Codell - Artists Biographies and The Anxiety

Artists' Biographies and the Anxieties of National Culture
Author(s): Julie F. Codell

Source: Victorian Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 1-35
Published by: Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793451 .
Accessed: 13/11/2013 13:26
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Victorian Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Artists' Biographies and theAnxieties of National Culture
JulieF. 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, The Art Journal called artists "public property,"
who as such deserved public scrutiny of their works, the "sanctity" of
their homes, and the "solitude" of their studios.1 Artists' biographies
derived 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
as
self-improvement vehicles to help readers familiarize
promoted
themselves with their own national culture.2 Malcolm Bell, one of
the most the as due
popular biographers, explained genre's vogue
to increased leisure for learning among the general populace.3 Bell
art was a means to assure the improvement of the
argued that
race and thusprovided a public good for thenation (Bell, 1910,
rose to become national
2). The producers of that public good
heroes and icons, but their former associations with Bohemianism
and degeneracy made them suspect and thus in need of public
which offered.
scrutiny and domestication biographies
Between 1880 and 1914, there were at least sixty-two art and archi
tecture series, mosdy biographies, but also historical, critical, and
technical books. Victorian artists were juxtaposed with and interposed
a canon
among Italian and English Old Masters, creating popular
and accumulation that argued for progress and British
by association
Victorian Review (2001 ) 1

J.Codell
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 in Colour" (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 were differences
defining and legitimating national culture, there
among series and also within series. Scholars and journalists wrote
biographies for the same series at a time when the distinction
between the popular biography and the scholarly monograph had
not yet Volumes within single series varied widely in style,
emerged.
accuracy, popularization, and arguments about art's morality and
commerce and the didactic identification of the artist's character with
the artwork's merit. debates were widely disseminated
These through
a range of series' and sizes intended for an economic spectrum
prices
of middle- and working-class readers.4 Versions of the same book
would appear recycled in both cheap and expensive editions.1
as part of a
The popularity of Victorian artists' biographies larger
process of acculturation of the middle- and working-classes coincided
a over national
with growing obsession identity, itself shaped and
defined through emerging cultural canons of art and literature under
same series. In artists and the
construction through these biographies,
public mirrored each other through mass-produced images of artists'
bodies, homes, studios, families, and their most well known works
texts. The French critic Robert de la Sizeranne
accompanying many
in English ContemporaryArt described the nationalism peculiar to Eng
lish art which was popularly treated as "the outcome of national
treatment on the Continent
life and national thought," unlike its
(La Sizeranne, 1898, 318). La Sizeranne noted that English art was
central to the formation of Englishness and related concepts of his
tory, progress, and cultural superiority. Other cultural institutions

fashioning modern national unity and identity included Mechanics'
Institutes, museums and galleries, a wide-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 . . .distinction
production, sacrificing
between the logic of the work and that of the social system"
(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993, 30-31). Artists' biographies

constituted a culture
industry. They regulated artists' personae
through performative of social and norms,
repetitions professional
individuals into a of "The Artist."
homogenizing typology English
Narratives criss-crossed with discourses on aesthetics, nationalism,
new
political economy, history, degeneracy, fiction, and the discipline
of art history to produce a bricolage of anecdotage, idealism,
didacticism, commercialism, and historical documentation that
revealed less about art and more artists' social, national, and
about
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 an event that can . . .
occasion,
reaffirm cultural eminence, contextualize social action,

alter literary opinion, deputize political influence, or
instruct economic conduct - this admissions procedure,
which is always in crisis, is constantly not often con
(if
sciously) surveilledin and throughbiographical recogni
tion, which, in this respect, functions as the generic
agencyof theproprietarypowers. (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, there were stillmany tensions, conflicts,
and uncertainties expressed in this period over the nature
ambiguities,
of the artist.
In short, art had become, one might say, too important to leave
Victorian Review 3

J.Codell
to the artists. Their were sullied by associations with

reputations
bohemianism popularized inVictorian fiction (Jeffares,
1979) or with
fears 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 their English followers
(e.g., Francis Galton, Henry Maudsley, Havelock Ellis) for whom

were twin artistic traits.6 But as artists
insanity and criminality
became identified with Englishness, these stereotypes were replaced
new
by professional models exemplified in serialized biographies that
new types.
produced
Artists recognized the opportunity of their entrance into
biographical
subjectivity, and they directly intervened representing their identities.
They negotiated theirpublic imageswith editors likeM. H. Spiel
mann, editor of theMagazine ofArt, and Marcus Huish, editor of the
Art journal, and with critics like F. G.
Stephens of theAthenaeum; all
of whom were among the army of artists' Artists even
biographers.7
wrote their own press releases
(Codell, VPR, 2000). Art critics, edi
tors, and artists, all tightly networked, advocated artists' full participa
tion in social and economic as a
spheres professionals with high
degree of autonomy in determining the market value of their products
and, more importantly, of their expertise. Artists exercised direct and
indirect control over public representations of themselves and of the
as a whole.
profession
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,
and ? were
originality, empirical observation, domesticity, masculinity
ascribed to
English artists.What made artists worthy of biographical
scrutiny wastheirmaterial and social success, after all, but what made
them worthy of iconic privilege was a strategic misrecognition that

they were solely motivated by English character traits and Victorian

ideals - 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
art market
price
surge, the measures of artistic worth market value and mass
by
consumption became as persistent as aesthetic, historic, or didactic
measures. The confluence of idealism and commercialism in the
construction of the artist became a Victorian from which
episteme
emerged two dichotomous types that were
problematic
as
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 a uniquely

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 to material and social
needs. Margaret Oliphant described a artist in 1884,
prelapsarian
on the of Giovanni Dupr?. Dupr? "lived and
writing autobiography
. . .
laboured with never-failing energy entirely undiverted by the great
events going on 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 a "too absorbed in the success of
primitive,
his statue to think whether or not he is sufficiendy taken notice of
in societyor asked to dinner by the rightpeople," the ideal of the
unworldly,unambitious ideal artist (Oliphant, 1884, 614).
poverty, devotion to art since
Oliphant emphasized Dupr?'s
a fall into vice,
childhood, diligence, redemption by love from
andwill to self-help(Oliphant, 1884, 621-22). The ideal of every
Mechanic's Institute, Dupr? warned others "of the dangers of
too much importance to early
premature applause, and of attaching
successes" 1884, 626-27). Unaware of politics even in 1848
(Oliphant,
was "an artist with his soul absorbed in his work"
Italy, he (Oliphant,
uninterested in the "dull annals of success and
1884, 627), worldly
Victorian Review 5

