Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  Manchester was a good example of the way in which artistic life in a large industrial city developed. Over the eighteenth century, the prerequisites fell into place: Manchester had a good-sized mercantile community, with leisure time and disposable income; it had good roads and - later - rail links; the professional middle classes and the roads together combined to produce local prosperity, which led to a wide variety of shops and services. And thus concerts were followed by two theatres, a library, and a literary and philosophical society. In 1772 there was one printseller in the local directory, and one artist, a ‘Miniature-painter, and Musick-maker’. By the end of the century there were a couple of local collectors, but no public artistic displays were held. Then in 1823 the Royal Manchester Institution was formed, initially by a group of artists who wanted to show their art regularly, although it was quickly taken over by the professional middle classes to be run as a cultural institution.70 Now the gentry were no longer assuming leadership automatically; more, in this case they actively refused it. Sir John Leicester, the last of the landed class still to live in Manchester, and an early collector of contemporary British art, solicited the support of several aristocrats who themselves bought British art: the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Egremont, Robert Peel.* None of them was interested in supporting the Institution, as the chairman wrote in exasperation: ‘Would you believe it? that tho’ Mr Peel purchases Paintings of the Old Masters at very high Prices and that his immense fortune, his Fathers and his Uncles, were all acquired by cotton spinning at Manchester, and altho’ they have had at least 40 guineas worth of compliments paid them by their Friends, upon this occasion, yet not one of them have had the good sense to support us.’72

  The cholera epidemic of 1832 changed the focus of the Institution somewhat, as did the furore around the Reform Bill of 1832, and the subsequent development of the Chartist movement: now education and reform seemed more important than a leisured environment for the middle classes, and culture was linked to education and improvement, both in exhibitions and in newspapers and magazines. From 1832 the Penny Magazine, promoted by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, stressed self-education and, to help supply what every working man should know, printed engravings of famous paintings. The Mechanics’ Institute from 1837 began to mount exhibitions, of scientific displays and new machinery as well as paintings loaned by local owners. The Royal Manchester Institution began to worry about its perceived middle-class exclusivity. In 1845 its annual exhibition stayed open on Saturdays in the evenings, and charged 6d. instead of the standard 1s.; in 1847, in the year of the Ten-Hour Factory Act, admission was further reduced to 2d. for the final two weeks of the exhibition: 11,000 people attended. By 1849 the entire final month was given over to 2d. admissions.73

  By this time, Manchester had a Natural History Society, a Botanical Society, a Statistical Society, a Medical Society and a Geological Society, for the most part run by the new professional classes. After the success of the Institution’s shows in the 1840s, a group of local worthies began to plan their own fine-arts exhibition. Thomas Fairbairn, the chairman, was a Unitarian who saw art as a moral force for good (he was also a remarkably prescient collector, buying Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience among other works). He was a commissioner for the Great Exhibition, helping to raise £60,000 to send as Manchester’s contribution. In 1857 the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, the largest fine-arts

  exhibition ever to be held in Britain, opened its doors. Attendance was low. The commissioners approached Thomas Cook, and he advertised ‘Moonlight Trips’ to bring workers from Newcastle, so that all could ‘feast in the glorious noon day of Art’s finest representations and richest treasures’. Ultimately Cook transported about 26,000 tourists from the north and east, but this was the least of it.74 The public’s imagination had been captured, and up to 1.5 million visitors poured through the doors. Many employers now arranged for their workers to visit, as they had for the Great Exhibition. Sir Titus Salt brought 2,500 employees from Salt and Co. textile works (which had been designed, incidentally, by William Fairbairn, Thomas Fairbairn’s father). The Art Treasures Examiner, a special weekly journal published during the run of the exhibition, saw them arrive,

  all dressed in their Sunday best…in three special trains…The fine brass band belonging to the establishment accompanied the first two trains, and the Saltaire drum-and-fife band the last…They were accompanied by their generous employer, Mr Titus Salt, who paid all the expenses connected with the trip, and remained with his interested charges during the time they were in the palace. The 2,500 partook of dinner in the large refreshment tent adjoining the second-class room.75

  That 1.5 million people thought it worth travelling to see a collection of paintings marked a very pronounced shift, from even a hundred years before. Two things had happened over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to make art a natural leisure activity for many in the population: the arrival of so many works of art from Europe, latterly driven by political upheaval, and the creation of an internal print market, through the development of retail networks and technological innovation. These two things were not isolated, but fed off each other. When the French Revolution brought a large number of European collections on to the market, and the end of the French wars even more, many rich men seized the opportunities to buy paintings and sculpture. Dealers sold at auction, and dealers sold privately, on commission. And even before that, in the half-century between 1720 and 1770, around half a million prints had been imported from Italy, France and Holland, priming a market where even those at the low end of the middle class could afford to buy prints now and again.76

