School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemArt collectors in colonial Victoria 1854-1892: an analysis of taste and patronage( 1976)My examination of the holdings of private art collections in Victoria before 1892 is confined to British and European art. It was to Britain that taste was oriented, and the emerging group of Australian painters made little impact upon those patrons and collectors recognized as being the cultural leaders of the community. It would have been difficult to incorporate my research on collectors of Australian art in an essay of this length. I have therefore confined myself to a number of general observations set out in Appendix E. These may be useful in better understanding a part of the background against which British and European art was collected. I have limited my discussion to the dates 1854 to 1892. The former date was chosen because it was in that year that private collectors first publicly exhibited pictures in their possession. I have chosen the latter date because by 1892 the recession had taken a firm hold, and it can be confidently said that the first period of wealth had passed. By 1892 art and its market had all but ceased to be a topic of discussion in the Melbourne journals. I will concentrate on the 1880's; my Chapter on the period before 1880 is meant to be no more than a preface. The topic has been approached from two points of view. Chapters I to III concentrate on individual collectors, and attempt to establish, and then clarify, the various currents of taste which prevailed. My first concern was to identify the principal collectors, and then establish the extent of their holdings. The three broad groups that I have defined are discussed in Chapter III, and I have devoted Appendix A to summarizing this essential background information, while at the same time extending the number of collectors discussed. I will be searching both for evidence of motives for collecting, and for the way in which qualitative standards were established, though the results are generally disappointing. I have then approached the topic from an entirely different angle. I felt it important to take a broad approach and examine in more general terms the various influences which worked upon collectors. This has extended to the role of Melbourne's International Exhibitions, to the receptiveness of the community at large to foreign art and, perhaps most importantly, to the state and role of the art market in Melbourne in the 1880's. In doing this I was compelled to leave out detailed discussion of a number of collectors whose pictures might seem to merit a more considered treatment. It would have been possible to devote the entire essay to the first process of identification, and of compilation of holdings. Considering the exploratory nature of the essay, I decided it would be more useful to sketch in a wider background which could then be used as a basis for further research. I will argue that in general Melbourne collectors in the 1880's, while becoming increasingly receptive to foreign art, clung tightly to a wellentrenched, traditional taste for landscape. I will be exploring the background to a fairly wide resistance to modern figurative art, especially "Olympian". Although the 1880's represented the period of Melbourne's greatest wealth collectors did not, in fact, reassess their attitudes to the notion of "high" art. I will argue that from the market's point of view particularly the period was one of unfulfilled expectations. There have been limitations upon my ability to accurately assess the state and holdings of private Melbourne collections. Very few have remained intact - the crash of the 90's saw to that. For this reason I have had to rely almost exclusively on contemporary documents, and as my work progressed it became increasingly clear that the various catalogues and press reports were fraught with inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Thus, great care should be taken in accepting attributions. Contemporary scholarship in the field of Victorian art seems to be in a state of flux, and no clearly defined, commonly accepted critical terminology has yet emerged. In describing the various genres and types I have not imposed a strictly uniform system, but have preferred to use a variety of terms which might better help to describe the pictures, many of which I have been unable to illustrate. Because of the limits imposed on an essay like this I have decided not to include a discussion of the development of British aesthetic theory through the nineteenth century, of changing attitudes to landscape and such. I have used the word "taste" in its broadest sense. Ruskin, for example, early recognized the inherent "freedom" of the concept, and argued in Modern Painters "that taste was an instinctive preferring, not a reasoned act of choice". In fact, the publication of Richard Payne Knight's treatise on taste in 1805 marked the final demise of the eighteenth century concept of taste as an intellectual perception governed by reason When the term was used by authors and journalists in Melbourne in the 1880's it was invariably conceived in this broad Ruskinian sense. The problems that I will be identifying and discussing relate principally to questions of motive, and not the establishment of qualitative criteria.
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ItemThe development of pessimism in the works of Mark Twain( 1976)The tendency towards pessimism in the 19th century novel is one of the most fascinating of the broad movements in literature, largely because its manifestations are so varied. The later novels of Dickens and Madam Bovary and Crime and Punishment would seem to have little in common and yet, like so many other novels of the period from about 1850 to the First World War, they are marked by a sense of the waste of human potential, a sombreness and narrowing in what life has to offer. We naturally feel that there must have been something in the age itself which inclined those who recorded it towards a pessimistic outlook. Yet how we are to comment on this general tendency is a difficult matter. I feel that little of value can be achieved by identifying general qualities of the age and looking back to find their influence on a variety of writers, at least not by those whose primary interest is literature and not history, however closely the two are linked in this perspective. Rather, certain qualities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries can perhaps be suggested by studying the careers of particular writers and noting the ways in which their impressions and judgments about life and their own times converge. Although a comparative study of a number of writers, with this point of view in mind, would represent a fuller working out of my interest, I feel that it would be quite inappropriate to the length of this thesis and I am confining myself to a study of Mark Twain. Twain is a figure of exceptionally wide significance in relation to the issue of pessimism as a general tendency in the 19th century. In part, this is because of the explicitness with which Twain expresses his growing pessimism. In this he resembles Tolstoy, for by the end of their careers both writers had reached a position of explicit, cosmic pessimism; a position registered particularly forcefully by their readers because it seems, at least superficially, to contrast sharply with their best known works - Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn - which are particularly beloved by all readers for their rendering of some of the simplest and most deeply felt of life's pleasures and values. But in what his pessimism reveals about the times in which he lived Twain is of more direct significance than Tolstoy. For although his later years were marked by exceptional difficulties and sorrows in his personal life, it is not in terms of private suffering that he develops his pessimistic outlook, but in terms of his beliefs about nature and society. (From Introduction)