3 - From ‘a Nibble’ to ‘Golden Guineas’: The British Art Market, 1850–61

Summary

AN OBITUARY OF JOANNA Mary Boyce, by then Wells, offered by The Spectator in 1861, gave a glowing account of her career and closed with a plea that her work be recognised by the British artistic establishment:

I cannot close this brief notice without expressing a hope that one of Mrs Wells's pictures may hereafter find a home in one of our national collections […] From their intrinsic merits alone the works of Mrs Wells deserve a national home.

As this tribute suggests, Boyce was highly regarded in the mid-nineteenth-century art world. Acquisition of works by contemporary artists for public collections such as the National Gallery was an indication of an artist's reputation and their success within a growing art market with numerous protagonists, fluctuating social and economic factors and variations in aesthetic taste and value. The proposal that work by the young woman artist belonged in a national collection and the intimation of its ‘intrinsic merits’ is unusual; as Jan Marsh has noted of patrons of women's art in the nineteenth century, ‘[q]uestions of merit were not involved, purchases being largely a matter of critical favour and financial investment’. Critical reviews and judgments of value were integral to the way in which artists navigated the art market in the nineteenth century. Although Boyce was highly regarded by fellow artists and critics, this appreciation did not necessarily translate into great financial success or prolific output seen in more commercially successful painters such as her husband Henry Tanworth Wells, or her brother, the landscape painter George Price Boyce. Such a comparison is of course inherently unfair given the restraints that Joanna Boyce experienced as a woman artist. Her career was also cut short by her early death while Wells lived to seventy-five. Despite The Spectator's prompt, Boyce's work did not enter public collections until 1923. During the twentieth century the artist's family gifted two paintings by Boyce to Tate and thirty-eight paintings by Wells entered public collections via a wide range of sources.

These acquisition histories alongside the disparity in representation of the artists’ work in public collections points to the differing ways in which the two artists were able to navigate the nineteenth-century art market.