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Artists' Biographies and the Anxieties of National CultureAuthor(s): Julie F. CodellSource: Victorian Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 1-35Published by: Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada

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Artists' Biographies and theAnxieties of National Culture

Julie . Codell

Amid the immense popularity of biographies in the nineteenth

century, perhaps no single figure was more scrutinized and surveilled

than the artist who was represented in every biographical form: press

interviews, expensive two-volume family biographies, and serialized

biographies. In an 1856 statement defending the popular mania for

artists' biographies, TheArt Journal called artists "public property,"

who as such deserved public scrutiny of theirworks, the "sanctity" of

their homes, and the "solitude" of their studios.1 Artists' biographiesderived many of their features from their antecedents, the series

and "libraries" of great authors and literary classics that appeared

beginning in the 1770s. Like these literary series, art series were

promotedas self-improvement vehicles to help readers familiarize

themselves with their own national culture.2 Malcolm Bell, one of

themost popular biographers, explained the genre's vogue as due

to increased leisure for learning among the general populace.3 Bell

arguedthat artwas ameans to assure the

improvementof the

race and thusprovided a public good for thenation (Bell, 1910,

2). The producers of that public good rose to become national

heroes and icons, but their former associations with Bohemianism

and degeneracy made them suspect and thus inneed of public

scrutiny and domestication which biographies offered.

Between 1880 and 1914, therewere at least sixty-two art and archi

tecture series, mosdy biographies, but also historical, critical, and

technical books. Victorian artistswere

juxtaposedwith and

interposedamong Italian and English Old Masters, creating a popular canon

by association and accumulation that argued for progress and British

Victorian Review (2001 ) 1







J. odell

culture as the culmination of the greatness of the past. Serialized

biographies bore titles that ranged from the grand- "The Makers of

British Art" (Walter Scott Co.), "Illustrated Biographies of Great Art

ists" (Sampson Low, Marston), "Masterpieces inColour" (T. C. and

E. C. Jack)- to the cozy

-"Popular Library of Art" (Duckworth),

"Little Books on Art" (Methuen), and "Miniature Series of Painters"

(George Bell). While series generally served overarching functions

of defining and legitimating national culture, therewere differences

among series and also within series. Scholars and journalists wrotebiographies for the same series at a timewhen the distinction

between the popular biography and the scholarly monograph had

not yet emerged. Volumes within single series varied widely in style,

accuracy, popularization, and arguments about art's morality and

commerce and the didactic identification of the artist's character with

the artwork's merit. These debates were widely disseminated througha range of series' prices and sizes intended for an economic spectrum

of middle- andworking-class

readers.4 Versions of the same book

would appear recycled in both cheap and expensive editions.1

The popularity of Victorian artists' biographiesas part of a larger

process of acculturation of themiddle- and working-classes coincided

with agrowing obsession over national identity, itself shaped and

defined through emerging cultural canons of art and literature under

construction through these same series. In biographies, artists and the

public mirrored each other through mass-produced images of artists'

bodies, homes, studios, families, and theirmost well known worksaccompanying many texts. The French critic Robert de la Sizeranne

inEnglish ContemporaryArt described the nationalism peculiarto Eng

lish artwhich waspopularly treated as "the outcome of national

life and national thought," unlike its treatment on the Continent

(La Sizeranne, 1898, 318). La Sizeranne noted that English artwas

central to the formation of Englishness and related concepts of his

tory, progress, and cultural superiority. Other cultural institutions

fashioningmodern national

unityand

identityincluded Mechanics'

Institutes, museums and galleries, awide-ranging art press, and a

voluminous trade in cheap prints.

2 volume 27 number 1







Artists' Biographies

Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's concept of "culture

industry" stresses mass culture's subjugation to the organizational

principles and values of industrial capitalism, which directed

"standardization and mass production, sacrificing. . .distinction

between the logic of the work and that of the social system"

(Adorno andHorkheimer, 1993,30-31). Artists'biographiesconstituted a culture industry. They regulated artists' personae

through performative repetitions of social and professional norms,

homogenizing individuals into a typology of "The English Artist."Narratives criss-crossed with discourses on aesthetics, nationalism,

political economy, history, degeneracy, fiction, and the new disciplineof art history to produce

a bricolage of anecdotage, idealism,

didacticism, commercialism, and historical documentation that

revealed less about art and more about artists' social, national, and

economic roles. But this hybridity only underscored the interest in

and anxiety about artists and their national roles.

As William Epstein recognizes,The entrance of a biographical subject intowritten discourse

is still a momentous occasion, an event that can . . .

reaffirmcultural eminence, contextualize social action,

alter literary opinion, deputize political influence, or

instruct economic conduct - this admissions procedure,

which is always in crisis, is constantly (if not often con

sciously) surveilled nand through iographical recogni

tion, which, in this respect, functions as the generic

agencyof theproprietary owers. (Epstein, 1991,222)

Artists' biographies reaffirmed what Epstein outlines. Artists'

political, economic, social, and cultural authorities were "always in

crisis," as these areas of influence were coherent neither with one

another nor with popular images of artists. In spite of didactic

and nationalist formulas, therewere stillmany tensions, conflicts,

ambiguities, and uncertainties expressed in this periodover the nature

of the artist.

In short, art had become, one might say, too important to leave

Victorian Review 3







J. odell

to the artists. Their reputations were sullied by associations withbohemianismpopularized inVictorian fiction(Jeffares,979) orwithfears of racial and national degeneration fanned by hysterical writers

who had, asWilliam Greenslade points out, "a focussed fascination

with the artist as a deviant subject" (Greenslade, 1994, 123). Artists

were prone to infection from both environment and heredity, for

Max Nordau and Cesar Lombroso and theirEnglish followers

(e.g., Francis Galton, Henry Maudsley, Havelock Ellis) forwhom

insanity and criminality were twin artistic traits.6 But as artistsbecame identified with Englishness, these stereotypes were replaced

by newprofessional models exemplified in serialized biographies that

produced new types.

Artists recognized the opportunity of their entrance into biographical

subjectivity, and they directly intervened representing their identities.

They negotiated theirpublic imageswith editors like . H. Spielmann, editor of theMagazine of rt, andMarcus Huish, editor of the

Art journal, and with critics like F. G. Stephens of theAthenaeum; allof whom were among the army of artists' biographers.7 Artists even

wrote their own press releases (Codell, VPR, 2000). Art critics, edi

tors, and artists, all tightly networked, advocated artists' full participation in social and economic spheres as professionals with a

high

degree of autonomy indetermining themarket value of their products

and, more importantly, of their expertise. Artists exercised direct and

indirect control over public representations of themselves and of the

profession as awhole.Bohemian and degenerate stereotypes were the b?tes noirs of artists'

biographies whose cultural work was to demonstrate artists' virtues:

hard working, domestic, paterfamilial, and, above all, successful. Bio

graphical images depicted them in large homes and studios to enforce

the texts' emphases on their success, familial ties, and labor. Traits

identified as English?

individuality, self-help, independent thinking,

originality, empirical observation, domesticity, and masculinity? were

ascribed to English artists.What made artistsworthy of biographicalscrutiny was theirmaterial and social success, after all, but what made

them worthy of iconic privilege was astrategic misrecognition that









theywere solely motivated by English character traits and Victorianideals - moral purpose, beauty, faith, and nationalism.

