The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512807363

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. The Visual Sketch in Britain
2. "Keeping Them Out of Harm's Way": Sketching, Female Accomplishments, and the Shaping of Gender in Britain
3. Perverting Female Propriety: Women's Verbal Sketches as Proper Display of Perversion
4. Sketching, Courtship, and Women's Novels
5. Resisting Monumentality: Wordsworth, Byron, and the Poetic Sketch
Appendix: Select Verbal and Visual Sketches Published in the United Kingdom, 1758-1850
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism

The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism Richard C. Sha

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 1998 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sha, Richard C. The visual and verbal sketch in British romanticism / Richard C. Sha. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8122-3420-0 (alk. paper) ι. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Art and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Artists' preparatory studies—Great Britain. 4. English language—19th century—Rhetoric, j . Visual perception in literature. 6. Romanticism—Great Britain. 7. Description (Rhetoric) I. Tide. PR468.A76S53 1997 920.9'357—dc2i 97-22660 CIP

For JO E L L E N PARKER who convinced me to become a literary critic and ARLENE SHA "Whose is the love that, gleaming through the world, Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn"

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

ix

ι

ι. The Visual Sketch in Britain

22

2. "Keeping Them Out of Harm's Way": Sketching, Female Accomplishments, and the Shaping of Gender in Britain

73

3. Perverting Female Propriety: Women's Verbal Sketches as Proper Display of Perversion

105

4. Sketching, Courtship, and Women's Novels

145

5. Resisting Monumentality: Wordsworth, Byron, and the Poetic Sketch

162

Appendix: Select Verbal and Visual Sketches Published in the United Kingdom, 1758-1850

195

Notes

209

Bibliography

251

Acknowledgments

269

Index

271

Illustrations

FIGURES ι. T i t l e p a g e f r o m Sketches by George Мог land

6

2. W i l l i a m a n d S a m u e l D a n i e l l , " T h e R e s i d e n c e o f a H o r d e o f CafFers"

12

3. D a v i d L u c a s after John C o n s t a b l e , " S u m m e r A f t e r n o o n — After a Shower"

15

4. S k e t c h attributed t o Paul S a n d b y M u n n , based o n C o w p e r ' s Task

31

5. S k e t c h attributed t o G e o r g e S a m u e l , based o n C o w p e r ' s Task

32

6. R i c h a r d E a r l o m , after C i p r i a n i , " B o y s at B l i n d m a n ' s B l u f f " (detail)

34

7. Sir Joshua R e y n o l d s ' s sketch f r o m R a p h a e l ' s Liberation

of

Saint Peter

41

8. Sir Joshua R e y n o l d s ' s sketch o f Lord Rockingham secretary Edmund

and his

Burke

42

9. U n k n o w n , after W i l l i a m G i l p i n , f r o m " T h e A r t o f Sketching Landscape"

56

10. W i l l i a m G i l p i n , plate 1 a n d title p a g e t o Two Essays

61

11. J. W . H a r d i n g , f r o m Sketches in North Wales

70

12. D o r a W o r d s w o r t h , f r o m her " P o r t u g u e s e S k e t c h b o o k "

86

13. H a r r i e t Lister G r e e n , Vale ofNewlands

90

14. A m o s G r e e n , Vale ofNewlands

91

15. H a r r i e t Lister G r e e n , The Falls of Moness

92

16. M a r i a C o s w a y , f r o m Lmitations in Chalk

94

17. E d w a r d O r m e after W i l l i a m O r m e , title p a g e t o Orme's Pocket Sketch Book

98

18. M i s s S m i t h , " G e n t i a n e l l a " ( u n c o l o r e d ) , f r o m Scenes of Flowers from Nature

100

19. Joshua Cristall, title p a g e v i g n e t t e f r o m A n n Batten Cristall, Poetical Sketches

125

χ COLOR

Illustrations PLATES

ι. Anne Rushout, "Ely Cathedral, August 5,1824" 2. Miss Smith, "Gentianella" (colored), Scenes of Flowers from Nature

87 88

Introduction

T H I S IS A BOOK ABOUT the rhetoric of the sketch in British R o m a n t i c i s m :

about how the visual sketch's broken lines, hasty brushwork, roughness, and irregularity persuade viewers that the sketch is artful almost despite itself; about how the visual and verbal sketch convinces audiences that less finish, less labor, and less fastidiousness to form is more aesthetic, more truthful, or, in the case of women artists, more proper, even though this entails construing absences as meaningful rather than as mere absences; and about how the sketch, its persuasiveness notwithstanding, must appear to resist rhetoricity if it is to maintain its truthfulness, authenticity, or propriety. 1 That is, the claims of authenticity and truthfulness are at odds with the ideal of truth as that which is supposedly persuasive in and of itself. These resistances to rhetoric, in the end, nonetheless make the sketch more ideologically effective insofar as ideology gains persuasiveness when it does not look like itself. At the same time, since simplicity and authenticity are requisite to Romantic aesthetics, this ideological rhetoric of denied rhetoricity makes the sketch truly artful to the emerging middling classes of Romantic readers. By situating the sketch's aesthetic and ideological powers in this powerful rhetoric of denied rhetoricity, I emphasize its conflicted rhetorical character. By "rhetoric," I mean the art of persuasion in speech or in representation. 2 Where Paul de Man equates rhetoric with communicative and epistemological blockage, an equation derived from Plato's belief that rhetoric yields only conviction without knowledge, I want to consider what rhetoric enables, despite its instability as knowledge. That neither the visual nor verbal sketch in the Romantic period has been the object of sustained critical study (aside from studies of a particular artist's sketches) suggests that its rhetoric has been so successful in covering its tracks that we have only recently begun to perceive it as rhetoric; rhetorical success breeds reptiles of the critical mind. 3 De Man's success in persuading readers that rhetoric obstructs meaning—that rhetoric necessarily turns against itself— moreover, makes any positive definition seem counterintuitive, a fact that nonetheless argues for a way of thinking about how persuasion is achieved

2

Introduction

even when it is based on false premises or when it must turn to feelings (and not judgment) in order to achieve persuasion. De Man defines rhetoric as "a disruptive intertwining of trope and persuasion,"4 and he argues that "rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration."5 Elsewhere he claims that "rhetoric, by its actively negative relationship to grammar and logic, certainly undoes the claims . . . of language . . . to be an epistemologically stable construct." 6 My attention to the sketch and its rhetoric, by contrast, reminds us that every time we rely on the inherent epistemological instability within language (and within literary language especially) to undo the work of ideology, we lose a sense of how ideology manipulates those instabilities into a coherent worldview, thereby making itself palatable.7 The sketch is ideological inasmuch as it filters details to arrive at the quintessential while appearing unmediated. If the sketch helps to impose order on the world by making the world seem ontologically ordered, it also relies upon energeia, what Aristotle refers to as "bringing-before-the-eyes," to persuade audiences of that intrinsic order.8 In an age in which, as Percy Shelley put it, "we have eaten more than we can digest," such a filter would have been especially therapeutic.9 More critically, de Man's position denies the possibility that subjects can transform those instabilities into a rhetoric that may pay lip service to ideology in an attempt to undermine it. The visual and verbal sketches of women artists, for example, appropriate the cachet of propriety signaled by the sketch; yet, once they transformed the ideology of feminine propriety into a rhetoric of propriety, they could manipulate that rhetoric to excuse improper acts. Normally ideology is a historically circumscribed rhetorical interchange, an interchange in which endless deferral makes living impossible. Rhetoric, however, transforms the vertigo of deferral into the agency of referral so long as a persuasive argument is made for any particular reference. Of course, my stress on the rhetorical interests behind reference undermines the ontology of reference even as this emphasis enables subjects to use rhetoric to realize their interests. Since ideology works only if it can persuade those subject to it of its benefits, of its ability to structure what otherwise might remain chaos, I foreground the possibility of agency. At the same time, because ideology becomes persuasive when those benefits are masked under the free play of the aesthetic, I see the two as necessarily intertwined. Whereas de Man also equates rhetoric with the delusions of conviction—an equation useful to the study of Romanticism, but one not fully

Introduction

В

explored by de Man, since he focuses on questions of epistemology and dismisses belief—I want to use the sketch as a vehicle for exploring the salutary and therapeutic uses of Romantic delusions.10 In a Romantic age so given to idealizing, delusions are inevitable. The questions we should be asking are how are these delusions made persuasive and what do they enable subjects to do? Because the imaginative and the visionary are central preoccupations of Romantic thought, the sketch plays a key role in lending the visionary the foothold of ontology by stressing the empirical basis of the sketch. The pronounced irresolution of the sketch, however, gives space to the visionary and the ideal by emphasizing the distortions of the finished image, not to mention the losses incurred when one becomes what one beholds.11 And insofar as sketchers declare their suspicions about totalizing representations, a declaration that relieves them of the burden of having to be self-conscious about the limits of their claims, the sketch shuts off self-consciousness at the moment when the self threatens to dissolve into mere detail. Such a conception of a unified consciousness capable of transcending the myriad details of the material world allows artists to act as if they have agency, even if what counts as agency is the mere recognition of the benefits of ideology or the creative act itself. If the aesthetics of the sketch makes it look nonideological and thus allows it to be more ideologically persuasive, its resistance to the excesses of art—polish—makes it more artful insofar as the artist is not interested in ornament for the sake of ornament or artifice for the sake of artifice. As the spontaneous delineation of topography or of the artist's feelings on the spot, the sketch aligns itself with nature, as opposed to culture. Yet implicit in this alignment is an anxiety about whether the representation is in fact art. This partly explains Constable's and Turner's reluctance to show their sketches. Because this book investigates how the artful rhetoric of denied rhetoricity confers upon the sketch its aesthetic and ideological powers—powers that, once shown to be rhetorical, lose their persuasiveness—my chapters situate the sketch at the crossroads between text and context, aesthetics and ideology. I therefore study a wide range of texts and images drawn from travel literature, discourses on art, art exhibition and auction catalogs, sketching manuals, periodicals, women's albums and sketchbooks, conduct books, women's novels, and poetry in hopes that the manifold uses of the term "the sketch" will help restore to our view the complex mediations of this seemingly immediate form. These mediations highlight the

4

Introduction

aesthetic and ideological strategies of the sketch and yet counter its apparent naturalness and truthfulness by foregrounding the rhetorical strategies of the nature or reality proffered. And because gender so clearly complicates the rhetorical functions of the sketch, with men relying on declared genius, authenticity, and originality to make their sketches worthy of publicity and with women often turning to the sketch to display their propriety or decorousness—conscious of their limitations—a major emphasis of this book is on the impact of gender on the sketch.12 That the deconstructive enshrinement of monumentality as Romanticism's central trope obscures the role of the sketch in Romanticism, not to mention the productions of women artists, indicates the powerful rhetoric of our own Romantic narratives. Just as Wordsworth in The Prelude recounts the tearing apart of the Bastille, stone by stone, by a newly empowered democratic mob, so too does he recognize that literary monumentality is, despite the monument's illusory self-sufficiency, in the hands of his readers. What the sketch offers Romantic artists is a way of coping with their skepticisms about form, art, and audience through a rhetoric of process that leads to products of the imagination, albeit ones still considered under the sign of process.

The Sketch and Its Rhetorical Aesthetics As a visual form, the sketch is so convincingly spontaneous, original, and natural that we still tend to look at Constable's and Turner's sketches and forget that Turner was quite skeptical of the plein air sketch and that Constable executed his large sketches (the six-footers) in the studio. That is to say, we forget the strategies by which these painters made their representations look natural or authentic or sketched out-of-doors.13 Building upon the recent work of Ann Bermingham and John Barreil, I emphasize how even such seemingly informal and natural images as sketches work to persuade viewers of their truth status.14 Hasty brushwork and shading, broken lines, roughness, and irregularity thus invite viewers to think in terms of either the artist's spontaneous and authentic feelings or the naturalistic and dynamic rendering of landscape. Both align the sketch more with nature than with culture, and both suppress the artist's training in painting techniques or use of an iconographical tradition. That the sketch stands at the origins of the painter's invention process (the artist's first thoughts) further, yet ironically, suppresses its rhetoricity—specifically, the role of in-

Introduction

5

ventio in the rhetorical process of composition. In the end, however, these formal signs of sketchiness insinuate an ordered, benevolent nature "out there": a structuring that is palpable yet not tyrannically superimposed. The sketcher argues that less is more—that less finish, less labor, and less attention to form is more artful and more truthful. Yet in making such a potentially implausible claim—how will less to perceive yield more sensations if the object of the senses is to perceive?—the sketcher begins in a defensive position whereby he or she must teach audiences how to perceive lessness and explain its higher value. In a Romantic age that placed primacy on the transformative capabilities of art, this defensiveness is especially acute, since what is at stake is not just art but the world. Sketchers therefore must transform the signs of lessness into a systematic rhetoric that convinces readers that less is more, that fewer signs of ornament are more true. At the same time, this lessness must still facilitate transcendence. Hence Launcelot Temple (John Armstrong) prefaced the very first book with sketch in its title, Sketches or Essays on Various Subjects (1758), by claiming that he felt "the value of his own labour too sensibly to bestow it where, in all probability, it might only serve to depreciate his Performance." 1 5 Although Armstrong makes it clear he values labor, he implies that too much labor diminishes; ergo, less is more. And hence the title page to Lady Blessington's Sketches and Fragments (1822) announces that "sketches sometimes possess an interest that is often not found in more finished performances." 16 This is especially true when the intent of the "sketch" is to apologize for what the draftsman Robert Hills called "the errors of an unpractised pen" in his 1816 Sketches in Flanders and Holland·, the origin of his sketches as a private correspondence not only excuses their defects, but also makes them "more faithful." 17 Less is not a simple quantitative fact or absence; it is a calculated strategy for instantiating simplicity or sincerity or propriety. Because the sketch bases its claims to aesthetic status on shared negativities—incompletion, irresolution, lack of finish, a visualizable thing yet one irreducible to mere vision—it relies on apologetic prefaces and errata sheets to allow errors to clamor quiedy for virtuosity. The sketch flaunts its imperfections so that readers and viewers can imagine what the artist might truly have accomplished with the proper tools, time, and education, or so that the work appears more authentic. Hence the advertisement to Blake's Poetical Sketches (1783), likely written by Blake's friends, stresses "poetic originality" as well as "the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page." 18 Calling attention to one's defects and irregularities is a strategy by which the artist begs for

Introduction

7

a noncritical reading, and paradoxically, testifies to his or her own genius and natural talent. Ann Cristall thus insists in her preface to Poetical Sketches (1795) that her "versification is wild, and still incorrect . . . ; they were written without the knowledge of any rules; of which their irregularity is the natural consequence." 19 Similarly, Henry Kirke White, the son of a butcher, informed his readers in Clifton Grove: A Sketch in Verse and Other Poems (1803) that what lay before them were the "unpremediated effusions of a Boy from his thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary information, but in the more active business of life." 20 Because a seeming causal relationship exists between youthfulness and irregularities, we expect to find the one where we find the other. Nevertheless, these defects may also be taken for signs of talent and originality insofar as the artist's youthfulness testifies to the existence of innate genius, genius that cannot be developed. When coupled with speed of execution and youthfulness, errors become the formal features of genius. N o artist knew this better than George Morland, whose published sketchbooks, Sketches (1791) and Sketches from Nature (1792-99), depict the artist sketching on the title page as if to say what might look composed is really natural talent (Figure 1). Such conflation between artist and nature is further reinforced by the fusion of the artist's body with the tree trunk: his legs could substitute for the roots of the tree. Morland often refused to correct his mistakes, saying, "they will pass as proofs of a fiery genius." 21 In the case of Blake, Cristall, and White, their genius is all the more innate because—as their prefatory remarks shrewdly indicate—they have not benefited from much formal education. Blake's Sketches are, we recall, "the production of an untutored youth." To the extent that one assents to the claim that the minimalist mantra "less is more" is a rhetorical claim that is at odds with empiricism, the sketch may fail to persuade. Hazlitt's sneer that if Turner "were to finish his trees or his plants in the foreground, or his distances, or his sky, or his water, or his buildings, or any thing in his pictures, in like manner, he could only paint and sell one landscape where he now paints and sells twenty," indicates a prevailing skepticism about the alleged superiority of a sketch aesthetic.22 Hazlitt's remarks acknowledge the economic gains of an aesthetic that places primacy on sketchiness, and the relative ease with which art could now be commodified undermines claims for the superior aesthetic value of sketches, since commerce is often understood as antithetical to art. Moreover, literary and artistic property debates of the late eighteenth century sought to fix aesthetic property in the unique hand

8

Introduction

and personality of the artist, and that meant that the sketch as a record of the artist's first thoughts now had the power to convert what otherwise might be considered immaterial ideas in the public domain into the juridical property of the artist.23 My reference to the property debates surrounding art demands a close attention to the rhetoric of originality surrounding the sketch.24 Once originality is the basis for juridical property, the stakes are high indeed for the artist to instantiate originality. The process of composition has a key role to play here, given that no two artists will think exactly alike. As a declared product of that composition process, the sketch, then, declares originality by substituting a narrative of its own origins for originality. As if visual sketchers are skeptical that their representations will bear the traces of the artist's original hand—an originality all the more suspect because it can be reproduced once aquatint (1750s), soft-ground etching (popular in the eighteenth century), and lithography (1798) are invented—both written and drawn sketches alike often detail the circumstances of composition in titles or in prefatory material. The title to John Papworth's Poetical Sketches of Scarborough Illustrated by Twenty-One Engravings of Humorous Subjects, from the Original Designs, Made on the Spot by J. Green, and Etched by Thomas Rowlandson (1813) thus promises originality in the form of sketches done on the spot (origin) and etched by an artist known for his humorous drawings.25 Yet claims of originality threaten to degenerate into mere claims once the sketcher realizes the many artists who have traversed the same terrain. James Edward Smith opens his preface to A Sketch of a Tour on the Continent (1793) acknowledging "the heap" of tours on the Continent already in existence; for him, originality has been reduced to the "original errors of one's own." 26 In the end, narratives of origin cannot substitute for originality. Sketchers therefore allude to the works of others in hopes that those allusions will not imply derivation; rather, allusions are to rescue the sketch from charges of primitivism. But the verbal sketch's relation to rhetoric is even more complicated than the foregoing suggests. Since the verbal sketch takes for granted that a valid analogy between the first draft and the preliminary drawing can be made—that differences between images and words can be elided—its coherence is based upon the rhetorical figure of analogy. Mary Jacobus has shown that Romantic "analogy is a term that elides or erases metaphoricity by attempting to claim an actual or essential reality for what is figurative, and so rendering the fictions of the creating mind as if they were independently existing entities." 27 If Jacobus is right, and if Romantic analogy veils

Introduction

9

rhetoricity as materiality, then the sketch remains coherent so long as the artist or the sketch is careful not to place too much pressure on the analogy between the visual sketch and writing. Yet perhaps our skepticism that one can bridge the gap between words and images results partly from the fact that visual sketching is no longer such a widespread practice: as Blake's, Coleridge's, and Shelley's notebooks reveal, the bounding lines between the visual and poetic line were often fine indeed. A brief examination of the biographical sketch in the Romantic period will help further substantiate the uses of the analogy between sketching and writing. Although Coleridge faults Wordsworth for his "minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery," he immediately praises "what a draftsman could present to the eye with incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil, or the painter with as many touches of his brush" at the expense of (Wordsworth's) verbal description.28 Despite Coleridge's avowed resistance to painting, his written biographical sketches attempt to borrow from the visual a sense of reality. Hence Coleridge compares his original conceptions of a finished poem to be called "The Brook" to the making of "artist studies . . . with the objects and imagery immediately before my senses" (Biographia 1:196). His turn toward the empiricism of sketching, nonetheless, is undercut by the absence of little more than the originating ideas. Likewise, Leigh Hunt enlists painting's assumed superior powers of imitation in service of biography when he claims in his "Sketches of the Living Poets" (1821-22) that he will "give sketches of the principle features of the living poets as an artist might sketch those of their faces."29 And Thomas De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches (1834) invokes the analogy to suggest that he has provided readers unmediated access to his mind by conflating the "the rapid sketch which at the moment my mind furnishes" with his written words.30 This need to remind readers of the analogy between writing and the preliminary drawing, however, belies the analogy's seeming naturalness. Here I want to suggest an important qualification to Mary Jacobus's theory of analogy: analogy only works to elide metaphoricity when it is rhetorically beneficial to do so.31 When verbal sketchers remind us of the visual basis of the term, they recall the analogy's status as rhetorical figure, thereby blocking its ability to forge a necessary or essential connection just at the moment essence is most needed. Joseph Snow's poetical sketch "The Last Supper. Leonardo Da Vinci" (1831) initially looks like a straightforward use of analogy.32 But after having praised Leonardo for making visible the "sublime conceptions of thy mind," and for having

10

Introduction

transcended the obscurity of Biblical parables, Snow turns on the image, arguing that the painting's very sensuousness, captivating as it is, seduces viewers from the religious significance behind the image. Snow's last lines warn, "I ask for no feeling of idolatry? For art,—remember Him who dies, who lives for thee." Snow's poetical sketch, then, supplements the painting, because it, unlike the image it describes, reminds readers of the dangers of sensual pleasure in a medium that allegedly lacks the image's seductive capacity to convince viewers of presence, incarnation, even as the poet longs to appropriate the palpable effect the painting has on its viewers. Snow realizes that what we would now call logocentrism is but a poor substitute for idolatry, since the imagined presence that words proffer do not compel the worship of language over thing in the way images can. In the end, however, Snow thus turns the image itself into the very intellectual parable he initially denounced. Snow exploits the analogy of writing to sketching because it allows him to harness the palpable effects paintings have on their viewers and at the same time to renounce images only at the end of the poem because he has only just become conscious of the negative power of images. Snow's sketch thus appropriates the rhetorical powers of painting to incarnate the things it represents only to contain that rhetorical power within a verbal text that is analogous to a sensuous image not fully embodied. The analogy here controls the traffic between the visual and the verbal, allowing words the benefits of that traffic without the false totalizing ambitions and vulgar sensuousness of the finished visual image. Romantic analogy as seen through the sketch, it would seem, has a partial shut-off switch.

