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18 results

  • 21 - Angelica Kauffman and the Sister Arts

  • Edited by Maureen McCue, Bangor University, Sophie Thomas, Toronto Metropolitan University
  • Book:
    The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 April 2023
    Print publication:
    31 December 2022, pp 391-407

  • Summary

    The sister arts are a curious and unstable collection of siblings. They are said to be daughters of Nature, a divine parent who endows them with mimetic features meant to enhance their mother’s beauty and charm their beholders. Since their birth, their job, if personified allegories can be said to work, has been to represent the relatedness of various cultural forms and practices. There have been many sisters, but the two who first entered the English language were Painting and Poetry. Others followed. In 1748, an English writing master suggested that drawing and penmanship – the purview of pencil and pen respectively – were sister arts (Bickham). Another half century later, the American Presbyterian minister John Blair Linn, in his 1802 poem The Powers of Genius, recommends that architecture be added to a list of sisters that include ‘Poetry, Painting, Statuary and Music’ (81). To understand the sisters’ importance in the period of British Romanticism is to recognise the seeds of something we might today call ‘interdisciplinarity’ or perhaps ‘transdisciplinarity’. To get there, we must invite the personified sisters to exit the realm of form. They properly belong to the realm of use. Despite their fine drapery, these allegories, in fact, work quite hard.

    Imaginary as they may have been, the sister arts were deployed by real people trying to make a living. This chapter briefly addresses the history of the sister arts in order to frame a discussion of their political implications for Romantic-era cultural practitioners and for their print mediators, with a particular focus on the painter Angelica Kauffman. It will then open out into the broader issue of disciplinarity, which, as Jon Klancher and others have argued, is a legacy of Romantic-era professionalisation across the arts and sciences (Klancher 2013; Valenza 2009). By ‘cultural practitioner’ I mean people who make cultural objects. I use the word make rather than create because I am interested in skilled labour and in practices of the hand. Because of my own disciplinary commitments, I have little to say about most of the cast of sisters. My argument has less to do with music, dance, theatre, gardening, drawing, &c. – all sisters at one point or another – and more to do with painting and poetry.

  • Chapter 4 - Poetry against the Wall

  • Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Romantic Art in Practice
    Published online:
    04 August 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 117-142

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 examines the dissolution of the Shakspeare Gallery and the crisis in the visual arts around the time of its closure in 1805. By the turn of the century, the cultural attitude toward illustrated books was beginning to shift. While the public remembered Boydell fondly, painters and engravers carefully distanced themselves from their old benefactor and his commercial model. Antiquarian connoisseurs, whose influence had largely been staved off by the literary galleries, again sought to gain control of visual taste, and rancorous aesthetic debates and professional enmity spilled into public view.

  • Chapter 5 - Crossing the Line

  • Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Romantic Art in Practice
    Published online:
    04 August 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 143-172

  • Summary

    Chapter 5 takes up the sister arts through the writings of the engraver John Landseer, who saw book- and printsellers as commercial middlemen, profiting off artists’ labors. As Landseer looked to distance himself from the literary field, he nonetheless adapted modes of literary publication (the lecture and the periodical) to suit the ends of professional engraving. Landseer’s letters to Leigh Hunt’s newspaper, the Examiner, demonstrate a causal link between the failure of literary galleries and the crisis in the arts. Landseer also influenced an important legal case that tied the sister arts to contract law through the 1930s.

  • Chapter 2 - William Blake, Antiquarians, and the Status of the Copy

  • Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Romantic Art in Practice
    Published online:
    04 August 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 65-85

  • Summary

    Chapter 2 offers a new reading of William Blake’s writings about antiquity and antiquarianism. His work on Greek antiquity affected his understanding of the status of reproductive engraving. I argue that while his illuminated printing was collapsing the space between picture and word and between originality and commercial reproducibility, Blake was also attempting to rewrite the history of art to include engraving as the central link between sculpture and painting. The sister arts served as a means to make lateral the relationship between picture and word—but more radically between painting and engraving.

