Herkomer: A Victorian Artist (review)

Abstract

This thoroughly researched and illustrated book on Hubert von Herkomer is a much- needed volume on one of the principal social realists of the later-Victorian period. Born in Germany but raised in Southampton, Herkomer was a largely self-taught artist with an excellent visual memory and a gift for narrative. As a member of that circle of artists who drew for the Graphic magazine--Frank Holls and Luke Fildes among them--he was inspired by the magazine's editor, William Luson Thomas, to wander London in pursuit of scenes of urban life at the lowest level. The market for genre scenes of pleasant peasants and cherubic children had seemed endless, inspired as it was by the Victorian desire to reassure the middle classes that the lower classes were picturesque and harmless. The artists of the Graphic did not do much to disabuse their middle-class readers (who paid sixpence per issue for the privilege) of a sense of superior comfort, but they did bring the occasional astringent view of floggings, poverty, and cultural conflict into the public view. Herkomer's interesting position as an outsider, as a young man with a more complicated background, as Other we might now say, may have given him an edge in portraying the obverse side of the city. But in this very direct account of the artist's life and work, Lee MacCormick Edwards relinquishes any theoretical framework for analysis or critique. If there is a fault in the book, it is that the author's methodology is so absolutely straightforward that no question of alienation or duality of identity is explored. Herkomer's own desire to be absolutely acceptable to the English art world seems seconded by his biographer. [End Page 641]