The annual exhibition of the Royal Academy was in the early nineteenth century a barometer of activity in painting, sculpture and architecture in Britain. Two hundred years later, while there have been lapses and shifts in emphasis, it probably remains so. The Academy was also, with its near-neighbour and sometime rival the British Institution, a barometer of artistic talent and politicking, an art school, a cathedral of the nation’s established church of art, and the place where the shared interests of artists and collectors could join together in mutual support and parade. Fine ideals; but behind the walls of paintings, beyond the plinthed busts and the modelled figure groups, social and economic competition involving patrons, artists and the priestly organizing councils of the Academy and the Institution was driven by the hydraulic forces of cash flow and money in the bank. This was expressed in a multitude of ways: the desire of a young family to lighten a parlour with a painting; the desire for a sculpture in a grand garden; or the attraction for many of a good print. As Jane Austen observed in Persuasion:
He was standing by himself, at a printshop widow . . . in earnest contemplation of some print . . . ‘Here I am, you see, staring at a picture. I can never get by this shop without stopping.’
The most powerful driver of contemplation and purchase was, however, the sheer necessity of decorating large walls in large houses with evidence of the owner’s wealth, taste and intelligence. In this chapter we will try to touch the intangible: what it was, apart from talent, that artists required to succeed in their chosen business.
London lay in the centre of a pan-European web of art businesses: art dealers working with agents abroad and with ship-owners brought works of art, ‘old masters’ and antiquities, to London for sale. Artists brought their work from studios and back rooms for exhibition and sale. Auctioneers recycled paintings and sculpture from dispersed collections at home and abroad to be split up and sold to the highest bidder: prices rose for the work of one artist, prices fell for the work of another. Sculptors produced portrait busts, reliefs, memorials, mythological or other figure groups from studios that, for the more successful, were in effect sculpture factories. Engravers working in as good light as they could find in smoky London and elsewhere engraved on dully shining copper plate images that reproduced works of art, evoked landscape, or illustrated books and journals. These sold and spread worldwide. Auctioneers – principally James Christie, father and son, from their rooms in Pall Mall – sold paintings by the greatest artists of the previous three hundred years, along with countless copies, fakes and failures. The art trade came to London because everything else did, and because that was where the money was made, held, spent and enjoyed.
The old master trade was fast and fickle. For living artists, pressures were of a different kind. When Turner exhibited his early masterpiece Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage of Macon at the Academy in 1803, he asked 300 guineas for it – the equivalent of about £20,000 today. This was the same sum that in 1801 the 77-year-old George Stubbs, venerable painter of horses, had earned for his heroic horse portrait Hambletonian, Rubbing Down – and he had to go to court to squeeze the money out of an inconstant young patron, Sir Henry Vane-Tempest. As a comparison, this was about the same sum as the £330 that the collector and amateur dealer Arthur Champernowne of Dartington Hall, Devon, paid in 1802 for Titian’s small masterpiece Noli Me Tangere. At the end of his career in the 1790s the first president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, grand and respected, charged 200 guineas for a full-length portrait; Reynolds’s successor as president of the Academy, Benjamin West, on the other hand, had a contract running with George III that brought him 1,000 guineas a year. Gainsborough asked £1,000 for a Shakespearean subject, but that was probably because he did not want to do it (see page 151). Pricing therefore was variable and inconsistent, but always some indicator of perceived worth at the time of transaction.
Turner, young, impetuous and bloody-minded, was well known around the Academy. He had been a diligent and attentive student in the Academy’s Schools; he had exhibited there since 1790 when he was fifteen years old; and he had peppered the Academy’s walls with new paintings ever since. Nevertheless, 300 guineas, near enough the price of a small Titian and a large Stubbs, is still an extraordinary sum to demand for a painting on the artist’s first appearance as a Royal Academician. Being made an Academician meant being fully accepted as an equal, or at least as a rival, by a majority of the established painters, sculptors and architects of the day, so it is already clear that self-doubt was not one of Turner’s problems. While Opening of the Vintage of Macon is a large painting, nearly 8 feet long, a third smaller than Hambletonian, the price demanded indicates that Turner was making a calculated move to benchmark his prices in the light of his own assessment of his worth.
Sir John Leicester, a landed baronet whose income came from the produce of farms and salt mines in Cheshire, and who had a penchant for buying British art, offered 250 guineas for the Macon. Turner refused the offer and held the painting back. The following year Leicester returned to the subject and offered the asking price, but Turner now demanded 400 guineas. He was trying aggressively to keep the painting out of Leicester’s hands, and one or other of them broke off the deal. Senior Academician John Opie took Turner’s side here: Joseph Farington reported that ‘he did not see why Turner should not ask such prices as no other persons could paint such pictures’. That was not the end of the story, as another aristocrat, Lord Yarborough, who owned large swathes of both Lincolnshire and the Isle of Wight, moved in and bought the painting for the original asking price of 300 guineas. Within two years, Leicester had got over that loss by acquiring Turner’s Shipwreck for 300 guineas.
This exchange raises many questions, principal among them being why was Turner playing such a dangerous game with rich and influential men who might believe they could destroy him with a glance? He was a Covent Garden barber’s son – his father trimmed their wigs; they owned and managed the lands that created the wealth that fed and fuelled the nation. Playing one off against the other was not the best way for a young artist to win friends, and clearly young Turner was not keeping to his place. On the other hand, Yarborough had helped to finance Turner’s 1802 trip to Paris and the Alps, and may have expected preferential treatment when the products were displayed. Nevertheless, even he was not offered a reduction in the price. Turner’s behaviour in respect of two powerful men bidding for his favour is a sure sign of artists’ growing awareness of their economic power.
