The concluding dozen pages of The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914, spell out two concerns or commitments that underpin, but are not allowed to dominate, the preceding text. First of these is an assertion of the fundamental value of attention to the physical properties of the work of art, to what we actually see, and a renunciation of approaches, notably the social history of art, that tend to look elsewhere. The second is an attack on widespread acceptance of Virginia Woolf’s famous response to Roger Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition that “on or about December 1910 human character changed”; more precisely, it is an attack on Peter Stansky’s perpetuation of that view, stated up front in the title of his book, On or About December 1910 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996). Put briefly, David Peters Corbett’s main argument is that there was a strong continuity in English painting from the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 through the artists who are the subjects of his final chapter, “The Aesthetics of Materiality: English Modernism Before 1914”—pre-eminently Spencer Gore and other members of the Camden Town Group.

That argument explains the dates in the book’s subtitle, and, within the confines of those dates, it makes sense, with Walter Sickert—the subject of the penultimate chapter—as the pivotal linking figure. But from a slightly longer perspective, 1914, only four years after Virginia Woolf’s celebrated 1910, seems like a strangely early choice of a cut-off date for a discussion of English modernism. While World War I and the cultural upheavals it caused might seem the reason for it, I suspect that Corbett’s chief reason for his abrupt ending in 1914 is that 1914 was the year of Gore’s death. Corbett’s discussions and analyses of Sickert’s and Gore’s paintings are compelling demonstrations of his devotion to the physical work of art, but while Gore’s paintings are genuinely appealing, he seems a rather slender reed to be put forth as the embodiment of the early twentieth-century English avant-garde. He appears to have been assigned that role because of Corbett’s unquestioned assumption, repeated frequently with slight variations throughout the book, that the role of a satisfactory modern art was “the imperative to register modern experience” (173), “to engage adequately with the world” (143), and “to evaluate and communicate the nature of experience” (98). Those are perhaps unexceptional expectations, but they do reflect a realist bias and even Ruskinian notions about art’s communicative role, more in tune with the values of the nineteenth century than the twentieth. From Corbett’s vantage point, the main contemporaries and rivals of Camden Town, the Vorticists and the Bloomsbury artists, fell short, the latter for depicting “a hermetic world, interior, civilized, ordered, and sterile” (231) and for a modernism that “exemplifies the pure development of visual innovation for visual pleasure as an end in itself” (232).

Corbett makes similar judgments about his nineteenth-century artists, finding the Aestheticism of Albert Moore lacking because “line, color, and form can deliver only a partial, ’unintellectual,’ and insufficient understanding of the world” (89). The works that fit within his history of English modernity have a core of realist contemporaneity, although at moments Corbett’s recognition of their contemporaneity seems a bit strained. Thus on page 172 he approves what he perceives as a rejection of the artificiality of Aestheticism in Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Silver—Chelsea, describing it as a “contemporary, industrial, quintessentially modern scene,” although there is nothing modern or industrial in the depiction, and the one recognizable feature in the view is the square tower of Chelsea Old Church. Even more remarkably, on the same page G. F. Watts’s Love and Death, a picture which for me embodies the artist’s devotion to timeless messages, and in which I cannot find a single modern detail, “brings questions about the meaning of existence forcefully into the contemporary world.” Such unconvincing observations suggest that the author has perhaps not looked as hard at the works of an older generation of Victorian artists as he has at the paintings of Sickert and Gore. They serve more as foundation stones upon which to erect his vision of modernity rather than objects of sufficient interest to deserve attention for their own sakes.

Indeed, in the book’s first three chapters Corbett devotes much more space to texts than to painting. In chapter 1, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s stories “Hand and Soul” and “St. Agnes of Intercession” receive fuller consideration than any Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and chapter 3, devoted to Charles Ricketts and Oscar Wilde, is barely about painting at all. Ricketts was an illustrator, as acknowledged in the chapter’s subtitle, and Corbett does reproduce some of his fascinating illustrations for Wilde’s The Sphinx, but says nothing about them. Rather his interest is in Ricketts as a critic and art historian. His discussion draws welcome attention to Ricketts’s largely forgotten writing and addresses such questions as the potential of poetical ekphrasis to upstage the work it purports to describe. But by this point Corbett’s attention to the printed word rather than to visual art in any form might make the reader feel misled by the author’s use of the word “visuality” in his subtitle. “Modern Art and Textuality in Britain” would perhaps more appropriately have told us what to expect. We should note, however, that the Ricketts and Wilde chapter may be a relic of interests that preceded Corbett’s discovery of visuality. A version of it appeared as early as 1994 in an article in Word and Image, whereas, according to the author’s acknowledgments (xvii), he began research for the book in 1997, and only realized what he wanted to do while in a program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in that year.

In the first two chapters, even when writing about paintings, Corbett tends to rely substantially on what others have said. In three pages (86–88) devoted to Albert Moore, while he misspells the title of one work (The Shulamite) and gives an incorrect location for another (Sapphires, which is in the Birmingham Art Gallery), he cites or quotes Robyn Asleson, Alfred Lys Baldry, Cosmo Monkhouse, William Michael Rossetti, Sidney Colvin, Henry Heathcote Statham, Algernon Swinburne, and an anonymous reviewer in The Daily Telegraph. The range of his reading is truly impressive, and his acknowledgments are generous to a fault. The citations of obscure as well as obvious sources in the notes and bibliography should become road maps for students seeking to navigate both the literature on Victorian art and up-to-date theory. In the case of Moore, the many quotations all seem apt, if at the expense of Corbett’s own voice. Elsewhere, he tends to use not only recent theoretical writing to buttress his arguments, but also modern secondary or even tertiary sources, with some inevitable slippage between what was said by whom in Victorian times and what Corbett may wish had been said. On page 42, he tells us that Rossetti himself spoke of Pre-Raphaelitism as a “materialist” art, with a footnote citation to Robert Herbert’s anthology of Ruskin’s art criticism, as cited by Jerome McGann. But a look at Herbert’s book shows that the assessment of the movement did not come from Rossetti, for whom it would seem out of character, but, as we might expect, from Ruskin’s Oxford lectures of 1883, in which he linked Rossetti and Holman Hunt in a “Realistic” school of painting. A careless error, which could easily have been forestalled by checking Herbert (or, properly, the standard Cook and Wedderburn edition of Ruskin), but not an unimportant one, since in establishing claims for a “materialist” Pre-Raphaelitism Corbett puts us on a highway leading to Sickert and Camden Town half a century later.

Despite such criticisms, which could easily be multiplied, I believe that Corbett’s heart is in the right place, and I believe in the validity of his larger argument. But I believe also that if he had devoted as much close attention to the paintings of an earlier generation of Victorian artists, from Ford Madox Brown to Moore, as he does to Sickert’s, rather than looking at them too frequently at second hand through the eyes and interpretations of other writers, he could have made a more compelling case.

The book conforms in format to a recognizable British academic style employed by publishing houses such as Ashgate and Manchester University Press (the initial British publisher of this volume). It is abundantly, but not particularly well illustrated. At points where the author does pay close attention to individual paintings, as in the case of Sickert, it helps to consult something with better reproductions (I recommend the Royal Academy’s Sickert catalogue from 1992) to see what he is talking about. But, for much of the book, text and accompanying image do not have much to do with one another.