Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner : British painting and the rise of modernity /edited by Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi.

"In the eighteenth century, Britain experienced a surge of major social, economic and cultural upheavals that manifested themselves particularly in the field of artistic production. While to some degree the aristocracy continued to favour the established cultural models of the Continent, the emerging middle classes fostered the development of an authentically British iconography, showing greater determination than the traditional patrons of the arts before them. In this book a team of British and Italian scholars address this subject, broadening the critical debate to include the contribution of eighteenth-century Italy. Here, historical and cultural analyses of Britain, and of London in particular, are combined with an examination of how a new and peculiarly native figurative language was forged alongside the continental tradition, manifesting itself in a dynamic quest that embraced and developed the classical tradition while attempting to break free of it. The resulting debate shaped the growth of the various pictorial genres - from history painting to landscape and portraiture - in which the British school evolved a distinct artistic identity that was to be recognized in the nineteenth century, expressed particularly in experimenting with landscape painting, seen as the image of modernity. Published on the occasion of the exhibition in Rome, the volume includes essays by Adriano Aymonino, Ilaria Miarelli Mariani, Carolina Brook, Brian Allen, Robin Simon, Pat Hardy, Martin Postle, Andrew Wilton, Valter Curzi, Sergio Marinelli, Giovanna Perini Folesani, Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari and Paolo Coen; the catalogue of the exhibited works, which is divided into seven sections (London, Capital of the British Empire; The New World; Towards a National Iconography; The Heroic Age of the Portrait; On the Spot Landscape: the Success of Watercolour; Variations on Landscape; Inside and Beyond Landscape: Constable and Turner); finally, the artists' biographies and a bibliography."--Provided by the publisher.