"Show-stoppers from many private and regional galleries, mixing paintings, watercolors, books, sculptures and photographs."—The Guardian"Stunning and constantly surprising. . . . Although it contains most of our great artists it is not a 'survey' so much as an unconventional, personal and thought-provoking take on British art, full of unexpected works and unfamiliar names, as well as familiar landmarks—over 300 works gathered from collections all over the world."—The SpectatorFrom the landscapes of Wilson and Constable to the visionary imagery of Blake and Bacon, this book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, is a beautifully illustrated survey of British art from 1750 to 1950. British Vision presents some of the most celebrated works in British art history, selected from public and private collections in Europe, Britain, and the United States by Robert Hoozee, drawing on the expertise of Andrew Dempsey, John Gage, Mark Haworth-Booth, and Timothy Hyman. Among the artists whose work appears in British Vision are William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Richard Dadd, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, and Lucien Freud.Essays by a group of distinguished art historians focus on two defining characteristics of British art, observation and imagination, seen within the context of society, landscape, and the visionary. Together, they set forth important arguments about what makes British art recognizable, what gives it its typically "British" style, and how British artists have contributed to the history of art as a whole. This lavishly illustrated catalog is a sumptuous record of the most comprehensive exhibition of British art to be displayed in recent years, and represents a unique opportunity to discover the creative forces that shaped British art over two centuries.

The second half of the twentieth century has seen British artists, architects, and designers assuming a central role on the world stage. Starting in the years of reconstruction after the war, the young began to challenge accepted artistic values, looking at popular culture for their inspiration; the iconoclasm of the Pop movement has continued to be one of the most vital ingredients of the British art scene. In the year-by-year record that this book provides, the work of newcomers making their first impact is seen alongside that of outstanding artists in their maturity, with connections and contradictions across the entire visual scene-from architecture, interior design, furniture, and the decorative arts to painting, sculpture, and graphic art.

During the nineteenth century, Britain became the first gaslit society, with electric lighting arriving in 1878. At the same time, the British government significantly expanded its power to observe and monitor its subjects. How did such enormous changes in the way people saw and were seen affect Victorian culture? To answer that question, Chris Otter mounts an ambitious history of illumination and vision in Britain, drawing on extensive research into everything from the science of perception and lighting technologies to urban design and government administration. He explores how light facilitated such practices as safe transportation and private reading, as well as institutional efforts to collect knowledge. And he contends that, contrary to presumptions that illumination helped create a society controlled by intrusive surveillance, the new radiance often led to greater personal freedom and was integral to the development of modern liberal society. The Victorian Eye’s innovative interdisciplinary approach—and generous illustrations—will captivate a range of readers interested in the history of modern Britain, visual culture, technology, and urbanization.

New Britain presents Tony Blair on all the major debates of British public life: from nationalized health care to crime prevention, from the welfare state to monetary policy, from religion to family values, from individualism to isolationism, from taxation to trade unions, from NATO to Northern Ireland, from community rebirth to economic growth. After seventeen years of Conservative Party rule under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, a change in Great Britain's leadership appears imminent. In Blair's Stakeholder Nation, government works in partnership with private and voluntary sectors to harness the pawer of the market to serve the public interest. In New Britain, we read in Blair's own articulate words how to improve the standard of living of all Britain's families; how to base a new social order on merit, commitment, and inclusion; how to decentralize British institutions of political power; and how to expand Britain's leadership in foreign affairs.

This book offers an innovative reassessment of the way Victorians thought and wrote about visual experience. It argues that new visual technologies gave expression to new ways of seeing, using these to uncover the visual discourses that facilitated, informed and shaped the way people conceptualised and articulated visual experience. In doing so, the book reconsiders literary and non-fiction works by well-known authors including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, G.H. Lewes, Max Nordau, Herbert Spencer, and Joseph Conrad, as well as shedding light on less-known works drawn from the periodical press. By revealing the discourses that formed around visual technologies, the book challenges and builds upon existing scholarship to provide a powerful new model by which to understand how the Victorians experienced, conceptualised, and wrote about vision.

This book looks at the relationship between culture and power expressed in architectural forms employed by the British in India. These buildings reflect the choices made by the British in their politics as imperial rulers.

This is a revisionist study of the literary and visual representation of the nation in the century following the formation of the British state. It argues that the most engaging accounts of Great Britain subject their imagery to sustained artistic pressure, threatening to dismantle the national vision at the moment of its construction.

This book traces the intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century and argues for China's central impact on the British visual imagination. Chang brings together an unusual group of primary sources to investigate how nineteenth-century Britons looked at and represented Chinese people, places, and things, and how, in the process, ethnographic, geographic, and aesthetic representations of China shaped British writers' and artists' vision of their own lives and experiences. For many Britons, China was much more than a geographical location; it was also a way of seeing and being seen that could be either embraced as creative inspiration or rejected as contagious influence. In both cases, the idea of China's visual difference stood in negative contrast to Britain's evolving sense of the visual and literary real. To better grasp what Romantic and Victorian writers, artists, and architects were doing at home, we must also understand the foreign "objects" found in their midst and what they were looking at abroad.

Tentoonstelling gehouden als een hulde aan de Engelse museumdirecteur, kunsthistoricus, dichter en criticus (1893-1968).

This book reveals the ways in which seventeenth-century poets used models of vision taken from philosophy, theology, scientific optics, political polemic and the visual arts to scrutinize the nature of individual perceptions and to examine poetry’s own relation to truth. Drawing on archival research, Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England brings together an innovative selection of texts and images to construct a new interdisciplinary context for interpreting the poetry of Cavendish, Traherne, Marvell and Milton. Each chapter presents a reappraisal of vision in the work of one of these authors, and these case studies also combine to offer a broader consideration of the ways that conceptions of seeing were used in poetry to explore the relations between the ‘inward’ life of the viewer and the ‘outward’ reality that lies beyond; terms that are shown to have been closely linked, through ideas about sight, with the emergence of the fundamental modern categories of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. This book will be of interest to literary scholars, art historians and historians of science.