Biographies expressed the anxious tensions between criteria of mate

rial success and idealistic motives. Because artists' new social and

national roles were provoked partly by the 1860s artmarket price

surge, themeasures of artistic worth bymarket value and mass

consumption became aspersistent

as aesthetic, historic, or didactic

measures. The confluence of idealism and commercialism in the

construction of the artist became aVictorian episteme from which

emerged two dichotomous types thatwere as problematic as the

bohemian and the degenerate: the prelapsarian and the professional.

The prelapsarian artist, constructed by such prominent critics as

John Ruskin and Margaret Oliphant, among others, was auniquely

Victorian ideal of the artist removed from economic and social

demands, innocent of such "worldly" knowledge about wealth and

status, outside the social order, and oblivious tomaterial and social

needs. Margaret Oliphant described a prelapsarian artist in 1884,

writing on the autobiography of Giovanni Dupr?. Dupr? "lived and

laboured with never-failing energy . . .entirely undiverted by the great

events goingon around him, in his own particular sphere." Dupr?,

"a typical Tuscan," was more of the fifteenth than of the nineteenth

century. Oliphant fixed her ideal artist forever in an orientalized

Italian Renaissance as aprimitive, "too absorbed in the success of

his statue to think whether or not he is sufficiendy taken notice of

in society r asked todinnerby theright eople," the idealof theunworldly, nambitious ideal artist(Oliphant, 1884,614).

Oliphant emphasized Dupr?'s poverty, devotion to art since

childhood, diligence, redemption by love from a fall into vice,

andwill to self-help Oliphant, 1884,621-22). The idealof everyMechanic's Institute, Dupr? warned others "of the dangers of

premature applause, and of attaching too much importance to early

successes" (Oliphant, 1884, 626-27). Unaware of politicseven in 1848

Italy, he was "an artistwith his soul absorbed in his work" (Oliphant,

1884, 627), uninterested in the "dull annals of worldly success and

Victorian Review 5







J.Codell

prosperity" (Oliphant, 1884, 631). In aNovember 1859 essa)1, she

castigated Academicians who aspired to social status and condemned

the lucrative practice of displaying single paintings inBond Street

galleries (Onslow, 1998).

Dupr?'s Florence was the imagined world of the innocent, artisanal,

uneconomical artist of Victorian dreams outlined by Oliphant and

echoed by Ruskin. Charles Waldstein argued that Ruskin contributed

to artists' elevated social status and redirected artists from their

bohemian "social dissonance" to help them attain the "exceptionalsocial position" and community respect they later enjoyed (Waldstein,

1893, 17-18). But Ruskin was ambivalent toward artists' public

respect and stature and remained suspicious of their social and

economic assimilation. In his writings Ruskin proposed a prelapsarianartist: "An artist need not be a learnedman; ... itwill be a

disadvantage to him. . . . he ideal of an artist, however, is not that

he should be illiterate, but well read in the best books, and thoroughly

high bred, both in heart and in bearing. In aword he should be fitfor the best society, and shouldkeep out of it." Society corrupted the

artist, "first, by its sympathy with his meanest powers; secondly, byits chilling want of understanding of his greatest; and, thirdly, by its

vain occupation of his time and thought... apainter of men must be

among men ... as awatcher, not as a companion" (11: 52-53).

Ruskin argued that an artist, being natural, was antithetical to

language: "an artistmay be unconscious of the principles of his own

work, and how he may be led by instinct to do all that is right,while he ismisled by false logic to say all that iswrong," exemplified

byReynolds'writtenrulesatoddswith his practice (4: 46): "The

whole duty inculcated upon the artist is that of being in all respectsas likeNature as possible" (4: 175). Inarticulateness was even proofof greatness: "The moment anyman

beginsto talk about rules, in

whatsoever art, you may know him for a second-rate man; and, if he

talks about them much, he is a third-rate, or not an artist at all. To

this rule there is no exception in art" (4: 119). Ruskin described theartist's mode of perception as prelapsarian and pre-language: To the

artist, "as to the child, there is something specific and distinctive in









those rough trunks that carry the higher flowers" (7: 21). For Ruskin,"a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly as

possible to thisconditionof infantinesight" (15: 28).In his pure goodness the artist had no interest inmaterial well-being:"he differs from us in feeling also an exquisite complacency in

Fasting, and taking infinite satisfaction inEmptiness... if you have

Nothing togivehim youwill find thatNothing isexacdy the thinghe most wants, and that he will immediately proceed tomake half

a picture of it" (4: 388). As therewas no want in the edenic worldof the artist, there could be no sense of deprivation from material

benefitsor froma social life(1: 27). Ruskin proposed a fixed income

"To give him his bread and cheese, and so much a day," which he

believed would encourage "your best men" to do good work (14:

488). However, money was ultimately irrelevant to the quality of

performance: "no amount of pay had ever made a good soldier, a

good teacher, a good artist, or agood workmen . . .you will find the

statistical law respecting them is,The less pay, the better work'. . .for ten pounds you shall have a Paradise Lost, and for a

plate of figs,a

D?rer drawingbut foramillion ofmoney sterling, othing" (7: 449).

Ruskin and Oliphant stripped the artist's mental capacity and

condemned artists' social and economic aspirations. Their ideal was

projectedonto the past. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's devoted thirteenth

century ainterChiaro dell'Erma inhis 1850 shortstory Hand

and Soul" exemplifies the prelapsarian ideal projectedonto the early

Renaissance in this case. Like Ruskin's artist as natural resource and

Oliphant's Dupr?, Chiaro is removed from the clamorous social and

brutal political struggles around him in Pisa. In dialogue with his soul,

appearing in the form of a beautiful young ladywho comes to him

because he "hast not laid thy life unto riches" and is still relatively

pure, he re-dedicates himself to spirituality and a social purpose and

abandons his drive for fame. His soul admonishes him to paint not

from the head but from the heart, which dominates him when he is

humble, and in the end he paints his soul, a kind of feminine spiritualside of the artist. Rossetti even incorporated

a nationalistic twist: the

story jumps from the thirteenth to the nineteenth-century and the

Victorian Review 7







J. odell

narrator, an artist intrigued by Chiaro 'spaintings then hanging in theUffizi, is contrasted with the rationalism of Continental art students

who fail to appreciated the painting's devotional purity.8

The prelapsarian model was necessary for the preservation of art's

misrecognitionas sacred and untouched by economics. The critic

Harry Quilter evenposited

a bohemian version of the prelapsarian

artist, 'Vhose requirements were simple" and who was "neither very

wise nor very witty. . .

