'A New Theatre of Prospects': Eighteenth-Century British
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
‘A NEW THEATRE OF PROSPECTS’: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH PORTRAIT PAINTERS AND ARTISTIC MOBILITY TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I SAMANTHA HOWARD PhD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK HISTORY OF ART SEPTEMBER 2010 ABSTRACT The eighteenth century saw the emergence of Britain as a pre-eminent imperial, mercantile and maritime power. At home, the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, and the advances in communications stimulated new opportunities for artists working inside and outside of London. Overseas, the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1756-1763) in particular, saw the spectacular growth of Britain’s world-wide interests through imperial expansion. Britain’s triumph over France resulted in impressive territorial gains which opened up a wealth of commercial possibilities and generated new markets for artistic goods and a demand for British artists. My approach is focused on the following major hubs of artistic activity in the period: the provinces and London, Edinburgh and America. Through a series of case studies, the different modes of artistic mobility demonstrated by British portrait painters are recovered to explore how they negotiated the locations’ distinct characters (metropolitan, provincial and colonial) in relation to their respective markets for artistic goods, their cultivation of patron networks, artistic connections and their artistic identity. This thesis, by engaging with the artistic mobility of eighteenth-century British portrait painters, seeks to challenge the standard narratives of the visual arts in this period, which have tended to concentrate on London in isolation. In doing so it raises the question whether our conceptions of the British art produced in the period may be better understood in terms of a broader circulation of artists and goods across and between interconnecting art worlds, and visual cultures. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract 2 Acknowledgments 4 Introduction 6 Chapter One - To, From and Around the Provinces 18 To and From London 19 Outside The Metropolis 27 Moving Between the Provinces and the Metropolis 38 Continental – Provincial Connections 49 Adaptive Media and Mobility 66 Chapter Two - To and From Edinburgh: Three Scottish Painters 83 An Artistic Hub 84 European artists in Edinburgh 85 Scottish Painters 90 Travel and Training 98 Metropolitan Practice 116 Chapter Three - America: Artistic Mobility in the British Atlantic World 137 New Horizons 138 Urban Visual Cultures 151 British Portrait Painters’ American Trajectories 159 The Itinerant British Portrait Painter in the Americas 183 Chapter Four – To and From India: 1785-1795 206 List of Abbreviations 234 Bibliography 235 Illustrations, Maps and Tables Vol. II 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I gratefully acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the award and additional travel grant that made research for this thesis possible. I have also been very fortunate to receive the support and encouragement of numerous individuals throughout the course of this project. My chief debt of gratitude is to my supervisor, Professor Mark Hallett, whose critical perspective and stimulating encouragement during my researches into the world of artistic mobility over the last six years have been invaluable. It is thanks to his patient guidance and belief in me that I have been able to reach this point. I would also like to thank Dr Jim Watt for his constructive observations and comments on all things imperial for the early drafts of this study. And to my friends, I owe a great deal for their camaraderie and convivial hospitality during the very mobile course of my research: Sarah and Tim in York, Clare in Edinburgh, Laura, Helen and Clarky in Norwich, Jonny in London, and Audrey and Greg in New Hampshire, USA. Finally, my special thanks go to my parents for their support and reassurance when I most needed it. 4 5 INTRODUCTION This thesis seeks to demonstrate the significance of artistic mobility for eighteenth-century British portraiture, and to recover the extent to which such mobility shaped the careers and practices of almost all ambitious portraitists working within Britain and its overseas territories in this period. The fact that the British art world has long been structured around different sorts of artistic mobility has recently been highlighted by the 2012 Tate Britain exhibition, Migrations: Journeys into British Art.1 The exhibition, which was made up of works from the Tate’s own collections, explored the impact of migrant artists on the development of the visual arts in Britain since the sixteenth century, and underlined the fact that artistic mobility, like other forms of migration, is often driven by the search for better economic prospects and by the need to escape from political or religious persecution.2 The opening display of works by early modern foreign-born practitioners is particularly pertinent to the focus of this thesis and serves to introduce us to London’s emergence as international artistic hub in the seventeenth century, as highlighted by Karen Hearn in