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Networked: The Art Market in the Nineteenth Century
Abstract
This chapter surveys the primary and secondary art market in select urban centers, with a primary focus on London, the area of the authors’ expertise. While eighteenth‐century art dealers and auction houses were increasingly influential, the networked international art market emerged as a recognizable phenomenon in the nineteenth century. It was characterized by a dense urban concentration of dealers and auction houses that aimed their activities at the broad public sphere as much as at wealthy elites. This attention to the larger public, characterized by such activities as exhibitions, advertisements, and notices and reviews in the general and specialist art press, reshaped the relationships among artist, art object, and public.
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This title was first published in 2002: Draw ing on extensive primary research, Greg Smith describes the shifting cultural identities of the English watercolour, and the English watercolourist, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. His convincing narrative of the conflicts and alliances that marked the history of the medium and its practitioners during this period includes careful detail about the broader artistic context within which watercolours were produced, acquired and discussed. Smith calls into question many of the received assumptions about the history of watercolour painting. His account exposes the unsatisfactory nature of the traditional narrative of watercolour painting’s development into a ‘high’ art form, which has tended to offer a celebratory focus on the innovations and genius of individual practitioners such as Turner and Girtin, rather than detailing the anxieties and aspirations that characterized the ambivalent status of the watercolourist. The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist is published with the assistance of the Paul Mellon Foundation.
This article presents the first instance of a single-artist retrospective exhibition, that by the Royal Academician Nathaniel Hone, in London in 1775 after his painting The Conjuror had been censored by the Royal Academy. The ‘retrospective’ is understood as the presentation of a considerable body of works by an artist spanning an extensive period of his or her production so as to represent a career. I argue that Hone consciously chose the retrospective format to safeguard his damaged reputation. Following Hone's exhibition a myriad other private exhibitions were staged in England by artists who felt no longer constrained by artists’ associations and institutions in the advancement of their careers.
The commercial fine art gallery first emerged in London in the 1850s and 1860s, and the recognizably modern gallery system quickly became the dominant force in the art market, overtaking the Royal Academy in both prestige and sales. While this expansion of the Victorian art market has generally been attributed to a new class of mercantile patrons and their commitment to the work of living British artists, many of these new gallery spaces explicitly tied their public identities to contemporary international art, regularly featured international art and publicized themselves as part of far-reaching international economic networks. In this essay, I examine the development of these new spaces for the consumption of modern art and their accompanying rhetoric of a multifaceted language of artistic, fashionable and mobile cosmopolitanism. I argue that their cosmopolitan appeal was central to their ability to carve out a reputable place in the art world and played a critical role in the creation of an audience for modern art.
CodellJulie F.. The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 376. $85.00. ISBN 0-521-81757-9. - Volume 36 Issue 4 - Malcolm Cormack
The “dealer-critic system” – Cynthia White and Harrison White’s oft-cited term describing the mutual dependence between the art market and the press – has been long recognized by scholars as a new and critically important feature of the nineteenth-century art world.1 Sociologists White and White charted the decline of the Academy and the rise of the commercial gallery system sustained by the press, and linked these structural changes to the shift from a focus on single important canvases to a speculative market that concentrated on the value of an artist’s entire oeuvre. Art-historical inquiry, building upon White and White’s work, has largely focused on the French art world in the late nineteenth century, as scholars have mapped the emergence of modernist work and practices within this institutional framework.2 Much of the groundwork for this new system, however, originated in Victorian London, which was a forerunner in the development of both the modern art market and the periodical press. In this paper, we argue that attending to the rich web of connections and intersections between the Victorian periodical press and the art market can expand and refine the definition of the dealer-critic system both in its Victorian particularities and as a more generally applicable theoretical model.3
