The artist Frank Softly, a character in Wilkie Collins's novel A Rogue's Life, first published in 1856, complains that until recently pictures by a modern British artist had not been admitted to private art collections “on terms of equality, into the society even of the second-rate Old Masters. His work was hung in any out-of-the-way corner of the gallery that could be found; it had been bought under protest; it was admitted by sufferance; its freshness and brightness damaged it terribly by contrast with the dirtiness and dinginess of its elderly predecessors.”Footnote 1 Indeed, for most of the eighteenth century, only the collecting of foreign Old Masters was considered a good strategy if one wanted to invest in art or advertise one's social status and cultural refinement. The grandest European Old Masters were seen as national assets: models for Britain's artists, evidence of a connoisseur's taste, and proof of the country's high state of civilization. As enthusiasm for art in general grew and Protestant iconophobia decreased, from midcentury the promotion of native art was hailed as a patriotic act. During the Seven Years’ War, comparisons between the military and cultural might of Britain and that of France helped justify demands for sponsorship of British art. However, with the important exception of portraits in the grand manner and so-called subject paintings such as those by Sir Joshua Reynolds, modern British art in collections remained largely confined to lowly genres and to inferior spaces in London's grand mansions and the aristocracy's country houses—portraiture in staircases and private apartments, and landscapes, animal paintings, and hunting scenes in the parlors.Footnote 2
It was in the 1790s that the first collections of exclusively British art were formed. At the same time, other collectors added British sections to their collections of Old Masters, experimented with mixed hangs, or deliberately juxtaposed specific old paintings and modern paintings. This phenomenon has so far been little explored, misdated, and poorly understood. In this essay, I therefore propose to analyze in an integrated manner a wide range of major and more minor collectors and collections of British art that hitherto have been treated in a fragmentary way or, in the case of some like Admiral Nelson's prize agent, Alexander Davison, and his unique British history gallery, not at all.
Moreover, I aim to contribute to an explanation of a significant moment in the history of British collecting and culture that has previously been overlooked or misunderstood. The collecting of grand-manner Old Masters and historical painting in a recognizably eighteenth-century mode was not simply replaced by the collecting of sentimental, picturesque, and antiquarian historical subjects in a distinctly nineteenth-century mode. The innovative cultural practices discussed here occurred simultaneously with the continuation of earlier practices of cosmopolitan Old Master collecting. Unlike scholars who have covered the two “ideal” modes separately, and those who have addressed specifically the moment of the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts and its particular mission for a British school inspired by the Old Masters, I argue that it is important to appreciate a moment of cultural change when no one orthodox pattern prevailed or led to predictable resolutions. Furthermore, the diverse social backgrounds of the collectors surveyed here do not support previously advanced arguments for a straightforward shift from aristocratic cosmopolitan taste to bourgeois cultural nationalism.
It is thus important, I shall argue, to acknowledge the complex nature of the cultural phenomenon under consideration, the diversity of the collectors involved, and the variety of their motivations, which cannot be reduced to straightforward class dynamics, economic patterns, or political alignments. However, the collecting of British art can nevertheless be understood as a coherent phenomenon, namely, as a novel and significant manifestation of cultural patriotism at the turn of the nineteenth century. I define “cultural patriotism” as the expression of patriotic sentiment—a preference for, and an emotional identification with, one's own country—through the production, promotion, and consumption of specific cultural processes, events, and goods.
In the “long” eighteenth century, a patriotic self-consciousness was forged in Britain through the “Second Hundred Years’ War” with France and fostered by adherence to widely shared beliefs and values such as Protestantism, liberty, and property. The invention of a new British identity in the century following the parliamentary union between England and Scotland in 1707 helped submerge regional and national differences and loyalties, especially in common opposition to French “popery” and absolutism. Moreover, the acquisition and experience of empire was a crucial political and cultural catalyst in the forging of the British nation. Who the “true patriots” were was often contested: for instance, in the 1730s and 1740s, Walpole or his adversaries? the supporters of the American Revolution or its opponents? From the 1790s onward, patriotism was more consistently appropriated by administrations and in support of the status quo. The monarchy under George III, and again especially from the 1790s, was able to an extent to co-opt these “nationalist” tendencies. Socially and culturally, there was over the course of the eighteenth century a growing Protestant, nationalist protest against a cosmopolitan, aristocratic culture that invested in French fashions and Italian opera; reactions included the promotion of an “English” or “British” school of art. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, even art societies such as the Royal Academy of Arts moved from embodying an enlightened, cosmopolitan patriotism to adopting a more narrowly nationalist outlook.Footnote 3
From the 1790s, in a period of heightened Anglo-French competition in the cultural as much as in the political, military, and imperial realms, collecting British art was construed as a manifestation of cultural patriotism and helped shape its languages and practices. Patriotic considerations influenced classificatory schemes, thus feeding on, and in turn developing, an interest in art history and an increasingly school-oriented interpretation of art.Footnote 4 Collectors and tendentious catalogers presented specific private collections as national assets and constructed public patriotic personas. Patriotic collecting was not necessarily pursued to the exclusion of traditional, cosmopolitan taste; indeed, the precise relationship between Old Masters and modern British art was often at the heart of the debate, as the former continued to provide one index of the European seriousness of the English or British school, and a benchmark of its achievement. It is in this vein that this essay offers a contribution to the study of cultural patriotism that is grounded in historically specific practices, institutions, and discourses.Footnote 5
Reconsidering private collectors sheds light on the relationships and porous boundaries between the public and the private in the art world of this period. The present argument about private collectors constitutes one strand of a larger reinterpretation of British cultural politics. It complements the argument that these same decades, from around 1790 to the 1820s, represent a crucial period of change in the development of the British cultural state. The state, traditionally rather reticent in supporting cultural endeavor, encouraged the dovetailing of public and private interests and invested heavily, for instance, in the development of the national collections of antiquities at the British Museum.Footnote 6 Similarly, as around 1800 the impact of the Royal Academy of Arts on the promotion of a British school appeared to be more limited than had initially been hoped, and as the short-lived commercial galleries of the 1790s failed to provide credible alternatives, attention shifted to the need for patronage either by the state or by private individuals. Yet, beyond more or less coherent acts of royal patronage—the purchase of a private collection as the nucleus of the National Gallery in 1824, and the subsequent decorating of the rebuilt Houses of Parliament with frescoes—the state did little to sponsor the British school of painting in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 7
With the exception of Russia, Britain was the last major European country to establish a national gallery.Footnote 8 The National Gallery has been explained as a manifestation of growing nationalism, delayed by patrician fears of its potential democratic implications: Would it not undermine the principle of private property? And would free and universal access not give rise to demands for wider political rights?Footnote 9 Princely collections from Dresden to Vienna had been made freely available to the general public by monarchs trying to absorb criticism prior to the French Revolution; elsewhere, conquest or revolution had prompted central collections. At the Louvre, from 1793 every citoyen could view collections that had formerly been in royal, ecclesiastical, or private possession.Footnote 10 Surviving monarchies, including Prussia’s, attempted to renew their waning prestige by opening their galleries after 1815.Footnote 11 This international background ensured that British debates on a national gallery were rarely entirely free of political anxiety.Footnote 12
The cultural history of collecting that I advocate is a history of the practices and discourses of collecting that pays attention to the social, political, and cultural milieu of collectors; to their personal taste, protocols of patronage, and display of their collections; as well as to representations of those collections in the wider public sphere. Collecting is often pursued in order to represent, sustain, or enhance the owner's social status; to signify economic achievement or to make an investment; to demonstrate the collector's cultural acuity, including to dignify the sources of recently acquired wealth; or for sheer love of art, the need for solace, or other subliminal motivations.Footnote 13 Standard explanatory patterns of class alignments cannot adequately account for the notable increase of interest in collecting British art around 1800. Underlying most earlier literature, from John Steegman's classic 1930s histories to Dianne Sachko Macleod's recent and important Art and the Victorian Middle Class, is the assumption that landed-elite cosmopolitan collecting in the “age of taste” was replaced in the nineteenth century by mercantile and industrial elite collecting of mostly sentimental, picturesque, and antiquarian history paintings. Collecting is seen as a corollary of political democratization and popular education. With a few well-known exceptions, the pioneering patrons and collectors of British art are usually considered to have been Victorian self-made middle-class men such as the horse dealer Robert Vernon, the Yorkshire woolen manufacturer John Sheepshanks, and the pharmacist Jacob Bell.
Macleod has rightly demolished the stereotype of Victorian middle-class urban collectors performing a parvenu mimicry of aristocrats. By patronizing specific, new forms of art such as early Victorian narrative paintings and the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, these new urban elites instead created a social and cultural identity for themselves that was clearly distinct from the landed elite and their Old Master collecting. Macleod focuses on the period when middle-class collectors permanently altered the nature and structure of art patronage. Yet this still leaves the period around the turn of the nineteenth century, when men of various backgrounds experimented with investing in British collections, underconceptualized and unexplained.Footnote 14 As different forms of collecting coexisted, there was no clear alignment between the collectors’ social class and the contents of their collections (other than many aristocrats collecting Old Masters). The forming of exclusively British collections, the conspicuous adding of important British sections to existing Old Master collections, and the growing attention being paid to the national school in the diverse collections of men of varying social (and political) backgrounds did not constitute middle-class emulation of traditional aristocratic standards. Neither was it an example of the affirmation of a distinctive middle-class identity, separate from the leisured existence of the aristocracy and gentry and their peculiar forms of connoisseurship and collecting. Aristocratic cosmopolitanism was not straightforwardly replaced by bourgeois nationalism.
Nor was financial investment a determining motive for the collecting of British art. Old Masters were still better objects of investment than contemporary art. By the early nineteenth century, the prices fetched by some eighteenth-century painters and paintings—including Reynolds, Wilson, and certain Hogarths—had risen significantly above their original sales value. But many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch, Flemish, Italian, and French masters still appeared safer objects of investment, above all because they had stood the test of time.Footnote 15 Anna Jameson declared that the “pictures of a living artist can never be what so many seek in pictures, an investment for money.”Footnote 16 Only from the 1820s did the risk of purchasing fake Old Masters (exposed by the Art Union) begin to act as a financial as much as a cultural incentive for collecting native art fresh off the easel.Footnote 17 Yet for the earliest systematic collectors of modern British art, theirs was not primarily an economic investment.
Ultimately, the commodity status and the exchange value of a work of art hinge on its meanings, related to the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of “value,” and on the representation of an interest superior to that of mundane commerce. Within James Clifford's square of the politics of value (adapted from Algirdas Greimas's semiotic square), modern British art would be located in the zone of authentic masterpieces (on the axes authentic/nonauthentic, and masterpiece/artifact). Yet within that quarter—of those objects commanding the highest admiration and prices—British art would be marginal, its economic value lower, and its aesthetic and cultural appreciation less assured than that of Old Masters.Footnote 18
Instead of class dynamics or economics, the interpretative framework that best helps explain the changing meanings and status of British art as collectibles around 1800 is the construction of “collecting British” (as I shall call it for brevity) as a form of conspicuous cultural patriotism. Art collecting was legitimized as a patriotic cultural service that individuals as much as institutions performed for the nation. To invest in (one's liking of ) British art meant to exercise patronage in a pedagogical and patriotic manner. For many collectors it was part of strategies to construct a patriotic persona. The perceived patriotic value of patronizing British art helped to legitimize collecting British as a means of personal advancement as well as to overcome earlier prejudice against British art. As collectors’ private taste was presented as a national asset, collecting British art became a form of virtuous citizenship. The practice was often linked to collectors’ philanthropic activities, concern with the armed forces, and contributions to diverse art societies. Some went as far as to suggest that it might help lift the confidence of a nation fighting for survival in a total war with France. Indeed, William Paulet Carey (1759–1839)—an Irish artist, fine-arts editor of the Literary Gazette, and propagandist in chief for modern British art—linked the health of British art with the “undaunted bravery” of Britain's fleets and armies and compared the art patron Sir John Fleming Leicester with the Duke of Wellington.Footnote 19 However tenuous the connection between art collecting and active national service, the rhetoric of cultural patriotism could be a powerful (if sometimes ambiguous) tool.Footnote 20
The men featuring in this essay often straddled the notional divide between the patron and the collector: the latter acquired art primarily for his own gratification, be it aesthetic, financial, or other, while the patron “not only exercised a more direct relationship with contemporary artists” but also acquired art “partly for their benefit (and even for that of the arts as a whole) or … lent support to artistic enterprises without expectation of material reward.”Footnote 21 Many of those systematically collecting modern British art saw themselves as patriotic patrons in this wider sense, thus eliding private and public agendas.
In the next section, I will briefly situate “collecting British” within the context of the ambiguous contemporary relationship between Old Masters and the emerging national school of art. I will then consider different, but related, aspects of the phenomenon of collecting British, looking in turn at pioneers of exclusive but diverse British collections; then a unique collection of specially commissioned British history paintings and a collection of watercolors as a distinctly British genre; and mixed collections, mixed hangs, and specific juxtapositions of Old Masters and modern British art. By way of a conclusion, I will briefly review the social, political, and aesthetic parameters of collecting British at the turn of the nineteenth century and its significance for cultural histories of collecting.
