Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art

by Professor Ann Bermingham

Rather than a history of techniques, media, and practitioners, Learning to Draw is an original and stimulating examination of drawing's cultural uses and meanings. Using a variety of sources including pedagogical and philosophical texts, novels, manuals of etiquette and decorum, letters and diaries, as well as drawings made by amateurs and professionals, Bermingham explores the social space that drawing both occupied and helped to form. Put simply, her book explains how drawing came to be seen as a practice of everyday life in the early modern period, what processes, both practical and ideological, enabled this to happen, how it intersected with changing social, political and practical needs, and what kind of cultural context enabled it to emerge as an amateur pastime.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 2000