Memory and Desire

Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Kenneth McConkey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351762830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte europeo

This title was first published in 2002. 'Memory and Desire' is a lavishly illustrated account of the art world in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. It calls upon rich resources of contemporary diaries, letters and art criticism, as well as the analysis of works of art to answer questions about how and why new artistic tendencies emerged and tastes changed. Eschewing the familiar narrative of an inevitable progress towards modernism, Kenneth McConkey considers a broad range of art and critical thinking in the period. Discussing the market for old master paintings, which rivalled those for modern art, and the question of how and why certain genres of art were particularly successful at the time, McConkey explores the detail and significance of contemporary taste. He draws upon the work of commercially successful painters such as John Singer Sargent, William Orpen, George Clausen, Alfred East, John Lavery and Philip Wilson Steer, and their critic-supporters to throw light upon current arguments about training, aesthetics, visual memory and the creation of new art. 'Memory and Desire' is a major contribution to our knowledge of this important period in British art.

1
Victims of Fashion

The rooms full of paintings by Turner, at the temporary exhibition in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, in 1899, confirmed Dugald Sutherland MacColl’s suspicions about the transience of great reputations. Turner’s masterpieces were diminished by ‘little changes of interest’ which turned him into ‘an eccentric’ whose career ended ‘in a climax of flimsy form and gaudy extravagant colour’.¹ The modern reappraisal of Turner’s work, for which MacColl was in part responsible in his rehang of the Turner rooms at the Tate Gallery in 1908, was yet to occur. For the present Turner’s oeuvre, in so far as it could be known, was incoherent and his legacy, apart from works from a restricted period and crystallized in the Claudian views of Italy (Fig. 1), unattested.

However, it was not just this which was troubling the writer. MacColl (Fig. 2) swoops down on Turner in a series of curves which illuminate a society the values of which are in flux. His prose is convoluted; it needs to be read slowly. He begins,

The ideals that excite humanity, even to the gravest and most universal, are victims of fashion … The virtues and vices must fight for their turn on the stage: Melancholy is the favourite pastime of one age, Honesty the entertainment of another, Patriotism the adored clown of a third. Beauty and Laughter may have to be tended by sects of grim fanatics while a tyrannical virtue or grimace is the fashion of the world, and the secret of the most ordinary affection must be guarded by hypocrisy lest it be forgotten.²

In the year before the dawn of the twentieth century, MacColl was acutely conscious of the action of time. In this extraordinary passage he also refers to the life expectancy of ideas. The mind is ever restive: there are no everlasting truths and the values which we hold at one moment may not so much be discredited as disregarded or mislaid the next. The change in the cut of a cuff may be deeply symptomatic of other shifts of opinion. One might salute a fellow traveller because his head is shaved like that of Baudelaire and he is dressed in black. Not for the first time does a writer about art realize that beauty is a relative rather than an absolute term, and that all the other determinants of social exchange in a sophisticated society perpetually change their value. In this, the historian, as much as the social commentator or art critic, is a reader of signs – someone who makes associations, who relates dress forms and possessions to the social fabric of making art and taking pleasure in that which has been made – not with the object of implying an easy homogeneity of thought and action, or to plot minute changes for their own sake, so much as to reproduce the texture of conflict and cohesion within the discourse of the producers of visual culture.

