A Companion to British Art E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Art History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1304

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This companion is a collection of newly-commissioned essays written by leading scholars in the field, providing a comprehensive introduction to British art history.

• A generously-illustrated collection of newly-commissioned essays which provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of British art
• Combines original research with a survey of existing scholarship and the state of the field
• Touches on the whole of the history of British art, from 800-2000, with increasing attention paid to the periods after 1500
• Provides the first comprehensive introduction to British art of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, one of the most lively and innovative areas of art-historical study
• Presents in depth the major preoccupations that have emerged from recent scholarship, including aesthetics, gender, British art’s relationship to Modernity, nationhood and nationality, and the institutions of the British art world

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Part 1 Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Part 2 General

1 The “Englishness” of English Art Theory1

2 Modernity and the British

Ancient Modernity

Early Modern Modernity

Present Modernity

Progressive Modernity

Insular Responses

Modernist Tradition

3 English Art and Principled Aesthetics

Part 3 Institutions

4 “Those Wilder Sortsof Painting”

The Bigger Picture

On Painted Ceilings

Beyond the Baroque

Hercules on the Stairs

5 Nineteenth-Century Art Institutions and Academies

Valuation and Investigation at the Royal Academy

Social Values and Academic Norms

The Institutional Body

6 Crossing the Boundary

Binyon and the Saturday Review

Binyon’s Theory of Art

Art and Life

The New Art

Binyon and Modernism

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

7 British Pop Art and the High/Low Divide

Introduction

Revisiting the Cultural Continuum

Artistic Agency and the High/Low Divide

British Pop Art in the Early 1960s

Derek Boshier and Richard Smith

Conclusion

8 When Attitudes Became Formless

Opticality and “the Eye/Body” Problem

Art, Objecthood, and Modernist Sculpture

Pop Goes London: Transatlantic Exchange and the Anxiety of Influence

Anti-form and Anti-monumentality: Modernism under Pressure

Destruction in Art

Part 4 Nationhood

9 Art and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Britain

10 International Exhibitions

Mapping as Cultural Practice in International Exhibitions

The Great Exhibition, 1851: Culture, Commerce, and Display

Visuality, Things, and the Display of Nations

National Unity and the New

Spectacles beyond Time and Space

The Fine Arts

Displaying the Empire

Franco-British Exhibition, 1908: Modernism and Women

Conclusion

11 Itinerant Surrealism

Introduction

Swanage 1936

Burlington Gardens 1936

Blackheath 1936

From War to Postwar

British Surrealism Now

Conclusion: Art in a National Frame

12 55° North 3° West

A Scottish Imaginary

Something like a “Tradition”

Being Scottish, Being British, Being Internationalist

Festival Times

Mapping and Remapping

13 Retrieving, Remapping, and Rewriting Histories of British Art

Thinking Conjuncturally

At the Water’s Edge

Conclusions

Acknowledgements

Part 5 Landscape

14 Defining, Shaping, and Picturing Landscape in the Nineteenth Century

Defining Terms

Situated in the Social Realm

Modes of Landscape Representation

Social-Historical Framework

Gardening and Garden Design

Painting

15 Theories of the Picturesque

16 Landscape into Art

Introduction

Production and Parkland

The Social Meaning of the Landscape Park

The Park: New Perspectives

Enclosure and its Representation

The Town and the Country

Norwich and the Norwich School

Conclusion

17 Landscape Painting, c.1770–1840

18 Landscape and National Identity

Whose Empire?

Constructions of Nation

The Problem of Culture

The Aesthetic

The Phoenix Park

Transformations

National Landscapes

The National Hero

The Political Backdrop to the Phoenix Park as a Symbol of Colonial Rule

The Reform of the Irish Board of Works – a Signifier of Metropolitan Systems of Government

The 1832 and 1834 Reports

The Landscaping of the Park

The Straight Avenue

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Part 6 Men and Women

19 The Elizabethan Miniature

Monument versus Miniature

Beauty in Little

20 “The Crown and Glory of a Woman”

The “Outworks” of Chastity

The Madonna and the Magdalene

Before and After

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and her “Vartue”

Conclusion: the Chaste and the Unchaste

21 Serial Portraiture and the Death of Man in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain

Social Legitimation and Serial Portraiture

Sir Joshua Reynolds and Serial Portraiture

Biography and History in Reynolds’ Portraits

Defining Reynolds’ Serial Portraits

Gender Distribution of Reynolds’ Serial Portraits

The Materiality of Reynolds’ Serial Portraits

Reynolds’ First Portrait of Augustus Keppel (1749)

Reynolds’ Full-Length Portrait of Keppel (1752)

Reynolds’ Third Portrait of Keppel (late 1750s)

Reynolds’ Rockingham Portrait of Keppel (1765)

Reynolds’ Portraits of Vice-Admiral Keppel (1780)

Reynolds’ Last Portrait of Keppel

22 Virtue, Vice, Gossip, and Sex

Victorian Values: Fractured Families

Confessions: Sexuality and Psychology

Conclusion

Index

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO ART HISTORY

These invigorating reference volumes chart the influence of key ideas, discourses, and theories on art, and the way that it is taught, thought of, and talked about throughout the English-speaking world. Each volume brings together a team of respected international scholars to debate the state of research within traditional subfields of art history as well as in more innovative, thematic configurations. Representing the best of the scholarship governing the field and pointing toward future trends and across disciplines, the Blackwell Companions to Art History series provides a magisterial, state-of-the-art synthesis of art history.

1 A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945

edited by Amelia Jones

2 A Companion to Medieval Art

edited by Conrad Rudolph

3 A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture

edited by Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton

4 A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art

edited by Babette Bohn and James M. Saslow

5 A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present

edited by Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett

Forthcoming

1 A Companion to Modern African Art

edited by Monica Visona and Gitti Salami

2 A Companion to Chinese Art

edited by Martin Powers and Katherine Tsiang

3 A Companion to American Art

edited by John Davis, Jennifer Greenhill and Jason LaFountain

This edition first published 2013© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to British art : 1600 to the present / edited by Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett.pages cm. – (Blackwell companions to art history)Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-3629-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Art, British. I. Arnold, Dana, editor of compilation. II. Peters Corbett, David, 1956– editor of compilation.N6764.C68 2013709.41–dc23

2012033131

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Graham Sutherland, Entrance to a Lane. © Tate, London, 2010.Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

List of Illustrations

1.1

William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug, 1745. Oil on canvas; support: 900 × 699 mm frame: 1080 × 875 × 78 mm painting.

