Abstract
In an 1814 letter to the comic actor Charles Mathews, Coleridge makes a careful distinction between theatrical naturalism and literal truth: “A great Actor, comic or tragic, is not to be a mere Copy, a facsimile, but an imitation, of Nature. Now an Imitation differs from a Copy in this, that it of necessity implies & demands difference—whereas a Copy aims at identity”1 As I described in my introduction, the language of this distinction between acting and mere mimicry—modeled on that between imitation and copy—constitutes an idée fixe of Coleridge’s lectures on aesthetics. For example, he counseled would-be dramatic poets with the same terms he applied to the actor Mathews, that is, “not to present a copy, but an imitation of real life.” Whether watching a play or reading it in one’s study, Coleridge states, “the mind of the spectator, or the reader, therefore, is not to be deceived into any idea of reality.”2 Coleridge’s carefully reiterated distinction between the imitative genius of art and the technique of merely “copying” reality illuminates and protects the idealist impulse integral to Romantic poetics. Clarifying his position in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge stipulates that images of nature, “however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature,” do not constitute art unless “they are modified by a predominant passion.”3 The shaping sensibility of the artist, actor, or poet must “modify” reality in the service of an ideal.
“The disadvantage of pictures is that they cannot be multiplied to any extent, like books or prints.”
—William Hazlitt, “Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England” (1824)
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Notes
Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 3:501.
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 5(2):277.
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe [after the Centenary Edition] (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 10:8.
Richard Sha, The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 52.
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 220–21. For a discussion of the English print trade informed by Benjamin’s “Mechanical Reproduction” essay, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997), 449–63.
Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters; or, The Language of Forms, ed. Benjamin Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 121.
David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 274.
See Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 320–36. Wark has dutifully included a transcript of Blake’s embittered commentary in the Yale edition of the Discourses, but Lawrence Lipking has warned against the critical tendency to read Reynolds solely through the lens of Romantic reaction against him. It is a consequence of Blake’s canonization by twentieth-century literary critics, Lipking contends, that we “perceive Reynolds’ Discourses through the screen of Blake’s famous marginalia,” not because Blake’s opinions had any impact on Reynolds’ reputation at the time. The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 164.
Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 88.
Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 144.
Timothy Clayton, The English Print, 1688–1802 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 177. I am indebted to Clayton’s original and comprehensive research for a considerable portion of the historical material in this chapter.
Reynolds, ed. Nicholas Penny (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 35.
From the engraver Sir Robert Stranges Inquiry into the Rise and Establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts (London, 1775), 71–75; see also Sidney C. Hutchinson, The History of the Royal Academy, 1168–1968 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1968), 40. Among the “auctioneers” alluded to by Strange was James Christie, whose association with the building “no doubt reinforced Reynolds’s need to rigidity lines between art and commerce.” Visual and Verbal Sketch in Romanticism, 43.
Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Georgians: Eighteenth-Century Portraiture and Society (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990), 26.
“A skilled painter ought not be a slave to Nature, but rather its arbiter.” Dialogue sur le colons (Paris, 1699), 8.
Ellis Waterhouse, Reynolds (New York: Phaidon Press, 1973), 20.
Richard Godfrey, Printmaking in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 48, quoted in Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 42.
A Review of the Polite Arts in France, at the time of their Establishment under Louis XVI, compared with their Present State in England (London, 1782), 51.
The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Edward Malone (London, 1797), 2:51–53.
The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Tom Taylor (London: Peter Davies, 1926), 1:212–13.
James Barry, Works (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), 177.
An Inquiry into the Requisite Cultivation and Present State of the Arts of Design in England (London, 1806), 221–22.
For a comprehensive account of Boydell’s career, together with larger issues he represents—namely, the failure of academic history painting and the rise of a commercial art market in Britain—see Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). This is the first important study to recognize the late eighteenth century as the “Boydell” era, in which “the histories of painting and engraving are inextricable one from the other” (1).
Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 106.
C. H. Watelet and P. C. Léveque, Dictionnaire des Arts de Peinture, Sculpture et Gravure (Paris, 1792), 2:109, quoted in Clayton, 282.
Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin, 1965), 35.
For important background to my discussion of class and taste in the Discourses, see John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 77.
See Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
Works, 162, quoted in James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London: Henry Colburn, 1818), 78.
Edward Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters (London, 1808), xxv, quoted in Sir Joshua Reynolds, 5.
English Art 1800–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 21.
“William Blake’s Annotation to Reynolds’ Discourses,”Discourses, 304; Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context, (New York: Norton, 1988), 333.
Correspondence and Table-Talk, ed. F. W. Haydon (London: Chatto and Windus, 1876), 1:185.
The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Walter Bissell Pope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 2:218.
Robert Woof et al., Benjamin Robert Haydon (Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, 1996), 113–15.
“The Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art,” Complete Works and Letters (New York: Modern Library, 1935), 203.
The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Harper Collins, 1961), 285–86.
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© 2001 Gillen D’Arcy Wood
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Wood, G.D. (2001). Prints and Exhibitions. In: The Shock of the Real. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06809-5_3
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