The Victorians

J.M.W. Turner, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, James Tissot, and William Holman Hunt are among the great Victorian painters whose work is showcased in this elegant volume, which accompanies an exhibition opening in February 1997 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.Britain was the world's most powerful and technologically advanced country during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), and British painters responded to their nation's rapid industrialization and increasing materialism with a mixture of realism and romanticism. Illustrated and discussed here are not only characteristically Victorian narrative and genre paintings but also work that reflected international cultural developments. From the medieval tendencies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites to the classicism of Frederic Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Victorian painting is seen to have encompassed a broad range of subjects and styles.