The Awakening Conscience
The great
majority of narrative paintings refer to well-known oral or text narratives,
but a few do not. British painters of the late Victorian period not only made a
speciality of painting narratives which were not known to the viewer, but
created a sub-genre of problem pictures, whose whole purpose was to encourage
speculation as to their narrative.
Precursors
of these problem pictures started to appear around 1850, but they became most
popular and problematic over the period 1895 to 1914, particularly those of
John Collier. These became popular topics of discussion among the chattering
classes, and their debate and possible narratives were even covered in the
press of the day.
This
article traces their origin, and provides a few examples by the master of
problem pictures, John Collier – whose Sleeping Beauty I discussed earlier.
William
Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The Awakening Conscience (1851-53)
Probably
the best-known precursor to the problem picture, and one of the earliest,
Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1851-53) shows a domestic conflict.
Originally, the woman’s face was even more anguished, but shock among critics
encouraged Hunt to moderate her facial expression to that now seen.
Careful
examination of the painting reveals many cues to a more controversial
narrative, of a ‘kept’ mistress and her lover in disagreement. There is no
wedding ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, which is a focal point of
the picture. The room itself is furnished gaudily and in poor taste, and
contains evidence of the woman’s wasted hours waiting for her lover: the cat
under the table (which symbolically is shown toying with a bird), the clock
inside a glass on top of the piano, the unfinished tapestry, and so on.
That said,
what is the underlying narrative? Is this just the regret of the ‘kept’
mistress, and her desire for a more regular relationship and family?
William
Frederick Yeames (1835–1918), And when did you last see your Father? (1878)
And when did you last see your Father?
Yeames’ And
when did you last see your Father? is set in the English Civil War, as
indicated by the Puritan dress of conical hats and plain clothes. This
contrasts with the opulent silks of the mother and chidren, who are clearly
Royalists. The young boy is being questioned, presumably as given in the title,
for him to reveal the whereabouts of his Cavalier father – an act which is
bringing great anguish to his sisters and mother.
Setting
most of the cues to the narrative in the dress and disposition of the
participants makes it a greater problem, although here with sufficient
interpretative information the problem is readily soluble.
William
Quiller Orchardson (1832-1910), Hard Hit (1879)
Hard Hit
Orchardson’s Hard Hit is more difficult to solve. The
fashionably-dressed young man about to open the door on the left is walking
away from a group of older villains, who have stopped at nothing (including
perhaps cheating) to beat him repeatedly at cards, and have relieved him of his
wealth.
This is told well using classic Alberti techniques
such as facial expressions, but most importantly here by body language and
direction of gaze. Orchardson’s model provided the inspiration, when he arrived
dejected at the studio one day and revealed that he had been ‘hard hit’ himself
the previous night.
William Quiller Orchardson (1832-1910), The First
Cloud (1887)
The First Cloud
His The First Cloud is the last of a series of three
paintings about unhappy marriage, specifically a young, pretty bride who
marries an older man for his wealth. With their faces largely concealed, the
narrative relies on their body language and physical distance. When it was
first exhibited, the following lines from Tennyson were quoted:
“It is the little rift within the lute
That by-and-by will make the music mute.”
The Garden of Armida
John Collier (1850–1934)
By the 1890s, Collier was looking for something beyond
the portraits which had made him successful, and exploring different ways of
making history painting more relevant to the social issues of life at that
time.
The Garden
of Armida (1899) was an early attempt to show a traditional historical subject,
that of Rinaldo in Armida’s garden from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (see this
article) in a contemporary setting and dress. In doing so, he posed the problem
as to whether the viewer was to see some more modern narrative beyond Tasso’s
original. It was not well received, and Collier decided to try more direct
problem pictures instead.
The Prodigal Daughter
The
Prodigal Daughter (1903) was far more successful, and remains one of Collier’s
best-known works. An elderly middle-class couple are seen in their parlour in
the evening, surprised by the interruption of their prodigal daughter, who
stands at the door.
This
immediately sparked debate over the role of women in the modern world, the
nature and scope of their family responsibilities, and changing class
boundaries. Collier went to great lengths to capture the expressed emotions, in
terms of the daughter’s facial expression, and the contrasting body language.
The daughter is seen as a ‘fallen woman’, thus part of a popular mythology of
the time. But far from appearing fallen and repentant, she stands tall, proud,
and wears a rich dress.
The
resulting discussion spilled over from art gossip columns into more general
editorial and comment sections of the press.
Mariage de Convenance
A few years
later, his Mariage de Convenance (1907) was another painting which received
extensive media coverage. In contrast with Orchardson’s early more obvious
treatment of the problem of marriages of convenience (which were often also
arranged marriages), Collier poses a real problem.
The mother,
dressed in the black implicit of widowhood, stands haughty, her right arm
resting on the mantlepiece. Her daughter cowers on the floor, her arms and head
resting on a settee, in obvious distress. Perhaps the daughter has been (or is
to be) married into money to bring financial security to the family, now that
the father is dead?
Collier
himself offered a slightly simpler version of that, when finally tackled by the
press, which omitted reference to the father’s death.
The Sentence of Death
By the time
that Collier showed his next problem picture, The Sentence of Death (1908),
they had become established as a familiar feature of the annual Royal Academy
exhibition. This painting at first disappointed the critics, but quickly became
very popular. Sadly the original work has not lasted well, and I rely on a
reproduction made at the time.
At a time
when disease and death were prominent in everyday life, this painting might
seem quite ordinary. A young middle-aged man stares blankly at the viewer,
having just been told by his doctor that he is dying. The doctor appears
disengaged, and is reading from a book, looking only generally in the direction
of his doomed patient.
Unusually
for Collier’s problem pictures, and for paintings showing medical matters in
general, the patient is male. This led to speculation as to the expected male
response to such news, and questions as to what condition might be bringing
about his death. There was even debate about interpretations of the
doctor-patient relationship.
Sacred and Provane Love
The First
World War changed Britain, and British art, dramatically. One of Collier’s last
problem pictures was Sacred and Profane Love (1919), which drew attention to
women’s problems again. On the left, sacred love is shown in a modestly if not
dowdily dressed plain young woman, and on the right, profane love as a
‘flapper’ with bright, low-cut dress revealing her ankles, flourishing a
feather in her left hand. The suitor is shown reflected in the mirror above, a
smart young army officer.
Although
not as enigmatic as his earlier works, Collier remained very topical, achieving
his narrative using dress and composition, rather than facial expression.
