English Accents: Interactions with British Art c. 1776-1855 9780815388814, 9781351159043, 135115902X, 9781351159029

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: international cross-currents in an age of nationalism
1 Americans in London: contemporary history painting revisited
2 Papierkultur: the British print, history and modernity in Enlightenment Germany
3 'Everything English is the mode here': Russian reactions to British painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
4 A view of New Holland: aspects of the colonial prospect
5 'A new people and a limited society': British art and the Spanish spectator
6 A la recherche de l'école anglaise: Lawrence, Wilkie and Martin, three British artists in Restoration France
7 'Consciously objective and moral': Hogarth and the political artist in Vormärz Germany
8 American landscape painting and the European paradigm
9 Slavs, Brits and the question of national identity in art: Russian responses to British painting in the mid-nineteenth century
10 Unmistakably American? National myths and the historiography of landscape painting in the USA
Afterword: British art and its histories
Select bibliography
Index

Citation preview

English Accents    Edited by Christiana Payne and William Vaughan

English Accents Interactions with British Art c. 1776–1855

Edited by Christiana Payne William Vaughan

ISBN 978-0-815-38881-4

www.routledge.com  an informa business

9780754607120_cover.indd 1

11/1/2017 4:03:34 PM

ENGLISH ACCENTS

BRITISH ART AND VISUAL CULTURE SINCE 1750 New Readings General Editor: David Peters Corbett, University of York This series examines the social and cultural history of British visual culture, including the interpretation of individual works of art and perspectives on reception, consumption and display. In the same series The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist Contentions and Alliances in the Artistic Domain, 1760-1824 Greg Smith The Quattro Cento and the Stones of Rimini A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance Adrian Stokes Art and its Discontents The Early Life of Adrian Stokes Richard Read Difficult Subjects Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain Kristina Huneault

1880-1914

Memory and Desire Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Century Kenneth McConkey The Cultural Devolution Art in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century Neil Mulholland British Artists and the Modernist Landscape Ysanne Holt Modern Architecture and the End of Empire Mark Crinson Representations of G. F Watts Art Making in Victorian Culture Edited by Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner Edited by Peter Draper Purchasing Power Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture Sophie Carter

English Accents Interactions with British Art c. 1776-1855

Edited by Christiana Payne and William Vaughan

First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing Reissued 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © The individual contributors, 2004

The authors have asserted their moral rights. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Typeset by Bournemouth Colour Press, Parkstone, Poole. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any Typeset by Bournemouth Colour Press, Parkstone, Poole. form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King's Lynn. including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2004043705 Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. ISBN 13: 978-0-815-38881-4 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-351-15904-3 (ebk)

Contents

List of figures Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: international cross-currents in an age of nationalism Christiana Payne 1

Americans in London: contemporary history painting revisited David Bindman

2

Papierkultur: the British print, history and modernity in Enlightenment Germany Anne-Marie Link

3

'Everything English is the mode here': Russian reactions to British painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Galina Andreeva

V II X III X V II

l

9 29

5i 79

4

A view of New Holland: aspects of the colonial prospect Michael Rosenthal

5

'A new people and a limited society': British art and the Spanish spectator Sarah Symmons

101

A la recherche de l'ecole anglaise: Lawrence, Wilkie and Martin, three British artists in Restoration France Barthelemy Jobert

125

6

VI

ENGLISH ACCENTS

7

'Consciously objective and moral': Hogarth and the political artist in Vormarz Germany William Vaughan

8

American landscape painting and the European paradigm Andrew Wilton

9

Slavs, Brits and the question of national identity in art: Russian responses to British painting in the mid-nineteenth century Rosalind P. Blakesley

203

Unmistakably American? National myths and the historiography of landscape painting in the USA Tim Barringer

225

10

Afterword: British art and its histories William Vaughan

155 179

251

Select bibliography

257

Index

265

List of figures

1 Americans in London: contemporary history painting revisited

1.1 John Trumbull, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, 17 June 1775, c. 1786, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 86.4 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, Trumbull Collection 1.2 John Trumbull, The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, 31 December 1775, c. 1786, oil on canvas, 62.5 x 94 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, Trumbull Collection 1.3 John Trumbull, The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, 3 January 1777, c. 1789-c. 1831, oil on canvas, 51.5 x 75.9 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, Trumbull Collection 1.4 John Trumbull, The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, 19 October 1781 (detail), 1787-c. 1828, oil on canvas, 53 x 77-8 cm/ Yale University Art Gallery, Trumbull Collection 1.5 John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, 4 July 17 7 6 ,1787-1820, oil on canvas, 53.0 x 78.7 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, Trumbull Collection 2 Papierkultur: the British print, history and modernity in Enlightenment Germany

2.1 J. G. Facius after Benjamin West, Angelica and Medoro, 1768, stipple engraving, 31.5 x 25.6 cm, © The British Museum, London 2.2 J. Walker after Matthew William Peters, Clara, 1777, stipple engraving, 26 x 20.4 cm, © The British Museum, London 2.3 William Woollett after Richard Wilson, Phaeton, 1763, line engraving with etching, 48.8 x 60 cm, © The British Museum, London 2.4 Thomas Watson after Nathaniel Dance, The Dying Marc Anthony, 1780, mezzotint, 52.3 x 37.7 cm, © The British Museum, London 2.5 John Hall after Benjamin West, Oliver Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament, 1789, line engraving, 48.5 x 65 cm, © The British Museum, London 2.6 F. Bartolozzi after Angelica Kauffman, The Judgement of Paris, 1779, stipple engraving, 3 1.1 x 23.4 cm, © The British Museum, London 2.7 William Woollett after Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1776, line engraving with etching, 43 x 39.3 cm, © The British Museum, London

VIII ENGLISH ACCENTS 3 'Everything English is the mode here': Russian reactions to British painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

4.2 John White Abbott, Trees in Peamore Park, Exeter, 1799, watercolour with pen and black ink, 43.1 x 35.5 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

3.1 Anton Losenko, Hector and Andromache's Farewell, 1773, oil on canvas, 155.8 x 211.5 cm/ State Tretyakov Gallery

4.3 Sophia Campbell, Sydney in All Its Glory, c. 1817, watercolour, 23 x 57 cm, private collection

3.2 Anton Losenko, The Travellers, 1763-69, lead pencil on grey paper, 29.5 x 36.3 cm, State Russian Museum

4.4 J. M. W. Turner, Plymouth with Mount Batten, c. 1814, watercolour, 14.6 x 23.5 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

3.3 Petr Sokolov, Portrait of Nikita Panin in Childhood, 1779, oil on canvas, 167 x 104 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery 3.4 Theodorus de Roode, Allegory on the Victory at Chesme for Catherine the Great, 1771, oil on parchment, laid on canvas, 50 x 65.5 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery 3.5 Dmitry Levitsky, Catherine the Lawgiver in the Temple of the Goddess of Justice, 1783, oil on canvas, 261 x 201 cm, State Russian Museum 3.6 Richard Brompton, Portrait of Alexander Kurakin, 1781, oil on canvas, 113 x 76 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery 3.7 Vasily Borovikovsky, Portrait of Catherine II Strolling in Tsarskoe Selo, 1794, oil on canvas, 94.5 x 66 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery 3.8 S. A. Alekseev, The Military Gallery in the Winter Palace, c. 1827, watercolour, dimensions and location unknown 3.9 }. Bennet and T. Wright. The Visit of Emperor Alexander I to the Studio of the Artist George Dawe, 1826, engraving, 35.7 x 46.6 cm, State Museum of Fine Arts, named after A. S. Pushkin 4 A view of New Holland: aspects of the colonial prospect

4.1 Augustus Earle, Cabbage Tree Forest, Illawarra, New South Wales, 1827, watercolour, 25.7 x 17.1 cm, National Library of Australia

4.5 Sophia Campbell, Newcastle and its Surroundings, c. 1818, watercolour, 22.8 x 57.8 cm, National Library of Australia 4.6 Peter De Wint, Yorkshire Fells, c. 1812, pencil and watercolour, 36.3 x 56.6 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 4.7 John Sell Cotman, A Ploughed Field, c. 1808, pencil and watercolour, 22.8 x 35 cm, © Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery) 4.8 Sophia Campbell (attrib.), View, Possibly of the Hawkesbury River, Showing Aborigines in the Foreground, later 1810s, watercolour, 39.4 x 59 cm, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales 4.9 Anon., View of the Hunter River, before 1809, watercolour, 24.4 x 41.6 cm, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales 4.10 George William Evans, A View of Sydney, NS Wales, on Entering the Heads the Distance Seven Miles, c. 1809, watercolour, 22.5 x 36 cm, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales 5 'A new people and a limited society': British art and the Spanish spectator

5.1 Anon., Interior of Westminster Abbey, Semanario Pintoresco, 1840, steel engraving, 14.1 x 18.5 cm (photograph courtesy of Hugo Glendinning)

Figures 3.2 William Hogarth, The Breakfast Scene', plate II, Marriage a la Mode, 2nd state, engraving, 33.3 x 44 cm, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum © The British Museum 5.3 Francisco de Goya, No Hay Quien Nos Desate? (Can't Anyone Untie Us?), plate 73 from Los Caprichos, first published 1799, etching and aquatint, 21.7 x 13.2 cm, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum © The British Museum 3.4 Francisco de Goya, Que Valor! (What Courage!), plate 7 from Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), c. 1810-12, etching and aquatint, 13.3 x 20.8 cm, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum © The British Museum 3.3 Francisco de Goya, Bust Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, 1812, oil on wood panel, 60 x 31 cm, London, National Gallery © National Gallery Enterprises 3.6 David Wilkie, The Defence of Saragossa, 1828, oil on canvas, 94 x 141 cm, The Royal Collection © 2002, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 3.7 David Roberts, Madrid, Palacio Real, 1833-33, pencil and watercolour, 27.3 x 33.3 cm, University of Liverpool Art Gallery and Collections, Sir Sydney Jones Collection 6 A la recherche de l'ecole anglaise: Lawrence, Wilkie and Martin, three British artists in Restoration France

6.1 Vallou de Villeneuve after Thomas Lawrence, The Daughters of Charles B. Calmady, Esq., 1827, lithograph, Paris, Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la Photographie (Cd 42) 6.2 J. Gigoux after Thomas Lawrence, Nature, lithograph, Paris, Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la Photographie (Cd 42)

ix

6.3 J. J. Belnos after Thomas Lawrence, La Tendresse Maternelle (Motherly Tenderness), 1836, lithograph, Paris, Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la Photographie (Cd 42) 6.4 G. Desmaisons after Thomas Lawrence, Une Jeune Veuve (A Young Widow), lithograph, Paris, Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la Photographie (Cd 42) 6.3 Goula after David Wilkie, Le Doigt Coupe (The Cut Finger), published 1826 by A. Raimbach, London, and Fr. Janet, Paris, etching and engraving, Paris, Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la Photographie (Cd 46) 6.6 J. P M. Jazet after David Wilkie, Le Petit Commissionaire (The Errand Boy), 1828, etching and aquatint, Paris, Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la Photographie (Cd 46) 6.7 J. P. M. Jazet after John Martin, Le Deluge (The Deluge), 1829, etching and aquatint, Paris, Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la Photographie (Ef236, t.i) 7 'Consciously objective and moral': Hogarth and the political artist in Vormdrz Germany

7.1 Moritz Retzsch, Hamlet; Prologue, 1828, etching, 19.3 x 28.2 cm. From Umrisse von Moritz Retzsch zu Shakespeare's Dramatischen Werke, in one volume, Ernst Fleischer, Leipzig, 1847 7.2 Wilhelm Kaulbach, Das Narrenhaus (The Madhouse), 1833-34, pencil, 43.9 x 60.8 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 7.3 William Hogarth, Tom Rakewell in the Madhouse', Scene VIII, from The

X ENGLISH ACCENTS Rake's Progress, 1735, engraving, 30.2 x 38 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 7.4 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Jobs als Student (Jobs as a Student), c. 1844, oil on canvas, 25.5 x 31.5 cm, museum kunst palast, Diisseldorf 7.5 William Hogarth, Tom Rakewell in the Rose Tavern', Scene III, from The Rake's Progress, 1735, oil on canvas, 62.3 x 75 cm, By Courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane's Museum, London 7.6 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Atelierszene (Studio Scene), 1836, oil on canvas, 72 x 88 cm, museum kunst palast, Diisseldorf 7.7 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Ein Magistrat aus dm Jahre 184.8 (A Magistrature in the Year 1848), 1848-49, oil on canvas, 91 x 13 1 cm, Solingen, Bergisches Museum, Schloss Burg an der Wupper 7.8 Adolf Rethel, Auch ein Totentanz aus dem Jahre 1848 (Another Dance of Death from the Year 1848), Scene 5,1848, wood engraving, 24.7 x 30.4 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 8 American landscape painting and the European paradigm

8.5 John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851-53, oil on canvas, 196.5 x 303.2 cm, Tate Gallery © Tate, London 2003 8.6 Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1828, oil on canvas, 100.6 x 138.43 cm, © 2003 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815-65 (47.1188) 8.7 Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872, oil on canvas, 213.4 x 365.8 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Lent by the Department of the Interior Museum 8.8 Thomas Moran, The Chasm of the Colorado, 1873-74, oil on canvas, 213.4 x 365.8 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Lent by the Department of the Interior Museum 9 Slavs, Brits and the question of national identity in art: Russian responses to British painting in the mid-nineteenth century

9.1 Joshua Reynolds, The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents, 1786-88, oil on canvas, 303 x 297 cm, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. GE 1348)

8.1 Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson River, i860, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 274.3 cm, Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Avalon Foundation (1963.9.1)

9.2 Christina Robertson, Portrait of Grand Duchess Maria Aleksandrovna, 1849, oil on canvas, 249 x 157 cm, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. GE 5254)

8.2 J. M. W. Turner, England: Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday, 1819, oil on canvas, 180 x 334.5 cm, Tate Gallery © Tate, London 2003

9.3 Vasily Perov, The Drowned Woman, 1867, oil on canvas, 68 x 106 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

8.3 Jasper Francis Cropsey, Richmond in the Summer of 18 62,1862, oil on canvas, 137 x 244 cm, private collection

9.4 G. F. Watts, Pound Drowned, c. 1848-50, oil on canvas, 144.7 x 2 13-4 cm, Trustees of the Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey

8.4 Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie, 1866, oil on canvas, 210.8 x 361.3 cm, Brooklyn Museum of Art (76.79)

9.5 Illarion Pryanishnikov, The Sempstress, 1870, oil on canvas on board, 44.5 x 36.5 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg

Figures

xi

10 Unmistakably American? National myths and the historiography of landscape painting in the USA

116.8 x 91.4 cm, Collections of The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Gift of Julia Bryant

10.1 Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), 1836, oil on canvas, 130.8 x 193 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs Russell Sage, 1908 (08.228)

10.4 John Constable, The Cornfield, 1826, oil on canvas, 143 x 122 cm, London, National Gallery

10.2 Thomas Cole, Course of Empire: Consummation of Empire, 1836, oil on canvas, 130 x 193 cm, Collection of the New-York Historical Society, Gift of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts (1858.3) 10.3 Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas,

10.5 Fitz Hugh Lane, Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1862, oil on canvas, 40.6 x 66 cm, © 2003 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815-65 (48.448) 10.6 Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, i860, oil on canvas, 101.6 x 162.56 cm, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr and Mrs William H. Marlatt Fund (1965.233)

Contributors

a n d r e e v a is the Head of Research and Projects at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Her PhD (Moscow, 1998) was on Anglo-Russian artistic links of the second half of the eighteenth century and first third of the nineteenth century. She has published widely on Russian art and on British artists working in Russia, and she curated the exhibition, Unforgettable Russia. Russians and Russia Through the Eyes of the British. ijth -iyth Centuries (State Tretyakov Gallery, 1997). g a l in a

is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art, Yale University, where he specializes in British and American art of the nineteenth century. He is the author of Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (Yale University Press, 1999) and editor (with Elizabeth Prettejohn) of Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity (Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press 1999). He was curator, with Andrew Wilton, of American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880 at Tate Britain, 2002. His next book Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain will appear in 2004. t im

Ba r r i n g e r

b in d m a n is Professor of the History of Art at University College, London. He has written on Blake, Hogarth and the English response to the French Revolution. His most recent book is Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race (Reaktion Books and Cornell UP, 2002). d a v id

is a Fellow of Pembroke College and a lecturer in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (co-editor; Merrell, 2003), and Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (under her maiden name of Rosalind P. Gray; Clarendon Press, 2000). She is currently working on a book on the Arts and Crafts Movement for Phaidon Press. Ro s a l i n d

p.

b l a k esl ey

XIV ENGLISH ACCENTS b a r t h e l e m y j o b e r t is Professor of Modern Art at the University of Grenoble. His publications include a monograph on Delacroix (University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton, 1998), and a hitherto lost manuscript by him, Souvenirs d'un voyage dans le Maroc (Gallimard, 1998). He has curated many exhibitions, including D'Outre-Manche, Vart britannique dans les collections publiques frangaises (Musee du Louvre, 1994). He is currently writing, with Bruno Foucart, a general study on French painting in the nineteenth century (to be published by Gallimard).

a n n e - m a r i e l i n k is Assistant Professor of Art History at Augustana University College, Alberta, Canada. She has published on the eighteenth-century German print market and on the illustrated book, as well as on the discipline of art history in the eighteenth century. She is presently completing a book manuscript, Art, History and Discipline in the Eighteenth Century University.

is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780-1885 (Yale University Press, 1993) and Rustic Simplicity: Scenes of Cottage Life in Nineteenth-Century British Art (Djanogly Art Gallery/Lund Humphries, 1998). She is currently working on a study of coastal scenery in nineteenth-century British art. Ch r is t ia n a p a y n e

M i c h a e l R o s e n t h a l is Professor of History of Art at the University of Warwick. He has published many books and articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art, including Constable: the Painter and his Landscape (Yale University Press, 1983, reprinted 1986) and The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: 'a little business for the eye' (Yale University Press, 1999) and he was guest curator for the Gainsborough exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2002. He is currently completing a major research project on early colonial Australia.

is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. Her publications include Flaxman and Europe, Goya in Pursuit of Patronage (Fraser, 1988), Printing the Unprintable, Goya: Art and Ideas (Phaidon, 1998). Her latest book is Goya: A Life in Letters (Pimlico, 2004). Sa r a h

sy m m o n s

is Professor Emeritus in History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published widely on Romanticism and on British and German art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His principal publications include Caspar David Friedrich (exh. cat.) (Tate, London, 1972), German Romanticism and English Art (Yale University Press, 1978), w il l ia m

v a u g h a n

Contributors

xv

Romanticism and Art (Thames and Hudson, 1994) and Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century (ed. with L. Morowitz, Ashgate, 2001). He is currently completing a study on the concept of the British School, to be published by Yale University Press, and preparing an exhibition on the works of Samuel Palmer, to be held at the British Museum in 2005. was Founding Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art; he has also been Assistant Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and was Curator of the Turner Collection in the Clore Gallery from its opening until 1989, when he became Keeper of the British Collection at the Tate Gallery. He is now Visiting Research Fellow at the Tate. He has written extensively on aspects of Romantic landscape, especially on J. M. W. Turner and on watercolour. His exhibitions include The Great Age of British Watercolours at the Royal Academy, London, in 1992 (with Anne Lyles), and the large Turner exhibition at the Folkwang Museum in Essen and Zurich Kunsthaus, 2001-2002. In 2002 he organized and catalogued American Sublime with Tim Barringer at the Tate, the first major survey of nineteenth-century American landscape to be seen in Britain. The exhibition subsequently travelled to the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

An d r ew

Wil t o n

Acknowledgements

This book originated in a conference that was held at the Tate Gallery in November 1998. It was entitled English Accents: The Uses of British Art in the USA, Russia and Australia. Special thanks are due to Harry Mount, who collaborated with Christiana Payne in the early stages of the planning of this conference, to Andrew Brighton and Richard Humphreys of the Tate Gallery, who made it a reality, and to Elizabeth Johns and Andrew Sayers, who gave stimulating papers at that conference but were unfortunately too busy with other projects to contribute to the book. Financial support for the conference was provided by the School of Humanities, Oxford Brookes University and by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, which has generously sponsored the illustration of the present volume. Brian Allen has been a steady supporter of the project throughout. The editors would like to express their grateful thanks to all those friends and colleagues who have given useful advice and encouragement, especially Sarah Burns, David Peters Corbett, Andrew Curtin, Dian Kriz, Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, Andrew Hemingway, the late Michael Kitson, Patrick Noon, Duncan Robinson, Kim Sloan, Sam Smiles, Helen Weston, Linda Whiteley, Scott Wilcox and Richard Wrigley. We are also indebted to Pamela Edwardes, Lucinda Lax and the two anonymous readers who read the manuscript for Ashgate Publishing. Above all, however, we would like to express our gratitude to the authors of the papers in the volume, who have collectively produced such a thought-provoking and wide-ranging survey of the ramifications of British art in the wider world. Christiana Payne William Vaughan

Introduction: international cross-currents in an age of nationalism Christiana Payne

Students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art have long been fascinated and diverted by tantalizing evidence of the wider, global significance of their subject: by the thought of Catherine the Great reading a French translation of Reynolds's Discourses in St Petersburg in 1790, for example, or of Constable's Hay Wain winning a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824. It is well known, too, that British prints were eagerly sought after in late eighteenth-century Europe, the export market being valued at around a quarter of a million pounds annually.1 Such facts are the more surprising since, for much of the twentieth century, British art could seem marginal in terms of the Modernist narrative centred on Paris and then New York; consequently, an interest in British art might appear somewhat narrow and parochial, in contrast to the international perspective that was more readily adopted by, for example, students of French or Italian art.2However, since the late twentieth century it has become increasingly evident that such insularity is not really justified by the historical evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the period leading up to the foundation of Tate Britain, in 2001, there was lively discussion of the nature of British art, which drew on wider debates around the whole question of art and national identity, a predominant preoccupation of art-historical discourse throughout the 1990s. A conference held at the Tate Gallery in 1996 posed the question 'Is there a British art?'; several speakers at that conference emphasized the need to consider British art not in a narrowly insular way, but in its proper international context.3 Two years later, a second conference looked at the reception of British art in Russia, the USA and Australia.4This volume has grown out of that second conference: it incorporates essays on those three countries, but also on France, Germany and Spain. Meanwhile, the necessity of framing any discussion of British art within broad international contexts has grown ever more apparent. In 2002

2

ENGLISH ACCENTS

Tate Britain, in a break with tradition, hosted an exhibition of American painting, American Sublime, curated by Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, two of the contributors to the present volume.5Both in the displays and in the catalogue, the connections with the landscapes of British painters such as Turner and Martin were presented and explored. In 2003 a further exhibition, Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics, brought French paintings to the Tate, whilst simultaneously demonstrating the enormously productive networks that fostered freedom of technique and novelty of subject matter in what may reasonably be called the Anglo-French art of the 1820s.6Other museums have also pursued projects which placed British art in an international context. In 2002 a conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum, entitled 'Going Abroad', looked at the overseas impact of British design and decorative art.7At about the same time, the Grand Palais in Paris put on an exhibition of the work of John Constable, enabling visitors to explore in detail one of the best-known instances of British art being received enthusiastically in another country, Constable's success at the Salons in the 1820s.8 Unlike some of these projects, which have focused on the reception of British art in just one country, this book provides the opportunity to compare reactions in different countries. It goes beyond the simple question of 'influence' to consider the ways in which models and conventions developed in Britain were adapted, appropriated or resisted in new environments. In the process, some surprising views of British art emerge, demonstrating how a multifaceted view from the outside can correct and enrich the narrative produced within a national school - an approach which might productively be adopted for the art of other countries. It becomes clear that many British artists and artistic conventions attracted admiration around the world, and even played an important role in the work of major artists such as Goya. In the late eighteenth century, British history painting was of international significance; far from being marginal, British art was widely seen as the essence of the modern. In the nineteenth century, compositional formulae established in British landscape and genre painting shaped responses to the 'new' landscapes of Australia and America, or provided models for artists wishing to record the manners of their countrymen. Several essays in this volume focus on prints; in a prephotographic age, prints were of vital importance for spreading knowledge of art, and British printmakers were acknowledged as amongst the world's best, both for their skill in existing methods and for their initiative in developing new media. Some of the episodes in the reception of British art abroad are extremely well known. Philippe Bordes has shown how, in the 1780s, Jacques-Louis David was fascinated by British painting and engraving, an interest fuelled by his friendship with Maria Cosway and his admiration for Reynolds's Ugolino;

Christiana Payne

3

had not the French Revolution intervened, it seems certain that he would have visited London and exhibited at the Academy. David's portraiture shows an interest in the nonchalant, elegant pose of the English country gentleman, while his letters indicate that the association of British art with political freedom made it an attractive alternative to the restrictions of the French Academy.9Revolution and war temporarily interrupted Anglo-French artistic contacts, but they were revived in the 1820s, when John Constable could claim that his reputation in France was much more secure than his recognition in his own country. At the Paris Salon of 1824, he showed The Hay Wain and The View on the Stour and won a gold medal, at a time when he had not yet achieved his ambition of full membership to the Royal Academy. French critics applauded his work, and French painters, including Eugene Delacroix, studied it carefully.10 The recent exhibitions in London and Paris have reiterated the importance of Constable and his contemporaries for the development of French Romanticism and the landscape painting of the Barbizon School, even claiming that 'the art historical movements of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism ... trace their genesis to this liberating infusion of British theory and practice half a century earlier'.11 Barthelemy Jobert's essay in the present volume (Chapter 6) complements these publications by examining the crucial importance of the print trade in spreading knowledge of British art in France in this period. Another well-known example of British paintings going abroad is provided by the collecting activities of Catherine the Great of Russia. Joshua Reynolds's most ambitious history painting, The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents, was bought by Catherine, along with paintings by other British artists, and now hangs in the Hermitage. Catherine was also an avid reader of Reynolds's Discourses,12 key documents in the early establishment of a self-consciously British School, which were translated into the major European languages very soon after their publication in Britain, and were arguably received much more enthusiastically in other countries than they were at home, a phenomenon which is also true of William Hogarth's treatise on aesthetics, The Analysis of Beauty. International admiration for British aesthetic theory developed in parallel with reverence for British philosophical and literary traditions, and for writers such as John Locke and William Shakespeare. Along with Reynolds and Constable, Sir David Wilkie was another British artist who enjoyed international success in his lifetime. The admiration of the French painter, Gericault, for Wilkie's celebrated painting, The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch (1822) has recently been highlighted.13 His reputation abroad was based primarily on prints, although some key paintings by him went to collectors in other countries, including King Ludwig of Bavaria and a buyer in New Orleans. Prints after his work, however, circulated widely in the United States, as well as in Germany, Spain, Russia

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and France.14 Like Hogarth, Wilkie was admired for what was seen as his accurate transcription of the manners of his time: he thus provided a model for genre painters who wished to portray the customs and national character of their own country. He himself was described as 'the Scottish Teniers', a tribute to his adaptation of techniques and compositions by the Flemish master. The American genre painter, William Sidney Mount, was described by critics in turn as 'the American Wilkie', and his use of compositions derived from prints after Wilkie is very obvious. Yet, in the 1830s, critics also wrote that Mount was 'a vigorous, untaught and untutored plant, who borrows from no one' and declared that, in his work, there was 'nothing to remind you of the print shops'.15 What is interesting here is that the critics were keen to downplay the British precedents for Mount's work, to claim him as 'truly national'. This, indeed, became a term of high praise in many countries in the early to mid nineteenth century. 'National' art was seen as honest, sincere, original and unaffected, a true reflection of the manners of a country's inhabitants and of the distinctive features of its terrain. It was, therefore, important to emphasize its origins in direct study from nature rather than in earlier art. It could also be seen as the reflection of some intrinsic 'national character'. The concept of the national school, whose art reflects the national character and thus has a certain homogeneity, has had far-reaching effects on the development of art history as a discipline: museum collections, university departments, research projects, book publishing, library and photographic collections, all are structured according to this categorization. It is largely, though not entirely, the product of the period covered by this volume. A symptom of this process in Britain was the appearance of biographical studies of artists of the British School, such as Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England (1765-71) and Allan Cunningham's Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1829-33).16Academies were founded in most major capital cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and generally held annual exhibitions at which critics from other countries could assess the state of the national school. From 1851 onwards, international exhibitions made it possible to survey the modem works of different countries side by side. The international exhibitions of 1855 and 1862 (the first held in Paris, the second in London) prompted widespread debate on national characteristics in art. In such debates there was often a vein of prejudice, ranging from national pride to outright xenophobia. Critics congratulated their native artists on their honesty, manliness or decency, or else discerned decadence, immorality or commercialism in the work of their national rivals. Artistic styles were seen as indicators of wider national characteristics, linked to the moral health of the nation and its political institutions. Foreign criticism of art, therefore, takes on a significance that goes beyond purely art-historical

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concerns, becoming part of the wider international cultural and political discourse of its time. The essays in this volume have been arranged in a broadly chronological order, to indicate the changes that took place between the late eighteenth century, when British art was openly admired as the product of a modern society, and the mid nineteenth century, when there is more evidence of resistance and even of covert uses of British precedents. From the 1760s onwards, the foundation of the Royal Academy, the establishment of annual exhibitions, and the publicity provided by the publication, and speedy translation, of Reynolds's Discourses aroused widespread interest in British art, at a time when a growing overseas empire further underlined its international significance. In Chapter 1, David Bindman questions our current idea of the parameters of British art, emphasizing the importance of the American history painters in Benjamin West's studio, whose work, he argues, needs to be considered as British in a wider sense, during this crucial period of the American War of Independence. Anne-Marie Link also focuses on the late eighteenth century, when Britain was presented in Germany as the model of a modem art. The high quality of British art was explicitly linked, by German observers, to the country's status as a modem, commercial society, with free political institutions successfully exploiting industrial development and exploration of the wider world. In this period, British artists were admired above all for their achievements in history painting: in retrospect, British history painting has been seen as a tragic mistake, unsuited to the 'national character', but in the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s, the history paintings of Reynolds, West and Trumbull were evidently very widely recognized as being at the cutting edge. Ironically, the best-known British painting of all at this period was Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe, a painting set in Canada and produced by an artist who was born in Pennsylvania. The next three chapters extend the geographical range to three further countries, Russia, Australia and Spain. Galina Andreeva and Sarah Symmons, writing on Russia and Spain respectively, provide a wide range of examples of responses to British art in these countries. Conventions developed in British portraiture were adapted by Sokolov, Levitsky and Borovikovsky in Russia, and by Goya in Spain. George Dawe in Russia, and David Wilkie and David Roberts in Spain, spent years working in these countries, and left important legacies for native artists. A stark contrast is provided by Australia, discussed by Michael Rosenthal in Chapter 4, where conditions were radically different to those countries in Europe and America which had fledgling, or well-established, Academies and exhibiting societies. Apart from the traditions of the Aboriginal peoples, Australia was a blank slate. Professional and amateur artists who arrived there from England found a country which was essentially strange. As Michael Rosenthal shows, in the

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late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries they interpreted and categorized it according to ideas and formats developed in eighteenthcentury England - such as the formulae of the prospect and of the picturesque. He suggests that some of these aesthetic concepts were suited to a new colony because they were developed in a country which was 'its own colony': artists in Australia replicated the hierarchical power structures they found in England. After the French Revolution and the ensuing wars, the idea of liberty was less unambiguously attractive, and Britain could no longer be seen as the most modern country in terms of its political institutions. Painters in Vormarz Germany, looking for a model for their politically liberal critiques, turned, not to contemporary British art, but to the eighteenth-century master, William Hogarth, as William Vaughan shows in Chapter 7. In the same period, Hogarth was carefully studied in Russia, particularly by Pavel Feodotov, who became known as 'the Russian Hogarth'.17 Hogarth had also provided inspiration for Goya in his series of etchings, Los Caprichos. In contrast to the widespread admiration of Hogarth as a model for social criticism, there were, by the 1820s, more negative views of contemporary British art. Foreign visitors to the Royal Academy, such as the German writer, Johann Valentin Adrian, complained that British art was ruined by its dependence on the marketplace: as a result, it was becoming flashy and meretricious. The loose, sketchy technique of artists such as Thomas Lawrence was held up as a warning, rather than an example to young artists in Russia and France, as Galina Andreeva and Barthelemy Jobert demonstrate. By the mid nineteenth century, it was mainly British landscape painting and genre, rather than history painting and portraiture, which had the greatest impact on the art of other countries. Here, however, artists strove to dissociate themselves from their sources because one of their main aims was to paint 'from nature'. Just as the American critics writing about William Sidney Mount in the 1830s had wanted to minimize the influence on him of British prints, so, in the late 1860s in Russia, socially critical artists, such as Perov and Pryanishnikov, seem to have been concerned to stress the Russian character of their works, even when visual comparison makes it clear that they were basing them on models provided by George Frederick Watts and Richard Redgrave. Artists could make a point by self-consciously rejecting compositional formulae: as Andrew Wilton points out, American landscape painters, wishing to express the vastness of their continent, rejected the repoussoirs of Claude and the careful balance and variety of the English picturesque in favour of either a more cluttered, or a more open scheme. Nevertheless, Jasper Cropsey's depictions of the Hudson River, despite aiming to capture the true character of the place, drew heavily on the compositions of Turner and the sketchy brushwork of mid-nineteenth century

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British painters. Art criticism of the mid nineteenth century often shows a consciousness of the choices available to artists and national schools; to adopt a German or a British manner in landscape painting, for example, or to follow the precedent of the British School in preferring individualism to strict academic rules. As Rosalind Blakesley shows in Chapter 9, the Russian critic Dmitry Grigorovich, writing about the international exhibition of 1862, implicitly used his praise of English art to support those who advocated that Russian artists should travel within Russia, and study their own country, rather than going abroad. In America, the perceived need to develop a young, vigorous, national school, and to overcome colonial status, led to a tendency to downplay British cultural influences. In Chapter 10, Tim Barringer shows how the British origins of Thomas Cole were suppressed by writers, such as William Cullen Bryant, who wished to claim him as a paradigmatically American artist. Furthermore, he argues that similar considerations have influenced the historiography of American landscape painting, encouraging art historians to look for evidence of 'indigenous' movements, such as Luminism, and to neglect the cross-cultural links with British art up until the present day. It may be suspected that such unconscious nationalistic prejudices have affected large areas of art-historical writing, as writers strive to prove the originality of their chosen artists, or else to define the characteristics of the national school that is the subject of their inquiry. Indeed, the recent interest in definitions of national identity may actually have made matters worse, as writers on excolonies, for example, are much more interested in exploring the new or the indigenous rather than the traditional or transported elements of their cultures. What the present volume demonstrates, however, is that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, despite its exploitation for nationalistic purposes, was essentially international in spirit: artists were willing to travel mentally and to look for good ideas from elsewhere, even if they did so by staying at home and looking at prints. Recognition of their use of British models does not undermine an acknowledgement of their originality or of their national character, any more than it diminishes the achievement of Constable and Turner to recognize their admiration for Claude. Indeed, the study of such cross-currents can cast a new and illuminating light on the development of artistic self-consciousness in the USA, Australia, Russia, Germany, France and Spain. At the centre of the discussion here is British art, but these essays have significance for the study of the cultural production of any country, suggesting a fertile area for research in the important connections that are obscured when art is studied, as it so often is, within narrow national boundaries.

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Notes 1.

The thriving export market has been documented in Timothy Clayton, The English Print, 1688-1802 (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), chapter 8; the figure quoted is on p. 262. He quotes D avid Macpherson's assertion in Annals of Commerce (1805) that since the 1760s 'British artists [have been] elevated from humiliating inferiority to acknowledged superiority over the rival artists of the continent, and British prints sought for in every part of the globe enlivened b y any rays of taste and science' (p. 261).

2.

The marginality of British art is discussed b y D avid Solkin in 'The British and the m odem ', in B. Allen, ed., Towards a Modern Art World (N ew H aven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), Pp. 1-6 .

3.

Speakers at this conference included Brian Allen, An d rew Brighton, Matthew Craske, Richard Humphreys, Michael Kitson, M urdo Macdonald, Marcia Pointon, William Vaughan and An drew Wilton.

4.

Papers were given at this conference by Galina Andreeva, Rosalind P. Blakesley, Elizabeth Johns, Michael Rosenthal and A n d rew Sayers.

5.

A . Wilton and T. Barringer, American Sublime, exh. cat. (London: Tate Britain, 2002).

6.

P. Noon et a l, Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics, exh. cat. (London: Tate Britain, 2003).

7.

'G oing Abroad: British art and design in a w ider w orld 150 0 -19 0 0 ', Victoria and Albert Museum, 6 - 7 December 2002.

8.

Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Constable: Le Choix de Lucian Freud, exh. cat., 2002.

9.

Philippe Bordes, 'Jacques-Louis D avid's anglophilia on the eve of the French Revolution', Burlington Magazine, 13 4 (1073), A u gust 1992, pp. 482-90.

10.

For a discussion of Constable's impact in France, see M. Cormack, Constable (Oxford: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1986), pp. 1 6 1-4 ; and Linda Whiteley, 'Constable et le Salon de 1824 ', in Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 2002, pp. 4 7 -5 1.

11.

P. Noon, 'Prologue', in Noon et a l, 2003, p. 10.

12.

See F. W. Hilles, The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1936), p- 67. Reynolds's reply to her praise of the Discourses, a letter dated A u gust 1790, is in F. W. Hilles, ed., Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1929), p. 205.

13 .

N oon et a l, 2003, p. 110 ; see also N . Tromans, David Wilkie: Painter of Everyday Life, exh. cat. (London: D ulwich Picture Gallery, 2002), pp. 7 and 89.

14.

On Wilkie's reputation abroad, and the adoption of compositional ideas from his w ork b y artists in France, Germ any and the U S A , see Arthur S. Marks, 'Wilkie and the reproductive print' in W. J. Chiego et a l, Sir David Wilkie of Scotland (17 8 5-18 4 1), exh. cat. (North Carolina M useum of Art, Raleigh, 1987), pp. 7 3-9 5. The Reading of the Will (1820) w as commissioned b y King L u d w ig of Bavaria, while Grace Before Meat (1839) went to a buyer in N e w Orleans, G lendy Burk. For the latter, see A . Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie, with his Journals,Tours, and Critical Remarks on Works of Art (London: John Murray, 1843), vol. Ill, pp. 247 and 26 1, and City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham: Catalogue of Paintings (Birmingham, i960), p. 154.

15.

E. Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 199 1), pp. 25 and 42.

16.

Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, with Some Account of the Principal Artists; and Incidental Notes on Other Arts (Strawberry Hill: Thomas Kirgate, 17 6 5 -7 1); Allan Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects (London: Fam ily Library, 18 2 9 -33 ).

17.

See R. P. Gray, "'H e lp me to eclipse the celebrated Hogarth": the reception of Hogarth in Russia',

Apollo, 15 3 (471), M ay 2001, pp. 23-30 .

1

Americans in London: contemporary history painting revisited David Bindman

There is a history still to be written on American attitudes towards British art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will be a rich and complex one for it was not always clear even in the fifty or so years after the War of Independence that Britain or the United States were foreign countries to each other, as painters continued to emigrate from Britain to America, and American painters to study and settle in London. The War of Independence was essentially a civil war fought by members of the same nation, hence it left behind deep and contradictory feelings of broken identity, made all the more complex by the strong support for the American Revolution in Britain, and the strength of loyalist feeling in America. In this essay I want to focus on the art of the period of the actual break between Britain and America. The art of the American colonies before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776 was the product of a transatlantic circuit in which artists came over from Britain either as visitors or settlers, and young painters in America looked to London for their training. A number sought, like the young John Singleton Copley, to exhibit at the Royal Academy and make a career in the capital, following the success of the King's painter, the Pennsylvanian Benjamin West. One might expect this traffic to come to an abrupt end with the War of Independence, but in reality young American artists still made their way to what had become the enemy capital, even though France had been an enthusiastic ally. One might also add that Paris was in every sense more hospitable to Americans and arguably had better artists and more established teaching institutions than London. This essay will explore the reasons for the continuing attraction of London for American artists, and the complexities of their position, by focusing on the London work of John Trumbull.

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Contemporary history painting The main attraction that drew ambitious young American artists to London from the 1760s onwards was the studio of Benjamin West, who was, despite his elevated position in England, of American birth himself, and he retained good contacts in his native country, encouraging young painters to enter his studio. West was renowned above all for applying the principles of history painting to modern and contemporary events, using contemporary dress. West, as Edgar Wind pointed out in 1938/ was the inventor of the genre of contemporary history painting, and Philippe Bordes has discussed the impact of his work on Jacques-Louis David, especially on Le Serment du Jeu de Paume (Versailles).2 West's primacy in this field was recognized by George Washington, himself the subject of many contemporary history paintings. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson of 1 August 1786 he expressed a preference for being sculpted by Houdon in contemporary rather than antique dress: I should even scarcely have ventured to suggest, that perhaps a servile adherence to the garb of antiquity might not be altogether expedient, as some little deviation in favour of the modern costume, if I had not learnt from Colonel Humphreys, that this was a circumstance hinted in conversation by Mr. West to Houdon. This taste, which has been introduced in painting by West, I understand is received with applause, and prevails extensively.3

The idea that the hero himself might have a view on his own representation was just one of the problems attendant on applying the principles of history painting to contemporary events. The traditional premise of history painting from its origins in the Italian Renaissance, was that it represented the story of an exemplary and heroic deed acted out in the distant or mythical past; as Racine put it, 'One may say that the respect that one has for the hero grows in proportion as he recedes from us.'4 Furthermore, modem subjects brought into history painting questions of accuracy of representation especially of the participants, who might (unlike the hero himself, whose heroism was likely to end in death) still be alive when the painting was completed. Edgar Wind argued forcefully that contemporary history painting, and the breach that it implied with academic rules of history painting, 'was produced by the impact of democratic ideas proclaimed by a group of American artists', like West himself, John Singleton Copley, and the former's pupils. West's originating role is beyond doubt, and the moment of initiation can be dated to The Death of General Wolfe of 1771, which depicted a recent act of heroism that prompted comparison with the death of the classical hero Epaminondas and of the medieval hero Bayard, the subjects of its original companion pictures.5 It is worth noting, however, that French artists, even towards the end of the century, evidently thought of contemporary history painting as an 'English' method and not an American one.6

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Although the setting of the Wolfe painting was Canada and more specifically the Heights of Abraham outside Quebec City, there was nothing 'American' about the painting; it makes the implicit claim that British heroes of today were in no way inferior to the legendary heroes of the past, a commonplace in contemporary drama, as Wind pointed out.7 However the many American painters in his studio, several of whom practised contemporary history painting, suggested an association between the genre and American origins. This association was further reinforced by such spectacular essays in the genre as Copley's The Death of Major Peirson of 1782-84, to the extent that even in the state of war between Britain and America in the years 1776-83 and the years after, West and Copley remained a magnet for aspiring American painters, deprived in the turmoil and relative isolation of the new Republic of proper training, experience of good paintings and public support.

John Trumbull in London

John Trumbull (1756-1843)8was the most prominent of these young painters, and he sought from the beginning of his career to make contemporary history paintings based on the recent events of the War of Independence. The traditional tendency of the discipline of the history of art to define itself by national schools has led to Trumbull's career being treated exclusively as part of the history of American art, a tendency reinforced in his case by his famous patriotic paintings, some of which, because of their prominent position in Washington's Capitol building, have become icons of American history. Yet in reality his decisive training took place in West's London studio, and his series of paintings of the War of Independence was conceived, begun and partially completed in London between 1784 and 1789. Wind claimed that being American in London during the war 'was socially advantageous if not positively glamorous', because of the general British support for the American cause.9 This is certainly an oversimplification, but even if it were broadly true a series of patriotic paintings, celebrating the victors in a war that had just resulted in the humiliating defeat of the country in which they were painted, could not be entirely unproblematic. Trumbull may well have been a glamorous figure in certain circles but on his first visit to London in 1780-81 he was jailed for eight months as an American spy and forced to leave the country immediately afterwards.10 Trumbull had been taken up by West on his first visit, but his most productive period in the latter's studio was on his return to London, where he remained from January 1784 until his return to America in November 1789, with a brief but important interlude in Paris and elsewhere on the Continent.

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West and Copley, whatever their private beliefs, were understood to be loyalists, although George III was at times suspicious of West's contacts with his former homeland; certainly in the later 1790s West openly expressed a desire to return to America.11 West had long been resident in London while Copley had come to England to pursue a career as a painter that had been threatened by the outbreak of the War of Independence.12 Trumbull, by contrast, was an American patriot from the beginning, whose declared intention was to return to the United States when he had learned enough to be able to paint its history. If West and Copley were sympathetic to the new American republic, they were prepared to keep quiet rather than risk the success of their paintings with the London public, a success they would have had no hope of enjoying on the other side of the Atlantic. Trumbull was furthermore a member of the new republic's political and social elite. His father was Governor of Connecticut and the only state governor to declare for American independence.13 The younger Trumbull went to Harvard, and was to be on close terms with many of the leaders of the new American republic, especially Thomas Jefferson. He was involved himself, as a colonel in Washington's army, in the War of Independence; he observed the actual events depicted in his painting of the Battle of Bunker's Hill/4though he was to resign in a huff over the length of his commission. He had, like Peter Paul Rubens, another career entirely outside painting, as a diplomat and probably a spy, but in the end he decided to devote himself to painting, turning down an invitation to become Jefferson's secretary in Paris. Trumbull's 'Americanness' was, therefore, of a different order from that of West and Copley. On his 1780 visit to London he was an active member of a rebellious colony who, to be admitted into the country, had to make a formal declaration that he would not further the former's cause. On his second visit in 1784 he was now a citizen of a foreign power that had just won its independence. Trumbull's own account of the genesis of his War of Independence paintings in his autobiography, published in 1841 at the end of his long life/5 reduces their genesis to a single-minded desire on his part to commemorate the heroism of his new nation in the late war. Even in the middle of working on them, in March 1785, he claimed to have come to Europe only to further that object: the great object of my wishes ... is to take up the History of Our Country, and paint the principal Events particularly of the late War: - but this is a work which to execute with any degree of honour or profit, will require very great powers - & those powers must be attain'd before I leave Europe.16

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Benjamin West and the War of Independence As one might expect, the circumstances were considerably more complicated than hindsight and autobiographical egotism would allow. In the first place it appears that the idea for a series of paintings on the War of Independence was not Trumbull's but West's. In a letter of 15 June 1783 to Charles Willson Peale in America, West announced that he was working on 'a few pictures of the great events of the American contest ... This work I mean to stile the American Revolution', with the intention of producing a series of engravings after them.17 West's purpose in writing to Peale was to procure pictures of American army uniforms to ensure accuracy, and in a further letter of 4 August 1783 he proposed to employ European engravers: 'as the subject has engaged all the powers of Europe all will be interested in seeing the event so portraid'18; it may have been for that reason that Trumbull took the first two paintings of his series to Germany to be engraved, rather than have them done in London. The only surviving painting that has been firmly tied to West's project is The Signing of the Preliminary Treaty of Peace in 1782 (Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, Delaware).19It was intended to show the commissioners assembled around a table, with the group of American signatories, including Ben Franklin, balanced by their British counterparts, but the latter were never more than broadly sketched in. It is an image of reconciliation between the nations, both represented by grave and honourable statesmen. It looks like a conversation piece, although it is generically a history painting, reconstructing an event that took place less than two years before. As part of the 'American Revolution' series this painting would suggest that West's primary aim was to promote the optimistic idea that the War of Independence had resolved itself into an enduring alliance between the two countries, based on mutual trust, implicitly excluding the French. In the 4 August letter to Peale, West described the American Revolution series as 'the arrangement of the subjects most expressive and most pointed, as for instance - the cause of the Quarel, the commencement of it, the carrying it on, the Battles, alliances &c. &c. - to form one work, to be given in eligent engravings'. This idea of the War of Independence as a 'Quarel' suggests that it was a dispute within a family, not a deep-seated conflict of ideologies, nor a matter of the moral superiority of one side over the other. This family quarrel, the painting tells us, is now settled, leaving its separate members stronger through greater mutual understanding and a negotiated balance of interests. Such an interpretation would resolve the ambiguities of West's own position as King's painter, yet still able to be on close terms with, and offer encouragement to, American patriots like Trumbull. It would also fit with the attitudes expressed in, for example, the cordial conversation between John

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Adams, the First Minister to the British Court, and George III, on 2 June 1785, in which the latter expressed pleasure at Adams's reaffirmation of the renewed esteem and affection 'between People who, tho separated by an ocean and under different Governments have the same Language, a similar Religion and kindred Blood'.20George III and the British government, it must be said, were at that moment concerned less with sentiment than to restore trading connections between Britain and America, under threat from the French and those Americans, like Jefferson, who leaned more towards France. West may also have had in mind an analogy between the War of Independence and the English Civil War, which, according to Whig ideology, had achieved a happy outcome out of a deeply divisive conflict in the constitutional settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. West had recently worked on a series of four paintings of subjects from seventeenth-century British history for Lord Grosvenor, which show the triumphant restoration of the Protestant monarchy after the Civil War, the latter represented by a painting of Oliver Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament, 1782 (Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey).21 From this low point of constitutional illegitimacy the restoration and triumph of a constitutional monarchy are depicted in General Monk Receiving Charles II on the Beach at Dover, 1782 (Milwaukee Art Center, Layton Art Gallery Collection), The Battle of the Boyne, 1778 (Duke of Westminster), and The Battle of La Hogue, c. 1775-80 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).22 Trumbull, as it happens, produced a large-scale version of the last painting under West's direction (Metropolitan Museum, New York).23

Trumbull's first American war paintings

In 1785 Trumbull began work in West's studio on the first small versions of The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, 17 June 1775 and The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, 31 December 1777, (Figures 1.1 and 1.2),24both subjects from the early phase of the War of Independence. These were in a finished state probably before the end of 1785, when he began work on three other scenes: The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, 3 January 1777 (Figure 1.3), The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, and The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, 19 October 1781 (Figure 1.4),25 all of which were to be completed many years later. West's collusion in Trumbull's project is clear from his open enthusiasm for the latter's efforts, and its initial promise appears to have dissuaded him from continuing with his own. It is impossible to be certain how far Trumbull simply took over West's project. It is perhaps telling that Trumbull's London battle scenes are not really full-size finished paintings but studies for

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engravings, but it is evident from West's letter to Peale that he, unlike Trumbull at that point, intended to balance the battle scenes with scenes of negotiation and reconciliation. Trumbull was an almost painfully diligent pupil of West, and also of Copley, and many of the figure groupings in the first paintings of the series, both central and peripheral, can be traced back to works by his two mentors.26 An intriguing and contentious example of this is the group of the three furhatted figures looking in shock at the death of General Montgomery, which Prown argues were probably painted, or at least achieved their final form, after August 1786 when Trumbull was shown the recently completed Oath of the Horatii by David.27Apart from the fact that there are groups of three figures in each painting, they could hardly be more different in spirit. Instead of showing the four-square resolution appropriate to a solemn oath, the furhatted figures in Trumbull's painting react in sudden horror to a volley of grapeshot that has just killed their commander and those officers around him. If a precedent were needed, one would go back to the disorderly scenes of close combat in The Battle of La Hogue painting by West, or to the grieving spectators reacting to their commander's death in The Death of General Wolfe. The battle of Bunker's Hill took place on 17 June 1775, and it was arguably the first battle in which American soldiers showed their prowess, but it was not a decisive victory for either side. The British succeeded in taking the hills overlooking Boston defended by the Americans, but only after very heavy losses. In Trumbull's painting Warren is a Wolfe-like hero, falling back dead in full view of his distraught fellow soldiers, but at the moment not of victory but of retreat. In the preliminary drawings, Warren is presented as even more Wolfe-like, but two incidents have been added to the final picture that are not in the preliminary drawings.28 The most prominent is the intervention of the British Major John Small to prevent a grenadier from bayoneting the helpless general. In addition, behind the central group, a British Major, John Pitcairn, dies in the arms of his son. Such even-handedness between conflicting armies is not common in history paintings, which conventionally reinforce the uniqueness of the moral decision taken by the hero; nor is it to be found in West or Copley's contemporary history paintings. The highlighting of the heroism of both sides seems to reinforce West's notion of the American war as a family quarrel, but it could also be seen as an astute marketing strategy, to make the painting acceptable to a London audience as well as to an American or European one.29 Such 'balanced' imagery would notionally allow an English observer to draw comfort from a scene that an American audience would see as patriotic. Still it is hard to believe that a series on the War of Independence could ever have been received with enthusiasm in England given the outcome, and the fact that it had been achieved with French help; certainly Trumbull made no

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attempt to exhibit them in London, but made a point of showing them to David and others in Paris. A less commercial reason might be found in Trumbull's devotion to a military ideology and consciousness of his own social position. The Death of General Warren can be read as an affirmation of the bond of chivalry among the military officer class, to which he himself belonged, that notionally transcended even national difference. Officers are obliged to obey orders to fight for their country, but they must at all times show respect for the life and dignity of those they defeat. Trumbull in his autobiography claimed that his painting of The Capture of the Hessians was intended as 'a lesson to all living and future soldiers ... to show mercy and kindness to a fallen enemy - their enemy no longer when wounded and in their power'.30The implicit corollary, however, is that common soldiers cannot be expected to show such restraint; hence in The Death of General Warren the grenadier seeks an empty revenge by bayoneting the expiring general, and must be restrained by an officer. It is also possible that Trumbull was aware of the American government's anxiety after the war had ended that it should be treated not as a rebel state but as a mature nation, able to deal on terms of mutual respect with the European powers. Hence there was possibly a diplomatic motive in emphasizing chivalry as much as bravery and self-sacrifice. The differing and not easily reconcilable agendas that hover around the painting contribute to a certain visual confusion, by contrast with, for example, West's Death of General Wolfe, with its clear focus on a single locus of heroism. The second painting in the series, depicting The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, 31 December 1775, represents an undeniable American defeat, for Montgomery was killed in a failed action that lost Canada to the Americans. But it was also the tragic end to a brilliant, and up to that point successful, campaign, admired even by English observers. Trumbull, in his autobiography, made the choice seem self-evident because of the 'brilliancy of conception and hardihood of attempt'31, and certainly Montgomery's daring provided a worthy precedent for Washington's generalship which was to feature in the next painting in the series. In representing Montgomery's death Trumbull made no attempt to emphasize the chivalrous relationship between opposing sides. The British army is present only as the invisible perpetrator of the cannon shot that blasts the general and his officers at close quarters. One might argue that the moral authority shared with the British in the previous painting has now been fully invested in the Americans, but the painting also regains a clarity of focus on the heroic death that had been lost in the Warren painting. The third battle scene, The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, 3 January 1777 which was at least well under way before Trumbull went to Paris, was unequivocally an American victory. It depicts the advent of George

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Washington on horseback at the moment of Mercer's death; it was a turning point in the war, giving Washington control of New Jersey. Even so it is not triumphal in its action. Mercer was killed at the point his own unit was overcome by a British force, and in the painting the moment depicted is simultaneous with Washington riding in to turn the setback into an American victory. The heroic death of the American general is balanced on the right by the death of a British captain, William Leslie, who drops his sword as he vainly tries to staunch the wound in his chest. The deadly mutual exchanges of war are literally foregrounded, while Washington's dashing intervention is shown in the middle distance. The painting, therefore, like the Warren painting, puts the primary focus on the 'gentlemen's war', with gallant officers from both sides in the thick of the action. Trumbull's awareness - and West's - of the difficult reception his series might have in England is made clear in a letter to his brother of 24 May 1786. He reveals that West had suggested that he paint a picture celebrating the recent British victory at Gibraltar 'which alone, if properly treated is sufficient to establish my Reputation', in London.32 This led to the large painting The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar,33begun around the time of the letter but only finished the next year after he had returned from Paris. It is once again a scene of chivalry on both sides. The central incident shows a dying Spanish officer who had charged a British column single-handed, refusing the assistance generously proffered by General Elliot and his men. This painting, specifically directed towards the London public, culminated in the Metropolitan version, exhibited with moderate success at Spring Gardens in April 1789. The battle paintings by Trumbull discussed so far all, in one way or another, take off from two pictures: West's Death of General Wolfe and Copley's Death of Major Peirson, with motifs derived from other paintings by the same artists. All four centre on the moment of death of a soldier hero, whose loss is recorded in the response of spectators who express compassion, admiration, grief, shock and horror. In each case the central scene is mediated through observers who stop, whatever their situation, to wonder at or lament the deed. The dying Wolfe is surrounded by carefully differentiated groups officers, men and a lone Indian - and the dying Peirson is the focus of a compassionate group that carries him off tenderly, while his fate touches many about him. Similarly the deaths of the generals in Trumbull's battle paintings are given meaning by the responses of those around them, though the battle continues to rage. In The Death of General Montgomery, all the living participants are spectators, while in the more crowded scene of The Death of General Mercer the witnesses of his heroism are the dying drummer, the grenadiers themselves and the British soldiers to the right. These spectators within the picture create a certain distancing effect and in each case - and this

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is as true of West and Copley as it is of Trumbull - the central scene is pushed back from the picture plane by corpses, broken guns and other impedimenta, as well as onlookers. The difficulty as always was to achieve clarity in the representation of heroism while giving a sense of the smoke and confusion of a real battle.

Trumbull in Paris and later American war paintings

When Trumbull went to Paris in July 1786 he had already intended to include in the series The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, and The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, 29 October ij8 i. These episodes chart the growing military success of the Americans under Washington, who takes on the magnanimity of the true gentleman and hero. In The Capture of the Hessians he is a generous and compassionate victor,34tenderly ordering care for the wounded Hessian Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rail, and in The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis,35 he retires to the middle distance as the war effectively ends with Cornwallis's surrender. This note of gentlemanly restraint towards the enemy was, as we have seen, a constant note from the beginning of the series, and Trumbull was also at pains in The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis to maintain the dignity of the defeated British officers, as well as of the victorious French and American soldiers. The most famous of the series, The Declaration of Independence (Figure 1.5),36 the only one of the series that does not involve a military engagement, seems not to have been in Trumbull's mind before he went to Paris. It was, it appears, Jefferson's idea; he admired Trumbull hugely, claiming that 'His natural talents for this art seem almost unparalleled.' The painting highlights, of course, Jefferson's own role in the events, and fits with his concern by 1786 to establish the international legitimacy of the new republic, but the result is essentially a portrait group, exhibiting likenesses of all the participants. Trumbull's American war paintings from The Death of General Mercer onwards are difficult to assess because he continued to repaint them for many years afterwards. The Surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga cannot be dated in any form before 1791,37 and the painting itself seems not to have been begun until 1822, although it was suggested as early as 1785. Even so there are signs that the 1786 visit to Paris had a decisive effect on his manner of painting. In broad terms his later work is much drier in manner, more precise in outline and more measured in effect, and the same is also true of his later reworkings of London compositions. There is strong evidence that this was partly due to his encounter with David, who had invited him to his studio in the Louvre, and showed a flattering interest in his own pictures, as examples of the new 'English' contemporary history painting.38 David's influence has long been recognized in The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, especially in the line of

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overlapping heads of the French soldiers on the left, which may be compared with the configuration of the heads of the Horatii in David's Oath. It is worth noting that their Davidian nature is not as clear in the oil sketches that probably date from shortly after his return from Paris.39 The paintings begun after the Paris visit, then, turn away from the 'English' handling of the London paintings: fluid paint, prominent impasto and strong chiaroscuro, all techniques expressive of the drama of the battlefield. The post-Paris paintings also tend to forgo the varied and nuanced response of spectators who rehearse the emotions as we witness the act(s) of heroism. The Capture of the Hessians is transitional; the version in the Trumbull collection at Yale is painted dryly, but it still expresses the human feelings of the central group and varied responses from the soldiers. The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, on the other hand, in the Yale version, worked on for many years afterwards, seems quite drained of feeling. The long line of unemotional faces of the French and American soldiers owes something not only to David's example, but also to the need to insert portraits of the participants. It can also be read as a rejection, as indeed was The Oath of the Horatii, of the use of intermediaries within the picture who express emotions on the spectator's behalf, and the distancing effect of placing secondary objects in the foreground. Though in the Yorktown painting the central incident of the surrender is set back from the foreground there are no intermediary objects, and the soldiers on either side make a continuum from foreground through the middle distance.

The inherent problems of contemporary history painting

Trumbull's shift from a broadly English to a more French manner was not only, or even primarily, stylistic; it represents among other things a concern to commemorate the living as well as the dead. This was especially true of the Yorktown painting, which was delayed for years by the interminable task of putting together accurate portraits of all the participants in France and America. In the process of doing this the uniqueness of the heroic act has descended into the bathos of the meticulously accurate group portrait. One might conclude that Trumbull's visit to Paris and his exposure to the influence of Jefferson and David vitiated the stirring vitality of his earlier battle scenes, but the problem is perhaps inherent in the whole idea of contemporary history painting. It is not accidental that David had infinite difficulty with Le Serment du Jeu de Paume, which contained dozens of stillliving figures, but achieved success with contemporary history paintings like The Death of Marat, which contained only a single, iconic (no longer living) figure.

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Public commemorations of great patriotic deeds were always under pressure to provide unequivocal messages. Trumbull's paintings of the deaths of Warren, Montgomery and Mercer were not used as the basis for any of the four paintings he was commissioned to do for the Rotunda of the Capitol, we might surmise because of their very lack of triumphalism. Those finally installed were not battle scenes, with their potential for untidiness, indecipherability and moral equivocation, but the scenes of surrender at Saratoga and Yorktown, The Declaration of Independence and The Resignation of General Washington. The dullness of the latter works contrasts with the dynamism of the early paintings Trumbull made in Benjamin West's studio, as he himself seems to have realized. The Capitol paintings represent not Trumbull's decline as a painter as it is often claimed, but the fact that the demands of public heroism could not easily be reconciled with the need to record all those who had secondary roles in these great events. At the beginning of this essay I quoted Edgar Wind's remark that contemporary history painting 'was produced by the impact of democratic ideas proclaimed by a group of American artists', but it should be clear from Trumbull's War of Independence paintings that he at least was no 'democrat' in any modern sense. Similarly the heroes of West and Copley's contemporary military subjects are always officers rather than common soldiers. But perhaps the most contentious point of Wind's claim is the use of the epithet 'American' to describe these painters, for it is fraught with paradox. West and Copley were both bom in America but as British subjects, and they remained so, despite in the former's case a conspicuous affection for his compatriots and a desire to help the new republic. Trumbull was bom a British subject but was from the beginning of the Revolution unequivocally an American, who frequently made disparaging remarks about the British. Yet he studied in London, kept the patriotic content of his paintings at first to a minimum, and did not hesitate to paint and exhibit a large painting commemorating a British victory. As Wind noted, West's Death of General Wolfe is set in Canada, thus distancing the act of heroism in space if not in time. The painting can be read as a demonstration of the way in which the emergent British Empire was beginning to form a new identity in distant places, relying on native American allies and the recruitment of soldiers from Scotland and Ireland. A native American is prominent in West's painting, but then a kilted Scottish soldier is conspicuously portrayed in the very centre of Trumbull's The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar. Even though the French thought of the invention of contemporary history painting as 'English' and George Washington thought it to be 'American', there is perhaps a good case for thinking of it rather as 'British', not in a narrowly nationalistic sense but as a response to a new and complex world opening up beyond Europe.

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I am grateful for help with this essay to Thomas Latham, who is currently preparing a PhD thesis on the subject of Anglo-American relations in the period at University College London.

Notes 1.

Edgar Wind, 'The revolution of history painting', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2, 1938, pp- 1 1 6 - 2 7 (Reprinted in Jaynie Anderson ed., Edgar Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, pp. 88-99).

2.

Philippe Bordes, Le Serment du Jeu de Paume de Jacques-Louis David (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1983), pp. 2 4 -5, passim.

3.

G. Chinard ed., Houdon in America (N ew York, 1973), p. 33.

4.

Quoted in Wind, 1986, p. 89.

5.

Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press), 1986, nos 93, 5 and 77. For a recent discussion of The Death of General Wolfe, see D avid Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 20 9 -12.

6.

Bordes, 1983, p. 25.

7.

Wind, 1986, pp. 90-91.

8.

The standard w orks are: Irma B. Jaffe, John Trumbull: Patriot-Artist of the American Revolution (Boston: N ew York Graphic Society, 1975), and Helen A . Cooper, ed., John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter (exh. cat., Yale University A rt Gallery, 1982). I have also used Daniel C. Favata, ed., John Trumbull: A Founding Father of American Art (exh. cat., Fordham University Libraries, N e w York, 2001).

9.

Wind, 1986, p. 97.

10.

Cooper, ed., 1982, pp. 4 -6 .

11.

Kenneth Garlick and An gus Macintyre eds, The Diary of Joseph Farington (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978-96), vol. iii, p. 1 1 0 6 ,8 December 1798. 'West had signified that if He could obtain payment from the King of the great demand on him, He w ould quit England for Am erica.'

12.

T. E. Stebbins in John Singleton Copley in America (exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, N e w York,

13 .

S. E. Morison, H. S. Comm ager and W. E. Leuchtenberg, The Growth of the American Republic (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 7th edn, vol. i, p. 175 . 'Jonathan Trumbull, an archconservative, w as nonetheless the only colonial governor to repudiate his oath of allegiance to the king and throw in his lot with the rebels.'

