(English) pride and (French) prejudice

Cross-Channel partialities, 1802–1837

 

 

 

William Hauptman

 

 

Cependant [les peintres]
été brillans [sic] dans tous les états d’Europe,
excepté en Angleterre, qui ne produisit jamais
ni un peintre, ni un tableau. Pourquoi?^[1]

 

 

England-France – Food for thought

In June 1772 the print seller Samuel Hooper published a particularly mordant satirical print by the Anglo-Swiss caricaturist Michel-Vincent Brandoin contrasting England and France through perceptions of their respective culinary provisions (Pl 1).^[2] The figure of France is personified by an exceptionally gaunt cook impaling a cat on a spit, the feline having little more flesh than the chef himself. His pitiable larder consists of only a sparse ham and an even leaner skate, a species of fish considered barely comestible.

 

 

1 Michel-Vincent Brandoin, France England, 1772. Engraving, 20.6 x 27.4 cm. Trustees of the British Museum

 

 

To accentuate the popular notions associated with the rudiments of French palates, Brandoin included clusters of skinned frogs and garlic cloves suspended at the top, both thought in Georgian England as repugnant staples of abject French appetites. In contrast, the figure of England is represented as an exceptionally well-nourished cook, intentionally invoking the traditionally stout and robust John Bull. He is characterized as palpably satisfied with his copious allocation of provisions which consists of an outsized joint of beef markedly more appealing than the lean French skate. As a complement to the frogs and garlic, Brandoin integrated an enviably plump ham and a well-fed capon, both suggesting the abundance of the English diet. To add to these telling dissimilarities, in the England section Brandoin added a massive barrel from which a brimming stein of beer has just been drawn; the French section, on the other hand, displays an empty goblet under a dry spigot, an ominous allusion that even the supply of wine to accompany the unappealing meal has become unobtainable.

Like many propagandizing images reflecting the recurring turmoil of Anglo-French relations, such hyperbolic English metaphors, which painted France as impoverished nation, were frequently composed from implicit suppositions, archaic stereotypes, and often expressed without the benefit of actual experience. When a year-long peace between the warring nations was signed in March 1802 and then a more permanent treaty in 1814, cross-Channel tourism was established anew after a hiatus of almost a decade, ‘exciting the attention of not only the thinking classes of the British community, but even the ignorant and the indifferent’.^[3] Many of these English travellers were shocked to find that their respective ideas of France and the French differed considerably from what had been expected or indeed characterized in the satiric literature. When Benjamin Haydon alighted on French soil for the first time, his incredulity could hardly be contained when he discovered that ‘[The French] absolutely had houses, churches, streets, fields, and children!’^[4] Britons also discovered that the starving nation as portrayed in Brandoin’s print earlier was unusually deceiving and scarcely the case decades later. The radical writer and publicist Henry Redhead Yorke, who on the route to Paris had anticipated a meagre meal of simple rural staples, was agreeably astonished when at a modest inn he was provided with:

 

… a jowl of salmon (the largest and fattest I ever saw) two of the finest soles I ever beheld, one partridge, one pidgeon [sic], an hashed hare, one fowl, boulli, spinach, and a few vegetables, one bottle of Picardy beer, one bottle of white champagne, and one bottle of Volney wine.^[5]

 

The experience of Lady Morgan was comparable when she naturally expected being served ‘frogs and soupe maigre’ in accord with ‘the old impressions’, but found a table laden with ‘roasts, ragouts, dressed fish, pastry, salads, fruits, and sweetmeats, with all sorts of wines, while tea and coffee were served round, pour la digestion’, all arranged for the breakfast meal.^[6]

These voyagers, weaned on earlier myths, were expressing the validity of Samuel Johnson’s remark to Hester Thrale that travel adjusts the imagination through confrontation with reality, and accordingly alters thinking about previously presumed beliefs.^[7] This applied to dozens of aspects of French life, from Haydon’s mundane observations of unexpected normalcy to the actuality of what they savoured at the table. But it did not apply to respective opinions concerning French and English painting that visitors now had the possibility of inspecting directly through public exhibitions in London and Paris. Notions of each country’s artistic achievement were as generally as unfamiliar to the French and English as each other’s respective cuisines and similarly prone to misunderstanding and condemnation. And as each nation had fervent views of its national food culture, so each had equally xenophobic sentiments regarding the native characteristics of its respective artistic paths.

Britons believed fervently that artistic progress after the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768 exemplified a fully cultivated, healthy, and vigorous society, a point of national pride recalling the nurturing English cook in Brandoin’s print. Martin Archer Shee wrote for many of his colleagues in 1805 when he explained that the rapid strides of improvement in English painting were due to the establishment of the Royal Academy, this ‘seminary of instruction’, which provided the crucial materials to produce a thriving artistic forum which could be well compared with the present state of the arts in Europe.^[8] The perspective from England’s ‘rivale éternelle’, however, was perceptibly the opposite in that artistic production in England was considered meagre and insubstantial, as metaphorically famished in spirit as Brandoin’s French cook, and furthermore with as few innate provisions available to create a viable national school. It is not insignificant that it was with a forceful representation of British painting at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855 that French critics acknowledged a veritable and reputable école anglaise. The anglophile critic Ernest Chesneau was not mistaken in proclaiming ‘La surprise fut très grande en France’.^[9]

 

 

Discovering the exhibitions of 1802

A tangible demonstration of how visitors to both sides of the Channel responded to the distinctiveness and unfamiliarity of the artistic accomplishments of their respective neighbors can be exemplified by the diverging, and often perplexing, reactions of French tourists to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1802 and conversely the responses of Britons visiting the Louvre show later that year. The London manifestation was the first to open to public scrutiny, only a little more than a month after the treaty was signed and immediately had inquisitive French tourists inspecting its contents, most viewing contemporary English painting for the first time. This view was implicit in the writings of the journalist, playwright, publisher, and anti-royalist Joseph Fiévée.^[10] Even before examining the contents of the exhibition, Fiévée confronted certain peculiarities in the display practices in London to which he was not accustomed from visits to the Paris Salons. Fiévée was shocked at the outset of his visit to find that an obligatory entrance fee of one shilling was required: ‘Un Français ne peut s’empêcher de trouver extraordinaire qu’un gouvernement reçoive 24 sous au profit d’un établissement destiner à répandre le goût des arts.’ Entrance to the Louvre exhibition, in contrast, was free and open to French and English students as well as foreign visitors, the latter of whom were only required to show their passports.^[11]

When Fiévée purchased the catalogue for an additional sixpence, he was surprised to find that some of the contributors were only identified as ‘A Gentleman’ (no. 1018) or ‘A Young Lady’ (no. 544), or even more inscrutably by an exhibitor identified only by initials, such as ‘Miss E. D. H.’ (no. 1069), a ‘View Near Harrow’. This manner of ascertaining the identity of the exhibitor was in contrast to the Paris exhibition livret, sold for 75 centimes, where all the artists were acknowledged by their full name, the names of their teaching masters (if applicable) indicated, their current addresses (when supplied) provided, and in some cases the identity of the owner who lent the work for the exhibition. The London catalogue of 1802, conversely, did not provide any information on the exhibitors, not even providing their first names, and only elucidated whether they were Academicians, Associates, or Honorary exhibitors. However, Fiévée found that the manner in which the London catalogue was methodically organized more pragmatic to consult than its Paris counterpart. From the first exhibition in Somerset House in 1780, the Royal Academy catalogue was habitually prepared according to a continuous progression of the works on display, announcing before the list of exhibitors: ‘The PICTURES are numbered as they are placed in the Room. The First Number over the Door.’ This manner was intended to provide a sensibly practical guide for the viewer by progressively ascertaining the works on display as they were being scrutinized by the spectator. The French livrets, on the other hand, followed the unchanging formula of citing the works in alphabetical order by the exhibitor, grouped first by painters and followed by sculptors, architects, and engravers, thus comprising more of a documented record than an accommodating guide for the spectator in situ. A further distinction of the London catalogue was that it was always a comprehensive record of the works on exhibition when the show opened to the public. This is in contrast to the Paris livret where various supplements were frequently required to the published catalogue because there were recurrent late arrivals which necessitated adding to the catalogue when the preliminary documentation of the exhibition was complete. These supplements could indeed be substantial as in 1802 when three supplements were required, thus adding almost 300 additional works included to the initial list of works on display.

Once having climbed the third flight of steep stairs to the Great Room of Somerset House, Fiévée’s first impression was that the entire contents consisted of interminable portraits, provoking the cynical comment, ‘C’est pour examiner des portraits qu’on paie à la porte.’ Fiévée had good reason to accentuate the profusion of portraiture, as nearly half of the exhibition depicted the physical appearances of diverse aristocratic noblemen, statesmen, and other notables, many of whom were unidentified in the catalogue. The Italo-French writer Ferri de St-Constant observed that their only distinction was in the resemblance to their respective sitters, ‘mérite dont le public ne tient aucun compte’.^[12] But if such plaints of the excess of portraiture in the London exhibitions became ubiquitous for decades among French visitors, it should be noted that the quantity of portraits exhibited in Paris in the 1803 exhibition was of a slightly higher proportion, most of them surely unfamiliar figures for visiting Britons.^[13] More important for Fiévée and other French visitors that year was the fact that among the customary landscapes, genre scenes, and infrequent examples of Biblical and historical subjects, the themes of some of the paintings on display were ingrained in esoteric native conventions and occasionally relied on obscure literary sources intrinsic to native English culture. Consequently, Fiévée and his compatriots were perplexed as to what many of the paintings represented, as he must have been in confronting Henry Thomson’s Henrie and Birtha (no. 57). The painting was undoubtedly unfathomable to any foreign visitor since the catalogue gave no source for the clearly esoteric subject of the painting, citing only an eight-line reference without its author, beginning with the archaic verse:

 

Sytte thee, Birtha, sytte and harke
Howe the ouzel chauntes his noate,
The gould fynche, and the mornynge larke,
Warblynge from theyre lyttel throate.

 

Fiévée could hardly have known that the painting derived from Thomas Chatterton’s 147 stanza poem of 1769 Aella and said to have been penned in the 16th century by the fictitious Thomas Rowley, hence the inscrutable archaic citation.^[14] Fiévée’s cultural background would have equally hindered him in ascertaining the setting of such locally inspired paintings as the two scenes by John Eckstein the Younger of a popular 13th-century Welsh legend, The Rash Lewellin (no. 253) and The Faithful Gelert (no. 254), both identified with paraphrases ‘From the admired poem, A Beth Gelert’.^[15] It is similarly difficult to conceive that any French visitor could have grasped the content of the oddly titled series of six works by the caricaturist John Nixon, all exhibited under a single catalogue number (no. 550), enigmatically entitled The Grim White Woman – Boswell’s Bonny Jane – The Sorceress of Ulla – Giles Jollup, and the Brown Margerine – the Water King – The Cinder King. As none of these curious scenes was elucidated in the catalogue, Fiévée could hardly have known that all were based on poems by Matthew Gregory Lewis.^[16] These anomalous works remained indecipherable iconographic conundrums, a confirmation of the French belief that much of English painting was essentially insular and could not compare with its own established school, which emphasized the employment of subjects that had higher moral and universal values.

Encountering such perplexing works, Fièvée was understandingly so selective in his remarks that he had nothing to say about the paintings that were more visually intelligible to him. There are therefore no comments on such distinguished landscape paintings as those exhibited by William and Thomas Daniell, Dominic Serres, Philip Reinagle, Augustus Callcott, or Turner’s three early scenes, including The Tenth Plague of Egypt. Exploring these singular works by painters and subjects unfamiliar to him, Fiévée found the entire presentation predictably uninspiring, validating the impressions he no doubt already had of English painting as either concentrated on portraiture or determined by trifling parochial scenes incomprehensible to foreigners. He only cited one painting he considered especially commendable which he described in a footnote as ‘une correspondance amoureuses découverte par un père’. Although he had forgotten the name of the painter by the time he published his account, the reference was to John Opie’s The Angry Father (no. 195), also known as The Discovery of the Clandestine Correspondence (Pl 2), which won plaudits in the English press as ‘painted in a manner that few artists in this or any other country could have equalled’.^[17]

 

 

2 John Opie, The Angry Father, 1802. Oil on canvas, 240.4 x 167.2 cm.
Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham

 

 

As a straightforward melodramatic scene effortlessly discernible by its expressive gestures and attitudes, it must have stood out for Fiévée for its uncomplicated narrative rendition of an intimate family drama. Of the dozens of sculptures in the exhibition, Fiévée cited only one example he thought admirable – ’Il y a de la grandeur dans l’ensemble des traits’ – a bust of Adam inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost (no. 1058), sculpted by the actress Sarah Siddons, the only work she ever exhibited at the Royal Academy. She was listed in the catalogue as an ‘Honorary Exhibitor,’ indicating her status as an amateur, her designation equally identified by an ‘H’ placed after her name.

