Highlighting an important preoccupation in Enlightenment philosophy and art theory with power as a form of extensibility, this book traces configurations of Britain's global empire in three multi-figure paintings by British artists who never travelled beyond the Mediterranean world.
This book explores a selection of the multi-figure compositions that proliferated across British painting and printmaking. Works by Arthur Devis, Francis Hayman and Joshua Reynolds represent figures associated with British imperial geographies, depicted by artists who never themselves travelled beyond the Mediterranean world. Building on a hitherto-neglected theorisation of power within Lockean thought as the extensibility rather than the unilateral force of bodies, the discussion provides a generative framework for considering how artistic form in such works could resonate with the social. In re-evaluating Enlightenment philosophy and art theory, it opens the way for a fresh consideration of the capacity of artworks to generate experience and not merely represent it. These images could – and still can – convey much of the joys, banalities or vagaries of living within the ordinary relations of power that informed the extraordinary scale of mid-eighteenth-century imperial occupation.