CHAPTER VI - ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Summary

In the arts of building, painting and sculpture, the nineteenth century starts about 1760. Before that date in most countries art had been a need of the church or the pleasure of court and nobility. From that date the artist, like the writer, began to emancipate himself from patronage. Art became the pursuit of self-reliant, socially emphatically independent men. ‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’, is what Shelley called the artists, and Schiller ranks the bard with the king; ‘for both walk on the summits of mankind’. The social break is best remembered in this country by Dr Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, written in 1755:

Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind, but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it,… till I am known, and do not want it.

It is characteristic that this remarkably early declaration of liberty should have been written in England. For socially, politically, philosophically, England was the leading country of Europe in the eighteenth century. That this was so in art and architecture too, is less known. It might be denied on the strength of the supreme aesthetic qualities of Watteau's or Tiepolo's paintings or the South German and Austrian churches and palaces of the Rococo. But if the later eighteenth century is looked at as a preface to the nineteenth, then it will be recognised beyond any doubt that from road making and canal making, from factory construction (of iron as early as 1792) and bridge construction to the arts of architecture and painting England was ahead at least until the closing years of the century.