Righting the Victorian artist: The Redgraves' A 'Century of painters of the English School' and the serialisation of art history

A Century of Painters of the English School by Richard and Samuel Redgrave, 1866 and revised in 1890, attempted a radical transformation of the art hi storical discourse from artists' biographies strung together to a master na rrative of a new national art history and a new image of the artist as prof essional. Their text participated in an on-going discourse about the nature and role of the artist in Britain since the eighteenth century among earli er 'Vasarian' texts (e.g. Walpole, Cunningham). To achieve their ideal 'con nected narrative', they attempted to eradicate the anecdotage typical of th e biographical histories. To nationalise their narrative they also wrote to erase foreigners and women from the 'English School' as they leveled and e mbedded genius in an historical 'progress' defined as collective and accumu lative. Their major narrative device was a serialisation, a method of story -telling that penetrated all areas of Victorial cultural production. Throug h serialisation's discontinuities and disruptions, the 'progress' of Britis h art became a professional, collective, masculine, and national enterprise .