Victorian Olympus

by William Gaunt

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Genres: Art History, Art

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

William Gaunt (1900–1980) was a British artist and art historian.

After serving briefly with the Durham Light Infantry in the First World War, Gaunt went on to Worcester College, Oxford, and graduated with honours. He completed an MA at the Ruskin School of Drawing and found work as a painter, art historian, art critic, novelist and travel book writer.

During the Second World War he was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to paint London city bomb sites.

Gaunt was drawn to the Pre-Raphaelites, whom he considered to be underappreciated, and wrote his most enduring book on the subject, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (1942), followed by further studies of Victorian art, The Aesthetic Adventure (1945) and Victorian Olympus (1952).

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The time distance between the publication of 'Victorian Olympus' and the high Victorian academic art that is the subject of this book and between the book and our own time is much the same - and that is what makes it so interesting today.

By 1952, academic Victorian Art was very much 'old-fashioned' and, in its sentimental aspects, despised. Gaunt, while prepared to be critical of those market-driven tendencies towards cloying feeling, is usefully fair-minded towards the least popular then and today of Victorian 'schools'.

This was part of a trilogy sandwiched in time between a similar work on the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility and one on the Aesthetic Movement in British Art. It centres on the magisterial and rather remarkable figure of Frederic Lord Leighton.

Leighton dominates the book as he dominated 'official' British Victorian Art which survived in some form well into the twentieth century but whose high point was the 1870s and 1880s. This was also the high point of both British imperialism and the arrival of the aspirant nouveau riches.

A key point to make here is that Art had become a creative industry producing massive numbers of works at high prices for the Anglo-American elite (a sort of Blairite wet dream) with standards dictated by the Royal Academy (of which Leighton was President) at the peak of this system.

Artists themselves could become rich in pandering to the tastes of the rising mercantile class. The British art world became self-contained with decreasing contact with Europe, despite Leighton's own cosmopolitanism. Leighton seems simply to have gone with the flow.

The winning formula and both the challenge to Pre-Raphaelitism and the cause for the reaction of the Aestheticism and its 'l'art pour l'art' was triggered by the arrival of the Elgin Marbles (as controversially then as today) - that is, the appropriation of the classical for the purposes of painting.

Classicism had long been dominant in education and culture in the educated ruling classes. The competition between the 'Goths' (represented by Ruskin) and the 'Romans' was a running theme in British culture especially architecture throughout the first two thirds of the nineteenth century.

Leighton was one of a number of artists, some directly inspired by the Elgin marbles or from travels that extended from Rome to Greece and Egypt, who, to varying degrees, adopted classical motifs in a form of cultural faux-realism that reflected Victorian feeling.

We can see what was going on here. A self-confident empire at its height saw itself reflected in the values of Greece and the power of Rome. The artists interpreted Victorian life in those terms for the aspirant 'new' mercantile and professional rich as well as for the London Establishment.

The story is, of course, far more complex than this. Gaunt does a good job of producing a coherent narrative out of very different artists and trends that could all be subsumed under the classical banner.

Indeed, it is a truism of British Art that 'movements' are never quite what they seem. There is a tendency to lump artists with similar ideals and characteristics into much tighter cultural constructs than the evidence justifies.

The greater artists of the classical tradition - Leighton himself, G. F Watts, Albert Moore, E. J. Poynter, Alma-Tedema - all had distinctive styles and purposes much as we see in the rival Pre-Raphaelite tradition whose eventual peak would be represented by Burne-Jones.

The justification of a loose school comes from the inspiration provided by the Greece of Athens, an almost archaeological appreciation of Ancient Rome and from the role of the Royal Academy in moulding taste in the upper classes.

An accurately depicted Roman soldier (as Gaunt points out) comes straight out of Clubland and the girl, from whom he parts reluctantly, from any upper middle class English home. The artists were often depicting Victorian life dressed up romantically in Roman or Greek or even Egyptian costume.

Leighton himself was a remarkable man, presented by Gaunt (whether justifiably or not we cannot know entirely) as almost god-like, the disciplined Zeus presiding over the Olympus of Establishment Art. As a personality, he undoubtedly fascinates.

Indeed Gaunt's book is in danger of becoming Leighton's biography. We could probably have done with more on Watts, Moore and Poynter although the Dutch artist who became a major figure in the London scene, Alma-Tadema, is well covered and fascinating in his own right.