J.Codell
prosperity" (Oliphant, 1884, 631). In a November 1859 essa)1, she
castigated Academicians who aspired to social status and condemned

the lucrative practice of displaying single paintings in Bond 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
to
bohemian "social dissonance" help them attain the "exceptional
social 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
prelapsarian
artist: "An artist need not be a learnedman; ... itwill be a
to him. . . .The
ideal of an artist, however, is not that
disadvantage
he should be illiterate, but well read in the best books, and thoroughly
high bred, both in heart and in bearing. In a word he should be fit
for the best society, and should keep out of it." Society corrupted the
artist, "first, by its sympathy with his meanest powers; secondly, by

its chilling want of understanding of his greatest; and, thirdly, by its
vain occupation of his time and thought... a men must be
painter of
men ... as a watcher, not as a
among companion" (11: 52-53).
an artist, was antithetical to
Ruskin argued that being natural,
language: "an artist may 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' written rules at odds with his practice (4: 46): "The
whole duty inculcated upon the artist is that of being in all respects
as likeNature as (4: 175). Inarticulateness was even proof
possible"
of greatness: "The moment any man begins to 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 the
artist's mode of perception as and To the
prelapsarian pre-language:
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 thiscondition of 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 in Emptiness if you have
Nothing to give him youwill find thatNothing is exacdy the thing

he most wants, and that he will immediately proceed to make half
a of it" As there was no want in the edenic world
picture (4: 388).
of the artist, there could be no sense of deprivation from material
benefitsor from a social life (1: 27). Ruskin proposed a fixed income
"To give him his bread and cheese, and so much a day," which he
to do
believed would encourage "your best men" good work (14:
was irrelevant to the quality of
488). However, money ultimately
performance: "no amount of pay had ever made a good soldier, a
a or a .. .
good teacher, good artist, good 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 for amillion of money sterling,nothing" (7: 449).
and
Ruskin and Oliphant stripped the artist's mental capacity
condemned artists' social and economic aspirations. Their ideal was
onto the past. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's devoted thirteenth
projected
centurypainterChiaro dell'Erma inhis 1850 short story"Hand
ideal projected onto the early
and Soul" exemplifies the prelapsarian
Renaissance in this case. Like Ruskin's artist as natural resource and
is removed from the clamorous social and
Oliphant's Dupr?, Chiaro
brutal political struggles around him in Pisa. In dialogue with his soul,
in the form of a beautiful young lady who comes to him
appearing
because he "hast not laid thy life unto riches" and is still relatively
to a social purpose and
pure, he re-dedicates himself spirituality 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 spiritual
side of the artist. Rossetti even incorporated a nationalistic twist: the
to the nineteenth-century and the
story jumps from the thirteenth
Victorian Review 7

J.Codell
narrator, an artist intrigued by Chiaro 's paintings then hanging in the

Uffizi, is contrasted with the rationalism of Continental art students
who fail to appreciated the painting's devotional purity.8
The model was
necessary for the preservation of art's
prelapsarian
as sacred and untouched
misrecognition by economics. The critic
even a bohemian version of the prelapsarian
Harry Quilter posited
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 the modern artistic field: "the art trader
cannot serve his
'discovery' unless he applies all his conviction,
which rules out 'sordidly commercial' manoeuvres, manipulation
and the 'hard sell', in favour of the softer, more discreet forms
of 'public relations' (which are themselves a highly euphemized
form of publicity) - receptions, society gatherings and judiciously
placed confidences" (Bourdieu, 1993, 77). As Walter Benjamin

also points out, art in the modern world offers an escape from
participation in economic reality and recasts itself through ownership

and connoisseur value from commodity into dream, fantasy, and
idealism (Benjamin, 1978, 155); in this way the consumer and
collector contribute to art's misrecognition. The ideal
prelapsarian
emptied artists of social and economic
"fallen" knowledge that led to
"sordid" ambition.
Instead, separation from such knowledge forced
them to see only through Ruskin's "infantine sight." In this role,
artists then were carriers of innocence whose "pure" works served
collectors' escape fantasies, as well as national ideals.
Ruskin's refusal to acknowledge 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 a parodie take on the
prelapsarian artist. In Vernon Lee's essay "In Umbria, A Study of

Artistic Personality" in Balcaro: Being essay on SundryAestheticalQuestions,
1881, Lee on the contradictions between the intense

speculated

Artists'
Biographies
spirituality of Perugino's paintings and Vasari's depiction of him as

greedy, 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 large
homes and carriages. Perugino lived "in the best part of town" in a
house "full of stuff and fine linen and place and
precious everything
which a wealthy burgher could desire," with a "handsome wife . .
. for whom he was forever new clothes .
designing and ordering
. . fantastic diadems . . . that she town as
might go through the
magnificent and quaintly attired as any noble lady."10
Her description of Perugino directly addressed the artist's
engagement with the market 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
some mere
repeated in large and small, copies, others slighdy varied
. . . was "a commercial . . .
by the pupils."11 Perugino speculator
who knew his public so thoroughly."12 Perugino "had the means of
a fortune . . . success was the only test."13
making
Lee then presented the dramatic incoherence "between noble art and
troubled Ruskin:
grovelling artists" that had
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, together with a precious noble gift taken
from a hand we should shrink from touching, accept the
art puritymay
disheartening, the debasing conclusion, that in
be born of the base? .
spring from foulness, and the excellent
. . it seems to
strip the holiness from art, theworthiness, nay,
almost the innocence, from our enjoyment. We feel toward
a
any beautiful work of art something akin to love: sort of
desire ... to be with it in some manner united; and thus
... that all thismay be sprung from out of unworthiness.
. . . contamination of us shudder and suspect
origin, makes
.. . sickened for a moment as the cross
thought quivered
theirmind of the foulness out of which the noblest of our
art has risen.14
Victorian Review 9

J.Codell
art objects increased the dangers of contamination
The pleasure of
from the unworthy artist to the spectator, her "we" who experience
the consequences of the leprous artist ("shrink from touching")
to to "our" national culture ("con
threatening spread moral disease
tamination of origin").
What are the relations between the character of thework

of art and the character of the artistwho creates it? . . .as
the peculiarity of the fruitdepends, caeterisparibus,upon the
... so also must the
peculiarity of the tree. peculiarity of the
be due to the peculiarities of the
spiritual product spiritual
whole of which it is born.1'
Art as the genealogical offspring of the artist becomes

a
metaphor in
Lee's medicalized language of degeneracy.
To prevent contamination by immoral artists Lee suggested
separating the artist from the man. 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 to keep out of his mere abstract
spiritmay be able
creations those baser instincts (which though recognized with
shame) he is unable to subdue in practise; his works show

him as he would desire himself to be, as he, alas! has not
the strength to be in reality; . . . for they have given to us
their better part, and kept for themselves, with bitterness and
shame, their worse.19
Through art making, artists then offered up for sacrifice their best
natures. This nature soothed consumers:
"higher"
we almost persuade ourselves that in those dubious times of
doubt and dissolution, the spotless, the unshaken were in a
way divinely selected, like so many vestal virgins, to cherish
in isolation the holy fireof art. . we
.
eagerly treasure up

