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Abstract
This paper examines how English medieval painting became the focus of a new kind of scholarly scrutiny, through the analysis of a series of articles written by W.R. Lethaby (1857–1931) for The Burlington Magazine between 1916 and 1918. Lethaby's writings are interpreted here as an exercise intended to re-position English medieval painting as a subject worthy of connoisseurial attention. Contemporary exhibitionary practice was also crucial in illustrating the new status of English medieval painting and in defining its English character. The exhibition British Primitives, held at the Royal Academy in 1923, is examined here to evaluate how this re-presenting of medieval art to reflect contemporary scholarship also made it vulnerable to contemporary modes of consumption, as witnessed in the increased value (both cultural and monetary) of medieval art on the international art market.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to my peer reviewers, whose suggestions for improving the final paper have been invaluable. I would also like to thank Dr. Karen Serres of the Courtauld Institute for providing access to the object files for Lord Lee's Crucifixion and the Estouteville Triptych and for arranging for a photograph to be taken of the Crucifixion for publication in this article. I am grateful to Judy Willcocks at the Central St. Martins Archive for providing access to the archive of W.R. Lethaby and for granting permission for the use of his photograph.
Notes
1 A version of this paper was presented at the Association of Art Historians Conference on April 11, 2015 in the session “British Art Through Its Exhibitions Histories.”
2 Lethaby was the architect of Melsetter House (1898), the Eagle Insurance Building, Birmingham (1900) and All Saints Church, Brockhampton (1902).
3 For Lethaby's career see Sylvia Backmeyer and Theresa Gronberg, W.R. Lethaby, 1857–1931: Architecture, Design and Education (London: Lund Humphries, 1984) and Godfrey Rubens, William Richard Lethaby: His Life and Work 1857–1931 (London: Architectural Press, 1986).
4 For example W.R. Lethaby, Architecture Mysticism and Myth (London: Percival & Co., 1892); W.R. Lethaby and Harold Swainson, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building (London: Macmillan, 1894); Lethaby, Mediaeval Art from the Peace of the Church to the Eve of the Renaissance, 312–1350 (London: Duckworth, 1904); Lethaby, Westminster Abbey & the Kings’ Craftsmen: A Study of Mediaeval Building (London: Duckworth, 1906); Lethaby, Architecture: An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of Building (Williams and Norgate, 1911); Lethaby, Westminster Abbey and the Antiquities of the Coronation (London: Duckworth, 1911); Lethaby, Westminster Abbey Re-Examined (London: Duckworth, 1925); and Lethaby, Philip Webb and His Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935).
5 W.H. St. John Hope and W.R. Lethaby, “The Imagery and Sculptures on the West Front of Wells Cathedral Church,” Archaeologia (Second Series) 59 (1905): 143–206; W.R. Lethaby, “The Palace of Westminster in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Archaeologia (Second Series) 60 (1906): 131–48.
6 W.R. Lethaby, “Greek Lion Monuments,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 38 (1918): 37–44.
7 W.R. Lethaby, “The Painted Book of Genesis in the British Museum,” The Archaeological Journal 69 (1912): 88–111; W.R. Lethaby, “Is the Ruthwell Cross an Anglo Celtic Work?,” The Archaeological Journal 70 (1913): 145–61; W.R. Lethaby, “The Perjury at Bayeux,” The Archaeological Journal 74 (1915): 136–8.
8 Other articles using the “Primitives” label were produced intermittently by Lethaby both before and after the publication of the main series between 1916 and 1918; see W.R. Lethaby, “English Primitives: The Painted Chamber and the Early Masters of the Westminster School,” Burlington Magazine 8 (July 1905): 257–69; Lethaby, “English Primitives,” Burlington Magazine 103 (October 1911): 2, 4; Lethaby, “English Primitives,” Burlington Magazine 257 (August 1924): 78–81.
9 Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
10 Eric Fernie, Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London: Phaidon, 1995).
11 Conrad Rudolph, ed. A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (Wiley-Blackwell, Kindle edition 2010), loc. 780–1839.
12 Brigitte Buettner, “Toward a Historiography of the Sumptuous Arts,” in Rudolph, Companion, loc. 14143–14158.
13 Paul Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1986).
14 Jenny Rose, “Eighteenth to Twentieth Century Documentation,” in The Westminster Retable: History, Technique, Conservation, ed. Paul Binski and Ann Massing (Cambridge: Hamilton Kerr Institute, 2009), 172–81.
