Art and Money in the Writings of Tobias Smollett by William L. Gibson

Abstract

130 false, and greatly detracts from its value. Brian McCrea University of Florida WILLIAM L. GIBSON. Art and Money in the Writings of Tobias Smollett. Lewisburg : Bucknell, 2007. Pp. 227. $49.50. Like many a Smollettian before him, Mr. Gibson chafes against the conventional view of his author as a ‘‘rough and tumble, second-rate scribbler’’ and, in response, offers a refreshing view through the lens of Smollett’s various writings on art and the commercial art market. The danger of such an approach is that it may tend to the selective or the reductive in its analysis of available texts, but Mr. Gibson manages to avoid these shoals. One might also ask the bigger question whether the ambivalence Mr. Gibson ultimately detects in Smollett’s portrayal of both artists and the new commercial imperatives of the art world of the eighteenth century may simply be inconsistency displayed over a long career of what amounts to hackwork , but here again the book is persuasive . Mr. Gibson advances the premise that Smollett’s articles on art in the Critical Review (usefully collected in an appendix to Art and Money) make him ‘‘the first writer of periodical art criticism’’ in English. Smollett used his journalistic criticism, we are told, to promote art and individual artists (often friends like Sir Robert Strange) as vehicles of British economic and national progress. The ambivalence is found elsewhere, in Smollett’s portrayal of the artist Pallet in Peregrine Pickle, whose failed career illustrates the downside of the marketplace Smollett more confidently endorsed in his art criticism. With respect to Pallet himself, Mr. Gibson is wise to try to move us away from the stale biographical debate (based on Hogarth? probably unverifiable) to possible literary antecedents (Eumolpus from the Satyricon ). The author’s suggestion that Pallet is in some ways Smollett himself, however, may fall a bit flat. We are also shown that Smollett’s responses to specific works of art are more sophisticated than might be expected , and it is here (for this reviewer) that Mr. Gibson’s book gains momentum . In Smollett’s reaction to an engraving by Strange after Guido Reni’s Toilet of Venus and to the erotic in general , we are shown Smollett’s divergence from the Burkean conception of the sublime: for Smollett, it is not merely through pain and terror that ecstasy may be achieved, but also by ‘‘exquisite titillation.’’ (More, possibly, could be made here of the relations between Smollett and his exquisitely titillating friend John Cleland.) The chapter on Smollett’s art criticism in the Travels through France and Italy is generally well done. There, Mr. Gibson shows us Smollett’s distrust of modern connoisseurship and consumerism—another departure from the less questioning art journalism of the Critical Review. Along the way, there are irritating tics. Mr. Gibson’s use of the modern notions of ‘‘cool’’ and ‘‘hipness’’ to explain the eighteenth-century conception of ‘‘taste’’ grates after the first couple of times, and is Balthus really the best modern analogy he can find with the Guido extolled by both Smollett and Cleland? Mr. Gibson is on firmer ground when he notes Smollett’s affinity for Flemish genre painting of the seventeenth century—like the tavern scene by Adriaen Brouwer that adorns the book’s dust jacket—even if this reinforces the view of Smollett as the jolly 131 chronicler of low life. Also irritating are the comparisons with modern ‘‘media darlings’’ and ‘‘micro-celebrities’’ (whatever the latter might be). In a book that very few nonspecialist readers will ever see, it is unnecessary to add ‘‘[sic]’’ after common eighteenth-century spellings like ‘‘antient’’ and ‘‘critick’’—but this may have been the decision of a Bucknell editor. More significantly, the interpretation is occasionally labored, for example where Mr. Gibson makes heavier weather of one of Pallet’s malapropisms (‘‘Potatoe domine date’’) than is probably justified. Similarly, it seems unfair at once to say that Smollett is critical in Humphry Clinker of the neo-Palladian ‘‘improvement’’ of the Baynards’s seat at the expense of its former, venerable Gothic appearance, and that the ‘‘the faux Palladian façade covers the ‘Gothic ignorance’’’ of its improver: this is having and...