Freedom, Nature, and the English School of Commercial Art

Abstract

Over the course of the eighteenth century, an aggregate of theories on painting and the visual arts appeared in Britain that I refer to here as “the English school of commercial art.” Its main theorists were Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds, and while their ideas do not truly constitute a coherent “school of thought,” taken together they suggest that the theories, practices, and reception of painting in eighteenth-century England contributed to an emerging idea of subjectivity, a notion that creative self-consciousness might be coterminous with fashionable self-presentation. The theories of visuality of Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds share certain important properties. All three were profoundly influenced by and responsive to the empiricist philosophies gaining currency in England at this time, most notably that of John Locke. All three anticipated the formulations of aesthetic judgment, subjectivity, and genius put forward by Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s in his critical philosophy, an attempted systematization that has been described both as bringing the narrative of Enlightenment philosophy to a grand resolution and as raising questions about subjectivity that remain unanswered into modernity. Perhaps most significantly, all three writers were actively engaged in the commercial practice of the art that they theorized. Our experience of fashionable objects is primarily visual, and as practicing portrait painters, Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds were alert to the material and ideational properties of drapery, hair styles, and the ornaments that adorn the bodies of men and women. Their treatises on painting, spanning the century, suggest the emergence into public discourses—both verbal and visual—of a particular type of subject, the creative genius who is also a figure of fashionable urbanity. In the works of all three, the nature of this complex figure is suggested in a succession of questions and conundrums that apply the concerns of idealist and empiricist philosophy to the emerging field of aesthetics. For instance, do our impressions of visible phenomena, which include the fashionably adorned bodies of urban contemporaries, conduce to ideas and abstractions? Are our fleeting and conditional impressions of such phenomena answerable to ideal beauty? Can a faculty of genius which “improves” nature in acts of artistic creativity flow somehow from the exertions of a “mechanic” whose “curious hand” and perceptive eye engage with drapery, hair styles, and other ornaments? Significantly, questions like these were made public by the theorists of the English school in stylish octavo books, objects which, as we shall see, themselves emerge in significant and unexpected ways as fashionable embodiments of genius.