Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (Material Culture of Art and Design) 1350259039, 9781350259034

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Things Change
Chapter 1: “A Sort of Picture or Image of my Self”: Amoy Chin Qua’s Almost Ancestral Portrait of Joseph Collet
Chapter 2: Shooting for Freedom: Examining the Material World of Self-Emancipated Persons
Chapter 3: Something Old, Something New: Repurposing and the Production of Ephemeral Festival Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Chapter 4: Botanical Fantasy in Silk: Transformations of a Rococo Floral Design from England to China
Chapter 5: Making Marble Edible: Madame de Pompadour, Friendship, and the Multiple Lives of Porcelain
Chapter 6: The Sovereign Betel in Eighteenth-Century Bengal and Bihar
Chapter 7: Isaiah Thomas’s Stamp Acts at the Halifax Gazette: Printers and Tacit Protest in Revolutionary America
Chapter 8: Between Art and Nature: The Dauphin’s Treasure at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid
Chapter 9: California Indian Basket Weavers, Spanish Imperialism, and Eighteenth-Century Global Networks
Chapter 10: British Prints between Caricature and Ethnography
Index
Plates

Citation preview

Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century

Material Culture of Art and Design Material Culture of Art and Design is devoted to scholarship that brings art history into dialogue with interdisciplinary material culture studies. The material components of an object—its medium and physicality—are key to understanding its cultural significance. Material culture has stretched the boundaries of art history and emphasized new points of contact with other disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, consumer and mass culture studies, the literary movement called “Thing Theory,” and materialist philosophy. Material Culture of Art and Design seeks to publish studies that explore the relationship between art and material culture in all of its complexity. The series is a venue for scholars to explore specific object histories (or object biographies, as the term has developed), studies of medium and the procedures for making works of art, and investigations of art’s relationship to the broader material world that comprises society. It seeks to be the premiere venue for publishing scholarship about works of art as exemplifications of material culture. The series encompasses material culture in its broadest dimensions, including the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles), everyday objects of all kinds (toys, machines, musical instruments), and studies of the familiar high arts of painting and sculpture. The series welcomes proposals for monographs, thematic studies, and edited collections. Series Editor: Michael Yonan, University of Missouri, USA Advisory Board: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware, USA Claire Jones, University of Birmingham, UK Stephen McDowall, University of Edinburgh, UK Amanda Phillips, University of Virginia, USA John Potvin, Concordia University, Canada Olaya Sanfuentes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile Stacey Sloboda, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Robert Wellington, Australian National University, Australia

Volumes in the Series British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775–1930, Edited by Rosie Dias and Kate Smith Jewellery in the Age of Modernism, 1918–1940: Adornment and Beyond, Simon Bliss Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700–Present, Edited by Megan Brandow-Faller Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers, Edited by Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, Seventeenth Century to Contemporary, Edited by Imogen Hart and Claire Jones Georges Rouault and Material Imagining, Jennifer Johnson The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives and Afterlives of the Domain, Edited by Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion, Freya Gowrley Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design, 1850–1920, Edited by Claire Moran Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge, Sarah R. Cohen Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art, Edited by Sharon Hecker and Silvia Bottinelli Forthcoming Books Transformative Jars, Edited by Anna Grasskamp and Anne Gerritsen The Material Landscapes of Scotland's Jewellery Craft, 1780–1914, Sarah Laurenson

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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century Art, Mobility, and Change Edited by Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Selection and editorial material © Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek, 2023 Individual chapters © their authors, 2023 Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Now unknown artist, Jahangir Seated on the Balcony of a Terrace with his son, Prince Khurram, and a Falconer, c. 1615. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Photo: Rijksmuseum. © H. Rowen Bequest, Hilversum. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-5903-4 ePDF: 978-1-3502-5904-1 eBook: 978-1-3502-5905-8 Series: Material Culture of Art and Design Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments

viii xiv xvii

Introduction: Things Change  Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek 1 1 “A Sort of Picture or Image of my Self ”: Amoy Chin Qua’s Almost Ancestral Portrait of Joseph Collet  Winnie Wong 15 2 Shooting for Freedom: Examining the Material World of SelfEmancipated Persons  Tiffany Momon 41 3 Something Old, Something New: Repurposing and the Production of Ephemeral Festival Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Paris  Matthew Gin 61 4 Botanical Fantasy in Silk: Transformations of a Rococo Floral Design from England to China  Mei Mei Rado 81 5 Making Marble Edible: Madame de Pompadour, Friendship, and the Multiple Lives of Porcelain  Susan M. Wager 107 6 The Sovereign Betel in Eighteenth-Century Bengal and Bihar  Zirwat Chowdhury 133 7 Isaiah Thomas’s Stamp Acts at the Halifax Gazette: Printers and Tacit Protest in Revolutionary America  Jennifer Y. Chuong 159 8 Between Art and Nature: The Dauphin’s Treasure at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid  Tara Zanardi 185 9 California Indian Basket Weavers, Spanish Imperialism, and Eighteenth-Century Global Networks  Yve Chavez 211 10 British Prints between Caricature and Ethnography  Douglas Fordham 233 Index