1.2

Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads, 1998. Wax-print cotton costumes on mannequins, dog mannequin, painted metal bench, rifle 165 × 635 × 254 cm with plinth.

2.1

Richard Payne Knight: Downton Castle, Herefordshire; print from Heaton’s of Tisbury.

2.2

The De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, by Erich Mendelssohn.

3.1

Gwen John, The Student.

3.2

Roger Fry, Self-portrait, oil on canvas, 1928.

4.1

The saloon, or “Heaven Room,” at Burghley, Lincolnshire, with painting by Antonio Verrio, c.1696 (north and west walls).80

4.2

The saloon, or “Heaven Room,” at Burghley, Lincolnshire, with painting by Antonio Verrio, c.1696 (north and east walls).

4.3

Antonio Verrio, An Assembly of the Gods, sketch for the saloon ceiling at Burghley, c.1694. Oil on canvas, 90 × 118 cm.

4.4

Paolo de’ Matteis, The Judgment of Hercules, 1712. Oil on canvas, 198 × 257 cm.

5.1

George Scharf: Exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, watercolor, 1828, depicting the Great Room at Somerset House during the exhibition of 1828 where portraits by the President, Sir Thomas Lawrence, are exhibited and Benjamin Vulliamy’s “Great Lamp” hangs in the center.

5.2

E. J. Brewtnall: A Party of Working Men at the National Gallery, London, engraving, 1870.

6.1

G. F. Watts, Physical Energy, c.1883–1906.

6.2

Charles Shannon: The Bath of Venus, oil on canvas, 1460 × 978 mm, 1898–1904.

6.3

Charles Ricketts:Don Juan, oil on canvas, 1162 × 959 mm, c.1911.

6.4

Augustus John: The Way Down to the Sea, 1909–1911, private collection.

7.1

Derek Boshier: The Identi-Kit Man, oil on canvas, 1830 × 1832 mm, 1962.

8.1

Anthony Caro: Twenty Four Hours, painted steel, 1384 × 2235 × 838 mm, 1960, Tate, London.

8.2

Barry Flanagan: sand muslin, mixed media, 181 × 302 × 302 mm, 1966.

9.1

Benjamin West: The Death of General Wolfe, oil on canvas, 1510 × 2135 mm, 1770.

9.2

William Bromley after John Opie, Lady Elizabeth Gray Entreating Edward IV to Protect her Children, etching and engraving, 316 × 223 mm, 1800.

11.1

Paul Nash: Image of Alfred the Great Monument, black and white negative, 69 × 113 mm, c.1935.

11.2

Eileen Agar: Quadriga, 521 × 610 mm, 1935.

11.3

Eduardo Paolozzi: St Sebastian, No. 2, bronze, 2203 × 711 × 508 mm, 1957.

11.4

Susan Hiller: Witness, audio-sculpture, 400 speakers, wiring, steel structure, 10 CD players, switching equipment, lights; ­suspended from ceiling and walls; approx. dimensions 700 × 900 cm, 2000. Installation shot of the work at Artangel at the Chapel, Golbourne Road, London.

12.1

Ron O’Donnell, The Great Divide, photograph from ­constructed set, 1987.

12.2

Douglas Gordon: A Divided Self I and II, 1996; video ­installation, sponsored by Channel 4, Turner Prize 1996.

13.1

Lubaina Himid: Study for a Memorial to Zong, acrylic on paper, 1991, Private Collection, from “Revenge: a Masque in Five Tableaux” first exhibited at Rochdale Art Gallery May 1992.

13.2

Lubaina Himid: Five, 1991, collection of Griselda Pollock on permanent loan to Leeds City Art Gallery, from “Revenge: A Masque in Five.”

14.1

Samuel Prout: Arch of Constantine, Rome.

14.2

John Constable: The Hay Wain, 1821, oil on canvas, 1302 × 1854 mm.

14.3

“In fig. 47 the trees are arranged in the gardenesque manner and in fig. 48 in the picturesque manner.”

14.4

Shrubland, designed by Charles Barry.

14.5

Panel Garden.

14.6

Alfred Parsons, Coombe in west country with PRIMROSES, KINGCUPS, and DAFFODILS.333

14.7

Gertrude Jekyll, Daffodils among Junipers where Garden joins Copse.

14.8

J. M. W. Turner: The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, oil on canvas, 907 × 1216 mm, 1838.

15.1

William Westall:Rievaulx Abbey from Duncombe Park, aquatint, hand colored, published 1819 by Hurst & Robinson, Cheapside, 10 × 13 in.

15.2

J. C. Bentley, after Joseph Mallord William Turner: Rievaulx Abbey, from The Gallery of Modern British Artists, intaglio print on paper, 94 × 155 mm, 1836.

15.3

Kedleston Hall from the south-west, taken from within the park.

15.4

Kedleston Hall from the south-west, taken from a position 30 yards to the east of Figure 15.3.

15.5

Scotney Castle; view over the garden from the viewing bastion.363

15.6

John Constable: The Vale of Dedham, Scottish National Gallery, Purchased with the aid of The Cowan Smith Bequest and the Art Fund 1944.

16.1

John Constable: Wivenhoe Park, Essex, oil on canvas, 561 × 1012 mm, 1816.

16.2

John Constable: Flatford Mill (“Scene on a Navigable River”), 1816–17.

17.1

George Stubbs: Haymakers, 1785.

17.2

J. M. W. Turner: The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, painting, 170.2 × 238.8 cm, 1817.

17.3

Samuel Palmer: Valley Thick with Corn, 1825.

17.4

John Constable: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, oil on canvas, 1831.

