Writing the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760-1810 (Oxford English Monographs)

OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS General Editors helen barr david bradshaw christopher butler paulina kewes hermione lee david norbrook fiona stafford

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‘WRITING THE LIVES OF PAINTERS’ Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810 KAREN JUNOD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Karen Junod 2011 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–959700–0 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Acknowledgements This book is indebted to the advice, assistance, and support of many people and institutions. I would like to express my special gratitude to the Berrow Foundation and to the Marquise and the late Marquis de Amodio for the generous scholarship that allowed me to write this project, which was originally submitted in the form of a D.Phil thesis at Oxford University. Thanks are also due to Lincoln College, where the scholarship was held, and which offered a wonderfully stimulating environment in which to work. With the help of a junior research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, I was able to complete and submit my dissertation at Oxford. As a graduate, I was privileged to be supervised by Anthony D. Nuttall (New College) and William Vaughan (Birkbeck College, London). Both were indefatigable in their advice, criticism, sensitivity, kindness, and trust in my abilities at all stages of the thesis. Sadly, Professor Nuttall was not able see this project in its published version; I hope I have done justice to his unflagging encouragement. William Vaughan generously extended his supervision well beyond his official duties, offering me ample advice in the development of this book from inception to published text. I am very grateful for his support, his friendship, and for his intellectual generosity towards me. In Switzerland, and at an earlier stage, Pascal Griener (University of Neuchâtel) and David Spurr (University of Geneva) also provided me with wonderful advice and encouragement. The rigorous comments of my two examiners at Oxford, Fiona Stafford (University of Oxford) and Mark Hallett (University of York), have definitely been helpful in transforming my dissertation into a book. Finally, I would like to thank the three anonymous readers for their insightful and stimulating reports, as well as Jacqueline Baker, Ariane Petit at Oxford University Press, and the Delegates of the Monograph Series for their support for this project. Research for this book was carried out at various institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States. I would like to thank the staff of the Bodleian, Ashmolean, and Taylorian libraries in Oxford, as well as the librarians of the British Library, the Royal Academy of Art, and the Paul Mellon Centre for studies in British Art in London. My thanks also go to the staff of the Lewis Walpole Library at Farmington, Conn., the Yale Center for British Art, and the Beinecke Library at Yale, for their kindness, patience, and efficiency. I completed the very final stages of this book as a

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British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, while embarking on a different academic project, and I would like to express my gratitude to this institution, too. Indira Ghose, at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), has been exceptionally supportive since my arrival at the English department there and I would like express my deepest thanks to her. Finally, the University of Fribourg generously paid the costs of reproduction for the series of pictures of Hogarth by J. T. Smith. In addition to the support I received from various individuals and institutions, my book owes a great deal to a community of other scholars, colleagues, and friends who have assisted me throughout the years. I would like to thank Ann Birmingham, Corine Besson, Maarten Delbeke, Patrick Flanery, Stephen Gill, Marc Gotlieb, Beatrice Groves, David Higgins, Felicity James, Roger Lonsdale, Didier Maillat, Fabienne Michelet, Paige Newmark, Santiago Cruz Petersen, Isabel Rivers, Adrianne Rubin, Michael F. Suarez SJ, Matthew Greg Sullivan, Andrew Van der Vlies, Colin Wiggins, and Scott Wilcox. Very special thanks go to Kathryn and James McNicoll for their unfailing support and friendship over the years. Luisa Calè read and commented on several sections of this book and her suggestions for improvement have been invaluable. Finally, I dedicate this book to my family, to my parents Rémy and Heidi, my sister Sandra and her family, and to you Michael, and our children Alice and John—without the love, support, intelligence, and encouragement of all of you, this book would not exist. I am grateful to the following institutions for granting me permission to reproduce the illustrations in this book: the Bodleian Library for Figures 1, 3, 4, and 5, the British Library for Figure 2, and the Yale Center for British Art for Figures 6–25. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘Artists’ Lives in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Strange Case of William Beckford’, in The Age of Johnson, ed. Paul Korshin and Jack Lynch, 16 (2005), 237–57; and Chapter 4 appeared in an earlier form as ‘Drawing Pictures in Words: The Anecdote as Spatial Form in Biographies of Hogarth’, SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature), 17 (2005), 119–34.

Contents List of Figures Abbreviations

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Introduction

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I . C O N T EXT S 1. Biography vs. Literature, Art, and Criticism

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I I . S E R I E S OF L I V E S 2. Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–1780)

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3. William Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780)

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I I I . INDIVIDUAL LIVES 4. William Hogarth: The Art of Biography and the Life of Anecdotes

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5. Thomas Gainsborough: Life in a Sketch, Sketch of a Life

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6. George Morland: Natural Art, Fictional Life, and Factual Biography

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7. John Opie: Domesticity, Publicity, and Gender

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Conclusion Bibliography Index

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List of Figures 1. Anecdotes of Painting by H. Walpole, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Antiq. d. E. 26, vol. 2: portrait print of Honthorst. 2. The True Effigies of the Most Eminent Painters, and Other Famous Artists that Have Flourished in Europe (1694): portrait of Honthorst, no. 51 # The British Library Board, 562*.d.17.

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3. Anecdotes of Painting by H. Walpole, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Antiq. d. E. 26, vol. 3: portrait print of Peter Roestraten.

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4. Anecdotes of Painting by H. Walpole, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Antiq. d. E. 26, vol. 3: portrait print of Sevonyans.

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5. Biographical Memoirs by Beckford, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 12 THETA 1169, frontispiece: Head of St Dennis.

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6. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth carrying his Master’s sick child round Leicester fields / The spot of ground / Leicester house. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.789. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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7. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth engraving his Master’s shop-bill the sign of The Angel. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.790. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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8. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth being out of his time draws his companion’s figure on the door of a certain place, to the great admiration of all his friends. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.791. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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9. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth declaring his love to Miss Thornhill. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.792. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 10. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth after his wife had put on a new night shift, ties up her things to send to Sir James Thornhill with a letter in which he told him, ‘He took his Daughter without a smock to her a____e’. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.793. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 11. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth has made breakfast and sends up a cup to his wife at the same time ordering the little dog to be admitted to her

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List of Figures

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

Mistresses bedchamber. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.794. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth drinking the first glass of wine with his wife––their dogs keeping respectful distances. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.795. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Sir James Thornhill’s boy entering his Master’s painting room to deliver the bundle and a letter in the presence of Lady Thornhill. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.796. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, The smock exposed. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.797. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, The reconciliation. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.798. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth drawing Sarah Malcolm. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.799. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth painting in Vauxhall Gardens in the presence of Jonathan Tyers. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.800. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth painting his picture of Capn. Coram for the Foundling Hospital. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.801. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth solicits his Patron Bishop Hoadley to look over his M.S of ‘Analysis of Beauty’. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.802. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth making up a portrait of H. Fielding, for a Bookseller, from the features of Garrick who borrowed one of the Author’s wigs for that particular purpose there being no genuine portrait of him. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.803. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth painting ‘The Ladys last stake’, in the presence of Lord Charlemont. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.804. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth sitting to Roubeliac for his Bust. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.805. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth at Old Slaughter’s hobbing with Highmore the painter. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.806. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth having been followed by Barry and a friend was caught backing a boy to fight purposely to catch his fearful

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List of Figures

countenance. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.807. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 25. John Thomas Smith, The Eleventh hour. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.808. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Abbreviations APE

Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 4 vols (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill Press, 1762–80).

BA

John Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, with a Catalogue of his Works Chronologically Arranged, and Occasional Remarks (London: Nichols, 1781).

BMEP

William Beckford, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (London, 1780).

Howe

The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930–4).

HWC

The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. Wilmarth S. Lewis, 48 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83).

LGM

George Dawe, The Life of George Morland, with Remarks on his Works (London, 1807).

LP

John Opie, Lectures on Painting, Delivered at the Royal Academy of Arts: with a Letter on the Proposal for a Public Memorial of the Naval Glory of Great Britain. . . .To which Are Prefixed, a Memoir by Mrs. Opie, and Other Accounts of Mr. Opie’s Talents and Character (London, 1809).

MGM

John Hassell, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Morland; with Critical and Descriptive Observations on his Works (London, 1806).

MPi and MPa

William Collins, Memoirs of a Picture: Containing the Adventures of Many Conspicuous Characters, Including a Biographical Sketch of G. Morland, 3 vols. (the 2nd entitled Memoirs of a Painter) (London, 1805).

SG

Philip Thicknesse, A Sketch of the Life and Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough (London: Printed for the Author, 1788).

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Introduction . . . the labour of writing the lives of Painters has been left to depend solely on the skill and ingenuity of men who knew but little concerning the subject they had undertaken, in consequence of which their work is rendered useless and insipid. ( James Northcote1)

These condescending words summed up James Northcote’s view of his fellow British biographers in the preface to his Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Knt. (1813). Northcote strongly believed that ‘if ever there should appear in the world a Memoir of an Artist well given, it will be the production of an Artist: but as those rarely possess an eminent facility in literary composition, they have avoided the task’.2 Given Northcote’s own professional background, his prefatory remarks were obviously selfpromotional. They identified him as an unusually gifted individual, a multi-talented man who was as skilled with paint as he was with words. Northcote certainly knew how to make the most of a situation: his book was published on the occasion of a major exhibition of pictures by Reynolds held by the British Institution at the British Gallery in Pall Mall in 1813. Northcote designed and wrote the Memoirs with a clear purpose: not only did he wish to be seen as a reliable authority on the first President of the Royal Academy at a time when the latter was granted particular attention, he also meant his text to eclipse and outstrip all other biographical accounts of Reynolds published until then, including Samuel Felton’s Testimonies to the Genius and the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1792) and, especially, Edmond Malone’s 1797 Account of the Life and Writings of the Author [Reynolds]. Visibly, Northcote wished to bask in some of the limelight of his eminent biographical subject. Despite their assertive and authoritative quality, however, Northcote’s observations were far from 1 James Northcote, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Knt. (London: Henry Colburn, 1813), preface (unpaginated). Northcote had first written a short memoir of Sir Joshua for John Britton’s Fine Art of the English School (London, 1809–12). 2 Northcote, Memoirs of Reynolds, preface.

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Introduction

accurate. Many biographies of artists published in Britain prior to his Memoirs had been written by people intimately aware of their subject, and few works, if any, were worthy of being described as ‘useless’ and ‘insipid’. Though decidedly biased, Northcote’s remarks neatly encapsulate issues central to this book, which explores the emergence and subsequent development of artists’ biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Britain. The present study investigates the making and shaping of a specific literary genre (described by Northcote in the above epigraph as ‘the labour of writing the lives of Painters’), explores notions of artistic authorship and agency (‘the skill and ingenuity of men’), and examines the function of these biographical narratives as well as their aesthetic value and importance at a time when the British art world was undergoing significant transformation.3 By tackling such issues, Writing the Lives of Painters evaluates the function of biography in the construction of artistic identity in Britain between c.1760 and 1810. Concurrently, this book assesses the genre’s concomitant role in shaping and enhancing the social and cultural status of painters during this period. As with other public figures, such as British monarchs, politicians, writers, and actors, painters were increasingly subjected to the vocabulary and narrative of commercial biography. No longer artisans, they finally became artists. Biography has re-emerged as a key theme for the humanities and social sciences in recent years. In literary studies, the figure of the author seems certainly more alive as a scholarly topic than at any time in the past.4 In opposition to the general drive of anti-authorial and anti-intentional criticism pervading literary theory during most of the last century, current scholarship has been keen to place the author back within the text. Stanley Fish’s observation that the ‘divorce’ between a writer and his work is not simply ‘inadvisable’ but plainly ‘impossible’––a view which, five decades ago, would have been quickly brushed aside by critics still persuaded that the author was long dead and buried––is now self-evident.5 The number of academic 3 Recent studies on British art in the 18th and early 19th centuries include Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); Martin Myrone, Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750–1810 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005); Martin Postle (ed.), Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (London: Tate, 2005); Luisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006); Matthew Hargraves, Candidates for Fame: The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760–1791 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). 4 Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Birth of the Author’, in Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the Lives of Writers (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998), 36–53. 5 Stanley Fish, ‘Biography and Intention’, in William H. Epstein (ed.), Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991), 10.

Introduction

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courses, seminars, and lectures on biography and biographical criticism has risen dramatically in recent years, accompanied as it has been by a similar record number of publications of more popular biographies. The genre is everywhere, ready to quench the reader’s thirst for personal, intimate, often voyeuristic details about the lives of society’s heroes and anti-heroes. As in literary studies, the role of biography in art criticism and art history has long been debated, questioned, appraised, and reappraised. Interestingly, while painters have become celebrities, their art has often been discussed in anti-biographical terms. Taking their lead from New Criticism, many art historians and art specialists still focus on the autonomy of the artwork and its internal features, while relegating biographical data to the periphery. Scholarship on visual culture tends to disregard questions of intentionality; instead, the emphasis is on an image’s reception, its public, its relationship with other images.6 Indeed, many art historians have shunned intentional and biographical elements in favour of social, historical, formal, or semiotic approaches to the works of painters. Yet the methodological question of the artist arises from within the very poststructuralist milieu which has predicated the ‘death of the author’. While Roland Barthes sentenced the author to death, Michel Foucault identified in the author-function the convergence of a complex web of discursive practices. For him, ‘the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society’.7 The ways in which Foucault identified the authorfunction bear particular relevance to biographical writing and criticism. By analogy, it posits biography as instrumental in defining the ‘mode of existence’ and ‘circulation’, as well as the self-fashioning and positioning of artists within a specific field of art. Pierre Bourdieu has called biography an ‘illusion’ and has questioned the very possibility of truthful biographical narrativization and reconstruction.8 Yet Bourdieu’s work suggests that it is precisely this artificiality and malleability of the genre that make biography a crucial instrument in the construction of artists’ reputations and promotion within a specific artistic field, because they allow writers to tailor their subject’s talents and genius to the needs and expectations of the art markets.9 Bourdieu’s views of the nature and the 6 Stuart Hall, ‘The Work of Representation’, in Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), 15–74, esp. 25. 7 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, tr. and ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124. 8 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’Illusion biographique’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 62–3 (June 1986), 69–72. 9 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and intr. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).

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function of biography coincide with those held by other critics who have similarly refuted the idea of the isolated genius and have resisted the interpretation of pure disinterestedness on the part of the artist and his or her audience. Poststructuralist speculations about biography have not prevented a growing number of art historians from reclaiming and reintegrating the biographical genre within art historical and visual studies in recent years. Catherine M. Soussloff ’s contested The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (1997), for instance, aims at locating the artist as cultural figure in ‘the discourse of history’.10 Spurred on by the ‘obvious lack of critical discussion about the concept of the artist’, Soussloff ’s book purports to discuss that very ‘genre, in which the artist has been textualized, the biography of the artist’.11 Soussloff defines the artist’s biography in strict terms. She divides the genre into its component parts, including ‘Prebirth’, ‘Birth’, ‘Youth’, ‘Maturity’, ‘Old Age’, ‘Death’ ‘Fate of Body’, ‘Fate of Works’; each of these categories being again divided into further sections such as ‘Portents’, ‘Dreams’, ‘Naming’, or ‘Discovery by a recognized artist or artistic authority’, among others.12 Clearly, the ‘absolute artist’ of Soussloff ’s book title is the artist as defined by a biographical schematism––a narrative a priori, often based on anecdotes, which continuously shapes our conceptions and ideas of the lives of individual painters. Soussloff ’s critical approach enables her to separate ‘the artist from other categories of human beings’, and hence to ‘locate’ and identify him within the ‘discourse of history’.13 However, her pre-existing idea of who an artist is, and what he does, fails to reflect the diversity of the genre of the artist’s life. The present work resists the fixity and closure of Soussloff ’s definition and explores the biographical texts that were produced in the specific contexts of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literary and artistic culture. In contrast to Soussloff’s pre-established biographical structure, this study pays particular attention to the generic variety that characterized artists’ biographies during this period. It discusses the ways in which such a generic diversity informed artists’ personalities, and how their fame and identities were socially, culturally, and textually constructed, promoted, and disseminated. Several books dealing specifically with artists’ biographies have been published since Soussloff ’s Absolute Artist. Karin Hellwig’s Von der Vita zur Künstlerbiografie (2005) focuses for the most part on the lives of artists written and published in Germany, and explores the nineteenth-century 10 Catherine M. Soussloff, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3. 11 12 13 Ibid. 16. Ibid. 2, figure 1. Ibid. 4.

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transformation of artists’ biographies from anecdotal to scientific works that enabled critical evaluation and appreciation of artists’ pictures.14 Gabriele Guercio’s important study Art as Existence (2006) also explores the origins of the life-and-work relationship and assesses the role of Vasari’s Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, et architettori (1550 and 1568) in the development of the nineteenth-century artist’s monograph in France, Germany, and Britain.15 In particular, Guercio’s book explores the increase in analogical interconnections between a painter’s work and his or her existence, arguing that such interconnections are characteristic of the nineteenth-century artist’s monograph. As the title of Guercio’s book indicates, Art as Existence examines how the nineteenth-century monograph likened art to existence and construed otherwise distinct works as chapters of the artist’s life story. Artists’ biographies published in Britain have been the object of little scholarly attention. Literary scholars have tended to focus on the biographies of writers. On the other hand, the vast majority of art historians who have integrated the biographies of British artists into their researches have usually used these texts as sources of information, rather than a literary genre in its own right. No doubt, many critics, including Ronald Paulson and David Bindman, have made a case for the pertinence of biographical knowledge in their artistic analyses, maintaining that the production and quality of art are closely related to the artist’s life and character (in this case, William Hogarth). However, such critics have never truly engaged with the biographical genre itself, thus uncovering its intricacies as well as its connections and affinities with other adjacent literary genres and subgenres. In this regard, Julie Codell’s The Victorian Artist (2003) is a notable exception.16 Her study focuses specifically on the British situation and explores the variety of artists’ textual lives, demonstrating as it does that life-writing in nineteenth-century Britain was a crucial site of mediation and exchanges. Her careful analysis, which discusses a wide range of different texts, including autobiographies as well as biographical serializations in newspapers, reveals how the artist remained pivotal in the linking of art objects to national identity and ideological intentions in nineteenth-century Britain.

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Karin Hellwig, Von der Vita zur Künstlerbiografie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005). Gabriele Guercio, Art as Existence: The Artist’s Monograph and its Project (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2006). 16 Julie Codell, The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); see also Malcolm Baker, ‘Sculptors’ Lives and Sculptors’ Travels’, in Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (London: V&A Publications, 2000), 22–33. 15

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Introduction

The present interdisciplinary study re-evaluates the place and the nature of the artist’s biography as a genre in British literature and art historiography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The period is of particular interest for several reasons. First, it is precisely in the eighteenth century that artists’ biographies started being questioned as a valid tool of art criticism. The biographical and historiographic model established by Giorgio Vasari’s Vite, and routinely rehearsed by Continental writers during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was gradually challenged by critics sceptical of the reliability and usefulness of biography for artistic analyses, attributions, and evaluations. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764) redirected the course of art-historical writing, abandoning Vasari’s biographical approach in order to propose instead a history of artistic forms. Despite its huge impact on other European art histories, the novelty and originality of Winckelmann’s Geschichte was felt on a much lesser scale in Britain. The popularity of biography as a literary genre, as well as the extraordinary cult and culture of celebrity that surrounded contemporary painters, meant that artists’ biographies remained vibrantly alive. Unlike Continental art criticism, biography continued to be one of the major vehicles for organizing and interpreting an artist’s output in Britain––although, I will show, such a biographical approach often conflicted with, and defined itself against, more connoisseurial and formal methodologies. The generic diversity of artists’ lives is equally worthy of consideration. Indeed, the nascent status of artists’ biographies meant that the genre was still loosely structured. Generic hybridity and heterogeneity were among the more obvious features of the body of biographies of artists published in Britain between 1760 and 1810. It is crucial to remember that the writing of artists’ biographies was not sustained by a unified community at that time. The people who wrote artists’ lives in Britain formed a collection of very disparate social beings with wide-ranging and contrasting agendas and notions of art. There were no professional art historians at that time and those who wrote artists’ biographies usually did so within other broader functions and competences. No pattern of identification brought them together, no institutional frame of reference led them to identify with one another or share similar concerns (whether artistic or otherwise). The authors whose works I discuss more fully in Parts II and III include a gentleman connoisseur, a novelist who was also a keen art collector, a famous editor of an important London magazine, a captain who later became a governor of Landguard Fort (in Suffolk), and a politically active woman writer, among others. Thus decentred and undisciplined, the writing of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artistic biographies was not regulated by fixed procedures or guidelines, but was shaped (in so

Introduction

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far as it had a shape) by a highly heterogeneous authorial community and usually intended for a no less highly diverse readership. This had a profound impact on the nature of the genre itself. Because they were integrated into social, aesthetic, and market concerns, these texts were very elastic, fluid, and various in form, content, and tone. My book contains a gamut of biographical lives, anecdotes, sketches, memoirs. Despite sharing certain features, these texts are still formally and semantically different from each other, and hence portray their subjects in very distinct ways. Although this study traces the emergence of artists’ biographies in Britain, it does not pretend to identify a specific date or to recognize a particular text which could serve as a definite starting point for the genre’s development. Quests for definitive literary origins are––as we know from discussions of the English novel––rarely, if ever, convincing.17 Nonetheless, the rise of artists’ biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Britain can be partly identified through material culture; it can also be attributed to the ways in which such biographies related to, and were in dialogue with, other more dominant literary genres. With the exception of Thicknesse’s Sketch of Gainsborough, which was published as an independent work in the form of a pamphlet, all the individual biographies of artists I discuss appeared in a miscellaneous assortment of other material. Such material may have included a catalogue of the artist’s works (as is the case in Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes of Hogarth), it may have incorporated fictional stories (as I will show in the chapter on Morland), or it may even have reproduced the artist’s own literary production (Amelia Opie’s prefatory biography to her husband’s 1809 Lectures on Painting being one example). The dynamic of the biographical text as a supplement to, or as just one element within, an assemblage of miscellaneous texts is an indicator of the genre’s emerging status. So too is its length. For artistic lives, we will see, tended to be relatively brief at that time, particularly when compared to other kinds of biography. Only in the nineteenth century, with the publication of Northcote’s Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1813), did artists’ biographies acquire a new status. Unlike the individual lives I discuss in my book, Northcote’s Memoirs was intended as an independent, extended, and fully fledged artistic biography. This text did not function as a supplement or an introduction to other narratives, but sought to combine a detailed account of an artist’s life and works. 17 On the debate about the origins and the rise of the novel, see e.g. Thomas Pavel, ‘Literary Genres as Norms and Good Habits’, New Literary History, 34 (2003), esp. 206–10, and Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 7–30.

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Introduction

Despite the generic diversity of artists’ biographies during this period, as well as their supplementary function, the different chapters in this book map a wider cultural shift that took place in British art historiography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, namely its emancipation from Continental models. Parts II and III of the present work cover the transition from serial to individual biographies which so characterized the writing of the lives of painters in Britain during this period. This particular transition contributed to a personalization of aesthetics that was not as widespread on the Continent as it was in Britain. Until the eighteenth century, the vast majority of the lives of Italian, French, and German painters had been published in biographical compendia, not as standalone texts. In contrast, the tradition of publishing individual and singlesubject biographies, including the publication of highly influential texts such as James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), was to have profound impact on the writing of the lives of painters. Such textual lives contributed to the creation of unique artistic personalities that were not only inspired by, but also fed into, a rhetoric of genius and celebrity which monopolized much of the aesthetic debate of the time. Thus, in this study, I investigate the emergence of biography as a literary genre and analyse the interconnections between biography and British literary and artistic culture, including art criticism, in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Britain. First, I explore the growing popularity of the biographical genre and the concurrent changes in the British art world during this period, including the emergence of a native school of painting. I put particular emphasis on the importance of literary anecdotes in the construction of artists’ lives, as well as their impact on art connoisseurship and art criticism. While central to the writing of artists’ lives, anecdotes also generated anti-biographical reaction among those specialists and connoisseurs who saw such personal stories as irrelevant and inappropriate for the analysis of artworks. The eighteenthcentury shift between biographical and connoisseurial methods is still extant today. The gulf that separates biographical notions of art and artists and the current critical edge of art-historical discourse still divides readers and exhibition visitors. Whereas artists’ monographs and catalogues accompanying contemporary exhibitions and recounting chronologically an artist’s life and work are hugely popular, art theory elaborated at universities or discussed in specialists’ journals still remains obscure to many, if not most, people. After the discussion of the ambivalent status of artists’ biographies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries––highly popular as a literary genre yet simultaneously decried as an analytical and critical tool––Parts II and III are more sharply focused and are devoted to a series of diachronic studies of specific biographical texts. Part II deals with two biographical

Introduction

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compendia, namely Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting (1762–80) and William Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780). Walpole’s book is usually considered the first serious attempt at a comprehensive biographical and antiquarian history of the arts in England. Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs, on the other hand, is a satirical spoof of the whole tradition of art-biographical writing. Yet both works were intended for connoisseurs who were acquainted with the context and the practices of art and art criticism. Moreover, Walpole’s and Beckford’s books contain stories and formulaic anecdotes about painters that helped shape certain images of artists, some of which would develop more fully in the biographies of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British painters. Part III addresses the textual construction and promotion of individual artists. The biographical portraits of William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, George Morland, and John Opie illustrate the range of literary genres available to biographers. Despite the heterogeneity of their forms and subjects, however, the four chapters of Part III trace a gradual shift in artists’ representations. Whereas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries painters like Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Morland were often presented as being somehow ‘different’ from the average individual–– indeed, as being extra-ordinary––nineteenth-century painters were frequently depicted in environments more familiar to readers.18 Amelia Opie’s private biography of her husband, John Opie, announces such a gradual change in artistic representations. Her portrait, which I discuss in my final chapter, describes a certain tension between the extraordinary and unusual status of the genius on the one hand, and his common ground with the reader on the other. Rather than attempting to distinguish and dissociate the painter from his public, Amelia Opie’s narrative presents her spouse as often resembling it in moral character and lifestyle, thereby foregrounding certain tropes about artists that would emerge more consistently during the Victorian period. This book treats its subject chronologically and historically and does not pretend to be comprehensive, an impossible task considering the wealth of primary texts. Instead, my study provides close synchronic readings of specific works which, once put together, compose a historical and diachronic picture. Importantly, the body of texts chosen does not include artistic autobiographies. The inclusion of such self-referential texts would have raised historical and theoretical issues very different from those involved in biographical writing—issues, I believe, which deserve their own independent study. However, it is worth remembering that there 18

Codell, Victorian Artist, 6.

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Introduction

were far fewer artists’ autobiographies than biographies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Northcote reminds us at the beginning of this introduction, painters, sculptors, and architects were conceivably even more reluctant to write about their own lives than about those of others.19 As I will show, however, autobiographical material and documents were often utilized by biographers keen to delve into the most private spheres of their subject. All the artists I discuss in Part III were key participants in the discourse and practices of British art in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The vagaries of posthumous fame have led some of them into relative obscurity. If many people are still familiar with Hogarth’s modern moral subjects like the Rake’s Progress (1733–5) and Marriage-à-la-Mode (1743–5), as well as with Gainsborough’s portraits, far fewer are acquainted with the works of George Morland and John Opie. In the early nineteenth century, however, both figures were well-known. Morland’s numerous prints of rural scenes, as well as the four biographies published immediately after his death in 1804, contributed to the spreading of his name and his art to a wide audience, keen to learn more about his eccentric life. The public fame and status of Opie, on the other hand, were acknowledged when the painter was buried in April 1807 in St Paul’s Cathedral, in the same vault as Sir Joshua Reynolds. The reader will no doubt be surprised by the absence of a chapter devoted exclusively to Reynolds, certainly one of the major figures of British art in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reynolds’s presence is never far away, though; it resurfaces on many occasions throughout this book.20 Reynolds’s biographies and posthumous fame have been covered by numerous literary scholars and art historians. In particular, Martin Postle’s Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (1995) has provided important critical discussion of Reynolds’s biographical afterlife.21 Reynolds’s concept of high-minded art and his vision of the intellectual artist have also been thoroughly studied. Richard Wendorf ’s Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (1996) analyses Reynolds’s construction of self-image as an artist and a man of virtù through his reported behaviour with social superiors, friends, and patrons. For the first 19 Artistic autobiographies include those by George Vertue, William Hogarth in the first half of the 18th century, and Ozias Humphry and James Northcote in the early decades of the 19th century. For a discussion of Humphry, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 295–321. 20 e.g. see Ch. 5. 21 Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. 273–311.

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president of the Royal Academy, painters should aim to possess good manners and sociability, as well as high morals to advance their interests.22 Many painters active in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain did not embrace the qualities and attitudes associated with Reynolds’s ideas of artists. On the contrary, painters often defined themselves against Reynolds’s artistic precepts and against the institution he represented. The biographies of painters published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created and promoted images of artists that were far from intellectual and noble. As I will show, the community of painters active in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century consisted of a palette of personalities all keen to distinguish themselves from their fellow painters. Such an eclectic group also mirrored the highly diverse aesthetic nature of the British school of painting during this period. A large number of the biographical narratives I examine have not been reissued since their first publication in this period. Part of the aim of this book is thus to reestablish the centrality of artists’ lives in British literature and art criticism during this period. I hope that my discussion will encourage alternative readings and other ways of engaging with these texts. 22 Richard Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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PART I CONTEXTS

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1 Biography vs. Literature, Art, and Criticism There is perhaps no kind of composition more delectable than Biography. ( John Davis, European Magazine (1798), 12)

Biography was everywhere in eighteenth-century British literature. Alexander Pope famously argued that ‘the proper study of mankind is man’, thus establishing society’s increasing desire to recognize and understand itself. The period produced one of the most substantial bodies of biographical works and critical literature on the genre, and also saw the appearance of the first professional biographers. Many writers selected biography as a favourite subject. Samuel Johnson remarked in 1763 that ‘the biographical part of literature . . . is what I love most’.1 Johnson was not alone in valuing the genre so highly. His voice was echoed in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1790, which maintained that biography had ‘become a favourite Amusement of the present age’.2 The cultural, social, and scientific context certainly proved congenial to the development of biography in Britain during this period.3 The genre

1

James Boswell, Life of Johnson (London: Printed by Henry Baldwin, 1791), 231. The Gentleman’s Magazine, 60 (1790), part the first, preface, iii. On 18th-cent. biography, see Philip B. Daghlian, Essays in Eighteenth-Century Biography (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1968); Frank Brady, ‘The Strategies of Biography and Some Eighteenth-Century Examples’, in F. Brady, J. Palmer, and M. Price (eds), Literary Theory and Structure; Essays in Honor of W. K. Wimsatt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 245–65; Paul J. Korshin, ‘The Development of Intellectual Biography in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 73 (1974), 513–23; John D. Browning, Biography in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1980); Annette W. Cafarelli, Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives, Studies in Literary Themes and Genres (New York: Twayne, and London: Prentice Hall, 1996); Stephen Howard, ‘Biography and the Cult of Personality in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1998). 2 3

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profited from the discoveries and experiences of the seventeenth century. Radical changes brought about by the new science, by John Locke’s empiricism, and by antiquarianism all produced a new sense of what constitutes a self and how it should be presented. The appeal of biography also owed something to the rise of individualism. The notion of a selfgoverning entity and of the independence of the individual had of course been put forward and discussed well before the eighteenth century, not least during the Renaissance.4 However, this notion continued to flourish during the eighteenth century, underpinned as it was by an increasing interest in manners and customs. In this regard, biographical writing inhabited an intellectual climate that distinguished the British situation from that on the Continent. Philosophical empiricism, with its reliance on sensory experience and impressions, naturally favoured the development of a narrative genre concerned specifically with recording and depicting individuals’ manners and habits. In contrast, the continuing predominance of Cartesian philosophy in France, for example, coupled with the persistent existence of aristocratic norms, inhibited the transition from highly coded and exemplary ‘Vies’ and other ‘Éloges de Grands Hommes’ to more realist accounts of individual lives.5 In the literary sphere, the same reasons would hamper the transition from aristocratic prose romance to bourgeois fiction.6 Other reasons explain the dramatic development of biography in eighteenth-century Britain: geographical and astronomical exploration and discovery, improvements in technology, the explosion of print, as well as the expansion of literacy, all provided individuals with a new sense of space. Such improvements and discoveries strongly affected the ways in which individuals conceived of their private and public existence. The explosion of print culture, in particular, afforded unprecedented opportunities for the production and dissemination of individual life-stories. As the emerging media were no longer restricted to the wealthy, famous, and privileged, men and women of all classes and backgrounds were keen to exploit them in order to narrate, revise, sometimes reinvent their social, cultural, and sexual identities. The century’s attraction towards and fascination with investigating the thoughts and feelings of human beings were definitely central to the genre’s 4 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Mary Ruth Rogers, Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 5 On the subject, see Marc Fumaroli, ‘Des “vies” à la biographie: Le Crépuscule du parnasse’, Diogène, 139 (1987), 3–30. 6 See Karen O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 400.

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development.7 Notions of sensibility often distinguished biography from its rival genre: history. Whereas history usually narrated grandscale narratives and dealt with the actions of men involved in public affairs, biography was more concerned with the private circumstances of individuals’ lives. Yet the two genres undoubtedly overlapped.8 As John Leycester Adolphus remarked in a prize-winning address delivered in Oxford in 1818, biography and history are ‘so intimate, that each occasionally deviates into the style and method of the other; the history of a nation becomes subordinate to that of an individual, and the narrative of a life expands into the chronicle of a state. We see the Biographer expatiate in disquisitions on politics and manners, and the Historian lay open the human mind with its secret passions and infirmities.’9 Despite such an overlapping, biography gradually attained a higher position in the hierarchy of historical narrative in the eighteenth century as it was thought that the lessons of the biographer (unlike those of the historian) could be applied directly to the feelings and interests of every individual. This is, in substance, what Johnson asserted in his 1750 essay in Rambler, no. 60, which he devoted specifically to biography. ‘Our passions are therefore more strongly moved’, he maintained, ‘in proportion as we can more readily adopt the pains or pleasure proposed to our minds, by recognizing them as our own, or considering them as naturally incident to our state of life.’ On this ground, Johnson believed, ‘no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition’.10 Johnson singled out biography as a unique genre with compelling emotional and didactic powers. ‘I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful’, he observed in the same essay. Hence, on account of its immediacy and actuality, biography was believed to surpass history and 7 On sensibility and the visual arts, see Ann Bermingham, Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s ‘Cottage Door’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. 1–34. 8 On the complex relations between history and biography in 18th-cent. Britain, see Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: The Genres of Historical Writing in Britain 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 131–46, and John Brewer, ‘John Marsh’s History of my Private Life 1752–1828’, in T. C. W. Blanning and David Cannadine (eds), History and Biography. Essays in Honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72–87. 9 John L. Adolphus, Biography: A Prize Essay Recited in the Theatre at Oxford, June 3 (Oxford, 1818), 5. 10 Samuel Johnson, ‘The Rambler no. 60’ (13 October 1750), in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 8 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), iii. 319.

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to be morally more useful and more instructive. Because of its private nature, biography remained an ideal vehicle for moral didacticism as readers could more easily identify with the private concerns of the biographical subject. And yet, one should remember that relatively few biographical works considered didactic moralism as their sole purpose. More often than not, writers and publishers broadly insisted upon a dual objective––one which was omnipresent in the literature of the period, including history writing—namely, to instruct and to entertain. ‘Of all compositions biography is in general the most entertaining and instructive’, the reviewer of The Life of Benvenuto Cellini asserted in his piece for the Critical Review of July 1771.11 Likewise, John Aikin declared in the preface to his General Biography of 1799 that ‘if any species of literary composition has to boast of an universal suffrage in its favour, it is that, which, by representing human characters . . . affords in a supreme degree the union of instruction and amusement’.12 In this regard, the role of the anecdote was crucial to the process of biographical composition. These brief personal stories brought out certain traits of their subjects’ characters, be they praiseworthy or accusatory, in a manner far more amusing, compelling, and hence more effective than abstract didacticism. Of course, not all anecdotes had the same function and different writers had different notions of anecdotes in the eighteenth century. Some used the term in its older meaning: the ‘secret histories’ and private transactions of eminent people. The word derives from the Greek an-ekdota, which at the time referred to unofficial historical accounts, concerned not so much with the political affairs of the court as with the private passions and sexual matters that occurred behind closed doors.13 In the course of the eighteenth century, however, the meaning of the term ‘anecdote’ gradually shifted from the ‘secret histories’––the published 11

The Critical Review (July 1771), 30–9, here 30. John Aikin, General Biography; or Lives, Critical and Historical, of the Most Eminent Persons of All Ages, Countries, Conditions, and Professions, 10 vols (London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799–1815), i. 1. 13 Anecdotes stemmed from ekdidonai = to give out, to publish, to edit + the negative prefix an; an-ekdota meaning thus ‘unpublished’, ‘not revealed’, and, by extension, ‘secret’. ‘Secret histories’ became popular for early women writers, particularly those that had an explicitly political dimension, such as Delarivier Manley. Her anti-Whig novel, The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians: Being a Looking-Glass for –––– in the Kingdom of Albigion (London, 1705), was directed towards Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough (the Whig favourite of Queen Anne), whereas another work by her entitled Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes, From the New Atlantis, and Island in the Mediterranean (London, 1709) satirized more generally the comings and goings of the people connected with the court. Like Procopius’s Secret History, Delarivier Manley’s Secret Memoirs and Manners focused on the characters’ personal and sexual behaviour. 12

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works containing undesired or unpublishable stories––to the events themselves. ‘Anecdote’ also came to refer to a semantically more inclusive type of narrative, not only referring to scandalous and salacious stories but also, deriving from the French, to a ‘biographical incident, a minute passage of private life’, a definition which Johnson added to the fourth edition of his Dictionary (1773).14 These brief and characteristic biographical units were very much part of the fabric of Johnson’s writing. ‘I love anecdotes,’ he confessed to Boswell during their tour to the Hebrides in August 1773. ‘I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.’15 Johnson was not looking very far into the future. By the end of the eighteenth century, the number of books announced and published as Anecdotes had increased dramatically. These volumes were not necessarily composed of anecdotes interspersed within a published text but often consisted of nothing but anecdotes. Eighteenth-century ‘-ana’ (used as a suffix) were not framed within a narrative context but frequently corresponded to fragments of actual conversations recorded and published during or after the death of a man (rarely a woman) of learning and wit.16 Works titled Anecdotes increasingly came to be understood as the compilation of miscellaneous material presented in a polite, worldly, yet very often playful and humorous manner. Johnson’s reference to the aphoristic dimension of the Anecdotes is worthy of note because it also underpins his interest in the general truth and potential durability of such narrative units. In his Lives of the Poets, Johnson frequently (though not exclusively) generalized his anecdotes so that they could bring out universal traits of his biographical subjects. Although directed to specific individuals and referring to specific events, his biographical anecdotes often reached beyond their particularism to encapsulate common truth about human nature.17 Boswell’s use of anecdotes was altogether different from Johnson’s. Boswell was more interested in eliciting human idiosyncrasies than in making general statements about human nature. His anecdotes––like his transcriptions of conversations––were of use in facilitating differentiation 14 All the editions prior to 1773 had only labelled the term as ‘something yet unpublished, secret history’. 15 James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson (London: Printed by Henry Baldwin for Charles Dilly, 1785), 32. 16 For a discussion on -ana, see for instance Richard Maber, ‘L’anecdote littéraire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Les ANA’, L’Anecdote, 31 (1990), 99–108, and Frank P. Wilson, ‘Table Talk’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 4 (1940–1), 27–46. 17 Robert Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson Biographer (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), 47.

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of character. As Robert Folkenflik has pointed out, ‘Boswell’s interest [was] in the individual scene’; he gave ‘a picture of “the general tenour of behaviour” chiefly by accumulating different scenes which contain similar characteristics’.18 Boswell’s use of anecdotes epitomized the shift discernible in biographical composition in the eighteenth century, a shift which saw biographers no longer seek to identify typical virtues of exemplary individuals, as they had done in the previous centuries. Rather, such writers became more and more concerned in presenting characteristic features of individuals, who were of interest because they did not resemble others. As we will see throughout the present study, anecdotes resurfaced again and again in the biographies of artists published in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. As in other biographical narratives, these concise stories aimed at revealing certain aspects of their subject’s lives and personalities. However, ‘artists’ anecdotes’ have come to mean something specific in the fields of art history and art criticism. Otto Kurz and Ernst Kris have shown in their seminal study Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (1979) that the lives of artists often included topoi or literary leitmotifs which, while supposedly referring to the artist’s specific life and work, were constructed on pre-established narrative and semantic structures.19 The origins of such anecdotes have been traced back to Pliny’s Natural History.20 The anecdote relating the artistic contest between two different painters (as between Apelles and Protogenes), the unexpected discovery of a painter’s or a sculptor’s talents by an older master, or the story in which an artist represents nature in such a realistic way that his picture is mistaken for nature itself (as is the case between Zeuxis and Eupompos) all appeared in Pliny’s work. They later re-emerged again and again in disguised forms in artistic biographies, in no matter what period or place these texts were written. These anecdotes about artists are significant not only because they have helped elucidate certain characteristic traits of distinguished painters and sculptors, but because their recurrence has also coloured our ideas and notions about the image and the myth of the artist.21

18

Ibid. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), based on Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein historischer Versuch (Vienna: Krystall Verlag, 1934). 20 Pliny, Natural History, tr. H. Rackham, 10 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1952). The lives of sculptors are to be found in book 34, ix. 163–97; those of painters in book 35, ix. 301–51. Duris of Samos (born c.340 BC) also wrote a book on the Lives of Painters and Sculptors but only a few fragments have survived. 21 On artists’ anecdotes, see Guercio, Art as Existence, 29 and Soussloff, Absolute Artist, 138–58. 19

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Predictably, the persistent reappearance of such anecdotes has led some scholars to question the authenticity of the biographical works in which they have appeared, some critics qualifying such texts as pure fiction and invention.22 While we may view such artists’ biographies as historical accounts that interweave fictional elements, it seems unfair to dismiss them as merely fictitious literary exercises. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that the inclusion and presence of such anecdotes in the biographical accounts of artists accounted for, at least partly, the development of art history as a scientific discipline in the late eighteenth century (a point I shall return to below). No doubt, the limits between fact and fiction and between biography and the novel were, as they are today, far from being clear. Some scholars have speculated that the development of the novel in the eighteenth century owed much to biography, while other scholars have reversed the scenario, attributing the changes in biography to the emergence and development of the novel. Perhaps, as Stephen Howard has cautiously advanced, it is safer to say that ‘both biography and novel grew from the same fertile soil . . . how, after all, could the influence of one medium on the other be conclusively proven?’23 There is no doubt, though, that many biographers active during this period were keen to distinguish their work from that of contemporary novelists. At a time when the novel was still considered as a relatively lower genre, writers of biography often stressed the dependable nature of their writing. They definitely saw their work as a branch of history.24 The preface of the British Magazine of 1782 made the clear assertion that the biographical passages included in the magazine focused chiefly on ‘Living Characters, faithfully represented by the impartial pen of Truth: not a circumstance will be admitted, that can incur even a shadow of doubt; nor shall a single fault be suppressed from motives of favour or prejudice’.25 The vocabulary and tone used in this passage resonated with that of contemporary historians anxious to present their works as infallible and impartial interpretations of past or present events. The dangers of confusing biography and the novel were also expressed by Robert Bolton in his Letters to a Young Nobleman (1762). Bolton advised his student not to confound biography with ‘those silly things which are offered to the 22 Paul Barolsky, ‘Vasari and the Historical Imagination’, Word and Image, 15 (1999), 286–91, as well as his Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). For a discussion of Barolsky’s approach, see Lynette M. F. Bosch, ‘Men, Myth, and Truth’, Oxford Art Journal, 16 (1993), 62–72. 23 Howard, ‘Biography’, 43. 24 On the interplay between fact and fiction, and between history and the novel, in the 18th cent., see O’Brien, ‘History and the Novel’, 397–413. 25 The British Magazine and Review; or Universal Miscellany of Arts, Sciences, . . . and Intelligence Foreign and Domestic, 3 vols (London, 1782–3), i, p. iv.

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public under the name of romance and novels. Vitious and foolish, they can only please the debauched, the lazy, the ignorant, and are below the contempt of a man of sense and virtue.’ Admittedly, Bolton did not dismiss all novels at once. He admired Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Lesage’s Gil Blas, two books from which he believed ‘we may learn a good deal of the manners of the world’.26 BIOGRAPHY: DIVERSIFICATION, DISSEMINATION, AND INSTRUCTION As in the case of the novel, the development and changes of the biographical genre in the eighteenth century owed something to the emergence and diversification of contemporary media. Magazines and newspapers represented a novel environment in which to commemorate the dead. Their publication facilitated the appearance of pieces on a more diverse range of individuals. Periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine and the European Magazine were full of biographical sketches and obituaries. Besides newspapers, a wide variety of other biographical collections became available at the time. Similar in many respects to the lives published in newspapers, and sharing their concise style, were the biographical entries written for biographical dictionaries.27 After the publication of the Biographia Britannica (from 1747 onwards) many other dictionaries which were both British and restricted exclusively to biography were published, including The New and General Biographical Dictionary of 1761. Dictionaries devoted specifically to certain professions also made their appearance. The Theatrical Biography published in Dublin in 1772 focused on ‘the memoirs of all the principal performers of the three theatres royal’ (i.e. Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and Haymarket). Similarly, it was during this period that the first dictionaries of artists, including British artists, were issued: Matthew Pilkington’s The Gentleman’s and Connoisseur’s Dictionary of Painters of 1770 was followed by Joseph Strutt’s A Biographical Dictionary . . . of . . . Engravers (1785), John Gould’s Dictionary of Painters, Sculptors, Architects and Engravers (1810), and Michael Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (1813). The information contained in such dictionaries was usually extracted from previous 26

Robert Bolton, Letters to a Young Nobleman (London: Millar, 1762), 67. On biographical dictionaries, see Isabel Rivers, ‘Biographical Dictionaries and their Uses from Bayle to Chalmers’, in Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 135–69. 27

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(and often foreign) works. Pilkington admitted in his preface that the literature devoted to the ‘Art of Painting’ was ‘extremely numerous’ but that very little had been published ‘in our native language’. Hence, Pilkington proceeded to writing his dictionary, a work which he hoped would prove ‘either instructive, or entertaining’.28 Pilkington gave special attention to Italian, Dutch, and Flemish artists––unsurprising since his publication appealed mostly to those able to afford fashionable foreign works of art, which for the most part originated in Italy. As well as establishing a canon of merit––after all, there were far more aspirants for fame than space to record their works and merits––such biographical dictionaries served an important practical purpose for an increasing readership in search of education. In eighteenth-century Britain, interest in art and in artistic biographies gradually extended beyond elite and professional circles to encompass many cross-sections of readers in search of entertainment and self-improvement. In the Bibliotheca Biographica (1760), Thomas Flloyd asserted his belief that ‘the generality of readers are well contented, in their historical researches, to obtain the knowledge of facts, and of such personal anecdotes as at once characterize, entertain, and instruct’. Indeed, Flloyd trusted that ‘Copious extracts from books, and large critical notes, frequently upon speculative points, are, perhaps, foreign to their purpose’.29 In his dictionary, Matthew Pilkington also wrote about his wish to offer a work which would ‘enable every individual to have an easy access to that knowledge of the artists, from which he might have been excluded, either by the want of a competent degree of polite literature, or by the want of a competent fortune’.30 His work was a successful publishing venture as no fewer than five revised, extended, or abridged editions appeared by 1824, sometimes under slightly different titles or formats.31 Clearly, individuals in search of knowledge needed the convenience of books to provide them with ready-made and easily manageable information. Access to knowledge was often facilitated by the more modest size, less ostentatious nature, and hence cheaper editions of some of these biographical collections. In 1777, Thomas Mortimer introduced his Student’s Pocket Dictionary stressing the need for ‘small pocket companions, 28 Matthew Pilkington, The Gentleman’s and Connoisseur’s Dictionary of Painters &c. (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1770), p. v. 29 Thomas Flloyd, Bibliotheca Biographica, 3 vols (London, 1760), i, p. ix. 30 Pilkington, Gentleman’s Dictionary of Painters, p. vi. 31 The 2nd edn appeared in 1778 under the title A Concise Introduction to the Knowledge of the Most Eminent Painters. By Which Every Lover of the Art of Painting May Instantly Know the Names, the Years, and Places of Birth (London, 1778). The following edns came out in 1798, 1805 (completed by Henry Fuseli), 1810, and 1824 respectively.

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digested in alphabetical order, and calculated to aid and refresh the memory of young people when subjects of History or Biography happen to be the topics of conversation in company’.32 In his Anecdotes of Painters who Have Resided or Been Born in England (1808), a work which was intended as a supplement to Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–80), Edward Edwards also apologized for the absence of printed portraits in his work but added that ‘such decorations would have subjected the Author to an expence beyond his finances, and would also have rendered the volume too costly for the generality of those to whom the work might be useful’.33 As reading audiences expanded in the eighteenth century, the demand for useful texts able to guide neophytes and provide them with the codes they needed to understand the cultural events surrounding them was being made increasingly felt. In France, Antoine-Joseph Pernety claimed in the preface to his Dictionnaire portatif de peinture of 1757: ‘On veut sçavoir tout, ou plutôt parler de tout, & ne paroître ignorer de rien’.34 In Britain, individuals were similarly keen to display their knowledge within the cultivated discourse of the period. In this regard, biography counted among the most accessible pedagogical means available to readers, with biographers often using their protagonists and heroes to guide such readers into a world of visual, musical, and theatrical culture. With the development of new media, a greater amount of space became available for the records of individuals’ lives and achievements. Biographical magazines and collections no longer involved a celebration of the elite but included a wider range of men and women, especially within the middle classes. In spite of such a democratization of the biographical subject, however, the cult and appeal of celebrity still remained an important factor for editors. This fascination with biography was evident to English publishers. In the preface to his General Biography (1799), John Aikin explained his criteria for biographical selection and asserted that ‘Fame, or celebrity, is the grand principle upon which the choice of subjects for a general biography must be founded’.35 Although Aikin here used ‘fame’ and ‘celebrity’ as synonyms, the two notions were sometimes differentiated. In an article on ‘Fame, Renown, Reputation, Celebrity,

32 Thomas Mortimer, The Student’s Pocket Dictionary; or Compendium of Universal History, Chronology, and Biography (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1777), unpaginated. 33 Edward Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters who Have Resided or Been Born in England (London, 1808), p. vi. 34 Antoine-Joseph Pernety, Dictionnaire portatif de peinture, sculpture, et gravure (Paris: Chez Bauche, 1757), p. iv. 35 Aikin, General Biography, i. 2.

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Notoriety’, which appeared in Hester Lynch Piozzi’s British Synonymy (1794), Piozzi made a clear distinction between all these ‘rational objects of turbulent desire . . . which have prompted so many actions good and bad’. ‘Fame’, Piozzi explained, harked back to classical times and was by far the most esteemed praise, well above celebrity, which was of ‘a weaker degree in strength, and narrower in extent’. Piozzi also explained that while ‘renown’ and ‘reputation’ were both expressive of various degrees of honour, ‘notoriety’ was usually acquired, and increased, at one’s own expense.36 Despite such semantic subtleties, the debate about these terms testified to an age’s obsessive interest in the names and behaviour of public individuals (the word ‘celebrity’ itself was not applied to a person until the early nineteenth century). In November 1783, in an article on Sir Joshua Reynolds, the European Magazine asserted that ‘public curiosity’ in Britain ‘is on the wing in search of anecdotes, pictures, and extravagant eulogiums on actors, actresses, and meteors of a day’.37 The situation in Britain was particularly congenial to the cult and culture of celebrity. Unlike France, where a privacy law regulated and protected the lives of individuals, Britain did not guard its citizens from the perusal of an increasingly inquisitive press and publishing industry.38 Predictably, the cult of celebrity became particularly intense in London, where individuals of both sexes and of every rank and profession were keen to expose and publicize their lives to the curiosity of readers. In the capital, more than anywhere else, the lives of politicians, monarchs, writers, actors, and painters were scrutinized and received through the vocabulary and narratives of commercial biography. ARTISTS AND STATUS The social and professional recognition that British artists enjoyed in the eighteenth century was relatively new. The circumstances in which artists’ biographies were written and cultivated were specific to the eighteenth century. The expansion of the art market and the burgeoning of an exhibition culture, combined with the explosion of print culture, were all crucial in redefining their rank in society. It was during this period that

36 Hester Lynch Piozzi, British Synonymy; or An Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation (London, 1794), 214–16. 37 The European Magazine (Nov. 1783), 323. 38 See Stella Tillyard, ‘Paths of Glory: Fame and the Public in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Postle (ed.), Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, 61–9, and Mark Hallett, ‘Reynolds, Celebrity and the Exhibition Space’, ibid. 35–47.

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painters and sculptors increasingly distanced themselves from artisans and began to be recognized for their creative and imaginative skills.39 The changes in the conditions of artistic production, distribution, and consumption in Britain have been thoroughly analysed by social, cultural, and art historians and will hence not be dealt with at great length in the present study.40 Nonetheless, several factors that played a crucial part in the social promotion of artists in the eighteenth century are worth mentioning here. One was the foundation of the Royal Academy of Painting in 1768.41 The establishment of an Academy, supported by King George III, represented a major leap towards social recognition and prestige for British artists. Like the accademia in Renaissance Italy, or the French académie in the seventeenth century, the English Royal Academy provided painters, sculptors, and architects with a stronger sense of identity and allowed them to assert their own claim to decorum, social status, and intellectual standing. They could, at last, rid themselves of the banausic image that tainted their profession. Iain Pears has remarked that ‘[t]he Royal Academy represented the final triumph of the intellectual component of the painter’s part over the technical aspect. From then on the guild mentality that concentrated on mechanical technique was abandoned, with such matters becoming more a simple vehicle allowing intellectual ideas to find expression.’42 The institution’s first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, characteristically urged his students to pursue an ideal beauty so as not to be considered as ‘mere mechanick[s]’.43 The Academy was not the only establishment to contribute to the social promotion of British artists during this period. A multitude of other shows and spectacles in the capital and, to a lesser extent, in the provinces helped painters and sculptors bolster their professional practice and fame.44

39 For a discussion of the status of artists in 18th-cent. Britain, see Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England 1680–1768 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 107–32, as well as John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 288–321. 40 See e.g. David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993) and Brewer, Pleasures, 201–51. 41 The origins and the history of the Royal Academy, with its related tensions and controversies, have been analysed by many scholars, among whom Ilaria Bignamini, ‘The Accompaniment to Patronage: A Study of the Origins, Rise and Development of an Institutional System for the Arts in Britain 1692–1768’, D.Phil. thesis (London, 1988) and, more recently, Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 42 Pears, Discovery of Painting, 123. 43 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 43. 44 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978).

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In addition, the proliferation of graphic material (often directly related to such spectacles) also helped artists display their skills and advertise their work to a much wider community.45 The status of painters and their fortunes were closely intertwined with the print trade. Individual engravings which could be purchased for very little money, illustrated novels which were becoming increasingly popular, as well as grand and costly print books like John Boydell’s A Collection of Prints from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare by the Artists of Great Britain––a veritable gallery on paper containing the engraved versions of the paintings exhibited in Boydell’s Shakespeare gallery––all played an important role in disseminating and promoting painters’ talents.46 Such lavish works were not only instrumental in disseminating artists’ pictures; they also showcased the talents of individual engravers. Hitherto primarily seen as a reproductive and mechanical art, printmaking was increasingly seen as a creative profession in its own right. Witness Joseph Strutt’s introductory paragraphs to his Biographical Dictionary . . . of . . . Engravers (1785) in which he maintained that the ‘art of engraving has not always been confined to the copying [of] other productions, but has frequently itself aspired to originality, and has, in this light, produced more instances of its excellence, than in the other’.47 At a time when Britain dominated the print market, engravers were progressively becoming recognized as artists in their own right, as well able to explore and experiment with new aesthetic possibilities as their fellow painters. The exhibition culture that developed in the course of the eighteenth century generated an important body of literary and printed material which played a significant role in insinuating British artists into the public consciousness. Besides good publicity, many writers also produced satirical texts on artists. The discords within and without the Royal Academy gave art critics ample material for their work. Sir Henry Bate Dudley, John Wolcot (alias Peter Pindar), and John Williams (better known as Anthony Pasquin) all largely built their literary careers on producing poetic or

45 On the British print market at that time, see Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983) and Tim Clayton, The English Print, 1688–1802 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). 46 John Boydell, A Collection of Prints from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare by the Artists of Great Britain (London: Boydell, 1803). Another typical example of book promoting an artist’s work through engraving is the Series of Etchings by James Barry (London, 1808). This series of etchings followed the publication, twenty-five years earlier, of An Account of a Series of Pictures (London, 1783). 47 Joseph Strutt, A Biographical Dictionary, 2 vols (London: Printed by J. Davis for Robert Faulder, 1785–6), i. 3.

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satirical portraits of contemporary painters, sculptors, or architects.48 Other textual sources became important: pamphlets and press articles discussing the state of the arts were also instrumental in promoting the reputation of British painters.49 Daily newspapers such as the Morning Post, the Public Advertiser, and the Daily Advertiser, which reported on current shows and exhibitions, provided readers with abundant information on artists and their works. The commentaries offered by these newspapers were highly diverse. Then, as now, art critics seldom agreed with one another on aesthetic matters. Embodying a highly heterogeneous community of anonymous or pseudonymous writers, literary dandies, or unpaid correspondents, these critics had very different notions and knowledge about what constituted ‘the arts’. However, despite expressing diverse (often conflicting) opinions, such critics had a significant role: not only did they exert a powerful influence on exhibition visitors, they also affected the practice of artists keen to know in which direction the tide of artistic fashion was flowing. Michael Rosenthal has shown that printed critiques often offered a virtual exhibition to readers and could therefore be used by those artists who had access to sympathetic journalists to personal benefit. No doubt, exhibition goers were conditioned and manipulated in their response before even entering the show room.50 Publications relating to the visual arts and advertised in the London newspapers were rarely disinterested, nor were they based purely on abstract aesthetic notions. More often than not, art reviews were personally biased, taking the form of obsequious puffings. Although there was no conventional standard for reviewing paintings, many pieces combined biographical elements with a discussion of the pictures exhibited (their subject-matter, composition, colouring, light, style). For the aesthetic part of such critical pieces, journalists often took their cues from theoretical works such as Jonathan Richardson the Elder’s Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715) and Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses––both of which provided lay 48 Anthony Pasquin, The Royal Academicians: A Farce (London, 1786) and Peter Pindar, Lyric Odes, to the Royal Academicians: By Peter Pindar, A Distant Relation to the Poet of Thebes (London, 1784). 49 On the important role of the press in advertising London’s artistic world, see esp. Mark Hallett, ‘“The Business of Criticism”: The Press and the Royal Academy Exhibition in Eighteenth-Century London’, in David Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 64–75; William T. Whitley, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Art Chronicler: Sir Henry Bate Dudley, Bart’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, 13 (1924–5), 25–66; as well as Grzegorz Sinko, John Wolcot and his School: A Chapter from the History of English Satire (Wrocław, 1962). 50 Michael Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: ‘a little business for the eye’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 68–73.

