Paul Delaroche: Painting and Popular Spectacle explores the connections between painting and an emergent popular visual culture in the early nineteenth century, which included new forms of optical entertainment such as Panoramas and Dioramas and innovation in fields such as illustration, art reproduction, and stage decor. Delaroche's paintings caused a sensation at the Paris Salon, with critics comparing the emotional response they elicited to that of popular melodrama. Yet his appeal to a certain type of spectator lay behind the increasingly hostile criticism to which his works were subjected, and has in our own time led to his uncertain status in the art historical canon. This book focuses on Delaroche's popularity with a newly expanded audience. Lacking in specialist knowledge, but nevertheless keen to engage with and deeply affected by art, the behaviour of this new public prompted lively discussions about who has the right to judge art and on whatgrounds.
Working across disciplinary boundaries, this book proposes a new reading both of Delaroche and of the connections between the arts in this period. The artist emerges as a figure at the cutting edge of an emergent trans-medial popular visual culture in which we see the formation of modern spectatorship.

About the Author
Patricia Smyth is Senior Research Fellow on the 'Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century' project in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick.

Reviews

'Through sustained analysis of the critical reception of Delaroche's work, this welcome book brings into the foreground the role played by illusion in popularising his distinctive style, and relates his "reality effects" to current debates about the significance of "theatricality" in the development of French painting from the eighteenth century onwards.'

Professor Stephen Bann CBE FBA, University of Bristol

'In a work of impressive interdisciplinary scope, Patricia Smyth applies 21st century theories regarding the immersive and self-commenting technologies of new media to provide an enlightening new way of understanding the simultaneous illusionistic transparency and legibility of Delaroche's art, created for a 19th century audience already affected by technologies of spectacular realism.' Beth S. Wright, Distinguished University Professor of Art History, University of Texas at Arlington

'In accounting for the growing demand for authenticity, she [Smyth] highlights the period's perception of the historical past's ineradicable distance from the present... The book avidly makes the case not only for the modernity of Delaroche's work, but also for the enduring influence of the artist's pictorial strategies on subsequent art and visual culture.' Gulru Cakmak, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide

"In Paul Delaroche: Painting and Popular Spectacle Patricia Smyth uses her evident familiarity with his (Delaroche's) work to pursue a searching investigation of the extent to which the historical painting of the period influenced (and was reciprocally influenced by) the new visual culture that accompanied the rise of the Romantic movement in France... Smyth's study... forms a necessary corrective to existing discussions of Delaroche's critical reception... (and) she breaks new ground by studying the widespread fame of his Marie-Antoinette before the Tribunal..." Stephen Bann, 'Reviving Delaroche', The Burlington Magazine

'For specialists in nineteenth-century painting, Smyth's book provides new purchase on the criteria informing response to one of the most popular artists of post-Napoleonic France. Rethinking the vocabulary applicable to Delaroche's emotionally-charged historical reconstructions, the book is germane to scholars focused on any mimetic genre-whether drama, cinema, or the novel-in which deft artifice masquerades as truth.' Jonathan P. Ribner, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

Book Information
ISBN 9781802070217
Author Patricia Smyth
Format Hardback
Page Count 264
Imprint Liverpool University Press
Publisher Liverpool University Press