From flamenco guitarists to parlour pianists, Matisse’s images of music-making often appear within decorative scenes of gleaming carpets, multi-coloured costumes and lavishly embroidered wall hangings. All of these textiles and more comprised what he called ‘ma bibliothèque de travail’, a working library of inspiration that he maintained throughout his career. ‘I am made up of everything I have seen,’ he remarked, to which he might have added, ‘and heard.’ Practising, performing, listening and concert-going: music, like textiles, was a lifelong pursuit. But his passion for them is not simply of anecdotal significance, nor does it explain their mere co-existence as the subject-matter of his art. Rather, just as music and textiles are interwoven at every stage of his life, so too is their structural and conceptual significance in his work. In a series of case studies, a single textile from his working library is paired with the art it inspired: the kasāya robe and 'The Song of the Nightingale'; the Moghan rug and the Symphonic Interiors; and the Bakuba velours and 'Jazz'. In each case, visual form is found to have musical counterpart, both in the textiles themselves and as represented by Matisse. This opens up new, more imaginative possibilities of interpreting his visual musicality, which is found to be metaphysical, modal and motivic in concept. Finally, these separate strands are drawn together in a single synoptic analysis of the Chapel of the Rosary, the artist’s self-proclaimed masterpiece and ‘total’ work of art. This thesis explores the expansive musical space created by the reduced visual form of textiles. Considered together for the first time, these enduring and inseparable continuities of Matisse’s art – music and textiles – suggest not only a means of unravelling his own visual musicality, but point towards a much-needed methodology for interpreting this notion more broadly.

This thesis investigates Dalí’s adoption of religious iconography to help represent themes that he had conceptualised through Surrealism, psychoanalysis and other thought systems. His selective use of sources was closely bound to his life circumstances, and I integrate biographical details in my analysis of his paintings. I identify unexpected sources of Dalí's images, and demonstrate how alert he was to the psychological motivations of traditional art. I find he made especial use of the iconography of martyrdom – and the perceptual and cognitive mechanics of the contemplation of death – that foreground the problem of the sexual and mortal self. Part I examines the period 1925-7, when Dalí developed an aesthetic outlook in dialogue with Lorca, formulated in his text, 'Sant Sebastià'. Representations of Sebastian and other martyr saints provided patterns for Dalí's exposition of the generative and degenerating self. In three chapters, based on three paintings, I plot the shift in Dalí's focus from the surface of the physical body – wilfully resistant to emotional engagement, and with classical statuary as a model – to its problematic interior, vulnerable to forces of desire and corruption. This section shows how Dalí's engagement with religious art paradoxically brought him into alignment with Surrealism. In Part II, I contend that many of the familiar images of Dalí’s Surrealist period – in which he considered the self as a fundamentally psychic rather than physical entity – can be traced to the iconography of contemplative saints, particularly Jerome. Through the prism of this re-interpretation, I consider Jerome's task of transcribing Biblical meaning in the context of psychoanalytical theories of cultural production. In Part III, I show how Dalí's later, overt use of religious imagery evolved from within his Surrealism. I trace a condensed, personalised life-narrative through Dalí’s paintings of 1948-52, based on Biblical mythology, but compatible with psychoanalytical theory: from birth to death to an ideal return to the mother's body.

In 1989 the American Surrealist associated painter, sculptor, and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) suggested an intermedial dimension to her multifaceted œuvre in her essay ‘Some Parallels in Word and Pictures.’ Taking this essay as a critical point of departure, this thesis offers an intertextual theorisation of Tanning’s practice. It concerns the role of narrative in her work, and the way in which she borrows from the histories of art and literature as source materials. The thesis presented here is that Tanning’s work from the context of Surrealism and beyond makes reference to the fairy tales and other, more extensive works of literature which she read in her youth whilst at work in her public library in Galesburg, Illinois, whether implicitly in visual references or explicitly in her works’ titles. Throughout, the library is read as a key source of inspiration. This is true too of the impact which Tanning’s belated visit to the Louvre had on her post-Surrealist stylistic development. Broadly, this thesis aims to rethink the methodologies used to interpret Surrealism, and reunite the literary and visual aspects upon which the Surrealist movement was initially founded. This interdisciplinary approach contributes fresh perspectives by marrying the history of Surrealism with that of the fairy tale, including that of Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, and the fairy tale illustrations of Gustave Doré, Maxfield Parrish, Arthur Rackham, and John Tenniel. The anti-fairy tale emerges as useful critical tool in defining the intertext which appears when Surrealism and the fairy tale are paired. The ‘demythologising’ project of Angela Carter is useful to call upon in the articulation of the anti-fairy tale, and her work is easily placed in dialogue with that of Tanning, especially in terms of its feminist leanings. The dialogic, intertextual theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, further developed by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, support this reading of Tanning’s visual narratives. More recently such theories of intertextuality have manifested themselves in the work of Dutch narratologist Mieke Bal who proposes a model of ‘preposterous history’ in order to creatively re-read the relationship between source (or pre-text) and intertext. This research is primarily text-based and devotes long-awaited attention to Tanning’s literary works which are read visually, including her short story ‘Blind Date’ (1943), and her novel 'Abyss' (1977), later reworked and republished as 'Chasm: A Weekend' (2004). I argue that her novel provides textual continuity with her Surrealist visual narratives of the 1940s creating a more cyclical, ‘preposterous’ shape to her career than has previously been acknowledged.