14.

Cooper, ed., 1982, pp. 3-4 .

15.

John Trumbull, Autobiography, Reminiscences and Letters by John Trumbull from 17 5 6 -18 4 1 (N ew York, London and N e w Haven: W iley and Putnam; B. L. Hamlen, 1841).

1995)/ p p - 9 2-3-

16.

Letter to Jonathan Trumbull, Sr, 15 March 178 5, quoted Cooper, ed., 1982, p. 7.

17.

Jules Prown in Cooper, ed., 1982, p. 29.

18.

ibid., p. 29.

19.

von Erffa and Staley, 1986, no. 105.

20.

D avid Brion Davis and Steven Mintz, The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery Through the Civil War (N ew York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 223.

21.

von Erffa and Staley, 1986, no. 83.

22.

ibid., nos 84, 88, and 90.

23.

ibid., no. 91.

24.

Cooper, ed., 1982, nos 4 and 7.

25.

ibid., nos 14, 24, and 30.

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26.

See Jaffe, 1975, pp. 78f., and Prown in Cooper, ed., 1982, pp. 3 0 - 3 1 .

27.

Prown in Cooper, ed., 1982, pp. 3 3 -4 .

28.

Cooper, ed., 1982, figs 23 and 26.

29.

ibid., pp. 57-8 .

30.

Trumbull, 18 4 1, p. 420.

31.

ibid., p. 414.

32.

Letter to Jonathan Trumbull, Jr, 24 M ay 1786 (quoted Cooper, ed., 1982, pp. 6 1-2 ).

33.

Cooper, ed., 1982, nos 1 0 - 1 3 .

34.

ibid., no. 24.

35.

ibid., no. 27.

36.

ibid., no. 25.

37.

ibid., no. 30.

38.

Bordes, 1983, pp. 3 7 -8 , and p. 103, n. 116 .

39.

Cooper, ed., 1982, p. 82, figs 40 -42.

David Bindman

1 .1 John Trumbull, The Death o f G eneral W arren at the Battle o f Bu nker's H ill , 27 Ju n e 17 7 5 , c. 1786, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 864 cm

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1.2

John Trumbull, The Death o f G eneral M ontgom ery in the A ttack on Quebec , 3 1

D ecem ber 17 7 5 , c. 1786, oil on canvas, 62.3 x 94 cm

David Bindman

1.3

John Trumbull, The Death o f G eneral M ercer at the Battle o f Princeton, 3 Jan u ary

17 7 7 , c. 1789-c. 18 3 1, oil on canvas, 51.5 x 75.9 cm

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1 4 John Trumbull, The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, 29 October 1781 (detail), 1787-c. 1828, oil on canvas, 53 x 77.8 cm

David Bindman

1.5 John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, 4 July iy y 6 ,1787-1820, oil on canvas, 53.0 x 78.7 cm

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2

Papierkultur. the British print, history and modernity in

Enlightenment Germany

Anne-M arie Link

In 1779, Germany's first periodical dedicated to the visual arts began its inaugural issue with an article entitled 'On new coloured English1 engravings'.2 Almost thirty years later, a German history of art would comment on the relationship between the 'enormous trade' of British engravings and the 'astonishing activity with which painting is carried out in England, as well as the degree of perfection, the spread of the love of art over that island, and the recognition of British accomplishments in art in the rest of Europe'.3 In between these texts, in 1790, another German commentator would note that Britain, with its 'possession of both Indias, of shipping and of trade with all corners of the world', was producing the newest art of the time.4 In all cases, the writers were referring to what they believed was the important phenomenon of a modem British art in their own time, produced by an 'advanced', that is, commercial and imperial nation, and the availability of this art to German viewers through the reproductive engraving. Their interest was not unusual, for British art in the form of the reproductive engraving garnered a great deal of comment in Germany during the later eighteenth century,5 with writers as diverse as the geographer Anton Friedrich Biisching and the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Herder noting both the rise of art in modem Britain,6as well as the accompanying 'inundation' of British prints into Germany.7 The concept of an 'inundation' of British art during the latter decades of the eighteenth century has until recently been only little examined;8 however, a consideration of the reproductive engraving and the British School in general, does suggest an altered picture of the visual culture of this period in western Europe, one which is less reliant on the painting, the exhibition and Paris, and one which embraces an expanding print culture or Papierkultur. This Papierkultur (literally a 'paper culture') allowed for the circulation of 'high art' images to an ever greater audience, one for whom the painted image had very

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little direct relevance. It also created a situation in which images produced, and were to a great extent produced by, texts which included not only the more obvious forms of art reviews, criticism and theory, but also national histories, travelogues and philosophical speculation. Although the result is an often fragmented and tangled body of commentary, remarks on British art do provide a rather remarkably consistent account of its reception in Germany from the 1770s to the turn of the century, one which was tied to an assumed positive relationship between British art and a new historically based conception of a 'modernen Europa'. Georg Forster, the German explorer who had accompanied Captain Cook, for example, explicitly tied British art to the concept of the modern when he wrote that the 'progress of art in modern Europe ("modernen Europa")' was to be seen especially in the present flourishing ('Aufbliihen') of British art.9It is this relationship between a 'flourishing' of British art, Germany's Papierkultur and the concept of a 'modernen Europa' which will be the focus here.

The British print, the ideal and the modem

It should first be noted that the relation of Germany to the British engraved image was from the beginning that of a consumer, a position which is the subject of Daniel Purdy's recent study on Anglo-German relations during this period. Purdy points out that later eighteenth-century German consumers were deeply interested in, and to a very considerable extent reliant upon foreign commodities, particularly British ones; they were also reliant upon text, for these commodities were experienced first, as Purdy observes, as 'textually generated objects' and secondarily, if at all, as material objects.10He argues that Germany's 'vibrant and complex consumer culture' was in fact almost entirely dependent upon text, so that the act of consumption, whether consummated or not, often began as 'an act of fantasy, generated by reading'.11 His observations hold generally true for art consumption in Germany, for it was the reproductive engraving rather than the painting which would 'appear' in a media network of texts, being supplied 'virtually' through the processes of description, review, discussion and analysis to the fantasy of the reader/consumer/collector, part of that 'new stratum of bourgeois people' with whose rise the eighteenth century is identified.12 Texts about pictures, supplying descriptions, reviews, opinions and prices, provided German readers the opportunity to read about, and if desired, to purchase and collect engraved images, the majority of which were reproductive (rather than 'original') and, in many cases, British. (There are also cases in which German engravers reproduced the work of British artists for the German market.)13 The press thus became the place of idea and

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commodity exchange to a nation fragmented into many principalities and courts, and, in the case of reproductive prints, provided a 'centre' - London to a country divided into many 'peripheries'.14 The recognition of London as an important art-producing centre is clearly seen in Germany's first periodical dedicated solely to the visual arts, the Miscellaneen artistischen Inhalts (Artistic Miscellany), for its inaugural article, published in 1779, was a review of coloured English engravings, all of them produced in London and all obtainable through print- or booksellers in Germany. The engravings were executed in the fashionable stipple technique and ranged from Benjamin West's Angelica and Medoro (Figure 2.1) to Matthew William Peters's Clara (Figure 2.2). They were made available to readers both through information regarding purchase or, as already mentioned, more likely 'virtually' through reading and imagination, as their images were fully and sometimes even eloquently described in the text. The practice of describing British prints was part of the journal's general aim of 'bringing news of artists and matters pertaining to art in their first newness'15 to its readers and its focus on the most important site of the new - London - is therefore not surprising. It was London that was the production centre of the inundation of prints to which Herder had referred, and it was also a centre of experimentation in newer engraving processes, such as coloured mezzotint and stipple engraving, which were able to reproduce at least some of the sensuous appeal of oil painting. Technical virtuosity would in fact rank high in the Miscellaneen's critical commentary on the English coloured engravings under review, so that the judgements of 'masterpiece' and of 'perfection' were to a great extent reliant upon it and the concept of a progressive modernity it invoked. The judgement of the 'highest possible level of perfection'16, which the British prints received, also, however, went beyond technological perfection to include other perfections increasingly associated in Germany with the new British School. It was the British School which was producing images of 'noble drawing' and 'high minded' beauty, images which adhered to the academic traditions of judging the best in art. These judgements were abundantly applied, for instance, to the Clara, an image which reproduced one of a number of paintings of young women by the cleric Matthew William Peters. Here, the British stipple engraving technique not only 'perfectly' represented a pink-tinged and soft-focused female beauty, but also a unique fusion of the ideal tradition and an image recognized as contemporary and modern. Although the concept of the ideal was not one usually associated with British art, the Clara's reception as among the 'best' of the newer British art, indicates a change in perception, at least in Germany, by the later decades of the eighteenth century. The relationship between the British School and the

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ideal tradition was in fact becoming an accepted one, with Britain increasingly recognized as the rejuvenator and modernizer of the European high art tradition. This concept was most notably promulgated in the popular Annalen der Brittischen Geschichte (Annals of British History), compiled by J. W. von Archenholz and published in periodical form from 1788 to 1792. Its aim was to provide an analysis of contemporary British life to German readers, with its 1790 volume containing a lengthy chapter on the 'History of art in England' in which the relationship between the tradition of art and the new British art was a focus. It was here noted that the ideal tradition was thriving in Britain, due to the fact that it had been imported there through judicious acquisitions of paintings and sculptures by wealthy Britons on their Continental visits (particularly to Italy), thus providing a visual base for the subsequent development of what would become the new British academic school of art.17 These same 'Old Master' paintings in British private collections were already known in Germany through reproductive engravings/8as were those British artists, such as Richard Wilson, whose images were deemed elevated enough to warrant reproduction (Figure 2.3). The transplantation of the ideal tradition on to British soil was also recognized by the Annalen as the seed from which the new British academy and its consequent new masters had developed, and from which they could claim a legitimacy, an observation echoed later by the art historian Johann Dominikus Fiorillo, when he noted: 'A British school of art has been called into being through the foreign travels of the English, especially to Italy, where they partook of the taste of better art works and brought back to England priceless collections.'19 Fiorillo's reference to the 'foreign travels of the English' is also important in terms of the relationship between the new British art and the contemporary world, that is, the second half of the fusion mentioned above. The notion of an advanced British encounter with the 'rest of the world', one which extended beyond the Grand Tour into explorations of ancient cultures like Greece or the recently 'discovered' cultures of Cook's voyages, becomes evident in German commentary on Britain during this period. If we return for a moment to the Clara, we find that a critical element of the image's perfection was its 'Greek or Circassian profile' a description which incorporates both an element of the antique ideal as well as a new conception of 'contact'. (Greece itself having only recently become a site of exploration, mainly by the British). Such 'advanced' contact was particularly associated with the British, particularly since the engraving was reviewed together with another Londonproduced stipple, a Venetian Lady, itself part of a larger 'phylum' of images of 'foreign' women.21 The Clara was thus both perfect in the aspects of higher art - elevated sentiment, beauty, perfect light, shade and balance - yet it also indicated the best of the present century's advances in travel and exploration. As has been pointed out by Mary Pratt, accounts of contact were critical in

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forming 'the rest of the world' for Europeans/2 and although Pratt's concern is solely with colonial encounters, her observations can also be applied here in the sense that the 'rest of the world' for eighteenth-century Germans included the world beyond very local borders, with other European countries or even neighbouring counties becoming zones of interest for a generally nontravelling public. British contact can therefore be regarded in a double sense, one worked out in publications like the Annalen and images like the Clara, which reminded German readers both of knowledges being forged by the more mobile British, and at the same time themselves functioning as contacts with 'foreign' British life.23

History, empire and the new British art

The Annalen, with its descriptions and comments, contributed to the making 'visible' of one region/culture to another, and as such can be regarded as a type of travel account, or Reisebeschreibung, which by 1750 had become one of Germany's largest genres of literature.24 Following the format established by the travel account, the Annalen commented on art galleries, collections and manufactures, much like the commentary on the arts and crafts discovered on overseas voyages, and like them, contributed to a primeval/developed binary, in which material culture was regarded as a distinctive mark of a nation or people's historical development. The Annalen aimed to make a foreign country legible by analyzing its level of development in terms of European civilization, and it is in this context that its influential discussion of British art can be particularly located. The chapter 'History of art in England' had in fact been written by Georg Forster, the translator of Cook's voyages for a German audience and a former resident of England for over ten years.25 Although not trained in the arts in any way, Forster was a respected observer and interpreter of the cultures with which he had come in contact and his interpretation of modern Britain would rely heavily on his assessment of its culture, which he saw as a clear indicator of the nation's commercial and intellectual vigour. British art for Forster was also the century's 'most recent bloom', providing a model of 'the progress of art' for all of European civilization.26 Forster's commentary displays the kind of historicizing thought regarding art and culture which his close ties to Gottingen and Mainz universities would have given him (as well as his knowledge of Herder's ideas on culture and society), for it was particularly at Gottingen that a new civil form of universal history was being promoted, itself part of a greater eighteenthcentury shift away from dynastic and ecclesiastic history/7 This form of history was to be a Menschheitsgeschichte, or history of humankind, and was to

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both recount and account for, the conditions of everyday civil life over the centuries. Set into a broad concept of progress, it was based on the notion of human perfectibility and the material products of this perfectibility. As Foucault has noted regarding this period, history became the 'mother of all the human sciences',28 and in Germany particularly, history would be linked with the study of cultural artefacts as the products of human knowledge, providing the visual proofs of the progression of cultures, the 'illuminating illustrations', as one Gottingen historian put it, to a 'true history of humankind'.29 Forster's interest in British art is closely related to this line of thought, for he too regarded the arts as indicative of a society's level of progress, the definition of which was now based upon conditions beneficial to the civil/bourgeois society which formed the object of the new historical thinking.30 Human progress, Forster explained, had to involve the 'grossen Haufen' ('the masses of the people') and no longer just the 'priviligierte Klasse', and this state of human progress was to be found presently only in Britain. Here, 'the possession of both Indias, of shipping and of trade with all comers of the world' had resulted in an 'epoch of the greatest prosperity and the greatest abundance of wealth', one in which 'the first dawn of artistic genius can finally be seen'. This dawn, reliant on a wealth produced by empire, which Forster saw as a good and necessary thing, had created the requisite state of luxury which allowed the arts to flourish, and although Forster was well aware of the pitfalls associated with luxury - feminization, laxity, greed - he was also convinced of its positive aspects, acknowledging that 'Our modem art is the foster child of luxury'.31 Even though this child of luxury (Luxus) could become conventional and aim only at audience-pleasing, rather than at genius, the conditions created by luxury were still the base upon which happiness, perfectibility, equality and culture could grow. Thus, when Forster writes of 'our' new art when referring to British art, it is because this art represented possibilities for all modern Europeans, although at this point in time the required degree of wealth was to be found only in modem Britain. Forster's opinions participated in the most recent thinking on the relationship between wealth and culture, in which wealth was a natural outcome of progressive social development - ' a r t s are perfected, and commerce extended, only in proportion as a passion for luxury, a taste for magnificence, and the love of pleasure gain ground amongst the people' was the claim made in the multi-translated The Origin of Laws, Arts, and Sciences,32 and repeated, with a warning, by Forster when he wrote: 'Luxury, Art and Science, the children of one birth, unite to bring forth a new brood - of monsters and of geniuses - into the world.'33 Forster had called Britain the 'land of freedom',34and it was here that 'a new brood' was creating the culture which marked an advanced and progressive

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civilization. Although Forster linked the 'land of freedom' to the claims of the 'grossen Haufen', his vision of the highest form of pictorial culture for this group remained couched in the language of high art rather than the language of the popular or of overthrow. Forster, like other commentators on the new British art, continued to champion a form of art created by academic art theory - Hogarth, for example, is not mentioned in his 'History of art in England'35 - but one whose beauties, lessons and inspiration would now provide benefits to a modern audience whose interests differed from the ruling elite traditionally served by the Academy. However, it was still the history painting which Forster would regard as the highest form of imagemaking for this new audience, an opinion shared by most German commentators, and one which draws our attention here. 'History painting' ('historisches Gemahld') and the British School were in fact almost synonymous in German review writing, and this is partly due to the fact that the category 'history picture' was a broad one. The lexicographer Johann Georg Sulzer, in his popular encyclopedia of art, supplied the following definition: 'Representations of mythology, allegory, battlescenes and genre pieces (even when they are portraits) can be considered in the historical class to the extent they portray a single character in action, or in a certain frame of mind, such as a penitent Magdalene and the like.'36 The modern British history picture therefore generally included any work considered 'noble' and 'elevated', thus supplying a new audience with what Forster would call a 'moving unity of the moral and the physical beauties',37a unity equally apparent in either an original painting as well as the more 'democratic' engraving. This new British history picture, for German commentators, was believed to eclipse all others, including the French, particularly in one critical aspect, and this was the belief that the British-produced picture had a more universal - now defined in terms of the burgerlich ('bourgeois/civil') - appeal than did those of France. Recent French art, including the engraving, tended to be regarded in terms of French art's 'sad' history - as explained by a printcollecting handbook - which had begun its decline in the Tong reign of Louis XV', so that 'a false taste had won the upper hand'. From this time on, it was explained, 'French engraving [was] very much in decay', the result of French art's 'superfluity of worthlessness [which] was not a little responsible for almost completely destroying the reputation of French engraving.'38 Such sentiments permeated discussions of contemporary engraving, in which the French engraving was often found to be lacking the 'serious' qualities expected of a higher art - Biisching, for example, noted that French engraving 'in recent times, has deteriorated into a taste for trifles and fripperies'.39Even David's history pictures could not meet with unqualified approval, for their meaning was often too closely tied to the political events of the French

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Revolution and Republic, a situation which Fiorillo at least seemed to believe limited their relevance to the universal 'everyone'. The French historical school of painting, although considered admirable in many respects, was thus also not the perfect model for a Germany seeking the modem - as Fiorillo explained, its figures were often merely 'coloured Basreliefs', its compositions often 'empty', and thus its pictures too frequently 'artificial'.40 In contrast to the artificial, the new British School was represented as having above all a desired and consistent quality of truth, both in regard to a genuine (rather than 'empty') emotional appeal and particularly in regard to its provision of a knowledge-providing historical circumstance and detail. Both forms of truth can be considered in terms of the complex shift of expectations of art during this period, which is generally recognized as a time of transition between art-as-imitation/instruction and as court or church related, to art as autonomous/non-instrumental. However, although recent research has generally interested itself in the latter,41 the shift to a purely disinterested 'aesthetic' stance was not sudden or clear cut, so that expectations of appeal to emotion, imitation and instruction remained in place both during and after Moritz's and Kant's new formulations, especially for a general audience and its interpreters. Therefore, the expectation of the British image as genuine (thus supposedly in line with bourgeois/civil values) rather than artificial or propagandistic, can be seen in terms of the shift away from court and church-related art, yet one still desirous of instruction - the older instruction of moral behaviour and educated tradition - but also a new instruction in the knowledge provided by the expanding boundaries of the modem world. These expanding boundaries, as so clearly perceived by Forster, supplied not only new subjects for representation, but also supplied the economic base of empire and its subsequent nurturing of the highest form of the arts at its centre. Thus, not only did the new British School exemplify the fmits of a modern academy, but the Academy itself exemplified the fruits of a modem economy. Reynolds's Discourses, as the theoretical programme of the new British School, were highly regarded in Germany, with the majority being reproduced and translated in the German periodical press two to three years after their delivery in London.42 Similarly, the names of British painters were well known, wrote the print-collecting handbook: Most art lovers are acquainted, through engravings, with the talents of the principal English painters, of which we will first name all the history painters: Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Nathaniel Dance, Gavin and William Hamilton, Francis Hayman, Prince Hoare, John Hamilton Mortimer, Robert Edge Pine, Thomas Stothard, John Trumbull43

And it was images such as Nathaniel Dance's The Dying Marc Anthony (Figure 2.4) or Benjamin West's Oliver Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament (Figure

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2.3) or even Angelica Kauffman's Judgement of Paris (Figure 2.6) which would garner the greatest attentions of the German cultural press. They were all 'those magnificent prints of the newer English art, where drawing, esprit, knowledge of the passions and the manners and customs of the time seem to produce a perfect unity'.44

The new British art and the 'manners and customs of nations'

A demonstrated knowledge of the passions and the manners/customs of the time, whether historical or contemporary, was particularly attributed to British-produced images, and it is mentioned often enough to warrant a closer consideration in terms of the print-collecting (or review-reading) audience in Germany. The interest in historical detail and truth was related to a developing interest in history itself as a structure for an understanding of the contemporary world,45 an interest supported by an increasing number of texts dealing with history and aimed at the 'general' educated reader. Most popular were texts of modern history,46 with the translated works of contemporary English, Scottish and French historians being well known in Germany.47 Historical accuracy was aimed at by the new historians, and was a particular feature of the historical institutes established at the university in Gottingen by the 1760s.48The importance given to historical accuracy was one carried over into writing about images - for example, the 'reality' of the armour worn by Marc Anthony or the likeness of Cromwell's visage - and it was particularly present in those British pictures 'taken out of our time and manners'.49 It is thus not surprising that the most celebrated British image in Germany was in fact such a picture, being William Woollett's well-known 1776 engraving after Benjamin West's painting, The Death of General Wolfe (Figure 2.7).50It quickly became famous in Germany as a model British 'masterpiece', and this fact clearly points to a reputation for the image beyond the purely British appeal often ascribed to it.51 The print, for example, was fully described in the influential periodical, the Neue Bibliothek der schonen Wissenschaften und der freyen Kiinste, shortly after its publication in 1776. The description detailed the 'dying hero', 'General Monckton, numb with grief', an 'Indian', the landing of the troops and the fact that most of the figures were 'true portraits'.52 It also concluded by stating that 'Everything is according to life', thus promising the viewer a 'true' representation of the 1759 battle on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec. Again, such a representation was expected of a British-produced 'masterpiece' (even though West was an American), and was in accordance with the definition of a history picture as demonstrating 'an exact knowledge of the manners and customs of the land ... [a

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knowledge which] requires long application and much learning. The more exactly the artist is instructed in the manners and customs of nations, the easier does it become for him to make his subject matter comprehensible/53 Comprehensibility, learnedness, a knowledge of other nations (West's American background thus increased the perceived 'reality' level of his North American pictures); all of these were attributed to the products of the British School, and it was West's 'magnificent scenes' of 'real life', with their 'true representation of costume', 'fine composition and stirring expression' that caused them to be recognized in Germany as 'the highest point attained by the British historical school'.54 As representative of this high point, West's Wolfe took its subject matter not from antiquity, but from that new site of events, stories, heroes and peoples that would make up a Western construct of history itself - the world beyond Europe. In the case of the Wolfe, this world was also already represented as being 'known', conquered and tamed by the British, not only in terms of the 'Indian' but also in terms of the French. Representation of this world with its claims of 'scientific' detail and high art reiterate the conclusions reached in postcolonial studies in which the construct 'history' is regarded not only as a function of Western colonialism, but also of the 'myth of a value free, "scientific" view of the past [and] the myth of the beauty of order'.55 It is notable that it is just these issues of precise, 'scientific' detail combined with the beauty of order which dominate the comments on West's picture in the language of the judgement of art: 'everything is according to life' and the picture has 'a fine composition' (implying balance, symmetry and order), so that the image becomes a 'masterpiece'. British-produced 'masterpieces' were linked to a modernity in which the elevated and elevating image of a high art long associated with Europe's power elites still had a critical role to play in modem bourgeois society. As the Berlin Academy's Monats-Schrift explained: can, with right, be taken for the best history painter which this century has produced. He is equally excellent in composition, expression and costume; his talent has been expended on the most interesting and exciting subjects of past as well as present times. In this respect he is to be far preferred over the best Italians, who employed their greatest efforts on holy families and crucifixions. As proof of this statement I can cite his r e g u l u s , his h a n n i b a l , his Death of g e n e r a l w o l f .56 w est

The replacement of holy families and crucifixions by 'exciting subjects of past as well as present times', and the implied eclipse of an Italian model of high culture for a new British one, indicate the changing role of the high art image in its relation to new consumers and expectations. As summed up by the Monats-Schrift, 'the best history painter of the century' could in fact only have been properly recognized in, and produced by, a nation thoroughly progressive - that is, colonial and industrial - in its practices:

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Ever since this nation [Britain] has so particularly honoured a w e s t and an a n g e l i c a [Kauffman], both of whom practise the most noble style, has its taste been uncommonly refined, and its factories have brought forth art and mechanical works that are so rightly beloved and sought out by all other nations.57

If the 'noble style' of the Western tradition - which easily accommodated such images as the Wolfe and the 'Grecian' productions of Angelica Kauffman with its assumptions of advanced civilization is here being lauded, it is now a noble style made technically available by that nation which had moved first into an era of 'mechanical works', industry and empire-produced wealth. Indeed, the 'noble' style of the British School was here given credit for the quality of the country's industrial output, emphasizing once again the critical relationship perceived between the arts, national wealth and the historical 'progress' of European society. Thus, the notion of the British School, as it was circulated in Germany, can be regarded as the visual component of the transition from what was once the visual style of the European elite to one increasingly mobilized in the name of the best of civil and bourgeois values the coming elite of a modem commercial Europe. The British product of the reproductive print and the commentaries that would accompany it in Germany, brought to German consumers the very best of the 'newer British art', whose perfect pictorial unity ensured a model of quality to a new eighteenth-century German art consumership in its own desire to become progressive, cultured and modern. This viewing experience also, however, ensured a conflation of the ideas of the modem with a British model based upon limited monarchy, imperialism and technological, commercial and industrial progress. For the eighteenthcentury German, a close member of European society had produced the most 'advanced' and thus the most modern culture, and it was in the interest of others to follow this model and to begin to reproduce the conditions out of which such a culture could arise. As Forster had noted, it was the 'possession of both Indias, of shipping and of trade' which had brought Britain to its present eminence and the British School of art was regarded as the logical fmit of this happy situation, giving form, in the language of the masterpiece, to the notion of a special British relationship with the contemporary world. It is this relationship - that between a 'progressive', commercial nation and a modem way of being in the world58- which was an integral part of the success of the British School in general. The often-praised technical perfections of the British print, as they manifested themselves in the techniques of line engraving, mezzotint, stipple and aquatint, matched the quality of the images they so 'perfectly' reproduced - from pictures of beautiful women to historical scenes - and it is these images, sustained by Germany's Papierkultur, which would become a measure of both art and progress for those Germans who increasingly perceived themselves as European modems.

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Au th or's note: A ll translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

Notes 1. 2.

German commentators used the terms 'English' and 'British' interchangeably, although most often both terms referred to English, mainly London-centred institutions and events. C h r isto p h G o ttlie b B eireis, 'V o n e in ig e n n eu en e n g lisch e n K u p fe ra b d riic k e n m it F a r b e n ',

Miscellaneen artistischen Inhalts, l , (17 7 9 ), p p . 7 - 1 3 . 3.

Johann Dominikus Fiorillo, Geschichte der Mahlerey in Grossbritannien (Gottingen: Johann Georg Rosenbusch, 1808), p. 856. The relationship between the art-historical writings of Johann Dominikus Fiorillo and ideas of history, culture, and discipline in the university form part of a project I am presently preparing: 'A rt, History, and Discipline in the Eighteenth-Century University'.

4.

J. W. von Archenholz, Annalen der Brittischen Geschichte des Jahrs 1789, vol. iii (Hamburg: B. G. Hoffmann, 1790), p. 10 1.

5.

Comm entary on the British print in Germ any is discussed in A . M. Link, 'Papierkultur: The N ew Public, the Print Market and the A rt Press in Late Eighteenth Century G erm any', unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1993, pp. 152-30 9 .

6.

Anton Friedrich Biisching, Entwurf einer Geschichte der zeichnenden schonen Kiinste (Hamburg: Carl Ernst Bohm, 178 1), p. 354.

7.

J. G. Herder, 'Zusatze und Nachtrage. Briefe zu Beforderung der Humanitat (17 9 1-17 9 6 )', in Bernhard Suphan, ed., Herders Sammtliche Werke, vol. ix (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 189 1), p. 5 13 .

8.

T h e m o st co m p reh en sive accou nt can b e fo u n d in T. C la yto n , The English Print, 1688-1800, (N e w H a ve n : Y ale U n iv e rsity Press, 19 9 7 ).

9.

Archenholz, 1790, p. 99.

10.

Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance. Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. ix.

11.

Purdy, 1998, p. 22.

12.

There is not room here for a full discussion of the complex issue of 'readership', a considerable segment of w hich w ould have included the 'art interested' and the amateur print collector. Jurgen Haberm as's classic definition of 'a new stratum of "bourgeois" people ... w hich from the outset w as a reading public' indicates the importance of the activity of reading as a defining quality of this group. (Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, (London: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 2 2-3 .) For a specific discussion of Germ any's new bourgeois/civil public for prints see A . M. Link, 'D as neue Graphikpublikum und die Graphikmode im Deutschland des spaten 18. Jahrhunderts', in Norbert Michels, e d .," ... Waren nicht

des ersten Bedurfnisses, sondern des Geschmacks und des Luxus." Zum 200. Griindungstag der Chalcographischen Gesellschaft Dessau (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1996), pp. 3 4 -7. See also Richard Van Diilman, The Society of Enlightenment. The Rise of the Middle Class and Enlightenment Culture in Germany (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). 13 .

A good example is provided b y one of Germ any's best-known engravers, Johann Friedrich Bause, w ho reproduced works after Reynolds. A Reynolds/Bause La Petite Rusee is reviewed in Anon., 'Beurtheilung neuer Kupferstiche, von teutschen Kunstlem, in Briefen,' Museum fu r Kiinstler und fu r Kunstliebhaber, 1 8 ,1 7 9 2 , p. 4 1 1 . German artists also used British prints as study models, as pointed

14.

The lack of a centre in Germany, and thus the lack of a place 'in w hich numbers of artists could compete against each other' w as in fact often cited as a reason for the slower development of a m odem German school (M. Huber and C. Rost, Handbuch fu r Kunstliebhaber und Sammler iiber die vornehmsten Kupferstecher und ihre Werke, vol. ix (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Fussli & Compagnie, 1796), p. 93). This does not mean how ever that German prints were not important to the Germ an print market; for an excellent overview of German printmaking during this period see Antony Griffiths and Frances Carey, German Printmaking in the Age of Goethe (London: The British Museum, 1994).

out in Clayton, 1997, p. 269.

15.

Beireis, 1779 , p. 7.

16.

ibid.

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17.

Archenholz, 1790, p. 98.

18.

The reproduction of England's Old Master paintings w as a scheme chiefly undertaken b y John Boydell and his publication of the Sculptura Britannica: A Collection of Prints, Engraved after the Most Capital Paintings in England in 1769. The collection w as promoted in Germ any mainly through the periodical press, most notably the Bibliothek der schonen Wissenschaften und der freyen Kiinste. See Sven H. A . Bruntjen, John Boydell, 17 19 -18 0 4 . A Study of Art Patronage and Publishing in Georgian London (N ew York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985), p. 40 and Clayton, 1997, p. 1 7 7 for information regarding Boydell's project.

19.

Fiorillo, 1808, p. 643.

20.

Beireis, 1779 , p. 9.

2 1.

The Venetian Lady w as part of a 177 6 set of 'Italian w om en' by Matthew Peters (engraved by G. Skorodumov).

22.

M ary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 5.

23.

Other examples include K. P. Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahre 1782 (Berlin: B. Behr, 1903) and Johann Jacob Volkmann, Neueste Reisen durch England, vorziiglich in Absicht auf die Kunstsammlungen, Naturgeschichte, Oekonomie, Manufakturen und Landsitze der Grossen (Leipzig: C. Fritsch, 17 8 1-8 3).

24.

For a good discussion of 'Reisekultur' see Hans Bodeker, 'Reisebeschreibungen im historischen Diskurs der Aufklarung', in H. Bodeker, G. Iggers, J. Knudson, P. Reill, eds, Aufkldrung und Geschichte. Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), pp. 276-98. See also A . M aczak and H. J. Teuteberg, Reiseberichte als Quellen Europaeischer Kulturgeschichte (Wolfenbiittel: Herzog A u gust Bibliothek, 1982).

25.

Although the chapter 'Geschichte der Kunst in England' (pp. 96-203) appears anonymously in Archenholz's third volume, Forster's authorship is revealed b y Archenholz in the ninth volume, at the time of Forster's death.

26.

Archenholz, 1790, p. 98.

27.

The new Gottingen school of history, and the role of the university as one of the most 'm odem ' of the eighteenth century in terms of disciplines is summarized in Charles E. McClelland, State, Society and University in Germany, 17 0 0 -19 14 (Cambridge, N e w York: Cam bridge University Press, 1980), pp. 40-46. The historical institutes established there are discussed in Horst Walter Blanke, Theoretiker der deutschen Aufkldrungshistorie (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1990), pp. 44ff.

28.

Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses. Une archeologie de sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 382.

29.

J. W. Thompson, A History of Historical Writing: the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1967), p. 123 . (Quoted from Schlozer's 179 2 Weltgeschichte in Auszuge und Zusammenhdnge). Voltaire too, in his Le Siecle de Louis XIV, considered die arts as a measure of a civilization.

30.

For a discussion of German historiography of the eighteenth century and its place in the 'formation of the m odem paradigm of historical understanding' (p. 2) see Peter Hans Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1975). Reill argues for a reconsideration of Germ an historical thought, not as 'm erely a poor imitation of the western model' (that is, the British and French model) but as having 'its ow n unique character, its ow n set of central issues' (p. 1).

31.

Archenholz, 1790, pp. 9 9 -10 1.

32.

Antoine Yves Goguet, The Origin of Laws, Arts, and Sciences, and their Progress Among the Most Ancient Nations (Edinburgh: Alex. Donaldson and John Reid, 176 1), p. 182. Goguet's popular w ork w as originally published in French in 1758; translated into German in 1760 and into English in 176 1.

33.

Georg Forster, Sdmmtliche Schriften, vol. v (Leipzig: F. A . Brockhaus, 1843), p. 66. (Originally published in Forster's 17 8 7 translation of Cook's Voyages.)

34.

Archenholz, 1790, p. 184.

35.

Hogarth's w ork w as known in Germ any mainly through L u d w ig Riepenhausen's copies in miniature for the Gottinger Taschen Calendar (1784-96) and b y Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's comments on them. Otherwise, Hogarth's engravings were not w ell circulated in Germany, mainly due to the fact that they preceded the heyday of the British print market; there is also the issue of Hogarth's non-academic status. Hogarth's theoretical Analysis of Beauty w as, however, often referred to in Germany, and in favourable terms, while his art w as more usually considered in the category of the ' Kunst das Ldcherliche' (Biisching, 17 8 1, p. 325). Johann Caspar Fiisslin, in his Raisonirendes

42

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36.

Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Ktinste in einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstzvorter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln (Leipzig: M. G. Weidemanns Erben und Reich, 17 7 1-7 4 ) , pp. 54 0 -4 1.

37.

Archenholz, 1790, p. 184.

38.

Huber and Rost, 1796, pp. 25-6 .

39.

Biisching, 17 8 1, p. 404.

40.

J. D. Fiorillo, Geschichte der Mahlerey in Frankreich (Gottingen: Johann Friedrich Rower, 1805), pp. 4 4 1-2 .

4 1.

See, for instance, Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and Jonathan Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic. Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: W ayne State

42.

The Neue Bibliothek der schonen Wissenschaften und der freyen Kiinste regularly translated and published the Discourses.

University Press, 1999).

43.

Huber and Rost, 1796, pp. 25-6 .

44.

Anon., 'Nachricht von neuen englischen Kupferstiche, mit Bemerkung der Grosse, und Preise. A u s einem Schreiben von London an ***/ Museum fu r Kiinstler und fu r Kunstliebhaber, 1 2 ,1 7 9 0 , p. 585.

45.

Robert Young provides a stimulating discussion of 'history' as a Western structure of ontological imperialism in Robert Young, White Mythologies. Writing, History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990).

46.

Rudolf Vierhaus, 'Historisches Interesse im 18. Jahrhundert', in Bodeker et al., eds, 1986, p. 269.

47.

The interest of the German reading class in these and other historians during the latter half of the eighteenth century is discussed in Bodeker et al., eds, 1986, pp. 269ft.

48.

It is also interesting to note that the university at Gottingen w as teaching classes in 'the history of m odem Europe and its colonies' b y 1788, if not earlier. (J. Putter, Versuch einer academischen GelehrtenGeschichte von der Georg-Augustus-Universitat zu Gottingen, vol. iii (Hannover: Helwingschen Hofbuchhandlung, 1820), p. 581.)

49.

Fiorillo, 1808, p. 7 51.

50.

West's painting w as first exhibited in 1770 in his studio and then in 1 7 7 1 at London's Royal Academy. Woollett's engraving after the painting w as published in 177 6 b y John Boydell, w ho realized 15000 pounds on his share of the profits, an enormous sum for the time. West's share of the profits is unknown, but can be assumed to have been large. It is estimated that 20000 copies of the print were sold during the eighteenth century (this figure includes several hundred from the original plate, plus the m any thousands more from pirated and reworked versions). (Helmut Von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 63.)

5 1.

Linda Colley, for instance, has explained the print's success in terms of the fact that West 'took classical and Biblical poses of sacrifice and heroism and brought them into the British here and now. A n d this w as w h y the painting caused a sensation, w h y it w as made into a best-selling print' (Linda Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation 17 0 7 -18 3 7 (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 179). A n n U hry Abram s discusses the image in similar terms (Ann U hry Abram s, The Valiant Hero. Benjamin West and GrandStyle History Painting (Washington, D C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), p. 182).

52.

Georg Friedrich Brandes, 'Vermischte Nachrichten', Neue Bibliothek der schonen Wissenschaften und der

freyen Kiinste, 19 (2 ), 1776 , p. 335.

544- 5-

53.

Sulzer, 1771-74/ PP-

54.

Fiorillo, 1808, pp. 7 5 1 -2 .

55.

Bill A sh cro ft, G areth G riffith s an d H elen Tiffen, eds, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (Lon don :

56.

R***R, 'Dichtkunst und Mahlerey in Betracht ihrer Krafte die Leidenschaften zu bewegen verglichen. A u s dem Englischen,' Monats-Schrift, 5, M ay 1778 , p. 257.

57.

Anon., ' f r a g men t iiber die Idee, eine Akadem ie der Kiinste in Bezug auf Fabriken und Gewerbe gemeinnutziger zu machen', Monats-Schrift der Akademie der Kiinste und mechanischen Wissenschaften

R ou tled ge, 199 4 ), p. 3 5 5 .

zu Berlin, 2, February 1788, p. 69.

Anne-Marie Link

58.

43

Forster for example directly related the 'the w a y to India and the N ew W orld' to 'our [European] mental/spiritual energy'. (G. Forster, Forsters Werke, vol. i (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1983), p. 68) (originally published in 1 7 9 1 in Forster's 'Uber lokale und allgemeine Bildung').

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2.1 J. G. Facius after Benjamin West, Angelica and Medoro, 1768, stipple engraving, 31.5 x 25.6 cm

Anne-Marie Link

2.2 J. Walker after Matthew William Peters, Clara, 1777, stipple engraving, 26 x 20.4 cm

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2.3 William Woollett after Richard Wilson, Phaeton, 1763, line engraving with etching, 48.8 x 60 cm

Anne-Marie Link

2.4 Thomas Watson after Nathaniel Dance, The Dying Marc Anthony, 1780, mezzotint, 52.5 x 37.7 cm

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2.5 John Hall after Benjamin West, Oliver Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament, 1789, line engraving, 48.5 x 65 cm

Anne-Marie Link

2.6 F. Bartolozzi after Angelica Kauffman, The Judgement of Paris, 1779, stipple engraving, 3 1.1 x 25.4 cm

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2.7 William Woollett after Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1776, line engraving with etching, 43 x 59.5 cm

3

'Everything English is the mode here': Russian reactions to British painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Galina Andreeva

Until now Russian-British relations have been studied largely in terms of political and broad cultural connections. There has been much research from this point of view in the areas of landscape gardening and architecture.1 The relationship between the two countries in the fine arts, however, has been left relatively untouched.2 The character of this relationship was, to some extent, defined by the specific ways in which Russians perceived and reacted to British art. Rather than attempting to cover the theme exhaustively, this essay examines what Russians knew about British visual art, especially painting; how Russians assessed British painting; and how Russian painters' reactions to British painting were followed up in their own work.

'Room with a view': Russian and British artists in Italy in the late eighteenth century

Italy afforded the first immediate point of contact Russians had with British painters. Anton Losenko (1737-73), an academician at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts and painter of historical themes spent three years between 1763 and 1769 in Rome. On his return he became the adherent and in some sense the initiator of classicism in historical painting in Russia. There is no doubt, given Losenko's own development as a painter, that whilst in Rome he paid attention to the works of that leader of European neoclassicism and principal artist in the British artists' colony, Gavin Hamilton (1723-98). The effect of Losenko's acquaintance with Hamilton's 1760s paintings on the Iliad, popular amongst artists and much discussed by contemporaries, can be traced. Hector and Andromache's Farewell (1773) (Figure 3.1), which is similar to Hamilton's work, particularly to his own painting on the same theme, shows the impact of the new visual impressions Losenko received in Rome.

52 ENGLISH ACCENTS Traditionally, Losenko's painting has been compared to works of the French tradition because of the link with Jean Restout's painting of the same theme. However, comparing Restout's, Hamilton's and Losenko's paintings, one can see that Losenko's treatment of the subject corresponds more to Hamilton's, both in period and style. In the genre of historical painting Russian interest in British painting was furthered by the simultaneous adoption of neoclassicism in both countries. Losenko's connections with British artists have been corroborated by the German painter J. Mannlich.3 Losenko might have had his attention drawn to Hamilton's work by Ivan Shuvalov, the first President of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, who was in Italy at the time and is said to have purchased a work from the British painter. Alternatively a connection might have been made via I. Reinfenstein, Catherine the Great's advisor on art, around whom J. H. Tischbein, J. P. Hackert and A. Kauffmann had gathered, all of whom had links with the British colony in Rome. The engravings of Hamilton's work were already in Russian collections, such as that of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, by this time. They were used by Russian artists not only in the late eighteenth century but also later on, for example by Andrei Ivanov (1772-1848) and Alexander Witberg (1787-1855).4 Engravings by L. Cunego from Hamilton's pictures are also mentioned as a source of creative inspiration in books recommended to artists by A. Pisarev in his An Outline Guide to the Arts or Rules for Painting, Sculpture, Engraving and Architecture (Petersburg 1808).5 Hamilton's recognition in Russia was confirmed by acquisitions of his work. In the 1780s Nikolai Yusupov, whose collection was one of the most famous and accessible for artists, bought The Abduction of Helen by Paris by Hamilton (now in the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, Moscow). Losenko's sketch The Travellers (Figure 3.2) is a variation on the group portrait in the style of 'a conversation piece', widely used in Rome at the time by British painters such as Nathaniel Dance. For Petr Sokolov (1753-91), Losenko's pupil, the tutelage of P. Batoni, who often worked for the British using in particular an 'anglicized' type of representational portrait, played an important role. Sokolov's painting of Nikita Panin in childhood (1779) (Figure 3.3) is one of the earliest examples of portraits 'in the English manner' in Russian painting.6 Russian landscape painters' Italian impressions inevitably include their impressions of the work of the British landscape painters R. Wilson, T. Jones, G. Forrester, S. Dalen and J. More. Fedor Matveev (1758-1826) who lived in Italy for forty-seven years knew the work of J. More. It is probable that some of the views that were taken by the Russian painter were chosen because of the popularity in Rome of the 'heroicized' views of Tivoli and waterfalls by J. More, which Goethe valued so highly.

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In general the reactions of Russian masters to British painting in Italy were few, the most noticeable in their practical consequences being related to Hamilton's activity.

'A Sentimental Journey': Russian travellers and visitors on British art

Russian travellers to Britain have made numerous and varied comments on the specific nature of the life, culture and art that they found in that country.7 Most valuable, in the context of this essay, are the comments by Russian artists on what they saw while working in Britain. As eyewitness accounts, they were highly valued by contemporaries and widened interest in the varied nature of culture and the arts in Britain. Letters of a Russian Traveller by Nikolai Karamzin (published in the Moscow Journal in 1791-92 then as a separate book in Moscow in 1801) had a huge effect on public opinion. The author wrote: 'England was a poor country for artists', yet conceded that the situation might be changing: 'At last England has produced a few good painters'. Karamzin, after his English journey in 1790, became an enthusiast of portraits painted 'in the English style' and advised Russian portrait painters that 'to understand feminine beauty (I would say to any painter) that if you've not been to England your brush will never capture perfect beauty'.8 All travellers were fascinated by English country estates and parks, and visited Strawberry Hill, Wilton House, Windsor Castle, Greenwich Hospital and, in London, Westminster Abbey and the British Museum. They remarked on the high quality of work in British decorative and applied arts. 'Their goods are quality - especially silver and steel products.'9 Through the sketchy observations dispersed in the travellers' comments concerning art it is possible to trace the names of artists of special interest to the Russians. These included British masters (Hogarth, Reynolds, Hamilton, Dance, Flaxman, Barry and Mortimer), and also foreigners who had worked in Britain and had influenced or assimilated British artistic traditions and whom most considered to be connected with past or current English artistic life, such as Van Dyck, Kneller, Lely, West, De Loutherbourg, Cipriani and Kauffman. 'Mr De Louter-bourg is the best landscape and battle painter in Europe. Miss Angelica Kauffman is a very fine historical painter, the acclaimed Royal portraitist Reynolds, Mr West, Mr Mortimer, N. Dance and Cipriane are the best English painters' proclaimed the Petersburg academician Gavril Skorodumov (1755-92) in London from 1773.10 British engravers, such as Bartolozzi, Woollett, Green, and later on Raimbach, were extremely popular. Skorodumov bore witness to this: I have the honour of reporting to the Imperial Academy of Arts that the best engravers in Europe work in London, and these are Bartolozzi in the historical genre,

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Wollett for landscapes, also Wiwares [F. Vivares] and a few other very fine masters whose work can be found in many different countries.11

Some travellers made personal discoveries. Alexander Kurakin, for example, who visited England at the beginning of the 1770s, was interested in the painting of Hogarth, mainly known in Russia for his engravings. Kurakin bought a genre painting by the English artist (the Politician, now in Alupka Palace, the Crimea). Ekaterina Dashkova became an enthusiast of the 'delightful lady artist Anglica Kauffman'. Vasily Zinoviev was fascinated by the unusual technique of glass painting by the now forgotten Jarvis, who was well known to the Russian court in the 1780s and received commissions from Catherine the Great.12 Nikolai Karamzin noted that 'Hamilton's paintings and the paintings of Angelica Kauffman and Benjamin West are very good and expressive.' The Russian writer also particularly noted the 'fantastic' Fuseli. 'I like best the work of Fisly [sic], ... he takes from Shakespeare the most fantastic and dreamlike and with amazing power and an incredibly rich imagination gives form to his aerial creations, gives them a name and a place.'13 Pavel Svinjin gave his attention to the monumental works of James Thornhill at Greenwich Hospital (in particular the Ceiling of the Painted Hall, almost unknown to the Russian public), and to Benjamin West's huge religious pictures for St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle. He described West as 'the best English painter'. At Windsor he also 'dallied for a while in the gallery of English beauties and admired the historic collection' by P. Lely.14 Later, in 1826, Alexander Turgenev was overcome by the six enormous works by James Barry, dedicated to The Progress of Human Culture (1777-84), which decorated the Society of Arts, at that time called the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce: From the stairs, decorated with Grecian bas-reliefs we were led into the Hall, where James Barry's wonderful pictures were exhibited. His work disproves the opinion of Montesquieu, Dubos and Winckelmann that the English are incapable of the fine arts. The six paintings decorating this hall in fact testify to the painter's art and imagination ... But the most wonderful painting was the sixth - Elysium, along the length of one wall. Here the great men of all races and all epoques are gathered, including our Peter the Great. My heart beat stronger when I recognised his features!15

The Russians were fascinated by the lively artistic atmosphere in London. Skorodumov proudly informed his compatriots: 'Here the arts flourish and painters are held in great respect.'16 Russians remarked on the best in the genre of the portrait, traditional in Russia, and also in genre painting, landscape, historical painting and the achievements of the British in decorative painting. They reacted to stylistic variety as well as variety of genre, appreciating the rococo orientation of Hogarth as much as the baroque creations of Thornhill, and the neoclassicism of Hamilton, West and

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Kauffman, alongside the romantic leanings of De Loutherbourg, Mortimer, Fuseli and Barry. In their remarks on these artists the multifaceted and 'speeded up' nature of the development of Russian aesthetics can be felt. Their evident tolerance reflects the peaceful coexistence of different directions and tendencies in Russian artistic life. Increased awareness of British culture in Russia produced a widespread perception, from the middle of the eighteenth century, of 'Englishness'. This included concepts such as 'English lifestyle', 'English State structures', 'English political economics', 'English moral philosophy', 'the English novel', 'English humour', 'an English gentleman' (a model of education and morality, described in Letters to my Son by Lord Chesterfield, which was popular in Russia), 'the English tourist' (an expert and inquisitive traveller), 'the English dandy', 'the English landscaped garden', 'the English portrait' and English silver and Wedgewood china.

Out of the mist: British art in Russia

Catherine the Great's policy in the arts is indicated by her comments that she was 'a friend of England', both in her 'interest and attraction to it'. This significantly affected the spreading of anglophilia in late eighteenth-century Russian society. Contemporaries noted that 'now men and women are trying as hard as possible to take on everything English: English things now appear good, delightful and admirable ... everything English is the mode here.'17 Interest in British art grew. From the second half of the eighteenth century the number of British artworks in Russia grew as a result of sales from British ships arriving in St Petersburg, auctions of the contents of British homes and inns, including the property of the British who had settled in the Russian capital. British works and prints appeared in antique and book shops owned by Russians and foreigners and in British shops. From the 1760s onwards the number of British engravings significantly increased. Newspaper advertisements, sales, auction and lottery catalogues show that pictures of the 'English school', as opposed to prints, were rare and were usually anonymous, mentioned as English pictures or English Royal portraits by van Dyck or van Dyck's school. The first high-quality artworks from Britain were ordered by the Russian Tsar's family. From the 1760s onwards the Tsar's house purchased goods in the decorative and applied arts, silver, clocks, crockery and china. In 1773 the unique 952-piece Wedgwood 'Service with a Green Frog', depicting views of Britain, was ordered. Paintings from the 'English school' also reached Russia in the 1760s. In 1764 from Gotskovsky's collection for the Imperial Collection were purchased two pictures as the works of van Dyck - a portrait of Charles

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I and of Queen Mary (Henrietta Maria). In 1772 Portrait of the Count Pembroke's Family, now attributed to Peter Lely, was purchased in Paris. At some point between 1763 and 1774 Lely's Historic Scene came into the possession of the Tsar Household.18In 1772 Catherine herself inspected and accepted four large canvases by Richard Paton, depicting The Destruction of the Turkish Fleet. In 1779 these decorated the main Throne Room at Peterhof.19As to the British sea painters' achievements in Russia, they were rightly linked with Britain's strength as a sea power. There are examples of the work of the British sea painters being 'taken over' or reinterpreted for Russian subjects. F. Hayman's Triumph of Britannia, famous through S. F. Ravenet's engraving, was used as a basis and reinterpreted by the Dutch painter Theodorus de Roode in his painting Allegory on the Victory at Chesme for Catherine the Great (1771, Figure 3.4).20Three portraits on copper by R. Brompton entered the Tsar's collection between 1773 and 1783. Dance and West painted portraits of the British King and Queen as a commission for the Palace of Chesme in 1778. Three genre paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby were bought between 1774 and 1779.21 Britain was also perceived by the Russians to be a treasure-trove of first-rate collections of antique, classical and contemporary western European art. 'The English have been travelling to Italy for a long time and with a passion in order to buy up the best and most acclaimed in antique and contemporary art' wrote Karamzin.22As a result Britain was seen as a good ally in Russia's drive to fill her Imperial Collections with western European art. In 1779 Catherine the Great purchased one of the best private collections, that of Robert Walpole. Amongst the many European masters in the collection a number of British painters were represented (Dobson, Wootton and Eworth), as well as Flemish, Dutch and German painters who worked in Britain (van Dyck, Lely and Kneller), all representing the establishment of the 'English school'. Walpole's collection is the foundation for the British collection in the Hermitage and in many ways formed Russian contemporaries' perceptions of the art of the founders of British painting of the New Age and their key figure, van Dyck.23

The portrait as a piece of history

Growing interest in Reynolds led to the recognition of a British contemporary academic school of painting. Reynolds's successes were followed in St Petersburg in the 1770s and supported by the sculptor M. E. Falconet, one of Catherine the Great's main arts advisors, who had a correspondence with him. The English traveller Nathaniel Wraxall, one of the first witnesses of Reynolds's work in Russia, wrote in 1774 after visiting Falconet:

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He praised our contemporary artists greatly, especially Sir Joshua Reynolds, with whom he is in constant correspondence and exchanges works. 'Count Ugolino in his cell' hangs over his fireplace. This picture was presented to him by Reynolds and from his words about the unusual expressiveness of this work I gather that he cannot look at it without mixed feelings of horror and ecstasy overcoming him.24

With Reynolds, as president of the Royal Academy of Arts, the possibility of inviting a leading portraitist to Russia was discussed. In 1785 he was commissioned to paint two large historical works, one for Catherine the Great and the other for Prince Grigory Potemkin. The artist chose themes from Pindar's Ode The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents and from Roman history The Continence of Scipio. These paintings arrived in St Petersburg in 1788-89, together with another presented for Potemkin, Cupid Loosens Venus' Belt (all are now in the Hermitage). Reynolds's technique met with restrained approval. As engraver James Walker, who had spent eighteen years in Russia, noted 'his manner of thickly applying paint seemed strange, and to Russian taste it was excessive'.25 Only in the mid nineteenth century (when the first copies of Reynolds's work were made by Russian artists) did Russians show an interest in his technique. Reynolds was valued as a theoretician above all. The same James Walker notes in his diaries that Catherine the Great, when visiting the Hermitage with him and the painter Doyen, expressed her admiration for Reynolds not only as a painter but also as the author of The Discourses, which she ordered to be translated, wishing them to be used for teaching purposes at the Academy of Arts. When considering the few works of theory in Russia and the fact that The Discourses by Reynolds appeared in Russian before the publication of the important works of Russian authors Petr Chekalevsky and Ivan Urvanov, it is easy to understand what an event the publication of this translation was.26 The biggest revelation for contemporaries was the claim that portraiture, so called 'the Portrait in historical style', should be close in rank to the 'most lofty' historical genre. The concept of the 'portrait with the spirit of history' can be seen to correspond with Dmitry Levitsky's painting Catherine the Lawgiver in the Temple of the Goddess of Justice (1783) (Figure 3.5), to which the artist printed a commentary. In Russia, Reynolds's theoretical works were conceived as a justification of current artistic practice based on the mastery and dominance of the portrait genre. Nineteenth-century artists, such as Alexei Venetsianov, who thought highly of Reynolds as a connoisseur in theory and painting, looked to his Discourses as an important theoretical source.27 Meanwhile, the number of Reynolds's works, including the engravings from his pictures, that occur in various private collections of the period testified to his fame. To use Alexander Benoir's expression, Catherine the Great's 'hypnosis of anglomania' had an effect on all those around her: 'The Empress never misses

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a chance of expressing her high regard for the [English nation], with the wish that all around her felt the same way.'28 The 'imperial will' had a 'hypnotic' effect in this respect in the formation of public taste. Among the private owners of British art were primarily the representatives of court aristocracy, close to the empress and sharing her predilections or somehow connected with Britain: I. Shuvalov, G. Potemkin, A. Besborodko, A. Lanskoy, I. Baryatinsky, S.Vorontsov, S. Gagarin, D. Golitsin, E. Dashkova, A. Kurakin, A. Stroganov, the Chernyshev brothers, P. Sheremetev, N. Yusupov and others. The Academy of Arts and the Academy of Science also began to acquire British art. In 1782 as Georgi in his book Opisanie Rossiiskogo Imperatorskogo stolichnogo goroda Sankt- Peterburga i dostopamjatnostei v okrestnostjach onogo (1797) mentioned, it was made a bequest of D. FortegiTs collection, for example, with 'original works by great British artists, showing animals and plants, mainly on parchment paper'. On the whole this consisted of British engravings, prints and art books. By the end of the eighteenth century Russian collections contained a number of British portraits, historical and mythological paintings, genre paintings and seascapes. Russia was one of the first countries to show an interest in British art and have works in state and private collections. Yet British pictures remained rare in Russia. In 1794 the number of paintings in the Imperial Collection according to accounts still did not exceed twenty and this number hardly changed until the end of the nineteenth century. Given this, it is interesting to note Russian reactions to British painters working in Russia. The principal figures amongst these were the portraitists Richard Brompton (1734-83) and George Dawe (1781-1829). Richard Brompton worked in Russia from 1780 until 1783 as Catherine the Great's court portraitist. We have information about three portraits of the 'English period' which he used to show his professional capabilities, eight portraits painted in Russia and only one painting with a mythological subject.29 Brompton's portraits of the Grand Princes Alexander and Konstantin Pavlovich (1781, SH), and The Prince of Wales (small version on copper plate - whereabouts unknown) served as a new iconographical approach towards portraits of young heirs for Russian painters. Brompton's approach in his unfinished portrait of Catherine the Great against the backdrop of her fleet (c. 1780, Tsarskoe Selo) was adapted in the portrait by D. Levitsky, mentioned above, of Catherine the Lawgiver in the Temple of the Goddess of Justice. Brompton's works were among those which acquainted Russian artists with British variants of the parade portrait against a landscape, or the small 'conversation piece' and promenade portrait (Figure 3.6). Russian artists with a new understanding of the conceptual basis for the British model were able to interpret these. Among them was one of the leading Russian painters of the 1790s - Vasily Borovikovsky. Writers who

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informed the world-view of the young Borovikovsky (N. L'vov, V. Kapnist and N. Karamzin) shared a view of nature as the unceasing spring of what the British called 'moral sense'. In Borovikovsky's work wonderful examples of this in practice can be seen; for example, Portrait of Catherine II Strolling in Tsarskoe Selo (1794) (Figure 3.7) or Portrait of Murtasa Kuli Khan (1796, SRM). No doubt Borovikovsky was acquainted with cultural achievements in the British Isles through the group of connoisseurs of British culture, including the future president of the Academy of Fine Arts, A. Olenin, and also through a connection with the Scottish architect, A. Menelaws, and the anglophiles A. Samborsky, A. Besborodko and V. Kapnist. Borovikovsky also was able to acquaint himself with British work through engravings, such as those of James Walker, who was extremely popular at the Russian court.30 Another source was the original anglicized works with landscape as backdrop by Angelica Kauffman. Engravings of her works were circulated in St Petersburg and her subject paintings based on the writings of Alexander Pope and Laurence Sterne became famous when Catherine the Great bought them for the Hermitage. At the end of the 1780s her anglicized portraits became very popular with Russian buyers. Other foreign painters who had worked in Britain and then in Russia became bearers of the anglomania sweeping post-revolution Europe, for example the Austrian Ludwig Guttennbrunn (1730-1819) and the Frenchman Jean Mosnier (1743/44-1808). A British style also appeared in the miniatures of G. Skorodumov and Augustin Ritt (1763-99), working through the 1790s. A growth of interest in British portraiture in the 1790s coincided with the French Revolution, the negative reaction to it in Russia, and a growing interest in British fashion, behaviour, clothes and 'dandyism'. The British style and manner in general was seen as 'very loyal'.

