Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914. Colin Platt
confessed to his mother, just before his fortunes changed: ‘The wish to do something that will sell seems to deprive me of all power over brushes and paints.’ Forbes’s marine masterpiece, A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885), painted in Newlyn the following year, at last brought him the recognition he had craved.
Before that happened, Forbes had depended on the support of well-off parents. And very few aspiring artists, even today, can succeed without an early helping hand. ‘Princes and writers’, wrote John Capgrave in 1440, ‘have always been mutually bound to each other by a special friendship … (for) writers are protected by the favour of princes and the memory of princes endures by the labour of writers.’ Capgrave (the scholar) wanted a pension from Duke Humphrey (the prince). So he put Humphrey the question: ‘Who today would have known of Lucilius [procurator of Sicily and other Roman provinces] if Seneca had not made him famous by his Letters?’ Equally, however, ‘those men of old, who adorned the whole body of philosophy by their studies, did not make progress without the encouragement of princes’. In Duke Humphrey’s day, ‘it is not the arts that are lacking, as someone says, but the honours given to the arts’. Accordingly, ‘Grant us a Pyrrhus and you will give us a Homer. Grant us a Pompey and you will give us a Tullius (Cicero). Grant us a Gaius (Maecenas) and Augustus and you will also give us a Virgil and a Flaccus (Horace).’4
There have been patrons of genius in every century: Abbot Desiderius in the eleventh century, St Bernard in the twelfth; Louis IX in the thirteenth century, Jean de Berri in the fourteenth; Philip the Good in the fifteenth century, Julius II in the sixteenth; and so on. Tiny seafaring Portugal has had three of them. Manuel the Fortunate (1495–1521), the first of those, could build what he liked out of the profits of West Africa and the Orient. Then, two centuries later, John V (1707–50) and Joseph I (1750–77) grew rich on the gold of Brazil. From the mid-1690s, word of the new discoveries in the Brazilian Highlands had spread quickly throughout Europe’s arts communities. And Western art can show few better examples of what biologists call ‘quorum-sensing’ than the instant colonizing of Joanine Portugal by foreign artists of all kinds – by the painters Quillard, Duprà and Femine, by the sculptors Giusti and Laprade, by the engravers Debrie and Massar de Rochefort, and by the architects Ludovice and Nasoni, Juvarra, Mardel and Robillon – most of whom returned home just as soon as the gold of Minas Gerais was exhausted.
Brazil’s ‘vast treasures’ included diamonds as well as gold, with sugar, hides, tobacco and mahogany. And the splendours of Portugal’s Rococo architecture under its Braganza kings owed as much to the fortunes of returned colonial merchants and administrators. In London a little later, Charles Burney, author of a four-volume General History of Music (1776–89), recognized the creative link between a thriving business community and the arts:
All the arts seem to have been the companions, if not the produce, of successful commerce; and they will, in general, be found to have pursued the same course … that is, like Commerce, they will be found, upon enquiry, to have appeared first in Italy; then in the Hanseatic towns; next in the [Burgundian] Netherlands; and by transplantation, during the sixteenth century, when commerce became general, to have grown, flourished, matured, and diffused their influence, in every part of Europe.5
London, when Burney wrote, had taken the place of Brussels and Amsterdam as the commercial capital of the West. And Burney’s artist-contemporaries, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, included Joshua Reynolds and George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs and Benjamin West. When they were joined shortly afterwards by William Blake, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, even the French had to acknowledge the excellence of British art – of Constable as a cloud-painter and of Turner as a colourist – indisputably of world class for the first time.
Commerce and peace go together. In Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address as President of the United States of America, he called for ‘Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none.’ And in 1801, nobody knew better the profits of neutrality than Jefferson himself – planter, statesman and architect-connoisseur – presiding over the unprecedented growth of the republic’s economy when almost every other Western nation was at war. Erasmus had written movingly in 1517 of ‘the wickedness, savagery, and madness of waging war’, and had castigated princes ‘who are not ashamed to create widespread chaos simply in order to make some tiny little addition to the territories they rule’.6 Yet just two centuries later, ‘I have loved war too much’, confessed Louis XIV (1643–1715) on his deathbed. And during the Sun King’s long reign, even building – his other passion – had come second to campaigning; for the two main construction programmes at Louis’s enormous palace at Versailles – the first from 1668, the second ten years later – corresponded closely with rare intervals of peace. Charles XI of Sweden (1660–97), a contemporary of the French king, inherited an economy almost destroyed by war and by the military adventures of the Vasas. In the next generation, Sweden would be reduced to penury again as his son, Charles XII, took up arms. But for almost twenty years from 1680 (when Charles XI declared himself absolute) neutrality was the policy of his regime. During that time, Sweden’s treasury was replenished and its war-debts were cleared, leaving a sufficiency in Charles’s coffers to complete his country mansion at Schloss Drottningholm, near Stockholm, and to start another big Baroque palace in the capital.
‘Money’, wrote Bernard Shaw in The Irrational Knot (1905), ‘is indeed the most important thing in the world.’ And it is usually the very wealthy who control it. Yet there have been exceptional episodes in the history of Western art when the arts have been governed neither by princes nor connoisseurs, but by the ‘tyranny of little choices’ of the many. In recession-prone Europe, after the catastrophe of the Black Death (1347–9), few individuals were seriously wealthy. However, there has never been a time when more money has been spent on memorial and votive architecture than under the collective sponsorship of the gilds. After the Reformation, when the pains of Purgatory had been forgotten, it was the individual investment choices of men of modest means that supported the Dutch Golden Age. ‘All Dutchmen’, noted the English traveller Peter Mundy in 1640, fill their parlours ‘with costly pieces (pictures), butchers and bakers not much inferiour in their shoppes … yea many times black smithes, coblers, etc. will have some picture or other by their Forge and in their stall.’ There were more than two million new paintings on Dutch walls by 1660. ‘Their houses are full of them’, said John Evelyn.7
I end my book at the First World War, when many were asking what constituted art and what, in the last resort, it was for. ‘Is that all?’, asked the Modernist critic, Roger Fry, in his Essay in Aesthetics (1909), quoting a contemporary definition of the art of painting (‘by a certain painter, not without some reputation at the present day’) as ‘the art of imitating solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments’.8 Fry, of course, had much more to say. Yet he was writing at a time when ‘the visions of the cinematograph’ (Fry) and the ‘death of God’ (Nietzsche) had caused many of the old certainties to fade. The Fauvists in Paris and the Expressionists in Berlin were all reading Nietzsche at the beginning of the last century. They were as committed as the philosopher to new ways of seeing, but would probably have agreed also with his ‘sorrowful’ conclusion – reluctantly confessed in Human, All Too Human (1878) – that the arts would be the poorer without religion:
It is not without profound sorrow that one admits to oneself that in their highest flights the artists of all ages have raised to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions which we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind, and they could not have been so without believing in the absolute truth of these errors. If belief in such truth declines in general … that species of art can never flourish again which, like the Divina commedia, the pictures of Raphael, the frescos of Michelangelo, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic but also a metaphysical significance in the objects of art.9