Continental Crosscurrents

Continental Crosscurrents explores British attitudes to continental art during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and reveals some exciting connections. Coleridge's wild enthusiasm for medieval art and Browning's distaste for Nazarene painting are explored more extensively than ever before. The figures of Edmund Sharpe and Sara Losh in the history of the Romanesque revival are virtually unknown, and for the first time the motives for Alfred Waterhouse's choice of this style for the Natural History Museum in London are revealed. The book concludes with the explosive British reaction to the primitivism of Gauguin and the mysterious unravelling of the identity of the figure of Loerke from Lawrence's Women in Love.