[who] thought painting the best thing in the

world" and who cared little for economic or social remunerations

(Quilter, 1883, 137).9 Ideological sanitation is, for Pierre Bourdieu,

part of the very nature of themodern artistic field: "the art trader

cannot serve his 'discovery' unless he applies all his conviction,

which rules out 'sordidly commercial' manoeuvres, manipulationand the 'hard sell', in favour of the softer,more discreet forms

of 'public relations' (which are themselves a highly euphemizedform of publicity)

-receptions, society gatherings and judiciously

placed confidences" (Bourdieu, 1993, 77). As Walter Benjaminalso points out, art in the modern world offers an escape from

participation in economic reality and recasts itself through ownershipand connoisseur value from commodity into dream, fantasy, and

idealism (Benjamin, 1978, 155); in thisway the consumer and

collector contribute to art'smisrecognition. The prelapsarian ideal

emptied artists of social and economic "fallen" knowledge that led to

"sordid" ambition. Instead, separation from such knowledge forced

themto see

only through Ruskin's "infantine sight." In this role,artists thenwere carriers of innocence whose "pure" works served

collectors' escape fantasies, as well as national ideals.

Ruskin's refusal toacknowledge the professional autonomy of artists

was characteristic of wider Victorian anxieties about art production,

genius, the solitary studio, and the economic value of artists' labour.

The prelapsarian model was necessary for the preservation of

art's moral purpose. But aestheticism had aparodie take on the

prelapsarian artist. In Vernon Lee's essay "In Umbria, A Study ofArtistic Personality" inBalcaro: Being essay onSundryAestheticalQuestions,

1881, Lee speculatedon the contradictions between the intense









spirituality of Perugino's paintings and Vasari's depiction of him asgreedy, mercenary, atheistic, and anxious for fame. She even echoed

Victorians' fascination with artists' studios and homes (see below) and

alluded to Ruskin's attack on successful artists for purchasing largehomes and carriages. Perugino lived "in the best part of town" in a

house "full of precious stuff and fine linen and place and everythingwhich awealthy burgher could desire," with a "handsome wife . .

. forwhom he was forever designing and ordering new clothes .

. .fantastic diadems

. . .that she might go through the town as

magnificent and quaintly attired as any noble lady."10

Her description of Perugino directly addressed the artist's

engagement with themarket and with money. His workshop, full of

assistants, was "an enormous manufactory of works of devotional art

. .. the same saints, the same madonnas, the same anglers,.. . forever

repeated in large and small, some mere copies, others slighdy varied

. . .by the pupils."11 Perugino was "a commercial speculator

. . .

who knew his public so thoroughly."12 Perugino "had themeans of

making a fortune . . . success was the only test."13

Lee then presented the dramatic incoherence "between noble art and

grovelling artists" that had troubled Ruskin:

Can a pure and exquisite work be produced by a base nature?

Can such anomaly exist - must themental product not be

stained by the vileness of themind which has conceived

it?Must we, togetherwith a precious noble gift taken

from a hand we should shrink from touching, acceptthe

disheartening, the debasing conclusion, that in art puritymay

spring from foulness, and the excellent be born of the base? .

. . it seems to strip the holiness from art, theworthiness, nay,

almost the innocence, from our enjoyment. We feel toward

any beautiful work of art something akin to love: a sort of

desire ... to be with it in some manner united; and thus

... that all thismay be sprung from out of unworthiness.

. . .contamination of origin,makes us shudder and suspect

.. . sickened for amoment as the thought quivered crosstheirmind of the foulness out of which the noblest of our

art has risen.14

Victorian Review 9







J. odell

The pleasure of art objects increased the dangers of contamination

from the unworthy artist to the spectator, her "we" who experiencethe consequences of the leprous artist ("shrink from touching")

threatening to spread moral disease to "our" national culture ("con

tamination of origin").

What are the relations between the character of thework

of art and the character of the artistwho creates it? . . .as

thepeculiarity of the fruitdepends, caeterisparibus, pon the

peculiarity of the tree. ... so also must thepeculiarity of the

spiritual productbe due to the

peculiaritiesof the

spiritualwhole of which it isborn.1'

Art as the genealogical offspring of the artist becomes ametaphor in

Lee's medicalized language of degeneracy.

To prevent contamination by immoral artists Lee suggested

separating the artist from theman. Human faculties required for art

production fell into two categories, the aesthetic and the moral.16

The latterwere "merely protective," and included "concentration,

patience, determination, desire of improvement."17 If too large,the moral qualities overruled the individual and negatively affected

the art. In some cases the artistic faculties took over the entire

personality.18 The moral qualities for all artists, however, functioned

to assure that

a noble spiritmay be able to keep out of hismere abstract

creations those baser instincts (which though recognized with

shame) he isunable to subdue inpractise; hisworks show

him as he would desire himself to be, as he, alas has notthe strength to be in reality;

. . .for theyhave given to us

their better part, and kept for themselves,with bitterness and

shame, their worse.19

Through artmaking, artists then offered up for sacrifice their best

natures. This "higher" nature soothed consumers:

we almost persuade ourselves that in those dubious times of

doubt and dissolution, the spotless, the unshaken were in a

way divinely selected, like somany vestal virgins, to cherishin isolation the holy fireof art. . .we eagerly treasure up









like relics anecdotes showing thegentleness and generosityof men likeLionardo [sic] andMozart. . .which, inour

desire to trace art back to a noble origin, seem to shed so

much lightupon theproduction of a great picture or great

symphony"20

To satisfy this Ruskinian ideal, she begins to lobotomize her ideal

artist into an "art-producing organism."21 Lee suggested a division

of labour: the artist created the physical form, but the spectator

brought to bear on the artwork associations and resonances andthus generated the work's meanings: "What the artist gives ismerelythe arrangement of lines and colours in a given manner . . .This,

and not any train of thoughts awakened by this possibly but not

necessarily existing resemblance to an already known natural object.. .and this is artistic form, the absolutely, objectively existing work

of art,"while spectators created meanings through their psychologicalassociations.22 Lee rebuilt an idealized artist who was

merely to evoke for us a series of phantom sights or sounds,of phantom men andwomen. Therefore, our firstactmust

be to diminish, by at least a half, all the practical sides of

his nature, so thatno practical activities divert him from his

purely ideal field. ... we have obtained a creaturewhose

interest is never purely practical. But thiswill not suffice.We

must diminish by at least a quarter his mere logical powers,thus rendering him farmore inclined toview things as

concrete, livingmanifestations, than as logical abstractions.23

Removed from both practical matters and abstract speculation, the

artistwas reduced to a receptacle for impressions. Lee posited a

reduced, intellectually bare, artist to get amorally pure artist.

But thiswas, Lee admitted, "a mere historic myth, inwhich the world

continues foolishly to believe . . . that the poet is aspecial creature

. . .different from the rest of humanity."24

Such purity only exists

in paintings, and artists as humans not only cannot eliminate their

humanity, but,

as she admitted,they

cannot

paint

without it, as their

character marks their works with personality, quite apart from moral

virtues: "the distinctive features of his nature must be reflected in his

Victorian Review 11







J. odell

work, since his work ismade out of and by his nature."23Let us tear away, throw aside this last amount of human

feeling, reduce our typical artist tomere intense powers of

seeing. Shall we stillhave wherewith to obtain anywork at all?

