Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean

Food and rituals around eating are a fundamental part of human existence. They can also be heavily politicized and socially significant. In the British Caribbean, white slaveholders were renowned for their hospitality towards one another and towards white visitors. This was no simple quirk of local character. Hospitality and sociability played a crucial role in binding the white minority together. This solidarity helped a small number of whites to dominate and control the enslaved majority. By the end of the eighteenth century, British metropolitan observers had an entrenched opinion of Caribbean whites as gluttons. Travelers reported on the sumptuous meals and excessive drinking of the planter class. Abolitionists associated these features of local society with the corrupting influences of slavery. Excessive consumption and lack of self-control were seen as symptoms of white creole failure. This article explores how local cuisine and white creole eating rituals developed as part of slave societies and examines the ways in which ideas about hospitality and gluttony fed into the debates over slavery that led to the dismantling of slavery and the fall of the planter class

Genius as an alibi ; the production of the artistic subject and english landscape painting, 1795-1820

Nineteenth-century writers and modern scholars have agreed that there was a major shift in the practice of landscape painting in England around the turn of the nineteenth century. Paintings by up-and-coming artists such as J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Girtin, and A. W. Callcott were seen to exhibit a concern for atmospheric effects and an "expressivity" lacking in earlier works. This shift has often been explained by invoking artistic genius: the keen intellect and sensibility of the artistic producer has served as a self-evident explanation of the rise to prominence of this form of landscape painting. This study endorses the centrality of the artistic subject to the enterprise of landscape painting, but disputes the notion that genius is a natural and self-evident phenomenon. It is argued here that the native landscape genius was a category of the creative individual which was socially produced at this historical moment in conjunction with or in opposition to other contemporaneous formulations of the artist. This examination of artistic subjectivity as determined by gender, social status, education, wealth, and so forth, is organized around three interrelated subject positions: the "man of letters" derived from the notion of the academic history painter, the "market slave," a negative construction of the artist who was seen to pander to the demands of the market and the "imaginative man of genius." The inscription of these positionalities in landscape imagery i s contingent upon a range of historically specific social phenomena. The discussion focuses particularly upon the discourse of nationalism during and immediately after the Napoleonic wars, epistemoiogical debates concerning the type of knowledge appropriate for a commercial society, and the discourse on the market as it relates to the circulation of paintings as cultural commodities. Determining the relationship of the artistic subject to these various social phenomena involves an examination of the physical spaces in which paintings were displayed and exhibited, the discursive spaces in which they were discussed and evaluated—including art criticism, aesthetic treatises, illustrated county histories and social and political commentary—and the institutional practices which shaped their production and reception. The power and appeal of the landscape genius, I argue, lay in its ability to a serve broad range of social interests in negotiating successfully the seemingly contradictory demands of the market in luxury commodities and of a social ideal of Englishness marked by independence, intellectual power and sensibility. The genius's imaginative encounter with external nature provided it with an alibi which served to obscure it s activities as an economic producer in a highly competitive market society.Arts, Faculty ofArt History, Visual Art and Theory, Department ofGraduat

The natural history of an English Arcadia : Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, the rural tradition, and pre-Darwinian science

The Hire 1ing Shepherd represented William Holman Hunt's first effort at producing a modern landscape with a moral theme. To date scholarship has focused exclusively on interpreting the work's complex iconography. Such a narrow approach fails to consider the more fundamental issue of how the painting functioned within the context of the rural landscape tradition as it existed in mid-Victorian England. This present investigation will address this problem by analyzing The Hireling Shepherd in concert with its critical reception and the relevant historical circumstances which surrounded its production. An assessment of the critical response to the painting clearly indicates that Hunt's coarse, idle, rural lovers disturbed and angered a large segment of the predominantly urban, middle-class audience that viewed it at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1852. To make sense of this response it is necessary to determine first what constituted acceptable rural imagery. An examination of prints, songs, and literary descriptions, as well as paintings, reveals that a remarkably congruent vision of the countryside as a place of peace, virtue, social harmony, and plenty was presented to the urban public as an accurate representation of contemporary rural life. This normative vision was predicated upon viewer needs and expectations which, in turn, were strongly affected by the economic status of agriculture in this period, and by related social and political issues. Hunt's image, therefore, is discussed in relationship to other, more acceptable rustic landscapes and analyzed in the context of contemporary agricultural issues. Despite its generally hostile reception in the conservative and centrist press, The Hireling Shepherd did have admirers, who also wrote favorably of the two other major Pre-Raphaelite works in the exhibition, Millais' Ophelia and A Huguenot. An examination of the reviews received by these three paintings together with other contemporary writings on Pre-Raphaelitism indicates that admirers tended to be politically liberal, scientifically-oriented intellectuals. They expressed a marked preference for the highly particularized and scientifically accurate detailing of these works as opposed to the more generalized and idealized effects of paintings produced in the academic tradition established by Joshua Reynolds and perpetuated by Charles Eastlake. Having identified the public for Hunt's rustic landscape, it is necessary to understand why this group wished to promote this type of painting. A scrutiny of writings by some of the most ardent supporters of The Hireling Shepherd and other like-minded intellectuals discloses similar beliefs in the value of scientific methodology as an instrument of social and moral progress. On an artistic level The Hireling Shepherd mediates these various ideas by suggesting that a "truthful" composition rendered with scientifically accurate detail is a better vehicle for revealing moral truth than the "false" idealizations of academic classicism. The results of this investigation indicate that Holman Hunt's refusal to promote an affirmative vision of rural England was prompted by his moral commitment to an art based on scientific observation and delineation. As a consequence The Hireling Shepherd challenged traditional assumptions about the nature and purpose of rustic landscape painting and at the same time activated an even larger conflict concerning the role of science as an instrument for maintaining ideological control of English society.Arts, Faculty ofArt History, Visual Art and Theory, Department ofGraduat

Introduction: visual culture and the Atlantic world, 1660-1830

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An economy of colour: Visual culture and the Atlantic World, 1660-1830

This study analyses visual culture in the context of British and French colonial activity in the North Atlantic from 1660-1830. It is a response to a noticeable omission in art history and cultural studies, which have largely ignored the diverse and important body of visual imagery relating to colonialism, Atlantic slavery and the development of racial ideology. This collection demonstrates that the visualization of individuals, communities, social types, fictive characters, artefacts and landscapes, played a highly significant role in both the European representation and self-representation of the peoples and places of the Atlantic colonial world. Consequently, it reasserts the primacy of visual culture as an active participant in forming this complex and fluid "imagined community". Drawing contributions from an international group of leading scholars, this volume should prove invaluable to students of art history, particularly those interested in race and culture