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readers with a vocabulary useful for the appreciation of foreign and British art. Unsurprisingly, journalistic articles usually focused on the most famous painters, whose pictures frequently held the most prominent places within the exhibition room. Consequently, Hallett has noted that ‘the exhibition became filtered through an emergent journalistic rhetoric of artistic celebrity, in which critical debate on the works on display at Somerset House was subordinated to the praise of individual contributors’.51 Closely related to the exhibition reviews, but drawing from different sources, were the reviews of biographies that had recently been published. Magazines like the Gentleman’s Magazine and the European Magazine were full of such biographical items. In its July issue of 1781, for instance, the Gentleman’s Magazine published large extracts from John Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth (1781), which was itself largely inspired by the last volume of Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–80). As in many other cases, the piece did not offer a critical discussion of Nichols’s biography, but for the most part summarized its content, thereby functioning as a biography in miniature. Many articles that appeared in the press often reproduced word-for-word extracts from other publications. Being of a convenient length, biographical dictionaries and biographical compendia such as Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting were each particularly suitable sources for periodicals: The Annual Register for the Year 1764 reproduced the ‘Memoirs of Sir Godfrey Kneller’ from Walpole’s Anecdotes and The New Annual Register for the Year 1780 reprinted his ‘Anecdotes of Sir James Thornhill’ and his ‘General Character of Hogarth’. Plagiarism was not only widespread in newspapers and periodicals; it also became an intrinsic feature of many biographical collections, which relied on their antecedents.52 THE BRITISH SCHOOL As well as popularizing the names of individual artists, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century periodicals developed into an important platform for the discussion of British art in general. The need for British artists to make a claim for themselves, especially in the field of elevated art, was strongly felt at the time. What characterized the British school and how it defined itself against the Continental schools were crucial aspects of the debate. Such questions were not easy to answer: not only were there many Hallett, ‘Business of Criticism’, 68. Pat Rogers, ‘Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and the Biographic Dictionaries’, Review of English Studies, 31 (1980), 170. 51 52

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foreign artists active in Britain during this period, but the majority of English painters––many of whom had spent some time in Italy or elsewhere abroad––did not share a coherent artistic style, or a common aesthetic vision.53 The main divide opposed those artists who, like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West, thought of the arts as a highminded and institutional activity and those who, like William Hogarth and later Thomas Gainsborough and George Morland, desired that art be less hierarchical. Whereas the former followed in the footsteps of the old masters and sought to produce an art expressive of eternal and universal values, the latter defended an art which distinguished itself by its more local character, focusing rather on scenes of contemporary life as well as ‘lower’ genres, especially landscape.54 Despite such a divide, writers commenting upon the state of British art were optimistic. The rapid progress made by painters and sculptors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave British art theorists, commentators, and collectors increasing confidence in their own artists.55 British painters, sculptors, and architects were no longer marginalized but often thought to be as talented as those from the Continent (if not more so). Analogies and comparisons between the English and Continental schools––especially the Italian and the French––were frequently made. The sculptor John Flaxman asserted in his posthumous eulogy of the sculptor Thomas Banks that many works produced by English artists between the year 1200 and the reign of Henry VII could be ‘compared with those of the best Italian artists of the same times’. Since the establishment of the Royal Academy, founded ‘under the auspices of our gracious sovereign George III’, Britain possessed ‘a sculptor in the late Mr. Banks, whose works had eclipsed the most, if not all, of this continental contemporaries’.56 Here, Flaxman was comparing Banks to Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, sculptors whom Vasari described in his Vite as the fathers of Italian Renaissance sculpture. Flaxman felt that the progress of British art owed much to the institutionalization of education and patronage. He also believed that the Royal Academy’s encouragement in the art of sculpture had not only been honourable to the Academy, but was also of benefit for 53

e.g. Henry Fuseli was Swiss, James Barry Irish, Johan Zoffany German. On the nature of the British School, see William Vaughan, ‘The Englishness of British Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 13 (1990), 11–23. Hogarth did do grand historical paintings and the occasional grand Baroque portrait––however, it was mostly with his prints and modern moral subjects that he gained popularity. 55 Hoock, King’s Artists, 68. 56 John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1838), 51; see also the account of Thomas Banks in The European Magazine, and London Review of 1791, ‘Britain may, however, at length boast an Artist [Mr. Banks], who rivals, if he does not surpass, the first Sculptors of any country of the present period’, 20 (1791), 164. 54

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the whole of Britain. In sum, Flaxman’s optimistic prose conveyed the belief that the British school was living through exceptional times comparable only to those experienced by sixteenth-century Italian artists. The Royal Academy was not the only official establishment to provide patronage for contemporary artists in Britain. The British Institution (founded in 1804)––like its ancestor the short-lived British School–– also played a significant role in reinforcing the concept of British art during this period.57 The British School was established in 1802 in order to allow contemporary artists the opportunity to exhibit and sell their works of painting, sculpture, drawing, and engraving. This emphasis on sales distinguished the School from the Royal Academy.58 When the School closed down in 1804, its role of promoting British artworks was taken over by the British Institution, which continued to organize exhibitions of works of living artists, alongside shows of old masters.59 The use of the term ‘British’ clearly reflected the patriotic motives at the heart of both establishments. It was, perhaps, a sign of the times that both societies opted for such a term, an indication of the need to evoke a greater unity during a period of war.60 While Britain remained at war with France, British commentators often defined and described British art by opposition and in reaction to the French school. The British clearly saw themselves as the preservers of an artistic tradition as a parallel to the political preservers of democracy. One example of their antipathy and occasional open hostility toward French art was expressed in the Catalogue of the British School, in which John Thomas Serres (one of the School’s co-founders) disparaged French artists for their ‘mediocrity of merit’.61 Such views were reaffirmed in the supplement to John Gould’s Biographical Dictionary of 1810 in which it was observed that the French school ‘appears to have no peculiar character; and it can only be distinguished by its aptitude to imitate easily any impression’. Gould added that the French

57 On the British Institution, see Peter Fullerton, ‘Patronage and Pedagogy: The British Institution in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Art History, 5 (1982), 59–72, and John Gage, ‘The British School and the British School’, in Brian Allen (ed.), Towards a Modern Art World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 109–20. 58 Gage, ‘British School’, 110. 59 Unlike the School, however, the Institution was run by leading connoisseurs such as Richard Payne Knight and explicitly excluded artists among its administrators––a clear sign, as Julie Codell has remarked, that connoisseurship was then still ‘the expertise of aristocrats and not of painters who were ironically barred from such expertise because as painters they were considered unable to be “objective” in judgement’: Victorian Artist, 18; she quotes Pears, Discovery of Painting, 182–9. 60 Vaughan, ‘Englishness of British Art’, 14. 61 John Thomas Serres, quoted in Gage, ‘British School’, 111.

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school ‘unites in a moderate degree the different parts of the art, without excelling in any one of them’.62 Admittedly, the British school could not boast a strong coherent style among its painters in the early years of the nineteenth century. At the time of Gould’s disparaging statement, the British school still lacked a strong unifying and homogeneous style. There was no clear attempt among critics, connoisseurs, and artists to pinpoint the distinguishing strengths of British talents––although the latter did pride themselves on their painterly effects.63 Rather than national features, the particularities and peculiarities of individual artists were considered. Serres argued that ‘originality was the ruling characteristic of the British’.64 This emphasis on personal creativity and genius led British painters, sculptors, and architects into what John Gage has defined as ‘an extreme manifestation of that Stilpluralismus’. This stylistic diversity characterized the artistic production in Britain until the early nineteenth century, when landscape painting gradually emerged as a quintessentially English genre.65 VASARI’S VITE AND THE LIVES OF BRITISH ARTISTS The highly unstable and undefined nature of the British school until the early nineteenth century had significant repercussions for the ways in which the biographies of British artists were written and published. The difficulty of identifying a British school in concrete terms in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries meant that the previous models of art-historical and biographical writing did not suit the British situation. Vasari’s Vite, in particular, which had affected the composition of artists’ biographies and art theory in Western Europe for at least two centuries after its first publication in 1550, did not supply a dominant model for the writing of artists’ lives in Britain. Nevertheless, Vasari did not remain completely unfamiliar to British scholars during this period. Notwithstanding the absence of a complete English translation of the Vite until 1850, some of Vasari’s old master biographies were known in Britain, having been extracted from his book and translated into English.

62 John Gould, A Dictionary of Painters, Sculptors, Architects, and Engravers (London, 1810), p. xix, quoted in Vaughan, ‘Englishness of British Art’, 15. 63 See Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). 64 Gage, ‘British School’, 111. 65 Ibid. 117.

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Examples of such translations started as far back as the seventeenth century and could be found in Henry Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman (1622)—the first work to make some of Vasari’s lives accessible to the public in England—as well as in William Aglionby’s Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues (1685), which also contained samples of Italian lives.66 In addition to such translations, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain also saw the publication of other individual biographies of Renaissance Italian masters which, though not directly translated from the Vite, still contained some of Vasari’s material.67 Interestingly, the Vasarian prototype of a compendium organized along a regional axis was gradually replaced in Britain by a new concern for individual aesthetics, detailed in long, individual biographies typically published as stand-alone volumes. These texts anticipated the highly popular monographs of Renaissance masters published in Britain later in the nineteenth century, works whose scope typically focused on a single artist and provided an account of his life and works. The biographies of Italian Renaissance masters and narratives of the lives of British painters shared a common objective: to depict the artist’s character and represent some aspects of his life and professional achievements. Despite such basic affinities, however, these biographical works differed quite substantially from each other. None of the modern lives of the Renaissance old masters contained any first-hand accounts (such as transcriptions of actual conversations, for instance) but consisted of existing material assembled from a variety of previous authors.68 Unlike the biographers of sixteenth-century Italian painters, those who wrote the textual lives of British artists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries followed contemporary conventions of life-writing. Biographies of painters published during this period certainly had many affinities with those of contemporary actors, musicians, and poets. All such texts recorded the ephemeral lives and careers of their subjects, attempting to capture their artistic performances. The ways in which such performances were recorded could take many different forms. Generic hybridity and

66 William Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues (London: Printed by John Gain for the Author, 1685) and Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London, 1622). For a discussion on William Aglionby, see Tancred Borenius, ‘An Early English Writer on Art’, The Burlington Magazine, 39 (1921), 188–95. 67 Karen Junod, ‘The Lives of the Old Masters: Reading, Writing, and Reviewing the Renaissance’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 30/1 (2008), 67–82. 68 The sources for Sir Abraham Hume’s Notices of the Life and Works of Titian (1829), for instance, included material from the 1767 edn. of Vasari’s Vite, from Ridolfi, Boschini, and Ludovico Dolce, as well as from more modern authors, including Sandrart, Mengs, Mariette, Visconti, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.

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heterogeneity were, we have seen, major characteristics of all these biographical texts. Although contemporary biographical writing provided an important model for the composition of artists’ lives, it is also important to remember that records left behind by artists, poets, dancers, actors, and composers were of a different nature, and thus provided different types of accounts. The main difference lay in the articulation of, and relation between, the life of the biographical subject and his work. The biography of a dancer, for example, usually concerns itself with the subject’s private and professional existence; it discusses the dancer’s birth, his family, the schools he attended, whom he married, his first performance, and perhaps even the quality and technique of such performances. The work contains factual information that can be researched and pinned down––information that introduces the biographical subject as a social human being. Nothing, however, can record the actual performance itself. What distinguishes a dancer’s art from many other arts is its evanescence. Embodied in the dancer’s execution, dance disappears as soon as its performer has left the stage. No sooner is a gesture executed than it vanishes. The few documents that exist concerning the life and career of the eighteenthcentury dance-actress Hester Santlow amount to a handful of family letters and parish records. Aspects of her performances are recorded in certain advertisements as well as in some notated dances. Yet, despite the useful information that such notations provide––including the various coupés, pas de bourrée, and contre-temps Santlow may have executed––they do not recreate the realities of the shows in which she appeared.69 Similar remarks may be made regarding actors. Perhaps the most disconcerting element for biographers of actors is the ephemerality of their subjects’ art. Without the benefit of modern technology, all that remain of past performances are written and, occasionally, visual records, as well as those passed down through common memory. Records such as these may be connected to the subject’s life and career, to her theatrical productions, and even to the character that the actor personifies on stage, but they do not register the subject’s performance per se, which is based on the body and the voice (or, sometimes, its absence). Thomas Davies’s Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick (1780) is a case in point. The book includes many anecdotes of Garrick and stories of other contemporary actors; it also provides various details about Garrick’s ‘voyage to Lisbon’, pinpoints the moment Garrick ‘seriously resolved to commence actor’, and his ‘first appearance on a London stage’. Besides such factual information, Davies 69

See Moira Goff, The Incomparable Hester Santlow: A Dancer-Actress on the Georgian Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

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also inserted analyses of the plays in which Garrick appeared. In chapter 17, for example, Davies provides a record of Johnson’s play Irene (1749), which the actor produced and in which he cast himself in the role of Demetrius. Characteristically, Davies’s remarks on the production are descriptive; he notes how ‘the dresses were magnificent, and marked with taste, the scenes splendid and gay, such as were well adapted to the inside of a Turkish seraglio; [and how] the view of the gardens belonging to it was in the taste of eastern elegance’.70 Davies mentions the audience’s outraged reaction to Irene’s first-night onstage strangulation; he also appraises the critical reception of the play.71 However, despite the wealth of facts about Garrick’s production of Irene, Davies’s account fails to resuscitate the performance as it happened. Rather than elaborating on the actors’ interpretations of characters, the writer thus turns to Johnson’s literary achievements, observing that ‘however some might find fault with the management of the plot, and others pretend to see an inconsistency in some of the characters, yet all agreed that it abounded in fine sentiment and elegant language; nay, they allowed the catastrophe was striking, and the moral excellent; indeed, the author had in his view throughout the play the cause of truth, of virtue, and religion’.72 Davies’s distancing himself from the performance and his focusing on Johnson’s text are in themselves not unexpected. Unlike the biographers of dancers and actors, those who write the lives of poets and painters all have at their disposal tangible records of their subjects’ literary and artistic productions. In addition to a whole gamut of documents relating to the subject’s existence––which might include birth certificate, civil records, autobiographical documents, and various other written and oral reports–– a poet’s biographer is usually able to consult his or her subject’s literary output: be it a book or articles, essays or unfinished introductions to works. The writer has at his disposal a body of published and unpublished literature which he can (per)use, read, and analyse in order to write his book. Often, the poet’s literary work becomes part of the biography itself, in the form of quotations and extracted passages. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets contains many citations from his subjects’ works, especially in the third part of each life, which critically assesses the poet’s literary output. Johnson’s life of Pope comprises a whole series of epitaphs and that of Shenstone includes several extracts from the Pastoral Ballad (1755), for example. The biographer’s compelling task consists of weaving both primary and secondary literature into a more or less coherent whole. Like writers, painters produce similar types of personal papers, 70 71

Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 2 vols (London, 1780), i. 119–20. 72 Ibid. 121–3. Ibid. 122.

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correspondence, and anecdotes. However, the nature of a painter’s artistic profession entails that, instead of books, his legacy to the world consists of paintings, drawings, as well as countless sketches. Biographies of writers and those of painters have long been associated with each other. Catherine Soussloff has explained that the lives of writers provided important models for the biographers of painters in the Renaissance.73 Boccaccio’s Life of Dante (1350–73) counted among such models. Boccaccio’s biographical text was significant because it was the first Life written in the vernacular, hence marking an important milestone in a genre where examples were either in Greek or in Latin. As Soussloff notes, ‘Boccaccio’s language, the vernacular, was as innovative for the genre of biography as Dante’s had been for the genre of epic poetry.’74 Certainly, the fame of Boccaccio’s Life of Dante was closely tied to the text of the Divine Comedy itself as it functioned as a preamble to Boccaccio’s lectures and commentaries on Dante’s epic poem.75 Boccaccio’s Life marked the beginning of the tradition of appending a biography to poetry, or to the commentaries thereon, a tradition which continued in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. It is worth noting, for example, that Johnson’s Lives were intended as biographical and critical introductions to the poets’ literary works. With no previous vernacular lives of artists to serve as models, Renaissance biographies of painters followed the formal, structural, and thematic patterns of the lives of the poets. Soussloff demonstrates how the very nature of the discourse on art which emerged in Renaissance lives of visual artists dealt with issues concerning ‘the use of antique models or sources, the value of precedence or the historical position of the individual artist, the appropriation of different styles for different subjects’.76 Such a discourse also relied on literary arguments concerning language and poetry, and especially on the questione della lingua, which was found in the early lives of Dante. Despite sharing such affinities, the lives of the poets and those of visual artists distinguished themselves on one major ground. The painter’s legacy of visual material meant that the relationship between the biography, the critical commentaries, and the work had to be renegotiated in the lives of painters. The main difference lay in the rhetorical introduction of ekphrases, that is, the verbal evocations of actual paintings, into the lives of painters. Indeed, the non-textual nature of a work of art meant that a new form of commentary had to be inserted into

73 Catherine M. Soussloff, ‘Lives of Poets and Painters in the Renaissance’, Word and Image, 6 (1990), 154–62. 74 75 76 Ibid. 157. Ibid. Ibid. 159.

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the lives of visual artists in order to deal with the artwork.77 The function of such ekphrasis was clear: to allow readers to ‘see’ the paintings in front of them, without having the actual pictures at hand (predictably, the function of ekphrasis has to be renegotiated when reproductions of the artist’s work are inserted within the textual life; many eighteenth-century biographies of Hogarth, for example, contain engraved reproductions of his work). Renaissance ekphrasis had a long tradition behind it, having originated in late antiquity. Homer’s extended description of the creation of a new shield by Hephaestus for Achilles certainly remains one of the most famous examples of classical ekphrasis. In the Renaissance, the genre was still vibrantly alive and was practised by writers such as Leon Battista Alberti, Giannozzo Manetti, Pietro Aretino, and Vasari.78 In comparison to these other writers, what rendered Vasari’s ekphrases unusual was their insertion within his lives of artists. By incorporating these rhetorical descriptions of artworks into his biographies, Vasari gave them a novel meaning. We recall that Vasari posited the history of art as a series of stylistic steps made up of the contributions of individuals. Each artist took his place in this progress of art only by virtue of adding a new stylistic approach to the artistic performances of his predecessors. Thus, within the biographical environment in which they were inserted, Vasari’s ekphrases were particularly significant as they charted the stylistic progress made by Florentine painters throughout three different ages, while at the same time connecting such progress to the men who had executed the artworks.79 Ekphrasis became the locus linking not only the man and his style but also the artist’s life and work.80 Vasari was unambiguous about the inevitability of conjoining the life of the artist and his work. In the Proemio to the second part of his Vite, he asserted: I have endeavoured not only to record what the artists have done but also to distinguish between the good, the better, and the best, and to note with some care the methods, manners, styles, behaviour, and ideas of the painters and sculptors; I have tried as well as I know how to help people who cannot find out for themselves to understand the sources and origins of various

77 It is worth stressing, however, that the two genres of the Vita and Commento belonged to two different discursive traditions which went back to classical times. 78 See Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), esp. 158–76. 79 Vasari’s three different ages, or epochs, corresponded respectively to three stages of artistic development: from a first phase, or primi lumi, through a period of growth and progression, and finally to the age of artistic perfection attained during the Florentine Renaissance. 80 Svetlana L. Alpers, ‘Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 23 (1960), 213.

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styles, and the reasons for the improvement or decline of the arts at various times and among different people.81

For Vasari, artists’ personal existence and their artistic productions were clearly believed to be dependent on each other. The Renaissance writer looked for the stamp that could be discerned in the body of an artist’s work, the imprint that distinguished him from other artists.82 Philippe Sohm has remarked that personal styles (as opposed to period or normative styles) are ‘those which humanize artists by revealing various personal matters such as their training and histories, their influences, the triumphs and failures of their lives, and the innate case of their minds and souls’.83 This view of artistic production as rooted in, and explained by, the character and the situation of the individual artist rendered the biographical text particularly important within the discourse of art history because it conflated artistic identity with biographical identity.84 Indeed, with Vasari, biography became a mediating tool between the artist’s life and his work. The critical and historiographic framework that Vasari put forward in his Vite had a significant impact on art theory and art history. Until the eighteenth century, the biographical text remained at the core of art history and it was this presumption of ‘life shaping art’ or ‘art mirroring life’ which governed the majority of art-historical discourse, attribution, and evaluation. LIFE AND WORK RELATIONSHIP In the eighteenth century, the homology between the man and his œuvre was still very much alive. In painting, as in literature and music, the transferring of human attributes into aesthetic criticism was common practice. Following the Renaissance theory of the bonus orator, it was usually believed that a good work could only be the product of a good man.85 In his Testimonies to the Genius and the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1792), Samuel Felton asserted that ‘[t]he way to be an excellent painter, is to be an excellent man’.86 Felton’s 81 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, tr. George Bull, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 83–4. 82 For a discussion of style in Vasari’s Vite, see Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 86–114. 83 Ibid. 87. 84 Guercio, Art as Existence, 30. 85 For a discussion of the concept of the bonus orator in literature, see Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson, Biographer, 118–27. 86 Samuel Felton, Testimonies to the Genius and the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1792), 7.

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declaration––in fact, a quotation from Jonathan Richardson the Elder–– implied that a painter needed to be morally good in order to produce good and fine art: ‘his business is to express great and noble sentiments’, Felton wrote, ‘let him make them familiar to him and his own, and form himself as bright a character as any he can draw’.87 Felton’s belief that an artist’s personality could be read through the lens of his work was repeated on numerous occasions. In the biographical preface to Flaxman’s Lectures on Sculpture of 1829, the writer asserted that [t]he best history of an Artist is, undoubtedly, to be found in an account of some of his principal Works; for in those are usually displayed the qualities of his mind, the nature of his studies, and the depth of his knowledge; and when the subjects are chosen by himself, they are fair transcripts of his thoughts and affections, and present as true a reflex of his heart and mind, as a clear mirror would of the features of his face: and never was this more strongly exemplified than in the present instance.88

There is, perhaps, no better example acknowledging the reciprocal reflection, the mirroring between an artist’s work and his life. Here, the writer sees and seeks the artist’s persona––‘his thoughts and affections’, ‘his heart and mind’––within the work itself. While pictures represented, for some, a reliable guide and channel into the artist’s personality, biography was deemed no less necessary for the understanding of his work. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century biography provided a window into the artist’s mind and personality and was hence seen as essential and instrumental to the correct analysis and appreciation of his work. Biography’s strength lay in its ability to provide readers with elements about the artist’s life which reached beyond the picture frame. In the introduction to his Life of Henry Fuseli (1831), John Knowles typically asserted that Although the mind of an author may, at a remote period, be appreciated by a perusal of his works, and the capacity and talents of an artist be judged of the powers of invention he has displayed,––by the harmony of his colour and the style and correctness of his lines; yet these do not completely satisfy; we wish the more to see him in his closet, to pursue him into familiar life, and to be made acquainted with the paths which he trod and the mode of study which he adopted to arrive at eminence. Who does not feel this impulse when he peruses the meagre accounts we have received of Shakspeare or Correggio? although the utmost efforts of industry have been employed to collect facts relating to these extraordinary men.89 87

Ibid. 6–7. John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (London, 1829), p. ix. My emphasis. John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli: The Former Written and the Latter Edited by John Knowles, 3 vols (London, 1831), i. 2–3. 88 89

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Knowles’s comparative remark on ‘Shakspeare’ and ‘Correggio’ shows the extent to which poets and painters were put on a par with one another, much as they were in Renaissance Italy. At a time when the equivalence between poetry and painting (‘ut pictura poesis’) monopolized much of the contemporary aesthetic debate, writers often sought to trace the specific resemblances between the works of (British) poets and those of (Italian) visual artists. Witness the article published in the Gentleman’s Magazine of April 1799 in which Shakespeare was associated with Correggio, Milton with Giulio Romano, Waller with Barocci, Dryden with Titian, Pope with Annibale Carracci, among others.90 Knowles’s statement also reiterates the readers’ desire to become acquainted with the artists as men. More often than not, the pleasure resulting from a contemplation of the artists’ works gave birth, among viewers, to an inquiry respecting the biographical origins and habits of their favourite painters. Thus, biography’s task was to quench such readers’ impulsive thirst for the ‘domestick privacies’ of their favourite painters. Besides providing them with official details on their subjects’ professional life, many eighteenthand early nineteenth-century biographers of artists were keen to disclose unofficial, private, and hidden facts about their biographee’s existence. Like most other life-writers of the time, artists’ biographers strongly believed that such details were far more revelatory of character and temperament than any public and professional information.91 LIVES OF ARTISTS AND CONNOISSEURSHIP The development of intrusive artists’ biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain was not to everyone’s taste. The role of the biographical text as a mediating critical tool was increasingly rejected by some on the ground that the genre was full of useless information: not only did it contain numerous elements unrelated to the artist’s visual work, it also included many anecdotes (including the famous Plinian topoi) which, by their very recurrence, were thought unreliable. The development of such intrusive biography was at the very origin of a divide in the eighteenth century between, on the one hand, a reading public of non-specialists, unable to master a language of formal analysis in order 90

The Gentleman’s Magazine (1799), 270. Edmond Malone, too, remarked that readers, ‘while they contemplate with delight and admiration those productions of his pencil which place him on a level with Titian and Vandyck, will naturally wish to know something of the man, as well as of the painter’: The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols (London, 1797), i, p. iii. 91

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accurately to analyse and discuss works of art and, on the other, a smaller group of connoisseurs who were indeed capable of commanding such a specialized language. If the majority of readers still interpreted art through artists’ lives, connoisseurs––in England as well as on the Continent–– slowly distanced themselves from the Vasarian model and evaluated works of art on the basis of aesthetic conclusion, empirical evidence, and a disciplined method of visual analysis focusing on technique and form. These ways of reading art were not mutually exclusive. Connoisseurs did read artists’ biographies and lay persons certainly looked at paintings in formal terms.92 However, there was then a tendency which had emerged in seventeenth-century Continental Europe, and which was at the origin of a new type of art history––one not based on anecdotal and biographical facts but on the notion that pictures should be approached in connoisseurial and formal terms. The development of antiquarianism in the middle and second half of the seventeenth century, aided by other disciplines such as palaeography, numismatics, and diplomatics,93 slowly undermined the biographical approach to artworks as initiated by Vasari.94 All these fields of enquiry implicitly stressed the importance of the visual and hence served as models for connoisseurship. Such a gradual shift from a biographical to a more formal approach to art is noticeable in the biographical works of the seventeenth-century Italian Giovanni Bellori or the French writers Roger de Piles and André Félibien, where the space devoted to stylistic descriptions was much more important than that occupied by the descriptive passages in Vasari’s Vite.95 In Britain, such theoretical conceptions about connoisseurship were first disseminated through translations and were later developed, discussed, and adopted by British art experts. One important example which bears out the spread of Continental theories of connoisseurship into England is the dedication to the English translation of de Piles’s Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres––a work which was first published in French in 1699 and whose English translation appeared in 1706:

92 In fact, the public of gallery-goers became increasingly proficient in reading art in formal and stylistic terms as Jonathan Richardson’s theories of connoisseurship were being popularized in the press at that time. See Brewer, Pleasures, 276. 93 The OED defines ‘diplomatics’ as ‘the science of diplomas, or of ancient writings, literary and public documents, letters, decrees, charters, codicils, etc., which has for its object to decipher old writings, to ascertain their authenticity, their date, signatures, etc.’ 94 On this subject, see Thomas Da Costa, ‘Antiquarianism, the History of Objects, and the History of Art before Winckelmann’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2000), 523–41. 95 On Bellori, see Janice Bell and Thomas Willette (eds), Art History in the Age of Bellori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 224–38.

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He calls his Account of the Painter’s Lives an Abridgment, and that with good reason, for you will immediately perceive that he industriously avoids entring into the Détail of their Actions: Indeed, the greatest of them Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Sir Peter Paul Rubens only excepted, did nothing of Consequence enough, otherwise than as Painters, to give occasion for any thing to be said of them worthy the notice of the Publick. In their private capacities their Lives were like the rest of the Bulk of Mankind, too mean for the Pen of an Historian, and Monsieur de Piles has thought fit to let his short History of them contain only such of their Actions as serv’d to give the World the best Idea of them as painters. He has incerted [sic] none but what had some Relation or other to their Art, and that was easily done in a few Pages, and sometimes in a few lines, unless he had design’d to write a History of Pictures, and not of Painters. I believe Gentlemen’s Curiosity, in this Case, will go no farther than to know where the Painter was born, whose Disciple he was, what was his Manner, how he Executed it, which were his best Pieces, and when he Dy’d.96

The gist of this passage explains why, in his Abridgement, de Piles deliberately omitted to include private details about the lives of his artists. The reason, we are told, is because such details were not exceptionally interesting and of no particular ‘Consequence’ for the ‘Publick’. As extraordinarily gifted as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Rubens might have been as artists, their personal lives were in many ways no more remarkable than the average individual. It is for this reason that the French scholar focused on his subjects ‘as painters’ and revealed only those facts which were directly relevant to the study of art. Keen to satisfy the gentlemen among his readers, he provided them with information about the artists’ place of birth and date of death, their masters, their manner and execution, as well as their best pieces. De Piles’s connoisseurial theory had a strong impact on subsequent art scholarship. In Britain, his writings were influential as they constituted a major source for Jonathan Richardson’s An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715) and his Two Discourses (1719), certainly among the most significant writings on connoisseurship published in eighteenth-century 96 Roger de Piles, The Art of Painting and the Lives of the Painters (London, 1706), unpaginated. In this preface, one can also read the following: ‘Our author tells us in his Preface, that he had seen all the remarkable Books of this kind, and after he had Examined Vasari, Ridolfi, Carlo Dati, Baglioni, Soprani, the Count Malvasia, Pietro Bellori, VanMandre, Cornelius de Brie, Félibien, Sandrart and others, thought his Abridgment necessary as well as his Dissertation, for large Volumes of the lives of Private Men, must certainly contain many trivial Things, and consequently prove tiresome. There are few who have Leisure or Application enough to run thro’ Ten or Twenty Books on an Art, which was intended chiefly for Pleasure, tho’ it has also its Opportunities of Instructing, as is made to appear, we hope, in the following Translation.’

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Britain.97 Richardson explains in the introductory pages to his Essay that his purpose was to provide his readers with a new and correct ‘Language’ about painting, a language which would allow them accurately to express their ‘Ideas’ and to communicate their ‘Thoughts’ about the arts. Richardson’s intentions were not left unheard. As the century progressed, an increasing number of individuals followed his connoisseurial precepts and adopted his alternative discourse about the arts––a discourse which concerned itself not so much with the painter’s biographical life as with a stylistic description of his artistic production. In his Gentleman’s and Connoisseur’s Dictionary of Painters (1770), Matthew Pilkington admitted to rejecting all types of anecdotal information for his biographical entries. Mentioning some of the sources that he had consulted, he asserted that he had observed in most of those authors, a tedious account of the artists, in respect of their singularities in publick or domestick life; their morals, or manner of living; their families, or the repositories of their works; but, I observed also, that the description of their particular excellencies or defects in the execution of their art; in their style of painting; in their colouring, or penciling; were so blended with other unimportant circumstances, as rendered it exceedingly difficult, to select what might prove instructive. For the life of each artist appeared encumbered with a load of descriptions, which could neither improve the taste or judgment of a lover of the Art, nor scarcely keep the attention of a judicious inquirer awake. Whoever has carefully read Vasari, Vanmander, Ridolfi, Sandrart, and some other writers on the subject, will, I believe, recollect, that they were compelled to contend with abundance or unimproving and untertaining [sic] narrative, to acquire such a degree of information, in regard to any artist, as perhaps they ardently sought after.98

Like de Piles some sixty years or so before, Pilkington stressed the ‘tediousness’ of gossip-laden biographies and the uselessness of ‘unimportant circumstances’. He affirmed that details which were not related to an artist’s style were not ‘instructive’ for the study of art. A ‘judicious inquirer’ and genuine ‘lover of the art’ could not allow his ‘taste or judgment’ to be distracted by such dreary biographical facts––and Pilkington explicitly mentioned the names of Vasari and of some of his followers as art-historiographic models to be avoided. Whilst rejecting the biographical approach, Pilkington was very explicit in what he thought should belong to the education of would-be amateurs and connoisseurs––and in this he closely

97 Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1715) and his Two Discourses (London, 1719). On Richardson, see esp. Carol Gibson-Wood, Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 98 Pilkington, Gentleman’s Dictionary of Painters, pp. v–vi.

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echoed Richardson’s connoisseurial rules: ‘[T]he study of the Works of the most famous Artists’, he wrote, and ‘[t]o observe them with so piercing an attention as to discover their manner of penciling, the force or the delicacy of their touch, as well as their style of invention or composition’. It is by noticing them ‘critically’ that the connoisseur is able to ‘distinguish [one artist] from others, whether they be his equals, or his superior in merits’. For Pilkington, it was clear that genuine art experts should channel all their concentration and effort into the formal aspects of art appreciation. It is also worth noticing that Richardson, like de Piles before him, addressed his introductory precepts to a select and socially restricted class of readers: the ‘Gentleman’, those men, Pilkington specified, of ‘our nobility and gentry, who either travel abroad for the improvement of their taste, or inspect the capital collections of painting in England’. His statement testifies to the strong social and gendered discrimination of connoisseurship in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Britain.99 BIOGRAPHY AND ART HISTORY—ENGLAND AND THE CONTINENT Although Richardson’s theories of connoisseurship remained influential throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, biography’s stronghold on art criticism did not vanish at once. The marketbased origins of Britain’s art institutions, combined with the cult and culture of celebrity that surrounded contemporary painters, meant that artists’ biographies, and biographical art historiography, continued to thrive until well into the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, biography remained the established vehicle for ordering and interpreting an artist’s output and, as art history gradually took shape, the institutions supporting it embraced the biographical model as the fundamental methodology of the new discipline. The forging of a national character and a national school in England was based on establishing a pantheon of individual genius rather than delineating national styles or iconographies. As Greg Thomas has noted, ‘the myth of the artist as a genius, as an originating subject, became the founding principle for interpreting the past’.100

99 Ibid., p. vii. On gendered issues associated with connoisseurship, see Ann Bermingham, ‘The Aesthetic of Ignorance: The Accomplished Woman in the Culture of Connoisseurship’, Oxford Art Journal, 16 (1993), 3–20. 100 Greg M. Thomas, ‘Instituting Genius: The Formation of Biographical Art History in France’, in Elizabeth Mansfield (ed.), Art History and its Institutions: The Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 262.

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On the Continent, a different situation prevailed. The move away from biographical art history and the elaboration of a new artistic discourse had seen its crystallization and full achievement as early as 1764, in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. This work was a milestone in art-historical writing, a watershed comparable to Vasari’s Vite two hundred years earlier. It provided a new theoretical model for art history in that it did not consist of the chronological alignment of artists’ biographies but discussed, analysed, and described the styles of four main sculptural traditions (the Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman). The use of biographical anecdotes had no place in this new system. Winckelmann’s departure from the Vasarian paradigm was clearly announced in the introduction to the Geschichte, in which he wrote that ‘[d]as Wesen der Kunst aber ist . . . der vornehmste Endzweck, in welches die Geschichte der Künstler wenig Einfluss hat, und diese, welche von andern zusammengetragen worden, hat man also hier nicht zu suchen’.101 Winckelmann pursued his anti-biographical argument asserting that history ‘soll den Ursprung, das Wachstum, die Veränderung und den Fall derselben, nebst dem verschiedenen Stile der Völker, Zeiten und Künstler, lehren, und dieses aus den übrig gebliebenen Werken des Alterthums, so viel möglich ist, beweisen’.102 Winckelmann thus defined an artistic tradition in terms of processes of historical development. He presented the history of ancient art as a systematic pattern of rise, development, and decline and saw the arts as a moral thermometer of the nation. For him, the style and state of the arts threw light on a nation’s health or illness. The German writer was convinced that the arts always flourished in periods of freedom and democracy and declined in periods of oppression, thus reiterating an idea that had already been expressed much earlier.103 Such a conceptual framework bore some similarities to Vasari’s Vite, which had also presented art history as a developmental process. Unlike Vasari, however, Winckelmann never made use of lives of artists; nor did his work stop at the peak of a nation’s artistic achievement but encompassed a whole cycle, including the decline of the arts at the end of the Roman Empire.104 101 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Weimar: H. Böhlans, 1964), 7; ‘The essence of art is, however, the noble purpose [of this book], in which the history of artists has little bearing. This type of history, based on the lives of artists, has been related by others and is thus not to be found here.’ My translation. 102 Ibid. ‘History must teach the origins, the growth, the variations, and the fall of the arts, as well as record the style of the people, of the times, and of the artists. It must also–– as much as possible––record this style with the works left over from Antiquity.’ My translation. 103 On the subject, see Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986), esp. 1–23. 104 Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 40–1 and 75.

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The impact of Winckelmann on Continental art-historical writing can be measured by a number of publications which appeared after 1764 and which adapted Winckelmann’s method to the arts of other countries or periods. In his Storia pittorica della Italia (1792), Luigi Lanzi transposed Winckelmann’s systematic approach to the arts of Italy from the thirteenth century onwards. In his preface, Lanzi harshly criticized the traditional art historiography and wrote, ‘chi diviene più dotto leggendo le gelosie degli artefici di Firenze, le risse di quei di Roma, le vociferazioni di quei di Bologna?’ Rejecting scandalous anecdotes, Lanzi paid due regard only to that ‘più degna porzione dei leggitori, che nella storia pittorica non si cura di studiar l’uomo, vuole studiare il pittore’.105 In the introduction to his Histoire de l’art par les monumens (1810–23) the Frenchman JeanBaptiste-Louis-Georges-Séroux d’Agincourt also acknowledged a debt to Winckelmann and offered his work as the continuation to the Geschichte. His Histoire analysed the art works and monuments of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Other examples would show that, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Continental art history had departed from the usual chronological accounts of artists’ biographies and favoured instead a history of artistic forms.106 In contrast, the English-speaking world did not have access to the Geschichte in a full-text translation before the second half of the nineteenth century.107 In the eighteenth century, only translated excerpts appeared in English magazines. The Monthly Review, for example, reviewed Winckelmann’s work when it came out, but only in a cursory manner.108 Thus, 105 Luigi Antonio Lanzi, Storia pittorica della Italia dal risorgimento delle belle arti fin presso al fine del xviii secolo, 5th edn (Florence, 1834), pp. vi–vii; ‘[W]hat do we learn by being informed of the jealousies of the Florentine artists, the quarrels of the Roman, or the boasts of the Bolognian schools?’ and ‘very respectable class of readers, who, in a history of painting, would rather contemplate the artist than the man’, in The History of Painting in Italy from the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century, 6 vols, tr. Thomas Roscoe (London, 1828), i, pp. iii–iv. 106 See also Johann Dominik Fiorillo, Die Geschichte der zeichnenden Künste von ihrer Wiederauflebung bis auf die neuesten Zeiten, 5 vols (Göttingen, 1798–1808), i, pp. x–xi: ‘Ich habe daher immer mein Hauptaugenmerk darauf gerichtet, in dem Mahler nicht den Bürger, den Liebhaber, den Gatten, den Hausvater, den Freund u.s.w., sondern den Künstler zu zeigen; sein Talent und seinen Styl zu charakzerisiren’ (‘I have also always aimed to show the painter not as a citizen, a lover, a husband, a father, a friend, &c, but as an artist; and to describe his talent and his style’: my translation). 107 The first full English translation of the Geschichte, The History of Ancient Art, did not appear before 1880; only the section on Greek art was available in 1849. On Winckelmann in England, see Denis M. Sweet, ‘Die Grenzen der Aufklärung: Winckelmann im englischen Sprachraum’, Beiträge zur internationalen Wirkung Winckelmanns, 4–5 (1986), 5–17. 108 The author of the article wrote, for instance, that ‘The very learned Author of this work treats of the rise and progress of the useful and polite arts, from the earliest ages to those of ancient Greece and Rome, in a very satisfactory and entertaining manner.’ The Monthly Review, 31 (1764), 552.

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as opposed to Continental Europe, the new system presented in Winckelmann’s Geschichte had not gained a hold on British art-historical writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Francis Haskell has pointed out that Winckelmann’s work, when consulted by British scholars, ‘was used only as a source of information about the arts of ancient Greece and Rome (information which very soon went out of date), and not as the key to a new approach to studying the visual arts in general’. Consequently, he adds, ‘the new century dawned without any theoretical framework for the construction of a valid history of art’.109 Until the first half of the nineteenth century, then, at a time when theoretical innovations were elaborated in Britain (mostly by German art historians), lives of artists continued to be published and played a key role in British art criticism and art-historical discourse. Francis Haskell, ‘The Growth of British Art History and its Debt to Europe’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 74 (1988), 204 and 205. 109

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PART II SERIES OF LIVES

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2 Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–1780) Few people have reflected on the difficulty of writing the history of an art. (Retrospective Review (1827), 415) —The distinguish’d part of Men With Compass, Pencil, Sword, or Pen Shou’d in Life’s visit leave their Name In Characters, which may proclaim, That they with Ardour strove to raise At once their Art’s and Country’s Praise (Matthew Prior, Protogenes and Apelles, 1718)

Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–80) is usually considered the first serious attempt at a comprehensive biographical history of the arts in England.1 The story behind the inception of this text is well-known to students of British art. Over the course of his life, George Vertue (1684–1756), engraver and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, amassed a body of information on various aspects of the arts in Britain, stretching from the Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century. Vertue’s plan was to write a national cultural history entitled Museum Pictoris Anglicanum.2 The project sought to combine historical accounts of the antiquities of England, discussions of ancient buildings and paintings, dissertations on art patronage, on collecting, on art techniques and institutions. Vertue also intended to include biographical 1 On Walpole’s Anecdotes, see Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in EighteenthCentury England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 127–63, and Morris R. Brownell, The Prime Minister of Taste: A Portrait of Horace Walpole (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. 86–91. 2 For a discussion of Vertue’s Museum, see Ilaria Bignamini, ‘George Vertue, Art Historian; and, Art Institutions in London, 1689–1768: A Study of Clubs and Academies’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, 54 (1988; publ. 1991), 1–18.

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information about painters, sculptors, architects, and engravers.3 The Museum, however, never came into being. Vertue died before completing the project and Walpole, having purchased the forty volumes of undigested and uncatalogued notebooks from Vertue’s widow in 1758, edited them before publishing them at his Strawberry Hill Press under the titles Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–80) and Catalogue of Engravers (1763).4 Both works contained a series of biographical articles about English and foreign artists who had spent all, or most, of their careers in England.5 Though by far the largest in scope, Walpole’s Anecdotes was not the first biographical series of artists published in Britain. In 1695, Richard Graham had compiled ‘A Short Account of the Most Eminent Painters, Both Ancient and Modern’, which was appended as a supplement to John Dryden’s translation of Charles-Alphonse Du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica, published as The Art of Painting.6 The ‘Short Account’ consisted of a digest of foreign biographical works and its material was arranged in chronological order. Eleven years later, in 1706, Bainbrigg Buckeridge published his own Essay Towards an English School of Painters––a text which was, again, attached to a foreign work (this time, de Piles’s Abrégé de la vie des peintres). Buckeridge’s Essay contained the names of all major artists who had worked or continued to work in Britain.7 Pursuing de Piles’s formula, Buckeridge highlighted the most salient biographical points on each painter, together with the genre and style in which the painter worked. Walpole did not have much regard for these earlier works. He was particularly condescending towards those authors who, like Buckeridge, had attempted to record the first traces of a characteristically British school of painting. ‘[W]hat little had been done before on this subject, was so far from assistance’, he wrote in the preface to his Anecdotes, ‘[that] it was scarce of use. The sketch entitled An Essay Towards an English School, at the end of the translation of Depiles, is as superficial as possible; nor could 3 Lionel Cust, ‘George Vertue’s Note-Books and Manuscripts Relating to the History of Art in England: Introduction and Proposal of a Scheme for their Publication’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, 3 (1913–14), 122–39. Vertue’s Note-Books were published in vols 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29 of The Volume of the Walpole Society. 4 The fourth volume of the Anecdotes, printed in 1771, was issued only in 1780 because of some unpleasant remarks that Walpole had made about Hogarth’s work. 5 For a detailed discussion of the publication of the different edns of Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting, see Allen Tracy Hazen, A Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press (Folkestone and London: Dawsons, 1973), 55–68. 6 Charles-Alphonse Du Fresnoy, De Arte Graphica (London, 1695). 7 Bainbrigg Buckeridge, An Essay Towards an English School of Painters (London, 1706). Almost half a century later, another English work sought to complete de Piles’s biographical list, namely James Burgess, The Lives of the Most Eminent Modern Painters Who Have Lived Since, or Were Omitted by Mons. De Piles (London, 1754).

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a fact scarce be borrowed from it ’till we come to very modern times’ (APE i, p. vii). British art historiography in the eighteenth century was certainly not as developed as it was on the Continent, where biographies of artists had been published since the sixteenth century. ‘In Italy’, Walpole remarked, ‘where the art of painting has been carried to an amazing degree of perfection, the lives of the painters have been written in numberless volumes, alone sufficient to compose a little library’ (APE i, p. v). Walpole’s own library was full of such lives, containing as it did not only Italian works but also French and German texts.8 Many of these works proved extremely useful to Walpole when he set himself the challenge of writing the Anecdotes. These foreign sources became embedded in the fabric of his narrative. And yet, in many respects, Walpole’s Anecdotes was different from such sources––formally, stylistically, and didactically. This chapter explores the roots of such differences. By examining the ways in which Walpole used and organized his textual and visual material, and by contrasting Walpole’s biographical and historical practices with those of his Continental predecessors, we may trace the origins of a quintessential British art historiography. At the same time, I show how Walpole’s Anecdotes helped construct various images of artists, images that were to develop more fully in the individual lives of artists published in the last decades of the eighteenth century and beyond. WALPOLE’S ANECDOTES—THE TEXT AND ITS STRUCTURE Walpole’s Anecdotes was published in four quarto volumes and was organized according to the reigns of British monarchs: the first volume covered ‘The Earliest Accounts of Painting in England’ and stretched as far back as the reign of Queen Elizabeth; the second extended from James I to the ‘Artists during the Interregnum’, the third from Charles II to William III; and, finally, the fourth discussed the arts under George I and George II.9 Walpole introduced each chapter with an overview of the state of the arts during a particular reign, although, as Lawrence Lipking has pointed out, this overview often ‘consist[ed] merely of a description of the monarch himself, 8 For instance, Walpole owned a copy of Jean-Baptiste Descamps’s La vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandais (Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1753–63), of AntoineJ. Dezallier d’Argenville’s Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres (Paris: De Bure, 1762), and of Joachim von Sandrart’s Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae (Nuremberg, 1683), among others. 9 Earlier, Giovanni Baglione had organized his own work, the Vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti (1642), along similar lines, according to pontificates.

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his character, his taste, his dispensations’.10 Walpole gauged the fame of each king or queen by the amount of money spent on promoting the arts under each rule. Hence, monarchs such as Henry VIII (the ‘sumptuous’, ‘opulent’, ‘liberal’ prince), Elizabeth I (who ‘loved pictures’), and Charles I (whose protection and love for the arts is the subject of an entire chapter)11 were placed very highly on the scale of artistic patronage. They were in stark contrast with figures like James I, whom Walpole totally despised.12 Besides biographical entries of inconsistent length, Walpole also added discussions on architecture and on other arts, including a ‘History of the Modern Taste in Gardening’ in the fourth volume. The main body of the text was supplemented by numerous footnotes and various appendices and indexes at the end of each book. One of the major appeals of the Anecdotes, however, lay in the engraved portraits of artists that were interspersed within each volume. That Walpole chose to order and structure Vertue’s notes within a biographical framework––to which he added printed portraits––was not surprising. Considering the wealth and variety of Vertue’s antiquarian notes, Walpole could have opted for a different, non-biographical, type of art history. Tradition guided his choice. The practice of honouring distinguished individuals through biography and portraiture went back to Antiquity and, though less prominent during the Middle Ages, had never entirely died out. During the Renaissance, it was revived through the publication of works like Paolo Giovio’s ‘Museo’, a catalogue based on the author’s extensive collection of historical portraits of illustrious men, to which were also appended biographical notices. Giovio’s work proved to be highly influential for the development of textual galleries of illustrious individuals in Western culture from the sixteenth century onwards.13 Significantly, the ‘Museo’ also served as a model for Vasari’s Vite, the second edition of which contained woodcut portraits of artists. The impact of the Vite’s bibliographic layout on other national art histories cannot be underestimated. After the 1568 edition of the Vite, and until the eighteenth century, a remarkable number of national art histories 10

Lipking, Ordering of the Arts, 34–5. APE ii, ch. 3. 12 Walpole wrote ‘It was well for the arts that King James had no disposition to them: He let them take their own course. Had he felt any inclination for them, he would probably have introduced as bad a taste as he did into litterature [sic]. A Prince who thought puns and quibbles the perfection of eloquence, would have been charmed with the monkies of Hemskirk and the drunken boors of Ostade. James loved his ease and his pleasures and hated novelties. He gave himself up to hunting and hunted in the most cumbrous and inconvenient of all dresses, a ruff and trowser breeches’ (APE ii, p. 1). 13 Paul Ortwin Rave, ‘Paolo Giovio und die Bildnisvitenbücher des Humanismus’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen (1959), 119–54. 11

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published on the Continent combined biographical notices with engraved portraits, as did Vasari’s own work. They included Joachim von Sandrart’s Teutsche Academie, published in Nuremberg in 1675, André Félibien’s Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes, printed in Paris ten years later, and Jean-Baptiste Descamps’s La vie des peintres flamands, also published in Paris, in 1753—to mention only a few. In eighteenth-century Britain, the combination of biography with portraiture became an increasingly popular type of publication, affecting as it did not only British art-historical writing but also other types of histories. The biographical turn that took place in British literature during this period (some aspects of which have been outlined in the preceding chapter) also impinged upon British historiography. The philosophical and grand-scale narratives of nations and empires in the vein of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), which had been so characteristic of the high Enlightenment, gradually gave way in the second half of the century to more circumscribed and more heroic types of historical narratives.14 British writers increasingly interpreted history through the lives and the faces of the country’s most eminent individuals. As Arline Meyer has pointed out, ‘it was as handmaidens of history that portraiture and biography came into closest contact; i.e., their intersection was on utilitarian rather than on aesthetic grounds’.15 The publication of Joseph Ames’s Catalogue of English Heads in 1748 and of the immensely popular Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain (1743–51) reflected, and simultaneously articulated, this biographical vision of a national identity. As an antiquarian and a print collector, Walpole played an important role in shaping this patriotic discourse. Indeed, Walpole counted among the earliest and keenest collectors of engraved portraits in eighteenthcentury Britain and his antiquarian knowledge became an inspiration for many fellow collectors and historians during this period, including Sir William Musgrave and James Granger.16 Walpole’s antiquarian authority 14 On British historiography in the 18th cent., see Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment (2000), and Karen O’Brien, ‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, 105–33. 15 Arline Meyer, ‘Sir William Musgrave’s “Lists” of Portraits; with an Account of HeadHunting in the Eighteenth Century’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, 54 (1988; publ. 1991), 455. 16 Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 53–66, and Lucy Peltz, ‘Engraved Portrait Heads and the Rise of Extra-Illustration: The Eton Correspondence of the Revd James Granger and Richard Bull, 1769–1774’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, 66 (2004), 1–53, esp. 5–10.

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is particularly evident in Granger’s Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution of 1769, a work which Granger explicitly dedicated to Walpole. The very structure of Granger’s Biographical History was inspired by the Anecdotes: like Walpole, Granger organized his portrait sitters chronologically, according to the reign in which they had lived. Because Granger’s work included more than one professional category, he then subdivided his portraits into twelve different hierarchical classes. Granger’s Biographical History was immensely successful and made portrait print collecting extremely fashionable in late eighteenth-century Britain (a fact that somewhat puzzled Walpole who had published his Anecdotes seven years earlier without initiating the same vogue). The success of Granger’s biographical history lay not only in its systematic and methodical ordering of the prints, but also in the biographical notices that accompanied such prints. No doubt, the brief memoirs inserted within the Biographical History increased the book’s audience well beyond that of specialist print collectors. VERTUE’S ANTIQUARIANISM AND WALPOLE’S SELF-FASHIONING Performing within an increasingly diverse and competitive literary market, Walpole was strongly aware of the need to make his Anecdotes appeal to a wider reading public. On numerous occasions, he expressed the necessity of writing an entertaining work. In a letter sent to Henry Zouch in 1759, he confessed ‘I must to make [sic] the [Anecdotes] interesting, make it historical; I would mix it with anecdotes of patrons of the arts; . . . I think it capable of being made a very amusing work, but I don’t know whether I shall ever bestow the necessary time on it’ (HWC xvi. 27). Walpole’s slippage from ‘interesting’, to ‘historical’ and finally to ‘amusing’ is a clear indication of his intention of writing a work which was not only humorous and engaging but also factually true. Walpole reaffirmed this ambition in the preface to the Anecdotes in which he stated again that ‘[h]ere and there I have tried to enliven the dryness of the subject by inserting facts not totally foreign to it’ (APE i, p. viii). Considering the applause with which Walpole’s work was received, one may safely say that the antiquarian was successful in satisfying his readers’ taste for biographical anecdotes––although it is worth noting that most of Walpole’s readers belonged to the upper social classes. In May 1762, the Reverend William Cole spoke of the ‘extreme pleasure and entertainment [he had] received from [Walpole’s] two late volumes on Painting in England’. Indeed it was a ‘continual feast’, Cole went on, ‘from one end

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to the other, and it is no small satisfaction to think that we are to be favoured with another volume before the entertainment is to be over’ (HWC i. 1). Abroad, Walpole’s Anecdotes was also warmly welcomed. The French connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette chose to learn English in order to translate the first edition of the Anecdotes, though he admitted that such a work contained nothing ‘important enough’ for a French audience.17 After the publication of the fourth volume, another French scholar and acquaintance of Walpole’s, Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Georges Séroux d’Agincourt, wrote of the ‘attention et le plaisir avec lesquels je les ai lues, et . . . je regarde la manière dont vous avez traité cette partie, comme propre à servir de modèle’ (HWC xlii. 65).18 Despite his remark, Séroux d’Agincourt did not copy Walpole’s biographical method but pursued Winckelmann’s stylistic approach and offered his Histoire de l’art par les monumens (1810–23) as a continuation to the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Walpole’s literary performance and his ability to write an engaging and entertaining work become especially evident when one peruses Vertue’s notebooks. To transform Vertue’s miscellaneous notes into a coherent text was certainly no easy task, especially as Walpole considered Vertue’s antiquarian observations a ‘heap of immethodic confusion’ (HWC xvi. 299).19 For Walpole––as for many contemporary writers actively involved in Britain’s ‘ordering of the arts’, to use Lipking’s phrase––the main difficulty resided in selecting and organizing the abundance of information available. Vertue’s and Walpole’s methodological practices were certainly very different. Unlike Vertue, who had painstakingly gathered and listed all possible facts about every aspect of British art, Walpole’s compiling activities forced him to be much more discriminatory. The latter ignored and omitted many topics that Vertue had initially wanted to 17 Pierre-Jean Mariette, Anecdotes sur l’état de la peinture en Angleterre, 3 vols (Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, inventaire Fr. 14650); see also Mariette’s Letter to Bottari, the librarian of the Vatican, of 3 Aug. 1764, in which he writes: ‘Il a été publié à Londres et en anglais un ouvrage en quatre volumes in 4-, qui contient des anecdotes sur les peintres, les sculpteurs, les architectes et les graveurs, qui ont exercé ces différents arts en Angleterre. Je me suis amusé à le traduire, et je suis déjà à la fin du troisième volume. Mais ce travail sera sans doute pour moi seul; car je n’y trouve rien d’assez important pour qu’il en soit fait part au public dans notre langue’, in Antoine-J. Dumesnil, Histoires des plus célèbres amateurs français, 3 vols (Paris: Renouard, 1857–8), i. 211–12. 18 Other writers published artists’ lives in 18th-cent. France, including Denis-Pierre-J. Papillon de la Ferté’s Extrait des différents ouvrages publiés sur la vie des peintres, 2 vols (Paris, 1776). 19 For a discussion of the relationship between Vertue and Walpole, see Lipking, Ordering of the Arts, 127–34, and Brownell, Prime Minister of Taste, 69–91. Such a view has been contested by more recent scholars who have traced very specific narrative structures in Vertue’s notes, see for instance Baker, ‘Sculptors’ Lives and Sculptors’ Travels’, 25.

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insert in his Museum, including discussions on art institutions and artistic techniques. The very number of artists that Walpole included in his work was inferior to that contained in Vertue’s notebooks. The main difference between Vertue’s projected Museum Pictoris Anglicanum and Walpole’s Anecdotes, however, did not lie in the number of facts discussed but rather in the tone and the style in which those facts were presented. The very essence of Vertue’s initial project underwent considerable transformation in Walpole’s hands: while Vertue aimed at antiquarian meticulousness, Walpole aimed at erudite entertainment. The use of different practices between the two men is perhaps best illustrated by the distinct ways in which they used and conceived of anecdotes. For Vertue, the anecdote was part of, and reflected, his professional practice as an antiquarian: his investment in visual and textual evidence and his concern with minute details. Vertue’s anecdotes were meant to provide readers with as accurate and truthful a picture of the past as possible. For Walpole, on the contrary, the anecdote was not so much an element of faithful historical reconstruction as an entertaining textual instance, a good story, an unusual incident, a captivating tale told to enthral and amuse his readers.20 Interestingly, Walpole often presented his (and Vertue’s) scholarship using the first person singular, employing phrases such as ‘I have said’, ‘I do not mean to say’, or ‘I speak now critically’ (APE i. 62, 87, 107, and 111). By doing so, he not only smoothed over Vertue’s rough notes, he also particularized and personalized the incident, placing himself in the limelight of artistic and connoisseurial erudition. No doubt, the Anecdotes represents a history of the arts in England seen through the prism of its author’s overtly biased eyes and judgement. And yet, it was precisely because of Walpole’s lack of objectivity and impartiality, because of his personal taste, his coups de cœur and coups de tête, his not hesitating to describe Sir John Vanbrugh’s buildings as ‘heaps of littleness’, that his work was praised for being so vibrant and alive (APE iii. 152). Despite his literary achievement, Walpole never ceased to regard Vertue as the real author of the work. While relying heavily on Vertue’s notes and observations, Walpole always distanced himself from his predecessor’s original research, considering his own editorial activity as ‘trifling and ornamental’ (HWC xl. 354). Such an assessment does not aptly reflect his literary input, as Walpole often completed and corrected Vertue’s information, making important scholarly amendments (Walpole was also responsible for important inaccuracies that were not present in Vertue’s notebooks). One may wonder why Walpole would utter such self-deprecating comments. The answer lies 20

See his anecdote on Sir Godfrey Kneller (APE iii. 112).

