Victorian Art

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an explosion of interest in sculpture. Sculptors of the “New Sculpture” movement sought a new direction and a modern idiom for their art. This book analyzes for the first time the art-theoretical concerns of the late-Victorian sculptors, focusing on their attitudes toward representation of the human body. David J. Getsy uncovers a previously unrecognized sophistication in the New Sculpture through close study of works by key figures in the movement: Frederic Leighton, Alfred Gilbert, Hamo Thornycroft, Edward Onslow Ford, and James Havard Thomas.

These artists sought to activate and animate the conventional format of the ideal statue so that it would convincingly stand in for both a living body and an ideal image. Getsy demonstrates the conceptual complexity of the New Sculptors and places their concerns within the larger framework of modern sculpture.

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SMETHAM COLLECTION Historical Background James Smetham (1821-1889) was an artist, poet, and teacher. He was born into a family with strong Wesleyan Methodist connections in Pateley Bridge, Yorkshire. In adulthood, he chiefly supported himself as a drawing master at Westminster College, London. There, he met Sarah Goble, a music teacher. They married in 1854, and had six children. He was a correspondent of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Ford Madox Brown, and others in Pre-Raphaelite circles; especially William Davies, who later edited his poems and letters. Smetham's artworks, produced in a variety of genres and mainly small in scale, were not commercially viable during his lifetime. Most characteristic of Smetham's artistic outputs were his prolific visual 'squarings' and literary 'ventilators'. His mental health collapsed in 1877, and he spent much of the final decade of his life in seclusion. After his death, Sarah Smetham greatly encouraged his artistic legacy. Custodial History Having descended through the Smetham family, the collection was deposited with Westminster College c1997 and subsequently bequeathed to Oxford Brookes University by the artist's great-great-grandson Bruce Smetham in 2016. The collection includes 46 original paintings and etchings by James

John Ruskin, Viktorya dönemi İngiltere’sinin en önemli sanat eleştirmenlerinden biri olmasının yanında, sanat hamisi, suluboya ressamı ve sosyal kuramcılarından birisidir. Jeolojiden, mimariye, edebiyattan, eğitime, botanikten, politik ekonomiye kadar birçok farklı alanda yazılar kaleme almıştır. Ruskin’in yazı biçimi ve edebi formları da aynı ölçüde çeşitlilik gösterir. Gezi yazıları, klavuzlar, mektuplar, şiirler, bilimsel ve akademik makaleler hatta bir peri masalı bile yazmıştır. Bununla beraber yazın hayatının olgunluk döneminde mesajını en
etkin biçimde aktarmayı amaçlayan daha sade ve anlaşılır bir dil kullanmayı tercih etmiştir. Ruskin’in bütün yazıları doğa, sanat ve toplum arasındaki bağlantıları vurgulayan bir ana çerçeveye oturur. 19. yüzyılın ikinci yarısından, I. Dünya Savaşı’na kadar olan süre içinde Ruskin, düşünce dünyasına muazzam etkileri olan önemli bir isimdi. William Turner’ın doğaya ve resme yaklaşımından fazlasıyla etkilenmiş olan Ruskin; Pre-Raphaelist’lere de sonuna kadar sahip çıkmış ve desteklemiştir. Bu durum başta Empresyonizm olmak üzere, sonrasında gelişen akımlara da ilham vermiştir. 1900’deki ölümünün ardından 1960’lara gelene kadar unutulmaya yüz tutan Ruskin düşüncesi, 1960’lardan itibaren yazın ve akademi çevrelerinde daha sağlam bir zemine oturdu. Günümüzde Ruskin düşüncesi, sanat ve zanaat alanlarında olduğu kadar, ekoloji, sürdürülebilirlik, politik iktisat gibi farklı disiplinlerde kabul edilmekte ve referans kaynağı olarak kullanılmaktadır.

Communication with the dead is not characteristically associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. However, lodged in the Rare Books Collection of the University of British Columbia is a remarkable diary kept by William Michael Rossetti. It consists of a small series of 27 handwritten folios entitled simply "Memoranda by himself." This diary is a meticulous record of twenty spirit-ualist séances that took place between 1865 and 1868, séances that attracted a number of Pre-Raphaelite artists, their friends, and family members. By 1865 spiritualism was practised widely throughout Britain. Though summoning the dead was by no means a recent preoccupation, it appeared in its modern form in America in the late 1840s, was brought simultaneously to England and the Continent in the early 1850s, and was widely disseminated by the 1860s. It was a highly controversial practice and drew in many famous names, for and against. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an early convert, Charles Dickens a vigorous opponent, but its adherents ranged from Queen Victoria at one end of the social spectrum to Mary Marshall-poor, vulgar, but hugely eminent as the "washerwoman medium"-at the other. Séances, both public and private, took place throughout the country. Some were spectacular displays of showmanship involving large audiences; some were intimate, devout gatherings, while others took the form of after-dinner entertainment. The social, anthropological, and religious status of spiritualism has been much debated, but one important factor drove people to the darkened room of the medium: the desire to contact a dead loved-one. It was this motive that lay behind the séances in William Michael Rossetti's diary, since many of them were driven by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's desire to reach out to the dead Elizabeth Siddal. Though William was of course present at all the séances, not all were attended by his brother, and the "spirit" of Elizabeth Sid-The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, ns 29 (Fall 2020)

St Pancras Hotel and Station were subjects of considerable aesthetic debate during the Victorian Era.  This paper considers the debate over the buildings both individually and together.  Were either or both "Gothic" monuments?  How and why did they appeal to Victorians?

This MA Thesis analyses hundreds of Victorian newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and other media to investigate how Victorian perceptions of Napoleon I affected perceptions of Napoleon III and vice versa. It is argued that Victorian Britons frequently viewed Napoleon III through the lens of Napoleon I with significant consequences for the legacies of both Emperors today. Through analysis of letters to the editor and newspapers which appealed to all classes of society, this thesis does not produce a history of ‘Great Men’ from the top-down but rather an analysis of how such men were perceived from the bottom up and how popular perceptions helped shape their legacies. Why is it that Napoleon I, once the most hated and feared enemy of Britain, has obtained an almost celebrity-like status in Britain today whilst Napoleon III, the friend of Queen Victoria and champion of the entente cordiale is largely forgotten by the general public? The answer, this thesis argues, can be found in Victorian perceptions of both Napoleons, and in the resulting perceptions of themselves.

The present paper assesses some aspects of the influence of The Arabian Nights on nineteenth-century English literature and how this in turn impacted on British Imperial policy, leading to the invasion of Egypt in 1882. Antoine Galland's Grub-Street translation (1706-21) and Edward William Lane's annotated translation (1838-40) are examined for their misrepresentations of Eastern Mediterranean cultures. Burton's and Payne's are not relevant to the purposes of this research as they were published after 1882. The misrepresentations examined in Galland's and Lane's translations are traced in nineteenth-century English literature to highlight how such misconceptions about Eastern Mediterranean cultures became instilled and widely accepted in Victorian culture. Due to wordage limitations only three key texts by three different authors have been closely analysed, with references to other works where relevant. These texts are William Beckford's Vathek (1786), Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854) and Benjamin Disraeli's Tancred (1847). Through analysing historical accounts of events and examining several political sources, the paper ends by establishing two points: the Nights-Orientalist course influenced politicians to think of the Near East as a potential region for Imperial expansion; and politicians and statesmen manipulated the misconceptions, which developed through the Nights-Orientalist course, to justify to the British public the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.

The Shakespearean fair Ophelia has become through the centuries a
multi faceted heroine apt to embody all the victims of patriarchal domination, but
also the evil and victimized decadent lady, who would annihilate her tormentor.
Similar oxymoronic identifications were possible partly because of the vagueness that
distinguishes her character in the Shakespearean tragedy, and partly because of the
fluctuating status of adolescent girls in society. Moreover, the contemporary reception
of Ophelia has strongly been biased by the treatment of this literary myth by the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the Victorian era, when issues about the condition,
the power, and the rights of women were raised with particular force, Ophelia soon
became an icon of sublime but dangerous beauty. Such an association even came to
the point that Elizabeth Siddal – poet, painter, and model of Millais’s Ophelia – was
identified with the Shakespearean heroine, by virtue of her unquenchable thirst for
knowledge, her unrequited love, her prettiness, and the torture she allegedly provoked
to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s conscience.

Much of the attention paid to John Addington Symonds in recent decades has focused on his life and memoirs, but his essays on art theory from 1887 reveal a crucial component of his multi-faceted attempt to articulate a homoeroticist identity.  In them, he outlined a preliminary methodology for the historian of homoeroticism.  He argued that artworks are unavoidably infused with the artist’s subjectivity and, consequently, that sympathetic and like-minded viewers can register it.  In this light, his historical work on figures such as Michelangelo and Cellini can be more adequately understood as his attempt to establish a necessary fiction of seeing them as reflecting his own desire for a homoeroticist subject position.  Despite the illusory prospects of this false intersubjectivity, Symonds nevertheless covertly demanded that the historian of the homoerotic was justified in looking for, and potentially seeing, same-sex desire even if there was no overt visual evidence.  That is, he attempted to establish a site of resistance to heteronormative bias, arguing that the historian of the homoerotic can and should look beyond the representation of sexual objects in search of other subjects.

The theme of the fallen woman finding salvation in death was a popular topic in Victorian art and literature, especially during the mid-Victorian era. From the fiction of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens to realistic paintings, the myth of the fallen woman had a strong presence. In this article, I will focus on artistic representations of the fallen woman, such as John Everett Millais's Ophelia and Augustus Egg's Past and Present triptych and discuss the importance of Williams Shakespeare's Ophelia and Thomas Hood's poem "The Bridge of Sighs" for the conception of this mythical figure. I will also argue that, despite these artists' efforts to mercifully portray the fallen women, in the end, they reinforced a Victorian patriarchal discourse, which regarded women as physically and intellectually weaker than men, while mythologizing this transgressing figure, created in order to remind all women of the fate they could expect if they defied the idealized conception of femininity imposed by society.

Viktorijansko doba u Engleskoj (1837. -1901.) -društveni život, kultura i umjetnost Završni rad doc. dr. sc. Dubravka Božić Bogović Osijek, 2014. Sažetak Viktorijansko doba, kako mu sama riječ kaže, razdoblje je engleske i svjetske povijesti obilježeno vladavinom kraljice Viktorije, najdugovječnijeg od svih engleskih monarha. Najprihvaćenije vremensko određenje ovog razdoblja poklapa se s godinama vladavine kraljice Viktorije, odnosno od 1837. do 1901. godine. Za vrijeme njene šezdeset i četverogodišnje vladavine, koju povijest popularno pamti pod nazivom"viktorijansko doba", na engleskoj se političkoj sceni na vlasti izmjenjuju dvije struje, konzervativci (torijevci) i liberali (vigovci). Iz njihovih redova dolaze četvorica istaknutih britanskih premijera koji, uz kraljicu Viktoriju, daju snažan pečat britanskoj politici tog doba. To su sir Robert Peel, vikont od Palmerstona, William Ewart Gladstone i Benjamin Disraeli. Unutrašnja politika britanskih premijera usmjerena je na provođenje brojnih socijalnih reformi kao i rješavanje irskog pitanja, dok je vanjska politika usmjerena na održavanje položaja vodeće pomorske i kolonijalne sile. Viktorijansko doba vrijeme je snažne ekspanzije engleskog gospodarstva i ekonomije. Zahvaljujući iskorištavanju brojnih tehnoloških inovacija, industrijska proizvodnja strelovito raste, a engleska ekonomija tog doba slovi za uvjerljivo najjaču na svijetu. Snažna industrijalizacija za posljedicu ima velike društvene promjene. Svakako najznačajnije su nagli porast broja stanovništva, snažna urbanizacija i sve istaknutije socijalne nejednakosti, odnosno društveno raslojavanje. Tijekom cijeloga ovog razdoblja radi se na popravljanju položaja najugroženijih skupina stanovništva, žena, djece, ali i radnika. U viktorijansko doba dolazi do unaprjeđenja zdravstva što za posljedicu ima poboljšanje životnih uvjeta stanovništva. Veliko se značenje pridaje slobodnom vremenu, a u okviru njega dolazi do snažnog razvoja i popularizacije brojnih sportova, osobito nogometa. Isto tako, dolazi do značajnog razvoja tiska, a čitanje postaje sve popularnije među širokim slojevima stanovništva. Najpoznatiji književnik viktorijanskog doba je Charles Dickens, a znanstvenik Charles Darwin sa svojim djelom Podrijetlo vrsta. Najveći umjetnički uspjesi postignuti su u arhitekturi i slikarstvu koje je obilježeno djelovanjem slikarske skupine prerafaelita. Najveće arhitektonsko dostignuće viktorijanskog doba je Kristalna palača u Londonu.

Although the field of aesthetics was consolidated in the nineteenth century, its study has been shaped by two contradictory tendencies: (1) the insistence that the aesthetic realm needs to be autonomous, independent of the world of common experience; (2) the ethical or political insistence that autonomy is impossible. Starting from this characteristic antinomy, and tracing it back to early theoretical formulations in Kant and Schiller, this chapter illuminates the ways in which the constant pull between form and reality, or between art and experience, was a fundamental characteristic of aesthetics in the Victorian period. The writings of Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Walter Pater, William Morris, John Ruskin, and others show the challenges of negotiating a concept that at times seems the only thing reconciling one to the world and at other times seems to be pulling one away to an impossible realm outside human existence.

This article argues that paintings of Aesthetic Movement artist Albert Moore (1841-1893) from the mid-1870s onwards are works about consciousness and sensate experience, as defined by Victorian physiological psychologists. First, Moore’s depiction of female figures in these works is considered alongside Luce Irigaray’s theories about sensuous experience. The experiences Moore paints are holistic, private, and self-constituting: in them, self-touch is a mediation between inside and outside, self and world. Sensuous experience is envisioned as multiplicitous, involving the whole body. Next, the logic of Moore’s aesthetic system is compared to that of the nineteenth-century ‘graphic method’, whereby instruments tracked and transcribed inner physiological phenomena (such as the circulation of blood). Moore’s paintings are shown to register rhythms analogous to those of the viscera, unfolding in time. Finally, George Henry Lewes’ (1817-1878) theories of physiological psychology are considered alongside Moore’s use of pattern. Lewes’ holistic and corporeal model of psychological experience is similar to that represented by Moore. Both explore (i) the idea of sensation and sentience as experienced and organised by the whole body, and (ii) differing levels of consciousness. Moore’s forms and working method are multi-layered; his paintings are like corporeal weaves, analogues to the sensate body.

This thesis aims to investigate how reading is related to photography and the law in mainly English but also some American fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. I contend that late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century fiction creates an opposition between photography and the law in order to discipline its readers in certain kinds of reading practice. I see photography used in the fiction as a subversive, contrary form of seeing and reading associated with perceived outsiders and literalism and as a foil used to delineate ideas of legitimacy and authorised and acceptable reading practices.
I link ideas of art, law, photography and reading in order to understand what kind of reader and reading fiction aimed to produce, and how such constructions legitimated the structures of power of the political elite from the invention of photography to the nineteen-twenties. I do so by concentrating on close readings of fictional work, including authors such as Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. The study aims to illuminate how vision and reading are tied together and how visual codes are involved in how reading is experienced, conceptualised and carefully regulated. It also suggests how legal knowledge and methods of reading were a prime influence on fiction, its themes, how it was read and its readers.
The representation of photography and reading in fiction itself can be linked to the legal prohibition of photography and photo-realistic artwork from the courtroom in the 1920s. Thus, the analysis of fiction itself illuminates the conceptualisation, truth status, authority and construction of the law and the way in which the law preserves its status through the ways in which it is read and envisaged.

