Nineteenth-century Art Research Articles

Wild melancholy. On the historical plausibility of a black bile theory of blood madness, or hæmatomania.

Nineteenth-century art historian John Addington Symonds coined the term hæmatomania (blood madness) for the extremely bloodthirsty behaviour of a number of disturbed rulers like Ibrahim II of Ifriqiya (850-902) and Ezzelino da Romano (1194-1259). According to Symonds, this mental pathology was linked to melancholy and caused by an excess of black bile. I explore the historical credibility of this theory of 'wild melancholy', a type of melancholia that crucially deviates from the lethargic main type. I conclude that in its pure form Symonds' black bile theory of hæmatomania was never a broadly supported perspective, but can be traced back to the nosology of the ninth-century physician Ishaq ibn Imran, who practised at the Aghlabid court, to which the sadistic Ibrahim II belonged.

The changing colours of nineteenth-century art and literature

One is struck at first by the luxuriance of Keats’s colour. When we come to analyse it we find it is very largely verbal colour. His colour-words are not epithets of colours he has seen; they are w...

Book Review: Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art, by Mey-Yen Moriuchi

Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art , by Mey-Yen Moriuchi. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. 180 pages, 31 color and 29 b/w illus. Hardcover $99.95. Reviewed by Natalia Majluf. The past two decades have seen an extraordinary

Jewish Art Collectors in Poland and the Works of Maksymilian Gierymski before World War II

From the end of the nineteenth century and up to the beginning of World War II, many of Maksymilian Gierymski’s (1846-1874) works were part of the collections of respected Jewish collectors, including Maksymilian Adam Oderfeld, Edward Rejcher, Stanisław Rotwand, Adolf Peretz, and Abe Gutnajer. They combined buying Polish art with providing financial support for many Polish cultural institutions. Thanks to these collectors the Polish public had better knowledge of Gierymski’s art. They bought his works at a time when the best examples of his oeuvre were abroad. 1939 was a tragic turning point for their activity. Collections were destroyed or stolen, including Gierymski’s work, and most of these items were not catalogued. Nevertheless, the collectors’ knowledge, passion, and expertise raised the bar for standards in Polish art collecting generally. The forgotten activity of Poland’s Jewish collectors is an essential part of the history of nineteenth-century Polish art.

Cézanne's Parrot by Amy Guglielmo

Reviewed by: Cézanne's Parrot by Amy Guglielmo Elizabeth Bush Guglielmo, Amy Cézanne's Parrot; illus. by Brett Helquist. Putnam, 2020 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-525-51508-1 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-525-51509-8 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad 5-8 yrs As nineteenth-century artist Paul Cézanne runs up against critical censure by taste-makers at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the progressive Impressionist exposition, even his parrot Bisou seems to concur with their dismissal. When Cézanne insists, "'Repeat after me … Cézanne is a great painter!' Bisou opened his beak as if to speak … But he just yawned instead." After rounds of frustration, scads of advice, and years of convincing himself to stick to his own vision, the artist finds success, and Bisou finally confers approbation. The parrot storyline that propels this picture book bio is, according to Guglielmo's concluding notes, based on an observation by a contemporary art critic, with invented dialogue mixed into the text along with credited quotations. It's an amusing concept, but it's not really enough to carry the slight and familiar story. Helquist's oil paintings are calibrated to the light-hearted but ultimately extraneous parrot plot, with the balding, pink-nosed artist looking perpetually grumpy and disappointed, and his critics looking gleefully mean-spirited. End matter includes source notes and a thoughtful recap of the artist's struggle and eventual acclaim; a list of Cézanne's paintings depicted in the book (page reference is made, but the pages themselves are unnumbered) is helpful. There's a missed opportunity, though, to label and/or likewise credit the many paintings in the background of Helquist's scenes, which could help viewers compare Cézanne's paintings with those of his peers. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Pig War!: How a Porcine Tragedy Taught England and America to Share by Emma Bland Smith