'To Dawe Esq/

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, artistic contacts between Russia and Britain grew, and the number of British historical and genre painters travelling to or working in Russia increased. Attention paid to Russia escalated with the growing interest in travel as a fruitful way of increasing one's creative 'baggage', and with the discovery of the attractions of Russia as an eastern power, compared with western Europe. Russia thus became part of the growing interest in the East, and in countries with an intriguing past, which was characteristic of the Romantic age. One of the features of the period in question was that British artists who were 'opening Russia up' to a western European audience turned to historical, battle and ethnographic subjects for their genre painting, with a particular preference for 'Oriental'

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motifs. Robert Ker Porter (1777-1842), for example, practised battle painting, while William Allan (1782-1850) turned to ethnographic sources. The Romantic attraction of such themes appeared both to artists who were beginning to travel, and to travellers who were beginning to paint. There was also an increase in the number of illustrated artistic publications that provided historical vignettes both of the country and of different Russian towns.31 Conversely, Russia experienced a growing knowledge of the artistic life of Britain. Information on the artistic news of London, and extracts from various British articles on aesthetic questions, began to appear with increasing frequency in Russian periodicals. In 1801 in response to an initiative by Prince Hoare, the secretary of the Royal Academy, news on the current state of affairs in the St Petersburg Academy of Arts was sent to London.32 People began to revise their general opinions on the achievements of the artists 'of England, a country proud of its patriotic talents'.33 The most substantial results of Russian-British exchange as far as painting is concerned at this time took place in portraiture, and in particular in the work of George Dawe. Dawe was invited to Russia in 1818 in connection with the 1812 Military Gallery, a monumental imperial project which was to include over 300 portraits of generals who had taken part in the Napoleonic war. The Gallery was opened in 1826, and now forms part of the Hermitage (Figure 3.8). There were a number of reasons for the invitation of Dawe to Russia. He was considered a talented representative of British portraiture, the reputation of which had been established already. Amongst British portrait painters, Thomas Lawrence was better known in Russia. In the 1810s and early 1820s Lawrence painted a number of portraits of the Russian aristocracy, including the portrait of Alexander I, which was highly praised by the sitter. However, Lawrence was fully occupied by the court commission of the portraits for the Waterloo Chamber. We could suppose that Alexander I, inviting Lawrence's rival Dawe, already had the ambition of surpassing the Waterloo Chamber project.34 The topicality of the Military Gallery project, and the novelty of depicting 'history in portraits' caused it to make a considerable impact on the minds of both Russian and foreign contemporaries. Literary figures and artists saw the 1812 Military Gallery as the most significant architectural, artistic and memorial complex of national importance. Attempts were made to transfer the idea of the Gallery in general, and its separate images into the field of literary endeavour. The writer and critic Fedor Glinka, for example, acknowledged the indelible impression left by Dawe's military images in his review 'On the portraits of Russian commanders' and stated his intention of publishing a book entitled A Collection of Poetic Inscriptions to the Portraits of Russian Commanders, Painted on Imperial Command by Mr Dawe.35

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The 1812 Gallery also played a particularly significant role in the work of Alexander Pushkin. A laudatory poem To Dawe Esq. was dedicated to Dawe in 1828, and mention was made of the Briton as a benchmark for the talent and popularity of the Russian artist Orest Kiprensky (1782-1836). More than once Pushkin referred the readers of his works to the expressive portraits of the 'quick eyed' artist who knew how to seize a likeness and convey 'the most striking visual characteristics'. In Journey to Arzrum (1829) Pushkin recalled 'the poetic portrait' of the General Alexei Ermolov, who was depicted against a Romantic background of the Caucasian mountains. In the poem The Commander (1835), he turned to the image of Barclay de Tolly which is one of Dawe's best works. Taking into account the special role of literature in the patriotic culture of the nineteenth century, it is evident that the opinions and evaluations of literary figures were just as authoritative as professional criticism, which rightly disputed the artistic and picturesque qualities of many of Dawe's portraits. The attitude of Russian artists to Dawe, as a foreigner who had been entrusted with the realization of such an important national monument as the 1812 Military Gallery, was partly one of jealousy. Orest Kiprensky proposed his monumental composition Peter the Great in Saardam for the 1812 Gallery. Kiprensky, as the best Russian portrait painter, implied by this suggestion that he was worthy to be involved in this very prestigious state-sponsored project. The creation of the 1812 Gallery strengthened the emergence of a new iconographic tradition in Russian artistic practice to which Russian artists now turned. Dawe's varied typology of military portraits was employed by Vasily Tropinin (1776-1857), Orest Kiprensky and Karl Bryullov.36 From 1830 onwards numerous artists, including the pupils of Alexei Venetsianov, copied the Gallery's paintings. Pavel Fedotov (1815-52), who began his career as a battle painter, also intended to copy them. Other artists were attracted by the decorative effects of the gallery as a whole, pictures with the interiors of the gallery were painted by G. Chemetsov, G. Hau, S. Alekseev and others. Apart from the portraits for the 1812, Gallery Dawe also carried out numerous private commissions. During his years in Russia, Dawe completed about 100 society portraits. These varied both in typology and in their pictorial resolution. Some were for show, while others were for private consumption. They ranged in size from life-size to small format. They were painted against a landscape background or in an interior. And they included single, double or many-figural compositions. There are several miniatures and a series of preparatory drawings. Many of these portraits are included in J. Bennet and T. Wright's engraving of The Visit of Emperor Alexander I to the Studio of the Artist George Dawe (Figure 3-9).37 One of the key questions concerns Dawe's phenomenal success in Russia, and the circumstances under which an artist, who was not one of the foremost

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British portraitists in the first third of the nineteenth century, achieved such enormous popularity abroad. Dawe's fame was ensured not only by the artist's successful career before his arrival in Russia, or by the European reputation which he had acquired by that time (Dawe had already worked in his homeland and in France, Belgium and Germany), but also by an intensely professional approach which was specifically geared towards official recognition. This included wide press coverage of the completion of the 1812 Gallery portraits, concerted work on private commissions, active participation in exhibitions, and large printed editions of the artist's work, which he protected by an exclusive author's right that Dawe received from Emperor Alexander I. One can judge Dawe's position in the cultural scene of St Petersburg and Moscow from the many comments of his contemporaries, who used Dawe's name in a nominal sense as the embodiment of talent and popularity. 'Why withhold praise from the talent of the Semonovas, the Zhukovskys and the Dawes?' asked one poet, personifying talent in the names of celebrities in Russia during the Romantic era - the actress Ekaterina Semenova, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky and the English painter Dawe. In reality, the reception of Dawe in Russia was both varied and critical. Publications in the press were contradictory, bearing witness to the problematic response to the British artist. Extreme views polarized on the page of the metropolitan publications Son of the Fatherland and Northern Bee. The articles published in these journals reflected on the whole the opposite viewpoints of the editors, Pavel Svinjin, who was guided by excessive patriotism, and the odious Faddey V. Bulgarin, a proponent of the official point of view. In the words of Pavel Svinjin, 'We cannot but regret the fact that the honour of carrying out this, the most valuable of our patriotic monuments, fell to the lot of a foreign artist - at a time when our Academy had many excellent portrait artists, such as Kiprensky, Varnek and Tropinin'.38 Faddey Bulgarin objected: 'We consider Mr Dawe one of the foremost artists of our time and our convictions are based on the opinions of many true connoisseurs'.39 The position of the Moscow Herald was more reserved, presented as it was in the reviews of I. N. Mal'tsev, an author who, by his own admission, 'maintains the middle ground between opponents and defenders'. Mal'tsev concluded: 'I will not call him [Dawe] a great painter or an outstanding genius.'40 The patronage of the court, the recognition of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, and the enormous popularity of Dawe in high society in the literary circles made him the focus of highly intense interest amongst professionals and critics, who took upon themselves the partial judgement of his artistic method. On the whole, the comments of literary figures, such as A. Pushkin, F. Glinka, P. Vyasemsky, I. Martynov and others were positive and even

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complimentary, as they appreciated the 'poetic picturesqueness' and 'characterfulness' of Dawe's portraits. The artist was praised 'for the effectiveness of his pictorial approach', for knowing how 'to seize a likeness', for varying his compositional methods within the confines of his chosen typology, for his energetic vitality, for the ease of his picturesque characteristics, and for the decorative and textural peculiarities of his 'sharp painting' which was 'enlivened' by effects of light and shade. 'The rare likeness, the strong broad brush and fortuitous choice of positions for each face bestows great worth on these portraits', 'Dawe knew how to vary the action of light and that which is called the fond in paintings to an extraordinary degree.'41 On the other hand, Dawe was censured for his speed, for careless technical execution which was the result of this, and for his 'fecundity', which was associated with a loss of artistic quality: The mechanical method of his hand is completely unique. His quick, even coarse, brush does not place, but throws the p ain t... Look at any of his portraits of Russian generals: one and the same warm tone of paint is on each face and because of this all of Dawe's portraits seem to be work a la prima in the manner of a sketch.42

It was a common opinion that 'it is a shame that he hurries so much and does not revise his works'. The drawing of the figures and draperies is weak and mannered: 'It does not have ... a purity of style ... or any majestic simplicity.' The main accusation made against Dawe was that he maintained only a superficial relationship with the model being portrayed. 'On all of the generals' faces are expressions which are to a greater or lesser extent theatrical.'43 It is interesting to note that the 'sketchy' manner of Dawe, which was new to the Russian artistic tradition, was linked by Russian commentators to the peculiarities of British taste in painting, and to the British School as a whole, which strove towards greater artistic freedom. In Dawe's defence, it was explained that 'the shortcoming of the works of the English artist or, more precisely, the general deficiency of the English school... is known to admirers of that school as originality'. Spectators who shared this viewpoint of the critics came to the conclusion that any shortcomings in Dawe's approach 'were partly the result of the taste of the English nation'.44 With the 1830s came a fundamental reassessment of Dawe's activity in Russia. In Gogol's short story Portrait Dawe appears as the fashionable artist Nol [in Russian it means 'zero', 'nil'], who 'resorted to painting in the English manner' where 'colours shout too loudly': 'he let himself paint fashionable little portraits for money', and 'amassed some capital for himself in a flash'. Later, in the 1860s, P. N. Petrov in his article 'Russian painting over a hundred years' saw Dawe as an energetic and effective painter, but placed Russian artists higher as far as quality of painting and depth of visual conception were

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concerned. He stressed that in the 1820s 'the highest form of artistry' were the portraits of Kiprensky, while the portraits of P. V. Basin were 'models of effect, coupled with wide execution'.45 Dawe's popularity was mentioned in the commentaries, published writing and work of Russian artists, including K. Bryullov, A. Varnek, A. Venetsianov and his pupils, V. Tropinin, P. Basin, and A. Stupin and his school. From the end of 1823 to 1828 Orest Kiprensky engaged in open competition with Dawe. Kiprensky's reaction is evident in his attempts to use a practice alien to his work, but one popular with the public - namely, the typology of Dawe's 'picturesque' parade portraits, which stylistically fell outside the avant-garde direction of the contemporary portrait school. The arts in Russia in the 1820s were characterized by the gradual arrival of Romantic features in the field of history painting. In this respect Dawe's painting Mother Rescuing her Child from an Eagle's Nest (1813, current whereabouts unknown), which was both romantic in content and classical in its stylistic relationships, attracted the attention of the literary and artistic circles of St Petersburg. Impressed by Dawe's canvas, both Alexander Orlovsky (in 1828) and Michael Markov (in 1832) painted versions of the same subject.46

Conclusion The aspects of British culture that were specifically national in feel - what Nikolaus Pevsner later called 'the Englishness of English Art' - attracted both Russians and other Europeans. In this respect the Russian interest in the British artistic tradition, including the way in which variations of 'L'Anglais' were assimilated by foreign artists, followed pan-European tendencies of the time. Any attempts to familiarize oneself with western European culture inspired either direct or indirect contact with British practice. We know that the artistic centre where Russian-British relationships were initially forged was Italy. However, later on, there was a new interest in the contemporary artistic life of Great Britain, British masters began to travel to work in Russia, and Britain became one of the countries where Russian academic pensioners would carry out their training. The number of British genre paintings in Russia increased, and there was a growing knowledge of the work of Hogarth, Reynolds, West, Bartolozzi, Hamilton, Fuseli, Flaxman, Barry, Lawrence and others. Russian-British links in painting in the second half of the eighteenth and first third of the nineteenth centuries appeared primarily in the field of portraiture. This was because both countries had artists proficient in the genre, and because of similarities in the ethical and aesthetic framework

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established by the ideology of both the British and the Russian Enlightenment. Russians particularly liked the British concept of history as an accumulation of characters, and of the acts of separate personalities. As far as art is concerned, this concept was expressed in historical portrait schemes, historical portrait galleries, and in the organization of historical portrait exhibitions. In Russia the creation of one of the most characteristic projects of this type - the 1812 Military Gallery in the Winter Palace - was entrusted to a British artist, and became the product of both ideological and artistic 'cooperation' between Russia and Britain. In the first third of the nineteenth century, the British portrait became one of the most outstanding reflections of the human disposition during the Romantic era. The same was true of Russia, where questions surrounding the early stage of the Romantic movement also found their expression primarily through portraiture. In connection with the work of Dawe, two national traditions in Russia came into contact, and famously 'defined themselves' precisely in the field of portrait painting. The problematic nature of Dawe's creative method engendered both opposition and self-affirmation amongst the representatives of the Russian school. The British master did not find followers in Russia, but his activity became the 'catalyst' of a series of oppositional processes - the motivation of Russian artists and critics, the gradual involvement of broad literary circles in the discussion of contemporary artistic life, and a general recognition of the danger of foreign monopoly. A knowledge of the iconographic, typological and thematic peculiarities of the British portrait school is visible in the art of Russian portraitists. One can see where Russian artists relied on the compositional schemes of historical and mythological paintings by British artists or painters affiliated with the British School such as Hamilton, West, Dawe and Opie. At the same time the pictorial freedom of the contemporary British masters was seen as unusual and 'useless' for the national artistic school. The reserved reviews of the technical methods of Reynolds and Dawe which 'did not bear any remarkable finish', bear witness to this. Gradually in Russia an interest in individual names or creative personalities began to be accompanied by an understanding of the differences of entire cultural traditions, the specific peculiarities of this or that artistic mentality and, following on from that, characteristic cultural phenomena. This process had already been noted in the previous century, and continued in the 1830s. Referral to the British heritage in all its complexity took place on a new level. The popularity of British literature grew, with subjects from works by British authors appearing in the compositions of Russian artists, such as Karl Bryullov and Fedor Tolstoi. In the figure of Fedor Tolstoi Russia found its talented

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answer to Flaxman. Tolstoi's illustrations to F. Bogdanovich's poem Dushenka in the 1810s and 1820s use fine contour drawing, a method analogous to Flaxman's famous illustrations to Homer, which were known in Russia through Pirolli's engravings. In the 1830s and 1840s attention also began to be paid to the Hogarthian direction in Russian art, and to the didactic potential of Wilkie's genre compositions. Throughout the nineteenth century, British art, along with British literature, continued to be seen in Russia as the most 'original' of all the national traditions abroad. As far as understanding the further development of Russia's national school is concerned, the British practice of 'entering the western European cultural context whilst maintaining the complete independence of its national spirit' was recognized as something worth noting and studying. After what was in essence Russia's participation at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, with its own artistic section, the most authoritative Russian critic of the second half of the nineteenth century, Vladimir Stasov wrote: The 1862 International Exhibition finally served to define which school of art we most resemble ... Our school (and I am talking about its earlier manifestations) shares the greatest number of common features with one of the European schools ... - with the English .... Just as with the English school, the best of our paintings in earlier times were portraits .... Here we walked in step with England, and all the honours which she earned belong to us too. The portraits of Levitsky, Borovikovsky, Kiprensky and Bryullov will soon come to equal the best portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney and Lawrence.47

Author's acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, which generously supported the research and funded the costs of illustrated materials. Also my deepest gratitude to Sasha Dagdeil and Dr Rosalind Blakesley for their help with translation.

Abbreviations

SH STG SRM RSHA

State Hermitage, St Petersburg State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow State Russian Museum, St Petersburg Russian State Historical Archive

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Notes 1.

For a Bibliography on this subject see: Dmitry Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect. British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 26 2-7.

2.

Recent important publications are: G. Andreeva, ed., Nezabyvaemaya Rossiya: russkie I Rossiya glazami

britantsev X V II-X IX vek (Unforgettable Russia. Russians and Russia through the eyes of the British, lyth -iy th centuries), exh. cat., State Tretyakov G allery/ British Council (Moscow: Trefoil, 1997); G.

Andreeva, 'Russko-Angliiskie svjazi v oblasti zhivopisi. Vtoraia polovina 18 - pervaia tret 19 veka', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Moscow, 1998; Rosalind P. Gray, Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 3.

J. C. Mannlich, Ein Deutscher Maler und Hoffman. Lebenserinnerungen. Berlin (Berlin, 1910) pp. 18 1-5 , 3 1 9 - 2 1 ,3 6 3 and 4 80-81.

4.

See: A . Ivanov, The Death ofPelopidus (STG, inv. 8013); A . Witberg, Mourning over Hector, 1809 (Samara A rt M useum, inv. Z H - 907), w hich are close to Hamilton's composition. Andromache Mourning the Death of Hector w as engraved b y Cunego in 1764.

5.

In the list of recommended literature there is a book b y Dallaway, Les Beaux Arts de TAngleterre ..., Paris 1807, where Hamilton's w ork is analysed.

6.

Galina Andreeva, 'Italian meetings. Russian and British artists in Rome in the second half of the 18th century', Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia. Newsletter (19), September 19 9 1, pp. 9 -12 .

7.

A . G. Cross, By the Banks of the Thames: Russians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Newtonville, Mass: Oriental Research Partners, 1980).

8.

N . Karamzin, Pisma Russkogo puteshestvennika. Povesti (Moscow: M oskovsky Rabotchi, 1982), pp. 447 and 472.

9.

P. I. Makarov, 'Pisma iz Londona', in Sochinenia i perevody Petra Makarova, 2, (Moscow, 1805), p. 5.

10.

R SH A , fond 789, opis I, delo 7 4 9 ,1 7 7 7 god, list 2 0 -2 1.

11.

ibid.

12.

Arkhiv kniaza Kurakina (1894), 5 / Saratov, p. 483; Zapiski knjagini Dashkovoi (1907), St Petersburg, p.

105; 'Z h u m al puteshestvija V. N . Zinovieva po Germanii, Italii, Frantsii, Anglii v 17 8 4 -17 8 8 ' (1878),

Russkaia Starina, 23 (1-2). Zinoviev said Jarvis w as a miniaturist. Possibly it w as the John Jarvis mentioned in E. Waterhouse, The Dictionary of British Eighteenth-Century Painters (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors' Club Ltd, 1981), pp. 194 and 196. 13 .

Karamzin, 1982, pp. 4 72 and 79.

14.

P. P. Svinjin, Ezhednevnye Zapiski v Londone (St Petersburg, 18 17), pp. 196-8.

15.

A . I. Turgenev, Chronika Russkogo. Dnevniki (M oscow-Leningrad: Izd-vo 'N au ka', 1964), pp. 400 and 402.

16.

R SH A , ibid.

17.

'Angliiskaia progulka' (1772), Zhivopisets. Quoted in: Smejuzhiisja Demokrit (Moscow, 1985), pp. 5 3 -4 .

18.

N o w all - SH, inv. 16 27, 2210.

19.

N o w all - Peterhof, inv. 369 - Z H ; 370 - Z H ; 3 7 1 - Z H ; 3 72 - ZH .

20.

1 7 7 1 , STG , inv. 26775. For English prototype see: G. Andreeva, 'I Flotu Rosskomu dver slavy otvorjaet...' O kartine T. Roode 'Allegoria na Chesmenskuju Pobedu', in E. Waegemans, ed., Russia and the Low Countries in the Eighteenth Century. Baltic Studies 5, (Groningen: INOS, 1998), pp. 1 5 9 - 7 1 .

21.

Whereabouts unknown. Brompton's w orks were mentioned in: [E. Munich], Catalogue raisonne des

tableaux qui se trouvent dans les galeries, salons et cabinets du Palais Imperial de S.Petersbourg, commence en 1773 et continue jusqu'en 1783, vol. 2, p. 701, N . 2623, 2626, 2635 - Archiv Ermitazha, fond I, opis V, delo 85. Portraits of George III and his w ife Sophia-Charlotte by N . Dance - SH , inv. 4469, 9565; Portrait of Prince of Wales George and his brother Frederick b y B. West - SH inv. 9527. Three w orks b y J. Wright, bought between 17 7 4 and 1779 , are now in: SH , inv. 3149 , inv. 1 3 1 5 , State M useum of Fine Arts, named after A . S. Pushkin, inv. 3912. 22.

Karamzin, 1982, p. 5 13 .

23.

See: A . Moore, ed., Houghton Hall. The Prime Minister, the Empress and the Heritage (London: Philip Wilson, 1996); A . Moore and L. Dukelskaya, A Capital Collection. Houghton Hall and the Hermitage (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).

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24.

Probably the author meant one of the engravings from Ugolino 'Angliiskii turist v Petersburge v 177 4 godu' in: Istoricheskiy Vestnik, December 18 8 1, pp. 822 -3.

25.

A . G. Cross, ed., Engraved in the Memory: James Walker, Engraver to the Empress Catherine the Great, and His Russian Anecdotes (Oxford and Providence: Berg, 1993), p. 146. On Reynolds in Russia see: Frederich W. Hilles, 'Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Empress Catherina' in W. H. Bond, ed., EighteenthCentury Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde. (N ew York: Grolier Club, 1970).

26.

Translation b y Ivan Tatishev published in 1790, but they were known at the Russian court in the early 1780s. P. P. Ch ekalevsk y,' Rassuzhdenie o svobodnykh hudozhestvakh...' w as published in 1 7 9 2 , . F. Urvanov, 'Kratkoe rukovodstvo k posnaniju risovanija i zhivopisi istoricheskogo roda ...' w as published in 1793.

1

27.

A . V. Kornilova, ed., Aleksei Gavrilovitch Venetsianov. Statji. Pisma. Sovremenniki 0 Khudozhnikke (Leningrad: Isskusstvo, 1980), p. 59.

28.

E. Maxtone Graham, The Beautiful Mrs Graham and the Cathcart Circle (London, Nisbet, 1927), pp. 12 -13.

29.

On Richard Brompton in Russia see Andreeva, ed., 199 7 (see n. 2), pp. 1 6 - 3 1 .

30.

Cross, ed., 1993.

31.

A . G. Cross, in Andreeva, ed., 1997, pp. 116 -2 8 .

32.

State of the Fine Arts. Letter from M r Labzin, Perpetual Secretary of the Academ y at St Petersburg: (addressed, in reply, to Prince Hoare, Secretary for Foreign Correspondence) in: Academic Annals (180 1-180 2), p. 33.

33.

Otechestvenny Zapiski (1820), 3 (5), p. 82.

34.

G. Andreeva, 'M ilitary Gallery in Winter Palace (The Hermitage): International aspects of the National Memorial', in Wessel Reinink, ed., Memory and Oblivion. Proceedings of the X X IX International Congress of the History of Art Held in Amsterdam, 1 - 7 September 1996 (Dordrecht: Kluw er Academ ic Publishers, 1996), pp. 1 5 1 - 7 .

35.

Severnaja Ptchela (1825), n. 154.

36.

See: G. Andreeva, 'Tvortchestvo Drordzha D aw e (17 8 1-18 2 9 ) v kontekste russkogo romantizma', in A.V. Tolstoy, ed., Rossija-Evropa: iz istorii russko- evropeiskikh khudozhestvennykh svjazei X VIII - X X vv.: sbornik statei, (Moscow: N il Rossiskoi Academ ii Khudozhestv, 1995), pp. 80-94.

37.

See Andreeva, ed., 1997, pp. 2 1 1 - 1 4 ; ibid., pp. 10 3-10 9 .

38.

Syn Otechestva (1820), 64, (40), p. 304. See also: Otechestnevvyie Zapiski (1827), 29, (81), p. 1 5 1 .

39.

Severnaya Ptchela (1827), n. 108-109.

40.

Moskovskiy Vestnik (1828), 1, p. 123.

4 1.

Severnaya Ptchela (1825), (154). Severnaya Ptchela (1827), n. 108-109.

42.

Syn Otechestva (1820), 64, (40), pp. 302-304.

43.

Moskovskyi Vestnik (1828), (7), pp. 1 2 3 -3 4 ; ibid., p. 304.

44.

Syn Otechestva (1820), 64, (40), p. 304.

45.

P. N . Petrov, 'Russian painting over a hundred years', Northern Lights, 2 ,18 6 3 , table 668.

46.

G. Andreeva, 'George D aw e in Russia', Artist, (6), 1989, pp. 38 -4 7. D aw e exhibited a picture w ith this title at the Royal A cadem y in London in 18 13 . According to Arn old's Library of the Fine Arts, vol. vi, 18 3 1 , p. 1 1 it w as bought b y 'an eminent and patriotic nobleman of the country'. The painting (or another version of it) appears in the engraving of D aw e's studio in Russia (fig. 3.9). A painting with the same title w as on loan to the National Galleries of Scotland in 1959, but it is not clear whether this w as the same painting that w as in Russia in 1826. Possibly there were two versions.

47.

V. V. Stasov. From the article ’ Posle V sem im oy vystavki' (1862), quoted in Jan Brooke and Eugenia Petrova, eds, Orest Kiprensky. Perepiska. Dokumenty. Svidetelstva sovremennikov (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 1994), p. 537.

Galina Andreeva

3.1 Anton Losenko, Hector and Andromache's Farewell, 1773, oil on canvas, 155.8 x 211.5 cm

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3.2

Anton Losenko, The Travellers, 1763-69, lead pencil on grey paper, 29.5 x 36.3 cm

Galina Andreeva

3.3 Petr Sokolov, Portrait of Nikita Panin in Childhood, 1779, oil on canvas, 167 x 104 cm

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3 4 Theodorus de Roode, Allegory on the Victory at Chesme for Catherine the Great, 1771, oil on parchment, laid on canvas, 50 x 63.5 cm

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3.3 Dmitry Levitsky, Catherine the Lawgiver in the Temple of the Goddess of Justice, 1783, oil on canvas, 261 x 201 cm

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3.6

Richard Brompton, Portrait of Alexander Kurakin, 1781, oil on canvas, 113 x 76 cm

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75

3.7 Vasily Borovikovsky, Portrait of Catherine II Strolling in Tsarskoe Selo, 1794, oil on canvas, 94.5 x 66 cm

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3.8 S. A. Alekseev, The Military Gallery in the Winter Palace, c. 1827, watercolour, dimensions unknown

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3.9 J. Bennet and T. Wright. The Visit of Emperor Alexander I to the Studio of the Artist George Dawe, 1826, engraving, 33.7 x 46.6 cm

4

A view of New Holland: aspects of the colonial prospect Michael Rosenthal

The invasion and subsequent settlement of New Holland, as Australia was initially known, are documented in an enormous quantity of watercolours and drawings, along with the rather fewer oil paintings and prints that were produced from 26 January 1788, when the British landed, and throughout the early colonial period.1 These concerned themselves with the various subjects, the Aboriginal population, the flora and fauna, the nature of the terrain, exploration and the development of the settlement which became Sydney at Port Jackson, that were to engage the interest of very many over the next few decades. Indeed, so abundant is the artwork that we are able, as Tim McCormick has demonstrated, to witness through drawings, watercolours and prints, the incremental development of the town of Sydney in some detail.2 And what I propose to focus on here is the extent to which this material documents the process of colonization and offers fascinating evidence to assist the understanding of what was actually taking place.3 Because this was a unique experiment - the British were settling in a country of which they had only the slightest knowledge - both literary and artistic responses demand close attention, revealing how preconceived ideas could be adapted to cope with the new, and how alienation could exist alongside an appreciation of Australian terrain. I shall first consider some of the earlier reactions to Australia before going on to look in closer detail at how the language in which that terrain was described and the ways in which it was pictured tell of the process of colonization. Because these were British settlers, bringing with them (to various degrees) British culture, they had to adapt that culture to accommodate the strangest of unfamiliar environments. Some of the first to encounter the place found it to be exotic beyond comprehension. Attempting, in 1813, to characterize what the British called the native cat, Thomas Skottowe compared it first to a fox, then to a rabbit.4 Birds made noises the British had never previously heard;

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trees that took deciduous forms shed their bark but not their leaves. Stress has been laid on the extent to which the colonists were repelled by this extraordinary continent. The evidence suggests that we might temper that view. On the one hand, calling one kind of eucalypt a 'cedar' (1790) or another a 'beech' (1796) when they were patently nothing of the sort, evidenced the extraordinary linguistic gymnastics demanded by the attempt to bring the unknown within European knowledge, and, by extension, conceivably bore witness to a kind of desperation. On the other, such naming of trees testified to a talent for creative ingenuity. What, in 1789, was called the 'Forest Oak' would never fool anyone into believing that it was an actual oak, but it is not hard to see why its overall shape and mass suggested the name. The same goes for the Australian native willow.5 If a vocabulary was needed to define the unknown, it made sense to give things names that stood a reasonable chance of being generally understood. Leaving everybody to invent their own neologisms would have fostered a botanical babble, and hardly have aided effective communication. This process, calling a gum an oak or a beech when it self-evidently was nothing of the sort, was illuminating about the strategies employed within the colonizing project, although this is complicated by the fact that individual reactions to Australian terrain could be completely contradictory.6For David Blackburn, Master of the Supply, writing on 12 July 1788, the 'country so far as it has been penetrated affords but a Bad Prospect to the New Colony', while on the previous day his fellow first-fleeter, Henry Waterhouse, had more pragmatically observed how the soil was 'tolerably good', how they had found a clay that makes 'most excellent Bricks' and how the trees were abundant, though he was not 'Botanist enough to distinguish any great variety'.7 From its inception, the history of the colony was complex and ambiguous. This went for the nature of the settlement, too, as we can clearly see from a couple of short quotes from two newspapers of 1789. The settlement we are making at Botany, or rather Jackson's Bay on the coast of New South Wales, reminds us of the Roman Empire, which sprang out of a nest of robbers ... The Thief Colony may hereafter become a great empire, whose nobles will probably, like the nobles of Rome and other empires, boast of their blood.

In contrast, we have this: The thieves of London no longer flatter themselves with becoming founders of a n e w r o m e . The climate and soil at Botany Bay, bear no resemblance to those of Italy. Convicts transported to that spot, will find the whole of their labour necessary to their sustenance, and from ... the aborigines ... they are likely to experience opposition, treachery, and eternal warfare. To pick a pocket, or by other means to pilfer, will be therefore serious offences, attended not only by the forfeiture of the rights, privileges, and liberties enjoyed in this country, but also with the horrors of

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transportation, by a voyage of nine months, and living for the remainder a wretched life, even worse than that enjoyed by the Negro slaves in the West Indies.8

This contradiction persisted. Here is Secretary of State Bathurst, writing in January 1819 to John Thomas Bigge, about to enquire into the state of the colony under the Governorship of Lachlan Macquarie. You are aware of the causes which first led to the formation of settlements in New Holland ... these settlements cannot be administered with the usual reference to the general principles of colonial policy which are applicable to other foreign possessions of his Majesty. Not having been established with any view to territorial or commercial advantages, they must be chiefly considered as receptacles for offenders.

Against this we might set James Wallis, writing in 1821 of 'a Colony, which is in all probability destined, at no very remote period, to become the mistress of the Southern Hemisphere'.10 And it is germane here that, in a book published in London in 1825, Barron Field could state that 'New Holland will be a second America'; an analogy that was taken up by Peter Cunningham in 1827. The former Surgeon General thought it extraordinary how, with transportation, 'the seeds of a mighty empire should have been sown, which even at this day far exceeds, in rapidity of progress towards riches and power, any founded on the American Continent'.11 When, in his Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793), Watkin Tench described Parramatta thus: 'In a colony which contains only a few hundred houses, built of twigs and mud, we feel consequential enough already to talk of a Treasury, an Admiralty, a Public Library, and many other similar edifices, which are to form part of a magnificent square',12 he implied that the colony would replicate, even improve on the institutions of the mother country. In this context it is significant that Francis Wheatley's 1786 portrait of founding Governor, Arthur Philip, shows him holding a plan of what may be a fortification and is inscribed 'New South Wales 1787', and that the foundation plate at the first Government House (and preserved at its site, outside the Museum of Sydney) styled him 'Governor in Chief and Captain General in and over the Territory of New South Wales &c. &c. &c.'13 The inference must be that the invasion of Australia was, as it were, dual intentioned at the very least; that is, it was meant both as a means of confirming Cook's claim to a territory distant enough to leave transported convicts so far out of sight as to be inevitably out of mind, and as a colony in the classical sense, a settlement in a new country. In light of this ambiguity it is salient that the First Fleet was shadowed by the French vessels La Bussole and L'Astrolabe, presumably because the French were keen to know what precisely the British were doing, and that, as Peter Barber has noted, the Malaspina Spanish expedition of 1793 was sent 'to discover the colony's true raison d'etre'. In his review of David Collins's Account of the English Colony in

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New South Wales, published in two volumes in 1798 and 1802, Sydney Smith displayed no such uncertainty. He opined that to 'introduce an European population, and consequently, the arts and civilisation of Europe into such an untrodden country as New Holland, is to confer a lasting and important benefit upon the world'.14 By 1831, rather extraordinarily, Daniel Tyerman discovered Sydney society, as befitted any British colony thankfully communicating 'the English idea of comfort to the Stranger who has long been absent from the only land (perhaps) in which genuine comfort can be found as the pervading genius loci'.15 If all that was needed was a dumping-ground for convicts, it would have made far more sense to establish it elsewhere. The British had easy access to and knowledge of the Scottish Islands, which themselves would have supplied far less amenable an environment for convicted criminals. By contrast (as has been intimated above) they effectively knew nothing of Australia. Cook had spent just a week, from 29 April to 6 May 1770, at Botany: any information accumulated had, of necessity, to be superficial. Alan Atkinson has written tellingly about the ambivalent status of the colony: In Autumn 1786, if not later, New South Wales was envisaged as a land of Englishmen where ... the rights admired by the more old-fashioned advocates of liberty would prevail. This remote continent, besides its many disadvantages, had two great virtues in the minds of the Home Office, for as long as Sydney was Secretary of State. It was so far from Europe that transported men and women would find it hard to get back. Also, it was useless.16

This experiment was being carried out on expendable people. The New South Wales Corps was as far from a crack regiment as could be found. As the convicts were mostly proletarian, Irish, or both, it was irrelevant whether they lived or died. Consequently, if the experiment was to succeed, all to the good; but if it failed, this would be no catastrophe. Bernard Smith was the first to point out the distaste that Australian terrain could arouse in some of the British.17 A good example is to be found in his Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, when Captain Watkin Tench describes the reactions of a party of exploration to that area to the north of Sydney that they called Broken Bay: 'Here they again wandered over piles of mis-shapen desolation, contemplating scenes of wild solitude, whose unvarying appearance render them incapable of affording either novelty or gratification.'18 Or one might cite George Caley, in 1804, having failed to find a route over the Blue Mountains, and noting how the 'dreary appearance, abruptness, and intricate and dangerous route experienced at this place induced me to call it the Devil's Wilderness'.19 These sentiments appear to have been shared by the explorer John Oxley, if we sample his accounts of the two rather more wide-ranging expeditions that he undertook in 1817 and 1818. At one point he noted that:

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There is a uniformity in the barren desolateness of this country which wearies one more than I am able to express. One tree, one soil, one water, and one description of bird, fish, or animal prevails alike for ten miles, and for one hundred. A variety of wretchedness is at all times preferable to one unvarying cause of pain or distress.20

While the Australian wilderness clearly was alienating for a European, it is worth noticing the language in which that alienation was articulated. Tench's 'piles of mis-shapen desolation', or 'wild solitude' were characteristic and conventional examples of the polite jargon commonly used for describing the kind of terrain which might otherwise be perceived as sublime. George, first Lord Lyttleton had traversed North Wales in 1756, and found that, at the top of Mount Berwin: a prospect opened to us, which shrunk the mind with awful astonishment. Nature is in all her majesty there; but it is the majesty of a tyrant, frowning over the ruins and desolation of a country. The enormous mountains, or rather rocks, of Merionethshire inclosed us all around. There is not upon these mountains a tree or shrub, or a blade of grass; nor did we see any marks of habitations or culture in the whole place. Between them is a solitude fit for Despair to inhabit.21

By the 1790s this kind of vocabulary, albeit without the rhetorical flourishes, had become commonplace. Caley's 'dreary appearance', or Oxley's preferring 'a variety of wretchedness', could just as easily have been applied to regions of the United Kingdom. And here it is germane to consider Augustus Earle's representations of the rainforest of the Illawarra region, to the south of Sydney (Figure 4.1). I initially thought that I might be able to claim for these a status unique in nineteenth-century European landscape painting. Earle's amazing capacity to resist the urge to compose these scenes, and, instead, to allow trees to shoot through and out of the pictorial space with wonderful randomness, suggests that his only artistic concern was to draw whatever happened to fall within his field of vision at any one time, apparently to document the amazing nature of the rainforest. However, John White Abbott's Trees in Peamore Park, Exeter (1799) (Figure 4.2) does form a valid domestic comparison. As Abbott was a drawing master and, therefore, a disseminator of pictograms, this suggests that, if we look, it is likely that we shall discover other European parallels for what Earle was about. Because of this, we have to qualify any assessment of Earle's as extraordinary images of arboreal chaos such as fits them perfectly to be icons of the exotic. As Bernard Smith pointed out, when Earle visited the region in the 1820s it was 'beginning to receive increasing attentions of travellers ... who wrote most favourably of its sub-tropical scenery and luxuriant vegetation'. Smith cites Barron Field being reminded of 'Humboldt's descriptions of South American vegetation', and Peter Cunningham fancying himself being 'transported to some far-distant tropical region' to point out how, if there were terms within which the exotic could be

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accommodated, however artificial the match, they would, nonetheless, be invoked.22 If what appeared alien could be perceived as conforming to preconceived models, then that which appeared easier on the eye provoked real approbation. John Oxley may have been put out by the 'barren desolateness' of some parts of Australia. Others moved him to warm approbation: From several of these hills over which our route led us, we had the most extensive and beautiful prospects; from thirty to forty miles round, from the north to the south, the country was broken in irregular low hills, thinly studded with small timber, and covered with grass: the whole landscape in compass of our view was clear and open, resembling diversified pleasure grounds irregularly laid out and planted. The animation of the whole scenery was greatly increased by the smoke of the natives' fires arising in every quarter, distinctly marking that we were in a country which afforded them ample means of subsistence.23

In this confident translation of Australia into English, Oxley made manifest the incongruent actualities of colonial appropriation. Language allowed landscape to be represented as what it was not. He was quite conformist in celebrating such an apparently open, luxuriant country. As is well known, the traverse of the Blue Mountains by Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson in 1813 was a key moment in the development of the colony, for, on reaching the western edge of the escarpment, the three prospected what appeared to be boundless pastureland.24 Governor Macquarie duly despatched the Surveyor, George William Evans, to chart a route over the mountains and beyond into the west, which, between 19 November 1813 and 4 January 1814, he duly did. On beholding that same westerly vista Evans found himself 'at a loss to describe the pleasant appearance of the place'.25 Later on, Barron Field thought that this was 'the first view of the promised land of Australia', after the wilderness of the Blue Mountains.26 Open pasture commonly attracted high praise. In 1818, for example, a John Howe was the first European to trek north from Windsor to the Hunter River. At one point on his journey he wrote that they had been travelling 'this last two hours thro' fine country thinly timbered & for the last hour many acres with not a tree on it, one spot I think exceeds 30 acres with not 20 trees on it and very fine ground'.27 Howe was making the same, and, it must be said, completely conventional connection between the aesthetic and the material. One valued a country which revealed potential for money-making: Hannibal Macarthur had already shown what wealth might be got from running Merino sheep. This was entirely in conformity with attitudes among many back in Britain. In a review of Richard Payne Knight's poem, The Landscape (1796), the agricultural writer, William Marshall, observed that 'by mere dint of neglect, places, heretofore beautiful, have been rendered picturesk, and highly irritating, both

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to the minds and bodies of those who explored them'. In Britain too wilderness was, for most, something to be disapproved of.28 In his Historical Account of New South Wales (1821) James Wallis claimed that the engravings therein would: serve to shew and convince ... from what slender beginnings, and in how few years, the primaeval forest... may be cultivated into plains coverd with bleating flocks, lowing herds, and waving com; may become the smiling seats of industry and the social arts, and be changed from a mournful and desolate wilderness, into the cheerful village, the busy town, and the crowded city.29

More succinctly, addressing former Governor Macquarie in the dedication to his poem, Australasia, W. C. Wentworth wrote of 'the forests you levelled, the roads you formed, the bridges you built'.30 In light of this it is interesting to take a survey of some of the landscape imagery - always by amateurs, often drawn or in watercolour - which was produced during the early colonial period. Sophia Campbell, the middle-class wife of the successful Sydney merchant, Robert Campbell, was, significantly, in England between 1810 and 1815, and therefore up-to-date with the latest fashions in landscape. Thus her Sydney in All Its Glory (Figure 4.3) of c. 1817 presents an entirely Anglicized view of the port, such as may be compared, say, with Turner's Plymouth with Mount Batten (c. 1814) (Figure 4.4), and which suggests, following the conclusions of Richard Neville, that the city had as much a provincial as colonial relation to the mother country.31 On the other hand, her watercolours of Newcastle and its surroundings (Figure 4.3) take a wide-angled, sweeping, essentially uncomposed view over the country, and, in contrast to the composition of Sydney in All Its Glory, this is something that is not found in contemporary landscape in Britain. Greg Smith has demonstrated how Thomas Girtin developed a 'panoramic mode' for the representation of coastal views in particular.32 Yet, even in one of his 'panoramic compositions' such as the impressively sweeping Unidentified Estuary of c. 1799 organization and focus is provided by the perspective of the river.33 That is, the eye is directed, the composition controlled. Equivalent compositions by other artists (arguably developing the mode where Girtin had left off) - De Wint's Yorkshire Fells (Figure 4.6) or Cotman's Ploughed Field (Figure 4.7) - come with compositional provisos, pictorial cues to direct the gaze. This contrast is worth dwelling on, for, in Australia, the British tended to open up their field of vision to a far greater extent. Numerous examples might be cited. Richard Neville has plausibly suggested that the watercolour view (Figure 4.8) over water and low-lying forest might be of Port Stephens, and might be attributed to Sophia Campbell.34This would date it to the later 1810s. The landscape is extraordinary. With a tree placed just off centre and an Aboriginal group to the right, and with no apparent linear perspective to

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focus the gaze, the eye moves from right to left and back again in a way mimetic of the actual movement of the head when prospecting an extensive view in actuality. This is an Australian version of the 'unbounded prospect' that had been a commonplace subject of encomium in eighteenth-century British poetry. Others occur widely - in the watercolours of Augustus Earle, and later, around 1830-32, over in western Australia, in Jane Eliza Currie's wonderful four-part Panorama of the Swan River Settlement.35 Here it is useful to make some observations on the status that the prospect, the extensive view, had attained in British culture. That the unbounded vista was commonly popular is abundantly clear from Uvedale Price's disparaging 'Prospect Hunters' in his Essay on the Picturesque: Let them see but clearly, and see enough, they are content; and much may be said in their favour; composition, grouping, breadth and effect of light of shadow, harmony of colour, &c. are comparatively tended to and enjoyed by few; but extensive prospects are the most popular of all views, and their superiority is generally decided by the numbers of churches and counties. Distinctness is therefore the great point.36

This kind of appraisal of landscape was commonplace. This is Arthur Young from his Northern Tour of 1770: After travelling a vast range of dreary waste, and shut up in a rocky hollow between two hills, you break at once upon a view which cannot fail to be astonishing: you look between two hills on an immense plain, comprehending almost the whole of Cleveland, finely cultivated, the verdure beautiful; and the innumerable inclosures adding prodigiously to the view.37

Indeed, as Price pointed out, the taste for prospects had attained the level of cliche, as we find with Edward Ferrers, the voice of common sense in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. After going for a walk, he returns 'with fresh admiration of the surrounding country; in his walk to the village he had seen many parts of the valley to advantage; and the village itself, in a much higher situation than the cottage, afforded a general view of the whole, which had exceedingly pleased him'.38He, too, had been enjoying an extensive vista from a high viewpoint. The significance of the sweeping, or panoramic, view in British culture incidentally one that is more often described in language than imagery - has been written about by both John Barrell and Michael Charlesworth. The former has convincingly proposed that 'a correct taste, here especially for landscape and landscape art, was used in this period as legitimising political authority, the claim to participate in the councils of the state', and how, 'among the meanings attached to the panoramic view may be the notion of a wider society, and the notion of the ability to grasp objects in the form of their relations to each other'. Therefore, to perceive the panoramic demands 'the exercise of that broad and comprehensive vision and that ability to abstract

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representative from actual nature that are now ... the qualifications for citizenship'.39 Writing of the Hoober Stand at Wentworth Woodhouse from which an extensive panorama over Yorkshire was (and is) to be enjoyed, Michael Charlesworth develops some telling conclusions. Comparing the differences in the kind of viewing encouraged by the panopticon and of the panorama he notes 'a crucial difference between the two superficially similar forms, expressible in whether the overlooked person realizes or understands that he or she is being overlooked', for, under the latter circumstances, they do not. Charlesworth brilliantly understands the kind of looking enabled by such a structure as the Hoober Stand to exemplify the exercise of power, and in Britain, of course, power was contingent upon the ownership of property. Thus, as he goes on to conclude, the 'panoramic visual field ... is an important colonial tool, first brought to perfection against domestic populations (the Highland Scots) before being exported across the globe in the service of Hanoverian geopolitical ambition'.40 The extensive view had a long history in Britain. There were the painted prospects that flourished in the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries; and, famously, the vista of the Thames valley as seen from Richmond Hill that, in The Seasons, James Thomson presented as the embodiment of 'happy Britannia'.41 Both were celebrations of the blessings of property. Translate this to the antipodean context, and the prominence of the wide-angled view is arguably to do with the notion of bringing the landscape within European knowledge, and, in so doing, going somewhere towards appropriating territorially the terrain thus represented. That is, as was noticed by Simon Ryan and as Sarah Thomas has recently pointed out with particular respect to William Westall's work on the Flinders circumnavigation, these watercolour prospects accommodate Australia within the cultural as a colony which, by being pictorially known can be materially appropriated.42 A watercolour View of the Hunter River (Figure 4.9) made before 1809, when the church at Newcastle was built, is comparable to the Sophia Campbell watercolour discussed above (Figure 4.5). Once again there is no linear perspective, and, once again, the wide angle seems expressive of the movement of the head as it looks from side to side to prospect this extensive vista. The lines of foreground fencing, along with the existence of the church, indicate the progress of civilization. So do pencil inscriptions, visible under the paint, which give landscape features such names as 'Perch Point' or 'Paterson's Plains' and, in so doing, effectively appropriate them as property. Paul Carter has written of the great significance of the naming of topographical elements within the colonizing process, in respect of which it is salient that, during his circumnavigation of Australia, Matthew Flinders was extremely sensitive to this very element. In A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814) he writes at one point how:

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Mons. Peron, naturalist in the French expedition, has laid a claim for his nation to the discovery of all the parts between Western Port in Bass' Strait, and Nuyt's Archipelago; and this part of New South Wales is called Terre Napoleon. My Kanguroo Island, a name which they openly adopted in the expedition, has been converted at Paris into Vile Deeres ... and so on along the whole coast to Cape Nuyts, not even the smallest island being left without some similar stamp of French discovery.43

In this context we might note the aquatint view of Sydney commonly known as 'Blake's View' (although engraved by William Stadden, not William Blake), inscribed 'A View of the Town of Sydney in the Colony of New South Wales', published in London in 1802, and where it is hard not to believe that the view of a spectacular sunrise is emblematic of the dawn of an expanding empire.44 It is as instructive to consider the partnership of Matthew Flinders and William Westall on the circumnavigation of the continent that the former conducted in the Investigator between 1801 and 1802. 1 shall cite a fairly typical Flinders journal entry, from February 1801, from somewhere beyond Van Nuyt's Archipelago (which lies to the north-west of Port Lincoln in South Australia). 'I landed to take angles of the neighbouring lands from the top of the cliffs on the east side', or, elsewhere, the 'view from the summit did not exhibit lakes or bays to the Eastward'.45 In the meantime Westall was, under Flinders's directions, systematically making drawings that would combine into panoramas of the land they were inspecting. They would ascend high ground, and by prospecting the terrain bring it within their knowledge. The evidence begins to contradict David Blackburn's early impression that the 'country so far as it has been penetrated affords but a Bad Prospect to the New Colony'. Indeed, as was noticed earlier, reactions to these prospects effectively constitute a counter-trope to the oft-cited despair that was engendered by being lost within Australian nature. This is the surveyor, George William Evans, heading west from Bathurst in New South Wales between 13 May and 12 June 1815: 'I ascended the height. No country can possibly have a more interesting aspect.'46 And when John Oxley published the Journals of Two Expeditions ... in the Years 18 17 -18 in 1820, his title significantly indicated that these were 'undertaken by Order of the British Government' (in the person of Governor Macquarie) while his text frequently described his ascending high ground to survey extensive prospects, as when he took this wide-ranging look: 'To the north-east, east, and south-east, our view was bounded by beautiful forest hills, seldom rising to any great elevation, thinly wooded, and covered with grass. These hills bounded the plains, and varied in distance from ten to thirty miles.'47 In an equivalent to those watercolours, Oxley writes of the experience of standing on an eminence and looking around the landscape, for his angle of vision was at least 135 degrees. Moreover, his is the language of the

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agricultural improver, and, by implication, the colonizer. Indeed, as has been noticed, it is fascinating how easily Oxley is able to recruit a vocabulary to describe what he thinks he sees, as, a year or so earlier, Henry Colden Antill, accompanying Macquarie on his grand progress of 1815 over the Blue Mountains had been able to accommodate their scenery within a familiar aesthetic diction. He described 'one of the grandest views that can be imagined' thus: In the foreground was a deep glen ... and around it an immense amphitheatre of lofty hills crowned with rocks upon which the sun was shining, affording a variety of tints; in the distance were lofty mountains as far as the eye could reach, forming a grand circumference of background; the whole coup d'oeil grand beyond the power of my pen to describe.48

While it is fascinating that Antill can describe in Gilpinian language that which is unimaginably unlike any terrain one might find in the British Isles, it is his final clause, 'beyond the power of my pen to describe', that I want to focus on. To indicate why, I shall quote G. W. Evans on 26 November 1813, when he was 'at a loss to describe the pleasant appearance of this place', or, on 5 December, when he was 'at a loss for language to describe the country'.49This apology was one he would repeat in 1813, when exploring to the west of Bathurst on Macquarie's orders. On 2 June he recorded that he ascended the height. No country can possibly have a more interesting aspect... I am deficient in abilities to describe it properly but shall endeavour to do so by comparing the country to an ocean, as it is nearly level with the horizon from NW to SW. Small hillocks are seen at great distances of a pale blue showing as land appears when first discovered at sea. Spaces clear of trees may be imagined islands, and the natives' smokes arising at various points, vessels.50

To describe land in terms of the ocean is to use what appears at least an incongruous simile, yet it was not exclusive to Evans. In 1818 John Howe entered country 'which appears very extensive being seen so far as the eye can reach & has the appearance of the boisterous ocean, only the fog is white & the ocean appears green'.51 The only way language can be matched to Australian land and landscape is by rendering it in terms of precisely what it is not. This supplies a contrast to the rather more comfortable option of translating the terrain into English because it is imagined that a pastoral, agricultural and eventually commercial potential is to be recognized from its appearances. The other way round of describing the unknown is to make pictures of it, a tactic which, in being as economically effective as any linguistic description, also brings it within the orbit of European management. This would be the simple explanation for the existence of the rather unusual landscape views discussed here, as Evans, in an extraordinary view: A View of Sydney, NS Wales, on

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Entering the Heads - the Distance Seven Miles (Figure 4.10), reports topographical actualities and augments the documentary element by an inscription telling us where we are and how far away Sydney is. However, if we examine the layout of the terrain, it becomes less straightforward, for we are being invited to prospect a vista laid out in a pattern which recalls such compositions as Claude's views of Lake Albano, or the view to the Pantheon at Stourhead, and which therefore is redolent of connotations of Arcadia. Historically, this would be unexceptionable, if the idea that that was a colonial rather than essentially a penal settlement was not at the time so contentious, for this colony could hardly replicate the nature of the society in the mother country. It could not, of course, be so straightforward. As Secretary of State Bathurst wrote to J. T. Bigge in 1819, 'these settlements cannot be administered with reference to general principles of colonial policy'. A population comprising principally British and Irish proletarians could hardly be expected to form itself into hierarchies approximating to those forming society back in Britain. And, apart from a prevailing assumption that the apparent failure of Aboriginal people to render the land property by mingling their labour with it meant that New Holland was ripe for the grabbing, and that, anyway, the four-stage model of human society meant the inevitable displacement of the primitive by the sophisticated, the process was not itself unproblematic. Augustus Earle, who, like many, considered Aboriginal people to hold a low rank in the scheme of evolution, nonetheless figured the actualities of their displacement with real candour, and the consequences were articulated as powerfully in Tasmania, where the British visited murderous violence on the population.52 In one drawing, John Glover (who wished one of his paintings of a Corroboree to serve as a memorial, 'to give an idea of the manner they [the Aborigines] enjoyed themselves before being disturbed by the White People') reprises the subject of the Fall, where a serpent entwined around an English oak in a setting otherwise of gums, offers two figures a bottle of grog.53 In a lithograph, Fern Valley, of around 1840 Mary Morton Allport returned people who were permanently exiled from it to their forest habitat. To the print she attached elegiac verses. Fern! beneath whose palmy leaf Sat of yore, the native Chief Who heard Corrobery, Feast and Song Echo your green arcades among! Fern! your sable children now Pine beneath a stranger bough! To weep their early greenwood home; The shaded creek, the verdant dome, The soft, luxuriant mossy floor They sing, they dance, they smile no more -

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The white man came with tyrant hand And drove them from their Father-land54

Allport's picture suggests that, despite the breezy confidence with which the British defused any dangers in the antipodean environment by attempting its domestication, it remained outside complete control. The interesting point is that, as the procedures for coping with the exotic were so parallel to those brought into play back in Britain, we are presented with an invitation to investigate to what extent and in what terms we might think of the United Kingdom as its own colony, with laws based on property legitimating the hegemony of the governing classes and disallowing alternative versions of how society might be organized, and doing this so effectively as to seduce people away from contemplating the possibility that the dominant need not necessarily be universal discourses.

Author's acknowledgement

I should like to thank Gordon Bull and David Hansen for their assistance and advice in the preparation of this paper, and owe an additional large debt to Scott Wilcox who, with characteristic generosity, sent me a copy of his important M.Litt dissertation, 'The panorama and related exhibitions in London' (University of Edinburgh, 1976).

Notes 1.

For this see Bernard Smith and A lw yn e Wheeler, eds, The Art of the First Fleet (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988).

2.

Tim McCorm ick et a l, First Views of Australia 178 8-18 25. A History of Early Sydney (Chippendale: D avid Ell Press, 1987).

3.

For this see Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (2nd edn, N e w H aven and London: Yale U niversity Press, 1985), and, in particular, Gordon Bull T ak in g Place: early colonial topographical landscape view s of Sydn ey 1788-0.1820', M A dissertation, University of Sydney, 1984.

4.

Thomas Skottowe, Select Specimens from Nature of the Birds Animals &c &c of New South Wales, ed. T. Bonyhady (Newcastle, N ew South Wales, 18 13 ) (facsmile edn Sydney, 1988), fols 37, 38.

5.

Dates from Joan Hughes, ed., The Concise Australian National Dictionary (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989).

6.

For this see Tim Bonyhady's outstanding book, The Colonial Earth (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Paul Carter's equally excellent The Road to Botany Bay (London: Faber, 1987).

7.

Mitchell Library M S S 6 9 3 7 /1, 14 letters from D avid Blackburn, 1787-92; M SS6544, Waterhouse Fam ily Papers.

8.

National Library of Australia, M S 4658, A Collection of Newspaper Articles, Extracts from Magazines, Pamphlets, Advertisements, Portraits, Views, Pictures, and other Illustrations, Relating to Australia, New Zealand and the South Seas (assembled b y Sir John Ferguson), pp. 6 and 36.

9.

[John Thomas Bigge], Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of New South Wales (London, 1822), p. 3.

92 ENGLISH ACCENTS 10.

James Wallis, An Historical Account of the Colony of New South Wales (London, 18 21), p. 40, quoted in Robert Dixon, The Course of Empire. Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788-1850 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 61.

11.

Barron Field, 'A ppen dix7 in Barron Field, ed., Memoirs on New South Wales; by various Hands (London: John Murray, 1825), p. 455; Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales; Comprising Sketches of

the Actual State of Society in that Colony; of its Public Advantages to Emigrants; of its Topography, Natural History, &c. &c., 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), ii, p. 2 13 . 12. 13.

Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793) (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1979), p. 246. M ary Webster, Francis Wheatley (London and N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1974) p. 97, cat. no.

5°.

14.

Peter Barber, 'M alaspina and George III Brambila and Watling: Three discovered drawings of Sydn ey and Paramatta b y Fernando Brambila', Australian Journal of Art, 9 (1993) pp. 3 1 - 5 6 , 32. Sydn ey Smith is quoted in Smith, 1985, p. 220.

15.

Journal of Voyages and Travels, compiled b y James Montgomery, 2 vols (London, 18 3 1), ii, p .142, quoted in Paul Langford, Englishness Identified. Manners and Character 1650-18 50 (Oxford: Oxford

16.

A lan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia. A History. I. The Beginning (Melbourne, Oxford, Auckland, N e w York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 58.

University Press, 2000), pp. 1 2 0 -2 1.

17.

Smith, 1985, passim.

18.

Tench, 17 9 3 /19 7 9 , p. 153.

19.

George Caley, Reflections on the Colony of New South Wales, J. E. B. Currey, ed. (Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1966), p. 1 1 1 .

20.

John Oxley, Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales, Undertaken by Order of the British Government in the Years 18 17 - 18 (London: John Murray, 1820), p. 1 1 3 .

21.

George, Lord Lyttleton, Works (Dublin, 1755), p. 555.

22.

Smith, 1985, pp. 255-6 . See also Rod Ritchie, Seeing the Rainforests in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Paddington, N SW : Rainforest Publishing, 1989), pp. 6 7-9 for Earle.

23.

Quoted in Dixon, 1986, p. 95.

24.

G. Blaxland, 'A journal of a tour of discovery across the Blue Mountains, N e w South Wales, in the year 1 8 1 3 ' in G. Mackaness, ed., Fourteen Journeys over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales (Sydney, Melbourne, London: Horwitz-Graham e, 1965), p. 10.

25.

'Assistant-Surveyor Evans's Journal 1 8 1 3 - 1 8 1 4 ', ibid., p. 2 1.

26.

Field, 1825, p. 430.

27.

John H owe, Diary, 18 18 , Mitchell Library M SS548 p. 6.

28.

[William Marshall], A Review of the Landscape, a Didactic Poem: Also of an Essay on the Picturesque:

Together with Practical Remarks on Rural Ornament. By the Author o f 'Planting and Rural Ornamental Gardening; a Practical Treatise' (London: G. Nicol; G. G. and J. Robinson; and J. Debrett, 1795), pp. 10 5-10 6 . 29.

Smith, 1985, p. 238.

30.

W. C. W entworth, Australasia. A Poem Written fo r the Chancellor's Medal at the Cambridge

Commencement, July, 1825, by W. C. Wentworth, an Australasian; Fellow-Commoner of St. Peter's College (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823), p. x. 3 1.

R. A . J. Neville 'Printmakers in Colonial Sydn ey 180 0 -1850 ', M A dissertation, University of Sydn ey 1988, p. 28. and passim.

32.

G reg Smith, Thomas Girtin: The Art of Watercolour, exh. cat. (London: Tate Britain, 2002) p. 143. See also An n Bermingham, 'Landscape-o-rama: The exhibition landscape at Somerset House and the rise of popular entertainments' in D. Solkin, ed., Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 178 0-1856 (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 12 7 -4 3 .

33.

Smith, 2002, cat no. 1 1 3 , p. 1 5 1 .

34.

Richard Neville, A Rage for Curiosity, exh. cat. (Sydney: State Library of N e w South Wales, 1997), pp. 8 1 -3 .

35.

Mitchell Library, M L 8 27 1-4 . For Earle see Macquarie Harbour (Mitchell Library PXD 265 f5), or

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Parramatta in New South Wales, Looking East (Mitchell Library PXD 265 f.3). For Earle in general see Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, Augustus Earle, Travel Artist (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1980), in w hich the extensive holdings of the National Library of Australia are illustrated. 36.

U. Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purposes of Improving Real Landscape (London: J. Robson, 1796), vol i p. 179.

37.

C. Hussey, The Picturesque (London, 1977), p. 103.

38.

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (18 11), m any edns, Chapter 18.

39.

John Barrell, "The public prospect and the private view : the politics of taste in eighteenth-century Britain' in Simon Pugh, ed., Reading Landscape. Country - City - Capital (Manchester and N e w York: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 19-40.

40.

Michael Charlesworth, 'Thom as Sandby climbs the Hoober Stand. The politics of panoramic drawing in eighteenth-century Britain', Art History 19. 2 (June 1996) pp. 24 7-6 5; pp. 2 5 7 and 263.

4 1.

J. Thomson, The Seasons, 'Sum m er' line 1442.

42.

Sarah Thomas, "'Beautiful to the eye or interesting to science": the conundrum of natural-history art' in Sarah Thomas, ed., The Encounter 1802. Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages, exh. cat. (Adelaide: A rt Gallery of South Australia, 2002), pp. 1 6 - 3 7 and 3 2 -3 4 ; quoting Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1996), p. 89.

43.

Carter, 1987, passim. Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), vol. i pp. 18 9 -9 3, quoted in Frank Crowley, A Documentary History of Australia I. Colonial Australia l y 88-1840 (Melbourne: Nelson, 1980), p. 109.

44.

Reproduced McCorm ick, 1987, Plate 5 1 , p. 85.

45.

Matthew Flinders, Journal on H.M.S. Investigator 18 0 1-18 0 2, Mitchell Library Safe 1 / 2 4 , pp. 306 and 380. For the colonial nature of Westall's w ork see also Michael Charlesworth, 'The ruined abbey: picturesque and Gothic values' in Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, eds, The Politics of the Picturesque. Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since lyyo (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press,

46.

Mitchell Library. M SQ 332.

47.

Oxley, 1820, p. 280.

48.

Mitchell Library, Safe i/2o a . Henry Colden Antill, Journal of an Excursion over the Blue Mountains or

1994)/ (PP- 62-80), pp. 7 0 -7 1.

Western Mountains of New South Wales to Visit a Tract of New Discovered Country in Company with his Excellency Governor & Mrs Macquarie and a Party of Gentlemen, 18 15 , p. 12. 49.

Mackaness, 1965, pp. 2 1 and 23.

50.

Mitchell Library, M s Q 332, entry for 2 June 18 15 .

5 1.

Howe, 18 18 , p. 5.

52.

For example, see Augustus Earle, View in Parramatta N. S. Wales Looking East (Mitchell Library PXD 265f3), Bathurst Plains and Settlement (Mitchell Library PXD265f4), Wellington Valley N.S. Wales looking East (National Library of Australia N K 12 / 2 4 ), A Native Family of N.S. Wales (National Library of Australia N K 12 / 4 5 ).

53.

National Library of Australia N K 6 4 4 /8, reproduced Smith, 1985, Plate 166. For the commemorative intention see Glover to G. Robinson 16 July 18 35 (quoted), Robinson Papers, Mitchell Library.

54.

Allport Library and M useum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania. The print is C2DR9. 5 1/8 9 5 . See Caroline Jordan, 'Progress versus the picturesque: white wom en and the aesthetics of environmentalism in colonial Australia 1820 -18 6 0 ', Art History 25. 3 (June 2002) pp. 3 4 1- 5 7 , particularly pp. 3 5 3 -4 .

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4.1 Augustus Earle, Cabbage Tree Forest, Illawarra, New South Wales, 1827, watercolour, 25.7 x 17.1 cm

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4.2 John White Abbott, Trees in Peamore Park, Exeter, 1799, watercolour with pen and black ink, 43.1 x 33.3 cm

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4.3

Sophia Campbell, Sydney in All Its Glory, c. 1817, watercolour, 23 x 57 cm

4.4 J. M. W. Turner, Plymouth with Mount Batten, c. 1814, watercolour, 14.6 x 23.5 cm

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4.5 Sophia Campbell, Newcastle and its Surroundings, c. 1818, watercolour, 22.8 x 57.8 cm

4.6 Peter De Wint, Yorkshire Fells, c. 1812, pencil and watercolour, 36.3 x 56.6 cm

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4.7 John Sell Cotman, A Ploughed Field, c. 1808, pencil and watercolour, 22.8 x 35 cm

4.8 Sophia Campbell (attrib.) View, Possibly of the Hawkesbury River, Showing Aborigines in the Foreground, later 1810s, watercolour, 39.4 x 59 cm

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4.9 Anon., View of the Hunter River , before 1809, watercolour, 24.4 x 41.6 cm

4.10

George William Evans, A View of Sydney, N. S. Wales, on Entering the Heads - the Distance Seven Miles , c. 1809, watercolour, 22.5 x 36 cm

5

'A new people and a limited society': British art and the Spanish spectator Sarah Symmons

With its overriding taste for commerce and positive enjoyment of everything to do with trade, the national character of the English has not encouraged the flowering of artistic genius, as in other countries. The English get their painting, architecture and music from the foreigner.1

This statement appeared in an article about Westminster Abbey published in 1840 in Semanario Pintoresco (Figure 5.1), the major illustrated periodical in Madrid devoted to art and literature. It expresses what had become a popular view. The economic prosperity of Britain was regarded with envy by Spaniards whose history during the Industrial Revolution was riven by wars and civil disorder, but they drew reassurance from the belief that artistic originality was less likely to flourish in a society devoted to commerce. However, the vision of the British as a mercantile nation, concerned exclusively with trade, manufacturing industry and making money was not one held by Spanish fine artists. In the late eighteenth century when enlightened Spanish visitors came to London, influences from Britain entered artistic life in Madrid. In the early nineteenth century, especially between 1823 and 1833, when Britain became a haven for Spanish political exiles, these influences increased considerably in Spain. For much of the century Spanish artistic movements drew on the enthusiasm and support of British patrons, writers, designers and collectors, while painters as diverse as David Wilkie, J. F. Lewis, David Roberts, Rossetti, Whistler and Sargent played important roles and exercised considerable influences on the development of native Spanish styles.2

Enlightened anglophiles

The first Spanish traveller to publish detailed impressions of the British artistic scene was Antonio Ponz, a distinguished painter and Secretary to the

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Royal Academy in Madrid. As the author of one of the most important Spanish Enlightenment publications on art and architecture, A Journey Through Spain (Viaje de Espafia), published in Madrid in eighteen volumes, from 1772 to 1794, he was particularly well placed to evaluate the burgeoning British School. Ponz's compendious analysis of Spanish monuments and paintings was written in the form of an epistolary travel journal and stylistically owes much to British and French epistolary literature as well as earlier travel writing. A Journey Outside Spain (Viaje fuera de Espana), in two volumes, was published in Madrid in 1785. Here Ponz recorded his visits to France, Britain and the Low Countries keeping a sharp eye out for artistic excellence, but always preserving the chatty, immediate quality of the letter to 'amigo mio' (my friend),3 analysing painting, sculpture and architecture from the viewpoint of a man of taste and feeling. The reader shares in a unique elaboration of works of art as if they were part of a personal history. Ponz's 'Journey' embodied an open-minded respect for individual freedom and artistic originality, and the prosperity, ease and political freedom of a country like England appeared to the writer as particularly striking. While the British might squander their wealth in waging violent wars, they also displayed opulence in their fine architecture and in the support given to contemporary painters and engravers. Enlightened Spaniards considered the British as possessing a degree of artistic freedom, which was denied to artists in Spain. On his journey from Dover to London Ponz stopped at Dover, Canterbury, Rochester and Godaiming, and, arriving in London, he visited Greenwich, Westminster, the British Museum and a number of private collections and public exhibitions. Impressed by the way the Royal Academy in London managed its affairs, Ponz felt that the amount of money raised by entry charges to the annual exhibitions not only supported the fine arts but also gave the institution independence from political influence, unlike the Spanish Academy which was under the control of the Spanish monarchy. The sense of freedom was not only enshrined in the political independence of the Royal Academy but also in the originality of certain artists. Ponz regarded Benjamin West as the leading painter of the day because of his famous work The Death of General Wolfe in which the painter had combined ancient and modem imagery. West's controversial history painting showed the artist abandoning classical draperies and dressing his protagonists in period costumes, a precedent that changed the practice of historical painting and one which may have corresponded to Spanish aesthetic preoccupations with nationalism and patriotism. Ponz was interested in British paintings of heroes and, having recorded his impressions of the Gothic style of Westminster Abbey, he also admired the tombs of great men, especially Roubiliac's Monument to Sir Isaac Newton, although his general opinion of British sculpture was low. Engraving, too, he saw as a particularly distinctive British

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achievement. Fascinated by the British libertarian spirit, he found England without press censorship, and the freedom among popular artists to air political views appeared audacious. He wrote: 'The renowned English liberty is most used, in my opinion, to write satires, and each day to put ridiculing prints, which mock the Ministry, on the doors of book shops and other stores'.4Despite his feelings about British anti-Catholic sentiments, and shock at the brutality of some caricatures, Ponz was sufficiently enthusiastic about the originality of British art to inspire more Spaniards to undertake the British journey. The Marques de Urena, who had studied architecture, music and painting, and was sufficiently gifted to be academico de honor at the Royal Academy in Madrid, visited England in 1787-88. For him, as for Ponz, British Gothic buildings, as well as contemporary architecture and the Royal Academy exhibitions, formed major attractions. In 1788 he visited the Royal Academy and noticed Reynolds's The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents commissioned by Catherine the Great, commenting on the lively handling of the paint. In the studios of George Romney and Benjamin West he admired the former's portraits and singled out West's The Death of General Wolfe.5 The skills of printmakers had made British artists well known throughout Europe, and the commemoration of heroes and new methods of engraving formed the most positive impressions among Spanish perceptions of the British School. If the British were more concerned with commerce than art, this tendency nevertheless helped the arts to flourish, and the commercial qualities of some English art appeared especially impressive to Spanish visitors. The poet and playwright, Leandro Fernandez de Moratm, whilst queueing outside Somerset House in 1793 for an entry ticket to the 25th Royal Academy Exhibition, was to reflect:' In this country you see nothing without paying for it.' He described how most of the exhibits consisted of portraits; the rest comprised a range of landscapes, views, ruins, seascapes, plans of buildings and miniatures. There were also plaster models for pieces of sculpture. Apart from a handful of works by front rank artists, most of the pictures, he felt, would scarcely grace a study or a smoking room. Moratm quotes the familiar refrain: in England artists were at the mercy of the market, too much lip service was paid to commercial concerns, and only the prints made by British artists were exceptional: 'The arts in England depend so much on trade and commerce, that what is not made to be sold by the dozen is not made well; it is for this reason that their prints are so excellent, and their statues so ridiculous.'7 This same high opinion of London print makers appeared when Moratm visited a specifically commercial venue, Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. 'In Pall Mall you can see the famous collection of printed copies of paintings', he

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wrote.8 These prints could be bought cheaply and produced very easily and quickly thanks to a new technique. The original paintings Boydell thought worthy of merit were hung with the prints. The exhibition was open to the public at a small entry fee, and the enviable freedom of this business enterprise was commended by Moratm who also praised the originality of the artists. As a leading Spanish playwright, Moratm found the British tradition of sublime, literary and theatrical compositions, notably those by Fuseli and Reynolds, more to his taste than the history paintings, landscapes and portraits he saw at the Royal Academy. All these distinguished Spanish visitors were recording their impressions at a time when many areas of Spanish cultural and artistic life came under British influence. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, leader of the Spanish Enlightenment, poet and Carlos IV's Minister of Justice, never visited England but profoundly admired the British sense of liberty and fair play. He formed a close friendship with Lord Holland and owned a collection of English books on art and literature. Juan Cean Bermudez, who had studied painting but functioned primarily as an archivist and civil servant, was also an academico de honor at the Madrid Royal Academy, and the first major Spanish art historian. He too admired British art and architecture and paid tribute to William Chambers in one of his own works.9 Sharing a common involvement in the fine arts that came from their membership of the Royal Academy in Madrid, these Spanish writers were concerned with the running of this institution and, during the many debates on the best methods to teach Spanish students and improve the quality of Spanish art, foreign systems were analysed.10 While France had provided the original model for training at the Academy, Jovellanos and Cean Bermudez became important figures in the infiltration of British art and ideas into Spain during the later eighteenth century. For both men the study of English art and aesthetics came from their shared interest in the reappraisal of Spain's Gothic architecture, and this coincided with the nationalistic spirit as Spain looked back to its artistic past. The attention that Jovellanos and Cean Bermudez paid to Gothic architecture was stimulated by their familiarity with British authors. Jovellanos, for example, acknowledged the influence of William Robertson, whose History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V became well known in Spain.11 Unlike Britain, Spain never experienced a full-blown Gothic Revival, but Spanish writers interested in medieval history modelled their approach on that of the British, and much early Spanish Romanticism took inspiration from England as well as from France and Germany. A Spanish passion for Ossian dates from the late 1780s, and the examination of medieval architecture, which began in the reign of Carlos III, was a growing obsession among writers by the time Carlos IV had ascended the Spanish throne in 1788.

