17 research outputs found
"On the Spot": travelling artists and Abolitionism, 1770-1830
Until recently the visual culture of Atlantic slavery has rarely been critically scrutinised. Yet in the first decades of the nineteenth century slavery was frequently represented by European travelling artists, often in the most graphic, sometimes voyeuristic, detail. This paper examines the work of several itinerant artists, in particular Augustus Earle (1793-1838) and Agostino Brunias (1730–1796), whose very mobility along the edges of empire was part of a much larger circulatory system of exchange (people, goods and ideas) and diplomacy that characterised Europe’s Age of Expansion. It focuses on the role of the travelling artist, and visual culture more generally, in the development of British abolitionism between 1770 and 1830. It discusses the broad circulation of slave imagery within European culture and argues for greater recognition of the role of such imagery in the abolitionist debates that divided Britain. Furthermore, it suggests that the epistemological authority conferred on the travelling artist—the quintessential eyewitness—was key to the rhetorical power of his (rarely her) images.
Artists such as Earle viewed the New World as a boundless source of fresh material that could potentially propel them to fame and fortune. Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858), on the other hand, was conscious of contributing to a global scientific mission, a Humboldtian imperative that by the 1820s propelled him and others to travel beyond the traditional itinerary of the Grand Tour. Some artists were implicated in the very fabric of slavery itself, particularly those in the British West Indies such as William Clark (working 1820s) and Richard Bridgens (1785-1846); others, particularly those in Brazil, expressed strong abolitionist sentiments. Fuelled by evangelical zeal to record all aspects of the New World, these artists recognised the importance of representing the harsh realities of slave life. Unlike those in the metropole who depicted slavery (most often in caustic satirical drawings), many travelling artists believed strongly in the evidential value of their images, a value attributed to their global mobility. The paper examines the varied and complex means by which visual culture played a significant and often overlooked role in the political struggles that beset the period
Angespannte Verhältnisse – Universitätsprofessoren und ihre Kollegen an den Berliner Museen um 1900
Peer Reviewe
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Science and the perception of nature: British landscape art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This thesis is not available on this repository until the author agrees to make it public. If you are the author of this thesis and would like to make your work openly available, please contact us: [email protected] Library can supply a digital copy for private research purposes; interested parties should submit the request form here: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/digital-content-unit/ordering-imagesPlease note that print copies of theses may be available for consultation in the Cambridge University Library's Manuscript reading room. Admission details are at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/manuscripts-university-archivesThe period between 1790 and 1820 saw striking changes in the depiction of British landscape. Conventional pictorial formulae (the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque) were abandoned in favour of what has been called a more 'naturalistic' mode of representation. The thesis argues that this is not the outcome of a logic internal to art alone, but best understood as interwoven with changes in the understanding of nature taking place more broadly at this time, in particular, in contemporary science. The first chapter links eighteenth-century aesthetic theories to contemporary physiological and philosophical investigations. Around the turn of the century a new understanding of the relationship between the mind and the world, based on a new conception of causality, replaced the eighteenth-century belief in a unifying common medium in all three fields. The second chapter focuses on one particular project in which art and science were consciously brought together under the auspices of a unitary metaphysics: Robert J. Thornton's botanical treatise The Temple of Flora. Its failure indicates that such enterprises were coming to seem increasingly fanciful. The third chapter counterposes geological treatises and their illustrations with contemporary landscape art. On the one hand, geological illustrations lagged behind the texts which they accompanied. On the other hand, the emergence of a new fieldwork approach in geology seems to have stimulated artists to perceive landscape .i,r.t ways that led beyond established formulae. The last chapter concentrates on the circle of artists around John and Cornelius Varley in London. It is argued that Cornelius Varley, who had serious scientific interests, was an important influence on the 'photographic' style of landscape depiction that developed within the circle. In conclusion, the traditional modes of landscape art were sustained by an epistemology which saw reality as mediated by a single, underlying common principle. As the credibility of such world-views came increasingly to be called into question, a subjectivistic approach, commonly termed 'naturalism' or 'empiricism', but which is better named phenomenalism, provided a short period of unstable synthesis at the beginning of the nineteenth century between the scientific observation of nature and the personal response of the perceiver
Welcome
Charlotte Klonk, Welcome to the conference Image Operations, ICI Berlin, 10–12 April 2014, video recording, mp4, 13:35 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e140410_1
Review of: Gould, Stephen Jay and Rosamond Wolff Purcell: Crossing over : where art and science meet. New York: Three Rivers Press 2000
Image Operations
Some images intervene directly in the world and change it in far-reaching ways. As components of media practices, they generate events, impacting immediately and concretely on people and bodies. Image operations such as these are particularly striking in the case of war, terrorist attacks, and the political campaigns of NGOs – but also in medicine. The international conference Image Operations brought together leading scholars to discuss the constitutive role of images and their ethical implications.Image Operations, conference, ICI Berlin, 10–12 April 2014 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e140410