11
SPECTATOR: ‘SO USEFUL IT IS TO HAVE MONEY, HEIGH-HO’
Three particularly perceptive and industrious foreign visitors came to London during the 1820s and 1830s, to have a good look: one came from France, one from Germany, one from the United States of America. Each saw the city and nation from a different perspective, and each in his own way expressed surprise and wonder at the way the metropolis displayed and spent its money, and enjoyed itself.
The French painter Théodore Géricault arrived in April 1820 to make a business proposition to the showman and entrepreneur William Bullock, owner of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Géricault’s outrageous and moving painting The Raft of the Medusa had been shown the previous year at the Paris Salon, the French equivalent of the Royal Academy. There it had garnered both praise and repulsion, and Bullock could immediately see that in showing it in London he would be bound to have a commercial success on his hands, if through controversy alone. Over the six months in which ‘Monsieur Jerricault’s Great Picture’ was displayed it was seen by up to 50,000 people, and made a healthy sum for both Bullock and Géricault. The artist stayed, worked and wandered in London until the end of 1821, experimenting on lithography with Charles Hullmandel. A miserable and solitary individual, Géricault wrote to a friend describing his London life:
I don’t amuse myself at all . . . I work a lot in my room and then roam the streets for relaxation. They are so full of constant movement and variety . . . I work and turn out lithographs with all my might. I have for some time been devoting myself to this art which is a novelty in London and is having an incredible vogue here. With a little more tenacity than I possess, I am sure one could make a considerable fortune . . . As soon as the true connoisseurs have come to know me they will use me for work worthier of myself . . . I renounce the buskin and Scripture, to lock myself into the stables, from which I expect to return covered in gold.
Géricault found darkness and tumult in London, but also invention, ingenuity and acceptance for his uncompromising art. He also saw how freely the English would spend their money, an observation that tempered even his driving pessimism. When he left England, his friend the architect C. R. Cockerell recorded a touching memoir of the Frenchman:
Singular life . . . lying torpid days & weeks then rising to violent exertions, riding tearing driving exposing himself to heat cold violence of all sorts . . . Often said that England was the best place for study he had . . . the air contributed to the habits of the People.
The German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel had a sunnier outlook on life. He made the journey in 1826, arriving on a coach drawn by four horses ‘in the finest harness just like the English ambassador’s in Berlin’:
It was driven by a huge great coachman sitting up on a box. The man looked like a fine gentleman, he wore many bright scarves, a handsome hat, thigh-boots, an elegant black under-coat and a large beige overcoat. Every two miles [from Dover] we changed horses, by turns greys, chestnuts, bays, and blacks. The countryside is a lovely green, full of trees and like one enormous park.
Schinkel visited the Regent’s Park Panorama, the Tower of London, ‘where the two princes were murdered’, as well as private art collections, mills, museums, factories, businesses, and architecture both notable and ordinary. He was in England and Wales on business from Prussia, as Waagen would be nine years later, though in Schinkel’s case it was as a civil servant, the Privy Counsellor for Public Works for the Prussian government, and Professor of Architecture at the University of Berlin. His mission in London – and in Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool – was to bring home detailed knowledge of architecture, manufacturing and society in England, for the interest of the burgeoning Prussian state. Britain, then, was the model economy that European governments paid to watch. Schinkel visited the inventor Jacob Perkins’s factory and inspected machinery and its manufacture in the factories of Henry Maudsley and Joseph Bramah. He quizzed Marc Isambard Brunel on the construction of the Thames Tunnel and may well have taken home with him a copy of Charles Tilt’s neat booklet on the works: ‘when everything is finished’, Brunel assured Schinkel, ‘everything would be as dry as a living room.’
For entertainment and subsistence, Schinkel ate in the local manner: ‘Dinner in an eating house in Piccadilly, in booths in the English style, a joint of roast beef was taken from one table to another to be sliced.’ He went to Astley’s Theatre, a permanent circus amphitheatre near Hyde Park with dramatic and alarming horses and ‘elephants’:
Indian play. Magnificent costumes, a battle and storming of a castle with red and white Bengal flares, 12 horses galloped up and down the steepest mountains, 4 elephants, the black ones made up from big London horses, very convincing.
A third visitor from afar who came to see what ideas he could take away with him was the Boston sugar merchant Isaac Schofield. Coming to England in 1840, with £300 to spend on refining equipment for his business, Schofield reflected that he had arrived in paradise. He took a train from Liverpool to London:
The verdure is luxuriantly rich, the farms highly cultivated and the prospects on all sides presenting a delightful variety of tilled and meadow lands, gardens, fields of grain, groves & forests. The rout[e] does not admit of many of the gentlemen’s seats being seen but the few that we glided by appeared to be laid out with the perfection of good taste. I allude to the grounds for the houses had very plain if not ordinary appearance.
Schofield experienced the full panoply of early Victorian engineering when travelling south via Birmingham:
The roads are very thoroughly made, the bridges beautiful, the tunnels grand and the depot buildings magnificent particularly the Euston depot in London. We passed through 6 or 7 tunnels, one of them a mile & ¾ in length, taking 2¾ minutes to go through.
The twenty-first-century equivalent of Schofield’s budget is £15,000, a healthy sum to spend on a trip to Europe: ‘Of one thing I am certain that I should be able to give a good a/c of the £300 and the only fear I have is that I shall not have time to make all the investigations I wish to.’ With money of this order he travelled in comfort from Liverpool:
The first class cars are beautifully cushioned and lined and are so divided that only six persons occupy one compartment, each seat being separated from the next by a cushioned partition about as high as the arm of a chair and a similar but narrower partition extends up to the top of the car . . . Being in the mail train we stopped only at Birmingham for a few moments, just long eno’ to allow of swallowing a cup of coffee without waiting for it to cool.
Schofield was in England to do business with the sugar brokers of Mincing Lane and to investigate refining equipment then being produced in London by Perkins and Bacon, the new partnership of Jacob Perkins’s former firm, since passed on to his son.
I have seen Jacob Perkins who lives now quite secluded in consequence of some disappointments wh: I have not time to explain – the fate of genius. His son is doing an excellent buss with his hot water stoves and I passed a most agreeable day with him and Mr Bacon who is connected with him at their factory. I shall see more of them on my return and think I can turn to good account for the benefit of the Refinery & other purposes some ideas I have acquired from seeing their machinery.
The visit combined, he tells his family back home, travel around England, business and pleasure in London, and further travelling into Russia to St Petersburg, then back to England via Lübeck, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels and Paris. ‘I fancy the whole Island must be a garden’, he wrote, when describing his journey to Windsor. Compared to Dickens’s frantic and furious descriptions of railway travel in Dombey and Son, this is bucolic and courteous in the extreme.
Nevertheless, Schofield, an ordinary businessman on an ordinary business trip, did leave an evocation of the roar and riot of London, its pains and its pleasures – an account that is extraordinary in its richness and clarity. Earlier we read his description of a coach journey down the Strand (see pages 53–4). Schofield stayed at a hotel in Charing Cross, from where he had only to go to the front door,
hold up my finger to an omnibus, wh: are continually passing and presto we are whisked through the Strand, Fleet, Ludgate, past St Paul’s, down Cheapside & the Poultry to the Bank, in the vicinity of wh: that is within half a mile to a mile, wh: are short distances here, I find most of my commercial friends.
