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Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity, by Dianne Sachko Macleod; pp. xx + 530. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 65.00, $95.00.
This book is a milestone in patronage studies in both its depth and breadth. Providing an appendix of the biographies, collections, bequests, references, and archival sources for 146 Victorian collectors, Macleod has contributed enormously to studies in Victorian art history and culture. Her text surveys patronage from the beginning of the Victorian period to the end of the century and brings art history into the field of cultural studies, linking it with social history, economics, and critical theory, recognizing, as she does, that "the appropriation of culture is a political act" (88).
Macleod argues for the historicity of her study in order to interrogate popular and often unfounded notions about Victorian middle-class taste and motives for purchasing art. Among the notions she debunks is the stereotype of new patrons as upstarts; a vast majority of them were at least second generation moneyed and educated, as she demonstrates through original research of patrons' origins. Thus, they were not "self-made" either, having had economic and educational opportunities before adulthood (5-6). Macleod maintains a balance between individual biographies and overarching social and cultural patterns to construct a richly variegated portrait of middle-class patronage.
By carefully examining individual biographies, many details of which she presents here for the first time, she comprehends patrons' complex and inconsistent motives for buying art, as art consumption shifted from patronage to the open market. Macleod marks changing financial, social, and artistic modes of behavior among the middle class for two and three generations, from the patrons who considered didactic narrative and landscape art to be expressions of their senses of duty and communality (121) to later patrons who craved Aesthete art for the withdrawn inner sanctums in their palatial homes filled with costly fetish objects of...