The Victorian Painting of Modern Life

This text offers a comprehensive and tightly focused account of the emergence and flourishing of British modern-life paintings at midcentury. Contemporary subjects were new and risky in the late 1840s and early 1850s; immensely popular and much debated by 1858; and already falling out of fashion by the mid-1860s. The book follows this story chronologically, moving from the anxious attempts by young artists such as William Powell Frith and William Holman Hunt to capture modern life in a visual la