This thesis examines how artists working for the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) represented aerial warfare. In contrast to the scholarly attention lavished on wartime films and posters, official war art remains a much neglected aspect of the propaganda war. The few studies that do exist, most notably by Brian Foss, survey the collection as a whole and consider it from an art history perspective. By focusing on the single theme of aviation, a central and defining experience of the Second World War, I embed the WAAC within the economic, social, military and cultural histories of the period and locate it within a longer time frame. Through bringing these usually disparate fields of study into dialogue, I am able to use the art to enrich broader understandings of the period, in particular, the ways in which aerial warfare was represented, how this image evolved during the war and how these cultural products related to economic, military and social factors. This thesis highlights the different roles the WAAC was expected to fulfil. Housed within the Ministry of Information, the WAAC was expected to perform a propagandist function. The committee distanced itself from propaganda and insisted that its primary function was to record for posterity the experience of living through the war. I assess exactly what kind of record the WAAC bequeathed by looking thematically at the key aspects of aerial warfare: aircraft production; the Battle of Britain; the Blitz and the bombing of Germany. I argue that whilst there was broad correlation between war art and propaganda, these images registered aspects of experience that were incongruent with and therefore absent from wartime propaganda, such as the fear of aerial bombardment and the true nature of the bombing of Germany. Moreover, propagandist constructions were not entirely separate to lived experience, rather they both reflected experience and shaped the way that individuals understood and made sense of the world around them. Therefore, in producing images that accorded with propagandist portrayals, the WAAC artists were recording a fundamental part of the experience of living through the war.

This thesis explores the ways in which the industrialist Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) used images of his manufactory and of himself to help develop what would now be considered a ‘brand’. The argument draws heavily on archival research into the commissioning process, authorship and reception of these depictions. Such information is rarely available when studying prints and allows consideration of these images in a new light but also contributes to a wider debate on British eighteenth-century print culture. The first chapter argues that Boulton used images to convey messages about the output of his businesses, to draw together a diverse range of products and associate them with one site. Chapter two explores the setting of the manufactory and the surrounding estate, outlining Boulton’s motivation for creating the parkland and considering the ways in which it was depicted. The third chapter looks at a period of reinforcement of the identity of Soho, exploring the ways in which images were placed and altered in order to convey specific messages to particular audiences. Chapter four examines printed portraits of Boulton and argues that images of Boulton himself also came to stand for his factory and his products.

The purpose of this study is ultimately to analyze the influence of cultural attitudes on the treatment of the Scottish estate in the first half of the 18th century (c.1715 – c.1776), making particular reference to the ideology of improvement, through the use of Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk as a case study. Grant’s improvement of his estate is not understood as literally agricultural or economic development alone, but as a complex ideological commitment to the transformation of land, landscape and society. Whilst Grant of Monymusk has been discussed with reference to economic improvement, the relationship between his role as a publically acknowledged improver and his patronage of art and architecture, as well as his attempts at publication, has not been subject to similar interest. This thesis uses an innovative interdisciplinary approach which draws on archaeological as well as art historical methodologies. It discusses a wider range of estate commissions, in particular Grant’s patronage of the portrait artists John Smibert and William Robertson, the poet John Ogilvie, his commission of the architectural surveyors Alexander Jaffray and Robert Robinson, as well as his work to construct planned villages at Kirktown of Monymusk and Archiestown. The thesis attempts to place these commissions within the context of recent studies of improvement which emphasize its role as an ideology with cultural implications. The use of an individual case study allows for a more in depth discussion of specific reactions to historical and ideological change, providing a narrative of a specific site and thus creating an individual response towards broader cultural and scientific developments.

As the first major study of the portrait artist Bernard Fleetwood-Walker (1893-1965), this thesis locates the artist in his social, political and economic context, arguing that his portraiture can be seen as an exemplar of modernity. The portraits are shown to be responses to modern life, revealed not in formally avant-garde depictions, but in the subject-matter. Industrial growth, the increasing population, expanding suburbs, and a renewed interest in the outdoor life and popular entertainment are reflected in Fleetwood-Walker’s artistic output. The role played by exhibition culture in the creation of the portraits is analysed: developing retail theory affected gallery design and exhibition layout and in turn impacted on the size, subject matter and style of Fleetwood-Walker’s portraits. Emerging, and soon dominant, tabloid newspapers shaped content and language to attract readers, influencing the articulation of the reception of the artist’s work. This thesis also makes a contribution to the regional perspective, demonstrating the temporary co-existence of multiple, heterogeneous, modern art worlds. Throughout the thesis the relevance of economic factors is emphasised, reappraising the Marxist theory of modern art and concluding that a more complex economic description is required to provide a sensitive and insightful analysis of art history.

Bagpipes and pipers, as cultural identifiers, are embedded within their national culture, charged with symbolisms. British authors have often viewed bagpipes as cultural icons, endowing them with connotations from devilish to virtuous, from rural to military. By analysing literary and artistic references one can perceive how the attitude towards the bagpipe changes with the evolution of Britain’s internal dynamics. Jacobitism contributed in casting a particular light on the bagpipe: it was the ‘voice of the rebellion’. In Scotland this constituted a reason for national pride, while in England the ‘common denominator’ of the Scot-enemy charged the bagpipe with the worst connotations. After Jacobitism stopped being seen as a threat, authors and artists came to view the bagpipe in a different light: the once negative icon was now imbued with ancestral values. The Scot – and the bagpipe by synecdoche – was romanticised: as James Boswell wrote, “The very Highland names, or the sound of a bagpipe, will stir my blood, and fill me with [...] a crowd of sensations with which sober rationality has nothing to do” (1785). The words of many Romantic authors contributed in characterising the instrument, endowing it with implications the influence of which is still relevant today.