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By Michael Ward
By Caroline Miley
Showing posts with label Caroline Miley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Caroline Miley. Show all posts
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Editors Weekly Round-up, November 3, 2019
by the EHFA Editors
Enjoy this week's English Historical Fiction Authors round-up. Never miss a post - subscribe for updates via email, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Enjoy this week's English Historical Fiction Authors round-up. Never miss a post - subscribe for updates via email, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Sex, Swearing and Humour in the Regency Period
By Caroline Miley
History is full of facts, but Catherine Morland is probably not the only reader who sometimes found them a little trying: “I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page.”(1) Facts are, of course, of primary importance. But it's one thing to discover, for instance, that the Duke of Wellington's birthday was May Day, and quite another to know how it would have been celebrated - and the way life was lived is often far more interesting, but harder to discover, than reigns and dates and public events.
Fortunately, in the late Georgian era there's a mass of contemporary material, ranging from newspapers, letters, diaries, memoirs and military dispatches to essays and novels. Not only are these full of useful information, they show clearly how people used to write and express themselves.
There's an idea that the Regency was full of people saying 'Demme, m'Lud, I do protest..' and so on, but a glance at Jane Austen's prose shows that ordinary people didn't speak like that at all. One of the things evident in reading a wide range of contemporary material is that educated people often used two quite different modes of expression, depending on what they were writing. There's the everyday, which is plain and unadorned. Clear, elegant prose was what the Georgians aimed for. Military dispatches, for instance, are models of concise statement. Here is the Duke of Wellington (in recorded speech): “All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guessing what was at the other side of the hill’.”(2) So too with letters, including those Jane Austen gives in her novels. But when describing scenery in memoirs, writers sometimes break into a special 'literary' form: 'When we attained the crest of the hill, what a vale of Elysian delight opened before us! Fair Venus herself would not disdain to dwell in the exquisite groves...' and so on. But they didn't talk like that. It was a poetic mode considered suitable for literature.
The real problem for anyone wishing to learn not only the facts but the feeling of an era, is the vast amount of material that never appears in print. At the forefront of this is sex and swearing. Neither subject is ever mentioned, although there must have been a great deal of both. We can know quite a lot about sex at the time, but less of how people talked about it, and therefore what they thought. It was not a subject for polite conversation, so remained hidden. Fielding’s novels (Tom Jones, The History of Moll Flanders) and contemporary plays show that, as might be expected, people were keen on sex and thought about it a lot. There are hints about sexual desire under the text of Austen’s novels and letters – Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, and other seductions, must have been motivated by libido, and there are occasional comments that ‘I could not like him in that way’. It is noteworthy that the Georgians were a great deal less squeamish about sex than the later Victorians. The fact of Colonel Brandon’s having an illegitimate daughter, for instance, doesn’t make him an unsuitable husband for Marianne. But when it comes to details of what people did and how they did it, if it were not for Fanny Hill (3) and Rowlandson's numerous, often very graphic erotic drawings, I don't know how we'd get on at all. As it is, these two sources provide almost too much information!
Swearing also doesn't appear in print, except the occasional genteel 'by G- sir!' Naval and military reminiscences give a few more clues - one of my favourites being the officer who recalled that he had been several days as a midshipman on his first ship before discovering that 'Damn your eyes!' was not a form of greeting. But I think it is safe to assume that there was a great deal of swearing among men and the lower classes of women, and that it centred, then pretty much as now, around the common ‘Anglo-Saxon’ sexual words in use today and blasphemy. In sharp contrast to today, though, a gentleman certainly did not swear in the presence of a lady.
Which brings me to the final category: humour. I've not been able to find any joke books of the period, but irony and satire there were in plenty, and I have to assume that broad fall-on-your-face humour was as likely to raise a laugh then as now. Again, the multitude of lampoons and caricatures of the period give us the best clues to this category. Thomas Rowlandson’s ‘The Stare Case’ depicts a crowd on the notoriously narrow staircase of the Royal Academy at Exhibition time. Plump ladies are tumbling down, their skirts hiked up to show their rounded bottoms (no underwear in those days), while some dirty old men (and the sculptor Nollekens) ogle them from the foot of the stairs. A similar idea animates his sketch of ‘The Line of Beauty (a concept in art), in which some Royal Academicians (4) have positioned themselves strategically to take in the more intimate charms of the nude model reclining before them.
