In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past
By Andrew SandersYale University Press, 2013 The cover and the opening study of Andrew Sanders’ opulent, enormously satisfying study of Victorian art features that gaudy and well-known 1856 Henry Wallis painting The Death of Chatterton, showing the poor young poet dead at his own hand in 1770, having despaired of ever achieving the fame he craved. Chatterton was only 17 when he killed himself; Wallis was 26 when he made his painting (his model, the future novelist George Meredith, was 24), and it was, as Sanders reports, a smash sensation with the picture-looking public; police officers had to hold back the admiring crowds, and engravings sold like ice in summer. It answered, in other words, a whopping great need.That need, that visceral link between Victorian art and the Victorian imagining of their own past, is the heart of Sanders’ book. He ranges his lively, readable text over a broad swath of the English literary canon, but that range is entirely governed by one book: Walter Scott’s 1814 novel Waverley, which kick-started the entire genre of historical fiction and, more importantly, gave an entire century the emphatic feeling that it could possess the past in a way previous centuries hadn’t felt – possess it aesthetically, possess it imaginatively.The Victorians took that feeling from the late Georgians and embraced it with the manic large-bore enthusiasm they lavished on everything. And although Sanders’ book ranges over a bracing spectrum Victorian art, this part of it also has a governing sigil – that languid, watery Wallis painting of poor dead Chatterton. The vial of poison rests on the crude wooden floor; the labored-over poems lie scattered in torn-up shreds (the waif tore them up! Did he cry while doing it?); the fancy red coat sits crumpled on a chair, thrown there in petulance; out the window, the dome of St. Paul’s seems to mock in the morning light (how often did the poet gaze bitterly at it, wanting the honors it so indifferently withheld?) … in the plumbing of pure, preposterous bathos, Wallis distilled a psyche-shaping masterpiece: even today, if young art students can be lured away from soup cans and taxidermied fish, they will immediately sense its overt power. This is not a flat-faced virgin hearing of her impending motherhood with a complacency thickly obscured by centuries of veneration; this is a boy you might meet tripping down High Street on a spring morning. Suddenly, to adapt a contemporary reaction, Chatterton is not only there, he’s ours.It was galvanizing, and it shot through Victorian art, fiction, and poetry like a gale-force wind.The endemic peril of reading art-history monographs like In the Olden Time is that, John Ruskin being dead quite some time now, they tend to get either their history or their art wrong. Happily, Sanders’ historical sense is impeccable, although he has a positively Edwardian tendency to deny the Victorians even the awareness of sarcasm, let alone any proficiency in it, when in fact you’d be hard-pressed to find a funnier century anywhere in human history (Dickens excepted, of course).Interpreting art is always more problematic, but even here Sanders acquits himself well and slyly leaves the more egregious blunders to his quoted sources. The central irritation of those blunders staggers belief, and yet printed art commentaries consist of little else. How many times, in how many countless art history books, have innocent readers encountered blocks of nonsense like the one Sanders quotes from a 19th-century critic blathering about John Everett Millais’ 1870 painting The Boyhood of Raleigh (our author’s rather bland allusion to Millais’ “limited intellectual prowess” in this case constituting slander rather than blather):
The sailor points to the southward, for there lies the Spanish main, the scene of all his troubles, and adventures. The young Walter sits up on the pavement, and with his hands locked about his raised knees, and with fixed, dreaming eyes, seems to see El Dorado, the islands of the east and west, the ‘palms and temples of the south,’ as well as the Mexican and other monarchs he had read about. Ships, gold, the hated Spaniards, and (most brilliant of all) that special object of his life’s endeavours, the ‘fountain of youth,’ were before his fancy. The other, whose intelligence is not of the vision-seeing sort, but rather refers to the visions of others, lies almost at length on the ground leaning his chin within both hands.
