TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART
English art stimulated and strengthened to a degree second only to
science by the movements with which, through the Prince Consort, the
Victorian Court identified itself. Contrast between the social
consideration of artists now and fifty years ago. From Gandish to
Gaston Phoebus. Progress in the association of art with the government
of England, and general gain to all concerned in consequence. Gradual
endowment of art by the State and establishment of the existing
machinery for teaching art and displaying its triumphs to a cultivated
public. The work of South Kensington. Success of the Academy tested by
figures and facts. Reciprocal benefits to art workers and art patrons.
Foreign recognition of English art. The past, present and future of
English sculpture.
The popularization and improvement of art in all its manifestations
followed the 1851 Exhibition and the initiative of the Prince Consort in a
degree second only to the development of science and music themselves.
That the Court of Victoria and Albert should have been to the painters of
a later day what the Court of Charles I. was to Van Dyck could not have
been expected. The Consort's interest and judgment in pictures were
inferior to his genuine concern for science. The complacency with which he
regarded the canvases of Winterhalter could not promise much enthusiasm in
the patronage of English painters. His rescue from disorder and decay of
the Raphael cartoons, long before the Prince's day belonging to our
Court, but by him first properly cared for and arranged, was not a work of
creation, but was one of artistic development. His were the active mind
and useful hand that rendered available for national instruction or
delight the hereditary treasures of Crown and country which before his day
were not indeed unknown, but were not perhaps properly appreciated in the
country which possessed them. The rise of a moneyed and fairly cultivated
class in English society was the chief element in the improvement of the
social and commercial position of the English painter. These agencies
happily coincided with the example set by the Prince to his successors of
assisting at the great artistic gatherings of the year.
Before May 3, 1851, the Crown had not been represented at the Royal
Academy dinner. It has seldom been unrepresented since. Sir Charles
Eastlake, in whose election to the Presidency the Queen and Prince had
been much interested, had not brought oratorical euphuism to the same
perfection as his successor, Lord Leighton. He was, however, a man of
cultivated mind, of acceptable presence, and of well-bred speech. His
proposal of the Prince's health was made in words that have to-day an
historical value. The reply of the Prince blended a philosophic criticism
less English than German, with an appreciation of our national masters
which was entirely patriotic. It was, he said, the fate of all
aristocracies to be assailed habitually from without, sometimes from
within. The Academy being an aristocracy of the brush, must accept the
position and turn to practical account any hints for improvement which it
might contain.[81]
These were still the days when art and artists had not migrated from the
gloomy studios of unfashionable Bloomsbury to the gleaming palaces of
modish Kensington. Sir Charles Eastlake's predecessor had been Sir Martin
Archer Shee, who, very faintly disguised, appears in Thackeray's Mr Smee
in _The Newcomes_. Gandish, the unappreciated genius of the palette at
whose school, on Mr Smee's advice Clive Newcome is placed, is not a
caricature at all of the most serviceable art teacher of that period whose
real name was Sass and who counted among his pupils John Everett Millais.
What has taken place since then is that in the smiles of popular favour,
Thackeray's Gandish has blossomed into the Mr Gaston Phoebus of Lord
Beaconsfield's _Lothair_. Colonel Newcome thought it a condescension to
ask the painter of 'Boadishia' to dinner. That artist's later and
transformed self would have resented an invitation at short notice as an
impertinence; he would have bluntly excused himself on the plea of being
pre-engaged to the Prime Minister,[82] the Heir Apparent, or to Windsor
three months ago. The social prejudice, confined to a small section of the
upper middle class, against the studio which lingered so long and so
unintelligently in England is easily explained. It is identical in its
origin with an equally unreasoning and antiquated feeling against
doctors, singers and players. This superstition had disappeared in the
days of Sir Henry Holland who, half a century ago was a welcome and
honoured guest at the most exclusive houses; under men like Sir James
Paget and Sir Richard Quain it has long since ceased even to be a memory.
