1819:A Year Like Any Other?

"Choose Reform or civil war,
When through thy streets, instead of hare with dogs
A Consort - Queen shall hunt a King with hogs
Riding on the Ionian Minotaur" - Oedipus Tyrannus, Percy Shelley (1820).

To end what has been my most productive year of blogging so far (more blogs AND more views than ever before) I thought that, instead of rounding up the year I've just lived through, I'd go back two centuries to 1819 and, luckily for me, Tate Britain had provided a free exhibition of that year's art to guide me on my way.

Of course, that's not true (so in that respect, at least, this blog is faithful to the ethos of 2019). The Tate Britain show, 1819:THE YEAR'S ART, happened, I attended it, and then I thought, for the last blog of the year, it'd be a nice simple one to write. After all I have got other things to do today. I'm off to Kintbury to see the new year in with some (sadly not all) of my very best friends. Today will be more about drinking, eating, and socialising than it will be about sitting in front of a computer writing.

All things (except the computer) I can imagine I'd be doing in 1819 which was, much like 2019 (and much like any year when you really start to analyse it), quite a tempestuous twelve month period. The curators of the Tate show surely have 2019 in mind when they ask, on entering the show, "how did artists respond to the turbulent times" in a year that was characterised by disillusion and culminated in political violence?

Britain's victory over France in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 had restored national pride but had been followed by years of social unrest, economic struggle, and a growing dissatisfaction with a political system that only a tiny part of the population felt involved in. George III had been king since 1760 (forty-nine years) and was close to death, he'd eventually perish the following year, and this seemed, to many, to mark both the ending of an era and a chance for a new start.

On 16th August, at St Peter's Field in Manchester, a rally calling for political reform was broken up by soldiers and fifteen people died in what became known as the Peterloo massacre. Instead of bringing the ruling and working classes closer together in a healing process, it brought ever deeper division. The government became more oppressive and those among the working class who believed in progress became more embittered and more radicalised.

George Cruikshank - Massacre at St. Peter's or "Britons strike hom"!!! (1819)

Poems and songs at the time may have had political undertones but it wasn't, yet, expected that artists respond directly to political events. Much of the art of the time focused on art, architecture, and portraiture but we can see, in the works of arch satirist George Cruikshank, the green leaves of social commentary beginning to flower. 

Cruikshank's soldiers are overweight and self-serving and speech bubbles have them shouting "remember the more you kill the less poor rates you'll have to pay", a sentiment that is surely at the forefront of the recently knighted Iain Duncan Smith's mind at all times. Those they crush, both the soldiers as well as IDS and his 'reforms', have, of course, no weapons to fight back with. Men, women, and children crushed not just under the hooves of horses and the bayonets of the privileged but under a system that seeks to maintain power at any expense. Including the death of those who speak truth to it.

Cruikshank wasn't the only one pissed off with George III, the bloated Prince Regent, Prime Minister Lord Liverpool (a Tory, then seven years into a fourteen year premiership), and the stout yeoman guard who were more than happy to do the killing for the monarchy and government. Percy Shelley wrote the poem England:-

"An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn - mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,

But leechlike to their fainting country cling

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;

An army, whom liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;

Religion Christless, Godless - a book sealed;

A senate, Time's worst statue, unrepealed -

Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illuminate our tempestuous day".

George Cruikshank - A radical reformer, (i e) a neck or nothing man! Dedicated to the heads of the nation (1819)

Anxiety was rising that Britain could follow in France's footsteps and have a full revolution. While overthrowing the monarch would have been (and still would be) grand, the violence, death, and the Reign of Terror would be less appreciated.

Then and now. Other similarities with the time we live in come in the way that past battles were weaponised for propagandist purposes. 1644's Battle of Marston Moor is the largest battle ever to take place upon British soil (and resulted in over four thousand deaths). When Abraham Cooper's painting of it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819 not only did it launch his career but it was cited as "an example of heroic resolution". As if the best way to sort out any problems is to kill those you disagree with. 