  • Chapter 3 - Literary Galleries and the Media Ecology

  • Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Romantic Art in Practice
    Published online:
    04 August 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 86-116

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 introduces Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery [sic], which opened on the premises of anthology editor Robert Dodsley’s former bookshop. This gallery served as a business model for several other “literary galleries” that welcomed spectators in to see grand-style paintings of literary subjects. These galleries institutionalized the sister arts by selling prints of paintings and illustrated editions of canonical literary works. Through a careful examination of their inexpensive gallery catalogues, which were literary anthologies (not traditional descriptions of artworks), I show how these institutions inadvertently privileged reading over seeing in policies and practices that governed both artists’ composition and viewers’ critical responses.

  • Chapter 6 - Ravaged Brides

  • Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Romantic Art in Practice
    Published online:
    04 August 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 173-198

  • Summary

    Chapter 6 builds on the tension between antiquarian aesthetics and artists’ practice by reading “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in the context of Thomas Kirk’s visual anthology of vase pictures, arguing that Keats describes an encounter with the urn as an alternative to antiquarian books that represented ancient vases. Keats, the history painter Haydon, and Landseer all had a stake in the 1816 debate between antiquarians and artists over the acquisition of the Parthenon marbles. I show how this victory for artists was overdetermined by a series of events that involved not only artists’ separation from connoisseurs but also from the literary tradition that once had served as an important source of cultural credibility.

  • Introduction

  • Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Romantic Art in Practice
    Published online:
    04 August 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 1-35

  • Summary

    The introduction offers two interventions into the history of the Romantic arts. First, it argues that there was a “sister-arts moment” between 1760 and around 1820. This moment was brought on by pressure from classical antiquarians, who started to publish luxury “art books” in the 1760s. The moment ends after 1816 when artists asserted their cultural authority over antiquarians by persuading the British government to purchase the Parthenon marbles. In theorizing a sisterly relationship between painting and poetry, visual artists developed a series of practices based on literary authorship, including mediation through print. Second, the introduction makes a case for “media ecology” as a model for describing the world Romantic artists and authors inhabited. The Introduction offers a model for holistic consideration of cultural producers and consumers as agents in a much larger ecology characterized by dynamic material circulation. Cultural products spread across media and are consumed, put to use, recycled, stored or discarded. Media ecology reconsiders cultural works in the context of the labor that affords all aspects of their production, consumption and circulation. Media ecology serves as an alternative to the concept of “print culture” and to “remediation,” neither of which adequately account for labor or institutional practice.

  • Chapter 1 - Original Copies

  • Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Romantic Art in Practice
    Published online:
    04 August 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018, pp 36-64

  • Summary

    Chapter 1 examines the remarkable fact that Josiah Wedgwood’s Staffordshire-made clay replicas of an acclaimed ancient Roman glass vessel (known to Britons as the Portland vase) exceeded the cultural authority of the antique vessel. Wedgwood harnessed the competing authority of antiquarians and Royal Academicians so well that his copies were celebrated as national treasures, extoled in both Erasmus Darwin’s long poem The Botanic Garden and in Benjamin West’s painting Manufactory Giving Support to Industry. Wedgwood copies upstaged the real Portland vase, offering proof that a reproduced, manufactured product, made by the labor of English hands, was worthy of the consecrated status of art object.

Romantic Art in Practice
  • Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820
  • Thora Brylowe
  • Published online:
    04 August 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018
  • Exploring the relationship between visual art and literature in the Romantic period, this book makes a claim for a sister-arts 'moment' when the relationship between painting, sculpture, pottery and poetry held special potential for visual artists, engravers and artisans. Elaborating these cultural tensions and associations through a number of case studies, Thora Brylowe sheds light on often untold narratives of English labouring craftsmen and artists as they translated the literary into the visual. Brylowe investigates examples from across the visual spectrum including artefacts, such as Wedgwood's Portland Vase, antiquarianism through the work of William Blake, the career of engraver John Landseer, and the growing influence of libraries and galleries in the period, particularly Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. Brylowe artfully traces the shifting cultural connections between the imaginative word and the image in a period that saw new print technologies deluge Britain with its first mass media.