Painting Out Of The Ordinary. Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth Century Britain.

Solkin, David H.:

ISBN 10: 0300140614 / ISBN 13: 9780300140613

Published by New Haven & London: Yale University Press & Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2008

About this Item

First edition. Hardcover book . Cloth and colour pictorial dustjacket. 270pp, large quarto. With 182 illustrations, mostly in colour, in plates and text, some full page. Art and genre painting in relation to changing social and industrial history in Britain. Very Good in Very Good jacket. Clean covers and pages apart from some small spots to top closed page edges; bump to cover and jacket corner. Pictures available.

Seller Inventory # 29939

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Painting Out Of The Ordinary. Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth Century Britain.
• Publisher: New Haven & London: Yale University Press & Paul Mellon Centre for British Art
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300140614
• ISBN 13: 9780300140613
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Art

About this title

Synopsis

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. With its plethora of illustrations, many of works published here for the first time, Painting Out of the Ordinary will be compulsory reading for anyone interested in British art and society of the Romantic era.

About the Author

David 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 the co-author and editor of Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836, both published by Yale University Press.