The essay accompanied the submission of 5 books and seven articles for the degree of PhD by publication. It explains that the common thread that links the various publications is research into prints and drawings.

This thesis draws together material and archival sources to investigate the long-overlooked portraits of English provincial gentry families commissioned between c.1550 and c.1680. Specifically, its focus is on portraits of family groups where more than one generation, connected through blood or kinship, is depicted in the same composition. The thesis identifies these as a coherent genre for the first time and examines the ways in which the gentry used such paintings to establish familial legacy and heritage for future generations. This thesis explains how these portraits respond to, and reflect, family memory and narratives, social networks, local histories, religious observance and artistic developments. They are important because the family, as the basic unit of society, was essential for the formation and transmission of belief and identity, and the place where children were socialised. The portraits simultaneously reflect broad social trends while also containing personal messages about the lives and relationships of individual families which were specific to their own particular place and time. The thesis argues for the significance of visual artworks and especially this genre of painting, in the construction of gentry status and self-fashioning over this key period of social change.

This thesis is concerned with representations of homosexual themes and subjects in the works of David Hockney (b. 1937). A male, homosexual British artist, Hockney came of age during a period in which homosexual acts between males remained criminalised in both Britain and the United States. Openly homosexual since the early 1960s, Hockney began to produce images concerned with homosexual themes during his Royal College of Art student years. This thesis explores Hockney’s discovery of texts, languages, images and publications relating to homosexuality from the 1960s onwards, and his personal and creative responses to these sources. The concept of a homosexual creative ‘canon’ existed amongst homosexual men of this period, albeit in an unofficial capacity; this wider context of historical creative and cultural precedent within homosexual subcultures has not previously been the subject of sustained critical engagement in relation to Hockney. In addition to the artist’s works dealing with homosexual themes produced prior to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain in 1967, this thesis looks beyond that period, and also considers Hockney’s personal self-fashioning and media engagements. Far from an anomalous maverick, Hockney and his works are shown to fit within a continuum of homosexual creative and cultural endeavour.

Over the past decade, there has been an ever increasing interest in the relationship between weather and climate and how they are portrayed artistically. The representations of skies, atmosphere, weather, climate and climate change through a variety of artistic media have been considered thus far (Eliasson 2003; Olson et al 2004, Kunz et al 2005; Thornes 1999, 2008a, 2008b). Furthermore, there have been a number of studies that have contemplated the use of environmental art as a form of proxy data for past weather, air pollution and climate change (Lamb 1967; Neuberger 1970; Brimblecombe and Ogden 1977, Baker and Thornes 2006 and Zerefos et al 2007). Monet’s series paintings can be considered as another example of art representing aspects of the weather and climate, for example, when Monet painted his scenes of London, he would include the sun when it was visible or a representation of the sun when it was obscured, trying to illustrate the atmosphere, and thus the weather, in his paintings. However, Monet also reworked many of his canvases with the intention of reflecting how the atmosphere appeared on specific days from year to year, therefore it seems it could be concluded that Monet was consciously painting the climate of London as well as the weather. For this reason, the opportunity to deconstruct Monet’s representations of the skies in his London Series (1899-1905) could not have come at a better time.

Reading with Gilles Deleuze, this thesis explores art as a production that abandons representation as a formation of identity in favour of an ontology of becoming. I argue that the move to abstraction in painting resonates with the aim of "thought without image" because it counters representation with a radical materiality that returns painting to the movement of matter. In order to situate Deleuze's thinking on art within a trajectory of a philosophy of becoming I open the thesis with a chapter on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. Here I introduce the notion of 'thinking in painting' and argue that, while in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of art painting is a pedagogical investigation of the pre-human, chaotic and invisible 'depth' of a lived visible world, Deleuze takes Bergson's commitment to the possibility of moving beyond the human seriously and reverses the order of perception in order to seize the non-human virtual that eludes actualization. For Deleuze, the task of painting is therefore not to reveal the ontogenesis of the actual and the lived, but to extract the virtual and to embody it as a monument to that event. In abstraction the interest moves from the mechanism of perception to the work of paint, and in the subsequent chapters on Mondrian, Pollock, Klee and Bacon I explore specific practices and their peculiar logic of sensation. In Mondrian we see the strange space of virtuality unleashed when the line is not constrained by the closure of the punctual system, and in Pollock's explosive "all-over" paintings identify that space not as a chaos but as a chaosmosis or machinic heterogeneity. I argue that by understanding these modulating and rhythmic compositions as haptic spaces, we break through the distancing of visibility and can begin to think at the level of expressive matter. I then turn to Klee, and using the famous image of "taking a walk with a line" explore the notion of the emergent figure in the context of Klee's aim to "render visible". What we find is an art where space and the form of expression works on the plane of composition and refers only to the unfolding rhythms of the abstract line. In the final chapter I discuss Bacon's portraits and look at how the multiplicity of the event that is maintained in the diagrammatic composition is drawn into the recognizable face. I conclude that the embodiment of the non-human event forces thought to confront the possibility of the emergent identity that is realized in the abstraction of "thinking in painting".

