1856 Critics at Odds
Poem by a Perfectly Furious Academician:
I takes and paints
Hears no complaints
And sells before I’m dry;
Till savage RUSKIN
He sticks his tusk in,
And nobody will buy.
NB. Confound Ruskin; only that won’t come into the poetry – but it’s true.1
This from Mr Punch, who over the years has had such fun at Art and the Royal Academy’s expense, but for once, this mild jibe apart, he kept his long nose out of it. John Ruskin, on the other hand, jumped right in, if not, perhaps, quite to the effect expected.
The Academy’s 88th Summer Exhibition is one of considerable interest, and not just for its critical reception at the time. For we know now what contemporary criticism could not foresee, that among the 1,376 works on show were several of household familiarity today. There, making their bows, were William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat (Fig.1, now in The Lady Lever AG); The Blind Girl (Birmingham M&AG) and Autumn Leaves (Manchester CAG) by Millais; Chatterton (Tate) by Henry Wallis; and April Love (Tate) by Arthur Hughes.
On the whole, it was well enough received. The anonymous reviewer for The Illustrated London News noted the comparative paucity of works by the Academicians themselves, at some 150 of the total, regretting particularly the absence of the President, Sir Charles Eastlake, and of Mulready, Maclise, and Danby. “Still more”, he went on, “do we miss Mr Egg”. He thought that, “with but one or two exceptions, all of the really clever pictures are very well hung”. Even so, “it is sad to reflect”, he sighed, “that of the 800 contributors not more than 80 are really artists.”2
The similarly anonymous reviewer for The Art-Journal reserved his principal objections to the conditions in which the works, and especially the sculptures, were presented.
The long existing misery to which sculptors have been subjected is this year greater than ever. It is impossible to enter the dark den on the ground floor without feeling how terribly it acts against the progress of this branch of Art.3
He was also exercised by the rejection of so many “worthy works”. The only answer, he felt, was for the government to hand over to the Academy the entire National Gallery, part of it which it then occupied.4
John Ruskin joined in with his Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy, “distinguished as they are from most of the criticism brought under [the public’s] notice, by the writer’s attaching his name to them.”5 For, as he believed, anonymity could all too easily afford a cloak to malice.
So what brought these several voices into near-agreement? We must remember that the Pre-Raphaelite controversies of recent years were still very much in the air, and these three critics were on the scent straight away, if not running necessarily in the same direction. “If the reader will glance generally around any of the rooms”, Ruskin declared,6 confounding at once Mr Punch’s confident expectations,
he will be struck by a singular change in the character of the entire exhibition. He will find he can no longer distinguish the Pre-Raphaelite works as a separate class … The meaning of this is that the battle has completely and confessedly been won …; that animosity has been changed to emulation, astonishment into sympathy … The excellence of it is all the more to be rejoiced in because it is in every whit progressive.7
The Art-Journal saw it somewhat differently. “The spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism survives but in a modified form … gradually subsiding into something more reasonable”, it argued, and went on to take Millais to task for the problem the movement still presented.8
Every one of these works of this artist differs from the other, and yet all are called Pre-Raphaelite. We can understand these differences [if they] declare improvement, but we cannot understand that work differing only in declension, should represent excellence and be worthy of imitation.9
The Illustrated London News, for its part, took the middle course.
Pre-Raphaelitism, we may judge … is in a very rapid state of transition from over-painstaking in details to useful results. The great high priest of the school, Mr Millais, has successfully thrown off all that was required to be thrown off;10
and the same went for Hunt.
