Art in Europe 1700-1830 (Oxford History of Art)

In an era of unprecedented change--rapid urbanization, economic growth, and political revolution--European artists from 1700-1830 were in the business of finding new ways of making, selling, and talking about art. Matthew Craske creates a totally new and vivid record of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art in Europe, taking a critical view of such conventional categories as the "rococo," the "neo-classical," and the "romantic." He goes on to explore crucial thematic issues, such as changes in "taste" and manners, and the impact of enlightenment notions of progress, and at the same time goes well beyond the usual geographic limits of surveys to include St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Warsaw, and Madrid. The result is a refreshingly holistic text which sets the art of the period firmly in its social history.

Arts & Photography

Craske, Matthew

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

This illuminating and original book is the first to examine eighteenth-century British funeral monuments in their social, as well as their artistic, context, looking not only at the sculptors who created the monuments, but also the people who commissioned them and the people they commemorated. Matthew Craske begins by analyzing the relationship of tomb designs to the changing and diverse culture of death in eighteenth-century England, and then explains conditions of production and the shifting dynamics of the market. He concludes with a masterly analysis of the motivations of the people who commissioned monuments, from aristocrats to merchants and professional people.

The Silent Rhetoric of the Body: A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England, 1720-1770

History

Yale University Press

This fresh and engaging perspective of William Hogarth (1697-1764) reveals him as a figure who reinvented the very idea of what it is to be an artist.
 Hogarth was the first artist to make his living as a humorist, brilliantly inventing a means of reproducing a wit for wide public consumption. He adapted literary satire as a graphic art form and invented the serial print. In his portraits, his representation of human character and its passions broke new ground, as did his depiction of disease and its effects on the body. His sympathy with the human predicament and natural tendency for philanthropy also surfaced in his art.
 Taking a thematic approach to this quintessentially British artist, Matthew Craske introduces the reader to Hogarth's varied artistic production, including his series, engravings, portraits, and such major paintings as A Rake's Progress. He brings to life an artist who produced works aimed at fostering self-improvement--works in which vice can ruin the aristocrat as swiftly as the harlot--but also works of great humor. We meet an artist emblematic of his day and time but also utterly innovative and long-sighted.

William Hogarth

Individual Artists

Princeton University Press

Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants' Portraits

Waterfield, Giles

French, Anne

Natl Portrait Gallery Pubns

<div>A revelatory study of one of the 18th century's greatest artists, which places him in relation to the darker side of the English Enlightenment Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), though conventionally known as a 'painter of light', returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, and he had an enduring concern with death, ruin, old age, loss of innocence, isolation and tragedy. In this long-awaited book, Matthew Craske adopts a fresh approach to Wright, which takes seriously contemporary reports of his melancholia and nervous disposition, and goes on to question accepted understandings of the artist. Long seen as a quintessentially modern and progressive figure - one of the artistic icons of the English Enlightenment - Craske overturns this traditional view of the artist. He demonstrates the extent to which Wright, rather than being a spokesman for scientific progress, was actually a melancholic and sceptical outsider, who increasingly retreated into a solitary, rural world of philosophical and poetic reflection, and whose artistic vision was correspondingly dark and meditative. Craske offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist's paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces. In doing so, he recovers Wright's deep engagement with the landscape, with the pleasures and sufferings of solitude, and with the themes of time, history and mortality. In this book, Joseph Wright of Derby emerges not only as one of Britain's most ambitious and innovative artists, but also as one of its most profound.</div>

Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)

Paul Mellon Centre

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Craske, Matthew. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Craske, Matthew