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Lead book review

The age of the starving artist

A review of A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by James Hamilton. A brilliant account of learning, or failing, to survive in a market of extraordinary brutality

26 July 2014

9:00 AM

26 July 2014

9:00 AM

A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain James Hamilton

Atlantic Books, pp.400, £25, ISBN: 9781848879249

What remains of art is art, of course; and what chiefly interests us is the creative talents of a painter or a sculptor. What we forget is that the work of art wouldn’t be there without some kind of engagement with the brutal forces of money.

James Hamilton’s riveting book is a richly detailed study of how, in Britain in the 19th century, artists and a small army of opportunists, art lovers, collectors and businessmen of all sorts used their ingenuity to turn the visual arts into money.

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