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Artists' Biographies and the Anxieties of National CultureAuthor(s): Julie F. CodellSource: Victorian Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 1-35Published by: Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
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Artists' Biographies and theAnxieties of National Culture
Julie . Codell
Amid the immense popularity of biographies in the nineteenth
century, perhaps no single figure was more scrutinized and surveilled
than the artist who was represented in every biographical form: press
interviews, expensive two-volume family biographies, and serialized
biographies. In an 1856 statement defending the popular mania for
artists' biographies, TheArt Journal called artists "public property,"
who as such deserved public scrutiny of theirworks, the "sanctity" of
their homes, and the "solitude" of their studios.1 Artists' biographiesderived many of their features from their antecedents, the series
and "libraries" of great authors and literary classics that appeared
beginning in the 1770s. Like these literary series, art series were
promotedas self-improvement vehicles to help readers familiarize
themselves with their own national culture.2 Malcolm Bell, one of
themost popular biographers, explained the genre's vogue as due
to increased leisure for learning among the general populace.3 Bell
arguedthat artwas ameans to assure the
improvementof the
race and thusprovided a public good for thenation (Bell, 1910,
2). The producers of that public good rose to become national
heroes and icons, but their former associations with Bohemianism
and degeneracy made them suspect and thus inneed of public
scrutiny and domestication which biographies offered.
Between 1880 and 1914, therewere at least sixty-two art and archi
tecture series, mosdy biographies, but also historical, critical, and
technical books. Victorian artistswere
juxtaposedwith and
interposedamong Italian and English Old Masters, creating a popular canon
by association and accumulation that argued for progress and British
Victorian Review (2001 ) 1
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J. odell
culture as the culmination of the greatness of the past. Serialized
biographies bore titles that ranged from the grand- "The Makers of
British Art" (Walter Scott Co.), "Illustrated Biographies of Great Art
ists" (Sampson Low, Marston), "Masterpieces inColour" (T. C. and
E. C. Jack)- to the cozy
-"Popular Library of Art" (Duckworth),
"Little Books on Art" (Methuen), and "Miniature Series of Painters"
(George Bell). While series generally served overarching functions
of defining and legitimating national culture, therewere differences
among series and also within series. Scholars and journalists wrotebiographies for the same series at a timewhen the distinction
between the popular biography and the scholarly monograph had
not yet emerged. Volumes within single series varied widely in style,
accuracy, popularization, and arguments about art's morality and
commerce and the didactic identification of the artist's character with
the artwork's merit. These debates were widely disseminated througha range of series' prices and sizes intended for an economic spectrum
of middle- andworking-class
readers.4 Versions of the same book
would appear recycled in both cheap and expensive editions.1
The popularity of Victorian artists' biographiesas part of a larger
process of acculturation of themiddle- and working-classes coincided
with agrowing obsession over national identity, itself shaped and
defined through emerging cultural canons of art and literature under
construction through these same series. In biographies, artists and the
public mirrored each other through mass-produced images of artists'
bodies, homes, studios, families, and theirmost well known worksaccompanying many texts. The French critic Robert de la Sizeranne
inEnglish ContemporaryArt described the nationalism peculiarto Eng
lish artwhich waspopularly treated as "the outcome of national
life and national thought," unlike its treatment on the Continent
(La Sizeranne, 1898, 318). La Sizeranne noted that English artwas
central to the formation of Englishness and related concepts of his
tory, progress, and cultural superiority. Other cultural institutions
fashioningmodern national
unityand
identityincluded Mechanics'
Institutes, museums and galleries, awide-ranging art press, and a
voluminous trade in cheap prints.
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Artists' Biographies
Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's concept of "culture
industry" stresses mass culture's subjugation to the organizational
principles and values of industrial capitalism, which directed
"standardization and mass production, sacrificing. . .distinction
between the logic of the work and that of the social system"
(Adorno andHorkheimer, 1993,30-31). Artists'biographiesconstituted a culture industry. They regulated artists' personae
through performative repetitions of social and professional norms,
homogenizing individuals into a typology of "The English Artist."Narratives criss-crossed with discourses on aesthetics, nationalism,
political economy, history, degeneracy, fiction, and the new disciplineof art history to produce
a bricolage of anecdotage, idealism,
didacticism, commercialism, and historical documentation that
revealed less about art and more about artists' social, national, and
economic roles. But this hybridity only underscored the interest in
and anxiety about artists and their national roles.
As William Epstein recognizes,The entrance of a biographical subject intowritten discourse
is still a momentous occasion, an event that can . . .
reaffirmcultural eminence, contextualize social action,
alter literary opinion, deputize political influence, or
instruct economic conduct - this admissions procedure,
which is always in crisis, is constantly (if not often con
sciously) surveilled nand through iographical recogni
tion, which, in this respect, functions as the generic
agencyof theproprietary owers. (Epstein, 1991,222)
Artists' biographies reaffirmed what Epstein outlines. Artists'
political, economic, social, and cultural authorities were "always in
crisis," as these areas of influence were coherent neither with one
another nor with popular images of artists. In spite of didactic
and nationalist formulas, therewere stillmany tensions, conflicts,
ambiguities, and uncertainties expressed in this periodover the nature
of the artist.
In short, art had become, one might say, too important to leave
Victorian Review 3
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J. odell
to the artists. Their reputations were sullied by associations withbohemianismpopularized inVictorian fiction(Jeffares,979) orwithfears of racial and national degeneration fanned by hysterical writers
who had, asWilliam Greenslade points out, "a focussed fascination
with the artist as a deviant subject" (Greenslade, 1994, 123). Artists
were prone to infection from both environment and heredity, for
Max Nordau and Cesar Lombroso and theirEnglish followers
(e.g., Francis Galton, Henry Maudsley, Havelock Ellis) forwhom
insanity and criminality were twin artistic traits.6 But as artistsbecame identified with Englishness, these stereotypes were replaced
by newprofessional models exemplified in serialized biographies that
produced new types.
Artists recognized the opportunity of their entrance into biographical
subjectivity, and they directly intervened representing their identities.
They negotiated theirpublic imageswith editors like . H. Spielmann, editor of theMagazine of rt, andMarcus Huish, editor of the
Art journal, and with critics like F. G. Stephens of theAthenaeum; allof whom were among the army of artists' biographers.7 Artists even
wrote their own press releases (Codell, VPR, 2000). Art critics, edi
tors, and artists, all tightly networked, advocated artists' full participation in social and economic spheres as professionals with a
high
degree of autonomy indetermining themarket value of their products
and, more importantly, of their expertise. Artists exercised direct and
indirect control over public representations of themselves and of the
profession as awhole.Bohemian and degenerate stereotypes were the b?tes noirs of artists'
biographies whose cultural work was to demonstrate artists' virtues:
hard working, domestic, paterfamilial, and, above all, successful. Bio
graphical images depicted them in large homes and studios to enforce
the texts' emphases on their success, familial ties, and labor. Traits
identified as English?
individuality, self-help, independent thinking,
originality, empirical observation, domesticity, and masculinity? were
ascribed to English artists.What made artistsworthy of biographicalscrutiny was theirmaterial and social success, after all, but what made
them worthy of iconic privilege was astrategic misrecognition that
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Artists' Biographies
theywere solely motivated by English character traits and Victorianideals - moral purpose, beauty, faith, and nationalism.
