Nicholas Tromans

Richard Dadd (1817–1886) constructed fairytale worlds and other highly original works of art. After making his name as an exceptional student at the Royal Academy in the late 1830s, he travelled to the Eastern Mediterranean, where he developed a psychotic illness that led to the killing of his father. Dadd spent the rest of his life in London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital and then Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, in both of which he was encouraged to paint. Dadd’s output encompasses much more than the fairy paintings for which he is renowned. There are also highly detailed sketches evocative of his Eastern Mediterranean travels, remarkable characterisations of the human passions, and perceptive portraits of his doctors. Profusely illustrated throughout, this new account of his life and art by Nicholas Tromans and other leading scholars re-examines the legacy of one of the most fascinating figures in the visual arts of the Victorian era.

The Private Lives of Pictures offers a new history of British art, seen from the perspective of the home. Focusing on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, the book takes the reader on a tour of an imaginary Victorian or Edwardian house, stopping in each room to look at the pictures on the walls. The book opens up the intimate history of art in everyday life, and examines many issues including how pictures were chosen for each room, how they were displayed, and what role they played in interior design. Superbly illustrated, The Private Lives of Pictures appeals to readers interested in both art and social history, and the history of interiors.

The first art book to explore Rossetti's art and poetry together, including her own artworks, illustrations to her writing, and art inspired by her Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) is among the greatest of English Victorian poets. The intensity of her vision, her colloquial style, and the lyrical quality of her verse still speak powerfully to us today, while her striking imagery has always inspired artists. Rossetti lived in an exceptionally visual environment: her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was the leading member of the avant-garde Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and she became a favorite model for the group. She sat for the face of Christ in William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, while both John Everett Millais and Frederick Sandys illustrated her poetry. Later on, the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and the great Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff were inspired by Rossetti’s enigmatic verses. This engaging book explores the full artistic context of Rossetti’s life and poetry: her own complicated attitude to pictures; the many portraits of her by artists, including her brother, John Brett, and Lewis Carroll; her own intriguing and virtually unknown drawings; and the wealth of visual images inspired by her words.Published in association with Watts GalleryExhibition Schedule:Watts Gallery, Guildford, Surrey (11/13/18–03/17/19)

. By this time, Watts had acquired a country home in Surrey – Limnerslease – around which he and his second wife, the designer Mary Watts, built a type of utopian settlement, which has recently been restored and opened to the public as Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. By the end of his life Watts was a national figure, an inspirational artist who had found a meaningful role for art as a catalyst for social change and community integration.

With its unprecedented focus on the history of Orientalism in British art, this handsome book places the British within the story of how the genre was established in the 19th century--a story heretofore dominated by the French. Featuring both well-known and rarely seen paintings, together with sketches and photographs, this volume examines the work of British artists who engaged with Middle Eastern themes over three centuries, from the 1620s to the eclipse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. Included are works by Joshua Reynolds, J. F. Lewis, W. H. Hunt, David Wilkie, John Singer Sargent, William Holman Hunt, J.M.W. Turner, Roger Fenton, Andrew Geddes, and Edward Lear. Many of their images are, or purport to be, the result of direct observation of actual places in the Middle East. The book spotlights numerous topics of timely cultural interest, including the cross-pollination of British and Islamic artistic traditions, as well as Western myths about the Islamic world in relation to artists' actual experiences. Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art (February 7 - April 27, 2008) Tate Britain, London (June 4 - August 31, 2008) Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (October 2008 - January 2009) Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (late February - April 2009)

This is the first modern book about the artist David Wilkie (1785-1841), the first British painter to become an international celebrity. Based on extensive original research, the book explores the ways in which Wilkie's images, so beloved by his contemporaries, engaged with a range of cultural predicaments close to their hearts. In a series of thematic chapters, whose concerns range far beyond the details of Wilkie's own career, Tromans shows how, through Wilkie's thrillingly original work, British society was able to reimagine its own everyday life, its history, and its multinational (Anglo-Scottish) nature. Other themes covered include Wilkie's roles in defining the border between painting and anatomy in the representation of the human body, and in transforming the pleasures of connoisseurship from an elite to a popular audience. For the first time, all of Wilkie's major subject pictures are brought together, reproduced and discussed. With a great range of new archival material and original interpretive arguments, this book replaces Wilkie at the centre of the visual culture of British Romanticism.