The
remaining problem paintings by Collier are an even greater problem in that I
have been unable to find any further details of them, or of the artist’s
intended narratives.
In the Laboratory
In The
Laboratory (1895), there is clearly a narrative between the old alchemist and a
young woman, who is trying to take an object from the man’s right hand. This
may be a reference to a text narrative which Collier was exploring prior to his
real problem pictures.
The Sinner
The Sinner
(1904) is most probably another problem picture, as it shows a woman, possibly
dressed in widow’s weeds, making an emotionally-charged confession. This begs
much further speculation.
Fire
Fire (date
not known) shows a young woman, sat up in bed, afraid by the bright warm light
of a fire, presumably one which is in the same building and putting her into
danger. It is not clear why she is not doing anything to try to escape, though.
The Minx
The Minx
(date not known) shows a femme fatale holding what might be a mirror in front
of her. Unfortunately the condition of the painting is not good, and its
narrative now more obscured that it was.
Conclusions
This
unusual and short-lived sub-genre exploited the ambiguities that arise in
narrative paintings to elicit debate and speculation. As Fletcher points out,
its themes were the problems of the day, particularly those of women, their
roles, and sexuality. Although other good narrative painters have achieved
similar depth in their works, Collier seems to have been unique in his
development of such problem pictures.
The Story
in Paintings: Problem pictures. By Hoakley. The Eclectic Light Company,
February 19, 2016.
A Fallen Idol
In 1913,
John Collier contributed A Fallen Idol to the annual Royal Academy summer
exhibition. The painting depicts a young woman crouched in grief or shame at
the knee of a slightly older man, who looks up and out into the distance,
presenting his impassive face for our inspection. Viewers seized on the picture
and its title, offering competing – and often facetious – answers to the
question of which of the two was the ‘fallen idol’. The World noted that there
was ‘always a little crowd of speculators’ before the picture, and even after
nearly three months of exhibition, public interest remained high enough that
The Times published Collier's response to ‘a correspondent who asked him to
“solve the riddle of his picture”’. When the tabloid paper the Daily Sketch
sponsored a competition for the best interpretation of the ‘problem picture’,
the editors were inundated with responses ranging from the serious to the
satirical. Readers suggested that the woman was ‘a bridge fiend who had become
overwhelmed by debt … The unhappy lady was also alleged to have: neglected her
dying child; confessed that she was a militant suffragist; ruined her husband's
digestion by her bad cooking’. He, in turn, was ‘held to be a gambler, forger,
cheat at cards, victim to drugs or drink, and even a Cabinet Minister’. While
the majority of respondents believed adultery (usually the woman's) was an
issue, even this did not resolve the picture, as viewers debated questions of
motivation and likely outcome. Had the husband neglected his young wife? Would
he accept his share of responsibility for their marital difficulties, or would
the matter end up in divorce court?
This rich
mixture of playful speculation and moral evaluation bears all the hallmarks of
gossip. And, indeed, the best way to describe the reception of A Fallen Idol is
to say that viewers gossiped about the depicted characters as if they were real
people. The Daily Sketch competition was, of course, an attempt to generate
publicity and attract readers, and the rhetorical device of gossip offered a
veneer of respectable distance from lowbrow responses. Yet the very fact of the
paper's reliance on gossip as a publicity device suggests that the possibility
of this kind of reading was a significant part of the painting's appeal. Such
press accounts thus provide tantalising evocations of the picture's ephemeral
social life: exhibited before large crowds at the Academy and widely reported
on in the press. In this article, I suggest that taking gossip seriously as a
mode of engagement with art both amplifies our understanding of the meanings,
functions, and pleasures of narrative painting, and suggests specific
connections between exhibition culture and the meanings of pictures.
Gossip is a
mode of conversation, ‘idle, evaluative talk’ about other people, fuelled by
speculation and often containing a hint of scandal or impropriety. While gossip
is commonly identified with the discussion of people whom one knows, the term
can also be extended to the discussion of people not directly known to the
gossipers, such as celebrities, royals, or – I argue – the invented characters
in narrative paintings. As Reva Wolf and Gavin Butt have argued in their
respective work on Andy Warhol and Larry Rivers, pictures themselves can be
acts of visual gossip, displaying artistic identities, and constituting subgroups
of viewers in the know. Gossip is also, as the case of A Fallen Idol makes
clear, a conversational mode of response generated by viewers, exchanged at
exhibitions, in the press, and – it is perhaps safe to assume, though we have
little direct evidence – in other social settings. As recent scholarship in
anthropology, sociology, and psychology has demonstrated, such gossip serves an
important social function, creating and solidifying individual and group
identities through the mutual investigation of social codes. Recognising both the social function and the
potential subversiveness of gossip, historians have begun to use gossip as a form
of historical archive, suggesting that it may be particularly valuable for
recovering the voices and perspectives of those generally excluded from more
authoritative sources. But gossip is, by its very nature, fugitive: filled with
inside knowledge and jokes, generally communicated in oral conversation, and
only rarely preserved in written form. How, then, might we begin to recover a
history and theory of gossip as a mode of engagement with narrative painting?
Located at
the intersection of the Victorian narrative tradition with the modern mass
media, the problem pictures of the 1910s generated a rich archive of gossipy
reception. Narrative paintings of modern life had been perennial popular
favourites at the mid-Victorian Royal Academy. The problem picture extended
that tradition into the late- nineteenth- and early- twentieth centuries,
transforming the highly detailed moralising paintings of the mid-Victorian era
into ambiguous and often slightly risqué paintings of modern life that invited
multiple, equally plausible interpretations. Viewers and critics responded
enthusiastically, crowding the Academy galleries and filling the pages of
newspapers and magazines with possible explanations. In the early years of the
twentieth century, the term ‘problem picture’ was coined by the press to
describe this phenomenon, a fact that points to the critical role of the
expanding periodical press in creating, sustaining, and extending the conversations
the pictures provoked. Although the popularity of the problem picture peaked in
the first decade of the twentieth century, artists continued to use the form in
the 1910s and beyond in order to engage with topical questions of morality and
politics, including divorce law, anti-Semitism, and drug use. Indeed, while the
problem pictures of the 1910s – with titles like Out of It and Cocaine – were
not granted much aesthetic legitimacy, this very lack of authority allowed for
an even greater level of popular response and speculation, recorded in the
chatty art coverage of the tabloid press, viewers' entries to newspaper
competitions, and occasional letters to artists – in other words, the
discursive traces of historical gossip.