Schofield was a businessman in a hurry, dining in ‘fast food’ chop-houses: ‘I always make a real good John Bull feast on Beef, dumplings, cheese and a pint of stout. I work too hard to grow fat fast.’ In his time off he visited the Adelaide Gallery, the Tower of London, the Panorama of London in Regent’s Park, Swiss Cottage and the zoo, and walked in London’s parks. These sights were the staple entertainment for the passing visitor, the men and women for whom John Murray published his Modern London guide in 1849, and who contributed not only additional income to the local economy, but sent home accounts of their experiences to enrich the literature.
There were countless ways of spending money in London on enjoyment. Géricault the artist, Schinkel the government inspector, Schofield the businessman – each had his own preference and priorities. Arthur Hugh Clough in his poem ‘Spectator ab Extra’, written in the 1850s, looks at the world around him with a more detached, cynical view than any of the three foreign visitors:
It was but this winter I came up to town,
And already I’m gaining a sort of renown;
Find my way to good houses without much ado,
And beginning to see the nobility too.
So useful it is to have money, heigh-ho!
So useful it is to have money.
Oh dear what a pity they ever should lose it,
Since they are the people that know how to use it;
So easy, so stately, such manners, such dinners,
And yet, after all, it is we are the winners.
So needful it is to have money, heigh-ho!
So needful it is to have money . . .
There’s something undoubtedly in a fine air,
To know how to smile and be able to stare,
High breeding is something, but well-bred or not,
In the end the one question is, what have you got.
So needful it is to have money, heigh-ho!
So needful it is to have money.
‘So needful it is to have money’, wrote Clough, while 250 years earlier the philosopher Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, had taken a different angle, one echoed in the 1770s by Adam Smith (see page 4). Bacon wrote:
Above all things, good policy is to be used, that the treasure and moneys in a state be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise a state may have a great stock and yet starve. And money is like muck; not good unless it be spread.
Consumers of the products of the business of art who used the common lubricant of money ranged from those of effectively infinite wealth who could buy more or less anything they wanted, to foreign visitors in search of business and information, to an indigenous family such as the Venns, suppliers of clergy to the Anglican church generation by generation since the Reformation. The Venns are an ideal counterpoise between the rich who could spend as they liked, the poor who observed and struggled, and those who asked casually, in Clough’s words, ‘High breeding is something, but well-bred or not,/ In the end the one question is, what have you got.’
Rooted as it was in the loam of English middle-class society, the Venns’ respectable and modest way of life, handed down from parson to parson, was easily put off balance by even the smallest shift in stock market prices. Rev. John Venn, rector of Clapham, Surrey, had died nine years earlier, leaving a younger generation to handle a serious financial crisis. Anxious about the fluctuation in the value of their assets, the Venns had little to cut when the crash came, and much to lose. They were intellectual, charitable, ruminative people, Cambridge-educated, and among the founders of the Church Missionary Society. Marrying into and forming friendships with the Macaulays, Trevelyans, Wilberforces and Stephens, they were at the heart of the intellectual aristocracy that came to embrace university teaching and the writing of history and fiction, and, eventually, spawned the Bloomsbury Set. The Venns were the kind who picked up the banner of influence, curiosity and social conscience from people such as Maria Callcott, and who bought their books at Hatchard’s, the ‘Godly Bookseller’. Travelling east and south, they spread the Christian gospel as missionaries, and published devout pamphlets, sermons and memoirs. John Venn had followed his father as a leading figure in the Clapham Sect, while Henry became a Prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral, and the secretary and mainstay of the Church Missionary Society. Their younger brother John was in 1822 coming to the end of his prize-winning school career at the East India Company’s college at Haileybury.
The Venns’ liberal, reformist views echoed those of their friends and associates. They dined with the Macaulays; they heard Wilberforce, Macaulay and O’Connell speak against slavery at the Freemasons’ Hall:
Could not get a seat, & stood in much heat & discomfort under the platform all the time. The uproar very tremendous . . . The audience thrown almost into fits by Mr Wilberforce’s speech.
Holidays included trips to the continent and a visit by steam-packet to Margate and Broadstairs, and in 1820 there was much family fuss over the ‘taking’ of their portraits by the careful and observant portrait artist Joseph Slater. Emilia gives a blow-by-blow account in her diary of visits to this busy artist whose likenesses combine the intimacy of Richard Cosway and the glamour of Thomas Lawrence with a touch of worthy dullness that suited his clients’ habit. Slater was already familiar with the Venns: he had drawn John Venn’s portrait a decade or more earlier, and may have been prepared for the fuss the family would make:
2 March 1820: Went to Slaters together to settle about having our pictures taken for dear John: – a gift from Jane.
16 March: Thursday: Had my 1st sitting for my own frightful picture.
7 April: To Slater’s to see our own pictures. All met in his room & made a great confusion there.
10 April: Catherine & I took Mrs Venn to Mr Slater’s, to have her picture taken; & I am quite tired of the sight of Slater’s room, & his face, & everything about it.
These were people for whom art was probably a strange business, interesting and enjoyable to touch upon, but stressful when it came too close.
How did visitors, and those residents with money, enjoy city life and consume the products of culture? In the theatre and in art exhibitions the excitement and dread to be found daily on the streets could be experienced vicariously through performance and picture. In public lectures learning and understanding, entertainment and experiment illuminated instruction that could also be found at home in books and journals. In clubland and chop-houses, in parties, soirées and conversation, the traces of company and friendship have come down to us in family likeness, the milking of grandparents’ memory, correspondence, memoirs, and from the chance and challenge of life.
In families with only the slightest sense of continuity, the practice of commissioning portraits was a given where there was money enough to accomplish it. The Venns were not unusual in this respect, just typical. When Emilia Venn says that she is ‘quite tired of the sight of Slater’s room, & his face, & everything about it’, she reveals the ordinariness of the activity of sitting for a portrait. Portrait drawing for those of modest circumstances stretched in its reach to the making of engravings to circulate the image further, when there was the family demand to do so. It follows that there came a point where the engraving of the portraits of notable individuals became less of a family and more of a commercial opportunity, opening up the market both for admirers to collect and for subjects to distribute. Ackermann and Colnaghi published portraits because they provided a real commercial benefit; they wrestled, for example, over the copyright of Nelson’s image in 1805, part of a battle for leadership in a lucrative and crowded market. When photography developed in the 1840s, it was no wonder that its most immediate and commercial application, evidenced by the burgeoning of photographic studios in every town and city, was to create a market for the reproducible portrait photograph. As photography rose and spread, so commercial engraving, in particular of portraits, began to change its nature, to invest in new technology, and then, inevitably, to fall away.
Portrait collecting beyond family use had become an established practice by the mid-nineteenth century. The engraving of portraits followed on naturally as a broadcast medium, the images sweeping across the nation and empire in the baggage of surveyor, trader and memsahib. Benjamin Robert Haydon noticed the trend in 1817:
Portraiture . . . is one of the staple manufactures of the empire. Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonise, they carry and will ever carry trial by jury, horseracing and portrait-painting.
