British Painting Research Articles

British painting: the golden age from Hogarth to Turner

Introduction - painting and the Hanoverian era. Part 1 Portraiture and society: portraying society - Hogarth's modern moralities the portrait business conversations the grand portrait. Part 2 High art and high life: the Academy the tragedy of British history painting vision from caricature to cartoon. Part 3 Low art and low life: everyday art animals the other traditions the nature of landscape travel and topography arcadias landscape and history the case of late Turner.

Cultural Politics, Colonial Crisis, and Ancient Metaphor in John Singleton Copley's "Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard"

John Singleton Copley's Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard is usually explored in terms of the artist's experimentation with the grand tour portrait and his transformation from a colonial to an English painter. This essay recontextualizes the portrait by exploring its deviation from the grand tour portrait format, Ralph Izard's political views, and the contemporary symbolism of the objects represented. The unusual collection of antiquities assembled for the portrait points to an embedded political subtext that presents the choice faced by American colonists as the political crisis deepened in 1775 - continued loyalty to the mother country despite rising tyranny or a declaration of independence.

Je-sais-quoi : la représentation des formes du vivant dans l'œuvre de William Hogarth

Frédéric Ogée : Je-sais-quoi. The representation of forms of life in the works of William Hogarth. The rise of English painting and, more widely, of a visual culture in 18th-century Britain, is a remarkable manifestation of the new epistemology which, under the influence of Locke, Newton and the natural philosophers of the Royal Society, transformed the way the British perceived nature. The painter and engraver William Hogarth played a crucial role in this (re)volution. His works can be read as examples of the new 'observational' attitude, of the 'modern' modes of representation of natural phenomena. One of his most original characteristics — from which both his success and his difficulties with academic orthodoxy derived — was the attention he paid to the variety of forms of life and the way he incorporated and played upon the irregular, the proliferating and the disorderly in nature. Both instinctively and culturally empirical, he devised an aesthetics that could account for evolution and accumulation, and new forms of representation of reality which daringly describe examples of proliferation and de-composition, turning his pictures into tangible visual experiments.

This other Eden: paintings from the Yale Center for British Art

In 1966, American collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon presented to Yale University a collection of British paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints and rare books, thus founding the Yale Center for British Art. This is an expanded catalogue for an exhibition touring Australia in 1998.

Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, and: The Victorians: British Painting 1837-1901 by Malcolm Warner (review)

Reviews207 Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists. Manchester City Art Galleries, 1997. Malcolm Warner. The Victorians: British Painting 1837-1901. National Gallery of Art, 1997. In his introduction to the National Gallery catalogue, Malcolm Warner positions himself in opposition to much of the recent scholarship in the field of Victorian art history, taking issue with what he sees as the recent tendency to "assign to pictures that illustrate painters' lives, facts of social life, or aspects of popular taste an importance out of scale to their quality" (14). A disregard for "quality" is Warner's chief gripe. According to him, art historians have been reluctant "to engage directly in the interpretation and criticism ofVictorian paintings as works ofart" and have held on "to solid biographical and sociological justifications for their interest" (my italics) (14). A few sentences later, Warner takes a more direct shot at those scholars with whom he has a problem, "feminist scholars and historians of die wider visual culture" he writes, "have singled out artists and pictures on grounds other than artistic ones, many of them regarding die whole notion of quality in art with distaste" (14). In contrast, Warner contends (radier disingenuously it seems), that unlike other scholars in the field, die curators for the National gallery exhibition (including himself) "did not approach the task from any particular theoretical or thematic angle" (14). Their goal, he claims, was only "high artistic quality," and the desire "to represent Victorian painting by its greatest works" (14), although he is at pains to define exactly what he means by this. Leaving aside the issue of quality (which I don't have space to debate here), and the problem of fitting Victorian painting (with its emphasis on narrative and sentiment) into modernism's definition of quality, I fail to see how Warner's selection was chosen with distinctly different criteria than those used by many other scholars in the field. The usual artists make their appearance, including those that have always been in the canon, like Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Turner, and Whistler; but so do other artists who have been resurrected by revisionist art history, like William Powell Frith and William Maw Egley. What Warner is really disturbed about is, of course, die effect of feminist interventions in the discipline of art history over the last twenty-five years. These interventions have precisely attempted to shift die objectives of the discipline away from die study of beautiful objects which reveal (male) genius to the study of (among otiier things) the ideological work performed by artistic production and by the discipline of art history itself. In die field of Victorian art history, feminist art 208Victorian Review historians have been especially active. In the past ten years or so scholars such as Deborah Cherry, Lynda Nead, Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Jan Marsh, Griselda Pollock, and Susan Casteras (among others) have changed (or so we thought) the face of Victorian art history. The feminist interventions in art history have, however, not reached the highest echelons of our cultural institutions, institutions like the National Gallery. The upshot of Warner's "non-theoretical" position is the near total absence of women artists from the exhibition (only one woman is included, Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler) and the conspicuous absence of the influence of feminist scholarship from the introduction and catalogue entries. Susan Casteras's influential and ground-breaking exhibition and catalogue, The Substance or the Shadow: Images of Victorian Womanhood (1982), for example, is omitted from the survey of American exhibitions of Victorian art that Warner outlines in his introduction. The National Gallery catalogue entries (by Warner, Anne Helmreich and Charles Brock), while thorough and useful in their way, don't address some important issues which have been raised by some of the foremost scholars in the field. Take, for example, the entry by Warner on William Holman Hunt's famous painting The Awakening Conscience which presents a "kept woman" who recognizes the sinfulness of her position when her lover plays a song to her on the piano that reminds her of her childhood. Warner writes simply that the image is indebted to Dickens and other Victorian writers "in its frank, sympathetic...

