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Constructing the Victorian Artist: National Identity, the Political Economy of Art andBiographical Mania in the Periodical PressAuthor(s): Julie F. CodellSource: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Fall, 2000), pp. 283-316Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for VictorianPeriodicalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20083750 .
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Constructing the Victorian Artist:
National Identity, the Political
Economy of Art and Biographical Mania in the Periodical Press*
JULIE F. CODELL
In a statement defending the popular mania for artists' biographies, The
Art Journal in an 1856 biography of James Clarke Hook called artists
"public property," who as such deserved the public's scrutiny of their
works, their bodies, the "sanctity" of their homes, and the "solitude" of
their studios (41). This panoptical surveillance was overdetermined by a
number of changes in artists' status and social roles. The extreme popular
ity of biographies in the nineteenth century has often been ascribed to the
public's voracious appetite for hero worship, but around mid-century this desire conflicted with new historicist notions of documentation and
veracity. Debates over whether to hide biographical subjects' warts or to
display them dominated discussions over biography's purpose and value. But artists faced a special set of problems in addition to these issues. The
Romantic "genius," slightly mad and beyond social conventions (Kriz), was fading from association with artists, and creativity was being replaced
by the language of productivity as artists were increasingly identified as
workers. Yet, artists were still represented in novels as poor, undomesti
cated, bohemians (Jeffares). Later in the century, artists were further
denounced as degenerates by an emerging, often hysterical, scientizing lit erature that crudely blended discourses from biology and psychology (Codell, JPRS and "Victorian Artists' Family Biographies").
This focus on artists was the result of their new-found success. Having been catapulted to positions of wealth and status by the art market surge of the 1860s, artists became national icons by the 1880s, and their works
and characters were idealized as morally sound, thoroughly manly, and
fundamentally "English." The scrutiny of artists as public property, then,
sprang from the conflict between their recent material success as a class
that gave them a new national profile, and stereotypes of them as degener ate or bohemian. These conflicts were further aggravated by the increas
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284 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
ing commercialism that threatened the Ruskinian interpretation of art as
an ideal expression and of the artist as exempt from economic and social
demands. The otherworldly artist was idealized by John Ruskin in A Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Art (1857; reprinted in 1880). Ruskin's
ideal artist, what I call a prelapsarian artist, was purposely ignorant of
economics and entirely outside the social hierarchy. Ruskin argued that
the state should educate and control artists by monitoring and even deter
mining their production. Artists, in Ruskin's view, were best cloistered to
make art, like children at play. Their economic subordination to the state
and to their patrons would then protect them from the forbidden knowl
edge of political economy and the Fall of Mammon. This image, which
also dominated the writings of Vernon Lee (In Umbria) and many other
critics, biographers, and novelists condemned the very material and social successes that gave artists their new opportunity to be biographical subjects.
The periodical press mediated these differences by asserting a profes sional image of the artist to encourage public consumption of works by
living English artists. Professionalism encompassed the idealist image of
the educated, gentlemanly artist and the actuality of artists working on
their own behalf in a highly commercial field. A profession was a calling, but it also meant autonomy in the marketplace, including the freedom to
set one's own prices.1 Photographs and descriptions in the press of artists'
sumptuous homes and studios celebrated their fame, wealth, and social
ity, while, juxtaposed to these images were statements, often made by art
ists in interviews, that they were motivated by higher purposes, such as a
love of beauty or patriotism. The press filled its pages with the success of
British artists, their prizes, commissions, and high prices. Artists "on the
highway to prosperity," as The Art Journal described Hubert von Herko mer (Dafforne, The Art Journal [1880]: 109), were the most popular sub
jects of press gossip and brief notes, as well as of its many biographical series that appeared from the 1850s into the early twentieth century.2
Artists were not shy in money matters nor were they ignorant or sub
ordinate to patrons or to the public. Assertively intervening in their own
public representation, artists negotiated with dealers, editors, and critics
about their economic realities, their new role as representatives of
national identity, and their childlike, prelapsarian "artistic nature." In the
vast sea of letters to critics like F.G. Stephens and to publishers, such as
M.H. Spielmann (Codell 1989), artists conveyed news and information
they wanted printed in a timely way to titillate the public about works in
progress - a drawing or maquette in preparation for the RA exhibition -
and to provoke potential consumers while appearing to be driven by aes
thetics and the work ethic. Artists exploited their networks, including each other, to gain economic security and social recognition. When F.G.
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JULIE F. CODELL 285
Stephens wrote obituaries, he often asked contemporaries of the deceased
artists to examine and correct his copy (Richard Redgrave to Stephens, Bodleian ms. don. d. 116, 9 June, 1875, fols. 96-97; Alfred Fripps to
Stephens, Bodleian ms. don d. 116, 17 Mar 1885, fols. 243-46, Bodleian
Library, Oxford). Through such channels artists wrote each other's post humous biographies, sustaining reputations and market values to the
advantage of the entire profession. Press biographers quoted artists
directly or drew on posthumous and thoroughly subjective domestic
biographies written by adoring wives and children (e.g., Wilkie Collins's
biography of his father, William Collins, cited as a source for The Art
Journal's biography of William Collins, 141). Through interviews and
photographs of their homes, studios, and bodies, and reproductions of
sketches and drawings that appeared to translate the creative process into
labor, artists collaborated with the press to represent a new professional
image.
The periodical press dominated this new art discourse and sought to
mediate conflicting forces of money, idealism, mass consumption, and
respectable professionalism. One means of achieving these ends was to
validate and naturalize artists' economic and social success, in opposition to Ruskin's ideal artist. Frederic Smallfield in an essay in the Temple Bar
in 1885 condemned exhibition spectators for merely gawking and social
izing rather than buying art (252). Buying the art of living artists was a
contribution to national culture and wealth, he argued, as well as a way of
securing the survival of British culture into the future. Smallfield called
the picture gallery "a picture shop" where artists came primarily to earn a
livelihood (254). He admonished artists to "sell all your pictures (if you
can), and then call in the fiddlers and the florists" who turned exhibitions
into social events (255). Smallfield wanted the exhibition to function for
the sake of sales, divorced from its accrued social activities and functions.
S. Cameron argues that critics provide a form of advertisement, shape
reputations as a form of capital, create a market for their criticism, as well as for the object of their criticism, and influence "higher order prefer ences," or
meta-preferences by validating the consumers' self-image
through concepts of proper taste (322-323). Critics shape these areas of
value and consumption by repetition and display of expertise - their spe
cial knowledge of the artist's place in the canon or their application of
esoteric aesthetic discourse. These performances create demand and shape consumers' perceptions and purchases: "The weight of the canon of
received work is a burden on potential consumers. This can be eased by critics but may conflict with their tendency to promote originality" (329).
Victorian critics lobbied for originality as both an artistic and an English trait, as they also situated works within the canon with its "fallout" values
of historical validation, economic worth, and cultural capital. Such critical
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286 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
tasks and roles were precisely the same for Victorian biographers as for
critics. Biographers negotiated the artist's subjectivity between tradition and innovation and created artists who mirrored consumers' identities of
nation, race, and the social order, supporting a mutual interdependence among critics, biographers, artists, and the public (329). Biographies in
the press repeatedly defended artists against popular stereotypes and
against their own commercial successes to present them as domesticated, socialized, clubby, diligent, high-minded, and paterfamilial.
The very appearance of artists in biographies heralded their changing status and their importance as representatives of national identity. As
William Epstein points out:
The entrance of a biographical subject into written discourse is still a momentous
occasion, an event that can, among other things, reaffirm cultural eminence, con
textualize social action, alter literary opinion, deputize political influence, or
instruct economic conduct, -
and this admissions procedure, which is always in
crisis, is constantly (if not often consciously) surveilled in and through biographi cal recognition, which, in this respect, functions as the generic agency of the pro
prietary powers. (1991: 222)
A modern notion of culture underlies this elevation of artists into biogra
phy. Ernest Gellner defines culture as
no longer merely the adornment, confirmation and legitimization of a social order
which was also sustained by harsher and coercive constrictions; culture is now the
necessary shared medium, the lifebook or perhaps the minimal shared atmo
sphere, within which alone the members of the society can breathe and survive
and produce. For a given society it must be one in which they can all breathe and
speak and produce; so it must be the same culture [...] it can no
longer be a diversi
fied, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition. (37-38)
Thus, the identification between readers and biographical subjects was
essential in the context of culture as a vital constituent of civic identifica
tion.
A single image of the Victorian artist did not emerge from this volumi
nous literature. The biographical treatment of artists persistently ranged from anecdotal sensationalism to calculated professionalism. In a series in
The Art Journal entitled "The Romance of Great Artists," Mary E. Wager in 1876 braided together brief anecdotal and sensationalistic paragraphs, each about a famous artist of the past. Focusing on love affairs and miser
able marriages, Wager revealed that Paul Rembrandt Vanrym "was a man
of low origin, of basest stamp of character, but of original genius" (248); that Paul Potter "fell in love when very young with the pretty daughter of
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JULIE F. CODELL 287
his neighbour" (248); that Jeanne Paul Slingeland "was famous for the
length of time it took him to paint a picture" (248); that Titian's marriage was unhappy (155); that Tintoretto's wife caused him to paint "twice as
many pictures as he ought" (156). The appearance of such anecdotage in
The Art Journal alongside defenses of art-making as a profession, an eco
nomic contribution to the nation, and a source of aesthetic uplift embraced competing means for promoting readers' identifications with
artists and with a homogenized national culture.
Despite a range of types personified in biographies, the particular con
fluence of idealism and the market in the construction of the artist became a uniquely Victorian episteme that converged in a typology of English artists. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, discourse about art constitutes art's
cultural meanings; the "work of art" is generated by all the verbal and
visual commentary about art-criticism, catalogues, biographies, exhibi
tions. These commentaries generate "a struggle for the monopoly of legit imate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the
production of the value of the work of art" (110-111). One characteristic
of the artistic field, as Bourdieu defines it, is its misrecognition as purely aesthetic or sacred, unmotivated by economics (77). Public, artist, dealer, and critic must all share this misrecognition to perpetrate a charismatic
ideology that anchors our belief in the work of art as spiritual or national, in artists' labor as sacred, and in art's price
as a unique surplus value. Mis
recognition dominated artists' biographies as they negotiated artists'
image in the context of social formation (hero worship and professional ism), art production and exchange values (living artists vs. Old Masters,
patronage vs. new buyers), and national identity. Such contradictions exemplified Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkhe
imer's "culture industry," their term for mass culture's subjection to the
organizational principles and values of industrial capitalism (29-31). Art
ists' biographies shared many of the characteristics Adorno and Horkhe
imer identified as traits of the culture industry (37-39). Biographers obsessed over artists' individualism and work ethic, insisting on each art
ist's uniqueness despite the similarity of their lives and in many cases of
their subjects, techniques, and audiences. The debate over the relationship between the artist's work and life was constant throughout the century, and the Victorian reader experienced considerable identification with the
biographical subject both as innovative ("daring") and as representative of
Englishness, a concept embracing individualism, self-help, nationalism,
domesticity, manliness, and the work ethic. Differences were homoge nized and artists were regulated, textualized, and commodified into the
public property Victorians needed them to be in order to allow them to
shape the culture that everyone breathed and inhabited.
Exemplary of the thorough embeddedness of biographical literature in
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288 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
the culture industry was the advertising that accompanied artists' biogra
phies in The Art Journal's Art Annuals in the late 1880s to fit artists into
the larger world of goods. These popular volumes appeared at Christmas
and Easter. Among the culture objects advertised were illustrated table
books on foreign countries; a production gallery for sculpture; Osier's
Table Glass and China; books on a wide range of topics (three-volume novels, children's books, books on art, geography, interior design, health,
history, wild animals, yachts, and aesthetics, illustrated books); artistic
cards; artists' proof etching; subscriptions to The Magazine of Art', furni
ture; metal, wood, and stone factory-made objects; leaded windows; gar
dening seeds; Millais engravings at bargain prices; cough remedies; and
gems. Such advertising exposed a context for art within a range of cheap books and prints, wide ranging interests in several disciplines, and domes
tic decoration, spheres unabashedly linked but which we now consider
discrete. The biography of a successful artist, added to reproductions of
high art and a critic's fulsome praise, might "raise" the advertiser into the
realm of high culture, imparting good taste or reputation to face powder or cocoa. Thus ads and biographies collaborated, perhaps in ways not
unlike collaborations between today's corporations and museums.
The admission of commercialism, however, was not without restric
tions. The press promoted artists through a regulatory discourse in biog
raphies and in its promotion of a political economy of art that sutured
public and artist:
Every artist who has reached a high position becomes, from the very elevation to
which he has raised himself, public property, so to speak: that is, the public whose
favourable suffrages he has won by his works, feel also an interest in the individ
ual who created them: they desire -
and the desire is legitimate and perfectly rea
sonable - to learn some of his life and history [...]. Such a man can no more expect
to escape observation -
and mark, it is not the eye of impertinent curiosity that
seeks him out, and that would penetrate even the solitude of this studio and, to a
certain extent, even the sanctity of his domestic hearth - than a great legislator,
or
a renowned warrior, or a successful author, or any other who soars above the
range of common men. It is the penalty, if it be so considered, each pays for his
position and popularity: the man himself may be indifferent to the praises or the censures of his biographer; [...] but as the history is the inevitable result of the
reputation, he must make up his mind that when he has himself achieved the one, sooner or later somebody will effect the other for him. (biography of James
Clarke Hook, The Art fournal 7 [1856]: 41)
This passage serves to restrict artists' new fame and fortune by the regula tion of them through biographies. "Suffrage" is an intriguing term; it
enfranchises the public and entitles it to scrutinize artists as soon as a suf
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JULIE F. CODELL 289
ficient straw vote of popularity is cast. The public had a role overseeing cultural production and especially its producers whose characters could
affect (or infect) the cultural products that became m?tonymie of the
nation itself. Artists' lives were suddenly important, as they would ulti
mately determine "history." Carlyle and others envisioned biography's purpose as defining an age, as Vasari's Lives of the Artist had defined the
Italian Renaissance. History was the sum of its geniuses' lives.
Key to the hygienic representation of artists was the articulation of the
balance between the artist's "real" motivation and consequence success, which included popularity and unity with the public, as well as material
wealth. A formulation of an acceptable political economy of artists, as
well as of art, was consistent with The Art Journal's concern with what it
called "art commerce." Samuel Carter Hall, first editor and founder of the
journal in 1839, bragged that in the beginning "I had to create a public for Art," by blending "information and instruction with interesting and use
ful intelligence" (Retrospect I: 197). The presentation of artists as ordi
nary, respectable citizens had an impact on evaluations and expectations of artists' social and national roles, as well as on the consumption of art
works. Hall sought to curtail purchases of Old Masters and provoke pur chases of living ones (Retrospect I: 199; Mancoff). He wanted "to show
'the commercial value of the Fine Arts,' that 'beauty is cheaper than
deformity,'" in reference to applied art and manufacturing ("Farewell to
S.C. Hall," The Art Journal [1880]: 354). Like most art press editors, he
argued for better fees for painters (Spatt 53). The Art Journal regularly
published the year's sales, detailing objects' prices, owners, buyers, and
dates of auction sales (e.g., Alfred Beaver, "Art Sales of 1884," The Art
Journal [1884]: 261-64; Walter Rowlands, "The Art Sales of 1887," The
Art Journal [1887]: 294-95). Knowledge of the market was recognized by the press as a vital part of artists' professional knowledge.
The art press promoted the surplus value of beauty and artist's dual roles in manufacture, providing added value of beauty to objects and con
suming raw art materials. P.L. Simmons in "Art-Aids to Commerce"
(The Art Journal [1872]: 295-96) recognized that "taste is a marketable
commodity, which being of so much value is worth getting honestly, and
by fair purchase." Simmons demonstrated that thanks to British art the
balance of trade in 1871 was in the black. Increased demand for art
abroad, as well as at home, supported the national income through a vari
ety of "artistic" goods: from marble statues and lithographic stone, which
contributed ?300,000, to lace (imports of foreign lace at ?750,000 sterling,
pillow-lace alone at ?383,617, and machine-made imitation lace,
?371,394), and artificial flowers, the latter producing ?115,712 in 1860 and
?367,186 in 1871. Bronze manufactures declined but imported statuary marble increased and, combined with slate and other stones, amounted to
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290 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
?266,264 in imports. Simmons lists the value of imported goods, such as
oil painting (?240,869), engravings and photos (?59,714), frames for pic tures (?9,498), opera-glasses (?49,412), and marble (?159,636), all totaling ?1,834,394. Exports of British manufactured art-related goods in 1871 included earthenware at ?1,731,483, furnishings at ?258,945, woolen car
pets at ?1,648,411, and "Works of Art" at ?4,434, for a grand total of
?6,203,557. Simmons concluded by estimating the service to commerce
by art as even greater, as he had not included "all the artist's materials, and
the value of designs and invention, and all those Art-embellishments
which form part and parcel of the commercial value of Art" (296). The
professional art discourse was keen on mapping art's economic contribu
tions to national wealth, balanced by the symbolic capital accrued by art
ists heroized in biographies. The power of the press to transform artists' public status was enhanced
by the relatively closed circulation of information. As Laurel Brake
points out, critics commonly wrote for several periodicals and newspa
pers, sometimes recycling and sometimes revising their articles, modify ing tone, style, and politics for diverse audiences (Brake 10-11). Links
were also international, as the art market became global. The French critic
Robert de la Sizeranne in his book English Contemporary Art based his assessments of English artists largely on British press biographies and interviews. Biographies in The Art Journal cited the Revue des Deux
Mondes as a source of critical reviews and information about English art
ists (biography of James Ward, The Art Journal [1855]: 47), indicating a
cross-channel sharing of press sources. Some biographers published in
several places; F.G. Stephens wrote a biography of James Clarke Hook for The Art Journal which became an Art Annual edition, and another
biography of Hook for The Portfolio. The circulation of knowledge was
further distilled, as press biographies later became books in popular series
published by periodicals' publishers (Codell, "Serialized Artists' Biogra
phies," 1999). George Newnes published a biographical series, Newnes
Art Library, and The Strand Magazine. George Virtue published The Art
Journal and its biographies as separate Annuals, as well as artists' biogra
phies in book form. Richmond Seeley published The Portfolio, and then
reprinted The Portfolio's biographies as series of monographs under the
title The Portfolio Artistic Monographs. As Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday the firm published The Portfolio's series "English Painters of the Present
Day" in several volumes of collections of essays in 1871. Cassell's pub lished The Magazine of Art and a biographical series, Gems of Art. Otto
Limited published biographies from The Connoisseur.
