Building or rebuilding their houses was one of the main concerns of the English nobility and gentry, some might say their greatest achievement. This is the first book to look at the building of country houses as a whole. Creating Paradise shows why owners embarked on building programmes, often following the Grand Tour or excursions around other houses in England; where they looked for architectural inspiration and assistance; and how the building work was actually done. It deals not only with great houses, including Holkham and Castle Howard, but also the diversity of smaller ones, such as Felbrigg and Dyrham, and shows the cost not only of building but of decorating and furnishing houses and of making their gardens. Creating Paradise is an important and original contribution to its subject and a highly readable account of the attitude of the English ruling class to its most important possession.

Originally published in Dutch and translated to Spanish for the fourth centenary celebration of the death of El Greco in 2014, this book is a comprehensive study of the rediscovery of El Greco -- seen as one of the most important events of its kind in art history. The Nationalization of Culture versus the Rise of Modern Art analyses how changes in artistic taste in the second half of the nineteenth century caused a profound revision of the place of El Greco in the artistic canon. As a result, El Greco was transformed from an extravagant outsider and a secondary painter into the founder of the Spanish School and one of the principle predecessors of modern art, increasingly related to that of the Impressionists -- due primarily to the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe's influential History of Modern Art (1914). This shift in artistic preference has been attributed to the rise of modern art but Eric Storm, a cultural historian, shows that in the case of El Greco nationalist motives were even more important. This study examines the work of painters, art critics, writers, scholars and philosophers from France, Germany and Spain, and the role of exhibitions, auctions, monuments and commemorations. Paintings and associated anecdotes are discussed, and historical debates such as El Greco's supposed astigmatism are addressed in a highly readable and engaging style. This book will be of interest to both specialists and the interested art public.

Representations of political power play an important role in Western art history from the late Middle Ages up to modern times. This volume by leading experts is a wide-ranging survey of significant trends in the development of political imagery.

The first comprehensive, scholarly sourcebook/research guide/bibliography on the major French Symbolists painters, this work includes nearly 3,000 entries covering a variety of materials. Each artist receives a primary and secondary bibliography with many annotated entries. Art works, personal names, and subject indexes facilitate easy access. The volume is designed for art historians, art students, museum and gallery curators, and others interested in this major art style of the last half of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. Art museums and art libraries in both the United States and abroad were gleaned for sources. This is a unique and substantial research tool. Symbolism is one of the most difficult art movements to define. Its primary meaning is the representation of things by symbols, by the imaginative suggestion of dreams and the subconscious through symbolic allusion and luxuriant decoration. The writings of Charles Baudelaire on the arts powerfully influenced the aesthetic theories of Symbolist artists and critics from 1860-1900, much as Baudelaire's poetics were the root of Symbolist literature. The Symbolist work, be it painting or poem, is above all personal and revelatory, precious not commonplace, reflecting and evoking a journey of the imagination. French Symbolist artists explored this style, attitude, and atmosphere from the 1880s to the early twentieth century. This sourcebook organizes biographical, historical, and critical information on four major French Symbolist artists: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), Gustave Moreau (1826-98), Odilon Redon (1840-1916), and Maurice Denis (1870-1943). The first three artists are recognized asoriginators of the movement. Denis is regarded as Symbolist's foremost theorist and profoundly religious practitioner. Although all four artists have been the focus of major retrospective exhibitions since 1990, no comprehensive sourcebook/bibliography exists.

Combining a unique overview of metropolitan visual culture with detailed textual analysis, this interdisciplinary study explores the relationship between the two cities which Londoners inhabited: the physical spaces of the metropolis, whose socially stratified and gendered topography was shaped by consumer culture and unregulated capitalism and an imaginary 'London', an 'Unreal City' which reflected and influenced their understanding of, and actions in, the 'real' environment. MARKET 1: Scholars, graduate and undergraduate student in Literary Studies; Victorian Studies MARKET 2: General reader and students/scholars of Cultural Studies; Art History; Urban and Social History; Visual Culture; Gender Studies; British Histor y

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk-the ideal of the "total work of art"-has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk's lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea's evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.

The Apocalypse of John is perhaps the most alluring and dangerous text in any scripture. This study looks at English responses to it in political pamphlets and scholarly exegesis, in poetry and preaching and visual art. Those who set out to find enduring meaning in the book failed. Yet in the post-Christian re-writings of Revelation by Shelley and Blake, John's own dynamic of unveiling comes to life, subverting the structures of power and reading built on the visions of Patmos.

