Paul Mellon Centre
Description: Paul Mellon Centre
Learn more at the Paul Mellon Centre.
Paul Mellon Centre
Paul Mellon Centre
16 Bedford Square
London
WC1B 3JA
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Subscribed to the newsletter
Send me site notifications emails
1 – 12 of 22 results
12 | Next
Description: Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting
In the London circles of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Frederic Leighton, the notion of “art for art's sake” became a shared concern: if art is not created for the sake of preaching a moral lesson, or supporting a political cause, or making a fortune, or any other objective, what might art be? Art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn traces the emergence of the debates over this issue in the 1860s and 1870s, focusing especially on the Rossetti, Whistler, Leighton, and other protagonists of the Aesthetic Movement and their paintings—some of the most haunting and memorable images in modern art. The English painters' search for the formula to best express the idea of “art for art's sake” was a unified and powerful artistic undertaking, Prettejohn demonstrates, and the Aesthetic Movement made important contributions to the history of modern art.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2007 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300135497
EISBN 9780300278590
Illustrations 128
Print Status in print
Description: Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century...
A distinctly modern art world emerged in eighteenth-century England. The period witnessed the establishment of the first public spaces for the display of works of art, widespread discussion of artistic issues, and the rise of an art market responsive to the tastes of a large and diverse audience. In his discussion of these phenomena, David H. Solkin shows how major developments in English painting went hand in hand with rapid economic expansion, and how the sudden light of public exposure transformed pictorial theory and practice.

The book opens by examining the attempts by artists in the early eighteenth century to represent commercial prosperity as a source of moral as well as material well-being. By the 1730s these efforts had borne fruit in an innovative imagery of polite conversation, which in turn laid the foundations for a new kind of public art designed specifically for a middle-class audience. Solkin reveals how market forces soon changed the traditional subject matter of historical painting into something less high-minded and more popular, as artists abandoned the idealized depiction of classical narratives in favor of creating detailed portrayals of contemporary British themes. At the same time, the image of the hero moved away from a character of stern and stoic masculinity toward a new paragon of sensibility and benevolence, designed to appeal to a non-heroic audience. The founding of the Royal Academy in 1768 heralded an attempt to reassert the more exclusive standards of the past, but this did not check the growth of a new genre of painting with its own inner dynamic, meaning, and ambition.

Generously illustrated, including many new color images, and written in a lively style, the book is compulsory reading for anyone interested in eighteenth-century British art, culture, and social history.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 1993 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300057416
EISBN 9780300278583
Illustrations 88
Print Status out of print
Description: Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British...
The Gothic Revival movement in architecture was intimately entwined with 18th- and 19th-century British cultural politics. By the middle of the 19th century, architects and theorists had transformed the movement into a serious scholarly endeavor, connecting it to notions of propriety and “truth,” particularly in the domain of religious architecture. Simultaneously, reform within the Church of England had worked to widen the aesthetic and liturgical appeal of “correct” gothic forms. Coinciding with these developments, both architectural and religious, was the continued expansion of Britain’s empire, including a renewed urgency by the English Church to extend its mission beyond the British Isles.

In this groundbreaking study, G. A. Bremner traces the global reach and influence of the Gothic Revival throughout Britain’s empire during these crucial decades. Focusing on religious buildings, he examines the reinvigoration of the Church of England’s colonial and missionary agenda and its relationship to the rise of Anglican ecclesiology, revealing the extraordinary nature and extent of building activity that occurred across the British world.

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300187038
EISBN 9780300276176
Illustrations 369
Print Status in print
Description: Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain
For artists of the increasingly mechanized Victorian age, questions about the meaning and value of labour presented a series of urgent problems: Is work a moral obligation or a religious duty? Must labour be the preserve of men alone? Does the amount of work bestowed on a painting affect its value? Should art celebrate wholesome rural work or reveal the degradations of the industrial workplace? In this highly original book, Tim Barringer considers how artists and theorists addressed these questions and what their solutions reveal about Victorian society and culture.

