Making an English country house: taste and luxury in the furnishing of Stoneleigh Abbey, 1763-1765

This is a crucial volume for any historian seeking a more nuanced understanding of material culture, consumption and luxury in early modern Europe

The postmaster's porcelain : collecting European decorative art in middle America

Field of study: Art history and archaeology.Dr. Michael Yonan, Dissertation Supervisor.Includes vita."July 2018.""This dissertation provides a case study of a type of art collecting that has not received significant scholarly attention, one based on the collecting activity of middleclass Americans living in the Midwestern United States, but who nonetheless are interested in the appeal of European "high" art. I intend to show that collecting and the appreciation of art are not limited to those with the financial acumen of a Rockefeller, Guggenheim, or Saatchi. The following analysis centers on Philip and Mildred Strain, a postmaster and schoolteacher, and the obstacles they overcame to amass a collection that reflected their interest in eighteenth-century European aesthetics. Typically, collectors attract the attention of scholars when they have access to art and artists that become revered enough to be placed in the art historical canon. Access to the work of those artists necessitates the ability to connect with dealers, as well as the artists themselves, in global cultural centers like Paris, New York City, or London. In 1958, Aline B. Saarinen published a book titled The Proud Possessors, which is composed of fifteen biographical sketches of American art collectors. It established a canon of American collectors on which the scholarship of collecting is based. Saarinen, an art critic for The New York Times, narrates the lives of men who built the physical, economic, and political infrastructure of the United States, women whose names now adorn major American museums, and the world travelers who brought the work of modern artists like Picasso and Matisse to America. Saarinen writes that “the overpowering common denominator” that unites these collectors is that "collecting art was a primary means of expression" and that their "involvement with art collecting was passionate and urgent." Saarinen's comments about the motives of the socially prominent collectors, whose financial resources and connections allowed them access to the international art market, can also be applied to Mr. and Mrs. Strain. The Strains also used their collection to express an identity of their own making. However, the Strains could be categorized as "outsider collectors," a term that echoes the concept of the outsider artist, a recognized genre in the art-historical canon. Outsider artists operate separately from mainstream art establishments; they are often self-trained and labor for years in obscurity before being discovered by a dealer, curator, or scholar. The Strains built their store of connoisseurial knowledge through secondary sources such as auction catalogs and collecting guides. Their close relationship with Jack Drew, an art and antiques dealer in Omaha, mimicked the relationships between the canonical collectors and dealers, galleries, and auction houses with Drew serving as a consultant facilitating access to the art and antiques markets of metropolitan cultural centers. The Strains lacked the financial and social resources of Saarinen's canon of collectors, but they shared a passion that motivated their appreciation of the art to which they were most attracted. I approach the Strains' collecting activities as Saarinen approached wealthy collectors. This dissertation will examine the Strains' biography to locate the origin of their interest in the art they collected. It includes a detailed documentation of the methods they used to display their collection in their home, since that environment no longer exists. Their collection has been dispersed and their residence remodeled for future inhabitants. My discussion relies on interviews with individuals who knew the Strains in order to understand how they lived with their collection. My analysis provides another chapter to the story of art collectors in America, expanding our understanding of the human impulse to express ourselves through the objects we possess."--PrefaceIncludes bibliographical references

Cultivating the world: English country house gardens, 'exotic' plants and elite women collectors, c.1690-1800

Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. Across Europe, mahogany furniture, Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles formed the backdrop to genteel practices of drinking sweetened coffee, tea and chocolate from Chinese porcelain. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire. Global Goods and the Country House builds on these narratives, and then challenges them by decentring our perspective. It offers a comparative framework that explores the definition, ownership and meaning of global goods outside the usual context of European imperial powers. What were global goods and what did they mean for wealthy landowners in places at the ‘periphery’ of Europe (Sweden and Wallachia), in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean, or in the extra-colonial context (Japan or Rajasthan)? By addressing these questions, this volume offers fresh insights into the multi-directional flow of goods and cultures that enmeshed the eighteenth-century world. And by placing these goods in their specific material context - from the English country house to the princely palaces of Rajasthan - we gain a better understanding of their use and meaning, and of their role in linking the global and the local

The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857

The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies

BROUGHT UP CAREFULLY: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF WOMEN, RACE RELATIONS, DOMESTICITY, AND MODERNIZATION IN ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND, 1865-1930