By the 1850s, London had established its identity as a World City, a phrase denoting its position as the capital of the largest empire of the world, its teeming and diverse population, and leadership in capitalism. The art market thrived in such conditions, buoyed by new technologies such as railway and shipping networks and, later, telegraphs and telephones, and sustained largely by a new type of wealthy middle-class patron.4 These new audiences were served by a new business model for selling art: the dealer-run commercial gallery, distinguished both from artist-run exhibitions and shops selling art among other items of home décor, that emerged in the 1850s and rapidly became a dominant force in the art market.5 By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the recognizably modern commercial gallery system had been established and London’s art market was widely considered the most advanced and cosmopolitan in Europe, a fluid center for an international network of patrons and dealers.6
London’s equally vast and dynamic periodical press played multiple functions in this economy. Periodic art criticism arose in conjunction with the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy in the late eighteenth century and quickly proliferated across specialized art journals, literary journals, and general interest publications.7 As Helene Roberts, Julie Codell, and others have demonstrated, the tone and function of such art reporting evolved as the art world expanded and professionalized over the long nineteenth century.8 According to its own rhetoric, art criticism initially acted as a disinterested guide for would-be consumers or viewers, directing the public’s attention to the best on offer in the market and educating their taste. At mid-century, art critics and editors such as Tom Taylor writing for the Times and Samuel Carter Hall at the Art Journal embraced this role of educator as part of the professionalization of the artistic field and concomitantly consolidated notions of the British School.9
As the art market expanded and became less centered on the Royal Academy, however, the press played an increasingly visible partisan role, with critics and journals acting as advocates for particular schools or artists, as in the case of the promotion of the PreRaphaelites by William Michael Rossetti and F. G. Stephens, who also contributed to larger aesthetic debates.10 The Whistler-Ruskin trial of 1878 sustained these tendencies by thrusting artists and critics into divergent camps.11 By the 1880s and 90s, the next generation of “New Critics,” such as D.S. MacColl and R.A.M. Stevenson, had become outspoken defenders of formalist art criticism and new French and French-influenced art in the face of considerable opposition by more conservative critics such as Harry Quilter and J. A. Spender. Such debates were fueled by the increasing recognition achieved by critics; signed reviews began to appear in periodicals beginning in the 1860s and, concomitantly, as Prettejohn points out...
In the nineteenth century, the Académie des Beaux Arts, and institution of central importance to the artistic life of France for over two hundred years, yielded much of its power to the present system of art distribution, which is dependent upon critics, dealers, and small exhibitions. In Canvases and Careers, Harrison and Cynthia White examine in scrupulous and fascinating detail how and why this shift occurred. Assimilating a wide range of historical and sociological data, the authors argue convincingly that the Academy, by neglecting to address the social and economic conditions of its time, undermined its own ability to maintain authority and control. Originally published in 1965, this ground-breaking work is a classic piece of empirical research in the sociology of art. In this edition, Harrison C. White's new Foreword compares the marketing approaches of two contemporary painters, while Cynthia A. White's new Afterword reviews recent scholarship in the field.
- Merrill
Creating the French Gallery: Ernest Gambart and the Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery in Nineteenth‐Century London
- Fletcher Pamela
Croal to James McNeill Whistler 1893 The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903 Margaret F. MacDonald Georgia Toutziari University of Glasgow www
- David Thomson
Ernest to Ford Madox Brown 1864
- Gambart
Auctions, Agents and Dealers, The Mechanisms of the Art Market 1660–1830
- Neil Marchi
The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939
- Anne Helmreich
The Tate Companion to British Art
- Richard Humphreys
The Life and Letters of John Everett Millais
- John Guille Millais
The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939
- Pamela Fletcher
Art Sales from Early in the Eighteenth Century to Early in the Twentieth Century
- Algernon Graves
Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present, A Cultural History
- Bénédicte Miyamoto
Auctions, Agents and Dealers, The Mechanisms of the Art Market 1660–1830
- Satomi Ohashi
Painters and Sculptors, A Second Series of Old Masters and New
- Kenyon Cox
Criticism and Congress
- Quilter Harry
System Number: 05778.The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler 1855-1903 edited byMargaret F.MacDonald Patricia de Montfort and Nigel Thorp; including The Correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler 1855-1880 edited byGeorgiaToutziari
- Thomson David Croal To James Mcneill Whistler
- Merrill Linda