Full Description
At a time of growing interest in relations between Marxism and Romanticism, Andrew Hemingway's essays on British art and art theory reopen the question of Romantic painting's ideological functions and, in some cases, its critical purchase. Half the volume exposes the voices of competing class interests in aesthetics and art theory in the tumultuous years of British history between the American Revolution and the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act. Half offers new perspectives on works by some of the most important landscape painters of the time: John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, John Crome, and John Sell Cotman. Four essays are hitherto unpublished, and the remainder have been updated and in several cases substantially rewritten for this volume.
Contents
List of Illustrations ... vii
Acknowledgements ... xi
Sources and Occasions ... xii
Introduction: Theoretical Apologia ... 1
Aesthetics and Ideology
1 The Science of Taste in the Eighteenth Century: Philosophical Criticism and the Scottish Historical School ... 41
2 Academic Theory versus Association Aesthetics: The Ideological Forms of a Conflict of Interests in the Early Nineteenth Century ... 86
3 Bourgeois Critiques of the Monopoly of Taste ... 114
4 Genius, Gender, and Progress: Benthamism and the Arts in the 1820s ... 150
5 Cultural Philanthropy and the Invention of the Norwich School ... 181
Landscape and Ideology
6 Meaning in Cotman's Norfolk Subjects ... 217
7 Sheep as a Pictorial Motif: Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral ... 246
8 Artisanal Worldview in the Paintings of John Crome ... 297
9 John Crome's 'Local Scenery': Iconography and the Ideology of the Picturesque ... 336
10 Constable and his Audience: An Argument for Iconography ... 387
11 The Field of Waterloo Exposed: Turner, Byron, and the Politics of Reaction ... 420
Coda: Regarding Art History ... 459
Bibliography ... 464
Index ... 492