The Sketch and Its Ideological Persuasiveness Thus far I have argued that the aesthetics of the sketch is rhetorical since absences must be made meaningful and since the verbal sketch is based on the figure of analogy. In his overview of why analogy was so important to Scottish rhetoricians of the late eighteenth century, Frederick Burwick comments that part of analogy's appeal was its "instinctive propensity": that is, its ability "to adduce causal relationships beyond experience." Burwick continues: "Analogy serves the aesthetic function of presenting fanciful and metaphorical truths, in addition to its rational function of proceeding from a fact or thing experienced." 33 It is precisely this "aesthetic function"

Introduction

II

that makes the sketch so ideologically powerful. Rational skepticism, however, can overcome the instinctual power of analogy as audiences consider its rhetorical gains when it functions as an excuse. Since visual representation takes for granted that complete mimesis is not possible (no landscape will ever capture each leaf or blade of grass), the verbal gains a way of naturalizing the selection process from the visual sketch. Once completion is beyond the realm of possibility, then artists need not be so self-conscious of their selections, since selection is inevitable. And given that perception itself is highly, albeit necessarily, selective because we cannot pay attention to every gradation in a visual field, the sketch as a process of abstracting details seems merely to reproduce the selectiveness of perception itself.34 In William and Samuel Daniell's Sketches of Southern Africa (1820), for instance, twenty-one plates of animal sketches—interspersed with occasional landscapes—are immediately followed by plate 22: "The Residence of a Horde of Caffers" (Figure 2).35 The plates and the accompanying commentary fail to register any kind of disruption between the animal and human sketches. If the viewer does not understand the implications of the layout of the volume, the word "horde" in the caption foregrounds the animal-like nature of these people. Perhaps because "horde" further denies them any subjectivity, homogenizing individuals into one monolithic barbarism or primitivism, the Daniells can exploit the seeming naturalness of the sketch to forget the reasons for their selectiveness. It is only the intrusion of the West that will allow the Caffers to improve or evolve. The selective emphasis on animal sketches, moreover, works to minimize the presence of indigenous peoples, a minimization reinforced by scale: the natives are so dwarfed by the landscape, it is possible to miss them completely. Indeed, these figures are superfluous to the unity or balance of the pictorial composition; the tree above them prevents the spectator's eye from wandering into the right margin. As Mary Louise Pratt argues in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, this minimization allows the European to present his aspirations as being uncontested.36 That the years in which these Sketches were published were pivotal to British colonization of South Africa (Parliament had voted in 1819 to spend fifty thousand pounds to encourage emigration so that the frontier of the eastern Cape Colony would be solidified) suggests that such minimization was literally necessary in order to make room for British settlers37 By dissolving the boundary between perception and ideology, these sketches foreclose the possibility of guilt. The increasing influence of nominalism from Locke to Hume to

12

Introduction

Figure 2. "The Residence of a Horde of Caffers," from William and Samuel Daniell's Sketches Representing the Native Tribes, A nimals, and Scenery ofSouthern Africa (1820), plate 22. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Berkeley, moreover, meant that the visual image's status as natural sign, the apparent natural and necessary connection between the painting and the object of representation, would have been especially suggestive, if not therapeutic, to writers looking to contain the arbitrariness of language, the absence of necessary or natural connections between words and things. 38 Once again the sketch enables rhetoric to be mistaken for description so long as its immediacy collapses representation with the object of representation. And because we believe what we see—the eyewitness effect—the verbal sketch profits as well from our visually based epistemology. This grounding in the visual is even more critical to Romanticism because of the primacy placed upon the visionary. That is to say, the visual lends the visionary the foothold of ontology, and the imagination the grounding

Introduction

13

of the real. Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches (1793) offers a clear instance when the poet describes himself as "stand [ing] alone / sublime upon this far surveying cone" (lines 366-67), 39 as if visual command and prospect allow him to envision history. In Descriptive Sketches generally, the poet conflates vision with the visionary in an effort to counter his skepticisms that the visionary will become real. By that I mean that Wordsworth, on the one hand, launches into visionary idealism when he claims that the oppression of the Swiss will end and that French revolutionary violence will give way to true liberty; yet, on the other hand, he grounds these flights in his footnotes, which insist that the poet has empirically observed this topography, on foot no less. Such a rhetorical strategy is obfuscated by the poet's dismissal of the "cold rules of painting" (Descriptive Sketches p. 72η). By claiming that the Alps "disdain the pencil" (the paintbrush), and by substituting "descriptive" for "picturesque," moreover, the poet underscores the marginal status of the visual even as he relies upon a visual epistemology to confer truth status upon his visionary idealism. Ellen Esrock's The Reader's Eye argues that readers who visualize verbal images—as Wordsworth invites readers to do in his preface to Descriptive Sketches when he asks his friend, Robert Jones, to supplement what is "feeble in my design, or spiritless in my colouring" (32)—tend to activate their memories more and often use images to unify an otherwise discontinuous narrative.40 Insofar as verbal sketches regularly invite readers to visualize the words on the page into images, they insinuate themselves into the memory of readers, thereby hopelessly blurring categories of fact and ideology with the end result of making the perception of ideology as ideology extremely difficult.

Denial of Rhetoricity This insistent need to remind audiences that what lies before them is a sketch mandates a denial of rhetoricity; if the sketch is calculated to be compensatory, audiences may begin to see its spontaneity or authenticity as an excuse for sloth. Whereas for men this denial of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, served to rescue them from charges of neoclassical sterility (Wordsworth charges Gray with an elaborate diction incommensurate with the value of what is said) or effeminacy (Keats's mawkishness is perhaps the most famous example), for women, the feminizing of rhetoric as artifice, ornament without substance, and insincerity meant that women

14

Introduction

artists had a much greater need not to look rhetorical. Locke, for example, implicitly feminizes rhetoric when he claims that it is for "nothing else but to insinuate the wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the Judgement" insofar as he relies upon the general cultural gendering of the passions as feminine and the judgment as masculine.41 For these reasons, women turned to the mimesis offered by the sketch as a counter to affective display. And yet, as many women artists recognized, once affective rhetoric was feminized, women's more "natural" relationship to feeling might have the opposite effect of making the man of feeling look suspiciously rhetorical. Thus if the mimesis of the sketch was initially empowering to the woman artist because it suggested self-command, she might then turn to exploit appeals to feeling in part because such emotional displays now might make her look "natural," and such appeals were enormously persuasive. In the rhetorical tradition of the exordium, nonetheless, male and female sketchers often initially try to forge an intimate relationship between artist and audience on the grounds that the artist is showing herself in the private act of creation whether in the studio or study. Recognizing at once that truth is the best form of persuasion and that truth must be presented so that it will be acknowledged and understood as truth, writers and artists in the Romantic period exploited the visual and verbal sketch's execution on the spot, hasty delineation, and discontinuity to situate their "simple" and "natural" styles against the overly sensuous, excessively elaborate, ornamental, structured, and deceptive rhetoric of neoclassical artists and Royal Academicians. Hence when Constable instructed David Lucas to reproduce the artist's sketches in Various Subjects of Landscape Characteristic of English Scenery (1830), he took care to highlight his naturalness at the expense of any artificiality (Figure 3).42 His sketchy dynamic rendering of light, atmosphere, and foliage thus calls less attention to the artist's talent than it does to the restlessness of nature herself. Indeed, Constable was so zealous about naturalness that he attempted to ground " C H I A R ' O S C U R O , " the artistic practice of carefully alternating light and shade to stress sharp contrasts, "[in] N A T U R E " : such a strategy further helped to naturalize his choice of mezzotint technology, since mezzotints are especially good at rendering contrasts. As if he feared that the mute, if natural, mezzotints could not speak for themselves, however, Constable in 1833 added an introduction and letterpress commentary that explicitly asked viewers to understand these sketches either in terms of exact transcriptions of the artist's private feelings—and therefore as nonrhetorical—or in light of natural history—once again denying rhetoricity.

Introduction

Figure 3. David Lucas after John Constable, "Summer Afternoon—After a Shower," from Various Subjects of Landscape Characteristics of English Scenery (1830), plate 16. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

When Constable states that "Landscape gilded by the setting sun . . . cannot fail to mark . . . it with pathos and effect," he uses nature to contain the excesses of rhetoric by making nature herself the arbiter of pathos (Various Subjects 26). These efforts to ground rhetoric and artistry in nature, however, only intensified the painter's anxiety to demonstrate his artfulness. Constable thus turned to epigraphs and quotations by Virgil, Thomson, and Wordsworth to place his work in the aesthetic sister-arts tradition of poetry and painting; by implication, nonetheless, rhetoric was confined to poetry. All claims to naturalness aside, the very fact that Constable sought to show that he could paint in the various genres of landscape painting— historical, fanciful, pastoral, lyrical, and grand—suggests a painter preoccupied with subsuming the artistry of his predecessors and contemporaries, namely Turner and Claude. 43 Constable's inclusion of the windmill also implies his having surpassed the masters of Dutch landscape.

l6

Introduction

Early on in his Bioßraphia Literaria; Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (1817), Coleridge sought to defend his juvenile poetry from charges of excessive rhetoric by claiming that even then— despite the fact that the words on the page had suggested otherwise to his critics—his skill was stronger than his ability to realize the merits of "an austerer, and more natural style."44 What looks like excessive rhetoric, then, was merely a youthful inability to realize: a simple lack of skill rather than the more damning lack of judgment. Coleridge's transformations of an excess of rhetoric into a lack of skill lead to careful instructions on how to read that excess as lack. What's missing is skill, not judgment. Coleridge, of course, insinuates his virtuosity, since even in youth his judgment exceeded his skill. The ability to convert an absence into a sign of virtuosity is indeed the mark of a skillful rhetorician! That Coleridge seems not to find a paradox between nature and rhetoric in "natural style" points to how that style could seem unrhetorical. Inasmuch as Coleridge and other writers of the Romantic period recognized that excessive figuration is what allows rhetoric to be perceived as rhetoric (as in Coleridge's deft recounting of the Reverend James Bowyer's impatience with ornament—"Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you mean!" [Bioßraphia 1:10]), they used what they considered to be a more natural, more simple, colloquial style—men speaking to men—recognizing that fewer signs of rhetoric in the sense of ornament might make their works more persuasive. Rhetoric is perceptible only when abused. Adam Smith is helpful in allowing us to understand the rhetoricity of Romantic simplicity more generally: "the simple man again, is not inded studious to appear with all the outward marks of civility and breeding that he sees others of a more disingenious temper generally put on."45 Too much concern over appearing well bred is evidence of falseness. Not only, then, do sketches deflect attention away from excess figuration (its artfulness or rhetoricity) and foreground naturalness, but the sketchers shun excess altogether by claiming that less is more. The sketch offers only the quintessence of detail in a world assaulted by detail. Despite Keats's and the general Romantic distaste for works that have a "palpable design" upon us, we do well to recall that palpable design does not preclude all design, only that which is too sensuous and too obvious. Defending rhetoric from "false ornament," the influential rhetorician Hugh Blair recognized the rhetorical nature of simplicity when he defined "simplicity as essential to all true ornament."46 Too emphatic denials of rhetoric, however, might lead to charges of provin-

Introduction

17

cialism, vulgarity, and even disgust, criticisms Wordsworth had in mind when he admitted the need to "purify" rustic language "from . . . its real defects." 47 Hence the poet ironically personifies an old man in "Old Man Travelling . . . A Sketch," a man who has become so much a part of nature that the birds do not see him moving, in order to show what is lost when nature and consciousness are one. Although the old man sketched "is by Nature led / To Peace so perfect," Wordsworth ruptures that perfection by closing with the impending death of the protagonist's son, just as the poet's giving face to the old man's "mild composure" signals the need for him to take on the complexities of rhetoric. 48

Methodology Throughout this study, therefore, I use rhetoric as a third term to deconstruct the false binary opposition between aesthetic play and crude ideological instrumentality. My attention to the rhetoricity of the sketch leads me to consider how the sketch, on the one hand, converts its audience into minimalists—less finish, polish, labor, formality, and false learning make the sketch more artful. This minimalism further enables the sketch to substitute a narrative of its own origins for originality; so many sketches dwell on their own instantiation, perhaps to the point of deflecting our attention away from issues of derivativeness. The possibility of derivation, however, returns with a vengeance with obligatory allusions to the work of others, since some allusions are necessary to rescue the work from charges of primitivism 4 9 On the other hand, the claim that the sketch has captured only the quintessence of detail endows it with the ability to contain rhetoric under descriptiveness and referentiality, thereby making it ideologically effective without seeming ideological. In a larger view, I suggest, rhetoric offers an important way out of the current impasse between ideology and aesthetics in new historicist studies of Romanticism. The received view is that Romantic aesthetics displaces, denies, or deflects historical particularities and that such displacement reveals Romantic aesthetics to be a kind of false consciousness.50 Our current attention to the ideological implications of Romanticism has reduced aesthetics to disguised ideology. By using the sketch to think about the relation of rhetoric to aesthetics in Romanticism, I foreground the necessity of disguise to rhetoric, aesthetics, and ideology. I also consider how Romanticism's denial of rhetoric yields an aesthetics of simplicity that is enor-

ι8

Introduction

mously ideologically persuasive in part because it does not look rhetorical. Here I specify de Man's general definition of literariness as the degree of "consistent rhetoricity o f . . . language" to suggest that for Romantic artists the rhetoric of denied rhetoricity is what makes art truly artful to the emerging middling classes of readers, galvanized into a reading public (as Jon Klancher has shown) by the periodical.51 The increasing dependence of Romantic artists on a purchasing public, moreover, honed their rhetorical skills to such an extent that Byron closed canto ι of Don Juan, an epic satire that promises to "sketch your world exactly as it goes" (8:89), with an address to his "gentle reader" and "still gentler purchaser" (1:221). 52 In fact, as publishers recognized, sketches offered an exemplary venue for book promotion. Because sketches were by definition unfinished or partial, they often included copious footnotes to guide the reader to other sources that could provide fuller background. Offering momentary synthesis, the sketch nonetheless situated itself in an ever-expanding web of textuality and iconography.53 And since that momentariness would need continual updating, new editions were always possible. My concern with how the sketch deploys its rhetoric according to the needs of any particular situation leads me to stress multiplicity, rather than to provide a history of the sketch as a narrowly defined art form. In the pages that follow, the sketch is defined as a visual object, a verbal genre based upon a visual object, an expected female accomplishment, a cachet of feminine propriety, and a prose and poetic vehicle for thinking about monumentality. By allowing each succeeding model to point to the blindnesses of others, my understanding of the sketch as multiple exposes the resistance of specific sketches to one model as well as the negativity inherent in the process of historical understanding. Steven Mailloux reminds us that critics who attempt to use historical context "to constrain interpretations" are inevitably caught up in the double bind of having to name context and not "elaborate further" or "carry out an infinite listing of all aspects of their contexts and interrelations." But I hope multiplicity will allow each model to be rhetorically persuasive, and yet self-consciously rhetorical54 By foregrounding the rhetorical status of my own claims, moreover, I want to arrest new historicism's tendency toward forgetfulness; as Brook Thomas charges, "the very post-structuralist assumptions that help attack past histories seem necessarily forgotten in efforts to create new ones."55 Chapter 1 begins with the changing fortunes of the visual sketch in the late eighteenth century because I want to put pressure on the analogy between sketching and writing. Sir Joshua Reynolds and William Gilpin's

Introduction

19

writings on the sketch and material practices of sketching show the economic stakes of a sketch aesthetic. Such an economically based reading further illuminates the rhetoricity of sketching generally: underlying claims that less finish is actually more artistic than more finish is a larger anxiety about the basis of value itself in a capitalist economy. Once value is contingent upon rhetoric and not upon anything intrinsic to the representation, how will anyone determine the real value of art? If Gilpin had the difficult rhetorical task of using the sketch to argue that less was more, women artists and writers faced even greater obstacles. Since one negative connotation of rhetoric was mere display, women artists had a greater need not to appear rhetorical lest they be accused of being merely for show and not substance. And since display was thought to injure feminine propriety, women turned to the sketch for its cachet of propriety. Sketching gave women the decorum needed to put readers and viewers in a receptive state of mind; however, that very propriety, if too overtly displayed, would become merely rhetorical. Chapter 2 thus defines sketching as a female accomplishment and traces the ideological work of sketching in women's conduct books and sketching and drawing manuals; it also suggests ways in which women visual artists resisted such strictures.56 In the end, after having made a persuasive case for their propriety, these women took issue with the fact that, whereas masculine unfinishedness could be justified on the grounds that talent, originality, speed, genius, or authenticity more than compensated for that lack, female unfinishedness connoted an unredeemable sign of moral failing—lack of application, lack of concentration, and lack of discipline. Quickness of execution for women implies sloth, not genius. This ability to recognize feminine propriety as a rhetoric and not as a given ideology is the focus of Chapter 3. Sketching enabled women writers like Helen Maria Williams, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Mary Russell Mitford, Ann Batten Cristall, and Octavia Stopford to adopt the persona of a proper lady, when it was rhetorically useful, to rescue themselves from charges of impropriety; moreover, insofar as sketching suggested objectivity, it enabled them to deny their rhetorical skills while making their claims to propriety more persuasive. That is, recognizing both the objectifying and affective powers of images, women writers turned to the sketch because it enabled them to appeal to the audience's emotions and to recognize the limits of affective appeals with calculated returns to the objectivity of vision. Focusing on the prominence of sketching in courtship rituals, Chapter 4 considers how women novelists turn to

20

Introduction

seemingly innocent scenes of sketching to probe the power relations between the sexes. Sketching once again serves as a rhetorical cachet of propriety. Wordsworth and Byron, by contrast, turned to the poetic sketch to rescue their works from charges of monumentality. If women writers used the sketch to excuse their improper desires for monumentality—their works were not in competition with the finished productions of men— these male poets exploited the ephemerality of the sketch as a counter to their monumentalizing ambitions. That is, where feminine desires for monumentality were illegitimate because feminine display was illegitimate, masculine consciousness of the limits of monumentality might serve to make their works more self-reflexive, more ironic, and more canonical. Gender, of course, intervenes to obscure the rhetoric of feminine ephemerality, how that declared mimetic sketchiness was used to deflect attention away from the affective power of the feminine sketch. By situating the Romantic sketch against deconstructive readings of monumentality, I show how critics are compelled to reenact this historical problem. In closing these introductory remarks, I want to suggest that one reason scholarship has been relatively silent on the sketch is that we still rely upon a rhetoric of sketching to excuse lapses in self-consciousness. Many literary critics, historians, and art historians still regularly claim to "sketch" out an argument or to offer a mere sketch of a period, thumbnail or otherwise. I suggest that "sketching" is rhetorically useful because it allows critics to display their self-consciousness about the limits of their claims so that they no longer have to think about them. The idea of sketching an argument enables critics to shut off self-consciousness just at the moment when critical narrative threatens to lose all coherence. Jacques Derrida, for instance, informs us in "Plato's Pharmacy" that he has only "sketched out" his "understanding" of Plato. Here the analogy stands in for a full-blown argument that is not there because any attempt to "qualify it, name it, comprehend it under a simple concept... [will be] immediately off the mark."57 The absence that the sketch points to persuades readers of Derrida's selfconsciousness; yet, the fact that he is at this moment writing a critical narrative that is in "excess" of all previous narratives perhaps allows us to read that absence as defensive, a recognition that critical narrative resists excess. Even by way of analogy to the preliminary drawing, however, the sketch offers presence within the gaps of our knowledge. Hence Jerome McGann tellingly deploys the sketch as a corrective to the "Elizabethan World Picture" of an older history. Whereas old historical critics "un-

Introduction

21

consciously" made "sweeping pictures," refusing to "theorize detail," new historicists dwell in anecdotes, the "ancillary sketch which [will not] find its way into a single larger picture of detail." 58 While the old school is thereby caricatured as being grandiose, monolithic, and general, the sketch confers upon the new historicism modesty, fragmentation, as well as localism and particularity—in short, contemporary signs of defensive self-consciousness. Underneath these necessarily defensive signs of self-consciousness, nonetheless, lies a shared fascination with the truth-delivering capacities of images. Why? Perhaps our recent attention to the rhetorical strategies of historical narratives has made us look to the residue of iconicity promised by the sketch as a way of conferring substance and reality on our versions of history, without looking like we are still relying on images to ground our claims. If the "natural" immediacy of the visual sketch frequently deflects attention away from any academic or art training, not to mention compositional strategies or organizing principles, then the sketch has the added benefit of looking original in its attempts to capture reality. By using iconic language to set a virtual scene before the eyes of readers, the sketch, even as a verbal form, employs energeia—the achievement in language of a highly natural quality or a pictorial quality that is lifelike—to persuade readers of "truth," presence. The fact that the sketch self-consciously calls attention to the totalizing claims of any image purporting to be finished by way of discontinuous lines or narrative should not, however, blind us to the sketch's reliance on the power of images to give claims an ontological footing. More to the point, the metaphoric nature of the verbal sketch and the hasty broken lines of the visual sketch deliberately mitigate the image's otherwise deceptive and vulgar sensuousness.

