Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Global and Local Geographies of Art

Michael Yonan, Stacey Sloboda

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501335495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art

While the connected, international character of today's art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century. Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art world s that were well developed in the eighteenth century. Capturing the full material diversity of eighteenth-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside far more numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of eighteenth-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on globalized map of the eighteenth-century art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for future studies in global art history.

1

Introduction: Mapping Global Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan

In 1775, Thomas Chippendale found himself, once again, in trouble with British Customs. In late spring of that year, government officials seized from the cabinetmaker’s London workshop a set of textiles belonging to the English actor David Garrick. These had been given to him, Garrick reported, by theater-loving English East India Company (EIC) merchants in appreciation for his assistance in establishing a playhouse in Calcutta.¹ The fabric (Figure 1.1), called kalamkari in India and chintz in England, was painted cotton made in Masulipatnam on the Coromandel coast. It was acquired and stamped by the EIC sometime before being transported from Calcutta to be presented to Garrick along with two pipes of Madeira wine. Chippendale, like most elite London cabinetmakers of the period, also specialized in upholding, or upholstery, and the fabric was likely in his workshop to be fitted onto a japanned (painted in imitation of lacquer) green and white canopy bed that updated the “Chinese Chippendale” style for which the London cabinetmaker was famed with a carved Indo-Greek cornice.

The fabric’s flowering-tree pattern is a hybrid design of the kind popular in eighteenth-century textiles in multiple countries. It incorporated design elements from Persian painting, French tapestries, English “branched hangings,” and Chinese embroideries and wallpaper. Yet there was a distinct danger behind its appeal. The brightly colored designs and light, durable cottons were so desirable and so threatened English textile production that the importation of Indian chintz was banned in 1721. That ban was repealed in 1774, but Garrick’s fabric was nonetheless seized the following year. Eventually it was returned after David Garrick’s death and fashioned into hangings for the bed now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.²

If material goods can be understood as having social lives, then this fabric’s early life was a vibrant and mobile one. Its origin in Masulipatnam and its reception in London typify an object in motion—a material trace of the commercial, artistic, social, and political networks that connected various points of the globe in the eighteenth century—but it is also an object whose production, circulation, and reception was dictated by the local conditions out of which it emerged.³ In Masulipatnam, kalamkari (which derives from the Persian for “pen work”) was an export item, one that Hindu craftsman developed to satisfy the tastes of Persian consumers connected to India through its Shia Muslim rulers. In London, the fabric was an import, a symbol of South Asia and of the increasingly militarized and colonializing British presence in the region and, by association, the entire world. In both locales, the fabric was exotic, produced by or for someone considered foreign. Chintz was part of both distinct and overlapping art worlds that were grounded in specific economic, social, artistic, and legal circumstances and connected and conditioned by transnational networks of people and their things.

Figure 1.1 Bed hanging from Masulipatnam, India, c. 1770. Painted and dyed cotton.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London (18-1906).

These types of transnational artistic and economic networks are a familiar part of the art world we occupy today; and as specialists in eighteenth-century art, we observe contemporary globalism with a sense of recognition. In our individual scholarly works, we each have addressed independently the problem of how the local and the distant intersect, considering how matters of geography, be they interactions across vast distances or across a single neighborhood, lent specific meanings to works of art. This book is the product of that thinking and it reflects our attempt to describe a series of eighteenth-century art worlds as sites deeply imbricated with notions of place. In exploring those sites, we seek to find a new way to describe what happened to art in the eighteenth century, one less reliant on linear narratives of stylistic progression and more oriented toward a conceptual interrelationship between place and space.

Let us consider each of the terms in our title.

