Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (63 page)

informed me of his own business there [in Paris], which was to collect pictures, medals, intaglios, and antiques of all kinds, for
a gentleman in London, who had just stept into taste and a large fortune. I was the more surprised at seeing our cousin pitched upon for this office, as he himself had often assured me he knew nothing of the matter. Upon my asking how he had been taught the art of a connoscento [
sic
] so very suddenly, he assured me nothing was more easy. The whole secret consisted in a strict adherence to two rules: the one always to observe, that the picture might have been better if the painter had taken more pains; and the other, to praise the works of Pietro Perugino.
⁷⁸

But this was the past, not the future. The future lay with the middle classes, who were by the turn of the century already finding art ever more accessible. In two auctions, in 1798 and 1800, the main purchasers included two dukes, four earls, five lords, a lady, six ‘gentlemen amateurs’, four painters, six art dealers, three bankers and ten merchants (four of whom were also MPs). The MPs seem to have been buying for profit rather than pleasure, so altogether there were fourteen upper-class or leisured collectors, against twenty-three buying for trade purposes.
⁷⁹
Even then, this may be an underestimate: many who described themselves as - and understood themselves to be - collectors would today be considered to be dealers. For example, the collector Benjamin Godfrey Windus cornered the market in drawings by David Wilkie, holding on to 650 works until Wilkie’s death raised their price, when he sold them at a good profit. He put two paintings by Turner into sales at Christie’s twice, buying them back both times until he could bid them up to the prices he wanted.
⁸⁰
Then there was William Quilter, who in 1875 claimed to be selling his collection of watercolours because he was moving house. David Cox’s
The Hayfield
was sold for £2,950, bid up by a collector and Agnew’s; equally, Copley Fielding’s
The Mull of Galloway
reached £1,732 after a tussle between Quilter’s son-in-law and Agnew’s. Altogether Quilter was said to have made £80,000 at the sale, and was regarded as nothing more than a clever collector until his death in 1889, when many of the pictures that had been sold appeared still to be in his possession. Gradually it emerged that he had arranged for some lots to be bid for, ostensibly by others, in fact on his own behalf, to raise the prices of the other items in the sale.
⁸¹

Prints, meanwhile, were continuing as a lucrative market in their own right, and print-sellers like Boydell were able to make a living from their professional activities, in a way that Pond had not. In 1800
the directories listed one specialist art shop in Manchester, which sold prints and framed pictures (there were probably several others we cannot know about today, because they listed themselves as booksellers). In 1804 Vittore Zanetti had a framing shop, and gradually moved into cleaning pictures and selling prints and
objets d’art
- coins, clocks, medals and figurines. This kind of mixture was becoming the norm.
The Stranger’s Guide to Modern Birmingham
in 1825 boasted of the city’s showrooms, which included ‘Eginton’s Painted Glass Manufactory, Thomason’s showrooms…displaying medals, jewellery, plate, cutlery, and bronze facsimiles of the Warwick Vase…and Jones’s Pantechnetheca [
sic
]…otherwise known as the General Repository of Art, New Street’, which had a picture gallery in the back.
⁸²
After the creation of the Royal Manchester Institution, by 1825 there were ten art dealers listed in Manchester, which had expanded to fifteen by 1836 (again, probably an underestimate). In 1817 Thomas Agnew, Zanetti’s apprentice, became his partner, and Zanetti and Agnew moved increasingly into works of art and print-selling. By 1823 their business was doing well enough that the marriage of Agnew to the daughter of the mayor of Salford could take place; by then the firm had an annual turnover of £8,000, of which £2,000 was profit. Agnew’s at mid-century was showing works by Constable, Frith, Turner, Etty, Landseer, Maclise, Martin and Clarkson Stanfield.
⁸³
In 1860 Agnew’s (now officially Thos. Agnew and Sons) had branches in Liverpool and London, with a showroom in Waterloo Place, just off Pall Mall, the traditional site of auction rooms. By 1875 the firm had built a new gallery in an old coaching yard in Old Bond Street, complete with sofas, tables, and the odd discreet picture on display, but no counters, no glazed windows.
⁸⁴
The Agnews, the message was clear, were not ‘trade’: they were gentlemen who happened to sell pictures.