Such
narratives in the press were not, of course, identical to any actual viewers'
vocalised responses, and the available archive is necessarily constructed
within journalistic and critical texts. The press thus does double duty,
constituting, at least in part, the mode of response it names as gossip, and
serving as our primary representation of it. But the consistent deployment of
the rhetorical form of ‘gossip’ as a frame for the representation of problem
pictures and their reception across a wide range of newspapers and journals –
from working-class Sunday papers to Society magazines, from tabloids aimed at
the lower-middle classes to the solidly established dailies – does point us to
the visual and historical particularities of these pictures, which encouraged
such a mode of response. In what follows, I use these pictures and their
reception to establish a taxonomy of gossipy modes of engagement with narrative
painting, and to investigate the specific functions of each mode. The result is
both an examination of a specific set of pictures and a case study that
illuminates some of the complex relations between the social experience of
viewing art, the media reporting of exhibitions, and the meanings of narrative
pictures, at the very moment of their apparent eclipse in the early twentieth
century.
Gossiping
at the Royal Academy
Exhibitions
were, of course, far more than collections of pictures. The physical space of a
gallery, the kinds of pictures exhibited, the hanging of the pictures, and the
composition, density, and motivation of the audience all shaped an exhibition's
culture, the physical and social environment that influenced viewers'
interactions with the art on view and with one another. Narrative painting,
particularly the problem picture, flourished in what we might call the Royal
Academy's culture of conversation, and the contours of that experience are
critical to understanding its reception. While the Academy's audience and
prestige declined over the course of the nineteenth century, it remained a
major social and artistic event well into the twentieth century, as the
extensive coverage of the 1905 opening-day private view attests: ‘From ten
o'clock onwards the great quadrangle … began to fill with carriages, and Watts’
giant equestrian statue of “Physical Energy” was soon besieged with footmen and
horsemen of another kind. The long and crimsoned staircase up to the vestibule
was lined with palms and flowers – lilies, roses, and glowing geraniums'. As
reported in 1907, the crush of visitors continued inside the exhibition: ‘At
four in the afternoon the crowd was so thick that it was only possible to move
round the rooms with the greatest difficulty. In front of many of the pictures,
the artist, surrounded by a knot of friends, was modestly answering questions,
explaining details, or receiving congratulations. Other knots of people discussed
golfing prospects or week-end trips’. Before particularly popular pictures, the
conversation could be deafening, as the Morning Post reported in 1903: ‘The
noise at four o'clock in the Third Gallery, where everyone was talking at once,
was extraordinary’.
Discussion
of the pictures extended beyond the physical space of the Academy and the day
of the private view, continuing in other social settings and in the pages of
the periodical press. The most commonly recognised motive for attending the
Academy was to get ‘conversation’, and reviews of the Academy in daily papers
often focused on this aspect of the exhibition, asking ‘And what about
the … pictures? What is going to be the most eagerly discussed, and what can we
talk about, at dinners, or (if we are dancing men) to girls who are so hard to
talk to about anything but the Academy, when one is “sitting out” with them’. As a critic for Reynolds's Newspaper
explained:
“ The
importance of the Academy is social rather than artistic. It has become a legalised
and highly respectable topic of conversation. We must all carry about with us a
stock of opinions about the works of the artists who paint for this exhibition.
These opinions are as necessary for each gregarious individual as a pocket
handkerchief or a cigarette case. They do to pull out and flourish on awkward
occasions: the aged don't mind them and with the young they often serve as a
prelude to sweeter things.”
While male
viewers were jokingly encouraged to get conversation to fill up awkward moments
or to advance their flirtations, women were instructed to take the social
duties of conversation more seriously. As the ladies' magazine the Queen
advised its readers in 1898, ‘A Royal Academy exhibition, like a new play,
creates conversation. It is a subject on which anyone can dilate at a dinner
party or an afternoon tea’. Popular pictures, it seems, served as topics of
gossip among various kinds of social groups, from friends attending the Academy
together to relative strangers meeting in a range of social situations. The
periodical press both claimed to reproduce such gossip and participated in it,
extending its reach beyond the walls of the exhibition. Located in both serious
art reviews and in more popular coverage of the Academy as a social event, such
reported gossip could both offer the uninitiated reader a view of the
fashionable Academy and serve as a foil to the more elevated appreciation
evinced by the critic himself.
The
Academy's culture of conversation had important implications for how viewers
approached individual paintings and the kinds of paintings to which they were
drawn. The narrative paintings of modern life that became popular at the
Academy from the 1850s onwards presented the contemporary world in naturalistic
form, inviting viewers to relate to the picture through the lens of their own
experience. Writing about William Powell Frith's modern-life scene The Railway
Station in 1862, Tom Taylor described the parameters of this kind of response:
‘There is nothing here that does not come within the round of common
experience. We all of us are competent to understand these troubles or
pleasures, anxieties or annoyances: There is no passage of these many emotions
but we can more or less conceive of ourselves as passing through’. Such
discussions tended to focus on emotional response and moral evaluation, as
viewers engaged with even the most unlikely painted characters as if they were
real people. In 1907, a report in the Daily Mail on the popularity of Frank
Cadogan Cowper's painting of the devil disguised as a troubadour singing to a
group of nuns offered a vivid example of this kind of reading, extended even
beyond the parameters of what might generally be considered modern-life genre:
“He has
fascinated them,” said one severe lady spectator with eyeglasses.
“And they
think they are converting him,” said a young man by her side.
“I think,”
said an American lady slowly, “that girl who is laughing is real fast.”
And so
throughout the afternoon the comment went on.””
Such readings
of paintings in terms of the depicted individuals' emotions and characters move
aesthetic response into the realm of gossip in intent and function: ‘idle,
evaluative talk’ about other people, exchanged to fill time and build
relationships, and serving to test and demonstrate moral beliefs and values.
