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Victorian Studies 43.2 (2001) 352-354



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Book Review

The Essence of Art: Victorian Advice on the Practice of Painting


The Essence of Art: Victorian Advice on the Practice of Painting, by Craig Harrison; pp. viii + 192. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999, £39.50, $69.95.

The idea of publishing documents on the practice of Victorian painting is a fine one and long overdue. This particular volume, however, does not seem thoroughly knowledgeable about the practice itself. Its author provides too little justification for his particular selections and too sketchy a context for them, and does not attend to recent scholarship. But most strikingly, although many of the texts are quite technical--covering color, drawing, lighting, and ways of arranging models--there are no reproductions of drawings and paintings by the authors of the documents. Surely Craig Harrison does not believe words alone can reveal the meaning of technical explanations and advice; drawings by Edward Poynter, Edward Armitage, Frederic Leighton, Hubert von Herkomer, and Philip Hamerton would have added considerably to this book, and would have demonstrated the practice more directly than words alone can do.

Some of the texts excerpted here are long and some are short and they also lack coherence with one another, but the author does not give reasons for his choices. Why is Charles Eastlake's influential Materials for a History of Oil Painting (1847; later published as Methods and Materials of the Great Schools and Masters) not included? Or Richard Redgrave's An Elementary Manual of Color (1859)? Or, for that matter, Kate Greenaway's Painting Book With Outlines From Her Various Works for Boys & Girls to Paint (c. 1900)? [End Page 352] Why does Harrison include three pages by Mrs. Jonathan Foster (a translator of Giorgio Vasari) against almost twenty pages of Edward Armitage? Practicing women artists could have been included. Elizabeth Butler published her drawings and sketch books, and Louise Jopling wrote several addresses to aspiring women artists. To use Foster instead of Butler, Jopling, or Harriet Grote--an apologist for and founder of the Society of Lady Artists--is to trivialize women's contributions to the discourse of art practice. To justify this selection of texts, which dates from the 1850s to the 1880s, Harrison would have needed to recognize distinctions between the art cultures of each decade, and to provide definitions or examples of crucial critical terms, such as "sentiment." A thesis would offer a common ground on which these excerpts, which range from technical advice to comments on subject matter and style, could be compared or contrasted. Authors included in the book were addressing various audiences--some the general public, some Academy students--yet the book juxtaposes excerpts without consideration of their different intentions, period discourses, or contexts.

This volume never alludes to recent secondary scholarship, preferring the Dictionary of National Biography of 1917 to current scholarship. There is also no mention of recent blockbuster exhibits of Victorian art (Frederic Leighton's, for example) or the publications that appeared in their wake reassessing these painters. This lack of context for Leighton's address, as for other excerpts, allows selections to remain unconnected and to appear chosen for personal or eccentric reasons. The absence of reference to recent scholarship also allows Harrison to claim on the book jacket that these texts are "long overdue for reappraisal," and to appear to be salvaging their authors for the first time. Harrison mistakenly claims that Philip Hamerton is "now only remembered as the target of Whistler's barbs" (25), although there has been scholarly interest in Hamerton. Harrison himself offers no reappraisal. Brief introductions before excerpts reveal little about the place of the author or the excerpt in Victorian art discourse.

Harrison's reductive arguments about Victorian art are also disturbing, as are his facile cultural comparisons: "Much television, like much Victorian art, is trivial, escapist, sentimental and didactic" (13), or "It is easy to make fun of them. They are often pompous. Their tastes seem very alien to us" (12), an assertion that contradicts his television analogy. One...

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