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List of Illustrations Plates 1 Chin Qua (active in Chennai), Portrait of Joseph Collet, painted unfired clay, height 33 inches/838mm, 1716. Accompanied by a painted wooden case, inscribed “AMOY CHIN QUA 1716.” National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 4005. Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London 2 “Run Away,” South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (Charleston, SC), April 3, 1770 3 Contractual drawing for the feu d’artifice erected for the victory celebration staged on October 28, 1758. Pen, ink, and pencil on paper. Archives nationales, France, K 1013, 2452 4 Textile length, mid-to-late eighteenth century, China. Silk satin weave brocaded with silk threads and gold metallic threads. Textile loom width: 60 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing, gu17952 5 Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Friendship (L’ Amitié), 1755. Biscuit porcelain, 30.5 cm (height including base). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan. Photo: Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum 6 Now unknown artist, Jahangir Seated on the Balcony of a Terrace with his son, Prince Khurram, and a Falconer, c. 1615. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Photo: Rijksmuseum. © H. Rowen Bequest, Hilversum 7 Detail of printed image from [Attributed to Isaiah Thomas], [collage of printed and stamped elements], Halifax Gazette, 13 February 1766. Letterpress and woodcut. Reproduced by permission of the American Antiquarian Society 8 Italian Workshop (goblet), Pierre Delabarre (adornment), lapis lazuli goblet with enameled dragons and boy, sixteenth century (goblet); 1625–45 (adornment). Enamel, lapis lazuli, opal, gold. © Museo Nacional del Prado 9 Unknown Chumash weaver, basket hat, late eighteenth century. Sedge root, bulrush root. H 2.76 cm × D 40 cm. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum

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10 James Gillray, Mamlouk, et Hussard Republicain, General result of Buonaparte’s Attack upon Ibrahim Bey’s Rear Guard, 1799, hand-colored etching, 260 × 378 mm., courtesy of the British Museum

Figures 1.1 Chin Qua (active in Chennai), Portrait of Joseph Collet, 1716. National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 4005. Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London16 1.2 Detail of Figure 1.117 1.3 Anonymous Chinese modeler in Guangzhou, Portraits of Captain Michael Tønder, Supercargo Pieter van Hurk, Supercargo Peter Muhle, and Supercargo Jochim Severin Bonsach. 1731. Nationalmuseeets (Denmark). Photograph by Lennart Larsen18 1.4 Probably Chin Qua (active in Chennai), Portrait of Edward Harrison, c. 1711–17. Current location unknown, formerly in the collection of Mrs. Sybil Weaver22 1.5 Chin Qua (active in Chennai), Unidentified English Merchant. Dated 1719. Metropolitan Museum of Art31 2.1 “Run Away,” South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (Charleston, SC), April 3, 177044 2.2 “Run Away,” Georgia State Gazette or Independent Register (Augusta, GA), March 22, 178852 3.1 Jacques-Philippe Le Bas after a drawing by Jean Damun, Décoration du feu d’artifice tiré devant l’Hôtel de ville de Paris le 28 octobre 1758, en réjouissance de la Victoire remportée sur l’Armée combinée des Hessois et Hanovriens à Lutzelberg, 1758. Photo: Musée Carnavalet, Paris62 3.2 Paris, ses fauxbourgs et ses environs où se trouve le détail des villages, châteaux, grands chemins pavez et autres, des hauteurs, bois, vignes, terres et prez, levez géométriquement, 1730. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division68 3.3 Louis Bretez, Plan de Paris, 1739. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris68 3.4 Contractual drawing for the illumination of the house of the Prévôt des Marchands for a celebration staged on October 1, 1758, 1758. Archives nationales, France72