There is a great deal of pictorial humour along those lines, as well as poking fun at stereotypes, such as fat greedy men shoving food into their faces and elegant dandies tight-lacing their corsets and padding their skinny hips. One of my favourites, ‘On the March’ which typically combines information with comedy, shows a line of soldiers and camp followers crossing a stream. All are burdened with various things; one man bears his wife on his back; a frolicking dog (a Rowlandson trademark) holds a bundle in his mouth, and at the rear a sturdy wife carries her officer husband, too refined to get his feet wet, on her back.
But lampoons are not the place to find the more subtle wit that really characterised the age. Here is Austen at her best, in her letters, where she spoke less guardedly than in her published works: “I do not want People to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”(5) And for a feast of raillery, as it was called, it’s hard to go past Sheridan, the noted wit and satirist, who thought that “There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature”(6). His plays are full of comedy, and he must have been a formidable opponent as an MP. To understand late Georgian humour, you can do a lot worse than to read contemporary plays. The wit is often surprisingly modern, my favourite being this riposte by Goldsmith’s Tony Lumpkin, when his mother suggests that he doesn’t want to disappoint his friends waiting at the tavern: “As for disappointing them, I should not so much mind; but I can't abide to disappoint myself.”(7)
These are not the great affairs of State (or affairs of Statesmen) that are the staple of so much history. But if we want to get inside the lives of ordinary people and find out what they thought and how they lived, then nothing is more important than humour, sex and swearing.
Notes
(1) Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, London, 1817, Chapter 14
(2) Quoted in The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D F.R.S, Secretary of the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830 (1884), edited by Louis J. Jennings, Vol. III, p. 276.
(3) Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, London 1748.
(4) Plate 32 from Charles Molloy Westmacott's "English Spy" 1824. Each artist's easel is initialled for identification: B.R.H. for Benjamin Robert Haydon, M.A. Shee for Martin Archer Shee, T.L for Sir Thomas Lawrence, B.W. for Benjamin West, R.W. for Richard Westmacott, J.J. for John Jackson, J.F. for Joseph Farington, and F.C. for Francis Chantrey (courtesy Met Museum).
(5) Letter to her sister Cassandra, December 24, 1798.
(6) The School for Scandal, Act 1, Scene 1.
(7) She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith, 1773, Act 1 Scene 1.
~~~~~~~~~~
Caroline Miley is an art historian and author of literary historical novels set in the late Georgian era. Her debut novel, The Competition, won a Varuna Fellowship and a Fellowship of Australian Writers award, and was selected by the Royal Academy of Arts for its 250th Anniversary celebrations. Her latest novel, Artist on Campaign, was inspired by wondering what would happen if a rake of an artist was obliged to put up with the British Army, and vice versa.
Her interests are art, both as a practitioner and a viewer, books, films, history, travel and gardens.
Social media
https://www.carolinemiley.com/
https://www.facebook.com/carolinemileywriter/
History is full of facts, but Catherine Morland is probably not the only reader who sometimes found them a little trying: “I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page.”(1) Facts are, of course, of primary importance. But it's one thing to discover, for instance, that the Duke of Wellington's birthday was May Day, and quite another to know how it would have been celebrated - and the way life was lived is often far more interesting, but harder to discover, than reigns and dates and public events.
 |
| Thomas Rowlandson ‘Soldiers on a March’ 1808 |
Fortunately, in the late Georgian era there's a mass of contemporary material, ranging from newspapers, letters, diaries, memoirs and military dispatches to essays and novels. Not only are these full of useful information, they show clearly how people used to write and express themselves.
