A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art

Welcome to the companion site for A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art.

This section of the website offers additional material on eighteenth-century art beyond Europe, specifically in China, Japan and India, including suggestions for further reading and web-links relevant to these topics. It also offers suggestions for additional web resources for Chapters 1–5 of the book. Finally, it includes some suggestions for museums and galleries that have significant collections or exhibits of eighteenth-century art.

The “Introduction” to A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art includes a section on “Tradition and Modernity in Art Outside Europe.” The last few pages of the section “Markets and Patrons” of Chapter 3 examine issues relating to European trade with other nations, principally China (which inspired the European vogue for chinoiserie) and India; and in the same chapter the section entitled “Painting for an Imperial Public” examines the ways in which western art represented colonized lands and peoples. The section in Chapter 4 entitled “Exploring Moral Boundaries: Orientalism, the Senses and the Imagination” considers western perceptions and fantasies of the “east.” In each of these cases the emphasis is on western interactions with nations beyond Europe and on western representations and interpretations of less familiar peoples and cultures. The aim of this website is to examine in a little more detail cultural and artistic developments in China, Japan and India themselves; and to adopt as far as possible a less Eurocentric view while referring to awareness in these countries of western artistic techniques. Study in the west of art outside Europe is evolving rapidly, yet with relatively little scholarly discussion available in English. It is hoped that the following resources, based exclusively on material available in English, will offer a useful basic introduction to the topic.

In order to access these additional resources use the ‘Browse by Resource’ tab in the menu at the top of this page.

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