8/14/2019 Artists' Biographies and the Anxieties of National Culture.pdf http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/artists-biographies-and-the-anxieties-of-national-culturepdf 1/36 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 [email protected]. . 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
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8/14/2019 Artists' Biographies and the Anxieties of National Culture.pdf
Artists' Biographies and the Anxieties of National CultureAuthor(s): Julie F. CodellSource: Victorian Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 1-35Published by: Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
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 [email protected].
.
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 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
to the artists. Their reputations were sullied by associations withbohemianismpopularized inVictorian fiction(Jeffares,979) orwithfears 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 theirEnglish followers
(e.g., Francis Galton, Henry Maudsley, Havelock Ellis) forwhom
insanity and criminality were twin artistic traits.6 But as artistsbecame identified with Englishness, these stereotypes were replaced
by newprofessional models exemplified in serialized biographies that
produced new types.
Artists recognized the opportunity of their entrance into biographical
subjectivity, and they directly intervened representing their identities.
They negotiated theirpublic imageswith editors like . H. Spielmann, editor of theMagazine of rt, andMarcus Huish, editor of the
Art journal, and with critics like F. G. Stephens of theAthenaeum; allof whom were among the army of artists' biographers.7 Artists even
wrote their own press releases (Codell, VPR, 2000). Art critics, edi
tors, and artists, all tightly networked, advocated artists' full participation in social and economic spheres as professionals with a
high
degree of autonomy indetermining themarket value of their products
and, more importantly, of their expertise. Artists exercised direct and
indirect control over public representations of themselves and of the
profession as awhole.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,
originality, empirical observation, domesticity, and masculinity? were
ascribed to English artists.What made artistsworthy of biographicalscrutiny was theirmaterial and social success, after all, but what made
them worthy of iconic privilege was astrategic misrecognition that
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prosperity" (Oliphant, 1884, 631). In aNovember 1859 essa)1, she
castigated Academicians who aspired to social status and condemned
the lucrative practice of displaying single paintings inBond 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
bohemian "social dissonance" to help them attain the "exceptionalsocial 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 prelapsarianartist: "An artist need not be a learnedman; ... itwill be a
disadvantage to him. . . . he ideal of an artist, however, is not that
he should be illiterate, but well read in the best books, and thoroughly
high bred, both in heart and in bearing. In aword he should be fitfor the best society, and shouldkeep out of it." Society corrupted the
artist, "first, by its sympathy with his meanest powers; secondly, byits chilling want of understanding of his greatest; and, thirdly, by its
vain occupation of his time and thought... apainter of men must be
among men ... as awatcher, not as a companion" (11: 52-53).
Ruskin argued that an artist, being natural, was antithetical to
language: "an artistmay 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'writtenrulesatoddswith his practice (4: 46): "The
whole duty inculcated upon the artist is that of being in all respectsas likeNature as possible" (4: 175). Inarticulateness was even proofof greatness: "The moment anyman
beginsto 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 theartist's mode of perception as prelapsarian and pre-language: To the
artist, "as to the child, there is something specific and distinctive in
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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 thisconditionof 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 inEmptiness... if you have
Nothing togivehim youwill find thatNothing isexacdy the thinghe most wants, and that he will immediately proceed tomake half
a picture of it" (4: 388). As therewas no want in the edenic worldof the artist, there could be no sense of deprivation from material
benefitsor froma social life(1: 27). Ruskin proposed a fixed income
"To give him his bread and cheese, and so much a day," which he
believed would encourage "your best men" to do good work (14:
488). However, money was ultimately irrelevant to the quality of
performance: "no amount of pay had ever made a good soldier, a
good teacher, a good artist, or agood 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
like relics anecdotes showing thegentleness and generosityof men likeLionardo [sic] andMozart. . .which, inour
desire to trace art back to a noble origin, seem to shed so
much lightupon theproduction 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
brought to bear on the artwork associations and resonances andthus generated the work's meanings: "What the artist gives ismerelythe arrangement of lines and colours in a given manner . . .This,
and not any train of thoughts awakened by this possibly but not
necessarily existing resemblance to an already known natural object.. .and this is artistic form, the absolutely, objectively existing work
of art,"while spectators created meanings through their psychologicalassociations.22 Lee rebuilt an idealized artist who was
merely to evoke for us a series of phantom sights or sounds,of phantom men andwomen. Therefore, our firstactmust
be to diminish, by at least a half, all the practical sides of
his nature, so thatno practical activities divert him from his
purely ideal field. ... we have obtained a creaturewhose
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 toview things as
concrete, livingmanifestations, than as logical abstractions.23
Removed from both practical matters and abstract speculation, the
artistwas reduced to a receptacle for impressions. Lee posited a
reduced, intellectually bare, artist to get amorally pure artist.