Elizabeth Siddal, icon of Pre-Raphaelite art, from Millais’ Ophelia to the countless portraits painted by Rossetti, was often represented in languid poses, with her eyes closed or in connection with sleep and death symbols such as the poppy. The representations of her by male artists have been widely explored by art critics, while her biographers have insisted on her laudanum addiction and her alleged suicide. Her own pictorial and poetic production, on the other hand, was consigned to oblivion until the advent of Gender Studies and feminist Art History.
Drawing on these critical approaches, this paper examines Siddal’s self-representational strategies in her paintings and poetry: the topos of sleep connected with death is used by Siddal in her own verses. Siddal adopted and re-invented the traditional role of the sleeping beauty, the passive female figure, the woman victimized by male love who sees in death, sleep and altered states of consciousness a possibility of utopian female freedom. Her use of sleep and death images and the ‘opiate’ atmosphere of her poems can be read as a form of liberation from the conventional role that was imposed upon her, and as a subtle strategy of rebellion – a critique of Victorian gender ideology.

Relying on extensive archival, stylistic and conservation research, this essay argues that the little known Venus painting preserved at Kelmscott Manor (Society of Antiquaries of London) is tremendously significant for numerous reasons.

Firstly, it reveals that, although historically attributed to Morris himself, Venus had, in fact, been jointly painted by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. As the only existing picture known to have been co-authored by the two lifelong friends and Morris and Co. associates, Venus thus offers a unique insight into an unexpected aspect of their otherwise well documented artistic collaboration.

Secondly, the essay discusses the origin of the painted Venus as an experimental adaptation of a functional embroidery design, first conceived for the recently rediscovered unfinished Venus embroidery. At the same time, it presents previously unknown archival evidence, which proves that the above mentioned Venus design was undoubtedly intended for the Red House dining room embroidery series, thus resolving a scholarly controversy as to whether goddesses were included.

Lastly, and most importantly, the essay demonstrates that the subject of Venus is the long-lost key to unlocking William Morris’s overarching thematic concept behind the Red House decorative scheme, which has long puzzled scholars.

This is a proof version of the catalogue. Much better views of text and images from the catalogue can be had at The Victorian Web (edited by George Landow) to which all the material has been uploaded.
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        The collection has been built and developed so as  to understand the iconological basis of Victorian art, and to utilize philosophical as well as empirical analytic methodes. (In terms of the latter, it deploys a kind of forensic iconography - made possible by the use of web resources.)
      The collection includes work by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle (notably drawings by Burne-Jones), the Victorian classicists, Ruskin-influenced landscapists, and masters of historical genre.
      The collection also includes work by the contemporary Slovenian artsist Mojca Oblak. She is involved in acquiring images for the collection, and for working alongside them to find ideas for her own work.

This book offers a critical analysis of Elizabeth Siddal's poetry. It is also a critical edition of Siddal's complete poetry and letters, based on the original manuscripts kept at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The Italian translation is provided on the opposite page of the original English text.

This book focuses on the encounters of literature and visuality in Victorian culture, with a special emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. lt aims at exploring why Pre-Raphaelitism, with its peculiar handling of literature and visuality, has been granted an important position in recent revisions of Victorian culture. Though the answer to that question is far from unequivocal, the visibility of Pre-Raphaelitism in recent revisions of Victorian culture seems to be due to its affinity with the procedures of contemporary critical theory. Both Pre-Raphaelitism and contemporary theory rely on the concept of borderline--be it the borderline between cultures, media, languages, disciplines or psychic structures. The Pre-Raphaelites, with their keen interest in illustration, ekphrasis, transgression, sensuality, nature, history and cultural others, often operate as an alibi of the very interpretive effort invested in the act of reassessing. This proposition works as the structural backbone of my study, which aims to investigate the ways in which the Pre-Raphaelite procedures have retained their functionality in the sphere of culture.

As recorded by many of his contemporaries, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a most extraordinary, avant-garde collector of antiques and Old Masters, but the great majority of his possessions got dispersed without trace at his posthumous sale of 1882. Relying on archival research and two historic images - a drawing by Hanslip Fletcher (1899, William Morris Gallery), and a Country Life photograph of 1921 - it has been possible to trace, and verify the attribution, of all five of his Old Masters left behind at Kelmscott Manor in 1874. Spring or Cultivation of Tulips by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1632), Matthias Knutsen (Bavarian school, 1556), The Birth of the Virgin (Italian, 17th century) and the Views of Rua Nova dos Mercadores, Lisbon (I & II, Netherlandish or Portuguese artist, 1570-1590) form a rare insight into Rossetti’s prized yet little-known collection, and stand as testimony to his two-year permanent residence of the house (from 1872-74).