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List of Illustrations

3.5 Contractual drawing for the illumination of the house of the Prévôt des Marchands for a celebration staged on October 23, 1758, 1758. Archives nationales, France72 3.6 Contractual drawing for the illumination of the house of the Prévôt des Marchands, 1759. Archives nationales, France73 3.7 Dessein du feu d’artifice tiré . . . devant l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris le jeudi 9 septembre 1762, 1762. Archives nationales, France74 3.8 Contractual drawing for the feu d’artifice erected for the victory celebration staged on October 28, 1758, 1758. Archives nationales, France74 4.1 Panel from a skirt, c. 1742, Spitalfields, England. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1992.24483 4.2 Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688–1763), design drawing for a silk, 1742, Spitalfields, England. Victoria and Albert Museum83 4.3 Detail of a robe à l’anglaise (textile), c. 1740s, China. Bath Fashion Museum86 4.4 Textile length, mid-to-late eighteenth century, China. The Palace Museum, Beijing89 4.5 Textile length, mid-to-late eighteenth century, China. The Palace Museum, Beijing90 4.6 Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining, 1688–1766), “Tree Peony,” album leaf from Immortal Blossoms in an Everlasting Spring 仙萼長春, 1723–35. National Palace Museum, Taipei90 4.7 Textile sample length, mid-to-late eighteenth century, China. Abegg-Stiftung © Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, 2001. Photo: Christoph von Viràg97 4.8 Textile panel, nineteenth century, China. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art99 5.1 Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1763. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Photograph licensed under a CC0 License108 5.2 Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Pygmalion and Galatea, c. 1780. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam108 5.3 Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Madame de Pompadour in the Guise of Friendship of the Heart, 1755. Sèvres, Manufacture et musée nationaux. Photo: © RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY109 5.4 Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Friendship (L’ Amitié), 1755. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Photo: Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum110

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5.5 Sieur Gilliers, Le cannameliste français, ou, Nouvelle instruction pour ceux qui désirent d'apprendre l'office, 1751. Houghton Library, Harvard University115 5.6 Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Friendship (in the Guise of Madame de Pompadour), 1750–3. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY116 5.7 Cesare Ripa, Iconologie, ou Explication nouvelle de plusieurs images, emblèmes et autres figures hyérogliphiques des vertus, des vices, des arts, des sciences . . . Tirée des recherches et des figures de César Ripa, moralisées par J. Baudoin, 1644. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg. Photo: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg/Iconologie/2117 5.8 Louis-Marin Bonnet, after François Boucher, Offrande sincère (Sincere Offering), before 1767, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY122 6.1 Francis Hayman, Modello for Robert Clive Meeting with Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, c. 1760. Photo: National Portrait Gallery. © National Portrait Gallery, London134 6.2 Pandan, c. 1780, Lucknow. Photo: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © Los Angeles County Museum of Art135 6.3 Betel quid, betel leaf, and betel or areca nut. Photo: Sarwath Chowdhury. Reproduced by permission of Sarwath Chowdhury135 6.4 Now unknown artist, Jahangir Seated on the Balcony of a Terrace with his son, Prince Khurram, and a Falconer, c. 1615. Photo: Rijksmuseum. © H. Rowen Bequest, Hilversum136 6.5 Attributed to Nidha Mal, Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, Receiving Two Officers in a Garden, mid-eighteenth century. Photo: National Museum, New Delhi. © National Museum, New Delhi139 6.6 Attributed to or after Dip Chand, Portrait of Mir Qasim, Nawab of Bengal, c. 1760–3. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London140 6.7 Dip Chand, Portrait of a Company Official, likely William Fullerton, c. 1760–4. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London147 6.8 Attributed to or after Dip Chand, Portrait of Mirza Himmat Ali Khan, c. 1760–3. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London148

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7.1 [Attributed to Isaiah Thomas], [collage of printed and stamped elements], Halifax Gazette, February 13, 1766. Reproduced by permission of the American Antiquarian Society160 7.2 Detail of Figure 7.1161 7.3 Thomas Major, A Proof Sheet of 26 One-Penny Stamps, 1765. Reproduction provided by the British Library166 7.4 Barry English, “Fig. 10,” in John Chandler and H. Dagnall, The Newspaper & Almanac Stamps of Great Britain and Ireland. Reproduced by permission of the Great Britain Philatelic Society166 7.5 William Bradford, Pennsylvania Journal, October 31, 1765. Reproduced by permission of the Library Company of Philadelphia170 7.6 [Attributed to Isaiah Thomas], “America,” Halifax Gazette, November 26, 1765. Reproduced by permission of the American Antiquarian Society173 7.7 Noel Rooke, book printing layouts, in Douglas Cockerell, Bookbinding, and the Care of Books. Public Domain174 7.8 Noel Rooke, “Fig. 4, A Duodecimo Sheet,” in Douglas Cockerell, Bookbinding, and the Care of Books. Public Domain175 8.1 Diego de Villanueva, plan for the second floor of the former Goyeneche Palace, now the Royal Academy of San Fernando and the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, Madrid, eighteenth century. Courtesy of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid186 8.2 Workshop of the Miseroni (?), rock crystal vase with handles in the form of fantastical creatures, 1590–1610. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid189 8.3 Case for rock crystal vase with handles in the form of fantastical creatures, 1690–1711. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid191 8.4 Michel Debourg (mount), Qing dynasty (jade carving), Chinese jade vessel with a silver-gilt foot, 1684–7. © Museo Nacional del Prado192 8.5 Miguel and Juan González, Conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés, no. 21, 1698. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid194 8.6 Amethyst. Museo de América, Madrid. Fotografía: Joaquín Otero197 8.7 Qing dynasty, China, masculine figurine, eighteenth century. Alabaster and soapstone. Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid199 8.8 Italian Workshop (Goblet), Pierre Delabarre (Adornment), lapis lazuli goblet with enameled dragons and boy, sixteenth century (goblet); 1625–45 (adornment). © Museo Nacional del Prado204