18.1

Wellington Testimonial in the Phoenix Park Dublin, engraving c.1830.

18.2

Laurie’s New Plan of London 1831 showing the Royal Parks in the west of the city.

18.3

Thomas Shotter Boys, Hyde Park near Grosvenor Gate, 1843, lithograph.

18.4

Plan of the Phoenix Park, Dublin 1830.

18.5

Plan of the Phoenix Park, Dublin 1845.

19.1

Nicholas Hilliard: Queen Elizabeth I, miniature painting, watercolor on vellum, 1595–1600.

19.2

Nicholas Hilliard: Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, miniature painting, watercolor on vellum, 1594.

20.1

Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Ladies Waldegrave, Scottish National Gallery, Purchased with the aid of The Cowan Smith Bequest and the Art Fund 1952.

20.2

William Hogarth: Before. Oil on canvas, 372 × 447 mm, 1730–1731.

20.3

William Hogarth: After. Oil on canvas, 372 × 451 mm, 1731.

20.4

William Hogarth: The Lady’s Last Stake, also known as Picquet; or Virtue in Danger. Oil on canvas, 914 × 1054 mm, 1759.487

20.5

Joseph Highmore: Pamela and Mr B in the Summer House. Oil on canvas, 62.9 × 75.6 cm, c.1744.

20.6

Philippe Mercier: Pamela Rising from her Bed. Oil on canvas, 990 × 1250 mm, 1740s.

20.7

Joseph Highmore: Pamela in the Bedroom with Mrs Jewkes and Mr B. Oil on canvas, 627 × 757 mm, 1744.

21.1

Sir Joshua Reynolds: Commodore The Honourable Augustus Keppel. Oil on canvas, 1270 × 1015 mm, 1749.

21.2

Sir Joshua Reynolds: Captain The Honourable Augustus Keppel. Oil on canvas, 2390 × 1474 mm, 1752–1753.

21.3

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1728–1792): Rear-Admiral Augustus Keppel. Oil on canvas, 762 × 635 mm, 1765.

21.4

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1728–1792): Vice-Admiral Augustus Keppel. Oil on canvas, 1270 × 1015 mm, 1779.

22.1

Frank Holl: Newgate: Committed for Trial. Oil on canvas, 1878.

22.2

Sir Frank Dicksee: The Confession, 1896.

Acknowledgements

This volume springs from our interest in developing the field of British art studies. It began as a remapping of the established lines of inquiry and developed into an exploration of the principal themes in the ongoing scholarship and historiography of British art. The interest in the retelling of the story of British art has grown over the past decade as witnessed by the appearance of several new publications including a three-volume History of British Art.1This volume brings a complementary dimension to this body of literature as well as the canonical surveys that have endured for more than half a century.2

It has been a long road from inception to publication. And there are many to thank who have helped the volume on its way. Jayne Fargnoli, our editor at Wiley-Blackwell, and her production team on both sides of the Atlantic have all made a contribution to the development of this book. In its final stages our copy-editor Camille Bramall worked enthusiastically and effectively on each of the essays.

We are also indebted to our editorial assistants, Mark Westgarth, Maxwell King, and Karen Fielder who have worked on this collection at various points in its evolution.

Finally, we would like to thank our contributors for their excellent essays and their forbearance and goodwill throughout this project.

Dana Arnold and David Peters CorbettOctober 2012

Notes

1 Bindman, D., Ayers, T. and Stephens, C. (eds) (2008) The History of British Art, 3 vols, London: Tate Publishing.

2 See for instance, Waterhouse, E. (1994) Painting in Britain 1530–1790, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Notes on Contributors

Editors

Dana Arnold is professor of architectural history and theory at Middlesex University, UK. Her current research focuses on architecture as visual culture and how aesthetic ideas are exchanged. She is currently completing a book on Architectural Aesthetics: Interpreting Classical Antiquity in the 18th Century to be published by IB Tauris. Her interest in how architecture, space, and ­cities combine is the subject of a number of monographs: The Spaces of the Hospital (2012); Rural Urbanism: London Landscapes in the Early Nineteenth Century (2006); and Re-presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London 1800–1840 (2000). Her bestselling survey Art History: A Very Short Introduction (2004) has been translated into many languages.David Peters Corbettis professor of history of art and American studies at the Universityof East Anglia. He has written widely on British and American art between the years 1850and 1950, includingThe Modernity of British Art, 1914–1930(1997), andThe World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848–1914(2004), and, as co-editor,TheGeographies of Englishness: Landscape and National Identity in English Art, 1880–1940(2002),Anglo-American: Artistic Relations between Britain and the US from ColonialTimes to the Present (2012), and British Art and the Cultural Field, 1939–1969 (2012).