Another dealer who began as a print-seller was Ernest Gambart, although his career took a more individual route. He was born in Belgium, the son of a bookseller, and he had arrived in London in the early 1830s as a representative of the French dealer Goupil. He set up on his own, although how, and with what capital, is unknown. Whatever the route, by 1846 he was one of the leading print-sellers in the country, and he also had a branch in Paris.
⁸⁵
He had linked up with Fox Talbot, the pioneer of photography, who had set up Talbot’s Reading Establishment, where Talbotypes of landscapes and genre subjects were produced in

bulk.
*
Gambart purchased 219 prints, and then another 123 only a few weeks later. Although Talbot’s establishment closed the following year, Gambart had seen the potential of mass-produced art. He moved swiftly to form an association of print-sellers which would be able to control the number of proofs and prints being sold, to protect the dealers.
⁸⁶

In 1849 Gambart held his first art exhibition, and he quickly became associated with many group shows. He began to deal with Charles Morton, who ran the Canterbury Music Hall. In 1856 Morton had built an extension to house a picture gallery, and Gambart supplied him with pictures on a sale-or-return basis. A painting at this time had three values: the price it could be sold for; the price that could be charged for viewing it in an exhibition; and the engraving and reproduction rights. Gambart took full advantage of all these income streams. In 1853 Holman Hunt’s
The Light of the World
was sold for 400 guineas; in 1854 Gambart approached him about the rights to reproduce it in an engraving. Hunt had, unusually, not already sold these rights, because he was worried
about the quality of the engravers being mooted. Gambart reassured him, and purchased the rights for 200 guineas. The engraving was published in 1858, and it was the single most successful print Gambart was ever to produce, and one of the most successful of the century, earning him enough to live on ‘for many years’. But Gambart had no intention of sitting back. Jacob Bell, the founder of the Pharmaceutical Society, had purchased William Powell Frith’s panoramic painting
Derby Day
for £1,500; Gambart offered the same amount again for the copyright together with the right to exhibit the picture while it was being engraved - a new idea. Before the painting was even exhibited, he had puff pieces inserted in the
Athenaeum
and the
Art-Journal.
Once the picture went on show, he made sure that the world knew of its success by pressing the Royal Academy to install a rail and a policeman, to keep the crowds away.
⁸⁷
Once more his engraving was phenomenally successful.

Frith was himself already an old hand at this sort of thing. His first great panoramic picture had been a bit of a gamble, but it had succeeded: engraving rights to
Life at the Seaside
(more generally known today as
Ramsgate Sands
) had been bought by a print-seller for 1,000 guineas, and the engraving and the purchase of the painting itself by Queen Victoria made him a popular as well as a financial success. Frith’s final picture in his trilogy of Victorian leisure pursuits,
The Railway Station
(1860-62), was sold not by Gambart but by Louis Flatow, a dealer who was reputed to be illiterate. Under Flatow’s management 80,000 people were said to have paid 1
s.
to see it, and many of those, and many more across the country, bought the subsequent engraving. Flatow was reputed to have made about £30,000 from his part in the transaction.
⁸⁸

Flatow may have made more on this one deal, but Gambart was the more innovative, with a view of the wider potential of the market, pioneering a complex interrelationship between art, the market and the dissemination of images and information. He commissioned F. G. Stephens, just before Stephens went to work for the
Athenaeum
, where for the next forty years he would reign as one of London’s pre-eminent art critics, to write a monograph on Holman Hunt. Stephens was well suited to the task. He had, together with Hunt, been a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (before deciding that he would never make a good painter, and destroying all of his work that he could get his hands on). The formal monograph he produced had several beneficiaries: Hunt himself, of course; Gambart, as Hunt’s dealer, who
could now point would-be collectors to this work of scholarship; and Stephens, who raised his own profile and bolstered his status as an expert.
⁸⁹
(Stephens would go on to write monographs on Mulready (1867), Landseer (1869) and Alma-Tadema (1895), as well as catalogues for the Grosvenor Gallery and the Fine Arts Society.) It is hard, looking back, to realize quite how innovative this symbiosis was, but its very naturalness to us is in fact an indicator of the great prescience of Gambart.