This dissertation explores the ways in which gender identity played an important role in shaping social and economic systems in post-Civil War Annapolis, Maryland. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study examines the definition, negotiation, and contestation of normative ideas about gender and acceptable social relationships during this time period of numerous social, political, and economic changes. Emergent gender ideologies were closely connected to citywide and national priorities, and normalized identity configurations were used to determine who would be considered eligible for civil rights and the protections of citizenship, and to individualize inequalities. Utilizing historical and archaeological evidence from two streets in the historic district of Annapolis, this dissertation focuses on the ways in which negotiations of gender norms can be seen through archaeologically recovered material culture - namely historic features, ceramics, glass, and fauna. This dissertation argues that the "public" project of governance in Annapolis was accomplished partially through negotiations about "domestic" spaces and responsibilities, which are closely tied to gender and race. During the post-Civil War period, developing gender norms - including ideas about what made a man worthy of citizenship or a woman worthy of protection - played an important part in reformulated expressions of white supremacy, initiatives to modernize cities, and the organization of domestic spaces and priorities. A variety of tactics were used to negotiate gendered identities in Annapolis, and variations in the ways that gender ideologies were expressed reflect active mediations of dominant ideologies

James Monroe’s White House: The Genius of Politics and Place

This research endeavor has discerned the origins of an enduring American nationalistic distinctiveness perpetuated by President James Monroe’s White House. A careful scholarly examination of Monroe’s White House as a cultural landscape enquires into the genesis of interdependence between place and politics. It also studies the depth of the American people’s ability to embrace, as their own, the symbolism and national vision fashioned in these spaces. The juxtaposition of James Monroe’s election as the first United States president after the War of 1812 with the resurrection of the White House manifested for him an exclusive opportunity, still fraught with perils, to define national identities and interiors for the early republic and its posterity. Early attempts to write about the White House compartmentalized the historical context by architecture, social aspects, executive functions, political power, and biographical literature. Self-imposed confinement in historical discourse prohibits a comprehensive narrative while encouraging the autonomy of places, events, ideals, and people. Interpreting the White House as a cultural landscape illuminates the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features within those spaces. Reciprocally, the physical environment retains a central significance as the medium through which human cultures act. Consequently, Monroe’s White House transubstantiated disaffection into a maturing national consciousness. Emphasizing and interpreting primary resources permits the examiner to expose a seemingly mutually exclusive trajectory of James Monroe’s early political career with the White House’s architectural evolution. In contrast, their paths reveal a diminishing parallel. At the point of infinity, the newly elected President Monroe refurbished the interiors and nurtured administrative protocols to foster domestic public and foreign diplomacy while encouraging national respect and integrity for the country

No sacrifice in sunshine, Walter Liberty Vernon : architect 1846-1914

This thesis traces the emergence of the Free Style, advocated by the designers of the Art and Crafts Movement, in the public architecture of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. From 1890, when the English-trained architect Walter Liberty Vernon was appointed Government Architect, the formality of neoclassical architecture, favoured by a succession of Colonial Architects, vanished in favour of less monumental designs that revived traditional building arts, often employing colonial Australian forms. I have traced the evolution of the architectural work of Vernon and the Government Architect’s Branch (GAB) of the NSW Public Works Department from the Queen Anne Revival through the Federation style to the Arts and Crafts Free Style. I have also traced Vernon’s early work, beginning with his initial training in London and his work in Sydney in the 1880s. Vernon’s design work shows him to have become an advocate of the utopian socialism promoted by the leading theorists of the Arts and Crafts Movement. A strong social consciousness can be seen in the buildings designed by the GAB under Vernon, with a focus on the design of well-lit, well-ventilated, simply furnished and unornamented public buildings. It is not simply in the handcrafted detailing of the state’s public buildings that the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement are apparent. I also aim to show how the improvements to the overall planning of institutions and the changes in the architectural style of public buildings reflect the social conscience of the Movement, whilst creating a designed environment. Vernon’s application of the ideals of the Art and Crafts Movement stretched far beyond designing individual highly-crafted buildings, encompassing the emerging disciplines of town planning and the Garden City Movement. In NSW the Free Style became the style of institutional reform, employed not only in the design of hospitals and asylums, but also in the design of workers’ housing and educational facilities across the state, including in the widespread urban renewal and suburban improvement undertaken in Sydney post 1900. Vernon’s legacy to the state of NSW is a series of elegant public buildings that employ the traditional arts of building: schools, hospitals and asylums, post offices, courthouses, police stations and workers’ housing