Artistic Conventions Research Articles

Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 (review)

Reviewed by: Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 Rebecca M. Lush Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840. By William H. Truettner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 159 pages, $39.95. William Truettner, a senior curator with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, presents a fascinating look at portraits of North American Indians by white artists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The monograph’s main argument examines the changing relationship between portraits of Indians and political issues surrounding empire and imperialism. In particular, Truettner examines the shift from the “Noble Savage” painting campaign to what the author dubs the “Republican Indian”; thus, the book examines changing political and [End Page 313] imperial conditions from English colonization to the early republic. Truettner argues that “Noble Savage” paintings emphasized the sitter’s ability to navigate white and indigenous culture in a colonial context where Native allies were key to English success against other European colonizers. “Republican Indian” paintings often highlighted the incompatibility of white and Indian cultures in the early United States, eventually marking Native peoples as a vanishing race. The author situates his analysis of a wide array of paintings within the political contexts of the time period, noting the inclusion of important items of material culture such as medallions and peace medals in the creation of a genre of paintings he refers to as “portrait diplomacy” (5). In Noble Savage paintings, Truettner identifies the importance of cross-dressing where the Indian sitter wears clothes and accessories from both indigenous and European cultures and how this cross-dressing enables a fluid political affiliation for patron and sitter. Additionally, the Noble Savage painting campaign often borrows from aristocratic and classical artistic conventions and incorporates iconography that emphasizes the elite status of the Indian sitter who was treated as a diplomat or delegate of his tribe. Truettner argues that the portrait archetype of the Noble Savage, often produced during formal sittings in artists’ studios, was frequently employed in connection to the Mohawks and other tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, due in part to the political prestige these tribes held with British colonial officials. The Republican Indian campaign includes paintings of Plains tribes (such as the Osage, Mandan, Sioux, Blackfoot, and Crow) from the first four decades of the nineteenth century when artists increasingly journeyed west to paint Indians, thus lending a more ethnographic approach. Republican Indian portraiture emphasized the sitter’s tribal affiliation and even branched out to include scenes of typical Plains Indian life such as buffalo hunts. One of the most significant contributions of the book is its linking of the British trans-Atlantic world to that of the early national period of the United States. Truettner notes how the shift from colonies to nation ushered in the need for a new perspective on Indians to accommodate the burgeoning imperialistic westward movement of white Americans. The book’s consideration of the vacillating representation of Indians as “savage” and “civil” complements the relatively recent discussion of the racialization of Natives in works from scholars across disciplines, such as historian Joyce Chaplin and literary scholar Gordon Sayre. Despite the fascinating commentary and historical context provided, there are, however, two main drawbacks to the monograph. The first is the scant attention given to representations of Native women. Truettner offers a cursory glance at a handful of fascinating portrayals of Indian women from the Republican Indian campaign and notes that these images have more in common with the Indian Princess mode. A more developed discussion of how the Indian Princess mode connects to the seemingly male-dominated categories of Noble Savage and Republican Indians would have been instructive. Furthermore, the book does not fully articulate the origins of the Noble Savage or Republican [End Page 314] Indian campaigns; situating these formalized portraits within a more detailed discussion of the widely circulated engravings and water colors of North American Indians by white artists from the sixteenth century would have helped create a more comprehensive macronarrative. Truettner discusses two key approaches to rendering Native subjects and has deftly arranged a dizzying number of reproduced portraits into a coherent narrative. Most of the included images are reproduced in full color...

Along the Waterfront: Alejandro Malaspina, Fernando Brambila, and the Invention of the Buenos Aires Cityscape, 1789-1809

Este artículo trata de ampliar nuestro conocimiento de como el arte visual ha contribuido a la nueva ola de imperialismo científico y representación geográfica avanzado por la España borbónica a través de sus numerosas expediciones ultramarinas al final del siglo XVIII, enfocando especialmente el viaje extensivo del Malaspina de 1789-1794 y dos cuadros de paisajes urbanos de Buenos Aires, atribuidos al miembro del equipo, el artista Fernando Brambila (1763-1834). Esto estudio intenta mostrar como la representación de esta ciudad capitalina viceregia de bajo perfíl fue condicionada no solamente por dictados científicos sino por la topografía extraña de la línea costanera del Río de la Plata y una cultura visual europea más amplia que incluía las convenciones artísticas evolucionandas de representar el espacio urbano y un interés creciente por los detalles de sitios distantes. El artículo usa este acercamiento para explicar la génesis de las dos vistas de Brambila y los motivos estéticos y prácticos por qué un cuadro, que mirando la ciudad a lo largo de su costa ribareña, se hizo el más conocido como imagen de Buenos Aires dl principio de siglo diecinueve, mientras el otro fue en gran parte olvidado.

