Search results for ""Author Colin Trodd""

This book argues that Ford Madox Brown’s murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall (1878–93) were the most important public art works of their day. Brown’s twelve designs on the history of Manchester, remarkable exercises in the making of historical vision, were semi-forgotten by academics until the 1980s, partly because of Brown’s unusually muscular conception of what history painting should set out to achieve. This ground-breaking book explains the thinking behind the programme and indicates how each mural contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life. It shows the important link between Brown and Thomas Carlyle, the most iconoclastic of Victorian intellectuals, and reveals how Brown set about questioning the verities of British liberalism.

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Prophet, poet, painter, engraver – William Blake (1757–1827) was an artist of uniquely powerful imagination and far-reaching creative gifts. His work expresses the spiritual drama of the English national being, integrating poetry and visual art in a sustained work of visionary creativity unparalleled in English art history. Revealing Blake to be far more than a revolutionary social radical, this classic study reshapes our understanding of the artist’s achievement. Kathleen Raine details the enriching effect of mystical, alchemical and gnostic philosophy on Blake’s art. She unravels the complex, deeply felt symbolism expressed in his paintings and prints, and describes the powerful impact of his reading of Dante, Milton and the Bible. Raine’s compelling text guides the reader through the life and thought of this extraordinary artist. Fully alive to the uniqueness of Blake’s art – which has ‘a reality, a coherence, a climate’ all its own – she introduces famous work such as Jerusalem, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Four Zoas and The Book of Job, relating them to Blake’s world view and explaining their prophetic qualities, their fierce energy, and their central place in British Romantic art.With 185 illustrations in colour

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