Constructing the Victorian Artist National Identity, the Political Economy of Art and.pdf

Constructing the Victorian Artist: National Identity, the Political Economy of Art andBiographical Mania in the Periodical PressAuthor(s): Julie F. CodellSource: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Fall, 2000), pp. 283-316Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for VictorianPeriodicalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20083750 .

Accessed: 13/11/2013 13:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and The Johns Hopkins University Press are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Victorian Periodicals Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:11:58 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rsvp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rsvp

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20083750?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Constructing the Victorian Artist:

National Identity, the Political

Economy of Art and Biographical Mania in the Periodical Press*

JULIE F. CODELL

In a statement defending the popular mania for artists' biographies, The

Art Journal in an 1856 biography of James Clarke Hook called artists

"public property," who as such deserved the public's scrutiny of their

works, their bodies, the "sanctity" of their homes, and the "solitude" of

their studios (41). This panoptical surveillance was overdetermined by a

number of changes in artists' status and social roles. The extreme popular

ity of biographies in the nineteenth century has often been ascribed to the

public's voracious appetite for hero worship, but around mid-century this desire conflicted with new historicist notions of documentation and

veracity. Debates over whether to hide biographical subjects' warts or to

display them dominated discussions over biography's purpose and value. But artists faced a special set of problems in addition to these issues. The

Romantic "genius," slightly mad and beyond social conventions (Kriz), was fading from association with artists, and creativity was being replaced

by the language of productivity as artists were increasingly identified as

workers. Yet, artists were still represented in novels as poor, undomesti

cated, bohemians (Jeffares). Later in the century, artists were further

denounced as degenerates by an emerging, often hysterical, scientizing lit erature that crudely blended discourses from biology and psychology (Codell, JPRS and "Victorian Artists' Family Biographies").

This focus on artists was the result of their new-found success. Having been catapulted to positions of wealth and status by the art market surge of the 1860s, artists became national icons by the 1880s, and their works

and characters were idealized as morally sound, thoroughly manly, and

fundamentally "English." The scrutiny of artists as public property, then,

sprang from the conflict between their recent material success as a class

that gave them a new national profile, and stereotypes of them as degener ate or bohemian. These conflicts were further aggravated by the increas



284 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000

ing commercialism that threatened the Ruskinian interpretation of art as

an ideal expression and of the artist as exempt from economic and social

demands. The otherworldly artist was idealized by John Ruskin in A Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Art (1857; reprinted in 1880). Ruskin's

ideal artist, what I call a prelapsarian artist, was purposely ignorant of

economics and entirely outside the social hierarchy. Ruskin argued that

the state should educate and control artists by monitoring and even deter

mining their production. Artists, in Ruskin's view, were best cloistered to

make art, like children at play. Their economic subordination to the state

and to their patrons would then protect them from the forbidden knowl

edge of political economy and the Fall of Mammon. This image, which

also dominated the writings of Vernon Lee (In Umbria) and many other

critics, biographers, and novelists condemned the very material and social successes that gave artists their new opportunity to be biographical subjects.

The periodical press mediated these differences by asserting a profes sional image of the artist to encourage public consumption of works by

living English artists. Professionalism encompassed the idealist image of

the educated, gentlemanly artist and the actuality of artists working on

their own behalf in a highly commercial field. A profession was a calling, but it also meant autonomy in the marketplace, including the freedom to

set one's own prices.1 Photographs and descriptions in the press of artists'

sumptuous homes and studios celebrated their fame, wealth, and social

ity, while, juxtaposed to these images were statements, often made by art

ists in interviews, that they were motivated by higher purposes, such as a

love of beauty or patriotism. The press filled its pages with the success of

British artists, their prizes, commissions, and high prices. Artists "on the

highway to prosperity," as The Art Journal described Hubert von Herko mer (Dafforne, The Art Journal [1880]: 109), were the most popular sub

jects of press gossip and brief notes, as well as of its many biographical series that appeared from the 1850s into the early twentieth century.2

Artists were not shy in money matters nor were they ignorant or sub

ordinate to patrons or to the public. Assertively intervening in their own

public representation, artists negotiated with dealers, editors, and critics

about their economic realities, their new role as representatives of

national identity, and their childlike, prelapsarian "artistic nature." In the

vast sea of letters to critics like F.G. Stephens and to publishers, such as

M.H. Spielmann (Codell 1989), artists conveyed news and information

they wanted printed in a timely way to titillate the public about works in

progress - a drawing or maquette in preparation for the RA exhibition -

and to provoke potential consumers while appearing to be driven by aes

thetics and the work ethic. Artists exploited their networks, including each other, to gain economic security and social recognition. When F.G.



JULIE F. CODELL 285

Stephens wrote obituaries, he often asked contemporaries of the deceased

artists to examine and correct his copy (Richard Redgrave to Stephens, Bodleian ms. don. d. 116, 9 June, 1875, fols. 96-97; Alfred Fripps to

Stephens, Bodleian ms. don d. 116, 17 Mar 1885, fols. 243-46, Bodleian

Library, Oxford). Through such channels artists wrote each other's post humous biographies, sustaining reputations and market values to the

advantage of the entire profession. Press biographers quoted artists

directly or drew on posthumous and thoroughly subjective domestic

biographies written by adoring wives and children (e.g., Wilkie Collins's

biography of his father, William Collins, cited as a source for The Art

Journal's biography of William Collins, 141). Through interviews and

photographs of their homes, studios, and bodies, and reproductions of

sketches and drawings that appeared to translate the creative process into

labor, artists collaborated with the press to represent a new professional

image.

The periodical press dominated this new art discourse and sought to

mediate conflicting forces of money, idealism, mass consumption, and

respectable professionalism. One means of achieving these ends was to

validate and naturalize artists' economic and social success, in opposition to Ruskin's ideal artist. Frederic Smallfield in an essay in the Temple Bar

in 1885 condemned exhibition spectators for merely gawking and social

izing rather than buying art (252). Buying the art of living artists was a

contribution to national culture and wealth, he argued, as well as a way of

securing the survival of British culture into the future. Smallfield called

the picture gallery "a picture shop" where artists came primarily to earn a

livelihood (254). He admonished artists to "sell all your pictures (if you

can), and then call in the fiddlers and the florists" who turned exhibitions

into social events (255). Smallfield wanted the exhibition to function for

the sake of sales, divorced from its accrued social activities and functions.

S. Cameron argues that critics provide a form of advertisement, shape

reputations as a form of capital, create a market for their criticism, as well as for the object of their criticism, and influence "higher order prefer ences," or

meta-preferences by validating the consumers' self-image

through concepts of proper taste (322-323). Critics shape these areas of

value and consumption by repetition and display of expertise - their spe

cial knowledge of the artist's place in the canon or their application of

esoteric aesthetic discourse. These performances create demand and shape consumers' perceptions and purchases: "The weight of the canon of

received work is a burden on potential consumers. This can be eased by critics but may conflict with their tendency to promote originality" (329).

Victorian critics lobbied for originality as both an artistic and an English trait, as they also situated works within the canon with its "fallout" values

of historical validation, economic worth, and cultural capital. Such critical




tasks and roles were precisely the same for Victorian biographers as for

critics. Biographers negotiated the artist's subjectivity between tradition and innovation and created artists who mirrored consumers' identities of

nation, race, and the social order, supporting a mutual interdependence among critics, biographers, artists, and the public (329). Biographies in

the press repeatedly defended artists against popular stereotypes and

against their own commercial successes to present them as domesticated, socialized, clubby, diligent, high-minded, and paterfamilial.

The very appearance of artists in biographies heralded their changing status and their importance as representatives of national identity. As

William Epstein points out:

The entrance of a biographical subject into written discourse is still a momentous

occasion, an event that can, among other things, reaffirm cultural eminence, con

textualize social action, alter literary opinion, deputize political influence, or

instruct economic conduct, -

and this admissions procedure, which is always in

crisis, is constantly (if not often consciously) surveilled in and through biographi cal recognition, which, in this respect, functions as the generic agency of the pro

prietary powers. (1991: 222)

A modern notion of culture underlies this elevation of artists into biogra

phy. Ernest Gellner defines culture as

no longer merely the adornment, confirmation and legitimization of a social order

which was also sustained by harsher and coercive constrictions; culture is now the

necessary shared medium, the lifebook or perhaps the minimal shared atmo

sphere, within which alone the members of the society can breathe and survive

and produce. For a given society it must be one in which they can all breathe and

speak and produce; so it must be the same culture [...] it can no

longer be a diversi

fied, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition. (37-38)

Thus, the identification between readers and biographical subjects was

essential in the context of culture as a vital constituent of civic identifica

tion.

A single image of the Victorian artist did not emerge from this volumi

nous literature. The biographical treatment of artists persistently ranged from anecdotal sensationalism to calculated professionalism. In a series in

The Art Journal entitled "The Romance of Great Artists," Mary E. Wager in 1876 braided together brief anecdotal and sensationalistic paragraphs, each about a famous artist of the past. Focusing on love affairs and miser

able marriages, Wager revealed that Paul Rembrandt Vanrym "was a man

of low origin, of basest stamp of character, but of original genius" (248); that Paul Potter "fell in love when very young with the pretty daughter of



JULIE F. CODELL 287

his neighbour" (248); that Jeanne Paul Slingeland "was famous for the

length of time it took him to paint a picture" (248); that Titian's marriage was unhappy (155); that Tintoretto's wife caused him to paint "twice as

many pictures as he ought" (156). The appearance of such anecdotage in

The Art Journal alongside defenses of art-making as a profession, an eco

nomic contribution to the nation, and a source of aesthetic uplift embraced competing means for promoting readers' identifications with

artists and with a homogenized national culture.

