ONE OF THE TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES' BEST BOOKS FOR 2022 'Eye-opening and full of surprises . . . A treasure' Sunday Times 'A biography as rich with colourful characters as any novel' Telegraph John Constable, the revolutionary nineteenth-century painter of the landscapes and skies of southern England, is Britain's best-loved but perhaps least understood artist. His paintings reflect visions of landscape that shocked and perplexed his contemporaries: attentive to detail, spontaneous in gesture, brave in their use of colour. What we learn from his landscapes is that Constable had sharp local knowledge of Suffolk, a clarity of expression of the skyscapes above Hampstead, an understanding of the human tides in London and Brighton, and a rare ability in his late paintings of Salisbury Cathedral to transform silent suppressed passion into paint. Yet Constable was also an active and energetic correspondent. His letters and diaries - there are over one thousand letters from and to him - reveal a man of passion, opinion and discord, while his character and personality is concealed behind the high shimmering colour of his paintings. They reveal too the lives and circumstances of his brothers and his sisters, his cousins and his aunts, who serve to define the social and economic landscape against which he can be most clearly seen. These multifaceted reflections draw a sharp picture of the person, as well as the painter. James Hamilton's biography reveals a complex, troubled man, and explodes previous mythologies about this timeless artist, and establishes him in his proper context as a giant of European art.

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India is the first comprehensive examination of British artists whose first-hand impressions and prospects of the Indian subcontinent became a stimulus for the Romantic Movement in England; it is also a survey of the transformation of the images brought home by these artists into the cultural imperatives of imperial, Victorian Britain. The book proposes a second - Indian - Renaissance for British (and European) art and culture and an undeniable connection between English Romanticism and British Imperialism. Artists treated in-depth include James Forbes, James Wales, Tilly Kettle, William Hodges, Johann Zoffany, Francesco Renaldi, Thomas and William Daniell, Robert Home, Thomas Hickey, Arthur William Devis, R. H. Colebrooke, Alexander Allan, Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, Charles Gold, James Moffat, Charles D'Oyly, William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and George Chinnery.

In 1802, at the age of 26, Joseph Mallord William Turner became the youngest ever member of the Royal Academy. A prolific painter and watercolourist, his paintings began by combining great historical themes with the inspired visions of nature, but his experimentation with capturing the effects of light led him swiftly towards an unusual dissolution of forms. Turner was a constant traveller, not only within the British Isles but also throughout Europe, from the Alps to the banks of the Rhine, from northern France to Rome and Venice. His death in 1851 revealed not only his zealously guarded private life but also a will that left both his fortune and more than thirty thousand drawings, watercolours and paintings to the nation. In this profusely illustrated book, Olivier Meslay invites us to follow the development of Turner's incandescent art, a bridge between Romanticism and Impressionism and one of Britain's most remarkable contributions to art history.

The modernist aesthetic and, later, Nazi ideology split German Romantic painting into two opposed phases, an early progressive movement, represented by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), and a later reactionary one - epitomized by Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) and Peter von Cornelius (1783-1867). In this rich and engaging book, Mitchell Frank explores the continuities between these two phases to reconstruct the historical position that existed in the nineteenth century and to look once again at the Nazarenes - and Overbeck in particular - as a fully integrated part of the Romantic movement. His innovative book is crucial to an understanding of German Romanticism and the legacy of this period in European art.

Philosophy, art, literature, music, and politics were all transformed in the turbulent period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Communist Manifesto of 1848. This was the age of the 'Romantic revolution', when modern attitudes to political and artistic freedom were born. When we think of Romanticism, flamboyant figures such as Byron or Shelley instantly spring to mind, but what about Napoleon or Hegel, Turner or Blake, Wagner or Marx? How was it that Romanticism could give birth to passionate individualism and chauvinistic nationalism at the same time? How did it prefigure the totalitarian movements of the 20th century? Duncan Heath and Judy Boreham answer these questions and provide a unique overview of the many interlocking strands of Romanticism, focusing on the leading figures in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and America.

