Mural Painting in Britain 1630-1730

Experiencing Histories

Lydia Hamlett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315466156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

This book illuminates the original meanings of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mural paintings in Britain.

At the time, these were called 'histories'. Throughout the eighteenth century, though, the term became directly associated with easel painting and, as 'history painting' achieved the status of a sublime genre, any link with painted architectural interiors was lost. Whilst both genres contained historical figures and narratives, it was the ways of viewing them that differed. Lydia Hamlett emphasises the way that mural paintings were experienced by spectators within their architectural settings. New iconographical interpretations and theories of effect and affect are considered an important part of their wider historical, cultural and social contexts.

This book is intended to be read primarily by specialists, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in new approaches to British art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

1 Animating Histories

Domestic wall paintings in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods mostly contained religious or moralising subjects and, bar a couple of famous examples, did not aim at effect – or affect – through illusionistic representation.¹ It was under the Stuarts that murals really took on a life of their own, encouraged by the introduction of continental artistic forms, the growing fashion for personalising a pagan mythology and the unprecedented increase in house building. These include the earliest example of a painted staircase at Knole, Kent; the houses of Sir Francis Bacon at Gorhambury and Verulam; the ‘play palace’ of Bolsover Castle; a plethora of painted ceilings and overmantels in royal residences, including at Whitehall and the Queen’s House, as well as the major extant mural commission of the late civil war and Interregnum, Wilton House.² Spaces within houses, in particular places of assembly and staircases, were developed, taking on functional and symbolic meanings that opened them up to tropes redolent of transformation, interactivity and the act of experience. History painting, if one defines it as easel painting, thrived neither amongst native artists nor migrant artists in Stuart Britain; nonetheless, vast histories began to be played out on the walls and ceilings of great houses. Murals were called ‘histories’, which referred to both historical and mythological and allegorical subjects, throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and their artists were called history painters.³ The historical and other parts of the painted interior were usually distinguished one from the other, with the histories costing more.⁴ But whilst murals were an important medium through which these histories could be represented, there remains a historiographical lacuna where they should be. This first phase of the assimilation of the continental mural into British visual culture, spanning the reigns of the early Stuarts until the Restoration, has its own characteristics that further complicate the picture. Firstly, most mural schemes from this time were oil on canvases inserted into architectural surrounds, sometimes painted in Britain and at other times commissioned and sent from abroad. Because these paintings were just as integral to their original architectural environments as were later murals painted directly onto the walls, they will be treated as equally important in trying to understand the role murals played in contemporary cultural life. Secondly, whilst some early murals appear to have been novel compositions (including the central panel of the Double Cube Room ceiling at Wilton House, discussed below), many others relied on visual sources, usually continental, from prints, book illustrations or even other mural paintings. These artistic borrowings have traditionally rendered seventeenth-century mural painting less interesting on account of its being derivative, lacking in artistic invention. It will become clear over the course of this book that, rather than copying images wholesale, murals instead repurposed them, allowing their subjects to be experienced in a totally new way.

Murals as Histories

A persistent unwillingness to acknowledge the narrative content and ideas contained within murals, or the ways in which these were experienced by a viewer, is in large part due to the entrenched nomenclature used to describe the genre of mural painting. The word ‘decorative’ or, more recently, ‘decorative-history’ (as a nod to their content), has only served to compact derogatory eighteenth-century criticism of murals as superfluous additions to architecture.⁵ ‘Decorative’ was not a term widely used during the period of time covered by this book and later came to be used to describe art that used often repetitive and one-dimensional forms, in other words art devoid of narrative. Most recently, it has been used to describe the decorative arts, objects in various media used to furnish interiors. Abandoning the word ‘decorative’ in this book, pace Alfred Gell, is not to argue that murals did not adorn or enhance architecture – they did and were described contemporaneously as doing so – and of course not to say that murals served any structural purpose.⁶ It is rather to argue that the way the word ‘decorative’, as retrospectively applied to murals by modern art historians, has by association placed them lower down in order of priority for sustained study. This is anachronistic: a co-dependency of animation existed between architecture, painting and other arts in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and murals were an integral part of this.

