Art and architecture

Critics of the BBC's recent 'Great Britons' series pointed out that the visual arts were almost unrepresented among the top 100 choices made by the British public: 'not Holbein or Van Dyck,' grumbled Daniel Johnson in the Daily Telegraph , 'not Wren or Hawksmoor, not Hogarth or Reynolds, not Constable or Turner'. No such danger with the Oxford DNB , I'm glad to say. Our artistic inheritance from the original DNB was considerable, but uneven, and we have expanded and transformed it. In discussing the area of the new dictionary that we call ART, which covers art, architecture and design during the huge period 1500-2000, I should begin by emphasizing the sheer width of its approach. We now pay due attention not only to painting, sculpture and architecture but also to landscape gardens, print-makers, photography, book-illustrators, miniaturists, fashion, design and caricaturists--not to mention patrons, collectors, critics, art historians, and connoisseurs. Twentieth-century consumerism has enhanced interest in design and crafts, and the growth of advertising has fostered a new awareness of visual style. The Oxford DNB has ample room for interior design, fashion, poster art--not to mention the clarity of lettering (designed by Edward Johnston) that helps us to find our way on the London Underground.

Who deserves the credit for this substantial shift in our scope and treatment? The many twentieth-century pioneers of a wider approach to the history of the arts, of course, to whose efforts we have been keen to respond, but also many people who were quick to grasp the opportunities the Oxford DNB presented. First among those mentioned must be our contributors, whose knowledge and insights have enabled us greatly to extend the depth and range of the dictionary's coverage. Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, has been Consultant Editor to the ART area since its beginnings in 1997. He has been supported by 26 Associate Editors, each providing their expertise in specialist areas, and by three in-house Research Editors. Dr Annette Peach has been with the ART area from start to finish; her doctoral thesis was published as Portraits of Byron (2001), and won the Rose Mary Crawshay prize from the British Academy. Dr Rosemary Mitchell worked on the dictionary from 1993 to 1999, and her thesis was published as Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830-1870 (2000); in 1997-9 she worked in the ART area before leaving for a permanent college teaching post in Leeds. Dr Deborah Graham-Vernon, whose thesis was on national identity in late-eighteenth-century Scottish art, succeeded Dr Mitchell and left us last year.

The ART area inherited 3242 people from the DNB , and has added another 998. Its contributors have perhaps been drawn from a wider variety of experts than most of the Oxford DNB 's areas outside the late twentieth century: university scholars, of course, but also curators of galleries and museums and people in fine-art dealing, connoisseurship and design, as well as friends of our biographical subjects. We have translated articles from Italian, French and Swedish, and have corresponded with contributors in Pennant Hills, Australia; Llanfairpwll, Wales; Sanquhar, Dumfriesshire; and Glengeary, co. Dublin--not to mention Rio de Janeiro, Toronto and Chicago. Contrast the old DNB and its earlier supplements, which had to depend heavily on metropolitan men of letters, reinforced by the professional associates of the people included.

How has the balance of subjects changed? DNB included 114 women in art (3% of the total), whereas now we have 274 (8% of the total); of these, 20 were co-subjects in other articles. New research on arts and crafts in which women have been key practitioners--for example, on book-binding, book illustration, and on textile design and decoration--has meant that we have been able to include new kinds of biographical subject. Our ART articles have a new emphasis: far more attention has in recent years been given to the women artists who worked alongside their fathers and brothers, highlighting women's overall impact on British art. To name but a few such women, we now have Sara Losh, architect; Merlyn Severn, photographer; Georgie Gaskin, jewellery designer; Romaine Brooks, painter and lesbian icon; and Mary Chamot, art historian and museum curator.

We fully acknowledge the collaborative nature of so much artistic activity by exploiting an experimental biographical form, much developed in the new dictionary: the group article. Of the 58 group articles in ART, some document the histories of families of artists such as the Cleveleys, Lens and Nasmyth families of painters; the Crace, Gillow and Hardman families of cabinet-makers, decorators and furnishers; and the Roettiers and Wyon families of medallists. Articles on the Camden Town Group, the Glasgow Girls, the Scottish Colourists, Venetian painters in Britain, and the Vorticists, among others, focus on the identity of the group, as well as on the lives of its individual members.

Today we treat ART subjects rather differently from the DNB . As with all aspects of the Oxford DNB we are keen to set artistic achievement in social context. We are alert to the impact that new materials make on architecture, sculpture and design; to the emergence of the new skills that are reflected in our more refined occupational descriptions ('painter and japanner', 'master mason', 'print-maker' and 'textile designer'); to photography's importance as a creative medium; and to historians' increasing preoccupation with the commercial aspects of art dealing. The DNB 's subjects included a high proportion of engravers, given the late-Victorian predominance of engraving as reproductive medium, but we give much more emphasis to the engraver's role in the history of the book, just as we relate architects' work more closely to the needs of patrons and the general public. None of this rules out aesthetic judgements and critical theory; so long as contributors--especially of long articles--provide essential biographical detail and observe space limitations, they have been encouraged to touch upon such aspects where appropriate.

Our information has also become more accurate--not just through deploying official data on births, marriages and deaths, but because we provide more accurate and up-to-date information about where individual works of art can be found. Where galleries have been renamed, and works have changed hands, we take care to check that the new locations are correctly given. Where possible, we try to cite examples of subjects' works that are in public collections, so that readers may go and see these for themselves.

Nobody who consults the Oxford DNB will have the slightest excuse for the notion that the British people have in the past as a nation been philistines, and we hope that the dictionary will make its contribution towards ensuring that they do not become so in the future.

Brian Harrison