The Victorian Art School

The Victorian Art School documents the history of the art school in the nineteenth century, from its origins in South Kensington to its proliferation through the major industrial centres of Britain. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, together with earlier examples in Manchester and Birmingham demonstrate an unprecedented concern for the provision of plentiful light and air amidst the pollution of the Victorian city. As theories of design education and local governance converged, they also reveal the struggle of the provincial city for cultural independence from the capital. Examining innovations in the use of new technologies and approaches in the design of these buildings, The Victorian Art School offers a unique and explicitly environmental reading of the Victorian city. It examines how art schools complemented civic ‘Improvement’ programmes, their contribution to the evolution of art pedagogy, the tensions that arose between the provincial schools and the capital, and the role they would play in reimagining the relationship between art and public life in a rapidly transforming society. The architects of these buildings synthesised the potential of art with the perfection of the internal environment, indelibly shaping the future cultural life of Britain.

Pictorial history celebrating 25 years of The Victorian College of the Arts. Founded in 1972 the school draws upon its distinguished antecedent institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Ballet Victoria School and Melbourne Teachers College. Highlights the aims of the College, such as nourishing artistic talent and passing it on to the next generation by teaching and mentoring. Illustrated throughout with photos and includes chapters on each school, interviews and references. Foreword by Governor of Victoria Sir James Gobbo. Simultaneously published in hardcover and paperback.

When women were admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1860, female art students gained a foothold in the most conservative art institution in England. The Royal Female College of Art, the South Kensington Schools and the Slade School of Fine Art also produced increasing numbers of women artists. Their entry into a male-dominated art world altered the perspective of other artists and the public. They came from disparate levels of society--Princess Louise, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, studied sculpture at the National Art Training School--yet they all shared ambition, talent and courage. Analyzing their education and careers, this book argues that the women who attended the art schools during the 1860s and 1870s--including Kate Greenaway, Elizabeth Butler, Helen Allingham, Evelyn De Morgan and Henrietta Rae--produced work that would accommodate yet subtly challenge the orthodoxies of the fine art establishment. Without their contributions, Victorian art would be not simply the poorer but hardly recognizable to us today.

Drawn from Birmingham Museums Trust's incomparable collection of Victorian art and design, this exhibition will explore how three generations of young, rebellious artists and designers, such as Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, revolutionized the visual arts in Britain, engaging with and challenging the new industrial world around them.

This volume celebrates the artists and subjects of Britain's Victorian Age. The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 until 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence for Britain. This collection draws on paintings and sculpture from the permanent collection of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, providing an overview of the most important artists of the period. Eminent scholars offer insights into their artistic subjects, styles, and techniques, as well as into the role of the Royal Academy in the age of Queen Victoria. More than 70 works of art are cataloged in depth. This book also includes biographies of the artists featured, each illustrated with a contemporary photograph.

First published in 1999, this book asks what kind of advice was available to somebody wishing to embark upon oil painting in England between 1850 and 1900. It is a fascinating collection of Victorian instruction on how and what to paint, linked to crucial advice about art, its meaning and its relation to contemporary life, given by practising artists, important and often popular in their time, but whose lectures and writings are long overdue for reappraisal: Leslie, Hamerton, O’Neil, Poynter, Watts, Leighton, Armitage, Quilter and Herkomer. Here, beyond the familiar voices of Ruskin, Whistler and Pater, we have a whole range of experience from an age in which issues about painting were hotly debated by large numbers of people: professional artists, amateurs, critics, gallery-goers and Academy students. This anthology brings back to life the humour, seriousness, ambitions, eccentricities and controversies of people whose work shaped the nature of mainstream Victorian art.

This title was first published in 2000. London in the nineteenth century saw the founding of the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Other, less permanent, organisations flourished, among them the British Institution, water-colour societies and the Society of Female Artists. These worked alongside the schools such as the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Art. In this volume, eleven scholars, experts on the individual institutions, analyse their complex histories to investigate such issues as: How did they generate and redesign their publics? What identities did they create? What practice of art making, connoisseurship and spectatorship did they enshrine? These reports elucidate the values associated with the key institutions and describe the responses and adaptation over time to major cultural developments: new movements, political change and the development of the Empire. The volume as a whole offers a fascinating account of the interconnections between these key institutions. Challenging conventional readings of the subject, the Introduction, by Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd, offers a definition of public art during the Victorian period.