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Art and Society in England and France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Two Paintings before the Public

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Alan Bowness
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Extract

The primary source material for the art historian is of course the work of art, and this in itself places him in a fortunate position because the permanent relevance of the work of art is, I take it, self-evident. For the art historian, the work of art is an historical fact, pre-selected for generally accepted aesthetic reasons. But the work of art has no absolute meaning: it does not exist in a vacuum. It has both what we might call a history and a geography—the history being that record of interpretation and evaluation which accrues to the work of art from the moment of its creation down to the present day; and the geography being the particular artistic and social context of its original creation. The history can at times be very misleading: it is obvious that each generation is going to interpret the past as it wishes, and no judgment can be objective. So it is the geography that is more important, and this is extremely difficult to define. But if we are to understand the work of art, we need to enquire into the circumstances of its creation: we must ask, what did this painting or sculpture or building signify when it first appeared? Only from such specific investigations can one proceed to general propositions about the state of art at any particular moment, and perhaps also about the state of society which produced the art.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 22 , December 1972 , pp. 119 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1972

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References

1 Now in the Tate Gallery; oil on canvas, 34 x 55 in.

2 In the Louvre; oil on canvas, 123 x 260 in.

3 See Hutchison, Sidney C., The History of the Royal Academy 1768–1968 (London, 1968), passimGoogle Scholar.

4 Curiously enough, Millais's Carpenter's Shop was one of the first pictures to be bought by a dealer as a speculation. Henry Farrer agreed to buy the painting before the Academy opened. He promised to pay £350 or £300, but appears to have given Millais only £150 when he had read the reviews.

5 The numbers refer to the Royal Academy catalogue: no. 518 is The Carpenter's Shop, no. 504 Ferdinand lured by Ariel, no. 553 A converted British family sheltering a Christian missionary from the persecution of the Druids, and no. 535 Berengaria's alarm… The Boccacciesque picture is Isabella, now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

6 There are several examples in the standard life, Millais, J. G., The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (London, 1899), i, pp. 75–6Google Scholar; more in the catalogue of the Grosvenor Gallery Millais exhibition of 1886. Contemporary evidence is to be found in the P.R.B. Journal entry for 21 July 1850, in which events of the summer are summarized.

7 This criticism is very much to the point, and the Nazarene influence on Millais and his friends in 1849 can easily be substantiated, but it is not my central concern here.

8 Op. cit., i, p. 78.

9 Now in the Guildhall Art Gallery; it is approximately the same size (32 x 51 in.) as Millais's painting. The connexion is pointed out by Boase, T. S. R., English Art 1800–1870 (Oxford, 1959), p. 282Google Scholar.

10 Herbert showed a painting at the 1849 Academy, which may have influenced Millais. It was no. 489, The Outcast of the People, exhibited with a quotation from Luke, ix.58. It has since disappeared.

11 Admission fee in 1850 was probably one shilling (information from the Royal Academy).

12 Panther edition (London 1969), p. 154.

13 The costumes in Millais's painting are vaguely Palestinian: they can hardly be identified with Victorian working class clothes. The types however were identified as ‘Londoners’ by Walter Armstrong in 1887, and must always have seemed too real for comfort.

14 Published by Lutyens, Mary in ‘Selling the Missionary’, Apollo, lxxxvii (11 1967), pp. 380–87Google Scholar. She dates the letter ‘probably 6 June’ (p. 382). Millais mentioned the article to W. M. Rossetti on 30 November; he had been told by ‘some persons in Oxford’ that Ruskin might be the author of the Guardian article, but this was certainly not the case.

15 Hunt, Holman, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London, 1905), i, pp. 194–95Google Scholar.

16 Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters, ed. Rossetti, W. M. (London, 1900), pp. 225–6Google Scholar.

17 Millais, J. G., op. cit., i, p. 78Google Scholar.

18 See Mary Bennett's entry for this portrait, no. 20, in the catalogue of the Millais exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and Royal Academy, London, January-April 1967 (cited subsequently as Millais exhibition, 1967).

19 By Lutyens, Mary, who claims that the letters she published in her Apollo article ‘make it clear that they met only in the summer of 1850’ (p. 381)Google Scholar. But I cannot see that this necessarily follows, and J. G. Millais says that his father met Coombe in 1848.

20 Thomas Coombe (1797–1872), Superintendent of the Clarendon Press and Printer to the University from 1838 onwards.

21 This matter is being investigated by Lindsay Errington in a Ph.D. dissertation for the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She points out for example that Pusey quotes the text from Zechariah in the letter to the Bishop of London published in 1851.

22 Op. cit., i, p. 75.

23 Grieve, Alastair, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Anglican High Church’, Burlington Magazine, cxl (05 1969), pp. 294–95Google Scholar; letter from Errington, Lindsay, Burlington Magazine, cxl (08 1969); pp. 521–22Google Scholar.

24 The issue of Baptismal Regeneration was being discussed in the columns of the Guardian during May 1850.

25 Though whether the change can have been made as late as the Gorham Case judgment on 8 March 1850 as Grieve (art. cit.) suggests, I very much doubt. There is in fact an entry in Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters, ed. Rossetti, , for 7 12 1849Google Scholar : ‘Millais has redesigned the subject of Christ in Joseph's Workshop…’ The drawing is in the Tate Gallery, T.4623.