Will this rarified, simplifiedmentality be much above amere

feelingless optic machine ... we have removed asmuch as

possible of all human qualities. . .until thisvisual organisms

becomes beyond compare perfect in itspower of perceivingand

reproducing."26

Lee has gone beyond her initialmedicalizing and scientizing narrative

into a kind of science fiction whose new organism, however, was a

"paltry conclusion" that ignored beauty in painting, while obsessed

with the moral character of the painter. After all, Perugino "was

an atheist and a cynic, but he was a great painter."27 Such

ambivalence about the effects of artworks were consistent with Lee's

suspicions about aestheticism's moral implications, her developmentof

psychological aesthetics,and her investment in "the connections

among art, health, and purity"

tied to her "feminist purity polemics,"as Kathy Psomiades argues in her recent study of Lee's writings.28

Lee's "paltry conclusion," a reductioad absurdum of the ties between

pure artist and good art, underscored her belief that Ruskin's

insistence on such a tie came out of fear of the sensuousness of

beauty as evil and led to his anxiety, as well as contributed tomaking

"morality sterile and art base in his desire to sanctify the one by the

other...

to clothe all that is really pure ina

false barb of sanctity,"thusmaking "a return to nature a return to sin . . . in his constant

sanctifying of beauty he makes it appear impure."29 Lee pointedout that Ruskin worked "to sweep usurping evil out of the kingdomof art."30 The evil was art itself: "this irresistible craving for the

beautiful, which he would have silenced as a temptation of evil," he

turned into amoral.31 She criticized his application of morality to art,

recognizing that the beautiful does not always come from purity, that

goodand bad are mixed in

life,

as in art, and that the bad and the

beautiful are often intertwined: "beauty, in itself, is neither morally

good nor morally bad: it is aesthetically good. . .

Beauty is pure,









complete egotistic: ithas no other value than its being beautiful"32She disagreedwith his belief thatgood artneeded amorallygoodartist.33 Lee recognized thatRuskin's morality could not survive and

that his "placid paradise of art," had "become suspicious... to

live in this sweet and noble impossible paradise" of beauty while

theworld was filled with poverty and evil became impossible for

Ruskin.34 In the end she argued against themoral resistance of evil

through prelapsarian isolation: we can only fight evil, "if we do not

shrink from the battlefield of reality intoan

enervating Capua ofmoral idealism," but instead recognize that the pleasure of beauty is a

good in theworld quite apart from the eradication of evil which alone

can only producea "mere joyless desert of painless vacuity," and

not a fertile garden inwhich artists "sow and plant" in a "redeemed

Ufe soil."35

Many biographers argued in defense that their artist subjects cared

little formoney, made money inadvertently while motivated by moral

or national idealism. But these same lifewritings also insisted onincluding prices as measures of worth and in representing artists' largehomes and studios. Art production became public acts of sacrifice

meriting generous payments in symbolic and cultural capital, as well

as inmaterial exchange value, and the value and appreciation of

works often served to "prove" national unity or artistic merit or

English character traits, such asindependence and entrepreneurship.

Furthermore the reduced artist that Ruskin advocated and Lee

parodied was in direct opposition to artists' own aspirations to rise

socially, and itwas precisely economic and social achievement that

dominated biographical series on artists. Artists and their biographerswrote to synthesize economic interests with ideal motives of duty,

modesty, and self-sacrifice. Biographies projected artists' motives

as "pure," but also portrayed them as mature, professional, and

entrepreneurial, partaking of manly English virtues of enterprise and

individuality The English artist asprofessional entrepreneur was as

Victorian as the prelapsarian model. As Walter Shaw Sparrow arguedin defense of artists employed in advertising, "the practice of everyart is bread-winning as well as aesthetic adventure, and attacks on

Victorian Review







J.Codell

bread-winning are crimes against citizenship" (Shaw Sparrow, 1924,245).One popular biographerAlfredLys Baldry likewiserecognizedthe need for "a correct estimate of themanner inwhich taste controls

theworkings of our social economy" (Baldry, 1899, 1-2).36 For

Baldry artists were "art workers," and as such were free to capitalizeon social and economic opportunities, enacting entrepreneurial self

determination, a unique Victorian model thatwas anathema to both

Romantic bohemianism and latermodern avant-garde images of

artists (Baldry, 1899, 1-2).

Biography's cultural work was to hygenicize and idealize artists

without ehminating their participation in economic and social

spheres. Itwas, after all, their success thatmerited biographical

(mis)recognition. Hugh Macmillan, writing in 1903 on G. F.Watts,

described the painter as "one of the last survivors of themen of

genius of the Victorian age" whose Ufe demonstrated "how splendidwas the period that formed him." Watts was a perfect synthesis of

modern and Renaissance, aVictorian "Titian and Michael Angelo"(Macmillan, 1903, 1-2). Despite Watts's "spiritual conceptions" and

"natural dislike to [sic] publicity," his biographer cited as further

evidence of Watt's worth the artist's rising prices. Itwas characteristic

of these biographies to include both idealistic and monetary measures

of art's values, in this case on the same page (34) Rising pricesseemed to bolster themoral imperative ofWatts who "sacrificed

everything for his ideal" (Macmillan, 1903, 40). "Everything" did not

include sacrificing material comfort,a

very large studio house, or aprivileged social circle, all of which Watts enjoyed.

Conflicting traits came to represent artists' Englishness. Social

affability characterized thewratercolorist Birket Foster (Cundall, 1906,

viii-ix), but Albert Moore was praised for ignoring "social dignitiesand commercial emoluments attaching to artistry" (Baldry, 1893,

24). Biographical series became performative through the repetitionof norms that naturalized the "artist." Series contained anywhere

from four to eighty biographies, each one repeating hegemonicnational and moral ideals. Artists were tagged from series to series

-Millais, manly and purely English; Burne-Jones, daringly original and

volume 27 number 1








otherworldly; Morland, the reprobate; Reynolds, the success; Turner,themiser; Gainsborough, the rebel;Watts, the civic-minded idealist.3

Obsessive repetitions of the lives of a handful of themost popularartists promoted them as national types, and some artists likeMillais

andWatts remained popular biographical subjects into the 1920s.

Not surprisingly, biographies tended to become xenophobic. In

Randall Davies's 1913 biography of Reynolds, the author reportedwith gratification that despite the foreign artists who populated the

"British School," the best artists were natives, a fact "gratifying tothe national pride; and itmay be added thatwith the exception of

Romney all of these were born south of the Trent" (Davies, 1913,

4). Davies' racial obsession was common among authors of these

serialized biographies that argued for apurely British lineage among

its artists.

Biographies sought to suture readers to amass national culture

and had a symbiotic relationship to exhibitions. M. H. Spielmann's

biography of Millais in 1898 was written "for the use of visitorsto theMillais exhibitionat theRoyal Academy" (Spielmann, 1898,

11). Ronald Gower hoped his book would send readers to see

theGainsboroughs in theNational Gallery (Gower, 1930, v-vi).

Accordingto C. Lewis Hind, English artists were themost lucrative

subjects because of the availability of theirworks: "Turner is a better

paying proposition than Velazquez, as most of his picturesare in

London" (Hind, 1926, 170).