Whereas Fiévée considered the exhibition ‘d’une grande foiblesse [sic], quatre ou cinq morceaux excepté’ among the more than a thousand entries, for English critics there was unequivocal approval of the excellence of the Royal Academy offering. Even the overwhelming presentation of portraits was hailed as delineating ‘an extraordinary display of cultivated taste’ and the entire exhibition matching ‘in splendour any that has yet been presented to the public’.^[18] The same review added, perhaps in a mocking stab at its French neighbour, that the quality of these works ‘would certainly not disgrace the most refined nation that ever existed’. Joseph Farington considered the 1802 show a successful performance and a demonstration of distinct artistic maturity, noting as well Opie’s canvas that Fiévée esteemed.^[19] Many admirers could also point with gratification that some of the luminaries of the London art establishment showed highly impressive works in 1802, none of which found favor with Fiévée: Benjamin West exhibited seven paintings, five of which were historical subjects; Sir Thomas Lawrence included nine portraits; Martin Archer Shee presented seven portraits all of which won warm approval; Richard Westall had seven works on show; and William Beechey’s commanding full-length image of the Duke of Cumberland standing on the battlefield which epitomized the heroic standards that the Academy promoted in such portraits and which French visitors could readily grasp visually. These works and others demonstrated for English critics not only the satisfaction of offering paintings of the highest order, but also an undeniable measure of the continuity of the legacy the Academy had established, which in turn had all the signs of heralding a fruitful artistic future. Constable, conversely, was a formidable dissenting voice, echoing Fiévée, in noting, ‘There is little or nothing in the exhibition worth looking up to,’ despite his own participation, the first landscape he exhibited in these rooms.^[20]

Britons visiting the Paris exhibition after it opened on 1 Fructidor (September 2) in special rooms in the Louvre, now named the Museum central des Arts, were confronted with what many considered a pedestrian display of current French painting. It was apparently clear that the offering that year was not as lofty or impressive as officials had hoped for and adjustments were made accordingly. In contrast to the Royal Academy exhibitions in which no changes could be made after the show opened and the catalogue printed, the situation in Paris was managed differently both politically and structurally. Because the Salon exhibitions were under the supervision of the Minister of the Interior – this in contrast to the complete independence of the Royal Academy from royal influence or interference – the French government had the power to sway exhibition procedures in accord with the desired effects on the public. This was the case in 1802 when on orders from Napoleon, the Minister, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, invited esteemed painters who had previously exhibited in the Salons to fortify the present showing by adding notable works they had exhibited earlier, ‘pour donner aux visiteurs étrangers une plus haute idée de notre école’.^[21] Several painters heeded the call, particularly François Gérard, among others, sending works weeks after the exhibition officially opened.^[22] Consequently, visitors could see such supplementary works as Girodet’s Le sommeil d’Endymion, already exhibited in the same rooms in 1791, or François Ménageot’s Méléagre supplié par sa famille de prendre armes of 1788–89, or Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s La mort de Cléopâtre of 1796, or other works by Carle Vernet, Jean-Baptiste Isabey, Charles Meynier, Étienne-Barthélémy Garnier, and Charles Paul Landon, all meant to enhance the impression of the excellence of current French painting. The practice of adding to the exhibition to enhance its appearance, however, would be abolished in the following Salon – there was no exhibition in 1803 – when the new Minister, Vivant Denon, wrote a directive ‘Aux Artistes’ to inform them that no works would be included after the opening, citing the previous exhibition which ‘n’a offert aux regards, soit des nationaux, soit aux étrangers, lors de l’ouverture du Salon [de 1802], qu’une exposition incomplete et mesquine’.^[23]

As Britons entered the Louvre in 1802 they were hardly aware of the uniqueness of the exhibition, or, had they arrived near the end of the showing, they would have been perplexed to see that the paintings added by invitation from Chaptal were not noted in the catalogue or the suppléments, thus making them impossible to identify. But Vivant Denon’s statement that the 1802 exhibition had been incomplete rang true since, early in September, Britons discovered the exhibition halls with a quantity of empty wall space because only about half the works were present when the exhibition formally opened to the public. These visitors must have been equally perplexed to find not only paintings, drawings, engravings, and sculpture on display, as in London, but also mosaics, encaustics, rudimentary esquisses, various têtes d’étude, projects for sculptural decorations and, oddly, civil engineering and topographical plans. They also confronted new subjects extolling Napoleonic rule, such as Girodet’s large canvas, Hommage offert à Napoléon Bonaparte, which arrived well after the opening of the exhibition and was recorded only in the 3rd supplément (no. 907) that explained the work in a monumental description of 153 lines. Many too would have gawked at Guérin’s star performance, Phèdre et Hippolyte, sent to the exhibition six weeks after the opening, which attracted so much attention that ‘tous les regards se portent, au salon d’exposition, sur le tableau…, qui semble, maintenant, former à lui seul, l’exposition toute entière’.^[24]

There were also unexpected surprises, particularly the presence of a work by the president of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, a version of Death on the Pale Horse which he called a sketch, and which was only noted in the 2nd supplément (no. 756). ^[25] The presence of the painting in this context was an oddity. Although some of West’s works were already in pre- and post-Revolution French collections,^[26] it constituted the only English painting in the exhibition and the last to appear in any of the Salons until 1824. One can imagine that the Rubens-inspired composition would hardly have shocked English viewers in the Louvre, but the vibrant colours and dramatic energy were in direct conflict with the majority of French works emulating the Davidian approach. Equally surprising for visiting Britons was to find two portraits of English noblemen painted by Girodet: a portrait of the American-born physicist and inventor, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (no. 908), and the other of Lord Buckinghamshire (no. 909).^[27] Many Britons may have also recognized a curious English subject in Mme Chézy-Quévanne’s Portrait de Nanette Stocker, grandeur naturelle (no. 61). The subject of the work was an English dwarf only 33 inches tall, who, with her equally dwarf companion John Hauptman, toured England as the ‘smallest woman in the kingdom’, she accompanied him on the piano as he played airs on the violin.^[28] The work did not receive positive reviews: one critic wittingly noted that the painting was no more than a ‘sujet proportionné au talent de l’artiste’.^[29]

But as was the case with Fiévée in London only months earlier, for the most part Britons in the Louvre were largely bewildered by many of the iconographic motifs new to them. It is difficult to imagine the reactions regarding Jean-Baptiste Huet’s commanding Un lion et sa femelle allaitant ses petits (no. 134), a curious depiction of ferocious beasts feeding a cub that Huet strangely transformed into a peculiar pseudo-domestic scene.^[30] Some of the subjects of the exhibited paintings were derived from abstruse literary sources entirely alien to the non-initiated, making identification of these as difficult for the Britons in Paris as it was for the French in London. The painting entitled Arie et Pétus (no. 28) by Louis-André-Gabriel Bouchet, a pupil of David and a winner of the Prix de Rome four years earlier, had no explanation provided by the livret as though familiarity with the subject needed no further clarification.^[31] One can only speculate how any English viewer responded to the myriad of depictions of rarefied classical subjects that likewise were scarcely elucidated in the catalogue, among which in 1802 included three separate canvases representing episodes of the esoteric history of Éponine et Sabinus, a tale of defiance against Roman rule taken from Plutarch and Tacitus. Even some of the religious subjects must have mystified the foreign visitor who had no knowledge of the figure depicted, such as Jean-Antoine Giroust’s Sainte Godelive (no. 117), a medieval Flemish saint beatified for sharing her meagre food with the poor for which her abusive husband had her strangled to death. Furthermore, many paintings were titled in the catalogue in such a way that what they actually represented was difficult to establish, such as an entry by Eulalie Morin, an encaustic identified as ‘Epreuve de l’Anneau’ (no. 213), which received no clarification in the catalogue. What would any cross-Channel spectator in the Louvre exhibition have thought of the bizarre peculiarity of exhibiting six drawings, an ‘ouvrage de science’, by Antoine-François Lomet – he was listed as ‘Chef de la quatrième division du Ministère de la guerre’ – all under the same catalogue listing (no. 196), which exhibited the mechanical details of a new steam mechanism capable of channeling 10 cubic meters of water per hour to a height of 26 meters, ‘sans bruit’?

 

 

Assessing the Other

It is evident that each school of painting develops a repertoire of subject-matter largely based on its own cultural roots and native resources, not unlike its cuisine. Such subjects and themes naturally may seem challenging or most often impenetrable to those unfamiliar with them, as cross-Channel visitors experienced in the respective exhibitions of 1802. Questions regarding whether one could comprehend the artistic production of a foreign school of painting or not were voiced by many writers during the first half of the 19th century. It was observed in 1814 when the attorney and historian of Europe, Sir Archibald Alison, visited the Louvre collection that ‘the character of every school of painting has been determined by some peculiar circumstances under which that school first originated’. He concluded therefore that painting could be best understood ‘by the disposition of the people to whom it was addressed’.^[32] It was in this sense that many Britons conceded that English and French art constituted separate creative entities derived from dissimilar cultural traditions, artistic motivations, aesthetic incentives, divergent political and social dispositions, and particularly different structures of patronage. In France, these elements forged a stylistic unity that stupefied English painters by its standardization which had few individual variations, a style that became scornfully known as ‘French manner’. It is little wonder that when Fuseli examined the paintings in the 1802 Louvre exhibition he was so struck by their extraordinary homogeneity that he claimed all of them fundamentally came from ‘the same pot’, thus demonstrating blind subservience to established rules with no genuine spirit of invention or originality.^[33] For Shee, the political revolution in France brought about a similar one in artistic taste, the components of which were founded in the notion that the ‘the pencil of a modern French artist moves in the heaviest manacles of servile imitation.’^[34]

For Britons, the pictorial methods and styles they saw in the Louvre exhibitions incited a consistent indictment of erring directions and contrived artistic philosophies grounded upon false premises. This was particularly true for Benjamin Haydon when he surveyed the paintings in the Salon of 1814, the first after the fall and exile of Napoleon. A satirical print published that year insinuates how English visitors to the exhibition appear rather perplexed by the offerings, some open-mouthed in astonishment (Pl 3).

 

 

3 Louis-Félix Legendre, Les Anglais au Salon du 1814, 1814. Coloured etching, 26.2 x 29.5 cm.
Trustees of the British Museum

 

 

One might imagine Haydon among these bewildered viewers, particularly concerning his thoughts on the ‘French manner’, which he understood was essentially deferential to the needs of the state, even if it followed a false path: ‘In England two and two make four, but in France they would make six, if the glory of the great nation required it.’^[35] Haydon, like many of his English contemporaries, found the present French school lacking in innovation or creative fertility owing to the seemingly fallacious and inflexible principles disseminated by the pernicious authority of David. Haydon’s plaint, echoing many of his colleagues – but not James Barry who professed admiration for David and announced ‘a Republic was the proper form of Government for Art to flourish under’, notions for which he was expelled from the Royal Academy^[36] – was that contemporary painters ‘mingle the principles of Sculpture with Painting’, thus producing lifeless and unnatural imitations, a false focus mired in fallacious ideas on the true nature of the painter’s mission.^[37] Haydon clarified what distinguished the English painter from the French painter in that the former inherently employed atmosphere, effect, light, and imagination as fundamental artistic values, which, Haydon noted, were profoundly absent in the ‘insolent imbecility’ and aesthetic sterility of the ‘French manner’.^[38] As Haydon told Sir Charles Eastlake in October 1816: ‘If Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, Ariosto, Dante, Michel Angelo, Raphael, Correggio, & Titian are right, they [the French] are wrong, and they are wrong by every principle of Poetry and Art which has ever existed.’^[39]

Similar observations were voiced by William Hazlitt in 1823 when he visited the Marquis of Stafford’s collection in Cleveland House.^[40] Hazlitt made pungent remarks concerning how works from different cultural circumstances and foundations could indeed be comprehended and esteemed outside of specific geographical boundaries in which they were formed particularly in the form of translation of literature to another language. Such works as Lesage’s picaresque novel L’histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, he proclaimed, could be rendered satisfactorily into English, as it was by Smollett and others,^[41] because of its universal lightness of tone in describing the protagonist’s improbable foibles and adventures, thereby naturally appealing to readers regardless of national origins. Yet the more profound writings of Racine or Rousseau, entrenched as they are in French aesthetics, education, and philosophical orientation, could not. In the visual arts, Hazlitt employed the examples of Flemish, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian art as ‘good and intelligible in their several ways – we know what they mean – they require no interpreter’. The exception to this quartet was French art which is produced by painters ‘with organs and with minds peculiarly their own’ so that comprehension can only come if the viewer was born and nourished in the same cultural environment. Its peculiar language was such, Hazlitt added, that it ‘ought never to be removed from the soil in which they grow. They will not answer any where [sic] else’. Echoing Haydon, Hazlitt then penned a diatribe on what he considered grievous blunders in current artistic directions in French painting that were absent in England: works by French painters are spiritless outlines of figures that are ‘colourless, motionless’, and have none of the power of the Antique models on which they are based; their representations of nature are ‘flat, dry, hard’ as if they were embedded biological specimens in a portfolio; their compositions substitute ‘minute industry for a comprehension of the whole’; they have no sense of providing their works with the ‘true, natural, and powerful workings of passion’; and so forth.

Haydon’s and Hazlitt’s tirades, nationalistic and partisan as they are, accentuate individually respective notions of the merits of their own school of painting and how they compare with the visual ideals advocated by the purported French masters of the day. If the English were gratified by the accomplishments of native talent as nurtured through the Royal Academy, for the French it was axiomatic that England produced few painters of note, most of whom were content to produce provincial works catering to base bourgeois taste. It was hardly unanticipated in this climate of artistic enmity that many French writers voiced the inflexibly believed dictum that their artists achieved a level of superiority which was a paradigm of high artistic taste, particularly as it applied to history painting, an area mostly lacking in England. This decidedly biased outlook of Gallic supremacy in the visual arts, and by insinuation its neighbor’s artistic inferiority, was the core of Louis Battissier’s remarks decades later when he reviewed the Royal Academy exhibition of 1837.^[42] The show was the first in its new quarters at the National Gallery which Batissier, like many of his colleagues decades later, considered a pedestrian structure with poor proportions and incommodious rooms for viewing works of art.^[43]

Batissier, who was trained as both a doctor and an archeologist and would assume to the title of an inspecteur de monuments historiques, began his critical review in remarking that painters currently working in England, in contrast to France, had no cohesive stylistic objectives that were essential for producing a tangible and recognizable school. For Batissier, all of the artistic efforts of native painters across the Channel were geared toward the trivial categories of portraiture, landscapes, and genre scenes, all of which assured sales to a public that had little interest in virtuous or inspirational scenes. Such preoccupations meant that in England no painter ‘ne cultive la grande peinture historique’, an important aesthetic lacuna expressed repeatedly by French writers throughout much of the early 19th century. This situation led Batissier to declare unconditionally:

 

Il y a donc dans ce pays aucun homme que l’on puisse comparer à MM. Eugène Delacroix, Ingres, Delaroche, Horace Vernet, Schnetz, Ary Scheffer, et à tant d’autres artistes dont le talent honore la France. On voit par là toute supériorité que notre art a sur l’art britannique.^[44]

 

Within this unambiguously xenophobic assessment – had Batissier wondered what other nation could boast of such contemporary painters and their formidable achievements? – he went on to state that to demand an English painter to produce a work ‘de haut style’ was in vain. He was convinced that the English painter was largely incapable to doing so because the means necessary were beyond his training or his capacities: ‘[English painters] ne savent pas dessiner avec cette purété,’ which he considered an indispensable element for the heroic creations Batissier had in mind.