In each of these cases money is regarded as passing directly between the
patronizing public and the employed professional. The purse is opened at
the door of the theatre, the concert hall, or in the consulting room of
the physician. That the payment is in the other cases as real though not
as sensibly direct is ignored. The terms on which Sir Charles Eastlake was
a visitor at the Victorian Court are those that have marked the subsequent
relations of his successors with the Crown. The intellectual influences of
a whole school of intelligent and highly educated critics following as
nearly as they could the example of Mr Ruskin, has shed a dignity on the
painter's calling that could not have resulted from material prosperity or
the favour of high place alone.
Sir Edwin Landseer, elected R.A. 1830, it may be said, years before the
transformation now spoken of, was welcome in any house whose threshold he
pleased to cross. His was rather the exception which proved the rule, and
for these reasons; he flourished most just when Court patronage was making
the Scotch Highlands fashionable; he was the painter of hounds, horses,
animals themselves so eminently aristocratic that no Englishman with any
pretensions to social breeding could affect disregard for them, or for
their reproducer in art without losing caste. Hence it is that while
fifty years since, the Clive Newcomes who took to painting were spoken of
by their families in a low voice much as if they had taken to drink, the
painter of repute to-day who chose to receive pupils[83] would have no
more difficulty in filling his studio twice over, than a fashionable
crammer for the army or Civil Service in filling his lecture room. As a
fact it is not in the private studios of great artists that the Royal
Academician of the future, unlike the intending exhibitor in the Parisian
salon, is to-day generally trained. Sass had a rival, or a professional
descendant, in the father of a clever versifier H. S. Leigh. Since that
day, English artists have generally learnt their craft in the Royal
Academy, or the Slade or other schools of England, or in foreign ateliers.
These have transformed the surface of Victorian England. The same
organization of art teaching, which is to-day at the disposal of all is
said to have discouraged the development of individuality. Where genius
exists, it is not very likely to be strangled by the conventions of a
public school, nor to be prevented from exchanging State teachers for
those whom native inspiration prompts it to prefer.
The South Kensington[84] machinery is not the only artistic growth of the
Victorian age. The National Gallery had been in existence more than ten
years before the reign began (since 1824). It was not a popular
institution until a year later, the architect Wilkins having made the
design, the present building in Trafalgar Square was opened, April 9,
1838. The nucleus of the collection was the Angerstein pictures,
thirty-eight in number, bought by the Government for L57,000. Twenty-seven
years had still to pass before the Trafalgar Square structure was enlarged
to its existing size by a parliamentary vote of L50,000. The immediate era
of the Queen's accession was marked by the purchase of a masterpiece of
Murillo, a landscape by Salvator Rosa, and an important picture by Rubens.
Still the Gallery lingered below the Imperial dignity of the nation to
which it belonged. The Vernon bequest enriched it only when the Queen had
been on the Throne ten years. It was not till after the Crimean War that
Parliament could attend to artistic claims, and that under the
Directorship of Sir Charles Eastlake, deservedly trusted by Crown and
country, the rooms designed by Barry were added to the block which Wilkins
had shaped.
The institution, now endowed with the paintings that had belonged to Sir
Robert Peel, began steadily to approach towards the dimensions and the
dignity of an Art Gallery comparable with that of any other capital in the
world. Nor probably have its perfections or its premises yet reached their
final limit.
While this was going on in London, the entire provinces were vigorously
taking their part in the new movement. The death of the Duchess of
Gloucester in 1857 was not allowed by the Queen's representative to
interfere with his opening in that year the Manchester Art Treasures
Exhibition, the completeness of which was largely due to the Royal
encouragement to private owners to send their statues and paintings to the
show. Thirty years later the Jubilee anniversary of 1887 was observed in
the same city by a like display of the creations of British genius. Then
the objects exhibited were the property no longer of the leisured, or a
patrician class. They belonged also to the new patrons whom, during less
than half a century, success in manufacture and commerce, accompanied by
the liberal agencies of travel and education have stimulated to
competition with the social order whose exclusive appanage art
encouragement once was. The material proof of art progress is the increase
of art values. Many instances of these were given in an earlier chapter.
