The Art and Thought of John La Farge: Picturing Authenticity in Gilded Age America offers an unprecedented portrait of one of the most celebrated artists of the Gilded Age and opens a window onto nineteenth-century American culture. The book reveals how the work of John La Farge contributed to a rich philosophical dialogue concerning the trustworthiness of human perception. In his struggle against a 'common truth' of iconic symbols presented by a new mass visual culture, La Farge developed a subversive approach to visual representation that focused attention not on the artwork itself, but on the complex, real encounter of artist, subject and medium from which the artwork came. Katie Kresser charts La Farge's efforts to assert his own reality - his own intrinsic uniqueness - in a postwar society that increasingly based personal identity on standardized vocational labels and economic productivity. La Farge's work is contrasted with that of Kenyon Cox, James Whistler and Henry Adams, all of whom (for La Farge) had fallen prey to the crass new visual environment - albeit in very different ways. This innovative study suggests that La Farge dealt with issues still relevant in a world characterized by ubiquitous mass media and the proliferation of 'normative' visions.

In "Mimesis Across Empires," Natasha Eaton examines the interactions, attachments, and crossings between the visual cultures of the Mughal and British Empires during the formative period of British imperial rule in India. Eaton explores how the aesthetics of Mughal "vernacular" art and British "realist" art mutually informed one another to create a hybrid visual economy. By tracing the exchange of objects and ideas--between Mughal artists and British collectors, British artists and Indian subjects, and Indian elites and British artists--she shows how Mughal artists influenced British conceptions of their art, their empire, and themselves, even as European art gave Indian painters a new visual vocabulary with which to critique colonial politics and aesthetics. By placing her analysis of visual culture in relation to other cultural encounters--ethnographic, legislative, diplomatic--Eaton uncovers deeper intimacies and hostilities between the colonizer and the colonized, linking artistic mimesis to the larger colonial project in India.

A fresh interpretation of the group of Fragonard's paintings known as the 'figures de fantaisie', Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination reconnects the fantasy figures with neglected visual traditions in European art and firmly situates them within the cultural and aesthetic contexts of eighteenth-century France. Prior scholarship has focused on the paintings' connections with portraiture, whereas this study relocates them within a tradition of fantasy figures, where resemblance was ignored or downplayed. The book defines Fragonard as a painter of the imagination and foregrounds the imaginary at a time when Enlightenment rationalism and Classical aesthetics contrived to delimit the imagination. The book unravels scholarly writing on these Fragonard paintings and examines the history of the fantasy figure from early modern Europe to eighteenth-century France. Emerging from this background is a view of Fragonard turning away from the academically sanctioned 'invention', towards more playful variants of the imaginary: fantasy and caprice. Melissa Percival demonstrates how fantasy figures engage both artists and viewers, allowing artists to unleash their imagination through displays of virtuosity and viewers to use their imagination to explore the paintings' unusual juxtapositions and humour.

Arguing in favour of renewed critical attention to the 'nation' as a category in art history, this study examines the intertwining of art theory, national identity and art production in Britain from the early eighteenth century to the present day. The book provides the first sustained account of artwriting in the British context over the full extent of its development and includes new analyses of such central figures as Hogarth, Reynolds, Gilpin, Ruskin, Roger Fry, Herbert Read, Art & Language, Peter Fuller and Rasheed Araeen. Mark A. Cheetham also explores how the 'Englishing' of art theory-which came about despite the longstanding occlusion of the intellectual and theoretical in British culture-did not take place or have effects exclusively in Britain. Theory has always travelled with art and vice versa. Using the frequently resurgent discourse of cosmopolitanism as a frame for his discourse, Cheetham asks whether English traditions of artwriting have been judged inappropriately according to imported criteria of what theory is and does. This book demonstrates that artwriting in the English tradition has not been sufficiently studied, and that 'English Art Theory' is not an oxymoron. Such concerns resonate today beyond academe and the art world in the many heated discussions of resurgent Englishness.

Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture is the first monograph to discuss the Victorian critic Walter Pater's attitude to sculpture. It brings together Pater's aesthetic theories with his theories on language and writing, to demonstrate how his ideas of the visual and written language are closely interlinked. Going beyond Pater's views on sculpture as an art form, this study traces the notion of relief (rilievo) and hybrid form in Pater, and his view of the writer as sculptor, a carver in language. Alongside her treatment of rilievo as a pervasive trope, Lene A~stermark-Johansen also employs the idea of rivalry (paragone) more broadly, examining Pater's concern with positioning himself as an art critic in the late Victorian art world. Situating Pater within centuries of European aesthetic theories as never before done, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture throws new light on the extraordinary complexity and coherence of Pater's writing: The critic is repositioned solidly within Victorian art and literature.