I. Old Masters and British Art
By the 1790s, certain patterns of discussing art and particular institutional frameworks of patronage and collecting were already in place, providing some of the interpretative context for the phenomenon of collecting British. Within these frameworks, individual collectors exercised personal preferences of taste and had different visions for the national school. Throughout the eighteenth century, artists, connoisseurs, and authors had discussed how an English or British school might overcome the country's alleged artistic backwardness—with the help of private and public patronage and through the better education of artists and of the country's social and cultural elite.
When Napoleon was systematically looting European Old Masters and transferring them to the Louvre as models for French artists, support for British art was construed as a national priority. A rhetoric of patriotic concern for the cultural heritage of the nation promoted commercial galleries’ swelling with paintings by British artists of scenes taken from Shakespeare, Milton, and national history. Moreover, galleries on paper—that is, series of engravings after privately held Old Masters of the foreign and English schools—were published in lavish formats and with explicitly patriotic commentary.
The notion now became firmly established that the origins of an English or British school of painting centered around the first president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds (his subject pictures and allegorical portraits elevated to the status of history painting), and around his associates and fellow Royal Academicians. This idea was enshrined in dictionaries and histories of art and propagated in Royal Academy lectures and parts of the national press. By 1810, the canon of native art was redefined and broadened to include Hogarth and Wilkie, and landscape and watercolor; it was now characterized by notions of Protestantism and naturalism.Footnote 22
When, from around 1800, artists and others campaigned for a national gallery of art, the relationship between the art historical canon and modern British art came to the fore. Old Masters were recognized objects of conspicuous consumption and display in town house and country house galleries. Reynolds advocated the role of Old Masters as models for British artists. But many living artists felt ambivalent about the juxtaposition of old and modern. The British Institution, launched by noble and genteel connoisseurs in 1805, staged competitions for artists to create companion pieces to the Old Masters in its exhibition. It also held retrospectives of Reynolds, Hogarth, Wilson, Gainsborough, and Zoffany.Footnote 23 In Britain's first public galleries, the Dulwich Picture Gallery (1814) and the National Gallery (1824), Old Masters were central too.Footnote 24 Yet, again, artists worried that their juxtaposition with modern art might prompt “the invidious to make disadvantageous comparisons.”Footnote 25
A wide variety and quality of paintings were readily available for view and purchase at artists’ studios and the annual exhibitions of a growing number of art societies, which had in turn given rise to a flourishing culture of art criticism.Footnote 26 By the 1790s, a number of middle-class men and aristocrats had been energetically commissioning and collecting modern British art.Footnote 27 In 1807, Prince Hoare ran a series, Galleries of English Art, in his magazine, the Artist, to raise the profile, and encourage emulation, of the “principal collections lately formed from the works of living painters” with “the noble purpose of encouraging contemporary merit.”Footnote 28 Sales catalogs for the period circa 1790–1830 paint a similar picture of the rise of collecting British as a legitimate, well-publicized practice.Footnote 29 British art thus became a respectable object of collecting at the very moment when sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European Old Masters of unprecedented quantity and quality were pouring onto the London market in the wake of the French Revolution. French aristocrats brought paintings as easily movable assets into exile; British dealers “were at hand with their guineas” whenever the French conquered another country.Footnote 30 Perhaps this influx fueled pro-British fervor; alternatively, without such riches of high-quality foreign art, collecting British might have taken hold even more quickly and more widely than it did.Footnote 31
In brief, a politico-cultural discourse on the British school of art informed various private and commercial practices as well as aspirations for public collecting. The notion that it was a patriotic duty to patronize native art permeated catalogs, reviews, and wider discussion. It was in these contexts that several collectors assembled the first exclusively British collections during the French wars at the turn of the century.
II. The Pioneers
The exclusively British collection of art was pioneered around 1790 by three men: the philanthropist Sir Thomas Bernard (1750–1818), the land-owning brewer and MP Samuel Whitbread II (1764–1815), and Sir John Fleming Leicester, Bart. (1762–1827). They were all medium-weight players in the British art world. Bernard helped found the British Institution and the magazine the Director, which was initially devoted to promoting British art. Whitbread supported the British Institution as well as the Artists’ Benevolent Fund and was a key figure in the campaign, in 1797–98, for the first sculpture copyright act (1798).Footnote 32 Leicester was a cofounder of the British Institution, treasurer of the short-lived Calcographic Society of engravers, and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Institution, to which he donated two paintings in 1823 in the hope of encouraging the establishment of a national gallery in Ireland.
It was Bernard who appears to have formed the very first exclusively British picture collection.Footnote 33 Bernard was treasurer and vice president of the Foundling Hospital and a cofounder of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor. He supported educational and medical charities, friendly societies, and allotments. The link between philanthropy and cultural projects was established by the Artist: “This gentleman, to whom the admirers of the Arts are every way indebted, and whose zeal for the promotion of liberal refinements is the proper accompaniment of his humane exertions in the case of the Orphan and the Poor, possesses a very considerable number of the works of our native artists, with little or no mixture of those of any other school.”Footnote 34 Started around 1797, Bernard's collection was based on first- and second-generation Academicians, with an emphasis on landscape and allegorical, literary, and theatrical subjects. Landscapes and literary subjects, from the late eighteenth century, and genre subjects, from the early nineteenth, began to be recognized as specifically British; at the same time, Bernard seemed to deliberately exclude the least prestigious categories of painting.
A much better-known (and better-documented) early British collection was formed around the same time by Samuel Whitbread II, the son of the Nonconformist, self-made millionaire founder of the Whitbread brewery and MP for Bedford. Whitbread's art patronage and collecting are best understood in the context of his roles as a brewer and a landlord, politician, and philanthropist.Footnote 35 Educated at Eton, at St John's College, Cambridge, and on the grand tour, Whitbread inherited his father's 12,300 acres in 1796 but continued to work at the brewery and to hold shares. A Whig MP for Bedford from 1790 on, Whitbread supported abolition, religious toleration, and parliamentary and economic reform. He encountered social snobbery when contemporaries “deliberately looked for signs of inelegance in a tradesman” and noticed “ungrammatical vulgarisms” in his parliamentary rhetoric.Footnote 36 His inferiority complex has been blamed for his failure to assert himself among political allies; he parted company with the Whigs in 1812. Whitbread suffered from mental disturbance, possibly due to Cushing's syndrome, a disease of the endocrine glands, and cut his own throat in 1815.