Reviewed by: The Pig War!: How a Porcine Tragedy Taught England and America to Share by Emma Bland Smith Elizabeth Bush Smith, Emma Bland The Pig War!: How a Porcine Tragedy Taught England and America to Share; illus. by Alison Jay. Calkins Creek, 2020 [48p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781684371716 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* 6-9 yrs Two wars have been fought with England on American soil, and now in 1859, on the Northwest Coast island of San Juan, war number three is about to erupt. [End Page 145] The first shot is fired by an American settler at a pig rooting in his potato patch; tensions escalate as the pig’s British owner demands unreasonable compensation for the deceased porker. Settlers write to their to their local authorities, who in turn send for military support. Cannons are mounted and aimed and the harbor fills with warships, and a squabble over harsh words and a dead pig turns into an international dispute over poorly delineated boundaries in the Salish Sea. President Buchanan calls for a negotiator: “Hastily (or as hastily as possible for a time when it took six weeks to cross the country), General Winfield Scott arrived to help the two sides work things out.” Smith deftly captures the retrospective absurdity of this historical incident with deadpan narration that will have young audiences slapping their foreheads in mock dismay over the childish behavior of hotheaded adults. Jay adds absurdity of her own in her visual parody of nineteenth-century art—portly, self-important men straining at their buttons, rendered in the dusty hues and crackled surfaces of naïve folk art and portraiture. An entertainingly conversational author’s note, period photographs, and timeline are included, as well as an illustrator’s note on her fictional flourish—the departed pig’s tombstone. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Picturing walls

Abstract Émile Zola’s literary oeuvre continues to provide scholars with one of the most comprehensive accounts of nineteenth-century art and culture. Yet the magnitude of this material has resulted in the works of art acquired by Zola over the course of his lifetime being largely overlooked. By focusing on how this ad hoc collection of more than fifty contemporary works was gathered and subsequently dispersed, this article elucidates the influence of close friendships and professional reciprocity on the reputation of artist and critic alike. It offers an unprecedented corrective to the pioneering article by Jean Adhémar (1960) which partly reproduced the procès-verbal from the posthumous auction of Zola’s estate held in 1903. Using the original version of this document, together with available sales catalogues, letters and Zola’s art writing, it provides the most comprehensive inventory of the works owned by Zola and how they relate to his life and work.

News

News

Invisible Women

Abstract Maria Vasilievna Iakunchikova designed three works of applied art and craft in a Neo-Russian style for the Russian section of the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900—a wooden dresser, a toy village in carved wood, and a large embroidered panel. Yet, so far as the official record is concerned, Iakunchikova’s participation in the exhibition is occluded. Her name does not appear in the catalogue, for it was the producers, rather than the designers, who were credited for her works. Indeed, her presence might have been entirely unknown, were it not for several reports of the Russian display in the periodical press by her friend Netta Peacock, a British writer living in Paris. The invisibility of the designer in this instance was not a matter of gender, but it had consequences for women artists. In general, women were marginalized in the mainstream of the nineteenth-century Russian art world—whether at the Academy of Arts or in prominent groups such as the Peredvizhniki—and, as a result, enjoyed fewer opportunities at the Exposition. But the Neo-national movement, linked closely with the revival of applied art and the promotion of kustar industries, was one in which women’s art had space to flourish. And, in the so-called village russe at the Exposition, which featured a display of kustar art, by far the larger contribution was made by women, both as promoters and as artists. In this article, I examine Iakunchikova’s contribution to the Exposition within a broader context of female artistic activity, and the significance of the Russian kustar pavilion for a gendered history of nineteenth-century art.

Gustave Doré’s Histoire de la Sainte Russie (1854): The Invention of Graphic Rhetoric, or the Artist at War

ABSTRACTThe Histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie (1854) by Gustave Doré (1832–83) is unique in the history of nineteenth-century European graphic art and an exceptional project within Doré's artistic career. Illustrated with 500 wood engravings, it narrates the history of Russia from its origins to the contemporary Crimean war. This article examines the volume as a tour de force of technological innovation and graphic rhetoric that confronts the challenge of how to represent war and its violence. To appeal to a broad audience, the artist pioneered a caricatural, graphic sequential history that anticipates modern bande dessinée tackling twentieth-century warfare.

