The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (review)

The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society, by Caroline Dakers; pp. vii + 304. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999, $39.95, £25.00.

This deeply sympathetic book about late-Victorian painters presents a wealth of verbal and visual detail though neither its main title nor its subtitle is entirely accurate. The first is too narrow, the second too broad. The book spreads beyond Holland Park into the wider environment of artists in West London, while "society" is decidedly too large a term here. Rather, it may be read in its oldest and most restricted sense, namely as "high society." That, of course, would be entirely appropriate. We are told about the coming together of two groups, the Royal Academicians and members of the old and the new moneyed aristocracy. The first group was limited to forty at any given time; the second was, of course, not large, but, by definition, unlimited. That may explain why, in a quite rapid and entirely novel development, from the 1860s, the latter group searched out the former: One way of appearing fashionable was to associate with success in the arts, and that meant with the artists themselves. What proportion of London, or Britain's high society was involved here, one would like to know. While there had always been a very small group of wealthy painters, now their numbers grew considerably; they became a subclass in themselves, dubbed by Caroline Dakers as "painters and millionaire princes" (calculated in today's money [6]). What was especially new was the way in which the artists' financial and social ascendancy manifested itself in their suburban houses. These were, of course, not nearly as large as those of their clients, but their architectural novelty made up for any such deficiency. Of vital importance was the actual location of the houses, on the western fringes of Kensington. During the 1860s, high-class suburban development meant large and solid- looking blocks by speculating developers in the Classical Renaissance style. But the artists' houses, beginning with Frederick Leighton's in Holland Park Road, departed from this schematic kind of design; they were, indeed, the first suburban houses to respond to a new fashionable boredom with speculative house building. Some of the houses, such as those built by Philip Webb or Richard Norman Shaw in Melbury Road, were arguably more avant- garde than the paintings produced in them.

This book is essentially about artistic patronage. As Dakers emphasizes, the collectors she deals with only bought from artists whom they knew personally. The story of Rosalind and George Howard (later the Earl of Carlisle of Castle Howard fame) is one of the most instructive. The chief members of the Pre-Raphaelite world circulated their home, 1 Palace Green; its architect, Webb, was adamant to build his avant-garde design, with its red brick and its tall, picturesque, even awkward design, totally antagonistic to the smoothness of the speculative Victorian surroundings. The splendor of the inside was even more striking, with W. R. Lethaby later making the point that it was the lack of public commissions for "national epics" which meant that the artist had "to turn himself into a provider of dining room pictures for men of money" (qtd. 99). The painters themselves also "held court" with patrons in their own houses, the chief example being Leighton's musical soirées.

Dakers's approach is, for the most part, plain biography—collective biography, to be precise, a vast, descriptive mosaic of personal relationships between artists, or between artists and patrons, but also an account of paintings and buildings, culled from a wealth of primary and secondary sources (the book badly lacks a general bibliography of the secondary literature and/or a list of abbreviated titles). Dakers's own contribution is strongest when she constructs links between personal, social, artistic, and architectural factors. There is, for instance, a hint that Luke Fildes turned to Shaw as the architect, who at that...