Lara Kriegel is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University.

Grand Designs

Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture By Lara Kriegel

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4051-5

Contents

List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….xvAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….19CHAPTER ONE Configuring Design Artisans, Aesthetics, and Aspiration in Early Victorian Britain…………………………………………52CHAPTER TWO Originality and Sin Calico, Capitalism, and the Copyright of Designs, 1839-1851……………………………………………86CHAPTER THREE Commodification and Its Discontents Labor, Print Culture, and Industrial Art at the Great Exhibition of 1851…………………126CHAPTER FOUR Principled Disagreements The Museum of Ornamental Art and Its Critics, 1852-1856…………………………………………..160CHAPTER FIVE Cultural Locations South Kensington, Bethnal Green, and the Working Man, 1857-1872………………………………………….191AFTERWORD Travels in South Kensington………………………………………………………………………………………………203Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..253Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….293

Chapter One

Configuring Design

ARTISANS, AESTHETICS, AND ASPIRATION IN

EARLY VICTORIAN BRITAIN

As the summer of 1837 drew near, a handful of young men gathered at London’s Somerset House to embark on a new pedagogical venture. They went seeking training in drawing and design. The fledgling institution in which they enrolled would soon minister to thousands, but in June 1837 the Government School of Design opened to little acclaim. In its early months, it counted a scanty seventeen students, many of them mere boys. These modest beginnings notwithstanding, the infant school carried a heavy burden and an awesome responsibility. It was the first response to the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures. In 1835 and 1836, this committee, led by the radical member of Parliament William Ewart, had called countless witnesses to investigate art academies, public museums, and aesthetic education in Britain. Its 1836 report outlined a litany of criticisms. Most notably, Ewart’s committee had expressed grave concern about the quality of Britain’s industrial art wares, including such staples as silks, china, and wallpaper. In the face of its apprehensions, the committee had urged the formation of an academy devoted to instructing would-be designers in the “application of the arts to manufactures.” It looked to the putative school, which debuted just a year later, as the salvation of Britain’s industrial arts. The infant school, like the protean notion of design itself, would carry a heavy burden.

Given these lofty goals, it is no surprise that the school’s early years were rocky ones, marred by derision and plagued by disagreements. When they looked back on its infancy, later Victorian critics referred to the institution as the “despised School of Design.” In his 1882 Travels in South Kensington, the chronicler Moncure Daniel Conway noted that the “poor little school” at Somerset House had become a “thing to make fun of.” From the vantage point of 1882, when Conway wrote, the meager enrollment at Somerset House appeared pitiable and its grand designs seemed laughable. Yet it had considerable staying power. By the time Conway penned his Travels, the once embattled Government School of Design had moved to South Kensington, where it had grown into the National Art Training School. This institution was the lynchpin of a network of 7 schools in the metropolis and 150 across the nation. Young artisans, would-be designers, aspiring artists, and even lady students flocked to the National School and its branches. Still grander things were in store for the school, which was renamed the Royal College of Art in 1896. As such, it holds a prominent place on the landscape of London’s South Kensington district to this very day.

Eventual success notwithstanding, estimations such as Conway’s have cast a pall over the early years of the School of Design, inflecting the historiography of the school, of Victorian art institutions, and of drawing more generally. As a result, the School of Design receives scant attention in histories of nineteenth-century arts training and Victorian aesthetic culture. More often than not, it appears as a discouraging prelude to eventual triumphs in industrial education or as a disheartening denouement to the polite practice of drawing so prevalent among elites in the early modern period. And those who do give heed to the school’s early years find themselves caught, by and large, in teleological narratives that seek to explain the institution’s inevitable failures or anticipate its ultimate triumph.

Singular in the depth of analysis and the drama it ascribes to the institution, Quentin Bell’s The Schools of Design remains the exception to this historiographical rule. In 1963, Bell penned what endures as the authoritative narrative of the institution’s early years. This meticulous text cast the school as a stage for tense contests among “incalculable and enigmatic” men. Many of these squabbles were petty intrigues that involved “political chicanery” and “office seeking.” Often, however, more substantial matters lay at the heart of these struggles. These had to do, specifically, with the curriculum for educating designers, which turned out to be as contentious as it was open-ended. The school’s proponents agreed that students should learn to draw. But what they were to draw, and to what larger purpose, remained subject to debate. The question of whether students should study from the human figure, particularly the nude, proved especially divisive. This was a charged matter in the waning days of an era in which drawing served “to identify and locate individuals in the social order.” Whether in Renaissance Italy or Victorian Britain, life drawing represented the apogee of training in art. Its pursuit conferred claims to taste, authority, power, and even masculinity. These matters would turn out to be noticeably fraught at an institution that sought to extend the cultural capital of artisans in an age of political upheaval, uprooting, and unrest.