like relics anecdotes showing the gentleness and generosity

of men likeLionardo . which,
. in our
[sic] and Mozart.
desire to trace art back to a noble origin, seem to shed so
much lightupon the production 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
to bear on the artwork associations and resonances and
brought
thus generated the work's meanings: "What the artist gives ismerely
the arrangement of lines and colours in a given manner . . .This,
and not any train of thoughts awakened by this possibly but not
to an
necessarily existing resemblance already known natural object.
. . and this is artistic form, the
absolutely, objectivelyexisting work
of art," while spectators created meanings through their psychological
associations.22 Lee rebuilt an idealized artist who was
merely to evoke for us a series of phantom sights or sounds,

of phantom men and women. Therefore, our first act must
be to diminish, by at least a half, all the practical sides of
his nature, so that no practical activities divert him from his
... we have obtained a creature whose
purely ideal field.
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 to view things as
concrete, livingmanifestations, than as logical abstractions.23
Removed from both practical matters and abstract speculation, the

artist was reduced to a for Lee a
receptacle impressions. posited
reduced, bare, artist to get a morally pure artist.
intellectually
But this was, Lee admitted, "a mere historic myth, inwhich the world
. . . that the
continues foolishly to believe poet is a special creature
. . .different from the rest of 24
humanity." 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.Codell
out of and
work, since his work ismade by his nature."23
Let us tear away, throw aside this last amount of human
our tomere intense powers of
feeling, reduce typical artist
seeing. Shall we still have wherewith to obtain anywork at all?
Will this rarified, simplified mentality be much above a mere
... we have removed as much as
feelingless optic machine
of all human . . .until this visual
possible qualities organisms
becomes beyond compare perfect in its power of perceiving
and
reproducing."26
Lee has gone beyond her initial medicalizing 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 was a
cynic, but he great painter."27 Such
ambivalence about the effects of art works were consistent with Lee's
suspicions about aestheticism's moral implications, her development

of psychological aesthetics, and her investment in "the connections
"
among art, health, and purity tied to her "feminist purity polemics,"
as Psomiades argues in her recent study of Lee's
Kathy writings.28
Lee's a reductio ad absurdum of the ties between
"paltry conclusion,"
pure artist and good art, underscored her belief that Ruskin's
insistence on such a tie came out of fear of the sensuousness of
as evil and led to his as well as contributed to
beauty anxiety, making
"morality sterile and art base in his desire to sanctify the one by the
other ...
to clothe all that is really pure in a false barb of sanctity,"
thus making "a return to nature a return to sin . . . in his constant
sanctifying of beauty he makes it appear impure."29 Lee pointed

out that Ruskin worked "to sweep usurping evil out of the kingdom
of 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 a moral.31 She criticized his application of morality to art,
recognizing that the beautiful does not always come from purity, that
are mixed in life, as in art, and that the bad and the
good and bad
beautiful are often intertwined: in itself, is neither morally
"beauty,
nor bad: it is aesthetically . ..
good morally good Beauty is pure,

complete egotistic: it has no other value than its being beautiful"32

She disagreedwith his belief thatgood artneeded amorally good
artist.33 Lee recognized that Ruskin's morality could not survive and
that his "placid paradise of art," had "become ... to
suspicious
live in this sweet and noble impossible paradise" of beauty while
the world was filled with poverty and evil became impossible for
Ruskin.34 In the end she argued against the moral resistance of evil
through prelapsarian isolation: we can only fight evil, "if we do not

shrink from the battlefield of reality into an enervating Capua of
moral idealism," but instead recognize that the pleasure of beauty is a
good in the world quite apart from the eradication of evil which alone
can only a "mere
produce joyless desert of painless vacuity," and
not a fertile a
garden inwhich artists "sow and plant" in "redeemed
Ufe soil."35
Many biographers argued in defense that their artist subjects cared

little for money, made money inadvertently while motivated by moral
or national idealism. But these same also insisted on
lifewritings
as measures of worth and in representing artists' large
including prices
homes and studios. Art production became public acts of sacrifice
as well
meriting generous payments in symbolic and cultural capital,
as inmaterial the of
exchange value, and value and appreciation
to or artistic merit or
works often served "prove" national unity
English character traits, such as independence and entrepreneurship.
Furthermore the reduced artist that Ruskin advocated and Lee

was
in direct opposition to artists' own to rise
parodied aspirations
was that
socially, and it precisely economic and social achievement
dominated biographical series on artists. Artists and their biographers
wrote to synthesize economic interests with ideal motives of duty,
modesty, and self-sacrifice. Biographies projected artists' motives

as as and
"pure," but also portrayed them mature, professional,
of manly English virtues of enterprise and
entrepreneurial, partaking
individuality The English artist as professional entrepreneur was as
as the
Victorian prelapsarian model. As Walter Shaw Sparrow argued
in defense of artists employed in advertising, "the practice of every
art is bread-winning as well as aesthetic adventure, and attacks on
Victorian Review

J.Codell
are crimes (Shaw Sparrow, 1924,

bread-winning against citizenship"
245). One popular biographerAlfredLys Baldry likewiserecognized
the need for "a correct estimate of the manner inwhich taste controls
the workings of our social economy" (Baldry, 1899, 1-2).36 For
were "art workers," and as such were free to
Baldry artists capitalize
on social and economic self
opportunities, enacting entrepreneurial
a thatwas to both
determination, unique Victorian model anathema
Romantic bohemianism and later modern 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
It was, after all, their success that merited
spheres. biographical
Macmillan, in 1903 on G. F. Watts,
(mis)recognition. Hugh writing
described the painter as "one of the last survivors of themen of
genius of the Victorian age" whose Ufe demonstrated "how splendid

was the was a
period that formed him." Watts perfect synthesis of
modern and Renaissance, a Victorian "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 prices
seemed to bolster the moral imperative of Watts who "sacrificed
everything for his ideal" (Macmillan, 1903, 40). "Everything" did not
include sacrificing material comfort, a very a
large studio house, or
privileged social circle, all of which Watts enjoyed.
Conflicting traits came to represent artists' Englishness. Social
affability characterized the wratercolorist Birket Foster (Cundall, 1906,

but Albert Moore was for
viii-ix), praised ignoring "social dignities
and commercial emoluments to
attaching artistry" (Baldry, 1893,
24). Biographical series became performative through the repetition
of norms that naturalized the "artist." Series contained anywhere
from four to eighty biographies, each one repeating hegemonic
national 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,

the miser; Gainsborough, the rebel; Watts, the civic-minded idealist.3
a handful of the most
Obsessive repetitions of the lives of popular
artists them as national types, and some artists likeMillais
promoted
and Watts remained popular biographical subjects into the 1920s.
Not surprisingly, biographies tended to become xenophobic. In
Randall Davies's 1913 biography of Reynolds, the author reported
with gratification that despite the foreign artists who populated the
"British School," the best artists were natives, a fact
"gratifying
to
the national pride; and itmay be added thatwith the exception of
Romney all of these were born south of the Trent" (Davies, 1913,
was common authors of these
4). Davies' racial obsession among
serialized that argued for a purely British lineage among
biographies
its artists.
to suture readers to a mass national culture