About the Authors

Previous article FreeAbout the AuthorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreEliza Butler is a core lecturer in art history at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. Her research centers on the intersections of landscape, natural history, and material culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America. Her writing has also recently appeared in Winterthur Portfolio.Maggie M. Cao is the David G. Frey Assistant Professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (2018). Her research focuses on the intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Sophie Cras is a maître de conferences (assistant professor) in contemporary art history at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, with a special interest in intersections between art and economics. Her first book, The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s, will appear in an English translation from Yale University Press in 2019.Michael D’Alessandro is an assistant professor of English at Duke University. His articles have appeared in The New England Quarterly, Studies in American Naturalism, Mississippi Quarterly, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Currently, he is working on a book project titled “Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Literature and Theatre, 1835–1875.”Chris Dingwall is a lecturer at Oakland University and author of Selling Slavery: Race and the Industry of American Culture (forthcoming). He recently co-curated African American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce, and the Politics of Race, an exhibition held at Chicago Cultural Center.Diana Seave Greenwald is assistant curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford, where she also earned an M.Phil. in economic and social history. Her book Painting by Numbers: Economic Histories of Nineteenth Century Art is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.Diana L. Linden is an independent scholar. Her book Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (2015) was selected as a finalist by the National Jewish Book Awards. She was the co-editor of The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (2006). Her work has also appeared in Prospects and American Jewish History.David McCarthy is a professor of art history at Rhodes College. He is the author of The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980 (1998); Pop Art (2000); H. C. Westermann at War: Art and Manhood in Cold War America (2004); American Artists against War, 1935–2010 (2015); and numerous essays about American art of the mid-twentieth century.John Ott is a professor of art history at James Madison University and author of Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (2014). His current book project is “Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954.”Alex J. Taylor is an assistant professor and academic curator in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2014 to 2016, he was the Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art at Tate. He is currently completing a history of corporate art patronage in the 1960s.Anne Verplanck is an associate professor of American studies at Penn State, Harrisburg. She is writing “The Business of Art: Transforming the Graphic Arts in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which explores such areas as entrepreneurship, innovation, and marketing to more fully understand the interplay of economics, social forces, and art.Alan Wallach is the Ralph H. Wark Professor Emeritus of art and art history and professor emeritus of American studies at the College of William and Mary. His publications include studies of Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School, and art museums in the United States. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 33, Number 3Fall 2019 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707480 © 2019 by Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Charon. Stanisław Tarnowski i dziewiętnastowieczna sztuka pamięci


 Wedle ostrożnych szacunków Henryka Markiewicza Stanisław Tarnowski był autorem stu pięćdziesięciu nekrologów opublikowanych na łamach „Przeglądu Polskiego” w latach 1872-1914. Paweł Kubicki, w wydanym w 1929 roku szkicu biograficznym poświęconym Tarnowskiemu, pisał o stu pięćdziesięciu pięciu nekrologach zamieszczonych w „Przeglądzie”, ale listę, przygotowaną we współpracy z Różą Tarnowską, uzupełniał jeszcze o dziesięć kolejnych szkiców wspomnieniowych wydanych osobno

Writing Cosmopolis: The Cosmopolitan Aesthetics of Emilia Dilke and Vernon Lee

In his 1920 review of Vernon Lee’s avant-garde pacifist allegory Satan, the Waster: A Philosophical Trilogy, George Bernard Shaw salutes the author as a representative of ‘the old guard of Victorian cosmopolitan intellectualism’. Shaw’s formulation reflects the fact that he is writing after the watershed (and bloodshed) of World War I had rendered cosmopolitanism a contested concept. He looks back nostalgically to a cultural moment when the idea of transnational European cooperation seemed both right-thinking and realizable, a moment that he identifies with the figure of Vernon Lee (1856–1935). A century on, as we face another watershed in Anglo-European relations, it seems timely to revisit that cosmopolitan ideal, at once old guard and avant-garde, and how it inflected Victorian cultural history. This article will take a particular aspect of Lee’s protean oeuvre — her contribution to the historiography of art — as a starting point for reflecting on the cosmopolitan mobility of nineteenth-century female art historians, and how their unsettling subversion of national cultural boundaries was a shaping factor in the evolving identity of British art and art history as produced in Great Britain. It will consider in particular the transnational contribution of the late-Victorian historian of French art, Emilia Dilke (1840–1904), alongside Lee’s own books on Renaissance Italy.