I

The Visual Sketch in Britain

SKETCHES ARE TODAY CONSIDERED to be virtuoso performances testi-

fying to the creative genius and technical prowess of the artist. Museums mount exhibitions on kinds of sketches (French nineteenth-century oil sketches, or open air oil sketches) and even on the sketches of a particular artist (Turner or Constable, for example).1 Galleries also hang sketches with or without their finished counterparts, and archives like the Dove Cottage Library, the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art have collections specifically devoted to sketches and drawings. But the sketch did not always claim such importance and priority. The early eighteenth century in England envisioned the sketch as essentially marginal—largely private and personal—and merely preparatory for a finished painting. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the declared genius and originality of the sketch demanded that it be publicly exhibited. Robert Wark summarizes this development: "the nature of British draughtsmanship shifts markedly with the late eighteenth century, at which time watercolor takes over as the dominant medium and landscape the dominant theme. There is a corresponding change in emphasis from the drawing as a preparatory study for a painting or print to the drawing or watercolor as a complete self-contained work of art."2 From 1787 until 1801, Benjamin West, the Royal Academy's second president, regularly exhibited his sketches—although he was often careful to label them "finished sketches"—and in those years so did Joseph Farington, John Flaxman, Henry Fuseli, George Morland, Joseph Nollekens, and Richard Westall.3 Even in the exhibition catalogs of the Royal Academy at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the number and percentage of works shown specifically entitled "sketches" steadily rose. A comparison of the ten-year periods of 1769-78 and 1801-10

The Visual Sketch in Britain

23

reveals that, with the exclusion of architectural sketches, only twelve works specifically entitled sketches were shown in the first of these decades. But from 1801 to 1810 roughly 137 works called sketches were exhibited.4 To be sure, the number of works exhibited in the latter period increased proportionally. Nevertheless, in terms of percentages, the number of sketches versus other works shown trebles: in 1769 only one sketch was shown, roughly .7 percent of the total; in 1801, approximately 2 percent of the works were sketches. While these numbers may seem small, they are much more significant in light of the Royal Academy's later competition from venues such as the shows at the British Institution, which began in 1806, the shows of the Society of Painters in Watercolours founded in 1805, and those of the Society of Watercolour Painters beginning in 1808—venues that were generally more receptive to drawn or watercolor sketches. My strategy in this chapter is to show, example by example, how British sketches and the rhetoric surrounding them perpetuate, on multiple levels, problems between the middle class and landed gentry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the ability to sketch was in the seventeenth century a relatively stable sign of gentility, the rising middle class would in the course of the next century appropriate the sketch—and its ability to confer truth and nobility upon the artist—for its own ends.5 Once the middling classes could use the sketch to persuade others of class distinctions, sketching ceased to be a reliable sign of such distinctions. On another level, as Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses and the Reverend William Gilpin's essays on sketching reveal, the sketch allows larger questions of aesthetic value and the value of landscape to emerge. Whereas Reynolds insisted upon the primacy of labor and finish to a work of art, Gilpin argued quite the contrary; for him, suggestiveness and immediacy more than compensated for the sketch's lack of finish. To Gilpin, less is more: "with a few bold strokes," the sketcher produces "such wonderful effusions of genius, [that] the more sober, and correct productions of his pencil cannot equal [them]." 6 Adding fuel to the fire, sketchers like Gilpin could not rest with finding value in the sketch; they argued for a reversal of aesthetic standards, that the sketch's very lack of finish made it alone capable of embodying truth. More finished works of the academy, then, were by logical extension necessarily false, labored, and ideological. Underlying this debate over aesthetic value was an economic contest between an economy of land as wealth and aristocracy as intrinsic value for Reynolds and one of exchange value, capitalism, and middle-class values of investment for Gilpin.

24

Chapter ι

Definitions and Methodology I must first address problems of definition and method. What is a visual sketch? Referring specifically to what artists think sketches are, the OED offers the following: "A rough drawing or delineation of something, giving the outlines or prominent features without the detail, especially one intended to serve as the basis of a more finished picture." What, then, are the differences between a sketch and a drawing? One might say that the sketch is usually a certain kind of drawing, one executed provisionally— or one the artist wants his/her audience to perceive as being drawn provisionally. It may, by definition, be preparatory to a finished work, though it may be done for its own sake. This dualism allows for the historical transformation of the signs of preparation into generic features to be valued, and once valued, often contested. More to the point, this dualism logically implicates the sketch in a host of other dualisms, which, in turn, greatly increases the likelihood that the sketch, once noticed, will be embroiled in controversy. Even a famous artist could be plagued by doubts: although J. M. W. Turner exhibited works entitled "sketches" in his own gallery and once in 1830 at the Royal Academy (Funeral of Sir Thomas Lawrence, A Sketch from Memory), Turner's will only specified what was to be done with his finished pictures. Joyce Townsend has recently documented Turner's "eye to economy" when working on sketches not intended for further elaboration. In such instances, Turner used cheap millboard to support his canvas, eschewed glazing, and had his palettes prepared with inexpensive pigments such as cobalt blue and smalt. To complicate matters further, notes to Turner's will, now lost, specified that his unfinished canvases be shown every five years and "unfinished drawings and sketches" every sixth.7 In the 1830s, this debate about the value, if any, of sketches and drawings so intensified that sketches became the subject of international controversy. After extensive argument, the superintendents of the English National Gallery decided against purchasing Sir Thomas Lawrence's collection of master drawings. Drawings were deemed unworthy of the national collection. In response, Talleyrand, the French ambassador to Great Britain, quipped, "Si vous n'achetez pas ces choses-la vous etes des barbares" (If you don't buy these things, you are barbarians).8 How do we handle a genre that sometimes is regarded as intensely private or even disposable? While some sketches are not thought worthy of preservation, others

The Visual Sketch in Britain

25

are considered to surpass the finished work. For example, in his famous Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759), Edmund Burke writes, "In unfinished sketches of a drawing, I have often seen something which pleased me beyond the best finishing."9 The sketch straddles the extreme boundaries between the thrown away and the monumental, that which suggests the permanence of a work of art. By thinking in terms of these extremes—the sketch is either all or nothing, art or trash—and by not allowing for compromise, critics unnecessarily commit themselves to positions of overdetermination or underdetermination, hyperbolic argument or silence. Since this binary, furthermore, so raises the stakes of the debate about sketches—the study of sketches, for instance, entails larger questions of the place, if any, of irresolution in aesthetics and politics—the debate can turn, as we shall see, vitriolic. Provisionality manifests itself in formal terms as roughness and lack of finish, indicated by loosely handled brushwork or drawing. Insofar as the OED definition relies upon a clear distinction between roughness and finish, it perhaps raises more problems than it solves. How might the OED definition account for Benjamin West's "finished sketches"? The sketch demands a consideration of both how finish is valued as well as how the extent of finish is determined in a particular work. What quantity or quality of finish, moreover, makes a work finished? That sketches run the gamut from roughness to finish only increases the difficulty. Constable's artistic practice, a subject I will address more fully later, makes a particularly difficult case in point because he would often make for his own reference small, rapid oil sketches on canvas from nature which he never sold, and then produce "full-size sketches"—often made in his studio, in oils, with many measuring six feet high—which he never exhibited. Despite the fact that we think of his works as being sketchlike, the artist was obsessed with finishing, which he once referred to as "eye-salve."10 What about Romantic artists who prided themselves on the unfinished character of their works? Are these sketches as well? This interpretive task is rendered even more problematic by the fact that the sketch's own generic indeterminacy and unfinishedness situate it nebulously between the poles of viewer and artist; between consumption and production; and between readerly psychological projection and transference and artistic expression. Because the sketch seems to demand the viewer's imaginative interplay, it also necessitates more self-consciousness in the act of interpretation. Should indeterminacy be allowed to confer upon the sketch the power of "a never-ending semiotic event," in Marjorie

26

Chapter ι

Levinson's incisive phrase, especially if that is one of the sketch's own conceptual interests? 11 A n d how do we draw the lines between our own projection or transference onto the sketch and what is really there? We might begin by heeding Albert Boime's warning that "in moments of revolution sketches tend to be perceived and overperceived, as statements in opposition to the status quo and in defense of change in the social order." 12 More importantly, Boime argues that in accounting for the reception of sketches, we need to distinguish between "the material artifact and its aesthetic aura, the immaterial analogue common to the consciousness of a collectivity" (42). Such a distinction, however, unfortunately does not prevent Boime from situating "the open-ended ideal expressed in the sketch" against "the conservative call for order . . . , a finalizing principle" (45). I want, by contrast, to query whether or not formal open-endedness should correspond to any one set of political beliefs. Without some kind of "finalizing principle," moreover, it is difficult to move beyond irresolution into action. The sketch can be a very private source of pleasure or it can be avowedly for public exhibition. Once again the illusory stability of this binary logic can serve to obscure the sketch's politics. That is, artists can simply claim privacy and thereby deny any agenda. If the work were truly private, what would be the purpose of any political agenda? In Romanticism, more critically, the sketch indicates the degree to which public and private spheres were contested and ruptured, notwithstanding Robert Upstone's claim in Sketchbooks of the Romantics that artists of the period were "highly protective of their sketchbooks, treating them very much as private." 13 As unfinished works, sketches might, if displayed, expose the artist only half-dressed. Yet the belief that sketches should remain private made public exhibition of sketches that much more titillating and erotic: the viewer, now a voyeur, expects the sketch to reveal something that the artist wants to hide. This, in turn, endows the sketch with greater authenticity insofar as the artist now has something to lose—privacy—by sketching in public. Such logic no doubt partly accounts for the popularity of such publications as George Morland's Sketches from Nature (1796-97) and, later, George Cruikshank's My Sketch Book (1833) as well as the other sketchbooks published by Rudolph Ackermann, Denis Dighton, Francis Nicholson, John Laporte, and others. 14 Upstone also ignores the fact that Gilpin and Constable regularly loaned out their sketchbooks to interested pupils and that both Constable and Turner had their preliminary drawings engraved. For these reasons, I argue that the alleged privacy of the Romantic sketch is usually staged. If that privacy is staged, then any claims that sketches offer

The Visual Sketch in Britain

27

an unmediated window onto the artistic process, or that sketches simply reveal an originary moment, must be taken as suspect. And if viewers look to the sketch to embody the hidden secrets of the artistic process, I would suggest that, more often than not, any secrets found are ones the artist wants divulged. What, then, are the strategies behind this display of privacy? I have thus far argued that the sketch by definition implicates itself in a host of binaries and that, by remaining hostage to these binaries, critics of the sketch are powerless to do otherwise than reproduce uncritical accounts; that is, they must read the sketch in the ways artists, publishers, and patrons want them to. This chapter's main argument deliberately attempts to destabilize such binaries by situating William Gilpin and Sir Joshua Reynolds in a dialectic that illuminates the stakes of both respective positions on the sketch. Nonetheless, taken as a whole, these binaries make the project of historicizing the sketch no easy task. Because the artistic sketch is what Marshall Sahlins has called a " 'sign in action,' a category and value that is situationally deployed," the term is notoriously and intrinsically difficult to pin down. 1 5 The fact that artists, art historians, and critics do not use the word precisely—sketch and drawing are often used interchangeably, and in the hands of a critic, the word easily slips from having any literal referent to becoming almost entirely metaphorical—does not help matters. Another inherent difficulty in defining the term is that the sketch has such long histories. Quite simply, it has always been so much a part of the painter's invention process that it resists historicizing into clear periods. Claude Marks traces the conceptual beginnings of the preliminary drawing back to ancient Egypt, when artists sketched on fragments of papyrus or chips of limestone. 16 Indeed, drawing has widely been regarded as the foundation of painting. Sketching also has usually played a central role in the securing of a commission; artists revise their sketches until they have satisfied their patrons rather than invest the time and raw materials to do a finished work that the patron refuses to purchase. But the sketch's histories are not only long, they are also complex. Even at a basic material level, sketchers can choose among a tremendous range of media, tools, and grounds. Media include chalks, pastels, charcoal, crayons, graphite, or inks, washes, watercolor, tempera, and gouache. In addition, there are four major types of grounds: cloths, parchments, papers, and cardboards. Metal points, stumps, pens, brushes, and erasers are among the tools from which the sketcher can select. The fact that each of these media, tools, and grounds has complex historical (and geographi-

28

Chapter ι

cal) affiliations of its own renders the conceptual grasp of the sketch that much more tenuous, and the project of historicizing it as a whole even more unwieldy. For example, while the colored crayon was not industrially produced until the end of the nineteenth century,17 watercolor experienced a tremendous revival in mid-eighteenth-century England, and the oil sketch became particularly prominent in nineteenth-century France.18 The history of the colors used in watercolors is also complex. A full range of colors did not become available until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Cobalt Green (1780), Turner's Yellow (1781), Indian Blue (1800), Cobalt Blue (1802), Emerald Green (1814), and Chrome Yellow (1820) were invented.19 To complicate matters even further, one might look at the tradition of enpkin air oil sketches, or the sketches of the "old masters," or even amateur sketches. How can we proceed from this complex of caveats to talk of the sketch in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain? As a result of their liminal status—either monumental or provisional, finished or unfinished, public or private, expressively true or mimetically so—sketches begin to assist definitions of social relations, in particular those of class and, as we shall see, gender. That virtually anyone of English middle- and upper-class ambition and standing was expected to sketch made this leisure activity an especially capacious sign. What are called for, then, are histories attentive to the multiple ways in which such binary categorizations hierarchize values associated with both the middle and upper classes. By and large, the first, more highly valued term in the Romantic period becomes associated with nobility, while the second implies vulgarity. Insofar as binary logic dictates the gulf between the oppositions to be incommensurate, such logic might become a valuable tool for widening the gulf between the social classes even as actual differences in income between the landed gentry and the middle class were narrowing. I begin this historical account in 1687 with the sketch's first appearance in English. The OED notes that "sketch" is derived from a Greek word meaning "done or made off-hand, extempore." That the word does not come into the English language until the late seventeenth century suggests that, until then, there is no need to distinguish the sketch from any other art form. The term's relatively late English coinage reminds us of what we have learned from Foucault—that there are no "natural" intellectual objects; rather, such objects are discursive formulations that are historically grounded. That early Renaissance artists largely conflated drawing and painting

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helps to explain the absence of a word referring to a preliminary drawing until 1687. Henry Peachum's The Art of Drawing with the Pen (1606), for example, defined painting as "an a r t . . . either by draughte of bare lines, lively colours, cutting out or embossing," thus closely allying painting and drawing.20 Likewise, Edmund Waller in his 1666 Instructions to a Painter uses drawing and painting interchangeably.21 Such conflation further accounts for the earlier ambiguity behind the word "pencil." We now take the word "pencil" to refer to a graphite drawing instrument, but from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century it was primarily understood to mean paintbrush. When distinctions were made between drawing and painting, it was usually to the benefit of painting. In Edward Norgate's manuscript The Art of Limning, originally written in 1620 but substantially revised between 1648 and 1650 and widely circulated, the author admonished his readers to "consider all drawing but as servant and attendant, and as the way of painting, not the end of it."22 Norgate's class-coded remarks are all the more powerful insofar as they suggest that the social hierarchy may be reversed if the artist does not have his or her priorities straight visa-vis the sketch and the finished painting. As early as 1620, we can begin to see how drawing acquires a class resonance. Only when it becomes possible to envision art as occuring not so much on or after the moment of completion, but more at original conception—the originating idea—can drawing become valued for its own sake. Roger North wrote in his autobiography in 1660 that "drawings are observed to have more of the spirit and force of art than finished paintings, for they come from either flow of fancy or depth of study, whereas all this or great part is wiped out with the pencil [i.e., the paintbrush], and acquires somewhat more heavy [яс], than is in the drawings."23 Such a change in taste accounts for the Earl of Arundel's decision to amass one of the most significant collections of drawings ever in England in the early to mid-seventeenth century.24 Eventually the logic implicit in North's remarks would extend to the earliest and most preliminary drawing or the sketch; in fact, sketches were intially valued by artists because they were equated with the artist's very ideas, or pensieri. The 1606 publication of Peachum's Art of Drawing, the first drawing manual by an English native, also helped pave the way for the sketch's later visibility and prominence. Peachum sought to give drawing and painting a central place in any aristocrat's education by claiming that every household in Europe had always had a drawing master.25 As a schoolmaster and tutor to many noblemen's sons, Peachum argued that drawing was an important

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sign of class distinction. Peachum and other middle-class writers like him thus gentrified drawing and, in so doing, helped to give it a much broader appeal by offering the middle class reasons to emulate their "betters." John Locke frowned upon gentlemen learning to paint since becoming proficient at it took up too much time and it was too sedentary; however, he did recommend that gentlemen learn how to draw in Thoughts Concerning Education (1715). 26 A few years later, Jonathan Richardson would argue much more strongly for the centrality of the connoisseurship of painting and drawing to an aristocrat's education.27 If Locke and Richardson helped to make sketching by the mid-eighteenth century a properly aristocratic act, then it might confer on its practitioners in the burgeoning middle class the trappings of aristocracy. No wonder so many drawing manuals of the eighteenth century, manuals geared to those who could not afford masters to teach them, proclaimed drawing and sketching to be "the noblest operation of human ingenuity, and may certainly be recognized among the Qualifications which are characteristic of a Gentleman."28 Yet when such evidence of nobility became downright pedestrian (W. H. Pyne spoke in the 1823 Somerset House Gazette of the rage of some "antique beaux and belles of haut ton who recollect their many friends who, with themselves, were stricken with the sketching frenzy"29) the sketch's reliability as a sign of distinction was contested. More recently, Graham Reynolds talks of the nineteenth century's "widespread enthusiasm for amateur sketching."30 One way of trying to restore to the sketch its reliability as a sign of gentility in the eighteenth century was to begin to distinguish between "high" and "low" forms of the sketch. As Kim Sloan has argued, sketches by the true nobility might be expected to reveal classical learning, knowledge of the "old masters," "taste," and skill in anatomy (the drawing of figures), while more technically correct sketches showing proper perspective and mimetic topographical rendering would indicate a lower social position.31 The boundary between sketching as mimesis and sketching as expression initially falls neatly along class lines. Such designations were not merely coincidental, since the middle class could only with great difficulty obtain firsthand knowledge of the "old masters," and since middle-class educators disputed the utility of a classical education. These barriers, of course, did not stop middle-class itinerant artists from the 1780s onward from making thousands of drawings each year, "most of them for publication in book form as aquatint plates, plain or coloured, and some issued as separate plates."32

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Figure 4. Sketching Society, sketch based on William Cowper's poem The Task, book 5, attributed to Paul Sandby Munn. Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

