New Directions in British Art History of the Eighteenth Century

This essay examines new developments in the history of eighteenth-century British art since the publication of David Solkin's Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England in 1993. While Solkin's account of an urban professional class recasting a civic humanist ideology in its own polite and commercial image continues to hold tremendous sway in the field, this state of the field article identifies three major trends that have tempered and challenged that account. Recent scholarship dealing with gender, space, and empire has subtly reoriented the field towards a more inclusive notion of artistic agency and reception, a more synchronic and spatial approach, and an increasingly global perspective.