Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History embraces many aspects of the so-called 'new' art history - attention to issues of class and gender, reception and spectatorship, racism and Eurocentrism - while at the same time recovering the remarkable vitality, salience and subversiveness of the era's best art. Indeed, the authors insist that there is a profound sympathy between these new perspectives and the art under examination. For it was nineteenth-century artists who first addressed the issues that preoccupy audiences and scholars today: the relation between popular and élite culture, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the question of the canon, and the representation of workers, women and non-whites.
In this edition, two completely new chapters examine the varied facets of architecture and design from 1790 to 1851, and from mid-century leading into the early twentieth century. In addition, there are new sections on challenges to academic painting in Russia and on the Vienna Secession, and Pre-Raphaelitism in England and the rise of naturalism in Germany are considered in greater depth. Many more illustrations are now in colour.