If all
narrative painting offered this potential, however, problem pictures
deliberately foregrounded it. Artists used ambiguous narratives and topical
subjects to situate their pictures in the realm of gossip, capturing public
interest through their creative reworkings of contemporary scandal and media
events. In return, viewers and critics generated multiple stories about the
characters in the paintings, inventing motives for their actions, dissecting their
characters, and predicting their futures. As one humorous account of a reading
of A Fallen Idol indicates, such responses could become quite elaborate: ‘The
thing's obvious of course; the woman's done it. Her husband doesn't mind much
either judging by his expression. He's simply trying to remember the address of
his lawyer, and whether that rich American widow who gave him the “glad eye”
over the table the other evening really meant matrimony or – or not’. The tone
of the comment is revealing of the differences between these pictures and
earlier Victorian moralising narrative paintings. At a time of rapidly changing
aesthetic standards, when many critics were urging attention to the formal and
material qualities of the art work rather than its subject matter, at least
some artists, critics, and viewers at the early-twentieth-century Academy were
willing to treat narrative paintings of modern life as open-ended games rather
than didactic lessons, while the expanding tabloid press opened the door to extended
coverage of such playful interpretations. Eliciting readings such as this one,
problem pictures became the quintessential example of narrative painting as
visual gossip.
A survey of
these late problem pictures and their reception suggests three major modes of
engagement with gossip: topicality, intertextuality, and identification. Each
of these three modes has roots in earlier narrative painting, making it
possible to map the continuities and differences between the problem picture
and its Victorian forerunners in ways that are suggestive of a longer history
of gossip as a mode of engagement with narrative painting. Problem pictures
pushed the boundaries of modern-life genre, featuring incidents of suicide,
scandal, and crime inspired by the lurid stories of tabloid journalism. The
pictures thus became acts of gossip in themselves and elicited gossip about
individuals – real and fictional – in return. As part of their speculation
about invented characters, viewers also engaged in intertextual readings linking
different pictures, and making identifications between the depicted characters
and real individuals. In each case, gossip functioned as a linking mechanism,
forging connections between viewers, between pictures, and between public and
private interpretations of the world.
Topicality:
Gossip and the Discourses of Morality
Three
problem pictures were exhibited at the Academy in 1913 and each relied upon a
topical appeal, drawing on contemporary events in the news. Collier's painting
A Fallen Idol received the most coverage, both because the artist had pioneered
the form in the previous decade, and because the exhibition of the picture
coincided with a renewed attention to the question of divorce law. The
much-publicised release of the report of the Royal Commission on Divorce and
Matrimonial Causes in December of 1912 highlighted the question, among others,
of whether or not men and women should be equally and legally culpable for
adulterous conduct. Janice Harris has argued that the hearings of the Royal
Commission opened up a cultural space in which to challenge the stock Edwardian
story of divorce, in which the adulterous woman destroyed the marriage and was
justly punished, and the picture seems to have provided a similar opportunity. While
responses to the picture rarely mentioned divorce directly, the question of
adultery and its effects were central to the picture's reception. The solidly
middle-class newspapers The Times and the Daily Telegraph concurred that ‘the
puzzle is this time no puzzle at all’, assigning guilt to the young wife and
assimilating the picture to the tradition of ‘fallen woman’ paintings. In contrast to the inexorable narrative of sin
and suicide that characterised the mid-Victorian fallen woman tale, however,
the possibility of reintegration into the family and respectable society is
suggested in these accounts, and The Times even proposed that the painting
‘might also be called, “Will he forgive her?”’ The woman's magazine the Queen,
in contrast, read the question of guilt as genuinely open-ended, asking ‘Who is
the fallen idol, the woman who crouches with bowed head by the man's knee, or
the man who looks sadly towards us above her stooping form?’, perhaps
suggesting a breakdown along gender lines in readings of the picture.
Tabloid
papers aimed at lower-middle-class readers were the place where the picture's
ambiguity was most fully explored in terms of gender and class. This was, in
part, because the format of such papers – focused on human interest news
snippets and readers' letters – was perfectly poised to exploit the playfully
risqué gossip that the picture could generate. In an article announcing the
competition for the ‘most convincing explanation’ of the picture, the Daily
Sketch compiled a list of responses, with female respondents including ‘Lady
Bland Sutton’ and ‘a tea shop waitress’ agreeing on the woman's guilt, while ‘a
City policeman’ observed, ‘Looks as if the gentleman had been owning up a bit,
and his wife's fair upset to find he ain't a hero after all’. In a later report
on the results of the contest, the responses were categorised by verdict,
shifting the focus to the probable nature of male and female weakness.
Responses were equally divided between identifying the man and the woman as the
sinner, but as the editors pointed out, ‘it is interesting to note that while
the woman's fall was in most cases attributed to passion the man's fault was
almost invariably of another order’, generally financial one. Perhaps the
strongest subtext of the article, however, is its emphasis on the inclusiveness
of the phenomenon. The results were introduced with the comment that ‘Fantasies
based on the picture came in from readers of all sorts and conditions. The
effort of a countess was followed by one from a pavement artist’, reassuring
the lower-middle-class readers of the Daily Sketch that their interest in the
pictures was shared by the highest reaches of society. In contrast, the Society
magazine the World distanced its readers from the ‘average man or woman’ to
whom such pictures appealed, and prophesied that ‘when the Academy supplements
reach our Colonies and Dependencies Mr. Collier will receive again many letters
from farthest India and Africa asking the nature of the crime of the lady’,
locating such viewers as far as possible from its fashionable readers.
In the face
of such speculation, Collier was eventually moved to intervene in the public
discussion. In a newspaper statement about the painting, he identified the wife
as the guilty party, but opened the door to conjecture about the causes and
effects of the transgression: ‘It is a young wife confessing to her middle-aged
husband. The husband is evidently a studious man, and has possibly neglected
her. At any rate, the first thought that occurs to him is, “Was it my fault?” I
imagine he will forgive his wife’. Collier's later comments on the picture
suggest that the painting was a quite deliberate intervention in the debate
over divorce law on the side of more sympathy for women: ‘To judge from the
correspondence I received, a good many people were interested in the question
whether the husband should or would forgive his wife. I think most of my
correspondents hoped that he would. Of this result of my picture I felt
distinctly proud’.
Out of It
If A Fallen
Idol engaged current social debates in a fairly substantive fashion, other problem
pictures at the Academy in 1913 were more closely linked to tabloid narratives
of melodrama and political scandal. Depicting a young woman in evening dress
lying unconscious or dead beneath some bushes, Out of It by Alfred Priest resonated
with two contemporary tragedies: the shooting and death of the Countess of
Cottenham while hunting, and the murder of a young domestic servant, Winnie
Mitchell, whose body was found buried in the woods. The artist himself located
this picture within the context of these two recent events, and justified its
sensational aspect with the claim that ‘life itself gives us these subjects’.