  Arthur Pond (c.1701-1758) was an example of an old-fashioned eighteenth-century print dealer. Originally he produced engravings after drawings he owned, or drawings that were owned by his patrons. From that he moved on to commission others to engrave works for him, producing first a series of Italian landscapes, and later Roman antiquities, Dutch landscapes and a second series of Italian landscapes. These were sold in sets of four uniform prints for 5s., which were published at three-month intervals. The uniformity made them suitable for framing, and they could even be hand-coloured first. Despite the success of these prints, and the increase in the size of the print market, from 1745 onward only about 12 per cent of Pond’s income came from this part of his business. The rest was earned in the way artists had always earned money in the past, via patronage. For much of his life Pond worked as a drawing master to upper-class women, who would in turn introduce him to others, who might commission portraits from him. At the same time he acted as agent and general factotum to their husbands, supervising the reception of pictures sent from abroad, cleaning them, arranging for them to be framed; Pond also painted his patron’s families, attended auctions as his representative, and copied old masters.77 The value placed on these services by society can perhaps best be seen in Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, when a relative of the eponymous vicar

  informed me of his own business there [in Paris], which was to collect pictures, medals, intaglios, and antiques of all kinds, for a gentleman in London, who had just stept into taste and a large fortune. I was the more surprised at seeing our cousin pitched upon for this office, as he himself had often assured me he knew nothing of the matter. Upon my asking how he had been taught the art of a connoscento [sic] so very suddenly, he assured me nothing was more easy. The whole secret consisted in a strict adherence to two rules: the one always to observe, that the picture might have been better if the painter had taken more pains; and the other, to praise the works of Pietro Perugino.78

  But this was the past, not the future. The future lay with the middle classes, who were by the turn of the century already finding art ever more accessible. In two auctions, in 1798 and 1800, the main purchasers included two dukes, four earls, five lords, a lady, six ‘gentlemen amateurs’, four painters, six art dealers, three bankers and ten merchants (four of whom were also MPs). The MPs
seem to have been buying for profit rather than pleasure, so altogether there were fourteen upper-class or leisured collectors, against twenty-three buying for trade purposes.79 Even then, this may be an underestimate: many who described themselves as - and understood themselves to be - collectors would today be considered to be dealers. For example, the collector Benjamin Godfrey Windus cornered the market in drawings by David Wilkie, holding on to 650 works until Wilkie’s death raised their price, when he sold them at a good profit. He put two paintings by Turner into sales at Christie’s twice, buying them back both times until he could bid them up to the prices he wanted.80 Then there was William Quilter, who in 1875 claimed to be selling his collection of watercolours because he was moving house. David Cox’s The Hayfield was sold for £2,950, bid up by a collector and Agnew’s; equally, Copley Fielding’s The Mull of Galloway reached £1,732 after a tussle between Quilter’s son-in-law and Agnew’s. Altogether Quilter was said to have made £80,000 at the sale, and was regarded as nothing more than a clever collector until his death in 1889, when many of the pictures that had been sold appeared still to be in his possession. Gradually it emerged that he had arranged for some lots to be bid for, ostensibly by others, in fact on his own behalf, to raise the prices of the other items in the sale.81

  Prints, meanwhile, were continuing as a lucrative market in their own right, and print-sellers like Boydell were able to make a living from their professional activities, in a way that Pond had not. In 1800 the directories listed one specialist art shop in Manchester, which sold prints and framed pictures (there were probably several others we cannot know about today, because they listed themselves as booksellers). In 1804 Vittore Zanetti had a framing shop, and gradually moved into cleaning pictures and selling prints and objets d’art - coins, clocks, medals and figurines. This kind of mixture was becoming the norm. The Stranger’s Guide to Modern Birmingham in 1825 boasted of the city’s showrooms, which included ‘Eginton’s Painted Glass Manufactory, Thomason’s showrooms…displaying medals, jewellery, plate, cutlery, and bronze facsimiles of the Warwick Vase…and Jones’s Pantechnetheca [sic]…otherwise known as the General Repository of Art, New Street’, which had a picture gallery in the back.82 After the creation of the Royal Manchester Institution, by 1825 there were ten art dealers listed in Manchester, which had expanded to fifteen by 1836 (again, probably an underestimate). In 1817 Thomas Agnew, Zanetti’s apprentice, became his partner, and Zanetti and Agnew moved increasingly into works of art and print-selling. By 1823 their business was doing well enough that the marriage of Agnew to the daughter of the mayor of Salford could take place; by then the firm had an annual turnover of £8,000, of which £2,000 was profit. Agnew’s at mid-century was showing works by Constable, Frith, Turner, Etty, Landseer, Maclise, Martin and Clarkson Stanfield.83 In 1860 Agnew’s (now officially Thos. Agnew and Sons) had branches in Liverpool and London, with a showroom in Waterloo Place, just off Pall Mall, the traditional site of auction rooms. By 1875 the firm had built a new gallery in an old coaching yard in Old Bond Street, complete with sofas, tables, and the odd discreet picture on display, but no counters, no glazed windows.84 The Agnews, the message was clear, were not ‘trade’: they were gentlemen who happened to sell pictures.