Despite a range of types personified in biographies, the particular con

fluence of idealism and the market in the construction of the artist became a uniquely Victorian episteme that converged in a typology of English artists. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, discourse about art constitutes art's

cultural meanings; the "work of art" is generated by all the verbal and

visual commentary about art-criticism, catalogues, biographies, exhibi

tions. These commentaries generate "a struggle for the monopoly of legit imate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the

production of the value of the work of art" (110-111). One characteristic

of the artistic field, as Bourdieu defines it, is its misrecognition as purely aesthetic or sacred, unmotivated by economics (77). Public, artist, dealer, and critic must all share this misrecognition to perpetrate a charismatic

ideology that anchors our belief in the work of art as spiritual or national, in artists' labor as sacred, and in art's price

as a unique surplus value. Mis

recognition dominated artists' biographies as they negotiated artists'

image in the context of social formation (hero worship and professional ism), art production and exchange values (living artists vs. Old Masters,

patronage vs. new buyers), and national identity. Such contradictions exemplified Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkhe

imer's "culture industry," their term for mass culture's subjection to the

organizational principles and values of industrial capitalism (29-31). Art

ists' biographies shared many of the characteristics Adorno and Horkhe

imer identified as traits of the culture industry (37-39). Biographers obsessed over artists' individualism and work ethic, insisting on each art

ist's uniqueness despite the similarity of their lives and in many cases of

their subjects, techniques, and audiences. The debate over the relationship between the artist's work and life was constant throughout the century, and the Victorian reader experienced considerable identification with the

biographical subject both as innovative ("daring") and as representative of

Englishness, a concept embracing individualism, self-help, nationalism,

domesticity, manliness, and the work ethic. Differences were homoge nized and artists were regulated, textualized, and commodified into the

public property Victorians needed them to be in order to allow them to

shape the culture that everyone breathed and inhabited.

Exemplary of the thorough embeddedness of biographical literature in




the culture industry was the advertising that accompanied artists' biogra

phies in The Art Journal's Art Annuals in the late 1880s to fit artists into

the larger world of goods. These popular volumes appeared at Christmas

and Easter. Among the culture objects advertised were illustrated table

books on foreign countries; a production gallery for sculpture; Osier's

Table Glass and China; books on a wide range of topics (three-volume novels, children's books, books on art, geography, interior design, health,

history, wild animals, yachts, and aesthetics, illustrated books); artistic

cards; artists' proof etching; subscriptions to The Magazine of Art', furni

ture; metal, wood, and stone factory-made objects; leaded windows; gar

dening seeds; Millais engravings at bargain prices; cough remedies; and

gems. Such advertising exposed a context for art within a range of cheap books and prints, wide ranging interests in several disciplines, and domes

tic decoration, spheres unabashedly linked but which we now consider

discrete. The biography of a successful artist, added to reproductions of

high art and a critic's fulsome praise, might "raise" the advertiser into the

realm of high culture, imparting good taste or reputation to face powder or cocoa. Thus ads and biographies collaborated, perhaps in ways not

unlike collaborations between today's corporations and museums.

The admission of commercialism, however, was not without restric

tions. The press promoted artists through a regulatory discourse in biog

raphies and in its promotion of a political economy of art that sutured

public and artist:

Every artist who has reached a high position becomes, from the very elevation to

which he has raised himself, public property, so to speak: that is, the public whose

favourable suffrages he has won by his works, feel also an interest in the individ

ual who created them: they desire -

and the desire is legitimate and perfectly rea

sonable - to learn some of his life and history [...]. Such a man can no more expect

to escape observation -

and mark, it is not the eye of impertinent curiosity that

seeks him out, and that would penetrate even the solitude of this studio and, to a

certain extent, even the sanctity of his domestic hearth - than a great legislator,

or

a renowned warrior, or a successful author, or any other who soars above the

range of common men. It is the penalty, if it be so considered, each pays for his

position and popularity: the man himself may be indifferent to the praises or the censures of his biographer; [...] but as the history is the inevitable result of the

reputation, he must make up his mind that when he has himself achieved the one, sooner or later somebody will effect the other for him. (biography of James

Clarke Hook, The Art fournal 7 [1856]: 41)

This passage serves to restrict artists' new fame and fortune by the regula tion of them through biographies. "Suffrage" is an intriguing term; it

enfranchises the public and entitles it to scrutinize artists as soon as a suf



JULIE F. CODELL 289

ficient straw vote of popularity is cast. The public had a role overseeing cultural production and especially its producers whose characters could

affect (or infect) the cultural products that became m?tonymie of the

nation itself. Artists' lives were suddenly important, as they would ulti

mately determine "history." Carlyle and others envisioned biography's purpose as defining an age, as Vasari's Lives of the Artist had defined the

Italian Renaissance. History was the sum of its geniuses' lives.

Key to the hygienic representation of artists was the articulation of the

balance between the artist's "real" motivation and consequence success, which included popularity and unity with the public, as well as material

wealth. A formulation of an acceptable political economy of artists, as

well as of art, was consistent with The Art Journal's concern with what it

called "art commerce." Samuel Carter Hall, first editor and founder of the

journal in 1839, bragged that in the beginning "I had to create a public for Art," by blending "information and instruction with interesting and use

ful intelligence" (Retrospect I: 197). The presentation of artists as ordi

nary, respectable citizens had an impact on evaluations and expectations of artists' social and national roles, as well as on the consumption of art

works. Hall sought to curtail purchases of Old Masters and provoke pur chases of living ones (Retrospect I: 199; Mancoff). He wanted "to show

'the commercial value of the Fine Arts,' that 'beauty is cheaper than

deformity,'" in reference to applied art and manufacturing ("Farewell to

S.C. Hall," The Art Journal [1880]: 354). Like most art press editors, he

argued for better fees for painters (Spatt 53). The Art Journal regularly

published the year's sales, detailing objects' prices, owners, buyers, and

dates of auction sales (e.g., Alfred Beaver, "Art Sales of 1884," The Art

Journal [1884]: 261-64; Walter Rowlands, "The Art Sales of 1887," The

Art Journal [1887]: 294-95). Knowledge of the market was recognized by the press as a vital part of artists' professional knowledge.

The art press promoted the surplus value of beauty and artist's dual roles in manufacture, providing added value of beauty to objects and con

suming raw art materials. P.L. Simmons in "Art-Aids to Commerce"

(The Art Journal [1872]: 295-96) recognized that "taste is a marketable

commodity, which being of so much value is worth getting honestly, and

by fair purchase." Simmons demonstrated that thanks to British art the

balance of trade in 1871 was in the black. Increased demand for art

abroad, as well as at home, supported the national income through a vari

ety of "artistic" goods: from marble statues and lithographic stone, which

contributed ?300,000, to lace (imports of foreign lace at ?750,000 sterling,

pillow-lace alone at ?383,617, and machine-made imitation lace,

?371,394), and artificial flowers, the latter producing ?115,712 in 1860 and

?367,186 in 1871. Bronze manufactures declined but imported statuary marble increased and, combined with slate and other stones, amounted to




?266,264 in imports. Simmons lists the value of imported goods, such as

oil painting (?240,869), engravings and photos (?59,714), frames for pic tures (?9,498), opera-glasses (?49,412), and marble (?159,636), all totaling ?1,834,394. Exports of British manufactured art-related goods in 1871 included earthenware at ?1,731,483, furnishings at ?258,945, woolen car

pets at ?1,648,411, and "Works of Art" at ?4,434, for a grand total of

?6,203,557. Simmons concluded by estimating the service to commerce

by art as even greater, as he had not included "all the artist's materials, and

the value of designs and invention, and all those Art-embellishments

which form part and parcel of the commercial value of Art" (296). The

professional art discourse was keen on mapping art's economic contribu

tions to national wealth, balanced by the symbolic capital accrued by art

ists heroized in biographies. The power of the press to transform artists' public status was enhanced

by the relatively closed circulation of information. As Laurel Brake

points out, critics commonly wrote for several periodicals and newspa

pers, sometimes recycling and sometimes revising their articles, modify ing tone, style, and politics for diverse audiences (Brake 10-11). Links

were also international, as the art market became global. The French critic

Robert de la Sizeranne in his book English Contemporary Art based his assessments of English artists largely on British press biographies and interviews. Biographies in The Art Journal cited the Revue des Deux

Mondes as a source of critical reviews and information about English art

ists (biography of James Ward, The Art Journal [1855]: 47), indicating a

cross-channel sharing of press sources. Some biographers published in

several places; F.G. Stephens wrote a biography of James Clarke Hook for The Art Journal which became an Art Annual edition, and another

biography of Hook for The Portfolio. The circulation of knowledge was

further distilled, as press biographies later became books in popular series

published by periodicals' publishers (Codell, "Serialized Artists' Biogra

phies," 1999). George Newnes published a biographical series, Newnes

Art Library, and The Strand Magazine. George Virtue published The Art

Journal and its biographies as separate Annuals, as well as artists' biogra

phies in book form. Richmond Seeley published The Portfolio, and then

reprinted The Portfolio's biographies as series of monographs under the

title The Portfolio Artistic Monographs. As Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday the firm published The Portfolio's series "English Painters of the Present

Day" in several volumes of collections of essays in 1871. Cassell's pub lished The Magazine of Art and a biographical series, Gems of Art. Otto

Limited published biographies from The Connoisseur.

Press biographies then, widespread and recycled, successfully regulated the image of the artist, as the artist became a textual creation. Epstein describes biography as "an agent in the great chain of enterprise, another



JULIE F. CODELL 29I

institutional channel through which the modern state can materially pro duce or reproduce the individual in this world" (Epstein, 1987, 67). Art

ists themselves attested to the importance of reading biographies. T.S.

Cooper wrote, "I had read every book I could get hold of about artists

and their work" (Cooper 7%), as did Benjamin Haydon: "Every life of

every great man he could get hold of he read eagerly. Let loose among his

father's books, he fed his sensibilities and excited his own ambition by

reading the lives of ambitious men" (Frederic Haydon 9). The architect

George Aitchison read the Life of Haydon by Tom Taylor (art critic for

the Times) to Frederic Leighton as he worked in the studio (Corkran 21).

Regulation of artists' personae became necessary as artists' cultural

importance demanded appropriate parameters around their behaviors. As

part of its process of regulation, serialized biographies ranged from Old

Masters to moderns, embedding moderns into a tradition it was also

simultaneously creating because that very "tradition" to which biogra

phies appealed was unofficial and still under construction. These series

had a cumulative effect beyond the merely additive one: issue after issue

spewed forth yet one more great English artist, indicating a "depth" of

British culture that became a kind of lay canon and as such validated the

cultural hegemony it was itself creating. Sometimes a biography was quite

literally about the subject, including quirks, anecdotes, reminiscences, while other lifewritings treated the personality in question as an embodi ment of a transcendental "Artist." Biographical subjects could take on

tremendous cultural responsibilities as "a means of evoking an essential

character and personality, an agent, in effect, of humanism" to produce what James Clifford called a "narrative of transindividual occasions"

(cited in Shortland/Yeo 14). Sometimes this self was further read as

embodying the personality of a nation.