The Past as a Strategic Branding Resource: A Case Study of Jay Chou, a Successful Chinese Music Artist

We explore a Chinese-styled aesthetic representational branding process, illuminating potential insights into interconnections between art, branding, and consumption in conjunction with processes of aesthetic representation. Interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs reveal concern around Chinese brands’ internationalization, particularly concerning retail strategy. Chinese export brands lack privileged positions in competition with prominent global brands. This paper sheds light on Chinese resources to address these needs by presenting the case of Jay Chou, a prominent Chinese music artist. As Eckhardt and Bengtsson (2007) suggest in the Chinese case it may be productive to engage the past as a strategic brand-signifying practice in a contemporary marketing regime. We investigate permutations of Chinese culture and ideology by linking consumer research and the production and consumption of images with Chinese traditions and artistic conventions of aural and visual perceptions. Thus, cultural issues around Chinese historical and traditional arts are brought into contemporary consumer research.

"Cut by Rainbow": Tales, Tellers, and Reimagining Wordsworth's Pastoral Poetics in Toni Morrison's <i>Beloved</i> and <i>A Mercy</i>

To avoid critical comparisons that might distract from the African American inflection of her writing, Morrison claims she has resisted using literary allusion to canonical authors in her work. However, given her background and formal literary qualifications, her insistence does not guarantee the absence of such allusion.2 In fact, Martin Bidney recog nizes Morrison's awareness of an integrated sense of community and her episodic encounters with nature and the sublime as indebted to William Blake, John Keats, and William Wordsworth.3 Identifying verbal echoes and reimaginings of Romantic concerns and episodes from Wordsworth's Prelude (1850), Bidney reminds us that Morrison has been and con tinues to be an attentive respondent to Wordsworth. Limited to reading Beloved (1987) for reworking of the plots of epi sodic moments in Prelude, Bidney does not acknowledge the cen trality of Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage (c. 1797) to Morrison's writing. approach offered here explores the profound influence that Wordsworth's elegiac vision of the pastoral exerted on Morrison's novels A Mercy (2008) and Beloved. This account of Morrison's engagement with Wordsworth resists a tendency to regard her as a contemporary advocate of Romantic ideological beliefs, artistic conventions, or practices. Reading the two works by Morrison as meditations on and mitigations against Wordsworth's own ambivalent treatment of the pastoral finds affinity with anti-pastoral elements in the poetics of Robert Frost and Derek Walcott. Through such an interpretation, Morrison emerges as a subtle respon dent to the pastoral and Wordsworth, one who is attuned to the complex, nuanced, and darker misgivings of Wordsworth's idealizing and compen satory poetics.

KEEPING ABREAST OF THE MAYA: A STUDY OF THE FEMALE BODY IN MAYA ART

AbstractThis paper discusses the importance of female breasts in gender construction in Maya art and explains artistic conventions and choices in their deployment. The visual analysis focuses on Late Classic pictorial vases and ceramic figurines. Rather than reflecting a natural body, the female breast was filtered through a cultural lens that drove its highly conceptual rendering in Maya art, mirrored in a breast hieroglyph. Through the principle of contrast, including morphology and absence vs. presence of breasts in specific pictorial contexts, Maya artists constructed female personae varying in age, class, supernatural status, and gender ambiguity. In order to flesh out the layered meaning of the breast, the paper turns to ethnographic studies of modern Maya medicine concerning the hot-cold system. It is argued that ethnographic data on women's bodies in medical discourse shed light on how the breast served as an index of age-based female stereotypes.

