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Victorian Studies 43.3 (2001) 495-497



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Book Review

Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: Treasures from the Royal Academy of Arts Permanent Collection


Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: Treasures from the Royal Academy of Arts Permanent Collection, edited by Helen Valentine; pp. 167. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999, $45.00, £30.00.

Histories of Victorian art have traditionally allotted the Royal Academy a significant, but largely malign, role. It was, Julian Treuherz confirms in Art in the Age of Queen Victoria, "the focal point of the Victorian art world, but it discouraged innovation, and the most advanced artists never became members" (12). This view replicates that dominant, if tired, Paris-based master narrative which structures the history of nineteenth-century art through a Manichean dualism between Salon exhibitions glorifying smug and degenerate "pompiers," and the innovative work of the avant-garde heroes of realism, impressionism, and modernism. The histories of British, German, and American art have largely been written in accordance with this paradigm, by which the "RA" is habitually stigmatised as a bastion of English conservatism and provincialism, steadily painting itself into a reactionary corner. The progression of a painter such as John Everett Millais from Pre-Raphaelite rebel to President of the Royal Academy--PRB to PRA--is accounted as a collapse in moral as well as aesthetic standards. The dominance of the RA and the absence of a coherent avant-garde (James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and even William Holman Hunt have been auditioned for the leading role) accounts for the "failure" of Victorian painting. A revisionist trend in recent scholarship has questioned this orthodoxy and attempted to reclaim some members of the Academy for reconsideration as more complex and significant artists than had hitherto been acknowledged (see, for [End Page 495] example, Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn, eds., Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity [1999] and Paul Barlow, "Millais, Manet, Modernity" in David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry, eds., English Art 1860-1914: Modern Artists and Identity [2000]).

Astonishingly, the RA has survived from its founding in 1768 without state funding, and with a minimum of internal reform. Ambivalent feelings about the institution's history have characterised its post-war custodians. Tangible evidence of this history persists in the collection of paintings and sculpture deposited by each Academician upon election to membership. The "Diploma work" is by no means the morceau de réception of the French system, a "masterpiece" demonstrating maturity and competence, but rather a work of the artist's own choice, in some cases one which had proved difficult to sell. Until recently viewed as shameful reminders of the institution's darkest days, the Victorian Diploma works hung for years on an inaccessible staircase in Burlington House: when this area was demolished as part of Sir Norman Foster's modernisation they were removed to storage.

Thanks to a revisionist spirit and a new curatorial professionalism at the RA, these works have now resurfaced, superbly conserved, in an exhibition subtitled "Treasures from the Royal Academy of Arts Permanent Collection" which is travelling to five venues in the USA. This show has an unusual texture; unlike Malcolm Warner's revelatory exhibition and catalogue of 1986, The Victorians: British Painting 1837-1901, where "the best rather than the most representative examples" (14) were chosen, here the exhibition is, in a sense, selected by the artists themselves. With the exception of Leighton, whose magnificent St. Jerome (1869) is inexplicably omitted, all the most significant Academicians--and quite a number of currently obscure figures--of the period are represented.

Do the exhibition and publication, then, present a joyous reassessment of neglected "treasures"? Not exactly. Treuherz's necessarily general Introduction, "A Brief Survey of Victorian Painting," is an uninteresting rehash of the orthodox history. More useful are essays by MaryAnne Stevens and Helen Valentine which sketch, respectively, the history of the Academy and the role and curriculum of its schools during the Victorian era. Valentine's account reveals that, despite their dominant position...

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