Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (59 page)

Reynolds’s first Discourse looked primarily at art education, but then he spread his wings, incorporating a wide range of aesthetic ideas, references to Renaissance artists, and citations from classical authors and French seventeenth-century theorists, as well as more recent authors such as Johann Winckelmann, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. His constant theme was that the ‘great style’ of painting - history painting - had an ‘intellectual dignity’ that ‘ennobles the painter’s art; that lays the line between himself and the mere mechanick; and produces those great effects in an instant, which eloquence and poetry, by slow and repeated efforts, are scarcely able to attain’.
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He was saying that painting in the grand manner relied on the classics and theories of aesthetics that formed the basis of an upper-class education every bit as much as connoisseurship did.

Yet, while this may very well have been the case, the purpose of the Royal Academy was to display the works of its members in order for the public to buy them. Financially it was managing very well, with Chambers as its extremely astute treasurer. Chambers had been commissioned to redesign Somerset House, which was to provide a permanent home for the Royal Academy, as well as for the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. The function of the Royal Academy as a conduit to commissions could be seen even here, however: Royal Academicians supplied £600-worth of work to decorate their own premises, in contrast to the Royal Society artists, who received a mere £63-worth of commissions for the same building.
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In 1780 the first exhibition at Somerset House drew 61,381 visitors - more than twice as many as any previous exhibition had seen. But first the Academy had to deal with the muddle caused by Reynolds’s extremely effective propaganda, which promoted the Royal Academy as a bastion of intellectual creative effort rather than a selling mechanism, and in addition had produced the general perception that it was under the patronage of George III. It was, if ‘patronage’ can be understood to mean ‘approval’, or ‘liking’; but not if it suggests sustained financial support. While George III used art intermittently to promote his reign - he had copies of a portrait of himself by Ramsay sent to every British embassy abroad, he commissioned Benjamin West to produce paintings for Windsor Castle portraying great moments in British history - he did
not have any plans to use British art to promote the glory of the state of which he was head, as many European rulers did, nor did he see the Royal Academy as a tool to provide propaganda for his reign.
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Thus the notice in the first catalogue of the Royal Academy exhibition was a tad disingenuous:

As the present Exhibition is a part of the Institution of an Academy supported by Royal Munificence, the Public may naturally expect the liberty of being admitted without any Expence.

The Academicians therefore think it necessary to declare that this was very much their desire but that they have not been able to suggest any other Means than that of receiving Money for Admittance to prevent the Room from being fill’d by improper Persons, to the entire exclusion of those for whom the Exhibition is apparently intended.
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The ‘Munificence’ extended by royal approval consisted of covering the losses that the Academy had made until it moved into Somerset House in 1780 - a total of £5,116 over eleven years. Any money in future was all to come from the income from admission charges and catalogues, not the royal coffers.

