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1151 lines
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The Shock of the Real
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The Shock of the Real
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Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860
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Gillen D'Arcy Wood
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Palgrave
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THE SHOCK OF THE REAL
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Copyright © Gillen D'Arcy Wood, 2001 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 200 I 978-0-312-22654-1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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First published 2001 by PALGRAVE™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world.
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PALGRAVE™ is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd).
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ISBN 978-1-349-62458-4
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ISBN 978-1-137-06809-5 (eBook)
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DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-06809-5
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Wood, Gillen D'Arcy. The shock of the real : romanticism and visual culture, 1760-1860 / Gillen
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D'Arcy Wood.
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p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
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1. Romanticism in art. 2. Arts, Modern-18th century. 3. Arts, Modern19th century. I. Tide.
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NX452.5.R64 W66 2001 709'.03'42-dc21
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00-051483
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Westchester Book Composition First edition: January 2001 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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CONTENTS c..o
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fllustrations
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Vlll
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Acknowledgments
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xi
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Introduction Belzoni's Tomb
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1
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Chapter 1
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Theater and Painting
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17
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Chapter 2
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Prints and Exhibitions
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67
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Chapter 3
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The Panorama
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99
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Chapter 4
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Ruins and Museums
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121
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Chapter 5
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Illustration Tourism Photography
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171
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Afterword
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Visual Culture 2000
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219
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Notes
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225
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Bibliography
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257
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Index
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269
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ILLUSTRATIONS ~
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Cover Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3
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Figure 1.4 Figure 1.5
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Horner's "Panorama of London," interior of
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Regent's Colosseum, 1829.
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Guildhall Library, Corporation of London.
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George Carter, The Apotheosis of David Garrick
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(1780).
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From the RSC Collection with the permission of
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the Governors of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. 26
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Johann Zoffany, Mr. Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard in the
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Tragedy cif Macbeth, engraving by Valentine Green,
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for John Boydell (1776). By permission of the
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Folger Shakespeare Library.
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34
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Matthew Darly, "Caricature of Reynolds'
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'Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy'," tide
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page engraving to The Theatres: A Poetical Dissection
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by Sir Nicholas Nipclose [pseud.] (1772).
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General Research Division, The New York Public
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Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
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43
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Sir Joshua Reynolds, Three Ladies Adorning a
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Term of Hymen (1773).
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53
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Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York.
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Reynolds, Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the
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Graces (1763-65). Oil on canvas, 242.6x151.5 em,
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Mr. and Mrs. W W Kimball Collection.
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Photograph courtesy of The Art Institute
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of Chicago.
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56
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viii
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fllustrations
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Figure 1.6 Figure 1.7 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 3.1
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Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2
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Reynolds, Mrs. Hale as Euphrosyne (1766).
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Reproduced by the kind permission of the
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Earl and Countess of Harewood and Trustees
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of the Harewood House Trust.
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57
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Reynolds, Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in Congreve's
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Love for Love (1771).
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Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon
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Collection.
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64
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Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe,
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engraving by William Woollett, for John Boydell
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(1776).
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© The British Museum.
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72
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Benjamin Robert Haydon, Christ's Entry into
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Jerusalem (1820).
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Reprinted by courtesy of the Athenaeum of Ohio/
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Mount St. Mary's Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio.
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89
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John Martin, Belshazzar's Feast (1820).
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Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon
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Collection.
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93
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Cross section of Robert Barker's two-level
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Panorama in Leicester Square. Robert Mitchell,
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Plans and View in Perspective of Buildings Erected in
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England and Scotland (1798).
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Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon
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Collection.
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102
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Hubert Robert, La Passerelle [Un Pont sous
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lequel on voit les campagnes de Sabine] (1767).
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127
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A. Archer, The Elgin Marbles at the British Museum
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(1819).
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© The British Museum.
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135
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Joseph Severn, Portrait ofjohn Keats (1819).
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By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery,
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London.
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136
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John Martin, "Ivanhoe," frontispiece illustration
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to Sir Walter Scott, Waverley Novels (London:
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Robert Cadell, 1830), vol. 16.
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176
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J. M. W Turner, "Melrose:' frontispiece illustration
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to Sir Walter Scott, Poetical Works (London:
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Robert Cadell, 1832-34), vol. 6.
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177
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Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 5.6 Figure 5.7 Figure 5.8 Figure 5.9 Figure 5.10 Figure 5.11 Figure 5.12 Figure 5.13
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Figure 5.14
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Figure 5.15
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Illustrations
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IX
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Turner, "Loch Coriskin," frontispiece illustration
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to Scott, Poetical Works, vol. 10.
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178
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Turner, "Loch Katrine," frontispiece illustration
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to Scott, Poetical Works, vol. 8.
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183
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William Henry Fox Talbot, "View of Loch
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Katrine." Sun Pictures in Scotland, plate 10 (1845).
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Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs, New York. 188
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Fox Talbot, "View of Loch Katrine." Sun Pictures
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in Scotland, plate 11.
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Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs, New York. 189
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Felix Nadar, Portrait of Eugene Pelletan (ca.1855).
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Howard
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Gilman Foundation Gift and Rogers Fund, 1991. 198
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Nadar, Portrait cifJean Journet (ca.1856).
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Cliche Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris. 199
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Nadar, Portrait cifTheophile Gautier (1854).
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The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
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200
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Nadar, Portrait cif Franfois Asselineau (1855).
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© Photo RMN-Reunion des musees nationaux. 201
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Nadar, Portrait cif Charles Baudelaire (1855).
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© Photo RMN-Reunion des musees nationaux. 202
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Nadar, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire (ca.1856).
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©Photo RMN-Reunion des musees nationaux. 203
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Nadar, Mannequin tirant un chariot d'ossements.
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From Paris Souterrain (1861).
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Felix Nadar/© Arch. Phot. Paris/Caisse nationale
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des monuments historiques et des sites, Paris.
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215
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Nadar, Un element de lumiere art!ficielle. From
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Paris Souterrain.
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Felix Nadar/© Arch. Phot. Paris/Caisse nationale
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des monuments historiques et des sites, Paris.
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216
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Nadar, Fafade de tibias avec ornamentation
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horizontale de m1nes. From Paris Souterrain.
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Felix Nadar/©Arch. Phot. Paris/Caisse nationale
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des monuments historiques et des sites, Paris.
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217
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ~
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Many people aided me in the writing of this book. Marilyn Gaull, in her editorial role, offered tireless support and showed infinite patience in bringing it to press. My sincere thanks are due also to Karl Kroeber and David Simpson for their great encouragement, careful reading (and rereading) of the manuscript, and always pertinent advice. Others who read part or all of the manuscript in draft versions, and offered indispensable help, were Martin Meisel, Jonathan Crary, William Galperin, Nick Roe, Anna Brickhouse, and Laura Engel. I likewise owe a debt of gratitude to David Ferris and Andreas Huyssen, whose inspiration was critical to my development of this study at its embryonic stages. At Palgrave, my thanks go to Kristi Long; her enthusiasm and professional acuity has made the road to publication mercifully smooth. On a personal note, I am deeply grateful to my family in Australia for their unstinting support, and to my wife, Nancy Castro, without whom I could never have enjoyed the requisite good health, of both body and mind, to finish this book. My debts to her are beyond measure.
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To Nancy ... happy changes in emphatic dreams
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an Imperial City stood, With Towers and Temples proudly elevate ... By what strange Parallax or Optic skill Of vision multiplyed through air, or glass Of telescope, were curious to enquire: And now the Tempter thus his silence broke ...
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-Milton, Paradise Regained IV33-34, 40-43
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Introduction~
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BELZONI'S TOMB
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I n Regency London, the south side of Piccadilly near Old Bond Street was known for a particularly gaudy edifice. The building, covered in pseudo-hieroglyphic script, recalled the recently excavated temple at Dendera in Egypt. Sphinxes presided over the entrance above giant, lurid statues of Isis and Osiris. To Leigh Hunt's fastidious eye, this faux-Egyptian erection distinguished itself amongst the red-brick boutiques of Piccadilly as an "uncouth anomaly," a "practical joke." 1 The fact that William Bullock, a showman and collector of curiosities from Liverpool, had given his new premises the grandiose title "London Museum" only compounded the jarring effect. Two hundred years on, the unblushing nature of the building's Egyptian references would suggest less fraternity with a museum than a Las Vegas theme hotel. Regency Londoners were similarly skeptical about the establishment's self-description. Bullock's lowbrow answer to the British Museum soon gained the nickname "The Egyptian Hall," a title that captured both the orientalist motifs of its outside and the miscellaneous entertainment to be found within.2 In 1811, Jane Austen wandered through rooms filled with stuffed birds, boa constrictors, giraffes and bears. Bullock maintained this permanent collection of natural curiosities and exotica, but cannily reserved other rooms to rotating exhibitions. In the following decades, his West End emporium hosted art shows, panoramas and dioramas, pseudo-scientific demonstrations, Napoleon's carriage, and gala appearances by Tom Thumb.
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Most fitted to Bullock's venue, however, was the exhibition advertised in the summer of 1821 as "The Egyptian Tomb" or "Belzoni's Tomb." The Bartholomew Fair strongman-turned-archaeologist, Giovanni Belzoni, had recently returned from the Valley of the Kings with a spectacular booty.
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2
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Shock cf the Real
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Before opening negotiations with the British Museum for purchase of his treasures, Belzoni struck a deal with Bullock to exploit the collection as a popular entertainment.3 He filled the entire upper floor of the London Museum with reconstructions of archaeological sites as he had found them. The result was more an "installment" than a typical museum exhibition: a veritable dreamscape of mocked-up tombs, statues, and sarcophagi, with the tomb of Seti as the exhibit's crowning glory. Patrons ascended the stairs into a sideshow world of Egyptiana enhanced by the lugubrious illumination of torches. "Every eye," reported The Times, "must be gratified by this singular combination and skilful arrangement of objects so new and in themselves so striking."4 The appeal of Belzoni's exhibition, unlike the recendy opened Elgin Marbles Gallery at the British Museum, was not determined by its aesthetic value; it derived, rather, from the exotic novelty of his treasures and the "striking" effect he produced in recreating their discovery. The British Museum offered highbrow antiquity. The Elgin gallery space--with its bare walls, open floors, and decorous silence--invited a disinterested, intellectual contemplation of the Parthenon sculptures ex-situ, divorced from their historical context. At the down-market Egyptian Hall, by contrast, Belzoni "gratified the eye" with an extravagant and thrilling simulacrum: a presentation of the artefacts on display not as art but as real.
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Roland Barthes has defined the "real" as a sign that "is assumed not to need any independent justification. It is powerful enough to negate any notion of 'function,' it can be expressed without there being any need for it to be integrated into a structure, and the having-been-there of things is a sufficient reason for speaking of them."5 The apparendy gratuitous descriptive details in a Flaubert story, to take Barthes' literary example, are not integrated into the structural realm of narrative, theme, or symbol; they resist interpretation or idealization of any kind. The most one can say, argues Barthes, is that the minutely rendered texture of Haubert's visual description, through its sheer density of insignificance, produces a particular aesthetic effect, namely the "real." The same might be said of Balzac's novels, in which a host of supernumerary characters appear and disappear without development or any direct relation to the plot. Like the descriptive details in a Flaubert story, it is the very fact of their presence that lends the narrative a self-authenticating quality, a more vivid sense of real, lived experience.
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Transferring Barthes' literary notion of the "real" to the visual arts, we encounter more than the sub-tradition of illusionist chicanery in Western painting from Zeuxis' grapes to baroque trompe l'oeil.6 In the visual entertainment marketplace of late Georgian London, Belzoni's 1821 exhibition,
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Belzoni's Tomb
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with its warren of dimly lit rooms imitating an Egyptian tomb and gaudy facsimiles side by side with original sarcophagi, clearly relied on the effect of the real for its appeal. Likewise did Bullock's principle competitors, the panoramas of Leicester Square and the Strand, which offered the life-like recreation of famous sights and scenes on a giant 360° canvas. Visiting the panorama on a visit to London, the poet Wordsworth was struck by the exhibit's accumulation of apparently gratuitous realistic detail:
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every tree Through all the landscape, tuft, stone, scratch minute And every cottage, lurking in the rocksAll that the traveller sees when he is there. (276-80)
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To Wordsworth, the fastidiously realized trees, tufts, and stones of the panorama-like Haubert's descriptively dense style for Barthes--served no aesthetic function beyond the effect of similitude. The pictorial objective of the panorama was what is now called "virtual reality": where, through a technologically contrived illusion, be it of an Alpine prospect, the city of London, or the Battle of Waterloo, the viewer is presented with a breathtakingly accurate simulation of "all that the traveller sees when he is there." The marriage of documentary representation and touristic curiosity at the panorama not only mirrors its contemporary, "Belzoni's Tomb," but foreshadows a sequence of developments in modern visual culture leading to photography and film, media that embody, in Barthes' words, "the Real in its indefatigable expression."7 The "reality effect" of these nineteenth-century West End entertainments was not, of course, real; nor should they be confused with a Flaubertian realism. "Belzoni's Tomb" and Robert Barker's panorama belonged to a different order of the imaginary: to an idea of simulated experience that, as Barthes claims, "forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity."8 The "real" is, in this sense, a production: in the case of "Belzoni's Tomb," the production of archaeological adventure in the Orient.9
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Exhibitions devoted to the spectacle of the "real" were wildly popularBelzoni attracted almost two thousand visitors on opening day and extended his exhibit through the autumn season-but they were not universally approved. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, considered the reality effect irredeemably vulgar. "Simulations of nature," he protested, are
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° "loathsome" and "disgusting."1 Coleridge's repudiation of mimetic repre-
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sentation echoes a recurrent theme of his lectures on aesthetics, which continually reiterate a distinction between the imitation of reality achieved
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Shock cif the Real
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by a work of art and a mere "copy" of nature. In the above-quoted lecture from his 1818 season at the London Philosophical Society, Coleridge explains that the viewer of a portrait in the conventional academic style begins with the presupposition of difference between art and nature. The pleasure of viewing the painting consequently lies in the appreciation of resemblances the artist has worked to achieve: in "a work of genuine imitation, you begin with an acknowledged total difference, and then every touch of nature gives you the pleasure of an approximation to truth." By contrast, the "simulations of nature"-Coleridge mentions waxworks museums, to which I would add "Belzoni's Tomb" and the panorama-that is, visual representations intended to deceive the viewer into mistaking them for the real thing, are not pleasurable but "disagreeable." The reason for the disparity in aesthetic effect between an imitation and copy is that the viewer of the copy, expecting nature itself, is "disappointed and disgusted with the deception," rather than pleasantly surprised at the picture's artful effects of similitude. "A good Portrait" Coleridge argues, is "a Work of Art-while a real Copy, a Fac Simile, ends in shocking us." A facsimile of nature is only as good as the mimetic fidelity of its details and yet, paradoxically, it is the presence of this very detail that establishes expectations in the viewer that can only be disappointed: "Not finding the motion and the life which we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, every circumstance of detail, which before induced us to be interested, making the distance from truth more palpable" (my emphasis). In short, the same pictorial effects of similitude produce pleasure in a work of art, but shock and disgust in a sub-artistic "real Copy."
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The notion of a "real copy" is a seeming contradiction in terms, and yet it describes most pointedly the emerging class of popular visual media in late Georgian England to which "Belzoni's Tomb" and the panorama belonged. Panoramas were no less popular in Paris than in London, and the disapproval of the literary elite no less decided. Five years after Coleridge's London lecture, the French critic Quatremere de Quincy deplored "the popularity of shows flocked to by the vulgar crowd," and delivered a warning about the cultural effects of popular mimetic media such as the panorama: "If the artist substitutes the real for the fictive ... if he abandons, for example, all the poetic figuration with which art is dressed for a positivist language, what will we find? The disenchanting effect of reality [le desenchantement de Ia realite] substituted for the charm of imitation."11 The shock of the real discloses its double value: for the "vulgar crowd" it represents a thrilling novelty, while to the discerning eyes of the cultural elite it effects a "disenchantment"-an experience that, for Baudelaire, in
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Belzoni's Tomb
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5
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the case of photography, will signal nothing less than the death of the Romantic imagination. For all their misgivings, some French critics were nevertheless sufficiently impressed by the international popularity of the panorama to engage in comparative analyses of local work in the medium with examples from abroad. In 1829, Johann Hittorf visited London to report on the opening of James Horner's sensational "Panorama of London" (see cover illustration) at the city's luxurious new entertainment emporium, Regent's Colosseum. Comparing Horner's painting unfavorably to the work of the Parisian panoramist, Pierre Prevost, Hittorf explained its success with the British public in highly revealing (if clearly parochial) terms. According to Hittorf's account, "the bulk of the London public [was] still unfamiliar with the sensation of the real in art [au sentiment du vrm] ,"and Horner's painting, unlike the work of Prevost, succeeded only in "delighting the eyes of most of the spectators most of the time, but without shocking the mind [choquer Ia raison] of a single one" (my emphasis).12 Echoing Coleridge and Quatremere de Quincy quite precisely, Hittort links the pictorial representation of unmediated reality with an experience of shock in the viewer. The putative failure of Horner's picture only underlines what is, for Hittorf, the definitive effect of the genre to which the panorama belonged: the shock of the "real."
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Whatever Hittorf's opinion, Horner's London panorama is a landmark in the visual culture of modernity. It combined technological engineering and visual spectacle on a scale never before seen, and, as a part of the ambitious Regent's Colosseum, belonged to a vision of multi-purpose recreational space that prefigured the contemporary Disney-style theme park. At Horner's show, patrons ascended to its viewing platform in London's first hydraulic lift, and were provided with telescopes to view the smallest and most "distant" aspects of the view of London, thus anticipating the latter-day urban panoramic experience offered by such iconic pillars of modernity as the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building. At the genesis of this book lies my desire to explore prefigurations of modernity, such as "Belzoni's Tomb" and the panorama, in the visual culture of the Romantic period. In doing so, I will be guided by the connection Coleridge and his French counterparts insist upon between these new visual media purveyors of the "real" and the effect of disenchantment or "shock." Are there reasons, beyond the philosophical argument Coleridge presents, why the link between "shock" and the "real" should be so necessary in his mind? What are the historical and cultural contexts of Coleridge's 1818 lecture and its impassioned, even violent rejection of "simulations of nature"?
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I have borrowed from Roland Barthes for my exposition of the reality
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6
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Shock of the Real
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effect Coleridge deplores. But for the student of twentieth-century critical theory, in particular those writings on the culture and aesthetics of modernity associated with the Frankfurt School, Coleridge's characterization of the reality effect of new visual media as "shocking" is likewise familiar, albeit chronologically disorienting. In his celebrated essay on mechanical reproduction (1936), Walter Benjamin has described the "sight of immediate reality" at the cinema as a "shock" experience endemic to twentiethcentury visual technology. 13 In another canonical essay, on Baudelaire (1939), Benjamin identifies the origins of the "shock" experience of visual-cultural modernity in Second Empire Paris in the individual citydweller's experience of an intimidating variety of visual and bodily stimulation, from shop windows, to photographs, to city crowds. Coleridge's use of the very term "shock" to describe the aesthetic response elicited by new visual media in London in 1818 suggests, however, that Benjamin's historical timeline may be misleadingly foreshortened. As Jonathan Arac has observed, "the same conditions of urban mass society that Wordsworth identified in 1800 acted crucially upon the poetic practice of Baudelaire."14 Pursuing Arac's suggestion, my purpose in this study is to extend the historical scope of Benjamin's analysis, to examine the embryonic forms of the "shock" aesthetic of modernity that Coleridge identifies in Regency London a full generation before Baudelaire in Paris.
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The gratification experienced by The Times reviewer at "Belzoni's Tomb" represents the positive appeal of that show's "reality effect," and we must assume that his approval was typical of the "vulgar crowd" at large (how else to account for Belzoni's success, or the panorama's?). My interest, however, lies in the consistently negative response evinced by those authors we identify most closely with the Romantic canon, exemplified by Coleridge's "shock" and "disgust" at sub-artistic "simulations." The fact that Coleridge's opinion of waxworks and other "simulations of nature" was probably not shared by the majority of his audience at the 1818 lecture leads to a fundamental question entertained by this book: Why were Romantic writers so prominently represented among the minority opinion that disdained the rise of popular visual media in late Georgian England? What stake did the Romantics have in actively, often virulently opposing new forms and forums of visual representation? In 1800, Wordsworth complained of the modern urban craving for "outrageous stimulation," which he, in publishing the Lyrical Ballads, sought to counteract through a new poetics of "common life" focused on "the essential passions of the heart." 15 But as this study will show, the late Georgian public's appetite was less for revolutions in lyric poetry than for the "outrageous stimulations" of
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the new visual entertainment culture. The response of the literary elite mingles apprehension and contempt. Lamb disdains theatrical spectacle, as does Wordsworth the "mimic sights" of the panorama, while both decry the illustration of books. Hazlitt experiences a depression of spirits at a printshop, Keats a "dizzy pain" at the British Museum, and Baudelaire "trepidation" in Nadar's photography studio. In examining these mostly neglected encounters between canonical Romantic writers and the visual
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culture they inhabited, The Shock of the Real uncovers an ideologically
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grounded reaction of-in Coleridge's terms--shock, disenchantment, and disgust directed toward the emerging visual media and entertainment industry we so closely associate with our own modernity.
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Much recent critical work has explored the neglected relation between canonical Romantic literature (the six great poets) and commercial, subliterary forms of Romanticism: gothic novels, travel journals, diaries, memoirs, and the periodical press. Much less scholarly attention, however, has been devoted to the relation of Romantic literary culture to the emerging commercial visual culture I am describing here: from domestic collectibles such as prints, illustrated books, and, later, photographs, to the public sphere of theaters, art exhibitions, museums, popular entertainments like "Belzoni's Tomb" and the panorama, and picturesque tours. To redress that neglect, this study places fundamental aesthetic categories of Romanticism-imagination, original genius, Hellenism, the gothic, picturesque landscape, and the sublime-in the often hostile territory of late Georgian visual culture. By this means, I suggest ways in which Romantic ideology was constructed not in opposition to the enlightenment rationalism of the eighteenth century, but as a reaction to the visual culture of modernity being born. Put another
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way, the conflict addressed in The Shock of the Real is not between M. H.
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Abrams' mirror and lamp, but between the lamp and the magic lantern: between Romantic, expressive theories of artistic production emphasizing original genius and the idealizing imagination, and a new visual-cultural industry of mass reproduction, spectacle, and simulation.
