Painting Out of the Ordinary

At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, London's art world was taken by storm by a new generation of painters, whose novel approach to the depiction of everyday life critics loudly trumpeted as a sign of the nation's cultural pre-eminence. Led by the precociously talented David Wilkie, this highly successful artistic movement sought to transform what was generally regarded as a low and vulgar pictorial tradition, with its roots in seventeenth-century Flanders and Holland, into a vehicle for entertaining but improving narratives which would set new standards of truthfulness in their imitation of nature. But on a deeper level, as David Solkin shows in this provocative yet highly accessible study, the same phenomenon also registered the profoundly ambivalent feelings of a country in the throes of accelerating economic growth, and of conflict both at home and abroad. What emerges from the imagery of Wilkie and his colleagues – among them William Mulready, Edward Bird and the controversial watercolourist Thomas Heaphy – is a widespread sense that the ordinary lives of the common people are becoming increasingly bound up with the exceptional events of 'history'; that traditional boundaries between country and city are in the process of melting away; and that a more regularised and dynamic present is everywhere encroaching upon the customary patterns of the past. In its fascination with the compression of space and time, early nineteenth-century British genre painting locates itself at the start of a trajectory linking the art of the Age of Revolution with the postmodern culture of the present day. With its plethora of illustrations, many of works published here for the first time, "Painting out of the Ordinary" will be compulsory reading for anyone interested in British art and society of the Romantic era.