British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840

Maureen McCue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317171485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

As a result of Napoleon's campaigns in Italy, Old Master art flooded into Britain and its acquisition became an index of national prestige. Maureen McCue argues that their responses to these works informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period's political, social and commercial realities. Dr McCue examines poetry, plays, novels, travel writing, exhibition catalogues, early guidebooks and private experiences recorded in letters and diaries by canonical and noncanonical authors, including Felicia Hemans, William Buchanan, Henry Sass, Pierce Egan, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Anna Jameson, Maria Graham Callcott and Samuel Rogers. Her exploration of the idea of connoisseurship shows the ways in which a knowledge of Italian art became a key marker of cultural standing that was no longer limited to artists and aristocrats, while her chapter on the literary production of post-Waterloo Britain traces the development of a critical vocabulary equally applicable to the visual arts and literature. In offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian art by early nineteenth-century writers, Dr McCue illuminates the important role they played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism.

Chapter 1Attempting ‘To Engraft Italian Art on English Nature’

DOI: 10.4324/9781315570280-2

When I was young, I made one or two studies of strong contrasts of light and shade in the manner of Rembrandt with great care and (as it was thought) with some success. But after I had once copied some of Titian's portraits in the Louvre, my ambition took a higher flight. Nothing would serve my turn but heads like Titian – Titian expressions, Titian complexions, Titian dresses; and as I could not find these where I was, after one or two abortive attempts to engraft Italian art on English nature, I flung away my pencil in disgust and despair. Otherwise I might have done as well as others, I dare say, but from a desire to do too well.

—Hazlitt (17: 39)

William Hazlitt's image of himself as a young artist struggling to ‘engraft Italian art on English nature’ provides an apt image for considering the ways in which Britain responded and attempted to assimilate Italian art into its culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Hazlitt's criticism of his own abilities is in reality an attack on what he sees as the contemporary British school's valuing and production of ‘glittering gew-gaws’ rather than those works that have the power to move the imagination. He accuses contemporary artists of lacking the ‘desire to do too well’, with being content in their inability to reach Titian's heights. His struggle and ultimate failure to meld these two traditions together supports the contemporary widespread idea that art had reached perfection only in the Italian school, but it also suggests something about the evolving consumption of Italian art in Britain in the Romantic period. At the end of the eighteenth century, London was bustling with exhibitions, theatres and other sources of entertainment. Unlike several of its European counterparts, Britain did not yet have a national gallery or a permanent collection of original Italian Old Master artworks. All of this would change with the onset of the war with France in 1793. Napoleon's campaigns on the Continent and the European aristocracy's need for ready cash brought countless artworks to the marketplace. British collectors, who now included both the nobility and the newly rich, bought vast numbers of these paintings and often displayed them temporarily in London auction houses. Although such displays usually charged an entrance fee, they were highly accessible to middle-class viewers. Indeed, as Richard Altick has shown, by the 1820s the public for art had grown so large that in the course of one season it supported venues such as the Egyptian Hall, the private collections of Stafford, Angerstein and others, and several auction houses, alongside the annual shows of the Royal Academy, the British Institute and the Society of Painters in Water Colour (404). At this time, viewers also began pushing for a national gallery in which to display the very best examples of Italian art that had reached British shores. Although many believed that having Italian Old Master art in Britain promised to elevate the British school of painting to the highest level, in reality it – and, more importantly, the print culture that grew to surround it – raised the social status of middle-class reader-viewers by enabling them to participate in the once-exclusive discourse surrounding Old Master art.

As the disparity between Hazlitt's inspiration and his ambition shows, one need not have been able to paint (or even purchase, though this was becoming increasingly possible) the work of an Old Master to experience it. The drive to ‘engraft’ Italian art onto British culture required and reflected a massive shift in the social structure of Britain. Although art historians have documented the ways in which class distinctions were negotiated in the public spaces of museums and galleries, I want to suggest that nineteenth-century print culture created an equally dynamic space for renegotiating this aesthetic, and therefore social, discourse. The increased access to exhibition spaces during the war and the post-Waterloo boom in travel to Italy were encouraged by a plethora of accompanying texts, including guidebooks, novels, poetry, periodicals, histories and biographies. Unlike catalogues raisonnés or artist manuals, which sought to educate connoisseurs and painters on the technical merits of visual and plastic art, these new texts engaged in a variety of discourses. Some debated the ways in which this art might reflect or impact British identity; others taught middle-class viewers the language of art appreciation; while still others offered an exciting and new imaginative experience of art which readers might hope to emulate. This chapter argues that by engaging with these objects in imaginative, political, social and aesthetic ways, such texts educated their readers and created an innovative space through which writers and their audience could fashion a variety of personal, national and international identities for themselves, ultimately renegotiating the social and cultural fabric of Britain.