The exhibitions showed pictures for sale, but the Academy did not act as a picture dealer, and charged no commission. Its sole contribution was to display the works of its members, and to indicate what was for sale by asterisks in the catalogues. But the huge crowds, particularly after 1780, guaranteed wide publicity, and therefore sales. By the middle of the nineteenth century the sale of pictures had topped £7,345; in the 1870s and 1880s the annual sales were around the £15,000 mark, and by 1888 they came to £21,594. Yet even without sharing in this income stream with its artists, five years after the Academy moved into Somerset House it had £6,000 invested in consols (government stock) and a charity fund that was worth £2,100; by 1796 its stock holdings were valued at £16,000. In the first half-century of its existence, the Royal Academy had made nearly £40,000 of pure profit, after the outgoings were taken into account.
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However, Reynolds and the Royal Academy were concerned that it should be seen not as a commercial enterprise, but as one of education,
and moral value. One of the most important arguments they mustered involved the importance of history painting. History painting presented not what had been, but what ought to have been - it idealized the world, and created ‘great truths’, relying on episodes often derived from epic poetry or classical literature. The problem was, history paintings were enormously expensive to produce - they might take years to complete, and the artists needed cash up front for models, for research into the historical period and costume, and for space to work on a large scale, as well as the basic costs of paint and canvas. And then, once the pictures were finished, for all the acclaim they might receive, only the very largest rooms could house a history painting comfortably, and even then the subject matter often made a work un-domestic. The rape of the Sabine women might be a perfectly good classical subject, but did one want to look at it over the breakfast cups? Even subjects that started out as marketable might not be by the time the pictures were finished. John Singleton Copley, one of the few artists who made history painting pay (although even he had to take on other work at times), had started work on
Charles I Requesting from Parliament the Five Impeached Members
in 1782, right after he completed his hugely successful
Death of Chatham.
In the thirteen years it took him to finish it, political realities had altered, and after the French Revolution scenes even tangentially connected to regicide were not particularly commercial. Other artists simply found that they worked too slowly for there to be any way of making history painting profitable: James Barry spent seven years on
The Progress of Human Culture
for the walls of the Society of Arts, and never earned more than enough to cover his expenses. Given that it was a mural, he could not even exhibit it elsewhere, and, worse, no commissions followed from it.
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Some artists, including Reynolds, found solutions that broadened out the meaning of the words ‘history painting’ until more commercial genres could fit comfortably under their umbrella. When Reynolds returned from his travels in Italy, he let it be understood that he was painting in the grand manner of the old masters. All his work, including his lucrative portrait commissions, should therefore be considered a species of history painting. Copley’s
The Death of Chatham
, however, showed what could be achieved in the market, and its success probably kept the genre alive far longer than would otherwise have been the case. In 1781 Copley hired a room in Spring Gardens to display his canvas,
and sold tickets at 1
s.
each to over 20,000 visitors. (It was said that the success of this show reduced the attendance at the Royal Academy exhibition that year by 30 per cent.) In 1791 he once more hired a space, this time a tent in Green Park, to show
The Floating Batteries at Gibraltar
, which had been commissioned by the Corporation of London. When the neighbours complained about the crowds, he moved the picture to a site even nearer to Buckingham Palace, and scored a coup when the royal family visited, along with 60,000 paying visitors.
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Copley had been paid £1,000 by the Corporation for the picture; it was recognized that, given the amount of time it would take him to paint, this was not a very substantial fee, but ‘the advantages of an Exhibition of the Picture and the publication of a Print from it will compensate him for the time and study requisite for completing so large a work,’ they reasoned.
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It probably would have, had he not then become embroiled in a three-way lawsuit between the Corporation, himself and the print-seller John Boydell.

It was the print-sellers who were the biggest commissioners of history paintings, and it was they who kept the genre afloat. In the 1770s John Boydell, one of the most successful print-sellers of the day, had an arrangement to commission engravings of the history paintings which were shown each year at the Royal Academy, scoring a great success with Benjamin West’s
Death of General Wolfe
, which West had painted without a commission, and sold to Lord Grosvenor for between £400 and £600. He may have sold the copyright to the image separately to Boydell, or Boydell may have bought it from Lord Grosvenor, but one thing is certain: it was Boydell who earned the £15,000 that came from sales of this phenomenally successful engraving.

Boydell had arrived from Shropshire in 1740, and apprenticed himself to a landscape engraver, setting up on his own in 1746 and specializing in cheap topographical prints. By 1760 he had almost entirely stopped engraving himself, and instead moved into print-selling, commissioning others to produce works he thought he could sell. He had clearly understood his market. As well as the upper classes, who had always bought prints, collecting images of art they had seen on the Grand Tour, now the newly cash-rich middle classes were also buying. Collecting prints had become a fashionable pastime, even for those with
only a moderate disposable income, encouraged by that arbiter of taste William Gilpin, whose
Essay upon Prints
(1768) had levelled the playing field: ‘A Painting, or Picture, is distinguished from a print only by the Colouring, and the manner of execution. In other respects, the foundation of beauty is the same in both; and we consider a print, as we do a picture, in a double light, with regard to a whole, and with regard to its parts.’
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People collected prints of certain places or of certain subjects, or prints by certain artists. They framed them and hung them, as paintings, or they put them in albums and scrapbooks. Auctions featuring prints became increasingly common, newspapers advertised the upcoming sales, and then reported on the results.

