The King's Artists : The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760-1840

The King's Artists : The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760-1840
Author: Holger Hoock
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2003-11-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780191556104

This is the story of the forging of a national cultural institution in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. The Royal Academy of Arts was the dominant art school and exhibition society in London and a model for art societies across the British Isles and North America. This is the first study of its early years, re-evaluating the Academy's significance in national cultural life and its profile in an international context. Holger Hoock reassesses royal and state patronage of the arts and explores the concepts and practices of cultural patriotism and the politicization of art during the American and French Revolutions. By demonstrating how the Academy shaped the notions of an English and British school of art and influenced the emergence of the British cultural state, he illuminates the politics of national culture and the character of British public life in an age of war, revolution, and reform.

Victorian Artists

Victorian Artists
Author: Quentin Bell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2023-07-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000886956

First published in 1967, Victorian Artists documents the painting of the Victorian period, that is, the period between the death of Constable and William IV in 1837, the first Post-Impressionist painting in 1910 and the end of an epoch in British painting. Professor Bell has given special attention to some of the pre-Raphaelite artists, and to Sickert and the Camden Town group. These most illuminating and diverting essays, which originated as Slade lectures at Oxford, combined with a large collection of illustrations, make this a unique discussion of a period whose aesthetic influence is still widely evident. This book will be of interest to students of art and history.

Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Author: Catherine Roach
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351554190

Repainting the work of another into one?s own canvas is a deliberate and often highly fraught act of reuse. This book examines the creation, display, and reception of such images. Artists working in nineteenth-century London were in a peculiar position: based in an imperial metropole, yet undervalued by their competitors in continental Europe. Many claimed that Britain had yet to produce a viable national school of art. Using pictures-within-pictures, British painters challenged these claims and asserted their role in an ongoing visual tradition. By transforming pre-existing works of art, they also asserted their own painterly abilities. Recognizing these statements provided viewers with pleasure, in the form of a witty visual puzzle solved, and with prestige, in the form of cultural knowledge demonstrated. At stake for both artist and audience in such exchanges was status: the status of the painter relative to other artists, and the status of the viewer relative to other audience members. By considering these issues, this book demonstrates a new approach to images of historic displays. Through examinations of works by J.M.W. Turner, John Everett Millais, John Scarlett Davis, Emma Brownlow King, and William Powell Frith, this book reveals how these small passages of paint conveyed both personal and national meanings.

Woman Behind the Painter

Woman Behind the Painter
Author: Rosalie Hook
Publisher: University of Alberta
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2006-03-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780888644374

"Rosalie Hook's diaries of her doings at home and abroad with her painter husband provide a fascinating window on the Victorian art world. James Clarke Hook, a brilliant and successful painter whose "Hookscapes" uniquely acquainted the British public with the beauties of their shores, first took his young bride to Italy on a traveling studentship awarded by the Royal Academy; and Rosalie eagerly records her response to the art treasures around her, to the ceremonies surrounding the Pope at Easter, to Vesuvius in eruption, and then to the political upheavals of the Risorgimento. Her Italy Diary vividly documents a sympathetic English response to the volatile southern culture. The son of a bankrupt, James Clarke Hook (1819-1907) managed, at a time of unprecedented prestige for the artist, to paint himself into country-gentlemanhood.