Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

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Victor Hugo’s appeal ‘Guerre aux démolisseurs’ [War on the Destroyers] was published in the Revue de Paris in 1829 and after the July Revolution official attitudes changed. In 1830 Guizot appointed Ludovic Vitet as the first inspector of historic monuments. Regional museums, national listings and the founding, by de Caumont, of the Societé Française d’Archéologie, all marked the arrival of historic conservation as a state enterprise. De Caumont produced the first inventory of monuments, the Statistique Monumentale du Calvados in five volumes between 1846-67. Thus the intellectual legacy of the encyclopédistes was finally to be applied to antiquities: they were ordered, categorised and nationalised. The balance of envy and admiration between England and France began accordingly to be reversed. In England there would be no equivalent support for historic buildings until the establishment of the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments in 1908, while museum displays continued to savour of the informal cabinet of curiosities and medieval antiquities were not displayed at all. Writing to Francis Douce in October 1833 Samuel Meyrick, who had just come back from Paris after his first visit since 1817, commented on the difference the intervening years had made. The city was much improved and so were the museums: I wish most heartily our national collection of coins instead of being locked up in boxes in the Brit. Mus. was displayed in show-glasses arranged according to countries, with tickets to tell how long each King reigned…We have imitated the Jardin des Plants[sic] … why not then the same with respect to the coins. 175 By the 1840s the English were openly acknowledging the superiority of the French system. In preparation for the establishment of the British Archaeological Association one of its founders, William Bromet, sent out a questionnaire to antiquaries which was based on Guizot’s in order to try and establish a central list of monuments. He also wrote to de Caumont for advice, ‘comme vous devez avoir tant de conaissance des demarches necessaires pour l’établissement d’une telle assemblé’. [As you must know a great deal about the necessary measures for the establishment of such an association.] 176 175 Samuel Rush Meyrick to Francis Douce, 21 October 1833, Douce Papers, 39204, d.28 f168. 176 Letter from Bromet to de Caumont quoted in Lewis, ‘Les rapports avec les antiquaires anglais’, p. 276. 158
It has been suggested that the effect of these national institutions, ‘a cog in the machine of centralisation’ as Choay puts it was bad for local antiquarianism, that government committees kept a stranglehold on conservation and excluded antiquaries. 177 This may well have been, in time, the effect but, by comparison with England, where, as was discussed in the last chapter, the relatively few formal or professional organisations were immediately antipathetic to antiquarianism, the impetus for organisation in France grew directly out of the antiquarian mentality. Victor Hugo’s article was only one of his contributions to the campaign for conservation. In 1835 he was appointed to the Comité de Monuments Inédits de la Littérature, de la Philosophie, des Sciences et des Arts, charged with producing a list of national treasures, the patrimoine, which the state should preserve. A year earlier the author Prosper Mérimée (1803- 1870), whose Chronique du règne de Charles IX was ‘an “ideal”…imitation of Scott’ succeded Vitet as national inspector of monuments. 178 The French idea of the ‘patrimoine’ developed out of the romantics’ view of the past. Medieval objects were displayed in the Louvre two decades before they were admitted to the collections of the British Museum. Local museums were also established across the country. The one in Rouen opened in 1834 and managed, as will be seen in the next chapter, literally to accommodate Langlois, who was eventually, somewhat to his annoyance, awarded the Légion d’Honneur. It is impossible to imagine a similar distinction being offered to the much better-connected and socially assiduous John Britton. More clubbable antiquaries than Langlois seem to have had no difficulty assimilating to the new professionalism. The Abbé de la Rue’s letters to Douce tell a tale of constant promotion. He had been made Professor of History at the University of Caen as early as 1810. In 1815 he was elected as a corresponding member of the Institut de France and was an early and enthusiastic member of the Societé des Antiquaires de Normandie. De Caumont grew up with the state system that he was also important in forming. If local antiquaries seem to disappear in France, as Choay suggests, that is not perhaps because they were frozen out as she concludes but rather the reverse. They merged with the academic establishment so seamlessly that the next generation neither perceived nor needed to make a distinction. By contrast in Britain antiquaries remained visible because they were excluded. Walter Scott, the only British public 177 Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, p.79. 178 Dargan, ‘Scott and the French Romantics’, p.609. 159
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Antiquaries in the Age of Romantici
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Abstract The thesis concentrates on
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List of Illustrations 1 The Antiqua
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Acknowledgements I would like to th
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Definitions Chapter One Don Quixote
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It was a change of emphasis that wa
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e but a Crosse or stone footstool i
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embankment or fortification. Perhap
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part of the understanding of the pa
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classical antiquity, was increasing
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e performed in historic costume.
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transformation. The eccentric, obse
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But wad ye see him in his glee, For
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interesting to him and his readers
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actor Charles Kemble on historic co
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considered view of Noviomagus, that
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eplaying the episode in The Antiqua
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Chapter Two ‘To stones a moral li
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Within architectural history there
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workings of this little commonweal
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Salisbury Cathedral and Wyatt ‘th
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from altering them in ways destruct
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philosophy of the Picturesque which
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about his protests at Salisbury, a
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within Milner’s position’. 51 H
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about Gothic architecture and its m
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Figure 10 St Peter's Chapel, Winche
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In addition to his Dissertation and
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Bright and cheerful mornings are no
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unning battle between the proprieto
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It constitutes at once a beautiful
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face amidst solemn azure and fleecy
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Britton could not resist pointing o
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Figure 16 Salisbury Cathedral from
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Secretary he addressed the third se
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measured details of medieval buildi
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exhortations to accuracy and appeal
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Some years later in 1840, when he w
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Figure 18 Toddington Manor, Glouces
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study of the last forty years’ of
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towards academic architectural hist
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expensive and elaborate.’ 170 Tha
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a small doorway in the south east c
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Her criticism of Michelangelo’s L
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The iconography of the east end of
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a church was a symbolic building, a
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Willis became the first academic an
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its annual congress that he began t
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admired, however. His lack of inter
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Chapter Three Revolution to Restora
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at least one French scholar. 5 Ther
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centered on the Louvre as it was tr
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Norman troubadour manuscripts of th
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Page 157: The demolition of Les Andelys was r
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From sacred emblem of the division
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evealed to him increasingly his dis
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prying eyes of his household; and w
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so dangerous’. 41 In a very simil
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view of the Reformation, had caused
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e-discovery and presentation of his
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oyal regalia. It was only in the lo
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Figure 42 The Honours of Scotland,
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Prebble points out, was just about
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First saw them from the window; two
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An article he sent to Mac Millans M
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and the exhibition at the British M
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order to satisfy the taste of a lat
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Illustrations of Shakspeare and its
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could be earlier and that the title
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his own particular ‘fairy system
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Figure 47 Douce's illustrations of
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Although Field demanded that his or
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manners and habits’ to fill the l
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It discovered King John dressed as
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Not surprisingly perhaps this ambit
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novelist, the painter, and the acto
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from meretricious commercial produc
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Kenilworth, the novel in which Shak
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Sir Walter has found out... that th
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had created monuments for Garrick
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The more I look at it the more I fe
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Their infinite variety. 130 It conj
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Figure 50 Shakespeare's monument at
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attempt at an antiquarian excavatio
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I was not prepared to see it look s
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It was in 1849, when Brunel’s Sha
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While Alexandrina Buchanan is certa
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to have no acknowledged part. 11 Th
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Britton, John, An Address from John
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Gunn, William, BD, An Inquiry into
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Pugin, A.W.N., Collected Letters, e
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Auberbach, Jeffrey A., The Great Ex
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Couve de Murville, M. N. L., John M
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_____ ‘Stitched Up: Eliza Stothar
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_____ Richard Parkes Bonington, The
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Strong, Roy, And when did you last
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Appendix John Britton (1771-1857) T
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were published posthumously. His ma
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foundation of the British Archaeolo
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distinction in the universities, Wi
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