It was within this framework that Batissier was markedly critical of David Wilkie’s brief forays into historical subjects, indeed using these examples to prove his point of the ineffectual efforts of English painters in designing and executing significant historical subject pictures. For Batissier, as for many of his French colleagues, Wilkie was ‘l’artiste le plus illustre de l’Angeterre’, later even more gloriously labelled ‘Le Léonard de Vinci de la peinture anglaise’,^[45] but this celebrity derived from his humble and often unpretentious genre scenes, one of which in the exhibition, The Cotter’s Saturday Night (no. 358), Batissier praised highly. In viewing the two historical scenes Wilkie exhibited in 1837, Batissier was particularly blunt that he was not meant to paint such subjects because he did not have the aesthetic equipment to go beyond his genre pictures. Batissier bemoaned Wilkie’s decidedly odd Rubenesque painting The Empress Josephine and the Fortune Teller (no. 144), which, he proclaimed, added no lustre to Wilkie’s reputation and for Batissier was considered so weak that the canvas should never have left the painter’s studio (Pl 4).

 

 

4 David Wilkie, Josephine and the Fortune-Teller, 1837. Oil on canvas, 211 x 158 cm.
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

 

 

His Mary Queen of Scots Escaping from Lochleven Castle (no. 119, untraced), based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Abbot and one of several works in the exhibition showing the same or a similar iconography, fared better in Batissier’s opinion, but his remarks were hardly encouraging. Batissier’s candid counsel to Wilkie was that he should refrain from delving into historical subjects and would continue to triumph in his art only if he remained immersed in his ‘scènes populaires’ for which he was better suited.

Batissier also faulted William Etty’s most ambitious work to date, The Sirens and Ulysses (no. 122), which was hung favourably in the East Room (Pl 5).^[46] Fulfilling the definition of a history painting both in its heroic dimensions and its source in Homer’s Odyssey, the pertinent passage of which Etty dutifully supplied in the catalogue using Pope’s and Cowper’s translation, the canvas is a horrifying depiction which attracted much notice and which Robert Browning remembered fondly more than a decade later.^[47]

 

 

5 William Etty, The Sirens and Ulysses, 1837. Oil on canvas, 297.0 x 442.5 cm. Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester

 

 

The painting undeniably aroused controversy for its concentration on the decaying bodies of the sailors at the lower right – ’In verdant meads they sport, and wide around / Lie human bones, that whiten all the ground’ – which one critic remarked were so faithfully depicted that ‘the surgeons will be in raptures’.^[48] But also disconcerting for many critics was the manner in which Etty highly eroticized the Sirens who clearly resembled voluptuous Victorian nudes rather than alluring classical ones. If the painting was described as a ‘disgusting combination of voluptuousness and loathsome putridity’, it was also touted in the press as ‘an historical work of the first class’ and indeed Etty’s finest creation since he began exhibiting in these rooms more than two decades earlier.^[49] But for Batissier, who was hardly scandalized by these expressive female figures – ’Ces syrènes sont bien les plus horribles femmes et les moins séduidantes qu’on puisse imaginer’ – the fault with the painting was centred on what he considered to be Etty’s limited knowledge of anatomy, particularly as seen in the excessively muscled sailors and the bound Ulysses on the oddly small vessel in the background. ‘M. Etty a à sa disposition six ou sept muscles, avec lesquels il compose les jambes et les torses de tous ses personnages,’ which he rendered with ‘d’une incorrection désespérante’. Batissier was no doubt unaware that Etty was a Visitor to the Academy’s life class in 1837, supervising students in their drawing from the live model and thus more than familiar with human anatomy, or that in researching the figures of the dead sailors in order to draw the remains of their decaying bodies accurately, he had visited mortuaries, one of the first English painters to do so.

Batissier also found much to disparage in Daniel Maclise’s even more sprawling canvas, Bohemian Gypsies (no. 479), cited in his review as Halte de Bohémiens, a painting that should have elicited positive remarks from the French critic precisely because it appeared not to have Etty’s exaggerations or overt individualism that was commonly associated with the ‘English manner’ (Pl 6).

 

 

6 Daniel Maclise, Bohemian Gypsies, 1837. Oil on canvas, 179 x 424 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the Trustees of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, formerly Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, Mumbai

 

 

Even though the literature on Maclise has noted that the painting has not been traced, the monumental work of almost 14 feet long has in fact been housed in a Mumbai collection since 1923.^[50] Maclise’s canvas was shown in the crowded West Room, where its neighbours included important works by Turner, Francis Danby, John Martin, and a work by William Fisk depicting a scene from French history that should have appealed to Batissier.^[51]

The London press highly praised Maclise’s bold conception as an extraordinary performance of ‘an exuberance of imagination which we never before met’, and one that foretold great promise from the young painter.^[52] One critic lauded it as a work with ‘more invention and original character that could be found in all other pictures put together’.^[53] Batissier, however, was largely apathetic to the audacious configuration of dozens of figures crowded in the foreground, remarking upon the largely uninteresting subject of gypsies reveling, each ‘à sa joie brutale et à ses instincts’. He found nothing noble or elevated in Maclise’s choice of the subject, which painted as it was on such a grand scale suggested ‘le haut style’ of more heroic and moral subjects. Batissier found that the capacious horizontal composition displayed no unity of action, while the featureless background seemed to be an inadequate complement to the foreground figures, who, however, exhibited ‘d’un bon dessin.’ All of these elements made Batissier wonder how Maclise ‘peut être tout à la fois si heureux et si maladroit dans un même ouvrage’.

Batissier’s belief that England produced no great painters comparable to French luminaries was reiterated later in his review when he again questioned where in England are ‘les David, les Gros, les Gérard, les Géricault, qui ont ouvert des écoles et formé des élèves’. To explain the dearth of any great masters in England comparable to the French, he asserted, ‘Chaque peintre anglaise marche dans son isolement et sa solitude, et pousse même souvent la manière qui lui est propre jusqu’à l’abberration.’^[54] It was this sense of personal inventiveness and eccentricity that he felt characterized English painting and which came to his mind when confronting Turner’s four paintings in the exhibition. Batissier’s critical comments on these closely reflected the observations made by Gustave Planche two years earlier during his visit to the Royal Academy exhibition. Planche, like many of his compatriots, knew Turner’s work chiefly from lithographic reproductions, and therefore severely reproached his more exuberant landscapes for his topographical inexactitude and fanciful visions, which in turn made Planche wonder what and how this seemingly inappropriate Professor of Perspective could teach his students.^[55] Batissier’s reaction to Turner’s paintings, consisting of three historical and literary scenes and his exceptionally dynamic landscape Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm (no.480), which was hung next to Maclise’s Bohemian Gypsies, was even more vehement (Pl 7).

 

 

7 JMW Turner, Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm, 1836/37.
Oil on canvas, 92.2 x 123.0 cm. Art Institute, Frederick T. Haskell Collection, Chicago

 

 

Batissier’s view was that Turner, now 62 years old and ‘n’est plus que l’ombre de lui-même’, had fallen into complete decadence, his paintings exhibiting ‘la bizarrerie la plus incroyable’, dominated by ‘une imagination déreglée,’ which were finally ‘aussi ridicule et aussi detestable!’ For the French critic Turner’s canvases were at once inexplicable and incoherent, and exemplified the folly of a painter who should have known when to have ceased painting while he was still in his prime. Clearly Turner’s imaginative pictorial language could hardly have found comprehension from any French critic. Even three decades later Jules Claretie described Turner’s works as particularly representative of English painting: Turner began by the servile depiction of nature and ‘finit par le délire complet’.^[56] But in fairness to the French evaluation of Turner, it should be recalled that, at this time, his paintings, so removed from any norms of the day either in England or in France, posed serious conundrums for many English critics as well. In reviewing Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire two years later, Thackeray admitted that he found his works ‘for the most part quite incomprehensible’ since ‘he has forsaken nature, or attempted (like your French barber) to embellish it’.^[57] Thackeray spoke for many of his colleagues when he described Turner’s paintings as a mixture of

 

… fancy pea-green skies, crimson-lake trees, and orange and purple grass – fancy cataracts, rainbows, suns, moons, and thunderbolts – shake them well up, with a quantity of gambouge, and you will have an idea of a fancy picture by Turner.

 

 

 

En visite: Some French visitors to Somerset House^[58]

As reviews of the London art world and its annual exhibitions began to appear more regularly in assorted critical publications in French newspapers and journals, French visitors began to frequent London exhibitions, and almost consistently demonstrated difficulties in comprehending the nature and direction of the English paintings. Discussing the works they saw in the Royal Academy exhibitions, they often repeated prejudiced notions of the English as generally uninclined to the visual arts. Many of these accounts consisted of little more than fragments in assorted mémoires and travel souvenirs by writers who had few pretensions in the critical examination of artistic trends or motivations. They nevertheless reflected widespread and continued French views of the ‘English manner’ which appeared so radically removed from and inferior to the modes and themes to which the French were accustomed in Paris. These accounts, rarely cited in the literature, demonstrate the general incapacity to concede styles and artistic vocabularies alien to educated sensibilities, as they equally reveal highly biased perspectives honed by xenophobic aesthetical considerations, indeed confirming for the most part Hazlitt’s assessment of the difficulty of foreigners in comprehending ingrained artistic expression divergent from their own. However, some French painters who sojourned in London were conversely more receptive to displays at the Royal Academy, suggesting that in certain instances cultural borders were not necessarily immovable impediments for acknowledging distinction, excellence, or progressive developments in contemporary art.

An important prototype for early French récits related to Somerset House exhibitions was Louis Simond’s sweeping perspective of life and society written during his English visits when the Napoleonic wars were still raging. Although French in origin and later Swiss by naturalization, Simond had no difficulty in gaining access to England during the conflicts as he was considered an expatriate, having left France after the Revolution and establishing himself in New York as a critic and merchant. Since Simond was proficient in the language, he had no difficulty in having access to important artistic figures, and indeed recorded visits to the studios of Lawrence, Thomas Phillips, William Owen, and Joseph Nollekens; he also associated with such literary figures as Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and De Quincey. The latter described him as ‘a thorough knowing man of the world, keen, sharp as a razor’, but Wordsworth recoiled from the Frenchman, a disagreeable encounter which De Quincey summarized as ‘They met, they saw, they interdespised.’^[59] From his visits, Simond published a highly articulate account of his voyage, peculiarly first in English and then in the following year his own French translation.^[60] His book, in typical journal form, was an unfettered descriptive account written in a facile narrative style that made it one of the most popular works of the genre for decades.^[61]

Simond’s notes on the art he examined in London are some of the first by a foreigner to recount the current trends, however briefly, and in some instances gleaned from personal connections with artists. Like many of his French contemporaries, Simond had little regard for painting in England and remarked that the perpetual accusation that the English neglected the fine arts was for the most part accurate. This to be the case to Simond when he fleetingly examined the exhibition of 1810 where, echoing Fiévée’s reaction earlier, he was astonished to see the extraordinary number of portraits exhibited, noting perhaps sarcastically that English artists are basically all portrait painters. The profusion of portraiture in these exhibitions was a common indictment even among London critics that same year, one observing that he was appalled by the inestimable portraits ‘which are thrusting themselves … so impertinently upon our notice, in every direction’.^[62] Similar to Fièvèe’s reactions as well, several paintings on exhibition represented bewildering or even frivolous subjects which Simond could hardly have seen approvingly or have fully comprehended, as for example Edward Bird’s genre painting The Game of Put (no. 98),^[63] a card game particular to English society, or a painting by Thomas Stewardson, Boys Playing at Beggar My Neighbour (no. 286), a child’s card game of chance equally indigenous to Tudor England, famously appearing later in Dickens’s Great Expectations where Pip loses to Estella.^[64]

Encountering paintings whose subjects were opaque to any foreign visitor, Simond did not warm to the manner and substance of paintings that constituted more conventional depictions of accustomed subjects. John Copley’s large equestrian portrait of George IV (no. 58),^[65] a forthright depiction easily intelligible to any French visitor who would have seen comparable portrayals of royal or military figures heroically portrayed on horseback (Pl 8), was in Simond’s opinion ‘certainly not good’ but without further remarks explaining his disapproval.

 

 

8 John Singleton Copley, Portrait of H.R.H the Prince of Wales at a Review, 1809. Oil on canvas, 372.1 x 318.4 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of Susan Greene Dexter in memory of Charles and Martha Babcock Amory 25.98

 

 

He precipitously dismissed West’s painting, Christ Teacheth To Be Humble (no. 92) as ‘not better’, a curious slight since it was thought by some of West’s friends to be among his finest works and indeed won favour in the press for the simplicity and dignified manner in which the subject is treated.^[66] Yet, if West’s and Copley’s traditional canvases gained no praise from Simond, his confrontation with Fuseli’s only contribution that year, the lost Hercules, To Deliver Theseus, Assails and Wounds Pluto (no. 3), a substantial canvas, received unforgiving condemnation.^[67] For Simond, the work epitomized ‘everything that is bad in drawing, colouring, composition, and taste’, indirectly hinting at the objectionable direction of English subject painting produced by the influence of the current Professor of Painting. While many critics admired Fuseli’s energy and the imaginative treatment, many also concurred with Simond that in this instance he was unduly excessive in his indefensible extravagance, a forerunner of Batissier’s commentary on Turner decades later. With few exceptions, Fuseli’s contributions to these exhibitions until his death in 1825 were relentlessly castigated by French writers as examples of the inexplicable characteristics of the English appetite for profligacy and peculiarity that deviated considerably from acceptable artistic principles as understood from the French aesthetics of beauty.