Focusing specifically on portraiture as a genre, this volume challenges scholarly assumptions that regard interior spaces as uniquely feminine. Contributors analyze portraits of men in domestic and studio spaces in France during the long nineteenth century; the preponderance of such portraits alone supports the book's premise that the alignment of men with public life is oversimplified and more myth than reality. The volume offers analysis of works by a mix of artists, from familiar names such as David, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Rodin, and Matisse to less well-known image makers including Dominique Doncre, Constance Mayer, Anders Zorn and Lucien-Etienne Melingue. The essays cover a range of media from paintings and prints to photographs and sculpture that allows exploration of the relation between masculinity and interiority across the visual culture of the period. The home and other interior spaces emerge from these studies as rich and complex locations for both masculine self-expression and artistic creativity. Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 provides a much-needed rethinking of modern masculinity in this period.

Focusing on W.B. Yeats's ideal of mutual support between the arts, Karen Brown sheds new light on how collaborations and differences between members of the Yeats family circle contributed to the metamorphosis of the Irish Cultural Revival into Irish Modernism. Making use of primary materials and fresh archival evidence, Brown delves into a variety of media including embroidery, print, illustration, theatre, costume design, poetry, and painting. Tracing the artistic relationships and outcome of W.B. Yeats's vision through five case studies, Brown explores the poet's early engagement with artistic tradition, contributions to the Dun Emer and Cuala Industries, collaboration between W.B. Yeats and Norah McGuinness, analysis of Thomas MacGreevy's pictorial poetry, and a study of literary influence and debt between Jack Yeats and Samuel Beckett. Having undertaken extensive archival research relating to word and image studies, Brown considers her findings in historical context, with particular emphasis on questions of art and gender and art and national identity. Interdisciplinary, this volume is one of the first full-length studies of the fraternite des arts surrounding W.B. Yeats. It represents an important contribution to word and image studies and to debates surrounding Irish Cultural Revival and the formation of Irish Modernism.

Emerging in the realm of popular entertainment, Jean-Charles Langlois's Panorama of Algiers (1833) drew an audience in much the same way that the arcades drew consumers. Just as the consumption of material goods never fully satiates the consumer, the landscape of Algiers, as represented in Langlois's panorama, kept the French coming back for more. This monumental painting--the result of Colonel Langlois's involvement in the 1830 siege of Algiers--offered a French audience a spectacle of the furthest reaches of the French empire. To witness Langlois's paintings and other representations of colonial landscapes that followed was to perceive the endless diversity of the ever-expanding French colonies.

Marrying an investigation of the imperial context with close analysis of French images of nineteenth-century Algiers, Empire of Landscape offers a new position on visual culture and the social history of art. John Zarobell not only considers the way paintings, photographs, prints, maps, and panoramas of the unpopulated Algerian landscape were tied to the social and political developments of their time, but also argues that the images themselves produced historical transformations of place, space, and perception that continue to affect us today. Empire of Landscape offers a unique basis for understanding the intersections among colonialism and the colonized, geography, place, politics, and the resonating propagandistic impact that images of landscape had in the nineteenth-century French colonial world and beyond.

Exploring the concept of portrait as memoir, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered examines the images and lives of four prominent Victorian women who steered their way through scandal to forge unique identities. The volume shows the effect of celebrity, and even notoriety, on the lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Dilke, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Sarah Grand. For these women, their portraits were more than speaking likenesses-whether painted or photographic, they became crucial tools the women used to negotiate their controversial identities. Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England shows that the fascinating power of celebrity - and specifically its effects on women - was as much of a phenomenon in Victorian times as it is today. Colleen Denney explores how these women used their portraits as tools of persuasion, performing a domestic masquerade to secure privacy and acceptance, or sites of resistance, tearing down male constructions of female propriety and fighting Victorian stereotypes of intellectual women. Questioning the classic Victorian notions of "separate spheres," this volume celebrates women's search for self within the constraints of the nineteenth century, as well as within the world of present-day academia.

Crossing disciplinary and chronological boundaries, this volume integrates text and image, essays and object pages to explore the processes inherent in gender representation, rather than resituating women in particular categories or spheres as other scholarly publications and exhibitions have done. Taking its lead from the 'Picturing' Women project on which it reflects and builds, the volume makes a substantial methodological contribution to the analysis of gender discourse and visuality. It offers new and stimulating scholarship that confronts historical patterns of representation that have defined what women were and are seen to be, and presents new contexts for unveiling what art historian Linda Nochlin has called the 'mixed messages' of representations of women.