Biographical literature and professional activity both endorsed an artist

brotherhood of cooperating, collaborating, sharing information, and

keeping women out. Few women artists appeared in press biographies or

individual biographies; there were enough to count on one hand - Kate

Greenaway, Helen Allingham, Henrietta Rae, Rosa Bonheur, Elizabeth

Thompson. The notion of artistic brethren was also a way of circling the

wagons against French Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and France's

growing popularity as a training ground for young British artists. As the

biographical discourse intersected with discourses of history, national

unity, gender, and race, the dominant trope of "brother artists" served to

metaphorize biological determinism to assure racial purity and bourgeois respectability. All English artists were thus "related," their genealogy resistant to degeneracy, except, of course, for those polluted through study in France.

In the art press serialized biographies first appeared in The Art Jour




nal's original incarnation as The Art-Union. "Portraits of British Artists" was comprised of one-column long laudatory biographies that idealized

hard-work as the promise that the artist's "latest production has been

always his best" (on Frith, The Art Journal [1847]: 164). Maclise, for

example, was "a leading glory of the British School [...] whose fame has

been extended throughout Europe" (The Art Journal [1847]: 164). These

mini-biographies included engraved portraits of the artists done by other

artists - Maclise by Edward M. Ward and Frith by Augustus Egg - rein

forcing the brotherhood ideal (The Art Journal [1847]: 165). The Art

Union also ran a series "Great Masters of Art," long biographies of Old

Masters with full-page engravings of their major works. Thus, the journal

produced parallel sets of biographies of the living and the dead, their fame

leveled and equaled by such biographical attention and England's national

culture raised by association.

In 1855 The Art Journal began a series entitled "British Artists: their

Style and Character," illustrated by large full- or half-page engravings of

paintings by prominent engravers, such as the Dalziel Brothers, J. and G.

Nicholls, J.W. Whymper, Butterworth, and Heath. This series assumed a

metaphoric relationship between artists' characters and styles and sought to find a common denominator between these two. Each essay began

with a truism of progress: "there is a peculiar interest and pleasure in

watching the progress of a young artist, from the time when he manifests

such indications of superiority as to attract especial notice, through all the

several stages of advancement, till he has won for himself an imperishable name" (biography of Edwin Ward, The Art Journal [1855]: 45). The essay on Frederick Goodall divided artists into those who "seem always to live

in perpetual sunshine, others to dwell amid clouds and darkness"; some in

meditation, some light-hearted; some whose friends are lowly and some

whose friends are aristocrats (The Art Journal [1855]: 109). Artists were

set into a typology of characters and a trajectory of careers, in order that

artistic temperament and style could be locked together in a kind of twin

identity.

Popularity was not condemned but considered a sign that artists were

hard-working and acceptable to an equally industrious British public. Artists had a presumably organic artistic development. Artistic develop ment was likened to a plant, growing with "unfolding petals [...] towards

maturity and perfection" (biography of Edward Ward, The Art Journal

[1855]: 45). Such natural development could be damaged or halted if art

ists became either disheartened "by neglect," or "spoiled by injudicious

flattery and untimely success," or "overcome by indolence" (the dangers Ruskin warned against in The Political Economy of Art). Ideally artists

should persist through hardships by dint of "self-reliance to overcome"

difficulties and succeed: no man ever became great without working



JULIE F. CODELL 293

assiduously for his object. Reputation is not to be had for the mere ask

ing" (biography of Edward Ward, The Art Journal [1855]: 45). Labor was a simpler value to define and recognize than was talent. The

discourse of heredity and environment invaded The Art Journal in

the area of inherited talent, and writers came down on both sides of the

debate: "Talent, or genius, is very far, as a rule from being hereditary; yet it would be strange indeed if it were not sometimes found descending from one generation to another when the individual is surrounded, even

from the cradle, by everything that would be able to develop, if not cre

ate, it," as in the case of Henrietta Ward, whose father, grandfather, mother, and husband were all artists (Dafforne, The Art Journal [1864]:

357). Yet even Ward was encouraged to "attain the highest position" by

diligence (359). A few years later, however, James Dafforne wrote, "Tal ent is often found to be hereditary" (biography of Stone, The Art Journal

[1869]: 33). Authors speculated that artists were set apart by tempera ment: "artists, as a body of men, are cast in a different mould; the nature

of their occupation, thoughtful, silent, sedentary, tends to promote that

peculiarity of feeling which seems to be an inherent portion of their exist

ence" even after their fame placed them beyond personal anxiety over

critics' comments (biography of Hook, The Art Journal [1856]: 41). But

they were also central to cultural improvement and thus active, as well as

"silent, sedentary": "One of the highest aims of artists ought to be to

make Art teacher of moral, of social, or of religious truths" (Dafforne,

biography of Redgrave, The Art Journal [1859]: 205).

Biography's discursivity with other topics such as biological determin

ism and philosophical idealism produced a set of contradictory ideologies about the artistic persona in The Art Journal. Series' changes in length, didacticism, and heroic idealism reflected an increasing professionalism, as well as a higher national profile of artists. From 1858 to i860 the series

"Tombs of British Artists" ran alongside "Living Artists," linking present and past into a vague continuity that became a "tradition." The 1859 "Personal Recollections of Artists" combined biography and anecdotage but ran for only a few issues. In 1873 a revised version of the original series on British artists, written by James Dafforne under a "Works of"

umbrella, focused more on works than on biography. In 1880 "Artists'

Studios" appeared complete with studio floor plans, followed in 1883 by the series "Artists Houses." Studios and houses were popular subjects and exposed a variety of new complex socio-economic issues that came to

replace the moral ones: the social arrivisme of artists, their material

wealth, and their success as measures of the sutured identities binding the

English artist to the English public. Homes and studios became rich symbols of artistic moral and national

character, reaching the status of fetishized spaces. In the 1881 series "The




Homes of our Artists," The Magazine of Art featured Leighton and Mill

ais. Leighton's house was "a substantial modern building - a house of

generous and easy yet unpretentious size, not intended to cause astonish ment by its proportions and style," a "charming place," appropriately artistic in "its lucidity and its colour" (W. Meynell, The Magazine of Art

[1881]: 170). The house was described in extensive detail: ornaments, pic tures, colour of wood, glass, tiles, and every inch of every room, including

Leighton's considerable art collection, the only house essay with such

coverage in this series. Leighton brought Oriental splendor into a rela

tively modest home that somehow retained its Englishness. The Maga zine, like other journals and like the Annuals, used artists' homes for

didactic purposes: "the President's home is all the more delightful for

forming so complete a contrast to the majority of the Artists' Homes with

which we shall have to deal," most of which were subdued in colour, while Leighton's was rich and brilliant in colour and materials: "English habits and English tastes have always inclined to the use of homely rather

than stately materials," but Leighton's surfaces were rich and translucent, not opaque. Above all, however, his home was not just a matter of taste, but "of kindness and courtesy also" (Meynell, The Magazine of Art

[1881]: 176). Artists' homes expressed their Englishness or their improvement of

native tastes and styles. But homes could reflect other, very different val ues. In its lack of aestheticism, Millais's home reflected English good sense and a critique of fashionableness like Leighton's. It was "remark

able for absence of every kind of affectation. It is scarcely picturesque,

though not an impossible house to put into a picture. It is stately and

prosperous; and prosperity which is not obtrusive or self-assertive is in

itself rather a beautiful thing than otherwise" (Oldcastle, The Magazine

ofArt[iUi]: 290).

Why were artists' homes so special? Inspired by Millais's residence,

John Oldcastle felt compelled to equate the sale of artists' works to a loss, which made their homes a compensation or substitute for this loss and a

payment for their public service:

An artist chiefly serves others by his power; the picture which has been his secret

for a little time, his hope for many days, and his companion, is destined to be the

possession of strangers for ever after. [...] he must endure many pangs of parting.

Some of those dear children of his he may never see again [. . .] they have fallen

into the hands of the Philistines [.. .] in return for all this diffused good and plea sure, he has won for himself the pleasure of following his own

altogether unfet

tered choice in the building of his home. (295)

Thus the artists' homes were their justified return on their contributions



JULIE F. CODELL 295

to others' pleasures, a kind of civil service, by which artists sacrificed

paintings that were metaphorically both their secrets and their children, a

psychological economy of art in which their creative power became pri mal.

As paintings embodied the artist's physical and psychological being (inner, secret, genetic offspring), artists' homes became a "secret" revealed

in biographies as displaced paintings or sculptures produced by a phallic creative force. In Lacanian terms, the home or, more often, the home

cum-studio, replaced a lack, a loss of phallic power deposited in the art

object, the product of this power. This psychological economy of

exchange had literal economic resonances, too, as the loss through the sale

of an art work could become a gain, if the art work appreciated and

increased its worth later, or the artist's fame increased the prices for his or

her paintings. The home then was a function of the value (economic and

cultural capital) of the artist's work and reputation and so was fetishized to serve as a substitute for the artists' lack, the lost art works borne out of

creative phallic energy and borne into the public realm. It also substituted

for the readers' lack, unable as most of them were to purchase original works. Most readers were limited to prints and reproductions in biogra

phies as the means by which they also "owned" artists and thus collec

tively shared the medium of culture. Biographies then replaced what

readers' lacked, and this may explain in part the fetishization of artists'

biographies in the press and the book industry. As Giles Walkley thoroughly demonstrates, artists' home studios were

heavily symbolic and marked artists as professionals. Studios were both

part of the home and separate, sites of both domestication and work. I

would also argue that the home studio crossed boundaries by masculiniz

ing the home, usually identified with Victorian femininity. Here, too, a

political economy of art emerged: by placing the artist's work site within the home, the studio appeared to "restore" the idealized cottage industry that appealed to Victorian nostalgia for a presumed pre-industrial unity of

work and life, while it protected the artist in a cloistered environment. This restoration of pre-industrial ideals and prelapsarian enclosures may

partially account for the near obsession with artists' studios and their ele

vation into an architectural genre, from the modular iron removable stu

dios of mid-century to single and multiple studio flats and fashionable

"studio-houses" of the late century: "the great proliferation of a single

building type in the English capital was the result of a craze" due, in

Walkley's view, to "the rise of professionalism among artists" for which "the heavenly, all facilitating studio represented both an inspirational tool

and material proof of the professional approach" as it also "removed the

suspicion of amateurism from the person based erstwhile in makeshift domestic surroundings" (Walkley xxiii-xxiv).




