Art and the British Empire

Art and the British Empire

Author: Timothy Barringer

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2007-05-15

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 9780719073922

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This volume is dedicated to the problematic relationship between art and the British Empire from the 16th century to decolonization in the 20th century. It examines a wide range of visual production, including book illustration, portraiture, monumental sculpture, genre and history painting, visual satire, and more.


Art and the British Empire

Art and the British Empire

Author: Timothy Barringer

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2009-08-15

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9780719081934

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This pioneering study argues that the concept of ‘empire’ belongs at the centre, rather than in the margins, of British art history. Recent scholarship in history, anthropology, literature and post-colonial studies has superseded traditional definitions of empire as a monolithic political and economic project. Emerging across the humanities is the idea of empire as a complex and contested process, mediated materially and imaginatively by multifarious forms of culture. The twenty essays in Art and the British Empire offer compelling methodological solutions to this ambiguity, while engaging in subtle visual analysis of a previously neglected body of work. Authors from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the USA and the UK examine a wide range of visual production, including book illustration, portraiture, monumental sculpture, genre and history painting, visual satire, marine and landscape painting, photography and film. Together these essays propose a major shift in the historiography of British art and a blueprint for further research.


Empire and Art

Empire and Art

Author: Renate Dohmen

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-07-01

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 1526122952

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The book examines the interactions between Britain and India during the Raj in relation to issues of empire and visual culture. It explores the impact of the Anglo-Indian colonial encounter on the arts and aesthetic traditions of both cultures. Presenting a unique overview that ranges from painting, print-making and photography to architecture, exhibitions and Indian crafts, the book considers the art of urban elites and princely states alongside popular arts. The book highlights the key role of art in forging British colonial ideology. It offers accessible discussions of issues such as Orientalism and (post)colonialism and presents current approaches to questions of British art and empire. It is structured around visual examples which include early nineteenth-century British views of India, Indian negotiations of Western aesthetics represented by Company painting, Kalighat art, and the rise of Indian national art. It covers the display of Indian crafts both in India and at international exhibitions in Britain, as well as the place of India in the British Arts and Crafts movement. The role of the market and items of fashion such as the Kashmir shawl are also discussed, along with the role of photography in representing the colony and questions around national and imperial architecture. The book is aimed at students but will also be relevant to members of the general public with an interest in questions of art, visual culture and empire in relation to Britain and British India.


Artist and Empire

Artist and Empire

Author: Sze Wee Low

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789811106088

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Organised by National Gallery Singapore in association with Tate Britain, Artist and Empire: (En)countering Colonial Legacies critically examines the effects of the British Empire through the prism of art. This catalogue accompanying the exhibition underscores the thought-provoking ways in which artist and Empire affect each other--artists negotiating historical conditions of colonialism in their work, and visual representation altering perceptions of the Empire. Essays by exhibition curators and external scholars situate the concept of Empire within broader socio-political discourse, while selected key artworks from the exhibition are paired with curatorial text that illumines concerns underpinning the works. A comprehensive, pull-out timeline spanning the 16th to 20th centuries charts the scope of activities undertaken in the name of the Empire, and contextualises the pursuits of artists from former colonies.


British Art and the Seven Years' War

British Art and the Seven Years' War

Author: Douglas Fordham

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2010-09-10

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0812242432

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Between the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the American Declaration of Independence, London artists transformed themselves from loosely organized professionals into one of the most progressive schools of art in Europe. In British Art and the Seven Years' War Douglas Fordham argues that war and political dissent provided potent catalysts for the creation of a national school of art. Over the course of three tumultuous decades marked by foreign wars and domestic political dissent, metropolitan artists—especially the founding members of the Royal Academy, including Joshua Reynolds, Paul Sandby, Joseph Wilton, Francis Hayman, and Benjamin West—creatively and assiduously placed fine art on a solid footing within an expansive British state. London artists entered into a golden age of art as they established strategic alliances with the state, even while insisting on the autonomy of fine art. The active marginalization of William Hogarth's mercantile aesthetic reflects this sea change as a newer generation sought to represent the British state in a series of guises and genres, including monumental sculpture, history painting, graphic satire, and state portraiture. In these allegories of state formation, artists struggled to give form to shifting notions of national, religious, and political allegiance in the British Empire. These allegiances found provocative expression in the contemporary history paintings of the American-born artists Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, who managed to carve a patriotic niche out of the apolitical mandate of the Royal Academy of Arts.


Artist and Empire

Artist and Empire

Author: Alison Smith

Publisher: Tate

Published: 2016-05-03

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781849763431

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Through broad groupings within thematic chapters, leading scholars focus on how particular objects tell the history of life under British rule. Paintings by well-known artists such as John Singer Sargent and Sidney Nolan are illustrated alongside Benin bronze heads and Mughal miniatures in a survey that ranges from 16th century colonialism through to the projection of Britain's imperial might in the late 19th century to its decline in the post-war era.