Prints became more affordable to more of the population as the century progressed. Earlier in the century, Hogarth had charged as little as 6
d.
for some of his prints, and by his depictions of daily life in London he attracted many who had never before thought of acquiring ‘art’. Gradually, different subjects became available at different price levels. At mid-century a set of engravings of the Raphael cartoons at Hampton Court were sold for a 5-guinea subscription; cheaper versions were then produced by lesser engravers for 1 guinea per set, and then single engravings went on sale for 1
s.
6
d.
each. In 1785
Pendred’s Directory of the Book Trade
listed sixty-one engravers and printers in London, with another twenty-four print-sellers. By 1800, London was the centre for prints in Britain - and also for all Europe.
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Now print-sellers like Boydell commissioned, or at least encouraged, artists to produce paintings not for the saleability of the painting itself, but for its commercial engraving potential. Landscapes sold well; portraits, which were the most commercially successful types of painting, sold poorly as engravings - no one wanted to buy a portrait of Mr and Mrs Smith, except Mr and Mrs Smith themselves. Historical, mythical and allegorical subjects were infinitely reproducible, as were the more humble genre scenes. Francis Wheatley, a modestly successful painter, had exhibited a series of paintings entitled
Street Cries of London
at the Royal Academy between 1792 and 1795. His real success came only a couple of years later, when sets of engravings after these paintings were among the most popular ever produced, finding a place in thousands of middle-class homes.

By this time, Boydell had set up his Shakespeare Gallery. Just as history painters in general, under the influence of Copley, had begun to
choose popular moments in British history - great military victories, the climactic moment in the life of a national hero - so Boydell saw that Shakespeare could be equally commercial, as
the
national poet. His plan was to commission the most popular artists of the day to paint various scenes from the plays, which would first be displayed in his new gallery and then be reproduced as engravings in a nine-volume edition of the plays. The artists he ultimately used were the portraitists and history painters Hoppner, Romney, Kauffmann, Opie, Rigaud and West and the landscape painter Ibbetson, as well as Henry Fuseli and Robert Smirke, who specialized in literary illustrations.
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The two most popular artists who were not included were Copley - with whom Boydell had quarrelled over money - and Gainsborough, because he too wanted more than Boydell was willing to pay, and died before a compromise could be effected. Boydell was not to be swayed when it came to money: he understood that the market ruled. He had also wanted to commission a work from Joseph Wright of Derby, who refused, claiming that Boydell was offering other artists more money, while slighting him. Boydell responded, ‘You begin your letter by telling me that you understood that I had classed the Painters according to their rank, and you gave me a list of the first class, in which you place your own name. Now, Sir, I never presumed to class the Painters. I leave that to the public, to whose opinion and judgement I bow with great reverence and respect.’
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Boydell was bringing together all the elements of the Shakespeare market: the theatrical revival spearheaded by Garrick, the concurrent increase in the number of images depicting actors in scenes from the plays, and the publishers’ new interest in producing editions of canonical authors - to edit the volumes Boydell hired George Steevens, who had revised Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Gallery opened in a building specially designed by George Dance the Younger, in Pall Mall, in 1789. Its first exhibition showed thirty-four paintings, its second, the following year, expanded into another three rooms, with another twenty-four. Every year until 1805 more pictures were added, to produce a panoply of the greatest, or just the most popular, scenes from Shakespeare.
Unfortunately for Boydell, while he understood the print market perfectly, this understanding did not extend to publishing, and the financial outlay for a multi-year, multi-volume publication was more than he had expected. Then his financial situation more generally was fatally undermined when the outbreak of the French Revolution closed off his main export market overnight. By 1805 he was bankrupt. This should not overshadow his achievements. First, entirely on his own, as a commercial enterprise, he had shifted the balance of the print market: by 1786 Britain exported more prints than it imported.
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Then, his Shakespeare Gallery had encouraged the idea, also promoted by the Royal Academy, that the dissemination of art to the masses was a patriotic act. When Boydell’s bankruptcy became inevitable, he circulated a pamphlet calling for the establishment of a national museum like his own Shakespeare Gallery, of the Royal Academy. By this he actually meant a commercial gallery, as he expected it, like the Royal Academy, to sell the pictures it displayed. But instead a European-wide movement was forcing an alteration, rather late in the day, to the way the British viewed their art.