Book Review: A Strange Business

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A Strange Business:a strange businessA Revolution in Art, Culture, and Commercein 19th Century Londonby James HamiltonPegasus Books, 2015Readers familiar with James Hamilton's invigorating, definitive biography of J. M. W. Turner will no doubt remember the very practical strand running through it. Hamilton wrote very evocatively about the aesthetics that guided Turner's art, and he was insightful and sympathetic about the day-to-day life of Turner's life, and this holds true in Hamilton's new book, A Strange Business: A Revolution in Art, Culture, and Commerce in 19th Century London, which naturally features quite a bit on Turner, all of it pithy and knowing, as in Hamilton's digression while talking about the Turner artwork that never made it to the galleries in his own lifetime (and would pack in the crowds today):

Turner's achievement as an erotic artist was unlike any other, not only because his work was so accomplished and lively, but because he chose to keep it to himself and, escaping destruction, it has survived more or less intact as a group. He worked closely with engravers to broadcast his landscape and subject pictures, but the erotic was just for himself.

But such appreciations are secondary in this new book. Here, Hamilton shifts his emphasis from the flourishing of Victorian artwork in all its forms to the flourishing of the art world – its financiers, its patrons, its mass marketing in an age when the arts of all kinds were increasingly democratizing. Hamilton does a masterful job of fitting into this pragmatic world a broad gallery of the age's best-known artists, figures like Thomas Lawrence, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Joshua Reynolds, or John Constable (although his thumbnail energy isn't always exactly kind, as when he first allows that Edwin Landseer – Queen Victoria's favorite painter – was “an angel with the paintbrush” but then elaborates, “[but] an unstable paranoiac with a drug dependency”). But he's more interested this time around in the men working around and behind the scenes of this explosion in popular forms of art and dissemination of literacy. These are names that won't be familiar to most readers, and Hamilton brings them wonderfully to life:

The robust Birmingham pen manufacturer Joseph Gillott rose from a family background of cutlery-making in Sheffield to become the wealthiest and most successful maker and supplier of pen-nibs in the world. Gillott cleverly grasped the obvious – that written records for trade were essential and would only grow; that growth in education demanded writing; and that expansion of the opportunities in travel required at the very least that somebody write out a ticket for somebody else. The common factor here was the pen-nib …

And what about the new art galleries in which so much of these newly-commissioned works were seen by a broader and broader viewing public? Hamilton gives us a fascinating look at how the physical spaces, no less than the artworks themselves, had their geniuses:

Francis Fowke, a captain in the Royal Engineers, designed the new galleries at South Kensington. He was in the vanguard of modern gallery design, lending a new factory and military aspect to the classical style of country-house architects of the Wyatt, Holland and Soane generations. Describing the care he took over the lighting and the heating of his buildings, Fowke identified a particular nuisance in picture galleries to be 'glitter', where light shone on the painted surface causing reflections which obscured the image. Fowke cured this by ensuring that the 'opening for the admission of light be exactly half the floor area of the gallery': a precise functional measurement that appeared to give clear glitter-free enjoyment of the paintings. The heating of the new gallery was effected by the method recently invented by Galsworthy Gurney for the Houses of Parliament: a fan of iron plates set in a circular trough of water surrounding the cylindrical coal-fired stoves. The cooling effect of the water on the iron gave a particular humidity to the air in the gallery, more efficiently than by simply exposing trays of water on top of the heaters. As Fowke described it, 'instead of the air being roasted and then moistened, it is as it were moistened and then stewed.'

Hamilton is such an infectiously readable writer that even readers unfamiliar with the age of Turner will wish this latest book were longer (for instance, the book's US cover features a detail from Ralph Hedley's 1881 painting John Graham Lough in His Studio, and yet Hedley himself, who typifies so many of the book's points about the commercialization of art and its spreading to industrial centers far from London – like Hedley's own Newcastle Upon Tyne). Hamilton's account details the hurtling, unplanned birth of the modern world of commercial art by walking through the galleries and turning the paintings around in order to examine the boards and finger-smudges. It's a Victorian art history that ranges from the museum boiler rooms all the way to the Crystal Palace, and no reader interested in art should miss it.