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My methodological approach is interrogatory. Each chapter will address questions, contradictions, or simply oddities in the visual culture of the period 1760-1860. For example: What was Lamb's objection to Garrick's statue in Westminster Abbey? Why did the Royal Academy exclude engravers? Why were Benjamin Haydon's paintings so huge? How did the panorama's representation of landscape impress Wordsworth, the quintessential Romantic poet of landscape? What metaphor of Greece did the Elgin Marbles produce: truth and beauty, or psychosis and death? How did
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Turner's illustrations of Scott succeed where the photographer Fox Talbot failed? And why did Baudelaire consider photography the death of Romantic genius? Taking the long view of Romanticism as an historical
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period, The Shock if the Real finds answers to each of these questions in a
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century-long conflict between the literary elite of late Georgian England (and, briefly, France) and a booming recreational industry in visual media.
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In chapter 1, I begin with an inquiry into the formation of modern celebrity culture in the career of David Garrick. The origins of Garrick's unprecedented fame in the late eighteenth century lay, I argue, in the peculiarly visual nature of his onstage technique--pauses, starts, pantomimic expressions, etc.-the psychological credibility of which has led to his canonization as the first "realist" stage actor. I am interested in the link, embodied by Garrick and insisted on by Coleridge, between the visual and the "real," but also with the means by which popular fascination for Garrick's physical presence onstage was sustained by sophisticated promotional merchandizing, evident in the plethora of paintings, prints, souvenirs, and memorabilia bearing his image. A study of Garrick belongs in a book on the Romantic period because the legacy both of Garrick's realism and his fame proved abhorrent to the critic Charles Lamb, whose 1811 essay "On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakespeare, considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation" sets the stage, as it were, for the Romantic anti-visual culture prejudice I will be examining throughout the book. Lamb laments the loss of the "literary" stage, and blames Garrick for the triumph of dramatic performance and scene painting over poetic genius. The second part of the chapter examines comparable machinations of fame in the career of comic actress Frances Abington, in particular the role of her portraitist Joshua Reynolds, whose many images of her functioned less as conventional portraits than as glamour publicity shots that merged her real-world identity with an onstage persona. In my reading of
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Reynolds' Portrait if Mrs. Abington as 'Miss Prue' with which the chapter
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concludes, I attempt to revivify the stale and all-too-often general association of eighteenth-century culture with tropes of theatricality and masquerade by situating the Georgian stage and its players within an emerging celebrity culture.
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While chapter 1 attempts to explain Lamb's seemingly aberrant expression of antitheatrical prejudice in 1811 through a backward look at Garrick's career, chapter 2 draws the same contextual analysis for Hazlitt's 1824 essay "On the Principal Art Galleries of England," in which he denigrates engraving and the popular fashion for mass-produced prints. As all roads in early nineteenth-century theater lead to Garrick, so all roads in Regency
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painting lead to SirJoshua Reynolds and the enduring influence of his academic lectures, the so-called Discourses on Art. The first part of chapter 2 finds in the Discourses a sub-textual argument against the art of engraving that, as a form of industrialized mimesis, Reynolds perceived to be antithetical to the ideals of the newly founded Royal Academy. This academic rejection of the print trade (engravers were excluded from the Academy) runs directly counter, however, to Reynolds' practical management of his own career, for which he, like all Georgian painters, depended on the successful commercial marketing of prints. As in my study of Lamb's reaction against the Regency culture of celebrity in chapter 1, the highbrow, literary idealism of the English cultural elite, represented in this case by Reynolds' Discourses, confronts an emerging market for visual media whose appetite for "real copies" it is unable to control. The second section of the chapter moves from the miniature to the gigantic, and the private to the public sphere, to examine the new trend for public exhibition of academic paintings, characterized by immense canvasses, which literally did not "fit" the increasingly domestic-bourgeois spaces and tastes in British painting. The popularity of public exhibitions unregulated by the Academy was, like the print market, a source of serious concern to the cultural establishment. Examining the career of one of the new breed of commercial academic painters, Benjamin Haydon, I trace a growing popular taste for what I term "spectacular realism." Haydon's paintings, as part of a school that included John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, and John Martin, offered a combination of spectacle and verisimilitude that heralded the radical divergence of popular visual media from the idealist principles and "grand style" that had governed conventional academic painting since the Renaissance.
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As I have already outlined, the apotheosis of "spectacular realism" in the first half of the nineteenth century was achieved at the panoramas of the West End. These enormous circumferential paintings, hung in specially designed rotundas, appropriated the elite academic genres of landscape and history painting to create a spectacular new form of visual entertainment for a mass audience. The inclusive nature of the panorama itself, which designated no privileged viewpoint, foreshadowed modern cinematic culture, and embodied the increasingly democratic, collective nature of visual recreation in the Romantic period. Chapter 3 analyzes Wordsworth's description of a panorama in Book Seven of The Prelude, where the poet of nature confronts the commodification of natural landscape in a popular visual form. In particular, I examine how Wordsworth's poetics of the sublime in nature are repudiated by the panorama's attention to a documentary recreation of the visible world. Wordsworth's subsequent rejection of the
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panorama's "lifelike mockery" represents an emblematic crisis of Romantic idealism in the emergent visual culture of modernity-the subject of this book as a whole.
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Chapter 4 shifts from the popular visual entertainment venues of the West End to their highbrow counterpart in Bloomsbury, the British Museum, with a special view to its status as symbol and repository of Hellenic ideals. In the first section, I examine the origins of eighteenth-century Hellenism as a strictly idealized, predominantly text-based phenomenon. I then argue that the critical strategies and presumptions of literary Hellenism-what I identifY in Schiller, Winckelmann, and Diderot as "sentimental distancing"-were overthrown by the installation of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum in 1816. In the same way that the verisimilitude of the panorama offended Wordsworth's relation to landscape as a notional, poetic ideal, the Marbles represented the visual-material "real" of antiquity come to shake the idealist foundations of literary Hellenism. In my analysis of the new archaeological Hellenism in section two, I read Keats' British Museum poems as unique illuminations on the instability, both political and aesthetic, of the Elgin Marbles' first arrival at the British Museum. A central purpose of this section is to present Keats' two Hyperion poems as a critique of the nationalist ideology under which the British Parliament justified acquisition of the marbles. At the British Museum, the nation's imperial destiny assumed the symbolic form of Athenian glory, but Keats' traumatic allegory of the museum-going experience in "The Fall of Hyperion" places this transaction under the threat of a "curse." Pursuing this notion of the "curse" of imperialism, the chapter concludes with a biographical study of Lord Elgin's unhappy career through the suggestive imagery of Byron's anti-Elgin poem, "The Curse of Minerva." Elgin becomes, in this reading, the anti-type of sentimental distancing. Through his fixation on the literal (as opposed to literary) object of antiquity, Elgin's antiquarian passion collapses into the very forms of psychological breakdown and personal disaster that Schiller, Winckelmann, and Diderot intuited, flirted with in the form of critical writing, but ultimately avoided through the defensive power of idealization. To this extent, Elgin's disputed legacy represents a profound irony. His acquisition of the Parthenon marbles was not a natural outcome of Romantic Hellenism but a transgression of its established parameters. Making Hellenism "real" had dire consequences for Elgin's career no less than his judgment, and the crises and contradictions of his story, I suggest, foreshadow the seemingly intractable outrage and political anxiety that continue to surround the Marbles. In Elgin's personal history, and Keats' poems, we find the origins of the Mar-
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bles' construction as intensely politicized, rather than merely conventionally idealized, antique remains.
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The first part of chapter 5 returns from the public spaces of early nineteenth-century visual culture--the art gallery, panorama, and museum-to the domestic sphere, first examined in my discussion of collectible prints in chapters 1 and 2. This chapter compares the aesthetics of book illustration-a popular and lucrative industry since the 1770s that reached an artistic apogee with Turner in the 1830s-and the emergent medium of photography. The fact that both Turner and the photographic pioneer Fox Talbot illustrated the works of Sir Walter Scott within a decade of Victoria's coming to the throne presents an extraordinarily instructive opportunity, never before grasped, to uncover the tensions between the two visual media and their relation to literary Romanticism. Framing my discussion of Turner and Fox Talbot is a dramatized account of their trips to the Highlands, through which I explore the emerging Scottish tourist industry that Turner's illustrations both drew upon and helped to promote. The increasing commercial importance of the new tourism is suggested by the fact that both Turner's engraved designs and Fox Talbot's photographs do less to actually illustrate Scott's literary narratives than document their respective tours, thus anticipating a twentieth-century souvenir tourist culture centered around the camera and photo album. That said, while Turner's illustrations contain a trademark visual rhetoric indissociable from British Romanticism, Fox Talbot's "Scott" photographs refuse to romanticize their subject, insisting on a putatively objectivist account of the Highland landscape. The second part of the chapter examines the Romantic backlash against the supposed "realism" of the photographic image with a reading of Baudelaire's jeremiad against photography in his 1859 Salon. I conclude with a consideration of Felix Nadar's nostalgic Second Empire portraits of aging Parisian bohemians (including Baudelaire), and his mock-Gothic study of the Paris Catacombs in 1861. Both these photographic projects suggest that Baudelaire's reports of the death of Romantic idealism, implicit already in the 1818 Coleridge lecture with which I began this study, were no longer exaggerated or premature.
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As is evident from this brief synopsis, my use of the term the "real" will not be strictly Barthesian, but serve rather as a generous catch-all. In the course of this book, the "real" will describe variously a style of stage acting; a type of pictorial scenic effect; a form of social identity; mass-produced prints (i.e. copies of a "real" original); Greek statues; book illustrations; and photographs. Each subject will bear its own particularly inflected definition of
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the "real," which I will be careful to introduce in a timely way. Against the charge that such a catholic application of the term necessarily compromises theoretical probity, I present no defense except that I have used the idea of the "real" only insofar as it is useful, and have otherwise preferred a historically descriptive, even at times anecdotal approach, to a densely theorized study. My purpose, in the most general terms, is to both adhere to and seek to verifY Benjamin's dictum that "the [modern] theory of 'progress' in the arts is bound up with the idea of the imitation of nature, and must be discussed in the context of this idea."16 By "progressive" art, Benjamin does not mean the modern avant-garde but rather its nemesis: a technology-driven popular market for visual entertainment, the prime currency of which is not any conventional (or, for that matter, radical) ideal of beauty but rather novelty and the shock effect of visual similitude, of the "real." In my efforts to represent what Bernard Comment has identified in the era of the panorama as "the beginnings of a new logic ... of surrogate experience," I employ the broad and familiar vocabulary of visual-culture studies, including "mass media;' "visual technology," "spectacle," "simulacrum," "celebrity," "entertainment," and "popular culture."17 My purpose in employing free use of a critical language associated with Benjamin, Barthes, Debord, Adorno, and others without engaging in detailed analysis of these theorists is to maintain focus on the historicist task at hand: to establish a deep connection between the visual culture of the Romantic period and later nineteenth and twentieth-century modernity, a link that, as I have suggested, has hitherto been obscured by Benjamin's foreshortened historical paradigm.
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In his editor's introduction to The Visual Culture Reader (Roudedge, 1998), Nicholas Mirzoeff describes how "visual culture has gone from being a useful phrase for people working in art history, fUm and media studies, sociology and other aspects of the visual to a fashionable, if controversial new means of doing interdisciplinary work."18 The "controversy" Mirzoeff refers to is the institutional guerilla war currendy being waged within art history departments by proponents of a popular media and theory-oriented visual studies curriculum (see October's special issue on the subject, Summer 1996). My interdisciplinary approach to "visual culture," however, does not accord with its role in this debate, either as a substitute for the now stale concept of postmodernism ("Postmodernism is visual culture;' declares Mirzoefi), or as an "academic clearing-house of cultural studies."19 This book owes far more to recent cultural historians of the Georgian period: to the encyclopedic archival studies of Richard Altick,
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John Brewer, and Timothy Clayton, and to the groundbreaking interdisciplinary work of John Barrell, Morris Eaves, and Shearer West. My aim is to continue the efforts of these scholars in drawing the history of visual media within the orbit of a literary culture from which, at least since Lessing's Laocoon (1766), it has been resolutely exiled. To this extent, The Shock of the Real helps illuminate our millennia! anxieties over the aesthetic values of text and image through a study of their original estrangement in the century after Lessing's unilateral declaration of the superiority of the word. By dramatizing this estrangement as a kind of Georgian "culture war," my study of Romantic visual culture adopts James Heffernan's model of verbalvisual inquiry, which "treats the relation between literature and the visual arts as essentially paragonal, a struggle for dominance between the image and the word."20
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Aside from its purpose in broadening the historical terms currently applied to our understanding of visual-cultural modernity, this book intersects also with debates over Romantic ideology. My principal concern is with issues of class, specifically the inseparability of Romantic sensibility from the self-constituting presumptions of a cultural elite. Lady Blessington called the crowds at Belzoni's exhibition "intolerably vulgar," while her friend Lord Byron derided the company at Elgin's gallery of antiquities as "brawny brutes [who] in stupid wonder stare/And marvel at his Lordship's 'stoneshop' there."21 A generation earlier, Reynolds' Discourses had likewise attempted to distance the ideals of the elite Royal Academy from the new commercial market in prints, while Wordsworth and later Baudelaire, adrift in the spectacularfourmillante cites of London and Paris, feared for the privileges of poetic imagination. In each case, we find an educated literary sensibility outraged by the spectacle of bourgeois consumption of art, and by the increasing influence of a decidedly middle-class taste for visual novelty and the "real." This conflict has consolidated itself in the twentieth century in a high culture/low culture divide, and the seemingly permanent resentment of an educated elite toward the visual mass media. To take a recent compelling example: in 1997, the highest grossing film of all time, James Cameron's Titanic, first excited public fascination with its staggeringly literal recreation of the doomed liner. Aside from the costs of the meticu-
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lously rendered period decor, the overwhelming majority of the film's
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record budget was spent on a historically exact and extraordinarily realistic cinematic staging-almost in real time-of the ship's sinking. In the phenomenal success of Titanic, popular appetite for the "shock" of verisimilitude showed itself to be as strong at the turn of the twenty-first century as
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at the turn of the nineteenth. While Cameron's film swept the middlebrow, popularity-conscious Academy Awards, in particular the technical achievement categories, highbrow critics ridiculed the inanities of his script. The disputed aesthetic merits of Titanic, as much as its fascination for the "real," suggest that the Romantic era conflict between the literary-cultural elite and popular visual media casts long shadows over our own.
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Further to this point: It is a commonplace to describe millennia! culture as "visual" rather than "literary." An evolutionary trajectory of commercial visual media-from photography to the cinema, through television, and now the post-photographic era of computer-imaging technology and the "virtual reality" arcade-has, it is routinely said, asserted an increasingly dominant role in Western and now global culture. As I have suggested earlier, one inspiration for this study lies in the misleading placement of photography as a point of origin in both academic and popular versions of this historical narrative. Walter Benjamin considered photography and later the cinema the principle emblems of the new mass culture, with Baudelaire, a contemporary of pioneer photography, as a representative urban poet on the cusp of modernity. In The Shock <if the Real, however, we will find that the literati of Regency London were already immersed in a protocinematic urban culture of panoramas, printshops, galleries, and spectacular theatricals.
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A more recent example of the characteristic foreshortening of modern visual-cultural history was the 1999 exhibition, "Fame After Photography," at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which represented 1839, the year of the camera's invention, as the moment of our "self-expulsion from a pre-photographic Eden."22 As a corrective to this critical myth of origins, my readings here are intended to demonstrate that the social and technological foundations for twentieth-century visual culture were set in the century preceding photography's emergence as a mass medium circa 1860. The rush to develop new commercial visual media in the pre-photographic era-from prints to panoramic illusions, from book illustrations to "Belzoni's Tomb"-prefigures the twentieth-century enthrallment with recreational visual technology no less than the invention of photography itself. This is not to read visual-cultural history deterministically, but as a sequence of evolutionary accidents. Daguerre, for example, a one-time pupil of the great panoramist, Prevost, created the Daguerrotype while experimenting with illusional effects for his famous diorama-an established visual entertainment that provided the commercial and technological impetus for his invention. In the more agonistic terms suggested by Marshall McLuhan, Daguerre's new photographic technology cannibalized
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the media that preceded it.23 It is thus by specific design that this revisionist study of Romanticism and visual culture chronologically ends with Second Empire Paris and photography, where surveys of visual-cultural modernity from Benjamin to MoMA have begun: the better to illuminate the largely unwritten pre-history of our millennia! visual age.
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Chapter 1 ~
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THEATER AND PAINTING
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The Legible Face:
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TRomantic Antitheatricality and the Legacy of Garrick he shock experience of modernity, as defined in my introduction, derives from the perceived realism of popular visual-cultural phenomena. Such a phenomenon was David Garrick. His first biographer, Thomas Davies, relates the impression Garrick made on his stage debut in October 1741:
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Mr. Garrick's easy and familiar, yet forcible style in speaking and acting, at first threw the critics into some hesitation concerning the novelty as well as propriety of his manner.... But after he had gone through a variety of scenes, in which he gave evident proofs of consummate art, and perfect knowledge of character, their doubts were turned into surprise and astonishment, from which they relieved themselves by loud and reiterated applause. 1
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The audience's response to Garrick anticipates the psychological phases of the sublime later described by Kant. The spectators move, by collective degrees, from an initial negative moment of "hesitation" and "doubt," to a pitch of "astonishment," to the psychical "relief" of approbation. The object of wonder in this case is not the natural sublime, but Garrick's naturalistic style. Although no conclusive visual evidence of his stage technique is available, first-hand accounts attest to the reality effect integral to a Garrick performance:
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So when great Shakespeare to his Garrick join's, With mutual aid conspire to rouse the mind,
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'Tis not a scene of idle mimickry, "Tis Lear's, Hamlet's, Richard's self we see. 2
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Garrick's friend, Samuel Johnson, marveled at his complete impersonation of a role, and explored further the critical distinction between "mimickry," represented in this case by the comic actor Samuel Foote, and Garrick's new standard of psychological realism:
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Foote was even no mimic. He went out of himself, it is true, but without going into another man. He was excelled by Garrick even in this, which is considered as Foote's greatest excellence. Garrick, besides his exact imitation of the voice and gesture of his original, to a degree of refinement of which Foote had no conception, exhibited the mind and mode of thinking of the person imitated.3
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In short, the attraction of a Garrick performance lay not merely in his ability to suspend the disbelief of his audience, as Coleridge would later define the effect, but to defy disbelief altogether in his adoption of a persona not his own.
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Although their individual styles differed markedly from each other, the great actors of the generation after Garrick-Kemble, Siddons, and later Kean-shared a common inheritance in Garrick's natural technique and emphasis on psychological depth.4 Like Garrick before her, Sarah Siddons did not seem to "act" when onstage, but to be in "downright earnest."5 But this association of the theater with psychological realism disturbed many of the early nineteenth-century writers who make up the Romantic canon. Wordsworth, for example, felt his imaginative powers "languish" at the theater's "gross realities" (The Prelude VII.509). Even for so influential a promoter of the Regency stage as William Hazlitt, a Shakespearean heroa sublime, infinitely rich character on the page--could become an "unmanageable reality" when impersonated on the stage.6 The positive appeal of the reality effect, on which purveyors of visual entertainment from Garrick to Belzoni depended for their door receipts, was the thrilling shock it provided the spectator. But Charles Lamb, watching Edmund Kean play Macbeth, felt his literary sensibility suffocate under "the too close pressing semblance of reality." Instead of thrill, Lamb experienced a "pain and an uneasiness" at Kean's performance of Shakespeare's text, "which totally destroy[ed] all the delight which the words in the book convey."7
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In addition to the disturbing effects of naturalistic acting, the new fashion for visual spectacle on the London stage threatened the theater's tradi-
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Theater and Painting
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tional status as a forum for poetic drama. The most popular theatrical entertainment of the eighteenth century, the pantomime, with its love of stage tricks and spectacular scenic innovations, had long been criticized for "preferr[ing] shew to sentiment." Critics complained of the ruinous effect of the pantomime on public taste, an effect that was to cultivate the audience's vulgar "desire to behold a glittering pageant, which, by filling the imagination, prevented the toil of thinking."8 Beginning in the 1780s, such criticism came increasingly to be leveled against more traditional drama as well. In Coleridge's nostalgic view, the doyen of playwrights, Shakespeare, had written for an Elizabethan stage of bare scenery and largely anonymous players: "The stage had nothing but curtains for its scenes, and the Actor as well as the author were obliged to appeal to the imagination & not to the senses."9 Coleridge's language is imprecise but his meaning clear: an audience's imagination is awakened by the literary/aural experience of Shakespeare's text-whose "words ... enchain the mind, and carry on the attention from scene to scene"-but dulled by the visible "outward action" of the performance. 10 Visuality, in this case, bears the full brunt of the time-honored philosophical denigration of sensory experience. Coleridge mourns the passing of an Elizabethan golden age in which poetic "recitation" rather than dramatic action was paramount. 11 Likewise Shelley declared that "the corruption which has been imputed to the drama begins when the poetry employed in its constitution ends." 12 The actor Macready-the model of the new nineteenth-century theater professional-fit Shelley's description of a stage inimical to poetic inspiration. He adopted the technique of translating his verse lines into prose as an aid to preparation. Stage managers too-and this trend was first established by Garrick himself-had long been wary of highbrow "literary" scripts. In short, when Coleridge delivered his first series of lectures on Shakespeare in 1808, "the connection between the theatre and literature was," in Raymond Williams' words, "virtually lost." 13 Due, in large degree, to the chilling effects of the Licensing Act of 1737, no writer of the first rank, save perhaps Sheridan, had written consistently for the stage in more than a century (Fielding, for example, abandoned playwriting for the novel). 14 Theater managers compounded the disincentives for serious verse dramatists by focusing increasingly on the commercial possibilities of scenic spectacle. With a regular schedule of pageants, pantomimes, and spectacular new stage sets and effects, the focus of London's theaters shifted pronouncedly through the late Georgian period to "visual as opposed to verbal presentation," as Marilyn Gaull has described it, to spectacle rather than poetry. 15
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As even the most casual student of the period will immediately realize, the foregoing account of the Romantics' negative attitude to stage representation contradicts the plain fact of their enthusiastic attendance at and voluminous commentary upon the theater of the early nineteenth century. Hazlitt and Lamb, for example-so often produced to buttress arguments for so-called Romantic antitheatricality (as they will be, in a qualified manner, in this chapter)-were among the most articulate and influential champions of the English theater in its history. Through his impassioned critical commitment to the career of Edmund Kean in the pages of the Times and the Examiner in the years 1814-17, Hazlitt acted as a de facto publicity agent for Kean's controversial challenge to the reign of the Kembles. That is, Hazlitt was definitely a player in the theater world, in the modern sense, whatever his doubts on the artistic merit of stage representation in general. To illuminate these contradictions inherent in Romantic antitheatricality is, I suggest, a more productive critical strategy than to attempt to resolve them on the basis of selective readings. Indeed, contradiction is, of itself, illuminating in this case. The relationship of Romantic authors to the Regency stage describes a pattern of ambivalence we will observe repeatedly throughout the course of this book. It signifies the literary elite's attitude of fascinated distrust toward the variegated and spectacular forms of visual culture emerging around them.