During his lifetime David Cox was glad to sell his landscapes for L20. Cox
had formed his genius amid the rural scenes of Hereford. He never liked
London. After living there fourteen years he settled at Birmingham. Here,
during his lifetime he had the satisfaction of seeing his masterpiece in
oil colour bought for L40. Ten years later, when the painter was dead, it
secured L50 in the open market. In the early seventies a Birmingham
manufacturer, the former partner of Mr Chamberlain gave for it L2,300. In
the same way De Wint's landscapes during his lifetime seldom commanded
more than L50. To-day they sometimes fetch L1,000, and are reckoned cheap
at 700 or 800 guineas.
The social consideration, and with it the commercial possibilities, of any
professional calling have in England always been regulated by its degree
of connection with the State. The department of practical art established
at South Kensington with the encouragement of the Prince Consort under the
Directorship of Mr Henry Cole in 1852 had no sooner expanded into the
science and art department under the President of the Council instead of
under the Board of Trade than the social repute of practitioners in all
branches of decorative art appreciably improved.
About this time, too, Marlborough House, up to that date an asylum for
exhibited pictures and a receptacle for the Duke of Wellington's funeral
car, suggested itself as a future residence for the Prince of Wales when
he came to have an establishment of his own. In 1856-7, therefore, the
House of Commons, without demur, allotted L10,000 for the removal of the
chaos of artistic treasures from their temporary resting place in Pall
Mall to their permanent home in South Kensington. Hither, therefore, were
sent the national purchases made at the sale of the Bernal collection, a
full account of which has been given in an earlier chapter.
Directly art was in this way officially and substantially incorporated by
the State, the golden stream of private munificence with no check and in
great volume flowed towards Brompton. Most readers of these lines will
remember the consignment to this wealthy spot of the Dickens manuscripts
and relics as well as the library and paintings bequeathed to it by the
friend and biographer of Dickens, the late John Forster, in 1876. These
had some years earlier been preceded by the pictures, bric-a-brac, and
foreign furniture collected by various private connoisseurs, now stowed
away in the glass-covered cabinets which line the galleries and which,
studied daily by English artizans, have probably done more than the '51
Exhibition ever effected, towards improving the designs of English
manufacture.
South Kensington, it should be remembered, is richer even than it appears.
Its activities are ubiquitous. It is a bank of art treasures on which
institutions affiliated to it throughout the Kingdom can draw at
discretion. To-day this department of State, decorative as to its purpose,
but distinctly remunerative as to its results, is supported by an annual
endowment of nearly half a million. That outlay not only gives profitable
holidays to countless pleasure seekers from every quarter of the Kingdom;
it enables a yearly average of 30,000 pupils of both sexes to pass through
its art and science classes.
This apparatus for developing and training the future artists of England
has been accompanied with an increasingly lavish expenditure by the State
when a chance has occurred of permanently adding to its artistic wealth.
Thus, during the early eighties the Treasury paid for a single painting
from the Blenheim collection, the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael, exactly the
same sum that, thirty years earlier, had been voted for the entire
collection of Sir Robert Peel.[85]
The transformation effected during the Victorian age in the position of
English art is illustrated by the statistics of visitors to the Royal
Academy exhibitions not less significantly than by the increase of prices
itself. Only within the last few years has what is called the 'private'
view of the Royal Academy become a fete day of fashionable society;--a
promenade for the display of the latest devices in Parisian or Bond Street
toilettes. Long after the great Exhibition or even the Prince Consort's
death, it was that the view of the critics, from being confined strictly
to the judges of the press, began to be transformed into an immense
meeting of authors, scholars, divines, novelists of both sexes, art
fanciers of every degree; all of them able to produce some credentials of
critical aptitude or profession, and of some slight connection with
periodical letters. The figures themselves shall tell their tale. To the
earliest exhibition at the Academy rooms, then in Trafalgar Square, of the
Queen's reign, the admissions were less than 79,000. Ten years later they
just fell short of 91,000. Between 1846 and 1866 the increase was 94,000.
