Material & Visual Culture Seminar Series

Each week we’ll hear from two speakers, sharing their research on, and approaches to, the study of seventeenth and eighteenth-century material and visual culture. From reassessing how the work of female artists is read, to European visualisation of Latin America, and the exchange of objects, this year's programme covers a broad range of topics. We aim to make a space in which these rich histories can be explored from varied disciplines to enhance our research practices.

We’ll be meeting on Wednesdays, 5-6pm GMT, online using Zoom. Sign up to receive the joining link and reminders. Registration closes 40 minutes before seminar start time.

SCHEDULE

28 September: Approaching Identities

Chair: Dr Georgia Vullinghs

Emma Pearce

Ailsa Maxwell

12 October: Patronage and Persona under the Stuarts

Chair: Dr Catriona Murray

Sarah Hutcheson

Megan Shaw

26 October: Baroque Devotional Visual Culture

Chair: Professor Carol Richardson

Dr Lucía Jalón Oyarzun

Dr Sandra Costa Saldanha

9 November: Pasteboard and Printing Plates: Elusive Objects

Chair: Molly Ingham

Chiara Betti

Dr Lucy Razzall

23 November: The Social Life of ... Tea

Chair: Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth

Anna Myers

Dr Lucy Powell

7 December: The Materiality of Making

Chair: Professor Viccy Coltman

Kerry Love

Alejandro Octavio Nodarse

ABSTRACTS

28 September

Chair: Dr Georgia Vullinghs

Emma Pearce; Re-reading the Runaway: The Visual and Material Culture of Eighteenth-Century Runaway Slave Advertisements in Jamaica and South Carolina

In late eighteenth-century North America and the Caribbean, advertisements for the return of runaway enslaved individuals were a common feature of the colonial newspaper. These adverts followed the same general formula: detailing the name of the fugitive person, their gender, age and height, followed by descriptions of other bodily features, skills, languages and clothing. They were submitted by enslavers as ‘subscribers’ to the newspaper and were positioned alongside other adverts for goods, services, shipping notices and missing or stolen livestock. The advertisements were highly oxymoronic - both conjuring a detailed image of an enslaved individual, whilst also being wholly dehumanising in treating them as someone else’s property to be returned.

The textual content of runaway slave advertisements have received much scholarly attention, yet the material and visual culture of the advertisements, and their context within the wider newspaper, has been widely overlooked. This paper aims to address this, with particular focus on Jamaican and South Carolinian newspapers. It will examine the woodblock illustrations that accompanied the newspaper text, and the rupture between the homogenised bodies represented on the paper page and the actual unlocated bodies of runaways. I argue that although the adverts ultimately attempt to dehumanise and recapture enslaved people, both in their literal function and their visual treatment on the physical newspaper page, they also serve as a testament to the thousands of individuals who attempted to find freedom and, even if only temporarily, resisted their enslavement through defying the gaze of their enslavers.

Ailsa Maxwell; Gendered Expectations: Children’s Tableware in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This paper will explore the production of tableware specifically for children in eighteenth century Britain. I will show how an analysis of this tableware illuminates childhood interactions with dining culture, gendered expectations, and introductions to polite society.

Children’s tableware grew immensely in popularity from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, yet the production of children’s tea-sets and instigation of children using their own tableware remains relatively overlooked in scholarship on children and in food historiography. I argue that food and drink cultures cannot be divorced from the lived experiences of children and that at a time of increased commercialisation and, to draw on J.H. Plumb, a ‘new world of children’ (1975), it seems that children were identified as a sector of the (gendered) purchasing classes and as a group actively engaging with contemporary food and drink culture well before 1800.

My case study will focus on children’s introduction to tea-drinking culture. I will firstly assess tableware such as the earliest example of a surviving child’s mug (1752, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), as well as various other surviving objects including tea services with cups, saucers, plates and slop bowls. Secondly, I will look at toys which mimicked dining ware. These included not only the expected play tea sets but also an elaborate assortment of miniature dinner services. Tea sets were also crafted for specific play with dolls, examples for discussion date back to 1680s Staffordshire earthenware. An examination of tableware as playthings exposes a gendered dimension to children’s experiences.

