Based on meticulous archival research, Dennis M. Read's study offers the most accurate and thorough account to date of the engraver, editor, and arts enthusiast R. H. Cromek. Though he is best known today as William Blake's nemesis, Cromek made significant contributions to the vitality of the arts in nineteenth-century Britain. Read traces Cromek's early years as an accomplished engraver, his collaborations and falling out with Blake, and his editing and publishing ventures, showing him to be a pioneer who recognized the opportunities of the emerging market economy. Read's descriptions of Cromek's disastrous associations with the Chalcographic Society, his publication of Robert Burns's unpublished works, and his duping by the perpetrator of a literary hoax make for fascinating reading and tell us much about the commercial art and publishing scenes in England and Scotland. Perhaps most important, Read salvages Cromek's reputation as an unscrupulous exploiter of Blake and others. A fuller and more balanced portrait emerges that shows Cromek's efforts to bring the arts to emerging cities of the midlands and beyond, describes his friendships and associations with luminaries of the fine arts and literature such as Leigh Hunt and Benjamin West, and challenges more biased reports of his successes and failures as an entrepreneur.

Through his intense vision Van Gogh was able to create paintings that speak directly to us all, and today this disturbed and rejected misfit is the most universally loved of all artists. The story of his thirty seven years of poverty, loneliness and failure is in fact a triumphant saga of absolute dedication and the final realization of genius. This extravagantly illustrated volume in the hugely popular New Horizons series, includes the story of his life; his relationships with his brother Theo and contemporaries such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and Gauguin; his descent into madness and his eventual suicide. As well as the many reproductions of paintings and drawings by Van Gogh and his contemporaries, extensive documentary evidence includes extracts from his letters, critical writings and documentary photographs.

Blake engaged with the legacy of Milton all his life. These watercolours, made around 1816-20 to illustrate the most perfect of Milton's shorter poems, are some of the finest of all his works. All 12 watercolours are reproduced here actual size.

Mary Greensted tells the story of the birth and development of the Arts and Craft movement in Britain with the help of numerous illustrations showing the buildings, furniture, metalwork, and the people who influenced it. The movement was concerned with the revival of traditional crafts, and a return to the vernacular, and it had socialist ideals at its heart. This movement, which flourished in the early twentieth century, has not only bequeathed us with a wealth of fine objects and buildings, but also a way of thinking about life and craft that continues to influence many today.
Contains information on dozens of designers, artists, architects and thinkers, including:
William Morris
CFA Voysey
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
AH Mackmurdo
CR Ashbee
Ernest Gimson

French Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-80 investigates the role played by the trope of the 'strong woman, fallen man' in re-establishing morale among the French people following the Franco-Prussian War. The study explores how certain French sculptors - including Falguiere, Mercie, Barrias, and Rodin - presented this recent history of defeat in commemorative monuments that increasingly dominated public space across France during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Though it focuses on French nationalism and the commemoration of war (or, as is the case with the French following the Franco-Prussian War, the commemoration of defeat), this volume also examines shifts in gender roles in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the impact of military defeat on relations between the sexes. The book probes the aesthetic discourse of the period concerning the merits of traditional allegorical sculpture versus new-fangled realist sculpture in depicting modern life. Drawing on extensive archival research, Michael Dorsch gives a voice to the sculptures he discusses, restoring these often ignored works to their proper place in history.

The Orientalism debate, inspired by the work of Edward Said, has been a major source of cross-disciplinary controversy in recent years. John MacKenzie offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this vast literature of Orientalism and brings to the subject highly original historical perspectives. The study provides the first major discussion of Orientalism by a historian of imperialism. Setting the analysis within the context of conflicting scholarly interpretations, John MacKenzie then carries the discussion into wholly new areas, testing the notion that the western arts received genuine inspiration from the East by examining the visual arts, architecture, design, music and theatre. John MacKenzie concludes that western approaches to the Orient have been much more ambiguous and genuinely interactive then Said allowed. The artistic construction of the East by the West has invariably been achieved through a greater spirit of respect and in search of a truly syncretic culture. The Orient has indeed proved an inspiration to the European arts, even when caught in the web of imperial power relations. -- .