Contributors

Jo Applin is a lecturer in modern and contemporary art at the University of York. In recent years she has been a visiting scholar in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Texas (2007) and a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (2009). She has recently completed a book Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (2012), and is currently writing a book on Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s 1965 Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field (2013). In addition, she has begun a new book project on women artists in the 1950s and 1960s titled Not Working.Andrew Ballantyneis professor of architecture at Newcastle University, UK. He is author and editor of several books, including the bestsellerArchitecture: a Very Short Introduction(2002) andDeleuze and Guattari for Architects(2007). He recently worked on a major study of mock-Tudor architecture that led to the publication, as co-editor, ofTudoresque: in Pursuit of the Ideal Home(2011). His continuing interest in the way we identify with and find form in complex things, including ourselves and our surroundings, resulted in his recent ­co-editedArchitecture in the Space of Flows(2011).Dympna Callaghan is dean’s professor of humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences, Syracuse University, New York, where she works on early modern English literature. Her publications include a Norton edition of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (2009), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2006), and The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies (2007).Michael Charlesworthis professor of art history at the University of Texas, Austin. He is an authority on landscape and the history of gardens, on photography until 1918, and on landscape drawing and painting. His publications includeDerek Jarman(2011),Landscape and Vision in Nineteenth Century Britain and France(2008),The Gothic Revival 1720–1870(3 vols, 2002), andThe English Garden(3 vols, 1993). He has also written articles about early cartography, book illustration, the late-twentieth-century artists Derek Jarman and Ian Hamilton Finlay, panoramic representation of landscape, and photographic history.Mark A. Cheethamwrites on art theory, art, and visual culture from c. 1700 to the present and is active as a curator of contemporary art. His co-curated exhibitJack Chambers: the Light From the Darkness/Silver Paintings and Filmreceived the OAAG “best exhibition” award in 2011. In 2006, he received the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association of America for “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, & Now.” His bookArtwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: the “Englishness” of English Art Theorywas published in 2012 by Ashgate. Cheetham teaches art history at the University of Toronto. http://web.me.com/greydog50/Mark_A._Cheetham/Welcome.htmlJulie F. Codellis professor, art history, Arizona State University, and affiliate in English, gender studies, Asian studies, and film and media studies. She has published many books, chapters, articles, reviews, and encyclopedia entries. She wroteThe Victorian Artist(2003) andImages of an Idyllic Past: Edward Curtis’s Photographs(1988); editedTransculturation in British Art(2012),Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars(2012),The Political Economy of Art(2008),Genre, Gender, Race, World Cinema(2007), andImperial Co-Histories(2003); and ­co-editedEncounters in the Victorian Press(2004) andOrientalism Transposed(1998), now being translated into Japanese by Hosei University (2014).Whitney Davisis George C. and Helen N. Pardee professor of history & theory of ancient & modern art at UC Berkeley. He is the author most recently ofQueer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond(2010) andA General Theory of Visual Culture(2011). He is ­currently completing two books:Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Ancient Egypt to New MediaandSpace, Time, and Depiction.Simon Faulkner teaches the history of art and visual culture at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the editor (with Anandi Ramamurthy) of Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain (2006) and (with James Aulich and Lucy Burke) of The Politics of Cultural Memory (forthcoming, 2010). He has published various essays on mid-twentieth-century British art, including work on R. B. Kitaj and John Minton. He is currently engaged in research on visual culture and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Pamela M. Fletcher is associate professor of art history at Bowdoin College. Her research and teaching center on Victorian and Edwardian painting, with a focus on questions of narrative, sentiment, and play in the context of exhibition culture. She is the author of Narrating Modernity: the British Problem Picture 1895–1914 (Ashgate, 2004) and co-editor (with Anne Helmreich) of The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London 1850–1939 (Manchester University Press, 2011). She is currently writing a book on the mid-Victorian painting of modern life, portions of which have appeared in the Oxford Art Journal, Victorian Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts.Anne Helmreich is an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Art at the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. She is a specialist in ­nineteenth-century European art with an emphasis on the art, architecture, and ­landscape design of Britain. Her publications include The English Garden and National Identity: the Competing Styles of Garden Design, 1870–1914 (2002) as well as many book chapters, articles, reviews, and encyclopedia entries. Ben Highmoreis reader in media and ­cultural studies at the University of Sussex. His particular interests are concerned with cultural feelings, domestic life, and post-war British art, craft, and architecture (­specifically the cultural movement New Brutalism). His most recent books areA Passion for Cultural Studies(2009), the edited collectionThe Design Culture Reader(2009), andOrdinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday(2011). His previous books have been on everyday life theory; the ­cultural theorist Michel de Certeau; and the city.Richard Johns is a curator of art at the National Maritime Museum, London. His curatorial and academic research encompasses various aspects of the art and visual culture of Britain from the mid-seventeenth through to the mid-nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the work of the decorative history painter James Thornhill and his contemporaries. Tom Normandis senior lecturer in the History of Art at the University of St Andrews. He is author ofScottish Photography: a History(2007),Ken Currie: Details of a Journey(2002),Calum Colvin: Ossian, Fragments of Ancient Poetry(2002),The Modern Scot: Modernism and Nationalism in Scottish Art 1928–1955(2000), andWyndham Lewis the Artist; Holding the Mirror up to Politics(1992). He is currently working on aspects of ­academic art in the Scottish context.Kate Retford is senior lecturer in ­eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art history at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her book, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England, was published by Yale University Press in 2006. In addition, she has written a number of articles on topics relating to eighteenth-century portraiture, gender, and the country house art collection. She was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship in the History of Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in order to begin her current book project on the conversation piece in eighteenth-century Britain. Cynthia Roman is curator of prints, drawings and paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. She was co-curator of the exhibition Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (Yale Center for British Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum) and assistant editor of the catalogue, which received the 2012 Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her research interests include history painting and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain. Dorothy Rowe is senior lecturer in history of art at the University of Bristol and research lead for the Transnational Modernisms Research Cluster. She is author of Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in Imperial and Weimar Germany (Ashgate, 2003), AfterDada: Magic Realism in Weimar Germany(Manchester University Press, 2013), and ­co-editor (with Abigail Harrison Moore) ofArchitecture and Design in Europe andAmerica 1750–2000 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) and (with Marsha Meskimmon) of Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (Manchester University Press, 2013), as well as a number of articles and chapters on German modernism and contemporary diasporic art in Britain. Sam Smiles is emeritus professor of art ­history at the University of Plymouth and programme director, Art History and Visual Culture, University of Exeter. His publications include J. M. W. Turner: The Making of a Modern Artist (2007), The Turner Book (2006), Eye Witness: Artists and Visual Documentation in Britain 1770–1830 (2000) and TheImage of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination(1994). He is ­currently completing a study of Turner’s last paintings (c. 1835–50) and preparing an exhibition on the same theme for Tate Britain. Colin Troddis senior lecturer in art ­history at the University of Manchester. He is the author ofVisions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World 1830–1930(Liverpool University Press, 2012), and co-editor of several volumes on Victorian art. He is currently co-editing a special issue ofVisual Culture in Britainon Ford Madox Brown and Victorian culture.Tom Williamson is professor of history at the University of East Anglia, where he heads up the Landscape Group, a collection of academics, researchers, and research students studying all aspects of the English landscape. He has published extensively on many aspects of landscape archaeology, agricultural history, and the history of landscape design. His publications include Champion: the Making and Unmaking of the English Midland Landscape (2012) as co-author, The Countryside of East Anglia: Changing Landscapes, 1870–1950 (2008) also as co-author, and Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1995). Janet Wolff is professor emerita of cultural sociology at the University of Manchester, where she directed the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts from 2008 to 2010. She returned to Manchester, her home town, in 2006. Before that, she taught at the University of Leeds; the University of Rochester (New York), where she was Director of the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies; and Columbia University, where she was associate dean for academic affairs in the School of the Arts. Her books include The Social Production of Art, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, Feminine Sentences, Resident Alien, AngloModern, and The Aesthetics of Uncertainty.