Press biographies then, widespread and recycled, successfully regulated the image of the artist, as the artist became a textual creation. Epstein describes biography as "an agent in the great chain of enterprise, another
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JULIE F. CODELL 29I
institutional channel through which the modern state can materially pro duce or reproduce the individual in this world" (Epstein, 1987, 67). Art
ists themselves attested to the importance of reading biographies. T.S.
Cooper wrote, "I had read every book I could get hold of about artists
and their work" (Cooper 7%), as did Benjamin Haydon: "Every life of
every great man he could get hold of he read eagerly. Let loose among his
father's books, he fed his sensibilities and excited his own ambition by
reading the lives of ambitious men" (Frederic Haydon 9). The architect
George Aitchison read the Life of Haydon by Tom Taylor (art critic for
the Times) to Frederic Leighton as he worked in the studio (Corkran 21).
Regulation of artists' personae became necessary as artists' cultural
importance demanded appropriate parameters around their behaviors. As
part of its process of regulation, serialized biographies ranged from Old
Masters to moderns, embedding moderns into a tradition it was also
simultaneously creating because that very "tradition" to which biogra
phies appealed was unofficial and still under construction. These series
had a cumulative effect beyond the merely additive one: issue after issue
spewed forth yet one more great English artist, indicating a "depth" of
British culture that became a kind of lay canon and as such validated the
cultural hegemony it was itself creating. Sometimes a biography was quite
literally about the subject, including quirks, anecdotes, reminiscences, while other lifewritings treated the personality in question as an embodi ment of a transcendental "Artist." Biographical subjects could take on
tremendous cultural responsibilities as "a means of evoking an essential
character and personality, an agent, in effect, of humanism" to produce what James Clifford called a "narrative of transindividual occasions"
(cited in Shortland/Yeo 14). Sometimes this self was further read as
embodying the personality of a nation.
Biographical literature and professional activity both endorsed an artist
brotherhood of cooperating, collaborating, sharing information, and
keeping women out. Few women artists appeared in press biographies or
individual biographies; there were enough to count on one hand - Kate
Greenaway, Helen Allingham, Henrietta Rae, Rosa Bonheur, Elizabeth
Thompson. The notion of artistic brethren was also a way of circling the
wagons against French Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and France's
growing popularity as a training ground for young British artists. As the
biographical discourse intersected with discourses of history, national
unity, gender, and race, the dominant trope of "brother artists" served to
metaphorize biological determinism to assure racial purity and bourgeois respectability. All English artists were thus "related," their genealogy resistant to degeneracy, except, of course, for those polluted through study in France.
In the art press serialized biographies first appeared in The Art Jour
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292 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
nal's original incarnation as The Art-Union. "Portraits of British Artists" was comprised of one-column long laudatory biographies that idealized
hard-work as the promise that the artist's "latest production has been
always his best" (on Frith, The Art Journal [1847]: 164). Maclise, for
example, was "a leading glory of the British School [...] whose fame has
been extended throughout Europe" (The Art Journal [1847]: 164). These
mini-biographies included engraved portraits of the artists done by other
artists - Maclise by Edward M. Ward and Frith by Augustus Egg - rein
forcing the brotherhood ideal (The Art Journal [1847]: 165). The Art
Union also ran a series "Great Masters of Art," long biographies of Old
Masters with full-page engravings of their major works. Thus, the journal
produced parallel sets of biographies of the living and the dead, their fame
leveled and equaled by such biographical attention and England's national
culture raised by association.
In 1855 The Art Journal began a series entitled "British Artists: their
Style and Character," illustrated by large full- or half-page engravings of
paintings by prominent engravers, such as the Dalziel Brothers, J. and G.
Nicholls, J.W. Whymper, Butterworth, and Heath. This series assumed a
metaphoric relationship between artists' characters and styles and sought to find a common denominator between these two. Each essay began
with a truism of progress: "there is a peculiar interest and pleasure in
watching the progress of a young artist, from the time when he manifests
such indications of superiority as to attract especial notice, through all the
several stages of advancement, till he has won for himself an imperishable name" (biography of Edwin Ward, The Art Journal [1855]: 45). The essay on Frederick Goodall divided artists into those who "seem always to live
in perpetual sunshine, others to dwell amid clouds and darkness"; some in
meditation, some light-hearted; some whose friends are lowly and some
whose friends are aristocrats (The Art Journal [1855]: 109). Artists were
set into a typology of characters and a trajectory of careers, in order that
artistic temperament and style could be locked together in a kind of twin
identity.
Popularity was not condemned but considered a sign that artists were
hard-working and acceptable to an equally industrious British public. Artists had a presumably organic artistic development. Artistic develop ment was likened to a plant, growing with "unfolding petals [...] towards
maturity and perfection" (biography of Edward Ward, The Art Journal
[1855]: 45). Such natural development could be damaged or halted if art
ists became either disheartened "by neglect," or "spoiled by injudicious
flattery and untimely success," or "overcome by indolence" (the dangers Ruskin warned against in The Political Economy of Art). Ideally artists
should persist through hardships by dint of "self-reliance to overcome"
difficulties and succeed: no man ever became great without working
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JULIE F. CODELL 293
assiduously for his object. Reputation is not to be had for the mere ask
ing" (biography of Edward Ward, The Art Journal [1855]: 45). Labor was a simpler value to define and recognize than was talent. The
discourse of heredity and environment invaded The Art Journal in
the area of inherited talent, and writers came down on both sides of the
debate: "Talent, or genius, is very far, as a rule from being hereditary; yet it would be strange indeed if it were not sometimes found descending from one generation to another when the individual is surrounded, even
from the cradle, by everything that would be able to develop, if not cre
ate, it," as in the case of Henrietta Ward, whose father, grandfather, mother, and husband were all artists (Dafforne, The Art Journal [1864]:
357). Yet even Ward was encouraged to "attain the highest position" by
diligence (359). A few years later, however, James Dafforne wrote, "Tal ent is often found to be hereditary" (biography of Stone, The Art Journal
[1869]: 33). Authors speculated that artists were set apart by tempera ment: "artists, as a body of men, are cast in a different mould; the nature
of their occupation, thoughtful, silent, sedentary, tends to promote that
peculiarity of feeling which seems to be an inherent portion of their exist
ence" even after their fame placed them beyond personal anxiety over
critics' comments (biography of Hook, The Art Journal [1856]: 41). But
they were also central to cultural improvement and thus active, as well as
"silent, sedentary": "One of the highest aims of artists ought to be to
make Art teacher of moral, of social, or of religious truths" (Dafforne,
biography of Redgrave, The Art Journal [1859]: 205).
