Nineteenth-century Visual Culture Research Articles

Glass Houses and Astral Societies as Models for a New Culture: Paul Scheerbart and Walter Benjamin

This article analyzes Paul Scheerbart’s (1863–1915) fantastic literature, particularly his novel Lesabéndio (1913) and the utopian work Glasarchitektur (1914), focusing on the changes in visual culture from the nineteenth century onwards. As an author, Scheerbart stands on a cultural threshold, since the First World War marked a clear transition in European societies. The way that the panoramic view, glass architecture, and other attributes of nineteenth-century visual culture are present in Scheerbart’s works is illustrative of his position between the two forms of modernity before and after the war. The article also examines various readings of Scheerbart’s works, most importantly the remarks of Walter Benjamin. With its panoramas, dioramas, and eventually photography, twentieth-century visual culture was characterized by the significance of technology—a quintessential aspect of modernity that was examined by Benjamin. Scheerbart’s works entail key themes foregrounded by Benjamin, who develops them further into core motifs and concepts of his cultural theory.

An amusing optical toy for the hands?: reassessing nineteenth-century British paper peepshows through embodied knowledge

ABSTRACT My article examines the structure of the nineteenth-century British paper peepshow and the experience of using it. Inspired by the agenda of media archaeology, I argue that an analysis of this medium that goes beyond excavating details of an obscured optical recreation can bring new insight into our understanding of peep media and nineteenth-century visual culture. By discussing the origin and circulation of the paper peepshow and detailing the clear distinction between it and media like the peepshow box and pop-up books, I detach the paper peepshow from the genealogy of these media while stressing the significance of its intermedial relationship with other nineteenth-century visual entertainments. I then adopt the notion of embodied knowledge to explore users’ engagement with this medium, drawing from personal handling experience in archives as well as theoretical conceptualisations. My article argues that peering into the paper peepshow should be understood as an act of creativity and imagination, and that the tactile played a crucial role in users’ interaction with this medium. This study thus fits well in debates about the embodied or multi-sensory vision in the nineteenth-century context, and functions as another example that affirms the active agency of users of visual recreations of this period. Overall, by analysing significant features of the paper peepshow and the experience of peeping into it, my research also constitutes a small but important expansion in the current understanding of peep media.

Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture ed. by Nancy Rose Marshall (review)

Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture ed. by Nancy Rose Marshall (review)

Attempts on the Image in Literature

Nineteenth-century European narrative literature repeatedly refers to the deliberate destruction (or intentions, attempts to destroy) of artificial images. The old artist in Honoré de Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece burns his collection of art; the hero of Alexander Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman threatens the monument to the Emperor Peter the Great in St Petersburg; the inhabitants of a French village in Prosper Mérimée’s novella The Venus of Ille re-melt the ‘evil’ antique statue found in the soil; the painter in Nikolai Gogol’s novel The Portrait compulsively buys and destroys masterpieces of painting; another picture, in Emile Zola’s novel L’Œuvre, is burned after the suicide of its author; the hero of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray attempts to stab his own portrait, which is displaying his sins; in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, six busts of the French emperor are broken, in turn first by a thief, and finally by a detective. Being destroyed or disappearing seems to be the recurrent destiny of intradiegetic images (material images included into a narrative text as its actors), and the attempts of their obliteration always constitute a highlighted, spectacular moment in the narrative, and not just an outward sign of someone’s inner feelings; they are typically presented as a sacrifice of ‘excessive’ (magical, demonic) objects. In some cases, they are explained by a deviant behaviour of the character (madness, delinquency), but the literary text is organized in order to make the reader sympathize with the experiences of that ‘iconoclast’, and mentally reproduce his acts. An analysis of texts should disclose the mechanism of this self-identification and put the stories about the attempts on the image into the general framework of nineteenth-century visual and literary culture.

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

Spratt’s Flaps: Midwifery, Creativity, and Sexuality in Early Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

In 1833, an unusual book was published in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Written and illustrated by the surgeon and artist George Spratt, Obstetric Tables stood out among midwifery guides of the period for its coloured lithographic illustrations, mobilised by the construction of paper flaps. This article explores the way these flap prints contributed to medical pedagogy, but also looks much more widely at their cultural resonances. Through their interaction with wider visual cultures, Spratt’s tables engaged not only with medical literature, but also with social anxieties over nudity and sexuality, midwifery and propriety, and the power of popular print. By studying Spratt’s tables alongside comic and satirical mobile prints, obscene and pornographic prints, and “fine art” nudes, this article demonstrates how medical images can be addressed as rich and complex resources for histories that are medical, visual, and cultural.

Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood by Diane Waggoner

Reviewed by: Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood by Diane Waggoner Katherine Wakely-Mulroney (bio) Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood. By Diane Waggoner. Princeton University Press, 2020. The impact of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass on modern conceptions of childhood was visual, as well as textual. John Tenniel's iconic illustrations encapsulate the play, discovery, boredom, frustration, and fear that Carroll's works describe. However, Diane Waggoner's study argues that the author's critical role in "expanding the meaning of the child to encompass a protean subversiveness, perversity, energy, and curiosity" was dependent on another, far less familiar cache of images (20). Between 1856 and 1880, the writer known in his private life as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, created hundreds of portraits of children using the new technology of photography. These were designed for private viewership, artfully arranged in the pages of albums rather than displayed on gallery walls. As Waggoner shows, Dodgson's photographs nonetheless reflect his extensive engagement with the Victorian art world, responding to debates concerning realism, Pre-Raphaelite compositional strategies, and the work of other pioneering photographers. Waggoner's volume is a treasure trove of nineteenth-century visual culture, allowing for comparison between Dodgson's beautifully reproduced portraits and their many artistic influences. By arranging her study chronologically, Waggoner invites readers to follow the evolution of Dodgson's aesthetic against the backdrop of Victorian cultural change. More crucially, she provides a powerful sense of how Dodgson's desire to look at and capture images of children, predominantly girls, intensified over the course of his adult life. His controversial interest in producing, commissioning, and collecting sketches and photographs depicting girls in a state of partial dress, or fully nude, became particularly pronounced in his final decades, and is consequently addressed in the last chapter of Waggoner's study. If images of this nature formed the "logical endpoint for [Dodgson's] decades-long undertaking to picture children's bodies," they also provide a logical endpoint for any work that seeks to reckon honestly with the man behind the camera (185). Waggoner begins by exploring the development of Dodgson's photographic style during the 1850s and 1860s, placing his work in dialogue with that of other photographers of [End Page 440] childhood, including Julia Margaret Cameron, and highlighting his role in the elevation of photography from a technical practice to an imaginative art form. Waggoner also uses this introductory chapter to establish the important social function of photography to Dodgson's life. The ritual of taking photographs and guiding adult and child friends through the images arranged in his albums allowed Dodgson to cultivate and commemorate relationships simultaneously. The second chapter is dedicated to Dodgson's portraits of his muse, Alice Liddell, and her sisters, Lorina and Edith. Waggoner avoids spending too much time treading familiar ground here, as Dodgson's complicated relationship with Alice and her family has been the subject of considerable scrutiny and speculation. His pictures of the Liddell girls are instead considered alongside eighteenth-century child portraiture, which provided a blueprint for the author's vision of girlhood as a time of innocence, beauty, and playfulness. Dodgson moved beyond this aesthetic, Waggoner suggests, by establishing a "poetics of imperfection" that celebrated both the unique attributes of individual children and his intimate knowledge of each subject (which is strikingly apparent in his portraits of Alice) (110). Chapter 3 considers Dodgson's understudied photographs of boys. These formed a significantly smaller percentage of his output, yet offer a unique insight into varieties of Victorian masculinity and the author's own childhood. Images of Alfred Lord Tennyson's sons epitomize what Waggoner terms "girlish boyhood," emphasizing the sitters' vulnerability and need. By way of contrast, Dodgson's portraits of pupils at his alma mater Twyford, a preparatory school for boys aged eight to fourteen, emphasize their subjects' transition from boyhood to maturity. These images were taken in 1858, and Waggoner examines them alongside the discourse of masculinity codified by Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days, published the previous year, and in light of Dodgson's own tenure as a pupil at Rugby School (the setting for Hughes's...

Novel Touch: Feeling Fabric in Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames

This article analyzes tactile illusions and calculations in Emile Zola's 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames, focusing on the text's descriptions of fabric and its account of characters' haptic perceptions. While scholars have approached Zola's narration of the rise of the grands magasins as a depiction of consumer manipulation and desensitization, often analyzing nineteenth-century visual culture, this essay proposes another interpretive framework with which to probe the effects of both modern commercial infrastructures and representational strategies on the perceiving subject. Connecting Zola's portrayal of the sense of touch to developments in consumer practices, modern aesthetics, and contemporary medical-scientific understandings of physiological events, this article highlights the ways in which tactile sensitivities become increasingly exchanged, quantified, and mediated in a variety of contexts. An examination of touch in Au Bonheur des Dames allows us to reassess not only the stakes of Zola's literary naturalism, but in addition, the changing cultural dimensions of haptic experience in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Victorian Artists' Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage, and the Art Market ed. by Julie Codell

