INTRODUCTION: A SHARP AND SHINING POINT

Standing on a table, the better to be seen by his audience, a burly man raises a sledge-hammer above his head and slams it down onto an anvil. Thomas Boys, the print dealer of Oxford Street, London, retiring in 1855 after forty-five years in the trade, had hired an executioner as party entertainment in his glittering gas-lit gallery to smash to pieces a dozen or more engraved printing plates of popular images by popular artists. Like magpies shot by a farmer, the shattered metal pieces were then nailed up for all to see. The object of the exercise, ran its Times advertisement, was to destroy the plates utterly, ‘to give a sterling and lasting value to the existing copies, which by this means can never become common’. Thus proceeded an event in which art and business, reputation and value, came together in an attempt to keep these four boisterous creatures together and in trim. On the anvil, past practices in the business of art were shattered into pieces, and new systems wrought. This was a consequence of art’s industrial revolution; it had left the quiet of the studio far behind and entered the furious market. It showed that art had a redoubled economic purpose, a sharply focused aggression, and was a significant factor in national and international trade.

This book explores how art in the nineteenth century was made and paid for, and how it evolved in the face of fluctuating money supply, the turns of fashion, and the new demands of a growing middle class, prominent among whom were the artists themselves. An endless subject such as this remains synoptic and laced with story and metaphor: it looks at networks, friendships and enmities, at debts, disasters and loyalties; and dances across a complex landscape in which art, literature, invention and entrepreneurship are the hedges and ditches, villages and townships that separate and maintain a shifting population. Complex social and institutional structures evolved across the nation, embracing art and music, drama and science. New clubs and academies, societies and institutions articulated the lives and motivations of the ingenious, ambitious and quarrelsome people who inhabited them. Together, they created a potent mixture to hurry the rapid growth of culture in Britain.

The violent and noisy performance in the Oxford Street gallery, as theatrical as some of the images it destroyed, was heavily criticized in the press and justified at considerable length by Thomas Boys. It demonstrates the sophistication of the relationship between art and business in the mid-nineteenth century, and reflects a complex evolution, with explosive bursts of invention and activity that confuse the rational and rattle society. One series of explosions, centred in Britain in the nineteenth century, stimulated social, technological and political change which continues to influence and direct us today. Its reactants were human genius, money and influence, its crucibles the streets and institutions, its catalyst time, its control the market.

It is in details such as the Boys Destruction that we can see local rules at work. Consumed by curiosity, some art collectors gather to watch engraved plates being smashed. Elsewhere in the landscape of art, down in its undergrowth, a scientist and a printer meet to experiment with wax crayon, ink and a slab of limestone to forward the printmaking art of lithography; an engineer invents a machine that will copy a piece of sculpture; a new yellow pigment is precipitated by chemistry over a brazier of coal; a sculptor cuts inscriptions on tomb-slabs at the price of 100 letters to the pound; a passionate horticulturalist builds a great art collection with the help of gold bullion dug up on the Isle of Wight; and a Chancellor of the Exchequer argues passionately and publicly for a new home for the Royal Academy ‘commensurate with the wealth and grandeur of the metropolis of this great and free country’. Activities of this kind, unremarkable individually, gather together to change the way we see, and intrude on understanding. A thought begets a risk, becomes an experiment, grows into an obsession, sparks an accident, begins a chain reaction, inspires a thought elsewhere, many miles away. ‘How splendid is the glow of that sunset’, a newly rich manufacturer exclaims in an art gallery, ‘I have never seen a sunset like that.’ ‘No, but don’t you wish you had?’ responds the artist, standing by. This exchange reflects the use of new pigments, discovered by accident, purified with water, dried, ground to powder, mixed with oil medium, squeezed into a tube, and bought by an artist.

Cultural events were both a cause for, and a product of, celebration. Where Boys celebrated a commercial advancement by having his engravers’ plates smashed in public, an engraver of an earlier generation, William Woollett, celebrated the publication of a new engraving long laboured over by firing a cannon from his roof. So great was the joy in his house that he would line up his family outside his studio, and wife, children and servants all gave three cheers. The sheer relief at all the time, energy and financial danger, during which a family’s welfare might hang by a thread, was overwhelming. Reproduction of images, whether those by old masters or living artists, topographers or travellers, had become big business, and as much a cause for advertisement and celebration as the launch of a new film or television series is today.

The multiplication of art had a wider, civic purpose, as John Pye, another leading engraver, made clear as early as 1845 in a voice that echoes down to our own time:

[E]ngravings, and casts of statuary, cherished by the mass of the people, have been spreading the genius of great masters abroad. Their conceptions are no longer pent up in galleries, open to but a few; they meet us in our homes and are the household pleasures of millions. Works designed for emperors, popes and nobles, find their way, in no poor representations, into humble dwellings, and sometimes give a consciousness of kindred powers to the child of poverty.

While the leading figures of the world of art and literature are players here, so too are patrons, financiers, collectors and industrialists; lawyers, publishers, entrepreneurs and journalists; artists’ suppliers, engravers, photographers and curators; hostesses, shopkeepers and brothel-keepers; quacks, charlatans and auctioneers. There is something magical about these people, these living mysteries: Caleb Whitefoord, the respected chairman of a Committee of Polite Arts, who kept a bedroom full of erotica; Maria Callcott, pioneer traveller in India, Italy, Chile and Brazil, who survived earthquakes, revolution and bandits, wrote delicious histories, but became a sad old gossip, racked by tuberculosis, confined to her couch in Kensington; David Uwins, a pioneer homeopath who gave his services free to artists and their families; and J. M. W. Turner, well known to all his contemporaries, the ringmaster of magic, sensual, grumpy and human, who rode his imagination through the deserts and forests of early nineteenth-century understanding, and left it drenched in colour, sparkling with unexplained consequences. His paintings are isles of wonder; his sketchbooks a clutter of rudimentary and not wholly coherent maps; his art ‘a strange business’.

Since the thirteenth century Britain had evolved freedoms, unique to itself. The eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) articulated the general effect on a nation of economic freedom at a local level:

It is the highest impertinence and presumption . . . in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense . . . They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the Society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

Adam Smith’s careful, even pedantic, analysis of ways of spending lays out in the eighteenth century the conditions required for the business of art to flourish in the nineteenth, and to echo with justification and warning down into the twenty-first. Capitalism, as developed by Smith’s ‘private people’, must have a sharp and shining point. A thriving art market, an essential component of a capitalist economy, provides just that.