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One thing is certain: as would-be playwrights, the Romantics had a difficult and distant relationship with the commercial theater. Their attempts to have plays accepted at the patent theaters constitute, in Timothy Webb's somber phrase, "a short, sad history." 16 The most marketable dramas, including Shelley's The Cenci and Keats' Otho the Great, were rejected, and only one script by a first-generation Romantic poet, Coleridge's Remorse, actually made it to the boardsY The Romantics' retreat into "closet drama" has been well documented and regularly maligned. 18 Wordsworth's The Borderers, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Byron's Manfred belong to the repertoire of what Byron called "mental theatre": highly literary, psychophilosophical dramas "rendered ... quite impossible for the stage."19 The experience of serving on the board at Drury Lane had left Byron with the "greatest contempt" for the commercial theater, to the point of taking legal action to prevent his tragedy Marino Faliero from ever reaching the stage. In a letter to John Murray from 1821 regarding its proposed production, Byron protested that "I have never written but for the solitary reader-and require no experiments for applause beyond his silent approbation.... I claim my right as an author to prevent what I have written from being turned into a Stage-play."20 Sir Walter Scott summed up the frustrations of
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a generation of would-be verse dramatists when he complained that, in the modern commercial theater, "the author is compelled to address himself to the eyes, not to the understanding or feelings of the spectators."21 With dramatic poetry and the psychological complexities of tragedy in increasing bad odor among the theatergoing public, scenic spectacle and the formulaic emotional conflicts of melodrama took center stage in the early nineteenth century.
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In addition to the Romantics' benighted attempts at writing plays, a strain of antitheatricality in their dramatic criticism reinforces our sense of their love-hate attitude toward the stage. Certainly, a perennial scandal to the Romantics' reputation as critics of Shakespeare is Coleridge's admission that he never attended a Shakespeare play "but with a degree of pain, disgust and indignation." The leading Shakespearean commentator of the age was a churlish theatergoer, dissatisfied even with the artistry of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble: "these might be the Macbeths of the Kembles, but they were not the Macbeths of Shakespeare." For Coleridge, Shakespeare didn't belong in the theater at all, but "in the heart and in the closet ... with Milton."22 A Hamlet or King Lear was an essentially ideal creation, produced not by the poet's "observation;' but "his inward eye of meditation."23 Shakespeare's characters were not, Coleridge insisted, mere "portraits." They possessed greater depth and psychological nuance than the visual arts and their shallow realities could possibly endow them with. In a similar vein, Byron held that stage productions "sacrifice character to the personating of it," while Lamb declared that the "greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual"; and, as such, he "cannot be acted."24 Keats accordingly heard the call of the muse upon reading King Lear, not on seeing it performed. The Romantic Shakespeare was a reader's Shakespeare, and the reader, according to Hazlitt, "is almost always disappointed in seeing [the plays] acted." Even a consummate performer such as Mrs. Siddons-whom Hazlitt called "tragedy personified"-communicated no more than the "pantomime part of tragedy," the "exhibition of immediate and physical distress," at the expense of the "poetical beauties and minuter strokes of character" found in Shakespeare's text. Only the reader, in the privacy of his study, shared the "profounder feelings" of the Shakespearean hero.25 Lady Macbeth in the flesh-and-blood form of Mrs. Siddons was inimical to the character's idealization in the imaginative act of reading. Antitheatricality, like much else in Romantic ideology, thus presumed a fundamental distinction between the ideal or sublime-symbolized here by the private interior of the reader's closet and, by extension, the interiority of the mind-and an external, sensory world of "reality" embodied, in
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this case, by the stage. "The boards of a theater and the regions of fancy," Hazlitt concluded, "are not the same thing." 26
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The most comprehensively argued statement of Romantic antitheatrical prejudice came, ironically, from perhaps the most enthusiastic theatergoer of the age, Charles Lamb. Published in Leigh Hunt's journal Rtiflector in 1811, the original title of Lamb's essay reads "On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for Stage Representation" (in subsequent reprints, the initial reference to Garrick has often been elided-a significant and misleading omission).27 In the essay, Lamb echoes Coleridge and Hazlitt's antitheatrical sentiments, the origins of which lie in classical iconophobia. The theater is an inferior medium, Lamb contends, for the simple reason that it is a visual medium. A theater audience cannot appreciate Shakespeare as a closet reader does: "What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements." As a visual medium, the theater excites the senses but not the mind; the subtle delineation of substantial feelings and ideas in Shakespeare's text lies beyond its scope. The art of the actor, Lamb insists, is limited to the "signs" of feeling. When it comes to "the motives and grounds of the passion," that is, the essence of dramatic character, "the actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds." Because the player's aim is "to arrest the spectator's eye upon the form and the gesture," Lamb argues, he will only distract his audience from the lyrical and psychological profundity of Shakespeare's verse. The result is a dramatic medium that represents "not what the character is, but how he looks; not what he says but how he speaks it." The actor, he concludes, is capable of communicating passion but not motive, feeling but not thought.
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Literary critics have generally downplayed the importance of Lamb's Rtiflector essay on Garrick and Shakespeare. Its antitheatrical polemic, apparently so at odds with Lamb's lifelong passion for the stage, has been called "notorious,""weak,""eccentric," and a "glaring aberration" in his oeuvre.28 For Jonathan Arac, however, the essay marks "an important moment in the history of the comparative valuation of media," a precursor to Benjamin's seminal "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Further to its significance for twentieth-century critical theory, Janet Heller has pointed to echoes of Lamb's devaluation of theatrical representation in contemporary film theory.29 Considered as a reaction against Garrick and his legacy as a visual artist and theatrical celebrity, Lamb's essay assumes central importance in the argument of this book. Writers of the Romantic canon perceived the emerging visual media of the late Georgian age as
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a threat to the traditional authority of the written word, and hence literature. The early nineteenth-century theater, as a forum for the visual art of dramatic performance, a purveyor of scenic visual spectacle, and a source of celebrity actors whose images were popularized in paintings, prints, and numerous other merchandised forms, played a vital role in the visual culture the Romantics so resented.
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At the opening of his Riflector essay, Lamb recalls his outrage at coming across a statue of Garrick in Westminster Abbey:30
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[T]he reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how, from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that has had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing a mind congenial with the poet's. (italics in original)
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Both Lamb and Coleridge regularly expressed their contempt for Garrick's editorial desecration of Shakespeare's texts. As the all-powerful manager of Drury Lane between 1747 and 1776, Garrick interpolated scenes in Richard III, cut the gravediggers from Hamlet, permitted Romeo a moment in Juliet's arms before dying and, most scurrilous of all, composed a new death speech for Macbeth-the better, it was said, to exhibit his mastery of protracted mortal convulsions. This alone does not explain, however, why Lamb, an ardent lover of both Shakespeare and theatergoing, would seek to belitde the man principally responsible for the bard's revival on the eighteenth-century stage. After all, almost one-third of the plays produced during Garrick's tenure at Drury Lane were by Shakespeare, while he himself performed no less than eighteen Shakespearean roles. He championed Shakespeare's genius against the carping of the French classicists, and rescued Romeo and Juliet from a century's obscurity. In the hagiographic account of the Abbey statue's inscription, at a time when Shakespeare's plays were neglected, "Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day." But despite this impressive record, Lamb is sufficiendy resentful of his legacy even "to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer of Shakespeare."
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The popularity of Garrick had spurred an enormous increase in theater attendance and excited great popular interest in its performers. Theophilus Cibber attested in 1759 that "on a moderate computation, the number of play-going people is now twenty to one compared with [some years ago]."31 This new theater public demanded advance publicity for productions, reviews of performances they had seen, and gossip about the players. Grub Street obliged, transforming the hitherto humble players of the stage
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into public celebrities. Groping for superlatives to describe Garrick's effect on the public imagination, the critic Benjamin Victor labeled him a "star," the first recorded use of the now ubiquitous epithet of fame. "There appeared a bright Luminary in the Theatrical Hemisphere," he wrote in 1761, "and the Fame of his extraordinary Performance reached St. James' End of the Town when Coaches and Chariots with Coronets, soon surrounded that remote Theatre. That Luminary soon after became a Star of the first Magnitude, and was called Garrick."32 Before Garrick's debut in 1741, theater criticism in England reached a relatively small audience. But in the years following his first descent on the London stage "like a Theatrical Newton," events at Drury Lane became" a topic of almost universal conversation," and theater journalism blossomed.33 A "little legion" of critics and admirers subjected Garrick's performances to intense scrutiny and comparison.34 "Who are the objects of admiration among us now?" cried the literary-minded Herald in 1757, appalled at the popular craze for all things Garrick: "the estimator of the manners and principles of the times, is pleased to single out a player for the glory of our degenerate age."35 The great Shakespearean actors of Lamb's generation-Sarah Siddons, her brother John Kemble, and Edmund Kean-subsequently became, according to the Garrick model, major cultural figures at their peak and national treasures in their decline.36
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In Lamb's view, the increase in the popularity of actors and critical attention to the art of performance--a cultural phenomenon for which Garrick was largely responsible--had come at the expense of dramatic text. At the Regency theater, the celebrity power of the actor's performance shattered Lamb's literary ideal of Shakespeare's characters. "It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K[emble]," he complained, "we speak of Lady Macbeth while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S[iddons]."37 Accordingly, in his Rtiflector essay, Lamb does not perceive the Garrick statue in Westminster Abbey as a tribute to Shakespeare, but a symbol of the poet's fall from popular regard in favor of the player. The insidious effect of Garrick's unprecedented fame as a stage performer, Lamb suggests, was to subordinate Shakespeare's poetic genius to the actor's art of dramatic interpretation. Most provoking was the statue inscription, which exalted Garrick as Shakespeare's "twin star." For Lamb, the Westminster Abbey statue embodied Garrick's odious legacy to the Regency stage: the actor as celebrity icon.
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The Abbey statue was not the only sanctifYing tribute to England's first star of the stage. On Garrick's death in 1780, the painter George Carter
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produced an extraordinary allegory, The Apotheosis of Garrick (figure 1.1), in which the actor's deathbed doubles as the altar of his canonization. Set in a Claudean arcadia, the painting depicts seventeen of Garrick's fellow actors, in Shakespearean costume, forming a mournful retinue at his bedside. Above their heads, two angels escort Garrick's earthly shape toward the slopes of Mount Parnassus and the welcoming arms of Shakespeare himself accompanied by the Muses. Carter's homage is the pictorial accomplishment of the Abbey statue inscription: the painting represents Garrick as Shakespeare's equal in the English cultural firmament. For Lamb, the heretical conceit of both the Abbey statue and Carter's painting-namely, the apotheosis of the actor-overturned the orthodox hierarchy of the arts, in which poetry reigned supreme over painting and music, and acting barely made the scale. "What connection," he demanded, does "that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man which a great dramatic poet possesses, ha[ve] with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a player ... can so easily compass?" Garrick's presence in Westminster Abbey as the popular emblem of Shakespeare's dramas, together with the notion that his "genius bade them breathe anew," was, for Lamb, a "scandal" and an "insult."
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Notwithstanding Lamb's discomfort under the loom of Garrick's statue, however, the actor's presence in the national pantheon was what early nineteenth-century celebrity culture-the age of Siddons and Keandemanded. But how did Garrick first create this market for fame? How did he construct his unprecedented celebrity? "To be considered 'famous' and praiseworthy in modern mass societies," Richard Brilliant has observed, "ha[s]less to do with a person's achievements than with a mechanism for distributing images, abundantly present in the public eye."38 Garrick's close association with the world of reproductive visual media-with the marketing of paintings, prints, and all manner of sub-artistic merchandiseexemplifies the close connection Brilliant describes between modern visual culture and the phenomenon of modern celebrity. In the first part of this chapter, I argue that Garrick's unique marketability in the emergent visual culture of late eighteenth-century England began with his radical innovations in acting technique: his visual, as opposed to oratorical style. The intensely visible nature of his dramatic performances in turn transformed Garrick's person, particularly his face, into a marketable "image" able to be reproduced and sold through a multitude of subsidiary visual media. This ubiquity of Garrick's image laid the foundation for his fame, in the modern sense of the instantly familiar, iconic public figure. The careers of actors such as Garrick, Siddons, and Frances Abington bear out the direct connection Guy Debord has drawn between the modern "society of spec-
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Figure 1.1 George Carter, The Apotheosis of David Garrick (1 780). From the RSC
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Collection with the permission of the Governors of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
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tacle" and the phenomenon of media fame: "M edia stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle's banality into images of possible roles."39 The first section of this chapter explores the connection between theatrical spectacle and media celebrity, while the second part, focusing on Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mrs. Abington, inquires further into Debord's understanding of the nature of m odern celebrity itself, as the diversification of individual identity " into images of possible roles"- in my terms, fame as masquerade.
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A Hazlitt piece from 1826, "Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen," alludes to Charles Lamb's abiding dissatisfaction with the new celebrity theater culture. The essay remembers a lively parlor game at which Hazlitt's guests nominated famous figures they would most like to see return from the grave. After consideration of Shakespeare, Milton, and Cromwell, the conversation turned to the performing arts. "Of all persons near our own time," Hazlitt recalls, "Garrick's name was received with the greatest enthusiasm." But the proposal of Garrick did not meet with unanimous approval. "A grumbler in a corner," Hazlitt writes, "declared it was a shame to make
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all this rout about a mere player and farce-writer, to the neglect and exclusion of the fine old dramatists, the contemporaries and rivals of Shakespear[e]."40 The curmudgeon of the party could only have been Charles Lamb, who evinces characteristic indignation at the new celebrity stage, and at the passion for fame that the evening's discussion in itself symbolized. In the conversation at Hazlitt's dinner table, the Elizabethan stage conjured images of the poets Shakespeare and Jonson, but the Georgian theater belonged to the actor Garrick. With Lamb's Rtfiector essay as its backdrop, this chapter explores how material, specifically visual, aspects of the Drury Lane Theater under Garrick-his natural, physiognomic style, spectacular scenery, and the "celebritization" of its actors through subsidiary commercial arts-came to define the theater of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries far more than the literary merit of the scripts performed.
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Garrick's "ruling passion," according to his first biographer, was not for the English dramatic tradition but "the love of fame." 41 Even in Lamb's time, a generation after his retirement from the stage, Garrick's image might be found everywhere: from Byron's rooms at Cambridge, to playing cards in London taverns, to the hallowed aisles of Westminster Abbey. As a drama critic and would-be poet of the stage, Lamb resisted this transformation of the English theater from a forum for poets of genius to a producer of celebrity actors. His resentment of Garrick's self-created, multi-media "stardom" exemplifies the resistance of the Romantic literary elite to the increasingly visible spirit of the age.
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At the most general level, Garrick's stylistic innovations for the stage belong to the new naturalism in eighteenth-century visual arts and taste. The "naturalness" of Garrick's performances corresponds, for example, to the relative informality and freshness of portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough, and anticipates the overthrow of Palladian stiffness in the Apollo Belvedere by the life-like charisma of the Elgin Marbles. That said, it is impossible to know how natural a Garrick performance would be judged today, when even the once-vaunted informality of 1950s film acting-Marlon Brando, James Dean, etc.-already appears idiosyncratic and contrived. Naturalism is a relative term and, furthermore, not the main point. The significance of Garrick's revolution in stage performance lies not in his naturalness per se
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but, as Diderot perceived in his essay The Paradox cifActing (ca.1773), in the
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technique that produced the 1fect of nature in his art. The essence of that reality effect lay in the visual elements of his style.
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In the first decade of the eighteenth century, the premier actor of the London stage, James Betterton, had described himself as a "speaker" and
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based his technique on the teachings of ancient rhetoricians. 42 Betterton had "fat, short arms;' according to one critic, "which he rarely lifted higher than his stomach." His performances consisted of senatorial declamations, with "his left hand frequently lodged in his breast, between his coat and waistcoat, while, with his right he prepared his speech."43 James Quin, the leading player at the time of Garrick's debut, continued the tradition of declamatory acting. As a 1747 review described, "he recited, rather than acted. In this indeed he resembled his predecessor Booth; and in my opinion he still retains too much of the deep rotundity of his pronunciation, and the formal deliberate sway of his motion."44 Beginning in the 1730s, commentators on the theater began to express contempt for the classical, oratorical style Quin embodied, and advertised the need for naturalistic innovation:
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The most universal complaint among good judges of the stage is that players are shockingly unnatural ... if we miss nature, we miss pleasure, our whole expectation from the theatre being that deception which arises from appearance mistaken for reality. (emphasis in original)45
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A market demand for the "pleasure" of "reality" is already evident here and within a decade, by virtue of Garrick's radical modernization of acting technique, the theater had caught up with its audience's changing tastes. Contemporary eyewitnesses perceived Garrick's revolutionary impact on English theater as clearly as the historians who have come after them. At a 1740s production of Rowe's Fair Penitent in which both Quin and Garrick appeared, the writer Richard Cumberland described the birth of a new era:
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Quin presented himself ... with very little variation of cadence, and in a deep full tone, accompanied by a sawing kind of action, which had more of the senate than of the stage in it ... but when after long and eager anticipation I first beheld little Garrick, then young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stage, and point at the wittol Altamont and heavy-paced Horatio-heavens, what a transition-it seemed as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene! Old things were done away, and a new order at once brought forward, bright and luminous, and clearly destined to dispel the barbarisms and bigotry of a tasteless age, too long attached to the prejudices of custom, and superstitiously devoted to the illusions of imposing declamation.46
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After seeing Garrick in the role of Richard III, Quin himself appreciated the significance of Garrick's vivid and psychologically complete represen-
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tation of the villain King. "If the young fellow was right," he reportedly conceded, "he, and the rest of the players, had been all wrong."47
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Garrick was not naturally equipped for oratory. He was "no declaimer," observed Johnson," ... there was not one of his own scene shifters who could not have spoken 'to be or not to be' better than he did." 48 Intent on making a virtue of his verbal shortcomings, Garrick built his technique around a visual concept of characterization. Consequently, throughout his career Garrick "disliked to perform any part whatever, where expression of countenance was not more necessary than recitation of sentiment."49 Eyewitness accounts invariably focus on Garrick's representation of character through non-verbal means: facial expression, gesture, and elaborate stage business. Through Garrick's influence, it became commonplace among critics to imagine an actor's effect on a deaf or foreign-speaking spectator. "Garrick," reported Georg Lichtenberg, "contrives that every gesture would make even a deaf spectator aware of the gravity and importance of the words which they accompany."50 In the case of an Italian attending a performance of Macbeth at Drury Lane, Garrick passed the new visual standard of dramatic interpretation with honors: the foreign visitor collapsed from his seat in horror during the dagger scene. 51 Likewise Diderot, fascinated by the new "English" style, took to blocking his ears during performances, the better to judge the actors' command of a purely visual rhetoric of the passions.52 The oratorical poses of seventeenth-century classicism rapidly fell into disrepute. The cult of sensibility had made it to the stage, with Garrick as the consummate man of feeling. From the night of his debut in 1741, Garrick added a physiognomic and gestural vocabulary of emotion to the representation of character, a revolution in acting technique that critics, in innumerable handbooks and reviews, began to consolidate in a body of dramatic theory from the 1750s on.
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The architecture of the Drury Lane theater was ideally suited to Garrick's intimate style. Built by Christopher Wren in the reign of Charles II, the interior remained largely unchanged until the eve of Garrick's retirement. The audience, numbering considerably under a thousand at full capacity, circled about the performers in boxes along the sides of the stage, and loomed above them in galleries overhanging the pit. This proximity allowed for a physical rapport between the actors and audience that would be lost in the vastly expanded theaters of Lamb's day. Garrick was, by all accounts, an extraordinarily nimble and dynamic performer who moved about the Drury Lane stage with reckless confidence. He captivated his audience, as the young Laurence Olivier would two centuries later, with a combination of natural charisma and heedless athleticism. The essence of a
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Garrick performance lay not in physical gesture, however, but the preternatural mobility and expressiveness of his face. Taking advantage of the intimacy of the theater, his performance of Hamlet, for example, would begin with a physiognomic representation of the Prince's mood. Garrick's "look" established his character in the audience's mind so vividly that his articulated thoughts, when they did come, seemed almost superfluous:
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When he entered the scene, his look spoke the character, a mind weighed down with apprehension and grief. He moved slowly, and when he paused he remained flxed in a melancholy attitude; such was the expression of his countenance, that the spectator could not mistake the sentiment to which he was about to give utterance. 53
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Likewise, John Genest reported how from Garrick's first entrance onstage as Hamlet "the character he assumed was visible in his countenance."54 Variations of this critique abound. The attraction of Garrick's mercurial face even induced some gendemen enthusiasts of the theater to eschew the comfort of their boxes and mix in with the rowdy groundlings of the pit. The critic and poet, Charles Churchill, fixed his admiring gaze on Garrick from the first row of benches where he joined the painter Henry Fuseli, who treated Garrick's performances as a master-class in the facial contours of dramatic passion.55
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Fuseli's interest in Garrick points to the fact that Georgian fascination with the dramatic possibilities of physiognomy began with painting, not the theater. Charles Le Brun's influential guidebook for painters on facial
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a expression, Methode pour apprendre dessiner les passions (1698), sought to
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systematize the human passions into generic physiognomic types. It is symptomatic of our distant remove from eighteenth-century naturalism that Le Brun's Methode, based on the mechanistic dualism of Descartes, now appears reductive at best and at worst grotesque. The book's influence on the eighteenth-century visual arts, however, was profound. After publication of an English edition in 1734, denizens of the theater adapted Le Brun's system to the stage as a visual directory of the passions an actor might consult and imitate. Aaron Hill, the first English theorist of dramatic technique, oudined the new Le Brunian science of acting in his groundbreaking 1730s theater journal The Prompter. 56 "Every passion," he wrote, "has its peculiar and appropriate look ... and which, intermingling their differences on the visage, give us all the soul-moving variety of pain, pleasure, or suspension which the heart can be strikingly touched by."57
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Whether by deliberate study or intuition, Garrick was already master of the new technique by the time of his debut. According to Hill's prescription, he transformed Le Brun's empirical psychology of the passions into dramatic art. Critics, used to the stiff-armed oratory of Booth and Quin, marveled at Garrick's physiognomic approach to characterization: "Mr. Garrick ... is indebted to nature for an almost matchless significance of feature, enlivened with eyes particularly brilliant; from an amazing flexibility of countenance, he can express the most contrast[ing] feelings: simplicity, mirth, rage, grief, despair, and horror, with nearly equal excellence."58 Garrick's technique emphasized the communicative power of facial expression, whereby "the passions rose in rapid succession, and, before he uttered a word, were legible in every feature of that various face."59 Employing a similar figure, Garrick's friend and admirer Hannah More recalled "the handwriting of the passions in [his] features" (my emphasis).60
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The metaphor of physiognomic "legibility"-a silent "handwriting" of the actor's face that discloses psychological meaning--illuminates the larger image-text conflicts evident in Lamb's 1811 essay. Because Garrick's onstage character is already "legible" in his face, the spoken text becomes, if not dispensable, then at the least secondary. Joseph Pittard, for example, found in Garrick "a player who personates in every part the living manners of a superior character, [and] manifests beyond contradiction, that he has conceived the true idea of the author."61 Another contemporary critic, John Hill, argued that the actor's interpretation of a role, far from a vulgarization of the poet's intent as Lamb would later suggest, was in fact indispensable to the experience of poetic drama. What the author has "left deficient;' he states, "the actor must supply, not in words of his own adding, but by the silent eloquence of gestures, looks and pauses."62 Thomas Wilkes ventured even further, beyond the idea of dramatic action that merely supplements the spoken word. "There is something," he suggests, "inexpressibly eloquent in a proper and just action, which words can never describe: it is the language spoken by the soul, which penetrates direcdy into the heart, and that undisguised, natural eloquence which only is universally intelligible" (my emphasis).63 To these critics, Garrick did not simply declaim or represent a role; he enlarged and enriched the dramatic text through a "legible" rhetoric of facial expression and gesture.