  Another dealer who began as a print-seller was Ernest Gambart, although his career took a more individual route. He was born in Belgium, the son of a bookseller, and he had arrived in London in the early 1830s as a representative of the French dealer Goupil. He set up on his own, although how, and with what capital, is unknown. Whatever the route, by 1846 he was one of the leading print-sellers in the country, and he also had a branch in Paris.85 He had linked up with Fox Talbot, the pioneer of photography, who had set up Talbot’s Reading Establishment, where Talbotypes of landscapes and genre subjects were produced in

  bulk.* Gambart purchased 219 prints, and then another 123 only a few weeks later. Although Talbot’s establishment closed the following year, Gambart had seen the potential of mass-produced art. He moved swiftly to form an association of print-sellers which would be able to control the number of proofs and prints being sold, to protect the dealers.86

  In 1849 Gambart held his first art exhibition, and he quickly became associated with many group shows. He began to deal with Charles Morton, who ran the Canterbury Music Hall. In 1856 Morton had built an extension to house a picture gallery, and Gambart supplied him with pictures on a sale-or-return basis. A painting at this time had three values: the price it could be sold for; the price that could be charged for viewing it in an exhibition; and the engraving and reproduction rights. Gambart took full advantage of all these income streams. In 1853 Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World was sold for 400 guineas; in 1854 Gambart approached him about the rights to reproduce it in an engraving. Hunt had, unusually, not already sold these rights, because he was worried about the quality of the engravers being mooted. Gambart reassured him, and purchased the rights for 200 guineas. The engraving was published in 1858, and it was the single most successful print Gambart was ever to produce, and one of the most successful of the century, earning him enough to live on ‘for many years’. But Gambart had no intention of sitting back. Jacob Bell, the founder of the Pharmaceutical Society, had purchased William Powell Frith’s panoramic painting Derby Day for £1,500; Gambart offered the same amount again for the copyright together with the right to exhibit the picture while it was being engraved - a new idea. Before the painting was even exhibited, he had puff pieces inserted in the Athenaeum and the Art-Journal. Once the picture went on show, he made sure that the world knew of its success by pressing the Royal Academy to install a rail and a policeman, to keep the crowds away.87 Once more his engraving was phenomenally successful.

  Frith was himself already an old hand at this sort of thing. His first great panoramic picture had been a bit of a gamble, but it had succeeded: engraving rights to Life at the Seaside (more generally known today as Ramsgate Sands) had been bought by a print-seller for 1,000 guineas, and the engraving and the purchase of the painting itself by Queen Victoria made him a popular as well as a financial success. Frith’s final picture in his trilogy of Victorian leisure pursuits, The Railway Station (1860-62), was sold not by Gambart but by Louis Flatow, a dealer who was reputed to be illiterate. Under Flatow’s management 80,000 people were said to have paid 1s. to see it, and many of those, and many more across the country, bought the subsequent engraving. Flatow was reputed to have made about £30,000 from his part in the transaction.88

  Flatow may have made more on this one deal, but Gambart was the more innovative, with a view of the wider potential of the market, pioneering a complex interrelationship between art, the market and the dissemination of images and information. He commissioned F. G. Stephens, just before Stephens went to work for the Athenaeum, where for the next forty years he would reign as one of London’s pre-eminent art critics, to write a monograph on Holman Hunt. Stephens was well suited to the task. He had, together with Hunt, been a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (before deciding that he would never make a good painter, and destroying all of his work that he could get his hands on). The formal monograph he produced had several beneficiaries: Hunt himself, of course; Gambart, as Hunt’s dealer, who could now point would-be collectors to this work of scholarship; and Stephens, who raised his own profile and bolstered his status as an expert.89 (Stephens would go on to write monographs on Mulready (1867), Landseer (1869) and Alma-Tadema (1895), as well as catalogues for the Grosvenor Gallery and the Fine Arts Society.) It is hard, looking back, to realize quite how innovative this symbiosis was, but its very naturalness to us is in fact an indicator of the great prescience of Gambart.

  In addition, these monographs were useful in an additional, unexpected, way. Dealers and their profits were beginning to worry both the artists and their collectors: art was beginning once more to look too much like ‘trade’. The monographs were a way of subduing overt commercialism, taming it, making it appear as scholarship. In a sim
ilar manner, although many dealers worked successfully and openly - like Agnew’s, or Sir Coutts Lindsay and Joseph Comyns Carr at the innovative Grosvenor Gallery - others did not call themselves dealers at all, even though they acted for collectors and artists exactly as any dealer would. The Pre-Raphaelite collector Constantine Ionides relied on the artist Alphonse Legros to advise him; the painters Frederick Shields in Manchester and William Bell Scott in Newcastle were both active in the promotion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to local collectors.90 That this was an ambiguous profession, however, can best be illustrated by the career of Charles Augustus Howell (1840?-1890), dealer and con man - it is hard to say which aspect was more important, although Dante Gabriel Rossetti was sure he knew the answer: