ABSTRACT
Many history paintings were undertaken without a true patron or commission. Embarking on a long-term, expensive project without hope of salary or sometimes even expenses, the painter expected to recoup through sales of tickets to the work's public exhibition (more expenses for rental of tent or exhibition room, advertising and printing of programs), sale of the work itself (unlikely), sale of publication rights (safe but relatively low profit), sale of engravings after the composition (large investment in payment to the engraver and further delay in realizing a profit), or sale of future work to patrons attracted by the initial one. The desperate might undertake a lottery, as Hogarth had done with his Sigismunda (in his case to unload the painting and publicize the plight of history painting in England). Each of these strategies exposed the painter to special dangers. Public exhibition, at first glance both a civic-minded and an economically sensible expedient, presented a peculiar peril. The Royal Academy frowned on member or would-be member artists displaying their work outside its galleries. Because the Academy maintained and disbursed the only pension fund available to painters, and only to its own members, exclusion from the group meant loss of the only economic safety-net available. (Ironically, the Academy funded the pensions with income from ticket sales to its own exhibitions which was not shared out to the exhibitions' participants [Pye 1845: 10-11].) One other potential disaster threatened such long-term projects. A subject selected with an eye to commercial exploitation in one decade might not please by the time it reached completion in the next. Copley, for example, began Charles I Requesting from Parliament the Five Impeached Members in 1782 (Plate 5.2), when the success of its companion piece, Death of the Earl of Chatham, was still fresh in the public mind. Unfortunately he completed it in 1795, after the Terror had instilled widespread distaste for themes of parliamentary rebellion and regicide. Not surprisingly the public exhibition was a disappointment despite a visit from the monarch.4
