by R. Folkestone Williams.
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.2 #7 (May 1867).
In a few days "the private view" will have come and gone; and the dinner of the Royal Academy, with its realisation of Wordsworth's "forty feeding like one," will have come and gone also. The speeches of the President and the Chancellor of the Exchequer will have been duly admired, and artists and patrons had their annual glorification. In other words, the great picture firm in Trafalgar-square will have opened their establishment with an entirely new stock in surprising variety, and will look with confidence for an increase of business from their friends and customers.
First, as to the banquet, which deserves recognition in a much higher sense than that time-honoured domestic institution which collects our civic aristocracy every November in Guildhall. The dinner of the Royal Academy is of a far more intellectual description. The skill of the cuisinier may not quite realise the idea of the feast of reason, any more than the directions of the toastmaster the flow of soul; indeed, ill-natured outsiders may stigmatise the whole thing as an affair of shop, borrowed from provincial auctioneers, who consider that a generous competition is only to be expected from a full stomach. Be this as it may, it is doubtless a pleasant road to connoisseurship. If a nobleman or gentleman blessed with an ample income and a good appetite cannot be made profitably æsthetic after the academical three courses and a dessert, including Non nobis Domine and all the artistic oratory, he must be fit for the institution at Earlswood.
Now as to the exhibition. That annual tax upon human patience, the Catalogue of the Royal Academy, is, let me assume, in the hands of the guests, who can see at a glance the amount of artistic industry of the supporters of the great firm they have been invited to patronise. Probably, however, they do not know that a very large number of intended contributors have been rejected, while another considerable moiety choose to exhibit elsewhere. They cannot help seeing that their hosts prefer their own manufacture, and that they have availed themselves of their proprietorship of the exhibition to monopolise the places for having them seen to the best advantage. But nothing can be more natural than this proceeding on the part of the Royal Academicians. Each is gifted with organs of vision; and if he is expected to live by his profession, while he looks to the interests of art it is hard to ask him to be blind to his own. As a corporation, therefore, they are obliged to support their shop; and, individually, they cannot help showing their customers that they have an eye to business.
On closer inspection there appears in the list of titles and names an evident falling-off of favourite contributors. This is accounted for by the recent opening of a still more attractive sale-room in Paris. The great Exhibition there is expected to command the purses of the world; and the better market this season has naturally received the best wares. Nevertheless a fair amount of business will be done at the private view, taking into consideration the fact that our Court takes little interest in purchasing, and that many of our art patrons have reserved their customary outlay in this direction for their visit to the French metropolis. The great pictures executed by the Academicians and Associates are, with very few exceptions, commissions; and the little pictures, if sufficiently pleasing, are commissions also, being for the most part trade speculations. The bulk of the show, including many clever productions, is still unsold, and, I am afraid, may remain so. The anticipated recompense of hundreds of exhibitors will be reserved for Paris.
But now we have a word or two to say about picture-collecting.
It is within the memory of man when in England this was a luxury confined to a few favoured individuals possessed of enormous wealth, or of galleries created by the taste of their ancestors. Mr. Hope, the Amsterdam banker; Mr. Rogers, the banker and poet; and Sir Robert Peel, the heir of the rich cotton-spinner, set examples to the commercial community of filling their mansions with the choicest specimens of "the old masters," as they were styled, till they rivalled the aristocratic heirlooms of the Grosvenors and the Staffords. There was certainly a trade in pictures at this period—indeed, it had flourished for more than a century—and great gains were made by such men as Emerson, Buchanan, and the Woodburns. In Italian, in French, and in Dutch and Flemish art there was an increasing demand—very high prices being readily obtainable for choice works. For English art there was the smallest demand. It is quite true that patrons were found for Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wilson, Romney, and a few other clever figure, portrait, and landscape painters; but their productions were little in request compared with those of Vandyke or Rubens, of Raffaelle or Coreggio, of Teniers, of Ostade, or of Gerard Dhow. It was not till the excellence of the English school had further developed itself in the chefs-d'œuvre of Turner, of Wilkie, of Hilton, of Leslie, of Etty, and of Landseer, that anything like liberal encouragement was afforded to English artists. Still it fell infinitely short of what was given to those time-honoured recipients of artistic patronage, "the old masters." In these the picture-dealers made their largest speculations; and examples of the Netherlandish and Italian schools continued to increase in the houses of the Nortons, Woodins, Farrers, Bentleys, and other enterprising leaders in the trade. They dealt in Reynoldses, in Wilsons, in Gainsboroughs, even in Morelands, in Cromes, and in Nasmyths, when they had a chance, and doubtless profited by the occasion; but the most patriotic of them would have thrown such ventures to the winds whenever there existed a prospect of securing a Backhuysen, a Vandevelde, a Cuyp, a Titian, a Guido, or a Michael Angelo.
