Beckford's second grand tour was also unique because it enabled him to display his capacity to influence both the production and consumption of art. On this occasion Beckford brought along John Robert Cozens, already an important landscape painter, and tried to use him as a conduit for redirecting the nature of British art. In his partnership with Cozens, Beckford conceived his role not merely as that of a wealthy patron but also as an important theorist of art, one concerned with the history of English painting and its place in the social order. As E. S. Shaffer has noted in a compelling discussion of the relationship between patron and artist, there was what one may call a tripartite structure between Beckford's second grand tour, his aesthetic project, and some of Cozens's most important paintings, such as Padua after 1782.93 Beckford was a wealthy patron for Cozens, providing the artist with the leisure to produce his most important landscape paintings, but he was also an active agent in determining the themes and style of the work of art; the collaboration between patron and artist was intended to transform aesthetic practice in Britain.
If Beckford's aesthetic was impelled by the need to change the conventions of British art, and especially to make the imagination rather than memory the organizing principle of this art, then it is easy to see how being on the road provided him with the license for this kind of project. It was in the process of describing the landscapes he encountered on his tour that Beckford developed his vision for English art, a program in which what was observed and its effects on the sensations were as important as what was imagined or visualized, and one in which natural objects, such as mountains, could be recollected and re-created in the mind independent of their location and temporality. The work that Cozens produced on the grand tour was similar to Beckford's writings done at the same time; both testify to what Shaffer aptly calls “the deepening of the relationship between the traveler and his landscape, and between writing and painting, and marks the conversion of fashionable staging posts in a social ritual into a melding of inner and outer experience in what would later be called by Wordsworth ‘spots of time’.”94
Like Cozens's paintings, Beckford's travel narratives indicate his fondness for ekphrasis, and the many “painterly” scenes in these writings reproduce Cozens's landscapes. And yet the closeness of patron and artist observed here has not gone down well with critics of English art, some of whom have blamed what they consider to be the shortcomings in Cozens's work on Beckford's overwhelming influence. Sir Anthony Blunt, for example, dismissed Padua after 1782 as the worst example of Beckford's imposition of his “spoilt, whimsical and temperamental” attitude on Cozens's delicate sensibility.95 Evidence of this imposition, Blunt argued, could be found in the dislocation of the painting from its immediate setting. The painting purports to be the representation of a storm over Padua that Beckford and Cozens witnessed when they were visiting that town during the grand tour of 1782, but there is no mention of such a storm in the letters and diaries Beckford kept during the same period. On the contrary, the painting is a meticulous representation of a storm that Beckford had witnessed in Padua during his first grand tour two years before, a scene vividly represented in the diaries from this period. This discrepancy in time would lead Blunt to conclude that far from being the representation of an immediate and sensuous experience, the painting was a recall of a past scene that the wealthy patron had forced upon Cozens. The implication here was that the painting represented the patron's whimsical vision rather than the artist's power of observation and sensibility.96
But this kind of post-romantic reading of Padua after 1782 misses the point: the fact that the sublimity of the painting depended on the artist's capacity to evoke an emotion independent of its topography and history.97 Cozens could bring his imagination to bear on the storm over Padua because he hadn't personally witnessed it; the impact of his work would depend not on an observed experience, but on a kind of autonomous imagination, something akin to Wordsworth's definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” which “takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility.”98 In this context, Beckford, who was praised as a collector and vilified as a man of taste, understood the close relation between the grand tour, the narrative of travel, and the romantic imagination. For him, notes Shaffer, “actual travel became the occasion for mental travel in which the well-stocked mind of the traveler constructed his own landscape, sometimes merely whimsically but gradually refashioning the raw materials of familiar Grand-Tour topoi into new modes of visual encounter with inner landscapes.”99 There are, however, good reasons to question Beckford's understanding of the aesthetic. Was his interest in art motivated by reigning theories of beauty or by utilitarian, some might say self-aggrandizing, motives? The case for the latter is supported by Beckford's notorious propensity for collecting beautiful and expensive objects.