Part 1

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett

A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present is a collection of new essays ­written by leading scholars in the field. Over the past 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. A series of important ­monographs, essay collections, exhibitions, and articles has expanded and ­deepened our understanding of British art of these centuries, raising it from an undertaught and understudied aspect of the history of art to one that is ­increasingly on syllabuses for undergraduate and MA students. This growth in scholarly depth and interest has made it important to provide a working collection for teachers and their students as an introduction to the field. This book is therefore offered as a text that can be used in multiple ways to approach the rich and varied material of British art.

A word about the nature of the book and how it is organized. The volume concentrates on painting for reasons of space. The reader will find there is some reference to architecture but little to sculpture or graphic art. It is emphatically not a survey and does not attempt to review or cover the whole ­history of art in Britain. Even if that were possible, we do not think it would be desirable to ­provide some information about everything at the expense of detailed study of nothing. Instead, the volume is designed for a different task, one that seems to us to be much more important and timely. The book is a selection of substantial essays – partly reporting on existing scholarship and the state of the field, partly original research – which have been designed and written specifically for an undergraduate audience. It is organized and imagined thematically and does not attempt to cover either the full chronological range or some notional list of high points. Instead it is intended to provide teachers of the subject who need to introduce undergraduates to British art with material that they will find ­substantial and stimulating in a classroom situation. Our hope is that teachers of the subject will find here a rich and diverse set of approaches to some of the important themes and areas that have emerged in the study of the subject, and that they will find it easy to tailor and adapt the groups of essays we have organized in order to answer particular needs. We do not wish to promote any particular reading of the material here, and the collection has been envisaged primarily as a stimulating way into what, for many students, will be an unfamiliar subject.

In commissioning essays for the book we have selected four themes, together with a broader “general” section at the start, each of which provides the center of gravity for one of the main sections of the volume. “Institutions,” “Nationhood,” “Landscape,” and “Men and Women” are ways of identifying and organizing some of the major preoccupations that have emerged from recent scholarship. They are not meant to seem exclusive, compulsory, or constraining, and the essays in each of the sections have been written and conceived to be diverse and to pursue similar material in distinct ways over the chronological range of the book. Tutors reading through the volume in order to consider how they wish to use the material will see that each thematic section can be used as a whole, can be dismantled and recombined with essays from other sections, or can be reduced to one or two of the contributions in order to pursue specific interests. It is this openness and malleability that we have worked to achieve in designing the volume, and that we hope tutors and students will find in the organization. It is, however, worth offering here some thoughts about the constitution of the individual sections and their themes, continuities, and divergences. The essays are meant to delve in stimulating and useable ways into aspects of their material; they are not conceived as surveys or as exhaustive accounts of all the significant dimensions of their subject matter. For instance, the very extensive work that has recently appeared on the Royal Academy means that the reader will not find, in the section called “Institutions,” any separate detailed discussion of the founding and constitution of the Royal Academy after 1768 (although she or he will find it discussed in Colin Trodd’s essay in the section and in Cynthia Roman’s in the “Nationhood” section). They will, however, find the nature of the art world between the 1760s and 1820s defined, since this is a subject which has had little presence in the literature to date. The reverse of this medal is the decision to provide a constellation of essays – by Sam Smiles, Tom Williamson, and Michael Charlesworth – in the “Landscape” section that consider the work of Constable as part of wider studies of landscape art as it evolved over the period between about 1760 and the mid-nineteenth century. Taken together, this group of essays provides a multiple and multi-directional set of perspectives on one of the central subjects to any study of British art in this key period of its history. Our hope is that tutors and students will find this multiplicity a stimulating way into the issues and meanings of the subject and that “Landscape” in this way can serve as a case study for classroom use that will allow students to use the book to deepen their knowledge of an important aspect of British art and work with it across a range of opinions and approaches.

The volume opens with the “General” section. It contains a trio of essays that deal, in distinct ways, with three of the most important questions which seem to us to be of wide relevance to the field. Mark Cheetham begins the volume with a detailed and scholarly discussion of the ways in which nationhood – “Englishness” – and ideas of and about art have intersected between the early eighteenth century and the present day. In a muscular and comprehensive argument that ranges widely – from Hogarth to the early twentieth century vorticists, to the contemporary artist, Yinka Shonibare, MBE – Cheetham explores how far we might legitimately think of “English” art as a unity, and what it implies to do so. The question of nationhood and nationality in art – the subject of one of the later thematic sections – is lucidly broached and analysed here. In the second essay of the “General” section, Andrew Ballantyne takes up the question of the British and modernity, an attribute they have often been accused of lacking, or at least adopting a skeptical and probably evasive view toward. British art seemed to many commentators in the twentieth century to opt out of the most exciting art of the moment, modernism, an art that claimed for itself a direct relationship with the expression of modern life. Ballantyne traces the idea of modernity from antiquity to the late twentieth century and concentrates on the ways in which architecture in Britain has, at certain key moments from the eighteenth century onwards, become the focus of debate and concern about the modernity of the times and their expression. He reveals that the British attitude to these vital but contested issues has been more complex and more pervasive than has often been acknowledged. Finally, British culture has been a modern, even a modernist, one, but quietly and without fanfare, however saturated in these qualities it might now seem. In the final essay of the “General” section, Janet Wolff considers with a precise, analytic, probe, another key question: how far is “English” or British art to be valued in aesthetic terms. As with modernism and modernity, earlier commentators often considered British art aesthetically inferior to what were seen as the more central national schools, France and Italy above all. Wolff takes on this question directly. Beginning with a discussion of a significant intervention by the important historian of British art, Charles Harrison, she considers the recent “re-evaluation” of the worth and importance of the art produced in Britain, especially in the early twentieth century when France and America have seemed to lead the field. Wolff not only provides a lucid guide to the debates, she also ranges widely across recent political and social theory in seeking to provide the reader with a firm place to stand and make a judgement about both the issues at stake in seeking to value and the value we might attribute to British art. Focusing on the work of Gwen John and the Bloomsbury artists of the early twentieth century, she argues for a “principled aesthetics” that will allow us both to assess the value of British art on its own terms, and to place it in wider art-historical and social contexts.