Abraham Cooper - Marston Moor (1819)

Depressingly, two hundred years later, there are many who still cling to notions of greatness being forged not in negotiation and compromise but in battle and blood lust. In the case of the Nazis, violence and war were necessary to stop the greatest acts of evil the world has ever witnessed. Elsewhere it's usually a bad idea. Violent solutions often give way to violent societies. Voting for hate tends to result in more hatred surprisingly enough.

Henry Perronet Brigg's The Search for the Heliotrope (based on a story by the medieval Italian writer Calandrino) shows a painter who has a stone that he believes makes him invisible. His friends, who pretend they can't see him, pelt him with stones nevertheless. It is, as the curators claim, an "odd and curious" painting but hung next to Cooper's celebration of war it seems to show that large acts of violence give way to small acts of violence. Anybody who has allowed the country's raging argument about Brexit over the last few years to give way to family arguments about the subject would surely, now, see the truth in this assertion.

Henry Perronet Briggs - The Search for the Heliotrope (1819)

JMW Turner - England:Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent's Birthday (exhibited 1819)

It's no wonder that in times of strife and division so many of us seek solace in nature, walking, and fiction. It was no different two hundred years ago. JMW Turner has long been one of my favourite painters. His view from Richmond Hill towards Twickenham purports, in its title, to celebrate the Prince Regent's birthday but it seems to me to be far more a celebration of England's green and pleasant land, the Arcadian idyll that is that stretch of the Thames, and, more generally, the beauty of nature in its purest form.

It wasn't Turner's smartest ever move. The Prince Regent's cruel behaviour towards his wife had made him deeply unpopular and Turner came across, to many, as a lickspittle. It's not the best work he ever made but I do believe it's due a reappraisal. While Turner looked to nature and (spit) royalty for inspiration, other artists, like Henry Singleton, looked to the world of the mythological.

Ariel, the magical spirit of Shakespeare's The Tempest, rides singing on a bat's back in a physically improbable but at least amusing scenario. Looked back on, twenty decades later, it's technically proficient but hardly anything to get excited about. But, at the time, this sort of escapism was wildly popular. Think of it as an early 19c version of Love Island or Mrs Brown's Boys. Utter shit basically.

Henry Singleton - Ariel on a Bat's Back (exhibited 1819)

William Etty - Miss Mary Arabella Jay (exhibited 1819)

Flattering portraits of forgotten socialites don't stand the test of time any better either. William Etty's portrait of Mary Arabella Jay, the daughter of a preacher friend of his in Bath, depicts a person of little or no interest to anybody know and, most likely, very few people then. It's not even a very good painting.  

It is, in fact, boringly middle class in its aspirations and intentions and the middle classes, at a time when the ruling classes were known to be inherently cruel and the working classes deemed to be simulated by political upheaval and base passions, were seen by many as the most admirable people. Something everyone should aspire to. Manners and taste were paramount and if this, in some way, contributed to the country's stability that's not necessarily a bad thing. But it hardly inspired great art, that's for certain.

There's a fairly drab section at the Tate that shows a woman holding a baby (George Dance) and a "delicate" and "decorative" book illustration (by Edward Francis Burney) of a widower which seems to say all we need to know about the genteel pretensions of the era. Henry Edridge's Rouen circumvents this trend by setting his "lively street scene" in the French city of Rouen. It was, presumably, okay to present foreigners as people who get dirty, wear less than perfect clothes, and, shocks a mighty, even occasionally leave their house and mix with the lower orders.

Henry Edridge - Rouen (1819)

Compare Edridge's Rouen with James Ward's Tabley Park in Cheshire. It's a masterclass in grandiloquent showboating and shows Ward blowing the trumpet loudly for not just himself but for Britain. It's very picturesque but is probably as representative of the day to day lived experience of the majority of the people from that time as George Howland Beaumont's radiant hunting landscape.

James Ward - View in Tabley Park (1813-8)

George Howland Beaumont - Landscape, with Jacques and the Wounded Stag (1819?)

Henry Bernard Chalon - A Representation of the Persians in the Costume of their Country, Attending at Carlton Palace (1819?)

Joseph Gandy - Jupiter Pluvius (1819)

Or, indeed, Henry Bernard Chalon's image of a Persian delegation's visit to Carlton Palace and Joseph Gandy's temple of Jupiter Pluvius. The latter two are, however, both fine paintings. Lambent yet precise in their execution, Chalon's shows the arrival of the Persian ambassador in London to ask for assurances from the British government that they would support Persia in the event of a Russian invasion.

