pictures had been intended for the Spanish monarchy but had been captured at sea by an English ship at some point in the past. Cursory consideration soon reveals flaws in these family stories. For instance, Breamore House’s Mexican paintings were not captured at sea by Dorothy Westrow’s brother Admiral Westrow in the mid-seventeenth century, since they were painted in the early eighteenth century. In any event, neither of Dorothy’s two brothers—Thomas Westrow (ca.1642–1682) and Norton Westrow—was an admiral, nor do the records of the Royal Navy document the existence of any other admiral named Westrow or Wasbrow.Footnote ¹⁵

Admiral Westrow’s questionable historicity notwithstanding, this pirate provenance endowed the Hulse family’s Mexican paintings with a satisfying nationalist patina. Centuries of conflict and Britain’s increasingly resolute colonization of the Americas made Spain’s empire the target of particularly intense patriotic fervor. Seizing Spanish colonial goods dealt a blow to a principal enemy, weakening Spain’s grasp on its lucrative empire and bolstering British confidence in its own.Footnote ¹⁶ All the better if the captured goods had been destined for the king of Spain himself (Figure 4). The stout mariners who hunted Spanish treasure galleons were patriotic heroes, celebrated in poetry and prose in ways that provided a compelling and culturally meaningful explanation for the presence in English country houses of outlandish Mexican paintings.

Figure 4.

“Drake Viewing Treasure Taken from a Spanish Ship,” The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Catalogue number b17921032, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8fc84550-c561-012f-ba31-58d385a7bc34. British audiences had long admired the exploits of sea-dogs such as Francis Drake, whose maritime victories over the Spanish were a source of national pride.

Figure 4 Long description

An illustration shows a mid-range, deck-level scene on a ship. Nine men are gathered around an open chest and piles of sacks and loose coins spread across the deck planks. One man sits on a low support with one leg crossed over the other, facing the treasure. Another man crouches near the open chest with his hands near the coins. Several men stand close together near the rigging. Two men lean over the ship’s side near the treasure. In the distance, a sailing ship and small boats are shown on the water. Text centered below the illustration reads: Drake viewing treasure taken from a Spanish ship.

It is no coincidence that as Lady Hulse offered her account of Admiral Westrow and the captured Spanish ship, British culture was awash with pirates. They featured in popular novels and poems such as Lord Byron’s The Corsair (1814), Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1822), and later in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 Treasure Island, which Prime Minister William Gladstone reportedly stayed up until two in the morning to finish.Footnote ¹⁷ They starred in dozens of plays performed in theaters across the UK, and appeared in periodical fiction and short stories, as well as in musical dramas, including W.S. Gilbert’s and Arthur Sullivan’s 1879 comic operetta The Pirates of Penzance, which responded to the ubiquity of earlier pirate-themed melodramas. Frederick Burwick and Manushag Powell counted 120 different pirate plays performed in British theatres during the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸

Pirates and privateers had long been popular with British readers and theatergoers. Since the sixteenth century, ballads had celebrated—and deplored—their activities, reaching a broad audience. Narratives by and about pirates and privateers were widely read and distributed, as were descriptions of their deaths following capture.Footnote ¹⁹ Settings ranged from the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean, the latter providing opportunity to denounce Spanish colonization of the Americas, which Protestant writers had for centuries condemned as a genocidal assault on peaceable indigenous populations (even as they promoted comparable schemes themselves).Footnote ²⁰

These attitudes made their way into pirate literature. In England, early modern pirate tales set in the Americas often contrasted the misdeeds of the Spanish with the heroic behavior of English sea-dogs. William Davenant’s mid-seventeenth century masque The History of Sir Francis Drake celebrates Drake’s capture of Spanish treasure as a victory for England, justice, and world peace.Footnote ²¹ In Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West (1600–31), Bess, the eponymous fair maid, disguises herself as a man and captains a very successful pirate assault on the Spanish fleet. As Claire Jowitt notes, the pirate Bess, whose name echoes that of Queen Elizabeth, functioned as a stand-in for the English state.Footnote ²² Such stories evoked pride in the successes of patriotic pirates, whose seizure of Spanish goods struck a blow for Protestantism, freedom, and Englishmen everywhere. (Spanish fiction, unsurprisingly, tended to represent English pirates “as a brutal and violent force aimed at uprooting Spain’s empire.”Footnote ²³)

Continuing earlier traditions, nineteenth-century pirate dramas were often explicitly patriotic. In 1809 one London theatre offered a performance of The Seven Capes; or, the Pirate of Algiers in which the stage itself was built of wood taken from a captured French warship, driving home the connection between piracy, British maritime supremacy, and consumer culture.Footnote ²⁴ Britain’s early modern assaults on Spanish shipping, in short, were a satisfying source of both national pride and commercial entertainment. Squire Trelawney in Treasure Island summed up well the patriotic appeal of the early modern pirate to nineteenth-century audiences. The (fictional) pirate Captain Flint, Trelawney proclaims proudly, was “the bloodthirstiest buccaneer that sailed. Blackbeard was as a child to Flint. The Spaniards were so prodigiously afraid of him that, I tell you, sir, I was sometimes proud he was an Englishman.”Footnote ²⁵ Admiral Westrow might not have existed, but stories about men like him certainly did.

