Exploring the myths and realities of the origins of the "modern artist" in Britain The artist has been a privileged figure in the modern age, embodying ideals of personal and political freedom and self-fulfillment. Does it matter who gets to be an artist? And do our deeply held beliefs stand up to scrutiny? Making the Modern Artist gets to the root of these questions by exploring the historical genesis of the figure of the artist. Based on an unprecedented biographical survey of almost 1,800 students at the Royal Academy of Arts in London between 1769 and 1830, the book reveals hidden stories about family origins, personal networks, and patterns of opportunity and social mobility. Locating the emergence of the "modern artist" in the crucible of Romantic Britain, rather than in 19th-century Paris or 20th-century New York, it reconnects the story of art with the advance of capitalism and demonstrates surprising continuities between liberal individualism and state formation, our dreams of personal freedom, and the social suffering characteristic of the modern era. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This book argues that Ford Madox Brown's murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall (1878-93) were the most important public art works of their day. Brown's twelve designs on the history of Manchester, remarkable exercises in the making of historical vision, were semi-forgotten by academics until the 1980s, partly because of Brown's unusually muscular conception of what history painting should set out to achieve. This ground-breaking book explains the thinking behind the programme and indicates how each mural contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life. It shows the important link between Brown and Thomas Carlyle, the most iconoclastic of Victorian intellectuals, and reveals how Brown set about questioning the verities of British liberalism. -- .

The Arts and Crafts Movement was a reaction to the brutality of working life and the sterility of industrial design in Victorian Britain. Although Arts and Crafts was initially a mediaeval revival, the movement was always about the artist craftsman and the appropriate use of materials, rather than any single design tradition. The movement was inspired and led by William Morris, whose company was founded in 1861 and produced a full range of interior furnishings, including tiles. These were designed by Morris himself, and also by leading artists and architects of the day such as Edward Burne Jones and Philip Webb. The term Arts and Crafts was formalised in the late 1880s, and many designers, artists and craftsmen joined Morris in this new movement, and leading designers including Walter Crane and C. F. A. Voysey produced distinctive and now highly collectable ceramic tiles that were used to decorate the bathrooms and the fireplaces of the wealthy and discerning. This book, with its companion on the work of William de Morgan, is the first complete introduction to British Arts and Crafts tiles from 1860 to 1920.

A new survey of the best works by the elusive and spectacular Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla. Often compared to his contemporary, the American artist John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla (1863-1923) was a master draftsman and painter of landscapes, formal portraits, and monumental, historically themed canvases. Highly influenced by French Impressionism, the Valencian artist was a master plein-air painter known for his luminous seaside scenes of frolicking youths and for vivid depictions of Spanish rural life and its pleasures and customs. This beautifully designed and produced volume brings together one hundred of Sorolla's major paintings, selected by his great-granddaughter Blanca Pons-Sorolla, the foremost authority on the artist. Benefiting from close proximity to the artist and his personal archives, she presents an in-depth essay that explores Sorolla's life, work, and remarkable international legacy. With virtually all of the artist's previous publications now out of print, this much-anticipated volume is an important addition to the literature on this great Spanish master.

This books strength lies in its combination of approaches: Symbolism is viewed as a set of concepts and as an artistic climate. Its structure allows for the inclusion of artists not normally found in most Symbolist anthologies.

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 Victorian era heralded an age of transformation in which momentous changes in the field of natural history coincided with the rise of new visual technologies. Concurrently, different parts of the British Empire began to more actively claim their right to being acknowledged as indispensable contributors to knowledge and the progress of empire. This book addresses the complex relationship between natural history and photography from the 1850s to the 1880s in Britain and its colonies: Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, India. Coinciding with the rise of the modern museum, photography's arrival was timely, and it rapidly became an essential technology for recording and publicising rare objects and valuable collections. Also during this period, the medium assumed a more significant role in the professional practices and reputations of naturalists than has been previously recognized, and it figured increasingly within the expanding specialized networks that were central to the production and dissemination of new knowledge. In an interrogation that ranges from the first forays into museum photography and early attempts to document collecting expeditions to the importance of traditional and photographic portraiture for the recognition of scientific discoveries, this book not only recasts the parameters of what we actually identify as natural history photography in the Victorian era but also how we understand the very structure of empire in relation to this genre at that time.

