The Art Institute of Chicago
Museum Studies
Volume 31, no. 1 (Spring 2005)
Edited by Gregory Nosan
The Art Institute of Chicago is celebrated for its holdings of nineteenth-century art, which contain many little-known masterpieces created in Britain and America during the Victorian age. In this special publication, a team of curators and scholars surveys a wide range of the museum’s Victorian-era objects, capturing the period’s fascinating mix of historical revivalism and stylistic innovation and illuminating a historical moment in which art objects fulfilled the varied desires of a wider range of consumers than ever before. Both general readers and more specialized audiences will enjoy the volume’s mix of short essays and a fully illustrated catalogue section, which together offer a challenging, nuanced look at the complexities of Victorian art and life. Essay topics include the burgeoning Victorian print market, an intimate sketchbook used by the English painter Edward Burne-Jones, still-life painting in nineteenth-century America, a spectacularly restored Gothic-style wine cabinet, and a rare album of pioneering photographs compiled by an aristocratic family. The catalogue section features highlights of the museum’s Victorian collection, including furniture, paintings, works on paper, photographs, and textiles by such noted artists as Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, John Everett Millais, William Morris, and Edward John Poynter. This publication is at once an introduction to a remarkable group of objects and a window onto an age of extraordinary social change and fertile artistic production.
Articles in this publication:
Martha Tedeschi, “‘Where the Picture Cannot Go, the Engravings Penetrate’: Prints and the Victorian Art Market”
Ghenette Zelleke, “Telling Stories in the Gothic Vein: William Burges and the Art of Painted Furniture”
Emily Heye, “Conserving the Art Institute’s ‘Sideboard and Wine Cabinet’”
Judith A. Barter, “True to the Sense and False in Its Essence: Still Life and Trompe I’Oeil Painting in Victorian America”
Debra N. Mancoff, “Unpainted Masterpieces: The Drawings of Edward Burne-Jones”
Douglas R. Nickel, “From the Manor House to the Asylum: The George Cowper Album”
96 pages, 8 3/8 x 10 1/4 in.
ISBN-13: 9780300113419
ISBN-10: 0300113412
