Bold, simple, bright and identifiably modern, Joseph Stannard’s Yarmouth Sands packs a remarkable visual punch. Through a close reading of this painting and its productive context (in Norwich, home to the first recognisable ‘art world’ in Britain beyond London), this paper will consider the ways in which artworks and their practitioners register the weight of the expectations placed upon them during moments of social and economic instability. In turn, this paper will consider the challenges that such a localised study of painting and its context might offer to the social history of art as a means of understanding art’s historical predicament more broadly.
Sarah Monks teaches art history at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Framing Space, Power and Modernity: Marine Painting in Britain, 1650-1850 (forthcoming), and has edited volumes on the Royal Academy of Arts, Anglo-American artistic exchanges and British art in India. She is currently completing a second book entitled Transported Subjects: British Art and Global Experience in the Eighteenth Century, and is planning another on British and American art 1800-1840.