Elizabeth Prettejohn

Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the Modern City of Ancient Rome

This paper argues that Alma-Tademas representations of the ancient city of Rome can be seen as significant explorations of urban experience, parallel to the more familiar nineteenth-century representations of modern Paris. Alma-Tadema distinguishes clearly between the small-town environment of Pompeian subjects and the metropolitan environment of pictures set in the capital. Using techniques such as oblique viewpoints and edge cropping, Alma-Tadema presents the “shock” experience characteristic of the modern city in urban theory. The late nineteenth-century notion of the citys modernity thus provides a novel perspective on traditional fascination with Rome as the ultimate paradigm for the urban.

Undermining the Archive

Dianne Sachko Macleod. Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity

Ford Madox Brown and History Painting

This article argues that Ford Madox Brown’s modern-life painting should be seen as a subset of his practice in history painting. Whether he chose subject-matter from the contemporary world or from the past, Brown sought to give it the weight and ethical seriousness traditionally associated with history painting. This ambition helps to make sense of Brown’s practice in religious painting, an area neglected in the previous secondary literature, but which this article argues was of crucial importance to Brown’s artistic project. His distinctive innovation was to replace the generalized timescale of traditional history painting with multiple temporalities: timed history, the timeless, and the modern perspective.

William Holman Hunt (1827–1910)

whilst I was painting ... in Rossetti‘s studio, there entered the greatest genius that is on earth alive, William Holman Hunt – such a grand-looking fellow, such a splendour of a man, with a great wiry golden beard, and faithful violet eyes – oh, such a man. So wrote Edward Burne-Jones in 1856, eight years after the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Hunt was only twenty-nine and Burne-Joness breathless words show us that, like a modern celebrity, his activities were mythologized as they occurred. All accounts of Hunts career, then and since, participate in this, but it is notable that the nineteenth-century concept of ‘genius’, defiant originality and physical daring, remains recognizable today. Hunts art is best summarized as addressing extremes: both signification and representation are taken to their absolute limit. His readiness to adapt and combine narratives and allusions from all sorts of texts, ancient and modern, pioneered a newly intense pictorial poetry. At the same time, on the same canvases, investigations into artistic vision and experiments in technique tested optical representation, and understandings of beauty and truth were redefined. Hunts success was won and maintained outside the establishment. His radical self-stylization created a new kind of artist/hero and confronted the problem of the role of art in a global, capitalist culture. This was, however, only one aspect of his broader preoccupation with the predicament of the individual within a modern, mass, materialist society. Hunts paintings and writings return again and again to the idea of the subjective experience of the lover, the outsider or the leader in tension with the collective values of family, establishment and crowd.