'Writing the lives of painters' : biography and artistic identity in Britain 1760-1810 / Karen Junod.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Junod, Karen, 1973-

Series:

Oxford English monographs

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Art and literature.

Art and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

History.

Great Britain.

Biography as a literary form.

Physical Description:

x, 258 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.

Summary:

'Writing the Lives of Painters' explores the development of artists' biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. During this period artists gradually distanced themselves from artisans and began to be recognised for their imaginative and intellectual skills. The development of the art market and the burgeoning of an exhibition culture, as well as the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, all contributed to redefining the rank of artists in society. This social redefinition of the status of artists in Britain was shaped by a thriving print culture. Contemporary artists were discussed in a wide range of literary forms, including exhibition reviews, art-critical pamphlets, and journalistic gossip-columns. Biographical accounts of modern artists emerged in a dialogue with these other types of writing.

This book is an account of a new literary genre, tracing its emergence in the cultural context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers artistic biography as a malleable generic framework for investigation. Indeed, while the lives of painters in Britain did not completely abandon traditional tropes, the genre significantly widened its scope and created new individual and social narratives that reflected and accommodated the needs and desires of new reading audiences. 'Writing the Lives of Painters' also argues that the proliferation of a myriad of biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artistic originality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent 'British School' of painting. Finally, by focusing on the emergence of individual biographies of British artists, the book examines how and why the art historiographic model established by Giorgio Vasari was gradually dismantled in the hands of British biographers during the Romantic period. Book jacket.

Contents:

Contexts. biography vs. literature, art, and criticism

Series of lives. Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of painting in England (1762-1780) ; William Beckford's Biographical memoirs of extraordinary painters (1780)

Individual lives. William Hogarth : the art of biography and the life of anecdotes ; Thomas Gainsborough : life in a sketch, sketch of a life ; George Morland : natural art, fictional life, and factual biography ; John Opie : domesticity, publicity, and gender.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [235]-252) and index.

ISBN:

0199597006

9780199597000

OCLC:

716776908