The composition of aesthetic beauty and its necessary correlation with the counterparts of ugliness and monstrosity have been the primary concerns of artists and philosophers through the ages. This collection of articles, selected from the proceedings of a conference on the theme of The Beautiful and the Monstrous that took place at Cambridge University in April 2008, seeks to reassess conceptualizations and representations of beauty and monstrosity and offers a timely critical evaluation of the relationship between the two. By means of a variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies, the authors provide rigorous analyses of philosophical and artistic expression from medieval to contemporary literature, thought and culture from France and across the French-speaking world. Throughout, they seek to challenge traditional approaches by addressing a diverse range of questions that relate to the beautiful and the monstrous: from formal, metaphysical and ethical considerations of aesthetics, to the threat of the monstrous in realms of psychoanalysis and politics; from figures of beauty and monstrosity as prescriptive social and identitarian categories, to transformations and metamorphoses which challenge the boundaries between human and monstrous other. Engaging with discourses on aesthetics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, psychoanalysis, feminism and postcolonialism, and discussing a spectrum of figures from angels to zombies, this collection offers a fresh range of perspectives on a fundamental transgeneric and transdisciplinary topic.

'To critics who said that the full-lipped so-called 'Beardsley mouth', which adorned many of his women, was 'inexpressive and ugly', the artist countered, 'Well, let them criticise. It's my mouth and not theirs. I like big mouths. People like the little mouth - the "Dolly Varden" mouth, if that describes it better. A big mouth is the sign of character and strength. Look at Ellen Terry with her great, strong mouth. In fact, I haven't any patience with small-mouthed people.' 'The popular idea of a picture is something told in oil or writ in water to be hung on a room's wall or in a picture gallery to perplex an artless public.' 'To my mind, there is nothing so depressing as a Gothic cathedral. I hate to have the sun shut out by the saints.' 'What a nice ample creature George Sand is: like a wonderful old cow with all her calves.' And other witty, urbane insights on life, art, and culture, illustrated with selected drawings from his Grotesques series.

Varied and deliberately diverse, this group of essays provides a reassessment of the life and work of the popular nineteenth-century artist Samuel Palmer. While scholarly publications have been published recently which reassess Palmer's achievement, those works primarily consider the artist in isolation. This volume examines his work in relation to a wider art world and analyses areas of his life and output that have until now received little attention, reinstating the study of Palmer's work within broader debates about landscape and cultural history. In Samuel Palmer Revisited, the contributors provide a fresh perspective on Palmer's work, its context and its influence.

This edited collection explores the intersection of historical studies and the artistic representation of the past in the long nineteenth century. The case studies provide not just an account of the pursuit of history in art within Western Europe but also examples from beyond that sphere. These cover canonical and conventional examples of history painting as well as more inclusive, 'popular' and vernacular visual cultural phenomena. General themes explored include the problematics internal to the theory and practice of academic history painting and historical genre painting, including compositional devices and the authenticity of artefacts depicted; relationships of power and purpose in historical art; the use of historical art for alternative Liberal and authoritarian ideals; the international cross-fertilisation of ideas about historical art; and exploration of the diverse influences of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the histories of nineteenth-century art and culture.

An interdisciplinary examination of nineteenth-century French art pertaining to religion, exile, and the nation's demise as a world power, this study concerns the consequences for visual culture of a series of national crises-from the assault on Catholicism and the flight of emigres during the Revolution of 1789, to the collapse of the Empire and the dashing of hope raised by the Revolution of 1830. The central claim is that imaginative response to these politically charged experiences of loss constitutes a major shaping force in French Romantic art, and that pursuit of this theme in light of parallel developments in literature and political debate reveals a pattern of disenchantment transmuted into cultural capital. Focusing on imagery that spoke to loss through visual and verbal idioms particular to France in the aftermath of the Revolution and Empire, the book illuminates canonical works by major figures such as Eugene Delacroix, Theodore Chasseriau, and Camille Corot, as well as long-forgotten images freighted with significance for nineteenth-century viewers. A study in national bereavement-an urgent theme in the present moment-the book provides a new lens through which to view the coincidence of imagination and strife at the heart of French Romanticism. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, French literature, French history, French politics, and religious studies.

Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking marks the first sustained study of pendant paintings: discrete images designed as a pair. It opens with a broad overview that anchors the form in the medieval diptych, religious history, and aesthetic theory and explores its cultural and historical resonance in the 19th-century United States. Three case studies examine how antebellum American artists used the pendant format in ways revelatory of their historical moment and the aesthetic and cultural developments in which they partook. The case studies on John Quidor's Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839) and The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849) and Thomas Cole's Departure and Return (1837) shed new light on canonical antebellum American artists and their practices. The chapter on Titian Ramsay Peale's Kilauea by Day and Kilauea by Night (1842) presents new material that pushes the geographical boundaries of American art studies toward the Pacific Rim. The book contributes to American art history the study of a characteristic but as yet overlooked format and models for the discipline a new and productive framework of analysis focused on the fundamental yet complex way images work back and forth with one another.

By the time of his death in 1904, critics, arts reformers, and government officials were near universal in their praise of Art Nouveau designer Emile Galle (1846-1904), whose works they described as the essence of French design. Many even went so far as to argue that the artist's creations could reinvigorate France's fading arts industries and help restore its economic prosperity by defining a modern style to represent the nation. For fin-de-siecle viewers, Galle's works constituted powerful reflections on the idea of national belonging, modernity, and the role of the arts in political engagement. While existing scholarship has largely focused on the artist's innovative technical processes, a close analysis of Galle's works brings to light the surprisingly complex ways in which his fragile creations were imbricated in the political turmoil that characterized fin-de-siecle France. Examining Galle's works inspired by Japanese art, his patriotically inflected designs for the Universal Exposition of 1889, his artistic manifesto in support of Dreyfus created in 1900, and finally, his late works that explore the concept of evolution, this book reveals how Galle returns again and again to the question of national identity as the central issue in his work.

The World Created in the Image of Man investigates the development of the third dimension in painting from the dramatic moment when spatial construction becomes charged with an external force antagonistic to the effort of forms, or human figures, to preserve their permanence. The competitive contact between the external and internal worlds represented in the picture brings a vital element to the unfolding of art as it occurs in both the West and the East. As the analysis of masterpieces from different historical periods and cultures demonstrates here, this vital impulse becomes a necessary part of pictorial composition and the measure of the quality of the work of art. It can reveal itself in a limitless and disparate variety of subject matter: a scene from Japanese court life, as depicted in the illustrations of the early twelfth century to the novel The Tale of Genji; a representation of the maternal feeling of the Virgin anticipating the fate of her child in Byzantine icon painting; Raphael's "universal interior" in The School of Athens; Rembrandt's allegory of historic continuity in Aristotle with the Bust of Homer. The progression of this dynamic eventually leads to the surrender of form to space with the Impressionists; and to the conclusion of the book, which considers Postmodern art in the form of the installation, where the emphasis is put on the unprecedented role of the viewer as a component of the work, and which suggests an environment that is totally alien, or even hostile to him. Art historians, students of art history and the educated general reader with an interest in painting will find this book a rewarding and stimulating read.

Kandinsky's theory of art has usually been treated as little more than a guide to help our understanding of his paintings. In contrast, this book attends primarily to the artist's writings on art; thus his art theory is treated on its own terms. Drawing on the diverse literature that has been written on Kandinsky's art and theory, the author demonstrates that while many different perspectives on his work have been identified, none holds the 'key' to that work. Instead, the book shows Kandinsky's method in his writings to be highly eclectic, resulting in an exciting and challenging variety of content (a description that also applies, as a postscript to the book shows, to his method in painting). Kandinsky, however, transcended this diversity and consistently sought evidence of the unity of all things: something that would be realised through his understanding of the term 'synthesis'. The book follows Kandinsky's fascinating attempts to establish synthesis (not only in art but also in other disciplines including science, mathematics, law and politics) in his key theoretical publications: On the Spiritual in Art (1911) and Point and Line to Plane (1926). The result is a new and innovative understanding of both Kandinsky's art theory and his art.

