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Histories of British art rarely ask metaphysical questions. More common are narratives in which the empiricism of Locke and Newton inspired artists to draw and paint the material world “after the life”. But how feasible was it for British artists to bracket metaphysical questions out of their work? As Eugene Thacker noted, “‘Life’ is a troubling and contradictory concept.... Every ontology of ‘life’ thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life [which] is most often a metaphysical concept, such as time and temporality, form and causality, or spirit and immanence.”

What, if anything, enabled British art to transcend its base materiality? Should paintings ever be more than mimetic ‘pictures’ of the material world, and if so, what beliefs, ideas, or eternal propositions did they invoke? We have grown accustomed to thinking of British artists as post-Reformation iconoclasts who embraced an empirical view of the world. Painting is treated like a mode of critique in which artists contributed to the disenchantment of the modern world. This panel is interested in British art, in any medium and from any period, that refused to settle for mimetic realism. While altarpieces, funerary monuments, and the spiritual visions of William Blake immediately come to mind, papers could interrogate the ‘naturalism’ or ‘lifelikeness’ of J.M.W. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Walter Sickert, and a great deal more.