Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Reading Reynolds with Bentham’: The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 2 ‘Prejudice Aside’: Jeremy Bentham's Moral Economy of Taste
- 3 ‘Directing the Art of the Country’: Henry Cole's Laws of Public Taste
- 4 The End of the Experiment
- 5 Taste Between Ethics and Aesthetics
- 6 The Return of Adam Smith
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - The End of the Experiment
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Reading Reynolds with Bentham’: The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 2 ‘Prejudice Aside’: Jeremy Bentham's Moral Economy of Taste
- 3 ‘Directing the Art of the Country’: Henry Cole's Laws of Public Taste
- 4 The End of the Experiment
- 5 Taste Between Ethics and Aesthetics
- 6 The Return of Adam Smith
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The books which Sir John Bowring read when a younger man, the Westminster articles which he admired or helped to write, the parade of logic, and the cynical utilitarianism which was thought to be intellectual about the time of the Reform Bill, have all passed into oblivion, and if resuscitated would be found most disgusting to the feelings of the present age.
— The Times, 13 October 1860He wished also to draw attention to the retrograde character of this art education movement throughout the country.
— Edmund Potter MP, House of Commons, 1 June 1865In the wake the first Reform Bill of 1832, a Benthamite critique of the Royal Academy of Arts had placed publicly funded art school education in an unauthorized cultural situation whose potential had been anticipated by Bentham in his essays on ‘Time and Place’ of 1780–2, indicated in his comments on the Royal Academy of Arts in 1806, initiated by the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures in 1835, and extended by Henry Cole as the ‘appointed father’ of national art education in 1852. The cultural climate of the second Reform Bill of 1867 and the rise of Gladstonian liberalism emphasized the value of an authorized pedagogy of art, in which the cultural authority vested in the academician and the museum curator began to seen as morally superior to Henry Cole's bid for ‘public attractiveness and … educational utility’.
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- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014