List of Illustrations

9.1

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Unknown Chumash weaver, basket hat, late eighteenth century. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum212 9.2 Unknown Chumash (?) maker, hair pin, eighteenth century. © The Trustees of the British Museum220 9.3 Unknown Badjao/Bajau/Bayao [Sama/Samah] maker, basketry cap/hat, collected 1898–1902. Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History223 10.1 J.P. Malcolm, Plate I and title page, An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, 1813. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University234 10.2 Unknown maker, Hawaiian standing figure (akua ka’ai), before 1780. Courtesy of the British Museum235 10.3 Unknown maker, human face mask from the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples of the Northwest coast, before 1780. Courtesy of the British Museum236 10.4 James Record after John Webber, Various Articles, at the Sandwich Islands, in James Cook and James King, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1785). Courtesy of the National Library of Australia237 10.5 J.P. Malcolm, Plate IV from An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, 1813. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University239 10.6 [James Gillray], A Colonel of the Janizaries, 1794. Courtesy of Yale University Digital Collections242 10.7 Attributed to James Gillray, Supposed to be a correct representation of a Mamaluke Chief; from a Sketch by a French Officer by whom he was taken Prisoner, 1798. Courtesy of Yale University Digital Collections243 10.8 James Gillray, Mamlouk, et Hussard Republicain, General result of Buonaparte’s Attack upon Ibrahim Bey’s Rear Guard, 1799. Courtesy of the British Museum245 10.9 J.P. Malcolm, Plate XXX from An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, 1813. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University248 10.10 Unknown maker, John Howard Galton bookplate, pasted in An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, 1813. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University250

Notes on Contributors Wendy Bellion is Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History and Associate Dean for the Humanities at the University of Delaware. Her research focuses on North American art and the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her publications include the books Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011) and Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019). Yve Chavez is Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma. Her research interests include Native American and colonial Latin American art, the California missions, early modern cross-cultural exchange, and Indigenous representation. She has published on basket weaving in Southern California, exhibitions of California mission art, and Indigenous visibility in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century California. Her current book project, Indigenizing the Visual Landscape of California’s Missions and Beyond: 1769-1936, examines the artistic contributions of Indigenous peoples at California’s missions, Native agency in early modern networks, and the survivance of California Indian visual and material culture. Zirwat Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury European Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research explores the interconnected histories of art and visual culture in Britain, France, South Asia, and the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published on Mughal material culture, British architecture, and Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy. She also directed Journal 18’s online, openaccess timeline, “Blackness, Immobility, and Visibility in Europe, 1600-1800.” Jennifer Y. Chuong is the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. Her research centers on the art and material culture of the eighteenth-century British transatlantic world, particularly its intersection with histories of race and environment. She is currently working on a book manuscript, “Surface Experiments: Art, Nature, and the Making of Early America,” in which she argues that eighteenth-century

