National Portrait Gallery Mid-Georgian Portraits, 1760-1790

National Portrait Gallery Mid-Georgian Portraits, 1760-1790
Author: John Ingamells
Publisher:
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN:

This catalogue includes such famous figures as David Garrick and Dr Samuel Johnson, Sarah Siddons and Emma Hamilton, and the work of such artists as Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney. It has been compiled by one of the leading authorities on 18th-century English portraiture, John Ingamells.

A Passion for Performance

A Passion for Performance
Author: Shelley Bennett
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 162
Release: 1999-09-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892365579

A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists brings together three engaging essays – by Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett and Mark Leonard, and Shearer West – that recreate the eventful life, both on and off the stage, of the great eighteenth-century actress Sarah Siddons. Siddons was renowned for her bravura performances in tragic roles, and her fame was enhanced by the many portraits of her painted by the leading artists of the day. The greatest of these was Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, a painting now in the Huntington Art Collections and recently studied at the Getty Center. A Passion for Performance places this magnificent portrait within the context of Siddons’s career as an actress and cultural icon. Includes a chronology of Siddons’s life by volume editor Robyn Asleson.

1776

1776
Author: Kenneth Pearson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 246
Release: 1976
Genre: American Revolution Bicentennial, 1976
ISBN:

Dilettanti

Dilettanti
Author: Bruce Redford
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2008-08-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892369248

Bruce Redford re-creates the vibrant culture of connoisseurship in Enlightenment England by investigating the multifaceted activities and achievements of the Society of Dilettani. Elegantly and wittily he dissects the British connoisseurs whose expeditions, collections, and publications laid the groundwork for the Neoclassical revival and for the scholarly study of Graeco-Roman antiquity. After the foundation of the society in 1732, the Dilettani commissioned portraits of the members. Including a striking group of mock-classical and mock-religious representations, these portraits were painted by George Knapton, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. During the second half of the century, the society’s expeditions to the Levant yielded a series of pioneering architectural folios, beginning with the first volume The Antiquities of Athens in 1762. These monumental volumes aspired to empirical exactitude in text and image alike. They prepared the way for Specimens of Antient Sculpture (1809), which combines the didactic (detailed investigations into technique, condition, restoration, and provenance) with the connoisseurial (plates that bring the illustration of ancient sculpture to new artistic heights). The Society of Dilettanti’s projects and publications exemplify the Enlightenment ideal of the gentleman amateur, which is linked in turn to a culture of wide-ranging curiosity.

The Game of Love in Georgian England

The Game of Love in Georgian England
Author: Sally Holloway
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 019882307X

Courtship in Georgian England was a decisive moment in the life cycle, imagined as a tactical game, an invigorating sport, and a perilous journey across a turbulent sea. This volume brings to life the emotional experience of courtship using the words and objects selected by men and women to navigate this potentially fraught process. It provides new insights into the making and breaking of relationships, beginning with the formation of courtships using the language of love, the development of intimacy through the exchange of love letters, and sensory engagement with love tokens such as flowers, portrait miniatures, and locks of hair. It also charts the increasing modernization of romantic customs over the Georgian era - most notably with the arrival of the printed valentine's card - revealing how love developed into a commercial industry. The book concludes with the rituals of disintegration when engagements went awry, and pursuit of damages for breach of promise in the civil courts. The Game of Love in Georgian England brings together love letters, diaries, valentines, and proposals of marriage from sixty courtships sourced from thirty archives and museum collections, alongside an extensive range of sources including ballads, conduct literature, court cases, material objects, newspaper reports, novels, periodicals, philosophical discourses, plays, poems, and prints, to create a vivid social and cultural history of romantic emotions. The book demonstrates the importance of courtship to studies of marriage, relationships, and emotions in history, and how we write histories of emotions using objects. Love emerges as something that we do in practice, enacted by couples through particular socially and historically determined rituals.

Gothic Nightmares

Gothic Nightmares
Author: Martin Myrone
Publisher: Tate
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2006-04
Genre: Art
ISBN:

"Gothic Nightmares explores the taste for weird, supernatural and fantastic themes in British art between 1770 and 1830. Presenting the wildly original and extravagant images of Henry Fuseli and his contemporaries in the context of the 'Gothic', it shows how art, taste and ideas of the self were transformed in an era of revolutionary change, helping lay the foundations of modern culture."--BOOK JACKET.