But thiswas, Lee admitted, "a mere historic myth, inwhich the world
continues foolishly to believe . . . that the poet is aspecial creature
. . .different from the rest of humanity."24
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
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work, since his work ismade out of and by his nature."23Let us tear away, throw aside this last amount of human
feeling, reduce our typical artist tomere intense powers of
seeing. Shall we stillhave wherewith to obtain anywork at all?
Will this rarified, simplifiedmentality be much above amere
feelingless optic machine ... we have removed asmuch as
possible of all human qualities. . .until thisvisual organisms
becomes beyond compare perfect in itspower of perceivingand
reproducing."26
Lee has gone beyond her initialmedicalizing 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 cynic, but he was a great painter."27 Such
ambivalence about the effects of artworks were consistent with Lee's
suspicions about aestheticism's moral implications, her developmentof
psychological aesthetics,and her investment in "the connections
among art, health, and purity"
tied to her "feminist purity polemics,"as Kathy Psomiades argues in her recent study of Lee's writings.28
Lee's "paltry conclusion," a reductioad absurdum of the ties between
pure artist and good art, underscored her belief that Ruskin's
insistence on such a tie came out of fear of the sensuousness of
beauty as evil and led to his anxiety, as well as contributed tomaking
"morality sterile and art base in his desire to sanctify the one by the
other...
to clothe all that is really pure ina
false barb of sanctity,"thusmaking "a return to nature a return to sin . . . in his constant
sanctifying of beauty he makes it appear impure."29 Lee pointedout that Ruskin worked "to sweep usurping evil out of the kingdomof 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 amoral.31 She criticized his application of morality to art,
recognizing that the beautiful does not always come from purity, that
goodand bad are mixed in
life,
as in art, and that the bad and the
beautiful are often intertwined: "beauty, in itself, is neither morally
good nor morally bad: it is aesthetically good. . .
Beauty is pure,
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complete egotistic: ithas no other value than its being beautiful"32She disagreedwith his belief thatgood artneeded amorallygoodartist.33 Lee recognized thatRuskin's morality could not survive and
that his "placid paradise of art," had "become suspicious... to
live in this sweet and noble impossible paradise" of beauty while
theworld was filled with poverty and evil became impossible for
Ruskin.34 In the end she argued against themoral resistance of evil
through prelapsarian isolation: we can only fight evil, "if we do not
shrink from the battlefield of reality intoan
enervating Capua ofmoral idealism," but instead recognize that the pleasure of beauty is a
good in theworld quite apart from the eradication of evil which alone
can only producea "mere joyless desert of painless vacuity," and
not a fertile garden inwhich artists "sow and plant" in a "redeemed
Ufe soil."35
Many biographers argued in defense that their artist subjects cared
little formoney, made money inadvertently while motivated by moral
or national idealism. But these same lifewritings also insisted onincluding prices as measures of worth and in representing artists' largehomes and studios. Art production became public acts of sacrifice
meriting generous payments in symbolic and cultural capital, as well
as inmaterial exchange value, and the value and appreciation of
works often served to "prove" national unity or artistic merit or
English character traits, such asindependence and entrepreneurship.