2 Alphonse Legros, D. S. MacColl, c. 1897

In the following chapters I am concerned with the mentality of the late nine-teenth-century artist and art lover in Britain. I am focusing upon a generation, born roughly between 1850 and 1880, which lived through the Edwardian years, up to, and in some cases beyond, the Great War – painters, collectors and critics whose common mentality held them to a set of values which functioned within a system of public display, acquisition and accumulation that was well recognized, but not fixed. By ‘mentality’ I mean something less restricted than that conveyed by the contemporary phrase, ‘mind set’, which tends to portray a particular sense of purpose or direction. In the sense used by French cultural historians, mentalité refers to the identification of areas of knowledge about behaviour, appearance, taste, shared beliefs, attitudes and suspicions.³ The term is more frequently used in the plural than the singular, suggesting that at any time, there might be conflicting or collaborating mentalities which compose a particular social formation.⁴ Groups, classes and the demarcations between them are permeable. Whilst it alludes to the sociocultural, my frame of reference is restricted to the specialist area of art production and consumption at a time of rapidly expanding visual and verbal literacy within western society.⁵ This immediately involves me in debates about the savant and populaire in visual culture, even though I do not wish to be tied to a sociocultural analysis of changing configurations.⁶ There are important occasions in which a character, an artist, collector or critic walks across the stage, trailing new images or tastes. Whole parts of the argument fall away and others are restated with renewed emphasis. Progression, as implied in histories of modernism, is irrelevant, although in the mind of the writer, as much as in that of the reader, it may be difficult to shake off. In the last 20 years art historians, while receptive to new theoretical models, have clung to the security of the equivalent of a modernist canon in British art at the turn of the century. This is most marked in the trajectory of Charles Harrison’s English Art and Modernism, in the histories of British Impressionism and the Camden Town Group, and latterly in the selection of canonical figures for inclusion in Lisa Tickner’s Modern Life and Modern Subjects.⁷

It goes without saying that while a conventional ‘development of style’ history is of less interest, I am acutely aware of the fact that individual artists’ work changes and develops in time. But whereas the history of modern art as a history of avant-gardes has tended to see successive movements like a kind of relay race in which the baton is passed from naturalism to Impressionism, to the varieties of post-Impressionism and on to an ever more rapidly mushrooming series of modern-isms, these explorations, although intrinsically preoccupied with sequence, eschew sequential narrative of this kind. They do not, on the whole, advocate new approaches to material which is otherwise secure within the modernist trajectory. ‘New’ readings often serve merely to consolidate the canon.⁸

With these potential freedoms in mind, certain methods and types of evidence are immediately of limited usefulness. While social historians have, for instance, elucidated the composition of a particular region or social group, and although deductions can be made from the socio-economic background of artists, the activity, unlike that of other trades and professions, was so marginal that little insight is obtained from the rigorous analysis of census data.⁹ Of the professions, that of ‘artist’ was never tightly regulated, in the sense of tests, examinations and qualifications.¹⁰ Important benchmarks existed nevertheless, and these operated through self-help groups and forms of behaviour in relation to the public and to patrons. However, there was sufficient latitude for John Lavery, Associate of the Royal Academy, to observe, when he joined the Artists’ Rifles at the start of the Great War, that its ranks were filled with ‘actors, musicians, hairdressers, scene-shifters’.¹¹ The category, ‘artist’, by 1914, had no fixed definition (Fig. 3). Painting attracted the sons and, increasingly, the daughters of the middle class, as well as those from artisan, working or even, like Lavery, orphan backgrounds. There is little evidence that background impeded progress. Training, perhaps because it valued non-standard skills and manual dexterity above more conventional forms of intellectual competence, marginalized class background. Recalling his student years, Julius M. Price noted that ‘Class prejudice and the cuff-and-collar brigade were unknown’, especially in Paris where ‘high spirits and eccentricity in every form are winked at benevolently by the authorities’.¹² It is almost the case that those few sons of the aristocracy who became painters were less easily accepted when they returned to society as painters.¹³ On the whole, becoming a painter was not regarded as being an acceptable profession for a young man of good fortune. In The Tragic Muse, Henry James describes the difficulties encountered by his central character, Nic Dormer, who clashes with his family in his wish to abandon his safe parliamentary career for life as a painter.¹⁴ Competence and the ability to judge the art market were more important in this field than breeding and background. Artisanal and mercantile values were at a premium. The robust and commonsensical W. J. Laidlay, a painter with a background in the legal profession, noted the contrasting motives of those who ‘go in for art’ because of an ‘overmastering love and instinct’, and those who enter the profession to make money. He was scathing about an ill-defined, heterogeneous body of so-called professional painters who, ‘although they call themselves artists … have nothing in common, and in reality differ only from amateurs in that they describe themselves as professional artists’.¹⁵ The profession was not a profession in that there were no rigorous tests for entry, no standards set for the production of art work, and in the midst of this unregulated activity sat the privileged few, the 70 members of the Royal Academy. Professional bodies were not good at supporting new trends and indeed, in the case of the Academy and the Society of British Artists, actively resisted innovation.