Maidens, fillies and the death of Medusa on a seventh-century pithos

AbstractA well-known relief pithos in the Louvre (CA 795) shows Perseus confronting a Gorgon whose human torso terminates in the body of a horse. Her equine features have proven difficult to explain, and earlier discussions of the scene have appealed to lost narratives, seventh-century artistic conventions and broad symbolic associations between Gorgons and horses. Focusing on her combination of equine and maidenly characteristics, this article interprets Medusa's unusual form with reference to a series of ancient Greek metaphors connecting maidens, horses and Gorgons. It argues that recognizing the metaphorical logic of the image allows us to understand Medusa's form as a sympathetic comment upon her death, which has parallels in the sacrifices of maidens in Greek art and literature.

Gathering Fruit at Ingleby. An Early Medieval Sculptural Fragment from Ingleby, Derbyshire

The carved stone fragment from Ingleby in Derbyshire has attracted little attention in the scholarly literature on medieval sculpture, largely because the question of its date has been considered particularly unclear. It thus raises interesting questions about dating, about the nature of the models lying behind the carving, and about its iconographic significances, the relevance of which extend far beyond Derbyshire. Here the piece is examined in the light of Anglo-Saxon art, and situated within the context of the later 9th and 10th century, but produced under the influence of artistic conventions dating back to the preceding century in the Insular world and Carolingian Gaul, which in turn look back to the art of late antiquity. The article argues for the influence of visual traditions in its illustration of agricultural tools rather than that of objects perhaps familiar in Anglo-Saxon England, and suggests that the unusual depiction of harvesting, which is perhaps only paralleled elsewhere in art from the South-West, is best considered in the light of the trees set in a rocky and watered landscape, also featured on the stone, and overall presents a set of eschatological iconographic references.

Style and Meaning in Laura Art: A case Study in the Formal Analysis of Style in Prehistoric Art

The objective identification of animals depicted in the rock art of the Laura region frequently presents problems. An analysis of the combinations of zoologically diagnostic traits represented and of trends in body outline reveals that animal figures were drawn as fairly conventionalized schema. By analogy with contemporary Aboriginal art systems it is unlikely that the artists intended to paint generalized animal images, and it is suggested that other, possibly non-visual information may have been encoded in the Laura rock art system which enabled Aboriginal people to identify the paintings. A preliminary analysis of the distribution of paintings in some shelter groups of Laura art suggest that the identity of the shelter is likely to have been one of the factors involved in determining the species represented. This suggestion gains some support from the paintings of introduced animals, for which now and diagnostic artistic conventions were devised. The apparently greater need for explicit rendition of introduced species might be explained by the fact that traditional modes for image recognition could not be applied to these newcomers.

Representations of Archers in the Relief of Tiglath-Pileser III

Modern scholarship has tended to focus on the concepts of ideology and propaganda in Assyrian palace reliefs. This paper wrestles with the presence of artistic conventions and their level of stability throughout the Neo-Assyrian period My aim is to draw attention to specific examples of accepted principles that were followed in the reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II and measure their stability throughout the centuries, with particular emphasis on reliefs of Tiglath-Pileser III. To do so, I have selected a relief from the Central Palace of Tiglath-Pileser III which illustrates an Assyrian officer preparing to shoot an arrow in a leftward direction. It is concluded that the violation of illusionistic perspective in this relief can be explained by accepting the presence of Assyrian artistic conventions.

Wheels in a land of camels: another look at the chariot in Arabia

A rock drawing in north‐west Arabia shows a rider, a chariot and a foot soldier in battle. It is exceptional not only for its subject (at present unique) but for its use of a mixture of the artistic conventions employed in Arabian rock art and those used in Neo‐Assyrian and Egyptian art. The three different parts of the composition have ‘captions’ in the Thamudic B script identifying the artists and the subjects, including the first occurrence of an Ancient North Arabian word for chariot.

“The Spider Is Alive”: Reassessing Becker's Theory of Artistic Conventions through Southern Italian Music

Howard Becker wrote that art is constructed, and understood, according to conventions. However, Becker does not adequately explain how artists negotiate historical circumstances affecting their work. Using the southern Italian phenomenon of tarantism and its music, I address how contemporary musicians employ conventions to transform sounds with deviant connotations. The alteration of musical conventions reflects material social conditions in the Salento region and provides insight into the formation of a Salentinian cultural movement's ideology. By accounting for how social groups contend with history, I argue that sociologists must reconsider the theory of artistic conventions.