The maiden fair: Nineteenth-century medievalist art and the gendered aesthetics of whiteness in HBO’s Game of Thrones

This essay explores diachronic processes of gendered white racial formation, taking HBO’s Game of Thrones (2007-) as a central example of the persistence of the nineteenth century’s aesthetic vision of women in contemporary medievalist television. The series portrays the essential medievalist female body as a white body – clothed or unclothed – reproducing an aesthetic gaze that draws heavily on pre-Raphaelite forms, while orientalism provides the dominant model for a female body coded racially ‘Other.’ Whiteness and medievalist nostalgia coalesce to prioritise white female bodies at the same time as they are made the objects of violent desire, while non-white female bodies are repeatedly displaced or marginalized even as they are stripped bare. Reading the visual program of the HBO series alongside examples from nineteenth-century art, the article shows that the racial coding of women in Game of Thrones reproduces an aesthetic treatment of women’s bodies popularized during the Victorian era.

Theatricality, Michael Fried and Nineteenth-Century Art and Theatre

This provocation uses a case study of the French history painter Paul Delaroche to examine the way in which theatricality is invoked as a critical term. Michael Fried considers Delaroche’s work to exemplify theatricality, a designation that, for him, connotes qualities of exaggeration and inauthenticity, but I argue that this is not how Delaroche was viewed in his own time. This leads to a wider consideration of the assumptions that underpin thinking about theatricality. In particular, I question the idea that theatricality, as Fried understands it, is a quality of popular, as opposed to avant-garde, art. Finally, I want to challenge the automatic association between theatre and artifice that is threaded through discussions of theatricality.

Questionable Company: Representing Ethnicity at the Mughal Court

This paper was prompted by the discovery of three dozen portrait drawings by an anonymous Indian artist in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk market. Some portraits, drawn in black pen and ink on paper and dating from around 1830, are framed by a caption, written in Devanagari script, apparently describing prominent figures in the Mughal court, following the British conquest of Delhi (1803). The first section focuses on the translated script of the captions around the portraits and provides some historical context to identify the subjects portrayed. It focuses on who they are. It also situates the portraits in relation to ‘Company School’ painting, i.e. work by eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century Indian artists adjusting their styles to paint subjects appealing to British (and European) taste. Attention shifts to portraits of British officials, possibly including Sir David Ochterlony, first Resident at the Mughal Court, 1803–06, and again, 1818–22, and Charles Metcalfe, 1811–18. The paper draws attention to the ways in which the artist distinguishes between Asian and European subjects, simultaneously coming to terms with the challenges of representing unfamiliar European ethnicities. The drawings themselves – historically interesting and occasionally amusing – are unique in relation to what is generally understood as ‘Indian painting’.

Ozer , Dzhesco Talashkino: Dereviannye izdeliia masterskikh Kn. M. Kl. Tenishevoi. 2 toma (review)

