That Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) became the most fashionable painter of his time was not simply due to his artistic gifts or good fortune. The art of pleasing, Richard Wendorf contends, was as much a part of Reynolds's success--in his life and in his work--as the art of painting. The author's examination of Reynolds's life and career illuminates the nature of eighteenth-century English society in relation to the enterprise of portrait-painting. Conceived as an experiment in cultural criticism, written along the fault lines that separate (but also link) art history and literary studies, "Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society" explores the ways in which portrait-painting is embedded in the social fabric of a given culture as well as in the social and professional transaction between the artist and his or her subject. In addition to providing a new view of Reynolds, Wendorf's book develops a thoroughly new way of interpreting portraiture.

Wendorf takes us into Reynolds's studio to show us the artist deploying his considerable social and theatrical skills in staging his sittings as carefully orchestrated performances. The painter's difficult relationship with his sister Frances (also an artist and writer), his complicated maneuvering with patrons, the manner in which he set himself up as an artist and businessman, his highly politicized career as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts: as each of these aspects of Reynolds's practice comes under Wendorf's scrutiny, a new picture of the painter emerges--more sharply defined and fully fleshed than the Reynolds of past portraits, and clearly delineating his capacity for provoking ambivalence among friends and colleagues, and among viewers and readers today.

Following in the methodological footsteps of his prize-winning Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society, Richard Wendorf's new book on British art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is an experiment in cultural history, combining the analysis of specific artistic objects with an exploration of the cultural conditions in which they were created. Themes include an investigation of what happens when a painter dies, the role of writing around and within visual objects, and the nature of evidence in art history. Extended interpretations of some of the most iconic images in British art, including Constable's Cenotaph, Raeburn's Skating Minister, Stubbs's Haymakers and Reapers, and Rossetti's Prosperpine, Venus Verticordia, and Blessed Damosel, are part of a broader investigation of the ways in which we practice art history today. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "John Keats and the Exaltation of a Genius" at Houghton Library in 1995 and of the John Keats Bicentennial Conference. The catalog includes a preface by Richard Wendorf, and essays by Helen Vendler and William H. Bond.

In this ambitious study, Richard Wendorf establishes the grounds of comparison between two arts that have often been linked in a casual way but whose historical interrelations remain almost completely unexplored. By focusing on the great age of English portraiture - from the arrival of Van Dyck to the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson - the author shows that, despite their obvious differences, visual and verbal portraits often shared similar assumptions about the representation of historical character. Grounded in modern theory devoted to the comparison of literature and painting and to the problem of representation, this book examines each form of portraiture in terms of the other. Among those writers considered are Izaak Walton, John Evelyn, John Aubrey, Roger North, Goldsmith, Johnson, Mrs Piozzi, Boswell; among the artists are Van Dyck, Lely, Samuel Cooper, Jonathan Richardson, Hogarth and Reynolds. The careers of `double agents' (painters, like Richardson and Reynolds, who experimented with biographical writing) are also discussed. The Elements of Life is a ground-breaking critical history of biography and portrait-painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

"William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry " was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

William Collins (1721-1759) is one of several eighteenth-century poets who have received more attention for what they are said to have anticipated--the full-blooded Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge--than for what they have achieved. Collins's career as a poet was brief, but the handful of major poems that he wrote in the mid -1740s has stirred interest among critics intrigued by the complexity and obscurity of his work and by the illness and possible madness that prematurely ended his life. Combining historical scholarship with close readings of all Collins's poems, Richard Wendorf provides the most comprehensive and detailed study to be devoted to the work of this enigmatic figure and to the forces that shaped his literary career. In doing so, he places Collins within an eighteenth-century poetic context and shows that his gift for myth-making makes him a vital link between the mythic poetry of Shakespeare and Spenser and that of the Romantics.

Wendorf's opening and closing chapters examine the relationship between Collins's life and his work, providing an authoritative discussion of his supposed madness and of the myths of insanity that clouded his reputation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wendorf argues that Collins's madness is problematical at best, and that much recent criticism is a distortion of his major work, which explores the transcendent powers of the irrational forces within us but is not necessarily the product of madness itself. The book's central chapters trace Collins's development as a poet and offer fresh approaches to his major odes. In these mature poems he turned from his early interest in Augustan poetry to very different sources of inspiration and came to reject the ordered and unified natural world of Pope and Thompson.