The nation was gearing up to face the first, grand, visual results of industrialization. Shouldering its way onto the skyline of London, the huge Albion Flour Mill with its steam-driven mill-wheels dominated the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge. Even after it was burnt out in 1791, probably by arson, its heavy form and black windows glowered across the river until its façade was cleaned up and used to front a line of private houses. The steam-engines of Matthew Boulton and James Watt that had powered the flour mill brought forests of chimney stacks to towns and cities, but also brought the benefit of decoration, colour and new manufacture to the nation, including bright coins, fine pottery, colourful cotton cloth. The ubiquitous churning steam-engine could by now be seen, heard and smelt in towns and villages around the country: it pumped water, winnowed crops, spun cotton and drove trip-hammers that shaped red-hot metal to make anything from steel girders to soldiers’ belt buckles. The noise of the steam-engine in its evolving state echoed behind the wealthy men now coming to town with rough accents in their speech and the trace of oil on their hands.
Even as late as 1836 the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was considered an exotic creature as he mingled in the drawing rooms of Kensington with the Callcott and Horsley families. Augustus and Maria Callcott, and Augustus’s brother John Callcott and his wife Elizabeth, were painters, writers and musicians, earning their living through the practice of their arts. John and Elizabeth’s daughter, another Elizabeth, married the composer William Horsley; of their children, John Callcott Horsley became a successful Royal Academician, Charles Horsley became a composer, and Mary Horsley, elegant and aloof, was productively wooed by Brunel. Their Kensington home, near the Gravel Pits, was a social hothouse; their family a dynasty. Piano music floated through the fern pots; conversation might turn equally to pigments or Paganini. Brunel’s friend and colleague William Gravatt found himself to be even more out of place than Isambard in these rooms: ‘wild beast’, the Horsleys called him, as he nervously spilled snuff on the carpet. When Brunels and Gravatts met Horsleys and Callcotts the steam hissed as two new unpredictable forces, with talent, ambition and wealth-generating power, collided. The artist’s creative energy and the engineer’s scalding steam had first to be defined, then harnessed, and only then, if necessary, understood. The Brunel–Horsley collision, and a generation earlier Turner’s calculating action towards his patrons, are reflections of the long-drawn-out change from the eighteenth-century art of picturesque response to landscape and its ownership, to the nineteenth-century romantic engagement with personality, emotion and mass production. Curiously, it was the engineer Brunel who, through his love of clarity in art and of control in process, came in the 1840s to attempt to draw together the production of art through the profits of transport.
In 1791, when Turner was exhibiting at the Royal Academy for only the second time and showing two watercolours, 295 artists sent 672 works to the annual exhibition. Ten years later, the size of the exhibition had increased by about a quarter, with 404 artists sending in 1,037 works. Fifty more years on, in 1851, the year of Turner’s death, the number of artists had doubled to over 800, while the number of works shows only a modest increase, restricted both by the dimensions of the Academy’s new premises in Trafalgar Square and by the expanding scale of the paintings that some Academicians chose to exhibit. In 1847, for example, William Etty showed his monumental triptych Joan of Arc, 10 feet high by nearly 30 feet wide, ‘set up at the top of the Great Room’.
Snowballing figures not only reflect the growth in the number of people competent enough to submit their paintings to the judgement of leading artists and the public, but are a consequence of many other interrelated changes. They reflect that these artists – along with their canvas, brush and paint suppliers; and the trades that clothed and shod them; and the gangs that built the turnpikes; and the carriage-owners who transported them around the country to encounter new subjects; and the men and women who considered, even if only momentarily, that they might buy their works – were part of the revolutionary social movement that brought a fresh breath of activity, income, and the dim illusion of leisure to a growing proportion of the British population.
In the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century, the disposable income of Britain’s wealthiest came from the digging out and sale of minerals, coal, iron, salt and clay from their land; from improvements in canals, roads, building construction, road transport, shipping and agricultural practices; and from a speeding-up of the circulation of knowledge, principally in printing and publishing. It had come also from the profits of slavery, both in the transport of slaves from West Africa and in the products of their labour, sugar and cotton in the West Indies. Coming back to his former home after thirty years in the country, the weaver Silas Marner, the eponymous protagonist in George Eliot’s novel, seeks Lantern Yard, in the town where he grew up:
‘Here it is . . . It’s gone, child . . . Lantern Yard’s gone. It must ha’ been here . . . but they’ve made this new opening; and see that big factory! It’s all gone – chapel and all.’
George Eliot transports us in her story from the opening years of the century to the 1830s, from the ‘bent, tread-mill attitude of the weaver’, to factory men and women ‘streaming for their mid-day meal’.
Britain was now noisier, fuller, changed by the appliance of science and technology to invention and engineering. There was now brewing and clothing manufacture; banking, investment and insurance; international export in everything from egg cups to steam-engines; and import of sugar and cotton from the west and tea and spices from the east. This was where the money was made. Money was also lost in great quantities, or failed to materialize through dismal investment, lost harvest and bankruptcy, with the result, way down the line, that work would dry up. This happened to the talented and well-known engraver Valentine Green in the early 1800s. Entrepreneurial acts would fail through miscalculation and over-enthusiasm, as in the case of the printmaker W. H. Pyne in 1815, who lost thousands of pounds on an undercapitalized printing project (see page 162). Large firms would go bust with catastrophic fallout, as in the case of the publishers Hurst and Robinson in the financial crash of 1826. Round and again, artists would not be paid, as the sculptor E. H. Baily experienced many times in the 1830s. Result: misery. To seek the sources of patronage that flowed out towards culture in Britain, it is most profitable to see where the money accumulated.
