BRITISH IMPRESSIONISM - Hardcover

MC CONKEY K

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714825212 ISBN 13: 9780714825212

Publisher: PHAIDON PRESS, 1999

Synopsis

In the late-19th century, contact with French Impressionist ideas meant that British artists' discontent with academic Victorian art became transmuted into a new concept of the role of art and the artist. In a new awareness of painting, disparate artists merged and refined their ideas on colour, light and form into an Impressionistic style that is distinctly British. Artists such as Philip Wilson Steer, George Clausen, Roderic O'Conor and Dame Laura Knight depicted an enormous variety of urban and rural scenes, from fashionable tennis parties, music-hall entertainers and laundry shops, to goose girls, boat-builders, turnip harvesters and picnickers.

About this title

About the Author:

Kenneth McConkey is Professor of Art History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Northumbria at Newcastle. He has written extensively about late Victorian and Edwardian painting.

From Publishers Weekly:

British impressionism, like its American counterpart, has skulked in the shadows of Monet, Renoir and other French favorites. Here, in 132 excellent plates and an engaging text, is a comprehensive survey of a movement that wore many faces, from Laura Knight's intensely radiant beach scenes to Walter Sickert's urban world refracted through a restricted palette and quirky narrative technique. There is no doubt that the British impressionists are cooler and more controlled than the French: Henry Herbert La Thangue's landscapes, for example, impress with their solidity even as their lyric poetry transports the viewer. Yet the British were also adept at recording transitory moments, middle-class pleasures, effects of light and atmosphere. McConkey, who teaches in England, follows the vagaries of a movement enlivened by American expatriates James Whistler and John Singer Sargent and French expatriate Lucien Pissarro, son of the famous impressionist, Camille.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: PHAIDON PRESS
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0714825212
• ISBN 13: 9780714825212
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160