The art academy failed to recognise his talent; he rejected the contemporary art scene in Vienna; and his visionary work was largely neglected during his lifetime: the painter Richard Gerstl (1883-1908), whose creative period lasted for just four intensive years, is regarded today as one of the most important representatives of Austrian Expressionism for his portraits and landscapes. With his early pictures Self-Portrait against a Blue Background and The Sisters Karoline and Pauline Frey Richard Gerstl began to create an oeuvre which was well ahead of his times and which made him one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism. In 1906 Gerstl met the musician Arnold Schoenberg. He embarked upon an affair with the latter's wife Mathilde, who briefly left her husband but then returned to him in 1908. Gerstl not only lost his lover but was also socially isolated; he committed suicide during that same year. His work sank into oblivion

A study of the ways landscape was perceived in nineteenth-century Britain and France, this book draws on evidence from poetry, landscape gardens, spectacular public entertainments, novels and scientific works as well as paintings in order to develop its basic premise that landscape and the processes of perceiving it cannot be separated. Vision embraces panoramic seeing from high places, but also the seeing of ghosts and spectres when madness and hallucination impinge upon landscape. The rise of geology and the spread of empires upset the existing comfortable orders of comprehension of landscape. Reverie and imagination produced powerful interpretive actions, while landscape in French culture proved central to the rejection of conservative classicism in favour of perceptual questioning of experience. The experience of subjectivity proved central to the perception of landscape while the visual culture of landscape became of paramount importance to modernity during the period in question.

The Artist and the State, 1777-1855: The Politics of Universal History in British & French Painting is the first book-length study to examine political uses of 'universal history', or the philosophy of history, in European art from 1777 to 1855. Daniel R. Guernsey discusses a range of mural paintings and sculptural works produced in England and France between the American Revolution and the Universal Exposition of 1855, comparing the ways artists such as James Barry, Eugene Delacroix, Paul Chenavard, David d'Angers, and Gustave Courbet expressed linear or cyclical histories of progress and decline. By considering the work of these important European artists together, he reveals not only the rich artistic interaction that took place between England and France - as well as Germany - at this time, but also how the notion of 'universal history' was to become a major preoccupation in the work of these individual artists, each one participating in shaping a highly significant mode of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political art.

The premise of Anna Green's timely and original book, is that nineteenth-century representations of childhood and adolescence-in paintings, but also in other forms of visual culture and in diverse written discourses of the period-are critical for understanding modernity. Whilst such well-worn signifiers for modernity as the city, the dandy and the prostitute have been well mined, childhood and adolescence have not. Paintings of the young produced in France from 1848 to 1886, Green contends, inform not only our understanding of modern life but also our perception of modernist or avant-garde painting. Figuring largely are Manet and the Impressionists, as well as a gamut of more traditional painters of children who are crucial in providing context for the avant garde. Because modernity is an essentially urban phenomenon, Green's focus is primarily on the city, usually Parisian, child. The painted youth of her study are organized initially by class and gender. Then the chapters are structured according to themes (parent-child relations, modes of discipline, work, education, and play, the spectacle, sexuality) that straddle the congruences among the book's triple trajectory: the young, their modernist representations, and the experience of modernity. Green's interdisciplinary approach ensures that this book will be of interest not only to art historians but to all those concerned with the cultural and social history of childhood.

The meaning of a painted portrait and even its subject may be far more complex than expected, Tamar Garb reveals in this book. She charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, showing how these paintings illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century. The author builds the discussion around six canonic works by Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse, beginning with Ingres's idealized portrait of Mme de Sennones and ending with Matisse's elegiac last portrait of his wife. During the hundred years that separate these works, the female portrait went from being the ideal genre for the expression of painting's capacity to describe and embellish "nature," to the prime locus of its refusal to do so. Picasso's Cubism, and specifically "Ma Jolie," provides the fulcrum of this shift.

"Style" has been one of the cornerstones not only of the modern discipline of art history but also of social and cultural history. In this volume, the writers consider the inadequacy of the concept of style as essential to a person, people, place, or period. While the subject matter of this book is specific to religious practices and artifacts from New Mexico between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the implications of these investigations are far reaching historically, methodologically, and theoretically.