15 Matthew M. Reeve, The Painted Chamber at Westminster, Edward I and the Crusades, 189–90 (http://www.queensu.ca/art/arthistory/faculty/mReeve/ReevePaintedChamber.pdf); Matthew M. Reeve, Thirteenth Century Wall Paintings of Salisbury Cathedral: Art, Liturgy and Reform (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 61–5.
16 C. David Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Penn State Press, 2004), 163.
17 Helen Howard, Pigments of English Medieval Wall Painting (London: Archetype, 2003).
18 Emily Howe, Henrietta McBurney, David Park, Stephen Rickerby and Lisa Shekede, Wall Paintings of Eton (London: Scala, 2012), 59–64.
19 Alexandrina Buchanan, “John Bilson (1856–1943) and the Study of Anglo-Norman Romanesque,” in Anglo Norman Studies XXXV: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2012, ed. David Bates (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), 95–118.
20 Bilson was critical of Lethaby and his contemporaries, such as W.H. St. John Hope (1854–1919) and E.S. Prior (1857–1932), for their Anglo-centric approaches. Buchanan, “John Bilson,” 97.
21 Alexandrina Buchanan, “Show and Tell: Late Medieval Art and the Culture of Display,” in Late Gothic England: Art and Display, ed. Richard Marks (London: Shaun Tyas in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007), 124–37.
22 Important exhibitions of medieval art held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London include the Exhibition of English Embroidery (1905), An Exhibition Illustrative of Early English Portraiture (1909) and An Exhibition of Early English Earthenware (1914).
23 Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Charles Whittingham, 1908).
24 The exhibition was praised for changing attitudes towards Romanesque manuscript illumination; see Adam S. Cohen, “The Historiography of Romanesque Manuscript Illumination,” in Rudolph, Companion, loc. 10874–11554 and Janet Backhouse, “Manuscripts on Display: Some Landmarks in the Exhibition and Popular Publication of Illuminated Books,” in The Legacy of M.R. James: Papers from the 1995 Cambridge Symposium, ed. L. Dennison (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2001), 47–50.
25 Tancred Borenius, “Mr. William Richard Lethaby,” Burlington Magazine 59 (August 1931): 85.
26 Henri Hymans, L'Exposition des Primitifs Flamands a Bruges (Paris: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1902).
27 Henri Bouchot, L'Exposition des Primitifs Française: La Peinture en France sous les Valois (Paris, 1904).
28 Mostra dell'Antica Arte Senese – Catalogo Generale Illustrato (Siena: Sordomuti di L. Lazzeri, 1904).
29 Paul Clemen and Eduard Firmenich-Richartz, Meisterwerke Wesdeutscher Malerei auf der Kunsthistorischen Austellung zu Düsseldorf 1904 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1905).
30 Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 98–106.
31 W.H. James Weale, “The Early Painters of the Netherlands as Illustrated by the Bruges Exhibition of 1902. Article I,” Burlington Magazine 1 (March 1903): 40–53.
32 Paul Vitry, “The Exhibition of French Primitives at Paris,” Burlington Magazine 13 (April 1904): 89–95; Roger Fry, “The Exhibition of French Primitives at Paris. Part II,” Burlington Magazine 15 (June 1904): 279–98; Roger Fry, “The Exhibition of French Primitives at Paris: Conclusion,” Burlington Magazine 16 (June 1904): 356–80.
33 Lethaby, “Painted Chamber,” 269. For an analysis of the discovery and documentation of the medieval paintings in the Painted Chamber see Binski, Painted Chamber.
34 Lethaby did not employ the term “primitives” in later published work, such as W.R. Lethaby, “London and Westminster Painters in the Middle Ages,” in The First Annual Volume of the Walpole Society 1911–1912 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 69–76.
35 Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, “Primitive,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 170–84.
36 Jules Helbig (1821–1906) argued that the use of the term “primitive” encouraged the devaluation of medieval paintings, consigning them to the “antechamber of great art.” Quoted in Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 447.
37 Edward Crocker served as Clerk of the Works at Westminster Abbey from 1818 until 1829 and oversaw the alterations made to the Painted Chamber during the period of 1818–1819 when the medieval wall paintings were discovered. Binski, Painted Chamber, 113.