In addition, these monographs were useful in an additional, unexpected, way. Dealers and their profits were beginning to worry both the artists and their collectors: art was beginning once more to look too much like ‘trade’. The monographs were a way of subduing overt commercialism, taming it, making it appear as scholarship. In a similar manner, although many dealers worked successfully and openly - like Agnew’s, or Sir Coutts Lindsay and Joseph Comyns Carr at the innovative Grosvenor Gallery - others did not call themselves dealers at all, even though they acted for collectors and artists exactly as any dealer would. The Pre-Raphaelite collector Constantine Ionides relied on the artist Alphonse Legros to advise him; the painters Frederick Shields in Manchester and William Bell Scott in Newcastle were both active in the promotion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to local collectors.
⁹⁰
That this was an ambiguous profession, however, can best be illustrated by the career of Charles Augustus Howell (1840?-1890), dealer and con man - it is hard to say which aspect was more important, although Dante Gabriel Rossetti was sure he knew the answer:

A Portuguese person called Howell
Who lays on his lies with a trowel
Should he give over lying,
‘Twill be when he’s dying
For living is lying with Howell.

Howell’s career is interesting because in many ways it resembled Pond’s, except that now the factotum was at the service of the artist, not the collector. Howell began as he meant to go on. He had fled England before he was twenty because of a mysterious involvement in the Orsini conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon III. He claimed to have spent the next decade diving for treasure off the coast of Portugal and living in Morocco as a sheikh - or sometimes it was in Rome as the Portuguese
ambassador. Whatever the case, in 1865 the sheikh-ambassador returned to London, to the rather less glamorous locale of his aunt’s villa in Brixton, until he became Ruskin’s secretary. Despite his ability to produce wonderful reproductions of Ruskin’s drawings - or perhaps because of it - that ended unhappily. Then he helped Rossetti in a slightly unusual undertaking for a dealer. Rossetti’s wife, Lizzie Siddal, had died in 1862 of a laudanum overdose, and Rossetti, overwrought and guilt-stricken, put the manuscript copy of his new poems in her coffin to be buried with her. By 1869 he was ready to publish them, and Howell arranged for their exhumation. He also worked for Whistler, helping him make prints of his etchings, and acting as his secretary during his suit for libel against Ruskin in 1879. He dealt in Japanese prints and the newly fashionable blue-and-white porcelain from China, he negotiated sales for a number of artists, including Watts, Sandys and Burne-Jones. He may in between projects have turned his hand to blackmail, and it is thought that by the end of his life the ‘Rossettis’ he sold would not always have been recognized as such by their notional creator.
⁹¹
Apart from his sidelines in blackmail and forgery, Howell had taken on many of the attributes of the modern dealer more completely than many of the more respectable had done. No longer an agent of a patron, nor a shopkeeper, Howell served no one except himself: a businessman.

As with the agent, so with the artist: from craftsman to Romantic genius was a long, hard haul, as we have seen. From genius to social equal of the patron was a much smaller step.
Punch
, as so often, spotted the trend quickly. (There were always lots of cartoons about artists in
Punch
; after all, most cartoonists either were or aspired to be one.) In 1888 ‘Studies in Evolution. - The Artist’ (see next page) showed the ‘Old Style’ artist, a bearded, pipe-smoking bohemian chatting up the barmaid of the Pig and Whistle, next to a sign that advertised a goose club, a free and easy, and a harmonic meeting - sure signs of lower-middle- or working-class status every one. The ‘New Style’ artist, by contrast, was shown as a handsome, well-dressed, moustachioed gentleman kissing the hand of an elegant woman ‘At Her Grace’s Garden Party’.
⁹²

The full professionalization of the art market was perhaps epitomized by Marion Harry Spielmann (1858-1948). He was not an artist, nor was he a dealer, but from 1887 to 1904 he edited the
Magazine of Art
, and he was an art critic for half a dozen more magazines and newspapers.