ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The Royal Academy of Arts was a key institution in promoting the visual arts in Britain by providing artistic training for promising students and, more importantly, by staging an annual exhibition to which members and non-members alike were allowed to contribute their works. Established in 1768 by a Royal Charter, the Royal Academy was a flagship art organization and naturally the full membership of the Royal Academy of which only forty were available was highly coveted . In the eighteenth century, surprisingly, there were a number of foreign artists holding full membership of the British Royal Academy: fourteen in all by the end of the eighteenth century. This study attempts to chart the tidal shift in artistic taste in late eighteenth-century Britain by looking into the activities of continental European artists active in Britain and into the changing perceptions of them in the British public mind. In recognition of the structural transformation of the artistic public sphere in this pivotal era in the history of Western art, this paper seeks to highlight the roles played by foreign artists in the formation of artistic cosmopolitanism on the one hand and of British cultural identity on the other. To further the investigation in detail, it addresses and attempts answer the following questions: who these alien artists were and what brought them to Britain; how active they were in Britain as artists; what kinds of public responses these foreign artists elicited in British press and how they changed. In the final analysis, it is suggested that the rise of nationalism in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century drastically changed public perceptions of alien artists but artistic migration and transnational movements of artworks and people were an integral part of British artistic identity-making.

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