The most striking physical characteristic of many series was their

size, small enough to fit conveniendy into apocket, perhaps

to

be read on railway carriages. Bell's Miniature Series, various series

published by Grant Richards and T. C. and E. C. Black, and the

BritishArtist seriespublished byPhilipAllen and editedbyKaines

Smith were all small books. Susan Stewart describes miniaturization

as expressinga longing for an "interior" life and intimacy, one of

the stated intentions of biographers (Stewart, 1993, 39). Harry Quilter

hoped tomake artists seem "men like ourselves, frail and exalted. . .bound to us by the tie of a common humanity, and claiming

Victorian Review 15







J. odell

our sympathy and love" (Quilter, 1880, 1-3).Miniaturization, Stewartpoints out, does not decrease significance, but increases it, as the

miniature becomes a site of didactic truth, the aphorism, the epigram,and the proverb (Stewart, 1993, 53). The didactic function of

biographywas enhanced by tiny reproductions that formed a gem-like

distillation of culture. The miniature's "infinite time of reverie" bears

"nostalgic versions of childhood and history. . .

manipulatable. .

.domesticated and protected from contamination" (Stewart, 1993,

65-69).The

miniature offers didactic essence, kernels of culture, thecaptured secret of creativity, and pleasant memories of a Ufe of

dreams and fantasies ? all of which served the biographical mission

of helping readers identifywith artists while retaining artists' purityand innocence.

Women artists' biographies smoothed over contradictions among

competing ideologies of domesticity, professionalism, and femininity.Marcus Huish's 1903biographyofHelen Ellingham, entitledHappy

England as Painted by elen Ellingham R. W. S., articulated a rareidentification of awoman artist with British nationalism. Her art fit

her roles as mother and wife - her geography limited to Surrey and

her subjects limited to women and children. Her watercolour medium

easily combined with domesticity, requiring little space and being"clean" compared to oils. Allingham emerged as the ideal - both

feminine and artist. Her work embodied "healthiness, happiness,and joy f life, oupledwith an idyllic eauty" (Huish, 1903,

2-4, 13-14, 20).38 Huish employed the degeneracy vocabulary ofhealth to underscore Allingham as an

undegenerate artistworthy of

representing one national type.

In Arthur Fish's biography of Henrietta Rae, Rae personified a

professional Victorian artist without the overt domestic identity typicalof women artists' lifewritings. Despite having two children, Rae

(called Mrs. Normand throughout the book) was nevercompletely

defined as amother or wife. Rae and her husband were bound in

artistic fellowship, not marital roles. The children were dispatchedone summer to the English countryside when Rae and her husband

entered amildly bohemian French atelier. Photos of Rae in the studio









werewithout her family Fish, 1905, facing96 and facing102).Fish insisted on the artist's "quiet life," a very common theme in

male artists' biographies,too: "The chronicle of events in the life of a

woman artist is in the natural order of things a circumscribed one . . .

there is little exciting, a great many efforts and a few achievements of

note ... a life of placidity tempered with seasons of disappointment"

(Fish, 1905, 9; italicsmine). The justification orbiography,then,was her art recognized "in theworld's art centres and received with

favour; work which has made her name prominent among those ofthewomen-painters of to-day, and marked her career with success"

(Fish, 1905, 10). Rae's success was achieved "in the usual ordinarymanner: by sheer persistent hard work; by a strong, determined fight

against the disability and discouragement that hinder awoman in

thebatde of life" (Fish, 1905, 13; italicsmine). Fish naturalized her

success, as obstacles were overcome by her will and good humour,

thus erasing the real barriers women artists experienced.

The periodical press also constructed a new biographical discourseon artists tomediate conflicting forces of money, idealism, mass

consumption, and respectable professionalism. Rather than suppress

issues, the press validated and naturalized artists' economic and

social success. S. Cameron argues that critics influence "higher order

preferences,"or meta-preferences by validating the consumers' self

image through concepts of proper taste (Cameron, 1995, 322-23)

and displays of expertise to stimulate demand by shaping consumers'

perceptions (Cameron, 1995, 329). Such critical tasks and roleswere precisely the ones carried out by Victorian biographers,

as

they transformed artists' commercial successes into public good and

identified artists with national traits, including entrepreneurship and

success, to generate consumer demand. Hind recounted how the

World paida guinea for a paragraph on an "unfinished picture by an

eminent Royal Academician," creating an advertisement for the artist

(Hind, 1926,131).

The press's biographical treatment of artists ranged from anecdotalsensationalism to calculated professionalism. In The Art Journals 1876

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J. odell

series "The Romance of Great Artists," Mary E. Wager braidedtogether brief anecdotal and sensationalistic paragraphs, each about

a famous artist of the past, focusingon love affairs and miserable

marriages. The appearance of such anecdotage inTheArt Journal

alongside defenses of art-making as a profession, an economic

contribution to the nation, and a source of aesthetic uplift embraced

competing means for promoting readers' identifications with artists.

The power of the press was enhanced by the relatively closed

circulation of information. As Laurel Brake points out, critics

commonly wrote for several periodicals and newspapers, recyclingand revising their articles for diverse audiences (Brake, 1994,

10-11). For example, C. Lewis Hind wrote biographies for several

publishers, was sub-editor of The Art Journal (1887-92), author of two

biographical series for theGlobe, edited Pictures of the ear for the Pall

Mall Gazette (1890s), and edited theStudio (1892-93), thePailMali

Budget (1893-95), and theAcademy (1896-1903). La Sizeranne's sources

for English ContemporaryArtwere British press biographies, and TheArt Journal cited biographies from the Revue desDeux Mondes ("BritishArtists. . . .Edwin Ward, The Art Journal, 1855, 47), indicating

a

cross-channel sharing of press biographies.

As early as 1856, The Art Journal promoteda

regulatory public gaze

that inscribed the social order and a set of obligations and exchangesfor economic rewards on artists through the biographical act:

Every artistwho has reached a high position becomes . . .

public property . . . the public whose favourable suffrages hehas won by hisworks, feel also an interest in the individual

who created them . . . the desire is legitimate and perfectlyreasonable ? to learn some of his lifeand history.

... it is

not the eye of impertinent curiosity7that seeks him out, and

thatwould penetrate even the solitude of this studio and, to

a certain extent, even the sanctity of his domestic hearth . . .

[anymore] than a great legislator, or a renowned warrior, or

a successful author, or any other who soars above the range

of common men. .. . theman himself may be indifferentto thepraises or the censures of his biographer;.

. .but









as thehistory is the inevitable result of the reputation, hemust make up hismind thatwhen he has himself achieved

the one, sooner or later somebody will effect the other for

him ("British Artists. . ..James Clarke Hook, TheArt journal,

1856, 1).

Art appreciation enfranchised the public ("suffrages") to scrutinize

popular artists, overseeing cultural production and domesticatingits producers whose characters could affect (or infect) the nation

through their cultural production. Furthermore, artists' new fameand fortune were to be regulated by the public gaze, as accretion

turned serialized biography into national history. Artists' Uves would

ultimately become English "history"; Thomas Carlyle and others

envisioned biographiesas defining an age, as Vasari's Lives of thertist

had done. National history was the sum of itsgeniuses' lives (Carlyle,

69-70).