In light of these disappointments, Simond questioned why the exhibition contained no work by Wilkie, whose works he had hoped to see. More than any of his colleagues, Wilkie was considered by many French critics decades later as one of the more acceptable English painters of the day, an opinion formed from the numerous prints that continually circulated in France. Simond explained to his readers that Wilkie’s absence that year was due to a dispute over his submission with officials of the Academy. Wilkie had in fact submitted a painting entitled The Man with the Girl’s Cap, although its title varied later from No Fool Like an Old Fool to A Man Teasing a Girl by Putting on her Cap, and equally to The Wardrobe Ransacked. West and Sir George Beaumont both thought the painting an inferior performance, and finally it was Shee who persuaded Wilkie to withdraw it in preference to Edward Bird’s paintings, including his The Game of Put.^[68] Wilkie would modify the painting for exhibition the following year where Simond commented on it briefly.

When Simond visited the exhibition of 1811, serious issues were raised in the London press regarding the lack of encouragement for the arts from the government as contrasted with French policies of support and the active acquisitions of works of art for Parisian and provincial museums. One writer denouncing such official funding in France noted that the politically minded program that marked these works had sunk its painters ‘into mere machinery and time-serving frivolity’ through the constant commission of propagandizing doctrine favoring the very state that offered its patronage.^[69] The same writer concluded that government intervention in England was potentially a detrimental factor for its painters as it could severely repress he indigenous originality of which Haydon and Hazlitt were so proud. He questioned mockingly what the results of such support in France had indeed accomplished: ‘What miserables [sic] did the French school produce? what better does it now produce?’ This invective led the writer to exclaim the xenophobic outcry ‘Let British Artists interest the British public’ – a polemical outburst for the very insularity of which French critics accused English painters – and in doing so, the English viewing public would never be subject to

 

… no unmeaning ‘Coronation de l’Empereur’, no ‘tableau dans lequel on se promène’, because it is 20 feet long: no ‘Visit to the Hospital at Jaffa,’ ‘Defeat of the Turks at Aboukir’, ‘Battle of the Pyramids’, &c will disgrace our national talent. Can truth be adhered to in such compositions, commanded by such patrons?

 

It is not likely that Simond was aware of these polemics while touring the exhibition which he thought inferior to the previous one.^[70] The centre of attention for him among the more than 900 works on exhibit, including about ‘80 historical, poetical, and fancy subjects’, which the English press deemed as ‘one of the best we remember’,^[71] was West’s large canvas The Death of Lord Nelson (no. 116), completed in 1806 (Pl 9).^[72]

 

 

9 Benjamin West, Death of Lord Nelson, 1806. Oil on canvas, 182.2 x 247.6 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

 

 

Even if critics applauded the work as an epic depiction of a recent historical event, ‘a work of truth, and not fancy’,^[73] Simond found little to esteem within the ‘coldness and bustle’ of the canvas which he described as ‘a sort of dull brick-red dust hue’ in which satisfactory expressions in the figures were visibly deficient. Simond also questioned the manner in which West had portrayed Nelson, which he thought represented the hero as if he was no more than a common soldier on the deck – Nelson died in the hold as indeed West would portray him again in 1808^[74] – thereby diminishing the courageous nature of the main figure. Simond likewise remarked on the absurdity of West’s decision to incorporate a multitude of sailors around Nelson during the heat of the battle, as though the more than 60 participants were formal necessities intended to pictorially evoke the pathos of Nelson’s death. Here Simond curiously faulted West’s painting for its large dimensions and number of persons present in the scene but at the same time ignoring such common compositional elements in French historical depiction, such as David’s massive Le Sacre de Napoléon, exhibited in the Louvre only three years earlier, in which a similarly congested panoramic scene with living portraits on a grand scale was portrayed with main figure equally decentralized and almost lost in the multitude.

Other subject paintings were also largely scorned by Simond, chiefly the four by Fuseli, culled from Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Homer respectively. Simond described each of these efforts as ‘light-headed compositions’, and proclaimed them memorably to be the products of an ‘indigestion of genius’. Because of Simond’s distaste for Fuseli’s expressive exaggerations in these canvases, it is curious that his negative opinion did not extend to George Dawe’s curious Fuseli-inspired painting A Demoniac (no. 464), which Simond described as ‘very stout and furious’, but added no further remarks on its uniquely monstruous and contorted nude imagery, a ferocious academic study, which, despite its infernal appearance, derived from a Biblical text (Pl 10).^[75]

 

 

10 George Dawe, The Demoniac, c1811. Oil on canvas, 174 x 230 cm. Royal Academy of Arts, London

 

 

And just as Fuseli’s paintings were savaged, so Simond’s remarks concerning genre paintings in the exhibition were equally dispiriting, except for the first work he saw by Wilkie, now a full member of the Royal Academy, depicting ‘an old man, with a woman’s cap and cloak, playing with a child, who is half-afraid, half-diverted with the disguise’. The catalogue listed the title of the painting only as ‘A humorous scene’, hung incongruously beneath West’s Nelson, which was in fact the same one Wilkie had submitted the year before but now modified into its present form (Pl 11).

 

 

11 Edward Finden, after David Wilkie, The Theft of a Cap, c1827.
Engraving, 9.7 x 7.5 cm. Trustees of the British Museum

 

 

Whether the painting lived up to Simond’s expectations can only be supposed, as his only comment was that its colours were ‘rich and vigorous’.

Many accounts of French visitors after those of Simond not unsurprisingly recurrently expressed similarly unsympathetic views, some only in a perfunctory manner. When Pierre-Marc-Gaston, duc de Lévis, visited the exhibition of 1813, he found little to esteem that year: ‘Quelques paysages et des portraits du crayon sont tout ce que j’y ai vu de tolerable.’^[76] It is surprising that he made no mention of some of the successes of the exhibition, such as Dawe’s sensational and highly melodramatic A Child Rescued by Its Mother From an Eagle’s Nest (no. 1), which was particularly applauded,^[77] or Wilkie’s Blind Man’s Buff (no. 148) ,which was placed in a central position – Wilkie was on the Hanging Committee – and generated substantial admiring crowds, and later had wide distribution through prints, even in France (Pl 12).^[78]

 

 

12 David Wilkie, Blind-Man’s Buff, 1812. Oil on panel, 63.2 x 91.8 cm.
Royal Collection Trust

 

 

This might be explained in that the author believed that the brilliance of English art had already peaked and was now in evident decline. For him, the true masters of English painting were such past figures as Hogarth, West, Reynolds, and Gainsborough, all of whom ‘l’on admire plutôt l’esprit que le talent’. For the writer Georges-Adrien Crapelet, the exhibitions of 1814 and 1816 were no more than a showcase of repetitious and unvarying portraits and peppered with a huge number of unexceptional works that ‘pervertissent le goût’ of younger artists who were encouraged to follow the same path.^[79] Crapelet’s abrupt dismissal was comparable to the ephemeral visit to the exhibition of 1818 by the writer and translator Madame d’Avot, decidedly a minor figure whose first name appears to have been lost. Her observations, dispatched in a single paragraph, were summarized by her bewilderment at the extensive disparities she observed between the paintings exhibited annually in London and Paris: ‘Mais la différence est grande entre notre école et l’école anglaise, surtout entre les productions qu’elles fournissent chaque année!’^[80] Although the exhibition contained notable works by Northcote, West, Wilkie, Fuseli, Callcott, Lawrence, and four paintings by Turner, including his dramatic Field of Waterloo and his luminous Dort, or Dordrecht, she affirmed that she found nothing in the exhibition worth commenting on. The only works among the more than 1,100 on view that pleased her were George Dawe’s portrait of the late Princess Charlotte (no. 42) and James Lonsdale’s painting of the actor Talma in the role of Hamlet (no. 19).^[81] Her reflections, however, were made in a tour of the exhibition that was so superficial that on the same day she was able to tour the British Museum and Bedlam, both of which she decreed had greater didactic value.

More plentiful accounts of visits to Royal Academy exhibitions were written by Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret, a bankrupt lawyer who took refuge in London in 1814 to escape his creditors.^[82] Like Simond, Defauconpret’s knowledge of the language served him well in his career as one of the most prolific translators of English and American writing, particularly the works of Sir Walter Scott.^[83] During his long career, he is credited with publishing an astonishing 422 volumes of translations, some with the assistance of his son, Charles-August.^[84] An indication of his proficiency can be seen in that, from 1815 to 1828, he translated no fewer than 120 volumes, forty-seven of which appeared (incredibly) in 1828.^[85] Once again it should be recalled that Defauconpret, like Simond, did not consider himself an art critic, but his views were based on personal preferences that generally reflected common notions in France on the state of contemporary painting across the Channel.

One of Defauconnpret’s most extensive accounts was written after he surveyed the exhibition of 1819 which, he assured his readers, he had seen three times.^[86] The exhibition was notable not only because it was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Academy, but also because the presentation that year became a showcase for a new, youthful generation of artists who were to dominate the artistic scene in later exhibitions.^[87] Even though Defauconpret reported that some local critics considered the presentation this year an indication that native painting was ‘rising so rapidly to the highest pinnacle of excellence’, he could hardly mask his disappointment.^[88] In fact, the exhibition that year was not particularly illustrious, as one English writer was advised not to waste his time because ‘in addition to the usual blemish of portraits, there was scarcely a work of merit to be seen’.^[89] Defauconpret heartily concurred that the exhibition was hardly a showcase of great talent and, as in previous French critical writing, he attacked the mass of portraits – 626 out of more than a 1000 paintings – as well as the paucity of history painting: ‘Il n’y en a véritablement que huit ou dix auxquels on puisse, en conscience, donner ce nom.’ Defauconnpret acknowledged that there were some fine painters in England but they were relatively few in number and hardly comparable to those working in Italy, Flanders, or France.

While disparaging the lack of historical painting, Defauconpret nevertheless had great respect for the works of West, ‘homme d’un talent reconnu, et qui est presque le seul peintre d’histoire que l’Angleterre puisse citer aujourd’hui’. His four canvases – Defauconpret noted only three, the fourth being his sketch The Resurrection of Our saviour (no. 111), painted in oils on several sheets of paper^[90] – were the last he exhibited at Somerset House before his death less than a year later. Defauconpret considered his entries only inconsequential performances considerably below the painter’s customary benchmarks, although he conceded that they were well drawn and finely coloured, but one fundamental element was missing: ’la pensée’. He apparently did not know that three of the works West presented that year dated to his youth a half century earlier.^[91] Concerning West’s Caesar Reading the History of Alexander’s Exploits (no. 337)^[92] (Pl 13), which he painted in 1769 and retouched before sending it to the exhibition, Defauconpret was oddly perplexed by the scene, citing his doubts as to the purpose of the two figures behind Caesar. Of its companion piece, Alexander’s Confidence in His Physician (no. 345)^[93] (Pl 14), his critical remarks were focused on the principal figure whom he considered so grievously ailing as to suggest that Alexander had already drunk the poison that he had been warned to expect.

 

 

13 Benjamin West, Caesar Reading the History of Alexander’s Exploits, 1769.
Oil on canvas, 93.9 x 99.7 cm. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Adolph D. And Wilkins C. Williams Fund, Richmond

 

 

 

14 Benjamin West, Alexander the Great Demonstrating His Trust in his Physician, c1771
Oil on canvas, 96 x 103.5 cm. Wellcome Library, London

 

 

It is curious why Defauconpret was critical of these paintings, as they were clearly unambiguous interpretations of their respective iconographical sources, indeed highly accessible efforts within an artistic language common to Continental audiences even though left unexplained in the catalogue. This was also the case with Northcote’s painting, Daniel in the Lion’s Den (no. 103), one of four paintings he devoted to the subject, which Defauconpret also had some difficulty with despite its straightforward depiction in the Rubensian mould (Pl 15).

 

 

15 James Northcote, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, 1818. Oil on canvas, 156.2 x 196.9 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston

 

 

He wondered why two of the lions ‘ouvrent une gueule menaçante’ while the others are entirely passive, thus missing the point of the Biblical story. Other subject paintings were derided for their ineptitude, especially Henry Singleton’s Ariel (no. 64), which Defauconpret thought lacked colour and tonality, despite its obvious nocturnal setting in The Tempest. He surmised that the painting would be ridiculed were it to be exhibited in France (Pl 16).

 

 

16 Henry Singleton, Ariel on a Bat’s Wing, 1819. Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 125.7 cm. Tate Britain, London

 

 

There were, however, several paintings Defauconpret thought commendable, among which was William Hilton’s Ganymede (no. 27) – ’Rien de plus joli’ – which he had presented to the Royal Academy that year as his Diploma Work after his election as an Academician. Most of the other works Defauconpret found noteworthy were generally facile genre and anecdotal subjects, such as Wilkie’s The Penny Wedding (Pl 17) and Edward Villiers Rippingille’s The Post Office (no. 269), his first success over which critics ‘licked and beslobbered me’.^[94]

 

 

17 David Wilkie, The Penny Wedding, 1818. Oil on panel, 65.1 x 95.6 cm.
Royal Collection Trust

 

 

Both paintings were especially singled out as highly representative of how unpretentious themes in the manner of Teniers could be conveyed through indigenous English subject-matter. This was equally true of the naive narrative of Mulready’s ‘deux Enfans [sic]’, here referring to his painting Lending a Bite (no. 143), a scene of where a rustic village boy permits another to taste his apple, a ‘humorous little thing,’ as one critic called it, which charmed Defauconpret in its nondescript anecdotal elements.^[95] It in this sense of undaunting works that Defauconpret admired included William Kidd’s comical Sunday Morning, or the Bad Account of Last Week’s Wages (no. 193), which depicts a wife scolding her husband who the previous evening spent his wages in a tavern and consequently was unable to provide funds for the traditional Sunday dinner.^[96] It might be supposed that Defauconpret’s ease with such efforts visualizing plainspoken episodes in anecdotal subjects was because he was exceptionally familiar with similar descriptions in the novels he translated where such events were conventional aspects of the narrative.