The result of this passion is, 200 years on, an unending stream of paintings of ‘unknown sitters’ in auction rooms across the country, and the ready availability of instant ancestry for those in need of it. Engravings shake off their identities less easily, as they usually have a name and date engraved beneath the image.
The collections of portraits that have survived the centuries more or less intact tend to be those that come from established and continuing families, usually with historic houses to keep them in, or they are of men and women connected to cultural or academic institutions. The danger to family portrait collections posed by careless heirs was neatly expressed at an early date by Sheridan in The School for Scandal (1777), when Charles Surface sells his family by auction:
This is a maiden sister . . . my Great Aunt Deborah, done by Kneller, thought to be one of his best pictures, and esteemed a very formidable likeness. There she sits, as a shepherdess feeding her flock – you shall have her for five pounds ten. I’m sure the sheep are worth the money . . . Knock down my Aunt Deborah, Careless.
It would not be long before Aunt Deborah lost her identity.
Institutional portrait series were more secure. The Royal Society, the Royal Institution, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians, livery companies, the Inns of Court – all and many more have recorded and displayed their officers, benefactors and celebrities with pride, as have (and still do) hospitals, universities and colleges worldwide. Portraits bring a sense of history, continuity and gravitas, and signal an institution’s sense of place in intellectual, professional or commercial life. Particularly significant collections for private or limited circulation include the thirty or more portrait profiles drawn by George Dance the Younger in the 1790s for the Royal Academy; the One Hundred Etchings, mainly of portraits made and circulated in the 1830s, by Mary Turner, the wife of Dawson Turner (see page 83); William Brockedon’s drawings of ‘Prominent People’ from the 1830s and 1840s; and the collection made for himself by Michael Faraday of portrait engravings of fellow scientists and other notables.
Faraday had collected and distributed engraved portraits at least since the early 1830s. He received a proof from Colnaghi of the engraving of Henry Pickersgill’s youthful portrait painted in 1829:
I always thought it much flattered but when I look in the glass just now and then think of the Engraving I cannot help but laugh out to imagine it meant to represent me especially as the real Common Cause usually now appears with his head in a handkerchief.
Many portraits were given to him as gifts. Thomas Phillips gave Faraday S. W. Reynolds’s engraving of Phillips’s portrait of Humphry Davy. Angela Burdett Coutts sent him an engraving of her father’s portrait: ‘I have received, and thank you heartily for, the fine portrait of Sir Francis Burdett that true old English gentleman’, Faraday responded. A most touching gift and letter came from Jane Davy, Sir Humphry’s widow, a woman who had been particularly nasty to Faraday when he was a young man touring Europe as Davy’s valet in 1813–15. By 1847 repentant and reflective, Lady Davy asked Faraday to accept a copy by Henry Pickersgill of a portrait of her late husband:
My finances are not so low even in this year of demands heavy & sad, as to deprive me, of the real pleasure of gratifying you entirely, in this little memorial of earlier Time. Pray do not therefore from mistaken caution, or delicacy, deprive me of my wish.
The purpose of these portrait collections, as Jane Davy knew and used to her purpose, was the prompting of memory and pleasure in recollection. Faraday told the French scientist Quetelet in 1851:
I do not think much of my own face but I have very great pleasure in looking upon yours & it brings by association all your kind feelings towards me back to my mind and very pleasant they are.
The artist, traveller and inventor William Brockedon was a particularly prolific maker and collector of portraits of notables. One hundred and four sitters in his collection of pencil drawings, ‘Prominent People’, reflect the extraordinary breadth of Brockedon’s apparent circle of friends and acquaintances. Drawn for his own pleasure, and ultimately for his son Philip, the collection reveals that Brockedon was highly selective in choosing who amongst his circle he would portray. Despite the fact that he referred to it later as ‘little Philip’s book of his father’s friends’, Brockedon wanted his collection to be not a living diary of his intimates, but a small ‘national portrait gallery’ in itself. To be worthy of Brockedon’s album, a subject had to have achieved something.
Brockedon’s ‘Prominent People’ represent all aspects of British intellectual, cultural and entrepreneurial life in the mid-nineteenth century. Some of them we have already met in these pages: there are painters (Clarkson Stanfield, Thomas Phillips, Samuel Prout), sculptors (John Gibson, John Flaxman, Richard Westmacott), scientists (William Wollaston, Michael Faraday, John Dalton), engineers (Jacob Perkins, Marc Brunel, Thomas Telford), writers (Sir Walter Scott, Alaric Watts, Thomas Campbell), travellers (Richard and John Lander, Charles Latrobe, George Croly), and so on. Other categories might include ‘miscellaneous writers’, archaeologists, soldiers, administrators, musicians, architects, botanists, geologists and encyclopedists. Indeed, one could say that the collection is itself encyclopedic. We might deduce from this that in describing the sitters as ‘Philip’s father’s friends’ Brockedon was stretching a point. So controlled is the collection that one might hazard that the artist sought many of them out. Categories that are significant by their absence include politicians, churchmen, British aristocracy and royalty.
Brockedon was one of the most prolific men of the nineteenth century, energetic, driven and omnipresent. He was active as a history painter influenced by Haydon, as a portrait draughtsman as intimate as Cosway, as an inventor encouraged by Faraday, and as a traveller obsessed with discovering the true route taken by Hannibal and his armies over the Alps in pursuit of which he claimed to have crossed the Alps fifty-eight times in the 1820s. The only area of creativity that seems to have escaped him was the writing of novels, though perhaps some may turn up one day. As a practising artist Brockedon had many friends in and around the Royal Academy, including John Martin, Samuel Prout, David Roberts, Clarkson Stanfield and Turner. His activity as a traveller led him to become a founder member of the Royal Geographical Society (1830), and he was in addition an active member of the Athenaeum Club, a founder member of the Graphic Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society elected in 1834. As an author he contributed articles to Charles Dickens’s Household Words, and wrote passages on Egypt, the Holy Land, Italy and Switzerland for illustrated publications by David Roberts, Clarkson Stanfield, Samuel Prout and others.
Soon after his son Philip died of consumption in 1849, aged twenty-five, Brockedon went into a decline. The young man, a civil engineer who worked for Marc and Isambard Brunel, had been the apple of his father’s eye, and his early death brought an end to the growth of the collection of ‘Prominent People’. When Brockedon himself died in 1854, the Illustrated London News reported that ‘English artists are mourning the loss of an old friend’. Dickens was rather more circumspect, describing Brockedon as knowing ‘a good deal about some curious places – is very ingenious – and may be useful’. The collection, now in the National Portrait Gallery, was left by Brockedon to his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, the transport entrepreneur Joseph Baxendale, whom we met in chapter 3.