William Beckford was an exception to all rules: thus he is a good place to start. The only legitimate son of a sugar plantation owner and politician – he had six illegitimate half-brothers; his father was Lord Mayor of London – at the age of ten he inherited a million-pound fortune, 5,000 acres in Wiltshire and a string of Jamaican estates. The influential diarist and Royal Academician Joseph Farington reported in 1796 that Beckford’s income was ‘£70,000 [per year], all of which he expends, and sometimes overdraws his agent’. The following year Farington recorded Beckford’s income as £155,000, much of which he spent on building and furnishing his Gothic palace, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire. Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, had analysed the economic classes in Britain in the early eighteenth century. He defined three upper classes: the great, who live profusely; the rich, who live very plentifully; and the middle sort, who live well. Beckford was most assuredly one of Defoe’s ‘great’. Others in that category included the landowner George Granville Leveson-Gower, Second Marquess of Stafford and First Duke of Sutherland; the collector Thomas Hope, whose inherited wealth came from his family’s merchant bank in Amsterdam and London; the mysterious Russian-born insurance broker Sir John Julius Angerstein; the owner of Cheshire landscape and its salt mines, Sir John Leicester, Bart; Charles Anderson-Pelham, First Earl of Yarborough, Lincolnshire landowner and art patron; and Samuel Rogers, the banker and poet whose long life crossed many. Some of these, perhaps Leicester and Rogers, believing themselves to have been among the great, may only have been rich. It’s complicated.
Many dozens, hundreds, of such families, more or less inventive and entrepreneurial, more or less wealthy, had long evolved within the shires of Britain, social and economic steam-engines many of them, each holding sway over local areas, each rolling influence and connection as far as it might reasonably reach. Debrett’s New Peerage and Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, first published in 1769 and 1826 respectively, reflect the depth and endurance of landed families. That both publications are still going into their fourth and third century indicates yet further the depth and endurance of their featured subjects.
Leveson-Gower had inherited the entire fortune of his uncle, the coal owner and canal entrepreneur Francis Egerton, Third Duke of Bridgewater. This comprised the income of the Bridgewater Canal and estates – around £30,000 a year (roughly £1.5 million today). He went further and married Elizabeth, Duchess of Sutherland, who herself owned over a million acres of Scotland. As if that were not enough, from his father, the First Marquess of Stafford, Leveson-Gower inherited estates in Staffordshire, Shropshire and Yorkshire. All these marriages and connections demonstrate why he had so much of the British Isles – Bridgewater, Sutherland, Stafford – tacked onto his names. ‘Abominably rich’, he was described; and ‘a leviathan of wealth’. George Leveson-Gower, the First Duke of Sutherland as he became, was the greatest landowner in the country, with a gross annual income of £200,000 (£10 million). His living standard, as Farington observed, ‘exceeded everything in this country. No-one could vie with it.’ The sculptor Francis Chantrey dreamed of carving a colossal figure of the duke on a rocky outcrop on Sutherland’s Staffordshire estate, but while the duke could reasonably have paid for it, the prospect defied even Chantrey’s great spirit.
These men and their families had their grand houses in London and even grander palaces in the country. Some, such as Leveson-Gower, Leicester and Yarborough, entered Parliament or the House of Lords; others, such as John Byng, Fifth Viscount Torrington of Southill, Bedfordshire, spent their money unwisely and clung to their wreckage or fled it. Yet others developed an area of study and made it their own: Samuel Rogers was a distinguished poet; Sir John Leicester made himself an authority on birds and fish, as well as becoming ‘the greatest patron of our national schools of painting that our island ever possessed’, according to an obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine. He bought paintings with an eye for quality, and in 1823 he offered unsuccessfully to sell his collection to the nation.
Thomas Hope also lived for art. He had no need to earn his living, but instead travelled widely in Europe meeting artists and collecting their work. Hope’s dominant interest was in spotting artists whose stars were rising: the sculptors John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey and Bertel Thorwaldsen; the painters John Martin, Benjamin Robert Haydon and Thomas Daniell. Chantrey, then a young man fresh from Sheffield, carved decoration on Hope’s furniture. Hope bought a London house in Duchess Street, designed by Robert Adam, and there, in rooms of exquisite taste and gas-lit grandeur, he displayed his collections to friends and other guests who had acquired tickets for the purpose. Leveson-Gower had been, in 1806, the first aristocratic collector to open the purpose-built gallery in his house to the public, but with mixed results. He was assailed by ‘the ignorance, vulgarity and something worse’ in some sections of his visitors; and ‘frivolity, affectation and insolence’ in others. The pleasure, availability and experience of art, though owned by others, was among the excitements and comparative freedoms of being in London.
By the opening years of the nineteenth century, art and literature that would come to be called ‘Romantic’ was beginning to develop a market in London and the main provincial towns of Britain. The hours that Samuel Taylor Coleridge invested sitting in his lime-tree bower, or William Wordsworth spent walking the fells of Cumberland to find inspiration for Lyrical Ballads, sooner or later began to be relived in the metropolis. The pace and determination of Wordsworth’s steps, as evoked in his published poems, added directly to the pace of visitors’ steps along to the Royal Academy exhibitions where new paintings by Turner, Martin and Wilkie were on show, alongside portrait busts by Nollekens, Flaxman and Chantrey. Coleridge’s reflections on nature, ‘her largeness and her overflow’, led also to his readers making their way to the Royal Institution lecture theatre. There they heard Humphry Davy and later Michael Faraday expounding and explaining scientific principles. While Lyrical Ballads sold in only modest quantities, its first publication in 1798 was in itself the prelude to the developing hum of contented browsing by customers among the thousands of volumes in John Hatchard’s bookshop in Piccadilly, and the Lackingtons’ Temple of the Muses bookshop in Finsbury Square.
