Jean Joseph Ernest Théodore Gambart (12 October 1814 – 12 April 1902) was a Belgian-born British art dealer, publisher and printseller who dominated the London art market during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. After arriving in London as the representative of the French publishers Goupil & Cie in 1840, he established his own business as E. Gambart & Co. and became a naturalised British subject in 1846. Through his activities as a publisher, dealer and exhibition organiser, he helped transform the marketing and sale of contemporary art in Britain, and is regarded by art historians as one of the principal architects of the modern international art market.
Initially a publisher of reproductive engravings, he built a successful business by acquiring copyright in contemporary paintings and issuing high-quality prints through subscription. He worked with many of the leading British and European artists of the Victorian era, including Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, William Powell Frith, Rosa Bonheur, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Paul Delaroche, and Abraham Solomon. His commercial success demonstrated the growing importance of copyright, reproduction rights and international distribution in the nineteenth-century art trade.
From the 1850s he expanded into dealing in original paintings, establishing the French Gallery in Pall Mall, one of London's earliest commercial galleries devoted to contemporary art. Through its exhibitions he introduced French painting to British audiences, promoted emerging artists, and pioneered new methods of exhibiting and marketing art outside the Royal Academy system. His promotion of Bonheur's The Horse Fair and his early support of Alma-Tadema were among his greatest commercial successes, while his practice of combining exhibitions with the publication of engraved reproductions became widely imitated by later dealers.
After retiring from business in 1870, he settled principally in Nice, where he served as Spanish Consul-General and assembled an important art collection. His former firm ultimately evolved into the Lefevre Gallery, one of Britain's leading twentieth-century commercial galleries. Although later overshadowed by dealers such as Joseph Duveen, Gambart is recognised as a pioneering figure in the professionalisation and internationalisation of the Victorian art market, and whose business methods influenced the relationship between artists, dealers, collectors and the wider public.
Early life and career Ernest Gambart was born in Kortrijk in Belgium, the son of Joseph Théodore Gambart, a printer, binder and bookseller, and Euphrasie Cartellier de Courval. By the age of 19, he had moved to Paris where he established his own print and papermaking business. He soon joined the leading print publishers Goupil; in 1840, Adolphe Goupil sent him to England to assess the British market and establish a branch of the business.
In 1842 he left Goupil and entered partnership with Auguste Lazare Junin to form the company Gambart & Junin, which specialised in the importing of colour Continental lithographic art prints. The company was a success, and by early in 1844 the company was established as publishers as well as importers and exporters. After Junin's death in 1847, he continued the business under his own name as E. Gambart & Co., located at 25 Berners Street, near Oxford Street. Gambart became a naturalised British subject in 1846.
Art publisher During the 1840s he became Britain's leading publisher of reproductive engravings after contemporary paintings. Rather than merely issuing prints, he negotiated exclusive copyright agreements with artists, purchased reproduction rights, and marketed engravings through subscription.
He established fair and mutually beneficial agreements with most of the best known British and European artists of the mid-Victorian period, including Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Rosa Bonheur, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, William Holman Hunt, John Linnell, J. M. W. Turner, David Roberts, Frederick Goodall, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, William Powell Frith and James Sant. Gambart employed leading engravers and later adopted colour lithography to improve the fidelity of reproductions.
The French Gallery
Having established himself as Britain's leading publisher of reproductive engravings, by the early 1850s he increasingly turned to dealing in original paintings, applying many of the same commercial methods to the exhibition and sale of contemporary art. Around 1854 he established a gallery at 120–121 Pall Mall, London, one of Britain's earliest permanent commercial galleries devoted to the sale of contemporary art. His first exhibition was the bronzes of Pierre-Jules Mène, sculptor of animals. In time, his exhibitions, often featuring French artists, became known as the French Gallery and an exhibition at the gallery was regarded as commercially valuable. The gallery exhibited annual displays of French painting alongside exhibitions of British artists, helping introduce Continental art to Victorian audiences at a time when the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition still dominated the London exhibition calendar. He later transferred his business to King Street, St James's. He alternated works for sale by British artists and Continental European ones such as Paul Delaroche and Rosa Bonheur in two annual events, the Winter Exhibition of British artists and the Spring Exhibition of French and Continental artists. The French Gallery quickly became the principal vehicle through which Gambart promoted the artists he represented.
