Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain

by Christiana Payne

The coastline of Great Britain was a powerful magnet for artists in the nineteenth-century. Its strong light created ideal conditions for experiments in open-air sketching and photography, and the difficulties of painting the endlessly moving waves presented a constant challenge. It also occupied a crucial place in imortant debates of the time. Napoleon's planned invasion in the early years of the century focused attention on the coast as a defensive boundary. Coastal geology and marine biology provided much of the evidence used in thedisputes over theories of evolution which led to the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. Meanwhile the British invention of the seaside holiday gradually worked its way down the social scale. The author explores artists' responses to the coast and looks at the different ways politicians, tourists, theologians, poets and scientists would have viewd the coast. She shows how the images fit into the wider responses to social change and the

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 2007