Compelling and troubling, colorful and dark, black figures served as the quintessential image of difference in nineteenth-century European art; the essays in this volume further the investigation of constructions of blackness during this period. This collection marks a phase in the scholarship on images of blacks that moves beyond undifferentiated binaries like 'negative' and 'positive' that fail to reveal complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. Essays that cover the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century explore the visuality of blackness in anti-slavery imagery, black women in Orientalist art, race and beauty in fin-de-siecle photography, the French brand of blackface minstrelsy, and a set of little-known images of an African model by Edvard Munch. In spite of the difficulty of resurrecting black lives in nineteenth-century Europe, one essay chronicles the rare instance of an American artist of color in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. With analyses of works ranging from Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

Scholars and enthusiasts alike will revel in this ambitious two-volume catalogue raisonne of Thomas Gainsborough's portraits and copies of Old Master works. The catalogue contains approximately 1,100 paintings, including nearly 200 works newly attributed to the British master, as well as updated information about his subjects and specially commissioned photography. Each portrait entry includes the biography of the sitter-including several newly identified-the painting's provenance, and exhibitions in which each work was shown. Gainsborough's copies after Old Masters, painted in admiration and used to assimilate their style of painting into his own work, are documented here as well. Research includes in-depth analysis of newspaper archives and other printed material to establish the date of a painting's production, chart the development of the artist's style, and assess the impression the work made within the context of its time. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This magnificent volume, featuring more than 750 illustrations, is the first definitive account of the Tonalist movement. Based on original research, it tells the fascinating story of how the progressive Tonalist landscape first dethroned the Hudson River School in the late 1870s and went on to become the dominant school in American art until World War I. More provocatively, it also situates Tonalism at the beginnings of American modernism, revealing how the movement's later exponents laid the groundwork for the artists of the Stieglitz Circle, and subsequently Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and Wolf Kahn. A History of American Tonalism places the key figures of the movement - such as George Inness, James McNeill Whistler, and John Henry Twachtman - in their cultural context, which was influenced by such thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and William James. It also examines the lives and careers of more than 60 other Tonalist painters, lesser known but highly talented. This new edition of A History of American Tonalism is augmented with more than 100 new illustrations, as well as a new overview of the stylistic principles of Tonalism. It will continue to be essential in understanding not only the Tonalist movement but American art as a whole.

This is the story of Faberge's Imperial Easter eggs - of their maker, of the tsars who commissioned them, of the middlemen who sold them and of the collectors who fell in love with them. It's a story of meticulous craftsmanship and unimaginable wealth, of lucky escapes and mysterious disappearances, and ultimately of greed, tragedy and devotion. Moreover, it is a story that mirrors the history of twentieth-century Russia - a satisfying arc that sees eggs made for the tsars, sold by Stalin, bought by Americans and now, finally, returned to post-communist Russia. There is also an intriguing element of mystery surrounding the masterpieces. Of the fifty 'Tsar Imperial' eggs known to have been made, eight are currently unaccounted for, providing endless scope for speculation and forgeries. This is the first book to tell the complete history of the eggs, encompassing the love and opulence in which they were conceived, the war and revolution that scattered them, and the collectors who preserved them.

The project of global art history calls for balanced treatment of artifacts and a unified approach. This volume emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and exchanges as circulations. It presents a strategy that highlights the processes and connections among cultures, and also responds to the dynamics at work in the current globalized art world. The editors' introduction provides an account of the historical background to this approach to global art history, stresses the inseparable bond of theory and practice, and suggests a revaluation of materialist historicism as an underlying premise. Individual contributions to the book provide an overview of current reflection and research on issues of circulation in relation to global art history and the globalization of art past and present. They offer a variety of methods and approaches to the treatment of different periods, regions, and objects, surveying both questions of historiography and methodology and presenting individual case studies. An 'Afterword' by James Elkins gives a critique of the present project. The book thus deliberately leaves discussion open, inviting future responses to the large questions it poses.