Nineteenth-century Britons could thus draw on hundreds of years of patriotic fiction when accounting for the presence of paintings from colonial Spanish America. Such stories provided a ready explanation of how this plunder reached the British Isles, illustrating the powerful hold on the British imagination of capture at sea, and in particular seizures from Spanish treasure ships. Tales about the capture of paintings destined for the Escorial reflect this long-standing and popular image of the English privateer as a romantic, patriotic figure singeing the king of Spain’s beard. Little wonder that such tales recurred in British family histories seeking to explain how artworks from distant Mexico came to hang on the walls of English country houses. These stories are testimony to the cultural impact of capture at sea.

Oceans of Art and Maritime Realities

They are also testimony to the importance of capture at sea in circulating global goods. Despite their sometimes-garbled chronologies, such stories point directly to a hard, material reality. Objects of all sorts, artworks included, were captured at sea. Since water was generally the most efficient and economical form of transport, paintings were routinely packed into the holds of ships for travel to international destinations, alongside the great diversity of other goods reaching early modern consumers in increasing quantities. When the Crowned Mary of Flushing sailed from Vlissingen toward St. Malo in 1667, its cargo consisted of two hampers of frying pans, five bags of pepper, fifty barrels of tar, twenty cases of tobacco, one hundred and fifty deal boards, a large number of cables and hawsers, and a variety of other goods, including “one case of pictures.”Footnote ²⁶ Little Eunice left Bordeaux in 1704 bound for Copenhagen with a cargo of red and white wine, brandy, paper, and “two pictures.”Footnote ²⁷ In 1709 the French Aventure Notre Dame de Rozaine sailed for Lisbon from Rouen carrying six cases of artwork, alongside the rest of its varied cargo of buckrams, linens, periwigs, hats, cider, and red herrings. Mr. Gregoire had shipped “a chest containing forty eight prints,” and Mr. Santoril two cases containing “pictures of the court in gilded frames.” “Three cases packt upp containing pictures” belonged to Daniel Bouette, later the mayor of Rouen.Footnote ²⁸ The Hector carried two cases of prints when it left Bordeaux for Philadelphia in 1795, along with hundreds of silk stockings, brandy, and other goods.Footnote ²⁹ Paintings also travelled in the personal luggage of passengers. For the long voyage from London to Japan in 1614 on the New Year’s Gift, the East India Company (EIC) official John Saris chose to adorn his cabin with an erotic painting of Venus, set in a large frame.Footnote ³⁰

As Mr. Bouette’s packed-up cases indicate, sellers paid close attention to the minutia of packing and other logistical matters. Crates filled with sand were the best way to transport sculpture, and it was advisable to ensure that the containers were as large as possible, to dissuade dockworkers from throwing them about. Water damage was a constant preoccupation. The Glaswegian art dealer William Buchanan (1777–1864) was meticulous in his instructions about the most secure ways of shipping paintings. Buchanan played an important role in the promotion of Italian and Spanish art in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, and employed agents in both countries to locate and arrange the transportation for saleable artworks. His correspondence contains detailed information about protective packaging, and whether to roll canvases with the painting on the inside or the outside.Footnote ³¹ Maritime “systems of delivery” were an important concern for artists and importers alike, as Jennifer Roberts notes in her study of the eighteenth-century transatlantic art trade.Footnote ³²

Since paintings regularly traveled by sea, they were vulnerable to capture at sea by pirates, privateers, and the navies of Western European states. All of the vessels mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, in fact, were captured by British ships and carried into Britain, along with their cargoes of silk stockings, herrings, and pictures of the French court. During times of war, “annoying the enemy” by targeting their vessels was an explicit military objective, reaffirmed by the Admiralty in proclamation after proclamation. The aim was not only to capture or destroy military vessels, but also to seize mercantile ships (and their cargoes), as a form of economic warfare.Footnote ³³

Conventions governing this practice developed from the thirteenth century, which saw the emergence of “letters of reprisal.” If an Englishman, for instance, was unable to resolve a dispute with a Frenchman, the English Crown might in certain circumstances issue a “letter of reprisal,” which permitted the holder to seize the belongings of any French person, as compensation. “Letters of marque” developed subsequently and authorized the confiscation of enemy goods during war. This included the cargoes of both naval and merchant ships, as well as enemy goods carried on neutral ships.Footnote ³⁴