The basis of this study is a close examination of the manuscripts which, in their decoration and illustration, form a stylistic group around the Book of Hours/Missal, Paris, B.N. Latin 757. Those painted in the same style are fr.343, Smith-Lesouef 22, n.a.lat.1673, Latin 8045, all in the Biblioth'que Nationale, and.s.2.3l (Latin 862) in the Biblioteca Estense, Modena. Two other manuscripts which are less closely related to this central group, Paris, B.N. n.a.fr .5243 and Munich Staatsbibliothek Latin 23215, are also discussed. Details of the decoration have made possible the identification of the original owner of two of the Books of Hours, Latin 757 and Smith-Lesouf 22, as Bertrando de' Rossi, conte di San Secondo (c.1346-1396), and of the romance Guiron le Courtois, n.a.fr .5243, as Bernab Visconti. Some aspects both of the finished painting and of the distribution of work in the unfinished manuscripts indicate that these books were the product of collaboration between more than one painter. The division of work however, is usually by process and not by unit and the essential characteristics of the style seem to be dependent upon one artist. Previously the manuscripts in the style of Latin 757 have all been dated to c.1380. Here the sequence in which they were decorated between c.1383 to c.1395 is established. These books are the earliest group of Lombard manuscrits-de-luxe to have survived. This style seems to have evolved in response to the demand for luxury books from the Milanese court. It is suggested here that the interest in illuminated books of Bernab? Visconti and his court may have been more influential than the later and, as far as it is known, restricted patronage of his nephew Giangaleazzo and that, correspondingly, Milan had ascendancy over Pavia as a centre for book-production at the end of the fourteenth century.

This thesis investigates the changes in the Israeli and Jewish-American public perception of Holocaust memory in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and offers an elaborate comparative analysis of public reactions to art about the Holocaust. Created by the inheritors of Holocaust memory, second and third-generation Jews in Israel and America, the artworks titled Your Colouring Book (1997) and Live and Die as Eva Braun (1998), and the group exhibition Mirroring Evil. Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (2002) were hosted at art institutions emblematic of Jewish culture, namely the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Jewish Museum in New York. Unlike artistic representation by first generation, which tends to adopt an empathetic approach by scrutinizing experiences of Jewish victimhood, these artworks foreground images of the Nazi perpetrators, and thus represent a distancing and defamiliarizing approach which triggered intense media discussions in each case. The public debates triggered by these exhibitions shall constitute the domain for analyzing the emergent counter-positions on Holocaust memory of post-war generations of Jews and for delineating their ideological views and divergent identity stances vis-à-vis Holocaust memory. This thesis proposes a critical discourse analysis of public debates carried out by leading Jewish intellectuals, politicians and public figures in Israel and in America. It suggests that younger generations developed a global discourse which challenges a dominant meta-narrative of Jewish identity that holds victimization and a sacred dimension of the Holocaust as its fundamental tenets.