I would add to Walkley's explanation that the symbolic importance of

the studio was a cleansing of the bohemianism and moral suspicion of stu

dios which were represented in fiction as chaotic, dirty, entropie, and

immoral, partly due to the presence of models (Jeffares). Other forms of

studio defense, such as the series on artists' behavior in The Magazine of Art which humorously demystified the studio "smoke" and defended life

studies from the nude shared with biographies a scrutiny riveted on stu

dios. Floor plans and descriptions of artists' studio-houses in The Archi tect further demystified this charged space (Walkley has many examples of this; 109). Advocating a professional image of artists, Richard Redgrave

promoted "the notion of a model house of the professional suburban art

ist," which eventually became paradigmatic (Walkley 34). Artists moved to upscale areas in hopes of attracting, or living among, potential consum

ers. Thomas Woolner "reckoned that a transfer to the heartland of the art

consumer was called for," and moved to the central West End where he

leased a house for ?1200 (Walkley 45). Artists competed with each other to build bigger and more elaborate homes (Luke Fildes and Marcus Stone,

Walkley 63), and women artists were included among the clients for stu

dio houses (e.g., Louise Jopling, Walkley 84, and Kate Greenaway, Walk

ley 113-14)). Such undesirables as models came up the servants' stairs, and thus artists separated themselves socially from the more morally troublesome participants who threatened to infect their homes. In this

way, they could assure clients and the public that their social status and

adherence to the order mirrored the public's and their patrons' expecta

tions (Walkley 50). Walkley points out that artists such as Val Prinsep and

Leighton were "virtual nouveaux-riches members of the middle classes"

and thus involved in property rents and merchant shipping, as well as art, but they used their homes to set themselves apart as artists by creating

unique spaces "to distinguish the paintings they produced in them"

(Walkley 56). Walkley shows that artists carefully calculated their choices

of neighborhoods, studio structures, and home architecture (e.g., Richard

Ansdell or Edward Cooke; Walkley 36), and these calculations were often

collective, artists living in adjoining houses or in the same neighborhoods

(Walkley 37). Biographies often took the form of interviews inside artists' homes and

studios. The core of artists' interviews was the assurance of the interview

subject's authenticity or reality, defined as the consistency between the

work and the character of the great men in often luxurious studios. Rich

ard Salmon argues, however, that the interview undermined the very inti

macy it promised. He recognizes the transference of interest after mid

century from the author's work to the author's life, making authors mar

ketable commodities "products to be circulated and consumed" (Salmon

159). As The Art Journal quote above indicated, artists, too, became com



JULIE F. CODELL ^ 97

modified as public property (White and White; Codell, 1995). Salmon

argues that the interviewer surveyed the biographical subject, including home and writing desk, to project an "authentic" self, "revealed" by the

author (Salmon 161-62). Being the subject of an interview in situ assumed a celebrity, worthy of the "cultural distinction which the interview con

fers upon its subject." The home or studio setting further authenticated

the subject's interviewability turning the surveillance into spectacle (162). The homes (or writing spaces in interviews of famous authors) were

sometimes referred to as shrines, and furnishings became fetishes of

authors' personalities and creative processes: "the home encoded the dis

tinctive cultural and epistemological assumptions of the interview in the

material substance of its location [...] often explicitly read as a domain of

revelatory signs," of, among other things, the author's privacy as inner

"sanctum" (164-66). Such overreadings and projections abounded in

biographers' attentions to artists' studios, fueled by popular beliefs about

studios not as real work places, but as untamed, morally ambiguous sites.

Finally, Salmon makes the point that the repetition of these topics as

"hermeneutical strategies" meant that the individuality of the biographi cal subject, what the interview promised to reveal, became the individual

ity of all such biographical subjects (e.g., three hundred articles were

collected in Edmund Yates's three-volumes Celebrities at Home which ran for six years in the World). Celebrity intimacy was an oxymoron, even a parody of itself, as some Victorians recognized (Salmon 168-69).

Repetitions and serialization also allowed a discursivity within and

between series. As a nationalist discourse emerged, each artist bore his or

her cultural contribution to the dominant belief that among all the

"schools" of art in history and all nations "not one presents a parallel case

of rapid improvement to our own," British art having attained in one cen

tury a distinction other nations took several centuries to attain. Such

national success was presumably due to Protestantism and the greatness of English literature as the subject of painting (biography of Frith, The

Art Journal [18 56]: 237). The most repeated theme of hard work justified the art's worth as

investment. Biographies openly assured readers of investment value: The

Art Journal constantly referred to its continuous watch over young

"promising" artists: "we have carefully watched," "our eye has ever been

upon" (biography of Edward Ward, The Art Journal [1855]: 45). Writing a biography on an artist was an investment that sometimes did not pay off: "some among those we had singled out from the ranks of our painters have not fulfilled the promise of their youth; they have stopped far short

of the point at which we predicted they would arrive" (Ward 45). Biogra phies referred to previous biographies of artists in the same journal as evi

dence that the journal or critic spotted talents early, thus making their




economic speculations correct, so that "their" artists' stock rose (biogra

phy of Redgrave, The Art Journal [1859]: 205). But overexposure could

damage market values. In his 1861 biography of T.S. Cooper, James Daf

forne commented on the increasing difficulty of the biographical task "in

proportion to the demand already made on our attention by the artists

themselves, through their works, or by notices of one kind or another

which have previously been published in the pages of the Journal: thus the

subject is, in a manner, exhausted, or we run the risk, by re-entering the

field of investigation, of multiplying words, without increasing the infor

mation we desire to afford," so common had the biographical subjects become, so numerous the artists and works, and so repetitive and recycled the information (The Art Journal [1861]: 133, referred to Cooper's auto

biography in the 1849 The Art Journal). The Art Journal was not alone in perpetuating this complex discourse.

The Magazine of Art ran several biographical series from 1878 to 1904 and after 1900 had series on photographers, etchers, and younger or "ris

ing" artists, an investment category. Its essays were generally brief and

chronological without the heroism or moralizing of The Art Journal. "Our Living Artists" abbreviated the genre, recognizing the limitations of

press biographies. Authors apologized for the magazine's inability to

address the life and work in any depth (Meynell, biography of G.F. Watts

[1878]: 241) or its inadequacy in fully estimating the value of living paint ers (Fenn, biography of Noel Paton, The Magazine of Art [1880]: 73). Each issue opened with a life sketch on the first page. The Magazine of Art's biographies praised artists for historical rather than moral reasons

and in a cooler tone than The Art fournal. It insisted that English art

could be modern and also part of the "great tradition," a complex defense

against the claims of French modernism encroaching on the market.

Burne-Jones, although "essentially and entirely modern" in his world

weariness and despairing tone (Phillips, The Magazine of Art [1885]: 288), was also "the legitimate successor of the Great Florentines of the Fif

teenth Century, the exponent of their methods, the interpreter of their

aims, and the guide who aspires to lead art back to the paths from which it

had since strayed" (286-87). The series was unconcerned with typologies or the didactic character of

artists. Its context for evaluation was the volatility of public taste, and

thus of the market: the lack of public favor for antiquarian painting and

costume pictures in the biography of Seymour Lucas (Penderel

Brodhurst, The Magazine of Art [1888]: 1); the decline of the public's interest in the Newlyn School by the time of Frank Bramley's biography in 1903 (Hiatt, The Magazine of Art [1904]: 54). Artists were instantly

placed in the context of popular identifications of them with a genre,

style, or subject. These contemporary contexts were consistent with the



JULIE F. CODELL 299

magazine's general attention to economic issues such as market fluctua

tions, annual auction sales, copyright laws, utilitarian decoration, adver

tising, and the market for new popular forms, such as artistic postcards. Frith's biography included prices of his works and their market apprecia tion. His illustrations to Dickens went for ?20 pounds each, selling for over ?1000 after the author's death (Fenn, The Magazine of Art 2 [1879]: 81). The journal often argued that the most popular was often the best, and Frith was praised for the popularity of his works (83).

Artists' entrepreneurship was key. Elizabeth Butler "saw at a glance that by the good luck of genius this field lay awaiting her; and this percep tion has undoubtedly been the foundation of her successes." She adapted the right mode for the job: "nowhere is realism better placed than on the canvas of the battle-painter. The situations and emotions of history, of

romance, and of actual life need idealising" (Oldcastle, The Magazine of Art 2 [1879]: 258). Furthermore her advance to professional status was

initiated "by entering simply and ingenuously into the market of sale and

purchase that she could fairly measure herself with her brothers of the

brush," though readers were reassured that she advocated only women's

right to work, not to vote or to legislate: "though personal conspicuous ness and public appearance have always been repugnant to her nature, she confesses to the nobler ambition of fame through her labours" (260). Still feminine in her recoiling from public space (hardly a recoil considering she exhibited annually for decades and published her sketchbooks, dia

ries, and autobiography), she negotiated her desire for fame into a "nobler ambition" that was the consequence of work, not directly of money, and thus was hygienicized from filthy lucre to duty. Work, not simply sales,

was made the measure of her painting's worth. Thus, Butler was

redeemed from her own success (and possible loss of femininity) by a

"nobler" calling. Her works, recounted in succession, became the events

of her life, as she was written into a professional biography with ambigu ous praise: "If she wields the brush at sixty, as we hope she may do, she

will be then, as she is now, and as she desires to be always - a student"

(262) - and presumably never a master! Such were the ambivalent terms

of biographical and critical assessments of successful women artists. Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's skill set her apart from other women and

threatened her gendered identity through masquerade: "For so full and firm a grip of a pencil seldom falls to the lot of a woman. Happily there is next to no bravura lurking in Miss Brickdale's handling. She does not

masquerade in the outward habiliment of any given master's manner"

(Dixon 262). Although her pencil was firm as a man's, she was still reas

suringly feminine, forsaking men's clothes, "the outward habiliment" of a

"master."