Biographies expressed the anxious tensions between criteria of mate
rial success and idealistic motives. Because artists' new social and
national roles were provoked partly by the 1860s artmarket price
surge, themeasures of artistic worth bymarket value and mass
consumption became aspersistent
as aesthetic, historic, or didactic
measures. The confluence of idealism and commercialism in the
construction of the artist became aVictorian episteme from which
emerged two dichotomous types thatwere as problematic as the
bohemian and the degenerate: the prelapsarian and the professional.
The prelapsarian artist, constructed by such prominent critics as
John Ruskin and Margaret Oliphant, among others, was auniquely
Victorian ideal of the artist removed from economic and social
demands, innocent of such "worldly" knowledge about wealth and
status, outside the social order, and oblivious tomaterial and social
needs. Margaret Oliphant described a prelapsarian artist in 1884,
writing on the autobiography of Giovanni Dupr?. Dupr? "lived and
laboured with never-failing energy . . .entirely undiverted by the great
events goingon around him, in his own particular sphere." Dupr?,
"a typical Tuscan," was more of the fifteenth than of the nineteenth
century. Oliphant fixed her ideal artist forever in an orientalized
Italian Renaissance as aprimitive, "too absorbed in the success of
his statue to think whether or not he is sufficiendy taken notice of
in society r asked todinnerby theright eople," the idealof theunworldly, nambitious ideal artist(Oliphant, 1884,614).
Oliphant emphasized Dupr?'s poverty, devotion to art since
childhood, diligence, redemption by love from a fall into vice,
andwill to self-help Oliphant, 1884,621-22). The idealof everyMechanic's Institute, Dupr? warned others "of the dangers of
premature applause, and of attaching too much importance to early
successes" (Oliphant, 1884, 626-27). Unaware of politicseven in 1848
Italy, he was "an artistwith his soul absorbed in his work" (Oliphant,
1884, 627), uninterested in the "dull annals of worldly success and
Victorian Review 5
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J.Codell
prosperity" (Oliphant, 1884, 631). In aNovember 1859 essa)1, she
castigated Academicians who aspired to social status and condemned
the lucrative practice of displaying single paintings inBond Street
galleries (Onslow, 1998).
Dupr?'s Florence was the imagined world of the innocent, artisanal,
uneconomical artist of Victorian dreams outlined by Oliphant and
echoed by Ruskin. Charles Waldstein argued that Ruskin contributed
to artists' elevated social status and redirected artists from their
bohemian "social dissonance" to help them attain the "exceptionalsocial position" and community respect they later enjoyed (Waldstein,
1893, 17-18). But Ruskin was ambivalent toward artists' public
respect and stature and remained suspicious of their social and
economic assimilation. In his writings Ruskin proposed a prelapsarianartist: "An artist need not be a learnedman; ... itwill be a
disadvantage to him. . . . he ideal of an artist, however, is not that
he should be illiterate, but well read in the best books, and thoroughly
high bred, both in heart and in bearing. In aword he should be fitfor the best society, and shouldkeep out of it." Society corrupted the
artist, "first, by its sympathy with his meanest powers; secondly, byits chilling want of understanding of his greatest; and, thirdly, by its
vain occupation of his time and thought... apainter of men must be
among men ... as awatcher, not as a companion" (11: 52-53).
Ruskin argued that an artist, being natural, was antithetical to
language: "an artistmay be unconscious of the principles of his own
work, and how he may be led by instinct to do all that is right,while he ismisled by false logic to say all that iswrong," exemplified
byReynolds'writtenrulesatoddswith his practice (4: 46): "The
whole duty inculcated upon the artist is that of being in all respectsas likeNature as possible" (4: 175). Inarticulateness was even proofof greatness: "The moment anyman
beginsto talk about rules, in
whatsoever art, you may know him for a second-rate man; and, if he
talks about them much, he is a third-rate, or not an artist at all. To
this rule there is no exception in art" (4: 119). Ruskin described theartist's mode of perception as prelapsarian and pre-language: To the
artist, "as to the child, there is something specific and distinctive in
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Artists' Biographies
those rough trunks that carry the higher flowers" (7: 21). For Ruskin,"a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly as
possible to thisconditionof infantinesight" (15: 28).In his pure goodness the artist had no interest inmaterial well-being:"he differs from us in feeling also an exquisite complacency in
Fasting, and taking infinite satisfaction inEmptiness... if you have
Nothing togivehim youwill find thatNothing isexacdy the thinghe most wants, and that he will immediately proceed tomake half
a picture of it" (4: 388). As therewas no want in the edenic worldof the artist, there could be no sense of deprivation from material
benefitsor froma social life(1: 27). Ruskin proposed a fixed income
"To give him his bread and cheese, and so much a day," which he
believed would encourage "your best men" to do good work (14:
488). However, money was ultimately irrelevant to the quality of
performance: "no amount of pay had ever made a good soldier, a
good teacher, a good artist, or agood workmen . . .you will find the
statistical law respecting them is,The less pay, the better work'. . .for ten pounds you shall have a Paradise Lost, and for a
plate of figs,a
D?rer drawingbut foramillion ofmoney sterling, othing" (7: 449).
Ruskin and Oliphant stripped the artist's mental capacity and
condemned artists' social and economic aspirations. Their ideal was
projectedonto the past. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's devoted thirteenth
century ainterChiaro dell'Erma inhis 1850 shortstory Hand
and Soul" exemplifies the prelapsarian ideal projectedonto the early
Renaissance in this case. Like Ruskin's artist as natural resource and
Oliphant's Dupr?, Chiaro is removed from the clamorous social and
brutal political struggles around him in Pisa. In dialogue with his soul,
appearing in the form of a beautiful young ladywho comes to him
because he "hast not laid thy life unto riches" and is still relatively
pure, he re-dedicates himself to spirituality and a social purpose and
abandons his drive for fame. His soul admonishes him to paint not
from the head but from the heart, which dominates him when he is
humble, and in the end he paints his soul, a kind of feminine spiritualside of the artist. Rossetti even incorporated
a nationalistic twist: the
story jumps from the thirteenth to the nineteenth-century and the
Victorian Review 7
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J. odell
narrator, an artist intrigued by Chiaro 'spaintings then hanging in theUffizi, is contrasted with the rationalism of Continental art students
who fail to appreciated the painting's devotional purity.8
The prelapsarian model was necessary for the preservation of art's
misrecognitionas sacred and untouched by economics. The critic
Harry Quilter evenposited
a bohemian version of the prelapsarian
artist, 'Vhose requirements were simple" and who was "neither very
wise nor very witty. . .
