| This study takes an interdisciplinary approach to the historical arts British culture of the late eighteenth century. The historical arts include verbal or visual narratives portraying characters and events from an ostensibly "real" past. Focusing on history-writing and history-painting, I argue that the historical arts illustrate the slow formation of an Anglo-British national identity, that tentative concord on what it meant to be British, rather than English, Scottish or Welsh. This study contributes an aesthetic to the "new British history," a recent alternative to histories in which Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are inexorably assimilated into "Little England." I illustrate how the fine arts produced and resisted this kind of history-making, offering practitioners of the new history materials for further inquiry. In exploring national identity alongside history-painting, this study also assists the critical recuperation of that art.;The project features a cast of interrelated characters, many of whom were friendly with each other: David Hume, Angelica Kauffman, Benjamin West, Sir Joshua Reynolds, James Macpherson, Thomas Pennant, Henry MacKenzie, Henry Fuseli, and Sir Walter Scott. Chapter I surveys history-writing and history-painting in the eighteenth century, and relates them to national identity. Chapter II, "Made in Italy," examines the work of Angelica Kauffman, a Swiss history-painter in Britain. Her critical reception illustrates the conflict between English national identity and Continental schools of the Grand Manner that limited the possibility of an uniquely English Grand Manner. Chapter III, "Domestic Antiquities," discusses an event from the "Dark Ages," the marriage of Vortigern, the British (Welsh) king who admitted Saxon invaders into Britain, with Rowena, a Saxon (English) princess. Eighteenth-century English painters colonized this legend, portraying the betrayal of the Welsh Britons as England's founding moment. Chapter IV, "Highland Histories," examines the Scottish Highland superstition of the second sight, whose seers perceive visions of the future. As history in reverse, the second sight bore Jacobitical significance, and acted as a counter-foil to Whig interpretations of history. An afterword relates eighteenth-century concerns about national identity to historical films of the 1990s. |