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As we have seen, Hazlitt echoed Lamb's distrust of stage representations of Shakespeare, observing that an actor's interpretation of a tragic hero offered only "the pantomime part of tragedy, the exhibitions of immediate and physical distress."64 In the case of Garrick, Hazlitt's charge of "pan-
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tomime" was not simply rhetorical. The popular pantomimes, at the low end of the theater marketplace, had exerted a profound influence on Garrick's Shakespeare revivals at the putative top end. Garrick's style, with its emphasis on pauses, starts and "speaking looks," was itself highly pantomimic. As a budding player, Garrick learned the elements of pantomime from the famous Covent Garden Harlequin, John Rich. Innumerable accounts testify to Garrick's putting this training to use as a parlor-trick, where he would perform a virtuosic dumb show of characters to the delight of his audience. The most famous of these private improvisations took place in the presence of Diderot, during Garrick's triumphant visit to Paris in 1763:
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Garrick put his head between two folding doors, and in the course of five or six seconds his expression changed successively from wild delight to temperate pleasure, from this to tranquility, from tranquility to surprise, from surprise to blank astonishment, from that to sorrow, from sorrow to the air of one overwhelmed, from that to fright, from fright to horror, from horror to despair, and thence went up again to the point from which he started.65
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Difficult as it is to believe that even Garrick could accomplish the complete gamut Diderot describes in only six seconds, the nature of the exhibition is itself revealing. Called upon to entertain an after-dinner company, Garrick chooses to perform not a soliloquy from Shakespeare, but a Le Brunian pantomime of the passions. Furthermore, he limits the scope of his performance by offering only his face to the assembly, keeping his body hidden behind the folding doors. What Diderot observed was, in fact, the core of the Garrick technique: the poetry of the "legible" face.
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To recapitulate: Contemporary accounts agree that Garrick's finest moments on the stage lay in the visual representation of character. According to Thomas Davies, a Garrick performance defied verbal description; to capture it "would call for the pencil of a Raphael or a Reynolds."66 Rare is the reference to his memorable enunciation of a line. In a Garrick performance, the deliberate, protracted absence of his voice--in a pause, start, or facial movement-drew the audience's focus away from his recitation of the dramatic text to the complex visuality of his style. These innovations set a new standard in the dramatic representation of character that demanded, in turn, a significant change in audience perception. True dramatic feeling, it was increasingly suggested, lay beyond the reach of words, to be communicated only by silent gesture. Theatergoers soon discovered that the most electrifying moments at the theater were not to be had in the
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os rotundum of declamation, but in the dramatic suspense of silences. In a tribute to Garrick on his retirement, Thomas Bowdler's sister recalled how
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Oft, when his eye, with more than magic pow'r, Gave life to thoughts, which words could ne'er reveal, The voice of praise awhile was heard no more; All gaz'd in silence, and could only feel! 67
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In a similar vein, Davies remarked how the expressive glances exchanged between Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard, not their recitation of Shakespeare's lines, communicated the emotional meaning of the murder scene in Macbeth: "their looks and action supplied the place of words. You heard what they spoke, but you learned more from the agitation of mind displayed in their action and deportment."68 Garrick's performance of this scene, like his famous "start" upon seeing Hamlet's Ghost, was considered a tour de force, and exemplary of the new style. The painter Johann Zoffany recorded the Macbeth scene, after which a popular print was made (figure 1.2), in which the physical and verbal urgency, as in Shakespeare's text, is all Lady Macbeth's. Garrick's Macbeth meanwhile is frozen in a helpless gesture of shock and incipient remorse. His glazed eyes are fixed on a point above the heads of the audience in the pit, and his lips parted in soundless horror. In the days of Betterton and Quin, such a pose would be premeditated and held indefinitely in the expectation of applause. As Garrick's faraway gaze in the Zoffany image suggests, however, the effect of his (undoubtedly) rehearsed attitude is built upon a pretended denial of the audience's presence, at the same time that he invites them to experience his reaction to the murder of Duncan as psychologically real and truly felt. "It is impossible," marveled Thomas Wilkes on witnessing the scene, "to convey an adequate idea of the horror of his looks."69
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The dramatic pause was the particular signature of Garrick's style. In his repertoire of stage effects, the Garrick pause served to heighten dramatic tension in ways that the most nuanced delivery of lines could not. According to his keenest commentator, Georg Lichtenberg, Garrick's performance of a Hamlet soliloquy might simply trail off into silence, the last words entirely lost to the audience.70 With the example of Garrick vividly in mind, Aaron Hill theorized the dramatic effects of the pause in his influen-
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tial 1745 Essay on the Art if Acting: "Beautiful and pensive pausing places
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will ... appear to an audience but the strong and natural attitudes of thinking; and the inward agitations of a heart, that is, in truth, disturb'd and shaken.'m Where Lamb will later see only the empty "signs" of passion in
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Figure 1.2 Johann Zoffany, Mr. Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard in the Tragedy of Macbeth, engraving by Valentine Green, for John Boydell (1 776). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
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the silent play of an actor's features, Hill perceives alanguage of genuine psychological depth. Som e contemporaries indeed saw low trickery in Garrick's starts and pauses, but fo r most spectators the effect was profoundly emotive.72 In his 1761 satire o f the stage, " T he R osciad," C harles Churchill upholds Garrick's use of the pause as essential to the emotional intensity and psychological truth of his performances:
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When reason yields to passion's wild alarms, And the whole state of man is up in arms, What but a critic could condemn the player For pausing here, when cool sense pauses there? Whilst, working from the heart, the fire I trace, And mark it strongly flaming to the face; Whilst in each sound I hear the very man, I can't catch words, and pity those who can.73
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Further evidence of Garrick's commitment to visual realism was his determination, not hitherto witnessed on the English stage, to stay conscientiously "in character" throughout a performance, rather than only when speaking his lines. Soon after his debut, the Gentleman's Magazine related how "when three or four are on the Stage with him, he is attentive to whatever is spoke, and never drops his Character, when he has finished a Speech." Garrick's devotion to character was in stark contrast to the habits of his compeers, who distinguished their non-speaking moments onstage by either "looking contemptibly on an inferior performer, unnecessary spitting, or suffering [their] Eyes to wander thro' the whole Circle of Spectators."74 Garrick's consistent representation of character, independent of his delivery of actual lines, marks the beginnings of modern "fourth wall" technique. In short, the visual emphases of Garrick's style--pauses, starts, and staying "in character"-do more than convey his particular strengths as an actor. They imply the modern concept of stage performance itself: as not merely the recitation of a speaking part, but a rich, psychologically credible impersonation of the dramatic role, as if real.
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The visual realism of Garrick's acting style, particularly the mesmerizing effects of his facial expression, was decisive in the creation of his f:1.111e. The emphasis on Garrick's physical appearance led to the successful marketing of his "image," in the commercial sense, a half-century long publicity campaign consummated by the erection of his visible shape in Westminster Abbey in 1797. As our millennial culture of celebrity dictates, it is through visual, not print media, that an ordinary individual is transformed into a public "personality." Garrick intuited this new cultural order, and expanded his promotional influence beyond merely bribing puffs in the press. He was the first public figure to employ mass-market strategies of self-promotion, and "belongs beside Josiah Wedgwood and Hogarth amongthe most astute eighteenth-century entrepreneurs of culture."75 Garrick developed close relationships, both personal and professional, with the major painters of the
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age: Hogarth, Wilson, Hayman, Reynolds, and Zoffany. As a consequence, there are more portraits of Garrick than any other eighteenth-century figure excepting George III. Almost no public art exhibition in England from the 1760s until his death was without a painting or statue of Garrick.76 This unprecedented collaboration between the visual and performing arts in England spawned its own genre: the theatrical conversation painting.77 But Garrick's marketing genius saw that genuine fame, in the modern sense he helped to create, lay not in the paintings themselves but the sale of engraved reproductions, such as Valentine Green's print of Zoffany's "Macbeth" picture. For example, Garrick's interest in Hogarth's commemoration of his sensational debut as Richard III centered on the potential marketability of an engraving. "Pray, does Hogarth go on with my picture," he asked in a letter from 1745, "and does he intend a print from it?"78 Even during his European tour of 1764-65, a supposed vacation from the stage, Garrick's mind ran very much on publicity. In a letter to his brother George (his de facto personal assistant), Garrick sent an urgent call for fresh supplies of prints to distribute to his Continental admirers: "I must desire you to send me by the first opportunity six prints from Reynolds' picture. You may apply to the engraver he lives in Leicester Fields, & his name is Fisher, he will give you good ones, if he knows they are for Me-You must likewise send me a King Lear by Wilson, Hamlet,]offier & Belv[idera] by ZcifJani [sic] ..."79 According to his biographer, Davies, Garrick's house at Hampton was itself a kind of shop window display, adorned "with multiplied paintings and engravings of himself, in various characters."80
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In British Theatre and the Other Arts (1984), Shirley Kenny points out that Garrick's self-promoting merchandise extended far beyond the baseline media of paintings and engravings:
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Garrick's likeness appeared in terra cotta, cast busts, watercolors, etchings, pencil, pen and ink, and wash pictures, as well as on medals (mulberry wood, copper gilt), wall hangings, Wedgwood jasperware, a hair picture, Liverpool Delft tiles, playing cards, and refreshments tokens for the Jubilee at Stratford.... Garrick pieces sold.81
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Prints of Garrick and other well-known actors appeared also in book form either as self-sufficient collectibles or illustrations to drama anthologies. The amount of financial stake Garrick had in the various sub-artistic commodity forms of "Garrickmania" is unclear. Regardless, the principal reward for his marketing of souvenirs bearing his image was not financial (although he became a very wealthy man), but an unprecedented celebrity
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in his lifetime and apotheosis afterward. On a visit to England in 1775, Lichtenberg admitted to being "dazzled . . .by his fame."82 A product of the new commercial culture of the eighteenth century, Garrick was a cultural icon in the very modern sense, a merchandized brand name, a protomovie star. His effect on popular culture was such that, in the early nineteenth century, Lamb confronted his legacy not merely in the fashion for natural acting and visual spectacle, but in a comprehensively merchandized celebrity theater industry-a Hollywood in embryo.
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To successfully sell a brand name, one must flood the market with a range of products from which the consumer may choose but cannot escape. Garrick's strategies for self-promotion thus anticipated the golden rules of modern mass media advertising: saturation and diversity. His image, unlike King George's, was not reserved for the walls of the gentry and state buildings; it was public property in the commercial sense: a massproduced commodity accessible to all social levels in a multiplicity of forms. The Garrick statue in Westminster Abbey should thus not be seen in isolation, but as a posthumous manifestation of the Garrick industry, as one of more than 450 individual likenesses produced over half a century.83 These images of Garrick-from portraits to playing cards, etchings to decorative tiles---spanned the full spectrum of Georgian visual culture, high and low. The academic pretensions of the Abbey statue and Carter's bombastic allegorical painting were, in fact, the exception rather than the rule. Garrick certainly enjoyed the respect, even the awe of the cultural elite. "Poussin is considered the painter of men of taste," adjudged Joseph Pittard, "so in like manner Mr. Garrick is the player."84 In an obituary, Edmund Burke likewise credited Garrick with elevating acting to the status of a liberal art. Nothing in Garrick's career or writings, however, suggests that the achievements of art were his foremost concern. If he did ennoble acting, it was by virtue of sheer talent, not conscious Jesign. True fame, Garrick knew, required not the imprimatur of the cultural elite, but the adoration of the masses. His prime motive was always, in Reynolds' words, a "passion for fame," and that passion was requited.85 The proof of Garrick's amazingly successful career in self-promotion lies in his permanent place in the foreground of Georgian cultural history-the equal of Johnson, Reynolds, and George III---so long after living memory of his actual performances has expired.
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The multitude and intensity of Garrick's collaborations with painters, engravers, and other visual media merchandisers came at the expense of his relationship to writers. In the new era of visual entertainment after 1760, where the public might as soon attend an art exhibition, museum, or eclec-
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tic West End emporium as read poetic drama in their closet, Garrick held no illusions about the viability of a progressive "literary" theater in the Elizabethan style. In a letter he wrote, in essence, dozens of times in his career, Garrick diplomatically informed James Boswell in the spring of 1772 that he could not accept his friend's script because it offered too little scope for spectacular adaptation:
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Mr. Mickle whom you so warmly recommended is a most ingenious man but I fear, from what I have seen, that his talents will not shine in the Drama-his play before the alteration was not in the least calculated for representation-there were good passages; but speeches & mere poetry will no more make a play, than planks & timbers in the dock-yard can be call'd a ship--It is fable, passion & action which constitute a Tragedy, & without them, we might as well exhibit one of Tillotson's Sermons.86
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Because it consists principally of "speeches & mere poetry;' Garrick deems Mickle's play too literary for Drury Lane. He perceives that in the competitive West End entertainment market, the successful management of a theater lies in a preponderance of visible "passion & action," not poeticizing and oratory. Thus while scene painters, set designers and a multitude of visual media merchandisers established ever more lucrative connections with the theater under Garrick's tenure, would-be successors to Shakespeare and Jonson found themselves out in the cold.87 Garrick was severe on unsolicited scripts and, as in the case of the unfortunate Mickle, his resistance to all recommendation beyond his personal interest earned him the enmity of an entire generation of English playwrights. Frustration centered also on Garrick's perennial revivals of Elizabethan and Restoration plays at the expense of new material. Even when a new play debuted, very often Garrick himself or one of his cronies had written it. After a decade of Garrick's hostile regime at Drury Lane, the literati's rage bubbled over.
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In The Case of the Authors Stated (1758), James Ralph blamed the two-
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theater Licensing Act of 1737 that reserved power in the hands of actormanagers like Garrick for the drought in dramatic genius: "The dramatical muse is the coyest of the choir . . . but in our days, all access to her is in a manner cut off. Those who have the custody of the stage claim also the custody of the muse." Ralph's complaint anticipates, in its essence, Lamb's antitheatrical critique of a half-century later: that the actor-manager had arrogated for himself the glory due to the playwright. I have described how the early nineteenth-century stage inherited the Georgian apotheosis of the actor. The eighteenth century likewise bequeathed to them, in a
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very practical sense, the death of the dramatic author. "On the stage;' states Ralph, "exhibition stands in place of composition: the Manager, whether player or harlequin, must be the sole pivot on which the whole machine is both to move and rest."88
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The pseudonymous "Stentor Telltruth" of the Herald also anticipates Lamb's concern, in the post-Garrick era, for the relative cultural status of actor and author: "All merits of the actor, it must be allowed, are local and temporary, while those of the author are universal and immortal." But under Garrick's influence, Telltruth complains, "the orders of society have been suffered ... to be reversed." Actors find fame and fortune, while writers starve in their garrets:
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[T]he dramatic poets even of the very last age appeared ... as far above actors in rank and esteem, as they at present do in fame. But such is the altered state of things, in our days, that it will be found, on talking with one manager, that he considers all living authors to be ignorant, presumptuous and despicable creatures; while another arrogantly treats them as dependents and hangers-on; nay draws characters of them for the stage, as ragged, shoeless mendicants, and writes letters for them, dated from Moor Fields, full of abject representations of their vile condition, and of his own glory and conscious preheminence [sic] ... such has become the case to a daring and even to a dangerous degree; dangerous, I mean, to literature and genius, and consequently, if not to the propriety, at least to the reputation of the age.89
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Another anti-Garrick diatribe from 1758, by William Shirley, abandons the high-handed indignation of Ralph and Telltruth in favor of oldfashioned bile. In a dozen pages of libelous heroic couplets, Shirley accuses Garrick of manipulating public opinion against writers, and encouraging the mob's "infatuation" with him:
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If e'er 'tis observed that good writers are few, The want, by no means, they'll attribute to you: But deem it an evil, for errors or crimes, That's fated to curse or to scandal the times: Your reports they rely on, your conduct excuse, Nor e'er wish to examine the works you refuse ... Nay, there are who have thought, that, instead of a farce, Should you print your intention to shew them your A_e, The Design all Reward would of Novelty reap, For they'd hurry, and cluster, and pay for a peep.90
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This marked hostility of writers toward Garrick's management at Drury Lane illuminates an important context for Lamb's 1811 Riflector essay. Considered in the tradition of Ralph, Telltruth, and Shirley, Lamb's unusually intense resentment of Garrick stands at the end of a half-century long decline in relations between the Georgian theater and the literary elite. His so-called antitheatricality is, in this sense, the product of an entrenched antagonism between those devoted to the preservation of theater as a forum for dramatic poetry, in which writers are the pre-eminent talent, and those in the business of creating the modern theater culture of spectacle and celebrity. Echoing his Augustan predecessor Stentor Telltruth, Lamb is thus concerned less with the aesthetic limits of dramatic representation per se, than the fate of literature on the modern stage and with it "the reputation of the age." What kind of culture, they ask-and the question is ours still today-venerates actors over writers?
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We have seen that the visual rather than oratorical emphases of Garrick's onstage technique reflected the broader impact of his career, which witnessed the progressive estrangement of authors from the stage and an inversely proportional boom in the theater's relationship with the commercial visual arts. But Garrick's most direct impact on the new visual-culture industry lay in his hiring innovative scene painters and designers to satisfY the public's appetite for spectacular effects. Already in the late 1750s, Garrick was attracting criticism for producing pantomimes and after-piece pageants designed purely for the visual delectation of his audience. Theophilus Cibber complained "of these unmeaning fopperies, miscalled entertainments ... these mockeries of sense, these larger kind of puppet shows-these idle amusements for children and holiday fools, as ridiculously gaudy as the glittering pageantry of a pastry cook's shop on a Twelfth Night."91 But these "fopperies," as Garrick well knew, were enormously popular with the public. Through the succeeding decade and a half, Garrick set about a series of innovations at Drury Lane intended to integrate the visual spectacle associated with opera and pantomime into legitimate theater.
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First, in 1763, Garrick removed spectators from the sides and rear of the stage to which the public had hitherto conceived a natural right. This promoted the audience's perception of the stage as, in Christopher Baugh's words, "a harmonious and completed vision."92 Experiments in stage lighting reinforced the new emphasis on visual and spectacular elements of the theater experience. On his return from Europe in 1765, Garrick got rid of the low-hung chandeliers that obtruded upon the Drury Lane stage, and
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introduced rudimentary footlights. With the sight-lines of the audience cleared and their focus on the performance aided by direct illumination, the stage was now literally set for innovations in scenic design. For these, Garrick hired Philippe De Loutherbourg, a young French academician known for his eclectic talents in pastorale, battle-scenes, and Romantic
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a landscape la Salvator Rosa. De Loutherbourg had no previous theater
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experience, but impressed Garrick with his knowledge of technological advances in French set design.
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Before De Loutherbourg's arrival at Drury Lane in 1771, scenery had played a minimal role in mainstream English theater. Stock sets, consisting usually of a single uniform backdrop and/or proscenium decoration, were shunted out year after year. Over the next decade, De Loutherbourg created a stunning new inventory of scenic properties and technologies, bringing the glamour of the Romantic picturesque to the aging pastoral backdrops of the Augustan stage. He specialized in mountainous vistas, exotic scenery, and the engineered effects-through light, sound, and moveable sets-of natural cataclysm. He introduced back-lit silk transparencies, graduated scenic fiats to give the illusion of depth, rapid changes of scene, and even mechanically operated puppets. The first sign of change at Drury Lane was De Loutherbourg's salary. Five hundred pounds a year was an unheard-of sum for a scene painter, and an indication of Garrick's commitment to spectacular innovations. For De Loutherbourg's second
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production, The Maid if the Oaks in 1774, Garrick invested 1500 pounds
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on the set: a "prodigious sum," declared the London Magazine, "yet it will not appear extravagant to anyone who sees it." In a fourteen-year association with Drury Lane, De Loutherbourg designed sets for pantomimes but also serious dramatic productions such as The Tempest. His crossover to legitimate drama excited anxiety in the literary press, which complained that he had "turned the stage of Shakespeare into an exhibition of scene painting." 93 But for the theater managers of the Regency period, Garrick's successful collaboration with De Loutherbourg reinforced the indispensability of visual spectacle to a successful new production.