This public gaze raised commercial success to a new level of meaning.

Popularity, measured by mass spectating and mass consumption ofartworks, became a symbol of national unity of taste and cultural

identity7. amuel Carter Hall, founder of the The Art journal in 1839,

later bragged in his memoir that in the beginning "J had to createa

publicfor Art... to show 'the commercial value of the Fine Arts'"

(Hall, 1883, 1: 197; "Farewell,"TheArt Journal, 880, 354;Mancoff,

1991). Like most art press editors, he argued for better fees for

painters (Spatt,1985, 53), and insistedthat thepublic needed to

recognize its role as upholding and strengthening national culturethrough consumption.

The market mediated then between the public's growing appreciationof art's importance and their identification with artists, and artists'

own need to understand the economics of their production and

consumption. TheArt Journal regularly published the year's sales in

an annual column detailing objects' prices, owners, buyers, and dates

of auction sales (e.g., Beaver, TheArt Journal, 1884, or Rowlands, The

Art Journal, 887).Knowledge of themarketwas explicatedby thepress as a vital part of artists' professional knowledge, not a "fallen"

knowledge that sullied them, theirworks, or their spectators.

Victorian Review







J.Codell

The press thus transformed art production into an economiccontribution to "national wealth," at once both material ("wealth")and cultural ("national"). P. L. Simmons wrote that "taste is a

marketable commodity, which being of somuch value isworth

getting honestly, and by fair purchase" (Simmons, 1872, 295-96). He

demonstrated that thanks to British art the balance of trade in 1871

was in the black. Increased demand for art abroad, as well as at

home, supported the national income through a variety of "artistic"

goods: frommarble statues and lithographic stone worth ?300,000,to lace totalling ?1.5 million sterling. Simmons listed the value

of imported oods: oil painting (?240,869), engravings ndphotos(?59,714), pictureframes(?9,498), opera glasses (?49,412), and

marble (?159,636). 1871 exports of British art-related manufactures

totalled?6,203,557 (Simmons, 1872,296).The art press promoted art consumption through serialized

biographies that first appeared inTheArt Journah original incarnation

as TheArt-Union. "Portraits of British Artists" offered one-columnlaudatory biographies inwhich hard work promised that the artist's

"latest production has been always his best" ("British Artists. . .

.William Powell Frith, The Art Journal, 1856, 164). Another series

"Great Masters of Art," presented Old Masters with full-page

engravings of theirmajor works. Thus, the journal produced parallelsets of biographies of the living and the dead, their fame levelled

and equalled by such biographical attention and contemporary culture

raised by association. Series often assumed ametaphoric relationshipbetween artists' characters and styles and found consumption to

be a common denominator between these two, as it "proved"national unity of taste and was earned by the artist's work ethic

and productivity made artworks the nations cultural capital and art

production a kind of civic act.39 Popularity was not condemned but

considered asign that artists were

acceptable to anequally industrious

Britishpublic.

Perhaps themost suturing images were those of artists' homes andstudios which became rich symbols of artistic moral and national

character, reaching the status of fetishized spaces in biographies.

volume 27 number 1








Studios and homes exposed the socio-economic issues in art

production and artists' public image. In 1880 and 1881 Edward

Tarver's "Artists' Studios" appeared in the TheArt Journal completewith studio floor plans, followed in 1882 by the series "Artists

Homes."

In the 1881 series "The Homes of our Artists," The

Magazine of rt featured Leighton and Millais, themost lionized and

popular biographical subjects. Leighton's house was "a substantial

modern building" of "unpretentious size, not intended to cause

astonishment by its proportions and style," a "charming place,"

appropriately artistic in "its lucidity and its colour" (Meynell, 1881,

170). The house was described in detail: Oriental splendour coexisted

with Englishness and a didactic purpose: his home symbolized

Leighton himself and was not just amatter of taste, but "of kindness

and courtesy" (Meynell,1881, 176).

But homes could reflect other, very different values. In its lack

of aestheticism, Millais's home reflected English good sense and a

critique of fashionableness like Leighton's. Itwas "remarkable forabsence of every kind of affectation. It is scarcely picturesque,

though not an impossible house to put into a picture. It is stately and

prosperous; and prosperity which is not obtrusive or self-assertive

is in itself rather a beautiful thing than otherwise" (Oldcasde, 1881,

290), likeMillais's own prosperity and popularity.

Why were artists' homes so special? John Oldcasde equated the sale

of artists' works with loss, and homes with compensation for this

loss:

An artist chiefly serves others by his power; the picture which

has been his secret for a littletime, his hope. . .and his

companion, isdestined to be the possession of strangers for

ever after. ... he must endure many pangs of parting..

. . those dear children of his he may never see again. . .

fallen into the hands of the Philistines ... in return for all

this diffused good and pleasure, he has won for himself the

pleasure of following his own altogether unfettered choice in

the building of his home (Oldcasde, 1881, 295).

Artists' homes were their justified return in an economic exchange of

Victorian Review







J.Codell

pleasures

-

the public's in art, the artist's in homes

-

like a pensionfor a cultural civil service. Artists sacrificed paintings, metaphoricallyboth their secrets and their children, in a

psychological economy

of art. Artists' homes displaced their artworks and transferred the

artist's phallic creativity to a safe domestic site.The home or the

home-cum-studio replaceda lack, a loss of phallic power deposited

in the art object. But this loss could become again if the work

appreciated later. The home contributed to this appreciation as it

compensatedfor the loss and contributed to the artist's

reputation.Thus, the large studio home itself,which Ruskin attacked artists for

owning, was forOldcasde a function of art consumption that bonded

spectator and artist. The home became fetishized as a substitute for

the artists' "lack," those lostworks borne out of phallic energy and

into the public realm.

As Giles Walkley argues, home studios marked artists as

professionals. Sites of domestication and work, studios crossed

boundaries by masculinizing the home. Here, too, a political economyof art emerged: placing the artist's work site in the home, made

the studio "restore" the idealized cottage industry that appealedtoVictorian nostalgia for a

pre-industrial work protected in a

cloistered home environment. Hints of pre-industrial prelapsarianideals partially accounted for the fascination with studios: "the

heavenly, all facilitating studio represented both an inspirationaltool and material proof of the professional approach" and

"removed the suspicionof

amateurism... inmakeshift domestic

surroundings" (Walkley, 1994, xxiii-xxiv). Studios wereprofessional

and prelapsarian, sites of work in "heavenly" domesticity.

