Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750-1810

This original book explores the radical transformation of the heroic male body in late eighteenth—century British art. It ranges across a period in which a modern art world was established, taking into account the lives and careers of a succession of major figures—from Benjamin West and Gavin Hamilton to Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman and William Blake—and influential institutions, from the Royal Academy to the commercial galleries of the 1790s.
Organized around the historical traumas of the Sev...