News-Antique.com - Jul 08,2010 - There is no doubt that provenance played a major part in the successful sale of the major private collections of Victorian paintings that I have mentioned in this series of posts, which means that the sale of these collections should not be used as an indication of the overall health of the market for Victorian paintings. The reason that I spent so much time analysing these sales is because they have played an important part in what is a slow but steady increase in the recognition and respect that Victorian painters are receiving. Although the extent to which the market for Victorian era art has improved is not as stellar as the figures achieved for the major private collections may suggest, the fact that many previously overlooked artists were given some long overdue attention, and works by more well known Victorian painters were the focus of competitive bidding, is proof that the market for Victorian paintings is heading in the right direction.
In the past one of the biggest problems that has plagued the market for Victorian paintings is the lack of academic and curatorial attention that the artists of the period have received. Over the last ten years academics and scholars have, however, begun to take the work of Victorian artists much more seriously, which has resulted in a number of major exhibitions such as:
‘Exposed: The Victorian Nude’ held at the Tate Britain in 2002
‘Love & Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria’ held at various locations in Australia during 2002/3
‘Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature’ held at the Tate Britain in 2004
‘Masterworks of Victorian Art from the Collection of John H. Schaeffer’ held at the BYU Museum of Art in 2008
‘Victorian Paintings from the Museo de Arte de Ponc’ held in Spain in 2009
‘Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage’, a touring exhibition that is currently showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
It is worth noting that there has been a significant increase in the interest that Americans are showing in Victorian art, which has been fuelled partly by several major exhibitions of Victorian art that have gone on show in America over the last ten years. According to the curator of the Californian Palace of the Legion of Honour, an American museum that purchased a major Victorian painting by John Roddam Spencer Stanhome in 2003, “Following a number of popular museum exhibitions recently, there has been a sea-change in the appreciation of Victorian art in America.” (The Daily Telegraph London, January 27th 2003).
Another major exhibition of Victorian paintings is about to go on show (May 20) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The exhibition, titled ‘Victorian visions: Nineteenth-century art from the John Schaeffer Collection’, “presents an impressive collection of some 45 paintings, watercolours, drawings and sculptures by some of the luminaries of Victorian art, including works by Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Poynter, Watts and Waterhouse” from the collection of