As cheaper reproductions of the "masters" became widely available, however, middle-class sketchers began to collapse the binary between noble and vulgar images/sketches. Loopholes in the so-called Hogarth Act of 1735, which granted copyright protection only to certain reproductive engravings, allowed engravers legally to copy the work of engravers w h o worked from old master paintings and buildings. 33 Middle-class artisans exploited the aristocratic doctrine of ut pictura poesis—as a painting, so a poem —to make even the reproduced image the logical culmination of Horace's dictate. Members of the "Sketching Society," a club founded by Thomas Girtin in 1799, for instance, actively turned to the prestige of English literature to bolster the significance of sketching landscape. Members selected a passage from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Thomson to sketch from, and some members eventually published lithographs based on these sketches (Figures 4 and 5). 34

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Figure 5. Sketching Society, sketch based on Cowper's Task, book 5, attributed to George Samuel. Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

To try and solidify class distinctions, the gentry began to denigrate reproductions. In short, detractors argued that such images were tainted threefold by commerce, technology, and vulgarity. In the late eighteenth century, however, developments in printing technology would make the mass reproduction of such drawings not only cheaper, but also more faithful to the originals. In fact, technological advancements in image reproduction now made it possible for reproductions to pass for the originals, thereby once again blurring lines between aristocratic originals and vulgar reproductions. One key technological development was the introduction in England of aquatint around 1771, which improved the ability to render tones, gradations from light to shade. Martin Hardie writes, "Aquatints coloured by hand can be deceptively like original drawings, and have not infrequently been exhibited as water-colours." 35 An examination of A Collection of Prints after the Sketches of Giovanni Cipriani (1789), advertised by Joshua Boydell, reveals just how sophisticated such technologies of imme-

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diacy could be. Through a combination of aquatint and etching, Richard Earlom is able to reproduce even Cipriani's underdrawing, the half-erased lines of his sketch (Figure 6). Aquatint, we recall, allowed William Gilpin to reproduce his sketches commercially and to capture the original's sense of hasty brushwork. Since artists like Gilpin had a vested interest in technology's ability to further the illusion of immediacy in the reproduced sketch, they assisted in the conflation of the noble image and its vulgar reproduction. Because prints that imitated drawings were the basis for instruction in illustrated drawing books of the period, reproductions now even led to the production of "original" drawings. 36 Even the basic issue of cost did not help to clarify the highly ambiguous social position of the sketch. The generally cheaper prices of sketches by artists made them available to a larger segment of the leisure class, some of whom could not afford to buy finished oil paintings. At the start of the nineteenth century, sketches by the so-called masters were almost always considerably less expensive than finished works: for instance, while Rubens's paintings commanded prices of two thousand pounds, his sketches sold for between one and forty pounds a piece. 37 Nonetheless, if sketches brought with them the aristocratic cachet of fine art, their comparative cheapness might make them especially valuable to a class looking for the symbolic capital with which to distinguish itself. Auction catalogs of the early nineteenth century, however, sought to preserve the value of painting and its gentility, often by slighting sketches whose lack of finish made them inferior. Rubens's sketches, for example, were often not sold as individual items but rather in groups, thus suggesting that isolated sketches did not have much value on their own. 38 The auction sales of George Morland's paintings between 1801 and 1805 offer even more compelling evidence of such distinctions.39 Morland and his promoters actively aligned his work with sketches in cheap published reproductions—calling groups of four sketches bound together with no text in plain blue paper wrappers Sketches by George Morland (1791) and Sketches from Nature (1804), both sold in series. Auction catalog entries, however, rarely referred to his paintings—many of which were called "sketches" in the cheaper format—as sketches.40 Out of three hundred paintings Morland sold at auction, only four were labeled "sketches," while nineteen entries specifically address Morland's "beautiful," "high," and "exquisite" finishing. When these catalogs did refer to his sketches, they made a special effort to call them "bold" and "spirited." Content to profit from the sale of both sketches and finished works, authors of such

Figure 6. Richard Earlom, after Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Boys at Blindman's Bluff (detail), from A Collection of Prints after the Sketches of Giovanni Cipriani (1789). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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catalogs nonetheless recognized and perpetuated the greater value and nobility of finish at the sketch's expense. Because so many reviewers pointed to the sketchiness of John Constable's paintings, his career offers a particularly instructive example of how the sketch could become a loaded term fraught with class assumptions. On the one hand, for those who insisted upon the importance of aristocratic finish, "sketchiness" suggested vagueness and weakness of artistic vision as well as vulgarity; on the other hand, for those who believed that finish would take away from original genius, "sketch" had the power to suggest unmediated genius as well as an unusual degree of originality and promise. In Anthony Pasquin's The Royal Academicians: A Farce (1786), for instance, the character Cosmetic praised "A Sketch of Young Hercules for Fat Catherine of Peterborough," while Sir Varnish lambasted it as "a model of infantine elegance."41 Cosmetic himself is quoted as being proud that "all the world knows my pencil is rapid." The Royal Academician Joseph Farington, in 1814, explicitly told Constable that he had failed to be elected associate of the Royal Academy because "he had not carried His finishing far enough," and Farington urged Constable to study Claude for finishing. On 30 July 1814 Farington recorded: "Constable . . . was, by my advice, at Mr. Angerstein's on Wednesday last to study the pictures by Claude, particularly the finishing before He commenced His studies from nature in the country."42 Although Farington was no doubt pleased that his advice was being followed to the letter, Constable demurred, sending Landscape: A Sketch to the 1815 Royal Academy Exhibition. The painting has unfortunately not been identified, nor are its whereabouts known. Even if the painter invoked the sketch to signal to the academy that he knew this one was unfinished and thus that he could properly discriminate between the finished and unfinished, the net effect of this strategy was to remind the critics of his taste for the unfinished. Taking Constable's lead, Robert Hunt, who reviewed this exhibition for The Examiner, linked Constable with the sketch when he claimed that it was a "pity that Mr. Constable's pencil is so coarsely sketchy."43 Reproving Constable for his lack of aristocratic finish, another critic in 1815 lamented, "In Mr. Constable's landscapes there is a constant reference to common nature . . . we cannot help regretting that his performances, from want of finish, are rather sketches than pictures."44 Ann Bermingham argues that Constable was profoundly affected by these criticisms: in the 1820s, while campaigning to become a full Royal Academician, Constable "began . . . to adjust the 'coarse' and 'sketchy' brushwork which had so disturbed the

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Examiner critic to [a] new, more generalized orchestration of lights and darks."45 In short, as Bermingham demonstrates, Constable began to systematize his use of finish so that it would be perceived as finish. Bermingham's reading of Constable's sketchiness needs to be qualified by the fact that the painter deliberately exhibited Landscape: A Sketch in 1815 even after Farington implied that he would not get elected without concentrating on his finish. Once again in 1823, after he was promoted to full academician, Constable exhibited Study of Trees: A Sketch at the Royal Academy, only the second of two "sketches" sent to the Academy in his entire career. (The whereabouts of the picture are also unknown, although it is presumed to have been an oil sketch.) Constable exhibited no such paintings at the British Institution. Again the reviewers were generally hostile. One wrote that "this is painted with boldness of pencil and force of effect, though apparently the work of only a day," and Charles Westmacott complained of "an unfinished scumbling style that is by no means effective or natural. . . . In [A Sketch] there is nothing made out." 46 In a larger view, Constable's preference not to exhibit his sketches and his obsession with finishing (he went so far as to rework paintings upon their return from exhibition) betrays his acknowledgment that, despite the lifelike naturalness they conveyed, sketches were low on the academy's hierarchy of genres. His manuscript notes for a lecture given in Hampstead in 1833 offer another clue. Constable writes, "With these drawings and sketches of the Old Masters purhaps there [sic\ merit is only felt by the profession."47 Indeed, the painter closes a letter to John Fisher enjoining him to "take it as one of my sketches," since the painter had not read it over.48 He thus equated carelessness with sketching. Accusations of sketchiness, then, would and did hinder his career, even as they helped him to acquire a reputation as one of England's foremost naturalistic landscape painters of English scenery. Constable, of course, was not the only painter chastised for his lack of finish or sketchiness. Gainsborough's A Romantic Landscape with Sheep at a Fountain was criticized for its "great excess of slender execution and paltry glazing."49 C. R. Leslie lambasted the British Institution's exhibition of 1816, charging that its "collection consists principally of the paltry sketches for which they give premiums, and the fragments and refuse of Somerset House." 50 Here, the British Institution's uncritical embrace of the sketch suggests its inferiority to the Royal Academy. And in a pamphlet entided The Rejected Pictures with Descriptive Sketches of the Several Compositions (circa 1815; later reprinted in the Annals of the Fine Arts), an alleged account of the paintings deemed unfit for public exhibition by the Royal Academy,

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the reviewer who calls himself Opifer chastens the artist of "a Sketch of the City of London, assembled to Prepare Petitions against the Property Tax" because "all is spotty and partly coloured." He elaborates by stating that all the portraits are "conveniently cyphers. . . . The style of this painting, like the oratory of the assembly which it represents, is obscure, presuming, laboured, and low. . . . There appears to be a most deplorable union of boldness and commonplace."51 The reviewer makes an implicit connection between the low status of the sketch in the hierarchy of painting genres and the low, that is, presuming, assembly who dares to question the property tax. This diatribe concludes with "none of the elevation of genius was required, but a sufficient dash of confidence, ignorance, and vulgarity" (10). Richard Payne Knight sought to defuse the sketch-finish controversy in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), a work read and annotated by both Wordsworth and Coleridge, by arguing that sketches were necessary for tracing the development of an artist and were signs of a true master. His strategy, I suggest, was to reposition the sketch in the middle space between a master's juvenilia and finished works; the sketch thereby became central to any claims of organic development, regardless of its finish or lack thereof. Knight wrote: Collectors of pictures and drawings are often ridiculed for paying great prices for slight or juvenile productions of great artists; and it must be owned that vanity, and a silly desire of possessing what's rare, are often motives for such purchases. But nevertheless, they are, in many instances, of a more liberal and reasonable kind: . . . we often trace a connection between the earliest and the latest, between the most imperfect and most perfect productions of a great master, which makes not onlv his slight sketches, but his boyish studies interesting.52 Knight's enthusiasm for sketches can be traced back to the early 1770s when he offered John Hamilton Mortimer (1740-79) one hundred guineas for all the sketches he would part with. Knight would remain an avid collector until his death. "Masterly intelligence in execution," Knight adds in his Analytical Inquiry, "is often more prominent and striking in a drawing or slight sketch: whence persons, who have acquired this refined or artificial taste, generally value them more: since finishing often blunts or conceals this evidence" (99). Knight's efforts to shroud the sketch from controversy, however, were only pardy successful. Perhaps not surprisingly, John Constable ridiculed "Priapus Knight" for his predilection for collecting sketches. Upon hearing that Knight had paid sixteen hundred pounds for "some drawings and slight sketches by Claude" in 1824, Constable jeered

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to his friend John Fisher, " I saw them—drawings—they looked just like papers used and otherwise mauled, & purloined from a Water Closet." 53 O f course, Knight had just been to Constable's studio that very morning and left without purchasing anything.54 Whereas those aspiring to gentility might exploit their ability to sketch as a visible sign of taste—sketching becomes an excuse for public display—the truly genteel had no need for such publicity and often found this display embarrassing. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, sought to define the sketch as inherently and appropriately private. William Gilpin, on the other hand, insisted on the sketch's publicity, in part because the sketch as public sign of gentility helped to make it worthy of widespread emulation. Once again the culture exploits the gap between the public and private to clarify the differences between the middle class and the aristocracy. "Amateur," moreover, takes on significantly different resonances for both the middle-class and aristocratic artist: while the former could afford to compromise his amateur status by selling his sketches, the latter could not be tainted by any hint of professionalism without calling into question his aristocratic position. That sketches increasingly came into the public eye and economy was a source of tremendous consternation for Royal Academicians who were concerned that, among other things, the indeterminacy of sketches would leave them open to misinterpretation. Even worse, the prices of sketches, cheaper than those of finished works, might allow the middle class to appropriate the visual arts as an indication of nobility. *

*

*

Before assessing the British Royal Academy's views on sketching, I would like to take a short detour through the French Academy, because its rigid systematizing of the sketch sharpens the contrast between Gilpin and Reynolds. More to the point, since scholarship on the English visual sketch has falsely assumed that across the channel attitudes toward the sketch were fundamentally similar, I want to establish basic differences.55 This contrast, furthermore, allows us to see how Reynolds's Francophobia contributes to his denigration of the sketch. While sketching was by the late eighteenth century a highly codified practice in the French Academy, the Royal Academy had comparatively little to say about it. Not only were the French Academy's remarks on sketching highly codified, as were its instructions in painterly technique, but the French language offered a greater precision in vocabulary; in French, pochade, cro-

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quis, esquisse, etude ^ academic, and ebauche, all correspond to the English "sketch."56 In general, the distinctions are based upon the sketch's degree of finish and its medium. The croquis is the drawn composition sketch that generally precedes the esquisse, the painter's first painted thought. A pochade is a freely painted, extremely rough sketch. The etude is generally a painted study of either a detail or a landscape delineated en plein air. And the academic is a painted or drawn study of the nude from life. Finally, the ebauche is painted or drawn on the final canvas and then covered up by the finished painting.57 French academicians also accorded the sketch a more central position in aesthetic theory and in academic practice than did the English.58 In 1673, Roger de Piles prefaces his translation of DuFresnoy's Art of Fainting with an explication of little more than a dozen terms necessary to understand the text. One such term, esquisse, he defines as: "un premier crayon ou une legere ebauche d'un Ouvrage que Ton medite. Les Italiens disent, Schizo. L'on dit esquisser une pensee, son oppose est arreter, terminer".59 Claude-Henri Watelet, an associate of the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture, similarly sings the praises of the term etude in his 1760 L'Art de peindre: Poeme, avec des reflexions sur les differentes Parties de la peinture: Un ordre methodique dans l'etude de Pensemble, est, je crois, non seulement utile, mais absolument necessaire; parce que dans tous les genres de connaissances, les progres dependent sur tout de la suite dans laquelle on place les idees relatives.60

Albert Boime has demonstrated that, in the nineteenth century as well, the sketch "was a formal part of [French] Academic aesthetics . . . and it assumed an important role in the curriculum of the Ecole and atelier, as well as in the official programme."61 The English Royal Academy's position toward sketching, by contrast, was far more ambiguous. The academy's emphasis upon varnishing days— three days when artists could apply finishing touches or a final coat of varnish to their paintings after they were hung for exhibition—suggests that the English did not embrace the sketch as did the French.62 Although Albert Boime argues that "for Reynolds, the sketch assumed a central role in the creative process," he bases this claim on a footnote in Reynolds's Annotations on the Art of Painting of Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy and not upon the Discourses.63 Unlike their French counterparts, Royal Academy schools offered little formal training in painting or drawing technique partly because Academicians regarded technique as vulgar.64 As late as 1833, then president Sir Martin Archer Shee warned that those who osten-

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tatiously display their "execution," the "lowest quality of art," rarely "fail to degenerate to mannerism, a disease of the pencil which always proves mortal."65 And since students were admitted to the various academies — of plaster, of live models—on the basis of the sketches they could already produce, training in sketching was considered not only vulgar, but too elementary. Even the academic lectures on design stressed taste, virtue, and art history, largely ignoring the nuts and bolts of how to sketch or paint. When the academicians did acknowledge the sketch, they treated it with ambivalence. The Abstract of the Instrument of Institution and Laws of the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1797), for instance, clearly assigned drawings low status: except for architects, those who exhibited only drawings were ineligible to become candidates for associates. Nonetheless, from 1797, candidates for the academy's highest honor, the gold medal, were to "give proof of their abilities by making a sketch of a given subject in the presence of a keeper" (34). Candidates for historical pictures were to sketch in oils. The rules of the Academy go so far as to specify a five-hour time limit for making their sketches.66 This ambivalence, however, might be partly accounted for by the length of time allowed, which suggests that expediency of execution was not valued and, further, that these sketches were expected to be properly finished. Sir Joshua Reynolds's annual Discourses (1769-90) to the students of the academy offer further important clues to the academy's ambivalence toward the sketch.

Depreciating the Value of Sketches: Reynolds and the Discourses Even in terms of his own material practices, Reynolds rarely spent time making preparatory drawings or oil sketches, a fact all the more surprising once we recall he often had assistants or other painters execute the draperies, landscapes, and hands of his portraits. How did he convey what he wanted done? In the rare cases when sketches of finished paintings were executed, there are no significant compositional variations between the sketches and finished paintings 67 Reynolds's sketchbooks suggest that the sketch enabled him to situate himself in an iconographical tradition; that is, his sketches record compositional strategies of the old masters or their layout of figures, as in his sketch from Raphael's Liberation of Saint Peter (Figure 7).68 Perhaps because these sketches show Reynolds's originality— his process of discovering the classical priorities he wishes to disseminate—

Figure 7. Sir Joshua Reynolds's sketch from Raphael's Liberation of Saint Peter. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

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' '

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Figure 8. Sir Joshua Reynolds's sketch of Lord Rockingham and his secretary Edmund Burke. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

Reynolds wanted sketches to remain private. So long as these sketches remained private, moreover, he could preserve their value as artistic capital: his portraits would now bear the traces of the originals he could afford to copy on his tour of Italy. I n Reynolds's sketch of Lord Rockingham

and his secretary,

Edmund

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Burke (Figure 8), the firm and heavy lines indicate no wavering and suggest that, like other sketches serving as records of his finished paintings and preserving a sense of his oeuvre in spite of the geographic dispersion of his paintings once sold, this sketch may well have been done after the painting was completed. The finished painting's one significant deviation from the sketch is the placement of Burke's hand in his waistcoat, an alteration explained by the general difficulty of painting hands. In his famous Discourses, Sir Joshua Reynolds's resistance to the sketch is tied to larger concerns of economy, and his remarks on sketching are characteristically ambivalent and sometimes contradictory; while sketching is a necessary part of the artistic process, Reynolds nonetheless calls attention to the sketch's dangerous potential to subvert the morality of both the viewer and the artist.69 In his eleventh Discourse, Reynolds writes: THOSE who are not conversant in works of art, are often surprised at the high value set by connoisseurs on drawings which appear careless, and in every respect unfinished; but they are truly valuable; and their value arises from this, that they give an idea of the whole; and this is often expressed by a dexterous facility which indicates the true power of a Painter, even though roughly exerted. 70

Here, Reynolds subtly redefines even as he acknowledges the "value" of master sketches. While connoisseurs clearly set an economic exchange value on such drawings, Reynolds shifts registers from economic exchange to aesthetic use; their "true" value derives from the fact that they "give the idea of the whole." If their real value is aesthetic and if monetary concerns are implicitly false, then commodification can only taint and fetishize sketches. That the Royal Academy in its early years occupied space in Pall Mall previously rented by James Christie, the famous auctioneer, no doubt reinforced Reynolds's need to rigidify lines between art and commerce. More to the point, Reynolds's rhetorical shift betrays his recognition of the enormous cumulative exchange value of sketches once they are considered worthy of public display. By 1780 when the Royal Academy moved into the stately Somerset House—the major public building of George Ill's reign—two years before Reynolds delivered his eleventh Discourse, artists were no longer tied to private patronage and were able to sell their sketches in public markets or to periodicals.71 In an account of a trip to Genoa in the January 1789 edition of the Lady's Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, a shopkeeper offers a young lady "a coloured drawing . . . sketched yesterday at the Veilla della Quarante," which the girl and her mother purchase.72 Turner's youthful sketches hung in his father's barbershop and were priced

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between one and three shillings. 73 A n d Thomas Girtin sold his sketches, which he advertised as having been "coloured on the spot," for between four and eight pounds. His larger and more finished paintings were considerably pricier, averaging twenty guineas a piece. 74 Artists like George Morland paid their debts by selling sketches, while Thomas Stothard sold his sketches in the 1780s for up to one guinea a piece to the Novelist's Magazine.7* Reynolds's aim in insisting that sketches were, properly speaking, private sources of contemplation and pleasure was to embarrass those w h o thought that sketches were public forms worthy of display and commodification. Reynolds furthermore sought to strengthen the Academy's control of the art market by tightening supply: if private sketches and sketchlike works had no public exchange value, they were not commodities. Louise Lippincott reminds us of the commercial intent behind the Royal Academy: "Persistent efforts to . . . establish a central institution to mediate between artists and patrons and subordinate entrepreneurs (auctioneers, dealers, and agents) to their control led to the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768." 76 As a collector of sketches by old masters, Reynolds's depreciation of the sketch may have been even more personally motivated: the auction catalog of his own collection reveals his acquisitions of sketches by Veronese, Ricci, Polidore, Rota, Carrache, Rubens (five), Correggio, Van Dyck, Schut, and Poussin. 77 This stress on privacy, however, only made public display and exchange of sketches that much more titillating; it eroticized the sketch insofar as it hinted that sketches revealed something the artist did not want shown. Having obscured the sketch's monetary value, Reynolds concludes his Discourse passage by carefully limiting the sketch's aesthetic value: " O n whatever account we value these drawings, it is certainly not for high finishing, or a minute attention to particulars" (11:198). This statement is double-edged; while Reynolds generally extols finish, the absence of which generally diminishes the sketch, he often warns against attention to minute particulars, the absence of which might be thought indirectly to increase the sketch's importance. That the criteria for "finish" are nowhere explicitly detailed in the Discourses (although Reynolds's notion of "laborious finishing" suggests that t o o much finish is possible) makes the sketch always already a marginalized genre. In other words, by making the sketch's very strength (lack of minute detail) its central weakness (lack of finish), Reynolds relegates it to the status of a necessarily minor genre. Reynolds is also careful to qualify the sketch's ability to demonstrate the painter's dexterity