The Grand Tour and London's Eighteenth-Century Exhibition Culture

Recent cultural and art-historical studies have sought to provide a fuller picture of eighteenth-century Britain's visual culture, particularly London's diverse exhibitions and shows.¹ Much of this scholarship, especially that which studies the relationship between exhibitions and print culture, has examined developments in print technology and contemporary British art. Other scholarship has explored the aristocracy's conception of ‘taste’, its reliance on Italianate and classical styles in architecture, music, painting and home furnishings, and the ways in which such fashions were copied by the middle classes. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the ways in which Italian Old Master art fitted into and upset this dynamic cultural space, a space forged between elusive markers of prestige and the commercial possibilities of mass access. While middle-class enthusiasm for contemporary exhibitions and the mixing of social classes within gallery spaces threatened to upset the balance of aristocratic power, Old Master art on British soil struck at the very root of aristocratic identity and privilege. This section considers the role Old Master art played both in the education of the gentleman viewer and as a marker of national prestige, in order to demonstrate that the influx of Italian art into Britain offered writers and reader-viewers an unprecedented opportunity to enact a more inclusive national identity and begin to claim a newly defined cultural authority.

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¹ See, for example, Galperin 34–71.

Unlike contemporary art, which needed to be vetted by critics and the public to determine its acceptability, Old Master art was almost unquestionably deemed great, and knowledge of it regarded as a marker of social prestige. Before the 1790s, however, the opportunity to see original examples of this art was largely confined to those with the means to embark on a Grand Tour to Rome. Originally a religious pilgrimage, the Grand Tour slowly evolved into an educational finishing school for Britain's male aristocrats and landed gentry. Although this was not the only reason for travelling to the Continent, and though more women than has been traditionally represented by scholarship made a similar journey, the Tour's masculine overtones and its educational purpose were critical factors in determining the value these works held in British culture. Despite the concerns that foreign luxuries and other temptations could corrupt or effeminize these young men, supporters of the Tour's educational benefits argued that by studying the arts and sciences abroad, especially in Italy, a young aristocrat became ‘not merely a “virtuoso”, but virtuous in the modern sense of the word also’ (Chaney 86–7). One of the major champions of these benefits was Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. In his influential Essays (1710), Shaftesbury asserts that knowledge of the fine arts would encourage the citizen-viewer to perform virtuous acts that would protect and strengthen the political republic.²

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² John Barrell has demonstrated the notion that only when the arts successfully strengthened the civic spectator's sense of duty to the republic could they present him ‘with images of ideal beauty by which he might be polished as well as politicised’. Conversely, if the arts were viewed by those incapable of exercising civic virtue, they would reinforce the viewers’ ‘taste for luxury’, and by thus effeminizing them, put society at risk (63–4).

For the socially elite Grand Tourist, the main purpose of art was didactic, not aesthetic. The viewer was trained in the mechanical aspects of art, such as perspective and composition, while also acquiring the literary or historical knowledge required to understand the subject matter of a painting or statue. Civic humanism argued that by understanding the cultural apparatus behind the painting or statue – including classical myth, religion, literature and history – the connoisseur was able to ‘read’ the art object and extract its moral lesson. As John Barrell has shown in The Birth of Pandora, this masculine virtue was easily threatened, particularly by statues of naked female figures. In order to maintain their authority in the face of such images, citizen-viewers developed a language that enabled them to maintain a proper distance while still freely gazing. This discourse, Barrell argues, represented

an emancipation from desire. […] To enable the citizen to triumph over his own sexuality was thus a primary object of civic education, and was to be a primary objective of the fine arts. (64–5)

This desire to view a compromising object without being compromised broke down the discourse of civic humanism, until the terms were reversed and the contemplation of art became an assertion of virility rather than an exercise in self-discipline (70). Increasingly, connoisseurs focused on the aesthetic rather than the moral qualities of a work. Although such connoisseurs would be mocked throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the marked contrast between their dry, pedantic criticism and their lecherous, microscopic gaze, art appreciation signalled one's prestigious social standing. ‘As long as the possibility of appreciating the higher genres of art was thought of as available only to the aristocracy’, writes Barrell, ‘it was certainly imagined that an informed concern with painting and sculpture conferred status on the noble or gentle connoisseur; it confirmed his standing as a patrician in the fullest sense of the word, as someone not only born to exercise power, but fit to exercise it’ (68). Italian art, long considered to represent the pinnacle of what was possible in the arts, would thus at the turn of the century provide new viewers with a clear avenue for achieving personal social prestige in an overly crowded market.

