Tender beauty: Victorian painting and the problem of sentimentality
Bown, Nicola (2011) Tender beauty: Victorian painting and the problem of sentimentality. Journal of Victorian Culture 16 (2), pp. 214-225. ISSN 1355-5502.
Abstract
One of the most enduring critical legacies of modernism has been the condemnation of the sentimentality of Victorian art. This essay argues that recent art historical attempts to discuss Victorian sentimentality are condemned to repeat modernist critical judgements about sentimental art because of their espousal of historicist methodologies which produce historical distance between artwork and the critical viewer in the present. Instead, I argue, our own emotional involvement with Victorian paintings should form part of our scholarly accounts of their meanings, because their affective power is central to their aesthetic qualities. To look properly, I argue, is also to feel. To exemplify this I discuss Augustus Mulready's Remembering the Joys that Have Passed Away (1873), in order to show how a sentimental look at this painting undermines approaches that absorb sentimentality into historicist, social-constructionist and ideological accounts of such a picture.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Victorian sentimentality, modernism, historicism, ideology, Augustus Mulready, children, snow, feeling |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Nineteenth-Century Studies, Centre for |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 13 Mar 2013 13:24 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Aug 2023 12:32 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/6245 |
Statistics
Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.
Archive Staff Only (login required)
 |
Edit/View Item |