Manet- achieving its most potent,spiritual embodiment in the life and work of Van Gogh and Gauguin, the Nabis and Schiele. This book also examines how the myth contributed to artists' attitudes to women, cast as muses or as tormentors, fuelling artistic suffering.

Alexander Sturgis is the Director of the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath and was formerly Exhibitions and Programmes Curator at The National Gallery, London.He is the author of Pocket Guide: Faces,Understanding Paintings and Dan's Angel;Rupert Christiansen is arts columnist and opera critic of the Daily Telegraph and the author of Romantic Affinities: Portraits of an Age 1780-1830; Lois Oliver is Assistant Curator at The National Gallery, London and author of Boris Anrep: The National Gallery Mosaics; Michael Wilson was formerly Head of Exhibitions and Display atThe National Gallery, London.The mythical artist - rebellious and heroic, isolated and suffering - is the creation of late eighteenth-century Romanticism. Throughout the nineteenth century the influence of this myth was felt in the way people thought and wrote about artists and, more importantly, in the way artists thought about, and depicted,themselves. The power of this myth persists, and still colours the popular perception of artists today.

Rebels and Martyrs considers how different artists reacted to this image;how they deliberately cast themselves as outsiders, bohemians and martyrs and how, in doing so, they revealed profound shifts in attitudes towards the aims of art and the source of artistic creation. This book focuses on key artists and groups who forged distinctive identities in response to this prevailing myth - the first artistic brotherhoods, such as the Nazarenes;the individuality of Delacroix, Courbet.

Director's Foreword

Rebels and Martyrs

Michael Wilson

Imagining the Artist: Painters and Sculptors in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Rupert Christiansen

Lois Oliver, Alexander Sturgis, Michael Wilson

Hero of the Establishment, Romantic Hero

Roman tic Myths

Bohemia

The Dandy and FIOneur

Priest, Seer, Martyr, Christ

Creativity and Sexuality

Chronology

Lois Oliver

Bibliography

Photographic Credits

Index