Victorian classicism in context : Sir E.J. Poynter (1836-1919) and the classical heritage

• Main Author: Kear, Joanna Madeleine
• Published: University of Bristol 1999
• Subjects: 700
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.324260

Sir E. J. Poynter (1838-1919) currently occupies an anomalistic position within the history of art and the classical heritage. His greatly diminished reputation is essentially a product of posthumous re-evaluation and neglect and bears testimony to the vagaries of art appreciation and public taste. He remains singularly neglected amongst the triumvirate of artists called the Victorian 'Olympians', despite occupying a uniquely prominent position in the art establishment of his day. Recent scholarship has tended to regard Poynter's art as simply imitative of that of his contemporaries Frederic, Lord Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema in both style and subject, and thus has afforded him a diminished position in the history of art and the classical heritage. This thesis was formulated with the express purpose of reassessing Poynter as an artist and a theoretician in the contexts of late Victorian/ Edwardian painting. The considerable dearth of recent literature relating to this artist and the sustained contemporary art historical interest in the Victorian period were major sources of inspiration to the conception of this project. The composition of this thesis has been governed by underlying contextual objectives and concentrates on select aspects of Poynter's work which relate him specifically to Victorian receptions of the ancient world. The central objective is not to rehabilitate Poynter as a leading Victorian 'Olympian', but to recover the contexts and rediscover some of the locations in which he worked in order to obtain a cohesive understanding of his classicism.