Walter Pater's significance for the institutionalization of English studies at British universities in the nineteenth century is often overlooked. Addressing the importance of his volume Appreciations (1889) in placing English literature in both a national and an international context, this book demonstrates the indebtedness of the English essay to the French tradition and brings together the classic, the Romantic, the English and the European. With essays on drama, prose, and poetry, from Shakespeare and Browne, to Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Pater's contemporaries Rossetti and Morris, Appreciations exemplifies ideals of aesthetic criticism formulated in Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Subjectivity pervades Pater's essays on the English authors, while bringing out their exceptional qualities in a manner reaching far into twentieth-century criticism. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Pater the Classicist is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater's important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. Widely considered our greatest aesthetic critic and now best known as a precursor to modernist writers and post-modernist thinkers of the twentieth century, Pater was also a classicist by profession who taught at the University of Oxford. He wrote extensively about Greek art and philosophy, but also authored an influential historical novel set in ancient Rome, Marius the Epicurean, and a variety of short stories depicting the survival of classical culture in later ages. These superficially diverging interests actually went closely hand-in-hand: it can plausibly be asserted that it is the classical tradition in its broadest sense, including the question of how to understand its workings and temporalities, which forms Pater's principal subject as a writer. Although he initially approached antiquity obliquely, through the Italian Renaissance, for example, or the poetry of William Morris, later in his career he wrote more, and more directly, about the ancient world, and particularly about Greece, his first love. The essays in this collection cover all his major works and reveal a many-sided and inspirational figure, whose achievements helped to reinvigorate the classical studies that were the basis of the English educational system of the nineteenth century, and whose conception of Classics as cross-disciplinary and outward-looking can be a model to scholars and students today. They discuss his classicism generally, his fiction set in classical antiquity, his writings on Greek art and culture, and those on ancient philosophy, and in doing so they also illuminate Pater's position within his Victorian context, among figures such as J. A. Symonds, Henry Nettleship, Vernon Lee, and Jane Harrison, as well as his place in the study and reception of Classics today.

"Life, Legend, Landscape" presents a rich selection of Victorian drawings and watercolors from the Courtauld Gallery collection, ranging from finished watercolors intended for public exhibition to informal sketches and preparatory drawings for paintings or sculpture. The selection includes a study by Edwin Landseer for the famous lions used at the base of Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square, London; the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti's intimate portrait of his muse, Elizabeth Siddal, seated at her easel; Whistler's delicate study of the young Elinor Leyland, and Fredrick Walker's outstanding The Old Farm Garden.

The group of young painters and writers who coalesced into the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the middle years of the nineteenth century became hugely influential in the development not only of literature and painting, but also more generally of art and design. Though their reputation has fluctuated over the years, their achievements are now recognised and their style enjoyed and studied widely. This volume explores the lives and works of the central figures in the group: among others, the Rossettis, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. This is the first book to provide a general introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite movement that integrates its literary and visual art forms. The Companion explains what made the Pre-Raphaelite style unique in painting, poetry, drawing and prose.

The group of young painters and writers who coalesced into the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the middle years of the nineteenth century became hugely influential in the development not only of literature and painting, but also more generally of art and design. Though their reputation has fluctuated over the years, their achievements are now recognised and their style enjoyed and studied widely. This volume explores the lives and works of the central figures in the group: among others, the Rossettis, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. This is the first book to provide a general introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite movement that integrates its literary and visual art forms. The Companion explains what made the Pre-Raphaelite style unique in painting, poetry, drawing and prose.

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cezanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

Modernism in the visual arts has been defined as a liberation from the classical inheritance. The excitement of modern art is often seen to lie in its radical break with the past. But according to one standard narrative, the modern discipline of art history began only with a study of ancient art and sculpture. Johann Joachim Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity, first published in 1764, set the precedent for the historical study of the visual arts, and is still the dominant method in art history today. The modern study of art and the making of modern art thus appear to be founded on incompatible principles: the one on the centrality of ancient art; the other on its utter repudiation. Elizabeth Prettejohn's important and revisionist new book starts from an opposite premise: that the modern study of ancient art and the making of modern art are inextricably intertwined. Subjecting Winckelmann's ideas to astute yet sympathetic critique, the author uses exciting theories of reception to construct a new theory of the relationship between ancient and modern art. Relating seminal ancient artifacts (such as Laocoon, the Parthenon Marbles and Venus de Milo) to modern interpretations by the likes of Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Rodin and Picasso, The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture will have strong appeal to students of art history and classics alike.