All posts tagged Edmund Burke

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (2006)

This book will offer plenty more suggestions for experimental improvements to Western assistance, but don’t expect a Big Plan to reform foreign aid. The only Big Plan is to discontinue the Big Plans. The only Big Answer is that there is no Big Answer.
(The White Man’s Burden, page 26)

The dynamism of the poor at the bottom has much more potential than plans at the top.
(p.94)

William Easterly (born 1957) is an American economist, specialising in economic development. He is a professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. Surprisingly for an American academic, he’s only written three books, all of them about development economics.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001)
The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006)
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014)

This was the second one and established him, as the title suggests, as a robust critic of the entire ideology of western aid to the developing world.

Background

Right at the end of 2005 the doyen of US development economists, Jeffrey Sachs, wrote a book called ‘The End of Poverty’, an optimistic clarion call whose introduction by globally famous rock singer Bono helped propel it into the bestseller list. The book was timed to precede the G8 conference and summit held in Scotland in July 2005. The G8 leaders pledged to double 2004 levels of aid to poor nations from $25 billion to $50 billion by 2010, with half the money going to Africa

This book by William Easterly is by way of being a refutation of Sachs’s one. Very crudely, Sachs said we must give more aid, lots more aid to Africa – and Easterly says ‘oh no we shouldn’t’.

Easterly thinks the messianic save-the-world attitude of people like Sachs is perilously close to the old colonial assumption that We Know Best what to do for the natives.

Right at the start of the book he distinguishes between two types of foreign aid donors: ‘Planners’, who believe in imposing generalised, top-down, big plans on poor countries, and ‘Searchers’, who look for bottom-up solutions to specific needs. Planners are portrayed as utopian romantics while Searchers are more realistic because they focus on piecemeal interventions.

Planners and Searchers

The basic binary or dichotomy idea is repeated countless times:

Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward.

Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions.

Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand.

Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions.

Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom.

Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied.

A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.

A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.

Searchers have better incentives and better results.

Searchers could find ways to make a specific task—such as getting medicines to dying children—work if they could concentrate on that task instead of on Big Plans. They could test whether a specific task had a high payoff for the poor, get rewarded for achieving high payoffs, and be accountable for failure if the task didn’t work.

Foreign aid has been dominated by the Planners.

The War on Terror

The new military interventions are similar to the military interventions of the cold war, while the neo-imperialist fantasies are similar to old-time colonial fantasies.

Military intervention in and occupation of a developing country show a classic Planner’s mentality: applying a simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in a non-western country. Iraq. Afghanistan.

The aid-financed Big Push is similar to the rationale behind the invasion of Iraq = we in the West know best, we’re going to show you how to run your country. With all the disastrous consequences Easterly’s book predicts for top down, Planner solutions.

Politico-philosophical traditions

Early on Easterly claims that his binary reflects the most basic one in politics, between Utopian revolutionaries and pragmatic reformers. The French Revolution epitomises the first, with its grand Plan to introduce liberty, equality and fraternity. Edmund Burke, father of modern conservatism, epitomises the latter, believing society is best improved by targeting specific identifiable abuses and implementing limited, focused solutions. Ad hoc reforms.

In practice, the latter is how all western democracies work, overflowing with Acts and Bills and Laws fixing this, that or the other issue unaddressed by the vast quantities of previous legislation on the subject. Incremental, reformist.

Capitalism versus communism

And then he related it to another world-size binary, that between capitalism and communism.

Communists believed top-down Big Planning would deliver utopia. Capitalists believe in bottom-up, ad hoc solutions, called businesses, markets. Following on from this is his description of the often overlooked but vital quality of economic freedom which we in the West enjoy without really being aware of it.

Economic freedom is one of mankind’s most underrated inventions, much less publicised than its cousin political freedom. Economic freedom just means unrestricted rights to produce, buy, and sell. Each of us can choose the things we want and not have somebody else decide what is best for us. We can also freely choose what we are going to sell and what occupation to choose, based on our inside knowledge of what we are best at and most like doing.

Easterly overflows with fluent, articulate ways of expressing really big ideas.

The conditions for markets

Property rights, contract enforcement, rule of law, corporate accountability.

On one level, as Easterly makes abundantly clear, he is defending free market capitalist solutions to poverty. But it’s more than that, because he is very well aware that free market capitalism, pure and simple, far from delivers utopia – witness America, the most capitalist society on earth and also the most inequitable (not to mention its vast prison population and violent crime levels).

No, once he’s delivered his broadside against Planners and for Searchers, against communism and for capitalism, Easterly very interestingly goes on to describe the complex matrix of prerequisites necessary for a functioning market and productive economy and the many, many ways these can fall short, be corrupted or undermined.

To put it another way, Easterly launches into a sequence of explanations of what is required to make democratic capitalist society work and these turn out to be numerous and complicated.

No cheating

There are a myriad ways for people to cheat each other in market exchanges. The avoidance of cheating requires a certain amount of social capital or, to put it more simply, trust. He cites studies which have shown a correlation between income and trust i.e. better off people are more trustworthy; poor people are likely to cheat. Hence well off, equal societies like the Scandinavian countries have high median incomes and very high levels of trust. By comparison Mexico is a ‘low trust’ country.

Social norms also seem to be stronger among rich people than among poor people, as a rich person loses more economic opportunities and income from social disgrace.

In better off countries people can rely on the law to enforce norms of honesty although, as anyone knows who’s been to law, it is still i) very expensive ii) tardy and slow iii) has an element of randomness involved, principally in the quality of your solicitor or barrister.

The poorer the country, the less able the majority of citizens are to go to law, and the more likely aspects of corruption will creep in.

Trust networks

There are two tried and tested ways to ensure standards of trust and honesty, working within family or ethnic groups. Family is obvious and the basis of networks of trade and business around the world. Within many societies specialisation in trading is particularly prominent in minority ethnic groups.

In pre-industrial Europe, it was the Jews. In East Africa, it’s the Indians. (Indians own almost all businesses in Kenya, although they make up only 1 percent of the population.) In West Africa, it is the Lebanese. In southern Africa, it is whites and Indians. Among indigenous African groups, often one dominates trading—the Bamileke in Cameroon, the Luba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Hausa in West Africa, the Igbo in Nigeria, and the Serahule in the Gambia. In Southeast Asia, the overseas Chinese (the “bamboo network”) play this role.

It’s overflowing with concepts like this which he illustrates with detailed and fascinating examples, which entertain and shed light, expanding your understanding of the world we live in.

Mafias

Unfortunately, the down side of strong ethnic networks is they often have their own systems of enforcement, which easily slip into intimidation. The mafia we know about, also the triads which figure largely in Chinese business networks. Drug lords in Jamaica, the farflung Russian mafia. Most societies have criminal networks which enforce their own systems of justice, outside official systems.

Property rights

If you own property you can mortgage it or borrow against it to raise money to invest in business. My shaky understanding of the rise of western capitalism is that we pioneered unique and innovative concepts of property, developed over centuries of adaptation and common law, which enabled the development of the money-making machine we call capitalism.

One aspect of this was the invention of the limited liability company and the corporation, a type of entity. Obviously this takes you into a vast area of history of the evolution of companies, company law, and company law-breaking. Easterly gives some examples but doesn’t go into detail because all he needs is to demonstrate his basis thesis, that:

Property law in the United States, as with many other kinds of law, evolved as piecemeal solutions to deal with particular problems as they arose.

Meanwhile, ‘Poorer societies define land ownership more by oral tradition, customary arrangements, or informal community agreement than by formal titles’. He gives a detailed description of land ‘ownership’, among the Luo tribe in western Kenya.

The traditional system among the Luo was a complicated maze of swapping plots among kin and seasonal exchanges of land for labor and livestock. There were both individual and family rights in cultivated fields and free-grazing rights for the community after the harvest. Each household’s claim to land included many plots of different soils and terrains, on which many different crops grew – not a bad system with which to diversify risk in an uncertain climate. The traditional land patron (weg lowo) would often give temporary land rights to the client (jodak). There were seasonal exchanges of ploughs and draft animals for land, or land for labour.

These may work in the context of their cultures but not many of them approach the objectivity and impersonality found in western concepts of property and companies. It’s small-time, localised.

Britain versus France

Interpreting everything in the light of his binary he applies it to the European traditions of law which he divides into two opposites. Britain good:

The common-law tradition originated in England and spread to British colonies. In this tradition, judges are independent professionals who make rulings on cases based on precedents from similar cases. The principles of the law evolve in response to practical realities, and can be adapted to new situations as they arise.

France bad:

The modern civil-law tradition originated under Napoleon, in France, and spread to French and Spanish colonies. (Spain was under the control of Napoleon at the time.) In this tradition, laws are written from the top down by the legislature to cover every possible situation. Judges are glorified clerks just applying the written law. This system of law lacks bottom-up feedback of the common law that comes from having cases determine law. As a result, the law is less well adapted to reality on the ground and has trouble adapting to new situations as technology and society change.

So:

The United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan and Uganda are examples of former British colonies that have well-developed property rights protection for their level of income. Algeria, Colombia, Haiti, and Nicaragua are examples of former French or Spanish colonies that have poor property rights protection for their level of income.

Surely Easterly could add in the whole of South America, repeating the centuries-old comparison between the poverty and political instability of the Hispanic south and central America and the (relative) stability and astounding economic success of Anglophone North America. (In fact he rolls on into a section on the dire financial mismanagement of Mexico in the 1990s and makes very interesting points about the limitations of Latin American societies and economies throughout the book.)

The failure to westernise Russia

At the collapse of communism in Russia, in 1991, scads of western economists and consultants descended on Moscow with the aim of showing them commies how it’s done and helping them transition to western-style democracy and capitalism in one ‘Big Push’. Planner behaviour par excellence.

One example of how not to do it is having Western lawyers and accountants rewrite the legal code overnight from the top down, as the West tried in Eastern Europe after 1990. In Eastern Europe, chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms in the West. 43 who drafted new laws for Eastern Europe and trained thousands of locals in Western law. Eastern European legislatures passed the Western-drafted laws, satisfying aid conditions for the West, but the new laws on paper had little effect on actual rules of conduct.

You can pass all the laws you like for the establishment of democracy and free markets but if the population they’re imposed on has no experience of either they will continue to behave according to the old ways, via networks of identity and obligation, through widespread ‘corruption’ and nepotism i.e. favouring family, tribe, clan, ethnicity and religious group first. Economic theorist Avinash Dixit’s research:

may help explain why the transition from communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union was such a disaster, and why market reforms in Latin America and Africa were disappointing. Even with severely distorted markets, the participants had formed networks of mutual trades and obligations that made the system functional at some level. Trying to change the rules all at once with the rapid introduction of free markets disrupted the old ties, while the new formal institutions were still too weak to make free markets work well.

The Russian people, especially managers of businesses and state industries, carried on ignoring the new capitalist rules in much the same way as they had ignored and circumvented the old communist rules. The Russian economy continued to be ineffective and corrupt. What keeps the Russian economy afloat is its huge reserves of oil and gas. In its dependence on a handful of basic commodities to sell to the rest of the world Russia is more like the petrostates of the Middle East and Africa than like a diversified, productive western economy.