“Institutions” contains five essays. In “‘Those Wilder Sorts of Painting’: The painted interior in the age of Antonio Verrio,” Richard Johns considers the ways in which the emergent art world of the 50 years or so between the 1670 s and the 1720 s – a period that has still been little researched – came together through the decorative history painting practiced by James Thornhill and others. Considering both the architectural settings of such paintings and the ways in which the period and its art can be conceptualized, Johns offers a reading of this art that allows us to understand both its place in a complex network of politics and patronage, and to see it as exemplary of the ways in which we can newly read neglected periods of British art in new and illuminating ways. Johns’ discussions of the concept of the Baroque, of the relationship between architecture and painting, and of the historiography of his period all provide a way into the period for the classroom. In the second essay, Colin Trodd offers a detailed and meticulous account of the art institutions of nineteenth-century Britain. Beginning with some comments on the Royal Academy, Trodd traces the way in which art institutions in the period, including the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, fought to make space for themselves in a changing society and “battled to make themselves into durable, distinctive and original places of knowledge and venues of value.” He concludes that these were fluid and mobile ways of ­organizing artistic activity, and that we must pay attention not only to the way in which they organized themselves, but to the pressures to which they were obliged to respond. David Peters Corbett takes up another aspect of the institutional construction of art history in the section’s third essay, “Crossing the Boundary: British Art across Victorianism and Modernism.” Corbett looks at the conventional division in studies of early twentieth-century British art between the Victorian and ­modernist eras and, drawing on detailed examples, argues that it is misleading to make such a division. The fourth essay in the section, “British Pop Art and the High/Low Divide,” sees Simon Faulkner discussing the ways in which Pop Art in Britain found a role within the institutions of British culture by resisting rather than ­celebrating the popular cultural forms of its subject matter, as the most common critical opinion has it. Discussing artists including Richard Hamilton, Peter Phillips, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, and Richard Smith, Faulkner marks out the ways in which the specific imagery of British Pop plays a role within the ­institutions of its culture. The “Institutions” section concludes with an essay by Jo Applin that looks at the ways in which British art “became subject to a range of formal and conceptual pressures in London during the 1960s.” Focusing on the London art schools of the sixties and the reception of American modernism in which they were at the forefront, St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art are examined as institutions where the understanding and usability of new artistic and conceptual forms was received, debated, and given a British cast during a crucial decade of reformulation and expansion in the British art world. One of Applin’s central concepts in her discussion is “antagonism,” and it is clear from all the essays ­collected in this section of the volume, that institutions are more than mere ­repositories for conventional wisdom and attitudes. Instead, the institutions of British art are mobile, changeable sets of cultural practice in which key changes in the constitution of both the art world and the wider culture are aired and decided upon, not by individuals as much as by and through the fluidity and capacity to change and morph of the institutions themselves. Art schools, museums, national institutions like the Royal Academy or the National Gallery, the structures in which imagery is described and recirculated, all these crucial aspects of the way in which art works and takes part in the wider culture are examined and opened for consideration in this section.

The second thematic section of the book is concerned with “Nationhood.” Five essays consider how this central question can be understood within selected moments of the history of British art. The first essay, by Cynthia Roman, deals with “Art and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Building on a vivid ­tradition of scholarship in this area, Roman demonstrates that in this period “­narratives about fine art and those about national identity were inextricably intertwined as the visual arts both reflected and mediated constructions of nationhood.” Discussing artists including James Barry, Benjamin West, and John Singleton Copley, as well as the print-seller John Boydell, Roman traces this intertwining through the Royal Academy and shows how it is manifested in portraiture as well as history painting, and in the accessible medium of prints as well as in grand manner painting on the Academy’s walls. “International Exhibitions: Linking Culture, Commerce, and Nation” by Julie Codell takes up a nineteenth-century subject, looking at international exhibitions around 1851. Drawing on ideas from the study of cultural geography, Codell considers the Great Exhibition of 1851 and other international exhibitions as maps that point to the imperial and colonial substructure of the societies of which they are a part. Analyzing the visual and material culture of these exhibitions, Codell traces the complication of national identities that emerged from the breaking of established boundaries between nations through the operations of art and commerce in this period. She shows that as art came to take up the role of expressing national pride at such events, it forced an increasingly permeable and open character on the nation and its rivals. In the following essay, Ben Highmore considers the nature of an international art form – Surrealism – once it crosses the Channel and takes root in a characteristically British soil. “Itinerant Surrealism: British Surrealism Either Side of the Second World War” allows him to evaluate the nature of nationality in art movements and the ways in which transformations and adaptations occur in a particular context. In “55˚ North 3˚ West: a Panorama from Scotland,” Tom Normand looks at some of the consequences for identity of the fact that four nations inhabit Britain. “The fascinating geography of British art” stems in part from this foundational political and social reality. By focusing on the period after the Second World War, Normand is able to follow the fortunes of “Scottishness” in its complex relationship both to “Britishness” and to other nations and nationalisms. The 1987 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition “The Vigorous Imagination – New Scottish Art” is seen as an exemplary and telling moment in this history, prompting Normand to look back into the nineteenth century to the career of the artist David Wilkie for the formation of modern Scottish artistic identity, before returning to the contemporary in order to trace the working out of that identity in the context of a new internationalism. Normand finds in the Scottish example a way that internationalism and national tropes continue to mix and refer in the twenty-first century. The final essay in the “Nationhood” section, Dorothy Rowe’s “Retrieving, Remapping, and Rewrit­ing Histories of British Art: Lubaina Himid’s Revenge,” considers the way contemporary black British artists have been involved in “the re-visualization of the borders of nationalism, identity and nationhood in British art.” Rowe’s analysis of Himid’s work allows her to make a strong and politically conscious case for attention to “the visual and aesthetic legacies of artworks produced by black and Asian women artists who have been active in Britain since the 1980s but whose contributions to the re-mapping of British art’s histories during the last 30 years are still being realized,” so that the structures and institutions of “British art,” its meanings and range, are questioned and reformulated as they are, from other perspectives, in the essays by Cheetham, Wolff, and others in the collection. Nationhood, identity, and meaning are all raised and explored in this section of the book’s essays.