The additions steadily continued till in 1879 the high water mark of
391,197 was reached. Since that date they have fluctuated: depending, as
one might naturally expect, upon the state of trade in the country, upon
the weather in town, or upon the general character of the London season.
Thus, in 1896, which was not a very brilliant season, the admissions were
10 less than in the preceding year, or in the Queen's jubilee year of
1887.
The mutual relations of art and wealth are probably for the most part
beneficial to each. The painter, during the latter half of the whole
Victorian age, has been the chief educator of the plutocrat, as Dante
Gabriel Rossetti shrewdly anticipated must prove the case. If the
intellectual teaching of the brush were not easily apprehended, there
would, for the representatives of the new wealth, have been no special
training in the humanities at all. As it is, the aristocracy of wealth,
following the creditable example of the aristocracy of birth, in England
as well as Italy, has secured for itself mental culture not less than
social distinction by its patronage of the creators of the nation's art.
To that role it brings the shrewdness already displayed in making its
fortune. Such a patron may be a generous paymaster; he insists on having
value for his money; he is quick to detect scamped work, or shortcomings
in technical detail; he no longer, as he was once fabled to do, buys his
canvases at so much per square foot any more than he fills his library
shelves by the yard. That no meritorious artist in Victorian England is
now likely to live and die so miserably as Haydon is due to the fact that
the newest wealth finds its natural outlet in the encouragement of the
oldest art. No aggregate of spiritual or intellectual interests has ever
been firmly established in England without being subject to some great
organic movement as a test of vitality before its roots struck deep in the
soil of British minds. Literature experienced many such phases. So did
science. So also, in the Oxford Anglican movement and in others since
then, did religion. Before, therefore, the new art was firmly enthroned in
our midst, it was at once shaken and quickened by that nineteenth century
revolution known as pre-Raphaelite; about this so much has been written by
recent experts as to absolve one from the duty of dwelling on it in detail
here. Art in the hands of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, and other
men of genius entered upon this ordeal as a sectional and limited pursuit.
It came forth a new national interest or rather one of European concern as
well. Without that severe process of discipline, Leighton and Millais, to
mention only two typical names, would not have taken their place as
masters of the brush for a continental as well as for an insular public.
Nor would the fame of the English school first known through the Paris
Exhibition of 1855, extended by the Paris Exhibition of 1868, have secured
for English artists representation in all the great galleries of the
world, and have added to British painters or to their national themes the
crown of foreign recognition and of cosmopolitan esteem. Later chroniclers
of the Victorian age may be able to record the same progress in the
sculptor's, as in the painter's art. Our climate is not favourable to the
out of door triumphs of the plastic art. But those who have examined the
statue of Outram in Pall Mall; who have gazed upon the effigy of the great
Duke of Wellington by Alfred Stevens in St Paul's; or have noted the
growing power as well as popularity of Hamo Thornycroft, still a young
man, cannot doubt that, apart from the successful labours of a naturalized
but most patriotic foreigner and his school, Sir Edgar Boehm, the English
chisel is in a fair way of emulating the progress of the English brush.
Commercial prosperity in art, as in other things, moves in cycles. The
years between 1870 and 1885 were very prosperous to English painters. The
lean years followed then, and are still being experienced while these
lines are written. As to the high prices given at Christie's and set forth
elsewhere in this volume, they have been generally for the works of old
and departed masters. With very few exceptions, the decade between 1886
and 1896 has witnessed none of those prices for contemporary artists which
marked the preceding period. This, too, notwithstanding the standard of
artistic work to-day is infinitely higher than it was; and that the
paintings which were hung on the line and were the talk of the town thirty
years ago, would have a very slight chance of being accepted at all
to-day.[86]