Sir John Gilbert: Art and Imagination in the Victorian Age ed. by Spike Bucklow and Sally Woodcock (review)

Shortly before he died, the Victorian artist John Gilbert put his affairs in order. Gilbert had enjoyed substantial professional acclaim; knighted in 1872, he became a full member of the Royal Academy four years later and had served as president of the Royal Watercolour Society for more than twenty-five years. And yet, his work had largely gone unsold. With hundreds of oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and illustrations in his collection, his tallest order was to distribute his artwork. He selected five major municipal museums across England; London’s Guildhall Art Gallery became a primary beneficiary. Guildhall increased its holdings in 1903 with an additional collection from the artist’s brother. Later, it would host two small exhibitions of Gilbert’s work, one in 1952 and another in 1985. Until recently, however, Gilbert had not received any concerted, comprehensive scholarly attention. It seemed fitting, then, that Guildhall initiate Gilbert’s first major exhibition (from 29 April to 29 August 2011). Sir John Gilbert: Art and Imagination in the Victorian Age, edited by Spike Bucklow and Sally Woodcock, accompanied the exhibition, which was curated by the late Vivien Knight, former head of Guildhall Art Gallery.

Rather than produce a straightforward exhibition catalogue (a book with an introductory essay followed by commentaries on works in the show), which retains an aura of limited relevance, Bucklow and Woodcock have put together a major scholarly volume on the artist’s life and work. Given, on the one hand, the paucity of literature on Gilbert and, on the other, the impressive depth and breadth of this new publication, Sir John Gilbert promises to become a decisive and essential publication in the scholarship on Victorian art and society.

Gilbert’s approach to painting marginalized him in the history of art. First, he failed to possess a fiery temperament and dramatic painting techniques, qualities that often attract the attention of the public, art critics, and, ultimately, art historians. Moreover, he was a conservative painter during an age of extreme radicalism. Inclined to represent such historical scenes as the charge of Prince Rupert’s cavalry at the Battle of Naseby—the central event in the First English Civil War but one hardly familiar to a broad, continental audience—he was regularly overshadowed by contemporaries both flashier and more avant-garde. Respectful of fellow artists, he nevertheless deemed John Everett Millais’s work overrated. He expressed similar reactions to the work of William Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, and James McNeill Whistler. Édouard Manet’s reevaluation of Renaissance perspective and the impressionists’ obsession with the fleeting moment in nature must have seemed entirely alien to him. And yet, by painting historical and literary themes—by aligning himself with what he felt were the enduring values of tradition—Gilbert quickly became outmoded.

But should he remain so? In recent years, Victorian art scholars have started to reassess established interpretations. The recent Millais exhibition at Tate Britain (from 26 September 2007 to 13 January 2008) alluded to ways in which this Pre-Raphaelite influenced surrealism and even certain contemporary artists. “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde,” at the same institution (from 12 September 2012 to 13 January 2013), seeks to overturn the artists’ reputation for painstaking fastidiousness and to argue that they constituted Britain’s first modern art movement. Sir John Gilbert invites a likeminded reassessment and fresh conversation about the modern legacy of narrative painting.

Editors Bucklow and Woodcock approach Gilbert’s work from a variety of historical, critical, and technical perspectives. One of the strongest essays is Neil Rhind’s on Blackheath, where Gilbert was born and primarily lived. Rhind shows that while Blackheath could not provide Gilbert with formal art school training, it became a cultural hub for music and literary societies during the artist’s formative years. Rhind also draws useful comparisons between Gilbert’s watercolors and photographs that he may have...