Imagendering II

6     In the course of the nineteenth century, the buying power of the newly rich industrials and manufacturers tipped the scales of the art market in favour of contemporary scenes while art criticism still debated the issue of their appropriateness to "high art". The contemporary and everyday was still a contested subject for painting. However, the middle class ascendancy to wealth and power caused the art market to turn away from historical painting. For patrons who wanted pictures for the walls of their homes, still-lifes and genre-scenes proved more attractive because of the smaller format and easy semantic accessibility. Historical and mythological painting adapted itself to the changing tastes by translating these topics into more contemporary iconologies, like John Everett Millais's scandalous "Christ in the House of His Parents" (1850) naturalistic carpenter's shop complete with a mother Mary who has chilblains on her feet. Later modifications in the Pre-Raffaelite efforts towards a decorative and ornamental style cleansed of emotional expression by Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti also adapted to the taste for less high-blown and heroic subject matters. A perfect combination of elaborate historical settings with Victorian genre sentiment can be observed in the paintings of the Academicians Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton.

7     In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the most prominent systems ordering society, namely class and gender, were threatened by "the Woman Question." Caricatures in Punch and other magazines showed the New Woman as a threat to the institutions of marriage and the family because of her "masculine" behaviour. The women's movement, the shifting labour market and reform legislation challenged traditional institutions like marriage and the role of women in the family. Discourses of provocation and radical reform intersected with those which rearticulated ideas of gender difference in order to police deviant behaviour. In the context of the economic difficulties and political and moral panic which dominated the second half of the century, the codification of domestic femininity as a part of the dominant position of the bourgeoisie became an obsessive topic of representation. Narrative and genre painting contributed to these containment strategies against threats perceived in interventionist reforms, women's paid employment, feminists speaking out against masculine sexuality and marriage, nationalist struggles and the rise of socialism (Cherry 122). The pictorial depiction of the domestic terrain in genre painting mapped feminine social spaces.

8     Contemporary scenes of life were particularly apt for the pictorial mapping of the domestic terrain, such as the drawing room, morning room, conservatory, and garden, as the appropriate spaces of respectable femininity, could construct femininity as a part of the dominant oppositional gender model. The Art Journal which promoted itself as the authoritative cultural magazine acclaimed the increasing number of domestic subjects:

England, happy in her homes, and joyous in her hearty cheer, and peaceful in her snug firesides, is equally fortunate in a school of Art sacred to the hallowed relations of domestic life. From prince to peasant, from palace to cottage [...] the same sentiments [...] have found earnest and literal expression through domestic pictures [...] The public at large naturally bring such compositions to the test of their own experience [...] for the works of this class are successful just as they awaken a dormant sympathy. (Doane 178)

The patriotic rhetoric invoking national humanity as transcending social differences of "prince to pauper" appeals to a sentimental unity based on bourgeois nationalism (Cherry 122). However, the critic's democratic invitation to readers to test "pictorial transcripts" against their own personal experience and to judge success in art according to their feelings of sympathy is a new tone taken. In the wake of growing popular interest in pictorial art, it is this respect paid to subjective response which gains more weight in the course of the century, in visual art as well as in theoretical discussions.

9      A debate carried on in The Times in 1885 concerned the propriety of the naked body in paintings. The critic John Horsley denounced contemporary nudes as improper even in mythological subjects.[1]He had in mind a picture by Wiedemann Browning of Jeanne d'Arc bathing ("Joan of Arc and the Kingfisher"). Robert Browning defended his son's picture claiming that it showed a historical incident. It was exhibited at the Grosvernor Gallery in 1886, cf. Weickert 269-270. Evoking conventional Victorian convictions, he called an appeal to the animal passions contrary to the moral and aesthetic duty of art, which should be "a manifest appeal to the love of beauty, and not to appetite, an ideal presentation not a literal transcript of individual fact, observance of special artistic conventions" (Weikert 266). The fact that the female body, especially the naked body, was no longer a natural attraction for the public gaze may be seen as not just another instance of Victorian prudery but as a growing awareness of the problematical relationship of spectators to objects. The habit of presenting women as objects to be looked at was coming to be questioned.

10      The female nude had a long tradition depicting the naked female body turned towards an implied male spectator outside the frame, displaying the Venus pudica position which suggests chastity and draws the gaze towards the genitals and posited so that the eyes are accorded no power of returning the look. According to Nanette Salomon, this type of picture legitimized male desire among a community of hierarchically differentiated men opposite an essentialized "universal" womanhood (99). In France Edouard Manet secularized the nude by showing unidentified prostitutes instead of Venuses and Ledas (e.g. "Olympia"). This intrusion of eroticism in the shape of authentic, lower class bodies into the realm of high art was a scandal to contemporary audiences. On the whole, however, photography, rather than painting, quickly became the medium for pornographic images. Its impersonal technique of automatic documentary registration favoured a voyeuristic gaze, suggesting a complete, merely apparatus-dependent intimacy between viewer and image. The Times-controversy is evidence for a confrontation between Victorian ideals of femininity and newer concepts of female corporeality due to these innovations (Betterton 3). On the one hand, the educated rhetoric of titles pointing out mythological or biblical references seem to have lost some of their legitimizing effect as Victorian art audience were no longer able to decode all the traditional iconographies for which they needed Ruskin's explanatory Academy Notes. On the other, artists' experiments like Manet's refusal to idealize the nude disturbed expectations of gratification by the female body as a passive possession for the male gaze. In spite of its overt conservatism the Times-debate exemplifies this double break with tradition.