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Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature
Criticism, Summer, 1999 by Alison Byerly
A CRUCIAL MOTIVATION behind the deliberate invocation of the sister art of painting by literary artists of the nineteenth century, as well as of painterly allusions to themes and techniques from literature, was the desire to reinforce the material and cultural status of each art. The imposition of multiple frames of reference diffused the burden of representation; it elided the question of a work's relation to reality by judging it according to its success in reproducing another form of art. The very gap between the two arts could thus be used to emphasize the material reality of each, while their shared themes achieved a cultural authority that neither could attain on its own. The nineteenth-century exploitation of this dual relation can be seen in the literary appropriation of the style and subject matter of the sketch.
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The ostentatiously unpretentious mode of the visual "sketch" informs every aspect of literary sketches such as Dickens's Sketches by Boz and Thackeray's Irish Sketch-Book, Paris Sketch-Book, and, although I will not be discussing it here, Vanity Fair: Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society. The literary use of the term hinged on its primary artistic meaning: a rapidly drawn picture that sacrifices aesthetic finish for a sense of spontaneity. The sketch embraces a certain ease or even disdain; the artist could draw a detailed portrait if he wished, but chooses to give a rapid impression of certain elements of the scene rather than elaborate them into a complete picture.
The provisional status that visual sketches originally occupied as the rough drafts of professional artists was to some extent retained by amateur sketches that abrogated the responsibility of completion. Ironically, this highly professional activity was so widely imitated among the fashionable that it became an emblem of upper-class leisure. Dickens and Thackeray, I will argue, appropriated the style and subject matter of the visual sketch in order to cast themselves in the role of the casual artist, the type of dilettantish observer, or flaneur, that Walter Benjamin analyzes in his essay on Baudelaire. By emphasizing the process, rather than the product, of artistic creation, they attempted to disguise the economic necessity that engendered their production of these pieces.
The sketches of Dickens and Thackeray deliberately evoke certain characteristics of visual art in order to reinforce the vividness and authenticity of their depictions. But the sketches also unconsciously replicate the tension between material and aesthetic value that was embodied in the form of the visual sketch. Verbal sketches, like visual sketches, gesture toward an exterior object that is the site of value. This object might be the prior experience that the sketch purports to reproduce, or it might be the future artwork that the sketch is presumably evolving toward. This outward gesture tends to efface the commodified nature of the sketch itself. The sketch, as we will see, was valued precisely because of its tendency to deny its own material value.
The visual sketch was commonly considered mere preparation for the completed work, a private aide-memoire rather than a public commodity. In fact, the sketch anticipated photography in its attempt not simply to interpret or render a scene but to reproduce it. The sketch was a material replacement for the scene itself. Its apparent freedom from economic imperatives was an illusion, as we will see. But this illusion was a powerful one, and useful to the writer who found himself uneasily situated between the roles of poet and hack journalist. By labelling his works "sketches," he was able to emphasize his artistry rather than his professionalism. Dickens and Thackeray, I will suggest, fully understood the unique capacity of the sketch-artist to mediate between reality and art, rendering the "real" more artistic and palatable while rendering "art" more realistic and marketable. Their use of this form is part of the larger Victorian movement toward integrating real life into art. At the same time, their reliance on the sketch betrays their uncertainty about that project, as they struggled to come to terms with the economic motives underlying their aesthetic productions.
The Visual Sketch
The role of the sketch prior to the nineteenth century was largely utilitarian: an artist's sketchbook was a kind of technical manual, filled with exercises and reproductions of famous paintings that the artist would accumulate for "personal reference."(1) It might include detail studies of specific poses and accessories for later incorporation into finished works, or merely "record instantaneous thoughts and observations" the artist wished to preserve.(2) Such sketches were seldom exhibited, and indeed were not regarded as "artworks" in their own right. Sketching was a characteristically professional activity, a necessary chore that any competent artist would need to perform.
While the sketch had at one time seemed clearly inferior to a finished work, it gradually came to acquire a merit of its own. Its spontaneity set it apart from more elaborate works, and seemed to give it a special kind of authenticity. Diderot comments in his Salon of 1765: "A sketch is generally more spirited than a picture. It is the artist's work when he is full of inspiration and ardour, when reflection has toned down nothing, it is the artist's soul expressing itself freely."(3)
