.
Exhibition Room, Somerset House: Thomas Rowlandson (with architectural backdrop by A.C. Pugin), in Rudolf Ackermann's Repository of the Arts, 8 January 1808 (from the series Microcosm of London) (Beinecke Library, Yale)
The famous purchases of the Prince Regent, an ardent art buyer, provided a royal boost to the commodification of art in London, the first true "world city" of capital speculation, spectacle and display.
Having one's portrait done by a painter of prominence was a common way of declaring one's social importance. The most successful of the portrait painters was Thomas Lawrence, noted for his remarkable ability to provide "improvements". Lawrence famously "improved" (i.e. shrunk) the exceptionally large nose of the Duke of Wellington, and limned the dissipated fifty-two-year-old Prince Regent as, in the words of William Hazlitt, "a well-fleshed Adonis of thirty-three": Hazlitt had fun imagining the "transports with which his Royal Highness must have received this improved version of himself".
As is seen in Thomas Rowlandson and Auguste Charles Pugin's "view" in Rudolf Ackermann's Microcosm of London -- a mirror representing the city and its manners and mores to itself -- the Royal Academy collection crowded the walls of a new repository, Sir William Chambers' Somerset House.
With the rise of the new "middling" commercial classes, the "fine arts" became, almost overnight, taste indicator and investment opportunity.
There were, of course, a few who saw the humour in this. Generally these few derived from the class above.
As Reay Tannehill relates in a monograph on the Regency "golden age" of illustration and engraving (Regency England: The Great Age of the Colour Print), around this time an acquaintance enquired of Byron:
What is the end of fame?
To which Byron is to have countered:
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture and worse bust
Having one's portrait done by a painter of prominence was a common way of declaring one's social importance. The most successful of the portrait painters was Thomas Lawrence, noted for his remarkable ability to provide "improvements". Lawrence famously "improved" (i.e. shrunk) the exceptionally large nose of the Duke of Wellington, and limned the dissipated fifty-two-year-old Prince Regent as, in the words of William Hazlitt, "a well-fleshed Adonis of thirty-three": Hazlitt had fun imagining the "transports with which his Royal Highness must have received this improved version of himself".
As is seen in Thomas Rowlandson and Auguste Charles Pugin's "view" in Rudolf Ackermann's Microcosm of London -- a mirror representing the city and its manners and mores to itself -- the Royal Academy collection crowded the walls of a new repository, Sir William Chambers' Somerset House.
With the rise of the new "middling" commercial classes, the "fine arts" became, almost overnight, taste indicator and investment opportunity.
There were, of course, a few who saw the humour in this. Generally these few derived from the class above.
As Reay Tannehill relates in a monograph on the Regency "golden age" of illustration and engraving (Regency England: The Great Age of the Colour Print), around this time an acquaintance enquired of Byron:
What is the end of fame?
To which Byron is to have countered:
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture and worse bust
Christies's Auction Room: Thomas Rowlandson (with architectural backdrop by A.C. Pugin), in Rudolf Ackermann's Repository of the Arts, 1 February 1808 (from the series Microcosm of London) (Beinecke Library, Yale)
