Pictures Within Pictures In Nineteenth Century Britain

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.

A novel art history of England told through the artworks on display in domestic space over hundreds of years. The Private Lives of Pictures offers a new history of British art, seen from the perspective of the home. Focusing on the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century, the book takes the reader on a tour of an imaginary Victorian or Edwardian house, stopping in each room to look at the pictures on the walls. Nicholas Tromans opens up the intimate history of art in everyday life as he examines a diverse array of issues, including how pictures were chosen for each room, how they were displayed, and what role they played in interior design. Superbly illustrated, The Private Lives of Pictures will appeal to readers interested in both art and social history, as well as the history of interiors.

During the Victorian period there developed a new anxiety about male-female relations and roles in modern society, as described by a member of the Athenaeum in 1858, ?the distinction of man and woman, their separate as well as their joint rights, begins to occupy the attention of our whole community, and with no small effect?. These essays examine Victorian painting in the light of this 'woman question' by analysing the change in representation of the family, romance, social issues such as emigration and colonialism, the use of the female nude and the traditions of portraiture, history-painting and still life. The art and artists are considered in a socio-political context, and the connections between Victorian sexism, racism and classism are examined. These essays bring to light much previously unknown work (especially by women) and reappraise many well-known paintings.

The nineteenth century witnessed a series of revolutions in the production and circulation of images. From lithographs and engraved reproductions of paintings to daguerreotypes, stereoscopic views, and mass-produced sculptures, works of visual art became available in a wider range of media than ever before. But the circulation and reproduction of artworks also raised new questions about the legal rights of painters, sculptors, engravers, photographers, architects, collectors, publishers, and subjects of representation (such as sitters in paintings or photographs). Copyright and patent laws tussled with informal cultural norms and business strategies as individuals and groups attempted to exert some degree of control over these visual creations. With contributions by art historians, legal scholars, historians of publishing, and specialists of painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic arts, this rich collection of essays explores the relationship between intellectual property laws and the cultural, economic, and technological factors that transformed the pictorial landscape during the nineteenth century. This book will be valuable reading for historians of art and visual culture; legal scholars who work on the history of copyright and patent law; and literary scholars and historians who work in the field of book history. It will also resonate with anyone interested in current debates about the circulation and control of images in our digital age.

19th-century British Photographs is gloriously illustrated olume that showcases the depth and variety of photographs from the National Gallery of Canada's permanent collection, and places them in their social and historical context. Featuring a number of iconic works from some of the medium's earliest practitioners - inc. Julia Margaret Cameron, William Henry Fox Talbot, Frederick H. Evans, Roger Fenton and Henry Peach Robinson - and an insightful analysis of the various photographic processes in use at the time, such as salted paper prints, daguerreotypes, albumen silver prints, collotypes and carbon prints, 19th-Century British hotographs provides readers with a complete overview of the crucial period in the development of photography.

Ten representative works of art in the world-renowned Huntington collection illustrate the richness and versatility of British painting during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Artists at this time employed many styles, borrowing from ancient Greece, India and China, from the Byzantine, and from the just-closing Rococo period. Nearly 100 colour illustrations place the ten primary pictures in artistic context.

"The black presence in Victorian art is greater than may be supposed. Indeed, the expanding art market in the nineteenth century was largely based on British prosperity resulting from imperial commerce and conquest. It can therefore be said that Victorian art owes its existence to those who are relatively absent from its images. Black Victorians brings together over 100 images depicting black figures, to reveal the diversity of representation within nineteenth-century visual culture and to foreground the 'forgotten' presence of people of African descent in Victorian British art. The range of images is broad, from pictures of soldiers and sailors in Britain's armed forces and men and women in genre scenes to portraits of entertainers and political refugees and studies of artists' models. Notable individuals featured include actor Ira Aldridge, Crimean heroine Mary Seacole, the Queen's god-daughter Sarah Bonetta Davies, composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. In addition to the fine arts of painting, drawing and sculpture, the selection includes photography, popular illustration, caricature and ephemera, which provide a cultural context for the portraits and subject pictures, as well as presenting black figures as members of British society in everyday settings. Many major artists of the period are represented, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edgar Degas and J. A. M. Whistler. Many works are virtually unknown and collected here for the first time. Presenting an important opportunity to see and assess how black figures have been portrayed in British art, Black Victorians is an original and fascinating survey of a subject that has been given little coverage to date. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to seek a fresh perspective on a well-documented period of British history."--Book jacket.

Focusing on one representative figure, Francis Bedford, this study emphasizes how photographs operated to form and transmit cultural ideas and values. The first writing on Bedford since the 1970s, the book examines this premier photographer who was also commercially successful. Major themes include the intersection of nature and culture, the practice of nineteenth-century tourism, attitudes toward historical identity, and the formation of a national identity in England and Wales.