Frank Holl was the subject of biographies in The Art Journal in 1876




and in The Magazine of Art in 1880, bracketing Holl's 1878 admission to

the RA as an Associate. A brief summary of these two articles on Holl

will expose the strategies for representing the artist and the extent to

which market considerations formed a part of the narrative of biographi cal criticism in the press. The 1876 article by James Dafforne began with an abstract evaluation of heredity and talent, a common topic through

which he meandered over issues of how much talent is passed from father to son and sons who exceeded their fathers, finally reaching his destina

tion: fathers who were engravers whose sons became painters, the case

with Holl (Dafforne, The Art Journal [1876]: 10), thus naturalizing artis

tic production as biological talent. Dafforne over-read Holl's paintings,

describing absent characters, e.g., the presumed but undepicted drunken

husband of the wife depicted pawning her wedding ring (11), an event

whose causes could be many. Speculating on the absence of Holl's works

in the RA exhibition of 1879, Dafforne admonished artists who procrasti nated about beginning works intended for the RA exhibition, admitting that this may have no relevance to Holl, whose reason for not exhibiting for a few years he did not know: "These remarks are not by any means

intended to apply to Mr. Holl; they are made solely with the view of stim

ulating the dilatory to 'take time by the forelock'" (12).

Branding artists as procrastinators, Dafforne ended with a moral tale of

economic purpose. From the beginning of this essay, Dafforne cited his own earlier assessments of Holl, admitting that he missed a few of Holl's

early works, while quoting The Art Journal's earlier reviews of them (11). Dafforne's frequent self-citations reflected the economic motivation of

these biographical reviews. By harping on the magazine's ability to spot talent early, Dafforne argued for the continued readership for the maga zine - those who read will know earlier than others in which artists to

invest. For this reason, too, Dafforne admonished Holl to paint "the

sunny side of human nature," since the public did not favor his typically sad subjects (12). Dafforne predicted a "high reputation and, it is to be

hoped, fortune," and thus advised Holl to go for happier images. Sugges tions of popular topics, Dafforne's reiterations of his prescience as a critic, and predictions of the artist's fortune (and readers' investments)

- all

reflected the magazine's self-justification as a market tool for consumers

and for artists who heeded Dafforne's advice.

The Magazine of Art praised Holl's subjects of unsentimental pathos which provoked "the interest of the public" (W. Meynell, The Magazine

of Art [1880]: 191). Wilfrid Meynell, the author of this biography, recog nized in the very beginning that artists were chosen for this series for their

success, and Holl's had been very swift (187). Admitting this, he noted

that the two-year scholarship Holl received was rejected because he did not like being in Italy, a point Dafforne did not mention, focusing only



JULIE F. CODELL 3OI

on the successful prize, not its rejection. Meynell explained this as charac

teristic of Holl's Englishness and of his awareness that he was too young and inexperienced to understand those Old Masters to whom he would

return later in life (190). To have spent time among past masters would

have caused his art to become conventional and mannered; the solution was to improve and attend to nature and thus nurture his individuality and originality. Meynell spent much less time describing the emotional

content of Holl's paintings and much more time appreciating his unsenti

mental depiction of hardship subjects (187-189). He concluded with

praise for Holl's portraits and for the renascence of portraiture in

England in the 1880s, partly due to foreign influence over a "somewhat

insulated English capacity." Meynell argued for Holl's international rep

utation, citing American successes, and described the poetic quality of

Holl's light and compositions, deflecting concerns over his "sad" subjects to more technical topics. In conclusion, Meynell argued that Holl was

"fresh blood" for the RA, his "brother painters" (190-91). Holl thus

bonded to the nation and identified himself with the brotherhood of the

Academy and the rise of English portraiture. By emphasizing technical,

national, and professional topics, Meynell forged a more professional discourse than Dafforne's, and ignored issues of investment for issues

of national and professional identity. Holl's successful admission into

the ranks of the RA in 1878 may have helped shift the discourse to

a more professional focus and away from concerns with popularity and

economics.

In addition to lifewritings in the British art press, the general press also

contained lifewritings: Scribner's in America ran a series on British artists, and biographies appeared in Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly

Review.} The Athenaeum regularly reviewed biographies, biographical dictionaries, biographies in book series, and biographies as history,

including series published in France and Germany. Art Annuals pub lished by The Art Journal produced a steady stream of artists' biographies in which the theme of struggle rewarded by success was repeated regu

larly at Christmas and at Easter. Artists' biographies in general periodi cals varied in length but tended to identify artists by popular tags: for

example, Watts was the idealist seeking to realize "the restoration of Art to her true and noblest function, and the personal self-sacrifice of every

worker in the commonwealth for the common good," according to Spiel mann's 1897 article, "Mr. G.F. Watts: His Art and his Mission," in Nine

teenth Century ([1897]: 161-72). Nineteenth Century published lengthy

biographies, such as Julia Ady Cartwright's "Jean Francois Millet"

(almost twenty pages). This essay included the economic fortunes of Mil

let's paintings, such as The ?ngelus which he had trouble selling but

which fetched ?8000 after several sales (433) and in France went from




2000 francs to 50,000 francs (437). His trajectory was marked by many

years of struggle and poverty until he reached fame, a slow progress that

became interpreted as a sign of the "endurance" of his work, rivaling the

"frieze of the Parthenon" and "the frescoes of Michael Angelo" (438),

typical of biographical hyperbole and advertising rhetoric (e.g., Spiel mann 168-69).

Press biographies over time measured changing reputations and the

emphasis on respectability. Burne-Jones appeared as a degenerate who

expressed "unhealthy morbidness of conception" like Shelley and Blake

and exhibited paintings of "twilight broodings" according to William

Davies' 1873 article in Quarterly Review (332). Subsequent biographers

sought to redeem him from this reputation. By the end of the century he was hailed as one of the greatest English artists and was among the most

popular biographical subjects in the press and in books. Other artists were also redeemed from moral suspicion. Cosmo Monkhouse's biogra

phy of Edward Poynter in Scribner's Magazine (22 [July-Dec, 1897]: 701

719) contained a large number of drawings and studies including many nudes. Poynter's life was described as one of hard work marked by few

incidents outside his home and his profession, characterized by his long

marriage and long residence at Albert Gate and in his studio on Bromp ton Road, "a situation as distinguished and modest as his own character"

(718), a reference sure to dispel any unclean notions about Poynter, his

nudes, and studio affairs. A major source of artists' biographies were Art Annuals published

between 1884 and 1909. These were saturated with the political economy of art and consolidated issues over artists' images as prelapsarian or bohe

mian and the conflicts over appropriate environs. These biographies also

included interviews that revealed imperial, racial, and class hostilities that

only further sutured artists as to the social order. Art Annual biographies were 1/2 crown and seven of them could be bound in a special cloth gild

binding for 2/6. They were about 3 5 pages in length; later biographies had

more illustrations, up to 60 in the 1906 biography of Alfred Waterhouse

when the price for individual numbers increased to 2/6. The 1900 entry was on British artists in South Africa with Boer War illustrations. The

series, almost entirely on Royal Academicians, also included Elizabeth

Butler as the token female British artist and three foreign artists, Rosa

Bonheur, Briton Riviere, and J. L. E. Meissonier, the latter an honorary member of the RA. The contents were divided into education, house, and

studio.

To represent Englishness properly, the artist had to be materially suc

cessful while at the same time disavowing economic motives. The initial

number by Mrs. Lang on Frederic Leighton began with a defense of the

Academy. Lang described the Presidency as requiring "a man of much



JULIE F. CODELL 303

social tact, a good businessman" (7). But despite being good businessmen,

English artists

do not yield to the exigencies of political economy in Art. They are always search

ing, always advancing, always approaching the fortress of art, from every side and

by every legitimate means; always, above all, such artists are unsparing of their

labour. The journeyman in Art, like the journeyman in letters, is too much with us. He has entered the camp of the world, and must sell his labour, at

cheapest cost to himself, in the highest market. To counterbalance his influence, Nature

provides a constant series of young men, new

generations not yet tamed by mar

riage and the world on one side; and, on the other, such steady followers of Art

for her own sake as Mr. Watts, Mr. Burne-Jones, and the President. Their work

has a kind of moral value, rising from its individuality and distinction, apart from

its quality and defects as painting

or sculpture. (32)

Here Lang acknowledges Leighton's success but denies it as his motiva

tion.

Walter Armstrong's biography of Millais revised and cleansed Pre

Raphaelitism from a radical rebellion to a mere "wave of impatience with

stereotyped fashion, which swept over the country in the early part of the

present reign. [...] Earnestness was the new watchword," making the

movement evangelical and softening its criticism of the RA, since by 1885 the former Pre-Raphaelite founder Millais was himself an Academician.

The Pre-Raphaelites were hygienicized and their youthful exuberance

indulged (3), so Millais could be respectable from youth to maturity. Most striking, however, was Armstrong's interview with Millais in

which the artist articulated imperialist and racist notions which were then

folded into his Englishness. Wanting to paint a picture of Christ's dictum to "suffer little children to come unto" him, Millais lamented the reality that the empirical British public would expect him to depict Semitic chil

dren:

what children do we care about? Why our own fair English children, of course;

not the brown, bead-eyed, simious-looking children of Syria. And with what sense of fitness could I paint the Saviour bare-headed under the sun of Palestine,

surrounded by dusky, gypsy-like children or, on the other hand, translate the

whole scene to England? The public is too critical to bear this kind of thing now.

(25).