REVIEWS 357 Bakhtin initially conceived specifically for the novel, in opposition to the supposed ‘monologism’ of poetry) to The Waste Land and considers how ‘Eliot uses dialogism […] to shift in time and space, creating the chronotopi of love, the road, the quest, and combining the epic past with the lyric present’ (p. 153). Probstein further shows how Four Quartets perfectly lends itself to a chronotope-based analysis, given how prominent the theme of time is in this text: ‘Time and history, as well as space’, notes Probstein, ‘are lyrical characters’ (p. 185) in the poem. Having delved into Eliot’s works, the book returns to the Russian context and explores Brodsky’s preoccupation with time and space, likewise ‘lyrical characters’ of his texts. Probstein begins with Brodsky’s poetical book, To Urania, and ends with his play, Marbles. While in the former the poet prioritizes Urania (space) over Clio (time), in the latter Brodsky succumbs to time positing that ‘a poet always deals with time, one way or another. […] Even while scribbling about space. Because what is a song anyway but restructured time?’ (p. 216). The conflict between space and time does not presuppose resolution for Brodsky. What is at stake for him, instead, is their complex relationship, which Probstein elucidates in this part of his work. The two closing chapters of The River of Time show how some of the modernist concerns of time and space are echoed in the works of two poets belonging to the postmodernist era: John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. The chapter on Ashbery’s poetics contains the author’s interview with the poet, which is a valuable addition to Probstein’s study. In this interview, Ashbery, whose work for many epitomizes postmodernist poetry, incidentally admits that ‘[he does not] understand the difference between modernism and postmodernism ’ (p. 220), an ironic observation that nonetheless reveals the salient connection between different poetical layers of the twentieth century, which Probstein’s The River of Time extensively explores. Slavonic Studies Section B. Tokarsky Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages University of Cambridge Ozer, Dzhesco [Jesco Oser]. Talashkino: Dereviannye izdeliia masterskikh Kn. M. Kl. Tenishevoi. 2 toma. Izdatel´skii dom Rudentsovykh, Moscow, 2016. 654 & 304 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Chronology. R 8,000.00. If, in art history, scholarship on the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement has suffered from the longstanding bias towards the fine arts over thedecorativeandappliedarts,itslesser-knownRussianvarianthaslanguished SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 358 even further in the shadows. Yet study of the Arts and Crafts demands us to consider such issues as the ‘democraticization’ of art-making, the attention of professional artists (including a significant number of women) to vernacular craft and national ornamental tradition, and the modernist turn to new media and collaborative projects; all of which are vital in histories of design, as well as those of global artistic modernism. It is in these broader histories, which have recently been garnering much attention, that the Russian movement tends to be overlooked. For these reasons Jesco Oser’s hefty two-volume tome, which examines the furniture and carved wood production of the Talashkino artist’s colony (the second of the important Russian Arts and Crafts centres of the late imperial era, after the more well-known kustar workshops at Abramtsevo) is a welcome addition to the literature. The first volume is divided roughly into two halves: the first providing a chronological account, the second, an artist by artist discussion. If the former suffers a little from being divided into sections of sometimes only a handful of lines, plentiful illustrations, many of which are published for the first time, give much to learn from visually. The second volume contains an anthology of primary and historical secondary sources, a bibliography, a detailed catalogue of known Talashkino works with photographs, or a description only (‘image unknown’), a chronology and, finally, an English translation (by Wendy Salmond) of the overview history in the first volume. As with his earlier book, Mir emalei kniagini Marii Tenishevoi (Moscow, 2004), which detailed the revivalist enamel works of Mariia Klavdievna Tenisheva, Talashkino’s founder, Oser situates the patron of the colony centre-stage in this account. Tenisheva, he infers, was the leading creative...