Bad government

Anybody who wants to know about bad government in developing countries, particularly in Africa, should look no further than The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015) and Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018).

Democracy works, but imposing democracy from the outside doesn’t.

Trying to impose it quickly failed in Russia, failed in Iraq, failed in most Arab countries after the Arab Spring, and has failed in most African countries where it has been imposed.

This is because democracy doesn’t start with elections every four or five years, but is the end point of a long, complex evolution of social norms and standards of behaviour. These standards are still undermined and not adhered to in many western countries; look at shameful recent events in the UK and America i.e. the Trump presidency and the hilarious incompetence of the Conservative Party. ‘Democracy’ is a kind of Platonic ideal which no individual country actually lives up to.

It is awfully hard to get democracy working well (p.128)

Thus the development of democracy, like that of free markets, in Easterly’s view, is something that evolves slowly over decades, centuries, to address specific social needs.

Just like markets, the functioning of democracy depends on the slow and bottom-up evolution of rules of fair play.

Democracy is an intricate set of arrangements that is far more than just holding elections.

Social norms may be the most difficult part of building a democracy – many poor countries are far from such norms. A staple of elections in many poor countries is to harass and intimidate the opposition so that they don’t vote.

What his account hints at but never quite states is that democracy might just never be the appropriate form of rule for most countries in the world. He hints as much in the section about oligarchies which explains that oligarchies i.e. the rule of a small class, generally a wealthy elite, will be economically effective for a certain period but will inevitably lead to stagnation. At some point an oligarchy realises that it has to make concessions to democracy i.e. the people, the majority of the population, in order to allow change and development, often driven by changing technologies and new economic patterns. Oligarchies stagnate and eventually acknowledge the need for change but the crux of the matter is the terms on which the oligarchy will concede power to the demos. The basis one is that it doesn’t want to give away too much of its power and too much of its money.

This explains the history of South America. All those countries were settled on the Spanish model of economic inequality – silver mines which required huge peasant labour, sugar plantations which required huge slave workforces, vast latifundia worked by big peasant workforces, with a small oppressed proletariat in the cities. A century or more of this established rule by a landed elite, that is their social model or norm.

Perpetual oligarchy is more likely in unequal agrarian or mineral societies than in more equal industrial societies, as Latin America demonstrated for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (p.109)

But societies, technology, cultures and economies change and so Latin American societies see the recurrent pattern of repressive rule by an elite, which is eventually overthrown in a violent revolution which gives hope to the majority of social change and economic redistribution, which the oligarchies permit, up to a point, at which there is a violent counter-revolution i.e. military coup.

The Mexican revolution typifies one part of this see-saw, being a broad social rebellion against the entrenched rule of a narrow elite. The military coup against Allende in Chile represents the opposite end of the cycle, as the forces of money and privilege stepped in when Allende threatened to take away their money and power. South America’s challenge is getting beyond these violent mood swings to achieve the kind of middle class, social democrat stability epitomised by the Scandinavian countries, but this will always be hampered by the legacy of a large, poor, rural peasant class and, these days, by the huge numbers of the poor in the countries’ teeming slums.

Security from violence

This, of course, is a prerequisite for the development of any economy. Western aid will not do much good in a country mired in civil war. Violence is part of the human condition, well, the male human condition. One of the key causes of conflict in the past 70 years since the war has, of course, been ethnic, religious or tribal difference. All the conditions listed above for the development of either markets or democracy are void if your country is mired in conflict, worst of all a civil war.

Reasons why good government may not take hold

conflict
elite manipulation of the rules of the political game
landed wealth
weak social norms
the curse of natural resources
high inequality
corruption
ethnic nationalism and hatreds

Part 2. Aid in practice

What I’ve summarised so far is ‘Part 1: Why Planners cannot bring Prosperity’. Part 2 of the book, titled ‘Acting out the burden’ applies these ideas to the actual practice of administering foreign aid, finding the same sorts of conclusions. Easterly very frankly describes himself as one of the hordes of bureaucrats the by-now bloated aid industry:

We bureaucracies will devote effort more to activities that are more observable and less to activities that are less observable. By the same token, we bureaucrats will perform better when we have tangible, measurable goals, and less well when we have vague, ill-defined dreams. We will perform better when there is a clear link from effort to results, and less well when results reflect many factors besides effort. We will perform better when we have fewer objectives, and worse when we have many objectives. We will perform better when we specialize in particular solvable problems, and less well when we try to achieve utopian goals. We will perform better when there is more information about what the customers want, and less well when there is confusion about such wants. We will perform better when agents at the bottom are motivated and accountable, and less well when everything is up to the managers at the top. (p.157)

You need to set narrow, achievable targets. You need to listen to feedback from your customers, the poor.

Aid agencies are rewarded for setting goals, not for achieving them. Aid agencies and transnational organisations publish plethoras of reports every year. Incestuous and narcissistic these reports rarely feature the voices of the poor in the developing world. Instead they proliferate aims and goals and targets like bunnies, the vaguer the better. It actually has a name: ‘goal proliferation’.

The UN Millennium Project developed a framework in 2005 with the help of 250 development experts, commissioning thirteen reports from ten task forces. All this helped the project to come up with its framework, with its eighteen indicative targets for the eight MDGs, its ten key recommendations (which are actually thirty-six recommendations when you count all the bullet points), “a bold, needs-based, goal-oriented investment framework over 10 years,” seventeen Quick Wins to be done immediately, seven “main investment and policy clusters,” and ten problems to be solved in the international aid system. (p.164)

Western countries all too often make aid conditional on the promise it will be spent on donor country products and services. Or dependent on the recipient country’s aid in, for example, the War on Terror.

Chapter 6. Bailing out the Poor

A chapter describing the origins, aims and achievements of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF needs to shed its excessive self-confidence that it knows in detail what is best for the poor, based on an analysis of the whole economy that shares the presumptions of utopian planning.

Easterly uses a fair amount of data and graphs. Here he assembles data showing that countries the IMF and World Bank have heavy involvement in tend to have disastrous political and economic records. Of course, you could argue this is because it’s precisely struggling or failing states which they ought to get involved in.

Chapter 7. The Healers: Triumph and Tragedy

A chapter on AIDS which, like everything else he discusses, Easterly fits into the terms of his primal binary:

The breakdown of the aid system on AIDS…reflects how out of touch were the Planners at the top with the tragedy at the bottom, another sign of the weak power of the intended beneficiaries. It shows how ineffective Planners are at making foreign aid work. (p.213)

Among a blizzard of facts it contains the riveting statistic that money spent educating prostitutes to be hygienic and insist on condoms can save between 100 and a thousand times more lives than money spent on (very expensive) retroviral drugs once people have contracted HIV (p.227) and both are eclipsed by oral rehydration therapy which can save babies dying of diarrhea or vaccinating against measles.

Aid, like all political-economics, is about choices and trade-offs. Easterly thinks western governments and aid agencies are unduly influenced by high profile, image-led, televisable results, what he calls ‘the bias towards observability’ (p.322). Thus a statistic like ‘number of retroviral drugs sent to Uganda to treat x number of AIDS patients’ eclipses ‘number of children vaccinated against measles thus preventing a measles outbreak and saving an unknown number of children’.

Part 3. The White Man’s Army

When I worked on Channel 4’s international affairs programme I met pundits and theorists who discussed the need for a new imperialism i.e. many developing countries just can’t run themselves and that was in the late 1980s, over 30 years ago.

A decade later it had become a fashionable idea. In Empire Lite (2003) Michael Ignatieff said the West needed to have the courage of its convictions and take control of failing states for the good of their citizens. In Colossus (2004) Niall Ferguson says America should face up to its position as sole superpower and formalise its financial and military control, claiming that there is:

‘such a thing as liberal imperialism and that on balance it was a good thing…in many cases of economic ‘backwardness,’ a liberal empire can do better than a nation-state.’

Senior British diplomat Robert Cooper wrote an article advocating for more western intervention in failing states, thinking which influenced Tony Blair’s famous Chicago speech, a set of ideas which explain his enthusiastic support of George Bush’s plan to invade Iraq and overthrow the evil dictator Saddam Hussein.

Leaving aside the vast culture wars-style furore this would cause, there’s a simpler problem with this superficially attractive idea, which is that the Iraq fiasco proved that the West isn’t, in fact, up to the job.

One reason for this is clearly stated by Rory Stewart and various other commentators on the Iraq and Afghan debacles, namely that the old imperial powers were in it for the long term. Their administrators stayed for decades, got to know and love the local languages and cultures, probably exploited the locals and their resources, but also built schools, roads, railways, abolished slavery, tried to help women (banned suttee etc).

The commentators and analysts he cites talk about ‘postmodern imperialism’. Whatever it’s called, it reeks of the same top down, Planner mentality which came to ruin in Iraq and no just ruin, but laughable, ridiculous ruin.

As he says:

One thing today’s nation-builders could learn from their colonial predecessors: once you get in, it’s very hard to constructively get out.

See America’s 20 year, one-trillion-dollar involvement in Afghanistan which reverted to Taliban rule before the last US troops had even left.

I found Easterly’s chapter on the legacy of European colonialism fascinating because its focus is on colonial incompetence rather than malice. The imperialists undermined traditional societies, imposed outside rulers, exacerbated tribal rivalries and drew preposterous borders mainly out of ignorance and stupidity. His detailed examples of blundering interference, destroying local cultures and rulers, embedding conflicts many of which are still with us today, are far more powerful and shaming than the cheap and easy blanket accusation of ‘racism’.

This emphasis is, of course, because Easterly wants to draw the comparison with modern-day aid agencies, western governments, NGOs and so on who he accuses of comparable amounts of ignorance and outside interference ignoring the wishes and complex realities of the natives. So he presents an entertaining survey of imperial mistakes and cock-ups.

There are three different ways that Western mischief contributed to present day grief in the Rest. 1) First, the West gave territory to one group that a different group already believed it possessed. 2) Second, the West drew boundary lines splitting an ethnic group into two or more parts across nations, frustrating nationalist ambitions of that group and creating ethnic minority problems in two or more resulting nations. 3) Third, the West combined into a single nation two or more groups that were historical enemies.

He describes a detailed analysis he did with academic colleagues. They examined the percentage of the population that belongs to ethnic groups that the borders split between adjacent countries.

Former colonies with a high share of partitioned peoples do worse today on democracy, government service delivery, rule of law, and corruption. Highly partitioned countries do worse on infant mortality, illiteracy, and specific public services such as immunisation against measles, immunisation for diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus, and supply of clean water.

They then did something interesting and amusing, which is calculate a value for how wiggly a state’s borders are, on the assumption that long straight borders indicate they were drawn on a map by ignorant colonial bureaucrats, whereas wiggly borders indicate older or more ethnically aligned borders.

We found that artificially straight borders were statistically associated with less democracy, higher infant mortality, more illiteracy, less childhood immunisation, and less access to clean water – all measured today. The straight hand of the colonial mapmaker is discernible in development outcomes many decades later.