The practices of the regular navy and ships operating under letters of marque differed in degree more than in kind. During periods of war, captains of mercantile ships often took out letters of marque, so that if they should happen upon an enemy ship, they were entitled to attack. Other ships cruised, cargo-less, with the express intention of attacking enemy shipping; these vessels were referred to as privateers, provided the captain was in possession of a letter of marque. Without one, he was a pirate. Naval vessels also cruised about on the lookout for prize. Such threats were one of the reasons shipowners took out insurance.Footnote ³⁵

On capturing an enemy ship, privateers and naval vessels were required to bring it into port so that its cargo could be inventoried and divided up according to the current legislation governing naval prize. Cargoes, and sometimes the captured ship itself, were typically auctioned off and the proceeds (“prize”) distributed to the captors. Pirates too aimed to capture goods at sea, and like privateers and the Royal Navy, they helped circulate global commodities of all sorts, from cochineal to tapestries, at “pirate marts” and through their personal distribution networks.Footnote ³⁶ The difference between pirates, privateers, and naval vessels was that pirates did not possess authorization for their actions in the form of a letter of marque and did not abide by legal regulations on the reporting of captures, the distribution of prize, and the like. Neither did they necessarily attack only enemy ships.Footnote ³⁷ Nonetheless, the lines between them were flexible. “Some persons account [privateers] but one remove from pirates,” observed Malachy Postlethwayt in 1774.Footnote ³⁸ All three—pirates, privateers, and naval vessels—engaged in capture at sea, and all three circulated a great variety of saleable goods through new circuits, bringing them to unintended markets.

In particular, capture at sea disrupted the transport of paintings in the early modern era. Traveling exposed artworks to the “friction of distance,” and the risk of damage or loss.Footnote ³⁹ In 1805 Buchanan lamented the loss of several of his shipments, captured at sea and taken to Spain. The Friendship was carrying £5,000 of his property, including “the Juno and Argus by Rubens, a grand picture from the Durazzo palace of Genoa, and a very capital picture by Titian from Milan,” when it was captured by the Spanish and taken into Algeciras.Footnote ⁴⁰ A painting by Titian of the Madonna and child with Saints Joseph and John was likewise “captured at sea, and carried into Spain, and … can never be recovered,” he reported in another letter.Footnote ⁴¹ A considerable number of the artworks acquired by Richard Worsley during a diplomatic stint in Venice ended up in the collection of Lucien Bonaparte when the ship transporting them to Britain was captured by a French privateer. “I did everything in my power to redeem your property, but without effect in regard to the pictures,” the British consul in Malaga reported sadly in 1801.Footnote ⁴²

Such seizures were a particular risk during the many conflicts that beset Europe from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. In 1665, for instance, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–67), the English privateer Lenox captured the Dutch Fox of Amsterdam between Blankenberge and Ostend. The Fox was taken into Dover and its cargo inventoried. The vessel carried four bags of caraway seeds, several hundred pounds worth of cloth, tobacco, sarsaparilla, kettles, wire, Westphalia hams, and, among other items, two cases containing twenty-four framed pictures on copper plate, eighteen oil paintings of landscapes, and twenty-four watercolors.Footnote ⁴³ In 1748, during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), the French privateer Vigilant seized a British merchant ship (the St. George), which was en route from Livorno to Dublin. The St. George’s cargo included a considerable quantity of wine, Calabrian silk, olive oil from Lucca, and twenty cases of marble busts and statues, as well as six cases of pictures.Footnote ⁴⁴

An even larger cargo of Italian artworks was aboard the British Westmorland when it sailed from Livorno in December 1778, six months into the Anglo-French War of 1778–83.Footnote ⁴⁵ In January 1779, while off the eastern coast of Spain, it was captured by two French warships and taken into Malaga. The Westmorland carried a range of commercial goods—sunflower seeds, thirty-two Parmesan cheeses, boxes of bulbs, artificial flowers, black gauze, Genoese paper, anchovies, hats, and more. It also transported eighteen crates containing the purchases of British “grand tourists” such as the young Francis Basset of Tehidy Park, Cornwall, and the antiquarian and collector Lyde Browne.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Westmorland moreover carried several cases belonging to George III’s younger brother. Paintings by Anton Raphael Mengs, portraits by Pompeo Batoni, etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and a very large number of classical and contemporary marble sculptures were among the items seized by the French navy. This spectacular artistic haul was estimated to be worth £100,000. The goods were acquired by the Spanish Compañía de Lonjistas de Madrid (effectively, the Spanish grocers’ guild), which sold off the Parmesan cheese and other merchandise. The artworks were lodged in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid, from where they made their way to various locations across Spain. Researchers have now identified a number of these objects in Spanish collections.

