Description

This module is intended as an introduction to painting in Britain, from William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough to John Constable and JMW Turner. It will focus on two genres in particular, history painting and landscape, and on the relationships between them, as these were defined by the practice of individual painters, by the theories of painting developed by artist-critics like Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Blake and Constable, and by attitudes to painting as they emerge from contemporary essays, poems and novels.

Throughout this period, history was agreed to be the highest, most dignified genre of art, yet it was also probably the least popular and the least successful in attracting patronage. Landscape, by contrast, was for most of the period regarded as one of the most humble genres, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century it had become one of the most popular and probably the most widely practised. The module will attempt to understand this contrast in the status and fortunes of the two genres by addressing the cultural politics of the visual arts in the period, a politics both of class and gender. It will ask what each genre was thought to be for - what was its function? What was it expected to teach? Which class was it thought to address? What appeal was it imagined as having for women, who as the period progressed were participating more and more in making and looking at pictures?

Objectives

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• a knowledge of the works of the most important history and landscape painters in the “great century” of British art
• an understanding of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century theories of history and landscape painting in the period
• a grasp of the relation between developments in painting and social, cultural and political change in the period

Preliminary reading

Most of the following will be included in the seminar reading for this option, and any of these texts will provide a good introduction the artistic, cultural and political issues which we will explore during the course.  In the main, the books listed are largely thematic rather than artist-focused, but you could additionally look at books and catalogues on individual artists if you wish (in the seminars we will be looking at works by Hogarth, Reynolds, Copley, Barry, Kauffman, Haydon, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner).  A couple of the works listed (Burke and Reynolds) are primary texts which we will be looking at in the seminars on art theory.  You are not expected to have read all of these books before the start of the course, but I have marked with an asterisk those books which are most helpful  for our purposes.  There is certainly no need to buy any of these books as all seminar reading will be on Key Texts or supplied as photocopies.  However the Reynolds and Burke are available in affordable versions, and the Harrison anthology is a good resource for the theoretical writings of the period.

  

*John Barrell,  The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: 'The Body of the Public' (New Haven and London, 1986)

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

 Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (London, 1987)

 Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven and London, 2000)

 *John Brewer. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997)

 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (modern edition available in Oxford World's Classics series)

 Matthew Craske,  Art  in Europe, 1700-1830 (Oxford, 1997)

 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation: 1707-1837 (New Haven and London, 1992)

 Stephen Daniels,  Fields of Vision: Landscape and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, 1993)

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

 Mark Hallett.  The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven and London, 1999)

 Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger (eds).  Art in Theory, 1648-1815 (Oxford, 2001)

 Paul Langford,  A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989) 

 Emily Ballew Neff,  John Singleton Copley in England (London, 1995)

 Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (Cambridge, 1995) 

 Simon Pugh,  Reading Landscape: Country, City, Capital (Manchester, 1990)

*Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (editions available from Yale University Press and Penguin Classics)

 Michael Rosenthal, Thomas Gainsborough: 'A Little Business for the Eye' (New Haven and London, 1999)

 *David H. Solkin,  Art on the Line: The Royal Academy's Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780-1836 (New Haven and London, 2001)

 *David H. Solkin,  Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven and London, 1993)