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in his ambiguous attitude towards antiquarians and antiquarianism. In making such comments, Walpole was not so much paying tribute to the meticulous and comprehensive nature of antiquarians’ research, as dissociating himself from a practice of knowledge which he claimed did not correspond to his own. Walpole regularly admitted to keeping a certain distance from antiquarian methodology. In practice, this was far from being the case.21 He placed particular importance on seeing first-hand evidence, the registration of sites, full citation of detailed documents, or the use of footnotes. In fact, when asked by William Hogarth what type of history he was writing, Walpole replied that he was compiling an ‘antiquarian’ history of painting in England, as opposed to a ‘critical history of painting’ (HWC ix. 366). Nevertheless, most of Walpole’s remarks concerning antiquarians were often patronizing and his comments on Vertue were close to being sheer condescension: ‘No man living, so bigotted to a vocation, was ever so incapable of falsehood’, he wrote, meaning that Vertue could make mistakes but he could not lie. Walpole also maintained that Vertue never dealt ‘in hypothesis, scarce in conjectures. He visited, and revisited every picture, every monument, that was an object of his researches; and being so little slave to his own imagination, he was cautious of trusting that of others’ (APE i, p. viii). Clearly, Walpole regarded Vertue’s solemn concern with ‘errant trifles’ as totally lacking in personal and critical judgement and it is precisely this lack of analytical and imaginative response towards the original material that led Walpole to divorce his own intellectual practice from that of his predecessor. Walpole also regretted that Vertue, and antiquarians in general, did not bestow more attention on style: ‘Style is become in a manner a mechanic affair’; he wrote in a letter to Henry Zouch, clearly betraying his class distinction again, ‘and if to much ancient lore our antiquaries would add a little modern reading, to polish their language and correct their prejudices, I do not see why books of antiquities should not be made as amusing as writings on any other subject’ (HWC xvi. 52). His remark anticipated similar comments made by Richard Gough in his Anecdotes of British Topography (1768). In this book, Gough described antiquarian literature as ‘incorrect pedigrees, futile etymologies, verbose disquisitions, crowds of epitaphs, lists of landholders, and such farrago, thrown together without method, unanimated by reflections, and delivered in the most uncouth and horrid style make the bulk of our country histories’. Antiquarian works, Gough added, ‘bring 21 In fact, there are many instances in the Anecdotes where Walpole refers to himself as an antiquarian (APE i. 27, 54, and 81). For a discussion of Walpole’s antiquarianism, see Wilmarth S. Lewis, ‘Horace Walpole, Antiquary’, in Richard Pares and A. J. P. Taylor (eds), Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier (London: Macmillan, 1956), 178–203.

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the study of antiquities into disgrace with the generality, and disgust the most candid curiosity. They represent their authors as men of uncultivated minds, fit only to pore over musty records, and grovel among ruined walls; shut up in closets from the commerce of life, and secluded from information even in their own way.’22 Gough’s portrait of antiquarians easily allows us to understand why Walpole wished to segregate himself from a group of men portrayed in such unflattering terms. Walpole was anxious to shape and present himself as a thinker, a nonchalant yet erudite writer of British art, an entertaining intellectual as keen on relating amusing anecdotes as he was on exposing his wit and critical comments to a reading public of gentlemen connoisseurs. By dismissing earlier writers of British art histories, by making patronizing comments on Vertue and, more generally, by dissociating himself from a society of supposedly ‘uncultivated minds’, Walpole not only presented himself as a guide and a leader—the first British art historian worthy of note—he also positioned himself as an outsider, a judge of other scholars’ works. (It is worth remembering here that the first volume of Walpole’s Anecdotes predated Reynolds’s Discourses by seven years.) This performing act of knowledge was not rare among eighteenth-century historians eager to compete for, and advertise, their discipline at a time when the literary market offered many other attractive genres to a keen reading public.23 WALPOLE’S ANECDOTES: BETWEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION Considering the social and cultural environment in which he operated, Walpole’s decision to entitle his book Anecdotes of Painting in England was thus judicious. The title was a commercially strategic choice which guaranteed the success of a work intended for public consumption.24 Beyond 22 Richard Gough, Anecdotes of British Topography (London: Printed by W. Richardson and S. Clark, 1768), pp. xviii–xix. For a study of antiquarianism, see Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz (eds), Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), esp. 1–13. 23 On the subject, see Greg Sullivan, ‘Rapin, Hume and the Identity of the Historian in Eighteenth-Century England’, History of European Ideas, 28 (2002), 145–62. 24 There are explicit references in Walpole’s Correspondence testifying to his awareness of having to write for a specific audience. In his letter to William Mason, 29 Dec. 1763, he wrote that ‘I should be glad to know how to convey to you another volume of my Anecdotes and a volume of Engravers, which will be published in a fortnight or three weeks—but they will be far from amusing you. If the other volumes were trifling, these are ten times more so; nothing but my justice to the public, to whom I owed them, could have prevailed over my dissatisfaction with them, and have made me produce them’ (HWC xxviii. 2–3), and in his

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such literary considerations, Walpole’s title was no less significant for it underpinned the author’s modest opinion about British art. Walpole had certainly little regard for his own artists (though he did claim improvement in British art during his lifetime).25 His choice of the word Anecdotes was informed by his knowledge of the genre’s semantic history and of the lower prestige associated with it. In the preface to his work, he set out explicitly the reason for his choosing such a modestly disclaiming title.26 ‘This country, which does not always err in vaunting it’s own productions’, he wrote, has not a single volume to show on the works of it’s painters. In truth, it has very rarely given birth to a genius in that profession. Flanders and Holland have sent us the greatest men that we can boast. This very circumstance may with reason prejudice the reader against a work, the chief business of which must be to celebrate the arts of a country which has produced so few good artists. This objection is so striking, that instead of calling it The Lives of the English Painters, I have simply given it the title of Anecdotes of Painting in England. (APE i, p. vi)

Walpole here visibly offers excuses for his inability to provide readers with a definitive history of British art.27 In this regard, the Anecdotes differed considerably from most Continental art histories published since the sixteenth century. Unlike the authors of such earlier works, who had written their narratives retrospectively, looking back on the artistic excellence which had already been achieved, Walpole was writing his Anecdotes as a preliminary work, a precursor to some future text which would glorify the talents of Britain’s own native artists.28 As a result, Walpole’s modest letter to Arthur Onslow, 31 Mar. 1764, he remarked that ‘The assistance of gentlemen, curious, communicative and able, like you, Sir, may enable me to make the next edition more worthy of appearing in public. It is for that public, Sir, that I beg you to continue your cooperation’ (HWC xl. 309–11). 25 In the dedication and advertisement to his fourth volume, especially, one can see that Walpole had changed his opinion about British art and artists; he noted for instance ‘How painting has rekindled from its embers, the works of many living artists demonstrate. The prints after the works of Sir Joshua Reynolds have spread his fame to Italy, where they have not at present a single painter that can pretend to rival an imagination so fertile, that the attitudes of his portraits are as various as those of history’ (APE iv, p. vi; see also iv. 51 and 52). 26 It is also worth noticing that whilst Walpole first intended to call his work ‘Lives of English Painters’ (see the entry dated 1 Sept. 1759 in his own biographical notes), four months later, on 1 Jan. 1760, he rectified his title and wrote ‘I began the Lives of English Artists, from Vertue’s MSS. (that is Anecdotes of Painting, etc.)’. 27 In fact, the great majority of artists mentioned in his work were born outside Britain. 28 For an opinion of Walpole on British artists, see his letter to Arthur Onslow of 31 Mar. 1764, in which he wrote, ‘My fear of making so trifling and uninteresting a work too prolix, prevailed on me to omit many stories that he had collected, especially on the less shining artists, for I think, Sir, you and I differ in nothing but when you ascribe more merit

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rhetoric differed quite substantially from the narrative of his European predecessors who, in response to Vasari’s biased views, had all wished to loosen the Florentine grip on the history of art and to illustrate as well as proudly comment on the talents of their own native artists. To Vasari’s triumphant account of artists rising to excellence, Walpole offered a much more apologetic and serpentine narrative. From a methodological point of view, Walpole’s historiographic practices were close to that of his Continental antecedents. The efforts embodied in the Anecdotes meant gathering the earlier fruits of biographical and historical research and distinguishing the true from the false. Before him, Descamps had asserted in his preface to La Vie des peintres flamands (1753–63) ‘il y a près de quinze ans que j’ai commencé à faire des notes sur la vie des Peintres Flamands. J’ai comparé dans ces notes les auteurs les uns avec les autres; j’ai démêlé, autant qu’il m’a été possible, l’erreur d’avec la vérité.’29 Similarly, Walpole admitted that after consulting Vertue’s notebooks, he had ‘been obliged to compose anew every article’ and therefore ‘recurred to the original fountains from whence [Vertue] drew his information, I mean where it was taken from books’ (APE i, pp. vii–viii). Besides Vertue’s notebooks, Walpole turned to a vast quantity of other Continental biographical art histories, including André Félibien’s Entretiens de la vie des peintres, Jean-Baptiste Descamps’s La Vie des peintres flamands, Joachim von Sandrart’s Academia nobilissimae artis pictoriae, and Carel Van Mander’s Het Schilder-Boek (1604), a series of lives of Dutch and German painters. In addition to such artistic literature, Walpole also made extensive use of more regional histories like Thomas Fuller’s Worthies of Cambridgeshire (1662) and Anthony Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses (1691–2). He also quoted treatises like Sanderson’s Graphice (a dissertation on limning of 1658), as well as numerous other manuscripts and historical documents. The second part of Walpole’s above remark (‘I mean where it was taken from books’) suggests that he did not draw all his information from textual sources: he also looked elsewhere. Undoubtedly, Walpole supplemented many literary facts with visual observations and with his own knowledge about specific pictures. The Anecdotes is full of descriptive passages of paintings. One characteristic feature of Walpole’s work––a feature which distinguished the Anecdotes from the work of his Continental forerunners–– lay in the function of these descriptions. For unlike most of his Italian and to our English performers than I do. Some of their paintings and some of their drawings, have and may have, a degree of merit, but when compared with the works of really great masters, I fear we ought not to say much for our friends’ (HWC xl. 309–11). 29 Descamps, La Vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandais, p. viii.

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French predecessors who theoretically subordinated their descriptive comments to higher stylistic principles, Walpole described his pictures for practical purposes. His comments on artworks were mainly provided on a utilitarian ground: ‘My view in publishing the Anecdotes’, Walpole admitted, ‘was to assist gentlemen in discovering the hands of pictures they possess, and I am sufficiently rewarded when that purpose is answered’ (HWC i. 25). Clearly, Walpole’s text was not intended for artists but was meant to be read by an audience of gentlemen connoisseurs keen to know how to read pictures and where to find them. As Lipking has observed, in ‘the artistically uncharted world of eighteenth-century England, Walpole’s cataloguing must have been invaluable. Not only did it guide the prospective traveller, it also stocked, no matter how unselectively, an imaginary museum where one might review the accumulated images of English art’.30 No doubt, Walpole’s history of the arts was framed within the doors of English country houses. The diversity of the original material consulted and the sheer number of paintings seen by Walpole made it difficult for him to provide a unifying commentary on British art throughout the ages––hence the absence of any coherent theoretical discussions at the beginning of each of his chapters (in contrast, Vasari’s, Sandrart’s, and Van Mander’s biographical works all had such theoretical introductions). Despite the multiplicity and heterogeneity of sources, however, one can still make general observations about the historiography of Walpole’s Anecdotes. Most importantly, it is worth stressing that Walpole replaced the Italian authors by northern writers (Dutch, German, as well as some French authors). His Anecdotes contain very little about Italian arts and Italian artists. There are only very few references to Vasari, and the other Italian writers that are mentioned, including Baglione and Ridolfi, appear only sporadically. On the other hand, Descamps’s work on the Dutch and Flemish painters is repeatedly cited, as are Van Mander’s Het Schilder-Boek and Sandrart’s Academia. By inserting Dutch and Flemish sources within his Anecdotes, Walpole allowed such foreign texts to become accessible to English-speaking readerships. More importantly, Walpole’s bibliographic references show that Italy was not essential for the development of the arts in Britain, at least until the early eighteenth century. (Reynolds’s academic Discourses––and the interest for Italian pictures spurred on by the Grand Tour from the early eighteenth century onwards––thoroughly changed the reception and perception of Italian art in Britain.)

30

Lipking, Ordering of the Arts, 137.

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There are numerous reasons explaining why there was an overwhelming presence of Northern artists in Walpole’s Anecdotes. Unlike Italian artists, whose tendency was to remain in their home country, many Dutch and Flemish painters saw a favourable market for their work in Britain and came over to meet commissions. Obliterating the production of the Italian painters, Walpole himself confessed in the preface to his Anecdotes that ‘Flanders and Holland have sent us the greatest men that we can boast’ (APE i, p. vi). The major wave of emigrant artists that left the Low Countries for England took place in the seventeenth century, under the reigns of Charles I and Charles II. Gerard van Honthorst was one such artist who crossed the Channel, making a successful visit to London in 1628. The Van de Veldes, too, were successful in England, having been granted royal protection in the early 1670s. From Walpole, we learn that ‘Charles II. had received [William] and his son [Peter] with great marks of favour’ (APE iii. 55). In addition to these names, the Anecdotes also included the biographical notices of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters John Griffiere, Gerard Edema, and Jan Looten (APE iii. 46–8, 48–9, 45, respectively). Interestingly, Walpole does not appear to have made any single note of Cuyp, Ruysdael, or Hobbema. By the eighteenth century, however, the exodus of painters from the Low Countries to England had been reduced to a trickle, thus Walpole’s fourth and last tome contains the names of very few eighteenth-century Dutch or Flemish painters. Conversely, at the same time, sculptors like Michael Rysbrack and Peter Scheemakers still continued to thrive in Britain. The presence of so many Dutch painters in Walpole’s book shows the extent to which the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish schools––perhaps more than any other Continental schools––helped the development of a quintessential English school of painting in the early nineteenth century.31 Certainly, the decades after 1800 saw the gradual emergence of landscape painting as a typical English genre and as a challenge to older eighteenth-century artistic conventions. Following in the footsteps of Dutch landscape painters––rather than those of the Italian old masters–– English painters such as Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner, and later 31 On the topic, see Peter Hecht, ‘Dutch Painters in England: Reading in Houbraken, Weyerman, and Van Gool’, in Simon Groenveld and Michael Wintle (eds), The Exchange of Ideas: Religion, Scholarship, and Art in Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Zutphen: Walburg Instituut, 1994), 150–62. An attempt at a comprehensive treatment of the Dutch artistic presence in 17th-cent. England is to be found in Horst Gerson’s Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischer Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Haarlem: De erven F. Bohn n. v., 1942), 365–429. See also ‘Shock of Recognition’: The Landscape of English Romanticism and the Dutch 17th-Century School (London: Arts Council, 1971) as well as Frank Simpson, ‘Dutch Paintings in England before 1760’, The Burlington Magazine (1953), 39–42.

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John Constable, produced works in watercolour and oil that distinguished themselves for their naturalistic style, their painterly effect, and their distinctive handling of subject matters. Kay Dian Kriz has argued that the works of early nineteenth-century landscape painters were often seen to embody ‘mental powers, and moral qualities associated with a particular ideal of Englishness’. Although Walpole did not discuss the lives and works of these later painters, his Anecdotes are significant for they trace the early origins of the British school of painting, at a time when landscape painting was still considered as a lower genre in Britain. WALPOLE’S ANECDOTES AND THE IMAGE OF THE ARTIST We have seen how Walpole’s Anecdotes pursued a European tradition of art writing; yet at the same time how his work distanced itself from such a tradition. Like other Italian Vite and French Vies, the Anecdotes combined the biographical notices and engraved portraits of painters, sculptors, and architects. However, the material included in it was not subsumed within a larger theoretical and stylistic framework. Also, unlike his Continental predecessors, Walpole did not explicitly promote a specific school, although the seeds of such a school were already present in the Anecdotes. In Walpole’s particular case, the absence of a theoretically synthesizing discourse was combined with the author’s reticence towards his own artists, the best indication for such a reserve lying in the absence of the term ‘painters’, ‘sculptors’, or ‘architects’ in the book’s title. In contrast, several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art writers had included their subject’s professional status in their title, including Vasari in his Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori. There is little doubt that Walpole had much respect for the sixteenthcentury artist and writer. In a letter sent to Richard Bentley in February 1755, he referred to his own ‘Vasari-hood’ as a way of describing his literary task (HWC xxxv. 207).32 This reference is perhaps an indication of Walpole’s desire to be associated (however loosely) with a leading figure in European art historiography. This allusion does not accurately reflect nor correctly describe his work, however: not only is the verbal and visual narrative of Vasari’s Vite more uniform than the Anecdotes in both its structural form and in its aesthetic content, the ways in which the Vite project and articulate images of artists are also more consistent.

32

For a more detailed comparative discussion of Walpole and Vasari, see Lipking, Ordering of the Arts, 155–159.

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The tension between these opposing ideals of tradition and innovation can certainly be traced in the ways in which images of artists are projected and constructed in Walpole’s Anecdotes. On the side of tradition, Walpole’s work marked, like Vasari’s Vite, a turning point in the social recognition and promotion of artists in the author’s native country. To devote four quarto volumes to the lives and works of artists definitely formalized the idea that the former were different from the average man. Moreover, by regrouping these artists within the one work, Walpole’s compiling gesture suggested that all individuals included in his work shared something in common. In both Vasari’s Vite and Walpole’s Anecdotes biographies and visual memorials complemented each other and constituted important cultural instruments that facilitated the transformation of painters, sculptors, and architects from respected artisans into cultural icons.33 While the biographical texts delved into the details of the subjects’ personal and professional lives, the portraits emphasized the artists’ bodily presence. The commemorative function of such images also guaranteed the perpetuation of the artists’ memory, and hence their immortality. However, there were also many differences between Vasari’s and Walpole’s works. Unlike Vasari, Walpole did not purposely attempt to create a sense of ‘familial’, or familiar, connections among his subjects. We recall that Vasari built his narrative as an uninterrupted sequence of artistic relations––relations between ‘masters’ and ‘students’––all of whom participated in a common project, the progress of the arts. As Paul Barolsky has shown, Vasari also created more specific ‘family’ connections within this larger scheme.34 Visually, the unified format of the woodcut portraits that decorated the second edition of the Vite––woodcuts that were similar in size, shape, and frames––further emphasized the affinities among Vasari’s artists. These portraits, placed unvaryingly at the beginning of each biographical notice, formally related the artists with one another and hence underpinned a sense of historical continuity between painters, sculptors, and architects of both past and present times.35 In contrast, Walpole did not establish such ‘family’ connections in his Anecdotes. As we have seen, chronology and monarchy furnished all, and the only, links. The reputations of Walpole’s artists were not gauged within a teleological

33 See also Joan Stack, ‘Artists into Heroes: The Commemoration of Artists in the Art of Giorgio Vasari’, in Rogers (ed.), Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, 163–76. 34 See Paul Barolsky, Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s Lives (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) and the chapter entitled ‘Fathers and Sons’, in Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari, 69–70. 35 Stack, ‘Artists into Heroes’, 165.

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framework that traced the progress of the arts in three different stages, from ‘fathers’ to ‘sons’ in Barolsky’s terms. Rather, the talents of Walpole’s biographical subjects were evaluated on the basis of a few specific artworks. More often than not, the fame and social prestige of the artworks’ owners played a role in determining the artist’s importance. Formally, this lack of family ties in the Anecdotes is emphasized by the absence of a consistent structural format for his biographical articles. Walpole’s notices are very different from one another: some are several pages long (Holbein’s, for instance, numbers thirty-four pages, and Hogarth is granted an entire chapter in the fourth volume); many are much shorter (the notice for David Beck, a ‘scholar’ of van Dyck, is just three lines long). The length of Walpole’s literary portraits was often determined by the number of primary and secondary biographical sources available. ‘One cannot write the life of Rubens without transcribing twenty authors’, Walpole writes about Rubens (APE ii. 78).36 In contrast, when recording the life and work of the much more obscure Paul Vansomer––a Flemish painter born in Antwerp in 1576––Walpole remarks ‘the accounts of him are extremely deficient, no author of the lives of painters mentioning him but Carl Vermander, who only says that Vansomer was living when he wrote, and then resided with his brother Bernard at Amsterdam’ (APE ii. 3). Hence, Walpole devoted the largest part of Vansomer’s biographical notice to listing and locating his works in British collections. The biographical and bibliographic variety that characterizes the Anecdotes is visually reinforced by the diversity of the engraved portraits. Unlike the homogeneous format of Vasari’s woodcuts, the design, size, and style of the engravings in the Anecdotes vary substantially from one artist to another. Some consist of circular pictures, or tondi, with a uniform background (Vandedort, Rubens, Polenburg, Dobson), others are bust or half-length portraits in three-quarters (Sir Antonio More and Sir Peter Lely). In addition to these single-subject portraits, several pictures distinguish themselves for including two sitters. The engraved portrait of the English carver Nicholas Stone, for example, represents a monument in which the faces of both the artist and his son, Nicholas Stone Junior, are depicted. The portraits are surrounded by instruments appertaining to the two men’s professional activities. The formula of the double portrait is repeated for other artists, including Edward Pierce Senior and Junior (the former a painter active during the reign of Charles I, the latter a renowned seventeenth-century English portrait sculptor), as well as John Van Bel36

For his entry on Rubens, Walpole drew most information from Félibien, Descamps, and Sandrart.

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camp and George Geldorp (both painters closely associated with Anthony van Dyck). Such compositions often underline the artistic affinities between the two individuals. Significantly, only a fraction of all the artists mentioned in the Anecdotes have their faces reproduced. Where portraits of the artists are used, the picture is often placed near the biography, on the adjacent page. Walpole clearly did not start a new chapter or a new page for each artist whose life he was writing. On the contrary, the bibliographic features of his books suggest that he wrote his text and then extra-illustrated it with the portraits he had. As a result, the portrait does not function, as in Vasari’s Vite, as a visual introduction to the life of the artist, nor does it open a new chapter, but rather visually complements the text of the artist’s life. Why some artists have portraits attached to their biographies, and others do not, is related to the origins and provenance of the portraits. We know that most of the heads inserted in Walpole’s Anecdotes came from Vertue’s own collection.37 Indeed, before he died, Vertue had compiled a large number of portraits, many of which he had discovered and copied during his visits to country houses. After Vertue’s death the antiquarian’s material allowed Walpole to follow Vertue’s footsteps when visiting country houses in search of portraits to add to his own collection. Both Vertue’s portraits and Walpole’s own pieces were used as the basis for the plates in the Anecdotes. The provenance of the engravings shows the extent to which most artists’ images in Walpole’s Anecdotes depended on, and were constructed through, pictures that were hanging on the walls of select British country houses. Characteristically, Walpole boastfully described the series of portraits in his Anecdotes as the ‘most compleat series of English artists extant’, one which contained ‘many extremely scarce prints’.38 Although it is true that the engravings in the Anecdotes represented one of the most significant collections of artists’ portraits in the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain, Walpole’s remark obscured the existence of earlier, yet similar work, published in Britain up to this time. One such series of engraved portraits of artists was theTrue Effigies of the Most Eminent Painters, and Other Famous Artists that Have Flourished in Europe, first published in London in 1694.39 The True Effigies contains the biographical notices and portraits of more than one hundred European artists, some of whom later 37 On Walpole’s portraits, see Antony Griffith, ‘Walpole’s Collection of Portraits’, Print Quarterly, 17 (2000), 290–3. 38 Quoted ibid. 293. 39 The True Effigies of the Most Eminent Painters, and Other Famous Artists that Have Flourished in Europe (London, 1694). A 2nd edn was publ. in 1739 under the title The Portrait of the Most Eminent Painters (London, 1739).

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1. Anecdotes of Painting by H. Walpole, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Antiq. d. E. 26, vol. 2: portrait print of Honthorst.

reappear in Walpole’s Anecdotes. The work is divided into three parts: the first consists of a ‘short account of the lives of the painters’ by the famous seventeenth-century Italian dealer and collector of drawings Sebastiano Resta,40 the second contains the engraved effigies of twenty-two artists, and the third––by far the largest––comprises ninety-nine plates of ‘divers hommes desprit sublime’. Unlike those found in the Anecdotes, where portraits are inserted close to the biographical notices, the engravings in

40 On Sebastiano Resta, see Genevieve Warwick, The Arts of Collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta and the Market for Drawings in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) as well as Genevieve Warwick, ‘Connoisseurship and the Collection of Drawings in Italy c. 1700: The Case of Padre Sebastiano Resta’, in Christopher Baker, Caroline Elam, and Genevieve Warwick (eds), Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 141–53.

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2. The True Effigies of the Most Eminent Painters, and Other Famous Artists that Have Flourished in Europe (1694): portrait of Honthorst, no. 51. # The British Library Board, 562*.d.17.

the Effigies are all placed after Resta’s biographical text, a configuration which emphasizes the gallery nature of his book. In the present context, the True Effigies is particularly useful for it brings up questions of identification and likenesses. Visual comparisons between the Anecdotes and the True Effigies show that portraits of the same artist can differ substantially from one work to another. The two representations of Gerard van Honthorst, for instance, are very unlike each other (see Figures 1 and 2). Cornelius Jansen also appears to be two completely different people in the two volumes. To be sure, the copies that Vertue made during his antiquarian peregrinations were bound to be approximate, and

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their inaccurate nature could only have been emphasized in the printing process. Yet it is worth remembering that our notion and experience of truthfulness and representational accuracy, deeply affected by photography, are very different from those of eighteenth-century viewers. At the time, portraits and likenesses were not necessarily truthful to their subjects, in the sense that they did not represent mirrored equivalents of the actual sitters. On the contrary, changes and enhancement from the original were often made and were acceptable as long as they were plausible. Peter Burke has noted that the use of portraits in the eighteenth century was ‘more institutional than individualistic’; that is, the sitters were assessed by their social status and roles in public life rather than by their personal and unique personalities.41 Attributes, appendages, and dress were therefore particularly important as they allowed the sitters to be socially identified. In Walpole’s Anecdotes, the issue of truthfulness was further complicated by the fact that many of the engravings contained in it were, in fact, selfportraits. The extent to which such self-portraits were enhanced interpretations of the subjects is impossible to assess. However, recurring elements in the portraits suggest that painters often resorted to visual topoi to depict their own images, or that of a subject. For instance, many artists in Walpole’s book wear neck ruffs, a sign of high social status. A number appear to be wearing wigs, including William Wissing and William Vandevelde. Other painters, including Daniel Mytens, are clothed in seemingly flamboyant attire. Indeed, many artists included in the Anecdotes are presented as respected gentlemen, an image of the artist which Vasari helped create in his Vite. And yet, the Anecdotes also introduces artists, including John Sybrecht, who are wearing much more modest garments. The lack of uniformity among the artists’ postures, accessories, and apparel certainly projects highly heterogeneous images. Among all the prints, it is worth commenting on two of them, albeit concisely. The first is that of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter and apprentice to Frans Hals, Peter Roestraten (see Figure 3), portrayed sitting at a table, wearing an unbuttoned shirt, carrying a half-full glass in his left hand and a smoking pipe in the right. The artist looks straight into the viewers’ eyes, laughing. The jug on the table may suggest that he is in a tavern, enjoying himself. For readers of artists’ lives, such a picture would have reminded them of a literary topos frequently interwoven in the biographical narrative, namely, the image of a painter recklessly drinking Peter Burke, ‘The Renaissance, Individualism, and the Portrait’, History of European Ideas, 21 (1995), 395. 41

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3. Anecdotes of Painting by H. Walpole, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Antiq. d. E. 26, vol. 3: portrait print of Roestraten.

away the profits of his artistic earnings. This topos does not appear in Roestraten’s biographical notice itself; and yet, as we shall see, it does occur in other notices in the Anecdotes. The second image is the engraved self-portrait of a certain Sevonyans, an artist about whom Walpole knew ‘almost nothing’ (APE iii. 126) (see Figure 4).42 Unlike Roestraten, the Sevonyans of the picture is not engaged in any identifiable activity but is staring into the void, outside the picture frame. His curly dark hair and white open shirt, as well as his undefinable gaze and are all elements typical of the romantic hero. No doubt, the engraved portraits in the Anecdotes made the artists’ features

42

The artist in question is Anton Schoonjans (Sevonyans), c.1655–1726.

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4. Anecdotes of Painting by H. Walpole, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Antiq. d. E. 26, vol. 3: portrait print of Sevonyans.

palpable and concrete and visually affected the viewer’s perception of them––even if such perception did not correspond to reality. Indeed, no matter how accurate they were, these images impinged upon the ways in which the roles and status of painters, sculptors, and architects were understood in eighteenth-century English society. The impact of such images was all the more potent as it was underpinned by similar topoi interspersed within Walpole’s textual narrative. Despite the embryonic quality and the ostensible casualness and sketchiness of some of Walpole’s biographical entries, his book still contains a series of well-known leitmotifs, many of which are already present in Pliny’s own account of artists. The negative yet persisting representation of the artist as a penniless, dissipated, and often drunken genius––briefly discussed above––runs throughout the text of the Anecdotes. We learn that

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Mabuse ‘had the two defects of his cotemporary countrymen, stiffness in his manner, and drunkenness’ (APE i. 47). In the same biographical entry, we also find Mabuse always wanting money to waste in debauchery, [so that] when the tailor came to take his measure [for a damask . . . Mabuse] sold the stuff, drunk out the money, and then painted a suit of paper, so like damask, that it was not distinguished, as he marched in the procession, between a philosopher and a poet, other pensioners of the Marquis, who being informed of the trick, asked the Emperor which of the three suits he liked best: The Prince pointed to Mabuse’s, as excelling in the whiteness and beauty of the flowers; nor did he ’till convinced by the touch, doubt of the genuineness of the silk. The Emperor laughed much––but, though a lover of the art, seems to have taken no other notice on Mabuse; whose excesses some time after occasioned his being flung into prison at Middleburgh, where however he continued to work. (APE i. 49)

Here, the anecdote combines two typical artists’ images. On the one hand, it presents the court painter as a financially careless and debauched individual, constantly wasting the profits of his artistic production on alcohol. On the other, this story also contains the famous Plinian topos of the artist’s exceptional ability to represent Nature so realistically that people mistake it for reality.43 This combination––of an exceptional genius indulgent in relentless debauchery, yet also working obsessively–– was to re-emerge in the biographies of George Morland and others, and is further discussed in Chapter 6. Interestingly, the above passage also presents the painter as being sandwiched between a poet and philosopher, a symbolic arrangement granting the painter membership of the liberal arts. The vulnerability of such a membership in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Flanders, however, is immediately exposed in the Emperor’s detached attitude towards the artist, and Mabuse’s subsequent imprisonment for errant behaviour. There are other examples in Walpole’s Anecdotes of reputed artists ruined and depraved by alcohol. The portrait painter John Greenhill, for instance, is seen to have drunk himself to death: ‘At first’, we learn, he was very laborious, but becoming acquainted with the players, he fell into a debauched course of life, and coming home late one night from the Vine 43 There is a similar story in the life of Holbein: ‘He had still at his house a portrait that he had just finished for one of his patrons’ we learn, ‘on the forehead he painted a fly, and sent the picture to the person for whom it was designed. The gentleman struck with the beauty of the piece, went eagerly to brush off the fly—and found the deceit. The story soon spread, and as such trifling deceptions often do, made more impression than greater excellencies’ (APE i. 64).

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tavern, he tumbled into a kennel in Long-acre, and being carried to Parrey Walton’s, the painter, in Lincoln’s-inn-fields, where he lodged, died in his bed that night, in the flower of his age. (APE iii. 22)

Although not a court painter, Greenhill counted among his sitters such eminent figures as Seth Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, and John Locke. His career, however, was abruptly cut short at the age of 34 in the alleged circumstances that Walpole describes above. Once more, we see before us the image of an extremely talented painter leading ‘a debauched course of life’. In this particular case the artist fatally succumbed to the pleasures of his drinking spree. There are other instances in the Anecdotes perpetuating the idea and the belief that many artists usually lead a life of poverty and hardship. We learn that William Dobson ‘loved his pleasures’ but ‘not having had time to enrich himself, was involved in debts and thrown into prison’. However, Dobson was more fortunate than many of his fellow artists since ‘he was delivered by one Mr. Vaughan of the exchequer, whose picture he drew and thought it the best of his portraits’ (APE ii. 207). In this biographical entry, we are also told that Dobson, ‘though no excellent performer’, was fortunate, for during his artistic education, by the advantage of copying some pictures of Titian and Vandyck, [he] profited so much, that a picture he had drawn being exposed in the window of a shop on Snow-hill, Vandyck passing by was struck with it, and inquiring for the author, found him at work in a poor garret, from whence he took him and recommended him to the King. (APE ii. 106)

Walpole here combines the typical image of the artist living ‘in a poor garret’ with the famous Plinian anecdote of a painter’s chance discovery by a senior master and his subsequent artistic fame, a topos echoing Vasari’s story of the providential discovery of Giotto by Cimabue. Nonetheless, this series of portraits of impoverished painters must not conceal the fact that other painters led a much more comfortable life. We learn that the sixteenth-century Dutch painter Sir Antonio More ‘was a man of stately and handsome presence; and often went to Brussels, where he lived magnificently’ (APE i. 124). Such a description is supported visually throughout the Anecdotes by the many portraits depicting artists in stately postures and dignified garments. Among other stereotypical themes running through Walpole’s work are those which deal with the discovery of a painter’s artistic talents. Certainly, the origins of fame are often strikingly similar among artists. For example, we learn that John Griffiere was ‘placed apprentice to a carpenter, a profession not at all suiting his inclination. He knew he did not like to be a carpenter, but had not discovered his own bent’. He quitted his master, we are further told,

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and was put to school, but becoming acquainted with a lad who was learning to paint earthen-ware, young Griffiere was struck with the science tho’ in so rude a form, and passed his time in assisting his friend instead of going to school, yet returning regularly at night as if he had been there. This deception however could not long impose on his father, who prudently yielded to the force of the boy’s genius, but while he gratified it, hoped to secure him a profession, and bound him to the same master with his friend the tyle-painter. (APE iii. 46–7)

The artist’s career is here triggered by a chance encounter which allows the painter to find and recognize his true calling. A somewhat similar biographical formula is applied to the life of Godfrey Kneller Jr, ‘who at first was destined for a military life, [and was therefore] sent to Leyden, where he applied to mathematics and fortification; but the predominance of nature determining him to painting, his father acquiesced and sent him to Amsterdam, where he studied under Bol, and had some instructions from Rembrandt’ (APE iii. 109). Finally, we also learn that Richardson the Elder was first ‘placed apprentice to a scrivener’ but then obtained ‘his freedom by the death of his master, [and thus] followed the bent of his disposition, [and] at twenty years old [he] became the disciple of Riley’ (APE iv. 16). In each of these three examples, the young artist is first destined to a professional occupation which does not suit his personal inclination. He overcomes the original situation in which he is placed and, following ‘the bent of his disposition’, he then embraces a career which turns out to be successful. Erust Kris and Otto Kurz have shown in their study of the biographical construction of the artistic myth that genius (almost) always reveals itself very early in the life of a painter, who then triumphs over the numerous obstacles hampering his way towards artistic recognition and fame.44 Although such stories of beginnings offer glimpses into an artist’s talents, Walpole never elaborates on the creative process itself. His references to the nature of an artist’s genius are usually very brief. Walpole’s style of biographical writing in the Anecdotes does not allow for any thorough exposition of the artist’s character, talents, or personality. Unlike his contemporary Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets, Walpole never tries to examine the more profound recesses of human and artistic life. There are no powerful moral or psychological statements in the Anecdotes, as there are in the Lives; nothing about the possibilities and limitations of human existence. In all his biographical entries, Walpole focuses on relating, factually yet pithily, his artists’ careers, mentioning their patrons, 44

Erust Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 26–38.

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and describing some of their artworks––but he does not thoroughly examine their personal and artistic nature and temperament. When referring to his subjects’ individual character, Walpole usually limits his portraits to a few adjectives. Comparing Godfrey Kneller with Michael Dahl, he writes that ‘[t]he more universal talents of Kneller and his assuming presumption carried away the croud from the modest and silent Dahl’ (APE iv. 8). Or, referring to the Dutch Baroque painter Gerard Soest, he remarks that he was ‘capricious, slovenly, and covetous’, adding that the artist ‘often went to the door himself, and if he was not in a humour to draw those who came to sit, or was employed in the meaner offices of his family, he would act the servant and say his master was not at home; his dress made him easily mistaken’ (APE iii. 44). Although this brief anecdote may hold some truth, it also draws on the figure of the servant––a ubiquitous figure in eighteenth-century English society and literature. Interestingly, the usual codes of subordination are here readjusted, the master now disguised as a person with lesser social and professional claims and entitlements—a narrative twist which may have been informed by the fundamental changes that services between unequals were undergoing during this period.45 Throughout, Walpole’s literary portraits are very brief and concise; they do not attempt to dive into the minds of his subjects, nor do they delve into their artistic personalities.46 The anecdotal details that Walpole provides enhance and sharpen a characteristic trait of his artists, but they do not further explore their psychology. And yet, despite remaining on the surface of his artists’ personalities, Walpole is nonetheless able to produce a lively rendering of his subjects. Thanks to the very presence of antiquarian details and his numerous anecdotes, Walpole’s literary portraits are realistic. His artists are not idealized persons, no saintly models for emulation, as biographical subjects tended to be in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. On the contrary, they contain the ungerminated seeds of complex, sometimes unpredictable, human beings. Holbein’s supposedly mischievous character is unveiled in the ironic revelation that the painter inscribed ‘under the name of an old student, the name of Erasmus’, upon which, we learn that ‘the author, with very 45 On the topic, see Bridget Hill, Servants: Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 46 In a letter to Lady Ossory, 20 June 1785, he remarks that ‘[a]s the world is now so overstocked with anecdotes, I don’t know whether it will not be advisable for future English biographers to aim at my conciseness and confine themselves to quatrains. Dr. Johnson’s history, though he is going to have as many lives as a cat, might be reduced to four lines; but I shall wait to extract the quintessence, till Sir John Hawkins, Madame Piozzi and Mr Boswell have produced their quartos’ (HWP xxxiii. 466).

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little spirit of repartee, wrote under a fellow drinking, the name of Holbein’. Although Walpole is not of the opinion that such anecdotes are ‘worth repeating for their importance’, he nonetheless believes that they are ‘very descriptive of the esteem in which the two men were held of whom such anecdotes could be thought worth preserving’ (APE i. 63). The painter Frederic Zucchero (1543–1609) offers another example of the playful usage of artistic skills: after losing face with some of Pope Gregory XIII’s officers, the artist, to be revenged, ‘painted their portraits with ears of asses, and exposed the picture publicly over the gate of St. Luke’s church’ (APE i. 140). Such anecdotal stories offer not only a glimpse into the character of painters, they also help personalize them, transforming them into more fallible, and hence more credible, biographical subjects. Despite their psychological sketchiness, Walpole’s allusions already contain elements which were to play a major role in the definition of genius in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain as they draw upon notions of originality, novelty, experimentation, and independence. Many artists in the Anecdotes stand apart from their contemporaries in the devising of novel and experimental painting techniques. We learn that the Dutch artist Cornelius Ketel ‘took into his head to make himself known by a method of painting entirely new. He laid aside his brushes, and painted only with his fingers, beginning with his own portrait’ (APE i.138–9). Here, the painter rejects traditional artistic practices and invents a totally original method of painting. Walpole also singles out Samuel Cooper for similar reasons, for although he ‘[o]wed great part of his merit to the works of Vandyck, yet [he] may be called an original genius, as he was the first who gave the strength and freedom of oil to miniature’ (APE iii. 61). Finally, Walpole praises the famous seventeenth-century woodcarver Grinling Gibbons by underlining his natural and inventive powers. For Walpole, Gibbons was ‘[a]n original genius, a citizen of nature; consequently, it is indifferent where she produced him. When a man strikes out novelty from himself, the place of his birth has little claim on his merit. Some become great poets or great painters because their talents have capital models before their eyes. An inventor is equally a master, whether born in Italy or Lapland’ (APE iii. 82). Clearly, geniuses in Walpole’s Anecdotes rise above temporal and local particulars, and distinguish themselves for their unique and visionary skills. Preservation of artistic heritage and commemoration of artists in England were clearly two of the most important goals of Walpole’s Anecdotes. On the one hand, they provided collectors with appropriate tools for authenticating and evaluating individual works. Walpole tried to counter the all too common tendency at the time of attributing paintings to only one of a few familiar names by listing many renowned English painters.

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His Anecdotes undoubtedly brought renown to artists whose names might otherwise have been lost in oblivion. In this regard, Walpole adduced support from Joseph Ames’s History of Printing (1748), which also presented an extensive list of artists in order ‘to prove to those who learn one or two names by rote, that every old picture they see is not by Holbein nor every miniature by Hilliard or Oliver’.47 On the other hand, Walpole’s biographical entries and images contributed significantly to the rise of the artist’s status in England in the eighteenth century. He presented, constructed, and codified images of painters, sculptors, and architects that not only became fundamental for the development of art and art history in eighteenth-century Britain, but also furthered our own understanding of the place of the artist in a modern society. As we will see in the next chapter, the biographical and historiographic sources that had inspired Walpole for the writing of his Anecdotes were to encourage another writer to compose his own lives of artists. This time, however, Walpole’s connoisseurial tone was to be replaced by the mischievous hand of a man keen to send up the whole tradition of artistic portraiture and art-biographical writing. 47

Quoted in Meyer, ‘Musgrave’s “Lists”’, 466.

3 William Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780) ¸ª Ø łıÅ ØŒØÇø ÆºÅŁØÆ (The tale is a lie giving the semblance of truth) (Aphthonius, Progymnasmata) Impertinent & without foundation (Biographical Memoirs, British Library copy [Cup. 501.h.58], pencilled annotation)

1780, the year in which the fourth and last volume of Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England was finally published, also saw the appearance of a small and seemingly insignificant book entitled Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters. Critics accustomed to reading the biographies of real painters were visibly much less confident about the nature and quality of this anonymous text. A reviewer of the Gentleman’s Magazine who assessed the Biographical Memoirs in June 1780 wrote bemusedly that Those conoscenti who expect here a Bellori or a Vasari, or a De Piles or a Walpole, will be disappointed. The six ‘extraordinary painters’ here celebrated never existed but in the author’s brain, as the reader may judge by their names, Aldrovandus Magnus, Andrew Guelph, Og of Basan, Sucrewasser of Vienna, Blunderbussiana and Watersouchy. Some ridicule on particular characters may perhaps be intended, but the meaning (if any) is much too latent for us to discover.1

Such a cautious and perplexed tone was echoed in the Monthly Review of the same year, in which the commentator betrayed, again, his bewilderment as to the exact meaning of the work. Interpreting the Biographical Memoirs as a possible roman à clef, he remarked that

1

The Gentleman’s Magazine (June 1780), 290.

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Not content with studying this performance carefully, we have consulted both professors and virtuosos concerning it; but still remain in the dark with respect to the Author’s real drift. The painters whose lives are here pretended to be given, are described under the strange names of Aldrovandus Magnus, Andrew Guelph, Og of Basan, his supposed disciples Sucrewasser of Vienna, Blunderbussiana and Watersouchy. On the first view of this performance, it naturally occurs, that the Author meant to draw some modern or living characters; but if such was his intention, we confess that we are not of that class of readers who can identify any one of them, in this mingled mass of true and fictitious history. The Author, however, is by no means a bad or uninformed Writer. In this performance the Reader will meet with some good descriptions, and some humour; which last, however, loses its effect, through the ill humour into which the Reader is continually thrown, by the vexatious obscurity that pervades the whole work.2

The ‘vexatious obscurity’ surrounding the Biographical Memoirs did not preclude the success of its publication: a second issue of the same edition came out later in the year with an extended title, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters: Exhibiting Not Only Sketches of their Principal Works and Professional Characters; But a Variety of Romantic Adventures and Original Anecdotes; Interspersed with Picturesque Descriptions or Many New and Singular Scenes, in Which They Were Engaged.3 It was followed by two other editions which appeared in 1824 and in 1834, respectively.4 By this time, the work’s author––William Beckford––had been identified. However, his name did not appear on the title-page until the twentieth century but was replaced by the formulation, common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘By the Author of Vathek’.5

2 The Monthly Review, or Literary Journal, 63 (July–Dec. 1780), 469; see also the review in The Critical Review; or Annals of Literature, 49 (1780), 479: ‘There may notwithstanding, for aught we know, be much hidden wit and humour in it, but the line of our understanding is not, we must acknowledge, long enough to fathom the depth of it’. 3 Even though it is called a ‘second edition’, only the title-page has changed: Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters: Exhibiting Not Only Sketches of their Principal Works and Professional Characters; But a Variety of Romantic Adventures and Original Anecdotes; Interspersed with Picturesque Descriptions or Many New and Singular Scenes, in Which They Were Engaged (London, 1780). There is no engraved frontispiece. 4 The 1824 edn was publ. by William Clarke as ‘A New Edition’; that of 1834 by Richard Bentley and presented as ‘By the Author of Vathek’. 5 The two 20th-cent. English edns of Beckford’s work are William Beckford, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, with an intr. and notes by Robert J. Gemmett (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969) and William Beckford, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780), with a new introduction by Philip Ward (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1977).

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Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs was definitely unusual. Unlike Walpole’s Anecdotes––and unlike all other biographies of painters published during this period––Beckford’s text dealt with the lives of fictional individuals, or so it seemed. Readers who tried to identify Beckford’s characters with modern or historical painters manifestly remained perplexed as to the importance and implication of the work, witness the two reviews quoted above. Admittedly, Beckford’s Memoirs has often been dismissed as a joke—one anonymous reader describing it as ‘impertinent’ and ‘without foundation’. But the text does not deserve such dismissive criticism. On the contrary, this chapter demonstrates that the unusual nature of Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs lies in its satirical treatment of artists’ lives as well as in the theoretical implications of such a treatment. Satirical accounts of painters were of course not uncommon during this period. We have seen that artists, and especially Royal Academicians, were often subjected to derision—satirists being particularly keen to discuss and ridicule painters’ idiosyncratic characters and behaviour. Six years after the publication of Beckford’s Memoirs, Pasquin wrote his Royal Academicians: A Farce (1786) to scoff at the institution’s failure to promote the ‘polite Arts’, a concept which had largely been developed in Reynolds’s Discourses. Pasquin’s play consisted of a series of meaningless speeches given by modern artists reassembled for this occasion in the antechamber of the Royal Academy one day before the opening of its annual exhibition. ‘Sir Varnish Dundizzy’ (alias Sir Joshua Reynolds), ‘Joseph Noddleskin’ (Joseph Nollekens), ‘Thomas Daubborough’ (Thomas Gainsborough), and ‘Tiny Cosmetics’ (Richard Cosway) all made their entries on to the stage, introduced by ‘Truth’. Beckford’s Memoirs did not aim directly at contemporary artists; yet reviewers still tried to identify his characters with modern artists. The Greek epitaph quoted at the beginning of this chapter, placed on the front page of the first edition, below the title, did nothing to help identify the author’s biographical sources. Extracted from the Progymnasmata, a work by the sophist and rhetorician Aphthonius, this epitaph warned readers that ¸ª Ø łıÅ ØŒØÇø ÆºÅŁØÆ (‘The tale is a lie giving the semblance of [or imaging] truth’)––a phrase which in the second issue of the first edition was translated into Latin as ‘Sermo est fictus, veritatis imago’ (‘The tale is invented, an image of truth’). This quotation hints at the complex relationship between factual and fictional truth, a relationship which is at the core of Beckford’s narrative and which manifests itself through the presence of fictitious characters as well of historical perso-

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nages, including van Dyck, Giulio Romano, Michelangelo, and Gerard Dou.6 Beckford’s parody further distinguishes itself from Pasquin’s Royal Academicians in its tackling significant theoretical issues central to contemporary debates about art criticism, namely the role and function of biography in the evaluation of artworks. Biographical art criticism, we have seen, was often discussed during this period by connoisseurs who rejected the biographical genre on the ground that it was highly unreliable and hence had little to do with the essence of art. Beckford belonged to such connoisseurial circles. Literature has shown how accomplished an art expert he was and how much he delighted in the possession of beautiful and usually highly expensive art objects.7 Beckford’s appreciation of the arts was undoubtedly somewhat exclusive as he was reluctant to permit access to his art and book collections. He often expressed his contempt towards false connoisseurs who were unfamiliar with the canons of taste, the language of art, and who owned paintings merely as a public façade. In the New Monthly Magazine of July 1884, we learn for example that during his lifetime Beckford was of the elitist opinion that: (e)xcept among a few gentlemen, there is no sound taste for the arts in England . . . People admire, and affect to be struck with works of art, because others affect the same thing . . . There is Raffaelle––he is at the head of painting everybody says, his pictures it is safe to applaud. Ask why Raffaelle is the prince of painters––they cannot tell you.8

Other accounts give evidence of Beckford’s meticulous understanding of the arts. His letters to his booksellers show how concerned he was with the high quality of the drawings and prints he purchased. He never accepted anything but the best proofs and impressions.9 Relying solely on his own judgement, he asserted that ‘in pictures, as well as prints, I have learnt to trust no eyes but my own.’10 It was the superiority of a line or a brushstroke

6 For a discussion of the interplay of fact and fiction, see the introduction to the Biographical Memoirs by Robert J. Gemmett (1969), 22. 7 See, for instance, the exhibition catalogue Derek E. Ostergard (ed.), William Beckford, 1760–1844: An Eye for the Magnificent (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 203–15 and 217–27. 8 The New Monthly Magazine, 71 (July 1884), 314. 9 See Robert J. Gemmett (ed.), A Consummate Collector: William Beckford’s Letters to his Booksellers (Wilby: Michael Russell, 2000), esp. Beckford’s letter from Bath, 7 Nov. 1830, in which he writes that ‘Nothing inferior to real eng(rave)rs’ proofs will suit me. I can do without any of these plates, but those I take must be good. Indifferent impressions of such trash are indeed intolerable’, 40; see also his letter from Bath, 22 Sept. 1830, 35, and from Ashton Hall, 2 Oct. 1830, 35. 10 Letter from Bath, 17 Sept. 1833, in Gemmett (ed.), Consummate Collector, 261.

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rather than the fame of a name that (in)formed his aesthetic views. Over a century later, Henry Venn Lansdown, a Bath artist and teacher of drawing, would write in his Recollections of the Late William Beckford that many who have hardly heard the painter’s name will of course not admire it, being done neither by Titian nor Vandyke; but Mr. Beckford’s taste is peculiar. He prefers a genuine picture by an inferior painter to those attributed to the more celebrated masters, but where originality is ambiguous, or at least if not ambiguous where picture cleaner[s], or scavengers, as he calls them, have been at work.11

One could thus infer that Beckford, had he been asked, would have designed a connoisseurial history of art in which lives of artists were absent. Such an assumption, however, excludes Beckford’s other persona: the skilled, fantastic satirical novelist.12 Beckford’s combination of connoisseurship and satirical talent as a novelist certainly produced a highly idiosyncratic work. Unlike Winckelmann and Lanzi who, we saw in Chapter 1, condemned and attacked biographical art history and criticism explicitly, Beckford opted for a much more convoluted line of criticism. He did not attempt a scientific history of art in which biographical details had been sifted away. Quite the opposite: he gave free rein to his novelistic imagination and offered a series of parodic narratives of varying length, replete with the most extravagant and absurd anecdotes about the lives and works of six different painters. Unlike other more serious connoisseurial works, Beckford’s book conveyed theoretical significance in anecdotal form. Considering the deftness and satirical acuity with which Beckford transformed the genre, it is clear that, despite his young age, he was well-acquainted with the tradition of biographical art history.13 Interestingly, the catalogue of his library at Fonthill listed several such histories, including Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England, Johan Van Gool’s Nieuwe Schouburg der nederlantsche kunstschilders (1750–1)—a biographical collection covering Dutch art of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth—as well as Jean-Baptiste Descamps’s La Vie des peintres flamands, 11 Henry Venn Lansdown, Recollections of the Late William Beckford, of Fonthill, Wilts; and Landsdown, Bath (n.pl., 1893), 18. 12 Other satires by Beckford include Modern Novel Writing; or The Elegant Enthusiast (London, 1796) as well as Azemia, A Descriptive or Sentimental Mode (London, 1797); for a more detailed discussion of Beckford’s satiric mode, see for instance Malcolm Jack (ed.), Vathek and Other Stories: A William Beckford Reader (London: William Pickering, 1993), pp. xxii–xxvi. 13 Beckford was only 17 when he started composing the Biographical Memoirs, see Robert J. Gemmett, ‘The Composition of William Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters’, Philological Quarterly, 47 (1968), 139–41.

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allemands et hollandais of 1753. The presence of Descamps in Beckford’s library is particularly revealing. Unlike Walpole who used Descamps’s work as a source of information, Beckford took the Vie des peintres flamands as a model to be ridiculed. Descamps’s text contained all the ingredients that Beckford was keen to parody in his own satire: ‘L’ordre que je me suis prescrit’, Descamps wrote in his preface, comme le plus clair & le plus simple, est de faire connoître l’année, la ville où le peintre a reçu le jour. J’expose son extraction, je le suis chez ses maîtres & dans les pays où il voyage, j’en raconte des événements, lorsqu’ils ont quelque rapport avec son talent, & je marque le temps de sa mort. La clarté du style, l’ordre des faits, la rapidité de la narration, beautés essentielles aux éloges historiques, sont celles que j’aurois bien voulu répandre dans mon livre.14

Descamps’s biographical art history, concerned with tracing in minute detail the development of an artist’s life and career, was precisely the type of art history and artists’ biographies that Beckford targeted and lampooned.15 Thus Beckford’s book is far from being merely a glorious spoof, utterly unserious, entirely meaningless.16 The Biographical Memoirs is indeed a text which slowly reveals itself to be a work written in jest. Nonetheless, its light-heartedness engages with serious issues of art-biographical writing and art criticism. It also foregrounds certain literary topoi about painters that were to become more prevalent in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I demonstrate how Beckford’s playful engagement with the genre of artists’ lives underpinned his critique of biographical criticism. Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs can also be seen to provide a revealing contrast to Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting and to Walpole’s practice of art historiography: what Walpole dismissed as critically futile, Beckford applauded as creatively and playfully inspiring. Indeed, whereas Walpole paid little attention to the biographical side of his artists’ entries––adopting an antiquarian attitude and focusing, we remember, chiefly on describing and locating artworks in specific collections––Beckford took particular pleasure in making up the most extravagant life-stories for his extraordinary painters. His six literary

Jean-Baptiste Descamps, La Vie des peintres flamands, i (Paris, 1753), pp. xiii–xiv. Descamps’s work is in fact mentioned in a footnote in the Life of Watersouchy, 155, of the Biographical Memoirs (1780). 16 Timothy Mowl e.g. refers to Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs as ‘precocious trivialities’, see his William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (London: John Murray, 1998), 80; Malcolm Jack equally describes it as no more than ‘light-hearted’ and ‘funpoking’ and thinks that Beckford’s text ‘should not be judged too seriously as a work of art criticism’, see his Vathek and Other Stories, pp. xii and xxiv. 14 15

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portraits are well-stocked with fictitious incongruities and delve into their subjects’ characters in a manner more elaborate than can be seen in Walpole’s biographical entries. Beckford’s lives are fewer but longer and more detailed than Walpole’s articles, describing more thoroughly the professional and personal (sometimes sentimental) circumstances surrounding the origins of the painters’ creative process. Interestingly, Walpole did not think highly of memoirs as a literary genre, claiming that they were of two sorts, ‘either of one’s self or of another; the former [were] generally false, and the latter seldom true’.17 Both features described by Walpole as typical of a memoir––untrustworthiness and familiarity––are characteristic of Beckford’s series of lives. Before making further comparative comments on Walpole’s and Beckford’s literary achievements, however, it is crucial to discuss the origins of the Biographical Memoirs as they underpin Beckford’s own censure of one of the basic tenets of biographical criticism, namely the alleged direct relationship between the life of an artist and his work. BECKFORD’S BIOGRA PHICAL MEMOIRS: NARRATIVES OF ORIGINS Like most novels issued in eighteenth-century Britain, the Biographical Memoirs was published anonymously.18 Beckford’s upper-class background inherited from his father (Lord Mayor of London), his severe Calvinist mother, and his being destined for a political career may have all been reasons for concealing his identity.19 At the time, fiction was consid-

17 Quoted in Gerrit P. Judd, Horace Walpole’s Memoirs (London: Vision, 1959), 16 (in ‘Commonplace Book’, 9-10, unpubl., in the possession of W. S. Lewis). Walpole’s mistrust of the genre did not prevent him from writing two memoirs himself, one of King George II (1751–60), another on The Reign of King George III (1760–72). 18 See Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds), The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), i. 40–6 and ii. 65–76, here, i. 41; see also Robert J. Griffin, ‘Anonymity and Authorship’, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, 30 (1999), 877–95. On 18th-cent. authorship, see e.g. E. J. Clery, Caroline Franklin, and Peter Garside (eds), Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and W. B. Carnochan, ‘The “Trade of Authorship” in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Nicolas Barker (ed.), A Potencie of Life: Books in Society. The Clark Lectures, 1986–1987 (London: British Library, 1993), 127–43. 19 Beckford also published under pseudonyms: for instance, his Modern Novel Writing; or The Elegant Enthusiast was said to be written by ‘The Right Hon. Lady Harriet Marlow’ (London, 1796); on the other hand, he published his Azemia, A Descriptive or Sentimental Mode (London, 1797) under the pseudonym of Jaquetta Agneta Mariana Jenks.

