James
Holland, The Lady Betty Germain Bedroom
at Knole, Kent, 1845 (Yale Center for British Art)
In the
first post for Home Subjects, we
wanted to delve a bit deeper into the quotation we chose to headline our front
page. It comes from a letter sculptor
Richard Westmacott wrote in 1834.
Reflecting on the contemporary art scene, he writes: “…Art is better done here than anywhere else
just now. I put historical Art out of
the question of course, for alas! There’s no employment in it—nor are our
houses, if there were a taste for it, adapted to receive large pictures, but
for our comfort, where is it practiced nowadays, with success? Echo answers “where?”—but in Portrait,
Landscape, Seaviews, Home Subjects—animals, and in every branch for which there
is a demand I am proud to say—and I am sure you will agree with me—we yield to
no country.”
One of
the ideas that inspired the Home Subjects
project is the persistent notion that the successes and failures of
contemporary English painting are correlated with the style of living common in
England. In the above example, Westmacott asserts that
British houses are designed for comfort, rather than to receive large
pictures. He then suggests that in the
fields which are seen as appropriate or important for the decoration of British interiors, “we yield
to no country.”
The
notion that the English style of living was intertwined with tastes in
collecting and patronage can be traced back many decades. In the 1790s, when major Italian history and
religious paintings were being imported into Britain during the French
Revolution, the idea that such pictures might be undesirable among collectors
because of unsuitability for English houses gained a certain currency. One critic wrote, “A most puerile objection
is also made against the pictures of Paul Veronese, because they are so large
that they cannot be admitted into our London houses. We shall grant that they are fit for few; but
how many of our Nobility and Gentry have large halls in the country, which they
will be glad to decorate with them.”
One of our ambitions in Home Subjects is to take this idea
seriously. How, and why, did the idea
that a particular sort of English domesticity shaped tastes in art,
develop? How did a belief in the nature of domesticity
and its interrelationship with painting and other forms of decoration influence
the types of work artists were inspired or commissioned to produce? And how did that shape the way modernism
developed in Britain? These are some of
the questions we pose with this project.
In a future post, I’ll return to the James Holland painting of the Lady
Betty Germain bedroom at Knole illustrated above, and suggest some ways we
might approach a picture using this line of enquiry.
--ANR
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