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Description
Christopher Rovee. Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+251. $55.00.
Imagine the faces of the Presidents of the United States in chronological order, or, if you will, those of British monarchs going back to George I. In doing this, you have created, in Christopher Rovee's use of the term, a gallery. As few of us have seen more than one or two presidents, kings, or queens, almost all of our images will necessarily be taken from photographs, paintings, engravings, and other representations. We are free to keep our galleries mental, or, if moved by patriotic, artistic, or entrepreneurial zeal, to turn them into external realities, whether online, in a bricks-and mortar space, or on the printed page. Our galleries would not of course be "objective" renditions; an integral part of the gallery is the spin put on its images. A future scholar examining our galleries might draw various conclusions about our society, as Christopher Rovee does about British visual culture in Imagining the Gallery.
Rovee wisely does not attempt a history of galleries from 1768 through 1832, but instead focuses on five aspects of his subject in chapters framed by a substantial introduction and a short epilogue. In the later eighteenth century, as he observes, the highest artistic mode was considered to be history painting but the number of portraits exhibited at the Royal Academy exceeded the history paintings by far. The reason is not hard to find: portraits were almost always painted on commission while no one but the very rich could afford to buy or find the space to hang most history painting, with the occasional exception of institutions. (Reward could be slow in the case of the latter: William Blake asserted that while executing The Progressive of Human Culture at the Adelphi for the Society of Arts, James Barry lived on bread and apples.) As portraiture had become the dominant mode in practice, something had to be done to elevate its status in order to force market... |
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