Visualising the Right Question

'When did the Victorian period end?' ought, on the face of it, to be an issue of interest for anyone concerned with the nature and role of the visual arts in Britain in the years on either side of 1900. But I am not sure that from the point of view of the historiography of that art it isthe right question to ask just at this moment. Conventionally, while historians have offered an absolute disctinction between the half-decade when British modernism flourished immediately prior to the First World War and everything that preceded it, they have not made hard and fast distinctions between the Victorian and Edwardian art worlds, so that in one important sense Victorian art appears to continue until the advent of modernism around 1910. This is the most obvious contender in the art-historical literature for the end of Victorianism but it is not without possible challenges. From one influential perspective, at least, it is not at all clear to art historians that Victorianism and modernism should be sectioned off, taught separately, or imagined as distinct periods in culture in this way. For the scholarship on Manet and French Impressionism, undoubtedly the most extensive and influential body of writing on nineteenth-century art, modernism begins in the mid-nineteenth century. In the work of T.J. Clark, whose The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985) continues to serve as the interpretative touchstone, the standard of modernity in art is set by what was done in France from Courbet onwards, and Clark and his followers have provided the intellectual context necessary to understand Impressionism as above all an innovative modern art, engaged with the characteristics of social modernity as its contemporaries experienced it and concerned to give that experience a form.

Faced with this glamorous and powerful interpretation, it is difficult for art historians concerned with British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not to feel tempted by the possibility of a similar diagnosis. If an engagement with social modernity is the necessary characteristic of modernism in the visual arts, then surely Britain must have had such an art? Given the leading role of Britain in the Industrial Revolution and of British literary and intellectual culture in the expression of its consequences, ought it not to be the case that British art, too, can be reinterpreted as modernist? There is something to be said for this. Contrary to what one might suppose from the standard viewof Victorian painting, many nineteenth-century visual artists were concerned to develop answers to the pressing question of what it would take for their art to become modern. 'Every artist must paint what he sees, rather every artist must paint what is around him, can produceno great work unless he impress the character of his age upon his production,' wrote G.F. Watts, on the face of it an unlikely championof modernity. ¹

The ringing denunciations of the great nineteenth-century vates like Ruskin and Carlyle, sceptical of industrial capitalism and all its works, together with the explicit social role and sporadic social engagement propounded for the visual arts by painters such as Watts, reveal a clear consciousness of social modernity. From at least the Pre-Raphaelites onwards many British artists were striving to create a self-consciously modern art. But this is itself problematic, the identification of a vigorous awareness of the issue is not in itself sufficient to identify a modernism. When Oscar Wilde wrote in the 1890s that 'the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter', the point of the joke was that it had proved very difficult to say what either modern form or modern subject matter might be. ² The answers Victorian artists proposed were varied, often equivocal and uncertain, certainly of a sort unfamiliar to twenty-first century viewers brought up on definitions of modernism derived from the art of Manet and the Impressionists. Nevertheless, there are connections here reaching from the mid-Victorian period to the heart of early twentieth century modernism...