Romantic Circles

Significance

The humor of this print lies chiefly in the pictures depicted on the walls, whose subjects parody the rural genre scenes for which Morland was most famous. These paintings of unattractive farm animals and laborers are comically inappropriate objects of interest for the so-called connoisseurs. As well-dressed gentlemen in the urban setting of a commercial art gallery, it seems unlikely that they possess an expert's knowledge of the rural scenes before them; furthermore, their catalogs and eyeglasses suggest that undue interest is being paid to these scenes of relentlessly everyday life. Because the connoisseurs’ interest does not seem warranted by the paintings themselves, the print suggests that it has instead been sparked by the popularity of Morland’s work in a growing art market. It is fitting, then, that the gaze of the connoisseurs seems to be directed by the commercial figure of the art dealer on the right, whose crassness equals that of the paintings he sells. Although the source of a connoisseur’s knowledge and pleasure is his gaze—a comparative gaze that evaluates the works before him in relation to those produced by the same artist or school—the connoisseurs in this print are figuratively blind: they are insensitive to the inappropriate oddity of such coarse rural scenes being used as signs of refinement for the urban art consumer. This print also speaks to the tensions developing between the private and public roles of art during the Romantic period. Though it failed to meet the standards for public art set by the Royal Academy and exemplified by history painting and grand manner portraiture, connoisseurs were known for promoting Dutch genre painting, preferring the private content and intimate pleasures of the rural or mundane scene. The esoteric opinions of the connoisseurs still managed to occasionally influence public opinion, however, as when J.J. Angerstein extolled the early work of David Wilkie. His favorable comments were soon repeated by critics in the public press and helped contribute to the enormous popularity of Wilkie’s work at the Royal Academy exhibition (Solkin). In contrast, this print emphasizes the potential for herd mentality and hypocrisy among the connoisseurs as a group, suggesting that they are influenced as much by the popular taste of their peers as by their own educated sensibilities. Furthermore, by depicting the social act of viewing art in a private gallery, this print operates as a dialectic between public and private aesthetics. The rural scenes on view exemplify a more popular genre of painting, but they are still oil paintings and would have been considered cabinet pictures: appropriate for hanging in the semi-public or informal areas of a house, or even in the main reception rooms of smaller bourgeois townhouses. However, the paintings are also being represented here in a satirical print that would have been exhibited, not on the wall, but in cradles or portfolios kept in private cabinets, libraries, and informal living areas, easily accessible for casual viewing by individuals or intimate groups. And yet, a print such as this one could have hung in the window of a print shop or in a gallery like that which is depicted, viewed for commercial purposes and circulated as an object in the very practices being satirized. Consequently, the print asserts that supposedly private aesthetic tastes are both socially constituted and publicly displayed, while also representing relatively public artworks and viewing practices in a less formal and arguably more private form.