One of the most influential and important artistic genres to have flourished in the art of the British Isles is landscape, and this forms the subject that the five essays in the third section of the volume all, from diverse positions, address. The section opens with a wide-ranging survey and consideration of definitions by Anne Helmreich, which orientates the reader and touches on several of the topics raised in subsequent essays. Michael Charlesworth in “Theories of the Picturesque” considers one of the most important moments in the formation of the genre. Dealing with the eighteenth-century theorists William Gilpin and Richard Payne Knight, Charlesworth sets out the character of the picturesque and relates it to those of the beautiful and the sublime. Charlesworth traces the popularity of the concept through its literary and theoretical manifestations and into the visual, including architecture and landscape gardening. An extended analysis of the work of John Constable takes the story into painting and then to Ruskin’s use of the idea. Concluding with a look at the twenty-first century relevance of the term, Charlesworth is able to assess the importance of the picturesque for any understanding of British visual and literary culture since the eighteenth century. Two very different and complementary considerations of landscape art across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries follow. Tom Williamson offers a precise, historical, and social study of the conditions in which landscape imagery of the period was nurtured and in which it served its function in the culture as a whole. Williamson places a salutary emphasis on the need to understand these aspects of artistic production and on the value and importance of studies of the physical realities of the “real” landscape and of how its meanings are worked into and upon in the realm of visual representation. Sam Smiles, meanwhile, offers a definition of landscape and a consideration of it in the period based on scrupulous and precise attention to four examples. Intended to be exemplary and telling, rather than to exhaust the subject, Smiles’ choices – Stubbs, Turner, Constable, and Palmer – are revealed as significant engagements with British culture at a time of exceptionally intense social and economic transformation. Taken together, these three essays, together with that by Helmreich, all of which consider aspects of the work of Constable among other elements in the period, allow a facetted and informative set of perspectives on a central moment for the study of British art and its meanings. To close the section, Dana Arnold’s fifth essay extends the study of landscape in this period by considering the relationship between the Phoenix Park in Dublin and building and landscape design in London. Drawing on a number of theoretical perspectives, and presenting some detailed historical material about the making of the park, Arnold’s essay acts as a bridge as well to the section on nationhood and the making of national visual cultures.

The final section is called “Men and Women” and deals in four essays about gender from the Elizabethan Miniature to Edwardian genre painting. Dympna Callaghan considers questions of representation, identity, and ideology in the Elizabethan genre of portrait miniatures, concluding that it “epitomizes both the ideological and technical problems” posed at the time. Two essays deal with the eighteenth century. Kate Retford provides a focus and revealing analyses of the representation of female chastity in eighteenth-century portraiture, while, in a matching pair to Retford’s essay, Whitney Davis considers the painting of men and offers a sophisticated and nuanced reading of the epistemological issues at stake in this moment. Finally, Pamela Fletcher examines Victorian and Edwardian painting in order to show how gender could provide narratives that organized and structured knowledge for the audience, and how the investigation of such visual practices can lead us into an understanding of both the pleasures and oppositional character of representations of this sort.

Part 2

General

1

The “Englishness” of English Art Theory1

Mark A. Cheetham

This article examines the intertwining of art theory, national identity, and art in England from the early eighteenth century to the present. We are used to the conjunction of art and nationality because generations of artists, art historians, and the public have typically defined art by its national origin. Students study French and Italian and Dutch art; museums habitually display works by national school or have the mandate to exhibit the art of their nation.2 While art historians commonly think of art production in terms of national schools, art theory is ­usually held to transcend accidental particulars. To address the “Englishness of English Art Theory” seems odd because the philosophical bent of art theory (aesthetics) urges us to abjure the specifics of place, gender, race, and nation.3 A central argument in this essay is that art theory and art practice are not so different. To assume that art is connected to place while theory remains unmoored is to deny the ­palpable interconnectedness of theory and practice in the English tradition. The discipline of art history, the practices of art theory and criticism, and public ­museums evolved in Britain and Europe in the late eighteenth century together and in concert with discourses of nationhood, nationalism, and patriotism.4 Habituated to this rubric, however, today we easily forget that thinking through the frame of nations is more than an innocent expedient. Characterization by nationality can perpetuate stereotypes about the supposed basis of artistic production. Thus English art is expected to be more than art made and displayed in England. It is supposed to include a defining measure of “Englishness” or ­perhaps “Britishness,” as at Tate Britain.5 Is there a self-consciously English type of art theory? The 300th anniversary in 2007 of the Acts of Union that included Scotland in a United Kingdom of Great Britain, with its concomitant assertions of English and other regional nationalisms, is a timely occasion for an assessment of the Englishness of English art theory.6

The categories of nation and nationality may seem natural. Portraits of ­monarchs seek to display the might and virtues of their country through the ruler. Landscape views published by Constable and Turner reflect and demarcate English scenery.7 Henry Moore’s representations of life in the London underground during the Second World War are memorable because they convey the Churchillian will of a people under siege. Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous study The Englishness of English Art (1956) is the central example in the history of English art of the widespread urge to deploy nationality as an explanation for the proclivities of artists. Pevsner wrote in the aftermath of the Second World War. As a German émigré, he relied on (while seeking to dispel) German models of national style and race.8 His ­positive view of English art as determined largely by climate and geography ­demonstrates that discourses of aesthetic nationality are often prompted by concerns beyond the realms of art.9 These discourses are common but by no means inevitable. The same is paradigmatically the case with art theory, but because this category normally seeks to transcend specifics in search of the general rule, we must think of theory more pragmatically to measure its embeddedness in the specificities of history and culture. In offering a way to think about the place of art theory in England – whether geographically, in relation to the history of art, or in terms of nationality – we should not assume, however, that there is something called “Englishness” or any other national essence of an immutable, Platonic sort awaiting discovery. The definition of “nation” changes, and England is no different from many other countries in its preoccupation with self-definition in these terms. On the other hand, for centuries and in many different guises, people continue to believe in just this sort of essence. The history of its attractions should not be dismissed without examination.

