In Scenes and Traces of the English Civil War, Stephen Bann “directs attention specifically to the visual legacy of the Civil War, as it was passed down, revisited and periodically reworked over two and a half centuries of subsequent English history” (9). Bann focuses his analysis on “traces” and “scenes.” Traces are the remains of physical objects left from the Civil War period, while scenes are post-1660 artistic creations that interpreted the conflict.

In the first two chapters Bann explores the traces the war left in churches and cathedrals. Many of these were the results of vandalism. The tomb of Lady Waller, the wife of the Parliamentary general Sir William Waller, is an outstanding example of this phenomenon. Lady Waller died in 1633, and Bann convincingly argues that her husband paid for her “magnificent tomb . . . in Bath Abbey” (40). The focal point of the tomb is a pair of two figures who lay side by side together, Lady Waller in repose and Sir William, arm bent, looking down on her. Jarringly, Sir William's nose has been broken off, perhaps by a Royalist who wanted revenge for Waller's actions in the war. This occurred prior to 1668, when Pepys viewed the tomb. Other objects in churches were destroyed for more overt religious reasons, as a broken organ in the Canterbury Cathedral archives, shattered by a Parliamentary troop in September 1642, attests. While Royalist and Parliamentary violence towards nonpolitical religious objects reveals the savagery of the struggle, the war also generated memorials that lamented the cost of the conflict. Bann highlights the life of John Bargrave, a member of a Royalist gentry family from Kent, to illustrate this point. In the early 1650s, Bargrave commissioned a memorial for his relative Robert in the Church of St. Peter in Bridge, Kent. The haunting painting of Robert Bargrave, and the inscription, “In the Civil War on the King's side the FAMILY stood and fell,” testify to the terrible losses the Bargraves endured for their king during the 1640s (70).

In chapter 3, Bann turns to a much more public trace of the war—the massive equestrian monument of King Charles I that has been at Charing Cross in central London since 1675. French sculptor Hubert Le Sueur made the statue for the Earl of Portland before the Civil War. Purchased and hidden by a London brazier, John Revet, during the war, the statue reappeared in 1662 when Revet offered it for sale. By 1675, the statue was in its present location and attracting significant attention. Bann notes that the political meaning of the statue changed quickly in the decades after the wars, from an overt celebration of Royalism to simply a means for appreciating the monarchy, yet his salient point is that the statue is “not just the oldest but also the finest equestrian statue” in London (86).

The final five chapters focus on “scenes” of the Civil War—various artistic interpretations of the wars in the centuries after 1660. Chapters 4 and 5 explore how memories and reactions to the Civil War evolved in the eighteenth century. Bann examines the life of David Polhill to illustrate these changes. Born in 1674, Polhill, who was Henry Ireton's grandson and Oliver Cromwell's great-grandson, lived in Kent and served in parliament for decades. Early in his career, he downplayed his family connections to the parliamentary cause. Yet after his death in 1754, Polhill's family mentioned his relationship to Cromwell on his memorial, revealing that being related to Civil War–era parliamentarians was no longer a political or personal liability. Bann notes that Horace Walpole, the younger son of the first British prime minister and a generation younger than Polhill, was even less concerned about the war. Strawberry Hill, the Gothic palace that Walpole constructed in Twickenham, harkened back to the pre-Reformation period. By celebrating the distant past and ignoring the recent past, Walpole “effectively bypasse[d] the memory of the Civil War” and created a present where it did not exist (124).

The final chapters of the book discuss nineteenth-century visual representations of the war. By the early 1800s there was a new interest in national history and history paintings. This created a growing market for artists like James Ward and Paul Delaroche, who painted scenes from the Civil War. Bann traces the influences of the Dutch masters, among others, on the French painter Delaroche, who painted Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers of Cromwell, which was exhibited at the 1837 Paris Salon. Bann's presence at the dramatic unrolling of the painting in 2010, which had been in storage in Scotland since being damaged during the Blitz in the Second World War, only adds to the interest of the painting. Bann concludes by examining history paintings as a genre in late nineteenth-century Britain.

This is an outstanding work of art history. Bann shows how visual objects have been used, repurposed, and reimagined to create and recreate the meaning of the English Civil War for generations. The numerous beautiful figures in the book make it all the more worthy of readers’ careful study.