[who] thought painting the best thing in the
world" and who cared little for economic or social remunerations
(Quilter, 1883, 137).9 Ideological sanitation is, for Pierre Bourdieu,
part of the very nature of themodern artistic field: "the art trader
cannot serve his 'discovery' unless he applies all his conviction,
which rules out 'sordidly commercial' manoeuvres, manipulationand the 'hard sell', in favour of the softer,more discreet forms
of 'public relations' (which are themselves a highly euphemizedform of publicity)
-receptions, society gatherings and judiciously
placed confidences" (Bourdieu, 1993, 77). As Walter Benjaminalso points out, art in the modern world offers an escape from
participation in economic reality and recasts itself through ownershipand connoisseur value from commodity into dream, fantasy, and
idealism (Benjamin, 1978, 155); in thisway the consumer and
collector contribute to art'smisrecognition. The prelapsarian ideal
emptied artists of social and economic "fallen" knowledge that led to
"sordid" ambition. Instead, separation from such knowledge forced
themto see
only through Ruskin's "infantine sight." In this role,artists thenwere carriers of innocence whose "pure" works served
collectors' escape fantasies, as well as national ideals.
Ruskin's refusal toacknowledge the professional autonomy of artists
was characteristic of wider Victorian anxieties about art production,
genius, the solitary studio, and the economic value of artists' labour.
The prelapsarian model was necessary for the preservation of
art's moral purpose. But aestheticism had aparodie take on the
prelapsarian artist. In Vernon Lee's essay "In Umbria, A Study ofArtistic Personality" inBalcaro: Being essay onSundryAestheticalQuestions,
1881, Lee speculatedon the contradictions between the intense
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Artists' Biographies
spirituality of Perugino's paintings and Vasari's depiction of him asgreedy, mercenary, atheistic, and anxious for fame. She even echoed
Victorians' fascination with artists' studios and homes (see below) and
alluded to Ruskin's attack on successful artists for purchasing largehomes and carriages. Perugino lived "in the best part of town" in a
house "full of precious stuff and fine linen and place and everythingwhich awealthy burgher could desire," with a "handsome wife . .
. forwhom he was forever designing and ordering new clothes .
. .fantastic diadems
. . .that she might go through the town as
magnificent and quaintly attired as any noble lady."10
Her description of Perugino directly addressed the artist's
engagement with themarket and with money. His workshop, full of
assistants, was "an enormous manufactory of works of devotional art
. .. the same saints, the same madonnas, the same anglers,.. . forever
repeated in large and small, some mere copies, others slighdy varied
. . .by the pupils."11 Perugino was "a commercial speculator
. . .
who knew his public so thoroughly."12 Perugino "had themeans of
making a fortune . . . success was the only test."13
Lee then presented the dramatic incoherence "between noble art and
grovelling artists" that had troubled Ruskin:
Can a pure and exquisite work be produced by a base nature?
Can such anomaly exist - must themental product not be
stained by the vileness of themind which has conceived
it?Must we, togetherwith a precious noble gift taken
from a hand we should shrink from touching, acceptthe
disheartening, the debasing conclusion, that in art puritymay
spring from foulness, and the excellent be born of the base? .
. . it seems to strip the holiness from art, theworthiness, nay,
almost the innocence, from our enjoyment. We feel toward
any beautiful work of art something akin to love: a sort of
desire ... to be with it in some manner united; and thus
... that all thismay be sprung from out of unworthiness.
. . .contamination of origin,makes us shudder and suspect
.. . sickened for amoment as the thought quivered crosstheirmind of the foulness out of which the noblest of our
art has risen.14
Victorian Review 9
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J. odell
The pleasure of art objects increased the dangers of contamination
from the unworthy artist to the spectator, her "we" who experiencethe consequences of the leprous artist ("shrink from touching")
threatening to spread moral disease to "our" national culture ("con
tamination of origin").
What are the relations between the character of thework
of art and the character of the artistwho creates it? . . .as
thepeculiarity of the fruitdepends, caeterisparibus, pon the
peculiarity of the tree. ... so also must thepeculiarity of the
spiritual productbe due to the
peculiaritiesof the
spiritualwhole of which it isborn.1'
Art as the genealogical offspring of the artist becomes ametaphor in
Lee's medicalized language of degeneracy.
To prevent contamination by immoral artists Lee suggested
separating the artist from theman. Human faculties required for art
production fell into two categories, the aesthetic and the moral.16
The latterwere "merely protective," and included "concentration,
patience, determination, desire of improvement."17 If too large,the moral qualities overruled the individual and negatively affected
the art. In some cases the artistic faculties took over the entire
personality.18 The moral qualities for all artists, however, functioned
to assure that
a noble spiritmay be able to keep out of hismere abstract
creations those baser instincts (which though recognized with
shame) he isunable to subdue inpractise; hisworks show
him as he would desire himself to be, as he, alas has notthe strength to be in reality;
. . .for theyhave given to us
their better part, and kept for themselves,with bitterness and
shame, their worse.19
Through artmaking, artists then offered up for sacrifice their best
natures. This "higher" nature soothed consumers:
we almost persuade ourselves that in those dubious times of
doubt and dissolution, the spotless, the unshaken were in a
way divinely selected, like somany vestal virgins, to cherishin isolation the holy fireof art. . .we eagerly treasure up
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Artists' Biographies
like relics anecdotes showing thegentleness and generosityof men likeLionardo [sic] andMozart. . .which, inour
desire to trace art back to a noble origin, seem to shed so
much lightupon theproduction of a great picture or great
symphony"20
To satisfy this Ruskinian ideal, she begins to lobotomize her ideal
artist into an "art-producing organism."21 Lee suggested a division
of labour: the artist created the physical form, but the spectator
brought to bear on the artwork associations and resonances andthus generated the work's meanings: "What the artist gives ismerelythe arrangement of lines and colours in a given manner . . .This,
and not any train of thoughts awakened by this possibly but not
necessarily existing resemblance to an already known natural object.. .and this is artistic form, the absolutely, objectively existing work
of art,"while spectators created meanings through their psychologicalassociations.22 Lee rebuilt an idealized artist who was
merely to evoke for us a series of phantom sights or sounds,of phantom men andwomen. Therefore, our firstactmust
be to diminish, by at least a half, all the practical sides of
his nature, so thatno practical activities divert him from his
purely ideal field. ... we have obtained a creaturewhose
interest is never purely practical. But thiswill not suffice.We
must diminish by at least a quarter his mere logical powers,thus rendering him farmore inclined toview things as
concrete, livingmanifestations, than as logical abstractions.23
Removed from both practical matters and abstract speculation, the
artistwas reduced to a receptacle for impressions. Lee posited a
reduced, intellectually bare, artist to get amorally pure artist.
But thiswas, Lee admitted, "a mere historic myth, inwhich the world
continues foolishly to believe . . . that the poet is aspecial creature
. . .different from the rest of humanity."24
Such purity only exists
in paintings, and artists as humans not only cannot eliminate their
humanity, but,
as she admitted,they
cannot
paint
without it, as their
character marks their works with personality, quite apart from moral
virtues: "the distinctive features of his nature must be reflected in his
Victorian Review 11
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J. odell
work, since his work ismade out of and by his nature."23Let us tear away, throw aside this last amount of human
feeling, reduce our typical artist tomere intense powers of
seeing. Shall we stillhave wherewith to obtain anywork at all?
