Academic Sessions: Liverpool 2002
The Roles of Visual Tropes in 17th- and 18th-Century Engravings of Colonial Subjects
Convenors:
Christopher Pierce, School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 3BX. c.pierce@liv.ac.uk
The 20th century was overwhelmed with pronouncements on the epochal cultural transformations to be expected from the advent of photography. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the rapidly expanding and increasingly efficient printmaking industry developed countless stylisations directed at satisfying the collective desires of the aristocracy, nouveaux riches, and \'contemporary masses\'. That this coincided with global European expansionism meant that there was not only a broader and wealthier purchasing public, but one embroiled in an intellectual reformation eager to bring \'things "closer" spatially and humanly\'. The commercialism of engraving affected its image: the authority of the object was in direct proportion to its marketability. What visual tropes can be exhumed from this economy? How were social modes of perception satisfied? How are these images diachronic? In the familiar words of Walter Benjamin, \'the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice- politics\'. Yet for centuries, colonial historians have relied on visual images as evidence in literary investigations. How could they have overlooked the system of economy on which mechanical reproduction depended? Branding the doyens of literary historicism as guilty of having their \'eyes wide shut\' to the image\'s economic, political and visual gamesmanship has two purposes. It forces a general reassessment of established dogma, and it promotes the revision of colonial history by visual means. What are the historiographical effects of recognising the visual tropes in 17th- and 18th-century engravings of colonial subjects? How do they impact upon our perceptions of colonialism\'s agenda?
The Portrayal of Paradise
Merilyn Savill (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
In his comments made with regard to the illustration of Cook\'s voyages of 1768-80 Bernard Smith claims that "European painters were not yet ready to renounce staffage elements from their landscapes: rural figures innocently conversing, playing the flute or quietly tending their cattle. Even when they were called upon to depict a different culture the activity of such figures was still provided as a keynote to the mood of the picture." It suggests that the importance of the figure was secondary to that of the landscape in the manner of Claude, and the French Academic convention favoured by the aesthetics of Shaftesburian civic humanism. It is the contention of this paper, however, that while the figures in the early illustrations are the visual tropes of Smith\'s assertion, those of John Webber (1750/2-93) of the third voyage, are not. Rather they are subjects of the anthropological records of the social practices of indigenous peoples who act within the confines of a physical landscape. This paper seeks to establish, quite clearly, the influence of the works of Jacques Callot (d.1640) on the Tahitian engravings after Webber of Cook\'s third voyage and to demonstrate the manner in which the various elements were employed to engage the viewer\'s interest in items of anthropological significance.
The Edges of Empire: Negotiating Imperial Space in Captain Cook\'s Images from the North Pacific
Megan A. Smetzer (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Scholars across academic disciplines have extensively analyzed the three voyages of Captain James Cook (1728-1779) and the subsequent illustrated narratives. Among the books and articles, many have specifically addressed the multitude of illustrations, particularly those from the South Pacific, as Cook explored that region most thoroughly. The goal of the third voyage (1776-1780), to find a Northwest Passage through North America, led to the production of images of the North Pacific, including representations of the Native people encountered there. These images, particularly those from Unalaska on the Aleutian Chain of Alaska and Kamchatka in Siberia, have been examined primarily for the ethnographic data contained within them. Rarely, if ever, have the images been considered in terms of how they functioned within a wider network of meanings. In this paper, I will examine four pairs of engravings executed by John Webber, the official expedition artist, in order to illuminate the ambiguities that existed at the edges of the British Empire and reverberated at the center during the late 18th century. Discrepancies arising between text and image in the 1784 publication of Cook\'s voyage reveal the tensions that existed between the imperial nations of Russia and Britain. By placing Webber\'s images from Unalaska and Kamchatka, depicting landscape, indigenous peoples, and their domestic interiors within the complex historical and cultural context of the era, I will show that discourses of nationalism imperialism, trade, and Enlightenment notions of race would have shaped the reading of these images by members of the British public sphere.
The Ninth Circle: Imagining Cannibals
Sue Wragg (University College Northampton, England)
In the ninth circle of Dante\'s hell is Ugolino, condemned to devour human flesh through eternity, gnawing on the neck and brains of his earthly tormentor: cannibalism here portrayed as punishment for earthly sin. Indeed, there is some ambiguity as to whether Ugolino committed this atrocity in life, for, as he starved to death, his sons, incarcerated with him, offered themselves as food. Descriptions of cannibalism remained both disturbing and fascinating: a signifier of evil, it was imputed to groups of people in order to demonize them. By 1492 a specific European iconography existed, based on the slander that Jews could be cannibals with a taste for the blood of Christian boys; an imagined combination of crimes which helped legitimate brutal persecutions. The fantasy of Jewish cannibalism, much of which appeared in print rather than in the \'high\' art format of painting, was both transportable and adaptable, and, I would argue, became the basis for key parts of that European visual vocabulary concerned with new worlds. Seeing or possessing such representations produced a frisson for the collector and the \'contemporary masses\': wonder at the sight of strangeness, horror in the face of the atrocities depicted. The trick for the artist, working at second hand, was to make images at once strange and recognizable; terror of the unknown cloaked in the safety of the familiar.
