Learning to Draw
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art
Ann Bermingham
Read this book online via the A&AePortal, our art and architectural history eBook platform. To learn more about how to access this book, please contact us.
View Inside
Format: ClothPrice: $80.00
Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Please ensure you're using that browser before attempting to purchase.
Also Available in:
Art ePortal
Out of Print
As early as the sixteenth century, drawing in England came to be seen as something more than an activity exclusive to artists—it became a polite and useful art, a practice of everyday life. This generously illustrated book explores the social and cultural processes that enabled drawing to emerge as an amateur pastime, as well as the meanings that drawing had for people who were not artists. Ann Bermingham shows how the history of drawing in England—from the age of Elizabeth I to the era of early photography—mirrored changes in society, politics, the practical world, and notions of self.
The book examines how drawing intersected with a wide range of social phenomena, from political absolutism, writing, empirical science, and Enlightenment pedagogy to nationalism, industrialism, tourism, bourgeois gentility, and religious instruction. Bermingham discusses the central role of drawing and the visual arts in Renaissance debates about government and self-government, then considers the relations between seventeenth-century drawing, natural science, and the masculine ideal of the honest gentleman. She also investigates landscape drawing in the context of eighteenth-century views on sensibility; the emergence of the amateur draftsman and the accomplished woman; and the commercialization of amateur drawing in the nineteenth century. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of photography on the social practice of drawing.
The book examines how drawing intersected with a wide range of social phenomena, from political absolutism, writing, empirical science, and Enlightenment pedagogy to nationalism, industrialism, tourism, bourgeois gentility, and religious instruction. Bermingham discusses the central role of drawing and the visual arts in Renaissance debates about government and self-government, then considers the relations between seventeenth-century drawing, natural science, and the masculine ideal of the honest gentleman. She also investigates landscape drawing in the context of eighteenth-century views on sensibility; the emergence of the amateur draftsman and the accomplished woman; and the commercialization of amateur drawing in the nineteenth century. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of photography on the social practice of drawing.
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Ann Bermingham is professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
ISBN: 9780300080391
Publication Date: March 11, 2000
Publishing Partner: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Publication Date: March 11, 2000
Publishing Partner: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
320 pages, x
180 b/w + 120 color illus.
180 b/w + 120 color illus.
