John Martin and the art of infrastructure

Although we rarely speak of the “infrastructure” of nineteenth-century British painting, historians have long been concerned with many of its core elements: the institutions through which artists trained and exhibited works, the social circuitry of patronage, the colonial and mercantile arteries through which art supplies were sourced from around the world, and the networks of printmakers and vendors through which printed reproductions were disseminated. One reason we don’t describe these elements as “infrastructure” is that the term would have been unrecognizable to those involved. The word didn’t emerge until the late nineteenth century and wasn’t commonly used until the early twentieth century. To speak of the “infrastructure” of nineteenth-century British painting nonetheless allows certain features to surface more clearly for us now: the physical scaffolding that facilitated the circulations of artists and artworks among a whole host of related human and nonhuman things, as well as the embeddedness of this infrastructure itself within multiple interacting systems. It can be narrowly defined in terms of the “hard” infrastructure of physical systems, described by Brian Larkin as the “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas.” But “soft” infrastructure can also designate immaterial networks, as in another definition offered by Larkin: “things and also the relation between things.” We might therefore glimpse hard infrastructure in the painted canal system of John Constable’s The Lock (fig. 1), while also recognizing the soft infrastructure of the institution (the Royal Academy) through which that painting was exhibited and sold. Infrastructure even transformed the luminous contours of Constable’s world: the streets, shops, and theaters around the Royal Academy were increasingly lit by gas lamps supplied with gas through extensive networks of underground pipes.