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ered a relatively low genre and Beckford’s unattributed publication was possibly used as a device for self-protection, to save his public respectability. Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs may also have been printed anonymously until its kindly reception was assured.20 The text represented an unconventional form of literary experimentation––no other explicitly fictional lives of artists had ever been published in England before the Biographical Memoirs––and its success was far from guaranteed. Anonymity also represented a source of freedom. As for many other writers, it was this very anonymity that allowed Beckford to deviate from the norm and to experiment with a new kind of writing. By exploring the form of disguised satire, Beckford was also able to affirm and assert indirectly his knowledge as a connoisseur and art expert. His position of authority as a satirist resided in his capacity to unveil and undermine false assumptions, to expose the flaws of a system––in this case, biographical art criticism––while remaining concealed.21 The Biographical Memoirs, we are told, was designed as a guidebook apparently intended for Beckford’s servant at Fonthill Splendens so that she could provide visitors with information about her master’s collection of paintings. Such a narrative of origin is conceivable. Stately houses were constantly sought out in the eighteenth century by tourists who wanted to view the pictures and artworks that the owners had purchased during their Continental Grand Tours. However, Beckford’s lively, playful, and mischievous imagination should make us beware of taking such an account at face value. The theme of the servant guiding visitors was (and still is) not unfamiliar in literature and Beckford’s account of the origins of his work may well be entirely fictitious.22 In fact, Beckford’s assigning the origin of the work, or at least part of it, to his housekeeper represents a method of self-concealment which was commonly practised by other eighteenthcentury writers who used friends or servants as mediators in order to avoid being held responsible for their own libellous or experimental

20 Horace Walpole’s strategies of self-concealment were very close to Beckford’s when he published his Castle of Otranto (1764). Anxious over the reception of his work, usually seen as the first ‘gothic’ novel, he published it under the pseudonym of “William Marshal, Gent.”, see Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. xvi. 21 Dustin H. Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reinterpretation (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 52. 22 The topos of the servant guiding visitors in country houses can be found for instance in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (written between 1796 and 1797 but publ. only in 1813) when Elizabeth Bennet pays her first visit to Pemberley (vol. iii, ch. 1). Closer to us, it can also be found in Peter Schaffer’s play Lettice and Lovage (London: Samuel French, 1987).

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work.23 In this particular case, Beckford’s work supposedly originated in the following circumstances: ‘The housekeeper at old Fonthill’, we are told, as is customary, used to get her fee by exhibiting the pictures to those who came to see the building. Once or twice I heard her give the most extraordinary names to different artists. I wondered how such nonsense could enter the brain of a woman. . . . The temptation was irresistible, in my humour. I was but seventeen. My pen was quickly in hand composing the ‘Memoirs’. In future, the housekeeper had a printed guide in aid of her description. She caught up my phrases . . . her descriptions became more picturesque, her language more graphic than ever . . . to the sight-seeing people! Mine was the textbook, whoever exhibited the paintings.24

It was thus inspired by the fantastically inaccurate descriptions of his loquacious housemaid that Beckford allegedly decided to write his Biographical Memoirs. Unlike most other country house handbooks, Beckford’s text was not intended to help people identify paintings; rather it provided his servant with extraordinary stories about the painters whose works were on display. And because a number of astonished visitors were sceptical about some of the marvellous incidents that she told them, Beckford mischievously determined that his maid should have a printed guidebook.25 Her credibility was thereby enhanced, allowing her to offer the most ‘charming dissertation[s] upon the pencil of Herr Sucrewasser of Vienna, or the great artist Blunderbussiana of Venice’ without being interrupted by the ‘squires’ and ‘farmers . . . [who] took all for gospel’.26 The design of the book pleased many. Beckford’s tutor, John Lettice, read the stories of Aldrovandus and Og of Basan ‘with great delight’ and thought that Blunderbussiana’s account was ‘the Chef d’oeuvre of the whole’.27 Lettice, who credited himself for encouraging his student to produce such ‘extraordinary’ biographical stories, was particularly keen to promote the book, certain as he was that it would ‘be extremely well

23 Another strategy of self-concealment was to declare one’s work to be the translation of an unknown manuscript written at remote times. In the preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764), for instance, the disguised Horace Walpole wrote that ‘The following work was found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England. It was printed in Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529’, Walpole, Castle of Otranto, 5. 24 Cyrus Redding, ‘Recollections of the Author of Vathek’, The New Monthly Magazine, 71 (June 1844), 151–2; my emphasis. 25 Lansdown, Recollections of the Late William Beckford, 35. 26 Redding, ‘Recollections’, 152. 27 The illegible word is certainly Sucrewasser; see Lewis Melville, Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (Author of Vathek) (London: Heinemann, 1910), 68.

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received’.28 In order to establish the success of Beckford’s narrative, Lettice used the preface as an avenue of literary praise, extolling the talents of his anonymous protégé and underlining the inventiveness and originality of the text: ‘Whatever merit the plan of the following work may be thought to want in some respects’, he wrote, it is at least presumed to be new; and perhaps a better could not have been found for the display of a picturesque imagination. It was the design of the writer to exhibit striking objects both of nature and art, together with some sketches of human life and manners, through a more original medium than those usually adopted in the walk of novel-writing and romance. How far the attempt has succeeded is now left to the candid decision of the public. (BMEP, advertisement; my emphasis)

Lettice was obviously at pains to distinguish the Biographical Memoirs from other fictional genres produced contemporarily, whether these drew upon a realistic tradition (‘novel’) or were rather inspired by fanciful, fairytale stories (‘romance’). However, the qualities that he granted to the book, especially the author’s ‘picturesque imagination’ and his ability to draw ‘sketches of human life and manners’, were much closer to contemporary biographical novels than to the types of guidebooks with which the Biographical Memoirs was presumably to be associated. THE BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS AND THE QUESTION OF GENRE Comparisons between Beckford’s satire and other eighteenth-century stately house handbooks reveal that the Biographical Memoirs did not belong to the same genre. Horace Walpole’s Aedes Walpolianae (1747), which recorded the holdings kept at Sir Robert Walpole’s country house, Houghton Hall, and hence can be considered as a typical handbook,29 was the exact opposite of Beckford’s work. The Aedes was conceived as a scientific book. Visitors relied on its information as they progressed from one room to another, in pursuit of their aesthetic pleasures. Walpole’s book was meant to assist visitors, helping them discover and analyse the styles and manners of the principal artists of each school whose paintings were on display (remember Walpole’s similar claim in his Anecdotes that ‘My view in publishing the Anecdotes was to assist gentlemen 28

Melville, Life and Letters, 68. Horace Walpole, Aedes Walpolianae; or, A Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton Hall (London, 1747). 29

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in discovering the hands of pictures they possess, and I am sufficiently rewarded when that purpose is answered’: HWC i. 25). By perusing such catalogues, Walpole believed visitors could ‘form very true ideas of most of the chief Schools’ and learn about ‘most of the chief Hands’.30 Walpole was convinced that ‘knowledge of this sort [was] only to be learnt from Pictures themselves’ rather than from textual descriptions.31 Indeed, the ‘numerous volumes wrote on this Art’, Walpole thought, ‘have only served to perplex it . . . ’Tis almost easier to distinguish the Hands of the Masters, than to decypher the Cant of the Virtuosi.’32 Wary of the possibility of accurately describing a picture in words, Walpole thus provided readers with only very factual, attributable, information: the name of the artist, the title, the size of the painting, and its emplacement.33 Beckford did the exact opposite. His Biographical Memoirs contains no specific information about the size and pedigree of existing pictures, nor any references to identifiable artworks displayed at his country house, Fonthill Splendens. The text does include some brief descriptive passages on paintings but their subjects are too eccentric to be plausible. We learn that one of Aldrovandus Magnus’s paintings shows the ‘Prince Drahomire, who in the year 921 was swallowed up by an earthquake in that spot where now stands the palace of Radzen’ (BMEP 23). Another of Magnus’s paintings depicts ‘the whole story of the Goths and the Vandals’ (BMEP 21–2). Obviously, such iconographic descriptions were not referential (though one cannot exclude that Beckford may have been inspired by real paintings when composing his work). More familiar subject-matters included in the Memoirs are the sublime and picturesque landscapes of Og of Basan and Andrew Guelph, as well as Og of Basan’s two miracles executed for the Cardinal Grossocavallo and representing ‘St. Dennis bearing his own head’. This last subject was illustrated and used as a frontispiece to the 1824 and 1834 editions of the Biographical Memoirs (see Figure 5). The image depicts the head of St Dennis looking at his truncated body while the body seems to be gazing at his own startled face. The picture is of course a satirical take on other representations of St Dennis, Bishop of Paris, who in c.250 was martyred by being beheaded by a sword. On a different level, the print can easily be interpreted as a visual metaphor for the entire book as it dismantles and undermines an established and recognized ‘subject’––here, the tradition of artists’ lives

30

31 32 Ibid., p. x. Ibid. Ibid. A typical entry in Walpole’s Aedes Walpolianae reads, for instance, ‘Christ appearing to Mary in the Garden, an exceeding fine Picture, by Pietro da Cortona. One Foot nine Inches and a half high, by one Foot eight Inches wide’, Walpole, Aedes Walpolianae, 65. 33

5. Biographical Memoirs by Beckford, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 12 THETA 1169, frontispiece: Head of St Dennis.

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and the question of truthful representation––by turning the truth on its head, so to speak. Despite such structural and iconographic differences, the narrator of the Biographical Memoirs and Walpole seem to have agreed on one specific point: they both acknowledge the impossibility of translating a picture into words. For example, in an effort to describe a painting representing the opulence of Watersouchy’s patron Monsieur Baise-la-Main, the narrator of Beckford’s Memoirs regretfully admits that ‘it would be in vain to attempt conveying, by words, an idea adequate to this chef d’œuvre, which must have been seen to have been duly admired’ (BMEP 150).34 In the Memoir of Watersouchy, the same narrator asserts in a similar way that [t]o describe exactly the masterly group of the gossips, the demureness of the maiden aunts, the puling infant in the arms of its nurse, the plaits of its swaddling-cloaths, the gloss of its ribbons, the fringe of the table-cloth, and the effect of light and shade on a salver adorned with custard-cups and jellyglasses, would require at least fifty pages. In this space, perhaps, those details might be included; but to convey a due idea of that preciseness, that air of decorum, which was spread over the whole picture, surpasses the power of words. (BMEP 129–30; my emphasis)

Beckford’s acknowledgement of his failure to reproduce a picture in words draws upon the inability topos, the ‘I cannot describe . . . ’, that infiltrates so many other artists’ biographies of the time. Yet, although Beckford denies the flexibility of the English language by suggesting that it cannot accommodate the descriptive mode, one cannot help but feel a certain pleasure on Beckford’s part in enumerating all the objects depicted in the painting. His alleged inability to describe such objects properly is in fact neutralized by his use of the praeterito, which allows him to get his description and his judgement on the record. The reader soon realizes that Beckford, undeterred by the impossibility of accurately rendering in words a painting’s iconographical subject, very much enjoyed exploring and celebrating the possibilities that language afforded him. Unlike Walpole who refrained from describing the pictures at Houghton Hall, Beckford joyfully exploited the narrative freedom of the novelist and digressed in a most leisurely fashion. These digressions allowed him to

34 He further adds that ‘[w]ere I not afraid of fatiguing my readers more than I have done, I should repeat, word for word, the exuberant encomiums this master-piece received upon this occasion; but I trust it will be fully sufficient to say, that none of the connoisseurs were uninterested, and every one had a pleasure in pointing out some new perfection’ (BMEP 151). Concerning Og’s painting of the deluge, he also writes ‘But it would be in vain to attempt giving an idea of the patriarch’s [i.e. Noah’s] countenance; so many expressions were united in his features’ (BMEP 71).

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display his talents as satirist and to relate the most extraordinary facts about the lives of his artists (here, as used in his title, the word ‘extraordinary’ can mean both ‘exceptional’, ‘remarkable’, as well as ‘odd’ or ‘bizarre’). By indulging in such stories, Beckford articulated situations that allowed him to expose the artist’s personality. Thus in antithesis to connoisseurial practices, Beckford revelled in biographical eccentricities— thereby sarcastically undermining the genre which had inspired him. THE BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS: BETWEEN TRADITION AND PARODY Structurally and semantically, Beckford’s satire is certainly far closer to artists’ biographical compendia than to stately house handbooks. Like many other artists’ lives, each of Beckford’s memoirs starts with the protagonist’s birth or pre-birth (i.e. his ancestors); unfolds in a series of adventures and chance encounters between the artist and his commissioners, patrons, or lovers; and usually, but not necessarily, ends with the central character’s death or after-death (i.e. his descendants or their reputation).35 In many respects, Beckford’s six heroes encounter experiences similar to the protagonists of picaresque novels, rogue literature, and travel accounts—one single source is most unlikely to have inspired Beckford’s text. We learn about Aldrovandus Magnus, a Prague artist appointed court painter to George Podebrak, the Duke of Bohemia. The reader also accompanies Og of Basan and Andrew Guelph on their travels to Tyrol, Venice, Tivoli, and Sicily. These painters react rather differently from one another to the sight of Nature which they observe and imitate on their journeys. We also become acquainted with Sucrewasser of Vienna whose artistic talents are spotted by an Italian painter called Insignificanti, as well as with Blunderbussiana, the son of a leader of a group of bandits in Dalmatia, who delights in depicting very crude subjects. The last Memoir recounts the life of Watersouchy, an artist who excels at depicting scenes of ultra-realism, such as point lace, collars of lap-dogs, or a flea. Although the various memoirs take place in different geographical environments, and portray very different artistic careers and destinies, they also permit some overlapping and interconnection. We learn that Og of Basan and Andrew Guelph, the two heroes of the second memoir, are the students of Aldrovandus Magnus, the protagonist of the first 35 See e.g. Ronald Paulson, ‘The Pilgrimage and the Family: Structures in the Novels of Fielding and Smollett’, in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 57–78.

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memoir whose master is a ‘disciple of the Van-eycks’ (BMEP 2). In turn, Og of Basan and Andrew Guelph become acquainted with Soorcrout and Sucrewasser, with whom they engage in an artistic contest in Venice. Following the precepts of their master, Og of Basan and Andrew Guelph condemn their rivals for copying nature instead of the antique models, and for using nut-oil rather than egg-white. In order to decide whose art and technique is superior, an assembly of conoscenti, presided over by a certain Signor Andrea Boccadolce, is summoned to listen to each party’s plea for his own artistic style and method. Ultimately, it is Og who succeeds in convincing the assembly of the ‘exquisite beauty of their performances’ (BMEP 44), and hence in defeating his rivals. The coherence of the narrative thus rests on the meeting of the various artists, as Sucrewasser reappears later in the book, with a narrative devoted to his own life. The construction of Beckford’s book––based as it is upon contrasts and differences––echoes the structure of the aesthetic contest between Og of Basan and Sucrewasser. Indeed, the writer arranged his memoirs as ‘parallel lives’, a structure that was relatively common in the eighteenth century when comparisons between men and women were thought to be the best way of understanding the similarities and differences in moral value. Here, the parallels were established mainly in order to define and accentuate specific artistic types. At the beginning of Sucrewasser’s memoir, for example, readers are warned that ‘they will no longer behold an artist, consumed by the fervour of his genius and bewildered by the charms of his imagination’; but that they will instead ‘admire the regular and consistent conduct of Sucrewasser, which form a striking contrast to the eccentricity of Og’ (BMEP 93). Similarly, the story of the thuggish Blunderbussiana, offspring of a Dalmatian bandit and artistically inspired by the gloomy environment that surrounds him––which includes the slain bodies which his father and his companions subsequently plunder–– marks a complete contrast with the life of Sucrewasser, who grows up in Vienna and who only delights in painting ‘blind Cupids, and sometimes a lean Fury, by way of variety’ (BMEP 99). Blunderbussiana’s artistic education––which he acquires by dissecting some of the corpses that his father brings back home and which allows him to study anatomy, thus attaining ‘perfection in muscular expression’ (BMEP 109)––is also a foil to the life and education of Watersouchy, student of the real Dutch painter Gerard Dou. In contrast to Blunderbussiana, whose artistic training may have been a satirical comment on the Royal Academy’s public anatomical dissections in which peeled cadavers of executed robbers were used, Watersouchy’s artistic attempts do not go beyond eatables and other detailed, elaborately patterned things such as point lace. There is little doubt that Beckford’s high-handed manner of treating Watersouchy’s and

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Sucrewasser’s ornamental art represented a critique of Dutch realism; and that his treatment of Blunderbussiana was an allusion to Salvator Rosa’s popular bandit scenes, which were a favourite among eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British art collectors. It would, however, be wrong to read Beckford’s series of six artistic lives solely as a critique of Dutch art, or indeed of any specific artistic school.36 Most of the names that Beckford chose for his fictional characters were obviously used to comic effect: we encounter the master Insignificanti, the connoisseur Boccadolce (‘sweet mouth’ in Italian), and the professor Clod Lumpewitz (the second part of the name being a compound of ‘der Lump’, German for ‘scoundrel’, and ‘der Witz’, a joke). Other names functioned as labels, identifying and typifying the art produced by the name’s bearer. It comes as no surprise that ‘the colouring’ of Sucrewasser (which literally means ‘sugar water’) was ‘gay and tender’ and that his drawing was ‘correct’ (BMEP 99). His faces too, we learn, ‘were pretty uniform and had all the most delightful smirk imaginable; even his Furies looked as if they were half inclined to throw their torches into the water’ (BMEP 99). There is nothing in Sucrewasser’s pictures that contradicts the connotations of sweetness that his name evokes. With regard to Watersouchy, the narrator maintains that the name ‘Watersouchy’ (which means ‘boiled fished in water’) was known ‘in Amsterdam since the first existence of the republic’ and that the head of this family could ‘never be forgotten, since he invented that admirable dish from which his descendents derived their appellation’ (BMEP 120). Watersouchy is the epitome of the Dutch artist, excelling in artistic ‘truth’ and ‘exactness’. We learn that the first compositions for which Watersouchy claims the exclusive honour include ‘an arm chair of the richest velvet and a Turkey carpet’ (BMEP 130)––both of which are executed in such an ‘exquisite’ manner that ‘every one wished to sit down in the one, and every dog repose on the other’ (BMEP 131). That each painter represents an archetype whose life is based on a collection of the most absurd and typical anecdotes is perhaps best illustrated by the name ‘Blunderbussiana’, for the name itself includes the suffix -ana which suggests a compilation of anecdotal stories by or about an individual. In this particular case, the name also shrewdly mixes the words ‘blunder’ and ‘blunderbuss’, a muzzle-loading firearm, and thus hints at the hostile and roguish lifestyle of the name’s owner. 36 Jeannie Chapel has observed that ‘although he had a low opinion of Dutch and Flemish art, Beckford, throughout his many years of collecting, owned examples of both schools in large numbers’, ‘William Beckford: Collector of Old Master Paintings, Drawings and Prints’, in Derek E. Ostergard (ed.), William Beckford (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 230.

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The parodic names and numerous digressions that Beckford included in his Biographical Memoirs served different purposes. On the one hand, they allowed him to display his imaginative and literary talents and to express his scathing sense of humour. On the other hand, these digressive stories also permitted the young author to flesh out very distinct biographical types or characters, each of whom were meant to represent a specific artistic style (‘sublime’ for Og of Basan, ‘picturesque’ for Andrew Guelph, ‘realistic’ for Watersouchy, etc.). In contrast to Horace Walpole who gave details of the artists’ styles by pointing to particular features of their work––a curve, a tone, a brushstroke––Beckford defined and interpreted these very styles through fiction, and especially through long, digressive biographical anecdotes of artists. The consequence and power of Beckford’s fictionalizing historical personages, as well as inventing new characters, was to increase the number of referential possibilities. One Memoir, containing enough elements to distinguish an artist’s style but not enough to particularize and identify him, could be applied to more than one painting. The life-text could hence be used as the biography for more than one artist. In other words, any Dutch or Flemish painting that Beckford’s servant might choose to describe to visitors at Fonthill Splendens could be attributed to Aldrovandus Magnus or Watersouchy, or any picture depicting muscular, Michelangelesque figures could be ascribed to Blunderbussiana. ‘Mine was the textbook’, Beckford is said to have written, ‘whoever exhibited the painting’.37 Such a statement was a direct allusion to what Walpole had written some time earlier about his Anecdotes of Painting in England. Walpole had asserted that one of the reasons why he had inserted so many names in his Anecdotes was ‘to prove to those who learn one or two names by rote, that every old picture they see is not by Holbein nor every miniature by Hilliard or Oliver’ (APE i. 159). Beckford satirically turned the issue upside down: he offered only a limited number of lives which were applicable to many paintings. Thus by filling his Memoirs with the most absurd anecdotes of artists, Beckford was not only sarcastically pointing to the fact that any artistic life, even the most ‘realistic’ one, inevitably contains some fictitious elements; he also questioned the very assumption that there is a dialectical relationship between the life of an artist and his work. In sum, it was the whole problem of the validity, the authenticity, and the function of artistic biography that Beckford brought into question.

37

Redding, ‘Recollections’, 152.

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THE BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS AND THE VASARIAN MODEL By interrogating the dialectic between the biographical text and the artwork, Beckford was questioning the very essence of the Vasarian model. In fact, Vasari was sometimes seen as a possible inspiration for Beckford, as the extract from the Gentleman’s Magazine quoted at the beginning of this chapter suggests. It was Vasari who first sought to elucidate the artwork through the life and personality of its maker. Indeed, the idea that a painter inevitably portrays himself or herself in his or her work––or, vice versa, that a painting necessarily reflects the artist’s individuality––was one of the important premises of the Vite.38 Beckford is quick to make great use (or abuse) of such a premise. On numerous occasions he exploits the potential of the life-and-work relationship, showing how an artist’s youth, environment, and travels supposedly condition the style of his painting and affect his subject-matters. Recounting Blunderbussiana’s childhood and artistic development in Dalmatia, Beckford writes that ‘(b)eing long inured to such ghastly sights [i.e. the corpses of his father’s victims], he by degrees grew pleased with them, and his inclination for painting first manifested itself in the desire he had of imitating the figures of his father’s warriors’ (BMEP 107). While this passage clearly relates the artist’s personal experience to his artistic production, it also plays upon a subject-matter––that of human dissection––which had been explored by other painters, including Rembrandt in his Anatomy Lesson of Professor Nicolaes Tulp (1632).39 On a literary level, Beckford’s allusion to the dismemberment of dead bodies in Gothic caves also anticipated the dissection scenes of later texts such as Percy Shelley’s Alastor (1816) or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).40 There are other instances in which Beckford establishes a humorous symmetry between biography and artistic work: we learn that Watersouchy has no sooner set his foot in the apartment of his master, Gerard Dou, than he finds ‘every object in harmony with his own dispositions’ (BMEP 127). The quiet and neatly arranged environment in which Watersouchy learns to paint impinges upon his own pictures. His master teaches him ‘cautiously to open the cabinet door, lest any particles of dust 38 Gabriele Guercio, Art as Existence (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2006), 31. 39 Closer to Beckford, in 1766, George Stubbs published his own ‘Anatomy of the Horse’, a series of thirty-six etchings and engravings of anatomical studies of horses. 40 See for instance Alan Rauch, ‘The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, Studies in Romanticism, 34 (1995), 227–53, and Bernard Ramadier, ‘Shelley et l’encombrante enveloppe: Le Passage de l’être à l’ombre dans Alastor’, in Jean Marigny (ed.), Images fantastiques du corps (Grenoble: GERF, 1998), 31–42.

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should be dislodged and fix upon his canvas’ (BMEP 128); he also advises Watersouchy ‘never to take up his pencil without sitting motionless for a few minutes, till every mote casually floating in the air should be settled’ (BMEP 128). ‘Such instructions’, we are told, are ‘not thrown away upon Watersouchy’ who ‘treasured them up, and refined, if possible, upon such refinements’ (BMEP 128). Beckford’s satirical depiction of Watersouchy’s artistic practice attempts to reproduce verbally the solemn atmosphere which emanates from certain Dutch paintings. Concurrently, this section on Watersouchy’s overly careful conduct parodies a passage found in Walpole’s Anecdotes describing the life and career of a certain H. Vandermijn who, we learn, ‘carried to excess the laborious minuteness of his countrymen; faithfully imitating the details of lace, embroidery, fringes, and even the threads of stockings’ (APE iv. 33–4). In the cases of both Blunderbussiana and Watersouchy, Beckford’s anecdotes allow the reader to glimpse situations that expose the artists’ personalities and environments. And, in turn, the painter’s world and individuality are sarcastically posited as reliable tools for an analysis of his work. The reason why Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs should be taken as a complex critical text rather than as ‘precocious trivialities’, as interpreted by some critics, is because the text does not simply relate the different Memoirs in a random manner, format, style. Instead, the young Beckford constructed his narrative by building upon, and simultaneously distorting, the traditional structure of an artist’s life. Beckford’s deep knowledge of the genre he parodied transpires particularly in his treatment of artists’ topoi. Very much aware of the internal construction of typical artists’ biographies, Beckford allowed himself the liberty to transform and deform their pattern, thereby positing himself not only as an art critic but also as an unconstrained novelist. The topos of the unexpected, fortuitous discovery of a young artist by a father figure and the former’s subsequent success are related in most memoirs.41 The early talents of Sucrewasser, for example, are discovered by the Italian painter Insignificanti, who recognizes the ‘delicacy of his pencil’ and resolves himself ‘to obtain him for his scholar’ (BMEP 95); Watersouchy’s premature artistic performances, on the other hand, are spotted by the ‘celebrated [and historically real] Francis Van Cuyck de Mierhop, a noble artist from Ghent, who, during his residence at Amsterdam, frequently condescended to pass his evenings at Watersouchy’s’ (BMEP 124). The most humorous and detailed version of this formulaic tale is provided in the first biographical account, which is devoted to Aldrovandus Magnus. In it, we learn that it was during a visit 41

Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, 26–38.

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paid to Aldrovandus’s parents that a certain Hemmeline, a student of Van Eyck, observed ‘a number of loose papers covered with sketches of animals and figures, scattered about the apartment’. Surprised by the quality of the drawings, Hemmeline ‘enquire[d] hastily for their author’. However, Aldrovandus’s father, ‘who was writing at his desk by the fire side’, remained unimpressed by his ‘friend’s enthusiasm’. We learn that ‘it was not till Hemmeline had pulled him three times by the sleeve that he cared to give any answer. Being of a somewhat phlegmatic disposition, he replied cooly, “that they were his son’s scratches, and that he believed he would ruin him in paper were he to live much longer in an idle way”’ (BMEP 2–3). Beckford obviously enjoyed mixing different topoi––on the one hand, the story of the unexpected discovery of an artist’s hidden talents by a senior figure, on the other, the story showing how the budding artist surmounts the various obstacles (including paternal resistance) barring his progress on his journey towards artistic greatness. Beckford then further develops the story of Aldrovandus’s humble beginnings, turning it into a bourgeois domestic drama. Switching to direct speech, Beckford stages a dispute between husband and wife on the future of their son, the former not prepared to consider another career for Aldrovandus, the latter lovingly trying to protect her child from the intransigence of her husband: ‘Woman’, answered old Aldrovandus, ‘cease thy garrulity, our son will be shipped off to-morrow, so there needs no farther words’. Upon this the mother burst into tears, and, as she was always averse to her son’s voyage, took this opportunity to give vent to her sorrow, and with a piteous voice cried out, ‘You will, then, barbarous man! Father without bowels! you will, then, expose our first born to dwell amongst a parcel of brutal circumcised Moors and infidels. You will, then, have him go over sea and be shipwrecked without Christian burial. O Lord! O Lord! why cannot folks live every one under his own figtree, without roving and wandering through perils and dangers, that make my blood run cold to think of. And all this for the lucre of gain! (BMEP 4–5)

Perhaps there is no better example of the way in which a biographical narrative formula, transformed in Beckford’s hands, functioned simultaneously as a critique of anecdotal art historiography and as a stepping stone for the deployment of Beckford’s imaginative and satirical gifts. In this particular example, Beckford took up a theme which was to become very popular in all spheres of the arts, including literature, produced in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain: namely scenes of shipwrecks, from which derived other types of narratives, in particular those dealing with the encounter of ‘the Other’.

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Another example of the reformulation of a stereotypical story used by Beckford is that which describes the relationship between master (or patron) and pupil, either as inseparable friends who remain loyal to each other42 or, conversely, as rivals who compete for artistic superiority––in the latter case usually with a pupil surpassing the talents of a teacher. A comical transformation of this topos can be found in the Memoir of Sucrewasser of Vienna, when we learn that [a]bout this time the Princess Dolgoruki, then at the Court of Vienna, selected Insignificanti and his pupil to paint her favourite lap-dog, whose pendent ears and beautifully curling tail seemed to call loudly for a portrait. Insignificanti, before he began the picture, asked his pupil, with all the mildness of condescension, Whether he did not approve his intentions of placing the dog on a red velvet cushion. Sucrewasser replied gently, that he presumed a blue one would produce a much finer effect. His master, surprized to find this difference of opinion, elevated his voice, and exclaimed, ‘Aye, but I propose adding a gold fringe, which shall display all the perfection of my art; all the feeling delicacy of my pencil; but, hark you! I desire you will abstain from spoiling this part of the picture with your gross touch, and never maintain again that blue will admit of half the splendor of red.’ These last words were pronounced with such energy, that Sucrewasser laid down his pencil, and begged leave to quit his master; who soon consented, as he feared Sucrewasser would surpass him in a very short space of time. (BMEP 96–8)

Beckford here takes on a topic––artistic rivalry––which forms an important part of the conventionalized fabric of artist’s biography, an ancient and persistent topos repeated and renewed into modern times. In Pliny, it is illustrated by the famous story of Apelles and Protogenes and that of Zeuxis’ competition with Parrhasius: Zeuxis first paints a picture of grapes in such a realistic manner that real birds fly down to eat them; his realism, however, is in turn surpassed by Parrhasius’ painting of a curtain which Zeuxis himself attempts to draw back.43 When Vasari uses such anecdotes in his Vite, they are often used as frameworks for broader considerations of stylistic, technical, and/or theoretical differences. In this instance, Zeuxis’ rivalrous encounter underlines the perfection of mimetic naturalism. In contrast, Beckford’s anecdote is here not incorporated within a larger theoretical framework about the progress of the arts; rather its humour resides in the portrait’s canine subject (no doubt a satirical reference to the eighteenth-century vogue of having one’s portrait painted 42 This is the case between Aldrovandus Magnus and George Podebrak as well as between Og of Basan and Benboaro Benbacaio. 43 See Pliny, Natural History, 9. 309–10.

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with one’s dog) as well as in the pettiness of the disagreement between the two painters, with Sucrewasser’s master trying conceitedly yet unsuccessfully to prove that red is more appropriate a colour for the dog’s cushion than blue. Using the same anecdotal source, Beckford provides satirical examples of characters that are able to to draw Nature in such a realistic way that people are fooled into mistaking it for reality. In the first Memoir, Aldrovandus, who has just been received at the court of the Duke Podebrak after his unfortunate love affair with Ann Spindlemans, is said to resume ‘his employments with double alacrity’ and to begin ‘an altarpiece for the cathedral, in which he may be said to have surpassed himself’. The subject [we are told] Moses and the burning bush, was composed in the most masterly manner, and the flames represented with such truth and vivacity, that the young Princess Ferdinanda Joanna Maria being brought by the Duchess, for a little recreation, to see him work, cried out, ‘La! Mamma, I won’t touch that bramble bush, for fear it should burn my fingers!’ (BMEP 14–15)

Beckford here pushed the topos of realistic representation to a point where it becomes most absurd (flames, as opposed to static objects, simply cannot be represented realistically). The theme of literal and literary representation resurfaces in the memoir of Andrew Guelph and Og of Basan, in which we learn that, in their youth, the two aspiring painters spent their time outside ‘in the fields’: it was in mutually delighting to observe nature, that they first imbibed the desire of imitating her production. Seldom did the sun set before they had engraved on the rocks the resemblance of some of the shrubs that grew from the fissures, or the likeness of several of the goats that came to drink at the spring beneath. (BMEP 29)

We are then related the tale of Og’s mother who, unfortunately, loses one of her favourite sheep. Keen to retrieve it, she climbs the rocks to which ‘her son and his friend were accustomed to resort [and] [t]he first object that struck her eyes was the portrait of the animal she was looking for, sketched upon the stone’ (BMEP 30). As well as representing Beckford’s story about the exact imitation of Nature, this last anecdote is also a reference to the story of Lysippus and Eupompos, a legend which purports to illustrate the artists’ repudiation of ancient masters and their adherence to Nature.44 At the same time, this short narrative also echoes the legend of Giotto’s encounter with 44 See Pliny, Natural History, 9. 173. In Beckford’s account of the lives of Og of Basan and Andrew Guelph, the rejection of tradition in favour of Nature is a topos which permeates the entire story; it comes out particularly clearly in their artistic competition with Soorcrout and Sucrewasser (pp. 38–45).

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Cimabue in which the former’s talents are ‘accidentally’ discovered by the latter while drawing figures of animals on rocks.45 Besides typical Plinian topoi, Beckford also reformulated other stories characteristic of artists’ biographies. He took particular pleasure in providing original endings for his biographies. Indeed, the death of the numerous painters concerned is often comical, verging on the absurd. We learn of Og of Basan’s Empedoclean suicide on Mount Etna, which he carried out because of his abandonment of a lover (BMEP 89–90). In contrast to Og’s dramatic death, we are told that Watersouchy spends his final days as an asthmatic man and that his ‘last effort of genius’ consists of painting ‘a flea’––at which points his sight deteriorates and then he shrinks ‘to nothing’ before dropping neatly ‘into his grave’ (BMEP 158). Watersouchy’s slow and gradual disappearance into oblivion contrasts with Og’s sudden and theatrical end—a narrative construction which is once again based on contrasts and differences. In the other memoirs, Beckford offers equally burlesque variations upon the theme of death. Blunderbussiana, we read, catches a ‘violent fever’ which he attempts to alleviate by plunging ‘into a cold bath’, which results in his being ‘taken delirious’. Confined to his bed, the artist then seems to ‘behold the mangled limbs of those he [has] anatomized, quivering in his apartment’ and for three consecutive days, he sees ‘cursed legs’, ‘gogling eyes’, and rattling ‘bones’ stalk into his room. After the third day, however, Blunderbussiana expires and his body is delivered to the ‘college of surgeons’ where his ‘skeleton’ is ‘canonized’ (BMEP 116–18). Finally, Aldrovandus Magnus dies of grief when his supply of canvas vanishes in a great conflagration which prevents him from finishing his heroic cycle of paintings depicting the ‘Goths and the Vandals’. His epitaph, written by Professor Clod Lumpewitz and rendered into English by the genuine seventeenth-century publisher and translator John Ogilby––ridiculed in the final lines of Book 1 of Pope’s Dunciad––compares Aldrovandus with Alexander the Great: whereas the latter dies for want of world to conquer, the former expires for ‘lack of canvas’.46 Clearly, each death is a satirical prolongation of the artist’s œuvre, offering as it does a comment on the nature of the painter’s artistic output. Like many biographical deaths of real painters, Beckford’s demises represent final acts that reveal the last (un)certainties about the artist’s life and work. As we will see, it is a topos that resurfaces in John Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth.

45

Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 57–8. Paul Barolsky, ‘Leonardo, Satan, and the Mystery of Modern Art’, Virginia Quarterly Review (1998), 393–414. 46

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A great many other formulaic anecdotes could be quoted from Beckford’s Memoirs: all would confirm the absurdity, and yet the critical gist, of this biographical send-up. For Beckford’s work is, as this chapter has shown, a literary quip, a parody dealing with the lives of artists who were never born, a book that never served as a guide to any collection, nor was used by anyone. However, by making up and revealing the story about the housekeeper at Fonthill Splendens, Beckford was able both to cultivate the complex theoretical issue of biographical art criticism and to tackle the difficult question about the dialectical relationship between an artist’s life and his work––a question which, we have seen, was crucial to the development of art criticism and art history in eighteenth-century Britain. Most readers did not appreciate Beckford’s joke. His was a book intended for elite and connoisseurial readerships and even they did not seem to immediately grasp the critical gist of the Biographical Memoirs. Interestingly, despite its obscure quality, Beckford’s send-up occupies a critical position in British art-historical writing. By parodying at length the very different lives of very different painters, and by lampooning the biographical origins of the creative process, Beckford was not only interrogating the authority of an older model; he also simultaneously set the ground for a tradition of artistic life-writing which was to become very popular in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a tradition in which writers were not so much interested in analysing a painter’s or sculptor’s artistic style as in seeking to define him as a subject. Indeed, as we will see in the next section, the last decades of the eighteenth century witnessed the publication of an increasing number of individual artists’ lives. Anticipating the more fully fledged nineteenth-century monographs, such texts underpinned the view that painters were the ultimate source of the artistic phenomenon. Consequently, these works increasingly became a showcase for advertising artists’ individual talents and for delving into their personalities.

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PART III INDIVIDUAL LIVES After Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England and Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, a great many biographies of artists published in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain focused on single artists. There were specific reasons for this individualization of aesthetics. The perceived lack of unity in the British school during this period contributed to the publication of individual lives. Not only did the variety of styles among British painters, sculptors, and architects make collective biographical art histories unsuitable for the British situation, but the artistic heterogeneity among painters significantly encouraged the publication of single-subject biographies. Closely related to such artistic issues was the growing cult of genius.1 The appearance of individual biographies of painters reflected and underpinned an aesthetic discourse based on the performances and originality of individual talents. Painters were socially and textually isolated, and revered for their unusual, transcending qualities. The individual textual lives that are discussed in this section all emphasize their subjects’ creative power and acclaim their unique and unconventional artistic skills. They each focus on the particularity of their master and explore the genial aspects of their life and works. However, while representing genius as an exceptional property that transcends the quotidian, these biographies also concern themselves with much less dignified qualities that are entangled in local details and worldly concerns. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, biographical accounts of painters often contained details and potentially scandalous information about their subject’s appearance, manners, and habits 1 On the subject, see John Hope Mason, The Value of Creativity: The Origins and Emergence of a Modern Belief (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) and James Engell, The Creative Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); see also Giorgio Tonelli, ‘Genius from the Renaissance to 1770’, and Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Genius: Individualism in Art and Artists’, both in Philip P. Wiener (ed.), The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 5 vols (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), ii. 293–7 and 297–312.

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that augmented the reader’s curious, often voyeuristic, penchant. While revealing a remarkable interest in genius, then, these biographical accounts also sustained a much more debased and more unscrupulous literary and artistic market that was keen on celebrities.2 Recent work in Romantic studies has challenged the myth of the solitary genius, arguing for an alternative model which emphasizes the role of print and consumer culture in the process of cultural production. The following chapters contribute to this argument and embrace the view that genius is not an innate talent that expresses itself naturally but that it is always socially, commercially, and textually produced and constructed.3 Furthermore, biographical and artistic identity is also in large measure the effect of interpersonal transactions and negotiation.4 During the period under consideration, it was a truth commonly believed that the most competent biographers were intimately acquainted with their subject. A great portion of the accounts discussed below were written by those who enjoyed a close relationship or friendship with their subject. As a result, many British biographers believed their narratives to be wholly truthful, which in reality was not always the case. In his Life of Henry Fuseli, published in 1831, John Knowles asserted that his account was based on the ‘daily intercourse and sincere friendship which subsisted for many years between this great artist and [himself]’ and thus afforded him ‘the opportunity of witnessing his domestic habits, hearing many of the incidents of his life, and watching his career as an artist’.5 It is because Knowles was able to observe Fuseli in his most private hours and to deal with the painter’s personal papers that his account was allegedly ‘authentic’. In some instances, especially in the case of those artists whose reputation had supposedly been tainted or controversial, biography was an opportunity for a relative or a friend to set the record straight. John Romney for example, writing the memoir of his father George Romney in 1830, denied and rejected all earlier accounts of his father, claiming they contained inappropriate or inaccurate information. Feeling ‘bound by duty to protect the posthumous fame of his revered Relative’ and seeing ‘with mortification that all the accounts which have been given 2 David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Market: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London: Routledge, 2005). 3 See e.g. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna 1792–1803 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995). 4 Michael Mascuch, The Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 52. 5 John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (London, 1831), i, p. vii.

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both of him and of his works were either defective, false, or injurious’, Romney Jr thus set himself the task ‘to dispel the malignant cloud that hangs over his Father’s memory, and to place his character in its true light; by giving publicity to the documents in his possession, and by relating the life and works of so rare a genius, which in fact none but himself could communicate’.6 Here, Romney explicitly put forward his close relationship with his father as a pledge for the truthfulness of his account. Intimacy with the deceased did not always guarantee objectivity, however. On the contrary, following a death, biographers who were closely and fondly related to their subjects often tended to regard them as ideal individuals. Conversely, they may have taken the chance––as Johnson put it––to finally ‘aggravate [their] infamy’.7 The deceased themselves could play a part in the construction of their own biographies.8 The autobiographical material that subjects left behind was often useful for biographers. Personal papers were believed to provide insights which could not otherwise be obtained. The reliability of such private documents was often misleading, though. Personal testimonies often projected subjects into identities which they had created for themselves. With the approach of death, many dying hoped to be remembered for certain qualities and insisted on certain aspects of their life, career, and character which they found particularly important and flattering. Some individuals went so far as to choose their own biographers for fear of seeing their life (ab)used in the service of inelegant or inappropriate agendas. Such cautious individuals approached faithful friends, relatives, or acquaintances before their death in order to ensure that their chosen biographer would sustain and promote the image they had fashioned for themselves during their lifetime. However, the emotional distance that death provided often led biographers to put forward portraits that were very different from their subjects’ socially and artistically self-constructed images. As Richard Wendorf has observed, death deletes memories and erases certain familiarities and friendships so that ‘no amount of personal intention, careful planning, or sympathetic collaboration can guarantee that an author’s [or an artist’s] wishes will finally be honoured or realized’.9 The act of writing the life of a person is always an act of appropriation. Once in

6

John Romney, Memoirs of the Life and Works of George Romney (London, 1830), p. vi. Samuel Johnson, The Idler: By the Author of the Rambler, 2 vols (London: Printed for J. Parsons, 1793), ii. 92. 8 David R. Unruh, ‘Death and Personal History: Strategies of Identity Preservation’, Social Problems, 30 (1983), 340–2. 9 Richard Wendorf, After Sir Joshua: Essays on British Art and Cultural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 4. 7

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the hands of the biographers, a subject loses entire control over his or her posthumous reputation.10 Thus placed at the intersection of biographical and aesthetic discourse, individual artists’ biographies published in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain anticipated the artist’s monograph, a term which first appeared in a review of a book on Albrecht Dürer published by Adam Weise in Leipzig in 1819.11 The term ‘monograph’ as a text dedicated to the analysis of the life and work of a single artist was not yet utilized in Britain during this period. Instead, texts that were devoted to individual painters took on the anatomy of contemporary biographical genres and were published and referred to as ‘lives’, ‘anecdotes’, ‘sketches’, or ‘memoirs’, among others. The difference between artist’s biography and artist’s monograph was not restricted to their title, genre, or designation, though. The very structure and functions of these two cohabiting genres were dissimilar.12 Gabriele Guercio has argued that one of the most fundamental elements that distinguish a monograph from a biography is that the former always ‘unequivocally remains an account of the artist’s life and works’.13 The dynamic and tension that regulate the relationship between the artist’s life and work are, as we have seen, already present in Vasari’s Vite. However, Guercio maintains that Vasari’s lives, although they anticipated the monographic project, ‘most often address the biographical and the artistic as parallel dimensions, viewing the former in terms of factual knowledge and the latter in terms of visual knowledge’.14 The nineteenth-century monograph outstripped the original purpose of Vasari’s art-historical project by suggesting analogical interconnections between the artist’s life and works. ‘Throughout the nineteenth century’, Guercio writes, the monograph ‘consistently endeavored not only to make the visual arts intelligible but also to retrace their human foundations, relating artists and their works to the contexts of life in which they originated. The life-and-work model presented the artist both as an individual empirically linked to a body of work through historical facts and as a personality created solely by that body of work.’15 In other words, the nineteenth-century monograph equated art with existence and interpreted distinct works as chapters of the painter’s life-story. Biographers active in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain addressed and negotiated with the life-and-work issue in numerous ways. 10 On the subject, see also Ian Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1992). 11 Gabriele Guercio, Art as Existence, (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2006), 3–4. 12 13 14 15 Ibid. 4–7. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 31–3. Ibid. 6.

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Often, biographers of painters did not draw explicit parallels between the painter’s life and his work; instead, they kept the biographical and the artistic domains separate. In many cases, these writers were more concerned with their subject as men than as artists. They focused on their subjects’ everyday lives rather than on providing formal analyses of their artworks. Because such texts were generically, structurally, and semantically so different, each of them produced and projected very different images of artists. One of the aims of this section is to discuss the role of such textual and generic diversity in the creation of artistic personalities. The chapters on Hogarth and Gainsborough give particular emphasis to specific literary genres––the anecdote and the sketch, respectively––and analyse the role of such genres in the biographical elaboration and reception of these two painters. On the other hand, my discussions of Morland and Opie shift the focus away from specific generic forms and explore the combinatory role of factual and fictional truth in the elaboration of artists’ reputations in the early nineteenth century. Although it may be argued that each artist’s textual life tells a different story and can therefore be considered as unique, together, these texts provide a narrative of fame and celebrity whose nature changed substantially between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries in Britain. Whereas painters like Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Morland were portrayed as being different from the average individual, as belonging to a separate and discrete category of human beings, Opie was portrayed as sharing many traits and concerns with them.

4 William Hogarth The Art of Biography and the Life of Anecdotes No man is truly himself, but in the idea which others entertain of him. (William Hazlitt1)

William Hogarth was the first English painter to receive major and relentless biographical coverage after his death, in October 1764. This was more than a coincidence. The diversity and unique qualities of his artistic output and personality set him apart from his fellow artists. His innovations included his famous modern moral subjects, those pictures that vividly evoked and satirized the manners and morals of his day. His artistic autonomy is evident in The Analysis of Beauty (1753), which he wrote against certain aspects of neo-classicism. Rather than the ‘ideal beauty’, Hogarth advocated the ‘line of beauty’––an ever-changing, serpentine line tracing the contours of more embodied forms of beauty.2 Hogarth’s involvement with the St Martin’s Lane Academy and his battle for the creation of a copyright law, which protected engravers from seeing their work illegally reproduced, is further evidence of his desire and ability to shape an artistic career that could be more independent of the traditional means of artistic and professional self-improvement. Well before his death, Hogarth inspired poets and critics alike. As early as 1732, poetical adaptations of his prints were published. Ekphrastic poems like John Durant Breval’s The Lure of Venus; or A Harlot’s Progress

William Hazlitt, ‘Whether Genius Is Conscious of its Power?’ in Howe, xii. 117. For discussions of Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty and of his aesthetic precepts, see the introduction by Joseph Burke in William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. xiii–lxii, and by Ronald Paulson in William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. xvii–lxii. 1 2

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(1733)3 and John Bancks’s ‘Modern Midnight Conversation’ and ‘Southwark Fair’ (1738)4 paid tribute to Hogarth’s images, attempting to replicate the worlds of his prints in the medium of writing. Later in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, John Trusler, Horace Walpole, William Gilpin, George Steevens, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt all produced their own critical exegeses of the painter’s pictures. The interest in Hogarth has not abated. Scholars are keen to explore the artist’s reputation and significance within the fields of British and European art to this day. A great deal of such criticism has focused on Hogarth’s visual works, on their literary, satirical, theatrical nature, and on the numerous commentaries they have generated, both in England and abroad.5 This chapter concentrates on Hogarth the man and explores the nature and function of literary anecdotes in the construction and promotion of the painter’s individual and artistic personality. To relate the anecdote to Hogarth may come as no surprise. Hogarth’s life and work have never ceased to be linked to this narrative form. After the publication of Walpole’s chapter on Hogarth in the fourth volume of his Anecdotes of Painting and Nichols’s first biographical work on the painter, which was published in 1780, many other writers exploited the popularity of the anecdote in their discussions of the artist. Inspired by their two famous predecessors, these writers published their texts on Hogarth under the title of ‘Anecdotes’ or ‘Biographical Anecdotes’. John Ireland named the third volume of his Hogarth Illustrated, ‘Hogarth’s Anecdotes of his Own Life and Other Original Material’ (1798). Thomas Cook published his own Anecdotes of William Hogarth, with an Explanatory Description of his Works in 1813. In addition, John Bowyer Nichols, John Nichols’s son, printed a collective work entitled Anecdotes of William Hogarth Written by Himself, with Essays on his Life and Genius in 1833, which reassembled autobiographical information as well as the most important critical articles on the artist published up to this time. Contemporary critics have continued to underline the propinquity of the anecdote with Hogarth’s artistic output and the narrative quality of his pictures, not least his modern moral subjects.6 By contrast, this chapter explores how Nichols drew on 3 John Durant Breval, The Lure of Venus; or A Harlot’s Progress: An Heroi-Comical Poem (London, 1733). 4 John Bancks, Miscellaneous Works, in Verse and Prose (London, 1738). 5 See Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999); David Bindman, Hogarth (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981); Matthew Craske, William Hogarth (London: Tate Gallery, 2000); David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée, and Peter Wagner (eds), Hogarth Representing Nature’s Machines (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001). 6 See Sacheverell Sitwell, Narrative Pictures: A Survey of English Genre and its Painters (London: B. T. Batsford; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 27–39, and Robert R. Wark, ‘Hogarth’s Narrative Method in Practice and Theory’, in Hugh T. Swendenberg (ed.), England in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century: Essays on Culture and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 161–72.

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Hogarth’s visual work in his biographical treatment of the painter. Rather than discussing the literary quality of Hogarth’s pictures, the following pages examine the spatial and pictorial qualities of certain anecdotes in John Nichols’s pioneering work. Some of Nichols’s literary anecdotes, I argue, are the most pictorial and visually effective passages of his biographical account, and thus function as verbal and textual counterparts to Hogarth’s pictures. These stories represent biographical images in words, and contribute to elaborating an image of Hogarth as an artist that is highly reminiscent of his own portraits of characters. JOHN NICHOLS AND THE BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES OF WILLIAM HOGAR TH John Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth; and a Catalogue of his Works Chronologically Arranged; with Occasional Remarks is the first modern biography of the English artist. His predecessors, who included the Swiss-born Frenchman and friend of Hogarth Jean-André Rouquet and John Trusler, each recreated, explicated, and (in certain cases) catalogued Hogarth’s prints. By contrast, John Nichols added personal details about his subject’s life and character. That Nichols’s book contains so many anecdotes is not surprising. His professional reputation and success rested on his writing and publishing literary anecdotes.7 Edward L. Hart has noted that throughout his career ‘Nichols produced more biographical data regarding the writers of his time than did all his contemporaries combined—including Boswell and Johnson’.8 Editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine (1792–1826), author of the seventeen volumes of the Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (1812–15) and Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (1817–58), Nichols had a passion for facts and details about the men and women of his age. His fascination with anecdotes was of course not disinterested. Nichols capitalized on a genre and an artist who had become increasingly popular in England by the second half of the eighteenth century. His project was 7 Robin Myers, ‘John Nichols (1745–1826), Chronicler of the Book Trade’, in Michael Harris and Robin Myers (eds), Development of the English Book Trade, 1700–1899 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1981), 1–35; Edward Hart, ‘A Study of the Biographical Works of John Nichols’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1951). 8 Edward L. Hart (ed.), Minor Lives: A Collection of Biographies by John Nichols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. xviii. Nichols had many anecdotes about Samuel Johnson that Boswell later inserted in his Life of Johnson, see Edward L. Hart, ‘The Contribution of John Nichols to Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 67 (1952), 391–410.

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born out of this enthusiasm for all things Hogarthian, an enthusiasm which was significantly enhanced by the publication of Walpole’s catalogue of Hogarth’s prints in 1780. Nichols was aware of the excitement around the painter, a fervour which Edmond Malone called ‘Hogarthomania’.9 In the ‘Memorandum’ to the 1785 edition of his Biographical Anecdotes, Nichols wrote that after ‘Mr. Walpole’s Fourth Volume on the subject of English Painters came out, [it] was followed by an immediate rage for collecting every scrap of our Artist’s designs’.10 Thus at a time when the market for Hogarth’s prints was expanding so rapidly, the need for biographical information about their author was increasingly felt. As a publisher and anecdotist, Nichols was quick to spot the niche. Nichols had first started to collect material on Hogarth in 1778.11 The task was not unproblematic. Despite his voluminous artistic output, which included self-portraits, Hogarth left very few personal documents or biographical evidence: no diaries, no letters, no notebooks, indeed none of the private archive that many writers during this period utilized to recount and reconstruct the life of their subject. It is was partly for this reason that, until the publication of Nichols’s work, seventeen years after Hogarth’s death, the artist’s reputation still rested primarily on literary reconstructions and interpretations of his work and environment, rather than on his life per se. Hogarth did begin to assemble some material with the intention of writing his own memoir, but he died before finishing the project, leaving behind only autobiographical notes, some of which were published in the 1798 supplement to John Ireland’s Hogarth Illustrated. These annotations focused on Hogarth’s professional achievements as a painter and engraver, but failed to provide what most eighteenth-century biographers were keen to offer: personal anecdotes about the painter’s life. The first product of Nichols’s antiquarian research was a pamphlet, probably printed in 1780. In 1781, the first edition of his Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth was issued in a single octavo volume. The book was based on a series of heavily footnoted critical extracts, many taken from Walpole’s chapter on Hogarth in the Anecdotes of Painting, around which were intertwined biographical facts and anecdotal stories about Hogarth. Nichols’s work also contained a catalogue of the artist’s 9 History MSS. Charlemont Reports [= The Manuscripts and Correspondence of James, First Earl of Charlemont, i. 1745–1783 (London, 1891), 382–3]. Charlemont, i. 382–3, quoted in Hart (ed.), Minor Lives, p. xxvii. 10 John Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth (London: Nichols, 1785), p. iii. 11 The only copy which survives is in the British Museum; for Nichols’s different publications on Hogarth, see R. W. Lightbown’s detailed introduction to the facsimile repr. of John Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth (London: Cornmarket Press, 1971), 3, as well as Notes and Queries, 4th ser. 1 (1868), 97.

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prints. Read in conjunction, biography and catalogue provided a chronological account of Hogarth’s life and career. Though often attributed to Nichols alone, the Biographical Anecdotes was in fact the product of a professional collaboration: the Shakespearian scholar George Steevens and the literary editor Isaac Reed also contributed significantly to the making of the text. Their respective contributions are difficult to assess. Nichols admitted that Steevens wrote ‘nearly every critique of the Plates of Hogarth’.12 Lightbown also observes that Nichols certainly helped Steevens compile the list of prints and that he himself contributed ‘to the catalogue, to which Reed probably added something’.13 The scope of the first edition was quickly surpassed in the second and third, published in 1782 and 1785 respectively. Both the biography and the catalogue were altered and augmented. The former was bulked up by the many details originally contained in the footnotes, now inserted within the main body of the text. The information provided in the catalogue greatly increased, too, with numerous new items added to each new edition. In addition, the biographical part of these later works included a more personal character of Hogarth by Steevens which, while improving on the purely anecdotal treatment of Hogarth’s life in the first edition, still showed only a partial acquaintance with the artist’s persona.14 In this character, Steevens described Hogarth as an unsophisticated and unpolished man: ‘Having rarely been admitted into polite circles’, Steevens wrote, ‘none of his sharp corners had been rubbed off, so that he continued to the last a gross uncultivated man. The slightest contradiction transported him into a rage.’ Remarking on the artist’s social connections, Steevens also observed that ‘to be member of a Club consisting of mechanics, or those not many removes above them, seems to have been the utmost of [Hogarth’s] social ambition; but even in these assemblies he was oftener sent to Coventry for misbehaviour, than any other person who frequented them’.15 These remarks on Hogarth’s personal character and temperament re-emerged in Nichols’s The Genuine Works of William Hogarth, with Biographical Anecdotes, published in three volumes between 1808 and 1817. By this stage, the structure and the content of Nichols’s original project had changed radically: the biographical part, included in the first volume, was now separated from the catalogue, contained in the two other tomes. Also, Nichols’s ‘Life of Hogarth’ did not simply consist of an enlarged version of the text of the Biographical Anecdotes; it contained some of the letters 12 13 14 15

R. W. Lightbown, intr. to Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1971), 3. Ibid. Ibid. 16–17. Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 97.

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and autobiographical material on Hogarth, which Nichols had copied from the supplement to John Ireland’s Hogarth Illustrated, published ten years earlier. NICHOLS AND THE SHIFT IN HOGARTHIAN CRITICISM: FROM WORK TO LIFE Comparisons between the chapter on Hogarth in Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting and that in Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes expose more systematically the biographical shift initiated by Nichols’s project. In Walpole’s chapter, details pertaining to the artist’s personal life are scarce. Readers are told that Hogarth ‘was born in the parish of St. Bartholomew, London, the son of a low tradesman’, that ‘in the year 1730’ he ‘married the only daughter of sir James Thornhill, by whom he had no children’, and that he ‘died of a dropsy in his breast at his house in Leicester-fields, October 26, 1764’ (APE iv. 65, 80, and 80 respectively). Such succinct personal details are considerably surpassed by Walpole’s remarks on the artist’s style and iconography. Like most of his predecessors, Walpole emphasized a visual knowledge of Hogarth’s artistic production. Not only did Walpole use Hogarth’s prints to establish a chronology of his life, he also drew out a conclusion about Hogarth’s personal disposition from the style and subject-matter of his pictures. As a true connoisseur, Walpole believed that the artist’s history lay in his artistic output—Hogarth’s ‘works are his history’, he asserted in his Anecdotes (APE iv. 74). Nichols’s work distinguishes itself from Walpole’s in the amount of biographical details it contains, as well as in the way in which such details are recounted. The three biographical areas that Walpole briefly touches upon––birth, marriage, and death––all resurface in a more elaborate form in the Biographical Anecdotes. In the opening paragraph to the work, Hogarth’s origins are revealed in detail for the first time. Nichols concentrates on Hogarth’s rural background and his Cumbrian roots: ‘THIS great and original Genius’, he writes, ‘is said by Dr. Burn to have been the descendant of a family originally from Kirkby Thore, in Westmorland: and I am assured that his grandfather was a plain yeoman, who possessed a small tenement in the Vale of Bampton, a village about 15 miles North of Kendal, in that county’ (BA 5). Hogarth’s rustic origins underpin Nichols’s portrait of Hogarth as a natural painter––a portrait that differs significantly from that depicted by Walpole, who describes Hogarth as ‘a writer of comedy with a pencil, [rather] than as a painter’. Walpole also associates the artist with literary figures like Molière and Samuel Butler

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(APE iv. 68). Nichols’s Biographical Memoirs plays down the analogy with literary satire and praises the artist’s faithful imitation of nature and real human idiosyncrasy. Nichols’s successor, John Ireland, also chooses not to emphasize the grotesque element in Hogarth, instead concentrating on his fidelity to nature. However, unlike Nichols who traces Hogarth’s artistic descent back to specific ancestors, Ireland starts his Hogarth Illustrated with the more symbolic scene of Leonardo da Vinci’s dying in the arms of Francis I, an introductory anecdote which Ireland finds most appropriate for he believes that Hogarth, like da Vinci, is ‘not the follower, but the leader of a class . . . a painter from divine impulse, rather than human instruction . . . the pupil,—the disciple,—the worshipper of Nature!’16 As we will see, da Vinci’s final moments provide the basic framework for Hogarth’s own deathbed scene. Hogarth’s marriage presents another example of Nichols’s biographical refinement and elaboration. Replacing Walpole’s single statement regarding Hogarth’s union with ‘the only daughter of sir James Thornhill’, Nichols expands on the event by stating the following: In 1730, Mr. Hogarth married the only daughter of Sir James Thornhill, by whom he had no child. This union, indeed, was a stolen one, and consequently without the approbation of Sir James and his lady, who, considering the extreme youth of their daughter, then barely eighteen, and the slender finances of her husband, as yet an obscure artist, were not easily reconciled to the match. Soon after this period, however, he began his Harlot’s Progress; and was advised to have some of his pictures placed in the way of his fatherin-law. Accordingly, one morning early, Mrs. Hogarth undertook to convey several of them into his dining-room. When he arose, he enquired from whence they came; and being told by whom they were introduced, he cried out, ‘Very well; the man who can produce representations like these, can also maintain a wife without a portion’. (BA 17)

The essence of Walpole’s factual, one-line report has now developed into a much longer narrative: the passage describes the Thornhills’ initial discontent at seeing their daughter betrothed to a penniless, still unrecognized artist, and their subsequent willingness to modify their judgement once the painter displays his artistic talents and potential financial dependability. It is supposedly on account of his genius that Hogarth was accepted into the Thornhill family; and through his art that the painter was able to climb the social ladder. The essence of Nichols’s narrative––that of a painter who is first rejected but then surmounts, through his talents, the obstacles that hamper his way towards artistic and social success––is, we 16

John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, 2 vols (London, 1791), pp. ii–iii.