Titan

Titan

Author: William R. Nester

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0806155345

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When the leaders of the French Revolution executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, they sent a chilling message to the hereditary ruling orders in Europe. Believing that monarchy anywhere presented a threat to democratic rule in France, the leaders of the revolution declared war on European aristocracies, including those of Great Britain. For more than twenty years thereafter, France and England waged a protracted war that ended in British victory. In Titan, William R. Nester offers a deeply informed and thoroughly fascinating narrative of how England accomplished this remarkable feat. Between 1789 and 1815, British leaders devised, funded, and led seven coalitions against the revolutionary and Napoleonic governments of France. In each enterprise, statesmen and generals searched for order amid a complex welter of bureaucratic, political, economic, psychological, technological, and international forces. Nester combines biographies of great men—the likes of William Pitt, Horatio Nelson, and Arthur Wellesley—with an explanation of the critical decisions they made in Britain’s struggle for power and his own keen analysis of the forces that operated beyond their control. Their efforts would eventually crush France and Napoleon and establish a system of European power relations that prevented a world war for nearly a century. The interplay of individuals and events, the importance of conjunctures and contingency, the significance of Britain's island character and resources: all come into play in Nester's exploration of the art of British military diplomacy. The result is a comprehensive and insightful account of the endeavors of statesmen and generals to master the art of power in a complex battle for empire.


The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire

The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire

Author: P. J. Marshall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-08-02

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780521002547

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Up to World War II and beyond, the British ruled over a vast empire. Modern western attitudes towards the imperial past tend either towards nostalgia for British power or revulsion at what seem to be the abuses of that power. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire adopts neither of these approaches. It aims to create historical understanding about the British empire on the assumption that such understanding is important for any informed appreciation of the modern world. Through striking illustration and a text written by leading experts, this book examines the experience of colonialism in North America, India, Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean, as well as the impact of the empire on Britain itself. Emphasis is placed on social and cultural history, including slavery, trade, religion, art, and the movement of ideas. How did the British rule their empire? Who benefited economically from the empire? And who lost?


Exhibitions, Music and the British Empire

Exhibitions, Music and the British Empire

Author: Sarah Kirby

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1783276738

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"International exhibitions were among the most significant cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century. These vast events aimed to illustrate, through displays of physical objects, the full spectrum of the world's achievements, from industry and manufacturing, to art and design. But exhibitions were not just visual spaces. Music was ever present, as a fundamental part of these events' sonic landscape, and integral to the visitor experience. This book explores music at international exhibitions held in Australia, India, and the United Kingdom during the 1880s. At these exhibitions, music was codified, ordered, and all-round 'exhibited' in manifold ways. Displays of physical instruments from the past and present were accompanied by performances intended to educate or to entertain, while music was heard at exhibitors' stands, in concert halls, and in the pleasure gardens that surrounded the exhibition buildings. Music was depicted as a symbol of human artistic achievement, or employed for commercial ends. At times it was presented in nationalist terms, at others as a marker of universalism. This book argues, by interrogating the multiple ways that music was used, experienced, and represented, that exhibitions can demonstrate in microcosm many of the broader musical traditions, purposes, arguments, and anxieties of the day. Its nine chapters focus on sociocultural themes, covering issues of race, class, public education, economics, and entertainment in the context of music, trading these through the networks of communication that existed within the British Empire at the time. Combining approaches from reception studies and historical musicology, this book demonstrates how the representation of music at exhibitions drew the press and public into broader debates about music's role in society"--Page 4 of cover.


The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist

The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist

Author: Kate Fullagar

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0300249276

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A portrait of empire through the biographies of a Native American, a Pacific Islander, and the British artist who painted them both Three interconnected eighteenth-century lives offer a fresh account of the British Empire and its intrusion into Indigenous societies. This engaging history brings together the stories of Joshua Reynolds and two Indigenous men, the Cherokee Ostenaco and the Raiatean Mai. Fullagar uncovers the life of Ostenaco, tracing his emergence as a warrior, his engagement with colonists through war and peace, and his eventual rejection of imperial politics during the American Revolution. She delves into the story of Mai, his confrontation with conquest and displacement, his voyage to London on Cook’s imperial expedition, and his return home with a burning ambition to right past wrongs. Woven throughout is a new history of Reynolds, growing up in Devon near a key port in England, becoming a portraitist of empire, rising to the top of Britain’s art world and yet remaining ambivalent about his nation’s expansionist trajectory.