British Art, 1848-1914

book Reviews Winston Churchill and the Queen). Nor is the index flawless: Under Western Eyes is mentioned in the text but missing in the index; ditto for the prizefighter Georges Carpentier; "feminism," a word according to the Oxford English Dictionary first used in 1895, is not here, presumably subsumed under "women: enfranchised" and "women: suffrage," surely only part of that complex story. A word explaining the indexing principles might have spared such caviling, to say nothing of aiding the reader. Specialists of the later two decades of the Transition period will appreciate this as a handy overview that can be recommended to undergraduates with the caveat that it is but a single, and thus somewhat lopsided, take on an utterly extraordinary period of social, economic , political and artistic challenge and change. To Wilson's credit, he stuffs a lot into his stocking, and if not all of it comes from the best class shops, there's enough to chew on and guidance to other sources. J. H. STAPE St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill, London British Art, 1848-1914 David Peters Corbett. The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848-1914. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. xviii + 318 pp. Cloth $75.00 Paper $35.00 DURING the high tide of modernism Victorian paintings were almost universally despised but now they are much more highly regarded. The rediscovery in its early stages may have been fuelled by the growth of social history and the undoubted fact that those canvases frequently had stories that could tell us much about Victorian society and its values. In this study, Corbett is moving away from that approach and is returning to a concentration on the works of art themselves . It is far from being connoisseurship in its traditional and longstanding form, but it is an emphasis on the painting itself in new and interesting ways. Dare one say that it would appear to be connoisseurship in a postmodern mode? That is mostly evident in the extreme complexity of the language used, so much so that I frequently found the text quite hard to follow, particularly in its emphasis upon "unmediated" art and "materiality ." I needed frequently to resort to the dictionary. "Ekphrasis" was, for example, unfindable in five dictionaries, even Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. I was fortunate in meeting a distinguished art historian who defined it for me—the interplay between a verbal description of a painting and the painting itself. It most comes into play in the com343 ELT 49 : 3 2006 pelling chapter on Charles Ricketts and Oscar Wilde. Corbett writes about Ricketts's comments on Titian's Assunta: "In that way Ricketts attempts to delay ekphrasis by defining value as a mystery, a force outside the true description of technical analysis. Ekphrasis confesses the personal interest that technical description displaces, and its introduction is resisted accordingly. But the deferral of value, which is always just out of the reach of technical analysis, ensures that he cannot avoid it. When he does resort to ekphrasis in order to assert value, Ricketts does so unequivocally" (155-56). Corbett, to the degree that I can follow his discussion, seems to be defending British painting against two forces that might be construed as enemies, one internal, one external. The internal one is more of a love/hate relationship: language itself. The greatest English art form is the word. English painters tend to be deeply literary, and allowing for how dramatically art has changed, I believe that in many senses they still continue to be so. At times this situation can go too far, as in John Carey's recent What Good Are the Arts? (2005) in which he would appear to dismiss art, and certainly to have it lose out to his own preferred metier of language. Despite Carey's championing of literature , his is a rather philistine work. In contrast, Corbett is convincingly assertive on the value of the art that he discusses. Yet art in England has an inferiority complex in relation to literature. Quite a few of the painters he discusses have also made notable contributions to the written word: Rossetti, Whistler, Ricketts, Sickert. But Corbett wishes...