The pilgrimage and illustrated journals of David Roberts in the southern Mediterranean Sea and the Near East (1838-39) and the marketing of his illustrated journals in the Shows of London

The body of drawings and sketches created by the Scottish painter David Roberts (1796-1864) during his expedition to the Holy Lands in 1838-9 marked the high point of his professional career. This paper will look at the period after his return to Britain in July 1839, particularly to 1842. It will suggest that although Roberts was no doubt influenced by his Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, religious faith was not as central to his trip as has often been supposed. It was instead through the business acumen of his publisher F.G. Moon that this body of work came to be regarded not merely as an aesthetic achievement but as a cause célèbre. A skilful and coordinated marketing campaign elevated these drawings to the status of a pilgrimage; a contemplative journey through the sites of biblical antiquity. Through detailed analysis of contemporaneous accounts it will show how one of the costliest publications of the era was disseminated, passing from prestigious galleries and the libraries of a wealthy elite through a continuum of public art exhibitions and popular media including panoramas, dioramas and the newly-emerging field of dissolving views. This will provide a rare case study into the interconnectedness of London’s exhibition culture in the 1840s.

‘The Only Thing “Womanish” is the Composer’: Music at Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions of Women’s Work

The 1880s saw a burgeoning of exhibitions of ‘Women’s Work’ across the world. These events focused on the artistic and industrial abilities of women, signifying an unprecedented shift away from the emphasis usually placed on maleness and masculinized technology in contemporary exhibition culture. The first Exhibition, held in Bristol in 1885, included a musical novelty: a concert entirely of works composed by women. The next, in Sydney in 1888, included a whole series of such concerts. These concerts—containing works by Kate Loder, Clara Wieck, Fanny Hensel, Agnes Zimmermann, and Maude Valérie White—were extraordinarily well received, applauded in both concept and execution. Yet, their reception appears paradoxical against the contemporary critical climate. In both Britain and Australia, the ‘question’ of women composers was widely debated, and works met with condescension or hostility. By exploring the expectations surrounding displays of ‘women’s work’, I argue that it was the exhibition context itself that influenced the reception of this music. While Exhibitions were conventionally seen as male-gendered events, ‘Women’s’ Exhibitions allowed organizers to blur the distinctions between private and public space. Similarly, while women composers were criticized for their encroachment in the male concert sphere, these Exhibitions also blurred these boundaries and gave critics an appropriate ‘feminine’ framework through which to view and critique the works.

Transcending the Gallery

Even more effectively than outdoor vistas, indoor galleries offered reformers the ability to manipulate what urbanites saw. Embracing the arts as a form of moral instruction, late-Federal Bostonians established public exhibition spaces to divert the city’s growing middle-class from more fashionable and sensualist attractions. Yet the 1820’s public exhibition culture that emerged at the Athenaeum and elsewhere was ridden with anxiety, as moralists warned that connoisseurship concealed a shallow and fashionable sensualism. To avert this danger, art gallery patrons absorbed themselves in visions that transcended the material art object and the social imposture of their fellow viewers. These supersensory flights from the urban gallery proved a key template for Transcendentalist encounters with nature, epitomized by Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” metaphor.

Drawing Forth Spirits

A decade after establishing the Athenaeum gallery, reformers’ concerns about the sensualism of public art exhibition culture led them to promote yet another source of moral instruction: amateur drawing. Still hoping to create a generation of pious and rational observers, Boston school reformers such as Elizabeth Peabody introduced drawing in the 1830s as a non-sectarian substitute for moral instruction. Simultaneously, industrial reformers promoted drawing at Boston’s popular artisan fair as a lingua franca for affluent connoisseurs and technically-minded mechanics. As drawing shifted from a polite art to a moral pursuit, critics feared the practice encouraged hollow mechanical imitation. Draughtsmen responded by embracing a more ethereal, Romantic visual idiom, transforming amateur drawing into a medium of Spiritualism and occultism.

Comic Opera

W. S. Gilbert (librettist) and Arthur Sullivan (composer) wrote fourteen works of musical theatre from 1871 to 1896, often called the ‘Savoy operas’ after 1881, when producer Richard D’Oyly Carte built the Savoy Theatre to house them. They crafted a distinctive genre of English comic opera through parodies of previous genres both high and low, both English and Continental. The operas are absurdist, parodic, and satirical, but are played in a deadpan style and are punctuated with resonantly affecting numbers. The comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan are an essential precursor of the modern musical, and their depiction of English society is humorous yet critical, replete with satire of English institutions, the law, the professions, gender relations, and empire. They examine the theatricality of everyday life, the dynamics of socialization, accidents of birth and circumstance, the effects of tutelage and authority, Victorian exhibition culture, social class, gender, and nationalism.