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century

Reviewed by: The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century Heather Mcpherson John Brewer. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. Pp. xxx + 721; 229 black and white illus.; 12 color plates. $40.00. The Pleasures of the Imagination remaps the cultural topography of England by situating the visual and performing arts and print culture at the center rather than the periphery of eighteenth-century experience. Brewer argues persuasively that the modern notion of high culture was an eighteenth-century invention that brought about profound transformations in attitudes, ideas, markets, and institutions (xv–xix). Brewer’s encyclopedic but extremely readable account of eighteenth-century cultural life focuses on the broader historical processes through which the arts were commercialized and consumed by a rapidly expanding urban populace. The seven thematic sections of this generously illustrated book explore different aspects of cultural production from the Georgian stage to book illustration. Brewer is particularly concerned with the role culture played in affirming British identity throughout the eighteenth century. Although scholars in particular disciplines may quibble with Brewer’s inclusions or exclusions, this important book provides a new road map for surveying eighteenth-century culture and synthesizes an amazing amount of recent scholarship into a compelling historical narrative. [End Page 541] The opening section traces the diminishing role of the monarchy as patrons and arbiters of taste and the emergence of London as cultural and commercial capital. Coffeehouses, taverns, and clubs became communities of taste and knowledge that helped shape artistic and literary culture. As Brewer tellingly points out, Handel’s famous Music for the Royal Fireworks, commissioned to commemorate the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1749, was first performed at Vauxhall several days before the official ceremony. The diary of Anna Larpent, a voracious reader who frequented the theater, concert halls, and Royal Academy exhibitions, testifies to the richness and diversity of cultural offerings. Although women played an increasingly prominent cultural role, there was considerable ambivalence about professional women and the feminization of British culture, reflecting patriotic sentiments and Franco-British rivalries. As culture became financially accessible to a broader cultivated public, competing discourses about taste evolved and the ideal of politeness gave way to sensibility. Part 2 examines the literary marketplace and the reading public. Brewer documents the commercialization of the publishing industry in which copyrights and patents became salable commodities and the periodical press generated a republic of struggling authors. Moreover, with the explosion of print culture and the establishment of circulating libraries and book clubs, books became available to a vastly expanded public including women. Literary culture was also transformed by new preoccupations with originality and the personality of the author exemplified by the career of Johnson. Part 3 examines the art market and the academy, connoisseurship and collecting, and artistic practice. These chapters provide a useful summary of recent art historical scholarship and rehearse the complex relationship between the expanding art market and the Royal Academy and the gap between artistic theory and practice. Long disadvantaged by the preeminence of foreign artists and inadequate training, British painters gained new status with the establishment of the Royal Academy and public exhibitions. Despite attempts to elevate public taste and promote history painting, portraiture remained the dominant mode of artistic production and artists vied with connoisseurs to shape public taste. Although Sir Joshua Reynolds triumphed as an exemplary modern painter and theoretician, less fortunate academicians, such as the miniaturist Ozias Humphrey, foundered in the increasingly competitive London art market. One of the book’s strengths is Brewer’s integration of the performing arts too frequently marginalized in discussions of verbal and visual culture. Part 4 considers the public (and patriotic) dimensions of the Georgian stage and the rise of the concert hall. The eighteenth-century public became increasingly fascinated by theatrical biography and individual interpretations of famous roles that spawned the cult of the actor. The famous tragedienne Sarah Siddons, who was patronized by the royal family, appeared in 1789 at St. Paul’s as Britannia to celebrate the king’s recovery from madness. From mid-century the dramatic repertory was realigned with Shakespeare occupying an increasingly prominent...

