ABSTRACT
The 'fertilisation from below' that characterises the impact of all things folk on the arts in our period is a recurrent phenomenon in cultural history and often affects style as well as content. In one sense, the interest in vernacular matters is an aspect of the more general preoccupation with the past at which I have looked at in Chapter Ten, and is very much a result of the same needs: a political and social insecurity, engendered by institutional and military upheaval, craves respite and stability. In a climate that, especially in France, saw the aristocracy and their values as artificial, exclusive and ultimately irrelevant, informality and spontaneity were valued for being 'natural'. The very difference, immediately perceptible, between bourgeois and aristocratic social spaces bears this out, the latter's salons with formal, carefully placed seating geared towards polite, detached conversation, and the former's drawing-rooms with comfortable furniture, heavy drapery and the ubiquitous piano symbolising familial togetherness. This element is satirised by E.T.A. Hoffmann in Kreisleriana, when the poet 'Baron Wallborn', writing to Kapellmeister Kreisler, idealises sentimental, Biedermeyer cosiness:
And finally, Kreisler, what you say about the pleasure that father and mother in their modest household derive from the jangling piano and faltering singing of their small children – I tell you, Johannes, I really believe that amid all the discordant earthly sounds an echo of angelic harmony is to be heard. 1
Spontaneity and 'naturalness' is shown in the increasing interest shown by the public at large in improvisation, and not only in music, as we shall see (Chapters Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three). Theories of education stressed natural development and play, as opposed to a 'Gradgrind' system in which children were treated as miniature adults. Portrait painters began to concentrate on the natural in their subjects and informality in their settings. As we have already seen in Chapter Nine (i), eighteenth-century portrait painting was raised from its low image, chiefly by Reynolds, who, while posing his aristocratic sitters as Greek sculptures, treated less exalted ones, such as his friend Dr Johnson, in a more realistic way. Indeed genre painting, which specialised in the 'lower' types of subject matter, had already set its sights well down 376the social scale, even if the message were more moral than nostalgic. This kind of art also became more elevated in the period, mainly because of the morality enshrined in its message: Edward Penny, one of the founder members of the Royal Academy and its first Professor of Painting, for example, made a good living from it and so did the Irishman, William Mulready. The Scots painter, David (later Sir) Wilkie made a great impact with his first Royal Academy exhibit, an unpretentious and charming genre painting called Village Politicians (1806). His delightful The Penny Wedding (1818) painted for the Prince Regent is equally vernacular and unaffected. The impulse enshrined in genre painting was also to give rise to, on the one hand, 'Chocolate-box art' – since many of the paintings were reproduced as advertisements on the covers of tins containing as diverse items as lip-salve, Gentleman's Relish and chocolate paste – and on the other, the high art of Courbet and Millet.