The Battle for British Art: How "British" Art Was Invented During the 18th Century
The conduct behind the scenes was also occasionally less than gentlemanly. The annual exhibition was almost the only showcase for British contemporary art, and it became a place where reputations were won and lost. Predictable, infighting between the artists involved was rife. With some 400 paintings to be crammed into the principal gallery at Somerset House, hung frame to frame, the position an artist’s works occupied on the wall was of paramount importance. Reynolds and his great rival Thomas Gainsborough, the other pre-eminent portrait-painter of the day, had enormous rows over the relative placing of their works. But Reynolds, ever the canny politician, won effective control of the hanging committee, and made sure his pictures occupied pride of place. The two painters’ relationship became strained to breaking point over the years, and eventually, when Gainsborough’s request to have his pictures rehung more favourably was turned down by the Academy in 1784, he snapped – withdrawing all of his pictures, never to exhibit there again.
In a sense, if anything unites the work of the succession of great British artists who emerged during the second half of the eighteenth century, it is their collective determination to prove that an artist does not have to be painting the grandest of subjects – Last Judgements, or the lives and loves of the gods – to be counted a great artist. So it was that Stubbs created some of the most remarkable masterpieces of the entire century – such as his majestic Whistlejacket – while working within the traditionally “inferior” genre of equestrian art. Turner and Constable would do the same, proving that landscape – conventionally regarded, for centuries, as the very lowest of all the genres – could be as profound a vehicle for speculation and reflection as any other subject for painting. In that respect, British art, unlikely though it may seem, paved the way for the most radical developments of modern art, which completely rejected the traditional hierarchies of subject matter and insisted that anything – any aspect of experience – could form the basis for serious works of art. But that, as they say, is another story.
Date: 18-06-2006
Owning Institution:
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Features
Subject:
18th Century
In the age of the multimillionaire Brit Artist, with the likes of Damien Hirst commanding a million pounds and more – considerably more, if art trade rumours are to believed – for a single work, it is hard to imagine a time when the very phrase “British Art” struck most people as a contradiction in terms. But in the early years of the eighteenth century, that was precisely the case. In 1714, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, declared that the arts in Britain had “sunk to their lowest state”. In the same year, a young student wrote an account of a visit to a painter’s studio, such as it then was, in which he describes finding the man in a rented garret, covering huge lengths of cloth with formulaic landscape scenes, which would then be cut into sections according to the gaps on his clients’ walls – a bit lopped off here to fit round a chimney, a bit there to accommodate a door. This really was art by the yard, but it was by no means uncharacteristic of the kind of journeywork expected of the British artist at the time – a figure regarded as little more than the lowest kind of artisan. Artists occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder, and the highest concentration of them was to be found living among the prostitutes and the destitutes in the slums of London’s West End. “Vulgar, illiterate and half sober” was the curt phrase chosen by the Earl of Shaftesbury, arbiter of taste, to damn the whole lot.
Yet fast forward to 3 March, 1792, and the situation could hardly be more different. That date marks the funeral of Sir Joshua Reynolds, first President of the Royal Academy. As his hearse arrives at St Paul’s Cathedral, a line of no fewer than ninety-two carriages stretches behind it. The back of the funeral procession is still almost a mile away, at Somerset House, home to the Academy at the time, where the painter’s body had been laid out in state. Whereas at the start of the century, British aristocrats would no more have rubbed shoulders with an artist than with a carpenter, or a peasant, now Reynolds’ coffin is being carried by dukes and lords. How did such a huge transformation take place?
Earlier this year I was approached by BBC4 to write and present a programme about the rise of British art in the eighteenth century, part of a series about the Enlightenment in Britain, collectively entitled “The Century that Made Us”. Like most such telly titles, it is prone to an element of hyperbole. But in the case of art, it contains more truth than exaggeration. British art, as a force to be reckoned with on the world cultural stage, really was an eighteenth-century invention. It was the creation not of one man alone, but of a group of extraordinary individuals – ruthless operators, shrewd networkers, eccentrics, loners – who between them transformed both the nature and the status of the visual arts in this country.
Various explanations were given for why British art was at such a low ebb at the start of the eighteenth century. The most ingeniously perverse was that proposed by a French connoisseur of the arts, the Abbe Laugier, who simply blamed the weather. Britain was too cold and miserable, he suggested, to foster creative genius: “Everybody knows that we have never had, from the extremities of the North, but frigid colourists.” A better explanation, perhaps, is to be found in the religious history of the nation. During the Reformation, the effects of which were felt in Britain for a century and more, from the 1530s into the Puritan 1640s, religious art had been destroyed on an unprecedented scale; and the very vocation of the artist had been tainted by association with the “graven images” condemned in the second Commandment. During the years that saw the final flowering of High Renaissance art, and the birth of the Baroque, all across Catholic Europe, the British artist had been confined by religious proscription to the minor genres – had become little more, in the eyes of his aristocratic patrons, than the furnisher of depictions of milord’s self, milord’s wife and milord’s country estate.
The notion that great art was something done abroad, essentially by Italian or French artists, was reinforced by that seminal formative experience undergone by aristocrats of the day in their youth - namely, the Grand Tour. On their travels abroad, dedicated in roughly equal measure to drinking, rites of sexual inititation and – last but not least – acts of aesthetic aquisitiveness, the aristocracy plundered the continent for works by the great (and not so great) Old Masters, to such an extent that it has been estimated that between 1720 and 1770 approximately 50,000 foreign paintings were imported into the country. As a result, the English country house of the period, stuffed as it was with Titians and Poussins, became a monument to the perceived cultural superiority of the continental European visual art tradition. It was in attempting to break this pattern of preconception, and distinctly limited patronage, that the artists of the eighteenth century would reinvent themselves.
The first painter to take on that challenge was the pugnacious cockney, William Hogarth – whose self-portrait, accompanied by his favourite pug, was an apt symbol of his no-nonsense, British bulldog spirit. Hogarth aspired to be Britain’s first great native painter of grand narrative themes – a kind of one-man riposte to the Old Masters of Renaissance and Baroque art, who set out to teach the aristocracy that if high art was what they wanted, they did not need to go shopping abroad. Partly because his work in this vein was, to be charitable, distinctly uneven, Hogarth’s many essays in serious narrative painting, such as The Pool of Bethesda or The Death of Sigismunda, are almost unknown today. He failed to win round his public to the notion that a British artist might compete at the highest level of “history painting”, as it was known. But he did successfully invent a new kind of popular narrative art, epitomised by his two great series of prints, The Rake’s and The Harlot’s Progresses – which were, in effect, prototypical satirical novels, told in the medium of graphic art, satirising the foibles and the failings of society with acerbic wit and in exhaustively entertaining detail. Hogarth’s prints sold in their thousands, reaching a public far beyond the closed world of the upper classes. He had in effect broken the cartel of the aristocracy and their continental dealers, by creating a new popular market for art.
Hogarth also dreamed of establishing a professional body of British artists – and he got as far as setting up his own academy, in St Martin’s Lane, where young artists with ambition might meet to sketch from the life, and after antique casts. But it was to be Reynolds, a painter of the next generation, together with the architect William Chambers, who really got such an institution off the ground. The creation of the Royal Academy, in 1768, was one of the defining moments in the history of British art. With the patronage of King George III – secured through the machinations of Chambers – British artists had finally secured a power base for themselves. Originally there were just forty academicians, with membership kept deliberately low in order to create an aura of exclusivity. The Academy was, in effect, a trades union, but it wanted to project the image of a gentleman’s club. There was nothing particularly gentlemanly about its annual exhibitions, however, which drew a vast and newly enthusiastic audience to Somerset House. “Who can examine a beautiful picture with advantage,” complained one visitor, “in a sweating room choked with clouds of dust, and as rudely elbowed as if at Bartholomew Fair.”
The conduct behind the scenes was also occasionally less than gentlemanly. The annual exhibition was almost the only showcase for British contemporary art, and it became a place where reputations were won and lost. Predictable, infighting between the artists involved was rife. With some 400 paintings to be crammed into the principal gallery at Somerset House, hung frame to frame, the position an artist’s works occupied on the wall was of paramount importance. Reynolds and his great rival Thomas Gainsborough, the other pre-eminent portrait-painter of the day, had enormous rows over the relative placing of their works. But Reynolds, ever the canny politician, won effective control of the hanging committee, and made sure his pictures occupied pride of place. The two painters’ relationship became strained to breaking point over the years, and eventually, when Gainsborough’s request to have his pictures rehung more favourably was turned down by the Academy in 1784, he snapped – withdrawing all of his pictures, never to exhibit there again.
At the heart of this apparently petty rivalry – resolved, touchingly, when Reynolds visited Gainsborough on his deathbed, and the two men tearfully made up – lay fiercely competing visions of the true path to greatness for British art. Reynolds believed throughout his life that the way forward lay, above all, in “imitation” – the word echoes again and again through his magisterial Discourses on Art, the series of lectures that he gave to the Academy’s young students. What this meant, in terms of his own practice as a painter, was a form of brilliant compromise. Reynolds had been to Italy in his youth, on a kind of cut-price painter’s version of the Grand Tour, and he had fallen in love with the Renaissance and Baroque painting of Italy, above all. He accepted that he would never win the kind of commissions that would enable him to compete with his great heroes, Raphael and Michelangelo, so he contented himself with copying the poses and the styles of Old master painting, and smuggling them into the comparatively “low” genre of portrait painting. The most brilliant result of the strategy is, perhaps, his portrait of The Montgomery Sisters, a group of fair-skinned aristocratic young ladies whom he conjured into a mock-Renaissance charade which involves unlikely acts of sacrifices to the stone idol of a pagan fertility god. Gainsborough, for his part, disdained such creaky – albeit witty – acts of staged emulation. His portraits, most notably perhaps the picture of his own two young daughters, chasing a butterfly, have nothing to declare but the artists’ own genius – his ability, in this case, not only to capture the precise difference in age between his own two young girls, “Molly and the Captain”, as he nicknamed them, but also to convey the very idea of the transience of youth in a flickering skein of brushstrokes.
Lurking within Gainsborough’s art, however, was a subtle and radically new idea – namely that a picture, or for that matter a sculpture, need not occupy a particularly high rung on the ladder of subject matter to be worthy of serious, even philosophical consideration. Subject matter, in other words, need not matter.
In a sense, if anything unites the work of the succession of great British artists who emerged during the second half of the eighteenth century, it is their collective determination to prove that an artist does not have to be painting the grandest of subjects – Last Judgements, or the lives and loves of the gods – to be counted a great artist. So it was that Stubbs created some of the most remarkable masterpieces of the entire century – such as his majestic Whistlejacket – while working within the traditionally “inferior” genre of equestrian art. Turner and Constable would do the same, proving that landscape – conventionally regarded, for centuries, as the very lowest of all the genres – could be as profound a vehicle for speculation and reflection as any other subject for painting. In that respect, British art, unlikely though it may seem, paved the way for the most radical developments of modern art, which completely rejected the traditional hierarchies of subject matter and insisted that anything – any aspect of experience – could form the basis for serious works of art. But that, as they say, is another story.
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