Noble art: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c.1600-1800 - Softcover

The words 'amateur artist' conjure up a picture of Victorian ladies and gentlemen sketching in watercolours out of doors, and of portfolios and sketchbooks filled with charmingly naive landscapes and flowers gathering dust in attics. This book sets out to challenge this image.
Far from being a Victorian phenomenon, drawing and limning (painting in miniature) were among the polite accomplishments of courtiers and virtuosi of the seventeenth-century Stuart court, including Prince Rupert and John Evelyn. Royal princesses, ladies at court and their circle of well-educated 'Bluestocking' friends made copies of paintings, miniatures and pastel portraits, and worked flowers in needlework, watercolour and cut-paper. Later in the eighteenth century, followers of Alexander Cozens and William Gilpin produced landscapes in monochrome, while the military pupils of Paul Sandby painted more highly coloured prospects of the coasts and fortifications of Britain's colonies, as well as the ruins of antiquity nearer to home. Grand tourists of both sexes interpreted the landscape and people of Europe through eyes trained by drawing masters like John Robert Cozens and Francis Towne. However, professional artists soon came to feel threatened by the skill and influence of amateurs, and when the Society of Painters in Water Colours was founded in 1804 non-professionals were excluded from membership, resulting in the emergence of an amateur closer to the Victorian stereotype.
Over 200 works, most of them from the British Museum's collections and previously unpublished, are described and illustrated in this major study of a neglected aspect of British art history.

Kim Sloan is Curator of the British School in the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.