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English medieval monuments had been admired by Ponz as creating a centre for representing the greatness of the English past, and the British Gothic revival consequently began to interest Spaniards drawn to their own medieval heritage. The anonymous writer in Semanario Pintoresco of 1840 reveals how interest in the British Gothic was still current in Spain, despite the vulgar opinion of the British as an inartistic nation, although he was quick to add that Westminster Abbey could be regarded as an oasis of Catholic architecture, deriving from French styles, amidst the wilderness of Anglicanism.12 And when the painter Mariano Fortuny came to Britain in 1874, his desire to visit artist acquaintances like John Everett Millais, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Lord Leighton was equalled only by his enthusiasm for Westminster Abbey. 'He had a true passion for the fifteenth century', wrote his biographer, adding that Fortuny had found much inspiration for his medieval historical painting in England, and planned to learn the language and make future visits.13 Reassessment of the past seems to have become fundamental to Spanish appraisal of British art, perhaps because the two countries underwent similar cultural and social changes in the late eighteenth century when both enjoyed a nationalistic revival in which the fine arts played an important part. In 1781 Jovellanos gave a discourse at the Royal Academy in Madrid in which he extolled the architecture of Majorca during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He also praised his nation's great masters in a manner not unlike the praise of Gainsborough given by Reynolds in his Fourteenth Discourse of 1788. Jovellanos argued that Spain could boast of a rich artistic heritage and, during the Golden Age, portrayals of the old and the sick, suffering and transfiguration had created the true glories of the Spanish School.14 Such Enlightened Spaniards may have seen Britain as a nation similar to theirs, one which had flourished in previous centuries and had now engaged successfully in coming to terms with the modem world. Spanish visitors to England might well have perceived the British artistic traditions from the past as residing exclusively in the beauties of Gothic architecture, but during the Enlightenment both countries shared a similar desire to establish a strong contemporary school. While England fostered the talents of Hogarth, Gainsborough and Reynolds, and founded the artists' first Royal Academy in 1768, Spain opened the first Spanish Royal Academy in Madrid during the reign of Fernando VI in 1752 and could subsequently point to the supremacy of Paret y Alcazar, Francisco Bayeu, Maella and Goya as the leading masters of a new national style of painting. Parallel with the enthusiasms of Ponz, the Marques de Urena and Moratin, a new appetite for British contemporary applied art sprang up in Spain. Antonio Ponz had been particularly impressed by the decorations at Syon House and there is some evidence that British interior designs as well as

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fashions were popular.15 British fashions were also much in demand in Madrid, and the supremacy of British design was sought after by the wealthy and fashionable. Richard Cumberland recalled that when his wife and daughter had an audience with the Spanish queen, Maria Luisa, they noted that the queen's jewels were 'of English setting'. Furthermore, when the queen asked the ladies for the pattern of their riding habits, 'they were copied from the uniform of our guards, and, when apprised of this, [the queen] replied, that it was a further motive with her for adopting the fashion'.16

Goya and British art

Three short wars between England and Spain in the second half of the eighteenth century may have excited the local populations and limited travel, but throughout the 1780s and 1790s letters written by the major artist of the day, Francisco de Goya, reflect a widespread knowledge of English artefacts, designs and images in the Spanish capital. Goya bought English boots, English cutlery and even a gig that was 'made in England'. His extraordinary knowledge of fashion was to focus on English dress styles as well as the more popular French designs. His son was taught to speak English and his wife, an accomplished dressmaker, made a gown 'a la inglesa'.17 Many British artists became known in Spain, from Reynolds, Romney, Cosway and Benjamin West, to James Barry, Fuseli, Richard Wilson and Gainsborough. Ponz, the Marques de Urena and Moratin had all been struck by the prolific quantity and original effects of British portraiture and this too was admired in Spain through the medium of engraving. At least two of the best portraits by Goya from the 1790s reflect this influence. The portrait of the Duke of Alba of 1794 shows a male portrait type which had become very fashionable in England, that of the educated man mainly dressed for intellectual pursuits, wearing a British style cutaway coat. The duke is posed in an interior standing beside an English square piano scanning a book of Haydn songs. The statuesque society woman, dressed in white and posed in a rural setting was another British neoclassical convention explored by Goya, a convention employed by Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney. Goya's patron in Cadiz, Sebastian Martinez, had a collection of coloured prints after British portrait artists of the eighteenth century, and Goya had stayed with Martinez during the second phase of his dangerous illness of 1793 when he would probably have examined the collection. The first full-length of a society woman Goya painted after his illness, Tadea Arias, dated 1793, has been found to derive from a portrait by Richard Cosway,18and the British heroine in painting and literature may have played a part in the new portrayals of women in Goya's art. Two of the artist's most prominent

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female patrons, the Duchess of Osuna and Duchess of Alba were among the earliest subscribers to the first Spanish translation of Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, as was the artist himself.19 The most popular British artist to be studied extensively in Spain during the later eighteenth century was arguably William Hogarth, whose prints circulated widely on the Continent and whose subjects appealed strongly to Spanish artists searching for new styles. In the 1770s and 1780s there was a great diversity of subject matter among painters in Spain. One particularly popular type of imagery was the depiction of contemporary life. Before Goya began to examine the vicissitudes of life in Madrid in his satirical prints Los Cayrichos, Luis Paret y Alcazar studied Hogarth's compositional patterns and vocabulary of figures in one of his early court paintings.20When he listed the essential volumes of his library he included a copy of Hogarth's complete works, possibly similar to the complete edition owned by Goya's friend Sebastian Martinez.21 By the 1780s and 1790s Hogarth's influence in Spain was extensive and even Goya may have learned something from Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty.22 On 22 September 1781, Goya wrote to the Conde de Floridablanca, describing how he was going to approach the construction of a demanding religious composition which the King had commissioned for the new church of San Francisco El Grande in Madrid. Seven altarpieces were planned by different court artists, and Goya chose a scene from the life of San Bernardino of Siena. It is a subject that offers sufficient scope to enrich the composition, in spite of the limits of the narrow proportions of the painting, for Your Excellency's enlightened understanding will appreciate th at... a pyramidal construction is demanded and a serpentine arrangement of the foreground and background for the best decorative effect.23

Addressing the minister as an enlightened man, Goya's concentration on the contrast between the pyramidal and serpentine lines suggests that he had already seen a copy of the English book and would at least have understood the gist of the argument through Hogarth's use of diagrams. Numerous Spanish artists of the day were to praise Hogarth, and the inventory of the library in the Royal Academy of 1828 included a copy of the Analysis.24 In 1824 Juan Cean Bermudez, who had become a particularly close supporter and friend of Goya, was to write a short survey of modern British artists and their particular qualities in volume v of his unpublished Historia de la Pintura.25 His analyses are informative and give insight into the effect of the British School on an educated Spanish spectator. British artists were concerned particularly with the imagination and with literary illustration, and in this context his hero was Fuseli, whose designs he had seen in engravings, and whose grandeur of pictorial conception in his compositions

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after Milton's Paradise Lost and in ' las extravagancias de Shakespeare en sus comedias' struck Cean Bermudez as particular manifestations of great genius.26 Through the medium of the excellent British print Cean Bermudez also praised Gainsborough, Barry, Hogarth and Reynolds. For him the charm of the British School lay in its adherence to nature and respect for antiquity, but he also found a freedom in British art and an exploration of drama and passion. And ultimately it was Hogarth whom Cean Bermudez was to commend because of his method of visual narrative in works such as A Harlot's Progress, and the theories of expression and composition adumbrated in The Analysis of Beauty.27 In January 1788 the Diario de Madrid advertised works by English engravers Sharp, Bartolozzi and Green 'y otros' (and others).28And this recognition of the importance of British printmakers was given full rein by one of the foremost members of the Madrid Royal Academy, Joseph Vargas Ponce. In his 1790 address to the Royal Academy on engraving he singled out Boydell, Woollett and Bartolozzi. From their copies of great British paintings and great moments from national history done with so much skill he detected something philosophical which would touch the hearts of such a sturdy people. And, like Antonio Ponz, he particularly praised Benjamin West's Death of General Wolfe as a major example: 'Before your so happily depicted death, oh Wolf [sic], how many soldiers would not exclaim: and when will I be able to give such a victory to my mother country?'29 Admiration for the way the British commemorated their heroes had impressed Antonio Ponz when he observed the wealth and grandeur of country estates like Blenheim, admired Roubiliac's monument to Sir Isaac Newton as well as West's painting and marvelled at the British School of architecture. In a similar way, British prosperity, fuelled by the rapid changes of industrialization, became another phenomenon which was to inspire Spanish tourists and professional artists. By the 1780s and 1790s, when the traffic in British artefacts and designs from England to Spain grew especially popular, Josiah Wedgwood became the envy of foreign porcelain designers and London the greatest European centre for the production of prints in Europe. During 1784-1803, when the porcelain factory of the Buen Retiro in Madrid was under the direction of Carlos and Felipe Gricci, international styles particularly influenced designs, and knowledge of Wedgwood bas reliefs was extensive. A number of imitations of Wedgwood were made by Sebastian Bautista, a sculptor and artisan, active around the mid-i78os.3° In 1793 one of the most promising students at the Royal Academy m Madrid, Bartolome Sureda, came to England and spent some three years studying printmaking and porcelain production. Like other Spanish visitors, he was impressed by the speed and growth of the manufacturing industry in

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England and he almost certainly visited Wedgwood's porcelain factory Etruria, as did the Marques de Urena. Sureda became general director of the Buen Retiro porcelain factory in 1804, and in 1821 he wrote a eulogy to Wedgwood's originality and to the way in which the British potter had transformed porcelain design. His visit to England was evidently a revelation and he kept extensive notes and made large numbers of drawings.31 His talents were, however, multi-faceted, and the new techniques of engraving, which he also learned in London, were to make an even more significant contribution to the direction of Spanish art and design than his knowledge of pottery. As both the Marques de Urena and Moratln recorded, it was the English who had developed and invented new methods and subjects for printmakers. The popularity of mezzotint and aquatint was particularly widespread because the printed images could simulate the light and textures of drawings and paintings. The development of aquatint in England reached its culmination in the 1780s. Sureda, like Moratin, would have visited Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and he sent one of his own earliest attempts at aquatint back to Madrid.32 Boydell was one of the biggest print exporters in Europe and he had established a business arrangement with Antonio de Sancha in Madrid, the printer who almost certainly produced Goya's earliest engraving, the series of etchings after the paintings of Velazquez.33 On his return to Spain in 1797 Sureda is thought to have taught the new techniques of printing that he had learned in England to Goya, who was at that time engaged in preparing Los Caprichos. These prints reveal extensive influences from Hogarth, particularly in the way that at least six plates by the Spanish artist are run together in the form of a novel or story.34 The theme of doomed marriage from Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode may also have attracted Goya, demonstrated particularly in his Los Caprichos plate 75 where a man and woman are tied together and begging to be released (Figures 5.2 and 5.3). The evolution of Goya's famous prints owes a good deal in general to English source material in point of imagery, subjects and the technique of combining aquatint, etching and drypoint on a single plate, and Gillray, Rowlandson and even Bunbury supplied the inspiration for individual prints.35Above all, however, the British freedom to caricature political leaders, their loathing of cant, hypocrisy and the bad behaviour of monarchs and their families as well as the Church, formed the wellspring of Goya's satire. This similarity is so striking that the Spanish artist's satirical vision has even been compared to British writers such as Swift and Walpole.36 Goya's obsession had turned to the study of British art at a time when he was looking for a new freedom of expression, but Hogarth and the British School of caricaturists did not provide the sole sources of inspiring British images for the Aragonese painter. The effect of British neoclassicism during

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the 1780s and 1790s and which had wrought changes on Goya's portrait art also led him to explore compositions by the British sculptor, John Flaxman, notably the outline illustrations to Dante, produced in Rome in 1792-93. Goya's enthusiasm for the spare, economical figures designed by Flaxman appears in precisely drawn copies after five Flaxman plates which were kept by the Spanish artist who returned to this source material years later when he was working on his second great set of prints Los Desastres de la Guerra, made during the War of Independence (1808-1814) (Figure 54).37 Having neglected engraving for some time after the comparative commercial disappointment of Los Caprichos Goya was inspired to turn back to etching during the war when he was isolated within his Madrid studio. While he was devising these images of the war, evidence suggests that Goya conducted a major piece of research into neoclassical source material, looking back at his own studies of antique sculpture in his early Roman sketchbook, and studying the copies after Flaxman which he had made during the previous decade.38 The commercialism of the British, the way they had used the Industrial Revolution to stimulate interest in art and industry, had created a means of reaching the widest possible audience, and this became particularly important during the military alliance of Britain and Spain against the French. The wide circulation of Hogarth's compositions, Flaxman's outlines and the pre-eminence of British printmakers had made British art particularly accessible. Enlightened Spanish visitors to England in the late eighteenth century had been struck by the British imagery of heroism, and while the pictorial commemoration of West's The Death of General Wolfe might no longer be considered appropriate to artists at work during and after the War of Independence, a new style of painted and printed commemoration entered Spanish iconography which drew on both French and English precedents. The influence of Flaxman in Spain became important at the time of the War of Independence and particularly in the iconography of commemorating casualties. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century the inspiration of Flaxman's outline illustrations appears in three major works to depict this particular theme by three different Spanish artists: Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra, Jose Aparicio's Famine in Madrid, 1818, a dramatic portrayal of a contemporary disaster, and one also treated by Goya in his Desastres, and Jose de Madrazo's The Death of Viriathus, Leader of the Lusitanians, a solemn and majestic Neoclassical history painting of a subject from Spanish antique history.39 As a pupil of David and a friend of Ingres, Madrazo would long have known about Flaxman's work. The Death of Viriathus was a heroic painting which received great attention when it was exhibited in Madrid in 1818, and

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the inventory of Madrazo's private collection reveals that he owned several works by the British sculptor.40 The imagery and techniques of Flaxman's illustrations revealed in compositions conveying the horrors of the guerrilla war, the famine in Madrid and need to commemorate heroes continued the convention of invoking British imagery in the context of heroism and reconciliation, suitable to a new age of Spanish absolutism.

The War of Independence and the British in Spain

During the campaign on the Iberian Peninsular, the Duke of Wellington brought his own team of British artists over to Spain. While the immediate effect of the war was to generate prints and sketches of battles, as well as portraits of the officers of both sides, there were more lasting influences.41 Wellington and his war artists seem to have contributed to a change in Spanish portraiture, and prints of war subjects and even, eventually, of Spanish landscape by British draughtsmen, also affected the trajectory of Spanish art for the next two decades.42 On 28 August 1812 Goya wrote how the duke was keen to have his equestrian portrait exhibited in the Royal Academy in Madrid. The half-length which Goya also produced at this time (Figure 5.5) reveals a change in style with an animated turn of the head, a tight silhouette, dramatic lighting and sense of presence which the Spanish artist may have derived from prints after British portraiture in the style of Sir Thomas Lawrence. The influence of Lawrence lasted in Spain throughout the 1820s and 1830s particularly in the work of the foremost Spanish portraitist of the nineteenth century, Federico de Madrazo.43 Not only portraits but also the subject of the War of Independence itself appear in the iconography of Spanish history painting throughout the nineteenth century. This too forged artistic and literary links between the two countries. Lord Byron's visit to Portugal and Spain in 1809 was his first experience of foreign travel and inspired the vivid poetry of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. After reading the Spanish Journal of William Beckford, Byron was at first attracted to places where Beckford had stayed,44 but the War of Independence exercised a profounder influence, replacing the Beckford experience with something more immediate. After leaving Portugal, Byron followed in the wake of the British army. He reached Seville on 25 July 1809 and wrote that he preferred 'the Gothic cathedral of Seville to St Paul's, St Sophia's or any religious building I have ever seen'.45 His enthusiasm for Spanish Gothic architecture was paralleled by his interest in the landscape, the heroism of Spanish guerrilla fighters, and the discovery of an ancient land which he entered in the spirit of a pilgrim. Byron's poetry was to become popular in Spain, although Childe Harold was not translated into Spanish until

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1829. However, Byronic-styled imagery appeared in Spain in pictorial form a few years earlier. The Scottish painter David Wilkie arrived in Madrid in 1827. Fernando VII's painters, Vicente Lopez and Jose de Madrazo, were among the major figures of the day who welcomed him, and the Scottish painter would have been the first British artist to view the new displays at the Prado. From October of that year to April of 1828 Wilkie was preoccupied in painting a number of Spanish subjects, three of them episodes from the War of Independence concerning the heroism of Spanish guerrilla fighters. Madrazo was sympathetic to Wilkie's interest in modem Spanish subjects and the Scottish painter became the first British artist to exhibit his work in Madrid. On 25 February 1828 Wilkie wrote to his brother from Madrid: The subjects are Spanish: illustrations of the war of independence. The first I began and completed in the space of ten w eeks,... Here it is seen and judged by an entirely new people, and by a limited society; but natives of different ranks seem to enjoy it, and I am still more flattered by what artists and judges of art appear to discover in it of principles of the old masters. Don Lopez, King's painter has seen it in all its stages, and says many kind things about it.46

The doggedness of the native inhabitants as they withstood the horrors of the war and the heroism of guerrilla fighters permeate Byron's Childe Harold, and changed the conventions of depicting European heroes and heroines.47 Byron had immortalized in canto I a famous episode in the Spanish guerrilla war which took place in Goya's home town of Saragossa, where Agustina de Aragon manned the battery to repel the French after her lover had been killed. This story inspired Wilkie's The Defence of Saragossa (Figure 5.6), exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1829 and which included a portrait of General Palafox. The same subject had been treated by Goya in his Desastres, although it is not likely that the Scottish artist could have known Goya's print. Wilkie's portrait of the Maid of Saragossa owes much to Murillo in features and colouring, while his depictions of Spanish fighters in The Guerrilla's Departure (also exhibited at the RA in 1829; now in the Royal Collection) creates a new iconography of Spanish heroism which evolved probably under the influence of Byron. The narrative and expressive qualities of British painting were features that Cean Bermudez had admired and these same qualities may have endeared Wilkie's depictions of their recent history to Spanish spectators. A number of artists visited Wilkie's studio in Madrid, and the inspiration of Wilkie's solid figures of the guerrilla warriors crops up in images from the late 1820s, such as Pharamond Blanchard's Los Contrabandistas of 1829.48 Goupil, the French dealer who specialized in nineteenth-century Spanish painters, printed and published prints after Blanchard in Paris, but this obscure French follower of Wilkie nevertheless spent much of his career working in Spain for English

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patrons. Other artists too were to find English influences useful in building up a market and patrons with British-influenced imagery. Cecilio Pizarro's paintings of an English-styled dandy among the medieval ruins of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo were completed in 1846 and he was to sell these and similar works to the British ambassador, Lord Howden.

Picturesque and Sublime visions of Spain

'Oh, lovely Spain! Renown'd, romantic land!' Byron wrote in canto I of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The mythologizing of Spain as the Romantic land is regarded by modem Spanish historians as one fabricated specifically in Britain,49 and the passion for Spanish architecture, history and art was to be fuelled by the British as their love affair with this one European country gained strength in the nineteenth century. Finally, it was the British who persuaded the Spanish to see their own landscape as both picturesque and sublime. While the British considered the Alhambra in Granada as sublime and Romantic, they were to be far more decisive in their influence on the native school of landscape. Among Wellington's draughtsmen were many who sketched and printed the landscape of Spain, and Edward Hawke Lockyer who came to Madrid in 1813 on a diplomatic mission created a memorable and highly dramatic rendering of Spanish landscapes in his Views in Spain, published in London in 1824.50Such British portrayals of Spanish scenery created a far-reaching effect. During the eighteenth century Spain had produced few, if any, landscape painters of note, but in the nineteenth century the subject was to become one of the great glories of the Spanish School. The most outstanding landscapist of the nineteenth century, Jenaro Perez de Villaamil, began his career from the inspiration of the British topographical painter, David Roberts. Again, the source of the inspiration sprang from commercial concerns as well as from the originality of the Scotsman's vision. Roberts arrived in Spain in 1832, on the recommendation of Wilkie, to make Spanish landscape and architecture his speciality. Intent on recording as many views as possible in his sketchbooks prior to producing lithographs for the popular market, Roberts quoted Byron the moment he reached Cadiz: 'the city of the dark blue sea'.51 As an artist he was to become arguably more influential in Spain than Hogarth, Flaxman, Wilkie or the British writers on the Gothic. Encouraged by Wilkie to try his hand at the comparatively neglected sublime qualities of Spanish towns and countryside, Roberts built up an extensive iconography of Spanish views which influenced Spanish painting for almost half a century. Having met Roberts in Seville, the young Perez Villaamil was to be so inspired by Roberts's views of Toledo, Seville,

1 14 ENGLISH ACCENTS Granada and Madrid (Figure 5.7) that he produced a series of lithographs, Espana arttstica y monumental, in which the nostalgia for medieval Spain is particularly acute. Published in three volumes in Paris between 1842 and 1844 the work sold 1 200 sets in only two months. In 1846 the Quarterly Review reported that Villaamil 'one of the best modem painters in Madrid [is] considered an imitator, at a respectful distance, of David Roberts'.52 Nevertheless, while Villaamil had his scenes compared to Roberts and his colouring compared to Turner,53 by the middle of the nineteenth century, as British art emerged as a major European school, such comparisons were regarded as praise. From Byron's famous lines in Childe Harold, to the romanticizing of landscape by British landscapists, the first guide book to Spain by Richard Ford (which encouraged hardy British visitors to brave the dangers and discomforts of the Spanish Romantic tour), to the designers and architects who explored and published prints after the Alhambra in Granada, and introduced British designers of pubs, theatres and billiard halls to the exotic decoration of 'Alhambrism', Spain has retained from the early nineteenth century an attraction for British tourists which has flourished to the present day. But there is a reverse side of this trend. The Spanish admiration for British commercial art, for the great printmakers and designers, as well as entrepreneurs like Boy dell and Wedgwood in the late eighteenth century, was to change in the nineteenth. This change was signalled even before the War of Independence when the poet Manuel Quintana attacked the British gusto for acquiring foreign art: The swimming prows of British ships shatter the breast of the angry sea, conquering wind and waves. And the world rewards their pains by paying art in tribute to the Thames. But this alone will not light the sacred torch of art in England ... For art has fled her fog-bound shores in fright, vowing never to return.54

The British are seen as undermining their native school by their zest for investing in foreign pictures, just as the British writers like Hazlitt and Thackeray were to condemn the commercialization of art as a betrayal of the ideals of the British Royal Academy. Nevertheless, while the Spanish journalist of 1840, quoted at the start of this essay, might also censure Britain for being commercial rather than artistic, and regard British libertarianism as undermining the serious nature of art, many more Spaniards intent on reforming their own artistic scene found rich pickings amidst British art movements, from the picturesque landscape to the Pre-Raphaelites. The commercialization of the Spanish landscape and history in pictures, which arguably sprang from British picturesque viewmakers, and was immortalized by Roberts, continued to inspire artists throughout the 1840s. When the Royal Academy in Madrid bestowed the honorary appointment of academico correspondiente on the Director of the National Gallery in London, Henry

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Boxall, on the archaeologist and diplomat Henry Layard and on William Stirling Maxwell in February 1870,55 they were anxious to pay tribute to the British as an artistic nation and to record their respect for an art which, like their own, had preserved its independence and contributed towards the promotion of the Spanish artistic heritage.

Author's acknowledgement

In collecting the research for this essay I would like to acknowledge the help of Professor Nigel Glendinning, Dr Jesusa Vega and Nicholas Tromans. The Research Endowment Fund of the University of Essex provided financial assistance with reproduction costs.

Notes 1.

Semanario Pintoresco Espahol 2nd edn, vol. II, p. 58.

2.

Carlos Reyero and Mireia Freixa, Pintura y Escultura en Espana, 18 0 0 -19 10 (Madrid: Manuales Arte Catedra, M adrid, 1995), give an extensive survey of British artistic influence on Spanish nineteenthcentury painters.

3.

Antonio Ponz, Viaje de Espana seguido de los dos tomos del Viajefuera de Espana (Madrid: Aguilar, 1947). He w as writing to his friend the Conde de Campomanes.

4.

Ponz, 1947, p. 1828.

5.

El Viaje Europeo del Marques de Urena (1787-1788), commentary and notes by Maria Peman Medina, Serie Fuentes Documentales no. 1 1 (Cadiz: Unicaja, Obra Socio-Cultural, 1992), pp. 3 1 1 - 1 3 .

6.

Pedro Ortiz Arm engol, El Ano que vivid Moratin en Inglaterra, 179 2-179 3 (Madrid: Editorial Castalia,

7.

Quoted and translated b y Reva Wolf in Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, 17 30 -18 30 (Boston: D avid R. Godine, Publisher, in association with Boston College M useum of Art, 1991), p. 14.

1985), P-

336 .

8.

Ortiz Arm engol, 1985, p. 147.

9.

J. Cean Bermudez, Descripcion artistica de la Catedral de Sevilla (Sevilla, 1804), p. 18.

10.

From the early eighteenth century w hen the Bourbon monarchs employed French artists at their court, to the mid nineteenth century w hen the two nations were linked through the marriage of Eugenie de Montijo and Napoleon III, France rather than England appeared as the foreign arbiter of Spanish culture, and it w as common for Spaniards to regard the English as similarly dependent on foreign styles.

11.

Jovellanos expressed profound admiration for Robertson in Elogio de Don Ventura Rodriguez, and in his Memoria del Castillo de Bellver.

12.

Semanario Pintoresco, ibid, (see n. 1).

13 .

Baron Davillier, Life of Fortuny, with his Correspondence from the French of Baron Davillier. With Notes and Reminiscences by A Friend (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1885), pp. 16 2-5 .

14.

Oracion pronunciada en la junta publica, que celebro La Real Academia de San Fernando, El Dia 14 de Julio de 17 8 1, para la Distribucion de premios Generales de pintura, escultura y arquitectura por el Sehor Don Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (Madrid, 178 1), p. 30.

15.

The new Alba palace of Buenavista in M adrid used the kind of Etruscan decoration which Robert A d am had made popular in London. Sarah Symmons, 'L a mujer vestida de bianco: el primer retrato de la duquesa de Alba pintado por G oya', GOYA (Madrid: Am igos del Museo del Prado, 2002), p. 36.

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16.

Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, written by him self ... vol ii, (London: Allen and co., 1807).

17.

Letter from G oya to Zapater written probably in December 178 2, Mercedes Agueda and Xavier de Salas, Francisco de Goya. Cartas a Martin Zapater (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1982), pp. 89-90, no. 36.

18.

Maria Peman Medina, 'Estam pas y Libros que vio G oya en casa de Sebastian M artinez/ Archivo

Espahol de Arte, 2 5 9 -6 0 ,19 9 2 , figs 1 -2 , p. 309.

19.

Clara [sic] Harlow by Samuel Richardson, first translated into Spanish b y Don Joseph Marcos Gutierrez, 179 4-96 , taken from the French translation b y Tourneur of the English novel Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady, first published in London, 174 7-4 8 .

20.

The Royal Parades of 1770, a painting of a gathering of royalty and ordinary people at an equestrian festival held in Aranjuez, part of w hich is taken from the design of Hogarth's March of the Guards to Finchley. Sarah Symmons, 'E l Galgo y la Liebre: Francisco de G oya y Luis Paret', Isabel Garcia de la Rasilla and Francisco Calvo Serraller, eds, Goya, Nuevas Visiones (Madrid: Am igos del Museo del Prado, 1987), pp. 39 6 -4 12.

21.

Enrique Pardo Canalis, 'Libros y cuadros de Paret en 178 7 ', Revista de ideas esteticas, 23, 1965, pp. 1 0 7 -1 1 2 .

22.

G oya too probably used a print b y Hogarth, no. 3 , ' The Countess's Levee', from Marriage a la Mode, in the development of his first major group portrait in 178 3, that of the Infante Don Luis and his family, w hich suggests that for Goya, as well as for Paret, the British artist offered compositional solutions w hich were up to date and intriguing.

23.

G oya to Floridablanca, Diplomaterio de Francisco de Goya, edited b y Angel Canellas Lopez (Zaragoza: Libreria General, 1981), p. 238, no. 52. Translation b y Philip Troutman.

24.

L89V Hogarth (Guiglielmo), L'Analysi della bellezza, plate 2 (Livorno, 1761) Royal A cadem y Library Documento 3/72, Indice de las Obras que posee La Biblioteca de la Real Academia de Nobles Artes de San Fernando, 1828; The library catalogue also included i.yv Robert Adam , Ruins of of the palace of Diocletian ..., London 1764; Addison, Dialogues (in French); F 49V Views Picturesque of England and Ireland b y W. Walt and Tho. Malton, 1779-86; and f.72 John Flaxman, Hesiod.

25.

J. Cean Bermudez, Historia de la Pintura, Ms. Archivo de la Real Academ ia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, vol 5 , Madrid 3 1 de Agosto de 1824, Chapter 39.

26.

ibid., f. 326

27.

ibid., f. 3 2 1.

28.

No. 20, 20th January 1788, p. 79.

29.

J. Vargas Ponce, Discurso historico sobre el principio y progreso del grabado, leido a la Real Academia de San Fernando ... el 4 de Agosto 1790, p. 58.

30.

Pilar Redondo Salinas, 'Porcelana del Buen Retiro', Madrid hasta 1875 (Madrid: Museo Municipal, 1 979~8o ), pp. 209-210.

31.

Jose Sierra Alvarez and Isabel Tuda Rodriguez, 'Sureda y la renovacion de la ceramica Espanola durante el primer tercio del siglo XIX', Bartolome Sureda (17 6 9 -18 51) Arte e Industria en la Ilustracion (Madrid: Tardia/M useo Municipal, 2000), pp. 8 9 -15 7 .

32.

Jesusa Vega, 'Bartolome Sureda y las tecnicas graficas', Sureda, 2000, pp. 17 6 -7 .

33.

It has been suggested that the first edition of the 300 copies of Los Caprichos m ay have been printed in M adrid at the workshop of Ibarra. Jesusa Vega, 'G o ya's printing techniques', in Sarah Symmons, ed., Printing the Unprintable, The Bicentenary of Goya's Caprichos (Colchester and Valencia: University of Essex and Fundacion Vicente Canada Blanch, 1999), pp. 1 1 - 1 5 .

34.

N igel Glendinning, 'The universal language of G o ya's Caprichos', in Symmons, ed., 1999, p. 23.

35.

Wolf, 19 9 1, p. 6.

36.

Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen, Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 15 4 -5 .

37.

Sarah Symmons, Flaxman and Europe: The Outline Illustrations and Their Influence (N ew York: Garland, 1984), pp. 24 7-65.

38.

A number of classical and religious allusions have been noted in these prints, from copies of drawings after antique sculpture which G oya made in Rome, to references to the Massacre of the Innocents, Lucretia, Christ on the Mount of Olives or The A g o n y in the Garden. Jesusa Vega, 'The dating and interpretation of G o ya's Disasters of W ar', Print Quarterly, 1 1 , (1), March 1994, p. 9.

39.

Aparicio's famine painting shows two central figures adapted from a plate of Flaxm an's illustrations

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to The Inferno, The Death of Ugolino. The dependence on Flaxman b y M adrazo in his history painting w as first noted b y Angel Vegue y Goldoni and F. J. Sanchez Canton, Tres Salas del Museo Romantico (Madrid, 19 2 1), pp. 68-74. 40.

Tnventario de las Estampas pertenecientes a Jose de M adrazo', Los Madrazo: Una Familia de Artistas (Madrid: Museo Municipal/Ayuntam iento de M adrid, 1985), items 53, 8 7 ,1 4 7 , 6 1-6 3 .

4 1.

This issue is well dealt w ith in Museo Municipal, Madrid, La alianza de dos monarquias: Wellington en Espaha (Madrid: Fundacion Hispano-Britanica, 1988).

42.

A list of British officers w ho published prints and memoirs of their time in Spain during the w ar is listed and analysed in J. Alberich, Del Tdmesis al Guadalquivir (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1976).

43.

Federico de M adrazo's portrait of Ingres, 18 3 3 (Hispanic Collection, N ew York) has been cited as based on a portrait b y Lawrence. Elizabeth du Gue Trapier, Catalogue of the Paintings in the collection of the Hispanic Society of America (N ew York, 1932), no. 286, p. 3 1.

44.

Specifically the Moorish Palace at Cintra where Beckford had leased Monserrat, a villa on the heights of Cintra w hich Byron visited. The place formed the inspiration for three of the stanzas of Childe

Harold. 45.

Byron quoted in William A . Borst, Lord Byron's First Pilgrimage (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 26.

46.

Allan Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie With His Journals, Tours and Critical Remarks on Works of Art (London: John Murray, 1843), vol. ii, pp. 506-507.

47.

Ilse Hempel Lipschutz, La Pintura Espahola y los romanticos franceses (Madrid: Taurus, 1988), p. 184.

48.

Recently acquired b y the Museo Romantico, M adrid, inv. no. 34 17.

49.

N otably b y Tonia Raquejo, El Palacio encantado, La Alhambra en el arte britdnico (Madrid: Taurus, 1989).

50.

Maria Dolores Cabra, 'U na Vision Innovada de la Guerra de Independencia', Goya, 1 8 1 - 1 8 2 (July-October 1984), p. 75-9.

5 1.

The w ords are underlined. National Library of Scotland, M S. 3 5 2 1, letter dated 2 March 18 33, f. 56.

52.

Quarterly Review, 77 (1846), p. 500.

53.

Reyero and Freixa, 1995, pp. 128-30 .

54.

Probably written 1805-180 6. Translated b y N igel Glendinning, Goya and His Critics (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 53.

55.

Sarah Symmons, 'The Spanish diary of Enid Layard', Bolettn del Museo del Prado, vol. 18, no. 36,2000, p. 87.

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5.1 Anon., Interior of Westminster Abbey, Semanario Pintoresco, 1840, steel engraving, 14.1 x 18.5 cm

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5.2 William Hogarth, The Breakfast Scene', plate II, Marriage a, la Mode, 2nd state, engraving, 35.5 x 44 cm

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5.3 Francisco de Goya, No Hay Quien Nos Desate? (Can't Anyone Untie Us?), plate 75 from Los Caprichos, first published 1799, etching and aquatint, 21.7 x 15.2 cm

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Francisco de Goya, Que Valorl (What Courage!), plate 7 from Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), c. 1810-12, etching and aquatint, 15.5 x 20.8 cm

121

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5.5 Francisco de Goya, Bust Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, 1812, oil on wood panel, 60 x 51 cm

Sarah Symmons

5.6

David Wilkie, The Defence of Saragossa, 1828, oil on canvas, 94 x 14 1 cm

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5.7 27-3

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David Roberts, Madrid, Palacio Real, 1833-35, pencil and watercolour,

x 33-5 cm

6

A la recherche de l'ecole anglaise: Lawrence, Wilkie and Martin, three British artists in Restoration France Barthelemy Jobert Translated by Christophe and Caroline Valia-Kollery

Delacroix's Portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter, now in the National Gallery in London, is the work by Delacroix in which the influence of contemporary English artists is the most clearly manifest, in this case Thomas Lawrence for the portrait itself and Constable for the landscape in the background, which incidentally was perhaps painted by Delacroix's friend Paul Huet.1 This example is an invitation to revisit the reception of the British School in France during the Restoration. In the historiography of Franco-British artistic relations, it is rather Constable, and more generally the landscapists, who take pride of place.2 Yet, while those artists did constitute the majority of the British artists at the Salon of 1824, generally regarded as the 'English Salon' and the key moment in the reception of English painting in France, they were not the only ones. The Salon was far from being the sole indicator of an artist's popularity. One also has to take into account another phenomenon, namely the wide circulation of reproductive prints, which had a much more important medium- and long-term impact. Most British artists took part in the Salon only once or twice, not enough to establish a sustained and regular presence which could have integrated them into the Parisian art world (in this respect the situation would be entirely different with the universal exhibitions of the second half of the century). One must also take into account the visits of French artists to Britain3 or of British artists to France: despite being irregular, they played an important part in the dissemination and reception of these works. Moreover, the Restoration must be reappraised in the broader context of the nineteenth century as a whole.4 In the limited space available here, I should simply like to focus on the reception of the British School of painting during the Restoration beyond the case of the naturalistic landscapists, with particular reference to three major artists who represented the diversity of British painting in France at the time: Thomas Lawrence, David Wilkie and John Martin. Which of their works were known in France?

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How were they received? Can one explain the considerable reputation that, according to contemporary accounts, they acquired in France? I shall attempt to answer these questions by examining not only the original sources (printed and manuscript) but also the critiques published at the time, that is, up to the end of the 1830s, as well as those French catalogues of such sales as included a significant proportion of prints (at least five) held in Paris from 1780 to 1880, whereby one can get an idea of which English prints were circulating in France.51 shall limit myself to the 'Romantic moment', roughly 1820-40, which coincides with the peak of French anglophilia and is a specific historical period in its own right. It is also worth noting that Lawrence died in 1830, Wilkie in 1843 and that by the late 1830s John Martin seems entirely forgotten in France. I shall therefore not refer to later documents, such as works on English painting published between 1830 and 1880 which, despite their essential role in the reception of those artists, are as good a reflection of the previous period as earlier events - such as the 1857 Arts Treasures exhibition in Manchester or the 1862 Universal Exhibition in London - which caused major developments in the reception of the British School of painting in France.

The reception of Lawrence at the Salon

Lawrence, like Constable, is a perfect illustration of the discovery of English painting by the Paris public at the Salons of 1824 and 1827 - perhaps even more so than Constable in that at every exhibition his works were a source of debate and argument, of enthusiastic praise and harsh criticism, with the result that discussions of the British School focused on his name and works. At first limited to Romantic circles, admiration rapidly became general. Thus, by 1830, Lawrence stood not only as one of the most famous English painters but also as one held in the highest regard. Not that his paintings were collected early on: with the exception of the few portraits of the royal family and of the Duke of Richelieu, and a few 'private' portraits painted during his visits to Paris, none of Lawrence's larger paintings provided a taste of his talent in French museums or public collections. It was only in the last third of the century that he became increasingly sought after, when the trend was to collect works by Reynolds, Romney or Hoppner and when family portraits that had until then remained closely kept in Britain began to leave the country. Thus Lawrence is no exception to the rule that the reputation in France of British artists was established mostly through prints. Yet he has a specificity: he owed his reputation to paintings - some of considerable importance. Quite exceptionally for an English painter of the time, engravings after his works reinforced earlier judgements of his canvases. This is perhaps

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why he rapidly became, in the eyes of French critics, the symbol of British painting and of what was perceived as its limitations. And it must be stressed that, although he visited a number of European countries after 1815, France included, Paris was the only place outside England where he exhibited in his lifetime. Of all British painters, Lawrence submitted the largest entry to the Salon of 1824 which, for the first time in Paris, revealed the presence of the British School; he showed several canvases, of which only two are mentioned in the booklet: a portrait bust of the Duke of Richelieu, from the full-length portrait which he had executed for George IV at Windsor6and a portrait of a woman7. The Portrait of the Due de Richelieu had every reason to be the focus of attention, on account of both the personality of the sitter, who had recently died, and that of the artist, who appeared as the leader of a school. This entry caused more discussion amongst critics than that submitted by Constable, the other major British painter at this Salon. This is easily explained: Lawrence was the only English portrait painter; his contemporaries, Bonington, Copley and Thales Fielding, Gastineau, J. D. Harding, James Roberts, John Varley and William Wyld were essentially showing only landscapes, in oil or watercolour, often small or medium-sized, less likely to capture attention than oil paintings of a much more imposing dimension. So most of the attention went to Constable's three canvases, The Hay Wain and A View on the Stour, both of imposing size, and A View near London. Hampstead Heath. Lawrence came bathed in glory while Constable was only preceded by his reputation among some French artistic circles. As for the others, they were quasibeginners. Worse, they were foreigners; the Salon, traditionally and by habit, was first and foremost a French exhibition, not an international event. If the public may have felt that they were witnessing a concerted action on the part of English painters, we now know that this was not the case and that only a set of fortuitous events brought about what was seen as a sort of invasion. The more important canvases were there because their owners were French - the Richelieu family for the portrait of the Duke, the art dealer Arrowsmith for the three Constables. The other English artists were resident in Paris and it was natural for them to show their work in an attempt to sell and acquire both reputation and regular clients. This had nothing to do with some sort of nationalistic demonstration. In other words, the British artists at the Salon of 1824 only represented themselves; in the final analysis they gave France a partial and very incomplete image of contemporary British painting, as neither Turner nor Calcott, nor even Wilkie, Martin or Haydon were represented in the 1824 Salon. The public was bound not to miss the 'Gerard of the three kingdoms'.8The Portrait of the Due de Richelieu had indeed been given pride of place in the Salon carre and was soon widely seen as the English canvas.9 It was also a

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source of controversy: while critics unanimously agreed that the portrait was a good likeness and true, opinions differed on its execution, which shocked by its negligence and lack of finish. 'What ten-year-old schoolboy would fail to paint better arms and shoulders?' wrote an indignant Fabien Fillet,10while another criticized the manner, the dry flesh, the coldness of the colours, 'negligence in all parts of the execution',11 and Le Moniteur spoke of 'carelessness, affected negligence in the accessories'.12 Yet all praised Lawrence's elegant, delicate choice of attitudes and a rather successful effect of 'premier jet'. Ay card and Flocon alone were less restrained and completely demolished the canvas.13 For most of the critics of the Salon, the specificity of British painters lay essentially in the manner - a judgement which was perhaps not so much caused as confirmed by the Salon. A similar view can be found in an article on Lawrence published as early as 1823 in the Revue encyclopedique: It is well composed, and remarkable especially in the likeness, the brilliant colouring and the gracefulness which has established the artist's reputation. But its drawing is not studied enough. The shapes are rather vague: the bones, the muscles, etc. (what in painting is called the 'dessous') are not indicated clearly enough. This defect, that of the English School, comes from the fact that in general it neglects execution too much in its attempt to express ideas. Brushwork is to painting as style is to literature. It too has an idea and elegance of its own. But it must especially shine by its truthfulness.14

Hence the irreconcilable opposition between English and French painters, based on style as much as subject matter, both ultimately interrelated. This is what Coupin elaborates upon, in another issue of the Revue encyclopedique: [in France] people think that imitation is not the sole aim of painting .... They believe, moreover, that, especially in works of some proportion, one should not content oneself with rendering the aspect of nature and care only about the masses but also that it is necessary to reproduce its details and finer points as much as possible. The English take the opposite route: seen from a distance, their works look very true to nature; but as one goes closer, the illusion vanishes and poorly mixed colours and rough brushwork are all there is to i t .... From this, it is easy to understand that the English see no importance in rendering the accessories, which must be sacrificed.15

Lawrence was nevertheless awarded the Legion d'honneur (and Constable a gold medal), perhaps more of an official tribute to his position than the actual recognition of his talent. The controversy caused by his entry to the Salon of 1824 resumed three years later when he exhibited Master Lambton and the Duchesse de Berry - and most probably Madame Ducrest de Villeneuve, nee Antoinette Duvaucel.16 Indeed there were now two clearly defined camps, judging from what the critics wrote, in particular that of the Figaro who distinguished between friends and foes, the latter being 'men of outstanding talent and sound judgement but altogether belonging to another school and another age.17 In other words,

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most of Lawrence's supporters belonged to the new Romantic School and his adversaries were advocates of the strictest classical orthodoxy. The severity of the critics focused on the portrait of the Duchesse de Berry which the 'Classics' described as a sketch with affected negligence and as such unworthy of being shown in view of the model's personality, of the author's reputation and of the genre of the canvas.18 However all concur on the successful likeness of the Duchesse as well as on the extraordinary life-like quality of the Lambton which enjoyed huge success. What sets apart Lawrence's critics from his supporters is their judgement on the style of the two portraits where the painter gave all his attention to the faces and the flesh, treating the accessories (that is, the setting and clothing) in a much more allusive manner. This, remarked the Nouveau Journal de Paris, was 'in order to give added merit to the parts which he thinks deserve greater importance'. Yet, it went on, 'the artifice smacks too much of charlatanism' and the great masters, except Rembrandt, 'have always shunned this practice, at least in such an excessive form'. The facility to which Lawrence has apparently yielded was violently condemned by many critics who referred to 'woolly skies' that looked like 'sand-pits'/9 over-abundant shine, 'variegated skies', 'an atmosphere heavy with smoke in thirty-six colours', 'touches of milky white diluted in soapy water'20and who questioned the verisimilitude of the light in Master Lambton, which was bathed in full daylight while the moon shone through the trees. Lawrence's supporters did not deny such defects sometimes even pointing out that they added elegance to the whole canvas but they simply regarded them as minor compared to the talent displayed by the artist in the execution of the portrait to which he had managed to give life and warmth. This is therefore a clash between two traditions, which we might call that of the posed portrait and of the captured portrait. Lawrence was not spared, neither in 1824 nor in 1827. Yet an evolution can be felt. In 1824 he caused a stir. Three years later, the public had more varied opinions and criticism was less severe. Some liked his paintings but even those who did not credited him with some talent. Stendhal is quite typical in this respect. In 1824 he wrote that 'M. Lawrence's manner has the force of the negligent genius. I must confess that I cannot understand this painter's reputation.'21 In 1827, the general tone has changed: To-day the English manner enjoys a triumph in Paris. This manner is but an imitation of van Dyck and Rembrandt, at times a rather awkward one, but one that has made awkwardness fashionable .... The character of the painter, his way of feeling the events of life shows despite the somewhat unsightly painting manner of his country; and that is why Mr Lawrence's name is immortal.22

Lawrence had in just three years somehow acclimatized to France at the time when appreciation for the famous 'English manner' was extending beyond some painters' studios to ever-widening circles. He became a fashionable

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painter, as was shown some time later by the reactions to George Hayter's portraits exhibited at the Salon of 1831.23 While being naturally seen by critics as a follower of his illustrious predecessor, from whom he was taking over, Hayter formed a sharp contrast to Lawrence in style and technique. He also formed a sharp contrast to French portraitists of whom the Salon of 1831 offered a sizeable sample for comparison, in particular Kinson and Champmartin. Hayter, like Lawrence before him, was a painter who was 'a la mode'. Indications are that he painted a lot during his visit to Paris. The public had mixed reactions25to his entry but critics were unanimously negative. Lawrence's works now represented the archetype of the aristocratic portrait. Hayter was systematically compared to him, much to his disadvantage. Thus Lenormant wrote at length in Le Temps: Nothing of Mr Lawrence is lacking in Mr Hayter, neither the shimmering skies, nor the mossy trees, the satin palaces, the snowy draperies, nor even the foggy trousers, nothing in truth but the adaptation, the individuality, the flesh tints, the life of the portraits by his model. How foolish they must look now, all those would-be princesses who lost no time in bringing glory to Mr Hayter! Is it not punishment enough to be shown at the Salon in such form? We might understand if some skilful imitator of Lawrence, of whom there are several in London, had taken into his fancy to export his master's manner to France: this would undoubtedly have met a great and well-deserved success here. Our painters would certainly have learnt a lot about this School, if only how to put a coat on a honest man's back without making him look like an awkward bourgeois. But that a talent which in one of us would be regarded at best as third-rate should - merely for having crossed the Channel ravish those who claim a refined taste is enough to make one call for revenge.26

Lawrence's reputation had not been established on his entries to the Salons of 1824 and 1827 alone. His visit to Paris in 1825 seems to have played a key role in the reception of his work in France. He had come to paint full-length portraits of the King and of the Dauphin at George IV's request. On this occasion he executed a bust-length portrait of the Duchesse de Berry (although he had to give up the idea of doing that of the Dauphin who steadfastly refused to pose for him). He then privately showed one of his most popular canvases, The Calmady Children. He kept regular contacts in Parisian high society and was a frequent guest of, amongst others, the salons of Cuvier and Baron Gerard whose bust portrait he painted. Such company undoubtedly helped him to find favour in circles where anglomania was then rapidly growing. His reputation was therefore well established in the Faubourg Saint-Honore or the Chaussee d'Antin; this was obvious at the Salon of 1827 where critics pointed out how highly regarded he was by the titled and monied elites. Lawrence was a renowned painter in Britain and his reputation in France grew after the Salon of 1824, where his work was first directly shown to the public (who previously only knew of it through interpretative prints), as he became acclimatized to the Paris artistic life.

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Lawrence and Delacroix

Such recognition seems to have first come from a few artists, in particular the Romantics. We know that in 1829 Delacroix published an enthusiastic article in the Revue de Paris on the portrait of Pius VII, part of the series for Windsor, which had just been reproduced in mezzotint by Samuel Cousins.27 Delacroix had met Lawrence during a visit to London in 1825 and apparently retained special fondness and admiration for him. Thus it was that he wrote to Schwiter, then in London, in 1833 that he almost departed immediately for England upon hearing of new exhibitions by Reynolds and Lawrence.28 His admiration for English painters somewhat diminished later on, especially after the 1855 Exhibition. From that point rather negative comments begin to appear in his Diary, on the exaggeration of the effects specific to the British School.29 Yet he is less critical in his letter to Theophile Silvestre, who had requested information on the English painters with whom Delacroix had been acquainted as well, as to his opinion on the British School: my impressions of that time [his 1825 sojourn in London] would perhaps be a little modified today. Perhaps I would find in Lawrence an exaggeration of effect that is a bit too reminiscent of the school of Reynolds. But his prodigiously fine drawing, the life he imparts to his women, who seem to be speaking to you, make him a portraitist superior to van Dyck himself, whose admirable figures pose tranquilly. The shining eyes, the half-open mouths are admirably rendered by Lawrence.30

As a young man, if less so in later years, Delacroix was a fervent admirer of Lawrence. He was not the only one amongst his fellow artists. But this was not a battle easily won, as we can see from this other excerpt from Delacroix's diary: 'Never has a nation [namely France] seemed more cautious against taste. Just imagine the invasion of a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence at the Salon of 1806. That was hard enough to digest when we first saw it in i 824'.31 The critics cited above make it clear: the Salon of 1827 saw the build-up of a trend in favour of Lawrence, from the artists' studios to high society. Undoubtedly, he also benefitted from the anglophilia that increasingly prevailed among some of the Paris elites by the end of the Restoration and increased still further after that. Lawrence, at the time of his death in 1830, was not only a famous painter but also a recognised talent, as shown by his obituaries in the Parisian press.

Obituaries of Lawrence in the French press

The Journal des Artistes, a periodical never too well inclined towards the Romantics and even less so towards English painters, published a most factual and biographical obituary.32 The significantly longer study published

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a year later in the Revue britannique, the first of comparable length in France, provides a bolder, more detailed judgement: amongst the most famous painters, Lawrence must have a place between van Dyck and Titian; he is connected with a great progress of British art, which had never attained the degree of perfection to which Lawrence took it, in terms of purity of drawing and grace of expression. Kneller's stiff and ponderous figures were not without a certain dignity. Gainsborough had verve and some energy. Reynolds, the great artist, who towered above those we have just mentioned, triumphed in his mastery of chiaroscuro, the melancholy expression and the piquant effect of his compositions. Lawrence's manner was somewhat more finished and complete.33

Within a few years, Lawrence had risen from the domain of the critique into history, the history of portraiture and of English painting; in both, his preeminent place was no longer contested, either in the notes published by L'Artiste on the lithographs inspired from his best-known works34 or in the 1843 article in Les Beaux-Arts.35 Many years later, Theophile Gautier took a similar stance. While stressing the lively, natural and expressive quality of Lawrence's portraits, which might seem timeless, all these writers were quick to point out that he was in essence the painter both of one country and one social class. For the Revue britannique, the true history of xixth-century England, of the England of politics and trade, rich and industrial, sumptuous, proud and elegant, will be seen, thanks to Lawrence, by posterity. His paintings symbolise the thoughts of our times; the bold, gracious combination of lines and colours reveals not only the outside appearance but also the intelligence of the men pictured by our portraitist.36

Years later, Gautier describes him as 'an absolutely modem painter; with him, no memories of antique marbles, no imitation of the great masters of Italy or Flanders. He sought his ideal amongst the high and mighty, and find it he did .... A fashionable great artist! these may seem incompatible words - yet that Lawrence certainly was.'37 In 1835, an anonymous article in L'Artiste puts it somewhat differently by insisting on social differences between France and England.38The author has no hesitation in referring to Lawrence's portraits as 'pages of history', the memento of a social class bound to disappear. Lawrence's skill in blending history and portraiture made critics condone his technical defects, although these were never ignored: 'Thanks to him, the physiognomy of the gentlemen of the upper-classes of his time and country shall be transmitted alive to posterity, much as the admirable portraits of Titian and of Raphael were comments on the Italy of their days.'39

The role of the print

All these critics were not relying on only the few canvases shown in Paris by

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Lawrence. As was the case for nearly all English artists of that period (setting aside those, like Bonington or the Fielding brothers, with careers on both sides of the Channel), his work was mostly known through reproductive engravings. It was first widely disseminated through high-quality English lithographs, in particular Samuel Cousins's, whose technique, the mezzotint, gave a particularly apt rendition of the stylish effects of the original canvases. Delacroix's article accordingly began with a tribute to the engraver's merits and makes a clear connection between Cousins's work and Lawrence's success.40 Indeed it was as high-quality, luxurious interpretative prints that Lawrence's portraits began to acquire fame in France. Many prints were in circulation, perhaps owing their success equally to the quality of the models and to the quality of the prints. As was noted by Delacroix, the painter benefited from all the advantages of this type of engraving - and also, with portraits, a strictly documentary interest. Yet some were more successful than others, especially portraits of women; for example, of Lady Gower, Lady Dover and Lady Grey,41 whose lithographs had been published in VArtiste in 1833. Other portraits had been copied early in that technique, a sign that they were intended for broad circulation, or more luxuriously in etchings and lineengravings (portraits of the royal family in 1827-28 by Belliard, Thomson, Grevedon, or later well-known French and English personalities, such as Richelieu by Lignon as early as 1824, Lord Castlereagh, Canning by H. Gamier, Walter Scott by Belnos). Here the interest of the portrait is mostly historical. Not so with the numerous reprises of portraits of women and children from 1830 onwards; for example, Lady Gower, Lady Dover and The Calmady Children transposed many times in lithographic form. There are no fewer than six versions of Nature, the title given to The Calmady Children, from Vallou de Villeneuve's in 1827 (Figure 6.1) to Cornilliet's, twenty years later (including Jazet's, Feudrich's in 1831, Gigoux's (Figure 6.2) and Gaujean's). Nature is a very special case; a French engraving made directly from the original, which Villeneuve had seen during Lawrence's sojourn in Paris, instead of from the English engraving (in this case, by G. T. Doo in 1829). These portraits were, to a large extent, made into prints because of their thinly veiled sentimentalism, as indicated by the titles they were given: thus Lady Gower became Motherly Tenderness (Belnos) (Figure 6.3) and A Young Widow (Desmaisons) (Figure 6.4), Lady Dover Melancholy (Leon Noel) and A Great Lady (again by Desmaisons). Miss Macdonald, reproduced by Walter in 1831, was reinterpreted by Desmaisons as Is He Thinking of Me? and in 1845 by Walter as Thinking. Desmaisons's three works are part of a series of six 'gracious subjects' published in 1833 with titles that said it all: A Young Mother, A Young Widow, The Pretty Village-Girl (from Landseer), A Great Lady; Is He Thinking of Me?, I Must Forget Him (a reprise of Miss Crooker, transposed by Bouchardy in 1829 as Angelina). Desmaisons was a specialist otfeuilles d'etude

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[study sheets] filled with expression heads, mostly of women. Here Lawrence was merely a source of models to be copied, all the more valuable as they were by him. This was a fashion phenomenon, the mere consumption of images, which explains why the success of a certain type of English art in France (particularly genre scenes) owed more to subject than style or manner. This reinterpretation of Lawrence's works seems to have been specific to France: English interpretation engravings were indeed much more classical, retaining the original title of the portrait or, in exceptional cases, using a commonly admitted other title; for example; Nature for The Calmady Children.

The reception of Wilkie and Martin in France

The predominant place of the reproductive print in the process of reception is more obvious with the two other artists under discussion here, namely David Wilkie and John Martin. Their outstanding reputation, on a par with Lawrence's (and at the time much superior to Constable's, not to mention Turner's) was mostly based on the broad circulation of engravings that, like those executed from Lawrence, pleased as much by subject-matter as by manner. It was not until 1833 that Martin exhibited at the Salon. As for Wilkie, none of his famous canvases ever came to France; only in 1857 and 1862 did French critics and amateurs visiting the Art Treasures exhibition in Manchester and the London Universal Exhibition (and its retrospective of the British School) have the opportunity to study at length the originals of the prints they had admired so much. The reception of Wilkie's work in France can therefore be regarded as a case in point. Like Lawrence, Wilkie was already a celebrated painter in Britain by the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He was, however, virtually unknown in France. His resounding first success at the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1806 with his Village Politicians had found some echo in the Parisian press, as had the canvases which followed at regular intervals, from The Blind Fiddler in 1807 to Blind Man's Buff in 1813. His name had appeared in some of the very few accounts published in Paris of exhibitions held in London during the Empire years, based on articles in the London press, and not by critics who had seen the original canvases. When he went to Paris with Benjamin Robert Haydon in June-July 1814, Wilkie was able to measure the gap between France and England with regard to knowledge of the recent developments in painting in both countries.42 The two painters visited many museums, monuments and studios, particularly those of David, Gerard and Girodet. However, they do not appear to have established any link with these artists nor even to have talked to them. They were even refused entry to Gros's studio on the grounds that the master could not receive anyone.43

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Wilkie and Haydon, despite being men of some importance in London, were still unknown in Paris. Their only lasting contacts were with print merchants. Wilkie had brought with him a portfolio of reproductive prints of his paintings which he tried to sell literally from door to door. He went to the famous interpretative engraver Bervic, who also dealt in prints, and with whom Abraham Raimbach, Wilkie's own interpretative engraver, had begun a fruitful acquaintance in 1802.44Bervic finally refused to take these prints for sale, as did two other unidentified merchants, on the basis that they were 'not sufficiently historical' for the Parisian market. 'Monsieur Roland' of the place des Victoires also refused on the pretext of the commercial downturn resulting from the war. It was also for commercial reasons that Bervic (or rather his wife, who was responsible for all negotiations in his absence), declined: Wilkie wanted immediate cash payment, while she insisted on payment upon sale, which illustrates the risk involved at the time in proposing English novelties to the Parisian market, even when they had known considerable success at home. This did not prevent Bervic, some time later, from being a keen admirer of the engraving The Village Politicians, two copies of which Wilkie finally managed to place with Delpech, in addition to printer's proofs. Naigeon acted as intermediary with another unidentified merchant who examined the proofs, found them to be well composed and skilfully engraved but, like the customers in his shop, 'clearly not in keeping with refined Parisian taste' - hence his refusal. In the end, only Delpech took a chance and apparently rightly so, since he told Wilkie, prior to the latter's return to England, that his prints had been viewed and unanimously praised by a large number of visitors. They were to be among the best known and best liked English engravings in France for some years. From 1817, Wilkie had competition in this area from West, as is borne out by a passage from C. R. Leslie's journal during his trip to the Continent to whom a Parisian had said 'I like your Vilkie, but not your Vest'.45 This remark takes on an additional dimension when one considers how much in favour the prints taken from West's works, such as The Death of General Wolfe or the The Battle at La Hogue, were during the last third of the eighteenth century. Wilkie's is, first and foremost, a success of engraving; the talent of his favourite interpreters during this period - Raimbach and Burnet - is certainly to some extent responsible, just as that of Woollett had been for West fifty years before. It is worth pointing out that Raimbach and Burnet follow in the same technical tradition as Woollett - the large interpretative print in etching or line-engraving, always a favoured form in France. One should not overestimate the place of the work of engravers in the vogue for Wilkie's work in France during this period. However, it is certainly not negligible. The first mentions of works after Wilkie in the catalogues of French print sales are somewhat later: 1819 for an unspecified engraving by Raimbach46 and 1821

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for a proof of the Le Doigt Coupe (The Cut Finger) (Figure 6.3), also by Raimbach.47 Only incomplete information is available but, given the slight delay between the point at which the prints start to be bought in France and the time when they are specified with precise sales figures, it seems that Wilkie's work came to circulate rapidly in the early years of the Restoration. The prints after Wilkie enjoy lasting popularity with collectors from this point onwards; they are frequently seen in sales catalogues throughout the century, in state proofs (epreuves d'etat), sometimes at very high prices. But they are also found in private sales and are often described as being framed, which suggests that they were also enjoyed for their decorative value alone. We see here the dual character of the interpretative print, sought after both as a print and as a reproduction. The circulation of copies and replicas is another indication of the popularity in France of prints after Wilkie. In the case of Wilkie, these are a little later, but increasingly numerous in France, judging from the proofs kept in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliotheque Nationale, which do not claim to be exhaustive. This is easily explained by the high cost which original proofs were to reach and by the fact that Wilkie, unlike Hogarth, did not publish less expensive series. By 1823, Jazet had already engraved six of the painter's works, the first in 1819-20, which would indicate an early success.48 But Wilkie continued to be interpreted by French engravers in the most diverse techniques and formats: lithographs on occasion but mainly aquatints and line engravings (the Beyer, Couche, Bovinet and Goula series being published in 1826 (Figure 6.6)). Marcia Pointon has suggested that the success of the reproductions of Blind Man's Buff (or the engravings after it) was largely due to the appropriateness of Wilkie's subjects to French taste and to the sensibilities of the time.49 But in fact all Wilkie's well-known works before 1830 were reproduced in this way: four reproductions of Village Politicians, four of the Blind Fiddler, a further four of Rent Day, three of Distraining for Rent, The Letter of Introduction and Reading a Will. It was therefore a much more generalized phenomenon (although Blind Man's Buff enjoyed special favour), which lies within the ancient tradition of pirating the most popular English prints in Paris. Wilkie, from this point of view, is Bartolozzi's natural successor. We should emphasize here a difference with Lawrence: Wilkie's works were copied, not corrupted by the addition of suggestive labels or truncated by the reproduction of isolated groups or motifs. Here the enjoyment of the works was being extended to a less well-off audience, who could not afford the successful, if costlier, originals. Nor was Wilkie's popularity limited only to the years 1825-33, when most of the copies appeared. In 1850-51, Goupil published four large engravings which reproduced Wilkie's most famous compositions: Rent Day and Distraining for Rent by Pratt, The Blind Fiddler and Blind Man's Buff by Bettanier.