Faraday’s and Brockedon’s portrait initiatives were intimate collecting for private enjoyment. At the other end of the scale was collectors’ particular, and not always secret, delight in erotica. Caleb Whitefoord was one such silent collector, though his predilection for naked female flesh was well known: the cartoon ‘Caleb curious. The Witty Wine Merchant’ by Isaac Cruikshank, of 1792, shows him alone enjoying a gallery of paintings of voluptuous beauties. In his letter of thanks for hospitality to Whitefoord, one guest, signing himself only ‘W. P.’, remarked on his host’s collection:
Without any compliment I must confess I have no where in my travels seen a bedchamber so well furnished as yours – & I must consider its ornaments as the most valuable part of your collection. When I awoke this morning the Venus & all her attendants presented themselves to my imagination & produced an impromptu [poem].
There follow six verses extolling the pleasures of Whitefoord’s bedroom, including
For a bigot the third Charles of Spain may be reckon’d,
Who, shock’d at his nudities, sent them away,
But you wisely resemble our own Charles the Second,
Preserving them all in your chamber to stay.
If your Sanctum Sanctarum to strangers you shew
Beware, my good friend! Lest you meet a free-booker,
Who a piece might purloin while, in joys of Virtu,
Italians cry – cazzo! – & Frenchmen cry – foutre!
Turner, spending a night at the Earl of Morley’s house, Saltram, near Plymouth in 1813, found his friend and travelling companion Cyrus Redding had been given a bedroom hung with paintings of frolicking figures of nymphs and shepherds. ‘Good night in your seraglio’, he said to Redding, as they departed for bed.
Nude subjects were commonplace in art exhibitions, the opportunities for titillation and arousal that they presented being neatly contained in classical or literary subjects, such as Andromeda, Phryne and Pygmalion: Andromeda was manacled naked to a sea rock and attacked by a dragon; Phryne was paraded naked around Athens to the delight of elderly philosophers; and the sculptor Pygmalion, carving the figure of a woman from cold marble, immediately fell in love with her smooth and shining form when he had finished. William Etty pushed directly at the boundaries of acceptability and received inevitable criticism for his sensual and often explicit nudes, dressing them up in classical subjects such as Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed (1830). Bought by Robert Vernon, this rare subject explores moral transgression followed by the impossible choice between execution and murder. While the depiction of pubic hair was very rare, cleverly avoided and otherwise compromised in exhibitions, it nevertheless found its way into a number of Etty’s oil and chalk studies, and into some of the erotic drawings that Turner made for his own pleasure. For all their directness, John Gibson’s Tinted Venus (c.1851–6) and Albert Moore’s many standing nude figures are determinedly incomplete. Pubic hair was avoided by artists in exhibition pieces as if its electric shock could kill. Etty, however, made a calculated practice of setting a level of explicitness appropriate to the patron. His niece and assistant Betsy wrote to Joseph Gillott, who bought dozens of nude studies from him:
My dear Uncle is at work on your Little Scribe. Mrs Bullock wanted that, the one that Mr Etty painted for Mr Bullock is not so modest.
A reviewer in The Times was deeply upset by Etty’s contributions to the 1835 Academy exhibition:
This painter has fallen into an egregious error. He mistakes the use of nudity in painting, and presents in the most gross and literal manner the unhappy models of the Royal Academy for the exquisite idealities in which Titian and the other Masters who have chosen similar subjects revelled . . . Mr Etty has permitted many unpardonable abominations. [Phaedra and Cymocles] is a most disgusting thing, and we wonder that in these times the people who have the direction of this exhibition venture to permit such pictures to be hung . . . Such pictures are as shocking to good taste as they are to common decency; they are only fit for the contemplation of very old or very young gentlemen, and ought to be reserved for the particular delectation of these classes of persons.
Etty had his own direct view on his intentions: ‘People may think me lascivious, but I have never painted with a lascivious motive. If I had I might have made a great wealth.’ Nevertheless, he did not do too badly: on his death, Etty left £17,000 in 3 per cent bank stock and his house in York, where he had lived as a country gentleman, ‘to cultivate cabbages, keep pigs and live pretty!’.
In demonstrating the inadequacies of the Obscene Publications Bill as presented to Parliament by the then Lord Chief Justice Lord Campbell in 1856 and 1857, Lord Lyndhurst described to the House of Lords an engraving that might be found in a printshop of a painting depicting ‘a woman stark naked, lying down, and a satyr standing by her with an expression on his face which shows most distinctly what his feelings are, and what is his object’. The painting, Lyndhurst revealed, was Jupiter and Antiope by the sixteenth-century Italian artist Correggio, a favourite in the Louvre, ‘right opposite an ottoman, on which are seated daily ladies of the first rank . . . who resort there for the purpose of studying the works of art in that great gallery’.
Lord Campbell’s bill, which by a small majority became an Act of Parliament, was principally aimed at publishers and book- and printsellers. It did nevertheless also put the fear of prosecution into those trustees and curators responsible for the display of the national collections of paintings, principal among them the director of the National Gallery, Sir Charles Eastlake, and the keeper, Ralph Wornum. The importation by a Paris dealer of a painting of The Three Graces caused Wornum consternation when it was held at Newhaven and there came to the attention of the customs authorities, as it
represented three naked women [and] was stopped . . . under the imagination that it was contrary to the spirit of Lord Campbell’s Act suppressing indecent pictures. This caused some days delay in the arrival of the picture in London.
In the event the painting was released and delivered to Trafalgar Square where Eastlake, as Wornum noted, pronounced it to be ‘Not a Raphael, of very little merit and less value’.
The Turner Bequest caused considerably longer-lasting concern to the National Gallery trustees, containing as it does groups of more or less explicit erotic drawings within its interstices. These crop up from all periods of Turner’s life, from his young manhood in the first decade of the nineteenth century to the 1840s when he was in his sixties. They are almost exclusively drawn and painted within the covers of sketchbooks, sometimes bizarrely juxtaposed with pages of financial calculations, incidental landscape detail and observations of the rising sun. They demonstrate clearly that sex was an active and fruitful part of Turner’s life, and while he took it in his stride as a man of the Regency, it gave those Victorians who came to assess his bequest after his death some considerable anxiety.
Whether Turner got his material at home or in brothels is not clear, but if it was the latter, there was plenty of scope. Renton Nicholson, the editor of The Town, a weekly newspaper of intimate and sexual gossip and revelation published between 1837 and 1842, estimated that there were 1,500 brothels in London, ranging from the ‘private aristocratical nunneries’ of the West End to low and disease-ridden dives. In the West End
the ‘birds of paradise’ nestle in flocks, supported in splendour and luxury, in open defiance of popular prejudice and parochial interference . . . In York Street, Baker Street, we find a brothel kept, positively, for the sole accommodation of a noble duke, and he far advanced in years. Of this house, and some others we shall treat more fully, under the heads of Sketches of Courtezans in the future numbers of The Town.
Notable society figures were pursued by The Town, in energetic efforts to expose them. This was in a tone of enthusiasm and applause, courtesans being treated like celebrities:
Within the purlieus of the patrician vortex of St James-street resides Ellen Clark. This woman is of surpassing beauty; and from her connection with a certain duke, we may greet her: ‘Hail, star of Brunswick!’ She is truly a title hunter, and in her bearing and liaisons, is completely aristocratic, that it may be said, that rank is a necessary qualification to be admitted to her favours. It is certain, however, that wealth is indispensible . . . [T]he beauteous Ellen has a perfect knowledge of commercial transactions and business.
