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Art on Sundays: Henrietta Barnett and the Whitechapel Fine Art Loan Exhibitions

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John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination

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Abstract

This chapter offers an account of the Whitechapel Fine Art Loan Exhibitions (1881–1898). I focus on the role of Henrietta Barnett (1851–1936), which, while generally overlooked in critical literature, was crucial to the success of the Exhibitions. How were artworks, primarily contemporary paintings and principally by Pre-Raphaelite artists, used to teach the poor? What kind of knowledge was disseminated from the pictures, and by whom? And which pictures proved the most popular, and why? I shall argue that what Barnett publicised as ‘pictures for the people’ constituted an ideal and a practice. It was an ideal that art could proffer a solution to the problem of poverty in the metropolis in the 1880s and 1890s, with implications for the nation; and it was a practice that rested on the object lessons in (and of) pictures, with consequences for the Church of England.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    H. O. Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People’, Cornhill Magazine 47 (March 1883), p. 344; reprinted in Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), p. 175.

  2. 2.

    For example: Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); J. A. R. Pimlott, Toynbee Hall: Fifty Years of Social Progress (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1935); Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform 1880–1914: The Search for Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). I have written about the significance of settlement for the Barnetts’ ideology of practicable socialism in: ‘From the Local to the Colonial: Toynbee Hall and the Politics of Poverty’, Victorian Studies 61:2 (2019), pp. 278–288.

  3. 3.

    Frances Borzello, Civilizing Caliban: The Misuse of Art 1875–1980 (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), p. 6.

  4. 4.

    Ibid. See also Borzello’s earlier essay: ‘Pictures for the People’, in Ira Bruce Nadel and F. S. Schwarzbach, eds., Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), pp. 30–40.

  5. 5.

    Seth Koven, ‘The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing’, in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 23, p. 25, and p. 34 respectively.

  6. 6.

    Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 97; Lucinda Matthews-Jones, ‘Lessons in Seeing: Art, Religion and Class in the East End of London, 1881–1898’, Journal of Victorian Culture 16:3 (2011), p. 403.

  7. 7.

    Diana Maltz is a notable exception in focusing on the rhetoric of Henrietta Barnett’s ‘Pictures for the People’ while Koven and Matthews-Jones refer to the article but focus on the role of Samuel Barnett. See also: Geoffrey A. C. Ginn, Culture, Philanthropy and the Poor in Late-Victorian London (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 68–107, 259–277; Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747–2001 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 82–92; Shelagh Wilson, ‘“The Highest Art for the Lowest People”: The Whitechapel and Other Philanthropic Galleries, 1877–1901’, in Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd, eds., Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian London (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 172–186.

  8. 8.

    H. O. Barnett, Canon Barnett. His Life, Work, and Friends, by His Wife, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1918), II, pp. 151–179. Subsequent references will be abbreviated as CBII.

  9. 9.

    CBII, p. vii and p. xi, respectively. For an account of the biography, which ‘reckon[s] with her strategies as a biographer’ and ‘disappearance from history’, see: Seth Koven, ‘Henrietta Barnett (1851–1936). The (auto)biography of a late Victorian marriage’, in Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler, eds., After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 31–53, (see p. 32 and p. 47 respectively). For accounts of Henrietta’s life, see Alison Creedon, ‘Only a Woman’. Henrietta Barnett, Social Reformer and Founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb (Chichester: Phillimore & Co., 2006), and Micky Watkins, Henrietta Barnett: Social Worker and Community Planner (London: Micky Watkins and Hampstead Garden Suburb Archive Trust, 2011).

  10. 10.

    Hill was a copyist for Ruskin at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the National Gallery, and Ruskin funded her first housing project at Paradise Place in Marylebone.

  11. 11.

    See Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study of the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Ellen Ross, ed., Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

  12. 12.

    H. O. Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People’, in Practicable Socialism (1894), p. 176.

  13. 13.

    On Rossiter’s Free Library and Art Gallery in South London, see: Taylor, Art for the Nation (1999), pp. 66–99. On Horsfall and his campaign for free galleries for the poor in Manchester, see: Amy Woodson-Boulton, Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 54–82.

  14. 14.

    CBII, p. 151.

  15. 15.

    H. O. Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People’, in Practicable Socialism (1894), p. 176.

  16. 16.

    CBII, p. 151.

  17. 17.

    H. O. Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People’, in Practicable Socialism (1894), p. 176.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., p. 175 and p. 178 respectively.

  19. 19.

    S. A. Barnett, ‘University Settlements’ in Practicable Socialism (1894), pp. 166–167. This article was first published as ‘The Universities and the Poor’, The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review XV (Jan-June 1884): pp. 255–261.

  20. 20.

    Interestingly, Henrietta claims she hung the pictures with Mr. Chevalier and other helpers: ‘with twelve skilled men, he and I hung some 350 pictures, and gave the men five meals, for their hours extended from 6 a.m. to the last train at night’ (CBII, p. 162).

  21. 21.

    H. O. Barnett, ‘Passionless Reformers’, Fortnightly Review (1894); reprinted in Practicable Socialism (1892), p. 88.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., p. 91.

  23. 23.

    The phrase, ‘God’s passionless reformers, influences/That purify and heal and are not seen’, is from ‘Under the Willows’; see Lowell, The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, with a critical preface by William Michael Rossetti (London: Ward, Lock, & Co., 1880), p. 201.

  24. 24.

    Barnett, ‘Passionless Reformers’, in Practicable Socialism (1892), p. 93.

  25. 25.

    CBII, p. 152.

  26. 26.