The trade expanded; and with a more general diffusion of wealth, consequent on commercial prosperity, arose two potent inclinations—the one to display the evidence of great riches by an accumulation of expensive articles of luxury; the other, to find an investment for surplus capital which should afford the largest amount of pleasure and the greatest prospect of profit. At this period there appeared a growing distrust of those long-established favourites of fortune, "the old masters." Some appeared to think that their fault was in not being old enough. Hence arose a partiality for "the Pre-Raphaelites;" but the majority of art patrons evidently yearned "for fresh fields and pastures new;" and finding in the best examples of the now more highly developed English school attraction as well as security, the tide of favour set in, and floated to fame and fortune the Friths, the Coopers, the Wards, the Faeds, the Robertses, the Stanfields, the Millaises, and the Holman Hunts.
Remarkable was the contrast between the picture-dealer of to-day and the picture-dealer of yesterday. Thousands of the once popular masters lay heaped on floors or neglected on walls, hardly getting so much as a glance from the picture-buyer. When the example was fine and its condition sound, there was still among real connoisseurs a spirited competition for possession; but the dingy, vamped-up, or doubtful fell lower and lower in public estimation, till, except as "furniture" to occupy wall space economically, there was no sale for them at all. The demand for modern pictures continued rapidly to increase. Bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and successful speculators of every description, entered into a spirited rivalry to secure the richest collection. It was not always taste that influenced their purchases; indeed, ideas on art were often as singular as they were characteristic. We know one instance in which a presumed millionnaire invariably calculated the value of the choicest paintings submitted to him for approval by their superficial measurement; an Elmore, an Egg, being considered worth so much, a Goodall or a Pyne so much more—per inch. A Brummagem estimate, of course.
With this expansion of the demand for modern pictures there arose a corresponding development in the trade. Indeed the largest dealers, by the extent of their speculations, deserve to be regarded as picture-merchants, many thousand pounds having sometimes been invested by them in such merchandise; and to display this large stock to the greatest advantage they have had recourse to spacious and handsome galleries, where English—sometimes a few French and Flemish—paintings of more or less merit are hung for sale.
The advantage to the artist of having a middle-man between himself and the public has been called in question; indeed, articles have recently appeared in some journals commenting unfavourably on the arrangement. It is one, however, that has long existed in the commercial as well as in the literary world, and picture-dealers are apparently quite as useful in their vocation as brokers or publishers. But let us see how it works. The picture-buyer goes, like the rest of the artistic world, to the Royal Academy Exhibition. "The hanging committee" have monopolised the best places on the walls for the works of themselves and their Fellows and Associates, leaving the outsiders wherever their frames can be made to fit in—high up, low down, anywhere. He wearily goes over the middling pictures and the bad pictures till he arrives at what are considered the best, where, if he chooses to be hustled by a mob till he can secure a view, he may make himself acquainted with their merit, or want of it, as the case may be. When he at last comes upon something he wishes to possess, the chances are a hundred to one that it was either disposed of before completed or sold at the "private view." Finally, he quits the building with aching eyes and a stiff neck, after craning at such clever compositions as have been hung too near the ceiling to be seen with comfort.
Then he lounges down "the sweet shady side of Pall Mall," till opposite Marlborough House. A clever painting in a window attracts his attention. He opens a door, and finds himself in the first of a series of galleries filled from floor to ceiling with carefully-selected oil-paintings. They are various in character: genre and landscape, idealistic and realistic; but all are attractive, some very desirable, to the connoisseur. He proceeds from gallery to gallery, making himself acquainted with or recognising the characteristics of the great masters of the English, French, and Flemish schools, ancient and modern. The picture-buyer soon realises a fact of paramount importance to him, and to all venturing to gratify a taste with limited experience, in securing the best and safest means for its enjoyment. Everything around him is genuine; the quality is indisputable; and the largeness of the field of selection is not more obvious than its excellence. The question now suggested to him is, Is it not more advantageous, as well as much more agreeable, to go leisurely over these three or four hundred examples, with the quiet companionship of some half-a-dozen spectators who have come on a similar errand, than to hunt fruitlessly through a host of inferior, undesirable, or unattainable works, in the midst of a crowd of sight-seeing Cockneys enjoying a holiday?
Some artists complain that these really private views attract noblemen and gentlemen from whose liberality they derive no profit. This, however, is not exactly the case. A picture is bought direct from the artist, at the dealer's sole risk. He exercises the judgment of a lifetime, and invests a princely fortune, in producing an attractive exhibition. Should he succeed in selling the picture at an enhanced price, he is materially assisting to establish the artist's reputation. This success permits him to make another venture on more advantageous terms to the vendor. Thus patronage is brought indirectly, doubtless in the end directly, to the artist, when he can readily get his own price.
It must be remembered that there are several such galleries in London, each of which is supported by a similar spirit of enterprise. Thus a painter of any merit has so many markets open to him, independently of the town and provincial exhibitions and his own private friends. It is the competition so created which has secured to the leading members of the profession gains which the greatest of the great masters of their art never realised.
