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 life and works of William Morris continue to excite the imaginations of fresh generations of scholars working in many traditions, from the history of art and design to literary criticism and the history of socialism and socialist thought. This book concentrates on Morris's social and political acheivements as well as his artistic talents.

Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces-public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden-thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination, of expression, and of being seen. Hence, the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not, and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs, one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long duree or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.

The first volume in two centuries on Alexandre Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments in Paris, this study presents a comprehensive picture of a seminal project of French Revolutionary cultural policy, one crucial to the development of the modern museum institution. The book offers a new critical perspective of the Museum's importance and continuing relevance to the history of material culture and collecting, through juxtaposition with its main opponent, the respected connoisseur and theorist Quatremere de Quincy. This innovative approach highlights the cultural and intellectual context of the debate, situating it in the dilemmas of emerging modernity, the idea of nationhood, and changing attitudes to art and its histories. Open only from 1795 to 1816, the Museum of French Monuments was at once popular and controversial. The salvaged sculptures and architectural fragments that formed its collection presented the first chronological panorama of French art, which drew the public; it also drew the ire of critics, who saw the Museum as an offense against the monuments' artistic integrity. Underlying this localized conflict were emerging ideas about the nature of art and its relationship to history, which still define our understanding of notions of heritage, monument, and the museum.

J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History is an in-depth consideration of the artist's complex response to the challenge of creating history paintings in the early nineteenth century. Structured around the linked themes of making and unmaking, of creation and destruction, this book examines how Turner's history paintings reveal changing notions of individual and collective identity at a time when the British Empire was simultaneously developing and fragmenting. Turner similarly emerges as a conflicted subject, one whose artistic modernism emerged out of a desire to both continue and exceed his eighteenth-century aesthetic background by responding to the altered political and historical circumstances of the nineteenth century.

In a moving intervention into Romantic-era depictions of the dead and wounded, Philip Shaw's timely study directs our gaze to the neglected figure of the common soldier. How suffering and sentiment were portrayed in a variety of visual and verbal media is Shaw's particular concern, as he examines a wide range of print and visual media, from paintings to sketches to political prose and anti-war poetry, and from writings on culture and aesthetics to graphic satires and early photographs. Whilst classical portraiture and history painting certainly conspired with official ideologies to deflect attention from the true costs of war, other works of art, literary as well as visual, proffered representations that countered the view that suffering on and off the battlefield is noble or heroic. Shaw uncovers a history of changing attitudes towards suffering, from mid-eighteenth century ambivalence to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concepts of moral sentiment. Thus, Shaw's story is one of how images of death and wounding facilitated and queried these shifts in the perception of war, qualifying as well as consolidating ideas of individual and national unanimity. Informed by readings of the letters and journals of serving soldiers, surgeons' notebooks and sketches, and the writings of peace and war agitators, Shaw's study shows how an attention to the depiction of suffering and the development of 'liberal' sentiment enables a reconfiguring of historical and theoretical notions of the body as a site of pain and as a locus of violent national imaginings.

James McNeill Whistler and France: A Dialogue in Paint, Poetry, and Music is the first full-length and in-depth study to position this painter within the overall trajectory of French modernism during the second half of the nineteenth century and to view the artist as integral to the aesthetic projects of its most original contributors. Suzanne M. Singletary maintains that Whistler was in a unique situation as an insider within the emerging French avant-garde, thereby in an enviable position to both absorb and transform the innovations of others - and that until now, his widespread influence as a catalyst among his colleagues has been neither investigated nor appreciated. Singletary contends that Whistler's importance rivals that of Manet, whose multi-layered (and often unexpected) interconnections with Whistler are the focus of one chapter. In addition, Whistler's pivotal role in linking the legacies of Baudelaire, Delacroix, Gautier, Wagner, and other mid-century innovators to the later French Symbolists has previously been largely ignored. Courbet, Degas, Monet, and Seurat complete the roster of French artists whose dialogue with Whistler is highlighted.