Will this rarified, simplifiedmentality be much above amere
feelingless optic machine ... we have removed asmuch as
possible of all human qualities. . .until thisvisual organisms
becomes beyond compare perfect in itspower of perceivingand
reproducing."26
Lee has gone beyond her initialmedicalizing and scientizing narrative
into a kind of science fiction whose new organism, however, was a
"paltry conclusion" that ignored beauty in painting, while obsessed
with the moral character of the painter. After all, Perugino "was
an atheist and a cynic, but he was a great painter."27 Such
ambivalence about the effects of artworks were consistent with Lee's
suspicions about aestheticism's moral implications, her developmentof
psychological aesthetics,and her investment in "the connections
among art, health, and purity"
tied to her "feminist purity polemics,"as Kathy Psomiades argues in her recent study of Lee's writings.28
Lee's "paltry conclusion," a reductioad absurdum of the ties between
pure artist and good art, underscored her belief that Ruskin's
insistence on such a tie came out of fear of the sensuousness of
beauty as evil and led to his anxiety, as well as contributed tomaking
"morality sterile and art base in his desire to sanctify the one by the
other...
to clothe all that is really pure ina
false barb of sanctity,"thusmaking "a return to nature a return to sin . . . in his constant
sanctifying of beauty he makes it appear impure."29 Lee pointedout that Ruskin worked "to sweep usurping evil out of the kingdomof art."30 The evil was art itself: "this irresistible craving for the
beautiful, which he would have silenced as a temptation of evil," he
turned into amoral.31 She criticized his application of morality to art,
recognizing that the beautiful does not always come from purity, that
goodand bad are mixed in
life,
as in art, and that the bad and the
beautiful are often intertwined: "beauty, in itself, is neither morally
good nor morally bad: it is aesthetically good. . .
Beauty is pure,
12 volume 27 number 1
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Artists' Biographies
complete egotistic: ithas no other value than its being beautiful"32She disagreedwith his belief thatgood artneeded amorallygoodartist.33 Lee recognized thatRuskin's morality could not survive and
that his "placid paradise of art," had "become suspicious... to
live in this sweet and noble impossible paradise" of beauty while
theworld was filled with poverty and evil became impossible for
Ruskin.34 In the end she argued against themoral resistance of evil
through prelapsarian isolation: we can only fight evil, "if we do not
shrink from the battlefield of reality intoan
enervating Capua ofmoral idealism," but instead recognize that the pleasure of beauty is a
good in theworld quite apart from the eradication of evil which alone
can only producea "mere joyless desert of painless vacuity," and
not a fertile garden inwhich artists "sow and plant" in a "redeemed
Ufe soil."35
Many biographers argued in defense that their artist subjects cared
little formoney, made money inadvertently while motivated by moral
or national idealism. But these same lifewritings also insisted onincluding prices as measures of worth and in representing artists' largehomes and studios. Art production became public acts of sacrifice
meriting generous payments in symbolic and cultural capital, as well
as inmaterial exchange value, and the value and appreciation of
works often served to "prove" national unity or artistic merit or
English character traits, such asindependence and entrepreneurship.
Furthermore the reduced artist that Ruskin advocated and Lee
parodied was in direct opposition to artists' own aspirations to rise
socially, and itwas precisely economic and social achievement that
dominated biographical series on artists. Artists and their biographerswrote to synthesize economic interests with ideal motives of duty,
modesty, and self-sacrifice. Biographies projected artists' motives
as "pure," but also portrayed them as mature, professional, and
entrepreneurial, partaking of manly English virtues of enterprise and
individuality The English artist asprofessional entrepreneur was as
Victorian as the prelapsarian model. As Walter Shaw Sparrow arguedin defense of artists employed in advertising, "the practice of everyart is bread-winning as well as aesthetic adventure, and attacks on
Victorian Review
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J.Codell
bread-winning are crimes against citizenship" (Shaw Sparrow, 1924,245).One popular biographerAlfredLys Baldry likewiserecognizedthe need for "a correct estimate of themanner inwhich taste controls
theworkings of our social economy" (Baldry, 1899, 1-2).36 For
Baldry artists were "art workers," and as such were free to capitalizeon social and economic opportunities, enacting entrepreneurial self
determination, a unique Victorian model thatwas anathema to both
Romantic bohemianism and latermodern avant-garde images of
artists (Baldry, 1899, 1-2).
Biography's cultural work was to hygenicize and idealize artists
without ehminating their participation in economic and social
spheres. Itwas, after all, their success thatmerited biographical
(mis)recognition. Hugh Macmillan, writing in 1903 on G. F.Watts,
described the painter as "one of the last survivors of themen of
genius of the Victorian age" whose Ufe demonstrated "how splendidwas the period that formed him." Watts was a perfect synthesis of
modern and Renaissance, aVictorian "Titian and Michael Angelo"(Macmillan, 1903, 1-2). Despite Watts's "spiritual conceptions" and
"natural dislike to [sic] publicity," his biographer cited as further
evidence of Watt's worth the artist's rising prices. Itwas characteristic
of these biographies to include both idealistic and monetary measures
of art's values, in this case on the same page (34) Rising pricesseemed to bolster themoral imperative ofWatts who "sacrificed
everything for his ideal" (Macmillan, 1903, 40). "Everything" did not
include sacrificing material comfort,a
very large studio house, or aprivileged social circle, all of which Watts enjoyed.
Conflicting traits came to represent artists' Englishness. Social
affability characterized thewratercolorist Birket Foster (Cundall, 1906,
viii-ix), but Albert Moore was praised for ignoring "social dignitiesand commercial emoluments attaching to artistry" (Baldry, 1893,
24). Biographical series became performative through the repetitionof norms that naturalized the "artist." Series contained anywhere
from four to eighty biographies, each one repeating hegemonicnational and moral ideals. Artists were tagged from series to series
-Millais, manly and purely English; Burne-Jones, daringly original and
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Artists' Biographies
otherworldly; Morland, the reprobate; Reynolds, the success; Turner,themiser; Gainsborough, the rebel;Watts, the civic-minded idealist.3
Obsessive repetitions of the lives of a handful of themost popularartists promoted them as national types, and some artists likeMillais
andWatts remained popular biographical subjects into the 1920s.
Not surprisingly, biographies tended to become xenophobic. In
Randall Davies's 1913 biography of Reynolds, the author reportedwith gratification that despite the foreign artists who populated the
"British School," the best artists were natives, a fact "gratifying tothe national pride; and itmay be added thatwith the exception of
Romney all of these were born south of the Trent" (Davies, 1913,
4). Davies' racial obsession was common among authors of these
serialized biographies that argued for apurely British lineage among
its artists.
Biographies sought to suture readers to amass national culture
and had a symbiotic relationship to exhibitions. M. H. Spielmann's
biography of Millais in 1898 was written "for the use of visitorsto theMillais exhibitionat theRoyal Academy" (Spielmann, 1898,
11). Ronald Gower hoped his book would send readers to see
theGainsboroughs in theNational Gallery (Gower, 1930, v-vi).
Accordingto C. Lewis Hind, English artists were themost lucrative
subjects because of the availability of theirworks: "Turner is a better
paying proposition than Velazquez, as most of his picturesare in
London" (Hind, 1926, 170).