Despite the confidence embodied in this masculine discourse, throughout the eighteenth century Britain felt culturally impoverished alongside its continental neighbours, a sentiment reinforced by foreign visitors’ accounts of Britain.³ In Art for the Nation (1999), Brandon Taylor argues that the desire for art excited by the Grand Tour ‘fed the expansion of a market for Italian and continental paintings and so stimulated patriotic anxieties about the relative invisibility of a British “school”’ (1). Unlike several of its European counterparts, Britain could boast no public art museum, and even the monarchy's private collection was depleted from earlier periods. Charles I, for example, had been a great collector, but Oliver Cromwell's parliament sold off or destroyed most of his holdings between 1649 and 1653. While wealthy collectors and antiquarians were sometimes able to purchase original artworks or, more often, engravings of well-known paintings, the middle-class market for Italian art in the eighteenth century, as Altick demonstrates in his influential The Shows of London, was limited to popular commodities such as cork models of the most important churches and ruins of Italy, and wax or needlework copies of famous paintings and sculpture. Such reproductions, Altick suggests, were manifestations of the cultural prestige attached to Old Masters, even as they attested to the general public's inexperience with original art (400–403). Simultaneously, the anxiety over British art's standing gave rise to a growing interest in all aspects of the fine arts, instigating a plethora of exhibitions (100). Groups such as the Society of Artists (1761) and its more successful offshoot, the Royal Academy of Arts (1768), sought to address this issue by officially creating a national school. With its emphasis on developing public taste, the Royal Academy, backed by George III, soon became the preeminent exhibiting society in London. The Royal Academy's annual exhibition, launched in 1769, was an extremely popular event in the London season and cost a shilling entrance fee. However, as David Solkin and John Brewer have stressed, exhibition galleries were overwhelmingly social spaces, places to see and be seen, to be entertained rather than educated.⁴ The dialectic between the higher virtues of art and the commercial dimension of the contemporary art world would be bypassed by the arrival of Italian art in London at the turn of the century.

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³ John Brewer notes, ‘It was a constant source of puzzlement and wonder to foreign visitors to England that the monarch of such a powerful nation should live in such low circumstances’ (12).

⁴ In his introduction to Art on the Line, Solkin asserts that eighteenth-century ‘Englishmen and women went to galleries and exhibitions to look at the pictures on the walls, but for much else besides: to see other people, to be seen by them and to talk with one another. [… T]here was a general expectation, to the despair of certain professional critics, that conversations in front of paintings should range freely over a wide spectrum of issues, exploiting the latitude that was implicit in the very nature of the hang’ (4). See also Brewer 69.

The developing interest in the arts was part of a wider movement of sociability, taste and refinement that characterized late eighteenth-century British culture (Gidal 21–2). Exhibition galleries, coffee houses, clubs, theatres, circulating libraries and an active periodical press were all public spaces that encouraged the acquisition of those markers of taste and knowledge that defined the polite man or woman.⁵ The middle-class acquisition of such markers blurred social boundaries, which is one of the reasons why the tension between the exclusive aristocratic right to art and contemporary art's reliance on the growth of trade was so troubling to upper-class viewers and the RA's official creed. As Nigel Llewellyn has argued, the fact that the eighteenth century

is presented historiographically both as an age of elegance and the moment when Britain becomes a major commercial nation, when reactions to art itself become commodified, established a recurrent paradox in the very heart of the context within which British reactions to Italian art have to be understood. (99)

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⁵ Brewer stresses that this public dissemination of culture was matched by a concern for the private cultivation of taste and skills such as writing, drawing and music. These, he writes, ‘were the two contexts – one public, the other private, yet intertwined – for the emergence of a new identity as a public person of taste and refinement’ (59).

This tension underlies almost all aspects of the contemporary art scene in Britain and would have lasting effects on how art, both native and foreign, was treated, supported and cultivated. Although rhetorically this binary opposition was clear-cut, in practice it was the combination of high art and commercial viability that created Britain's art world. While officially the Royal Academy endorsed history painting as the highest form of art, many of its members were financially dependent on the popularity of portraiture a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Attempting ‘To Engraft Italian Art on English Nature’
• 2 Connoisseurship
• 3 Making Literature
• 4 Samuel Rogers’s Italy
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index