Art patronage

“ I am greatly inclined to believe that the enormous sums annually expended on these clever portraits contribute more to lower than to raise the art in popularity and in the genuine estimation of the public. The sums thus lavished may be termed patronage, certainly; but it is patronage that bribes the artist to the restraint, and often to the destruction, of his genius.
Is there, in fact, any one who can honestly deny that a splendid exhibition-room, crowded with ladies and gentlemen on canvass, as large as life, is a lounge of great tediousness and inanity? ”

“ I could press this on you at length, but I hasten to apply the principle to the subject of art. I will do so broadly at first, and then come to architecture. Enormous sums are spent annually by this country in what is called patronage of art, but in what is for the most part merely buying what strikes our fancies. True and judicious patronage there is indeed; many a work of art is bought by those who do not care for its possession, to assist the struggling artist, or relieve the unsuccessful one. ”

“ Thus much for the Middle Ages and the artistic instincts of the people generally; it remains to be added that the more gifted individuals, the geniuses, were better looked after than ever before or since. There was a certain tradition of art patronage amongst the nobles; but an enormous amount of it was done by the monasteries and the various corporations of the towns, pious and otherwise. Wherever you had any noticeable number of men gathered together, they welcomed and gladly employed any man who showed signs of genius. ”

“ When he turns from these views to contemplate the patronage which has been given to the fine arts, will he have less reason to esteem his profession,--a profession so richly cherished by all the greatest characters of the earth? and which in return has immortalised its patrons. Posterity has never ceased to venerate the names of the Cosmos and Lorenzos who sought art, and fostered to their full maturity the various talents of their countrymen. ”

“ As a result, speaking generally, the painters are without mental culture, the patrons are without art-acquirements. (This supposes the patrons to be of the upper classes; but of course at the present time a large share of art-patronage comes from the rich middle or manufacturing classes, whose uninformed tastes are even less likely to tend to the due appraisement and elevation of art.) ”

“ Yet in a nation great and opulent there is room, and ought to be patronage, for an art like that of painting through all its diversities; and it is to be wished, that the reward now offered for an historical picture may excite an honest emulation, and give beginning to an English school. ”

“ The arts are of humble growth and station; they are the product of labour and self-denial; they have their seat in the heart of man, and in his imagination; it is there they labour, have their triumphs there, and unseen and unthought of, perform their ceaseless task.—Indeed, patronage, and works of art deserving patronage, rarely exist together ”

“ To-day the artist asks protection of neither Church nor aristocracy. The greatest artists come from the common people—the middle classes—and these same classes do the most to support the artist by admiring, appreciating, and paying for his works.
In Europe painters and sculptors still depend to a great extent on the nobility for patronage, as the nobility holds the preponderance of the wealth of that continent. ”

“ Gratian.—Patrons of art are too often mere lovers of furniture,—have not seriously considered art, nor cultivated taste. And if it be a fault, it is not altogether their own; it is in character with genius to be in advance, and to teach, and by its own works. It is that there is a want of cultivation, of serious study, among artists themselves. If the patron could dictate, he would himself be the maker, the poet, the painter, the musician,—excellence of every kind precedes the taste to appreciate it. It makes the taste as well as the work: my friend Aquilius has made me a convert. ”

“ The attitude of the “portrait-painter” may be likened unto that of the “poet laureate,” whose verse is at the command of conditions he does not{245} control; who may, by accident, write a good thing,—but the rule is otherwise, with even the best.
To rightly place a human being on canvas, or in stone, or in marble, or in poetry, is the noblest achievement of art. On the technical side it exhausts the resources of the art; on the spiritual side it exhausts the genius of the artist. But “portrait-painting” as a profession, as an industrial and a commercial proposition, is a degradation of art. ”

“ There are at this time a greater number of excellent artists than were ever known before at one period in this nation; there is a general desire among our nobility to be distinguished as lovers and judges of the arts; there is a greater superfluity of wealth among the people to reward the professors; and, above all, we are patronised by a monarch, who, knowing the value of science and of elegance, thinks every art worthy of his notice that tends to soften and humanise the mind. ”

“ The numerous principalities which had supported their own artists and vied with one another to attract and retain the best skill in each era, ceased to exist. The patrician class, munificent and appreciative patrons of art in all ages, stepped down from their commanding positions to make way for the merchant and the manufacturer. ”

“ My conception and invention are, on all hands, allowed to be superior; my execution will be found so too. To what is it that gentlemen of the first rank both in genius and fortune have subscribed their names? To my inventions. The executive part they never disputed.
The painters of England are unemployed in public works, while the sculptors have continual and superabundant employment. Our churches and our abbeys are treasures of their producing for ages back, while painting is excluded. Painting, the principal art, has no place among our almost only public works. ”

“ These facts are not to be denied; but they also lead us to another lesson, which is, that the patronage so generally dispensed was for the protection of living genius, and that they by whom it was so dispensed sought no other collections than the works of native and living artists. On any other ground there can be no such thing as patronage. Nothing else is worthy of that name. The true and generous patron of great works selects those which are produced by the talents existing around him. ”