How was it that the intense and personal thoughts of a pair of English poets, or Turner’s response to the landscapes he travelled through, or the young Faraday’s back-room experiments with electrical batteries came only ten or fifteen years later, while these men were of an age to appreciate the fruition of their work, to result in bookshop purchases and a lively market in paintings and engravings for domestic decoration? What were the conditions of success for an artist, scientist or poet in the nineteenth century?
Turner’s father kept a busy barber’s shop in Maiden Lane, 200 yards from the Covent Garden piazza. His clientele included lawyers and theatrical people from Drury Lane, merchants from Long Acre, artists and musicians from the surrounding streets, and yet more artists, scientists and antiquaries from Somerset House nearby. There was no real shortage of money in the Turner family. Counting up from James Boswell, who paid around £6 per year to have his hair dressed every day, and Charlotte Burney who reported that ninepence (9d) for a hairdressing was ‘3d too dear’, and further still the London woollen draper William Mawhood who recorded ‘hair combed; cost 6d’ in 1778, and multiplying those up by a figure that suggests an average of about twenty customers a day, the elder William Turner might have earned £300 a year. This represents perhaps £20,000 in the early twenty-first century. Turner the barber was not a poor man, and he had the foresight and vicarious ambition to display his son’s early watercolours in his shop with a three-shilling price tag. This was perhaps six times the price of a good haircut, and about right. Nevertheless, only ten years later Turner would be demanding for one painting what his father might have earned from cutting hair in a year.
The first condition of success for the young Turner, given energy, purpose and ability, was continual support from a busy father who had high ambitions for him. A further condition was the capture of luck and good fortune and the contacts these might bring. An early patron, when Turner was twenty-four, was the broker Sir John Julius Angerstein, who paid 40 guineas (£2,000) for a watercolour of Caernarvon Castle, perhaps twice the asking price, when it was exhibited in 1799 at the Royal Academy. Why Angerstein was so inordinately generous we do not know, but it is an indication of the beguiling chemistry that the young Turner had about him that he could begin to entice such prices.
For Michael Faraday, conditions of success comprised a father substitute, the radically inclined bookbinder George Riebau of Marylebone, whose shop hummed with the intellectual élite of the day. Faraday was one of Riebau’s many apprentices, and, through craft and diligence, he showed that he might have become a great bookbinder. But Riebau noticed other talents which distracted Faraday from binding books, and so gave him the time to pursue them by allowing him to visit steam-engines on the banks of the Thames and exhibitions at the Royal Academy and the British Institution. He also gave him the opportunity and perhaps some of the materials to build electrical machines in a room behind the bindery. Circumstances in Faraday’s young life developed to the extent that one or two of Riebau’s customers, particularly the painters John James Masquerier and Richard Cosway and the architect George Dance the Younger, took special notice of the apprentice; Cosway and Dance may also have invited him to their homes to see their art collections. Memory of the kindness of each one of these men stayed with Faraday, and nearly ten years later he wrote appreciatively that ‘Mr Dance’s kindness claims my gratitude, and I trust that my thanks, the only mark I can give, will be accepted.’ A further assistance Dance gave to Faraday was to give him tickets to attend Humphry Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution in 1812. This led to the further development of Faraday’s profound interest in the discoveries and teaching of science, his first meeting with Humphry Davy, and all that followed. Bookbinding’s loss was science’s gain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the last of ten children of an uxorious elderly Devon clergyman and his middle-aged, put-upon wife. There were many children but not much money in those rural valleys, but nevertheless, as Coleridge expressed it in a proto-Oscar Wildean remark, ‘my father was very fond of me, and I was my mother’s darling – in consequence I was very miserable.’ The sudden death of his father when the boy was nine changed Coleridge’s life instantly. Within a year he had been parcelled off to London to live with an uncle, a tobacconist in the City, with whom he dived into clubs and coffee-houses to pick up the ebb and flow of idle gossip and high-minded conversation. ‘My Uncle was very proud of me, and used to carry me from Coffee-house to Coffee-house, and Tavern to Tavern, where I drank, and talked, and disputed, as if I had been a man . . . I was most completely spoilt and pampered, both mind and body.’ Coleridge’s education continued at Christ’s Hospital and Jesus College, Cambridge, followed briefly by the army, preaching, dreams of America, marriage, fatherhood and mounting debt. Energetic and provocative editorship of the periodical The Watchman gained Coleridge enemies as well as friends, some of whom contributed generously to his modest and unreliable income, as did a royalty in 1796 of 30 guineas for his first volume of poems with the unpromising title Poems on Various Subjects. Coleridge lived on the edge.
Coleridge and Wordsworth met in Bristol in 1795. The former was already a literary lion, well known, acclaimed, forthright, but not really to be trusted with money. Wordsworth, on the other hand, tall, lithe and weathered, had invested his youth and early manhood in walking many hundreds of miles in the Lake District, Wales and Somerset, and down into Burgundy and the Alps. While less worldly than Coleridge, Wordsworth had seen more of the world by walking through it. Like Coleridge, however, he had hardly a penny to his name. To publish Lyrical Ballads, the pair had to raise 30 guineas to pay the costs of Joseph Cottle, their publisher and friend. Reputation mattered, and Coleridge insisted on the two authors remaining anonymous: ‘Wordsworth’s name is nothing – to a large number of persons mine stinks.’ By this time Coleridge was twentysix, a surprisingly young age to have garnered a ‘stinking’ reputation, while Wordsworth was a more measured twenty-eight. Within two years, Cottle’s edition had sold out, and the authors’ copyright was bought for £80 by Thomas Longman. This was a modest but notable success.
