Making Art in the Age of Industry

The intersection of painting, still life, and photography represented by George Lance's The Golden Age and Roger Fenton's Copy of a Picture by Lance raises important questions about the dynamic relationship between media and materiality in Victorian art. Still life as a genre forces us to confront our habits as viewers: when we look at a depiction of an arrangement of fruit, flowers, and decorative objects, for instance, are we always conscious that we are viewing a painting, a representation? Or do we see through the work's materiality to the things on display? And what happens when the medium shifts to photography? Lance's still life paintings—and Fenton's photographic copy of one of those paintings—raise questions about the material status of the work of art in the mid nineteenth century and about the dynamic between the natural world, the manufactured object, and pictorial representation. What emerges are two compelling—and competing—claims for artistic identity in the age of industry: the hand-made and the mechanical copy of the hand-made

Art · Art history · George (robot · Painting · Art, Politics, and Modernism