Alex Kidson – författare

This collection of writings by specialists from many disciplines explores a wide range of topics relating to English painter George Romney (1734–1802). The contributors to the book address not only Romney’s personality and artistic practice, but also aspects of the cultural context of his work, such as its relation to theater and its diffusion through prints. Key essays discuss the central themes of the artist’s work, his rivalry with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and his painting technique. Alex Kidson offers in the introduction a survey of previous writings about Romney and their impact on the artist’s reputation two centuries after his death. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

After a period of ‘darkness’ when Liverpool – the second city of the British Empire – lacked the kind of annual public art exhibition enjoyed by many of Britain’s other provincial centres, light dawned in 1871 when a group of town councillors gambled with public funds to create the first Liverpool Autumn Exhibition. Hailed a success, the exhibition would go on to become an annual event and a cultural institution, the Royal Academy of the North of England. From 1877 the history of the Autumn Exhibition was intertwined with that of Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, but it was during its first six years of growth that its immense popularity was sealed. This new study anatomises those six little-known Victorian art exhibitions, and assembles images of the key, and representative, works that were seen and sold in them.

The first complete catalogue of the paintings of David Wilkie, one of Britain’s most significant and influential painters of the nineteenth century. This book catalogues in depth every painting by the Scottish painter Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841). Trained at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh, Wilkie moved to London at the age of twenty and created an immediate sensation at the Royal Academy with his Village Politicians, a scene set in a Scottish inn during the French Revolution. Wilkie created paintings that demanded to be read like novels, his cast of characters based on an extraordinary skill in painting expressions and honed by intense study of costume and settings. Even as his style changed, Wilkie enjoyed celebrity and the patronage of royalty, aristocracy and dedicated collectors. Engravings spread his work to every corner of Europe and the USA. In his lifetime, among British painters his fame far exceeded that of Constable, who modelled for Wilkie, and Turner, whose deep respect for the Scotsman was enshrined in his famous Peace, Burial at Sea. Over fifty years in the making, this catalogue brings together the fullest-ever corpus of research on Wilkie’s paintings, the prints after them, the cultural influences on them, and the people that commissioned and bought them. Not only is this the essential guide to the career of the artist, it is also a rich source of information about the times in which he lived.