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You're Blocking My View!: The Spectator in the Romantic Art World

Exhibit Icon
Spectators at an art exhibition

Romantic London is a city of spectacles: from Bartholomew Fair to Covent Garden, from the Great Exhibition Hall to the Royal Academy. These spectacles serve as both the location and occasion for a wide range of viewing practices and interactions, as spectators turn their gaze from the stage and exhibit to the boxes and crowds. This gallery seeks to examine the notions of the viewer and the gaze through the crowd scenes afforded by London’s social calendar of cultural spectacles. Focusing on the formation of the art spectator, this gallery traces the various modes of viewing art—from its conception in life-drawing classes to its display at the Royal Academy Exhibition, and finally to its place in the private collection. The expansion of the viewing public also occurred in sites of drama or live event: from the theatre and Westminster Abbey, which became a tourist site in the eighteenth century, to Bartholomew Fair and the Royal Cockpit, which drew spectators from all classes of society. This circulation of art and the growing public of spectators raises the debate regarding the codification of viewing practices during the Romantic period. As "viewing" became a cultural and social practice available to a wider audience, there was a concerted effort to educate and refine public taste through exhibition catalogues, popular writings, and, as this gallery seeks to demonstrate, through images themselves. Peter de Bolla argues that paintings came to play a role in the education of the eye by “didactically presenting an encyclopedia of looks” (see The Education of the Eye, 62). The gallery further argues that those spectacle scenes which feature the Rückenfigur—the figure who presents his back to the audience—afford the viewer the opportunity to step into the work and actively engage in a range of viewing practices. Rather then excluding the audience, the Rückenfigur draws attention to the spectacle of viewing art and acts as a stand-in for the external viewer; furthermore, the unspecified direction of his gaze allows for a degree of freedom and subversion. Finally, though there are exemplary instances of what Michael Fried terms the state of absorption, or a state of the intense—presumably educated and proper—study of art, the spectacle scene does offer an encyclopedia of looks that abounds in errant spectatorship, ultimately transforming spectators into spectacle (see Fried's Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot). Consequently, this gallery offers images that actively participate in the debate concerning the role of the spectator.

Date Published

Date Published
August 2009

Exhibit Items

Interior of Westminster Abbey


In collaboration with William Combe

This illustration, created by John White to accompany William Combe's written history of Westminster, gives an interior view of the Abbey and depicts several of its monuments.

9th. 10th. & 11th. Windows North Aisle

Spectators at an art exhibition

Isaac Cruikshank, George Cruikshank
In collaboration with Pierce Egan

This image depicts Tom and Jerry—the two main characters from Pierce Egan's popular journal, Life in London—attending the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy.

A SHILLING WELL LAID OUT. Tom and Jerry at the Exhibition of Pictures at the Royal Academy

The Bartholomew Fair

John Nixon
In collaboration with Thomas Rowlandson, William Combe

St. Bartholomew’s Fair was one of the highlights of the London social season, drawing crowds from all strati of society. 

Bartholomew Fair

A crowd in an art auction hall


In collaboration with Augustus Charles Pugin, Thomas Rowlandson

This image depicts an art exhibition and sale at Christie's, London's famous auction house, drawing attention not only to the displayed artwork but also to the busy social scene.

Christie's Auction House

Theater-goers watch a performance

Thomas Rowlandson
In collaboration with William Combe

In this illustration of William Combe's comic text, Dr. Syntax seeks the picturesque in the theater.

Doctor Syntax at Covent Garden Theatre

Students painting a nude woman at the academy

Thomas Rowlandson

In this image, students of the Royal Academy at Somerset House are trained in the techniques of observing and depicting the female nude.

Royal Academy - Somerset House, London

Two lovers in a dark room

Edward Calvert

This intimate domestic scene portrays two lovers who, because of their profound absorption in each other, are simultaneously spectator and spectacle.

The Chamber Idyll

A crowd bets on a cock fight

William Hogarth

This image depicts a cockfight, with special emphasis on the diversity of spectators in attendance and their singularity of purpose (gambling).

The Cockpit

Exhibit Tags

Exhibit Tags
spectacle
middle class

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