Publisher's Synopsis
Kriz studies the way in which the application of paint was thought to represent the character of the artist and particular forms of Englishness. Examining a wide range of contemporary paintings, prints, and written texts, she determines how a "visual rhetoric" that relied heavily on brilliant surface effects was understood to participate in discourses on art, politics, commerce, and morality during the decades in which England was at war, militarily and culturally, with Napoleonic France. Kriz shows that the power of the landscape genius lay in his ability to negotiate the seemingly contradictory demands of a market in luxury commodities and a social ideal of a virile and virtuous Englishness. The genius's encounter with external nature provided him with an alibi that served to obscure his activities as an economic producer in a competitive market society.
Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art