‘A slave kept in Leyland’s back parlour’: The Male Artist in the Victorian Marketplace

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones enjoyed regular patronage from a variety of middle-class patrons, such as William Graham and Frederick Leyland. Nonetheless, such support came with drawbacks; Burne-Jones complained of being a ‘slave’ to Leyland and Rossetti described his relationship to patrons as that of a ‘whore’. These figurations speak of the dilemma the nineteenth-century male artist faced in the Victorian marketplace, a concern shared by literary artists too: for example, Browning in his artist poems. Focusing on self-perceptions by Victorian artists, as well as poetic representations of artists by Victorian writers and didactic commentaries about artists by authors such as Samuel Smiles, this article explores the various tropes used for imagining the male artist in relation to the challenges of the contemporary marketplace. It focuses in particular on concerns about the emasculation of the artist and the gendering of issues such as artistic freedom versus commodification.