What difference might it make for a particular speculative view on the visual arts to be deemed “English”? Received opinion suggests that this is an unpromising line of inquiry on a number of counts. First, it is notoriously difficult to ­disentangle the competing claims to national identity in the United Kingdom today, let alone over the 300 years during which English art theory can be said to exist. To speak of art theory written and having an effect in England is unproblematic. But when we modify art theory with the adjective “English” and imply a specific quality, “Englishness,” what do we say about Edmund Burke (Irish), David Hume (a Scot), James McNeill Whistler (American), or Wyndham Lewis (who was born in Canada)? Englishness tends to mask other British identities, which is in itself a problem. Second, art theory – paradigmatically an intellectual category – is not supposed to sit well in Britain thanks to a purportedly innate aversion to speculation. George Orwell wrote “the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world view’.”10 We find self-fulfilling versions of this claim across the considerable range of studies of Englishness, from Kate Fox’s penetrating and hilarious Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (2004)11 to the more scholarly study by Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006).12 For the most part, what Fox calls “The Importance of Not Being Ernest Rule”13 is regarded as a positive quality of Englishness, as is a supposedly ­anti-rationalist (and anti-theoretical) emphasis on empiricism as the systematic application of innate common sense. Acclaimed biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd asserts approvingly in Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination that the “native aptitude has … led to a disaffection from, or dissatisfaction with, all abstract speculation.”14 Illustrating David Simpson’s claim that in England, “the vigilance against theory has hardly let up since at least the 1650s,”15 the group Art & Language provided a more colorful, if hyperbolic, instance of the myth in 1976 with the claim that “the French Pox [semiotics] stands in opposition to Anglo-Saxon Empiricism.”16 If one were to credit such stereotypes, in England and Britain, artwriting17 of a theoretical sort would not exist, appear only as something imported, foreign, and thus suspect, or it would be found under another description.

In England, theory is usually seen as what other people misguidedly do, ­especially the French and the Germans. Such stereotypes exaggerate accurate observations. If we are to test what Collini labels the “absence” thesis – in this context, that the English do not favor or produce art theory because of its intellectualism – we must attend to at least three paradoxes. First, as noted, art ­theory is typically held to strive for the universal, to be above the vagaries of nationality. Second, the English are construed as a practical lot, not prone to theory in art or any other realm. Most paradoxically of all, there is an abundance of English art theory that is self-characterized by qualities of “Englishness.” To relieve these conundrums, it is important to ask in general whether English traditions of artwriting (in ways analogous to English art) have inappropriately been judged according to “imported” criteria, whether of German idealist ­aesthetics or French pictorial modernism. Not surprisingly, then, when a non-systematic or common-sensical approach is found in the art historical writing of a German national, for example, it is the occasion for praise. Michael Kitson praised Pevsner’s Englishness of English Art in such terms, concluding his lengthy review of the book in 1956 as follows:

happily, [Pevsner] is not consistent in his approach, and when he is off his guard, so to speak, he does in fact look first at works of art and seems only to dash in his theme as an afterthought … when he gave the Reith Lectures, art history, like cheerfulness, would keep breaking in.18

Just as an historically nuanced understanding of English modernism in the visual arts must augment the paradigms of Continental modernism brought so forcefully to bear by Roger Fry in the early twentieth century to find English art ­wanting,19 for example, so too we must recast the category of art theory and abandon the restrictive paradigms of pure thinkers such as Kant.20 Instead of a survey of the English corpus,21 what follows provides an account of the claims and tangles of nationality, an examination of issues that are presented as the “Englishness” of this strain of art theory and which are integral to its various accents. Canvassing such an extensive chronology tempts one to find continuity where there is little, to seem to inscribe a stable “Englishness” merely by discussing attempts to find it. While this quality remains elusive, attempts to promote one or another version of a national identity have nonetheless motivated English art theory from its ­inception to the present.

It is often claimed – usually with derogatory overtones – that art in England has a particularly language-oriented and literary bent.22 Ronald Paulson has argued that the pervasive English iconoclasm that began in the late seventeenth century is nothing less than the substitution of words for images.23 John Barrell has vividly described the ostensible difficulty stemming from the propinquity of the visual arts and text in England: for Roger Fry in the early twentieth century, Barrell reports for example, “the English national character was … defined by that very preoccupation with painting as narrative, as rhetorical, the lack of which had defined it 200 years before.” Barrell elaborates: “The Englishness of English art was characterized … as a quality distinctive only by its inadequacy.”24 A corollary argument would find English art theory wanting because of its pollution by visual practice. Inverting the commonplace notion that English art is too literary, ­supplies us with a positive insight about English theory and visual production: in each category, we must see the other pole, that is, read the theory in the pictures and see the images in the text. As I will show, this doubleness has been a feature of English art and artwriting for centuries. Importantly, it continues to figure in contemporary art and perhaps now finds more favor in our less formal, less ­modernist times. Most of the speculation on the visual arts in England has indeed come from painters: early on, from Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, William Blake, and Henry Fuseli. In the nineteenth and ­twentieth, we can also think of John Ruskin, Roger Fry, and Herbert Read, though they were amateur artists. As we will see, Wyndham Lewis was a prolific theorist and novelist as well as the founder of Vorticism. In our own time, we can point to Victor Burgin as well as to Art & Language, whose very name connects elements that should not be held apart artificially when we discuss the Englishness of English art theory.