Armstrong lamented the lost innocence of the artist and the art world

amidst such realism: "The world - the modern Art-world - is now so old, it knows and demands so much that the naivete of Vermeer must not be

looked for in any of those who paint its pictures" (32). Millais's imperial




Englishness extended to his house: "None of the thought-out quaintness of the Anglo-Dutch revival, but a great plain, square house with an

excrescence here and there demanded by convenience," with severe orna

ments and Roman columns, creating an effect like "that of a Genoese [sic]

palazzo" (29). His studio was distinguished by its masculine simplicity: "There are no cunningly devised corners, or galleries, or inglenooks or

window-seats," and it was filled with easels for work, not socializing (30). Alma Tadema, whose "Anglo-Dutch revival" was lampooned by Arm

strong, had one of the most luxurious home studios among Victorian art

ists. Helen Zimmern's biography of the artist followed the convention of

describing the studio as a metaphor for the artist's virtues: "no superflu ous rooms, such as drawing-rooms and merely fancy apartments. All

there is, is to be of use" (30). However, as Walkley notes, this "modest

residence" had 66 rooms, including an atrium, a billiard room, and a large cellar for mineral waters, plus studios for his wife Laura and his daughter

Anna. Such differences point up clearly the ideological purposes of these

biographies and the nature of the conflicts over images of studios as

potential signifiers of greed, ostentation, commercialism, and social ambi

tions.

Zimmern deflected potential accusations of the artist as ostentatious or

degenerate by contrasting his studio to his wife's, which gave him by con

trast the virtues of masculinity, utility, and simplicity. The studio of Laura Alma Tadema, also an active professional artist, contained Mexican

onyx on the windows, a grand piano of oak, ivory, mother of pearl, and

tortoiseshell, and red velvet embroidery from "some Venetian palace," all

done by four Dutch workmen brought over for this purpose. Thus, her

studio's luxury by contrast deflected charges of ostentation from her hus

band and tied luxury to femininity and decoration. In Laura's studio such

luxury could be more safely indulged, fortifying the association of art

making with mere female accomplishment and decoration to preserve Laura's "femininity" (31), while this deflection also preserved her hus

band's "masculinity" and professionalism. Zimmern assured her readers that Alma Tadema was "mentally

healthy" and his works "wholesome and pure" as only a healthy body and mind combined can produce (3). "Health" was a common term in the

literature of degeneracy and artists were often defended as wholesome or

healthy in biographies to distinguish them from French artists' degener acy or from their debased fictional counterparts. Biographies insisted that

successful artists were by nature indifferent to their success and motivated

by determination and hard work, a common "misrecognition," to use

Bourdieu's word, in these biographies. Thus, being an arduous worker, Alma-Tadema succeeded against all odds (Zimmern 3). He produced his

best work, moral commentaries on the Romans, after moving to England.



JULIE F. CODELL 305

Zimmern was dutifully hyperbolic - his work was "splendid," "remark

able," "superb," and evoked "power."

Zimmern's biography included an interview which, in this case, opened with a stereotype of the inarticulate, "innocent" artist: "Artists, as a rule, have rarely the power of literary expression, can rarely formulate their

ideas concerning their craft [...] an instinctive rather than a theoretical

embodiment [...] he has, of course, his views on Art, and most interesting

they are, as the views of a worker in any profession must always be, and

above all the views of a master workman" (27). Zimmern placed the artist

between artisan and professional but in the artisanal tradition as a master

workman. He fulfilled her stereotype, leaving her to be the articulate, log ical, rational one of the two. Interestingly, she noted that there was a large

public interested in his views on art, one of the few references to the read

ing public in these biographical interviews. The remainder of the inter

view consisted of long quotations from the artist.

Finally, Zimmern assured her readers that Alma-Tadema was not

"led astray by success; he grows, if possible, yet more self-exacting, self

critical, he never loses sight of the fact that "noblesse oblige." He was

original although all his works expressed one idea, making him "homoge neous throughout" (29), the vision of a unified self. Despite this, he was

also truly original, "like sturdy rock in the smooth sea of a tame and con

ventional world," though also well-known to "London society" (29). Alma-Tadema emerged from this biography as an ideal Victorian artist -

original but not anti-social or eccentric, successful but unmotivated by social or economic desires, and prelapsarian and unFallen in his "inarticu

lateness," despite lengthy quotes of his words. F.G. Stephens's biography of Hook, noting that there were already

four others in existence, portrayed the ultimate English artist. Hook

defended the RA's refusal to open its exhibitions for free to the "proletar iat" (5), anathema to Hook who loved riding to the hounds, rabbit shoot

ing and boating (6). His studio was "sincere [...] made for living in, and

everywhere a home. [...] everything on the walls is English" (26). Stephens contrasted Hook's studio with Millais's:

It will be seen that Mr. Hook's studio differs in most respects, including size,

from that of Sir John Millais, which is a luxuriously appointed smaller chamber, with lofty and stately doors of polished wood, having carpets all over the floor, and enriched with couches and easy-chairs for those who sit for their portraits. It

differs from Mr. Alma-Tadema's grand Pompeian hall, with its ambo, having a

semi-dome plated with aluminum, its superb bench, exquisitely carved and sump

tuously cushioned, as well as inlaid with ivory and ebony, covered with Tyrian silk, and embroidered in lovely patterns," and it is not like the "studios made in

Greece, as is the case in Sir. F. Leighton's magnificent atelier at Kensington. Each



3o6 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000

of these chambers is a place of steadfast work and great fame. As the studios differ,

so the mansion at Silverbeck, where the sun shines, the birds sing and the pure

wind whispers in the trees, differs from the great house lined with marble at Pal ace Gate, from the Greco-Roman villa at St. John's Wood and from the P.R.A.'s

elegant Italian palazzo near Holland Park (28).

This is a stunningly nationalistic inscription on the studio: studios of

Leighton, Millais and Alma-Tadema approached foreignness, ateliers and

palazzi modeled on Pompeii or Greece and used for social purposes as

well as for work. Hook embodied Englishness: his clothes were home

spun, his opinions forthcoming, and his body "thin-flanked, broad

shouldered, and muscular" (32). Other artists were also masculinized:

Luke Fildes was a "manly man" in his biography (31), while Marcus

Stone never appealed "to any craving for sensationalism" and his figures were "undisturbed by any sordid emotions [...] properly ordered passions

[...] obeying the laws of self-repression laid down by good society," and

thus not the work of a degenerate aesthete (4-5). Artists controlled the content of these biographies not only through

interviews, but in some cases through their own selection of authors. Wil

liam Holman Hunt had the Archdeacon Farrar co-author his Art Annual

biography with Alice Meynell to emphasize the religious content of his

lucrative Biblical paintings, the works with which Hunt most identified

himself (Landow). Farrar insisted that Hunt made less money than he

could have earned, if he "merely followed the practice of the ordinary run

of painters," and that his pay for Finding the Saviour, the extraordinary sum of 5500 guineas, represented several years' wages (16). What better

way to dispel accusations of greed than by having a cleric do the dispel

ling! Hunt's home and studio were subjects of Meynell's portion of the

biography and these environs re-enforced Farrar's image of the artist: his

studio "needs no adornments sought for their own sake. The walls are

rich with gleanings from all kinds of travel, here it is a working studio, and very simple" with "signs of constant reading," presenting Hunt as

sincere, traveled, and intelligent. Art Annuals were sites of contention over the proper studios and

houses for artists, social and luxurious, or simple and English. But

comfort was also a value. Marcus Stone's house had "nothing of the

incongruity between genius and its surrounding, the contrast between a

poverty-stricken studio and the great works of art produced in it on

which novelists are so prone to enlarge." His house was "conspicuous for

its aspect of comfort and artistic appropriateness [...] in keeping with his

tastes. His studio, for instance, is no mere workshop with bare walls and

unkempt appearance" but large enough to occupy nearly the whole of the

upperpart of the house" (Baldry 27). This is a curious switch from



JULIE F. CODELL 307

Stephens's commentary on sumptuous studios and homes; here Stone is

praised for having a house that is not poor or bare, falsely simple, undo

mestically "unkempt," but decorated according to "artistic appropriate ness" (31). Sometimes the defense of the artist was strident because of

obvious economic and social success: Little insisted that Orchardson

"never prostitutes his high abilities to pander to lasciviousness [...] sickly

moralising, or special pleading of any kind"; he kept "the manner of a

healthy-minded and sane man of affairs and man of the world," including "his excellent robust virility" (15). Lady Butler's studio was that "of a

hard worker rather than of a petit-maitre [...] on the business-like walls

are no evidence that she has ever given herself to the subtleties of bric-a

brac; no pieces of precious colour drops from screens, no stuffed pea cocks stand gaily on guard, and no orange trees in flower tempt you to

linger. It is an ascetic work-place rather than an aesthetic showroom" (W.

Meynell, Art Annual [1898]: 23). Butler was ascetic, hard working, a pro fessional (not a miniature version of one, "petit-maitre") and still an

uneconomic, prelapsarian virgin, having never "given herself" to luxury! Even after 1900, Art Annual biographies promoted Victorian values

and discourse - the work ethic, the uneventful life, success in the market, ideal motives, and social parity with their patrons (Dibdin 28). This series

was a culmination of forty years of debates on artists' social and economic

functions and moral character. A changed discourse, however, began to

appear in the press around the mid-i88os. Starting in 1886, The Art Jour nal's series "Biographies of Artists" included Continental artists, Old

Masters, and women, e.g., Rosalba Camera in 1886, Maude Goodman in

1887, Helen Allingham in 1888, Marianne Stokes, Celia Elvetus, Mrs.

Traquair, and Miss K. Cameron in 1900, Henrietta Rae in 1901, Kate

Greenaway in 1902, and Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes in 1904. This series

incorporated previous Art Annual biographies. By 1898 this was an

extensive series with forty-eight biographies including many minor Asso

ciates, photographers, and several foreigners and Old Masters. In subse

quent years the number of biographies ranged from 24 (1899) to 28

(1903). In 1891 The Art Journal began a humorous series entitled "Draw

ings of Artists in their Studios" which did not run again. Despite the per sistence of biographies between 1847 and 1904, series changed over time

from didactic to professional, from describing artists as embodying moral

truths in an elevated language, to casual accounts of artists' training, travel, and works. The cool tone of "Biographies of Artists" contrasted

sharply with the moralizing of the 1850s biographies. The artist-subject

changed from almost exclusively Academicians and Associates to non

RA artists, women, and foreigners, as the RA was losing its authority to

new professional and international societies (Codell 1995). Some periodi cals treated biographies with contempt, indicating a shift toward profes



3o8 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000

sionalism and a modern separation of art works and artists from moral

imperatives. The Portfolio ran several series on contemporary English and French artists, and on printmakers, especially etchers, the special interest of its editor Philip Hamerton (Codell 1987). These contained very little

biography and were almost entirely about works of art and aesthetics, another of the editor's interests. Perhaps because Hamerton was a print

maker, he did not have the idolatrous view of artists associated with

painters, and so did not seek to unify art and life, or style and character.

