Using unpublished source material at Princeton University, the University of British Columbia, the British Library and the National Art Library in the V&A, this thesis aims to broaden current scholarly understanding regarding Rossetti's exposure to, interest in, and subsequent appropriation of aspects of monastic life and saintly legend in his religious and secular paintings and poems. The intention of part one of this thesis is to discuss and analyse Rossetti's early interest in monasticism and the legends of the saints. Rossetti's attraction to Catholic ritual and ceremony, both in terms of its aesthetic impact and the feelings of awe it engendered, will form the background to a discussion of his admiration for pre-Reformation art. The concern which he displayed in his own paintings and poems for saintly legend and theological mysteries will be shown to have its origins in early Christian art, as well as in the apocryphal lives of the saints and the writings of the Church Fathers, which had seen a resurgence in popularity in the wake of the Oxford Movement. Rossetti's growing fascination with art as a vehicle for the conveyance of religious ideas will be considered in relation to the early and mid-nineteenth century revival of interest in the medieval painter-monk and in the practice of illumination. Rossetti's 1856 watercolour Fra Pace will be examined in this context. The pertinence of the example of St Luke, who used his art as a preaching tool, will also be considered, Rossetti having returned to this concept directly, and obliquely, throughout his career in both his visual and poetic art. The influence of the quasi-monastic Nazarene painters, also called the German Brotherhood of St Luke, will be examined. Rossetti's suggestion of "Brotherhood" as an appendage to "Pre-Raphaelite" will be considered within a specifically monastic context, looking at the artist's family history, analogous artistic communities, and the revival of interest in ascetic institutions within the nineteenth century. The extent to which the works of the Pre-Raphaelite group showed a basis towards asceticism will be analysed, as will contemporary reactions to this.

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.

This practice-based research investigates the relationship between the process of making layered images and narratives of walked journeys. Two such journeys – Franz Schubert’s song cycle, Winterreise, and the autobiographical account of John Clare’s escape from an asylum, Reccolections &c Of Journey From Essex – were examined and compared through a body of drawings, prints and paintings. A study of the construction of the two narratives highlighted their layered composition: Winterreise is experienced as a synthesis of Wilhelm Müller’s poems and Schubert’s musical setting; whilst the full impact of Clare’s account is appreciated in the context of his poetry and biography. The research began with a bookwork, a visual response to the layering of information observed in the song cycle of Winterreise, and led to the formulation of a method of interpreting narratives using Thomas De Quincey’s model of The Palimpsest. De Quincey identified the effacements, amendments and aggregation of material in a palimpsest manuscript with the absorption of experience. In paintings made to interpret the experience of Winterreise, abrading layers of a picture surface elicited the compound characteristics of the narrative: allowing one idea to be seen through another. The fictive identity of the song cycle emerged in a suite of monoprints, through their assembly of layered imagery. Conversely, John Clare’s account is that of an actual journey, physically walked. The research culminated in a focus on the terrain of the two narratives. The metaphorical landscape of Winterreise is contrasted with Clare’s more visceral relationship with earth and trees through a series of paintings based on Journey From Essex. The research discovered new possibilities in the narratives’ meaning through the invention of a visual language to describe both physical nature of walking and a distinctive sense of place.

Taking as it basis the longstanding alignment of men with an active, eroticised gaze and women with visual spectacle within Western culture, this thesis demonstrates the prevalence of this model during the Victorian era, adopting an interdisciplinary approach so as to convey the varied means by which the gendering of vision was propagated and encouraged. Chapter One provides an overview of gender and visual politics in the Victorian age, subsequently analysing a selection of texts that highlight this gendered dichotomy of vision. Chapter Two focuses on the theoretical and developmental underpinnings of this dichotomy, drawing upon both Freudian and object relations theory. Chapters Three and Four centre on women’s poetic responses to this imbalance, beginning by discussing texts that convey awareness and discontent before moving on to examine more complex portrayals of psychological trauma. Chapter Five unites these interdisciplinary threads to explore women’s attempts to break away from their status as objects of vision, referring to poetic and artistic texts as well as women’s real life experiences. The thesis concludes that, though women were not wholly oppressed, they were subject to significant strictures; principally, the enduring, pervasive presence of an objectifying mode of vision aligned with the male.