Philip Hensher

The age of the starving artist

A review of A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by James Hamilton. A brilliant account of learning, or failing, to survive in a market of extraordinary brutality

Who’s in, who’s out: George Bernard O’Neill’s ‘Public Opinion’ depicts a private view of the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy [Bridgeman]

What remains of art is art, of course; and what chiefly interests us is the creative talents of a painter or a sculptor. What we forget is that the work of art wouldn’t be there without some kind of engagement with the brutal forces of money.

James Hamilton’s riveting book is a richly detailed study of how, in Britain in the 19th century, artists and a small army of opportunists, art lovers, collectors and businessmen of all sorts used their ingenuity to turn the visual arts into money. ‘The business of art, when seen in the perspective of the time, does not always reflect the course of art history as perceived 200 years later,’ Hamilton says, and this is a remarkable attempt to show us what art might have looked like to those who were making their living through it.

The relationship between a work of art and its value had long puzzled anyone who has thought about it. Hogarth had tried to put his highest price not on one of the ‘comic history paintings’ for which he was celebrated, but on a gruesome ‘Sigismunda mourning over the heart of Guiscardo’. Joseph Wright of Derby, later in the century, demanded of the collector/curator John Boydell:

Is not my picture as large as Mr [Benjamin] West’s? Has it not equal, nay much more work in it? Is it not as highly finished? And has not the public spoken as well of it? Then why should you attempt to make any difference in our prices?

The answer, then as now, was that there is no correlation between labour and prices, a fact that continued to raise hackles. When Ruskin attacked Whistler, and his barrister in the subsequent libel trial expressed incredulity that ‘the labour of two days is that for which you ask 200 guineas’ — the same wishful thinking is at work.

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