Elizabeth Prettejohn – författare

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cézanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

Pater the Classicist is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater's important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. Widely considered our greatest aesthetic critic and now best known as a precursor to modernist writers and post-modernist thinkers of the twentieth century, Pater was also a classicist by profession who taught at the University of Oxford. He wrote extensively about Greek art and philosophy, but also authored an influential historical novel set in ancient Rome, Marius the Epicurean, and a variety of short stories depicting the survival of classical culture in later ages. These superficially diverging interests actually went closely hand-in-hand: it can plausibly be asserted that it is the classical tradition in its broadest sense, including the question of how to understand its workings and temporalities, which forms Pater's principal subject as a writer. Although he initially approached antiquity obliquely, through the Italian Renaissance, for example, or the poetry of William Morris, later in his career he wrote more, and more directly, about the ancient world, and particularly about Greece, his first love. The essays in this collection cover all his major works and reveal a many-sided and inspirational figure, whose achievements helped to reinvigorate the classical studies that were the basis of the English educational system of the nineteenth century, and whose conception of Classics as cross-disciplinary and outward-looking can be a model to scholars and students today. They discuss his classicism generally, his fiction set in classical antiquity, his writings on Greek art and culture, and those on ancient philosophy, and in doing so they also illuminate Pater's position within his Victorian context, among figures such as J. A. Symonds, Henry Nettleship, Vernon Lee, and Jane Harrison, as well as his place in the study and reception of Classics today.

With the rise of museums in the 19th century, including the formation in 1824 of the National Gallery in London, as well as the proliferation of widely available published reproductions, the art of the past became visible and accessible in Victorian England as never before. Inspired by the work of Sandro Botticelli, Jan van Eyck, Diego Velázquez, and others, British artists elevated contemporary art to new heights through a creative process that emphasized imitation and emulation. Elizabeth Prettejohn analyzes the ways in which the Old Masters were interpreted by critics, curators, and scholars, and argues that Victorian artists were, paradoxically, at their most original when they imitated the Old Masters most faithfully.  Covering the arc of Victorian art from the Pre-Raphaelites through to the early modernists, this volume traces the ways in which artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Orpen engaged with the art of the past and produced some of the greatest art of the later 19th century. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The group of young painters and writers who coalesced into the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the middle years of the nineteenth century became hugely influential in the development not only of literature and painting, but also more generally of art and design. Though their reputation has fluctuated over the years, their achievements are now recognised and their style enjoyed and studied widely. This volume explores the lives and works of the central figures in the group: among others, the Rossettis, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. This is the first book to provide a general introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite movement that integrates its literary and visual art forms. The Companion explains what made the Pre-Raphaelite style unique in painting, poetry, drawing and prose.

The group of young painters and writers who coalesced into the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the middle years of the nineteenth century became hugely influential in the development not only of literature and painting, but also more generally of art and design. Though their reputation has fluctuated over the years, their achievements are now recognised and their style enjoyed and studied widely. This volume explores the lives and works of the central figures in the group: among others, the Rossettis, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. This is the first book to provide a general introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite movement that integrates its literary and visual art forms. The Companion explains what made the Pre-Raphaelite style unique in painting, poetry, drawing and prose.

Walter Pater's significance for the institutionalization of English studies at British universities in the nineteenth century is often overlooked. Addressing the importance of his volume Appreciations (1889) in placing English literature in both a national and an international context, this book demonstrates the indebtedness of the English essay to the French tradition and brings together the classic, the Romantic, the English and the European. With essays on drama, prose, and poetry, from Shakespeare and Browne, to Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Pater's contemporaries Rossetti and Morris, Appreciations exemplifies ideals of aesthetic criticism formulated in Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Subjectivity pervades Pater's essays on the English authors, while bringing out their exceptional qualities in a manner reaching far into twentieth-century criticism. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

What can modern art have to do with ancient sculpture? Surely the excitement of modern art lies in its utter repudiation of classical example? Elizabeth Prettejohn's important and revisionist new book argues otherwise: that ancient sculpture and modern art have been in constant dialogue since Johann Joachim Winckelmann invented the modern discipline of art history. It shows how ancient sculptures could inspire artists such as Rodin, Leighton or Picasso, and how modern artworks could help to interpret sculptors such as Pheidias and Praxiteles. The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture will have strong appeal to students of modern art and the classics alike.