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Essay on The 19th Century Art History
Contemporary British writer Sir Walter Scott has played a pioneering role in the Romantic movement, and the important impact his work has had on artists on both sides of the Channel is documented. Scott's evocative novel inspired a vogue for so-called genre--historique paintings, which sought to re-create historical events in a realistic and compelling human manner.
One of the most masterful examples is "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey" (1833) by French artist Paul Delaroche. The poignant scene of the beautiful, young English queen, blindfolded and kneeling before the executioner's block, was one of the extremely popular works in the Paris Salon of 1834.
Those representations which are non-transparent, and with which it is appropriate to get imaginatively involved, are called 'imaginative representations'.
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey is an example. One can start investigating the engagement which is characteristic of such representations by noticing something implicit in the very term 'representation'. (Matravers 66) Something represents something else if it stands proxy for it, which suggests that one engages with an imaginative representation as a proxy for confronting its content.
An imaginative representation of the execution of Lady Jane Grey will give the art critic an impression--whether accurate or not - of the execution of Lady Jane Grey. This obviates the necessity for the critic to perform the impossible task of travelling back in time in order to see for himself. That is, the representation attempts to provide some kind of analogue of what the critic would have encountered were he to have experienced the event as a confrontation.
It is as well to clarify the relations between imagination, fiction and truth. Imagining is a propositional attitude. Watching an imaginative representation might cause one to imagine the death of Lady Jane Grey and believe the propositions....
