Paintings from Books

• Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900
  Richard D. Altick. xxvi + 527 pp. (Ohio State University Press, 1985)

Richard Altick, well-known for his work on the English common reader, has turned his attention to painting. Altick's thesis is that from the mid-eighteenth century to the encl of the nineteenth, middle-class literary culture transforms into popular taste through the medium of painting. His argument is based on the questionable assumption that nineteenth-century paintings (which do not interest him for their visual qualities) are equivalent to subliterary texts such as street literature. He defines a literary picture as one that is somehow [sic] related to English literature; 'the pictures', he says, 'were in effect extensions of the books themselves'. He does not tell us how. By limiting himself to oil paintings Altick not only reinforces the tendency to regard Blake and Rossetti as separate and atypical but also, since watercolour was a lowlier and more popular medium than oil, undermines the terms of his enquiry.