At the time of his death in 1820, Benjamin West was the most famous artist in the English-speaking world, and much admired throughout Europe. From humble beginnings in Pennsylvania, he had become the first American artist to study in Italy, and within a few short years of his arrival in London, was instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts (he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds to become its second President) and became history painter to King George III. In his lifetime, West's meteoric rise to prominence and the great pleasure he took in his success attracted criticism, and his posthumous reputation took a savage mauling from Victorian critics, one of whom dubbed him 'The Monarch of Mediocrity'. But even at his critical nadir, West's most celebrated work, The Death of General Wolfe, commemorating the British victory at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1771, continued to fascinate. Although it was not, as is sometimes claimed, the first history painting to feature contemporary costume, it was the first picture in such a vein to become a critical and popular success in Britain. West remains today the most neglected and misunderstood of Britain's great eighteenth-century artists, lacking the social bite of Hogarth, the bravura of Reynolds or the easy elegance of Gainsborough. Nor was he a forceful writer (unlike Hogarth and Reynolds), and he did not possess the intellectual credentials to which so many of his fellow artists aspired. And yet, as Loyd Grossman asserts in his new book, West was extraordinarily in tune with the artistic and intellectual currents that swirled through his turbulent times. He was in the vanguard of both Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and among the very first artists to give visual expression to the exciting and heroic qualities of contemporary events, as opposed to episodes dredged up from the biblical, classical or mythological past, which had long enjoyed the highest artistic status. West's Wolfe was painted at a time when Europeans were just beginning to abandon the tendency to look backwards. Men and women of letters, philosophers and historians were increasingly convinced that modernity could equal and even surpass the achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This new-found ability to believe in the value of the present and to look forward to a progressive future is very much the foundation of the 'modern' attitude that has affected the way we live and think ever since. While acknowledging that West's reputation is still precarious, Grossman explains why Wolfe was such an instant success and why this thrilling work of art continues to exercise such a strong grip on our imaginations nearly 250 years after it was first shown to the public. He situates West in the midst of Enlightenment thinking about history and modernity, and seeks to demolish some of the prejudices about the talent and intentions of the young man from the Pennsylvania frontier who attained such eminence at the British court.

From the canonical texts of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the radical thinking of today's "DIY" movement, from theoretical writings on the position of craft in distinction to Art and Design to how-to texts from renowned practitioners, from feminist histories of textiles to descriptions of the innovation born of necessity in Soviet factories and African auto-repair shops...The Craft Reader presents the first comprehensive anthology of writings on modern craft. Covering the period from the Industrial Revolution to today, the Reader draws on craft practice and theory from America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The world of craft is considered in its full breadth -- from pottery and weaving, to couture and chocolate-making, to contemporary art, architecture and curation. The writings are themed into sections and all extracts are individually introduced, placing each in its historical, cultural and artistic context. Bringing together an astonishing range of both classic and contemporary texts, The Craft Reader will be invaluable to any student or practitioner of Craft and also to readers in Art and Design. AUTHORS INCLUDE: Theodor Adorno, Anni Albers, Amadou Hampate Ba, Charles Babbage, Roland Barthes, Andrea Branzi, Alison Britton, Rafael Cardoso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Eames, Salvatore Ferragamo, Kenneth Frampton, Alfred Gell, Walter Gropius, Tanya Harrod, Martin Heidegger, Patrick Heron, Bernard Leach, Esther Leslie, W. R. Lethaby, Lucy Lippard, Adolf Loos, Karl Marx, William Morris, Robert Morris, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Stefan Muthesius, George Nakashima, Octavio Paz, Grayson Perry, M. C. Richards, John Ruskin, Raphael Samuel, Ellen Gates Starr, Debbie Stoller, Alexis de Tocqueville, Lee Ufan, Frank Lloyd Wright

This book constitutes the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that the Arts and Crafts simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, it instead offers a new social and cultural account of the movement, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. Thomas provides unprecedented insight into how women navigated authoritative roles as 'art workers' by asserting expertise across a range of interconnected cultures: from the artistic to the professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial and domestic. Through examination of newly discovered institutional archives and private papers, Thomas elucidates the critical importance of the spaces around which women conceptualised alternative creative and professional lifestyles. -- .

Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) was one of the leading British landscape painters of the 19th century. Inspired by his mentor, the artist and poet William Blake, Palmer brought a new spiritual intensity to his interpretation of nature, producing works of unprecedented boldness and fervency. Pre-eminent scholar William Vaughan-who organized the Palmer retrospective at the British Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005-draws on unpublished diaries and letters, offering a fresh interpretation of one of the most attractive and sympathetic, yet idiosyncratic, figures of the 19th century. Far from being a recluse, as he is often presented, Palmer was actively engaged in Victorian cultural life and sought to exert a moral power through his artwork. Beautifully illustrated with Palmer's visionary and enchanted landscapes, the book contains rich studies of his work, influences, and resources. Vaughan also shows how later, enthralled by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Palmer manipulated his own artistic image to harmonize with it. Little appreciated in his lifetime, Palmer is now hailed as a precursor of modernism in the 20th century. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Martin A. Danahay's lucidly argued and accessibly written volume offers a solid introduction to important issues surrounding the definition and division of labor in British society and culture. 'Work,' Danahay argues, was a term rife with ideological contradictions for Victorian males during a period when it was considered synonymous with masculinity. Male writers and artists in particular found their labors troubled by class and gender ideologies that idealized 'man's work' as sweaty, muscled labor and tended to feminize intellectual and artistic pursuits. Though many romanticized working-class labor, the fissured representation of the masculine body occasioned by the distinction between manual labor and 'brain work' made it impossible for them to overcome the Victorian class hierarchy of labor. Through cultural studies analyses of the novels of Dickens and Gissing; the nonfiction prose of Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris; the poetry of Thomas Hood; paintings by Richard Redgrave, William Bell Scott, and Ford Madox Brown; and contemporary photographs, including many from the Munby Collection, Danahay examines the ideological contradictions in Victorian representations of men at work. His book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of English literature, history, and gender studies.

Sculpture and the Museum is the first in-depth examination of the varying roles and meanings assigned to sculpture in museums and galleries during the modern period, from neo-classical to contemporary art practice. It considers a rich array of curatorial strategies and settings in order to examine the many reasons why sculpture has enjoyed a position of such considerable importance - and complexity - within the institutional framework of the museum and how changes to the museum have altered, in turn, the ways that we perceive the sculpture within it. In particular, the contributors consider the complex issue of how best to display sculpture across different periods and according to varying curatorial philosophies. Sculptors discussed include Canova, Rodin, Henry Moore, Flaxman and contemporary artists such as Rebecca Horn, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Dion and Olafur Eliasson, with a variety of museums in America, Canada and Europe presented as case studies. Underlying all of these discussions is a concern to chart the critical importance of the acquisition, placement and display of sculpture in museums and to explore the importance of sculptures as a forum for the expression of programmatic statements of power, prestige and the museum's own sense of itself in relation to its audiences and its broader institutional aspirations.

The Centennial decade was an era of ambivalence, the United States still unresolved about the incomprehensible damage it had wrought over four years of Civil War, and why. Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exhibition -- a spectacular international event celebrating one hundred years of American strength, unity, and freedom -- took place in the immediate wake of this trauma of war and the failures of Reconstruction as a means to restore power and patriotism in the nation's struggle to rebuild itself. The Unfinished Exhibition, the first comprehensive examination of American art at the Centennial, explains the critical role of visual culture in negotiating memories of the nation's past that conflicted with the optimism that Exhibition officials promoted. Supporting novel iconographical interpretations with myriad primary source material, author Susanna W. Gold demonstrates how the art galleries and the audiences who visited them addressed the lingering traumas of battle, the uneasy re-unification of North and South, and the persisting racial tensions in the post-Emancipation era. This careful consideration of the visual record exposes the complexities of the war's impact on Americans and clarifies how the Centennial art exhibition affected a nation still finding its direction at a critical moment in its history.

