Body-building

This ambitious and original book explores the radical transformation of the heroic male body in late eighteenth-century British art. It ranges across a period in which a modern art world was established, taking into account the lives and careers of a succession of major figures – from Benjamin West and Gavin Hamilton, to Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman and William Blake – and influential institutions, from the Royal Academy through to the commercial galleries of the 1790s. Organized around the historical traumas of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the Wars of American Independence (1775-1783) and the French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars (1789-1815), Body-building places the visual representation of the hero at the heart of a series of narratives about social and economic change, gender identity and the transformation of cultural value on the eve of modernity. In the course of the 1750s and 1760s, British culture was overhauled, with the introduction of public art exhibitions, a booming print market and the establishment of new art institutions. Younger painters and sculptors were deceived into believing that by pursuing the 'Grand Manner' and creating images of heroes engaged in noble acts, they could rival the greatest masters of the past and embody society's highest values. In responding, however, to the needs of a highly diversified art public and to profound historical doubt around the validity of heroic masculinity, they in fact created weird and volatile images, forging an uncompromising new ideal of the artist as heroic outsider. Martin Myrone offers a fresh analysis of this phenomenon, demonstrating complex relationships with the Gothic, the cult of sensibility and the politics of empire. Combining visual analysis, social history and masculinity studies, Body-building offers a vivid image of this critical period in Britain's cultural history and establishes an ambitious new framework for the study of late eighteenth-century art and gender.