The market that readers of The Rise of the Art Market in London, 1850–1939 encounter is not one driven by an invisible hand. In lieu of focusing on quantitative analyses of the “fiscal exchange value of the work of art” (15), the volume’s editors and contributors trace the tacit, coordinated, and often failed activities of myriad actors—dealers, auctioneers, collectors, painters, museum trustees, the art presses—that underpinned the development of London’s art market within a legible geographical terrain from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar years. The collection thus privileges the theoretical parameters of “cultural geography” and the methods of art history over those of economic history. By reconnecting the making of art with the conditions and operations of its sale within retail markets, editors Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich argue that their volume not only reveals some of the crucial foundations of the contemporary art market, but that it also challenges “the heroic narrative of [artists’] rebellion against bourgeois convention and materialist concerns” (19) informing much of the historiography of modern art. Instead, it presents instances of artists embracing and even shaping new financial indicators of success.

The book’s first section, entitled “Structures,” identifies the commercial gallery system—or, as Helmreich clarifies, its informal “networks” (81)—as a formative site for the emergence of the modern art market. Complementing the editors’ outline of a cultural geography wherein price was not merely an outcome of the forces of supply and demand is Mark Westgarth’s alluring simile of “the pricing of pictures . . . as a kind of alchemy” (40), a proposition bolstered by his account of the discreet negotiations between dealers to establish prices for the sale of pictures and curiosities in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the resultant distrust toward dealers. Fletcher’s account of the emergence of commercial galleries from the mid-nineteenth century onward on Bond and Regent Streets traces how dealers rehabilitated their own image and thus transformed galleries into a crucial site within the Victorian cultural field. They achieved this by hosting exhibitions that paralleled the exhibition calendar of the Royal Academy, emulating the display strategies of shops in the West End to draw visitors (and potential customers), and “gate-keeping” (57) against fraud by authoring and publishing exhibition catalogues and art criticism. As Helmreich’s careful study of the often-impenetrable Goupil stockbooks (which recorded the firm’s inventory) demonstrates, the performance of commercial galleries depended on their ability to move inventory across markets in Britain, on the continent, across the Empire, and to the United States. Such circulation, in turn, depended on the singular infrastructure of “international and imperial trade, communication, and finance” available in London (82). As Anna Gruetzner Robins’s essay argues, dealers also played a critical role in the formation of the art-historical canon, as in the case of Roger Fry’s mobilization of a formidable dealers’ network for the organization of post-Impressionism exhibitions. Robins provides a compelling portrait of Fry as both dealer and canon-maker by highlighting how, in his essay on Paul Cézanne, he discussed the one painting by the artist that sold at the Manet and the Post Impressionists exhibition, thus “giving a mercantile transaction an aesthetic and historical importance” (92). The transition from the buoyant economic conditions of the late nineteenth century to the slump of the 1920s, as Andrew Stephenson’s essay shows, spurred the government to promote commercially oriented design, encouraged a turn toward sachlichkeit or “fitness for purpose” (111) in art and design, and introduced women as prominent metropolitan and middle-income consumers in the aftermath of World War I. These factors together blurred the lines between “painting, sculpture, interior decorations and furnishings” (120). Furthermore, they facilitated the emergence of a modernist aesthetic in art and design that extended even to the gallery space itself, as in the case of the Mayor Gallery, where pottery, painting, and sculpture were presented harmoniously in stark settings.

