"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.

This important re-evaluation of the Dutch- born painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema traces his personal and artistic journey towards international fame and success in London and investigates how this exceptionally creative artist used his own houses and studios as laboratories to produce vivid paintings of life in ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Lawrence Alma-Tadema s paintings were immensely popular among his contemporaries, and have since enchanted a wide audience through the medium of cinema. Anyone who has ever enjoyed the great epic films of antiquity from Italian silent classics and Cecil B. DeMille to Ridley Scott s Gladiator will instantly recognize their origins in sets and costumes Alma- Tadema invented. Accompanied by glowing reproductions of the artist s rich and detailed works, this book boldly re-assesses Alma-Tadema s art through the idea of home: from his admiration for the interiors depicted in early Dutch paintings through his fascination with Pompeian ruins, to his creation of large studio houses that were artworks in their own right. Building upon Alma-Tadema s renown as the archaeologist of artists, the new scholarship in this impressive volume shows how the spaces he created and inhabited with his talented artist-wife Laura and their two daughters reflected an aesthetic vision that has thrilled viewers and other artists for more than a century. Appealing to general and scholarly audiences alike, this book underscores Alma-Tadema s reputation as one of his era s greatest creative talents."

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.

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.

With the rise of museums in the 19th century, including the formation in 1824 of the National Gallery in London, as well as the proliferation of widely available published reproductions, the art of the past became visible and accessible in Victorian England as never before. Inspired by the work of Sandro Botticelli, Jan van Eyck, Diego Velazquez, and others, British artists elevated contemporary art to new heights through a creative process that emphasized imitation and emulation. Elizabeth Prettejohn analyzes the ways in which the Old Masters were interpreted by critics, curators, and scholars, and argues that Victorian artists were, paradoxically, at their most original when they imitated the Old Masters most faithfully. Covering the arc of Victorian art from the Pre-Raphaelites through to the early modernists, this volume traces the ways in which artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Orpen engaged with the art of the past and produced some of the greatest art of the later 19th century. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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.

As treasure troves of creativity, the homes of artists reflect the intellectual worlds of their creators. Starting with the Villa Stuck in Munich-the aesthetic, conceptual cosmos and life's work of the aristocratic artist Franz von Stuck-this unique volume integrates the artist's house as a category into the international context and is the first to assign these buildings the status of major works. About twenty examples bring to life the fascination that these artistic fantasies hold for art lovers, including both existing projects and some which, although they have been lost, were of unique importance in their day and still retain their charisma. Along with paintings, sculptures, and photographs closely related to the houses, plans and models convey the correlation between art and life as well as the kind of harmony of the arts expressed in Richard Wagner's historical concept of the total work of art. Houses featured (selection): Sir John Soane's Museum, London; William Morris Red House, Bexleyheath; Louis Comfort Tiffany's Tiffany House, New York City; Mortimer Menpes's flat, London; the Fernand Khnopff Villa, Brussels; Jacques Majorelle's villa and garden, Marrakesh; Kurt Schwitters' MERZbau, Hannover; Max Ernst's house, Arizona