This thesis discusses the influence of the personal and intellectual friendship between John Ruskin and Edward Burne-Jones on the artist's work, and argues that the friendship was instrumental in Burne-Jones's transition from Victorian to modern aesthetics. Chapter 1 deals with the wide range of critical responses elicited by Burne-Jones's work; it also highlights the difficulty of appreciating Burne-Jones fully without an awareness of his relations with Ruskin. In Chapter 2 I discuss Ruskin's early critical theories and his position in the aesthetic debate of the mid-nineteenth century. This is particularly relevant to Burne-Jones's development because he started his artistic career in total agreement with Ruskin. Chapter 3 addresses those experiences in Burne-Jones's life prior to meeting Ruskin, which led the artist to embrace the work of the critic. At the end of the chapter I touch on Burne-Jones's friendship with Rossetti, whose mid-1850s influence suggested to Burne-Jones a path pointing in a different direction from Ruskin. With his mature work Burne-Jones revisited and explored Rossetti's early ideas on 'design', and developed an artistic creed which both acknowledges Ruskin's teaching and departs from it. Ruskin took an interest in Burne-Jones's career as soon as they met. They became friends, and Ruskin commissioned work from him, gave him practical advice and made demands on his style. But the strongest influence Ruskin exercised was by his writing, as Burne-Jones read Ruskin all his life. Chapter 4 explores the emergence of those of Rusk in's critical ideas which had the greatest impact on Burne-Jones's art. The last chapter deals with Burne-Jones's response to Ruskin's critical theories and personal experiences. This response crystallised at its clearest in the four series of The Briar Rose, on which Burne-Jones worked between 1864 and 1895. The pictures, I conclude, present themselves as a continued emotional and intellectual dialogue with Ruskin and formulate an aesthetic pointing towards the twentieth century.

The nine items that I am submitting for a PhD by publication (two books and seven articles, amounting to some 220,000 words in total) constitute, I claim, a coherent body of research in terms of both subject-matter and of underlying art-historical methodology. The field studied is British figurative painting during the 1940s and 1950s, with particular reference to the art of Francis Bacon, who emerged as an innovative and influential figure at that time. Other British artists under scrutiny include Graham Sutherland, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. My main interest is in visual intelligence and the process of visual translation within creativity, as discussed in the accompanying, 12,000 word reflective essay. I seek to analyse how artists feed in a highly purposeful and inventive manner off one another (Bacon and Sutherland in the 1940s), off their predecessors (such as Edgar Degas, Waiter Sickert, Chaim Soutine, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti) and, especially in the case of Bacon, off various kinds of photographic imagery, above all propaganda emanating from pre-war Nazi Germany. This approach serves to embed the interpretation of meaning and content, a crucial concern for all these artists against the backdrop of a profoundly traumatic period in world history, within the analysis of formal language and of the process whereby artists and extend and manipulate to their own ends available resources of two-dimensional imagery.

This thesis takes the form of a biographical study of the art teacher and painter Francis Henry Newbery. Its focus is Newbery’s thirty-three year association with the Glasgow School of Art. The first two chapters examine Newbery’s early life and his educational background in Dorset and London where he attended the National Art Training School at South Kensington. John Beard, Newbery’s headmaster at the Bridport General School in Dorset, the educational theory of Friedrich Froebel and the modern approach to art teaching of Edward Poynter the Principal of the National Art Training School are all identified as formative influences in the development of Newbery’s own approach to pedagogy at Glasgow. The first two chapters are also concerned with Newbery’s training as a student and an art master under the Department of Science and Art and examine how the Department’s system operated in Bridport School of Art, a small school in a rural county. This acts as an introduction to Chapter 3 in which the development of the very different Glasgow School of Art in the years preceding Newbery’s arrival is examined. Chapters 4 and 5 are both concerned with Newbery’s adaptation of a pupil-centred approach to the requirements of the Department of Science and Art’s regime. Chapter 6 discusses Newbery’s association with the Arts and Crafts movement and views his introduction of craft studios at Glasgow School of Art against a national and local educational background. Chapter 7 looks at the development of the Glasgow Style in the Glasgow School of Art and identifies Newbery’s role as an encourager and promoter of the style. It sees the Style as growing out of the design ideology and teaching which was available in the School. The Arts and Crafts movement, however, with the new exhibition opportunities which it made available is seen more as a context in which the new form language could thrive rather than a source for the style itself. Chapter 8 reviews Newbery’s part in the building of a new School of Art to the design of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and demonstrates the headmaster’s crucial role in the planning of the building and his overriding concern for functional accommodation. Chapter 9 examines Newbery’s development of his own educational regime after the School had severed its links with South Kensington in 1901. It shows how he was able to build on his School’s reputation through its association with the Glasgow Style to attract highly capable practical artists and craftspeople to teach on its staff. It also examines how Newbery and his governors sought to develop a teaching practice based on the best British and continental models with varying degrees of success. Chapter 10 discusses the measures that Newbery took to increase and develop the artistic culture of Glasgow and Scotland through the medium of the School and its influence. Chapter 11 looks at Newbery’s work as an artist and examines his oeuvre in the context of his educational ideas and late nineteenth century movements. The years of Newbery’s retirement in which he was extremely active are also examined in this context.