Originally published in 2004. Once the most popular Victorian artist, G. F. Watts was also a complex and elusive figure. Influenced by evolutionary theory, he reinterpreted the tradition of the classical body, while his philanthropic and educational interests informed projects for a more affective public art. This book is the first modern account of the full range of Watts's different artistic interests and practices. Offering fresh approaches to his historical, allegorical and mythological paintings, it also traces his increasingly radical approach to portraiture and sculpture and examines the institutional and biographical factors behind his immense public profile. Together the essays present a comprehensive analysis of Watts's work and his vital relationship to the intellectual, cultural and social forces of his time.

Should sight trump the other four senses when experiencing and evaluating art? Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present questions whether the authority of the visual in 'visual culture' should be deconstructed, and focuses on the roles of touch, taste, smell, and sound in the materiality of works of art. From the nineteenth century onward, notions of synaesthesia and the multi-sensorial were important to a series of art movements from Symbolism to Futurism and Installations. The essays in this collection evaluate works of art at specific moments in their history, and consider how senses other than the visual have (or have not) affected the works' meaning. The result is a re-evaluation of sensory knowledge and experience in the arts, encouraging a new level of engagement with ideas of style and form.

Maria Spilsbury Taylor (1776-1820) lived and worked in London and Ireland and was patronized by the Prince Regent. A painter of portraits, genre scenes, biblical subjects and large crowd compositions - an unusual feature in women's art of this period - she is represented in major museums and art galleries as well as in numerous private collections. Her work, hitherto considered on a purely decorative level, merits closer attention. For the first time, this volume argues the relevance of Spilsbury's religious background, and in particular her evangelical and Moravian connections, to the interpretation of her art and examines her pervasive, and often inovert references to the Bible, hymnody and religious writing. The art that emerges is distinctly Protestant and evangelical, offering a vivid illustration of the mood of patriotic, Protestant fervour that characterized the quarter century succeeding the French revolution. This focus may be situated in the general context of increasing interest in the religious faith of historical actors - men and women - in the eighteenth century, and in the related contexts of growing acknowledgement of a religious aspect to "enlightenment" art, as well as investigations into Protestant culture in Ireland. The book is extensively illustrated and contains a list of all of Spilsbury's known works.

Memory has always been crucial to French literature and culture as a means of mediating the relationship between perception and knowledge of the individual coming to terms with his identity in time. Relatively recently, memory has also emerged as the key force in the creation of a collective consciousness in the wider perspective of French cultural history. This collection of essays, selected from the proceedings of a seminar on 'Memory' given by Dr Emma Wilson at the University of Cambridge, offers a fresh evaluation of memory as both a cultural and an individual phenomenon in modern and contemporary French culture, including literature, cinema and the visual arts. 'Anamnesia', the book's title, develops the Aristotelian concept of anamnesis: recollection as a dynamic and creative process, which includes forgetting as much as remembering, concealment as much as imagination. Memory in this extremely diverse range of essays is therefore far from being presented as a straightforward process of recalling the past, but emerges as the site of research and renegotiation, of contradictions and even aporia.

How do objects 'speak' to us? What happens to authorship when voice is projected into inanimate objects? How can one articulate an object into speech? Is the inarticulate body necessarily silent? These are just some of the questions brought up by this unique and unusual collection of essays, which presents subjects and categories often overlooked by the disciplines of art history, visual culture, theatre history and comparative literature. Drawing from and expanding upon the 'Performing Objects, Animating Images' academic session run by the Henry Moore Institute at the Association of Art Historians conference, held in London in 2003, this book presents thirteen essays that bring together a multidisciplinary approach to the animated object. Contributions range from literal accounts of magic lanterns, tableaux vivants, puppets and ventriloquist dummies, to the more abstract notions of voice displacement in audio art and authorship projection in writing machines. The contributors come from diverse backgrounds in art history, cultural history, comparative literature, and artistic, theatrical and curatorial practice, and all tackle the issue of 'articulate objects' from a range of lively and unexpected perspectives.