Biographies sometimes took the form of interviews inside homes

and studios. The core of interviews was the assurance of the

subject's authenticity, defined as consistency between the work and

the character of the great embodied in their domestic spaces. Richard

Salmon argues, however, that the interview undermined the very

intimacy itpromised,as

it transferred interest from the author'swork to the author's life,making authors marketable commodities

"productsto be circulated and consumed" (Salmon, 1997, 159).

volume 27 number 1







Artists Biographies

As TheArt Journal quote above indicated, artists, too, becamecommodified as

public property. Salmon argues that the interviewer

surveyed the biographical subject, including home and writing desk,to project an "authentic" self, "revealed" by the author (Salmon,

1997,161-62). Being the subject of an interview in situ assumed

acelebrity7,worthy of the "cultural distinction which the interview

confers upon its subject." The home or studio authenticated the

subject and turned surveillance into spectacle (Salmon, 1997, 162):

"the home encoded the distinctive cultural and epistemologicalassumptions of the interview in thematerial substance of its location

. . .often explicidy read as a domain of revelatory signs," of, amongother things, the author's privacy as inner "sanctum" (Salmon, 1997,

164-66). The repetition of these topics as "hermeneutical strategies"meant that the revealed "individuality" of any biographical subjectwas the homogenized individuality of all such subjects (e.g., three

hundred articles inEdmund Yates's three-volume Celebrities atHome

that ran for sixyears

in theWorld). Celebrity intimacy

was an

oxymoron and parody of itself (Salmon, 1997,168-69).

Another economic issue foregrounded in press biographies was

the labour value of art. Biographies deployed market values to

homogenize differences among artists through a "universal" measure,

the market value of awork of art.Hard work justified art as

investment, and biographies readily assured readers of labour as

investment value: TheArt Journal admitted watchingover young

"promising" artists: "we have carefully watched," "our eye has everbeen upon" ("British Artists. . . . dwin Ward

"The Art Journal, 1855,

45). Biography was part of the political economy of art as investment

and stimulator of consumer demand.

TheMagazine of rt ranbiographical seriesfrom1878 to 1904,and after 1900 focused on

photographers, etchers, and younger or

"rising" artists, an investment category. Essays were generally brief

and chronological without the heroism or moralizing of The Art

Journal. Entrepreneurship was key in a journal that encouraged artists'commercial ventures. Elizabeth Butler "saw at a glance that by the

good luck of genius this field lay awaiting her; and this perception

Victorian Review







J. odell

has undoubtedly been thefoundation of her successes" (Oldcasde,1879, 258). Her professional status was initiated "by entering simplyand ingenuously into themarket of sale and purchase that she could

fairlymeasure herself with her brothers of the brush," though readers

were reassured that she advocated only women's right towork in

private: "though personal conspicuousness and public appearancehave always been repugnant to her nature, she confesses to the nobler

ambitionof fame through er labours" (Oldcasde, 1879,260). Still

"feminine" in recoiling from public space (hardly a recoil consideringshe exhibited annually for decades, busily attended public dinners and

soir?es, and published her sketchbooks, diaries, and autobiography ),she negotiated her ambition for fame into thework ethic, a "nobler

ambition," exchanging success for duty.Work, not simply sales, was

themeasure of her painting's worth. Thus, Butler was redeemed from

her own success (and possible loss of femininity) by a "nobler" callingwith some very ambiguous praise: "If she wields the brush at sixty,as we

hopeshe

may do,shewill be

then,as she is

now,and as

she desires to be always- a student" (Oldcasde, 1879, 262)

- and

presumably never amaster

Such inconsistencies constituted the ambivalent biographical assess

ments of successful women artists in the press. Eleanor Fortescue

Brickdale's skill threatened her gendered identity through masquerade: "For so full and firm a

grip of a pencil seldom falls to the lot

of awoman.Happily there is next to no bravura lurking inMiss

Brickdale'shandling. She does not masquerade in the outward habili

ment of any given master's manner" (Dixon, 1902, 262). Althoughher phallic pencil was "firm" as aman's, she was still reassuringly

feminine, forsaking men's clothes, "the outward habiliment" of a

"master." Like Butler, shewas infantilised as an eternal student.

One biographer in 1861 commented on the increasing

difficultyof thebiographical task inproportion to the

demand alreadymade on our attention by the artists

themselves, through theirworks, or by notices of one kind or

another which have previously been published in the pagesof theJournal: thus the subject is, in amanner, exhausted,

volume 27 number 1








orwe run the risk,by re-entering the fieldof investigation,of multiplying words, without increasing the information we

desire to afford. (Dafforne, 1861, 133)

This writer as early as 1861 pointed out that the public was alreadyso

deluged with information on art that biography's words, like art

works, were so common that theirworth was becoming devalued.40

Later art periodicals reduced or eliminated biographies in favour

of critical essays on individual artists, perhaps reflecting the glut

of biographies and specialized interests of a new sophisticated artconsumer more interested in connoisseurship than in didacticism. The

Portfolio had little interested in artistic personalities, focusing instead

on professional concerns, without personality cults, fetishism, and

anecdotage (Codell,VPR, 1987).TheStudiohad amodern view of

biography. Harriet Ford writing on Marianne Stokes did not describe

her experiences but internalized them in a kind of stream of Stokes's

consciousness (Ford, 1900, 152).The Studiodid not depict artists ork

ing in their studios. Its series, "Afternoons in the Studio," was notabout material wealth or studios' spaciousness ("Afternoons

. . . ,"

TheStudio,1894, 116) and avoided photographic imagesof homes or

studios: "the principles taught are of infinitelymore moment than the

privateopinion of theman who happens tobe themedium throughwhich theseprinciples are conveyed" (Baldry,1896, 10).Biographyhad become a degraded popular,populist, and philistinegenrefor this

aestheticist publication.

For most Victorians, however, artists remained idealized, heroiccontributors of the public good,

aswell as of public goods. In

collaboration with artists and readers, biographers solidified the

national profile of English artists. In the process of acquiring

and pursuing increasing importance, artists acknowledged several

exchanges that appeared in or alongside biographical subjectivity: a

grand home for the "loss" of the artwork to a philistine audience;

the exchange of patronage for the "free" market; the exchange of

privacy for public scrutiny that permitted an elevated place in thesocial order; the exchange of prelapsarian innocence for a professional

engagement with market forces, assertion of artists' expertise, and

Victorian Review







J. odell

normative socialization.But these exchanges were increasingly threatened by changing

modern market values, and the biographical culture industry soughtto secure future hegemony forVictorian art against encroaching

French modernism that attracted wealthy American art patrons after

1900. Against these forces, biographies represented British artists

as "normal" adults, citizens, professionals, and property owners

to acculturate new consumers and socialize new artists who read

each other's biographies.41 Ruskin's reduced, pre-language artistswere removed from economics, hermeneutics, and full participationin cultural production which includes economic negotiations and

interpretive acts, or cultural capital. Lifewritings reinscribed the

authority to participate in these exchanges onto artists and claimed

for them symbolic capital. As true professionals, artists gave their

art and expertise freely and generously to the nation, contributing to

the public goodas ideal citizens of the state. Biographies argued that

artists, national icons and thoroughly socialized, produced two publicgoods

- themselves and their art.Through biographies artists entered

amuch wider public sphere than was available through exhibitions to

have their productions sanctioned and their exchanges recognized.

