Description:
Repainting the work of another into one's own canvas is a deliberate and often highly fraught act of reuse. This book examines the creation, display, and reception of such images in nineteenth-century Britain. Using pictures-within-pictures, British artists asserted their own painterly abilities and claimed a place for their national school in the international canon. By recognizing these witty redeployments of existing works, viewers could demonstrate their own cultural knowledge. At stake for both artist and audience in such exchanges was status: the status of the painter relative to other artists, and the status of the viewer relative to other audience members. Through examinations of works by Turner, Millais, Davis, Brownlow King, and Frith, this book reveals how these small passages of paint conveyed both personal and national meanings.
Review Quotes:
Winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize for a single-authored book with a subject after 1800!
'Pictures-within-Pictures is a smart, impressively-researched, and rich series of readings of individual paintings that opens up into a thought-provoking discussion of how visual citation and recognition functioned for Victorian artists and viewers, and how such references forged new identities for viewers and audiences in specific exhibition venues.'
--Pamela Fletcher, Bowdoin College
'Catherine Roach has written a fascinating account of an equally fascinating genre that has largely escaped scholarly attention .... As Roach points out in this excellent, innovative study, in reproducing other artists' works, painters made those works their own, appropriating them to comment on on array of moral, social and art world topics and (hopefully) their own place in the canon.'
--Julie Codell, Visual Culture in Britain
'Catherine Roach's Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain announces its quirky theme in its title: paintings that appear within paintings. Such pictures provide a guilty pleasure for the art historian, providing--in Roach's words--"the delighted surprise that comes from identifying an image from memory and seeing it made strange" (19). Yet Roach's book demonstrates that this is not just an art-historical gimmick or a simple riddle. Rather, through such pictures, artists make significant statements about art and nationhood, and propose their own art histories.'
--Andrea Korda, caa.reviews