For the exhibition of 1820, Defauconpret again confronted a display overburdened with portraiture, fewer than the previous year, but which even English critics agreed were ‘distinguished by nothing which immediately concerns the public’, in effect nothing less than a brazen display of English egotism.^[97] Many critics nonetheless indicated that this exhibition signalled a great advance over previous years, so that, ‘If we were asked by a foreigner to point out the first school of art in Europe, we should, fearless of contradiction, refer him to our own.’^[98] Defauconpret, however, thought that it was even less impressive than the previous one. If he discovered few works to commend, he was nevertheless enthralled by The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (no. 152) by Henry Thomson spelled ‘Thompson’ in the text (Pl 18).^[99]

 

 

18 Henry Thomson, The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter, 1820. Oil on canvas, 241.4 x 299 cm. Tate Britain, London

 

 

Thomson’s painting of a large-scale Biblical scene surely stood out, not the least because of its sizeable dimensions, even though Farington remarked that it was little noticed.^[100] Defauconpret was particularly taken by all aspects of the work, ‘un tableau qu’on voit avec plaisir’, the drawing ‘pur’, the details ‘soignés’. The main miscalculation on Thomson’s part for Defauconpret was the manner in which he depicted the figure of Christ which he thought displayed neither dignity nor true grandeur, his gesture of holding the wrist of Jairus’s daughter suggesting rather an ordinary doctor feeling the pulse of his patient.^[101] One might well imagine that Defauconpret would have had the same praise for Wilkie’s highly acclaimed contribution that year, The Reading of a Will (no. 151) taken as it was from Scott’s Guy Mannering which Defauconpret translated. Placed inappropriately next to Thomson’s Jairus, he pronounced it to be not one of the artist’s best works, but oddly ‘sans contredit, le plus parfait de toute l’exposition’.

How capricious and personal some of Defauconpret’s observations tended to be is exemplified in his unexpectedly favourable reaction to elements of Fuseli’s painting Chriemhild, the Widow of Siegfried the Swift, Exposes his Body (no. 131), a highly esoteric subject taken from the Lied der Nibelungen. This painting is one of the few instances in which a French critic praised a work that the English press soundly rejected as an alarming performance from an important member of the Royal Academy establishment. One critic questioned why the painting instantly inspired undesirable sensations, answering broadly and frankly that it ‘is destitute of natural propriety, and natural truth’, and further that the ‘expressions are all make-believes; they are distorted, ill-imagined, and fantastically ugly’.^[102] While the painting Defauconpret saw is untraced, his description verifies that Fuseli re-employed a composition he had devised in a sepia drawing on the subject 15 years earlier^[103] (Pl 19).

 

 

19 Johann Heinrich Füssli, Kriemhild klagt an der Leiche Siegfrieds in Dom zu Worms Gunther und Hagen des Mordes, 1805. Pen, ink, and sepia, 36.5 x 47 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Graphische Sammlung

 

 

The scene represents the aftermath of Siegfried’s murder by Hagen, Kriemhild’s half-brother, as his body is laid out on a funeral bier. After Siegfried miraculously begins to bleed from his wounds, his widow accuses both Hagen and Gunther of planning his murder. Although there were certain elements Defauconpret found distasteful, particularly the figure of Kriemheld who seemed unusually stiff as though she were impaled, as well as the awkwardness of her emotional gesture in her outstretched arms, he nevertheless strangely considered the entangled group tastefully conceived, the drawing correct, and the dramatic lighting effects ‘bien ménagés’. Defauconpret’s limited praise of the work represented a notable contrast to consistent French commentary on the painter’s pictorial vagaries.

The exhibition of 1821 was particularly notable in Anglo-French art history in that it was in this showcase that Charles Nodier, author of the contes fantastiques that enthralled the younger French Romantics, famously recognized the power and distinctiveness of Constable’s Hay Wain, the first time any of his work was praised by a French critic.^[104]

However important Nodier’s admiration for Constable’s painting was, less attention has been paid to his remarks on the state of English sculpture, a subject infrequently remarked upon by French writers at this time. Most foreign critics had little perception of sculptural developments in England except for the works of Flaxman, whose reputation, like that of Wilkie, was well established throughout Europe. The sculptural examples most continental visitors saw were either the modest selection shown in the dungeon-like rooms at Somerset House,^[105] or outdoor monuments which were commonly dismissed as overshadowed by their public settings, or sepulchral examples in churches which were generally not commented upon. Among the almost 80 sculptural offerings exhibited in 1821, Nodier remarked that only the eight works submitted by Francis Chantrey, spelled consistently as ‘Chantrein’, were noteworthy. By this time Chantrey had already been elected an Academician and was the object of a highly flattering article hailing his accomplishments as the true representative of English sculptural art.^[106]

 

 

20 Sir Francis Chantrey, Portrait of Walker King, D.D., Bishop of Rochester, 1821
Marble, 52.7 x 32.7 x 24.1 cm. Los Angeles County Museum, Gift of Times Mirror Foundation, Los Angeles

 

 

Among the works that Nodier particularly commended was Chantrey’s sensitive portrait of Walker King, Bishop of Rochester (no. 1136), who edited the works of Edmund Burke (Pl 20), but his greatest admiration was reserved for the celebrated bust of Sir Walter Scott (no. 1133).^[107] Nodier praised Chantrey’s remarkable technique, his ‘marbre vraiment animé’, which so skilfully reproduced the writer’s physiognomy, ‘pleine de pénétration, de finesse et de puissance’ (Pl 21).

 

 

21 Sir Francis Chantrey, Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1828. Marble, 66.7 x 53.3 x 27.9 cm.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Gift of Martha McGeary Snider, 2002, Philadelphia

 

 

In Chantrey’s skilled hands Scott ascended to the elevated heights he merited, at once a mixture of ‘Corneille et de Molière, de Swift et de Milton’, while also revealing ‘le front d’Homère et la bouche de Rabelais’. It is odd, however, that Nodier had nothing to say about Chantrey’s bust of Wordsworth, exhibited next to that of Scott, which the poet himself praised and which Coleridge considered ‘more like Wordsworth, than Wordsworth himself is’.^[108]

The exhibition of 1822 had several distinguished French visitors. Defauconpret was again present, but the exhibition proved to be so disappointing for him that he brusquely informed his readers that ‘rien, absolument rien’ of any distinction was to be seen. He explained that noteworthy historical works were absent, the landscapes were mediocre, and the portraits were both good and bad: ‘Tout est dit en ce peu de mots.’^[109] Nonetheless, he noted one superior work, Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners (no. 126), the distinctive star of the show which he placed on ‘le premier rang’ (Pl 22).

 

 

22 David Wilkie, The Chelsea Pensioners, 1822. Oil on canvas, 97 x 158 cm. Apsley House, London

 

 

Notwithstanding its hugely enthusiastic reception by a plethora of admirers, requiring for the first time a protective bar in front of the painting to avoid damage by a public eager to look closely at the details, it may be surprising to learn that the painting was not as revered by other French visitors. The noted Orientalist Eusèbe de Salle, who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym of Arcieu, reminded his readers that Wilkie, spelled consistently as ‘Wilkies’, had obtained as much fame in France as in England, but his latest effort was hardly in the category of his earlier works, explaining that the painting attained such success in London more because of its politically oriented subject – that is, the victory of the Duke of Wellington, who commissioned the painting, over the French forces – than its purely artistic merit.^[110]

While De Salle and Defauconpret were examining the paintings that year, they might have encountered another French visitor, the historian and translator Amédée Pichot, a collaborator of de Salle who jointly translated Byron’s works, likewise penned his commentary that constituted by far the longest discussion of the state of English art by a French visitor at this time.^[111] Among his most illuminating observations, Pichot, like those of Nodier, discussed the current state of English sculpture. When Pichot surveyed the modest assembly of about 60 examples, all exhibited in the dimly lit Model Academy, he summarised his unfavourable opinion by quoting Martial’s Epigrams, I, xvi, ‘sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura’ (‘some are good, some passable, and many are bad’), the same citation Defauconpret cited in his summary of the exhibition of 1819. The main thrust of his discussion of the examples of sculpture submitted that year centred on the offerings of Flaxman, whose early work he much admired, naming him the Racine of sculpture in their sculptural refinement and elegance. Yet, for Pichot the two works Flaxman submitted in 1822 when he was in his late sixties proved to be a disappointment. His most prominent contribution was a plaster model of Satan Overcome by St. Michael (no. 985), produced for Lord Egremont, of which the finished work in marble was to grace the North Gallery at Petworth (Pl 23).^[112]

 

 

23 John Flaxman, St. Michael Overcoming Satan, 1817. Plaster, ht 335 cm. University College, London

 

 

Placed as it was in the Somerset House crypt, the statue was, as one commentator noted, so badly displayed that it was ‘hardly possible in this confined room, to judge of, much less do justice to, this towering group’.^[113] For Pichot, Flaxman’s sculpture was ‘presque sans beauté et sans grâce’, in effect no more than a minor effort from the ‘grand maître’.

What particularly captured Pichot’s admiration were two representations of Eve, both citing identical references to Paradise Lost in the catalogue. The first was a work identified by him as by ‘Bayley’, meaning Edward Hodges Baily, the Bristol sculptor and favoured student of Flaxman. Baily’s statue Eve at the Fountain (no. 986) had indeed been hailed by numerous critics as a particularly gracious performance and later as one of the ‘most immediate successes ever made by a work in sculpture’ (Pl 24).^[114] 

 

 

24 Edward Hodges Baily, Eve at the Fountain, 1818. Marble, 82 x 65 x 124 cm. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

 

 

Pichot described it as ravishing and affable, primarily in the ‘sourire célèste’ of the figure whose downward gaze enchanted him in its purity and innocence. The second work was the Statue of Eve (no. 990, untraced) by John Charles Rossi, whom Flaxman considered to be more of a mason than a sculptor, but it was this work that some critics thought was the better of the two. Rossi’s sculpture differed from Baily’s in that the former placed an anachronistic mirror at Eve’s feet, which Pichot indicated was a maladroit sculptural expression of Milton’s lines describing Eve’s gaze into ‘the clear / Smooth lake’ – here citing lines 459–460 from Milton’s text. Pichot, echoing Nodier, also found Chantrey’s single entry formidable, a portrait bust of George IV commissioned by the 6th Duke of Devonshire (no .988).^[115] What Pichot particularly admired in Chantrey’s work, about which he had much to say, was the fact that it was at once classical in nature and at the same time ‘une émanation pure du génie anglaise’, the phrase rarely used in French writing at this time. It was precisely this sense of individuality that for Pichot, as for Nodier, distinguished Chantrey as the only English sculptor who was to be considered as a veritable master of his craft, ‘le seul parmi [les sculpteurs] qui soit vraiment original’.

As Pichot proceeded to discuss the paintings, he shared Defauconpret’s opinion that the exhibition that year ‘ne fait pas honneur’ to the exhibitors or to the institution, or to potential visitors. Once again noting the large number of portraits, Pichot was candid in his judgment that they were only intended to flatter the vanity of the sitter, or the caprice of seeing oneself encased in a brilliant gold frame being admired by random idlers. Of the landscapes, where Pichot professed inherent English excellence, as did Nodier – ’les Anglais ont conservé leur supériorité’ – he was disappointed that only one work of Turner was exhibited, which he described peculiarly as ‘qu’un portrait’. Here Pichot made a grievous error in confusing JMW Turner with ‘J Turner’, a painter listed in the catalogue as a miniaturist living in Golden Square, who exhibited a Portrait of a Lady (no. 764, untraced). There is no known information on who this painter was. He – or she – exhibited at the Royal Academy only once and is not listed as having shown works in any other London art venue.^[116] But did Pichot see the sole painting Turner the landscapist exhibited that year, his uncharacteristic What You Will! (no. 114) which had no explanation of its title in the catalogue (Pl 25)?

