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Trumbull, The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar

Met associate director Carrie Rebora Barratt on leadership in John Trumbull’s The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar,  1789.

This painting depicts the events of the night of November 26, 1781, when British troops, long besieged by Spanish forces at Gibraltar, made a sortie, or sudden attack, against the encroaching enemy batteries. The focal point of the painting is the tragic death of the Spanish officer Don Jose de Barboza. Abandoned by his fleeing troops, he charged the attacking column alone, fell mortally wounded, and, refusing all assistance, died near his post. Trumbull portrays him rejecting the aid of General George Eliott, commander of the British troops. This work, the largest and last of three versions of the subject that Trumbull executed between 1786 and 1789, demonstrates his ambition to solidify his reputation on the basis of the highly respected genre of history painting.

View this work on metmuseum.org.

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Video transcript

If you said, “Who would you want to meet from the past?” I would love to meet John Trumbull. The painter, who was the son of a Connecticut governor, at his core: an aristocrat. The courtesy world was paramount-- even on the battlefield. Every one of his pictures has an agenda. The Sortie Made by the Garrison at Gibraltar, a battle fought between the Spanish and English. And portrays one moment, the victory of General George Elliott, the commander of British troops, with all of his allies against Don Juan de Barboza, the vanquished leader of the Spanish, dying on the ground in front of him. General Elliott reaches his hand out in a very compassionate gesture to the man who he’s just defeated. If you didn’t get it, that the generals had a kind of a code of conduct for the battlefield, well there it is, in microcosm. The would-be aristocrats, the military leaders, each and every one of these men is identifiable in stark, polite contrast to the teeming tower of men fighting, this great rag-tag bunch of hooligans, basically --the burning sky behind them. Trumbull wants us to focus on the leaders, the looks on their faces. Elliott’s face, in sort of Roman profile, is absolutely composed. It’s kind of emotionless, a kind of stoicism that was the key attribute of the modern leader. Here’s this man, ivory pants without a smudge, as if he just walked out onto the battlefield. Trumbull was a great fan of classical statues. George Elliott is based on the Apollo Belvedere. Barboza is the Dying Gaul except that instead of his hand falling to the ground, his hand rises up. The hands of Elliott and Barboza almost meet, as if in a Michelangelo. It’s sort of The Birth of Adam: in death comes rebirth. And there really is something personally that I take from this: I think the people that I admire most in this world are people of compassion and calm, regardless of what’s going on around them.