He went on to say that his subject was drawn from a similar source: ‘My picture
was inspired by a newspaper report five or six years ago. A beautiful girl is
supposed to leave the card-table after a dinner-party. She goes out, just as
she is, in her evening gown, without a cloak or hat. A search party is
organised, but the body is discovered, so the report says, by a village urchin's
dog’. Priest's eagerness to locate the picture's origin in a newspaper report
suggests that the interest of the picture lay in the conversations it could
generate about contemporary events and people in the news. Both of the recent
deaths had generated substantial news coverage, and each was connected with a
whiff of scandal: The death of the Countess – who had divorced her first
husband, with the Count named as co-respondent – was surrounded by the innuendo
of suicide, or worse; while the death of the young servant girl implicated a
married man and was compared to a Hardy novel. In each case, there is the muted
suggestion that the woman's past has somehow caught up with her, an implication
of retribution that provides the animating element of moral judgment to
readers' and viewers' speculations.
A third
painting exhibited at the Academy in 1913 extended the problem picture's
topical reach into the masculine realm of politics and public life. Depicting a
‘group of Jewish financiers’ and ‘a fair-faced gentile’ facing one another
across the aftermath of a luxurious dinner, Edgar Bundy's Finance enjoyed a
popularity that was largely attributed to its ‘topical interest’. To many
viewers, the picture seemed to refer to the on-going Marconi affair, a
political and financial scandal in which the Jewish Isaacs family was accused
of nepotism and three cabinet ministers were accused of illegal stock
speculation. A cartoon by E.T. Reed published in the Daily Sketch made the
connection directly, casting Winston Churchill as the affronted gentile with
the three accused ministers and three heavily caricatured Jewish businessmen
confronting him across the table. As the cartoon's caricatured rendering of the
Jewish men suggests, discussion of the scandal was fuelled by stereotypes of
greedy Jewish financiers and fears of an international Jewish cabal whose
influence on finance and politics exceeded any national government. Reviews of
the picture accordingly focused on its depiction of Jewish character and power.
In the mainstream press, many critics seem simply to have assumed the
transparency of the characterisation of the Jewish men; the Daily Mail critic
described the scene and commented: ‘The crude display of wealth and the
strained, keen expression on the faces of the Jews all turned on the young man
are wonderfully realistic’. Martin Hardie, writing in the Queen, noted some
heavy-handedness in the representation, but defended it as ultimately true both
to life and artistic intention: ‘Mr. Bundy has chosen unpleasant Semite types
because it suited his purpose; but they are types, none the less, and not
caricatures’. Such responses, however, did not go uncontested. Writing in the
Daily Telegraph, Claude Phillips – whose mother had been raised an Orthodox Jew
– noted that ‘for these life-size figures of opulent financiers … the most
repulsive types have been deliberately chosen and as deliberately exaggerated’,
and called the painting ‘a passionate assertion in paint of anti-semitism’.As
viewers identified the represented figures with real political actors, their
discussion of ‘race’, character and motive became a vehicle both for the evaluation
of specific politicians and entrepreneurs, and for the confirmation or
refutation of racial stereotypes and prejudices.
The
strongest reaction against the painting came in a periodical aimed at Jewish
readers. In a lengthy response to the painting entitled ‘A Disgraceful
Picture’, the editors of the Jewish Chronicle reviewed the debate and charged
the Academy with ‘moral retrogression’ for exhibiting the picture, accusing the
institution of trafficking in journalistic public pandering and offering
offence to Jewish viewers and artists. But it is the Academy's location as a
place for the formation and exchange of social attitudes that is the cause of
the most serious transgression: ‘The picture is blatant in its anti-Semitism
and one has only to listen for a few minutes to the remarks of visitors to the
Exhibition who stand in front of this picture to realise how unwise the Council
of the Academy were in permitting this cartoon to find a place on their walls’.
As viewers are drawn to the picture by the contemporary scandal and use it as
an occasion to gossip and air their opinions, their beliefs are being shaped
and directed by what the editors of the Jewish Chronicle see as the
anti-Semitic perspective of the image.
Cocaine
Problem
pictures faded from the walls of the Academy during the years of World War I,
but reappeared in 1919 with a subject unimaginable at the pre-War
Academy. Cocaine by Alfred Priest) reverses the composition of A Fallen Idol,
with the man's head in the woman's lap, as she looks out and meets our gaze
with a troubled stare. But the circumstances are a world away from Collier's
respectable middle-class couple in distress. The woman sits in her dressing
gown, in a luxurious modern room in the early hours of the morning (the clock
on the side table reads 4.50). A young man in evening dress is slumped in her
lap, unconscious, returned home after a long night out on the town. The title
signals his presumed vice: cocaine. The drug was much in the news in the spring
of 1919. While it had long been available by prescription, it was only during
World War I that cocaine became identified with a drug underground and a
subject of public concern. The overdose death of the young actress Billie
Carleton in November 1918 and the inquest and trial that followed focused
attention on the dangers of modern drug use, and created a public understanding
of cocaine as ‘a moral menace’, particularly for vulnerable young modern women.
Contemporary responses situate the picture within this context, introducing its
topic by noting, ‘poor Billie Carleton can't be left alone’.
But, of
course, the picture does not follow the news account, as it is the man who is
the ‘dope fiend’ here. As Priest explained in an interview with the Daily
Mirror, the picture is based on a true story of a young wife who ‘discovered
suddenly that her idol had feet of clay’. Like Collier, Priest aimed to arouse
viewers' sympathy as well as their condemnation: ‘And you will observe that in
the picture her hand protects and sustains as it falls across the shoulders of
the crushed thing that is her husband’. While the gender roles have changed,
the dynamics of fallenness and forgiveness are the same as in Collier's Fallen
Idol, challenging viewers' stock stories and inviting them to write new ones.
As these
examples make clear, topicality and a symbiotic relationship with the press was
central to how the problem pictures of the 1910s worked. The motives of
individual painters of problem pictures varied, from Priest's self-conscious
attention-seeking to Collier's interest in serious social and political questions.
But they all shared the desire to use the pictures to spark discussion,
allowing viewers to engage with contemporary ‘moral panics’ and media scandals,
ranging from the most intimate matters of marital life to the motivations and
weaknesses of politicians and public figures. Artists drew on popular news
stories and scandals to engage viewers in their pictures and the press
publicised – and ‘problematised’ – the resulting pictures. The press was thus a
critical component in the circuit of meaning and interpretation, providing the
raw material for the pictures and then reporting on (and thus helping to create
and sustain) the conversations they generated.