Together with Spring, the cityscapes of Lisbon are the only examples of Rossetti’s fascination with genre scenes, which comprised over one third of lots sold at his posthumous sale of 1882. It is argued that in various aspects of their subject matter, the Rua Nova paintings encapsulated Rossetti’s key antiquarian and artistic preoccupations, comprising a microcosm of his collecting interests, ranging from architecture and topography, through historic costume, to the representation of people from different cultures. The circumstances behind their purchase are considered in relation to Rossetti’s taste and expertise in Old Masters, and his timely election to the Arundel Club. Their erroneous attribution to the school of Velazquez is discussed in the wider context of knowledge and dissemination of Old Masters in Victorian England, highlighting Rossetti’s avant-garde interest in the then little-known Spanish school in the 1860s. Rossetti was unaware of their documentary significance as the only surviving representations of the main trading street in pre-earthquake Lisbon, Rua Nova dos Mercadores, where merchants sold luxury goods similar to some of the antiques that Rossetti himself collected. Rossetti originally purchased the paintings in 1866 for Tudor House, after finding them at a printseller’s in Bunhill Row, London, whose shop was located opposite to the grave of the artist’s hero- William Blake. Some time after 1871 these cityscapes must have been taken to Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire (since 1962 owned by the Society of Antiquaries of London).

The whereabouts of only two of Rossetti's Old Masters outside of Kelmscott are currently known, i.e. the Botticelli in the V&A collection and The Triumph of Chastity attributed to workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni at the North Carolina Museum of Art. The five Old Masters preserved at Kelmscott Manor are evocative and informative survivals from Rossetti’s occupancy of the house and stand as testimony to his vital contribution to the decoration of the Manor.

In 1878 a correspondence was begun between Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and Thomas Hall Caine (1853-1931) regarding the sale of the painting ‘Dante’s dream at the time of the death of Beatrice’ to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The sale of this painting is chiefly interesting in that much of the correspondence between Rossetti and Caine, during the period late 1880 to autumn 1881, is largely unresearched and these letters (part of the Hall Caine bequest, and housed at the Manx National Heritage Library, Douglas, Isle of Man) contain details of the process of this sale.

William Robinson (1838–1935) was an influential Irish gardener and journalist who came to be known as the main instigator of the English flower garden and cottage aesthetics that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century. His adamant rejection of artificial forms and colours in gardens came as a blow to the fashionable high-Victorian gardening style in which straight lines and geometrical patterns dominated in the form of topiary art, unvaried masses of colours, and flat land terracing. This paper purports to analyse, mainly through a corpus of Robinson’s newspaper articles, the socio-economic implications of his aesthetic choices. It seems that his rejection of artificiality and laudation of a more natural style of gardening was indeed a way of promoting the socio-professional figure of the gardener at the expense of the architect. By putting the plants’ needs and forms at the core of his definition of beauty, thus making horticultural knowledge the prerequisite to garden creation, he endeavoured to oust architects from the landscape profession. This natural aesthetics also theoretically entailed less care and fewer costs, which appealed to aspiring Victorian middle-classes who could acquire and share horticultural knowledge in the columns of Robinson’s popular gardening magazines. The community of gardeners gathered in those pages reflected a larger Weltanschauung in which the figure of the gardener embodied the possibility of harmonious coexistence and symbiosis between Victorians and Nature.

