Karl Gutzkow - "Berlin Panorama einer Weltstadt"

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Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Art in England

D >> Dutton Cook >> Art in England




And the Mary Abbott whom George Romney had married years before and left
behind at Kendal, with his son and daughter and thirty pounds, while he
sought his fortune alone in London--the wife, his union with whom was to
be as 'a spur to his application'--was she to be denied the sight of her
husband's success, a share in his prosperity, a place in his house in
Cavendish Square? It is hard to understand the utter unmanliness and
heartlessness of Romney's conduct in this respect. There is no word of
accusation against her--- no hint affecting her character--no question
as to her being in any way unworthy of his love and trust, and of her
rightful position by his side. His separation from her, in the first
instance, was, under all the circumstances of the case, no doubt
justifiable; and it is hardly possible to believe that his original
withdrawal from Kendal was in pursuance of a plan of deliberate
abandonment of his family. But for the protraction of this separation,
after the first necessity for it had passed away, there would seem to be
absolutely no excuse. His son, the Rev. John Romney, with a laudable
desire to serve his father's memory, urges, as some faint apology for
the painter's cruelty, that his affairs were at all times less
prosperous than they seemed; that his brothers were a heavy burden upon
him and drained him of his savings; that his professional journeys to
Paris and Rome consumed all the money he could raise; and that thus a
'succession of untoward circumstances threw impediments in the way of
good intent, till time and absence became impediments also.'

In truth, Romney appears to have been always curiously timid and
reticent; to have suffered from excessive moral cowardice. On his first
arrival in London and association with the young painters of the day, he
began to feel some shame at his early imprudence, and some alarm lest it
should present any hindrance to his professional advancement. He had
given 'hostages to fortune,' and dreaded the result. He was thus
persistently silent on the subject; and, as time went on, it became more
and more difficult for him to avow the marriage he had from the first
made so much a matter of mystery. And then, too, the prosperous unions
of other artists, his contemporaries, excited his jealousy and increased
his apprehensions. He began to think it indispensable to the success of
a painter that he should marry well. Nathaniel Dance had been united to
Mrs. Drummer, known as 'the Yorkshire fortune,' with eighteen thousand a
year. John Astley had secured the hand of Lady Duckenfield, with an
income of almost equal value. Then, from his literary and poetic friends
he was little likely to receive encouragement to act justly in such a
matter. Laurence Sterne was no especially good exemplar of conjugal
fidelity. Mr. Hayley and the rest indulged in extremely poetic views
concerning the privileges and prerogatives of genius; were opposed to
trammels and scruples of any kind in such respect; and poured round the
painter dense showers of versified adulation, so infused with ideality
and Platonism that the simple rules of right and wrong were quite washed
away by the harmonious and transcendental torrent. Romney, weak, vain,
selfish, suffered himself to be led down paths which, however flowery
and pleasant, were yet mean and contemptible enough, and listening to
the twanging of Hayley's lyre, turned a deaf ear to the pining of the
poor woman fading away, alone and deserted in the north--the Mary Abbott
whom he had vowed in his youth until death should them part to love,
honour, and cherish. For some thirty years the husband and wife never
set eyes upon each other--were absolutely separated.