Editor’s Note

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NotePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue opens with an essay on the aesthetic and political potential of the modern scrapbook. Makeda Best’s argument focuses on a unique object at the Archives of American Art, one that artist William H. Johnson created through careful selection, transformation, and recombination. I must admit feeling kinship with the scrapbooker when I collect and assemble the content for each issue of the journal. Diverse research materials intersect on our pages, bringing together multiple art-historical contexts, artistic media, and interpretive methods. At its best, the resulting arrangement—in this case, a sequence of articles concerning African American modernist painting and politics, the social practice of gift-giving in the art world of the 1960s, and the economics of nineteenth-century art—exceeds the sum of its parts. Taken together, this research by Best, David McCarthy, and Diana Seave Greenwald presents new ways of reading artworks and primary sources in the field of American art history.In “Archive Matters,” two essays apply inventive methodological questions to American aestheticism, focusing on personal papers at the Archives. Elizabeth Lee revisits her research on Abbott Handerson Thayer by considering what the diary of the artist’s physician-father and period letters might say (or not say) about medical themes in Thayer’s paintings. While archives can appear to their modern users as incoherent or incomplete, Lee advocates for subjecting them to a critical, indeed clinical, gaze that reanimates their contents and thereby an artist’s oeuvre. Erica E. Hirshler brings Thayer into her own reflection on archival absences by looking to the letters he exchanged with fellow painter John Singer Sargent. Hirshler is interested in the gaps in this, like most, archived letters. How do we creatively approach these gaps, Hirshler asks, while remaining critical of the interventions into the historical record that doing so necessitates?With this issue, the journal welcomes curator of African American manuscripts Erin Jenoa Gilbert. This new position is part of the Archives’ African American Collecting Initiative (2018–21), supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. We look forward to Gilbert’s expansion of the collections by and about African American artists, and to the exciting research opportunities her work will surely provide our authors and readers. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 58, Number 1Spring 2019 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703658 © 2019 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Imagining and Imagined Sites, Sights, and Sounds of Slavery

Imagining and Imagined Sites, Sights, and Sounds of Slavery Celia E. Naylor (bio) Within academia and related publishing venues, we have witnessed the burgeoning fields of digital humanities, digital scholarship, digital pedagogy, and digital liberal arts. The recent launching of the William and Mary Quarterly's first born-digital article published via the OI Reader app constitutes, as Quarterly editor Josh Piker announced, "a significant milestone for the Quarterly."1 It is also quite telling that the inaugural born-digital article for the journal is Simon P. Newman's essay entitled "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth-and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica." In this article Newman employs "sound and video recordings as well as enhanced eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artwork and maps, all in digital format … [to] challenge readers to think about Jamaican society in new ways." He attempts to "explore how white men saw and experienced the island and its population in order to enhance our understanding of how enslaved men, women, and children who attempted long-term escapes were able to achieve varying degrees of liberty and self-determination at the heart of Britain's largest slave society."2 Through the use of various mediums (literature, music, visual culture, etc.) and media (newspapers, digital media, etc.), Newman creates opportunities for twenty-first-century readers to consider the multidimensional and multisensory aspects of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Jamaican society. He provides pointed examples of how white artists' images represented Jamaica as idyllic, with pastoral scenes that essentially erased the physical and [End Page 25] energetic presence of blacks; such pictures simultaneously removed all traces of the quotidian experiences of enslaved and free people of color, including the violence deeply embedded within the Jamaican slavocracy. English architectural draftsman James Hakewill's picturesque illustrations of Jamaica from 1820–21 represent one demonstration of such visual depictions. Newman also discusses the similar intentions and representations in the numerous pencil sketches and watercolors of Jamaica by English artist William Berryman, as well as the more limited Ten Views painted by Scottish artist William Clark. Even Clark's depiction of enslaved people at work in Antigua, Holeing a Cane-Piece, still presented an easy, bucolic scene of subjugation.3 One of the strategies Newman employs in order to illustrate the problematic nature of selected early nineteenth-century artistic renditions is to digitally enhance two of Hakewill's prints by repopulating these images of public spaces with more figures of enslaved and free people of color in Kingston's Harbour Street and in King's Square, Saint Jago de la Vega.4 These digitally enhanced images not only offer a necessary correction of skewed, contrived views of Jamaican settings but also (re)integrate the actual physical, corporeal presence of enslaved and free people of color who lived and labored in order for Jamaican society to function at all levels. Using these scenes from specific Jamaican sites becomes not only a process of portraying a more accurate historical view of such public spaces in Jamaica but also a digital portal for humanizing black bodies within these venues. Even as Newman clearly recognizes that "eighteenth-century and modern media present their own interpretive challenges," his article underscores "the problems inherent in historical sources while also considering the merits and weaknesses of modern pictorial, aural, and video materials."5 Just as it is crucial to point out the deliberate erasure (and racialist characterizations) of enslaved and free people of color in the work of Hakewill and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century white artists, we must also interrogate twenty-first-century decisions made in reimagining these digitally enhanced scenes. Newman states that the figures used to repopulate these images were originally from the artwork of European artists, including eighteenth-century London-based Italian painter Agostino Brunias, as well as nineteenth-century artists Berryman, Clark, and Hakewill.6 The decision to enhance these images with other racialist artistic representations of people of color crafted by white artists introduces other problematic layers of (re)presentation and interpretation. Given all of the resources available in the twenty-first century, perhaps it would have been fruitful to create new artistic, though still [End Page 26] historically centered, renditions...

Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais

Reviewed by: Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais Janice Niemann (bio) Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais; pp. 256. Reaction Books, 2018. $46.18 cloth. The victorian hothouse was a place of paradoxes. Jane Desmarais explores these paradoxes in Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, focusing on English Decadent writers, such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and French Realist artists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Claude Monet, and Émile Zola, at the fin de siècle. Monsters under Glass includes chapters on the history of the hothouse, hothouses in cities, flowers, scents, paradisiacal and torturous gardens, and other glass structures such as aquariums. Highlighting developments in hot-house technologies and historical perceptions of the hothouse, Desmarais positions this "alluring yet dangerous" (7) space as a literary metaphor that simultaneously calls to mind horticultural experimentation and invasion by foreign bodies, crowded urban settings and isolated life under glass, fruitful reproduction and illicit sex, death and decay and flourishing life. Desmarais weaves nineteenth-century anxieties about modernization, the role of women, colonial expansion, scientific hybridization, and fear of the other through her succinct analyses of late nineteenth-century prose, poetry, paintings, and illustrations. Following existing scholarship on the place of gardens in nineteenth-century literature, Desmarais aligns the Victorian hothouse with other semi-private garden spaces, such as the conservatory and the shrubbery, as a site of sexual transgression, of "amatory and often clandestine encounters" (128). While Desmarais's premise that the hothouse is a transgressive space is not, on its own, a revolutionary idea, Monsters under Glass provides a much-needed complement to existing scholarship on Victorian greenhouses and glasshouses. Isabel Armstrong's Victorian Glassworlds (2008) offers [End Page 160] an insightful history of the role of glass itself in the Victorian imagination and Victorian literature, and explores the role of the conservatory in literature, but does not go in depth into glass's specific use as a hothouse material. Amy King's Bloom (2003) proposes that metaphors of blooming flowers indicate a woman's marriageability in nineteenth-century novels, but she focuses on flowers generally and tends to emphasize the act and language of "blooming" more than the cultural histories and social implications of the flowers themselves within floral metaphors. Lindsay Wells's Victorian Studies article "Close Encounters of the Wardian Kind: Terrariums and Pollution in the Victorian Parlor" (2018) digs into the role that Wardian cases—small glass enclosures that create sustainable microclimates for growing plants, often foreign plants—play in nineteenth-century art history, but not that of larger glass structures. In studying the hothouse as a unique metaphor or trope, Desmarais's book fills a gap in this scholarship and adds to the fertile fields of garden studies, glass studies, and space studies in Victorian literature and culture. Particularly important to the field are her argument that late nineteenth-century artists, especially Félicien Rops and Beardsley, completely overturned the cultural connotations of the so-called language of flowers in their depictions of floral women and women as flowers, depicting, instead, women who are "active and sexual" and, fittingly for hothouse flowers, "modern hybrids" (160); her demonstration that the hothouse metaphor shifts in meaning alongside developing hothouse technologies, a change that speaks to late-century anxieties about modernization; and her proposal that hot-house metaphors always have nineteenth-century connotations. This last point makes Desmarais's book of interest to scholars outside the field of Victorian studies as well. Desmarais's prose is refreshingly accessible and engaging, she offers a succinct history of gardening, hothouses, and hothouse plants, and she is a strong close reader—highlights of her readings include her analyses of Manet's Music in the Tuileries, Arthur Symons's London Nights, and Octave Mirbeau's Le petit pavillon and Le jardin des supplices. While in a few places I would have liked to see more citations or more extended textual analysis (because these moments are some of the book's strongest), and some of the historical explanations focus more on...