Painting Out of the Ordinary : Modernity and the Art of Everday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century England

by David H. Solkin

• ISBN13: 9780300140613
• ISBN10: 0300140614
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2008-08-26
• Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre BA

Summary

At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, a new generation of painters led by the precociously talented David Wilkie took London's art world by storm. Their novel approach to the depiction of everyday life marked the beginning a trajectory that links the art of the Age of Revolution with the postmodern culture of today.What emerged from the imagery of Wilkie and other early 19th-century British genre paintersamong them William Mulready, Edward Bird, and the controversial watercolorist Thomas Heaphywas a sense that common people were increasingly bound up with the exceptional events of history, that traditional boundaries between country and city were melting away, and that a more regularized and dynamic present was everywhere encroaching upon the customary patterns of the past.

Author Biography

David H. Solkin is professor of the social history of art, Courtauld Institute of Art. He is the author of Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England and editor of Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836, both published by Yale.

Table of Contents

New adventures in time and space	p. 1
Village politics	p. 7
1809 : the epic of common life	p. 37
Arcadia lost	p. 79
The art of discipline	p. 111
The colonisation of carnival	p. 145
The end of Olde England	p. 191
The rural and the modern	p. 241
Notes	p. 247
Selected bibliography	p. 261
Photograph credits	p. 264
Index	p. 265
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.