Ann Bermingham’s eagerly awaited new book, Learning to Draw, is about much more than the development of drawing practices. As the subtitle, Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art, suggests, this is a wider history of the formation of the individual as a subject in (visual) culture. It analyzes the way drawing “resulted in an aestheticization of the self and the things of everyday life,” a phenomenon that Bermingham sees as...