The Periodical and the Art Market: Investigating the “Dealer-Critic System” in Victorian England

Abstract

The Cynthia White and Harrison White's oft cited term describing the mutual dependence between the art market and the press has been long recognized by scholars as a new and critically important feature of the nineteenth-century art world.1 Sociologists White and White charted the decline of the Academy and the rise of the commercial gallery system sustained by the press, and linked these structural changes to the shift from a focus on single important canvases to a speculative market that concentrated on the value of an artist's entire oeuvre. Art-historical inquiry, building upon White and White's work, has largely focused on the French art world in the late nineteenth century, as scholars have mapped the emergence of modernist work and practices within this institutional framework.2 Much of the groundwork for this new system, however, originated in Victorian London, which was a forerunner in the development of both the modern art market and the periodical press. In this paper, we argue that attending to the rich web of connections and intersections between the Victorian periodical press and the art market can expand and refine the definition of the dealer-critic system both in its Victorian particularities and as a more generally applicable theoretical model.3