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Wilkie's second stay in France in 1823 was thus very different from his first. Gericault and Delacroix had visited his studio or seen his works in England and spoken widely of their esteem for him. However Wilkie's contacts with French artists were not extensive and he remained on the margins of the artistic life of Paris. He continued to suffer as a result of painful family problems and poor health (he stopped briefly in Paris between July and September on his way to Italy). Although not entirely reclusive, he was still in the hands of his doctors. This however did not prevent him, upon being recognized on a visit to the Louvre, from being assailed by such a multitude of admirers that he was completely exhausted. He returned to France two years later, travelling between Geneva and Spain via Lyons and Montpellier, where Fabre, to whom he had been recommended, showed him the paintings he had donated to the town.50 He spent a few weeks there in 1828 before returning to England and never came back to France (he travelled to the Middle East by way of the Netherlands and Germany in 1840). Wilkie's work then was well-known in France around 1830 as the culmination of a movement begun fifteen years before and which apparently kept on growing. The delay which occurred during the Empire had been overcome although none of his paintings had been shown in France; one had to go to London to see them. Gericault in 1820 and Delacroix in 1825 were keen to do so, showing their enthusiasm for English painting in general and Wilkie's in particular. The judgement made ten years later by the critic Gustave Planche, also on a visit to England, demonstrates the permanence of the assessment of Wilkie's work in France; a favourable opinion, based more on knowledge of the prints than of the original works and therefore on the earlier part of the artist's career rather than the later (the 'Italian' and 'Spanish' years) which was less available in this medium.51 Planche's reservations, relating entirely to Wilkie's paintings, focus on colour. On the other hand he admires all the features which engraving is capable of reproducing: composition, attitudes, faces and expressions. One should note this difference, almost unnoticeable but nevertheless present, revealed by a critic as knowledgeable and observant as Planche when he saw a painting by a master he had only judged until then via the intermediary of engraving. Most noteworthy is his measured assessment, which is typical of that generally applied to the second part of Wilkie's work. Many decades would go by before a definitive judgement would be made on Wilkie by French critics; the Manchester Exhibition and the London Universal Exhibition in 1862 would be crucial here. At that time the pictorial talent of the 'English Teniers' would be judged in a more balanced fashion, taking into account its evolution after 1830. When his subjects were no longer in fashion, nothing would remain for the artist. His success corresponds both to the taste of the period and to the methods of artistic circulation in the early nineteenth century when the reproductive print had a final golden age.

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The case of John Martin offers numerous analogies with Wilkie (he was first popularized in France through his prints), and also Lawrence, since he exhibited in Paris. Thus he was one of the best-known and most admired British painters of the Romantic generation. He had begun to be known in England just before the fall of the Empire, participating regularly in London exhibitions since 18 11 and also working on prints from 1816 onwards. The turning point in his career occurred in 1821. This followed the exhibiting of Belshazzar's Feast, which he undertook to engrave himself in mezzotint. The Revue encyclopedique noted in 1819 the positive reception of the Fall of Babylon. The same review was very positive in 1821, although with some final reservations as to the lack of dignity of the characters.52 Nevertheless, it was the prints which would be almost entirely responsible for the distribution of his works. Martin was perfectly aware of the opportunities made possible by engraving.53 He began making mezzotints around 1824, interpreting some of his own paintings such as Christ in the Wilderness or the Ascent of Elijah. Mezzotint became his favourite technique, through which his most celebrated works were distributed throughout Europe, particularly in France. His first major project in mezzotint was the group of illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost, between 1824 and 1827, for the London publisher Septimus Prowett. They broadened his reputation while revealing steel engraving to him. Thus, by the middle of the 1820s, he was in full possession of his artistic and stylistic means - and fully aware of the technical possibilities offered by the print in deriving the greatest commercial profit. Large-scale mezzotint interpretations of contemporary or older canvases followed at regular intervals: Belshazzar's Feast (1826, after the painting of 1821), Joshua (1827, after the painting of 1813), The Eve of the Deluge (1828, after the work of 1826), The Fall of Nineveh (1829-30 for the painting and the engraving), The Fall of Babylon (1831; the first canvas dates from 1819), The Crucifixion (1834). The publication of these sheets came therefore rather late after the reopening of Franco-British artistic relations in 1815. They were published at a time when well-established contacts between Britain and France were giving rise to a feeling of anglophilia in France. Additionally, the growing success of Romanticism in literature would find fertile ground in the works of Martin. These were known almost immediately in Paris, meeting with instant success, as emphasized by Jean Seznec who quotes numerous literary testimonies.54It was the first time since Hogarth and West that a British artist was celebrated in Paris while enjoying his first success in London, a fact worth underlining. Here again success is measured in the publication of copies, in this instance by Jazet who in 1829 offered three sheets after Martin (Le Deluge (The Deluge) (Figure 6.7), Joshua and Belshazzar's Feast) and one after Francis Danby (Crossing the Red Sea).55 An article which appeared on this occasion in the

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Journal des Artistes56makes clear the success of these pieces and the reactions to which they gave rise (the copies being faithful transcriptions of the originals, according to the author, probably Charles Farcy, the editor of the Journal). The success was primarily due to the price, Jazet's prints being sold for a quarter of the price of the original prints, but also to questions of style. The Journal des Artistes noted to what extent the engravings, exhibited in the rue Vivienne, caught the eye of passers-by. To some extent the writer deplored this, having some reservations himself, as always in the case of England or Romanticism. For example, he regretted the lack of correctness and the general overly fantastical appearance of Martin's compositions. They certainly appeal to the imagination. Jazet was not the only engraver to benefit from the fashion for Martin in France. J. G. S. Lucas, who had settled there, in his turn offered copies of the master's original sheets some years later.57 On this occasion, the Artiste published a critical article, referring both to the engraver and the painter: 'Having seen the original works [it is not known whether this refers to paintings or engravings], we can testify that the artist [Lucas] has reproduced John Martin's works. The prints, in smaller size, have retained the majestic proportions, the infinite perspective and horizon, which are the main original feature of Martin's talent.'58 But where does the originality of his works come from? It is less in his subjects than in the way he treats them. After all, others had illustrated Paradise Lost and he was far from being the only painter of his time to treat religious subjects. However, none had systematically tried to render the general impression of an episode by such a combination of masses while eliminating detail and expression from one character or another. It is in the sensations that they produce that Martin's compositions are successful. The elements which come together (effects of mass, architecture) are effective in precisely that way. The texts develop a particular line of criticism in relation to Martin, as if his strange painting demanded a different approach from that applied to other painters. J. Seznec had sensed the extent to which enthusiasm for Martin arose from a literary sentiment, as expressed directly by the Journal des Artistes in 1835.59 It is of subsidiary importance that Martin became known by his engravings rather than by his original paintings. It is the genre which is most important and this is perfectly rendered by mezzotint which renders the effects of tone and thus of chiaroscuro which, for many, explain the general impression produced by Martin's compositions. His greatest success spans the period from the late 1820s to the mid-i830s. All the articles to which we have referred appeared more or less between these dates, and in 1833 the Magasin pittoresque published two wood engravings, one after Belshazzar's Feast and the other after The Flight from Egypt by David Roberts stated to 'be conceived in the genre of M. Martin'. The exhibition of a version of the The Deluge at the Salon of 1835 was no less important. It made possible a confrontation between the

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interpretations and the original, and thus gave a better idea of the resources of Martin the painter. Martin's success was, according to Thore, writing later in the 1860s, essentially with the 'curious and the worldly' and not with artists. He quotes Planche's remark in his Salon: 'He is the poets' painter, he is the painters' poet, and yet he is neither a painter nor a poet.'60Louis Peisse, in Le Temps,61 is retrospectively both the most complete and theoretical critic on the subject of The Deluge. It was this criticism that best developed Planche's general intuitions. It puts forward the basic proposition that painting, being limited and determined by the use of its materials, cannot entirely keep pace with the imagination which can conjure up anything, including the impossible - and Martin, precisely, attempts to represent such impossibilities. There is, therefore, nothing surprising in his using an entirely different system from the great painters (Raphael, Poussin, Girodet) who represented the Flood before him. Their system emphasized certain individual figures whereas 'for M. Martin, man and his destiny in the midst of these physical catastrophes are but accessories; he is only concerned with the phenomenon'. Peisse's very negative conclusion is certainly not that of the majority of critics, which tend to be split on the value of Martin's paintings. But it is significant that he brings together the different themes developed (to a greater or lesser extent) by others. It is the final judgement which differs. Viel-Castel, for his part, particularly appreciates the treatment of masses and sums this up as 'a great and beautiful poetry within this picture'.62Whether one denigrates or praises the painter, one rehearses identical arguments. The painting becomes less important than the idea. The partial failure (or partial success) of the The Deluge thus demonstrates the extent to which Martin's reputation rested on a fundamental ambiguity. The genre he worked in is separate, he used methods and sought ends which were not the same as those of his contemporaries. One may then be seduced or shocked, according to whether one accepts or rejects these. But in doing so, one is outside the normal artistic movement. French painting offers nothing comparable: the paintings of Louis Boulanger, which one might be tempted to compare with those of Martin, remain, in their exaggerated Romanticism, faithful to the classical model in the disposition of characters in groups and identifiable figures, expressing the passions and sentiments bom of the event. Martin introduced a radical novelty which was understood but rarely accepted. The relationship between the painting and its interpretative print also differs from the usual relationship between painter and engraver. The comparison relates not to the question of the passage from colour to black and white but to that of the equivalent rendering of effect, of the general impression. There is little evidence in 1835 of the reaction which otherwise occurred so often apropos English paintings popularized in France through

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engravings and discovered at a later date: disappointment with the colour and manner. Here this is practically absent, a further indication of the very particular treatment of John Martin's art on the part of critics. Lawrence and Martin exhibited in Paris, Wilkie did not. However, the basic role played by the print in the distribution, knowledge and appreciation of their work in France is clear, even though there were differences in method, rhythm and character. In some cases, critical discourse no longer separated the original painting from the interpretative engraving. Nevertheless, around 1830 they represented modem British painting which cannot be limited - as is perhaps all too frequent a tendency today - to landscape painting. If the beginning of the recognition of a British School dates from these years, it is also because it showed all its resources in every area and a particular talent in portraiture and in genre, which were to become its favoured areas in the eyes of French critics. At that time, there was no concern with defining a Romantic English painting, which these three artists today appear to represent, to various degrees. For contemporaries it was simply modern painting from across the Channel. The relationship of these three painters with the French Romantic current is not as direct as one might first believe. Certainly Lawrence was initially defended by Delacroix and his friends and Martin had recruited zealots to his cause in the most advanced literary movement at that time, that of Hugo. But Wilkie was much more traditional, both in the subjects he treated and in the style and technique of the engravings through which he was known. And Lawrence quite quickly became an 'acceptable' painter. Both represented permanence rather than change, if only through the genre of their painting, which links each of them to an older tradition, unlike Martin whose success departed once the fashion for the fantastic, the sublime and the grandiose was over. The British School, as it appeared through these three representatives, showed a certain modernity both in style and manner, and to a much lesser extent in subject-matter. But their success seems to have had more to do with the renewal that they brought than the rupture they might have caused. It is entirely different for landscape painting, where this second aspect was, in France at least, responsible for the success and the later reputation of English artists, and in particular of its most famous representatives, Constable and Turner.

Notes 1.

On this painting, see Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugene Delacroix. A Critical Catalogue 18 6 1-3 1, vol. i (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 198 1), pp. 54-6 . More generally, on the relations between Delacroix, Great Britain and the English art of the period, see B. Jobert, Delacroix (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), especially pp. 9 2-10 2.

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2.

For the main references in a very large bibliography, see Colin Shaw Smith, From Francia to Delacroix: The English Influence on French Romantic Landscape Painting (North Carolina University, 19 8 2/A n n Arbor, 1982); Marcia Pointon, in particular The Bonington Circle. English Watercolour and Anglo-French Landscape, 1790-1850 (Brighton: Hendon Press, 1985); Patrick Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington,' On the Pleasure of Painting', exh, cat. (N ew Haven, Yale Center for British Art, 19 9 1-9 2); and, most recently, P. Noon et ah, Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics, exh. cat. (London: Tate Britain, 2003).

3.

On this, see Susan Lodge, Trench artists visiting England, 1 8 1 5 - 1 8 3 0 ', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, London University, 1966.

4.

On this, see B. Jobert, 'L a reception de Tecole anglaise en France, 18 0 2-18 7 8 . Un aspect des relations artistiques franco-britanniques au dix-neuvieme siecle', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV, 1994, to be published in edited version b y the Presses de l'Universite de Rennes.

5.

For details on the method used in this analysis and the full list of references, see Jobert, 1994, and the findings used in m y essay 'Estam pe anglaise, estampe frangaise: une histoire commune?' published in O. Meslay, B. Jobert and A . Serullaz, D'Outre-Manche. L'art britannique dans les collections publiques frangaises, exh. cat. (Paris: Musee du Louvre, 1994).

6.

No. 1053. The painting is at the Chancellerie des Universites in Paris. See M eslay et a l, eds, 1994, no. 28, pp. 66-7, and Olivier Meslay, 'Sir Thomas Lawrence and France. The portrait of the due de Richelieu', in British Art Journal, 3, (2), Spring 2002, pp. 44-9.

7.

No. 2227 in the supplement to the booklet, the painting is not identified. Most critics only mentioned the Due de Richelieu, for example Le Moniteur w hich only refers to a 'single w ork' (no. 13 4 7 , 1 2 December 1824, p. 1602). The two most prominent critics w ho mentioned another portrait were A . Jal, L'Artiste et le philosophe, entretiens critiques sur le Salon de 1824 (Paris: Ponthieu, 1824), pp. 1 6 1 - 3 , and Marie Aycard and Ferdinand Flocon, Salon de 1824 (Paris, 1824), p. 63. See also Revue critique des productions de peinture, sculpture, et gravure exposees au Salon de 1824 par M*** (Paris, 1824), p. 195 (this is a compilation of reviews first published in L'Oriflamme).

8.

Jal, 1824, p. 46.

9. 10.

Aycard and Flocon, 1824, p. 62. Fabien Pillet, Une Matinee au Salon, ou les peintres de Tecole passes en revue. Critique des tableaux et sculptures de Vexposition de 1824 (Paris: Delaunay, 1824), p. 73.

11.

Revue critique, 1824, p. 195.

12.

Article mentioned above, n. 7, p. 1602.

13 .

Aycard and Flocon, 1824, pp. 63-4.

14.

L. S. Belloc, 'Portrait du Roi par Sir Thomas Lawrence', in Revue encyclopedique, 1 8 2 3 ,1 (February).

15.

Pierre-Alexandre Coupin, in Revue encyclopedique, 1824, 4 (December), pp. 5 9 7 -8 (article on Lawrence). See also 1825, 1 (January), pp. 3 1 3 - 1 6 (article on Constable, Bonington and the other British landscapists) and pp. 3 19 -2 0 (on English watercolourists).

16.

N os 1503 and 1504 of the booklet respectively for the first two canvases, no. 1683 in the second supplement for the third, Portrait de Mile ***, portrait aux trois crayons. Most probably executed during Lawrence's last visit to Paris, this w as one of the few w orks in French ownership - in this case the model herself (still a young w om an at the time, she married in 1834) - and as such qualifying as a possible entry to the Salon. She bequeathed it to the Louvre in 1872; all of which, together with the description of the painting in the booklet, leads me to suggest this identification. The portrait w as in the exhibition M eslay et al., eds, 1994, p- 254, no. 168.

17.

See inter alia Le Figaro, 19 Novem ber 1827, p. 8 1 1 ; the Annales de la Litterature et des Arts, 3 1 (1828), p. 20; La Nouvelle Annee litteraire, 1 ,1 8 2 7 , p. 110 ; Le Corsaire, 7 January, 1828, p. 2, for similar view s. Le Nouveau Journal de Paris is much harsher (22 December, 1827, p. 3), as is Coupin in the Revue encyclopedique, 1828, 1 (January), p. 316 . Delecluze only mentions the painting - 'so graceful and fantastic' - in passing {Journal des Debats, 20 December 1827, p. 1). For a picturesque account of the cabal organized b y the admirers of Master Lambton (who unfortunately cannot be identified with accuracy; however, according to the unnamed author, they belonged to the most refined circles in Paris), see Le Nouveau Journal de Paris, 24 Novem ber 1827, p. 3.

18.

VObservateur litteraire et dramatique, no. 9 8 ,1 2 January 1828, pp. 7-8. Le Nouveau Journal de Paris, 22 December 1827, p. 3, is highly critical of the portrait of the Duchesse de Berry; see also Le Journal du Commerce, no. 2916, 24 December 1827, p. 2; La Gazette de France, 16 February 1828, p. 3; A . Jal, Esquisses, croquis, pochades et tout ce qu'on voudra sur le Salon de 1827, pp. 227 -8 . VObservateur des Beaux-Arts, while of the same opinion as the above, is less critical in tone ( 1 6 ,1 June 1828, p. 61).

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19.

This expression w as used by several papers, in particular Le Figaro and Le Nouveau Journal de Paris.

20.

Le Nouveau Journal de Paris on the Duchesse de Berry.

2 1.

Stendhal, 'Salon de 18 24 ' (first published in Le Journal de Paris), in Melanges d'art (Paris: Le Divan, 1932), pp. 79-80.

22. 23.

Stendhal, 'Des Beaux-Arts et du caractere fran^ais' (published in July-October 1828 in La Revue

trimestrielle), ibid., pp. 158 -9 .

N os 10 4 9 -10 53 of the booklet: Portrait en pied de M. le colonel Cradock, Portrait de madame la comtesse Minto avec ses deux enfants, Portrait de M. le general comte de Flahaut, Portrait de Vamiral Codrington and several other unidentified portraits under the same number.

24.

On H ayter's artistocratic connections and the effet de mode in his favour, see in particular three extensive reviews b y A . Jal, Salon de 18 3 1, Ebauches critiques (Paris: A . J. Denain, 18 3 1), esp. pp. 3 1 - 8 ('De M. Hayter, et par contre-coup de M. Kinson'), pp. 5 3 -4 and p. 107; by Charles Lenormant in Le Temps (republished in 'Salon de 1 8 3 1 ' in Les Artistes contemporains, 1, Paris, 18 33, pp. 5 4 -5 ; and anon., in La France nouvelle, 25 July 18 3 1, p. 1.

25.

F. S. Melchior, 'Lettres sur Paris', in Le Voleur, 30 June 18 3 1, p. 1.

26.

C. Lenormant, see n. 24, pp. 54 -5.

27.

E. Delacroix, 'Thom as Lawrence. Portrait de Pie V II', in Revue de Paris, 1829, pp. 10 9 -13 , later published in CEuvres litteraires, vol. II (Paris: G. Cres and Co., 1923), pp. 15 7 -6 2 .

28.

Fifty canvases b y Reynolds and forty-three b y Lawrence were shown at the British Institution. See the letter dated 3 July 18 3 3 in A . Joubin, Correspondance generate de Eugene Delacroix (Paris: Plon, 1936), vol. i, p. 36 1.

29.

E. Delacroix, Journal, 18 22-18 6 3, A. Joubin, ed., revised b y R. Labourdette (Paris: Plon, 1980), PPA u gust 1855) and p. 763 (8 February i860).

30.

Letter of 3 1 December, 1858 in Joubin, ed., 1938, p. 57.

533-4 (27

31.

Delacroix, 1980, p. 820.

32.

'Thom as Lawrence', Journal des Artistes, 14 February 1830, p. 135.

33.

'Artistes celebres de notre temps. No. 1. Thomas Lawrence', in Revue britannique, December 18 3 1, pp. 1 7 4 -8 4 (the passage quoted here is on p. 184). Article adapted from the Edinburgh Review.

34.

'Des portraits de Lawrence', in VArtiste, 1 0 ,1 8 3 5 , pp. 4 7 -8 (portraits of L ad y G rey and L ad y Dover) and 1 ,1 8 3 8 , p .3 1 6 . y ’

35.

P. G., 'Sir Thomas Lawrence', in Les Beaux-Arts, vol. 2 ,18 4 3 , pp. 16 1- 5 .

36.

Revue britannique, December 1 8 3 1, p. 176.

37.

T. Gautier, 'Peintres anglais. I. Lawrence', L'Artiste, 14 ,1 8 6 2 , p. 19 1.

38.

VArtiste, 1 0 ,1 8 3 5 , pp. 47-8 .

39.

Revue britannique, December 18 3 1, pp. 17 4 -5 .

40.

Delacroix, 1829, p. 1 5 7 (see n. 27).

4 1.

For this I am relying on catalogues of sales that included engravings and were held in Paris from 1780 to 1780 (see Jobert, 1994).

42.

On Wilkie s sojourn in Paris, see A . Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie, with his Journals, Tours and Critical Remarks on Works of Art, with a Selection from his Correspondence, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1843), including a reproduction of Wilkie's journal during his first visit to France ('Journal of a Tour to Paris'), vol. i, pp. 3 8 9 -4 3 1. See also B. R. Haydon, Diary, (eds E. Willard and B. Pope), vol. i (Cambridge, Mass.: Plarvard University Press, i960), pp. 3 5 7 -7 5 .

43.

Cunningham, 1843, vol. i, p. 428.

44.

See Cunningham, 1843, vol. i, pp. 4 1 4 -1 6 , and M. T. S. Raimbach, Memoirs and Recollections of the Late Abraham Raimbach, esq., Engraver (London, privately printed, 1843), pp. 5 2 -3 .

45.

Quoted b y A . S. Marks in 'Wilkie and the reproductive print', in H. A . D. Miles and D. Blayney Brown, eds, Sir David Wilkie of Scotland (17 8 3-18 4 1), exh. cat. (Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art, 1987), p. 93. Leslie rates Wilkie's reputation in Paris as 'very high'.

46.

Sale of 8 -1 0 February 18 19 , no. 96.

47.

Sale of 1 9 - 3 1 March 18 2 1, no. 986.

14 4 48.

49.

ENGLISH ACCENTS L'Aveugle joueur de violon, Les Politiques de village and Le Doigt Coupe published by Jazet and Bance in 18 19 -2 0 ; Le Lapin sur le mur, b y Jazet, Bance et Aum ont in 1822; Le Jour de loyer and Le Colin-Maillard b y Bance in 1823. He then executed La Lettre de recommandation, Les Moissonneurs, Orage pendant la Moisson in 1824, La Fete de village, Le Petit Commissionnaire (1828), Le Seigneur du village and La Noce du village (1834) all published b y Jazet and Aumont. M. Pointon, "From blind m an's buff to Le Colin-Maillard: Wilkie and his French audience', Oxford

Art Journal, 7 (1984), pp. 1 5 -2 5 . 50.

On Wilkie's second sojourn, see Cunningham, 1843, vol. ii, pp. 1 4 3 -5 7 ; also Raimbach, 1843, esp. pp. 128-4 8. The account of the visit to Fabre is given b y Wilkie in a letter published b y Cunningham, 1843, vol. ii, pp. 456-8.

5 1.

See G. Planche, 'Histoire et philosophic de Tart. vn. L'ecole anglaise en 1835. Exposition de Somerset House', in Revue des Deux-Mondes, 15 June 1835, vol. ii, pp. 674-6.

52.

Revue encyclopedique, 18 19 , iii, p. 16 7, and 18 2 1, i, p. 601.

53.

On John Martin's engravings, see M. J. Campbell, J. D. Wees and R. A . Burnett, John Martin, Visionary Printmaker (Campbell Fine A rt/Y ork City A rt Gallery, 1992).

54.

Jean Seznec, John Martin en France (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), passim.

55.

Later on Jazet did other sheets in the same style: Destruction de Ninive after Martin (Jazet and Aumont, 18 3 1), Destruction de Babylone after Martin and Depart des Israelites de VEgypte after Roberts (Jazet and Aumont, 1834).

56.

F., 'Gravure. Le Deluge. Le Passage de la Mer Rouge. Josue arretant le soleil. Le Festin de Balthazar, imitation des gravures anglaises par Jazet', in Journal des Artistes, 1829, 2 (13 December), pp. 3 7 3 -5 .

57.

N ot to be confused with the engraver D avid Lucas, w ho worked with Constable. On copies b y J. G. S. Lucas, see Campbell et al., 1992, pp. 1 8 4 ,1 8 6 and 196.

58.

S., 'John Martin. Le Deluge, La Tour de Babel, Le Festin de Balthazar, La Destruction de Babylone, Les Israelites, La Crucifixion, La Plaie des Tenebres, Le Dernier Jour de Pompei, par Lucas', LArtiste, 1 0 ,1 8 3 5 , pp. 1 4 -1 5 .

59.

R. M., 'John Martin', in Journal des Artistes, 18 35, 2, pp. 1 5 2 -7 .

60.

T. Thore (pseudonym W. Burger), 'John Martin', in Charles Blanc, ed., Histoire des peintres de toutes les ecoles. Ecole anglaise (Paris, 1863), p. 3. Planche's quotation is from his Salon of 1834.

61.

L. Peisse, Le Temps, 29 March 18 35, p. 3.

62.

H. de Viel-Castel, Journal des jeunes personnes, 1 April 18 35, 3, p. 1 3 1 ; see also E. Seguin, La Tribune politique et litteraire, 16 March 18 35, p. 3.

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6.1 Vallou de Villeneuve after Thomas Lawrence, The Daughters of Charles B. Calmady, Esq., 1827, lithograph

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6.2 J. Gigoux after Thomas Lawrence, Nature, lithograph

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6.3 }. J. Belnos after Thomas Lawrence, La Tendresse Maternelle (Motherly Tenderness), 1836, lithograph

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6.4 G. Desmaisons after Thomas Lawrence, Une Jeune Veuve (A Young Widow), lithograph

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6.5 Goula after David Wilkie, Le Doigt Coupe (The Cut Finger), published 1826 by A. Raimbach, London, and Fr. Janet, Paris, etching and engraving

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6.6 J. P. M. Jazet after David Wilkie, Le Petit Commissionaire (The Errand Boy), 1828, etching and aquatint

Barthelemy Jobert

6.7 J. P. M. Jazet after John Martin, Le Deluge (The Deluge), 1829, etching and aquatint

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7

'Consciously objective and moral': Hogarth and the political artist in Vormdrz Germany William Vaughan

Admiration for Hogarth as a moralist and graphic artist has been continuous in Germany since the artist's own lifetime. His Analysis of Beauty (1753) was published in Hanover in a translation by Christlob Mylius only a year after it appeared in England, and was taken far more seriously as a contribution to aesthetics in Germany than in the artist's native country.1 It was a German philosopher and scientist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), who produced the most serious and extensive commentaries on the key 'progresses' in the eighteenth century.2 Respect for Hogarth persisted amongst artists through to the twentieth century. When setting out to produce his excoriating satires on capitalist society in Germany immediately after the First World War, the Dadaist Georg Grosz wanted, according to his friend Harry Kessler 'to become the "German Hogarth", consciously objective and moral; to preach, better, to reform - he has no interest in abstract art'.3 This long and extensive interest in Hogarth - which was charted recently in the exhibition Marriage a-la-mode: Hogarth und seine deutschen Bewunderer (Hogarth and his German Admirers) held in Berlin and Frankfurt in 19994 forms an interesting counterpoint to the somewhat chequered reputation that the artist has enjoyed in his own country. However, we should recognize that different agendas have been in progress. Nobody in Britain in the eighteenth century or later would have denied Hogarth's brilliance as a satirist, or the originality of his 'modem moral subjects' as an artistic genre. Doubts were expressed early, on the other hand, about his suitability as a prototype for art of elevated aesthetic value. Despite the artist's own ambitions to succeed as a 'fine' artist, the model he provided could not easily be reconciled with the Italian and French styles that had status internationally and that were being promoted in polite society. Recent readings of Hogarth's work have stressed the extent to which his art had an intellectual base, and have shown how far his work was from being the simple outpourings of a populist.5Yet, valuable

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though this corrective is to the image of Hogarth as a 'people's p a in te rit still does not undermine the principal point that, for the arbiters of taste in eighteenth-century Britain, from Lord Burlington to Reynolds, Hogarth was not to be recommended as an example to follow in aesthetic matters. In other countries, where anxieties about the relationship of Hogarth to the identity of a national school of 'high' art was not an issue, the artist's qualities as a satirist could be appreciated in a less guarded manner. In many European countries, particularly those of northern and eastern Europe, he could be celebrated as a product of a society whose modernity and democratic principles were to be admired. Above all, it was his ability to act as a social critic that gained him respect. Artists restricted by the controls of a police state could look with envy at a painter who could expose the follies of his age in such a biting manner. It was for this reason that Hogarth had such a high place in Tzarist Russia. 'Help me to eclipse the celebrated Hogarth,' exclaimed the St Petersburg artist Pavel Fedotov in the 1840s when embarking on his own satires on contemporary life.6 As in Russia, the respect for Hogarth in Germany depended on the perception of him as an essentially political artist; one who painted or drew with a mission, who was a moralist and who saw the visual arts as properly engaging with the problems of his age through a direct and unvarnished observation of the world. It was this quality that led the German art historian Richard Muther to hail Hogarth as the key figure for the development of modem art. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, when realism was held to be the essence of modernity, Muther claimed it was Hogarth's example that had caused England 'to be the first to tread the artistic path that was later to be pursued by all nations'.7 It is no accident, either, that it should be Friedrich Antal, an emigre from Nazi Germany with strong left-wing sympathies, who wrote the work that placed Hogarth firmly in a tradition of radical realist art, Hogarth and his Place in European Art.8

The V o rm d rz period

In this chapter I will be focusing on a particular point in the history of German admiration for Hogarth. This is the role that he played as an inspiration for German artists during the period when the country was moving towards the uprising of March 1848, which is known in Germany as the Vormdrz (before March) period. It was a critical moment, when liberal and radical movements were working together to bring about the introduction of democratic regimes in the largely authoritarian German states and hoping further to achieve a united Germany under a democratically elected Government.9 In the event, the uprising failed in its objectives. Yet it had dramatic consequences, the

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most notable being the shift away from radical politics that led eventually to the unification of Germany as an Imperial Reich under Prussia in 1871, and the removal of Karl Marx from his native Rhineland to exile in London, where he became the leading ideologue of international communism. The Vormiirz period was one when political commentary by artists was taken very seriously. Inspired to a large extent by radical writers such as Marx himself, Ferdinand Freiligarth and Georg Weerth, many saw themselves as having a key part to play in raising public consciousness about social and political issues. Nor was this a matter to be left simply to cartoonists and pictorial journalists. It was one engaged in, as will be seen, by many of the leading history painters of the day, including Wilhelm Kaulbach (1804-74), principal painter to King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The culminating artistic outcome of this process was Auch ein Totentanz in den Jahre 1848 (Another Dance of Death in the Year 1848), the series of wood engravings designed by Alfred Rethel (1816-59) as a commentary on the 1848 Revolution. While responses can be found in art centres throughout Germany, the key place for political commentary was Diisseldorf. Set in the midst of one of the most rapidly industrializing parts of Germany, Diisseldorf was a centre for radical commentary. Amongst its leading history painters was Karl Friedrich Lessing (1808-80), whose Hussite Sermon was widely interpreted as a critique of the contemporary power of the Catholic church in the Rhineland.10 Diisseldorf was also the place where the painter most engaged in radical criticism, Johann Peter Hasenclever (1810-53), studied and later displayed his work. The use of Hogarth's work as a paradigm in this climate of politically engaged art certainly merits investigation - perhaps all the more since the Hogarthian influence on Diisseldorf artists was not an area covered in the exhibition on Hogarth and his German Admirers in 1999.12

Objections to Hogarth: the problem of the aesthetic

Before proceeding to a study of Hogarth's reputation and influence in the Vormiirz period it should be noted that admiration for Hogarth, while great, had never been unqualified. There were those who echoed the view prevalent in Britain that Hogarth had moved beyond the bounds of taste and refinement in his eagerness to observe the unsightly and make emphatic critical comment. The Berlin painter and engraver Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801) was one of the earliest to be inspired by Hogarth in shaping his own observations on contemporary society. Yet he himself was uneasy with the epithet 'German Hogarth' that was applied to him, claiming 'not to be at peace with him [Hogarth] in many aspects of art, no matter how much I

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admire him in others'.13 While Chodowiecki shared Hogarth's keenness to record the foibles of society, he did so with more restraint, exuding a geniality that lacked the bite of the English master; particularly in the tasteful illustrations that he produced for almanacs. It might well be that Chodowiecki was responding here to the constraints imposed by the aesthetic preferences of the time. This was certainly the experience of his younger contemporary Johann Heinrich Ramberg (1763-1840) who, following a stay in London, modelled the subject matter of his art closely on Hogarth's moral cycles, but who felt unable to emulate the English master's acerbic vigour. 'You say I should be a German Hogarth,' he complained to one admirer, 'and admonish me for frittering away my talent on little almanac engravings ... But how could I become a German Hogarth without having a particular desire to starve?'14 It would seem that despite admiration for Hogarth, the possibility of emulating him in Germany in the eighteenth century was hampered both by the taste for more subdued pictorial modes and by the censorship that operated in most German states to counter any form of subversive social or political commentary. With the growth of idealist aesthetics - particularly after the publication of Kant's Critique of Judgement in 1790 - the concept of art as instructing through uplifting ennoblement grew, throwing even greater doubts on the effectiveness of Hogarth's prosaically detailed and satirical manner. The poet Schiller may have invoked the name of Hogarth in some early comic drawings of his own in 1786.15 In his celebrated Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1793, however, he presented a very different concept of the role of the arts. Although he studied Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty while preparing to write his letters,16 he made it clear in the resultant text that it was the evocation of beauty that was the principal gift of the artist to humanity, a beauty that could inspire and uplift in times of crisis. The idea that art played a political role through the inspiring image of beauty, rather than through observation and commentary had serious implications for the Hogarthian method. This idealism was taken even further by the Romantics, who stressed the transformative power of beauty. For August Wilhelm Schlegel, one of the leading critics associated with the movement, Hogarth's methods were too prosaic to effect such changes. In a celebrated essay on Flaxman's Outlines to Homer, published in the journal Athenaeum in 1799, he contrasted the 'magical' effects of Flaxman's succinct line with what he considered to be the overelaborate details in Hogarth's narratives, as conveyed to him in the engravings after these by Ernst Ludwig Riepenhausen that were published in Hanover in 1797 in connection with Lichtenberg's Commentaries.17 For Schlegel, the Outline represented the essence of the poetic in the visual arts. It suggested form without elaborating it, inciting the imagination to expand and complete the picture. It was a similar interest in

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the mysterious powers of the visual that caused the Romantics to take an interest in the enigmatic form of the hieroglyph and the emotive properties of colour. Hogarth's method was, for them, too prosaic in character to be worthy of admiration. While Hogarth fell foul of high theory in the early nineteenth century, this did not prevent key aspects of his art being adopted in popular forms of illustration - including Outline.18 Despite Schlegel's promotion of Flaxman's synoptic method, most Outline artists found this too severe for their purposes and resorted to augmenting their succinct designs with details and pictorial analogies that echoed those in Hogarth's engravings. This was the formula that lay behind the work of Moritz Retzsch (1779-1857), a Saxon artist now little known but highly popular in the early nineteenth century for his Outlines both to German classics such as Goethe's Faust (1816) and to the plays of Shakespeare.19 Thus in Retzsch's Outlines to Hamlet (1828) the artist included a prologue in which the murder of Hamlet's father is enacted with portentous commentary (Figure 7.1). With one hand the usurper Claudius pours the poison into the ear of the sleeping King, while with the other he lays hands on the crown on the table by his side. Above stands the figure of justice, a sign of the retribution to come. As Boettiger makes clear, the scene is laced with symbolic detail. The table on which the crown rests 'stands upon lion's claws above which is carved a cherub's head. The artist designed the lion's claws to denote strength, and the cherub's head clemency, upon which the power of all crowns and thrones is founded.'20One detail that Boettiger dwells on with particular pleasure is that of a spider descending 'upon a butterfly, which has innocently settled on a pot of flowers'. He relates this to the depiction of the spider on the poor box in the wedding scene of The Rake's Progress by 'the great satirist Hogarth'.

Critical responses to Hogarth in Vormarz Germany Retzsch's employment of Hogarthian motifs in his Shakespearean Outlines can be seen as a prelude to the more widespread exploration of the English master's art that occurred in the 1830s. Awareness of Hogarth had perhaps been increased by the re-evaluation of the artist currently taking place in Britain - a process that was set underway by the exhibition of the artist's work at the British Institution in 1814 and which culminated in the position he was given as 'founder' of the British School of art in Allan Cunningham's Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1829-33).21 The enthusiasm for Hogarth can also be seen as part of a wider interest in English art in Germany at the time, and in particular the painting of genre and social satire. The greatest living British artist for most Germans of the time

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was Wilkie, whose Reading of the Will had been acquired by the King of Bavaria with great acclaim in 1820.22 Furthermore the prints of Gillray, Cruikshank and Rowlandson were all very well known. Undoubtedly these all played a part in the development of a contemporary interest in the depiction of modern life. Yet within this band of influence the Hogarthian element can still be discerned. It was his insistent morality, the sustained social critique, that was singled out. Such qualities in Hogarth became all the more admired as there was a growing concern about more recent British art, which was held to have become undermined by the exhibition culture of Britain and given way to rank commercialism. Whereas in the eighteenth century the new commercial society in Britain had been admired for its modernity and liberality, there was now a fear that the process had gone too far, and that luxury had bred corruptness. The chilling sight of contemporary London, with its grotesque contrasts of wealth and poverty seemed to confirm most visitors in this opinion.23 Such views can be found in the commentaries on contemporary British art published in Germany by visitors. The most celebrated of these were by Johann Valentin Adrian, an admirer of British literature who translated many works by Scott and edited a complete German edition of Byron in 1830.24 He was also the author of the two most widely read accounts of Britain in Germany during the period, Bilder aus England (Pictures from England) (1827-28) and Skizzen aus England (Sketches from England) (1830-33).25 Despite the pictorial-sounding titles, these 'pictures' and 'sketches' from England consist mainly of observations on the life and literature rather than the fine art of the country. However, they do contain a number of chapters dealing with the latter. His sections on the fine arts in Britain are based on a report on a visit to England originally published in the Kunst-Blatt in 1823.26 They paint a picture of British art as being entirely ruled by the market place. Adrian comments that art can be seen everywhere - but almost always in a commercial context - whether in the print shops in the Strand, in the galleries of celebrated artists, like Lawrence and West (where, he notes, the ubiquitous charge of a shilling entrance is made), or in the exhibition halls. 'English art,' he concludes, 'is a hired serving-wench of the exigencies of the day, of the transient fashion, of vanity.'27 He also suggests that matters are getting worse - something that might be symbolized by the accession in 1820 of the fashionable portrait painter Lawrence to the post of President of the Royal Academy on the death of its former incumbent, the history painter Benjamin West. Adrian detected signs of what was, in his eyes, the detrimental effect of Lawrence's 'false striving after brilliance and ostentation'28 in the Academy exhibition. Here he is saddened to see even the much admired Wilkie abandoning his former meticulous manner in favour of the 'chasing after effect' of the day, particularly in his portrait of the Duke of York: 'Effect makes

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this picture also one without purpose, it is just fireworks and theatrical glitter ... in short this is not the old Wilkie, this is just one more person who seeks to outbid the president in stage-effects.'29 Similar views were expressed in later publications that reported to Germany the state of art in Britain. The most important were those by Johann David Passavant and Gustav Waagen.30Both were published in books widely read in Germany in the 1830s as well as being translated and published in Britain. Like other observers, Passavant felt that historical art in Britain was at a low ebb. However he did concede that 'subject and landscape-painting are greatly in vogue, and this province of the art displays specimens of first-rate talent'. Furthermore, he considered this to be a common contemporary problem for he adds that this situation is 'a fact which is the less remarkable when we consider that almost the same occurs on the continent'.31 The 'almost' is telling: For Passavant was well aware that in Germany, where a sense of the public promotion of the ideal persisted, strenuous efforts were being made to counter the growing effects of commercial exhibition. When Passavant went to the National Gallery, by contrast, he was deeply impressed by both the moral force and pictorial quality of Hogarth's Marriage a la mode series. The presence of Hogarth's uplifting works in this publicly funded collection of old masters stressed the point that such institutions as the National Gallery could preserve excellence in a way that contemporary temporary exhibitions - dependent upon commercial success for their survival - could not. It is a sign of how well known Hogarth was in Germany at that time that Passavant felt there was no need to describe Hogarth's work in detail because 'the masterly descriptions by Lichtenberg, as well as numerous engravings, have rendered them so familiar to the German reader, that I shall merely add a few words'.32 Similar views were expressed by Gustav Waagen on his slightly later art tour of Britain. Like Passavant he felt that the works of Hogarth were so well known in Germany 'by the engravings, and the written descriptions of Lichtenberg, that it would be superfluous for me to enter into a particular account of them'.33 Yet he did express genuine surprise at the quality of Hogarth as a painter, particularly since English commentators seemed not to have noticed this: But what surprises me is the eminent merit of these works as paintings, since Hogarth's own countryman, Horace Walpole, says he had little merit as a painter. All the more delicate shades of his humour are here marked in his heads with consummate skill and freedom, and every other part executed with the same decision ... in colouring they stand in a far higher rank than numerous productions of the most modern English school, with all glaring inharmonious colours.34

Like Passavant, Waagen felt that the British School had degenerated in recent times 'into a flimsiness and negligence, so that but a very superficial and general image is given of every object'.35

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Pictorial responses to Hogarth in Munich and Berlin: Kaulbach, Genelli and Menzel Both Passavant and Waagen were emphatic supporters of the Nazarenes and Revivalist art in Germany. In view of this, their promotion of Hogarth seems to be particularly striking. As has already been noted, it was amongst the historical artists who emerged from the Academies then dominated by the Nazarenes that interest in Hogarth seems to have been strongest. In Munich, where Peter Cornelius was director, the work of Wilhelm Kaulbach, the up and coming history painter who was soon to replace Cornelius in royal favour, experienced this tension in particular. Although he painted massive canvases and frescoes on German history and mythology - notably the Hunnenschlacht (1834),36he also produced satires - including ones on Ludwig himself. Some of his satirical work took the form of Hogarthian cycles, including six illustrations to Schiller's moral tale Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (1831-36).37 These, which exist now as drawings in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Berlin National Gallery, did not lead to a publication. However they did encourage Kaulbach to become engaged on another series of his own based on the concept of The Rake's Progress. The last scene in this planned cycle was the madhouse, a work that gained considerable success as a print in its own right (Figure 7.2). It is clear that the image of the madhouse has direct references to the final scene of Hogarth's own Rake's Progress (Figure 7.3). Yet Kaulbach's work has a more monumental and introspective mood than Hogarth's. The space is unspecific and the figures, more academic in construction, are larger and more focus is placed on delusion. In the place of the gawping public visitors of Hogarth's print, the figures are observed simply by the more neutral warder in the background. In his own account Kaulbach talked of his distress at having seen these figures in real life and how the picture had come out later as a kind of therapy.38 Despite the success of The Madhouse and the invitation to produce a cycle of engravings on the theme, Kaulbach did not pursue this genre further. By the time the print appeared in 1835 he was already receiving patronage from Ludwig I and perhaps did not want to compromise his position as a history painter with further satirical illustrations.29 It was in fact the Berlin artist Bonaventura Genelli who was to produce the most explicit imitations of Hogarth's cycles in the period with his Outline cycles Aus dem Leben eines Wiistlings (Scenes from the Life of a Rake) (1840 published 1866) and Das Leben einer Hexe (The Life of a Witch) (1843). As with Kaulbach, Genelli's approach can be seen to involve an attempt to 'ennoble' Hogarth. For while he takes Hogarthian themes, he casts his figures in Grecian form. He does not have individual characters either. His figures are

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'types'. The life of the witch, moreover, has a Faustian dimension. For in it a young girl sells herself to the forces of darkness but eventually finds salvation.40 While capital of the up and coming state of Prussia, Berlin did not enjoy the prestige of Munich as an artistic centre and its academy and monarchy had less of a hold on the patronage of art. There was a stronger element of bourgeois patronage, and a great encouragement of Realist art. This is seen paradigmatically in the success of Adolf Menzel as a painter. Menzel openly professed his adherence to a realistic representation of both the past and the present, making his idol his Berlin forbear Daniel Chodowiecki. He used Hogarth as a model, too, in a literal sense, copying figures from that artist's March to Finchley when preparing his illustrations to the life of Frederick the Great.41 Menzel may well have been affected by the fact that Hogarth had dedicated his print of the March to Finchley to Frederick the Great - largely because a dedication had been refused by George II who objected to the lowlife elements of the work. However it is clear that this was also due to Menzel's admiration of Hogarth as a forerunner of his own kind of urban realism. It is perhaps not too fanciful to imagine that the crowd in the foreground of his famous picture of the honouring of those fallen in the March uprising owes something to that crowd of Londoners surrounding soldiers in Hogarth's March to Finchley.

Pictorial responses to Hogarth in Diisseldorf: Hasenclever and Rethel

It was in Diisseldorf, however, that Hogarth's art could be seen to be used most directly as a means of engaging with contemporary social and political issues. Diisseldorf was the place in which the traditional and the modem came into greatest conflict. The Academy there was intended to be a 'flagship' of idealist art. It was re-established under the aegis of Cornelius and later taken on by his disciple, the Berlin painter Wilhelm Schadow. Yet despite the rigorous training, the artists there were all too aware of the modern world developing around them and the burgeoning new bourgeois audience for art. As has already been mentioned, much of the historical painting there had thinly veiled allusions in it to modem events. However there were also more direct opponents. The most extreme was Johann Peter Hasenclever, a pupil of the academy, who was dismissed for the light-hearted nature of his work.42 Hasenclever early developed a reputation for satirical commentaries on modern life inspired by both Hogarth and Wilkie. The most successful of these particularly amongst the more progressive members of the Rhineland bourgeoisie - was his Jobsiade cycle.43Based on the satirical verse novel by Karl

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Arnold Kortum44 it tells the story of a small-town German philistine's progress to public office. One of the scenes, fobs as a Student (Figure 7.4) has a direct quotation from Hogarth's rake orgy scene in it (Figure 7.5). This is so obvious that it must have had the character of a tribute to an old master. In his painted sketch for this work Hasenclever also showed a certain Hogarthian brio. As has already been mentioned, Hogarth's qualities as a painter were frequently commented on by visitors to London after his pictures became available to public inspection with the opening of the National Gallery and the establishment of the Soane Museum.45However, it is unclear whether Hasenclever made this journey, and he may have been responding more to a general and widely acknowledged British bravura manner. It may be that Hasenclever was also influenced by Hogarth's method, his opposition of the study of nature to the artifice of the academies. He certainly produced a notable satire on academic method in his large-scale painting Atelierszene (Figure 7.6). In this Hasenclever and his friends are shown in one of the studios of the Diisseldorf Academy posing in mockery of the idealized forms they had been taught to absorb into their art. One mimicks the classical sculpture the Borghese Fighter, which can be seen as a cast, removed to the left. The contrast of forms stresses the gap between the real and the ideal. Such mockery echoes the anti-Academie satires of Hogarth, such as Boys Peeping at Nature.46 Interestingly this spoof on teaching methods was bought by the local Kunstverein and presented to a member.47 Hasenclever was closer than other Diisseldorf artists to the radical political circles of the Rhineland. He was a particular friend of the campaigning poet Ferdinand Freiligarth, and seems to have been encouraged by him to engage in political issues in his art.48 The radicals, for their part, celebrated Hasenclever as a painter who, like Hogarth, penetrated the realities of the social scene. It is typical of this attitude that, in the novelist and journalist Georg Weerth's Humoristische Skizzen aus dem deutschen Handelsleben (Humorous Sketches from German Commercial Life), Hasenclever should be linked with Hogarth for his powers of satirical observation when the author describes a bookkeeper in frock coat incongruously armed with sabre and dagger to assume the role of a town guard: 'The whole made an ensemble that would have set the graver of a Hogarth or the brush of a Hasenclever feverishly to work. Herr Lenz resembled a soldier from the army of Sir John Falstaff.'49 Weerth, who had travelled extensively in Britain in the mid-i840s, had a good first-hand knowledge of Hogarth's works. Indeed, it was while he was watching an English worker's festival in 1845 that he first associated the names of Hogarth and Hasenclever, when seeking to describe a particularly outlandish costume.50

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It was a similar set of interests that led Hasenclever to produce his monumental radical work A Magistrature in the Year 1848,51 as a commentary on the events following the 1848 uprising (Figure 7.7). For while the bourgeoisie had initially supported the populace in their armed protest, they rapidly climbed down when matters seemed to be getting out of hand. Hasenclever's picture records a key moment in the growing rupture between the classes, when a group of artisans burst into a session of the Dusseldorf town magistrature to present a petition with their demands. The artist shows the officials in disarray at this intrusion. It is striking that he has satirized the shrinking representatives of bourgeois officialdom with Hogarthian sharpness, while the spokesman for the workers stands as a heroic upright figure, offering their petition to the magistrature.52 The final version of the picture was enthusiastically received in left-wing circles. Taken out of Germany by Freiligarth when fleeing as a result of the collapse of the Revolutionary movement, the painting was toured in both England and the United States. It was sympathetically received in both countries, possibly, as Boime suggests, because of the concerted promotional support it was getting in the highest radical circles.53When put on show in the Crystal Palace in New York it received the ultimate accolade of a commendation from Karl Marx. Writing to the editor of the New York newspaper Daily Tribune, Marx commented on the vividness with which the artist had represented the split between the interests of the workers and the bourgeoisie that he himself had described in his own earlier reports to the paper. He concluded: 'What the writer could only dissect, the eminent painter has reproduced in all its dramatic vitality.'54 Yet despite such promotion, Hasenclever's heroic picture of proletarian protest rapidly fell into oblivion. In Germany there would have been little chance of such a subversive work gaining public recognition; although a sketch for it was acquired by the Dusseldorf Kunstverein, where radical sympathies still abounded. The picture itself was bought by a private American patron and disappeared from public view for nearly a century. The image of the 1848 uprising that remained in people's minds was not that of active protesters, but of an anonymous group of victims. This was the image at the centre of the celebrated cycle Another Dance of Death from the Year 1848 by Alfred Rethel. Although a fellow student at the Dusseldorf Academy, the careers and views of Rethel and Hasenclever differ in almost every respect. Hasenclever was dismissed from the Dusseldorf Academy because of the Director Schadow's disapproval of his light-hearted and satirical work. Rethel was the Director's favourite pupil, a youth with all the earnestness and idealism of the Nazarenes. Rethel left the Dusseldorf Academy too, but in his case it was to study at a purer source of Nazarene idealism, under Philip Veit in Frankfurt. While Hasenclever found his

164 ENGLISH ACCENTS support from the bourgeoisie with his humorous and satirical genre paintings, Rethel was supported - as a true history painter should be - by the public authorities, winning a competition in 1840 to decorate the Town Hall at Aachen (incidentally his home town) for a series of murals on the life of Charlemagne. Even while performing this public function, he was not pleasing bourgeois taste. He annoyed the town councillors by stressing Charlemagne's pan-European vision rather than promoting Aachen as the emperor's favourite residence. When a dispute arose about this, Rethel sought the aid of the Prussian authorities to overrule local objections about his version of history. Rethel was also a staunch opponent of 'red revolution'. Unlike Menzel and Hasenclever, he viewed the uprisings of 1848 with horror. It was his wish to expose the evils of these, rather than a desire to satirize the bourgeoisie, that encouraged him to enter the public arena with his own form of graphic satire. Recognizing that high-minded history paintings on the walls of town councils were not likely to address the populace, he deliberately turned to the engraved cycle as a way of reaching the 'Volk' in the way that Hogarth and so many other graphic artists had done before him. Rethel's decision to mount the hustings, so to speak, and address a public through the 'popular' medium of the print was undoubtedly influenced by a number of factors. He must have felt the need for immediate action - for action more direct than the slow effect that could be achieved, perhaps over generations, by exemplary public murals. He was aware, too, of the huge amount of visual material that had emerged as a result of the uprisings, of both a journalistic and propagandist kind. Amongst the many technical revolutions of the 1840s was that which created a regular illustrated press. Popular imagery was not now confined to the broadsheet, with its relatively naive techniques and small local distribution. Since the invention of stereotyping around the 1840s it could now be used in national newspapers. The revolution of 1848 was the first to receive detailed and continuous pictorial commentary. Rethel, like all other adults in Germany, must have been constantly barraged with these images of uprisings and heroic popular triumphs, as well as with the savage political commentaries of the pictorial satirists. It was this world that he now sought to challenge, drawing upon older traditions of folk imagery. The most famous of these was Holbein's Dance of Death series of woodcuts. Designed between 1523 and 1526, these were a product of the period of social unrest in Germany in the early sixteenth century. The theme of the dance of death itself was of earlier origin. To Rethel it may well seem to have had the timelessness of a universal truth. It was also constant in being used as a warning against greed and materialism, and a focusing of attention towards the spiritual. In one sense egalitarian - for death comes to all, great or small it could also be used as an argument for the status quo. Accept your lot; there

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are more important things to worry about. We must also remember that death and punishment were the most visible outcomes of revolution. Some, such as Hasenclever's friend the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, used the death of the revolutionaries as an invocation to the survivors to stay true to the principle fought for. In his celebrated poem Die Toten an die Lebenden (The Dead to the Living) written in July 1848,55 the dead of the barricades speak to those still living to exhort them not to betray them by abandoning the struggle. After the poem was published, Freiligarth was imprisoned and put on trial on the charge of provoking the citizenry to insurrection through his work. When he was acquitted on 3 October there were widespread celebrations in Diisseldorf. The poem became known as the 'Republican catechism for the German people'. As Boime has shown, it was this climate of support that encouraged the artisans to present their petition to the Diisseldorf magistrature a week later.56 This is the moment that was recorded by Hasenclever in his Magistrature in the Year 1848. It also seems to have been the moment that stimulated Rethel to make his own intervention. Freiligarth's poem has the dead inciting the living to fight. Rethel would take the same theme. In his case, however, the result will not be the triumph of a new order. It will simply result in the triumph of death itself. Like Hasenclever, Rethel worked under the inspiration of a poet. In his case it was the poet and painter Robert Reinick. Reinick was later to provide the verse to accompany the cycle and they clearly debated the structure and theme very closely. Rightly, they calculated that a visual narrative on the theme of death would have a more immediate and far-reaching impact than a poem on its own. While appealing to a sense of tradition with its simulation of 'woodcut' graphic style, the pictorial language used in the work is not entirely archaic. The forms are drawn with a clear sense of modern conventions. As Boime has put it, 'Despite its conspicuous dependence on the medieval broadside, Rethel's visual conception is strikingly modern in its eccentric and unstable perspectives.'57 Such instability can be seen in the dynamic diagonals that pervade the designs, moving them forward in a continuous narrative. Its narrative sequence is clearly one of the ways in which it differs markedly from the Dance of Death cycle of Holbein in which there is no such continuity. When modernizing the theme, Rethel might have been drawing directly on the example provided by Hogarth. In invoking the name of Hogarth in connection with Rethel's cycle, I realize that I am being conjectural. In contrast to the other German artists cited in this article, there is no documentary evidence to support the notion that Rethel was working with Hogarth in mind. Yet despite this, I still feel it is profitable to consider Another Dance of Death in the context of the interest in Hogarth in Germany at the time. It is possible, indeed, that Rethel might have wished to cast his cycle in a Hogarthian form as a direct challenge to Hasenclever, who

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had, ever since the success of the Jobsiade been thought of in radical circles as the German equivalent of the English master. Even if Rethel was not paying a personal tribute to Hogarth by adopting a comparable narrative form, he would have been able to draw upon the common knowledge of Hogarth's narrative to enhance the effectiveness of his own modern morality. As in Hogarth's Harlot, Rethel's Another Dance of Death tells its narrative in six scenes, beginning with seduction and ending in death. Yet there is one way in which Hogarth and Rethel's narratives differ. Like Rethel, Hogarth was 'exposing' the vices of the modem city. But the latter saw this process very much in terms of individual morality. It is the 'folly' of the main characters that is the cause of their downfall. They are victims of their own mistakes. Rethel's victims are 'the people' who remain broad and anonymous. His unifying character is the seducer, the figure of Death as a personification of revolution. One further visual point needs to be made. As with Hogarth, the narrative gains power by the formal continuities between the scenes. This is not simply a matter of iconography. It is also one of movement, the modern 'unstable perspectives' that Boime detected. Death moves in on the modem town in plate 2, approaching it from the left. The implication in the compositions is that it is 'somewhere on the left' that the allegorical scene in the first plate took place. Later, in the last scene, Death returns towards the left when he has completed his business. The 'left' side remains the side of subversion and insurrection throughout the series. In plate 4 Death hands the sword of rebellion to the people from the left. In scene 5 (Figure 7.8) the workers fall in the left part of the picture, while the fire of the unseen soldiers quelling the rebellion comes from the right. This scene also shows death revealing his true identity - drawing aside his coat to show the skeleton beneath - with ghastly glee. This might, too, be seen as a Hogarthian tribute. For Hogarth was celebrated for the ghoulish savagery that could often be found in his humour, what the French poet Baudelaire was later to call the 'comedy in the funeral'.58 Baudelaire, who deliberately reversed the saying common in Parisian studios that Hogarth's work was the 'funeral of comedy', argued in favour of the English master's macabre relish, which he saw as a necessary corollary of his position as an unflinching moralist facing the truth about human mortality. This quality was noted by contemporaries, too, in Rethel's cycle. As William Bell Scott remarked, death appeared to be enjoying himself hugely throughout the whole of his destructive enterprise.59 Rethel's prints were employed in the years to come by the Prussian authorities as propaganda prints to warn against further attempts at rebellion.60 It is unclear, however, whether Rethel himself would have supported such usage. Scholars disagree about the extent to which the artist was himself a counter-revolutionary. While Boime sees him unequivocably as a reactionary, others have argued that he was more a liberal regretting the

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outcome of the breakdown of negotiated reform.61 Whatever the truth about this, it is clear that Rethel depicts the workers as victims rather than as a malevolent force. It is this that makes the story he tells such a tragic and moving one. Certainly Rethel had borrowed the Hogarthian apparatus of Hasenclever. As Boime has observed, 'He had discovered that the way to drive the dagger into his enemies was to borrow their own weapons.'62But in doing so, it might be argued, he returned the process to the deeper human purposes that Hogarth's own art engages with. With the retrenchment of political radicalism after 1848, this Hogarthian moment in German art also disappeared. Both Hasenclever and Rethel had suffered disillusion - that seems to have hastened the death of the former and the collapse into insanity of the latter, in both cases in 1853. Menzel, meanwhile, left his depiction of the honouring of the fallen insurgents of 1848 deliberately unfinished as a protest against the 'lies' that this apparently concessionary moment turned out to have represented. In his later works technical virtuosity takes pride of place above observation and commentary. Yet the idea of the artist as a serious social and political commentator remained, and when it returned as an active principle, in Berlin in the 1920s, it was the art of Hogarth, once again, that provided the challenge.

Notes 1.

Johannes Dobai, Die Kunstliteratur des Klassizismus und Romantik in England, vol. ii, 175 0 -9 0 (Bern,

2.

Frederick Burwick, 'The hermeneutics of Lichtenberg's interpretation of Hogarth', in Lessing Yearbook, 19 ,1 9 8 7 , pp. 16 7 -9 1.

1975)/ PP- 696ft.

3.

H arry G raf Kessler, Tagebiicher 19 18 -3 7 , ed. W olfgang Pfeiffer-Belli (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), p. 114 .

4.

Martina Dillmann and Claude Keisch, eds, Marriage a-la-mode: Hogarth und seine deutschen Bewunderer (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/ Stadelsches Kunstinstitut und Stadtische Galerie Frankfurt am Main, 1999). This catalogue contains an important series of essays on German responses to Hogarth, which are referred to below.

5.

See in particular D avid Bindman, Hogarth and his Times: Serious Comedy (London: British Museum, 1997) and Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, eds, The Other Hogarth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

6. 7.

See R. P. Gray, '"H e lp me to eclipse the celebrated H ogarth": the reception of Hogarth in Russia',

Apollo, 15 3 , (471) (M ay 2001), pp. 23-30 .

'England berufen war, Kunstlerish am friihesten in die Bahnen einzulenken, die spater von alien Nationen beschritten w urden.' Richard Muther, Geschichte der Englischen Malerei (Berlin, 1903), p.12.

8.

F. Antal, Hogarth and his Place in European Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).

9.

D avid Blackboume, Fontana History of Germany 1780-1918; The Long Nineteenth Century (London: Fontana Press, 1997), pp. 13 6 -7 .

10.

W. Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 2nd edn, pp. 224 -5.

11.

Wolfgang Hiitt, Die Diisseldorfer Malerschule (Leipzig, 1964), pp. 55ft, 117ft.

12.

see above, n. 4.

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13.

'in vielen Theilen der Kunst nicht mit ihm zu frieden, w ie w ohl ich ihn in andem bewundere', Letter to F. J. Bertuch, 9 M ay 177 5. Charlotte Steinbrucker, ed., Daniel Chodowiecki, Briefe zwischen ihm und seinen Zeitgenossen, 1 (Berlin, 1919), p. 99.

14.

'sie sagen ich hatte ain deutscher Hogarth werden sollen, und schimpfen auf mich, dafl ich mein Talent an Almanachkiipferchen versplittem hatte - . . . w ie hatte ich denn auch ein deutscher Hogarth werden konnen, ohne ganz besondere Lust zu verhungem ?' J. Chr. Hoffmeister, Johann Heinrich Ramberg in seinen Werken dargestellt (Hannover, 1877), p. 58.

15.

Dillmann and Keisch, eds, 1999, p. 1 3 1.

16.

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. Elizabeth M . Wilkinson and L. A . W illoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. lxxiv.

17.

W. Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press,

18.

ibid., pp. I23ff.

1979)/ PP - 124“ 5 -

19.

ibid., pp. 12 3 -5 4 .

20.

C. A . Boettiger et a l, Erleuterungen der Umrisse von Moritz Retzsch zu Shakespeare's Dramatischen werke, complete in one volume (Leipzig: Ernst Fleischer, 1847), p. iv.

2 1.

'Before the birth of Hogarth, there are m any centuries in w hich w e relied w holly on foreign skill. With him, and after him, arose a succession of eminent painters, w ho have spread the fame of British art far and w ide.' Allan Cunningham, The Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects (London: John Murray, 18 2 9 -3 3 , 6 vols), vol. i, p. 2.

22.

E. Riihmer, Neue Pinakothek Miinchen, exh. cat. (Neue Pinakothek, Munich, 1981), pp. 366-7.

23.

W. Vaughan, Taste and the multitude: The Somerset House exhibitions in Continental eyes', in D. Solkin, ed., Art on the Line; The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780 to 1836 (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 24 4 -5.

24.

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 1875, vol. i, p. 123.

25.

Bilder aus England, 2 vols (Frankfurt, 18 27-28 ); Skizzen aus England, 2 vols (Frankfurt,1830 -33).

26.

Kunst-Blatt, 1823, nos. 1 0 1 ,1 0 2 and 103.

27.

'die englische Kunst ist eine feile Dienerin der Bediirfnisse des Tages, der voriibergehenden Mode, der Eitelkeit'. Kunst-Blatt, 1 8 2 3 ,1 0 1 , p. 403.

28.

'einem falschen Streben nach Glanz und Prunk'. Kunst-Blatt, 1 8 2 3 ,1 0 1 , p. 404.

29.

'Effekt macht denn dieses Gemalde auch ohne Zw eck, allein es ist Knallfeuer, Theaterflitter,... Kurz, das ist nicht der alte Wilkie, das ist ein anderer, der den Prasidenten gerade jetzt im Knalleffekt iiberbieten w ill.' Kunst-Blatt, 1 8 2 3 ,1 0 2 , p. 405.

30.

For a further account of Passavant and Waagen in Britain at this time see Vaughan, 2001, pp. 2 4 3 -5 2.

3 1.

Johann D avid Passavant, Tour of a German Artist in England (London: Saunders and Ottley, 1836), vol. i, p. 241.

32.

Passavant, 1836, vol. i, p. 50.

33.

G. Waagen, Works of Art and Artists in England (London: John Murray, 1838), vol. i, p. 232.

34.

ibid., p .2 3 3 .

35.

ibid., p. 232.

36.

Neue Pinakothek Miinchen, 19 8 1, p. 147.

37.

Martin Dillmann, 'Kaulbach: Ein Historienmaler begegnet Hogarth', in Dillmann and Keisch, eds,

38.

Werner Hofmann, Bruchlinien. Aufsdtze zur Kunst des 19. Jhs. (Munich: Prestel, 1979), p. 223.

1999, p. 154.

39.

Fritz von Ostini, Wilhelm Von Kaulbach (Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1906), pp. 65ff. See also Dillmann and Keisch, eds, 1999, pp. 1 3 4 -5 .

40.

Martin Dillmann, 'Genelli: Die Holle wieder in Jenseits', in Dillmann and Keisch, eds, 1999, p. 138.

4 1.

Claude Keisch, 'Satire, Ironie, Tiefere Bedeutung: Hogarth, M e n z e l', Dillmann and Keisch, eds, 1999, pp. 14 0 -5.