Fatum as Theme and Method in the Work of Francis Bacon

The paintings of Francis Bacon embody his passionate and determined challenge of in its various guises. His marked fascination for Aeschylus' Orestes or Christ rests with their having questioned fate, while the Eumenides or Furies of Greek mythology, first presented in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of Crucifixion (1944), became a leitmotif in the English painter's work. Even the manner in which Bacon approached the canvas was described by him as a struggle between the artist's will and the inevitability of the paint. But what is fate for many of us Bacon preferred to call chance or accident. The distinction for him rested with the artificial explanations or beliefs we impose upon life. Bacon attacked these relentlessly because they engender an unquestioning and destructive acceptance of the vagaries of life, or, simply put, they result in a fantastic approach to life.

Methods and materials of the Pre-Raphaelite circle in the 1850s

This paper combines the results of technical analysis on four paintings by English Pre-Raphaelite painters, executed between 1852 and 1857, with documentary evidence concerning the working lives and methods of the artists. It examines their manner of handling materials, which was designed both to imitate past painters and to be innovative. Looking at Millais and his followers in particular, this account focuses on their distinctive use of grounds and pigments, discusses the interpretation of technical data, and explores the circumstances which inspired these techniques.

The Thornham Parva retable: workshop practice in fourteenth-century English panel painting

The Thornham Parva Retable was made in England c. 1330-40, originally forming a larger altarpiece with the Musée de Cluny Frontal. Technical examination of the Retable provides an insight into the production of a major commission, where so little comparative material survives. This paper provides an overview of the materials and techniques used in the making of the Retable, including the construction of the wooden support, the preparatory layers and design of the figures, the methods of gilding and tin relief decoration and the execution of the paint layers. It also explores questions of workshop organization.

Late mediaeval wall painting techniques at Farleigh Hungerford Castle and their context

Little systematic analysis has been undertaken of late mediaeval wall painting in England, but the early fifteenth-century paintings at Farleigh Hungerford have recently been subjected to detailed examination. Despite previous invasive conservation treatments, this revealed a highly sophisticated use of translucent glazes over gold and silver leaf, a wide range of pigments including orpiment and lead-tin yellow, and oil as a medium. These materials, the techniques of their application and aspects of their alteration in situ are considered within the context of other English wall painting of the period, as well as the sophistication of the scheme attributed to the patronage of Sir Walter Hungerford.

The Elizabethan wall paintings of Hill Hall: influences and techniques

Executed c. 1570 for Sir Thomas Smith, Queen Elizabeth I's ambassador to Paris, the wall paintings of Hill Hall are among the finest of their period. Including both biblical and classical themes, the paintings are based on a series of Italian engravings and Flemish woodcuts. While European architectural influence of this period is well known, the response of English wall paintings to influences from the continent has been less widely examined. Since 1994, the paintings at Hill Hall have been the subject of an extensive programme of investigation and analysis. Detailed examination of the original materials and painting techniques has shed considerable light on the little-known field of wall painting practice of this period. In addition, comparison of the print sources with both the underdrawing and the finished paintings reveals the adaptations made for a different medium and a different culture.

