Writing the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810 by Karen Junod (review)

Once, Cimabue thought to hold the field / In painting; Giotto’s all the rage today; / The other’s fame lies in the dust concealed.

—Dante, Purgatory, Canto XI

The eighteenth century is often considered the turning point in the modern history of life writing. It was during this period that biography underwent what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives describe as an “explosion in both the kinds and the sheer numbers of life narratives” (1). Among these was the emergence of the biography of the British artist, yet its status as a literary genre is as contested now as it was 250 years ago. Writing from the perspective of the early nineteenth century, James Northcote, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s most entertaining yet flawed biographer, declared in his Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1819) that,

It is my fixed opinion that if ever there should appear in the world a Memoir of an Artist well given, it will be the production of an Artist but as those rarely possess an eminent facility in literary composition, they have avoided the task; and the labour of writing the lives of Painters has been left to depend solely on the skill and ingenuity of men who knew but little concerning the subject they had undertaken, in consequence of which their works have been rendered useless and insipid.

(v)

Northcote, of course, considers himself to be an exception. While British artists raised their status through institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts (established 1768) in this first “golden age” of English life writing, biographies of artists were still much less likely to be written than those of poets. Northcote attributes this to the “weak and purile” state of British painting in the early part of the eighteenth century, “as to reflect equal disgrace on the age and nation” (1). “Weak and purile” might also be an apt description for how some have considered the genre of the artist-biography since Vasari. One of the first major studies of the biography of the artist, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz’s Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (1934, translated into English and republished in 1979), was presented as an “experiment” in the field of art history, indicating an unease with biography, an attitude that persists within the discipline. What is more, the biography of the artist has further suffered for falling between the cracks of the disciplines of English and art history, resulting in a paucity of studies compared with other genres of biography.

Karen Junod’s Writing the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810 focuses on a well-considered and suitably varied selection of British artists’ biographies published during the latter part of the long eighteenth century and analyzes the integral roles of biography in shaping artistic identity and how this intersected the emergence of British painting. Junod’s selection of texts amply demonstrates the striking variety and degree of experimentation with genre and form. She describes the texts analyzed in Parts II and III as “decentred and undisciplined” and states that the “writing of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artistic biographies was not regulated by fixed procedures or guidelines, but was shaped (in so far as it had a shape) by a highly heterogeneous authorial community and usually intended for a no less highly diverse readership” (6–7).

The book is organized into three parts: I. Contexts, II. Series of Lives (Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England [1762–80] and William Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters [1780]), and III. Individual Lives (William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, George Morland, and John Opie). Each section is divided into synchronic analyses that range in approach from the historical and contextual to the biographically thematic, including artistic identity, the image of the artist, and the life/work relationship. Junod...