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by calling attention to its "roughness." Even more critically, Reynolds's deployment of the term "finish" in an ambiguous manner serves to reinforce the need for men of taste and judgment (which the Academy would produce) who can distinguish between what is and is not properly finished.78 Such examples of Reynolds's ambivalence toward sketching are not isolated in the Discourses. Although he does argue that "the power of drawing, modelling, and using colours, is very properly called the Language of the A r t " (2:26), he carefully circumscribes the importance of this "language." " I WOULD not be thought . . . to oppose the use, the advantage, the necessity there is, of a Painter's being readily able to express his ideas by sketching. The further he can carry such designs, the better" (12:214). But the acknowledgment of the advantages of sketching is qualified by what follows: "the evil to be apprehended is, his resting there, and not correcting them afterwards from nature, or taking the trouble to look about him for whatever assistance the works of others will afford him" (12:214). Reynolds distrusts the sketch because it encourages premature repose rather than continued application and labor. Moreover, values associated with the sketch such as "genius" and "originality" tend to downplay the importance of the art-historical tradition—"the works of others"—a tradition the academy is charged with upholding, if not inventing. We might recall that the Royal Academy's main function was to encourage a native tradition of British art. To Reynolds, sketches must also be corrected and assiduously compared to others of their kind and to "nature" herself. In the very first Discourse Reynolds recognizes the importance of the sketch and yet warns the students of the dangers of overestimating the value of "a FACILITY in composing,—a lively, and what is called masterly, handling of the chalk or pencil" (1:17). Whereas Castiglione had earlier argued that the noble courtier should display sprezzatum, less labor and concern than is actually present,79 in order to convince others of true gentility, Reynolds fears that his students will become "captivated" by "those dazzling excellencies, which they will find no great labour in attaining" (1:18). Students, however, must not forget that sketches are merely a means to an end—the finished painting— and they must avoid becoming enthralled by the aura of easeful mastery that surrounds the sketch. Reynolds continues, "After much time spent in these frivolous pursuits, the difficulty will be to retreat; but it will then be too late; and there is scarce an instance of return to scrupulous labour, after the mind has been debauched and deceived by this fallacious mastery" (1:18). As if his remarks were not harsh enough, Reynolds further insists:

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THIS seems to me to be one of the most dangerous sources of corruption; and I speak of it from experience, not as an error which may possibly happen, but which has actually infected all foreign Academies. The directors were probably pleased with this premature dexterity in their pupils, and praised their dispatch at the expence of their correctness, (i: 18)

The president of the Royal Academy's seemingly extreme position can be explained in part by his need to promulgate the virtues of the newly established English academy as the institution that would help students distinguish between mastery and the appearance of mastery. Indeed, because Reynolds diagnoses indolence as the cause of the gradual decline of the arts (15:280), and because he wants to position the Royal Academy as the antidote to this decline, his rhetoric against the sketch and the ease it encourages is all the more heightened. If mastery could be acquired easily without the direction of masters, moreover, there would seem to be no need for such an institution. This also explains Reynolds's dismissive comments about genius; he announces that "you must have no dependence on your own genius" (2 : 35).80 "Genius" further troubles Reynolds because it implies that an artist can break the established rules (6:96). Reynolds's nationalistic fervor here further intensifies the vehemence of his rhetoric; the English academy will not succumb to this "foreign infection" (read "French") so long as it recognizes the costs of too much praise for too little labor. The sketch's potential to subvert the economics of painting, thereby encouraging "sloth" and "idleness," makes Reynolds even more anxious. That is, because the sketch placed primacy upon original genius and quickness of execution, it obviated the need for careful training, for sustained labor, and for aristocratic finish.81 Although painting must remain laborintensive, the facile sketcher tries to gain reputation without having to devote himself much to the work or thought. Indeed, Reynolds must continually inculcate the students with such statements as "labour is the only price of solid fame" (1:18), and "labour is the price which the Gods have set upon everything valuable" (15:281). Reynolds's reframing of labor as "price" allows him to treat labor as if it were a real thing of fixed value (fixed by no less than the gods) and to imply the necessity of exchanging "labour" for fame. Because not much time and energy is invested in the sketch, the sketcher should not reap rewards that he is not entitled to; he should not gain something for nothing. Reynolds elaborates, young men who have this "frivolous ambition of being thought masters of execution," are terrified by the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular seige, and de-

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sires, from the mere impatience of labour to take the citadel by storm. They wish to find a shorter path to excellence, and hope to obtain the reward of eminence by other means, than those which the indispensible rules of art have prescribed, (i: 18)

Rather than accept the prescriptions of the "indispensible rules of art" (which of course are largely Reynolds's own), the sketcher attempts to effect a revolution by storming the "citadel" of art. By again marking an aesthetic transgression in political terms, Reynolds warns that this "impatience of labour" will have disastrous social consequences. As Reynolds himself was keenly aware, these arguments, though rhetorically effective, lead to a critical impasse. On the one hand, his valorization of labor and consequent denigration of the sketch allowed him to justify the ways of the academy to man —and to royal patronage—by implying that the work of the academy and of artists is just like the intensive nation-building labor of commerce and the socially productive work done in the fields, and not like the fallaciously "useless" easeful mastery of the sketch.82 On the other hand, he recognized the leveling tendency of his reliance upon labor as a criterion for art. Could not anyone become an artist if willing to labor? H o w then might the academy appropriate economic language to justify its cost and patronage without ceding cultural authority to the laboring classes and tradesmen? Reynolds's twofold solution was, first, to insist upon the primacy of labor while carefully unmooring the term "labor" from any material base, rendering it increasingly metaphorical. 83 "The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it," he claims (4:57). Once "real" labor has been rendered invisible or mental and therefore immeasurable, art embodying "mental labor," which now requires training to recognize, can be worth much more than worldy measurement would otherwise allow. Art becomes more valuable than toil even as it requires toil. Reynolds limits the importance of mere physical work with his term "mental labor," which refers to a higher, albeit invisible, form of industry, whose sweat and tears become transmogrified into the aesthetic by taste and by the ability to acknowledge one's place in the social and painterly hierarchy. As Reynolds puts it, "when society is divided into different ranks, and some are appointed to labour for the support of others, those whom their superiority sets free from labour begin to look for intellectual entertainments." 84 Second, since Reynolds envisions labor as a reifiable object of fixed and intrinsic value, like finish in painting, and not as Adam Smith would soon define it—as that human effort which grounds all value—art, in his view, can express labor, mental or otherwise, but it remains insulated

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from the free exchange of the marketplace. Hence Reynolds's logic dictates that art's value cannot fluctuate according to supply and demand. Rather, the academy has the tacit role of insuring that the value of works by artists accepted into its exhibitions at very least remains stable. But Reynolds's suspicion of the sketch does not end here. As if arguing that the sketch as antithetical to labor were not enough, Reynolds proceeds to link what little labor is in evidence in the sketch with mechanical labor. (Indeed one might ask why Reynolds did not anticipate Whisder's retort to Ruskin's charges of fraud for charging two hundred guineas for sketchy paintings: the "instantaneous work of [his] hand" had taken "knowledge . . . gained in the work of a lifetime" to perfect.) Reynolds calls facility in drawing a "useless industry" and mere "mechanical felicity" (i: 18). In his second Discourse, he again explicitly connects sketching to the mechanical and "servile" practice of copying: the practice of copying is not entirely to be excluded, since the mechanical practice of painting is learned by it, let those choice parts [of the master's painting] only be selected. . . . If its excellence consists in its general effect, it would be proper to make slight sketches of the machinery and general management of the picture. Those sketches should be kept always by you for the regulation of your stile. (2:30) As John Barrell has observed, the term "mechanic" for Reynolds has strong political resonances; because of the mechanic's vulgarity, ignorance, and self-interest, Reynolds must relegate him to the status of a fundamentally disenfranchised laborer.85 Reynolds's conditional language, " i f . . . it would be," intensifies the potential danger surrounding the sketch and its attendant vulgarity. At this point in my discussion of Reynolds's emphasis on labor and distrust of the sketch, I want to reconsider his general refusal to do any preliminary sketches. Reynolds's studio practice of painting the face of his portraits right on the final canvas, usually in one sitting, then sketching in the body suggests that for Reynolds the sketch as something only preliminary was a kind of alienated labor. By that I mean alienation not in the conventional Marxist sense, but rather in terms of a kind of labor that could not be commodified and which was thus, from a capitalist's view, a misspent effort. Instead of wasting his time and labor making sketches intended for further elaboration but not in themselves vendible, Reynolds could (and did) proceed direcdy to the most valuable parts (the face and body) of the finished and commissioned portrait. Indeed, Reynolds often delegated the remaining details of his portraits to others. Reynolds's rheto-

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ric against exchange value, then, did not prevent him from shrewdly profiting from his aura, his labors, and the labor of others. N o t only can the sketch breach decorum, flout moral convention, and subvert the artistic economy, but it also is especially vulnerable to misinterpretation. Reynolds argues: It is true, sketches, or such drawings as painters generally make for their works, give this pleasure [excitement] of imagination to a high degree. From a slight undetermined drawing, where the ideas of the composition and character are, as I may say, only just touched upon, the imagination supplies more than the painter himself, probably, could produce; and we accordingly find that the finished work disappoints the expectation that was raised from the sketch. . . . A great part of the beauty of the celebrated description of Eve in Milton's Paradise Lost, consists in using only general indistinct expressions . . . but a painter, when he represents Eve on a canvas, is obliged to give determined form, and his own idea of beauty distinctly expressed. (8:163-64) Although sketches can express "general ideas," Reynolds again speaks of them pejoratively. Sketches only "touch upon" ideas of "composition and character," and they are merely "slight and undetermined." In short, sketches not only raise expectations which they cannot fulfill, they show the painter's lack or inability. That Reynolds here conflates the indistinctness of the sketch with Eve's body further intensifies his critique. For Reynolds, even the master's sketch lacks accuracy: "they [masters] first made a variety of sketches; then a finished drawing of the whole; after that a more correct drawing of each separate part" (1:19). More importantly, the sketch makes Reynolds anxious because it relies so heavily on the viewer's imagination. In an age when the josding and pushy mob must be excluded from the exhibitions of the academy and when, in the 1820s, constables must be hired to keep the peace, viewers cannot be trusted to interpret as they wish, much less imagine what they desire. H o w could anyone be sure that the price of admission to the exhibitions has excluded all of the rabble? We might recall here that in 1769 the Royal Academy began to charge admittance to its exhibitions " t o prevent the R o o m from being filled by improper persons." 86 Reynolds's anxiety about audience resurfaces in his assessment of Gainsborough's "unfinished" manner. While he concedes that the imagination can supply the finish perhaps even more satisfactorily than the painter can, he warns that there is one evil attending this mode; that if the portrait were seen, previous to any knowledge of the original, different persons would form different ideas, and all

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would be disappointed at not finding the original correspond with their own conceptions; under the great latitude which indistinctness gives to the imagination, to assume almost what character or form it pleases. (14:259)

The sketch's indeterminacy leaves the possibility of misinterpretation open. More importantly, as John Barrell argues, Reynolds believed that ambiguity could divide the spectator's attention between public virtue and private, sensual enjoyment. Ambiguous paintings or sketchlike works, therefore, could do the exact opposite of what Reynolds envisioned for painting: they could contribute to the degradation of the public.87 Private pleasure, thus, potentially stands in the way of instilling public virtue, the end of painting. In a paragraph that immediately follows the one cited above, Reynolds further denounces a lack of determinacy. We cannot on this occasion, nor indeed on any other, recommend an undeterminate manner, or vague ideas of any kind, in a complete and finished picture. This notion, therefore, of leaving anything to the imagination, opposes a very fixed and indispensable rule in our art,—that everything should be carefully and distinctly expressed, as if the painter knew, with correctness and precision, the exact form and character of whatever is introduced into the picture. This is what with us is called Science and Learning; which must not be sacrificed and given up for an uncertain and doubtful beauty, which, not naturally belonging to our Art, will probably be sought for without success. (8:164)

If the finished work belongs to the enlightened world of "Science and Learning," then sketches by implication belong to an "uncertain and doubtful" cosmology where beauty reigns regardless of the cost. The sketcher also trangresses the "natural" boundaries of the arts and becomes dangerously allied with poetry, an art Reynolds would later speak of as "deviating from actual nature" and predicated on the "violation of common speech" (13:234). Elsewhere, Reynolds again links poetry and sketches together to their mutual disadvantage: "General ideas, which are expressed in sketches, correspond very well to the art often used in poetry," but they leave only "general indistinct expressions" (8:164). Deviation, unnaturalness, indistinctness, and violation seem politically powerful charges to levy against poetry, and by extension, the sketch. John Opie, professor of painting at the Royal Academy from 1805 to 1807, similarly argues the dangers of poetry by way of the sketch. To explain the relative superiority of painting over poetry, Opie writes: "Poetry, though unlimited in its field of description and omnipotent as the vehicle

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of relation and sentiment, is capable of giving but faint sketches of form, colour, and whatsoever else is more immediately addressed to the sight."88 By aligning sketches with poetry—a rhetorical maneuver recalling that of Reynolds—and by calling attention to the lack of descriptive power of both poetry and the sketch when compared to painting, Opie renders the "omnipotence" of poetry "as a vehicle of relation and sentiment" insignificant in relation to the power of painting. To make this differential in power even more compelling, Opie implicitly invokes gender distinctions. If the sketch and poetry are "faint" and are vehicles of "sentiment," they too become feminine and therefore must be actively controlled or protected by masculine painting. For Reynolds and the academy, then, the sketch must be confined to the margins of painting, its aesthetic and use value depreciated, and to the private—where it would not be commodified. If the sketch garnered too much influence, it might put the Royal Academy out of business. Indeed, by the 1780s the "sketch" was already being used to promote works from other venues. Thus a "lady in reduced circumstances" by the name of Mrs. Nelson displayed her drawings made by hot pokers on wood, in 1788 in London, advertising that they were "like the Original Sketches of those great masters."89 In sum, the Royal Academy needed to justify its existence and base its justification on its ability to uphold moral principles, to preside over an artistic economy that dictated that rewards must be strictly in proportion to labor exerted, and to maintain the social hierarchy. Because the sketch threatened the very foundations on which the academy stood, it had to be persistently controlled. *

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These attempts by Royal Academicians to align the roughness of the sketch with the lower-class mechanic or to ignore the sketch entirely are even more significant if we recall that in the eighteenth century painting became an increasingly important sign of taste for British nobility.90 By the nineteenth century, the author of An Account ofAll the Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the British Institution from 1813-1823 Belonging to the Nobility and Gentry of England (1824) claimed "that knowledge, which has been called vertu, is best acquired by conversation, and a constant examination of the best works (paintings) of the best Masters."91 What made knowledge and familiarity with painting one of the few remaining reliable indications of taste in the eighteenth century was the fact that only the wealthy had first-

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hand "constant examination" of original paintings. Until Hogarth's exhibitions at the Foundling Hospital in the mid-eighteenth century, there were virtually no public exhibitions of art in England. And until the National Gallery opened in 1824, there were few museums or galleries for the public. The Royal Academy and Society of British Artists charged admission to their exhibitions precisely to keep out the vulgar. Collections of paintings were located in private country houses, and access to these was restricted to those who could afford not only to go on tour, but also to look respectable enough to be given admission, and to pay admission, and even to tip the servants.92 As one eighteenth-century Englishman put it, " I have heard a famous painter assert that our English Nobility and Gentry may boast of many good Pictures . . . yet 'tis so difficult to have access to any of these Collections, . . . they are in great Measure, useless, like Gold in Miser's Coffers ," 93 And in 1781 Viscount Torrington noted "that the expense of seeing Blenheim is very great" due to the "servants of the poor D of M " who "are very attentive in gleaning money from rich travellers." 94 The immense popularity of prints and sketching and the sale of sketches therefore threatened to make knowledge of painting a much less reliable sign of distinction. 95 Because sketches were comparatively cheap and ubiquitous, the middle class bought them or produced their own. This conferred upon members of the middle class firsthand, albeit compromised, knowledge of the visual arts and, by extension, "taste." By the early nineteenth century, William Henry Hazlitt would have to remind readers of the inferiority of prints to the originals. In 1824, the year in which the National Gallery opened to the public at no charge, he anonymously published the small octavo volume Sketches of the Principal PictureGalleries in England?6 Perhaps for Hazlitt the prose "sketch" offered some compensation for his failed career as a painter. Claiming that the picture galleries offer a "cure" from the "business of the world at large"—"the hubbub, the shifting scenery . . . the folly, the idle fashions without" (Sketches, 4)—Hazlitt appealed to an audience eager to escape the quotidian world through art. He reminded them as well that their "taste" must be subjected to continual correction by the "privileged few," like Hazlitt himself, who could time and time again see the original pictures for themselves. (Throughout Sketches, Hazlitt reminds his audience that this is not the first time he has seen these paintings.) Significantly, despite his last-minute insertion of an advertisement acknowledging that Mr. Angerstein's collection was now the National Gallery, which did not charge admission, Haz-

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litt throughout refers to the collection not as an institution open to the public, but rather as the property of Angerstein. In keeping with this elitism, Hazlitt remarks in this essay that prints can only look "mean, cold and meagre" only after one has seen the originals (5). Harking back to an age when "Literature was not cheap and vulgar" and when "the pride of intellect, like the pride of art, or the pride of birth, was confined to the privileged few," Hazlitt uses the verbal sketch to denounce the vulgarity of the "reading public" and the general availability of printed works (7). Paintings by contrast, thankfully, cannot be truly "multiplied to any extent" (6), and the ensuing advantage is that the sight of a "fine original picture" becomes "an event so much the more memorable, and the impression so much the deeper" (6). While he argues that a "visit to a genuine Collection is like going on a pilgrimage —it is an act of devotion performed at the shrine of art" (7), it is clear that Hazlitt is pleased not everyone wants to become a pilgrim. Of course the free admission to the National Gallery might begin to change that. By making the visit to a gallery an event of sacramental proportions, moreover, Hazlitt invests seeing collections with the religious power to convert the damned into the elect; his verbal sketches as essays on unseen art (Hazlitt does not reproduce any of the images he treats, yet he notes in passing that fine engravings of some of the paintings do exist) effectively control access to the originals. If direct access to art could be so controlled, and if the supply of art could be thus fixed, then the aesthetic and economic value of painting could be preserved, if not inflated. For those who could not see the actual paintings or purchase them, Hazlitt's art criticism, however, gave his periodical-reading audience an idea of what it was like to talk about paintings with the taste and learning of a connoisseur; indeed, Hazlitt often juxtaposes specific paintings with literary quotations in case someone knows not what to say. In the end, Hazlitt capitalized on the fact that talking like a connoisseur was for some just as impressive as owning visual art: the ability to discourse about paintings subsumed the need to pay for looking at them or owning them. *

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Some of the very reasons Sir Joshua Reynolds handled the sketch gingerly also paradoxically explain the Reverend William Gilpin's enshrinement of the sketch. In fact, although Gilpin had sent Reynolds a manu-

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script copy of his Three Essays, which included his essay on "The Art of Sketching Landscape" ("ASL"), as early as 1776, Reynolds objected to it, finding it, among other things, "too systematic." 97 The president of the academy also took care to remind Gilpin that "the epithet picturesque is not applicable to the excellencies of the inferior schools, rather than to the higher" (Three Essays, 34). Once expressed, Reynolds's objections led Gilpin to delay publishing his essays for sixteen years.98