This collection of essays sets out to challenge the dominant narrative about Victorian theatre by placing the practices and products of the Victorian theatre in relation to Victorian visual culture, through the lens of the concept of 'Ruskinian theatre, ' an approach to theatre which values its educative purpose as well as its aesthetic expression.

India in Art in Ireland is the first book to address how the relationship between these two ends of the British Empire played out in the visual arts. It demonstrates that Irish ambivalence about British imperialism in India complicates the assumption that colonialism precluded identifying with an exotic other. Examining a wide range of media, including manuscript illuminations, paintings, prints, architecture, stained glass, and photography, its authors demonstrate the complex nature of empire in India, compare these empires to British imperialism in Ireland, and explore the contemporary relationship between what are now two independent countries through a consideration of works of art in Irish collections, supplemented by a consideration of Irish architecture and of contemporary Irish visual culture. The collection features essays on Rajput and Mughal miniatures, on a portrait of an Indian woman by the Irish painter Thomas Hickey, on the gate lodge to the Dromana estate in County Waterford, and a consideration of the intellectual context of Harry Clarke's Eve of St. Agnes window. This book should appeal not only to those seeking to learn more about some of Ireland's most cherished works of art, but to all those curious about the complex interplay between empire, anti-colonialism, and the visual arts.

Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923) painted pictures that critics praised for their ability to exude the fragrance of field flowers and glow with the plumage of birds. Raised in Salem and long residing in Connecticut, she maintained a studio in New York City, where she exhibited her art for over forty years at the National Academy, American Watercolor Society and other prestigious venues. Transforming flower painting from a domestic outlet for female amateurs to a marketable commodity for professionals, she never wavered in her conviction that women had the right to shape independent careers on their own terms. She delineated both cultivated flowers and clumps of weeds with an intensity of focus unmatched by any other artist of her era. Often, she combined plants with local birds to convey a sophisticated understanding of their environmental interaction that encouraged others to appreciate and conserve nature. She made an extended European tour in the 1860s and regular trips to Great Britain in later years but preferred home nature. Assembling a cross-section of her stunning oil paintings, watercolours, chromolithographs and illustrated volumes for the first time, and analysing them against letters, diaries and periodical reviews, Fidelia Bridges combines a recovery of the artist's biography with close readings of her artworks. Living an outwardly conventional life, she embraced the bicycle and later the automobile as vehicles of female liberation, cultivated her garden with the skill of a horticulturalist, and left a lasting pictorial legacy to be found in US public museums and private collections nationwide.

This book is about encounters between art and industry in nineteenth-century Britain. It looks beyond the oppositions established by later interpretations of the work of John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement to reveal surprising examples of collaboration – between artists, craftspeople, designers, inventors, curators, engineers and educators – during a crucial period in the formation of the cultural and commercial identity of Britain and its colonies. Across thirteen chapters by fourteen contributors, Art versus industry? explores such diverse subjects as the production of lace, the mechanical translation of sculpture, the display of stained glass, the use of the kaleidoscope in painting and pattern design, the emergence of domestic electric lighting and the development of art and design education and international exhibitions in India. -- .

This book examines the widespread response in British artistic media to the death in childbirth in 1817 of Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, daughter of the Prince Regent and heiress to the throne, showing how both in print materials like poetry and sermons and extra-literary artifacts like visual art, ceramics, metalwork, and textiles her life and death were invested with the qualities of myth even as her memorialists appropriated her experiences in the process of producing consumer commodities for an emerging mass audience.

This study is an examination of Baudelaire's art criticism and its relationship with his creative writing. It is the first book in English to treat in one volume the diverse aspects of the subject: the principal aesthetic ideas, the importance of Delacroix, Boudin, Meryon, Guys, and Manet, the essays on laughter and caricature, and the language and rhetoric of the Salons and other critical writings. The title reflects Baudelaire's conviction, which emphasizes in relation to Delacroix, Daumier, Guys, and Wagner, that all art, whether it is painting, poetry or music, springs from the memory of the artist and speaks to the memory of the consumer of that art. This idea, exemplified in his own creative writing, extends to criticism itself, which is seen primarily as a phenomenon of recognition, and it is that sense of recognition that the author has sought to emphasize throughout.

