ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: ART AND CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Volume 9
VICTORIAN PAINTING
First published in 1980 by Garland Publishing, Inc.
This edition first published in 2019
by Routledge
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1980 John Charles Olmsted
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-138-35894-2 (Set)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42671-1 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-36644-2 (Volume 9) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-43027-5 (Volume 9) (ebk)
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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
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Copyright 1980 by John Charles Olmsted
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Victorian painting, essays and reviews.
(Garland reference library of the humanities; v. 208 )
Bibliography: p.
CONTENTS: V. 1. 1832-1848.
I. Painting, VictorianGreat BritainBibliography.
2. Painting, BritishGreat BritainBibliography.
I. Olmsted, John Charles.
Z5947.3.G7V53 [ND467] 016.7592 80-65711
ISBN 0-8240-2742-6 (v. I)
Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
For Jeff
The best of the pioneering work on Victorian painting has been done by scholars who have drawn heavily on nineteenth-century periodicals. A. Paul Oppes long essay, first published in 1934, and T.S.R. Boases volume in the Oxford History of English Art both used periodicals, particularly the Athenaeum and the Art-Union, to gauge critical response to major exhibitions, to trace the growth of government support of art and to assemble a wealth of detail concerning provincial exhibitions, attitudes towards painters of previous generations and debates within the community of artists about issues as diverse as hanging practices in the Royal Academy, the relative importance of genre and of history painting and the techniques of fresco.
This anthology of fifty-three essays drawn from eleven weekly, monthly and quarterly periodicals was assembled in order to reproduce in convenient form some of the more important articles on English painting published from 1832 to 1848 in Great Britain. Reviews of major exhibitions form a large part of the collection, but essays treating individual artists, discussions of the effect of state patronage of the arts and attempts to assess the uniqueness of the English tradition of painting are also included. A selected checklist based on a study of the relevant volumes of the Athenaeum and the Art-Union (after 1849 called the Art Journal) and of articles identified in the three published volumes of the Wellesley Index provides access to a good deal of relevant material which could not be included in this volume.
I am grateful to Oberlin College for a research grant which greatly assisted me in compiling this volume. I am indebted to the staffs of the University of Michigan Graduate Library, the Oberlin College library and the libraries at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, for access to their collections. Robert Longsworth, Larry Buell and Robert Pierce have been as always supportive colleagues and friends.
A. Paul Oppe, Art, Early Victorian England 18301865, ed. G.M. Young (Oxford University Press, 1934), II: 10176; T.S.R. Boase, English Art 18001870 (Clarendon Press, 1959). For a useful survey of materials on Victorian painting see David Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 42453.
In 1844 an anonymous writer for the Westminster Review remarked that there are few subjects which are just now exciting more attention in England than the present state of the Fine Arts (p. 473). Writing in the same year, Thackeray noted a striking increase in the quality of the art criticism appearing in the major newspapers and journals (Frasers Magazine 29 [June 1844], 70016). The modern reader who moves in any organized way through the major periodicals of the 1830s and 1840s readily agrees with both these assessments. Reviews of annual exhibitions appear in more and more journals throughout the two decades, and the increasing sophistication of the reviews of annual exhibitions suggests the growth of a public with at least a rudimentary knowledge of the fine arts. Efforts at state patronage of the arts, and later the Prince Consorts lively interest in advancing the arts in England, no doubt helped to make more people aware of the work of contemporary painters, but there seems to have been a genuine and spontaneous growth of interest in painting throughout the period.
The best journals of the day regularly devoted space to coverage of the fine arts. A favorable review in the Times could make the reputation and often the fortune of a young painter. Reviews in the Athenaeum or, after 1839, in the Art-Union (later the Art Journal) were almost as influential. Readers of Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine read lively accounts of the annual exhibitions by John Eagles, a writer perhaps best known for his role in irritating the young John Ruskin into writing Modern Painters. Occasional reviews of exhibitions appeared in the Examiner, Frasers Magazine, the Gentlemans Magazine, the Literary Gazette, the Monthly Review and the New Monthly Magazine. While essays on the arts often focused on the work of individual artists or explored such heated topics of the time as the techniques of fresco and the influence of the Royal Academy schools, most writing on the arts was prompted by the great annual exhibitions held in London. The first of the exhibitions each year, that of the British Institution, was by common agreement among critics the last in quality and importance. Reviews of the late winter showings regularly lamented the low quality of the pictures displayed. The Institution was praised, however, for its regular exhibitions of Old Masters which, in a country notoriously provincial in its views of European art, provided aspiring painters the opportunity to study and copy major paintings drawn from private collections. Retrospective exhibitions of British masters no doubt also provided a sense of context and tradition for young artists.
The next of the annual exhibitions was that of the Society of British Artists. These March showings were somewhat less harshly treated than those of the British Institution, but both were looked on as feeble anticipations of the great exhibitions held each May by the Royal Academy and by the two societies of painters in water colors: the old society, founded in 1804, and the new, established in 1831. Special exhibitions, such as those of the cartoons for the state competitions to decorate the Palace of Westminster, and private exhibitions, such as the famous displays by John Martin and Benjamin Robert Haydon, also drew lively comment from reviewers.
