The personalities and careers of Victorian artists, and their social and intellectual context, are explored in this account, which aims to reveal how they blended foreign influences with the native British tradition.
The range of artistic production in the Victorian age included history painting; topographical landscapes of the Continent and the Middle East; Landseer's royal portraits and heroic animal pictures; Pre-Raphaelite painting with its combined naturalism and symbolism; Leighton's classical mythologies; and Frith's popular depictions of the leisured middle classes. Amid this great variety of styles and emphasis, influential critics such as Ruskin dictated that art should be morally uplifting, an orthodoxy challenged by Whistler, Sickert, Steer and their fellows among the "London Impressionists".