Fishy Business: Richard Wright's The Fishery (1764), Marine Painting, and the Limits of Refinement in Eighteenth-Century London

Ordinarily marginalized for their commercially-driven subject-matter and artisanal practices, British marine painters were presented with a new opportunity in the 1760s: a public competition encouraging them to produce aesthetically-refined "works of art" commensurate with Britain's new identity as maritime and cultural world power. Through a close analysis of the first prize-winning painting (Richard Wright's The Fishery), its problematic subject-matter (the Society of Arts' "Land-Carriage Fish Scheme"), and the competition's scandalous disintegration, this article describes the anxieties, failures, and conflicts generated by such attempts to forge a culture of refinement within a society increasingly set against itself by commercialism and competitiveness.