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Gallery building


In June 1788, Boydell and his nephew secured the lease on a site at 52 Pall Mall to build their new gallery and engaged George Dance, then the Clerk of the City Works, as their architect for the rebuilding project.

Pall Mall at that time had a mix of expensive residences and commercial operations popular with fashionable London society, such as bookshops and gentlemen's clubs. The area also had some less genteel establishments: King's Place (now Pall Mall Place), an alley running to the east and behind the Boydells' gallery, was the site of the high-class brothel of Charlotte Hayes described in Nocturnal Revels in 1779. This contrast is echoed in Rev. George Reeves's description of Pall Mall in his A New History of London (1764) as "greatly disfigured by several mean houses of the lowest mechanicks being interspersed in it in many places, and many of them joining to the most sumptuous edifices".

Across King's Place, immediately to the east of the Boydells' building, 51 Pall Mall had been purchased on 26 February 1787 by George Nicol, bookseller and future husband of Mary Boydell, Josiah's elder sister. As an indication of the changing character of the area, this property had been from 1773 to 1787 the home of Goostree's gentlemen's club. This had begun as a gambling club for wealthy young men, but had later become a reformist political club that counted William Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce as members.

The existing house at 52 Pall Mall had been built in 1726–1727 by William Pickering, a painter, under a 61-year building lease from James Tichborne, the ground landlord. From 1738, it had housed the bookshop of Robert Dodsley, and from 1759, that of his brother James. In 1787, James Dodsley moved his shop to another location in Pall Mall, perhaps because the lease originally granted to William Pickering had expired. 52 Pall Mall was then taken on a new 80-year lease by Benjamin Vandergucht, a painter and picture dealer. Vandergucht agreed an annual rent of £120, payable to Sir Henry Tichborne, the grandson of James Tichborne. This lease describes the site as having a 25-foot frontage on Pall Mall, with a depth of 122 feet. Within a year, Vandergucht assigned his ground lease to the Boydells.

Dance's Shakespeare Gallery building had a monumental, neoclassical stone front, and a full-length exhibition hall on the ground floor. Three interconnecting exhibition rooms occupied the upper floor, with a total of more than 4000 sqft of wall space for displaying pictures. The two-story façade was not especially large for the street, but its solid classicism had a determinedly imposing effect. Some reports describe the exterior as "sheathed in copper".

The lower story of the façade was dominated by a large, rounded-arched doorway in the center. The unmoulded arch rested on wide piers, each of which was broken by a narrow window, above which ran a simple cornice. Dance placed a transom across the doorway at the level of the cornice bearing the inscription "Shakespeare Gallery". Below the transom were the main entry doors, with glazed panels and side lights matching the flanking windows. Above the transom the arch was filled by a radial fanlight in the lunette. In each of the spandrels to left and right of the arch Dance placed a carving of a lyre inside a ribboned wreath, and above all this ran panelled band course dividing the lower story from the upper.

The upper façade had paired pilasters on either side and a thick entablature and triangular pediment above. Sir John Soane criticised Dance's combination of slender pilasters and a heavy entablature as a "strange and extravagant absurdity". The capitals topping the pilasters sported volutes in the shape of ammonite fossils&mdash;a neo-classical architectural feature invented by Dance specifically for the gallery that became known as the Ammonite Order. In a recess between the pilasters, Dance placed Thomas Banks's sculpture Shakespeare attended by Painting and Poetry, for which the artist was paid 500 guineas. The sculpture depicted Shakespeare, reclining against a rock, between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting. Beneath it was a panelled pedestal inscribed with a quotation from Hamlet: "He was a Man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again".

Gallery operation


The Shakespeare Gallery, when it opened on 4 May 1789, contained 34 paintings, and by the end of its run it had between 167 and 170. (The exact inventory is uncertain and most of the paintings have disappeared; only around forty paintings can be identified with any certainty. ) The Gallery itself was a hit with the public and became a fashionable attraction. It took over the public's imagination and became an end in and of itself. Newspapers had carried updates of the construction of the Gallery, down to drawings for the proposed façade. The Daily Advertiser had a weekly column on the Gallery from May through August (exhibition season). Furthermore, artists who had influence with the press, and Boydell himself, published anonymous articles to heighten interest in the Gallery which would in turn hopefully increase sales of the edition.

To contribute paintings to the Gallery, Boydell obtained the assistance of the most eminent painters and engravers of the day. Artists included Richard Westall, Thomas Stothard, George Romney, Henry Fuseli, Benjamin West, Angelica Kauffmann, Robert Smirke, John Opie, and Boydell's nephew and business partner, Josiah Boydell. Among the engravers were Francesco Bartolozzi and Thomas Kirk.

At the beginning of the enterprise, reactions were generally positive. Two reviews from the most influential newspapers in London at the time solidified and validated the public's interest in the project and the artists' efforts. The Public Advertiser wrote on 6 May 1789: "the pictures in general give a mirror of the poet...[The Shakespeare Gallery] bids fair to form such an epoch in the History of the Fine Arts, as will establish and confirm the superiority of the English School" and The Times wrote a day later: This establishment may be considered with great truth, as the first stone of an English School of Painting; and it is peculiarly honourable to a great commercial country, that it is indebted for such a distinguished circumstance to a commercial character—such an institution—will place, in the Calendar of Arts, the name of Boydell in the same rank with the Medici of Italy.

However, criticism increased as the project dragged on and James Gillray published a cartoon labelled "Boydell sacrificing the Works of Shakespeare to the Devil of Money-Bags". Charles Lamb was a critic of the venture from the outset: what injury did not Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery do me with Shakespeare. To have Opie's Shakespeare, Northcote's Shakespeare, light headed Fuseli's Shakespeare, wooden-headed West's Shakesepare, deaf-headed Reynolds' Shakespeare, instead of my and everybody's Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait! To confine the illimitable!

Yet, Boydell's project inspired imitators. In April 1788, after the announcement of the Shakespeare Gallery, but a year before its opening, Thomas Macklin opened a Gallery of the Poets in the former Royal Academy building on the south side of Pall Mall, opposite Market Lane, which had been previously leased to the auctioneer James Christie. The first exhibition featured one work from each of 19 artists, including Fuseli, Reynolds, and Gainsborough. The gallery added new paintings of subjects from poetry each year, and from 1790 supplemented these with scenes from the Bible. The Gallery of the Poets closed in 1797 and its contents were offered by lottery. This did not deter Henry Fuseli from opening a Milton Gallery in the same building in 1799. Another similar venture was the Historic Gallery opened by Robert Bowyer in Schomberg House at 87 Pall Mall, with 60 paintings (many by the same artists who worked for Boydell) commissioned to illustrate a new edition of David Hume's History of Great Britain. As with Boydell's venture, these imitative projects ultimately ended in financial disaster.