Summary
Critical essay
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Extract
Art in The Edinburgh Review.
Little attention has been given to the 'art talk' to be heard The Edinburgh Review (1802-1929). This quarterly took in a wide range of art subjects in its conversation with a readership that by 1818 had already grown to nearly 14,000. Although primarily concerned with politics, economics and literature, the Edinburgh, arriving in its blue and yellow Whig livery, gradually came to include the arts, and always with the same original and large views that characterised its core articles. Brilliance shone even at its start, as its three young and little known originators risked and won such: Francis Jeffrey, a Scottish advocate, as yet almost briefless, following education at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, was to become a Scottish Judge and an MP; Sydney Smith, a distinguished Wykehamist and Oxonian and a cleric, a moral philosopher and wit, constantly attracted the epithet 'humane'; and Henry Brougham, newly called to the Scottish bar, was a future Lord Chancellor.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Their education was of course classical, and as such was in tune with the recently completed Edinburgh New Town architecture's doubly symmetrical gridiron plan; the 'Modern Athens' buildings on Calton Hill had to wait for the new century's third decade, when the Napoleonic wars became a thing of the past. Never insular in its compass, the Edinburgh, in its art concerns as in others, was fully aware of other languages and continents as well as past ce...See the full content of this document
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