Learning to Draw:

Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art

As early as the sixteenth century, drawing in England came to be

seen as something more than an activity exclusive to artists; it
became a polite and useful art, a practice of everyday life. This
generously illustrated book explores the social and cultural
processes that enabled drawing to emerge as an amateur pastime,
as well as the meanings that drawing had for people who were not
artists. Ann Bermingham shows how the history of drawing in
England, from the age of Elizabeth I to the era of early
photography, mirrored changes in society, politics, the practical
world, and notions of self. The book examines how drawing
intersected with a wide range of social phenomena, from political
absolutism, writing, empirical science, and Enlightenment
pedagogy to nationalism, industrialism, tourism, bourgeois
gentility, and religious instruction. Bermingham discusses the
central role of drawing and the visual arts in Renaissance debates
about government and self-government, then considers the
relations between seventeenth-century drawing, natural science,
and the masculine ideal of the honest gentleman. She also
investigates landscape drawing in the context of eighteenth-
century views on sensibility; the emergence of the amateur
draftsman and the accomplished woman; and the
commercialisation of amateur drawing in the nineteenth century.
The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of
photography on the social practice of drawing.