The paradox of Leighton is that this representative of British Imperial self confidence who, out of relaxed noblesse oblige, allowed the Royal Academy to sponsor some of the most trite and sentimental art of the Victorian age was also a man of cosmopolitan experience.

Easily one of the most accomplished artists of the age, he spent much of his life travelling and could, at one point, as easily have become the leading figure of post-Nazarene German Art as of British academic culture. His early life could be seen as the last culminatory moment of the Grand Tour.

His first master work - 'Cimabue's Madonna Carried in Procession' (1853-1855) - is not in the classical tradition but distils his exposure to the Nazarenes (the more austere German equivalent to the Pre-Raphaelites). It dominates its room in the National Gallery.

Even the choice of classical themes was drawn not from some abstract extension of an eighteenth century literary classicism but from actual engagement with Greek and Roman works in situ. Alma-Tadema too studied artfacts with all the attention of the archaeologist.

This was not the classicism of J-L David with its austere moral lessons. Leighton himself was not seemingly averse to the Whistlerian concern with Art as Art and not Lesson. Instead, classicism was a style onto which anything might be grafted and, generally, in that age, it was feeling.

A highly formalised and stratified society with complex codes of class behaviour that would mystify 'foreigners' and with a form of evangelical puritanism containing much overt behaviour found 'pagan' classicism quite useful in safely crossing certain emotional boundaries.

The erotic aspects cannot be denied but the models used by these artists were a respectable profession. The nude was idealised and not naked. In sculpture as in painting, this idealised nude could give an erotic uplifting frisson without any taint of the overtly sexual.

The key to it all was a lush sensual non-Davidian style conveying romantic sentiments of honour, duty, love, longing, fatalism and so forth that endorsed the codes of society and, undoubtedly, allowed it to function as a coherent whole in which everyone came to know their place.

There is a great deal of self-flagellation in the United Kingdom today because of the rise of the non-aristocratic graduate and a multicultural post-imperial society. Objectively speaking, the criticisms of empire are wholly valid - plundering, conquest, exploitation, class privilege, stratification.

In this sense, Imperial Britain was, in fact, closer to Rome than it can ever be to our day. Just as Rome was partially civilised by Athens, the classical past more than partially civilised the British Empire. It was to be an Empire better than most had been in history.

It is a cliche that the past is another country. It was inevitable that middle class intellectuals in the London of the 1920s should seek to embrace modernism and try to turn the High Victorian into a subject of mirth and scorn but we should not continue too far in this direction today.

The 1920s reacted as they did because the Empire committed suicide much as the West of our liberal middle class world is busy committing suicide. The Empire did it on a war in 1914 driven ironically by sentimental ideals of honour and duty derived from the high classical ideals of the Victorians.

Recall Kipling's heartbreaking response to the death of his son in the First World War and you can see the culture cracking apart at the seams. Rupert Brooke is still holding on to the high ideals. Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon snap under the pressure of a failing illusion.

In fact, many of the 'classical' attitudes survived long enough to give some though limited grounding to the British war effort in the Second World War and it lingered right up to the first half of my own secondary school experience in a small town grammar school. It has all gone now.

In other words, it could be argued that the British Empire was both at its greatest culturally, but also doomed to destruction and decline, during its romantic and sentimental relationship to the classical past whose remnants still sit, like ruins in the making, in our modern world.

The story Gaunt tells is not often told today because our mentalities are so different from then. We can still relate to the romantic national nostalgia of the Pre-Raphaelites and the cynicism of the Aesthetes but not easily to the high ideals and deliberately constructed self-delusions of empire.

This is not an easybook to get hold of but, if you find it, try it as a way into a world now lost and never to be recovered and to rediscover the High Victorian character of the estimable (though not quite as 'perfect' as Gaunt suggests) Fredric Lord Leighton.

[Persephone Abbott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the final volume in a trilogy about the artistic movements of the Victorian era. I would gladly read the others; Mr. Gaunt writes very engagingly of the art world using humor yet removes himself from making overly judgmental statements which would distract the reader.

[Jorge Villarruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una historia sobre los pintores victorianos que trataron de revivir un estilo de vida olímpico, entre ellos Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Poynter y Richmond. Buen libro para conocer esta escuela de pintura que fue muy exitosa en su momento pero que pasó de moda tan rápido que nadie la recuerda ya.