Introducing the concept of music and painting as 'rival sisters' during the nineteenth century, this interdisciplinary collection explores the productive exchange-from rivalry to inspiration to collaboration-between the two media in the age of Romanticism and Modernism. The volume traces the relationship between art and music, from the opposing claims for superiority of the early nineteenth century, to the emergence of the concept of synesthesia around 1900. This collection puts forward a more complex history of the relationship between art and music than has been described in earlier works, including an intermixing of models and distinctions between approaches to them. Individual essays from art history, musicology, and literature examine the growing influence of art upon music, and vice versa, in the works of Berlioz, Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Rodin, Debussy, and the Pre-Raphaelites, among other artists.

This book seeks to configure the ways in which the interdisciplinary, the eclectic and the combinatory have served a strategic purpose in the development of a self-aware and identity-conscious visual discourse in Mexico, from the formative nineteenth century to the post-national 1990s. The construction and interrogation of identities in reproductive media provides the unifying analytical interest ranging over observational writing, illustrated periodicals, graphic art, photography and film. Chapters discuss nation-building imagery and exhibitionary paradigms; cultural nationalism and photographic ethnicity; the interplay of graphic arts and film in the construction of originary identities; disabused perspectives on modernization and urbanism in film and photography; women photographers and the indigenous subject; the questioning of objective identities and the play of reflexive tropes in modernist and 1990s photography; the deconstruction of the Mexican archive in post-national photography and multimedia art; and archaeological models and materials and the dismantling of cultural nationalism in visual culture.

Vilified by leading architectural modernists and Victorian critics alike, mass-produced architectural ornament in iron has received little sustained study since the 1960s; yet it proliferated in Britain in the half century after the building of the Crystal Palace in 1851 - a time when some architects, engineers, manufacturers, and theorists believed that the fusion of iron and ornament would reconcile art and technology and create a new, modern architectural language. Comprehensively illustrated and richly researched, Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain presents the most sustained study to date of the development of mechanised architectural ornament in iron in nineteenth-century architecture, its reception and theorisation by architects, critics and engineers, and the contexts in which it flourished, including industrial buildings, retail and seaside architecture, railway stations, buildings for export and exhibition, and street furniture. Appealing to architects, conservationists, historians and students of nineteenth-century visual culture and the built environment, this book offers new ways of understanding the notion of modernity in Victorian architecture by questioning and re-evaluating both Victorian and modernist understandings of the ideological split between historicism and functionalism, and ornament and structure.

Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, 1768-1848 offers a range of case studies which consider individual artists' personal, professional and artistic relationships with the Royal Academy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bringing together the research of leading historians of British artistic culture during this period. Over its introduction and nine essays, this collection considers the Academy as a lived organism whose most effective role, following its establishment in 1768, was as a reference point towards, around and against which artists operated in their relationships with each other and with artistic practice itself. In so doing, this collection also considers the relationship between Academic ideals and individual practice (as well as lived experience) during this period of art's increasingly public manifestation at the Academy. Individual artists examined include Joshua Reynolds, Joseph Wright of Derby, Benjamin West and William Etty. Thinking beyond the dichotomy of loyalism and rebellion - and complicating notions of the Academy as a monolithic ossifying institution from which progressive artists would be 'liberated' in the wake of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's emergence in 1848 - this volume investigates the Academy's varied impact upon the lives, experiences and ideals of its diverse artistic communities.

The 4th Marquess of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace were both passionate collectors of miniatures, exquisite small paintings in watercolor or enamel, generally made for private contemplation and one of the most popular mediums of portraiture in an age before the advent of photography. This book features over seventy of the finest miniatures in the Wallace Collection, all of them reproduced in color, most for the first time. The volume spans the period from the mid-16th to the late-19th centuries. The entries include much new information on the miniatures and are accompanied by images of related works in the Wallace Collection and elsewhere. There are introductory essays on the history of the collection and on French eighteenth-century miniatures, a particular highlight of the collection.

Exceptional among English-language publications in its focus on French miniatures, this book offers a fascinating and tantalizing glimpse into the magical world of the miniature.

This ground-breaking book presents a critical study of pictorial narrative in nineteenth-century European painting. Covering works from France, Germany, Britain, Italy and elsewhere, it traces the ways in which immensely popular artists like Jean-Leon Gerome, Karl von Piloty and William Quiller Orchardson used unique visual strategies to tell thrilling and engaging stories. Regardless of genre, content or national context, these paintings share a fundamental modern narrative mode. Unlike traditional art, they do not rely on textual sources; nor do they tell stories through the human body alone. Instead, they experiment with objects, spaces, cause-and-effect relations and open-ended ambiguity, prompting viewers and reviewers to read for clues in order to weave their own elaborate tales. -- .