An in-depth examination of William Blake's glorious and acclaimed series of twelve monoprints Among William Blake's (1757-1827) most widely recognized and highly regarded works as an artist are twelve color printed drawings, or monoprints, conceived and executed in 1795. This book investigates these masterworks, explaining Blake's technique-one he essentially reinvented, unaware of 17th-century precursors-to show that these works were produced as paintings, and played a crucial role in Blake's development as a painter. Using material and historical analyses, Joseph Viscomi argues that the monoprints were created as autonomous paintings rather than as illustrations for Blake's books with an intended viewing order. Enlivened with bountiful illustrations, the text approaches the works within the context of their time, not divorced from ideas expressed in Blake's writings but not illustrative of or determined by those writings. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A compelling and persuasive account of how the Romantic Movement permanently changed the way we see things and express ourselves. Three great revolutions rocked the world around 1800. The first two - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution - have inspired the greatest volume of literature. But the third - the romantic revolution - was perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching. From Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Burns, to Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz, Rossini and Liszt, to Goya, Turner, Delacroix and Blake, the romantics brought about nothing less than a revolution when they tore up the artistic rule book of the old regime. This was the period in which art acquired its modern meaning; for the first time the creator, rather than the created, took centre-stage. Artists became the high priests of a new religion, and as the concert hall and gallery came to take the place of the church, the public found a new subject worthy of veneration in paintings, poetry and music. Tim Blanning's sparkling, wide-ranging survey traces the roots and evolution of a cultural revolution whose reverberations continue to be felt today.

A fuller, richer picture of an artist at the height of his powers Thomas Gainsborough's (1727-88) London years, from 1774 to 1788, were the pinnacle and conclusion of his career. They coincided with the establishment of the Royal Academy, of which Gainsborough was a founding member, and the city's ascendance as a center for the arts. This is a meticulously researched and readable account of how Gainsborough designed his home and studio and maintained a growing schedule of influential patrons, making a place for himself in the art world of late-18th-century London. New material about Gainsborough's technique is based on examinations of his pictures and firsthand accounts by studio visitors. His fractious relationship with the Royal Academy and its exhibition culture is reexamined through the works he sent to its annual shows. The full range of Gainsborough's art, from fashionable portraits to landscapes and fancy pictures, is addressed in this major contribution, not just to the study of a great artist, but to 18th-century studies in general. Distributed for Modern Art Press

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

Miles Edmund Cotman (known to his contemporaries as Edmund) was given the role of sheet anchor to a family of outstanding artists, at the centre of which was his father, the brilliant Norwich School painter John Sell Cotman. Edmund's loyalty was to be detrimental to his own artistic career, and perhaps unfairly, posterity has often dismissed him as an inferior hack artist. While he did not show the genius of his father, he did in fact produce a variety of distinguished and well-executed work. Geoffrey Searle looks at Edmund Cotman's background, the circumstances of his work, and the work itself that survives for us today.Illustrated with a representative sample of Cotman's works (including oils,watercolours and etchings), this is an important addition to the literature about the Norwich School.

Known as the master of French Romanticism for his energetic paintings, Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was also a consummate draftsman. This handsome book, one of the few to explore this topic in depth, provides new insight into Delacroix's drawing practice, paying particular attention to his materials and techniques and the ways in which the artist pushed the boundaries of the medium. The remarkable group of nearly 130 drawings featured here, many of which have been rarely seen, include academic and anatomical studies, sketches from nature, and preparatory drawings related to many of Delacroix's most renowned canvases, among them The Massacre at Chios and Liberty Leading the People.

Shortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book Award Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory. Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

Stanley Plumly explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from personal tragedy, these painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists' lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angled look at the philosophy of the sublime.

