At Once Authoritative and Exhausting’ 1

William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age New Haven and London : Yale University Press , 2006 , 180 pp. , 149 col. and b. & w. illus., £40.00 hdbk, £21.99 pbk William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné 2 vols , New Haven and London : Yale University Press , 2006 , 674 pp. , illustrated, £175.00 The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910 Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2003 , 376 pp. , 37 b. & w. illus., £60.00 William Holman Hunt: Painter, Painting, Paint Manchester and New York : Manchester University Press , 2006 , 288 pp., 24 col. Plates, 48 b. & w. illus., £55.00 William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age . London : Guildhall Art Gallery , 6 November 2006–4 March 2007 The books brought together for review here all focus on the problem of writing the artist, one of art history's major preoccupations. In her introduction to The Victorian Artist, Julie F. Codell presents Richard Altick's assessment of biography as ‘a rich but unstable compound of history, journalism, eulogy, inspiration, and materials suitable for the study of the mind’, as at once a description of the complexities of the genre and an implicit warning of the difficulties encountered when studying it.2 Each of the four books under review offers a different approach to the question of biography. One scrutinizes the entire genre of artists' lifewritings in the late Victorian age; the other three focus on a single major Victorian artist. William Holman Hunt is the subject of two very different types of art-historical writing: the catalogue raisonné and the monograph. William Powell Frith receives an aptly panoramic treatment which combines a volume of essays with documentation of a major retrospective exhibition. Of these studies, which mostly adhere to tried and tested modes of art-historical scholarship, Julie Codell's is by far the most adventurous and pioneering. Her engaging tome, The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910, presents a thorough survey of the vast biographical literature produced during that period. Codell rightly points out that ‘Despite the scale of this literature, it has been relatively ignored and rarely examined critically by art historians.’ (3) And she intrepidly sets out to map this uncharted territory. The scope of her work is ambitious and the results impressive. Just one glance at the bibliography, subdivided into primary and secondary sources, makes one realize the hours she must have spent in libraries perusing even the most obscure biographical serial. This scholarly rigour helps to establish the coordinates that enable Codell to accomplish her Herculean task. She surveys the functions of biography as a genre; provides a typology of the artist; and distinguishes between different forms of lifewriting. Whilst the distinction between autobiography and biography seems obvious, it is in the sub-categories of biography that Codell excels. Her ‘subject is the artist as text.’ (4) But she is not just interested in who is being ‘written’, she also pays attention to who is doing the writing. Close scrutiny of the biographer's identity throws additional light on the modes through which the subject is constructed and to what ends. As Codell lays out her material – ranging from autobiography to the proliferation of illustrated, pocket-size biographical sketches – the increasingly ruthless and shameless commodification of the artist becomes apparent. A real strength of Codell's research is the attention she bestows on both the high and low end of the biographical market. She discusses the often slight, repetitive and blatantly populist serial publications with the same zest for her subject that she brings to the ‘serious’ biography or autobiography. The artistic types and narrative modes Codell sketches at the outset inform her analysis of the different genres of lifewriting. In her ‘Family Biographies’ chapter, Codell concentrates on the domestication of the artist who is presented as a respectable pater familias, a capable breadwinner whose art will buy a comfortable residence and support a household in style. Success is measured in material wealth and social status. The writer of a family biography, mostly the artist's widow, brother, son or daughter (rarely the widower or sister) had privileged access to the subject's life. But he or she was also invested in that life and its representation. So scandal was often papered over with accounts of respectability. Codell argues that behind such respectable representations of the artist loomed the ghost of the impoverished, disorganized, mad genius: a traditional and potent image which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had transmogrified into that of the degenerate artist. The pseudo-scientific discourse of the time, through which it was constructed, so Codell argues, was omnipresent and influential, and biographers felt the need to defend their subjects against possible charges of degeneracy. In order to capture that underlying threat Codell deploys a draconian prose in which the Victorian artist is ‘normalized’ (196), i.e., shown to be a