Art and Action

What is the purpose of art? In the middle of the nineteenth century, English artists and art writers argued that painting was a powerful, untapped vehicle of social reform. Art had the ability--indeed, the responsibility--to provoke real change to improve lives in the face of rapid industrialisation, increasingly visible poverty, and political unrest. The belief that painting should have a social and ethical motive became widespread in the Victorian period, yet it has not been thoroughly examined in subsequent scholarship. Art and Action reconstructs this forgotten discourse, showing how the idea of art as social reform shaped beliefs about art's purpose, inspired new strategies of political engagement, and laid the groundwork for the aesthetic revolution of the twentieth century. Drawing on evidence from a rich array of literary and visual sources, Chloe Ward brings together the artists, philanthropists, and critics who debated the political purpose of painting, including John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, George Frederic Watts, Richard Redgrave, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater. Through close readings of their work, Ward identifies six predominant "social theories of painting" that defined art's role in Britain during a momentous era of reform. Art and Action compellingly reveals that in nineteenth-century Britain, painting was not seen merely as a lens through which to understand society but as a tool by which to shape it.