Appreciating the Sketch's Value: William Gilpin Contra Reynolds, William Gilpin, perhaps the most widely read theorist of the sketch in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England, unabashedly celebrated the value of the sketch on numerous levels. Gilpin's essays and remarks on sketching, his popularity as an amateur drawing master, as well as his actual preliminary drawings made him enormously influential. Gilpin made popular a picturesque aesthetic that enshrined the sketch as its central art form. On the one hand, Gilpin stressed the sketch's aesthetic value. His argument here was twofold: he endowed the sketch with the flexibility to act as mirror and as lamp, with both powers of mimesis and Romantic expressiveness. On the subject of mimesis, Gilpin went so far as to argue that the sketch was even more natural than nature herself insofar as the sketcher "take[s] the lines of the country just as [he finds] them," and in an adorned sketch "grace[s] [those lines] a little, where they run false" ("ASL," 70). As if to cover all the bases, Gilpin also pointed to the sketch's expressive value. On the other hand, unlike Reynolds, who feigned disinterest in the economic value of art even as he sought to preserve the academy's control of the art market by exiling the sketch from the realm of aesthetic production, Gilpin had no qualms about exploiting the sketch's newfound economic value. Hence William Combe's Tours of Doctor Syntax poked fun at Gilpin's ability to "ride and write, and sketch and print, / and thus create a real mint." 99 Quite literally so, to cite only one instance: in 1802, William and his brother Sawrey sold their sketches as well as William's Two Essays on sketching for funds to endow a parish school in Boldre. Gilpin thus exploited the sketch's double aesthetic value to enhance the sketch's status as commodity. Gilpin begins his defense of the sketch's aesthetic value by emphasizing its virtually unsurpassed powers of mimesis. His decision to link the

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sketch with mimesis in the end allows him to wish away one of Reynolds's central objections to the sketch—that its indeterminacy leaves it open to misinterpretation. If the sketch reveals the essential traces of what it represents, then the issue of subjectivity becomes moot. As Gilpin defined it, the picturesque emphasized roughness or ruggedness of texture, variety, and irregularity (Three Essays, 6-7). Roughness becomes the sine qua поп of picturesque pleasure—hence Gilpin's version of roughness is divested of Reynolds's lower-class associations. We might recall Gilpin takes special care to absolve the picturesque and the sketch from charges of vulgarity by exiling "appendages of tillage" from it (Three Essays, iii). The sketch, then, is an especially appropriate way of representing the picturesque because it can be completed with a "few rough strokes" ("ASL," 66). And the sketcher's reed pen "ever delights in the bold, free, negligent strokes, and roughness of nature."100 The means of representation both conveys the roughness of what is represented and at the same time amplifies that roughness. Indeed, Gilpin exploits this conflation because it lends an aura of mimetic truth to the sketch: the roughness of the means and of the drawing itself merely imitate what is in nature. Even more fortuitous, accidental and "negligent strokes" of the brush are now accorded potential intentionality and can be harnessed in the service of roughness. By calling attention to the hand and to the labor— albeit not much labor—behind the bold strokes, roughness proclaims the presence of the artist even as it enhances the truth of the representation. Such bold strokes, moreover, were accurately captured in Gilpin's reproduced aquatints: tonal gradations could be achieved by allowing certain parts of the plate to be acid-bitten longer than others and by using different grounds to vary the texture of the background and foreground. Because the "Proteus shapes" (from the poem "On Landscape Painting," line 38 in Three Essays) of nature continually resist the finish of oil paintings, the sketch's incompleteness, moreover, enables a more accurate mimesis than finished paintings, insofar as paintings are more finished than nature herself is. In his Observations on Various Parts of England (1808), Gilpin writes, "the wild features of nature suffer continual change from various causes": namely, light and weather.101 This same idea is echoed in Gilpin's Two Essays: One, On the Author's Mode of Executing Rough Sketches ("RS"); The Other, On the Principles on Which They Are Composed ("PC"): "the appearance of the same country, under different effects of light, is totally different. These effects therefore cannot be too much studied; and should be studied, when the artist finishes a picture, by making different

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Figure 9. Unknown, after William Gilpin, "Landscape," plate 1.3, from "The Art of Sketching Landscape," in Three Essays (1792). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

sketches of the same subject, so as to ascertain the best." 102 The sketch's very provisionality, its recognition that it is truly and not merely etymologically derived "offhand"—of the moment—then, accords it greater accuracy since it does not present itself as representing more than a moment. The looseness of handling in the single sketch, furthermore, lends a sense of dynamism to an otherwise static and false rendition of landscape. Even the inherent randomness of the aquatint process (in which globules of aquatint ground adhere to the plate randomly) gives the reproduction the feel of the original sketch insofar as that randomness helps to capture the fluidity of atmosphere, most notably in the background, and the ruggedness of the terrain (see Figure 9). For Gilpin, the sketch is not only uniquely capable of literal fidelity to what it represents, it is at times innately truthful. Because it is comprised of outlines and is lacking in "colour, the great vehicle of deception" ("ASL," 73), the sketch, unlike the oil painting, does not deceive. Part of the sketch's putative truthfulness comes from the fact that it has an intimate connection to the landscape it renders; Gilpin thus exploits the sketch's execution "on the spot." Because the sketch is executed in this way, it becomes a kind

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of portable inscription that bears the imprint and authority of nature herself. Gilpin elaborates on the intimate connection between the sketch and nature, ironically through the mediation of the words of Thomas Gray. " 'Half a word,' says Mr. Gray, 'fixed on, or near the spot, is worth all our recollected ideas. . . .' What Thomas Gray says relates chiefly to verbal description: but in lineal description it is equally true. The leading ideas must be fixed on the spot: if left to the memory, they soon evaporate" ("ASL," 64-65). Because the sketch has not yet been filtered through the memory, it offers an accurate record to enable further recollection. Indeed, one of the functions of the sketch is to "fix" views of nature "in your own memory" ("ASL," 62). Insofar as the sketch bears the traces of the "spot" delineated and has not been processed through the memory, its veracity can hardly be called into question. Instantaneity (an even more immediate form of spontaneity), then, allows the sketch to short-circuit consciousness. Despite Gilpin's professed deference to professional artists, his larger strategy in aligning the sketch with mimesis is to mount a "rhetoric of iconoclasm"—one admittedly toned down —against professional painting. W. J. T. Mitchell defines the term as a method whereby "the repudiated image [finished painting] is stigmatized by notions such as artiface, illusion, vulgarity, irrationality; and the new image [the sketch] (which is often declared not to be an image at all) is honored by the titles of nature, reason, and enlightenment." 103 The logical consequence of the truth of the sketch is that all other, more finished, images must be false and ideological. Hence Gilpin redefines finish as stiffness, suggesting deathlike, unnatural fixity. He thereby endows the sketch with true liveliness. Gilpin argues that "the art of painting, in it's [sic] highest perfection, cannot give the richness of nature . . . generally an attempt at the highest finishing would end in stiffness" ("ASL," 72). Once finish has become "stiffness," Gilpin can claim that even correct productions of the pencil fail to capture truth. All this promotion of the sketch's unique mimetic powers leads Gilpin at times to argue that the sketch belongs to the realm of nature and not art: "the picturesque eye abhors art; and delights solely in nature" {Three Essays, 26). While taking great pains to distinguish the "embellished scene"—"a very beautiful species of landscape" that pleases us with "symmetry and elegance" (Observations, xv)—from objects "purely picturesque," Gilpin states that the embellished scene "is too trim, and neat for the pencil; which ever delights in the bold, free, . . . strokes, and roughness of nature—abhorring in it's [sic] wild sallies, the least intrusion of art" (Observations, xiv). But the sketch not only defies the "intrusion" of art, it is potentially better

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than nature. Because the sketcher takes only the very best of what nature has to offer, his or her work may "even be called more natural, than nature [her]self: inasmuch as it seizes, and makes use, not only of nature's own materials, but of the best of each kind" ("PC," 21). Gilpin's assessment of the sketch's relationship to nature and art is, however, more complex than the foregoing suggests. In " O n the Author's Mode of Executing Rough Sketches" ( " R S " ) and his essay " O n the Principles on Which the Drawings Are Composed" ( " P C " ) , Gilpin draws an analogy between sketching and translating. Even the sketcher of "fictitious" and "imaginary" views must to some degree translate his or her "accurate observations of the most beautiful objects of nature" into sketches ("PC," 23). Translation becomes for Gilpin a strategy by which he inscribes his picturesque aesthetic upon nature herself: Nature should be copied, as an author should be translated. If, like Horace's translator, you give word for word, your work will necessarily be insipid. But if you catch the meaning of your author, and give it freely, in the idiom of the language into which you translate, your translation may have both the spirit, and truth of the original. Translate nature in the same way. Nature has its idiom, as well as language; and so has painting. ("PC," 20) Translation allows Gilpin to acknowledge an essential difference between nature and art. A t the same time it enables him to close this gap by emphasizing the similarities between them. Moreover, Gilpin's invocation of Horace here serves to invest the art of sketching with the cultural authority—that is, the "spirit and truth"—of the classic. Gilpin shrewdly places the sketcher on the same level as an "author," a rhetorical maneuver to harness the authority of literature in service of the sketch. H e also further insinuates the picturesque into the place of poetry's legitimate sister art, painting: ut picturesque poesis. Gilpin's ending poem to his Three Essays, " O n Landscape Painting" ( " O L P " ) , finalizes that substitution. Gilpin's analogy of sketching to translation paradoxically allows him to position himself as a "translator" or demystifier of an ostensibly "foreign" landscape, while at the same time it allows him to project his own intentions onto the landscape by claiming that they are part of "nature's idiom." The analogy of sketching to translation is doubly empowering insofar as it presents sketching as an act of demystification, on the one hand, and allows him to displace his authorial voice onto the landscape, an act of mystification, on the other. While promoting sketching as a means of allowing democratic access to the landscape by making it widely intelli-

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gible, Gilpin's use of translation nonetheless lends a sense of exclusivity to the sketch. This strategy further allows Gilpin to link the contestable value of the sketch with the more readily demonstrable value of landscape. Because literal fidelity to the meaning of the original words makes a translation incomprehensible, fidelity must be thought of in a larger context: not that of meaning but that of, in Walter Benjamin's terms, "the original's mode of signification." 104 Once so defined, fidelity and freedom become mutually reinforcing terms insofar as "emancipation" from meaning now becomes the task of fidelity ("Task of the Translator," 80). Once again this maneuver allows Gilpin to dismiss Reynolds's fears about the sketch and misinterpretation. Gilpin uses translation to render the artist's representational "liberty" and "indulgence" in service of fidelity to nature. The translator's role, then, is effaced because readers are to respond to these sketches as if they merely reflect the original. 105 To the end of further rendering his presence invisible, Gilpin writes, in " O n Picturesque Beauty" in Three Essays, "if, indeed, either in literary, or in picturesque composition you endeavor to draw the reader, or the spectator from the subject to the mode of executing it, your affectation disgusts" (18). A t one point, moreover, Gilpin even effaces his role of translator completely by comparing the original sketch to a "hasty transcript from nature" ("ASL," 70). Having thus fully articulated the sketch's mimetic value and having, to some extent, attempted to democratize the aesthetic by teaching the middle-class how to produce a mimetic sketch, Gilpin now argues that sketches, by a select few with real talent and genius, embody expressive value as well. "The rough sketch of a capital master . . . giv[es] the imagination an opening into all those glowing ideas, which inspired the artist" (Three Essays, 50). Gilpin elaborates on this line of argument: The art of giving . . . expressive marks with a pen, which impress ideas, is no common one. T h e inferior artist may give them by chance: but the master only gives them with precision.—Yet a sketch may have it's [sic] use, and even it's [itc] merit, without these strokes of genius. ("ASL," 73)

In these exceptional instances, the sketch's value is contingent on less quantifiable and measurable qualities such as the artist's skill, vision, ideas, originality, and genius. Gilpin's appreciation of the sketch's twofold aesthetic value, not surprisingly, enabled the economic value of his own sketches and that of sketches generally to appreciate. A s a work of mimesis, the sketch in the hands of middle-class tourists was a quick and easy means of reifying one's

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experience of a tour, of converting one's experience into a kind of cultural capital whose value is realized only when displayed. Here again Gilpin confronts Reynolds's strictures about the necessary privacy of sketches. Speaking on the uses of foreign travel, Bishop Richard Hurd wrote in 1764: "what a harvest of true knowledge and learning must he gather and bring home with him, from the number less varied scenes he has pass'd thro' in his voyages." 106 Gilpin argues that sketches allow a "man of business" to bring these harvests home ("ASL," 89). Gilpin's admission that even his own sketches brought for sale had more "science" in them than "art" indicates once again his ability to sell sketches on the basis of their mimetic value ("RS," 31). The image's illusory ability to deliver presence further endowed the sketch with an aura of property; by referring repeatedly to the sketch as "your landscape," Gilpin deliberately makes the sketch a kind of property. Furthermore, as a work of direct Romantic expression by artists with genius, the sketch truly became an exchangeable item, but only for some: "only . . . a master . . . can give expressive touches" ("ASL," 88). Since it manifests this expressive theory of aesthetic value directly—and not through an entity like finish—Gilpin's sketch in the end becomes an object inalienable from its exchangeable value, yet irreducible to that value. Once thus inalienable, the sketch becomes, by definition, a marketable form. Because Gilpin envisions the sketch as an unmediated window onto the artistic mind, it makes visible what would otherwise remain an unvendible abstraction. The "master" sketcher is thus accorded the ability to assign value for his works in process at the same time as he offers evidence of that skill, vision, and genius: he becomes the producer of a commodity whose value is demonstrable because it is vendible. Nonetheless, those abstractions allow the sketch to be much more than a mere commodity. I now turn to Gilpin's overwhelming reliance upon the rhetoric and logic of capitalism to insure the sketch's value. Gilpin not only argues that the sketch is valuable, he infers that, once in circulation, it embodies a kind of surplus value. Put simply, less to Gilpin is more, though his logic and syntax can be more contorted than this glib phrase suggests. Referring modestly to the limited value of his own sketches, Gilpin, for instance, seemingly takes his hat off to the "master" who "could furnish the detail" to Gilpin's "general hints" ("PC," 32). Yet, only one sentence later, Gilpin argues that "we always conceive detail to be the inferior part of a picture" (32), thereby putting masters in their proper place. Gilpin's endowment of the sketch with surplus value helps account for the fact that, unlike Reynolds, who is troubled by the sketch's lack of

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Figure io. Plate ι and title page to William Gilpin's Two Essays (1804). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

labor intensiveness, Gilpin celebrates the fact that the sketch requires virtually no labor, only the "playful toil of three short mornings" ("OLP," 19). Even better, such drawings "more enchant the eye, / Than what was labour'd thro' as many moons" ("OLP," 19). The Reverend William Gilpin thereby offers a kind of prelapsarian labor in the form of the sketch as a reward to those otherwise employed. Needless to say, the right to participate in this Edenic labor would have to be earned. While Gilpin encourages the middle-class man of business to learn to sketch, he demands that the poor, by contrast, attend workhouses and parish schools designed to discipline their "idleness, dissipation, and dishonesty." 107 In fact, his sketch of the parish school at Boldre carefully insinuates that school as the very bulwark against the kinds of lower-class "plunder" he wants to counter: bathed in light, the school imposes order on the otherwise dark forest (Figure 10). And the symmetry of the school imposes visual order on the indiscriminate

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lines of the forest where the masses blend into one another. Where the poor are concerned, Gilpin's chief economic term is frugality: at the poor house in Boldre, even "the very crumbs from the cutting bread for each meal are put into the milk or broth" ("Account of the Parish School," Two Essays, n). While the fine art of painting is better left to those who aspire to become masters, the "art of sketching landscape" is not only "attainable," but also "more useful" to "men of business" ("ASL," 89). Wedding art, ease, and utility, Gilpin further reminds his readers that sketching requires minimal investments of time and money. The necessary tools for sketching— namely, a reed pen, white paper, a type of ink called "iron water," noted for its indelibility, a piece of moistened sponge for toning down the shading in the drawing, and a tint, usually brown for taking off the "rawness of the white paper" ("RS," 11-14)—were rather cheap and extremely portable; therefore, the tourist in search of the picturesque could afford to sketch scene after scene and would not be encumbered by the paraphernalia required for painting. Not only were an easel, oils, a palette, a canvas, a frame to stretch the canvas, and brushes expensive, they were also bulky. It was far cheaper to learn to sketch than to paint. For roughly ten shillings, one could purchase Gilpin's Three Essays (1792), which included among other things a fairly complete instruction manual; but painters would most likely have to retain a master to teach them the rudiments of classical beauty, perspective, and anatomy, not to mention the actual techniques of oil painting. (Although manuals for painting were generally available, they were, on the whole, much pricier.) The quickness with which one could learn how to sketch and to exe : cute a drawing was also a selling point: Gilpin insists that sketching is a "quick method of conveying picturesque ideas.... Nor let the professional man laugh at these little instructions; I mean them not for him; but only for the use of those who wish for an easy mode of expressing their ideas" ("RS," 15). As Gilpin presented it, sketching was especially suited to the "man of business" who only had occasional leisure to devote to the practice. By making the British landscape—and not the art gallery—the site of aesthetic education, Gilpin dramatically raises the symbolic value of English landscape and at the same time opens it up to a wider audience. Later Gilpin more explicitly challenged the Royal Academy when he claimed that "nature . . . is the only school where [the artist] must study forms" ("RS," 27). Throughout, Gilpin's rhetoric on the sketch shrewdly capitalizes on the logic of surplus value to suggest to these "men of business" that sketch-

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ing is one simple way of short-circuiting the necessary proportional relation between labor and wage, investment and return. Apponat lucro, he urges readers, "let him take it as a gain" ("ASL," 47). In fact, by teaching the "art of sketching" to the middle class, thereby increasing the supply of art, Gilpin enables his audience to benefit from art's decreased exchange value simply because they can now exchange less for the same aesthetic value. To this end he emphasizes, in addition to the negligible investments needed, the many gains from sketching: sketches both assist one's memory and make a forceful impression on the viewer, an impression potentially more astonishing than a more finished picture could give. By designating the sketch as synecdochic, suggesting a much larger " w h o l e " than the actual lines convey, Gilpin sustains his argument that less truly yields more and flies in the face of Sir Joshua Reynolds who, as we have already seen, wanted the sketch to remain a sign of painterly lack. Since the labor of representation, moreover, is partially displaced from the artist onto the viewer who must now create a " w h o l e " from this part and w h o must be open to feel the sketch's "effect," the sketcher profits as well from someone else's labor. What made the sketch even more valuable to Gilpin and his audience was the fact that it also offered a quick and easy means of converting someone else's property into aesthetic property. As Carole Fabricant notes in her analysis of guidebooks written for domestic British tourists, "the act of aesthetically and psychologically 'taking possession of a country' is put forward as a mutually satisfying alternative to—indeed, a politically safe substitute for—the act of materially possessing it." 1 0 8 Sketching offered considerably more than these guidebooks: it offered both a substitute for the act of materially possessing property itself as well as an easy and quick material record of that symbolic possession. In short, the sketch made the symbolic seem more real. " M e n of business" would find the greatest use in sketching in its capacity to assist the imaginative possession of the landscape by the artistic means of production, the material process of putting pen or pencil to paper. Someone else's property thus became reified for the viewer and perhaps framed and hung on the sketcher's own walls at home. Alan Liu shows us how the picturesque enabled the appropriation of landscape: Gilpin writes in his Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791), for example, "forms and colours . . . fleet before us; and if the transient glance of a good composition happen to unite with them, we should give any price to fix, and appropriate the scene" (2:225). Gray had earlier appropriated scenery in the Lakes: "From hence I got to

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the parsonage . . . and, saw in my glass a picture, that if I could transmit to you and fix in all the softness of its living colours, would fairly sell for a thousand pounds." . . . With the arrival of increasing middle-class tourists from the nineteenth-century industrial centers . . . such imaginary appropriation of landscape then articulated the actual methods of appropriation, capitalization, and industrial development. Essentially the new monied classes invested unowned property in the Lakes with the imaginative capital earned in urban areas.109

Indeed, Gilpin's rhetoric about the sketch is explicitiy appropriative. In language recalling that of some of the aforementioned drawing manuals, Gilpin promotes the sketch because it enables travelers to "bring home the delineation of a fine country" ("ASL," 89) and to "seize" the best of nature's materials and "discriminating features" of the landscape ("PC," 20-21). In his poem "On Landscape Painting," moreover, Gilpin commands the sketcher to with "Haste, snatch thy pencil, bounteous nature yields / To thee her choicest stores" (lines 102-3). And he even explicitly compares the pleasures of the traveler in search of the picturesque to those of an "explorer" who discovers new horizons in his essay "On Picturesque Travel" (1794). The first source of amusement to the picturesque traveller, is the pursuit of his object— . . . We suppose the country to have been unexplored. Under this circumstance the mind is kept constantly in agreeable suspense. . . . Every distant horizon promises something new; and with this pleasing expectation we follow nature through all her walks. (Three Essays 47)

While travel becomes an affordable substitute for exploration, even colonization, sketching materializes one's exploits. But the violence of Gilpin's verbs—take, seize, snatch—becomes more disturbing in light of the fact that Gilpin explicitly and consistently genders the landscape as feminine: "the nearer we copy her, the nearer we approach perfection" ("PC," 19). Nature is also feminized as a passive container: she is the "grand storehouse" of all picturesque beauty. Through the act of sketching, we are to "capture" her "loveliest features," and her "scatter'd charms" ("OLP," lines 3, 11). The invocation of gender serves to intensify the sketcher's power. The sketch becomes invested with the socially constructed right of men to dominate women, of active men to do what passive women really desire. Insofar as nature is always "yielding" "giving" and "shedding" her bounty ("PC," 19), the artist is only doing what nature (she) wants him to do. That nature herself insistently needs to be corrected, refined, and managed—Gilpin's nature is far from perfect, far

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from picturesque—further justifies the sketcher's mastery. Thus, as Gilpin envisions them, sketches naturalize and legitimate appropriation as an appropriate response to landscape. Yet Gilpin's legitimation of appropriation moves beyond Alan Liu's imaginary realm and acquires real force when we consider that by defining the value of landscape in its ability to be sketched, appropriated, Gilpin redefined aristocratic land as flawed property. That is, so long as aristocrats hold on to land as a symbol of familial wealth, they, from Gilpin's capitalistic stance, never truly own the property since the land cannot be exchanged. To this end, Gilpin makes it clear that land has little intrinsic value; the sketcher's role is to add value to the land, to convert land into commodity. "Nature gives us the materials of landscape . . . but leaves us to work them up into pictures . . . She gives us grass; but leaves us to make hay. She gives us corn; but leaves us to make bread" ("PC," 19). The exchangeable sketch is valuable because it transforms land from nature into commodity, even if it fails to commodify the actual property. As a leisure activity, sketching replicates serious business, showing the middle class what appropriation looks like. Sketching's greatest value as a leisure activity was in educating participants in the pleasurable workings and value of capitalism. 110 If we recall Gilpin's rendering his own presence invisible through the idea of sketching as translation, as well as his insistence that even nature herself desires capitalistic transformation into valuable property, we can see how Gilpin was able at once to promote the sketch, to justify capitalism, and to create value.