3 A. C. Gow, In War Time, 1915

These blighting negatives give little assistance in forming a picture of the totality of the art world. Although there are photographs and paintings of institutional elites – the selecting juries, for instance – there is no sense of that cross section of society who ‘go in for art’. We have to turn up one day in the fourth week of March at the entrance to the passage between Burlington Arcade and what was then the University of London, in Burlington Street, to get a glimpse of it. Here, according to the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘flows the never-ending stream of Art, real and alleged. Carts, cabs, vans, pedestrians pass slowly beyond the entrance to the Academy Schools. They stop just long enough at the next great doorway to deliver their freight … and then they pass out into Piccadilly to hurry back to picture land.’¹⁶ The keen observer of this human traffic of ‘very eminent outsiders’, ‘lady amateurs’ and ‘cheerful gentlemen up from the country’ would see a rich variety of dress codes (Fig. 4). Bearded worthies of the older generation contrasted with clean-shaven, fashionable youths and headstrong young women. The efforts of the majority of these people would be peremptorily dismissed over the next week or two. The regulation of what was allowed to be seen was in the hands of the selectors and hangers. Although there was at least one attempt to introduce more democratic processes, for the most part their productions were consigned to the oblivion of ‘picture land’, a realm which remains for ever unmapped.¹⁷ And while we will never know who was really in the queue of would-be exhibitors, we must assume that for all those who were there, there were many others who would not join it in the first place, who had no truck with the Academy because they were members of a different club which demanded exclusivity_.¹⁸

4 Lewis Baumer, ‘A Young Man who has studied in Paris’ and ‘Up-to-Date’, 1901
(from Pall Mall Gazette ‘Extra’, Pictures of 1901)

Historians have now turned their attention to trade and training organizations such as art schools and exhibiting societies, which underscore values or become identified with recognized tendencies. Important though this is, it does not constitute a fresh approach if it is merely used to confirm the familiar modernist trajectory of succeeding styles.¹⁹ New societies like the New English Art Club, identified with the promotion of Impressionism, could be ranged against established ones, particularly the Royal Academy, in supporting a familiar case. The struggle to liberalize the acquisition of works for the national collection through the Chantrey Bequest might be co-opted in the effort to underscore the promotion of certain types of art.²⁰ While acknowledging that moulds have to be broken, the deeper tensions in the body politic of late Victorian and Edwardian painting are more to do with taste, tradition and commercial success than they are with the onward march of modernism. In examining the artist and art lover’s world at the turn of the twentieth century we look at the mentalities of imperialism, social improvement, the ‘new’ psychology and the powerful economic drivers which crowd the creative process. The painter was not impervious to any or all of these if he or she needed to find suitable skills, working and exhibiting networks, and a market niche.

What little statistical evidence there is, tells us that the competition for public attention was much greater than it had been.²¹ There was concern about overproduction and the fact that the market was now more diverse, with older art in competition with the new. Deriving crude data for the changing balance between certain genres within annual exhibitions is useful, but is often not sufficiently coherent to permit meaningful generalization – beyond the familiar observation that conventional history painting was now old-fashioned. It would be bizarre to think that the selectors of the Royal Academy summer exhibitions consciou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Victims of Fashion
• 2 Savant and Populaire – Connoisseurship and Popular Taste in the Art of the Past
• 3 The Power of Appreciation
• 4 Haunts of Ancient Peace
• 5 Fashionable Flic-Flac
• 6 The Spirit of Storms
• 7 The End of Naturalism
• 8 The Renaissance of the Imagination
• 9 A Walk in the Park
• 10 Some Men and a Picture
• 11 Memory and Visuality
• Coda: Memory and Modernity
• Notes
• Select Bibliography Books
• Index