domesticated and sociable professional, ‘nationalize[d] and masculinize[d]’ (139), and at times ‘sanitized and Anglicized’ (242). For this reader the threat never seemed quite to materialize, which makes Codell's language sound somewhat overdetermined. Compared to sections devoted to the innocent artist or the bohemian, her analysis of the degenerate artist is quite short (100–103) and lacks the vivid quotations that she deploys to great effect elsewhere in the book. This reluctance to spell out fully the negative discourses surrounding the figure of the artist somewhat blunts Codell's assertion that Victorian lifewritings were driven by an innate desire to refute them. Overwhelmingly, her marshalled evidence points to the Victorian artist as a jovial and sociable animal who scrubs up nicely in image and text. One suspects that Codell's reserve here stems from her genuine interest in the subject matter which she displays in her careful and detailed analysis of the professional, personal and national images of the artist. One of the most interesting aspects to emerge from Codell's investigation about writing the Victorian artist concerns the significance of timing. It is a given that autobiography is a retrospective genre. The author surveys his or her life's achievements, settles scores, records, remembers, omits. She or he is faced with the task of reconciling the former with the present self, of bridging the gap inevitably opened up by the passage of time. Testimony and confession, possibly tinged with nostalgia, are the staple modes of the autobiographical narrative. Codell's research reveals that autobiographies of Victorian artists were mostly written at a time when their halcyon days had passed and their reputations had fallen prey to changes of taste. So their intention was often to shore up what remained of a tattered reputation, to document the once-sparkling life and demonstrate status, sociability and success, to stem the tide of cultural amnesia by gathering together the past life and offering it up to posterity. Codell also shows that the established modes of Victorian literary autobiography, which scholars have studied extensively, did not form the blueprint for the autobiographies of Victorian artists, who tended to present themselves as social beings, chatty and easy-going and operating in well-established professional and social networks. The mode of narration frequently emulated Benvenuto Cellini's picaresque and swaggering reminiscences and invested the Victorian artist with a hint of the Renaissance man. Codell cleverly offsets the wealth of material by identifying such blueprints and offering a close reading of a small number of definitive texts. In the vast chapter on ‘Biography as History’ she focuses on the seminal A Century of British Painters by the brothers Richard and Samuel Redgrave, who both enjoyed successful and varied careers in the roles of artist, arts administrator and art historian. She carefully considers both the original 1866 edition and the expanded and revised edition of 1892. This shift in focus from the panoramic to the particular allows Codell to track minute changes as well as present general observations that elude other scholars, who have concentrated on far smaller samples and narrower contexts. Whilst most Victorianists will be familiar with the autobiographies of Benjamin Robert Haydon and William Holman Hunt which, until now, have stood out as beacons in uncharted waters, Codell provides a detailed and reliable map for the territory in between. Her ambition and stamina make this a very useful book, which puts into perspective a welter of detailed studies undertaken over the past two decades and helps to establish a wider context. With such an excellent guide in hand, one hopes, new evaluations of classic texts and a wide range of much larger questions will emerge to preoccupy future scholarship. If Codell's perceptive analysis stands for a newly self-reflexive attitude to the genres within which writing about art, and in particular the artist, is framed, Judith Bronkhurst's long-awaited catalogue raisonné of the works of William Holman Hunt is a monumental contribution to a crucially important, but perhaps endangered, species. One suspects Hunt, an artist obsessed with the longevity of his work, and with the value of persistent labour itself, would have been delighted with the sheer quality of the publication, from the meticulous research to the beautifully reproduced and copious colour illustrations. Bronkhurst's acknowledgements serve as a poignant reminder of the passage of time. They list a veritable roll call of names familiar to any Victorian scholar who have contributed to the mammoth task – many of them now ‘late’. The two tomes bring to a conclusion a project begun in the 1960s. That decade saw the start of a series of one-man shows that returned seminal Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian artists such as Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown to public consciousness and renewed scholarly interest and appreciation. Almost four decades have passed since Mary Bennett curated the William Holman Hunt show at the Walker Art Gallery (1969). Hunt was the second