Again, it's not surprising that my mind should wander forwards to Boris Johnson, our new (and highly untrustworthy) PM. With Johnson funded by Russian oligarchs (and preventing an investigation into meddling by Moscow into our democracy) it seems he'd be unlikely to stand up for another country should Russia threaten them. Let alone Persia, now Iran where Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is in prison (and on hunger strike), primarily due to Johnson's recklessness, inattention to detail, and his self-serving nature.

We're stuck with the prick for five more years now (quite possibly longer if Labour can't unite the centre and left and find a leader that speaks of a positive future) and we'll have to watch while his harebrained schemes, like bridges from Scotland to Ireland, eat up the public coffers and people starve to death and kill themselves due to his policies.

If it actually existed I'd like to move to Joseph Gandy's temple of Jupiter Pluvius and shut myself and all my friends away from it all in this, frankly unlikely looking but, rather wonderful architectural caprice. Gandy's work reminds me of Claude and shows the human imagination unleashed can be a wonderful thing. It's a shame so many of our elected representatives are so weak when it comes to having transformative, as opposed to punitive, ideas.

William Blake - A Figure Standing in a Gothic Apse, perhaps the Empress Maud (c.1819)

William Blake - Detailed Drawings for 'A Figure Standing in a Gothic Apse' (c.1819)

Nobody could accuse William Blake of being short of ideas, or of not being a visionary. I'd just finished Peter Ackroyd's biography of the man (as well as curating and overseeing a walk dedicated to his life and times) so Blake, for me, is very much the man of the moment. Sadly the two graphite works in the 1819 exhibition are feint and difficult to read and, therefore, were only really of canonical interest. With two blogs about Blake already this month and another to come once I've returned to Tate Britain to visit the show entirely given over to him it'll be no disservice to the great man if, for once, I skip over him fairly briefly.

In fact, he's been upstaged at the Tate by his contemporaries John Sell Cotman and John Crome whose watercolours of Norman crypts (Rouen again, it must have been the holiday destination du jour back in 1819), pastoral oak trees of Norfolk, and the rolling hills of the more rustic parts of that same county are all a treat to the eye.  

They remind us that in times of turmoil there is always great beauty and that in the midst of great beauty there is often turmoil. These two may be uneasy bedfellows but they have been bedfellows for far more than the last two hundred years and will likely remain so. We can delight in nature, friendship, music, poetry, and love in these last few hours of 2019 while still raging against the injustices and cruelties in the world and we can also, I endeavour to do so, continue to do this as we move into 2020 and beyond.

Part of how we care and how we show love is fighting for those less fortunate for us. Putting out an open hand of friendship rather than the clenched fist of hatred. It was that way in 1819, it's been that way in 2019, and, if any of us are still here it'll be much the same in 2219. Thanks to everyone who read, shared, or contributed to one of my blogs in 2019 and happy new year to you all. I'll leave you with two poems, both open to various interpretations, from (around) 1819 that seem as relevant now as they did back then.

"Britons be firm, assert your rights, be bold,

Perish like heroes, not like slaves be sold,

Firm and unite, bid millions be free,

Will to your children glorious liberty,

While cowards - despots, long may keep in view

And silent contemplate, the deeds on Peterloo" - Peterloo, J Harkness, Preston (c.1810-30). 

These are THE PEOPLE all tatter'd and torn,

Who curse the day wherein they were born,

On account of Taxation too great to be borne,

And pray for relief, from night to morn;

Who, in vain, Petition in every form,

Who, peacably Meeting to ask for Reform,

Were sabred by Yeomanry Cavalry, who,

Were thank'd by THE MAN, all shaven and shorn,

All cover'd with Orders - and all forlorn" - The Political House that Jack Built, William Hone (1819).

John Sell Cotman - Crypt in the Church of St Gervais, Rouen (1819)

John Crome - The Poringland Oak (c.1818-20)

after Thomas Gainsborough - English Scenery (1819)

John Crome - Mousehold Heath, Norwich (c.1818-20)