The most striking physical characteristic of many series was their
size, small enough to fit conveniendy into apocket, perhaps
to
be read on railway carriages. Bell's Miniature Series, various series
published by Grant Richards and T. C. and E. C. Black, and the
BritishArtist seriespublished byPhilipAllen and editedbyKaines
Smith were all small books. Susan Stewart describes miniaturization
as expressinga longing for an "interior" life and intimacy, one of
the stated intentions of biographers (Stewart, 1993, 39). Harry Quilter
hoped tomake artists seem "men like ourselves, frail and exalted. . .bound to us by the tie of a common humanity, and claiming
Victorian Review 15
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J. odell
our sympathy and love" (Quilter, 1880, 1-3).Miniaturization, Stewartpoints out, does not decrease significance, but increases it, as the
miniature becomes a site of didactic truth, the aphorism, the epigram,and the proverb (Stewart, 1993, 53). The didactic function of
biographywas enhanced by tiny reproductions that formed a gem-like
distillation of culture. The miniature's "infinite time of reverie" bears
"nostalgic versions of childhood and history. . .
manipulatable. .
.domesticated and protected from contamination" (Stewart, 1993,
65-69).The
miniature offers didactic essence, kernels of culture, thecaptured secret of creativity, and pleasant memories of a Ufe of
dreams and fantasies ? all of which served the biographical mission
of helping readers identifywith artists while retaining artists' purityand innocence.
Women artists' biographies smoothed over contradictions among
competing ideologies of domesticity, professionalism, and femininity.Marcus Huish's 1903biographyofHelen Ellingham, entitledHappy
England as Painted by elen Ellingham R. W. S., articulated a rareidentification of awoman artist with British nationalism. Her art fit
her roles as mother and wife - her geography limited to Surrey and
her subjects limited to women and children. Her watercolour medium
easily combined with domesticity, requiring little space and being"clean" compared to oils. Allingham emerged as the ideal - both
feminine and artist. Her work embodied "healthiness, happiness,and joy f life, oupledwith an idyllic eauty" (Huish, 1903,
2-4, 13-14, 20).38 Huish employed the degeneracy vocabulary ofhealth to underscore Allingham as an
undegenerate artistworthy of
representing one national type.
In Arthur Fish's biography of Henrietta Rae, Rae personified a
professional Victorian artist without the overt domestic identity typicalof women artists' lifewritings. Despite having two children, Rae
(called Mrs. Normand throughout the book) was nevercompletely
defined as amother or wife. Rae and her husband were bound in
artistic fellowship, not marital roles. The children were dispatchedone summer to the English countryside when Rae and her husband
entered amildly bohemian French atelier. Photos of Rae in the studio
16 volume 27 number 1
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Artists' Biographies
werewithout her family Fish, 1905, facing96 and facing102).Fish insisted on the artist's "quiet life," a very common theme in
male artists' biographies,too: "The chronicle of events in the life of a
woman artist is in the natural order of things a circumscribed one . . .
there is little exciting, a great many efforts and a few achievements of
note ... a life of placidity tempered with seasons of disappointment"
(Fish, 1905, 9; italicsmine). The justification orbiography,then,was her art recognized "in theworld's art centres and received with
favour; work which has made her name prominent among those ofthewomen-painters of to-day, and marked her career with success"
(Fish, 1905, 10). Rae's success was achieved "in the usual ordinarymanner: by sheer persistent hard work; by a strong, determined fight
against the disability and discouragement that hinder awoman in
thebatde of life" (Fish, 1905, 13; italicsmine). Fish naturalized her
success, as obstacles were overcome by her will and good humour,
thus erasing the real barriers women artists experienced.
The periodical press also constructed a new biographical discourseon artists tomediate conflicting forces of money, idealism, mass
consumption, and respectable professionalism. Rather than suppress
issues, the press validated and naturalized artists' economic and
social success. S. Cameron argues that critics influence "higher order
preferences,"or meta-preferences by validating the consumers' self
image through concepts of proper taste (Cameron, 1995, 322-23)
and displays of expertise to stimulate demand by shaping consumers'
perceptions (Cameron, 1995, 329). Such critical tasks and roleswere precisely the ones carried out by Victorian biographers,
as
they transformed artists' commercial successes into public good and
identified artists with national traits, including entrepreneurship and
success, to generate consumer demand. Hind recounted how the
World paida guinea for a paragraph on an "unfinished picture by an
eminent Royal Academician," creating an advertisement for the artist
(Hind, 1926,131).
The press's biographical treatment of artists ranged from anecdotalsensationalism to calculated professionalism. In The Art Journals 1876
Victorian Review
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J. odell
series "The Romance of Great Artists," Mary E. Wager braidedtogether brief anecdotal and sensationalistic paragraphs, each about
a famous artist of the past, focusingon love affairs and miserable
marriages. The appearance of such anecdotage inTheArt Journal
alongside defenses of art-making as a profession, an economic
contribution to the nation, and a source of aesthetic uplift embraced
competing means for promoting readers' identifications with artists.
The power of the press was enhanced by the relatively closed
circulation of information. As Laurel Brake points out, critics
commonly wrote for several periodicals and newspapers, recyclingand revising their articles for diverse audiences (Brake, 1994,
10-11). For example, C. Lewis Hind wrote biographies for several
publishers, was sub-editor of The Art Journal (1887-92), author of two
biographical series for theGlobe, edited Pictures of the ear for the Pall
Mall Gazette (1890s), and edited theStudio (1892-93), thePailMali
Budget (1893-95), and theAcademy (1896-1903). La Sizeranne's sources
for English ContemporaryArtwere British press biographies, and TheArt Journal cited biographies from the Revue desDeux Mondes ("BritishArtists. . . .Edwin Ward, The Art Journal, 1855, 47), indicating
a
cross-channel sharing of press biographies.
As early as 1856, The Art Journal promoteda
regulatory public gaze
that inscribed the social order and a set of obligations and exchangesfor economic rewards on artists through the biographical act:
Every artistwho has reached a high position becomes . . .
public property . . . the public whose favourable suffrages hehas won by hisworks, feel also an interest in the individual
who created them . . . the desire is legitimate and perfectlyreasonable ? to learn some of his lifeand history.
... it is
not the eye of impertinent curiosity7that seeks him out, and
thatwould penetrate even the solitude of this studio and, to
a certain extent, even the sanctity of his domestic hearth . . .
[anymore] than a great legislator, or a renowned warrior, or
a successful author, or any other who soars above the range
of common men. .. . theman himself may be indifferentto thepraises or the censures of his biographer;.
. .but
18 volume 27 number 1
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Artists' Biographies
as thehistory is the inevitable result of the reputation, hemust make up hismind thatwhen he has himself achieved
the one, sooner or later somebody will effect the other for
him ("British Artists. . ..James Clarke Hook, TheArt journal,
1856, 1).
Art appreciation enfranchised the public ("suffrages") to scrutinize
popular artists, overseeing cultural production and domesticatingits producers whose characters could affect (or infect) the nation
through their cultural production. Furthermore, artists' new fameand fortune were to be regulated by the public gaze, as accretion
turned serialized biography into national history. Artists' Uves would
ultimately become English "history"; Thomas Carlyle and others
envisioned biographiesas defining an age, as Vasari's Lives of thertist
had done. National history was the sum of itsgeniuses' lives (Carlyle,
69-70).
This public gaze raised commercial success to a new level of meaning.