42.

Hanna

Bestvater-Hasenclever,

(Recklinghausen: Bongers, 1979).

J.

P.

Hasenclever.

ein

zvacher Zeitgenosse

des

Biedermeier

William Vaughan

169

43.

W. Hutt, Die Diisseldorfer Malerschule (Leipzig, 1964), pp. 60-64.

44.

Karl Arnold Kortum, Jobsiade, oder Leben, Meinung und Taten des Hieronymus Jobs, dem Kandidaten (Munster und Hamm, 1784).

45.

Bindman, 1997, p. 37.

46.

1 7 3 1 . Used as a subscription ticket to the Harlot's Progress. See R. Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 3rd revised edn (London, 1989), cat. 120, pp. 7 5 ff. The influence of Hogarth's prints on Hasenclever is noted b y Hutt in the second edition of Die Diisseldorfer Malerschule (Leipzig: Seeman Verlag, 1984), p. 98, without reference to specific instances.

47.

I. Markowitz, Die Diisseldorfer Malerschule (Kunstmuseum, Diisseldorf, 1969), pp. 1 1 6 - 1 7 .

48.

For a detailed account of Hasenclever's political position, see A . Boime, 'Social identity and political authority in the response of two Prussian painters to the Revolution of 1848', Art History, 13 , (3) (September 1990) pp. 34 4-8 7, esp. pp. 348-6 5.

49.

'Die weifle, altertiimliche Weste in Falten geschniirt durch den Riemen des Sabelgehanges, der schwarze Frack mit den dolchspitzen Zipfeln, die Brille endlich und die rote N ase nicht zu vergessen - alles das machte ein Ensemble, w as den Griffel eines Hogarth oder den Pinsel eines Hasenclever auf der Stelle in die geschaftigste Bewegung gesetzt haben wiirde. Der Herr Lenz glich einem Soldaten aus der Arm ee Sir John Falstaffs'. Georg Weerth, Humoristische Skizzen aus dem deutschen Handelsleben, XI. Der Buchhalter Lenz als Biirgergardist, first published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 16 June 1848. See Georg Weerth, Sdmtliche Werke, 5 vols (Leipzig: Aufbau Verlag, 1956), vol. ii p. 368.

50.

Skizzen aus dem sozialen und politischen Leben der Briten. VIII Das Blumenfest der englischen Arbeiter. First published in Gesellschaftspiegel, 1 ,1 8 4 5 , pp. 180-87. Sdmtliche Werke, 5, p. 239.

5 1.

Boime entitles the picture Workers Confronting the Magistrature. I prefer the title used b y Hiitt, Ein Magistrat aus dem Jahre 1848 (i.e. A Magistrature in the Year 1848), as this is apparently the earliest known name for the picture. It should be noted too that, as w ell as a number of sketches and studies for the work, there are two finished versions, one n ow in the Bergisches Museum, Schloss Burg an der W upper (1848-49) and one in the Kunstmuseum Diisseldorf (1850). Both are reproduced in Boime, 1990, w ho discusses the significance of changes between the two versions.

52.

It has been pointed out to me b y Christiana Payne that the overall composition of Hasenclever's

Magistrat bears a striking resemblance to that of Charles West Cope's The Board of Guardians - the Widow's Application for Bread (18 4 1, present whereabouts unknown, repr. C. Payne, Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780-1890 (Yale University Press, 1993), p. 1 1 , fig. 2). The adaptation of an English picture dealing with a social problem and involving the confrontation of rich and poor w ould certainly fit in with Hasenclever's interests. 53.

Boime, 1990, p. 357.

54.

New York Daily Tribune, 3844, 1 2 A u gust 1853. See Karl M arx - Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), vol. ix, pp. 2 2 7 -3 7 . B is now believed that this article, like so much of the journalism that appeared under M arx's name, w as actually written b y Engels.

55.

Published in Neuere politische und soziale Gedichte, 18 4 9 -5 1. See A . D. Gorella and H. von Heppe, eds, Kunst der Biirgerlichen Revolution 1830-1848/9 (Berlin: N eue Gesellschaft fiir bildende Kunst, 1973),

p. 92. 56.

Boime, 1990, p. 362.

57.

A . Boime, 'A lfred Rethel's Counterrevolutionary Death Dance', Art Bulletin, 73 (December 1991), p. 582.

58.

'Hogarth, l'enterrement du comique! J'aimerais mieux dire que c'est le comique dans l'enterrement'. First published in Le Present, 15 October 1857. C. Baudelaire, ed. H. Lemaitre, Curiosites esthetiques (Paris: Editions G am ier Freres, 1962), p. 292.

59.

William Bell Scott, Gems of Modern German Art (London: Routledge & Sons, 1873), p. 76.

60.

Gorella and von Heppe, eds, Kunst der Biirgerlichen Revolution, 19 73, pp. 18 and 14 1.

61.

Boime, 19 9 1, pp. 577-9 8. For the view of Rethel as a liberal see in particular P. Paret, "The German Revolution of 1848 and Rethel's Dance of Death', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xvii, 1 (1986), pp. 2 3 3 -5 5 .

62.

Boime, 199 1, p. 598.

17 0

7.1

ENGLISH ACCENTS

Moritz Retzsch, Hamlet; Prologue, 1828, etching, 19.5 x 28.2 cm

William Vaughan

171

7.2 Wilhelm Kaulbach, Das Narrenhaus (The Madhouse), 1833-34, pencil, 43.9 x 60.8 cm

17 2

7.3

ENGLISH ACCENTS

William Hogarth, Tom Rakewell in the Madhouse', Scene VIII, from 77ze Rake's

Progress, 1735, engraving, 30.2 x 38 cm

William Vaughan

74 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Jobs als Student (Jobs as a Student), c. 1844, oil on canvas, 25.3 x 31.5 cm

173

174

7.5

ENGLISH ACCENTS

William Hogarth, Tom Rakewell in the Rose Tavern', Scene III, from The Rake's

Progress, 1735, oil on canvas, 62.5 x 75 cm

William Vaughan

7.6 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Atelierszene (Studio Scene), 1836, oil on canvas, 72 x 88 cm

175

176

ENGLISH ACCENTS

7.7 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Ein Magistrat aus dem Jahre 1848 (A Magistrature in the Year 1848), 1848-49, oil on canvas, 91 x 13 1 cm

William Vaughan

177

7.8 Adolf Rethel, Auch ein Totentanz aus dem Jahre 1848 (Another Dance of Death from the Year 1848 ), Scene 5,1848, wood engraving, 24.7 x 30.4 cm

8

American landscape painting and the European paradigm Andrew Wilton

There is no doubt that [the] influence of nature on Art, among a simple people who have not already acquired a style, is much more marked and much more permanent than in the case of a people whose civilisation is of very ancient date, and who already possessed Art-history and Art prejudices when the taste for landscape arose. The same may be said in the case of a people who carry into a new country, having its own physical peculiarities, the traditions of their mother country.1

The author of these remarks could hardly, in 1863, have failed to think of America as a 'new country' into which the arts were being 'carried', and indeed he goes on to name the United States specifically. He was writing particularly about the role of geology in landscape painting, and was very much alive to the insights into that science that were being opened up in the United States. This essay attempts to explore some of the ways the unique 'physical peculiarities' of America were used by artists to transform the traditions that they had inherited, if not from their 'mother country', then at any rate from the European cultures on which, inevitably, their art was founded. Most artists subscribed to the rigorous Christian principles that governed American life, and conceived the natural world as an embodiment of divine truth. They painted their pictures in an almost sacramental spirit of awe: the ancient idea of the Sublime imbues their work, however simple or modest in scale or subject. But while the religious fervour of many of the American painters has rightly been emphasized, less has been said in this context of the parallel movements in early nineteenth-century Britain. The millenarian visions of John Martin are frequently invoked as background to the not dissimilar compositions of Thomas Cole - especially, for instance, the Heavenly City that rears up into the Empyrean in the background of Cole's Voyage of Life: Youth (1840), which owes much of its imagery to Martin's mezzotint plates for Paradise Lost,2 but seems to have repaid the favour in

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Martin's late canvas, The Plains of Heaven.3 Cole came from Lancashire, where he trained as an engraver for fabric printing. In that part of the country various extreme manifestations of nonconformity, including millenarianism, were rife, and Cole's early years were spent in circumstances not dissimilar to those of Martin, who was bom in Northumberland and began his career as a coach painter.4 There are many subtler resonances. The Calvinist intensity of Cole and Frederic Edwin Church can be seen as an American echo not only of the nonconformists but also of the devout High Anglicanism of Samuel Palmer, whose rapt meditations on moonlit pastoral scenes, painted in the late 1820s and early 1830s, explore moods similar to those that imbue Church's early landscapes - Twilight, 'short arbiter 'twixt Day and Night' of 1830, for example;5 although Palmer's scale embodies in almost caricatured form the tight, enclosed 'dells, and nooks, and comers of Paradise'6that he perceived in the Kentish fields and lanes, while Church's view is expansive, embodying its intensity in a miraculous stillness and twilight calm. One might equally draw a parallel between the watercolours that Palmer produced later in his career and the twilit landscapes of Sanford Robinson Gifford. In both, the expressive possibilities of warm, rich colour are used to achieve what subdued, crepuscular shades had done earlier. The 'barred' sunsets and deep, warm shadows of Palmer's Milton subjects, dating from the 1860s and 1870s, are comparable with, for example, the golden dusks of Gifford's A Lake Twilight (1861) and Hunter Mountain, Twilight (1866).7 Palmer's technique of layering watercolour, gum and bodycolour in densely worked strata is more opaque than Gifford's transparent applications of thin oil-based pigment, but achieves a similar intensity. Gifford may have seen work by Palmer when he was in England in 1835, by which time Palmer's later manner was established; but he was probably also influenced by the striking intensity of mood achieved by the Pre-Raphaelite painters in their landscapes of this period. He may also have admired, as Cropsey was to do,8 the art of the young Sidney Richard Percy, who in his early career followed Pre-Raphaelite practices and painted Scottish mountain subjects with an intensity that approaches that of the Pre-Raphaelites. For those who were unable to visit England, Pre-Raphaelitism was available only in glimpses. The British Loan Exhibition that toured the East Coast cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington in 1857 and 1838 was a commercial venture, originally proposed by the London dealer Ernest Gambart, but in the event organized by a group that included William Michael Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, with Gambart shipping out a large group of watercolours to complement the oil paintings.9It is interesting that two out of the six on the panel cited in the Philadelphia catalogue were PreRaphaelites, for Pre-Raphaelitism did not figure prominently in the selection

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of works, and of those pictures that could safely be so labelled few were landscapes: John Brett's Glacier of Rosenlaui and John William Inchbold's Noonday on the Lake of Thun, Switzerland and Spring10 were the most obvious examples. Richard Redgrave, with his The Mid-Wood Shade, exemplified the genre of woodland interior that was popular in England and even more so in Germany. It became a mainstay of American landscape: the enclosed view of tree-stems around a rocky stream or waterfall, foliage blending into semidarkness a little way from the foreground, sunlight flickering and dappling leaves and rock-surfaces with perhaps a glimpse of sky. In such subjects something of the private, sequestered atmosphere of Palmer's sheepfolds and narrow lanes is created in the context of a much vaster natural setting. What came to be known as 'Pre-Raphaelitism' in America was characterized for the most part by a concern with precise observation, often of plants rendered with Ruskinian conscientiousness, rather than 'PreRaphaelite' subject matter or painting technique. There was always a strong pull towards the expansive rather than the minute, a pull exerted, of course, by the scale of the landscape itself. Even when working on a small canvas or sheet of paper, as in the oil sketches that so many of them regularly made, the Americans tended to breadth rather than to miniature. The European tradition of plein air painting was well established by the mid century, and the Americans contributed significantly to it, working on the intimate scale of the Romantic naturalists and the watercolourists. In this format their practice is closest to that of their European counterparts. But the most consistently precise in handling of the oil-sketchers was Albert Bierstadt, trained in the academic school of Diisseldorf, rather than any directly Ruskin-influenced artist.11 For Frederic Church, the oil sketch was a medium of great importance for the gathering of information and the working out of pictorial ideas; but he came to use it increasingly as a means of private meditation after he built a large house, Olana, overlooking the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River in 1872. Some of the oil studies of these later years are remarkably free in execution. Jasper Francis Cropsey produced what is surely the locus classicus of what came to be known - very much after the event - as the 'Hudson River School'. It is his painting of Autumn on the Hudson River (i860), on a canvas that measures over 1.5 metres in height, and some 2.75 metres in width (Figure 8.1). The composition is couched in a traditional Claudean format which imposes a sense of order that at first sight seems at odds with the undisciplined wildness of the scenery it depicts. It was in fact characteristic of Cropsey to use this compositional scheme; he had recourse to it throughout his career, and all his major works rely on it in one form or another. In Autumn on the Hudson River it is not merely a formula: it plays an important role in establishing the historical and conceptual parameters of the work.

182 ENGLISH ACCENTS Cropsey painted his large picture in London in 1858-60. He had been in the British capital since 1856, and enjoyed a considerable reputation there. In 1857 his Indian Summer Morning in the White Mountains, America was shown at the Royal Academy (cat. no. 497), and was hailed as 'the work of an excellent American painter recently settled in London'. The critic went on to detail his approbation and reservations: 'it is highly coloured, and every incidental line in the mountains has been signalised. The water is extremely well rendered, being distinguished in an eminent degree by that which is wanting in other parts - breadth!'12 The English critics were anxious to admire American landscape paintings. They were tiring of the work that the now ageing British landscapists were offering year after year. They were very aware that Turner was dead, and 'so little remembered that "It really seems as if he had never lived!" is a melancholy ejaculation frequent with us at our public exhibitions'.13 PreRaphaelitism was a controversial development, far from universally approved; besides, it was not primarily a landscape style. The appearance of Church's great picture of Niagara Falls14 in 1857 suggested that America might supply the deficit, and Cropsey was an American actually living in London. Although he might well paint subjects derived from his experiences in Europe, then, there was psychological pressure on him to paint American scenes. American landscape was still unknown, and it had not been painted to death by generations of Romantics. Another Cropsey was also in the Academy's 1857 show: The Clove, Catskill Mountains, America (cat. no. 983). Two pieces appeared the following year, Brambles (cat. no. 112) and The Backwoods of America (cat. no. 741), and a further three in 1859, displaying his topographical range: Sea Coast at West Lulworth, Dorset (cat. no. 318), Vermont Scenery - America (cat. no. 721) and Paestum (cat. no. 924). In i860 three views of the Isle of Wight were hung at the Academy. Autumn on the Hudson he exhibited privately, following a tradition that had been popular with artists in London since the late eighteenth century. Some of the most conspicuous exponents of the tradition were in fact Americans: Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley and Mather Brown all displayed work in settings intended to enhance the theatrical suggestions of their subjects by isolating them and designing suitable lighting. During his time in London, Cropsey looked carefully at a range of work by his English contemporaries. As an exhibitor at the Academy and elsewhere, he had opportunity enough to assess the competition. He met many artists in the course of his stay, among them some of the most celebrated landscape painters of the time: for example, J. B. Pyne, the Bristol follower of Turner, was at the Hampstead Conversazione which he attended with the marine painter E. W. Cooke on 24 February 1858; and at an 'Amateurs Conversazione' on

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4 March, he saw work by Henry Bryan Willis, whose 'clever drawings particularly cattle' he admired.15 He recorded an interest, too, in the young Sidney Richard Percy, although he considered that Percy's works seem very hard, and mechanical - with a kind of tea-tray dexterity - they are very free in handling, rather good, and brilliant in colour, true excepting the manerisms [sic] to nature quite perfect in the arrangements of the composition, drawing, &c. but everywhere is visable [sic] this peculiar cleverness so positively that I can not take entire pleasure in his works.16

His reservations centred on the fact that he found 'nothing that aims at a story, or purpose beyond the landscape element' - the kind of overriding purpose that he did find in 'Turner and our Cole'.17 On 10 April he noted with pleasure the work of the Newcastle artist Thomas Miles Richardson: exquisite passages of colour in the Italian subjects ... There is however a great error in the shadows. The entire front of a house has the sun shining on it, while all through the other parts the sun throws other objects in the shadow. ... it requires the sun in two opposite directions - and yet it is so beautiful in pictorial effect that I would almost rather not have it changed.18

One of the most suggestive of his encounters is that with the elderly watercolourist David Cox, on 27 July 1858 - less than a year before Cox's death. Beyond referring to him as 'distinguished', Cropsey says nothing about this survivor from the great age of the Romantic watercolour, but it seems at least possible that he was able to learn from Cox's late style. During the 1850s Cox produced a number of works in oil, imitating both the mood and the general texture of his watercolours of this period, which are characterized by a broad, flickering touch and a freedom of execution among the most 'advanced' in Europe at the time.19 Cropsey had already, in the late 1840s, adopted Cole's broken handling, a pragmatic use of paint dictated by the nature and texture of each subject. Cox's style may have demonstrated a resolution of the awkwardness that Cropsey found in Percy's work: that freedom combined with hardness which suggested superficiality. Cox showed that a broad manner could convey both delicacy of atmosphere and warmth of feeling. Although this is speculative, it seems possible that such considerations, in relation to the artists he found around him in London, influenced Cropsey's procedure in his numerous oil sketches as well as in the larger finished canvases. Autumn on the Hudson River was a picture into which he poured a great deal of himself. First and foremost, it encapsulated for him what it meant to be American. It embodied the nostalgia of an exile for his homeland, what he called 'my native and beloved country'20 and was conceived as propaganda for that land. As he put it in his explanatory note on the picture: 'The object of the painter has been chiefly to convey an idea of the vastness and magnitude of the American landscape, the clearness and beauty of the atmosphere, and

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the richness and variety of colour in the foliage during the "Indian Summer" period of the year.'21 He began his picture on 27 July 1858, at a period when he was experiencing financial problems of a kind that dogged him throughout most of his stay in England. He and his wife were made much of in society - lionized indeed; but purchasers for his work were in short supply, and he was wondering whether he would have done better to stay at home: all my old commissions about a years work, pay poorly - that the chances of getting ahead seems small. I find in looking over my book that I have about 3 1 yet to do, which will yield only 3500 [i.e. dollars]. They are all of medium size and will be a great deal of labour. When I compare this with the flattering accounts I have just had from my artist brothers in America, it does not leave over agreeable reflections.22

He needed to draw attention to himself in a more decisive way than he had managed previously, and the idea of the large, single picture exhibited on its own as a popular attraction had been firmly planted by Church's Niagara. One of the central impulses behind Cropsey's conception was the idea of the American landscape as an embodiment of national identity. This was not a new idea. The pioneer of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, Thomas Cole, had conceived his own art as a continuous celebration of nationhood in terms of the indigenous scenery of the country, 'a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest'.23 Church's Niagara had already equated grand scale with the sense of patriotic pride in the wonders of American nature. He showed it in a frame augmented by crimson draperies; and when he exhibited his next tour de force, a South American subject, The Heart of the Andes (1859), he devised an elaborate architectural proscenium surmounted by the portraits of three American presidents: an explicit linking of his achievement as an American painter - and, perhaps, explorer - with national achievement as a whole.24Cropsey chose his Hudson subject deliberately as one that had associations with national history. The hills he depicts in the distance are hills 'rendered classic to the Americans by Washington Irving having resided among them, and by the present residence of N Parker Willis, Miss Wetherell, and other literary people'.25 In both Niagara and The Heart of the Andes Church deliberately flouted the conventions of picturesque or ideal landscape composition as they had developed in Europe and, in particular, as they had been formulated in England in the late eighteenth century. Instead of the Claudean repoussoirs of tree-clumps or buildings, and the carefully varied but balanced elements of the picturesque landscape as defined by the Rev. William Gilpin, he opted in the Niagara for a bold horizontal stress that eliminates all merely 'pictorial' accessories, focusing with maximum power on the line of the water as it precipitates itself over the fall. In The Heart of the Andes he piled incident upon incident regardless of visual clarity or balance, seeking rather to convey by

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replication the irreducible complexity of tropical scenery - a picture in which, as Mark Twain put it, 'you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first'.26 At the same period, other artists were seeking ways to express the openness of the American landscape in boldly minimal compositions: at about this date Gifford, Heade and Kensett all experimented with wide horizons, empty foregrounds or blank skies. For his great American picture, Cropsey rejected this strategy, adhering to the Claudean model with a tenacity that is surprising considering his aim to explain the novelties of his country to a new audience. It is unlikely that he adopted the design out of deference for a convention that he knew the English would appreciate: his output as a whole shows that this format suited his temperament; he rarely deviated much from it. But his use of it here has a special resonance. It was a compositional type that had become particularly associated with J. M. W. Turner, whose admiration of Claude was lifelong, and whose adoption of the typical Claudean scheme began in his early twenties and continued throughout his career.27 (It should be interpolated that Church, too, favoured the Claudean scheme for subjects of many kinds, from the New England scenes of his youth to several of his later South American views.) One of the best-publicized art events of Cropsey's time in London was the opening to the public of displays of Turner's paintings at the National Gallery and Marlborough House in the late 1850s. Like most of his American 'artist brothers', Cropsey greatly admired Turner, whom he coupled with Thomas Cole as a master with special significance for him: 'In Turner and our Cole we always have something to abstract the mind. One is led to forget both self and picture in dreamy or abstract reasoning,' he wrote in his Journal in March 1858.28 He is likely therefore to have made a point of viewing the Turners when they came on show. Among them he would have seen the large picture - one of Turner's biggest - that had been exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819, England: Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday (Figure 8.2).29This is a picture that announces its national context in its title: the view from Richmond Hill, up the Thames towards Twickenham, is identified with an idea of 'England' and associated too with the head of state - the Prince of Wales had been Regent since 1808 and would assume the crown as George IV in 1820. In the lines of poetry that Turner appended to the catalogue entry for his picture, he also invoked a national literary figure who lived in the neighbourhood of the view: James Thomson, author of the Seasons, four long poems which had been established as a classic since their appearance in the 1730s. Thomson lived in Richmond, and another literary hero of Turner's, Alexander Pope, lived at Twickenham. Even closer to his heart, perhaps, was the memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Academy's first President, whom he greatly admired and who had lived in a house close to Turner's viewpoint on

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Richmond Hill. Turner himself had chosen to live nearby, building himself a small villa among the trees that fill the valley to the right of the river in his picture. The whole valley of the Thames, verdant, rich in history, had been described as an epitome of England in Thomson's Summer, which surveys the panorama of ... glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all The stretching landscape into smoke decays! Happy Britannia! where the Queen of Arts, Inspiring vigour, Liberty, abroad Walks unconfin'd even to thy farthest cots, And scatters plenty with unsparing hand.30

Richmond Hill, then, is a national picture, a river landscape with powerful cultural associations, exactly parallel to Cropsey's Autumn on the Hudson River. A topographical view, it employs the Claudean format loosely but very evidently, with trees grouped asymmetrically on either side of the vista through which the river flows - again, closely paralleled in Cropsey's composition. Turner's invocation of the Prince Regent is a striking, if purely coincidental, precedent for Church's gesture of crowning The Heart of the Andes with the portraits of presidents; Cropsey did not employ this device, as far as we know, but his accompanying commentary made it clear that he wished the public to comprehend a nexus of cultural ideas specific to America. He may well have hoped that Queen Victoria would take a personal interest in the picture: on 7 February 1861 he noted 'Wrote this morning to Sir Charles Phipps to ask if I might have the honor of exhibiting my picture to Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace.' In the event, Queen Victoria came to see Autumn on the Hudson River while it was being exhibited, and Cropsey and his family were presented at court in July. It may therefore be no coincidence that the next large canvas that he painted in London was a view from Richmond Hill, which he began in the late summer of 1862 (Figure 8.3): 'Have been occupied in sketching a large canvass, and preparing for commencing the picture, which is to be a view from the Star & Garter, Richmond Hill - 8 ft x 4.6 size.'31 He worked on it through the winter, and was ready to show it at Graves's gallery in March 1863.32 Its foreground, like that of Turner's Richmond Hill, is filled with figures enjoying the view, including fashionable ladies and gentlemen, children playing with a hoop (a hoop is prominent in Turner's picture), a self-portrait of Cropsey painting the subject (Turner shows a portfolio and painting equipment), and soldiers (military personnel figure in Turner's view). Cropsey's soldiers are a direct allusion to America: they are in the uniform of Union troops and bring to mind the Civil War that was raging in his homeland as Cropsey painted. While engaged on his Richmond subject, Cropsey may well have borne in

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mind Thomson's famous verses describing the scene.33 When he was at work on Autumn on the Hudson River, one of the literary figures who must have been in Cropsey's mind was the American poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant, whom he had seen a few days before he began to paint. On 27 July 1858 he wrote in his journal: on Sunday I could not get time [to write] for my friend Duggan would have me walk in the morning, and in the afternoon went to Hampstead to call on Mr Edwin Field and to give the children an airing on the heath. At Mr Fields we met Mr Cullen Bryant and his wife & daughter.34

This was the occasion on which they met David Cox, the topographical watercolourist Carl Haag and other 'distinguished artists'. And the next day's entry states: 'on Monday evening last (to day is Wednesday) we had Wm. Cullen Bryant with us - and his daughter - Mr Bryant looks patriarchal with his full white beard'.35 Bryant's had been a resonant voice in the evolution of American attitudes to landscape. He had been celebrated in 1849 as a founding figure of the newly emergent school when Durand painted his homage to Thomas Cole, Kindred Spirits in which Cole, fons et origo of modern American landscape painting, was depicted standing on a rocky ledge among the Catskills, in conversation with Bryant. Another of Durand's pictures paid direct tribute to a youthful poem of Bryant's, 'Thanatopsis',36which celebrated the eternal and immutable communion that human beings - and in particular Americans enjoy with their natural surroundings. Bryant had preached a greater understanding of nature to a population increasingly preoccupied with the material circumstances of urban life. He had been the first, in 1844, to advocate the establishment of a park in the middle of Manhattan which would recreate for city-dwellers something of the wilderness that lay all around them in the state of New York and beyond. By the time Cropsey was working on Autumn on the Hudson River, that park was in the process of being created by a journalist and architect, Frederick Law Olmstead, in collaboration with Calvert Vaux, the English-born architect who was later to help Church build Olana. Olmstead had travelled in England and had admired the parks of the English landscape gardeners Capability Brown, in the eighteenth century, and, in modem times, Sir Joseph Paxton. Only a few days earlier, on 22 July, the Cropseys had attended a 'grand dinner at Richmond - given in honor of Mr Mason our Paris Ambasador [sic]'. At the dinner, Mrs Cropsey 'was seated next to Sir Joseph Paxton ... she had a charming talk with Sir Joseph. He asked to know me - and I was introduced to him.'37 It would be pleasant to imagine the great gardener and the artist discussing the landscape of Richmond, and perhaps developing between them ideas concerning the interrelationship of river scenery and nationhood that Cropsey applied in his two pictures.

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In introducing the American wilderness into the centre of New York City, Bryant and Olmstead, along with several other advocates of the scheme, made a vital point about the way landscape was viewed. On the face of it, there was no possibility of 'domesticating' those vast and rugged spaces, converting them into consumable 'parks'. There was inevitably something inchoate, undigested, about them: that constituted a great part of their fascination. Much later, the writer Willa Cather was to suggest that the West was 'a country still waiting to be made into a landscape'.38Yet the perception of American scenery as park-like was inherent in the attitudes not only of citydwellers but also of the pioneer explorers of prairies and mountains. George Catlin, for instance, that early recorder in both words and paint of native American life in the West, had already in 1840 envisaged the territory beyond the Mississippi as 'a nation's park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty'.39That use harks back to the earliest of all meanings of 'park': the royal hunting ground, enclosed for the diversion of monarchs, inseparable from the notion of 'wildlife', which surely figures strongly in the American use of the term in the West. Catlin was in fact proposing a solution to the problem of the disappearing native population - a solution prophetic of future dispensations as much as being redolent of old attitudes: 'a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes'.40And the idea of a 'park' in the ancient, functional sense was not necessarily identical with the idea of scenery that might be accounted beautiful according to conventional aesthetic theory. When in 1863 Olmstead travelled West to take up the post of manager of a gold-mining estate in California, he imagined that he would discover a landscape that was 'dreary'; instead, he found places of natural beauty that took his breath away. The sequoia grove at Mariposa in the Sierra Nevada struck him as a collection of 'cathedral columns or gigantic organ pipes' - similes that had struck several Americans in their encounters with indigenous vegetation, and which signalled the continuing power of ancient images in assimilating new phenomena.41 He was likewise compelled to employ European parallels when he visited the Yosemite Valley a little later: he could describe the place as a 'chasm' with 'walls ... a quarter of a mile distant, each side - nearly half a mile in height - half a mile of perpendicular or overhanging rock in some places'. His final judgement, however, was: 'Of course it is awfully grand, but it is not frightful or fearful. It is sublimely beautiful, much more beautiful than I had supposed. The valley is as sweet & peaceful as the meadows of the [Warwickshire] Avon, and the sides are in many parts lovely with foliage and color.' It has been argued that Olmstead's response takes account of the contrast between rugged wilderness and fertile landscape;42but his comments

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suggest rather that his sense of the picturesque prompted the perception that the two were integral to a single coherent 'composition' that assembled itself according to time-honoured rules. The rocky cliffs and verdant valley were complementary in an entirely conventional way, 'beautiful' in the same way that the Avon valley was beautiful, although their scale was indeed 'sublime'. This was to appreciate Yosemite as 'park', and not as 'wilderness', which, as is implied in Willa Cather's use of the term, is defined as inchoate, disordered. Albert Bierstadt was demonstrating at this same period the extent to which Yosemite conformed to pictorial norms: his views in the valley are constructed on lines that are less surprising in their orthodoxy when we take Olmstead's comments into account. The combination of grand rocks and lush river valley actually to be found at Yosemite meant that Bierstadt needed few compositional tricks to bring home the drama of the place, beyond some considerable exaggeration of scale. His Diisseldorf training ensured that European assumptions about picture-making never left him. His art derives its tensions from the clash between traditional formal expectations of landscape painting and his wish to convey the spectacular qualities of the West. The underlying 'Europeanness' even of Bierstadt's most sensational Rocky Mountain subjects was picked up by English critics, who were bound to notice those aspects of his work that they recognized, and for which they had a ready-made vocabulary. They observed the connection in technical matters: It has been said by critics in Paris that the American school is an offshoot of the English. Bierstadt's magnificent picture, 'The Rocky Mountains/ proves, if proof were needed, the contrary. The work is a direct product of the Diisseldorf school. And surely much is this landscape to be admired for its modelled anatomy of mountain masses, for its grandeur in scale, for its wide reach over space, for its grasp and command of the elements of earth, water, sky. ... The colour, perhaps, is a little crude - a common infirmity in pictures of German descent. The management, however, of 'the clear-obscure' of light and shade, and glancing rays of dazzling sunshine, gives the whole scene somewhat of a poetic enchantment. Thus that hardness, almost, it would seem, inseparable from Diisseldorf landscapes, has been relieved.43

The critics discerned European references equally in Bierstadt's approach to his subject matter. When his large picture of Mount Hood (1865)44was shown in London in 1869-70, his work had been known in England for almost a decade. Yet the review that appeared in the Art-Journal for January 1870 persists in seeing the Western American landscape in terms of Europe: The spectator looks from the northern bank of the Columbia River,... upon a shadowed pool below, which recalls the memory of an Italian lake. Limestone rocks, of the clear bluish-grey familiar to the Scottish landscape painters, are in the foreground, close by which a troop of deer are tranquilly browsing ... Beyond the banks rise stupendous rifted cliffs, of some basaltic rock, not very dissimilar in its cleavage from the Italian tufa.45

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Even Americans were prepared to note parallels: the New York Post argued that 'that which Coleridge wrote of Mont Blanc may justly be quoted in connection with Mount Hood'.46Nancy Anderson has recently suggested that such a comment 'brought Americans full circle' - meaning that by this date the Americans had established their own landscape art and could now refer back once more, in a spirit of confident independence, to canonical descriptions of European scenery. This perhaps discounts to some extent the degree to which the subject matter selected by painters of landscape in the United States remained determined by what had for a hundred years been deemed picturesque. The scale was vaster, to be sure; but the elements remained constant: the snowy mountain, the still lake, the vertiginous cliffs, the columnar waterfall, the shaft of sunlight among storm-clouds. Bierstadt did not renounce these components; he orchestrated them with a new breadth of vision, and with a telling sense of the value of realistic detail in the composite effect. But he was not prepared to abandon the standard features of landscape, however vividly and freshly he observed them. He made paintings of what was already, in Willa Cather's sense, 'landscape'. Despite the fact that he travelled so far from the beaten track, he did not attempt to paint that which was 'still waiting' to be interpreted as art. One parallel that has not been considered is that between Bierstadt's vision of the Far West and the apocalyptic painters of the first half of the century. If there was a sense of fulfilment in the vision of that promised land - a 'Garden of Eden', as Bierstadt himself described Yosemite47 - there was also, perhaps, a sense that such paradisal beauty might be destroyed. It was vulnerable to precisely the 'haste and waste', in Kipling's phrase, that was overwhelming the primeval wilderness of the eastern states. Might not the very fact that men such as he, Bierstadt, had penetrated so far, and found what they saw so wonderful, constitute a threat to its very existence? In some of his magnificent descriptions of the Rocky Mountains, of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, there is detectable a note of prophetic warning. The ferocious storm that bursts across the rugged landscape of A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie (1866) (Figure 8.4) with its deep blacks and startling flashes of brightness, carries an echo of Martin's catastrophes, such as The Great Day of His Wrath (Figure 8.5). The lurid glow that floods into Yosemite in Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (1868) accompanied by low, sinister clouds that swoop in like a flock of menacing birds, is a reminiscence of the vengeful fires that drive Adam and Eve from Eden in Thomas Cole's picture of the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, dating from 1828 (Figure 8.6).48 Bierstadt even sharpens the towering crags to approximate more closely to the fantastic pinnacles of rock that stand at the gateway to Cole's Paradise. Yosemite's conformity to pictorial norms may be one reason why it was the first location to be designated by Congress an area of special natural interest

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'for public use, resort and recreation', an area in due course to be designated a National Park. The term itself was first employed in relation to the Yellowstone region, which acquired National Park status in 1872, following the expedition of Ferdinand Hayden on which another artist, Thomas Moran, made drawings that were submitted to Congress and influenced its decision.49 The perception of the wilderness as 'park' was, then, from the outset intimately connected with the interpretations of artists. Those artists, whether painters or landscape gardeners, brought to bear on their subjects criteria that had been formed in Europe, highly prejudicial to seeing American scenery with fresh eyes. One of the most important aesthetic consequences of the movement westward was the opening up of the desert, and Bierstadt's lack of interest in the possibilities of the desert as subject matter is noteworthy. It was on Moran's second journey West, with John Wesley Powell's expedition to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in 1873, that the uniquely American qualities of the region were fully revealed. The scale of the colossal fissure in the desert, with its mile-deep revelation of strata repeating patterns of erosion bespoke a chronology reaching back, by modem calculations, some two billion years. Such a phenomenon could hardly have been comprehended before the publication of Lyell's speculations, and Darwin's demonstrations of the true extent of geological time.50 As late as 1857 it was possible for an explorer, Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, to admire the Canyon but to miss its significance. He had been commissioned to establish the navigability of the Colorado River, and his interest was concentrated on that objective. Even the artists who illustrated Ives's report failed to convey in any great degree either the aesthetic or the geological interest of the place. A further dimension of understanding - that of time - was required before it could be adequately described. In a sense, before Darwin the Grand Canyon did not exist, just as the mountains of Europe were ignored by travellers until new reasons for noticing them had been established. But now its existence was essential: it made a genuinely 'national' response to nature possible. When Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon in 1903 and uttered his famous dictum that every American should experience this natural wonder, he made the new truth explicit: this was scenery that by virtue of its uniqueness might be equated with the American identity. Here was the final confirmation of Cole's insight that the scenery of the continent ought to be of 'surpassing interest'. It demonstrated the antiquity of the land with irrefutable power. A potent blend of science and religion was brought to bear on these completely new landscapes. Powell saw the geology of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in a Humboldtian way as evidence of God's magnificent presence in all creation; he spoke of 'a Book of Revelations in the rock-leaved Bible of geology',51 and on discovering a deep gorge opening out of the main

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canyon, named it 'Bright Angel Creek' after Milton's 'Angelic Squadron bright' in Paradise Lost.52 A little later, in 1880-81, Moran accompanied the geologist Clarence E. Dutton on a survey of the North Rim that resulted in an important report on The Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District. Dutton imposed a further layer of non-American myth on the unresisting wilderness. He made explicit the sense noted by many travellers that the Grand Canyon is 'nature's architecture', going so far as to draw specific parallels between particular buttes and spires and the building styles of the Middle East and Asia. The Tower of Ra, Vishnu Temple, Shiva Temple and Brahma Temple are all features of the Canyon named by Dutton, and they imply clearly perceived similarities with actual architectural types. Other names have more nebulous associations: Wotan's Throne and the Tower of Babel refer to mythical buildings and suggest a different dimension of reference, not so much to the physical achievements of other civilizations, but rather to the religious imagination at its most fertile. But in their learned and poetical allusions these two strict and thorough scientists registered their awareness of what Powell called the 'unreckoned ages'53 to which the Arizona landscape bore testimony. Their naming rituals also suggest, as much as their published reports, that they were fully aware of the future implications for society of what they were studying. The survey expeditions provided Moran with the context in which to record the region in a scientific spirit. Even more than Church, Moran revered Ruskin - had met the man, and copied works by Turner.54 Yet the Ruskinian devotion that imbues Church's art is transmuted into something very different in Moran's hands. The art-based vision of Bierstadt is replaced by a more pragmatic acceptance of the overriding value of the subject matter itself: what is striking about the two huge paintings that Moran produced of the Yellowstone and Colorado Canyons in the early 1870s is that they dispense, in an innovative way, with the trappings of the Sublime or the picturesque: they are driven simply by the need to record natural phenomena perceived as generically different from anything experienced elsewhere. It would be possible to analyse The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (Figure 8.7) in conventional terms, but to do so would be to stress its lack of conformity to the requirements of traditional landscape. In his next canvas, The Chasm of the Colorado (Figure 8.8), any resemblance to a prototype has vanished. There are no obvious structural reference points, apart from the distant horizon on the right; the whole surface of the ground depicted is broken into discontinuous fragments among which the eye is pushed and jostled, unable to complete a trajectory in any direction. The only clear antecedent is Church's large picture The Icebergs of 1861,55 which tackled an equally alien subject, and similarly abandoned conventional pictorial models. Church was able to arrive at his conclusion by enlarging the

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Ruskinian study from nature on to a huge scale. Moran, confronted by an altogether vaster subject, borrowed some of Church's expedients, notably the wall of ice at the left of the composition (which becomes rock in his painting), and opened up the picture space to suggest the chronological expanses implied in the spatial ones. The picture conveys the sense of being in altogether alien territory: the new world that is also as old as the earth itself, and at the same time carries with it the future history of the land: the geologist in the light of the past history of the earth, makes prophecy of a time when this desolate land of titanic rocks shall become a valley of many valleys, and yet again the sea will invade the land, and the coral animals build their reefs ... and the shrouds shall remain entombed in the bottom of the sea, when the people shall be changed, by the chemistry of life, into new forms ... Then other mountains and other hills shall be made into beds of rock, for a new land, where new rivers shall flow.56

As Kinsey perceptively observes, Powell's Methodist world-view is creatively assimilated in this passage into a scientist's understanding of the long timespan implicit in the geology of the Grand Canyon. As I argue in another place,57 one of Moran's strategies for conveying the religious connotations of the Western desert was to absorb the techniques and palette of an artist well known for recording the Middle East. David Roberts's series of views in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia, lithographed by Louis Haghe and published from 1842 to 1849 became a locus classicus of desert topography that figured in many American collections, and it is clear from many parallels and similarities that his paintings of those regions supplied models for Moran's accounts of the 'numinous' sites of the Far West. The most explicit demonstration of the impulse to 'Christianize' the desert occurs in Moran's large picture of The Mountain of the Holy Cross of 1873.58The mountain had been first properly described when Hayden led an expedition there in 1873; Moran was not of the party, but the photographer William Henry Jackson took fine photographs of the peak. When he saw these on their return, Moran determined to visit the place himself, and made it his reason for travelling. It was difficult to access, and although he made drawings of the area he relied heavily on at least one of Jackson's photographs for his picture.59 He effected some characteristic transpositions of elements in order to create a suitable composition - the cross, for example, is not actually visible from the valley up which the traveller approaches the peak - and produced a design in which the symbolic image occupies the place of the cross in a traditional crucifixion: at the summit of a hill placed in the centre of the work, to which the pilgrim, as Kinsey points out, has difficult access in a long upward struggle. We are put in mind of a host of allegories of Christian faith, both visionary and vernacular, in which the labouring soul trudges upward

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to the source of redemption and forgiveness.60 The crisp execution of the landscape detail, and the bright tonality, are reminiscent not so much of Roberts, or indeed of any British artist, as of German landscapes of the mid century: the later works of J. C. C. Dahl, for example, and the Alpine scenes of Waldmuller. The picture is, in some respects, the apotheosis of the Germaninspired 'woodland interiors' that Kensett and others had been producing in the immediately preceding decades. The Germanic note is further stressed, perhaps, by the group of tall pines on the right, which are strongly reminiscent of Bierstadt's beautifully observed trees. Alpine resonances had been struck as early as 1869 when Samuel Bowles, one of the first to describe the mountain, wrote: 'No Swiss mountain view carries such a majestic sweep of distance, such sublime combination of height and breadth and depth; such uplifting into the presence of God.'61 Bowles gave his book the title: The Switzerland of America: A Summer's Vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado, emphasizing the European parallel in two ways: both by invoking the Alps, and by using the term 'parks', which, as we have seen, came to the United States fraught with a long history of European meanings. There is then a strange disjunction in the American attitude to the national scenery. On the one hand, a lively awareness of - if not a firm insistence on the startling grandeur and unexpectedness of the New World; on the other a lingering instinct to justify both art and landscape by reference to Europe. In the practice of the more modestly talented of the American painters the Old World never seems far away; even so fine a craftsman as David Johnson presents his America as a 'homely' place of pastoral valleys and friendly hills rather than as an ultimately inimical wilderness. But the most distinguished masters of the American Landscape School present their country as literally astounding, and the purport of their works is to astonish, not to remind one of European parallels.

Author's note and acknowledgements Some of the ideas developed in this essay are introduced in m y contributions to A n d rew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880, the catalogue to an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London 2002, and I am grateful to Tim Barringer, as w ell as to m any colleagues in Am erica, for opportunities to discuss the subject.

Notes 1.

D avid Thomas Ansted, FRS, writing in the London Art-Journal, 1863, p. 234.

2.

For example, 'The Courts of G o d', illustrating Paradise Lost, Book 3, line 365, and 'H eaven - the Rivers of Bliss' illustrating Book 1 1 , line 78; both 18 2 4 -2 5. Titles taken from J. Dustin Wees, Darkness Visible: The Prints of John Martin (Sterling and Francine Clark A rt Institute, Williamstown, Mass, 1986), where both subjects are reproduced, pp. 22 and 27.

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3.

Tate Gallery, London. This picture includes an expansive landscape w hich is surprisingly 'Am erican' in general conformation and specific detail. The canvas is one of a triptych that Martin painted in 1 8 3 1 - 5 3 ; he showed it in Am erica in 1856.

4.

See William Feaver, The Art of John Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 6.

5.

The N ew ark Museum, New ark, N e w Jersey, Wallace M. Scudder Bequest Fund 1956.

6.

A . FI. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, new edn (London: Eric and Joan Stevens, 1972), p. 15.

7.

Private collection, U S A ; repr. in colour in J. K. Howat, ed., American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, exh. cat. (N ew York: Metropolitan M useum of Art, 1987), p. 2 2 1; and Daniel J. Terra Collection, Terra M useum of Am erican Art, Chicago, repr. in colour in Howat, 1987, p. 230.

8.

See no. 15.

9.

For a detailed discussion of the exhibition and its genesis see Susan P. Casteras, 'The 18 5 7 -5 8 exhibition of British art in Am erica and critical responses to Pre-Raphaelitism' in Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, eds, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites, exh. cat. (Brooklyn Museum, 1985), pp. 1 0 9 -13 3 .

10.

Rosenlaui is in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London; Spring illustrated lines from W ordsworth's 'Excursion': 'W hen the primrose flower / Peeped forth to give an earnest of the spring', and is possibly the picture n ow in the Ashmolean M useum, Oxford, w ith the title In Early Spring. The various showings of the exhibition varied considerably in content since w orks were sold off the w alls and replaced. I am grateful to Christopher N ew all for help with these points.

11.

See Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Painted Sketch, exh. cat. (Dallas M useum of Art, 1998).

12.

Art Journal, 18 57, p. 173.

13 .

Art Journal, July i860, p. 199.

14.

Corcoran M useum of Art, Washington D C.

15.

Cropsey, M S Journals for the years 1858 to 1867, New ington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-onHudson, N e w York. Entries for 24 February and 5 March 18 58 am grateful to Charlotte Gere for drawing m y attention to Cropsey's diaries for this period.

.1

16.

ibid.

17.

Cropsey, M S Journals 20 M arch 1858.

18.

Cropsey, M S Journals 10 A pril 1858.

19.

See David Cox 178 3-18 59 , exh. cat. (Birmingham M useums and A rt Gallery, 1983).

20.

Cropsey, M S Journals for the years 1858 to 1867, 24 February 1862.

2 1.

Pamphlet in the possession of the N ew ington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, N ew York, cited in Franklin Kelly, ed., American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, vol. i (Washington, N ew York, London: National Gallery of A rt/O xfo rd University Press, 1996), p. 120.

22.

Cropsey, M S Journals.

23.

Thomas Cole, 'E ssay on Am erican scenery', 18 35, The American Monthly Magazine (N ew Series I) Jan. 1836; reprinted in John W. McCoubrey, American Art 1700-1960 (Eaglewood Cliffs, N e w Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 98.

24.

A n anonymous photograph in the New-York Historical Society shows The Heart of the Andes in the proscenium that Church designed for it, as it appeared at the Metropolitan Fair in A id of the Sanitary Commission, 1864; see Franklin Kelly, Frederick Edwin Church, exh. cat. (National Gallery of Art, Washington D C, 1989), p. 56 am grateful to Gerald L. Carr for details of Church's methods of display.

25.

Kelly, 1996.

26.

Samuel Langhom Clemens (Mark Twain), letter to Orion Clemens, 18 March 18 6 1 (dated i860); Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Mark Twain's Letters, N e w York, 19 17 , vol 1, p. 45; cited in Kevin J. Avery, Church's Great Picture The Heart of the Andes (Metropolitan M useum of Art, N e w York, 1993), p. 43.

27.

See Michael Kitson, 'Turner and Claude', Turner Studies, 2 (2), Winter 1983, pp. 2 - 1 5 . This has been reprinted in Ian Warrell, et al., Turner et le Lorrain (Nancy: Hazan, 2002), the bilingual catalogue of an exhibition held in the Clore Gallery in 2000.

.1

28.

Cropsey, M S Journals, 20 March 1858.

29.

Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, 2nd edn (N ew H aven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), no. 140. The picture w as accessioned b y the National Gallery at an early

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.1

30.

James Thomson, Summer, lines 14 40 -14 4 5. See A . Wilton, Painting and Poetry: Turner's Verse Book and his Work of 18 0 4 -18 12 , exh. cat. (Tate Gallery, 1990), esp. pp. 4 7 -6 1.

3 1.

Cropsey, M S Journals, 5 September 1862.

32.

On 2 1 March 1863 (the year is not specified, but no other date is possible), Cropsey wrote in his Journal 'M r Tauber has just come in to help me write cards to send out for view of m y Richmond Hill at G rave's March 22n d.' The picture w as in Cropsey's sale w hen he left London for Am erica; it belonged to two enthusiastic collectors of Am erican art, James Graham and James McHenry. Sold Bonhams, London, 14 December 1999 (cat. no. 50).

33.

That Thomson's Seasons w as a central text for all Am ericans is strikingly demonstrated b y Captain William Clark, w ho on discovering the Falls of the Missouri in 1805 wished for 'the pencil of Salvator Rosa or the pen of Thompson [sic]' in order to do justice to the scene. See Elliott Coues, ed., The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1893 (Dover edn, n.d.), vol. ii, p. 364, n. 16.

34.

Cropsey, M S Journals 27 July 1858.

35.

Cropsey, M S Journals, 28 July.

36.

Landscape - Scene from Thanatopsis, 1850; Metropolitan M useum of Art, N e w York; repr. John Caldw ell and O waldo Rodriquez Roque, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. i (Metropolitan M useum of Art/Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 4 21.

37.

Cropsey, M S Journals, 2 7 July.

38.

Cited in Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmstead and America in the Nineteenth Century (N ew York, 1999), p. 237; see also Cather's comment on Nebraska, in M y Antonia (1918), chapter 1: 'not a country at all, but the material out of w hich countries are made'.

39.

George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians. Written During Eight Years' Travel Amongst the Wildest Tribes of Indians in North America. In 1832, 33, / / 36, 37, 38, and 39, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London: published b y the author, 184 1), p. 262.

34 35 40.

Catlin, 18 4 1, p. 261.

4 1.

See for example Washington Irving, 'A tour on the prairies', The Crayon Miscellany, no. 1, 18 35, chapter 7. The topic is discussed in Barbara N ovak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 18 2 5-18 2 5 (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 1 5 1 .

42.

Rybczynski, 1999, pp. 2 3 5 -7 . In the Am erican West the w ord 'park' has the further, purely geographical sense of 'valley'.

43.

Art Journal, N ovem ber 1867, p. 248.

44.

Repr. in colour in N an cy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, Art and Enterprise, exh. cat. (The Brooklyn Museum, 1991), p. 86; the picture measures 182.9 x 304 8 cm; it is in the collection of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles.

45.

Art Journal, January 1870, p. 29.

46.

1 7 February 1865, cited in Anderson and Ferber, 19 9 1, p. 85.

47.

Letter to John Hay, 22 A u gust 1863, cited in Anderson and Ferber, 199 1, p. 178.

48.

Sunset in the Yosemite Valley is in the H aggin Museum, Stockton, California. It is reproduced in Anderson and Ferber, 19 9 1, p. 207, no. 47.

49.

For an extensive discussion of M oran's w ork at Yellowstone and its consequences, see Joni Louise Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), pp. 43-92.

50.

George Catlin had expressed his sense of the incomprehensibility of such scenes at Big Bend on the Yellowstone in the 1830s: the indisputable, though astounding evidence of the fact, that there has been at some ancient period a super surface to this country, corresponding w ith the elevation of these tabular hills, whose surface is, for half a mile or more, on their tops, perfectly le v e l... The fact that there w as once the summit level of this great valley, is a stubborn one, how ever difficult it m ay be to reconcile it w ith reasonable causes and results (Catlin, 18 4 1, p. 75).

5 1.

John Wesley Powell, report published in William A Bell, New Tracks in North America (London, 1870); cited in Kinsey, 1992, p. 1 1 1 .

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52.

197

Paradise Lost, book iv, 1. 977.

53.

Cited in Kinsey, 1992, p.108.

54.

See Richard P. Townsend, " 'A lasting impression": Thomas M oran's artistic dialogue with J. M. W. Turner', in Richard R Townsend, ed., /. M. W. Turner 'That Greatest of Landscape Painters' (Tulsa and Washington: The Philbrook M useum of A rt in Association with the University of Washington Press 1998).

55.

In the Dallas M useum of Art, anonymous gift. Repr. in colour in A n d rew Wilton and Tim Barringer,

American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 2002), pp. 225 and 2 16 (detail). 56.

Powell, 1990, p. 214 , cited in Kinsey, 1992, p. 1 1 2 . A n instructive parallel m ay be found in twentiethcentury Australian paintings of the Red Centre of that continent, another land where parallels with the landscape of Europe break down.

57.

Wilton and Barringer, 2002, p. 248.

58.

The Gene A u try Western Heritage Museum, Los Angeles. The picture measures 210 .2 x 164.5 cm -

59.

See Kinsey, 1992, pp. 14 3 -5 . Kinsey suggests that Moran 'probably w orked from' one of Jackson's photographs w hen planning his picture; in fact, it seems clear that he literally copied the photograph (repr. Kinsey, p. 140, fig. 78) for the details of the peak itself and its immediate slopes.

60.

A n example of this image that combines the visionary and the vernacular, though it is unlikely to have been known to Moran, occurs in the background of The Destruction of the Temple, a painting by the little-known Bristol millenarian painter Samuel Colm an (1780 -184 5), Tate Gallery. A n example of Continental mountain painting using the format of M oran's Mountain of the Holy Cross is Adrian Lu d w ig Richter's The Watzmann, 1824, Munich, N eue Pinakothek, repr. William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 2 12 , plate 145.

61.

Samuel Bowles, The Switzerland of America: A Summer's Vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado, 1869, pp. 9 5-6, cited in Kinsey, 1992, p. 149.

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8.1 Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson River, i860, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 274.3 cm

8.2 J. M. W. Turner, England: Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday, 1819, oil on canvas, 180 x 334.5 cm

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8.3 Jasper Francis Cropsey, Richmond in the Summer 0 / 18 6 2 , 1862, oil on canvas, 137 x 244 cm

8.4 Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie, 1866, oil on canvas, 210.8 x 361.3 cm

199

200

8.5

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John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851-53, oil on canvas, 196.5 x 303.2 cm

Andrew Wilton

8.6 Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1828, oil on canvas, 100.6 x 138.43 cm

8.7 Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872, oil on canvas, 213.4 x 363.8 cm

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8.8 Thomas Moran, The Chasm of the Colorado, 1873-74, oil on canvas, 213.4 x 365-8 cm

9

Slavs, Brits and the question of national identity in art: Russian responses to British painting in the mid­ nineteenth century Rosalind P. Blakesley

From the time of Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725), who sent many students of different disciplines abroad to hone their skills, Russian artists and writers eagerly walked the streets of Europe's artistic capitals, absorbing and commenting on local cultural life. Rome was long the destination of choice both of the artists and, from the late eighteenth century onwards, of their government, which was anxious to distance Russian intellectuals from the political upheavals of post-revolutionary France.1 As the engraver Fedor Iordan (1800-83) wrote, 'in my time Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich [Nicholas I] did not like foreign parts, especially France, and Russian artists therefore lived and studied in Italy'.2 Only in the 1860s, when both the French Revolution and Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia were becoming distant memories, did the Russian authorities' anti-French sentiment begin to wane, allowing Russian artists travelling in Europe to base themselves in the rising artistic centre of Paris, rather than in Rome.3 London during this period tended to be eclipsed as a cultural centre by the Italian and French capitals. Certain artists, notably Alexander Ivanov (1806-58), did visit, while Iordan (a later professor and Rector of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg) lived in England and studied under Abraham Raimbach (1776-1843), an English engraver of Swiss descent. But neither Ivanov nor Iordan had been inspired to visit Britain by its artistic resources. Ivanov came to visit the great Russian emigre thinker Alexander Herzen, and was frustratingly silent about the day they spent together in the National Gallery.4Iordan, for his part, had wanted to study in Paris, but was obliged to relocate to London after the Russian government sponsoring his studies became alarmed at the liberal political views in France to which he might have been exposed. The indifference towards London as a place for artists to study was not representative of Russian interest in British art. As Galina Andreeva shows in

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her essay in this volume, both Imperial and aristocratic collections had been acquiring British art since the 1770s, including paintings and prints by Joseph Wright of Derby,5Nathaniel Dance and William Hogarth, whose work became particularly popular in Russia. Catherine the Great herself referred to Hogarth's print The Enraged Musician when she was bemoaning her excessive workload,6 and the Hermitage in St Petersburg had acquired prints of The Rake's Progress by 1817 and The Four Times of Day by 1837. Russian patrons also commissioned works from British artists, such as The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents (Figure 9.1) and The Continence of Scipio, which Sir Joshua Reynolds painted for Catherine and her favourite Prince Grigory Potemkin from 1786 to 1789/ Most importantly, many British artists worked in Russia from the eighteenth century onwards, often in the Imperial employ.8 Catherine the Great's agents even approached an artist as well-known as Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose portraits for the Russian aristocracy in London had raised his profile in Russian society.9 While this particular negotiation fell through, as Lawrence did not want to work abroad for more than a year, other British artists willingly moved to Russia. They included the portraitist Richard Brompton, who was appointed painter to the Imperial court in 1780; George Dawe, who in 1818 was commissioned by Alexander I to paint every Russian general who had served in the Napoleonic campaign;10and Christina Robertson, who worked in St Petersburg for lengthy periods between 1839 and 1854, and regularly portrayed members of both the Russian nobility and the family of Nicholas I (Figure 9.2).11 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the long-standing presence in Russia of British art and British artists was stimulating greater interest in their country of origin, and various articulate and influential Russian critics joined the thousands who flocked to London to view the international exhibitions of 1851 and 1862. Their commentaries on what they saw, published in Russian periodicals which enjoyed a wide circulation, give a vivid insight into both Russian attitudes towards English painting and culture, and the implications which these had for Russian art.

The background: Russian criticism of western European art

By the mid nineteenth century, exhibition reviews were a frequent and popular feature in the Russian periodical press. The visual arts in general had been appearing as a regular topic of discussion since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when brief references had been made to famous paintings or antique sculpture. These short notices had soon expanded into more lengthy appraisals of the arts, for example the poet Konstantin Batyushkov's (1787-1835) article 'Stroll to the Academy of Arts', which was published in

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1814.12 Batyushkov's article was one of the first critical commentaries on an exhibition to appear in the Russian press, and initiated a strong tradition of artistic criticism based around exhibition reviews. During the repressive regime of Nicholas I (r. 1825-55) in particular, when freedom of speech and publication was severely limited, reviews provided a rare platform on which the most probing political, social and aesthetic discourses of the visual arts could be aired.13 During the first half of the century, the Old Masters and French and German painting, in particular that which appeared at the annual Salons in Paris, attracted most attention in Russian articles and reviews. English artists featured less, with the notable exception of Hogarth, whose moralistic genre scenes exerted a wide appeal following the rise of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1820s and 1830s, and the critical consciousness which it inspired. The painter Pavel Fedotov, for example, declared his ambition 'to eclipse the celebrated Hogarth', and developed a form of satirical genre painting new to Russia which drew on the British artist's work.14 Hogarth also featured in individual monographs and in the periodical press.15 Pictorial Review (1835-44) highlighted Hogarth more than any other artist in its nine years of publication, with a substantial illustrated article on him in the very first issue,16 and numerous other journals published illustrations or reviews of Hogarth's work.17 Pictorial Review also showed a broader interest in the English art scene, with short articles on Sir John Soane's Museum and the National Gallery in London and a few reproductions of English paintings, such as The Gypsy Woman by Reynolds.18 It was joined by the London correspondents of other journals, who began to comment more frequently on British art. But on the whole these were passing mentions or relatively brief factual accounts, largely overshadowed by the sea of critical commentary on the modern schools of Germany and France. The 1850s and 1860s, however, witnessed a change in emphasis in Russia's coverage of the visual arts. First, and most important, was the increasing priority given to Russian painters and sculptors, as opposed to western European artists. This reflected both the rising profile and confidence of Russian artists, whose work was now exhibited in collections as important as the Hermitage and the Uffizi in Florence;19 and the campaign to establish an identifiable Russian school of painting which, spearheaded by the indefatigable critic Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906), was gathering momentum at the time. The French School was increasingly used as a foil against which the achievements of young Russian artists could be praised, and detailed accounts of European painting in general appeared less and less. But paradoxically, exhibitions in London, which had rarely been discussed in detail in the first half of the century, for the first time attracted considerable attention.

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The Great Exhibition The event which precipitated this new interest was the Great Exhibition, held in Joseph Paxton's remarkable Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851. The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, to give it its full title, was an industrial, as opposed to an art exhibition, but is of relevance here for the intense spotlight which it focused on London. Designed to demonstrate Britain's pre-eminence in world industry and trade by exhibiting British products alongside those of other countries, it was the world's first international exhibition. Other European powers had already held industrial exhibitions, most recently France's eleventh Industrial Exposition in 1849, but 1851 marked the first time that countries had exhibited together, and openly competed. People flocked to it in their thousands (by the time it closed, over six million visits had been made), taking advantage of special transport arrangements to visit the public event of the year. The commissioners of the Russian section had considerable difficulty persuading manufacturers, industrialists and artists to contribute to their proposed display. Count Fedor Tolstoi, a medallist, sculptor and VicePresident of the Academy of Arts, had been charged with organizing a Fine Art section but, after repeated attempts to cajole members of the Academy to exhibit, ended up being the sole academician to participate.20Nevertheless, a Russian section was eventually assembled, and numerous Russian critics and journalists visited the Exhibition, including Stasov. One of the more famous Russian visitors was the writer Fedor Dostoevsky, who felt quite simply that the Crystal Palace 'stands for modernity'.21 Indeed, despite the reluctance of numerous Russians to participate, the Exhibition received an extraordinary level of coverage in the Russian press. The Moscow News and the St Petersburg News reported on preparations for the Exhibition on a weekly basis, and when it opened they were joined by countless other periodicals which published letters from visitors, reports from correspondents, and extracts from accounts in the foreign press. The Exhibition even featured repeatedly in the Russian Arts Leaflet (1851-62), a short, illustrated broadsheet published by the illustrator Vasily Timm (1820-95) which usually concentrated on domestic affairs. The pages of the Russian Arts Leaflet were dominated by reproductions of contemporary Russian paintings and graphic illustrations of notable events in Moscow and St Petersburg, accompanied by short explanatory texts. An issue might focus on the opening of a bridge by the Tsar, the anniversary of the Life Guards of the Izmailovsky Regiment, or the annual exhibition in the Academy of Arts. Western cultural developments barely featured, but the journal devoted several issues to the Great Exhibition. The first of these appeared on 1 May 1851, the day the Exhibition opened, and comprised four pages of text,

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including a plan of the Exhibition, and seven illustrations, of which six detailed some of the Russian objects on display and one showed Crystal Palace itself.22 On 10 September a centre-spread illustration was devoted to the official opening ceremony, surrounded by several smaller illustrations of some of the participants.23Finally, on 20 September, an issue marking the close of the Exhibition featured a large centre-spread illustration of the interior of Crystal Palace, with detailed vignettes of fashionably dressed visitors promenading through its vast, glass-enclosed space.24 The coverage of the Great Exhibition in the Russian press stimulated new interest in London as a cultural centre, and in the 1850s and 1860s London's exhibitions were mentioned more frequently than had been the case in the first half of the century. Chronicle of Light (1858-59), a short-lived journal which published reproductions of both Old Masters and a few modem European paintings, carried references to shows at the Royal Academy in London, as well as reviews of exhibitions in cities such as Munich, Lyon and Rome: and the Contemporary Chronicle (1861-71) included reports from correspondents in London, Paris and Prague.25 However, it was when the International Exhibition of 1862 held in London that British art finally became the subject of sustained critical analysis in the Russian periodical press.

