Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  While the Dilettanti and their descendants were to rule for some time to come, another part of the art world was developing - one that in the next century would become economically and socially dominant. Public art exhibitions had begun with an act of charity, when Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, built in 1742, received a portrait of Captain Coram from Hogarth as a gift on its foundation. Within five years, fifteen of Hogarth’s friends had also donated works of their own, and by 1760 the Foundling Hospital collection included paintings by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Ramsay and Benjamin West. In 1759 they planned an annual exhibition, and the Society of Arts (see pp. 6ff.) agreed to let them use its rooms in the Strand. This was to be the first ever public exhibition of paintings in Britain.

  The Society had insisted that the exhibition have no admission charge, but 6,582 catalogues were sold, at 6d. each, suggesting that as many as 15,000 or 20,000 people may have attended. However, some of the artists, including Reynolds, felt that more could be achieved with an admission charge, and they formed a breakaway group to exhibit at James Cocks’s auction rooms in Spring Street the following year. Notwithstanding a 1s. admission charge, they sold over 13,000 catalogues, and in their best year they claimed nearly 23,000 visitors. They called themselves the Society of Artists of Great Britain (and later the Incorporated Society of Artists), while the Free Society of Artists was those who continued to show at the Strand.10

  In 1768 the architect William Chambers, who had seen with dismay the squabbling and the factionalism between the two groups, went to George III with a petition, signed by twenty-two of the Incorporated Artists, asking for a royal charter to set up a school of art, to be funded by an annual exhibition.* Chambers was the obvious man to head the delegation, as he had been in charge of architectural work at Kew for Princess Augusta, and had also been the architectural tutor to George III himself when he was still the Prince of Wales. By December of the same year, everything was arranged: Reynolds had been, reluctantly and to his surprise, persuaded first to attend a meeting of the petitioners, then to become the nascent Royal Academy’s first president. (He did get a knighthood out of it, so it probably ultimately seemed worthwhile.) The Royal Academy school was to be free to promising students, their tuition to be paid for out of the proceeds of the annual exhibition, as were mooted prizes and scholarships to study abroad. By the end of the first year, seventy-seven students were already enrolled, including among the first intake Thomas Banks, Richard Cosway and John Flaxman.11

  Until 1779 the annual exhibition was held every year in Pall Mall, in what had been Dalton’s Print Warehouse but was then occupied by the auctioneer James Christie. There was, at this stage, nowhere except auction rooms and shops for the public display of art. The line between exhibition and sale was blurred anyway - the art at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition was, after all, for sale, and many auctioneers and dealers charged for pre-auction viewings. Christie was not an art specialist. In 1767 he had held, to choose randomly, sales of ‘The real genuine Household Furniture, China, Linnen [sic], a gold repeating Watch by Tompion, a plain ditto, 2 Brilliant Rings, and other effects, of a Gentleman, retired into the country…’ and also of works by Italian, French and Flemish painters, consigned from abroad.12 In this he was not alone. Other auctioneers sold paintings with catalogue entries that read ‘A landscape Italian’ or ‘A scene with peasants’, with no other description, no artist’s name, or date.13 Auctions were auctions; selling was selling; art was a commodity like any other.

  This was what the Royal Academy now worked very hard to disguise. That art should be openly linked to commerce was not desirable at all. Art as commerce lowered the occupation - now designated a ‘profession’, or ‘calling’ - of the artist, reaffirming his hated position as a craftsman. If art, instead of being a trade, was a moral good, worthy of study for the improvement it worked on the beholder, then the artist was in a position of strength, as an instructor and preceptor even to the upper classes. Many of the prominent painters of the day came from distinctly humble backgrounds - Hogarth’s father had been a schoolmaster, and the painter’s sisters ran a shop; Benjamin West’s father was an innkeeper, Gainsborough’s a publican, Wilton’s a plasterer - although some came from more elevated backgrounds. Reynolds, while his father had been ‘only’ a schoolmaster, boasted two uncles who were fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and a grandfather who had been prebendary of Exeter.