Biography's discursivity with other topics such as biological determin
ism and philosophical idealism produced a set of contradictory ideologies about the artistic persona in The Art Journal. Series' changes in length, didacticism, and heroic idealism reflected an increasing professionalism, as well as a higher national profile of artists. From 1858 to i860 the series
"Tombs of British Artists" ran alongside "Living Artists," linking present and past into a vague continuity that became a "tradition." The 1859 "Personal Recollections of Artists" combined biography and anecdotage but ran for only a few issues. In 1873 a revised version of the original series on British artists, written by James Dafforne under a "Works of"
umbrella, focused more on works than on biography. In 1880 "Artists'
Studios" appeared complete with studio floor plans, followed in 1883 by the series "Artists Houses." Studios and houses were popular subjects and exposed a variety of new complex socio-economic issues that came to
replace the moral ones: the social arrivisme of artists, their material
wealth, and their success as measures of the sutured identities binding the
English artist to the English public. Homes and studios became rich symbols of artistic moral and national
character, reaching the status of fetishized spaces. In the 1881 series "The
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294 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
Homes of our Artists," The Magazine of Art featured Leighton and Mill
ais. Leighton's house was "a substantial modern building - a house of
generous and easy yet unpretentious size, not intended to cause astonish ment by its proportions and style," a "charming place," appropriately artistic in "its lucidity and its colour" (W. Meynell, The Magazine of Art
[1881]: 170). The house was described in extensive detail: ornaments, pic tures, colour of wood, glass, tiles, and every inch of every room, including
Leighton's considerable art collection, the only house essay with such
coverage in this series. Leighton brought Oriental splendor into a rela
tively modest home that somehow retained its Englishness. The Maga zine, like other journals and like the Annuals, used artists' homes for
didactic purposes: "the President's home is all the more delightful for
forming so complete a contrast to the majority of the Artists' Homes with
which we shall have to deal," most of which were subdued in colour, while Leighton's was rich and brilliant in colour and materials: "English habits and English tastes have always inclined to the use of homely rather
than stately materials," but Leighton's surfaces were rich and translucent, not opaque. Above all, however, his home was not just a matter of taste, but "of kindness and courtesy also" (Meynell, The Magazine of Art
[1881]: 176). Artists' homes expressed their Englishness or their improvement of
native tastes and styles. But homes could reflect other, very different val ues. In its lack of aestheticism, Millais's home reflected English good sense and a critique of fashionableness like Leighton's. It was "remark
able for absence of every kind of affectation. It is scarcely picturesque,
though not an impossible house to put into a picture. It is stately and
prosperous; and prosperity which is not obtrusive or self-assertive is in
itself rather a beautiful thing than otherwise" (Oldcastle, The Magazine
ofArt[iUi]: 290).
Why were artists' homes so special? Inspired by Millais's residence,
John Oldcastle felt compelled to equate the sale of artists' works to a loss, which made their homes a compensation or substitute for this loss and a
payment for their public service:
An artist chiefly serves others by his power; the picture which has been his secret
for a little time, his hope for many days, and his companion, is destined to be the
possession of strangers for ever after. [...] he must endure many pangs of parting.
Some of those dear children of his he may never see again [. . .] they have fallen
into the hands of the Philistines [.. .] in return for all this diffused good and plea sure, he has won for himself the pleasure of following his own
altogether unfet
tered choice in the building of his home. (295)
Thus the artists' homes were their justified return on their contributions
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JULIE F. CODELL 295
to others' pleasures, a kind of civil service, by which artists sacrificed
paintings that were metaphorically both their secrets and their children, a
psychological economy of art in which their creative power became pri mal.
As paintings embodied the artist's physical and psychological being (inner, secret, genetic offspring), artists' homes became a "secret" revealed
in biographies as displaced paintings or sculptures produced by a phallic creative force. In Lacanian terms, the home or, more often, the home
cum-studio, replaced a lack, a loss of phallic power deposited in the art
object, the product of this power. This psychological economy of
exchange had literal economic resonances, too, as the loss through the sale
of an art work could become a gain, if the art work appreciated and
increased its worth later, or the artist's fame increased the prices for his or
her paintings. The home then was a function of the value (economic and
cultural capital) of the artist's work and reputation and so was fetishized to serve as a substitute for the artists' lack, the lost art works borne out of
creative phallic energy and borne into the public realm. It also substituted
for the readers' lack, unable as most of them were to purchase original works. Most readers were limited to prints and reproductions in biogra
phies as the means by which they also "owned" artists and thus collec
tively shared the medium of culture. Biographies then replaced what
readers' lacked, and this may explain in part the fetishization of artists'
biographies in the press and the book industry. As Giles Walkley thoroughly demonstrates, artists' home studios were
heavily symbolic and marked artists as professionals. Studios were both
part of the home and separate, sites of both domestication and work. I
would also argue that the home studio crossed boundaries by masculiniz
ing the home, usually identified with Victorian femininity. Here, too, a
political economy of art emerged: by placing the artist's work site within the home, the studio appeared to "restore" the idealized cottage industry that appealed to Victorian nostalgia for a presumed pre-industrial unity of
work and life, while it protected the artist in a cloistered environment. This restoration of pre-industrial ideals and prelapsarian enclosures may
partially account for the near obsession with artists' studios and their ele
vation into an architectural genre, from the modular iron removable stu
dios of mid-century to single and multiple studio flats and fashionable
"studio-houses" of the late century: "the great proliferation of a single
building type in the English capital was the result of a craze" due, in
Walkley's view, to "the rise of professionalism among artists" for which "the heavenly, all facilitating studio represented both an inspirational tool
and material proof of the professional approach" as it also "removed the
suspicion of amateurism from the person based erstwhile in makeshift domestic surroundings" (Walkley xxiii-xxiv).
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296 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
I would add to Walkley's explanation that the symbolic importance of
the studio was a cleansing of the bohemianism and moral suspicion of stu
dios which were represented in fiction as chaotic, dirty, entropie, and
immoral, partly due to the presence of models (Jeffares). Other forms of
studio defense, such as the series on artists' behavior in The Magazine of Art which humorously demystified the studio "smoke" and defended life
studies from the nude shared with biographies a scrutiny riveted on stu
dios. Floor plans and descriptions of artists' studio-houses in The Archi tect further demystified this charged space (Walkley has many examples of this; 109). Advocating a professional image of artists, Richard Redgrave
promoted "the notion of a model house of the professional suburban art
ist," which eventually became paradigmatic (Walkley 34). Artists moved to upscale areas in hopes of attracting, or living among, potential consum
ers. Thomas Woolner "reckoned that a transfer to the heartland of the art
consumer was called for," and moved to the central West End where he
leased a house for ?1200 (Walkley 45). Artists competed with each other to build bigger and more elaborate homes (Luke Fildes and Marcus Stone,
Walkley 63), and women artists were included among the clients for stu
dio houses (e.g., Louise Jopling, Walkley 84, and Kate Greenaway, Walk
ley 113-14)). Such undesirables as models came up the servants' stairs, and thus artists separated themselves socially from the more morally troublesome participants who threatened to infect their homes. In this
way, they could assure clients and the public that their social status and
adherence to the order mirrored the public's and their patrons' expecta
tions (Walkley 50). Walkley points out that artists such as Val Prinsep and
Leighton were "virtual nouveaux-riches members of the middle classes"
and thus involved in property rents and merchant shipping, as well as art, but they used their homes to set themselves apart as artists by creating
unique spaces "to distinguish the paintings they produced in them"
(Walkley 56). Walkley shows that artists carefully calculated their choices
of neighborhoods, studio structures, and home architecture (e.g., Richard
Ansdell or Edward Cooke; Walkley 36), and these calculations were often
collective, artists living in adjoining houses or in the same neighborhoods
(Walkley 37). Biographies often took the form of interviews inside artists' homes and
studios. The core of artists' interviews was the assurance of the interview
subject's authenticity or reality, defined as the consistency between the
work and the character of the great men in often luxurious studios. Rich
ard Salmon argues, however, that the interview undermined the very inti
macy it promised. He recognizes the transference of interest after mid
century from the author's work to the author's life, making authors mar
ketable commodities "products to be circulated and consumed" (Salmon
159). As The Art Journal quote above indicated, artists, too, became com
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JULIE F. CODELL ^ 97
modified as public property (White and White; Codell, 1995). Salmon
argues that the interviewer surveyed the biographical subject, including home and writing desk, to project an "authentic" self, "revealed" by the
author (Salmon 161-62). Being the subject of an interview in situ assumed a celebrity, worthy of the "cultural distinction which the interview con
fers upon its subject." The home or studio setting further authenticated
the subject's interviewability turning the surveillance into spectacle (162). The homes (or writing spaces in interviews of famous authors) were
sometimes referred to as shrines, and furnishings became fetishes of
authors' personalities and creative processes: "the home encoded the dis
tinctive cultural and epistemological assumptions of the interview in the
material substance of its location [...] often explicitly read as a domain of
revelatory signs," of, among other things, the author's privacy as inner
"sanctum" (164-66). Such overreadings and projections abounded in
biographers' attentions to artists' studios, fueled by popular beliefs about
studios not as real work places, but as untamed, morally ambiguous sites.
Finally, Salmon makes the point that the repetition of these topics as
"hermeneutical strategies" meant that the individuality of the biographi cal subject, what the interview promised to reveal, became the individual
ity of all such biographical subjects (e.g., three hundred articles were
collected in Edmund Yates's three-volumes Celebrities at Home which ran for six years in the World). Celebrity intimacy was an oxymoron, even a parody of itself, as some Victorians recognized (Salmon 168-69).
