This book is a wide-ranging exploration of the production of Victorian art autograph replicas, a painting’s subsequent versions created by the same artist who painted the first version. Autograph replicas were considered originals, not copies, and were highly valued by collectors in Britain, America, Japan, Australia, and South Africa. Motivated by complex combinations of aesthetic and commercial interests, replicas generated a global, and especially transatlantic, market between the 1870s and the 1940s, and almost all collected replicas were eventually donated to US public museums, giving replicas authority in matters of public taste and museums’ modern cultural roles. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, museum studies, and economic history.

This book explores the nature of Britain-based artists’ engagement with the transformations of their environment since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. At a time of pressing ecological concerns, the international group of contributors provide a series of case studies that reconsider the nature–culture divide and aim at identifying the contours of a national narrative that stretches from enclosed lands to rising seas. By adopting a longer historical view, this book hopes to enrich current debates concerning art’s engagement with recording and questioning the impact of human activity on the environment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, environmental humanities, and British studies.

A critical study of the life of art criticism in the 1970s, this volume traces the evolution of art and art criticism in a pivotal period in post-war British history. JJ Charlesworth explores how art critics and the art press attempted to negotiate new developments in art, faced with the challenges of conceptualism, alternative media, new social movements and radical innovations in philosophy and theory. This is the first comprehensive study of the art press and art criticism in Britain during this pivotal period, seen through the lens of its art press, charting the arguments and ideas that would come to shape contemporary art as we know it today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, British cultural history and history of journalism.

This book proposes new understandings of modern life in Britain by bringing constructs of female spirituality centre stage and examining three ‘forgotten’ artists identified with the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorianism. Thomas Cooper Gotch, Robert Anning Bell and Frederick Cayley Robinson are resituated squarely within the tumultuous social and cultural changes of the period. Becoming visible again, in more inclusive histories, allows such artists not only to re-inhabit but to reshape narratives of modernism, reanimating the scholarly discourse and creating a dynamic cultural history of modern Britain expressed through their striking visions of womanhood. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, gender studies and British studies.

Art Markets, Agents and Collectors brings together a wide variety of case studies, based on letters and detailed archival research, which nuance the history of the art market and the role of the collector within it. Using diaries, account books and other archival sources, the contributions to this volume show how agents set up networks and acquired works of art, often developing the taste and knowledge of the collectors for whom they were working. They are therefore seen as important actors in the market, having a specific role that separates them from auctioneers, dealers, museum curators or amateurs, while at the same time acknowledging and analyzing the dual positions that many held. Each chronological period is introduced by a contextual essay, written by a leading expert in the field, which sets out the art market in the period concerned and the ways in which agents functioned. This book is an invaluable tool for those needing a broader introduction to the intricate workings of the art market.

Acknowledging the significance of Edward Said’s Orientalism for contemporary discourse, the contributors to this volume deconstruct, rearrange, and challenge elements of his thesis, looking at the new conditions and opportunities offered by globalization. What can a renewed or reconceptualized Orientalism teach us about the force and limits of our racial imaginary, specifically in relation to various national contexts? In what ways, for example, considering our greater cross-cultural interaction, have clichés and stereotypes undergone a metamorphosis in contemporary societies and cultures? Theoretically, and empirically, this book offers an expansive range of contexts, comprising the insights, analytical positions, and perspectives of a transnational team of scholars of comparative literature and literary and cultural studies based in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, USA, Singapore, Taiwan, and Turkey. Working with, through and beyond Orientalism, they examine a variety of cultural texts, including the novel, short story, poetry, film, graphic memoir, social thought, and life writing. Making connections across centuries and continents, they articulate cultural representation and discourse through multiple approaches including critical content analysis, historical contextualization, postcolonial theory, gender theory, performativity, intertextuality, and intersectionality. Given its unique approach, this book will be essential reading for scholars of literary theory, film studies and Asian studies, as well as for those with a general interest in postcolonial literature and film.

This book examines illustrations created to accompany fictions written by several of the most popular authors published in Britain and America between 1885 and 1920. By studying the lavish illustrations that complemented not only initial serializations, but also subsequent publications of fictions by H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, James De Mille, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells, the book demonstrates the significance of images to the fin de siècle romance form. In order to make fantastic plots seem possible, graphic artists worked hand in hand with authors to not only fill gaps in audience understanding, but also expand and deepen the meaning of these marvels. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, illustration studies, British and American history, and British and American literature.

Extending the scholarly discussion of visual history, this book examines eighteenth-century engraved book illustrations in order to outline the genealogy of the modern visualisation of the past in Britain. This study is based on a body of more than a hundred engraved historical plates designed in the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain and published in more than a dozen pictorial histories. Focusing on these previously unstudied engravings, this work contributes to the study of eighteenth-century visual culture and is informed by current interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of visual and book studies. Eighteenth-Century Engravings and Visual History in Britain is about the urge to envision the past and about the establishment of the new relationship between visual media, visuality, and history in eighteenth-century Britain. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, British history, book studies, and visual culture.

A prolific artist, writer, designer, and political activist, William Morris remains remarkably powerful and relevant today. But how do you teach someone like Morris who made significant contributions to several different fields of study? And how, within the exigencies of the modern educational system, can teachers capture the interdisciplinary spirit of Morris, whose various contributions hang so curiously together? Teaching William Morris gathers together the work of nineteen Morris scholars from a variety of fields, offering a wide array of perspectives on the challenges and the rewards of teaching William Morris. Across this book’s five sections—“Pasts and Presents,” “Political Contexts,” “Literature,” “Art and Design,” and “Digital Humanities”—readers will learn the history of Morris’s place in the modern curriculum, the current state of the field for teaching Morris’s work today, and how this pedagogical effort is reaching well beyond the college classroom.

This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the religious and artistic story behind The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt. Created in the mid-nineteenth century, it is often said to be the most widely exhibited work of art in history and remains one of the most widely known Christian paintings to this day. The subject matter provides a rich wealth of resources, touching on the extraordinary artistic renewal associated with the Oxford Movement, its religious and intellectual revolution in recovering early Christian tropes and motives of scriptural interpretation. The book also considers the painting’s impact on the religious and cultural life of the British Empire as its tour served not just spiritual edification but also the promotion of imperial values. The contributions reflect on concerns of decolonisation while illustrating religious art’s ability to engage relevantly with contemporary concerns. Enabling a fresh encounter with the painting, this book will be of interest to theologians, biblical scholars, and historians.