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have seen, a well-known biographical formula in artists’ lives. At the same time, the allegedly genuine ingredients contained in the plot of Hogarth’s encounter with his beloved––that of elopement and secret union of two young lovers from differing social classes––remain common features of eighteenth-century literature. Finally, one of the most memorable scenes contained in the Biographical Anecdotes describes Hogarth’s death. Nichols’s record of the artist’s final moments is far from unusual. Deathbed scenes are ubiquitous in literature.17 Texts often recount the last hours of a (wo)man’s life in vivid detail, and in such a way as to suggest that the manner of dying ‘may shed some light on the ultimate mysteries of human personality and its destiny after death’.18 In the field of art, the death of the artist is a frequent topos too, representing as it does the final act that reveals the ultimate truth about the artist’s life and work. Leonardo’s death in the arms of Francis I is one of the most famous deathbed scenes in the artistic literature. It became a favourite subject for painters in the nineteenth century, especially in France.19 The death of Leonardo is first mentioned in the first edition of Vasari’s Vite (1550) and is included again, with some transformations, in his 1568 edition. The episode, though entirely fictitious,20 recounts how Leonardo’s frail body was suddenly traversed by a ‘paroxysm, the forerunner of death’, and how the king ‘held his head’ ‘to show him favour and to soothe his pain’. ‘Conscious of the great honour being done to him’, we learn, ‘the inspired Leonardo breathed his last in the arms of the king: he was then seventy-five years old.’21 Building his narrative on Leonardo’s demise, Nichols describes Hogarth’s death: on the ‘25th October, 1764’, the artist ‘was seized with a vomiting, upon which he rung his bell with such violence that he broke it, and expired about two hours afterwards in the arms of Mrs. Mary Lewis, who was called up on his being taken suddenly ill. To this lady, for her faithful services, he bequeathed 100 l.’22 Nichols further reveals that 17 On the subject, see Hermione Lee, Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (London: Pimlico, 2008), 200–18; Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study of the Literary Tradition of the ‘Ars Moriendi’ in England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); and, for a more focused discussion of the subject, Margarete Holubetz, ‘Death Bed Scenes in Victorian Fiction’, English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, 67 (1986), 14–34. 18 Beaty, Craft of Dying, 1. 19 Francis Haskell, ‘The Old Masters in Nineteenth-Century French Painting’, Art Quarterly, 34 (1971), 55–85. 20 We know the episode is pure fiction because the court was in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Leonardo died at Cloux. 21 Vasari, Lives of the Artist, i. 270. 22 Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 93–4.

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Hogarth had ‘boasted of having eaten a pound of beef-steak for his dinner’ the previous evening and that his subsequent death was caused by an ‘aneurism’. This passage visibly echoes the final moments of the Renaissance man, although this time the event is given a satirical spin. The stately and solemn atmosphere surrounding Leonardo’s last moments has been replaced by a rather more burlesque ambience: the ‘honour’ felt by Leonardo towards the king has now been exchanged by the retching and bell-ringing episode. What is more, the regal presence of Francis I has been substituted by the much more modest company of Mrs Mary Lewis. Instead of a scene that purports to stage the symbolic equality between the king and the artist, we now have an event which relies on the social disparity between the painter and his servant in order to stress the artist’s generous gesture towards his maid, a posthumous token of recognition for her faithful services to him. On a more artistic level, Leonardo’s deathbed scene has often been interpreted as the emblematic transmission of Renaissance and classical theoretical concepts from Italy to France. In this regard, the event in the Biographical Anecdotes is no less meaningful. For by satirically subverting the scene, and by grounding the event in a purely English context––the allusion to the ‘beef-steak’ contributing to such a localization23––the passage constructs and underpins the image of Hogarth as a quintessentially English artist, one who has shown complete autonomy and independence from his predecessors, especially Continental. NICHOLS, HOGARTH, AND ANECDOTES The episodes of Hogarth’s birth, marriage, and death give some insight into Nichols’s narrative techniques. Nichols provided information on certain aspects of Hogarth’s life through literary and artistic commonplaces, formulaic and anecdotal topoi that pervaded the biographies of visual artists. Further examples show that Nichols’s manner of constructing the image of his artist rested on two different types of anecdotes: some followed a Boswellian technique which consisted in providing particulars that would satisfy the audience’s thirst for curiosities by offering them a glimpse into the artist’s character and idiosyncrasy. For example, readers of the Biographical Anecdotes could learn that ‘Hogarth was . . . the most absent of men. At table he would sometimes turn round his chair as if he

23

For a discussion of the emergence of roast beef as a patriotic emblem, see Ben Rogers, Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation (London: Vintage, 2004).

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had finished eating, and as suddenly would return it, and fall to his meal again.’ In another instance, Nichols also admitted that Hogarth ‘once directed a letter to Dr. Hoadly, thus,—“To the Doctor at Chelsea.” This epistle, however, by good luck, did not miscarry; and was preserved by the late Chancellor of Winchester, as a pleasant memorial of his friend’s extraordinary inattention.’24 Hogarth’s absent-mindedness is again illustrated in the following incident, which recounts how one day ‘soon after he set up his carriage’, [Hogarth] had occasion to pay a visit to the lord-mayor (I believe it was Mr. Beckford). When he went, the weather was fine; but business detained him till a violent shower of rain came on. He was let out of the Mansion-house by a different door from that at which he entered; and, seeing the rain, began immediately to call for a hackney-coach. Not one was to be met with on any of the neighbouring stands; and our artist sallied forth to brave the storm, and actually reached Leicester-fields without bestowing a thought on his own carriage, till Mrs. Hogarth (surprized to see him so wet and splashed) asked where he had left it.25

Although all three anecdotes provide details about the artist’s character, the last final two are particularly noteworthy for they echo certain episodes from contemporary fiction. Incidents in which letters are misdirected and in which confusion arises due to doors being opened in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and by the wrong people can be found in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), for example, when Beau Didapper surreptitiously sneaks into what he believes is Fanny’s apartment, only to discover that he has made a mistake and has instead entered the room of Lady Booby’s servant Mrs Slipslop––a mistake that is the source of further confusion, and ultimately general chaos.26 Besides Hogarth’s distractions, Nichols’s array of anecdotes reveals other traits of Hogarth’s personality. One episode stages the artist’s unreliable memory. We learn that during a theatrical impromptu, ‘a laughable parody on the scene of Julius Caesar, where the Ghost appears to Brutus’, Hogarth personated the spectre; but so unretentive was his memory, that, although his speech consisted only of two lines, he was unable to get them by heart. At last they hit on the following expedient in his favour. The verses he was to deliver were written in such large letters, on the outside of an

24

Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 58. Ibid. 58–9. Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1742), ii. 277–87. 25 26

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illuminated paper-lanthorn, that he could read them when he entered with it in his hand on the stage.27

The portrait of Hogarth that emerges from these different stories is far from flattering. They show him to be a forgetful and awkward individual, clumsily engaged with the world surrounding him, a far cry from the image of the intellectual and high-minded artist that Reynolds promulgated at the same time in his Discourses.28 And yet, nor do these various passages present Hogarth as a misunderstood and isolated genius on the margins of society––an image of the artist that emerged later in the nineteenth century, as we will see in Chapter 6 on George Morland. On the contrary, Hogarth is here presented as a companionable individual, integrated, if somewhat maladroitly, into his social environment. Besides character-revealing anecdotes, Nichols’s portrait of Hogarth in his Biographical Anecdotes is complemented by a second type of anecdote, namely a story that portrays the artist in action. Rather than revealing Hogarth’s nature and temperament, these anecdotes provide an insight into his practices as a draughtsman. For example, Nichols notes that it ‘was likewise Mr. Hogarth’s custom to sketch out on the spot any remarkable face which particularly struck him and of which he wished to preserve the remembrance’. Nichols then illustrates this statement with the following scene: A gentleman still living informs me, that being once with our painter at the Bedford Coffee-house, he observed him to draw something with a pencil on his nail. Enquiring what had been his employment, he was shewn the countenance (a whimsical one) of a person who was then at a small distance.29

This scene is one among many other stories in which the artist is seen recording the facial features of a particular or several individuals present around him. Like these other events, the above anecdote explains the very method adopted by Hogarth for the execution of his pictures: the artist first seized the essential features of a scene or a face before completing the final version elsewhere. Hogarth created, in Joseph Burke’s phrase, a ‘mnemonic shorthand’ which allowed him to record swiftly an event taking place before his eyes.30 He then elaborated on this very first impression to execute and complete the definitive picture. While the 27

Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 57–8. Richard Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 12–59. 29 Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 15. 30 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1955), p. xxxix. 28

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above anecdote exemplifies Hogarth’s artistic technique, it simultaneously functions as the framing narrative to a longer, more detailed story: It happened in the early part of Hogarth’s life, that a nobleman, who was uncommonly ugly and deformed, came to sit to him for his picture. It was executed with a skill that did honour to the artist’s abilities; but the likeness was rigidly observed, without even the necessary attention to compliment or flattery. The peer, disgusted at his counterpart of his dear self, never once thought of paying for a reflector that would only insult him with his deformities.31

The story goes on to say that, because the nobleman refused to accept and pay for a picture showing the defects of his countenance, Hogarth showed him his readiness to add ‘a tail and some other little appendages’ to the portrait before sending it to a certain ‘Mr. Hare, the famous wild-beast man’ so that it could be exhibited at his place. The artist’s ‘intimation had its desired effect’, we learn; the man finally sent the money to Hogarth and received his portrait which was, however, immediately ‘committed to the flames’.32 Here fidelity, by a shift of context, becomes satirically grotesque. A final anecdote which reveals the method of Hogarth’s artistic production is given in the famous ‘Sunday walk’ episode. Very much in the same Fieldingesque vein of some of the above quoted passages, we learn that During his apprenticeship, [Hogarth] set out one Sunday, with two or three companions, on an excursion to Highgate. The weather being hot, they went into a public-house, where they had not been long, before a quarrel arose between some persons in the same room. One of the disputants struck the other on the head with a quart pot, and cut him very much. The blood running down the man’s face, together with the agony of the wound, which had distorted his features into a most hideous grin, presented Hogarth, who shewed himself thus early ‘apprised of the mode Nature had intended he should pursue,’ with too laughable a subject to be overlooked. He drew out his pencil, and produced on the spot one of the most ludicrous figures that ever was seen. What rendered this piece the more valuable was, that it exhibited an exact likeness of the man, with the portrait of his antagonist, and the figures in caricature of the principal persons gathered round him. This anecdote was furnished by one of his fellow apprentices then present, a person of indisputable character, and who continued his intimacy with Hogarth long after they both grew up into manhood.33

The portrayal of poet-satirists as observers of life on the streets, with its chance meetings and altercations, is a well-known topos in literature. 31 32 33

Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 15. Ibid. 15–16. Ibid. 7.

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While representing an amusing relief within the flow of the biographical narrative, this anecdote also has certain aesthetic implications for it places the artist in a realistic tradition: it was by observing Nature and the world around him, and not by replicating the art of the old masters, that Hogarth distinguished himself from previous artists. The episode contains elements that are characteristic of many of his pictures: portraits, characters, and caricatures are certainly staples of Hogarth’s art. Here, we learn that Hogarth produced ‘an exact likeness of the man, with the portrait of his antagonist, and the figures in caricature of the principal persons gathered round him’.34 The self-reflexive dimension of the above episode is emphasized by its location within the narrative of the Biographical Anecdotes. Like a Hogarthian print, the incident is framed between significant passages, transposing into the biographical narrative the playful effects of framing which are so important in Hogarth’s prints.35 It is precisely when Hogarth abandons his apprenticeship, breaks off his reproductions of existing images, and experiences the ‘impulse of genius’, that the ‘Sunday walk’ anecdote is introduced. Many of the scenes observed and anecdotally enacted by Hogarth thus illustrate themes found in his pictures. This contiguity between the painter’s life and his work is a premise of artists’ biographies. Before Nichols, indeed since the Renaissance, countless writers sought to explicate the artworks through the life of their maker. Nichols’s text, however, raises a different type of question—one concerned with the very origins of his anecdotes. We remember that Nichols possessed little documentary and biographical material directly related to his subject. We also know that he built his knowledge of the artist on contemporary memories, manuscripts, and on other miscellaneous collections and diverse literary materials. Nichols also admitted at the end of the first volume of his final monument to Hogarth, the Genuine Works, that Mr Reed provided ‘a variety of authentic anecdotes, particularly on theatrical subjects’.36 However, a close examination of the text reveals that Nichols rarely gave exact references for the anecdotes he provided; on the contrary, he usually attributed his stories to unnamed witnesses, friends, or acquaintances.37 This lack of referencing suggests that the origins of Nichols’s stories may not depend on existing textual evidence. Indeed, when reading 34 Hogarth’s Characters and Caricaturas, 1743, originally designed as a subscription ticket for his Marriage-à-la-Mode. 35 For a discussion on frames and images, see Peter Wagner, ‘Frame-Work: The Margin(al) as Supplement and Countertext’, in Wagner (ed.), Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 75–99. 36 Lightbown, intr. to Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1971), 5. 37 Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 13–14.

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through Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes of Hogarth, one gradually suspects that he fictionalized Hogarth’s life to make it conform to, and explain the visual evidence of, his subject’s art: people’s gaucherie, caricatures, awkward situations, street scenes are all staples of Hogarth’s images. The anecdote recounting the satirical impromptu restaging of a Shakespearian tragedy, quoted above, underpins the tone of many prints executed by an artist keen to portray the world as a stage on which actors play the comedies and tragedies of human life. An ‘artist’s biography can be documented and factual’, Philip Sohm suggests, ‘[but] biography is also an artful construction of embellished or even invented “facts” that explains why paintings look the way they do’.38 Nichols produced and adjusted some of his anecdotes about Hogarth in order to characterize his life and personal style. Faced with a lack of biographical material, he created ‘his’ Hogarth in the image of his visual work. Instead of elucidating the artwork through the artist’s life, Nichols inverted the process and elucidated the painter’s life through his work. Biography, in Nichols’s case, did not simply stage Hogarth’s life, it embodied his artistic production. Nichols’s statement, directly quoted from Walpole, which indicates that ‘the works of Hogarth . . . are his history’, takes additional meaning in the context of Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes.39 Not only does such a statement suggest that a chronological listing of the artist’s pictures provides a sequential overview of his personal and professional career, here it also implies that Hogarth’s works form the essence of his biography. THE LIFE OF ANECDOTES: PICTURES IN WORDS After their publication, a large number of anecdotes contained in Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes continued to have lives of their own. Many were extracted from their original narrative and bibliographic contexts and reappeared in self-contained forms in other contemporary books and periodicals. The Gentleman’s Magazine republished many of Nichols’s anecdotes, including stories on Hogarth’s absent-mindedness.40 The ‘Sunday walk’ anecdote resurfaced in multiple works, including the New Annual Register of 1782 and the 1791 edition of the British Plutarch (along with other stories about the artist).41 The same event again resurfaced Philip Sohm, ‘Caravaggio’s Deaths’, Art Bulletin, 84 (2002), 449. Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 106. The Gentleman’s Magazine (July 1781), 323–4. 41 The New Annual Register for the Year (1782), 33, as well as Thomas Mortimer, The British Plutarch, 8 vols (London: Charles Dilly, 1791), vii. 145–6. 38 39 40

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in John Ireland’s Hogarth Illustrated in 1791. This time, however, Nichols’s version underwent significant modifications for Ireland added numerous elements to the episode and exaggerated many features that were contained in Nichols’s account, transforming the episode into a literary caricature.42 The reappearance of Nichols’s anecdotes in such diverse bibliographic contexts was definitely instrumental in spreading Hogarth’s reputation to various and eclectic readerships, functioning as textual supplements and equivalents to the many prints that were circulating contemporarily in different British media. Interestingly, the re-emergence of such stories also underlined the highly transferable qualities of these narrative units. Because they were self-contained, these anecdotal units could be read separately from their original literary environment. Indeed, like an exemplum, a testimonium, or an apophthegm, an anecdote represents a brief, quasiindependent literary unit, which is ready for relocation in a new context. Framed within the linear and chronological progression of the biographical narrative, an anecdote represents, by contrast, a literary and textual space in which time has been momentarily suspended, or decelerated, in order to focus on one specific moment.43 This semantic and formal selfsufficiency and autonomy of the anecdote has a significant impact on its visual and pictorial quality: the quasi-suspension of time, the abundance of details, and the frequent use of the deictic mode render the anecdote a highly pictorial narrative form. Often, the reader does not only read the anecdote but constructs a mental picture of the scene described, and thus visualizes it as a picture. In contrast to broad and thus visually less distinct pieces of information about the artist’s life and work, the anecdotal passages in Nichols’s book strike the readers with their pictorial sharpness, allowing them to witness and reproduce the event in their mind’s eye. As Joel Fineman has observed, the anecdote ‘produces the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, by establishing an event as an event within and yet without the framing context of historical successivity’.44 The ‘Sunday walk’ episode epitomizes the typical features of the anecdote: its gradual focus on a specific event (from an outdoor ‘excursion to Highgate’ to ‘a public-house’ to ‘the same room’) as well as its use of deictic forms such as definite articles, personal pronouns, and possessive attributes. While certain verbal indices create a sense of movement–– ‘went’, ‘struck’, ‘drew out his pencil’––others give instead an impression 42

Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, i, pp. xviii–xx. Here, ‘focalization’ corresponds to external focalization, where the narrative is focused on a character, rather than internal focalization, which focuses through a character, see Mieke Bal, ‘Narration and Focalisation’, Poétique, 29 (1977), 107–27. 44 Joel Fineman, ‘The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction’, in Aram H. Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 61. 43

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of atemporality, spatiality, or simultaneity; witness the use of the participle in ‘running down’ or expressions such as ‘together with’ or ‘on the spot’. Pamela Cantrell has remarked in her pictorial analysis of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, ‘[it] is not that the action unfolds in one moment, of course, but rather that its successive dimension is compressed into a mood of simultaneity’.45 Similarly, the ‘Sunday walk’ episode contains a sequence of different narrative actions: the characters’ excursion, the quarrel, and Hogarth’s execution of the sketch. Yet all these events are condensed in one single picture. In Jerry C. Beasly’s terms, the anecdote represents a ‘dynamic stasis’, that is, an arrested moment which nevertheless includes some temporal dimension.46 Because of their intrinsic qualities––their moving (unfixed) pictoriality––anecdotes like the ‘Sunday walk’ episode and the one recounting Hogarth’s visit to the Lord Mayor are closely analogous to Hogarth’s own polyscenic pictures, in which multiple fields of actions are related simultaneously within the same visual space.47 The third plate of the Harlot’s Progress (1732) is a good example of such narrative pictures: the maid or bunter (‘common servant’) is seen pouring some tea for Moll Hackbout in the foreground while, in the background, Justice Gonson and his bailiffs enter the room in order to arrest the harlot and send her to Bridewell Prison. That Nichols’s anecdotal stories represent very close narrative equivalents of Hogarth’s pictures is supported by the fact that, in his Biographical Anecdotes, the anecdote often replaces the image. Indeed, Nichols often provided a story when he could not provide the picture itself, claiming that the sketch made by Hogarth had either been stolen, lost, or had not been engraved. For instance, after relating the theatrical event in Dr Hoadly’s house, Nichols writes regretfully that ‘the original drawing is still preserved, and we could wish it were engraved; as the slightest sketch from the design of so grotesque a painter would be welcome to the numerous collectors of his work’.48 In this case, the anecdote is used, literally, as the verbal and spatial counterpart to, and substitute for, Hogarth’s pictures. W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that the physical existence of the anecdote (or any kind of text) in the form of words represents in the most literal sense a textual space to be taken into consideration. Such an observation reinforces the already close relationship and similarity between anecdotal 45 Pamela Cantrell, ‘Writing the Picture: Fielding, Smollett, and Hogarthian Pictorialism’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 24 (1995), 75. 46 Quoted ibid. 74. 47 For a discussion of ‘polyscenic’ pictures, see Lew Andrews, Story and Space in Renaissance Art: The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3. 48 Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 58.

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passages and images.49 Clearly, in the Biographical Anecdotes, Nichols narrated his subject’s life by using narrative units that closely resembled his subject’s artistic images, both in form and in content. By inserting such verbal images into his text, he constructed an anecdotal portrait of Hogarth in a manner that echoed Hogarth’s own practice as a visual narrator of the life and progress of eighteenth-century individuals. THE LIFE OF ANECDOTES: WORDS IN PICTURES As has been shown in the preceding section, Nichols inserted in his Biographical Anecdotes textual units which shared many similarities with Hogarth’s anecdotal images. Interestingly, Nichols’s biographical account, in its turn, directly (and indirectly) inspired several artists to paint scenes from Hogarth’s life. In the nineteenth century, Hogarth became the visual hero of anecdotal pictures. John Thomas Smith (1766–1833), Edward Matthew Ward (1816–79), and William Powell Frith (1819–1909) all produced pictures illustrating events in the artist’s life, either in series or as individual pieces. By choosing Hogarth as their subject, these artists took up and simultaneously revised a theme popular in the visual arts during this period, namely scenes from the lives of the old masters. Certainly, by making Hogarth their pictorial hero, these artists renewed and readjusted an iconographic tradition that allowed them to celebrate their own national painter, the ‘father’ of the English school of painting. Their anecdotal paintings show the extent to which British painters needed to have stories told about them to put them on a par with the old masters. A printmaker and a draughtsman, Smith is often remembered for his anecdotal biography of the sculptor Joseph Nollekens (1737–1823), Nollekens and his Times (1828), an entertaining, gossipy, yet informative account of the London art world in the late eighteenth century. Among the wide-ranging topics and numerous individuals tackled in his book, Smith also made some allusive comments on Hogarth. He reported for example that Mr Nollekens had frequently seen ‘Hogarth, when a young man, saunter round Leicester-fields, with his master’s sickly child hanging its head over his shoulder’.50 He also recounted that his father, who ‘knew Hogarth well’, had often said that the painter ‘revelled in the company of the drunken and profligate’ and that ‘Churchill, Wilkes, Hayman, &c. 49 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory’, in Mitchell (ed.), The Language of Images (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 282. 50 John T. Smith, Nollekens and his Times, 2 vols (London: Colburn, 1828), i. 46–7.

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were among his constant companions’. It was on account of such profligacy that Smith refused to consider Hogarth ‘a moral teacher of mankind’.51 Most remarks on Hogarth, however, are contained at the end of Smith’s biography, in a section called ‘Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of Several Artists and Others Contemporary with Nollekens’. Here, Smith commends Hogarth for his ‘easy and perfectly natural mode of grouping, his sweetness and harmony of colouring, his exquisite pencilling and general brilliancy of effect’;52 he also makes connoisseurial observations on Hogarth’s prints and questions the authenticity of some of the pictures inserted in Samuel Ireland’s Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth (1799). Smith’s series of images on the life of Hogarth is no doubt a testimony–– often humorous, sometimes plainly satirical––to his admiration and respect for the English painter.53 The sequence consists of twenty drawings finished in pen and ink, which chart episodes of Hogarth’s personal and professional life in loose chronological order, beginning with the young apprentice and ending with his later career as the acclaimed and busily engaged painter and art theorist (Figures 6–25). The title of each drawing is inscribed on the reverse in Smith’s hand: No. 1 ‘Hogarth carrying his Master’s sick child round Leicester fields / The spot of ground / Leicester house’ No. 2 ‘Hogarth engraving his Master’s shop-bill the sign of The Angel’ No. 3 ‘Hogarth being out of his time draws his companion’s figure on the door of a certain place to the great admiration of all his friends’ No. 4 ‘Hogarth declaring his love to Miss Thornhill’ No. 5 ‘Hogarth after his wife had put on a new night shift, ties up her things to send to Sir James Thornhill with a letter in which he told him “He took his Daughter without a smock to her a____e”’

51

Ibid. 267–8. Ibid. 342. Yale Center for British Art, Stanby, Frederick Gye, Leonard G. Duke Collection, sig.: B1975.3.789–808. The sheets with the drawings are preceded by a sheet with the following inscription in brown ink: ‘Original Drawings Illustrating the Life of Hogarth by J. T. Smith / bought at Mr. Standby’s sale by F. G.’ To my knowledge, these drawings have never been published, except for B1975.3.800 in the exhibition catalogue ‘Vauxhall Gardens’, 20 July–25 Sept. 1983, cat. 93. Several of the drawings are on sheets watermarked 1817, which would mean that the drawings were done in 1817 or later. I am very grateful to Scott Wilcox at the Yale Center for British Art for helping me with this reference. 52 53

6. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth carrying his Master’s sick child round Leicester fields / The spot of ground / Leicester house. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.789. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

7. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth engraving his Master’s shop-bill the sign of The Angel. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.790. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

8. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth being out of his time draws his companion’s figure on the door of a certain place, to the great admiration of all his friends. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.791. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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No. 6 ‘Hogarth has made breakfast and sends up a cup to his wife at the same time ordering the little dog to be admitted to her Mistresses bedchamber’ No. 7 ‘Hogarth drinking the first glass of wine with his wife––their dogs keeping respectful distances’ No. 8 ‘Sir James Thornhill’s boy entering his Master’s painting room to deliver the bundle and a letter in the presence of Lady Thornhill’ No. 9 ‘The smock exposed’ No. 10 ‘The reconciliation’ No. 11 ‘Hogarth drawing Sarah Malcolm’ No. 12 ‘Hogarth painting in Vauxhall Gardens in the presence of Jonathan Tyers’ No. 13 ‘Hogarth painting his picture of Capn. Coram for the Foundling Hospital’ No. 14 ‘Hogarth solicits his Patron Bishop Hoadley to look over his M.S of “Analysis of beauty”’ No. 15 ‘Hogarth making up a portrait of H. Fielding, for a Bookseller, from the features of Garrick who borrowed one of the Author’s wigs for that particular purpose there being no genuine portrait of him’54 No. 16 ‘Hogarth painting “The Ladys last stake” in the presence of Lord Charlemont’ No. 17 ‘Hogarth sitting to Roubeliac for his Bust’ No. 18 ‘Hogarth at Old Slaughter’s hobbing with Highmore the painter’ No. 19 ‘Hogarth having been followed by Barry and a friend was caught backing a boy to fight purposely to catch his fearful countenance’ No. 20 ‘The Eleventh hour’

54 Hogarth’s portrait of Henry Fielding, which served as the frontispiece to the so-called Murphy edn of Fielding’s Works (1762), was produced from memory, and apparently with difficulty, nearly eight years after his friend’s death. See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), ii. 342–4, for a convenient summary of the facts and anecdotes relating to the making of the portrait.

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The first scene is a direct adaptation of a passage from his Nollekens and his Times. The other drawings highlight aspects of the artist’s life and career, without referring to any specific sources (though some of the topics depicted––including Hogarth’s courtship and subsequent marriage to Jane Thornhill, his friendship with Tyers as well as his painting in Vauxhall Gardens––are all first mentioned in Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes).55 Formally, Smith’s most evident source for his visual sequence of Hogarth is Hogarth himself. Smith clearly absorbed and reworked his predecessor’s own method of narrative paintings. The formula of a sequence of scenes taken from the life of a subject was a direct take upon the artist’s modern moral subjects, including his Harlot’s Progress (1732) and his Rake’s Progress (1733). In keeping with these two series, Smith’s sequence chronicles the personal development and advancement of his leading protagonist. However, unlike Hogarth’s two Progresses, which record the dissolute life and downfall of two different fictional characters, Smith’s series of drawings relates the personal and professional achievements and successes of his (real) protagonist: Hogarth is presented as an industrious artist, painting in Vauxhall Gardens or in his studio, working on his portraits of Captain Coram and Sarah Malcolm; Hogarth is also seen sitting for the French-born sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac, one of the most eminent sculptors in eighteenth-century Britain. Other elements distinguished Smith’s drawings from Hogarth’s own anecdotal series. Both the Harlot’s and the Rake’s Progress are organized around pregnant moments in the life of their protagonists; the tight syntactic and chronological unfolding of Hogarth’s narratives connects one scene to the next. In contrast, Smith’s drawings of the life of Hogarth are based on a much looser chronology; the unity of action revolves around the hero’s biography, but the transition between one picture and the next is not always visually and semantically self-evident. Take, for example, the passage from drawing 10 to drawing 11 (Figures 15 and 16 in this book). The first of these two pictures depicts the reconciliation between Hogarth and his wife, on the one hand, and the latter’s parents, on the other; in the second drawing, the artist is seen portraying Sarah Malcolm in her cell, attended by a heavily paunched prison officer. No element in the first picture anticipates the subject of the subsequent one (nor, conversely, is any detail figuring in the second picture the direct result 55 Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes (1785), 29: ‘Soon after his marriage, Hogarth had summer-lodgings at South-Lambeth; and being intimate with Mr. Tyers, contributed to the improvement of the Spring Gardens at Vauxhall, by the hint of embellishing them with paintings, some of which were the suggestions of his own truly comic pencil.’

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of an action that is staged is the preceding one). Nor is the semantic gap that separates the two images filled by visual clues that allow viewers to reconstruct and re-establish the chronology between the two episodes. The two images stand independently next to each other, and without some knowledge of Hogarth’s biography, the story-line between them is fully disrupted (according to Nichols, Hogarth reconciled himself with his in-laws ‘soon after’ 1730, and Hogarth executed Sarah Malcolm’s portrait during her time in prison, in the early months of 1733). The only internal sequence of drawings that is narratologically more compact is the one that relates Hogarth’s encounter and relationship with Jane Thornhill. As we have seen, the episode first appeared in more detail in the first edition of Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes. Smith kept Nichols’s basic plot: the two lovers’ encounter, the Thornhills’ initial disapproval, and their subsequent reconciliation with the younger couple. However, Smith also built upon this framework to give a visually more elaborate and at times more comical version of the story. The sequence is covered in seven drawings (Figures 9–15). After Hogarth’s opening courtship, the series goes on to depict the young couple in a domestic environment. There then follow two drawings illustrating Sir James and Lady Thornhill, and a final scene shows ‘The reconciliation’ between the two couples. As in Hogarth’s individual Progresses, several elements re-emerge and tie together the various individual scenes. Jane Thornhill’s bundled frock, which is central to Smith’s plot, resurfaces in drawings 5, 8, and 9 (Figures 10, 13, and 14). The item in question is here used by Smith as a proof of Hogarth’s romantic and sexual conquest. This trophy, after its delivery and later discovery by Sir James and Lady Thornhill, produces intense reactions in them. Interestingly, their bodily positions––arms raised for him, swooning position for her–– mirror, respectively, that of the character and of the horse-head depicted on the canvas behind them. Other elements resurface in Smith’s anecdotal series: The ‘little dog’ reappears throughout the sequence. In the love-story subplot, the animal is used by Smith as a symbol of fidelity between the couple, in a way similar to Van Eyck’s painting of the Arnolfini Marriage (1434) and countless others. The dog appears to belong to Jane Thornhill; indeed she carries the animal in the initial ‘courtship’ drawing. By scene 10 (Figure 15), however, the dog strongly resembles Hogarth’s own pet Pug, who famously features in the artist’s self-portrait of 1745. As a matter of fact, the dog reappears as a symbol of companionship in drawings 15, 17, and 18 (Figures 20, 22, and 23), where he is depicted lying beside his master.

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9. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth declaring his love to Miss Thornhill. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.792. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

10. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth after his wife had put on a new night shift, ties up her things to send to Sir James Thornhill with a letter in which he told him, ‘He took his Daughter without a smock to her a____e’. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.793. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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11. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth has made breakfast and sends up a cup to his wife at the same time ordering the little dog to be admitted to her Mistresses bedchamber. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.794. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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12. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth drinking the first glass of wine with his wife— their dogs keeping respectful distances. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.795. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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13. John Thomas Smith, Sir James Thornhill’s boy entering his Master’s painting room to deliver the bundle and a letter in the presence of Lady Thornhill. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.796. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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14. John Thomas Smith, The smock exposed. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.797. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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15. John Thomas Smith, The reconciliation. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.798. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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16. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth drawing Sarah Malcolm. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.799. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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17. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth painting in Vauxhall Gardens in the presence of Jonathan Tyers. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.800. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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18. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth painting his picture of Capn. Coram for the Foundling Hospital. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.801. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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19. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth solicits his Patron Bishop Hoadley to look over his M.S of ‘Analysis of Beauty’. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.802. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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20. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth making up a portrait of H. Fielding, for a Bookseller, from the features of Garrick who borrowed one of the Author’s wigs for that particular purpose there being no genuine portrait of him. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.803. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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21. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth painting ‘The Ladys last stake’, in the presence of Lord Charlemont. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.804. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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22. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth sitting to Roubeliac for his Bust. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.805. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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23. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth at Old Slaughter’s hobbing with Highmore the painter. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.806. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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The re-emergence of these visual details definitely creates a sense of unity within Smith’s sequence and, at times, also invites a more symbolic reading of Smith’s drawings. As a genre, Smith’s images all represent visual adaptations of Hogarth’s biography. While some of the drawings freely illustrate significant moments in the artist’s life and career, others represent pictorial adaptations of more specific anecdotes. These latter images are, literally, words turned into images. After Smith, other artists were inspired by anecdotes of the life of Hogarth.56 In the nineteenth century, at a time when Hogarth’s reputation as a great moral painter was thriving again, Frith produced Hogarth Before the Commandant at Calais (1851) and Ward Hogarth’s Studio in 1739 (1863).57 In the latter picture, Hogarth is seen hiding with Captain Coram behind Hogarth’s portrait of Coram on the right; the two men are listening to the flattering comments made by visitors and children from the Foundling Hospital, which Coram set up in 1739. Ward’s interpretation of the event stages, and simultaneously underpins, the public’s widespread admiration for the artist during this period, and marks a stark contrast with Smith’s more conventional version of scene 13 (Figure 18), in which Hogarth is seen painting the portrait of Coram who sits on an elevated pedestal in the background of the drawing. In contrast to Ward’s biographical painting, Frith’s earlier picture illustrates a specific anecdote from the life of Hogarth, an anecdote which is recounted for the first time in Nichols’s Biographical Anecdotes of 1781 (the event is also reported by Hogarth himself, in his ‘autobiographical notes’).58 It reads: Soon after the peace of Aix la Chapelle, he went over to France, and was taken into custody at Calais, while he was drawing the gate of that town, a circumstance which he has recorded in his picture, intituled, ‘O the Roast Beef of Old England !’ published March 26, 1749. He was actually carried before the governor as a spy, and, after a very strict examination, committed a prisoner to Grandsire, his landlord, on his promising that Hogarth should not go out of his house till it was to embark for England. (BA 31)

Though inspired by the same anecdote, Frith’s picture represents a visual sequel to Hogarth’s ‘Gate of Calais’. In Frith’s picture, Hogarth is seen standing behind a barrier among the common people, intensely looking at the haughty and affected French officials who have arrested him. Some of the characters in the crowds, including the friar, the tall French sentinel, 56 Christine Riding, ‘Introducing Hogarth: Past and Present’, in Mark Hallett and Christine Riding, Hogarth (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), 35–37. 57 Mark Hallett, Hogarth (London: Phaidon, 2000), 321. 58 See BA 31, as well as William Hogarth’s ‘Autobiographical Notes’, in The Analysis of Beauty (1955), 227.

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24. John Thomas Smith, Hogarth having been followed by Barry and a friend was caught backing a boy to fight purposely to catch his fearful countenance. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.807. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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25. John Thomas Smith, The Eleventh hour. Pen and sepia wash. B1975.3.808. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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and Hogarth himself already appear in ‘The Gate of Calais’ (in the latter picture, Hogarth is seen on the far left sketching the gate, a portrait that he ironically describes to be ‘tolerably like’).59 In Frith’s picture, Hogarth is not pictured as sketching, but the intensity of his look suggests that observation is second nature to him. Clearly, from their initial appearance in 1780, the anecdotes that Nichols inserted in his Biographical Anecdotes went on to have lives of their own. Extracted from their original narrative context, these stories developed into pictures that contributed significantly towards shaping and propagating Hogarth’s artistic image from the late eighteenth century onwards—the image of a highly original, talented, hard-working, and yet sometimes forgetful individual, who shrewdly observed the world around him, presenting it as a stage on which characters performed the comedies and tragedies of human life. This intermedial development from printed words into images on canvas definitely underlined the close connection between life and art––a connection, we have seen, which lay at the core of art-biographical writing from the Renaissance onwards. Interestingly, Hogarth was not the only British painter whose personal and biographical reputation connected intimately with a particular genre. Gainsborough’s posthumous fame, too, was highly contingent upon a specific generic form: the sketch. As will be shown in the next chapter, the sketch recurrently resurfaced in discussions of Gainsborough in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shaping his posthumous reputation. In both cases, these two genres, which became increasingly popular by the turn of the century, both as literary and artistic forms, contributed to shaping the lives of individual painters, while at the same time promulgating typical aspects of British aesthetics. 59

Hogarth ‘Autobiographical Notes’, 228.

5 Thomas Gainsborough Life in a Sketch, Sketch of a Life J’aimerois mieux avoir fait l’histoire des —— qui n’a pas plus de dix pages, que la belle, l’admirable, l’immortelle histoire de —— qui a dix gros volumes. (Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle1) Reynolds & Gainsborough Blotted & Blurred One against the other & Divided all the English World between them. (William Blake2)

^

In July 1788, a weak Thomas Gainsborough gathered his last energies to write a letter to Sir Joshua Reynolds begging him to ‘come once under my Roof and look at my things, my Woodman you never saw, if what I ask more is not . . . disagreeable to your feeling, that I may have the honor to speak to you’.3 Gainsborough regarded the single, contemplative figure of The Woodman as his chef-d’œuvre and his desire to show it to his most serious artistic rival was no doubt very strong. The tone of his letter, however, was humble and reconciliatory. He confessed that ‘I can from a sincere Heart say that I always admired and sincerely loved> Sir Joshua Reynolds’.4 The shaky and irresolute scrawl which characterized this letter was in great contrast with the artist’s previous missives, which all revealed a much more flowing and authoritative handwriting.5 Gainsborough had visibly lost the full control and creative energy of his pen. Death, it

1 Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle, Mes pensées; ou Le qu’en dira-t-on (1752), ed. Claude Lauriol (Geneva: Droz, 1997), 237 2 William Blake, William Blake’s Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley Jr, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), i. 1450. 3 John Hayes (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough (New Haven: Yale University Press 2001), 176. 4 5 Ibid. Ibid., p. xxv.

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seemed, was not far away. A month or so after writing his letter to Reynolds, on 2 August 1788, Gainsborough died. At his own request, Gainsborough’s funeral was a private affair attended only by a handful of friends whom the artist most respected. Six artists were pallbearers: the architect Sir William Chambers, Benjamin West, the engraver Francesco Bartolozzi, Paul Sandby, the miniaturist Samuel Cotes, and Joshua Reynolds himself. From the obituary published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in August 1788, we learn that Gainsborough wished to be buried ‘near the grave of his friend Mr. [Joshua] Kirby’ and ‘that a stone, without either arms or ornament, might be placed over him; inscribed with his bare name; and containing space for the names of such of his family who, after his death, might wish to take up their abode with him’.6 Gainsborough’s desire to rest among those closest to him, and his request for an unadorned gravestone, was consonant with the unassuming and unaffected image with which he was associated during his lifetime. In comparison to Reynolds’s own elaborate state funeral––‘one of the most important funerals of late eighteenth-century London’, according to Richard Wendorf––Gainsborough’s final moments appeared, in contrast, to be rather modest.7 The names of Gainsborough and Reynolds have frequently been coupled together, each painter being seen as a foil for the other.8 When placed side by side, the life and art of these two men inevitably reveal many differences, though there are also many similarities. Reynolds has conventionally been presented as a painter who carefully and strategically managed his private and professional existence in order to be part of ‘the great stream of life’, a position which did not deviate ‘to any significant extent from accepted models of decorum or taste’.9 Indeed, Reynolds’s selfconstructed character was ‘formed in accordance with contemporary ideals of the civilised man who practised the art of pleasing’.10 Reynolds’s preoccupation with his self-image was so intense that he entrusted his own posthumous reputation to the hands of his closest friends, including James Boswell, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone, among others. However, the literary portraits that these men produced did not always match their subjects’ lofty biographical expectations. Boswell famously 6

The Gentleman’s Magazine (1788), 755–6. Richard Wendorf, After Sir Joshua (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 3. For a comparison between Gainsborough’s and Reynolds’s funerals, see also Gainsborough and Reynolds: Contrasts in Royal Patronage (London: The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 1994), 9. 8 Andrew Kennedy, ‘Blotting and Blurring One against the Other’, Oxford Art Journal, 25 (2002), 106–18. 9 10 Ibid. 107. Ibid. 7

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remarked that ‘Sir Joshua was indeed a man of pleasing and various conversations, but he had not those prominent features which can be seized like Johnson’s’.11 Burke, too, several years after Reynolds’s death, observed that Sir Joshua was ‘timid’ in society, and that in his intellectual life he betrayed a propensity for generalizing and for ‘reducing everything to one System’ that could not be supported by what Burke called ‘the variety of principles which operate in the human mind and in every human Work’.12 These remarks were not critical of Reynolds, nor were they offensive, but, understandably, they were not as complimentary and gratifying as Reynolds may have wished them to be since they portrayed him as an unexciting biographical subject whose intellectual methods were questionable. In the end, it was James Northcote who, in 1819, wrote the first substantial account of Reynolds’s life and career.13 Northcote had been Reynolds’s assistant for five years and had gained the privilege of seeing his master in a more private environment. Reynolds, however, never regarded Northcote as a close friend, very much to the latter’s annoyance. Henry Fuseli harshly stated that, while he was on close personal terms with Reynolds, Northcote was ‘considered as little better than his pallette [sic] cleaner’.14 As a result, the biography that grew out of their relationship vacillated between respect and admiration on the one hand, and frustration, even disregard on the other. In comparison with Reynolds, Gainsborough’s public character was less ostentatious and less urban(e)ly cosmopolitan. Gainsborough seemed to be more at ease with his close friends (many of whom did not belong to the British art world) than within the circles of high culture and fashion. Despite his seemingly self-effacing image, Gainsborough was no less tactical in his career. Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone have argued that the artist was far from being the ‘spontaneous and uncalculated’ man that studies have usually portrayed. On the contrary, Gainsborough, like Reynolds, was a shrewd businessman who carefully managed his time and career and knew how to play his cards strategically.15 The Town and 11 Letter from Boswell to Thomas Barnard, Thursday 16 Aug. 1792, in Charles N. Fifer (ed.), The Correspondence of James Boswell with Certain Members of the Club (London: Heinemann, 1976), 371. 12 Thomas W. Copeland et al. (eds), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958–78), ix. 329. 13 James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1819) (London: Cornmarket Press, 1971). 14 David H. Weinglass (ed.), The Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli (Millwood, NY: Kraus International, 1982), 507. 15 Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone (eds), Gainsborough (London: Tate, 2002), 10–25.

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Country Magazine of 1772 published an anonymous piece, likely to have been written by Philip Thicknesse (1753–66), which stated that Gainsborough knew the value of time too well to throw it away upon any one; do you think it reasonable that because you have nothing else to do here, but to be with him, that he should be idle for your indulgence? He that takes up G’s time, robs him in reality: if you choose to see him, sit to him, and then he does not lose by your company—depend upon it, unless you have some business with him, you will never see him again.16

Countering the idea that his art was purely an expression of his natural and impulsive personality and temperament, and that his landscapes were driven only by a love of nature, Rosenthal has also shown that Gainsborough astutely marketed his career within the terms of the dominant culture of the age, namely the culture of sensibility. What is more, like Reynolds, Gainsborough also resorted to the press and to friends in order to bolster his artistic reputation. Thicknesse, who for a while counted among such friends, published in 1770 a work entitled Sketches and Characters of the Most Eminent and Most Singular Persons Now Living in which he asserted that ‘with a black lead pencil [Gainsborough] is equal to any of the greatest Masters of Antiquity’; Thicknesse also claimed that Gainsborough ‘exceeded all the modern Portrait Painters, being the only one, who paints the mind (if we may be allowed the expression) equally as strong as the countenance!’17 The anonymous Thicknesse also declared in the Town and Country Magazine that ‘Mr. G. is one of those extraordinary genius who appear once in an age––his pictures may not be said so properly to be like the originals as to be the people themselves.’ Such praise of Gainsborough’s art resurfaced in later works. The Ear-Wig; or An Old Woman’s Remarks on the Present Exhibition of Pictures of the Royal Academy, published in 1781, commented on Gainsborough’s A Shepherd, observing that this painting was ‘by far the finest picture in the Exhibition. In point of drawing, colouring, composition, choice of nature, and every other requisite to constitute a complete work of art, this performance is unrivalled.’18 Such laudatory comments on Gainsborough’s art and talents were not isolated, but were part of a larger body of other texts that helped construct Gainsborough’s living reputation as one of the most significant and influential painters of his day. 16

The Town and Country Magazine (1772), 486. Philip Thicknesse, Sketches and Characters of the Most Eminent and Singular Persons Now Living (Bristol: John Wheble, 1770), 95–6. 18 The Earwig; or An Old Woman’s Remarks on the Present Exhibition of Pictures of the Royal Academy (London: Printed for G. Kearsly, 1781), 13–14. 17

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Despite comparable careers, the success of both Gainsborough and Reynolds was not followed by similar responses from biographers. Reynolds’s death generated numerous accounts, some of which, we have seen, had been commissioned by the president himself. Gainsborough’s demise, on the other hand, did not produce any keen reactions among life-writers. Unlike Reynolds, Gainsborough’s self-fashioning and self-promoting tactics did not extend beyond the grave: there is no record of Gainsborough courting his future biographers. Most texts devoted to him were related in minor genres, consisting of short articles, brief sketches, and hastily published pamphlets. Astonishingly, the first fully fledged biography of the artist appeared only in the second half of the nineteenth century and was written by George Williams Fulcher.19 What is more, many of those texts that were published were far from laudatory. They were shaped and affected by personal politics and portrayed the painter in ways that neither matched nor balanced his personal and artistic popularity. Despite this relative paucity of major biographical accounts, Gainsborough’s textual lives present an interesting case for many of them revolve around the genre of the sketch. By focusing on a wide variety of different narratives, including texts on the margins of the biographical form, this chapter explores the significance of the sketch––both in its visual and literary aspects––as a way of shaping and simultaneously undermining Gainsborough’s artistic and biographical reputation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As I will show, the recurrence of the sketch in the construction of Gainsborough’s posthumous life was also part of a much wider discourse on the quintessential nature of British art. EARLY ACCOUNTS: SKETCH AND SKETCH The anonymous obituary printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine, published in the weeks following Gainsborough’s death in August 1788, counted among the earliest tributes to the artist.20 Like many other obituaries published at the time, the piece provides succinct information about Gainsborough’s personal and professional life. After briefly explaining the reasons for the artist’s demise (‘His death was occasioned by a wen in the neck, which grew internally, and so large as to obstruct the passages’), the article follows the painter from Sudbury (Suffolk), where Gainsborough was born, to various other places, including Ipswich, Bath, and London, where the artist spent most of his successful career as a 19 George Williams Fulcher, Life of Thomas Gainsborough (London: Longman, Brown, 1856). 20 The Gentleman’s Magazine (Aug. 1788), 753–6.

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landscape and portrait painter. The obituary also comments on Gainsborough’s acquaintance with Thicknesse, on the painter’s fondness for music and, not least, underlines Gainsborough’s humane qualities (‘that generous heart, whose strongest propensities were to relieve the genuine claims of poverty’). In addition to containing a detailed description of Gainsborough’s funeral, the obituary makes influential remarks on Gainsborough’s artistic style. It underlines the painter’s love of Nature and his propensity to depict rural subjects: ‘Nature was his teacher’, the obituarist notes, ‘and the wood of Suffolk his academy. Here he would pass in solitude his mornings, in making a sketch of an antiquated tree, a marshy brook, a few cattle, a shepherd and his flock, or any other accidental object that were presented.’21 This last statement epitomizes much of the posthumous criticism on Gainsborough’s aesthetics, informed as it was by notions of the picturesque and of the sketch.22 The sketch as a form of expression is indeed at the centre of the obituarist’s critical evaluation of Gainsborough’s pictures. The writer believes that the accuracy of the artist’s portraits does not originate in the precise rendering of individual features, but rather in the ‘indecision’ of Gainsborough’s ‘outlines’. When viewed at a proper distance, the critic believes, the artist’s ‘scratches’ would form a coherent whole and take the appearance of ‘eyebrows or nostrils’. Rather than being considered a flaw, this lack of precision in the painter’s handling is the source of his works’ superiority: it allows Gainsborough to show his sitters’ faces ‘in more points of view than one’ and to give ‘not merely the map of the face, but the character, the soul of the original’. The evaluation of Gainsborough’s art in the Gentleman’s Magazine–– and in particular its praise of the sketch––reflected contemporary rhetoric of literary and artistic creation. The sketch certainly held a prominent place in the aesthetic and critical discourse of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.23 By then, the sketch was no longer considered such a marginal, private, and personal form, a preparatory work for a finished painting or text, such as it had been viewed until the mideighteenth century. On the contrary, it was now seen as a complete and self-contained work. At a time when theories of genius and originality 21

Ibid. See esp. David A. Brenneman, ‘Thomas Gainsborough and the Picturesque Sketch’, Word and Image, 13 (1997), 392–404. 23 Richard C. Sha, The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 1–72, and Wendelin Guentner, ‘British Aesthetic Discourse, 1780–1830: The Sketch, the Non Finito, and the Imagination’, Art Journal, 52/2 (1993), 40–7, and Wendelin Guentner, ‘The Sketch as Literary Metaphor: The British Romantic Travel Narrative’, European Romantic Review, 7 (1997), 125–33. 22

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were being developed, the roughness, irregularity, spontaneity, and authenticity of the sketch demanded that it be revealed publicly. It was considered to embody the artist’s first thoughts, at the very origins of the creative process. Because of its being composed so spontaneously, the sketch was also thought to be morally a sincere form of expression, a proof of absolute truth and honesty. Richard Sha has demonstrated that the enormous ideological power of the sketch resided in its denying rhetoricity; that is, Sha explains, the sketch was able to convince audiences that ‘less is more’, that ‘less finish, less labour, and less fastidiousness to form is more aesthetic, more truthful’, and more meaningful.24 The unfinished quality of the sketch, its incapacity of determination and resolution was considered as positive. The sketch was particularly valued because it could absorb and stimulate the beholder’s imagination. The latter could fill the sketch’s incompleteness and thereby find in this participatory role some aesthetic pleasure.25 Wendelin Guentner has shown that the sketch’s intrinsic quality of rousing the viewer’s imagination was already given high importance in the theory of the sublime by Edmund Burke, who in 1757 wrote that ‘[i]n unfinished sketches of drawing, I have often seen something which pleased me beyond the best finishing’.26 After Burke, other writers celebrated the sketch. William Gilpin gave it central importance to his theory of the picturesque, especially in his Three Essays of 1792 as well as his Observations on Several Parts of England (3rd edition, 1808).27 In his writings, Gilpin, like Burke, praised the incompleteness of the sketch, its ‘non-finito’, and its power to trigger the beholder’s imagination. He also applauded its ideological transparency. Being executed ‘on the spot’ and spontaneously, the sketch, according to Gilpin, was not imbued with any principle or dogmatic creed. However, as Wendelin Guentner points out, Gilpin made a clear distinction between an ‘adorned sketch’ and a ‘primitive sketch’ in that the latter consisted of the premier jet, the very first spontaneous version of a drawing without any subsequent ornamentation and embellishment, whereas the former

24

Sha, Visual and Verbal Sketch, 3 and 1 respectively. See also Ernest H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 2002), 194–6. 26 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 77, quoted in Guentner, ‘British Aesthetic Discourse’, 41. 27 On Gilpin and the sketch, see Sha, Visual and Verbal Sketch, 54–65, as well as Guentner, ‘British Aesthetic Discourse’, 42–6. The essay in his Three Essays is entitled ‘The Art of Sketching Landscape’. Gilpin also wrote Two Essays: One, On the Author’s Mode of Executing Rough Sketches; The Other, On the Principles on Which They Are Composed (London, 1804). 25

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represented an improved version of the first draft, where light and composition had been readjusted.28 The assessment of Gainsborough’s style made in the Gentleman’s Magazine and its remarks on the imaginative power of the painter’s ‘unfinished’ faces clearly reflected contemporary views on aesthetics. On a biographical level, the piece was instrumental in constructing and propagating Gainsborough’s image as one of the most original and gifted artists of his day. Parts of the obituary were republished in the European Magazine of August 1788, and in other books and journals. Unlike the Gentleman’s Magazine piece, however, the European Magazine article did much to deflate the idea that Gainsborough was a man ill at ease with the world of letters. Whereas the Gentleman’s Magazine maintained that ‘Gainsborough was not a man of reading’,29—and that his ‘figure of Lavinia [i.e. the Milkmaid]’ could not have been ‘painted from Thomson’s character’; that it was instead ‘a little simple character from his own imagination’—the European Magazine contributor instead asserted that Gainsborough’s ‘Epistolary Correspondence possessed the ease of Swift, and the nervous force of Bolingbroke;––and a selection of his letters would offer to the world as much originality and beauty, as is even to be traced in his Painting!’ The same contributor also stated that in conversation Gainsborough’s ‘ideas and expression discovered a mind full of rich fancies and elegant truths’.30 After the appearance of such obituaries, many subsequent articles on Gainsborough were produced by those keen to associate their names publicly with that of the artist. Their motives for doing so could vary significantly. Reynolds offered a homage which was largely predictable, and no doubt anticipated. His annual discourse at the Royal Academy in December 1788––the first to be delivered after Gainsborough’s death–– was in part intended as a tribute to his friend and rival. The president started his fourteenth discourse with complimentary remarks, describing Gainsborough as ‘one of the greatest ornaments of our Academy’ and claiming that if ‘ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the Art, among the very first of that rising name’.31 Careful to obey the didactic purpose of the annual discourse and not to venture into personal matters, the president made clear that the object of his address was ‘not so much to praise or to blame [Gainsborough], as to draw from his excellencies and 28 29 30 31

Guentner, ‘British Aesthetic Discourse’, 43–4. The Gentleman’s Magazine (Aug. 1788), 755. The European Magazine (Aug. 1788), 119. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 248.

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defects, matter of instruction to the Students in our academy’.32 He spoke of the artist’s technical abilities, his habit of bringing back ‘into his painting-room, stumps of trees, weeds, and animals of various kinds’ and of designing them ‘not from memory, but immediately from the objects’; he also mentioned Gainsborough’s ‘custom of painting by night’––a technique which Reynolds considered highly advantageous for it allowed Gainsborough to ‘acquire a new and higher perception of what is great and beautiful in Nature’.33 Like the Gentleman’s Magazine obituarist, Reynolds devoted much of his discourse to appraising Gainsborough’s artistic style and manner, especially the ‘slightness’ that characterized his works. The sketch was again at the very centre of the president’s assessment. Yet, this time, Reynolds’s artistic evaluation of Gainsborough’s art was more ambiguous than the Gentleman’s Magazine critic––an ambiguity which exposed Reynolds’s delicate position as Gainsborough’s admirer (yet rival) on the one hand and as the president of the Royal Academy on the other. Although Reynolds did recognize the fluidity of Gainsborough’s brushwork, he nonetheless described his rival’s paintings as the combination and accumulation of ‘all those odd scratches and marks’, as a ‘chaos’, an ‘uncouth and shapeless appearance’, which ‘by a kind of magick’, assumed––‘at a certain distance’––a ‘form’.34 At first glance, Reynolds’s assessment of Gainsborough’s scratchy and sketchy style and of his ‘chaotic’ compositions appears belittling. There are reasons for this: Reynolds’s remarks were aligned to the practices of art as taught at the Royal Academy, which encouraged the production of English art through constant and continued application and effort, and through the careful study of the old masters. In such an institutional context, Gainsborough’s sketchy handling of paint would have come across as an unfinished style, lacking in detail, and hastily produced—not the spontaneous and unadulterated mark of genius. However, Michael Rosenthal has demonstrated that Reynolds’s observations were in fact not so denigratory and that they were part of the president’s strategy to bring Gainsborough back into the ‘academical fold’, as an attempt to rehabilitate his friend into a Royal Academy which he had abandoned.35 Indeed, in his fourteenth discourse, Reynolds adapted to Gainsborough’s style certain observations that Vasari had written of Titian’s handling:

32

33 34 Ibid. Ibid. 251. ibid. 257–8. Michael Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 119–21. 35

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the Works he did about this time, are so full of strokes and spots, after a certain bold Manner, that they seem nothing near, but look very well at a distance. Which Manner of his several Painters endeavouring to imitate, have made very gross, coarse pieces. This way, though it seems easie, is the most laborious of all; but is made to hide the pains of the painter.36

Although seemingly chaotic and disorderly, Titian’s paintings––like Gainsborough’s––were in fact the product of hard work. Seen from a suitable distance, all these ‘strokes and spots’ fell into place and produced astonishing illusionism. Despite the superiority of the Roman school, Vasari was thus ready to grant some merit to the Venetian school, and especially to Titian. Rosenthal demonstrates how Reynolds’s oblique allusion to Titian suggests that Gainsborough’s ‘place in the pantheon equates with the Venetian’s artist’s position in High Renaissance art’37–– a painter who practised outside the academic system, yet whose aesthetic vision and artistic practices deserved to be admired and recognized nonetheless. PHILIP THICKNESSE’S SKETCH: PUBLIC ACCOUNT OF PRIVATE BUSI NESS Like Reynolds, Thicknesse counted among Gainsborough’s earliest biographers. His Sketch of the Life and Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough was issued very soon after its subject’s death in August 1788, and was intended as a tribute to a former friend. Yet, unlike in Reynolds’s case, Thicknesse’s biographical account was also motivated by private ambition and permeated by personal politics: not only did the Sketch allow him to expose some of his subject’s personal flaws, it also enabled him to reveal and bring closure to a quarrel that had long marred his and his wife’s relationship with the painter. In this regard, the sketch as a literary and textual form was particularly suitable for Thicknesse as it allowed him to unveil Gainsborough’s artistic and personal reputation, whilst simultaneously undermining the artist’s character. As a literary form, Thicknesse’s publication of a sketch suited the demands of a literary market ruled by commercialism and productivity. At a time when newspapers, journals, and magazines were proliferating so rapidly, the publication of short literary pieces was particularly convenient.