The Imperial Imaginary
Betsie Gross (University of Southern California, USA)
To place Georges Cuvier\'s and Henri de Blainville\'s racist "scientific" findings regarding the body of the "Venus Hottentot", Saartjie Baartman, into a broader historical context, I cast my net furher back in time to Francois le Vaillant\'s Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa by the Way of Good Hope in the Years 1880, 81, 82, 83, 84 and 85 (1790) and John Barrow\'s An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Tears 1797 and 1798 (1801). Le Vaillant\'s and and Barrow\'s engagement with the subject of "Hottentot" women, particularly with regard to their prominent derrieres and extended genitalia, mirrors later concerns expressed by Cuvier and de Blainville. The "Venus Hottentot" form becomes a subsequent point of departure for discussing bodies of women from the Cape of Good Hope throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth-century. In conjunction with primarily textual manifestations from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries that reference the bodies of "Hottentot" women at the Cape of Good Hope, I\'d like to take a closer look at visual evidence, various nineteenth-century prints reproduced by Kirby, Altick, Gilman, and other scholars in conjunction with their discussions regarding the "Venus Hottentot\'s" display in Paris and London.
Sight and Oversight: Early Modern Images of Native Americans as Forms of Knowledge
Stephanie Pratt (University of Plymouth, England)
My paper will address a continuing problem in the understanding and interpretation of late seventeenth and eighteenth century prints concerning Native Americans. There is a noted tendency in historical books about America to use such illustrations merely as mute witnesses to a carefully argued text and to ignore the historical nature of the visual representation as codified within the printed image. One primary example is the illustrations made for Francois Du Creux\' Historia Canadensis (1664) placed in a recent historical text close to another set of well-known illustrations found in the Codex Canadensis and dated c. 1700. What the authors (Cummings et al) have failed to see is that there is a direct visual relationship between both sets of images that is clearly based in the historical situation of the Jesuits in New France around the turn of the century. My intention is to place these misused images back again into their proper historical context as systems and forms of knowledge created within a larger context of late 17th and early 18th century European visual culture.
Christopher Pierce, School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 3BX. c.pierce@liv.ac.uk
The 20th century was overwhelmed with pronouncements on the epochal cultural transformations to be expected from the advent of photography. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the rapidly expanding and increasingly efficient printmaking industry developed countless stylisations directed at satisfying the collective desires of the aristocracy, nouveaux riches, and \'contemporary masses\'. That this coincided with global European expansionism meant that there was not only a broader and wealthier purchasing public, but one embroiled in an intellectual reformation eager to bring \'things "closer" spatially and humanly\'. The commercialism of engraving affected its image: the authority of the object was in direct proportion to its marketability. What visual tropes can be exhumed from this economy? How were social modes of perception satisfied? How are these images diachronic? In the familiar words of Walter Benjamin, \'the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice- politics\'. Yet for centuries, colonial historians have relied on visual images as evidence in literary investigations. How could they have overlooked the system of economy on which mechanical reproduction depended? Branding the doyens of literary historicism as guilty of having their \'eyes wide shut\' to the image\'s economic, political and visual gamesmanship has two purposes. It forces a general reassessment of established dogma, and it promotes the revision of colonial history by visual means. What are the historiographical effects of recognising the visual tropes in 17th- and 18th-century engravings of colonial subjects? How do they impact upon our perceptions of colonialism\'s agenda?
The Portrayal of Paradise
Merilyn Savill (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
In his comments made with regard to the illustration of Cook\'s voyages of 1768-80 Bernard Smith claims that "European painters were not yet ready to renounce staffage elements from their landscapes: rural figures innocently conversing, playing the flute or quietly tending their cattle. Even when they were called upon to depict a different culture the activity of such figures was still provided as a keynote to the mood of the picture." It suggests that the importance of the figure was secondary to that of the landscape in the manner of Claude, and the French Academic convention favoured by the aesthetics of Shaftesburian civic humanism. It is the contention of this paper, however, that while the figures in the early illustrations are the visual tropes of Smith\'s assertion, those of John Webber (1750/2-93) of the third voyage, are not. Rather they are subjects of the anthropological records of the social practices of indigenous peoples who act within the confines of a physical landscape. This paper seeks to establish, quite clearly, the influence of the works of Jacques Callot (d.1640) on the Tahitian engravings after Webber of Cook\'s third voyage and to demonstrate the manner in which the various elements were employed to engage the viewer\'s interest in items of anthropological significance.