Four young men – an artist, a scientist and two poets – started out in life with nothing to declare but their geniuses. Two had fathers or father substitutes behind them for early support, while the other two were cut adrift from family support in their early years. All were fuelled by internal energy and varying strengths of mind and self-belief. While two of them, Turner and Faraday, may have had institutional hopes or ambitions, there was sparse institutional support to go round. Turner won a silver medal (but no prize money) from the Society of Arts in 1793. Faraday found employment from 1813 at the Royal Institution; for the rest of his life he received a modest salary, first as a general assistant, rising over the years to become director of the Royal Institution. Coleridge never received a salary, and with a wife and lover, children, and an inordinate desire to travel, lived on subventions from friends, publishers and patrons. Wordsworth likewise lived precariously on his writing, until 1813 when he was saved from imminent financial ruin by being given the £400-a-year appointment as distributor of postage stamps for Westmorland and Penrith. This post was found for him after a word from Samuel Rogers (one of the rich, who lived very plentifully) was dropped softly into the ear of the local patron, the Earl of Lonsdale (one of the great, who lived profusely). Being a poet in the mid-nineteenth century was no guarantee of making a living, but knowing the right people would certainly help.
The origins of Turner’s early benefactor Sir John Julius Angerstein, who by 1800 had over forty years’ experience in marine insurance, are mysterious and romantic. He came from Russia as a fifteen-year-old, bearing the surname of the doctor who had delivered him of his supposed mother, Anna, Empress of Russia. His father was said to be Andrew Poulett Thompson, a Russia merchant from London, whose company traded with St Petersburg and who evidently had close links with the Russian court. Whoever he was, and wherever he came from, Angerstein made large sums of money as an independent underwriter, as a modernizing member of Lloyd’s, and as a deviser and founder of the national lottery of his day. Making his money in the City, he spent it in the West End, collecting old master paintings and entertaining friends from the literary and theatrical worlds at his home, 100 Pall Mall, in the heart of fashionable moneyed London. When he was in his late eighties, Angerstein narrowly avoided an ill-advised marriage, and a sudden net outrush of funds. As Joseph Farington reported it, Angerstein
(now 86 or 7) complained of want of domestic society & thought Mr Coutts had judged well in securing this to himself by marrying the actress, Miss Meilan [i.e. Harriet Mellon]. Sir John Colpoys, Gover[nor] of Greenwich Hospital, had conversations with Mr A disswading him from it. It has, however, broken off in consequence of the Lady requiring a Carriage for herself & a separate bed.
Angerstein’s greatest contribution to the development of culture was his imposing art collection. This, along with his house, was bought by the government after his death, and came to form the nucleus of the National Gallery. Angerstein owned paintings by Raphael and Titian, Rubens and Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Claude and Poussin – masterpieces that were and remain the backbone of the national collection. He had paid 1,600 guineas in 1803 for Rubens’s Rape of the Sabine Women, and 5,000 guineas after a London auction sale in 1807 for Rembrandt’s Woman Taken in Adultery. These were enormous sums, but money Angerstein could well afford. It puts into context the 40 guineas that he pressed on the young Turner for his watercolour Caernarvon Castle.
For Faraday, assistance came not in cash but in contacts. One of his early contacts, Richard Cosway, was a Devon schoolmaster’s son, a comparably modest background to Coleridge’s, though he was a generation older. Sent to London from the far west with only his trunk and his talent to accompany him, Cosway, aged twelve or thirteen, had been attached in 1754 to the drawing master William Shipley. Whether by chance or intention, this was a fortunate choice, as Shipley was the founder and driving force behind the new Society of Arts – full name: Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which was resident then, and is resident still, in John Adam Street, parallel to the Strand. When the talented Mr Shipley and the young genius Master Cosway came together, they were both at the start of great projects – Shipley his Society, and Cosway his career. Within weeks, the former had presented the latter with the £5 first prize for drawing in the under-fourteens category, and Cosway never looked back.
With a talent to amuse and entice as potent as Turner’s ability to charm money out of clients, Cosway developed a portfolio of willing sitters, enraptured by the delicacy of the likenesses he wrought and the aromatic intimacies that his portraits hinted at. Cosway had passed through the Royal Academy Schools in their earliest years, and in 1771, still under thirty, was elected an Academician. Only Turner, in the next generation, came to such high recognition at so young an age. Even within the social conventions of the day, Cosway lived loosely; indeed, he and his wife themselves seem to have had a loose relationship, his wife Maria having had an affair in Paris in 1786 with the then American ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson. Though he never went to Italy, unlike his wife who had been born there, Cosway admired Italian women. ‘Italy for ever I say – if the Italian women fuck as well in Italy as they do here,’ he wrote to his patron Charles Townley, ‘you must be happy indeed – I am such a Zealot for them, that I be damned if I ever fuck an English woman again (if I can help it).’
By the first decade of the nineteenth century, Cosway had risen through careful application of his extraordinary talents as a draughtsman and his clever use of social networks to be one of the most sought-after miniaturists of his day. He was patronized by the Prince of Wales and by aristocrats including the Earl of Radnor and the Marquess of Blandford. These and many other patrons paid Cosway fully and generously, leaving him rich, successful, and heavily and apparently happily encumbered with his Italian-born wife. The Cosways rented from 1784 a sumptuous apartment in Schomberg House, Pall Mall, a late seventeenth-century mansion that by this time had been divided into three. Their middle portion, 81 Pall Mall, had previously been occupied by James Graham and his Temple of Health and Hymen, a high-class brothel filled with sparking electrical paraphernalia which masqueraded as a centre of sex therapy and electro-medicine. Thomas Gainsborough was a neighbour at number 80 until his death in 1788, Christie’s the auctioneers was nearby at number 125 until 1823, Angerstein was just up the road to the east at number 100, and there was royalty in St James’s Palace down the road to the west.
