Featured image: Thomas Jones Barker, The Secret of England’s Greatness (c. 1863)

Join us on Wednesday 19 August 2026 in the U3A Main Room at 11.00am – Art and History Class for Episode 6 of The Age of Empire covers a remarkable 134 years — a period that begins with Britain losing one empire in America and ends with the map of the world painted red.

An empire born of exploration

The story opens with the great voyages of discovery. Travelling aboard Captain Cook’s second Pacific expedition was the landscape painter William Hodges, whose luminous canvases of Tahiti, New Zealand and the Antarctic ice gave Britain its first honest look at the far side of the world. Hodges painted what he saw rather than what audiences at home expected, and in doing so he made exploration visible.

Revolution and rebellion

The same decades that opened the Pacific closed America. The War of Independence cost Britain thirteen colonies, and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia became the enduring symbol of that break. It was a curious counterpoint to what came before: a century earlier, William Penn had signed his famous treaty with the Lenape at Shackamaxon — an agreement, Voltaire later remarked, never sworn to and never broken.

Rebellion surfaced again in India. What began as a mutiny among sepoys of the East India Company’s army in 1857 ended with the Company dissolved and the subcontinent brought under direct Crown rule. In 1876 Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India.

The technology of conquest

The Empire’s later expansion owed much to a single invention. The machine gun — Gatling, then Maxim — transformed the African wars into contests that were no longer contests at all. Hilaire Belloc’s grim couplet said it best: “Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.“ And the campaigns in Sudan, Matabeleland and the Gold Coast proved him right.

Nowhere is the imperial mood of those years better captured than in the fate of General Charles Gordon, killed at Khartoum in January 1885 while awaiting a relief column that arrived two days too late.

Joy’s painting is almost certainly untrue to the facts of Gordon’s death — but it is entirely true to how Victorian Britain wished to remember it: the lone Christian gentleman, unarmed and unflinching, at the top of the palace steps.

Painting the Empire

That taste for heroic imagery kept Richard Caton Woodville in constant work. His battle scenes — the Light Brigade, Rorke’s Drift, Omdurman — hung in parlours across the country and shaped how a generation pictured its soldiers. He was, in effect, the Empire’s war photographer working in oils.

The zenith

By the close of Victoria’s reign the British Empire governed roughly a quarter of the world’s population. The queen who had come to the throne in 1837 as monarch of a European kingdom died in 1901 as Empress of the largest empire in history. Ten years later, at the Delhi Durbar of 1911, that empire reached its symbolic high-water mark — and began, quietly, to recede.