Nineteenth-century writers and modern scholars have agreed
that there was a major shift in the practice of landscape
painting in England around the turn of the nineteenth century.
Paintings by up-and-coming artists such as J. M. W. Turner,
Thomas Girtin, and A. W. Callcott were seen to exhibit a concern
for atmospheric effects and an "expressivity" lacking in earlier
works. This shift has often been explained by invoking artistic
genius: the keen intellect and sensibility of the artistic
producer has served as a self-evident explanation of the rise to
prominence of this form of landscape painting. This study
endorses the centrality of the artistic subject to the enterprise
of landscape painting, but disputes the notion that genius is a
natural and self-evident phenomenon. It is argued here that the
native landscape genius was a category of the creative individual
which was socially produced at this historical moment in
conjunction with or in opposition to other contemporaneous
formulations of the artist.
This examination of artistic subjectivity as determined by
gender, social status, education, wealth, and so forth, is
organized around three interrelated subject positions: the "man
of letters" derived from the notion of the academic history
painter, the "market slave," a negative construction of the
artist who was seen to pander to the demands of the market and the "imaginative man of genius." The inscription of these
positionalities in landscape imagery i s contingent upon a range
of historically specific social phenomena. The discussion
focuses particularly upon the discourse of nationalism during and
immediately after the Napoleonic wars, epistemoiogical debates
concerning the type of knowledge appropriate for a commercial
society, and the discourse on the market as it relates to the
circulation of paintings as cultural commodities. Determining
the relationship of the artistic subject to these various social
phenomena involves an examination of the physical spaces in
which paintings were displayed and exhibited, the discursive
spaces in which they were discussed and evaluated—including art
criticism, aesthetic treatises, illustrated county histories and
social and political commentary—and the institutional practices
which shaped their production and reception.
The power and appeal of the landscape genius, I argue, lay
in its ability to a serve broad range of social interests in
negotiating successfully the seemingly contradictory demands of
the market in luxury commodities and of a social ideal of
Englishness marked by independence, intellectual power and
sensibility. The genius's imaginative encounter with external
nature provided it with an alibi which served to obscure it s
activities as an economic producer in a highly competitive market
society. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/41450 |
| Date | January 1991 |
| Creators | Kriz, Kay Dian |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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