At the time of the foundation of the Society of Dilettanti, between 1733 and 1735, young British noblemen were wont to make the “Grand Tour” through France and Italy, much as the Roman aristocrats had visited Greece and Asia Minor, during the later days of the Republic and the Empire. Usually the Englishman was accompanied by a tutor, who enabled his young charge to acquire the rudiments of a classical art education. The youth came back to London equipped as an arbiter in all matters of taste. The Society of Dilettanti only admitted such men as these, and its avowed object was to cultivate a taste for works of art which had attracted them during their tours. At first the Society of Dilettanti was little more than a dining club. Horace Walpole, writing in 1743, sneered: “The nominal qualification is having been in Italy; the real one being drunk.”
As the Society became more staid, with the advancing years of its founders, more ideal methods were adopted. Several of the promoters took leading positions in English life. Sir Francis Dashwood, for instance, became Bute’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. The fourth Earl of Sandwich not only enriched the language with a new term and a novel article of diet, but posed as a leader in all branches of English activity from gambling and theatricals to art criticism. In course of time such men as these had the spending of very considerable funds accumulated by the society. The sources whence the Society derived its income make amusing reading. There was, for instance, the “face money,” levied under a rule which ordained that every member’s portrait should be painted by Kneller for the benefit of the Society. Still larger sums accrued from the “Rule Ann. Soc. Undec.” This set forth that any member who was fortunate enough to secure an advance in his salary should contribute one per cent. of the first year’s rise to the Dilettanti coffers. In the Annals, under date January 6, 1744-5, one finds the following: “Received of the Duke of Bedford eleven guineas for having received the place of the first Commissioner of the Admiralty.”
On the whole, the funds of the Society of Dilettanti were expended with good judgment. Students’ scholarships were endowed in connection with the Royal Academy schools. Finely illustrated works dealing with various antiquarian subjects were published from time to time. Excavations were encouraged. Above all, a body of public opinion was created which took a real interest in classic sculpture.
Proofs of a sincere appreciation of classical art among the leaders of English society in the second half of the eighteenth century could be readily multiplied. We might instance the case of Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond, who celebrated his Italian tour by setting up a collection of painting, sculptures and casts in a gallery of his house in Whitehall and establishing schools of art there under Cipriani, the painter, and Wilton, the sculptor. But the supreme evidence of the value of the system is furnished by the case of Thomas, Earl of Elgin. That nobleman was engaged about 1802 upon a mission to the Ottoman Porte. He was fortunate enough to obtain a firman to examine and remove certain “inscriptions” from the Acropolis of Athens, at that time a Turkish fortress. His agents, under this firman, collected the Elgin marbles, which were conveyed to England in 1812 and finally purchased by the British Government in 1816. Even at this date, in spite of the writings of Lessing and Winckelmann, public opinion was in grave doubt as to the desirability of paying the beggarly £35,000 which the Earl of Elgin asked for his treasures. He had spent upwards of £70,000, so the offer was an exceptionally generous one. Even a man like Flaxman was doubtful as to the real value of the marbles. Like many art-lovers of his age, he preferred Raphael to Rembrandt—the “[Venus of Medici]” to the “[Three Fates].”
FLAXMAN
MICHAEL AND SATAN (SKETCH)
Victoria and Albert Museum,
South Kensington
Flaxman was the first English sculptor of European reputation. He was born in 1755 and died in 1826, so his career practically coincided with that of Canova. The son of a manufacturer of plaster of Paris casts, the boy Flaxman was terribly handicapped by a threatened deformity. But when he laid aside his crutches at ten years of age, his natural bent towards art began to display itself definitely. In 1770 he won the silver medal for sculpture at the Royal Academy. Patrons, however, proved few and far between and the necessity for making a living drove Flaxman to accept the commissions for the classical designs made famous through their association with Wedgwood pottery. His real career as a sculptor began in 1787. Like Thorvaldsen he could have said: “I was born when I first saw Rome. Before I merely existed.” When Flaxman returned to England eight years later, his future was assured. He became an A.R.A. in 1797 and an R.A. in 1800.
Perhaps no modern artist has produced work more nearly approaching the sculpture of Greece in spirit. In Flaxman’s best known work, the “[Michael and Satan],” we can trace a severe restraint which is foreign to the more florid styles of Canova and Thorvaldsen and which brings the Englishman far closer to the masters of the Hellenic school whom he sought to follow. He equalled either Canova or Thorvaldsen in fertility and purity of design, particularly in bas-relief. But Flaxman also suffered as they had done from a too close adherence to the eclectic influences derived from Winckelmann. When Flaxman sought to portray the intense passions, his borrowed style betrayed him. If intensity of emotion was of little moment in sculpture, Flaxman would rank among the immortals. As a fact, we know that it constitutes its very life. Consequently, one can only regret that it was not given to the first great English sculptor to emulate the achievements of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and evolve a style capable of expressing the manifold energies of his age in marble, as truly as they did on canvas. As it was, the genius of Flaxman only served to perpetuate a false ideal. His English followers made no effort to rid themselves of the methods which had marred even the finest work of the earlier masters of their school. Truth to tell, Flaxman’s reputation depends much more upon his non-sculptural work than it does upon his marbles—upon his Homeric illustrations, upon his drawings, with their mysterious reminiscences of Blake, for instance. Flaxman’s facility in design was so tremendous that it alone made him stand out far above his fellow sculptors. Added to this, there is a certain natural austerity in his sculptures which distinguishes them from the conventional theatricalities of the earlier eighteenth-century artists and the Georgian and early Victorian sentimentalities which followed. But it would be untrue to suggest that as a sculptor he rose superior to his age. Weighed in the scale of European art, ancient and modern, the life-work of Flaxman contains the same lesson as that of Canova and Thorvaldsen. It stands as a perpetual memorial of the eternal law, that no living art can be built upon a borrowed style—even though that style be Greek.