Chapter XXV: 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]