The age of the starving artist

What remains of art is art, of course; and what chiefly interests us is the creative talents of a painter or a sculptor. What we forget is that the work of art wouldn’t be there without some kind of engagement with the brutal forces of money.

James Hamilton’s riveting book is a richly detailed study of how, in Britain in the 19th century, artists and a small army of opportunists, art lovers, collectors and businessmen of all sorts used their ingenuity to turn the visual arts into money. ‘The business of art, when seen in the perspective of the time, does not always reflect the course of art history as perceived 200 years later,’ Hamilton says, and this is a remarkable attempt to show us what art might have looked like to those who were making their living through it.

The relationship between a work of art and its value had long puzzled anyone who has thought about it.