Eighteenth Century Engravings And Visual History In Britain

"Extending the scholarly discussion of visual history, this book examines eighteenth-century engraved book illustrations in order to outline the genealogy of the modern visualization of the past in Britain. This study is based on a body of more than a hundred engraved historical plates designed in the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain and published in more than a dozen pictorial histories. Focusing on these previously unstudied engravings, this work contributes to the study of eighteenth-century visual culture and is informed by current interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of visual and book studies. This book is about the urge to envision the past and about the establishment of the new relationship between visual media, visuality and history in eighteenth-century Britain. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, British history, book studies, and visual culture"--

Extending the scholarly discussion of visual history, this book examines eighteenth-century engraved book illustrations in order to outline the genealogy of the modern visualisation of the past in Britain. This study is based on a body of more than a hundred engraved historical plates designed in the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain and published in more than a dozen pictorial histories. Focusing on these previously unstudied engravings, this work contributes to the study of eighteenth-century visual culture and is informed by current interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of visual and book studies. Eighteenth-Century Engravings and Visual History in Britain is about the urge to envision the past and about the establishment of the new relationship between visual media, visuality, and history in eighteenth-century Britain. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, British history, book studies, and visual culture.

This book proposes new understandings of modern life in Britain by bringing constructs of female spirituality centre stage and examining three ‘forgotten’ artists identified with the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorianism. Thomas Cooper Gotch, Robert Anning Bell and Frederick Cayley Robinson are resituated squarely within the tumultuous social and cultural changes of the period. Becoming visible again, in more inclusive histories, allows such artists not only to re-inhabit but to reshape narratives of modernism, reanimating the scholarly discourse and creating a dynamic cultural history of modern Britain expressed through their striking visions of womanhood. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, gender studies and British studies.

A critical study of the life of art criticism in the 1970s, this volume traces the evolution of art and art criticism in a pivotal period in post-war British history. JJ Charlesworth explores how art critics and the art press attempted to negotiate new developments in art, faced with the challenges of conceptualism, alternative media, new social movements and radical innovations in philosophy and theory. This is the first comprehensive study of the art press and art criticism in Britain during this pivotal period, seen through the lens of its art press, charting the arguments and ideas that would come to shape contemporary art as we know it today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, British cultural history and history of journalism.

Before the invention of photography, prints were the principal means for reproducing and disseminating visual information. The engraver did for the image what the printer did for the written word, and painters were compared and judged on the evidence of prints of their work. In this authoritative and innovative book, Timothy Clayton describes the growth of the print trade in England during the eighteenth century, a period during which Britain emerged from artistic obscurity to dominate the international print market. This highly readable account offers a fascinating tour of the principal outlets for prints in London, the provinces, and the British colonies over a period of more than one hundred years. Clayton considers the variety of published material -- history prints, topography, portraiture, satire, propaganda -- the channels of distribution, and the various audiences to which prints were addressed. He examines the effect of the sudden and dramatic influx of foreign prints in the second decade of the eighteenth century and traces the way in which English engravers and printsellers attempted to establish a national industry. Prints were used to promote English entertainments, luxury industries, landscapes, gardens, and paintings and to demonstrate the increasing wealth and sophistication of the English nation. Their influence over the commercialization of leisure and the development of luxury manufacturing was considerable. By the 1760s, British engravers and painters were winning recognition and establishing a new reputation on the Continent through the dissemination of their work. During the following decade, the enthusiasm for English prints developed into full-blown anglomania, and engraved scenes from English literature and national history were displayed on walls throughout Europe.

What can visual artifacts tell us about the past? How can we interpret them rigorously, weaving their formal and material qualities into rich social contexts to reach wider historical conclusions? Unfolding key historiographical and methodological issues, Writing Visual Histories equips students to answer these questions, showing visual analysis to be a key skill in historical research. A multifaceted structure makes this a practical guide for writing and reflecting on visual histories. A first section includes six case studies -- on topics ranging from medieval heraldry to Life magazine. These examples are followed by an exploration of essential concepts that inform historical thinking about visual matters, a treatment of disciplinary practices, and discussion of the practicalities (such as accessing museum collections and organising permissions) that scholars working with visual sources have to navigate. This book is an invaluable tool kit for opening up a historical understanding of visual phenomena and practices of looking, and for writing that takes an integrated approach to studies of the past.

Hitherto relegated to the closets of art history and literary studies, book illustration has entered mainstream scholarship. The chapters of this collection offer only a glimpse of where a complete reconfiguration of the visual periphery of eighteenth-century texts might ultimately take us. The use of the gerund of the verb “to reconfigure” in the subtitle of this collection, instead of the corresponding noun, underlines the work-in-progress character of this interdisciplinary endeavour, which aims above all to discern new vistas while charting or revisiting landmarks in the rich field of eighteenth-century book illustration. The specific interpretive lenses through which contributors to this collection re-evaluate the visual periphery of the text cover an array of disciplines and areas of interest; among these, the most prominent are book history and print culture, art history and image theory, material and visual culture, word and image interaction, feminist theory and gender studies, history of medicine and technology. This spectrum could have been even less restrictive and more colourful if it were not for pragmatic and editorial considerations. Nonetheless, its plurality of vision provides a framework for an inclusive and multifaceted approach to eighteenth-century book illustration. Perhaps these essays are most valuable in the practical models they provide on how to tackle the interdisciplinary challenge that is the study of the eighteenth-century illustrated book. The collection as such is the first formal step in an effort to rethink or reconfigure the visual periphery of eighteenth-century texts. It has become clear that the study of the illustrated book of the Age of Enlightenment has the potential of yielding multiple findings, perspectives and discourses about a society immersed in visual culture, skilled in visual communication and reflected in the visual legacy it left behind.

To China and Latin America, often regarded as central components of a British 'informal empire'.