Publication date: autumn 2025

Hardback – 234 × 156 mm – 320 pages

Seventy colour illustrations

ISBN 9781843682653

Distilling a lifetime’s study of English art, Duncan Robinson here looks at the six leading artists of the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries through the lens of their relationship with writing. Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Blake, Constable, Turner all engaged in different ways with literature and the word. From Hogarth, who developed a new kind of narrative from his experience of the theatre, to Turner who wrote increasingly elaborate and enigmatic epic poetry to explain his painting, passing by Blake’s naive Songs of Innocence and Experience and his hallucinatory deranged mythological visions, the originality and fascination of these great artists are brought into a new, sharper focus by Robinson’s approach. Written with his characteristic geniality and profound, but lightly worn scholarship, and richly illustrated with familiar and many unfamiliar images, this will be an unmissable book for all interested in this seminal period in English art.

With an introduction by Brian Allen, former Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Duncan Robinson, CBE, DL, FSA was a British art historian and academic. He was the director of the Yale Center for British Art from 1981 to 1995, and of the Fitzwilliam Museum from 1995 to 2007, as well as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Deputy Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University. He died in 2022.