The focus on art works rather than artists was part of the journal's

emphasis on connoisseurship and professionalism, as reflected in the

journal's title. The Portfolio appears to have had little interested in artistic

personalities, focusing instead on the professional concerns, perhaps because of its mission to accommodate printmakers in all media to the status of painters as fine artists, but without personality cults, fetishism, and anecdotage.

Later art periodicals reduced or eliminated biographies in favor of criti

cal essays on individual artists, perhaps reflecting the glut of biographies in the book trade and the specialized interests of a new more sophisticated art readership more interested in connoisseurship or technique than in

didacticism in art. The Studio, starting in 1894, examined artists from all over Europe and the colonies, and from the US as well, focusing not just on establishment painters but on young artists, women artists, illustra

tors, designers, and architects. The Studio offered specialist topics, as in the series on French Pastellists in 1904, like The Portfolio's series on

engravers, indicating a more articulated market with buyers focused on

specific genres. Most interesting was The Studio's treatment of biography. Harriet

Ford writing on Marianne Stokes did not describe her experiences but

interiorized them. On Stokes' art education in Paris, Ford ignored people and places and concentrated on Stokes' changed consciousness: "Vague and vapoury ideas of art gave place, under a merciless system, to hard

headed logic, a looseness of method to a just and positive observation"

(152). "An Artist's House" by architect M.H. Baillie Scott used line

drawings, not photographs, to illustrate an ideal artist's house, not the

home of a particular artist (28-37). Studios were the subject of a series, but unlike its predecessors The Studio's series did not depict rooms or

exteriors of studios, nor were artists shown working in their studios as

they were in the 1860s and 70s. Studios were always "devoid of ornament, outside or in" in this series (S.E.B., on Flenry Scott Tuke, The Studio 5

[1895]: 93), as this series was not about the materiality of the studio in its

wealth and spaciousness. The interviewer was "not making an inventory" but remained seated and relaxed, even playful in conversation with the

artist (on Whistler, The Studio 4 [1894]: 116). The Studio eradicated the



JULIE F. CODELL 309

biography, as it erased images of the artist's body, home, and studio. This

journal believed that "the principles taught are of infinitely more moment

than the private opinion of the man who happens to be the medium

through which these principles are conveyed to the younger members of the profession" (Baldry, "The Work of Solomon J. Solomon, A.R.A."

The Studio S [1S96]: io).4

Biography had become a degraded popular, populist, and philistine genre for this aestheticist publication. Aligned with this aestheticism, the

journal's reproductions were often prints or line drawings rather than

photographs to convey the "artisticness" of the image, not simply its real ism. Decorative illustrators were as likely to be subjects of essays as were

painters (e.g., Watson, "Miss Jessie King and Her Work," The Studio 16

[1902]: 177-88). The Studio's disembodied presentation of artists was

matched by its aversion to citing prices or discussing material success in

general. At the series' end, artists' studios and homes appeared less impor tant and sometimes were not even depicted, the bourgeoisification of the artist having become either so complete that it needed no more mention, or so banal as to be uninteresting.

Biographers claimed artists to be representatives of their age and nation

(Salmon 42). The new journalism addressed issues similar to those faced

by artists seeking consumers: entrepreneurial publicity, professionaliza tion, and an audience expanded to newly literate working classes. Art

journalists and artists had much in common in their professional activi

ties, and it is not surprising that they worked together to promote each other and a set of shared ideals and intentions through the new journal ism's practices of investigation, interview, and advertising hyperbole, to

suturing readers to subjects and readers to

periodicals. In artists' biogra

phies these practices were folded into ideals of heroism, national identity, and cultural dominance exemplified by those artists deemed representa tive of "Englishness" by virtue of their success, domesticity, manliness, and discretion (e.g., Orchardson "never prostitutes his high abilities").

Ironically but not surprisingly, interviews of artists in their sumptuous spaces "revealed" their idealism and heroic virtues as fulfilling a presumed unity of style and character. The intimacy promised by interviews

included Millais's imperial racism and Hook's hostility to the working classes, these being part of the acceptable views of the classes to which artists aspired, further aligning them with hegemonic social, political, and

cultural ideologies.

Finally, there are other sources of biography endemic to the press, such as obituaries that briefly recapitulated an artist's life, and book reviews of

serialized biographies which often summarized biographies and thus pro duced an abbreviated biography. The domestication of artists was not

unique to the art press: The Times ran a series called "Celebrities at




Home," for example (Salmon 41). There were also satires and take-offs on

biography. In 1877 The Athenaeum, which published many book reviews

of artists' biographies, ran a humorous paragraph entitled "Turner's

Trousers" (2626 [Feb 23, 1878]: 259), which played on the fetishization of

any rag touched by a great artist. Victorians were well aware of their

heroizing tendencies; they produced a vast literature on biography in the

press in which they debated issues of historicity and didactic purpose and even satirized their own tendency to idealize the biographical subject (Nadel). Into this Victorian debate over biography, artist subjects intro

duced economic measures of success, from large home studios to appreci ated prices and investment values of art, and a new role for artists as

representatives of Englishness and creators of a national culture in their art and in their lives.

Arizona State University

NOTES

* I wish to thank my colleagues Debra Mancoff, Susan Casteras, and Dianne

Sachko Macleod who read and commented on versions of this essay, and Bill

Scheuerle, VPR editor, and the anonymous reader of VPR for valuable

insights and suggestions. I also wish to thank Steven Tomlinson of the Bodle

ian Library, Oxford, for assistance regarding the Stephens letters.

i. Norman Feltes has shown in the case of the profession of literature that writ

ers, too, were well aware of the conflicting claims of market place autonomy

and the idealism of the professional "calling." 2. Other studies of the popular images of Victorian artists and the relation of

artist to the wider bourgeois culture include Gillett; Macleod; Hemingway

and Vaughan. For other examinations of artists' family or domestic biogra

phies, see Codell, 1996 and 1999, and on serialized artists' biographies,

see

Codell, 1999. Studies of the vast biographical literature of the period are well

discussed by Altick and Nadel, 1984. 3. Fortnightly Review had many articles on art and by artists, such as Philip

Hamerton, editor of The Portfolio. Prominent art writers included FT. Pal

grave, A.C. Swinburne, Walter Armstrong, G.H. Lewes, Violet Paget,

George Moore, and artists such as Henry O'Neil, D.G. Rossetti, Walter Sick

ert, Edward Poynter (later Director, National Gallery). Articles were less

biographical and more critical essays or anecdotal "reminiscences" of meet

ings with the artists. Samples of articles with some biographical

content

include:

1869 "Notes on Leonardo da Vinci," Walter Pater

1870 "Notes on Albrecht Durer," Sidney Colvin (later Slade Professor,

Oxford)



JULIE F. CODELL 3 11

1872 "Nicolas Poussin," Emilia F. Dilke Pattison

1877 "Titian," Andrew Lang

18 80 "Sir William Boxall, "

John Duke Coleridge 1884 "Hablot-Browne and book-illustration,

" Frederick Wedmore

1887 "Benvenuto Cellini's character," J.A. Symonds

1892 "Madame Bodichon; a Reminiscence," Mathilda Betham-Edwards

"Mulready," Emilia F.S. Dilke Pattison

1893 "Michelangelo," Herbert P. Home

1896 "Monticelli," Mildred Drage

"John Everett Millais, painter and illustrator," Joseph & Elizabeth

Pennell

1897 "Leighton and Watts: two ideals in art," H.H. Statham

1898 "Aubrey Beardsley," Arthur Symons "Edward Burne-Jones," William Sharp

1900 "The Art of Watts," Arthur Symons

The Athenaeum had a large number of book reviews of artists' biographies,

biographical dictionaries, and serialized biographical books, such as Sampson, Low's Great Artist series reviewed from 1880 to 1891, serialized biographies

published by Virtue, by Seeley, by Macmillan, and by George Bell and Sons, and a German series published by Grevel and Company and a series entitled

Les Artistes Celebres published in Paris by Rouam. Art Annuals published by The Art Journalwere also regularly reviewed.

Nineteenth Century had a smaller percentage of articles on art compared with

Fortnightly Review. Writers and artists who wrote included Ruskin, Holman

Hunt, Swinburne, F. T. Palgrave, Marcus Huish, Seymour Haden, William

Morris, Walter Armstrong, Emilie Barrington, Violet Paget, Harry Quilter,

Frederick Burton, J. Atkinson Beavington, G.F. Watts, Claude Phillips. Art

ists' biographies included:

1881 "Jules Jacquemart, "

Frederick Wedmore

1883 "The Truth about Rossetti," Theodore Watts

1888 "Jean-Francois Millet, "

Julia Ady Cartwright 1892 "Michelangelo," Janet Ross

1896 "Lord Leighton and his art," W.B. Richmond

1897 "Mr. G.F. Watts," M.H. Spielmann

1898 "E. Meissonier," Charles Yriarte

1899 "Some recollections of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, "

Joseph Jacobs

4. This reworking of biography in Solomon's case was by Alfred Lys Baldry, one of the most

popular biographers of artists, who would write a standard

biography of Marcus Stone for The Art Journal complete with attention to

the artist's appearance and environs in the same year he wrote a mildly anti

biographical essay on Solomon for The Studio.




WORKS CITED

Primary Sources

"Afternoons in The Studios: - A Chat with Mr. Whistler." The Studio 4 (1894):

116-30.

Armstrong, Walter. "Sir J.E. Millais, Royal Academician, His Life and Work."

Art Annual. London: J.S. Virtue, 1885.

"Artists'Homes." The Art Journal (1882): 57-58.

Baldry, Alfred Lys. "The Life and Work of Marcus Stone, R.A." Art Annual.

London: J. S. Virtue, 1896. - . "The Work of Solomon J. Solomon, A.R.A." The Studio 8 (1896): 3-11.

Beaver, Alfred. "Art Sales of 1884." The Art Journal (1884): 261-64.