Being compulsive collectors, the Cosways filled their apartment with fashionable furniture and furnishings, and a growing collection of old master paintings and drawings, some of course from Christie’s, their neighbour. At one time they had an Egyptian mummy lurking about the place. They were an odd couple, the demonstrative Italianate Maria and the petite Richard, only 5 feet tall, known as ‘Miniature Macaroni’ and ‘Tiny Cosmetic’. Theirs was a private collection of quality and breadth, exotic and, in an era of artist-collectors, unrivalled by that of any British artist of the day. The Cosways had tone, and entertained: money flowed in and out, and sitters came and went, announced and ushered in by their elegantly attired black servant, Quobna Ottobah Cuguano. Cosway was, according to his wife, ‘toujours riant, toujours gai’.30
By the time Faraday met Cosway, around 1806–7, the painter was in his mid-sixties. He was way past his prime, had sold or given away the bulk of his old master collection, and had moved north to Stratford Place, Oxford Street. His wife had to all intents and purposes left him, and was travelling Europe. Cosway gave Faraday a brief experience of the world beyond the bookbindery, a brush with glamour, and a hint of an alternative way of life. But as a leading player in the art world of his day, as a producer of art as well as a conduit for money, Cosway was central. He was a maker of fashion, who lived at the apogee of style, though it may be that after the departure of his wife he tended to let his standards of housekeeping slip. The critic William Hazlitt wrote of Stratford Place:
What a fairy palace was his of specimens of art, antiquarianism and virtù jumbled all together in the richest disorder, dusty, shadowy, obscure with much left to the imagination. How different from the finical, polished, petty, perfect, modernised air of Fonthill !
Cosway was not such a suitable patron for young Faraday, the son of devout members of the Sandemanian church, a fundamental Christian sect. It may be for this reason that, apart from a polite mention in correspondence, Faraday does not refer to him again. Cosway’s fellow artists tended to despise him; perhaps it was the inordinate success of the pint-sized miniaturist that got under their skins, or his flaming talent, or his amorous opportunities and victories. This of course also brought grudging admiration, as Sir Thomas Lawrence the portrait painter said to Joseph Farington when he compared Cosway to contemporary portrait painters:
What are [they] . . . when compar’d to the knowledge . . . of this little Being which we have been accustom’d never to think or speak of but with contempt?
Not content with raising high prices for his miniatures, Cosway went into business with reproductive engravers such as John Raphael Smith, Valentine Green and Francesco Bartolozzi. Together they published more than 160 prints after Cosway’s work, in extensive editions which spread his popularity around Britain and Europe, exemplifying John Pye’s observation that ‘works designed for emperors, popes and nobles, find their way . . . into humble dwellings, and sometimes give a consciousness of kindred powers to the child of poverty’. While reproductive engraving was a highly volatile business, very susceptible to recession and financial crisis, it was nevertheless the only effective and economical means of broadcasting images and widening an artist’s reputation. A risky way of making money though it was, in times of stability some engravers such as Bartolozzi made a very good living. Others, like Green, suffered in 1804 ‘a total want of employ in his profession [which has] reduced him at a very advanced age to great distress’.
A man who crossed the lives of most if not all of those discussed here was the banker and amateur poet Samuel Rogers. He seems already to have been around for ever even before our period started. Inheriting his father’s fortune in 1793 by a lucky stroke, his elder brother’s ill-advised marriage, Rogers was able to indulge himself with an income of £5,000 a year in the writing and self-publishing of his poetry, in travel and in entertaining. Invitations to Rogers’s breakfast parties in the grand house he built for himself in St James’s, overlooking Green Park, were highly prized, and it was there that poet met painter, aristocrat met actor, and novelist, publisher, politician and natural philosopher stood toe to toe, discussing issues of the day and looking at the pictures. This social round went on for years, even into a third generation which had other, different, pressures. A fortnight after she had visited the Great Exhibition in 1851, the diarist Isabella Mary Hervey went to see the by now 88-year-old Samuel Rogers, to ‘have breakfast there and see his pictures’.
While being a wicked gossip, with a tongue as sharp as a knife, Rogers could be generous to an out-of-pocket writer such as Thomas Moore, conciliatory in patching up a quarrel between Moore and Byron, perceptive in offering the smiling young Sheffield lad Francis Chantrey the opportunity to decorate furniture for himself and Thomas Hope, and thoughtful when realizing that Wordsworth needed the financial certainty of an official post. Rogers was the bell-wether for the attitudes of the widely spread social group that encircled him, and prompted Moore to remark that:
I always feel with him that the fear of losing his good opinion almost embitters the possession of it, and that though, in his society, one walks upon roses, it is with constant apprehension of the thorns that are among them.
Nevertheless, he could be difficult company. In a conversation at Farington’s table, where Thomas Lawrence and the collector Richard Payne Knight were fellow guests, Rogers said little. ‘He must have the lead’, Farington remarked, ‘or he is silent.’
There are some common routes in the journeys to fame and fortune outlined here: a rich man’s one-to-one patronage from above (Angerstein and Turner; Rogers and Wordsworth); a rich man’s munificence to many (Beckford to painters, stained-glass and furniture makers and craftsmen involved in creating Fonthill; Hope to furniture makers and upholsterers); determined advocacy from below (Turner, father and son; Coleridge and uncle; Cottle, for Coleridge and Wordsworth); family contacts from a great distance (Cosway and Shipley); apprenticeship and lucky encounter (Riebau, Faraday and Cosway); exotic benediction (Cosway and Faraday; Rogers and hangers-on). Most such routes are one-to-one, with little or no institutional involvement.