12 October

Chair: Dr Catriona Murray

Sarah Hutcheson; Residences and Regalia: the Remodeling of Windsor Castle and the crafting of an architectural symbol under Charles II

In Peter Lely’s Portrait of Charles II in Garter Robes (c 1675-80), the king is shown seated, prominently displaying the garter on his leg, with the royal regalia resting on the table next to him. The scepter, lying on its side, visually underlines the view out the window behind Charles to Windsor Castle, whose vertical towers echo the lines of the upright imperial crown sitting just to the right of the window. This arrangement almost grants an extension of regalia status to the royal residence, which underwent a remodeling of the main royal quarters and reception spaces from 1675-84. This remodel, orchestrated by architect Hugh May, aimed to modernize the medieval palace—magnificent Baroque interiors were commissioned from Antionio Verrio and Grinling Gibbons—but also to stress the continuity of the monarchy, steel reeling from the Interregnum. One strategy was highlighting the historic connection between Windsor and the Order of the Garter: Verrio’s new ceiling of St George’s Hall (1684) depicted Charles II in his garter robes being crowned by Plenty and Religion in the midst of gods and allegorical figures. Tying garter emblems, along with other regalia, to Windsor helped signify a site-specificity that was crucial for a monarchy that had until recently been living in exile. The king was back at Windsor Castle, and Windsor Castle was now part of a new constellation of monarchic emblems that could appear throughout visual media.

Megan Shaw; Collecting and Custodianship: Recovering Female Patronage in the Buckingham Collection

Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham (1603-1649) is best known as the wife and widow of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), the royal favourite to the Stuart kings James VI & I and Charles I. With the assistance of his advisor Balthasar Gerbier, Buckingham assembled a large collection of paintings and fine sculpture in under a decade. The famous collection was largely housed at the Duke and Duchess’s primary residence, York House on London’s Strand. Katherine inherited York House and its contents in 1628 after Buckingham was assassinated. This paper explores Katherine’s ownership, custodianship, and management of the collection between 1628-1635 to reorient our understanding and perception of the collection and the couple’s patronage. Katherine’s place in this story has been overlooked. The key sources for the house and collection date from the time of Katherine’s ownership but have long been used incorrectly to illustrate how things were during Buckingham’s lifetime, rather than what survived thanks to the custodianship of the widowed duchess. Furthermore, newly discovered inventories of Katherine’s Red and Green Closets allow a richer picture of the collection to emerge. As well as communicating wealth and magnificence, the contents of her Green Closet emphasise Katherine’s access to the global trade of foreign and exotic materials which were greatly sought after by the elite for their cabinet rooms. Her display of natural and artificial curiosities, decorative and devotional objects, and furniture alongside paintings and sculpture illustrate that the collection was broader and richer than has previously been shown.

26 October

Chair: Professor Carol Richardson

Dr Lucía Jalón Oyarzun; The Battle of Confetti: Affective Images in the Eighteenth-Century Roman Carnival

A comparative analysis of images and texts of the Roman carnival that took place during the 18th century in the Baroque fabric of the city, offers us a way of conceptualizing “affective images” as tools to understand how the city saw and made sense of its collective being. We build the notion of “affective image” from Spinoza’s definition of the image, not as a retinal reality, but a fully embodied one (Jalón Oyarzun, 2022). At our site and period of study, images were mostly used for political representation, they were descriptive but also normative and even prescriptive, configuring the events before they took place (Boiteux, 1997). Meanwhile, texts from travelers or local accounts offer us embodied readings of the practices and spatialities that escaped representation. One example of this is Goethe’s Roman Carnival who described one of the last carnivals before the prohibition following the French Revolution and the fears of popular revolt it created, a moment that marked the change from “a party the people give to themselves” in Goethe’s words to 19th century urban spectacle. I will focus my presentation on one of the micro-events threading the carnival: the battle of confetti happening every year in the environs of the Palazzo Ruspoli. These small balls of plaster prepared before the carnival were thrown around marking everything they touched in white. This proposal is part of an ongoing post-doctoral research project led at the Digital Visual Studies Center at the University of Zürich (UZH).

Dr Sandra Costa Saldanha; Roman Visual Culture and the Construction of Baroque Devotional Images: Guidelines, Models, and Interpretations in Eighteenth-Century’s Ibero-American Sculpture

The influence of Roman visual culture on Baroque sculpture is an unavoidable analysis tool, fundamental for a more adequate knowledge of 18th century’s artistic practices. In fact, like other areas of artistic creation, devotional sculpture is also deeply indebted to the main Roman commissions of the Settecento. Mostly analyzed as unique creations,of greater or lower quality, more or less subsidiary from conventional aesthetic standards, their models, iconographic sources, or even their subsequent influence, are scarcely explored.

The approach to this subject, however, has been limited almost exclusively to theengraving effects on the works, with no studies dedicated to the impact of sculptural archetypes on artistic production. This is not a marginal topic, reduced to the usual distinction between copies and original works, or to the reproduction of sculptural objects on pictorial supports, but rather to the role of these models in the construction of 18th century imagery, their plastic and iconographic contributions.

As a common practice in the activity of several artists, the adoption of referential models, their multiplication and dissemination, whether through replication or compositive adaptation, is essential. Testimonies of aesthetic preferences and artistic consumption in different times, they constitute unique documents for the understanding of the processes of model transfer and plastic updating, but also the pedagogical practices of each period.

