Art in the age of opulence

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Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Edited by Angus Trumble and Andrea Wolk Rager

What was the Edwardian period about? Was it even a distinct period anyway, and if so, was it looking forward to the condition of modernity or backward to a continuity of the past?  These thoughts are inescapably posed by this book, which is opulent in itself.

It was by any definition a brief period: King Edward VII reigned from 1901 to 1910 and Virginia Woolf asserted that the 20th century began around about December 1910; certainly there can be little doubt that things would never be the same after the end of the First World War. 

The first years of the new century witnessed tensions within society, notably in campaigns for women’s rights and for the claims of the expanding ranks of industrial labour. Yet, for a while, the aristocracy still attempted to hold on to its privileged lifestyle, albeit with the increasing necessity of marrying into American money. Opulence, in the sense of conspicuous demonstration of wealth and abundance, reflected both this aspect of Edwardian life and also the culmination of the extent of British imperial power.  The two elements came forcibly together when Lord Curzon was made Viceroy of India and the maximum show of imperial grandeur was required for his installation. 

Curzon had married Mary Leiter, whose fortune flowed from Chicago’s Marshall Field’s department store, and Mary played her regal role impressively, spending considerable sums – somewhat exaggerated by the press – in purchasing 40 dresses from Worth in Paris  to assist her in fulfilling her duties.  A major section of the book features the resplendent dresses, tiaras and jewellery, ostrich feathers and fans from this period.

Opulence might also be recognized in various society portraits, mostly of women, since male dress, aside from ceremonial uniform, offered little pictorial interest. These portraits, in the hands of John Singer Sargent and Philip de Laszlo, referred knowingly back to the age of Gainsborough and Lawrence. But alternative approaches were emerging. Subjects could be shown engaged in outdoor activities, as in Charles Furst’s Diana of the Uplands, in which the depiction of the windblown skirt suggests the influence of photography. 

The growing importance of photography in visual culture is a valuable lesson to be gained from this book and the very natural and non-opulent photographic portraits, taken in colour using the Autochrome process, reproduced here are particularly compelling.  The atmospheric scenes of foggy London by Alvin Langdon Coburn demonstrate how tonal photography was consciously taking over pictorial features.  In one of the short contributed essays, Alexander Nemerov examines the photographs by Frederick H. Evans of the time-worn steps in Wells Cathedral, seeing them as a meditation on the current conflicts between faith in religion and a substitute faith in art.

By 1900 the countryside was no longer the place where most people in Britain lived and nostalgic reactions to this loss of rural experience prospered in the Edwardian era. Edward Ashbee set up ‘The Guild of Handicrafts’ in the village of Chipping Campden to counteract the dehumanizing effects of industrial labour by returning to traditional craft skills.  As a reaction to the formality and constraints of bourgeois living, artists such as Augustus John and Alfred Munnings sought a spurious version of the Romany life by touring the countryside in horse drawn caravans.

So the book goes far beyond examining just the spectacular show of conspicuous opulence that characterizes the period and offers a much more extensive view of the emerging cultural currents that were to continue to flow well into the new century.  As well as providing a visual feast, perhaps a little embarrassedly acknowledging the ‘Downton effect‘, the detailed catalogue notes and the eight contributed essays ensure its scholarly credentials.

Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, edited by Angus Trumble and Andrea Wolk Rager, is published by Yale University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-300-19025-0