Faces of the Teouma Lapita People: Art, Accuracy and Facial Approximation

In 2008 we completed facial approximations of four individuals from the early Lapita Culture, a seafaring people who were the first to settle the islands of the Western Pacific circa 3000 years ago. Typically an approximation is performed as a 3D sculpture or using computer graphics. We chose to sketch what we have been able to determine from the remains because the artistic conventions of drawing work with visual perception in ways that are more complementary to the knowledge, theories and methods that make up the facial approximation of human remains.

<i>Byron: The Image of the Poet</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Byron: The Image of the Poet Alan Rawes Byron: The Image of the Poet. Edited by Christine Kenyon Jones. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pp. 129. ISBN 9780874139976. £40.50. Byron as celebrity has become a popular scholarly topic recently, but, as the editor of Byron: The Image of the Poet points out in her introduction, this is the 'first collection of essays to be published' on the 'visual aspects of Byron and Byronism' and their role in the creation of Byron as a celebrity. The book originated in the equally ground-breaking and highly successful 2003 conference on the topic at the National Portrait Gallery. And it is a book that physically does justice to its subject matter: large, generously laid out on the page and containing 22 colour plates and 21 black-and-white illustrations, this is a very handsome publication. It reproduces and discusses a very 'wide range of visual manifestations of Byron': from portraits drawn from life to '"authorised" paintings and busts whose production Byron did his best to control during his lifetime'; from nineteenth-century 'caricatures, informal sketches and engravings' to 'film portrayals'; from frontispieces to Masonic jewels, medals and other memorabilia. The essays contained in it are full of insights into the 'trajectory from Byron to Byronism' that saw the transformation of George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron of Rochdale, into a 'mythic persona'. A number consider Byron's own role in the creation of the visual aspects of that persona, and his attempts to control, with varying degrees of (temporary) success, 'the creation or promulgation of his own visual image' become a central theme of the collection as a whole. Equally, these essays are interested in how 'visual Byronism' embarked 'on a distinct life of its own, increasingly independent of its roots in Byron's real life and ad vivum portraits'; in how Byron's 'mythic persona' was 'a creation not just of Byron himself but also of many other hands'. The collection usefully describes, but also reflects upon, the details of this history. It explicitly asks questions about the value of its products. Key, perhaps, is the issue of whether 'pictures […] of Byron lead more people to read him, or […] in some way replace him and his work', as the editor puts it in the introduction. The stated aim here is not to attempt a definitive answer to such questions so much as open them up for critical debate, and the benefit of approaching these questions through a collection of essays is, as the editor says, that the format allows 'different voices to be heard' and 'varying viewpoints to be taken'. The viewpoints collected here are certainly various, and this is one of the volume's strengths. [End Page 173] In the collection's opening chapter, 'Lord Byron's Image', Germaine Greer focuses on the profile of Byron by Richard Westall – the image of Byron that 'would dominate the published iconography of Byron to his death and beyond'. Greer describes Westall as 'the creator of the Byronic stereotype', but goes on to explore some of the ways in which this stereotype 'was woven out of disparate but connected iconographic strands' drawn from a range of long-standing artistic conventions: the 'Apollonian' 'profile portrait' invented/used by Alexander the Great for 'coins, seals, and medals', the 'venerable tradition of the portrait of the artist as a young man' and 'the stereotypes of Hamlet and Milton's Satan'. As a result, Greer concludes, 'Byron portraits have as little documentary value as they do pictorial' – indeed the stereotype they promulgate 'has served permanently to distort our understanding of Byron's humanity'. Annette Peach's view of the value of portraits of Byron is rather different. In '"Famous in my time": Publicization of Portraits of Byron during His Lifetime', Peach focuses on 'Byron's intense desire to maintain control over the execution and dissemination of his image', which, according to her, was 'a visual expression […] of the creative exploration and representation of the self that lies at the heart of much of his poetry'. Concentrating on the 'official' portraits of Byron taken from life (by Sanders, Westall and Phillips), discussing what 'Byron brought to...

O normie i konwencji artystycznej – wybrane zagadnienia nieprzetłumaczalności na przykładzie sztuki

The language of art is a specific sort of linguistics which uses not only language norms but also individual artistic conventions. Several language skills are required from the translator as well as individual feeling for the style, form and means of expression used by the artist. This article analyses certain difficulties which may appear while translating artistic texts, such as, for instance, lack of translation possibilities referring to modern theories of translation, along with the need for equivalent vocabulary connected with art (painting, sculpture, graphic, performance, video-art etc.). What seems to be of crucial importance is that the contact with the artist and deep study of his art should be treated as an inseparable element of translation.