Repetitions and serialization also allowed a discursivity within and
between series. As a nationalist discourse emerged, each artist bore his or
her cultural contribution to the dominant belief that among all the
"schools" of art in history and all nations "not one presents a parallel case
of rapid improvement to our own," British art having attained in one cen
tury a distinction other nations took several centuries to attain. Such
national success was presumably due to Protestantism and the greatness of English literature as the subject of painting (biography of Frith, The
Art Journal [18 56]: 237). The most repeated theme of hard work justified the art's worth as
investment. Biographies openly assured readers of investment value: The
Art Journal constantly referred to its continuous watch over young
"promising" artists: "we have carefully watched," "our eye has ever been
upon" (biography of Edward Ward, The Art Journal [1855]: 45). Writing a biography on an artist was an investment that sometimes did not pay off: "some among those we had singled out from the ranks of our painters have not fulfilled the promise of their youth; they have stopped far short
of the point at which we predicted they would arrive" (Ward 45). Biogra phies referred to previous biographies of artists in the same journal as evi
dence that the journal or critic spotted talents early, thus making their
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298 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
economic speculations correct, so that "their" artists' stock rose (biogra
phy of Redgrave, The Art Journal [1859]: 205). But overexposure could
damage market values. In his 1861 biography of T.S. Cooper, James Daf
forne commented on the increasing difficulty of the biographical task "in
proportion to the demand already made on our attention by the artists
themselves, through their works, or by notices of one kind or another
which have previously been published in the pages of the Journal: thus the
subject is, in a manner, exhausted, or we run the risk, by re-entering the
field of investigation, of multiplying words, without increasing the infor
mation we desire to afford," so common had the biographical subjects become, so numerous the artists and works, and so repetitive and recycled the information (The Art Journal [1861]: 133, referred to Cooper's auto
biography in the 1849 The Art Journal). The Art Journal was not alone in perpetuating this complex discourse.
The Magazine of Art ran several biographical series from 1878 to 1904 and after 1900 had series on photographers, etchers, and younger or "ris
ing" artists, an investment category. Its essays were generally brief and
chronological without the heroism or moralizing of The Art Journal. "Our Living Artists" abbreviated the genre, recognizing the limitations of
press biographies. Authors apologized for the magazine's inability to
address the life and work in any depth (Meynell, biography of G.F. Watts
[1878]: 241) or its inadequacy in fully estimating the value of living paint ers (Fenn, biography of Noel Paton, The Magazine of Art [1880]: 73). Each issue opened with a life sketch on the first page. The Magazine of Art's biographies praised artists for historical rather than moral reasons
and in a cooler tone than The Art fournal. It insisted that English art
could be modern and also part of the "great tradition," a complex defense
against the claims of French modernism encroaching on the market.
Burne-Jones, although "essentially and entirely modern" in his world
weariness and despairing tone (Phillips, The Magazine of Art [1885]: 288), was also "the legitimate successor of the Great Florentines of the Fif
teenth Century, the exponent of their methods, the interpreter of their
aims, and the guide who aspires to lead art back to the paths from which it
had since strayed" (286-87). The series was unconcerned with typologies or the didactic character of
artists. Its context for evaluation was the volatility of public taste, and
thus of the market: the lack of public favor for antiquarian painting and
costume pictures in the biography of Seymour Lucas (Penderel
Brodhurst, The Magazine of Art [1888]: 1); the decline of the public's interest in the Newlyn School by the time of Frank Bramley's biography in 1903 (Hiatt, The Magazine of Art [1904]: 54). Artists were instantly
placed in the context of popular identifications of them with a genre,
style, or subject. These contemporary contexts were consistent with the
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JULIE F. CODELL 299
magazine's general attention to economic issues such as market fluctua
tions, annual auction sales, copyright laws, utilitarian decoration, adver
tising, and the market for new popular forms, such as artistic postcards. Frith's biography included prices of his works and their market apprecia tion. His illustrations to Dickens went for ?20 pounds each, selling for over ?1000 after the author's death (Fenn, The Magazine of Art 2 [1879]: 81). The journal often argued that the most popular was often the best, and Frith was praised for the popularity of his works (83).
Artists' entrepreneurship was key. Elizabeth Butler "saw at a glance that by the good luck of genius this field lay awaiting her; and this percep tion has undoubtedly been the foundation of her successes." She adapted the right mode for the job: "nowhere is realism better placed than on the canvas of the battle-painter. The situations and emotions of history, of
romance, and of actual life need idealising" (Oldcastle, The Magazine of Art 2 [1879]: 258). Furthermore her advance to professional status was
initiated "by entering simply and ingenuously into the market of sale and
purchase that she could fairly measure herself with her brothers of the
brush," though readers were reassured that she advocated only women's
right to work, not to vote or to legislate: "though personal conspicuous ness and public appearance have always been repugnant to her nature, she confesses to the nobler ambition of fame through her labours" (260). Still feminine in her recoiling from public space (hardly a recoil considering she exhibited annually for decades and published her sketchbooks, dia
ries, and autobiography), she negotiated her desire for fame into a "nobler ambition" that was the consequence of work, not directly of money, and thus was hygienicized from filthy lucre to duty. Work, not simply sales,
was made the measure of her painting's worth. Thus, Butler was
redeemed from her own success (and possible loss of femininity) by a
"nobler" calling. Her works, recounted in succession, became the events
of her life, as she was written into a professional biography with ambigu ous praise: "If she wields the brush at sixty, as we hope she may do, she
will be then, as she is now, and as she desires to be always - a student"
(262) - and presumably never a master! Such were the ambivalent terms
of biographical and critical assessments of successful women artists. Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's skill set her apart from other women and
threatened her gendered identity through masquerade: "For so full and firm a grip of a pencil seldom falls to the lot of a woman. Happily there is next to no bravura lurking in Miss Brickdale's handling. She does not
masquerade in the outward habiliment of any given master's manner"
(Dixon 262). Although her pencil was firm as a man's, she was still reas
suringly feminine, forsaking men's clothes, "the outward habiliment" of a
"master."
Frank Holl was the subject of biographies in The Art Journal in 1876
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300 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
and in The Magazine of Art in 1880, bracketing Holl's 1878 admission to
the RA as an Associate. A brief summary of these two articles on Holl
will expose the strategies for representing the artist and the extent to
which market considerations formed a part of the narrative of biographi cal criticism in the press. The 1876 article by James Dafforne began with an abstract evaluation of heredity and talent, a common topic through
which he meandered over issues of how much talent is passed from father to son and sons who exceeded their fathers, finally reaching his destina
tion: fathers who were engravers whose sons became painters, the case
with Holl (Dafforne, The Art Journal [1876]: 10), thus naturalizing artis
tic production as biological talent. Dafforne over-read Holl's paintings,
describing absent characters, e.g., the presumed but undepicted drunken
husband of the wife depicted pawning her wedding ring (11), an event
whose causes could be many. Speculating on the absence of Holl's works
in the RA exhibition of 1879, Dafforne admonished artists who procrasti nated about beginning works intended for the RA exhibition, admitting that this may have no relevance to Holl, whose reason for not exhibiting for a few years he did not know: "These remarks are not by any means
intended to apply to Mr. Holl; they are made solely with the view of stim
ulating the dilatory to 'take time by the forelock'" (12).
Branding artists as procrastinators, Dafforne ended with a moral tale of
economic purpose. From the beginning of this essay, Dafforne cited his own earlier assessments of Holl, admitting that he missed a few of Holl's
early works, while quoting The Art Journal's earlier reviews of them (11). Dafforne's frequent self-citations reflected the economic motivation of
these biographical reviews. By harping on the magazine's ability to spot talent early, Dafforne argued for the continued readership for the maga zine - those who read will know earlier than others in which artists to
invest. For this reason, too, Dafforne admonished Holl to paint "the
sunny side of human nature," since the public did not favor his typically sad subjects (12). Dafforne predicted a "high reputation and, it is to be
hoped, fortune," and thus advised Holl to go for happier images. Sugges tions of popular topics, Dafforne's reiterations of his prescience as a critic, and predictions of the artist's fortune (and readers' investments)
- all
reflected the magazine's self-justification as a market tool for consumers
and for artists who heeded Dafforne's advice.
The Magazine of Art praised Holl's subjects of unsentimental pathos which provoked "the interest of the public" (W. Meynell, The Magazine
of Art [1880]: 191). Wilfrid Meynell, the author of this biography, recog nized in the very beginning that artists were chosen for this series for their
success, and Holl's had been very swift (187). Admitting this, he noted
that the two-year scholarship Holl received was rejected because he did not like being in Italy, a point Dafforne did not mention, focusing only
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JULIE F. CODELL 3OI
on the successful prize, not its rejection. Meynell explained this as charac
teristic of Holl's Englishness and of his awareness that he was too young and inexperienced to understand those Old Masters to whom he would
return later in life (190). To have spent time among past masters would
have caused his art to become conventional and mannered; the solution was to improve and attend to nature and thus nurture his individuality and originality. Meynell spent much less time describing the emotional
content of Holl's paintings and much more time appreciating his unsenti
mental depiction of hardship subjects (187-189). He concluded with
praise for Holl's portraits and for the renascence of portraiture in
England in the 1880s, partly due to foreign influence over a "somewhat
insulated English capacity." Meynell argued for Holl's international rep
utation, citing American successes, and described the poetic quality of
Holl's light and compositions, deflecting concerns over his "sad" subjects to more technical topics. In conclusion, Meynell argued that Holl was
"fresh blood" for the RA, his "brother painters" (190-91). Holl thus
bonded to the nation and identified himself with the brotherhood of the
Academy and the rise of English portraiture. By emphasizing technical,
national, and professional topics, Meynell forged a more professional discourse than Dafforne's, and ignored issues of investment for issues
of national and professional identity. Holl's successful admission into
the ranks of the RA in 1878 may have helped shift the discourse to
a more professional focus and away from concerns with popularity and
economics.