36 William Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues (London, 1685), 359–60, quoted in Rosenthal, Art of Gainsborough, 120. 37 Rosenthal, Art of Gainsborough, 120.

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Subjects treated had to be brief and quickly assimilable in order to be marketable.38 Biographical sketches and obituaries appeared with increasing regularity in these years and represented an easy way for the professional writer to make money. For Thicknesse, however, the wish to publish a sketch of the life of Gainsborough went far beyond financial considerations and was motivated by his desire to become the painter’s first official biographer. Thicknesse’s eagerness for biographical self-association was not unlike Thomas Tyers’s who, three years earlier, had published a Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson immediately after the author’s death in December 1784. In both cases, the format of these works originated in the speed with which they were composed and published so soon after their subject’s death. The writers’ promptness prevented them from being all-inclusive, a fact of which Tyers was only too aware: ‘The reader is apprized’, he apologized in his account, ‘that this memoir is only a sketch of life, manners, and writings’—‘In every work regard the writer’s end; / For none can compass more than they intend’39—‘It looks forwards and backwards almost at the same time. Like the nightingale in Strada, it hits imperfect accents here and there.’40 Tyers believed that he has worked ‘his little bit of gold . . . into as much gold-leaf as he could’.41 Thicknesse did not offer such apologies. Yet, like Tyers’s, his memorial was far from being comprehensive as it focused more on private business than on issues of style, attribution, and chronology. His evaluations of Gainsborough’s works were expressed only in very general terms. At first sight, Thicknesse’s Sketch of 1788 resumed the complimentary tone of his 1770 Sketches and Characters of the Most Eminent and Most Singular Persons Now Living in which, we saw, he singled out Gainsborough as an unusually gifted artist. In his Sketch, Thicknesse again extolled Gainsborough’s ‘own inimitable pencil’ (SG 3), ‘the powers it possessed’ (SG 3), the ‘truth of his drawings’ (SG 4). Like Reynolds, he also described Gainsborough as the ‘first Artist as a Painter, Britain ever produced’ (SG 3) and affirmed that ‘no man living in this Kingdom, nor do 38 For an account of biographical sketches in a nineteenth-century newspaper, see Barbara Garlick, ‘“The True Principle of Biographical Delineation”: Harriet Martineau’s “Biographical Sketches” in the Daily News’, in Barbara Garlick and Margaret Harris (eds.), Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic: Essays in Honor of P. D. Edwards (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998), 46–61. 39 Tyers is here quoting Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), part II, ll. 255–6. 40 Thomas Tyers, A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson (London, 1785), 13; see also p. 7, ‘There is here neither room nor leisure to ascertain the progress of his publications though, in the idea of Shenstone, it would exhibit the history of his mind and thoughts’, and p. 21: ‘This is not the record-office for his sayings: but a few must be recollected here.’ 41 Ibid. 25.

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I believe in any other, possessed a genius so great, or so universal as Mr. Gainsborough, for whether on Portraits, Landscapes, modelling, or Mechanics, all his doings were equally excellent’ (SG 4–5). After such gracious introductory remarks, the account becomes more factual and explains the artist’s beginnings in Suffolk: ‘Mr. Gainsborough’, Thicknesse writes, like the best Poets, was born a Painter, for he told me, that during his Boyhood, though he had no Idea of becoming a Painter then, yet there was not a Picturesque clump of Trees, nor even a single Tree of beauty, no, nor hedge row, stone, or post, at the corner of the Lanes, for some miles round about the place of his nativity, that he had not so perfectly in his mind’s eye, that had he known he could use a pencil, he could have perfectly delineated. I say had he known he could use a pencil, for he could, and did use one the first time he took it up in such a manner, that the first effort he made with one, is of a group of Trees now in my possession, and they are such as would not be unworthy of a place at this day, in one of his best landscapes. At the same time that he gave me this, his maiden drawing, it was accompanied with a great many sketches of Trees, Rocks, Shepherds, Plough-men, and pastoral scenes, drawn on slips of paper, or old dirty letters, which he called his riding School, and which have all been given, borrowed, or taken away from me, except his first wonderful Sketch, which would have been gone also, but that I had pasted it in a M.S. bound book of music, composed and written by my affectionate and departed brother. (SG 5–7)

This lengthy passage contains in a nutshell different elements central to Thicknesse’s portrait of the artist. Significantly, the extract once again associates Gainsborough with the sketch and the picturesque (the ‘clump of Trees’, the ‘hedge row, stone, or post, at the corner of the Lanes’) as well as with more pastoral scenes containing ‘Shepherds’, ‘Plough-men’, and ‘maidens’. It also defines more precisely Gainsborough’s artistic practice, his direct observation of Nature as well as his rapid and agile use of the pencil. Like other writers, Thicknesse’s posthumous account helped construct Gainsborough’s image as a sincere painter, a man more at ease in the natural world than in London’s fashionable society. In addition, the passage introduces Gainsborough as a modest and unambitious character. Unlike many other contemporary portrayals of painters––including Reynolds, Morland, and West––in which artistic vocation and intuitive calling play an important role, the painter is here described as being unaware of his own artistic talents: ‘he had no Idea of becoming a Painter’. Beyond any artistic considerations, the significance of this passage lies in its placing the sketch at the very centre of the relationship between Thicknesse and Gainsborough: not only does the biographer underline the fact that the first effort Gainsborough made with one pencil is of ‘a

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group of Trees now in my possession’, but he also adds that he was able to retain Gainsborough’s ‘first wonderful Sketch’ and that he pasted it ‘in a M.S. bound book of music’—an allusion perhaps to Gainsborough’s passion for music as well as to the musical quality of certain of his compositions.42 Thicknesse’s metaphorical appropriation of his subject, as well as frequent references to himself in the account, is characteristic of the whole work. Indeed, as one reads on, one becomes gradually aware that Thicknesse’s Sketch is as much a portrait of himself as it is a portrait of Gainsborough. There were specific reasons for Thicknesse’s autobiographical selfstaging. Throughout his life, Thicknesse––a man who had made himself known for being very argumentative and confrontational––praised himself for having discovered Gainsborough and for having provided him with financial help at a time when the artist most needed it, that is, at the beginning of his career. It was he who had persuaded the artist to leave his native Sudbury for Bath and who had encouraged him to produce more ambitious works of portraiture. Thicknesse’s ambition to become Gainsborough’s most trusted and most reliable biographer was thus not unexpected. His pride at having detected Gainsborough’s talents comes across in the very first paragraph of his Sketch: If an intimate acquaintance, and a most affectionate regard for upwards of thirty five years, with the lately departed, excellent, and first Artist as a Painter, Britain ever produced, could be deemed a qualification to write memoirs of his life and Paintings, so far, and no further, I am competent to the task I have undertaken; but to do Mr. Gainsborough justice, it requires a pen, equal to his own inimitable pencil, to hold forth the powers it possessed, or the tender feelings of his heart, a task I am by no means adequate to, but as I can with truth boast, that I was the first man who perceived; though through clouds of bad colouring, what an accurate eye he possessed, and the truth of his drawings, and who dragged him from the obscurity of a Country Town, at a time that all his neighbours were as ignorant of his great talents, as he was himself; I may justly claim the pleasure, (or vanity it may be called) of holding forth his merits, since they have been seen, admired, and acknowledged by all lovers of the Arts, and envied even by the first artists his Cotemporarys; for tho’ many may excel in fine outlines, good likenesses, decorated with chaste, elegant, and high finished borrowed drapery in portrait painting, I will venture to affirm, that no man living in this Kingdom, nor do I believe in any other, possessed a genius so great, or so

42 My emphasis. For an analysis of Gainsborough and music, see David A. Brenneman, The Critical Response to Thomas Gainsborough’s Painting: A Study of the Contemporary Perception and Materiality of Gainsborough’s Art (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1995), 110–36.

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universal as Mr. Gainsborough, for whether on Portraits, Landscapes, modelling, or Mechanics, all his doings were equally excellent. (SG 3–5)

The tone of this passage is symptomatic of the entire biographical account, especially in the way in which it stages the biographer’s position towards his subject. Revealingly, Thicknesse starts his Sketch with reference to himself, rather than to Gainsborough. Such a reversal of biographical priority––one which was also to characterize Boswell’s Life of Johnson–– is sustained throughout the extract. Thicknesse’s allusion to his artistic discovery is made at the painter’s own expense: not only was Thicknesse alone able to detect and decipher Gainsborough’s talents, he also held the view that Gainsborough ‘himself’ was quite unaware of any such talents. There is no doubt that the quality of this passage is congratulatory: Gainsborough was for Thicknesse a painter with an ‘inimitable pencil’ and ‘an accurate eye’; a ‘universal’ ‘genius’ excelling in many different artistic genres. At the same time, however, Thicknesse’s narrative is also extremely self-deferential. Ironically, his praise strongly enhances his own finding: the greater the artist, the more merit to the man who spotted his supposedly hidden talents. The way in which the biographer allegedly apologizes for his inadequacy to compose the biographical account is equally well-crafted, for the sentence is structured so that it first refers to, and puts stress on, a ‘pen, equal to’ Gainsborough’s ‘own inimitable pencil’, and only then points to the biographer’s own incompetence. Even though Thicknesse is here confessing his incapacity to equal, in words, the artist’s painterly skills, later in the Sketch, he makes direct comparisons between his own literary abilities and Gainsborough’s artistic style. Having related the major events of his subject’s life, he concludes in a pseudoapologetic manner that ‘[t]his is a hasty sketch of my departed friend and his family, written in one day and finished in one respect only, like his best pictures, i.e. at one sitting’ (SG 49). This statement presents Thicknesse as a spontaneous writer able to work instinctively and capable, like Gainsborough, of reaching the essence of his subject. This came as no minor declaration at a time when the reading public’s opinions on the learned and natural poet (Milton and Shakespeare respectively) were running high, especially since Johnson’s ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765) had painted a praiseworthy picture of the playwright. The early part of Thicknesse’s account describes the painter’s first move to London. It also relates the circumstances of the famous episode in which the biographer first met Gainsborough: Thicknesse, who had just been appointed Lieutenant Governor of Land Guard Fort, was ‘walking with the then printer and editor of the Ipswich journal, in a very pretty town garden of his’ (SG 9). It was in this garden, we learn, that Thicknesse

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perceived ‘a melancholy faced countryman, with his arms locked together, leaning over the garden wall’ (SG 9–10). Tricked by this ‘inimitable deception’ (SG 10)––the figure turned out not to be a human being but a ‘wooden man painted upon a shaped board’––Thicknesse was not resentful but, on the contrary, deeply impressed. He immediately obtained the artist’s address and called at his house whereupon he berated Gainsborough for having imposed upon him ‘a shadow instead of a substance’ (SG 11). It was in the artist’s studio that Thicknesse also noticed ‘several portraits truly drawn, perfectly like, but stiffly painted, and worse coloured’ as well as a series of ‘little landscapes, and drawings’ which ‘charmed’ him immensely and gave him ‘infinite delight’ (SG 11)–– ‘Madam Nature, not Man, Thicknesse remarks, ‘was then his only study, and he seemed intimately acquainted with that beautiful old lady’ (SG 11). After describing their first encounter, the Sketch gathers pace and moves on to relate the two men’s friendship and partnership. Although Thicknesse is complimentary towards Gainsborough, he also constantly stresses his own self-importance and merit for having made Gainsborough the famous painter he later became: ‘I believe . . . it was what I had said about the landscape, and Thomas Peartrees head’, he writes, ‘which first induced Mr. Gainsborough to suspect (for he only suspected it) that he had something more in him, which might be fetched out’ (SG 13). Inescapably, the autobiographical structure of Thicknesse’s text–– most of it is related in the first person singular––grants priority to biographer. His subject is cast only in a secondary role. The impact of such a shift in moral priority between the two men is enhanced by ‘a very singular and extraordinary circumstance’ (SG 17) residing at the core of Thicknesse’s narrative. The friendly and congratulatory tone employed by Thicknesse at the beginning of his account is gradually punctuated by uncomplimentary remarks towards the painter: ‘I believe I may venture to say’, he writes, ‘that all great genius’s are a little allied to a kind of innocent madness, and there certainly was only a very thin membrane which kept this wonderful man within the pale of reason’ (SG 18). This ‘circumstance’, we learn, arose between the artist, Thicknesse, and his wife, and revolved around a portrait of the biographer. More precisely, this likeness was part of a bargain between the biographer’s wife, Mrs Ann Thicknesse (née Ford) and Gainsborough and was intended as a pendant to her own portrait. Knowing how much the painter had fallen ‘in love’ with her seventeenth-century viola da gamba, ‘Mrs Thicknesse told him he deserved the instrument for his reward, and desired his acceptance of it, but said at your leisure, give me my husband’s picture to hang by the side of my own’ (SG 22). Gainsborough undertook Ann Ford’s portrait in 1760, soon after he had moved with his family to Bath.

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His passion for music no doubt stimulated his desire to depict the sitter, who was by then regarded as a uniquely talented virtuoso on the English guitar and the viola da gamba, as well as an excellent singer. Gainsborough’s famous portrait, executed in a Van Dyck-esque style, places music at the centre of the composition and depicts Ann Ford, her English guitar on her lap, leaning against a table on which musical scores are piled up. The portrait also includes Ford’s viola da gamba in the background, partly covered by the red curtain which functions as a painterly counterpoint to the patterned carpet and a contrast to Ford’s own silvery dress. Gainsborough’s bravura performance of this portrait honoured its sitter. Thus when Ann Ford (who married Thicknesse in September 1762) asked the artist to produce a pendant to her own likeness, she no doubt had in mind a similarly grand composition for her husband. Gainsborough, however, never honoured his promise and never completed the picture. Thicknesse’s first sitting, we learn, was ‘(not above fifteen minutes)’ and it was everything ‘that has ever been done to it’ (SG 17). This episode is veritably the bone of contention between the Thicknesses and the artist and it occupies centre stage in the narrative. The biographer relates the whole quarrel in great detail and describes his frustration at having to deal with a man who showed absolutely no desire to honour his duty as a portrait painter. Obviously, Thicknesse––who clearly considered himself Gainsborough’s discoverer––did not take well to the fact that the artist, by now famous and financially independent, neglected to ever finish the portrait of his patron. Gainsborough’s broken promise takes on particular significance when one realizes that the picture at the centre of the contention remains in the state of a sketch. Indeed, every time Thicknesse mentions his own failed likeness in the narrative, it is to underline its unfinished, uncared-for state. Gainsborough never developed it into the grand, prestigious full-length portrait that Mrs Thicknesse had hoped for. For instance, we are told that the same day the viola da gamba was sent to the painter by Mrs Thicknesse, Gainsborough ‘stretched a canvass, called upon [Thicknesse] to attend, and he soon finished the head, rubbed in the dead colouring, of the full length, painted [his] Newfoundland dog at [his] feet; and then it was put by, and no more said of it, or done to it’ (SG 23). When ‘after some considerable time’ Mrs Thicknesse visited the painter to see her husband’s portrait, it had remained untouched and ‘had something of the appearance (for want of light and shade in the drapery) of a drowned man ready to burst, or rather of a ragged body which had been blown about upon a gibbet on Hounslow Heath, for the dog’s head, and his masters, were the only parts that betrayed the pencil of so great a master’ (SG 24). The final blow came a while later, when the Thicknesses, once again calling upon

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the painter and finally hoping to see the desired portrait, were instead presented with ‘Mr. Fischer’s portrait, painted at full length, compleatley finished, in scarlet and gold, like a Colonel of the foot guards’ (SG 24). Their disappointment was all the more intense as the couple knew that Fischer’s likeness had not only been ‘begun and completed’ after Thicknesse’s, but it had still not ‘been paid for’. For a man who considered his own role so important in the promotion of Gainsborough’s career, especially in its early stages, the blow was too much. After conceding defeat and realizing that he would never see the final product, Thicknesse explained the true reasons for his disappointment: ‘I did not lament the loss of his finishing strokes to my Portrait’, he confessed, ‘but I grieved that it had ever been began [sic]. . . . and I solemnly assured him, it should never be touched, it had I said been touched enough, and so had I’––whereupon, ‘the subject was dropt’ (SG 29–30). The Thicknesses, however, never succeeded in coming to terms with Gainsborough’s inconsiderate and negligent gesture. Unable to bear the sight of the unfinished portrait (which by then they had retrieved from Gainsborough), they finally decided to return it to the artist, sending it with a card asking him to ‘take his brush, and first rub out the countenance of the truest and warmest friend he ever had, and so done, then blot him forever from his memory’. Gainsborough’s reaction was immediate: upon receipt of that note, we are told, ‘he went directly to London, took a house in Pall-Mall at three hundred pounds a year rent, returned to Bath to pack up his goods and pictures, and sent me a note upon a slip of paper wherein he said. “God bless you and yours, I am going to London in three days”’ (SG 31). The friendship with Thicknesse was over. Thicknesse’s shift in appreciation of Gainsborough between 1770, the date of publication of his first Sketch, and 1788, can be described through the prism of the sketch’s double meaning. For Thicknesse’s narratives crystallize the dialectical tension between ‘finished’ and ‘unfinished’––a tension that was highly debated in contemporary aesthetic and literary discourse, as we have seen above. Whereas the 1770 account lavishes praise on Gainsborough’s artistic facility, extols his sketchy compositions, and describes the painter as a man ‘who paints the mind’, the 1788 text undermines most of the biographer’s initial admiration and respect for his subject (it also contrasts with other, non-biographical criticism of Gainsborough published contemporarily). At the end of the 1788 account, the sketch is indisputably referred to in derogatory terms. In light of the word’s dual meaning, Thicknesse’s remark, already cited above, that ‘[t]his is a hasty sketch of my departed friend and his family, written in one day and finished in one respect only, like his best pictures, i.e. at one sitting’, becomes much more ambiguous. The regret that Thicknesse

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expressed was undoubtedly genuine: his sketch was what it was, a memorial composed swiftly in one sitting, and therefore not to be understood to be a definitive biography (interestingly, the very first paragraph of his text, quoted above, consists of a single sentence only––no doubt a sign of extreme hastiness). However, the subtext of Thicknesse’s work, revolving around the more negative meaning of the term, also expressed his frustration and disillusionment with Gainsborough. The opposition between ‘primitive’ and ‘adorned’ sketch, as discussed by Gilpin, is here gelled in the biographer’s narrative and his supposedly light-handed prose is crafted in such a way as to convey his disappointment in the painter. It is certainly worth noting that the first encounter between Thicknesse and Gainsborough took place with an act of deception (remember the story of the ‘melancholy faced countryman’ Thomas Peartree). There was perhaps no better way for Thicknesse to hint at Gainsborough’s subsequent ‘artistic infidelity’ towards him. Aware of the talent and success of the individual he saw as his protégé, Thicknesse found it hard to accept Gainsborough’s refusal to reciprocate, artistically, the financial and moral support granted to him at the beginning of his career. Deeply offended that the artist had outgrown his own reputation, Thicknesse used literature and the format of the literary sketch as an instrument of biographical appropriation and retaliation. In other words, Thicknesse was paying Gainsborough back, providing only a ‘sketch’ of his life as Gainsborough had produced only a ‘sketch’ of his head. FROM SKETCH TO LIFE Thicknesse’s biographical Sketch of Gainsborough, along with the standards that Reynolds prescribed in his fourteenth discourse, may have contributed to lowering Gainsborough’s reputation after his death. The prices fetched at his posthumous sales were relatively poor and the publication of a set of prints by Joseph and Josiah Boydell in 1797 was surprisingly unsuccessful. Critics, however, were well aware that Thicknesse’s biographical account was far from being comprehensive and that it represented only a partial and biased literary portrait of the artist. Thicknesse’s Sketch was reviewed in the Critical Review for November 1788. In this essay, the critic observed that the work was ‘a narrative of Mr. Thicknesse’s transactions with Mr. Gainsborough’ and that it contained ‘little discrimination of Gainsborough’s talents, and a very short account of the man’. For this very reason, the same critic hoped ‘to receive a much better life of this celebrated painter, if some of his former intimate acquaintance can be prevailed on to transmit a more

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finished picture of him to posterity’.43 The critic’s reference to ‘a more finished picture’ ties up with the debate surrounding Gainsborough’s posthumous reputation in its attempt to define the nature of the painter’s personal artistic style, between unfinished and sketchy on the one hand, and finished and detailed on the other. The commentator’s wish for a more comprehensive biographical portrait of Gainsborough was not immediately realized, though. As has been noted, the first fully fledged life of the artist, by George Williams Fulcher, was published only in 1856. Until then, the vast majority of remarks on Gainsborough appeared in journals or magazines, or as book chapters, as well as in more private documents, most of which were devoted to Gainsborough’s art rather than his life per se. Among such later accounts, some were produced by Gainsborough’s ‘former intimate acquaintance’ but none of them provided a ‘more finished picture’ of their friend. The Exeter musician and composer William Jackson, whom Gainsborough had met in Bath in 1763, made some observations on Gainsborough in his Four Ages (1798) in which he claimed (as did Thicknesse, a decade earlier) that the artist’s character was ‘better known to [him] than to any other person’ and therefore that he would endeavour ‘to divest [himself] of every partiality, and speak of him as he really was’.44 This was far from being the case. Jackson’s observations concerning Gainsborough were highly biased and did not do justice to the painter’s artistic talents. Like Thicknesse, Jackson had an axe to grind and utilized the biographer’s ascendancy over his deceased subject to express, and come to terms with, certain tensions that had affected their relationship. Making some observations on portraiture, Jackson asserted that the ‘first consideration in a portrait, especially to the purchaser, is, that it be a perfect likeness of the sitter—in this respect, [Gainsborough’s] skill was unrivalled—the next point is, that it is a good picture—here, he has as often failed as succeeded. He failed by affecting a thin washy colouring, and a hatching style of pencilling’.45 Jackson’s allusions to Gainsborough’s ‘hatching style’ engaged with Reynolds’s and Thicknesse’s rhetoric on the sketch, viewing it as a flaw in Gainsborough’s painterly execution. During his lifetime, Jackson had also made acerbic remarks on Gainsborough’s interests in music. In the severe tones of a professional, he believed that the painter was ‘too capricious’ to learn any instrument properly, though he admitted that the painter had ‘a nice ear’ and that ‘he could perform an air 43

The Critical Review, 66 (1788), 423. William Jackson, The Four Ages; Together with Essays on Various Subjects (London, 1798). 45 Ibid. 154. 44

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on the fiddle, the guitar, the harpsichord or the flute’.46 Rosenthal has explained that the roots of Jackson’s disaffection with Gainsborough ‘may have been to do with his affiliating himself with German musicians [including Karl Friedrich Abel], thereby undermining the status of those wishing to maintain, as Jackson did, a British tradition’.47 No doubt Jackson’s The Four Ages, like Thicknesse’s Sketch, represented a very partial account of Gainsborough and constructed an image of the painter that highly contrasted with evaluations made of him during his lifetime. Notwithstanding the presence of such spiteful texts, the early nineteenth century finally saw the production of much more positive accounts of Gainsborough’s life and works. The 1829 edition of Pilkington’s Dictionary of Painters described Gainsborough as an ‘excellent’ artist and maintained that his ‘style of execution, as well as his choice of subjects, was original’.48 In the same entry, the author added that ‘[u]pon the whole, we may justly say, that whatever he attempted, [Gainsborough] carried to an excellent degree of excellence’.49 Gainsborough’s contemporary, John Constable, also expressed great admiration for the painter and wrote that, in his early career, he had seen Gainsborough ‘in every hedge and hollow tree’ around Ipswich.50 Constable produced many pictures, including his famous Cornfield (1826), which shared many stylistic and iconographic elements with Gainsborough’s art.51 Allan Cunningham’s Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters (1829–33) sealed Gainsborough’s reputation as one of the most significant and influential painters of contemporary art in Britain. British readers were finally presented with what Fulcher later described as a more ‘reliable narrative of Gainsborough’s life’.52 The main purpose of Cunningham’s account was to set the record straight and to revise the ‘suspicious testimony of avowed enemies and careless friends—and the random notice of some periodical writers’. Cunningham penned a chronological account of Gainsborough in the first volume of his Lives, together with remarks on ‘the early painters’ and biographies of Hogarth, Richard Wilson, and Reynolds. His section concerning Gainsborough went beyond merely assessing the painter’s artistic style to provide information on 46

Quoted in William Vaughan, Gainsborough (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 93. Rosenthal, Art of Gainsborough, 77. 48 Matthew Pilkington, A General Dictionary of Painters, 2 vols (London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, 1829), i. 373 and 374 respectively. 49 Ibid. 375. 50 John Constable’s Correspondence, ed. and with an intr. and notes by R. B. Beckett ([Ipswich, Suffolk]: Suffolk Records Society, 1962–9), ii. 16, quoted in Michael Rosenthal, Constable: The Painter and his Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 22. 51 Rosenthal, Constable, 177. 52 Fulcher, Life of Gainsborough, p. iv. 47

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his family history and life in Suffolk. Cunningham had to admit that ‘the penury of contemporary biography’ concerning Gainsborough prevented him from providing a ‘personal history’ of him. Nonetheless, his text included facts and details about the artist’s appearance and character that had never been presented before: ‘In person,’ Cunningham wrote, ‘Gainsborough was eminently handsome, and, when he wished to please, no one had in greater perfection a ready grace and persuasive manners—gifts that cannot be acquired.’53 Lamenting the works of his predecessors, he added that ‘it is to be regretted, that those who wrote anything concerning him were careful in noting his eccentricities, and chronicling his absurdities— forgetting much that was noble and excellent in the man’. Cunningham was certainly at pains to undermine and deflate the impact of Thicknesse’s and Jackson’s unfavourable accounts. Much of his chapter elucidated the roots of Thicknesse’s malignant narrative towards the painter: ‘It is not unusual’, he observed, ‘to see a friend of this fashion marching triumphantly before genius as it is struggling into distinction, and imagining all the while that from his notice the other’s reputation arises. . . . While the artist continued humble the patron was kind; but as he began to assert his own independence, the esteem of the other subsided, and the vain friend became the avowed enemy.’54 Cunningham trenchantly described Thicknesse’s account as an ‘unworthy pamphlet’ and thought that both he and Jackson had ‘little minds’ that had retained only ‘little things’. In contrast to Thicknesse and Jackson, the Scot did not use biography as a vehicle for solving personal feuds, conflicts, and jealousies. On the contrary, his biographical chapter on Gainsborough was much more ambitious and was part of a wider and larger scale project aimed at (re) defining and promoting the typicality and superiority of British art. His references and allusions to Gainsborough’s sketches were not calculated derogatorily to undermine the artist’s talents and reputation. Rather, they were part of a wider aesthetic and critical discourse devoted to the quintessential nature of British painters. Cunningham saw Gainsborough’s art and pictures––especially his landscapes––as most typical of British identity. ‘The chief works of Gainsborough are not what is usually called landscape’, he wrote, ‘for he had no wish to create gardens of paradise, and leave them to the sole enjoyment of the sun and breeze’. On the contrary, Cunningham believed that The wildest nooks of his woods have their living tenants, and in all his glades and his vallies we see the sons and daughters of men. A deep human 53 Allan Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 6 vols (London: John Murray, 1829–33), i. 342–3. 54 Ibid. 324.

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sympathy unites us with his pencil, and this is not lessened because all its works are stamped with the image of old England. His paintings have a national look. He belongs to no school; he is not reflected from the glass of man, but from that of nature. He has not stepped his landscapes in the atmosphere of Italy, like Wilson, nor borrowed the postures of his portraits from the old masters, like Reynolds. No academy schooled down into uniformity and imitation the truly English and intrepid spirit of Gainsborough.55

The celebration of the naturalism of British art, as expressed here by Cunningham, had become a national issue by the early nineteenth century. It was often seen as the expression of both the Protestant spirit and the enquiring, empirical mind of the Anglo-Saxon.56 Cunningham’s defence of Gainsborough’s natural landscapes was also a critique against Reynolds’s own vision of British painting. For Reynolds had always looked up to foreign schools, especially the Italian, and sought to combine their qualities in order to produce an art that expressed eternal and universal values. In contrast, Cunningham saw the human and humane dimension of art in the very locality of British scenes and genres, including ‘lower’ genres like landscapes. On a biographical level, the significance of Cunningham’s project lay in the model that had inspired it. Against all expectations, Cunningham did not, as the title suggests, take Vasari’s Vite (Lives) as his inspiration but rather the literary example provided by Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–81). Peter Cunningham recounts in the introduction to his 1854 edition how Johnson’s Lives––a ‘cheap but highly-prized acquisition’ purchased by his father in Edinburgh and ‘gained by the sweat of the brow’––produced a ‘good work (the Lives of the British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects)’.57 Throughout his career, Cunningham expressed great admiration for Johnson.58 Like him, he aimed to follow the ‘vicissitudes’ of his subjects’ ‘fortunes’. He approached his lives of artists ‘as representative human experiences’.59 For the first time, then, the lives of British artists, including Gainsborough’s, were put on a par with the private and professional achievements of British poets. They were, at last, given their own biographical pantheon.

55

Ibid. i. 344–5. Vaughan, Gainsborough, 207. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent Poets, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1854), i, pp. xxvi–xxvii. 58 See his Biographical and Critical History of the British Literature of the Last Fifty Years (Paris, 1834), 6. 59 Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 87. 56 57

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The biographical vicissitudes of Gainsborough in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflected the genre’s versatility and potential. Clearly, the artist’s posthumous biographical reputation was shaped by, and depended upon, the whims and agendas of a limited number of individuals who all assumed different positions within society, and towards Gainsborough himself. In each case, the biographical text represented a personal encounter on the page and, for the writer, a means of appropriation. This partly explains why there was such a disparity between Gainsborough’s outstanding fame during his lifetime and his immediate posthumous status. The relatively tame biographical impact that his death generated may also have resided with the fact that the artist was far from being an unusual character. Although portrayed as an extraordinarily gifted individual, Gainsborough was never depicted as an eccentric man. In contrast, the next chapter focuses on an altogether different painter, George Morland, a man who unlike Hogarth, Reynolds, and Gainsborough lived defiantly in the margins of society and only followed his own eccentric and private artistic ambitions. In the present study, Morland’s biographical reception represents another instructive case for it again revisits and rearticulates the close interconnections between biography and aesthetics, as well as between life and art, in the discourse of British art at an important stage in its history.

6 George Morland Natural Art, Fictional Life, and Factual Biography The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipp’d them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues. (Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3) His art was Nature. (Pope) Here lies a drunken dog. (George Morland)

Among the painters discussed in this study, George Morland (1763–1804) best illustrates the irregularity and unpredictability of posthumous fame. Despite his contemporary appeal and popularity, and the monographs and essays about him which were published with regularity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, little has been written about him in modern times.1 Unlike Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Reynolds, Morland is today considered a lesser figure in British art, a minor master demoted to the back benches of artistic fashion. This, however, was not the case in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then, Morland was one of the most popular and prolific English painters of his generation. His sentimental genre pictures and his representations of rural and cottage scenes were congenial to contemporary tastes. His art derived from the examples of Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century painters, and in particular from artists like Adriaen Brouwer and David Teniers who specialized in rustic and peasant scenes. Morland’s paintings also shared many aesthetic affinities with those by 1 For a recent discussion of Morland, see esp. Ann Wyburn-Powell, ‘George Morland, 1763–1804: Beyond Barrell: Re-examining Textual and Visual Sources’, British Art Journal, 7/1 (2006), 55–64.

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Gainsborough and Francis Wheatley (1747–1801), both of whom were similarly influential in promoting the English school of painting at the turn of the century. However, unlike Gainsborough and Wheatley––indeed unlike most other British painters active during this period––Morland’s eccentric genius and unconventional personality became the object of unprecedented attention among writers, who published an exceptionally high number of biographies in the immediate aftermath of the artist’s death in 1804. This chapter explores the origins and nature of Morland’s biographical success. Why did the painter become the subject of so many different lives? Why were writers so keen to narrate his existence? First and foremost, Morland’s generally scandalous lifestyle held real interest for many people, not least because the painter had scorned any social norms to which artists usually adhered, while prosecuting his career. No less importantly, I show that Morland’s unusualness was the result of interconnected factors, which affected both the British art market and literature during this period. Indeed, Morland was active at a time when commercial transactions between painters and clients were undergoing significant changes in Britain. The emergence of art dealers played a crucial role in shaping Morland’s dissolute and destitute life. In addition, Morland’s natural genius (a phrase sometimes used by contemporary writers as a means of disguising the painter’s eccentric and morally questionable behaviour) would not have been so widely reported had it not fed into contemporary debates about artistic creation and invention. His appeal as an unconventional painter, again, would have remained virtually unnoticed had there not been a wider interest among readers in literary figures who dwelt on the margins of society. Morland’s eccentricities undoubtedly appealed to contemporary literary sensibilities. Writers narrating his life were keen to exploit certain themes that were becoming progressively popular in British literature during this period––themes that would ultimately develop more fully in the nineteenth century and which still colour our notions of the ‘image of the artist’. MORLAND’S SUCCESS The emergence of the doctrine of sensibility in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was undeniably instrumental in generating a particular interest in Morland’s works. At the same time, his paintings underpinned contemporary nationalistic concerns for they were seen as quintessentially English. Morland’s rural subjects and his representations of the poor appealed to chauvinistic fervour. Ann Wyburn-Powell

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has argued that Morland’s paintings and prints were ‘seen by a contemporary as consonant with feelings of patriotism, national pride, and reassurance’—not, as John Barrell claimed in The Dark Side of the English Landscape (1980), as ‘constituting any form of subversive social comment’.2 Relying on textual and visual evidence, Wyburn-Powell has demonstrated convincingly that Morland’s pictures were viewed by most of his contemporaries ‘as simple and truthful’ and that they ‘duly reflected contemporary notions of virtue, benevolence, and patriotism’.3 In contrast with the view held by most scholars who, along with Barrell, have underlined the political and radical undercurrent of Morland’s rustic images, Wyburn-Powell claims that the artist ‘was simply supplying a ready market with standard, even unreflecting, moralizing tales of thrift, economy, industry and punishment’.4 Although he attended a handful of lessons at the Royal Academy, Morland only rarely presented his works at the institution’s annual exhibitions. In this regard, he eschewed the methods of public self-promotion and self-advertisement which many other contemporary artists were keen to utilize and exploit. Morland’s few contributions to the Royal Academy included the Slave Trade, which he exhibited in 1788, another picture representing a stable scene which he submitted for the exhibition of 1791, and five other artworks put forward for the 1792 show. Although sporadic, his presence was noted by contemporary critics who hailed his works and artistic talents. In May 1792, a reviewer for the Morning Herald singled out two of Morland’s works––‘The Benevolent Sportsman’ and ‘A Farm Yard’––declaring that ‘In the representation of rustic scenes, this Artist stands unrivaled [sic].—These Pictures are equal to any of his former productions, and that is no small praise’.5 Morland’s success also rested on the various galleries that opened during the second half of the eighteenth century and which were devoted exclusively to his work. In 1792, the dealer Daniel Orme inaugurated a very successful gallery in Bond Street, London, which housed over one hundred of Morland’s pictures for sale. About one year later, in c.1793, the engraver John Raphael Smith opened another temporary Morland Gallery, issuing simultaneously A Descriptive Catalogue of Thirty-six Pictures Painted by George Morland.6 Such galleries distinguished themselves from other contemporary galleries, including Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery 2

3 4 Ibid. 62. Ibid. Ibid. The Morning Herald (4 May 1792), 3, quoted in Ellen G. D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’: Prints by John Raphael Smith 1751–1812 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 150. 6 D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’, 150–64. 5

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and Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery––for, as Ellen G. D’Oench has remarked, they focused ‘on a modern artist whose subjects of “rustic nature” found a nationalistic public response before and during the years of the Napoleonic wars’.7 Instead of advocating history paintings of literary or military subjects, these two Morland galleries showcased sentimental pictures and images of common nature that strengthened the ‘ideal of patriotism by emphasizing the association between virtuous conduct and contentment in the lives of the rural poor’.8 More than his contributions to the Royal Academy and the Morland galleries, it is the many engravings that were made after his paintings that spread Morland’s fame in Britain and abroad. Prints after his works had been on the market since 1785.9 Among the engravers who reproduced Morland’s paintings, John Raphael Smith was no doubt the most influential in promoting Morland’s pictures.10 A notice in the Monthly Magazine of May 1782 observed that Smith ‘early discovered the great excellence of Morland, and contributed, perhaps more than any man, to spread the celebrity and secure the success of that eccentric and original genius’.11 The two men probably met in the early 1780s, when Smith produced several mezzotints after portraits by Morland’s father, Henry Robert Morland. Very early on, Smith must have spotted the potential of the younger Morland’s pictures.12 In fact, many contemporary commentators believed Smith to have supplied most of the ideas for Morland’s genre compositions, for Smith was believed to have a good understanding of the art market and a shrewd insight into current aesthetic fashions. One of Morland’s biographers, John Hassell, wrote in his 1806 biography that Smith ‘laid hold of the first opportunity to employ Mr. Morland, and there is reason to believe that his discrimination was well rewarded; for the best of George’s works were published by Mr. Smith, who from long experience was no stranger to the taste of the town, and who probably pointed out to the artist such subjects as he well knew would be most attractive’.13 Smith, however, was not uncritical of Morland’s talents and saw in him 7

Ibid. 154. David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum, 1989), 30, quoted in D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’, 154. 9 Reginald C. Grundy, ‘Some Early Engravings after Morland’, Connoisseur, 45 (May–Aug. 1916), 131–41. 10 In about 1802, Morland produced a sketch of Smith wearing a broad-brimmed hat (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum). 11 The Monthly Magazine, 33 (1 May 1812), 380, quoted in D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’, 180. 12 For a discussion of Smith’s relationship to Morland, see D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’, 103–4. 13 MGM 12, quoted in D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’, 123. 8

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shortcomings and deficiencies which he thought were partly due to the artist’s isolation from polite society and ‘from his indifference to the conventions of acceptable subject matter’.14 His activity as an engraver, however, allowed him to take certain liberties by altering some of Morland’s original designs, often improving on the rustic style of the artist’s original pictures.15 REMEMBERING MORLAND While the large market that existed for Morland’s prints made his name and art known in Britain and other parts of Europe, especially in France and Germany, it also helped generate the rash of biographies and other commemorative pieces that appeared immediately after his death in October 1804.16 William Sandos published his Tears of Nature that same year.17 The title of Sandos’s elegy alluded to the sadness felt by Nature at the loss of her favourite painter: ‘Lament! ye rocks of our much envied shore, / Morland is fled! Your copier’s no more’ (6). ‘Say Nature! who shall next thy paths explore? Thy fondling’s fled, thy pupil is no more’ (13). In his elegy, Sandos took also the opportunity to address other painters, inviting them to follow in Morland’s natural footsteps: ‘Ye persevering artists! you whose skill / Would e’en to trace the universal scene, / Yet failing to pourtray your wond’rous will, / Go, copy Morland, be, what he has been’ (20). Interestingly, Sandos’s interpretation depicting Nature grieving over the loss of Morland, who is now no longer able to depict her beauties through art, echoes another poem published sixteen years earlier in the essay periodical The World. In this ‘Elegy on the Death of Mr Gainsborough’, the writer, too, wondered about who might be able to take up the artist’s place to paint Nature’s pastoral charms: ‘Who now shall paint mild evening’s tranquil hour, / The cattle slow returning from the plain, / The glow of sultry noon, the transient shower, / The dark brown furrows rich with golden grain’ (9–12).18 Besides Sandos’s elegy, several other obituaries appeared in various periodicals, including the Monthly Magazine, the Gentleman’s Magazine, D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’, 158. On Smith’s transformations of Morland’s pictures, see D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’, 157–163. 16 Within three months of Morland’s death at the age of 41 on 29 October 1804, Smith had his mezzotint portrait of the artist on the market. 17 William Sandos, Tears of Nature: An Elegy on the Death of that Celebrated Artist Mr. George Morland (London: T. Jones, 1804). 18 Sandos, ‘Elegy on the Death of Mr Gainsborough’, quoted in William T. Whitley, Thomas Gainsborough (London: James Murray, 1915), 313. 14 15

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and the European Magazine. Most critics writing about the painter underlined, like Sandos’s Tears of Nature, the unique quality of Morland’s talents and the quintessentially British nature of his works. The piece in the Gentleman’s Magazine19 of November 1804––reproduced almost word for word in the European Magazine20––noted that Morland ‘was the first (or at least, among our countrymen, by far the most eminent,) of those who have given the true spirit and character of our great palladium—the British Oak; as well as the form and action of all our most familiar animals, in all their subtleties and varieties’. The same article commended the painter for his ‘natural’ and ‘picturesque’ scenery and asserted that if ‘Gainsborough, sometimes dull, was oftener capricious, and still oftener careless; and the character of Wilson’s landscape, seldom purely English, was sometimes mixed, and sometimes absolutely indeterminate’, Morland’s pictures, on the other hand, ‘never [made] a mistake— never [insulted] by falsehood, [disgusted] by affectation, [disappointed] by error, or teized [sic] by mystery’.21 Such tributes were followed by more substantial accounts. Within three years of his death, no fewer than four lives of Morland appeared. They included William Collins’s Memoirs of a Painter (1805);22 Francis William Blagdon’s Authentic Memoirs of the Late George Morland (1806), John Hassell’s Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Morland (1806), as well as George Dawe’s The Life of George Morland (1807).23 Although all dealt with the same subject, each book differed in format, structure, style, and purpose. Collins’s biographical account was sandwiched between two fictional volumes of a novel entitled Memoirs of a Picture (1805)––a text whose narrative plot, I will show, had connections with Morland’s biography. Blagdon’s Memoirs, on the other hand, was published in folio by Edward Orme, brother of Daniel Orme, and owner of one of the Morland 19

The Gentleman’s Magazine, 2 (1804), 1076–8 and 1237. The European Magazine, 46 (Nov. 1804), 351–3. 21 The Gentleman’s Magazine, 2 (1804), 1077. 22 Not much is known about William Collins Sr (c.1740–1812), Morland’s biographer and father of William Collins Jr (1787–1847), the Royal Academician and landscape painter. Fragments of biographical information retrieved from various sources inform us that Collins Sr was an Irish picture-dealer, living in London, that he was the author of The Slave Trade (1793) and of other texts, including An Heroic Elegiac Ode, published under the pseudonym Barnaby Bathos. His grandson, the novelist Wilkie Collins, also tells us that his grandfather wrote ‘articles in the public journal, songs, fugitive pieces . . . sermons for a cathedral dignitary’ as well as a ‘political pamphlet’, in Wilkie Collins, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A., with Selections from his Journals and Correspondence, 2 vols (London, 1848), i. 6–7. 23 Francis William Blagdon, Authentic Memoirs of the Late George Morland (London: Printed for Edward Orme, 1806). Full references to the other texts are given in the list of abbreviations. 20

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Galleries. As the extended title suggests, Blagdon’s book contained ‘anecdotes never before published together with a fac-simile of his writing’, as well as specimens of the artist’s ‘hieroglyphical sketches’. The book also comprised a series of twenty-one plates interwoven within the text, which included a portrait of the artist, as well as various rustic scenes like ‘A Mad Bull’, ‘A Cottage Sty’, and ‘Morland’s Asses’ reproduced by various engravers, including Thomas Vivares and Robert Dodd. Blagdon asserted that the ‘primary object’ was not to produce a comprehensive account with ‘minutiae the perusal of which [afforded] much gratification to the lovers of biographical literature’. Rather, his work was ‘to unite the engravings that accompany [his sketch] into a volume’.24 The large format of the book allowed it to be viewed as a textual gallery of prints. Although smaller in size, Hassell’s and Dawe’s books were similarly influential in spreading Morland’s art to wider audiences as each of them also incorporated selections of the artist’s prints: Hassell’s Memoirs contained a series of seven plates as well as A Descriptive Catalogue with Remarks on the Leading Beauties of the Principal Pictures in the Morland Gallery. Dawe’s biography more or less resembled Hassell’s, with its inclusion of a frontispiece portrait, a decorated title-page, and a series of plates interwoven within the text. Predictably, each biographer introduced his work as the most authentic, instructive, and entertaining source for Morland’s life. Collins and Dawe both claimed close connections with the painter, thus relying on a trope common in early biography that the truth value of the text rested on the writer’s first-hand knowledge of the subject, his relatives, and his work. Collins presented himself as ‘as an intimate acquaintance with [Morland and] his family . . . for more than twenty years’; and therefore believed that his account had ‘every just reason to anticipate success’ (MPa 2–3). In a similar authorial gesture, Dawe asserted that his own ‘father, Mr. Philip Dawe, was articled to the late George Morland’s father’, and that he himself ‘became intimate with the son from his childhood, and kept up a familiar intercourse with him during the greater part of his life’. Such a close connection with the Morland family incited Dawe to produce ‘an authentic biography’––a text that would replace all other biographical accounts of Morland which, he felt, were ‘far from satisfactory’ (LGM i). Despite such assertions of authenticity and sincerity, most biographers (including Dawe) drew their material from uncertain sources and often retailed mere anecdotal hearsay. Their colourful descriptions of Morland’s life were based on spurious, sometimes plainly false, stories.25 For example, 24

Ibid. 3–4.

25

Wyburn-Powell, ‘George Morland’, 56–8.

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Collins, Hassell, and Dawe all wrote that after the death of his father, Morland was told that he had a good ‘claim’ to a ‘dormant’ baronetcy.26 Morland allegedly refused the ‘claim’ and the prestige associated with it. Hassell added that Morland had asserted that there was ‘more honour in being a fine painter than in being a titled gentleman’ (MGM 4). Collins also mentioned Morland’s refusal to reclaim the ‘dormant’ title by describing how the painter had supposedly remarked to his apprentice, ‘Well, Bobby, never mind, there’s more honour in being a fine painter, than a fine Lord; and as for tacking Sir to my name, I’ll be d—d if I stand a glass of gin for it— plain G. M. will always sell my pictures, and secure them as much respect all over the world ’ (MPa 64). However, as Wyburn-Powell has shown, the only Morland to have been created Baronet was Sir Samuel Morland who had been given the title during the reign of Charles II. The baronetcy had become extinct in 1716 and so it could not be ‘dormant’, nor could it have been reclaimed so many years later.27 Commercial reasons certainly encouraged the insertion and acceptance of such lively, yet speculative, anecdotes. The presence of these stories enhanced Morland’s artistic aura and idiosyncratic charisma. Many anecdotes regarding Morland made entertaining reading, whilst at the same time sensationalizing the artist’s scandalous and unconventional behaviour. For if biographers praised Morland’s artistic dexterity and stressed his unusual creative productivity––in less than a decade, Morland supposedly produced as many as 800 pictures; Hassell and Dawe also indicate that the painter executed up to 4,000 works (MGM 19 and LGM 164)––they also saw the biographical appeal and commercial potential of relating Morland’s alcohol addiction, his association with smugglers, his constant lack of money, his escapes from creditors, his unhappy family life, the tragic loss of his child, his regular move from one home to another, his imprisonment, and his acquisition of ‘animals of various kinds, [including] pigs, fowls, rabbits, and others, either for food or for amusement’ (LGM 83). Here are mentioned only a few of the extraordinary aspects of the painter’s existence; it was no wonder such details were bound to quench readers’ thirst for biographical knowledge. MORLAND’S GENIUS, NATURE, AND THE MARKET Morland’s position as a painter was markedly ambivalent. Any close reading of the artist’s biography revealed examples of exaggerated contra26

Ibid. 57.

27

Ibid.

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dictions: a talented figure, yet no model to follow. Morland was the product of an era that increasingly saw genius as a quality that was outstanding and special, and yet at the same time also tainted and corrupted, the one often a condition of the other. Such tensions were noticeable in Hassell’s introductory paragraphs in which he claimed that ‘the children of genius and literature do not always possess that rectitude of principle and conduct which distinguishes her less gifted mortals. . . . Frequently, indeed, do we see combined in one and the same individual, an epitome, and unhappy assemblage of all that we abhor, and all that we admire!’ (MGM 2–3) Like many other biographers writing during this period, Hassell made Morland’s bad habits serve a moralizing and didactic purpose. Similarly, Dawe warned his readers of the consequence of dissipation and debauchery. His account, like Hassell’s, was full of moral disquisition: ‘The following is the history of genius perverted and debased by vice’, he wrote, ‘and sinking, at last, under its baneful influence; and though it does not, like that of genius exalted by virtue, present a noble a pleasing subject of contemplation, it may afford useful instruction, by contributing to unfold the origin and the consequences of mental degradation’ (LGM, p. iii). By the second half of the eighteenth century, genius had become a topic of considerable discussion. In one of the first essays devoted to the subject, An Essay on Genius (1774), Alexander Gerard had argued that genius was natural, as opposed to cultivated and cultured. His claim supported the theme of nature-based Romanticism that was gradually emerging during this period. Earlier, Edward Young’s 1759 Conjectures on Original Composition presented genius in contrast to reliance upon classical texts, a move away from literary customs and established traditions. The descriptions of both Gerard and Young favoured notions of inspiration and creativity that were necessarily outside the traditional realms of culture and education. Interestingly, such notions resurface in all four biographies of Morland, in which the word ‘genius’ appears on a regular basis. In his Memoirs of a Painter, Collins tackles the subject by referring to the artist’s dexterity of execution. The speed at which Morland finished his pictures not only explained how the artist could defray the needless expenses he incurred; it also defined the very nature of Morland’s multiple talents, which were based upon intuition rather than industry, upon spontaneity rather than reflection. In his appendix, Collins addressed himself to his readers by remarking: Before we enter into the merits of the above question [i.e. ‘Whether the late Mr. G. Morland was, or was not, the mere child of genius’], we beg leave to remind our readers of one fact, which it is hoped we have established in the

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genuine Memoirs of his life preceding this Appendix, namely, that at all events he was not the mere creature of industrious or laborious study. (MPa 172)

Collins also believes that ‘the amazing quickness with which he designed, and made choice of any subject, is a strong proof to us that he decided intuitively’ (MPa 178). Collins visibly placed spontaneous and natural talent above regular and careful industry. ‘[W]ithout an intuitive talent, or genius’, he wrote, ‘no man ever was, or ever [would] . . . become a great sculptor, painter, musician, or poet’ (MPa 179). The argument about the superiority of rapid and instinctive execution was not new. Shakespeare himself was seen as a paradigm of the artless genius (the reference to ‘child of genius’ in the passage underlines the association with the poet). Besides, the discourse on the swiftness of the pencil had already gained much ground among art and literary critics by the second half of the eighteenth century. As we saw in the preceding chapter, to throw one’s impulsive thoughts onto paper was believed to be naturally more truthful and morally more authentic. Hazlitt’s 1820 essay ‘On Application to Study’ testified to the persisting fascination and popularity of the theory in the early nineteenth century: ‘I do not conceive rapidity of execution necessarily implies slovenliness or crudeness’, Hazlitt wrote. ‘On the contrary, I believe it is often productive both of sharpness and freedom. The eagerness of composition strikes out sparkles of fancy, and runs the thoughts more naturally and closely into one another. There may be less formal method, but there is more life, and spirit, and truth’ (Howe, xii. 62). For Hazlitt, an artist who could produce work fast and profusely was one of superior talent: ‘the greatest artists’, he wrote, ‘have in general been the most prolific or the most elaborate, as the best writers have been frequently the most voluminous as well as indefatigable’ (Howe, xii. 58). These two qualities applied to Morland; in the same essay Hazlitt observed that Morland has been referred to as another man of genius who could only be brought to work by fits and snatches. But his landscapes and figures (whatever degree of merit they might possess) were mere hasty sketches; and he could produce all that he was capable of, in the first half-hour, as well as in twenty years. Why bestow additional pains without additional effect? What he did was from the impulse of the moment, from the lively impression of some coarse, but striking object; and with that impulse, his efforts ceased, as they justly ought. (Howe, xii. 56)

Fourteen years before Hazlitt, Hassell made similar connections between natural genius and artistic truth. In his Memoirs of the painter, Hassell wrote that it was by one ‘of those sudden impulses so natural to him that [Morland] left the path which leads to the grand line, for a gratification he felt more inclination to indulge, by pursuing the picturesque delineations

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of rural scenery’ (MGM, p. vi). For Hassell, Morland’s talents lay in his ability to portray Nature as it is, and not as it ought to be. Although his apprenticeship to his father, as well as his few visits to the Royal Academy, had taught him something of the art of the old masters, the painter distinguished himself by following his own artistic inclinations, where ‘affectation’ never distorted his ‘scrupulously just and amusing pencil’ (MGM 20). Dawe also sprinkled his text with frequent references to Morland’s natural genius and originality: ‘To the praise due to originality he is entitled’, he wrote, ‘[h]is originality, however, was not of the highest order: it was not the effect of an extensive acquaintance with the powers and productions of art; but perhaps, on the contrary, rather owing to his neglect of them; which obliged him to depend only on himself and nature’ (LGM 177). Although Dawe’s remark about Morland’s natural genius was congratulatory, it also obliquely hinted at his defiant behaviour towards social and artistic standards and customs. Indeed, in this case, Morland’s natural genius was not only a qualification of the latter’s art, technique, or subject-matter; it also meant to be unfettered by artistic and social conventions. Unlike most major contemporary British painters, sculptors, and architects who were socially integrated, Morland spent much of his personal and professional life and career living on the margins of society. Although equally described as unusually talented, Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Reynolds had each been involved in the social and cultural establishment of their days. They did not develop overtly oppositional or outsider personas. As Brewer has noted, in the eighteenth century, ‘artists, authors, and performers had to confront their peculiar social position, one in which they were supposed to embody the values of politeness and gentility’.28 The need to keep such social and moral standing in the public eye ‘was vital not only to the career of individuals but to the status of literary and artistic professions as a whole’.29 The behaviour and reputation of British artists was paramount to the promotion of the British school at a time when it sought recognition and prestige. But Morland had no heed for such social and cultural standing. Along with many minor artists during this period, including many Grub Street hack writers, opera singers, and stage actors, the painter’s life revolved around a world where heavy drinking, imprisonment for debt, extravagance, and perpetual financial insecurity were commonplace. For him, reputation and success did not 28 John Brewer, ‘Cultural Production, Consumption and the Place of the Artist in Eighteenth Century England’, in B. Allen (ed.), Towards a Modern Art World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 22. 29 Ibid. 20.

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depend on his acquiring the polished behaviour of a gentleman or a man of leisure, nor––like Hogarth and Reynolds––on his producing theoretical works that would display and demonstrate his intellectual skills and faculties. On the contrary, the notion of creative genius meant something far less restrictive, namely, to be entitled ‘to overlook or flout the customary rules and constraints of polite society’.30 In Morland’s case, genius became an excuse for indolence and immorality. The image of the artist as an eccentric and unconventional individual was not new. In the Renaissance, there already existed an alternative to the view of the painter as a well-adjusted individual, one which conceived of the artist as a man who refused to accept artistic and social conventions and who belonged in the eyes of the public to a class of his own. Vasari’s portrayal of Piero di Cosimo is often put forward as a typical example of the antisocial and unconventional painter. In his Vite, Vasari describes Piero di Cosimo as a misanthropic, eccentric, and reclusive individual, a man secretive about his work. Vasari also relates that the painter lived in constant solitude and squalor, and that he took little notice of his material being.31 The factual accuracy of Vasari’s account has recently been questioned. Sharon Fermor, for example, has shown how Vasari’s textual life contained many rhetorical tropes that served to accentuate Piero di Cosimo’s foibles. The painter’s idiosyncratic and unorthodox behaviour, Fermor demonstrates, served to reinforce the moral point of Vasari’s biographies and represented a negative foil for the more normative characters contained in the Vite, including Leonardo da Vinci. Despite the many factual inaccuracies contained in Vasari’s account, however, the eccentric life of Piero di Cosimo has remained an object of persistent fascination among readers and writers.32 The German literary critic Wilhelm Wackenroder described how ‘everything’ about Piero di Cosimo was ‘extraordinary’ and ‘unusual’, and how ‘Nature had filled his soul with a continuously seething fantasy and had covered his mind with heavy and dark storm clouds’.33 The image of the artist as an eccentric and marginal figure, as was perceived in Piero di Cosimo, progressively developed from the second half of the eighteenth century. Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting, we saw, already contained undeveloped literary portraits of eccentric artists whose most powerful characteristic resided in their 30

Ibid. Sharon Fermor, Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention, and Fantasia (London: Reaktion Books, 1993), 7–10 and 22–8. 32 For a discussion of the unreliability of Vasari’s account of Piero di Cosimo, see Louis Alexander Waldman, ‘Fact, Fiction, and Hearsay: Notes on Vasari’s Life of Piero di Cosimo’, Art Bulletin, 82 (2000), 171–9. 33 Quoted in Fermor, Piero di Cosimo, 9. 31

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defying social customs and artistic standards and practices. In the nineteenth century, such an image would become increasingly popular and would eventually develop into what is now generally regarded as Bohemian, although the term and the idea of ‘Bohemianism’ did not emerge until later in the nineteenth century.34 Unlike his predecessors, however, Morland’s genius and eccentricity were directly related to new developments that were shaping the contemporary artistic market. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Morland belonged to a new era in artist–client relationships, whereby the artist no longer produced a specific painting for a specific patron. Instead, the painter executed works in his studio at his own expense with regard to materials and time, and sold them through a dealer, an agent, or a gallery. In this new situation, the client no longer had a say in the subject-matter, its scale, colouring, or treatment. In Britain, Morland was one of the first to exploit these new developments. Artistically, the abandonment of the old contractual system between patron and artist meant that the latter had more freedom to execute pictures of his own choosing (though, as we have seen above, Morland did not completely ignore contemporary aesthetic fashions either). Socially, the changes in the artist–patron relationship had no less impact on artists’ lives. The presence of art dealers and middle-men allowed painters to dissociate themselves from the realities of economic transaction, thus enabling them to appear as upwardly mobile individuals of independent means.35 The distance that Morland was able to maintain between himself and his purchasers allowed him to enhance the ‘aura’ and ‘myth’ that surrounded him. In his case, the devolution of commercial and pecuniary transactions to dealers and middle-men meant that he could live a ramshackle life and still be famous. Although promising, this newly acquired freedom did not work out as effectively as expected. Morland fell foul of unscrupulous dealers and other go-betweens who illicitly traded on his skills. Such scheming middle-men purchased Morland’s latest work at a cheaper rate for ready money that Morland could neither refuse nor resist; they then sold his pictures at a considerable profit for themselves. They encouraged his rakishness and debauchery in order to profit by his financial embarrassments. Morland would thus find himself in a position in which he had to work incessantly in order to earn enough money for his dubious pleasures; and yet he was invariably insolvent. Successful as he was, Morland was never able to reap 34 Piero di Cosimo holds a role in George Eliot’s Romola (1862–3), which is set in 15thcent. Florence. 35 Brewer, ‘Cultural Production’, 21.

