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“... innovative’ developments in Western visual culture, over a period starting with David’s politically-engaged works of the 1780s, and culminating in Cézanne’s ‘revolutionary’ but ‘apolitical’ modernism a century later. Very few of the artists or images discussed along the way would look out of place in the most conventional of ...”

“... In a notebook entry written during the summer of 1743, the English engraver George Vertue paid tribute to his friend the ‘ingenious’ William Taverner, who ‘besides his practice of the Law ... has an extraordinary Genius in drawing and painting Landskips, equal if not superior in some degree to any painter in England’. Like other contemporary amateur producers of landscape watercolours, Taverner must have been aware that the favourite occupation of his leisure hours had long been associated with the demonstration of power and prestige; Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (first English translation, 1561) was only the first of many treatises on aristocratic conduct to recommend drawing as an activity appropriate to men of the highest rank ...”

“... When David Wilkie’s ‘Village Politicians’ first appeared at the Royal Academy in 1806 it caused a sensation. Less than ten years after the end of the French Revolution, less than ten years before Waterloo, we find a room of common Scots not only arguing the political toss but represented in a style that seeks neither to caricature them nor to elevate them ...”

“... greeted the last major Wilson exhibition, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, curated by David Solkin, now of the Courtauld Institute, certainly the best, and probably the most respected, historian of 18th-century British art now practising. In the introduction to his excellent and, as it turned out, controversial catalogue, ...”

“... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an ...”

“... with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the ...”

“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... from the picture then Panofsky’s arch will overbalance and the critic with it. To suggest, as David Solkin does in his conclusion, that Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on the Bird in the Air Pump can ‘offer us a timely word of warning, before we join the chorus of acclamation for those market forces we see marching in apparent triumph across the ...”

“... chosen policy. The key event here is the Richard Wilson exhibition of 1982-3, organised by David Solkin, whose thoughtful and carefully researched catalogue attempted to situate Wilson’s landscapes in a range of historical contexts including the moral and political ideas and ideals attached to the ownership of land in the 18th ...”