Painting Labour in Scotland and Europe, 1850-1900 explores hitherto unrecognized European variations in the phenomena of rural labour imagery, particularly in Scotland. In exploring these distinctions relative to Scotland and Europe it looks to develop a new understanding of the commonalities and idiosyncrasies of rural labour imagery which have often been treated as homogenous. Lacking the detailed analysis that has been accorded other images, writing about Scottish painting has often been appended to analyses of English or French imagery. It has generally been understood as intellectually divorced from the sometimes brutal realities of evolving Scottish nineteenth-century urbanism, or simply ignored. Painting Labour in Scotland and Europe, 1850-1900 sets out systematically to discuss the Scottish rural painting in relation to its particular Scottish historical context, both sociological and aesthetic and its English and European counterparts. Alongside canonical Scottish images by major figures such as James Guthrie, the book explores many hitherto under researched and unconsidered paintings by nineteenth-century Scottish artists, and considers them in relation to major English and Continental Realist and Romantic painters. The juxtaposition of J.F. Millet with W.D. McKay, and Edwin Landseer with George Reid makes for a volume that will appeal both to an academic audience and to one interested in European art history more generally.

The world that shaped Europe's first national sculptor-celebrities, from Schadow to David d'Angers, from Flaxman to Gibson, from Canova to Thorvaldsen, was the city of Rome. Until around 1800, the Holy See effectively served as Europe's cultural capital, and Roman sculptors found themselves at the intersection of the Italian marble trade, Grand Tour expenditure, the cult of the classical male nude, and the Enlightenment republic of letters. Two sets of visitors to Rome, the David circle and the British traveler, have tended to dominate Rome's image as an open artistic hub, while the lively community of sculptors of mixed origins has not been awarded similar attention. Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital, c.1770-1825 is the first study to piece together the labyrinthine sculptors' world of Rome between 1770 and 1825. The volume sheds new light on the links connecting Neo-classicism, sculpture collecting, Enlightenment aesthetics, studio culture, and queer studies. The collection offers ideal introductory reading on sculpture and Rome around 1800, but its combination of provocative perspectives is sure to appeal to a readership interested in understanding a modernized Europe's overwhelmingly transnational desire for Neo-classical, Roman sculpture.

Louise Jopling: A Biographical and Cultural Study is the first in-depth study of this nineteenth-century painter who was among the first women admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists (in 1902). In part an engaging biography of a compelling celebrity figure and social campaigner in Victorian England, Patricia de Montfort's book interweaves a vivid and rounded portrait of this Manchester-born artist, teacher, and author with insightful analysis of Jopling's artwork and the aristocratic-bohemian social milieu that she inhabited. Painted by Whistler and Millais, Jopling herself portrayed Victorian-era celebrities like the actress Lillie Langtry and her patrons included members of the de Rothschild banking family. Her work also included figure compositions, interiors, landscape and genre scenes. Drawing upon Jopling's unpublished diaries, notebooks and correspondence as well as her 1925 memoir Twenty Years of My Life, de Montfort's study opens the way for a twenty-first century rediscovery of this now little-known artist, who combined professional artistic practice with social activism, against the backdrop of an often troubled private life. The full scope of Jopling's artistic endeavours are discussed in relation to the cultural framework for fin de siecle working women, as are her progressive views on education and women's suffrage.

In a reevaluation of that period in Victorian illustration known as 'The Sixties,' a distinguished group of international scholars consider the impact of illustration on the act of reading; its capacity to reflect, construct, critique and challenge its audience's values; its response to older graphic traditions; and its assimilation of foreign influences. While focused on the years 1855 to 1875, the essays take up issues related to the earlier part of the nineteenth century and look forward to subsequent developments in illustration. The contributors examine significant figures such as Ford Madox Brown, Frederick Sandys, John Everett Millais, George John Pinwell, and Hablot Knight Browne in connection with the illustrated magazine, the mid-Victorian gift book, and changing visual responses to the novels of Dickens. Engaging with a number of theories and critical debates, the collection offers a detailed and provocative analysis of the nature of illustration: its production, consumption, and place within the broader contexts of mid-Victorian culture.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

First published in 1984. Signs for the Times explores imaginative and creative relationships between three major areas of mid-Victorian arts: literature, painting and architecture. Through the detailed critical analysis of particular novels, prose writings, paintings and buildings, Chris Brooks establishes a fusion of realistic and symbolic values that he sees as central to the Victorian creative imagination. He argues that the creative achievement of the mid-nineteenth century needs to be seen far more as a whole than it has previously, and that fundamental imaginative terms are common to art and architecture, to major theoretical writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin and Rugin as well as to the central literary figure of Dickens. All those interested in literature, art, or architecture will welcome this interpretation of symbolic realism within the mid-Victorian world.

