Art and Print Culture

Study of Romantic art, especially the relation of painting and literature (the “sister arts”) is still a relatively unexplored area. While excellent work continues to be done on Romantic painting, the interrelation of literature and the visual arts is still emerging as a mature area of inquiry. This subsection includes work on the relation of painting and literature and on literature's relation to print culture broadly conceived.

British painting, especially landscape, came into its own during the Romantic age but book illustration and, less successfully, history painting were important. Portraiture remained strong but landscape, by virtue of its more intense and direct relation to nature in the period, achieved supremacy. Poetry also expressed this new approach to nature: see the studies of their interrelationship by Barrell (1980), Heffernan, Kroeber, Twitchell, and essays in Copely and Garside. Contemporary documents on art appear in Eitner, Wornum, and Reynolds. Aesthetic issues are discussed by Eaves (1992), Paulson (1989), Rosenblum, and scholars in Barrell (1992) and Eisenmen.

Both landscape and history painting responded to the era's epochal events, the dual revolutions and expansion of the British empire, bringing public and patriotic narratives into their art. See Archer and essays in Cannon-Brookes on the relation of nation and empire to history painting; and consult Bindman, Boime, Paulson (1983), and essays in Barrell (1992) on art and revolution.

Print culture also was deeply engaged with political issues, especially graphic satire or caricature, the most successful of all types of printmaking in the late 18th century. See the standard work by George and by Gombrich; excellent recent studies by Donald and Wood; and innovative work by Eaves, who is breaking down divisions between verbal and visual arts in his studies of prints and printed texts. William Blake is central to this work: see The Blake Archive and Viscomi (1993).

Altick (1985) is standard for book illustration; Paley and Bindman (1993) are strongly recommended on art and apocalypse.
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Altick, Richard. The Shows of London (1978)

Altick, Richard D. Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900 (1985)

Archer, Mildred. India and British Portraiture 1770-1825 (1979)

Barrell, John. Exhibitions Extraordinary!! (2001)

Barrell, John, ed. Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art, 1700-1850 (1992)

Barrell, John. The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (1986)

Barrell, John. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (1980)

Bindman, David. “The English Apocalypse,” in Carey (1993)

Bindman, David. The Shadow of the Guillotine. Britain and the French Revolution (1989)

Boase, T.S.R. English Art, 1800-1870 (1959)

Boime, Albert. Art in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1800 (1990)

Brion, Marcel. Art of the Romantic Era (1966)

Brown, David Blaney. Romanticism (2001)

Bruntjen, Sven H.A. John Boydell, 1719-1804: A Study of Art Patronage and Publishing in Georgian England (1989)

Burke, Joseph. English Art, 1714-1800 (1976)

Cannon-Brooks, Peter, ed. The Painted Word: British History Painting 1750-1830 (1991)

Carey, Frances, ed. The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (1999)

Carretta, Vincent. George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (1990)

Copley, Stephen and Peter Garside, ed., The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770 (1994)

Cummings, Frederick and Allen Staley. Romantic Art in Britain: Paintings and Drawings, 1760-1860 (1968)

Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Age of George III (1996)

Eaves, Morris. "The sister-arts in British Romanticism," in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism ed. Stuart Curran (1993)

Eaves, Morris. The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (1992)

Eisenmen, Stephen F. et al, eds. Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (2002)

Eitner, Lorenz. Neoclassicism and Romanticism, Sources & Documents, 1750-1850 Vols. 1-2 (1970)

George, Mary Dorothy, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (1967)

George, M. Dorothy. English Political Caricature: a Study of Opinion and Propaganda, 2 vols. (1959)

George, Mary Dorothy, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Vol. V 1771-1783 Nos. 4839-6360 (1935)

George, Mary Dorothy, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Vol. VI 1784-1792 Nos. 6361-8283 (1938)

Godfrey, R.T. Printmaking in Britain (1978)

Gombrich, E.H. “Imagery and Art in the Romantic Period,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (1963)

Hagstrum, Jean. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (1958)

Heffernan, James A. The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner (1984)

Honour, Hugh. Romanticism (1979)

Irwin, David. Neoclassicism (1997)

Kroeber, Karl. British Romantic Art (1986)

Kroeber, Karl and William Walling, eds. Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities (1978)

Lister, Raymond. British Romantic Painting (1989)

Paley, Morton D. The Apocalyptic Sublime (1986)

Paulson, Ronald. Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700-1820 (1989)

Paulson, Ronald. Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (1983)

Paulson, Ronald. Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century (1975)

Praz, Mario. Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts (1970)

Quennell, Peter. Romantic England: Writing and Painting, 1717-1851 (1970)

Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (1959; rpt. 1975)

Rosenblum, Robert. Transformations in Late 18th-Century Art (1967)

Smiles, Sam. The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (1994)

Smith, Bernard. Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of the Cook Voyages (1992)

Twitchell, James. Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770-1850 (1983)

Twyman, Michael. Printing 1770-1970: An Illustrated History of Its Development and Uses in England (1970)

Vaughn, William. Romantic Art (1985)

Viscomi, Joseph. Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993)

Waterhouse, Ellis. Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 (1953)

Watson, J.R. Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (1970)

Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 (1994)

Wornum, Ralph N. Lectures on Painting, by the Royal Academicians: Barry, Opie, and Fuseli (1848)

 
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