Arte mueble en el Auriñaciense cantábrico. Nuevas aportaciones a la contextualización del frontal grabado de la cueva de Hornos de la Peña (San Felices de Buelna, Cantabria)

In their excavations at the cave of Hornos de la Pena (Cantabria) at the beginning of the 20th century, H. Breuil, H. Obermaier and H. Alcalde del Rio discovered the frontal bone of a horse engraved with a representation of that same animal. The excavators attributed the piece to the Aurignacian, but later studies have doubted whether it in fact belonged to that technocomplex. This doubt has arisen partly because until the stratigraphy at Hornos de la Pena has not been studied in detail and partly because the naturalistic character of the representation seemed to set it apart from the artistic conventions of the early Upper Palaeolithic of Cantabria. This article presents new information about the stratigraphy at the site obtained from a number of unpublished documents preserved in the archive of the Museo Arqueologico Nacional in Madrid, information that in our opinion supports an attribution of the piece to the Aurignacian.

Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania: Captain Cook and Indigenous People

AbstractBeginning with a brief historiographic survey of the prolific literature on European voyages of exploration in Oceania, in particular those of James Cook, this article considers how embodied encounters helped shape the written and visual representations of indigenous Oceanian people by Cook and his naturalists and artists in New Holland (Australia), the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). I treat encounters as situated and permeable: not as a generalised clash of incommensurate cultures but as ambiguous intersections of multiple personal agencies, both indigenous and foreign. This approach suggests an indirect liaison between particular local actors and the expanding stock of empirical information provided by travellers and drawn on by metropolitan natural historians to illustrate their deductions about mankind. I suggest that voyagers’ representations of Oceanian people should be read not merely as reflections of received knowledge derived from dominant metropolitan discourses or literary and artistic conventions but also as personal productions generated in the flux, stress, high emotion and uncertainty of meetings with actual people in the vulnerable settings of voyages under sail. Such representations were often significantly, if obliquely affected by local agency.

The quiet revolution of poetry slam: the sustainability of cultural capital in the light of changing artistic conventions

This paper considers the educational and theoretical implications of an analysis into the artistic movement of poetry slam. Slam is a successful and growing global phenomenon, which both directly and indirectly sets itself against the dominant literary world. As such, it could be viewed as presenting a challenge to dominant literary conventions and thus to the cultural capital of those who rely upon such conventions. Using data drawn from an ongoing ethnographic study, employing semi-structured interviews with 44 poets, promoters and educators active in the slam community, and participant observation of 21 slams in four cities, this paper explores what poetry slam can tell us about the ways in which members of dominant art worlds and new artistic movements interact and the implications which this has for the sustainability of cultural capital in the light of newly emerging artistic conventions and discourses.

How things began: the origins of geological conservation

Abstract The origins of geoconservation cannot be investigated without first defining its scope. This presents a problem because there is no established working definition of the field. By using the Giant's Causeway as a case study, useful parameters were identified revealing great complexity. They embrace initial curiosity, scientific communication, mythology, access issues, the involvement of national scientific institutions, controversial but ultimately successful iconography, the invention of new artistic conventions, dissemination by engraving, scientific reaction, rekindling of a fundamental geological controversy, tourism, popular literature, modes of transport, commercialization, additions to fundamental science, designation history and historic associations of the site. Other sites are similarly complex and assist in refining the scope. Sites are seen as the principal resource but on analysis achieve their status from what they reveal or the importance of the materials they yield, in turn spotlighting the major museum collections. These are now well documented though not all are secure. It was not the scientific imperative that established the first public designation but an impassioned delight in unspoiled nature which three men, two Americans, Henry Thoreau and George Marsh but especially the Scots environmentalist, John Muir, projected carefully into the attuned ear of the US President. This brief overview closes with the revelation of neglected areas of heritage, paths that geoconservation could have taken and still may and suggests how earlier definitions could be elevated into a more specific and holistic geoconservation strategy.