Regarding religious sculpture, the reproduction of an image also involves the assumption that, through the copy, something of the devotional effectiveness of the original is transmitted. By disseminating prestigious models, acclaimed for their symbolism, the reputation of patrons, or the skill of their creators, the reproduction of a sculpture thus assumes important repercussions, not only in the dissemination of original works, but also in the transmission of their meaning. It is not just about replicating the works of renowned masters, but rather emulating the relevance and devotional authority of those works.

In the context of major Roman 18th century’s commissions, the core of pontifical spirituality, their influence on sculptural production is an essential tool for the study of Baroque art. Widespread throughout the western world, soon they became emblematic models, providing the compositive and iconographic basis for a wide range of works.

Taking a leading role among these models, I highlight the impact of two fundamental commissions: the apostolate of Saint John Lateran’s Basilica and the series of founding saints of religious congregations and orders in St Peter's, whose prestige, technical quality, compositive accuracy, and iconographic precision, among other reasons, have been powerful causes for making them reference models across Europe.

In this way, the aim of this proposal is to present the results of the ongoing research,focusing in particular on: in the main compositive and iconographic models; in the context of the Settecento Roman visual culture; in the referential role of these sources in Ibero-American production of sculpture; in the ordering guidelines, in particular the role of patrons in defining the models followed; in the processes of adapting the sources to the final works, representative of the interpretation, evolution, and transformation of these models in Ibero-American context.

9 November

Chair: Molly Ingham

Chiara Betti; Not Just a Bunch of Metal: Printing Plates as Research Tools

Why is it crucial to research printing plates and printing things in general? What information can they provide, and to what fields are they relevant?

Printing plates belong to the category of “difficult objects”. Even though they are found in many libraries, archives, and museums, printing plates are often under-researched, poorly catalogued, and little-known. My PhD focuses on the collection of copper plates amassed by the antiquary Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755). Rawlinson’s collection of plates is the most extensive built by a private individual in the Western world (752 items), and it has never been studied before. Moreover, the collection is documented by a large number of account books, letters, auction catalogues, and a miscellany of precious manuscript material.

Using the Rawlinson copper plates as an example, I will demonstrate how the research of print technology can support bibliographical studies, the history of collecting, art history, and heritage science. Additionally, this paper will show how trade catalogues offer valuable material for studying provenance and collecting practices. Since I am venturing into unexplored territory, I will also highlight the challenges that the study of printing plates and related documentation poses. Lastly, this paper will demonstrate that copper plates are not only research tools and functional printing equipment but also artworks in their own right.

Dr Lucy Razzall; ‘Nothing but a thin painted Past-board’: Paper, Pasteboard, and Paradox in Early Modern England

This paper is about one of the possible fates for waste paper in early modern England: to be turned into pasteboard. Pasteboard was so called because it was made by pasting sheets of paper together, or compressing pulped paper, and so it describes what was the predecessor of papier mâché or cardboard. Pasteboard had many uses – including for the binding of books, as a writing or drawing surface, in the construction of fireworks, the setting of broken limbs, and the making of boxes, instruments, and models.

Pasteboard was a versatile substance that materialised several paradoxes. It was both stiff and pliable. It could form a flat surface or a three-dimensional structure. It was thicker than individual sheets of paper but not as strong as wooden ‘board’, and it could provide essential support, strength, and protection whilst also being something temporary or disposable, the product of leftovers. In this paper I consider the literary and imaginative potential of pasteboard in early modern material culture, alongside some literary sources. In English writing, it appears frequently as an emblem of flimsiness and insubstantiality, and underpins notions of hypocrisy or worthlessness. I examine some of these pasteboard moments in pamphlets, poems and plays, tracing how the material and imaginative paradoxes of pasteboard work themselves out in various literary ways.

23 November

Chair: Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth

Anna Myers; 'Within this monument': George Cooper's 1759 Shakespeare Tea Chest

This paper examines a tea chest at the Victoria & Albert Museum that is signed and dated ‘made by George Cooper, 1759’ and further inscribed ‘Made from the mulberry tree that grew in William Shakespeare’s Garden at New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon’. The latter text refers to a tree which tradition has held was planted by Shakespeare circa 1609 upon his retirement from London to his home, New Place, in Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1756 the tree —‘venerated’ by the local populace as ‘belong[ing] to the immortal Shakespeare’—was cut into blocks and sold by then resident, the Reverend Francis Gastrell (Davies, 1781). Capitalising on the contemporary conception of the mulberry tree and its wood as a material connection to Shakespeare, Cooper, among other local entrepreneurs carved the blocks into objects ranging from snuff boxes and writing standishes to scales and pastry cutters.

Scholars have often related the significance of ‘Shakespeare’s mulberry tree', and objects made from its wood, known as ‘mulberry’, or ‘Shakespeare relics’, to eighteenth and nineteenth-century English consumer culture and literary tourism. Examining the aesthetic, material, and utilitarian values of George Cooper’s tea chest, this paper rather situates mulberry relics within broader eighteenth-century cultural consumption networks while highlighting contemporary reference and reverence for the god-like, ethereal Shakespeare. Building on the methodological approach of Catheryn Enis and Tara Hamling, who have shown that through the use of domestic mulberry relics, people would feel an affinity with Shakespeare by replicating the everyday activities of the playwright and his own household, it argues that eighteenth-century people forged intimate and communal connections, defining social through contact with Shakespeare, embodied in this specifically functional mulberry relic (Enis and Hamling, 2019).

Dr Lucy Powell; Parroting: Chelsea Chinaware in 1745, a Grotesque Teapot and the Global Imaginary

This paper will take as its focus a ‘grotesque’ ‘Chinaman’ teapot, now in the V&A, which was created at the soft-paste porcelain factory in Chelsea, for an elite clientele of newly-minted English tea-drinkers between 1745 and 1749. Mapping the tea-pot’s material lives and afterlives: its design and manufacture, sale and use in the home, I will recover the elusive web of associations that enlivened and enriched it. I’ll explore the linguistic double-valence of ‘China’, whereby a single term denotes both a people and an object, an empire and a physical material, and, through the theories of Bruno Latour and Arjun Appadurai, the ontological ramifications of such slippages. Moreover, Chelsea teapots were part of the first attempts by European potters to replicate and thereby supplant the vastly lucrative trade in Chinese export porcelains, and this grotesque, featuring a ‘chinaman’ and a parrot, speaks with particular eloquence to the conflicting valences of desire, global exploration and scientific experiment in the mid-century, English metropolis. Through the drama of William Wycherley, the poetry of Alexander Pope and the prose of Daniel Defoe, I’ll locate the teapot in its rich cultural and literary setting, one that was much preoccupied with femininity, ‘luxury’, and the precariousness of virtue. As Andreas Reckwitz has argued, social life is fashioned by ‘doings with things’, and this talk will think carefully about the repercussive nature of fashioning, owning and using such china in mid-eighteenth century England, and the implications of this on our readings of the enlightenment project at large.

7 December

Chair: Professor Viccy Coltman

Kerry Love; Popular Culture and National Identity in Eighteenth Century Printed Handkerchiefs

Handkerchiefs were one of the most flexible and multi-purpose objects used by most people in late Georgian society. Whilst they were carried in the pocket to blow one’s nose, or to wipe or clean the face and hands, they could also be worn by both men and women. There are examples of them used to tie around wounds, wrap small goods in pockets or waved for dramatic effect in scenes of battle or sorrow. Some formed the centrepiece of a quilt, sewn in as the central panel. Concealment is a common use in fiction as handkerchiefs hide the face and pass goods between people secretly. Produced in silk, cotton, and linen, whilst plain white was very common, printed designs were equally popular. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between developments in the textiles industry that allowed these goods to be quickly produced to respond to current events, reflect popular culture, and explore national identity using political symbolism. The fabric itself was closely connected to local industries (such as Lancashire weaving) or national identity (in the case of Irish Linen) and this paper will discuss how 18th-century Britons conceptualised and understood their relationship with these objects through these themes. Finally, it will reflect upon printed cotton’s relationship to innovation and the connection between political events and businesses’ desire to profit from their popularity.

Alejandro Octavio Nodarse; Goya’s Nothings: The Destructive Capacities of Print

Between 1812 and 1814, Goya’s image of Nada (Ello dirá), or Nothing (The Event will tell), sustained a transformation. A set of proofs, pictured above, preserves two states of the sixty-ninth image and the (initial) close of Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War). The metal of the copper plate undergoes a dramatic alteration: two white “rays” of light, un-inked paper once visible with near-geometric precision, appear suddenly mutilated in the final state. The engraver’s burin, acid, and resinous aquatint wound the ground itself as the work stages its own return to Nada, to Nothing.

With what force does an artist destroy his own work? That force and the transformations it entails—before and between 1812 and 1814, between two traces of Nothing—is the subject of this paper. This (seemingly) limited frame will open a wide horizon, historiographically and methodologically. For as we near the site of Goya’s destructive transformation, we will glimpse his most profound engagement with a history of print—and, more specifically, with the technology of aquatint invented in the late-seventeenth-century—to radical medial and metaphoric ends. Challenging the reproductive role assigned to the medium by his peers, Francesco Milizia and Agustín Céan Bermúdez, Goya employs print as a supra-iconographic force both within and against his images. In working against the pictorial substrate (in this initial case, the etched line of the first proof) Goya will interrogate the very possibility of vision and of artistic creation during a time in which such images themselves seemed destined for obsolescence.