Gothic Fielding? Philip James De Loutherbourg’s Tom Jones. 

This article confronts P.J. de Loutherbourg’s drawings of the selected scenes from Tom Jones with the possible “Gothic” content in Henry Fielding’s novel. Commenting on Fielding’s pictorialism, I argue that the most suitable scene from Tom Jones would have been the actual Gothic mansion of Mr. Allworthy, but the scene does not attract the illustrator’s attention. Then, I discuss de Loutherbourg’s patterns of Gothicizing the selected scenes in the manner of Salvator Rosa, which in the original depend on the mock-heroic or the grotesque. The article concludes with raising more general questions about the paradigms of de-contextualization and re-contextualization in late 18th century print market and book illustration.

Article Title	Type	Size
Porownania 21 2 2017 19 Lipski	[pdf]	[911 KB]