In addition to lifewritings in the British art press, the general press also
contained lifewritings: Scribner's in America ran a series on British artists, and biographies appeared in Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly
Review.} The Athenaeum regularly reviewed biographies, biographical dictionaries, biographies in book series, and biographies as history,
including series published in France and Germany. Art Annuals pub lished by The Art Journal produced a steady stream of artists' biographies in which the theme of struggle rewarded by success was repeated regu
larly at Christmas and at Easter. Artists' biographies in general periodi cals varied in length but tended to identify artists by popular tags: for
example, Watts was the idealist seeking to realize "the restoration of Art to her true and noblest function, and the personal self-sacrifice of every
worker in the commonwealth for the common good," according to Spiel mann's 1897 article, "Mr. G.F. Watts: His Art and his Mission," in Nine
teenth Century ([1897]: 161-72). Nineteenth Century published lengthy
biographies, such as Julia Ady Cartwright's "Jean Francois Millet"
(almost twenty pages). This essay included the economic fortunes of Mil
let's paintings, such as The ?ngelus which he had trouble selling but
which fetched ?8000 after several sales (433) and in France went from
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302 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
2000 francs to 50,000 francs (437). His trajectory was marked by many
years of struggle and poverty until he reached fame, a slow progress that
became interpreted as a sign of the "endurance" of his work, rivaling the
"frieze of the Parthenon" and "the frescoes of Michael Angelo" (438),
typical of biographical hyperbole and advertising rhetoric (e.g., Spiel mann 168-69).
Press biographies over time measured changing reputations and the
emphasis on respectability. Burne-Jones appeared as a degenerate who
expressed "unhealthy morbidness of conception" like Shelley and Blake
and exhibited paintings of "twilight broodings" according to William
Davies' 1873 article in Quarterly Review (332). Subsequent biographers
sought to redeem him from this reputation. By the end of the century he was hailed as one of the greatest English artists and was among the most
popular biographical subjects in the press and in books. Other artists were also redeemed from moral suspicion. Cosmo Monkhouse's biogra
phy of Edward Poynter in Scribner's Magazine (22 [July-Dec, 1897]: 701
719) contained a large number of drawings and studies including many nudes. Poynter's life was described as one of hard work marked by few
incidents outside his home and his profession, characterized by his long
marriage and long residence at Albert Gate and in his studio on Bromp ton Road, "a situation as distinguished and modest as his own character"
(718), a reference sure to dispel any unclean notions about Poynter, his
nudes, and studio affairs. A major source of artists' biographies were Art Annuals published
between 1884 and 1909. These were saturated with the political economy of art and consolidated issues over artists' images as prelapsarian or bohe
mian and the conflicts over appropriate environs. These biographies also
included interviews that revealed imperial, racial, and class hostilities that
only further sutured artists as to the social order. Art Annual biographies were 1/2 crown and seven of them could be bound in a special cloth gild
binding for 2/6. They were about 3 5 pages in length; later biographies had
more illustrations, up to 60 in the 1906 biography of Alfred Waterhouse
when the price for individual numbers increased to 2/6. The 1900 entry was on British artists in South Africa with Boer War illustrations. The
series, almost entirely on Royal Academicians, also included Elizabeth
Butler as the token female British artist and three foreign artists, Rosa
Bonheur, Briton Riviere, and J. L. E. Meissonier, the latter an honorary member of the RA. The contents were divided into education, house, and
studio.
To represent Englishness properly, the artist had to be materially suc
cessful while at the same time disavowing economic motives. The initial
number by Mrs. Lang on Frederic Leighton began with a defense of the
Academy. Lang described the Presidency as requiring "a man of much
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JULIE F. CODELL 303
social tact, a good businessman" (7). But despite being good businessmen,
English artists
do not yield to the exigencies of political economy in Art. They are always search
ing, always advancing, always approaching the fortress of art, from every side and
by every legitimate means; always, above all, such artists are unsparing of their
labour. The journeyman in Art, like the journeyman in letters, is too much with us. He has entered the camp of the world, and must sell his labour, at
cheapest cost to himself, in the highest market. To counterbalance his influence, Nature
provides a constant series of young men, new
generations not yet tamed by mar
riage and the world on one side; and, on the other, such steady followers of Art
for her own sake as Mr. Watts, Mr. Burne-Jones, and the President. Their work
has a kind of moral value, rising from its individuality and distinction, apart from
its quality and defects as painting
or sculpture. (32)
Here Lang acknowledges Leighton's success but denies it as his motiva
tion.
Walter Armstrong's biography of Millais revised and cleansed Pre
Raphaelitism from a radical rebellion to a mere "wave of impatience with
stereotyped fashion, which swept over the country in the early part of the
present reign. [...] Earnestness was the new watchword," making the
movement evangelical and softening its criticism of the RA, since by 1885 the former Pre-Raphaelite founder Millais was himself an Academician.
The Pre-Raphaelites were hygienicized and their youthful exuberance
indulged (3), so Millais could be respectable from youth to maturity. Most striking, however, was Armstrong's interview with Millais in
which the artist articulated imperialist and racist notions which were then
folded into his Englishness. Wanting to paint a picture of Christ's dictum to "suffer little children to come unto" him, Millais lamented the reality that the empirical British public would expect him to depict Semitic chil
dren:
what children do we care about? Why our own fair English children, of course;
not the brown, bead-eyed, simious-looking children of Syria. And with what sense of fitness could I paint the Saviour bare-headed under the sun of Palestine,
surrounded by dusky, gypsy-like children or, on the other hand, translate the
whole scene to England? The public is too critical to bear this kind of thing now.
(25).
Armstrong lamented the lost innocence of the artist and the art world
amidst such realism: "The world - the modern Art-world - is now so old, it knows and demands so much that the naivete of Vermeer must not be
looked for in any of those who paint its pictures" (32). Millais's imperial
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304 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
Englishness extended to his house: "None of the thought-out quaintness of the Anglo-Dutch revival, but a great plain, square house with an
excrescence here and there demanded by convenience," with severe orna
ments and Roman columns, creating an effect like "that of a Genoese [sic]
palazzo" (29). His studio was distinguished by its masculine simplicity: "There are no cunningly devised corners, or galleries, or inglenooks or
window-seats," and it was filled with easels for work, not socializing (30). Alma Tadema, whose "Anglo-Dutch revival" was lampooned by Arm
strong, had one of the most luxurious home studios among Victorian art
ists. Helen Zimmern's biography of the artist followed the convention of
describing the studio as a metaphor for the artist's virtues: "no superflu ous rooms, such as drawing-rooms and merely fancy apartments. All
there is, is to be of use" (30). However, as Walkley notes, this "modest
residence" had 66 rooms, including an atrium, a billiard room, and a large cellar for mineral waters, plus studios for his wife Laura and his daughter
Anna. Such differences point up clearly the ideological purposes of these
biographies and the nature of the conflicts over images of studios as
potential signifiers of greed, ostentation, commercialism, and social ambi
tions.
Zimmern deflected potential accusations of the artist as ostentatious or
degenerate by contrasting his studio to his wife's, which gave him by con
trast the virtues of masculinity, utility, and simplicity. The studio of Laura Alma Tadema, also an active professional artist, contained Mexican
onyx on the windows, a grand piano of oak, ivory, mother of pearl, and
tortoiseshell, and red velvet embroidery from "some Venetian palace," all
done by four Dutch workmen brought over for this purpose. Thus, her
studio's luxury by contrast deflected charges of ostentation from her hus
band and tied luxury to femininity and decoration. In Laura's studio such
luxury could be more safely indulged, fortifying the association of art
making with mere female accomplishment and decoration to preserve Laura's "femininity" (31), while this deflection also preserved her hus
band's "masculinity" and professionalism. Zimmern assured her readers that Alma Tadema was "mentally
healthy" and his works "wholesome and pure" as only a healthy body and mind combined can produce (3). "Health" was a common term in the
literature of degeneracy and artists were often defended as wholesome or
healthy in biographies to distinguish them from French artists' degener acy or from their debased fictional counterparts. Biographies insisted that
successful artists were by nature indifferent to their success and motivated
by determination and hard work, a common "misrecognition," to use
Bourdieu's word, in these biographies. Thus, being an arduous worker, Alma-Tadema succeeded against all odds (Zimmern 3). He produced his
best work, moral commentaries on the Romans, after moving to England.