Based on extensive research, Men at Work offers a compelling study of the image as a means of exploring the relationship between labour and art in Victorian Britain. Barringer arrives at a major reinterpretation of the art and culture of nineteenth-century Britain and its empire as well as new readings of such key figures as Ford Madox Brown and John Ruskin.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date February 2005 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300103809
EISBN 9780300276183
Illustrations 146
Print Status out of print
Description: The Diary of Ford Madox Brown
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00350
Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) was perhaps the most important and influential associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The diary that he began in 1847 and kept for some twenty years appears here in a complete and fully annotated edition. It is an absorbing and moving chronicle of the life of an impoverished artist striving for acknowledgement and success in mid-nineteenth-century London.

Madox Brown’s character was moulded by the harsh circumstances of his life. Without money and seemingly without recognition, a widower with a young child and later a second wife and children, he seemed to many a taciturn and suspicious figure and his diary demonstrates his antagonism toward some of his contemporaries, notably John Ruskin, John Everett Millais, and the London art trade. But he also speaks in revealing detail of his working life and recounts with enthusiasm his relationships with friends and associates—particularly William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Siddal.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date May 1981 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300027433
EISBN 9780300274028
Illustrations 21
Print Status out of print
Description: Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis and the Art of Orientalism
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00344
John Frederick Lewis (1804–1876) is one of the best-known yet least understood British Orientalist painters of the nineteenth century. His numerous, highly detailed Orientalist images stand in dramatic contrast to the meager written archive of the years he spent in Egypt between 1841 and 1851; art historians have long puzzled over the details of this significant period and struggled for meaningful insight into his process of artful construction.

This innovative book, the first critical monograph devoted to this acclaimed artist, draws on both newly uncovered historical data and imperial and post-colonial theory to propose a compelling new interpretation of Lewis’s paintings and biography. In addition to offering formal, historical, and theoretical examinations of Lewis’s highly nuanced subject matter, Weeks argues that Lewis crafted an ambiguous, cross-cultural identity that challenged viewers’ understanding of fact and fiction and, along with his pictures, subverted systems of patriarchal power in England and abroad.

*The eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2014 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300208160
EISBN 9780300273458
Illustrations 111
Print Status out of print
Description: The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00340
Pioneered by William Hogarth (1697–1764) and his peers in the early 18th century, and then revitalized by Johan Zoffany (1733–1810), the conversation piece was an innovative mode of portraiture, depicting groups posed in landscape or domestic settings. These artists grappled with creating complex multi-figured compositions and intricate narratives, filling their paintings with representations of socially, nationally, and temporally precise customs. Paying particular attention to the vibrant (and at times fabricated) interior and exterior settings in these works, Kate Retford discusses the various ways that the conversation piece engaged with the rich material culture of Georgian Britain. The book also explores how these portraits served a wide array of interests and concerns among familial networks and larger social groups. From codifying performances of politeness to engaging in cross-cultural exchanges, the conversation piece was a complex and nuanced expression of a multifaceted society.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
". . . it provides not only an extremely satisfying account of conversation pieces but makes significant contributions to our understanding of British art and the eighteenth century more broadly. Essential." — Craig Hanson, Choice

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date October 2017 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300194807
EISBN 9780300272888
Illustrations 232
Print Status out of print
Description: Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00322
In May 1914 the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London opened its exhibition of “Twentieth-Century Art.” The catalogue identified four main strands in modern painting but included a fifth group of Jewish artists, hung in the “Small Gallery.” In this illuminating book art historian Lisa Tickner takes a fresh look at the work of artists from each of these strands. In a series of innovative case studies, combining analysis with substantial new research, she examines the artists’ radical approaches to the process of painting and their resources in the defining conditions of modern life.

