Description
Why are Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian paintings so popular with the public, yet so problematical for academic or scholarly art historians? In this module we examine Victorian art and its critical fortunes from the date of making through to the present day.
Each week, we shall explore in detail individual artworks by many of the principal artists and movements from the period. These might include the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Aesthetes, British Impressionists, and Symbolists, alongside work by and representing what Stephen Marcus has referred to as the ‘Other Victorians’.
There will be extensive discussion of both contemporary and more recent theoretical and critical literature on the subject, including debates about art, beauty, 'realism', race, class, empire, religion, science, slavery, industrialism, urbanism, gender, sexuality, and the body.
Preliminary Reading
During the holidays, you should familiarise yourself with images and objects produced in the Victorian period, first and foremost by visiting as many art galleries as possible. Most galleries in the UK have excellent holdings of Victorian art. Local and regional collections of special interest include: York Art Gallery, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford, the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield (see also the Ruskin collections in Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery across the street), the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. Farther afield – but with particularly great collections – are the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Manchester Art Gallery, Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, the Liverpool galleries (Walker Art Gallery, Sudley House, and Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight), the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery in Bournemouth, the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. In London: Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Guildhall Art Gallery (City of London), Leighton House Museum (Holland Park), the William Morris Gallery. Even smaller galleries in towns such as Harrogate, Bury, Burnley, Oldham, Preston, Southport (and many more) hold interesting works.
In short: wherever you happen to be in the UK, you will find great Victorian art – one of the crucial reasons for studying it.
You should also familiarise yourself with the Art UK website (artuk.org) which features paintings by – literally – thousands of Victorian artists. Here are some names to start your searches: Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Elizabeth Lady Butler, William Powell Frith, William Holman Hunt, Edwin Landseer, John Lavery, Frederic Leighton, Daniel Maclise, John Everett Millais, Albert Moore, William Orpen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddall, Simeon Solomon, Marie Spartali Stillman, John William Waterhouse, James McNeill Whistler – you will soon find your own favourites.
Please also begin to tackle the books on the preliminary list below. Remember: looking at the pictures is studying art! Even if you don’t have time to read the whole book – have a good look at the pictures.
1. Victorian art
For helpful overviews, see:
- K. Bendiner, An Introduction to Victorian Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985)
- B. Denver, The Late Victorians: Art, Design and Society 1852-1910 (London 1986) [This is a compendium of interesting primary sources relating to late Victorian art and design]
- P. Gillett, The Victorian Painter’s World (Gloucester: Sutton, 1990), also published as Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990)
- Two books that are useful mainly for wide selections of pictures:
- L. Lambourne, Victorian Painting (London: Phaidon Press, 1999)
- J. Treuherz, Victorian Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993)
More specific texts include:
- T. Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999)
- D. Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004)
- M. Droth, J. Edwards, and M. Hatt, Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014)
- J. Edwards and I. Hart (eds), Rethinking the Interior c. 1867-1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010)
- K. McConkey, British Impressionism (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989; paperback London: Phaidon, 1998)
- J. Marsh and P.G. Nunn, Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999)
- L. Nead, Myths of sexuality : representations of women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)
- E. Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate, 2000)
- E. Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007)
- E. Prettejohn, (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
- A. Smith (ed.), Exposed: The Victorian Nude (London: Tate, 2001)
- A. Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement (New Haven and London, 2011)
- A. Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001)
2. Background reading: the social, cultural, and political context of Victorian Britain
It would be useful to get to grips with the major social and political events during the period. One very basic introduction is:
- C. Harvie and C. Matthew, Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000).
Other wide-ranging surveys include:
- J. Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (London: Harper Collins, 2003)
- F. O’Gorman, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- A.N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Norton, 2003 and several reprints)
More specific texts:
- K. Boyd and R. McWilliam ‘Introduction. Rethinking the Victorians’ in K. Boyd and R. McWilliam (eds) The Victorian Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007) pp.1-47. [a rather dense, but very thorough overview of how Victorian Britain has been studied over the last 100 years].
- M. Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) [less rigorous but perhaps a bit more fun.]
- K. Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000) [fascinating study of Victorian attitudes to sight, setting painting and sculpture in a broader context.]
3. Victorian writings
The following are intended as preliminary suggestions to familiarise you with a range of Victorian writings; all of them involve art or artworks. Try to read at least some of these so you start to develop a sense of Victorian poetry and prose writing.
- Robert Browning ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’ in Men and Women (1855)
- David Carrier (ed.), England and its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste (Amsterdam: G & B Arts, 1997) [essays by Ruskin, Pater, and Adrian Stokes]
- George Du Maurier, Trilby (1894)
- Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851)
- Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1873 and many reprints: try to read at least one of the essays in this crucial volume!
- Graham Robertson, Time Was (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1931 and many reprints) [the reminiscences of an insider in the art and theatre worlds; a very good read!]
- Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’ and other poems (Penguin edition of The Complete Poems, 2001; or try one of the many volumes of selections)
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems and short story ‘Hand and Soul’ (see Rossetti’s Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 2003) or the website rossettiarchive.org)
- John Ruskin, Modern Painters (5 vols, 1843-60; available in abridged editions), or any of his other writings (for a helpful selection see: The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from his Writings, ed. John D. Rosenberg (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964)
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