    CBII, p. 153.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    There is not space in this essay to pursue the broader debate about Sunday openings, which were not legally sanctioned at national institutions until 1896. For excellent analyses, see: Maltz, British Aestheticism (2006), pp. 98–131; and Woodson-Boulton, Transformative Beauty (2012), pp. 54–82.

  29. 29.

    There are three versions of ‘Time, Death, and Judgement’: Watts gave the first version to the National Gallery of Canada in 1886, the second to St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1897 (now on loan to the Watts Gallery, Compton), and the third to the Tate Gallery in 1900. The painting was one of the few allowed to break the Barnetts’ rule of never displaying a painting more than once.

  30. 30.

    H. O. Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People’, in Practicable Socialism (1894), pp. 179–180.

  31. 31.

    On the gift and presentation of the mosaic, see: CBII, pp. 170–171.

  32. 32.

    Henrietta claims (CBII, p. 155) that ‘Sunday Afternoon’ first appeared in The Westminster Gazette, but I have not been able to locate it.

  33. 33.

    Woodson-Boulton, Transformative Beauty (2012), p. 54.

  34. 34.

    CBII, p. 152.

  35. 35.

    There is some variability in the visitor numbers recorded in the biography (CBII, p. 156), compared to the Toynbee Record and St. Jude’s Parish Magazine and newspaper articles, but the broad range is consistent. The highest attendance reported was 73,271 in 1892.

  36. 36.

    On attendance at National Gallery, see Jonathan Conlin, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery (London: Pallas Athene, 2006), pp. 473–474.

  37. 37.

    CBII, p. 161.

  38. 38.

    H. O. Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People’, in Practicable Socialism (1894), p. 187.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., p. 186.

  40. 40.

    Some dates given are uncertain.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., p. 183.

  42. 42.

    The painting was commissioned, but never collected, by Thomas Gold Appleton; Millet thus changed the title from ‘Prayer for the Potato Crop’ and added a steeple to the church. It was bought by Eugène Secrétan, a copper industrialist (who donated copper for the Statue of Liberty), in 1881 and famously sparked a bidding war between the Louvre and the American Art Association in 1889 (with the latter victorious) before it was bought by Hippolyte François Alfred and bequeathed to the Louvre in 1906. Equally famously, Salvador Dalì insisted it was a funeral scene and, after being x-rayed, a coffin-like shape was revealed under the basket.

  43. 43.

    H. O. Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People’, in Practicable Socialism (1894), p. 186.

  44. 44.

    For example: ‘St. Jude’s Loan Art Exhibition’, Daily News (13 April 1881); ‘A Social Experiment’, Pall Mall Gazette (4 May 1881); ‘Fine Art in Whitechapel’, The Times (21 March 1883); ‘Our Ladies’ Column’, Leicester Chronicle (9 April 1887).

  45. 45.

    CBII, pp. 159–160.

  46. 46.

    S. A. Barnett, ‘Our Pictures Shows’, St. Jude’s Parish Magazine (January 1889), p. 44.

  47. 47.

    H. O. Barnett, ‘Pictures for the People’, in Practicable Socialism (1894), p. 177.

  48. 48.

    (Unattributed), ‘At the East-End “Academy.” A “Private View” at St. Jude’s Schools, Whitechapel’, Pall Mall Gazette (28 April 1886), pp. 1–2.

  49. 49.

    In a letter to Frank in 1885, Samuel trumpeted the value of the catalogues: ‘Exhibition—bition—tion—on [sic]. This has been the event of the week. Day after day crowds have come. The spectators have learnt wonderfully. They study their catalogues, remember the pictures of past years and compare their lessons. More and more am I convinced of the education which such an effort has accomplished. If preaching be any good (and perhaps without life it is none), this preaching has been of the best’ (CBII, p. 156).

  50. 50.

    E. T. Cook, ‘Fine Art in Whitechapel’, The Magazine of Art 7 (1884), p. 347.

  51. 51.

    ‘The Day is Coming’ was published in Justice on 29 March 1884 and subsequently incorporated into Chants for Socialists (London: Socialist League Office, 1885).

  52. 52.

    The opening lecture has not been published, but Frances Borzello reproduces a report on it from the East London Observer (12 April 1884) in: ‘An Unnoted Speech by William Morris’, Notes and Queries 25.5 (1978), pp. 314–316. An excerpt can also be found in: May Morris, William Morris. Artist Writer Socialist. Volume the Second, Morris as a Socialist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), p. 165.

  53. 53.

    John Ruskin, Lectures on Art, in E. T Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., The Works of John Ruskin. Library Edition, 39 vols. (London: George Allen 1905), XX, p. 57.

  54. 54.

    CBII, p. 151.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., p. 158.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., p. 157.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., p. 158.

  58. 58.

    Ibid.

  59. 59.

    Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibition: Easter 1893. Thirteenth Year (London: Penny & Hull Printers, 1893), pp. 10–11.

  60. 60.

    CBII, p. 164.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., p. 160.

  62. 62.

    ‘Thirty Years of Art at Whitechapel’, The Times (13 April 1911).

  63. 63.

    CBII, p. 163.

  64. 64.

    The ‘trio’ here referenced were Henrietta and Samuel Barnett and Charles Aitken (the first director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery).

  65. 65.

    Katrina Schwarz and Hannah Vaughan, eds., Rises in the East: A Gallery in Whitechapel (London: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd., 2009), p. 9.

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  1. Michigan, USA

    Lucy Hartley

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  1. Bath, UK

    Sheona Beaumont

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    Madeleine Emerald Thiele

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Hartley, L. (2023). Art on Sundays: Henrietta Barnett and the Whitechapel Fine Art Loan Exhibitions. In: Beaumont, S., Thiele, M.E. (eds) John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21554-4_12

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