Although merchants and collectors (and their insurers) were distressed by this capture, no one contested its legitimacy. Indeed, the Westmorland itself carried a letter of marque against France. Had its captain encountered a vulnerable French mercantile ship, he would doubtless have attempted to capture it. Since the Westmorland’s capture accorded with international norms governing capture at sea, neither the merchants whose goods had been loaded onto the vessel, nor the owners of the captured artworks, challenged the legality of the seizure. The owners and their agents nonetheless made sustained and largely fruitless attempts to recover their goods through diplomatic channels and direct offers of money.

In Great Britain the legality of captures was determined by the Court of Admiralty, which adjudicated matters arising from events at sea, including the seizure of foreign ships. Its Prize Courts met regularly in the UK and various cities in the British Empire to determine whether a capture constituted “lawful prize,” or whether some or all of the cargo, and the ship itself, should be returned to the previous owners. The documentation generated by these courts is a rich source of information about both the complex legal status of captured ships and their heterogenous cargoes, artworks included.Footnote ⁴⁷

The 1798 capture of the US schooner Hope by the British privateer Charlotte, for instance, occasioned a protracted investigation in the Vice-Admiralty Court of the Bahamas. The Hope’s cargo included three boxes of framed oil paintings. Unusually, the inventory described the subjects. Most were “scripture-pieces,” showing Moses striking water from the rock, the crossing of the Red Sea, and other Biblical themes. There were in addition over a hundred prints on unspecified subjects. The case centered on the ownership of the cargo. The Hope had left New York City with a destination of Havana, and as Britain was at war with Spain, the privateer justified the capture on the grounds that the goods were the property of Spanish merchants in Cuba. The Hope’s captain disputed this, insisting that the goods belonged to himself and other New York merchants. Since Britain was not at war with the United States, he argued that the Charlotte had no grounds for seizing these neutral goods. The Admiralty Court eventually ruled in his favor.Footnote ⁴⁸

In short, the notion that art might be captured at sea is not simply a romantic nineteenth-century fancy, fed by visions of fictional pirates. Paintings did travel by sea. As a consequence, they were sometimes captured at sea, all the more so during the many conflicts that roiled Europe and its colonies, when states actively encouraged the capture of enemy ships through letters of marque and the regulations on naval prize. Capture at sea moved art into, out of, and around Europe, drawing it into new orbits, disrupting intended trajectories, and creating new markets. Capture at sea was one of the means by which global aesthetic objects circulated.

Capture at Sea and the World of Goods

These captures brought millions of pounds of merchandise into Britain.Footnote ⁴⁹ Spanish ships were particularly lucrative. The prize from the Hermione, captured in the Philippines during the Seven Years’ War, totaled £544,648. The Santísima Trinidad, seized during the same conflict, carried a cargo valued at well over $1,500,000.Footnote ⁵⁰ For comparison, the total value of all retained imports into Britain in 1772–73 was about £13,000,000.Footnote ⁵¹ The Thetis and the Santa Brigida, captured in 1799, carried nearly three million dollars between them, while the 1805 capture of the Santa Gertruda brought in over a million dollars.Footnote ⁵² The porcelain, cacao, vicuña wool, and myriad other commodities laden on captured ships flowed into the economy, bringing these global goods to British consumers.

This is not how we usually think about Britain’s expanding consumer scene. The rich scholarship on eighteenth-century consumption has drawn our attention to the impact of new industries and technologies, new shopping and retail experiences, new ways of organizing household income, and the greatly proliferating variety of manufactured goods. The importance of colonial groceries in transforming the British diet, the consequences for enslaved West Africans, and a great many other aspects of this burgeoning world of things have rightly attracted close scrutiny, transforming our understanding of life in eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies.Footnote ⁵³ The significance of maritime capture in circulating consumer goods has not attracted comparable attention, despite its evident economic significance. Yet the evidence for its impact in bringing new commodities to British consumers is preserved not only in the voluminous records of the British Admiralty, but also in the family legends that ascribe the origins of an unusual Mexican painting to capture at sea.

To be sure, paintings were not foremost on anyone’s list of desirable booty. Gold and silver were generally the most remunerative, useful, and resonant goods that a ship might contain. When eighteenth-century newspapers reported on valuable captures, they stressed the quantities of coin or gold bars, not the fact that the cargo included marble statues or framed oil paintings. In fact, the frames, rather than the pictures they enclosed, were often the most valuable part of an artwork. Paintings were not the treasure that privateers dreamed of on setting to sea. When a group of English raiders attacked a Spanish priory in the early seventeenth century, they were disappointed to find it abandoned, with “nothing left but bookes and pictures only.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Nonetheless, as we have seen, paintings might form part of the cargo of a captured ship, and so were disposed of along with the other goods on board. Admiralty inventories not only itemized captured commodities but also estimated their value. The Hope’s cargo of paintings was valued at over five hundred dollars. Its 168 bottles of white wine, in contrast, were worth only $112. Large pictures, such as Breamore House’s Mexican paintings, were worth more than smaller works.Footnote ⁵⁵ Viewed solely from a monetary perspective, paintings (especially if, like those on the Hope, they were “richly framed”) could be worth a great deal of money.