There's an idea that the Regency was full of people saying 'Demme, m'Lud, I do protest..' and so on, but a glance at Jane Austen's prose shows that ordinary people didn't speak like that at all. One of the things evident in reading a wide range of contemporary material is that educated people often used two quite different modes of expression, depending on what they were writing. There's the everyday, which is plain and unadorned. Clear, elegant prose was what the Georgians aimed for. Military dispatches, for instance, are models of concise statement. Here is the Duke of Wellington (in recorded speech): “All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guessing what was at the other side of the hill’.”(2) So too with letters, including those Jane Austen gives in her novels. But when describing scenery in memoirs, writers sometimes break into a special 'literary' form: 'When we attained the crest of the hill, what a vale of Elysian delight opened before us! Fair Venus herself would not disdain to dwell in the exquisite groves...' and so on. But they didn't talk like that. It was a poetic mode considered suitable for literature.
Swearing also doesn't appear in print, except the occasional genteel 'by G- sir!' Naval and military reminiscences give a few more clues - one of my favourites being the officer who recalled that he had been several days as a midshipman on his first ship before discovering that 'Damn your eyes!' was not a form of greeting. But I think it is safe to assume that there was a great deal of swearing among men and the lower classes of women, and that it centred, then pretty much as now, around the common ‘Anglo-Saxon’ sexual words in use today and blasphemy. In sharp contrast to today, though, a gentleman certainly did not swear in the presence of a lady.
Which brings me to the final category: humour. I've not been able to find any joke books of the period, but irony and satire there were in plenty, and I have to assume that broad fall-on-your-face humour was as likely to raise a laugh then as now. Again, the multitude of lampoons and caricatures of the period give us the best clues to this category. Thomas Rowlandson’s ‘The Stare Case’ depicts a crowd on the notoriously narrow staircase of the Royal Academy at Exhibition time. Plump ladies are tumbling down, their skirts hiked up to show their rounded bottoms (no underwear in those days), while some dirty old men (and the sculptor Nollekens) ogle them from the foot of the stairs. A similar idea animates his sketch of ‘The Line of Beauty (a concept in art), in which some Royal Academicians (4) have positioned themselves strategically to take in the more intimate charms of the nude model reclining before them.
 |
| Thomas Rowlandson ‘R.A.s of Genius Reflecting on the True Line of Beauty, at the Life Academy Somerset House June 1, 1824’ |
There is a great deal of pictorial humour along those lines, as well as poking fun at stereotypes, such as fat greedy men shoving food into their faces and elegant dandies tight-lacing their corsets and padding their skinny hips. One of my favourites, ‘On the March’ which typically combines information with comedy, shows a line of soldiers and camp followers crossing a stream. All are burdened with various things; one man bears his wife on his back; a frolicking dog (a Rowlandson trademark) holds a bundle in his mouth, and at the rear a sturdy wife carries her officer husband, too refined to get his feet wet, on her back.
 |
| Thomas Rowlandson ‘The Stare Case’ 1811 |
But lampoons are not the place to find the more subtle wit that really characterised the age. Here is Austen at her best, in her letters, where she spoke less guardedly than in her published works: “I do not want People to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”(5) And for a feast of raillery, as it was called, it’s hard to go past Sheridan, the noted wit and satirist, who thought that “There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature”(6). His plays are full of comedy, and he must have been a formidable opponent as an MP. To understand late Georgian humour, you can do a lot worse than to read contemporary plays. The wit is often surprisingly modern, my favourite being this riposte by Goldsmith’s Tony Lumpkin, when his mother suggests that he doesn’t want to disappoint his friends waiting at the tavern: “As for disappointing them, I should not so much mind; but I can't abide to disappoint myself.”(7)
These are not the great affairs of State (or affairs of Statesmen) that are the staple of so much history. But if we want to get inside the lives of ordinary people and find out what they thought and how they lived, then nothing is more important than humour, sex and swearing.
Notes
(1) Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, London, 1817, Chapter 14
(2) Quoted in The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D F.R.S, Secretary of the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830 (1884), edited by Louis J. Jennings, Vol. III, p. 276.