the exhibition catalogue: ‘One of the most striking aspects of early modern British art, and especially in the fields of painting and sculpture, is how much of it was produced by incomers.’3 Portrait painters such as Willem Wissing, Anthony van Dyck and Godfrey Kneller were amongst the many artists from all over Europe who dominated the London art world throughout the Stuart period.4 The exhibition confirmed that their extended presence in the English capital was significant for the introduction of innovative and sophisticated portrait modes which became highly influential for indigenous artists. Meanwhile, the 1 Lizzie Carey-Thomas et al, (eds.) Migrations Exhibition Catalogue, (Tate Publishing, London 2012) 2 Penny Curtis, ‘Foreword’ pp.8-9 and Nigel Goose ‘Migration to Early Modern Britain’ pp.10-15, in Ibid. 3 Karen Hearn, ‘Portraiture’p.16, in Ibid. 4 Portraits exhibited: Willem Wissing, Portrait of Henrietta and Maria Hyde (c.1683-5);Anthony van Dyck, Charles I (1636) and Henrietta Maria (1636); Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of John Banckes (1676) 6 exhibition’s display of paintings by the Italian landscape artist, Francesco Zuccarelli (A Landscape with the Story of Cadmus Killing the Dragon, exhibited 1765), by the American- born history painter and portraitist Benjamin West, (Pylades and Orestes brought as victims before Iphigenia, 1766) and by the Swiss-born portraitist: Angelica Kauffman (Portrait of a Lady, c.1775), highlights London’s continuing role as a professional locus for foreign-born artists well into the eighteenth century. Tate Britain’s exhibition, in its focus on artistic mobility, intersected with several of the core concerns of this thesis. Yet, in concentrating on the migration of foreign artists into Britain, it presents a rather one-way perspective on the question of artist mobility – one which pays almost no attention to the movement of British-born artists within the nation itself and across the globe. Moreover, it tends to focus only upon London; other national artistic centres in the British Isles, such as Edinburgh, are barely represented; the same is true for provincial centres of the visual arts. As this thesis will demonstrate, however, eighteenth-century artistic mobility was of a far more expansive, reciprocal, and international character, and saw scores of artists – both British and foreign-born - not only leaving the nation’s shores in search of distant international markets, but also criss-crossing Britain itself. This was particularly true for portrait painters, who became the new ‘merchant adventurers’ of an increasingly internationalised art world.5 Portraitists responded quickly to the widened demand for their goods generated by an expanding national economy and a wider imperial realm, and pursued ever more nomadic careers as they did so. 5 The Merchant Adventurers were trading associations established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in port towns such as London, Bristol and York. As individuals and as a corporate organisation, the Merchant Adventurers were noted for their enterprising spirit. They were widely travelled and not only set up national but also international trade networks (like their later counterparts - the chartered trading companies). See W. E. Lingelbach, “The Internal Organisation of the Merchant Adventurers of England” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Royal Historical Society New Series, Vol. 16 (1902), pp. 19-67. 7 This thesis, by engaging with the artistic mobility of eighteenth-century British portrait painters and exploring the movement of foreign-born artists across British networks of artistic practice, seeks to raise questions about whether our conceptions of the British art produced in the period may be better understood in terms of a broader circulation of artists and goods across and between interconnecting visual cultures. My approach will focus not only upon imperial networks of artistic mobility but will also focus on those that operated within Britain itself. These will be explored through four case-studies, each of which will offer the opportunity of pursuing a detailed analysis of a distinctive circuit of artistic opportunity and practice in the period. The first, explored in my opening chapter, will be that formed by the traffic of portraitists across the English provinces. For those portraitists who struggled in metropolitan artistic practice but who were reluctant to join the anonymous ranks of studio assistants, copyists and drapery artists working in London, provincial artistic practice offered a variety of alternative locations from which to operate and between which portraitists could travel. These locations ranged from the country estates of the aristocracy and the seasonal spa resorts such as Bath and Tunbridge Wells, to prosperous commercial and manufacturing centres such as Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester. An alternative case-study, investigated in my second chapter, will be that provided by the traffic of portraitists between London and Edinburgh. Stimulated by the events of the Restoration and the 1707 Act of Union, these two cities shared close political and cultural connections and had a well-established history of artistic exchange with each other.