Since captured pictures had a commercial value, they were brought to market, whether that market was an Admiralty auction or a less authorized site of exchange. Admiralty procedures, from the paperwork generated by a ship’s capture to the auctions used to dispose of its cargo, transformed war booty into ordinary property.Footnote ⁵⁶ Admiralty auctions occurred in taverns or private houses hired for the purpose, the bidding briskly regulated by a candle that measured the time allocated for the sale of each lot. They operated differently from the fashionable art sales held at Christie’s and the other London auction houses, but, like them, they offered British consumers opportunities to acquire foreign artworks.Footnote ⁵⁷

Pirates likewise circulated captured goods to new groups of consumers. Jowitt, for instance, has shown how the “pirate marts” that took place along England’s coast enabled a surprising number of people in late sixteenth-century Purbeck to own parrots. These ostensibly illicit markets were at times tolerated or indeed patronized by local officials, who themselves appreciated the opportunity to acquire “imported” goods. Their significance in circulating global objects was considerable, if difficult to quantify.Footnote ⁵⁸

Mariners lacking such distribution networks sometimes tried to make their own arrangements. In November 1760, John Hervey, midshipman of HMS Defiance, stationed in Jamaica, was court-martialed for stealing “a case of pictures” and a number of other goods from a captured ship. Hervey had been entrusted with transporting the cargo to shore. Instead of surrendering it to port officials, he arranged for these items to be carried to Mr. Carr’s tavern in Port Royal. Witnesses reported that there they “saw the prisoner spread [them] out upon the table.” When questioned about his actions Hervey insisted it was “a private matter.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Sailors such as Hervey were agents in an international art market that circulated objects outside of the orbits traced by more genteel gifting and purchasing.

Paying attention to capture at sea draws our attention to these unexpected historical actors and venues. Privateers, entrepreneurial sailors such as John Hervey, the people who sat opposite him at a table in a Port Royal tavern, and those attending Admiralty auctions at Garraway’s Coffee House were as much participants in the era’s international art world as was Sir Paul Methuen, who purchased his Mexican painting from a Spanish aristocrat. Alongside genteel drawing rooms (or wherever it was that Methuen negotiated the details of his purchase) and the elegant London auction houses were other locations—a tavern, a coffee house—where global art changed hands, and other people, facilitating those exchanges.

Destined for the Court in Madrid

Let us return to where we began: the presence in early modern Britain of paintings from colonial Spanish America. As we have seen, capture at sea brought foreign merchandise of all sorts to British consumers, providing a significant, and underexplored, mechanism for circulating global goods. In fact, the family legends accounting for Spanish American artworks in the collections of the British gentry point us directly toward this phenomenon. Incorrect though some details of these stories may be, and much as they may resonate with pervasive anti-Spanish tropes about plucky English pirates, paintings from the Americas destined for the court were captured at sea from Spanish treasure ships. By questioning how and why these artworks reached Britain we gain insight not simply into the trajectories of individual pictures. We gain a fuller understanding of the varied mechanisms whereby art circulated, as well as the ways in which these unanticipated trajectories shaped an artwork’s reception and subsequent influence. We appreciate the ways in which maritime predation mattered not only in terms of its monetary value but also its cultural and social impact.

In 1806 the London auction house of Cassano offered an unusual item for sale. The catalogue described lot 23 as “a very large Peruvian Painting.” It continued:

According to another description it offered a birds-eye view of “the great square of Lima,” and had been painted by “an untutored native” of Peru.Footnote ⁶¹ The sale was advertised in the London papers, which described the picture as “a real Peruvian painting of the utmost curiosity.”Footnote ⁶² Here then was another large painting of the central plaza of a major Spanish American city, comparable perhaps to those of Cristóbal de Villalpando and Manuel de Arellano. Like Breamore House’s Night Fair, this painting was reputed to have been captured from a Spanish vessel while en route to the court in Madrid.

Indeed, the painting had reached Britain through capture at sea. As the advertisement stated, it formed part of the substantial prize arising from the seizure of the Santiago Apostol, a Spanish ship sailing from Peru for Spain. The Santiago carried a phenomenal cargo of over 2,000,000 pesos in gold and silver, as well as eleven thousand pounds of vicuña wool, 147 cases of quinine, and an array of other goods, including seven paintings. In April of 1793 it had the misfortune of being captured first by a French privateer, and shortly thereafter by the Royal Navy. After a lengthy and acrimonious dispute between Spain and Britain, the Admiralty declared the ship “good prize,” and in this way the “very large Peruvian Painting” reached the UK market, along with the rest of the Santiago’s valuable cargo.Footnote ⁶³

What is more, it was truly “destined for the Court in Madrid.” The festivities it depicted took place in Lima during February 1790. Bartolomé de Meza, an official from the Indigenous Limeño neighborhood of Santiago del Cercado, organized (and largely funded) a series of parades and dances as a contribution to Lima’s program of civic events marking Charles IV’s 1788 coronation. Meza commissioned two paintings depicting the festivities, one of which was intended as a gift for the new monarch—this was the picture packed into the Santiago’s hold.Footnote ⁶⁴ The painting, in other words, was intended for the king of Spain, and reached Britain via capture at sea, exactly as was stated at the time.