The book was awarded The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2010. Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet, its critical analyses are saturated with daunting analyses of contemporary art's exhaustion, its predictability or its absorption into global commercial culture. In this book, the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art. He argues it is a consequence not only of confounding art-works, but also of the paradoxical impetus of a culture of modernity. By positively reassessing the perplexing or apprehensive features of cultural modernity as well as of aesthetic inquiry, this book redefines the ambitions of art in the wake of this legacy. In the process, it challenges many familiar approaches to art inquiry in order to offer a new understanding of the aesthetic, social and cultural aspirations of art in our time.

Art mirrors life; life returns the favor. How could nineteenth and twentieth century technologies foster both the change in the world view generally called «postmodernism and the development of new art forms? Scholar and curator Faye Ran shows how interactions of art and technology led to cultural changes and the evolution of Installation art as a genre unto itself - a fascinating hybrid of expanded sculpture in terms of context, site, and environment, and expanded theatre in terms of performer, performance, and public.

This vibrant collection of essays claims that a complex network of texts by critics, biographers and diarists established the credibility and influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Throughout the twentieth century, Modernist taste failed to acknowledge the achievement of oppositional groupings such as the Pre-Raphaelites. The essays collected here, however, reveal that the British group anticipated later avant-gardes by using the written word to configure for itself a radical artistic identity. Public and critics alike were scandalized by the radicalism of Pre-Raphaelite painting, its unflinching portrayal of historical figures and of contemporary life, and its irreverent attitude to artistic convention. Pre-Raphaelitism's innovations were not confined to style: new forms of artistic identity and behaviour were explored. As the contributors interrogate the texts through which Pre-Raphaelitism was constructed, they demonstrate that the movement's wide influence as a cultural phenomenon derived from the interplay between exhibited works and critical discourse. Applying a range of sophisticated methodologies from the fields of literary studies, art history, and cultural studies, these interdisciplinary essays uncover the neglected role of texts in the success of the Pre-Raphaelite rebellion and argue in favor of a new centrality for this movement in the history of nineteenth-century European culture.

This book is the first full-length study dedicated to French women Orientalist artists. Mary Kelly has gathered primary documentation relating to seventy-two women artists whose works of art can be placed in the canon of French Orientalism between 1861 and 1956. Bringing these artists together for the first time and presenting close contextual analyses of works of art, attention is given to artists' cross-cultural interactions with painted/sculpted representations of the Maghreb particularly in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Using an interdisciplinary 'open platform of discussion' approach, Kelly builds on established theory which places emphases on the gendered gaze. This entails a discussion on women's painted perspectives of and contacts with Muslim women as well as various Maghrebi cultures and land-all the while remaining mindful of the subject position of the French artist and the problematic issues which can arise when discussing European-made 'ethnographic' scenes. Kelly argues that French women's perspectives of the Maghreb differed from the male gaze and were informed by their artistic training and social positions in Europe. In so doing, French women's socio-cultural modernity is also examined. Moreover, executed between 1861 and 1956, the works of art presented show influences of Modernism; therefore, this book also pays close attention to progressive Realism and Naturalism in art and the Orientalist shift into Modernist subject matter and form. Through this research into French women Orientalists, Kelly engages with important discussions on the crossing view of the historical female other with the cultural other, artistic hybridity and influence in art as well as the postcolonial response to French activities in colonial Algeria and the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco. On giving focus to women's art and the impact of cross-cultural interchanges, this book rethinks Orientalism in French art. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in the history of art, gender studies, history, and Middle Eastern and North African studies.