In the section entitled “Intersections,” Julie Codell demonstrates how the populist art press, especially journals such as Art Journal and Magazine of Art, contributed to the professionalization of the artist in Victorian Britain by publishing biographies that highlighted artists’ commitment to public service. By explaining the links between artists’ economic successes, their moral characters, and the well-being of the national economy, these journals both rehabilitated the status of commerce in art and encouraged their readers to purchase the works of contemporary artists. Although this particular “political economy of art” (144), which facilitated the homogenization and unabashed commodification of both art and artists, became untenable in the face of the decentralization triggered by the rise of a diversified gallery system, and alongside aestheticism’s more subtle acceptance of economic success, its emphasis on the internationalism of British artists also laid some enduring foundations for modern British art. Ysanne Holt’s examination of Studio magazine’s presentation of design principles in the language of internationalism in the interwar years poses an important challenge to the parochialism applied to British interwar art in art-historical scholarship. In addition to retracing the roots of interwar internationalism to the Arts and Crafts discourses and practices of the nineteenth century, Holt also explores how in the face of economic slump the design strategies of the magazine registered British material and visual culture’s turn toward decoration (in this case, functionality) and away from the alleged decadence of ornament. The emphasis on decoration in the 1920s reemerges in Morna O’Neill’s essay on Hugh Lane, specifically in her discussions of the collector’s display of artworks—for example, in his juxtaposition, using a decorative logic, of paintings by Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Lane not only deftly brokered deals between collectors and museums, but his selection of “mood” paintings for Johannesburg and Dutch genre paintings for Cape Town, both British colonial cities in South Africa, cautiously served the diverse needs of these two national collections. Whereas a dealer like Lane was able to shape museum collections in a colonial city, such influence was not necessarily available to dealers in London, as Alexandra MacGilp’s essay on the Tate’s collection of more traditionally themed paintings by English modernist Matthew Smith shows. MacGilp makes a compelling case for why the Tate’s tepid collection of avant-garde painting was a product of the conservatism of its bureaucratically functioning board of trustees (and thus was not representative of the oeuvres of the chosen artists), and its reliance on the recommendations of an increasingly conservative Royal Academy.

The section entitled “Negotiations” focuses on artists’ efforts to navigate the dealer-gallery networks, and reveals the savvy immersion and financial success of even Pre-Raphaelite painters within such networks. Malcolm Warner’s essay, for example, counters the image of John Everett Millais as struggling artist, and instead shows how the cautious stance of dealers encouraged him to return to conventional narrative painting, after his failed efforts to sell evocative, symbolic, and narrative-free “mood” pictures like Spring (1857–59). Warner explains that the success of the former genre rested on its being compositionally and thematically legible and formulaic, and thus familiar to audiences. Furthermore, many of Millais’s narrative compositions were designed with an eye toward their reproduction in engraving—a popular medium through which dealers popularized artists’ works. Such observations about the pairing of painting and reproductive engraving—although not a novel proposition—is explored in impressive detail in Brenda Rix’s contribution to the volume, which reveals as much about the changing practices and trends in the Victorian print trade as it does about William Holman Hunt’s careful orchestration of his career through ingenious (indeed, manipulative) handling of exhibitions, art presses, and an aura of intrigue. Hunt was not alone in such “negotiations,” as Patricia de Montfort’s essay on James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti demonstrates. In spite of their crucial differences and shared disdain for patrons, both artists recognized the importance to their careers and their legacies of garnering stable patronage and approbation within the art market rather than the exhibition culture of the Royal Academy, where they had experienced significant rejection and failure. Whereas male, cosmopolitan artists like Rossetti and Whistler succeeded in crafting spheres for the positive reception of their work, Pamela Nunn contends that such options remained outside the reach of female artists from the (settler) colonies. Her pragmatic account of Frances Hodgkins’s and Thea Proctor’s English and Continental sojourns, and their navigation of differing tastes (perhaps, even notions of “Britishness”) in the London and Australasian art markets, concludes that their “refusal of modernism . . . may have had everything to do with commercial needs” (288).

The archival findings—including the helpful glossary of galleries and dealers—presented by the volume’s contributors alone make it important to any scholar of British art and the modern global art market. While the essays successfully instantiate the editors’ argument that plotting the cultural geography of the art market is crucial to an understanding of the breadth and depth of its operations, the volume often falls short of its more ambitious claims to offer new avenues for studying modernism or to engage with debates about globalism. This is partly due to the constraints posed by the length of the essays. However, it is also due to a tendency of some essays to move back and forth between identifying economic factors as shaping or being shaped by the cultural factors that they examine, when in fact the volume sets out to excavate instances of the latter. Thus, for example, the economic constraints of the “slump” too often become explanatory for a turn to “decoration,” when indeed valuable insights could be gained through a more comparative approach with Russian Constructivism or in relation to changes within British design debates fostered by the exigencies of Britain’s imperial administration in India. Similarly, the iteration of the “global” that readers encounter in this volume often pertains to the circulation and movement of painters, dealers, and objects across modern, imperial networks, and the economic successes afforded by such expansion of the infrastructures of capital. A more critical engagement with the global—broached in O’Neill’s and Nunn’s essays—might map the uneven terrain of imperial networks or explore the alliances through which imperial subjects also subverted its hegemony. In the absence of such approaches, the economic performance of artists and dealers remains the sole barometer of their success in the art market.