Early American painter Gilbert Stuart has long been mistakenly represented as a hard-drinking rogue, habitual liar, and inexplicable financial failure. To explain his stylistic unevenness as an artist, he is assumed to have had an inferior assistant, but the documentary evidence for an assistant who painted on his portraits is non-existent-in fact, there is evidence to the contrary. This ground-breaking study demonstrates that Stuart suffered from a hereditary form of manic depression, leading him to create pictures that contain peculiar lapses characteristic of a manic-depressive, or bipolar, artist. Using documentary and empirical evidence-from diaries and letters to x-radiographs of paintings-this book fills important gaps in our knowledge of Stuart, and connects the strange visual effects in some of Stuart's paintings with cognitive deficits attendant with the disorder. In addition to Stuart, other bipolar artists, including George Romney, Raphaelle Peale, Gilbert Stuart Newton, and William Rimmer, are discussed in relation to these deficits, revealing patterns which carry broader implications for all manic-depressive artists. This volume is a significant contribution not only to studies of Stuart and the four other painters but also to our understanding of the mind of a manic-depressive artist. It bridges the broad disciplines of art history and psychopathology.

Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists provides an in-depth analysis of fourteen women illustrators of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Jemima Blackburn, Eleanor Vere Boyle, Marianne North, Amelia Francis Howard-Gibbon, Mary Ellen Edwards, Edith Hume, Alice Barber Stephens, Florence and Adelaide Claxton, Marie Duval, Amy Sawyer, Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Pamela Colman Smith and Olive Allen Biller. The chapters consider these women's illustrations in the areas of natural history, periodicals and books, as well as their cartoons and caricatures. Using diverse critical approaches, the volume brings to light the works and lives of these important women illustrators and challenges the hegemony of male illustrators and cartoonists in nineteenth-century visual and print culture. -- .

This is the story of the forging of a national cultural institution in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. The Royal Academy of Arts was the dominant art school and exhibition society in London and a model for art societies across the British Isles and North America. This is the first study of its early years, re-evaluating the Academy's significance in national cultural life and its profile in an international context. Holger Hoock reassesses royal and state patronage of the arts and explores the concepts and practices of cultural patriotism and the politicization of art during the American and French Revolutions. By demonstrating how the Academy shaped the notions of an English and British school of art and influenced the emergence of the British cultural state, he illuminates the politics of national culture and the character of British public life in an age of war, revolution, and reform.

Reconciling Art and Mothering contributes a chorus of new voices to the burgeoning body of scholarship on art and the maternal and, for the first time, focuses exclusively on maternal representations and experiences within visual art throughout the world. This innovative essay collection joins the voices of practicing artists with those of art historians, acknowledging the fluidity of those categories. The twenty-five essays of Reconciling Art and Mothering are grouped into two sections, the first written by art historians and the second by artists. Art historians reflect on the work of artists addressing motherhood-including Marguerite Gerard, Chana Orloff, and Renee Cox-from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Contributions by contemporary artist-mothers, such as Gail Rebhan, Denise Ferris, and Myrel Chernick, point to the influence of past generations of artist-mothers, to the inspiration found in the work of maternally minded literary and cultural theorists, and to attempts to broaden definitions of maternity. Working against a hegemonic construction of motherhood, the contributors discuss complex and diverse feminist mothering experiences, from maternal ambivalence to queer mothering to quests for self-fulfillment. The essays address mothering experiences around the globe, with contributors hailing from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

An original and overdue exploration of the representation of masculinity in British academic art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918 analyzes transgressions of gender and sexuality as represented in paintings by Leighton, Sargent, Tuke, and their contemporaries in the Royal Academy. This volume treats paintings as eloquent objects, no narratives of which are too elusive to be traced, and challenges conventional binaries of masculine versus feminine or heterosexual versus homosexual. Consulting not only the paintings themselves but also newspapers, journals, criticism, novels, and poetry of the day, Painted Men argues against the misconception of British academic art as merely reactionary and even blind to the dynamism of its own time. Instead, this art is shown to engage with broader social attitudes and contemporary sexual debates. As the book reveals the complexities of specific paintings, it illuminates different and competing attitudes toward masculinity and modernity in British art of the period.