The period between 1730-1830 saw the rise of an English school of art, much later than the other schools on the European continent. English portrait painters played a crucial part in this evolution ...by deploying the art of portraiture in infinite variations, in search of a veracity and an intimacy whose contours and peculiarities they tirelessly strove to capture and render. Indeed, they radically transformed their chosen pictorial genre by transcribing onto canvas the new conceptions and perceptions of the individual which had emerged in the Age of Enlightenment. Sensitive to the new universalist values associated with the notions of identity, individuality and sociability, the British portraitists set out to represent the variety and diversity of human beings, moving away from ancient types and models to focus on the particular, singular, circumstantial personalities of the models. In this essay I try to present the narrative of this remarkable blossoming, focussing on the works of a series of exceptional artists—William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence—whose works provide us with a remarkable visual chronicle of the evolutions of men, women and children in this rich moment in European history.
Au nom de tous les collègues dix-huitiémistes (et au-delà) de l’UFR d’études anglophones de l’Université Paris Diderot Il y a un an disparaissait notre collègue et ami Robert Mankin, Professeur ...d’histoire britannique à l’Université Paris Diderot, emporté en quelques mois par une maladie dégénérescente rare et cruelle. Tous ceux qui l’ont connu se souviendront de ce grand spécialiste de Hume et de Gibbon, de cet authentique humaniste qui sut si bien interroger et partager l’immense érudition q...
In this essay, I would like to focus on the consequences of the new epistemology that emerged in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century England, on the manner in which it modified the British ...view of human life, and, as a consequence, the way it was now represented in art and literature. In relation to Peter Reill’s ground-breaking central argument inVitalizing Nature(2005), I will try to examine the manner in which the new conception of Nature, and of the knowledge of nature, which was so frequently discussed in the early Enlightenment, came to influence the English conception of self, identity,
Famously described by William Burn as “the age of equipoise,” the mid-Victorian period was nevertheless marked by a large amount of popular discontent which, in turn, generated widespread fears of ...disorder. This paper purports to explore the role played in such a context by representations — those of poverty in particular — in the attempt to maintain a social order which some thought was being threatened. At a time when ethics and aesthetics were widely considered as interdependent, British painting and illustration bore witness to the terrible living and working conditions of the poor, provided models for workmen to imitate and, most strikingly perhaps, suggested a human taxonomy which, it was hoped, would then help to avoid social upheaval.
Lorsque, au milieu du xviiie siècle, le premier grand peintre anglais William Hogarth commença à rencontrer un certain succès public, les « connoisseurs » de l’époque jugèrent, en forme de compliment ...empoisonné, que Hogarth était certes un artiste de talent mais qu’il l’était « à sa manière », in his own way. D’une certaine façon, on pourrait dire que cette appréciation eut une valeur inaugurale et prémonitoire car elle n’a, depuis, jamais cessé d’être portée, non seulement sur l’art de Hogar...
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