A revelatory study of one of the 18th century's greatest artists, which places him in relation to the darker side of the English Enlightenment Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), though conventionally known as a 'painter of light', returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, and he had an enduring concern with death, ruin, old age, loss of innocence, isolation and tragedy. In this long-awaited book, Matthew Craske adopts a fresh approach to Wright, which takes seriously contemporary reports of his melancholia and nervous disposition, and goes on to question accepted understandings of the artist. Long seen as a quintessentially modern and progressive figure - one of the artistic icons of the English Enlightenment - Craske overturns this traditional view of the artist. He demonstrates the extent to which Wright, rather than being a spokesman for scientific progress, was actually a melancholic and sceptical outsider, who increasingly retreated into a solitary, rural world of philosophical and poetic reflection, and whose artistic vision was correspondingly dark and meditative. Craske offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist's paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces. In doing so, he recovers Wright's deep engagement with the landscape, with the pleasures and sufferings of solitude, and with the themes of time, history and mortality. In this book, Joseph Wright of Derby emerges not only as one of Britain's most ambitious and innovative artists, but also as one of its most profound. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Gregory Dart expands upon existing notions of Cockneys and the 'Cockney School' in the late Romantic period by exploring some of the broader ramifications of the phenomenon in art and periodical literature. He argues that the term was not confined to discussion of the Leigh Hunt circle, but was fast becoming a way of gesturing towards everything in modern metropolitan life that seemed discrepant and disturbing. Covering the ground between Romanticism and Victorianism, Dart presents Cockneyism as a powerful critical currency in this period, which helps provide a link between the works of Leigh Hunt and Keats in the 1810s and the early works of Charles Dickens in the 1830s. Through an examination of literary history, art history, urban history and social history, this book identifies the early nineteenth century figure of the Cockney as the true ancestor of modernity.

John Martin's many influential works brought him huge popularity in his lifetime and his paintings have gone on to inspire film-makers, designers and artists in Europe and America. This beautifully illustrated book makes an important contribution to the revival of national and international interest in him and will complement a forthcoming touring exhibition. Establishing the context of Martin's youth in rural Northumberland, his career in London and subsequent national and international fame, Morden captures the apocalyptic mood in England from the 1790s to the 1840s and examines Martin's central position as a painter of the "sublime". The distinctive character of his work is explored through key paintings in terms of his techniques, devices and subject matter and their relationship to the culture and of popular entertainment of the time. Influencing 19th century railway and public architecture, Martin's reputation spread to Europe and America, going on to determine the course of early 20th century cinema and anticipate inter-active mass media in the 21st century. This book establishes John Martin as an important figure in cultural history, shaping the way we view and respond to our modern world.

Scottish and Irish Romanticism is the first single-author book to address the main non-English Romanticisms of the British Isles. Murray Pittock begins by questioning the terms of his chosen title as he searches for a definition of Romanticism and for the meaning of "national literature." He proposes certain determining "triggers" for the recognition of the presence of a national literature, and also deals with two major problems which are holding back the development of a new and broader understanding of British Isles Romanticisms: the survival of outdated assumptions in ostensibly more modern paradigms, and a lack of understanding of the full range of dialogues and relationships across the literatures of these islands. The theorists whose works chiefly inform the book are Bakhtin, Fanon and Habermas, although they do not define its arguments, and an alertness to the ways in which other literary theories inform each other is present throughout the book.
Pittock examines in turn the historiography, prejudices, and assumptions of Romantic criticism to date, and how our unexamined prejudices still stand in the way of our understanding of individual traditions and the dialogues between them. He then considers Allan Ramsay's role in song-collecting, hybridizing high cultural genres with broadside forms, creating in synthetic Scots a "language really used by men," and promoting a domestic public sphere. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the Scottish and Irish public spheres in the later eighteenth century, together with the struggle for control over national pasts, and the development of the cults of Romance, the Picturesque and Sentiment: Macpherson, Thomson, Owenson and Moore are among thewriters discussed. Chapter 5 explores the work of Robert Fergusson and his contemporaries in both Scotland and Ireland, examining questions of literary hybridity across not only national but also linguistic borders, while Chapter 6 provides a brief literary history of Burns' descent into critical neglect combined with a revaluation of his poetry in the light of the general argument of the book. Chapter 7 analyzes the complexities of the linguistic and cultural politics of the national tale in Ireland through the work of Maria Edgeworth, while the following chapter considers of Scott in relation to the national tale, Enlightenment historiography, and the European nationalities question. Chapter 9 looks at the importance of the Gothic in Scottish and Irish Romanticism, particularly in the work of James Hogg and Charles Maturin, while Chapter 10, "Fratriotism," explores a new concept in the manner in which Scottish and Irish literary, political and military figures of the period related to Empire.