38 Lethaby, “Painted Chamber,” 257.
39 Matthew M. Reeve, Painted Chamber at Westminster, 189–90.
40 Lethaby, “Painted Chamber,” 269.
41 Lethaby, “English Primitives,” 2.
42 Barbara Pezzini, “The Burlington Magazine, The Burlington Gazette and The Connoisseur: The Art Periodical and the Market for Old Master Paintings in Edwardian London,” Visual Resources 29 (September 2013): 154–5.
43 For the foundation of the Burlington Magazine see Helen Rees Leahy, “For Connoisseurs: The Burlington Magazine,” in Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 231–45 and Caroline Elam, “A More and More Important Work: Roger Fry and the Burlington Magazine,” Burlington Magazine 145 (March 2003): 142–52.
44 Lawrence E. Tanner, Recollections of a Westminster Antiquary (London: J. Baker, 1969), 90.
45 For a discussion of Morellian methods of analysis see Fernie, Art History, 103–5 and J. Anderson, “Giovanni Morelli's Scientific Method of Attribution: Origins of Interpretations,” in Révolution et évolution de l'histoire de l'art de Warburg a nos jours, ed. H. Olbrich, XXVIIe Congrés International d'Histoire de l'Art; Strasbourg 1–7 Septembre 1989; actes vol. 5 (Strasbourg: Société alsacienne pour le développment de l'histoire de l'art, 1992), 135–41. For the influence of Morellian analysis on connoisseurship at the beginning of the twentieth century see Flaminia Gennari Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Master paintings in America 1900–1914 (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003),123–6.
46 Binski and Manning, Westminster Retable.
47 Lethaby consulted Henry Thomas Riley, Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth and XVth Centuries Being a Series of Extracts Local, Social and Political from the Early Archives of the City of London A.D. 1276–1419 (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1868). See W.R. Lethaby, “The Broderers of London and Opus Anglicanum,” Burlington Magazine 29 (May 1916): 74 and W.R. Lethaby, “English Primitives: The Ascoli Cope and London Artists,” Burlington Magazine, 54 (June 1929): 304–8; W.H. St. John Hope, “On the Sculptured Alabaster Tablets Called St. John's Heads,” Archaeologia 52 (1890): 669–708. St. John Hope staged an exhibition of English alabasters in 1910; see Illustrated Catalogue of the Exhibition of English Medieval Alabaster Work, Held in Rooms of the Society of Antiquaries 26th May to 30th June, 1910 (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1913).
48 A.R.N. Roberts, “The Life and Work of W.R. Lethaby,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 105/5000 (March, 1957): 367–8.
49 Madeline H. Caviness, “Seeking Modernity through the Romanesque: G.G. King and E.H. Lowber Behind a Camera in Spain c. 1910–25,” Journal of Art Historiography 11 (2014): 7–8.
50 Frederick R. Bohrer, “Photographic Perspectives: Photography and the Institutional Formation of Art History,” in Art History and Its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 246–59; W.M. Freitag, “Early Uses of Photography in the History of Art,” Art Journal 39 (1979–80): 117–23. For Berenson, Conway and Witt specifically, see “Documents in the History of Visual Documentation: Bernard Berenson on Isochromatic Film,” in Art History Through the Camera's Lens, ed. Helene Roberts (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995) 123–32; Fiorella Giofredi Superbi, “The Photograph and Bernard Berenson: The Story of a Collection,” Visual Resources 26 (December 2010): 289–303; and Lucy Fernandes, “The Witt Library: Photographic Collections and Art History in the Early Twentieth Century” (MA thesis, Courtauld Institute, 2009).
51 W.R. Lethaby, “London and Westminster Painters,” 69–76.
52 See Lethaby, “London and Westminster Painters,” plates XIX and XX. Tristram was a student at the Royal College of Art and worked closely with Lethaby at Westminster Abbey producing watercolour copies of surviving medieval paintings.
53 Due to copyright restrictions it was not possible to reproduce Tristram's copies of the Westminster sedilia. depicts a watercolour by Tristram used by Lethaby to illustrate his article “English Primitives I: Master Walter of Colchester,” Burlington Magazine 29 (August 1916): 191.
54 Edward. S Prior, “A Sketch of English Mediaeval Figure Sculpture,” The First Annual Volume of the Walpole Society 1911–1912 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), plates IV–XVIII, 55–68.
