Victorian Painters

Crescent, 1988-08-27. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Harrison House, New York [Published date: 1988]. First Harrison House printing, with full letter line. Very good in very good dust jacket. Brown cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. Light bumping to edges and corners of covers. Binding tight. Small red spot on top edge of text block. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and light creasing along edges. Light overall scuffing to jacket as well. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival quality Brodart cover. NOT Ex-Library. With 45 full color illustrations. [From front jacket flap] The extraordinary richness and variety of English painting during the reign of Queen Victoria is only now, after years of neglect, beginning to be appreciated. If the period produced few Bntish artists of world stature, this was more than balanced by the cumulative effect of sheer quantity and diversity of talent. Encouraged by new sources of patronage, painting broadened its subject matter and swelled its output. It was a period in which painters achieved great fame and often great wealth. It was also a turbulent period for painting, a period of movements and counter-movements. of schisms and rivalries. It produced not just the glories of the PreRaphaelite movement but the academic though frequently brilliant works of the Neo-classical school, and many fine landscapes, genre paintmgs, nudes, still lifes, sporting, animal and fairy paintings. As a period of feverish activity, it is without parallel in the history ofEnglish painting. But it was also the era in which the very foundations of painting were shaken by the arrival of a new art-form, photography, which brought into question many of the traditional ideas of painting. As a specialist dealer, Jeremy Maas has become familiar with a remarkably wide range of paintings of the period. Never before has Victorian painting received such extensive coverage in a single volume. The 300 illustrations, 45 of them in color, include many pictures never before reproduced. Although all the main movements are followed through, Mr. Maas does not neglect important but isolated artists. The work of some previoiisly Iittle-known painters is here revealed and shown to be of considerable merit. Much new material has been brought to light in Mr. Maas's study of the influence of the camera on painting and of the genre of fairy painting, which he isolates and considers as a whole for the first time.