Profitably painting a moral
Nicholas Harman
VICTORIAN PAINTING by Christopher Wood Weidenfeld, £40, pp. 384 Once this millennium flimflam is out of the way a genuine centennial commemo- ration looms ahead. Queen Victoria and her era came to an end in 1901. The possi- bilities are limitless, both cultural and commercial, as dusty treasures emerge from basements and spare bedrooms. Chistopher Wood, a dealer in and expert on the paintings of the period, shows us what to look out for in a sumptuous and keenly priced book designed both to please the eye and to inform the mind. Study it carefully, and at fashionable dinners you will avoid the risk of making yourself ridiculous by muddling your Egg with your Herkomer.
To the Victorians, painting was a serious business. During the Queen's reign the railways made travel rapid and cheap, lithography put skilful reproductions into middle-class drawing-rooms, competition from photographers pushed painters into devising and theorising about new sorts of images, and the wives and daughters of the newly rich were transformed into ladies by learning a little Italian and copying the Masters, Old and New, so that Victorian Commerce created a whole new class of patrons. The best surviving collections of the paintings of the time are therefore to be seen in Manchester and, especially, Liverpool, where the real fortunes were made. (The Liverpool sugar kings, though, commemorated themselves in London, and the Queen herself rose up in her carriage on the new southern Embankment by Vauxhall Bridge, to admire Tate's gift to the nation.) My sole reservation about the selection of pictures reproduced here is that there are not enough of those chaps with whiskers whose cheque-books often got the best work out of their portrayers.
The Hirsts and other terrible infants of today are proud that huge prices are part of the post-modern wave. The Victorians were just as greedy, and did even better out of art than their present-day successsors; the most ridiculous of them, the tit-and- bum man Frederic Leighton, remains the only painter to have been made a lord. Give or take a good deal of humbug, the big difference is that Victorian patrons knew rather a lot about art, and were not shy of saying what they liked.
They liked pictures that would point a moral or adorn a tale, in ways that the new photographs could not manage. Unlike television, where you sit in front of a screen while the camera tells you where to look and what to think, successful Victorian paintings lay out a scene and leave you to look for what it means. It was entertaining, and very profitable. Moreover, thanks to lithography, painters for the first time became famous among those who could not afford actual paintings. Millais, who began as a dreamy Pre-Raphaelite and ended sternly painting Mr Gladstone, became the richest of all, partly by selling reproduction rights to 'Bubbles' for use as a Pear's Soap advertisement, and you can't get more up to date than that.
With fewer such sources of income, the French painters of the late Victorian era had to busy themselves with working on their paint. That is how they and their immediate successors transformed the way in which we see the world. Much better rewarded, the Victorians, practically all of them, remain a picturesque and insular relic of the richest and most technologically advanced culture of their time. It's fun, enjoy it.
William McDuff's 'Shaftesbury, or Lost and Found, 1862.
Two shoeblacics, members of the Boys Shoeblacks Brigade, point to a portrait of its philanthropic founder Lord Shaftesbury in the window of a print shop.
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