The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn Kate Smith The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America By Jennifer Van Horn. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Through the meanings they hold and the practices they animate, objects are powerful things. By examining a range of objects, from city prospects to portraits, gravestones, dressing tables and prosthetic limbs, Jennifer Van Horn demonstrates how objects were particularly important to eighteenth-century Anglo-American communities as they wrestled with questions of identity and order. Elite White families utilised objects as key means of constructing and asserting themselves as civil people. Focusing on Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, The Power of Objects convincingly shows how objects were crucial sites in forming specific identities and excluding others, within British America. In crafting these identities, elite White Anglo-Americans responded to aesthetic debates in Britain, but also reacted to what they viewed as "the threatening counterexamples provided by native Americans and African Americans" (21). The assertion of such identities was often fraught, however, because of the contradictory meanings at stake in material things. The Power of Objects provides a compelling account of the complex ways in which elite White communities consistently drew upon material culture to construct their identities and shows the range of cultural references within them. The first half of the book explores how communities of civil people were created and expressed through the production and acquisition of city prospects, portraits and gravestones. The creation of views of cities, such as Philadelphia, provided communities with a means to "assert their civil environs and future prospects" (35). Participation in these projects, which were funded by subscription, allowed civic bonds to be forged and ensured that artists produced a particular view of "their" city. A careful balance was in play then, between including the detail needed to show the development of a city and excluding that which revealed the complexities of city life. Yet, these drawings were engraved and printed in Britain, significantly linking these communities to transatlantic networks. Similarly, artistic transatlantic networks were cultivated through other means, such as in the 1750s, when elite families in Philadelphia commissioned the British portrait painter John Wollaston to create a series of portraits. Wollaston used similar poses, backgrounds and props in each portrait to produce a community of the civil. These portraits were markedly different from others, including those he painted in New York, demonstrating the value patrons placed on creating a visually coherent community. The civilising project embarked on by Anglo-Americans did not end with portraits, however, but rather continued even after death. The gravestone portraits produced for individuals, particularly in Charleston, show a particular response to concerns over rapid bodily decay. These portraits followed the forms of the miniature portrait genre, but, carved in immutable stone by New England carvers, they provided a fixed point of representation to challenge the decay at work beneath the ground. At the same time, the text included on gravestones, and projects to develop graveyards into more ordered, tended spaces, signified a community of the dead that linked to that of the living and contributed to a wider sense of civility. While the civilising project seemed all encompassing, the second half of the book reveals a more subversive and complex set of objects produced for and used by women and men. In Charleston, in the 1760s, it became popular for women of marriageable age to have their portrait painted in a masquerade style. These portraits provided male patrons and viewers with a prompt to consider the mutability of identity and female sitters with a route to empowerment. They were specifically painted at the moment within a woman's lifecycle in which she had power: on the verge of marriage. The portrait underlined her ability to conceal and reveal herself, and to (temporarily) have control. Women's ability to construct a particular identity was also at stake in the dressing tables they used. These items of furniture offered a site in which women could "create" their face, transforming themselves from a private self into a public individual. They contained complex sets of objects which also trained women in...