With the Pre-Raphaelites, and Millais in particular, The Art-Journal and Ruskin were at odds at almost every turn. Take Autumn Leaves:
By much the most poetical work the painter has yet conceived”: and “[it] will rank in future among the world’s best masterpieces.11
It contains three figures—girls with a heap of leaves before them, to which they have just set fire, as indicated by the rising smoke … We are curious to learn the mystic interpretation that will be put upon this composition.12
Ruskin found Hughes’ April Love “exquisite in every way, lovely in colour, most subtle in the quivering expression of the lips, and sweetness of the tender face.”13 The Art-Journal ignored it altogether. But with The Scapegoat, the two found themselves entirely at one. Ruskin devoted several pages of earnest condescension to Hunt, who, in his earnest desire to paint The Scapegoat, has forgotten to ask himself first, whether he could paint a goat at all … I can only, therefore … pray him, for practice sake, now to paint a few pictures with less feeling in them; and more handling.14
The Art-Journal put it more bluntly: “If narrative and perspicuity be of any value in Art, these qualities are entirely ignored here … A goat is a goat and that is all … [It] exhibits large capabilities idly and perniciously wasted.”15
On the outstanding works of 1856, however, Ruskin, The Illustrated London News and The Art-Journal stood firmly side by side, with Pre-Raphaelitism out of the question. Christmas Day at St Peter’s, Rome, 1854 by David Roberts, “that established favourite with everybody but Mr Ruskin” according to The Illustrated London News, held second place.16 Ruskin himself thought it “both careful and brilliant”, while admitting that neither the architecture nor the “pomp of St Peter’s” were quite to his taste.17 The Art-Journal declared it “a picture of the very highest excellence”.18
But by far the best was The Abandoned by Clarkson Stanfield, a large painting of a derelict hulk adrift in a heavy sea and lifted by the swell high against the sky (Fig. 2). “Never was abandonment and desolation more complete,” said The Illustrated London News.19 “It cannot fail to be classed among the most valuable works of one of the greatest artists of our age and country,” said The Art-Journal.20 “I never saw a Stanfield I liked so well,” said Ruskin.21 Last heard of in the 1930s, who knows where it now is. Stanfield too has long been abandoned: he deserves better.
Attributed to Shirley Brooks, Punch, 24 May 1856.↩︎
“The Exhibition at the Royal Academy”, The Illustrated London News, 10 May 1856, 509.↩︎
“The Royal Academy: Exhibition the Eighty-Eighth, 1856”, The Art-Journal, 1 June 1856, 161.↩︎
“The Royal Academy: Exhibition the Eighty-Eighth, 1856”, The Art-Journal, 1 June 1856, 161.↩︎
John Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy, and the Society of Painter in Water Colours: No. II (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1856), 5.↩︎
Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited, 12.↩︎
Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited, 12.↩︎
“The Royal Academy: Exhibition the Eighty-Eighth, 1856”, The Art-Journal, 1 June 1856, 161.↩︎
“The Royal Academy: Exhibition the Eighty-Eighth, 1856”, The Art-Journal, 1 June 1856, 161.↩︎
“The Exhibition at the Royal Academy”, The Illustrated London News, 10 May 1856, 512.↩︎
Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited, 32.↩︎
“The Royal Academy: Exhibition the Eighty-Eighth, 1856”, The Art-Journal, 1 June 1856, 171.↩︎
Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited, 34.↩︎
Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited, 26ff.↩︎
“The Royal Academy: Exhibition the Eighty-Eighth, 1856”, The Art-Journal, 1 June 1856, 170.↩︎
“The Exhibition at the Royal Academy”, The Illustrated London News, 10 May 1856, 514.↩︎
Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited, 13.↩︎
“The Royal Academy: Exhibition the Eighty-Eighth, 1856”, The Art-Journal, 1 June 1856, 162.↩︎
“The Exhibition at the Royal Academy”, The Illustrated London News, 10 May 1856, 514.↩︎
“The Royal Academy: Exhibition the Eighty-Eighth, 1856”, The Art-Journal, 1 June 1856, 164.↩︎
Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited, 17.↩︎
Thematic categories: animals in art, art criticism - genre painting, art criticism - marine art, art criticism - Pre-Raphaelites, critique of Exhibition - criticism, genre painting, marine art, Pre-Raphaelites, rejections, religious art, Sculpture Room, symbolism