 

 

25 JMW Turner, What You Will!, 1822. Oil on canvas, 49.8 x 54.3 cm.
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

 

 

This unpretentious canvas would have in fact perplexed Pichot, since it was exhibited with no explanatory citation to clarify its title as deriving from Twelfth Night, although Pichot was well versed in Shakespeare.^[117] If Pichot was prepared for the landscapes he knew from Turner’s prints, he was hardly predisposed to attest to Turner’s capacities in the realm of a literary subject. But to Pichot’s credit, fifteen years before Batissier’s severe condemnation of Turner’s methods, he recognized Turner’s genius despite his disappointment in 1822 and named him ‘peut-être le premier de tous les paysagistes,’ while also praising Constable and Callcott and the marvelous effects of their colour and light ‘qui sont d’une poésie sublime’.^[118]

 

 

 

Supporting French artistic voices: ‘Unsuspecting Virtues’

 

… la peinture des Anglais est pleine de lumière, de force et de richesse.^[119]

 

All of the commentary cited above came from writers, journalists, or tourists expressing personal sentiments honed by characteristic French viewpoints. But some French painters in London during this period found few difficulties in proclaiming insightful and often favourable reactions to the paintings they examined at Somerset House, in effect challenging Hazlitt’s remarks about the difficulty of comprehending works deeply imbedded in a foreign culture. This is to be expected, as painters have different sensibilities from rank amateurs and can emobdy certain aesthetic aspects that untrained critics may not perceive. Many of the French painters visiting London during this period were intimates of the miniaturist Simon-Jacques Rochard, who had dozens of contacts among leading figures in the London art world, including Lawrence, Wilkie, Constable, the architect Charles Robert Cockerell, Romney, and even the young John Frederick Lewis.^[120] The most important aspect of Rochard’s role in Anglo-French relationships was his numerous links to many distinguished compatriots sojourning in London, one of the most influential of whom was Léonor Mérimée, the father of Prosper. As professor of drawing at the École Polytechnique and secrétaire perpétuel of the École des Beaux-Arts, the elder Mérimée came to London in 1817 to study the training methods of the Royal Academy schools.^[121] Mérimée was hardly disapproving of English painting, nor immediately prejudiced against its individuality, as evidenced in several letters to Rochard in which he encouraged him to modify his earlier French style to accord with the pictorial effects common to portraiture across the Channel, more particularly advising that all parts of a painting need not be soigné as was considered a requisite in France. Mérimée, who was an admirer of Reynolds and collected engravings of some of his portraits, also advised Rochard to purchase as many of these as he could to further absorb the style of a painter he considered the master of the genre. Mérimée also counselled Rochard to immerse himself in Reynolds’s Discourses: ‘C’est qu’on a écrit de mieux sur la peinture.’^[122] Although Mérimée made no references to visits to exhibitions, he nevertheless incited interest in English painting theory in France through his 1844 translation of Fuseli’s discourses, the first time these appeared in French.^[123]

Rochard also developed an important relationship with Géricault when he was in London for the exhibition of his Le Radeau de la Méduse, a venture the English press welcomed as ‘presumptive evidence of the fair and candid encouragement we afford to our Continental neighbours’.^[124] While it is not certain that in May 1821 Rochard and Géricault planned to visit Somerset House together, where they might have encountered Nodier, it seems all the more likely since Rochard showed seven portraits that Géricault would have been eager to see. Géricault’s largely positive perception concerning the English painting he examined at Somerset House in 1821 has already been discussed many times, but it is worth noting that he was particularly discerning in his remarks, recalling only several minor animal paintings he admired while ignoring some of the luminaries of the presentation that year, including eight portraits by Lawrence, three scenes by Fuseli, and Constable’s four landscapes, one of which was his Hay Wain that had enticed Nodier.^[125]

A more substantial account by a French writer visiting the Somerset House exhibition the following year, the same one that Defauconpret found so deficient and Pichot as hardly a luminous affair, was penned by Jacques-Luc Barbier – after his marriage to the singer Marie Walbonne, he assumed the name of Barbier-Walbonne – who recounted his thoughts on the exhibition in a letter of 28 May 1822 to Baron Gérard, for whom he had been an assistant.^[126] In writing to his illustrious compatriot, Barbier-Walbonne shared his thoughts with a colleague who in turn was an important liaison for diverse English painters visiting Paris, including West in 1802, Wilkie, Haydon, and Calcott in 1814, CR Leslie and William Collins in 1817, and most notably Lawrence in 1825 when the latter painted Gérard’s portrait.^[127] Barbier-Walbonne, who as a soldier in 1794 assisted in the confiscation of paintings in Flanders, particularly the canvases of Rubens,^[128] would seem hardly disposed to finding admirable qualities among the works he surveyed that year in London. And yet he told Gérard unexpectedly that he was ‘frappé de la magie’ of English painters, praising the ingenious use of light and the forceful richness of tones and colours, highly unanticipated compliments from a student of David. He saw the prominence of these traits as an individual attribute of English painting while citing a paradoxical comparison to contemporary Italian art: whereas the Italians, the expected purveyors of light, were becoming more sombre in their landscapes, as though working ‘dans les brouillards du Nord’, the English in contrast were painting as if they were ‘sous le beau ciel d’Italie’.

Even more unforeseen concerning the much-maligned English predilection for portraiture was Barbier-Walbonne’s opinion of those exhibited by Lawrence and Phillips, who between them contributed 16 examples. All of these he found ‘ont de reliefs que nous sommes loin d’atteindre’, achieving notable expressive effects, ‘et je suis forcé de trouver qu’ils ont raison’. The major blemish of British art for Barbier-Walbonne, as for almost all the other Continental récits, was the weakness in history painting, which that year represented a particularly anemic selection. Even talented painters in the genre were ‘presque nul’, although Barbier-Walbonne made an exception for Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners. Despite noticeable errors in colour and drawing that Barbier-Walbonne detected – ’Ils [English painters] en sont à ne pas savoir dessiner une rotule’ – it is all the more extraordinary that, in comparing English and French painting, he told Gérard that current efforts in Paris seemed doctrinaire and tedious in comparison. Barbier-Walbonne remarked that English painting overall had unsuspected virtues, so much so that ‘leurs tableaux écraseraient les nôtres’, a startling admission at this time from any Frenchman. It recalls Opie’s statement a generation earlier that some French artists covertly acknowledged English progress and innovation in the pictorial arts but would not, or could not, state it openly.^[129]

From May to August 1825, Delacroix, already by this time an avowed anglophile, made his historic visit to London where he likewise had repeated contacts with Rochard who guided him through several collections. Although it has often been stated that Delacroix made the rounds of the exhibitions, as might be expected, there is little information concerning which ones he attended. Considering Delacroix’s faithful reports on his visits to the theatre, the opera, and the British Museum – where he made copies of the Elgin Marbles – one of the most intriguing questions, ignored in much of the literature on him, is whether he attended the Royal Academy exhibition that year. The absence of any direct reference in Delacroix’s writings – his journal entries were suspended months before his departure from France – of having gone to Somerset House should not be thought an indication that he overlooked the exhibition, and it is hardly imaginable that he would not have taken the opportunity, like Géricault earlier, directly to inspect the offerings of contemporary English painterly trends.

The 1825 exhibition was generally hailed by the English press as particularly successful, ‘probably the best that they have ever set before us’, indeed ‘a very capital visual and intellectual feast’.^[130] For Delacroix it would have been an important occasion to scrutinize the works of painters he particularly respected, some of whom he had contacts with in London. Lawrence, whose studio Delacroix visited in August, showed eight portraits, including a full length of the Duke of Wellington and Master Lambton which, however, was hung in an inferior position.^[131] Since Delacroix also had several contacts with Etty, he would have surely wanted to examine his powerful The Combat: Woman Pleading for the Vanquished (Pl 26), the first number in the catalogue and one of the successes of that year which won almost universal acclaim.^[132]

 

 

26 William Etty, The Combat: Women Pleading for the Vanquished, 1825. Oil on canvas, 300 x 387.5 cm (with frame). National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh

 

 

From his encounters with Constable’s landscapes at Arrowsmith’s gallery earlier, it is certain that Delacroix would have been induced to examine his three entries that year, all entitled Landscape in the catalogue, one of which was his audacious The Leaping Horse. Would Delacroix have missed the opportunity to inspect the first major work by Turner available to him, The Harbour at Dieppe, which was said to have surpassed Claude and palpably engrossed Bonington and Alexandre Colin?^[133] Having Delacroix’s thoughts on these and other works exhibited in Somerset House that year would have added immensely to our understanding of his perceptions of contemporary English subject pictures in situ, particularly in what he admired and what he dismissed. Nevertheless, while such comments are lacking, some of his ideas expressed in a notebook about seven years later in which he penned diverse notions on English painting certainly reflect aspects of what he must have seen in London, placing English painting:

 

… au premier rang parmi les écoles de peinture contemporaine. Il faut reconnaître aussi qu’elle est une de plus remarquables parmi celles de toutes les époques précédentes… Venue tard et à peine née, elle a marché à pas de géant et a pris en peu d’années la place qu’elle occupe.^[134]

 

 

 

 

 