The picture’s unintended trajectory influenced British, and indeed European, images of Peru. After the Santiago’s capture, it was auctioned off, along with other items from the cargo, at Garraway’s Coffee House in London, in 1795.Footnote ⁶⁵ Joseph Skinner, a naval surgeon with a particular interest in herbal medicines, attended the auction in order to acquire samples of the medicinal herb calaguala (Phlebodium decumanum); the Santiago carried over a ton. While there he also purchased Meza’s painting, along with back issues of a Peruvian periodical called the Mercurio peruano.Footnote ⁶⁶ Inspired by his impulse purchases, Skinner published a book about Peru, based on articles in the Mercurio, which he illustrated with prints modelled on the painting (Figure 5).Footnote ⁶⁷

Figure 5.

Female Warrior of the Yurimagua Tribe, in Joseph Skinner, The Present State of Peru: Comprising its Geography, Topography, Natural History, etc (London, 1805), Plate 5. This print, supposedly representing “an Amazon, or female warrior of the Yurimagua tribe,” was based on a Peruvian painting captured at sea in 1793. It was reproduced in various European countries as an illustration of typical Peruvian dress.

Figure 5 Long description

The illustration shows a Female Warrior of the Yurimagua Tribe dressed in a detailed outfit. She wears a patterned tunic with intricate designs, paired with red leggings that reach just above the knee. Her footwear consists of white shoes with a distinct pattern. She holds a large axe in her right hand and her head is adorned with a decorative headpiece featuring feathers. The warrior is depicted in a dynamic pose, suggesting movement, with her left foot forward and her body slightly angled to the left. The background is plain, emphasizing the figure and her attire.

Skinner’s The Present State of Peru achieved a modest level of success, but he soon lost interest in his Peruvian painting, which he sold in 1806. Its current location is unknown. The book’s illustrations, however, took on a life of their own. Contemporary Peruvian descriptions of the 1790 celebrations make clear that the participants in the festive procession depicted in Meza’s painting sported fanciful costumes representing mining, the city of Lima, and the like.Footnote ⁶⁸ Skinner’s disassembly of the painting into a series of prints transformed these allegorical outfits into examples of typical Peruvian costume. Prints derived from Skinner’s book were republished in the UK, France, and Germany, where they were used to illustrate children’s encyclopedias and other compendia that depicted national costumes from around the world.Footnote ⁶⁹ The allegorical became actual. By providing new and supposedly accurate representations of the region and its inhabitants (based as they were on “a real Peruvian painting”), these prints influenced the way Europeans imagined Peru.

This visual reimagining of Peru was the direct result of way that Meza’s painting reached Britain. Its capture at sea, and sale in a public auction offering not only paintings but also medicinal herbs, and the other miscellanea taken from the Santiago’s hold, allowed Skinner to acquire an object that would never otherwise have fallen into his hands. Had the Santiago arrived safely in Cadiz, Meza’s painting would have become the property of the Spanish crown, consigned in all probability to the storerooms that warehoused similar gifts from other patriotically minded American loyalists.Footnote ⁷⁰ It would have had no effect on British imaginings of distant Peru. “Traveling pictures,” to use Jennifer Roberts’s useful term, took on new meanings as they moved; capture at sea not only altered the itineraries of travelling art, but at times also determined the nature of these new meanings.Footnote ⁷¹

According to family legend dating from at least the nineteenth century, Sir Hugh Cholmley acquired eight paintings of the conquest of Mexico in the 1670s as he was returning from a diplomatic posting in Tangier. En route his ship was said to have captured “a Dutch vessel that carried these paintings, seized, without any doubt, from the Spanish.”Footnote ⁷² And in fact, on his return from Tangier, Sir Hugh’s ship was caught up in a naval action off the Isle of Wight in March 1672. “We have taken a Smirna ship and some others,” he reported shortly after his safe arrival in London (Figure 6).Footnote ⁷³ In an incident that contributed to the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74), a small English squadron commanded by Sir Robert Holmes launched an unprovoked attack on the Dutch Smyrna convoy. The Dutch convoy consisted of six men-of-war and some sixty well-armed merchantmen, laden with silks, mohair, cotton, spices, and a range of other goods. Most had sailed for Amsterdam from Smyrna (today’s Izmir) via Livorno and Cadiz; other vessels joined the convoy at Lisbon and Porto. The English fleet numbered only five ships (joined by three more a day later), but succeeded in sinking the Dutch rear admiral Klein Hollandia, and capturing two merchantmen (the Vrede of Rotterdam and the Landtman of Amsterdam).Footnote ⁷⁴

Figure 6.