The essays collected here explore the Catholic instruments of religious devotion produced in New Mexico from around 1760 until the radical transformation of the tradition in the twentieth century. The writers in this volume make three key arguments. First, they make a case for bringing new theoretical perspectives and research strategies to bear on the New Mexican materials and other colonial contexts. Second, they demonstrate that the New Mexican materials provide an excellent case study for rethinking many of the most fundamental questions in art-historical and anthropological study. Third, the authors collectively argue that the New Mexican images had, and still have, importance to diverse audiences and makers.

The distinctiveness of New Mexican santos consists not only in their subjects (which conformed to Catholic Reformation tastes) but also in elements that may appear to have been "merely decorative" graphically striking and frequently elaborate abstract design motifs and landscape references. Despite their anonymity, the images are, as a group, readily distinguished from local products anywhere else in the Spanish colonial world. This distinctiveness suggests that we should inquire not so much about the individual identities of their makers as about the collective identity of the society and place that produced and used them.

Why is Walt Whitman's face as familiar as his poetry? In answering this question, Ruth Bohan tells a story of self-invention and portraiture. Whitman approached successive editions of Leaves of Grass as opportunities to establish close, dynamic links between his poetry and visual representation. Bohan shows as well that Whitman, who sought out friendships with numerous artists, left a legacy absorbed after his death into the fabric of American modernism.

Looking into Walt Whitman provides ample evidence that the poet's engagement with the visual arts extended beyond photography into painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Through discussion of Whitman's gradual emergence as an American, democratic, and radical figure, the book opens new ways to assess his impact upon such artists as Thomas Eakins, Joseph Stella, and Marsden Hartley.

Biography, art history, and the history of literature come together in Bohan's rich, suggestive book. Based on years of research, it presents valuable information about Whitman portraiture; the publishing of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass; artists' responses to his transgressive persona; and Robert Coady's work on The Soil, among other pivotal topics.

The many images, reproduced in color or as duotones, will be of significance both to Whitman specialists and to readers seeking an introduction to Whitman's role as a poet who vitally shaped both the visual and literary arts of America.

The American brilliant cut glass tradition is perhaps nowhere better showcased than in the intricate art of Charles Guernsey Tuthill. Born in 1871 in Corning, New York, Tuthill entered the glass trade as a young apprentice, launching a career that would not only produce some of the finest cut glass in America but also innovate that art form in ways that adapted to the changing life of the new century.

In this detailed narrative of the business Tuthill founded, the patterns he created, the techniques he used, and the other artisans and consumers he knew, Maurice Crofford has written the story of an earlier, more elegant and leisurely era. For those knowledgeable about cut glass, the development of the forms will be instructive; for others, who simply appreciate the beauty of the glass, the numerous black and white photographs will appeal. Beyond both of those dimensions, however, Crofford provides insight into how industrialization and mass production and, more especially, the automobile, changed forever the ways upper-class Americans lived, entertained, and displayed their good fortune. In Tuthill's career, moreover, Crofford finds an example of American ingenuity and creative genius that responded to changing times.

The glass itself is of extraordinary beauty, and the descriptions here include the patterns, effects sought, and methods of hand production. Crofford details not only those patterns best known to aficionados of American cut glass of the Brilliant Period but also other patterns retrieved through exhaustive dogging of Tuthill's trail.

Through the written records of Tuthill's succession of businesses and through interviews with surviving members of the Tuthill family,Crofford has reconstructed a remarkably detailed catalog of this master craftsman's work as well as an engaging story of his life and career.

This study of colonialism and art examines the intersection of visual culture and political power in late-eighteenth-century British painting. Focusing on paintings from British America, the West Indies, and India, Beth Fowkes Tobin investigates the role of art in creating and maintaining imperial ideologies and practices--as well as in resisting and complicating them.
Informed by the varied perspectives of postcolonial theory, Tobin explores through close readings of colonial artwork the dynamic middle ground in which cultures meet. Linking specific colonial sites with larger patterns of imperial practice and policy, she examines paintings by William Hogarth, Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Arthur William Devis, and Agostino Brunias, among others. These works include portraits of colonial officials, conversation pieces of British families and their servants, portraits of Native Americans and Anglo-Indians, and botanical illustrations produced by Calcutta artists for officials of the British Botanic Gardens. In addition to examining the strategies that colonizers employed to dominate and define their subjects, Tobin uncovers the tactics of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance that make up the colonized's response to imperial authority. By focusing on the paintings' cultural and political engagement with imperialism, she accounts for their ideological power and visual effect while arguing for their significance as agents in the colonial project.
Pointing to the complexity, variety, and contradiction within colonial art, "Picturing Imperial Power" contributes to an understanding of colonialism as a collection of social, economic, political, and epistemological practices that were not monolithic and inevitable, but contradictory and contingent on various historical forces. It will interest students and scholars of colonialism, imperial history, postcolonial history, art history and theory, and cultural studies.