The true history of prices, with regard to this branch of commerce, has yet to be written. In several cases that have come within my knowledge there has been much exaggeration—for a trading purpose, of course. In one, a popular painting was reported to have produced the enormous sum of eleven thousand pounds for the picture and copyright; but the Chancellor of the Exchequer having had his attention directed to the contrast between this amount and the sums returned by the fortunate artist for income-tax assessment, the latter was put on his oath, when the eleven thousand collapsed to two! But two thousand pounds for a single picture by a modern English artist, given as a speculative venture by a dealer, ought to be considered a liberal recompense. Compare the gains obtained by Sir Joshua Reynolds; go higher still, and take the earnings of Rubens, Vandyke, Titian, Raffaelle, and Michael Angelo: the comparison ought to be in the highest degree satisfactory to their successors in the same branch of art.
Other Englishmen have been quite as munificently appreciated; as in the "Joan of Arc" of Etty, which, though certainly not his happiest production, realised about three thousand guineas. Fine works of Landseer and of Maclise command as high a commercial value. As for the masterpieces of Turner, it is scarcely possible to over-estimate them. Their more skilful contemporaries have profited largely by this rise in value of first-class English works; and if attractive landscape and figure painters do not make a noble income, they must be either idle or very difficult to deal with.
Under these circumstances it demands much capital to speculate in this direction to any considerable extent. An approximation can be obtained of the amount thus invested by reviewing the value of the stock possessed by the great dealers. In one it reaches 100,000l; in two others it is about 60,000l.; and the less enterprising are content with an outlay of from ten to thirty thousand. In the possession of Messrs. Gambart, Cox, Wallis, Agnew, and Worby may be found the richest portion of this commerce; nevertheless, in town as well as throughout the provinces, there are a multitude of small dealers who help to swell the amount invested in art to half a million sterling. From this some idea may be formed of the extent of art patronage. The wealthy resort to the gallery of the dealer, not only because there is variety, but because there is selection there; and no doubt in the majority of instances because they have more confidence in the judgment there displayed than in their own. Nevertheless, sooner or later they are sure to find their way to the studio, however secluded may be the habits of its tenant or eccentric his characteristics. In this direct way were made those important collections which one after another have been added to the National Gallery. Mr. Vernon was a jobmaster, Mr. Sheepshanks a clothier. They are instances of the gains of trade invested in art; and the desire of maintaining a gallery thus created ultimately inducing its presentation to the nation. Several collections having a similar origin have had a different fate. Prominent among them was an excellent one formed by Mr. Acraman, a Bristol ironmaster, that was dispersed by auction at the bankruptcy of that once prosperous man. Among manufacturers and merchants a monetary pressure has not unfrequently forced them to realise; but returning prosperity is pretty sure to revive the taste for art where it has once existed.
At present one of the largest and most valuable collections has been formed by a celebrated steel-pen maker. It was this enterprising gentleman who beat up the quarters of our greatest landscape-painter, notwithstanding the representations made to him of the artist's intractableness. His only letter of recommendation took the shape of Bank-of-England notes of the value of a thousand pounds. Five of these displayed one after the other made an impression. Turner took his opulent customer into his studio, and pointed out pictures he was ready to sell, naming his price. It was agreed to without a moment's hesitation, though rather high; moreover, the sum was in guineas. The artist then said he would not conclude the bargain unless he had a commission for a companion to each picture. This also was promptly complied with. The seller became more exacting, and declared that he did not dispose of the frames with the pictures: the frames were conceded. The money was paid, and the transfer completed.
During the transaction Turner had no idea that his liberal customer had been assured that it was a hopeless task trying to get him to part with any of his productions; nor was he aware that the pen-maker had set his heart upon adding some of the choicest of them to his collection, cost what they might; therefore Turner could not quite understand why he had been permitted to have his own way in the negotiation so completely.
"Now tell me," said he, putting on a confidential manner, "why was it you did not, like everybody else who has come to buy my pictures, try to get me to take pounds instead of guineas?"
"Because," was the prompt reply, "I knew you would not let me have your pictures unless I paid you in guineas."
This is not a solitary instance of close dealing on the part of some of our great artists. Wilkie has been known to be equally eager to secure his frame, after getting a handsome price for his painting. To their honour, however, be it said, that a totally opposite spirit in dealing with their customers is much more general. By the way, it does not always happen that their customers deal with them in a liberal spirit. There is a well-known instance of an illustrious patron of art who, having engaged a select number of Royal Academicians to paint a series of pictures to decorate a summer-house, paid them at the very inadequate rate of 30l. apiece. Government seems inclined to go to the other extreme, as witness the sums paid to Mr. Dyce and his co-labourers for the mural decorations of the Houses of Parliament. Judged by the merit of the work done, I do not think 5000l. too much; but for perishable frescoes, totally unfit for our climate, it is dear indeed. The same objection may apply to the cost of the lions for the Nelson monument. Landseer's 6000l. and Baron Marochetti's 5000l. may be considered an extravagance. What sum, I wonder, would have contented Michael Angelo, Benvenuto Cellini, or Canova, for as good a model?