Anon, Holme’s attack on the Smyrna Fleet, 12 March 1672, 19.4 x 30.3cm, National Maritime Museum, PAF5525. This heavily annotated Dutch drawing of the unprovoked English attack on the Dutch Smyrna fleet indicates that Spanish vessels formed part of the convoy, which perhaps explains the presence on board of eight paintings from colonial Mexico.

Figure 6 Long description

The diagram illustrates the English attack on the Dutch Smyrna fleet on 13 March 1672. It depicts ships clustered in groups, with annotations in Dutch indicating fleet positions and movements. The top of the image shows a shoreline labeled 'Londen' and 'Nieu Diep'. The English fleet, marked with 'E', is positioned to the left, while the Dutch fleet is centrally located. Smaller boats are visible in the foreground. Annotations include 'Smyrna Vloot door de Engelsche onder Commando van de Capitein Holms aen gevallen den 13 Martij 1672'. The drawing provides a visual representation of the naval engagement, with directional flow from left to right and a cartouche at the bottom summarizing the event.

In addition to the Persian and Italian commodities that made up the bulk of their cargos, these ships carried Spanish colonial goods and silver taken on during the stopover in Cadiz, where a number of Spanish ships joined the convoy. The Klein Hollandia also carried troops heading to the Spanish Netherlands.Footnote ⁷⁵ Since they are not mentioned in the inventories of the commercial goods aboard the captured vessels, Sir Hugh’s Mexican paintings were presumably personal possessions carried by a passenger; personal goods were liable to be appropriated by captors alongside the cargo, regulations banning such seizures notwithstanding. In sum, the eight Mexican paintings were captured at sea, just as Cholmley family history affirmed, although they had not been taken by the Dutch from a Spanish ship. Perhaps to celebrate his unusual acquisition, Sir Hugh’s household put on a performance of John Dryden’s “The Conquest of Mexico” in 1683. It is tempting to imagine the paintings might have provided inspiration for the costumes and staging.Footnote ⁷⁶

Capture at sea was likewise how the sixteenth-century Codex Mendoza ended up in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The Codex Mendoza is an illustrated account of the Mexica state, created in Mexico by indigenous artists around 1542. According to eighteenth-century sources, it had been commissioned by Mexico’s first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, as a gift for Emperor Charles V (see Figure 7). While en route to Europe, the vessel in which it travelled was captured by a French man-of-war; the cargo was taken to the French court. Richard Hakluyt, chaplain to the English ambassador, subsequently purchased the Codex and took it to England, where it passed through various hands before entering the collections of the Bodleian in 1659. Over the next centuries this complex object informed European debates about the evolution of writing and the truth value of Indigenous sources, as scholars such as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra have shown. Like Meza’s painting, it shaped European representations of the Americas; figures derived from it appeared in costume books and other compendia. Had it reached Spain as intended, access to the Codex would have been highly restricted; its cultural and intellectual impacts on early modern Europe resulted from its capture at sea (Figure 7).Footnote ⁷⁷

Figure 7.

“The Founding of Tenochtitlán,” Codex Mendoza, ca.1542, 32.7 x 22.9cm, Bodleian Library MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1, fol. 002r. Yet another image from colonial Mexico captured at sea, this page from the Codex Mendoza depicts events associated with the foundation of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán.

Figure 7 Long description

The page features an illustration related to the foundation of Tenochtitlán. At the center, an eagle is perched on a cactus, symbolizing the Aztec capital. Surrounding the eagle are various figures and symbols, including warriors and plants. The border is decorated with intricate designs. The top of the page contains handwritten text, including 'A Figure' and other annotations. The layout is divided into sections with figures positioned in each quadrant, depicting scenes and elements significant to the Aztec culture. The bottom section shows warriors holding shields and weapons. The page is part of a larger manuscript, with visible text and markings on the edges.

Family tales of English privateers seizing paintings on the high seas may appear implausible, and specific features in these stories are incorrect, but behind these details stands a larger truth about the role of maritime conflict in the circulation of artworks. Ultimately, there is no reason to doubt the Hulse family’s story that their Mexican paintings were captured at sea, even if this occurred in the eighteenth, rather than seventeenth, century, and did not feature Admiral Westrow. Paying attention to the role of capture at sea in circulating paintings helps us appreciate the close connections between global warfare and Britain’s increasing consumption of, and access to, global goods. It reminds us that as objects were diverted to new destinations, they took on new meanings, and had new capacities to influence the British (and indeed European) imagination. Capture at sea was a consequential rather than incidental event, which shaped both the material culture available to Britons and the ways in which they thought about these global objects, with lasting legacies.