This thesis presents the research undertaken to develop a prototype digital resource to display a fine art collection at the National Library of Wales. The thesis first presents art historical investigations into the work of Kyffin Williams: the work of Kyffin Williams and his relationship with the National Library of Wales; the artist?s position within the canon of Welsh art history; and how ideas around space, place and landscape can contribute towards a fresh understanding of the artist?s work. This art historical inquiry is then used to develop a digital resource, called Kyffin Williams Online, to display the digitised Sir Kyffin Williams Bequest Collection of the National Library of Wales. The thesis addresses the incongruity of a large art collection being held in a library rather than museum or gallery and the restrictions of using reproductions of works of art. These restrictions are acknowledged and used to provide ways in which digitised works of art can be used for research for their own sake, rather than only as facsimiles or reproductions. This has been achieved by using the focus on space, place and landscape in the art historical investigation has been used to develop a geo-spatial presentation of content which is relevant to the art collections of the National Library. The thesis closes by using the resultant digital resource to show examples of how these methods can be used to further art historical investigation, and how the knowledge, expertise and methods used can be transferred to the National Library in its work with digitised collections.

This thesis seeks to explore the notion of non-representation in painting and consider our experience of such paintings in phenomenological terms. It is centred around an analysis of the Exposed Paintings by Callum Innes, made from 1993 to date, and employs the term object-image to examine how such paintings make a viewer aware of their material actuality or corporeality. It considers object-images in relation to the theory and practice of American art in the middle of the twentieth century as well as British painting and sculpture of recent decades. The main section of the thesis draws upon the writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to ask questions of our perceptual experience of non-representational paintings especially in relation to the idea of the reciprocity of viewer and viewed.

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John Rogers Herbert (1810-1890) is hardly ever mentioned in the various histories of nineteenth- century art, yet he was considered one of the most important artists of his time. During his sixty- year career, Herbert was admired by his colleagues, the press and public for his strong narrative ability and high ideals of art. Herbert's oeuvre demonstrates accomplished technique in many genres of painting. He began as a renowned portraitist, expanded into romantic and poetical dramas, history painting, orientalist scenes, landscapes and seascapes. His reputation was assured when he found himself among the artists favoured with fresco commissions at the New Palace of Westminster. However, the paintings for which he is best known are the biblical scenes he set in the real landscape of the East. These he infused with devout ideas of ideal sacred art, attempting to create a new visual expression of Catholicism for Victorian England. The object of this PhD is to re-establish Herbert into the story of Victorian painting; to examine his contribution to the Royal Academy and wider art circles, and how his Catholicism influenced his work. This thesis contains the first extensive biography ever written about Herbert, placing his life and work in context. His career is examined in detail, with special consideration of his impact on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and his important commissions at the New Palace of Westminster. also investigate his philosophy of art: his fascination with the East and his role as a Catholic influenced his sacred painting. Herbert's sacred art is truly 'Catholic', and this is contrasted to Victorian Protestant notions of sacred art, using various primary sources.

The critical analysis examines and positions new works I produced during my Residency at Oriel y Pare - Landscape Gallery St Davids (a partnership between National Museum Wales and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park) in 2008-9. The evaluation considers the development of subject matters together with the processes concerned in making artworks since I commenced painting at Cardiff School Art in 1982. In order to give a comprehensive picture of my development as a painter, this enquiry includes a biographical framework, referencing progression through Christian iconography and Biblical narrative, mortality, political conflict including the U11!,est in Wales, England and Northern Ireland. These figurative works were superseded by a visit to New York, where the cityscapes and high viewpoints created more abstract imagery, while yet representing the urban landscape, and where colour became less expressive than in my formative years. The Pembrokeshire coast has been my central inspiration and influence for the past fifteen years, where light, reflection, refraction, colour, journey, surface texture and the ambiguity within plan-like space, coupled with a personal correspondence with belief, identity and upbringing have produced significant work. I further consider and present a series of key critical issues that include the role of the spiritual, absence, isolation and mortality. Figuration and abstraction are also explored, as are the processes within my practice: walking, drawing, mark-making, photography and painting. Artists with whom I have a particular affinity for their methods of painting and subject-matter are also referenced, especially Frank Auerbach (1931-), Willem De Kooning (1904-1997), Terry Setch (1936-), Peter Prendergast (1946-2007), Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and Howard Hodgkin (1932-). The Residency presented the opportunity to pause, reflect, question and produce new work in direct response to a new location, Caerfai Bay. My relationship with the processes of photography, drawing and painting is questioned through an intensely detailed and self-critical analysis as evidenced in the comprehensively illustrated journals, which accompany this portfolio of work. The journals display both my inspiration and anxieties with the coastal landscape and its correspondence with personal beliefs, identity, upbringing and the inevitable contemplation of mortality. The critical overview concludes with the exhibition Influere shown at Oriel y Parco This extensive portfolio of new works and journals was installed alongside a personally curated selection of paintings, drawings, prints, and geological specimens from the National Museum of Wales's collection that have inspired and influenced my development as an artist (see accompanying DVDs and CD Rom portfolio).

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