(3) Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, London 1748.
(4) Plate 32 from Charles Molloy Westmacott's "English Spy" 1824. Each artist's easel is initialled for identification: B.R.H. for Benjamin Robert Haydon, M.A. Shee for Martin Archer Shee, T.L for Sir Thomas Lawrence, B.W. for Benjamin West, R.W. for Richard Westmacott, J.J. for John Jackson, J.F. for Joseph Farington, and F.C. for Francis Chantrey (courtesy Met Museum).
(5) Letter to her sister Cassandra, December 24, 1798.
(6) The School for Scandal, Act 1, Scene 1.
(7) She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith, 1773, Act 1 Scene 1.
~~~~~~~~~~
Her interests are art, both as a practitioner and a viewer, books, films, history, travel and gardens.
Social media
https://www.carolinemiley.com/
https://www.facebook.com/carolinemileywriter/
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Editors Weekly Round-Up, February 5, 2017
by the EHFA Editors
The EHFA Editors hope you enjoy this week's articles from the blog.
The EHFA Editors hope you enjoy this week's articles from the blog.
by Lauren Gilbert
by Barbara Gaskell Denvil
by Caroline Miley
Friday, February 3, 2017
Politics in Late Georgian Art
by Caroline Miley
There was no political art in England in the 1790s and 1800s – no art ‘of or relating to the government or public affairs of a country’1. It is a surprising assertion, given that the era was one of upheaval, change and scandal, and that the arts in general proliferated. It was a period in which exhibiting societies began to proliferate and mushrooming journals offered art criticism to a growing middle class. The annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy, the British Institution, the Society of Painters in Water-colours and their fellows were well attended. And these institutions were supported and patronised by the aristocracy, even royalty. The Prince Regent was noted for his support of the arts.
Among the contemporary and controversial topics which did not appear in the painting of the period were: The French Revolution; the Napoleonic wars; slavery (neither the ownership of slaves nor the Abolitionist movement), food riots, the Luddites, Irish home rule, the American war and the loss of the colonies, prison reform, the Highland Clearances, enclosures, Catholic emancipation, the Mary Ann Clark scandal (in which it was revealed that the Duke of York’s mistress was selling commissions in the army to officers who met with her approval); Peterloo – the list is endless. It was a period of wars, political, industrial and technological change, turbulence, and social scandals.
But look up the words ‘art’ ‘Georgian’ and ‘political’, and you will be pitched instantly into the world of the golden age of British satirical prints. The works of Cruikshank, Rowlandson and Gillray almost exemplify the era. Print shops such as that of the famous Hannah Humphrey abounded, their windows papered with the latest lampoons, with no holds barred as their creators excoriated or ridiculed everyone from the King down, through generals and members of Parliament, the aristocracy, leaders of the ton, famous actresses, and anyone who happened to be in the public eye. England, in fact, was notable for the lack of censorship of such productions.
There was plenty of overt politics, then, and plenty of satire – but it was confined exclusively to the medium of the print and the popular broadsheet. The sphere of the fine arts – painting, and especially painting in oils, the professional’s medium – was a completely different matter. There was a knife-sharp divide between the fine and graphic arts.
Nowhere was this more obvious than the way His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, was portrayed in each medium. In official portrait after portrait, painted carefully by the great and the good of the art establishment from Cosway to Lawrence, he appears as debonair, regal, handsome, a pillar of the monarchy and society (1). But he was also the favourite butt of satirists (2).
The nature of official portraits is, of course, to be official: to convey an image sanctioned by the establishment of the day. As such, paintings of men and incidents in public life can never altogether escape the taint of propaganda, and the agenda of the day was to celebrate the stability and growth of Empire. The death of Tipu Sultan, a Indian ruler who strongly resisted the encroachment of the East India Company into his territory, and was killed by the British at Seringapatam in 1799, might be thought today to have its controversial elements. John Singleton Copley’s painting of the event (3), an unabashed depiction of British expansionism at the point of the sword, is characteristic of the way such events were portrayed, and received by the public.
