This nearly exemplary exhibition brings together some seventy
pictures and a good deal of period memorabilia to present a snapshot
of the mildly infamous Grosvenor Gallery in London, which from 1877
to 1890 was the chief artistic and social venue for
second-generation pre-Raphaelites (Burne-Jones, Alma-Tadema, et
al.), those associated with the Aesthetic Movement (Whistler and his
followers), and sundry other important artists including George
Frederic Watts (whom Henry James called “the first portrait painter
in England”) and James Joseph Tissot.
The Grosvenor Gallery, located in New Bond Street in the heart of
London’s gallery district, was the brainchild of Sir Coutts
Lindsay—according to Whistler, “the handsomest man in London”—and
his wife, Lady Blanche Lindsay, an aristocratic couple of
advanced tastes and sporadic artistic ambition. Both Lindsays were
amateur painters, and both exhibited occasionally at the Grosvenor
Gallery. But Henry James was right to insist, in his review of the
gallery’s inaugural exhibition in 1877, that their creation of the
gallery was not a vanity operation, existing to provide them with “a
place to exhibit [their] own productions.” The aesthetic achievement
of the artists associated with the Grosvenor Gallery—and the
organizers of the exhibition, Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, have
assembled good examples from most of its stars—was rarely (if ever)
of the first rank. But in providing a lively and welcoming
alternative to the Royal Academy—the raison d’être of the
gallery—the Lindsays performed a valuable service not only to the
artists they nurtured but to the life of London artistic culture
generally.
As the organizers of this exhibition stress, the Lindsays sought to
provide an alternative to the Royal Academy in more ways than one.
Not only did they exhibit the period’s more innovative artists—or, as in the
case of Watts, more innovative work by artists whose less daring
efforts were welcome at the Royal Academy—they also pioneered
new exhibition techniques. For example, they eschewed the crowded,
floor-to-ceiling montage preferred at the Academy in favor of a more
commodious arrangement in which an artist’s works would be grouped
together with generous spacing between each picture. Alas, Sir Coutts was
forward-looking in other ways as well: the Grosvenor Gallery was, as
a press release for this exhibition notes, “the first
commercial gallery in London to have an elegant restaurant on its
premises” along with many other “amenities.”
No doubt it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The Grosvenor’s inaugural exhibition attracted wide notice. The young
Oscar Wilde as well as Henry James weighed in with enthusiastic
notices. (The exhibition did not, however, spark Wilde’s critical acumen: “there are,” he wrote about Watts’s rather ghastly Love
and Death, “perhaps few paintings to compare with this in intensity
and marvel of conception.”) But the Grosvenor’s greatest stroke of
good fortune came with John Ruskin’s declaration that Whistler’s
Nocturne in Black and Gold: Falling Rocket amounted to “flinging a
pot of paint in the public’s face.” This led the infuriated Whistler
to instigate the notorious libel suit against Ruskin that provided
Londoners with so much entertainment at the time. (Whistler won the
suit, but the victory was pyrrhic: the court awarded him only a shilling
in damages, and so the legal fees bankrupted him.)
The notoriety generated by this suit gave the gallery a terrific
boost right at the beginning, and its denizens were soon providing
grist for the satiric mills of Punch magazine, which regularly
lampooned the gallery. (A generous selection of these sallies is on
view in the exhibition.) Grosvenor and its habitués even attracted
the comedic gaze of Gilbert and Sullivan, who referred to the “greenery-yallery-Grosvenor-gallery-foot-in-the-grave -young-men” in
Patience, their send-up of Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic
Movement. Lady Lindsay was a full partner—financial and in other
ways—of the Grosvenor Gallery, but Sir Coutts managed to keep the
gallery open after they separated in 1882. Additional financial
reverses, however, forced him to close the gallery in 1890, after a
run of fourteen years.
The organizers of this show write that they aimed
“not to replicate specific rooms or exhibitions so much as
to distill and evoke the gallery’s main achievements and key
exhibition reforms in terms of major works of art, contributors,
and issues.” In this they have succeeded admirably, and if this
revisting of the Grosvenor Gallery
is only nearly exemplary it is chiefly
because of the occasional intrusion of
feminist politics. Thus we are treated to a small amount of PC
language (“spokespersons” etc.) and are assured that a section
of the exhibition devoted to women artists bears witness to
“a continuing concern with gender construction.” In the end, though,
these are minor distractions from what is a modest but eminently
informative exhibition about a neglected sliver of Victorian
cultural history.
A catalogue of the exhibition, edited by
Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, has been published by the Yale
University Press (209 pages, $34.95).