At the School of Design, two competing models of study came to the fore. The first, the academy, placed a premium on figure study so that pupils could attain their highest aesthetic potential. The second, the workshop, eschewed the figure in favor of a trades-based education that would prepare students for practical employment. Each of these had its own champion. Advocating the academy was the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, a historical painter, a devotee of the Elgin marbles, and a gadfly to the art world. He argued for training that focused on the figure and culminated with the nude. According to Haydon, such a course of study would tap into the “genius of Britain” and elevate the people. William Dyce, a Scottish fresco painter and longtime superintendent of the School of Design, promoted the workshop. In contrast to Haydon, he understood design training as a means to vocational ends. During the first decade of the school’s existence, these two men staked their positions in impassioned speeches, bureaucratic reports, and instructional manuals. But there was more in question in their competing models than drawing itself. When they sparred over the figure, those on both sides of the matter argued about the place of the artisan in aesthetic and cultural hierarchies at a time of sociopolitical transition. While Haydon viewed design education as a vehicle for nurturing aspiration, Dyce upheld industrial art training as a regime of containment. Given the stakes of this disagreement, the ripple effects were especially dramatic. In London and the provinces, drawing masters, students, and council members struggled between the positions offered by Dyce and Haydon as they sought to define a curriculum for design training. During the first decade of the school’s existence, their contentious dispute inspired splinter academies, incited student revolts, and ruined careers. In sum, the figure was a nakedly political issue at the School of Design. The School of Design was just one component of a broader extension of cultural capital and visual literacy among the working and middle classes during the early Victorian era. At that time, parliamentary radicals sought to make the nation’s monuments, museums, and churches accessible to the populace; mechanics’ institutes endeavored simultaneously to expand the intellectual and aesthetic worlds of artisans. Most notable for our purposes, an explosion of print culture brought aesthetic appreciation and artistic pursuits to an expanding public sphere in unprecedented ways. The School of Design’s early years coincided with a watershed moment in the proliferation of affordable drawing books, which made the onetime polite practice of ladies and artists accessible to mechanics, businessmen, and youths. The era also witnessed an increase in illustrated periodicals for laborers, most notably the utilitarian Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Like the School of Design, these publications participated in the broader contemporary project of providing their consumers with visual literacy, aesthetic acumen, and work ethics. Riddled with contradictions themselves, their pages amplify the conflicts that played out at the School of Design. On the one hand, they advertised the seductions of the artistic ambition that Haydon so revered; on the other, they urged the wisdom of the modest pursuits that Dyce firmly proposed.

This chapter addresses the fractious early years at the School of Design in an attempt to understand the volatile relationships between institutional development, aesthetic theory, and cultural capital in early Victorian England. It locates this struggle within the broader cultural matrix of which it was a part, especially the print culture of the day. Placing the School of Design in this larger context allows us to move beyond the narratives of success and failure that have long characterized the history of the institution. The Government School was a staging ground for important discussions about aesthetic principles and artisanal practices that would inform the project of design reform in the decades to come. When they advanced their arguments regarding the figure, Haydon offered notions about the beauty of curvilinear design and Dyce proposed ideas about the instrumentality of minimal ornament that would find their way into aesthetic canons later in the century. Moreover, when they offered their programs for artisanal training, Haydon provided visions of artistic uplift and Dyce suggested lessons about working diligence that would eventually inform cultural politics at the South Kensington Museum.

BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON, THE MILK JUG, AND THE LIMB

Design reform found one of its most prescient, passionate, and tragic advocates in Benjamin Robert Haydon. Haydon was an artist, iconoclast, and debtor who devoted a lifetime to challenging the art establishment. He waged his battle on the page and the canvas alike. In young adulthood, Haydon imagined that he was involved in a grand struggle against privilege and corruption in art. Haydon’s passion is evident in his voluminous diaries, where he confided in 1804, “I must believe myself destined for a great purpose, a great purpose. I feel it, I ever felt it, I know it.” Haydon’s crusade met an early setback in 1809, when he exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time. The academy dealt Haydon a major blow when it removed his beloved Dentatus from a place of prominence. It replaced Haydon’s painting of the dramatic assassination of a classical hero with an academician’s portrait of a little girl donning a pink sash. The slight only added fuel to Haydon’s campaign against the Royal Academy, which he likened to a “ruthless, calculating coiled snake” and denounced as the “constituted imbecility of art.” As he battled the academy, Haydon sought to resurrect history painting as the proper vehicle for the visual expression of the British national character. According to Haydon, this manly form represented the British spirit far better than effete portraiture could. Convinced of history painting’s importance, Haydon brought the urgency of a military maneuver to its resuscitation. Ardently and passionately, he painted such figures as the Duke of Wellington and Marcus Curtius. These subjects embodied the patriotism, masculinity, civic duty, and sacrifice that Haydon so revered. Given the artist’s proclivities, it is hardly surprising that he viewed himself as the “Napoleon” of art-the ultimate warrior, hero, and martyr. Indeed, like Napoleon, Haydon was undone by his ambition, frustrated when his reach exceeded his grasp. A romantic hero and a tragic martyr, Haydon would take his own life in 1846.

A wretched man with grandiose aspirations, Haydon might seem, at first, an unlikely progenitor for the School of Design. Yet it was Haydon “more than any other man” who spurred Britons to “take a practical interest in art.” His role had as much to do with accident as calculation. It was equally indebted to the painter’s rancor and his convictions. In the wake of the Reform Bill of 1832, Haydon gained a strategic audience for his grievances against the Royal Academy. At that time, he received a commission to paint a commemorative portrait of the Reform Banquet of 1832, which was held at London’s Guildhall. While he sketched leading Whigs and Liberals whose ascendance marked a new era in politics, Haydon offered a vision of a new day in art. He found an especially sympathetic ear in William Ewart, a radical and a new member of Parliament for Liverpool. An opponent of monopoly and privilege, Ewart shared Haydon’s dislike for the Royal Academy. Haydon was pleased to come across this “keen little man” who had a sharp understanding of the “presumption” of the academicians. The two men wrought an alliance out of their shared antipathies. Together political radical and radical artist joined ranks to fuel the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, the very body that would inspire the School of Design.

With Ewart in the chair and Haydon as a witness, the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures mounted a radical critique of the aesthetic establishment in Great Britain. In the process, it sought to do nothing less than reconfigure the relationship between art and state. This involved attacking old institutions and championing new ones. First and foremost, the committee sought to expose the Royal Academy’s privilege and mismanagement. It called countless witnesses who charged that the academy deadened talent, promoted mediocrity, and encouraged mannerism. One of the most dramatic was Haydon himself, who used his testimony as an official platform to attack the Royal Academy. Haydon decried the academy as a “despotism,” “a House of Lords without appeal,” and an “anomaly in the history” of a “constitutional people.” In sum, it was a blight on the English nation. If the committee was concerned to expose old corruption in art, it also envisioned a new aesthetic order. This effort became ever more pressing in light of the mounting evidence that the trades in shawls, ribbons, and wallpapers were in decline. Haydon was, predictably, among those who promoted public access to art in the face of this apparent crisis. In particular, he championed drawing as a universal pursuit and a surefire way to improve industrial design.

Haydon brought this radical platform to an audience far broader than the committee’s meeting room. While Ewart’s committee interviewed its witnesses, Haydon toured the nation, preaching his radical vision for art. At the London Mechanics’ Institute, and later across the provinces, Haydon extolled the twinned virtues of access to art and education in drawing. He offered his message to respectable laborers and middle-class listeners. In these meetings, the outcast Haydon found the audiences that he had “so eagerly desired,” as well as the hearing that he had been “so long and pertinaciously denied.” Time and again, Haydon recounted in his diaries with delight how the crowds “smothered” him and the minions “crowded round” to show their drawings after the lectures. To be sure, Haydon was an appealing figure for these audiences. He parlayed his position as outcast, rebel, and radical into great advantage within the brotherhood of the lecture hall in both London and the industrial north. “We are all mechanics in varying degrees,” he claimed. He relayed to these audiences the dream of a day when art would cease to be a “mystery” for the humble mechanic, the artisan, or the journeyman.

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