There were plenty of paintings which celebrated those in public life, such as Benjamin West’s ‘Death of Nelson’ (4), and they concurrently celebrated State patriotism, offering no challenge to or critique of the existing order. And leading artists were themselves part of the establishment: The Royal Academy was under Royal patronage, prominent artists were knighted, and Sir Thomas Lawrence, for instance, had a place in the procession for the coronation of George IV. The idea of artists as critics of society was not to come until after the Romantic era. In the Georgian period, they were solidly enrolled among its members.
There were strict limits, however, to what even a successful member of the Royal Academy could expect to get away with, and political subjects, even when cast in the past, were unlikely to meet with approval. Copley, for instance, trod too close to the edge in 1795 when he exhibited ‘Charles I Demanding the Five Impeached Members of the House of Commons’2, an event which had happened in the 1640s. At a private viewing, Queen Charlotte, after a long and ominous silence, said to the artist, “You have chosen, Mr. Copley, a most unfortunate subject for the exercise of your pencil.”3 It didn’t sell.4 The canon of acceptability had been set out by Royalty.
Was this discrepancy a problem? Probably not. The fine and graphic arts existed side by side, and for a broad audience. The upper class saw both Academy paintings and the wares of the print shops. The middle classes bought at the print shops and saw the paintings at occasional exhibitions – those which were not in private hands, and even they were sometimes exhibited publicly. Among their purchases, though, would be engravings of the most popular of the fine art productions. The print dealers were selling reproductions of West’s ‘Death of Nelson’, for example, for a decade after Trafalgar. This multiple audience had ample opportunity to compare the two approaches. The disjunction between the two distinct art forms was not the result of the views of an elite being forced on the mass of the people; the people themselves shared these views.
A concept prominent at the time although not much in use today is that of decorum. There was appropriate conduct, appropriate dress, and appropriate relationships. One did not wear diamonds in the morning nor a cotton dress to a grand ball. Beau Nash, when Master of Ceremonies at the Bath Assembly Rooms, castigated a gentleman who turned up in boots rather than shoes with the immortal phrase: ‘Pardon me, sir, but you have forgot your horse’5. So, too, appropriate art.
Unlike popular art forms, the fine arts were the subject of canons of taste, which were no mere arbitrary principles laid down by a coterie of snobs. At this period, and for a very long time indeed, art was seen as the expression of a society and its natures and functions were debated and theorised, then as now. Art had its own rules of decorum. In the era in question, the greatest theorist was Johann Winckelmann, whose ground-breaking The History of Ancient Art (1764) swayed several generations. His ideas were absorbed and transmitted by, among others, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Founder of the Royal Academy. They were the single greatest influence on the art of the Georgian era throughout Europe.
Winckelmann idealized Greek art for its ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’. His central doctrine was that the point of art is beauty, which he elevated to the status of a general good. Beauty, in his view, could only be achieved by subordinating particular characteristics, for example of a nude, so as to depict an ideal type rather than a flawed individual (5). Total, overall harmony was the desired end. Or, as Reynolds put it, “the whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.”6
Art which adhered to this concept of grandeur was considered appropriate – appropriate to a civilised society, a cultured drawing-room. Controversy, scandal, impropriety, vulgarity, riot, revolution, and all such topics did not aspire to beauty, to ‘quiet grandeur’, to ‘noble simplicity’. They were deformities which must be brushed away, lest they injure overall harmony.
In some countries, political subjects were not uncommon. In a stark contrast, the era in France saw fine art come to the fore as a propaganda medium. A large number of artists – not only David, but Boilly and others painted overtly political subjects. Many were simply state propaganda, but others offered a distinct perspective or critique. The death of Marat (6), or the execution of the King, are subjects that could not have appeared in England. ‘French Revolutionary Art’, in fact, is a whole category, almost a genre.