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the pecuniary benefits of his extraordinary success. As Collins’s Memoirs revealed, the more successful the artist became, the more debauched his life: ‘While our English genius proceeded in the several pursuits of riding, music, drinking, smoking, and painting; in each of which he had few competitors, his pictures became every day in higher estimation’ (MPa 66–7). Thus obtaining credit in advance, and living from day to day, Morland accumulated considerable debt. Having unsuccessfully tried to extricate himself from his financial embarrassments, he burnt himself out completely and died at the age of 41. COLLINS’S 1805 MEMOIRS OF MORLAND: BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION All four biographies published immediately after Morland’s death were influential in constructing and propagating the artist’s eccentric image in early nineteenth-century Britain. Among them, Collins’s book illustrates particularly well the unscrupulousness of art dealers, while at the same time revealing the significance of factual and invented truth in the construction of Morland’s image as an unconventional artist. At its first inception, his Memoirs of a Painter was not published as an independent text but was inserted between the first and third volumes of a novel entitled Memoirs of a Picture. The publication of a biography between two volumes of a novel was highly unusual. The closest equivalent to a tripartite structure such as this may have been the insertion of a biographical sketch within a fictional narrative, as with Lady Vane’s portrait in Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751).36 However, the organization of Collins’s two interconnected, yet physically separated, memoirs was quite unprecedented. The exact sequence of events leading to the composition and publication of Collins’s three-volume work cannot easily be traced. Different passages taken from both Memoirs indicate that the author had already started work on his novel prior to Morland’s death (MPa 3–4). However, Collins had also supposedly promised his friend that he would compose a sketch of his life were he to outlive him. The abrupt and random interruption of the fictional narrative at the close of the first volume of Memoirs of a Picture seems to indicate that Collins remained faithful to his 36 Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness, first publ. in 1780, is perhaps the closest example to Collins’s work for, by the 5th edn, it contained a substantial amount of biographical information on Thomas Chatterton. I would like to thank Professor Roger Lonsdale for pointing out Croft’s text to me.

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promise and suspended the composition of the novel in order to write the biographical Memoirs of his friend. (As we have seen with Thicknesse’s Sketch of Gainsborough, writers were anxious to publish their biographical account first.) Collins then simply added his Memoirs of a Painter to what had been previously written in his work. As mentioned in the first chapter, the interconnections between novel and biography were widely discussed during this period, with historical characters or settings very often part of the fictional narratives they shaped, and vice versa. In Collins’s case, the links between fictional and biographical narratives were further emphasized by their dealing with similar issues, namely the vicissitudes of the art market, the corruptness of art dealers, and their possible impact on the lives of artists. Interestingly, modern scholars have tended to treat Collins’s two Memoirs separately.37 Earlier critics, however, were more willing to consider the two texts as a single work. Among Collins’s keenest admirers was the author’s own grandson, Wilkie Collins, who would later write one of the longest critical accounts of the two Memoirs. He devoted a substantial section of the first chapter of his Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848) to discussing and summarizing his grandfather’s work, remarking that [t]he work is contained in three volumes, and comprises a curious combination of the serious purpose of biography with the gay licence of fiction. The first and the third volumes are occupied by the history of the picture. The second volume is episodically devoted to a memoir of George Morland, so filled with characteristic anecdotes, told with such genuine Irish raciness of style and good-natured drollery of reflection, that this pleasant biography is by no means improperly placed between the two volumes of fiction by which it is supported on either side.38

Wilkie Collins also observed that the Memoirs of a Picture belonged ‘completely both in style and matter, to a school of fiction now abandoned by modern writers’.39 The nineteenth-century novelist seems to have admired this work greatly––so much, in fact, that some scholars have argued that Collins’s Memoirs was the main source for one of Wilkie Collins’s most famous novels, The Moonstone (1868), as both have inanimate objects of great value as central features and consist of highly crafted intrigues.40 37 See David Winter, ‘George Morland (1763–1804)’, Ph.D. thesis (Stanford, 1977), 12 n. 11. 38 Wilkie Collins, Memoirs of William Collins, i. 9. 39 Ibid. i. 8. 40 P. Miller Frick, ‘Wilkie Collins’s “Little Jewel”: The Meaning of The Moonstone’, Philological Quarterly, 63 (1984), 313–21.

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The Memoirs of a Picture begins with the theft of a painting by Guido from the Royal Gallery of France by a certain Chevalier Vanderwigtie and traces its journey as it passes through the hands of many different keepers, which include the Prussian cavalry, a surgeon, a Dutch picture-dealer at Rotterdam, and a Flemish artist named Glazetint. The latter, being forced to sell the Guido, makes two counterfeit copies of the work before selling each copy to different individuals, including two English art dealers who have been charged by a nobleman to purchase the original. The two copies undergo as convoluted a series of adventures as the original, again passing into the possession of many different individuals, including a Chinese mandarin by the name of Des-chong-fong who is busy gathering artworks for a collection in honour of the Great Mogul. Impatient to make his own fortune, Des-chong-fong sets up his own business in London and exhibits the Guido in his shop, believing it to be the original. However, the painting is stolen not long afterwards. Meanwhile, another picture-dealer from Liverpool presents himself at Des-chong-fong’s door and attempts to sell him the other counterfeit Guido. On seeing this second copy, the Chinese mandarin accuses the Liverpudlian of having stolen his own fake masterpiece but their dispute is soon interrupted by the thief of the original Guido himself, the Chevalier Vanderwigtie, who confesses to his crime. The story thus ends with the revelation that the two paintings supposedly by Guido are imitations. However, it does not provide any more information about the original picture, whose location still remains a mystery at the end of the story. Throughout this tortuous plot, Collins makes several virulent attacks against picture-dealers, whom he describes as a ‘band of Philistines’, a ‘multifarious class of bipeds, composed as they are of the most contradictory elements of chaotic atoms that ever occupied or burthened space, since the evening and morning which composed the first long day of the glorious creation’ (MPi, p. vi). Collins’s knowledge of art dealership, which he calls ‘picture-craft’, is well documented as he was himself an art seller. For example, he denounces their tendency to examine artworks ‘with inward satisfaction, but with all the external marks of critical indifference’, a hypocrisy which Collins believed was ‘one of the laudable arts of the craft’ (MPi 184). Each transaction involving the original and fake Guidos serves to add new blemishes to the profession. Significantly, Collins also uses the topic as a means of commenting upon the effect of dealers’ wickedness on his friend Morland, who twice turns up in a disguised form in the Memoirs of a Picture. The first reference to Morland appears in the second half of the book, during a passage where Collins discusses the well-known conflicts between the old and modern schools of art (MPi 136–45). After denouncing the fashion among the British

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aristocracy for old master paintings, and praising the talents of certain British artists, Collins then introduces his subject and underlines the extraordinary performance of a ‘genius’, who ‘without any of the advantages arising from the patronage of the great, in general thought to be indispensably necessary to the introduction of an artist, burst forth upon the public, in despite of all the parade of etiquette’ (MPi 143–4). The author then alludes to this painter’s profuse artistic production and notes that ‘the multitude of pictures painted by him, far exceeded in number those of any other master, ancient or modern, of his age [and that] the same may be said respecting the number of copies after him’ (MPi 144). In the same passage, Collins denounces the advantages taken by some people of Morland’s artistic talents and claims that it is ‘[c]hiefly through the medium of ignorant auctioneers, exhibitions, and contracts of the most selfish description, together with a race of money leaders, publicans, and the very works of sinners, usurious tradesmen’ that the artist’s work has been ‘poured in upon the markets like a deluge’. These unscrupulous men have ‘long made a prey of the folly and the talents of this uncommon and eccentric being’. The artist’s name is not explicitly divulged but there is no doubt that the painter here alluded to is Morland. Morland emerges again later in the text, in chapter 15, in a passage in which Collins condemns the financial advantage taken by some individuals of the artist’s numerous pictures. This time, however, Collins deals with the issue in a much more satirical tone. By this point in the story, the Guido has already passed through the hands of many different individuals and is now owned by two picture-dealers who, having abandoned their postchaise on their way to London because of the ‘off-hand horse dropping down dead’, are forced to walk a few miles before reaching the next village. It is on this short journey that the two unfortunate men are attacked by a ‘well-mounted’ highwayman who insists they surrender all their belongings ‘upon pain of immediate death’ (MPi 218). Among their possessions is the painting which the two dealers yield most regretfully. Their disappointment, however, is equalled, if not surpassed, by that of their assailant who, finding ‘nothing but a piece of painted copper therein, where his imagination had led him to expect diamonds of the greatest value’, flings ‘this divine resemblance of the immortal Guido’s picture under the grate, and retire[s] to a nighthouse in the neighbourhood of ––––’ where he consoles himself amongst his companions (MPi 221). This uncommon company of ‘eccentric characters’ includes an itinerant portrait-painter ‘of good talents, yet without patronage’, the captain of the group, a groom ‘to a very eminent face-painter’, as well as a former driver of ‘the stage coach between Hampstead and London’ frequently used by ‘the eccentric and celebrated George Morland’ (MPi 223).

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Having heard about the robber’s strong disappointment, the groom tries to reassure him and declares that he has known ‘his own master frequently give from twenty to thirty guineas for pictures much smaller than the one described by the captain’ (MPi 223). This, the driver confirms and swears the acquired painting might, ultimately, turn out to be a picture of his friend Georgy, and in that there, he’d stand ten quid for it, if only a span long. For to his certain knowledge, a brother whip at Highgate, one Bob Belly, that kept the Bull, had made a pretty bit of fortune out of Georgy’s pictures and scoring, for Bob was a bit of a draftsman his-self d’y’see, and a dead rum-one in the chalk way! And ifs’ a be I liked, I could mention pretty a dozen more queer prigging coves, as well as that there saucy publican at Highgate, and nearly as little deserving it, and all a true bill, I say.—What cares I for a parcel of spunging [sic] swells? (MPi 224)

On hearing such promising accounts, ‘the collector’ departs to retrieve his ‘booty’ in order to submit it to the inspection of ‘such competent judges’. And ‘[t]he instant he displayed it’, we learn the ci-devant driver of the Hampstead stage, declared with an oath, ‘it was as much beneath the hand of his friend George, as a dogs’-meat neddy was to a blood horse. Georgy’d never bemean himself to paint such b—d outlandish, papish trumpery!—he’s the boy for good old English pieces; his be the right sort—pigs, asses, sheep, or your cart-horses, mind ye—and as for true nature, your natty blowings, only look at Bet Sympson, that there gipsy, and her flash-man, cutting Tom’s queer mug—and ’bove all, that there beautiful piece as Jem Blaze the chimney-sweeper offered so much for— there you see nat’ral as life . . . call this here painting? . . . Look at that, I say . . . my eyes! w’y ye talk of this here—lord, I would’n’t gie ye half a tawney for it, cap.––would’n’t indeed if I’d as many shrieves as would burst my reader.’ (MPi 225–6)

This second allusion to Morland, unlike the first one, is an implied satire on the low-class subject-matter of Morland’s paintings. It is a typical example of a sincere tribute to Morland mixed with uncontrolled satirical humour. Though satire may usually appear inconsistent with friendship, it is in this particular case a qualification of the author’s praise for his subject. The passage provides specific examples of rural and low-life scenes, such as ‘Bet Sympson’ the gypsie or ‘Jem Blaze’ the chimney-sweeper; it also mentions the assembly of ‘eccentric characters’, the night-house, this ‘receptacle of the unfortunate brave’ and ‘general rendezvous for the idle and the profligate’ where men assemble ‘for the general purpose of consuming . . . our native gin’. All these elements and details contribute to creating a specific image of Morland: that of a rough and unrefined man mingling with the socially less privileged classes. The ‘liberties’ that Collins

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took with the painter’s name allowed him to stage Morland within a fictional and fictitious literary environment which strongly shaped his image as an artist. His two allusions to Morland in the first volume not only blurred the fragile limits between historical and invented truth; they also set the scene for the artist’s later appearance in the Memoirs of a Painter. Clearly, the two Memoirs were far from being impervious to each other. The parallelism of the texts’ titles––Memoirs of a Picture and Memoirs of a Painter––including the alliteration, hinted at the close and comparable structure of the two works. Like the Guido painting, Morland’s career was characterized by its constant change of abode, a peripatetic life conditioned, guided, and finally ruined by the contingencies of the art market and the unscrupulousness of picture-dealers. What made his two entangled Memoirs particularly compelling were the ways in which Collins denounced the hypocrisy of British art dealers during this period. Whereas the first volume revealed the tricks and scams performed by different individuals in order to own, sell, and make money from an old master painting, the second approached the problem from the other side and showed the ruinous impact and consequences of the art market on the life of an English painter who constantly avoided dealing directly with this very type of dealer. The three volumes were two facets of the same story. As Collins asserted, they represented a coherent ‘tout ensemble’ with its own literary ‘spirit’ (MPa 143). MORLAND’S LIFE AS A WANDE RER: RECUPERATING JOHNSON’S LIFE OF SAVAGE The interest in Morland’s textual lives thus derived from his original and eccentric behaviour. Morland did not conform to the more elevated and high-minded image of the artist promoted by other painters during this period, not least by royal academicians like Reynolds, Fuseli, and West. However, Morland’s biographical existence would not have been so successful had it not been underpinned by a wider contemporary interest in literary figures living on the margins of society. The figure of the wanderer, in particular, became increasingly popular in contemporary British (and German) literature; it was also undergoing significant changes. While wandering individuals in the early eighteenth century were often portrayed as insouciant and in control of their movements–– visiting new and foreign places as Grand Tourists, for the sake of education, entertainment, discovery, or sheer pleasure––itinerant characters

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from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards were more inclined to lose their sense of control, autonomy, and enjoyment, consequently becoming anxious, despondent, and vulnerable. Wanderers inhabiting late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary texts tended to occupy more marginal social positions than their sentimental predecessors. Accompanying such a displacement, from the centre to the margin, was a gradual loss of freedom. The liberatory, visionary, and creative experience that travellers underwent during their peregrinations often developed into something much more relentless, painful, and destabilizing. For many wanderers in the early nineteenth century, travelling and itinerancy threatened to grow into homelessness, exile, or a relentless motion continued only because these individuals had no other choice.41 Morland’s travels in and out of London were far from being insouciant and fulfilling. The artist took lodgings in at least twelve districts––including Camden Town, Paddington, Firzroy Square, Lambeth, Queen Ann Street, among others––most of which he left for fear of being tracked down by angry dealers and creditors. Although Morland may have moved impulsively from one location to another for novelty’s sake at the beginning of his career, his wandering and constant relocation were soon to carry more and more emotional baggage. As the years went by, a developing sense of exclusion, isolation, and alienation accompanied his movements. In his Memoirs of the painter, Collins recorded such a gradual sense of fear and alienation. We learn that Morland, having just returned to the capital after a brief stay outside Leicester, where he went in order to abscond from his creditors, ‘stole into his own house, as he stole out of it, trembling in every joint, as if a cold fit of an ague was upon him’ (MPa 81). Morland’s fear of being discovered by his creditors and his overwhelming fear of prison led him to behave like a hunted animal. This Rousseau-esque trepidation of constantly being surrounded by enemies was not just physical; it also affected his mental state: ‘Here his temper grew troublesome to himself and those about him’. [B]rooding over his own misconduct, and terrified with the sound of every strange voice, his constant theme was the horrors of a jail. This phantom eternally haunted his imagination in every terrific shape and form which his bewildered fancy painted it; and it was a general opinion then amongst his friends, that he would either lose his senses or destroy himself in less than twenty-four hours, if taken to prison direct. (MPa 88) 41 On the topic, see for instance Anne Janowitch, ‘“Wild Outcasts of Society”: The Transit of the Gypsies in Romantic Period Poetry’, in Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (eds). The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 213–30.

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The emotional breakdown that Morland was undergoing, accompanied as it was by images of ‘phantoms’ and other terrifying visions, resembled a state of mind not unlike paranoia, a mental condition which John Farrell has defined as ‘a psychological tendency in which the intellectual powers of the sufferer are neither entirely undermined nor completely cut off from reality, but rather deployed with a peculiar distortion’.42 Morland’s paranoid attitude was all the more disturbing and debilitating as it was associated by his addiction to alcohol. The artist’s drinking habit and dependence definitely accelerated his mental and physical decay: they ‘brutalized his faculties’, we learn from Collins, and ‘impaired his understanding’ (MPa 120). Unlike in the early eighteenth century when high consumptions of alcohol were not automatically condemned, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century biographers were more inclined to denounce their subject’s alcohol addiction. By the late eighteenth century, drunkenness was no longer seen as socially and culturally acceptable but was gradually seen as an illness.43 Boswell, for example, is supposed to have been stricken with guilt and remorse at his own drunken excesses. However, the effects of alcohol on Boswell were not as physically devastating as they were on Morland: the bottle turned the painter into a shadow of himself. By the end of his life, Morland ‘looked besotted and squalid’; Collins tells us, ‘cadaverous hanging cheeks, a pinched nose, contracted nostrils, bleared and bloodshot eyes, a bloated frame, swelled legs, a palsied hand, and a tremulous voice!’ (MPa 133). The image of Morland as the decaying artist had several precedents. We have seen that Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting already contained several biographical notices of painters suffering from alcohol addiction. The Flemish painter Mabuse (alias Jan Gossaert) and the English portrait painter and draughtsman John Greenhill––to mention only two examples––both failed to resist the temptations of the liquor. But painters were not the only kinds of artists to serve as models for Morland. Other figures in British literature were similarly influential in shaping his artistic image. One eighteenth-century literary character emerges as a particularly important source of inspiration for Morland’s biographers—Richard Savage. Savage epitomized the image of the persecuted man of genius. He, like Morland, had lived the life of an exceptionally talented artist but had constantly been homeless and insolvent. In his Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage of 1744, Johnson tells us that Savage ‘had seldom 42 John Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1. 43 Thomas B. Gilmore, ‘James Boswell’s Drinking’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3 (1991), 337–57.

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any Home, or even a Lodging in which he could be private, and therefore was driven into public Houses for the common Conveniences of Life, and Supports of Nature’.44 Because Savage immediately squandered whatever money he received for his poetical pieces, he constantly lived a ramshackle life, in fear of being discovered by his creditors. Like Morland several decades later, Savage ‘spent his Time in mean Expedients and tormenting Suspense, living for the greatest Part in Fear of Prosecutions from his Creditors, and consequently skulking in obscure Parts of the Town, of which he was no Stranger to the remotest Corners’.45 And, in order to drown or dodge the harsh realities of his own existence, we also learn that ‘it was the constant Practice of Mr Savage, to enter a Tavern with any Company that proposed it, drink the most expensive Wines, with great Profusion, and when the Reckoning was demanded, to be without Money’.46 Johnson’s portrait of Savage functioned as a strong literary precedent for Morland’s own textual life. In fact, Collins explicitly acknowledged Johnson’s biography of the poet as literary inspiration for his own book. The two texts visibly had many features in common. The authors’ condemnation of, as well as their protective attitude towards, their subject were very similar. In both cases, the biographers were intimate acquaintances of their subject. They both sought to defend their misunderstood genius and to protect them from the insults and libels which their idiosyncratic behaviours invited. Johnson also condemned Savage’s mother for abandoning her son.47 Her denial, Johnson argued, was a major reason for Savage’s straying from the path of social convention, and for having to seek patronage during his entire professional career. Morland also suffered a family tragedy, not in the absence and rejection of maternal love, but in the death of his first-born child. This tragic event seems to have particularly aggravated Morland’s situation, driving him away from

44 Samuel Johnson, An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (London, 1744), 136. 45 Ibid. 136. 46 Ibid. 75. 47 ‘The Punishment which our Laws inflict upon those Parents who murder their Infants is well known, nor has its Justice ever been contested; but if they deserve Death who destroy a Child in it’s Birth, what Pains can be severe enough for her who forbears to destroy him only to inflict sharper Miseries upon him; who prolongs his Life only to make it miserable; and who exposes him, without Care and without Pity, to the Malice of Oppression, the Caprices of Chance, and the Temptations of Poverty; who rejoices to see him overwhelmed with Calamities; and, when his own Industry or the Charity of others has enabled him to rise for a short Time above his Miseries, plunges him again into his former Distress?’ Johnson, Account, 21.

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his good resolutions and precipitating him into a life of homeless dissipation and debauchery.48 Despite their social eccentricities and their fickleness, both Savage and Morland were deeply admired by their biographers. Johnson was particularly fascinated by Savage’s sharp knowledge of human nature and by his capacity to retain ‘in his Mind all the different Combinations of Passions and the innumerable Mixtures of Vice and Virtue, which distinguish one Character from another’.49 The Wanderer, Johnson observed, may well have been based on an ‘obscure’ design, but the poem ‘was never denied to abound with strong Representations of Nature, and just Observations upon Life’.50 Throughout his narrative, Johnson was at pains to show that ‘[t]he Knowledge of Life was indeed [Savage’s] chief Attainment’.51 Likewise, Collins held Morland’s art in genuinely high esteem. Some of his pictures, he noted, ‘possessed all that fascinating tone of natural colouring which distinguishes this painter’s works from all others’ (MPa 118). Collins went so far as to assert that this ‘lamented master’, whose life he related, had contributed ‘more towards diffusing a general knowledge of the arts . . . than any one individual we have ever heard or read of ’ (MPa 113). And yet, much as they admired and sympathized with their chaotic heroes, never did these two biographers idealize their subjects; nor did they unreservedly commend their behaviour. Collins was particularly irritated by Morland’s complete incapacity to manage his personal finances. Money slipped through the painter’s fingers like sand through his pockets.52 Collins was especially annoyed by Morland’s disregard for his advice on money matters: ‘[H]e had the mortification to find all the plans’, Collins wrote about himself in the third person, ‘which he proposed for extricating poor George, although eagerly embraced at the moment they were given, were never acted upon, even for one short day’ (MPa 38–9). On several occasions, Collins reproached the painter 48 We learn that ‘the loss of his son . . . wrought so effectually upon him, that a change became every day visible to the writer of this. A tedious illness, and a considerable diminution of female loveliness, the consequence of it, unfortunately for both, succeeded for some time after her accouchement. The Britannia Tavern, Mother Red Cap’s Tea Gardens, the Castle Tavern, and Assembly Rooms at Kentish Town, became now more pleasant than his home’ (MPa 29). 49 Johnson, Account, 54. 50 Ibid. 66–7. 51 Ibid. 80. 52 Collins remarks for instance that ‘Amongst many other instances of this folly, none was more conspicuous than the number of new boots, buckskin and other breeches, for himself and his servant; horses also, new bridles and saddles, with every other extravagance of the stable; all these, procured upon credit, at any price the venders pleased, were poured in’ (MPa 48).

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for striking ruinous deals, considering them acts ‘of stupid folly . . . bordering upon idiotism’ (MPa 39). Johnson’s condemnation of Savage was never as harsh as was Collins’s of Morland. Yet he, too, pointed to his subject’s social foibles and inconsistencies. In particular, Johnson condemned his friend for saying one thing whilst doing another. Indeed, Savage often indulged in the luxury of forgetfulness, only rarely learning from his own mistakes. Johnson regretted that his friend was never ‘made wiser by his Sufferings, nor preserved by one Misfortune from falling into another’.53 Savage’s stubbornness, like Morland’s, drove both to lead a life full of uncertainty and misery. Clearly, both Johnson’s and Collins’s sympathetic attitudes towards their friends were far from monochromatic. Their feelings and judgement were marked by a combination of sincere admiration and no less authentic condemnation. This divided judgement resurfaces most evidently at the end of the two narratives, when Johnson and Collins––the latter quoting Johnson’s memorable lines at the end of his Life of Savage––warned their readers of the malevolent consequences of the ‘want of prudence’, ‘negligence’, and ‘irregularity’ that their two subjects exhibited, insisting that ‘[if] long continued [they] will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible’ (MPa 156). Although such condemnation of their subject’s behaviour here seems uncompromising, the two biographers nonetheless asked their readers––especially ‘those in confidence of superior capacities or attainments’––to suspend their verdict and judgement. For they believed that both Savage and Morland had followed highly unusual paths in life––paths that were largely unknown to the majority of other individuals. Morland definitely epitomized the image of the modern artist as an individual both liberated, yet at the same time isolated, by his own artistic innovation and personal idiosyncrasy. As hinted above, the image that Morland constructed for himself as a painter prefigured the trope and myth of the Bohemian artist that was to become so much part of nineteenth-century artistic narratives. Morland’s biographers were particularly instrumental in establishing such a myth for, as Elizabeth Wilson has observed, ‘Bohemia as a recognised concept . . . came into existence only when writers began to describe it and painters to depict it. From the start this was a myth created in literature and art, often when these artists fixed their own transient circumstances as permanent or archetypal examples of how an artist ought to live.’54 Once representations of Bohemian artists 53 54

3–4.

Johnson, Account, 96. Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000),

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existed in texts and images, new generations could build upon them, thus perpetuating the myth.55 Collins’s biographical recuperation of Johnson’s Life of Savage in the early nineteenth century shows the extent to which such literary precedents were fundamental in the creation of the Bohemian myth at a later date. However, Bohemian tropes aside, the nineteenth century also produced many other varieties of artists’ narratives which projected images in antithesis to the careless, transgressive, excessive, and eccentric type to which Morland belonged. Indeed, at the opposite end of the scale, the nineteenth century also generated a whole body of literature that presented painters in a more favourable light, and in more reputable environments. The next and final chapter of this book, which focuses on Amelia Opie’s biographical portrait of her husband, John Opie, demonstrates that the image of such respectable and decent painters, while inspired by late eighteenth-century Reynoldsian ideas about the artist, also matched and suited the demands and desires of an increasingly modern audience. As we will see, Opie’s biographical portrait of her husband foregrounded topoi that were to become central to the construction of the image of artists during the Victorian period, especially in their ability to distinguish themselves from less desirable stereotypes (including the Bohemian artist) and to reach equity with other professions. 55

Ibid. 6.

7 John Opie Domesticity, Publicity, and Gender The previous chapters have shown that the vast majority of biographers involved in the writing of the lives of painters and sculptors in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Britain were closely associated with their subject. The practice of art-biographical writing had not yet developed into a large-scale (and inevitably more anonymous) industry but was restricted to a relatively limited circle of individuals keen to make assessments of the lives of those they remembered. Amelia Opie’s Memoir of her husband, the painter John Opie (1761–1807), is no exception to the rule, and confirms the tendency during this period for British artists to have their lives posthumously narrated by relatives, close friends, or acquaintances. Nonetheless, Opie’s Memoir marks a pivotal transition in the biographical writing of artists’ lives in Britain. The celebration of her husband’s artistic and personal achievements announces certain tropes that would become progressively prevalent in the biographical literature of artists during the Victorian period. Unlike the three painters discussed in the previous chapters, and unlike most other artists’ lives published in Britain in the eighteenth century, Opie’s Memoir portrayed her subject in a private setting, as a gentleman and trustworthy husband. The domestic environment in which Amelia Opie set her biography marked a sharp contrast with the public, social, and often cosmopolitan spheres in which most other painters’ lives were inscribed. The private world in which Amelia chose to present her husband was not without its tensions, however. As I show in this chapter, the relational dynamic between biographer and subject was complicated by gendered issues, and especially by the biographer’s conflicting duty and desire to pay tribute to the life of her spouse, while at the same time implicitly promoting her own work and career as a successful novelist. At the time of his death, John Opie had been hailed by the public as ‘the Cornish wonder’ and supposedly been praised by Sir Joshua

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Reynolds as ‘uniting Caravaggio and Velazquez in one’. His two historical paintings, James I of Scotland Assassinated by Graham at the Instigation of his Uncle the Duke of Atholl and its sequel The Assassination of David Rizzio, which were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786 and 1787 respectively, had both been an immense success and had won him election as an associate, and then as a full member, of the Royal Academy. Opie had also contributed several paintings to more commercial enterprises, including Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, Thomas Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery, and James Woodmason’s Irish Shakespeare Gallery (1793) in Dublin.1 His paintings were praised by many critics. In 1798, a review in the European Magazine described John Opie’s works as displaying ‘the powers of a vigorous mind, various, bold, and inventive, strictly conforming to the laws of nature and seldom deviating from the rules of art’. ‘He paints the turbulent passions with great effect’, the reviewer continued, ‘and selects with judgement such situations and circumstances as are best calculated to strike the imagination . . . His colouring is good, and the distribution of his groups well designed. His old people in particular merit great praise.’2 The author of British and Irish Public Characters of 1798 (published in 1799) compared him favourably to Reynolds, saying that Opie’s portrait of Mrs Wollstonecraft ‘excelled in verisimilitude; but his characteristical excellence consists in strength; and Reynolds himself, although he is praised for having transferred the soul into the countenance could never give, perhaps, so bold and spirited a likeness of the male head as Opie’.3 After a successful career as a painter of historical scenes, Opie turned to portrait painting in order to satisfy the demand of the fashionable crowd. In 1805, he had been elected Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy and in February 1807––following the examples of Reynolds, Fuseli, and Barry––had started giving a series of lectures there. His sudden death only permitted him to deliver four of the six lectures required of him by the institution.4 Despite strained relations with most of his colleagues at the Academy, he was buried in great pomp at St Paul’s Cathedral, next to Reynolds. The Gentleman’s Magazine obituary described him as ‘one of

1 For the Woodmason Gallery, Opie submitted two scenes from King John—The King, Hubert and Arthur on the Battlefield and Hubert, Arthur and the Executioners—and Antigonus and the Bear from The Winter’s Tale. 2 The European Magazine, 34 (Oct. 1798), 220. 3 British and Irish Public Characters of 1798 (Dublin: Printed for J. Milliken and John Rice, 1799), 379–80. 4 They did not, however, represent his only literary work. In 1798, the artist had also composed a Life of Reynolds for John Wolcot’s edn of Pilkington’s Dictionary as well as a letter published in The True Briton entitled ‘An Inquiry into the requisite Cultivation of the Arts of Design in England’.

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the greatest ornaments’ of the Academy, a man who had ‘attained the most unquestioned pre-eminence in his art’.5 At the time of her husband’s death, Amelia Opie had established her own reputation as a writer of fiction and poetry. She had published two of her best-known moral tales, The Father and Daughter (1801) and Adeline Mowbray; or The Mother and Daughter (1804), as well as a collection of shorter Simple Tales (1806) and a series of poems.6 Her literary production had been well received in contemporary reviews. Her tales, in particular, were praised for their passion, emotion, and pathos.7 After reading The Father and Daughter, the dramatic author, artist, and editor Prince Hoare allegedly informed Mrs Opie that he ‘could not sleep all night after [reading] it’ and Walter Scott said that he had cried over the book ‘more than he ever cried over such things’.8 The critic of the Critical Review (1805) appraising the newly published Adeline Mowbray also asserted that Opie’s talents did ‘honour to her sex and country’ and that she displayed ‘a power of working upon the passions’ that was ‘unrivalled by any writer of the present day’.9 However, Opie’s concern with matters of the heart should not eclipse her intense commitment to wider political, social, and moral issues.10 Along with many other female writers at the turn of the century, Opie participated in contemporary debates about the duty and role of individuals, especially of women, in a rapidly changing society. The decade of the Revolution and the reaction to it in England was definitely a turning point for men and women who now had to negotiate with a whole range of new attitudes and beliefs.11 Amelia Opie’s political position during this period was far from being clear and consistent.12 Fed on the liberal and dissenting values of her father, the Norwich physician Dr James Alderson, she was initially enthusiastic about revolutionary developments in France and critical about her own government. 5

The Gentleman’s Magazine (1807), 387–8. She had also published The Dangers of Coquetry, a novel in 2 vols which was not successful, as well as An Elegy to the Memory of the Duke of Bedford (1802), and The Warrior’s Return and Other Poems (1808). 7 For a discussion of Opie’s pathos, see the intr. to The Father and Daughter by Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Toronto: Broadview Literary Press, 2003), 11–21, esp. 11–13, as well as the intr. to Adeline Mowbray by Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. vii–xxxiv. 8 Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie (Norwich: Fletcher & Alexander, 1854), 85 and 175. 9 The Critical Review, 4 (1805), 219. Ten years later, however, Thomas Love Peacock was much less flattering as he satirized Amelia Opie in his novel Headlong Hall (1815) with the character of Miss Philomela Poppyseed. 10 Gary Kelly, ‘Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology’, Ariel, 12/4 (1981), 3. 11 12 Ibid. Ibid. 5. 6

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She had established contact with a number of radical leaders in London and was friendly with some of the most eminent Jacobin writers of the time, including William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Elizabeth Inchbald. She had also keenly attended the 1794 Treason Trial of Thomas Hardy, Horne Tooke, John Thelwall, and Thomas Holcroft, whose acquittal she warmly welcomed. However, her commitment to radical politics did not last beyond the 1790s––a change of attitude that was partly rooted in her desire to safeguard her own literary career.13 By the end of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of radical groups and publishers were being suppressed or arrested and the anti-Jacobin press launched a fierce attack on revolutionary figures and radical literature, with Godwin and Wollstonecraft among those writers most violently condemned. The publication of Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft in 1798 especially, in which Godwin revealed personal and intimate aspects of his wife’s life (especially her passion for Henry Fuseli and her affair with Gilbert Imlay) provoked an outcry in the anti-Jacobin press which denounced Wollstonecraft as a prostitute.14 As a result, not only were Wollstonecraft’s philosophy and social criticism discredited but, more generally, any feminist theory was brought into disrepute. As Roxanne Eberle has remarked, ‘[t]he British public was invited to ostracize and fear the outspoken women who had emerged in the radical 1790s. Any statement of feminine self-assertion—aimed at either political freedoms or sexual fulfillment [sic]—could be interpreted as both treasonous and licentious.’15 In such a political and literary context, Amelia Opie’s withdrawal from the Godwin circle and her conversion to more conservative beliefs and principles in the late eighteenth century was hardly surprising.16 As a woman writer, financially dependent on her readership, Opie was careful to avoid any close connections with Wollstonecraft for such associations were intellectually hazardous as well as economically risky. Opie also took great pains to distinguish her work from other contemporary novelists. At a time when the novel was still considered by some as an immoral and improper genre—full of ‘folly, errour, and vice’ to use Maria Edgeworth’s

13 Some scholars such as Roxanne Eberle argue that Amelia Opie kept her revolutionary principles longer than is usually believed, see Roxanne Eberle, ‘Amelia Opie’s “Adeline Mowbray”: Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or the Vindication of a Fallen Woman’, Studies in the Novel, 26 (1994), 121–52. 14 Ibid. 122. 15 Ibid. 123. 16 In fact, in her Memoir, she describes Burke’s book on the French Revolution as a ‘splendid work’ (LP 23).

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words17—Amelia Opie sought to find her own voice in a more acceptable type of work. She chose the ‘simple’ and ‘moral’ tale, a genre which she defined in The Father and Daughter (1801) as ‘wholly devoid of those attempts at strong character, comic situation, bustle, and variety of incident, which constitute a Novel’. Peter Garside has remarked that ‘[t]he choice of alternative terms, both “moral” and “tale”, matche[d] Opie exactly: the first declaring a prominent and suitable didactic function; the second recognizing the need for a degree of simplicity, especially appealing to an audience eager to grasp at new truths and securities.’18 In her tales, Opie thus reformulated the codes of masculinity and femininity in ways that were antithetical to those vindicated by Wollstonecraft. She seemingly accepted what Ellen Pollack has described as ‘the myth of passive womanhood’,19 acknowledging the position of woman as man’s cherished companion and the preserver of domestic virtue.20 As a writer, Opie also showed great conformity to the conventional sexual and family roles. Her tale Adeline Mowbray––a story loosely based on the relationship between Godwin and Wollstonecraft––articulates her traditional views of marriage in the most explicit manner, describing as it does the dangers and the distress that may be brought upon those who maintain relationships outside marriage.21 By stubbornly refusing to marry Glenmurray, therefore compromising her principles, the narrative’s heroine, Adeline, subjects herself and her child to the world’s censure. At the end of the tale, however, having been treated as a fallen and immoral woman and endured the ostracism of her own community, including her own mother’s, Adeline changes her conception of marriage, describing it as a ‘wise’ and ‘sacred institution’, stressing its moral importance in the upbringing of children as well as its benefit to society as a whole.22 Despite its ostensibly conventional and conservative nature, Opie’s re-examination 17 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, 2 vols (Dublin, 1801), i. 3–4: ‘The following work is offered to the public as a Moral Tale––the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel. Were all Novels like those of madame de Crousaz, Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Burney, or Dr. Moore, she would adopt the name of novel with delight: But so much folly, errour, and vice are disseminated in books classed under this denomination, that it is hoped the wish to assume another title will be attributed to feelings that are laudable, and not fastidious.’ 18 Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter, A Tale in Prose (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. xiii. 19 Ellen Pollack, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3. 20 See also Eleanor Rose Ty, Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (Toronto and Buffalo, NY: Toronto University Press, 1998), 6–7. 21 Opie, Adeline Mowbray, p. viii. 22 At this stage, Adeline is the mother of a girl, Editha, whom she had with Berrendale, her late and unfaithful husband.

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of the close ties between husband and wife and between parents and offspring was not altogether politically innocent. On the contrary, Eleanor Rose Ty has shown how qualities such as delicacy, sensibility, marital faithfulness, and obedience became powerful tools for social change in the minds of certain female writers, including Opie.23 Indeed, Opie’s recasting of gendered codes, although apparently hostile to feminine and feminist discourse, allowed her subversively to critique the society in which she lived. Ironically, Opie challenged the accepted view of female inferiority and passivity by valorizing the very features deemed positively feminine. The remaining pages of this chapter show that Opie’s Memoir of her husband recast and reviewed the conventional ties of conjugal relationship in similarly paradoxical ways. THE OPIES AND CONJUGAL TRIBUTE Despite leading independent careers, the Opies were nonetheless considered a devoted couple, each able to benefit from the personal and professional experience of the other. The author of the British and Irish Public Characters noted that, although Opie’s first marriage was ‘unpropitious, and did not add much to his felicity; his second wife (late Miss Alderson, of Norwich) is a most accomplished, and no less beautiful woman; and we trust that the union of painting and literature will contribute to the mutual happiness of the parties’.24 The Gentleman’s Magazine for July 1808 also believed that John Opie had been blessed with ‘the singular good fortune to unite the sister Arts of Poetry and Painting by his marriage with this lady’.25 The union of poetry and painting was certainly apparent in works such as Opie’s famous portrait of his wife, dating to the time of their marriage in 1798, as well as his likeness of Mary Wollstonecraft, painted one year earlier. Conversely, the fruitful alliance between art and literature was later evident in Amelia Opie’s Lays for the Dead of 1834, a collection of elegiac poems based on a series of portraits of deceased friends and relatives painted by her husband, and which also included the poem ‘Portrait the Sixth’ addressed to John Opie himself.26

23

Ty, Empowering the Feminine, 7–8. British and Irish Public Characters of 1798, 380. 25 The Gentleman’s Magazine (1808), 612. 26 Shelley King, ‘“So Soon the Lone Survivor of You All”: Representation, Memory, and Mourning in Amelia Opie’s “On the Portraits of Deceased Relatives and Friends, which Hang around Me”’, in A. Cavanaugh (ed.), Performing the Everyday: The Culture of Genre in the Eighteenth Century (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 120–9. 24

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By its very nature, the Lectures on Painting of 1809 also merged the couple’s artistic and intellectual efforts, for the work contained both his and her literary output: Amelia Opie’s private biographical Memoir, in which she reviewed and reinterpreted the life and works of her dead husband, was followed by a series of public lectures which he gave at the Royal Academy. The couple’s textual collaboration was complemented by other texts, including the April 1809 issue of The Artist, entitled ‘To the Memory of John Opie’ and written by Prince Hoare, as well as personal tributes paid to the artist by the painter James Northcote, the Academy President Martin Archer Shee, the novelist Elizabeth Inchbald, and the dramatist James Boaden. Finally, the work also contained Opie’s ‘Letter Addressed to the Editor of the “True Briton”, on the Proposal for Erecting a Public Memorial on the Naval Glory of Great Britain’, a patriotic text in which Opie expressed his desire to see such a national monument ‘give [the world] an exalted and universal impression of British valour, taste, munificence, and genius’ (LP 171 and 178). Opie’s design for the project was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome and included paintings of naval history as well as life-size statues of naval heroes related to the subject of the paintings. The focal point of the design was to be a sculpture of Neptune Paying Homage to Britannia as well as a statue of George III. As Alison Yarrington has noted, Opie’s design was significantly motivated by his desire to ‘promote high art and the royal Academy at a national level by playing upon patriotic impulses in a time of war’.27 Introducing an artist’s literary and theoretical work with a biographical preamble was not unusual in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reynolds’s academic discourses had been prefaced by Edmond Malone’s Account of the Life and Writings of the Author (1797), whilst James Barry’s Works, published in 1809, contained not only his ‘Correspondence from France and Italy with Mr. Burke’ but were also preceded by ‘Some Account of the Life and Writings of the Author’. More unusual was Amelia Opie’s Memoir itself, for although women writers were becoming increasingly conspicuous in the landscape of British literature at the time, only very few had ventured to act as conjugal biographers and exposed so publicly their spouse’s intellectual, artistic, and personal achievements. Conjugal biographies were usually produced by husbands or male partners—Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) being perhaps the most candid, and condemned, biographical account written during this period. 27 Alison Yarrington, ‘Popular and Imaginary Pantheons in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, in Matthew Craske and Richard Wrigley (eds), Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), 112.

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Despite being relatively unusual and uncommon as a model, the tradition of wife as biographer had an important precedent in Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, a text completed in 1671 but first published in 1806, thus preceding Opie’s own Memoir by just three years.28 Although there is no evidence that Amelia Opie had read Hutchinson’s Memoirs, the tone and style of her own biographical tribute bore a close resemblance to that of her seventeenth-century predecessor. Hutchinson penned the biography of her spouse, John, after his death in prison in 1644. The chief aim of her narrative was to clear his name, after his involvement in wartime politics had led to condemnation by royalists and republicans alike, who viewed him as a traitor. Interlaced into the narrative was a more private character sketch of her husband, which presented him as a Puritan saint, a man whose chief pastime in prison had been the study of the scriptures. Line Cottegnies has observed that this emphasis on work and business had ‘naturally a Puritan ring to it: the celebration of the individual’s engagement with work and study [was] understood as a manifestation of his electness’ as well as ‘a condemnation of idleness’.29 The Memoirs contributed to shaping the image of Lucy Hutchinson as a pious and obedient wife, subservient to her husband.30 The heroic, virtuous, and gentlemanly figure of John Hutchinson certainly overshadowed the author’s own position, casting her as a modest, respectful, self-effacing wife confined within the restricted walls of the domestic sphere. The manner in which Lucy Hutchinson projected herself––indeed, her very conception of the feminine role and gender–– appeared to be entirely traditional. And yet, as N. H. Keeble has observed, Lucy Hutchinson’s whole text was also seen as ‘a gross impropriety’; her biographical enterprise ‘at odds with the woman’s role it [endorsed]’.31 Although the account portrayed her as a submissive and reticent woman, it also introduced her as an intellectually and creatively independent, defiant, and opinionated narrator who spoke for her subject.32 Indeed, Keeble believes that the bio28 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson . . . with Original Anecdotes of Many of the Most Distinguished of his Contemporaries (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1806). 29 Line Cottegnies, ‘The Garden and the Tower: Pastoral Retreat and Configurations of the Self in the Auto/Biographical Works of Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson’, in Frederic Regard (ed.). Mapping the Self: Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/Biography (Saint-Etienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, 2003), 129–30. 30 Cottegnies, ‘Garden and Tower’, 127. 31 N. H. Keeble, ‘“The Colonel’s Shadow”: Lucy Hutchinson, Women’s Writing and the Civil War’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds), Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 235. 32 Ibid. 240.

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graphical narrative conferred ‘an enduring identity’ on Lucy Hutchinson; it ‘[characterized] her as [her husband’s] shadow when his surviving image [was] hers; it [presented] him as an author when he [was] her literary creation. Every page thus [constituted] an implicitly ironic and assertive gloss on the text’s explicitly deferential submissiveness.’33 The very act of writing allowed her to lay implicit claim to the prerogative of the masculine gender.34 As a consequence, the Memoirs contained within it an inescapable tension. Although Lucy Hutchinson embraced her role as a woman writer, it was a role incompatible with contemporary notions of gender and femininity. ‘Since a wife should, as John Hutchinson instructed his, “keepe quiet”’, Keeble observes, ‘she could not at one and the same time be obedient and articulate. It was when, with the Colonel’s death, the wife “vanisht into nothing”, that the writer came into being.’35 AMELIA OPIE’S MEMOIR: PERFORMING DUTY Like her seventeenth-century predecessor, Opie craftily negotiated the tension between her role as a supposedly unassuming wife on the one hand, and her position of independently minded and ambitious female writer on the other. In contrast to Hutchinson, Opie did not write her husband’s tribute spontaneously but had to be persuaded by Prince Hoare to do so. Her ‘sense of duty’ (LP 1) convinced her of the importance of assuming this sorrowful and melancholy exercise of recollection. Having overcome her feelings of ‘terror’ and annihilated ‘all selfish considerations’, we learn, she finally succeeded in fulfilling ‘the dearest, and the last duty in [her] power to the husband whom [she had] lost’ (LP 2).36 As her husband’s panegyrist, the novelist was strongly aware of the difficult task of providing an exhaustive record of her late spouse’s life. ‘[T]hat is impossible’, she admitted, ‘as there are circumstances in his life on which it would be improper and indelicate for me to expatiate, and biographical accounts must be complete, in order to be valuable’ (LP 2).37 Several reasons led Amelia Opie to write the Memoir. She was particularly keen to express her gratitude and pay respect to the 33

34 Ibid. 235. Ibid. 236. Ibid. 243. 36 The couple first met at an evening party in London in 1797 and were married the following year. 37 This was an explicit reference to her husband’s first marriage which had ended in a divorce by Act of Parliament: Opie’s first wife, a wealthy Jewish woman named Mary Bunn, had eloped with a certain John Edwards. See Ada Earland, John Opie and his Circle (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1911), 107. 35

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man who had encouraged her to become a writer of fiction. ‘If I have ever valued the little power of writing which it has been my amusement to cultivate’, she wrote, it is now that it enables me to pay a public tribute to him who first encouraged me to give my writings to the world, and if I have ever rejoiced that I obeyed his wishes on that subject, it is now that having already appeared as an author, I can offer myself to the notice of the public on this sacred and delicate occasion, with more propriety than if this were my first literary effort. (LP 2)38

This passage epitomizes the correct and compliant style and prose of the entire Memoir. Yet, it also projects Amelia Opie in her dual role of wife and writer, effacing as it does the importance and talents of her husband while promoting her own work and position as a female author. Besides obediently acknowledging her husband’s role in shaping her literary career, Amelia Opie also wrote her Memoir as a defence against criticism that had been levelled against him during his lifetime. She felt obliged to save her spouse’s reputation and respectability and to polish the coarse and unrefined behaviour with which he was often associated. Opie’s artistic reputation had long been tainted by individuals such as John Wolcot who, taking advantage of the painter’s lack of formal education, had contributed to the dissemination of Opie’s simple image among fashionable London circles.39 Other painters poked fun at the painter’s crude and artless speech. Never short of witty remarks, Fuseli allegedly remarked ‘Dere is dat poo-re dogue Opee—de failow can paaynt notin but teeves and morederers—an wen ze dogue paaynts a teef or a morederer, he lookes in de glass’.40 The author of the Observations on the Present State of the Royal Academy with Characters of Living Artists (1790) also described Opie as ‘heavy’ and ‘inelegant’ and thought that his visual characters were merely ‘accidental’.41 Amelia Opie was at pains to rectify what she 38 Amelia had used her husband’s name to introduce herself as an ‘avowed Author’ in The Father and Daughter––a strategic move since by then her husband was already famous. 39 Dr John Wolcot, better known under his pseudonym Peter Pindar, had been Opie’s first teacher and mentor in Cornwall. He encouraged Opie to submit a picture to the Society of Arts in 1780 in London, and he brought the artist to the capital. But his generosity and support were not disinterested. Using his talents as a pseudo-critic and writing puffs and parodies rather than thoughtful critical comments on contemporary artworks, Wolcot always made sure he received half of the profits resulting from the sales of Opie’s paintings. Their partial friendship, however, was soon brought to an end and the two individuals never resumed their ‘collaboration’, especially after Opie’s marriage to Amelia, who had a profound dislike for the writer. 40 Quoted in Earland, Opie and his Circle, 59. 41 Observations on the Present State of the Royal Academy with Characters of Living Artists. By an Old Artist (London, 1790), 24.

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believed were deceitful and hurtful comments. She was particularly insistent on promulgating her spouse’s intellectual faculties. For example, she vehemently denied the allegation that the painter had not composed his academic Lectures himself: her husband, she asserted, ‘never received from any human being the slightest assistance whatever in the composition of his lectures’ (LP 10). She also maintained that the ‘powers’ of her spouse’s memory were such ‘that he remembered all he had read’, including ‘Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Hudibras, Burke and Dr. Johnson’ whom he knew ‘by heart’ (LP 18–19). To press home her convictions regarding her spouse’s personal qualities and intellectual powers, her account also included observations made by other friends, including philologist and radical Horne Tooke, who had stated that ‘Mr. Opie crowds more wisdom into a few words than almost any man I ever knew;—he speaks as it were in axioms, and what he observes is worthy to be remembered’ (LP 7). Central to her biographical argument was the belief that natural and innate knowledge, wisdom, and benevolence were more authentic than acquired learning. As in her tales, Amelia Opie drew a clear moral distinction between the public world of appearances and the private world of essence. She condemned the deceitful sophistication of the London art world and observed that it was full of ‘half-learned’ individuals and ‘word-catchers’, that is, ‘men, more eager and more able to detect a fault in grammar, than to admire the original thoughts which such defective language expressed’ (LP 20). Throughout her Memoir, Amelia Opie constantly enhances her husband’s personal qualities by denigrating those esteemed in the public eye. There appears not a single page in which she does not stress his kind and benevolent personality: we learn about his ‘extreme placability’ and his ‘READINESS TO FORGIVE INJURIES’ (LP 15), about his lack of ‘vanity or conceit’ (LP 16),42 and about his ‘friendly and generous heart’ (LP 6, footnote). Indeed, she insisted, ‘truth [was] his only object on all occasions’ (LP 23). Thus, although the Memoir focuses on presenting John Opie in his private and domestic hours, it also strives to impart moral as well as didactic values, thereby acquiring some public function. The motives behind Amelia’s indiscriminately laudatory portrait of her husband were led by her desire to present him as an honourable example, a guide for younger generations. ‘It is probable that many young artists’, she remarked

42 She also notes that ‘[s]uch a power of forgiving and forgetting injuries as this, is, I fear, a rare virtue, though forcibly enjoyed by our Saviour’s precepts and example, but Mr. Opie’s entire FREEDOM FROM VANITY of any kind is a still rare quality’ (LP 15).

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men whose habits and whose style are yet to form, will eagerly seek out opportunities to study the pictures of Mr. Opie, and endeavour to make his excellencies their own; but let them not overlook the legacy, the more valuable legacy which he has bequeathed to students, and even to proficients in art, the powerful example of his life. (LP 32)

The nature of her husband’s talents enabled Amelia Opie to make a case for the value and importance of industriousness and diligence. Because Opie did not learn his profession in the academy but under the guidance of a poorly qualified artist (John Wolcot), he spent his entire life trying to reach the level of such eminent painters as Reynolds and Fuseli––men whom he particularly admired––by constant effort and commitment. In the Memoir, Amelia Opie perpetually insists on her husband’s relentless dedication to his profession, underlining in a moralistic tone that ‘[i]t was not only from inclination, but from principle, that he was industrious’ (LP 29); she also claims that ‘he never was idle for a moment’ (LP 11). Such remarks on the merit of regular and hard work fitted the function of the Memoir which, we recall, was published as a prefatory text to Opie’s Lectures and hence endorsed the ideology of the Royal Academy. Interestingly, the moral content of Amelia Opie’s Memoir reflected and equalled her husband’s own beliefs in the morality of painting as he expressed it in his own academic speeches. For the painter, art fulfilled a moral function in society and had to reform and teach, regardless of the subject, style, or genre in which it was executed and performed. In his Lectures, Opie maintained that the artist must always keep ‘the true art in view; he must rise superior to the prejudices, disregard the applause, and contemn the censure, or corrupt and incompetent judges; far from aiming at being fashionable, it must be his object to reform, and not to flatter,—to teach, and not to please,—if he aspires like Zeuxis, to paint for eternity’ (LP 35). Opie’s life as presented in the Memoir thus became a repository for instruction in work. It expressed the novelist’s confidence in her husband’s artistic genius as well as in the moral and cultural value of the art he practised. AMELIA OPIE: A FIGURE IN THE SHADOW? Whilst the Memoir concentrates on John Opie’s life and character, it never entirely loses sight of its author either. Amelia Opie’s presence permeates her own account; her role as a biographer is inevitably inscribed in the narrative. At first glance, the text erases the novelist’s presence, portraying her as a submissive and obedient woman––a figure

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in the shadow. In view of contemporary debates about sex, marriage, and gender, as well as Opie’s personal and intellectual demarcation from otherwise more assertive feminist discourse, her biographical self-erasure is not surprising. Described and staged as it was, the harmonious relationship between the novelist and her painter-husband as portrayed in the Memoir functioned as a strong anti-model to Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s own example of conjugal relationship. The radical couple, we remember, had been very outspoken against the institution of marriage, seeing it as an inhibition of individual development and describing it as ‘evil’, ‘a system of fraud’, and the ‘worst of all monopolies’.43 Shelley King and John B. Pierce have remarked that ‘Wollstonecraft had argued that marriage was the ultimate expression of society’s tendency to teach women only to please men, while Godwin saw it as an odious monopoly that artificially restricted human choice.’44 Both aspects discredited and disparaged by the Wollstonecraft–Godwin couple—female subservience and the decrease in freedoms entailed by matrimony—were acted out and implicitly endorsed by the Opies in the Memoir. For example, Amelia Opie remembered how the couple spent one evening ‘in a company consisting chiefly of men who possessed rare mental endowments, and considerable reputation, but who were led by high animal spirits and a consciousness of power to animadvert on their absent acquaintance . . . with an unsparing and ingenious severity’. Recording her reluctance to leave the company of such individuals, Amelia Opie communicated her desire to remain present despite them. Her husband’s answer was, however, implacable: ‘An angry look’, we learn, and a desire expressed aloud that I should get ready to go, was all the answer that I received; and I obeyed him.—When we were in the street, he said: ‘I never in my life acted from a motive so unworthy as that of fear; and this was a fear so contemptible, that I should have scorned to have acted upon it.— and I am really ashamed of you.’ No wonder—I was ashamed of myself. (LP 21–2)

43

18.

Quoted in the intr. to The Father and Daughter by Shelley King and John B. Pierce,

Opie, Adeline Mowbray, p. ix. In his essay ‘Of Co-operation, Cohabitation and Marriage’, Godwin writes ‘Add to this, that marriage, as now understood, is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous. So long as I seek, by despotic and artificial means, to maintain my possession of a woman, I am guilty of the most odious selfishness.’ William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (1793), ed. Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 762. 44

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The author here shapes her biographical narrative around distinct gendered opposites, condemning her own behaviour for fear of becoming a laughing stock in the eyes of the remaining male guests. Her anxiety––of which she herself is finally ashamed––contrasts with her husband’s staunch refusal to act out of fear. The scared, obedient, and humiliated woman is in stark contrast with the man’s authority and control. Later in the narrative, this gendered opposition emerges once again, even more strongly, during Amelia Opie’s discussion of her husband’s attitude to the opposite sex: ‘[S]till’, she writes, it was impossible for him to find a rival amongst women;—for, if ever there was an understanding which deserved in all respects the proud and just distinction of a MASCULINE understanding, it was that of Mr. Opie. In many men, though of high talents and excellent genius, there are to be seen womanish weaknesses, as they are called, and littlenesses, the result of vanity and egotism, that debase and obscure the manliness of their intellect. But the intellect of Mr. Opie had such a masculine vigour about it, that it never yielded for a moment to the pressure of weakness; but kept on with such a firm, untired, undeviating step towards the goal of excellence, that it was impossible for the delicate feet of woman to overtake it in its career. (LP 26–7)

In this passage, Opie not only sets in opposition male strength and female weakness; she also deferentially singles out her husband from other men because of his total lack of pride and selfishness, two traits which she associates with female behaviour and which she deciphers in ‘many’ other men of ‘high talents and excellent genius’. Clearly, throughout the narrative, Opie projects herself as the submissive and acquiescent, but also protective and supportive wife of an allegedly highly talented man. AMELIA OPIE’S MEMOIR: FULFILLING DESIRE And yet, as we have seen in Lucy Hutchinson’s biographical tribute to her husband, the mournful voice of Amelia Opie, the compliant widow, tangles intimately with that of the assertive professional writer. While casting herself as the humble and admiring rescuer of her husband’s professional and private reputation, her Memoir is also underpinned by her own desire for self-promotion. Her account decidedly validates her identity as an intellectually engaged woman writer. Although the text appears to reproduce the hierarchical model of the dominant (masculine, idealized) and submissive (feminine) partner, the subtext, on the other hand, orchestrates a dynamic of competition and a battle for narrative

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control and self-construction. Throughout the biographical account, Amelia Opie’s self-effacing behaviour paradoxically supports her own originality as a female writer. Interestingly, the novelist was actively engaged, and expressed great interest, in the production of her own image during this period. Between 1801 and 1809 (the date of publication of her Memoir), no fewer than four engraved portraits, all based on paintings by John Opie, were published in contemporary periodicals. These engraved images appeared in the Lady Monthly’s Museum of March 1801 and in the European Magazine of May 1803; the print published in The Cabinet of June 1807 was also reissued in the Flowers of Poetry that same year.45 Like these images, the concluding sentences of her Memoir equally highlight Amelia Opie’s desire for fame and recognition. Whilst expressing her satisfaction in having written her Memoir, she also concedes a well-founded hope that by means of these tributary pages my name will descend with Mr. Opie’s to posterity;—for as the gums of the East give perpetuity amongst Eastern nations to the bodies of the dead, so the merit of Mr. Opie’s work will ensure immortality to mine and this public testimony to his virtues, borne by her who KNEW him, and who LOVED him best, will live, I trust, as a memorial of my gratitude to him, for nine years of nearly uninterrupted happiness. (LP 53–4)

This passage indicates the author’s subversive yearning for self-publicity in the very act of mourning. She positions herself as her husband’s equal, securing the immortality of her own work through her husband’s last farewell. The humble and despondent tone of the beginning of the Memoir has, by the end of the narrative, been replaced by the voice of a woman in control of her own name and career. There are other ways by which Amelia Opie inscribes herself and her work in her narrative. Her literary demarcation lies in the very themes that she chooses to tackle with regard to her husband’s life. Indeed the entire Memoir bears the imaginative energy of her fictional work. Amelia Opie approaches and frames her husband’s portrait through the prism of her simple and moral tale, frequently reiterating and protecting her spouse’s ‘simple’ background and his ‘simple’ pleasures. His ‘tastes were simple’, she insists, ‘he loved what may be denominated the cheap pleasures of existence, reading, conversation, and evening walk, either for the sake of exercise or for the study of picturesque effect’ (LP 33).46 By casting John Opie as a ‘simple’ King, ‘“So Soon the Lone Survivor of You All”’, 129. She also observes that ‘[h]e was temperate in most of his habits. Dinner parties, if they consisted of persons whose society he valued, he was always willing to join. Still, his habits and his taste were so domestic in their nature, that he, on the whole, preferred passing his 45 46

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character, the writer inevitably establishes intertextual links with her fictional work, in which traditional values such as simplicity, faithfulness, obedience, industry, sincerity, and honesty were set in contrast with those held in other contemporary works, many of which, we have seen, conveyed much more liberal and progressive notions about society and its members.47 Besides John Opie’s simplicity and his ‘uncommon’ learning and humanity, there are other values that Amelia Opie explicitly promotes in her Memoir, including those relating to familial piety. Opie’s fictional tales, we remember, often deal with the severe and serious consequences incurred through the disruption of the family unit. In her Memoir, the novelist moves to the other side of the equation, constantly underlining the moral values of strong family ties. She uses Opie’s personal experience to point out the happy consequence of living in a harmonious family atmosphere. Describing the painter’s relationship with his mother, the novelist praises her husband for speaking ‘of his mother with the most touching enthusiasm. He described her as the most perfect of human beings;—as the most mild, most just, and most disinterested of women’ (LP 14). Comparing John Opie to Thomas Chatterton, she insists that ‘it was not in talent only that he resembled the unfortunate Chatterton [but that he] resembled him also in attachment to his family’ (LP 11). Both artists generously shared the pecuniary outcomes of their artistic efforts; Chatterton ‘never looked forward to any worldly good without telling his mother and sister that he hoped to share it with them’; similarly, we learn that ‘no sooner had Mr. Opie settled in London, with a prospect of increasing employment, than some of his first earnings were transmitted by him to his mother; and his sister whom he tenderly loved, and who well deserved his affection’ (LP 11–12). However, Amelia Opie does not fail to stress that her husband possessed personal qualities that Chatterton did not possess, those of ‘industry’, ‘patience’, ‘prudence’, and ‘self-denial’ (LP 12). She also strongly condemns Chatterton’s suicide some forty years earlier, considering it an act of egotism: ‘The mother and sister whom Chatterton held so dear were left by his wretched and selfish suicide in the same state of poverty which they had ever known; while those of my husband were enabled by his well-deserved success to know the comforts of a respectable competence’ (LP 12). Amelia Opie’s comparison between

evenings at home, to joining any society abroad; and he employed his hours from tea- to bed-time either in reading books of instruction or amusement, in studying prints from the best ancient and modern masters, or in sketching designs for pictures of various descriptions’ (LP 34). 47 Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1–19.