Français :
William Robinson (1838-1935) est un jardinier et journaliste irlandais considéré comme le principal instigateur de l’esthétique du jardin fleuri de cottage anglais qui est apparue dans la dernière partie du xixe siècle. Son vif rejet des formes et des couleurs artificielles dans les jardins a profondément remis en cause le grand style victorien alors en vogue, dans lequel lignes droites et motifs géométriques dominaient, sous formes de topiaires, d’aplats de couleurs monotones et de terrasses planes. Cet article se propose d’analyser, principalement au travers d’un corpus d’articles de presse écrits par Robinson, les implications socio-économiques de ses choix esthétiques. Il semble en effet que son aversion pour l’artificialité et ses prêches pour un style de jardin plus naturel soit une manière de promouvoir la figure socio-professionnelle du jardinier aux dépens de celle de l’architecte. En mettant les besoins et les formes des plantes au cœur de sa définition de la beauté, faisant ainsi du savoir botanique un préalable à la création d’un jardin, il s’est efforcé d’évincer les architectes de la profession paysagère. Cette esthétique naturelle impliquait également, du moins en théorie, moins d’entretien et de frais, ce qui répondait aux aspirations des classes moyennes victoriennes, qui pouvaient acquérir et partager leurs connaissances horticoles dans les colonnes des journaux à succès consacrés au jardin et édités par Robinson. La communauté de jardiniers rassemblée dans ces pages était le reflet d’une Weltanschauung dans laquelle la figure du jardinier incarnait la possibilité d’une coexistence harmonieuse et d’une symbiose entre les Victoriens et la nature.

19th Century British visual culture is characterised  by a proliferation of images with fantastic themes. As poignantly noted by Nina Auerbach, Victorian imagination remains essentially otherworldly and supernatural, despite its aim to be scientific, moral and rational.  [...]
What, however, remains largely overlooked, is a particularly ambiguous figure that pervasively surfaces within the arts of the period. I am referring to the female -and much more recurrent- counterparts to the Victorian monster: the lamias and sirens, Eves, witches and fairies that overpopulate Victorian paintings. Largely, these images have been classed as part of a general European trend. [...]
What I instead set upon in this dissertation is to consider British artworks as a separate and distinct phenomenon. I believe, in fact, that peculiar features of beauty and passivity set these images aside from their much more feral German or French counterparts; and, moreover, that the success and praise that these paintings received in their time makes them unique and worthy of investigation. I intend to investigate the reasons behind the appeal of these artworks, and their potential function. I will, in fact, argue that these images play a powerfully exorcising role, simultaneously othering and appropriating the figure of what is ultimately a wayward female, under the mask of wings and spells. By creating a very specific and fetishised narrative of women’s transgression, I argue that male artists fashioned a powerfully prescriptive fiction that limited and dictated the way in which women could transgress, therefore redefining female rebellion through a language of spectacle, femininity, sexuality and male pleasure that accommodated it within hegemonic culture.

The home of the artist Frederic Leighton, begun in 1864 and from then a lifetime preoccupation for the artist and his architect, George Aitchison, was among the most famous studio-houses built in West London in the late nineteenth century, and the only one to remain today as a museum. But Leighton’s home did not so much survive as an original artefact as become reconstructed in the image of one. Not only were its original decorative schemes almost entirely lost in the decades after Leighton’s death, the dispersal of the contents means that a mere fraction of the works of art once in Leighton’s collection, and almost none of the furnishings, artefacts and antiques remain. The Museum, recently reopened after major refurbishments, has attempted to recover the look and feel of the original interiors, but it nevertheless presents a greatly stripped-down version of the house as it was once occupied. This article asks what the Museum can really tell us about Leighton; it argues that, while drawing attention to Leighton as an important art world figure, the existence of the house has also obscured his artistic identity. Seen as a place for entertainment and social activity, the role of the studio-house as a creative site of artistic production, and its special contribution to the image of Leighton as an artist, has been all but lost. This article returns to perceptions of Leighton’s house during his lifetime, showing that it was Leighton’s practice that determined the agenda for the public eye, his studio appearing not as a corollary of Leighton’s social position, but as the creative centre of the artist’s world. The article examines how that image was constructed, and what it was intended to convey about Leighton’s art.