“ From the middle of the seventeenth to the first forty years of the eighteenth century, when national talent at length began to break forth in its own strength, such was the state of patronage, and the artists who enjoyed its benefits were but little qualified to create a national interest; for their mannerism and foreign modes served only the more decidedly to exclude a characteristic style, and, as must ever be the case in similar instances, prevented any developement of native originality. ”

“ It is like looking at ourselves through a glorifying medium, contemplating our own portrait from the brush of a distinguished court painter; which, judged by the walls of Royal Academy Exhibitions, is the highest, as well as the best paid form of art. ”

“ In the same rank, and perhaps of not so great merit, is the cold painter of portraits. But his correct and just imitation of his object has its merit. Even the painter of still life, whose highest ambition is to give a minute representation of every part of those low objects which he sets before him, deserves praise in proportion to his attainment; because no part of this excellent art, so much the ornament of polished life, is destitute of value and use. ”

“ These powers were not the peculiar possession of a well-born class; the centuries had bred them unobserved into the nature of the race, into the physical constitution of the whole people. The artisan, no less than the prince, took delight in the dawn of art, and welcomed it with equal worship. ”

“ A painter must be content with the work his patrons set him to do and not indulge his own caprices. Well, well, admitting the range of the painter's art to have been cramped and limited, has any age or country the power to cramp the genius of an artist? Is high art only to be found in imaginative pictures? Does not a portrait become high art under a master hand? ”

“ These are the persons who may be said to have exhausted all the powers of florid eloquence, to debauch the young and inexperienced; and have, without doubt, been the cause of turning off the attention of the connoisseur and of the patron of art, as well as that of the painter, from those higher excellences of which the art is capable, and which ought to be required in every considerable production. By them, and their imitators, a style merely ornamental has been disseminated throughout all Europe. ”

“ Their taste is a servile dependant on their vanity, and their patronage has an air of pauperism about it. Perhaps the only public patronage which was ever really useful to the arts, or worthy of them, was that which they received first in Greece, and afterwards in Italy, from the religious institutions of the country; when the artist felt himself, as it were, a servant at the altar; when his hand gave a visible form to Gods or Heroes, Angels or Apostles; and when the enthusiasm of genius was exalted by mingling with the flame of national devotion. ”

“ For that power, which enables the artist to conceive his subject with dignity, may be said to belong to general education; and is as much the genius of a poet, or the professor of any other liberal art, or even a good critic in any of those arts, as of a painter. ”

“ But such of us who move in these humbler walks of the profession are not ignorant that, as the natural dignity of the subject is less, the more all the little ornamental helps are necessary to its embellishment. It would be ridiculous for a painter of domestic scenes, of portraits, landscapes, animals, or of still life, to say that he despised those qualities which have made the subordinate schools so famous. The art of colouring, and the skilful management of light and shadow, are essential requisites in his confined labours. ”

“ So then, generally, it should be the object of government, and of all patrons of art, to collect, as far as may be, the works of dead masters in public galleries, arranging them so as to illustrate the history of nations, and the progress and influence of their arts ”

“ AND now we come to that great and important subject, the Fine Arts, which day by day are becoming more appreciated and find a rapid increase of patrons. It is true that there are some who do not regard Art as an essentiality, and who are even indifferent to it as an ornament. ”

“ In their hands are both power and wealth, to be used in the rearing of art, surely with as much discrimination and judgment as in the monarchies of Europe and the Orient. We might say from another stand-point that the earliest works in any branch of the arts are those of the highest value in the future. ”

“ The union with this interloping tendency, so foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has produced portrait; and by the position of this hybrid, or at least far from regularly bred creature; by the amount of the real artistic quality of beauty which it is permitted to retain by the various schools of art, we can, even as by the treatment of similar social interlopers we can estimate the necessities and tendencies of various states of society, judge what are the conditions in which the various schools of art struggle for the object of their lives, which is the beautiful. ”

“ If, in later days, artists were pressed into the service of kings, great nobles, merchant princes or millionaires, and art became largely tributary to their pomp and magnificence, it was at least at the expense of the whole people. ”

“ Be it also recollected, that to support the mastery here, in a style founded on no peculiar habitudes of intellect, but embracing the general and intrinsic principles of art, where all good artists would consequently be rivals, without incurring the imputation of copying, required unabating effort, diligence, and originality,—more liberal and varied excellence, than in the preceding system. ”

“ Such intellectual organization is by no means favorable to that grandeur usually associated with highest genius, which frequently hurrying alike the artist and spectator beyond reality, derives its very mastery from daring disregard of [Pg 106] rule, grasping, with dangerous hardihood, those lofty graces, pardoned only when successful; and even then, however they may elevate the individual subject or artist, not enriching art with useful examples or solid acquisitions. ”

“ Our upper classes supply a very small amount of patronage to artists at present, their main patronage being from the manufacturing districts and from the public interested in engravings;—an exceedingly wide sphere, but a low sphere,—and you catch the eye of that class much more by pictures having reference to their amusements than by any noble subject better treated, and the better treated it was the less it would interest that class. ”

“ Being of refined and elegant tastes, and singularly generous disposition, she associated herself with young aspirants for fame in poetry, painting, and sculpture, and to the utmost of her power endeavoured to procure for them public notice and patronage. ”