Writing the Lives of Painters Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760-1810

Writing the Lives of Painters focuses on the development of artists' biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. The development of the art market and the burgeoning of an exhibition culture, as well as the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, all contributed to redefining the rank of artists in society. Contemporary artists were discussed in a wide range of literary forms such as exhibition reviews, art-criticalpamphlets, and journalistic gossip-columns, and biographies. This book is an account of a new literary genre, tracing its emergence in the cultural context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It maintains that the proliferation of a myriad biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artisticoriginality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent 'British School' of painting, and examines how and why the art historiographic model established by Georgio Vasari was gradually dismantled in the hands of British biographers during the Romantic period.

Karen Junod is a Lecturer in English literature at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland).