La presse et le développement du marché de l'art à Londres dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle

Abstract

In the decades following the Glorious Revolution, painting and the arts in general did not seem readily compatible with the values of the newly created Protestant nation. As there was no national school of painting, British amateurs imported works of art from the Continent and artistic matters were seen as foreign. Identified with French absolutism or with the Counter-Reformation, painting was considered as highly suspicious. Yet soon after the lapse of the Licensing Act, the development of the British press proved very beneficial to the arts as well as to British artists. The first positive effect was that, although they were not illustrated, newspapers and periodicals all included advertising for artistic productions. Announcements for auctions or adverts for contemporary artists presented paintings and engravings as mere objects of consumption and therefore contributed to make them acceptable for British readers. The introduction of art and artistic matters in the public sphere which resulted from the publication, the circulation and the reading of these short messages greatly helped the gathering of a national artistic community. Painters and engravers took advantage of this publicity to engage in a dialogic relationship with readers, defining their new public and, at the same time, constructing their new identity as artists. This development of the arts in Britain, which didn't seem possible at the beginning of the eighteenth century, owed much to the press and more particularly to Richard Steele's essays in The Tatler and Spectator. Indeed Steele, who was close to artists and whig patrons, was the first to appeal to a modernisation and a moralisation of arts, thus making painting worthy to be accepted in Britain.