The Edges of Empire: Negotiating Imperial Space in Captain Cook\'s Images from the North Pacific
Megan A. Smetzer (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Scholars across academic disciplines have extensively analyzed the three voyages of Captain James Cook (1728-1779) and the subsequent illustrated narratives. Among the books and articles, many have specifically addressed the multitude of illustrations, particularly those from the South Pacific, as Cook explored that region most thoroughly. The goal of the third voyage (1776-1780), to find a Northwest Passage through North America, led to the production of images of the North Pacific, including representations of the Native people encountered there. These images, particularly those from Unalaska on the Aleutian Chain of Alaska and Kamchatka in Siberia, have been examined primarily for the ethnographic data contained within them. Rarely, if ever, have the images been considered in terms of how they functioned within a wider network of meanings. In this paper, I will examine four pairs of engravings executed by John Webber, the official expedition artist, in order to illuminate the ambiguities that existed at the edges of the British Empire and reverberated at the center during the late 18th century. Discrepancies arising between text and image in the 1784 publication of Cook\'s voyage reveal the tensions that existed between the imperial nations of Russia and Britain. By placing Webber\'s images from Unalaska and Kamchatka, depicting landscape, indigenous peoples, and their domestic interiors within the complex historical and cultural context of the era, I will show that discourses of nationalism imperialism, trade, and Enlightenment notions of race would have shaped the reading of these images by members of the British public sphere.
The Ninth Circle: Imagining Cannibals
Sue Wragg (University College Northampton, England)
In the ninth circle of Dante\'s hell is Ugolino, condemned to devour human flesh through eternity, gnawing on the neck and brains of his earthly tormentor: cannibalism here portrayed as punishment for earthly sin. Indeed, there is some ambiguity as to whether Ugolino committed this atrocity in life, for, as he starved to death, his sons, incarcerated with him, offered themselves as food. Descriptions of cannibalism remained both disturbing and fascinating: a signifier of evil, it was imputed to groups of people in order to demonize them. By 1492 a specific European iconography existed, based on the slander that Jews could be cannibals with a taste for the blood of Christian boys; an imagined combination of crimes which helped legitimate brutal persecutions. The fantasy of Jewish cannibalism, much of which appeared in print rather than in the \'high\' art format of painting, was both transportable and adaptable, and, I would argue, became the basis for key parts of that European visual vocabulary concerned with new worlds. Seeing or possessing such representations produced a frisson for the collector and the \'contemporary masses\': wonder at the sight of strangeness, horror in the face of the atrocities depicted. The trick for the artist, working at second hand, was to make images at once strange and recognizable; terror of the unknown cloaked in the safety of the familiar.
The Imperial Imaginary
Betsie Gross (University of Southern California, USA)
To place Georges Cuvier\'s and Henri de Blainville\'s racist "scientific" findings regarding the body of the "Venus Hottentot", Saartjie Baartman, into a broader historical context, I cast my net furher back in time to Francois le Vaillant\'s Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa by the Way of Good Hope in the Years 1880, 81, 82, 83, 84 and 85 (1790) and John Barrow\'s An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Tears 1797 and 1798 (1801). Le Vaillant\'s and and Barrow\'s engagement with the subject of "Hottentot" women, particularly with regard to their prominent derrieres and extended genitalia, mirrors later concerns expressed by Cuvier and de Blainville. The "Venus Hottentot" form becomes a subsequent point of departure for discussing bodies of women from the Cape of Good Hope throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth-century. In conjunction with primarily textual manifestations from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries that reference the bodies of "Hottentot" women at the Cape of Good Hope, I\'d like to take a closer look at visual evidence, various nineteenth-century prints reproduced by Kirby, Altick, Gilman, and other scholars in conjunction with their discussions regarding the "Venus Hottentot\'s" display in Paris and London.
Sight and Oversight: Early Modern Images of Native Americans as Forms of Knowledge
Stephanie Pratt (University of Plymouth, England)
My paper will address a continuing problem in the understanding and interpretation of late seventeenth and eighteenth century prints concerning Native Americans. There is a noted tendency in historical books about America to use such illustrations merely as mute witnesses to a carefully argued text and to ignore the historical nature of the visual representation as codified within the printed image. One primary example is the illustrations made for Francois Du Creux\' Historia Canadensis (1664) placed in a recent historical text close to another set of well-known illustrations found in the Codex Canadensis and dated c. 1700. What the authors (Cummings et al) have failed to see is that there is a direct visual relationship between both sets of images that is clearly based in the historical situation of the Jesuits in New France around the turn of the century. My intention is to place these misused images back again into their proper historical context as systems and forms of knowledge created within a larger context of late 17th and early 18th century European visual culture.