Vying for Authority: Realism, Myth, and the Painter in British Literature, 1800-1855

Abstract

Over the last forty years, nineteenth-century British art has undergone a process of recovery and reevaluation. For nineteenth-century women painters, significant reevaluation dates from the early 1980s. Concurrently, the growing field of interart studies demonstrates that developments in art history have significant repercussions for literary studies. However, interdisciplinary research in nineteenth-century painting and literature often focuses on the rich selection of works from the second half of the century. This study explores how transitions in English painting during the first half of the century influenced the work of British writers. The cultural authority of the writer was unstable during the early decades. The influence of realism and the social mobility of the painter led some authors to resist developments in English art by constructing the painter as a threat to social order or by feminizing the painter. For women writers, this strategy was valuable for it allowed them to displace perceptions about emotional or erotic aspects of artistic identity onto the painter. Connotations of youth, artistic high spirits, and unconventional morality are part of the literature of the nineteenth-century painter, but the history of English painting reveals that this image was a figure of difference upon which ideological issues of national identity, gender, and artistic hierarchy were constructed. Beginning with David Wilkie, and continuing with Margaret Carpenter, Richard Redgrave and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I trace the emergence of social commitment and social realism in English painting. Considering art and artists from the early decades in relation to depictions of the painter in texts by Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Mary Shelley, Joseph Le Fanu, Felicia Hemans, Lady Sydney Morgan, and William Makepeace Thackeray, reveals patterns of representation that marginalized British artists. However, writers such as Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Robert Browning supported contemporary painting and rejected literary myths of the painter. Articulating disparities between the lived experience of painters and their representation calls for modern literary critics to reassess how nineteenth-century writers wrote the painter, and why. Texts that portray the painter as a figure of myth elide gradations of hierarchy in British culture and the important differentiations that exist within the category of artist.