The bibliographer, collector and textile exporter Henry Spencer Ashbee, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Pisanus Fraxi’, collected, studied and catalogued erotic literature in a unique compendium which presented an overview of sexual exercise available for payment in London across the nineteenth century. The son of a gunpowder manufacturer, Ashbee exploded into the near-silent and invisible world of English sexual practice, finding sex and its practical literature to be a fascinating and absorbing subject. He acquired much of his material on business trips to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, and noticed an interesting sociological phenomenon at home – flagellation, he found, was a practice particularly favoured by the English:
This vice has certainly struck deeper root in England than elsewhere, and only here, I opine, can be found men who experience a pleasure rather in receiving than administering the birch. Nevertheless this is a fact, and did not discretion forbid, it would be easy to name men of the highest positions in diplomacy, literature, the army, &c., who, at the present day, indulge in this idiosyncrasy, and to point out the haunts they frequent.
Ashbee goes on to list some female flagellants, women of the town who served ‘as it were, an apprenticeship in order to acquire the art of gracefully and effectively administering the rod’. He gives a forensic account of the activities and offices of these businesswomen: Mrs Collett had premises in Tavistock Court, Covent Garden, then Bedford Street, where she died. Her niece, Mrs Mitchell, was taught by Aunt Collett, and carried on a successful business of her own, first in the Waterloo Road, and finally in St Mary’s Square, Kennington, where she died. Colleagues in the profession included Mrs James, a maid to the family of Lord Clanricarde, at 7 Carlisle Street, Soho, who eventually retired from business ‘with a good fortune, and dwelt at Notting Hill in luxury, her house being decorated in pictures, and her person covered in jewels’. The queen of the profession, according to Ashbee, was Mrs Theresa Berkley, of 28 Charlotte Street: ‘she was a perfect mistress of her art, understood how to satisfy her clients, and was, moreover, a thorough woman of business, for she amassed during her career a considerable sum of money.’
Theresa Berkley was fully equipped to amuse her clients:
Her supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant . . . Holly brushes, furze brushes; a prickly evergreen called butchers brush; and during the summer, glass and China vases, filled with a constant supply of green nettles, with which she often restored the dead to life. Thus, at her shop, whoever went with plenty of money, could be birched, whipped, fustigated, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, holly-brushed, furse-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, curry-combed, phlebotomized, and tortured till he had a belly full.
In the late 1820s Berkley’s business was going so well that an inventor of her acquaintance built a flogging machine for her which, she was assured, ‘would bring her into notice, and go by her name after her death’. The ‘Berkley Horse’ became an instant hit among her clients, and according to Ashbee brought her much business. Ashbee claims that she made £10,000 over the eight years during which she used the flogging machine at Charlotte Street. When she died in 1836, her machine was presented by her executor to the model collection of the Society of Arts. It is now, however, untraced.
The commonplace sexual activity that Turner depicts in his sketchbooks almost invariably concerns men and women in pairs; in a few, however, the figures are numerous, and in one, painted in Switzerland in 1802, the participants seem to be two women. In all of these, it seems clear, Turner was the observer, the voyeur, as he was of landscape. There are at least four further drawings which are patently gynaecological, if not pornographic. In Turner’s mainly minuscule erotic watercolours, arms, bodies and legs well up entwined and emerge out of atmospheric backgrounds, where the swish of a curtain or the tug of a sheet adds a jaunty counterpoint to the action. Pencil drawings depict single female nude figures in poses which are clearly relaxed and intimate, as well as poses adopted in the life class. Subjects with a particular erotic undercurrent are among the groups of watercolours and gouaches that Turner made at Petworth in the 1820s and 1830s, and in Venice in the 1830s and 1840s. These reflect just another aspect of the life that Turner experienced in the places where he was at his most relaxed: in the Venice examples the women are likely to have been prostitutes, while at Petworth, the Liberty Hall in Sussex overseen by the Third Earl of Egremont, life was easy-going and straightforward for visiting artists. Their host, himself the father of many illegitimate children, seems to have had no difficulty in accommodating additional unexpected overnight guests.
Walter Thornbury, Turner’s first biographer, took a typically Victorian attitude to Turner’s evident sexual appetite, principally by not discussing it directly. He wrote that Turner
would often, latterly, I am assured on only too good authority, paint hard all the week till Saturday night; he would then put by his work, slip a five-pound note in his pocket, button it securely up there, and set off to some low sailors’ house in Wapping or Rotherhithe, to wallow till the Monday morning left him free again to drudge through another week. A blinded Sampson, indeed – a fallen angel, forgetful of his lost Paradise.
If this is the case, the evidence of the sketchbooks suggests that he did not entirely ‘put by his work’ on these weekends. Thornbury also observed that Turner left four illegitimate children (two is the currently accepted number) and reports a curious conversation:
‘I once,’ said a friend, ‘heard Mr Crabbe Robinson . . . casually mention a remark dropped by the late Miss Maria Denman [John Flaxman’s sister-in-law], when the two were out for an excursion with [Samuel] Rogers (I think), and had put up at an inn in a village near London.’ ‘That,’ said the lady, pointing to a youth who happened to pass, ‘is Turner’s natural son.’
This fourth-hand story, with its dropped and uncertain remarks, should be taken with caution, but not necessarily dismissed. Turner’s achievement as an erotic artist was unlike any other, not only because his work was so accomplished and lively, but because he chose to keep it to himself and, escaping destruction, it has survived more or less intact as a group. He worked closely with engravers to broadcast his landscape and subject pictures, but the erotica was just for himself. Comparison with Etty is revealing, in that Etty’s nudes are distinctly posed studio models, not intimate actual or would-be companions. The doors of propriety had slammed closed with a crash on the subject of nudity in painting by the time Benjamin Disraeli published his novel Lothair in 1870.
When the curtain was withdrawn they beheld a life size figure exhibiting in undisguised completeness the perfection of the female form, and yet the painter has so skilfully availed himself of the shadowy and mystic hour and of some gauze-like drapery which veiled without concealing his design that the chastest eye might gaze on his heroine with impunity.
Market forces and the desire for spectacle created a demand for exhibitions that presented themselves as ‘experiences’. Among these were ‘panoramas’, massive art machines for which circular buildings such as Barker’s Panorama in Leicester Fields (later Leicester Square) were built, bringing wide-screen entertainment to all. The term ‘panorama’ (from the Greek pan-, ‘all’, and -orama, ‘view’), a word now so deeply embedded in the language that it might always have been there, was not coined until 1789 when the painter-entrepreneur Robert Barker and his son Henry devised it to describe their 360-degree prospect of Edinburgh from Calton Hill. This was shown first in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and then in the Haymarket, London. He may have patented the word ‘panorama’, but nevertheless Barker’s initiative set off a wave of imitations and improvements, prompting rival panoramas of the Battle of the Glorious First of June, followed by a view of Brighton and another of Plymouth from Mount Edgcumbe. Thomas Girtin came into the business in 1801 to create what he called an Eidometropolis, a word hammered out of ‘Eidophusikon’ (eido- = ‘form’ or ‘shape’; -phusikon = ‘physical’), coined by the painter Philip de Loutherbourg to describe his theatre of moving pictures that entertained audiences in the 1790s. Girtin’s creation was an enveloping view of London, painted on a canvas about 200 feet in circumference, as seen from the roof of a warehouse near Southwark Bridge; it included a stark and telling view of the shell of the burnt-out Albion Mills. Though from a lower perspective, this is more or less the view that can be seen daily from the pods of the London Eye. Girtin went on to produce a panorama of Paris, before his early death in 1802.
