Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket

Several recent scholars have...

LEAST UNDERSTOOD, but most famous, among Ruskin’s pronouncements must surely be this: “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence...

By the early years of Victoria’s reign, gas lighting had converted London nights into day, and to many writers in this period it seemed that London was the most illuminated capital city in Europe...

~Two significant and contrasting interests can be characterized in relation to English art in the later nineteenth century. On the one hand some concern was voiced for the social function of art within a society which derived much of its prosperity from industrial manufacture. At its crudest this was expressed in terms of a requirement that art should be morally...

~In 1890 a short comic piece appeared in Puck’s Library under the title “A Chapter in Art,” in which the paintings stored away in a house’s attic begin to talk. The main speaker in this exchange, a view of Mount Popocatépetl erupting, traces its career from fame to oblivion:

The campaign to neutralize and Americanize aestheticism extended beyond prescriptions for wholesomeness and manly discipline in art. Those seeking normalization also undertook to restructure the very concept of artistic vision. At the core of this enterprise was the remodeling of “morbid” egotism into healthy and specialized subjectivity. This newly legitimized subjectivity in turn helped create a dynamic role for art as a form of therapy couched in a purely visual language, acting directly on …