Victorian Material Culture

Victoria Mills, Kate Nichols, Victoria Mills, Kate Nichols

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781138225329
• eBook ISBN: 9781315400242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Commodities

From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. This volume on 'Victorian Arts' will include sources on painting sculpture, book illustration, photography and the much-neglected area of Victorian stained glass.

PART 1 Paintings

1.1 Artists’ materials

DOI: 10.4324/9781315400266-3

1.1 Artists’ materials

Paint is perhaps the most obvious of artists’ materials, but it is only one among many. Artists’ materials also include supports (usually canvas); priming (also often referred to as grounds) applied to the support to prepare it for the application of paint; pigment (which gives colour to paint); vehicles, which bind the pigment to make paint, most commonly linseed in the nineteenth century, as well as poppy seed and in some instances whale oil; brushes and palette knives (and palettes); varnish, applied after painting (egg white as a temporary varnish, usually replaced by either mastic or copal); and picture frames.¹ And these are just the materials that make up the painting, before one considers props, costumes, plaster casts, anatomical models, cadavers (human and animal) or the ‘lay figure’, a jointed wooden doll, sometimes life-sized, which by the nineteenth century often had a stuffed torso and arms, and was used to model clothing and pose in place of a living model.²

Artists’ materials underwent numerous changes in the long nineteenth century, and the sources selected here foreground contemporary understandings of these transformations. There is a focus on William Holman Hunt, largely because he was so vociferous on the subject of artists’ materials, while Ford Madox Brown’s diary provides a more personal insight into an artist’s use of a lay figure, and offers a glimpse of the practical ways in which artists discussed their materials. These diary entries demonstrate the physical labour of making art (itself laboured on by Madox Brown in his enumeration of hours worked): the wrestling with lay figures, whose arrangement, according to Madox Brown, seems to have been inordinately time-consuming. The materials of the lay figure had a significant impact on its use, as Brown discovered on leaving his out in the rain. This is not, of course, to suggest that artists in the later nineteenth century, or those outside of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, did not engage with materials.³ Indeed, as David Peters Corbett and Kirstie Sinclair Dootson have explored, the later nineteenth century was a period of intense scrutiny of the ways in which meaning was created by the physical stuff of paint, with varied political implications.⁴

Collapsible metal paint tubes were introduced in 1841, making painting a much more portable activity. Previously, paint had been supplied in animal bladders, bound at the top; painters would pierce the bladder with a tack and use a stopper of wood or ivory to keep the paint in. They readily burst and were notoriously messy. After the widespread introduction of paint tubes, bladders became obsolete. But as short pieces from Art-Union reproduced here suggest, even in 1840 when rival new technologies for paint transportation were being produced (in this case Winsor and Newton’s patented – and very expensive – glass syringes), the disappearance of bladders was by no means a foregone conclusion. The Art-Union editorial comments favourably on the potential broadening of opportunities that Winsor and Newton’s glass tubes might bring to female artists, who had apparently been previously put off by the inconvenience and mess of transporting paint in bladders. A later nineteenth-century Winsor and Newton advert for moist watercolours in collapsible tubes (an innovation of around 1850) shows the range of colours available (including Indian yellow and indigo, discussed in the next section) and their comparative prices. The advertisement’s seeming embarrassment in its promotion of these tubes despite them being ‘somewhat wasteful’ seems particularly noteworthy; as Harley remarked in an article of 1971, the collapsible metal tubes made for artists were also the beginning of disposable packaging for a wide range of commodities.⁵

The suppliers of artists’ materials also changed, a topic addressed by numerous sources in the painting section. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, artists generally manufactured their own paints, passing on recipes through their studios. Victorian artists, like Holman Hunt, became increasingly aware of this practice after the translation into English of Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte (1437) by Mary Merrifield in 1844. As the status of artists changed, and as more and more people started painting, by the seventeenth century a new business had sprung up: the artist’s colourman (although there were also colourwomen, like Elizabeth Emerton who took over her late husband’s business in 1741).⁶ Colourmen supplied paint and materials, often at first as a sideline (generally they were involved in manufacturing house paints as well). By the nineteenth century, most professional artists also used colourmen rather than making their own paints, and a number of firms emerged, including Reeves, Winsor and Newton, Ackermann’s and Robersons. The mid- and later nineteenth-century return to medieval media such as fresco and especially tempera (discussed in detail in the following section) is a key reaction against purchasing ready-made materials.

In the speech reprinted here, Holman Hunt details the alienation of the nineteenth-century painter from their materials, and advocates the formation of a ‘society for looking after the material interests of painting’.⁷ Holman Hunt draws on mid-century investigations into the history of pigments, including Merrifield’s Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting (1849) and Eastlake’s Materials for a History of Oil Painting (1847), and suggests the key material role played by new engagements with ‘Old Masters’ for Victorian artists.⁸ He notes the impact that larger political events might have had on the supply of artists’ materials, in this case the shift in linseed production for oil paints from the Black Sea to India after the Crimean War. Holman Hunt emphasises the importance of materials for making art; as he understands it, artists are currently in a state of ‘helplessness’, which is hindering ‘our national genius’.⁹ Understanding materials had wide-reaching consequences.¹⁰

Some artists – especially those associated with Pre-Raphaelitism – began experimenting with designing their own one-off picture frames in the 1840s and 1850s. They attempted to move away from mass-produced picture frames and to engage with a Ruskinian ‘truth’ in materials and textures.¹¹ From the 1860s onwards, those connected with the Victorian ‘classical revival’ also commissioned frames to fit their artworks.¹² The importance of frames in contributing to the meaning of artworks is explored in Frederick Stephens’ discussion of William Holman Hunt’s Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–1860), an image that examines the relationship between what Hunt saw as the ‘old’ (Judaism) and the ‘new’ (Christianity). Contemporary reviews similarly noted that the painting seemed uncontainable: ‘the symbols have overflowed the picture, and expanded themselves all over the frame’.¹³ In his 1873 volume of essays Thoughts on Art, art critic Philip Hamerton further explored the role of frames in relation to their materials and suggested a range of new technological solutions to the problem of ‘the extreme perishableness of frames’.¹⁴ This, Hamerton asserts, was exacerbated in the nineteenth century by industrial pollution, making it nearly impossible to keep the gilt clean, in addition to the damage caused by the regular circulation of paintings at exhibitions, a relatively recent innovation.

Notes

• 1 An overview is provided by Joyce H. Townsend, ‘The Materials used by British Oil Painters in the Nineteenth-Century’, Tate Papers, 2 (2004), at https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers [accessed 15 June 2021]. More detailed analysis is provided in Leslie Carlyle, The Artist’s Assistant: Oil Painting Instruction Manuals and Handbooks in Britain, 1800–1900, with Reference to Selected Eighteenth-century Sources (London: Archetype, 2001). Jason Edwards offers an essential critical reflection on the use of whale oil in Turner’s paintings in ‘The Vegan Viewer in the Circum-Polar World; Or, J. H. Wheldon’s The Diana and Chase in the Arctic (1857)’, in E. Quinn and B. Westwood (eds), Towards a Vegan Theory. Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 79–106.
• 2 Jane Munro (ed.), Silent partners: artist and mannequin from function to fetish (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014).
• 3 A survey of other sources for nineteenth-century artists materials is provided by Townsend, ‘Materials Used by British Oil Painters’. Briefly, these comprise: inventories of artists’ studios at their deaths (e.g. Turner); archives of artists’ colourmen; artists correspondence; surviving materials (such as artists’ palettes).
• 4 David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 83–127; Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, “The Texture of Capitalism: Industrial Oil Colours and the Politics of Paint in the Work of G.F. Watts”, British Art Studies, 14 (2019), at www.britishartstudies.ac.uk [accessed 15 June 2021].
• 5 R. D. Harley, ‘Oil colour containers: Development work by artists and colourmen in the nineteenth century’, Annals of Science, 27:1 (1971), pp. 1–12.
• 6 For an overview, see Paint & painting: an exhibition and working studio sponsored by Winsor & Newton to celebrate their 150th anniversary (London: Tate Gallery, 1982), pp. 35–44.
• 7 William Holman Hunt, ‘The Present System of Obtaining Materials in use by Artist Painters, as Compared with that of the Old Masters’, Journal of the Society of Arts (23 April 1880), pp. 485–99, on p. 498.
• 8 See further Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern painters, old masters: the art of imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017).
• 9 Holman Hunt, ‘Present System of Obtaining Materials’, p. 498.
• 10 For more on Holman Hunt and materials, see M. R. Katz, ‘Holman Hunt on Himself: textual evidence in aid of technical analysis’, in E. Hermens (ed.) Looking Through Paintings: the Study of Painting Techniques and Materials in Support of Art Historical Research (London: Archetype, 1998), pp 415–44; Carol Jacobi, William Holman Hunt: Painter, Painting, Paint (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
• 11 Lynn Roberts, ‘Nineteenth-Century English Picture Frames I: The Pre-Raphaelites’, International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 4 (1985), pp. 155–172.
• 12 Lynn Roberts, ‘Nineteenth-Century English Picture Frames II: The Victorian High Renaissance’, International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 5 (1986), pp. 273–293.
• 13 Manchester Guardian, 24 April 1860, reproduced in F. G. Stephens, William Holman Hunt and his Works: a memoir of the artist’s life, with description of his pictures (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1860), p. 115.
• 14 Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Thoughts About Art (London: Macmillan and Co., 1873), p. 369.

1 ‘VARIETIES’ Art-Union 3:26 (March 1841), p. 49

DOI: 10.4324/9781315400266-4

WINSOR AND NEWTON’S GLASS TUBES. – This is a most valuable invention, and well calculated to supersede every former method of putting up colour for the immediate use of the artist. The advantages of these tubes are important, and not the least so is the perfect cleanliness with which the colour is transferred to the palette. This is effected by means of a small air-tight screw, which acting at one end forces the colour out of a small orifice at the other end, and so perfectly under control, that any quantity can with ease be ejected from a very minute portion to the entire contents of the tube. The colour in these vessels does not thicken and become dry, as is usual in the ordinary bladder packets, but works well and freely to the last, after having been kept any length of time. It is a matter of surprise, that amid the many objections to the old method of putting up colours, nothing has before been devis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Introduction to Volume VI: Victorian Arts
• Part 1 Paintings
• Part 2 Sculpture
• Part 3 Stained glass
• Part 4 Art of the book
• Part 5 Photography
• Index