In a characteristically pragmatic English manner, the proprieties were maintained. Fine Art continued – for a while – to exemplify all that was most uplifting, in the rooms of the Royal Academy and the British Institution, while around the corner at the print shops, the citizenry forked out their penny plain and twopence coloured for scandalous broadsheets that exposed every carbuncle on the behinds of the dignified gentry whose porcelain features graced the salons.
If the Georgian era was anything, it was a time of rapid transformation. So, too, in art. The taste for the Grand Manner was ebbing. In 1812 Benjamin West exhibited ‘Christ Healing the Sick’ to enormous acclaim. In the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of the same year, JMW Turner exhibited ‘Snowstorm – Hannibal Crossing the Alps’ (7) and Constable ‘A Water Mill’. Change was on its way, but it was necessary to wait until the Victorian era for Turner’s Slave Ship (1840) although the scandalous event it refers to took place in 17817 and it was in the Victorian era that work, controversially, with its potential for critique of ruling-class politics, for the first time became a subject for art.
Notes
1. Oxford English Dictionary
2. Exhibited at Wigley’s Rooms at Spring Gardens in 1795. “King Charles I accused five members of the House of Commons of treason and demanded their surrender. The House refused, considering this a breach of their rights, and the event proved to be the foundation for the civil war that led to the king's execution.” “Process and Paradox: The Historical Pictures of John Singleton Copley” http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/4aa/4aa382.htm
3. Brushes were called pencils at this period.
4. “No customer made his appearance for Charles and the impeached members.” Allan Cunningham The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Volume 5, John Murray, London 1832, p. 181.
5.http://www.exclassics.com/nash/nashpdf.pdf
6. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourse III.
7. The infamous Zong matter, in which over a hundred living slaves were thrown overboard to avoid financial loss to the owners. The subsequent court cases caused a scandal in England and contributed to the anti-slavery movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre.
Illustrations
(1) ‘The Prince Regent in Garter Robes’, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1816
(2) ‘The Prince Regent’ by George Cruikshank, 1816
(3) ‘The Last Effort and Death of Tipu Sultan’ by John Singleton Copley, 1800
(4) ‘The Death of Nelson’, from the painting by Benjamin West, engraved by James Heath. Published 1 May 1811.
(5) ‘Cimon and Iphigenia’ by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1780
(6) ‘Death of Marat’ by Jacques-Louis David. Marat was one of the leaders of the Montagnards, the radical faction ascendant in French politics during the Reign of Terror until the Thermidorian Reaction. Charlotte Corday was a Girondin from a minor aristocratic family and a political enemy of Marat who blamed him for the September Massacre. She gained entrance to Marat's rooms with a note promising details of a counter-revolutionary ring in Caen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat
(7) ‘Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps’ by J M W Turner, 1812
[All illustrations are in the public domain]
~~~~~~~~~~
Caroline Miley is an art historian and writer with a long-time passion for literature, art, the English landscape and history, especially the late Georgian era. She has published several non-fiction books on art, craft and social comment. The Competition, in which she brought together her enthusiasms for the Regency art world and the Industrial Revolution, is her debut novel.
Website and contact
Book page
Buy The Competition
There was no political art in England in the 1790s and 1800s – no art ‘of or relating to the government or public affairs of a country’1. It is a surprising assertion, given that the era was one of upheaval, change and scandal, and that the arts in general proliferated. It was a period in which exhibiting societies began to proliferate and mushrooming journals offered art criticism to a growing middle class. The annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy, the British Institution, the Society of Painters in Water-colours and their fellows were well attended. And these institutions were supported and patronised by the aristocracy, even royalty. The Prince Regent was noted for his support of the arts.
 |
| (1) |
Among the contemporary and controversial topics which did not appear in the painting of the period were: The French Revolution; the Napoleonic wars; slavery (neither the ownership of slaves nor the Abolitionist movement), food riots, the Luddites, Irish home rule, the American war and the loss of the colonies, prison reform, the Highland Clearances, enclosures, Catholic emancipation, the Mary Ann Clark scandal (in which it was revealed that the Duke of York’s mistress was selling commissions in the army to officers who met with her approval); Peterloo – the list is endless. It was a period of wars, political, industrial and technological change, turbulence, and social scandals.