This
multi-layered relationship with the press is one key difference between these
problem pictures and earlier examples of topicality in Victorian art. While
major current events such as the Crimean War and the ‘Indian Mutiny’ sparked
spates of paintings in the mid-Victorian era, they tended to use individual
incident and anecdote primarily to convey a larger theme – such as patriotic
sentiment – rather than to explore or dramatise the nuances of an individual's
life or psychology. William Powell Frith's modern-life panoramas and his
narrative series such as The Race for Wealth (1880), which rely upon viewers'
knowledge of contemporary events for their legibility and evoke multivalent
conversations, are closer in function, but still provide a legible and
(over)determined arc from sin through deserved punishment, and thus provide a
kind of moral and narrative horizon beyond which interpretation cannot easily
extend. The possibilities for reception
differed as well, of course, as the gossip and scandal driven human-interest
coverage of the New Journalism did not yet exist as either source or publicity
outlet for these modern-life pictures.
In
contrast, the problem pictures of the 1910s fused the tradition of modern-life
genre painting with new modes of journalistic sensation. Like the stories of
murder, sex, and accident that filled the pages of the mass circulation press,
problem pictures dramatised the everyday life of ‘ordinary’ people. The
pictures' theatrically posed moments of suspense left the details of the
characters' past, present, and future to viewers' imaginations, fuelled by the
habits of gossip and scandal fostered by the tabloid press. The elusive key to
each picture seems to turn on the psychology and motivation of the actors
represented: Was the wife's infidelity justified, and will it be forgiven? Are
the Jewish dinner guests shrewd businessmen or corrupt conspirators? How did
this promising young man fall prey to a drug habit? As an article in Truth
noted in 1878, such questions are the very source of gossip's popularity: While
discussion of the facts of a case is necessarily limited in scope, conjecture
about people's motives offered endless possibilities. This kind of gossipy
speculation plays a critical role in the formation and performance of moral
values and social norms. As contemporary psychologists John Sabini and Maury
Silver have argued, gossip ‘involves taking a stance about another's behavior –
behavior which could be our own, but isn't. To do that is to dramatize
ourselves: our attitudes, values, tastes, temptations, inclination, will, and
so forth’. At a time when gender roles were under pressure from feminist
challenges to Victorian ideals and the growth of the middle class was creating
fractures between its upper and lower reaches, class and gender were the
primary axes along which interpretations of these pictures were generated,
labelled and disseminated. As viewers indulged in the seemingly frivolous
pleasures of gossip before these pictures, they were staking claims to their
own identities and values, testing their moral codes against the problems of
modern life and the values of their peers.
Simultaneously,
this kind of gossip functioned as a link between the public and the private
worlds, as political scandals and legal questions of divorce or drug use were
understood and debated through the discussion of these invented characters'
lives, psychologies, and motives. As Patricia Meyer Spacks has argued in her
study of gossip and literature, gossip's power derives from its ‘liminal
position between public and private … Gossip interprets public facts in private
terms: The senator will not run for re-election because his wife will abandon
him if he does. It also gives private detail general meaning: The young woman's
drinking problem exemplifies the strain on women trying to do everything at
once’. Drawing upon public narratives of
law, celebrity, and scandal and using the techniques of narrative painting to
evoke relational responses from their viewers, these topical problem pictures
fused the public and the private through the medium of gossip.
Intertexuality
and Identification: Gossip and Social Networks
While
subject matter was perhaps the most obvious way in which artists engaged their
audiences, the gossipy appeal of problem pictures was not limited to
contemporary news events. As viewers focused on the characters in these
paintings, they made other kinds of links and connections between the
represented figures. A seemingly mundane ‘human interest’ story from 1913
suggests some of the ways viewers could relate to the painted figures. On 6 May
1913, the day after it ran a feature on A Fallen Idol, the Daily Sketch
featured Alfred Priest's Out of It on its front page. The story focuses on the
fact that the pictures share the same model – one Miss May Fagerstein, who is
pictured below the painting. While the article does not pursue them, there are
at least two potential modes of using this connection to extend the discussion
the picture aroused. On the one hand, viewers might follow the model through
the stories of the different pictures, interpreting them as episodes in the
life of a single character. On the other, the news story suggests the
possibility of seeing ‘through’ the pictures to the real personalities involved
in creating them. Both of these options – what I call intertextuality and
identification – expanded the potential for treating the characters in the
paintings as subjects of gossip and creating social networks of artists and
viewers.
Out of It
While the
suggestion was not taken up in the accompanying article, the use of the same
model opened up the possibility of reading the pictures in tandem, and
attributing the young woman's death in Out of It to the crisis depicted in A
Fallen Idol. This mode of intertextual reading was common in earlier problem
pictures, as viewers turned the models into characters whose histories could be
followed by attentive viewers. One reviewer recognised the unhappy husband of A
Fallen Idol as a character in Collier's problem picture of 1908, The Sentence
of Death, a scene of a young man in a doctor's office: ‘Perhaps the clue may
lie in the fact that the young gentleman who supports the weeping woman is the
same youth whose case was given up as hopeless by the doctor two years ago’.
This identification, of course, opens up an entirely new area for speculation
as to the couple's situation. The accused woman in Collier's problem picture
The Cheat of 1905 was identified as appearing in several other contemporary
pictures, including his problem picture of 1906, ‘Indeed, indeed, repentance
oft I swore!’ The Daily Mirror saw the narrative connection as an obvious one:
‘Now we know that the cheat was the woman standing up. This year she is gazing
into the fire, wishing she hadn't cheated’. Reading the pictures as successive
incidents added a stronger moral element, illustrating a narrative arc from
crime to remorse, if not punishment. This kind of intertextual reading both
extended viewers' understanding of the depicted personalities as characters
with histories and psychologies, and created a community of viewers who
followed the stories year after year.
A variant
on this kind of intertextual reading put the characters into conversation with
the individuals depicted in the portraits that filled the walls of the average
Academy. A long notice in Truth in 1906 made much of who precisely was the
recipient of the whispered confession of Collier's penitent, whose ‘opulent
physical charms’ offered ample evidence of the direction her ‘faults … must
have probably tended’. The hanging suggested one scenario, in which ‘The
elaborately “frocked” lady … is supposed to be exclaiming, just loud enough for
“The Hon Mr and Mrs Douglas Carnegie with their sons John and David” to hear
her in their full-size motor-car, “Indeed, indeed, repentance oft I swore!”’