Notice how this isn’t in any way a matter of vague interpretation but simple observation. It’s not just that young Walter’s eyes are very pointedly not dreaming – even that might be a matter of personal opinion, no, it’s that the other boy isn’t lying “almost at length on the ground’ – he’s clearly, visibly sitting hunched and cross-legged. Read enough of this sort of slop and you start to wonder if any art critic in the checkered history of a very dubious profession has ever actually looked at a painting.Sanders spends a refreshing amount of time studying Victorian attitudes to the politics of the past (George Eliot and the teenage Jane Austen are quoted with equal aplomb), and when it comes to another iconic, immensely popular painting on that subject, Paul Delaroche’s 1831 masterpiece Cromwell Uncovering the Coffin of Charles I, Sanders might have frustratingly little to say himself, but his literary spadework turns up choice bits by others:
One French critic noted that Delaroche’s painting had managed to reflect on ‘a period like our own, in a century when the destinies of kings have been found to weigh little in the scales of the great interests of the people’ and the German poet, Heinrich Heine, noted of the figure of Cromwell, as he stands contemplating Charles’s decapitated corpse, that he was ‘firm as earth,’ ‘brutal as fact,’ ‘powerful without pathos, naturally supernatural, marvelously commonplace … beholding his work almost like a woodman who has just felled an oak.’
Not so lucky is poor itinerant German virtuoso Franz Xaver Winterhalter, whose work has for a hundred years been casually derided almost as comprehensively as that of the great Landseer himself (who gets one wilting little mention in the whole length of In the Olden Time). Winterhalter made his reputation (and a pile of money) working precisely in the crucible of Sanders’ devising; he painted the royalty and semi-royalty of England and the Continent in the visual argot of eternity. He placed his beak-nosed, corpulent, very human subjects squarely in the crossroads where the conception of history becomes history itself, or tries to.A perfect (and touching, though it’s of course now gauche to admit it) example is his bright, exquisite 1851 work called The First of May, 1851, in which an aged Duke of Wellington presents a little golden cask to Queen Victoria’s infant son Prince Arthur while the Queen’s Consort, Prince Albert, towers serenely over the moment, half-gazing toward the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition that he so fervently wanted to symbolize the future; the sun shines down providentially on the palace of modernity, but it also illuminates the fine white hair of the conqueror of Napoleon. The triangular juxtaposition – the past doing honor to the present and the future in an explicit evocation of the Adoration of the Magi (Winterhalter could be a bit of a ham) – illustrates as neatly as anything else in the book the particularly vibrant way art and literature taught the Victorians to think about the past, but it gets from Sanders one utilitarian passage:
It was with a conscious sense of history that Queen Victoria had Franz Xaver Winterhalter paint the aged Duke presenting his infant godson, Prince Arthur, with a casket on the child’s birthday. Behind the royal party and the uniformed godfather, Winterhalter shows the Crystal Palace.
But such passing disappointments don’t mar an accomplishment of such breadth and sheer thought-provoking fun as In the Olden Time. Sanders is throughout a superb guide to an era far more visually vital than it’s usually given credit. Only when his narrative winds its way to the borders of the present does it falter into polite euphemisms. “Historical painting did not die in the nineteenth century,” he tells us, “but, like the historical novel, and the writing of historical romances, it steadily adapted itself to representing the quotidian rather than the exceptional, the exemplary rather than the extraordinary.”Indeed. A 21st century equivalent of Sanders’ inquiry would be inconceivable. No facet of 20th century history is illuminated, challenged, or reaffirmed by a 20x20 blank canvas, or a rusty hub-cab placed at random on a stage, or a traffic sign splashed with bovine (one hopes) menstrual blood, regardless of how many millions of dollars such flotsam fetches at auction. In so wonderfully describing the vital, immediate role Victorian art played in the Victorian life of the mind, Sanders is accidentally penning a long eulogy for the last era in which art served that function. Etiolated modern art students would flip through Sanders’ book sneering – but Chatterton on his death bed is ever so slightly smiling, and they’ll never know why.