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A review of De Loutherbourg's design for Mrs. Cowley's The Runaway (1776) indicates that his principal achievement in scenic design was the effect of verisimilitude:
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The piece was decorated by an excellent garden scene painted by that great master Louterbourg [sic], who has the honor of being the first artist who showed our theatre directors, that by a just position of light and shade, and
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a critical preservation of perspective, the eye of the spectator might be so effectually deceived in the playhouse, as to be induced to mistake the produce of art for pure nature.94
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De Loutherbourg's innovations in spectacular realism were a crucial technological and aesthetic precursor not only to the Regency stage, but also the hugely successful panoramas and dioramas of the West End. A further example of De Loutherbourg's singular importance in the modern history of mimetic media was his experimental Eidophusikon, an independendy produced "theater without actors" of the rnid-1780s. With houselights dimmed, and a display of moving figures and changing lights orchestrated from behind the proscenium, the Eidophusikon offered Londoners the first identifiably proto-cinematic entertainment.95 At the Eidophusikon, as at the panoramas where many Drury Lane scene painters later found employment, the combination of spectacle and verisimilitude proved enormously lucrative and perennially popular.
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Garrick's hiring of De Loutherbourg thus shared with his innovations in stage performance a common aesthetic purpose: the effect of the real. That is, Garrick's promotion of verisimilitude in stage production should be seen as a logical extension of the psychological realism he introduced to stage performance. Predictably, Lamb, Coleridge, and other Romantic writers were as disenchanted with De Loutherbourg's legacy as with Garrick's, for both contributed to the transformation of English theater from an Elizabethan, essentially literary medium, to a modern, predorninandy visual medium. A satirical print by Matthew Darly from 1772 (figure 1.3) anticipates Romantic disaffection with the growing emphasis on theatrical "show." Employing the iconography from Reynolds' celebrated tribute painting, Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy (1761), Darly places Garrick between the poetic muses and his production staff of set builders and costume designers. Where Reynolds' painting suggested that Garrick favored comedy over tragedy, Darly makes clear through his caption that Garrick's principle loyalty is to spectacle rather than dramatic texts of either genre: "Behold the Muses Roscius sue in Vain/Taylors & Carpenters usurp their Reign."96
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Further to this trend toward spectacle, theaters were progressively enlarged after 1780, pardy to accommodate the extravagant visions of set designers like De Loutherbourg, to the point where Sarah Siddons deliberately altered her onstage technique, "fearful that the power of my voice was not equal to filling a London theater."97 Leigh Hunt later decried the renovations as a further lapse in taste from the Romantic ideal of an intimate
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, './.1,-J,,ft//},· • ;;;,,,_..J]UJ. 'Cil S ·"" ,;, 1:"~';
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' /~?·m·j·f;,(',.,/n:, 'M"'/' /A;,~ ,yf~'f"·
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Figure 1.3 Matthew Darly, "Caricature of Reynolds' 'Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy'," title page engraving to The Theatres: A Poetical Dissection by Sir Nicholas Nipclose [pseud.] (1772). General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
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Elizabethan theater. "The managers and the public thus corrupt each other," Hunt charged, "but it is the former who begin the infection by building these enormous theatres in which a great part of the spectators must have noise and shew before they can hear or see what is going forwards. In time these spectators learn to like nothing else; and then the managers must administer to their depraved appetite, or they cannot get rich."98 Coleridge likewise complained that "in the glare of the scenes, with every wished-for object industriously realized, the mind becomes bewildered in surrounding attractions," while Scott agreed that "show and machinery have ... usurped the place of tragic poetry."99 Lamb too, in his neverperformed prologue to Coleridge's Remorse, contrasted the text-oriented
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austerity of the Shakespearean stage with the De Loutherbourgian visual effects in vogue at the Regency theater:
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The very use, since so essential grown, Of painted scenes, was to his stage unknown. The air-blest casde, round whose wholesome crest, The mardet, guest of summer, chose her nestThe forest walks of Arden's fair domain, Where Jacques fed his solitary veinNo pencil's aid as yet had dared supply, Seen only by the intellectual eye. Those scenic helps, denied to Shakespeare's page, Our Author owes to a more liberal age. 100
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Lamb's antitheatrical critique reads more gently here than in his Reflector essay, but he nevertheless betrays a quiet contempt for the gaudy "liberality" of the Regency stage, and nostalgia for the "intellectual" theater of the Elizabethans. Garrick's legacy, both as a realist actor and a managerial architect of stage spectacle, was a theater where "no attention is paid any more to good dialogue; [where] effect is all that is demanded. One goes to the theater to see, scarcely any longer to hear."101 Given Lamb's antispectacular prejudices, it is little wonder his prologue was rejected; although, caught in a love-hate relation to the Regency stage, he appears to have been disappointed that it was.
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In his antitheatrical manifesto of 1811, "On Garrick and Acting ... ," Lamb attempted to reassert the ideal experience of reading Shakespeare over its visual realization at the theater. His argument for closet reading hangs on the issue of the psychological depth of Shakespeare's characters, which, he believed, could not satisfactorily be represented onstage. But the conflict between the late Georgian theater and the literary elite runs deeper than the question of dramatic character. Already in 1770, Oliver Goldsmith complained that only "old pieces are revived, and scarcely any new ones admitted. The actor is ever in our eye, and the poet seldom permitted to appear."102 The same paucity of quality new drama was true of the Romantic period. The fame of Siddons, Kemble, and Kean, which so overshadowed the dramatists of the early nineteenth century, perpetuated a theatrical culture of celebrity that had originated in Goldsmith's time with Garrick. Through Garrick's influence, the English stage had transformed
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from a forum for the acted recitation of dramatic poetry to a celebrity theater where the most famous people in London appeared nightly, in a limited range of roles, to satisfY the public's craving simply for the sight of them.
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If Garrick's celebritization of Drury Lane alienated authors, his intensely visual, physiognomic acting style marginalized the text itself. This supersession of text by spectacle lies at the heart of Lamb's antitheatricality. As quoted earlier, Lamb rejected the Garrickian metaphor of the "legible" face. "Of the motives and grounds of the passion," he insisted, "the actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds" (my emphasis). Lamb is consequently impatient with shopworn articles of the Garrick legend: "those who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic of his eye ... but what have they to do with Hamlet? What have they to do with intellect?" However skilled the actor, Lamb contends, his face cannot become text. One cannot "read" into his opaque expression the legible passions of the poet. But Lamb's was a minority opinion. The historical significance of Garrick's acting style is not that he introduced visuality to the eighteenth-century stage-critics had long complained of the theater's debasement by pantomime, opera, musical entr'actes, and Bartholomew Fair style entertainments-but that he brought a realistic visual technique to literary drama, hitherto reserved for an oratorical, "poetic" style. With his highly visual approach to dramatic performance, Garrick first made a spectacle of himself then turned to technological innovations in scenery. And it was against this theater of spectacle, both human and mechanical, that Lamb and other Romantic writers revolted.
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The implications of the Garrick revolution extend further than the nineteenth century. In Garrick's signature "physiognomic" style lies a Georgian embryo of the cinematic close-up. His intimate technique invited the kind of ritual rapt attention the camera now pays to film and TV actors, to create an atmosphere of meaning at climactic moments in the plot and a suggestion of psychological depth. Further anticipating twentieth-century celebrity culture, Garrick intuited the natural link Debord has observed between visual spectacle and the parasitic media of celebrity self-promotion. Having created a public fascination for his face through his onstage performances, he took direct control over marketing his image in myriad merchandized forms. The booming popularity of souvenirs bearing his "close-up" image shows the marketability of his visual style beyond the theater itself. Whether exhibited onstage at Drury Lane, in a printshop window, or a decorative screen in a drawing room, Garrick's
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image seduced the public gaze to fascinated scrutiny of his changeable features. The ubiquity of his image in Georgian London prefigures the postmodern cult of media stardom whereby an individual's fame-be it a newscaster, sporting hero, or movie star-is judged according to market recognition of his or her face on a TV screen, magazine cover, or billboard. That recognition then becomes the basis of the uniquely modern career of the celebrity, who is famous simply for being famous. 103
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Lamb was a devotee of the theater, whatever his reservations about the popularity of its actors. But he nevertheless longed for a return to the Elizabethan stage where, according to his friend Coleridge, "the idea of the poet was always present, not of the actors, not of the thing to be represented. It was at that time more a delight and employment for the intellect, than an amusement for the senses."104 But between Lamb, Coleridge, and the Elizabethans lay the Restoration and the theater-crazed Georgian age. This century and a half witnessed the birth of opera and pantomime, the enlargement of theaters from intimate boxes to cavernous auditoria, the rise of the scene painter, the corresponding demise of the dramatist, and the institution of Garrick's visual style as the summit of dramatic stage performance. Sarah Siddons, for example, supreme icon of the Romantic stage, inherited the lineaments of a realistic, visual style from the master Garrick. Her facial expression, like Garrick's, appeared to the spectator "so full of information, that the passion is told from her look before she speaks."105 Frustrated by Garrick's enduring influence on acting style, Shelley ultimately called for a return to the masks of Greek tradition, to rid the stage of the "partial and inharmonious effect" of the physiognomic style and its "master[s] of ideal mimickry."106 In short, the Romantic age inherited from Garrick a drama of the eye, not the ear, a theater of spectacle not poetry. Critics and would-be poets of the stage, such as Charles Lamb, were hostile to the popular aura surrounding the visual art of the actor and the notion of theater-as-spectacle. The cultural agenda of Lamb's essay for Hunt's Riflector was thus not antitheatrical in any absolute sense, but an effort to reclaim the theater for literature and literary genius. Considered in this light, Lamb's "On Garrick and Acting ..." appears not as "a glaring aberration" in Romantic theater criticism but a deliberate, ideologically grounded counter-attack in the culture war between England's literary elite and the new celebrity-based visual entertainment industry.
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4 7
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Performing the Real: Reynolds, Mrs. Abington, and Celebrity as Masquerade
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"On the stage he was natural, simple, ciffecting;
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T'was only that when he was ciff he was acting"
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-Goldsmith on Garrick
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By all accounts, Garrick's acting technique centered on perfecdy controlled, rapid transitions in feeling. Lichtenberg marveled at Garrick's "gift for changing expression," while Frances Abington, a long-time leading lady at Drury Lane, specified that his unique "excellence lay in the bursts and quick transitions of passion."107 This critical rhetoric applied to Garrick's mercurial performances echoes David Hume's skeptical description of human identity in his Treatise of Human Nature, published on the eve of Garrick's stage debut in 1740. In the section entided "Of Personal Identity," Hume describes the self as "a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." Onstage, Garrick mastered the creation of just such a plausible chain of related impressions in his representation of dramatic character. His portrayal of, say, Hamlet, conveyed to his rapt audiences exacdy the "smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of connected ideas" that Hume insists positivist philosophy has wrongly defined in terms of "identity." According to Hume's celebrated figure, the human mind is not a single, unified vessel but "a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance."108 If the mind is a "kind of theatre" and the fount of our essential character, then Garrick in the role of Hamlet, with his seamless control of dramatic appearances, offered as convincing an account of human identity as was possible in a Humean world.
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The Georgians explored the possibilities of a theatrical, Humean identity for themselves in their enthusiasm for masquerades. These events included lavish, often decadent affairs at the homes of the elite, but also public masquerades that attracted thousands of people to venues like the Vauxhall Gardens, creating a de facto outdoor theater for what Terry Casde has called a "shimmering liquid play on the themes of self-presentation and self-concealment."109 At the height of masquerade mania, in 1743, Fielding invoked the masquerade as a synecdoche for society as a whole, which he called "a vast masquerade, where the greatest Part appear disguised." 110 Sixty years later, when the popularity of masquerades had terminally declined, Charles Lamb continued to make use of the metaphor, describing life in London to
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Wordsworth as "a pantomime and a masquerade."111 The Georgians were fascinated with the theatrical nature of the newly teeming streets of urban England, and enjoyed dressing to deceive. At Garrick's spectacular Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford in 1769, not a word of Shakespeare's plays was read or performed, but thousands attended the masquerade balls nominally in his honor. The guests apparently felt little obligation to Shakespeare's texts:James Boswell appeared as a Corsican chief. Garrick himself, a quintessential theater professional and notoriously jealous of his own pre-eminence, disliked masquerades, in which everyone assumed the aura of theatricality. As Goldsmith wittily observed, Garrick was already "in character" as a public celebrity: "On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting I T'was only that when he was off he was acting."112 Accordingly, Garrick almost invariably went as himself.
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A close and conscious connection existed in the eighteenth-century imagination between painting, masquerade, and the theater. The visual and verbal rhetoric of all three phenomena frequently overlapped. For example, criticism of the morally pernicious illusions of theatrical performance, mostly from the clergy, was often indistinguishable from charges brought against the masquerade. 113 In another cross-fertilization of art and entertainment, women attended masquerades as characters from the court portraiture of Van Dyck and Holbein. Likewise, as we have seen in the career of Garrick, the Georgian actor, no less than the masquerade maven, "became an image responded to, interpreted and analyzed like a work of art." 114 The inverse also held true. Garrick's friend and mentor, William Hogarth, saw painting as a form of theater: "my picture was my stage, and men and women my players, who were by means of certain actions and expressions to exhibit a dumb show." 115 Bearing out Hogarth's point, his Beggar's Opera, a painting of the theater, is barely distinguishable in com-
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a positional terms from his Marriage Ia Mode or A Harlot's Progress, with
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their theatrical view of real life. These works also contained literal references to the new Georgian entertainment culture. In the second plate of A Harlot's Progress, Moll Hackabout has recently enjoyed a fancy-dress entertainment. Her mask lies by the table and, as evidence of the masquerade's reputation as a scene of sexual intrigue, she is in the process of concealing the departure of a lover. In Hogarth's comedic vision of Georgian London, one masquerade led naturally to another.
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In a culture fascinated by the ambiguous sign of the mask, the line dividing life-like theater and theatricalized real life could on occasion be literally crossed. In one Garrick-produced stage pageant of London life, the rear wall of Drury Lane was opened to a view of passers-by on the street, creating a seamless link between the real London and its theatrical simula-
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tion. A generation later on the same stage, in the winter of 1815-16, a popular Drury Lane pantomime recreated a famous actual masquerade from the previous social season. The result was a masquerade of a masquerade, produced as a form of commercial entertainment. Compounding the delicious ironies of this production, Byron attended both "the real masquerade" (emphasis in original) and its stage re-creation. He ended up onstage with a friend, cavorting "amongst the figuranti" who "were puzzled to find out who we were." 116 In the unscripted intrusion of Lord Byron from the pit onto the stage, the pantomime crossed the threshold of the "real."Just as guests at the original masquerade had no doubt sought to guess his identity through his costume, so the Drury Lane company, assuming the roles of the same guests, are left to wonder at the mysterious new arrival.
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As the most fashionable portraitist of the age, Garrick's friend Sir Joshua Reynolds was naturally attuned to the Georgian love of playacting, both public and private. From the 1760s on, he began to incorporate the booming unofficial drama industry of amateur theatricals, tableaux vivants, and masquerade parties into his pictorial repertoire. In his so-called historical portraits, which represented aristocratic women as characters from classical mythology, Reynolds "moved the contemporary love for masquerades from the assembly room to the studio."117 These portraits featured prominendy at Royal Academy exhibitions. They excited popular comment and reviews, and often found mass-market distribution in the form of prints. The second section of this chapter on theater, art, and celebrity shows how Reynolds' career converges with Garrick's not only as his occasional portraitist and an eminent visual artist in his own right, but as stage manager of a fashionable new London theater: the portrait studio. Richard Wendorf has drawn attention to the theatrical quality of Reynolds' studio methods and "the dramatic nature of the sitting itself." In this context, Wendorf suggests, we might usefully consider Reynolds' studio as "a carefully contrived stage," and Reynolds himself "a theatrical manager." Wendorf is indebted for this insight to David Piper, who has argued that Reynolds conceived the challenge of portraiture as "not merely that of recording an individual facial likeness, but of producin,5with all the theatrical implications of that word-a convincing, coherent character in action." 118
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Reynolds' famous theatrical portraits of Garrick, Siddons, and Frances Abington played a crucial role-both as original, exhibited artworks and as mass produced prints-in constructing an aura of celebrity around the late eighteenth-century theater and its performers. During her career, Sarah Siddons cultivated an image of regal disinterestedness, but in retirement she was candid about the lure of fame for actresses and the necessity of mar-
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keting oneself through paintings and prints: "I was, as I have confess'd, an ambitious candidate for Fame.... As much of my time as could now be stol'n from imperious affairs, was employ'd in sitting for various Pictures."119 The most successful stage performer of the Romantic age, like Garrick before her, recognized the dependence of performing artists on subsidiary visual media to promote them. But the aura of performance in Reynolds' art extended beyond the players of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. As we shall discover in his so-called historical portraits, Reynolds' aristocratic female subjects embraced, no less enthusiastically than his professional sitters, the theatrical possibilities of personal identity bequeathed by Hume, Garrick, and the age of masquerade.
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In the second half of the eighteenth century, Garrick and Reynolds transformed the visual rhetoric of the theater and portrait painting respectively. The personable and relaxed manner of Reynolds' portraits replaced the stiff profiles of Godfrey Kneller, while Garrick's natural ease onstage usurped the mummified posturing of Booth and Quin. 120 But for both Reynolds and Garrick, "naturalism" was a production, an aesthetic effect, a relative truth: what appeared real onstage or in a portrait would be "ridiculous" in
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ordinary life. Diderot, in his Paradox ifActing (ca.1773), had argued for the
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essential artificiality of "natural" acting. In a conversation between Johnson and Gibbon that Reynolds went to the unusual effort to transcribe, Johnson insisted, following Diderot, that the impression of reality in a Garrick performance was an elaborate fiction for which dramatic technique and preparation beforehand far outweighed an emotional commitment to the role onstage. To Gibbon's objection that Garrick "surely feels the passion at the moment he is representing it," Johnson asked derisively whether Reynolds likewise experienced the emotions of his subject while painting. "It is amazing," he continues,
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that any one should be so ignorant as to think that an actor will risk his reputation by depending on the feelings that shall be excited in the presence of two hundred people, on the repetition of certain words which he has repeated two hundred times before in what actors call their study. No, Sir. Garrick left nothing to chance. Every gesture, every expression of countenance and variation of voice, was settled in his closet before he set his foot upon the stage. 121
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Conscious planning and artistic technique were equally indispensable, Johnson asserts, to Garrick rehearsing a role in his study as to Reynolds conceiving a portrait's composition in his studio.
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Reynolds chose the discussion between Johnson and Gibbon as one of two dialogues "illustrating Johnson's manner of conversation" to record for posterity, suggesting that, like Johnson (and, later, Coleridge), Reynolds despised the fashion for confusing "nature" in art with literal truth. In his presidential lecture to the Royal Academy in 1786, he made a deliberate effort to distance the higher branches of drama and art-namely tragedy and history painting-from sensory illusion. To Reynolds, a player such as Garrick appeared
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to aim no more at imitation, so far as it belongs to anything like deception, or to expect that the spectators should think that the events there represented are really passing before them, than Raffaelle in his Cartoons, or Poussin in his Sacraments, expected it to be believed, even for a moment, that what they exhibited were real figures. 122
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To illustrate his analogy between theater and painting, Reynolds emphasized the pragmatic responsibilities of the actor, who was required to communicate intimate psychological truths before a large auditorium of people. However immersed in his role, the actor, like the painter at his canvas, must remain aware
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that everything should be raised and enlarged beyond its natural state; that the full effect may come home to the spectator, which otherwise would be lost in the comparatively extensive space of the Theatre ... All this unnaturalness, though right and proper in its place, would appear affected and ridiculous in a private room. 123
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In short, Reynolds agrees with Johnson and Diderot that the effect of the real, in theater as in painting, is a stylized production. Just as the actor never fully deludes his audience, but rather participates in a mutual understanding of the codes-physiognomic, gestural, and scenic-exclusive to stage performance, so the portrait artist employs exaggeration and "art" to stage naturalistic visual effects in his paintings. At the same time, however, the apparently parallel relation between Garrick and Reynolds was, in an important respect, a mirror image. While Garrick's radically "natural" style brought theatrical performance closer to real life, Reynolds' historical portraits bestowed on his real-life subjects the aura of the theater.
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The figural use of the theater to describe eighteenth-century social phenomena, particularly (following Burke) episodes in the French Revolution, is pandemic. Marc Baer has rightly warned that, "as with many unex-
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amined metaphors, theatre may be in danger of becoming too all-encompassing."124 I wish to avoid the more fanciful critical applications of "theatricality" by adhering to literal references to the theater in Reynolds' paintings, and only then proceeding to speculative inferences about theatricality at the social level. Like any critic who attempts to conjoin painting and theatricality, I am indebted to Michael Fried's pioneering work on the subject, which illuminates how certain eighteenth-century portraits and genre paintings are built upon a relative awareness of the spectator. Rather than focusing on the subject's deliberate recognition or self-absorbed neglect of the viewer's presence, however, my analysis of Reynolds' historical portraits suggests that the pose, dress, and setting of these subjects imply a theatrical self-consciousness whether they are looking at us or not. Certainly, neither Reynolds nor his subjects communicate what Fried has identified in French portraiture as a "desire to escape the theatricalizing consequences of the beholder's presence."125
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Women are the exclusive subjects of Reynolds' historical portraits because it was the domestic sphere that played host to Georgian allegorical imaginings and heroic fantasy. 126 As such, these paintings reinforce the impression that, for a Georgian woman of a certain class, personal identity could be more fluid than for her male counterpart, who was rigidly defined by birth, profession, and his standing in the wider world. As Gill Perry has observed, "although many middle and upper class women in the eighteenth century had access to learning and education, without comparable profession, political or military roles through which they could be publicly identified, they were more easily transformed into seductive allegorical images than their male counterparts."127 Mistress of the self-sufficient, isolated realm of a county seat, any woman of rank was free to imagine herself a nymph or goddess. It is the activity of this restless, housebound female imagining that these Reynolds paintings record. In addition, from the 1770s on, prominent landed gentry such as the Duke of Marlborough and the Duke of Richmond began to erect theaters on their estates to satisfy the general lust for performance and show. Full-fledged productions at these private theaters attracted audiences in the hundreds. 128 Many of Reynolds' female subjects were regular performers on this unofficial private theater circuit, and would have perceived their sitting for Reynolds as an extension of their careers as amateur actresses. These private theatricals, as well as after-dinner tableaux vivants and "attitudes" (ala Lady Hamilton), drew on the pictorial iconography of ancient statuary and Old Master paintings. The interior of the Greek Revival home--dotted with classical busts, tapestries, and ceramics featuring allegorical scenes-provided the
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Figure 1.4 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Three Ladies Adorning a Term if Hymen (1773). Tate
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Gallery, London/ Art Resource, New York.