The Sketch and Appropriation Gilpin, of course, was not the only advocate of the sketch's value in teaching the benefits and pleasures of appropriation. We witness the promotion of sketching as a means of appropriation especially in drawing manuals written for the middle class, those who could not afford to hire drawing masters (by 1775 the London firm of Sayer and Bennett was already advertising over two hundred such manuals for sale). 1 1 1 1 mean appropriation in two senses: first, sketching was a way of making gentility one's own, of appropriating nobility; and second, sketching facilitated the taking of views that figured and, by implication, legitimated the domination of women, the enclosure of common land, and colonial imperialism. The combined force of both forms of appropriation meant that sketching empowered the

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middle classes with a sense of distinction, what Pierre Bourdieu calls "a distant and self-assured relation to the world and to others," and a way of preserving the distance between themselves and the lower classes and natives by reducing real landscapes and real people to the status of picturesque objects.112 The negative aspects of enclosure and colonialist appropriation were thereby erased. That drawing masters so often found employment at institutions like the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich or the Addiscombe Military College for the East India Company's cadets establishes a contingent relationship between taking sketches and taking land.113 The sketch's ability to deny the negativity of appropriation was enhanced by its seeming naturalness: the artist's appropriation of an art historical tradition and strategies of compositional unity was already covered up by sketchy spontaneity. The Artist's Vade Месит; Being the Whole Art of Drawing, which went through at least seven editions between 1762 and 1786 and sold for 7s. 6d., proclaimed: To be able on the Spot to take a Sketch of a fine Building, or a beautiful Prospect of any curious Production of Art, or uncommon appearance in Nature, or whatever else, may present itself to view in our Journies and Travels, in our own or Foreign Countries, may be thus brought home and preserved for our future use, either in Business or Conversation, and is the best Method of bringing to Mind those Beauties that have once charmed us. 1 1 4

What is most striking here is the virtual conflation of the verb "taking": "taking" a sketch is equivalent to "taking" the object delineated "home . .. for future use." The sketcher's appropriating gaze is also legitimated by the fact that objects present themselves for viewing. This language is echoed in other manuals such as Carington Bowles's All Draughtmen's Assistant; or, Drawing Made Easy (1772) where Bowles asserts that "the artist may at Pleasure take Sketches of any Appearances in the Works of Nature or Art, either in his own, or any foreign Country, and bring them Home for future use and inspection."115 And Hester Piozzi went so far as to designate all of Italy as an "academy figure, for which we all sit to take drawings." 116 By suggesting that objects present themselves for the taking, authors of these extremely popular manuals and guidebooks displace the desire for appropriation from the subject to the object and make appropriation an, if not the, appropriate way of experiencing landscape and tourismappropriate because it is only an aesthetic practice and, strangely enough, because the object delineated so desires it. Part of the cultural authority of

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the object delineated becomes the sketcher's property; for example, by seeing Mont Blanc and by appropriating that experience through the act of sketching it and showing the sketch to others, the artist/tourist transforms the Swiss Alps into cultural capital, testimony of his "taste" and social position. On another level, sketching provides a seemingly nonthreatening material form for the containment of appropriating desires: no one is advocating real taking. Nonetheless, the pleasures of imaginative taking are real. By so blurring the boundaries between real and imaginative appropriation, this displacement attenuates and contains the potential violence of appropriation. And on yet another level, in teaching the middle class the benefits of appropriation and converting Tory landed wealth into wasteful hording, sketching shows the middle class how to create value in landscape. Insofar as sketching enabled many of its practitioners to appropriate and to justify their appropriation—to make taking look so innocent—it became especially useful to the cause of enclosure and, later, colonialism. Yet as sketchers often realized, if appropriation meant that property needed to be mack private, it could be unmade. This potential unmaking of private property is foregrounded by the fact that reproduced drawings (often by aquatint) were used to teach amateurs how to produce original sketches of their own. How could artistic property be secured from endless transfer? The Reverend William Gilpin found a partial solution: he exploited aquatint to reproduce the hasty brushwork of his monochrome sketches and at the same time adopted the practice of impressing his original sketches with a stamp of his initials. As Gilpin's impressed stamp implies, his success at educating others to become genteel sketchers left his own work vulnerable to misappropriation. The fact that sketching masters often plagiarized word for word previous manuals ironizes this rhetorical obsession with appropriation, suggesting that once property is appropriated, it is open to endless circulation. John Hassell argues in The Speculum; or, Art of Drawing in Water Colours; with Instructions for Sketching from Nature (1816) that nature's "profusion offers itself." 117 A few paragraphs later, by contrast, Hassell stresses the sketcher's activeness: "you must pursue your researches with avidity, for of such coy materials is nature composed as often to shun the general eye." Here nature's very coyness authorizes and legitimates the sketcher's insistence and visual penetration; perhaps nature's displayed eroticism would even justify sadism under cover of "research." That Hassell's title could also invoke an instrument widely used in gynecological

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examinations emphasizes the gender and powerful erotics of this gaze. In a later work, The Camera; or, Art of Drawing in Watercolours and Sketching from Nature (1823), moreover, Hassell went so far as to insist that "the village maiden, loosely attired, performing her domestic duties, is always a sketch for the artist." 118 The phrase, "loosely attired," implies looseness of conduct, and thereby begins to strip this woman of her dignity if not of her clothing. What we have here is a male fantasy; one rendered even more ideal by the equation of the sketch with the "maiden." In much the same way that the sketcher "commands" the sketch, he takes possession of the woman. By divesting such figures of any agency of their own, without registering any resistance on the part of the sketcher and subject, Hassell legitimates the sketch's appropriative force. Like Gilpin and Hassell, Richard Dagley, author of A Compendium of the Theory and Practice of Drawing and Painting (1819), further sought to attenuate the sketch's appropriative force by calling attention to its "intellectual character": "The pleasure which sketching affords in ranging from place to place, and bringing home the choice and selected parts of nature, may be compared to sports of the field, but with the addition of intellectual character."119 Superimposed over blood, Dagley offers leisurely sport—the fact that this sport is in fact hunting, as it were, is not important. And superimposed over the body, Dagley provides the intellect. Nonetheless, Dagley's choice of "parts" of nature perhaps makes readers wary of these impositions insofar as they resonate with the mutilated anatomy of the feminine landscape. All of this rhetoric of taking within sketching manuals and topographic literature can be best understood by situating it within the nineteenth-century obsession with world appropriation. Domestically, the English leisure class appropriated common land and property owned by smaller farmers and incorporated them into larger properties. Whereas the upper classes enlarged their properties, the middle class benefited from enclosure, as Alan Liu has recently argued, because it allowed middle-class Whig professional bureaucratization of nature to replace Tory landowning and squirearchical rule.120 From 1761 to 1801, roughly 2.5 million acres were enclosed. The effects on the lower classes were devasting. J. L. and Barbara Hammond, two noted historians on the subject, argue that since even the poorest had to pay the expenses of enclosure, small farmers often had to sell their land. 121 And whereas before enclosure cottagers might be considered as "laborers having land" insofar as they had the right to glean after harvest, to graze cows and to till soil on common land, after enclosure,

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cottagers were laborers whose land had been taken from them.122 Perhaps a contemporary opponent of enclosure put it best when he remarked, "If his parents were so poor as to transmit no patrimony to him, he is born the inhabitant of a land, every spot of which is appropriated to some other person. . . . He cannot seize any animal or vegetable for his food, without invading property, and incurring the penalty of the law." 123 The plight of the laboring poor did not stop such petitioners from justifying enclosure on grounds that appropriation was necessary for progress and even, in times of bad harvest, on the basis that enclosure would prevent, through higher productivity, the starvation of the poor. Precisely by taking away the poor's legal right to appropriate from common land, enclosure put an end to the "commoner's relative wage independence, and made agricultural labour necessary."124 This same leisure class was consumed with appropriation on a global scale—the building and legitimation of empire. Colonialist expeditions of the time always included a place for draftsmen as part of the crew. Sketches were often sold as essentially disinterested ethnographies, when, in fact, they usually were used to mark, define, and homogenize the other as barbaric and primitive.125 Once so defined, England's mission becomes increasingly clear: to civilize. This logic impels Quintin Craufurd's Sketches Chiefly Relating to the History, Religion, Learning, and Manners of the Hindoos (1790). Toward the beginning Craufurd writes that "the following sketches may perhaps enable the reader to form some judgement on the subject,"126 as if to suggest that these sketches have no rhetorical intent. However, in his discussion of the practice of widows throwing themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres, Craufurd turns the particular into a generalization applicable to all the Orient: "The intention of so barbarous a practise is sufficiently evident, and in all Oriental countries, the superiority and security of the husband, and the preservation of his domestic authority, seems to have been the object" (260-61). Even the barbarous East practices in its own uncivilized way the same patriarchalism seen in the West, implying that the male is universally superior. Yet this pagan version of patriarchy invites protection from English paternalism: as Lisa Lowe argues in Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, "The British stance toward India . . . figured Colonial power as the father and the oriental object his child, underdeveloped, and in need of protection." 127 As we might expect, within the next few pages, Craufurd sketches the history of a rajah's widow who escapes death through the intervention of a British officer. The widow, of course, deeply appreciates being saved because her life has been "infinitely useful to her son" (274-75).

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Figure и. J. W. Harding, plate 2 from Sketches in North Wales (1810). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

J. W. Harding's Sketches in North Wales (1810), which contained both engraved and prose sketches, presents a sketch of a laborer gathering peat moss for fuel (Figure 11). The figure is momentarily arrested from his labor and his eyes look out and engage the viewer's. Alongside, Harding offers the following commentary: " I t is painful to an eye, which has witnessed the golden abundance of some of the better cultivated districts of England, to view the wretched state of Agriculture in Wales. The Welsh farmer has yet to learn the most central principles of the art." 1 2 8 Harding thus places

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the viewer of the sketch in the position of a witness: we see the figure involved in such "primitive" labor. We are also invited to make a causal connection between the Welsh farmers' primitiveness and their emphatic discontent. Our transformation into witnesses is enhanced by the use of hand-coloring, since the artist's hand transforms the copy into an original of sorts, and by Harding's perfection of lithographic techniques to convey texture (he was the first to use brush stumps and crayons in lithography). Unlike his cultivated British counterpart, the farmer in Harding's Sketches can only attend to his animal-like "wants": Instead of endeavoring, by the substitution of a better system and more energetic exertions in the cultivation of his land, to add to his comforts, his only object seems to be, to accommodate his wants to his scanty means. (Commentary, plate 2)

Such primitivism is additionally visually foregrounded by the emphatic circularity of the horse's path. As framed, the sketch allows for no other path and no way out of this problem without outside intervention. The implication is that only if England more forcefully intervenes—as the viewer's gaze must penetrate the various frames of this image—will Wales become more "cultivated"; its agriculture will improve and, by extension, the general level of "culture" will improve also. The word "art" reminds us of these competing definitions. Lest Harding's representation of Wales appear to have no pragmatic purpose, we only have to recall that between 1797 and 1817, seventy-five enclosure bills affecting 134,000 acres in Wales were proposed and passed. 129 Since the Napoleonic Wars had made farming enormously profitable, the rewards of enclosure were even higher than before. 130 Despite the visual sketch's rise to prominence in British Romantic culture, its influence was hotly contested. This chapter has suggested reasons why the sketch was so vulnerable to controversy. The Royal Academy sought to keep the sketch private in an effort to buttress its own foundations. Because of its associations with genius, originality, and quickness of execution, the sketch might obviate the need for careful training. If that training was seen as antithetical to natural depictions of landscape, moreover, sketches might usurp the place of the finished oil painting. Even worse, since the sketch might suggest that less labor was more aesthetically valuable, it threatened to subvert the artistic economy. Underlying debates concerning the value of unfinishedness was a concern about the possibility of misinterpretation and the growing public access to painting exhibitions. And since sketches were generally much cheaper than their finished

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counterparts, a larger segment of the middle class might appropriate the sketch as symbolic capital. More importantly, insofar as sketching manuals for the middle class linked the sketch with appropriation, it facilitated a debate between the middle class and the landed gentry over whether land had intrinsic value or only acquired true value through appropriation, enclosure, and even colonialism. In the following chapters, I examine how this debate over the aesthetic and economic value of the sketch acquires added complexity and resonance within larger debates about gender and morality.

2 "Keeping Them Out of Harm's Way": Sketching, Female Accomplishments, and the Shaping of Gender in Britain

ALTHOUGH LEISURE-CLASS WOMEN and m e n p r o d u c e d b o t h verbal and

visual sketches, the histories of male and female sketches are radically different. In general, women's sketches were supposed to be an end in and of themselves, while men's were potentially only part of the artistic process. Sketches by men might embody genius, while those of women were praiseworthy if they were "correctly" drawn. Female modesty virtually relegated women's sketches to the private sphere, while there were few such moral strictures on masculine artistic assertion. Women were thought to be naturally suited for the unfinished and the partial in ways that men were not because of cultural notions of feminine passivity and of feminine inferior mental capacity. At times, sketching was even a way of keeping women silent. After all, one could not easily concentrate on delineation and converse. I argue that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain essential notions of femininity were continually being ruptured by the creation of a consumer society, resulting in a dramatic increase in leisure time, the fear that leisure-class women would spend more of their time outside the home and away from their families, and the fear that women would become professionals and thus forsake their domestic duties. In response to such destabilizing forces, femininity became increasingly narrowly defined by both men and women alike. This chapter will show how what I call the discourse of sketching contributed to the shaping of gender and, conversely, how ideas about femininity in turn changed the way writers and artists thought about female artistic production. That so much was written about the sketch in such diverse sources as women's conduct books, works

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on female education, ladies' drawing manuals, reviews of women's paintings and sketches, women's novels, periodicals for women, and women's written and drawn sketches testifies to the integral role this discourse played in imposing Active order upon the complexities of gender in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since women with professional ambitions resisted these strictures, few women painters exhibiting in London called their works "sketches" (Royal Academy catalogs reveal only a handful, and most of these were "honorary" exhibitors).1 In point of fact, artists like Maria Cosway, Miss E. A. Rigaud, Maria Spilsbury, Miss E. Jones, and Miss A. E. Jackson even produced grand-style history paintings for exhibitions at the Royal Academy, British Institution, and Society of British Artist shows, often under cover of biblical and other moral subjects.2 Any discussion of the gendering of the sketch must first acknowledge an apparent confusion of terms: "sketches" and "drawings" were and are often used interchangeably. The Royal Academy, however, often sought to preserve the distinctions between these words. From the academy's perspective, "drawing" was the more exact and technical term, often presuming knowledge of perspective, proportion, and anatomy. "Sketching" was the feminized version of drawing because it required no such technical knowledge. In their lectures on design, for example, James Barry, professor of painting at the Royal Academy from 1782 to 1799, and John Opie, who occupied the same position from 1805 to 1807, never used the term "drawing" loosely. They assumed drawings would be "correct"; that is, they expected them to demonstrate knowledge of anatomy, proportion, perspective, and taste. By contrast, Barry and Opie generally eschewed the term "sketch."3

Sketching as a Female Accomplishment In A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser suggest that, in the middle of the eighteenth century in Britain, " 'lady' came to mean a woman with pretensions to refinement who did not have to labor with her hands."4 With a decreasing emphasis on manual labor came a stress upon female accomplishments such as needlework, sketching, music, and dancing.5 Thus the novelist Charlotte Palmer wrote in the 1790s: "I cannot say that I should like to see my daughters pickling and preserving, and putting their hands into a pan of flower [ж], and all that; let them keep their tambour, their

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music, their filligree, and their drawing; that's quite enough."6 Likewise, Catharine Macaulay would enlist the aid of such "innocent amusements" to help ladies "of fortune" "get rid of time."7 Eighteenth-century English middle- and upper-class women were expected to sketch. The wealth of references to sketching and drawing in the discourses on female education and in the novels by women provides only one index of the phenomenon's prevalence.8 By the early nineteenth century, the English country house often had rooms designated specifically for drawing. According to the OED, drawing rooms were both rooms to which ladies would withdraw after dinner and rooms where their drawing equipment would be set up. Indeed, whereas for genteel men sketching was a small part of a much broader education that encompassed subjects thought dangerous for women (such as classical languages), for leisureclass women, sketching was often a cornerstone of their curriculum.9 As Mary Poovey has observed, feminine propriety dictated that women be excluded from "an entire tradition of learned argument" since such learning suggested a kind of sexual display, a voracious sexual appetite.10 Although female education improved dramatically over the century, girls whose families were wealthy enough to send them to boarding schools were generally taught handwriting, harpsichord, needlework, tatting, and how to "shade a few sketches under the watchful drawing master's eye." 11 And in the anonymous Polite Lady; or, A Course in Female Education (1769), a mother exhorts her daughter to become an "accomplished woman," and informs her that "no young lady deserves this honourable character without a competent knowledge in the art of drawing." 12 Speaking for "thousands of parents," the Reverend Thomas Broadhurst articulated the "real wishes with regard to the education of their daughters: accomplishments, accomplishments, accomplishments."13 He then listed drawing, dancing, and music. As one of the principal "female accomplishments," sketching became, as Maria and R. L. Edgeworth would phrase it in their enormously influential Practical Education (1801), a "ticket to admission to fashionable company."14 More importantly, the Edgeworths noted, sketching would "increase a lady's chance of a prize in the matrimonial lottery" (3:6). The female protagonist of Fanny Burney's The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814) thus captures the interest of Harleigh when she is discovered idly sketching on the back of a letter: "It was beautifully executed, and undoubtedly from nature. Harleigh, with mingled astonishment and admiration, clasped his hands, and energetically exclaimed, 'Accomplished creature! who—and what are you?'" 1 5 Because her identity and even her name

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are unknown, her ability to sketch becomes the only sign of her class position. Although she has no money, she cannot be a member of the working classes: she is too accomplished. And yet perhaps her sketch is too astonishing. Harleigh responds to it by dehumanizing her; he calls her a "creature"—in part a term of endearment to be sure—and asks her "what" she is. Because ladies might use their preliminary drawings as a means of attracting the attention of an appropriate suitor, or as a form of "aesthetic dowry" in marriage negotiations, or even as a token of affection given within one's coterie, the inability to sketch came to signify a lack of taste and gentility. In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), for example, Mrs. Norris and her daughters find Fanny's lack of interest in sketching and music unimpeachable evidence of her stupidity and "want of genius and emulation."16 Moreover, Fanny's lack of interest marks her as a member of the lower middle class, a class distinction that Mrs. Norris, who is mindful of her own very precarious class position, finds useful. She sneers, "It is not at all necessary that she should be as accomplished as you are; on the contrary, it is much more desirable that there should be a difference" (55). But with characteristic wit, Jane Austen undermines the authority of these ladies by calling our attention to their deficiencies in "the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility" (55), thus poking fun at the middle-class rage for meaningless accomplishments.17 Nevertheless, what Austen makes clear is that without accomplishments like sketching, women lacked the currency necessary to participate in a middle- or upper-class marriage market.18 If accomplishments were to remain a reliable sign of gentility and taste, working-class women had no business becoming accomplished. Priscilla Bell Wakefield thus argued that "the acquisition of polite accomplishments, unless designed for a profession, should be confined to persons of leisure and superior rank, for they [such accomplishments] unfit others for the duties of their station, by refining their ideas too much for the sphere in which they are to act, and give them a taste for a luxurious life and dissipated pleasures, inconsistent with the happiness of themselves or their connexions."19 If working-class women became accomplished, then, they might yearn for a higher station. Even worse, accomplishments might give them an unbridled appetite for pleasures and thereby open the door to their complete moral degeneration. But the established order had more to fear from accomplished working-class women than just corrupt morality. According to Antonia Fräser, as early as the late seventeenth century, accomplishments became