He had now as much work as he could possibly execute. He was often at
his easel for thirteen hours a day, beginning at eight in the morning,
lighting his lamp when the daylight had gone, and toiling on sometimes
until midnight. He had five, and occasionally six, sitters a day. He
generally completed a three-quarter portrait in three or four sittings,
and could accomplish this easily, provided no hands were introduced into
the picture. The sittings varied in duration from three-quarters of an
hour to an hour and a half each. His only time now for ideal or
historical art was in the interval between the departure and arrival of
his sitters, or when they failed to keep their engagements with him; but
he would regard such disappointments with pleasure, having always at
hand a spare canvas upon which he could employ himself with some fancy
subject. Of course, this close application was not without injurious
effect upon him in the end. 'My health,' he wrote, at a later period of
his life, 'is not at all constant. My nerves give way, and I have no
time to go in quest of pleasure to prevent a decline of health. My hands
are full, and I shall be forced to refuse new faces at last, to be
enabled to finish the numbers I have in an unfinished state. I shall
regret the necessity of forbearing to take new faces; there is a delight
in novelty greater than in the profit gained by sending them home
finished. But it must be done.' His annual retirement for a month's
holiday to Hayley's house at Eartham was of little real service to his
health. He was compelled the while to attitudinize incessantly as a
genius. Hayley, in globose language, was always entreating his guest to
moderate his intense spirit of application, conjuring him to rest from
his excess of labour 'in the name of those immortal powers the Beautiful
and the Sublime,' etc., while he was at the same time urging the painter
to new and greater toils, teasing the jaded man with endless
suggestions, bewildering him with a jabber of sham sentimentality and
hazy aestheticism. 'Whenever Romney was my guest,' writes Hayley, 'I was
glad to put aside my own immediate occupation for the pleasure of
searching for and presenting to him a copious choice of such subjects as
might happily exercise his powers.' Poor Romney was permitted no rest.
Hayley was for ever in close attendance gratifying his own inordinate
vanity at the painter's cost. He produced four representations of
Serena, the heroine of Hayley's _Triumphs of Temper_. He painted a scene
from the _Tempest_ for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, which project
Romney always claimed to have originated, and Hayley was in the studio
sitting for Prospero. At Hayley's house a small coterie of poetasters,
male and female, assembled for purposes of mutual glorification in the
most windbag sort of verse, and were glad to buy portraits and sketches
from the painter with such small coin as sonnets and stanzas, and poetic
epistles. Romney executes a likeness of Mrs. Hayley, and is rewarded
with eighty-eight glowing lines by her husband, who calls to his aid
Eolus, Orion, Boreas, Auster, Zephyr, Eurus, Famine, and Ceres for the
better decoration of his verse. He paints a portrait of Miss Seward, and
the lady's gratitude gushes forth in eulogy of

....the pleasures of the Hayleyan board,
Where, as his pencil, Romney's soul sublime
Glows with bold lines, original and strong, etc.

'Beloved and honoured Titiano!' she wrote, some years later; 'how that
name recalls the happy, happy hours I passed with you at Eartham; when
by the title 'Muse' you summoned me to the morning walk!' Amongst the
drossy twaddle which passed current as poetry at Eartham, a sonnet in
Romney's honour by a true poet--William Cowper--may be counted as pure
gold.

In the beginning of 1782 Emma Lyon, then known as Mrs. Hart, afterwards
as Lady Hamilton, first sat to Mr. Romney. Painters and poets enough had
already been busy celebrating her loveliness, the lady nothing loth. She
took pleasure in the full display of her charms: holding probably that
her beauty was not given her for herself alone, but that the whole
world, if it listed, might at least look on it and adore. At one time
indeed she was rumoured to have personated the Goddess of Health, when
the 'celestial' Doctor Graham was giving his strange and indecorous
lectures in Pall Mall; but that scandal has been contradicted. Certain
it is, however, that her witcheries effectually subjugated Romney and
Hayley. The painter went fairly mad about her; could not see her often
enough; was restless and miserable out of her presence; reduced the
number of his sitters, and admitted no visitors until noon, that he
might have time sufficient to devote to the beautiful Emma and her
portraits. This infatuation endured for years. 'At present,' he wrote to
Hayley, in 1791, 'and the greatest part of the summer, I shall be
engaged in painting pictures from the _divine lady_. I cannot give her
any other epithet; for I think her superior to all womankind.' For a
long time he seemed to be able only to paint Emma Lyon. His son
enumerates some two dozen portraits, in which she appears as Circe,
Iphigenia, St. Cecilia, Sensibility, a Bacchante, Alope, the Spinstress,
Cassandra (for the Shakespeare Gallery), Calypso, a Pythoness, Joan of
Arc, a Magdalen, etc.; some of these were left unfinished. But at one
time the form and features of his beautiful model appeared upon the
painter's canvas, let him try to paint what he would. The fair Emma had
absolutely enthralled him. Absent from the object of his adoration, he
was reduced to despair. He writes to Hayley, complaining that he has
discovered an alteration in his Emma's conduct: 'a coldness and neglect
seemed to have taken the place of her repeated declaration of regard.'
Hayley sends up some verses for the painter to copy and sign, beginning
'Gracious Cassandra,' and asking pitifully,

.... what cruel clouds have darkly chilled
Thy favour that to me was vital fire?
Oh, let it shine again: or worse than killed
Thy soul-sunk artist feels his art expire!

The poet seems to have been not less love-stricken. 'Her features,' he
writes, 'like the language of Shakespeare, could exhibit all the
feelings of nature and all the gradations of every passion with a most
fascinating truth and felicity of expression.' Presently the lady has
given her hand to Sir William Hamilton and set sail for Naples. She
makes peace with the painter, however, before her departure; calls upon
him, resumes her former kindness of manner, is as cordial with him as
ever, and sits to him for a portrait he is to paint _as a present to her
mother_. Poor Romney!

