The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870-1910 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910 Linda H. Peterson (bio) The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910, by Julie F. Codell; pp. xiii + 376. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, £60.00, $85.00. In this masterful study, Julie Codell argues for the pivotal role of life writing in the achievement of professional status for Victorian artists. Codell suggests that public self-presentation [End Page 711] in a wide range of auto/biographical genres—not only full-length memoirs and posthumous family biographies, but also interviews, mini-biographies in periodicals, and biographical dictionaries and histories of British art—made a crucial difference in the Victorian artist's ability to distinguish himself (or herself) from less desirable stereotypes (the failed Romantic genius, the bohemian, the degenerate) and to reach equity with other professions. For Victorian artists, this meant presenting themselves as "gentlemen and ladies whose material success and public appeal became representative of English cultural domination and superiority" (2). According to the preface, Codell began her study in 1986. The years devoted to research on this project show in the depth and comprehensiveness of its chapters. If you want to understand nineteenth-century styles of artistic self-presentation, read the chapter "The Victorian Typology of Artists" to learn about autochthonous, prelapsarian, bohemian, decadent, and professional artists. If you want a succinct commentary on any major (and many minor) artists' life writings of the period, read the central chapters on autobiographies, family biographies, and historical collections, which include intelligent, original analyses of artists well known (William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Elizabeth Butler, William Frith) and others who should be (Louisa Jopling, Helen Allingham, George Morland, to name only a few). If you want to compare the life writings of women painters and authors, read the section "Women Artists' Autobiography: Transgressors and Flaneurs," and modify your assumption that Victorian women wrote domestic memoirs and authorized their professional work as an extension of motherhood. (These women artists didn't.) If you want to understand how the profession of art in the nineteenth century fits in relation to the development of other rising professions, read "Biographical Functions, Mediations, and Exchanges," which deftly weaves a wide range of sociological literature with confirming—or challenging—points from the life writing of artists. For scholars of autobiography, Codell's study suggests a rethinking of some widely held assumptions about gender and genre. Since the publication of Martin Danahay's A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1993) and the important sequel in Trev Broughton's Men of Letters, Writing Lives (1999), we have associated masculine life writing with singularity, with the gifted, independent author producing works of high art in isolation. Not so for Victorian artists. Sociability and "the social" are keywords in Codell's study, reflecting the artists' desire to present themselves as members of congenial working groups, professional societies, and a national school of British painters. So, too, we have tended to associate women writers with domestic memoirs—a genre that allowed them to unify home and work, motherhood and authorship, private role with public work. Not so for Victorian women painters: "Women artists' autobiographies shared the dominant buoyancy and collectivity of their male colleagues and insisted on professional self-representations with a minimum of domestic narrative" (142). Indeed, according to Codell, when domesticity appears in Victorian artists' life writings, it tends to be in "family biographies" of male painters, written by widows or children and knowingly constructed to present the subject as a professional artist and solid family man—right down to the "'normative' images and photographs [that] countered degenerate stereotypes" (174-75) and "domesticate[d] the artist into 'one of us'" (23). Codell gives a spirited defense of these biographies, often derided by modern critics as "widow biographies" that produced "parodies of life" (174). On the contrary, argues [End Page 712] Codell, widows like Georgiana Burne-Jones and Mary Watts or daughters like Hilda Orchardson Gray and Amy Woolner knew precisely what they were doing when they celebrated their subjects' artistic achievements within "public, civic, and familial matrices" (182): they were securing their husbands' or fathers' reputations...