Herkomer: A Victorian Artist (review)

Herkomer: A Victorian Artist, by Lee MacCormick Edwards; pp. 159. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999, $59.95, £35.00.

This thoroughly researched and illustrated book on Hubert von Herkomer is a much- needed volume on one of the principal social realists of the later-Victorian period. Born in Germany but raised in Southampton, Herkomer was a largely self-taught artist with an excellent visual memory and a gift for narrative. As a member of that circle of artists who drew for the Graphic magazine--Frank Holls and Luke Fildes among them--he was inspired by the magazine's editor, William Luson Thomas, to wander London in pursuit of scenes of urban life at the lowest level. The market for genre scenes of pleasant peasants and cherubic children had seemed endless, inspired as it was by the Victorian desire to reassure the middle classes that the lower classes were picturesque and harmless. The artists of the Graphic did not do much to disabuse their middle-class readers (who paid sixpence per issue for the privilege) of a sense of superior comfort, but they did bring the occasional astringent view of floggings, poverty, and cultural conflict into the public view. Herkomer's interesting position as an outsider, as a young man with a more complicated background, as Other we might now say, may have given him an edge in portraying the obverse side of the city. But in this very direct account of the artist's life and work, Lee MacCormick Edwards relinquishes any theoretical framework for analysis or critique. If there is a fault in the book, it is that the author's methodology is so absolutely straightforward that no question of alienation or duality of identity is explored. Herkomer's own desire to be absolutely acceptable to the English art world seems seconded by his biographer.

The book is organized in a thematic fashion that emphasizes quite accurately Herkomer's variety of interests and abilities. The first chapter provides a very thorough grounding in his childhood and education; then the Graphic work is discussed. Herkomer's early and continued interest in highly marketable peasant scenes--English, Welsh, or Bavarian--is covered in turn. Discussion of his most famous work, The Last Muster (1875) is subtitled "A Planned Triumph" and situates this individual painting in the context of the artist's effort and technique. The work, incorporating as it does the Victorian fascination with patriotism, the military, and death, produced outstanding public and critical acclaim for the twenty-six-year-old artist. The depth of research here is remarkable. This chapter and the following section on Herkomer's social realism together form the centerpiece of the book. Dealing briefly with "images of female melancholia" (81) as an aspect of social realism, Edwards skates along the edge of feminist theory, but for the most part the works are discussed in terms of other contemporary artistic works with similar subject matter. A deeper analysis of the rise of social realism and its attractiveness to Herkomer is missing. On Strike (1891), his Royal Academy diploma piece, shows a resolute worker with his hungry family. Edwards is as concerned with how high it was hung at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1891 as with the relationship of the painting to its social and political context.

The shift to earning money rather than fame meant, of course, portraiture in both England and Germany--as well as in America. Edwards covers Herkomer's relationship with the American architect Henry Hudson Richardson who built Herkomer's home at Lululaund, a perhaps unnecessary inclusion, the chief benefit of which is the gorgeous Falstaffian portrait of Richardson. The last three chapters, on the artist's theater work, cinematic experiments, printmaking, and late work are really remarkable; they recount how Herkomer, already financially successful beyond most of his peers, went outside the life of the artist, and became truly European in his interests, including bringing auto racing to Germany.

The book touches upon but does not fully deal...