The International Exhibition of 1862

The interest of Russian arts commentators in the 1862 Exhibition is not surprising, as it was the first international exhibition to include a Russian Fine Art section, comprising 126 works by sixty-nine artists (Russia had not been invited to participate at the Paris Exhibition in 1855 due to the hostilities of the Crimean War).26 The Russian works had been selected by the Russian Academy of Arts and, according to Iordan, who had been in charge of the selection process, attracted considerable attention. 'One could see the surprise of those viewing the Russian school for the first time,' he wrote, and he claimed to have heard many favourable comments on the Russian exhibits on display.27 Other commentators disagreed, notably Stasov, who in an article for the Contemporary Chronicle claimed that visitors saw nothing innovative in the Russian Fine Art section, and himself criticized it for giving an incomplete picture of the development of Russian art. Stasov compared Russia's appearance at this, the first international exhibition to take place after the Emancipation of Serfdom in 1861, with that of a young debutante at her first ball. But he added that the Academy's selection procedure had had the effect of an over-anxious mother, who fussed so much in preparation that her daughter became shy and self-conscious, rather than a confident beauty who

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would make heads turn.28 In a second article on the Exhibition published in the Contemporary Chronicle in 1863, Stasov mentioned English painting, which he praised for its portraits and for Hogarth's satire. However, Stasov introduced English painting primarily as a comparison to the Russian School, as both had excelled at portraiture, and Fedotov was, in Stasov's eyes, Hogarth's most worthy successor.29 Having noted these similarities, Stasov discussed the Russian section alone, and the general lessons which could be learnt from the Exhibition about the state of contemporary art.30A critic called L. de-Roberti also focused on the Russian contribution in several articles in the Contemporary Chronicle, one of which was accompanied by plans which showed exactly where the Russian paintings had been hung. His and Stasov's approach reflects the increasingly nationalistic concerns which were flavouring much social and cultural rhetoric in Russia at the time: in the aftermath of the humiliating defeat of the Crimean War and the social and political watershed marked by the Emancipation, the country was undergoing a period of sustained self-analysis, and a preoccupation with Russia's position, both past and future, in relation to the West pervaded many areas of Russian intellectual life.31 One Russian commentator on the International Exhibition of 1862, however, distinguished himself by concentrating not on the Russian section, but on English painting. He was Dmitry Grigorovich (1822-99), a writer who had studied in the Academy of Arts, and who was to enjoy a long and active involvement in the visual arts.32 Grigorovich had already been to England twice, but, by his own admission, had failed to see many paintings on either occasion, and so in 1862 he travelled to London specifically to study English art, both at the International Exhibition and in other galleries. The following year he published his account, 'Paintings by English Artists at London Exhibitions in 1862', in the Russian Herald (1856-1906), a monthly journal whose contributors included the writer Lev Tolstoi. The article, which was published in three parts, has never been translated or discussed in detail in English, but is significant both in providing the most comprehensive critical analysis of modern British painting yet to appear in the Russian press, and for Grigorovich's revealing comments on the relative merits of British painting compared to those of other European schools. Grigorovich's account is long - some ninety-eight pages - and not illustrated, and is part personal confession, part eulogy, and part critical review. He begins by acknowledging his own limitations, admitting that prior to his visit to London in 1862 he knew the work of only a few English painters, namely Reynolds, Lawrence, Dawe, George Morland and Richard Parkes Bonington. But he had been impressed by these artists and, crucially, revealed how he had encountered them, writing that 'engravings, lithographs, aquatints and photographs of English paintings constantly fuelled my

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curiosity'.33 His comment reveals that British paintings were widely reproduced in Russia, not least through the relatively new method of photography. All five of the artists whom Grigorovich singled out were also represented in Russian collections by this time, and the work of Morland, Lawrence and Bonington had featured in a seminal exhibition of works from Imperial and private collections which had been held at the Academy of Arts in 1861.34 There had, therefore, been ample stimuli in Russia to whet the writer's appetite for British art. In London, Grigorovich was delighted with the range of what he saw 'never before has English painting been displayed so comprehensively'35 and he began his account by setting out the methodology which he was going to employ to discuss it. In the first place, he distanced his approach from that of French critics and artists, who tended to scorn English art. He compared the French attitude towards English art with the damning Russian criticism of the modern French School which had prevailed fifteen years previously. At that time, 'many of our artists, who had never been in foreign parts and had rarely even set foot beyond the confines of Vasil'evsky Island [the part of St Petersburg where the Academy of Arts is based], loudly proclaimed that French artists had long strayed from the path followed by Poussin, and had now become complete rubbish'. In recent years, however, many young artists had chosen to study in France rather than Rome, realizing that 'in corrupt Paris, there is a lot which even a Russian artist can usefully learn'. The Academy's stalwarts, Grigorovich jibed, had reacted to this with horror: tearing out their hair and ripping the lapels of their Academy uniforms, they dismissed everything which was not produced on Vasil'evsky Island as a worthless, passing fancy - 'in a word, frantsuzyatina [French nonsense]!'36 Grigorovich's scathing attack on the Russian Academy's dismissal of modern French art, despite its students' growing preference for Paris, hints at the rift developing between the Academic establishment and progressive young artists at the time. In fact in 1863, the year in which Grigorovich's article was published, fourteen students rebelled against the Academy and left in protest at the limitations of its annual competition system, marking the beginning of an active new arts scene outside the Imperial Academy of Arts. But Grigorovich himself also had reservations about many modern European schools: the French, he claimed, were imitative of either the Old Masters or the modern Belgian School; the Germans copied France and Belgium, or, in the work of the Nazarenes, the Early Renaissance; and the Russian School 'still has no original character: it imitates now Italy, now France, now Belgium'. The English School alone seemed distinct, an idea which gradually develops into the dominant theme of Grigorovich's account. Grigorovich attributed the distinctive nature of English painting to two major factors. Firstly, he believed (not entirely correctly) that many successful

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English artists, including Turner, John Martin, Francis Danby, John Flaxman, Bonington and Lawrence, had never studied at the Royal Academy, and the influence of the Academy itself was on the wane.37 Grigorovich himself valued the Academic system, claiming that 'Academies must of course exist in every civilized state', but he insisted that an Academy's role was simply to provide an education and material support. The true essence of art - colour, composition, and sentiment - lay outside the Academy's domain, which was why, in his opinion, regions without academies, such as Flanders and Holland, enjoyed greater artistic diversity.38 Grigorovich here echoed various critics of the academic system, not least the Berlin gallery director Gustav Waagen, who in 1835 had argued that academies had created a tedious uniformity in European art.39 The second factor in the distinct identity of English painting, according to Grigorovich, was the unique national temperament: 'English art - and here lies its distinctive feature - has not borrowed from anybody; it was bom on its own soil, and has developed by the force of its own national genius.'40The Russian placed considerable emphasis on 'national temperament', and held it responsible for numerous idiosyncrasies in English art. The dearth of good history painting, for example, was due to the fact that it was contrary to the natural inclination of English artists.41 Those who did paint monumental subjects preferred subjects from recent history to religious or classical scenes, and never produced anything truly 'heroic'. Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe in particular confirmed that Targe historical subjects do not, or at least have not, come easy to English artists', while West's biblical scenes, such as The Last Supper, were 'below any form of criticism'. Reynolds was also criticized for the prosaic 'Englishness' of his biblical and mythological subjects, as, for example, in The Three Graces and The Holy Family in the National Gallery. Whereas Rembrandt had depicted Christ as a human being, Grigorovich felt that West and Reynolds had turned him into a 'mere Englishman'.42 These responses reveal a certain ambiguity in Grigorovich's view of national identity in art: while praising English painting for its cohesiveness as a national school, Grigorovich found the religious scenes of West and Reynolds too 'English', which contributed to the poverty of history painting in the country as a whole. 'National temperament', in Grigorovich's opinion, could therefore have both a positive and a negative influence on art. Having introduced the English School, Grigorovich devoted the bulk of his account to a detailed description of history painting, portraiture, genre and landscape painting, which he analysed in turn. The exposition of history and portrait painting glossed over Hogarth, 'the originality of whom is already too well known',43 and concentrated instead on Reynolds, whose portraits were compared favourably to those of Old Masters such as Holbein and van Dyck. Grigorovich particularly liked Mrs Siddons in the Guise of the Tragic Muse

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and Portrait of Miss Boyle ('Nelly O'Brien').44 Gainsborough was also singled out for his sensitive treatment of nature and for The Blue Boy, which the Russian critic thought the best portrait in the entire Exhibition.45 Grigorovich noted that the portrait was an open challenge to Reynolds, who had maintained that blue was too cold a colour to dominate a painting, and the Russian evidently delighted at Gainsborough's audacious retort. The other history and portrait painters he applauded included Lawrence; Daniel Maclise and his Feast Scene from Macbeth; and Charles Robert Leslie, whose Coronation of Queen Victoria convinced Grigorovich that the English were unrivalled in portraying female beauty thanks to the 'charming models which one meets in such abundance only in England'.46 Grigorovich's view of British painting up to this point has many features in common with English reviews of the Exhibition. The very display of British painting, starting with thirty-six works by Hogarth and extending in chronological order through half of the total space allocated for art, encouraged critics to assess its coherence as a national school, and many English writers remarked upon the distinctiveness of the British section, and of Hogarth, its founding father.47 The catalogue for the fine art section declared of Hogarth, 'No man was more distinctly and decisively original and creative; no one was ever less affected by pre-existing influences,' while The Times saw him as 'thoroughly and in a word national'.48The Illustrated London News summed up the views of various English critics when it wrote, 'English art is simple, spontaneous, natural, domestic, direct.'49 The English commentators, like Grigorovich, saw the virtue of English painting as lying in its break with the Academic tradition of history painting in order to promote a national school through more naturalistic genres. In places, Grigorovich's review also closely resembles those of the French critics Theophile Gautier and Theophile Thore. Gautier shared not only Grigorovich's regard for English landscape, portraiture and genre painting and for Hogarth's originality, but also the Russian critic's belief that the English were unsuccessful at history painting as it did not suit their national temperament.50 Thus Gautier, too, read the English School as a reflection of national character. Thore, for his part, maintained, like Grigorovich, that the Exhibition offered the best opportunity ever to study English painting; he questioned whether the foundation of academies of art had been beneficial to the development of painting; he identified moralistic painting, portraiture and landscape painting as Britain's areas of artistic excellence; and he lauded Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough as the founding fathers of these schools, even singling out the same paintings and the same histories as Grigorovich, such as Gainsborough's motivation in painting The Blue Boy. Thore also asserted the existence of a distinct English School, which eclipsed all of the other national schools of art on display.51 These themes reappeared

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both in his second review of the Exhibition published in Temps, and in the account of English painting which he published in the Histoire des Peintres de Toutes les Ecoles in 1863. 'L'ecole anglaise', he trumpeted in the former, 'prendra desormais son rang dans l'histoire de Tart',52 a sentiment which was in complete accordance with Grigorovich's views. However, Thore and Grigorovich parted company dramatically when it came to contemporary English painting and the Pre-Raphaelites. For Thore, the Pre-Raphaelites focused excessively on microscopic detail at the expense of overall effect, and he found the luminosity of their paintings overwhelming: 'un peu d'ombre, s'il vous plait!'53 He particularly disliked William Holman Hunt's The Light of the World, of which he wrote, 'C'est horrible de couleur, faux et detestable de tout point.'54 In sharp contrast, Grigorovich thought Hunt the best painter in the Exhibition, and wrote nothing short of a eulogy to his work. Grigorovich prefaced his description of Hunt with an account of the deterioration of art in England where, as elsewhere, artists had become increasingly materialistic and had tailored their products to suit bourgeois demand. But he felt that Hunt eschewed such commercial considerations, striving instead to restore a religious purity to art.55 Hunt was lauded for his draughtsmanship, his 'sincerely religious character', his 'elevated mind', his 'poetic individuality', and the fact that, whilst being well acquainted with the Old Masters, he imitated nobody. Grigorovich hailed The Light of the World and Christ in the Temple Amongst his Books and Teachers as 'the most remarkable painted work of our time',56 praising the latter in particular for being both realistic and spiritual. It alone, according to the Russian critic, could refute the accusations that materialism had suffocated true art. Grigorovich's appreciation of Holman Hunt reveals an unusual sensitivity to the aims and aspirations of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which, despite Ruskin's best efforts, was still censured by many less sympathetic critics both in Britain and abroad. Nor would the Russian have encountered anything comparable in Russia which might have made him more receptive to their work: Russian art at the time was dominated by the 'Artists of the '60s', who developed a highly critical form of social realism, and it was not until Mikhail Nesterov's (1862-1942) experimentation with issues of spirituality, historicism and naturalism later in the century that Russia was to produce anything comparable to the Pre-Raphaelite approach. Grigorovich's receptivity towards Pre-Raphaelitism at this early stage is therefore to his credit, coming at a time when neither Russian critics nor Russian artists had provided a route into understanding their art. Part II of Grigorovich's review was devoted to English genre painting, which in his view surpassed that of any other country.57 No fewer than eight pages were devoted to Hogarth and his satire, which was praised with reference to The Rake's Progress, Gin Lane and The Strolling Actresses Dressing in

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a Barn (the last two of which had been reproduced in the Russian press).58 Grigorovich then focused on David Wilkie, whom he thought an able successor to Hogarth and compared favourably to the Ostade brothers, Terborch, Metsu and Teniers the Younger.59 But Wilkie never imitated the Dutch. Rather, returning to Grigorovich's most pressing message, he studied them, but retained his individuality. 'Looking at his works/ Grigorovich enthused, 'it is impossible to be mistaken of their English origin: they are imbued with the spirit of national character.'60Grigorovich was critical only of Wilkie's Spanish and Italian scenes, with which the artist failed to identify as well as he did when he chose a 'national' subject for his art.61 In Grigorovich's repeated references to national character, we can see him more in tune intellectually with the other Russian critics writing on the 1862 Exhibition than might first appear. They were all concerned with the question of what it is that makes a national school of painting, be it the English School, which in Grigorovich's view had established a clear identity, or the Russian School, which both Stasov and Grigorovich felt was still in an embryonic stage. Indeed, in his article on the Exhibition in the Contemporary, Stasov claimed that the Russian School was closest in character to English painting, as both had long imitated other European schools but had begun to assert their independence, first in portraiture then, more recently, in Hogarth, Fedotov and their successors' depictions of the idiosyncrasies of everyday life. Stasov and Grigorovich's agenda of emphasizing national identity in art carried undertones of opposition to the Russian Academy, whose long prioritization of history painting, and insistence on the use of classical casts and Old Master paintings as models for its students, was increasingly criticized for producing uninspired, derivative art. Progressive critics and artists were instead advocating the realities of everyday Russia as the most valid artistic stimuli, and some were even clamouring for a period of travel in Russia to be recognized as part of a young artist's training, replacing the traditional Academic practice of sending its students abroad. Grigorovich, in praising the English School of painting so fulsomely for developing its own identity, may have intended to promote its independence as an example for young Russian artists to follow, and in doing so contribute to the ongoing debate which polarized the traditional Academic painters against a new, progressive and ethnocentric form of Russian art. Part III of Grigorovich's article, continuous with Part II in the March issue of the Russian Herald, mentioned British prowess at animal painting and watercolour, but focused primarily on landscape painting.62 Grigorovich insisted that landscape artists flourished in inclement climates, for which he offered the bizarre explanation that there was no need to reproduce or compete with nature if the weather was usually good, as was the case in the south, but if the weather was bad, landscape painting served to remind one

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of nature's beauty.63 His main concern, however, remained that of championing the distinct nature of English art; whilst he mentioned a number of landscape painters,64highest praise was reserved for Constable, Turner and Bonington as they embodied 'the general character of British landscape painting'.65 Grigorovich attributed this to a direct study of nature, taking up the theme of 'truth to nature' which was permeating commentaries on landscape painting all over Europe. English landscape artists, he claimed, favoured neither the idealized classical landscapes of Claude Lorraine and Poussin, nor the romanticized fetes galantes of the French Rococo, but instead, Tike Ruisdael and Hobbema acknowledge only one professor - nature'.66 Grigorovich even went as far as to say that landscape was the most popular genre of painting in England as there was 'no country where they have loved nature so much'.67 Various Russian painters, notably Silvestr Shchedrin (1791-1830) and Alexander Ivanov, had been experimenting en plein air from the 1820s onwards, and in 1862, the very year of the International Exhibition, Russian interest in plein air painting soared when the Kushelev-Bezborodko gallery, which included a first-class collection of Barbizon paintings, opened at the Academy in St Petersburg.68Grigorovich's account of English landscape painting therefore again touched on themes which were topical in Russia at the time. Grigorovich's article is an exceptional piece of writing not only for providing the first detailed appraisal of British painting in Russian journalism, but it was also one of the most thorough and informative analyses of any modem European school yet to appear in the Russian press. Although unillustrated, it vividly conveyed the merits and failings of numerous works and individual artists, of whom only a fraction have been mentioned here, and convincingly argued that England's modem painters could compete with those of any European school. Grigorovich maintained that never before had so many talents appeared in one country in so short a period, and concluded, triumphantly, that his readers would doubtless agree that English painting 'deserves more attention than you had previously thought, and than the French critics have led you to believe'.69 Thus he consciously posited his advocacy of the English School as a corrective to attitudes which were prevailing in France.

The response of Russian artists

There is little written evidence that Russian painters of the mid-nineteenth century actively responded to the work of their British contemporaries whom Grigorovich described, despite the many parallels between Victorian social realism and the work of Russia's socially critical artists of the 1850s onwards.

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But Vasily Perov (1834-82), the leader of the 'Artists of the '6os', expressed the desire to go to London to see the International Exhibition when he was living in Paris in 1862.70This hope was not realized, but Grigorovich visited Paris as well as London that year and became close to Perov (twenty years later he was to read Perov's funeral address), and his article would have been familiar to the Russian artistic colony in France. It may have inspired Perov to investigate English painting further, and analogies have often been drawn between his work and contemporary English art. Most notably, Perov's images of female exploitation and distress relate directly to the nineteenth-century iconographic tradition of suffering women which had developed in English poetry and art. Perov, like many of his contemporaries, drew inspiration from Thomas Hood's poem 'The Bridge of Sighs' (1844), which related to a recent tragedy in which a destitute shirtmaker attempted suicide by throwing herself and her youngest child into London's Regent Canal; the infant drowned but the mother survived, and was convicted of murder. This and other comparable cases received wide press coverage, and both British and Russian artists of the mid-nineteenth century addressed the theme of female suicide by drowning. The resemblance between Perov's The Drowned Woman (1867) (Figure 9.3) and George Frederick Watts's painting Found Drowned (1848-50) (Figure 9.4) is particularly strong: in both cases the body of a woman is lying at an angle to the river in which she has drowned (the Moskva and the Thames respectively), and the painting is dominated by muted brown and grey tones.71 There is little, if any, documentary evidence to substantiate these visual comparisons, as Perov does not mention Watts in his correspondence, nor was the British artist represented in Russian collections. Perov also took pains to emphasize the Russian context of his image, with an identifiable Moscow skyline and the inclusion of an officer in uniform, whose slightly Asiatic countenance suggests an eastern Slavic identity. But the strong similarities between these two paintings in terms of subject, composition and colouring would suggest Perov's familiarity with Watts's work.72 The theme of the sempstress was also shared by British and Russian artists, inspired by Thomas Hood's other famous poem of the period, 'The Song of the Shirt', whose publication in Punch in 1843 had helped treble the circulation of that particular issue. The poem proved equally popular in Russia, where it was translated by the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, amongst others, and was later put to music by the composer Modest Mussorgsky. Visual responses to the poem in Britain included Richard Redgrave's Sempstress (1846, formerly Forbes Magazine Collection, New York) and Frank Holl's Song of the Shirt (1875), while in Russia the theme appeared in various works, from Fedotov's sepia drawing A Poor Girl's Beauty is a Fatal Thing (The Mousetrap) (1844-46, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) to Illarion Pryanishnikov's painting The

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Sempstress of 1870 (Figure 9.5). Again, there are no documented conduits of influence to explain these affinities; neither Fedotov nor Pryanishnikov travelled abroad, nor are there known references to Redgrave or Holl in the Russian periodical press at the time. But Pryanishnikov shares Redgrave's composition of an exhausted sempstress bathed in light to the right of a window, the scarcity of her material possessions and the lateness of the hour serving to underline her economic distress. The Russian even places a jug in a near identical position to that of the pitcher and ewer in Redgrave's work. But Pryanishnikov, like Perov, also gives a distinctly Russian identity to his image, in his case by including an icon in the traditional holy comer of a Russian Orthodox home. From the mid-i870s there was a flood of artistic publications in Russia, and the last quarter of the century spawned a variety of sophisticated and frequently illustrated art journals which encompassed European developments. From 1875 to 1880, the Herald of Europe (1866-1908) employed Zola as its Paris correspondent, and in doing so played a vital role in the diffusion of French artistic thought in Russia. It was joined by World Illustration (1869-98), Art (1883-84), the Arts Journal (1881-87), Artist (1889-94), the Herald of Fine Arts (1883-90) and, most famously, the World of Art (1899-1904).73English artists occasionally featured in these journals. World Illustration, for example, published reproductions of works by Gainsborough, Frederic Lord Leighton and Alma-Tadema, while the World of Art paid considerable attention to the work of Aubrey Beardsley. But there was rarely a repeat of the concentration on London as a cultural centre which had briefly appeared in the middle of the century. Rather, the reviews of the 1831 and 1862 International Exhibitions marked an unusual peak of Russian journalistic interest in both the London arts scene, and in British art.

Notes 1.

For Russian artists living and working in Rome in the first half of the nineteenth century, see R. Giuliani, 'Thorvaldsen e la colonia romana degli artisti russi', in R Kragelund and M. Nykjaer, eds, Thorvaldsen: I'ambiente, Vinflusso, il mito (Rome: L'Erm a di Bretschneider, 1991), pp. 1 3 1 - 4 3 .

2.

F. I. Iordan, Zapiski rektora i professora Akademii khudozhestv Fedora Ivanovicha lordana (Moscow: no publisher given, 1918), p. 67.

3.

For Russian artists in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s, see E. V. Nesterova, 'K istorii russko-frantsuzskikh khudozhestvennykh svya zei', Problemy razvitiya zarubezhnogo iskusstva, 8, 19 78, pp. 5 9 -6 7 ; E. V. Nesterova, 'Russko-frantsuzskie khudozhestvennye svyazi 6o~7okh godov XIX veka', Problemy razvitiya russkogo iskusstva, 1 1 , 1979, pp. 74-8 2; and E. V. Nesterova, Tensionery Peterburgskoi Akadem ii khudozhestv vo Frantsii', Iskusstvo, 1 2 ,1 9 8 1 , pp. 4 7 - 5 1.

4.

Herzen records their visit to the National Gallery, but does not elaborate. See A . I. Herzen, 'A . Ivanov', in N . I. Bespalova and V. V. Vanslov, eds, Russkaya progressivnaya khudozhestvennaya kritika vtoroi poloviny X IX - nachala X X veka: khrestomatiya (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe Iskusstvo, 1977), p. 76.

5.

W right's Iron Forge Viewed from Without (1773) w as the first identifiably British painting to enter the Hermitage collection, in 1774 . For these and other British paintings acquired during Catherine's

Rosalind P. Blakesley

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reign, see L. Dukelskaya, 'British paintings in the Hermitage and Catherine the Great', in B. Allen and L. Dukelskaya, eds, British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial Collections in the Hermitage (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 36-40. 6.

Catherine's Secretary of State, Alexander Khrapovitsky, recorded that on 1 3 December 1788 the Empress exclaimed: 'I am like Hogarth's musician, w hom everyone disturbed. You try to get on with one task, but instead are faced with twenty.' See A . V. Khrapovitsky, Dnevnik A. V. Khrapovitskogo,

1J8 2 - 1J9 3 . Po podlinnoi ego rukopisi s biograficheskoyu stat'eyu i oh'yasnitel'nym ukazatelem Nikolaya Barsukova (St Petersburg: A . F. Bazunov, 1874), p. 2 12. 7.

For details of these commissions, see L. A . Dukelskaya and E. P. Renne, Angliiskaya zhivopis' X V I-X IX veka (Gosudarstvennyi Ermitazh: sobranie zapadnoevropeiskoi zhivopisi, ed. B. B. Piotrovsky et al.) (Florence: Iskusstvo/Giunti G ruppo Editoriale, 1990), pp. 12 5 -9 ; F. W. Hilles, 'Sir Joshua and the Empress Catherine', in W. H. Bond, ed., Eighteenth-Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde (N ew York: The Grolier Club, 1970), pp. 2 6 7 -77 ; and M. Postle, 'Sir Joshua Reynolds and the court of Catherine the Great', in Allen and Dukelskaya, eds, 1996, p. 60.

8.

See A . G. Cross, By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in EighteenthCentury Russia (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1997), pp. 3 0 8 -3 13 ; and E. Renne, 'British artists in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century', in Allen and Dukelskaya, eds, 1996, pp. 1 0 4 -1 1 5 .

9.

These included portraits of Semen Vorontsov, the Russian ambassador to England, 178 5 -18 0 6 , and his son Mikhail, w ho became governor general of Novorossia, 18 2 3 -4 5 . See Dukelskaya and Renne, 1990, pp. 9 7-8 and 1 0 1-10 2 .

10.

Alexander I commissioned this series of portraits after being impressed b y the speed and accuracy of D aw e's w ork w hen they met in Aachen in 18 18 . They now hang in the 1 8 1 2 Gallery in the Hermitage, w hich w as designed to house them b y the Italian architect Carlo Rossi in 1826. For D aw e's w ork in Russia, see G. B. Andreeva, 'Tvorchestvo Dzhordzha Dou (17 8 1-18 2 9 ) v kontekste russkogo rom antizm a', in A . V. Tolstoi, ed., Rossiya Evropa: iz istorii russko-evropeiskikh khudozhestvennykh svyazei X V III- nachala X X vv.; sbornik statei (Moscow: Nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut teorii i istorii izobrazitel'nykh iskusstv Rossiiskoi akademii khudozhestv, 1995), pp. 80-94.

11.

See E. Renne, 'Bridging Two Empires: Christina Robertson and the court of St Petersburg', in J. Pomeroy, R. P. Blakesley et al., eds, An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (London: Merrell, 2003), pp. 87-99; E. Renne, 'A British portraitist in Imperial Russia: Christina Robertson and the court of Nicholas I', Apollo, 142, September 1995, pp. 4 3 -5 ; and E. Renne, 'Prid vom yi khudozhnik Kristina Robertson', Nashe nasledie, 55, 2000, pp. 3 5 -7 .

12.

K. N . Batyushkov, 'Progulka v Akadem iyu khudozhestv', Syn otechestva, 1 8 ,1 8 1 4 .

13 .

Count Sergei U varov (17 8 6 -18 55), Nicholas I's Minister of Public Enlightenment from 18 3 3 to 1849, claimed that 'am ong the rights of a Russian subject, the right of written communication with the public is not included' but w as 'a privilege w hich the government can grant and rescind as it sees fit'. Quoted in D. Fanger, 'O n the Russianness of the Russian nineteenth-century novel', in T. G. Stavrou, ed., Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 43.

14.

Ya. D. Leshchinsky, ed., Pavel Andreevich Fedotov, khudozhnik i poet (Leningrad/M oscow: Iskusstvo, 1946), p. 78.

15.

For Hogarth's influence in Russia and the w ork of Fedotov, w hom Stasov called 'the Hogarth of Russia', see R. P. Gray, "'H e lp me to eclipse the celebrated Hogarth": the reception of Hogarth in Russia', Apollo, 15 3 (471), M ay 2001, pp. 23-30 .

16.

Zhivopisnoe obozrenie (1835), 1, pp. 13 7 -4 2 . Later issues of Pictorial Review published numerous illustrations of Hogarth's work, including Gin Lane, False Perspective Exemplified, The March to Finchley, The Stage Coach, Canvassing For Votes, The Distressed Poet, An Election Entertainment, The Polling, Calais Gate and The Laughing Audience, ibid. (18 36 -37), 2, pp. 3 2 ,1 7 7 - 8 ,2 6 2 - 4 and 3 7 7 -9 ; ibid. (18 37-38 ), 3, pp. 8 1 -4 and 1 8 3 -4 ; aRd ibid. (1841), 7, pp. 249, 272, 329 and 369.

17.

These included The Gazette of Fine Arts (18 3 6 -4 1) and the Muscovite (18 4 1-56 ). See, for example, Khudozhestvennaya gazeta (1838), 1 1 , p. 364, and ibid. (1840), 20, pp. 2 4 -2 5 ; and P. M . Leonev, 'Esteticheskoe koe-chto po povodu kartin i eskizov gospodina Fedotova', Moskvityanin, 3 (10), M ay 1950, p. 26.

18.

Zhivopisnoe obozrenie, 5 ,1 8 3 9 -4 0 , pp. 3 7 and 3 2 1 - 5 ; ibid., 4 ,1 8 3 8 - 3 9 , p. 192.

19.

The first Russian self-portrait w hich the Uffizi commissioned w as probably that of Karl Bryullov (1 799~1 852), following the success of his vast history painting The Last Day of Pompeii (1830 -33): the Uffizi already owned a self-portrait b y Orest Kiprensky (17 8 2-18 36 ), but it is not clear whether this

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20.

The Fine Art section consisted solely of Tolstoi's galvanized metals and a few other examples of applied art. For this and other information on the Russian participation in the Great Exhibition, I am grateful to David C. Fisher, PhD candidate in the Department of History at Indiana University, for showing me the draft of chapter 1 of his doctoral thesis, 'Exhibiting Russia at the World's Fairs, 18 51-19 0 0 '.

2 1.

M Berman, A ll That Is Solid Melts Into Air. The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 220.

22.

Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok, 1 M ay 18 5 1.

23.

ibid., 10 September 18 5 1.

24.

ibid., 20 September 18 5 1.

25.

See, for example, anon., 'Khudozhestvennye izvestiya iz A n glii' ('Artistic N ew s from England'), Sovremennaya letopis', 3 ,1 8 6 2 , pp. 25-6 .

26.

M any of these works are now in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the State Russian M useum in St Petersburg, and provincial Russian galleries. See L. I. Iovleva, 'O russkom khudozhestvennom otdele na Vsem im oi vystavke 1862 goda v Londone', in G. Andreeva, ed., Nezabyvaemaya Rossiya: russkie i Rossiya glazami britantsev X V II-X IX vek (Moscow: Trefoil Press, 1997), pp. 252-6 . The full details of those works now in the Tretyakov Gallery are listed on p. 256.

27.

S. N . Kondakov, ed., Yubileinyi spravochnik Imperatorskoi Akademii khudozhestv, 1764.-1914, I (St Petersburg: Imperatorskaya Akadem iya khudozhestv, 19 14 ), p. 46.

28.

V. V. Stasov, 'N asha khudozhestvennaya proviziya dlya Londonskoi vystavki' (1862), in V. V. Stasov, Izbrannye sochineniya v dvukh tomakh, vol. i (M oscow /Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1937), p. 36.

29.

V. V. Stasov, 'Posle vsem im oi vystavki 1862 goda' (1863), in Stasov, 19 37, pp. 49-58.

30.

ibid., pp. 60-89.

31.

The organizers of the entire Russian display in London in 1862, and not just the art section, were concerned w ith w hat constituted 'Russianness', and how to exhibit it. This concern w ith Russia's image abroad, and its impact on Russia's participation in the international exhibitions, is being explored b y D avid Fisher in his doctoral thesis, 'Exhibiting Russia at the W orld's Fairs, 18 5 1-19 0 0 ' (see no. 20).

32.

From 1864 to 1884 Grigorovich served as Secretary of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, an influential organization founded in 1820 w hich played a major role in supporting artists b y sponsoring exhibitions, publications and travelling scholarships abroad. For the Society's history, see N . P. Sobko, Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk Imperatorskogo Obshchestva pooshchreniya khudozhestv 1820-1890 (St Petersburg: V. I. Shtein, 1890); and E. Golubeva, 'Iz istorii "Obshchestva pooshchreniya khudozhnikov'", Iskusstvo, 1 0 , 19 6 1, pp. 6 7-72.

33.

D. V. Grigorovich, 'K artiny angliiskikh Zhivopistsev na vystavkakh 1862 goda v Londone', Part I, Russkii vestnik, 43, February 1863, p. 816.

34.

See Imperatorskaya Akadem iya khudozhestv, UkazateV sobraniyu kartin i redkikh proizvedenii khudozhestva, prinadlezhashchikh chlenam Imperatorskogo doma i chastnym litsam Peterburga: vystavka 18 61 goda (St Petersburg: Gogenfel'den & Co., 1861).

35.

Grigorovich, 1863a, p. 816.

36.

ibid., p. 817.

37.

Grigorovich w as mistaken about Turner and Flaxman, both of w hom had studied in the Royal

38.

Grigorovich, 1863a, p. 820.

A cadem y schools.

39.

M. Craske, Art in Europe 1700-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 13 0 - 3 1.

40.

Grigorovich, 1863a, p. 818.

4 1.

Grigorovich acknowledged that the demise of state patronage in England had also taken its toll on history painting, as the majority of commissions were now for private 'castles and cottages', rather than palaces and public edifices, ibid., p. 823.

42.

ibid., p. 823.

43.

ibid., p. 825. A s w ell as featuring regularly in the periodical press, Hogarth's works had also been included in the 18 6 1 A cadem y exhibition of works from private and Imperial collections.

Rosalind P. Blakesley 44.

ibid., p. 826.

45.

ibid., p. 829.

219

46.

ibid., p. 836.

47.

The w a y in w hich the art displays, and the English section in particular, were shaped to promote the notion of national schools has been examined b y T. Prasch in 'Naturalism, Nationalism, and Progress: A rt at the London International Exhibition of 186 2', paper presented in the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British A rt spring lecture series, London, March 1989.

48.

The Times, 7 June 1862, p. 8.

49.

Illustrated London News, 27 September 1862, p. 342.

30.

A sample of the view s of both Gautier and the English critics w as given b y Prasch in the paper referred to in no. 47.

5 1.

T. Thore, Salons de W. Burger, 1861 a 1868, vol. i (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1870), pp. 1 8 9 ,2 3 1 ,2 4 1 - 5 7 and 270. Thore's review, 'Exposition Internationale de Londres en 186 2', w as originally published in

L'lndependence. 52.

ibid., p. 3 14 .

53.

ibid., p. 282.

54.

ibid., p. 281.

55.

Grigorovich, 1863a, p. 840.

56.

ibid., p. 844.

57.

D. V. Grigorovich, 'Kartiny angliiskikh Zhivopistsev na vystavkakh 1862 goda v Londone', Part II, Russkii vestnik, 43, March 1863, p. 3 1. Despite the fact that both Part I and Parts II—III of Grigorovich's article are in volume 43, these are in fact two different volumes with the same number.

58.

ibid., pp. 34-8.

59.

ibid., p. 43.

60.

ibid., p. 44. The Russian never distinguished between English and Scottish art.

61.

ibid., p. 45.

62.

Landseer w as singled out as the most remarkable animal painter, with Grigorovich noting that reproductions of his paintings did not do justice to the ingenious anthropom orphism, draughtsm anship and colouring of the originals. D. V. G rigorovich, 'K artin y angliiskikh Zhivopistsev na vystavkakh 1862 goda v Londone', Part III, Russkii vestnik, 43, March 1863, p. 88.

63.

ibid., pp. 67-8.

64.

These included Gainsborough, Morland, John Crome, D avid Roberts, Martin and Danby.

65.

Grigorovich, 1863b, p. 76.

66.

ibid., p. 72.

67.

ibid., p. 86.

68.

For the Kushelev-Bezborodko collection, see, R. P. Gray, 'The Golitsyn and Kushelev-Bezborodko Collections and their role in the evolution of public art galleries in Russia', Oxford Slavonic Papers, n s 3 1 ,1 9 9 8 , pp. 5 1-6 7 .

,

69.

Grigorovich, 1863b, p. 90.

70.

V. G. Perov, letter to the Imperial Academ y of Arts, 18 April 1863, in A . A . Fedorov-Davydov, et al., eds, V. Perov: dokumenty, pis'ma i rasskazy, katalog proizvedenii, bibliografiya (Moscow: Izogiz, 1934), p. 90.

7 1.

These similarities have been noted. See, for example, V. A . Petrov, 'Tvorcheskii put' V. G. Perova', in T. Yu. K lyueva, ed., V. Perov: vystavka proizvedenii k 150-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1988), pp. 3 3 -4 ; and V. A . Lenyashin, Vasily Grigorevich Perov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1987), p. 94.

72.

For Perov's genre painting, see R. P. Gray, Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 1 5 5 -7 7 .

73.

For further information on these journals, see R. S. Kaufman, Russkaya i sovetskaya khudozhestvennaya kritika s serediny X IX v. do 194 1 g. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1978), pp. 5 2 -7 5 ; and chapters 8 - 1 1 in R. S. Kaufman, Ocherki istorii russkoi khudozhestvennoi kritiki X IX veka: ot Konstantina Batyushkova do Aleksandra Benua (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990).

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9.1 Joshua Reynolds, The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents, 1786-88, oil on canvas, 303 x 297 cm

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9.2 Christina Robertson, Portrait of Grand Duchess Maria Aleksandrovna, 1849, oil on canvas, 249 x 157 cm

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9.3

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Vasily Perov, The Drowned Woman, 1867, oil on canvas, 68 x 106 cm

9.4 G. F. Watts, Found Drowned, c. 1848-30, oil on canvas, 144.7 x 213.4 cm

Rosalind P. Blakesley

9.5

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Illarion Pryanishnikov, The Semptress, 1870, oil on canvas on board, 44.5 x 36.5 cm

10

Unmistakably American? National myths and the historiography of landscape painting in the USA Tim Barringer

As the cultural critic Homi Bhabha has pointed out, 'Nation and Narration' are profoundly intertwined; national identity and nations themselves are invented and articulated through stories, histories and myths.1 The very idea of the self-contained and well-defined nation is itself mythical: in Benedict Anderson's apposite formulation, nations are merely 'imagined communities', fragile and contingent structures.2Nonetheless, the idea of a collective national identity rooted in a particular geographical territory, ethnic type or language, can be a myth of terrible power, always threatening to essentialize the self, and to exclude the other. Despite the hegemonic claims of particular concepts of nationhood, however, each national story is constantly contested; as groups and interests within the demos jostle for power, fissures become apparent along the lines of class, gender, religion and region; boundaries are challenged, edges and limits become porous. The visual image has an important role to play in these processes: it has the power to articulate concepts of national identity in readily comprehensible and iconic forms, both through narrative structures (exemplified in the nineteenth century by history painting and genre painting) and through the portrayal of persons and terrain (portraiture and landscape painting). Works of art representing real or imagined locations are often understood as enshrining the spirit or character of the nation, though they also have the potential to represent marginal spaces or dissident views within a culture and to undermine simplistic concepts of national identity. Pre war Ante-bellum America was riven by deep inner contradictions, with the primary fault-line forming around the issue of slavery. American national myths, overriding the nation's heterogeneity with a sense of collective purpose, differed from those of ancient European nations where lineage, ethnicity and geographical rootedness were dominant concepts. The history of the United States, from the Declaration of Independence onwards, was a

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conscious project, rather than the result of historical accidents deriving from an immemorial inheritance. Even its protagonists understood this history as a unique experiment: its origin lay in a successful struggle - alone among British colonies at the time - to gain independence from an oppressive imperial overlord. The subsequent development of the United States, notably in the economic sphere, seemed blessed by divine providence. This doctrine of exceptionalism allowed the United States to assert its unity (in spite of evident inner divisions) by postulating a unique national identity: it was the anti-Europe, a new world democracy. The narrative of America's historical development attained the status of an epic, played out in a territory already vast but subject to incremental, quasi-imperial, westward expansion throughout the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century commentators were acutely aware that American art should embody this cult of uniqueness. Henry H. Tuckerman declared in American Artist Life, 1867: our atmosphere of Freedom, of material activity, of freshness and prosperity, should animate the manly artist. He has a vantage-ground here unknown in the Old World, and should work confidently therein. ... Academic trammels, prescriptive patronage, the deference excited by great exemplars, do not here subdue the artist's aspirations, or make him despair of himself, or bewilder his ideal of excellence. ... Let the American artist rise above the national drawbacks ... let him use widely the resources around him, and be true to himself and he can achieve miracles.3

There is clearly an analogy here between the epic of American history - the clearing of the forests and the forging of a new civilization - with the creation of a uniquely American School of art. Both are seen as robustly masculine exercises. But it was not merely the economic and political benefits of the new democratic state which provided a unique setting for the American artist. The most significant and recognizable emblem of the new nation - in the absence of the ancient monuments, traditions and dynasties through which other national cultures could be defined - was the landscape itself. Discourse about the American landscape, from the beginning, quite justifiably presented it, too, as unique. De Witt Clinton wrote in 1816: Can there be a country in the world better calculated than ours to exalt the imagination - to call into activity the creative powers of the mind, and to afford just views of the beautiful, the wonderful and the sublime: Here, nature has conducted her operations on a magnificent scale ... This wild romantic and awful scenery is calculated to produce a corresponding impression on the imagination.4

Landscape painting came to stand in the nineteenth century as a synecdoche for the national project of the United States, a part which encapsulates and stands for the whole, a genre of national self-portrayal central to the definition of American identity. Until the Civil War, these strategies were, it seems, broadly successful. As Angela Miller has noted in her perceptive study The

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Empire of the Eye, 'it was no small success to create an art form fluid enough to serve the multiple and shifting needs of nationalist sentiment in the decades during which the very concept of nation remained problematic'.5Accordingly, it was necessary to present American landscape paintings as if they were as unique and free from corrupting external influences as the wilderness itself. To assert the uniqueness and coherence of each nation's artistic production accords with assumptions deeply embedded within the discipline of art history. Myths of nation underpin almost every major art-historical text and institution: indeed, one could argue that art and art institutions have played a small but significant role in constituting the 'imagined community' of the modem nation state.6The discipline emerged in a recognizably modem form in Germany, during the Romantic period, when dreams of German unification were emerging. Art museums from the Louvre to Munich and from London to New York organized their collections until recently according to national 'schools', presupposing a distinct and essential national culture, which underpins cultural production. The notion of national 'school' can imply a collective project emanating from a culturally and ethnically pure population group; in its crudest formulation, it glorifies conformity to a 'national style' and exiles that which dissents from it, the transient or hybrid. Consonant with the notion of a national school is the Hegelian (and also Ruskinian) belief that from works of art and architecture can be read the emergence, fruition and decline of a national spirit. Even art historians who reject this essentialist and explicitly deterministic account of the relationship between national identity and artistic production routinely employ categories of art-historical understanding deeply conditioned by conceptions of national identity. American art presents a different challenge. Clement Greenberg remarked in 1955 that, before Abstract Expressionism, America 'had not yet made a single contribution to the mainstream of painting or sculpture'.7 Certainly the period before 1945 is hardly represented at all in the great European collections,8 and any notion of an American School held beyond the USA is almost entirely confined to the post-war period. The works of earlier American painters, such as Benjamin West, James McNeill Whistler and Mary Cassatt, tend to be ingested by the national schools of their country of domicile - Britain or France. Nineteenth-century American art has, however, been the subject of intense historical scrutiny in its home country, at least since the founding of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1924,9 and with renewed vigour following the donation of the Karolik collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in 1945.10In addition to the rapid growth of permanent collections of American art in the major museums of the United States, numerous blockbuster exhibitions have, in recent years, explored and attempted to define what, to paraphrase Pevsner,

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we might refer to as 'The Americanness of American Art',11 and even to characterize America itself. Thus, the National Gallery of Art exhibited several hundred works which, it claimed, epitomized 'American Light' in 1980, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art's comprehensive exhibition of the Hudson River School, mounted in 1987, celebrated America as a paradise, or possibly a paradise lost.12 A massive bibliography confirms the extraordinary efflorescence of interest in American art over the last twenty or thirty years. In this essay I explore the strategies by which art history has framed the work of American landscape painters from 1825 to about 1870 in a narrative and analytical context heavily invested in myths of the American nation. In doing so I shall offer some thoughts about the limitations this nationalist reading of American art places on our understanding of a corpus of work which is too little known in Europe, despite its outstanding aesthetic quality and richness of meaning and resonance. Particularly at issue is the extent to which the linkage between American and British art, a relationship which is mutually illuminating, has been understated for nationalist reasons. It is important, in an era of self-reflexive art-historical scholarship, to acknowledge one's own position. My vantage point in this inquiry is perhaps an unusual one: I write as a British historian primarily of British art teaching in an American university, but also as co-curator, with Andrew Wilton, of a major international loan exhibition held at Tate Britain in London in 2002, American Sublime, the first exhibition to present nineteenth-century American landscapes to a British audience. While the primary objective of the exhibition is to allow a new audience to assess a group of works representative of the finest achievements of American landscape painting from the 1820s to the 1870s, the exhibition and catalogue intended also to make a historiographic intervention by questioning the myths of uniqueness and difference which, I hope to demonstrate, have been a major element in the historiography of American art.

Peculiar to our country: the case of Thomas Cole

There were many landscape painters active in America before the arrival of the seventeen-year-old English emigrant, Thomas Cole, in 1818; but in the existing historiography the works of Alvan Fisher and the landscapes of Washington Allston generally stand only as harbingers of Cole's arrival. The informative 1986 exhibition, Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830, which threw light on this little-known period, reinforced this teleological history by climaxing with a group of Cole's earliest works.13 Cole's special

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status was widely recognized in his own time, and on his death, William Cullen Bryant delivered before the National Academy of Design and published a funeral oration which, despite its very specific rhetorical context, has remained a central text in the historiography of American art. Its central rhetorical strategy is an elision of Cole's uniqueness with the uniqueness of the American landscape. Cole's early work captured what Bryant described as 'mountain summits, unmistakably American, with their infinity of treetops, a beautiful management of light, striking the forms of trees and rocks in the foreground, and a certain lucid darkness in the waters below'.14 And surveying the artistic landscape without Cole, Bryant attempted a somewhat hubristic metaphor: It is as if the voyager on the Hudson were to look towards the great range of the Catskills, at the foot of which Cole, with a reverent fondness, had fixed his abode, and were to see the grandest of its summits had disappeared, had sunk into the plain from our sight.15

Cole had not only painted the awesome features of the American landscape but also in the eyes of the foremost nature poet of the era he had actually become one of them. Bryant's text became a keynote in later accounts of Cole's role as progenitor of American landscape paintings. Thus Henry H. Tuckerman in American Artist Life: To [Cole] might be directly traced the primal success of landscape painting as a national art in the New World; his truth and feeling excited enthusiasm: all who had ever enjoyed the aspects of nature peculiar to this continent were, to use the language of Bryant in his discourse on Cole's career and character 'delighted at the opportunity of contemplating pictures which carried the eye to a scene of wild grandeur peculiar to our country.16

Beyond Bryant's eulogy, and Cole's own writings, our major source on this artist is a biography by the Revd Louis Legrand Noble, a work of nationalist hagiography with an explicitly - but not inappropriately - religious bent, published in 1853.17 The events of Cole's life of early hardship, travel and apprenticeship in Steubenville, Ohio, and Pittsburgh were presented by both Bryant and Noble as archetypal American rites of passage, the strivings of the self-made man, as opposed to a European reliance on inheritance and precedent.18 Yet one key element of Cole's biography remained problematic; his formative years, personally and artistically, had been spent in Britain. Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England, in 1801, the son of a textile manufacturer belonging to a community of dissenting Protestants in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. He worked as an engraver in a calico factory in 18x5 and became an engraver's apprentice in Liverpool in 1817. Although his access to paintings must have been limited, he would certainly have had access to the rich print culture of the period. Through the

230 ENGLISH ACCENTS engravings, aquatints and mezzotints inevitably present in a printmaker's shop, he must have absorbed the main compositional tropes and expressive effects of British landscape art of the period. Although his status as an immigrant was typical rather than exceptional, Cole's biographers felt the need not only to establish his American identity but also to dissociate him from his British origins. Thus Bryant claims 'He regarded himself ... as an American, and claimed the United States as the country of his relatives. His father passed his youth here, and his grandfather, I have heard him say, lived the greater part of his life in the United States.'19 There is no documentary evidence to support this statement, which may reflect an embroidery of the truth by Bryant or by Cole himself; yet as recently as 1948 Wolfgang Bom, in the first modem account of American landscape painting, still identified the family as being of American origin.20 Cole's progress from obscurity to national fame is likewise the stuff of myth.21 Here the key text is History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, by the painter, playwright and journalist William Dunlap, which was first published in 1834. Dunlap's volume oscillates between an aspiration to become the American Vasari and the more typically Protestant project of presenting miniature biographies as homiletic moral exemplars, placing it in a trajectory from the keystone of English Protestantism, Foxe's Book of Martyrs to its Victorian successor, Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct of 1859. According to all the major texts, Cole's transformation into an American genius came in 1825 when, after a visit to the Hudson Highlands and the Catskill mountains - a direct confrontation with the wilderness - Cole exhibited three paintings of Catskill scenery in the window of the New York bookseller William A. Colman. In a scene of symbolic endorsement typical of art-historical mythmaking, Cole's Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill) was purchased by Dunlap himself and a view of Kaaterskill Falls was purchased by Colonel John Trumbull, President of the American Academy,22who (in Dunlap's much-quoted paraphrase) declared 'I am delighted and at the same time mortified. This youth has done at once, and without instruction, what I cannot do after fifty years' practice.'23 Central to the reception of these works was the notion of Cole as a distinctively, paradigmatically, American artist. His work from the Hudson Valley was both reflective and formative of a vogue among urban New Yorkers for the picturesque scenery which could be accessed easily by steamer and, by the 1830s, also by railroad.24 In an interesting parallel between the national and personal narratives we have been examining, the opening of the Erie Canal, from Albany to the Great Lakes took place in 1825, the year Cole moved to New York. This confirmed the Hudson River's status as the greatest commercial artery inland from New York: industry lined the southern reaches of the River at the very moment when Cole asserted its primeval and unspoilt

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beauty. The Hudson River's territory also encapsulated large agrarian estates, little changed from the colonial era, and areas of untouched wilderness. This region, then, offered a wide repertoire of possible types of landscape imagery, from the industrial and natural sublime to picturesque landscapes of cultivation. But it was the apparently virgin American wilderness (in fact already popular with, and accessible to, more adventurous tourists) upon which Cole's early work focused. Cole's writings, among which the 'Essay on American Landscape Scenery' of 1836 is the most significant, lauded the American wilderness, in comparison with the cultivated landscapes of Europe: I would have it remembered that nature has shed over this land beauty and magnificence, and although the character of its scenery may differ from the old world's, yet inferiority must not therefore be inferred; for though American scenery is destitute of many of those circumstances that give value to the European, still it has features, and glorious ones unknown to Europe. ... The most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness. It is the most distinctive, because in civilized Europe the primitive features of scenery have long since been destroyed or modified - the extensive forests that once overshadowed a great part of it have been felled - rugged mountains have been smoothed, and impetuous rivers turned from their courses to accommodate the tastes and necessities of a dense population - the once tangled wood is now a grassy lawn; the turbulent brook a navigable stream - crags that could not be removed have been crowned with towers, and the rudest valleys tamed by the plough.25

Cole's defence of his native landscape was at its most perceptive when he addressed the philosophical underpinnings of the picturesque in the philosophy of Associationism, which so richly endowed English sites such as Tintem Abbey or Senlac Edge (site of the Battle of Hastings) with meaning and sentiment. While the sites of the battles of the War of Independence offered some associations with the historical narrative of the United States, Cole noted: 'American associations are not so much of the past as of the present and the future'.26 To treat Cole and his work as a kind of cultural emanation of the young nation is, however, to misread his position, just as the landscape of the Hudson River Valley - one very specific region in New York State where surviving wilderness lay in uneasy proximity to large-scale industrial exploitation - could not adequately stand as a synecdoche for the entirety of a complex nation whose terrain also encompassed the southern climate and slaveholding politics of the Carolinas and the sprawling industrial cities of the North.27Cole's position with regard to the expanding Jacksonian economy of his day, and the rapid industrialization of the north-east, was deeply ambivalent. Recent scholarship, notably by Alan Wallach, has disrupted the trope of Cole as an uncontentious father figure producing images of an American landscape around which all could and can unite. In fact Cole was a

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partisan, engaged in the factional politics of the era, and was deeply sympathetic with the Federalist, aristocratic culture of New York State. Cole's Viewfrom Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) in 1836 (Figure 10.1) has become an icon of national identity through its presence in the Metropolitan Museum since 1908. Drawing on European compositional sources - from the Claudean repoussoir to the blasted oak of Salvator Rosa - the painting offers a deeply ambivalent reading of the American landscape. While the civilizing mission of American culture, moving from right to left, east to west, is apparent, converting the wilderness to smallholdings and peaceful agrarian communities, heavy industry is nowhere to be seen. Cole himself, suspended between the wilderness and the farmland, between past and present, stands as a witness to historical change, chronicling the destruction of that very element - wilderness - which he identified as America's claim to aesthetic uniqueness. This role as the prophet of potential national doom, in contrast to his familiar role as celebrant of national glory, marks Cole's most ambitious series of paintings, The Course of Empire, also completed in 1836. Following an imaginary country through the stages of historical development, from the Savage State through a Pastoral or Arcadian era, it moves on to demonstrate the dangers of overweening luxury in Consummation of Empire (1836, Figure 10.2), an elaborate, iconographically loaded, canvas closely related to the biblical epics and apocalyptic images of John Martin from whom Cole had borrowed before.28The inevitable moral and political consequences of luxury are graphically illustrated through canvases depicting Destruction and Desolation. Cole's pessimistic imperial narrative has recently been the subject of several significant readings.29There is a broad consensus that, although not strictly an American subject, the sequence offered a parable of American history; like Ruskin's Stones of Venice fifteen years later, it offered a comparison between the rise and fall of a past empire and the dangers lying ahead for a contemporary one. While Ruskin pitted the medieval and Renaissance maritime empire of Venice against its modern British counterpart, Cole alluded more vaguely, through his use of classical architecture, to Rome and perhaps (in a Tumerian gesture) Carthage. For all the vagueness of the actual empire depicted, Cole's intervention was more direct and topical: Alan Wallach convincingly identifies his programme as being one of opposition to the expansionist, utilitarian and democratic platform of Andrew Jackson against the gentrified Federalism of Cole and his patrons. There is no question that a Gibbonian view of Rome was the primary model for his imperial schema; a key scene in Noble's biography records (or perhaps invents) a moment in Rome in 1832 when he 'seated himself on the fragments of a column to enjoy the sunset'. The inspiration of this 'scene of ruin' brought forth the idea of The Course of Empire.30 It would be worth

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exploring the possibility, however, that Cole was also alluding to the overweening ambitions of the empire at whose heart he grew up, and whose crisis and ultimate military victory in the Napoleonic Wars he experienced during his adolescence - that of Britain. The British Empire, ultimately driven by the economic and financial engines of the industrial north (Cole's place of origin) and the City of London, had not yet adopted the lavish pomp and circumstance of the Victorian era. But Consummation of Empire could easily be read as a satire on imperial London, with commercial and government buildings astride a fantastic depiction of the River Thames in the decadent, but opulent, regency and personal reign of George IV. Its creamy fantasy architecture has as much in common with the theatrical stucco of John Nash's Cumberland Terrace (1826) in Regent's Park, as with Trajan's Rome. Other hints of a British point of reference can be found in the Stonehenge which appears in the middle distance of the Pastoral or Arcadian State, a common focus for Romantic longings for a long-lost past.31 Explicit compositional and conceptual debts to J. M. W. Turner and John Martin add to these overtones.32 Cole had, indeed, visited Turner in 1829, when he saw Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812, London: Tate Gallery), 'a sublime picture with a powerful effect of Chiaro scuro'.33 While Cole was critical of Turner's technique, this work was surely a decisive influence upon the Destruction scene in The Course of Empire. Cole referred to the 'great struggle for freedom' as endowing the American landscape with associations: his relish at the collapse of a great empire may reflect his republican contempt for the regime from which the United States had emerged bloodily.34 The Course of Empire paintings were enthusiastically welcomed by many contemporary critics, although some offered American democracy as an alternative to this decadent, European cycle of rise and fall, rather than accepting the series as a critique of American 'progress'. Bryant's oration praised the work as Cole's central achievement, but even during Cole's lifetime, detractors of the allegories argued that Cole was better suited to the more explicitly American task of naturalistic landscape painting. Perhaps the proximity of Cole's visual rhetoric to that of English painters of the apocalyptic Sublime, such as Martin, Danby and Turner, may partly account for this. The wish to posit antecedents for the American Impressionism of the late nineteenth century (largely landscape-based and by definition antagonistic to allegory) also played a role. Benjamin Champney's Sixty Years' Memories of Art and Artists, written in a nostalgic vein in 1900 when Cole's work was almost forgotten, articulated this orthodoxy: he admired Cole's landscapes as 'more thoroughly American than any landscape work perhaps yet accomplished' but repudiated the allegories 'because such a thing is hardly within the province of landscape art'.35 After a half century of neglect of Cole's work, Wolfgang Born's pioneering

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work American Landscape Painting: An Interpretation was published by Yale University Press in 1948. Bom follows the same trajectory as the latenineteenth century critics: Some [of Cole's works] were limited to the representation of untamed nature, where gnarled and barren trunks recalled Ruisdael's anthropomorphic trees, raising their branches like arms in despair. Others indulged in ponderous allegories. ... The public was swept off its feet, but the connoisseurs became somewhat cool. Posterity decidedly favored Cole's pure landscapes.36

Exhuming Cole from obscurity at the moment of Abstract Expressionism's triumph, Bom recovered the 'subjectless' and 'pure' landscapes, as opposed to the presumably 'impure' figural compositions. Only with the onset of PostModernism, and the return to figuration in contemporary American art, could art history stomach a reappraisal of the allegorical cycles. The most significant manifestation of his revisionist process was an exhibition catalogue by Alan Wallach and William H. Truettner to accompany a full historical survey of Cole's work at the National Museum of American Art in 1994. Wallach and Truettner placed the Course of Empire series at the physical and intellectual centre of the display, and the distinguished team of scholars, broadly Marxist in their sympathies, interpreted Cole's work in the context of the social, political and intellectual history of his period. Most powerful was the deconstructive strategy by which Cole's role as the 'father' of American art was problematized.

Kindred compositions If an examination of Cole's direct relationship to British visual culture complicates the received account of his American uniqueness, many of the same arguments apply to his successors. In addition to Bryant's eulogy to Cole, which was quickly published, artistic tributes appeared, including a canvas To the Memory of Cole (1848, Des Moines Women's Club, Iowa) by Cole's only significant student Frederic Church, which referenced his master's own painting The Cross in the Wilderness (1845, Paris, Musee du Louvre). The most effective homage, however, was produced by Asher Brown Durand, Cole's friend and fellow member of the National Academy, in response to a commission from Cole's patron Jonathan Sturges. Kindred Spirits (1849) (Figure 10.3) gives brilliant expression to the parallel and interlocking myths of the development of American art, and of America itself.37 Durand placed Cole with William Cullen Bryant on a rocky promontory, gesturing at the magnificent, and recognizably American, landscape which opens up before them. Kindred Spirits might, indeed be regarded as sui generis, a visual analogue for the uniqueness of American landscape painting and a tribute to

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a founding genius in each of the sister arts of poetry and painting, a double portrait and a landscape painting, and the very epitome of a particular time and place. Yet a comparison with a somewhat earlier example of English landscape painting, which has attained an even more iconic role in its own national culture, John Constable's The Cornfield (1826) (Figure 10.4), reveals a rather more complex web of relationships.38 Durand would probably have been familiar with Constable's composition, from which, perhaps, he adapted the upright format, and loosely Claudean balancing of unequal masses on right and left. The painting entered the National Gallery in London with much fanfare after the artist's death in 1837; Durand visited England in 1840 and spent time in the National Gallery. Furthermore, the composition circulated widely as a mezzotint published in 1834.39Durand had consciously alluded to Constable's work in The Beeches40 (1845, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art) and there is a strong formal rhyme between Kindred Spirits and The Cornfield, even if Durand's sentimental arching of a bough across the top of the composition recalls the vignette format of contemporary book illustration. Durand certainly admired Constable; although they never met, Constable's biographer, the London-based American painter C. R. Leslie, showed him a range of Constable's sketches.41 Despite their ostensible similarities, however, the two works vividly demonstrate the differences between the iconography of the English and American landscapes. Constable's work emphasizes cultivation and tradition; the ancient byways of East Anglia present a landscape almost entirely shaped by human endeavour, from gateposts and fences to field systems and drainage. Despite some signs of decay - notably a five-bar gate off its hinges and an abandoned plough - all is well in this pastoral idyll peopled by a relatively contented peasantry, picturesquely accompanied by donkeys and a flock of sheep. The distant church with its medieval tower, probably a figment of Constable's imagination, and certainly not visible from his notional viewpoint in Fen Lane, near East Bergholt, implies the persistence of an immutable social and theological order. Kindred Spirits offers a quite different, if equally mythical, prospect. Here the hand of man is (except for Cole, Bryant, and presumably Durand) completely absent: we are presented instead with a visual gazetteer of the American wilderness; waterfalls, cliffs, the lush vegetation of the forest floor and the rocky barrenness of the mountain peaks. Exactly as Cole argues in his essay, 'the primitive features of scenery' remain.42 If the divine is present, it is as a transcendental force through nature, rather than through organized religion. The processes by which Kindred Spirits naturalizes myths of America are strikingly analogous to those by which Constable performs the same role for England. Although apparently a naturalistic image - the trees, rocks, mountains and water must originate in studies from nature - Kindred Spirits

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is an elaborately rhetorical construction. The more adventurous tourists among its original New York audience would have known that the two recognizable landmarks from the Hudson Valley area - the Clove of the Catskills and Kaaterskill Falls - could not be seen from a single vantage point. In Durand's image, the wilderness of upstate New York stands for the whole of the USA; in Constable's, an obscure corner of East Anglia stands for 'English Landscape Scenery' which in turn came to emblematize the political unit of Great Britain and even the British Empire. Yet in each case these landscapes are more symbolic than actual. The fact that Catskill Clove and the Kaaterskill Falls were well-known landmarks undercuts the idea of a virgin wilderness; this landscape had already been processed and commodified for tourists. Durand was clearly suggesting that Cole's legacy lay in his celebration of the American wilderness, not the allegorical and historical series; sketching on the spot is identified as the key to his practice. Yet other elements in Durand's painting also undercut any initial impression of unmediated mimetic realism in Kindred Spirits: the names of Cole and Bryant inscribed in the bark of a tree to the left; the single eagle possibly representing the departure of Cole's soul; the broken tree trunk in the foreground (a favourite motif of Cole's) hinting at American landscape painting shattered by the loss of its leader. And in Durand, as in Constable, absences are as significant as presences. All traces of the Native American population are gone; yet there is no hint here either of the processes of social and economic change identified in Cole's The Oxbow. Likewise, in Constable's work, any engagement with the social conditions of the rapidly changing East Anglian countryside at the time of the 'Captain Swing' riots is avoided, although some interpreters have discerned in the unhealthy-looking tree to the left signs of disease in the body politic. And while Constable's nervous and expressive brushwork, thick impasto and dramatic chiaroscuro find no match in Durand's relatively unresponsive surfaces and limited tonal range, each artist successfully manipulated complex and shared elements to create parallel icons of quite different national identities. Durand's fabrication of an idealized America was achieved, like Cole's, with conscious reference to British traditions, just as Constable drew on Claude in the process of distilling an ideal from his East Anglian sketches.

Exhibiting exceptionalism: the Luminist myth

In 1980, John Wilmerding of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC organized a major loan exhibition which drew together American landscape paintings from the period immediately after Cole's death. Of these artists, only Cole's pupil, Frederic Edwin Church, gained a reputation in his lifetime

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to rival Cole's. American Light went so far as to state: 'By proposing luminism as the conclusive development of early American landscape painting (in contrast to more traditional and often uneven Hudson River school surveys), one can view it as the central movement in American art through the middle of the nineteenth century.'43 Although his text clearly acknowledges the opposite, Wilmerding's subtitle, 'the Luminist Movement' ostensibly implies that its members constituted a group, like the Impressionists, or even signatories to a manifesto, like the Futurists or Surrealists of the twentieth century. Yet the term 'luminism' would not have been recognized by any of the artists - Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Robinson Gifford, John Frederick Kensett, let alone the eminent Frederic Church whom the exhibition included. Lane, the paradigmatic figure of Luminism who was active in Massachusetts and Maine, seems to have had little if any connection to the other, New York based painters;44 Heade, only fitfully successful in his career, stood at the margins of the art world.45 Issues of representation and national identity are sublimated in the Luminist literature into a rhetoric of the transcendent and spiritual, though one which still bears a markedly nationalist imprint. It is not merely the meanings of light in Romanticism which are under discussion, but a wholly national - and naturalized - phenomenon: American light. The term 'luminism' appears to have been coined by John I. H. Baur, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum, in an article published in 1948,46 the same year as Wolfgang Born's survey of American landscape painting, during the intense nationalism of the early days of the Cold War, and the triumph of the New York School. Although Baur's cast of characters was rather different from that of American Light (Thomas Birch and Joshua Shaw, for example, do not appear to have survived in the Luminist canon;47 Church was not yet co-opted), he identified Heade and Lane as the key Luminists. For Baur, Luminism was unselfconscious and unmediated, an art of pure perception with minimal reference to tradition or to the moralizing Romanticism which bedevilled Cole. But the essence of Luminism remained elusive. Writing of Fitz Hugh Lane's works such as Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine (1862) (Figure 10.5), he notes: It is difficult to define the almost magic quality which radiates from these serenely polished coastal scenes with their unearthly clarity of light or their enveloping tones of dusk. It does not reside in the technique, which is dry, meticulous, sometimes even stiffly naive; nor is it in the design. ... It seems to exist rather in an almost impersonal quality, as if conscious thought had been suspended to permit the scene to impress itself on the senses and feelings in the purity of immediate perception.48

As late as 1986, Barbara Novak was still wrestling with the same problem: If pure luminist paintings are rare, pure luminist painters are rarer still. The archetypal luminist is of course Fitz Hugh Lane whose works embody all the

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characteristics generally associated with luminism: not only light but glow, not only glow but structure, not only classic space carefully mensurated in orderly planes, but hyper-clarified objects and impersonal or universalised self.49

Searching again for a definition of Luminism in the more substantial 1934 statement of his argument, Baur invoked the discourse of American uniqueness: Whether the scientist agrees or not, there is ample evidence that, to the artist, American light looks different from that of Europe. Long before the Impressionists of the late nineteenth century, who are generally considered the official painters of light, a group of obscure American artists made this discovery and turned it quickly to poetic use. Technically they were extreme realists ... Spiritually, they were the lyrical poets of the American countryside and the most sensitive to its nuances of m ood.50

Lane recommends himself to the proponents of Luminism partly because his obscure, provincial life kept him free from corrupting European influences: he was able to paint American light in an American way. He appears to be a homespun American original. Yet a crucial element in Lane's development was the example of Robert Salmon, an Anglo-Scottish marine and scene painter who was active in Boston from 1828 until 1842.51 Salmon, whose own copy of a work by Turner hung in his Boston studio, represents a direct link to British painting, although undoubtedly he absorbed much from the work of his Boston contemporaries.52 The proximity of Salmon's work to Lane's undermines the claims to an exclusively American genealogy for Luminism. Indeed, it would not be difficult to demonstrate that many of the characteristics identified with Luminism can be widely found in northern European art of the 1820s and 1830s. Luminism served for Baur as the point of origin in a teleological history. For Baur, the Luminists in some ways prefigured French Impressionism - the 'official painters of light' in his curiously naive formulation - and therefore Modernism, whose triumphant culmination had been reached by the New York School (the telos of this celebrated teleology). This far-fetched notion allowed Modernism to be an American phenomenon, with a brief Parisian interlude. These parallels between American painting of the 1850s and that of the 1950s were widely acknowledged as the Luminist bandwagon gained speed. In 1969, Barbara Novak cited Luminism as 'one of the most truly indigenous styles in the history of American art'.53 By the 1960s, the Americanness of Abstract Expressionism (and its radical separation from European art) could be demonstrated by formal links with the earlier work; and the international prestige of modern American art could be used to bolster the reputations of the obscure landscapists of the nineteenth century. The art market responded to this mutual endorsement of historical and (almost) contemporary American art with a massive inflation of the sale value of the works of Heade, Lane and Kensett.

