Victorian Artists’ Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage and the Art Market, edited by Julie F. Codell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Artists’ Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage and the Art Market ed. by Julie F. Codell Joan DelPlato (bio) Victorian Artists’ Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage and the Art Market, edited by Julie F. Codell; pp. xv + 298. New York and London: Routledge, 2020, £115.00, $160.00. Victorian Artists’ Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage and the Art Market, edited by Julie F. Codell, is a unique foray into the proliferation of Victorian replicas of paintings authorized by the artist and produced by her or his own hand. The book offers an understanding of a little-known but bustling practice in the history of the art market. Framed by an erudite introduction, this edited volume investigates sixteen case studies of well-known Victorian artists, countering replicas’ misunderstanding as unoriginal or crass displays of copyism. It also studies questions we now associate with intellectual property: in short, did the artist or the patron of an original retain the right to sanction autograph replicas? Opinion tended to favor the patron. Surprisingly, contributors to this volume demonstrate how the aesthetic and monetary value of the replica could be enhanced over the original. It is a challenge to synthesize this dense and fact-laden book. The introduction incisively articulates the study’s theoretical premises and its interventions into conventional Victorian art history, particularly as these replica studies redefine an artwork’s aura. Collectively, the authors build a sociology of the autograph replica’s patronage, using [End Page 444] tools of reception theory to shift from an exclusive focus on the artist to include patrons. Nearly all of the essays are conceptually strong. A few contribute mightily to the volume as a compendium of information, even though they are not quite digested. Throughout, whole paragraphs or very long in-text citations filled with information on replicas’ locations might have been assigned either to endnotes or to the appendix that charts so clearly the autograph replicas of only five of the artists studied. The essays consider not only royalty and aristocrats but also and especially the Victorian industrialists and professionals wealthy enough to purchase replicas as an investment, as a contribution to the arts, and as a status symbol. Newly rich middle-class buyers included silk merchants, gin distillers, doctors, brewers, clergymen, wool manufacturers, members of Parliament, military tailors, and lawyers. Artists sold replicas to dealers like Thomas Agnew and Ernest Gambart. Men of finance—bankers, accountants, and stockbrokers, and the American railroad magnate William Henry Vanderbilt— purchased them. Artists sold replicas to Charles Dickens, other artists, and architects. Curiously, Royal Academy teacher William Dyce commissioned William Holman Hunt to replicate Dyce’s own work. David Roberts sold to his dentist and gifted replicas to his daughter, whose father-in-law Elhanan Bicknell, head of a company that made candles from whale oil, bought replicas. A subset of replica purchasers were rich industrialists, often from the north of Britain. In their new civic roles, they were saluted by one critic for national enrichment in donating their purchases to public museums. Replicas were purchased by leaders in heavy industry such as Glasgow iron and steel manufacturers, Sheffield foundry owners, Manchester spinners, Lancashire cotton producers, and a Midlands farm machinery owner. Liverpool ship-owner Frederick Richards Leyland, who had twenty-five trade ships crossing the Atlantic, was a well-known patron of Pre-Raphaelite originals and replicas. In the art world, the Victorian middle class became professionals not only as buyers but also as critics and curators. And the overlap between original and replica did not just parallel but indeed “mimicked” the production and distribution of other Victorian commodities at home and abroad (10). Lead manufacturer James Leathart bought a replica of Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852–63), which was further replicated within Brown’s portrait of Leathart alongside his leadworks. Yet projections of the self might also be less visible, more suggestive. Were manufacturers of cloth drawn to John Frederick Lewis’s replicas depicting gorgeous fabric clothing, admired by John Ruskin and painted with such a startling degree of verisimilitude as to invite touch? In these essays, more specific linkages could have been made from patrons’ identities to the subjects or other characteristics of...