This was, however, the period in which the institutions rose in influence. The British Institution, founded in 1804 by aristocrats, collectors and moneyed men to boost the reputation of painting and sculpture, rapidly became a challenge to the Royal Academy. The British Institution was to the Royal Academy what in scientific endeavour the Royal Institution was to the Royal Society: in each case the former claimed for its purpose the cultural improvement of the general public and the creation of an economy, while the latter remained principally a professional body. When Angerstein, Beckford, Leveson-Gower and Rogers were reaching the peaks of their influence in the first decade of the century, a new generation of entrepreneurs was beginning to look about itself and see where the money could be made, and where it could be spent for enjoyment and showy investment. There was also the shock of the new, as the politician John Cam Hobhouse recalled:
Dined at Lord Lovelace’s . . . [His] eldest son is to be a sailor, [his] second a civil engineer – a new profession for a peer’s son!
The backgrounds of the new rich were very different from those of the landed and moneyed gents who had the deep pockets that the patronage of artists requires. They included the horse-and-carriage dealer Robert Vernon; the Leeds cloth manufacturer’s son, John Sheepshanks; the whaling entrepreneur son of a Somerset serge manufacturer, Elhanan Bicknell; the carriage manufacturer Benjamin Godfrey Windus; and the tile manufacturer from the Black Country, John Hornby Maw, a farmer’s son.
These men did not come from rolling country acres, except where their forebears had been working them, but instead from more or less the same modest backgrounds from which sprang the natural artistic talent and genius that they would come to support. Their attitudes to their artists were, immediately, new. Their roots were in Defoe’s ‘middling kind’; the sort that William Beckford’s father, the London alderman with slave-owning interests in Jamaica and reform interests in Britain, had described eloquently in the House of Commons in 1761:
the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentleman, they who bear all the heat of the day . . . [They] are a good natured, well-intentioned and very sensible people who know better perhaps than any other nation under the sun whether they are well governed or not.
The particular quality of British life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was that talent, whether for industry or art, was a passport.
In the dealings between art and money in the mid-century we witness a change in the values of social class and the intricate relationships between money and status as expounded by Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, a shift to the crueller, cutting worlds of Dickens, George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell. Articulate foreign visitors noticed the changing ways of life that natives of Britain might miss. The German historian Friedrich von Raumer, in London in 1835, went out to dinner in a grand London house:
In the first place the furniture of that room was antique; hangings and furniture resplendent with silk and gold; the dinner service of silver, a silver hot plate under every plate, change of knives and silver forks with every dish, and of these dishes, as well as of the wines, a countless succession; servants in full livery, and all in white kid gloves . . . Several times, when all the plates were removed, I thought the business was at an end, but in a minute the table was full again. At length we came to the rinsing of the mouth; but instead of rising after this operation, it was only succeeded by new varieties of sweet dishes. Again the table was cleared, and a large silver basin was placed before one of the gentlemen. He poured a bottle of water into it, dipped in a corner of his napkin, and pushed the basin to me. It was filled with rose water, and was a new and very refreshing luxury to me. At length we arose; but the ladies only left the room, and passed their time in amusement or in ennui, while the gentlemen sat down again and did not rejoin the ladies for an hour. Cards were now introduced; but I made my escape, mindful of the coming day, and got home about midnight.
The French critic Hippolyte Taine drew a picture of the British from the viewpoint of a guest in a large house forty years later. The sense of display and detail that Raumer noted in the 1830s concerned rooms that were public: the drawing room and the dining room. By the 1870s, however, it had flowed like a tide upstairs and into the guest bedrooms, out of general sight:
In my bedroom . . . there are two dressing-tables, each having two drawers, the first is provided with a swing looking-glass, the second is furnished with one large jug, one small one, a medium one for hot water, two porcelain basins, a dish for tooth-brushes, two soap-dishes, a waterbottle with its tumbler . . . The servant comes four times a day into the room; in the morning to draw the blinds and the curtains . . . at mid-day and at seven in the evening, to bring water and the rest . . . at night to shut the window, arrange the bed, get the bath ready, renew the linen; all this with silence, gravity, and respect. Pardon these trifling details; but they must be handled in order to figure to oneself the wants of an Englishman in the direction of his luxury; what he expends on being waited on and comfort is enormous, and one may laughingly say that he spends a fifth of his life in his tub.
The nation’s fluctuating financial state of health was a permanent background presence. After the end of the wars with France in 1815 money supply suffered intermittent constrictions, about one every ten years, which manifested themselves variously and painfully as bank crashes, share-price collapses, private misery, public uncertainty and social unrest, against a deceptively camouflaged background of advances in technology, improvements in urban living and expanding world influence. Big splashes in one part of the ocean reduce to a wave that washes away a cottage on a distant shore. One respectable London family, the Venns, who had for generations produced parsons for the Anglican church one after the other like eggs from a hen, is an example of the struggling middle class of the immediate post-Waterloo years. They tripped off to Margate for fun, they deplored slavery, they were good to their maid; but anxiety will out: ‘What shall we do’, 28-year-old unmarried Emilia Venn wrote in 1825, ‘now that they are reducing the interest from 5 per cent.’ A few days later the family was pulling itself together:
Had a long discussion with [brother] Henry about our affairs after breakfast . . . Became more fully acquainted with the state of our income, & Henry’s characteristic liberality & generosity towards us.
The shock, when it came, left the Venns flapping and clucking and unable to see straight:
12 Dec 1825 Mr Batten [Emilia’s brother-in-law] went into the city, & came back with the news of the banks failing everywhere & of such a panic as has not been known for years.
13 Dec Mr Cunningham came & brought the news that Sir Peet Paul & Henry Thornton’s bank had stopped payment. Mr Batten dined at Sir Rob. Ingles & had a letter in the evening telling him of the failure of their bank.
23 Jan 1826 Nothing talked about but the Drury’s & their debts.
1 Feb News brought to us early in the morning that the Drury’s were gone! . . . Half the tradesmen round have been ruined by them.
