An entertaining and illuminating look at how the Victorians constructed their - and our - sense of the past and expressed it through art - by one of Britain's most celebrated historians.
Bluff King Hal, magnificent Elizabeth, innocent Princes in the Tower, beautiful, tragic Lady Jane Grey or Mary Queen of Scots on the scaffold, Cavaliers and Jacobites, the doomed handsome heroes of a lost cause; that is how we think of them. But why?
The spell they cast is one of reality amplified by the history painting of the Victorian age. Whole generations of schoolchildren were brought up on textbooks with reproductions of 'And When Did You Last See Your Father?', 'The Boyhood Of Raleigh' and Flora Macdonald's 'Farewell To Prince Charles': "Will ye no come back again?"
Yet these paintings and so many others depicting the Wounded Cavalier, King Charles and Nell Gwyn, Alfred and the cakes - creations by Frith, Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Benjamin West, Cope and Ward - have been ignored or despised by art historians and critics under the modernistic influence.
Now in this enthusiastic, pioneering study, Roy Strong shows how and why - through a unique alliance between painter, antiquarian and historian - these works came into being; he separates the fanciful recreations from the accurate reconstructions of the past, pinpoints the sources and identifies such literary parallels as the medieval romances of Walter Scott and charts the origins and course of the popular taste for history.
