At the Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877-1890Colleen Denney
BOOK REVIEW
In a decade that has seen the decline or dissolution of a number of the venerable elite among the world’s art galleries, Colleen Denney’s At the Temple of Art reminds us where it all began. Sir Coutts Lindsay and his multitalented wife Carolyn Blanche Fritzroy (whose mother was a Rothschild) virtually created the modern concept of art gallery as a temple of genius, a style of presentation and marketing that cultivated a privileged and intensely “aesthetic” clientele. Grosvenor Gallery exhibitions became an important part of the London “season”; invitations to private views were coveted; and in its heyday, literally thousands of people intent on seeing and being seen crowded through its doors on a single day. The Lindsays had an instinct for artists and understood the value of controversy. Whistler and Albert Moore, Burne-Jones, and the later Pre-Raphaelite circle, Irish and London Impressionists, and the Glasgow Boys were among the artists the Lindsays championed and lionized. The Lindsays set themselves in direct opposition to the hidebound, desultory, and chauvinistic Royal Academy by championing artists outside the establishment who often were young, foreign, or female. Exhibition at the Grosvenor conferred notoriety among the general public, but also automatic credibility among the fashionable elect. Blanche Lindsay’s own gifts as an artist and musician meant that women were accorded greater visibility at the Grosvenor Gallery than anywhere else in the capital. Not only did the gallery become a prestigious venue for many women artists, including “amateurs” from the highest levels of society, such as the Marchioness of Waterford and H. R. H. The Princess Louise, and Lady Lindsay herself, but also professional female painters such as Louise Jopling, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan, Laura Alma-Tadema, Maria Spartali Stillman, and the sisters Montalba – Clara, Henrietta, and Hilda, to name a few. The Lindsays provided both financial and moral support to the women, presenting their work with the seriousness and consideration accorded their male counterparts. However, as Denney ably points out, the biases of the male-dominated art establishment and society at large resisted comparing directly the work of women with that of men. Women artists invariably were categorized as followers – of their husbands or their teachers, that is, “handmaidens in the temple.” Genius and innovation were exclusively male qualities, while to become avowedly professional placed the female artist in a kind of social limbo. The Grosvenor Gallery also encouraged women as audience and consumers, with Lady Lindsay, herself, presiding as hostess. Denny treats her subjects with enthusiasm and empathy. Particularly welcome are her many generous extracts of contemporary criticism and her analysis of the society of the period and of the emergence of women artists in its changing artistic climate. The text – despite a few small factual errors – is well organized and traces the arc of the gallery’s 14-year existence from its auspicious beginning to is closing in the face of large financial losses and its legacy as a temple in which the art object is separated out “from ordinary life and ordinary time” in a ritual of appreciation that extends to the artist-creator and his or her inscrutable genius. –Thomas A. Dean, Women’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2003 To see a full description of this book, search our online database
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Photograph courtesy of Louise Dell-Bene Stahl © 2001