From these beginnings productions came thick and fast, showing at the Panorama in Leicester Square, and in Spring Gardens just off Trafalgar Square. Subjects included Boulogne, Constantinople, the Battle of Trafalgar, Weymouth, Copenhagen, and even, in the Athenaeum Rooms, Leicester Square, ‘A Grand Panorama of the World’. Competition was intense, ‘the largest, most beautiful and instructive panorama ever offered to the public’ being the claim of the Astronomical Panorama at Savile House, Leicester Square. Within months of the Battle of Waterloo, on 18 June 1815, Henry Barker’s panorama of the scene was displayed in Leicester Square. The great and the good attended this, The Times reporting that the Duke of Wellington had visited a later version, of 1823, as if he had not seen enough of that particular battle already. Topicality was a constant theme, along with geographical splendour. The young architect Thomas Donaldson, recently home from touring and studying in Rome and Naples, illustrated the speed of turn-round in panorama production, and promoters’ hunger for the exotic and extraordinary. Pompeii was in the 1820s crawling with archaeologists, artists and architects, all digging and measuring and coming home with souvenirs. The smothered city was a rich source of detail for Donaldson, who would become a distinguished London architect and a founder of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He wrote to his friend and mentor Robert Finch in Rome, displaying how he was putting his new knowledge to good use as an adviser to a panorama-maker:
A Panorama is now open of a view of the Forum of Pompeii. It is painted most exquisitely, every object is given with great fidelity & the Harmonious warm glowing atmosphere of the Contorni of Naples is represented so as to complete the illusion . . . Another view will be open’d in about 12 days . . . I have written the little Pamphlets for both which tho’ it does not produce any profit yet serves to make me known as my name is mentioned as the author at the beginning in the ‘Avviso’.
Panoramas were the newsreels of the nineteenth century: Pompeii emerged onto their walls in the 1820s, distant landscapes of Canada, Egypt and India became subjects as their horizons opened to British travellers in the 1830s and 1840s, battles in the Crimea came into the repertoire in the mid-1850s. Realism was crucial. Robert Burford, who succeeded the Barkers as the most prominent of panorama promoters, displayed a view of Benares complete with ‘strange conical edifices’, ‘motley population’ and ‘the obscene form of a corpse, carefully laid out on the frame to which it has been consigned by some pious relative’. As Henry Mayhew expressed it as late as 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition:
New amusements were daily springing into existence [in London], or old ones being revived . . . The geographical panoramas had rapidly increased, no less than three Jerusalems having been hatched, as it were, by steam – like eggs, by the patent incubator – within the last three weeks. ‘Australia’ and ‘New Zealand’, like floating islands, had shifted their quarters from Miss Linwood’s Gallery to the Strand.
The Times reported in 1860 on a further evolution of the form, the ‘Stereorama’:
We have one panorama, properly so called, in Leicester Square; we have had moving pictures, improperly called ‘panoramas’, in such numbers that the world has at last become fairly tired of them, and they are fast falling into desuetude; we once had a diorama in the Regent’s Park, which consisted of two stationary pictures shown under varying influence of light and shade, and which is now a matter of history. Cosmoramas have always been abundant . . . and we now have an exhibition at Cremorne called the Stereorama.
The Stereorama was an elaborate stage-set in which segments of Alpine views were constructed in a circle around the viewer, with ‘the effects of real water’, and an 18,000-square-foot canvas backdrop. The novelty, like all panoramas, reverses the principle of the circus, by putting the audience in the middle and the attraction itself in the surrounding stalls.
The fashion began to fade in the 1860s. John Ruskin remembered Burford and his clarity of vision, writing in his autobiography Praeterita of the ‘greatly felt loss’ that the vanishing of panoramas was to him in later life:
Burford’s panorama in Leicester Square, which was an educational institution of the highest and purest value . . . ought to have been supported by the Government as one of the most beneficial school instruments in London. There I had seen, exquisitely painted, the view from the roof of Milan Cathedral, when I had no hope of ever seeing the reality, but with a joy and wonder of the deepest.
With Burford’s death in 1861, The Times foresaw the end of the panorama as public entertainment and, in Ruskin’s view, instruction. ‘In consequence of the lamented death of Mr Burford,’ The Times announced,
it appeared highly probable that the two panoramas daily exhibited at the Colosseum would soon be the only specimens of their kind . . . Year after year [Burford] remained the pictorial illustrator of his times, and an event of public interest seemed scarcely to have received its due acknowledgement until the spot where it had occurred had formed the subject of one of his beautiful panoramas.
A final step in the disappearance of the panorama was the incorporation of the word in the language, and its easy use as a noun describing Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897:
A long and splendid panorama of Empire was unrolled yesterday in the chief thoroughfares of London before the Queen and a vast gathering of her subjects.
While panoramas were one method of mass communication of knowledge about exotic places and events, attendance at public lectures became during the course of the nineteenth century another mass activity, comparable in some centres to theatre. The dramatic moments and spectacle to be found at the Royal Institution, for example, could be as enthralling as that on hand in a theatre in Drury Lane. Lecturing at the Royal Institution and establishing a new level of intellectual showmanship, Humphry Davy and, following him, Michael Faraday drew crowds sometimes exceeding 1,000 to the Institution’s auditorium. Faraday, who began his lecturing career in the shadow of Sir Humphry, had stepped nervously for the first time onto the lecturing stage when he addressed an audience at the City Philosophical Society in 1816:
With much diffidence I present myself before you this evening as a lecturer on the difficult, and refined Science of Chemistry, a Science that requires a mind more than mediocre to follow its progress.
Such anxieties did not last long, and Faraday soon became a star attraction. Friedrich von Raumer, the German historian and Anglophile, was impressed by his delivery:
He speaks with ease and freedom, but not with a gossipy, unequal tone, alternately inaudible and bawling, as some very learned professors do; he delivers himself with clearness, precision and ability.
Raumer added later: ‘Why have we [in Germany] nothing similar? . . . This British institution combines, in a laudable manner, external convenience, literary resources, agreeable conversation, and welcome instruction.’
The Royal Institution was one of many places where the public, or members of a loose and informal society, could experience scientific lectures. Open more or less equally to both men and women, the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street had weekly ‘discourses’ on Friday evenings in the season, linking central principles and recent discoveries in science to matters of topical note. A discourse that Faraday gave in 1835 was ‘The manufacture of pens from quills and steel’, outlining the past, present and future of pen-nib making, and drawing together the results of the invention and entrepreneurship of pen-makers including Joseph Gillott and William Brockedon. Five hundred and twenty-eight people attended. Others included surveys and explanations of the science behind the work of Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, details of experiments in vaporization that Sir John Franklin was to carry out on his ill-fated expedition to the Arctic in 1846, and an account of the latest studies of how black-figure glazes were made on Greek pots.