Reviewed by: Victorian Artists' Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage, and the Art Market ed. by Julie Codell Elena Cooper (bio) Victorian Artists' Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics, Patronage, and the Art Market edited by Julie Codell; pp. 298. Routledge, 2020. $160.75 cloth. victorian artists' autograph replicas is a collection of essays by art historians exploring the multiple facets of "autograph replicas"—painters' repetitions of their own paintings in oils or watercolours—in Victorian painting. Displacing "the usual view" of a painting as "a one-off, unique, singular production," the collection is premised on the view that autograph replicas were different from other types of reproduction common in the nineteenth century, such as reproductive engraving and forgery (3–4). The importance of this volume for scholars of Victorian studies lies first with the centrality of autograph replicas to nineteenth-century visual culture: as "prolific" and "vigorously consumed" rather than a "marginal activity" (3). Secondly, while the essays offer "new ways to understand art and art history" (5), the volume's breadth of approach draws on and speaks to scholars of many other disciplines and of Victorian studies more generally. The autograph replica was an important part of the "culture of replication," affecting "all aspects of nineteenth-century Victorian life—literature, art, manufacturing, science and media" (4). Accordingly, autograph replicas are placed in a larger context, including the nineteenth-century culture of the copy, gallery and display practices, relationships between patrons and artists, the art market, gender, and copyright history. This broad scope is well illustrated by the first group of chapters (part 2), which rather than privileging the artist as maker of artistic meaning instead explores "location as meaning." Jo Briggs discusses the American replica, referring to the high status afforded autograph replicas in US art collections, such as the founding collection of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, as works of "national or public significance" (27). Autograph replicas were a means of bringing "prestigious artworks to America," and as such paintings were seen as embodying "timeless ideals," a painting's status as replica was "immaterial" (33). Andrea Korda considers the relationship of the two versions of Newgate by Frank Holl. Far from just "dead copies" that always refer back to the original work, replicas "also exist as distinct and unique objects with their own originating moments and subsequent histories" (38), and her essay charts the dynamic understandings of the Newgate replica as it moved "from private to public space, and consequently from personal object to cultural icon" (49). Part 3, comprising essays by Richard Green and Robyn Asleson, provides a detailed case study of the work of the artist Albert Moore, who pursued the Aesthetic Movement's principle of "art for art's sake." Green argues [End Page 153] that replicas involved Moore striking a "delicate balance" between aesthetic beauty and the need to earn a living (62). Robyn Asleson shows that Moore's replicas indicate his "open-ended approach to creativity" (64) in exploring beauty's myriad expressions and countering "the simplistic notion of replicas as merely repetitive or mechanical" (67). She also draws attention to the ways in which copyright law—both understandings of who owned copyright and also the debate over proposals restricting the right to make replicas—had a direct bearing on Moore's artistic practice. In part 4, "Replicas and Artists' Agency," Julie Codell explains Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "prolific" production of replicas and uncovers his relationship with certain patrons, suggesting that Rossetti's multiple versions of pictures "reveal aesthetic and patronage values" (91). Rossetti's contemporaries argued over the value of his replicas, reflecting the "Victorians' conflicted assessment of autograph replicas" (79) more generally; there was an "uneasiness about replication" even though artists made autograph replicas "regularly and often" (81). Colin Trodd links Ford Madox Brown's replicas to Brown's vision of creative labour as free, his view of artistic work as within the artist's ownership, and his "wider project of generating activist art" (104). As Trodd concludes, "the conflation of replication with the control of production" enabled Brown "to imagine the circumstances for improving the operational framework of the art world and to assert the rights of expressive labour over the power...

Black Female Bodies and the “White” View

Abstract This article contributes to the studies of living human exhibitions in Eastern Europe or, more precisely, in Polish territory in the late partition period. The article intends to demonstrate the strategies of presenting Black African women in Warsaw, Cracow, and Poznań. The idea of construing the view has been used as a key concept to look into the processes of the sexualization and racialization of the Others’ female bodies and the construction of “savagery” in the context of nineteenth-century visual culture.