1. M Rubichon, De l’Angleterre, nouv. ed., Paris 1815, I, p555. ↑
2. See Kate Grandjouan, Close Encounters: French Identities in English Graphic Satire, c. 1730–1790, PhD Thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and more specifically in idem., ‘Body Politics: Charles [sic] Brandoin’s France England, 1772’, Zbornik matice srpske za likovne umetnosti, XLIII, 2015, pp65–80. For more on food as one of the defining aspects of characterizing France for the English, see Lisa Wood, ‘“Wholesome Nutriment” for the Rising Generation: Food, Nationalism, and Didactic Fiction at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, XXI, Summer 2009, pp615–630, and John Richard Moores, Representations of France in English Satirical Prints 1740–1832, London 2015, pp25–50. ↑
3. Revd William Shepherd, Paris in Eighteen Hundred and Two, and Eighteen Hundred and Fourteen, London 1814, p1. The literature on Anglo-French relationships during this period is immense, but see especially Paul Gerbod, Voyages au pays des mangeurs de grenouilles, Paris 1991; Paul Tholoniat, Londres vue par les voyageurs français au XIX^e siècle, PhD thesis, Université de Lyon II 1993; Paul Gerbod, Les voyageurs français à la découverte des îles Britanniques, Paris 1995; Jacques Gury, ed, Le voyage Outre-Manche, Paris 1999; and Claire Hancock, Paris et Londres aux XIX^e siècle. Répresentations dans les guides et récits de voyage, Paris 2003. For more pointed discussions of artistic interchanges during and after 1802 see Patrick Noon, ‘Colour and Effect: Anglo-French Painting in London and Paris’, in Constable to Delacroix. British Art and the French Romantics, exh cat., London 2003, pp12–27 and William Hauptman, ‘ “The Blood-Stained Brush”: David and the British circa 1802’, The British Art Journal, X, 3, 2009–2010, pp78–97. ↑
4. Tom Taylor, ed, Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, London 1853, I, p226. ↑
5. Henry Redhead Yorke, Letters from France, in 1802, London 1804, I, pp56–57. ↑
6. Lady Morgan, France, London, 2nd edn, 1817, I, p376. ↑
7. Bruce Redford, ed, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, Princeton 1992, II, p78. ↑
8. Martin Archer Shee, Rhymes on Art: or, The Remonstrance of a Painter, London 1805, pp9–10. ↑
9. Ernest Chesneau, L’art et les artistes modernes en France et en Angleterre, Paris 1864, p45. ↑
10. J Fiévée, Lettres sur l’Angleterre, Paris 1802, pp 61–63. On Fiévée, who became the editor of the Journal des débats, see the biographical introduction by Jules Janin in Oeuvres de J. Fiévée, Paris 1843, pp i-xxxvi; Jacques Caritey, ‘Un Préfet de l’Empire: Joseph Fiévée, Maître des Requêtes, Préfet de la Niêvre,’ La Revue administrative, XIV, 1961, pp138–149; and Jean Tulard, Joseph Fiévée: Conseiller secret de Napoléon, Paris 1985. For his voyage to London, see P Reboul, ‘Le voyage de Fiévée en Angleterre’, Revue des Science Humaines, LXXI, July–September 1953, pp255–261. ↑
11. John Carr, The Stranger in Paris, London 1803, p109. ↑
12. JL Ferri de St.-Constant, Londres et les anglais, Paris [1802–1803], III, p81. ↑
13. Tony Halliday, Facing the Public. Portraiture in the Aftermath of the French Revolution, Manchester,1999, p192. ↑
14. Thomson’s citation are excerpts from Manne’s song, which he probably took from the poem in Robert Anderson, The Works of the British Poets, London 1795, XI, p338, where in fact the line reads: ‘Sytte thee, Alyce, sytte and harke.’ The poem is examined in Irvin B Kroese, ‘Chatterton’s Aella and Chatterton’, Studies in English Literature, XII, Summer 1972, pp557–566. ↑
15. The reference is to a poem of 1800 by William Robert Spencer, ‘Beth [sic] Gelert’, which was widely published at the time. Prince Llywelyn mab Iorwerth of Wales (Llywelyn the Great) returns from the hunt and cannot find his infant son, but sees his Irish wolfhound Gelert with blood on his muzzle. Concluding that the dog had killed his son, he in turn kills the dog only to find that his unharmed child with the body of a wolf that his faithful hound had killed to protect the child. In his remorse, Llywlyn built a monument for the dog, Bedd Gelert (Gelert’s Grave). For more, see Robin Gwyndaf, Welsh Folk Tales, Cardiff 1999, p44. ↑
16. These were published in Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, London 1801: ‘The Grim White Woman’ appeared in I, pp101–112; ‘Boswell’s Bonny Jane’, pp1–10; ‘The Sorceress, or Wolfworld and Ulla’, pp226–236; ‘Giles Jollop the Grave, and Brown Sally Green’, pp26–30; ‘The Water King’, pp56–61; and ‘The Cinder King’, II, pp416–418. Two of these subjects in watercolours, Sorceress of Ulla and Giles Gollup [sic] & the Brown Margarine [sic], are in the British Museum. ↑
17. ‘Retrospect of the Fine Arts’, The Monthly Magazine, XIII, 1 June 1802, p493. See also John Pope Rogers, Opie and his Works, London 1878, p200. ↑
18. [Umbra], ‘The Arts. Remarks on the Royal Academy Exhibition at the Royal Academy, at Somerset House, 1802,’ The Monthly Mirror, XIII, May 1802, p309. ↑
19. Kenneth Garlick et al, eds, The Diary of Joseph Farington, New Haven and London, 1978–1998, from which all citations from the diary derive. His comments on the exhibition of 1802 are in V, pp1772–1773. ↑
20. Constable’s well-known comment about the exhibition of 1802 is contained in his letter of 29 May 1802 to John Dunthorne, as cited in Charles Robert Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, esq., R.A., 2nd edn, London 1845, p16. His painting was listed in the catalogue as A Landscape (no. 19). See too Michael Kitson, ‘A Context for Constable’s Naturalism’, in From Gainsborough to Constable. The Emergence of Naturalism in British Landscape Painting 1750–1810, exh cat., Sudbury 1991, pp9–13. ↑
21. L de Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon. Spectacles et Musées, Paris 1913, pp431–432. ↑
22. A Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat, Paris 1906, III, pp266 and 270, the latter providing further details. For Chaptal’s letter to Gérard, dated 20 September 1802, see Le Baron Gérard, ed. Lettres au Baron Gérard peintre d’histoire, 3ème edn, Paris 1888, p9. ↑
23. CP Landon, Nouvelles des arts, peinture, sculpture, architecture et gravure, Paris 1803–1804, III, p297. ↑
24. Journal des débats et des décrets, 29 October 1802, p4. See too Journal anecdotique de Mme Campan, Paris 1824, pp203–207: she described the remarkable interest the painting elicited. ↑
25. Fiske Kimball, ‘Benjamin West au Salon de 1802: La Mort sur le cheval pâle’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, VII, 1932, pp403–410, and Anne Bermingham, ‘Apocalypse at the Academy: Death on the Pale Horse and the Revelation of Benjamin West’, in Sarah Monks et al, Living With the Royal Academy, Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, 1768–1848, Farnham 2013, p161. The painting was hailed by the French painter and critic Charles Paul Landon for its expression et ‘bon gout’; see ‘Examen des ouvrages exposés au Salon’, Nouvelles des arts, II, 1802, p69. ↑
26. Olivier Meslay, ‘British Painting in France Before 1802,’ The British Art Journal, IV, 2, Summer 2003, pp3–19, see pp13ff. ↑
27. Sanborn C Brown and Kenneth Scott, ‘Portraits of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford’, Antiques, LXIX, March 1956, see p244 for Girodet’s portrait. Thompson lived in France after 1792 and married the widow of the chemist Lavoisier. The portrait of Lord Buckinghamshire, presumably Robert Hobart, the 4th Earl, has not been traced. ↑
28. A drawing of 1815 by John Claude Nattes of both Stocker and Hauptman during their exhibit in London is in the London Museum, no. 62.186/5. ↑
29. Revue du Salon de l’An X, Paris 1802, p12. ↑
30. The painting, now in a private collection, was sold at Christie’s on 21 October 1997, lot 331. ↑
31. Bouchet’s painting derived from a 17th-century play of female heroism by Gilbert Gabriel, Ariet et Pétus, ou les amours de Néron. The play was written and published in 1660, with another version by Marie-Anne Barbier, performed at the Comédie Française in 1702 and published in 1713. Bouchet’s painting, which received a prix d’encouragement, is now in the Musée de Picardie, Amiens and titled Aria et Paetus se donnant la mort. ↑
32. [Sir Archibald Alison], Travels in France, During the Years 1814-15, 2nd edn, Edinburgh, 1816, I, pp108 and 133. ↑
33. Farington, V, p1900. ↑
34. Shee, Rhymes, p2, in a footnote to line 14 of his poem. ↑
35. Taylor, p257. ↑
36. Farington, IV, p1181. ↑
37. Frederic Wordsworth Haydon, ed, Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk, London 1876, II, p151. ↑
38. Taylor, p253. ↑
39. Wordsworth Haydon, II, p151. ↑
40. W[illiam] H[azlitt], ‘The Marquis of Stafford’s Pictures’, The London Magazine, VII, February 1823, pp146–151 and reprinted in Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England, London, 1824, pp56-57. For the collection, see John Britton, Catalogue Raisonné of the Pictures Belonging to the Most Honourable Marquis of Stafford, London, 1808 and Peter Humfrey, ‘The Stafford Gallery at Cleveland House and the 2nd Marquess of Stafford as Collector’, Journal of the History of Collections, XXVIII, pp43–55. For Hazlitt’s art criticism, see JD O’Hara, ‘Hazlitt and Romantic Criticism of the Fine Arts’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXVII, 1968, pp63-85. ↑
41. Smollett translated Gil Blas in 1749, immediately after his novel The Adventures of Roderick Random in which he acknowledged the influence of Le Sage’s work. It is notable that in Nathaniel Dance’s portrait of Smollett of about 1764, now in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, he is holding a copy of Gil Blas. ↑
42. L. B[atissier]., ‘Exposition de l’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, à Londres,’ L’Artiste, XIII, 1837, pp241–245. ↑
43. The description of the National Gallery by Francis Wey decades later is worth repeating: ‘… édifice maigre, disproportionné, mal éclairé, étriqué et coiffé d’un petit dôme qui fait l’effet d’une casquette de jockey oubliée sur la plate-forme’; see Francis Wey, Les Anglais chez eux, Paris, 1876, p19. ↑
44. This plaint would be repeated five years later in Frédéric Mercey, ‘Les arts en Angleterre’, Revue des Deux-Mondes, XXXII, 1842, p911: ‘Rien par delà le détroit qui rappelle, même d’une manière éloignée, les Horaces de David, le Brutus de Lethière, le Marcus Sextus de Guérin, la Mort de César de M. Court, ou, même dans une sphère différente, l’Elisabeth de M. Delaroche, le Massacre de Scio de M. Delacroix, ou la Bataille de Fontenoy de M. Horace Vernet.’ A similar sentiment was repeated in Edmond Texier, Lettres sur l’Angleterre, Paris 1851, p259. ↑
45. Philarète Chasles, Études contemporaines. Voyages, philosophie et beaux-arts, Paris 1866, p403. ↑
46. For Etty’s paintings, see Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, R.A., London 1855, II, pp52–53; Leonard Robinson, William Etty. The Life and Art, Jefferson, North Carolina and London 2007, pp227–229; and Sarah Burnage et al., William Etty: Art and Controversy, exh cat., York 2011. Etty, incidentally, was on the selection committee for paintings. ↑
47. For Browning and Etty’s painting, see Rowena Fowler, ‘Browning’s Nudes’, Victorian Poetry, XXVII, 1989, pp32–33. ↑
48. ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy. Third Notice – The Designs’, The Spectator, X, 20 May 1837, p475. ↑
49. ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy – Opening of the New National Gallery’, The Spectator, 6 May 1837, p427, and ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, Gentleman’s Magazine, VII, June 1837, p628, and ‘Royal Academy’, The Athenaeum, 6 May 1837, p330. ↑
50. It was noted as untraced in Richard Ormond, ‘Daniel Maclise’, The Burlington Magazine, CX, 1968, p690, and repeated in Nancy Weston, Daniel Maclise: An Irish Artist in Victorian London, Dublin 2001, p144. The painting was once in Lord Angus Holden’s collection in Bradford where Burne-Jones, commissioned for works to adorn the house, saw it in 1878; see Stephen Wildman and John Christian, et al, Burne-Jones. Victorian artist and Dreamer, exh cat., New York 1998, p274. The painting was auctioned at Christie’s in July 1913 and purchased by Knoedler from whom Sir Ratan Tata acquired it for £200; see Richard E Spear, ‘Colonial Collectors: The Tata Bequests of Nineteenth-Century European Paintings in the Mumbai Museum’ The Burlington Magazine, CL, January 2008, pp15–27; the painting is barely visible in the background of the photograph reproduced on p19. The collection was bequeathed in 1923 to the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, for which see WE Gladstone Solomon, A Guide to the Art Section. Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, Bombay,1923, p11. For further information, see Pratapaditya Pal and Sabyasachi Mukherjee, eds, East Meets West: A Selection of Asian and European Art from the Tata Collection in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Mahataj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Formerly Prince of Wales Museum of Western Art, Mumbai 2010, p176. My thanks to Prasanna Mangrulkar, Assistant Curator of Paintings of the museum, for providing information and the photograph. ↑
51. Turner’s painting was his Snow-Storm, Avalanche, and Inundation – A Scene in the Upper Part of Val d’Aouste, Piedmont, now in the Art Institute, Chicago; Danby’s painting was entitled ‘Rich and Rare Were the Gems She Wore’, derived from an 1808 poem by Thomas Moore, is now in a private collection. Martin’s painting was a version of The Deluge, 1834, now in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. The latter was severely criticized as looking ‘like a large polished dark japanned tea-tray, over which some red ink and cream have been spilt and run into streaks’; see ‘Exhibitions – The Royal Academy’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XLII, September, 1837, p340. Fisk’s painting was entitled La Journée des Dupes, commemorating the events of 1630 when the enemies of Richelieu had erroneously believed that they had persuaded Louis XIII to dismiss him, but instead cemented Richelieu’s favour with the royal family. ↑
52. ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, The Literary Gazette, XXI, 27 May 1837, p340, and the glowing reviews in ‘Fine Arts’, The Monthly Magazine, XXIV, July, 1837, p101. ↑
53. R. H. H[orne]., ‘Royal Academy. Critique on Six Pictures’, The Monthly Repository, XI, 1837, p378, and ‘Royal Academy’, The Athenaeum, 13 May 1837 p346. ↑
54. Batissier’s comments are in his second article on the exhibition, p262. ↑
55. Gustave Planche, ‘Exposition de Somerset House’, Revue des Deux Mondes, II, 1835, p680. ↑
56. Jules Claretie, Voyages d’un parisien, Paris 1865, p95. See too Hippolyte Taine, Notes sur l’Angleterre, Paris 1872, p350, who remarked that Turner’s painting in his later period were ‘un gâchis inextricable, une sorte d’écume fouetée, une fouillis extraordinaire où toutes les formes sont noyées’. ↑
57. [Thackeray], ‘A Second Lecture on the Fine Arts, by Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Esq.’, Fraser’s Magazine, XIX, June 1839, p744. ↑
58. An important source for foreign visitors to the Somerset House exhibitions is William Vaughan, ‘Taste and the Multitude: The Somerset House Exhibitions in Continental Eyes’, in David Solkin, ed, Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836, New Haven and London 2001, pp243-–252, although much of his discussion centres on the observations of Johann David Passavant and Gustav Waagen in the 1830s. See too Barthélémy Jobert, La reception de l’école anglaise en France, 1802–1878. Un aspect des relations artistiques franco-britanniques au XIX^e siècle, PhD thesis, Université de Paris IV, Paris-Sorbonne 1994. ↑
59. Thomas De Quincey, Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets, London 1907, p261. ↑
60. The English edition was titled Journal of a Tour and Residence in England, during the Years 1810 and 1811, Edinburgh 1815, but noted the author only as ‘A French Traveller’. The French edition was entitled Voyage d’un français en Angleterre pendant les années 1810 et 1811, Paris 1816. Simond’s comments on the 1810 exhibition are in I, p128. ↑
61. Etienne Delécluze, who had anglophile tendencies, noted in his Souvenirs de soixante ans, Paris 1862, p119, that Simond’s volumes were some of the more important ones on England he had read. ↑
62. ‘Royal Academy’, The London Chronicle, CVII, 1 May 1810, p420. ↑
63. ‘Memoir of Edward Bird’, Arnold’s Library of the Fine Arts, I, February 1833, p262. The painting is untraced, as noted by Nicholas Tromans, David Wilkie. The People’s Painter, Edinburgh 2007, p88, but a description can be found in The Examiner, 19 May 1811, pp314–315. ↑
64. Library of Universal Knowledge, New York 1879, II, p545. The Dickens reference is from Great Expectations, London 1861, I, p125. ↑
