18th century
A01=Matthew C Hunter
ambitious paintings
art
artists
Author_Matthew C Hunter
british pictorial arts
Category=AFC
Category=AJ
Category=TBX
chemical volatility
chemicals
critics
dynamic combustibles
engineering
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_tech-engineering
experimental philosophers
experiments
history of technology
intellectual reflection
James Watt
leading industrialists
london
matthew boulton
methods
photography
portraitist
replication
royal society
sir joshua reynolds
techniques
unstable chemistry
visual effects
Product details
- ISBN 9780226390253
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 25 Feb 2020
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century--and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today. As early as the 1670s, experimental philosophers at the early Royal Society of London had studied the visual effects of dynamic combustibles. By the 1770s, chemical volatility became central to the ambitious paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, premier portraitist and first president of Britain's Royal Academy of Arts. Valued by some critics for changing in time (and thus, for prompting intellectual reflection on the nature of time), Reynolds's unstable chemistry also prompted new techniques of chemical replication among Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and other leading industrialists. In turn, those replicas of chemically decaying academic paintings were rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century and claimed as origin points in the history of photography.
Tracing the long arc of chemically produced and reproduced art from the 1670s through the 1860s, the book reconsiders early photography by situating it in relationship to Reynolds's replicated paintings and the literal engines of British industry. By following the chemicals, Painting with Fire remaps familiar stories about academic painting and pictorial experiment amid the industrialization of chemical knowledge.
Matthew C. Hunter is associate professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