Throughout his life, Whitbread was concerned with his “reputation with the country” and sought to make his personal actions, public pronouncements, and moral status look consistent. He was a lenient local magistrate and a benevolent landlord. Philanthropy was a means both of maintaining his reputation and of trying to foster the laboring classes’ respect, industry, and loyalty. Art patronage was a practical form of patriotism, as a thriving national school of art was seen to benefit the decorative arts, national prosperity, and Britain's international prestige. Art patronage for Whitbread was philanthropy in an immediate sense, too, especially with respect to “little-known young men with sparks of genius and capacity for hard work,” such as George Garrard and S. W. Reynolds. Whitbread concerned himself with the personal and financial well being of “his” resident artists and their families; they, in turn, helped with Whitbread's electoral interest and artistic affairs.Footnote 37 When Whitbread inherited, he reportedly resolved “to make a collection of the works of English Artists.”Footnote 38 He owned at least seventy-two contemporary paintings—primarily landscapes, portraits, and animal pictures—most of which he had bought or commissioned directly from artists. Whitbread also commissioned busts from Joseph Nollekens and John Bacon.
In brief, Whitbread's patronage and collecting were shaped by his personal background, his politico-moral thinking, and his personal aspirations. His collecting was meant to help him maintain a good reputation and realize “his related political goal of an orderly and industrious stratified society.” The motivations for his conspicuous patronage of artists and his collecting included a desire to overcome the perceived stigma of his origins. Art patronage also seemed to be for him one means of reconciling the tensions between the “attitudes of an aristocrat and the ideals of a democrat.” In his own estimation, Whitbread mostly failed.Footnote 39
The man behind the single most important early collection of modern British art was Sir John Fleming Leicester. It was displayed at Tabley House, his attractive country seat in Cheshire, and especially at his London mansion at 24 Hill Street, in the fashionable Berkeley Square, Mayfair.Footnote 40 Educated at Cambridge and taught drawing by Royal Academician Paul Sandby, Leicester decided to collect British art after his grand tour in 1784–86, against the prevailing “Anti-British Prejudice” that doing so was still proof of “bad taste and ignorant profusion.”Footnote 41 His collection comprised mainly first- and second-generation Academicians; the subjects ranged from the occasional modern history painting, through portraits, to horse and dog paintings, views of Tabley House, and dramatic depictions of a fancifully dressed Leicester reviewing his own regiment, the King's Cheshire Yeomanry.
Leicester's persistent practice over three decades helped bring about change in the tone and terms of the debate on art collecting. In 1806, Leicester announced the completion of his top-lit Hill Street gallery with a commissioned drawing by John Buckler, exhibited at the Royal Academy.Footnote 42 The Artist called Leicester “the first patron, who, in a country abounding in artists and teeming with excellence, has dared to set the example of an English Gallery, formed on a costly and extensive plan hitherto considered due to the works of foreign schools only.” Listing the early collection, the editorial continued, “the collected labours of our own artists, like the admired works of former times and distant countries, can add splendour to the splendid.”Footnote 43
From 1818, Leicester granted a select public—the noble, genteel, and otherwise polite or fashionable—access to his gallery on one or two days a week in the period between the exhibitions of the British Institution and the Royal Academy. This made national news for the splendor of the well-lit neoclassical space, its fashionable audience, and the display of “the genius of British Art to the highest advantage.”Footnote 44 In his preface to the catalog, Leicester's agent, William Paulet Carey, appealed to notions of national purpose and public welfare. The nation was to be educated in the excellence of native artists; gallery visitors, allegedly transcending class, wealth, and power, found their identity as citizens of a new Athens or Florence.Footnote 45 Detailed catalogs had a real impact on public perceptions of individual collections, as Continental experience had shown. In Leicester's case, the catalog would “prove a triumph to the English School and a powerful blow against Prejudice.”Footnote 46 Carey later claimed that no Old Masters exhibition in Britain “ever occasioned so deep or general a sensation.”Footnote 47
With the opening of the gallery, Leicester's priorities changed. Although the core of his collection remained landscapes and literary and fancy subjects, Leicester also bought major history paintings, traditionally the highest genre, by Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, and William Hilton. When first approached to contribute a picture, West, who was at that time the president of the Royal Academy, praised Leicester's “friendship … for the Pencil of British Artists.”Footnote 48 Leicester also bought Richard Wilson's View on the Arno and commissioned William Collins's Landscape, English Scenery as a pendant: by juxtaposing modern and contemporary art, Leicester suggested that the national school was sufficiently well established to sustain a variation on the Old Masters/modern model. J. W. M. Turner's central position within this increasingly formal British art gallery was consolidated with the purchase, for 350 guineas, of Sun Rising through Vapour in 1818. At the Tabley sale of 1827, Turner bought the painting back, and he included it in his 1831 will as one of two works bequeathed to the National Gallery to hang next to paintings by Claude.Footnote 49
The Repository of Arts in 1819 lauded Leicester's “obviously patriotic motive … in forming this fine collection, and throwing open … his gallery to the lovers of art.”Footnote 50 Yet, in some respects, Leicester's patriotism was, as the Examiner asserted, “at once a satire on government, and its example.” The radical paper condemned the government in terms that associated Leicester's cultural practice with the idiom of oppositional patriotism: “that government which unconsciously creates sinecures of thousands a year for lazy worthless courtiers and constitution-killers, but never expends a guinea in furtherance of British genius in painting.”Footnote 51
Others were concerned with modes of patronage. Royal Academician James Northcote praised Leicester's “truly British Catalogue” and the collector himself for being “the first person of consequence and Taste, who saw the merits of British Art and forwarded the endeavours of the professors when they were struggling against a vulgar prejudice. The Committee in Pall Mall [i.e., the British Institution] can only be considered as followers of your example but with this great difference that you patronised the Artists with your own private fortune. They do it with the money which they gain by the public Exhibitions they so frequently make. You act like a Nobleman, they act like merchants.”Footnote 52 The references to the noble Leicester and mercantile connoisseurs were not social descriptors but, instead, contrasting modes of patronage. The Royal Academy hoped that, finally, liberal patronage was overcoming traditional prejudice and that “so truly patriotic [an] example will excite emulation in others & lead to the establishment of ‘the British School.’”Footnote 53
As with Whitbread, collecting was part of Leicester's wider strategies of self-fashioning. In 1823, Leicester offered to sell his collection “consisting solely of the finest specimens of our Native Artists” to the nation to create a “National Gallery of British art.” Prime Minister Lord Liverpool declined, ostensibly because of economic constraints and parliamentary reluctance, but more likely because most politicians and connoisseurs still thought of a national gallery primarily in terms of canonical Old Masters. Snubbed by government, Leicester commissioned a painting to record his Hill Street gallery, which appeared at the Royal Academy show: W. F. Witherington's A Gallery Hung with British Pictures, also known as A Modern Picture Gallery (1824).Footnote 54 In that same year, an engraving after Thomas Wageman's Portrait of Four Major Collectors was published as the frontispiece to C. M. Westmacott's British Galleries of Painting and Sculpture. The grouping of King George IV, the Marquis of Stafford, Lord Grosvenor, and Sir John Leicester implies that collecting British was as worthy as collecting Old Masters. Also in 1824, the king commissioned the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Thomas Lawrence, to make a copy of his portrait of George IV to hang in “the gallery of that English Macenas, amidst the works of the British School.”Footnote 55
In 1826, Leicester's long-standing quest for a peerage was successful: created the Baron de Tabley, he invited the jocular titulation “Baron de Tableaux.” Some public commentary explained Leicester's peerage as the reward not least for his “love for, and encouragement of, the Fine Arts.” His “patriotic munificence … , in raising our Native School, has made his own elevation a theme of general triumph to artists who have felt it as a compliment paid to them through their most liberal and constant patron.”Footnote 56 By the 1820s, therefore, the discursive power of collecting British art as a patriotic act was so established to the point that it could be used to justify royal and government action.