Easterly gives extended descriptions of Congo, Palestine and the broader Middle East (Syria, Iraq), India and Sudan, in each case going into much detail to show how ruinous western involvement in each country was.

Chapter 9. Invading the Poor

This brings us up to date with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then the Coalition Provisional Authority’s attempt to turn Iraq overnight into a free market capitalist system. Cheerleader of neo-liberal capitalism and post-modern imperialism, Niall Ferguson, is quoted again:

The United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy…the proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary…by military force…Imposing democracy on all the world’s “rogue states” would not push the U.S. defence budget much above 5 percent of GDP. There is also an economic argument for doing so, as establishing the rule of law in such countries would pay a long-run dividend as their trade revived and expanded…

But Easterly then goes back before the Iraq adventure, back before the fall of communism to look at two case studies of American intervention during the Cold War, in Nicaragua and Angola, a country of ‘spectacular misery’ (p.277). He demonstrates how the West and America in particular never really understood the local history, culture and political dynamics of either country, and how their interventions (supporting the murderous Contra opposition to the communist Sandanista government in Nicaragua, and the psychopath Jonas Savimbi against the Marxist MPLA government in Angola) resulted in decades of misery, extreme violence, unnecessary deaths and economic ruin.

This is yet another area where the Planners’ utopian goals—universal peace, democracy, human rights, and prosperity—substitute for modest tasks that may be more doable by Searchers, such as rescuing innocent civilians from murderous attacks.

So, to summarise:

The pre-cold war, cold war, and post-cold war record on intervening militarily to promote the more ambitious goals of political and economic development yields a cautionary lesson – don’t.

Chapter 10. Homegrown development

By contrast with the sorry record of weak states created by uninformed western bureaucrats, ruled by colonial exploiters and then abandoned to their fate in the 1960s, Easterly contrasts a series of nations which have done very well economically, rising to and sometimes superseding western levels of economic development and which were never colonised. The highest per capita growth rates in the world 1980 to 2002 were enjoyed by South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. What they have in common is they were never colonised but also, more Easterly’s point, found their own paths to economic success and had little or no western aid and intervention.

Most of the recent success in the world economy is happening in Eastern and Southern Asia, not as a result of some global plan to end poverty but for homegrown reasons.

Whereas the bottom ten countries in the per capita growth league are all in Africa, are all former colonies, are all the recipients of massive amounts of western aid, which doesn’t seem to have helped them at all.

He has sections about two of the home-grown high-growth success stories, Singapore and Hong Kong, analysing the reasons for their success. Both were, in fact, British colonies but, crucially, ones where the British authorities were wise enough to leave the local merchants and businessmen to their own devices.

He then goes on to the two giants of Asia, China and India. China’s story is simple. It stopped being a backward country, and took a huge leap forward as soon as the ruling communist party replaced Mao’s repressive, ruinous tyranny with measured, controlled form of Chinese-style capitalism.

In the mid-2000s I worked at the UK Department for International Development for 18 months. On the first day, as I was being shown round, my guide made the frank and disconcerting point that over the past 20 years nearly half a billion people had been lifted out of poverty and it was absolutely nothing to do with western aid; it was entirely down to China adopting capitalism.

You could argue that China has developed a strange hybrid version of capitalism:

It is an unconventional homegrown success, failing to follow any Western blueprint for how to be modern. It combines lack of property rights with free markets, Communist Party dictatorship with feedback on local public services, and municipal state enterprises with private ones. (p.310)

But that plays right into Easterly’s thesis, which is that each country has to work out its own way to economic success, precisely by not having identikit western models (à la World Bank and IMF) forced on them.

After China and India, Easterly gives us 3 or 4 page summaries of the success of Turkey, Botswana and, surprisingly, Chile. I quote his conclusion at length because it’s an important, succinct summary of his position.

The success of Japan, China, the East Asian Tigers, India, Turkey, Botswana, and Chile is turning into a comic relic the arrogance of the West. Americans and Western Europeans will one day realise that they are not, after all, the saviours of ‘the Rest.’

Even when the West fails to ‘develop’ the Rest, the Rest develops itself. The great bulk of development success in the Rest comes from self-reliant, exploratory efforts, and the borrowing of ideas, institutions, and technology from the West only when it suits the Rest to do so.

Again, the success stories do not give any simple blueprint for imitation. Their main unifying theme is that all of them subjected their development searching to a market test, using a combination of domestic and export markets. Using the market for feedback and accountability seems to be necessary for success. But we have seen in chapter 3 that creating free markets is itself difficult, and the success stories certainly don’t all fit some pristine laissez-faire ideal.

We know that gross violations of free markets and brutal self-aggrandizing autocrats usually preclude success. Beyond that breathtakingly obvious point, there is no automatic formula for success, only many political and economic Searchers looking for piecemeal improvements that overcome the many obstacles described in chapters 3 and 4.

Bottom-up, diverse, culture-specific, exploratory, open-minded, experimental, market-driven, are the characteristics of economic success in developing countries. Piecemeal solutions to defined problems. NOT the top-down, highly planned, centralised, vague and unspecific utopian visions of western aid donors.

Chapter 11. The Future of Western Assistance

When you are in a hole, the top priority is to stop digging. Discard your patronising confidence that you know how to solve other people’s problems better than they do. Don’t try to fix governments or societies. Don’t invade other countries, or send arms to one of the brutal armies in a civil war. End conditionality. Stop wasting our time with summits and frameworks. Give up on sweeping and naive institutional reform schemes. The aim should be to make individuals better off, not to transform governments or societies.

Aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development based on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that. Shorn of the impossible task of general economic development, aid can achieve much more than it is achieving now to relieve the sufferings of the poor.

Put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the textbooks, and the nurses. This is not making the poor dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.

He then gives examples of ground-up, localised interventions which have improved the lives of poor people, especially children, in Mexico, Kenya and India. He does a survey of small-scale interventions and also new methods of evaluation which he thinks could be replicated. Then a list of 6 basic principles which, again, I quote in their entirety so as to share the ideas and knowledge:

Have aid agents individually accountable for individual, feasible areas for action that help poor people lift themselves up.
Let those agents search for what works, based on past experience in their area.
Experiment, based on the results of the search.
Evaluate, based on feedback from the intended beneficiaries and scientific testing.
Reward success and penalize failure. Get more money to interventions that are working, and take money away from interventions that are not working. Each aid agent should explore and specialize further in the direction of what they prove good at doing.
Make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to do more of what works, then repeat step (4). If action fails, make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to send the agent back to step (1). If the agent keeps failing, get a new one.

And a restatement of his core position:

Aid won’t make poverty history, which Western aid efforts cannot possibly do. Only the self-reliant efforts of poor people and poor societies themselves can end poverty, borrowing ideas and institutions from the West when it suits them to do so. But aid that concentrates on feasible tasks will alleviate the sufferings of many desperate people in the meantime. Isn’t that enough?

If we can’t sort our own countries out, how can we expect to sort out other peoples’?

Since the turn of the century inequality has increased in all western countries, as the rich get richer, public services collapse, and the middle and working classes get poorer.

Poverty in the UK

If we cannot ‘abolish poverty’ in our own countries, what kind of deluded hubris makes us think we can solve it in countries completely unlike ours, with wildly different cultures and traditions?

The fallacy is to assume that because I have studied and lived in a society that somehow wound up with prosperity and peace, I know enough to plan for other societies to have prosperity and peace.

Western social scientists don’t begin to comprehend fully the complex process of state formation and rule of law in the West, so they shouldn’t be too quick to predict how it will work anywhere else.

The rules that make markets work reflect a complex bottom-up search for social norms, networks of relationships, and formal laws and institutions that have the most payoff.

To make things worse, these norms, networks, and institutions change in response to changed circumstances and their own past history. Political philosophers such as Burke, Popper, and Hayek had the key insight that this social interplay was so complex that a top-down reform that tried to change all the rules at once could make things worse rather than better.

In the section titled ‘You can’t plan a market’, he writes:

Introducing free markets from the top down is not so simple. It overlooks the long sequence of choices, institutions, and innovations that have allowed free markets to develop in the rich Western economies.

Markets everywhere emerge in an unplanned, spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances, and not through reforms designed by outsiders. The free market depends on the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms that are difficult for outsiders to understand, much less change…Planners underestimated how difficult it is to get markets working in a socially beneficial way.

But, as Easterly indicates, the arrogance never stops, and each new generation of politicians wants to strut and swank upon the world stage, and pledge billions to ‘aid’ and ‘poverty reduction’, commissioning the same kinds of Grand Plan, which will spend hundreds of millions on western consultants and experts and advisers and banks and planners with, in the end, little or no permanent effect on most of the inhabitants of the poorest countries.

Conclusion about the book

It might be 15 years old but ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is like an encyclopedia of ideas and arguments, every page exploding with explanations and concepts told in a clear, punchy, often humorous style. It’s hugely enjoyable and massively enlightening.

Thoughts about the West

Easterly’s book, written in 2004 and 2005, comes from a position of confident superiority – I mean it takes for granted that the West is rich and has an obligation to sort out ‘the Rest’ i.e. the Third World, the developing world or the Global South, whatever the latest term is for the poorest countries.

But nearly 20 years later it feels to me like the whole picture has changed. I can’t speak for America but the fact that Donald Trump might be re-elected president tells you all you need to know about the state of its ‘democracy’ and its deeply divided society.

But as for the country I live in, Britain no longer feels like a rich country. For thirteen years it has been mismanaged by a Conservative party in thrall to the neoliberal mirage that Britain can ever be like America, that – if only the state could be reduced to a bare minimum, all state-provided services slashed to the bone, personal and corporate taxes significantly cut – then the British people’s inner capitalist would be set free, Free Enterprise would flourish and Britain would become a high-education, high-tech, 21st century economy like the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan).

In pursuit of this grandiose delusion the Conservative Party has undermined all Britain’s social services, sold off our utilities, privatised state industries, making Britain a poorer, dirtier, more polluted and miserable place for most of its inhabitants to live in, with most public services on the verge of collapse (English town halls face unprecedented rise in bankruptcies, council leaders warn).

Easterly takes it for granted that the West is rich and will continue to be rich, and is democratic and will continue to be democratic, so that we can continue to intervene in other countries from a position of stable superiority. But what if this assumption is wrong?

Easterly’s book amounts to a long list of all the elements which need to be in place to secure wealth and democracy and, the longer the list went on, the more nervous I became about its viability. Democracy seems so unnatural, so against human nature, requires such a concerted effort to maintain and, in the 15 years since the book was published, so many forces have arisen, within western countries themselves and her enemies abroad (Russia, to some extent China), which seek to actively undermine it, not least the forces of the authoritarian, nationalist right.

And then there’s global warming. Severe weather conditions are coming which threaten to permanently damage food and water supplies, make parts of the planet uninhabitable and uproot billions.

The net effect of this book was to terrify me at the fragility and uncertainty of western wealth and democracy. What if Vladimir Putin is correct and liberal democracy is doomed? Personally, I don’t think he is, Putin said that for propaganda effect. On the other hand, it’s fairly clear that liberal democracy is in trouble. Easterly’s book is nominally about our obligation to save the poorest countries in the world. But what if we can’t even save ourselves?