Dozens of other institutions put on series of lectures including the Surrey Institution, the North London Institution, the Russell Institution, the National Gallery of Practical Science (the Adelaide Gallery) and the London Mechanics’ Institute. The setting-up of institutes and institutions in London and beyond was an early Victorian industry. Some concentrated on public instruction, others were geared to formal education courses. A subject that generated particular excitement was electricity, and on the day of the publication by John Murray of the four-volume collected edition of The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, 5 February 1816, an evening course of lectures on ‘Electrical Philosophy’ began at the Russell Institution, Great Coram Street, Russell Square, given by Mr Singer. Thus poetry with a shocking line in emotional assault and exotic travel was launched in London at the same time as new understanding of the shock and power of electricity was revealed.
There was an early wildness in claims about what electricity could do, from its use in medicine to its appearances in nature. In the 1780s the quack doctor James Graham filled his rooms in his Temple of Health and Hymen at Adelphi Terrace, and later in Schomberg House, Piccadilly, with electrical apparatus, wires, glass insulators, metal globes and a flying dragon with electric sparks coming out of its eyes. People came for miles to find their cures in all this nonsense. The Times reported in 1822 on a claim by the botanist Linnaeus’s daughter that ‘Nasturtium blossoms have been observed to emit electric sparks towards evening . . . It is seen most distinctly with the eyes partly closed.’ In electrical lectures there were sparks and shocks, and hair-raising demonstrations, as members of the audience were encouraged to come up to the stage and hold a terminal while static electricity was generated to raise their hair and cause showers of sparks. When the Duke of Wellington visited the Adelaide Gallery, he fiddled about with a battery and got a nasty shock: ‘the hero of a hundred fights, the conqueror of Europe, was as helpless as an infant under the control of that mighty agency.’ While Faraday chose not to make money out of his discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831, leaving that to others, the market for scientific instruments that his discoveries had spawned became flooded with bizarre and yet more bizarre pieces of equipment in which handles were turned, levers pulled, coils of wire revolved in magnetic fields, and sparks flew.
From Leicester Square, down across Trafalgar Square to the Strand, there was entertainment of a more or less educational kind. Opposite what is now the Savoy Hotel was the Exeter Exchange – generally known as Exeter ’Change – where the air was filled with growls and roars of lions and tigers, barely drowned by the noise of traffic. The menagerie at Exeter ’Change managed to maintain a thin veil of respectability, by attracting the respectable to a place where wild animals could be studied, until it was demolished in 1829 to widen the road. Haydon and Landseer both went there to draw, and it was one of the sights that moved the young Wordsworth when he first came to London in the 1790s. An advertisement in The Times in 1818, placed by the proprietor Edward Cross, announced the birth of a pair of lion cubs at Exeter ’Change and encouraged thinking people to come along and see them, because ‘so far from partaking of the ferocious spirit of their noble sire and dam, [they] are even more docile than the tamest of our English dogs’:
it really is curious to see how quiescently they receive the embraces of ladies and children . . . it affords the philosophic mind a rare opportunity of appreciating the correctness of Buffon on natural history.
Another prize exhibit was Chunee the elephant. Cross acquired the beast in 1812, and rapidly it became one of the most famous creatures in London. Byron was deeply impressed by its apparent courtesy, writing in his journal that ‘the elephant took and gave me my money again, took off my hat, opened a door, trunked a whip, and behaved so well, that I wish he was my butler’. The animal performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and was regularly paraded along the Strand. But Chunee could not take the strain for ever. He suffered agony from an infected tusk in 1826 and became enraged – or as The Times put it, showed ‘strong symptoms of madness’ – and crashed about in his cage. He ‘refused the caresses of his keepers’ and rammed the 3-foot-thick oak and iron bars so violently that he was in danger not only of breaking himself free, but of releasing the other wild animals into the streets. The soldiers guarding government offices down the road at Somerset House were sent for, and they and a dozen other men with guns rallied round, formed an orderly firing squad, and eventually, after loosing a barrage of bullets at him and piercing him with spears, killed him. The commotion drew crowds to gather, causing the surrounding streets to be closed, but with the dead elephant still warm and its blood ‘flood[ing] the den to a considerable depth . . . the public were admitted (upon payment of the accustomed charge)’, and the room ‘kept crowded till a late hour at night’. Lurching as it did from cod-education to horrific sensationalism, the menagerie in the Strand fed a voracious but equivocal appetite.
Half a mile from the Strand, in Piccadilly, William Bullock ran a show that was as busy and as popular as Exeter ’Change, but quieter and not so smelly. His elephant, like all his other animals, was stuffed, and silent. To the designs of the architect Peter Frederick Robinson, Bullock built a grand Egyptian temple fronting Piccadilly to house his ever-increasing natural history and ethnography collection. Opening the building to the public in 1812, Bullock proclaimed his museum to be a genuine establishment for the ‘Advancement of the Science of Natural History’. Two hundred yards south from the Royal Institution, where discoveries in chemistry were made and taught daily, this was a challenging claim. ‘One department of the Museum (the Pantherion)’, Bullock wrote,
is entirely novel, and presents a scene altogether grand and interesting . . . the lofty Giraffa, the Lion, the Elephant, the Rhinoceros, etc are exhibited as ranging in their native wilds and forests; whilst exact models, both in figure and colour, of the rarest and most luxuriant Plants from every clime, give all the appearance of reality.
Bullock goes on to suggest that, while in Paris the Louvre is ‘enriched with the spoils of nearly the whole Continent’ and ‘contains more treasure in Painting and Sculpture than perhaps will ever be amassed in one Collection’, the British Navy and colonies have such extended reach that he will ‘shortly be enabled to make a collection of Natural History far surpassing anything of the kind at present in existence’.
From beginnings in Birmingham and Liverpool, where as a young man he was an apprentice and then a practising silversmith, Bullock came with his collection to London, having first shown it in Liverpool. He had, quite simply, global ambitions as an exhibitor, which he expressed in his early thirties in London in the presence and activities of his splendid Egyptian Hall. ‘When the information and delight which may be derived from this Exhibition, especially by the rising generation, are considered,’ he continued,
the great sum expended in forming it, and the erection of the present large and commodious building for its reception, the Proprietor trusts that the terms will be approved of. Admission to each exhibition, One Shilling . . . Subscriber for life £10.10s.
Bullock claimed to have gathered together 15,000 species at a cost exceeding £30,000. Donations came from individuals all over Britain, including some from Sir John Leicester of Tabley, who had made himself an expert in the study of fish, Mrs Polito, the widow of Stephen Polito, the original owner of the menagerie at Exeter ’Change, and the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. Bullock was continually on the lookout for more specimens, and broadened his ambition to collect man-made objects. In an advertisement in his Companion to the museum he announced:
The full value given for rare and uncommon Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, Shells, Old Paintings, Carvings on Wood or Ivory, Stained Glass, ancient and foreign Arms and Armour, or any uncommon production of Art or Nature.
