This collection brings together for the first time many of the influential Marxist art-historian Andrew Hemingway's most important works on Romantic landscape painting. With a careful eye for both the ideological and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of pieces, Hemingway's keen insights offer stunning new perspectives on some of the most important painters of the era.

List of Illustrations ... vii Acknowledgements ... xi Sources and Occasions ... xii Introduction: Theoretical Apologia ... 1 Aesthetics and Ideology 1 The Science of Taste in the Eighteenth Century: Philosophical Criticism and the Scottish Historical School ... 41 2 Academic Theory versus Association Aesthetics: The Ideological Forms of a Conflict of Interests in the Early Nineteenth Century ... 86 3 Bourgeois Critiques of the Monopoly of Taste ... 114 4 Genius, Gender, and Progress: Benthamism and the Arts in the 1820s ... 150 5 Cultural Philanthropy and the Invention of the Norwich School ... 181 Landscape and Ideology 6 Meaning in Cotman's Norfolk Subjects ... 217 7 Sheep as a Pictorial Motif: Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral ... 246 8 Artisanal Worldview in the Paintings of John Crome ... 297 9 John Crome's 'Local Scenery': Iconography and the Ideology of the Picturesque ... 336 10 Constable and his Audience: An Argument for Iconography ... 387 11 The Field of Waterloo Exposed: Turner, Byron, and the Politics of Reaction ... 420 Coda: Regarding Art History ... 459 Bibliography ... 464 Index ... 492