Romantic Art in Practice
Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820
Cambridge Studies in Romanticism Series

Exploring the relationship between visual art and literature in the Romantic period, this book makes a claim for a sister-arts 'moment' when the relationship between painting, sculpture, pottery and poetry held special potential for visual artists, engravers and artisans. Elaborating these cultural tensions and associations through a number of case studies, Thora Brylowe sheds light on often untold narratives of English labouring craftsmen and artists as they translated the literary into the visual. Brylowe investigates examples from across the visual spectrum including artefacts, such as Wedgwood's Portland Vase, antiquarianism through the work of William Blake, the career of engraver John Landseer, and the growing influence of libraries and galleries in the period, particularly Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. Brylowe artfully traces the shifting cultural connections between the imaginative word and the image in a period that saw new print technologies deluge Britain with its first mass media.

Introduction; 1. Original copies: Wedgwood's Portland Vase in paint and poem; 2. William Blake, antiquarians, and the status of copy; 3. Literary galleries and the media ecology: painting for print in the age of anthologies; 4. Poetry against the wall: the (sister) arts in crisis; 5. Crossing the line: engraving, John Landseer and the aftermath of the Shakespeare gallery; 6. Ravaged brides: Grecian urns on romantic paper; Bibliography; Index.

Thora Brylowe is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder.