Chapter Four

A Network of Foreign Artists

Degas and Cazin used to meet with each other at the Café Guerbois in Paris; they were friends. Sometimes, they also met with other artists such as Alphonse Legros and James McNeill Whistler. It is possible that these artists also met Manet there. This was an artistic circle that had links to London, Sussex and Dieppe, and Henry Hill.

This network, or group of artists, is an important aspect in the development of Impressionism. The ‘Master Artists’, Alan Bowness suggests in his 1989 lecture, make the museum art.[170] These are not, however, the lonely geniuses of modern myth, but can be recognised through an identifiable pattern and that their breakthrough work evolves out of artistic competitiveness and group activity; that the evolution of the new developments in painting and sculpture is largely a chain of artists, working and talking together in artistic centres. ^[171] From these groups and supportive networks, the exceptional stand out.

These networks may vary, crossover, cross-pollinate ideas. George Moore, the Irish writer and critic met Degas at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, ‘a haunt of Impressionist painters and naturalist writers during the 1870s’.^[172] They also move places. Bowness posits that the artistic centre moves, and has done from Paris at this moment, to America and back again. Moore, writing in 1890, remembered that after the death of Manet ‘the centre of art shifted from the Nouvelle Athènes to the Café de la Rochefoucauld. Degas followed it.[173] At a time in England where there was, from the gallery going public, a ‘demand for narrative,’[174] the concept of supportive artist network is a critical aspect of the development of Impressionism in the late nineteenth century, and for the English schools which followed.

Whistler, Legros and Fantin-Latour created the Société des trois in 1858. They put on a private show, the Atelier Flamand at the studio of François Bonvin as a Salon des Refusés.[175] Landscape with Cattle in a Meadow represents Bonvin in Hill’s collection. The provenance for this picture does not provide records about how Hill acquired it. It is possible that Hill bought this painting directly from the Mosselmann sale in 1875, or through his connections in Paris.^[176]

This network of artists from Paris also spent time in Dieppe. There is some evidence of a crossover between Hill’s two circles of artist friends. Artists such as Phil Morris painted Procession of First Communicants at Dieppe mentioned by Meynell in her A Brighton Treasure House Article, as part of the Hill collection, likely to be The First Communion.[177] Sickert described his teaching from Scholderer that he had at Dieppe as a young man as ‘excellent preparation for the reception of the teachings of Degas.’^[178] This network produced an exchange of new ideas and stretched across the channel. Many of them came to London, and some to Sussex.

It is likely that Hill met with Fantin-Latour on one of his visits to London, and it is likely that he had a personal association with the painter, to have bought so many of his paintings. Fantin-Latour was very good friends with the German painter, Otto Scholderer (1834 – 1902), who settled in England in 1871. Their network of friends across borders in France, England and the wider continent, which includes Whistler, Legros and Cazin, is revealed through correspondence between these two artists. [179] Without the personal connection it is difficult to reconcile the existence of three Scholderer still life paintings of dead game in the Hill collection, which otherwise seem thematically out of place.[180] It is possible that Hill became familiar with the work of Scholderer at the Gallery of French Artists, where he did exhibit. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy regularly from 1875 – 1896.^[181] Scholderer and his wife did however, spent the summer of 1876 and 1877 at Littlehampton in West Sussex, on the South coast of England.^[182] This was a small town 20 miles west of Brighton, connected by this time to the town by the Brighton-Portsmouth Line. It is possible during this stay that he met with Hill.  Letters from Scholderer to Fantin-Latour show that he met with his friend Cazin in England.^[183] He, Cazin and Fantin remained close. A letter from Fantin to Scholderer in 1880 says that he is seeing Cazin and his wife more often, and that they speak of Scholderer.^[184] In many of their letters to each other, they ask after Legros, Whistler and Cazin.

Hill owned two pictures by the Dutch painter David Adolph Constant Artz (1837 – 1890). Artz lived in Paris from 1866 to 1874, and hosted musical evenings for his friends (who included Scholderer and Fantin-Latour) at his studio.[185] Hill also owned a number of terracotta sculptures by Jules Dalou. Dalou was curator of the Musée du Louvre under Gustav Courbet before taking refuge in England in July 1871, where he stayed with Legros and taught at the South Kensington School of Art. Ionides also bought work by Dalou. It is likely that as collectors of the same artists and network, Ionides and Hill knew each other.

In London, Frank Holl and his circle were making a name for themselves through their Black and White woodblock prints for the Graphic and producing from these paintings of social realism. Hill owned two paintings and one drawing by Frederick Walker, Holl’s companion in his night-time walks. Walker often worked up subjects from his prints for the Graphic into oil paintings. Maas suggests that he was an artist of tantalizing promise.^[186] Meynell identifies Hill as a patron of Phil Morris who also worked for the Graphic. Others published included Robert Macbeth, Charles Green and William Britten, all represented in the Hill collection. ^[187]

At the other end of the thread, in Paris, was the school of Millet and Courbet and their French realism. Courbet knew Scholderer, who was a friend of Oswald Sickert (Walter Sickert’s father). Scholderer was part of a mixed group of artists who studied under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudron (1802-1897). This group included Whistler, Edwin Edwards, Fantin-Latour, Léon L’ Hermitte, J. M. Cazin, Jules Dalou and Legros.[188] This group of painters and sculptors were a network of associates. Many of them were represented in Hill’s collection and most of those represented spent time in London, Sussex, Dieppe or Paris, those towns strung like pearls on a thread of artistic exchange.