Biographies sought
and had a symbiotic relationship
to exhibitions. M. H.
Spielmann's
biography of Millais in 1898 was written "for the use of visitors
to theMillais exhibitionat theRoyal Academy" (Spielmann, 1898,
11). Ronald Gower hoped his book would send readers to see
the Gainsboroughs in the National Gallery (Gower, 1930, v-vi).
to C. Lewis Hind, artists were the most lucrative
According English
of the availability of theirworks: "Turner is a better
subjects because
than Velazquez, as most of his are in
paying proposition pictures
London" (Hind, 1926, 170).
The most was their
striking physical characteristic of many series
size, small enough to fit conveniendy into a pocket, perhaps to
be read on railway carriages. Bell's Miniature Series, various series
by Grant Richards and T. C. and E. C. Black, and the

published
BritishArtist seriespublished by Philip Allen and edited byKaines
Smith were all small books. Susan Stewart describes miniaturization
as a an "interior" life and intimacy, one of
expressing longing for
the stated intentions of biographers (Stewart, 1993, 39). Harry Quilter
to make artists seem "men like ourselves, frail and exalted
hoped
. . .bound to us a common humanity, and claiming
by the tie of
Victorian Review 15

J.Codell
our
sympathy and love" (Quilter, 1880, 1-3). Miniaturization, Stewart
does not decrease but increases as the
points out, significance, it,
miniature becomes a site of didactic truth, the
aphorism, the epigram,
and the proverb (Stewart, 1993, 53). The didactic function of
was enhanced that formed a gem-like
biography by tiny reproductions
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, the
secret of creativity, and of a Ufe of
captured pleasant memories
dreams and fantasies ? all of which served the
biographical mission
of helping readers identify with artists while retaining artists' purity
and innocence.
Women artists' biographies smoothed over contradictions among

competing ideologies of domesticity, professionalism, and femininity.
Marcus Huish's 1903 biographyof Helen Ellingham, entitled
Happy
as Painted byHelen
England Ellingham R. W. S., articulated a rare
identification of a woman 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. as the ideal - both
Allingham emerged
feminine and artist. Her work embodied "healthiness, happiness,
and joyof life,coupled with an idyllicbeauty" (Huish, 1903,
2-4, 13-14, 20).38 Huish employed the degeneracy vocabulary of
health to underscore Allingham as an artist worthy of
undegenerate
representing one national type.
In Arthur Fish's biography of Henrietta Rae, Rae a
personified
professional Victorian artist without the overt domestic
identity typical
of women artists' lifewritings. Despite
having two children, Rae
(called Mrs. Normand was never
throughout the book) completely
defined as a mother or wife. Rae and her husband were bound in
artistic fellowship, not marital roles. The children were
dispatched
one summer to the when Rae and her husband
English countryside
entered a
mildly bohemian French atelier. Photos of Rae in the studio

were without her family(Fish, 1905, facing96 and facing 102).

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 seasons
placidity tempered with of disappointment"
(Fish, 1905, 9; italicsmine). The justificationforbiography, then,

was her art recognized "in the world's art centres and received with
favour; work which has made her name prominent among those of
the women-painters of to-day, and marked her career with success"
success was achieved "in the usual
(Fish, 1905, 10). Rae's ordinary
manner: sheer hard work; by a strong, determined
by persistent fight
the and that hinder a woman in
against disability discouragement
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 a new
periodical press also constructed biographical discourse
on artists to mediate 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
or by validating the consumers' self
preferences," meta-preferences
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 roles

were ones carried out by Victorian as
precisely the biographers,
successes into public good and
they transformed artists' commercial
identified artists with national traits, including entrepreneurship and
success, to generate consumer demand. Hind recounted how the

World paid a guinea for a paragraph on an "unfinished picture by an
eminent Royal Academician," creating an advertisement for the artist
(Hind, 1926,131).
The treatment of artists ranged from anecdotal
press's biographical
sensationalism to calculated In The Art Journals 1876
professionalism.
Victorian Review

J.Codell
series "The Romance of Great Artists," Mary E. Wager braided

each about
together brief anecdotal and sensationalistic paragraphs,
a famous artist of the past, focusing on love affairs and miserable
The appearance of such anecdotage in The Art Journal
marriages.
alongside defenses of art-making as a profession, an economic
contribution to the nation, and a source of aesthetic uplift embraced
means for
competing 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
wrote for several and newspapers, recycling
commonly periodicals
and revising their articles for diverse audiences (Brake, 1994,
10-11). For C. Lewis Hind wrote for several
example, biographies
was sub-editor of The Art Journal (1887-92), author of two
publishers,
biographical series for the Globe, edited Pictures of theYear 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 The
Art Journal cited biographies from the Revue des Deux Mondes ("British
Artists. . . .Edwin Ward, The Art Journal, 1855, 47), indicating a
cross-channel sharing of press biographies.
As as 1856, The Art a
early Journal promoted regulatory public gaze
that inscribed the social order and a set of and exchanges
obligations
for economic rewards on artists through the biographical act:
...
Every artistwho has reached a high position becomes
. . . the
public property public whose favourable suffrages he
has won by his works, feel also an interest in the individual
who created them . . . the desire is legitimate and perfectly
reasonable ? to learn some of his life and 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 even the of his domestic hearth . . .
extent, sanctity
[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 indifferent
to the praises or the censures of his . .but
biographer;.

as the
history is the inevitable result of the reputation, he
must make up his mind thatwhen he has himself achieved
the one, sooner or later somebody will effect the other for
him ..
("British Artists. .James Clarke Hook, TheArt journal,
1856,41).
Art appreciation the public
enfranchised to scrutinize
("suffrages")
popular artists, overseeing cultural production and domesticating
its producers whose characters could affect (or infect) the nation
through their cultural production. Furthermore, artists' new fame

and 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 biographies as an age, as Vasari's Lives Artist
defining of the
had done. National was the sum of its lives (Carlyle,
history geniuses'
69-70).
This gaze raised commercial success to a new level of
public meaning.
mass mass
Popularity, measured by spectating and consumption of
artworks, became a taste and cultural
symbol of national unity of
identity7.Samuel Carter Hall, founder of the The Art journal in 1839,
later bragged in his memoir that in the beginning "J had to create a
to show 'the commercial value of the Fine Arts'"
publicfor Art...
(Hall, 1883, 1: 197; "Farewell,"TheArt Journal,1880, 354;Mancoff,
1991). Like most art press editors, he
argued for better fees for
painters (Spatt, 1985, 53), and insisted that thepublic needed to

recognize its role as upholding and strengthening national culture
through consumption.
The market mediated then between the public's growing appreciation
of art's importance and their identification with artists, and artists'
own need to understand the economics of their production and
consumption. The Art Journal regularly published the year's sales in

an annual column detailing objects' prices, owners, buyers, and dates
of auction sales (e.g., Beaver, The Art Journal, 1884, or Rowlands, The
Art Journal,1887).Knowledge of themarketwas explicated by the
a "fallen"
press as a vital part of artists' professional knowledge, not
that sullied them, theirworks, or their spectators.
knowledge
Victorian Review

