Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World by Zara Anishanslin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World by Zara Anishanslin Dale Bauer (bio) Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World zara anishanslin New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016 421 pp. This is an impressive, meticulously detailed narrative of the "imperial power" of silk designing, weaving, and consumption. Zara Anishanslin divides it into four major parts based on the narratives of the silk designer, the master weaver, the silk wearer in the United States, and finally, the painter who captured her in her luxurious silk. Then Anishanslin documents the history of these figures before she analyzes the social and historical context in which each worked and lived. (Her images include some amazing documents of eighteenth-century life—from the watercolors of silk design to the pictures of the banyan and of the painter Robert Feke's other portraits.) This book begins with the wide-ranging London silk industry, whose powers signify the range of cultural force often against the French but also operate as a sign of luxury in America (5). The one portrait of the silk wearer generates a history of consumption in a "transatlantic network" of a singular object with vast cultural meanings (10). Anishanslin's method illustrates the US silk explosion as a story of the political and material exchanges between England and the United States starting before the Revolutionary War. Particularly striking in the first part—on the designer of botanically inspired silk—is the author's focus on the status of a female silk designer, especially one who had no training in silk design but who had an expansive knowledge of the landscapes and botanicals of her day, as well as the exchanges of botanicals between Britain and America. As a clergyman's daughter, Anna Maria Garthwaite, silk designer, was invested in designing flowered silks. Garthwaite had created a "cutwork landscape" in 1707, [End Page 223] which illustrated her fine artistic skills and which meant that she used these skills in creating intricate designs (often of botanical images) (42, 61). These landscapes enhanced the "visual effects" of her designs (44). She advanced the rococo fashions of British culture, which extended to America, demonstrating the global trade of the eighteenth century. Spitalfields silk itself was "a thing of fashion" (129), and fashion itself illustrated the imperial power that Britain wielded. Garthwaite was also known for her flowered silk designs that highlighted the ordering of natural landscape and botanicals. In so doing, she created "memorable fashionability" and distinctive art instead of producing actual gardens or a family (69). Simon Julins, master weaver, of the comfortable "middling culture," is the subject of part 2 (110). Julins was an expert at weaving silk flowers, a particularly exacting task. Silk weavers like Julins worked in "proto-industrial spaces" in guilds that had great political leverage (131). Working in such guild memberships, as Julins did, gave male artists clublike atmospheres where they could work with their own journeymen (135). His studio offered Asian and botanical silks to buy, which responded to Americans' interest in sericulture, and, as Anishanslin has it, Garthwaite's and Julins's skills were also fashion forward (109). This chapter also charts the riots about cloth costs—whether in cheaper cottons and calico or expensive wools and silks—along with arguments about the weavers' status as journeymen or master weavers (137). America also sent silk to English markets as a form of competition while additionally showing how American raw silk could compete with England's (141, 157). Perhaps more important, American women produced silk, even writing treatises on silkworms (159). Part 3 is the most exciting section, on Anne Shippen Willing, whose decision to wear this damask flowered silk in 1746 was both a consumer and a cultural choice, showing her inclusion in a wealthy mercantile family. "Distribution, consumption, and display" of such silk meant that the British Atlantic world—in its global dimensions—had cultural influence even as America was demonstrating its trading in other commodities. Anne Willing's "sociable performance" in the four portraits she had of herself showed the force of urban transatlantic exchange, illustrating along with the Willings' wealth (partly from...