The Union of Science and Art: Stained Glass Windows for the South Kensington Museum

This article traces the history of a number of stained glass windows designed for the world’s leading museum of art and design, the South Kensington Museum, which opened in 1857. During the expansion of the museum in the 1860s and 1870s under the directorship of Henry Cole, several large-scale windows celebrating the union of science and art formed part of an ambitious interior decorative scheme that reflected the museum’s collection, its unique history, and evolving role as a national institution for the promotion of artistic and technical education. Although most of these windows were later removed, and some have been lost, the rediscovery of some windows in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s store, and the reinstatement of others, provides an opportunity to consider the original scheme, its context, and significance. Drawing on themes of religious and moral instruction, as well as knowledge and learning, combining allegorical and figurative scenes with ornamental motifs, institutional devices, and royal mottos, the iconography of the windows demonstrates a peculiarly British approach to stained glass design for secular public contexts. Interpreting these windows reveals how the decoration of public museums and galleries articulated institutional aims and helped to define and shape nineteenth-century visual culture.<br>

Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture. Edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart

Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture. Edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart

Storms! Shipwrecks! Massacres!

This essay focuses on an underrepresented medium of nineteenth-century visual culture—the theatrical playbill—and its relationship to antebellum riot spectatorship. Specifically, it contends that antebellum theater producers used sensational playbills in order to cultivate a profitable nativist audience. Philadelphia serves as a central case study, because the city witnessed a series of nativist and anti-immigrant riots during the era, including the infamous Kensington and Southwark riots of 1844. As pamphlets and lithographs of these riots soon appeared, theater producers posted eye-catching playbills and mounted theatrical melodramas capitalizing on the spectacular street violence. Because the playbill is ephemeral in nature and many of these noncanonical dramas were soon forgotten, scholars often have overlooked popular theater artifacts. Yet through scrutiny of extant theatrical materials now, we can better understand the era’s class-based conflicts, specifically how the visual culture of theater contributed to them.

Letters from the People: A Response to Radiclani Clytus

Letters from the People: A Response to Radiclani Clytus Benjamin Fagan (bio) It is a real pleasure to compose this letter in response to Radiclani Clytus’s invigorating and absolutely necessary “Visualizing Black Print: The Brooklyn Correspondence of William J. Wilson aka ‘Ethiop’” (Spring 2018). As Clytus notes, Wilson is not exactly unknown to scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, and especially not to those who focus on African American literature and culture. In 2015, for example, Leif Eckstrom and Britt Rusert edited a digital edition of Wilson’s 1859 “Afric-American Picture Gallery” for the Just Teach One: Early African American Print initiative. But while scholars may be aware of Wilson’s earlier correspondence to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, published under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” these missives have gone largely unexamined. That is, until Clytus’s essay. In addition to accomplishing the important work of introducing Wilson and his letters in particular to readers of this journal, Clytus situates these newspaper writings within a series of overlapping cultural constellations and in doing so makes a powerful argument for placing Wilson at the center of our explorations of nineteenth-century African American literature. Clytus devotes much of his article to exploring Wilson’s writings on the spectacle of New York City’s streets. From the 1830s to the 1850s, the promenades up and down Broadway in particular attracted the attention of a host of onlookers, with well-known white authors such as George Foster and Nathaniel Parker Willis offering detailed accounts of the display. Adopting the “urban flaneuring” of such figures, Wilson-as-Ethiop recognized the Broadway strolls as condensed performances of [End Page 17] the antebellum city’s overlapping racial and class anxieties (30). Relaying the scene in an 1852 letter to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Wilson detects in all the “white, ghost-like, motionless face[s],” be they rich or poor, “the same hawk-line nose, and thin, livid lip, and restless wolf-like countenance, indicative of keen scent after what is another’s” (36). By contrast, writes Wilson in the same letter, the scene on Church Street, “alias (black) Broadway,” is one defined by black joy: “Life, vivacity, merriment, mark the faces that now present themselves” (48). This juxtaposition of predatory whiteness to the “refined freedom” of black New Yorkers upends the visions of race and class peddled by writers like Foster, whose 1850 New York by Gas-Light consistently characterizes the city’s black inhabitants as, in Clytus’s crisp phrasing, “insistently proximate to Manhattan’s criminal underworld” (48; 36). Wilson thus emerges as a sophisticated theorist of the ways in which race and class are performed through urban spectacle. Accordingly, for those of us interested in issues of race, class, and the city in the nineteenth century, his missives to Frederick Douglass’ Paper become necessary reading. By reading the Ethiop missives together with a range of visual materials, Clytus also recovers Wilson as a keen reader of nineteenth-century visual culture. As Clytus argues in his essay’s opening, through his letters to the newspaper, “Wilson insisted on nothing less than the graphic reformation of African American subjectivity” (30). While not producing what we might traditionally recognize as visual material, through his manipulation of “the idea of figural vision in print,” Wilson created imaginative illustrations of black life in the city that ran counter to dominant visual representations of African Americans (31). Clytus reads the Ethiop letters together with a selection of images that include Edward Clay’s Life in Philadelphia and Life in New York series, Thomas Benecke’s Sleighing in New York, and illustrations that accompanied an 1848 plan to build an elevated railway along Broadway. Such images tended to either erase black New Yorkers from the city or, more frequently, traffic in racist stereotypes. Countering such misrepresentations, Wilson’s letters suggest a visual register where blackness not only escapes the distorted images of white artists but indeed “embod[ies] the ideal of representative democracy” (49). Scholars who have written on Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery” have similarly focused on his attention to the visual, and Clytus’s attention to his newspaper correspondence cements Wilson’s status as a key critic of visual culture. In...

Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture. Edited by Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein

<i>Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture</i>. Edited by <scp>Daniel Harkett</scp> and <scp>Katie Hornstein</scp>

PHOTOGRAPHIC EXCEPTIONALISM

Asserting that photographic education is an understudied area of photographic historiography, this article makes a case study of the entry of creative photography into US higher education in the post-Second World War period as a means to extend Stephen Bann’s notion of “photographic exceptionalism” beyond the historiography of nineteenth-century visual culture. Charting the trajectories in post-war America of two creative photographic pedagogies, the integrated model identified with Moholy-Nagy and the medium-specific one identified with the proponents of what is here called “Aspen modernism” (Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams and Minor White), it is argued that there is an Other to mid-twentieth-century photographic exceptionalism that signals its vulnerability. According to Bann, photographic exceptionalism still substantially informs thinking and writing on photography: so how did it survive postmodernism? The final section of the article looks at the legacies of the separatist model for what is now called “art photography” in relation to the institutional landscape of the art world. It is argued that the Photo Boom of the 1970s set in motion a new, institutional medium-specificity for photography and that this too has its vulnerabilities.

“… acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American People”. Thanksgiving in Post-Civil War American Visual Culture

In nineteenth-century visual culture, representations of the Thanksgiving dinner became an indicator of disputed concepts of national and cultural identity, participation issues and the construction of a common system of values in the United States. Although not institutionalized as a national holiday until 1941, nationwide Thanksgiving Days repeatedly had been decreed to celebrate significant moments in US history, though until the mid-nineteenth century they were very seldom depicted. As the tradition spread, images of the festive meal - focusing on the motif of serving and carving the turkey - framed American history according to white Anglo-Saxon protestant values. Stressing traditional demarcations between gender, class, and ethnicity, starting during the Civil War, the motif was used to convey notions of inclusion and exclusion.

O panorama como simulacro. Tecnologias da imagem colonial em Uma holandesa em América (ca. 1880)

This article approaches nineteenth-century visual culture through two artifacts: 1) the panorama, as a practice of modern domestication of nature and bodies; and 2) a novel built with paper and scissors and illustrated with clippings from European press by Soledad Acosta de Samper around 1880. Both are produced at a time when the visual image is particularly relevant and a part of a cultural strategy that, according to Paulette Silva, privileges collection, classification, and exhibition. This article starts with a theoretical approach to panorama, and then examines the way in which it is deployed as a technology of the gaze in Una holandesa en América, an illustrated novel in which the panorama is challenged in its imperial component and then reaffirmed within the creole project of nation building.

The Gamin de Paris in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture: Delacroix, Hugo, and the French Social Imaginary by Marilyn Brown

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Writing off the Flâneur

Although repudiation of Benjaminian orthodoxy as regards the identity and significance of the figure of the flâneur is now commonplace, there has been little substantial work that places this Parisian phenomenon in a precisely delineated historical context. The three books in question here revisit the topic from different angles: flânerie as a genre of the essay; the flâneur as something largely irrelevant to late nineteenth-century visual culture; and the flâneuse as a generic modern and contemporary literary persona. The chapters in Promenade et flânerie suggest how forms of writing (here specifically the tradition of the essay) shape representations of kinds of walking (and the thoughts elicited thereby, or not) and their locations, formats, and styles, primarily within a French literary tradition. The word itself—essai—implies an attempted action, with an inherent element of unpredictability, which lends itself to the contingent consequences of flâneurs’ motion, more than the structured conventions of the original promenade. The premise is that the two terms, ‘promenade’ and ‘flânerie’, correspond to different ‘poetics’ of walking. In this sense, the volume is oriented towards literary history, in a way that complements Le Promeneur à Paris aux XVIIIe siècle (2007) by the historian Laurent Turcot, the best book on walking in Paris, in any century, not just the eighteenth, and an essential reference for any study of the subsequent phenomenon of the flâneur as a variety of pedestrian