  Reynolds understood that, for the taint of ‘artisan’, of ‘mechanic’, to be removed from the role of the painter, those who influenced opinion would have to be convinced that artists had as much learning and taste as the people who bought the pictures. He worked for this in two ways. In 1771 he established the annual Royal Academy dinner, which placed artists and connoisseurs together in a social setting, with the artists acting as the hosts. (It was held with some emphasis on 23 April, St George’s Day, celebrating the patron saint of England, and it continues to this day.) His second chosen battleground was a series of lectures. He gave the first at the opening of the Royal Academy, and it was published in 1778 as A Discourse, Delivered at the Opening of the Royal Academy, to be followed by another fourteen discourses between 1769 and 1790. Publication was crucial, taking the skirmish into the enemy’s own territory, proving that theory was not the exclusive province of the connoisseur. Reynolds made sure to present a copy to each member of the Academy, and also to each member of his club. (Johnson and Goldsmith had both at separate times confessed - boasted? - that they knew nothing of art: they admired Reynolds not for his painterly skills, but for his personal charm and his literary abilities.) The first seven discourses were republished in a single volume in 1778, and then in Italian, French and German editions, further ramming home the point that the president of the Royal Academy - and by extension its members - was part of the civilized community of the Grand Tourists.

  Reynolds’s first Discourse looked primarily at art education, but then he spread his wings, incorporating a wide range of aesthetic ideas, references to Renaissance artists, and citations from classical authors and French seventeenth-century theorists, as well as more recent authors such as Johann Winckelmann, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. His constant theme was that the ‘great style’ of painting - history painting - had an ‘intellectual dignity’ that ‘ennobles the painter’s art; that lays the line between himself and the mere mechanick; and produces those great effects in an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts, are scarcely able to attain’.14 He was saying that painting in the grand manner relied on the classics and theories of aesthetics that formed the basis of an upper-class education every bit as much as connoisseurship did.

  Yet, while this may very well have been the case, the purpose of the Royal Academy was to display the works of its members in order for the public to buy them. Financially it was managing very well, with Chambers as its extremely astute treasurer. Chambers had been commissioned to redesign Somerset House, which was to provide a permanent home for the Royal Academy, as well as for the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. The function of the Royal Academy as a conduit to commissions could be seen even here, however: Royal Academicians supplied £600-worth of work to decorate their own premises, in contrast to the Royal Society artists, who received a mere £63-worth of commissions for the same building.15

  In 1780 the first exhibition at Somerset House drew 61,381 visitors - more than twice as many as any previous exhibition had seen. But first the Academy had to deal with the muddle caused by Reynolds’s extremely effective propaganda, which promoted the Royal Academy as a bastion of intellectual creative effort rather than a selling mechanism, and in addition had produced the general perception that it was under the patronage of George III. It was, if ‘patronage’ can be understood to mean ‘approval’, or ‘liking’; but not if it suggests sustained financial support. While George III used art intermittently to promote his reign - he had copies of a portrait of himself by Ramsay sent to every British embassy ab
road, he commissioned Benjamin West to produce paintings for Windsor Castle portraying great moments in British history - he did not have any plans to use British art to promote the glory of the state of which he was head, as many European rulers did, nor did he see the Royal Academy as a tool to provide propaganda for his reign.16

  Thus the notice in the first catalogue of the Royal Academy exhibition was a tad disingenuous:

  As the present Exhibition is a part of the Institution of an Academy supported by Royal Munificence, the Public may naturally expect the liberty of being admitted without any Expence.

  The Academicians therefore think it necessary to declare that this was very much their desire but that they have not been able to suggest any other Means than that of receiving Money for Admittance to prevent the Room from being fill’d by improper Persons, to the entire exclusion of those for whom the Exhibition is apparently intended.17

  The ‘Munificence’ extended by royal approval consisted of covering the losses that the Academy had made until it moved into Somerset House in 1780 - a total of £5,116 over eleven years. Any money in future was all to come from the income from admission charges and catalogues, not the royal coffers.