65. The catalogue provided a very elaborate descriptive title indicating the chief figures of Lord Heathfield and General Turner in the background; see Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley, Cambridge MA 1966, II, pp378–379. ↑
66. Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West, New Haven and London 1986, pp339–343. See too ‘Royal Academy’, The London Chronicle, CVI, 28 April 1810, p412. Lawrence told Farington that he considered it a fine work, as did Westall, but Beaumont and Richard Payne Knight apparently were indifferent; see Farington, X, pp3625, 3627–3628. ↑
67. The catalogue cited the title as indicated in the text (no. 3), with a passage from Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad, V, verse 485. The work was apparently destroyed, as indicated in Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Fuseli, 1741–1825, Zürich and Munich 1973, p653, no. 68, but described in ‘Fine Arts. Royal Academy’, La Belle Assemblée, I, May 1810, pp248–249. ↑
68. Farington, X, p3633, and Haydon, I, p154, among other sources that recount the incident. ↑
69. ‘Exhibitions: And General Remarks on the State of the Fine Arts’, The Literary Panorama, X, July 1811, col. 105–106 and for the following citations. See as well Holger Hoock, ‘ “Struggling Against a Vulgar Prejudice”: Patriotism and the Collection of British Art at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of British Studies, XL, July 2010, pp566–591. ↑
70. Simond’s remarks on the exhibition are in II, pp143–146. ↑
71. ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1811’, The Monthly Magazine, XXXI, 1 June 1811, pp462–463. ↑
72. Erffa and Staley, pp220–222, no. 108. For more on the painting, see Charles Mitchell, ‘Benjamin West’s Death of Nelson’, in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, London 1969, pp265–273. The large canvas is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. ↑
73. ‘Mr. West’s Grand Historical Picture of the Death of Lord Nelson’, La Belle Assemblée, I, May, 1806, p218. ↑
74. Erffa and Staley, pp222–223, no. 109. ↑
75. Dawe provided the citation and source for the work, exhibited in the Anti-Room, as taken from Mark, V: 1–20, describing Jesus healing a man possessed by demons. The painting was given to the Royal Academy as Dawe’s Diploma Work when he was elected a full member in 1814. ↑
76. De Lévis, L’Angleterre au commencemant du dix-neivième siecle, Paris 1814, p207. ↑
77. ‘Royal Academy, Somerset-House’, The National Register, VI, 2 May 1813, p284. See also TSR Boase, English Art, 1800–1870, Oxford 1959, pp150–151. ↑
78. Marcia Pointon, ‘From “Blind Man’s Buff” to “Le Colin Maillard”: Wilkie and His French Audience’, Oxford Art Journal, VII, 1984, pp15–25, and Barthelémy Jobert, ‘À la recherché de l’école anglaise: Lawrence, Wilkie, and Martin, Three British Artists in Restoration France’, in Christiana Payne and William Vaughan, eds, English Accents: Interactions with British Artists c. 1770–1855, London and New York 2018, pp134ff. ↑
79. [Georges-Adrian Crapelet], Souvenirs de Londres en 1814 et 1816, Paris 1817, pp34–35. ↑
80. Madame M D’Avot, Lettres sur l’Angleterre, ou deux ans à Londres, 2nd edn, Paris 1821, p182. ↑
81. ‘Exhibition at Somerset-House’, The New Monthly Magazine, IX, 1 June 1818, p442. ↑
82. A brief biographical account of Defauconpret, with his portrait, is in J Béraud and L Machu, ‘Un mémoire inédit de Defauconpret (1789)’, Revue du Nord, XLVII, July–September 1965, pp383–397. ↑
83. Paul Barnaby, ‘Another Tale of Old Morality: The Translations of A.-J.-B. Defauconpret in the French Reception of Scott’, in Murray Pittock, ed, The Reception of Walter Scott in Europe, 2006, pp41–44, and idem, ‘Restoration Politics and Sentimental Poetics in A.-J.-B. Defauconret’s Translations of Sir Walter Scott’, Translation and Literature, XX, 2011, pp6–28. ↑
84. Joseph-Marie Quérard, La France Littéraire, ou Dictionnaire Bibliographique, Paris,1828, II, p419. ↑
85. For his translations, see Jacques GA Béreaud, ‘La traduction en France à l’époque romantique’, Comparative Literature Studies, VIII, September 1971, pp224–244, and Patrick Hersant, ‘Defauconpret, ou le demi-siècle d’Auguste’, Romantisme, XXIX, 1999, pp83–88. ↑
86. [Auguste-Jean-Baptise Defauconpret], Londres en mil huit cent dix-neuf, Paris 1820, pp94–111. ↑
87. William Sandby, The History of the Royal Academy of Arts, London 1862, I, p288. ↑
88. ‘Fine Arts’, La Belle Assemblée, May 1819, p237. ↑
89. An Englishman, ‘To the Editor of the European Magazine’, The European Magazine, LXXV, June 1819, p537. ↑
90. . Erffa and Staley, pp366–367, no. 365, as perhaps this work. ↑
91. See Erffa and Staley, no. 202. There were at least three versions of the painting taken from Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido; the first probably dated to about 1769, as did a second lost version, while the one exhibited in 1819 was one of West’s last works, which he was still painting only a month before the opening; see Farington, XV, p5346. ↑
92. Erffa and Staley, pp176-177, no. 26, who dated the painting c1771. ↑
93. Erffa and Staley, p166, no. 7, who date the painting prior to 1772 when Valentine Green made a mezzotint of it. ↑
94. Wilkie’s painting is in the Royal Collection, RCIN 405536. The citation of Rippingille is in a letter to John Clare in British Library, MS, Edgerton 2246, f. 72. For more on the painting, see David H Solkin, Painting Out of the Ordinary. Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, New Haven and London 2008, pp194–198. The painting is lost but known from a reduced version Rippingille painted on wood in 1829, now in Leeds Museums and Galleries, currently exhibited in Lotherton Hall, Aberford, Leeds. My thanks to Yvonne Hardman for this information. ↑
95. ‘Royal Academy’, The Literary Panorama, London 1819, col. 760. One critic shared this opinion, describing the canvas as gratifying ‘a keen relish for pictorial and natural humour’; see ‘Royal Academy Exhibition’, The Examiner, 9 May 1819, p300, but another saw ‘no effort at composition, nor any great merit in colour’, and thought the image of the woman, child, and dog at the pump ‘no way connected to the story’; see ‘The Fine Arts. Royal Academy’, The Literary Gazette, May 22, 1819, p330. For more on the painting, now in a private collection, and its later embodiment as Giving a Bite, see Marcia Pointon, Mulready, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, Lonson, 1986, p157, cat. no.130. ↑
96. ‘British Gallery,’ The Literary Gazette, III, 19 June 1819, p395, remarked that the painting had much character and the story was well told, but the colour was disagreeable and not ‘artist-like’. ↑
97. Defauconpret, Londres en mil huit cent vingt… , Paris 1821, pp119ff. and ‘Royal Academy’, The London Journal of Arts and Sciences, I, 1820, p213. ↑
98. ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy,’ Annals of the Fine Arts, V, 1820, p389. ↑
99. The modern history of the painting is a curious one that amply illustrates the vagaries of taste. The painting was left to Francis Chantrey after Thomson’s death to be offered as a gift to a church, which refused it, and then offered again to another church, which likewise refused it; see The Artist and Amateur’s Magazine, 1843, p47. It was purchased in 1966 for £50 from a collector at Cranbury Park, Hampshire, where it was stored behind the organ in the chapel. It was later discovered by the late David Bindman who subsequently presented it to the Tate where it remained in storage for more than four decades; see Caroline Elam, ‘Forward: Celebrating David Bindman’, in Diana Dethloff et al, eds, Burning Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman, London 2015, p7. ↑
100. Farington, XVI, p5526. See too ‘Royal Academy’, The London Journal of Arts and Sciences, I, 1820, p215 and ‘Fine Arts. Royal Academy’, The Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, 6 May 1820, p299. ↑
101. Here Defauconpret agreed with an English critic who found the painting ‘Flat, stale and unprofitable’, and the figure of Christ bearing the expression of ‘the family apothecary’; see ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, Annals of the Fine Arts, V, 1820, p394. ↑
102. ‘Notice of the Fine Arts. VI’, The London Magazine, I, June 1820, p697. See too the harsh criticism, detailing many formal faults, in ‘Royal Academy: Somerset House’, The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, 20 May 1820, p334. ↑
103. Schiff, I, p587, no1387 and p654, no. 81 who notes the painting as lost. My thanks to Franca Candrian of the Kunsthaus, Zurich for supplying the image. ↑
104. Charles Nodier, Promenade de Dieppe aux montagnes d’Écosse, Paris 1821, pp80ff. See too ‘The Royal Academy’, The European Magazine, LXXIX, May 1821, p434. On Nodier, see La Fabrique du romantisme. Charles Nodier et les ‘Voyages pittoresque’, exh cat., Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris 2014. ↑
105. For more on the exhibition of sculpture in Somerset House, see Alison Yarrington, ‘Art in the Dark. Viewing and Exhibiting Sculpture at Somerset House’, in Solkin, Art on the Line, pp173-–87. ↑
106. ‘Francis Chantrey, Sculptor’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, VII, April 1820, pp3–10. ↑
107. The illustration for pl 21 is from one of the many marble versions that Chantrey produced. After he had presented the original marble to Scott in 1828, Chantrey asked him to sit once more for an updated version, looking more serious, when he added several years to the facial features. On the bust, see George Jones, Sir Francis Chantrey, R.A. Recollections of His Life Practice, and Opinions, London,1849, pp253–256, and F Russell, Portraits of Sir Walter Scott: A Study of Romantic Portraiture, London 1987, no. 32. A version was also shown in the Salon of 1824 where it was admired by Stendhal: see Mélanges d’art et de littérature, Paris 1867, p238, and René Jullian, ‘Le regard de Stendhal sur l’art anglais’, in KG McWatters and CW Thompson, eds, Stendhal et l’Angleterre, Liverpool 1987, p52. ↑
108. In a letter of 12 June 1822 from Wordsworth to Allan Cunningham, in William Knight, ed, Letters of the Wordsworth Family from 1787 to 1855, New York 1907, II, p157. For the Coleridge citation, see The Gentleman’s Magazine, XIII, March,1840, p227. ↑
109. [Defauconpret], Londres en mil huit cent vingt-deux, Paris 1823, p63. ↑
110. EDS Arcieu, Diorama de Londres, ou tableau des moeurs britanniques en mil huit cent vingt-deux, Paris 1823, pp399–400. ↑
111. Amédée Pichot, Voyage historique et littéraire en Angleterre et en Écosse, Paris 1825. His commentary on the exhibition is contained in I, pp115f, which included an abbreviated primer on English painting from the period of Henry VIII to the establishment of the Royal Academy (pp146–151). ↑
112. See David Irwin, John Flaxman 1755–1826. Sculptor Illustrator Designer, London 1979, pp178ff, and Philip McEvansoneya, ‘Lord Egremont and Flaxman’s “St Michael Overcoming Satan”’, The Burlington Magazine, CXLIII, 2001, pp351–359. ↑
113. ‘Royal Academy’, The Literary Gazette, VI, 22 June 1822, p393, and ‘The Exhibition at the Royal Academy’, The London Journal of Arts and Sciences, III, 1822, pp320–321, which also criticized the work. ↑
114. The citation is from William B Scott, The British School of Sculpture, London [1871], p125. The statue was shown in its plaster form in 1818, but the marble version of 1822 gained international recognition. Baily reworked the statue for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1841, when it was now entitled Eve Listening to the Voices, where he altered the position of the head and the right arm of ‘his old statue of Eve’, and therefore made it inferior: see Richard Wyatt’s letter to John Gibson, Royal Academy, Archives, John Gibson papers, GI/1/364. For more on the statue, see Caroline Jordon, ‘ “The very spirit of purity and chastity”; Eve at the Fountain by Edward Hodges Baily’, Sculpture Journal, XV, 2006, pp19–35, and idem, Edward Hodges Baily (1788–1867) and the Notion of Poetic Sculpture, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds 2007. ↑
115. The bust exhibited in 1822 is now in Chatsworth, but Chantrey also produced replicas for various patrons. For the commission, see Alison Yarrington et al, ‘The Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey, R. A., at the Royal Academy, 1809–41’, Walpole Society, LVI, 1991–1992, pp165–167. ↑
116. ‘Turner, J. (fl. 1822) / Of Hampstead. Exhibited at the R.A., 1822’ is listed in Daphne Foskett, A Dictionary of British Miniature Painters, New York and Washington,1972, I, p555. Robson’s London Directory, London 1842, p282 lists a ‘Miss Turner, miniature painter’ residing at 8 Singleton Street, Hoxton. ↑
117. Pichot knew the play well enough to comment on it two decades later when he published Galerie des pesonnages de Shakespeare, Paris 1844, in which Twelfth Night is given as ‘Les nuit des rois ou Ce que vous voudrez’. ↑
118. Pichot, I, pp185–191. ↑
119. Henri Gérard, Correspondance de François Gérard Peintre d’histoire, Paris 1867, p142. ↑
120. For Wilkie and Rochard, see Charles Ephrussi, ‘Simon-Jacques Rochard (1788–1871)’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, VI, 1891, p446. For his relationship with Constable, see RB Beckett, ed, John Constable’s Correspondence, London 1964, II, pp354, 356 and 359. His friendship with Cockerell is noted in Lee Johnson, ‘Géricault and Delacroix Seen by Cockerell’, The Burlington Magazine, CXII, September 1971, pp548ff. Rochard painted a portrait of Lewis in about 1826, now in a private collection, for which see Briony Llewellyn, John Frederick Lewis: Facing Time, exh cat., Watts Gallery, Guildford 2019. ↑
121. G Pinet, Léonor Mérimée (1757–1836), Paris 1913, p61; Dennis McNiece Healy, Mérimée et les anglais, Paris 1946, p102. ↑
122. Ephrussi, pp451–452. ↑
123. Mérimée’s translation was published as ‘Discours de Fuseli sur la peinture’, Les Beaux-Arts, III, 1844, pp113–115, 129-133, 145-147, 161–163, and 177–189. ↑
124. ‘M. Jerricault’s [sic] Large Picture’, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, &c., X, 1 July 1820, p50. See too Lee Johnson, ‘The “Raft of the Medusa” in Great Britain’, The Burlington Magazine, XCVI, 1954, pp249–254. ↑
125. William Hauptman, ‘Géricault, Delacroix and Constable’s The Hay Wain’, The British Art Journal, XXIII, 2, 2022, pp17–32. ↑
126. The letter is in Gérard, Correspondance, pp142–143, and discussed in Charles Ephrussi, ‘François Gérard d’après les lettres publiées par M. le baron Gérard,’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts, V, 1891, pp80–81; Prosper Dorbec, ‘Les influences de la peinture anglaise sur le portrait en France’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, LV, 1913, pp85–102; and Robert Pugh, ‘Les beaux-arts en Angleterre jugés par les français pendant la première moitié du XIX^e siècle’, The French Quarterly, VI, 1924, pp195–196. ↑
127. For West’s visit to Gérard, see Farington, V, 1823; for Wilkie and Haydon, see Pope, I, p364; for Callcott, see Brown, p57; for Leslie and Collins, see Taylor, I, p41. Gérard wrote to Lawrence on 2 September 1825 concerning the arrangements to visit his studio: see Royal Academy, Archives, Lawrence Letters, LAW/4/369 and 1 October, LAW/5/177, where Gérard invited Lawrence to dine. For more on Lawrence’s French connections, see Olivier Meslay, ‘Sir Thomas Lawrence and France: The Portrait of the Duc de Richelieu’, The British Art Journal, III, 2, Spring 2002, pp44–49. ↑
128. Gaston Brière, ‘Le peintre J. L. Barbier et les conquêtes artistiques en Belgique’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’art français, 1920, pp204–210; Ferdinand Boyer, ‘L’organisation des conquêtes artistique de la Convention en Belgique (1794)’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, XLIX, 1971, pp490–500. ↑
129. Farington, V, p1820. ↑
130. ‘The Fifty-Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, The European Magazine, LXXXVI, May 1825, p458, and ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, London Magazine, II, June 1825, p256. ↑
131. André Joubin, Correspondance Générale d’Eugène Delacroix, Paris 1936, I, pp165–166. See too Michèle Hannoosh, ‘An Unpublished Letter from Sir Thomas Lawrence to Delacroix’, The Burlington Magazine, CXLVI, 2004, pp323–326. ↑
132. Dennis Farr, ‘Delacroix and Etty’, The Burlington Magazine, XCIV, 1952, p80, and Robinson, Etty, p122. For critical reactions to Etty’s painting, see ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, London Magazine, II, June 1825, pp256–257, and ‘The Fifty-Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, European Magazine, LXXXVII, June 1825, p459. ↑
133. Marcia Pointon, Bonington, Francia & Wyld, London 1985, p149. ↑
134. Michèle Hannoosh, ed, Eugène Delacroix Journal, Paris 2009, II, p1520. ↑