ARTH491

Victorian Art in its European Context

Instructor Information

Dana Wheeles
dw6h@virginia.edu
Office Hours: TBA

Course Requirements:

A. Attendance. Any absences must be excused in advance except in cases of extreme emergency. Since seminars meet only once a week, any absence will be detrimental to your performance in the class.

B. Assigned Readings. There will be a significant amount of reading for each class meeting and it is expected that all assigned readings be completed prior to class and that students are prepared to discuss the material. All chapters and articles not in the textbook will be available on toolkit or on reserve in the Fine Arts Library.

C. Short Responses. Each week a short (1 page) response to the week's readings will be due at the beginning of class. Please note that this should not be a summary of the readings' content, but a thoughtful consideration of the author's argument, with your own questions/comments.

D. Long research paper. Early in the semester students will select a topic of interest for a 20-page research paper. Students will submit an outline on October 18th, a first draft on November 15 and the final paper on December 6.

E. Presentation. Students will present their research, with slides or using Power Point, in 20-minute presentations.

Final grade components: attendance and discussion 50%; short responses 15%; presentation 15%; final paper 20%

Readings

August

August 23: Introduction

August 30: Romanticism and other Continental Interactions

• Lionel Lambourne, Introduction, pp. 8-24.
• Roy Strong, Chapter 31 (“Revolution, Reaction, and Romance”) in The Spirit of Britain (Pimlico, 2000), pp. 473-511.

September

September 6: Victorian Art Institutions and their European Counterparts

• Lambourne, Chapter 1 (“The Victorian Art Establishment”) pp. 25-41.
• Colin Trodd, “The Authority of Art: Cultural criticism and the idea of the Royal Academy in mid-Victorian Britain,” Art History, Vol. 20, No. 1 (March 1997) pp. 3-22.
• Thomas Crow, “The Salon Exhibition in the Eighteenth Century and the Problem of its Public,” in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris (New Haven, 1985), pp. 1-5.

September 13: : Landscape: Aesthetics and Innovations

• Lambourne, Chapter 5 (“Oils versus Watercolours: Landscape Painting”) pp. 93- 125.
• Ann Bermingham, “Middle Grounds and Middle Ways: The Victorian Suburban Experience of Landscape,” in Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860, pp. 156-193.
• Gerard Finley, “Turner’s ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’,” in Angel in the Sun: Turner’s View of History (Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999).

September 20: Portraiture / Trilby

• Lambourne, Chapter 4 (“The Good and the Great: Portrait Painting”) pp. 93- 125.
• E.L. Doctorow, “Notes on the History of Fiction,” in The Atlantic Monthly (Summer 2006) pp. 88-92.
• Trilby, pts 1-3

September 27: Looking to the Past: The Gothic Revival

• Roy Strong, Chapter 29 (“ ‘A Little Gothic Castle’ : Horace Walpole”, in The Spirit of Britain: A Narrative History of the Arts (New York: Fromm International, 2000) pp. 446-459.
• Rebecca Easby, “The Myth of Merrie England in Victorian Painting,” in Florence Boos, ed., History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (Garland, 1992) p. 59-81.
• John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in The Stones of Venice.

October

October 4: Victorian Obsessions

• Lambourne, Chapter 8 (“Childhood and Sentiment”) pp. 168-190.
• Lambourne, Chapter 12 (“’All Human Life is Here: Cross-Sections of Society”) pp. 256-277.
• Lambourne, Chapter17 (“The Frailer Sex and the Fallen Woman”), pp.366-389.
• Matthew Sweet, “Check Out Your Chintz,” in Inventing the Victorians (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001), pp. 121-135.

October 11: History and Genre Painting

• Lambourne, Chapter 3 (“The Fresco Revival and Mural Painting”), pp. 42-64.
• Lambourne, Chapter 6 (“The Narrative Impulse: Genre Painting”), pp. 126-150.
• Claire Willsdon, Chapter 2 (“Royalty and Reform: State Patronage at the Palace of Westminster, 1841-1864”) in Mural Painting in Britain 1840-1940 (Oxford, 2000) pp. 27-61.

October 18: Religious Painting / Trilby / Paper Outline Due

• Adele Ernstrom, “Why should we be always looking back” ‘Christian art’ in nineteenth-century historiography in Britain,” Art History, Vol. 22, No. 3, (September 1999), pp. 421-435.
• Jane Kristof, “The Feminization of Piety in Nineteenth-Century Art,” in Linda Woodhead, ed., Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Ashgate, 2001), pp. 165-189.
• Trilby, pts 4-6

October 25: Pre-Raphaelitism

• Jason Rosenfeld, “The Pre-Raphaelite ‘otherhood’ and group identity in Victorian Britain,” in Morowitz and Vaughan (eds), Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 67-81.
• Mitchell Benjamin Frank, “Brotherhood,” in German Romantic Painting Redefined (Ashgate, 2001), pp 11-36.

November

November 1: Pre-Raphaelitism and Beyond

• Alastair Grieve, “Rossetti and the Scandal of Art for Art’s Sake,” in Prettejohn (ed) After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 17-35.
• Susan Casteras, “The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy to Symbolism,” in Pre-Raphaelite Art in its European Context (Associated University Presses: 1995), pp. 33-49.
• Lambourne, Chapter 18 (“Impressionism in Britain”), pp. 462-485.
• Lambourne, Chapter 15 (“The Sombre School of Art”), pp. 326-347.

November 8: Women Artists / Trilby

• Anne Higonnet, “Secluded Vision: Images of Feminine Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (HarperCollins, 1992), 170-185.
• Deborah Cherry, “Women Artists and the Politics of Feminism 1850-1900,” in Orr, ed., Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester, 1995), pp. 49-69.
• Trilby pts. 7-8

November 15: Class Presentations / Paper Drafts Due

November 22: No Class Meeting (Thanksgiving Recess)

November 29: Class Presentations