J.Codell
The press thus transformed art production into an economic

contribution to "national wealth," at once both material
("wealth")
and cultural ("national"). P. L. Simmons wrote that "taste is a
marketable so much value isworth
commodity, which being of
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 for art abroad, as well as at
demand
a
home, supported the national income through variety of "artistic"
goods: from marble statues and lithographic stone worth ?300,000,
to lace
totalling ?1.5 million sterling. Simmons listed the value
of importedgoods: oil painting (?240,869), engravingsand photos
(?59,714), picture frames (?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 art
promoted consumption through serialized
biographies that first appeared in The Art Journah original incarnation
as The Art-Union. "Portraits of British Artists" offered one-column
laudatory biographies inwhich hard work that the artist's

promised
"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 parallel
sets of of the living and the dead, their fame levelled
biographies
and equalled by such attention and contemporary culture
biographical
raised by association. Series often assumed a metaphoric
relationship
between artists' characters and styles and found to
consumption
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 art works the nations cultural
capital and art
a kind of civic act.39 was not condemned but
production Popularity
considered a that artists were to an
sign acceptable equally industrious
Britishpublic.
Perhaps the most suturing images were those of artists' homes and
studios 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 the socio-economic issues in art

exposed
production and artists' public image. In 1880 and 1881 Edward
Tarver's "Artists' Studios" appeared in the The Art Journal complete
with studio floor plans, followed in 1882 by the series "Artists
"
Homes. In the 1881 series "The Homes of our Artists," The
Magazine ofArt featured Leighton and Millais, the most 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
was not just a matter of taste, but "of kindness
Leighton himself and
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 for

absence of every kind of affectation. It is scarcely picturesque,
an to put into a
though not impossible house 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,
own
290), likeMillais's prosperity and popularity.
so
Why were artists' homes 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, is destined to be the possession of strangers for

ever after. ... he must endure of .
many pangs 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 pension
for a cultural civil service. Artists sacrificed paintings, metaphorically
both 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 a lack, a loss of phallic power deposited
replaced
in the art object. But this loss could become a gain if the work
later. The home contributed to this appreciation as it
appreciated
compensated for the loss and contributed to the artist's reputation.
Thus, the large studio home itself,which Ruskin attacked artists for
was for Oldcasde a function of art that bonded
owning, consumption
spectator and artist. The home became fetishized as a substitute for
the artists' "lack," those lost works borne out of energy and
phallic
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 economy
of art emerged: placing the artist's work site in the home, made
the studio "restore" the idealized cottage industry that appealed
to Victorian a work protected in a
nostalgia for pre-industrial
cloistered home environment. Hints of pre-industrial prelapsarian
ideals partially accounted for the fascination with studios: "the
an
heavenly, all facilitating studio represented both inspirational
tool and material proof of the professional approach" and
"removed the suspicion of amateurism ... inmakeshift domestic
surroundings" (Walkley, 1994, xxiii-xxiv). Studios were professional

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
as consistency between the work and
subject's authenticity, defined
the character of the great embodied in their domestic spaces. Richard
Salmon argues, however, that the interview undermined the very
as it transferred interest from the author's
intimacy it promised,
work to the author's life,making authors marketable commodities
to be circulated and consumed" (Salmon, 1997, 159).
"products
volume 27 number 1

Artists Biographies
As The Art Journal quote above indicated, artists, too, became

commodified as
public property. Salmon argues that the interviewer
surveyed the biographical subject, including home and writing desk,
to an "authentic" self, "revealed"
project by the author (Salmon,
an interview in situ assumed
1997,161-62). Being the subject of
a
celebrity7,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
epistemological
assumptions of the interview in thematerial substance of its location
. . .often as a domain of
explicidy read revelatory signs," of, among
other things, the author's privacy as inner "sanctum" 1997,
(Salmon,
164-66). The repetition of these topics as "hermeneutical strategies"
meant that the revealed of any biographical
"individuality" subject
was the
homogenized individuality of all such subjects (e.g., three
hundred articles in Edmund Yates's three-volume Celebrities atHome
that ran for six years in theWorld). Celebrity intimacy was an
oxymoron and parody of itself (Salmon, 1997,168-69).

Another economic issue foregrounded in press was
biographies
the labour value of art. Biographies deployed market values to
homogenize differences among artists through a "universal" measure,
the market value of a work of art. Hard work justified art as
investment, and biographies readily assured readers of labour as

investment value: The Art over
Journal admitted watching young
"promising"
artists: "we have carefully watched," "our eye has ever
"
. . .
Edwin Ward The Art Journal, 1855,
been upon" ("British Artists.
was
45). Biography part of the political economy of art as investment
and stimulator of consumer demand.
TheMagazine ofArt ranbiographical series from 1878 to 1904,

and after 1900 focused on etchers, and younger or
photographers,
an investment category. Essays were generally brief
"rising" artists,
and chronological without the heroism or moralizing of The Art
was in a that artists'
Journal. Entrepreneurship key journal encouraged
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.Codell
has undoubtedly been the foundation of her successes"(Oldcasde,

1879, 258). Her status was initiated "by entering simply
professional
and ingenuously into the market of sale and purchase that she could
fairlymeasure herself with her brothers of the brush," though readers

were reassured that she advocatedwomen's to work in
only right
private: "though personal conspicuousness and public appearance
have always been repugnant to her nature, she confesses to the nobler
ambitionof fame throughher labours" (Oldcasde, 1879, 260). Still
"feminine" in recoiling
from public space (hardly a recoil considering
she 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 the work ethic, a "nobler
success for
ambition," exchanging duty. Work, not simply sales, was
the measure of her
painting's worth. Thus, Butler was redeemed from
her own success (and possible loss of femininity) by a "nobler"
calling
with some very ambiguous praise: "If she wields the brush at sixty,
as we
hope she may do, she will be then, as she is now, and as
she desires to be always - a student" 1879, 262)
- and
(Oldcasde,
a master!
presumably never
Such inconsistencies constituted
the ambivalent assess
biographical
ments of successful women artists in the press. Eleanor Fortescue
Brickdale's skill threatened her
gendered identity through masquer
ade: "For so full and firm a grip of a
pencil seldom falls to the lot
of a woman. there is next to no bravura
Happily lurking inMiss
Brickdale's She does not in the outward habili
handling. masquerade
ment of any
given master's manner" (Dixon, 1902, 262). Although
her phallic pencil was "firm" as a man's, she was still
reassuringly
feminine, forsaking men's clothes, "the outward habiliment" of a
"master." Like Butler, she was infantilised as an eternal student.
One biographer in 1861 commented on the increasing
difficulty of the biographical task in proportion to the
demand already made on our attention by the artists
themselves, through theirworks, or by notices of one kind or
another which have previously been published in the
pages
of the Journal: thus the subject is, in a manner, exhausted,
volume 27 number 1

or we run the risk, by

re-entering the field of investigation,
of multiplying words, without increasing the information we
desire to afford. (Dafforne, 1861, 133)
as out that the was

