Wet Paint: Visual Culture in a Changing Britain – A Round Table Debate

Political decisions and debates regarding the interregional and interna- tional partnerships that constitute Great Britain, including those over Scottish Independence, EVEL (English Votes for English Laws) and proposed legislation on an ‘in/out’ referendum on British membership of the European Union, have contributed to, and intensified, the examination of Britain’s institutions, as well as its national emblems and arche- types. In light of such a dynamic situation, Visual Culture in Britain has asked representatives of British universities, the museum sector and research centres to respond to the idea of a changing Britain through the prism of British art and visual culture, using cogent examples wherever possible, and to outline their observations, understandings and positions within this rapidly developing context

Gothic visions of classical architecture in Hablot Knight Browne’s “dark” illustrations for the novels of Charles Dickens

In the early gothic literature of the eighteenth century danger lurked in the darkness beneath the pointed arches of gothic buildings. During the nineteenth century there was a progressive, although never complete, dislocation of gothic literary readings from gothic architecture. This article explores a phase in that development through discussion of a series of ‘dark’ illustrations produced by Hablot Knight Browne to illustrate novels by Charles Dickens. These show the way in which the rounded arches of neo-classical architecture were depicted in the mid-nineteenth century as locales of oppression and obscurity. Such depictions acted, in an age of political and moral reform, to critique the values of the system of power and authority that such architecture represented

Maria Cosway’s Hours: Cosmopolitan and Classical Visual Culture in Thomas Macklin’s Poets Gallery

Thomas Macklin’s Gallery of Poets opened at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street in 1788 with the aim to ‘display British Genius’ through ‘Prints Illustrative of the Most Celebrated British Poets’. Early newspaper coverage promised ‘a monument of the powers of the pencil in England, as the Vatican is at Rome’. The incongruous juxtaposition between Fleet Street and the Vatican spells out the cosmopolitan ambition of the literary gallery phenomenon through its real and imagined geographies of display. Through the format of the paper gallery of prints, Macklin’s Poets offered the inventions of British Poets as a repository of painting. This chapter examines how the cosmopolitan idiom of the paper gallery is negotiated in the first number of Macklin’s Poets. This essay examines the extent to which this ambition was achieved in the first Number of Macklin’s Poets which carried an engraving of Maria Cosway’s The Hours, originally a painting with an impressively European iconographic heritage. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783, and was retroactively associated by Macklin with Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Spring’. The trope of the Hours brought with it a weighty provenance derived from classical marble bas-relief, through the antiquarian pages of Pietro Santi Bartoli and Bernard de Montfaucon to Flaxman’s designs for Wedgwood plaques and vases. Cosway’s name also imported into Gray’s poem her reputation as a cosmopolitan, cultured woman who had completed the Grand Tour and who moved in elite circles including those of the Prince of Wales in London and the Duke of Orleans, Pierre d’Hancarville and Thomas Jefferson in Paris. The iconographies of the painting, the print, and the poem articulate a European cosmopolitan tradition for British Art

Book illustration

Book synopsis: William Blake, poet and artist, is a figure often understood to have 'created his own system'. Combining close readings and detailed analysis of a range of Blake's work, from lyrical songs to later myth, from writing to visual art, this collection of thirty-eight lively and authoritative essays examines what Blake had in common with his contemporaries, the writers who influenced him, and those he influenced in turn. Chapters from an international team of leading scholars also attend to his wider contexts: material, formal, cultural, and historical, to enrich our understanding of, and engagement with, Blake's work. Accessibly written, incisive, and informed by original research, William Blake in Context enables readers to appreciate Blake anew, from both within and outside of his own idiom

Gothic Revival Architecture Before Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill

The Gothic Revival is generally considered to have begun in eighteenth-century Britain with the construction of Horace Walpole’s villa, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, in the late 1740s. As this chapter demonstrates, however, Strawberry Hill is in no way the first building, domestic or otherwise, to have recreated, even superficially, some aspect of the form and ornamental style of medieval architecture. Earlier architects who, albeit often combining it with Classicism, worked in the Gothic style include Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Kent and Batty Langley, aspects of whose works are explored here. While not an exhaustive survey of pre-1750 Gothic Revival design, the examples considered in this chapter reveal how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gothic emerged and evolved over the course of different architects’ careers, and how, by the time that Walpole came to create his own Gothic ‘castle’, there was already in existence in Britain a sustained Gothic Revivalist tradition

William Etty: ‘A child of the Royal Academy’

The discourse of the 'British School' which took shape around 1800 was both a step towards, and a means of apprehending the anticipation of, the artistic field in its modern formation. This chapter elaborates the regulations surrounding entry into the Schools and progression through them, in which works of art submitted for assessment were always judged 'blind'. As the opening lines of the most recent biography of the painter William Etty assert: 'Anyone in early nineteenth-century England deciding to enter upon a career as an artist was bound to look to the Royal Academy for training, opportunities and recognition. There was a clear sense among Etty's contemporaries, and which has remained among art historians ever since, that Etty's untiring dedication to the study of the Academic nude presented a challenge to conventional taste, and an interpretative problem

The Chatterton of sculpture': Thomas Procter and the martyrology of the British School

The name of the sculptor and painter Thomas Procter does not feature prominently in modern accounts of British art at the end of the eighteenth century. The substantial modern biographical account of Procter appears in Thomas Brayshaw's antiquarian history of the parish of Giggleswick in Yorkshire, where the artist was born and raised. Brayshaw was able to draw on the family's memories as well as documentary sources and access to the few paintings and miniatures by Procter that had passed down in the family. During Procter's lifetime, his three exhibited works in sculpture, shown at the Royal Academy in 1785, 1786 and 1792, were received rapturously. Procter's reputation endured through mid-century, both at home and abroad. A separate, romanticised account of Procter's tragic life declaring him as 'the Chatterton of sculpture', tragically short-lived poet who served as the archetype of creative genius, was published in the literary annual The Winter's Wreath in 1828, and was republished in Britain and America