Victorian Painting Book

There is a tendency to lump British art of the mid- to late-19th-century into two distinct categories: the swooning, languorous beauties--images of idealised womanhood--depicted by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the no less idealised portraits of the social and political effects of the Industrial Revolution. Christopher Wood is a leading authority in this field--in 1971 he produced what has become the standard reference work on the subject, The Dictionary of Victorian Painters. In Victorian Painting, his richly illustrated overview of the art of that epoch, he argues that "to write a history of painting in the Victorian period is to write of England's golden age"--an age that produced artists as diverse as Constable, Millais, Frith, Waterhouse and Rossetti and that encompasses a 70-year span from the last vestiges of Romanticism in the 1830s to the impact of Post-Impressionism as the 20th century took hold. Chronologically ordered into carefully researched sections embracing movements as varied as Social Realism and Aestheticism, Military Battle Painting and the Classical Revival, Victorian Painting has drawn on the archives of Sotheby's and Christies among other art collections as well as a great number of private sources. The result is a history that is packed with generous colour templates, including Classical Revivalist Lord Leighton's famous orange-hued slumberer in Flaming June (1895) and Last Romantic John William Waterhouse's seductive enchantresses in Hylas and the Nymphs (1896). Informatively written and using imaginative picture research, as a catalogue of an age Victorian Painting is a volume to treasure. --Catherine TaylorRead More