11 - Art

Summary

Since the Renaissance, the British had the reputation of being a literary, but assuredly not a visual, nation. Thus the sudden flourishing of visual art in Victorian Britain could seem an astonishing development. Certainly the French thought so, when they encountered the fine arts of Great Britain at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1855. This was the first of the great international exhibitions to make a feature of fine art (the Great Exhibition of 1851, for which the Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park, excluded painting). 'An English painting is as modern as a novel by Balzac', wrote Théophile Gautier, who began his two-volume collection of reprinted press notices with ten chapters on artists of the British school, among them Mulready, Landseer, Grant, Millais, Hunt, Egg, Frost, Hook, Webster, Leslie - 'the truly original talents, the incontestable glories of England' - names strange to the French in 1855. And when Baudelaire reviewed the Paris Salon four years later, he began by lamenting the absence of the British, again listing the strange names: Leslie, the two Hunts, Maclise, Millais, Chalon, Grant, Hook, Paton, Cattermole. Some rumour had led Baudelaire to hope for a sight of 'these devotees of the imagination and of exotic colour, . . . these favourites of the fantastic muse; but alas', the British did not appear, and Baudelaire addresses them in disappointment: 'Were you so badly received then the first time . . . and do you consider us unworthy of understanding you?'