  The exhibitions showed pictures for sale, but the Academy did not act as a picture dealer, and charged no commission. Its sole contribution was to display the works of its members, and to indicate what was for sale by asterisks in the catalogues. But the huge crowds, particularly after 1780, guaranteed wide publicity, and therefore sales. By the middle of the nineteenth century the sale of pictures had topped £7,345; in the 1870s and 1880s the annual sales were around the £15,000 mark, and by 1888 they came to £21,594. Yet even without sharing in this income stream with its artists, five years after the Academy moved into Somerset House it had £6,000 invested in consols (government stock) and a charity fund that was worth £2,100; by 1796 its stock holdings were valued at £16,000. In the first half-century of its existence, the Royal Academy had made nearly £40,000 of pure profit, after the outgoings were taken into account.18*

  However, Reynolds and the Royal Academy were concerned that it should be seen not as a commercial enterprise, but as one of education, and moral value. One of the most important arguments they mustered involved the importance of history painting. History painting presented not what had been, but what ought to have been - it idealized the world, and created ‘great truths’, relying on episodes often derived from epic poetry or classical literature. The problem was, history paintings were enormously expensive to produce - they might take years to complete, and the artists needed cash up front for models, for research into the historical period and costume, and for space to work on a large scale, as well as the basic costs of paint and canvas. And then, once the pictures were finished, for all the acclaim they might receive, only the very largest rooms could house a history painting comfortably, and even then the subject matter often made a work un-domestic. The rape of the Sabine women might be a perfectly good classical subject, but did one want to look at it over the breakfast cups? Even subjects that started out as marketable might not be by the time the pictures were finished. John Singleton Copley, one of the few artists who made history painting pay (although even he had to take on other work at times), had started work on Charles I Requesting from Parliament the Five Impeached Members in 1782, right after he completed his hugely successful Death of Chatham. In the thirteen years it took him to finish it, political realities had altered, and after the French Revolution scenes even tangentially connected to regicide were not particularly commercial. Other artists simply found that they worked too slowly for there to be any way of making history painting profitable: James Barry spent seven years on The Progress of Human Culture for the walls of the Society of Arts, and never earned more than enough to cover his expenses. Given that it was a mural, he could not even exhibit it elsewhere, and, worse, no commissions followed from it.20

  Some artists, including Reynolds, found solutions that broadened out the meaning of the words ‘history painting’ until more commercial genres could fit comfortably under their umbrella. When Reynolds returned from his travels in Italy, he let it be understood that he was painting in the grand manner of the old masters. All his work, including his lucrative portrait commissions, should therefore be considered a species of history painting. Copley’s The Death of Chatham, however, showed what could be achieved in the market, and its success probably kept the genre alive far longer than would otherwise have been the case. In 1781 Copley hired a room in Spring Gardens to display his canvas, and sold tickets at 1s. each to over 20,000 visitors. (It was said that the success of this show reduced the attendance at the Royal Academy exhibition that year by 30 per cent.) In 1791 he once more hired a space, this time a tent in Green Park, to show The Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, which had been commissioned by the Corporation of London. When the neighbours complained about the crowds, he moved the picture to a site even nearer to Buckingham Palace, and scored a coup when the royal family visited, along with 60,000 paying visitors.* Copley had been paid £1,000 by the Corporation for the picture; it was recognized that, given the amount of time it would take him to paint, this was not a very substantial fee, but ‘the advantages of an Exhibition of the Picture and the publication of a Print from it will compensate him for the time and study requisite for completing so large a work,’ they reasoned.21 It probably would have, had he not then become embroiled in a three-way lawsuit between the Corporation, himself and the print-seller John Boydell.

  It was the print-sellers who were the biggest commissioners of history paintings, and it was they who kept the genre afloat. In the 1770s John Boydell, one of the most successful print-sellers of the day, had an arrangement to commission engravings of the history paintings which were shown each year at the Royal Academy, scoring a great success with Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe, which West had painted without a commission, and sold to Lord Grosvenor for between £400 and £600. He may have sold the copyright to the image separately to Boydell, or Boydell may have bought it from Lord Grosvenor, but one thing is certain: it was Boydell who earned the £15,000 that came from sales of this phenomenally successful engraving.