Popularity, measured by mass spectating and mass consumption ofartworks, became a symbol of national unity of taste and cultural
identity7. amuel Carter Hall, founder of the The Art journal in 1839,
later bragged in his memoir that in the beginning "J had to createa
publicfor Art... to show 'the commercial value of the Fine Arts'"
(Hall, 1883, 1: 197; "Farewell,"TheArt Journal, 880, 354;Mancoff,
1991). Like most art press editors, he argued for better fees for
painters (Spatt,1985, 53), and insistedthat thepublic needed to
recognize its role as upholding and strengthening national culturethrough consumption.
The market mediated then between the public's growing appreciationof art's importance and their identification with artists, and artists'
own need to understand the economics of their production and
consumption. TheArt Journal regularly published the year's sales in
an annual column detailing objects' prices, owners, buyers, and dates
of auction sales (e.g., Beaver, TheArt Journal, 1884, or Rowlands, The
Art Journal, 887).Knowledge of themarketwas explicatedby thepress as a vital part of artists' professional knowledge, not a "fallen"
knowledge that sullied them, theirworks, or their spectators.
Victorian Review
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J.Codell
The press thus transformed art production into an economiccontribution to "national wealth," at once both material ("wealth")and cultural ("national"). P. L. Simmons wrote that "taste is a
marketable commodity, which being of somuch value isworth
getting honestly, and by fair purchase" (Simmons, 1872, 295-96). He
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 variety of "artistic"
goods: frommarble statues and lithographic stone worth ?300,000,to lace totalling ?1.5 million sterling. Simmons listed the value
of imported oods: oil painting (?240,869), engravings ndphotos(?59,714), pictureframes(?9,498), opera glasses (?49,412), and
marble (?159,636). 1871 exports of British art-related manufactures
totalled?6,203,557 (Simmons, 1872,296).The art press promoted art consumption through serialized
biographies that first appeared inTheArt Journah original incarnation
as TheArt-Union. "Portraits of British Artists" offered one-columnlaudatory biographies inwhich hard work promised that the artist's
"latest production has been always his best" ("British Artists. . .
.William Powell Frith, The Art Journal, 1856, 164). Another series
"Great Masters of Art," presented Old Masters with full-page
engravings of theirmajor works. Thus, the journal produced parallelsets of biographies of the living and the dead, their fame levelled
and equalled by such biographical attention and contemporary culture
raised by association. Series often assumed ametaphoric relationshipbetween artists' characters and styles and found consumption to
be a common denominator between these two, as it "proved"national unity of taste and was earned by the artist's work ethic
and productivity made artworks the nations cultural capital and art
production a kind of civic act.39 Popularity was not condemned but
considered asign that artists were
acceptable to anequally industrious
Britishpublic.
Perhaps themost suturing images were those of artists' homes andstudios which became rich symbols of artistic moral and national
character, reaching the status of fetishized spaces in biographies.
volume 27 number 1
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Artists' Biographies
Studios and homes exposed the socio-economic issues in art
production and artists' public image. In 1880 and 1881 Edward
Tarver's "Artists' Studios" appeared in the TheArt Journal completewith studio floor plans, followed in 1882 by the series "Artists
Homes."
In the 1881 series "The Homes of our Artists," The
Magazine of rt featured Leighton and Millais, themost lionized and
popular biographical subjects. Leighton's house was "a substantial
modern building" of "unpretentious size, not intended to cause
astonishment by its proportions and style," a "charming place,"
appropriately artistic in "its lucidity and its colour" (Meynell, 1881,
170). The house was described in detail: Oriental splendour coexisted
with Englishness and a didactic purpose: his home symbolized
Leighton himself and was not just amatter of taste, but "of kindness
and courtesy" (Meynell,1881, 176).
But homes could reflect other, very different values. In its lack
of aestheticism, Millais's home reflected English good sense and a
critique of fashionableness like Leighton's. Itwas "remarkable forabsence 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" (Oldcasde, 1881,
290), likeMillais's own prosperity and popularity.
Why were artists' homes so special? John Oldcasde equated the sale
of artists' works with loss, and homes with compensation for this
loss:
An artist chiefly serves others by his power; the picture which
has been his secret for a littletime, his hope. . .and his
companion, isdestined to be the possession of strangers for
ever after. ... he must endure many pangs of parting..
. . those dear children of his he may never see again. . .
fallen into the hands of the Philistines ... in return for all
this diffused good and pleasure, he has won for himself the
pleasure of following his own altogether unfettered choice in
the building of his home (Oldcasde, 1881, 295).
Artists' homes were their justified return in an economic exchange of
Victorian Review
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J.Codell
pleasures
-
the public's in art, the artist's in homes
-
like a pensionfor a cultural civil service. Artists sacrificed paintings, metaphoricallyboth their secrets and their children, in a
psychological economy
of art. Artists' homes displaced their artworks and transferred the
artist's phallic creativity to a safe domestic site.The home or the
home-cum-studio replaceda lack, a loss of phallic power deposited
in the art object. But this loss could become again if the work
appreciated later. The home contributed to this appreciation as it
compensatedfor the loss and contributed to the artist's
reputation.Thus, the large studio home itself,which Ruskin attacked artists for
owning, was forOldcasde a function of art consumption that bonded
spectator and artist. The home became fetishized as a substitute for
the artists' "lack," those lostworks borne out of phallic energy and
into the public realm.
As Giles Walkley argues, home studios marked artists as
professionals. Sites of domestication and work, studios crossed
boundaries by masculinizing the home. Here, too, a political economyof art emerged: placing the artist's work site in the home, made
the studio "restore" the idealized cottage industry that appealedtoVictorian nostalgia for a
pre-industrial work protected in a
cloistered home environment. Hints of pre-industrial prelapsarianideals partially accounted for the fascination with studios: "the
heavenly, all facilitating studio represented both an inspirationaltool and material proof of the professional approach" and
"removed the suspicionof
amateurism... inmakeshift domestic
surroundings" (Walkley, 1994, xxiii-xxiv). Studios wereprofessional
and prelapsarian, sites of work in "heavenly" domesticity.
Biographies sometimes took the form of interviews inside homes
and studios. The core of interviews was the assurance of the
subject's authenticity, defined as consistency between the work and
the character of the great embodied in their domestic spaces. Richard
Salmon argues, however, that the interview undermined the very
intimacy itpromised,as
it transferred interest from the author'swork to the author's life,making authors marketable commodities
"productsto be circulated and consumed" (Salmon, 1997, 159).
volume 27 number 1
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Artists Biographies
As TheArt Journal quote above indicated, artists, too, becamecommodified as
public property. Salmon argues that the interviewer
surveyed the biographical subject, including home and writing desk,to project an "authentic" self, "revealed" by the author (Salmon,
1997,161-62). Being the subject of an interview in situ assumed
acelebrity7,worthy of the "cultural distinction which the interview
confers upon its subject." The home or studio authenticated the
subject and turned surveillance into spectacle (Salmon, 1997, 162):
"the home encoded the distinctive cultural and epistemologicalassumptions of the interview in thematerial substance of its location
. . .often explicidy read as a domain of revelatory signs," of, amongother things, the author's privacy as inner "sanctum" (Salmon, 1997,
164-66). The repetition of these topics as "hermeneutical strategies"meant that the revealed "individuality" of any biographical subjectwas the homogenized individuality of all such subjects (e.g., three
hundred articles inEdmund Yates's three-volume Celebrities atHome
that ran for sixyears
in theWorld). Celebrity intimacy
was an
oxymoron and parody of itself (Salmon, 1997,168-69).