Credit

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly was published by Penguin Books in 2006. All references are to the 2007 Oxford University Press paperback.

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Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (2005)

This is the catalogue of a major exhibition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portraits held at Tate Britain back in 2005. I went, loved the exhibition and bought this catalogue. In my opinion the written content of the catalogue is poor, but the colour reproductions of 100 or so of Reynolds’s best paintings are spectacular.

The catalogue contains a biography of Reynolds by Martin Postle and four essays by Reynolds scholars:

‘The Modern Apelles’: Joshua Reynolds and the Creation of Celebrity by Martin Postle
Reynolds, Celebrity and The Exhibition Space by Mark Hallett
‘Figures of Fame’: Reynolds and the printed Image by Tim Clayton
‘Paths of Glory’: Fame and the Public in Eighteenth-Century London by Stella Tillyard

The essays are followed by some 100 full-colour reproductions, divided into the following sections:

With separate sections of images devoted to:

Reynolds and the Reproductive Print
Reynolds and the Sculpted Image

The concept of celebrity

As the title suggests, the idea is somehow to tie Reynolds’s 18th century art and career to 21st century ideas of ‘celebrity’. In my opinion all four essays fail to do this. Despite frequently using sentences with the word ‘celebrity’ in them, the catalogue nowhere really explains what ‘celebrity’ is.

The authors have a hard time really distinguishing it from the notion of ‘fame’ and the pursuit of ‘fame’ and the risks of ‘fame’ – subjects which have been thoroughly discussed since ancient Greek times.

In Greek mythology Pheme was the personification of fame and renown, her favour being notability, her wrath being scandalous rumors… She was described as ‘she who initiates and furthers communication’… A tremendous gossip, Pheme was said to have pried into the affairs of mortals and gods, then repeated what she learned, starting off at first with just a dull whisper, but repeating it louder each time, until everyone knew. In art, she was usually depicted with wings and a trumpet… In Roman mythology, Fama was described as having multiple tongues, eyes, ears and feathers by Virgil (in Aeneid IV line 180 ff.) and other authors.

In other words, the concept of ‘fame’ and the way it unavoidably attracts a spectrum of public comment, from dignified praise at one end through to scurrilous rumour at the other end – is as old as Western civilisation.

In my opinion the authors struggle to establish a really clear distinction between these multiple and time-honoured notions of fame with all its consequences, and their attempt to shoe-horn modern-day ‘celebrity’ into the picture.

The whole thing is obviously an attempt by Tate to make Reynolds and his paintings more ‘relevant’ to a ‘modern’ audience, maybe to attract in those elusive ‘younger’ visitors which all arts venues need to attract to sustain their grants. Or to open a new perspective from our time back to his, which makes his society, his aims and his paintings more understandable in terms of modern concepts.

I can see what they’re trying to do, and it is obvious that the four authors have been told to make as many snappy comparisons between the society of Reynolds’s day and our own times as possible – but flashy references to the eighteenth-century ‘media’ or to Reynolds’s sitters getting their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’, aren’t enough, by themselves, to give any insight. In fact, these flashy comparisons tend to obscure the complexity of 18th century society by railroading complex facts and anecdotes into narrow 21st notions and catchphrases.

Being modish risks becoming dated

The authors’ comparisons have themselves become dated in at least two ways:

the ‘modern’ celebrities they invoke have dated quickly (David Beckham is given as a current example)
it was written in 2005, before the advent of social media, Instagram, twitter etc, so has itself become completely out of date about the workings of ‘modern celebrity’

There is a third aspect which is: Who would you trust to give you a better understanding of social media, contemporary fame, celebrity, influencers, tik tok and so on – a social media marketing manager, a celebrity journalist or… a starchy, middle-aged, white English academic?

There is a humorous aspect to listening to posh academics trying to get down wiv da kids, and elaborately explaining to their posh white readership how such things as ‘the media’ work, what ‘the glitterati’ are, and showing off their familiarity with ‘the media spotlight’ – things which, one suspects, library-bound academics are not, in fact, all that familiar with.

The authors’ definitions of celebrity

The authors attempt numerous definitions of celebrity:

Reynolds’s attitude towards fame, and how it was inextricably bound up with a concern for his public persona, or what we today would call his ‘celebrity‘ status.

So Reynolds was concerned about his fame, about building a professional reputation and then defending it, but wasn’t every other painter, craftsman and indeed notable figure of the time? As Postle concedes:

In this respect he was not untypical of a whole range of writers, actors and artists who regarded fame as the standard for judging the worthiness of their own performance against the achievements of the past.

Postle goes on to try and distinguish fame from celebrity:

However, Reynolds [achieved fame] by using the mechanisms associated with what has become known as ‘celebrity‘, a hybrid of fame driven by commerce and the cult of personality.

Hmm. Is he saying no public figures prior to Joshua Reynolds cultivated a ‘cult of personality’ or that no public figures tried to cash in on their fame? Because that is clearly nonsense. And putting the word celebrity in scare quotes doesn’t help much:

Reynolds pandered to the Prince [of Wales]’s thirst for ‘celebrity‘ and fuelled his narcissistic fantasies.

The author doesn’t explain what he means by ‘celebrity’ in this context or why the prince thirsted for it and how he was different in this respect from any other 18th century aristocrat who ‘thirsted’ for fame and respect.

Through portraits such as these [of the Duc d’Orleans], Reynolds openly identified with fashionable Whig society; the Georgian ‘glitterati’ – liberal in the politics, liberated in their social attitudes, and libidinous in their sexual behaviour.

Does use of the word ‘glitterati’ add anything to our understanding?

He was also the first artist to pursue his career in the media spotlight.

‘Media spotlight’? Simply using modern clichés like ‘media spotlight’ and ‘celebrity’ and ‘glitterati’ didn’t seem to me to shed much light on anything. The reader wants to ask a) what do you understand by ‘media spotlight’? b) in what way did Reynolds pursue his career in a media spotlight?

As experience of the modern media tells us, a sure sign that an individual’s fame has been transmuted into ‘celebrity’ is when press interest in his or her professional achievements extends to their private and social life.

I’m struggling to think of a time when there hasn’t been intrusive interest in the lives of the rich and famous, and when it hasn’t been recorded in scurrilous satires, squibs, poems.

People gossiped about Julius Caesar, about all the Caesars. We have written records of the way Athenians gossiped about Socrates and his wife. Prurient interest in the personal lives of anyone notable in an urban environment go back as far as we have written records.

Here’s another definition:

In a process that seems to prefigure the ephemeral dynamics of heroism and redundancy found in today’s celebrity culture, the exploitation of celebrity typified by Reynolds’s representation of [the famous soldier, the Marquess of] Granby depended not only on the glorification, in portrait form, of individuals who had already gained a certain kind of renown within the wider realms of urban culture, but also on a continual replenishment – from one year to the next – of this hyperbolic imagery of bravery, beauty and fame.

I think he’s saying that visitors to the annual exhibitions liked to see new pictures – or, as he puts it with typical art scholar grandiosity, ‘a continual replenishment of this hyperbolic imagery’.

‘The ephemeral dynamics of heroism and redundancy found in today’s celebrity culture’? Does that tortuous definition have any relevance to Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Rihanna et al?

What these authors are all struggling to express is that Reynolds made a fabulously successful career by painting the well-known and eminent people of his day, making sure to paint army or naval heroes as soon as they returned from famous victories, making sure he painted portraits of the latest author after a hit novel or play, painting well-known courtesans, carefully associating his own name (or brand) with success and fame.

It was a dialectical process in which Reynolds’s portraits, often hung at the annual Royal Academy exhibition – which was itself the talk of the town while it lasted – promoted both the sitter and their fame, but also kept Sir Joshua’s name and reputation as Top Painter Of The Famous continually in the public eye.

That’s what the essay writers are trying to say. But you have to wade through a lot of academic rhetoric to get there. Take this questionable generalisation thrown out by Stella Tillyard, which sounds reasonable, until you start to think about it.

Like so much else that defines us in Europe and America now, celebrity appears to have been made in the eighteenth century and in particular in eighteenth century London, with its dozens of newspapers and print shops, its crowds and coffee houses, theatres, exhibitions, spectacles, pleasure gardens and teeming pavements. (Stella Tillyard, p.61)

‘Like so much else that defines us in Europe and America now’? What would you say defines modern society in 2020? I’d guess the list would include the internet, mobile phones, social media, webcams and digital technology generally, big cars, long-haul flights, cheap foreign holidays, mass immigration, multi-cultural societies, foreign food… things like that.

Quite obviously none of these originated in eighteenth century London.

Tillyard’s essay is the best of the four but it still contains highly questionable assertions. She thinks there is a basic ‘narrative’ of ‘celebrity’ which is one of rise, stardom, fall and rise again. The examples she gives are Bill Clinton getting into trouble because of Monica Lewinsky, and the footballers Francesco Totti and David Beckham. She thinks this basic narrative arc echoes the story of Jesus Christ, rising from obscurity, gaining fame, being executed, and rising from the dead. You have to wonder what drugs she is on.

Nonetheless, Tillyard’s is the best essay of the four because she’s an actual historian and so has a wide enough grasp of the facts to make some sensible points. She also gives the one and only good definition of celebrity in the book when she writes that:

Celebrity was born at the moment private life became a tradeable public commodity. (p.62)

Aha. Right at the end of the four essays we get the first solid, testable and genuinely insightful definition of celebrity.

According to Tillyard’s definition, the really new thing about celebrity is not the interest in gossip about the rich and famous – that, as pointed out, has been with us forever – it is that this kind of fame can be packaged into new formats and sold. It has become part of the newly mercantile society of the 18th century.

Celebrity, among other things, is about the commodification of fame, about the dissemination of images representing the individual celebrity, and about the collective conversations and fantasies generated by these processes. (p.37)

The assertion is that Reynolds was able to capitalise on his reputation. He made money out of it. He was able to exploit the new aspects of mid-18th century fame in order to build up a successful business and make a fortune.

He developed a process for making his portraits well known. The lead element in this was ensuring they were prominently hung at the annual exhibition of paintings by members of the new Royal Academy and so became the subject of the enormous amount of comment the exhibition attracted in the scores of newspapers, magazines, cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, poems and plays which infested Georgian London.

Deftly riding this tide of gossip and talk and critical comment, Reynolds was able to assure his sitters that he would make them famous – and he made himself famous in the process. And, as a result, he was able to charge a lot of money for his portraits.

He was able to turn the insubstantial, social quality of ‘fame’ into hard cash. That’s how the argument goes. I’ve put it far more plainly than any of these four writers do, and it’s an interesting point, but still begs a lot of questions…

Robert Orme’s 15 minutes of fame

When Postle says that the soldier Robert Orme got his ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ (p.27) it strikes me as being a flashy but misleading reference.

Andy Warhol’s expression, ‘in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’, refers very specifically to the 15-minute time slots allocated on the kind of American TV programmes which are punctuated every 15 minutes or so with ad breaks. Its merit derives from its source in a very specific technology and at a very specific moment in that technology (the later 1960s).

Whereas Robert Orme took part in an important battle of the Seven Years War (surviving the massacre of General Edward Braddock’s forces by French and Indians in July 1755), returned to England and was for a while feted and invited to dinners to give first-hand accounts of the massacre.

OK, so interest in Orme petered out after a while, but his story hardly conforms to the ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ description in the very precise, TV-age way Warhol had intended.

It’s an example of the way the authors are prepared to twist the historical record in order to shoehorn in their strained comparisons with modern ‘celebrity’ or the ‘glitterati’ or ‘the media spotlight’.

My point is that just chucking modern buzzwords at historical events doesn’t help us understand the historical events and doesn’t shed much light on the buzzwords or the ideas behind them, either. Not without a much more detailed analysis, anyway.

What was new about 18th century ‘media’

The one place in the four essays which comes alive i.e. presents new facts or insights, is in historian Stella Tillyard’s essay, where she explains that a new concept of ‘fame’ was being driven by some genuinely new developments in mass publication. She suggests four factors which account for the rise of a new type of fame in the mid-18th century:

1. A limited monarchy – the mystique surrounding the Divine Right of Kings which had clung to the Stuart Monarchy (1660-1714) drained away from the stolid Hanoverian monarchs who replaced them after 1714. Their powers were circumscribed from the start by Parliament and this made them much more human, much more worldly and, well, sometimes boring figures, for example. George III, widely known as Farmer George.

2. Royal glamour migrated – instead of surrounding the monarch in a nimbus of glory the human desire to have glamorous figures to look up to and gossip about migrated to new categories of ‘star’ or ‘celebrity’, namely top military figures, successful actors and even writers.

3. The lapse of the Licensing Act left the press a huge amount of freedom. By 1770 there were 60 newspapers printed in London every week, all looking for gossip and tittle tattle to market. Combined with a very weak libel law which allowed almost any rumour and speculation to be printed. Well before the tabloids were invented, the taste for an endless diet of celebrity tittle tattle was being catered to.

4. A public interested in new ways of thinking about themselves or others. This is the tricksiest notion, but Tillyard argues that this huge influx of new printed matter, combined with shops full of cheap prints, to make literate urban populations think about themselves and their roles as citizens of a busy city, and as consumers, in new ways.

Now all this chimes very well with the picture painted in Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds, which clearly shows how almost every incident, not only from his personal life but of the lives of all his famous friends (for example, the writer Dr Johnson, the actor David Garrick, the historian Edmund Gibbon, the poet Oliver Goldsmith) was quickly leaked to scurrilous journalists, who reported them in their scandal sheets, or made cartoons or comic poems about them.

Reynolds’s world was infested with gossip and rumour.

By contrast with Tillyard’s authoritative historian’s-eye view, Postle’s art critic assertions are less precise and less persuasive:

Reynolds grew up in an age that witnessed the birth of modern journalism.

Did he, though? ‘Modern’ journalism?

Googling ‘birth of modern journalism’ you discover that ‘modern journalism’ began with a piece written by Defoe in 1703. Or was it during the American Civil War in the 1860s? Or maybe it was with Walter Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, often referred to as the ‘father of modern journalism’?

In other words, the birth of ‘modern’ journalism happened more or less any time you want it to have done, any time you need to add this cliché into your essay to prop up your argument. And that little bit of googling suggests how risky it is making these kinds of sweeping assertions.

In fact it suggests that any generalisation which contains the word ‘modern’ is dodgy because the term ‘modern’ itself is so elastic as to be almost meaningless. Historians themselves date ‘the modern period’ to the 1500s. Do you think of the Elizabethan era as ‘modern’?

The modern era of history is usually defined as the time after the Middle Ages. This is divided into the early modern era and the late modern era. (Define modern era in history)

Postle’s assertion that there was something uniquely and newly journalistic about Reynolds’s era sounds fine until you think of earlier periods – take the turn-of-the 18th century and the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) which was packed with coffee house publications and scurrilous poems written against each other by leading figures. Alexander Pope’s entire career exemplifies a world of literary gossip and animosity.

Going further back, wasn’t the court of Charles II the subject of all kinds of cartoons, pictures, scurrilous paintings and poems and plays? Lots of John Dryden’s poems only make sense if you realise they’re about leading figures of the day, either praising or blaming them. During the British civil wars (1637-51) there was an explosion of pamphlets and leaflets and poems and manifestos denouncing the actions of more or less every notable figure, and giving a running commentary on the political developments of the day. Wasn’t Shakespeare’s time (1590 to 1615) one of rumour and gossip and pamphlet wars?

And in fact I’ve just come across the same idea, on page 4 of Peter H. Wilson’s vast history of the Thirty Years War, where he writes:

From the outset, the conflict attracted wide interest across Europe, accelerating the early seventeenth-century ‘media revolution’ that saw the birth of the modern newspaper.
(Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson, page 4)

So surely the widespread availability of gossip sheets and scandal mongering publications was a matter of degree not kind. Artists of the late-17th century (van Dyck, Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller) had earned types of ‘fame’ and certainly tried to capitalise on it. By Reynolds’s day there were just more outlets for it, more magazines, newspapers, journals – reflecting a steadily growing urban population and market for all things gossip-related. Between 1650 and 1750 the British population increased, the population of London increased, the number of literate people increased, and so the market for reading matter increased.

So when Postle asserts that newspapers played an increasingly important part in the critical reception of art, well, they played an increasingly important role in the critical reception of everything, such as war and politics and religion, such as the Seven Years War, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and every other kind of debate and issue.

1. That is what newspapers do – tell people what’s going on and editorialise about it – and 2. there were more and more of them, because the population was growing, and the number of literate consumers was steadily growing with it.

Reynolds didn’t invent any of this. He just took advantage of it very effectively.

Reynolds’s strategies for success

But was Reynolds unique?

As mentioned above, the four essayists have clearly received a brief to make Reynolds sound as modern and edgy and contemporary and down with the kids as possible.

But the tendency of the essays is also to try and make Reynolds sound unique – in his painterly ambition, in the way he used connections and pulled strings to paint famous sitters, promoted himself socially (by being a member of many clubs and inviting all the famous men and women of the time to large dinners), promoted his work through public exhibitions, tried to wangle key painting positions to the royal family, and by having prints made of his portraits which could be sold on to a wider audience.

The trouble is that – having just read Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds which presents an encyclopedic overview of his times, its clubs, newspapers, magazines, his colleagues and rivals, of the mechanisms of a career in art and an in-depth overview of all Georgian society – I realise these were the standard procedures of the day.

For example, the authors point out that Reynolds was keen to paint portraits of famous people to boost his career – but what portrait painter of the day wasn’t? Allan Ramsay and Thomas Gainsborough, to name just two contemporary painters, lobbied hard to win aristocratic patrons, to promote their portraits to other potential clients, to expand their client base, and so on. It was a highly competitive and commercial world.

The catalogue contains sections on the portraits of aristocratic ladies, military heroes and courtesans as if Reynolds had invented the idea of painting these kinds of figures – but paintings of aristocrats go back at least as far as the Renaissance, and statues of emperors, notable figures and military leaders go back through the ancient Romans to the Greeks.

There’s a section devoted to showing how Reynolds used prints extensively to promote his career, not only here but abroad, where British art prints commanded good prices. (One of the few new things I learned from the essays was that British mezzotinting was so highly regarded as to become known as la maniere anglaise, p.51)

But all his rivals and colleagues did just the same, too – otherwise there wouldn’t have been a thriving community of printmakers and of printbuyers.

And the authors strain to prove that the kind of high-profile aristocrats, military leaders, and top artists-writers-actors of the day that Reynolds portrayed were often discussed, profiled, ridiculed and lampooned in London’s countless scurrilous newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, poems, broadsides, gossip columns and so on.

But this was just as true of all the notable figures that all the other portrait painters of his day painted. It was an extremely gossipy society.

In other words, none of the activities the authors attribute to Reynolds was unique to him – they were being energetically carried out by scores of rivals and colleagues in the swarming ant hill of rivalry and competition that was Georgian London. What is interesting, is the extent to which Reynolds did all these things best (when he did), or where he failed, or where he pioneered a new aspect of this or that activity.

Unfortunately, the four authors don’t really have much space to make their cases. The four essays are relatively short. They have nowhere like the 550 closely-typed pages that Ian McIntyre has in his masterful biography of Reynolds. Therefore, to anyone who’s read McIntyre, the four essays come over as fleeting and superficial sketches of subjects and issues which deserve to be dealt with in much, much greater detail if you want to understand why Reynolds was the towering figure that he was.

It wasn’t that he did all these activities listed above – it’s that he did many of them better, more comprehensively, and more systematically than his rivals.

And also that he just worked harder at it. He was extremely disciplined and professional, working a solid 6 or 7 hour days, every day, often on Sundays. He produced, on average, well over one hundred commissions a year, an extraordinary workrate. This isn’t mentioned anywhere in the essays, but it is a key reason for his success.

Or the even more obvious fact that a his success was down to the fact that he was, quite simply, the best portrait painter of his time. He may well have adopted the canny career strategies listed above, but they’d have been meaningless if he hadn’t also been a painter of genius.

Art scholarship prose style

This section contains no facts and is devoted to an analysis and skewering of pretentious artspeak. Art scholar prose is very identifiable. It has at least three elements:

use of fashionable, pretentious buzzwords such as ‘subvert’, ‘interrogate’, ‘engage’, ‘gendered’, ‘identity’, ‘desire’, ‘site’, ‘gaze’, ‘other’
combined with a curiously starchy, old-fashioned locutions such as ‘whilst’, ‘amongst’
thin content

1. Buzzwords

In terms of his desire to associate himself with the celebrity of others, the most compelling paintings by Reynolds are surely his portraits of prostitutes… (p.29)

‘Wish’ wouldn’t be a better word?

When the ancient philosopher, Socrates, visited the artist’s house with friends, the courtesan was to be found under the gaze of the painter (p.29)

The word ‘gaze’ now has the adjective ‘male’ attached to it in all contexts, and is always a bad thing.

[At the new public exhibitions of the 1760s] the visitor’s encounter with the painted images of celebrities was crucially informed by those other burgeoning cultural sites of the period, the newspaper and the periodical. (p.35)

Do you think of a newspaper or magazine you read as a cultural site? Alliteration is always good, makes your ideas sound grander and more important.

In arranging that his pictures of such women [the royal bridesmaids at the wedding of George III and Queen Charlotte]… Reynolds… was contributing to, and trading upon, a burgeoning cult of aristocratic celebrity within the sites and spaces of urban culture. (p.39)

Tillyard in particular likes the word and idea of the ‘site’:

In response to the overwhelming attention of the London public [Jean-Jacques Rousseau] took himself off to the wilds of Derbyshire and began to write his Confessions, in which he demanded the right to be heard on his own terms rather than to become the site for others’ imaginings. (p.66)

Omai [a South Sea islander Reynolds painted] is both sophisticate and innocent, celebrity and savage, an eloquent but mute subject whose lack of the English language and inability to write allowed his audience and the picture’s viewers to make him a site for their own imaginings. (p.69)

It is surprising that Omai isn’t taken as an example of The Other, an almost meaningless word commonly used to describe anyone who isn’t a privileged white male.

The press functioned as one vital counterpart to the exhibition space in terms of what was emerging as a recognisably modern economy of celebrity… (p.37)

The ‘modern economy of celebrity’ sounds impressive but what does it mean, what is an ‘economy of celebrity’ (and remember the warning about using the word ‘modern’ which is generally an empty adjective used solely for its sound, to make the text sound grand and knowledgeable).

Reynolds painted a number of portraits of aristocratic patrons such as Maria, Countess Waldegrave and Elizabeth Keppel. This allows art scholar Mark Hallett to write:

In being invited to track the shifting imagery of such women as Keppel, Bunbury and Waldegrave, attentive visitors to the London exhibition rooms thus became witness to an extended process of pictorial and narrative transformation, choreographed by Reynolds himself, in which his sitters became part of a gendered, role-playing theatre of aristocratic celebrity that was acted out on an annual basis in the public spaces of the exhibition room. (p.39)

If you read and reread it, I think you realise that this long pretentious sentence doesn’t actually tell you anything. It is prose poetry in the tradition of the mellifluous aesthete, Walter Pater, just using a different jargon.

‘Narrative’, ‘gendered’, ‘theatre’, ‘spaces’ are all modish critical buzzwords. What does ‘gendered’ even mean? That some portraits were of women and some of men? Hmm. And a gallery isn’t really a theatre, no matter how hard art scholars wish their working environment was more jazzy and exciting. It’s a gallery. It consists of pictures hung on a wall. Therefore to say a gallery is a ‘role-playing theatre’ is simply a literary analogy, it is a type of literary artifice which makes absolutely no factual addition to our knowledge.

Translated, that sentence means that regular visitors to the Royal Academy exhibition often saw portraits of the same famous sitters and so could judge different artists’ treatment of them, or gossip about how their appearance changed from year to year. That’s what ‘pictorial and narrative transformation’ means.

The artist’s portrait of Granby can now be understood as just one element within an unfolding iconography of military celebrity that was being articulated by the artist in the exhibition space during the 1760s.

Translated, this means that Reynolds painted many portraits of successful military heroes. As did lots and lots of other portrait painters of the time. But it sounds more impressive the way Hallett expresses it using key buzzwords.

We can even suggest that such details as the Duchess [of Devonshire]’s ‘antique’ dress and rural surroundings… transform her into a figure of pastoral fantasy, a delicately classicised icon of aristocratic otherness… (p.43)

Ah, ‘the Other’ and ‘otherness’, it was the last empty space on my bullshit bingo card. What does ‘otherness’ mean here? That aristocrats aren’t like you and me? That, dressed up in fake Greek robes, leaning against a classical pillar in a broad landscape, they seem like visions from another world? Better to say ‘otherness’. Makes it sound as if you understand complex and only-hinted-at deeply intellectual ideas (taken, in fact, from Jacques Lacan and other French theorists).

2. Starchy prose style

It’s peculiar the way art scholars combine these flashy buzzwords from Critical Theory (interrogate, subvert, gender, identity, The Other) with creaky old phrases which sound as if they’ve come from the mouth of a dowager duchess.

It’s as if Lady Bracknell had read a dummy’s guide to Critical Theory and was trying to incorporate the latest buzzwords into her plummy, old-fashioned idiolect. For example, art scholars always prefer ‘within’ to ‘in’, ‘amongst’ to among, and ‘whilst’ to while – versions of common English words which help them sound grander.

Some contemporary critics thought Reynolds’s experiments with oil and painting techniques meant his works would eventually decay and disintegrate. Mark Hallett says:

The fact that an exhibition including paintings such as these is now taking place, more than two hundred years after Reynolds’s death, helps put paid to such aspersions.

‘Helps put paid to such aspersions’? Isn’t that the voice of Lady Bracknell? ‘I should certainly hope, Mr Moncrieff, that in future you shall keep your aspersions and animadversions to yourself.’

3. Thin content

See above where I’ve highlighted the relative lack of new or interesting insights in the four critical essays, which can’t be concealed by tarting them up with references to the eighteenth century ‘glitterati’ or Andy Warhol.

Sometimes the essays descend to the bathetic. When we read that scholar Richard Wendorf has written a paper in which he observes that

Reynolds was adept at cultivating patrons through observing the rules of polite society

we are straying close to the University of the Bleeding Obvious.

When we learn that Reynolds sometimes flouted these rules in order to create a Bohemian effect, in order to copy the more raffish end of the aristocratic spectrum of behaviour, it feels like a variation on the obvious, and hardly something which required an entire essay to ‘explain’.

Conclusion

Having read the four essays twice, what you take away is that Reynolds specialised in painting portraits of famous people, that this ensured the portraits were much talked about, written about and commented on by the larger-than-ever number of daily newspapers and magazines, and encouraged other famous people to commission their portraits from him, all of which boosted his professional career.

And that he was canny in using the means available to him – aristocratic patrons, choosing famous people to paint – famous soldiers, sailors, aristocrats, courtesans, writers and fellow artists – socialising and hosting grand dinners, joining top clubs, getting supporters to talk him up in the press, and encouraging the distribution of prints of his work – to build a successful and profitable career.

All of these were strategies adopted by most of his contemporaries were doing. He just did it better.

I’m confident making a statement like that because I’ve just read Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds which places the great man in the incredibly busy, buzzing, competitive, dog-eat-dog environment of Georgian London, and gives extended portraits of scores and scores of his peers, rivals, colleagues and competitors.

It shows how British society changed during Reynolds’s long career, from his earliest paintings in the 1740s to his last ones in 1790. He changed, art changed, society changed.

None of the essays in this catalogue have much space to play with and so these art scholars play very fast and loose with the historical record, yanking together quotes and events which were actually far separated in time, in order to impose on the people and culture of a very different society the modish contemporary art scholar concerns of ‘gender’, ‘identity’ and ‘celebrity’.

The point being: these essays are actually quite an unreliable introduction to the life and career of Joshua Reynolds, written at the behest of a gallery with an agenda and a marketing plan. By all means buy or borrow this book for its wonderful reproductions of the paintings. But read the McIntyre biography to understand the man and his times.

Unanswered questions

Having read both MacIntyre’s book and this catalogue, I still have a couple of unanswered questions:

1. They both tell me that History Painting was meant to be the highest and most prestigious genre of the day. In which case, how come the greatest painter of the age, Reynolds, didn’t paint any history paintings, and neither did his closest rivals, Allan Ramsay or Thomas Gainsborough?

2. Why are there so many black servants in 18th century portraits?

More eighteenth century reviews

Eighteenth century reviews

Joshua Reynolds: The Life and Times of The First President of the Royal Academy by Ian McIntyre (2003)

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 to 1792) was one of – if not the – leading English painter of the 18th century. He specialised in portraits, painting about 2,000 of them during a long and busy professional career, as well as 200 ‘subject pictures’, and over 30 self-portraits.

Self-portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1780) Note the bust of Michelangelo, the Rembrandtesque hat, and the text of one of his Discourses folded in his hand © Royal Academy of Arts

Reynolds promoted a ‘Grand Style’ in painting which was less interested in visual or psychological accuracy to his sitters than in placing them in idealised and heroic poses and settings. He was known – and criticised – for pinching aspects from the Old Masters – poses, tints, props, tricks of lighting and so on.

So when you look at this painting – of Reynolds’s lifelong friend, the successful actor David Garrick – you see that not only is he caught between the two allegorical figures representing Comedy and Tragedy, but that the figures are each painted in different styles – the figure of Comedy on the left in a flirty rococo style of Correggio, the figure of Tragedy is done in a consciously ‘antique’ or neo-classical style reminiscent of Guido Reni, dressed in Roman robes with a stern profile – and Garrick in the middle, is wearing a historical costume reminiscent of van Dyck but his face is done in an unashamedly realistic or figurative style.

David Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy by Joshua Reynolds (1760)

Reynolds was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. He gave an inaugural lecture and this soon settled into an annual – later, biannual – lecture or ‘discourse’. At the end of his life these were published together as 20 or so Discourses about art, which were influential for decades afterwards.

The biography

Ian McIntyre’s biography of Sir Joshua Reynolds is a big book, weighing in at 608 pages, including index and notes (542 pages of actual text). What makes it hugely enjoyable is the way McIntyre very deliberately widens its scope to become a portrait of the age. Not a page goes by without entertaining and often amusing digressions away from the basic chronology of events.

For example, before we’re ten pages in we’ve had a whistlestop history of Devon and the town Reynolds was born in, Plympton, from Roman times to his birth in 1723. There’s an interesting explanation of the medieval and Renaissance tradition of Emblem Books and in particular the work of Jacob Cats, little known in this country but hugely influential on the continent. A little detour into the life of a well-known gypsy of the early 18th century, Bamfylde Carew. And so on.

The book is packed with footnotes, often as many as six on a page, giving biographical snapshots of every single person Reynolds comes into contact with, reads or meets or writes to or mentions, often with a bit of background about their achievements in art or literature – Reynolds cultivated friendships with the leading writers of the time – or, quite often, the wars or battles they were involved in, as a) Reynolds painted a large number of military and naval personnel and b) Britain was almost continually at war throughout the 18th century.

This blizzard of contextual information is partly explained because, as McIntyre candidly points out, we don’t actually know all that much about Reynolds’s life. We know he went to Italy to study the Old Masters for an extended stay from ages 25 to 27 (1750 to 1752). Then he returned to London, set up a studio, and quickly became very successful. We have annual business ‘pocketbooks’ he kept, and these are packed full of appointments with sitters, practical notes about rents and paints and canvas and shopping (p.94). We have the accounts and minutes of the Royal Academy which he set up and ran from 1768 till his death in 1792, the Discourses he published to the world – the written version of the lectures he delivered at the Academy – and numerous descriptions of him in the diaries and letters of contemporaries – but not much more.

Reynolds didn’t keep a diary or interesting notes and thoughts about art which contain breath-taking insights and ideas. He never married, and so didn’t have either a wife or children to write memoirs about him. He doesn’t appear to have had affairs, or if he did they were kept very secret (the issue is discussed on p.85). His sister, Fanny, was his housekeeper for 25 years, followed by a niece.

Er, that’s about it in terms of a ‘personal’ life.

`So in a way McIntyre’s strategy of padding out the story with reams and reams of information about pretty much everyone else alive at the time was a necessity – a factual account of just Reynolds’s life would be quite sparse. Still, McIntyre’s encyclopedic approach makes for a highly enjoyable account.

As does his rangy, slangy style. He is at pains to emphasise that he is not a stuffy art critic, he’s one of the boys:

Then, brushing away a crocodile tear, he [an anonymous critic] put the boot in. (p.319)
Reynolds was taking a fair amount of stick in the press… (p.320)

18th century artists

Thus McIntyre doesn’t just place Reynolds in the 18th century art world – he introduces us to quite an intimidating number of 18th century artists, starting with Reynolds’s predecessors in Britain, referencing leading contemporary painters in France and Italy, and then a host of other contemporary painters – the famous, the not so famous, and the downright obscure. They include – and this list excludes all the many sculptors:

Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646 to 1723) leading portraitist of his time
Francesco Solimena (1657 to 1747) leading Italian painter of the Baroque
Jonathan Richardson (1667 to 1745) whose book, ‘An Essay on the Theory of Painting’ inspired young Reynolds
Joseph Highmore (1692 to 1780)
William Hogarth (1697 to 1764) leading English artist, caricaturist and printmaker
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699 to 1779) ‘the other great middle-class painter of the century’ specialising in quiet domestic scenes, in contrast to either grand historical paintings, or pink and blue rococo
John Shackleton (? to 1767) Principal ‘Painter in Ordinary’ to George II and George III
Thomas Hudson (1701 to 1779) Reynolds was apprenticed to him
Francesco Zuccarelli (1702 to 1788) Italian landscape painter from Venice
Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702 to 1789) French portraitist working mainly in pastel
Francis Hayman (1708 to 1776)
Arthur Devis (1712 to 1787) started as landscape artist, then portraits of members of pro-Jacobite Lancashire families, then portraits of London society
Allan Ramsay (1713 to 1784) rising star arrived in London from Rome in 1738, painted the definitive image of the coronation of King George III and a stream of royal commissions
Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714 to 1789) landscape and marine painter
Richard Wilson (1714 to 1782) ‘the classic master of British 18th century landscape painting’
Henry Robert Morland (1716 to 1797) Young woman shucking oysters
Richard Dalton (1720 to 1791)
Katherine Read (1721 to 1778) Scottish portrait painter
John Astley (1724 to 1787) portrait painter
George Stubbs (1724 to 1806) English painter of horses
Francis Cotes (1726 to 1770) pioneer of English pastel painting
Thomas Gainsborough (1727 to 1788)
Anton Raphael Mengs (1728 to 1779) German artist, precursor of neo-classicism
Charles Catton (1728 to 1798) coach painter to George III
George Barrett Senior (1732 to 1784) Irish, leading contemporary landscape painter
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 to 1806) late Rococo painter of remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism
Robert Edge Pine (1730 to 1788)
George Romney (1730 to 1802) portrait painter in the Reynolds / Ramsay league
Sawrey Gilpin (1733 to 1807) English animal painter, illustrator and etcher who specialised in painting horses and dogs
Johann Zoffany (1733 to 1810) German neo-classical painter
Joseph Wright (1734 to 1797) to become Wright of Derby
Jeremiah Meyer (1735 to 1789) Painter in Miniatures to Queen Charlotte, Painter in Enamels to King George III
John Singleton Copley (1738 to 1815) Anglo-American painter, active in both colonial America and England
Benjamin West (1738 to 1820) first American artist to visit Rome, settled in London as a painter of historical scenes, early pioneer of neo-classicism
Nicholas Pocock (1740 to 1821) master of a merchant ship aged 26, he became a noted painter of naval battles
Ozias Humphry (1740 to 1810) a leading English painter of portrait miniatures, later oils and pastels
Angelica Kauffman (1741 to 1807) history painter and portraitist
Ozias Humphrey (1742 to 1810) a leading English painter of portrait miniatures, later oils and pastels
Mary Moser (1744 to 1819) English painter specialised in flowers
Philip Reinagle (1749 to 1833) pupil of Allan Ramsey, specialised in hunting pictures: Members of the Carrow Abbey Hunt
Robert Smirke (1753 to 1845) English painter and illustrator, specialising in small paintings of literary subjects
James Gillray (1756 to 1815) British caricaturist and printmaker
Thomas Rowlandson (1757 to 1827) English artist and caricaturist of the Georgian Era
Maria Cosway (1760 to 1838) Italian-English artist and educationalist
John Opie (1761 to 1807) English painter of historical subjects and portrait, took London by storm in 1781
Thomas Phillips (1770 to 1845) leading English portrait painter of the day, notable for portraits of William Blake and Lord Byron
Benjamin Haydon (1786 to 1846) British painter who specialised in grand historical pictures,

As with many of McIntyre’s digressions about contemporary figures, I found it well worth taking a few minutes to look up each of these painters. I was particularly drawn to some of the pictures of Jean-Étienne Liotard who I’d never heard of before.

The Chocolate Girl by Jean-Etienne Liotard (1744)

Provenances

An interesting aspect of Reynolds’s career is the number of portraits which have gone missing or are disputed. That the authorship of works of art can be disputed is significant: it shows you that, when the provenance of a painting is crystal clear, then the experts can confidently pontificate about its distinctive composition and style; but where there is no signature of clear history of ownership, where the authorship is disputed, then style and composition are not enough to determine the identity of the painter. Take this portrait of a black man.

Portrait of an African by Allan Ramsay (1757 to 1760)

It is instructive to learn that it was once thought to be a portrait of Olaudah Equiano and painted by Joshua Reynolds, but is now generally accepted to a portrait of the young Ignatius Sancho painted by the Scottish painter, Allan Ramsay. The point being that the ‘house style’ of 18th century portrait painters was so similar, overlapped at so many points, that even experts can’t tell them apart.

Destructions

McIntyre’s book is extremely thorough. He documents the sitters and the painting sessions for what seems like every one of Reynold’s nearly two and a half thousand paintings. But a theme which emerges is the dismayingly large number of paintings which have been lost or destroyed, by Reynolds:

Portrait of Lady Edgcumbe – destroyed by bombing during Second World War
Portrait of Thomas Boone – untraced
Portrait of Jane Hamilton – untraced
Portrait of Mrs Baddeley – untraced
Portrait of Alexander Fordyce – untraced
Portrait of Elizabeth Montagu – untraced

No fewer than nineteen works by Reynolds were destroyed in a disastrous fire at the family seat of the Dukes of Rutland, Belvoir Castle in Grantham, Leicestershire, in 1816 (in which also perished works by Titian, Rubens and Van Dyck).

Or other artists of the day:

Benjamin West’s Cimon and Iphigenia and Angelica and Medoro – untraced

Which gives rise to a meta-thought: I wonder what percentage of all the paintings ever painted, still exist? Half? A quarter? To put it another way – how much of all the art ever created has been ‘lost’?

[The beginnings of an answer are given in Peter H. Wilson’s vast history of the Thirty Years War where he writes that Dutch artists produced several million paintings in the 16th and 17th centuries combined – ‘of which perhaps 10 per cent survive‘ (p.816). 10% – is that a good working guesstimate?]

Miscellaneous notes

Reynolds’s first studio was at 5 Great Newport Street, in London’s West End. It was on the edge of the country, with a good sized garden both behind and in front (inconvenient in rainy weather since rich people’s carriages couldn’t park right outside the door, p.119). His rival, Allan Ramsay (1713 to 1784) lived round the corner in Soho Square.

In 1760 he moved to a house on the west side of Leicester Fields, later Leicester Square. The Prince of Wales kept a big house dominating the north side. Hogarth had lived since 1733 in a house on the east side.

Reynolds’s style is considered ‘more masculine and less ornamental’ than that of his main rival, Allan Ramsay, who was therefore generally thought to be the better painter of women portraits (p.117).

Penny-pinching Reynolds was careful with money. Anecdotes abound. He got up early to visit the fishmarket to select the best value fish then returned home with detailed instructions to his servant about which ones to buy. He made a fuss about the value of an old mop (p.122)

Vandal

Reynolds was fantastically disrespectful of old paintings. Apparently, he stripped back layer by layer of paint to see how they had been painted, a number of Venetian paintings and one by Watteau – stripped them right down to the canvas until he had utterly destroyed them (p.239).

Factory production

None of your romantic waiting-for-inspiration nonsense, 18th century painters painted to order and commission and on an awesome scale. Allan Ramsay’s portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte dressed for his coronation (1761) was so popular that his studio i.e. assistants, produced no fewer than one hundred and fifty pairs of the paintings to meet the market; buyers including members of the royal family, sovereigns, heads of state, colonial governors, ambassadors, corporations, institutions and courtiers.

Knock ’em out, pile ’em high was the watchword. When one aristocratic sitter offered to come for an additional sitting so that Reynolds could have a session devoted to her hands (of which she was very proud) Reynolds casually told her not to bother as he normally used his servants as models for hands (p.137). (This chimes with the revelation in James Hamilton’s book that Gainsborough generally painted the entire body of his sitters from models, often his wife or grown-up daughters.)

Anti-romanticism

It has been the fate of arts to be enveloped in mysterious and incomprehensible language, as if it was thought necessary that even the terms should correspond to the idea entertained of the instability and uncertainty of the rules which they expressed.

To speak of genius and taste as any way connected with reason or common sense, would be, in the opinion of some towering talkers, to speak like a man who possessed neither, who had never felt that enthusiasm, or, to use their own inflated language, was never warmed by that Promethean fire, which animates the canvas and vivifies the marble.

If, in order to be intelligible, I appear to degrade art by bringing her down from her visionary situation in the clouds, it is only to give her a more solid mansion upon the earth. It is necessary that at some time or other we should see things as they really are, and not impose on ourselves by that false magnitude with which objects appear when viewed indistinctly as through a mist. (Discourse 7)

No good at drawing

Reynolds was acknowledged to be more interested in colour and tone than in drawing and design. He himself confessed he wasn’t too strong on anatomy. One of the hardest parts of pure figure drawing is hands and Reynolds’s sitters hands are often ungainly, stylised or hidden. He wasn’t too bothered about strict visual accuracy:

The likeness consists more in taking the general air, than in observing the exact similitude of every feature. (quoted on page 127)

‘Flying colours’

Throughout his career Reynolds experimented with materials that make an oil painting, incorporating at one time or another, asphalt, wax, charcoal, experimenting with non-traditional types of key colours such as incarnadine for red. This was often disastrous, as scores of anecdotes testify, the painter Benjamin Haydon just one who was sharply critical of his over-treatment of his paintings (quoted page 282).

One painting, being carried to its patron, was knocked in the street and the entire creation simply slid off the canvas and onto the street. Many others complained that the colours changed. The sky in Admiral Barrington’s portrait changed from blue to green within months of receiving it (p.362). Hence his reputation for ‘flying colours’ and many burlesques and parodies about them.

Rich

As a result of his astonishing industry, Reynolds was by 1762 making £6,000 a year (p.141). By way of comparison, the homely parson in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village has a stipend of:

A man he was, to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year.

By about 1780 it cost 50 guineas for a ‘head’, 70 guineas for a ‘half length’, 200 guineas for a full length (p.361).

Reynolds’s deafness

In Rome in 1751 Reynolds suffered a heavy head cold which left him partially deaf. For the rest of his life he carried about an ear trumpet. There are numerous humorous anecdotes of him pretending not to hear unflattering or critical remarks.

Reynolds’s height

Sir Joshua Reynolds was five feet five and one-eighths of an inch tall (p.149).

Reynolds and the king

Despite his prolific portrayal of the British aristocracy, Reynolds was disliked by King George III and never got the post of Principle Painter in Ordinary which he aimed for. This post went to Allan Ramsay in 1761. A number of reasons are given for this dislike, for example that when Reynolds was offered the presidency of the newly founded Royal Academy in 1768 but said he’d have to consult his close friends, Dr Johnson and Edmund Burke. Since it was a royal appointment which the king had personally agreed, he was offended that Reynolds hesitated, and particularly offended at the mention of Edmund Burke, a critic of the king. And his friendship with John Wilkes, a radical critic of the king and the Establishment as a whole (p.322).

