Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Plates bright and vivid. Nice book in great condition. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> At the height of the Napoleonic Wars London’s art world was taken by storm by a new generation of painters whose novel approach to the depiction of everyday life critics loudly trumpeted as a sign of the nation’s cultural pre-eminence. Led by the precociously talented David Wilkie this highly successful artistic movement sought to transform what was generally regarded as a low and vulgar pictorial tradition with its roots in seventeenth-century Flanders and Holland into a vehicle for entertaining but improving narratives which would set new standards of truthfulness in their imitation of nature. But on a deeper level as David Solkin shows in this provocative yet highly accessible study the same phenomenon also registered the profoundly ambivalent feelings of a country in the throes of accelerating economic growth and of conflict both at home and abroad. What emerges from the imagery of Wilkie and his colleagues – among them William Mulready Edward Bird and the controversial watercolourist Thomas Heaphy is a widespread sense that the ordinary lives of the common people are becoming increasingly bound up with the exceptional events of ‘history’; that traditional boundaries between country and city are in the process of melting away; and that a more regularised and dynamic present is everywhere encroaching upon the customary patterns of the past. In its fascination with the compression of space and time early nineteenth-century British genre painting locates itself at the start of a trajectory linking the art of the Age of Revolution with the postmodern culture of the present day. (OS)