Only a year later, the Gentleman's Magazine mourned the death of “the greatest patron of the native school of painting that our Island ever possessed.”Footnote 57 When the Hill Street collection was auctioned off, for nearly £7,500, the Morning Post considered the sale “one of the greatest triumphs to English art, which has occurred since Sir Joshua’s. The prejudice against English genius is now for ever dissipated … the English Nobility seem at last to be convinced, that a fine picture by a living Artist of the originality of which there can be no doubt, is more valuable than a trumped up, stippled up, doctored up leonardo or titian!”Footnote 58 In brief, between them, the pioneers Bernard, Whitbread, and Leicester had established the claims of the modern British school as collectible art and its promotion as a manifestation of cultural patriotism. A generation after his death, Leicester's “patriotic … efforts” were still lauded for “having made memorable in the arts the years 1818 and 1819, in which the overthrow of anti-national and unjust prejudice was, in a degree, so happily effected.”Footnote 59
III. A British History Gallery and a National Genre
Alongside these early collections of diverse British paintings, several collectors invested in highly particular collections, which reflected more specific art historical and aesthetic sensibilities. The most unusual collection was created by the wealthy, if shadowy, financier Alexander Davison. His example shows how the new trend of collecting British art converged with the rage for visualized national history at a time when antiquarianism and historicism informed the arts, literature, and, indeed, the sciences more widely. From around 1800, popular, Romantic, nationalistic, narrative, and often illustrated English history was increasingly widely distributed in the form of historical novels, such as those by Sir Walter Scott and William Harrison Ainsworth; history paintings, and engravings made from them; and other visual, material, and performative culture.Footnote 60 In history painting, George III had led the way with several series commissioned from Benjamin West: neoclassical paintings of battlefield heroism and magnanimity in victory for the Warm Room in Buckingham House, as well as a copy of his Death of Wolfe; and, at Windsor Castle, medieval history paintings illustrating the life of Edward III and thirty-five paintings from the Old and New Testaments for a prospective new Chapel of Revealed Religion.Footnote 61
Like other history painters, West worked much from David Hume's History of England. In 1792, Robert Bowyer published a prospectus for an illustrated edition of Hume with sixty large pictures.Footnote 62 Bowyer bought or commissioned from leading history painters, who represented English history not in the antiquarian tradition that prioritized verisimilitude of setting or dress but, instead, in sentimental terms; this shift echoed a slightly earlier change in historiographical writing from “masculine dignity” to “affective immediacy.” Sentimental narratives were intended to elicit sympathy rather than prompt emulation.Footnote 63 By 1806, Bowyer had published five parts in four folio volumes, and the commissioned paintings had been exhibiting at his house in Pall Mall. Yet economic difficulties related to the Napoleonic wars forced the sale of his gallery in 1807.
As Bowyer was selling, a unique collection of British historical paintings was built circa 1806–8 by Alexander Davison (1750–1829), Admiral Nelson's prize agent and executor.Footnote 64 Davison had prospered as a ship owner and merchant in the Canada trade during the American Revolutionary War. He was later a government contractor, supplying the army with uniforms and weapons, and new barracks with general supplies and coal. During the 1803 invasion crisis, Davison raised, at a cost of nearly £3,000, the Loyal Britons volunteer corps. In 1804, however, he was imprisoned for electoral malpractice when campaigning for Parliament. After his release, he faced accusations in 1805-6 of misusing public subscriptions for a Nelson monument.
Having been challenged on patriotic grounds—of abusing the political process and a patriotic subscription—Davison sought to repair his scandalous reputation and commissioned British art in an ostentatious act of cultural patriotism. The project, consisting “wholly of a series of Pictures of Historical Subjects, taken from the annals of our own country,” was unprecedented in Britain.Footnote 65 Davison intended to encourage “talents of our Native Artists, and to bring them fairly in contrast with those of the Foreign Schools, by employing a select part of them on some interesting Historical Subjects.”Footnote 66 He commissioned scenes from English or British history from eight native artists, who were to include in the scene they chose to depict their own self-portrait; Davison topped up whatever price they named with fifty guineas.
Some, like the president of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, saw the gallery as revolving around John Singleton Copley's Collapse of the Earl of Chatham in the House of Lords, 7 July 1778 (1779–80; often referred to as the Death of Chatham), which Davison had recently won in a lottery. Only such patronage of living painters, not of Old Masters, was proof of patriotic ardor and could sustain a national reputation for cherishing the arts. Davison's initiative, like Leicester's collecting, elided personal self-fashioning, public service, and national prestige.
Copley had exhibited the Death of Chatham to critical and popular acclaim in 1781. It cast William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, as a great orator, statesman, and patriotic martyr dying in the act of defending the empire he had helped build. Chatham had collapsed, felled by a stroke, during a speech in the House of Lords just after reciting England's proud history of self-defense against invasion.Footnote 67 Printed not long after the French invasion threats of 1803–5, Davison's catalog introduced the Death of Chatham by linking its exemplary role as a British work of art on a subject of national importance with an appeal to “patriotism and the liberality of the affluent” to promote similar efforts:
The luminous talents and exalted character of the great Statesman whose death is recorded in this distinguished example of British art; the singular coincidence of time and place, in which the world was deprived of its brightest ornament of intellectual excellence; added to the elevated dignity and eminent abilities of the other noble personages represented [are] circumstances that cannot but have their full force on the minds of Englishmen, in this and in ages to come, whenever they shall contemplate this performance. The powers of the pencil thus transmitting the august glories of that period to futurity, whilst they have evinced the present high state of national talent in this first walk of the graphic Muse, call most imperiously and most persuasively also on the patriotism and the liberality of the affluent, to enrich their country and posterity with similar examples of excellence in art, on subjects of great national importance, and worthy of such superior illustration. It is the duty of the present, possessing the means, to confer that benefit on future times.Footnote 68
Around Copley's masterpiece of modern history, Davison commissioned ambitious paintings by the leading Academicians, West, Northcote, and Smirke, and the new star in London's artistic firmament, the young Scotsman David Wilkie; Copley, too, painted a picture specifically for the gallery.Footnote 69 Their subjects ranged chronologically from King Alfred to the Tudors. In contrast to Bowyer's commissions, sentimental narrative and common emotions were less prominent, subsumed in more traditional political and dynastic subjects.