The personal connections between the artists in Hill’s collection and Hill himself can explain some of the seemingly disparate elements of Hill’s collection. Pickvance seemed surprised by its scope, but if it evolved through associations with artists and then friends of those friends, the collection starts to have a logic. To reference back to Hill’s ‘Old Friend’ writing his obituary, he said artists guided Hill in his choices about what art to collect. It sheds light on Hill’s early collecting of challenging artists. He was collecting as a peer to a circle of artists, rather than as a collector, and was therefore on the cusp of collecting.

The absence of work by Alphonse Legros is something that does not fit this proposed model for the collection. Legros was influential on Ionides and his collection, and as part of the circle of artists who Hill did collect, one might expect to see him represented in Hill’s collection. There is a suggestion in the Meynell article that cost could explain this absence. She writes that the collection ‘would be all the better, no doubt, if it comprized examples of […] the austere and dignified sincerity, the deep imaginative melancholy, the consummate facture of Legros’ amongst others. She continues that as ‘in these days of high prices and aesthetic lunes, when works of art are all but worshipped,’ that the collection is at once so excellent and complete.^[189] This suggests that works by Legros were too expensive for Hill to buy, should he have wanted to.

In the preface to his book From Manet to Manhattan, Peter Watson cites a lecture by Sir Alan Bowness.[190] In this, the former director of the Tate distinguishes an identical four-stage process for an artist’s rise to fame. Watson quotes ‘The first is peer recognition. Other artists come to regard a particular colleague as significant. The second stage is recognition by the serious critics. The third stage is recognition by collectors and dealers, and the last is recognition by the general public.’[191] This, Watson identifies ‘mean that what the artists in any particular group think of each other is important’. This is particularly pertinent in the case of Henry Hill and his collection. The pattern of his collection seems to suggest that he was buying his art at an earlier stage of the four-stage process identified by Bowness, by buying at the suggestion of his artist friends who were recommending work to Hill at the peer recognition stage. Hill therefore, came to own one of Whistler’s Nocturnes when critics were still shocked, and Degas at a time when his work was not understood in England.

Bowness distinguishes between art for the museums and art for the market, describing producers of the latter as ‘artist as journeyman’. Hill mostly collected these journeyman artists. His collecting, his commissioning work, the promotion of exhibitions for the sale of work of living artists, and his support for the educating of inspiring artists and craftsmen places him as patron of them. Maybe he could recognise himself in their approach, working hard to establish themselves in the business and to gain recognition as associate academicians. Bowness describes these artists as having served an apprenticeship and providing ‘honest, decent work for the market.[192] Seen in this way, Hill was an investor in the business of art, and his collection reflects this. Hill also has in his collection those artists who Bowness defines as a major talent whose art was ‘for the museums’. Degas was one such major talent forged from the artistic centre of Paris.  Bowness states that the ‘third stage of recognition’ is that of a collector or dealer.  ‘Almost every major talent attracts one or two important collectors at an early stage in his career, and these collectors almost always appear on the scene because of their friendships with artists, whose advice they take.’[193] Henry Hill was certainly a patron for Degas early in his career, but he did not seem to be an important enough collector to influence the English public about his work.

Hill was buying Degas well before Bowness’s ‘second stage of recognition’, which is the recognition from critics necessary for the creation of a verbal language for that art, and a critical consensus about it.  The controversy at the time of L’Absinthe being sold at Christie’s in 1892 and then exhibited in 1893 shows the language of the critic in England only being established at that time, almost twenty years after Hill had bought his pictures.[194] Other than the Meynell article on the Hill collection and some reviews of the Brighton Loan Exhibition in 1876 where Hill showed L’Absinthe, it had largely gone unnoticed.[195]  It would appear that in this instance, these circles of recognition are not quite so straightforward. It is possible that this is due to the differences in national temperament between Parisian and English collectors. The peer network was exchanging artistic ideals, but the public was slower to catch on. Daubigny introduced the dealer Durand-Ruel to Monet in London in 1871, and Hill bought from Deschamps, but Impressionism did not take hold in England until almost 30 years later.[196] Hill was not an important enough collector in terms of influence and of marking the trajectory of an exceptional talent. He was not the third stage of recognition for this artist. He did, however, appear on the scene because of his friendships with artists, whose advice he took, and therefore takes the position of a peer / friend collector.[197]

This pattern of collecting is clearest when Hill buys multiple examples of an artist’s work. Multiple examples seem to reflect an element of patronage and personal connection. Evidence for this is identified through the Fine Arts Sub Committee data. The pattern suggests that Hill collected painters rather than paintings. He used this network to expand both his own knowledge and connoisseurship, but also that of the public of Brighton and interested visitors, as part of his public service or civic duty. Choosing to lend familiar favourites as well as controversial cutting-edge work, he had confidence in his collection because of his social network of artist friends. It is not a linear or thematic collection. It weaves a path through Paris, Dieppe, Sussex and London.