55 Paul Binski, “The Earliest Photographs of the Westminster Retable,” Burlington Magazine 130 (February 1988): 128–132.
56 John Pierpoint Morgan printed colour photographs of his collection in the Burlington Magazine to add to its prestige; see Flaminia Gennari Santori, “Medieval Art for America: The Arrival of the J. Pierpoint Morgan Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Journal of the History of Collections 22 (2010): 81–98.
57 Theresa Gronberg, “William Richard Lethaby and the Central School of Arts and Crafts,” in Backmeyer and Gronberg, W.R. Lethaby, 14–23.
58 See note 55.
59 The engravings were by Orlando Jewitt (1799–1869); see Binski and Massing, Westminster Retable, 177.
60 W.R. Lethaby, “English Primitives V: Matthew Paris and Friar William,” Burlington Magazine 31 (August 1917): 45–52.
61 The Exhibition of the School of Ferrara-Bologna 1440–1550, held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1894, was influential in its extensive use of photographs for comparative analysis, as well as those listed in note 22.
62 Catalogue of an Exhibition of English Medieval Paintings and Illuminated Manuscripts, June 8th to June 20th, 1896 (London: Harrison & Sons, 1896).
63 Elizabeth Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 140–1 and 181–2.
64 The collections of the Government Schools of Design formed between 1837 and 1852, the Thames Bank Workshop set up by A.W.N. Pugin between 1842 and 1848 and the Architectural Museum established at Cannon Row in 1852 each made extensive use of casts to assist designers, stonemasons and architects in their training. The architectural courts at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham (1854) were made up entirely of casts and facsimiles. It is nevertheless apparent that the organizers of the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition wanted to claim the superiority of their venture by expressly forbidding the inclusion of casts in the display.
65 Sam Smiles, “The Art of Recording,” in Making History: Antiquaries in Britain 1707–2007, ed. David Gaimster, Sarah McCarthy and Bernard Nurse (London: Royal Academy, 2007), 123.
66 Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), “Charles Alfred Stothard,” http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26602 (accessed July 2015).
67 DNB Richard Smirke http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25762/25761 (accessed July 2015).
68 Bernard Nurse, “Bringing Truth to Light,” in Gaimster, McCarthy and Nurse, Making History, 143.
69 The exhibition attempted to resolve a dispute concerning the national origins of the Norwich Retable (1370–1406). See Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London, November 21, 1895 to June 17, 1897 (Second Series, vol. XVI; London: Nicholas & Sons, 1897), 173. The final layout of the exhibition was more sympathetic to St. John Hope's hypothesis (which argued for the English origins of the retable) probably because St. John Hope was Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries at the time and his wishes took precedence.
70 Janet Backhouse discusses the importance of the Society of Antiquaries exhibition for its display of manuscripts; see Backhouse, “Manuscripts on Display,” 43–4.
71 Borenius held the Durning-Lawrence chair of History of Art at UCL from 1922 to 1947. Borenius's lecture notes on English Romanesque and Gothic Art are contained in UCL Archives MS Add 173/7. British Library MS Add. 52731, Lethaby to Cockerell January 2, 1923.
72 For the growth of medieval art collections in North America see Elizabeth Bradford Smith, ed., Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting 1800–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
73 See “The Consequences of the American Invasion,” Burlington Magazine 16 (July 1904): 353–5 and Robert Witt, The Nation and Its Art Treasures (London: William Heinemann, 1911).
74 “Early English Painting National Gallery's Deficiencies,” The Times, January 8, 1923, 11.
75 For a useful précis of the founding of the Courtauld see http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/about/history.shtml (accessed June 2015).
76 See letters to The Times printed January 10, 15, 16, 19, 1923.
77 The Times, January 15, 1923, 11.
78 British Library Add MS 52731, Lethaby to Cockerell January 2, 1923.
79 British Library Add MS 52731, Lethaby to Cockerell January 20, 1923.
80 Lethaby also suspected that Tancred Borenius was orchestrating Lee's venture in an attempt to gather more interest for his courses in medieval art at UCL. British Library Add MS 52731, Lethaby to Cockerell January 3 and January 20, 1923.
