Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art

Ann Bermingham

ISBN 10: 0300080395 / ISBN 13: 9780300080391

Published by Yale University Press, New Haven; London, 2000

About this Item

The cloth boards are bright and clean with slight edgewear and the upper page edges have a little soiling and staining. Small stain to the ffep with contents fine. The dust jacket is sunned to the spine and the top of the rear which has some scratching and staining. There is a little creasing but it is otherwise very good. Sent from our bookshop in the UK. ; Small 4to 9" - 11" tall; xv,[1],304 pages.

Seller Inventory # k608

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art
• Publisher: Yale University Press, New Haven; London
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300080395
• ISBN 13: 9780300080391
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 1.6 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

Rather than a history of techniques, media, and practitioners, Learning to Draw is an original and stimulating examination of drawing's cultural uses and meanings. Using a variety of sources including pedagogical and philosophical texts, novels, manuals of etiquette and decorum, letters and diaries, as well as drawings made by amateurs and professionals, Bermingham explores the social space that drawing both occupied and helped to form. Put simply, her book explains how drawing came to be seen as a practice of everyday life in the early modern period, what processes, both practical and ideological, enabled this to happen, how it intersected with changing social, political and practical needs, and what kind of cultural context enabled it to emerge as an amateur pastime.

Reviews

Starting with the 16th-century Italian influence of Castiglione's concept of courtly grace and concluding with the effects of 19th-century photography, Bermingham (art, architecture, and women's studies, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) presents the complex social environment of amateur drawing in England. Despite her modest statement that this is by no means a comprehensive study, she explores many aspects of her subject that will probably be unfamiliar to most readers (e.g., one section is about businesses that catered to amateur artists). The botanical illustrations and the beautiful images found in landscape "sketch books" are definite highlights. Although the focus is on drawings, media such as paintings and drawings adapted into prints are also discussed and shown. Apects of class and gender are considered throughout, with the chapter "Accomplished Women" being particularly noteworthy. Because of its highly detailed, scholarly writing, this book is recommended as most useful for university-level art history collections.
-Anne Marie Lane, Univ. of Wyoming, Laramie
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.