Masculinities in Victorian Painting

This fully illustrated study examines the construction of masculinity in culture based on an analysis of pictorial representations of the male in a wide range of contexts: social historical legal literary institutional anthropological educational marital imperial and aesthetic. Powerful images from the work of dozens of Victorian artists - from Leighton Waterhouse Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema to Dicksee Pettie Watts Woodville and Tuke to name a few - are used to illustrate the 5 key paradigms of masculinity: the classical hero the gallant knight the challenged paterfamilias the valiant soldier and the male nude. Aspects of 20th-century theory such as rescue compulsion male sexuality the male gaze and racial ideas are also considered. The author concludes that maleness was and is learned and 19th-century ideas still influence the construction of manhood today; that social institutions are influenced by and themselves use artistic representation; that artistic images strongly influence ideas of gender; and that multi-disciplinary cultural study is the best way to examine the formation of gender ideologies.