![]() ![]() That relation has been somewhat neglected. Particular attention will be paid to the relation between Hazlitt’s critical and theoretical writings in this field, especially the essay in which he expounds his concept of ‘gusto’, a concept which Stanley Chase long ago recognised as representing for this writer ‘the crowning quality of great art’. The present paper aims to consolidate, supplement and even in part reconcile the foregoing observations by considering Hazlitt’s writing on art from a specifically linguistic and textual point of view and thereby assessing his role as innovator in a manner at once exact and comprehensive: the analytical method here outlined permits detailed comparison between writings on art of any genre and period, in so far as it focuses on those passages in which individual works of art or collections of works are verbally represented. 9Īnd lastly, Tom Nichols has emphasised the decisive importance of Hazlitt’s contribution to the critical reception of Titian in Britain: ![]() More recently, Richard Read has analysed the ‘sensuous particularity of Hazlitt’s ekphrases’ as ‘a gateway both to the massively enlarged domain of external appearances that Ruskin explored in his defence of Turner’s art from the 1840s onwards, and the equally enlarged subjective world that Pater opened for aesthetic reverie from the 1870s’. Stange presented its development as instantiating a more general and ‘radical change in the nature and function of … expository prose’, from ‘cognitive’ to ‘expressionist’. 7Īrt criticism in this precise sense was, he averred, ‘a new genre’, one inaugurated by Hazlitt and Lamb, though in a climate prepared by the aesthetic theories of Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel. 6īy ‘art criticism’ Stange understood a ‘writer’s attempt to give a prose account of the aesthetic values and affective qualities of a work of visual art’. Just such a break was posited nearly fifty years ago by Robert Stange, for whom Hazlitt, with Charles Lamb, could ‘be said to have made later art criticism possible by challenging traditional ideas about the relations between painting and literature, and thereby extending the possibilities of prose expression’. And without this bridge-passage the transformation will seem mysterious, a radical discontinuity or paradigmatic break, when it is really only a question of neglect and omission.’ 5 ‘Hazlitt’s work,’ Bryson has argued, ‘is the essential bridge-passage where one can hear the themes of Enlightenment aesthetics suddenly transform into new configurations, to emerge finally as the new Romantic music. If his theory of the visual arts addressed ‘some of the most fundamental problems in aesthetics’ in a way that now seems ‘prophetic’, it was also firmly grounded in that of his immediate forebears. 2įor Norman Bryson, again, ‘Hazlitt’s work on painting stands at neglected watershed between Augustan and Romantic aesthetics’. Stephen Bann, on the other hand, has stressed Hazlitt’s ‘startlingly contemporary’ concern with the ‘involvement of the body with its motor capacities and its perceptual skills, in the acts of painting and responding to painting’, and views him as ‘foreshadowing the “aesthetic criticism” of Ruskin, Pater and Stokes, and thus as the first critic to pose the distinctive issues which these unique commentators on the arts successively tried to explore’. For example, in John Barrell’s estimation, Hazlitt aided the demise of the eighteenth-century ideal of ‘civic humanism’ by promoting a view of painting as privately and individually rather than publicly and collectively gratifying. ![]() As a writer on art William Hazlitt has widely been recognised, for better and for worse, as a transitional, even pivotal figure. ![]()
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