"British Artists: Their Style and Character: No. II. -

Edwin Ward, A.R.A." The

Art Journal (18 55): 45-48. "British Artists: Their Style and Character: No. IV - Frederick Goodall, A.R.A."

The Art fournal (1855): 109-12.

"British Artists: Their Style and Character: No. V. - William Collins, R.A." The

Art fournal (1855): 141-144.

"British Artists: Their Style and Character: No. XII. -James Clarke Hook,

A.R.A." The Art Journal (1856): 41-44.

"British Artists: Their Style and Character: No. XVII. - William Powell Frith, R.A." The Art Journal (18 56): 237-40.

Cartwright (Ady), Julia. "Jean Fran?ois Millet." Nineteenth Century 24 (Sept 1888): 419-39.

Cooper, T.S. My Life. London: Richard Bentley, 1891.

Corkran, Henriette. Celebrities and I. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1902.

Croal, David Thomson. "The Life and Work of Luke Fildes, R. A." Art Annual.

London: J.S. Virtue, 1895.

Dafforne, James. "British Artists: Their Style and Character, No. XLV - Richard

Redgrave, R.A." The Art fournal (1859): 205-207. - . "British Artists: Their Style and Character. No. LV.

- Thomas Sidney Cooper,

A.R.A." The Art fournal (1861): 133-35. - . "British Artists: Their Style and Character, No. LXXVII.

- Henrietta Ward

(Mrs. E.M. Ward)." The Art Journal (1864): 357-59. - . "British Artists: Their Style and Character, No. LXXIX.

- Marcus Stone."

The Art Journal (1869): 33-37. - . "The Works of Frank Holl." The Art Journal (1876): 9-14. - . "The Works of Hubert Herkomer, A.R.A." The Art Journal (1880): 109-112.

Davies, William. "The State of English Painting." Quarterly Review 134 (April

1873): 289-336.

Dibdin, E. Rimbault. "Frank Dicksee, R.A." Art Annual. London: J. S. Virtue,

1900.

Dixon, M. Hepworth. "Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale." The Magazine of Art 25

(1902): 256-63.



JULIE F. CODELL 313

Farrar, Archdeacon, and Alice Meynell. "William Holman Hunt." Art Annual.

London: J. S. Virtue, 1893.

"Farewell to Mr. S.C. Hall." The Art fournal (18 80): 353-57.

Fenn, W.W. "Our Living Artists: William Powell Frith." The Magazine of Art 2

(1879): 80-83. - . "Our Living Artists: Sir Joseph Noel Pat?n, R.S.A., LL.D." The Magazine of

Art 3 (1880): 1-4.

Ford, Harriet. "The Work of Mrs. Adrian Stokes." The Studio 19 (1900): 149-56. Hall, Samuel Carter. Retrospect of

a Long Life from 181 s to i88j. 2 vols. London:

R.Bentley, 1883.

Haydon, Frederic. Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and table-talk.

With a memoir by his son, Frederic Wordsworth Haydon. London: Chatto and

Windus, 1876.

Hiatt, Charles. "Mr. Frank Bramley, A.R.A., and His Work." The Magazine of

Art 26 (i903):54-59. La Sizeranne, Robert de. English Contemporary Art. Trans. H.M. Poynter. New

York:F. A. Stokes, 1898.

Lang, Mrs. A. "Sir F. Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, His Life and

Work." Art Annual. London: J. S. Virtue, 1884.

Lee, Vernon [Violet Paget]. In Umbria, A Study of Artistic Personality. Portland, ME: T.B.

Mosher, r9oi (reprint from Belcaro: Being essay on Sundry Aesthetical Ques

tions. London: W. Satchell and Co., 1881).

Little, James Stanley. "The Life and Work of William Q. Orchardson, R.A." Art

Annual. London: J.S. Virtue, 1897.

Meynell, Wilfrid. "Our Living Artists: George Frederick Watts, R.A." The Maga zine of Art 1 (1878): 241-45.

- . "Our Living Artists: Frank Holl, A.R.A." The Magazine of Art 3 (1880): 187

9i - . "The Homes of Our Artists: Sir Frederick Leighton's House in Holland Park

Road." Magazine of Art 4 (1881): r 69-76. - . "The Life and Work of Lady Butler (Miss Elizabeth Thompson)." Art Annual.

London: J. S. Virtue, 1898.

Monkhouse, Cosmo. "Sir Edward J. Poynter, PRA." Scribner's Magazine 22

(July-Dec 1897): 701-719.

Oldcastle, John. "Our Living Artists: Elizabeth Butler (nee Thompson)." The

Magazine of Art 2 (1879): 257-62. - . "The Homes of our Artists: Mr. Millais' House at Palace Gate." The Magazine

of Art 4 (1881): 290-95.

Penderel-Brodhurst, J. "Seymour Lucas, A.R.A." The Magazine of Art n (1888): 1-2.

Philips, Claude. "Edward Burne-Jones." The Magazine of Art 8 (1885):

286-94.

"Portrait of W.P. Frith." The Art Journal (1847): 164.




"Portrait of D. Maclise." The Art Journal (1847): 164.

Rowlands, Walter. "The Art Sales of 1887." The Art Journal (1887): 294-95.

Ruskin, John. A Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Art. London: Smith, Elder,

1857.

S.E.B. "Afternoons in the Studios: Henry Scott Tuke at Falmouth." The Studio 5

(1895): 90-95.

Scott, M.H. Baillie. "An Artist's House." The Studio 9 (1897): 28-37.

Simmons, P.L. "Art-Aids to Commerce." The Art Journal (1872): 295-96.

Smallfield, Frederic. "A private view of private views." Temple Bar 74 (June

1885): 252-57.

Spielmann, M.H. "Mr. G.F. Watts: His Art and His Mission." Nineteenth Cen

tury 4r (Jan-June 1897): 161-72.

Stephens, F.G. "

J.C. Hook, Royal Academician, His Life and Work." Art

Annual. London: J. S. Virtue, 1888.

Tarver, Edward J. "Artists' Studios." The Art Journal (1880); 273-76; (1881):

109-12.

"Turner's Trousers." Athenaeum 2626 (Feb. 23, 1878): 259.

Wager, Mary E. "The Romance of Great Artists." The Art Journal (1876): 15 5-57;

187-89; 248-49.

Watson, Walter R. "Miss Jessie M. King and Her Work." The Studio 26 (1902):

177-88.

Zimmern, Helen. "L. Alma Tadema, Royal Academician, His Life and Work."

Art Annual. London: J. S. Virtue, 1886.

Secondary Sources

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. "The culture industry: enlightenment as

mass deception." Ed. Simon During. The Cultural Studies Reader. London and

New York: Routledge, 1993.

Altick, Richard. Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cam

bridge: Polity Press, 1993.

Brake, Laurel. Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the

Nineteenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1994.

Cameron, S. "On the Role of the Critics in the Culture Industry. "Journal of Cul

tural Economics 19/4 (1995): 321-31.

Codell, Julie F. "Victorian Artists' Family Biographies: Domestic Authority, the

Marketplace and the Artist's Body." Essays in Honor of Mary Lago. Eds. L.

Hughes & J. Law. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2000. 65-108. - . "Serialized Artists' Biographies: A Culture Industry in Late Victorian Brit

ain." Book History 3 (2000): 94-124.



JULIE F. CODELL 315

- . "The Public Image of the Victorian Artist: Family Biographies, "fournal of

Pre-Raphaelite Studies ns 5/3 (Fall 1996): 5-34. - . "Artists' Professional Societies: Production, Consumption and Aesthetics."

Towards a Modern Art World, ed. B. Allen. New Haven and London: Yale UP,

r995 - . "'The Artist's Cause at Heart': Marion Harry Spielmann and the Late Victo

rian Art World." Bulletin ofthefohn Ry lands University Library of Manchester

71 (Spring 1989): 139-63 - . "M. H. Spielmann and the Role of the Press in the Professionalization of Art

ists." Victorian Periodicals Review 22 (Spring 1989): 7-15.

- . "Moderate Praise: The Contribution to Art Criticism of The Portfolio." Victo

rian Periodicals Review 20 (Fall ̂ 87): 83-93.

Douglas, Mary. Risk and Blame Essays in Cultural Theory. London and New

York: Routledge, 1992.

Epstein, William. Recognizing Biography. Philadelphia: U of Penn P, 1987. - . "(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical Subject." Contesting the

Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Bio

graphical Criticism, ed. Epstein. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991.

Feltes, N.N. Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago: U of Chicago P,

1986.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. London: Basil Blackwell, 1983.

Gillett, Paula. Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society. New Brunswick: Rut

gers UP, 1989.

Hemingway, Andrew, and William Vaughan. Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Jeff ares, Bo. The Artist in Nineteenth Century English Fiction. Atlantic High lands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979.

Kriz, Kay Dian. The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the

Early Nineteenth Century. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997.

Landow, George. "William Holman Hunt's 'Oriental Mania' and his Uffizi Self

Portrait." Art Bulletin 64 (Dec 1982): 646-55.

Macleod, Dianne Sachko. Art and the Victorian middle class: money and the mak

ing of cultural identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Mancoff, Debra N. "Samuel Carter Hall: Publisher as Promoter of the High

Arts." Victorian Periodicals Review 24 (Spring 1991): 11-21.

Nadel, Ira. Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form. New York: St. Martin's, 1984. - , ed. Victorian Biography: A Collection of Essays from the Period. New York

and London: Garland, 1986.

Salmon, Richard. "Signs of Intimacy: The Literary Celebrity in the "Age of

Interviewing."Victorian Literature and Culture (^997):iS9~77- Ed. Michael

Shortland and Richard Yeo, eds. Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.



3i6 Victorian Periodicals Review 33:3 Fall 2000

Spatt, Hartley S. "The Aesthetics of Editorship: Creating Taste in the Victorian Art World." Ed. Joel H. Wiener. Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the

Editor in Victorian England. Westport and London: Greenwood, 1985.

Walkley, Giles. Artists' Houses in London, 1764-1914. Aldershot: Scholar Press,

1994.

White, Harrison, and Cynthia White. Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World. New York and London: John Wiley, 1965.



Constructing the Victorian Artist National Identity, the Political Economy of Art and.pdf

Documents

Transcript of Constructing the Victorian Artist National Identity, the Political Economy of Art and.pdf