History painting was defined loosely in Britain in the 1600s, where the writer and theorist, William Aglionby, described it as, ‘an Assembling of many Figures in one Piece, to Represent any Action of Life, whether True or Fabulous, accompanied with all its Ornaments of Landskip and Perspective’.⁷ Until the communication of a singular, usually moral, narrative or idea became history painting’s primary objective, with its associated formal changes, a separation of subject and medium had not been considered necessary. By the time of the Earl of Shaftesbury’s treatise the Tablature of Hercules, though, and the painting by Paolo de’ Mattheis produced to accompany it, it was no longer sufficient for history painting to contain historical subjects (see Plate 1). The key to history painting for Shaftesbury – the type that was to prevail and to be held up as the most ‘sublime’ of genres by the end of the eighteenth century – was to present a plausible account of an historical event or myth.⁸ To eliminate confusion, this focused on the way that the subject was presented, and entailed capturing an obvious moment in time. The protagonist should make himself or herself known to the viewer, their portrayal taking precedence over the secondary and tertiary figures who should, in turn, take care not to interfere with one another (in the case of the Choice of Hercules, the hierarchy is Hercules, Virtue and then Vice).⁹ Utmost care should be taken not to detract from authenticity with anachronistic garments or questionable perspective, whilst human activity, as opposed to landscape or animals, was elevated to be the sole focus.¹⁰ Since credibility was key, emblems were banned alongside other objects Shaftesbury considered superfluous. Similarly any detail not concomitant with the tragic style of the work should be omitted.¹¹ Shaftesbury concludes that both painter and poet are historians but that painters have a more difficult challenge because, at least according to his new rules, they are compelled to represent the past in a single view.

None of these objectives, which became crucial to eighteenth- to nineteenth-century history painting, in particular after the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768, were high on the priority list of art forms in the long seventeenth century, a period that can loosely be described as the English, then British, Baroque. Instead, the emphasis was on the process of transformation, the spectator’s journey of discovery, or enquiry, into meaning. The display and juxtaposition of histories that murals and architecture together facilitated, of which allegory was a key part, provided the physical context in which this journey could be undertaken. Shaftesbury’s use of the word ‘wild’ to describe murals confirms that the genre refused, from a British point of view, to be subjected to any form of rule-making, unlike contemporaneously evolving types of painting such as the Kit-Cat portrait, or the conversation piece, both of which adhered to the principles of politeness.¹² Shaftesbury was also concerned to distance himself from the Académie Royale where history painting and mural painting were one and the same thing.¹³ He refused to believe that the mural as a medium could be anything more than partisan propaganda, so heavily linked as it was to political absolutism. Murals, with their haywire perspective, jumbled hosts of figures, abundance of emblems, personifications and enigmatic narratives, diverged in almost every way from Shaftesbury’s ideal presentation of the historical subject that has so shaped our modern view of what history painting should be. Taking almost any individual ceiling or wall painting and trying to identify a single idea behind it is a challenge for a contemporary spectator, and this is only compounded when we look at a sequence of murals one next to the other. The feeling of confusion we have when first faced with most schemes quickly turns to indignation: if the meaning is not immediately clear, or does not become clear with a cursory attempt at trying to elucidate it (having been well-versed in what we can expect from modern history painting), we conclude it must be frivolous. Adjectives such as this are applied conveniently to describe both the form and the content of murals, each a reflection of the other. This response is, perhaps, understandable from the point of view of a contemporary viewer. Though rather than assuming failure on the part of the artist or patron, perhaps we are still missing the point when it comes to decoding murals.

Murals as Animators

Whilst murals were not contemporaneously described as decorative in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, their function was frequently described as animative. Using Samuel Johnson’s definition, we can say that murals had the power ‘to give life to’ the histories that patrons wanted the spectator to understand, experience and be persuaded by in their homes. These included their personal histories, often intertwined with those of mythology, as well as the histories of their seats, and the significance of their family within the political, religious and cultural contexts of the day.¹⁴ That this was the status quo is confirmed by various literary sources, includ...