In 1794 there were symptoms of decay in the painter's constitution; his
mental infirmities increased. He became the victim of a sort of
intellectual superfetation. He was perpetually planning labours of a
magnitude which, from the first, rendered them hopelessly impracticable.
His brain was morbidly active, while his hand grew tremulous and
uncertain, and his sight dimmed. His manner became irritable, and more
than ever timid and suspicious. He wrote to his son: 'I have made many
grand designs; I have formed a system of original subjects, moral and my
own, and I think one of the grandest that has been thought of; but
nobody knows it. Hence, it is my view to wrap myself in retirement and
pursue these plans, as I begin to feel I cannot bear trouble of any
kind.' He quits his house in Cavendish Square and becomes the purchaser
of a retreat at Holly Bush Hill, Hampstead, after abandoning a project
he at one time entertained for the purchase of four acres near the
Edgware Road, and covering them with a group of fantastic buildings of
his own design. To the house at Hampstead he made many whimsical
additions, however, erecting a large picture and sculpture-gallery, a
wooden arcade or covered ride, a dining-room close to the kitchen, with
a buttery hatch opening into it, so that he and his guests might enjoy
beefsteaks 'hot and hot' upon the same plan as prevailed at the
Beefsteak Club, then occupying a room in the Lyceum Theatre. The cost of
these changes amounted to nearly three thousand pounds. With quite a
childish eagerness he took possession of his new house before the walls
were dry, and while the workmen were still completing the changes he had
ordered. Still he had not room enough for his numberless art-treasures.
His pictures were crammed and huddled away any and everywhere. Some were
arranged along the wooden arcade, where, exposed to the open air, and to
the alternate action of moisture and frost, they were almost entirely
destroyed in the course of the winter, while some were deliberately
stolen. The painter could do little work now: he could begin, but was
unable to finish or even to resume his undertaking. His appetite for art
seemed to fail him; he ceased to have faith in himself; he was preyed on
by nervous dejection; weighed down with dark alarms and vague
forebodings. Soon his head is swimming and his right hand numb with
incipient paralysis. Hayley visits him for the last time in April 1799,
and had 'the grief of perceiving that his increasing weakness of body
and mind afforded only a gloomy prospect for the residue of his life.'
He lays down his brush for ever. Suddenly, without a word to any one of
his intentions, he takes the northern coach and arrives at Kendal.
Fainting and exhausted, he is received with the utmost tenderness and
affection by his wife. No word of reproach for the neglect and solitude
to which he had doomed her for so many years escapes her lips. With
unremitting solicitude, with religious earnestness, this loving,
forgiving woman tends the sick-bed of the sinking man. His mind expires
before his body; for months he remains hopelessly imbecile, free from
suffering, but wholly unconscious; breathing his last at Kendal on the
15th of November 1802, in the sixty-eighth year of his age.

The inconsistency manifest between Romney's wanton cruelty in his
domestic character, and his reputation among his intimates and
contemporaries for great kindliness of nature, generosity, and general
worth, is remarkable enough. There are many men, however, who appear to
the least advantage when seen by the light of their own fireside. Hayley
says much of his friend's _extreme sensibility_:' his lips,' writes the
poet, 'quivered with emotions of pity at the sight of distress or at the
relation of a pathetic story.' Cumberland mentions that the painter was,
'by constitution, prone to tears.' Yet his charity was not for home
wear; the distress he did not see troubled him very little. It is vain
to seek for any sufficient apology for Romney's shameful treatment of
his wife and children. If it were possible to forget this deep stain
upon his character he would seem, in all other relations of life, to be
entitled to esteem and commendation. For the poor and needy he was
ready, not merely with his sensibility, but with his purse. To his
friends he was ever faithful and liberal. After attaining professional
eminence he was almost indifferent to the emoluments of his art, prizing
money much less for its own sake than for the recognition of his
position and abilities that it demonstrated; while to all young artists
he was especially kind and indulgent. He was the first to encourage
Flaxman, and to appreciate and applaud his works; was ever the cordial
and loving friend of the sculptor, as their correspondence amply
testifies. 'I always remember,' says Flaxman, 'Mr. Romney's notice of my
boyish years and productions with gratitude; his original and striking
conversation; his masterly, grand, and feeling compositions are
continually before me; and I still feel the benefits of his acquaintance
and recommendations.'