Tickner discusses Walter Sickert’s Camden Town Murder and L’Affaire de Camden Town in the context of tabloid crime. Augustus John’s Lyric Fantasy is seen as rooted in, but also as qualifying, the Edwardian fascination with gypsies and tramping while memorializing John’s dead wife, Ida. The studies for Wyndham Lewis’s lost Kermesse are connected to popular dance and to his sense of the "wild body." Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach is related to the emergence of the beach as a social and psychic space and to childhood summers in St. Ives drawn on by her sister, Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse. And David Bomberg’s In the Hold, along with Mark Gertler’s Jewish Family, is shown to emerge from contemporary debates surrounding Jewish art and the possibility of a secular, urban, Yiddish culture. In an extended Afterword, Tickner considers the interplay between modernism and modernity in British art before 1914.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date June 2000 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300083507
EISBN 9780300271928
Illustrations 153
Print Status in print
Description: Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies,...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00314
This highly original book asks new questions about paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies between 1700 and 1840, when the trade in sugar and slaves was most active and profitable. In a wide-ranging study of scientific illustrations, scenes of daily life, caricatures, and landscape imagery, Kay Dian Kriz analyzes the visual culture of refinement that accompanied the brutal process by which African slaves transformed “rude” sugar cane into pure white crystals.

In these works refinement is usually associated with the metropole, and “rudeness” with the colonies. Many artists capitalized on those characteristics of rudeness—animality, sensuality, and savagery—that increasingly became associated with all the island inhabitants. Yet other artists produced works that offered the possibility of colonial refinement, not just economic profit and sexual pleasure, thus complicating perceptions of difference between the two sides of the Atlantic.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date August 2008 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300140620
EISBN 9780300270204
Illustrations 117
Print Status in print
Description: The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00304
Robert Adam was one of the greatest British architects of the later eighteenth century. So widespread was his influence as a decorator and furniture designer that his name has become a household word. But it is the synthesis of architecture, planning, and decoration that stands at the heart of Adam’s achievement, as Eileen Harris shows in this enlightening book. She considers in detail the interaction of each of these elements in nineteen of Adam’s most accomplished interior projects, including some of the most famous British country houses and London town houses.

Most of Adam’s enormous body of work was in preexisting houses; the challenges of remodeling stimulated his inventive imagination, and he became a master at turning awkward situations to advantage. Harris has mined archival sources, including the large collection of drawings from the Adam office at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and fully examined the houses themselves to discover exactly what Adam did in each project and why. In her detailed discussions of the planning, decoration, ceilings, carpets, chimney pieces, and furniture of such interiors as those at Kedleston, Syon House, Osterley Park, Newby Hall, Culzean Castle, and Home and Lansdowne Houses in London, Harris uncovers the full extent of Adam’s prodigious achievements.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2001 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300081299
EISBN 9780300267518
Illustrations 506
Print Status out of print
Description: Reynolds: Portraiture in Action
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00296
A deeply researched and elegantly written study on Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)—Georgian England’s most celebrated portraitist and the first president of the British Royal Academy of Arts—this invaluable volume explores all aspects of Reynolds’s portraiture. Mark Hallett provides detailed, compelling readings of Reynolds’s most celebrated and striking works, investigating the ways in which they were appreciated and understood in his own lifetime. Recovering the artist’s dynamic interaction with his sitters and patrons, and revealing the dramatic impact of his portraits within the burgeoning exhibition culture of late-eighteenth-century London, Hallett also unearths the intimate relationship between Reynolds’s paintings and graphic art.

Reynolds: Portraiture in Action offers a new understanding of the artist’s career within the extremely competitive London art world and takes readers into the engrossing debates and controversies that captivated the city and its artists.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 2014 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300196979
EISBN 9780300267631
Illustrations 431
Print Status out of print
Description: Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00255
One of the most successful and internationally celebrated artists of the eighteenth century, Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) established her reputation with sensitive portraits as well as ambitious history paintings. This major study explores the artist’s work and career by considering how Kauffman reconciled the public and presumed masculine pursuit of painting with her role as woman artist and arbiter of private taste.

Author Angela Rosenthal analyzes Kauffman’s pictorial strategies and her significant contribution to portraiture as a field of representation, including detailed discussion of the artist’s extraordinary series of self-portraits. Featuring a wealth of new information, this illustrated book demonstrates Kauffman’s role in shaping European visual culture, shedding new light on the history of women artists and on art history as a critical discipline.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300103335
EISBN 9780300264517
Illustrations 161
Print Status out of print
12 | Next