A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present

Over the last two decades, British art of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries has been one of the most lively and innovative areas of art–historical study. In response to this surge of interest in the field, this collection of newly commissioned essays by leading scholars provides a comprehensive introduction to British art history, from 1600 to the present.

The book is organized thematically to present in depth the major preoccupations that have emerged from recent scholarship in British Art. These include aesthetics, gender, modernity, nationhood, and nationality, and the institutions of the British art world.

Illustrated throughout and combining original research with a survey of the current state of the field, A Companion to British Art provides a much–needed resource for students, teachers, and researchers alike.

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgements xiii

Notes on Contributors xiv

Part 1 Editors Introduction 1

Part 2 General 11

1 The Englishness of English Art Theory 13
Mark A. Cheetham

2 Modernity and the British 38
Andrew Ballantyne

3 English Art and Principled Aesthetics 60
Janet Wolff

Part 3 Institutions 77

4 Those Wilder Sorts of Painting : the Painted Interior in the Age of Antonio Verrio 79
Richard Johns

5 Nineteenth–Century Art Institutions and Academies 105
Colin Trodd

6 Crossing the Boundary: British Art across Victorianism and Modernism 131
David Peters Corbett

7 British Pop Art and the High/Low Divide 156
Simon Faulkner

8 When Attitudes Became Formless: Art and Antagonism in the 1960s 180
Jo Applin

Part 4 Nationhood 199

9 Art and Nation in Eighteenth–Century Britain 201
Cynthia Roman

10 International Exhibitions: Linking Culture, Commerce, and Nation 220
Julie F. Codell

11 Itinerant Surrealism: British Surrealism either side of the Second World War 241
Ben Highmore

12 55° North 3° West: a Panorama from Scotland 265
Tom Normand

13 Retrieving, Remapping, and Rewriting Histories of British Art: Lubaina Humid s Revenge 289
Dorothy Rowe

Part 5 Landscape 315

14 Defining, Shaping, and Picturing Landscape in the Nineteenth Century 317
Anne Helmreich

15 Theories of the Picturesque 351
Michael Charlesworth

16 Landscape into Art: Painting and Place–Making in England, c.1760 1830 373
Tom Williamson

17 Landscape Painting, c.1770 1840 397
Sam Smiles

18 Landscape and National Identity: the Phoenix Park Dublin 422
Dana Arnold

Part 6 Men and Women 449

19 The Elizabethan Miniature 451
Dympna Callaghan

20 The Crown and Glory of a Woman : Female Chastity in Eighteenth–Century British Art 473
Kate Retford

21 Serial Portraiture and the Death of Man in Late–Eighteenth–Century Britain 502
Whitney Davis

22 Virtue, Vice, Gossip, and Sex: Narratives of Gender in Victorian and Edwardian Painting 532
Pamela M. Fletcher

Index 552

Dana Arnold is Professor of Architectural History and Theory at Middlesex University, UK. She has published several books on British architecture and visual culture and is author of the best selling Art History: A Very Short Introduction (2004). She is series editor of New Interventions in Art History, Wiley–Blackwell Companions to Art History, and Blackwell Anthologies in Art History.

David Peters Corbett is Professor of History of Art at the University of East Anglia. He has published a number of books, and has received prizes from the Historians of British Art, College Art Association USA, and a Guardian book of the year award. He is the editor of the journal Art History.