The Victorian Artist
Artists' Life Writings in Britain, c.1870–1910

This 2003 book examines the origins, development, and explosion of biographical literature on artists in Britain between 1870 and 1910.

Julie F. Codell (Author)

9780521817578, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 August 2003

392 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2.8 cm, 0.876 kg

Review of the hardback: '… a North American pioneer of the critical study of Victorian art and culture. …Codell's use of theory is relevant, concise, and clear … persuasive and not intrusive … results in fascinating conclusions about the audience for art … To read this book is to be helped in thinking anew about so many aspects of artistic culture in Britain … contributes greatly to the expansion of our understanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art. The foundation for a fuller and more pluralistic understanding of the period.' Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies

The Victorian Artist, first published in 2003, examines the origins, development, and explosion of biographical literature on artists in Britain between 1870 and 1910. Analyzing a variety of narrative modes, including gossip, anecdotes, and serialization, as well as the differences among genres - autobiographies, family biographies, biographical histories, and dictionaries - Julie Codell discerns and articulates the multiple, often conflicting identities that were ascribed to artists collectively and as individuals. Her study demonstrates how this body of literature, combined with images of artists' bodies, their works and their studios, reflected anxiety over economic exchanges in the art world, aestheticism, and the desire to tame artists in order to fit them into an emerging national identity as a way of socializing new audiences of readers and spectators. Her book provides a sociological and cultural overview of the art world in Britain in the decades before World War I.

Introduction: the artists as text
1. Biographical functions, mediations and exchanges
2. The Victorian typology of artists: from prelapsarian to professional
3. Artists' autobiographies: Cellini, Res Gestae, jouissance, and the collective life
4. Family biographies: domestic authority, social order, and the artist's body
5. Biography as history: anecdotage, serialization, and national identity
Conclusion: gifting art: from Bohemians to benefactors.

Subject Areas: History of art & design styles: from c 1900 - [ACX]