On Permanent Display

The Melbourne Review introduces a new visual arts column, asking both curators and members of the public to respond to some of the lesser known jewels of the NGV’s permanent collection, across any genre or period.

This month, Robert Buss’s The monopolist (1840).

Ted Gott

Early one morning in mid April 1836, Robert Seymour, then one of the most popular illustrators in Britain, blew his head off with a shotgun. It was Seymour who had had the original idea that became The Pickwick Papers, proposing in 1835 to publishers Chapman and Hall that they bring out a volume of his drawings poking fun at the follies of middle-aged Cockney ‘sportsmen’. The words a young Charles Dickens was then commissioned to write alongside Seymour’s illustrations subsequently became a runaway success that eclipsed Seymour’s own art, leading to the illustrator’s mental collapse and suicide.

Seymour was quickly replaced by another popular British painter and illustrator, Robert Buss, who was known for comic paintings in which he gently satirised the absurdities of daily life in post-Regency and early Victorian England. Already a fan himself of the emerging new writer Dickens, Buss now suspended his own work on a major canvas he was preparing for the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition, and drew for Dickens and his publishers a range of Pickwickian characters and situations in a manner sympathetic with that of Seymour. Buss’s lively drawings were botched, however, by the journeyman engraver tasked with transferring them to etching plates for printing. Dickens was dissatisfied with the end result, and Buss’s involvement with The Pickwick Papers quickly came to end, a replacement artist for Seymour eventually being found in Hablot Browne (or ‘Phiz’).

While stung by his Pickwick experience, Robert Buss continued to read Dickens’s works as they appeared, and frequently created paintings and illustrations of them of his own accord. Given this, it is not surprising to see echoes of the already legendarily stout and bespectacled Samuel Pickwick in the protagonist of Buss’s The monopolist (1840), painted just four years after Pickwick’s first appearance in print.  Buss’s monopolist warms his bottom before a cheery fire in the Victoria Dining Rooms, blissfully oblivious to the plight of a cold and wet workman who reaches a shivering, mittened hand towards the warmth so amply hogged by the wealthy gentleman’s Pickwickian girth. Buss himself proposed a somewhat serious reading of the humour in The monopolist, writing that his painting depicted ‘the class of persons who live by fattening on the poor’.

Whether we take a light-hearted Pickwickian or a more sombre reading of The monopolist, this exquisite little painting invites us to enjoy Buss’s meticulous attention to detail in depicting the cosy setting and furnishings (the carafes, half-filled wine glass and cheerful advertisements for hot roast joints and Ramsbottom ale) that situate so captivatingly this vignette of selfishness and snobbery in the Victoria Dining Rooms.

Ted Gott is Senior Curator of International Art, NGV

 

Edwina Preston

Ridiculous and Victorian Dickens’s characters might seem, but they are no more ludicrous than those who inhabit our own times. I can’t help imagining a modern take on Buss’s The Monopolist:

The room is somewhat more crowded, but we can make out certain personages we know. Sitting upright as a poker in his rocking chair, missing nothing, the ancient news baron and plutocrat, Sir Rupert Murdoch. Beside him, sipping parsimoniously on a sherry and holding fast to a purse full of cash wadded up under her skirts, Dame Gina Rinehart. (The story of her beleaguered relations with her children is a novel in itself, rivalling Bleak House, and entitled Oh, Pity my Fortune!) Sir Clive Palmer, maverick new Member of Parliament, leans heavily on an old-fashioned blunderbuss that threatens accidentally to go off at any moment. Above them, on the wall, is a map of the country, neatly dissected with red dotted lines, with asterisks to represent towns that have recently been excised in the name of progress. Next to this is another map, this one of the world, in which one can plainly see that the vast continent of Africa has been struck out entirely with a black charcoal cross.

In the corner, crammed together, is a trio of complainants: a recently arrived destitute family, having fled persecution in their home country and seeking lodgings; a balding school headmaster, whose school for paupers has had its funding rescinded and is about to be closed; a bespectacled scientist, desperate to be heard, who has discovered that the industrial revolution has produced a measurable hole in the sky.

In the centre of the picture, Sir Anthony Abbott, lover of antiquated technologies, holds to his ear a conspicuously oversized ear-trumpet to pick up the grievances of his parishioners. Sadly, said instrument is trained in entirely the wrong direction. He cannot hear a thing.

Edwina Preston is the author of The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer (UQP).

 

Robert  Buss, The monopolist 1840
Oil on canvas, 51.1 x 61.0 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1877

 

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