Hands Across the Sea: The Yale Center for British Art
[pullquote]“BRITISH ART is just simply better than French art.”[/pullquote]
That’s Angus Trumble speaking. He’s curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) in New Haven, Connecticut, and while his contention may scandalize art historians—certainly Francophiles—a visit to the YCBA will convert many to his iconoclastic view.
Donated to Yale University by Paul Mellon (Yale ‘29), the YCBA opened in 1977 in an inventive building designed by Louis Kahn. It has lots of filtered daylight and most galleries have room-size space—features hospitable to British paintings, which typically focus on family portraits, domestic life and the pleasures of the countryside.
In the early 18th century such subjects were considered undignified compared to historical or religious subjects. British artists had to defend their art and compete against prestigious foreigners working in London. William Hogarth inveighed against French portraitists who “monopolised all the people of fashion in the kingdom…so that all our artists went into utmost distress and poverty.”
The illustrious Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, had to insist that portraits such as his were high art not mere potboilers. He held the neoclassical view that portraits should “[take] the general air” rather than reproducing “the exact similitude of every feature,” while his rival Thomas Gainsborough gloried in portraying fine silks, frothy frills and all the fol-de-rols of fashionable costume. Both men created magnificent pictures of Britain’s elite, many of which are now in the YCBA collection.
Reynolds’ painting Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue is perhaps the most enticing. Shown looking over a chair back, her mouth in a moue, she ponders her next stratagem in the role of Miss Prue in playwright William Congreve’s Love for Love. Equally alluring is Gainsborough’s Mary Little, later Lady Carr, who luxuriates in her glossy pink dress with its masses of lace and a black choker that highlights her pearly décolletage.
As the empire and the Industrial Revolution enriched industrialists, merchants and landowners alike, more people could afford to commission pictures that showed the world how well they were doing. The portrait had long been a favorite British art form, now it expanded into the distinctively British genre called the conversation piece. Well-suited to small rooms, conversation pieces illustrate families talking with one another, playing music or enjoying the outdoors in scenes of domestic life.
