Aesthetic Principles

Macaulay has never been considered a particularly romantic figure. Outside of the Lays of Ancient Rome, and despite a few other, mainly youthful, assays into fictional composition, he is not normally associated with the artistic creation of his era. While it is possible to address his historical compositions as a form of literature, as many modern studies have done, and as Macaulay and his generation still, by and large, considered historical writing, he was never an artist in the style of Walter Scott. Nevertheless, throughout his life Macaulay retained a consistent interest in literature, as well as in the visual arts, particularly painting. His contemporaries obviously valued his opinions in this respect. In 1844 he was appointed to the Fine Arts Commission, headed by Prince Albert, which oversaw the decorations of the new Houses of Parliament. He was also a founding trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, charged with framing the principles for selecting sitters and artists, and in the last decade of his life he was also a trustee of the British Museum. Moreover, Macaulay’s views and taste in art, and particularly in painting, reflected and enriched his general worldview.

It is important to remember that Victorian Britain could not boast a rich pictorial tradition similar to that of Italy, France, the Low Countries, Spain, or Germany. In the eighteenth century British painters began, for the first time, forming a truly viable and significant national pictorial style, particularly in portraiture, but also encompassing landscape painting. During the Romantic era the latter genre became a particular favorite among British painters. Nevertheless, and not to discount the important achievements of William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, and several other artists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Britain proved incapable of establishing a rich and innovative pictorial tradition at the level of Italy or France. Contemporaries seemed to sense this, and painting was still unfavorably compared with literature, whether poetry or prose. This relative indifference to the visual arts among the upper middle class was due not least to the influence of evangelicalism, which exalted the word above the image as a gate to the soul.