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JULIE F. CODELL 305
Zimmern was dutifully hyperbolic - his work was "splendid," "remark
able," "superb," and evoked "power."
Zimmern's biography included an interview which, in this case, opened with a stereotype of the inarticulate, "innocent" artist: "Artists, as a rule, have rarely the power of literary expression, can rarely formulate their
ideas concerning their craft [...] an instinctive rather than a theoretical
embodiment [...] he has, of course, his views on Art, and most interesting
they are, as the views of a worker in any profession must always be, and
above all the views of a master workman" (27). Zimmern placed the artist
between artisan and professional but in the artisanal tradition as a master
workman. He fulfilled her stereotype, leaving her to be the articulate, log ical, rational one of the two. Interestingly, she noted that there was a large
public interested in his views on art, one of the few references to the read
ing public in these biographical interviews. The remainder of the inter
view consisted of long quotations from the artist.
Finally, Zimmern assured her readers that Alma-Tadema was not
"led astray by success; he grows, if possible, yet more self-exacting, self
critical, he never loses sight of the fact that "noblesse oblige." He was
original although all his works expressed one idea, making him "homoge neous throughout" (29), the vision of a unified self. Despite this, he was
also truly original, "like sturdy rock in the smooth sea of a tame and con
ventional world," though also well-known to "London society" (29). Alma-Tadema emerged from this biography as an ideal Victorian artist -
original but not anti-social or eccentric, successful but unmotivated by social or economic desires, and prelapsarian and unFallen in his "inarticu
lateness," despite lengthy quotes of his words. F.G. Stephens's biography of Hook, noting that there were already
four others in existence, portrayed the ultimate English artist. Hook
defended the RA's refusal to open its exhibitions for free to the "proletar iat" (5), anathema to Hook who loved riding to the hounds, rabbit shoot
ing and boating (6). His studio was "sincere [...] made for living in, and
everywhere a home. [...] everything on the walls is English" (26). Stephens contrasted Hook's studio with Millais's:
It will be seen that Mr. Hook's studio differs in most respects, including size,
from that of Sir John Millais, which is a luxuriously appointed smaller chamber, with lofty and stately doors of polished wood, having carpets all over the floor, and enriched with couches and easy-chairs for those who sit for their portraits. It
differs from Mr. Alma-Tadema's grand Pompeian hall, with its ambo, having a
semi-dome plated with aluminum, its superb bench, exquisitely carved and sump
tuously cushioned, as well as inlaid with ivory and ebony, covered with Tyrian silk, and embroidered in lovely patterns," and it is not like the "studios made in
Greece, as is the case in Sir. F. Leighton's magnificent atelier at Kensington. Each
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3o6 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
of these chambers is a place of steadfast work and great fame. As the studios differ,
so the mansion at Silverbeck, where the sun shines, the birds sing and the pure
wind whispers in the trees, differs from the great house lined with marble at Pal ace Gate, from the Greco-Roman villa at St. John's Wood and from the P.R.A.'s
elegant Italian palazzo near Holland Park (28).
This is a stunningly nationalistic inscription on the studio: studios of
Leighton, Millais and Alma-Tadema approached foreignness, ateliers and
palazzi modeled on Pompeii or Greece and used for social purposes as
well as for work. Hook embodied Englishness: his clothes were home
spun, his opinions forthcoming, and his body "thin-flanked, broad
shouldered, and muscular" (32). Other artists were also masculinized:
Luke Fildes was a "manly man" in his biography (31), while Marcus
Stone never appealed "to any craving for sensationalism" and his figures were "undisturbed by any sordid emotions [...] properly ordered passions
[...] obeying the laws of self-repression laid down by good society," and
thus not the work of a degenerate aesthete (4-5). Artists controlled the content of these biographies not only through
interviews, but in some cases through their own selection of authors. Wil
liam Holman Hunt had the Archdeacon Farrar co-author his Art Annual
biography with Alice Meynell to emphasize the religious content of his
lucrative Biblical paintings, the works with which Hunt most identified
himself (Landow). Farrar insisted that Hunt made less money than he
could have earned, if he "merely followed the practice of the ordinary run
of painters," and that his pay for Finding the Saviour, the extraordinary sum of 5500 guineas, represented several years' wages (16). What better
way to dispel accusations of greed than by having a cleric do the dispel
ling! Hunt's home and studio were subjects of Meynell's portion of the
biography and these environs re-enforced Farrar's image of the artist: his
studio "needs no adornments sought for their own sake. The walls are
rich with gleanings from all kinds of travel, here it is a working studio, and very simple" with "signs of constant reading," presenting Hunt as
sincere, traveled, and intelligent. Art Annuals were sites of contention over the proper studios and
houses for artists, social and luxurious, or simple and English. But
comfort was also a value. Marcus Stone's house had "nothing of the
incongruity between genius and its surrounding, the contrast between a
poverty-stricken studio and the great works of art produced in it on
which novelists are so prone to enlarge." His house was "conspicuous for
its aspect of comfort and artistic appropriateness [...] in keeping with his
tastes. His studio, for instance, is no mere workshop with bare walls and
unkempt appearance" but large enough to occupy nearly the whole of the
upperpart of the house" (Baldry 27). This is a curious switch from
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JULIE F. CODELL 307
Stephens's commentary on sumptuous studios and homes; here Stone is
praised for having a house that is not poor or bare, falsely simple, undo
mestically "unkempt," but decorated according to "artistic appropriate ness" (31). Sometimes the defense of the artist was strident because of
obvious economic and social success: Little insisted that Orchardson
"never prostitutes his high abilities to pander to lasciviousness [...] sickly
moralising, or special pleading of any kind"; he kept "the manner of a
healthy-minded and sane man of affairs and man of the world," including "his excellent robust virility" (15). Lady Butler's studio was that "of a
hard worker rather than of a petit-maitre [...] on the business-like walls
are no evidence that she has ever given herself to the subtleties of bric-a
brac; no pieces of precious colour drops from screens, no stuffed pea cocks stand gaily on guard, and no orange trees in flower tempt you to
linger. It is an ascetic work-place rather than an aesthetic showroom" (W.
Meynell, Art Annual [1898]: 23). Butler was ascetic, hard working, a pro fessional (not a miniature version of one, "petit-maitre") and still an
uneconomic, prelapsarian virgin, having never "given herself" to luxury! Even after 1900, Art Annual biographies promoted Victorian values
and discourse - the work ethic, the uneventful life, success in the market, ideal motives, and social parity with their patrons (Dibdin 28). This series
was a culmination of forty years of debates on artists' social and economic
functions and moral character. A changed discourse, however, began to
appear in the press around the mid-i88os. Starting in 1886, The Art Jour nal's series "Biographies of Artists" included Continental artists, Old
Masters, and women, e.g., Rosalba Camera in 1886, Maude Goodman in
1887, Helen Allingham in 1888, Marianne Stokes, Celia Elvetus, Mrs.
Traquair, and Miss K. Cameron in 1900, Henrietta Rae in 1901, Kate
Greenaway in 1902, and Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes in 1904. This series
incorporated previous Art Annual biographies. By 1898 this was an
extensive series with forty-eight biographies including many minor Asso
ciates, photographers, and several foreigners and Old Masters. In subse
quent years the number of biographies ranged from 24 (1899) to 28
(1903). In 1891 The Art Journal began a humorous series entitled "Draw
ings of Artists in their Studios" which did not run again. Despite the per sistence of biographies between 1847 and 1904, series changed over time
from didactic to professional, from describing artists as embodying moral
truths in an elevated language, to casual accounts of artists' training, travel, and works. The cool tone of "Biographies of Artists" contrasted
sharply with the moralizing of the 1850s biographies. The artist-subject
changed from almost exclusively Academicians and Associates to non
RA artists, women, and foreigners, as the RA was losing its authority to
new professional and international societies (Codell 1995). Some periodi cals treated biographies with contempt, indicating a shift toward profes
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3o8 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
sionalism and a modern separation of art works and artists from moral
imperatives. The Portfolio ran several series on contemporary English and French artists, and on printmakers, especially etchers, the special interest of its editor Philip Hamerton (Codell 1987). These contained very little
biography and were almost entirely about works of art and aesthetics, another of the editor's interests. Perhaps because Hamerton was a print
maker, he did not have the idolatrous view of artists associated with
painters, and so did not seek to unify art and life, or style and character.
The focus on art works rather than artists was part of the journal's
emphasis on connoisseurship and professionalism, as reflected in the
journal's title. The Portfolio appears to have had little interested in artistic
personalities, focusing instead on the professional concerns, perhaps because of its mission to accommodate printmakers in all media to the status of painters as fine artists, but without personality cults, fetishism, and anecdotage.
