Bøker i Material Culture of Art and De-serien

How do our senses help us to understand the world? This question, which preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers in Western Europe, also emerged as a key theme in depictions of animals in eighteenth-century art. This book examines the ways in which painters, sculptors, porcelain modelers, and other decorative designers portrayed animals as sensing subjects who physically confirmed the value of material experience. The independent agency of animals with their own right to free existence, a topic of growing urgency in our own era, emerges in striking and often surprising ways within this early nexus of artistic experimentation.The sensual style known today as the Rococo encouraged the proliferation of animals as exemplars of empirical inquiry in the eighteenth century, ranging from the popular subject of the monkey artist to the alchemical wonders of the life-sized porcelain animals created for the Saxon court. Examining writings on sensory knowledge by La Mettre, Condillac, Diderot and other philosophers side by side with depictions of the animal in art, Cohen argues that artists promoted the animal as a sensory, thinking subject while also validating the material basis of their own professional practice.

This book broadens the discussion of pottery and china in the Victorian era by situating them in the national, imperial, design reform, and domestic debates between 1840 and 1890. Largely ignored in recent scholarship, Ceramics in the Victorian Era: Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature argues that the signification of a pot, a jug, or a tableware pattern can be more fully discerned in written and painted representations.Across five case studies, the book explores a rhetoric and set of conventions that developed within the representation of ceramics, emerging in the late-18th century, and continuing in the Victorian period. Each case study begins with a textual passage exemplifying the outlined theme and closes with an object analysis to demonstrate how the fusing of text, image, and object are critical to attaining the period eye in order to better understand the metaphorical meanings of ceramics.Essential reading not only for ceramics scholars, but also those of material culture, the book mines the rich and diverse archive of Victorian painting and literature, from the avant-garde to the sentimental, from the well-known to the more obscure, to shed light on the at once complex and simple implications of ceramics' agencies at this time.

A desire for intimacy in domestic spaces - motivated by a growing sense of individualistic expression, an incentive to conceal the labor or enslavement taking place, and an appetite for solace and comfort - led to interiors taking on more specific roles in the eighteenth century. By examining the architectural, visual, and material culture of eighteenth-century spaces, Intimate Interiors foregrounds the interrelated concepts of intimacy, privacy, informality, and sociability in order to show how these ideas played an increasingly integral role in the period's architectural and material design.Across eleven innovative chapters that explore issues of gender, politics, travel, exoticism, imperialism, sensorial experiences, identity, interiority, and modernity, this volume demonstrates how intimacy was a fundamental goal in the planning of private quarters. In doing so, the political nature of private spaces is uncovered, whilst highlighting the contradictions and complexities of these highly performative "private" interiors. Employing distinct methodological perspectives across various geographical sites, from Turkey to Versailles, Britain to Benin, Intimate Interiors draws as-yet untraced connections between Enlightenment Europe, imperial outposts, and major metropolitan centers across the globe.

During the long 19th century, Scotland was home to an established body of skilled jewellers who were able to access a range of materials from the country's varied natural landscape: precious gold and silver; sparkling crystals and colourful stones; freshwater pearls, shells and parts of rare animals. Following these materials on their journey from hill and shore, across the jeweller's bench and on to the bodies of wearers, this book challenges the persistent notion that the forces of industrialisation led to the decline of craft. It instead reveals a vivid picture of skilled producers who were driving new and revived areas of hand skill, and who were key to fostering a focused cultural engagement with the natural world - among both producers and consumers - through the things they made. By placing producers and their skill in cultural context, the book reveals how examining the materiality of even the smallest of objects can offer new and multifaceted insights into the wider transformations that marked British history during the long 19th century. The Material Landscapes of Scotland's Jewellery Craft 1780-1914 brings together a vast array of jewellery objects with a range of other sources - including paintings, engravings, newspaper reports, letters, inventories of big houses and small workshops, sketchbooks, novels, works of literary geology and early travel writings - to provide a detailed cultural history of jewellery production. In doing so, it sets out innovative methodologies for writing about the histories of craft production, the natural environment and the material world.

Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art is the first edited volume to critically examine uses of lead as both material and cultural signifier in modern and contemporary art. The book analyzes the work of a diverse group of artists working in Europe, the Middle East, and North America, and takes into account the ways in which gender, race, and class can affect the cultural perception of lead.Bringing together contributions from a distinguished group of international contributors across various fields, this volume explores lead's relevance from a number of perspectives, including art history, technical art history, art criticism, and curatorial studies. Drawing on current art historical concerns with materiality, this volume builds on recent exhibitions and scholarship that reconsider the role of materials in shaping artistic meaning, thus giving a central relevance to the object and its physicality.

"The Art of Mary Linwood is the first book on Leicester textile artist Mary Linwood (1755-1845) and catalogue of her work. When British textile artist and gallery owner Mary Linwood died in 1845 just shy of 90 years old, her estate was worth the equivalent of ¹5,199,822 in today's currency. As someone who made, but didn't sell, embroidered replicas of famous artworks after artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Stubbs, and Morland, how did she accumulate so much money? A pioneering woman in the male-dominated art world of late Georgian Britain, Linwood established her own London gallery in 1798 which featured copies of well-known paintings by these popular artists. Featuring props and specially designed rooms for her replicas, she ensured that her visitors had an entertaining, educational, and kinetic tour, similar to what Madame Tussaud would do one generation later. The gallery's focus on picturesque painters provided her London visitors with an idyllic imaginary journey through the countryside. Its emphasis on quintessentially British artists provided a unifying focus for a country that had recently emerged from the threat of Napoleonic invasion. This book brings to the fore Linwood's gallery guides and previously unpublished letters to her contemporaries, such as Birmingham inventor Matthew Boulton and Queen Charlotte. By examining Linwood's replicas and their accompanying objects through the lens of material culture, the book provides a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on women and cultural agency in the early 19th century"--

Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from 1750-1840, this book demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how the function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at a time when it took on unprecedented social and emotional significance.Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries' social and emotional lives.The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late 18th- and early 19th-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.

From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Featuring ten essays from leading historians of British, Spanish, and West African art, this global survey brings a fresh approach to the study of eighteenth century material culture, foregrounding cultural connections, translation, and movement over static and rooted perspectives. Each chapter takes a diverse scholarly approach, identifying a specific historical example of early modern transnationalism, and engages with a number of dynamic fields of enquiry and practice, ranging from material culture and ecocriticism, through to global history and decolonization. Underpinned by case studies which feature objects and practices that span Asia, Europe, Australasia Africa and North America, the book expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds.Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, this timely book illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period. Going beyond Eurocentric perspectives, it reveals the innate mobility and transculturality of eighteenth-century art worlds; charting new directions for global art history and cultural history of the period.

"This book examines the art gallery at Cleveland House, known in the 19th century as the 'Louvre of London' due to its internationally-renowned collection of Old Master paintings. Through detailed analysis of a wide range of visual, material, textual and archival sources, the book presents the gallery as a methodological case study on the intersection of domesticity and the display of art, and the construction of the notion of 'public', 'private' and 'national' galleries in the period. The book is essential reading for researchers in Regency-era British art, museum studies, collecting studies, and the histories of interior decoration and design"--

"This interdisciplinary anthology presents 10 chapters from a range of scholars in art history, cultural studies and anthropology to unpack the complex relationship between people and things via an object-centred model of identity. Presenting a global section of case studies, Material Selves confronts vital questions of identity, agency, and materiality, highlighting the way in which we use objects to tell stories, construct myths and make sense of our place in the world. Thus, this path-breaking volume shows how the objects with which we adorn and surround ourselves provide a model for the construction of raced, gendered, and cultured subjectivity"--