Romney's historical pictures are very numerous; though comparatively few
of them can be considered as completely finished works. According to
Allan Cunningham's estimate, for one really finished there are five half
done, and for five half done there are at least a dozen merely sketched
out on the canvas. The painter was all impulse; very eager and impatient
at the beginning, but soon wearied, and only by painful efforts and
extraordinary labour ever arriving at the conclusion of his
undertakings. There was a want of concentrative power about him; he was
ever frittering away his undeniable abilities upon a number of hastily
adopted projects, crudely conceived, and remorselessly abandoned when
the temperature of his enthusiasm lowered, or any unlooked-for
difficulties appeared in his path. How the erratic and desultory nature
of his mind was fostered and aggravated by Hayley's mischievous efforts
has already been shown. That the glowing eulogium pronounced by Flaxman
upon his friend's productions will be endorsed by modern critics is
hardly to be expected. Indeed, the characteristics upon which Flaxman
especially dwells as worthy of the highest praise will be rather
accounted as defects in the present day. The severe imitation of the
antique; the artificial simplicity of composition; the bare background;
the bas-relief style of treatment; the pseudo-purity which rejected
natural feeling and action in favour of a conventionally ideal
expression--these were precious gifts in Flaxman's eyes; to modern
artists they will appear rather errors of judgment pertaining to a past
school of art: false fashions which the present generation of painters
have happily outgrown and abandoned. At the same time, however, it
should not be forgotten that the majority of Romney's works of this
class will bear comparison with the best productions of his
contemporaries, and that some of them evince in a remarkable degree his
grace of manner, skill in expression, and loftiness of aim.

As a portrait painter Romney will be more prized and remembered,
although it is not likely that any existing connoisseurs will be found
to proclaim themselves with Lord Thurlow, of 'the Romney faction,' as
opposed to the school of Reynolds. In contrasting the works of the rival
painters, it is easy to see that however close a race for fame they
seemed to be running in their own time, there exists in truth a wide
distance between the president of the Academy and 'the man in Cavendish
Square.' It is not only that Romney had not the variety of Reynolds;
that he could not give to portrait painting the new life with which
Reynolds had so happily invested it:--he did not hit character nearly so
well; he could not endow his sitters with the air of repose, ease, and
elegance peculiar to the Reynolds portraits; he failed to give interest
to his backgrounds, generally too near and flat, and heavily painted;
and he had not Sir Joshua's success in subduing the eccentricities of
costume of the day, and bestowing a certain grace and beauty upon even
the most exuberant capes, cuffs, ruffles, wigs, cravats, and frills,
prevalent a century ago. There is an air of _fashion_ about many of
Romney's portraits as opposed to the look of _nobility_, which is the
especial attribute of Reynolds's pictures. In contemplating a Sir Joshua
there will be found a propriety, an integrity about the work which
effectually prevents all thought of the parts played by the tailor or
the milliner at the toilet of the sitter. This is not always the case
with Romney's portraits; pattern, and cut, and vogue do not fail to
assert themselves. In colour Romney is very unequal; in his own day it
was notoriously inferior to Reynolds's, though in spite of some
instances of chalkiness and thinness, generally rich, pure, and
lustrous. But the President's recourse to meretricious methods of
obtaining beauty of tint has ruined the majority of his works, rendering
their glories fleeting as photographs. Romney prudently adhered to a
safer manner. Many of his pictures can even now be hardly less fresh and
glowing in colour than when they first left his easel. His carnations
and flesh tints are often singularly fine. His small portraits possess
dignity, with force and manliness, however, rather than absolute ease or
refinement. But his chief success was in his female heads. In quick and
distinct appreciation of beauty he was not behind Reynolds; while,
occasionally, he attained a certain poetic height of expression it would
be difficult to parallel among Sir Joshua's works.

The fluctuation in fame which Romney has suffered has, of course, fallen
to the fate of many of his professional brethren. We read, for instance,
that Sir Godfrey Kneller sometimes received in payment for a portrait a
considerable sum in hard cash, with a couple of Rembrandt's thrown in by
way of makeweight. Yet now a single specimen of Rembrandt exceeds in
value a whole gallery of Knellers. And Rembrandt died insolvent, while
Sir Godfrey amassed a fortune! No one will dispute the justice of the
reversal of judgment which has taken place; the elevation of Rembrandt
at the expense of Kneller. But it may be a question whether George
Romney has not been unfairly abased, even though it may be agreed on all
hands that Sir Joshua Reynolds has not been unduly exalted. Possibly,
however, when a man rises or is lifted up to a high pitch of celebrity,
it is inevitable that he should in some degree mount upon the prostrate
and degraded reputations of his contemporaries.




