ABSTRACT
In his essay, The Romanization of Roman Britain, read to the British Academy in 1905 (and revised twice in the next ten years), Francis Haverfield wrote:
Later, when discussing the Celtic artist in Roman society, Haverfield concluded that ‘his Celtic art lost its power and approximated to the conventionalism of Samian ware’ (p.51). When he writes of ‘the heavy inevitable atmosphere of the Roman material civilisation’, it is hard not to conclude that his bias is formed by Late Victorian society and those values which Morris and Burne-Jones assailed so passionately. Clearly complex societies, whatever their undoubted virtues, were no good for art.