The 1825 crash was heralded in two letters from a perceptive young London architect, Thomas Donaldson, to Robert Finch, a retired parson living in Rome. In the first, written in April 1824, Donaldson saw nothing but riches in London:
We are going very well in England . . . and so rich that the great Capitalists know not how to employ their money. Project after Project, Bubble after Bubble rises, has its day and then sinks to nothing. They have already begun upon London Bridge, which is to consist of 5 elliptic Arches . . . They are driving piles. Scientific men profiting by the excess of money in the market are devising schemes which tend at the same time to public utility and individual profit and by this means we have some very useful projects in contemplation.
But within a year Donaldson realized that something else was coming:
The people in England seem completely mad with schemes for the formation of large associations of capitalists in schemes of every description. The famous South Sea Bubble of former days is acted over and over again. Speculators are continually failing and involving hundreds of others yet still the floating unemployed capital is so great as to make the money’d men undertake any speculation in the hopes of realising some interest for their capital. We have 2 steam washing companies – a bread company – a fish company – a milk company. In fact all the necessaries of life are now furnished by companies at reduced prices and they say goods of the best quality.
The shudder from the 1825 crash had its intimate repercussions on the early life of one of the great commentators on his time. Charles Dickens’s father lost his job as a journalist when the British Press went bust in 1826, so the fifteen-year-old boy was thrown out of the only school he had known when John Dickens could no longer pay the fees. Too much, then too little money around caused intricate chains of bad investments to snap: these ups and downs are in the nature of a developing economy, in which losers and winners are the hedges and ditches, the light and shadow of the landscape. Many tiny tragedies followed in the wake, for example, of the scam of majestic proportions dreamed up by the Scotsman Gregor McGregor. After an adventurous career fighting in the Peninsula War and in South America, McGregor invented in 1820 a small state in South America, ‘Poyais’, somewhere on the coast of Venezuela. Coming to England, he sold investment bonds, deeds to land, and official positions with a civil service that did not exist, of a nation that never was, in a landscape populated only by mosquitoes, mangoes and monkeys. Thousands of people were taken in, millions of pounds were invested in this pretending Utopia. As this house of cards fell apart, and fever-ridden, furious victims crawled back home, banks and companies came to pieces and livelihoods were ruined. McGregor, having escaped across the Channel, tried it on again in France, failed again, and skipped back over the Atlantic to Caracas, where he died.
The journalist Alaric Watts wrote of the 1825–6 crash as ‘the Great Panic, with which there has been nothing since, in the way of commercial distress, to compare’. Seventy or eighty country banks failed, as did six in London. Sir Walter Scott and his publishers, Constable in Edinburgh and Hurst and Robinson in London, went bankrupt and Scott had to sell his lucrative and formerly unassailable copyrights to pay part at least of his debts, tied up as they were in a complex web of business links with publishers and printers. At the other end of the income scale, William Woollett’s widow Elizabeth, who had joined in the three cheers for the completed plates in the good old days, had transferred all her late husband’s engraved plates to Hurst and Robinson in exchange for an annuity in 1819; when they collapsed, the Woolletts’ surviving daughter was left in penury.
Charles Knight, proprietor of the educational Penny Magazine, widely read by all classes, described the dismay at the Publishers’ Club when news of the crash came through, the panic ‘passing over all our tribe like the Simoom, bringing with it general feebleness, if not individual death’. Hearing that his bank in Windsor was about to close its doors to creditors because its own money was tied up in another failing bank in London, Knight acted as an emergency courier from London of a large amount of cash. ‘Funds for the Windsor Bank!’ he cried as his coachman changed horses at Hounslow. ‘Funds for the Windsor Bank!’ cried the turnpike man as the news spread and Knight’s coach galloped on through the river mist. Arriving at last in Windsor, the coach clattered and clashed on the old bank yard ‘amidst hurrahs of a multitude outside, to whom I had proclaimed my mission’. The bank was saved by Knight’s timely and determined action.
Further crashes, in 1837 and 1838, came about when very large sums of money were poured into capital schemes in both Britain and the United States. Another in 1847 was fuelled by ‘railway mania’ – over-investment in the burgeoning railway system developed through private enterprise scarcely controlled. And so they went on, the inevitable results of a fluid supply of money meeting hope, miscalculation and criminal fraud. A young apprentice wood engraver, Edward Whymper, later a distinguished mountaineer, safely employed in cutting illustrations for books, coolly described the next crash of 1855:
A London bank has failed (Strahan, Paul and Co) which has made moneyed men rather dull. They have debts to the amount of £750,000 and next to nothing to pay it with. How they have managed it, nobody knows, for the last partner brought in to the business £180,000. They have made away with securities that were placed with them to keep (that is, stole them) and one clergyman lost all his means (£22,000).
This crash found expression in Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit, published as a monthly serial between December 1855 and June 1857. In real time Dickens evokes the growth and climax of the swindle carried on by ‘the Man of the Age’, Mr Merdle, ‘the richest man in London’. When Merdle’s Bank collapses and the company’s fraud is exposed, Merdle kills himself.
The late Mr Merdle’s complaint had been simply Forgery and Robbery . . . he – the shining wonder, the new constellation to be followed by wise men bearing gifts . . . was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows.
Merdle’s suicide demonstrates the danger and insecurity inherent in the new money that paid the artist that painted the picture that furnished the house that Jack built. Merdle killed himself with a pretty tortoise-shell-handled penknife borrowed for the purpose from Fanny Sparkler. Fanny was the newly married daughter of William Dorrit, former long-term resident of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, whose fortune had been swindled from him, then belatedly returned. Thus the circle turns: in life rather than fiction the penknife might have been lent to Merdle by Emilia Venn.