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materially beneficial to even lower-class women.20 Accomplishments became a form of female currency to be used to improve a woman's social status. One such woman was Hannah Woolley, born in 1623 and left an orphan. Because she could speak Italian and play several musical instruments, Woolley attracted the patronage of a noble lady and was engaged as a governess. That position allowed her to become her lady's "Woman, Stewardess, Scribe and Secretary" (Fraser, 319). In her Gentlewoman's Companion (1675), Woolley baldly declared the economic power of such accomplishments, equating them with a "tithe." She wrote that she became obliged to write her book out of "the mere pity I have entertained for such Ladies, Gentlewomen and others, as have not received the benefits of the tithe of the ensuing accomplishments" (cited in Fraser, 319). While accomplishments might cause the corruption of working-class women, they were somewhat paradoxically critical to the preservation of leisure-class virtue. Although commonly thought of as "innocent amusements," female accomplishments for leisure-class women were hardly innocent; rather, they were part of a complex ideological ploy to keep women attached to the home. In an industrial age when "women's age-old occupations disappeared" one by one—"household spinning and weaving, brewing and baking, preserving and mending"—and with the corresponding rise in leisure time, attachment to the home had to be even more assiduously cultivated.21 In his Plan for the Conduct of Female Education (1797), Erasmus Darwin argued that "as the ladies in polite life have frequently much leisure time at their disposal, it is wise for them to learn many elegant as well as useful arts [i.e., drawing, embroidery ('painting with the needle')] in their early years; this will make them appear less solicitous to enter the circles of dissipation, and to depend less on the happiness or caprice of others."22 Speaking of accomplishments in general, Maria and R. L. Edgeworth argue that such skills "should cultivate those tastes which can attach them to their home" (Practical Education 3:6). Edgeworth elaborates, "Every sedentary occupation must be valuable to those who are to lead sedentary lives; and every art, however trifling in itself, which tends to enliven and embellish domestic life, must be advantageous, not only to the female sex, but to society in general" (3:7). The Edgeworths unfortunately did not have the benefit of reading Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals, written contemporaneously, which depict middle-class female life as anything but sedentary!23 And to further demonstrate the usefulness of these accomplishments, the Edgeworths cite a mother who exclaims, "I

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should wish my daughter to have every possible accomplishment; because accomplishments are so charming resources for young women, they keep them out of harm's way, they make a vast deal of their idle time pass so pleasantly to themselves and others!" (3:5). When women have more time on their hands, they must be kept "out of harm's way." The daily practice of sketching was one way of doing just that. To show how such accomplishments might preserve a lady's virtue, the Edgeworths' Practical Education offers a lesson in the exemplary history: that of Madame Roland, who was executed for establishing a salon where Brissot, Condorcet, Buzot, and other Girondins met regularly to plan a revolt against the Jacobin control of the French Convention, and who, more importantly to the Edgeworths, resourcefully occupied her time with drawing while in prison. To illustrate their point, the Edgeworth's include this journal entry from Madame Roland. I then employed myself in drawing until dinner time . . , the study of the fine arts, considered part of female education should be attended to, much less with a view to the acquisition of superior talents, than with a desire to give w o m e n a taste for industry, the habit of application, and a greater variety of employments; for these allow us to escape from ennui, the most cruel disease of civilized society; by these w e are preserved from the dangers of vice, and even from those seductions which are far more likely to lead us astray. ( 3 : 1 3 - 1 4 )

Because Madame Roland guided her husband's political philosophy and was executed, she would seem to represent the antithesis of the Edgeworths' ideal woman. If we place Madame Roland's journal entry, written near her death, in the context of her history, we find that her conviction that drawing has an overtly moral purpose—to preserve a woman from ennui, which preserves her from vice and seductions—has come about all too late. The Edgeworths seem to suggest that had Madame Roland recognized the virtues of drawing before she became involved in politics and had she chosen sketching over knowledge of Plutarch (at the age of eight) she might have been spared the guillotine. Sketching might have very literally kept her "out of harm's way." As the ability to sketch became increasingly commonplace by the late eighteenth century, however, even the most gifted sketching powers conferred only slight value upon women. Accomplishments became less and less reliable signs of class difference. The enormously influential evangelist Hannah More, for instance, found the middle-class rage for such accomplishments repugnant insofar as this took away from their "religious

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knowledge" and desire for "practical industry."24 Thus she labeled this "phrenzy of accomplishments" a disease which "unhappily is no longer restricted within the usual limits of rank and fortune; . . . the middle orders have caught the contagion, and it rages downward with increasing and destructive violence" (1:68). In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), so too does Bingley attest to the fact that he has "never heard of a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished."25 When every lady is expected to sketch, it is not so much the ability to do so that becomes remarkable, but its absence that is noteworthy. As the female sketch acquired an economic and social force of its own, its significance was redefined in such a way as to limit its powers. One strategy was to make a lady's true accomplishment not the sketch itself, but what she caught with her sketches, namely, a man. Jane Austen's Lady Susan Vernon suggests that "Singing, Drawing & c. will gain a Woman some applause, but will not add one Lover to her list."26 Although these accomplishments were needed to gain a man's interest, they are not in and of themselves sufficient. And given that a lady could not actively pursue her suitors, she had to rely upon men to use her "accomplishments" as an occasion for expressing their masculine desires. (I elaborate upon the sketch's relation to courtship rituals in Chapter 4.) Encoding the sketch in a complex system of feminine morality, moreover, meant that ladies would have the added burden of carefully negotiating this minefield when they sketched.27 Women who were "vulgar" enough to use their sketches as a form of female currency—that is, as way of gaining public admiration or a man's attention—became the subjects of censure. At the same time that women were supposed to acquire accomplishments such as sketching, they were warned not to exhibit their drawings publicly—at least not beyond the confines of an intimate coterie—lest approbation instill them with pride. Public display would serve only to jeopardize female modesty: the very lynchpin of their morality. Maria and R. L. Edgeworth warn in Practical Education (1801) that accomplishments should only be considered as "domestic occupations"—and therefore without currency—and "not as matters of competition, or of exhibition, nor yet as the means of attracting temporary admiration" (3:20). Hannah More put it more bluntly, arguing that a woman's talents are not "instruments for the acquisition of fame"; rather, such ambition is "subversive of her delicacy as a woman, and contrary to the spirit of a Christian."28 Women who desired to avoid public censure were faced with the difficult task—a

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double bind—of demonstrating their accomplishments without calling attention to them or making them overtly public. Any attempt to show their sketches would leave them vulnerable to charges ranging from a lack of decorum to a want of delicacy, thus femininity, and to unchristian thinking. More importantly, as Poovey has observed, vanity, "an incarnation of female appetite," was often considered a manifestation of uncontrolled sexual appetites as well. We can thus see why the proper lady and woman artist would want to be indirect and self-effacing by keeping her sketches private. At the same time, however, these increasingly constrained assumptions about the sketch indirectly testify to their growing influence and, in a larger view, are symptomatic of the crumbling of absolute private/public distinctions. The culturally accepted use of women's sketches to decorate the domestic interior, for instance, was part of a larger cultural transformation of the Romantic interior into a museum-like space.29 In drawing and sketching manuals written for women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ideas concerning women's artistic abilities dovetail with the moral strictures about sketching advocated in the conduct books.30 These manuals insist that the ability to draw properly signals a woman's general propriety and conduct. In his introduction to his Drawing Book for Ladies (1785), Carrington Bowles, who published dozens of drawing manuals for both men and women, declared that drawing is the most admired of all the arts, because it "teaches us to imitate all the works of the creation."31 Instructions about how to draw are systematically inflected with ideas about morality. Even the subtitles of this book are revealing. One considers "thс proper Materials for Drawing," and "the Conduct of the Teints of Lights and Shadows," as if knowledge of these skills obtained through the purchase of this relatively cheap manual might transform its purchaser into a competent sketcher and a proper lady and woman artist. The author of The Toung Ladies' Drawing Book even lectured his female audience on the proper way to purchase a camel-hair or sable paintbrush. He writes that "when dipped in water the hairs should form a point" and that "this is the proper mode of proving them when about to purchase, instead of the filthy practice of putting them in the mouth." 32 G. Brown prefaces his manual Every Lady Her Own Drawing Master (1799), a manual later plagiarized by George Brookshaw in 1816, by promising to help "unleash" female genius: At a time when female genius seems disposed to make every effort to exert itself, it is to be lamented that so many incorrect drawings are universally presented as copies to paint from; and it is equally surprising that but a few attempts have as yet been made to correct an evil so generally prevalent. 33

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The inability to sketch flowers properly or to discriminate between a correct and an incorrect drawing becomes not a simple lack of skill, but a sign of "evil." 34 This slippage from skill to morality demands the insistent judgment of men. In his manual, Brown continues, "the richest drapery . . . will avail little, if the wearer has not an elegant form and graceful action: so it is with painting flowers; if they are not drawn with freedom and ease, however highly finished . . . , they will not be held in high esteem" (22). Since her esteem for her own productions is clearly irrelevant, the female sketch becomes a kind of doubly alienated labor: if it is commodified, the sketcher flirts with prostitution, and if she places any value on it whatsoever, she becomes vulnerable to charges of immodesty. Brown's metaphors linking the sketch with her form and action and not dress, moreover, confer upon the sketch the power to reveal female essence. Hence, although Brown suggests that he will free female genius from its fetters, he carefully puts in place an even more powerful system of moral constraints. As Ann Bermingham observes, Brown's format—the placing of outline drawings alongside colored versions of the same, thus inviting ladies to trace his plates or even color them in—further widens the gap between these copies and works of art. 35 Not only are the outlines cheap reproductions, they merely require color (associated with femininity due to its sensuousness), and not line copying (masculine because of its associations with intellect). And by devoting just one short paragraph to the actual method of drawing outlines as compared to two and a half pages explaining how to color, Brown both insures the marginal status of female sketching and the serial publication of his next set of outlines. Like Bowles, Brown also insists that he teaches ladies that drawing is only a form of private amusement. This manual is expressly written for a lady who lacks a drawing master, but "wishes to amuse herself in painting" (4, emphasis mine). Unfinished and unpolished in its nature, the "sketch" offered a veil of self-effacement, making it attractive for women artists and writers. Insofar as women were only producing sketches and not finished works, that production was not immediately threatening, partly because strictures against display kept the majority of these sketches from directly entering the market.

Feminizing the Visual and Verbal Sketch At the heart of the tendency to identify the sketch as a female accomplishment were biological and epistemological theories that suggested, albeit

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not explicitly, that sketching was an act and mode for which women were naturally suited. The purportedly limited capacities of the female mind made the sketch's lack of completion uniquely suitable for women writers, artists, and readers. In fact, Elaine Showalter reminds us that, even as late as the Victorian period, scientists believed that "women's physiological functions diverted about twenty percent of their creative energy from brain activity."36 Masquerading under the sign of science, these pronouncements marked women as naturally and irrefutably less intelligent than men and, by extension, capable only of fragmentary works. But men were not the only proponents of natural differences in mental capacities between the sexes. In her 1793 Letters on the Female Mind: Its Powers and Pursuits, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins wrote a trenchant riposte to Helen Maria Williams's Letters from France Containing Sketches, arguing that Williams had broken natural law by trying to do more than adorn: It cannot, I think, be truly asserted, that the intellectual powers know no difference of sex. Nature certainly intended distinction;... the feminine intellect has less strength but more acuteness; consequently, in our exercise of it, we shew less perseverance and more vivacity. We are not formed for those deep investigations that tend to the bringing into light reluctant truth; . . . then it is within her province to give her spirit and decoration, which the less flexible and less volatile mind would fail in attempting. 37

Hawkins invokes a binary opposition between masculine and feminine mental capacities: the male is capable of deep, probing thought, while the female has greater "vivacity," "acuteness," and flexibility. By conceding that women were not naturally formed for "deep investigations that tend to bring to light reluctant truth," she implies that Williams's sketches have vainly attempted to transcend female abilities. If sketches by men could rely upon "spirit," "genius," "originality," and "authenticity" to redeem them from the unfinished and the quotidian, sketches by women, by contrast, could not transcend their incompletion, since anything more finished than "sketches" left a lady vulnerable to charges of "misapplication"—with its implied gesture toward corruptible morality. Hawkins even suggests that thinking will disfigure women insofar as the "contracted brow . . . and the motionless eye-ball . . . gives nothing to soft features." In this context, we might consider how Lord Byron's "A Sketch from Private Life" (1816) links the sketch, the feminine, and domestic space; Byron uses the sketch to remind his wife's servant of her proper place. Had Mrs. Clermont submitted to "master'd Science," which would have "tempt [ed] her

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to look down / On humbler talents with a pitying frown," and had she never learned "penmanship," Mrs. Clermont would never have dared, or been able publicly to slander Byron.38 If we return now to Hawkins, we find that men seek out "truth," while the women must remain content to add their "spirit and decoration." Claiming that these distinctions should not "degrade" the female sex, Hawkins insists that the categories are "natural." While this strategy does limit female mental capacities, Hawkins appropriates "vivacity," "acuteness," and "flexibility" as essentially female: they become her own "province," thus, in some admittedly limited way, empowering the female mind.39 As Mary Poovey aptly put it, "women had a clear investment in accepting naturalization of the feminine ideal."40 If the fragmentary nature of sketches appealed to women, so too did their relative informality. Indeed, the spontaneity of sketches often provided a safe outiet for women's feelings. In her Letters on the Female Mind, Hawkins writes: The peculiar properties of the female mind I should therefore reckon acuteness of perception, vivacity of imagination, and a concatenation of invention that disdains all limit. The corporeal part of our composition here lends its aid, and while it produces, perhaps, only pains to the body, adds every possible intellectual charm to the mind: our irritable nerves are our torments and our grace; we conceive quickly and clearly, we feel exquisitely. (10)

By arguing that a woman's corporeal pains, though "tormenting," add grace to her mind and enable her to "feel exquisitely" and more intensely than a man, Hawkins makes the female body a source of strength. Moreover, her sense of the biological relationship between "irritable nerves" and quickness of mental conception allows her to endow women with both biological fecundity and mental inventiveness. Rather than seeing mental expenditure at odds with a woman's natural abilities to conceive, Hawkins makes these categories mutually reinforcing. Given that the female mind perhaps drew upon corporeal pain to conceive quickly and clearly, and that her mind was fertile ground for invention, it is easy to see how and why the sketch —a form that played a crucial role in the invention process — would become gendered. So long as the female sketch neither claimed it was a finished product nor suggested sustained thinking, it might remain appropriately feminine.41 But the feminization of sketching was not without its dangers. Despite the fact that sketches were, it was argued, "naturally" suited for

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female mental capacities, some writers warned of the dangers of allowing women too much praise for their drawings. Thus the author of the article "The Miseries of Improper Education," part of which appeared in the May 1789 issue of Lady's Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, warned that if women were overly praised for their bold strokes, they might forget "habitual industry and assiduous integrity." Here, gentle reader, I cannot but wonder at the enterprizing genius of the age, which prefers "striking such bold strokes," to all the effects which may be produced by habitual industry and assiduous integrity. I shall dismiss the subject with only remarking that when we, in pursuit of fortune, aim at striking a bold stroke, instead of persevering in a course of industry, we exchange certainty for chance, contentment for anxiety, and nine times out of ten, rectitude for dishonesty. 42

Although some sketching preserves a lady's virtue, too much praise for too little accomplishment may prove pernicious. Women must not forget that such "bold strokes" are merely that. The danger here seems to be that because the sketch is both quickly produced and often much esteemed, women might forget the habits of industry. In a woman's efforts "to gain fortune"—which was itself very unladylike and could only be sought under conditions of necessity, such as the death of a husband—sketches might bring her more value than her labor and application justly deserve. I might recall here that the Royal Academy sought to privatize the sketch precisely for these reasons. In the hands of women, then, sketches could subvert an explicitly masculine artistic economy that defined "bold strokes" as antithetical to labor. In women, moreover, "boldness" might signify perversion, since it is a masculine trait that women should not desire. It is just this subversion that Hannah More would denounce in her Strictures (1799). Hawkins, of course, urged Williams to read more Hannah More. Addressing specifically women who "scribble" in order to achieve "fame," More warns: To extort admiration they are accustomed to boast of an impossible rapidity in composing; and while they insinuate how little time their performances cost them, they intend you should infer how perfect they may have made them had they condescended to the drudgery of application. They take superfluous pains to convince you that there was neither learning nor labour in the work for which they solicit praise: the judicious eye too soon perceives it. . . . Instead of extolling these effusions for their facility, it would be kind in friends rather to blame them for their crudeness. ( 2 : 1 1 )

Praise must only be exacted in direct proportion to the actual labor and pains involved. Anything more verges on criminal extortion. More recog-

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nizes the moral dangers for women in emphasizing rapidity of composition: the ethos of sketching tends to promote facility and speed over care and labor. The gendering of the sketch in the eighteenth century and its confinement to the private sphere lent a modicum of authority to women sketchers and writers. If this degree of representation was itself an act of power in Foucault's sense, the role of sketching in women's lives nonetheless contributed to the marginalization of women's sketches in two important ways. The first was to envision sketching as an extension of the domestic space—a placement which immediately devalued these drawings. For instance, Dora Wordsworth sketched not for her own sake, but for the pleasure of her immediate family. Her sketchbooks, now at Dove Cottage, no doubt owe their preservation to her kinship with William. A loose note in Mary Wordsworth's hand which is inserted at the beginning of her daughter's "Portuguese Sketchbook" of 1845 reads: H o w little did I expect so soon to part forever with my beloved Child. When she was explaining these drawings to her Father, and I attending to Something else. She said playfully, but somewhat reproachfully to me, "Mother, I took so much trouble, often when tired, to do my best for your sake, and give you pleasure, and you do not condescend to look, at my Drawings." Alas! 4 3

As this note suggests, the work of amateurs like Dora, and especially those of women, were regarded sentimentally rather than artistically.44 Such sentimental readings obscure Dora's talents: her sketches of Portugal carefully harmonize natural scenery and architecture (Figure 12). And since women were not supposed to exhibit them, sketches became treasured as a kind of domestic circulating medium in the pages of commonplace books—their very name attests to their quotidian nature—and in the pages of albums and sketchbooks, only to be seen by a coterie, or to be thrown away, or eventually to be shelved in some archive.45 Anne Rushout's sketchbooks (circa 1820s), now housed at the Yale Center for British Art, offer a glimpse of what can be lost by such neglect. Despite the monumental scale of her subject, Ely Cathedral (see Plate 1), Rushout's facility of handling is most evident in her ability to exploit negative space to capture the dynamism of atmosphere and the rigidity of stone 46 If this strategy did not altogether marginalize the woman's sketch, the private nature of these drawings made them inherently suspect. Take, for example, the warning of "a Lady" whose 1777 epistle on the cultivation of taste cautions women not to confine their reading to manuscripts, because they might be "incorrect" and "careless." By contrast, it was imperative for

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Figure 12. Dora Wordsworth, untitled, from her "Portuguese Sketchbook." The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage Library. ladies "to regulate [their] taste by published compositions."47 Public and published sources, then, were inherently better than private ones. Indeed, the irony was that women were providers of the very private sources they had to eschew so that ladies might preserve their taste from corruption.

Separate Easels Why was the sketch such an appropriate genre for women amateur artists? In a culture that widely believed professionalization of women would detract from both womanly and aristocratic virtues, the obstacles to a lady's artistic success were large indeed.48 As Leonore DavidofF and Catherine Hall put it, in the eighteenth century "high art implied a free floating individualism which ran counter to the modesty and willingness to divert energies to others, demands which were central to femininity." Time spent on painting professionally necessarily detracted from a woman's primary duties: the care of the household and husband, and the bearing and care of children.49 Because sketches purportedly did not demand as much in-

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