By engaging with ‘realism’ in the context of Socialist Realism in Bulgaria, a notion that inhabits the space in between fine art, ideology and art history, this practice-based research offers new insight into the examination of continuities between fine art during Communism and post-Communism, exploring the relationship between the abstract and the figurative and their functioning both within, and exceeding, the pictorial space of painting. The two main research questions that inform the studio work and underpin this study have been: How can art practice explore the official representations of Socialist Realism in post-Communist Bulgaria in the axis between photography and painting? How can this process affect an understanding of the relationship between abstract and figurative painting within the context of ‘realism’ of Socialist Realism and contemporary fine art in the country? By focusing on these research questions, this study conceptualises the relationship between the abstract and the figurative in the context of Socialist Realism in fine art in Bulgaria and its official representations after the collapse of the Communist regime. This relationship marked one of the central oppositions in fine art during the Communist era in the country, often constituting a dividing line between what was considered ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ art. This study is concerned with the differences in the definitions of ‘realism’ within Socialist Realism in Bulgaria over the years, differences which may be considered as ruptures in its development. Yet it acknowledges these differences within the framework imposed by the Communist ideology. The latter remained unchangeable, yet had a determining impact on the development of fine art throughout the Communist period. Furthermore, the study explores how fragments of this framework are transferred into the post-Communist period, and how they function in state-funded institutional representations of Socialist Realist works and in examples of former ‘official’ artists’ works, as well as in the readings of Socialist Realism after the fall of the Communist regime, readings which fluctuate between the oppositions of ‘official or unofficial’ art, praise or disavowal of Socialist Realism. In order to explore both the ruptures and the continuities, the research looks at Socialist Realism and its specificities in Bulgaria in relation to Socialist Realism in fine art in the Soviet Union and other post-Communist countries in Eastern Europe. The relationship between the abstract and the figurative is situated within this context and explored through a series of transformations of photographic sources into paintings. These transformations are performed by my practice, engaging with the photographic sources’ production, dissemination and display in relation to ‘realism’ in Socialist Realism.

Marianne North was a major figure within the history of nineteenth-century botanical illustration. She produced a substantial body of botanical paintings as the result of extensive travels to many different parts of the world and was responsible for the founding of a major purpose-built gallery containing a representative collection of her work which still stands today in the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Despite North's percieved importance as a botanical painter, relatively little of any critical/analytical substance has been written about her life and work from an art-historical or scientific perspective. North's place within nineteenth-century visual culture is arguably a contested one, despite having been a major contributor to nineteenth-century botanical painting. North's work therefore remains problematic to both botanists and art historians because it does not conform wholly to the established nineteenth century conventions of either scientific-botanical illustration or art. This thesis will explore the uncertain positioning of North's painting through a close analysis of its relationship to nineteenth and twentieth-century visual practices. In light of this analysis, it will be argued that North's painting does not successfully combine artistic and scientific perspectives, as some have argued, but instead presents an unidentifiable mode of visual representation that shifts uncertainly between art and science, thereby deconstructing any categorical distinction between the two.

Early 17th-century Antwerp, despite political and religious troubles, was a thriving European art centre and home of such renowned artists as Peter Paul Rubens and other painters of his circle, like Jan Brueghel I, Frans Snyders, Anthony van Dyck and Hendrick van Balen. This interdisciplinary thesis in Technical Art History, after a general introduction to this specific art scene, looks at how specific aspects of their studio practice, such as collaborations within and outside their studios or the many copies and versions of their paintings, found manifestation in their works but also in their theoretical concepts. For this an in-depth study and examination of c.20 paintings from mainly Scottish collections (National Galleries of Scotland Edinburgh, Glasgow Museums, Hunterian Art Gallery of the University of Glasgow, Talbot Rice Gallery of the University of Edinburgh, Hopetoun House South Queensferry) was conducted, using detailed photography, multispectral imaging, tracings, dendrochronology, polarised light microscopy and SEM- EDX-analysis of paint samples in cross-sections. The technical examination and analysis, informed by art historical research, significantly aided the answering of questions regarding these paintings’ materials and techniques, as well as they helped to authenticate sometimes contested authorship and date. Four main chapters discuss Frans Snyders’ studio practice focussing on reappearing motifs, Rubens’ tronies, Jan Brueghel’s minute staffage figures in collaborative works, as well as Rubens’ and Brueghel’s painting Nature Adorned by the Graces. An own chapter critically discusses the test results of the application of Stable Lead Isotope Analysis on paint samples, which were carried out at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC).