Seven Discourses on Art
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Undergraduate and graduate students studying Western art history and classical theory
- Teachers and curators interested in traditions of art education and the origins of academic institutions
- Advanced enthusiasts seeking to sharpen their judgment in art appreciation
- Readers in aesthetics, literature, or translation studies who need to cite the original text
Not a good fit for
- Complete beginners who only want to learn specific painting steps and techniques
- General casual readers expecting light, story-driven reading
- Learners who struggle with English reading and have no parallel translation for support
Reading tips
- Read one lecture through first and identify its core argument before moving to the next; avoid swallowing the whole book at once.
- Jot down the judgments about taste, imitation, and style as you go, and compare them with specific paintings.
- When you meet unfamiliar names or works, consult art-history reference books or annotations, then reread the passage.
- Read alongside later art criticism to see how academic ideas were inherited or challenged.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
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About the author
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) was an English portrait painter. He was born in Plympton, Devon, in 1723 and died in London in 1792. In 1753 he opened a studio in London; in 1768 he was elected the first President of the Royal Academy and was knighted. His lectures at the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790 were collected as Discourses on Art, an important document of art criticism of the period; related works in the collection include Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, Fifteen Discourses, and Seven Discourses on Art. Through these writings his ideas on art have exercised a lasting influence and hold a place in the history of art criticism.