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perfect setting for these impromptu performances, and the intriguing image of the Georgians imitating their furniture. On such occasions, the boundaries between pictorial and performance art were crossed, a theatrical transgression clearly visible in Reynolds' historical portraits.
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In Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen (1773, figure 1.4), the Montgomery sisters, nicknamed "the Irish Graces," dress up as nymphs and form a fanciful tableau about a statue of the Roman god of marriage. The setting is local and contemporary-the Montgomery estate in Ireland, aflame in glorious autumnal color-but the drama performed, a rambunctious fertility rite, is wholly pagan. The seasonal wind is a decisive pictorial element. It flaps at the women's dresses and hair, and wraps an enormous crimson curtain around a tree behind them. The breeze communicates its spirit to the sisters themselves: the eldest, Anne, dressed in a long white robe, dances on one foot while next to her Elizabeth, in a sprinter's pose, accepts a floral baton from Barbara, who is on her haunches. Reynolds' references to the Grand Style emerge here from the coloristic and compositional sub-text of
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his conventional portraits to a dazzling combination of explicit motifs: diaphanous classical clothing, mythological characters, and Dionysian dance-steps. Elements of Poussin pastorale and Watteau jete galante are apparent, but the picture possesses a theatrical composition and energy unique to Reynolds. The Montgomery sisters were well-known amateur actresses, and the foreground of Reynolds' painting, entirely filled by the cavorting women, resembles a stage. Reynolds also includes an abundance of props: Barbara's basket of flowers; a rug-covered table behind Elizabeth; a gold pitcher and chair with a ram's head molding (emblematic of the grooms-to-be) on the right; and, of course, the antiquary statue of Hymen presiding. The billowing curtain at the rear makes for a serviceable backdrop to the scene: we can even see where it has been tied to the tree. "At any moment the curtain may fall;' Ernst Gombrich observes, whereupon "three smiling amateur actresses will resume their social duties:>~29
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Stylistically, Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen represents an adventurous compromise in Reynolds' oeuvre between the real and the ideal. "When a portrait is painted in the Historical Style," he explained in his Fifth Discourse (written at the time he painted the Montgomery sisters), "it is neither an exact minute representation of an individual, nor completely ideal."130 One thing is sure: Three Ladies could never be confused with a dry neo-classical allegory. Reynolds has not removed the Montgomery sisters to antiquity, but has brought the Georgian fantasy of antiquity brilliantly to life. These aristocratic women, however idealized, are palpably real in their enthusiasm for playing the Graces. Reynolds has made his canvas a stage, and invites us to enjoy an impromptu performance at the Montgomery estate. As with many of his historical portraits, Reynolds received his commission for Three Ladies from one of his subjects' future husbands, who wished to commemorate his impending nuptials in the form of a unique and permanent display of his bride. "It was the very instability produced by the irresolvable tension of portrait and allegory," remarks Marcia Pointon, "that made this format [the historical portrait] peculiarly appropriate for the representation of young women-marriageable, recently married, or about to be married." 131 Reynolds' female subjects assumed their roles as part of a transaction conducted between men, and for the delectation of the male eye, but the paintings arguably do more to liberate than exploit them. To participate in a fanciful allegory, full of fun, theater, and sexual energy, was a singular opportunity in an aristocratic woman's life. In the case of the Montgomery sisters, the Reynolds painting depicts a rare moment of euphoric self-creation for brides-to-be in a transitional period
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between two households and identities, between childhood subordination to their parents and assumption of their husband's name. 132
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The fanciful portrait of Lady Sarah Bunbury (like the Montgomery sisters, an enthusiastic amateur actress) likewise exemplifies Reynolds' increasingly comedic vision of portraiture after 1760. Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces (1765, figure 1.5) lacks the dynamism of Three Ladies, but shares the same elaborate theatricality. We are in a portico of the Bunbury residence converted for an after-dinner tableau. The scene is filled with the decorative flowers, props, and statuary we saw in Three Ladies. Lady Sarah wears an entirely fictitious classical robe, and her attitude of supplication is pure melodrama. A younger member of the family cast in the role of servant girl sits at the right, dressed in Lincoln green with gold trim, pouring a libation. At the very bottom of the painting, a straight black line indicates the foreground termination of Lady Sarah's stage (a blue coverlet hangs over its edge); we observe her from a front row seat. Lady Bunbury later left her husband, who had commissioned the portrait, in scandalous circumstances. Lord Bunbury nevertheless insisted on keeping the painting, presumably to taste the extremity of masquerade in his ex-wife's attitude of virtuous servility.
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A less solemn historical portrait from the following year, Mrs. Hale as Euphrosyne (figure 1.6), owes its reputation to the svelte beauty of the principal subject and Reynolds' successful realization of her allegorical identity, "Good Cheer." Mary Chaloner, soon to be Mrs. Hale (and eventually a mother of twenty), makes a spectacular entrance from stage right, her dark hair trailing from where she has come. She wears the customary classical robe but with her waist and bodice flatteringly articulated. She also shares the anatomically impossible features of Reynolds' classicized women: extraordinarily long legs, a truncated torso and, in place of shoulders, a swanlike neck that declines gently into her upper arms. She performs in the late afternoon light to the accompaniment of two bare-shouldered nymphs on flute and cymbals and a boy playing the triangle, who is distracted by the entrance of two cherubic children. They have come onstage when they ought not and look out at us, the audience, with mischievous glee. One lifts a finger conspiratorially to his lips: we are not to tell Mrs. Hale she has been upstaged. The musical ensemble scene (commissioned for the Robert Adam music room at Harewood House) is not "orgiastic," as Pointon's overheated reading has suggested, but a playful mock-Bacchanal. Despite suggestions of sexual display in Mrs. Hale's diaphanous garment and the bare shoulders of her musicians, decorum is preserved through the self-
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Figure 1.5 Reynolds, Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces (1763-65). Oil on canvas, 242.6x151.5 em, Mr. and Mrs. W W Kimball Collection. Photograph courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
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Figure 1.6 Reynolds, Mrs. Hale asEuphrosyne (1766) . Reproduced by the kind permission of the Earl and Countess of Harewood and Trustees of the Harewood House Trust.
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conscious theatricality of the subject. 133 Mrs. Hale is playing a Bacchante, not embodying one. Portrayed as one of the mythical Graces, she is available as an object of male fantasy, but her expression of confidence and "good humor" means that she controls the terms of that fantasy and thwarts subjugation. No contemporary review of the painting suggests that Mrs. Hale either compromised her respectability through her public exhibition as a follower of Bacchus, or exposed herself to the contempt of the mere voyeur.
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Further to the relation of Reynolds' historical portraits to the public, the identity of his female subjects becomes more complex than the simple adoption of an allegorical persona. Protocol disallowed the inclusion of a lady's name in exhibition catalogues, because of the good chance her portrait might find itself hung next to that of a famous courtesan or actress (a characteristically English laxity in class distinctions that scandalized French visitors). Mrs. Hale as Euphrosyne, for example, appeared at the Society of Artists Exhibition in 1766 entitled simply A LAdy; whole length. In 1773, a Reynolds portrait of Mrs. Hartley with her child was listed as A Nymph with a Young Bacchus, even though its real-life subject was widely known. Likewise, the sentimental title of the 1769 painting, Hope Nursing Love, fooled nobody that Reynolds' subject was a certain Miss Morris. As Martin Postle has pointed out, although the painting is now usually referred to as Miss Morris as Hope Nursing Love, Reynolds himself never gave it that name. 134 These shifting descriptions signifY more than an art-historical curiosity. The anxiety of connoisseurs and art historians to make a clear distinction between portraiture and history painting-between the real identity of Reynolds' subjects and their ideal persona--suggests a teasing ambiguity in his historical portraits. Whether Reynolds' subject is Mrs. Hale or Euphrosyne or an anonymous lady remains undetermined in the painting itself. Certainly Reynolds never clarified the issue. The identity of his female subject shifts in the viewer's mind according to the changing caption beneath her. With their emphasis on role-playing, these portraits invoke Hume's skeptical definition of the self in his Treatise on Human Nature. In Reynolds' allegorizing vision, personal identity has become a kind of theater and a chance at masquerade.
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When done satisfYing the theatrical fantasies of his aristocratic clients, Reynolds' favorite "fanciful" subjects were courtesans and actresses. These two classes of women, closely associated and often confused, shared a liminal and highly mobile status in Georgian society, circulating with unusual freedom through its various classes. As models for historical subjects, they
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highlighted the purely theatrical nature of Reynolds' enterprise, reducing the allegorical remoteness of the paintings. One favorite Reynolds model, the renowned beauty Kitty Fisher, was an eighteenth-century Marilyn Monroe, a celebrity avant Ia lettre. She began her career apprenticed to a milliner, spent six years in the beau monde as mistress to the rich and famous, posed for Reynolds as Cleopatra, then fell ill from over-use of noxious cosmetics, married into obscurity, and died. All before the age of thirty. That Reynolds, the consummate art professional, painted her so often without commission is as convincing a proof of her charismatic appeal as her string of celebrated lovers. 135 Reynolds' association with Kitty Fisher was not without commercial interest, however. Her portraits were promptly engraved and made available for mass consumption in the form of prints.
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In a manner similar to the salons of the aristocracy, the Georgian theater also served as a "showcase for women who had that autonomous characteristic called beauty," and as a talent pool for ambitious society portrait painters like Reynolds. 136 Ironically, the most famous of English theatrical portraits, the darkly melodramatic Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784), is an anomaly in Reynolds' oeuvre. Few of his paintings aspire to such serious sublimity. Just as Garrick, in Reynolds' famous theatrical portrait from 1761, appears to choose the buxom charms of Comedy over the severity of Tragedy, Reynolds was most drawn to the whimsical, mercurial possibilities of playacting. His taste in actresses lay not, in fact, with the celebrated tragedian Sarah Siddons, whom he found cold onstage, but with the comic genius of Frances Abington: he painted her more often than Garrick and Siddons combined. 137
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In life, Mrs. Abington was not considered a genuine beauty in the mold of Kitty Fisher, but onstage she was a siren of the quicksilver, impish kind. Georg Lichtenberg was particularly alive to her charms, describing with relish her unorthodox habit of walking upstage with her back to the audience. "I wish you might have seen," he wrote home to Germany, "the propriety with which she swayed her hips, with each step evincing a mischievous desire to aggravate the glances of imitative envy and admiration with which a thousand pairs of eyes followed her." 138 Sexual charisma, Lichtenberg implies, won her the admiration of the men, while her "exquisite taste" in dress excited the "imitative envy" of female spectators. According to nineteenth-century accounts of her life (biography would be too dignified a name for the published innuendo that perpetuated her memory), Mrs. Abington's acting talent served her offstage as well as on. After an unpromising childhood as a cobbler's daughter turned teenage prostitute in Covent Garden, her liaison with the actor and reprobate
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Theophilus Cibber gave young Frances Barton (as she then was) her first opportunity on stage. 139 Once established as a rising star of the theater, she embarked on a social and sexual career worthy of the Restoration comedy heroines she impersonated onstage. She married for form's sake, but soon attached herself to a prominent parliamentarian when touring in Dublin. On the death of her lover, she invested the generous benefits of his will in a consortium of London residences. These she selected according to a simple criterion: her own satisfaction and convenience. "Conversant in amours;' reported John Haslewood, in his salacious Secret History of the Green Room (1795),
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she now resolved to separate her lovers into two different classes: the first, those whose liberality might enable her to live in splendour; and the second, those whom her humour pitched upon. For this purpose, she had various houses in town for her various admirers; her assignation with Mr. Jefferson, formerly of Drury Lane, were made at a house near Tottenham Court Road; while my Lord Shelburne, now Marquis of Lansdown, allowed her fifty pounds per week, gave her an elegant house, the corner of Clarges street, Piccadilly, and continued this generosity until he married. Mr. Dundas succeeded his Lordship as her humble servant. 140
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With these unusual domestic arrangements, Mrs. Abington effectively reversed the terms of sexual exchange of her youth. She now "kept" men in addition to being kept, and visited houses according to her whim, as a gentleman might take his choice of bordellos. The freedom aristocratic Georgian women found, transiently, in attending masquerades or posing for historical portraits, Mrs. Abington discovered as a permanent way of life. Shearer West has said of Sarah Siddons that "her private life, as much as her stage roles, was a kind of performance, enacted with the knowledge that she was constantly being observed, admired, or envied."141 Frances Abington's career demonstrates, however, that Mrs. Siddons marked the zenith rather than the origin of celebrityhood among Georgian actresses. Like Siddons, who combined stardom with a carefully crafted persona of idealized maternity, Mrs. Abington play-acted, performed, and improvised her way from humble beginnings to the very heights of Georgian society, taking on the roles of expensive courtesan, high-society lady, and theater diva with equal relish and conviction as and when they arose.
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Mrs. Abington was the model of the modern entertainment celebrity in several respects. The scandal of her private life served only to increase her
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fame, and the glamour of her personality alone, independent of her professional identity, became the object of popular fantasy and emulation. As Kimberley Crouch has pointed out, Mrs. Abington belonged to that select band of "actresses so successful at taking on the characteristics of their wealthiest and most socially secure patrons that they became worthy of imitation."142 Mrs. Abington's first appearance on stage in any given year was a sure "harbinger of the reigning fashion for the season."143 In 1759, appearing in Garrick's play High Life Below Stairs, she debuted a particularly fetching cap that soon sprang up in millinery windows all over Britain and Ireland as "Abington's Cap." It was perhaps the first celebrity-endorsed product. Later, in the 1776 season, she chose to make "a very beautiful style of petticoat, of Persian origin," her trademark. "It was no sooner seen," Haslewood relates, "than it was imitated in the politest circles."
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As a performer, Mrs. Abington belonged to the new natural school of acting. Her ability to be rather than merely perform a role reminded contemporaries of Garrick. Lichtenberg speaks of her "talent for convincing the innermost heart of the spectators that she does not feel herself to be acting a part, but presenting reality in all its bitter truth." 144 Exclusively a comedienne, her most famous role was the social-climbing Lady Teazle in Sheridan's The School for Scandal, in which she represented a perfect combination of "artificial refinement and natural vivacity" (my emphases). 145 The irony that her own fortune-hunting career so closely resembled Lady Teazle's did not disable her performance; indeed it energized the public response in her favor. In the epilogue to The School for Scandal, written for Mrs. Abington in the character of Lady Teazle, the tantalizing paradox of her artifice and naturalness comes to a head. The epilogue's theme is Lady Teazle's renunciation of her glittering London social life for retirement to the country. But as she relates a conversation with Sheridan (the "bard") about the necessity of a tragic sequel to the play, theatrical metaphors invade the language of the epilogue, to the point where the role of "Lady Teazle" herself becomes indistinguishable from the actress who plays her:
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Farewell! Your revels I partake no more, And Lady Teazle's occupation's o'er! All this I told our bard; he smiled and said 'twas clear, I ought to play deep tragedy next year. Meanwhile he drew wise morals from his play, And in these solemn periods stalked away: "Blessed were the fair like you, her faults who stopped,
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And closed her follies when the curtain dropped! No more in vice or error to engage Or play the fool at large on life's great stage."
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The puzzle of this speech surrounds the shifting referent of the "I" Oater "you"). Who, for instance, is "play[ing] the fool;' Mrs. Abington or Lady Teazle? Is Lady Teazle's "occupation" her own as a misbehaving wife, or Mrs. Abington's, who performs her? When the metaphor turns to the curtain dropping on "life's great stage," are we to imagine the conclusion of Lady Teazle's social career or Mrs. Abington's at the theater, to resume her role as real-life celebrity? The passage is confounding to us on the page but must not have been to Sheridan's audience, who had the benefit of Mrs. Abington herself to give shape to the ironies. Perhaps it was Mrs. Abington's performance of this epilogue that prompted Lichtenberg to observe "that the cardboard world of Drury Lane is too restricted for her," and allude mysteriously to the common surmise that she would soon "play her part in the greater sphere it reflects."146 Like her manager Garrick, Mrs. Abington embodied the new theater culture of celebrity in which the aura of onstage performance merged with the aura of popular fame. For the Georgian public as for our postrnodern age, celebrity culture implies a breakdown between public persona and personal identity, between the theatrical and the real.
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While her excellence in the role of the parvenue was undisputed, Mrs. Abington never suffered the indignity of typecasting. "So various and unlimited are her talents;' enthused Thomas Davies, "that she is not confined to females of a superior class; she can descend occasionally to the country girl, the romp, the hoyden, and the chambermaid, and put on the various humours, airs, and whimsical peculiarities of these under parts."147 Paradoxically, Mrs. Abington appeared most natural to Davies when playing "females of a superior class;' but had to "descend" to the level of "hoyden" and "chambermaid" from where she did, in reality, originate. The relation between her theatrical and real identity has been entirely inverted in his mind. Playing host to Mrs. Abington after her retirement, Henry Crabb Robinson makes an ambiguous observation that strikes at the heart of the Abington mystique: "Mrs. Abington would not have led me to suppose she had been on the stage by either her manner or the substance of her conversation. She speaks with the ease of a person used to good society, rather than with the assurance of one whose business it was to imitate that case."148 First, Crabb Robinson is surprised by Mrs. Abington's lack of theatrical airs. He then makes a highly nuanced contrast between her manifest
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"ease" in fashionable circles and celebrated "assurance" as a professional actress impersonating high born ladies. The distinction between Mrs. Abington's true identity and her theatrical aristocratic persona crumbles under the weight of Crabb Robinson's indeterminate language. Whose business is it to "imitate" the ease of social privilege: Mrs. Abington in real life, or onstage? Is Crabb Robinson complimenting Mrs. Abington's comfort at his dinner table, or her performance of it? The eighteenth-century love of the theater and theatrical metaphors reaches an acme of confusion in the figure of Mrs. Abington. Wherever she went, Mrs. Abington impressed her admirers with her plausibility. Be it at the theater or the dining tables of the cultural elite, Mrs. Abington came across as "real," whatever mask she happened to be wearing.
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Reynolds captures the complex imbrication of Mrs. Abington's life and art in his celebrated portrait of her as Miss Prue in Congreve's Love for Love (figure 1.7). Mrs. Abington as 'Miss Prue' is an intriguing tribute to the actress Garrick himself despised for her caprice and vanity but critics lauded as their "theatrical Euphrosyne." 149 In Reynolds' painterly vision of Mrs. Abington, celebrity and masquerade went hand in hand. Aside from her immortalization as Miss Prue, she posed for Reynolds as the Comic Muse, as Thais, as Roxalana in The Sultan, but never as herself. No hard evidence exists to support the suggestion that the two were lovers, except Reynolds' painting her so often, and buying forty tickets for her benefit night-an act of almost unparalleled liberality for the miserly painter. Reynolds' nineteenth-century biographers, Leslie and Taylor, admit that Mrs. Abington "seems to have been a special favourite with Reynolds," and that he painted her "con amore," but, with the bleak naivete that gave the Victorian age its reputation, they still wonder why "Sir Joshua should have wasted so much regard on such a woman." 150
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Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse won fame for the grandiose manner of Sarah Siddons' pose. So much so, that a debate arose over whether Reynolds or his subject was responsible for its celebrated indices of pathos: the languid tilt of Siddon's head and exhausted waft of her hand. Mrs. Abington as 'Miss Prue' is no less a masterpiece of attitude, but here the Comic Muse presides. Where Mrs. Siddons impressed with her gravity, Mrs. Abington startles with a presumptuous candor, sitting sidesaddle on a Chippendale chair, leaning on its back. She pays no attention to the small Pomeranian in her lap, but instead looks at us with an air of distracted curiosity. Her hair is drawn back dramatically from her brow in an elaborate coiffure, but her pose is disarmingly girlish. In a painting that combines
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Figure 1.7 Reynolds, Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in Congreve's Love for Love (1771). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
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ambitious structure with the tenderest detail, the punctum is Mrs. Abington's left thumb, which plays at her lower lip. The character of Miss Prue in Congreve's comedy is a sexually precocious ingenue, one of Mrs. Abington's most famous roles, which she reportedly played with a combination of "childish simplicity and playful awkwardness."151 In Reynolds' painting, however, her child-like innocence is less plausible than the sensual pressure
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of her thumb on her mouth. With the black silk bands about her wrists, it forms a triangle of erotic suggestion at the precise center of the painting.
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Mrs. Abington's dress, an extravagant rush of pink and white silk, is a visual sensation, but presents a problem for critics. Congreve's character, Miss Prue, is an unsophisticated country girl from the 1690s, whereas the gown in Reynolds' painting suggests the height of 1770s' society fashion. Mrs. Abington's piled-up hair, lace trimmings, and silk wristbands were the latest imports from Paris. "Reynolds seems to have been bewitched by the woman herself," suggests Robert Halsband, "and to have forgotten the part she is playing."152 Eighteenth-century actresses habitually dressed onstage according to fashion irrespective of the role (Mrs. Abington enjoyed a large clothing allowance from Garrick's coffers), but this fact does not resolve the ambiguity of the painting's setting: is it a stage or a private boudoir? The background-a dark flat or curtain with a sliver of scudding clouds to the right-is equally suggestive of the theater and portrait studio. Joseph Musser asks the obvious question, namely "How much of the portrait is Mrs. Abington the woman? How much the public figure, the actress? How much Miss Prue?"153 The theatrical suggestion of the painting's title comes up against the personal intimacy of the pose. Is this a Restoration comedy, or a private audience with Mrs. Abington? The portrait embraces both possibilities at once. As an actress "in character," Reynolds' Mrs. Abington visually encodes the new informality of stage acting in the age of Garrick. As a woman, she embodies the theatrical "ease" of the Georgian career celebrity, at home across all levels of society. Mrs. Abington plays the role of Miss Prue for us, but the finery of her dress more suggests her role in real life, as a cobbler's daughter and child prostitute turned darling and fashion plate of the beau monde. The slipperiness of the painting's title reinforces this essential instability of the image: as a masquerade that assumes the aura of reality. Mrs. Abington as 'Miss Prue' resembles Reynolds' allegorical portraits of Georgian women in seeking to elevate the art of portraiture from the tradesman's task of taking a likeness into a pictorial Human Comedy. The painting shows that while Reynolds' ambitions for portraiture were academic in theory, they were theatrical in practice. Just as Crabb Robinson became lost in the ironies of Mrs. Abington's "assurance" of gentility-is it performed, he wondered, or a "natural ease"?-so in his portrait of Mrs. Abington, Reynolds opened his art to the Georgian world of masquerade, with no distinction made between theater and reality, between the face and the mask it wears.
