The year 1819 was felt to be epochal by contemporaries, a moment of political and social turbulence which helped usher in a new sense of modernity. In recent years, historians and literary scholars have scrutinized the post-Waterloo years, and 1819 especially, with increasing detail, yet the art history of the period remains relatively underdeveloped. This paper will offer an overview of London’s art world in 1819, informed by a sociological analysis of the Royal Academy’s student body, while also focussing on key works by John Martin, Henry Perronet Briggs and Joseph Michael Gandy. Viewed in relation to questions around exhibiting practices, the transvaluation of genres, and the changing dynamics of class, these and other works testify to the emergence of a specifically middle-class cultural field around 1819 – compromised and incoherent and therefore, arguably, worthy of greater scrutiny from the specific perspective of the social history of art.