Another economic issue foregrounded in press biographies was
the labour value of art. Biographies deployed market values to
homogenize differences among artists through a "universal" measure,
the market value of awork of art.Hard work justified art as
investment, and biographies readily assured readers of labour as
investment value: TheArt Journal admitted watchingover young
"promising" artists: "we have carefully watched," "our eye has everbeen upon" ("British Artists. . . . dwin Ward
"The Art Journal, 1855,
45). Biography was part of the political economy of art as investment
and stimulator of consumer demand.
TheMagazine of rt ranbiographical seriesfrom1878 to 1904,and after 1900 focused on
photographers, etchers, and younger or
"rising" artists, an investment category. Essays were generally brief
and chronological without the heroism or moralizing of The Art
Journal. Entrepreneurship was key in a journal that encouraged artists'commercial ventures. Elizabeth Butler "saw at a glance that by the
good luck of genius this field lay awaiting her; and this perception
Victorian Review
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J. odell
has undoubtedly been thefoundation of her successes" (Oldcasde,1879, 258). Her professional status was initiated "by entering simplyand ingenuously into themarket of sale and purchase that she could
fairlymeasure herself with her brothers of the brush," though readers
were reassured that she advocated only women's right towork in
private: "though personal conspicuousness and public appearancehave always been repugnant to her nature, she confesses to the nobler
ambitionof fame through er labours" (Oldcasde, 1879,260). Still
"feminine" in recoiling from public space (hardly a recoil consideringshe exhibited annually for decades, busily attended public dinners and
soir?es, and published her sketchbooks, diaries, and autobiography ),she negotiated her ambition for fame into thework ethic, a "nobler
ambition," exchanging success for duty.Work, not simply sales, was
themeasure of her painting's worth. Thus, Butler was redeemed from
her own success (and possible loss of femininity) by a "nobler" callingwith some very ambiguous praise: "If she wields the brush at sixty,as we
hopeshe
may do,shewill be
then,as she is
now,and as
she desires to be always- a student" (Oldcasde, 1879, 262)
- and
presumably never amaster
Such inconsistencies constituted the ambivalent biographical assess
ments of successful women artists in the press. Eleanor Fortescue
Brickdale's skill threatened her gendered identity through masquerade: "For so full and firm a
grip of a pencil seldom falls to the lot
of awoman.Happily there is next to no bravura lurking inMiss
Brickdale'shandling. She does not masquerade in the outward habili
ment of any given master's manner" (Dixon, 1902, 262). Althoughher phallic pencil was "firm" as aman's, she was still reassuringly
feminine, forsaking men's clothes, "the outward habiliment" of a
"master." Like Butler, shewas infantilised as an eternal student.
One biographer in 1861 commented on the increasing
difficultyof thebiographical task inproportion to the
demand alreadymade on our attention by the artists
themselves, through theirworks, or by notices of one kind or
another which have previously been published in the pagesof theJournal: thus the subject is, in amanner, exhausted,
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Artists' Biographies
orwe run the risk,by re-entering the fieldof investigation,of multiplying words, without increasing the information we
desire to afford. (Dafforne, 1861, 133)
This writer as early as 1861 pointed out that the public was alreadyso
deluged with information on art that biography's words, like art
works, were so common that theirworth was becoming devalued.40
Later art periodicals reduced or eliminated biographies in favour
of critical essays on individual artists, perhaps reflecting the glut
of biographies and specialized interests of a new sophisticated artconsumer more interested in connoisseurship than in didacticism. The
Portfolio had little interested in artistic personalities, focusing instead
on professional concerns, without personality cults, fetishism, and
anecdotage (Codell,VPR, 1987).TheStudiohad amodern view of
biography. Harriet Ford writing on Marianne Stokes did not describe
her experiences but internalized them in a kind of stream of Stokes's
consciousness (Ford, 1900, 152).The Studiodid not depict artists ork
ing in their studios. Its series, "Afternoons in the Studio," was notabout material wealth or studios' spaciousness ("Afternoons
. . . ,"
TheStudio,1894, 116) and avoided photographic imagesof homes or
studios: "the principles taught are of infinitelymore moment than the
privateopinion of theman who happens tobe themedium throughwhich theseprinciples are conveyed" (Baldry,1896, 10).Biographyhad become a degraded popular,populist, and philistinegenrefor this
aestheticist publication.
For most Victorians, however, artists remained idealized, heroiccontributors of the public good,
aswell as of public goods. In
collaboration with artists and readers, biographers solidified the
national profile of English artists. In the process of acquiring
and pursuing increasing importance, artists acknowledged several
exchanges that appeared in or alongside biographical subjectivity: a
grand home for the "loss" of the artwork to a philistine audience;
the exchange of patronage for the "free" market; the exchange of
privacy for public scrutiny that permitted an elevated place in thesocial order; the exchange of prelapsarian innocence for a professional
engagement with market forces, assertion of artists' expertise, and
Victorian Review
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J. odell
normative socialization.But these exchanges were increasingly threatened by changing
modern market values, and the biographical culture industry soughtto secure future hegemony forVictorian art against encroaching
French modernism that attracted wealthy American art patrons after
1900. Against these forces, biographies represented British artists
as "normal" adults, citizens, professionals, and property owners
to acculturate new consumers and socialize new artists who read
each other's biographies.41 Ruskin's reduced, pre-language artistswere removed from economics, hermeneutics, and full participationin cultural production which includes economic negotiations and
interpretive acts, or cultural capital. Lifewritings reinscribed the
authority to participate in these exchanges onto artists and claimed
for them symbolic capital. As true professionals, artists gave their
art and expertise freely and generously to the nation, contributing to
the public goodas ideal citizens of the state. Biographies argued that
artists, national icons and thoroughly socialized, produced two publicgoods
- themselves and their art.Through biographies artists entered
amuch wider public sphere than was available through exhibitions to
have their productions sanctioned and their exchanges recognized.
Facing the authority of hegemonic images of artists as degenerate,
bohemian, prelapsarian, greedy, or "fashionable," biographies
represented artists above all as professionals, itself a term thatwas
unstable and conflicted, combining uneasily market autonomy with a
vocational drive, a pre-industrial Revolution "calling" to one's truevocation. These contradictory terms were mediated by the notion of
expertise, aprecious entitywith a special surplus value. In contrast
to artisanal labour, artists' labour was rooted in an expertise and
represented in images of bourgeois studios filled with m?tonymie
signs of that expertise knowledge inwhich aesthetics, taste, social
status, and themarketplace co-existed; in photos studios overflowed
with antique busts, books, oriental rugs, and portraits of rich patronson the walls.