Stubbs' seeing

The English painter George Stubbs, best known for his pictures of horses, was recognized in his own lifetime for the anatomical exactitude of his work. His reputation led him into the debates about creation and extinction.

The idea of the English landscape painter: genius as alibi in the early nineteenth century

The idea of the English landscape painter: genius as alibi in the early nineteenth century

Forging the dusk of chaos: the modernity of Mina Loy

On Mina Loy Ellen Keck Stauder Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Carolyn Burke. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. Pp. 494. $35.00 The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger Conover. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. Pp. 236. $22.00 For students of modernism, Mina Loy poses, and always has posed, a dilemma of placement on the cultural map. The dilemma is a little like what Alfred Barr must have faced in the case of Brancusi when he made his now infamous chart of cubism and abstract art for the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. 1 Barr found a place for all of the twentieth century artists under the banners of an “-ism,” all that is, except Brancusi, who alone was represented by his name, apparently inassimilable to any other category. As Barr wrote, “Brancusi stands apart. He is the most original and the most important of the near-abstract sculptors but he has never belonged to any group” (116). The same might be said of Loy’s status and her relationships to artistic movements, though with the one caveat that she seems to have been associated with nearly all of the significant art or literary movements of the modernist period—associated with but not defined by these movements. The similarity between Loy and Brancusi is more than skin deep and more than a matter of critical reception, as her remarkable testimonial poem, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” published in the famous “Waste Land” edition of the Dial in November 1922, demonstrates. However, in contrast to Brancusi, whose works are widely known and around whom a considerable body of scholarship exists, Loy’s visibility on the cultural horizon has been eclipsed. While she once was, as Roger Conover puts it, “the Belle of the American Poetry Ball” (xi), she now is nearly forgotten. In 1917, shortly after she arrived in America, Loy was selected as the archetype of the “modern woman” by the New York Evening Sun (Burke 224), yet Loy’s poetry has been out of print for a number of years, she is almost never anthologized and is rarely mentioned in histories of modernism. In addition, her art [End Page 141] has all but disappeared and what remains is nearly all in private hands. Until now there has been no biography and only the beginnings of a body of criticism. Even Loy’s name is not unambiguously known. In my experience, it is not uncommon for people in conversation to ask if I mean Myrna rather than Mina Loy. One of the wonderful revelations of Carolyn Burke’s biography is to discover that there may in fact be a connection between these two renowned beauties. Contrary to what fame might make one expect, influence in this case ran from poetry to popular culture rather than the reverse. The Hollywood actress reportedly took Loy’s name as her own at the suggestion of a “‘wild Russian writer of free verse,’ who surely knew Mina’s reputation” (Burke vi). With the publication of Carolyn Burke’s Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy and Roger Conover’s edition of her poems, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, this situation of neglect and confusion will change dramatically. These two excellent volumes give us both the life and the work; together they will allow critical attention to be directed not simply at recovery but at evaluation. It has long been possible to construct the basic outlines of Loy’s life. She is frequently mentioned in period memoirs and Conover’s earlier edition of her poetry, The Last Lunar Baedeker (Highland Fields, NJ: Jargon Society, 1982) has extensive biographical notes. From these sources one can muster a thumbnail sketch and many tantalizing details of her remarkable life. She was born Mina Lowy in 1882 in England to an English Protestant mother and a Hungarian Jewish father. Against her mother’s wishes, she was allowed to study art first in England and then in Munich and Paris. Loy married the English painter and photographer, Stephen Haweis, in 1903, living with him first in Paris and later in Florence. Together they were active in avant-garde art circles, especially the Salon d’Automne, to which...