Reynolds and Dr Johnson

I’d like to like Dr Johnson more than I do. At the end of the day, his bluff English pragmatism comes close to philistinism. His rudeness was legendary, as was his greed (the story of a host setting out bowls of clotted cream, strawberries and a jar of cider for a party of guests and Johnson eating the lot, or asking for pancakes and eating 13 in a row) and his addiction to tea. And his depression: letters are quoted in which he describes his morbid fear of being left alone to his thoughts. Which is why it was difficult to get rid of him; he’d pop round for tea then stay, talking interminably, till past midnight. If he was ever left out of a conversation:

His mind appeared to be preying on itself; he fell into a reverie accompanied with strange antic gesticulations. (Reynolds, quoted page 210)

Reynolds and his sister

Reynolds’s sister, Francis (1729 – 1807), acted as his housekeeper from when he moved to London in the early 1750s until 1779, when some kind of argument – still unknown – led to her leaving and her place being taken by their nieces. Fanny was an artist in her own right, of histories and portraits. She also wrote and won the support of Dr Johnson, who encouraged her and remained friendly and supportive even after the break with her brother. Mutual friends were critical of Reynolds’s treatment of her, e.g. Mrs Thrale (p.327).

Reynolds and Gainsborough

The ‘Grand Style’ which Reynolds spoke about in his Discourses meant improving on nature, removing blemishes and imperfections, creating an idealised image.

The likeness consists more in taking the general air, than in observing the exact similitude of every feature. (p.127)

And by ‘idealised’ he often meant aspiring to the style of Roman art and architecture, all pillars and togas. Thus Gainsborough and Reynolds disagreed about what their sitters should wear. Gainsborough, the more informal, casual and bohemian (p.338) of the pair thought it was an important part of capturing a sitter’s personality that they wore their own clothes; Reynolds, by contrast, kept a wardrobe of ‘idealised’ costumes and often painted his sitters in Romanised togas and tunics. The Dowager Duchess of Rutland complained that Reynolds made her try on eleven different dresses before settling on what she dismissed as ‘that nightgown’ (p.151).

Benjamin West, the American painter of historical scenes and second President of the Royal Academy, is quoted criticising Reynolds’s fondness for dressing his female sitters in antique robes, pointing out how much more interesting and useful for posterity it would be to see them in their actual everyday wear.

Technical terms

Conversation piece

An informal group portrait, popular in Britain in the 18th century, beginning in the 1720s, distinguished by portrayal of a group apparently engaged in genteel conversation or some activity, very often outdoors. Typically the group will be members of a family, but friends may be included, and some groups are of friends, members of a society or hunt, or some other grouping.

Fancy picture

Fancy picture refers to a type of eighteenth century painting that depicts scenes of everyday life but with elements of imagination, invention or storytelling. The name fancy pictures was given by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the supreme examples of the genre produced by Thomas Gainsborough in the decade before his death in 1788, particularly those that featured peasant or beggar children in particular. (Source: Tate)

Profile portrait

The profile portrait ultimately derived from coins and medals from ancient Rome. It could be used as a commemoration of the dead, or as a tribute to the living great.

Eighteenth century London courtesans

In terms of his desire to associate himself with the celebrity of others, the most compelling paintings by Reynolds are surely his portraits of courtesans which he began to make from the late 1750s onwards.

I include this list not out of a conscious or unconscious wish to define women by their sexuality, but because these women’s lives are fascinating, and the niche they occupied in the society of their time so startlingly different from our day.

Kitty Fisher (1741 to 1767)
Nelly O’Brien d.1768
Emily Warren (d.1782)
Grace Dalrymple Elliott (1754 to 1823) in Paris during the revolutionary Terror and imprisoned

Eighteenth century women artists

Katherine Read (1721 to 1778) Scottish portrait painter
Angelica Kauffman (1741 to 1807) history painter and portraitist
Mary Moser (1744 to 1819) English painter specialised in flowers
Maria Cosway (1760 to 1838) Italian-English artist and educationalist

Those are the ones I noticed in the text. There’s a full list of eighteenth century women artists online:

18th Century Women Artists

More eighteenth century reviews

Eighteenth century reviews

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by Simon on July 6, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Biography, War

Tagged 18th century, Allan Ramsay, Angelica Kauffman, Anton Raphael Mengs, art, Arthur Devis, Bamfylde Carew, Belvoir Castle fire, Benjamin Haydon, Benjamin West, Biography, Charles Catton, Claude-Joseph Vernet, Conversation piece, Correggio, courtesans, David Garrick, Devon, Discourses, Dr Johnson, Edmund Burke, Emily Warren, English painter, Fancy picture, Fanny Reynolds, Francesco Solimena, Francesco Zuccarelli, Francis Cotes, Francis Hayman, Garrick, George Barrett Senior, George II, George III, George Romney, George Stubbs, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, Grand Style, Great Newport Street, Guido Reni, Henry Robert Morland, Ian McIntyre, Ignatius Sancho, Jacob Cats, James Gillray, Jean-Étienne Liotard, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jeremiah Meyer, Johann Zoffany, John Astley, John Opie, John Shackleton, John Singleton Copley, John Wilkes, Jonathan Richardson, Joseph Highmore, Joseph Wright, Katherine Read, Kitty Fisher, Leicester Fields, London, Maria Cosway, Mary Moser, Mrs Thrale, Nelly O'Brien, Nicholas Pocock, oil painting, Olaudah Equiano, Ozias Humphrey, Ozias Humphry, Painting, Philip Reinagle, Plympton, portraits, Queen Charlotte, Richard Dalton, Richard Wilson, Robert Edge Pine, Robert Smirke, Rococo, Royal Academy of Arts, Sawrey Gilpin, Self portraits, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Soho Square, subject pictures, The Chocolate Girl, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Hudson, Thomas Phillips, Thomas Rowlandson, Watteau, William Hogarth

Posted by Simon on July 6, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/06/joshua-reynolds-ian-mcintyre/

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century by John Brewer (1997)

It was in the 18th century that the notion of the arts or high art separated from lower, mechanical activities & trade. Poetry, music, painting, sculpture, all dated back to antiquity – but the idea of linking them all into a new category, a separate field of investigation, as done by philosophical pioneers by Kant or Burke, was an 18th century innovation.

The word ‘aesthetics’ was coined in the 1750s – a new area of philosophical study.

The figure of the connoisseur (French) appears, supported by the concept of ‘taste’ and ‘good taste’, separate from the king & aristocracy, the previous sole guardians of taste.

Similarly, the figure of the impresario (Italian) – the middleman, the artistic manager, art dealers, printers & engravers, a Europe-wide network of people feeding the growing demand for ‘art’ from a newly affluent middle class.

David Hume & Adam Smith associated the civilising arts with the influence of commerce in bringing together remote people in a common cause. 18th century polite society was urban – a thing of coffee shops and salons and exchanges and assembly rooms and dining clubs and reading societies – where a wide range of people could meet and debate – no longer with courts.

Critics & sociologists, by defining polite, commercial, refined & tasteful society, also created their opposite, the vulgar, peasant cultures of, for example, the Scottish Highlands – or the backward savage cultures of America & Tahiti. Only later in the century did intellectuals begin to hanker after the folk traditions, stories, poems, legends, songs which had allegedly been expunged by the spread of civilisation – the origins, for example, of the taste for ‘the Celtic’, as explained in the British Museum exhibition Celts: Art and Identity – which also became a component of the Romantic Movement.

The King and Court

After the Civil War no monarch had the money or could get it off Parliament to realise the kind of extravagant building plans executed on the Continent by, for example Louis XVI (Versailles). Charles II couldn’t afford Christopher Wren’s grand plans to rebuild Whitehall, James II didn’t have the time, William III was sour & anti-social, preferring his palaces in Holland, though he grubbed the money to pay for Wren to refurbish Hampton Court. The Georges were foreign and so didn’t want to waste money on English palaces.

First half of the 18th century: The Kit-Kat Club (1696-1720) symbolises the move from Court – royal patronage & libertinage – to the ideals of a civilised society of polite gentlemen, as described in the new Tatler and Spectator magazines. Members; Addison, Steele et al.

Second half of 18th century: Dr Johnson’s Literary Club (1764-94): Johnson, Garrick, Reynolds, Burke.

Polite society

Politeness as a cure for the severe stresses left by the Civil War: politeness more important than ideology or creed: politeness ensuring tolerance & peace. As promoted in the hugely influential Spectator and Tatler.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Edmund Burke

Joshua Reynolds: The Life and Times of The First President of the Royal Academy by Ian McIntyre (2003)

The biography

18th century artists

Provenances

Destructions

Miscellaneous notes

Vandal

Factory production

Anti-romanticism

No good at drawing

‘Flying colours’

Rich

Reynolds’s deafness

Reynolds’s height

Reynolds and the king

Reynolds and Dr Johnson

Reynolds and his sister

Reynolds and Gainsborough

Technical terms

Conversation piece

Fancy picture

Profile portrait

Eighteenth century London courtesans

Eighteenth century women artists

More eighteenth century reviews

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century by John Brewer (1997)

The King and Court

Polite society

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Edmund Burke

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (2006)

Background

Planners and Searchers

The War on Terror

Politico-philosophical traditions

Capitalism versus communism

The conditions for markets

No cheating

Trust networks

Mafias

Property rights

Britain versus France

The failure to westernise Russia

Bad government

Security from violence

Reasons why good government may not take hold

Part 2. Aid in practice

Chapter 6. Bailing out the Poor

Part 3. The White Man’s Army

Chapter 9. Invading the Poor

Chapter 10. Homegrown development

Chapter 11. The Future of Western Assistance

If we can’t sort our own countries out, how can we expect to sort out other peoples’?

Conclusion about the book

Thoughts about the West

Credit

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Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (2005)

The concept of celebrity

Being modish risks becoming dated

The authors’ definitions of celebrity

Robert Orme’s 15 minutes of fame

What was new about 18th century ‘media’

Reynolds’s strategies for success

But was Reynolds unique?

Art scholarship prose style

1. Buzzwords

2. Starchy prose style

3. Thin content

Conclusion

Unanswered questions

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More eighteenth century reviews

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Joshua Reynolds: The Life and Times of The First President of the Royal Academy by Ian McIntyre (2003)

The biography

18th century artists

Provenances

Destructions

Miscellaneous notes

Vandal

Factory production

Anti-romanticism

No good at drawing

‘Flying colours’

Rich

Reynolds’s deafness

Reynolds’s height

Reynolds and the king

Reynolds and Dr Johnson

Reynolds and his sister

Reynolds and Gainsborough

Technical terms

Conversation piece

Fancy picture

Profile portrait

Eighteenth century London courtesans

Eighteenth century women artists

More eighteenth century reviews

Share this:

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century by John Brewer (1997)

The King and Court

Polite society

Related links

Share this:

Follow