He was among the first to sell art in this way; prior to his galleries, most fine art was sold by the artist directly to the buyer, who was often a patron. His friendship with many of the artists and buyers, including pen-maker and well-known patron Joseph Gillott, as well as with critics, would become a model for how the art business would be run in the future. He ensured his exhibition premises carried an air of luxury and privilege, and charged entrance fees in order to maintain a level of exclusivity. He strove for a cosmopolitan appeal and balanced private, commercial interests with public values, such as education and the elevation of taste through international collaboration.
He helped to establish the reputation of some of the artists; for example, in 1855 he brought Rosa Bonheur to England with her monumental painting, The Horse Fair, which he bought for forty thousand francs so that he could display the painting at the French Gallery. Through this exhibition, Bonheur's work was recognised by several English critics, such as William Michael Rossetti who commented on it positively, and the painting was shown to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle in a private audience. For the same visit, he arranged a stay in Scotland where Bonheur made sketches for later works. He published many of her paintings as steel engraved reproductions. Through his efforts, Bonheur became better known in England than her native France, and one of the most successful artists he represented.
Having established Bonheur's reputation in Britain during the 1850s, he repeated many of the same promotional techniques with younger Continental artists during the following decade, most notably the Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who first met Gambart in 1864. Gambart was impressed by the young man's work, and arranged an exhibition in London in 1865 and promoted his work while the artist remained in Belgium. Alma-Tadema moved permanently to London in 1870. According to Gambart's biographer Jeremy Maas, "Gambart found a painter who was tailor-made to his requirements... Alma-Tadema was Gambart's greatest creation." E. Gambart & Co. and its successor firm Pilgeram & Lefèvre, established by Gambart with his nephew, commissioned a total of 72 paintings from Alma-Tadema, at least 19 of which were reproduced.
According to Alma-Tadema's biographer Vern Grosvenor Swanson, "With offices in several European capitals, and headquarters in London, Gambart's power and influence were considerable. Wherever he went, the whisper 'Gambart is here' would be heard in artistic circles, and every opportunity and subterfuge used by painters to induce him to visit their studios." He was among the top three dealers in London at a time when art was in high demand, his challengers being Agnew's, and P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., and was nicknamed "the Prince of Victorian Art". In the following decades, other dealers emulated Gambart and named their galleries after specific national schools, regularly promoting artists from them, including the German Gallery, the Belgian Gallery, the Dutch Gallery, the Continental Gallery, and the Japanese Gallery.
Business methods and innovations Gambart introduced commercial practices that became standard in the international art market. He negotiated exclusive contracts, controlled copyright and reproduction rights, staged single-artist exhibitions, cultivated critics and collectors, and combined the sale of original paintings with engraved reproductions aimed at a much wider public. His combination of copyright ownership, international distribution and carefully managed publicity became an influential model for later art dealers.
Rather than depending solely upon aristocratic patronage, he marketed artists to an expanding middle-class audience through exhibitions, illustrated catalogues and subscription prints. These innovations substantially increased both artists' incomes and the commercial value of their work.
He worked with some of the finest engravers and technicians of his day, such as Charles George Lewis, to create works as close to the artist's intent as possible in a black and white medium. He also later employed colour lithography. His attention to quality paid off both in the arrangements he maintained with leading artists and also in sales. Among his best selling reproductions were William Holman Hunt's The Light of the World (1853), an inspiring and highly influential image of Christ, and William Powell Frith's The Derby Day (1858).
Art historian Pamela Fletcher argues that Gambart transformed the relationship between artists, dealers and collectors by creating an exhibition space in which dealers, rather than artists or academies, controlled the presentation and marketing of contemporary art.
Artistic copyright