  Boydell had arrived from Shropshire in 1740, and apprenticed himself to a landscape engraver, setting up on his own in 1746 and specializing in cheap topographical prints. By 1760 he had almost entirely stopped engraving himself, and instead moved into print-selling, commissioning others to produce works he thought he could sell. He had clearly understood his market. As well as the upper classes, who had always bought prints, collecting images of art they had seen on the Grand Tour, now the newly cash-rich middle classes were also buying. Collecting prints had become a fashionable pastime, even for those with only a moderate disposable income, encouraged by that arbiter of taste William Gilpin, whose Essay upon Prints (1768) had levelled the playing field: ‘A Painting, or Picture, is distinguished from a print only by the Colouring, and the manner of execution. In other respects, the foundation of beauty is the same in both; and we consider a print, as we do a picture, in a double light, with regard to a whole, and with regard to its parts.’22 People collected prints of certain places or of certain subjects, or prints by certain artists. They framed them and hung them, as paintings, or they put them in albums and scrapbooks. Auctions featuring prints became increasingly common, newspapers advertised the upcoming sales, and then reported on the results.

  Prints became more affordable to more of the population as the century progressed. Earlier in the century, Hogarth had charged as little as 6d. for some of his prints, and by his depictions of daily life in London he attracted many who had never before thought of acquiring ‘art’. Gradually, different subjects became available at different price levels. At mid-century a set of engravings of the Raphael cartoons at Hampton Court were sold for a 5-guinea subscription; cheaper versions were then produced by lesser engravers for 1 guinea per set, and then single engravings went on sale for 1s. 6d. each. In 1785 Pendred’s Di
rectory of the Book Trade listed sixty-one engravers and printers in London, with another twenty-four print-sellers. By 1800, London was the centre for prints in Britain - and also for all Europe.23

  Now print-sellers like Boydell commissioned, or at least encouraged, artists to produce paintings not for the saleability of the painting itself, but for its commercial engraving potential. Landscapes sold well; portraits, which were the most commercially successful types of painting, sold poorly as engravings - no one wanted to buy a portrait of Mr and Mrs Smith, except Mr and Mrs Smith themselves. Historical, mythical and allegorical subjects were infinitely reproducible, as were the more humble genre scenes. Francis Wheatley, a modestly successful painter, had exhibited a series of paintings entitled Street Cries of London at the Royal Academy between 1792 and 1795. His real success came only a couple of years later, when sets of engravings after these paintings were among the most popular ever produced, finding a place in thousands of middle-class homes.

  By this time, Boydell had set up his Shakespeare Gallery. Just as history painters in general, under the influence of Copley, had begun to choose popular moments in British history - great military victories, the climactic moment in the life of a national hero - so Boydell saw that Shakespeare could be equally commercial, as the national poet. His plan was to commission the most popular artists of the day to paint various scenes from the plays, which would first be displayed in his new gallery and then be reproduced as engravings in a nine-volume edition of the plays. The artists he ultimately used were the portraitists and history painters Hoppner, Romney, Kauffmann, Opie, Rigaud and West and the landscape painter Ibbetson, as well as Henry Fuseli and Robert Smirke, who specialized in literary illustrations.* The two most popular artists who were not included were Copley - with whom Boydell had quarrelled over money - and Gainsborough, because he too wanted more than Boydell was willing to pay, and died before a compromise could be effected. Boydell was not to be swayed when it came to money: he understood that the market ruled. He had also wanted to commission a work from Joseph Wright of Derby, who refused, claiming that Boydell was offering other artists more money, while slighting him. Boydell responded, ‘You begin your letter by telling me that you understood that I had classed the Painters according to their rank, and you gave me a list of the first class, in which you place your own name. Now, Sir, I never presumed to class the Painters. I leave that to the public, to whose opinion and judgement I bow with great reverence and respect.’24