Victorian Painting

This highly informative book surveys the personalities and careers of Victorian artists in their social and intellectual context, revealing how they blended foreign influences with the rich native British tradition. The range of artistic production in the Victorian age included history painting; topographical landscapes of the Continent and the Middle East; Landseer's royal portraits and heroic animal pictures; Pre-Raphaelite painting with its combination of naturalism and symbolism; Leighton's luxurious classical mythologies; and Frith's hugely successful depictions of the leisured middle classes. Amid this great variety of styles and emphasis, influential critics such as Ruskin dictated that art should be morally uplifting, and orthodoxy was challenged by Whistler, Sickert, Steer and their fellows among the "London Impressionists." 177 illus., 24 in color.