81 R.E. and A.V., “A Medieval Painted Panel,” Burlington Magazine 26 (December 1914): 92–5.
82 British Library MS Add. 52731 letters written between January and December 1923.
83 W.R. Lethaby, “A Fourteenth Century Triptych,” Burlington Magazine 41 (September 1922): 110–19.
84 British Library Add MS 52731 Lethaby to Cockerell March 2, 1923.
85 British Library Add MS 52731 Cockerell to Lethaby October 12, 1923. There is no documentary evidence to support Holmes's claim that either Lee or Durlacher's paintings were offered to the National Gallery. See NG1/9: “Minutes of the Board of Trustees (12 Feb 1918–16 Dec 1927).”
86 Receipts from Grosvenor Thomas and Durlacher and Sons are contained in Courtauld Institute object files for P.1947.LF.167 and P.1947.LF.109.1, respectively.
87 British Library Add MS 52731 Cockerell to Lethaby, March 15, 1923.
88 Sydney C. Cockerell, “Medieval Pictures Called English,” Burlington Magazine 42 (May 1923): 261–2.
89 Burlington Magazine 42 (June 1923): 312.
90 The Times, October 11, 1923, 16.
91 The triptych has since been subject to extensive scientific analysis and is now reassigned to the German school; see Caroline Villiers, Geraldine van Heemstra and Catherine Reynolds, “A Fourteenth-Century German Triptych in the Courtauld Gallery,” Burlington Magazine 139 (October 1997): 668–75.
92 Lee purchased Durlacher's triptych in 1928 and it entered the Courtauld collection as part of the Lee Bequest in 1947 (P.1947.LF.109.1). It is now titled “Crucifixion Triptych, formerly known as the Estouteville Triptych,” and attributed to Germany (West), late fourteenth century (1375–1399). Lee's Crucifixion also entered the Courtauld collection in 1947 as part of the Lee bequest and has also been reassigned to the German school; see object file P.1947.LF.167.
93 Exhibition of British Primitives (from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century), with some related illuminated manuscripts, figure embroidery and alabaster carvings, Royal Academy of Arts, London. October and November 1923 (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1923).
94 The Society of Antiquaries Exhibition of English Medieval Alabaster Work (1910) and the exhibitions listed in note 61 would also have served as inspiration.
95 British Primitives, catalogue numbers 11–20 are represented by photographs in the exhibition.
96 Andreas Lindblom, La Peinture Gothique en Suide et en Norvege (Stockholm: Wahlström and Widstrand, Bernard Quaritch, 1916).
97 W.R. Lethaby, “English Primitives – VII The English School in Sweden and Norway,” Burlington Magazine 31 (November 1917): 192–9 and W.R. Lethaby, “English Primitives – VII (2) the English School in Sweden and Norway (Conclusion),” Burlington Magazine 31 (December 1917): 233–5.
98 Lindblom is credited beneath the reproduction of each photograph.
99 British Primitives catalogue numbers 11, 14, 20, 30, 35, among many others.
100 Conway served on the exhibition committee for the British Primitives exhibition and his collection of photographs was donated to the Courtauld Institute in 1932.
101 Martin Conway, “British Primitives,” Burlington Magazine 43 (November 1923): 225. See also British Primitives, catalogue number 30.
102 Rees Leahy, “For Connoisseurs,” 240–1.
103 The list of “Paramount Pictures” was first drawn up in 1922 but was revised in 1927 and 1930. The list fell into abeyance after World War II and in 1953 the government officially ended its commitment to the scheme. Martin Bailey, “Private Masterpieces,” Apollo (February 2007), http://www.apollo-magazine.com/february-2007/66650/private-masterpieces.thtml (accessed February 2013).
104 David Alexander Robert Lindsay, Art Treasures for the Nation: Fifty Years of the National Art-Collection Fund (London: Thames & Hudson, 1953), 10.
105 See also Carl Tancred Borenius, “English Primitives,” Proceedings of the British Academy (London, 1924) and Carl Tancred Borenius ed. Monographs on English Mediæval Art (London: University College London, 1929–30).
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Notes on contributors
Julia Snape
JULIA SNAPE studied at Manchester University where she obtained her PhD in 2013 with a thesis entitled “Medieval Art on Display 1750–2010.” She is particularly interested in researching the exhibitionary histories of medieval art in England, Europe and the United States in both private and public contexts. Since obtaining her PhD, Snape has worked in the museums sector in the UK in a variety of roles that have encompassed collections management, exhibition production and conducting research for a wide range of exhibitions. Snape is currently assisting with the creation of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries at Westminster Abbey.