Seller's market
PAUL GRINKE
Victorian Painters Jeremy Maas (Barrie and Rocklilt /The Cresset Press 7 gns) Water-colour Painting in Britain: Volume Ill The Victorian Period Martin Hardie (Batsford 126s)
Mr Maas's brief is very wide, and for that reason perhaps an accurate reflection of a madly higgledy piggledy period. As a dealer in nineteenth century paintings he can justly claim to have played a considerable part in their revival and many collectors must wistfully recall his annual exhibitions of the Pre-Raphaelites at a time when they were a genuinely eccentric taste, with prices to match. As an apologist for a period which could boast some truly awful painting at either end of the reign, only real enthusiasm could have carried him through the stickier marshes of sentimentality, coy- ness and banality to reach thankfully dry, if arid, land at the turn of the century.
The most accurate assessment of the period is probably, though sadly, that of Gerald Reitlinger in his Economics of Taste where he calls the period 1860-1914 the Golden Age of the living painter, and points out that it was a print-seller's rather than a critic's revolution which produced such a situation. In 1860 Gambart, the biggest operator on the London art market, paid £5,750 for Holman Hunt's Finding of Christ in the Temple, with all rights. This meant in practical terms the exclusive right to market steel engraved reproductions (which sold for two or three guineas each and on subscription to working men's clubs), and almost as an afterthought to exhibit and eventually sell the original oil. This price must have looked astronomical in 1953 when the same artist's important Isabella and the Pot of Basil was sold at auction, presumably also with all rights, for £115.
Later in the century the speculative market in the reproduction of contemporary paint- ings went completely overboard when Agnews paid a shattering £11,000 for Hunt's Shadow of the Cross, with all rights; but as Hunt took up to five years to finish a paint- ing he was never a rich man by Victorian standards. No wonder that Millais, the most fitfully brilliant of all high Victorian painters, could claim in the 1880s that he was earning £40,000 a year. The climax comes with his Cherry Ripe, a pool shadow of a once great talent, which was snapped up by the Graphic to be issued in 600,000 copies as a Christmas Supple. ment. Art was thus transmuted into instant colour supplement material and its terms were dictated not by the individual con- science of the painter but by a demanding fickle public and the dealers who catered for it.
For today's taste the best, or at least the most rewarding, Victorian painting was produced by those whom society shunned or considered impossible to rate in a bullish market. The Pre-Raphaelites, as a group, had their enthusiasts, but most can be discounted as speculators backing an outsider, and here the influence of a critic such as Ruskin had more pull than the most powerful dealer; oddballs like Richard Dadd, working quietly in Bethlem Hospital where he was committed for patricide, pro- duced strikingly original work which was neglected in his own day, as was James Smetham's, a minor but gifted artist afflicted with a religious paranoia which drove him insane. Other more stable personalities, such as Muller, Roberts. Lewis. Danby and the endearing Lear, worked largely outside England and were consequently less vulner- able to the commercial pressures at work on the Academicians. Of those who stayed at home the fate of Millais, the child prodigy, is typical.
Of the more conventional artists, Frith and Tissot and a host of minor genre painters are still fascinating as a mirror of society, albeit a moralising image. Victorian England loved contrasts which pointed a moral and they liked their contrasts pre- sented in readily intelligible, pictorially accurate terms. Victoria herself treasured a cunningly contrived photographic set-piece which compared Babylonian hedonism with modern morality, and even Pugin's polem- ical plea for a return to mediaeval architecture was issued under the evidently compelling bannerhead of Contrasts. How else can one account for Ruskin's deter mined insistence on the minutiae of Holman Hunt's A wakening Conscience as tangible evidence of a theme of moral decay? 'There is not a single object in all that room ... but it becomes tragical, if rightly read, that furniture so carefully painted. even to the last vein of the rosewood. –is there nothing to learn from that terrible lustre of it, from its fatal newness ... ?' A modern eye would have to search hard for the evidence of an abandoned soul called to the sudden reali- sation of her plight in this ostensibly jolly domestic interior.
Mr Maas's best chapter, in a book which makes a very creditable and well organised attempt to encompass too large a field, is that on the effects of photography. The endpapers are embellished with a striking series of carte de visite photographs of Victorian painters, and the impact of thii- new art is evident throughout. Muybridge's studies of the horse in motion revolu- tionised horse painting and revealed the now ludicrous errors of earlier masters of the genre. Most artists recognised photo- graphy for the mixed blessing it was, nicely dubbed by Charles Landseer as a 'foe-to- graphic art', but Ruskin welcomed the daguerrotype in 1845 as 'a most blessed invention'. Madox Brown's Work shows clearly how an intransigent sitter such as Carlisle could be captured on film and transferred to the canvas at leisure, and both Frith and Millais used it on significant occasions but were chary of recording the fact. It is surprising that no previous book on Victorian painting, apart from Aaron Scharf's specialist study, has taken this highly important factor into account.
Victorian Painters has a wealth of illustrations, some of which will be familiar only to those who follow the London art market, and a text which is well informed, accurate and eminently readable. One small cavil directed at the publishers is the ex- traordinary inattention given to the deploy- ment of illustrations throughout the book so that paintings keyed to the text of one chapter are maddeningly transposed into the next where they appear woefully out of place. Those who do not share Mr Maas's enthusiasm for his subject may how- ever be forgiven for endorsing the SPECTATOR critic's opinion of Etty's The Sirens and Ulysses as a 'disgusting com- bination of voluptuousness, and loath- some putridity—glowing in colour and wonderful in execution, but conceived in the worst possible taste'; and for applying this judgment to Victorian painting as a whole.
Meanwhile, the long awaited third volume of Martin Hardie's epic investigation of English water-colour painting deals with an art in decline, though strangely at the height of its popularity. While sketching clubs and countless manuals made water-colour paint- ing popular up and down the country, there were also legions of professionals of very varied abilities, and this concluding volume puts a good many of them firmly in their place.
In the final volume of a study which has been lovingly compiled from Hardie's own notes, rather than being planned as three separate works, three new appendices review certain important facets of water-colour painting which were omitted from the earlier volumes: the Drawing- Masters are examined at some length and there is a valuable chapter on the more important eighteenth century amateur artists, including such gifted artists as the Earl of Aylesford. Oldfield Bowles, William Lock of Norbury and ending with Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, the friend and pupil of Ruskin and Burne-Jones. As a man who had enormous influence as a patron and was himself a competent water- colourist, Sir George Beaumont is honoured with a separate appendix which should complement Margaret Greaves's recent study
Previous page
