Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Catherine Roach (review)

Like riddles, pictures-within-pictures can be amusing. In her thoroughly researched and well-organized book, Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Catherine Roach focuses on five artists—John Scarlett Davis, J. M. W. Turner, John Everett Millais, Emma Brownlow King, and William Powell Frith—who produced some of the most significant examples of such pictures. Roach shows that, integral to their amusement, these paintings had (and still have) a serious and generally conservative social function. By displaying pictorial pedigrees laboriously traced back to Raphael, Anthony van Dyck, Joshua Reynolds, and so on, pictures-within-pictures encourage a reverence that reasserts class stratification. As Roach says, "What was true of certain viewers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is still true of those with an interest in art today: visual literacy allows us to claim membership in an elite group" (19).

Some pictures include other pictures in their composition because they portray exhibition spaces, art collectors' homes, artists working in their studios, or places of art sales. Because these pictures inside pictures are rarely labelled, knowing what they depict is key to understanding their significance. Arguing that a "well-cultivated visual memory indicated education, social standing, and mental agility," Roach concludes that "a visual reference to previous masterworks provided a way of pleasing discriminately" because "only those educated in the history of art could appreciate this device" (14, 15). Here Reynolds's words echo: "The higher efforts [in fine arts] do not affect minds wholly uncultivated" (15). Knowledge becomes a status marker, a token of belonging in a respectable society where, Roach notes, "upward mobility through education was at least theoretically possible, if difficult in practice" (15). Many pictures-within-pictures seem to have worked together to form a particular cultural device that ensures class difference; their inter-pictorial citations were used to preserve an enclave of elites and their sense of superiority. Pictures-within-pictures, as Roach indicates, give "guilty pleasure" for those who possess facilities to recognize what is referenced while shaming those who do not (19). An anecdote described in the introduction of the book shows this well: visiting the Vatican, a Victorian English couple "fear others will discover that they do not already know its artworks through an education" (18).

Roach teaches us that pictures-within-pictures, including their conservative social function, are important historical objects for expanding our understanding of a particular segment of the British population in the nineteenth century. Helping assess the rightful place of artists, patrons, and institutions in the pantheon of masterworks, pictures-within-pictures offer us valuable archival materials, capturing the British elite's changing notions of the canon while revealing their aspirations, biases, and anxieties. Turner's "intense awareness of the historical distance between himself and Raphael," for instance, resulted in a disquieting pictorial structure in his Rome, from the Vatican (1820), revealing the "artificiality and even fragility … of the British School" (65, 4).

In contrast to this anxiety at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an example six decades later displays the (over-)confidence of the Victorian establishment. In a chapter titled "Critiquing the Critic," Roach focuses on Frith's A Private View at the Royal Academy (1881) and Oscar Wilde. Roach skillfully analyzes key figures in A Private View in relation to the depicted paintings hanging behind them. Her tightly woven discussion persuades us that A Private View is less a documentary record of a social event than Frith's determined attempt to advocate for his own conservative view of art. Roach says that Frith "shared the widespread concern that the British School of painting would be corrupted by undue foreign influence" and saw "Pre-Raphaelitism, Impressionism, and Aestheticism as 'crazes' that should not be allowed to affect enduring principles of art" (170, 178). With regard to Wilde, prominently portrayed a few steps to the right from the center in A Private View, Roach suggests that the painter provides guidance to the young aesthete for...