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This paper discusses the impact of ideas about the historical and racial origins of the Holy Family that are captured in the painting Anno Domini or the Flight into Egypt (1883/4) by Edwin Longsden Long. Anno Domini fits into a wider 19th-century popular visual and literary narrative around Egypt and its ancient and biblical past. This general narrative, and its racial constructions, has been explored within reception theory and art history, but often overlooked in histories of archaeology and Egyptology. This paper unpacks how Anno Domini fits into a well-known orientalist way of seeing Egypt but also reflects ideas about race that were prevalent in archaeology and other newly established scientific disciplines at the time. The construction of the Virgin Mary and Christ child as White Europeans in Anno Domini both reflects and had an impact on constructions of race in Britain and on ancient (and modern) peoples in the Holy Land and Egypt in the late nineteenth century.
These constructions fed the growing use of scientific terminology to give such racist imagery authority, as found in A. H. Sayce's ‘Sunday school book’ The Races of the Old Testament (1891). Sayce’s popular book used photographs taken by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1887 of different 'racial types' from Egyptian monuments. Anno Domini vividly illustrates the preoccupation with race and identity found in archaeological interpretations of and motivations for recording material culture from ancient Egypt. This paper illustrates how art, archaeology, orientalism and racial theory fused and fed each other.

The cultural construction and imagery of the fallen woman shifted prostitution from threatening force and offered an alternative narrative, which defined the prostitute as desperate victim of her ways.  If the prostitute was regretful and penitent, middle-class morality had to be correct; and if she was dedicated to her self-destruction, she could not possibly present a noteworthy capacity for social upheaval.

Julia Margaret Cameron es una de las primeras artistas que se dedicó a la fotografía en la Inglaterra victoriana, una época en la que la mujer empezaba a ser algo reconocida por su trabajo fuera del ámbito del hogar. En un momento en el que los avances tecnológicos se oponían al pensamiento retrogrado que pretendía mantener a las mujeres fuera de la vida pública, algunas pioneras se opusieron a estas normas y tomaron las riendas de su propia vida y de su trabajo. En este contexto destaca el arte de la fotografía por ser una de las aficiones más comunes entre mujeres de la alta clase social. Si bien la captura de imágenes era una forma más de entretenimiento, muchas de ellas se dedicaron de forma profesional, creando sus propios estudios y recibiendo encargos por los que obtuvieron cierto reconocimiento. En este periodo Cameron comienza a dedicarse a la fotografía de forma aficionada. Su estilo borroso y los temas literarios, religiosos y artísticos que reflejaba en sus instantáneas serán la marca personal de su producción. No obstante, la técnica “defectuosa” que presentan muchas de sus obras fue incomprendida por algunos de sus contemporáneos. Pero no podemos olvidar que estas imperfecciones son lo que distingue su trabajo fotográfico del resto.
Los temas en los que destacó, con una visión personal y femenina, fueron la representación de bellas mujeres, niños y una serie dedicada a hombres ilustres. En toda esta labor se deja notar su visión personal, en la que influyó su pasión por el arte del Renacimiento y Barroco, y su relación con los artistas prerrafaelitas y simbolistas.

Il lavoro  ricostruisce la figura e l’opera di Ernest Binfield Havell, studioso britannico di arte indiana nel periodo del British Raj e il suo ruolo nell'aver rivalutato e promosso  l’arte indiana in un periodo nel quale quest’arte era considerata dal mondo occidentale niente più che una forma di artigianato.

From their initiation as an art movement in the mid-1840s, the Pre-Raphaelites rooted
themselves within the notion of rebelling against Victorian art traditions by drawing upon the
stylistic tools of pre-Renaissance art. Similarly, Aubrey Beardsley’s short career in the fin de
siècle was oriented within his departure from Victorian-accepted artistic norms and framed
his work within Japanese- as well as Gothic-inspired style. This movement, bearing apparent
similarity between rebellious art in mid-Victorian era and its counterpart in the Victorian fin
de siècle, makes it all the more surprising that it has not been the subject of a thorough
analysis, if discussed previously at all. I argue in the present paper that, in spite of their
different styles, Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti on one hand,
and Aubrey Beardsley on the other, were similar in their rebelliousness by attempting to
break away from Victorian art traditions. Furthermore, by drawing on Carol Jacobi’s ‘Salt,
Sugar and Curdled Milk’, I argue that there is an added element to the comparison which
goes beyond the apparent rebellious transgression and further assimilates two stylistically
different but similarly rebellious modes of art.