But the reviewer was entranced by another possibility, complimenting the
hanging committee for ‘having successfully resisted the temptation of moving
[the picture] from Gallery VII to Gallery V … For then Mr Collier's grande dame
would have been positively sighing out her vain expostulations in close
proximity to the characteristic portrait of the Rt. Hon. Sir John Gorell
Barnes, LL.D., President of the Divorce Division of the High Court of Justice’.
‘Indeed, indeed, repentance oft I swore!’
The tight
hanging of the Academy exhibition encouraged viewers in such readings of
pictures in relation to one another. Mark Hallett has traced this mode of
response to the earliest Academy exhibitions of the late eighteenth century,
arguing that the new exhibition format of the Academy ‘fostered an equivalently
novel form of interpretation in which paintings were defined as objects
interacting with those hanging nearby’. In his discussion of this ‘dialogic’ mode of
reading pictures, Hallett focuses on the meta-narratives of artistic, social,
and political power that the Academy hangings created, but, of course, such an
approach also allowed for more individual readings, as viewers made their own
connections and comparisons. As demonstrated in the example cited above, such
readings made the Academy exhibition an imagined social space where the
characters in narrative paintings could interact with the prominent society
figures represented in the exhibited portraits. Was there a hint of scandal
when the Truth critic imagined the penitent confessing to the Carnegies? A
suggestion of titillation when the Honourable Judge's serious portrait was
juxtaposed with the ‘opulent physical charms’ of one of his ‘cases’? Such
juxtapositions could also be used as a kind of critique of the élite whose
portraits dominated the Academy. In his review of Tom Mostyn's picture of a
doss house, A.C.R. Carter drew attention to the social impossibility of the
intrusion of its subjects into the more rarefied space of the Academy: ‘As
Bridge is now more fashionable than slumming, the Hanging Committee has
apparently shied at waking the consciences of its patrons, and has hung this
powerful study of despair and callousness high above the head of the “Countess
of Warwick!”’ [by Sargent]. For some critics, this interaction between the
pictures was precisely the problem with the Academy: as a critic in the Art
Journal complained at the early date of 1856:
“ In going
around the rooms, the mind is called upon to be always jumping from great to
little, and from grave to gay, and back again, and has to go through a series
of sudden convulsions and transitions, in seeking to do justice to the labours
of each artist. For my part, my powers are not facile enough to prance with
ease from broad farce to pathos, or from pet lap-dogs … to a great historic or
poetic effort; or … the ruins of Carthage, … to the broad business city face of
Mr. ——, with his well-brushed whiskers.”
His respondent,
however, pointed out that he was speaking as a ‘lover of Art’, while the
Academy was aimed at a wider audience, who ‘go to see the portraits of their
friends, or wile away an hour or two, or to say that they have been there, and
to be amused, but not to think closely of or study the works; and the variety
of images and characters in the very quick succession to which you object is
part of the amusement and excitement to them’. As many scholars have noted, the
change from this kind of crowded hanging to the modern convention of a single
row of widely-spaced pictures worked to highlight the formal qualities and
autonomy of each individual image, but it also changed the social experience of
the exhibition by diminishing the potential narrative contact between images. Modern
hanging practices create a different physical relationship between the pictures
and the viewers, and encourage a different pattern of movement and attention.
Rather than standing in a conversational group and looking at a wall filled
with pictures – a mode of viewing represented in countless illustrations of the
Academy – the single row of widely spaced pictures encourages viewers to walk
from one picture to the next, pausing before each individual work in turn, in a
measured rhythm of diversion punctuated by attention, either individual or
communal.
A second
possibility opened up by the identification of Miss May Fagerstein as the model
for both A Fallen Idol and Out of It was the link it made to the real people
behind the pictures, whether professional models or identifiable public
figures. Shared models were a way of linking artists and their aims in the
public imagination. Defining the problem pictures of the year had become a kind
of contest between different critics and papers by the 1910s, and one effect of
the Daily Sketch cover was to define Out of It as a problem picture by virtue
of its shared model with A Fallen Idol, painted by the ‘Great Problem-Artist’
John Collier. Recognisable portraits of the artist's friends or public figures
opened up even more scope for discussion. Collier's friend Reginald Barratt was
recognised by critics both in the role of the doctor in The Sentence of Death
and as the ‘cheat's’ partner. Critics played upon their recognition in various
ways: While one critic for the Morning Post in 1905 explicitly identified the
sitter and his connections to Collier – describing the figure in The Cheat as
‘an excellent portrait of Mr. Collier's fellow artist and near neighbour, Mr.
Reginald Barratt, A.R.W.S’. – others were more circumspect. In 1908, the critic for the Art Journal simply
hinted that the ‘doctor is at once recognisable as a prominent associate of the
old Water-Colour Society, who has several times played parts in Mr. Collier's
pictorial dramas’, while an article in the Morning Post used the crowd's
ignorance as a foil to the critic's (and, presumably, the reader's)
penetration: ‘The artist who sat to Mr Collier for the physician in his picture
was in the Sixth Gallery during the afternoon, but was unrecognized by the
crowd despite the singular fidelity of his likeness’. Recognition of the sitter
located the viewer ‘in the know’, conversant with artistic circles and
friendships and elevated above the unfashionable ‘shilling public’.
Artists had
embedded portraits – of celebrities or friends – in narrative paintings
throughout the Victorian period. Two of the most popular painters of
modern-life genre – John Everett Millais and William Powell Frith – regularly
included friends and public figures in their paintings, and artists such as
Edwin Landseer, Daniel Maclise, Anna Mary Howitt, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema did
so on occasion as well. While at least
some viewers must have recognised such references, there are few traces of such
recognition in published reception. One exception comes from the American
press. An article in the New York Times identified Kate Dickens, the novelist's
daughter, as the female figure in Millais's Black Brunswicker (1860), and used
the occasion to note ‘she is engaged to be married to CHARLES COLLINS (the
“Eye-witness” of All the Year Round,) brother of WILKIE COLLINS, and a great friend
of MILLAIS'S’. Though not made explicit,
the subject of the gossip is appropriate to the picture's subject, young lovers
embracing. An article in the Saturday Review entitled ‘Newspaper Gossip’
rebuked the American papers for ‘print[ing] what in English towns is only said
or whispered’, but went on to repeat the identification of Kate Dickens and the
news of her engagement as an example of the misguided American practice. Other
identifications played on contemporary scandal, such as Landseer's The Taming
of the Shrew (The Pretty Horsebreaker), exhibited at the Academy in 1861. The
model for the ‘pretty horsebreaker’ was recognised as a famous horsewoman, but
the precise identification varied. Reviews of the Academy identified her as the
respectable Miss Annie Gilbert, but at least one group of viewers read the
figure of the luxuriously reclining woman as the courtesan Catherine Walters, also
known as ‘Skittles’. As viewers recognised (or mis-recognised) portraits within
narrative paintings, the scope of gossip reached beyond pure fiction, blending
real actors with invented scenarios.