Claude Monet’s Water Lilies are widely recognized as a celebration of nature and a call to visual experience. The skilled brushwork, vivid color, and immersive quality of the paintings suspend thoughts of the outside world and its concerns. And yet, when one realizes that these works were made during a period of social and political turmoil—rapid changes of government, the Dreyfus Affair, and the destruction and devastation of World War I—questions arise about the personal, cultural, and historical contexts within which they were created. In this book, James H. Rubin explores these conditions and shows how Monet’s work—said to be a harbinger of abstraction—appeals not only to the eye but also to something deep in modern consciousness. The myth of Impressionism is that it was reviled and misunderstood, but by the 1890s Monet was rich by anyone’s standards, and his works were considered French cultural treasures. Monet was featured in a propaganda film in response to German militarism, and he was persuaded by Georges Clemenceau to donate a number of his Water Lilies paintings to the French nation following the Treaty of Versailles. Taking this into account, Rubin uncovers how the theme of floating lily pads could serve political ends, exposing relationships between Monet’s apparently subject-free art and its material circumstances in the modern world. Engagingly written, masterfully argued, and featuring more than 150 illustrations, Why Monet Matters is a major study of an artist who had the will and the talent to remain relevant to his time without conceding to its fashions. Scholars, students, and those who appreciate Monet and Impressionism will value and learn from this book.

The first full edition of the correspondence, between three artists Joanna Boyce, her brother George P. Boyce and Henry Wells, who she eventually married. It dates from the period 1845 to 1861, and covers artistic life in both Paris and London, including the Pre-Raphaelites. This correspondence, between three artists Joanna Boyce, her brother George P. Boyce and Henry Wells, whom she eventually married, dates from the period 1845 to 1861. They were all friends of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, but in addition Henry and Joanna both studied in Paris, and Joanna wrote extensively about her time there, training with Thomas Couture. She wrote for The Saturday Review as well as painting a small number of very interesting and much admired pictures. Her brother George established himself as a successful watercolourist and member of the Old Watercolour Society, having been encouraged both by David Cox on his Welsh sketching expeditions,and by Ruskin, whose letters advising him what to paint in Venice are included here. Henry Wells was primarily a portrait painter. At first he specialised in miniatures, and was commissioned to paint Mary, princess of Cambridge byQueen Victoria. There are vivid accounts of visits to country houses to carry out commissions from their owners. The three wrote constantly about techniques of painting and about the new colours that became available at this period, and about their visits to exhibitions both in Paris and London. They all contributed to the Royal Academy and other exhibitions. In addition, there is the extraordinary story of Joanna's and Henry's courtship and marriage, at first encouraged and then viciously opposed by Joanna's recently widowed mother. The correspondence survives only in an unpublished transcript made in the 1940s, as the originals were all destroyed in a bombing raid on Bath during the second world war. Excerpts from George P. Boyce's diaries were published in the 1930s, but the present edition contains a considerable amount of new material.

Each volume in this new series offers an in-depth exploration of one major work in MoMA's collection. Through a lively illustrated essay by a MoMA curator that examines the work in detail, the publication delves into aspects of the artist's oeuvre and places the work in a broader social and arthistorical context.

This is an expert and detailed account of the painter Claude Monet, one of the key founders of the Impressionist movement and arguably the most influential painter of modern times. It is an insightful biography that tells the story of his life, the historical context of society at the time, and his relationships with Renoir, Sisley and Manet. It features a beautiful gallery of all Claude Monet's most significant works accompanied by in-depth analysis of his style and technique, stunningly illustrated with 500 beautiful images. It explores his relationship with the traditional art world and his courageous rejection of it, choosing to establish a new form of art. The first half of this impressive book is a review of the life of Claude Monet and the development of his talents. It follows his early experiences and artistic education, as well as his personal life, financial difficulties and marriages, shedding light on why Monet became the painter he did. The second half is a gallery of more than 300 of his works with analysis of each painting. Paintings are reproduced from all phases of his career, including when he lived at Argenteuil, where some of the most famous impressionist works were created. This extraordinary book is an essential volume for anyone wanting to learn more about this fascinating and ground-breaking artist, and to study his greatest works in one beautiful collection.

Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions"from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home decor"the essays in this collection share a common focus on materiality, the nitty-gritty elements that helped give shape and meaning to British self-definition during the period. Each essay demonstrates how preoccupations with common household goods and habits fueled contemporary debates about cultural institutions ranging from personal matters of marriage and family to more overtly political issues of empire building. While existing scholarship on material culture in the nineteenth century has centered on artifacts in museums and galleries, this collection brings together disparate fields"history of design, landscape history, childhood studies, and feminist and postcolonial literary studies"to focus on ordinary objects and practices, with specific attention to how Britons of all classes established the tenets of domesticity as central to individual happiness, national security, and imperial hegemony.