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Reynolds' sustained fascination with Mrs. Abington as a theatrical model suggests the role of Miss Prue he chose for her may also have served
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a personal end: as an image of his own wishful projections. The painting's title denotes a theatrical portrait-a public figure depicted in her professional role-but the picture itself hums with the contradictory suggestion of very private longing (the impression of Mrs. Abington's figure is rendered with the utmost care). Contradiction being the language of desire, Mrs. Abington as 'Miss Prue' reveals as much about the painter as his subject. Reynolds composes Mrs. Abington as "Miss Prue" as he would have her pose for him in his dreams: younger than she actually was (at least 33 when the portrait was done, possibly as old as 40), knowing and yet innocent, with an expression of sexual wonder directed openly toward him. Viewed more largely, Reynolds' seemingly compulsive need to paint Mrs. Abington makes him a forefather of the modern paparazzi, a cog in the increasingly powerful machine of popular celebrity, indentured to perpetual reproduction of the faces of the stars. Thanks in part to the exposure brought by publication of Reynolds' paintings, Mrs. Abington's fame, like Garrick's, extended far beyond the Drury Lane stage. Through the reproduction of her image in paintings and prints, and the imitation of her taste in seasonal fashions, her personal aura reached into the shop windows, drawing rooms, and wardrobes of the nation at large. As her admirer Georg Lichtenberg prophesied, Mrs. Abington's professional prominence as an actress launched her from the "cardboard world" of the theater to a celebrity status in "the greater sphere" of public imagination. In this light, Mrs. Abington as 'Miss Prue' appears as a carefully orchestrated publicity shot, an eighteenthcentury "glossy" combining sexual allure, high fashion, and the tantalizing promise of intimacy. In Reynolds' worshipful portrait, Mrs. Abington is both impossibly glamorous and casually familiar, both remote and available. The painting is an archival image from the pioneer days of an entertainment celebrity culture we have inherited from the Georgians, and that the Romantic literary elite was first to despise.
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Chapter 2~
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PRINTS AND EXHIBITIONS
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Reynolds and Hazlitt: Between the Royal Academy and the Print Trade
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"The disadvantage of pictures is that they cannot be multiplied to
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any extent, like books or prints." -William Hazlitt, "Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England" (1824)
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I n an 1814 letter to the comic actor Charles Mathews, Coleridge makes a careful distinction between theatrical naturalism and literal truth: "A great Actor, comic or tragic, is not to be a mere Copy, a facsimile, but an imitation, of Nature. Now an Imitation differs from a Copy in this, that it of necessity implies & demands dijference--whereas a Copy aims at identity. "1 As I described in my introduction, the language of this distinction between acting and mere mimicry-modeled on that between imitation and copyconstitutes an idee fixe of Coleridge's lectures on aesthetics. for example, he counseled would-be dramatic poets with the same terms he applied to the actor Mathews, that is, "not to present a copy, but an imitation of real life." Whether watching a play or reading it in one's study, Coleridge states, "the mind of the spectator, or the reader, therefore, is not to be deceived into any idea of reality."2 Coleridge's carefully reiterated distinction between the imitative genius of art and the technique of merely "copying" reality illuminates and protects the idealist impulse integral to Romantic poetics. Clarifying his position in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge stipulates that images of nature, "however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature;' do not constitute art unless "they are modified by a predominant passion."3 The shaping sensibility of the artist, actor, or poet must "modify" reality in
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the service of an ideal. In the early nineteenth century-the age of "Belzoni's Tomb," spectacular realism at the patent theaters, and the panoramas of the West End-coleridge's need to assert an idealist aesthetic over the fashion for "facsimile" acquired new urgency. The theatrical and panoramic spectacles of the Regency age aimed at unmediated reproduction of the external world, and thus lacked all "modifying" sensibility. Coleridge's apparently universal statements on the aesthetic difference between imitation and copy may accordingly be historicized as a reaction against the early nineteenth-century proliferation of new visual media devoted to mimetic reproduction of reality. For Coleridge, the terms "copy," "facsimile," and "simulation" made up a single,composite bogey, a menace of popular taste that threatened the hegemony of elite, idealist principles in art.
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In his 1824 essay, "Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England," William Hazlitt extends Coleridge's definition of the "copy" from the effect of verisimilitude at the theater to the mechanical reproduction of paintings in the form of prints. For Hazlitt, an engraving of a painting by Reynolds, for example, was another potentially obnoxious form of facsimile. Consequently, his essay makes pains to distinguish between a visit to a print shop and a "pilgrimage" to a collection of original paintings. The first constitutes no more than "a point to aim at in a morning's walk," while the latter is "an act of devotion performed at the shrine of Art!" For Hazlitt, the commercial printshop was a "mean, cold, meagre, petty" establishment when compared to the cathedral-like galleries of a private collector. According to the same hierarchical order, the engraved image itself was far inferior to the original painting. Whereas an original painting allowed Hazlitt to "enter into the minds of Raphael, of Titian, of Poussin, of the Caracci, and look at nature with their eyes," a print signified only "hints, loose memorandums, outlines in little of what the painter has done."4 Despite Hazlitt's confident dismissal of the artistic claims of engraving, his very argument for the superiority of original painting over its engraved reproductions suggests a significant concession to the influence of the print trade. 5 In short, Hazlitt perceives printshops as a threat to the role of picture galleries in English culture and, by implication, to the status of his own connoisseurship. The Romantic view of art, Walter Benjamin has stated, places "the whole sphere of authenticity outside ... technical reproducibility ... the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition."6 Engraving, as a commercial product, was crucial to the success of the new British school of painting that emerged in the late eighteenth century. As a technical process, howeverwhereby the image was copied and mass-produced-printmaking contra-
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dieted Romantic ideals of authenticity, original genius, and the beau ideal. The Romantic repudiation of technical reproduction Benjamin postulates is clearly evident in Hazlitt's essay. Following Shaftesbury, he likens the effect of engraving on art to that of the printing press on literature.7 Mass production, Hazlitt predicts, will reduce art to the "cheap and vulgar" state of popular literature, dictated to by the gross tastes of the "public" rather than the enlightened sensibilities of the elite.
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The terms of both Coleridge's theoretical contempt for "copying" reality in art and the theater and Hazlitt's prejudice against printshops may be traced back to Sir Joshua Reynolds' infl.uentiallectures to the Royal Academy (1769-90; first published collectively in 1791 as Discourses on Art), a key reference text for Romantic antimimetic prejudice. As David Solkin has explained, as a rising artist in the 1750s, Reynolds found himself at ground-zero of the new commercial art culture: "Up until the middle of the eighteenth century, artists had typically worked on commission for individual patrons, in a manner that could at least be represented or imagined as a close collaboration between spiritual equals. But all this changed dramatically with the advent of the exhibitions, which encouraged painters and sculptors to exchange a traditional form of clientage for the pitfalls of a competitive free-for-all fueled by anonymous and impersonal commercial demands."8 The principal market demand Solkin alludes to was the sale of print reproductions, which followed the exhibition of a painting if it was sufficiendy successful in attracting public notice. In my first chapter, I sought to explain the resentment of Charles Lamb toward the early nineteenth-century stage through an examination of the radical changes in the chara<;ter and social role of the theater wrought by Garrick in the second half of the eighteenth century. This chapter adopts a similar strategy, first sketching the historical background to Hazlitt's concern over the proliferation of art as "copies" through an examination of the ia[e eighteenthcentury print market, then, in the second section, addressing establishment anxiety over the commercial exhibition of art through a study of the history painter Benjamin Haydon. As in my analysis of Romantic antitheatricality, this chapter looks back to late eighteenth-century Britain, specifically to the two principal agencies of the new commercial art market-print reproduction and public exhibition-with a view to explaining the anxieties that the marriage of art, mimesis, and the marketplace inspired among the Romantic literary elite.
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Whatever their unconscious susceptibility to his infl.uence, the Romantics largely resented Reynolds. Blake scribbled scornful notes in the margins of
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his copy of the Discourses, while Hazlitt used his position as art critic for The Champion to attack the legacy of Reynolds' conservative idealism.9 Throughout his long career as tastemaker and theoretician of painting, Reynolds, like Coleridge after him, fought strenuously against the notion "that objects are represented naturally when they have such relief that they seem real." Nature in art, he argued, should never be confused with the replication of material reality, as it had been by the painters of the Dutch Baroque. The stakes for Reynolds, as a painter, were even higher than for Coleridge. If painters were to condescend to the "real," they must necessarily abdicate their hard-won "rank ... as a liberal art, and sister to poetry." Reynolds makes a clear opposition between the eye and the intellect, between the merely visible and the poetically imagined. "What pretence," he asks, "has the art [of painting] to claim kindred with poetry, but by its powers over the imagination?"10 As we shall see, this question will be taken up, with increasing rhetorical urgency, by Romantic idealists from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Charles Baudelaire. But simply to place Reynolds' Discourses on the fault line between classicist orthodoxy and Romantic reaction is to miss the greater conflict the lectures represent, namely that between the Georgian academic elite and the commercial art trade.
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As Richard Wendorf has stated, "Britain's gradual evolution from a 'client' to a 'market' economy affected painters and writers no less than it did the average merchant or shopkeeper."11 Responding to the threat of commercialization, Reynolds, in his role as President of the Royal Academy, continually reminded his students of the disinterested, intellectual nature of the artist's vocation: "the industry which I principally recommended, is not the industry of the hands, but of the mind. As our art is not a divine gift, so neither is it a mechanical trade. " 12 Whatever he preached from the podium of the Royal Academy, however, in the management of his own career Reynolds showed a keen awareness of the commercial imperatives facing artists, namely as purveyors of mass produced engraved copies of original paintings. It is this seeming disparity between Reynolds' theory and practice, his finessed distinction between "copying" as art and as business, that provoked Blake to condemn the Discourses as "the Simulations of the Hypocrite who smiles particularly where he means to Betray" (as we shall see, Blake was not the only engraver to show bitterness toward Reynolds). 13 But if they are not quite the work of a hypocrite, Reynolds' lectures do betray some telling prejudices. Anticipating Hazlitt's 1824 essay on picture galleries, Reynolds' sub-textual argument against engraving in
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his Discourses depends upon the transfer of conventional academic antipathy toward copying nature to the facsimile process of mechanical reproduction associated with the print trade. This hidden politics of the Discourses, I will seek to show, points to Reynolds' difficult dual role in the late Georgian art world: as President of the conservative Royal Academy on one hand and, on the other, a conspicuous beneficiary of the booming commercial print trade to which the Academy was ideologically opposed.
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The work of engraving being so laborious and time-consuming, and the taste of the market so fickle, print-selling required an appetite for highrisk speculation. A print merchant managed the commercial relationship between the painter and engraver, and offset risk by raising a subscription for the engraving at the time of the painting's first exhibition. Confidence in the marketability of an elite painter such as Reynolds was sufficiently high that an engraving might be commissioned without subscription so as to appear simultaneously with the painting Gust as museum exhibitions today are invariably accompanied-some would say overwhelmed-by merchandizing in the form of catalogues for serious connoisseurs, and posters, t-shirts and coffee mugs for the rest). In 1762, Reynolds published his celebrated allegory, Garrick between Comedy and Tragedy, in this manner. Reproductions of the painting, including many pirated variants, were soon for sale in printshops and on street corners throughout Europe.
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The bullish and self-confident English print industry Reynolds enjoyed was a recent phenomenon. In the early eighteenth century the workshops of Paris and Amsterdam dominated the international print market. Connoisseurs and collectors in England were obliged to order their reproductions of Old Masters and keep up with new trends via continental agents. Remarkably, the direction of this traffic was almost completely reversed in less than fifty years. William Hogarth first proved the commercial viability of well-made English prints with his Harlot's Progress ~eries (1732). A decade later, Arthur Pond's Claude engravings demonstrated that fine art prints were capable of comparable appeal. These prints established a whole new standard in reproductive quality, and Pond followed them with a series of equally fetching picturesque scenes of Roman antiquities. Between them, Hogarth and Pond opened up a middle-class market for art with a sales logic that was simple and effective: "Both produced sets containing four to eight prints unified by theme and composition, relevant to contemporary interests, large and rich enough to decorate the walls of a Georgianscale room, after known original paintings by name artists." 14 The print industry targeted new bourgeois consumers. Its products, both in size and
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Figure 2.1 Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, engraving by William Woollett, for John Boydell (1776). ©The British Museum.
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subject, were consequently designed to appeal less to the artistic sensibility of their clientele than their practical need to decorate domestic wall space.
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As important as Hogarth and Pond's ventures were to the development of skilled local engravers, it was the printselling magnate John Boydell who transformed the native industry into a powerhouse on the European and colonial art markets. Borrowing from the commercial techniques of booksellers, Boydell established a network of continental buyers to supplement his local trade. His 1763 subscription series, A Collection <if Prints, Engraved from the Most Capital Paintings in England, subsequently attracted 173 initial subscribers of whom more than a third were foreigners. 15 Boydell first established his market share through the technical excellence of these Old Master reproductions, but his increasing dominance over the international print trade in the following decade had important consequences for the British art scene. Prints of paintings by British artists, such as West's Romantic battle scene The Death <if General Wolfe (figure 2.1), achieved great celebrity and sold in the thousands. Likewise, prints featuring local subjects-quintessentially English prospect views and picturesque land-
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scapes-rode the wave of fashion for English engraving to create new tastes on the continent. In an important sense, late eighteenth-century British art was the age of Boydell, not Reynolds or Gainsborough. As corporate owner of an international network of printshops, Boydell enjoyed more power, if not prestige, than the President of the Royal Academy. It is no surprise then that Reynolds, despite his indebtedness to the flourishing English print trade for his own professional success, had "mixed feelings" for the man principally responsible for creating it.16
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Indeed, in Reynolds' twenty years of presidential lectures to the Royal Academy, engraving barely rates a mention, let alone the actual trade in prints. The Discourses refer to engraved reproductions only as a means by which academy students "may now avail [themselves] of the inventions of antiquity." 17 Pond published his popular series of Roman ruins in 1746, and James "Athenian" Stuart's prints of Greek architecture excited great interest in 1762. Notwithstanding these publications, the "inventions of antiquity" represented only a tiny portion of the booming market in fine art prints. This, in turn, was only part of a much larger print market, which offered middle-class consumers everything from maps and landscape views to satirical prints, decorative designs, and illustrated books. 18 What Reynolds' Discourses never acknowledge is that, already by the time of the Academy's founding in 1768, career success as an artist depended on the commercial reproduction of paintings in miniaturized print form, to be mass produced up to a thousand copies and sold in print shops in England and abroad. 19
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Although Reynolds was conspicuously reticent on the subject, academy students attending his inaugural lecture as president in 1769 did not have far to look for evidence of the close relationship between high art and the print trade. An embossed sign at the entrance to the lecture hall in Pall Mall declared it the Royal Academy, but without entirely obscnring the somewhat plainer inscription above the lintel, which advertised a print warehouse. As the engraver Robert Strange relates, "Part of the rooms only were appropriated for the purposes of the royal academy; the rest, for the farther benefit of [the engraver] Mr. Dalton, were occasionally let out to auctioneers."20 Nor did the Academy's presence curtail commercial activity on the site, which continued side by side with academic instruction for years afterward. The fact of academy students sharing the Pall Mall premises with engravers and art auctioneers raised more problems for Reynolds than the danger of double-booking. The shared tenancy symbolized the dynamic kinship of art and commerce in the late Georgian period,
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in which painters and engravers did, in fact, share in the manufacture of the new, much-heralded British school of art. Timothy Clayton has summed up the centrality of the engraving industry to the artists of Reynolds' generation: "Engravings served to legitimize paintings by authenticating their provenance and attribution. They brought additional renown to the painting and to the collector. It was to be expected that these factors would increase the sale value of the paintings at auction."21 In a counterintuitive reversal of value, the copy "legitimizes" and "authenticates" the original. That is, an artist such as Reynolds stood to gain financially not only from a share of print sales, but also from the value accrued to his original painting through the public exposure that sale brought. The worth of the painting, it seems, was not intrinsic to an academic standard of aesthetic merit but a function of the quality and number of its reproductions.
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The foundation of a Royal Academy in 1768 had ended a decade-long internecine struggle in the art community that reflected the greater class divisions of Georgian England. The denizens of the new Royal Academy represented aristocratic, Tory interests, and, in its neo-classicist curriculum and elitist system of self-governance, looked to the continental academies, particularly the French, for its model. By contrast its rival, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (known as the "Society of Artists"), more resembled a trade union of artists: aggressively egalitarian, nationalist, and Wilkite.22 This ideological conflict is reflected in the strong anticommercial rhetoric of Reynolds' Discourses. The Society included merchants and manufacturers among its members as well as artists and connoisseurs. It awarded annual prizes not only for painting and drawing but also for the industrial genres of design, engraving, and papermaking. In so doing, it sought to emphasize a natural kinship between industry and the fine arts. By the mid-1760s, a group of elite painters, including Richard Wilson, Benjamin West, and Angelica Kauffinan (although not Reynolds initially), had become sufficiently dissatisfied with the commercial principles and democratic political structure of the Society to apply to the King to found an Academy. By resorting to Royal auspices to solve their factional conflicts, Britain's new academicians committed themselves to an institutionbased, conservative ideology of art antithetical to the commercial codes of the expanding print market. In direct opposition to the Society's policy, the Academy reserved membership for painters and sculptors, excluding engravers and all others associated with "trade."23 Thus in its very charter, the Academy stood to embody an aristocratic model of patronage, not a popular market; to serve the tastes of a (self-described) noble and civicminded elite, not the bourgeoisie; to promote original works of genius, not
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the mass reproduction of prints; in short, to pursue a disinterested and cultivated, rather than commercial, career in the arts. The supersession of the Society of Artists by the Royal Academy in the late 1760s thus represented the end of a brief but troubled interregnum of pro-commercialism in the Georgian republic of taste. The democratic unionization of British artists failed, giving way to a continental, absolutist model of state art.
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But for all these political struggles at the institutional level, the art market itself did not change. The popular audience for fine art prints continued to expand rapidly. By the beginning of the Academy's second decade, the British export market in prints was worth two hundred thousand pounds a year.24 Increasingly therefore, the Royal Academy came to embody an ideal of state patronage entirely at odds with the realities of the new bourgeois market for fine art. Furthermore, the opening of this market was due less to English artists themselves than to those engravers and print-sellers who had improved their skills and adapted workshop technologies to better compete internationally. But it was precisely this group to which the doors of the Royal Academy, flagship of the British Art Renaissance, were now to be shut.
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Anticipating Coleridge's distinction between imitation and copy, Reynoldsian theory divides "imitation" into two categories. The sixth Discourse (1774) defines the "liberal style of imitation" as a selective, analytical study of the Old Masters through which "what is learned ... from the works of others really becomes our own."25 Reynolds here effectively integrates imitation, as a species of academic instruction, into an enlarged notion of originality. This is in contrast, however, to another class of imitators for whom Reynolds reserves an unusually harsh string of epithets. Those painters who treat "strict imitation" or "copying" as an end in itself, says Reynolds-he specifically nominates the despised underclass of journeyman portraitists or "face painters"-are not liberal artists but rather the "narrow, confined, illiberal, and servile kind of imitators." These are the villains of the Discourses, who would reduce painting to a mere craft, genius to talent, and art to a merely sordid trade in likenesses:
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When I speak of the habitual imitation and continued study of masters, it is not to be understood, that I advise any endeavour to copy the exact peculiar colour and complexion of another man's mind; the success of such an attempt must always be like his, who imitates exacdy the air, manner, and gestures, of him whom he admires. His model may be excellent but the copy will be ridiculous. (my emphasis)26
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Reynolds' explicit reason for clearly distinguishing imitation and copy is to assert the Academy's allegiance to the Italian grand style of the Renaissance and Baroque over the pernicious influence of Dutch realism and, worse still, journeyman portraiture. Placed in a more immediate context, however, Reynolds' disapproval of copying as a means of instruction at the Academy reveals much that is implicit about his attitude toward engraving. In a polemical pamphlet highly critical of Reynolds, published the year following Reynolds' delivery of his sixth discourse, Robert Strange relates the gossip surrounding the exclusion of engravers from the Academy: "they said,-that engravers were men of no genius,-servile copiers,-and consequently not fit to instruct in a royal academy. This too, I am sorry to say it, was the language, as I was informed, held by their president" (my emphasis).27 Strange's anecdote reveals two things: first, that in Reynolds' mind, "servile copying" applied equally to poorly trained painters and to engravers; second, that Reynolds was reluctant, nevertheless, to publicly denigrate those artisans with whom he had so crucial a business association. His contempt for the servility of engraving circulates at the level of rumor, not official pronouncement. In light of this evidence, Strange's accusation that Reynolds' Discourses and the institutional policies they dignified amounted to "an attack upon the art of engraving" seems justified, despite the fact there is no direct expression of this prejudice in the lectures thernselves.28
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Sources for Reynolds' rhetoric of servility to describe engraving may be found in his extensive library of French academic theory.29 In 1699, Roger de Piles stipulated that "un habile Peintre ne doit point etre esc/ave de la Nature, il en doit etre Arbitre."30 Two decades later, Jean-Baptiste Dubos laid down the precise language for Reynolds' rejection of engraving: "il faut savoir faire quelquechose de plus que copier servilement la nature, pour
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a donner chaque passion son caractere convenable" (my emphasis).31 Given
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the reputation of these precedents, Reynolds' description of engraving as "servile copying" was a rebuke that carried with it the full weight of academic scorn: hence Strange's pointed sense of injury. But Strange was perhaps more perplexed than angry. The elitist attitudes of the Academy seemed an act of self-sabotage: "I appeal to their understandings, whether perpetuating the merit of their works to posterity, supposing them to be men of abilities, must not, in a great measure, depend upon the perfection of engraving, an art which they meant to disgrace by this exclusion?" Reynolds' apparent disdain for engravers was particularly perverse, Strange contended, because "I know no painter, the remembrance of whose works will depend more on the art of engraving than that of Sir Joshua."32 In pri-
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vate, Reynolds acknowledged this. Looking over a set of prints by the gifted engraver James McArdell, he reportedly exclaimed, "By this man, I shall be immortalized!"33
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Reynolds was playing a deep game. As Strange points out, his lectures to the Royal Academy effectively denied the existence of the print trade, while from the outset of his own artistic career he demonstrated an acute awareness of its importance. Immediately on his return to England from study in Rome in 1752, Reynolds undertook an engraving of his portrait of Lady Charlotte Fitzwilliam for promotional purposes. From that moment on, he constructed a prototypically modern career as an artist, utilizing the print medium to multiply the commercial value of his paintings and promote his name. Among Reynolds' engravers were the leading men of the emerging English school: Valentine Green, William Wynne Ryland, James McArdell, and John Raphael Smith. He cultivated business relationships with both Boydell and Ryland & Bryer, the largest print merchants of the day. Through these commercial initiatives, Reynolds became the first truly "famous" English artist. He published more of his paintings, in more copies, than any other artist of the period. Furthermore, Nicholas Penny has pointed to the significant number of Reynolds' portraits, particularly of celebrities such as Mrs. Abington, that he undertook without commission, speculating that "Reynolds' chief reason for making the paintings was in order that prints could be made of them."34 Evidence also exists that Reynolds' "predilection for broad effects of light and shade" was a deliberate attempt to render his paintings conducive to mezzotint reproduction.35 In this light, the idealist dogma of Reynolds' Discourses, in which he barely refers to the print trade and characterizes art as the disinterested practice of imaginative genius entirely removed from the common world of capital and industry, bears little connection to realities of his own career. Indeed, for Valentine Green (himself, ironically, an engraver), Reynolds exemplified the parlous effects of the new commercial art culture, which was "making Marchands d'Estampes [printsellers] of our first men of genius, and reducing the study of their professions to connoisseurship in proof impressions from engravings."36 In the diary of his journey to Flanders and Holland, Reynolds showed clear evidence of such expertise. His description of engravings done under the supervision of Rubens displays a sophisticated understanding of the translation of painting to miniature, black-and-white form. He observes, for example, that Rubens' engravers "always gave more light than they were warranted by the picture," and offers this technique as an example "which may merit the attention of [English) engravers." Unlike
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his principal rival, Thomas Gainsborough, who never showed the slightest interest in engraving either as a technique or commercial opportunity, Reynolds, in his more ingenuous moments, considered it a "science" very much worthy of his study.37
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As a successful engraver, Robert Strange considered the marriage of art and commerce a natural union in modern, industrial Britain: "The progress of the fine arts cannot but attract the attention of every lover of his country. Connected with various branches of manufactures, they became objects of importance in a commercial kingdom:'38 He perceived his duty as an artist and "lover of his country" to aggrandize the prosperity of a mercantile, commercial empire. The fine arts, engraving among them, served to adorn and inspire its progress. But Reynolds saw his patriotic mission entirely differently. The Royal Academy, as he conceived it, was an Augustan institution, designed to evoke the role of the great oligarchic orders of antiquity and the Renaissance. The Academy's concern for the state was moral and intellectual rather than economic: "An institution like this has often been recommended upon considerations merely mercantile; but an Academy, founded upon such principles, can never effect even its own narrow purposes."39 This brand of disinterested elitism was a political necessity for the Academy because, as Clayton puts it, "exaltation of genius at the expense of craftsmanship attracted painters who sought an intellectual foundation for their profession ... the cultural current favoured originality and genius:'40 It was in order to protect (or, in fact, create) an aura of exalted disinterestedness about the artist's vocation that Reynolds' lectures are full of high-sounding blandishments about genius, imagination, and the Grand Style, but entirely empty of references to the practical demands of the Georgian art market. Implicit in the Royal Academy charter was the need to rise above the servility associated with the portrait and print trades. At an institution where imagination and invention were privileged, and only the most "liberal" style of imitation permitted, the "narrow" and "servile" art of the engraver was therefore anathema.
