Redefining History Painting in the Academy: The Summer Composition Competition at the Slade School of Fine Art, 1898-1922

Author: Chambers, Emma

Source: Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 6, Number 1, Summer 2005 , pp. 79-100(22)

Publisher: Manchester University Press

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Abstract:

Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was particularly unpromising ground for an aspiring history painter, yet the Slade School of Fine Art, founded in 1871, structured its curriculum to provide students with the necessary skills and knowledge to produce traditional History Paintings. Indeed, the most prestigious prize at the school was the Summer Composition Competition, which required students to produce a large-scale painting from a biblical or literary set title. This emphasis, at a time when public patronage was limited and the commercial art market increasingly demanded domesticscale portraiture, modern life or landscape painting, deserves examination. What did tutors at the Slade expect students to gain from acquiring the skills to produce History Paintings and in what ways were students, freed from the constraints of working for the market, able to adapt and challenge the conventions of History Painting to create contemporary compositions? This article argues that student paintings also provide a means of assessing the ways in which the ideological and compositional conventions of History Painting, which had traditionally defined monumental public art, were gradually replaced by those of `decorative painting' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Keywords: SLADE SCHOOL OF FINE ART; HISTORY PAINTING; DECORATIVE PAINTING

Document Type: Research article

Publication date: 2005-06-01

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