Broadly, then, Bullock’s ambitions were not only global, but Napoleonic. The establishment that he was nurturing was beginning even to encroach on the territory of the British Museum in Bloomsbury.
Always having an eye out for the spectacular, and in a purposeful move to outdo the panorama-makers with a stupendous show of scale, Bullock displayed in 1816 the 26-foot-long canvas Brutus Condemning his Sons by the French artist Guillaume Lethière, and the following year the 30-footlong canvas Christ Raising the Son of the Widow of Nain by Jean-Baptiste Joseph Wicar, one of the enablers of Napoleon’s short-lived plan to denude Europe of its treasures. Stealing a march on the panorama men, this was spectacular art; the panoramas were merely spectacle. Showing at the Egyptian Hall at the same time as the Wicar in 1817 was the 11-foot-high statue by Canova, Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker. This had been commissioned for Napoleon, but was never delivered to him; instead it was bought as spoils of war by the nation as a gift for the Duke of Wellington. Shipped to London in 1817, the work lingered at the docks before being moved slowly to Apsley House by way, briefly, of the Egyptian Hall. There the Prince Regent saw it, incognito, as The Times reported:
Yesterday the Prince Regent went to Bullock’s Museum, to see the grand picture by Wicars [sic], of Christ raising the Widow’s Son; the colossal statue of Bonaparte; and the portrait of the Empress Josephine. His Royal Highness mixed among the spectators without being recognised.
Bullock sold his collection in 1819 and went to Mexico to look for more and different artefacts for display. He maintained his commercial interest in large paintings, displaying Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem in 1820, and an exhibition of John Martin’s paintings in 1822. He sold out of the Egyptian Hall in the mid-1820s and went back to the United States on another characteristically bold venture, this time to set up a utopian housing scheme on the banks of the Ohio River. The Hall itself began a new lease of life as a place for the exhibition of paintings and watercolours, for parties and soirées, and gradually lost its special Bullock shine. Being hired out for entertainments, it was the venue for the masquerade and carnival to commemorate the twenty-first birthday of Princess Victoria in May 1837, a month before she became queen. A scene ‘of unparalleled grandeur’ was promised for the evening, at a price of one guinea for a single ticket, to include supper and a bottle of wine, and a guinea and a half ‘for a lady and gentleman’.
The Royal Panopticon of Science and Art opened in 1854 in Leicester Square, the brainchild of Edward Marmaduke Clarke, a scientific-instrument maker who had been one of the many technicians and inventors to take quick advantage of developments in the manufacture of electrical machines. Clarke saw a good business in bringing science to a metropolitan audience. The Panopticon was to be a place of entertainment and education, in the manner of the by now defunct Adelaide Gallery, where the enjoyment and understanding of the science of electricity was but one of the many plums on offer. The Panopticon offered everything: it tried to combine the splendour of art with the aroma of animals and the prick of science.
The artisan and mechanic may learn how to avail themselves of the discoveries and inventions of the master-minds . . . The artist may take the initiative from the admirable works around him . . . The manufacturer . . . will be better prepared to meet that competition which . . . is ever fatal to the indulgence of inactivity and ignorance . . . The agriculturalist [could determine] the value of the one-thousand-and-one species of manure offered to his notice as the acme of perfection.
In short, education was the thinnest of wrappings for entertainment in this spectacular building, which brought the most exotic Moroccan architectural manner to central London, where the Odeon cinema now stands. It had a frontage of 104 feet and a central rotunda 97 feet in diameter supported on iron columns; it glowed with coloured Minton tiles, prickled with statuary, boasted with armorial bearings, and had an ‘Ascending Carriage’, or hydraulic lift, to take visitors to the upper galleries. Conceived in 1850 in the midst of the enthusiasm and national drive which brought the Great Exhibition to its successful completion – the latter achieved only with the combined energies and bullying power of Prince Albert, Henry Cole and British organizational and industrial zeal working in concert – the Royal Panopticon opened with enormous fanfare in 1854, soon attracting 1,000 visitors a day. Clarke had invested five years of his life in it and had spent more than £80,000, but nevertheless through poor management, lack of vision and the interference of religious organizations, it became ‘a total, irretrievable failure’. It was sold up in 1856, the building and remaining equipment being bought by the entrepreneur E. T. Smith for £9,000. Smith turned it into the Alhambra Theatre for drama, dance and practically everything else on two legs, including one of the first performances of the ‘Parisienne Quadrille’, better known as the Can-Can.
With the Royal Academy, the British Institution, the National Gallery, the panoramas, Exeter ’Change and Bullock’s Piccadilly emporium all in a relatively restricted geographical area, public exhibitions in London were a reflection of how the subsidized and the unsubsidized sectors responded to supply and demand. The National Gallery was a creature of the state, displaying the nation’s paintings as a government service. There was no public subsidy for the Academy and the British Institution, and both organizations could remain active and open to the public only through heavy influx of funds from the interested public and the independent rich. The panoramas, Exeter ’Change, the Egyptian Hall and the Royal Panopticon, on the other hand, succeeded or failed by the hard hand of commerce. Attracting income through clever footwork from a multiplicity of sources, the Royal Academy is with us still. The British Institution, still going strong in 1867, was only dissolved by its directors when its lease in Pall Mall expired that year; it had plenty of money in the bank: its capital at closure was £15,000 in consols, with £1,057 cash in hand. The Institution was mourned by the Art-Journal on behalf of the interested general public:
It has afforded a source of gratification to circles widely exterior even to those comprehending the third and fourth social removes from the proprietorship of the paintings; and by these alone . . . its lapse will be sincerely deplored.
Set up as the national bastion in support of old master and modern painting, the tide of change had swept over it, and in a post Pre-Raphaelite era it was out of touch. Or as the Art-Journal put it enigmatically:
Could the authorities of the British Institution have foreseen that painting would lapse into the scenery of society and familiar life, they would probably have cultivated their bank accounts in such wise as to make their successors masters of the present situation.
Exactly 100 years after James Graham had brought electricity and medicine together, understanding of electricity had reached the stage when in 1882 a deputation of professors from King’s College, London, could approach the London Livery Companies for money to develop the teaching of the subject, and demonstrate how the teaching of electricity at the College sent electricians around the world and into pioneering industries:
There are at least six of our students who are engaged in Messrs Siemens’ works; among them the chief electricians in the cable testing department, and one of their chief engineers on board the cable ship ‘Faraday’, and another who had the entire charge of Messrs Siemens exhibit at the Crystal Palace electrical exhibition.
Electricity had come a long way in those 100 years into the culture of art, science and entertainment, and gradually superseded steam as the nation’s driver. In 1883 Sir Coutts Lindsay installed electric lighting in his Grosvenor Gallery in New Bond Street, where it was powered by a coal-fired generator. Within two years Lindsay was supplying half the street with electricity and had created a cellar under the gallery to take a larger generator and a larger furnace. With its 110-foot-high chimney, the Grosvenor Gallery, the cradle of the Aesthetic Movement, became ‘the real cradle of the modern power station industry’. Thus, the first British power station resided in the basement of an avant-garde art gallery: in its early years, industry was once again being nurtured by art.