Art in Britain 1660–1815

David H. Solkin is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the History of Art and Dean and Deputy Director of The Courtauld Institute of Art. His publications include Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction (Tate Gallery, 1982), Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 1993) and Painting out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Yale University Press, 2008); he is also the editor and co-author of Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836 (Yale University Press, 2001) and Turner and the Masters (Tate, 2009).

“Solkin is the author of two or three of the most important books on 18th and early 19th century British art to have been published in the last quarter century… In his Pelican history he has attempted something even more ambitious, and has been triumphantly successful. He describes it as a social history of art, a critical analysis of how the visual culture of the 18th century ‘operated within a social field structured by relationships of power’. The book is extraordinarily comprehensive, its discussion of the different genres of painting as they develop through the 18th century so full, detailed and thoughtful that it will be completely impossible to do it justice”—John Barrell, London Review of Books