A Great and Monstrous Thing by Jerry White

Author:Jerry White [White, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Tainting from Beggars’: The Business of Pictures

Art was one of the great industries of eighteenth-century London. The art took many forms and the artists came in many guises, but there is no doubt that the production and popular consumption of art increased greatly in the century following 1700. It was valued very highly. An appreciation of painting and sculpture was one of the most important benefits to be derived from the young Englishman’s grand tour of continental Europe, that final polish to a university education — sometimes an alternative to it — that became a badge of leisured wealth in these years. To discern animation in a sculpture and the truthful expression of ‘the passions’, nature and character in a painting were proper ‘amusements . . . of a man of parts’. And a cultured, appreciative and enlarged public for painting and sculpture was seen as one of the achievements of an age which in print had too often celebrated the vulgar.

The connection between art and the Continent influenced greatly the character of art production in London in the first half of the century. In the early years especially it was largely a migrant trade. London was the Mecca of foreign artists, the only sculptors, painters and engravers credited among metropolitan art buyers with talent, certainly with genius; and the best education for an artist was to be had not in London but in Rome and Venice. History painting — generally scenes from the Bible or antiquity — was most valued among connoisseurs, but of the history painters just one of any note was English, Sir James Thornhill. English portrait painters were better regarded, but even then the leading artist was Sir Godfrey Kneller, German by birth and schooled by Rembrandt, who had come to London when he was twenty-nine in 1675. It has been said that at the opening of the eighteenth century ‘the arts in this country had sunk almost to their lowest ebb’. On the other hand the appetite for art in London, among those who had cultivated taste abroad and among the growing numbers of the middling sort keen to decorate their houses and commemorate their wealth and progeny, was sharper than ever before. Much of the first half of the century was spent in finding ways to nurture British talent to satisfy this rising popular clamour for pictures.

The need for an academy to school artists in London was recognised early on as an essential first step. The normal training in art for a talented youth was through apprenticeship to an acknowledged master, for which the apprentice paid by way of premium, just as in any other trade. It was a practice that held good through the century. Thomas Hudson, a renowned portrait painter of the 1730s to the 1750s, had been apprenticed to Jonathan Richardson at Holborn Row, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, some time around 1718. Hudson was from Devon and in 1740 he took a fellow Devonian, Joshua Reynolds, to be an apprentice and lodger

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