Furthermore the reduced artist that Ruskin advocated and Lee
parodied was in direct opposition to artists' own aspirations to rise
socially, and itwas precisely economic and social achievement that
dominated biographical series on artists. Artists and their biographerswrote to synthesize economic interests with ideal motives of duty,
modesty, and self-sacrifice. Biographies projected artists' motives
as "pure," but also portrayed them as mature, professional, and
entrepreneurial, partaking of manly English virtues of enterprise and
individuality The English artist asprofessional entrepreneur was as
Victorian as the prelapsarian model. As Walter Shaw Sparrow arguedin defense of artists employed in advertising, "the practice of everyart is bread-winning as well as aesthetic adventure, and attacks on
Victorian Review
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bread-winning are crimes against citizenship" (Shaw Sparrow, 1924,245).One popular biographerAlfredLys Baldry likewiserecognizedthe need for "a correct estimate of themanner inwhich taste controls
theworkings of our social economy" (Baldry, 1899, 1-2).36 For
Baldry artists were "art workers," and as such were free to capitalizeon social and economic opportunities, enacting entrepreneurial self
determination, a unique Victorian model thatwas anathema to both
Romantic bohemianism and latermodern 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
spheres. Itwas, after all, their success thatmerited biographical
(mis)recognition. Hugh Macmillan, writing in 1903 on G. F.Watts,
described the painter as "one of the last survivors of themen of
genius of the Victorian age" whose Ufe demonstrated "how splendidwas the period that formed him." Watts was a perfect synthesis of
modern and Renaissance, aVictorian "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 pricesseemed to bolster themoral imperative ofWatts who "sacrificed
everything for his ideal" (Macmillan, 1903, 40). "Everything" did not
include sacrificing material comfort,a
very large studio house, or aprivileged social circle, all of which Watts enjoyed.
Conflicting traits came to represent artists' Englishness. Social
series "The Romance of Great Artists," Mary E. Wager braidedtogether brief anecdotal and sensationalistic paragraphs, each about
a famous artist of the past, focusingon love affairs and miserable
marriages. The appearance of such anecdotage inTheArt Journal
alongside defenses of art-making as a profession, an economic
contribution to the nation, and a source of aesthetic uplift embraced
competing means for 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
commonly wrote for several periodicals and newspapers, recyclingand revising their articles for diverse audiences (Brake, 1994,
10-11). For example, C. Lewis Hind wrote biographies for several
publishers, was sub-editor of The Art Journal (1887-92), author of two
biographical series for theGlobe, edited Pictures of the ear 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 TheArt Journal cited biographies from the Revue desDeux Mondes ("BritishArtists. . . .Edwin Ward, The Art Journal, 1855, 47), indicating
a
cross-channel sharing of press biographies.
As early as 1856, The Art Journal promoteda
regulatory public gaze
that inscribed the social order and a set of obligations and exchangesfor economic rewards on artists through the biographical act:
Every artistwho has reached a high position becomes . . .
public property . . . the public whose favourable suffrages hehas won by hisworks, feel also an interest in the individual
who created them . . . the desire is legitimate and perfectlyreasonable ? to learn some of his lifeand 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 extent, even the sanctity of his domestic hearth . . .
[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 indifferentto thepraises or the censures of his biographer;.
. .but
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The press thus transformed art production into an economiccontribution to "national wealth," at once both material ("wealth")and cultural ("national"). P. L. Simmons wrote that "taste is a
marketable commodity, which being of somuch value isworth
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 demand for art abroad, as well as at
home, supported the national income through a variety of "artistic"
goods: frommarble statues and lithographic stone worth ?300,000,to lace totalling ?1.5 million sterling. Simmons listed the value
of imported oods: oil painting (?240,869), engravings ndphotos(?59,714), pictureframes(?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 promoted art consumption through serialized
biographies that first appeared inTheArt Journah original incarnation
as TheArt-Union. "Portraits of British Artists" offered one-columnlaudatory biographies inwhich hard work promised that the artist's
"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 parallelsets of biographies of the living and the dead, their fame levelled
and equalled by such biographical attention and contemporary culture
raised by association. Series often assumed ametaphoric relationshipbetween artists' characters and styles and found consumption to
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 artworks the nations cultural capital and art
production a kind of civic act.39 Popularity was not condemned but
considered asign that artists were
acceptable to anequally industrious
Britishpublic.
Perhaps themost suturing images were those of artists' homes andstudios which became rich symbols of artistic moral and national
character, reaching the status of fetishized spaces in biographies.