Pre-Raphaelite to receive such treatment, two years after his brother-in-arms, Millais. Despite a rich stream of scholarly and popular publications and many exhibitions of Victorian art, Hunt remains only the second Pre-Raphaelite artist, after Rossetti, to have received art-historical canonization with an impressive catalogue raisonné. Mary Bennett's lifelong work on Madox Brown is nearing publication and it is to be hoped that Malcolm Warner will bring to press his magisterial catalogue of Millais's work, completing the Pre-Raphaelite canon. Bronkhurst offers an elegant and sympathetic introduction. She is right to caution her reader not to put too much emphasis on Hunt's own pronunciations, and instead summons a number of witnesses who testify to the artist's charm and charisma, his ability to spellbind children and laugh at himself. The lighter side of Hunt's character is often forgotten as most scholars have tended to focus on his monumental and tendentious autobiography. It is to be welcomed that Bronkhurst refrains from privileging the autobiographical account and instead presents a multifaceted portrait of the artist drawn from a wide range of familiar and less well-known sources. A nice touch is the decision to illustrate the introductory essay with details taken from Hunt's paintings. These provide some unusual views and whet the appetite for the full-colour illustrations that accompany the catalogue entries. The first volume is dedicated to the artist's oil paintings, which are presented in strict chronological order. Bronkhurst is a meticulous chronicler of the work. The generous catalogue entries are packed with details and facts, ranging from the circumstances of production to the intricacies of iconography. The fate of the work is tracked in exhibition and saleroom appearances (with sale prices given). She also lists every known textual reference to the work, whether diary entry, en-passant mention in a letter or exhibition review. Bronkhurst has left no stone unturned in her research. She proves an expert and trustworthy guide to Hunt's creative world, its complex obsessions and As Bronkhurst out this rich the of time are The very first she is a work only in the textual that Hunt's life. This forms the of her It also her to the work and out and the and of and present an image of Hunt that is somewhat larger the makes even the reader realize that Hunt's first Pre-Raphaelite at the in one into the artist's it the catalogue number through the entries on the – mostly and of in the Gallery and elsewhere – the of the Pre-Raphaelite becomes apparent. Hunt remained to this for the of his the second of the the artist produced a one paintings, to be number the seminal The of the at the in the and the begun in and now in is his work. scholar will with the difficulties faced by the when to an artist's The chronological approach Hunt's particular – often other and over of time – and offers new into his It also the form of an to the artist's life it are by a of when one to sketches for a work which Hunt over a number of years as these are the second As one from the introduction to the of the catalogue that and of and works in three and a on Hunt's this reader was by two the of and the decision to a high of these So far Bronkhurst has presented as the whose is even to together sketches to one work. She now not to a of Hunt's as This decision value by the it would have been useful to catalogue Hunt's well-known portrait of Rossetti portrait of John Everett in to left and right which Bronkhurst as with Hunt's of Rossetti But Hunt's of Rossetti, is in the of the catalogue a work has been as and remains The reader now to for the second edition of Hunt's autobiography the catalogue of the exhibition she to these two In a catalogue raisonné that so far privileged to establish the order of all Hunt such a distinction makes one would have to have these two reproduced and in close But in Bronkhurst's of Hunt's works these two – in a single – have by some one with a the other with an one in the and this reader was by a that a number of works here were not some have been elsewhere and Bronkhurst points out are to be But this is small for the scholar who would have to have Bronkhurst's to her work by the of her A volume a or provides the future for this of would have a catalogue raisonné the catalogue raisonné that would have left to be the catalogue raisonné is reading for interested in Hunt's work and will to Victorianists for years to The wealth of presented in the entries most that to its will the to all of whether to a and exhibition appearances or But this is by no a publication just for the The introductory essay will also and the of the reader who Hunt's work for the first time. Bronkhurst's monumental would have been by a less traditional that of the catalogue which to that genre of that are never quite In has been by the of It a for scholarship, one which and to the of the artist's so by and allows image and In years to on this catalogue raisonné as the of a by Whilst will be the for will be the For most of the century, Hunt's work has scholarly at In the of seminal studies on Hunt's interest has on the of the artist and the of his art, its social and