But look up the words ‘art’ ‘Georgian’ and ‘political’, and you will be pitched instantly into the world of the golden age of British satirical prints. The works of Cruikshank, Rowlandson and Gillray almost exemplify the era. Print shops such as that of the famous Hannah Humphrey abounded, their windows papered with the latest lampoons, with no holds barred as their creators excoriated or ridiculed everyone from the King down, through generals and members of Parliament, the aristocracy, leaders of the ton, famous actresses, and anyone who happened to be in the public eye. England, in fact, was notable for the lack of censorship of such productions.
There was plenty of overt politics, then, and plenty of satire – but it was confined exclusively to the medium of the print and the popular broadsheet. The sphere of the fine arts – painting, and especially painting in oils, the professional’s medium – was a completely different matter. There was a knife-sharp divide between the fine and graphic arts.
Nowhere was this more obvious than the way His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, was portrayed in each medium. In official portrait after portrait, painted carefully by the great and the good of the art establishment from Cosway to Lawrence, he appears as debonair, regal, handsome, a pillar of the monarchy and society (1). But he was also the favourite butt of satirists (2).
 |
| (2) |
The nature of official portraits is, of course, to be official: to convey an image sanctioned by the establishment of the day. As such, paintings of men and incidents in public life can never altogether escape the taint of propaganda, and the agenda of the day was to celebrate the stability and growth of Empire. The death of Tipu Sultan, a Indian ruler who strongly resisted the encroachment of the East India Company into his territory, and was killed by the British at Seringapatam in 1799, might be thought today to have its controversial elements. John Singleton Copley’s painting of the event (3), an unabashed depiction of British expansionism at the point of the sword, is characteristic of the way such events were portrayed, and received by the public.
 |
| (3) |
There were plenty of paintings which celebrated those in public life, such as Benjamin West’s ‘Death of Nelson’ (4), and they concurrently celebrated State patriotism, offering no challenge to or critique of the existing order. And leading artists were themselves part of the establishment: The Royal Academy was under Royal patronage, prominent artists were knighted, and Sir Thomas Lawrence, for instance, had a place in the procession for the coronation of George IV. The idea of artists as critics of society was not to come until after the Romantic era. In the Georgian period, they were solidly enrolled among its members.
Was this discrepancy a problem? Probably not. The fine and graphic arts existed side by side, and for a broad audience. The upper class saw both Academy paintings and the wares of the print shops. The middle classes bought at the print shops and saw the paintings at occasional exhibitions – those which were not in private hands, and even they were sometimes exhibited publicly. Among their purchases, though, would be engravings of the most popular of the fine art productions. The print dealers were selling reproductions of West’s ‘Death of Nelson’, for example, for a decade after Trafalgar. This multiple audience had ample opportunity to compare the two approaches. The disjunction between the two distinct art forms was not the result of the views of an elite being forced on the mass of the people; the people themselves shared these views.
 |
| (4) |
A concept prominent at the time although not much in use today is that of decorum. There was appropriate conduct, appropriate dress, and appropriate relationships. One did not wear diamonds in the morning nor a cotton dress to a grand ball. Beau Nash, when Master of Ceremonies at the Bath Assembly Rooms, castigated a gentleman who turned up in boots rather than shoes with the immortal phrase: ‘Pardon me, sir, but you have forgot your horse’5. So, too, appropriate art.
Unlike popular art forms, the fine arts were the subject of canons of taste, which were no mere arbitrary principles laid down by a coterie of snobs. At this period, and for a very long time indeed, art was seen as the expression of a society and its natures and functions were debated and theorised, then as now. Art had its own rules of decorum. In the era in question, the greatest theorist was Johann Winckelmann, whose ground-breaking The History of Ancient Art (1764) swayed several generations. His ideas were absorbed and transmitted by, among others, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Founder of the Royal Academy. They were the single greatest influence on the art of the Georgian era throughout Europe.