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As TheArt Journal quote above indicated, artists, too, becamecommodified as
public property. Salmon argues that the interviewer
surveyed the biographical subject, including home and writing desk,to project an "authentic" self, "revealed" by the author (Salmon,
1997,161-62). Being the subject of an interview in situ assumed
acelebrity7,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 epistemologicalassumptions of the interview in thematerial substance of its location
. . .often explicidy read as a domain of revelatory signs," of, amongother things, the author's privacy as inner "sanctum" (Salmon, 1997,
164-66). The repetition of these topics as "hermeneutical strategies"meant that the revealed "individuality" of any biographical subjectwas the homogenized individuality of all such subjects (e.g., three
has undoubtedly been thefoundation of her successes" (Oldcasde,1879, 258). Her professional status was initiated "by entering simplyand ingenuously into themarket of sale and purchase that she could
fairlymeasure herself with her brothers of the brush," though readers
were reassured that she advocated only women's right towork in
private: "though personal conspicuousness and public appearancehave always been repugnant to her nature, she confesses to the nobler
ambitionof fame through er labours" (Oldcasde, 1879,260). Still
"feminine" in recoiling from public space (hardly a recoil consideringshe 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 thework ethic, a "nobler
ambition," exchanging success for duty.Work, not simply sales, was
themeasure of her painting's worth. Thus, Butler was redeemed from
her own success (and possible loss of femininity) by a "nobler" callingwith some very ambiguous praise: "If she wields the brush at sixty,as we
hopeshe
may do,shewill be
then,as she is
now,and as
she desires to be always- a student" (Oldcasde, 1879, 262)
- and
presumably never amaster
Such inconsistencies constituted the ambivalent biographical assess
ments of successful women artists in the press. Eleanor Fortescue
Brickdale's skill threatened her gendered identity through masquerade: "For so full and firm a
grip of a pencil seldom falls to the lot
of awoman.Happily there is next to no bravura lurking inMiss
Brickdale'shandling. She does not masquerade in the outward habili
ment of any given master's manner" (Dixon, 1902, 262). Althoughher phallic pencil was "firm" as aman's, she was still reassuringly
feminine, forsaking men's clothes, "the outward habiliment" of a
"master." Like Butler, shewas infantilised as an eternal student.
One biographer in 1861 commented on the increasing
difficultyof thebiographical task inproportion to the
demand alreadymade on our attention by the artists
themselves, through theirworks, or by notices of one kind or
another which have previously been published in the pagesof theJournal: thus the subject is, in amanner, exhausted,
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orwe run the risk,by re-entering the fieldof investigation,of multiplying words, without increasing the information we
desire to afford. (Dafforne, 1861, 133)
This writer as early as 1861 pointed out that the public was alreadyso
deluged with information on art that biography's words, like art
works, were so common that theirworth 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 artconsumer more interested in connoisseurship than in didacticism. The
Portfolio had little interested in artistic personalities, focusing instead
on professional concerns, without personality cults, fetishism, and
anecdotage (Codell,VPR, 1987).TheStudiohad amodern view of
biography. Harriet Ford writing on Marianne Stokes did not describe
her experiences but internalized them in a kind of stream of Stokes's
consciousness (Ford, 1900, 152).The Studiodid not depict artists ork
ing in their studios. Its series, "Afternoons in the Studio," was notabout material wealth or studios' spaciousness ("Afternoons
. . . ,"
TheStudio,1894, 116) and avoided photographic imagesof homes or
studios: "the principles taught are of infinitelymore moment than the
privateopinion of theman who happens tobe themedium throughwhich theseprinciples are conveyed" (Baldry,1896, 10).Biographyhad become a degraded popular,populist, and philistinegenrefor this
aestheticist publication.
For most Victorians, however, artists remained idealized, heroiccontributors of the public good,
aswell 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
exchanges that appeared in or alongside biographical subjectivity: a
grand home for the "loss" of the artwork to a philistine audience;
the exchange of patronage for the "free" market; the exchange of
privacy for public scrutiny that permitted an elevated place in thesocial order; the exchange of prelapsarian innocence for a professional
engagement with market forces, assertion of artists' expertise, and
Victorian Review
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normative socialization.But these exchanges were increasingly threatened by changing
modern market values, and the biographical culture industry soughtto secure future hegemony forVictorian 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 artistswere removed from economics, hermeneutics, and full participationin cultural production which includes economic negotiations and
interpretive acts, or cultural capital. Lifewritings reinscribed the
authority to participate in these exchanges onto artists and claimed
for them symbolic capital. As true professionals, artists gave their
art and expertise freely and generously to the nation, contributing to
the public goodas ideal citizens of the state. Biographies argued that
artists, national icons and thoroughly socialized, produced two publicgoods
- themselves and their art.Through biographies artists entered
amuch wider public sphere than was available through exhibitions to
have their productions sanctioned and their exchanges recognized.