Conclusions: Conflict and the Circulation of Paintings

During the early modern era paintings moved in and out of Britain for many reasons. They travelled as diplomatic and personal gifts. Thomas Roe, England’s first ambassador to the Mughal court, brought a number of paintings for Emperor Jahangir, along with a velvet-covered carriage and other goods, although in Roe’s estimation these offerings did little to enhance England’s reputation. “Your pictures not all worth one Penny,” he complained to the EIC in 1615. In Surat, he explained, “are nothing esteemed but of the best sorts: good Cloth and fine, and rich pictures, they are coming out of Italy overland and from Ormus; so that they laugh at us for such as we bring.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Paintings were also commodities. In the same years that Roe was complaining about the poor quality of the English gifts for Jahangir, the EIC shipped over a hundred European paintings on a variety of themes to Hirado, in the (largely mistaken) belief that they would prove attractive to Japanese consumers. Reciprocal processes brough extra-European art into Britain. Japanese elites, for instance, gifted paintings to English aristocrats, and in 1614 the EIC offered Londoners the chance to buy a number of byobus, or painted Japanese screens. A century later commercial art markets in Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere were providing more structured opportunities to purchase foreign art.Footnote ⁷⁹ Such objects joined individual collections and circulated across Europe as gifts to patrons and friends.Footnote ⁸⁰

Scholars have traced the ways in which diplomacy, evangelization, and the expansion in trade moved artworks around the early modern world.Footnote ⁸¹ They have demonstrated that these movements could have a significant impact on stylistic developments, as local artists responded to unfamiliar artistic formats. The global circulation of Chinese porcelain influenced ceramic forms and iconography from Vietnam to Europe and the Middle East, for instance.Footnote ⁸² They have studied the practices of collecting, which made global artistic goods interesting and desirable, and the changing meanings accruing to them as they traveled. Such research has greatly enhanced our understanding of the political, religious, and commercial forces that moved artworks across cultures.Footnote ⁸³

Commerce, evangelization, and diplomacy were not the only forces that moved art across borders. Endemic naval conflict also circulated artworks, although far less attention has focused on its role in setting paintings in motion. Recent research into the circulation of art in early modern Europe has downplayed political tensions, note Maartje van Gelder and Tijana Krstic, conjuring up a world “in which battles and violence play no significant role.”Footnote ⁸⁴ For Britain, capture at sea resulted in the seizure of tens of thousands of vessels and millions of pounds worth of merchandise, including many works of art. Recognizing the importance of maritime predation in circulating artworks offers an alternative perspective on the era’s expanding world of things. Commodities of all sorts were on the move, from caraway seeds and Chinese silks to enormous Mexican paintings; capture at sea, on the very oceans that enabled the increasing circulation of goods, was a significant and underappreciated force propelling objects to new markets and unexpected consumers.Footnote ⁸⁵ In particular, capture at sea brought otherwise hard-to-access artworks from colonial Spanish America into Britain. This helps to explain their presence in British collections and their subsequent impact on British imaginaries.

To date these paintings’ mobility and current locations have not been seen as meaningful elements of their history.Footnote ⁸⁶ Scholars have rarely considered “the movement of pictures in the clunky and literal sense,” nor attended to “the material costs of transporting images—the delays, resistance, and losses,” as Roberts pointed out.Footnote ⁸⁷ By paying attention to the mechanics of how images moved from one place to another, and specifically to the moments when artworks slipped from one trajectory to another, when movement was delayed and images were lost, we better appreciate the role of war in moving art into early modern Britain. We also perceive a different group of historical actors: the sailors, officers, and officials who captured, evaluated, and distributed naval prize, and the people who purchased, or simply took, goods seized in this way. We identify new bodies of source materials, such as the Admiralty records that record these processes, as well the family legends that highlight the role of capture at sea. By recognizing additional ways for consumers to acquire global artworks, we open up new avenues for research into how their trajectories shaped the meanings accruing to captured art.

Scrutiny of war’s capacity to move artworks has focused largely on objects seized through colonial violence and during the First and Second World Wars. The presence of looted objects in museum collections has also prompted ongoing discussions about restitution.Footnote ⁸⁸ These important debates should alert us to the ways in which military conflicts of all sorts have the potential to disrupt and redirect the movement of artworks. We can draw on the insights of scholars and campaigners exploring more recent conflicts to consider the ways in which the early modern “mobile, constantly-moving world of things” was entwined with the era’s pervasive naval warfare.Footnote ⁸⁹ Campaigners have rightly challenged museums to explain how objects have ended up in their collections. Yet even when objects are not caught up in debates about return and restitution, asking why they are where they are can shed light on the ways in which artworks circulated, and the importance of those moments when things went astray.