The Taming of the Shrew
The social
significance of this kind of response is demonstrated by a fictional character
invoked by the critic W.W. Fenn, writing in Belgravia: one ‘Jack Knowington’.
Presented as the narrator's fictional companion at the Academy, ‘Jack
Knowington’ identifies the older man in Millais's painting The North-west
Passage (1874) as ‘Lord Byron's friend Captain Trelawney’ and uses the
identification as a starting point for a long gossipy digression:
“It's rather curious … now that cremation is
being discussed, to find ourselves face to face with the presentment of one who
actually assisted as high priest at such a ceremony; for you know it was
Trelawney who brought home Shelley's heart … There's another funny thing, too,
about the picture: it seems he had a great objection to sitting … but a lady
interceded … and an odd bargain was struck. … The lady complained of a headache
and looked ill. “Take a Turkish bath,” said Trelawney, “and I'll sit to
Millais.”
Knowington
is a figure of mockery, as he uses the picture to demonstrate his social
standing and inside knowledge. But he also allows the critic to ventriloquise
the information, and the article's very title – ‘Echoes from the Royal Academy,
By a Listener’– suggests the importance of hearing (rather than seeing) at the
exhibition.
Conclusion
One final
example pushes the historical archive to its furthest reaches, presenting an
intriguing view of the more personal identifications modern-life narrative
paintings could trigger. In March of 1915, a woman wrote a pair of letters to
John Collier, in which she connects the genre of the problem picture to her
most intimate personal experience. Her first letter begins ‘For weeks I have
thought of a picture. I wish you would paint it. … I would call the picture “A
sleep he got of me,” based partly upon the poem “Wedding Morn” by D.H. Lawrence
and upon an actual experience’. In a second letter (after an apparently
sympathetic response from Collier), she emphasised the personal nature of the
story: ‘Shall you mind if I again tell you that it is an actual experience of
my own? And I read Lawrence's poem afterwards. You understand?’ D.H. Lawrence's
poem is the meditation of a woman on her wedding morning, anticipating the next
day's dawn after the consummation of her marriage, so it is not surprising that
the writer goes on to say that it is difficult to speak of the experience, as
it is ‘intimate in the extreme’. If he is interested in painting the picture,
he should read the poem and then, she promises, ‘I will do my very best to fill
in afterwards. It's a very human [illegible] in all its intensity. An everyday
happening, but peculiarly vivid at the present-hour. My lover is a soldier.
Would you consider the khaki setting too topical, too banal?’ While this was
clearly an unusual letter, it suggests a dynamic of personal identification in
response to Collier's problem pictures, hinting at a powerful if largely
unrecoverable potential impact of modern-life genre. For this viewer, at least,
the narrative impulse is a two-way street. She does not simply read narrative
painting in light of personal experience and real social life; narrative
painting and its conventions become a lens through which to interpret her own
life experience, and – she anticipates – to put her own personal experience
into a public frame.
I end with
this example to call attention both to the range and depth of these more
personal readings of narrative paintings, and the limitations of the archive in
allowing us to recover them. Readings of narrative pictures in terms of gossip
– responding to and discussing their characters and their situations as if they
were real people – reached from the most personal experience to the political
intrigue of financial scandals, but only traces of such responses are left to
us today. If not entirely recoverable, however, such meanings were nonetheless
a constitutive part of the experience of narrative painting for Victorian and
later viewers. As anyone who has ever visited a ‘blockbuster’ museum or gallery
exhibition knows, looking at art is a social and performative experience in
most forms of modern exhibition culture. Narrative painting embraces this fact,
and much of its meaning is created in those encounters, allowing for the
performance of individual identity, the creation of social and artistic groups
and subgroups, and connecting personal and public understandings of the world.
Gossip,
then, is not only a mode of responding to narrative painting, but a model for
how modern-life narrative painting functions. Spacks similarly argues that
gossip is a useful analogy for the realist novel, which mediates between public
and private life, and sets up a dialogic relationship with the reader. In these
narrative paintings, however, the dialogue takes place not only in a private
exchange between the image and its viewer, but also in a public exchange
between viewers. Identifying gossip as a model for the experience of looking at
modern-life narrative painting thus links the physical and social spaces of
exhibitions with the meanings of the pictures themselves. As Andrew Hemingway
eloquently notes in his analysis of the social experience of the
early-nineteenth-century Academy, ‘the art of the past was also a particular
type of experience – a function of social relations then prevailing, an effect
of discourse, and a range of complex learnt pleasures’. Academies and galleries
are not just stages for social actors with the pictures standing in as props,
nor are they mute backdrops for aesthetic experiences. The social experiences
of exhibitions are a constitutive part of looking at pictures, or, to shift the
emphasis, pictures are a constitutive and relational part of the social
experience of a visit to an exhibition.
The
reordering of priorities implicit in that last formulation runs contrary, of
course, to the focus of much art-historical writing. But I think it does
suggest something important about the popularity – in the Victorian period and
beyond – of narrative painting and its relation to modern exhibition culture.
Modern-life genre painting creates a shared set of referents – invented
characters and situations – for viewers to gossip about. Gossip most commonly
concerns people known to both gossipers, and serves as social glue, allowing
the gossipers to affirm their membership in a group and to reinforce its shared
values. But as Max Gluckman recognised long ago, gossip about celebrities or
royals can serve the same purpose in the larger, more anonymous social contexts
of modern life: ‘In the great conurbations the discussion of, for example,
stars of film, and sport, produces a basis on which people transitorily
associated can find something personal to talk about’. The fictional characters
in narrative painting provided common ground for the large diverse Academy
audiences, offering a real but morally neutral way to engage in gossip and its
creation of a sense of shared experience and group identity.
Narrative
Painting and Visual Gossip at the Early-Twentieth-Century Royal Academy. By
Pamela Fletcher. Oxford Art Journal. June 1, 2009.