Facing the authority of hegemonic images of artists as degenerate,
bohemian, prelapsarian, greedy, or "fashionable," biographies
represented artists above all as professionals, itself a term thatwas
unstable and conflicted, combining uneasily market autonomy with a
vocational drive, a pre-industrial Revolution "calling" to one's truevocation. These contradictory terms were mediated by the notion of
expertise, aprecious entitywith a special surplus value. In contrast
to artisanal labour, artists' labour was rooted in an expertise and
represented in images of bourgeois studios filled with m?tonymie
signs of that expertise knowledge inwhich aesthetics, taste, social
status, and themarketplace co-existed; in photos studios overflowed
with antique busts, books, oriental rugs, and portraits of rich patronson the walls.
Modern culture, as Ernest Gellner argues, became in the modern
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Douglas, ?ke Gellner, defines culture as amutually interdependent set
of relationships among itsmembers: "a culture is a system of persons
holding one another mutually accountable... .From this angle,
culture is fraught with the political implications of mutual account
ability" Douglas, 1992,31). Artistsbecame objects of scrutinynd
anxiety because they bore the responsibility for such culture that
promised to secure national unity and homogeneity and thus movinginto the center stage of national identity, theywere held to thismutual
accountability
Bourdieu argues that allwritings about art contribute to art's cultural
meanings and artists' intervention in the literature of art demonstratesthat they recognized this hermeneutics. Victorian biographies shapeda lay canon, privileging popular paintings and successful artists as
representatives of national culture and character. In constructinga 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 andauthority 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 biographies were unstable and had to be
serialized, repeated, and performed over and over to insist on their
autonomy and entrepreneurship in themarket, status and domestica
tion in the social hierarchy, and representation of Englishness, how
evercontradictory
theseeconomics, social,
and cultural virtuesmight
be.42
Arizona State University
Victorian Review
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36. Baldry was a biographer ofMillais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Herkomer,
Moore, Velasquez, and Reynolds for book series and in theperiodical
press.
37. For more details on Turners fortuna, seeCodell inHughes and Law,
2000, 75-84 ; formore onMillais, Leighton, Watts, andMorland, see
Codell, BookHistory, 2000, 94-124.
38. For comments on this alignment ofwatercolors with femininity, see Jan
Marsh, "Women and Art, 1850-1900," inMarsh and Nunn, 26.
39. For specific examples,seeCodell, KPR, 2000.
40. Dafforne in 1861 referred toCooper's 1849 autobiography publishedinTheArt Journal, a typical inter-referentiality in biographies thatwere
often based on artists' own autobiographical essays and interviews,
allowing artists' intervention into somany biographical texts.
41. Artists avidly read biographies as otherVictorians did. T. S. Cooper in
hismemoirs wrote, "I had read every book I could get hold of aboutartists and theirwork" (Cooper, 1891, 78), while Frederic Haydonwrote thathis father Benjamin Haydon's reading included biographies:
"Every life of every greatman 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 byTom Taylor (art critic for The Times) to thepainter while he
worked inhis studio (Corkran, 1902, 21).
42. Iwish to thank my colleagues for theirhelpful suggestions in the course
ofmy writing this essay: Susan Casteras, Dianne Sachko Macleod,
Debra Mancoff, Kathy Psomiades, JuliaWatson, and the anonymousreader forVictorian Review.
30 volume 27 number 1
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Brake, Laurel. SubjugatedKnowledges:ournalismGender and Literature in the
Nineteenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1994.
Cameron, S. "On theRole of the Critics in the Culture Industry" Journal ofCultural Economics 19 (1995): 321-31.
Codell, Julie F. "Victorian Artists' Family Biographies: Domestic Authority,theMarketplace, and theArtist's Body." In BiographicalPassages: EssaysinVictorian andModernist
Biography,ds. L.
Hughes &J. Law,65-108.
Columbia: University ofMissouri Press, 2000.
Victorian Review 33
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