This writer early as 1861 pointed public already
so with information on art that art
deluged biography's words, like
works, were so common that their worth 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 art
consumer more interested in than in didacticism. The
connoisseurship
Portfolio had little interested in artistic personalities, focusing instead
on without
professional concerns, personality cults, fetishism, and
anecdotage (Codell,VPR, 1987). The Studiohad amodern view of
on Marianne did not describe
biography. Harriet Ford writing Stokes
her experiences but internalized them in a kind of stream of Stokes's
consciousness (Ford, 1900, 152). The Studiodid not depict artistswork
ing in their studios. Its series, "Afternoons in the Studio," was not
about material wealth or studios' spaciousness . . . ,"
("Afternoons
The Studio, 1894, 116) and avoided photographic imagesof homes or
studios: "the principles are of infinitely more moment than the
taught
privateopinion of theman who happens to be themedium through
which theseprinciples are conveyed" (Baldry,1896, 10). Biography
had become a degraded popular, populist, and philistinegenrefor this
aestheticist publication.
For most Victorians, however, idealized, heroic
artists remained
contributors of the public good, as well
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
that appeared in or alongside biographical a
exchanges subjectivity:
home for the "loss" of the art work to a philistine audience;
grand
the exchange of patronage for the "free" market; the exchange of
an elevated
privacy for public scrutiny
that permitted place in the
social order; the exchange of prelapsarian innocence for a professional
and
engagement with market forces, assertion of artists' expertise,
Victorian Review

J.Codell
normative socialization.
But these exchanges were increasingly threatened by changing

modern market values, and the biographical culture industry sought
to secure future hegemony for Victorian 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 artists
were removed from economics, hermeneutics, and full participation
in cultural production which includes economic negotiations and
or cultural
interpretive acts, capital. Lifewritings reinscribed the
to in these onto artists and claimed
authority participate exchanges
for them symbolic capital. As true professionals, artists gave their
art and to the nation, contributing to
expertise freely and generously
the public good as ideal citizens of the state. Biographies argued that
artists, national icons and thoroughly socialized, produced two
public
- themselves and their art.
goods Through biographies artists entered
a much wider was available to
public sphere than through exhibitions
have their productions sanctioned and their exchanges recognized.
as
Facing the authority of hegemonic images of artists degenerate,
bohemian, or "fashionable,"
prelapsarian, greedy, biographies
as itself a term thatwas
represented artists above all professionals,
unstable and conflicted, combining uneasily market autonomy with a
vocational drive, a pre-industrial Revolution "calling"
to one's true
were mediated
vocation. These contradictory terms by the notion of
a a
expertise, precious entity with special surplus value. In contrast
to artisanal labour, artists' labour was rooted in an expertise and
in
represented images of bourgeois studios filled with m?tonymie
signs of that expertise knowledge inwhich aesthetics, taste, social

status, and the marketplace co-existed; in photos studios overflowed
with antique busts, books, oriental rugs, and portraits of rich patrons
on the walls.
Modern culture, as Ernest Gellner argues, became in the modern
volume 27 number 1

period "no longer merely the adornment, confirmation and legitimi

zation 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 no longer be a diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or
tradition" (Gellner, 1983, 37-38). Similarly,the anthropologistMary
Douglas, ?ke Gellner, defines culture as a mutually set
interdependent
of relationships among itsmembers: "a culture is a system of persons
one another . . .From this
holding mutually accountable. angle,
culture is fraught with the political implications of mutual account
ability" (Douglas, 1992, 31). Artists became objects of scrutinyand

anxiety because they bore the responsibility for such culture that
to secure national
promised unity and homogeneity and thus moving
into the center stage of national identity, were held to this mutual
they
accountability
Bourdieu argues that all writings about art contribute to art's cultural
meanings and artists' intervention in the literature of art demonstrates
that they recognized this hermeneutics. Victorian biographies shaped
a lay canon,
privileging popular paintings and successful artists as
representatives of national culture and character. In constructing
a
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 and
authority 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 were unstable and had to be

biographies
serialized,repeated, and performed over and over to insist on their
autonomy and entrepreneurship in the market, status and domestica
tion in the social hierarchy, and representation of Englishness, how
ever contradictory these economics, social, and cultural virtues might
be.42
Arizona State University
Victorian Review

J.Codell
Notes
-
1. "British Artists: Their Style and Character: No. XII. James Clarke
Hook, A.R.A.," TheArt Journal'(1856):4l.
2. See Altick ,'Trom Aldine to Everyman," Studies in Bibliography, 1958,
5-15 on the representation of literaryfigures in biographies; Rubin on
similar acculturation inmodern American culture; Minihan on the role
of cultural institutions in British national identity; and Codell, Oxford
Art Journal, 2000, for a study of the creation of a national art history in
the genre of biographical histories.
3. Bell was a biographer of Rembrandt, Titian, Watts, and Burne-Jones,

among others.
4. See my essays on artists' biographies in books series, in Book History,

2000, 94-124, and on artists' biographies in the periodical press, in
Victorian Periodicals Review (hereafter cited as VPR), 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.
see my essays inRylands Bulletin, 1989, 139-63, and
7. On Spielmann ,
KPR, 1989, 7-15; on seeMacleod, 1986, 597-607, and
Stephens,
Codell, VPR, 2000 283-316.
8. D. G. Rossetti, "Hand and Soul," The Germ (1850, 23-33. Rossetti was
so own creation that he
intrigued by his reprinted it in The Fortnightly
Review 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 ofmodern avant
to a
garde artists whom is attributed carelessness about social and
economic matters and a willingness to live in poverty and sacrifice
themselves for art, a very persistent cultural biographical ideal.
10. Lee, "In Umbria," 168.

Artists Biographies

14. Lee, "In Umbria," 172-73.



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
or his own for, ours . .
deliberately unconsciously leaving forestalling
. 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 the hermeneutic role of the
consumer.


28. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, "'Still Burning fromThis Strangling Embrace':
Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics," inRichard Dellamora, ed.,
Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999,
33-37).
29. Lee, "Ruskinism," Belcaro: Being essay onSundryAestheticalQuestions.
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 is due to the
moral corruption of the artist: if the artist remained truthfullymodest,
the perfection of the artwould continue indefinitely."
Victorian Review 29

J.Codell

36. Baldry was a biographer ofMillais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Herkomer,
Moore, Velasquez, and Reynolds for book series and in the periodical
press.
37. For more details on Turners fortuna, see Codell inHughes and Law,
2000, 75-84 ; formore on Millais, Leighton, Watts, and Morland, see
Codell, Book History, 2000, 94-124.
38. For comments on this alignment of watercolors with femininity, see Jan
Marsh, "Women and Art, 1850-1900," inMarsh and Nunn, 26.
39. For specific examples, see Codell, KPR, 2000.

40. Dafforne in 1861 referred to Cooper's 1849 autobiography published
in TheArt Journal, a typical inter-referentiality in biographies thatwere
often based on artists' own autobiographical essays and interviews,
so
allowing artists' intervention into many biographical texts.
41. Artists avidly read biographies as other Victorians did. T. S. Cooper in
his memoirs wrote, "I had read every book I could get hold of about
artists and theirwork" (Cooper, 1891, 78), while Frederic Haydon
wrote that his father Benjamin Haydon's
reading included biographies:
"Every life of every great man 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 by Tom Taylor (art critic for The Times) to the painter while he
worked in his studio (Corkran, 1902, 21).
42. Iwish to thank my colleagues for their helpful suggestions in the course
ofmy writing this essay: Susan Casteras, Dianne Sachko Macleod,
Debra Mancoff, Kathy Psomiades, JuliaWatson, and the anonymous
reader forVictorian Review.

Works Cited
Primary Sources
"Afternoons in the Studios: - A Chat with Mr. Whistler," The Studio 4
(1894): 116-30.
"Artists Homes," TheArt Journal (1882): 57-58.
Baldry, Alfred Lys. JohnEverettMillais: His Art and Influence.London:

George Bell, 1899.
?. Albert Moore: His Life andWorks. London: George Bell, 1893.
?. "The Work of Solomon J. Solomon, A.R.A.," The Studio 8 (1896): 3-11.
Beaver, Alfred. "Art Sales of 1884," TheArt journal (1884) :261-64.
Bell, Malcolm. A Record and Rxview. London: George Bell, 1910.

Burne-Jones,
-
"British Artists: Their Style and Character: No. II. Edwin Ward, A. R.
A.," TheArt Journal (1855): 45-48.
"British Artists: Their Style and Character: No. XII. - James Clarke Hook,
A.R.A.," TheArt Journal (1856): 41.
-
"British Artists: Their Style and Character: No. XVII. William Powell
Frith, R. A.," The Art Journal (1856): 237-40.
Carlyle, Thomas. "On History," Selections.Edited by Harry W. Boynton.

Boston and NewYork: Allyn and Bacon, 1916.
Cooper, Thomas S.My Ufe. London: Richard Bentley, 1891.
Corkran, Henriette. Celebrities and I. London: Hutchinson, 1902.
Cundall, H. M. The Eife andWork of BirketFoster. London: Adam and

Charles Black, 1906.
-
Dafforne, James. "British Artists: Their Style and Character, No. LV.
Thomas Sidney Cooper, A. R. A.," TheArt Journal (1861): 133-35.
Davies, Randall. Reynolds. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913.
Dixon, M. Hepworth. "Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale," TheMagazine ofArt

25 (1902): 256-63.
"Farewell toMr. S. C. Hall," TheArt Journal (1880), 353-57.
Fish, Arthur. Henrietta Rae (Mrs. ErnestNormand). London and New York:
Cassell, 1905.
Victorian Review 31

J.Codell
Ford, Harriet. "The Work ofMrs. Adrian Stokes," The Studio 19 (1900):
49-56.
Gower, Ronald Sutherland. Thomas Gainsborough. London: George Bell,

1930.
Hall, Samuel Carter. Retrospectof a Long Lifefrom 1815 to 1883. 2 vols.

London: R. Bentley, 1883.
Haydon, Benjamin R. TheUfe, Letters and Table Talk of Benjamin Robert

Haydon, ed. Richard Henry Stoddard. New York: Scribner, Armstrong,
1876.
Hind, C. Lewis. Naphtali: Being InfluencesandAdventures whileEarning a Living

byWriting. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1926.
Huish, Marcus B. Happy England, as Tainted byHelen Allingham, R Wr.S.

London: Adam and Charles Black, 1903.
La Sizeranne, Robert de. English Contemporary Art. Translated by H. M.
Poynter. New York: F. A. Stokes, 1898.
Lee, Vernon [Violet Paget]. "In Umbria," in Belcaro: Being essay onSundry
Aesthetical'Questions. London: W. Satchell, 1881, 156-96.
?. "Ruskinism," in Belcaro, 197-229.
RA.
Macmillan, Hugh. TheLife-Work ofGeorge FrederickW7atts, London:
J.M. Dent, 1903.
Meynell, Wilfrid. "The Homes of Our Artists: Sir Frederick Leighton's

House inHolland Park Road," Magazine ofArt A (1881): 169-76.
Oldcasde, John. "Our Living Artists: Elizabeth Butler (nee Thompson),"

TheMagazine of
Art! (1879): 257-62.
?. "The Homes of our Artists: Mr. Millais' House at Palace Gate," The
Art A (1881): 290-95.
Magazine of
Oliphant, Margaret. "An Artist's Autobiography," BlackwoodsMagazine 136
(Nov. 1884): 614-31.
"Portrait ofW. P. Frith," TheArt Journal {1847): 164.
Quilter, Harry. "The Nemesis ofArt: Or, a Philistine Lecture," TheArt

Journal (1883): 134-37.
?. Giotto. London: 1880.
Sampson Low, Marston,
Rowlands, Walter. "The Art Sales of 1887," TheArt Journal (1887): 294-95.

Ruskiri, John. Works ofJohnRaskin. Edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander

Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: G. Allen, 1903-12.
Simmons, P. L. "Art-Aids to Commerce," TheArt Journal (1872): 295-96.
Sparrow, Walter Shaw. Advertising and BritishArt. London: John Lane, 1924.
Spielmann, M. H. Millais andHis Work. Edinburgh and London: Wm.

Blackwood, 1898.
Tarver, Edward J. "Artists' Studios," TheArt Journal (1880); 273-76; (1881):

109-12.
Wager, Mary E. "The Romance of Great Artists," TheArt Journal (1876):

155-57; 187-89; 248-49.
Waldstein, Charles. The work ofJohnRuskin; its influence

uponmodern thoughtand
life.New York: Harper, 1893.
Secondary Sources
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The culture industry:

as mass In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed.
enlightenment deception."
Simon During, 29-48. London: Routledge, 1993.
Al tick,Richard. Uves andLetters: A History ofLiterary Biography inEngland and
America. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965.
?. "From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the
English
Classics, 1830-1906." Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 3-24.
Benjamin, Walter. Reflections:Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical W'ritings.

Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Peter Demetz. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field ofCultural Production. Edited by Randal Johnson.

Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993.
Brake, Laurel. Subjugated Knowledges:journalism Gender andLiterature in the
Nineteenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1994.
Cameron, S. "On the Role of the Critics in the Culture Industry" Journal of
Cultural Economics 19 (1995): 321-31.
Codell, Julie F. "Victorian Artists' Family Biographies: Domestic Authority,

theMarketplace, and theArtist's Body." In BiographicalPassages: Essays
inVictorian andModernist Biography,eds. L. Hughes &J. Law, 65-108.
Columbia: University ofMissouri Press, 2000.
Victorian Review 33

J.Codell
?. "Serialized Artists' Biographies: A Culture Industry in Late Victorian

Britain," Book History 3 (2000): 94-124.
?."Righting theVictorian Artist: The Redgraves' A Century ofPainters of the
English Schooland the Serialisation ofArt History," OxfordArt journal

23 (Fall2000): 93-118.
?."Constructing theVictorian Artist: National Identity, the Political
Economy ofArt, and Biographical Mania in the Periodical Press,"
Victorian Periodicals Review 34 (Fall 2000): 283-316.
? "The Public Image of theVictorian Artist: Family Biographies," journal
n.s. 5 (Fall, 1996): 5-34.
oj'Pre-RaphaeliteStudies
"
?. 'The Artist's Cause at Heart': Marion Harry Spielmann and the Late
Victorian Art World," Bulletin of theJohnRy landsUniversityLibrary of
Manchester 71 (Spring 1989): 139-63.
?. "M. H. Spielmann and the Role of the Press in the Professionalization of
Artists," Victorian Periodicals Review 22 (Spring 1989): 7-15.
?. "Moderate Praise: The Contribution toArt Criticism of The
Portfolio"
Victorian PeriodicalsReview'20 (Fall 1987): 83-93.
Douglas, Mary. Risk and Blame. Essays inCultural Theory. London: Routledge,
1992.
Epstein, William.RecognisingBiography. Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1987.
?. "(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical Subject." In Contesting
the Subject: Essays in thePostmodernTheory and Practice oj Biographyand
BiographicalCriticism, ed.W. Epstein, 217-36. West Lafayette: Purdue

University Press, 1991.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations andNationalism. London: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
Greenslade, William. Degeneration,Culture and the

Novel, 1880-1940.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Jeffares,Bo. TheArtist inNineteenth CenturyEnglish Fiction. Atlantic

Highlands, New Jersey:Humanities Press, 1979.
Macleod, Dianne Sachko. "Mid-Victorian Patronage of theArts: F. G.
Stephens's 'The Private Collections of England,'" Burlington 128 (Aug
1986): 597-607.
Mancoff, Debra N. "Samuel Carter Hall: Publisher as Promoter of theHigh
Arts," Victorian Periodicals Review'24 (Spring 1991): 11-21.

Marsh, Jan, "Women and Art, 1850-1900." In JanMarsh and Pamela

Garrish Nunn, Pre-RaphaeliteWomen Artists, 10-53. Manchester:
Manchester City Art Galleries, 1997.
Minihan, Janet. TheNationalisation ofCulture: The Development of State Subsidies

Arts inGreat Britain.New York: New York University Press,
to the
1977.
Onslow, Barbara. "'Humblecomments for the

ignorant': Margaret
Oliphants Criticism of Art and Society," Victorian Periodicals Review ?\
(Spring 1998): 55-74. Special Issue onWomen Editors and Critics,

ed. D. Trela.
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis, "Still Burning fromThis Strangling Embrace":

Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics," inRichard Dellamora, ed.,
Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999,
33-37.
Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making ofMiddlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Salmon, Richard. "Signs of Intimacy: The Literary Celebrity in the "Age of

Interviewing," VictorianUterature and Culture 25 (1997): 159-77.
in the
Spatt, Hartley S. "The Aesthetics of Editorship: Creating Taste
Victorian Art World." In Innovatorsand Preachers:The Role of theEditor
inVictorian England, ed. Joel H. Wiener, 43-59. Westport: Greenwood,
1985.
Miniature, theGigantic, theSouvenir,

Stewart, Susan. On Eonging:Narratives of the
theCollection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Walkley, Giles. Artists' Houses inLondon, 1764-1914. Aldershot: Scolar Press,

1994.
Victorian Review 35


Codell - Artists Biographies and The Anxiety

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Codell - Artists Biographies and The Anxiety

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Artists' Biographies and the Anxieties of National Culture

Author(s): Julie F. Codell

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

century, perhaps no single figure was more scrutinized and surveilled

interviews, expensive two-volume family biographies, and serialized

biographies. In an 1856 statement defending the popular mania for

Victorian Review (2001 ) 1

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

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

(George Bell). While series generally served overarching functions

tory, progress, and cultural superiority. Other cultural institutions

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

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

(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993, 30-31). Artists' biographies

As William Epstein recognizes,

reaffirm cultural eminence, contextualize social action,

agencyof theproprietarypowers. (Epstein, 1991, 222)

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

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

to the artists. Their were sullied by associations with

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

graphical images depicted them in large homes and studios to enforce

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

they were solely motivated by English character traits and Victorian

Biographies expressed the anxious tensions between criteria of mate

The prelapsarian artist, constructed by such prominent critics as

John Ruskin and Margaret Oliphant, among others, was a uniquely

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

century. Oliphant fixed her ideal artist forever in an orientalized

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

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

castigated Academicians who aspired to social status and condemned

galleries (Onslow, 1998).

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

artist, "first, by its sympathy with his meanest powers; secondly, by

work, and how he may be led by instinct to do all that is right,

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

possible to thiscondition of infantinesight" (15: 28).

Nothing to give him youwill find thatNothing is exacdy the thing

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

narrator, an artist intrigued by Chiaro 's paintings then hanging in the

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

placed confidences" (Bourdieu, 1993, 77). As Walter Benjamin

participation in economic reality and recasts itself through ownership

Ruskin's refusal to acknowledge the professional autonomy of artists

prelapsarian artist. In Vernon Lee's essay "In Umbria, A Study of

1881, Lee on the contradictions between the intense

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

spirituality of Perugino's paintings and Vasari's depiction of him as

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

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

What are the relations between the character of thework

Art as the genealogical offspring of the artist becomes

patience, determination, desire of improvement."17 If too large,

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

shame) he is unable to subdue in practise; his works show

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

like relics anecdotes showing the gentleness and generosity

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

merely to evoke for us a series of phantom sights or sounds,

Removed from both practical matters and abstract speculation, the

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:26:57 PM

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