William
Henry Hunt (British, 1790-1864), View
over Bushey, mid 19th century, pen and watercolor over pencil, 10 3/8 x 13
in. (26.4 x 33 cm), The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical
Gardens, 59.55.736.
In his notes on an exhibition of the
work of watercolor artists Samuel Prout and William Henry Hunt held at the Fine
Arts Society in London (1879-80), John Ruskin makes the point that not only are
certain kinds of subjects more suitable for display in British homes, but that certain
media are better suited to particular types of homes. In particular, he distinguishes
between the “great people,” who “always bought Canaletto, not Prout, and Van
Huysum, not Hunt,” and those who did purchase and display these “simple”
images:
“There was indeed no quality in the
bright little water-colours which could look other than pert in ghostly
corridors, and petty in halls of state; but they gave an unquestionable tone of
liberal-mindedness to a suburban villa, and were the cheerfullest possible
decorations for a moderate-sized breakfast-parlour, opening on a nicely-mown
lawn. Their liveliness even rose, on occasion, to the charity of beautifying
the narrow chambers of those whom business or fixed habit still retained in the
obscurity of London itself…” (Works of
John Ruskin, preface to Vol. 14)
Much scholarship has focused on the
fact that Britain lacked the kind of state patronage enjoyed by artists in the
nations of continental Europe, and that the art-buying public of late
18th-century Britain evolved in part out of the rise of the commercial classes.
One of the threads weaving through the themes explored by this study group is
the notion that British taste is bound by class, in particular a bourgeois one.
However, as Ruskin notes, only somewhat patronizingly, the decorators of
suburban villas, much like the denizens of grand houses, sought to create an
atmosphere of “liberal-mindedness” in their domestic spaces. Questions of
“liberality” have teased British art since before the foundation of the Royal
Academy, and clearly the concept is still at work as Ruskin seeks to define the
function of art within the middle-class home. Does he employ the term as it was
used by theorists of the 18th century, as a means of defining a ruling class
through its access to wealth and education? Or has the concept itself changed,
now that the “moderate-sized breakfast parlour” is the site in which this
identity is constructed, and now that an arrangement of “bright little
water-colours” can just as easily as a display of great paintings or sculpture serve
as its marker?
-- MM
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