The Art of a Nation – British Culture on the Continent, 1625-1900
For decades, the state of self-reflection about English or British identity and cultural values had not reached such heights as it did during the Brexit referendum, reinforcing a feeling of national belonging in an entire nation. This provides the occasion to reappraise how Englishness or Britishness in terms of artistic innovations has been understood and defined in the past and has contributed to European culture. There is generally no doubt that the English landscape garden, Gothic Revival or the Arts and Crafts Movement have had a great impact on the artistic evolution and on aesthetic ideas in Europe. However, we know far less about the recognition of British art, the extent of its influence, the mechanisms of contribution, the processes of appropriation and the intentions or motivations behind them.
This session aims to explore continental engagement with British art and architecture through their processes of transfer, adaptation, and interaction with local art production. To this end, we seek to examine how British art was conceived and understood as foreign innovation, and for which qualities and cultural attribution it was selected. How did contemporary reviews judge on the significance and status of British Art? What role did aristocratic networks, politics, economic ties, the art market, and Grand Tour tourism play as decisive factors in activating the transfer process. To discuss these topics, we welcome case studies on understudied examples of artistic transfers including interior design, furniture, and ceramics as well as studies on collecting British art and art historiography.
Session Convenors:
Daniela Roberts, Institute of Art History, University of Wurzburg
Gerry Alabone, National Trust / City & Guilds of London Art School
Speakers:
Maja Albert, State Office for Monument Preservation of Lower Saxony, Lüneburg
Architecture as a profession. The new house in Wrestedt (1788/89)
District administrator Carl Otto Levien von Lenthe commissioned the construction of his new house according to Oberlandbaumeister Christian Ludwig Ziegler´s design in Wrestedt, a village located in what is known today as the district of Uelzen and was formerly the northern part of the Electorate of Braunschweig-Lüneburg. It is a Palladian style house with a nearly quadratic floor plan, two stories and a pyramid roof. Inside you find an impressive two-flight staircase underneath a lierne vault. Between the heathland´s typical sheep-stables, barns and farmhouses one may ask: How did this extraordinary house come to be?
Otto Christian von Lenthe, father of Carl Otto Levien, made a great career after his studies in Halle and a Grand Tour that included England. Later he was minister of war of the Electorate and so highly valued by Elector and King George II that he was promised vacant manors in fief. It was however Elector and King George III who delivered on that promise by granting Otto Christian´s sons Wrestedt in 1776. The brothers split up the inheritance, so Carl Otto Levien became the owner of the manor.
To date the Lenthe family owns the house and all paperwork regarding its construction. This includes Carl Otto Levien´s thoughts on its design, Ziegler´s various floor plans and even the bills. In this article I want to investigate both the house and the paperwork to answer the question: Which meaning was attributed to Palladian style that made it necessary to use for expressing affiliation? In addition, I want to show that architecture was fundamentally used as an appropriate medium for communication and a well understood language by contemporaries.
Vibe Nielsen, University of Copenhagen
Displaying Nature under Glass and Steel – British Influences on the Glass Houses of Copenhagen
In the late-nineteenth century, collecting art and plants were prestigious projects, which in Denmark were characterised by collectors such as the brewing magnate Carl Jacobsen (1842-1914), whose collections have been displayed in the halls of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek since 1897: “We Danes have a much better understanding of flowers than of works of art, I think that the greenery in the winter can draw people in here, and when they look at the palm trees, perhaps a glance will also be cast upon the statues” said Carl Jacobsen about the Winter Garden in the Glyptotek, when it opened to the public in 1906, and thus supplemented the Victorian Palm House in the Botanical Garden with another magnificent glass house.
The Palm House in the Botanical Garden of Copenhagen was built in 1872-74 with the father of Carl Jacobsen, the brewer J.C. Jacobsen (1811-1887), as one of the driving forces. It was inspired by London’s Crystal Palace, built for the World Exhibition in 1851, and similarly aimed to accommodate a display of the world under its dome.
In this paper, the ideas behind these two prestigious architectural projects are unfolded in a discussion of the ways in which contemporary British glasshouses inspired the Jacobsen benefactors. The initiatives to create palm houses in Copenhagen are thus revisited and analysed with a socio-economic and cultural-political lens: It is argued that in addition to bringing sculptural beauty and green lushness to the visiting public, the plant collections of the Glyptotek and Botanical Garden were also examples of how private benefactors self-positioned themselves in a world, which was characterised by imperial exploitation and representations of Europe as the only true civilisation.
Alice Ottazzi, I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence
Creating a School, or Theorizing English Art in the 18th century
Prior to the 18th century, the English School had no recognition on the continent both in the theoretical discourse and in a more tangible way, as it is scarcely present in the market or in the collections. This situation changed in the first decades of the 18th century and an idea of English School emerged in France thank to the action of some Parisian art dealers (Gersaint, Remy, Glomy) and connoisseurs that started to differentiate in sale’s catalogues and in written texts English engravers from the Flemish and the Netherlandish ones.
This paper, based on a chapter of my book Trésors d’une île. La ricezione della scuola inglese a Parigi nel XVIII secolo (2024), aims to investigate the process leading to the constitution and recognition of the concept of English school in France. Although it was not acknowledged by the academic discourse, the idea of an English school already existed within the French artistic milieu thanks to the prints trade, in specific mezzotint and stipple engraving. Perceived as a British product, these types of engravings represented a means to export a national artistic identity.
Besides the crucial action taken by the merchants in the diffusion of English prints and in the creation of an idea of visual and figurative unity, authors as Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Antoine- François Prévost, Jean-André Rouquet or Dézallier d’Argenville helped legitimize the discourse on British art. Convoking different sources as sales’ catalogues, private correspondences, artists’ biographies, treatises or dictionaries, I will examine how the visual and material analysis combined with the theoretical notions of style, “touche” or “coloris” shaped an idea of English art and then English school. It emerges then a European constellation of connoisseurs whose activities mobilize, in order to understand the evolution of taste, methodological concepts as the ones of circulation, exchanges and network.
Violaine Gourbet, University of Tours
A Belated Enthusiasm: German Art Historians and John Constable (End of the Nineteenth Century)
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, John Constable remained largely unknown in Germany. However, from the 1870s onwards, his paintings began to attract an enthusiastic reception from German collectors, curators, and above all art historians. This presentation will explore the factors and mechanisms that contributed to this new critical recognition, situating it within the broader context of a renewed interest in English art, while highlighting the distinctiveness of Constable’s appeal. It argues that this critical reception, at a time of national tensions in Europe, was shaped by various, sometimes contradictory discourses, fostering an ambivalent mythology of the painter: Constable appeared both as a transnational and a national figure.
Firstly, I will explore the pivotal role that France played in this delayed reception in Germany, highlighting several key channels of this indirect transfer. The circulation of French collections and texts in Germany, in particular, contributed to a new perception of Constable as a precursor to European and French modernity.
I will then demonstrate that this narrative coexisted with the fascination of some German authors for Constable’s Englishness, embedded within a broader, idealised, and somewhat nostalgic vision of England—one rooted in conservative values like patriotism, social order, a love for rural life, and virility, and partially fuelled by an anti-French sentiment.
Finally, I will examine how this reception led to a new way of writing on German art: the recognition of Constable’s work shed new light on various German landscape painters, who were retrospectively regarded as Constable’s heirs or equals. I will demonstrate that these comparisons formed part of a broader discourse strongly connecting English and German cultures.