The two paintings in the gallery depicting the earliest historical events focused on the theme of virtuous kingship. Wilkie blended history and genre in The Wife of the Neat-herd Rebuking King Alfred, (who had taken refuge in their Cottage, disguised as a Peasant) for having suffered her Cakes to burn. For Hume, Alfred had been a model of wise kingship who combined military leadership with the dispensation of justice and encouragement of the arts and sciences.Footnote 70 Henry Tresham's Lord John Warren, Earl of Surrey, resisting the unconstitutional Attempt to Question, by a Quo Warranto, the Tenures and Liberties of the Ancient Barons. Anno, 1275 was a story of traditional rights under threat, their defense by a spirited earl, and of Edward I's emergence as England's Justinian.Footnote 71 No less than five paintings put female royalty at the center of scenes of dynastic growth, crisis, or defeat.Footnote 72 Among these, Arthur William Devis's The Conspiracy of Babington against Queen Elizabeth, detected by her Minister, Sir Francis Walsingham offers a clever solution to Davison's stipulation. For in this painting, the artist who is depicted presenting a painting for the queen's inspection, a picture of Babington and his six associates, is a portrait of Devis himself. The queen, seated in the royal library, points out the conspirator Barnwell's portrait to Walsingham. Devis appealed to the antiquarian tradition by working from historical portraits and descriptions as well as from tombs in Westminster Abbey in order to deliver “authentic” portraits, costumes, and other attributes. Finally, West depicted a military leader in the mid-eighteenth century tradition of the compassionate sentimental hero: Sir Philip Sidney, mortally wounded, rejecting the water offered to him, and ordering it to be first given to a wounded Soldier. A famous late Tudor statesman, poet, and sometime soldier, Sidney had died of injuries sustained in a skirmish against Spanish forces in the Netherlands in 1586. According to Davison's catalog, Sidney had been regarded “as the most perfect model of an accomplished gentleman” in terms of his “virtuous conduct, polite conversation, heroic valour, and elegant erudition.”Footnote 73
His gallery of scenes of virtuous royal, civic, and military leadership and English dynastic history earned Davison much praise as “an enlightened patron and true patriot.”Footnote 74 Yet, after his strategy of rehabilitation through patriotic patronage had been partially vindicated, Davison was convicted in 1809 of padding government contracts and sentenced to nearly £19,000 in damages and twenty-one months’ imprisonment. In fact, Davison had profited more from other fraudulent aspects of his contracts to supply army barracks.Footnote 75 To meet his debts to the Treasury, Davison eventually put up for sale his house in St James's Square as well as some foreign paintings and his plate, books, and gems. Only one picture from the historical gallery—Copley's Lady Jane Grey—was put in the sale; along with the house, it was bought back for Davison. The compulsive fraudster had prevailed over the patriotic patron, but, for the time being, he had managed to keep his unique British gallery together.
Appreciation of Davison's unique form of patriotic artistic patronage endured, even though some commentators were skeptical about its wider impact, given patrons’ and collectors’ persistent fondness for Old Masters. Davison finally sold his collection of British paintings by auction in 1823: most pictures fetched between 75 and 500 guineas. For decades to come, the project would be held up as an example of desirable patronage, although it was not followed (except for some plans) in our period.Footnote 76 Copley's star piece, the Death of Chatham, went to the Earl of Liverpool for a very respectable 1,000 guineas. A few years after the National Gallery had been founded, he gifted it to the nation: the national subject and a work of perceived national significance had found a national home.
Men of lesser means and with a different aesthetic vision for the British school invested in other genres. At the start of the nineteenth century, watercolors began to be defined as a distinctly British genre. Partly in response to poor display conditions at the Royal Academy, watercolorists founded three exhibition societies between 1804 and 1831.Footnote 77 It was also in the early 1800s that the notion of a national school of landscape painting emerged, on account of its subject matter, accurate observation in a Baconian empirical tradition, and its bravura display of painting technique. This manifested a peculiarly English response to art, which was contrasted with contemporary French painting.Footnote 78
Whereas many collectors possessed watercolors among their holdings of mixed media and genres, one man made his name in the art world by collecting watercolors in a concerted fashion. In 1819, a year after Leicester had opened his Hill Street gallery, Sir Walter Fawkes (1769–1825), a Westminster- and Cambridge-educated Yorkshire gentleman, agricultural improver, and writer on historical and political subjects, opened his house in Grosvenor Place. A select public could view over sixty works by Turner and some forty drawings by other British artists and a few of Fawkes's amateur-artist friends. Artists’ gossip had it that disappointment with a commission from William Hodges had made Fawkes turn from oils toward watercolors.Footnote 79 An early patron of Turner since the late 1790s, Fawkes displayed three of Turner's marines prominently amid Old Masters in the drawing room at Farnley Hall by 1818.Footnote 80 Apart from a love of art and a fascination with landscape, their friendship was also based on shared interests in reforming politics. During the 1820s, Fawkes narrowly avoided bankruptcy as his publishing, collecting, and lifestyle eroded his financial resources; in a rare inversion of patron-artist relations, Turner lent his friend money.
As Fawkes opened his London gallery to an eager public, the catalog—like other domestic and foreign commentary at the time—defined watercolor as the quintessentially British genre: “It is among the distinctions of the British School of Art, that in its bosom painting in Water Colours has arrived at greater excellence, and has united more of the qualities of painting in oil, with qualities peculiarly its own, than in any other age or country.”Footnote 81 In line with other collectors, Fawkes made a point of presenting a catalog of his collection to the Royal Academy.Footnote 82 In unsubtly self-celebratory fashion, the catalog carries extracts from press commentary describing the gallery variously as “a delightful repast both for the Patriot and the Amateur,” an asset for the artistic profession, a “triumph of Water Colours,” and a glorious display of “the varieties of the great British master's genius.”Footnote 83
IV. Mixed Collections, New Juxtapositions
Alongside the formation of exclusively British collections, a number of leading collectors conspicuously added British art to their overwhelmingly traditional collections. Some experimented with separate rooms for British art or with a mixed hang. The men in this group included financiers as well as men of noble and genteel descent; as collectors, they pursued various aims but especially the self-consciously pedagogic and self-professedly patriotic promotion of the national school.
In some collections, modern British art obtained a distinct presence as part of a wider aesthetic and art historical vision. Thomas Hope (1769–1831), the scion of the Amsterdam-London banking dynasty, considered the patronage of the highest branches of art a means of improving the national character, manners, and happiness.Footnote 84 Hope's Duchess Street mansion from 1804 admitted a select public once a week during the social season. For this two-story neo-Greek picture gallery, which contained mainly popular seventeenth-century Italian paintings, Hope commissioned works with themes from Greek mythology and high-minded history from British artists.Footnote 85 The French painter Dubost suggested that Hope boost his reputation by selling all his Old Masters and collecting only “the best Modern Artists, by which He wd. set a great example.” Yet, it was the juxtaposition of canonical Old Masters with selective contemporary British art that remained the hallmark of Hope's collection.Footnote 86 A similar approach was taken by the founder of modern Lloyds, John Julius Angerstein (1732–1823), whose small but choice mixed collection famously forms the nucleus of the National Gallery. For Angerstein, a prominent City broker and marine insurer of obscure Russian origins, both collecting and philanthropy seemed to serve to enhance his social status.Footnote 87 The illustrated catalog for the sale of the collection showcased key works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Claude, and Poussin—crucially, “the British public will see, with just pride and satisfaction, that the pictures of Reynolds, Hogarth, and Wilkie, worthy of being associated with the greatest works of art, … adorn and complete a Collection formed upon the most scrupulous principles of selection and taste.”Footnote 88
Other collectors pursued specific pedagogic aims on behalf of the British school by mixing old and contemporary art in their collections. Sir George Howland Beaumont, seventh Baronet (1753–1827), an accomplished amateur artist himself, was an immensely influential link between the worlds of national politics, connoisseurship, and art. An eager disciple of Reynolds's aesthetics, Beaumont directed painters and fellow collectors to the example of the Old Masters; by the 1800s this was for some too narrow a vision for the British school, but many artists benefited from Beaumont's patronage. At 34 Grosvenor Place, he displayed Poussin, Claude, and Canaletto alongside a didactically conceived selection of works by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wilson, and Wilkie.Footnote 89 In 1821–22, Beaumont lobbied for a National Gallery, promising sixteen of his own best paintings on condition that the government buy the Angerstein collection. He released important seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French, Dutch, and Italian paintings alongside key works of the British school to the National Gallery in 1825.
Equally judicious selections of some of the best modern British art were also made by leading aristocrats. The second Marquis of Stafford (George Granville Leveson-Gower, later first Duke of Sutherland [1758-1833]), by 1820 supposedly the richest man in the country, owned the single most important private collection of Old Masters. Stafford was recognized as a leading sponsor of modern British artists, as he displayed Old Masters for their benefit and placed their own works—from key portraits to allegorical landscapes—“in distinguished situations, to command respect and attention.”Footnote 90 Similarly, by 1821 the illustrated catalog of the 143 paintings in the collection of Robert Grosvenor, the second Earl of Grosvenor (1767–1845), noted as “creditable to his Lordship's liberality and discrimination, that he discovered and patronized the rising talent of the English School.” Alongside a strong collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European art, he owned iconic works of eighteenth-century British art such as West's Death of Wolfe, Gainsborough's Blue Boy, and Reynolds's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse.Footnote 91
In contrast to Grosvenor's largely separate displays of Old Masters and modern British art, other collectors experimented with mixed hangs and specific juxtapositions of the old and the modern. Even the royal art collections suggested a sense of aesthetic continuity, whereby painters such as Ramsay, Gainsborough, and Zoffany might have been seen by George III to extend the tradition of Van Dyck.Footnote 92 A number of collectors—from peers such as the first Marquis of Exeter at Burleigh House, the third Earl of Egremont at Petworth, and the Earl Spencer at Althorpe, to the genteel historian Sir Richard Colt Hoare at Stourhead and Sir Walter Fawkes at Farnley Hall, to the London bankers Thomas Hope, Sir Francis Baring, Samuel Rogers, and Samuel Dobree—experimented with a mixed hang of English and foreign schools and with the juxtaposition of specific genres or individual paintings.Footnote 93 In short, in the decades around 1800, a diverse range of collectors from grandees to financiers had helped refine thinking about the relationships between modern and contemporary British art and Old Masters, both in conceptual terms and with respect to their spatial and aesthetic juxtaposition in specific galleries. Whether they followed traditional protocols of patronage or had more limited interaction with living artists, most of these collectors were widely recognized for their pedagogic, patriotic promotion of the national school.
V. Conclusions
Having surveyed different manifestations of collecting British, we can draw several conclusions about the phenomenon's social, political, aesthetic, and broader cultural parameters and its significance for cultural histories of collecting. Between approximately 1790 and 1830, British pictures had made significant headway as collectibles. A range of private collectors from bankers to noblemen invested in the cultural cachet and patriotic prestige that came with sponsoring British artists and showcasing national art. In the case of men such as Bernard, Davison, Whitbread, and Angerstein, commitment to British art was part of self-conscious attempts at self-fashioning, which also included conspicuous philanthropy. Many enjoyed a loose association with the Royal Academy, either via individual painters, by presenting catalogs of their collections, or through being invited to the prestigious annual dinner at Somerset House—as did Leicester, Rogers, Fawkes, Baring, Angerstein, Whitbread, and Hoare. There were key figures in the foundation and early history of various art societies, including the British Institution, such as Bernard, Whitbread, Beaumont, and Stafford. Several helped run the British Museum, or took an active interest in copyright for sculpture or other professional issues requiring legislation, or were among the National Gallery's early supporters.
Indeed, most of these men thus reached across the porous boundaries between private, semipublic, and official art worlds in their efforts to shape British cultural politics. They were invested both in traditional forms of patronage and in new ways of making their private collections accessible to select publics. Between 1804 and 1819, Hope, Stafford, Grosvenor, Rogers, Leicester, and Fawkes opened their galleries to artists and wider publics. Several men adhered to traditional protocols of patronage—the landed Leicester, Beaumont, and Whitbread but also middle-class men such as Davison, Hope, and Rogers. They commissioned paintings directly from artists; influenced the creative process; occasionally had drawing masters, painters, or sculptors in residence; and tried to bridge social and economic gaps for artists. As the nineteenth century progressed, this type of patron was gradually replaced by middle-class collectors who purchased rather than commissioned art and who, if they did commission, respected the autonomy of the artists as fellow professionals.