Modern culture, as Ernest Gellner argues, became in the modern
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Artists' Biographies
period "no longer merely the adornment, confirmation and legitimization of a social order . . .culture is now the necessary shared
medium . . .within which . ..members of the society. . .can all
breathe and speak and produce;so itmust be the same culture . . .
it can nolonger be a diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or
tradition"(Gellner,1983,37-38). Similarly, heanthropologistMary
Douglas, ?ke Gellner, defines culture as amutually interdependent set
of relationships among itsmembers: "a culture is a system of persons
holding one another mutually accountable... .From this angle,
culture is fraught with the political implications of mutual account
ability" Douglas, 1992,31). Artistsbecame objects of scrutinynd
anxiety because they bore the responsibility for such culture that
promised to secure national unity and homogeneity and thus movinginto the center stage of national identity, theywere held to thismutual
accountability
Bourdieu argues that allwritings about art contribute to art's cultural
meanings and artists' intervention in the literature of art demonstratesthat they recognized this hermeneutics. Victorian biographies shapeda lay canon, privileging popular paintings and successful artists as
representatives of national culture and character. In constructinga digestible and inclusive national culture, biographers assessed artis
tic worth in a discourse of professionalism and nationalism built
upon contradictory aesthetic, moral, and economic measures. The
dichotomy between prelapsarian and professional entrepreneur was
a conflict over whether artists or patrons owned cultural power andauthority and over artists' right to knowledge of the "world," as
well as to public recognition of their expertise that enabled them to
control theirmeans of production and theirmarket values. Artists'
subjectivities produced in biographies were unstable and had to be
serialized, repeated, and performed over and over to insist on their
autonomy and entrepreneurship in themarket, status and domestica
tion in the social hierarchy, and representation of Englishness, how
evercontradictory
theseeconomics, social,
and cultural virtuesmight
be.42
Arizona State University
Victorian Review
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J. odell
Notes
1. "BritishArtists: Their Style and Character: No. XII. -JamesClarke
Hook, A.R.A.," TheArt Journal'(1856):4l.
2. See Altick ,'Trom Aldine toEveryman," Studies inBibliography,1958,
5-15 on the representation of literaryfigures in biographies; Rubin on
similar acculturation inmodern American culture;Minihan on the role
of cultural institutions inBritish national identity; and Codell, OxfordArt Journal,2000, for a study of the creation of a national arthistory in
the genre of biographical histories.
3. Bell was a biographer ofRembrandt, Titian, Watts, and Burne-Jones,
among others.
4. See my essays on artists' biographies in books series, inBookHistory,
2000, 94-124, and on artists' biographies in the periodical press, in
Victorian PeriodicalsReview (hereafter cited asVPR), 2000, 283-316.
5. Versions of Baldry's biography ofMillais, for example, appeared in
four of Bell's series (1899, 1902, 1908, 1909) and one of Jack's, for
example.
6. Of all the biographical genres family or domestic biographies most
directly addressed the degeneracy literature in texts and images. See my
essays on family biographies inJPRS , 1995, 5-34, and inHughes and
Law, eds., 2000, 65-108.
7. On Spielmann ,seemy essays inRylands Bulletin, 1989, 139-63, and
KPR, 1989, 7-15; on Stephens, seeMacleod, 1986, 597-607, and
Codell, VPR, 2000 283-316.
8. D. G.Rossetti,
"Hand andSoul,"
The Germ(1850,
23-33. Rossetti was
so intrigued by his own creation that he reprinted it inThe FortnightlyReview inDec 1870 and itwas published by the Kelmscott Press in
1895, having become highly regarded byVictorians.
9. This version of the prelapsarian may be a forerunner of modern avant
garde artists towhom is attributed a carelessness about social and
economic matters and awillingness to live inpoverty and sacrifice
themselves for art, a very persistent cultural biographical ideal.
10. Lee, "In Umbria," 168.
11. Lee, "In Umbria," 168.
12. Lee, "In Umbria," 169.
28 volume 27 number 1
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Artists Biographies
13. Lee, "In Umbria," 170.14. Lee, "In Umbria," 172-73.
15. Lee, "In Umbria," 176.
16. Lee, "In Umbria," 177.
17. Lee, "In Umbria," 177.
18. Lee, "In Umbria," 178.
19. Lee, "In Umbria," 192.
20. Lee, "InUmbria,"
174.
21. Lee, "In Umbria," 180.
22. Lee, "In Umbria," 183-84. On page 183, she argues that if the artist
worries about associations awakened by the forms, "he will... be
deliberately or unconsciously leaving his own for, forestalling ours . .
. in reality transforming himself into the customer who would enter
his workshop," to order a painting with a specificmeaning. Customers
generate meanings; artists provide the forms for thesemeanings and
associations. Like Ruskin, Lee accepts thehermeneutic role of the
consumer.
23. Lee, "In Umbria," 186.
24. Lee, "In Umbria," 189.
25. Lee, "In Umbria," 192.
26. Lee, "In Umbria," 194.
27. Lee, "In Umbria," 196.
28. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, "'Still Burning fromThis Strangling Embrace':
Vernon Leeon
Desire and Aesthetics,"in
Richard Dellamora, ed.,Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1999,
33-37).
29. Lee, "Ruskinism," Belcaro: Being essayonSundryAestheticalQuestions.London: W. Satchell, 1882, 226-27.
30. Lee, "Ruskinism," 203.
31. Lee, "Ruskinism," 204-05.
32. Lee, "Ruskinism," 210.
33. Lee, "Ruskinism," 217: "For him the corruption of the art isdue to themoral corruption of the artist: ifthe artist remained truthfullymodest,
the perfection of the artwould continue indefinitely."
Victorian Review 29
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J. odell
34. Lee, "Ruskinism," 224.
35. Lee, "Ruskinism," 229.
36. Baldry was a biographer ofMillais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Herkomer,
Moore, Velasquez, and Reynolds for book series and in theperiodical
press.
37. For more details on Turners fortuna, seeCodell inHughes and Law,
2000, 75-84 ; formore onMillais, Leighton, Watts, andMorland, see
Codell, BookHistory, 2000, 94-124.
38. For comments on this alignment ofwatercolors with femininity, see Jan
Marsh, "Women and Art, 1850-1900," inMarsh and Nunn, 26.
39. For specific examples,seeCodell, KPR, 2000.
40. Dafforne in 1861 referred toCooper's 1849 autobiography publishedinTheArt Journal, a typical inter-referentiality in biographies thatwere
often based on artists' own autobiographical essays and interviews,
allowing artists' intervention into somany biographical texts.
41. Artists avidly read biographies as otherVictorians did. T. S. Cooper in
hismemoirs wrote, "I had read every book I could get hold of aboutartists and theirwork" (Cooper, 1891, 78), while Frederic Haydonwrote thathis father Benjamin Haydon's reading included biographies:
"Every life of every greatman 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" (Haydon, 1876,
9). Frederic Leighton's friend the architect Aitchison read theLife of
Haydon byTom Taylor (art critic for The Times) to thepainter while he
worked inhis studio (Corkran, 1902, 21).
42. Iwish to thank my colleagues for theirhelpful suggestions in the course
ofmy writing this essay: Susan Casteras, Dianne Sachko Macleod,
Debra Mancoff, Kathy Psomiades, JuliaWatson, and the anonymousreader forVictorian Review.
30 volume 27 number 1
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Artists' Biographies
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