Eighteenth Century

The eighteenth century has assumed vital importance in the project of globalizing art history, which is remarkable given its relative underdevelopment as a field of art-historical inquiry for much of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1970s, the eighteenth century was the subject of infrequent attention, especially in Anglo-American spheres, where it was viewed alternatively as the dying gasps of the Baroque or the tentative beginnings of the modern. Particularly in Europe, the century’s importance has been understood in finite terms difficult to understand within the nationally oriented art histories that have proliferated there. It is a century uniquely ill-suited to straightforward categorizations by national style, as well as neatly ordered periodization or trajectories of influence. Its complexity resists easy summarization and chafes against the straightforward application of art-historical methodologies that privilege high art and stylistic coherence. But when art history began to prioritize approaches that revealed art as the product of complex international cultural interactions, the eighteenth century’s importance became increasingly apparent. The sheer number of scholarly studies devoted to it has increased exponentially. Scholars have found rich examples of transoceanic exchange and its artistic effects in the period, as they likewise identified plentiful instances of hybrid styles, new media, and cultural mimicry. Specialists have long recognized the century’s potential for unraveling or complicating art-historical hierarchies, as well as recognized the richness of content that it offers. Barbara Maria Stafford said as much in 1988 when she remarked that in the entire history of art, nearly everything that falls under its parameters however broadly defined, could be found somewhere in eighteenth-century visual and material culture, so panoramic was the period’s scope and so diverse the artistic products made within it.⁴

The eighteenth century provides a key moment in the development of a global culture. The century is far enough removed from those moments of initial cross-cultural contacts in the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance worlds to offer something more systematic than initial impressions and novel exoticism. By the eighteenth century, significant parts of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe had been in political, economic, and cultural contact with each other for centuries, with the terms of their artistic interaction likewise significantly developed. The eighteenth century therefore possessed a global sensibility, defined by structures of deep international connection that came with repeated interaction. Yet the eighteenth century is also early enough in the process of globalization to reveal lingering pre-modern notions of the global: cultural beliefs as they were understood prior to mass industrialization, scientifically justified notions of race and colonialism, and modern modes of communication and travel. We contend that this combination of older structures of global knowledge with premonitions of the modern and postmodern interconnected globe typify the century, and it is in its global dimension that it mostly fully realizes Stafford’s characterization.

At the same time, “the eighteenth century” is a term worth defining explicitly as a global formulation. Scholars of global history have observed that “human beings inhabit a unitary and finite space, move along the same temporal scale of world-historical time, and constitute one single collective entity.”⁵ To do the work of global history, one must be able to speak of that world-historical time, that shared time and space that all people occupy regardless of their individual cultural position. As scholars writing in English in the early twenty-first century, we opt for the Gregorian description of a period from roughly 1700 to 1800 CE as our volume’s scope, fully aware that that designation coexists with other terminologies such as Qing, Mughal, ancien régime, and Enlightenment. To discuss, for instance, the Edo period as part of the eighteenth century is to assert its interest to scholars of eighteenth-century art broadly, not just to scholars of Japan. We hope as well that the strict periodization we adopt can coexist with less purely chronological ones, with a series of undertakings engaged variously in different parts of the world within shared historical circumstances.

Art Worlds

In identifying “art worlds” as an organizing theme for the book, we place value on an institutional approach that attends to the social entities that enable making, distributing, buying, and responding to art. An art world, according to the sociologist Howard Becker, is a social space in which artists and casts of supporting characters (apprentices, paint sellers, stonecutters, textile dyers, etc.) join with patrons, merchants, dealers, audiences, and critics to create, maintain, and modify the conventions that collectively define “art.”⁶ This book explores those conventions and the social practices that inform them in various geographic locales. To describe those social spaces in a global context, it is nevertheless essential to attend to the specifics of place and culture. The transnational networks that link these spaces are one part of their art world, but the local sites of production and consumption are equally important aspects of any...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Mapping Global Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan
• 2 Flowering Stone: The Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court Kristina Kleutghen
• 3 The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia: A View from the Liulichang Market in Beijing Michele Matteini
• 4 Floating Pictures: The European Dimension to Japanese Art During the Eighteenth Century Timon Screech
• 5 A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art Yeewan Koon
• 6 Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach to Eighteenth-Century California J. M. Mancini
• 7 Making it Ours: Religious Art in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Spanish American Newspapers Kelly Donahue-Wallace
• 8 Tortoiseshell and the Edge of Empire: Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France Mari-Tere Álvarez and Charlene Villaseñor Black
• 9 Other Antiquities: Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in Eighteenth-Century France Kristel Smentek
• 10 Drifting Through the Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy Hannah Williams
• 11 The Art World of the European Grand Tour Carole Paul
• 12 The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman Michael Yonan
• 13 Toward an Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa Prita Meier
• 14 St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam Stacey Sloboda
• Notes on Contributors
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright