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The Artist as Celebrity in Victorian London
From: Science Museum
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Caroline Dakers |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
For Henry James, the taste for art in London was "the great fashion". Show Sundays and musical soirees at artists' studios, followed by the opening of the Summer Exhibitions at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery, were significant events in the London Season. Magazines and journals featured "peeps" into the lives and homes of the most fashionable artists, who posed in front of recent works. In this feature, based on a presentation to the "Locating the Victorians" conference in July 2001, Caroline Dakers outlines how the packaging and promotion of the artistic lifestyle could be as significant as the artistic product itself. Such factors determined whether an artist became rich in a period when--by present-day values--several did indeed become millionaires. |
 t is well documented that the second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age for British artists. There has never been a time, before then or since, when artists and sculptors could make so much money from selling their work. A large number also sold copies of their work.In addition, they offered themselves to wealthy patrons to decorate their houses, to become the sort of interior designers that we know now very well in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century society. They would provide friezes and wallpaper designs, they would design bookcases, furnishing, tiles, bookplates, even counterpanes for aristocratic ladies' beds. And these are not minor artists: they included artists such as Frederic Leighton. The Architect journal in 1877 commented on the way artists sold themselves so successfully. The reviewer wrote:
Within the last few years... there has been increasing tendency towards house-decoration, not only amongst men of wealth, but also amongst men of taste, and by degrees the services of the best artists have been enlisted for a cause on which the last generation of painters would have looked down, but which was warmly espoused by the greater painters of the Renaissance period. The revival of art furniture, the increasing influence of Japanese art, as its principles become better understood, and, above all, the rapid development of sociability as well as of social luxury of late years, have all tended in this direction. Artists like Mr Poynter and Mr Leighton have decorated the works of architects like Mr Aitchison and Mr Stevenson and the happy results may be seen in dozens of houses in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park and Kensington.
Some of these artists became richer than aristocrats: Frederic Leighton, president of the Royal Academy, with an income in excess of #20,000 a year, was made a peer of the realm (he unfortunately died a few days before he could take his seat in the House of Lords); Burne-Jones and Millais were made baronets; George Frederic Watts received the Order of Merit; many others were knighted. They were men within society, recognised as significant movers and, above all, gentlemen. |
Patrons and collectors
The novelist Wilkie Collins noted the number of collectors, the newly rich middle classes--industrialists, merchants and bankers--who wanted to buy the work. Without the patrons these artists would not, of course, have made the money that they did, and he wrote that these new collectors wanted to buy 'interesting subjects; variety, resemblance to nature; genuineness of the article, and fresh paint'. Very importantly, they also wanted to get to know the artists so that they could be assured that the paint they were paying for was fresh, and came from living artists. Henry James was rather more critical. He called these collectors 'unimaginative and unaesthetic... the British merchant and paterfamilias and his excellently regulated family'. He abhorred their love of subject pictures, which he called the 'anecdotical class'. |
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| Paintings such as Marcus Stone's Two's Company, Three's None (1892) were extremely popular among the merchant classes. | |
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William Michael Rossetti analysed the motives of these collectors, in particular the business man who turned picture-buyer; He feels it is a privilege to be made free of the art-precincts and promoted into the intimacy of a great or a distinguished painter. He is apt to find the world of art much more entertaining than the world of commerce; and, while pluming himself upon having converse with persons whose names are in all men's mouths, he can still feel, in a certain sense, he himself 'rules the roost', as all these fine performances would collapse without a purchaser to sustain them. Some of the strategies adopted by late Victorian artists to promote their work, to engage with business men, very often had little to do with their paintings or the subject of their paintings, and much more to do with the way they lived, their willingness to be interviewed , to be photographed, to succumb to the expectations of the public and to fulfil, again in Henry James's words, that observation that art in this period in England had become 'a great fashion'. There are many links between this period and the era we are now seeing, certainly in Britain, where artists have been dubbed the 'Brit' artists. Through exhibitions like Sensation, the activities of Charles Saatchi, magazines such as Hello, we are taken into the homes, the lives, the very intimate sex lives of some artists--Tracey Emin, for example. In the late nineteenth-century period we see something that is very close, that is actually the beginnings of an approach to art and the celebrity of artists with which we are now familiar. |
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| Caroline Dakers outlines the importance of being Leighton's neighbour. | |
The grandest and most expensive strategy that many artists in the second half of the nineteenth century could adopt was to build a house and a studio to which potential collectors could be invited. But they also had to make sure that the property was advertised in the appropriate magazines and journals. Such artists never merely produced a work of art. They were always interested in the selling of that work, in the way in which it could be consumed by the public, either in its original form or in reproduction. The articles that were written suggest a very close relationship between the journalist and the artists themselves--some were indeed friends, but with others it is possible to sense in reading these articles a closeness of understanding of what the artist required from the journalist. |
Luke Fildes and Marcus Stone
A few years after Leighton began building his house, two artists--Luke Fildes and Marcus Stone--decided to gamble all in building houses for themselves in nearby Melbury Road. In 1875 they acquired plots, they both went to Norman Shaw and commissioned work from him. And within five years, they were in their houses and their houses were being featured in the Building News. What is interesting here is not just the houses, but the way they were presented to the reading public. The people who would pick up Building News had an architectural interest; those who read Queen magazine, which also featured interviews with the artists, would be more interested in lifestyle and their social habits. Here we're given not only the designs but also the plans of the houses. The public would know how the artists lived, not just within their studios, but as family men. And patrons going to these houses, who were themselves business men, industrialists and merchants, could feel comfortable visiting houses which had accommodation (eventually, in Luke Fildes case) for seven servants. They were moving into houses rather like their own--a little smaller, but similar--so they felt at ease buying work from men who they could believe in, that they wanted to invest their money in. |
As well as revealing their houses to the public, artists revealed themselves, their appearance--they were photographed constantly and they were 'written up'.  Particularly interesting is the fact that the artists who engaged in these relationships with the press and the public seemed to want to be seen as 'manly men'. They were artists who pushed their masculinity. They were very definitely heterosexual. No secret lives were hinted at in these articles in the journals (Whistler was not featured in this way, nor was Albert Moore). Luke Fildes appeared in the Strand in 1893, looking more like a bank manager than an artist, but supposedly at work in front of his paintings. He was described in this way:He talks to you earnestly, as though he considered that nothing should be said or uttered without thought. Every word, with him, has its due weight and value... That he is in love with his work is unquestionable, but the studio--and only an artist knows its fascinations--has not severed him from home ties. His wife is his constant companion... There are four boys...
 The works that Marcus Stone and Luke Fildes produced again seem designed to give this confidence to the merchants and the business men who were coming to buy. Marcus Stone produced endless pictures which were virtually all the same, for example Two's Company, Three's None (above), and Married for Love. He produced these year on year, three or four large canvases every year, selling to collectors such as Sir John Aird, the engineer who built the Assuan and Assyut dams across the Nile, a man of action, a man who would appreciate the tall, military, upright stance of Marcus Stone. |
 This is a typical picture by Fildes from 1889, An Alfresco Toilette, sold to George McCulloch who made his fortune in Australia from his silver mine, came back to England and set himself up in South Kensington, surrounding himself with an extraordinary collection of art. Again, a man of action, a man who saw a connection between his own life and these artists who conveyed confidence, good investment potential, luxury and fashionability. |
These articles, which gave the public who couldn't come to London an opportunity to feel they were in the studios, were placed in journals with advertisements for the engravings, giving a list of what could be bought. The prices were accessible, and it is a fact that many of these artists made their fortunes almost more from the engravings of their works of art than through the original one-off painting. Frederick Holyer was the most successful photographer of artists' work in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was particularly famous for his photographs of Burne-Jones's work. People went to his studio in Kensington to see the photographs, so his own practice mirrored that of that artists, and their practice in their own studios in Kensington. |
Listen to Caroline Dakers discussing the popularity of Luke Fildes' painting The Village Wedding.
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Forgotten artists
In conclusion, there is one case study of an artist who sank without trace, despite the fact that during his lifetime he successfully used the strategies outlined above. Herbert Schmalz limped along behind the major artists even in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of his career, he couldn't afford to build a whole house with a studio for himself, so he moved into a small studio in Holland Park Road. His small studio--one of about eight in the block occupied by artists--was almost next to Leighton, by then president of the Royal Academy, whom he immediately befriended. He showed at the Royal Academy and at the Grosvenor Gallery. He employed various gimmicks--again, a late twentieth-century trait. He acquired a fourteen-stone boarhound, and whenever he was at the Grosvenor Gallery during private views, he took the dog with him and tied it up outside, so that he public knew that Herbert Schmalz was there and available for private conversation and, perhaps, the purchase of a work of art. He painted Leighton's favourite models, the Dene sisters, and in fact he married one of them--Edith Dene--and possibly slept with Dorothy Dene, Leighton's best known model. |
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| Schmaltz's Holland Park studio as it exists today, worth far in excess of the £1,000 it cost to build. | |
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His paintings frequently involved the tying-up of women, a lot of execution and death by various means, and one might expect that at the time his works might have raised questions of taste, but he regularly invited journalists into his studios to discuss them. A description in the Strand of how Schmaltz had used his fifteen-year old model for Christians and Lions ran as follows: No-one can fail [in looking at the painting] to notice how the bonds which bind the girl to the post seem to cut into the soft flesh of her arms. This was realised absolutely by the model, for Mr Schmalz had a post erected in his studio and bound the girl to it exactly as represented. Within the limited area of the panel it will be noticed how the whole spirit of the large picture has been retained, even the mark in the foreground of the chariot-wheel, which is thrown to one side the thigh and the shin-bone of some long dead-and-gone martyr who had perished for the sake of her faith. With the success of paintings like Christians and Lions, Schmaltz made enough money to build his own house. On Addison Road, still in Holland Park, he acquired a large house and commissioned a whole studio to himself, which cost over £1,000. His house and studio survive (now valued at several million pounds). His reputation did not, although interestingly Christians and Lions has recently been sold at Christie's for over £50,000. |
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