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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
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612-822-4611
The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Paperback

Art HistoryGeneral SociologyBritish History

ISBN10: 0804748004
ISBN13: 9780804748001
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: May 29 2003
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.66 Width: 6.36 Depth: 8.96
Language: English

The Education of the Eye examines the origins of visual culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It claims that at the moment when works of visual art were first displayed and contemplated as aesthetic objects two competing descriptions of the viewer or spectator promoted two very different accounts of culture. The first was constructed on knowledge, on what one already knew, while the second was grounded in the eye itself. Though the first was most likely to lead to a socially and politically elite form for visual culture, the second, it was held, would almost certainly end up in the chaos of the mob. But there was another route through these conflicting accounts of the visual that preserved the education of the eye while at the same time allowing the eye freedom to enter into the realm of culture. This third route, that of the sentimental look, is explored in a series of contexts: the gallery, the pleasure garden, the landscape park, and the country house. The Education of the Eye sets out to reclaim visual culture for the democracy of the eye and to explain how aesthetic contemplation may, once more, be open to all who have eyes to look.

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