Beginning with the premise that the portrait was undergoing a shift in both form and function during the Romantic age, Joe Bray examines how these changes are reflected in the fiction of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Elizabeth Hamilton and Amelia Opie. Bray considers portraiture in a broad sense as encompassing caricature and the miniature, as well as the classic portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds and others. He argues that the portrait in fiction often functions not as a transparent index to character or as a means of producing a straightforward likeness, but rather as a cue for misreading and a sign of the slipperiness and subjectivity of interpretation. The book is concerned with more than simply the appearance of portraits in Romantic fiction, however. More broadly, The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period investigates how the language of portraiture pervades the novel in this period and how the two art forms exert mutual stylistic influence on each other.

The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. The conclusion by Harriet Ritvo, the pre-eminent authority in the field of Victorian/animal studies, provides valuable insight into the burgeoning field of animal studies and points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.

Intertwining art history, aesthetic theory, and Latin American studies, Aarnoud Rommens challenges contemporary Eurocentric revisions of the history of abstraction through this study of the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia. After studying and painting (for decades) in Europe, Torres-Garcia returned in 1934 to his native home, Montevideo, with the dream of reawakening and revitalizing what he considered the true indigenous essence of Latin American art: "Abstract Spirit." Rommens rigorously analyses the paradoxes of the painter's aesthetic-philosophical doctrine of Constructive Universalism as it sought to adapt European geometric abstraction to the Americas. Whereas previous scholarship has dismissed Torres-Garcia's theories as self-contradictory, Rommens seeks to recover their creative potential as well as their role in tracing the transatlantic routes of the avant-garde. Through the highly original method of reading Torres-Garcia's artworks as a critique on the artist's own writings, Rommens reveals how Torres-Garcia appropriates the colonial language of primitivism to construct the artificial image of "pure" pre-Columbian abstraction. Torres-Garcia thereby inverts the history of art: this book teases out the important lessons of this gesture and the implications for our understanding of abstraction today.

"Signifying Animals" examines what animals mean to human beings around the world, offering a fresh assessment of the workings of animal symbolism in diverse cultures. The essays in the book are based on first-hand field research with peoples as dissimilar as the Mongolian nomads of Soviet Central Asia, Aboriginal Australians, Inuit hunters of the Canadian Arctic and cultivators of Africa and Papua New Guinea.
The essays look at accounts of mythical beasts among the Amerindian peoples of Andean South America, alleged sightings of an extinct giant bird in New Zealand as well as the complex symbolism of the American rodeo. Others discuss animal symbolism in the Middle East, India and the ancient picts of Scotland. The book advances a powerful argument against some prevalent fallacies in symbolic interpretation.

The practice of walking to a sacred space for personal and spiritual transformation has long held a place in the British imagination. Art and the Sacred Journey in Britain examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination from the years 1790 to 1850. Through a close analysis of a range of interrelated written and visual sources, Kathryn Barush develops the notion of the transfer of 'spirit' from sacred space to representation, and contends that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond. Drawing on a rich range of material including paintings and drawings, manuscripts, letters, reliquaries, and architecture, the book offers an important contribution to scholarship in the fields of religious studies, anthropology, art history, and literature.

In Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures scholars look afresh at representations of nineteenth-century 'oriental' bodies, inquiring deeply into their erotic dimensions, tracing their global dissemination at cross-cultural intersections of the visual and the political. Authors consider the impact of eroticized orientalist representations registered on racial and gendered bodies at historical moments across the globe in the media of photography, painting, prints and sculpture by contextualizing the visual within social practices, ethnography, literature, travel writing and the dynamics of imperialism. Authors examine orientalism's politico-erotic import across not only imperial Britain and France but also throughout India and the Middle East initiating cross-cultural analyses of orientalism outside of Europe. Works studied include Orientalist and homoerotic works by canonic artists such as Ingres, Gerome, Delacroix and Girodet, and lesser-known artists such as sculptor Raffaele Monti and painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann. Contributors explore Turkish and European writings, explorer Richard Burton's self-fashioning, and popular Orientalist photography in India and the Middle East. Authors draw on methods from gender studies, semiotics, material culture and psychoanalysis to explore art, national identity, homoerotic subcultures, female agency, class, sexuality and colonialism. The book is directed to interdisciplinary scholars and students in art history, literature, history, and postcolonial studies.