Later art periodicals reduced or eliminated biographies in favor of criti
cal essays on individual artists, perhaps reflecting the glut of biographies in the book trade and the specialized interests of a new more sophisticated art readership more interested in connoisseurship or technique than in
didacticism in art. The Studio, starting in 1894, examined artists from all over Europe and the colonies, and from the US as well, focusing not just on establishment painters but on young artists, women artists, illustra
tors, designers, and architects. The Studio offered specialist topics, as in the series on French Pastellists in 1904, like The Portfolio's series on
engravers, indicating a more articulated market with buyers focused on
specific genres. Most interesting was The Studio's treatment of biography. Harriet
Ford writing on Marianne Stokes did not describe her experiences but
interiorized them. On Stokes' art education in Paris, Ford ignored people and places and concentrated on Stokes' changed consciousness: "Vague and vapoury ideas of art gave place, under a merciless system, to hard
headed logic, a looseness of method to a just and positive observation"
(152). "An Artist's House" by architect M.H. Baillie Scott used line
drawings, not photographs, to illustrate an ideal artist's house, not the
home of a particular artist (28-37). Studios were the subject of a series, but unlike its predecessors The Studio's series did not depict rooms or
exteriors of studios, nor were artists shown working in their studios as
they were in the 1860s and 70s. Studios were always "devoid of ornament, outside or in" in this series (S.E.B., on Flenry Scott Tuke, The Studio 5
[1895]: 93), as this series was not about the materiality of the studio in its
wealth and spaciousness. The interviewer was "not making an inventory" but remained seated and relaxed, even playful in conversation with the
artist (on Whistler, The Studio 4 [1894]: 116). The Studio eradicated the
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JULIE F. CODELL 309
biography, as it erased images of the artist's body, home, and studio. This
journal believed that "the principles taught are of infinitely more moment
than the private opinion of the man who happens to be the medium
through which these principles are conveyed to the younger members of the profession" (Baldry, "The Work of Solomon J. Solomon, A.R.A."
The Studio S [1S96]: io).4
Biography had become a degraded popular, populist, and philistine genre for this aestheticist publication. Aligned with this aestheticism, the
journal's reproductions were often prints or line drawings rather than
photographs to convey the "artisticness" of the image, not simply its real ism. Decorative illustrators were as likely to be subjects of essays as were
painters (e.g., Watson, "Miss Jessie King and Her Work," The Studio 16
[1902]: 177-88). The Studio's disembodied presentation of artists was
matched by its aversion to citing prices or discussing material success in
general. At the series' end, artists' studios and homes appeared less impor tant and sometimes were not even depicted, the bourgeoisification of the artist having become either so complete that it needed no more mention, or so banal as to be uninteresting.
Biographers claimed artists to be representatives of their age and nation
(Salmon 42). The new journalism addressed issues similar to those faced
by artists seeking consumers: entrepreneurial publicity, professionaliza tion, and an audience expanded to newly literate working classes. Art
journalists and artists had much in common in their professional activi
ties, and it is not surprising that they worked together to promote each other and a set of shared ideals and intentions through the new journal ism's practices of investigation, interview, and advertising hyperbole, to
suturing readers to subjects and readers to
periodicals. In artists' biogra
phies these practices were folded into ideals of heroism, national identity, and cultural dominance exemplified by those artists deemed representa tive of "Englishness" by virtue of their success, domesticity, manliness, and discretion (e.g., Orchardson "never prostitutes his high abilities").
Ironically but not surprisingly, interviews of artists in their sumptuous spaces "revealed" their idealism and heroic virtues as fulfilling a presumed unity of style and character. The intimacy promised by interviews
included Millais's imperial racism and Hook's hostility to the working classes, these being part of the acceptable views of the classes to which artists aspired, further aligning them with hegemonic social, political, and
cultural ideologies.
Finally, there are other sources of biography endemic to the press, such as obituaries that briefly recapitulated an artist's life, and book reviews of
serialized biographies which often summarized biographies and thus pro duced an abbreviated biography. The domestication of artists was not
unique to the art press: The Times ran a series called "Celebrities at
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310 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
Home," for example (Salmon 41). There were also satires and take-offs on
biography. In 1877 The Athenaeum, which published many book reviews
of artists' biographies, ran a humorous paragraph entitled "Turner's
Trousers" (2626 [Feb 23, 1878]: 259), which played on the fetishization of
any rag touched by a great artist. Victorians were well aware of their
heroizing tendencies; they produced a vast literature on biography in the
press in which they debated issues of historicity and didactic purpose and even satirized their own tendency to idealize the biographical subject (Nadel). Into this Victorian debate over biography, artist subjects intro
duced economic measures of success, from large home studios to appreci ated prices and investment values of art, and a new role for artists as
representatives of Englishness and creators of a national culture in their art and in their lives.
Arizona State University
NOTES
* I wish to thank my colleagues Debra Mancoff, Susan Casteras, and Dianne
Sachko Macleod who read and commented on versions of this essay, and Bill
Scheuerle, VPR editor, and the anonymous reader of VPR for valuable
insights and suggestions. I also wish to thank Steven Tomlinson of the Bodle
ian Library, Oxford, for assistance regarding the Stephens letters.
i. Norman Feltes has shown in the case of the profession of literature that writ
ers, too, were well aware of the conflicting claims of market place autonomy
and the idealism of the professional "calling." 2. Other studies of the popular images of Victorian artists and the relation of
artist to the wider bourgeois culture include Gillett; Macleod; Hemingway
and Vaughan. For other examinations of artists' family or domestic biogra
phies, see Codell, 1996 and 1999, and on serialized artists' biographies,
see
Codell, 1999. Studies of the vast biographical literature of the period are well
discussed by Altick and Nadel, 1984. 3. Fortnightly Review had many articles on art and by artists, such as Philip
Hamerton, editor of The Portfolio. Prominent art writers included FT. Pal
grave, A.C. Swinburne, Walter Armstrong, G.H. Lewes, Violet Paget,
George Moore, and artists such as Henry O'Neil, D.G. Rossetti, Walter Sick
ert, Edward Poynter (later Director, National Gallery). Articles were less
biographical and more critical essays or anecdotal "reminiscences" of meet
ings with the artists. Samples of articles with some biographical
content
include:
1869 "Notes on Leonardo da Vinci," Walter Pater
1870 "Notes on Albrecht Durer," Sidney Colvin (later Slade Professor,
Oxford)
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JULIE F. CODELL 3 11
1872 "Nicolas Poussin," Emilia F. Dilke Pattison
1877 "Titian," Andrew Lang
18 80 "Sir William Boxall, "
John Duke Coleridge 1884 "Hablot-Browne and book-illustration,
" Frederick Wedmore
1887 "Benvenuto Cellini's character," J.A. Symonds
1892 "Madame Bodichon; a Reminiscence," Mathilda Betham-Edwards
"Mulready," Emilia F.S. Dilke Pattison
1893 "Michelangelo," Herbert P. Home
1896 "Monticelli," Mildred Drage
"John Everett Millais, painter and illustrator," Joseph & Elizabeth
Pennell
1897 "Leighton and Watts: two ideals in art," H.H. Statham
1898 "Aubrey Beardsley," Arthur Symons "Edward Burne-Jones," William Sharp
1900 "The Art of Watts," Arthur Symons
The Athenaeum had a large number of book reviews of artists' biographies,
biographical dictionaries, and serialized biographical books, such as Sampson, Low's Great Artist series reviewed from 1880 to 1891, serialized biographies
published by Virtue, by Seeley, by Macmillan, and by George Bell and Sons, and a German series published by Grevel and Company and a series entitled
Les Artistes Celebres published in Paris by Rouam. Art Annuals published by The Art Journalwere also regularly reviewed.
Nineteenth Century had a smaller percentage of articles on art compared with
Fortnightly Review. Writers and artists who wrote included Ruskin, Holman
Hunt, Swinburne, F. T. Palgrave, Marcus Huish, Seymour Haden, William
Morris, Walter Armstrong, Emilie Barrington, Violet Paget, Harry Quilter,
Frederick Burton, J. Atkinson Beavington, G.F. Watts, Claude Phillips. Art
ists' biographies included:
1881 "Jules Jacquemart, "
Frederick Wedmore
1883 "The Truth about Rossetti," Theodore Watts
1888 "Jean-Francois Millet, "
Julia Ady Cartwright 1892 "Michelangelo," Janet Ross
1896 "Lord Leighton and his art," W.B. Richmond
1897 "Mr. G.F. Watts," M.H. Spielmann
1898 "E. Meissonier," Charles Yriarte
1899 "Some recollections of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, "
Joseph Jacobs
4. This reworking of biography in Solomon's case was by Alfred Lys Baldry, one of the most
popular biographers of artists, who would write a standard
biography of Marcus Stone for The Art Journal complete with attention to
the artist's appearance and environs in the same year he wrote a mildly anti
biographical essay on Solomon for The Studio.
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312 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000
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