COSWAY, THE MINIATURE-PAINTER.


Biographers seem often to choose between two weaknesses. They are fond
of asserting that the hero of their narration comes in truth of a gentle
stock, however the clouds of misfortune may for a time have veiled from
general observation the glories of his family tree,--or, failing this,
they take a sort of pride in dwelling upon and exaggerating the
humbleness of his descent and condition. He is a somebody, or he is a
nobody; a gentleman of distinguished origin or an utterly unknown
creature with the vaguest views about his lineage: a waif of the
wayside, a stray of the streets, his rise from obscurity to eminence
being entirely attributable to his own intrinsic merits and exertions.

To this last-mentioned method of biographical treatment has been
subjected Richard Cosway, painter and Royal Academician of the last
century: a man of fame in his day, though that fame may not have come
down to us in a very good state of preservation. The fact that in his
prime he was a man of fashion, a 'personage' in society, the companion
of princes, and an artist of eminence, has given a sort of impetus to
the fancy of tracing him back to a vastly inferior state of life.
Writers dealing with the painter's story, and prepared to point to him
presently as the occupant and ornament of a 'gilded saloon,' have found
a preliminary pleasure in dilating upon his earlier and humbler position
as an errand-boy in a drawing academy. The contrast was effective,
picturesque--dramatic. Contemplate this scene of gloom and degradation;
now turn to this other canvas, all sunshine and prosperity. Is not the
comparison impressive? But then it ought to be true.

This black and white view of the vicissitudes of Cosway's career is due,
in the first instance, to Mr. J.T. Smith, engraver, antiquarian, and
author of the _Life of Nollekens_ and other books. Mr. Shipley, from
Northampton, brother of the Bishop of St. Asaph, and founder of the
Society of Arts, had established a drawing school at No. 229 in the
Strand. Cosway, when quite a lad, says Smith, obtained the notice of
Shipley, and was engaged by him to attend in the studio and carry to and
fro the tea and coffee with which the housekeeper of the establishment
was permitted to provide the students at a cost of threepence per head.
Nollekens and the father of Smith were among the students, and
good-naturedly, the story goes on to say, gave the boy Richard Cosway
instruction in drawing, and encouraged him to compete for the prizes he
afterwards obtained from the Society of Arts. These particulars probably
Smith obtained from his father or from Nollekens--if indeed they be not
wholly due not so much to his own invention as to the confusion of names
and misconception of incidents to which every one is liable who puts too
great a strain upon his memory. Allan Cunningham, it may be observed,
relates facts concerning Cosway's origin and youth which go far towards
controverting the errand-boy episode in his life, as chronicled by
Smith.

Richard Cosway was born in 1740, at Tiverton, in Devonshire, a county
singularly productive of famous artists, having given birth among others
to Haydon, Northcote, and Reynolds. The father of Cosway was the master
of the grammar-school at Tiverton: his uncle was for some time mayor;
and the family, originally Flemish, and engaged in woollen manufactures,
was possessed of considerable property in the town and neighbourhood. To
the connexion of the Cosways with Flanders was ascribed their ownership
of certain valuable works by Rubens, which first lit up a love of
painting in the heart of young Cosway, and made him an idle schoolboy
and an indefatigable artist. The master of Tiverton school was naturally
indignant at the want of scholarly application of his son and pupil; was
for birching him into better behaviour, forbidding him to ply his pencil
at all under heavy penalties. The boy's uncle, the mayor, and a
judicious friend and neighbour, one Mr. Oliver Peard, seem to have
better appreciated the situation. They interposed on behalf of the young
artist, and succeeded in obtaining for him permission to make drawings
during such times as he could be spared from the grammar-school. But at
last it appears to be agreed on all hands that the boy must close his
books: he is wilful, and must have his way--become an artist: there is
no hope whatever of his succeeding in any other line of life. He is to
be humoured to the top of his bent. His passion is to be cured by
indulging it. If he succeeds--well and good,--there is nothing more to
be said. If he fails, his failure will sober him, his friends argue:
render him docile and tractable, obedient to parental commands for the
future.

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