Winckelmann idealized Greek art for its ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’. His central doctrine was that the point of art is beauty, which he elevated to the status of a general good. Beauty, in his view, could only be achieved by subordinating particular characteristics, for example of a nude, so as to depict an ideal type rather than a flawed individual (5). Total, overall harmony was the desired end. Or, as Reynolds put it, “the whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.”6
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Art which adhered to this concept of grandeur was considered appropriate – appropriate to a civilised society, a cultured drawing-room. Controversy, scandal, impropriety, vulgarity, riot, revolution, and all such topics did not aspire to beauty, to ‘quiet grandeur’, to ‘noble simplicity’. They were deformities which must be brushed away, lest they injure overall harmony.
In some countries, political subjects were not uncommon. In a stark contrast, the era in France saw fine art come to the fore as a propaganda medium. A large number of artists – not only David, but Boilly and others painted overtly political subjects. Many were simply state propaganda, but others offered a distinct perspective or critique. The death of Marat (6), or the execution of the King, are subjects that could not have appeared in England. ‘French Revolutionary Art’, in fact, is a whole category, almost a genre.
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In a characteristically pragmatic English manner, the proprieties were maintained. Fine Art continued – for a while – to exemplify all that was most uplifting, in the rooms of the Royal Academy and the British Institution, while around the corner at the print shops, the citizenry forked out their penny plain and twopence coloured for scandalous broadsheets that exposed every carbuncle on the behinds of the dignified gentry whose porcelain features graced the salons.
If the Georgian era was anything, it was a time of rapid transformation. So, too, in art. The taste for the Grand Manner was ebbing. In 1812 Benjamin West exhibited ‘Christ Healing the Sick’ to enormous acclaim. In the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of the same year, JMW Turner exhibited ‘Snowstorm – Hannibal Crossing the Alps’ (7) and Constable ‘A Water Mill’. Change was on its way, but it was necessary to wait until the Victorian era for Turner’s Slave Ship (1840) although the scandalous event it refers to took place in 17817 and it was in the Victorian era that work, controversially, with its potential for critique of ruling-class politics, for the first time became a subject for art.
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Notes
1. Oxford English Dictionary
2. Exhibited at Wigley’s Rooms at Spring Gardens in 1795. “King Charles I accused five members of the House of Commons of treason and demanded their surrender. The House refused, considering this a breach of their rights, and the event proved to be the foundation for the civil war that led to the king's execution.” “Process and Paradox: The Historical Pictures of John Singleton Copley” http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/4aa/4aa382.htm
3. Brushes were called pencils at this period.
4. “No customer made his appearance for Charles and the impeached members.” Allan Cunningham The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Volume 5, John Murray, London 1832, p. 181.
5.http://www.exclassics.com/nash/nashpdf.pdf
6. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourse III.
7. The infamous Zong matter, in which over a hundred living slaves were thrown overboard to avoid financial loss to the owners. The subsequent court cases caused a scandal in England and contributed to the anti-slavery movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre.
Illustrations
(1) ‘The Prince Regent in Garter Robes’, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1816
(2) ‘The Prince Regent’ by George Cruikshank, 1816
(3) ‘The Last Effort and Death of Tipu Sultan’ by John Singleton Copley, 1800
(4) ‘The Death of Nelson’, from the painting by Benjamin West, engraved by James Heath. Published 1 May 1811.
(5) ‘Cimon and Iphigenia’ by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1780
(6) ‘Death of Marat’ by Jacques-Louis David. Marat was one of the leaders of the Montagnards, the radical faction ascendant in French politics during the Reign of Terror until the Thermidorian Reaction. Charlotte Corday was a Girondin from a minor aristocratic family and a political enemy of Marat who blamed him for the September Massacre. She gained entrance to Marat's rooms with a note promising details of a counter-revolutionary ring in Caen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat
(7) ‘Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps’ by J M W Turner, 1812
[All illustrations are in the public domain]
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