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In a parallel argument, the grandiose, panoramic canvases of Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt were routinely compared to those of the Abstract Expressionists, a process which reached its apotheosis in the Museum of Modem Art's bicentennial exhibition of 1976, The Natural Paradise: Painting in America i8oo-i% o. For Wilmerding, writing in the catalogue, On one level the literal or implied panoramic scale of canvases from both periods surely recalls the continuing American association of the vast landscape with the national identity. The pulsing surges of energy, seemingly uncontainable within the picture's framing edges, characterize equally the view of nature described in Frederick Church's Niagara Falls of 1857 and embodied in Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm of almost a century later. The latter, of course, is no landscape, but it is very much an American environment.54

Wilmerding's underlying thesis in American Light, four years later, posited an isolationist account of American uniqueness, arguing that 'Like abstract expressionism a century later, luminism provided a revealing index in the national temperament in its time and place.'55Once again, the Hegelian notion of indexicality underpins a nationalist reading. And perhaps American Light, the culminating, officially endorsed assertion of Luminism at the National Gallery of Art, was as revealing of the national Zeitgeist as the works it contained. Although planned earlier, American Light coincided with the beginning of the Reagan era in American politics, and a reassertion of 'American values' after the crises of Vietnam, Watergate, and the economic problems of the Carter presidency. Like all the more intellectually coherent contributions to American Light, Earl A. Powell's essay 'Luminism and the American Sublime' effectively revealed the redundancy of the very notion of Luminism. By viewing American landscape painting in the context of the Sublime, a philosophical tradition reaching back through Kant and Burke to Longinus, and placing it in a visual tradition including Turner, de Loutherbourg, Martin and Friedrich, Powell reveals the fallacy of Novak's claim for Luminism as an 'indigenous style'. An interpretation based on the traditional landscape categories of the picturesque and the Sublime overcomes the dichotomy of 'bad/Romantic/ European-influenced' painters of the Hudson River School versus 'good/Realist/all-American' painters of Luminist persuasion (a painful binary for an artist like Church, whose oeuvre is split in half by it). It is notable that during the 1990s the term 'luminism' has gradually fallen from favour and as it has done so American landscape painting of the nineteenth century has been gradually reintegrated into a global historical context.

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Questioning national identity A significant development since the mid-1980s, prefigured by the earlier work of David C. Huntington, has been the rehabilitation of Frederic Edwin Church as perhaps the outstanding figure in American painting of the mid-nineteenth century. Publications and exhibitions organized by Franklin Kelly, Gerald Carr, Katherine Manthome and others have explored the intellectual and visual richness of Church's work with a methodological rigour which has avoided many of the pitfalls of earlier scholarship on American landscape.56 National identity has emerged as a central problem for Church scholarship, but the latest generation of scholars have interrogated concepts of 'nation', and their effects on the historiography of art, more critically than their predecessors. National identity is recognized as a historically contingent and contested formulation, rather than as being self-evident and immutable. It is now possible to understand Church's work as simultaneously engaging in a dialogue with the inherited tradition of European art and exploring the deeply troubled issue of American identity in the 1850s and 1860s. Kelly's discussion identifies Church's earlier work as meditating on 'the National Landscape', and his analyses are most effective in the case of works which explicitly link nation and narration, such as Hooker and Company Journeying Through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford, in 1636 (1846, Hartford, Wadsworth Athenaeum) and West Rock, New Haven (1849, New Britain Museum of American Art). While the former is effectively a history painting in a landscape setting redolent of divine blessing, the latter provided a vividly modern representation of the hiding place of the seventeenth-century 'regicides' Edward Whalley and William Goffe whose antagonism toward the English crown was seen as prefiguring American opposition to colonial rule.57 These earlier works appear to identify easily recognizable, but socially and geographically specific, formulations of American identity. Kelly's formula 'the National Landscape' evades the issue of 'whose nation?', just as the notion of an 'imagined community' does not specify who does the imagining. Most effective is Kelly's reading of a complex and ambivalent work of Church's maturity, the masterly Twilight in the Wilderness (i860) (Figure 10.6). Kelly acknowledges the painting's aesthetic and stylistic debt to Ruskin and Turner, while also arguing that - in contrast to his earlier scenes of cultivation and settlement - 'Church was forcibly stating that the true essence and identity of North America lay in the virgin wilderness itself'.58 The painting emerges as a troubled meditation on national identity - at a general level, concern about the destruction of the wilderness, but more vividly the imminent crisis of the Civil War; finally, Kelly reads the work as a religious icon 'a call to belief in God in times of stress'.59If Kelly is sensitive to Church's articulation of a Yankee, protestant conception of national identity, The Empire

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of the Eye, Angela Miller's study of 'Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-75'60argues that 'nation' and 'national landscape' were themselves contested terms at this period. it is in the dilemma of representation itself that landscape painting reveals its deepest, most submerged concerns - concerns that parallel the central dilemmas of national building. Artists, critics and audiences explored issues of national identity in displaced fashion, through the symbolic content of form and composition, through arguments about what to represent, and through the recurrent issue of the relationship between part and whole.61

Miller's thoughtful reading of Twilight in the Wilderness reveals the deep ambiguities about national identity which underscored this moment of crisis: Church's wilderness apocalypse is a baptism through violence into a redeemed sense of nationhood. Such was the manner in which northerners frequently justified the social and human costs of war, interpreting its advent as the first act of the millennium. A more troubling alternative was that the war, by defeating America's republican experiment, heralded nature's final triumph - perhaps through divine intervention - in an apocalyptic blaze.62

While such recent American scholarship has subjected deeply held assumptions about national identity to penetrating analysis, the framework of reference has remained national in focus. A further step is to expand the analytical frame beyond the boundaries of the USA, allowing that most familiar of art-historical procedures - comparison - to yield some surprising results. Such an international perspective is assumed as a basic practice in the study of art from before 1800, yet is applied much more rarely to art from the era of nationalism. It by no means implies flattening out differences, or abandoning national identity as a problematic. This was demonstrated by the excellent exhibition New Worlds from Old: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Landscape, of 1998-99, in which Australian and American landscapes were juxtaposed.63 The two bodies of work were mutually illuminating, and differences were certainly as apparent as similarities: the formation of two contrasting national identities could be traced from canvas to canvas and room to room. However, the crucial issue of mutual rootedness in European, and specifically British, traditions was, presumably for the usual nationalist reasons, largely left unexplored. The exhibition's achievement could be expanded through an examination of parallels between American landscape painters of the 1850s and 1860s and their currently little-known contemporaries not only in England but also across northern Europe.64Rather than placing the American works in the context of a hermetic national tradition viewed from within, and justifying this through tenuous links with twentieth-century art, such an international viewpoint attentive to historical context might allow for a more complex interplay between national particularities and shared iconographic and technical vocabularies. Myths of

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national identity could then remain as the subject of inquiry but cease to determine the methods and interpretations of the historian.

Notes 1.

Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990).

2.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

3.

Henry H. Tuckerman, American Artist Life, Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists, Preceded by a Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of Art in America (N ew York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867, 2nd edn) p. 28. First edition published as Artist Life: Or, Sketches of American Painters (N ew York, 1847).

4.

De Witt Clinton, 18 16 , quoted T. S. Cum mings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1865), p. 12.

5.

Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics 18 2 5-18 7 5 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 4.

6.

Carol Duncan, Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995); Fran^oise Forster-Hahn, 'Shrine of art or signature of a new nation? The National Gallery(ies) in Berlin, 18 4 8 -19 6 8 ', in G. Wright, ed., The Formation of National Collections of Art (Washington, D C: National Gallery of Art, 1996), pp. 79-99; Detlef Hoffmann, 'The Germ an art museum and the history of the nation', in D. J. Sherman, and Irit Rogoff, eds, Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 3 - 2 1 .

7.

Clement Greenberg, '"A m erican-typ e" painting' in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 209.

8.

Exceptions include the Thyssen-Bom em isza Collection now in Madrid, see Barbara N ovak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting (London: Philip Wilson, 1986); Niagara Falls from the American Side (1867) b y Frederic Church at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh; Thomas Cole's The Cross in the Wilderness (1845) in the Louvre, Paris, and a handful of other works from slightly later periods such as Thomas M oran's Nearing Camp on the Upper Colorado River, Wyoming, 1882, recently acquired b y Bolton M useum and A rt Gallery (see A . Wilton and T. Barringer, American Sublime (London: Tate Gallery, 2002), pp. 248-9). The high market value of these w orks and the great competition among Am erican museums and private collectors to acquire them makes it unlikely that highly significant examples w ill be acquired b y European galleries in the future.

9.

Morrison Heckscher, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: An Architectural History (N ew York: Metropolitan M useum of Art, 1995), p. 55. The w in g w as initially conceived for the display of Am erican decorative arts. The M useum had collected Am erican paintings from the time of its inception but their incorporation into an 'Am erican W ing' focused attention on their characteristics as bearers of national identity, rather than on their role in the history of art.

10.

Boston, M useum of Fine Arts: M . and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 18 15 -18 6 5 (Boston: M useum of Fine Arts, 1949). Introduction b y John I. H. Baur, especially pp. ix-xiv.

11.

See Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art; an Expanded and Annotated Version of the Reith Lectures Broadcast in October and November 1955 (London: Architectural Press, 1956).

12.

See John Wilmerding, ed., American Light: The Luminist Movement, 18 50 -18 75 (Washington, D C: National Gallery of Art, 1980); John K. Howat, ed., American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School (N ew York: Metropolitan M useum of Art, 1987).

13 .

Edw ard J. N ygren, ed., Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1850 (Washington, D C: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986).

14.

William Cullen Bryant, A Funeral Oration Occasioned by the Death of Thomas Cole, Delivered Before the National Academy of Design, 4 May 1848 (N ew York: D. Appleton, 1848), p. 13.

15.

Bryant, 1848, pp. 3 -4 .

16.

Tuckerman, 1867, p. 28.

17.

Originally published as The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life & Other Pictures by Thomas Cole N.A. with

Selections from his Letters and Miscellaneous Writings; Illustrative of his Life, Character & Genius, by Louis

Tim Barringer

243

L. Noble (N ew York: Cornish, Lam port & Co., 1853). Noble knew Cole personally, but also derives a great deal of material from Bryant's Eulogy and from William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (Boston: Charles E. Godspeed & Co., 1918), originally published in 1834. 18.

See inter alia Elwood C. Parry III, 'Thom as Cole's early career' in N ygren, 1986, pp. 16 1-8 6 .

19.

Bryant, 1848, p. 6.

20.

W olfgang Bom, American Landscape Painting: An Interpretation (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 46.

21.

See A lan Wallach's exemplary analysis of the 'D iscovery story' in William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, eds, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (N ew H aven and London: Yale University Press,

22.

A s A lan Wallach notes, Linda Nochlin identified this trope in her classic article of 19 7 1 'W h y have there been no great wom en artists?' reprinted in Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth Baker, eds, Art and Sexual Politics (N ew York and London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 7.

23.

Dunlap's account appeared first in the New-York Evening Post, 22 N ovem ber 18 25 (reproduced in Ellw ood C. Parry, III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 25-6).

24.

A rich source w hich mixes a tourist aesthetic w ith a religious commentary is C. Rockwell, ed., The

1994)/ PP- 23-4-

Catskill Mountains and the Region Around: Their Scenery, Legends, and History; with Sketches in Prose and Verse by Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Cole and Others (N ew York: Taintor Brothers & Co., 1869). 25.

Thomas Cole, 'E ssay on Am erican scenery', American Monthly Magazine, 1, January 1836, pp. 1 - 1 2 , reprinted in John W. McCoubrey, ed., American Art iyoo-1960: Sources and Documents (Upper Saddle River, N J: Prentice Hall, 1965), pp. 9 8 -110 .

26.

Cole, 1836, p. 108.

27.

See Miller, 1993, for a full discussion of this issue.

28.

Cole's debts to Martin are discussed in Truettner and Wallach, 1994, pp. 8 1-2 .

29.

Ella Foshay, M r Luman Reed's Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art (N ew York: H arry N . A bram s/N ew -Yo rk Historical Society 1990), pp. 58 -6 2 and 130-40; Truettner and Wallach, 1994, pp. 90-95; Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 1 5 8 -6 1.

30.

Quoted Foshay, 1990, p. 130.

31.

Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 16 5-9 3 .

32.

For a full discussion see Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986).

33.

Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, edited b y Eliot S. Vessell (Cambridge: Bellknap Press of H arvard University Press, 1964), p. 81.

34.

For a full account of this argument see Tim Barringer 'The course of empires' in Wilton and Barringer, 2002, esp. pp. 5 1 - 3 ; see also the analysis of Cole's Course of Empire, pp. 95-10 9.

35.

Benjamin Champney, Sixty Years' Memories of Art and Artists (1900), ed. Barbara H. Weinberg (N ew York: Garland 1977), p. 142, quoted Miller, 1993, p. 68.

36.

Bom, 1948, p. 46.

37.

For full catalogue entries see D avid B. Law all, Asher B. Durand: A Documentary Catalogue of the Narrative and Landscape Paintings (N ew York and London: Garland, 1978), no. 136, pp. 7 7 -8 , and

38.

For a w itty insight into The Cornfield's iconicity in the m odem era see Colin Painter, At Home with Constable's 'Cornfield' (London: National Gallery, 1996).

Howat, 1987, pp. 10 8 -10 .

39.

D avid Hill, Constable's English Landscape Scenery (London: John Murray, 1985), p. 1 1 5 .

40.

Howat, 1987, p. 104.

4 1.

ibid. See also Law all, 1978.

42.

Cole, 1836.

43.

Wilmerding, 1980, p. 1 1 .

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44.

John Wilmerding, ed., Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane (Washington, D C: National Gallery of Art, 1988).

45.

Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr, ed., The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonne (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).

46.

John I. H. Baur, 'Early studies in light and air b y Am erican landscape painters', Bulletin of the Brooklyn Museum, 8, Winter 1948, pp. 1 -9 ; John I. H. Baur, 'Am erican Luminism: A neglected aspect of the Realist Movement in nineteenth-century Am erican painting', Perspectives USA, 9, Autum n 1954, pp. 90-98.

47.

Wilmerding, 1980, does not contain a listing of the w orks included in American Light or any catalogue entries. M any of the w orks illustrated were not included in the exhibition. It is possible that these artists were represented in the exhibition.

48.

John I. H. Baur, 'Trends in Am erican painting', pp. x v-lvii in Boston, 1949, p. xli.

49.

Barbara N ovak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting (London: Philip Wilson, 1986), p. 28.

50.

Baur, 1954, p. 90.

5 1.

Direct evidence of the link can be found in Lane's inscription, 'From a sketch b y Robert Salmon' on the verso of Yacht ' Northern Light' in Boston Harbor (1845, Shelburne Vermont, Shelburne Museum). See E. A . Powell, 'The Boston Harbor pictures' in Wilmerding, 1988, p. 48.

52.

John Wilmerding, Robert Salmon: Painter of Ship and Shore (Boston: Boston Public Library, 19 7 1), p. 10.

53.

Barbara N ovak, American Painting in the Nineteenth Century (N ew York: Praeger, 1969), p. 95. Novak, 1995, however, explores very fully the relationship between Am erican and European art, pp. 226 -73.

54.

John W ilm erding 'Fire and Ice in A m erican Art: Polarities from Lum inism to Abstract Expressionism' in Kinaston McShine, ed., The Natural Paradise: Painting in America 1800-1950 (N ew York: M useum of M odem Art, 1976), p. 42.

55.

ibid.

56.

See for example Franklyn Kelly, Frederic Edwin Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988); Franklyn National Gallery of Art, 1989); Franklyn Kelly Edwin Church, 18 45-1854 (Fort Worth: Am on

Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D C: Kelly, ed., Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, DC: and Gerald F. Carr, The Early Landscapes of Frederic Carter Museum, 1987); Katherine E. Manthome,

Creation and Renewal: Views of Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, D C: National Museum of Am erican Art, 1985); Katherine E. Manthome, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America (Washington, D C: National M useum of Am erican Art, 1989). 57.

Kelly, 1988, pp. 22-4 .

58.

ibid., p. 11 5 .

59.

ibid., p. 122.

60.

Miller, 1993.

61.

ibid., p. 2.

62.

ibid., p. 129.

63.

Elizabeth Johns, et ah, eds, New Worlds from Old: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Landscapes (Canberra: Australian National Gallery of Art, 1998).

64.

I develop this theme in a forthcoming essay on the comparison between Church and his PreRaphaelite contemporaries in Britain. Twilight in the Wilderness bears comparison w ith the later w orks of John Linnell; a comparison between Durand and Thomas Creswick w ould be instructive; Cropsey and Gifford make a significant foil for Benjamin Williams Leader. German, Danish, Dutch and French comparisons can also be drawn.

Tim Barringer

245

10 .1 Thom as Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, fl/ter a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), 1836, oil on canvas, 130.8 x 19 3 cm

246

ENGLISH ACCENTS

10.2 Thom as Cole, Course of Empire: Consummation of Empire, 1836, oil on canvas, 13 0 x 19 3 cm

Tim Barringer

10.3 A sh er Brow n D urand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas, 116 .8 x 91.4 cm

247

248

ENGLISH ACCENTS

10.4

John Constable, The Cornfield, 1826, oil on canvas, 14 3 x 12 2 cm

Tim Barringer

249

10.5 Fitz H ugh Lane, Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay; Maine, 1862, oil on canvas, 40.6 x 66 cm

10.6 Frederic E d w in Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, i860, oil on canvas, 10 1.6 x 162.56 cm

Afterword: British art and its histories William Vaughan

As Christiana Payne has made clear in the Introduction, it is more the intention of this book to open up areas for exploration and debate than to arrive at conclusions. Through bringing together the work of scholars engaged in investigating various aspects of the relations between British art and that of other cultures during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we have sought to stress how much the culture of that period formed part of an international community. We have wished to emphasize how limiting the isolationist view of British art has been in the past. We further hope to have suggested that the approach adopted here might provide food for thought even for those students of the art of countries with more confident national traditions. Perhaps it is fitting that a volume published in a land entirely surrounded by water should be the one to stress that, culturally speaking, no country is an island. The investigation of British art in terms of its international relations is a process that has been gathering pace in recent years. To a certain extent it is the product of new ways of considering the history of art - and the abandonment of some old ones. We have mercifully left well behind us now the nationalistic approach so common a century ago. We no longer perceive each country as possessing an art endemic to the character of its ethnic majority that has unfolded in time through some process of inner necessity, unaffected in any of its essentials by the cultures of its neighbours. Quite apart from the distasteful racism inherent in such beliefs, they led to a depressing predictability about the judgements made. In the case of the British, the lack of a vigorous visual practice was habitually attributed to what one French writer referred to as 'some congenital inaptitude in the race'.1 We now have a more flexible view of artistic production, one that stresses it as a product of a particular society, a specific set of historical circumstances. While not necessarily dismissive of issues of aesthetic value, we can see more clearly

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now how such judgements are mediated themselves by circumstances. Changes in taste have certainly played their part in the assessments of British art. The history of art that has been explored in this volume shows how different the perception of British art was in the period under review than it is today. Few today, perhaps, would conclude as the German scholar Richard Muther did in his Geschichte der englischen Malerei (History of English Painting) in 1903 that, in the eighteenth century, 'England was destined to be the first to tread the artistic path that was later to be pursued by all nations'.2 For more than a century it has been commonly accepted that it was France, not Britain, that laid the foundations of modernity in art. Muther's assessment came, in fact, at the end of a period of high regard for British art that began in the era under review in this book. Such admiration had never been continuous or universal, yet while assessments may have varied, everyone agreed that British art at the time was different, challenging and, above all, new. 'Our school badly needs an infusion of fresh blood/ wrote Delacroix to Theophile Silvestre in 1858. 'It is old, and it seems to me that the English School is young, that they seek to be natural, while we seek only to imitate other paintings.'3 Even when, a few years later, French art was able to demonstrate new youth - and decisively outpace the naturalism for which British art had earlier been admired - in the emergence of Impressionism, Britain was still held to offer an exciting alternative; this time in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In the 1880s and 1890s there were many French writers - notably Ernest Chesneau, Robert de la Sizeranne, and Gabriel Mourey - who celebrated the achievements of the modem British School.4 Such praise is made all the more remarkable, however, by the huge silence that followed it. While interest in historic British art survived as a specialist taste for certain Continental writers, there were none to sing the praises of British artists who emerged after 1900. Aubrey Beardsley and the 'Glasgow Boys' were the last British artists to arouse any significant international interest until the emergence of Henry Moore as the winner of the Venice Biennale after the Second World War. The early twentieth century was a time of growing doubt about the British artistic achievement. In the Bloomsbury circle it became part and parcel of all that was to be dismissed about the Victorian era. This view received its fullest expression in the book on British art published by Roger Fry in 1934, in which he accused his country's artists of being too commercial and 'failing to recognize the responsibilities of their calling'. They were not, he concluded 'altogether worthy' of 'the greatness of British civilization'.5 Even those who sought to defend British art tended to do so by making excuses. This can be seen in the most famous work on the subject, Nikolaus Pevsner's The Englishness of English Art. First published in 1954 - and still in print today - Pevsner set out explicitly to counter the negative view of British art expressed by Fry. Yet he does so more in the spirit of an affectionate

Afterword

253

appreciation of eccentricity than in the celebration of an innovative achievement of importance. Even more tellingly, he adhered to the view that British art had no contribution to make in the modem world. Taking a diametrically opposed view to the one expressed half a century earlier by Richard Muther, he proclaimed that the British were a conservative nation incapable of the radicalism that had proved so important for the development of modem art. 'Art in her leaders is violent today; it breaks up more than it yet reassembles. England dislikes violence and believes in evolution. So here, spirit of the age and spirit of England seem incompatible.'6 It is only since the 1960s - in the wake of that child of commercialism, the Pop Art movement - that British art has been considered to play a visible, sometimes even significant, role in contemporary art. This partial revival of fortunes has much to do with the growing internationalism of the contemporary art world and the blurring of national boundaries. It is striking that this period has also seen the first movements towards the broad perception of historic British art in an international context. In saying this, however, we should not overlook the fact that there had been certain specialist lines of inquiry before. Perhaps the most positive was that of representatives of a central European Marxist tradition who sought to oppose the development of Modernist abstraction with the promotion of a critically engaged realist practice - notably Friedrich Antal and Francis Klingender.7 For such writers Hogarth remained much what he had been for Muther - the initiator of a critical realist practice addressing the issues of a modem commercial society. Continued British adherence to a narrative form of modernity - evident for example in Pre-Raphaelite art and Sickert - was not seen (as it was by Roger Fry) as a mark of aesthetic failure. It was understood instead as the retention of an artistic practice with a social purpose. There were also those, coming from very much the opposite direction politically, who sought to save British art from the charge of eccentric provincialism by stressing its debts to high Continental culture - notably that of Italy and France. This view received its most magisterial expression in Ellis Waterhouse's Painting in Britain, 1530 to 1790.8 Forming a volume in the Pelican History of Art series, and still in print today, this survey terminated at the last decade of the eighteenth century - an unusual cut-off point for histories of British art. By doing so, Waterhouse was able to stress the presence of a classical tradition in British art. Significantly his paradigmatic artist was Reynolds - the antithesis of the Marxist historian's hero Hogarth. In his grand portraits and his discourses on art Reynolds exemplified the ennoblement of local art practice through attention to Academic art theory and the precepts of the Old Masters. While Waterhouse, Pevsner, Antal and Klingender had all addressed the issue of British art's relationship to the Continent, the classical tradition and

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modernity in terms of aesthetic evaluation, historians working after i960 have tended to approach the matter more in terms of social and cultural interaction. A pioneer of this approach was Michael Kitson, both in his own writing and in the encouragement he gave to students to consider a more internationalist view of British art. It is a great shame that his groundbreaking exhibition Zwei Jahrhunderte englische Malerei, held in Munich in 1979-80, had a catalogue accessible only to those who can read German.9For in it there was a wealth of detailed scholarly material by Kitson, John Gage and others that showed a new sense of engagement with the details of historical investigation in the field of international relations. Such studies have persisted since then. Indeed, several of the essays published in this volume bear witness to the continued fruitfulness of this approach. However, there have been other developments as well that have cast such investigations in a new light. A key factor has been the introduction into British art studies of the new concern for the social history of art that revolutionized the discipline in the 1970s. The issues that this raised for the international status of British art - and by inference British art studies - were explored in the conference Towards a Modern Art World, held at the Tate Gallery in 1989 with joint sponsorship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. The very title of this conference - and of the publication that subsequently emerged from it10 suggest a new bullishness in returning to the consideration of Britain's role in the formation of a modem art world. Yet the terms are different from those of earlier advocations of British modernity. As David Solkin made clear in his introductory essay, there was no attempt to resurrect the claim that British art had been a leading light in the development of modem art in an aesthetic sense. Rather the aim was to see British art situated within something rather different - the undoubted emergence of a modem art world in Britain in the eighteenth century in terms of commercial practice, of the market place. No one would doubt, Solkin claimed, Britain's leading role in the development of modernity in political and economic terms at this time. 'Yet why, then, did this modem art world, if that is indeed what the British had produced, fail to create a significant body of modem art?'11 Solkin's answer to this question becomes in effect a critique of the view that the Modernist aesthetic sums up all that is relevant in the consideration of the history of art in modern times. Here he was able to draw strength from the mounting tide of criticism of Modernism as a high aesthetic practice that had been growing since the 1970s. While not wishing to doubt the value of the artistic tradition that had led triumphantly from Manet and the Impressionists through Picasso and Matisse to Abstract Expressionism in New York, he did feel that it should be seen as only one of many narratives that can be traced through the history of the modem art world. '[Sjurely much stands to be gained,' he pleads, 'by reopening the boundaries between modernist and other forms of painterly

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practice, and from situating all of these practices more securely within the institutional and commercial mechanisms of the modem art world'.12 Such arguments encouraged a reconsideration of artistic practice in institutional terms. Amongst other things, it has led to a growing exploration of that area of British art so firmly written-out of the histories of Modernism - that of the early twentieth century.13 Yet it has also led to an understanding of how the issue of international relations between artistic practices might be considered in different terms. We are encouraged now to look at the art market itself as an international phenomenon, and to explore the political and commercial dimensions that have always lain behind the public promotion of artistic practices. Such inquiries - combined with a concern for the exploration of issues of aesthetics and pictorial manner within a specific historical context - promise much for the future.

Notes 1.

'quelque inaptitude congeniale de la race'; Gabriel Mourey, La Peinture anglaise du XVIIIe siecle (Paris and Brussells: Les Editions G. Van Oest, 1928), p. 8. In fairness to Mourey, it should be stressed that he did not present this view as being necessarily his own.

2.

'England berufen war, kiinstlerisch am friihesten in die Bahnen einzulenken, die spater von alien Nationen beschritten w urden'; Richard Muther, Geschichte der Englischen Malerei (Berlin: S. Fischer, ^ 3 ) , p. 12.

3.

Delacroix to Theophile Silvestre, Paris, 3 1 December 1858. Eugene Delacroix: Selected Letters 18 13 -18 6 3 , selected and translated b y Jean Stewart with an introduction b y John Russell (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1 9 7 1 ) , p. 352.

4.

Ernest Chesneau, La Peinture anglaise (Paris, 1882); Gabriel Mourey, Passe le Detroit. La vie et Part a Londres (Paris, 1895); Robert de La Sizeranne, Peinture anglaise contemporaine (Paris, 1897).

5.

Roger Fry, Reflections on British Painting (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), pp. 23 -4 .

6.

Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1956), p. 194.

7.

Frederick Antal, Hogarth and his Place in European Art (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 196 1) and F. D. Klingender, Hogarth and English Caricature (N ew York and London: Transatlantic Arts, 1944).

8.

Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1330 to 1790, Pelican History of A rt (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

9.

Munich, Haus der Kunst, Zwei Jahrhunderte Englische Malerei: Britische Kunst und Europa, 1680-1880, exh. cat. (Munich: Haus der Kunst and British Council, 1979).

1953)-

10.

Brian Allen, ed., Towards a Modern Art World (N ew H aven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).

11.

ibid., p. 1.

12.

ibid., p. 6.

13 .

See in particular Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects, British Art in the early Twentieth Century (N ew H aven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); and D avid Peters Corbett and Lara Perry, eds, English Art, 18 6 0 -19 14 : Modern Artists and Identity (Manchester University Press, 2000).

Select bibliography

Abrams, Ann Uhry (1985), The Valiant Hero. Benjamin West and Grand-Style History Painting, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Adrian, J. V. (1827-28), Bilder aus England, Frankfurt am Main, 2 vols. ----- (1830), Skizzen aus England, Frankfurt am Main, 2 vols. Agueda, Mercedes and Salas, Xavier de (1982), Francisco de Goya. Cartas a Martin Zapater, Madrid: Ediciones Turner. Allen, B. (ed.) (1995), Towards a Modern Art World, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ----- and Dukelskaya, L. (eds) (1996), British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial Collections in the Hermitage, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Anderson, Nancy K. and Ferber, Linda S. (1991), Albert Bierstadt, Art and Enterprise, exh. cat., The Brooklyn Museum. Andreeva, G. (1991), 'Italian meetings. Russian and British artists in Rome in the second half of the 18th century', Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia. Newsletter (19), September, pp. 9-12. ----- (1996), 'Military Gallery in Winter Palace (The Hermitage): International aspects of the National Memorial', in Wessel Reinink (ed.), Memory and Oblivion. Proceedings of the XXIX International Congress of the History of Art held in Amsterdam, 1- 7 September 1996, Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 151-7. ----- (ed.) (1997), Nezabyvaemaya Rossiya: russkie i Rossiya glazami britantsev XVII-XIX vek (Unforgettable Russia. Russians and Russia Through the Eyes of the British. i7th-i9th Centuries), exh. cat., State Tretyakov Gallery/British Council, Moscow: Trefoil Press. ----- (1998), 'Russko-Angliiskie svjazi v oblasti zhivopisi. Vtoraia polovina 18 - pervaia tret 19 veka', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Moscow. Anon. (1790), 'Nachricht von neuen englischen Kupferstiche, mit Bemerkung der Grosse, und Preise. Aus einem Schreiben von London an ***', Museum fur Kiinstler undfiir Kunstliebhaber, 12, 585-90. Anon. (1862), 'Khudozhestvennye izvestiya iz Anglii', Sovremennaya letopis', 3, pp. 25-6. Antal, Friedrich (1962), Hogarth and his Place in European Art, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Archenholz, J. W. von (1790), Annalen der brittischen Geschichte des Jahrs 1789, vol. iii, Hamburg: B. G. Hoffmann.

258 ENGLISH ACCENTS Avery, Kevin J. (1993), Church's Great Picture The Heart of the Andes, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Aycard, Marie and Flocon, Ferdinand (1824), Salon de 1824, Paris. Baur, John I. H. (1948), 'Early studies in light and air by American landscape painters', Bulletin of the Brooklyn Museum, 8, Winter, pp. 1-9. -------(1954)/ 'A m erica n Lum inism : A neglected aspect of the Realist M ovem ent in

nineteenth-century American painting', Perspectives USA, 9, Autumn, pp. 90-98. Beireis, Christoph Gottlieb (1779), 'Von einigen neuen englischen Kupferabdriicken mit Farben', Miscellaneen artistischen Inhalts, 1, pp. 7-13. Bindm an, D a vid (1997), Hogarth and his Times: Serious Comedy, London: British M useum .

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Bibliography 259 Cole, Thomas (1836), 'Essay on American scenery', American Monthly Magazine, 1, January 1836, pp. 1-12 , reprinted in John W. McCoubrey, ed., American Art 1700-1960: Sources and Documents, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965, pp. 98-109. Colley, Linda (1994), Britons. Forging the Nation 1707-1837, London: Pimlico. Cooper, Helen A. (ed.) (1982), John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter, exh. cat., Yale University Art Gallery. John Singleton Copley in America (1993), exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Cropsey, Jasper Francis (1858-67), MS Journals for the years 1858 to 1867, NewingtonCropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Cross, A. G. (1980), By the Banks of the Thames: Russians in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Newtonville, Mass: Oriental Research Partners. ----- (ed.) (1993), Engraved in the Memory: James Walker, Engraver to the Empress Catherine the Great, and His Russian Anecdotes, Oxford and Providence: Berg. ----- (1997), By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cunningham, Allan (1843), The Life of Sir David Wilkie with his Journals, Tours and Critical Remarks on Works of Art, London: John Murray. Davis, David Brion, and Mintz, Steven (1998), The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery Through the Civil War, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delacroix, E. (1980), Journal, 1822-1863, A. Joubin, ed., revised by R. Labourdette, Paris: Plon. Dillmann, Martina and Keisch, Claude (eds) (1999), Marriage a-la-mode: Hogarth und seine deutschen Bewunderer, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/ Stadelsches Kunstinstitut und Stadtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main. Dixon, Robert (1986), The Course of Empire. Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788-1830, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Driscoll, John (1997), All That is Glorious Around Us: Paintings from the Hudson River School, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Dukelskaya, L. A. and Renne, E. P. (1990), Angliiskaya zhivopis' XVI-XIX veka (Gosudarstvennyi Ermitazh: sobranie zapadnoevropeiskoi zhivopisi, ed. B. B. Piotrovsky et al), Florence: Iskusstvo/Giunti Gruppo Editoriale. Favata, Daniel C. (ed.) (2001), John Trumbull: A Founding Father of American Art, exh. cat., Fordham University Libraries, New York. Feaver, William (1975), The Art of John Martin, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fedorov-Davydov, A. A., et al. (eds) (1934), V. Perov: dokumenty, pis'ma i rasskazy, katalog proizvedenii, bibliografiya, Moscow: Izogiz. Ferber, Linda S. and Gerdts, William H., eds, (1985), The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites, exh. cat., New York: Brooklyn Museum. Field, Barron (1825), Appendix in Barron Field (ed.), Memoirs on New South Wales; by Various Hands, London: John Murray. Fiorillo, Johann Dominikus (1808), Geschichte derMahlerey in Grossbritannien, Gottingen: Johann Georg Rosenbusch. Forster, Georg (1983), Forsters Werke, vol. i, Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag. ----- (1843), Sammtliche Schriften, vol. v, Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus. Foshay, Ella (1990), Mr Luman Reed's Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art, New York: Harry N. Abrams/New-York Historical Society. Friedman, W. H. (1976), Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, Doctoral Thesis 1974, New York.

260 ENGLISH ACCENTS Fiisslin, Johann Caspar (1771), Raisonirendes Verzeichniss der vornehmsten Kupferstecher und ihrer Werke, Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Fiisslin und Comp. Garcia de la Rasilla, Isabel and Calvo Serraller, Francisco (eds) (1987), Goya, Nuevas Visiones, Madrid: Amigos del Museo del Prado. Garlick, Kenneth, and Macintyre, Angus (eds) (1978-96), The Diary of Joseph Farington, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Glendinning, Nigel (1977), Goya and His Critics, New Haven and London: Yale

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262 ENGLISH ACCENTS Nygren, Edward J. (ed.) (1988), Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830, Washington DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art. Ortiz Armengol, Pedro, (1985) El Ano que vivid Moratin en Inglaterra, 1792-1793, Madrid: Editorial Castalia. Paley, Morton D. (1986), The Apocalyptic Sublime, New Haven: Yale University Press. Pardo Canalis, Enrique (1965), 'Libros y cuadros de Paret en 1787', Revista de ideas esteticas, 23, pp. 10 7-112. Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (2002), Constable: Le Choix de Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Parry, Ellwood C., III, (1988), The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Passavant, Johann David (1836), Tour of a German Artist in England, London: Saunders and Ottley. Peman Medina, Maria (1992), 'Estampas y Libros que vio Goya en casa de Sebastian Martinez/ Archivo Espahol de Arte, 259-260, pp. 303-320. Pevsner, Nikolaus (1956), The Englishness of English Art; an Expanded and Annotated Version of the Reith Lectures Broadcast in October and November 1955, London: Architectural Press. Pointon, Marcia (1984), 'From blind man's buff to Le Colin-Maillard: Wilkie and his French audience', Oxford Art Journal, 7, pp. 15-25. ----- (1985), The Bonington Circle. English Watercolour and Anglo-French Landscape, 1790-1830, Brighton: Hendon Press. Pomeroy, J. and Blakesley, R. P. et ah, eds (2003), An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from The State Hermitage Museum, London: Merrell. Ponz, A ntonio (1947), Viaje de Espaha seguido de los dos tomos del Viajefuera de Espaha, M adrid: Aguilar.

Powell, Earl A. (1990), Thomas Cole, New York: Harry A. Abrams. Purdy, Daniel L. (1998), The Tyranny of Elegance. Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. R***R (1788), 'Dichtkunst und Mahlerey in Betracht ihrer Krafte die Leidenschaften zu bewegen verglichen. Aus dem Englischen', Monats-Schrift, 5, May, pp. 246-60. Raquejo, Tonia (1989), El Palacio encantado, La Alhambra en el arte britanico, Madrid: Taurus. Renne, E. (1995), 'A British portraitist in Im perial Russia: Christina Robertson and the court of N icholas I', Apollo, 162, September, pp. 43-5. ----- (2000), 'Pridvomyi khudozhnik Kristina Robertson', Nashe nasledie, 55, pp. 3 5 - 3 7 . Reyero, Carlos and Freixa, M ireia (1995), Pintura y Escultura en Espaha, 1800-1910, M adrid: M anuales A rte Catedra.

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmstead and America in the Nineteenth Century, New York. Schiller, Friedrich (1967), On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. Elizabeth M . W ilkinson Rybczynski, W ytold (1999),

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Seznec, Jean (1964), John Martin en France, London: Faber and Faber. Smith, Bernard (1985), European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ----- and Wheeler, Alwyne (eds) (1988), The Art of the First Fleet, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sm ith, Colin S h a w (1982), From Francia to Delacroix : The English Influence on French Romantic Landscape Painting, N orth Carolina U n iv e rsity /A n n Arbor. Solkin, D a vid (1993), Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England, N e w H aven and London: Yale U n iversity Press.

Bibliography 263 Stasov, V. V. (1937), Izbrannye sochineniya v dvukh tomakh, vol. i, Moscow/Leningrad: Iskusstvo. Sulzer, Johann Georg (1771-74), Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kiinste in einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstworter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln, Leipzig: M. G. Weidemanns Erben und Reich. Sureda (2000), Bartolome Sureda (1769-1851) Arte e Industria en la Ilustracion, Madrid: Tardia. Symmons, Sarah (1984), Flaxman and Europe: The Outline Illustrations and Their Influence, New York: Garland. ----- (2002), 'La mujer vestida de bianco: el primer retrato de la duquesa de Alba pintado por Goya', GOYA, Madrid: Amigos del Museo del Prado. Tench, Watkin ( 17 9 3 / 19 7 9 ) , A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (179 3), Syd n ey: Lib rary of Australian History.

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264 ENGLISH ACCENTS Buchhalter Lenz als Burgergardist, in Georg Weerth, Sdmtliche Werke, 5 vols, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 1956. Wees, J. Dustin (1986), Darkness Visible: The Prints of John Martin, Williamstown, Mass: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Wilmerding, John (1976), Tire and ice in American art: polarities from Luminism to Abstract Expressionism' in McShine, K., ed., The Natural Paradise: Painting in America 1800-1950, New York: Museum of Modem Art. ----- (ed.) (1980), American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875, Washington DC: National Gallery of Art. Wilton, Andrew and Barringer, Tim (2002), American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880, exh. cat., London: Tate Britain. Wind, Edgar (1938), 'The revolution of history painting', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2,1938, reprinted in Jaynie Anderson, ed., Edgar Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Wolf, Reva (1991), Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, 1750-1850, Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, Boston, in association with Boston College Museum of Art.

Index

Illustrations are indicated by italicized numbers Abbott, John White 83 Trees in Peamore Park, Exeter 95 academies 4, 210, 2 11; see also Berlin; Dusseldorf; London; Madrid; Munich; New York; Paris; St Petersburg Adrian, Johann Valentin 6,158-9 Alba, Duke of 106 Alekseev, S. A. The Military Gallery in the Winter Palace 76 Alexander I, Tsar of Russia 60, 204 Allan, William 60 Allport, Mary Morton 90-91 Allston, Washington 228 Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence 105, 216 American Revolution and War of Independence 5, 9 ,11-2 0 , 231 Anderson, Benedict 225 Anderson, Nancy 190 Antal, Friedrich 154, 253 Antill, Henry Colden 89 Aparicio, Jose 110 Archenholz, J. W. von 32 Arrowsmith, John 127 Atkinson, Alan 82 Austen, Jane 86 Aycard, Marie 128 Barber, Peter 81 Barrell, John 86

Barry, James 54-5,106,108 Bartolozzi, F. 53,10 8 ,136 The Judgement of Paris Bathurst, Lord 81,90 Batoni, Pompeo 52 Batyushkov, Konstantin 204-5 Baudelaire, Charles 166 Baur, John I. H. 237-8 Bautista, Sebastian 108 Bayeu, Francisco 105 Beardsley, Aubrey 216, 252 Beckford, William 1 1 1 Belnos, J. J. 133, La Tendresse Matemelle (Motherly Tenderness) 147 Bennet, J. The Visit of Emperor Alexander I to the Studio of the Artist George Dawe 77 Benoir, Alexander 57 Berlin, Academy of Arts 161 Bermudez, Juan Cean 10 4 ,10 7 -8 ,112 Berry, Duchesse de 129-30 Bervic, Charles Clement 135 Bhabha, Homi 225 Bierstadt, Albert 181,18 9-90 ,19 2, 239 A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie 199 Bigge, John Thomas 81, 90 Birch, Thomas 237 Blackburn, David 80, 88 Blanchard, Pharamond 112 - 13

266 ENGLISH ACCENTS Boettiger, C. A. 157 Boime, A. 16 3,16 5-7 Bonington, R. R 127,133,208,209,210,214 Bordes, Philippe 2 ,10 Bom, Wolfgang 230, 233-4, 237 Borovikovsky, Vasily 5,58-9,66 Portrait of Catherine II Strolling in Tsarskoe Selo 75 Boulanger, Louis 140 Bowles, Samuel 194 Boxall, Henry 114 -15 Boydell, John 41 n. 18 ,10 3 -4 ,108 ,109, 114 Brett, John 181 British Empire, see Empire Brompton, Richard 56,58, 204 Portrait of Alexander Kurakin 74 Brown, Capability 187 Brown, Ford Madox 180 Brown, Mather 182 Bryant, William Cullen 7,18 7,18 8 , 229-30,233,234-6 Bryullov, Karl 61,64, 65,66 Bulgarin, Faddey V. 62 Bunbury, Henry 109 Burke, Edmund 239 Burlington, Lord 154 Bumet, John 135 Biisching, A. F. 29,35 Byron, Lord 1 1 1 - 1 2 , 1 1 3 ,1 1 4 ,1 5 8 Caley, George 82,83 Callcott, A. W. 127 Campbell, Sophia 85, 87 Sydney in All Its Glory 96 Newcastle and its Surroundings 97 View, Possibly of the Hawkesbury River, Showing Aborigines in the Foreground 98 Carlos IV, King of Spain 104 Carr, Gerald 240 Carter, Jimmy 239 Carter, Paul 87 Cassatt, Mary 227 Cather, Willa 188-90 Catherine II (the Great), Empress of Russia 1, 3, 52, 54, 55-9, 73, 75, 204 Catlin, George 188 Chambers, William 104 Champmartin, C. E. 130

Champney, Benjamin 233 Charlemagne 164 Charlesworth, Michael 86-7 Chekalevsky, Petr 57 Chesneau, Ernest 252 Chesterfield, Lord 55 Chodowiecki, Daniel 15 5 -6 ,16 1 Church, Frederic Edwin 18 0 ,18 1,18 2 , 184 ,18 5,19 2, 234, 236-7, 239-41 Twilight in the Wilderness 249 Cipriani, Giovanni Batista 53 Claude Lorraine 6, 7, 90,185, 214, 232 Clinton, de Witt 226 Cole, Thomas 7,179 -8 0 ,18 3,18 4 ,18 5 , 187,190, 228-37 Expulsion from the Garden of Eden 201 View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) 24s Course of Empire: Consummation of Empire 246 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 190 Collins, David 81 Colman, William A. 230 colonialism 38 colonies 6, 7, 9-20, 79-91, 226 Constable, John 1 ,3 , 7 ,12 5 -6 ,12 7 ,12 8 , 13 4 ,14 1, 214, 235-6 The Cornfield 248 Cook, Captain James 30, 32, 33, 81, 82 Cooke, E. W. 182 Cope, C. W. 169 n. 52 Copley, John Singleton 9 - 1 1 ,1 2 ,1 5 ,1 8 , 20,36,182 Cornelius, Peter 16 0 ,16 1 Cosway, Richard 106 Cosway, Maria 2 Cotman, John Sell 85 A Ploughed Field 98 Coupin, Pierre-Alexandre 128 Cousins, Samuel 13 1 ,1 3 3 Cox, David 18 3,18 7 Cropsey, Jasper Francis 6 ,18 1-7 Autumn on the Hudson River 198 Richmond in the Summer of 1862 199 Cruikshank, George 158 Cumberland, Richard 106 Cunningham, Allan 4 ,15 7 Cunningham, Peter 81, 83

Index 267 Currie, Eliza Jane 86 Cuvier, Baron Georges 130 Dahl, J. C. C. 194 Danby, Francis 138, 210, 233 Dance, Nathaniel 36, 47, 52, 53, 56, 204 Darwin, Charles 191 Dashkova, Ekaterina 54, 58 David, Jacques-Louis 2 -3 ,10 ,15 -16 , 18 -19 ,3 5 -6 ,110 ,13 4 Dawe, George 5, 58-65, 77, 204,208 Delacroix, Eugene 3 ,12 5 ,13 1,13 3 ,1 3 7 ,14 1 Desmaisons, G. 133 Une Jeune Veuve (A Young Widow) 148 De Wint, Peter 85,97 Dobson, William 56 Dostoevsky, Fedor 206 Doyen, G. F. 57 Dunlap, William 230 Durand, Asher Brown 187, 234-6 Kindred Spirits 247 Diisseldorf, Academy of Arts 161-3, Dutton, Clarence E. 192 Dyck, Anthony van 5 5 -6 ,12 9 ,13 1,13 2 , 210 Earle, Augustus 83, 86, 90 Cabbage Tree Forest, Illawarra, New South Wales 94 'English manner', see sketchiness Empire, British 5, 20,32-3,34, 232-3, 236 engravings, see prints Evans, George William 84, 88, 89-90 A View of Sydney, N. S. Wales, on Entering the Heads - the Distance Seven Miles 99 Eworth, Hans 56 Fabre, F. X. 137 Falconet, M. E. 56 Fedotov, Pavel 6, 6 1,154 , 205, 208,213, 215-6 Fernando VI, King of Spain 105 Field, Barron 81, 83,84 Fielding brothers (Copley and Thales) 12 7 ,13 3 Fiorillo, Johann Dominikus 32,36 Fisher, Alvan 228 Flaxman, John 6 6 ,110 - 11,15 6 ,15 7 , 210 Flinders, Matthew 87-8

Flocon, Ferdinand 128 Floridablanca, Conde de 107 Ford, Richard 114 Forster, Georg 30, 33-5, 36, 39 Fortuny, Mariano 105 Foucault, Michel 34 Franklin, Benjamin 13 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia 161 Freiligarth, Ferdinand 15 5 ,16 2 -3 ,16 5 French Revolution 3, 6,35-6,59, 203 Friedrich, Caspar David 239 Fry, Roger 252,253 Fuseli, Henry 54 ,55,10 4,10 7-8 Gage, John 254 Gainsborough, Thomas 66,105,106,108, 13 2 ,2 11, 216 Gambart, Ernest 180 Gautier, Theophile 132, 2 11 Genelli, Bonaventura 160-61 George I I 161 George III 14 George IV 127,130 ,18 5-6 , 233 Gerard, Baron 130,134 Gericault, Theodore 3 ,13 7 Gifford, Sanford Robinson 180,185, 237 Gigoux, J. 133 Nature 146 Gillray, James 109,158 Gilpin, Revd William 184 Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis 134 Girtin, Thomas 85 Glinka, Fedor 60 Glover, John 90 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 5 2 ,15 7 Gogol, Nikolai 63 Goula Le Doigt Coupe (The Cut Finger) 150 Goupil 136 Goya, Francisco de 2,5, 6 ,10 5 ,10 6 -11, 112 No Hay Quien Nos Desate? (Can't Anyone Untie Us?) 120 Que Valor! (What Courage!) 12 1 Bust Portrait of the Duke of Wellington 122 Green, Valentine 108 Greenberg, Clement 227 Grigorovich, Dmitry 7,208-16

268 ENGLISH ACCENTS Gros, Antoine-Jean 134 Grosvenor, Lord 14 Grosz, Georg 153 Haag, Carl 187 Hackert, J. P. 32 Haghe, Louis 193 Hamilton, Gavin 3 6 ,51-2 ,54 Hamilton, William 36 Hasenclever, Johann Peter 15 3 ,16 1-3 , 16 4 ,16 3,16 7 Jobs als Student (Jobs as a Student) 173 Atelierszene (Studio Scene) 175 Ein Magistrat aus dem Jahre 1848 (A Magistrate in the Year 1848) 176 Hayden, Ferdinand 19 1 Haydn, Joseph 106 Haydon, B. R. 12 7,134 -3 Hayman, Francis 36,36 Hayter, George 130 Hazlitt, William 114 Heade, Martin Johnson 183,237-8 Herder, J. G. 29 ,31 Herzen, Alexander 203 Hoare, Prince 36, 60 Hogarth, William 6 ,3 3 ,4 1-2 n. 33,34,66, 10 3,10 7 -10 ,13 8 , 204, 203, 208, 2 10 -11, 212-13, 233 Analysis of Beauty 3 ,10 7 ,13 3 ,13 6 'The Breakfast Scene', Marriage a la Mode 119 'Tom Rakewell in the Madhouse', The Rake's Progress 172 'Tom Rakewell in the Rose Tavern', The Rake's Progress 174 and German art 133-67 Holbein, Hans 164-5, 210 Holl, Frank 215 Holland, Lord 104 Hood, Thomas 215 Hoppner, John 126 Houdon, Jean-Antoine 10 Howe, John 84, 89 Huet, Paul 125 Hugo, Victor 14 1 Hunt, William Holman 212 Huntington, David C. 240 Inchbold, J. W. 18 1 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 110

International exhibitions 4,125-6, 204 Great Exhibition (1851) 204, 206-7 International Exhibition (1862) 7, 66, 134 ,137 , 204, 207-16 Iordan, Fedor 203,207 Irving, Washington 184 Ivanov, Alexander 203,214 Ivanov, Andrei 52 Ives, Lt. Joseph Christmas 191 Jackson, Andrew 232 Jackson, William Henry 193 Jarvis, John 54, 67 n. 12 Jazet, J. P. M. 13 3 ,13 6 ,13 8 -9 Le Petit Commissionaire (The Errand Boy) 149 Le Deluge (The Deluge) 15 1 Jefferson, Thomas 1 0 ,1 2 ,1 4 ,1 8 ,1 9 Johnson, David 194 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de 104,105 Kant, Immanuel 36,156, 239 Karamzin, Nikolai 53-4, 56 Kauffman, Angelica 37,39,49, 52,53,54,

55/ 59 Kaulbach, Wilhelm 155,16 0 Das Narrenhaus (The Madhouse) 17 1 Kelly, Franklin 240 Kensett, John Frederick 185,194, 237-8 Kinsey, Joni Louise 193 Kinson, F. J. 130 Kipling, Rudyard 190 Kiprensky, Orest 61, 62, 64, 66 Kitson, Michael 254 Klingender, Francis 253 Kneller, Sir Godfrey 132 Knight, Richard Payne 84 Kortum, Karl Arnold 162 Kurakin, Alexander 54, 58, 74

Landseer, Sir Edwin 219 n. 62 Lane, Fitz Hugh 237-8 Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine 249 Lawrence, Thomas 6, 6 0 ,6 6 ,111,12 5 -3 4 , 1 3 6 ,1 4 1 ,14 5 -8 ,158, 204, 208, 209, 210, 2 11 Layard, Henry 115 Leighton, Lord 105, 216 Lely, Sir Peter 54,56 Lenormant, C. 130

Index 269 Leslie, C. R. 133, 2 11, 233 Lessing, Karl Friedrich 135 Levitsky, Dimitry 3, 37, 38, 66 Catherine the Lawgiver in the Temple of the Goddess of Justice 73 Lewis, J. F. 101 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 133,136 ,

159

Locke, John 3 Lockyer, Edward Hawke 113 London, Royal Academy of Arts 3 ,3 , 60, 10 2 ,10 3 ,10 4 ,10 3 ,112 ,114 ,18 3 , 210 Longinus 239 Lopez, Vicente 112 Losenko, Anton 3 1-2 Hector and Andromache's Farewell 69 The Travellers 70 Loutherbourg, J. P. de 33,33, 239 Ludwig I, King of Bavaria 3 ,13 3 ,13 8 , 160 Lyell, Charles 191 Lyttleton, George, First Lord, 83 Macarthur, Hannibal 84 McCormick, Tim 79 Maclise, Daniel 2 11 Macquarie, Lachlan 81, 84, 83, 88-9 Madrazo, Federico de 1 1 1 Madrazo, Jose de 1 1 0 ,1 1 2 Madrid, Royal Academy of Arts 102,103, 1 0 4 ,1 0 3 ,1 0 8 ,111,114 Maella, M. S. de 103 Manet, Edouard 234 Manthome, Katherine 240 Maria Luisa, Queen of Spain 106 Markov, Michael 64 Marshall, William 84-3 Martin, John 2 ,12 3 -6 ,12 7 ,13 4 ,13 8 -4 1, 151,179 -8 0 ,19 0 , 210, 232, 233, 239 The Great Day of His Wrath 200 Martinez, Sebastian 106,107 Marx, Karl 13 3,16 3 Marxism 234, 233 Matisse, Henri 234 Matveev, Fedor 32 Maxwell, William Stirling 113 Menzel, Adolf 16 0 -6 1,16 4 ,16 7 Metsu, Gabriel 213 Millais, John Everett 103

Miller, Angela 226-7, 240-41 Milton, John 10 8 ,138 ,18 0 ,19 2 Modernism 1, 238, 233, 234-3 modernity of British art 2, 29-33, 38-40, 14 1,13 4 , 206, 232, 234-3 Moore, Henry 232 Moran, Thomas 191-4 The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone 201 The Chasm of the Colorado 202 Moratin, Leandro Fernandez de 103-4, 10 3,10 6 ,10 9 More, J. 32 Moritz, K. P. 36 Morland, George 208, 209 Mortimer, John Hamilton 36 ,33,33 Mount, William Sidney 4, 6 Mourey, Gabriel 232 Munich, Academy of Arts 160 Murillo, B. E. 112 Mussorgsky, Modest 213 Muther, Richard 134, 232, 233 Nash, John 233 Napoleon Bonaparte 203 national character 4, 210, 2 13 ,2 3 1 national identity 18 4 ,19 1, 210,223-42, 218 n. 31 national schools 4, 7, 208,219 n. 47, 226, 227 nationalism 7,208, 241, 231 Nazarenes 160,163, 209 Nekrasov, Nikolai 213 Nesterov, Mikhail 212 Neville, Richard 83 New York, National Academy of Design 229, 230,234 Newton, Sir Isaac 102 Nicholas I, Tsar of Russia 62, 203,204, 203 Noble, Revd Louis Legrand 229 Novak, Barbara 237-8, 239 Olmstead, Frederick Law 187-9 Opie, John 63 Orlovsky, Alexander 64 Ossian 104 Ostade brothers 213 Oxley, John 82, 83-4, 88-9

270

ENGLISH ACCENTS

Palmer, Samuel 18 0 ,18 1 Paret y Alcazar, Luis 10 5,10 7 Paris Salons 1, 2, 3 ,12 5 -4 1 passim, 205 Passavant, Johann David 159-60 Paton, Richard 56 Paxton, Sir Joseph 187, 206 Peale, Charles Wilson 13 -14 Peisse, Louis 140 Percy, Sidney Richard 180,183 Perov, Vasily 6 ,2 15-16 The Drowned Woman 222 Peter I (the Great), Emperor of Russia 54, 203 Peters, Matthew William 31, 32 Clara 45 Petrov, P. N. 63 Pevsner, Nikolaus 64, 227-8, 252-3 Philip, Arthur 81 Picasso, Pablo 254 Pillet, Fabien 128 Pine, Robert Edge 36 Pizarro, Cecilio 113 Planche, Gustave 137,14 0 Pointon, Marcia 136 Pollock, Jackson 239 Ponce, Joseph Vargas 108 Ponz, Antonio 10 1-3 ,10 5 ,10 6 ,10 8 Pope, Alexander 59,185 Porter, Robert Ker 60 Potemkin, Prince Grigory 57,58, 204 Poussin, Nicholas 209, 214 Powell, Earl A. 239 Powell, John Wesley 19 1-3 Pratt, Mary 32-3 Pre-Raphaelites 114 ,18 0 ,18 1,18 2 , 212, 244 n. 64, 252, 253 Price, Uvedale 86 prints role in spreading knowledge of British art 1-2 ,3 -4 , 29-40, 10 3-4 ,10 7 -8 ,10 9 -11,12 5 -6 , 132-41, 229-30 Prown, Jules 15 Pryanishnikov, Illarion 6, 215-6 The Semptress 223 Purdy, Daniel 30 Pushkin, Alexander 61, 62 Pyne, J. B. 182 Quintana, Manuel 114

Racine, Jean 10 Raimbach, Abraham 52,135-6, 203 Ramberg, Johann Heinrich 156 Raphael 132 Reagan, Ronald 239 Redgrave, Richard 6 ,18 1, 215-6 Reifenstein, I. 52 Reinick, Robert 165 Rembrandt van Rijn 129, 210 Rethel, Alfred 15 5 ,16 3 -7 ,17 7 Retzsch, Moritz 157 Hamlet; Prologue 170 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 2,53,56 -7, 66,104, 10 6 ,10 8 ,12 6 ,13 1,13 2 ,15 4 ,18 5 , 204-5, 2°8/ 210, 2 11, 253 Discourses 1 ,3 , 5 ,3 6 ,5 7 ,10 5 The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents 3 ,10 3, 220 Richardson, Samuel 107 Richardson, Thomas Miles 183 Richelieu, Duke of 126-8 Riepenhausen, Ernst Ludwig 156 Roberts, David 5 ,10 1,113 - 4 ,13 9 ,19 3 - 4 Madrid, Palacio Real 124 Robertson, Christine 204 Portrait of Grand Duchess Maria Aleksandrovna 221 Robertson, William 104 Romney, George 6 6 ,10 3,10 6 ,126 Roode, Theodorus de 56 Allegory on the Victory at Chesme for Catherine the Great 72 Roosevelt, Theodore 191 Rosa, Salvator 232 Rossetti, D. G. 101 Rossetti, W. M. 180 Roubiliac, Louis-Frangois 102 Rowlandson, Thomas 109,158 Rubens, Sir Peter Paul 12 Ruisdael, Jacob van 214, 234 Ruskin, John 18 1,19 2 , 232, 240 Ryan, Simon 87 St Petersburg, Imperial Academy of Arts 51, 52,57-8, 60, 62, 203, 206, 207, 209, 213, 214 Salmon, Robert 238 Sargent, J. S. 101 Schadow, Wilhelm 16 1,16 3 Schiller, Friedrich 156,160

Index 271 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 156 ,157 Schwiter, Baron 12 5 ,13 1 Scott, Sir Walter 158 Scott, William Bell 166 Seznec, Jean 138-9 Shakespeare, William 3, 54 ,10 8 ,157 Sharp, William 108 Shaw, Joshua 237 Shchedrin, Silvestr 214 Shuvalov, Ivan 52, 58 Sickert, Walter 253 Silvestre, Theophile 13 1, 232 Sizeranne, Robert de la 252 sketchiness as a characteristic of British art 6,19, 63, 65,128-9, *59/162 Skorodumov, Gavril 53, 54 Skottowe, Thomas 79 Smiles, Samuel 230 Smith, Bernard 82, 83 Smith, Greg 85 Smith, Sydney 81 Sokolov, Petr 5, 52 Portrait of Nikita Panin in Childhood 71 Solkin, David 254 Spanish War of Independence 110 -13 , 114 Stasov, V. V. 66, 205, 206, 207-8, 213 Stendhal 129 Sterne, Laurence 59 Stothard, Thomas 36 Sturges, Jonathan 234 Sulzer, Johann Georg 35 Sureda, Bartolome 108-9 Svinjin, Pavel 54, 62 Swift, Jonathan 109 Tench, Watkin 81, 82 Teniers, David, the younger 4,137, 213 Terborch, Gerard 213 Thackeray, William Makepeace 114 Thomas, Sarah 87 Thomson, James 87,185-7,19 6 n. 33 Thore, Theophile 140, 2 11- 12 Thornhill, Sir James 54 Timm, Vasily 206 Tischbein, J. H. 52 Titian 132 Tolstoi, Count Fedor 65-6, 206 Tolstoi, Lev 208

Tropinin, Vasily 61, 62, 64 Truettner, William H. 234 Trumbull, John 5, 9 ,11-2 0 , 36, 230 The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, 17 June

1775 23

The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, 31 December

1775 24

The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, 3 January 1777 25 The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, 19 October 1781 26 The Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776 27 Tuckerman, Henry H. 226, 229 Turgenev, Alexander 54 Turner, J. M. W. 2, 6, 7, 8 5 ,114 ,12 7 ,13 4 , 14 1,18 2 -3 ,18 5 -6 ,19 2 , 210, 214, 232~3/ 238-40 Plymouth with Mount Batten 96 England: Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday 198 Twain, Mark 185 Urena, Marques de 10 3,10 5,10 6 ,10 9 Urvanov, Ivan 57 Vaux, Calvert 187 Veit, Philip 163 Velazquez, Diego 109 Venetsianov, Alexei 57, 64 Victoria, Queen 186 Viel-Castel, H. de 140 Villaamil, Jenaro Perez de 113 - 14 Villeneuve, Vallou de 133 The Daughters of Charles B. Calmady, Esq. 143 Waagen, Gustav 159-60, 210 Waldmiiller, F. G. 194 Walker, James 57,59 Wallach, Alan 231-2, 234 Wallis, James 81, 85 Walpole, Horace 4 ,109 ,159 Walpole, Robert 56 Washington, George 1 0 ,1 1 ,1 2 ,1 6 - 1 8 , 20 Waterhouse, Ellis 253

272 ENGLISH ACCENTS Waterhouse, Henry 80 Watts, George Frederick 6, 215 Found Drowned 222 Wedgwood, Josiah 55,108-9, X14 Weerth, Georg 155,16 2 Wellington, Duke of 1 1 1 , 1 1 3 , 1 2 2 Wentworth, W. C. 85 West, Benjamin 5, 9 - 1 1 ,1 2 ,1 3 - 1 5 ,1 8 , 20, 3 1,3 6 ,4 2 n. 50,42 n. 51,44,48,53, 5 4 ,5 6 ,10 2 ,10 6 ,13 5 ,13 8 ,15 8 ,18 2 , 210, 227 The Death of General Wolfe 10 ,16 ,37-9 , 5 0 ,10 3 ,10 8 ,110 Westall, William 87-8 Wheatley, Francis 81 Whistler, J. A. M. 101, 227 Wilkie, Sir David 3-4, 5, 6 6 ,1 0 1 ,1 1 2 ,1 1 3 , 12 5 -6 ,12 7 ,13 4 -7 ,14 1,14 9 ,15 0 , 15 8 ,16 1, 213 The Defence of Saragossa 123

Willis, Henry Bryan 183 Wilmerding, John 236-7, 239 Wilson, Richard 32,52,10 6 Phaeton 46 Wind, Edgar 10 - 11, 20 Witberg, Alexander 52 Woollett, William 37,42 n. 50,46,50,

53-4,108,135

Wootton, John 56 Wraxall, Nathaniel 56 Wright, Joseph, of Derby 56, 204 Wright, T. The Visit of Emperor Alexander I to the Studio of the Artist George Dawe 77 Young, Arthur 86 Yusupov, Nikolai 52,58 Zinoviev, Vasily 54 Zola, Emile 216