Images of Greece as Images of England

Abstract

The pattern of Greek subjects in English art must be understood in terms of the ideas about the racial identity of the English nation which were developed during this period, and the institutions which put them into practice. Theories about the specifically Greek identity of the English nation develop from the 1850s onwards, with Knox’s Anglo-Saxonism and with Aryanism. This physical similarity was claimed on the basis of alleged evidence from the history of migrations and from comparative anatomy. The idea of the Aryan race had brought together the Indo-European nations as a single anthropological type on the basis of linguistic and physical similarities.