Victorian Artists' Autograph Replicas

Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage and the Art Market

Julie F. Codell, Julie F. Codell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429628078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Business

This book is a wide-ranging exploration of the production of Victorian art autograph replicas, a painting's subsequent versions created by the same artist who painted the first version.

Autograph replicas were considered originals, not copies, and were highly valued by collectors in Britain, America, Japan, Australia, and South Africa. Motivated by complex combinations of aesthetic and commercial interests, replicas generated a global, and especially transatlantic, market between the 1870s and the 1940s, and almost all collected replicas were eventually donated to US public museums, giving replicas authority in matters of public taste and museums' modern cultural roles.

This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, museum studies, and economic history.

Part I

Introduction

1 Victorian Artists’ Autograph Replicas

Auras, Aesthetics, Copyright, and Economics

Julie F. Codell

Authors in this book argue that replicas in the Victorian art world were among the most prolific, sought-after, and vigorously consumed objects in the Victorian art world, becoming a near industry for many artists. Replication was not a marginal activity but was central enough to be much debated in Parliament and in the press throughout the century over issues of copyright, artists’ agency, patrons’ control of artists’ production, market values, and the struggle over authority and power between patrons and artists. Beyond Britain, replicas retained a high value among later collectors around the globe who were willing at times to pay high prices to obtain replicas by celebrity artists; many of these works now populate US museums and have thus shaped public taste in the United States. Even those patrons who worried that replicas of their first versions would affect the market value of their first versions and who thus refused to let artists make replicas of those first versions at the same time commissioned replicas of other works by their favorite, often celebrity, artists, so desirable were autograph replicas.

While the replica is distinct from the copy, it existed in an expansive and intense “culture of the copy” (Schwartz) embracing prints, full-page images in periodicals, models both scientific and artistic, and the frequent miniaturization of objects, epitomized by the copies of sculpture and other objects and images that filled the re-sited Crystal Palace at Sydenham.¹ This culture provided an entrée into high culture for a mass audience, as copies offered cultural capital to those unable to afford originals, but whose contact with high culture was part of an effort to solidify public taste and shape national identity. Replicas, unlike copies, served a much smaller circle of art patrons and collectors able to purchase paintings and who commissioned replicas that maintained an identity as a work of originality not sustained by copies. The function, reception and circulation of replicas, then, differed from that of other kinds of repetitions, or exact copies, or forgeries (Briefel; Wood).

To understand replica production requires investigating artists’ studio practices and their complex, often implicit or subterranean, relations to the market, to patrons, and to the public. Artists considered their autograph replicas to be value-added—their later production, they argued, reflected more skill and knowledge on their part and so merited higher prices for replicas than for first versions. In this volume authors examined artists’ replication practices from a variety of perspectives: from the purchases of canvases of various sizes (Frith) to artists’ rhetorical ways of describing their replication practices to patrons and to other artists (Rossetti; Hunt) to a recognition that replication was a way to explore their own ideas (Moore; Watts) aside from or alongside commercial motives. Artists’ studio practices varied from making replicas directly from first versions, the most common method, to making replicas from sketches for first versions, also common, to making replicas by starting from scratch with models and props—not a common method at all despite artists’ claims to the contrary. In several cases, artists produced first versions and replicas of these at the same time in their studios (e.g., chapters here on D. G. Rossetti, James Tissot, Edward Burne-Jones, and Abraham Solomon), disrupting our conventional notions of the chronology of versions and of studio practice.

In this volume, chapter authors reveal a variety of reasons and motives for producing and for consuming replicas and so demonstrate that replica production was not monolithic or completely motivated by commercial interests. Rather it was a complex production that created, expressed and revealed intertwined aesthetic and market values. While most first versions remained in Britain, often landing in public museums, later versions traveled around the globe, many settling in the United States and a few in Australia, Japan, Israel, South Africa, among other places.

In these explorations, this volume’s authors provide a groundbreaking study, embracing examinations of artists’ studio practices and relations to the market, to patrons, and to the public. The study of replica production, like recent fields of art market studies and studies of collecting, serves to help us rethink assumptions about commercial motives, artists’ participation in the market, and patrons as the co-producers of art. Some of these topics have begun to be addressed in the study of nineteenth-century French art.² Victorian replica production, however, differs in some ways from that of French artists and merits a distinct, in-depth study such as offered in this volume.

This book breaks new ground in its wide-ranging exploration of the production of autograph replicas in Victorian art. Our focus makes our subject appear diametrically opposed to the usual view of a painting as a one-off, unique, singular production, in contrast to inherently reproducible sculptures and prints.³ Print reproductions and sculpture translations or adaptations (reproductions in different media) are distinct from autograph replicas in painting and have merited many of their own studies.⁴ Despite recent studies of copies and replicas (e.g., Mainardi; Boon), the actual processes of Victorian artists’ production and reception have remained understudied.

Autograph replicas were produced in France, Italy, and the United States, as well, earning the nineteenth century the reputation as a “culture of replication” (Orvell 39).⁵ This culture affected all aspects of nineteenth-century Victorian life—literature, art, manufacturing, science, and media (Codell and Hughes). Among the important artists of the period who produced autograph replicas were Vincent Van Gogh, J.A.D. Ingres, D. G. Rossetti, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Delaroche, Camille Corot, Edgar Degas, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-François Millet, Gustave Courbet, Edward Burne-Jones, William Merritt Chase, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet. Peter Gay noted, “the Victorian century begot a veritable industry devoted to paintings of paintings” (Gay 59).

Artists making copies and variations of their own work was a regular practice from at least the Renaissance on. However, there were two distinct changes in the nineteenth century. One was that Victorian artists defined replicas as variations, not exact copies of earlier versions, and, secondly, replicas had a global market based on a celebrity culture in which some artists’ achieved brand-name status having their lives and works publicized in the press to feed an increasingly literate public’s appetite for culture as a mark of social status. While the word derived its common meaning from replica (Italian, c. 1555), “a copy or duplicate of a work of art” (OED), “replica” in relation to art appeared first in English in 1824, meaning “a copy or duplicate of a work of art; esp. a copy made by the original artist” (OED Online), referring to autograph works.⁶ The changed meaning from copy to version brought it closer to the eighteenth-century Italian replicare: a response or rejoinder, an expanded meaning that reflected changing studio practices, artist-patron relations, widening reception, and notions of creativity, originality, and value.

Autograph replicas could be editorial interventions by an artist experimenting with a subject or by a commissioning patron requesting changes in size, medium, or subject from the first version. There are many references in Victorian periodicals to art replicas as versions by Old Masters and by living British artists, indicating the acceptance of replication. Popular in the nineteenth century, banished by modernists’ fetish of originality, and re-evaluated under postmodernism’s fascination with appropriation and repetition, the autograph replica offers some new ways to understand art and art history. Art historian David Freedberg argues that studying “copies and transformations remains one of the great tasks of the history of images” (121); autograph replicas are “transformations” worthy of such a task.

Pre-modern Praise of Copies

Medieval replicas were believed linked to a sacred original (often imaginary) and workshop apprentices contributed to most Renaissance replicas. The modern replica emerged in the eighteenth century when replication took on new functions for patrons, fueled partly by an emerging celebrity culture and patronage in a free market. Many Renaissance artists were well-known throughout Europe and often traveled widely to fulfill commissions across Europe. Most court artists in Britain were foreigners from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries: Anthony van Dyck, Hans Holbein, Hans Memling, Petrus Christus, and Levina Teerlinc, among others. Their fame rested on aristocratic patronage and on humanists (e.g., Erasmus) who exchanged portraits, with one another, portraits being the major genre these patrons demanded.

Alexander Nagel points out that

before the advent of the cult of art—before the museum, the picture gallery, the connoisseur, the art dealer, and the art forgery—images naturally took the form of copies… . as translations of the physical form of a person … [that] transmitted something of the essence of the person they depicted… . the Byzantine icon was based on the idea that a copy of an image … was another translation of the prototype-form… . and so belonged as much to the time of the content they depicted as to the time of their making.

(http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/14/nagel.php)

Patricia Rubin argues that in fifteenth-century northern Italy,

the application of makers’ names also became a more systematic aspect of the commerce of art… . as trademarks, with standardized formulae and formats… . guaranteed the master’s handiwork, if not the actual presence of his hand… . into the sixteenth century.

(Rubin 570)

These ideas persisted into the Baroque period, as Maria Loh argues:

The term “originality” is itself an eighteenth-century invention… . Repetition played an important role in … Baroque practice and theory… . premodernist discourse addressed the question of artistic innovation within… . an aesthetic mode that embraced demonstrative repetition through its own historically bound terms … mixture (misto), wit (acutezza), novelty (novita), theft (furto), and pastiche (pasticcio).

(Loh, 2004, 477)

Repetition as pastiche was appreciated as a type of imitation that “glosses, appropriates, or recontextualizes previous works… . the forger does not want the viewer to see the deception, whereas the artist of repetition does” (Loh, 2004, 478).

Furthermore, “invention” and “unique construction” could be seen as improvements. Sometimes an artist imitated another artist’s style (maniera) or theme (concetti) or specific details (figure) and “the vehicle for demonstrating artistic ingenuity was the witticism (acutezza).” Repetitions contributed to building canons, constructing artistic identities, sustaining reputations and interpreting the model (Loh, 2007). Spectating meant “being able to see several things at once (for example, the new in the old and vice versa) and to see one thing in several ways (such as originality in repetition)” (Loh, 2004, 489), so repetitions served to please viewers and to express novel...