Milton & English Art

The importance of Milton's poetry as a source of inspiration for artists, poets and men of letters from the end of the seventeenth until the middle of the nineteenth centuries is equalled only by that of Shakespeare. This book is concerned with Milton's influence over painting and graphic art. It seeks, in the first place, to provide a comprehensive and detailed historical survey of illustrations to Milton executed in England between 1688 and 1860.

The author's purpose is to recognize rather than evaluate, and the critical function of this book lies in defining and describing the kind of response which Milton's poetry has drawn from artists of varying character over a period of two hundred years. Historically, the period spans the great age of the Royal Academy, the Romantic Movement in the arts and the Industrial Revolution. Why Milton's poetry should have provided a common source of inspiration for artists dissimilar in their intellectual circumstances and ideals is a question the book seeks to answer by examining major and minor work. In this latter category are included not only sketches but also some of the writings of artists and men of letters relative to artistic theory. At the same time the problems of method and interpretation which confront the artist who is commissioned to illustrate a work of literature are discussed in reference to individual artists and specific works.

It is hoped that the book will be of interest to the student of English art and will go some way to filling the gap in our knowledge of achievements made in narrative and literary painting in this country. At the same time the students of Milton will find here a revealing pictorial record of the kinds of significance Milton’s poetry possessed for previous generations. Shifting views of the nature and importance of Milton's poetry in our own time, the present tendency in critical circles towards a reappraisal of Paradise Lost, make the appearance of this book (the only full-length work on the subject) especially timely, for it enables the reader of Milton to view the poet against the historical perspective of changing taste and fashion.

What the painter finds worthy of translation in his literary source various enormously from generation to generation as well as from one individual to the next. Through the attitudes of painters, poets and men of letters to John Milton and his work much is revealed of the artistic climate of the period. The work of Milton's first illustrator, J.B. Media, is firmly rooted in the medieval traditions of biblical iconography. Fuseli's violent and impassioned Milton pictures reflect the fervent conviction of many in England at the turn of the eighteenth century that Milton had provided a unique, English example of revolutionary and radical philosophy. Blake's most personal interpretation of Milton's poetry is also the most faithful translation into visual terms of the poet's verbal imagery. The Paradise Lost illustrations of John martin reflect, in their effects of cosmic turbulence, the aspirations and horrors of industrialization in mid-nineteenth-century England.

The book is lavishly illustrated with over two hundred monochrome reproductions accompanying the text.

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