From Dionysus to ‘Dionea’: Vernon Lee's portraits

Perhaps the portrait has always had a special relationship with death. As an absent presence, a shadow that lingers after the sitter is gone, the portrait is fated to become a deathmask when the subject is no more. Representation preserves the dead who defy the ravages of the grave, but it also prematurely mortifies the living. From the moment of depiction, the portrait is a memento mori reminding its beholders of the subject's inevitable submission to change and decay. Encrypted into the portrait, death waits for its own eventuality — an occurrence that makes a likeness into a monument. Bodily likenesses and simulacra have always had a disquietening power. The art historian Ewa Kuryluk writes: ‘In ancient India and Greece, contemplating one's reflection was considered perilous. Dreaming of one's reflection foreshadowed death to the Greeks’.1 A related fear survives in those cultures where to be filmed or photographed is to risk the appropriation of one's soul. Portraiture as resemblance, a form of doubling in which one glimpses one's death mask, connects with the idea of the doppelganger or double, and the notion that to see or meet one's double is to presage or encounter death. In nineteenth-century literature and in particular the literature of the fin de siecle, the connections between the portrait, the double and death become acute. A host of texts including Dante Gabriel Rossetti's ‘St. Agnes of Intercession’, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Vernon Lee's ‘Oke of Okehurst’ and Henry James' The Wings of the Dove feature painted likenesses that anticipate death or destruction. In the first of these, ‘St. Agnes of Intercession’, Rossetti's hero is an English painter who, while visiting a gallery at Perugia in Italy, discovers that the painting he had made of his fiancee is the exact likeness of one made by Bucciuolo Angiolieri of his betrothed some 400 years before. Furthermore, on reading the gallery guide, the painter discovers that the portrait is itself a literal deathmask. Stricken by a fatal illness, Bucciuolo's betrothed had requested that he should paint her portrait before she died:

The Victorians: British painting, 1837-1901

The Victorians: British painting, 1837-1901

French and British paintings from 1600 to 1800 in the Art Institute of Chicago: a catalogue of the collection

The second in a series of scholarly catalogs on the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, this volume focuses on the museum's important holdings of French and British paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The catalog contains comprehensive entries on close to one hundred paintings, representing the full range of artistic production (portraiture, landscape, still life, genre, and history painting) in France and Britain during this period. Featured are major works by some of the most significant artists of the time: Jacques Louis David, Jean Honore Fragonard, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Jean Antoine Watteau among the French; Henry Fuseli, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Benjamin West among the British. Each painting in the catalog is accompanied by complete and up-to-date documentation, including a detailed description of physical condition, a fully documented provenance, and a critical discussion of attribution, date, subject, and function, as well as a summary of earlier scholarship. Many of these works are little published and some are published here for the first time. Forty-one works are reproduced in color, the rest in duotone; there are also 101 comparative illustrations.

Asthma in the Life of a Modern British Painter, Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

The case of the recently deceased British painter Francis Bacon may be added to the series of articles (1-4) that illustrate how asthma can relate to artistic creativity, while adding its burden to the many turmoils and adversities of a negative “quality of life” (5). Francis Bacon, considered “one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century” (6), was born in 1909 in Ireland, of English parents. His father was an army officer with a passion for horses and hunting and a disdain for illness and physical weakness. When his son developed asthma at a very young age, the captain not only resented it, but intentionally challenged the little boy with activities that aggravated his breathing problem. A move to London when Francis was 5 years old kept him for a while away from the animals to which he was evidently allergic. His biographer (5) provided interesting details about asthma.

Body colour: The misuse of mummy

Abstract Mummy, or Egyptian Brown, was manufactured from the embalmed bodies of ancient Egyptians, and can be seen in the context of a range of resinous, transparent brown pigments popular in British painting in the mid‐eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its use was encouraged by the belief that it contained bitumen, an assumption apparently based on the earlier use of both bitumen and mummy as a drug. In the course of at least three hundred years of trade, an unrecorded number of archaeological objects was destroyed in order to make pigment. Its ethical and technical unsuitability as a raw material for paint was ignored by artists and colourmen alike until its use appears to have died out at the start of the twentieth century.

Actaeon's Sin: The "Previous Iconography" of Fowles's "The Ebony Tower"

through the limitations of his treatment of women (Cooper viii). However, I find the title story more interesting than most critiques have, not because Fowles said that it demystified Magus (Salami 136), but because he did not say how it mystifies the reader. In The Ebony Tower, David Williams, a young English painter, art teacher, and critic, goes to hunt down Henry Breasley, an aging expatriate artist living at Coetminais in Brittany, on behalf of a London publisher doing a book on his work. In the end, however, it is Williams who is brought to bay, shocked from his habitual complacency by the encounter with Breasley and two young Englishwomen attending him; the assignment turns into an appalling revelation of his shortcomings as an artist and a man.