The Invention of British Art

The Invention of British Art
Virtual Roundtable

October 25, 2024
9am PDT | 12pm EDT | 5pm BST

The notion of British art emerged during the Victorian period with roots in the late 18th century. Roundtable speakers will problematize and historicize the concept of British art in international and interdisciplinary contexts. Competitive national “schools” emerged across Europe from the eighteenth century on, shaping production and reception. The “British school “ was a reaction to centuries of foreigners (e.g., Van Dyck, Holbein) hired by the Royal Court. William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds became curiously inscribed as British art’s founding fathers despite their antagonistic methods and aesthetics.

Panelists will examine the Victorian art histories that invented this notion, an internationalizing art market, the expanded British public, Victorian modernism, art’s imperial receptions, and anthropology’s notions of primitivism. The creation of British art was tied to Victorian nationalism, empire, a rising middle class, changing gender and class identities, expanded public education, and emerging cultural institutions (e.g., dealers’ galleries, museums). Furthermore, the concept of British Art intersected with an increasingly international art market: Bond Street galleries of Dutch, French, and German art; art from Asia and white settler colonies highlighted in the art press; and Victorian art exhibited and collected across the globe, becoming de-territorialized and re-signified abroad. The artworld was imbricated in commodity culture through dealers’ new roles, new kinds of exhibitions, auctions, museums, art journalism, and World’s Fairs that shaped a fragile and tenuous “Britishness” amid international displays.

Today art in Britain still echoes the Victorian artworld’s imperial and global legacy: e.g., the 4 short-listed 2022 Turner Prize artists came from Canada, Guyana, and Montserrat, the latter two active in the Black Artists movement.

Speakers

Julie Codell
Arizona State U
“Invented Art Histories”
The influential Samuel and Richard Redgraves’ art history (1866; 1890) was intended to correct disjunctive, anecdotal 17th-and 18th-century British art histories by creating a master narrative that defined national identity, Britishness, masculine fraternity, and cultural superiority. To do this the Redgraves attacked foreign artists who worked for centuries in Britain, usually at court, denigrated women artists, advocated for the Royal Academy, and promoted artists as embodying Victorian values of individualism, respectability, and social propriety in a sanitized, nationalistic, ideological British art history.

Pamela Fletcher
Bowdoin College
“Salisbury, Portsmouth, Dublin: The Circulation of Art and the Definition of a ‘British Public’”
Moving through a far-flung network of local art dealers, print sellers, and bookstores, many Victorian pictures were exhibited for days, weeks or even several months in cities and towns across the nation and empire, reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers. How can we recover this history of circulation and how might it trouble our London-centric definitions of a “British public”?

Anne Helmreich
Director, Smithsonian Archives of American Art
“Imperial, Transatlantic, British, English, or Metropolitan London? The Geographic Frame of the Victorian Art Market”
I elucidate the geographic context for Victorian artists and dealers, focusing on the print market. Lightweight, multiple, and portable, prints held promise for an increasingly international and imperial art market, but significant points of friction and resistance emerged.

Morna O’Neill
Wake Forest U
“Victorian, Edwardian, Modern? Periodization and the Demise of British Art”
I will address the unstable place of “British art” in US art history, vis-a-vis periodization. Scholars have sought to problematize “Victorian” and “Edwardian” as challenging art historical conceptions of modernity and Modernism. In addition, historical and artistic considerations of imperial entanglements further reveal the existential precariousness of “British art.”

Amy Woodson-Boulton
Loyola Marymount U
“’British Art’ and ‘Primitive Art’”
Museums of art and anthropology developed alongside and in relation to one another. How did these institutions—and their separateness—work together to help define “British art” in the nineteenth century? How do these legacies continue to shape these institutions today, as they grapple with their colonial histories?