"The Culture of Love" interprets the sweeping change in loving that spanned a period when scientific discoveries reduced the terrors and dangers of sex, when new laws gave married women control over their earnings and their bodies, when bold novelists and artists shook off the prudishness and hypocrisy that so paralyzed the Victorians. As public opinion, family pressure, and religious conviction loosened, men and women took charge of their love. Stephen Kern argues that, in contrast to modern sex, Victorian sex was anatomically constricted, spatially confined, morally suspect, deadly serious, and abruptly over.

Kern divides love into its elements and traces profound changes in each: from waiting for love to ending it. Most revealing are the daring ways moderns began to talk about their current lovemaking as well as past lovers. While Victorians viewed jealousy as a "foreign devil," moderns began to acknowledge responsibility for it. Desire lost its close tie with mortal sin and became the engine of artistic creation; women's response to the marriage proposal shifted from mere consent to active choice. There were even new possibilities of kissing, beyond the sudden, blind, disembodied, and censored Victorian meeting of lips.

Kern's evidence is mainly literature and art, including classic novels by the Brontes, Flaubert, Hugo, Eliot, Hardy, Forster, Colette, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Musil as well as the paintings and sculptures of Millais, Courbet, Gerome, Rodin, Munch, Klimt, Schiele, Valadon, Chagall, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. The book's conceptual foundation comes from Heidegger's existential philosophy, inparticular his authentic-inauthentic distinction, which Kern adapts to make his overall interpretation and concluding affirmation of the value of authenticity: "The moderns may have lost some of the Victorians' delicacy and poignancy, perhaps even some of their heroism, but in exchange became more reflective of what it means to be a human being in love and hence better able to make that loving more their very own."

Edgar Degas's painting entitled A Cotton Office in New Orleans is one of the most significant images of nineteenth-century capitalism, in part because it was the first painting by an Impressionist to be purchased by a museum. Drawing upon archival materials, Marilyn R. Brown explores the accumulated social meanings of the work in light of shifting audiences and changing market conditions and assesses the artist's complicated relationship to the business of art.

Despite the financial failure of the actual cotton firm he represented, Degas carefully constructed his picture with a particular buyer--a British textile manufacturer--in mind. However, world events, including an international stock market crash and declines in the market for cotton and art, destroyed his hopes for this sale. It was under these circumstances that the canvas was exhibited in the second Impressionist show in Paris in 1876. While it received a more positive response than other works exhibited, its success was with the conservative audience. After considerable difficulty, Degas finally succeeded in selling the painting in 1878 to the newly founded museum in the city of Pau. The painting was probably regarded as an appropriate homage to the old textile manufacturing family who funded its purchase. It also appealed to "progressive" provincial and more cosmopolitan audiences in Pau.

The picture's scattered form and atomized figures--in which some interpreters today read evidence of the artist's own ambivalence about capitalism--seemingly contributed to its "innovative" cachet in Pau. But the private and public meanings of the painting had shifted, in discontinuous fashion, between its production and consumption. Under the circumstances, Degas's unfixed and even mixed messages about business became, among other things, his most successful (if unwitting) marketing strategy. The official recognition Degas received in Pau in 1878 heralded the gradual upswing of his own financial status during the 1880s, but his attitudes towards success remained mixed.

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle. In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

Thomas Cole's influence after his death, through both the finished and unfinished paintings that remained in his self-designed studio, was truly profound. This book brings new understanding to Cole's last paintings and how they affected later artists. Written by one of the foremost American art historians, it examines the artist's ambition to create paintings that expressed complex and elevated meanings. Images of works not seen for many years will illustrate Cole's intentions and influence.

British artists and commentators in the late 18th and early 19th century encoded the twin aspirations of progress and power in images and descriptions of Southeast Asia's ruined Hindu and Buddhist candis, pagodas, wats and monuments. To the British eye, images of the remains of past civilisations allowed, indeed stimulated, philosophical meditations on the rise and decline of entire empires. Ruins were witnesses to the fall, humbling and disturbingly prophetic, (and so revealing more about British attitudes than they do about Southeast Asia's cultural remains). This important study of a highly appealing but relatively neglected body of work adds multiple dimensions to the history of art and image production in Britain of the period, showing how the anxieties of empire were encoded in the genre of landscape paintings and prints.