The Art-Journal and Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England, 1850–1880 (review)

Given that the art press is still relatively understudied, this book offers a long-overdue full-length study of the popular Art-Journal. This influential magazine advocated patriotic consumption of living British artists, bourgeois representation of artists to dispel any taint of Bohemianism, and creation of a public for whom art was a regular part of domestic life and leisure activities. Katherine Haskins focuses on the Art-Journal’s vast array of fine publications, including separate bound series, individual reproductions, regularly published illustrations, and special annual issues with full-page reproductions. These images, which were widely disseminated around the world, profoundly shaped Victorian notions of community, nation, and culture.

Art historians still marginalize art reproduction in favor of original works and tend to study reproductions according to media specialties instead of as the complex industry it was. Victorian artists replicated their own works in painted copies or received remuneration from dealers or printers who made prints of their most popular paintings. Haskins discusses what it meant for an image to be published between 1850 and 1880, the high period of handcraft engravings before photographic processes replaced prints. She also examines the Art-Journal’s relation to its publishers, Virtue and Co., a prominent print publishing house. The number of plates produced in this period was staggering, with over eight hundred prints printed individually and thousands of prints published in the journal.

Haskins lucidly argues that prints shaped the reciprocal relations between originals and copies that marked the acculturation of the Victorian public and their graphic literacy. Art and its reproductions were tied to moral issues and social hierarchies. The appeal of a painting’s subject, “the anodyne and the uncontroversial,” dominated interest in formal qualities, making engraving a fitting medium for disseminating images, while also leaving Victorian art outside the emerging definition of an alienated and anti-bourgeois modernism (8).

Haskins draws on many disciplines and concepts to illuminate these relations and mass acculturation: metadata in information management, Pierre Bourdieu’s links between high culture and consumer culture, and Bruno Latour’s notion of cultural communication, among others. She applies the notion of information space to print: the physical page; the identifiable images; the means of transforming one medium into another; and the materiality of the page itself in terms of layout, juxtaposition, format, etc. The examples are often illuminating, although some are too brief and could have been better integrated into her arguments.

One of Haskins’s key concepts is analogy, which she borrows from Barbara Stafford. Stafford defines analogy as the way consciousness responds to visual stimuli to connect something new with already familiar experience and to find similarities, resemblances, and commonalities. Analogy is the opposite of allegory, which rhetorically and non-mimetically exploits difference rather than likeness and seeks obfuscation rather than clarity, as in irony or enigma. Victorians found analogous relations between art and commerce, and the fine art printing industry mediated this analogy.

In chapter 1, Haskins focuses on the Victorian art market, the creation of the “Art-Journal print,” the view of the print as an autonomous work, and the way the journal and dealers together promoted prints intended to edify the public and democratize painting. In some cases, like Turner’s paintings, prints made images more legible for a public that never saw the original. Public appreciation and art knowledge depended on the “pivotal reconciliation of ideals and industry represented by Victorian fine art publishing and art journalism” (28). Both fostered the notion that good art was defined by its appeal to the public, which it brought into a unity, however imagined, through shared experiences of seeing the same works on everyone’s parlor walls. This is one of Haskins’s most significant points, and it merits consideration by scholars of the press and art history.

Haskins examines three examples of printed versions of popular painting genres and their accompanying Art-Journal texts: marine painting...