Facing the authority of hegemonic images of artists as degenerate,

bohemian, prelapsarian, greedy, or "fashionable," biographies

represented artists above all as professionals, itself a term thatwas

unstable and conflicted, combining uneasily market autonomy with a

vocational drive, a pre-industrial Revolution "calling" to one's truevocation. These contradictory terms were mediated by the notion of

expertise, aprecious entitywith a special surplus value. In contrast

to artisanal labour, artists' labour was rooted in an expertise and

represented in images of bourgeois studios filled with m?tonymie

signs of that expertise knowledge inwhich aesthetics, taste, social

status, and themarketplace co-existed; in photos studios overflowed

with antique busts, books, oriental rugs, and portraits of rich patronson the walls.

Modern culture, as Ernest Gellner argues, became in the modern

volume 27 number 1








period "no longer merely the adornment, confirmation and legitimization of a social order . . .culture is now the necessary shared

medium . . .within which . ..members of the society. . .can all

breathe and speak and produce;so itmust be the same culture . . .

it can nolonger be a diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or

tradition"(Gellner,1983,37-38). Similarly, heanthropologistMary

Douglas, ?ke Gellner, defines culture as amutually interdependent set

of relationships among itsmembers: "a culture is a system of persons

holding one another mutually accountable... .From this angle,

culture is fraught with the political implications of mutual account

ability" Douglas, 1992,31). Artistsbecame objects of scrutinynd

anxiety because they bore the responsibility for such culture that

promised to secure national unity and homogeneity and thus movinginto the center stage of national identity, theywere held to thismutual

accountability

Bourdieu argues that allwritings about art contribute to art's cultural

meanings and artists' intervention in the literature of art demonstratesthat they recognized this hermeneutics. Victorian biographies shapeda lay canon, privileging popular paintings and successful artists as

representatives of national culture and character. In constructinga digestible and inclusive national culture, biographers assessed artis

tic worth in a discourse of professionalism and nationalism built

upon contradictory aesthetic, moral, and economic measures. The

dichotomy between prelapsarian and professional entrepreneur was

a conflict over whether artists or patrons owned cultural power andauthority and over artists' right to knowledge of the "world," as

well as to public recognition of their expertise that enabled them to

control theirmeans of production and theirmarket values. Artists'

subjectivities produced in biographies were unstable and had to be

serialized, repeated, and performed over and over to insist on their

autonomy and entrepreneurship in themarket, status and domestica

tion in the social hierarchy, and representation of Englishness, how

evercontradictory

theseeconomics, social,

and cultural virtuesmight

be.42

Arizona State University

Victorian Review







J. odell

Notes

1. "BritishArtists: Their Style and Character: No. XII. -JamesClarke

Hook, A.R.A.," TheArt Journal'(1856):4l.

2. See Altick ,'Trom Aldine toEveryman," Studies inBibliography,1958,

5-15 on the representation of literaryfigures in biographies; Rubin on

similar acculturation inmodern American culture;Minihan on the role

of cultural institutions inBritish national identity; and Codell, OxfordArt Journal,2000, for a study of the creation of a national arthistory in

the genre of biographical histories.

3. Bell was a biographer ofRembrandt, Titian, Watts, and Burne-Jones,

among others.

4. See my essays on artists' biographies in books series, inBookHistory,

2000, 94-124, and on artists' biographies in the periodical press, in

Victorian PeriodicalsReview (hereafter cited asVPR), 2000, 283-316.

5. Versions of Baldry's biography ofMillais, for example, appeared in

four of Bell's series (1899, 1902, 1908, 1909) and one of Jack's, for

example.

6. Of all the biographical genres family or domestic biographies most

directly addressed the degeneracy literature in texts and images. See my

essays on family biographies inJPRS , 1995, 5-34, and inHughes and

Law, eds., 2000, 65-108.

7. On Spielmann ,seemy essays inRylands Bulletin, 1989, 139-63, and

KPR, 1989, 7-15; on Stephens, seeMacleod, 1986, 597-607, and

Codell, VPR, 2000 283-316.

8. D. G.Rossetti,

"Hand andSoul,"

The Germ(1850,

23-33. Rossetti was

so intrigued by his own creation that he reprinted it inThe FortnightlyReview inDec 1870 and itwas published by the Kelmscott Press in

1895, having become highly regarded byVictorians.

9. This version of the prelapsarian may be a forerunner of modern avant

garde artists towhom is attributed a carelessness about social and

economic matters and awillingness to live inpoverty and sacrifice

themselves for art, a very persistent cultural biographical ideal.

10. Lee, "In Umbria," 168.










Artists Biographies

13. Lee, "In Umbria," 170.14. Lee, "In Umbria," 172-73.






20. Lee, "InUmbria,"

174.


22. Lee, "In Umbria," 183-84. On page 183, she argues that if the artist

worries about associations awakened by the forms, "he will... be

deliberately or unconsciously leaving his own for, forestalling ours . .

. in reality transforming himself into the customer who would enter

his workshop," to order a painting with a specificmeaning. Customers

generate meanings; artists provide the forms for thesemeanings and

associations. Like Ruskin, Lee accepts thehermeneutic role of the

consumer.






28. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, "'Still Burning fromThis Strangling Embrace':

Vernon Leeon

Desire and Aesthetics,"in

Richard Dellamora, ed.,Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1999,

33-37).

29. Lee, "Ruskinism," Belcaro: Being essayonSundryAestheticalQuestions.London: W. Satchell, 1882, 226-27.

30. Lee, "Ruskinism," 203.

31. Lee, "Ruskinism," 204-05.


33. Lee, "Ruskinism," 217: "For him the corruption of the art isdue to themoral corruption of the artist: ifthe artist remained truthfullymodest,

the perfection of the artwould continue indefinitely."

Victorian Review 29







J. odell



36. Baldry was a biographer ofMillais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Herkomer,

Moore, Velasquez, and Reynolds for book series and in theperiodical

press.

37. For more details on Turners fortuna, seeCodell inHughes and Law,

2000, 75-84 ; formore onMillais, Leighton, Watts, andMorland, see

Codell, BookHistory, 2000, 94-124.

38. For comments on this alignment ofwatercolors with femininity, see Jan

Marsh, "Women and Art, 1850-1900," inMarsh and Nunn, 26.

39. For specific examples,seeCodell, KPR, 2000.

40. Dafforne in 1861 referred toCooper's 1849 autobiography publishedinTheArt Journal, a typical inter-referentiality in biographies thatwere

often based on artists' own autobiographical essays and interviews,

allowing artists' intervention into somany biographical texts.

41. Artists avidly read biographies as otherVictorians did. T. S. Cooper in

hismemoirs wrote, "I had read every book I could get hold of aboutartists and theirwork" (Cooper, 1891, 78), while Frederic Haydonwrote thathis father Benjamin Haydon's reading included biographies:

"Every life of every greatman he could get hold of he read eagerly. Let

loose among his father's books, he fed his sensibilities and excited his

own ambition by reading the lives of ambitious men" (Haydon, 1876,

9). Frederic Leighton's friend the architect Aitchison read theLife of

Haydon byTom Taylor (art critic for The Times) to thepainter while he

worked inhis studio (Corkran, 1902, 21).

42. Iwish to thank my colleagues for theirhelpful suggestions in the course

ofmy writing this essay: Susan Casteras, Dianne Sachko Macleod,

Debra Mancoff, Kathy Psomiades, JuliaWatson, and the anonymousreader forVictorian Review.









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