First published in 1929. This title explores the early work of five Victorian Romantics; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne Jones, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Simeon Solomon, and exhibits them at or soon after the moment of entry into the movement. This title will be of interest to students of literature and art history.

Sarah Angelina Acland (1849-1930) is one of the most important photographers of the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. Daughter of the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, she was photographed by Lewis Carroll as a child, along with her close friend Ina Liddell, sister of Alice of Wonderland fame. The critic John Ruskin taught her art and she also knew many of the Pre-Raphaelites, holding Rossetti's palette for him as he painted the Oxford Union murals. At the age of nineteen she met the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose influence is evident in her early work. Following in the footsteps of Cameron and Carroll Miss Acland first came to attention as a portraitist, photographing the illustrious visitors to her Oxford home. In 1899 she then turned to the challenge of colour photography, becoming, through work with the 'Sanger Shepherd process', the leading colour photographer of the day. Her colour photographs were regarded as the finest that had ever been seen by her contemporaries, several years before the release of the Lumiere Autochrome system, which she also practised. This volume provides an introduction to Miss Acland's photography, illustrating more than 200 examples of her work, from portraits to picturesque views of the landscape and gardens of Madeira. Some fifty specimens of the photographic art and science of her peers from Bodleian collections are also reproduced for the first time, including four unrecorded child portraits by Carroll. Detailed descriptions accompany the images, explaining their interest and significance. The photographs not only shed important light on the history of photography in the period, but also offer a fascinating insight into the lives of a pre-eminent English family and their circle of friends.

The first comprehensive assessment of Degas's legacy to be published in over two decades, Perspectives on Degas unites a team of international scholars to analyze Degas's work, artistic practice, and unique methods of pictorial problem-solving. Established scholars and curators show how recent trends in art historical thinking can stimulate innovative interpretations of Degas's paintings, prints, sculptures, and drawings and reveal new ideas about his place in the art historical narrative of the nineteenth-century avant-garde. Questions posed by contributors include: what interpretive approaches are open to a new generation of art historians in the wake of a vast body of existing scholarship on nineteenth-century art? In what ways can feminist analyses of Degas's works continue to yield new results? Which of Degas's works have received less attention in critical literature to date and what does study of them reveal? As the centenary of Degas's death approaches, this book offers a timely re-evaluation of the critical literature that has developed in response to Degas's work and identifies ways in which the further study of this artist's multi-facetted output can deepen our understanding of the wider scientific, literary, and artistic ideas that circulated in France during the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

Before Modernism, narrative painting was one of the most acclaimed and challenging modes of picture-making in Western art, yet by the early twentieth century storytelling had all but disappeared from ambitious art. France was a key player in both the dramatic rise and the controversial demise of narrative art. This is the first book to analyse French painting in relation to narrative, from Poussin in the early seventeenth to Gauguin in the late nineteenth century. Thirteen original essays shed light on key moments and aspects of narrative and French painting through the study of artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Charles Le Brun, Jacques-Louis David, Paul Delaroche, Gustave Moreau, and Paul Gauguin. Using a range of theoretical perspectives, the authors study key issues such as temporality, theatricality, word-and-image relations, the narrative function of inanimate objects, the role played by viewers, and the ways in which visual narrative has been bound up with history painting. The book offers a fresh look at familiar material, as well as studying some little-known works of art, and reveals the centrality and complexity of narrative in French painting over the course of three centuries.

The British School of Sculpture, c. 1760-1832 represents the first edited collection exploring one of the most significant moments in British art history, returning to centre stage a wide range of sculpture considered for the first time by some of the most important scholars in the field. Following a historical and historiographical introduction by the editors, situating British sculpture in relation to key events and developments in the period, and the broader scholarship on British art more generally in the period and beyond, the book contains nine wide-ranging case studies that consider the place of antique and modern sculpture in British country houses in the period, monuments to heroes of commerce and the Napoleonic Wars, the key debates fought around ideal sculpture at the Royal Academy, the reception of British sculpture across Europe, the reception of Hindu sculpture deriving from India in Britain, and the relationship of sculpture to emerging industrial markets, both at home and abroad. Challenging characterisations of the period as 'neoclassical', the volume reveals British sculpture to be a much more eclectic and various field of endeavour, both in service of the state and challenging it, and open to sources ranging from the newly arrived Parthenon Frieze to contemporary print culture.