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and concretely embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical 'likenesses' connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Human reason and the principle of rationality realized objectively in Nature were both regarded as finite effects of God's seminal Word. Although Coleridge intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a 'mirror' of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were 'mirrors' of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own skeptical doubts.
Coleridge and Scepticism examines the nature of these skeptical doubts, as well as offering a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. Ben Brice situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first, a tradition of epistemological 'piety' or 'modesty', informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second, a tradition of theological voluntarism, emphasizes the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. Brice argues that Coleridge's detailed familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions, ultimately served to undermine hisconfidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature.

A bold reassessment of nineteenth-century British painter and decorative artist Edward Burne-Jones, elucidating his fundamentally radical defiance of the Victorian age Challenging the dominant characterization of Edward Burne-Jones as an escapist who withdrew from the modern world into imaginary realms of his own creation, this groundbreaking book argues that he was engaged in a fundamentally radical defiance of the age, protesting against imperial aggression, capitalist economic inequality, and environmental destruction in the wake of the industrial revolution. Harnessing the utopian power of embodied aesthetic encounters, Burne-Jones drew inspiration from the medieval concept of dreams as visionary states of transformation. Therefore, his art functioned not as a retreat, but as a vehicle for revolutionary awakening. Often characterized as a painter, this book re-centers Burne-Jones's practice in the decorative arts, demonstrating that he consistently interrogated the boundaries of artistic media, in keeping with wider debates over the role of the arts in the nineteenth century. The first scholarly monograph solely devoted to Burne-Jones since 1973, The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones offers a thorough re-examination of his work, illuminating his radical defiance of the artistic, social, and political hierarchies of nineteenth-century Britain. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The Bible is full of miracles. Yet how do we make sense of them today? And where might we see miracles in our own lives? In this installment of the Hansen Lectureship series, historian and theologian Timothy Larsen considers the legacy of George MacDonald, the Victorian Scottish author and minister who is best known for his pioneering fantasy literature, which influenced authors such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, and Madeleine L'Engle. Larsen explores how, throughout his life and writings, MacDonald sought to counteract skepticism, unbelief, naturalism, and materialism and to herald instead the reality of the miraculous, the supernatural, the wondrous, and the realm of the spirit. Based on the annual lecture series hosted at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center, volumes in the Hansen Lectureship Series reflect on the imaginative work and lasting influence of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

A newly expanded edition of the defining book on one of French Romanticism's most influential and elusive painters Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was a solitary genius who produced stormy Romantic works like The Death of Sardanapalus as well as more classically inspired paintings such as Liberty Leading the People. Over the long span of his career, he responded to the literary fascination with Orientalism, the politics of French imperialism, and the popular interest in travel, painting everything from sweeping, epic tales to intimate interiors. In this beautifully illustrated book, Barthelemy Jobert delves into all facets of Delacroix's life and art, providing an unforgettable portrait of perhaps the greatest and most elusive painter of the French Romantic movement. Bringing together large canvases, decorative cycles, watercolors, and engravings, Jobert explores the inner tensions and contradictions that drove the artist, re-creating the political and cultural arenas in which Delacroix thrived and enabling readers to fully appreciate the extraordinary range of his artistic production. He reveals how Delacroix successfully navigated the Salons of Paris and the halls of government, socialized with George Sand and Victor Hugo, engaged in intense philosophical discussions about art with Baudelaire, and maintained a lively repartee with the press. He vividly describes Delacroix's journey to Morocco, which unexpectedly led him to rediscover his classical roots, and shows how Delacroix profoundly influenced later painters such as Cezanne and Picasso. This new and expanded edition of Jobert's acclaimed book includes a thoroughly updated introduction and conclusion, and a wealth of new information and illustrations throughout.

It has often been suggested that Romanticism of its very nature has affinities with religious quest and spiritual value. These new essays, written in honor of distinguished eighteenth-century and Romantic scholar John L. Mahoney, explore the intersection of Romanticism and religion. They range from broad considerations of this relationship in several Romantic writers to close readings of individual poems. The collection breaks new ground in the exploration of the role of religion in the Romantics experience and will be of interest not only to scholars of Romanticism and historians of nineteenth-century religion, but to anyone interested in the intellectual life of the nineteenth-century England.