Abstract
It has long been recognised that French Impressionism was in some ways a response to the economic, political and social upheavals of Second Empire Paris. But although the links between the Victorian novel and the city have received extensive critical attention, treatments of Victorian painting have largely failed to consider why, despite radical changes in London comparable in scale to Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris, no developments in English art occurred comparable to French Impressionism.1
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Notes
For surveys of Victorian representations of London, see Victorian Artists and the City, ed. Ira Bruce Nadel and F.S. Schwarzbach (New York, 1980);
E.D.H. Johnson, ‘Victorian Artists and the Urban Milieu’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (1973), pp. 449–74;
Alex Potts, ‘Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Images of London in the Nineteenth Century’, History Workshop Journal,26 (Autumn 1988) 28–56;
Mireille Galinou and John Hayes, London in Paint: Oil Paintings in the Collection at the Museum of London (1996).
Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (Harmondsworth, 1979); and The City as a Work of Art (New Haven, 1986).
See Getting London in Perspective, ed. R. Hyde, J. Hoole and T. Sato (1984), pp. 30–1, 56–7 and front cover;
And London — World City 1800–1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven, 1992), no. 155, for illustrations of sublime but unrealised projects to transform the riverside.
‘The Boiled Beef of New England’ (1863), in Dickens, Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, ed. Michael Slater et al. 4 vols. (1994–2000), IV, p. 279.
Henry C. Selous’s painting of the opening ceremony is reproduced in Felix Barker and Peter Jackson, London: 2000 Years of a City and its People (1983), p. 283.
Thomas Colman Dibdin’s Crystal Palace in Hyde Park (1851) is cat. no. 90 in Galinou and Hayes, London in Paint. The two royal commissions by James Duffield Harding and William Wyld are cat. nos. 300 and 1050 in Oliver Millar, The Victorian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge, 1992).
Jonathan Richardson (1719), quoted in Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 170.
Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression (1975);
John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape (Baltimore, 1976).
On changing attitudes to narrativity in painting, see Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance (Chicago, 1988), Ch. 1.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (1966), p. 62.
Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1974), p. 268;
Richard D. Altick, Paintings from Books (Columbus, 1985), pp. 82–5.
Graham Reynolds, Victorian Painting (1966), p. 14; Altick, ibid., p. 92.
John Brewer, ‘Cultural Production, Consumption, and the Place of the Artist in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven, 1995), pp. 17–18.
Ibid., p. 64; Graham Reynolds, Paintings of the Victorian Scene (1953), pp. 9–10;
John Steegman, Victorian Taste (1970), pp. 50–3.
Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste (1961), pp. 109–10.
George Eliot, Middlemarch[1871–2], ed. W.J. Harvey (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 225.
Richard Redgrave 1804–1888, ed. Susan P. Casteras and Ronald Parkinson (New Haven, 1988), pp. 18–19, 111–14.
The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Gallery catalogue (1984), no. 58; Christopher Wood, Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life (1976), pls. 225, 226.
An exception to my generalisation is G.F. Watts’s The Seamstress (c. 1850), pl. 5 in Helene E. Roberts, ‘Marriage, Redundancy or Sin: The Painter’s View of Women in the First Twenty-Five Years of Victoria’s Reign’, in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, 1973), pp. 45–76.
On visual responses to Hood’s poem, see T.J. Edelstein, ‘They Sang “The Song of the Shirt”: The Visual Iconology of the Seamstress’, VS, 23 (1980) 183–210.
Wood, Victorian Panorama, pls. 36–40, 1. On the implicit censorship in Victorian painting, see Raymond Lister, Victorian Narrative Paintings (1966), pp. 10–13; Altick, Paintings from Books, pp. 98–102, 123.
Patrick Conner, Savage Ruskin (1979), pp. 29–31;
George Landow, ‘There Began to Be a Great Talking about the Fine Arts’, in The Mind and Art of Victorian England, ed. Josef L. Altholz (Minneapolis, 1976), pp. 124–45.
Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (1903–12), III, pp. 25, 27–34, 40.
Review of Pre-Raphaelitism, November 1851, in Ruskin: The Critical Heritage, ed. J.L. Bradley (1984), p. 128.
Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years 1819–1859 (New Haven, 1985), p. 152.
Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford, 1973);
Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (2000), Chs. 4 and 5.
On these, see Staley, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, pp. 28–9, 37–43; Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740–1860 (1987), pp. 174–80.
The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (New Haven, 1981), p. 144.
See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987), pp. 342–7 and pls. XXV, XXVI.
See John House, ‘London in the Art of Monet and Pissarro’, in Malcolm Warner et al., The Image of London (1987), pp. 73–98.
Alan Bowness and Anthea Callen, The Impressionists in London (1973), p. 13.
Conversely, Frith’s panoramic canvases were themselves translated or ‘realized’ into tableaux vivantsin popular melodrama. See Martin Meisel, Realizations (Princeton, 1983), pp. 380–2.
Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge, 1989).
‘Conventionalities’, Saturday Review, 9 December 1865, p. 723, quoted in Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988), p. 155.
Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian England, (Oxford, 1988);
Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (Rutherford, 1987), pp. 131–43.
Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959) 195–216; pp. 209–12;
Ursula Vogel, ‘Whose Property? The Double Standard of Adultery in Nineteenth-Century Law’, in Regulating Womanhood, ed. Carol Smart (1992), pp. 147–9, 160–5.
Quotations from Hansard, 145, 147 (1857), in Gail L. Savage, ‘“Intended Only for the Husband”: Gender, Class, and the Provision for Divorce in England, 1858–1868’, in Victorian Scandals, ed. K.O. Garrigan (Athens, Ohio, 1992), p. 14.
Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (1985), pp. 37–42.
The studies for Found (c. 1858–9) are discussed in Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), no. 64 and pls. 65–76.
Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, pp. 32–3. On the female model, see Paula Gillett, The Victorian Painter’s World (Gloucester, 1990), pp. 155, 182–5.
Ibid., p. 269; W.J. Fishman, East End 1888 (1988), pp. 66–74;
The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–1850, ed. E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (1971), pp. 120–5, 147–52, 178–80.
By contrast, the socioeconomic determinants of prostitution are emphasised in Augusta Webster’s dramatic monologue of a defiant courtesan, ‘A Castaway’ (1870), in Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock (Oxford, 1996), pp. 602–17.
See Brown’s 1865 exhibition catalogue in Kenneth Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park, 1998), Appendix 3.
Helene E. Roberts, ‘Exhibition and Review: The Periodical Press and the Victorian Art Exhibition System’, in The Victorian Periodical Press, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester and Toronto, 1982), p. 91; Wood, Victorian Panorama, p. 176.
See Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven, 1988), pp. 68–9.
Bracebridge Hemyng, ‘Prostitution in London’, in Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. [1861–2] (New York, 1968), IV, pp. 234–5.
See two studies by Paul Hogarth entitled Arthur Boyd Houghton (1975) and (1981).
Osborn’s painting is discussed in Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1993), pp. 78–81.
See Kirk Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte (New Haven, 1987).
Two notable exceptions are George Clausen’s Schoolgirls (1880) and A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill (1881), which juxtapose middle-class girls and women with working-class flower-sellers, a milk-seller, and street pavers. For reproductions, see Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood, fig. 24 and plate; Wood, Victorian Panorama, pl. 161. Compare also Edward Clegg Wilkinson’s Spring — Piccadilly (1887), in Wood, pl. 160; and Logsdail’s contemporaneous painting (figure 38 infra). At a more facile level, Augustus E. Mulready’s mawkish paintings of the haves and the have-nots offer a trite moral commentary on social inequalities.
Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art, ed. Julian Treuherz (1987), p. 83.
Fildes was joining an artistic colony in the Melbury Road area, including Leighton, Watts and Marcus Stone. See Mark Girouard, Sweetness and Light: The ‘Queen Anne’ Movement 1860–1900 (1977; New Haven, 1984), p. 92.
Alexander Robertson, Atkinson Grimshaw (Oxford, 1988).
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© 2004 Alan David Robinson
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Robinson, A. (2004). The Painting of Modern Life. In: Imagining London, 1770–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596924_5
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