Reviewed by: Victorian Artists' Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage, and the Art Market ed. by Julie Codell Elena Cooper (bio) Victorian Artists' Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage, and the Art Market edited by Julie Codell; pp. 298. Routledge, 2020. $160.75 cloth. victorian artists' autograph replicas is a collection of essays by art historians exploring the multiple facets of "autograph replicas"—painters' repetitions of their own paintings in oils or watercolours—in Victorian painting. Displacing "the usual view" of a painting as "a one-off, unique, singular production," the collection is premised on the view that autograph replicas were different from other types of reproduction common in the nineteenth century, such as reproductive engraving and forgery (3–4). The importance of this volume for scholars of Victorian studies lies first with the centrality of autograph replicas to nineteenth-century visual culture: as "prolific" and "vigorously consumed" rather than a "marginal activity" (3). Secondly, while the essays offer "new ways to understand art and art history" (5), the volume's breadth of approach draws on and speaks to scholars of many other disciplines and of Victorian studies more generally. The autograph replica was an important part of the "culture of replication," affecting "all aspects of nineteenth-century Victorian life—literature, art, manufacturing, science and media" (4). Accordingly, autograph replicas are placed in a larger context, including the nineteenth-century culture of the copy, gallery and display practices, relationships between patrons and artists, the art market, gender, and copyright history. This broad scope is well illustrated by the first group of chapters (part 2), which rather than privileging the artist as maker of artistic meaning instead explores "location as meaning." Jo Briggs discusses the American replica, referring to the high status afforded autograph replicas in US art collections, such as the founding collection of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, as works of "national or public significance" (27). Autograph replicas were a means of bringing "prestigious artworks to America," and as such paintings were seen as embodying "timeless ideals," a painting's status as replica was "immaterial" (33). Andrea Korda considers the relationship of the two versions of Newgate by Frank Holl. Far from just "dead copies" that always refer back to the original work, replicas "also exist as distinct and unique objects with their own originating moments and subsequent histories" (38), and her essay charts the dynamic understandings of the Newgate replica as it moved "from private to public space, and consequently from personal object to cultural icon" (49). Part 3, comprising essays by Richard Green and Robyn Asleson, provides a detailed case study of the work of the artist Albert Moore, who pursued the Aesthetic Movement's principle of "art for art's sake." Green argues [End Page 153] that replicas involved Moore striking a "delicate balance" between aesthetic beauty and the need to earn a living (62). Robyn Asleson shows that Moore's replicas indicate his "open-ended approach to creativity" (64) in exploring beauty's myriad expressions and countering "the simplistic notion of replicas as merely repetitive or mechanical" (67). She also draws attention to the ways in which copyright law—both understandings of who owned copyright and also the debate over proposals restricting the right to make replicas—had a direct bearing on Moore's artistic practice. In part 4, "Replicas and Artists' Agency," Julie Codell explains Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "prolific" production of replicas and uncovers his relationship with certain patrons, suggesting that Rossetti's multiple versions of pictures "reveal aesthetic and patronage values" (91). Rossetti's contemporaries argued over the value of his replicas, reflecting the "Victorians' conflicted assessment of autograph replicas" (79) more generally; there was an "uneasiness about replication" even though artists made autograph replicas "regularly and often" (81). Colin Trodd links Ford Madox Brown's replicas to Brown's vision of creative labour as free, his view of artistic work as within the artist's ownership, and his "wider project of generating activist art" (104). As Trodd concludes, "the conflation of replication with the control of production" enabled Brown "to imagine the circumstances for improving the operational framework of the art world and to assert the rights of expressive labour over the power...
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Sep 3, 2021
Open Access
Humberto Schubert Coelho 