As for class dynamics, contrary to what has previously been suggested, in the period before circa 1830 there was no very close correlation between class, artistic taste, and collecting. Davison was perhaps the only genuine parvenu; the second-generation brewer Whitbread and the financiers we have examined were already pretty well established, although their art patronage generally and their collecting of British art in particular were arguably part of the ongoing fortifying of their reputations. Aristocrats such as Grosvenor and Stafford, meanwhile, might have experimented with collecting British in part in the attempt to show national cultural leadership at a time when their class was under pressure to justify its privileged existence.Footnote 94 Not all men of trade or new wealth preferred modern art (witness Angerstein), nor did the landed elite consistently collect foreign Old Masters, as the efforts of Egremont, Stafford, and Grosvenor, as well as Leicester's pioneering patronage of contemporary British art, show.
The move toward new forms of collecting was more inclusive in social terms than has been previously assumed, as it extended from cultured financiers and businessmen to men of genteel descent and noble lineage. At both ends of that social spectrum, patriotic patterns of collecting could potentially serve social strategies. The occasional nouveau riche may have sought to ennoble his wealth by collecting national art. And some aristocrats—perceiving their class to be under pressure to reinvent itself during and after the French Revolution—expanded the British sections of their art collections in an ostensibly patriotic manner. Yet other collectors of British art seemed not to be pursuing a particular social agenda at all.
As for politics, collecting British not infrequently seems to have accompanied a reforming political outlook: Whitbread, Fawkes, Rogers, Egremont (and after Pitt's death, Grosvenor and Stafford, too) fall into this category. Visitors to Southill can still guess Whitbread's politics by looking at the portraits of prominent Whig figures as well as at Romney's Milton Dictating to His Daughters. On the other hand, there were Whigs and radicals who preferred old art (Charles James Fox, even Rogers to an extent), while some political conservatives such as Beaumont systematically encouraged the modern along with the old.
With collecting practices not following straightforward political patterns, and with patronage of contemporary art overwhelmingly construed as patriotic, what precisely “patriotic” meant could vary. Most collectors made a nationalistic claim to be sponsoring the nation's culture, economic interest, and prestige. Yet for Whitbread, collecting British art expressed moral virtue in the vein of oppositional patriotism. Whether it was an entirely correct representation of his intentions or not, Leicester's gallery was used by the Examiner to satirize the government's alleged corruption and its failure to sponsor national culture. More broadly speaking, investment in British art could be linked to its potential to improve the human condition—to reform both the individual and the community.
These collectors had varying aesthetic preferences and visions for the British school. The specific composition of British collections did matter. Yet what was emphasized most strongly was the fact that a collector was collecting modern and contemporary British art at all. Collecting British in this early phase was more eclectic in terms of genres and painters than were Victorian practices, which expressed more specific aesthetic sensibilities. In pursuing their various collecting strategies, these earlier patrons assembled a core canon of painters, to which most added further artists according to their individual taste. As has become evident, in the mixed and exclusively British collections surveyed here, the native school encompassed Reynolds, West, Gainsborough, and Wilson as founding fathers, and also their pupils, colleagues, and successors in the Academy. Important collectors such as Angerstein added Hogarth, before the architect and Royal Academy professor Sir John Soane led an early nineteenth-century Hogarth revival; Soane owned, most famously, both the Rake's Progress series and the Election.Footnote 95 Similarly, Fawkes presented watercolors as a specifically British genre. But looking at the sample of some three dozen collections surveyed for this study in comparison with dictionaries and published histories of art, we see that private collections displayed a wider selection of genres and subject matter: in addition to history painting as the most prestigious genre, then in process of being reconceptualized in a modern and national manner, portraits, landscapes and seascapes, allegories, and literary subjects were all prominently represented, as were conversation and animal paintings. As individual patrons followed both the broad parameters of an aesthetic and art historical debate about a solidifying canon of British art and highly personal preferences while shaping their collections, they may have both furthered and constrained the capacity of collecting British to be recognized as a legitimate practice.Footnote 96
The motivations of individual collectors will always be difficult to ascertain; what we can study, as this essay has sought to exemplify, are patterns of practice, discourse, and legitimization. Collecting British as a patriotic practice could legitimize private agendas, serve to explain official endorsement of private collectors (such as Leicester's knighthood), and boost certain forms of national art. Genuine appreciation for modern British art, on the one hand, and strategic investment in recognized patriotic practices and personal advancement, on the other hand, were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Anglo-French cultural competition, as a more or less explicit leitmotif of this period, played a more limited role in practices of private collecting than it did with respect to the discourse and practices of public galleries and museums. Comparisons, however, might be instructive: unlike in Britain, in France several collections of contemporary paintings were formed by bankers, such as Pourtales, Laffitte, and Perrier, who pursued both social status and a form of daringly speculative investment. However, from the middle of the eighteenth century, collecting of French art and developing le goût patriotique were also construed as forms of virtuous citizenship.Footnote 97 It would be worthwhile to undertake comparative European studies of the collecting of modern art in a period characterized by the dialectic of canonical Old Masters and emergent national schools of painting.
In the generation following the ones considered in this essay, Victorian industrialists collected Pre-Raphaelites specifically in order to distinguish themselves from the traditional landed elite and their cosmopolitan patterns of Old Masters collecting. Whereas in the earlier period there was no close correlation between the gradual tilt in the balance of socioeconomic power and the social status of collectors, by the early to mid-Victorian period the prosopography of collectors was changing. Between the collectors we have encountered here and patrons of the Pre-Raphaelites stood men such as Robert Vernon, a London horse dealer on a grand scale, who from the 1820s started collecting British art and amassed a systematic historical survey collection of the British school from Reynolds onward. Vernon focused on art in a serious vein—Reynolds, Wilson, and Turner—as did the collectors surveyed here, as well as attending to the next generation of painters—for example, Hilton, Etty, and Eastlake—along with some genre and narrative art that was “compatible with the low-toned palette and pensive mood” of the core collection.Footnote 98 A socially ambitious sponsor of the British Institution, listed in Boyle's Court Guide as “Robert Vernon, Esq.” in the 1820s, and from the 1830s resident in Pall Mall, Vernon was collecting with a view to presenting his art to the nation. On the eve of the public opening of his gallery, in May 1843, Vernon hosted a dinner for the nation's leading artists. As an art journal reported, “Here a right notion may be formed of the capabilities of British Art; and to this glorious gallery every foreigner should be especially directed. … All honour to so veritable a patron—so true a patriot!”Footnote 99 After several generations of patriotic patrons collecting British, no longer were British artists “struggling against a vulgar prejudice.”