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In light of their sub-textual hostility toward engraving, Reynolds' Discourses constitute not merely a Johnsonian summation of three centuries of European art theory, but a concerted attempt to reinvigorate academic principles in a visual culture increasingly governed by commercial investment in mechanical reproduction. A Royal Academy answered the pressing need, shared among Britain's elite artists, to preserve painting from too close a connection to the commercial world and middle-class taste. Founded a hundred years after the French Academy and centuries after its
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Italian models, the Royal Academy thus represented less a consolidation of the Renaissance culture of art in Britain than a circling of the wagons against the encroaching commercialization and industrialization of painting. British academic painters of the late eighteenth century found themselves in a quandary. They depended on the print trade for their income and celebrity, but to be guaranteed the elite social standing they desired (as the equals of poets), they could never concede engraving, a form of industrialized mimesis, to be anything but a sin against art. Given this, it is no surprise that the Discourses are so strangely dissonant to their times. Reynolds' lectures ignore engraving in the midst of a boom in English prints, preach artistic disinterestedness in a competitive commercial art market, and champion history painting in the great age of British landscape and portraiture. From our viewpoint, the Discourses appear as they did to Blake: a monument of denial and disingenuousness. The Academy building in which Reynolds delivered the greater part of his lectures-with its echoes of artists, engravers, and auctioneers working in adjacent rooms-is the more faithful image of the English art world in the age of Reynolds.
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For all the contradictions between Reynolds' public statements and private career management, the historical question remains: Did the Royal Academy ultimately succeed in giving birth to the longed-for British School of painting? And to what extent did the officially maligned print industry determine the outcome of that mission?
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A key principle of Reynolds' Discourses is the so-called "hierarchy of genres," in which history painting serves the artist's impulses to the sublime, with landscape, portraiture, and still life accorded humble minority status. To champion the cause of history painting was an obvious course. The heroic moments of Scripture and Antiquity dominated the Italian Renaissance canon to which the eighteenth-century European academies continued to look for their model of excellence. Moreover, to its powerful sponsors in Britain, history painting answered the pressing need for a national school of art that would reflect the grandeur of her expanding empire. As Benjamin Haydon declaimed, it was the duty of British history painters to "adaptO to great national work, to illustrate national triumph." As such, the Royal Academy and its signature heroic style constituted a nationalist project in the arts. To Reynolds, the Academy represented a natural and long-overdue consummation of art and national destiny. "It is indeed difficult," he maintained, "to give any other reason why an empire like that of Britain, should so long have wanted an ornament so suitable to
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its greatness, than that slow progression of things, which naturally makes elegance and refinement the last effect of opulence and power."41 For Reynolds, the grand style, embodied in history painting, adorned the State as an "ornament" to its power.
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To succeed as such in the British context, however, required the Angli-
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cization of history painting. Benjamin West's Death cif General WOlfe (1771)
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spawned a generation of patriotic, contemporary history paintings that reached its zenith in the Napoleonic Wars. The British Institution, founded in 1806 as a forum for academic painting, devoted prizes not to traditional religious and mythological subjects but the celebration of British Naval victories. Haydon's response to Waterloo shows this imbrication in the academic mind of the political, the martial-imperial, and the grand style: '"Have not the efforts of the nation,' I asked myself, 'been gigantic?' To such glories she only wants to add the glories of my noble art to make her the grandest nation in the world."42 The patriotic hope at the Royal Academy and British Institution was that the encouragement of history painting might overturn a pernicious continental heresy. To its critics in Europe, the meagerness of British painterly achievement, when compared to the country's rich literary heritage, was due to the poor climate. The perennial mediocrity of the British school was the symptom of a psycho-cultural disability attending the lack of sun:
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Abbe du Bos, president Montesquieu, and Abbe Winckelmann have followed one another in assigning limits to the genius of the English ... that we are eternally incapacitated by the clouds that hang over our heads ... that our climate is so distempered, that we disrelish everything, nay even life itself; that we are naturally and constitutionally addicted to suicide; that it is a consequence of the filtration of our nervous juices; that it is in consequence of a north-east wind. 43
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In the half-century after the founding of the Academy, however-with the septuagenarian Benjamin West still, in Byron's unpatriotic assessment, "Europe's worst dauber, and poor Britain's best"-James Barry's skeptical defiance gives way to a chorus of bitter self-loathing among the art establishment.44 For Prince Hoare, even John Boydell's ambitious Shakespeare Gallery project had been insufficient to "remove the charge brought against us by other nations, of deficiency in history painting. It cannot be denied ... that works in the higher provinces of this class do not constitute the prominent feature of our school."45 The Shakespeare Gallery-the most systematic and well-funded attempt to nationalize history painting in
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Britain (beyond the Academy itself)-was offered to public lottery in 1805, closing down after barely a decade (see chapter 3).46
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Reflections on British art in the reformist, inquisitional mode extend as far back as James Barry's "Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England," published only six years after the Academy's founding. 47 Some half-century later, Haydon's "Enquiry into the Causes which have Obstructed the Advance of Historical Painting for the Last Seventy Years in England" (1829) was still flogging the same horse. Significantly, Haydon dates the period of crisis in English art from the decade of the Royal Academy's founding, as if the Academy had brought only a greater visibility to the absence of a British school rather than actually producing it as was intended. Likewise Hazlitt, always an enemy of the Academy, argued that the institutionalization of art under royal patronage had done nothing to improve the degraded reputation of British painting: "What extraordinary advances have we made in our own country in consequence of the establishment of the Royal Academy? What greater names has the British School to boast than those of Hogarth, Reynolds, and Wilson, who owed nothing to it?"48 In short, the cause of history painting came to be seen, for all Reynolds' mission statements from the Academy, as next to hopeless. As John Brewer relates, "collectors and critics who had been on the Grand Tour compared the art they had seen with the work of contemporary British painters and found the latter lacking in technical skill and, above all, nobility of conception."49
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But these negative accounts do not give us the full picture. The success of the British print trade in this period contradicts the academic consensus surrounding the new British school of painting. By the mid-1 780s England was supplying the Continent with prints in an export industry worth almost a quarter-million pounds a year, the majority of earnings generated
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° by Boydell's thriving conglomerate of printshops.5 Copies of Old Masters
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made up a sizeable proportion of British engravings flooding the European market, but an increasing number were works by local artists. Until the continental upheavals of the 1790s, contemporary British art enjoyed great success in Germany, Holland, France and Italy. West, Copley, Barry, Wilson, and Reynolds were, in art circles at least, household names. From the German point of view, where anglophilia was particularly strong, London had displaced Paris and Amsterdam as the art capital of Europe. New engravings of British paintings were regularly reviewed in French and German publications, and agents for British printsellers trafficked busily on the Continent. In short, while academic connoisseurs and artists ~t home reflected despondently on the apparent failure of the Royal Academy to
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produce artists of international standard, the view from the Continent was of a British School in the process of spectacular parturition:
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Barely out of the cradle it has announced itself through its great success, and is the more deserving of applause and even of exciting the emulation of its elders since the aspects which make it distinctive are the noblest aspects of the art; soundness of composition, beauty of form, loftiness of idea, and truth of expression. The school is only known to us through prints.....51
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Claude-Henri Watelet published this encomium to British painting in the French Academy's monumental Dictionnaire des Arts (1792). Periodicals and sales catalogues throughout Europe quoted his rave review, helping to define popular continental opinion of British painting well into the nineteenth century. So: why bouquets for British artists abroad, and brickbats at home?
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Watelet's admission that the British school "is known to us only through prints" has significant ramifications for our understanding of art, commerce, and print technology in the late Georgian period. First of all, the international success of the British School appears to contradict Benjamin's influential notion of the decay of the Romantic "aura" under the conditions of mechanical reproduction. For connoisseurs on the Continent, the print was the British school, but whatever incipient aura surrounded British painting did not"decay" on this account. The mass production of copies of British paintings served, in fact, to create a fashion for British art inspired not by the originals themselves, but a cult of prints only. Second, and more importandy, late Georgian painting now assumes its proper form as an unstable art-historical phenomenon. By 1824, Hazlitt perceived the dual identity of modern European art: as a set of original paintings housed in private galleries on the one hand and, on the other, an industry of miniaturized commercial print copies circulated by an international network of shops, agents, and buyers for a bourgeois market. Hazlitt feared for the fate of original painting and its aura in the new age of mechanical reproduction. Paintings were at a colossal "disadvantage" in the new art marketplace, he noted, because unlike prints "they cannot be multiplied to any extent." As Reynolds' career exemplifies, academic painters sought exposure and profits in the print trade, but were forced to compete with the vulgar ephemera of satirical prints, trade advertising, book illustration, and decorative designs for their corner of the expanding print market. Lost in the shuffle, Hazlitt implies, was the visibility of the original works themselves.
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The aura of disinterested genius surrounding academic art, so resolutely
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upheld by Reynolds and Hazlitt, showed signs of terminal decay in the half-century that followed the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768. By the time Benjamin Haydon entered the scene in the new century with his atavistic notions of state patronage, the art market had expanded far beyond its traditional audience of connoisseurs and aristocrats. Fine art in the Regency period became accessible to a broad and voracious middleclass whose investment in public exhibitions and print reproductions amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. Having examined the print industry, I turn now to what Reynolds' principal engraver, Valentine Green, called the "humiliating practice" of exhibiting art to the general public. For the academic establishment, it marked another disastrous step toward the vulgarization of British art when her most talented painters opened their doors to the masses, requiring no proof of their new patrons' taste beyond a capacity to advance the shilling's admission.
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Contracted Optics: Benjamin Haydon and the Cult of Immensity
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"Some people prifer to look at paintings with closed eyes, so as not to disturb their imagination. "
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-A. W Schlegel
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In the Poetics, a widely read text in the eighteenth century, Aristotle describes an elemental relation between the human desire for knowledge and the pleasure derived from imitative reproduction of the visible world. We enjoy mimetic art, he says, because "we enjoy looking at the most accurate representations of things." But even Aristotle's definition, less hostile toward mimesis than Plato's, is inflected by social distinctions. Not only do "philosophers" derive pleasure from the mimetic arts but so do "other people as well, however limited their capacity may be."52 For Sir Joshua Reynolds, it was only a half-step from Aristotle's idea of a universally pleasurable art object to its rejection on the basis of that universal appeal:
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Painting is not only to be considered as an imitation, operating by deception, but it is, and ought to be, in many points of view, and strictly speaking, no imitation at all of external nature. Perhaps it ought to be as far removed from
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the vulgar idea of imitation, as the refined civilized state in which we live, is
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removed from a gross state of nature; and those who have not cultivated their imaginations, which the majority of mankind certainly have not, may be said, in regard to arts, to continue in this state of nature.53 (my emphases)
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For example, the likeness of a portrait to its subject offers a thrill only to those languishing in "the gross state of nature," a lower class of sensibility. Eschewing mimesis, argues Reynolds, the Academy must nourish the subtle "imaginations" of the cultural elite, and oppose the fashion for imitative visual media so fascinating to "the majority of mankind."54 Certainly, Reynolds' portraits conformed to this principle. They were notoriously unlike their subjects.
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A decade prior to the founding of the Royal Academy, in three letters to Johnson's The Idler, Reynolds had warned of the potential for untutored art commentary to promulgate an unwanted narrow concentration on likeness and detail. Reynolds' fears were dramatically realized in the explosion of art reviews in the years following the Society of Artists' first public exhibition in 1761. A principal motive for Reynolds' legislative, at times dogmatic, tone in his Discourses was thus to correct what he perceived as the tendency in the new art press to apply merely vulgar mimetic standards to the appreciation of art. "With hardly any exceptions," David Solkin points out, "the art criticism published in the 1760s was not sophisticated.... As the contrast with Reynolds suggests, this endeavor to free the discussion of works of art from its prestigious social origins not only challenged the hegemony of the connoisseurs, but also revealed a growing divide separating the ambitions of the artistic intelligentsia from the more catholic tastes of the general viewing audience."55 Certainly the stakes of the debate were high. An entire class of Britons, never before exposed to high art or questions of pictorial aesthetics, constituted a cultural tabula rasa, and sought a template for their opinions. Moreover, the emergence of public exhibitions in Britain signified not only a sea-change in the production, consumption, and cultural profile of the visual arts, but, in the manner of the Parisian Salons, were themselves barely controlled experiments in social mixing.56 The spectacle of artisans rubbing shoulders with ladies of fashion, and the clerisy with the demi-monde, became, in its turn, a rich subject for commercial art, taking the form of bawdy satirical prints by Rowlandson, Gilray, and others. In short, the emergence of public art in Britain post1761 puts the elitist rhetoric of Reynolds' Discourses in its proper context. Unwilling to expose his work before an unflltered market of viewers, Reynolds first withdrew his work from the Society of Artists' exhibitions after 1766, and later instituted admission charges to Royal Academy shows. Both moves were an attempt to regain some measure of control over the constitution of the new British art public. 57
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As is evident from the above-quoted passage from his Discourses on Art, Reynolds' argument for class distinctions in visual taste-between the truly
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educated, the merely polite, and the irredeemably common-doubles as an anticommercial argument. For Reynolds, relative proximity to the commercial sphere of life determined a person's susceptibility to vulgar representations of the "real." The genteel connoisseur, safely removed from commercial interest, has learned the skill of "looking upon objects at large, and observing the effect which they have on the eye when it is dilated, and employed upon the whole, without seeing any of the parts distinctly." By contrast, the common unsophisticated eye sees only a painting's detail, and judges its parts according to their fidelity to everyday life as he knows it. To illustrate his point, Reynolds draws on Pliny's tale of the shoemaker, whose sole response to a sculpture by Apelles was to question the correctness of the sandaP8 The anecdote, says Reynolds, illustrates how a viewer's concern for the reproduction of reality in a work of art is the "observation of a very narrow mind; a mind that is confined to the mere object of commerce, that sees with a microscopic eye but a part of the great machine of the economy of life, and thinks that small part which he sees to be the whole" (my emphasis).59 Reynolds here makes an important connection between realism and commercialism, a kinship we have observed in the remarkable career of the actor Garrick. Equally revealingly, Reynolds' anticommercial rhetoric relies on metaphors of size to describe inherent class differences in art appreciation. Proportional to a painting's "grandeur," the eye of the connoisseur "dilates" in order to embrace its ideal pictorial content. By contrast, the poor dullard tradesman "sees with a microscopic eye" and, as such, really doesn't see anything of importance at all. Reynolds' engraver Valentine Green draws on the same optical metaphor to make the same distinction, but in a way that combines an academic notion of the educated or "dilated" eye with a contempt, not unmixed with fear, for the new market power of popular taste:
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more than the virtue of economy is sometimes necessary to the attainment of riches; arithmetical calculations are never more uncertain, than when applied to matters of taste, and works of superior genius, which are influenced by causes far beyond their contracted optics to account for, with all their feebleness of foresight, and miserable contrivance.60 (my emphasis)
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Both the physical and legal-financial meanings of the word "contracted" are in play here. For Green, commercially produced paintings appeal only to a "contracted" view of artistic representation. The commercial eye of popular taste is consequently blind to the heroic themes and moral depth of the academic grand style, demanding instead the pictorial replication of
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the familiar contemporary world, the "miserably contriv[ed]" realm of the
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''real.''
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Green's figure of "contracted optics" links two themes I wish to examine in the career of the history painter Benjamin Haydon: commercial exhibition and size. In the 1760s, one critical point of dispute between the Society of Artists' leadership and its disgruntled elite members was the issue of charging admission to its shows. As I have described, Reynolds recoiled at the prospect of the Society's commercialization, refusing to exhibit there because, in his opinion, the open admission policy attracted a "company [which] was far from being select, or suited to the wishes of the exhibitors."61 Despite Reynolds' scruples, however, a succession of post1760s British history painters, frustrated at a lack of private patronage for their work, took the radical step of introducing their heroic scenes to the general public outside of the Academy's annual public exhibitions. In so doing, these painters, including John Singleton Copley, John Martin, and Haydon, effectively reversed Reynolds' strategic withdrawal from the procommercial Society of Artists in 1766. To the dismay of the Academy, these artists chose to compete in the Georgian visual entertainment market alongside a gaudy assortment of popular theaters, West End shows, and fairground-style recreations. For reasons that demand investigation, this populist academic art was invariably huge. T. S. R. Boase has called it the "cult of immensity" in British Art.62 The success of many of these commercial exhibitions by academic painters would seem to suggest that Reynolds underestimated the level of cultivation among the hoi-polloi: that there was indeed a popular audience for art in the grand style. But, as I shall argue, in an important sense Reynolds and Green were right to suspect the essentially populist appeal of these painterly "spectacles."
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Haydon took the grand injunctions of Reynolds' Discourses literally, and aspired to be the English Raphael. But as Gainsborough once remarked, the worst painters choose the grandest subjects, and it would be difficult to find a better proof of this maxim than Haydon: in Marilyn Gaull's words, the "exemplary failure" of British history painting. 63 He was always an unlikely painter given the astigmatic condition he suffered since childhood. His strategies for compensating for this disability, as recorded by his son, would strain credulity were it not for the evidence of Haydon's often confused paintings themselves. According to Frederick Haydon's account, Reynolds' figure of the dilated eye was a literal condition of his father's work:
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His method of painting was his own. His natural sight was of little or no use to him at any distance, and he would wear, one pair over the other, some-
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times two or three pairs of large round concave spectacles, so powerful as greatly to diminish objects.... How he contrived to paint a head or a limb in proportion is a mystery to me, for it is clear that he had lost his natural sight in boyhood. He is, as he said, the first blind man who ever successfully painted pictures.64
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We have seen that, for Reynolds, a "dilated eye" represented the exercise of the imaginative faculty in appreciation of the ideal in art. Green's "contracted optics," conversely, implied the deliberate and cynical concentration of the eye on visual detail-on the "real." Haydon's own optical pathology of dilation and contraction, and his uneasy balance of natural sight with artificial projection, is an instructive metaphor for his crossover role between the Royal Academy and the commercial art marketplace. Like Reynolds before him, Haydon painted (as best he could) according to the "dilated" prescriptions of academic art, but with an eye nevertheless "contracted" to popular taste.
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It was as would-be leader of a British art renaissance that Haydon embarked on his first major work, The Death of Dentatus (1808), a subject appropriately drawn from Hooke's triumphalist history of imperial Rome. "Dentatus" was the first of Haydon's many attempts to invest British painting with the grandeur and authority of the Continental masters. Its exhibition at the British Institution won Haydon minor acclaim, but he took five years over his next painting, accumulating debts from which he would never subsequently escape. Whatever the privileges accorded to history painting by the conservative Royal Academy, Haydon had chosen a precarious living in the real world of the Regency art market. Even before arriving in London from Plymouth, he had been warned away from a career as a history painter: "Why, yee'll starve with a bundle of straw under ye'er head," was the extent of James Northcote's encouragement.65 Sure enough, Haydon soon discovered that the Academy's attempt to recreate an aristocratic system of patronage for history painting had been a rank failure. Probably only Benjamin West, with a fifteen hundred pound annuity from George III, could be said to have earned a satisfactory living from history painting according to the traditional client model. The church's doctrinal antipathy toward religious art and the downturn in construction of large country estate houses further compounded the budding history painter's problems in this period.66 Private patrons were few simply because there was precious little space for these huge paintings, which could be years in the making, to be hung (in Goldsmith's The Vicar ofWaktifield, the
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