Industrial resolution

It was a time when people throughout Europe were being uprooted from ancestral soil like market produce, and driven by invisible forces to large cities.

The rule of nobility was being ended by mob decree and the busy work of the guillotine. Towering factory chimneys were beginning to spew smoke rising from the fires of progress.

And within the human mind was flowering the profound notion of equality, staying the knee from bending to any king of flesh. Feeding this roiling sea of change were the surging rivers of awakening science and technology.

Like the cave painters and stone etchers before them, the artists and writers had to document and make sense of it all. As Irish poet, writer and physician Oliver Goldsmith shows us in his 1770 poem, “The Deserted Village,” they performed magnificently.

The works of some of the greatest painters and writers of this period, roughly from the last part of the 18th century to the first part of the 19th century, are presented in a new exhibit at the University of Virginia’s Art Museum. Titled “From Classic to Romantic: British Art in an Age of Transition,” it runs through Jan. 30.

“This exhibition is about one of the most tremulous periods in Western history — the age of revolutions,” said Bruce Boucher, director of the museum. “You start about 1750 with neoclassicism, which was the last age to have an unalloyed admiration for the classical world.

“And also for the sense of a stable social hierarchy where everyone knew his position, from God and his angels down to the lowest human being or animal in the field. You end with the ‘Rights of Man,’ the Declaration of Independence and the idea that each person was a unique individual of equal worth with everyone else.”

Greeting the visitor entering the exhibition space is an oil-on-canvas portrait of William Bleamire. It was painted in the late 1790s by Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of the most respected portraitists of his day.

The portrait had been thought lost until Boucher’s keen and knowledge eye spotted it in UVa’s extensive collection of English art from the 18th and 19th centuries. Then he made another discovery.

“I was in storage and saw this painting up on a rack,” Boucher said as he stood next to the oil-on-canvas image of the Countess of Gower, also by Lawrence. “It was all yellow, but the quality leapt out to me.

“I said then that it looked like a Lawrence. I sent an image of it to a woman at Yale who is an expert on Lawrence, and she identified it. The Countess Gower was the wife of one of Lawrence’s great patrons.

“It was really transformed by the cleaning. You can see this wonderful technique in creating the band in her hair, and also the way he highlights the eyes and the wonderful skin tones. Even things like the fringe on her dress are beautifully done.”

During this period of transformation, even the way landscapes were artistically perceived and rendered, changed. Illustrating the classical style is the 1775 work by Thomas Gainsborough titled “A Mountainous Landscape.”

Nearby are several examples of the new, more realistic approach by artists like John Constable and John Martin.

“We see how Martin’s landscapes are much wilder and much more expressive of nature,” Boucher said of the British artist, who lived from 1789 to 1854. “John Constable is the perfect example of this.

“He said his landscapes were like scientific experiments. This idea that you create a slice of life in landscape, which is naturalistic, is something that’s part of this new interest in art and science.

“You had people like Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, who published his scientific works in verse form. Percy Shelley published poems, which dealt with scientific issues like atmosphere, and also larger philosophical ideas like the sublime, which involved man’s perception of landscape.”

One of the sections in the exhibit is titled “Sentiment and Sociability: Women and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England.” Here is found George Morland’s work “The Tea Garden,” which depicts ordinary people rather than members of the aristocracy.

“This is a beautiful stipple engraving by Morland that shows us a middle-class family out in their Sunday best at one of the public gardens where people would meet and eye each other,” said Boucher, who taught art history for nearly a quarter-century at University College London.

“You see these wonderful hats that women wore, which were very fashionable at the time. And during this period we have the first ‘It’ girls.

“These are young women from relatively humble backgrounds who go on the stage and make a name for themselves. They become sensations and form liaisons with the aristocracy.”

The cult of celebrity finds purchase in the commotion of change. Ink-stained hands now can mass produce everything from art prints to promotional flyers that celebrate the latest rising star.

As the great looms of progress spun new social fabrics, the exalted position of the horse would decline. For centuries the horse had partnered with man in toil and travel, giving love and loyalty in abundance.

But the driving wheels of steam-fed trains and the pistons of combustible engines would transform the horse from a necessity to a luxury. Painters like Morland foresaw this, and reflected the coming change in some of their work.

Two examples of this are seen in Morland’s “The First of September, Morning,” and “The First of September, Evening.” In these mezzotint prints we see the close bond shared by man, dog and horse.

As Boucher pointed out, the images also present a kind of lament for the passing of the pastoral way of life. The artist indicates this in the decay of a roof, and a horse being led in the direction of a setting sun.

Nearby, beneath the protective cover of glass, rests another masterpiece. It’s a copy of the large book “The Anatomy of the Horse” by George Stubbs. Published in 1766, its 24 etched plates reveal the muscles, fasciae, nerves, veins and skeleton of the horse with extraordinary exactness.

Also included in the exhibit are works by William Blake, Richard Cosway, John Opie, Benjamin West and several other celebrated artists of that era. Their works now show us something of what had been, and perhaps something of what may be.

“This is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when people were driven off the land and forced into cities,” Boucher said. “There is all the social misery and dislocation of people going from living in small villages where they knew everyone, to being thrown into these great cities where they hardly knew anyone.

“And they were on slave wages for the most part, and living a very miserable life as a part of the cog in the great machinery of the Industrial Revolution. This exhibit looks at the way earlier generations tried to make sense of the world around them through art.

“In doing so it helps to enlarge our own understanding of art in our world.”

“From Classic to Romantic: British Art in the Age of Transition” will be on display at the University of Virginia’s Art Museum through Jan. 30. The museum is at 155 Rugby Road.