Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>From the middle of the nineteenth century, English artists and art writers argued that painting was a powerful, untapped vehicle of social reform. Art had the ability—indeed, the responsibility—to provoke real change to improve lives. Art and Action reconstructs this forgotten discourse, showing how this idea shaped beliefs about art’s purpose, inspired new strategies of political engagement, and laid the groundwork for the aesthetic revolution of the twentieth century. Recovering painting’s political significance in nineteenth-century Britain, this book moves socially themed painting from the margins of Victorian art to the centre of the period’s conversations about culture, politics, and social change. Drawing on evidence from a rich array of literary and visual sources, Art and Action brings together the artists, philanthropists, and critics who debated the political purpose of painting, including John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, George Frederic Watts, Richard Redgrave, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater. Through close readings of their work, the book identifies six predominant ‘social theories of painting’ that defined art’s role in Britain during a momentous era of reform. As Art and Action compellingly reveals, in nineteenth-century Britain painting was not seen merely as a lens through which to understand society but a tool by which to shape it.</jats:p>