Then and Now: Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-Century England by Joan Coutu (review)

The collecting practices of eighteenth-century British grand tourists, and the development of the metropolitan art market more broadly, has in the last twenty-five years received significant scholarly attention. Major exhibitions, and the research these spectacles responded to and inspired, underscore the material importance of art's role in the history of early modern Britain. Notable examples include the Tate/Palazzo delle Esposizioni exhibition, Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (1997) and, more recently, the Yale Centre for British Art/Ashmolean collaboration with the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in The English Prize: The Capture of the "Westmorland," an Episode of the Grand Tour (2013). These events and their catalogues examined the significance of works from antiquity - along with copies and classically inspired contemporary works - in relation to the development of national identity, imperial ambition, and British aesthetics. Furthermore, this is a period when art was often deployed for its transformative capabilities, smoothing the transitions in a rapidly changing society coping with new wealth and newly won political power. John Ingammells's Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (1997) and the National Gallery's collaboration with the Getty Research Institute in British Sales 1780–1800: The Rise of the London Art Market (2013) similarly make important interventions that identify from which personal, temporal, artistic, geographic, and economic spheres these objects derived. Nevertheless, the aesthetic motivations for these acquisitions and their display, and the socio-politics that informed them, have not been adequately evaluated. In Then and Now: Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-Century England, art historian Joan Coutu brings the worlds of aesthetics and collecting together and, in the process, provides a nuanced account of the midcentury shift from the "identity-driven and philologically based" installations to the newly emerging aesthetic motivations for procuring and displaying classical sculpture. She argues that, when we drill down, some of these collections are revealed as self-aware manifestations of refinement, or exempla, intended to "spur like-minded individuals to honourable action." Her focus is, with one exception, on aristocratic assemblages that she examines in four case studies: the collections of the Second Marquis of Rockingham (Charles Watson-Wentworth), the Third Duke of Richmond (Charles Lennox), the Tenth Earl of Huntingdon (Francis Hastings), and a useful departure from the "natural aristocracy" in a chapter dedicated to the collecting habits of the political propagandist, merchant, and relatively new member of the landed gentry, Thomas Hollis. What these collections share is that key decisions (and peculiarities) about acquisition and display can in part be explained by acknowledging them as complex, intellectual, and individualized expressions of Whig ideology - a spectrum that ranges from avid party commitment to codes of liberal morality. This aesthetic articulation of the grand manner emerges "when the patriciate's hitherto self-proclaimed natural right to lead faced unprecedented threat, from the rising merchant class, the career politician, and also the monarchy."

One of the many strengths of this book is the author's remarkable ability to explicate the characteristics of multifarious dialogues between individual, allegorical (and allegorized) works, and the environment (physical and political) that they inhabited in relation to "whom the collectors were." Although all were "activated politically," they expressed in idiosyncratic ways that have hitherto been unexamined. Coutu advances these littlestudied mid-century collections as reflections of a newly emerging temporal understanding of England's socio-political relationships with antiquity. Since the energy in archaeological digging resulted in material dealing, the ability to collapse the distance between then and now became increasingly difficult. Antiquity was at once manifested and distanced as original works, and sculpture all 'antica was given physical prominence in country estates and urban spaces, thus shedding new light on art's rhetorical capacities. Coutu examines this temporal shift throughout the book but establishes its significance structurally through a preludial first chapter that culminates in the conclusion investigating the classical archetype in relation to the legitimization...