Using the paintings as a tool to explore Victorian society, Paxman looks at how the middle-classes, mill-owners, working people, and those on the bottom rung of society's ladder lived in those buttoned-up times.
The Victorians airs on BBC One on Sundays at 2100 GMT"
-Taken from BBC News
I saw the first episode 'Painting The Town' last night (available on BBC iPlayer) and was pleasantly surprised. It's no secret that I like Victoriana and that it looms large over my reading & writing preferences. The programme succeeded on two counts really: the Victorian history side appealed to me, and the art side to my other half. Believe me, it's rare that we find something on television by chance that ticks boxes for both of us.
I discovered two artists over the course of the program that I immediately ran off and Googled afterwards: John Atkinson Grimshaw and Gustave Doré.
- Grimshaw, Humber Dockside, Hull, Dated 1882
I've always liked landscapes, city scenes, sunsets - I'm quite a philistine and a sentimentalist I suppose, in art terms, but they please me. I was struck by how much Grimshaw's paintings remind me of some of the kind of book cover artwork that I find myself most drawn to, the kind of thing I'd like to put on the covers of my own works one day (touch wood).
- Doré, Warehousing in the City, London: A Pilgrimage (1872)
Doré on the other hand dealt primarily with engravings. He lends London a look of permanent night, in a way (as Paxman points out in the programme) - a dirty, overcrowded, gritty, stinking, vibrant, beautiful, baroque, organised mess of a place. This is precisely the way I like to look at the place both in terms of others' depiction of it in fiction and in their cities based in some way upon it and also my own.
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