化学是一门通常以火来催生材料变化的科学，本书对此要探讨的并非是以某种纯粹系统进行变革的化学，反而是去研究化学经常与其他事物所产生的关系，以及和自然哲学领域的互穿。这不是一本关於化学史的书，而是对於用化学材料来创作和思考的论述。
本书内容追溯至1670年代到1860年代期间，探讨那些以化学物质创作和复制的艺术品，是如何随着时间的推移而产生明显变化，进而改变18世纪漫长的英国绘画艺术发展史，以及如何重新推翻当代摄影观念。作者透过探讨英国画家雷诺兹（Joshua Reynolds；当时的他是首席肖像画家和英国皇家艺术学院的第一任校长）的画作和侧写英国工业知识史，将两者关系串连和重思早期摄影发展史，并且对於雷诺兹画作的既往解读有了全新诠释。这是一本十分原创的艺术史学术之作，其连结了艺术与科学之间的关系，或者更精确地说，是进一步探究英国启蒙运动期间发展而来的化学丶绘画丶版画和摄影之间的关系。本书除了扎根於丰富原始文献之外，也呈现许多未曾公开出版过的珍贵插图。
本书好评
"Painting with Fire is scholarship of signal vision, intellectual force and literary panache. Transforming our understanding of even the most canonical of geniuses such as Joshua Reynolds, it urges with passion and penetration an original interpretation of painting as a chemical and ecological enterprise, where understandings of time itself unfold through the natural materials of artistic practice. It is bravura, breathtaking, and sometimes breathless work, powerfully confirming Hunter's voice as one of the most vibrant and virtuosic on early modern art and science today." - James Delbourgo, author of Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum
"Painting with Fire offers an original and transformative interpretation of the 'British Enlightenment' and challenges some of the fundamental assumptions underlying the historiographies of modern painting, print, and photography. The book is deeply, indeed voraciously, researched, both in the archives and in the secondary literature. It brings British art into a central position within Western modernism, overturns the standard interpretation of the work of Joshua Reynolds, and offers a radically new interpretation of the history of photography, presenting this thing we call a 'photograph' as one among many other kinds of experimental visual chemical operations."- Jennifer Roberts, Harvard University
"Painting with Fire is a strikingly original account of the relationship between art and science-or, more particularly, between chemistry, painting, and photography-in the British Enlightenment. It reveals a series of uneasy entanglements that our own disciplinary restrictions have hitherto rendered invisible. Deeply rooted in primary source research, the book is peopled with an extraordinary array of figures familiar and unfamiliar. It is well illustrated with much previously unpublished visual material. Hunter's lively prose leads the reader from Joshua Reynolds's studios to Matthew Boulton's Birmingham manufactory, from early modern experiments with light and pigment to photography's Victorian heyday. By drawing attention to the chemical instability of the artwork and documenting the profound experimentation with pigment and light that fundamentally expanded the possibilities of both art and industry in this period, Hunter reveals the intellectual unsustainability of established accounts of eighteenth-century painting and of the emergence of photography. This is an incendiary contribution to art history."- Tim Barringer, Yale University
关於作者
Matthew C. Hunter是麦吉尔大学（McGill University）艺术史与传播研究系的副教授。 曾合着《超越模仿与惯例：艺术与科学的表现形式》（Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science）和《聪明的物体》（The Clever Object）两本书，以及着有《灰室》（Grey Room）一书。 他於2016年荣获阿瑟金斯利波特奖 （Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize）。
本书内容追溯至1670年代到1860年代期间，探讨那些以化学物质创作和复制的艺术品，是如何随着时间的推移而产生明显变化，进而改变18世纪漫长的英国绘画艺术发展史，以及如何重新推翻当代摄影观念。作者透过探讨英国画家雷诺兹（Joshua Reynolds；当时的他是首席肖像画家和英国皇家艺术学院的第一任校长）的画作和侧写英国工业知识史，将两者关系串连和重思早期摄影发展史，并且对於雷诺兹画作的既往解读有了全新诠释。这是一本十分原创的艺术史学术之作，其连结了艺术与科学之间的关系，或者更精确地说，是进一步探究英国启蒙运动期间发展而来的化学丶绘画丶版画和摄影之间的关系。本书除了扎根於丰富原始文献之外，也呈现许多未曾公开出版过的珍贵插图。
本书好评
"Painting with Fire is scholarship of signal vision, intellectual force and literary panache. Transforming our understanding of even the most canonical of geniuses such as Joshua Reynolds, it urges with passion and penetration an original interpretation of painting as a chemical and ecological enterprise, where understandings of time itself unfold through the natural materials of artistic practice. It is bravura, breathtaking, and sometimes breathless work, powerfully confirming Hunter's voice as one of the most vibrant and virtuosic on early modern art and science today." - James Delbourgo, author of Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum
"Painting with Fire offers an original and transformative interpretation of the 'British Enlightenment' and challenges some of the fundamental assumptions underlying the historiographies of modern painting, print, and photography. The book is deeply, indeed voraciously, researched, both in the archives and in the secondary literature. It brings British art into a central position within Western modernism, overturns the standard interpretation of the work of Joshua Reynolds, and offers a radically new interpretation of the history of photography, presenting this thing we call a 'photograph' as one among many other kinds of experimental visual chemical operations."- Jennifer Roberts, Harvard University
"Painting with Fire is a strikingly original account of the relationship between art and science-or, more particularly, between chemistry, painting, and photography-in the British Enlightenment. It reveals a series of uneasy entanglements that our own disciplinary restrictions have hitherto rendered invisible. Deeply rooted in primary source research, the book is peopled with an extraordinary array of figures familiar and unfamiliar. It is well illustrated with much previously unpublished visual material. Hunter's lively prose leads the reader from Joshua Reynolds's studios to Matthew Boulton's Birmingham manufactory, from early modern experiments with light and pigment to photography's Victorian heyday. By drawing attention to the chemical instability of the artwork and documenting the profound experimentation with pigment and light that fundamentally expanded the possibilities of both art and industry in this period, Hunter reveals the intellectual unsustainability of established accounts of eighteenth-century painting and of the emergence of photography. This is an incendiary contribution to art history."- Tim Barringer, Yale University
关於作者
Matthew C. Hunter是麦吉尔大学（McGill University）艺术史与传播研究系的副教授。 曾合着《超越模仿与惯例：艺术与科学的表现形式》（Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science）和《聪明的物体》（The Clever Object）两本书，以及着有《灰室》（Grey Room）一书。 他於2016年荣获阿瑟金斯利波特奖 （Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize）。