26 The flower is bright red: I suspect that there is an appropriate biblical text behind its obvious symbolism.

27 Art. cit., p. 295.

28 In her as yet uncompleted Ph.D. thesis.

29 Compare too Lindsay's, LordHistory of Christian Art (1847)Google Scholar and MrsJameson's, Sacred and Legendary Art (1848)Google Scholar.

30 William Dyce (1806–64) is the other English artist influenced by the German Nazarener. His work as head of the Government Schools of Design, and his activities in the decoration of the Houses of Parliament left him comparatively little time for easel painting, however.

31 Millais, J. G., op. cit., i, p. 93Google Scholar.

32 Millais exhibition, 1967, no. 257.

33 Millais exhibition, 1967, no. 32; in the Ashmolean Museum.

34 Millais, J. G., op. cit., i, p. 135Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., i, p. 135.

36 Millais exhibition, 1967, no. 35.

37 It is evident from his son's Life that Millais was not a religious man. Of course young men of th e period did take religious matters seriously, but it seems to me highly improbable that Millais would have drawn up the programme of The Carpenter's Shop by himself.

38 This is obvious from J. G. Millais, op. cit.

39 Hunt, Holman, op. cit., i, p. 107Google Scholar.

40 Millais exhibition, 1967, no. 18; in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

41 Collection Mrs E. M. Clarke.

42 The former is now in the Ashmolean Museum; the latter in the City of Manchester Art Galleries. Hunt had begun a large religious painting, Christ and the Two Maries, in 1847, but finding it too difficult put it ‘aside face to the wall’ for fifty years. The picture is now in Adelaide and is substantially a late work.

43 The picture is now in th e Tate Gallery. I t is no. 40 in Virginia Surtees, Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar.

44 See Doughty, Oswald, A Victorian Romantic (London, 1949), pp. 575–76Google Scholar.

45 I mean that nobody could believe that the child Mary would have books with Latin titles in her house.

46 The Free Exhibition, Hyde Park Corner, 1849, no. 368.

47 In the Tate Gallery; no. 44 in Surtees, op. cit.

48 Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters, p. 235.

49 Millais, J. G., op. cit., i, p. 75Google Scholar.

50 Millais exhibition, 1967, no. 30.

51 Ibid., no. 29.

52 Ibid., no. 34.

53 Ibid., no. 38.

54 Ibid., no. 51.

55 Ibid., no. 53.

56 Quoted approvingly from the 1856 Academy Notes by Millais, J. G., op. cit., i, p. 290Google Scholar.

57 Hunt, Holman, op. cit., i, p. 204Google Scholar.

58 See Boime, Albert, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1971), passimGoogle Scholar.

59 Quoted from Pontus Grate, Deux Critiques d'Art de l'Epoque Roman-tique (Stockholm, 1959), p. 48Google Scholar and passim.

60 Ibid.

61 Most conveniently available in Mayne's, Jonathan English edition, Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845–1862 (London, 1965)Google Scholar.

62 It shows Courbet with his father and two friends in the farmhouse kitchen at Ornans: the picture is still at Lille.

63 Formerly a t the Gemaldegälerie a t Dresden, but destroyed in 1945.

64 Now at Besançon.

65 See in particular Clark, T. J., ‘A bourgeois Dance of Death: Max Buchon on Courbet’, Burlington Magazine, cxi (04 and 05 1969), pp. 208–12 and 286–90Google Scholar.

66 Proudhon, P. J., Du Principe de l'Art (Paris 1865), pp. 236–7Google Scholar.

67 The French text is in Courbet raconté par lui-même (Geneva, 1948), ii, p. 75Google Scholar.

68 Mack, , Courbet (London, 1951), p. 79Google Scholar.

69 See Riat, G., Gustave Courbet (Paris, 1906), p. 86–92Google Scholar.

70 Ibid., p. 88.

71 Ibid., p. 86.

72 See note 65.

73 Riat, , Courbet, p. 94Google Scholar.

74 In ‘Courbet's Early Subject-matter’, contributed to the international symposium, French 19th Century Painting and Literature, at the University of Manchester in November 1969 (published by the Manchester University Press in 1972)Google Scholar.

75 Reprinted in Champfleury, , Grandes Figures d'Hier et d'Aujourd'hui (Paris, 1861)Google Scholar.

76 Champfleury, , Souvenirs et Portraits de Jeunesse (Paris, 1872), pp. 171–83Google Scholar.

77 Namier, L. B., ‘1848: Revolution of the Intellectuals’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xxx (London, 1946)Google Scholar.

78 Starkie, Enid, Baudelaire (London, 1957), p. 183Google Scholar.

79 Starkie, , Baudelaire, p. 192Google Scholar.

80 Ibid., p. 193.

81 In an undated letter to Bruyas, probably late 1853, printed in Borel, Pierre, Le Roman de Gustave Courbet (Paris, 1922), p. 69Google Scholar.

82 In the Louvre.

83 Courbet's Atelier du Peintre (Newcastle, 1972)Google Scholar.