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her husband and the young poet thus extends as far as presenting the two as genial and good-natured––both, she points out, were clearly misunderstood artists who remained devoted to their family. Yet, simultaneously, she presents her beloved husband as an anti-Chatterton, for the latter committed an unlawful, selfish, and violent act which she, the famous and publicly appraised writer of moral tales, could not endorse. By choosing the genre of ‘the moral tale’, we recall, Amelia Opie was able to lay claim to a higher status for her work. She also distinguished herself as a biographer, for her narrative––unlike many other biographical accounts produced at the time––refrained from stripping away the morally respectable, refined veneer of her subject’s existence. Her biographical treatment of the painter was doubly important: on the one hand, it projected John Opie as a morally decent, honest, and industrious individual, at a time when his reputation as an artist was no longer at its peak. On the other hand, it also allowed Amelia Opie to remain faithful to her standing fame as a writer of moral and simple literature, a financially prudent move considering her first two major tales had been immensely successful among the reading public.48 No doubt, to write a simple and moral Memoir was not merely a personal and deferential act of recognition; it also constituted a polemical act of literary, cultural, and political significance.49 OPIE’S MEMOIR AND THE DISCOURSE OF ART Amelia Opie’s self-emancipating and self-promoting gesture as a female writer articulated itself in yet another way: the publication of her Memoir as a preamble to her husband’s academic Lectures automatically introduced her text, and herself, into a field and discourse of art that was predominantly masculine. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, women who had ventured into becoming art reviewers, biographers, or indeed painters, were few and far between.50 Female writers whose work entered the sphere of art historiography and art criticism during this period were 48 By 1809, an 8th edn of The Father and Daughter had been published, and her Poems of 1802 reached a 6th edn by 1811; for a discussion of Opie’s earnings, see Jan Fergus and Janice F. Thaddeus, ‘Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790–1820’, Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture, 17 (1987), 191–207, esp. 197–201. 49 Joanna Tong, ‘The Return of the Prodigal Daughter: Finding the Family in Amelia’s Opie’s Novels’, Studies in the Novel, 36 (2004), 465. 50 Nineteenth-cent. women art historians included Marianna Starke, Lady Eastlake, Lady Callcott. On women art historians in the early 19th cent., see Claire Richter Sherman and Adele M. Holcomb (eds), Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820–1979 (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1981), esp. 3–21.

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often viewed in a condescending light by their male counterparts—their critical pieces being usually identified as an appropriation of male prerogatives. Hazlitt’s dismissive review of Lady Morgan’s Life and Times of Salvator Rosa in the July 1824 issue of the Edinburgh Review is a typical example of such masculine condescension. Hazlitt certainly had little positive to say about Lady Morgan’s biography. His censorious review suggests that her account of the Italian painter had failed to satisfy most rules of artbiographical writing. He described Lady Morgan’s text as ‘very fabulous’ and ‘apocryphal’, as containing only few ‘striking traits’ and ‘data’ and as full of ‘conjectures’. Hazlitt accused the Irish novelist of having peopled her Life of the Italian artist with imaginary individuals, making them roam in the same romantic ‘solitudes’ or hide ‘in the recesses of the same ruins’ as Rosa. In short, Hazlitt charged Lady Morgan with stringing ‘the flowers of literature and the pearls of philosophy’ onto what he considered the meagre threads of her biography.51 He believed that Lady Morgan was ill equipped to undertake such a serious critical artform and wished that she ‘would condescend to a more ordinary style, and not insist continually on playing the diplomatist in petticoats, and strutting the little Gibbon of her age!’52 His contemptuous remark clearly testifies to the strong gendered discrimination of art-historical discourse and to the fact that women were, by and large, still excluded from this masculine discursive network during this period. By publishing the Memoir of John Opie fifteen years before Lady Morgan’s biography of Salvator Rosa, Amelia Opie was clearly treading uncharted and contentious territory. For her, however, the field of art was not totally unknown as she had made many connections with the artistic community of late eighteenth-century London through her husband. Her interests in visual matters and topics had already been crystallized in 1801, when she published her ‘Epistle supposed to be Addressed by Eudora, The Maid of Corinth, to Her Lover Philemon, Informing him of her having traced his Shadow on the Wall while he was sleeping, the Night before his Departure: Together with the joyful Consequence of his Action’––a poem based upon Pliny the Elder’s classical legend on the origin of painting. The novelist may have learnt of Pliny’s tale through William Hayley’s notes to a Poetical Epistle to an Eminent Painter, which appeared in 1778. The myth of the origin of painting was very popular in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Artists as diverse as George Cumberland, John Flaxman, William Blake, and J. C. Lavater used Pliny’s story to support 51 William Hazlitt, ‘Review of “The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa”’, Edinburgh Review (July 1824), 317. 52 Ibid. 318.

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their theories on the outline and the silhouette.53 For Amelia Opie, the legend of the Corinthian maid allowed her to explore matters closer to her heart, including issues of femininity, agency, as well as the private and public implications of female creativity.54 Unlike most iconographic representations of the subject, Opie presented the maid as an autonomous female artist, for although she acknowledged the inspiring presence of Cupid, she limited his effect on the material product of the maid’s art.55 Opie’s interpretation of the myth no doubt had political, social, and cultural implications for it turned the ancient story of the origin of painting into the more modern story of the origin of the female artist. Shelley King has shown that Opie’s own literary treatment of the story revealed ‘a careful management of contemporary cultural values to produce an autonomous female artist figure whose aesthetic command of her own private erotic desire [resulted] in the social benefit of public art’.56 Opie’s feministic interpretation of Pliny’s story was a clear sign of her transgressive investment and self-authorization within a specifically masculine discourse: not only did she venture to write about an artistic topic; she transformed it from within in order to spell out concerns directly associated with her own position as a female artist. Her Memoir was similarly subversive, introducing her as a woman historian fully conscious of her literary power and knowledge of painting. Her remarks about art were certainly not meant as rigid artistic precepts. They were sporadic and quietly interwoven within the fabric of her text. Nonetheless, the account of her husband contains passages that testify to her understanding of the visual arts, and her familiarity with its various aspects. Amelia Opie was certainly sensitive to current aesthetic theories and practices. Moulding her husband’s career within the theoretical framework of the Royal Academy, she remarked that her spouse’s success and excellence had been obtained ‘by continued and daily perseverance’ and not ‘by convulsive starts of applications’; ‘not by the alternately rapid and faint step of the hare, but by the slow yet sure and incessant pace of the tortoise’ (LP 29). While underpinning the moral and didactic function of her biographical narrative, Opie’s remarks were undoubtedly inspired by Reynolds’s conception of industry––a concept which the first president of the Academy defined specifically as the industry ‘of the mind’ rather than that ‘of the hands’. The intellectual and cosmopolitan nature of contemporary aesthetic theories, as divulged and taught at the Royal Academy, resurfaces intermittently in the Memoir. John Opie’s high-minded approach towards 53 Shelley King, ‘Amelia Opie’s “Maid of Corinth” and the Origins of Art’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 37 (2004), 637. 54 55 56 Ibid. 630. Ibid. 643. Ibid. 630.

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art was indebted to his predecessors, many of whom are introduced as moral examples. For example, we learn that John Opie deeply admired Fuseli, not only because the Swiss painter possessed ‘great classical attainments’ but also because he had ‘wit’, ‘conversation’, and ‘learning’––three qualities each of which made Fuseli ‘an honour to his profession’ (LP 28). In addition to such oblique observations on the nature of contemporary and institutional art theory, Amelia Opie made more specific observations on certain pictorial genres. For example, she considered portrait painting as ‘the most painful and trying’ as well as the most ‘irritating’ exercise because ‘beauties and merits in the portrait’, she believed, are ‘often stigmatised as deformities and blemishes’ and ‘high lights’ are often taken for ‘white spots, and dark effective shadows for the dirty appearance of a snuff taker’ (LP 43). Amelia Opie’s remarks on portrait painting were fuelled by her own interest in literary portraiture. In fact, she conceived of her own Memoir as a textual counterpart to portrait painting: ‘It was my business’, she writes at the end of her biographical narrative, ‘to copy the art of the portrait-painter, who endeavours to give a general rather than a detailed likeness of a face, and, while he throws its trivial defects into shadow, brings forward its perfections in the strongest point of view’ (LP 53). Amelia Opie’s technique of literary portraiture––one which openly acknowledges her partiality as a biographer––was very close to her husband’s own approach to portrait painting, inspired as it was by Dutch portraiture, and especially by Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro style.57 Although Opie’s statements on painting, painters, and genres seem undogmatic and non-prescriptive, her performance as a literary portraitist implicitly undercut and engaged with the masculine approach to art as it was conceived and taught during this period, especially by academicians like Reynolds and Fuseli, whom she mentions several times in her Memoir. Like many other female writers who tackled historical subjects during this period, Amelia Opie critiqued the masculine contours of art historiography and the type of knowledge it produced. For by presenting John Opie in a private and domestic environment, she resisted what Greg Kucich has described as ‘the totalising inclination of masculine historiography to delineate grand sweeps of historical process that subsume individual subjects within universal paradigms of historical development’.58 The portrait of her husband resisted such totalizing, high-minded, and allencompassing narratives. It also implicitly questioned and reviewed the 57 Christopher White, David Alexander, and Ellen D’Oench, Rembrandt in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1983). 58 Greg Kucich, ‘Romanticism and Feminist Historiography’, Wordsworth Circle, 24 (1993), 137.

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cosmopolitan idea of art so prevalent at the time––an idea based on the assumption that the British school should draw inspiration from the Continental schools, and which also rested on the belief that British artists should pursue and build upon a tradition of art that went back to the Renaissance, if not earlier. The interiority, domesticity, and locality of Amelia Opie’s Memoirs displaced and simultaneously humanized this masculine, cosmopolitan, and transhistorical type of knowledge. Indeed, her Memoir crystallized the views held by an increasing number of female historians during this period, including Catharine Macaulay who, in her History of England, declared that ‘History is called upon to scrutinize with exactness . . . [the] character’ of individual subjects. For Macaulay––as for Opie––the ‘disposition’ of the human heart, rather than grand historical narrative reconstructions, would lead to the deepest truths of experience.59 Opie’s pioneering engagement with contemporary views of art confirmed the growing tendency during this period for female writers to contribute to the hitherto predominantly male discourse about art historiography and painting. Although women art historians would have to wait until later in the nineteenth century to be socially and professionally recognized, the influence of women as alternative social agents in the visual arts was already felt in the early part of the century. Indeed, while women were, for the most part, still being excluded from the real sites of power in the public sphere, their influence nonetheless pervaded many cultural centres of the time, including those specifically designed and established by men. Cynthia Roman has shown that Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery for example––which between 1793 and 1806 displayed paintings by leading artists of the day––included an increasing number of feminized historical images that put particular emphasis on the domestic and the private.60 In many paintings exhibited in the Historic Gallery, women held a central position. The emotional and sentimental dynamic of the stories depicted in Bowyer’s gallery pictures, as well as the moral virtue of their female protagonists, were designed to engage the sympathy of the spectators, allowing them to empathize with the characters’ actions, sentiments, and passions. Such emotional engagement had cultural and 59 Catharine Macaulay, The History of England, from the Accession of James I to that of Brunswick Line, 8 vols (London, 1764–83); here iv. 419; i. 69, quoted in Kucich, ‘Romanticism’, 137. The domestic nature of Opie’s interpretation and depiction of her husband’s existence may also have been affected by the rise of contemporary painting illustrating everyday life subjects; on the topic, see David H. Solkin, Painting out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 60 Cynthia Roman, ‘Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery and the Feminization of the “Nation”’, in Dana Arnold (ed.), Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 15–34.

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political significance. Not only did depictions of feminine virtue provide new models for social morality; representations of domesticity also highlighted the importance of sentiment as a vital component in English national identity. As Roman observes, Bowyer’s agenda was ‘to represent the British nation as a body of moral private individuals’; his idea of counter-publics included, rather than excluded, the powerful influence of feminine virtue. Although Amelia Opie did not hold centre stage in the Memoir, her position as biographer conferred on her a role that was as significant as that of the many female protagonists in Bowyer’s gallery pictures. Like them, it allowed her to communicate moral and social values to a growing reading and viewing public, and to refine the roles played by women in British society. No doubt, as in many of Bowyer’s gallery pictures, the domestic in Opie’s Memoir became intimately linked with the cultural and political, with her depiction of conjugal and family life now central to social and political notions of the public good. THE LAST SIGH Having astutely negotiated the tension between duty and desire, and between private and public, Amelia Opie finally reached the most painful and melancholy part of her biographical account: her husband’s illness and death. The gravity of the moment, however, did not seem to lessen her impulsive need for self-publicity. On the contrary, her apparent tribute to her spouse was counterbalanced by her own self-pitying inscription in the narrative: ‘Great as my misery must have been at such a moment under any circumstances’, she wrote, it was . . . aggravated by my being deprived of the consolation and benefit of my father’s presence and advice at that most trying period of my life, for he was attending the sick-bed of his, apparently, dying mother. Yet she recovered, at the age of eighty-five, to the perfect enjoyment of life and happiness; while Mr. Opie was cut off in the very prime of his days! (LP 46)

Rather than focusing specifically on her husband’s final moments, Opie turned the reader’s attention to herself, exaggerating her own suffering by mentioning the absence of her beloved father during this, one of the most difficult moments of her existence. The allusion to her grandmother’s recovery, whilst pointing to the injustice of life, also overshadowed her husband’s demise. Drawing the attention to her own feelings and sentiments, Amelia Opie spoke of her comfort at seeing so many friends visit in order to pay tribute to her spouse, interpreting their last respects as a sign of his particular qualities and testimony to ‘how truly society feels the

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value, and how deeply it laments, “the loss of a man of genius”’ (LP 51). Using, once more, a vocabulary familiar from her novels––personal suffering and the incurrence of debt––she apologized in advance for not being able to repay ‘such kindnesses and such obligations’ to her friends, except perhaps ‘in the indelible sentiments of gratitude which they excited in [her] and [which] may hope to be considered as adequate payment’ (LP 47). The mourning voice of the widow merged, once again, with that of the writer of moral tales keen to present her husband’s life as a lesson in ‘industry, and honour, affection, and gratitude’ (LP 52). The qualities and values which the novelist stressed throughout her Memoir were those that were eventually cultivated into the image of the virtuous bourgeois artist of the Victorian era. Opie’s emphasis on integrity, morality and learning was indeed stimulated by the need to counter the image of her spouse as a misunderstood genius, one who had not quite achieved his potential as a painter because of a lack of proper grounding. Yet, at the same time, such qualities were to gain further importance in the biographies published later in the century. As Julie Codell has observed, ‘the rise of British artists’ celebrity was considered evidence that British public taste had improved and that artists were thoroughly socialized, not alienated and suffering in garrets’. Many ‘Victorian artists’, Codell continues, ‘were models of success, decorum, proper manliness . . . and, ultimately, of Britishness, all intended for public consumption’.61 Amelia Opie was at pains to show that, despite his having to endure bouts of hardship, her husband still honoured all the qualities of ‘decorum’ and ‘proper manliness’ belonging to any respectable man. She offered her Memoir as a book of conduct to be followed by students of art and other individuals in need of moral and intellectual guidance. In this regard, Opie’s portrait of her husband marked a transition in art-biographical writing for, unlike most lives published up until the end of the eighteenth century, yet very much like those published later in the nineteenth century, it was predicated on ‘the presentation of a mutually reflecting mirror between public and artist, not on distinguishing the artist radically from the public’.62 Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Morland, we have seen, were all portrayed as exceptional, indeed extraordinary individuals, isolated from the public on account of their genius or eccentricity. Opie, by contrast, was portrayed in a more private light, within an environment which readers could recognize, and with which they could more easily identify. Although biographies of artists published in the first half of the nineteenth century still 61

Julie Codell, The Victorian Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),

2–3. 62

Ibid. 6.

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sought to present their subjects as remarkably talented and interesting, these narratives gradually came to fulfil Victorian ideals of perseverance, conscientiousness, and moral responsibility. C. R. Leslie’s Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1843; expanded version 1845) portrays the artist through the use of carefully edited letters, appearing to allow Constable to give a first-person account of his life. At the same time, Leslie convincingly introduces Constable both as a genius and as a man who is socially conventional, economically dependable, and morally respectable. The image of the artist as talented, yet professionally tenacious re-emerges in Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family (1855) in which the character of J. J. Ridley displays certain Victorian didactic principles of loyalty and industry.63 The artistic, social, and political circumstances in which the lives of artists were produced in the latter part of the nineteenth century were of course different. Codell’s book shows that later published biographies reflected and simultaneously accommodated the readers’ changing interests and needs. As the nineteenth century progressed, accessible works such as artists’ biographies also became economically important. These were addressed to the new bourgeois audiences who played a significant part in the shaping of the public and private patronage during the Victorian era. 63 See Richard Altick, ‘Writing the Life of J. J. Ridley’, in Laurence S. Lockridge, John Maynard, and Donald D. Stone (eds), Nineteenth-Century Lives: Essays Presented to Jerome Hamilton Buckley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 26–58.

Conclusion Eleven years after James Northcote’s disparaging remark regarding the lack of suitable biographies of artists in Britain, Hazlitt voiced his own opinion about the biographical genre and about the writing of the lives of painters in particular. In his essay published in the Edinburgh Review of July 1824, he wrote that there were ‘few works more engaging than those which reveal to us the private history of eminent individuals; the lives of painters seem to be even more interesting than those of almost any other class of men’.1 As examined in the preceding chapter, Hazlitt was reviewing Lady Morgan’s Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, which had been published in London earlier that same year. Although his essay on Lady Morgan’s book was far from being eulogistic, his appreciation and approval of artists’ lives was in sharp contrast with that of Northcote who, we remember, had considered the genre as ‘useless’ and ‘insipid’. The observations made by Hazlitt in his Edinburgh Review essay crystallized some of the fundamental changes that had taken place between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with regard to the writing of the lives of painters. Unlike Northcote’s derogatory comments, Hazlitt’s reflections on the genre gave it prime importance and centrality in the landscape of biographical writing. Hazlitt’s article also sanctioned the leading role of painters in society, considering their lives unusually interesting and appealing. No longer demoted to the lower echelons of the social and cultural ladder, painters were finally granted centre stage in the landscape of the creative arts. The genre of the artist’s life was to develop dramatically in the course of the nineteenth century, and would reach unprecedented popularity. Codell’s book demonstrates that the surge of interest in the textual lives of artists in Britain was closely related to the changing material conditions of their works and practices. New sites of artistic production and promotion––which included professional training schools, large studios, and public art galleries––allowed painters to become increasingly visible William Hazlitt, ‘Review of “The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa”’, Edinburgh Review (July 1824), 317. 1

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among audiences in Britain. The profession of the Victorian artist developed in many different ways, of course, and thus produced numerous versions of the public artistic self. The extent of forms and media in which their lives were recorded and publicized was far-reaching, too. Codell’s monograph explores this widening scope of the textual lives of painters in nineteenth-century Britain and addresses a wide variety of genres, including artists’ autobiographies, biographies by family members compiled from letters and photographs, as well as serial and collective biographies that treated artists’ lives as variations upon generic themes. Importantly, throughout the nineteenth century, this diversification and popularization of artists’ biographies was further fuelled by the many pictures of artists in circulation during the period. Such a body of texts and images had important economic repercussions too, as it was addressed to the new bourgeois audiences, whose affluence played significantly in the burgeoning art market of the Victorian era. At the time of Hazlitt’s review of Lady Morgan’s Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, in 1824, artists’ biographies had evolved into a major literary genre in Britain. Although many of them were still printed as supplements to other texts, or as part of other miscellaneous textual items, a growing number of painters’ biographies appeared as stand-alone volumes. Northcote’s 1813 Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, we have seen, counted among the first artists’ biographies to be published in Britain as an independent book. Unlike all the individual lives discussed in this study, Northcote’s narrative was intended as a fully fledged and self-contained artistic biography. His text did not function as an appendage or introduction to other narratives but sought to combine a detailed account of an artist’s life and his works. By 1819, an extended version of the Memoirs had been published in two volumes entitled The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The book also contained ‘original anecdotes of many distinguished persons, his contemporaries’, as well as a brief analysis of Reynolds’s Discourses. Among the many books used by Northcote for his biography were Mrs Piozzi’s Anecdotes (1786), Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), Richard Cumberland’s Memoirs (1806–7), and John Wooll’s Biographical Memoirs of Joseph Warton (1806). Northcote’s collection of anecdotes about Reynolds did not read smoothly, however, and the book’s critical reception was rather cold. Many reviewers condemned it for lacking substantial critical analysis and for its disjointed content.2 Northcote’s wish to publish a Life of his master was closely entangled in his desire for self-promotion. As discussed at the very beginning of this 2

For a more thorough discussion of this biography, see the intr. to James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1971), 1–37.

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book, Northcote was anxious to advocate his own versatile talents as a lifewriter and painter. In this particular case, he promoted his biography of Reynolds by making offensive remarks about the people whom Reynolds had initially approached. In conversation with Hazlitt, he asserted that Reynolds ‘had expected Burke to write his Life, and for this he would have paid almost any price. This was what made him submit to the intrusions of Boswell, to the insipidity of Malone, and to the magisterial dictation of Burke: he made sure that out of these three one would certainly write his Life, and ensure him immortality that way’ (Howe, xi. 220). None of them, we remember, had fulfilled Reynolds’s desire and Northcote set out to complete the task. Northcote clearly bore a grudge against his eminent master for not including him among his potential biographers. However, by publishing his Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Northcote was able to establish a certain ascendancy towards the men whom Reynolds had originally favoured. Northcote’s long-standing wish for fame and posterity––and his desire to be linked to Reynolds––was obvious in the very Conversations that Hazlitt recorded. This time the spotlight was finally focused on him. The Conversations of James Northcote appeared in several magazines over a period of four years before being published jointly in a single volume.3 The first of these twenty-two Conversations appeared in the August 1826 edition of the New Monthly Magazine and was headed ‘Boswell Redivivus’. The Conversations were no slavish imitations of Boswell’s biographical model, however. Hazlitt admitted to a certain slackness with regard to accuracy and acknowledged to have ‘forgotten, mistaken, mis-stated, altered, transposed a number of things’. ‘All that can be relied upon for certain’, Hazlitt confessed, ‘is a striking anecdote or a sterling remark or two in each page.’4 Hazlitt’s relaxed attitude towards biographical accuracy 3 The first group of dialogues, which Hazlitt sold to the publisher Henry Colburn in 1826, appeared under different titles in the following magazines: ‘Boswell Redivivus’, The New Monthly Magazine (Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov. 1826; Feb., Mar. 1827). ‘Real Conversations’, The London Weekly Review (Mar., Apr. 1829). ‘Conversations with an Eminent Living Artist’, The Court Journal (Jan., Feb., Apr. 1829; Jan., Feb., Apr. 1830). ‘Conversations as Good as Real’ appeared in The Atlas (Apr.–Nov. 1829). All of them were collected for the Conversations of James Northcote, which Colburn published in 1830. The book contained a portrait of James Northcote, Esq., RA, in his 82nd year. It was engraved by T. Wright, after a drawing by A. Wivell. Hazlitt was not the first to use the literary mode of ‘conversations’ in order to write the biography of a painter. In 17th-cent. France, André Félibien had published the Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres (1666). For a discussion of Félibien’s Entretiens, see René Démoris, ‘Félibien: Biographie, théorie et histoire dans les Entretiens’, in Les Vies d’artistes (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1996), 177–93. 4 Quoted in Percival P. Howe, The Life of William Hazlitt (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1928), 350.

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did not suit Northcote’s expectations and many editorial changes had to be made. Details about contentious issues and retaliations between Hazlitt, Northcote, publishers, and vexed readers underlined the painter’s selfconsciousness and his desire to control his own words. The book subsequently contained no fewer than six cancelled leaves. Like Reynolds before him, the old Northcote was clearly anxious to preserve his stature as a painter for posterity.5 Interestingly, the Conversations embodies and revisits several important issues discussed throughout this study, including the rise of painters’ social standing, the use of biography in the construction of artistic identity, as well as the decisive role of the biographer in the shaping of an afterdeath reputation. Hazlitt’s recorded conversations also exemplify the shift in artbiographical writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in its personalization and individualization of aesthetics as well as in its emancipation from Continental models. That Northcote’s utterances were deemed worthy of retention and later publication is in itself clear evidence of the artist’s rise in social status during this period. In this particular case, Northcote’s self-portrayal as an intellectual painter was no doubt inspired by his earlier master who believed that the artist had ‘to improve [mankind] by the grandeur of his ideas’ and that ‘instead of seeking praise, by deceiving the superficial sense of the spectator, he [had to] strive for fame, by captivating the imagination’.6 In the Conversations, Northcote reiterated similar ideas when he compared the works of English painters and writers. Discussing the works of Hogarth, he said: This is why Hogarth can never come into the lists. He does not lift us above ourselves: our curiosity may be gratified by seeing what men are, but our pride must be soothed by seeing them made better. Why else is Milton preferred to Hudibras, but because the one aggrandises our notions of human nature, and the other degrades it? Who will make any comparison between a Madona of Raphael and a drunken prostitute by Hogarth? (Howe, xi. 201)

For Northcote, as for Reynolds, a painting’s iconographic subject existed to elevate the viewer’s mind and had to remain as timeless and universal as possible. It is clear that in the Conversations Northcote was at pains to pass on his master’s knowledge and teaching to posterity. Tellingly, Northcote 5 See Herschel M. Sikes, ‘“The Infernal Hazlitt”: The New Monthly Magazine, and the Conversations of James Northcote, R.A.’, in Heinz Bluhm (ed.), Essays in History and Literature: Presented by Fellows of the Newberry Library to Stanley Pargellis (Chicago, 1965), 179–91, as well as James Northcote’s Letter Book, Bodleian Library, Eng. Misc. e. 143. 6 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 42.

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regarded himself as a mediator between two different eras. In the Conversations he remarked to Hazlitt that after the visit of a certain female friend, he wondered ‘why she is so kind as to come except that I am the last link in the chain that connects her with all those she most esteemed when she was young, Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith—and remind her of the most delightful period of her life’ (Howe, xi. 224). Hazlitt, who was recording these words, had very different opinions about Hogarth and about his natural aesthetic. In this respect, Hazlitt’s role as a biographer was a delicate one, as he attempted to produce a literary portrait of an artist with very different opinions from his own. This tension between the biographer and his or her subject was not unusual. We have seen that both Thicknesse’s Sketch of Gainsborough and Amelia Opie’s Memoir of John Opie articulated conflicts of personal and professional interests. Here, Northcote and Hazlitt disagreed on aesthetic and stylistic issues, albeit not always openly. Unlike Northcote––and unlike Reynolds–– for whom the imitation of Nature consisted of conceiving of an ideal of Nature in one’s mind before transferring it to canvas, Hazlitt believed in the immediacy of observation. In his article ‘Fine Arts’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he challenged Reynoldsian concepts of ideal Nature and wrote that the pre-eminence of the great masters ‘has constantly depended, not on the creation of a fantastic, abstract excellence, existing nowhere but in their own minds, but in their selecting and embodying some one view of nature, which came immediately under their habitual observation, and which their particular genius led them to study and imitate with success’ (Howe, xviii. 122; my emphasis). Hazlitt believed that the greatest works of art (among which he listed the Greek statues, the Italian, Dutch, and Flemish masters, and Hogarth) ‘owe[d] their pre-eminence and perfection to one and the same principle;—the immediate imitation of nature’ (Howe, xviii. 111). Intensity, clarity, precision, and minuteness were prerequisites of good art. If Hazlitt admired Hogarth, it was precisely because the painter-engraver was able to paint character and expression. Hazlitt was convinced that it is not by rejecting details and peculiarities that an artist remains faithful to Nature. He believed instead ‘that the highest perfection of the art depends, not on the separation, but on the union (as far as possible) of general truth and effect with individual distinctness and accuracy’ (Howe, xviii. 70). For him, general and particular, mind and body, form and detail had to be combined in order to transcribe Nature in the most faithful and realistic way. Hazlitt’s belief in the aesthetic of the natural may have affected the genre in which he chose to portray his biographical subject. Indeed, the conversational genre allowed him to present and reveal Northcote in the most natural and truthful manner, thereby achieving through literature

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the accuracy he so admired in the painting and sculpture of the great masters. In his review on Lady Morgan’s Life of Salvator Rosa, quoted above, he declared that The great charm of biography consists in the individuality of the details, the familiar tone of the incidents, the bringing us acquainted with the persons of men whom we have formerly known only by their works or names, the absence of all exaggeration or pretension, and the immediate appeal to facts instead of theories.7

Hazlitt’s notion of biography reproduced the emphasis already made by Johnson in his 1750 Rambler, no. 60, on the essential value of life-writing arising from its ability to capture everyday aspects of human life. The Conversations allowed Hazlitt to achieve precisely this goal: the portrayal of his subject in a lifelike manner. Northcote’s individuality, the possibility of an intimate acquaintance with him, and the vividness of spoken facts were all successfully reproduced. In view of Hazlitt’s critical and philosophical essays, which refuted abstraction and emphasized the individual, the concrete, and the particular, the Conversations as a literary genre clearly helped him give shape to his artistic convictions.8 Like Titian’s portrait of Hippolito de Medici, Hazlitt was able to write ‘all the lines of the face . . . the sharp angles, the same acute, edgy, contracted, violent expression’ of his subject (Howe, xviii. 120). Interestingly, the Conversations also allowed Hazlitt to engage with his subject in a way that was less blatantly critical and derogatory than some of his predecessors. Unlike Thicknesse’s Sketch of Gainsborough or later John Thomas Smith’s Nollekens and his Times (1828)––two texts which staged the biographers’ disagreement towards their subject––Hazlitt used the conversational mode in order to represent the limitations of Northcote’s and Reynolds’s aesthetic theories, while seeming to be the faithful recorder of the painter’s words.9 Indeed, the Conversations as a biographical genre helped Hazlitt distance himself naturally from the theories expressed by his biographical subject. The writer perversely allowed Northcote to speak and reveal himself, as well as demonstrate the failure of his artistic and literary beliefs, without condemning him openly. Hazlitt, ‘Review’, 317. On the subject, see Roy Parke, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 9 In fact, Hazlitt found six points of difference with Reynolds, which he stated in different ways and in several essays. These six objections are mentioned at the end of his ‘Introduction to an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses’ (Howe, xviii. 63); see also Leonard M. Trawick, ‘Hazlitt, Reynolds, and the Ideal’, Studies in Romanticism, 4 (1965), 240–7, and Eugene C. Elliott, ‘Reynolds and Hazlitt’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 21 (1962), 73–9. 7 8

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The status of Hazlitt’s Conversations as an artist’s biography may legitimately be questioned. The text contains no diachronic development of Northcote’s life and career; nor does it include comprehensive descriptions of works of art. Furthermore, as Hazlitt’s comment in the preface to the first Conversation makes clear, his text is not always reliable. As I have shown throughout this study, however, the concept of the artist’s life was extremely diverse and flexible in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (it continued to be so during the Victorian period). The forms and structures of painters’ textual lives did not fit a single mould but rather stretched it in various directions. Such biographical diversity promoted numerous artistic personalities, who in turn reflected the eclecticism and variety of the British school of painting during this period. Hazlitt’s Conversations also represents a powerful example of how the practices of art-biographical writing developed and emancipated themselves from Continental practices, adopting contemporary literary forms and addressing issues that were more consonant with the concerns and interests of modern readers. Despite its uncharacteristic nature, however, Hazlitt’s conversational narrative contains topics that belong specifically to the biographies of painters––topics, interestingly, that are also present in Vasari’s Vite. Instead of being exposed and theorized, however, they are here discussed, enacted, self-fashioned, and internalized. For example, the theme of the original artist is not presented through the use of traditional artists’ anecdotes but is discussed by Hazlitt and Northcote at the very beginning of the first conversation, when the two men comment on Byron’s desire to be ‘something different from every body else’ (Howe, xi. 187). Issues of originality resurface on many occasions throughout the Conversations, including in the second conversation when the two men discuss Opie’s talents. Northcote considered Opie a ‘very original-minded man’ and a ‘true genius’ who was always able to ‘put your thoughts into a new track that was worth following’. Elaborating his claim, Northcote explained that the difference lay ‘between sense and genius;—a man of genius judges for himself’, he observed, ‘and you hear nothing but what is original from him’, a man of sense, on the other hand, ‘judges as others do’ and, though he may not be ‘the most instructive companion’, he is at least ‘the safest guide to follow’ (Howe, xi. 197). Northcote’s conception of originality echoes Vasari’s as he, too, identifies an artist’s individual talents through the display and performance of ground-breaking skills. In Northcote’s eyes, Opie––like Vasari’s painters––distinguished himself by virtue of making novel and unusual contributions to the performance of his predecessors. No doubt, the claim of artists to be considered as intellectuals and not as manufacturers––a claim that was fundamental for the develop-

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ment of the artists’ status in the Renaissance––is here conveyed not by the description or the analysis of elevated iconographic subjects but by the performance of Northcote, who is prompted to display his knowledge of a vast number of different subjects. The sense of historical development, too, so central to Vasari’s Vite, arises in the Conversations not from the accumulation of the lives of different artists but rather from the assertions of one English painter very much aware of the meeting of past and present within himself. The letter inserted in the fourth conversation, written by Northcote to a young female admirer, again takes up the theme of transience in a moving way. In the note, the painter expresses his bewilderment as to why a young woman would ‘desire a letter’ from him: ‘If I was a fine Dandy of one-and-twenty,’ Northcote writes, with a pair of stays properly padded and also an iron busk, and whiskers under my nose, with my hair standing upright on my head, all in the present fashion, then it might be accounted for, as I might write you a fine answer in poetry about Cupids and burning hearts. . . . But what has a poor grayheaded old man of eighty got to say to a blooming young lady of eighteen, but to relate to her his illness and pains, and tell her that life is little better than a dream, and that he finds that all he has been doing is only vanity. (Howe, xi. 212)

Here, the notion of time passing and that of human destiny––issues that Vasari dealt with through his collection of individual biographies––is internalized by a Northcote conscious of his own mortality. Acutely aware of living his final years, the painter reflects on the vanity of his own actions and achievements, thus adding a modern and decidedly more relative meaning to the notions of artistic success, talents, and fame that are so central to Vasari’s biographical narrative. Five years after the publication of Hazlitt’s article in the Edinburgh Review, Allan Cunningham published his own Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1829–33). Cunningham’s work crystallized many of the developments that took place in British artbiographical writing, and represented the culmination of a process that I have observed in its initial stages.10 Cunningham’s Lives, we saw, praised the naturalistic tendencies of British art and keenly promoted the production of genre and landscape painting. Cunningham’s narrative gave prime importance to Hogarth and Gainsborough, two artists who had been

10 Vols i and ii, appeared in 1829, iii in 1830, iv in 1831, v in 1832, and vi in 1833. For a discussion of Cunningham’s text, see Julie Codell, The Victorian Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 76–7 and 212–14.

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considered academically inferior up until the first decade of the nineteenth century. The title of Cunningham’s work, we recall, was inspired by Johnson’s Lives of the Poets––a text with which Cunningham’s own Lives shared many features. Indeed, the structure and tone of Cunningham’s Lives were much closer to those of Johnson’s than to Walpole’s Anecdotes. In fact, Walpole and Cunningham had antithetical opinions of Johnson: whereas the former criticized Johnson for his ‘loaded style’, for his ‘triptology’, and for choosing words that were often ‘too forceful for ordinary occasions’,11 the latter admired him for his intellectual and emotional sagacity, skill, and insight.12 Cunningham’s Lives were less antiquarian than Walpole’s Anecdotes and provided readers with more information about the artists as human beings. Like Johnson, Cunningham was keen to explore the origins of artistic creativity. He held painters, sculptors, and architects in high esteem with regard to their powers of invention and natural genius––issues focused on only indirectly in the Anecdotes. Significantly, Walpole’s and Cunningham’s works were addressed to different audiences. Cunningham’s text was not intended for a specialist audience of gentlemen aristocrats, but was addressed to the uninitiated, that is, the moneyed middle classes who gradually emerged in the nineteenth century.13 By applying a literary model to artistic biography, Cunningham was adapting to a readership already comfortable with literary discussions and familiar with the lives of writers. (Ruskin would do the same for art criticism when he aimed his Modern Painters (1843) at a similar audience at ease with literature but still uneasy in the refined world of art connoisseurship.) Cunningham’s modest background (he was formerly a stonemason) goes some way to explaining his emphasis on the less elitist aspects of his subjects’ personal and artistic experiences. He, like Johnson, addressed the upper echelons of a more popular market, rather than the aristocratic connoisseurial one that Walpole looked to. Cunningham’s Lives testifies to the important shift that took place in art historiography in Britain between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth; a shift which saw the gradual disappearance of a foreign model of art-historical writing and the slow emergence of a native frame of biographical and artistic reference. Concurrently, Cunningham’s achievement epitomizes the enduring impact of eighteenth-century 11 Horace Walpole, ‘General Criticism on Dr. Johnson’s Writings’, in The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 5 vols (London, 1798), iv. 361–2. 12 On the subject, see Annette W. Cafarelli, Prose in the Age of Poets (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1990), 87. 13 William Vaughan, ‘The Englishness of British Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 13 (1990), 16.

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literary and biographical practices. Cunningham was part of a group of nineteenth-century writers whose artists’ biographies were no longer exclusively aimed at providing readers with lengthy formal and iconographic analyses of artworks. From this point on, the interest increasingly shifted towards the individual artist, who now became the prime focus of attention.

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Index —ana 19, 95 Abel, Karl Friedrich 172 actor, see biography (of actors) Adolphus, John Leycester 17 Aglionby, William 32 Aikin, John 18, 24 Alberti, Leon Battista 37 alcohol 196 see also topos of drunken genius Alderson, James 203 Ames, Joseph 55, 79 anecdote 4, 8–9, 18–21, 36, 40, 45, 58, 84, 96, 98, 100, 103, 118–20, 227, 231 and artistic personality 76–8 and Hogarth 111 and Morland 183 Anecdotes (published work) 19, 61, 108–9 function 124–5 literary anecdote 111–12 Plinian anecdote 74–6 relation to images 125–6 secret histories 18 status of the genre 61 anonymity 87–8 antiquarianism 16, 55, 58–60, 113, 233 Apelles 100 Aphthonius 82 Aretino, Pietro 37 art catalogue 7–8, 54, 90 art collector 55, 95 art criticism 3, 8, 11, 20, 38 biographical 43, 46, 54, 83–7, 99, 103 Britain versus the Continent 53, 55, 61 formal and connoisseurial 41–4 art dealer 188–91, 194 art exhibition 25–8, 31 art gallery 178, 188, 225 art history 20–1, 38, 103 art historian (female) 217–21 art historiography 6, 8, 233 history of the arts in England 51–5, 57–61 art market 25, 64, 106, 162–3, 177, 179, 188, 190, 194, 226 art review 28–9 artist artistic community 6–7, 11 artistic identity 2–4, 26, 38, 228

artistic personality or character 4, 8–9, 39, 76–7, 93, 98, 103, 111, 119 status 66, 73, 75, 79, 87, 228, 231 see also anecdote; biography; genius; image of the artist; topoi authorship 2 author-function 3 disguised 88 female author 203, 206, 208, 212–22 intentionality 3 autobiography 5, 9–10, 226 Baglione Giovanni, 63 Banks, Thomas 30 Bancks, John 111 Barocci, Federico 40 Barolsky, Paul 66–7 Barry, James 202, 207 Beckford, William 80–103 Biographical Memoirs 9, 80–103, 105 Bellori, Giovanni 41 Bentley, Richard 65 biographer 106–9, 212–14 relation to subject 182, 201 see also authorship (female author) biographical compendia 8–9, 22, 29, 32, 93 biographical dictionaries 22–23, 29 biography and art history 38–9, 44–7 and didacticism 17–18, 24, 184, 211, 219 and English identity 44, 55 and the novel 21–2 as genre 2–8, 16–17, 33, 93, 109, 225–6 conjugal biography 207, 212–13 function 2–3, 83, 96, 226, 228 in literary criticism 2–5 in Britain 2, 5, 6–7, 10, 15–16, 20, 23–5, 33, 225 individual biographies 8, 32, 53, 103, 105, 107 of actors 34 of artists 2–8, 20–1, 40, 66–9, 76, 96–7, 100–3, 105, 112, 123, 157, 225, 232, 234 of dancers 34 of painters 11, 80 of poets 35–6

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biography (cont.) parallel lives 94 serial biographies 5, 8, 226 versus history 17–18 versus the monograph 108 Blagdon, Francis William 181–2 Blake, William 218 Boaden, James 207 Bocaccio 36 Bohemianism 188, 199 Bolton, Robert 21–2 bonus orator 38 Boswell, James 19–20, 112, 118, 154, 196 The Life of Johnson 8, 166, 226–7 Bowyer, Robert 221–2 Boydell, Joseph 27, 170 see also Shakespeare Gallery Boydell, Josiah 170 Breval, John Durant 110 British Institution 31 British School 31 British school of painting 8, 11, 32, 44, 52, 65, 105, 186, 221, 231 versus the Continental schools 29–31 Brouwer, Adriaen 176 Bryan, Michael 22 Buckeridge, Bainbrigg 52 Burke, Edmund 154–5, 159 burlesque 102 Butler, Samuel 115 Byron, George Gordon 231 caricature 122–4 Carracci, Annibale 40 celebrity 3–4, 8, 29, 109 celebrity culture 6, 24–5, 44, 106, 183 reputation 156–7, 210, 228 versus fame 24 Chambers, Sir William 154 Charles I 54, 64 Charles II 53, 64 Chatterton, Thomas 189n, 216–17 Cimabue 75, 101–2 Codell, Julie 5, 223–6 Cole, Rev. William 56 Collins, Wilkie 190 Collins, William Memoirs of a Painter 181–5, 189–90, 194–200 Memoirs of a Picture 189–94 connoisseur 41, 44, 60, 63, 83, 87, 103 connoisseurship 8–9, 40–4, 58, 79, 84, 93, 127, 233 Constable, John 65, 172, 224

conversation (genre) 229 Cook, Thomas 111 Cooper, Samuel 78 Correggio 40 Cosimo, Piero di 187 Cosway, Richard 82 Cotes, Samuel 154 creativity 32, 76, 86, 105, 184, 187 see also genius Croft, Herbert 189n Cumberland, George 218, 226 Cunningham, Allan 172–4, 232–4 Cunningham, Peter 174 Cuyp, Aelbert 64 Dahl, Michael 77 dancer, see biography (of dancers) Dante 36 Davies, Thomas 34–5 Dawe, George 181–3, 186 De Piles, Roger 41, 43–4, 52 death-bed scene, see topoi Descamps, Jean-Baptiste 55, 62–3, 84–5 description 62–3, 92 digression 92, 96 dissection (human) 97 Dobson, William 75 Dodd, Robert 182 Dou, Gerard 83, 94, 97 Dryden, John 40, 52 Du Fresnoy, Charles Alphonse 52 Dudley, Sir Henry Bate 27 Dürer, Albrecht 108 Dutch school 64 Dutch realism 95, 98 Edema, Gerard 64 Edgeworth, Maria 204–5 Edwards, Edward 24 ekphrasis 36–7 ekphrastic poem 110 Elizabeth I 53–4 English school of painting 64, 126, 160 engraving 27, 110, 179 see also portrait (engraved portrait) Eupompos 20, 101 fact-fiction relation 82, 109, 189–90 Félibien, André 41, 55, 62 Felton, Samuel 1, 38–9 Fielding, Henry 119, 121 Flaxman, John 30–1, 39, 218 Flemish school 64 Flloyd, Thomas 23 Francis I 116–8

Index Frith, William Powell 126, 149, 152 Fulcher, George Williams 157, 171–2 Fuller, Thomas 62 Fuseli, Henry 106, 155, 194, 202, 210, 212, 220 Gainsborough, Thomas 9, 10, 30, 109, 152, 153–75, 176–7, 181, 186, 223, 229, 232 Garrick, David 34–5 genius 3, 4, 9, 32, 44, 76, 78, 105–6, 166, 229–31 and Hogarth (companionable genius) 116, 120 and Morland (isolated and misunderstood genius) 120, 177, 184–5, 188, 192, 196–7 cult of genius 105–6 natural genius 185–6, 233 persecuted genius 196–7 rhetoric of genius 8, 158 socially conventional and respectable 223–4 George I 53 George II 53 George III 26 Gerard, Alexander 184 Gibbon, Edward 55 Gibbons, Grinling 78 Gilpin, William 111, 159, 170 Giotto 75, 101–2 Giovio, Paolo 54 Girtin, Thomas 64 Godwin, William 204–5, 207, 213 Gough, Richard 59–60 Gould, John 22, 31–2 Graham, Richard 52 Grand Tour 87, 194 Granger, James 55–6 Greenhill, John 74–5, 196 Griffiere, John 64, 75 grotesque 121 Guercio, Gabriele 5, 108 Hals, Frans 71 handbook (stately house) 88–9, 93 Hassell, John 179, 181–6 Hayley, William 218 Hazlitt, William 111, 185, 218, 225–32 Conversations of James Northcote 227–32 Henry VIII 54 Historic Gallery 221 Hoare, Prince 203, 207, 209 Hobbema, Meindert 64

255

Hogarth, William 5, 9, 10, 30, 37, 59, 67, 102, 109, 110–52, 172, 175, 176, 186–7, 223, 228–9, 232 modern moral subjects 110–11 The Analysis of Beauty 110 Holbein 67, 74n, 77–8 Homer 37 Honthorst, Gerard von 64, 70 Hutchinson, Lucy 208–9, 214 Hutchinson, John 208–9 identity English identity 5, 173, 177–9, 222 see also artist image 3 biographical images 112 image of the artist 9–11, 20, 26, 53, 65–7, 71–4, 79, 107–9, 118, 120, 152, 177 decaying artist 196–7 eccentric artist 187–9 in the Victorian period 201, 223–4 modern artist 199 unrefined and low-class artist 193–4 Imlay, Gilbert 204 Inchbald, Elizabeth 204, 207 individualism 16, 234 Ireland, John, Hogarth Illustrated 111, 113, 116, 124 Ireland, Samuel 127 Irish Shakespeare Gallery 202 Jackson, William 171–3 James I 53–4 Jansen, Cornelius 70 Johnson, Samuel 15, 17, 19, 35, 107, 112, 166, 229–30, 233 Lives of the Poets 19, 35–6, 76, 174, 233 Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage 196–200 Ketel, Cornelius 78 Kneller Jr., Godfrey 76–7 Knowles, John 39–40, 106 Kris and Kurz, The Legend of the Artist 20, 76 Lamb, Charles 111 landscape painting 30, 64–5, 156, 173, 232 Lansdown, Henry Venn 84 Lanzi, Luigi 46, 84 Lavater, Johann Casper 218 Leonardo da Vinci 42, 117–18, 187 Leslie, Charles Robert, Life of John Constable 224

256

Index

Lettice, John 88–9 life-artwork relation 38–40, 86, 96–7, 103, 108, 122–3, 152 lives (genre) 108, 230–1, individual lives 16 see biography Lipking, Lawrence 53, 57, 63 Locke, John 16 Looten, Jan 64 Lysippus 102 Mabuse (Jan Gossaert) 74, 196 Macaulay, Catharine 221 Macklin, Thomas, see Poets’ Gallery Malone, Edmund 1, 154, 207 Manetti, Giannozzo 37 Mariette, Pierre Jean 57 memoir 56, 86, 93–4, 108 Michelangelo 42, 83 Milton, John 40, 166 Molière 115 monograph 5, 8, 32, 103, 108 More, Sir Antonio 75 Morgan, Lady 218, 225–6, 230 Morland Gallery 178–9, 181–2 Morland, George 9–10, 30, 74, 109, 120, 164, 175, 176–200, 223 Morland, Henry Robert 179 Mortimer, Thomas 23 Musgrave, William 55 Mytens, Daniel 71 naturalism in painting 174, 229, 232 New Criticism 3 new science 16 Nichols, John 7 Biographical Anecdotes of Hogarth 29, 102, 111–26, 132–3, 149, 152 The Genuine Works of William Hogarth 114–15 Nichols, John Bowyer 111 Nollekens, Joseph 82, 126 Northcote, James 1–2, 7, 10, 155, 207, 225–32 novel 86, 92, 98, 190 obituary 157–8, 160, 163 Ogilby John, 102 old masters 32–3, 64, 122, 126, 161, 186, 192, 194 Opie, Amelia 7, 9, 109, 201–24, 229 engraved portraits of herself 215 Memoir 200, 201, 206–23, 229 Opie, John 9, 10, 200, 201, 206–7, 212–21, 229, 231

originality 32, 76, 105, 231 see also genius Orme, Daniel 178, 181 Orme, Edward 181 painter characterization of painters 77–8 in Britain 26, 30, 173–4, 225 status of painters 2, 25–27, 74, 174 see also artist pamphlet 7, 28, 157 paranoia 196 parody 103 Parrhasius 100 Pasquin, Anthony (John Williams) 27, 82 pastoral 164, 180 patriotism and art 31 Peacham, Henry 32 Pernety, Antoine-Joseph 24 picturesque 158, 164, 181, 185, 215 Pierce, Edward Jr. 67 Pierce, Edward Sr. 67 Pierce, John B. 213 Pilkington, Matthew 22–3, 43–4, 172 Pindar, Peter (John Wolcot) 27, 210–1 Pisano, Giovanni 30 Pisano, Nicola 30 Piozzi, Hester Lynch 25, 226 Pliny, the Elder 73, 100 legend of the origin of painting 218–19 see also topoi; anecdote Poets’ Gallery 179, 202 Pope, Alexander 15, 35, 40, 102 portrait engraved portrait (prints) 54, 56, 65, 67–9, 72, 215 function in biography 68 literary portraits of artists 77, 164, 220 portrait painting 220 portraiture 55, 171, 202 representational accuracy or truthfulness 71–3, 90–2 woodcut portrait 54, 66–7 print 27, 122, 124 see engraving print culture 16, 25, 106, 162–3 press 22, 25, 28, 162–3 periodicals 29, 123 newspapers 28 reviews of biographies 29 Protogenes 100 readership 7, 23, 40, 44, 56, 60, 63, 103, 124, 224, 233 realism (in painting) 122

Index Reed, Isaac 114, 122 Rembrandt 97, 220 Resta, Sebastiano 69–70 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 1, 10–11, 25–6, 30, 82, 153–7, 160–4, 170–5, 176, 186–7, 194, 200, 201–2, 207, 212, 219–20, 227–30 Discourses 28, 60, 63, 82, 120 Richardson, Jonathan 28, 39, 42–3, 76 Ridley, J. J. 224 Ridolfi, Carlo 63 Roestraten, Peter 71–2 Roman school 162 romance (genre) 89 Romano, Giulio 40, 83 romantic hero (figure of ), see topoi Romney, John 106–7 Rosa, Salvatore 95 Rosenthal, Michael 28, 155–6, 161, 172 Roubiliac, Louis François 132 Rouquet, Jean André 112 Royal Academy 26–7, 30–1, 82, 160–1, 178–9, 186, 202–3, 207, 212, 219 royal academician 82, 194 Rubens, Peter Paul 42, 67 Ruskin, John 233 Ruysdael, Jacob 64 Rysbrack, Michael 64 Sandby, Paul 154 Sanderson, William 62 Sandos, William 180–1 Sandrart, Joachim von 55, 62–3 Santlow, Hester 34 satire 9, 82, 84–5, 87, 89–90, 93, 98–9, 101–2, 116, 118, 120, 123, 192–3 Savage, Richard 196–9 Scheemakers, Peter 64 Scott, Sir Walter 203 self-portrait 71 sensibility (aesthetic of ) 156, 177 sentimentality 176, 179, 222 serial lives, see biography (serial biographies) Séroux d’Agincourt, Jean Baptiste 46, 57 Serres, John Thomas 31–2 Sevonyans (Anton Schoonjans) 72 Shakespeare, William 40, 166, 185 Shakespeare Gallery 178, 202 Shee, Martin Archer 207 Shelley, Mary 97 Shelley, Percy B. 97 shipwreck (theme in fiction) 99 silhouette 219

257

sketch 36, 108–9, 152, 157–61, 164, 168–71 biographical sketch 163 Smith, John Raphael 178–9 Smith, John Thomas 126–7 drawings illustrating the life of Hogarth 127–52 Nollekens and his Times 126, 132–3, 230 Smollett, Tobias 125, 189 Soest, Gerard 77 Soussloff, Catherine M. 4, 36 spatial narrative form 124 see also anecdote spoof, see satire St Martin’s Lane Academy 110 Steevens, George 111, 114 Stone, Nicholas 67 Strutt, Joseph 22, 27 Sybrecht, John 71 Teniers, David 176 Thackeray, William M., The Newcomes 224 Thicknesse, Ann (née Ford) 167–9 Thicknesse, Philip 155, 158, 162–3, 168–71 Sketches and Characters 155 Sketch of the Life and Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough 7, 162–73, 190, 229–30 Thornhill, Sir James 133 Thornhill, Jane 132–3 Titian 40, 161–2, 230 Tooke, Horne 204, 211 topoi in biographies of artists 98, 118 Plinian topoi of artists’ lives 20, 40, 71–4, 102 topos of chance discovery of the artist’s talent 75–6, 98–9 topos of realistic imitation of nature 74, 101, 167, see also Zeuxis topos of rivalry between teacher and apprentice 100 topos of the artist’s hardship 75 topos of the artist in his deathbed 102, 116–18 topos of the artist overcoming obstacles 75–6, 99, 116–17 topos of the drunken genius 71–5 topos of the impossibility of description 92 topos of the satirist observer of life 121 Victorian topoi of artists’ lives 85, 200, 201 visual topoi 71–2 visual topos of the romantic hero 72–3 True Effigies 68–70 Trusler, John 111–12

258

Index

Turner, J. M. W. 64 Tyers, Thomas 132, 163 ut pictura poesis 40 Van Belcamp, John 67 Van de Velde the Elder, Willem 64 Van de Velde the Younger, Willem 64, 71 Van Dyck, Anthony 67–8, 83, 168 Van Eyck, Jan 94, 99, 133 Van Gool, Johan 84 Van Mander, Karel 62–3, 67 Vanbrugh, Sir John 58 Vansomer, Paul 67 Vasari, Giorgio 37–8, 41, 43, 62–3 Vite 5–6, 30, 32, 37–8, 41, 45, 54, 65–6, 68, 71, 75, 97, 100, 108, 117, 161–2, 174, 187, 231–2 Venetian school 162 Vertue, George 51, 54, 57–60, 62, 68, 70 Museum Pictoris Anglicanum 51, 58 Victorian artist, see image of the artist Vivares, Thomas 182

Aedes Walpolianae 89 Anecdotes of Painting 9, 24, 29, 51–79, 80, 82, 84–5, 89, 96, 98, 105, 111, 113, 115, 187, 196, 233 Catalogue of Engravers 52 wanderer (figure of the) 194–5 Ward, Edward Matthew 126, 149 Weise, Adam 108 West, Benjamin 30, 154, 164, 194 Wheatly, Francis 177 William III 53 Wilson, Richard 172 Winckelman, Johann Joachim 45–6, 84 Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums 6, 45–7, 57 Wissing, William 71 Wollstonecraft, Mary 202, 204–6, 213 Wood, Anthony 62 Woodmason, James, see Irish Shakespeare Gallery Wooll, John 226 Young, Edward 184

Wackenroder, Wilhelm 187 Waller, Edmund 40 Walpole, Horace 52–64, 85–6, 90, 92, 96, 111

Zeuxis 20, 100, 212 Zouch, Henry 56, 58–9 Zucchero, Frederic 78