As is well known, Beckford was the leading collector of his day, owner of a rich array of precious and magnificent objects on display in today's museums, including works in porcelain, metal, and wood.100 There is perhaps no single major museum in Europe and North America without a dazzling object from the Beckford collection. The Fonthill Ewer, with its smoky crystal and enameled gold mounts, probably made in the workshop of Ferdinand Eusebio Miseroni in Prague in 1680, can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Fonthill-Gaignieres Ewer, a Qunbai porcelain jar now at the National Museum of Ireland, dates to the Yuan dynasty (ca. 1300); and some of the best collections of French furniture at leading institutions such as the Wallace Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum were initially owned by Beckford. For Beckford, collecting art objects and expensive objects had become an obsession. At one point toward the end of the eighteenth century he was in Paris several times, with a cursory interest in the politics of the French Revolution but primarily lured there “by the thought of the spoils he might pick up in the glittering debris left in the wake of revolution.”101 Many of Beckford's precious pieces of art and furniture were bought on the cheap from a fleeing French aristocracy. This art came to be woven into the fabric of Beckford's life; as an 1822 epitaph in the pages of the Times of London noted, he was “one of the few possessors of great wealth who have honestly tried to spend it poetically.”102
But for Beckford and other colonial barons there was something else driving this desire to collect art and to locate the self at the center of the culture of taste, and this had very much to do with the hidden hand of sugar and slavery. In effect, slavery functioned as the hidden cause—the political unconscious, as it were—of Beckford's aesthetic being.103 And to understand the role this absent cause played in shaping the desires and aesthetic demands of the subject of taste, one needs to highlight two points about Beckford's relationship to the culture of consumption. First, it is evident that most of his artistic endeavors in areas as diverse as design, architecture, travel, and even the writing of his gothic novel, Vathek, were driven by deep anxieties about his identity, his genealogy, and his relation to the public culture, where he was both an insider and outsider. Beckford was an insider because his immense wealth had enabled him to live the life of the aesthete; he was an outsider because the Beckfords were deeply involved in West Indian slavery, being major slaveholders on the island of Jamaica. In spite of having been described as “the third generation of the Beckford clan of buccaneering sugar potentates,” Beckford's father had risen in the political system to become lord mayor of London, and he had used his immense wealth to secure cultural standing in English high society for strictly utilitarian reasons.104
Alderman Beckford did not for once imagine that he could erase his Jamaican identity and the structure of difference associated with it. On the contrary, he used his immense wealth to buy his way into the English ruling class while using his political skills to align himself with the ascendant Whigs. More importantly, he had a keen understanding of the role of the culture of consumption and the organization of the arts in ensuring an individual's social standing. For example, whe
n he married into the aristocracy in 1756, the alderman began “the construction of a building of increased grandeur, more suited to his social standing and political aspirations.” The new building, Fonthill House (fig. 3.11), was modeled on Houghton Hall, which Sir Robert Walpole had built “as a monument to political merit.”105 Designed and constructed in the dominant Palladian style that was popular with the English ruling class, Fonthill House reflected the taste of the Whig establishment, of which Alderman Beckford was an important part.
It is important, then, to underscore the alderman's utilitarian view of art as a counterpoint to his son's much more subjective relationship to the aesthetic. Unlike his son, the alderman did not aspire to be more than what he was allowed to be within the culture of Englishness—a Jamaican Creole with a lot of money and the political clout that came with it. In contrast, young Beckford engaged with art at moments of psychological crisis and considered it central to his identity as a modern subject; for him, art was the mediator of a conflicting set of desires and a form of compensation. Thus Beckford valued the landscape and its painting because he saw himself as a “passionate nomad,” and he saw collecting as essential to his engagement with Englishness.106 As a collector, Beckford's only other rival in the kingdom was the prince regent, later George IV. But while the prince and other aristocrats collected objects out of curiosity or fashion, Beckford had what Bet McLeod describes as “a very personal engagement with his collection,” which was informed by a “highly individual and romantic streak.”107
The intensely subjective relationship between Beckford and his collection provides important insights into his overall relationship with the ideology of the aesthetic, and it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that it was in his acquisition, rather than admiration, of works of art that he sought to transform his “not quite white identity” into the quintessential subject of taste and thus of what was assumed to be true Englishness. In short, Beckford considered the mastery of the culture of taste to be the essence of his being and the conduit to an Englishness that he couldn't take for granted. What were the sources of Beckford's deep anxieties about his cultured self? Why would a subject born into and brought up in the most privileged economic and political circumstances of the eighteenth century live under the shadow of deep anxieties about the self and its place in the public sphere while ordinary middle-class people, subjects like Anna Margaret Larpent discussed earlier, could use limited cultural resources to fashion themselves as part of the aristocracy of taste?
3.11 View of the west and north fronts of Fonthill House. 1823. From John Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill.
There are some obvious and popular explanations for Beckford's cultural anxieties. One is that beneath the mask of taste and civility, Beckford's life was haunted by what one of his biographers has called the absence of “a dazzling descent.”108 Another is that Beckford's homosexuality marked him as an outsider, a fact confirmed by the reaction to his alleged affair with an adolescent boy named William Courtenay, the event used by his enemies to ruin his political and social standing, effectively turning him into the subject of scandal rather than taste.109 Both of these are valid explanations, but both point to some of the ways in which Beckford's social anxieties were tied up in the knot of colonialism and slavery. Colonial origins aggravated Beckford's sense of cultural isolation and alienation as much as his sexuality and behavior did.
One possible counterpoint is that other colonial barons, like Codrington, had been able to succeed in the aristocracy of taste without the hindrance and taint of their vast slaveholdings. But even before their involvement in the colonial and slaving enterprise, the Codringtons were already part of the English aristocracy. The irony here is that Codrington, who never disavowed his ownership of slaves or concealed close ties to the West Indian plantation system, could be accepted as a founding member of the culture of taste, while Beckford, who had been born in England and whose ties to Jamaica were minimal, couldn't find a similarly secure place in the system of art and culture. The issues here, then, are of social class and colonial disavowal, and they need to be sketched out carefully in order to account for the subject of taste who didn't make it to the inner sanctums of Englishness.
With regard to class, the facts are straightforward. William Beckford's great-grandfather, Peter Beckford, the son of a Clerkenwell cloth worker, migrated to Jamaica in 1643 to join his brother, who was already involved in the slave trade. By taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the colonial space and the revolution that new rules of property had triggered in the British economy, Peter Beckford was able to acquire enough land and slaves to become a member of the white Creole oligarchy in Jamaica, rising to be president of the council under Charles II and lieutenant governor and commander in chief under William III. By the time of his death, Peter Beckford had amassed what was considered to be “one of the greatest fortunes to come out of Jamaica in an age when to have a vast commercial fortune one must either be a Nabob from India or a sugar king from the West Indies.”110 This wealth was passed on to his son, also named Peter, who held it intact for the two William Beckfords, the alderman and his son.
Irrespective of their wealth and power, however, the Beckfords lived under the shadow of a questionable genealogy. As part of the plantocracy in Jamaica, the Beckfords were on top of their world, but in England they were wealthy but without pedigree. Their challenge was how to process this wealth into an elevated standard of social respectability. As we have already seen, Alderman Beckford bought his way into the establishment, marrying into it, becoming lord mayor of London, and controlling the institutions of power as a member of its powerful guilds. However, the alderman's aspirations were limited to the exteriority of power; he did not set out to “pass” into the inner sanctum of Englishness. In fact, he seemed to have found a way of being both Creole and English, emulating whatever was dominant in the cultural geography of Englishness but inflecting it with his Jamaicanness.
The architectural style of Fonthill House was a superb example of this compromise. From one perspective, the house was an outstanding model of the Palladian style favored by the second generation of the Whig aristocracy, and by building a house that closely resembled that of the prime minister, Alderman Beckford had found a way of identifying Whig aristocracy and its fashions. He understood, almost intuitively, the close relation between politics, identity, and architecture in eighteenth-century England. He knew, for example, that after the failed Jacobite uprising in 1715 and the resulting hostility toward Catholicism and things deemed Catholic, architecture, like other forms of art, came to function as an expression of the idea of Britain as a Protestant nation. As one critic has noted, the “extravagant and exaggerated architecture” associated with Catholicism was now out of fashion, replaced by controlled and proportional systems of design.111
Despite its size and majesty, Fonthill House was intended to be a model of proportion and Protestant restraint. From another perspective, however, the interior of the house seemed to qualify, or even defy, Protestant order. The ornate rooms of the house had a distinctively un-Protestant quality to them. A contemporary observer was struck by the extravagance of these interiors, their “touches of vulgarity” and “the appearance of riches almost tawdrily exhibited.”112 This was clearly a house built on Creole money; its penchant for ostentatiousness was a sign of the owner's desire to display new wealth. And thus, standing in juxtaposition to the controlled lineament of the house's exterior was its unabashedly orientalist interior, complete with an entrance known as the Egyptian Hall and a Turkish Room. How do we explain these contrasts?
In his work on Indian nabobs, Edwardes has noted that an owner or heir to a colonial fortune seeking to reposition himself in relation to the conflicting impulses of the eighteenth century would be adept at using the architecture of the ruling class to both inscribe and conceal his own ambiguous identity, putting on “a Classical or, more precisely a neo-Classical front behind which he could display as much or as little
Asian luxury as he chose.”113 This was the process at work in Alderman Beckford's buildings. In Fonthill House he had brought together all the key features of the Palladian style of the aristocracy of taste and pollinated them with the alterity of orientalism and the West Indian landscape. The most original aspect of Fonthill was its setting “at the bottom of a wooded valley on the west margin of an artificial lake, complete with bridge, grotto and unique boathouse, apsed and aisled like a rococo basilica in miniature.”114
In this setting the alderman had simultaneously attempted to capture the ideal of the garden as a sign of what Horace Walpole called “the English Constitution” and to recapture the landscape of the Jamaican great house.115 Like other wealthy outsiders, Alderman Beckford perceived the country house as both a symbol of social standing and an expression of his claim over the English landscape. The external structure of the country house would mirror the architecture of the ruling class; its interior would be a place where luxuries acquired through colonial enterprises could be simultaneously displayed or concealed. In these circumstances, Palladianism attracted nabobs and West Indian planters because it was a style that enabled both revelation and concealment, representing order and control on the outside but retaining a measure of extravagance within, in its decor and furnishing. Alderman Beckford understood the primacy of display and concealment well. While the façade of his house reflected the architecture of his class, its interior exhibited the magnificent style associated with the colonies, including the Baroque. Indeed, there is a sense in which Fonthill House can be read as an extension of the West Indian Georgian house, including Drax Hall in Jamaica, which Alderman Beckford purchased in 1762.
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 19