Renegotiating Identity: “<i>Primitivism” in 20th Century Art</i> as Family Narrative

Renegotiating Identity“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art as Family Narrative Carolyn Butler Palmer (bio) The prevailing viewpoint is made all too clear in one of the “affinities” featured on the catalogue covers, a juxtaposition of Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror . . . with a Kwakiutl half-mask, a type quite rare among Northwest coast creations. Its task here is simply to produce an effect of resemblance (an effect actually created by the camera angle). In this exhibition a universal message, “Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” is produced by careful selection and maintenance of a specific angle of vision.1 James Clifford A 100-year-old legacy of curatorial colonialism has produced profound disorganizations of unique knowledge systems. . . . The subjugation of indigenous peoples under colonialism results in innumerable forms of oppression from which the arts are not immune. A focus on institutions and patrons of the arts (academics being defined as one type of patron or consumer of native arts) cannot significantly enhance a reading of indigenous aesthetic or worldviews. By shifting the locus of the analysis from the psychology of the oppressor to the experiences of the oppressed, a discursive space is made available in which new paradigms of knowledge may become accessible.2 Nancy Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) Your questions have brought back memories of the time. I definitely recall the book about my family, The Totem Carvers, and that show [“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art] and its catalogue being major catalysts in my need to return to BC [British Columbia] and take up the art. The catalogue for that show has a Kwagiutl mask on the cover, along with a painting by Picasso, my favorite painter even then. There was a Charlie James piece in the show too. Those were pivotal in my beginning to comprehend the influence my artistic heritage was to play in my life.3 David Neel (Kwagiutl)4 [End Page 186] Introduction During the summer of 1985, a twenty-five-year-old professional photographer, David Neel, walked through the doors of the Dallas Museum of Fine Art and into the traveling exhibition, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.5 Initiated by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art made visual a historical narrative of European and Euro-American interest in “non-Western art” by juxtaposing the art of Euro-American modernists with cultural objects from around the world.6 Two months after the exhibition’s New York début in September 1984, a now famous debate erupted over the exhibition’s Eurocentric underpinnings. In April 1985, just one month before the exhibition opened in Dallas, Art in America published anthropologist and critic James Clifford’s essay “Histories of the Tribal and Modern.” Clifford charges the exhibition’s curators, William Rubin and Kirk Varnendoe, with creating a “modernist family of art,” “decontextualizing cultural objects,” and “reproducing colonial” assumptions.7 Clifford connects his critique to the discourses of identity politics and difference that raged during the 1980s, and as he predicts, the exhibition has become important within the discourses of modern art history because of the debates about formalism that ensued.8 In his exhibition review, Clifford also calls explicit attention to a pair of photographs that appear on the cover of the accompanying exhibition catalogue. One photograph depicts what Clifford refers to as a “Kwakiutl half mask.” The other is a close-up shot of a carefully selected section of Pablo Picasso’s oil-on-canvas painting, Girl before a Mirror (1932). As Clifford points out, the juxtaposition is problematic because it highlights what he says is a superficial set of “affinities” predicated on the objects’ visual properties alone. Clifford uses the comparison to showcase the shortcomings of formalism, specifically its tendency to physically and theoretically abstract objects from their cultural contexts: it is a curatorial practice, he argues, that is in itself a perpetuation of colonialism—a strategy of oppression. Clifford’s essay was directed toward a specific audience. His exhibition review first appeared in Art in America, a glossy journal that in the mid 1980s was routinely filled with essays about Euro-American artistic conventions and hosted a range...

The Earliest Eyewitness Depictions of Khoikhoi: Andries Beeckman in Africa

Countless studies by historians, art historians and anthropologists have dealt with the early modern image of the South African Khoikhoi. Lacking everything that Europeans valued, they fell prey to the most contemptuous imagery available. The term ‘Hottentots’, by which they were known, was considered more or less synonymous with monstrous appearance, beastly habits and cultural ignorance. As such they were portrayed in official reports and travel journals, in prints and drawings. Few European artists and travel writers published their observations with any recourse to reality, however. They usually created their images in Europe in accordance with prevailing artistic and literary conventions, time and again reverting to stereotypes that were embedded in prejudice and based on incomplete and distorted knowledge. Thus far scholars have not discovered a single drawing by an eyewitness from the first two centuries of Khoikhoi-European encounters. As a consequence our insight into the mechanisms of stereotyping is far from complete. We neither know how the images were perceived by European viewers nor do we know if and how the stereotypes blurred the perception and judgement of eyewitnesses themselves.