cultural on the art Bronkhurst a of her and engaging introduction to the of Hunt's This has been from the of and mention and has increasingly received the scholarly attention it most in Pre-Raphaelite Painting such as this bring the of art and to on the a which as material and not as This of interest a of the Pre-Raphaelite scholarship. In her 2006 study of Hunt – her and focuses on the in the of other scholars have in interesting and questions surrounding Hunt's work the problem She who of Hunt: not the about are not in the of by the when faced with Hunt's work. of the up the of the as the of Hunt's artistic and for ‘a new of the image which form as well as with Bronkhurst an interest in the itself, its and material and a that Hunt's autobiography is not to be at and which have been by different scholars over the She has tracked which have remained and and and and them is a and somewhat study of the and of Hunt's work. Her is meticulous and It is at its most when a for the and of Hunt's work, as both be when against the by to her subject results in a definitive account of a particular of which has been for some time and has now fully her own project when be and put into the of the artist's for a a between image and textual With these two Hunt has been and about his and textual have a of As one one hopes, will be opened and the of that Bronkhurst has to the scholarly will in time new and into the and art of and will be by this exhibition of Hunt's work, Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite which at the Manchester Art Gallery in and is to to the Art Gallery of and the of in The exhibition an important, form of art-historical It has been in scholarly attention on the work of Victorian artists whose reputations have been for the of the Whilst the art-historical have now been on Hunt, the and a range of successful and established Victorian artists to be for just their The retrospective of William Powell work at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London November 2006 – March the for a of this artist. value and on the publication which one of two forms – the traditional catalogue or a of The was in William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian to with the Guildhall exhibition. In their introduction the and that Frith is now well known mostly for three at the and The They have with Victorian art and are in surveys of the period. So one hopes, is a portrait of Frith the well known and the essay to a The biographical provides into the artist's and professional with on his and the artist's of subject matter and as well as his and second within of the artist's London offers a panoramic that sets the for the essays to They literary the and of his work, some on his work, his of the the of his and The is wide and the They left this reader whether the artist perhaps has fallen out of for all the right In her essay on and scrutinizes of She reveals some to be staple and that are for For her close scrutiny of work shows that the and at the of at the the in a from one of the in For or For observations are of Painters have on and and in different and for different But the of whether the artist be to have the Victorian If Frith is not quite the and the panoramic seems to what is he essay on and and on in this They both and of through which to The exhibition which the is and well put of the works are for the and by a of mostly genre of both and as well as portrait present a survey of the artist's its and But the Frith is less when works are The exhibition the Victorian artist's of his ability and need to between and works and to and at the the for an artist's It perhaps that this of the Victorian be for the small number of works for exhibition. They Frith at his the exhibition and provide a with the artist's work, the of would have been by the traditional of the catalogue with detailed entries for all the works in the the will a guide to the art and of It offers a of for his work as well as new into the of in the Victorian These four books – but a small – demonstrate that the study of Victorian art has of concerns are to One that will be many of Victorian artists such will make the writing of a less and task it has been in the also will from the and that It will that a catalogue raisonné the work of many the of one dedicated As a genre of art-historical are and will in the In the literary that art did not literary their or and when with them in the of Pre-Raphaelite A it no of art-historical The genres of biography and autobiography are no taken to provide and and Art have begun to and with the complexities of biographical narrative. The Victorian artist is no written in of a mode Victorian biography seemed to as Whilst the in its own it focuses on the of and as forms of narration in Victorian biography. The study of the Victorian artist has self-reflexive and that of Victorian art The books brought together here out for writing the artists and their The study of Victorian art is most will to make it less for But it is by no A remains to be it

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• Visualizing Identities

  Amelia Yeates•Visual Culture in Britain•2015

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