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British and Anglo-American subjects used wide-ranging experiments with unstable surfaces (like those of wood, paper, and paint) to place transience at the center of modern ideas about society, economy, the environment, and art. A second project examines print’s materialization of racial difference in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and an article bridging these two projects, “Engraving’s ‘Immoveable Veil’: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique,” was published in The Art Bulletin. Douglas Fordham is Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of two monographs on British Art, most recently Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (2019). As a Mellon Indigenous Arts Fellow, he worked with PhD students and the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Aboriginal Art to produce an exhibition and catalogue, Boomalli Prints and Paper: Making Space as an Art Collective (2022). He recently received a Senior Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and is working on British and Indigenous printmaking. Matthew Gin is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A historian of eighteenth-century European architecture and visual culture, he is especially interested in actors, objects, and forms of expertise that sat on the edges of architectural practice in the early modern period. His current book project is an expanded cultural and material history of the ephemeral festival architecture built in France during the Enlightenment. Tiffany Momon is a public historian and Assistant Professor of History at Sewanee: The University of the South. At Sewanee she serves as faculty affiliate for the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, an initiative investigating the university’s historical entanglements with slavery and slavery’s legacies. Momon is the founder and co-director of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive (blackcraftspeople​.o​rg), a Black digital humanities project that centers Black craftspeople, their lives, and their contributions to the making and building of America. Her publications include “John ‘Quash’ Williams, Charleston Builder,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (2020). Mei Mei Rado is Assistant Professor of Textile and Dress History at Bard Graduate Center in New York. She specializes in textiles and dress of both China and France from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, with a focus on transcultural

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exchanges. Dr. Rado has published in the journals The Burlington Magazine, Fashion Theory, and Perspective, and the edited volumes Materials, Practices and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture (2021) and Arachné: un regard critique sur l’histoire de la tapisserie (2017). Her forthcoming book is titled The Empire’s New Cloth: Western Textiles at the Eighteenth-Century Qing Court. Kristel Smentek is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century European graphic and decorative arts in their transcultural contexts. She is the author of Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2014), co-editor of Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (2022), and co-curator of the accompanying exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums. Susan M. Wager is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. Her current book project re-thinks Madame de Pompadour’s patronage in terms of artistic reproduction and the translation of images across media. She has published on Pompadour’s prints in The Burlington Magazine and her intermedial assemblage in Journal18. An article on François Boucher and biscuit porcelain is forthcoming in The Art Bulletin. She is a contributor to the exhibition catalogue Casanova’s Europe: Art, Pleasure, and Power in the Eighteenth Century, and curator of “Madame de Pompadour: Patron and Printmaker” at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in 2016. Winnie Wong is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (2014, Joseph Levenson Book Prize 2015). She is currently writing a book on the painters of the Canton Trade. Tara Zanardi is Associate Professor of Art History at Hunter College, CUNY. Her expertise and research interests cover eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish visual and material culture. Her recent books are Framing Majismo: Art and Royal Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain (2016) and a co-edited volume, Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (2018). Her current work includes an edited volume, Intimate Interiors: Sex, Politics, and Material Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Bedroom and Boudoir (2023), a journal issue on the theme of “Wonder Women,” a journal issue on “Silver” (2022), and a book, The Porcelain Room at Aranjuez: Charles III, Imperial Politics, and Natural History.

Acknowledgments Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change evolved from a panel organized for the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) conference “Art and Architecture in the Long Eighteenth Century: HECAA at 25,” held at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas) in November 2018. We are grateful to the conference organizers, panel speakers, and especially HECAA president Amy Freund for the invitation to begin the scholarly conversation that then grew into an essay for a Journal18 issue (spring 2020) reflecting on the conference and later developed into this book. Big thanks are also due to Michael Yonan, Series Editor for Material Cultures of Art, who graciously encouraged this project from the beginning, and the Bloomsbury team that energetically guided the book into production: commissioning editors Alexander Highfield and April Peake, editorial assistant Ross Fraser-Smith, project manager Nivethitha Tamilselvan, and production managers Ken Bruce and Amy Jordan. The anonymous peer reviewers for the press offered welcome and useful suggestions. Generous financial support for Material Cultures was provided by the University of Delaware’s College of Arts and Sciences, Center for Material Culture Studies, and Department of Art History and by MIT’s Department of Architecture. Our greatest debt is to our ten contributors, who worked assiduously and creatively throughout the many challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic to realize their essays: Yve Chavez, Jennifer Chuong, Zirwat Chowdhury, Douglas Fordham, Matthew Gin, Tiffany Momon, Mei Mei Rado, Susan Wager, Winnie Wong, and Tara Zanardi. We are also grateful to the many colleagues who gave their time, energy, and suggestions to this project along the way, including Kyoungjin Bae, Jeff Collins, Mónica Domínguez Torres, David Doris, Finbarr Barry Flood, Jessica Horton, Samuel Luterbacher, Aaron Hyman, Michele Matteini, Ünver Rüstem, Stacey Sloboda, Zoë Strother, and Nancy Um. Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek

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Introduction Things Change Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek

Things change. Material objects seldom survive in their original state. Things get broken and restored, lost and found, moved and reused. They transcend their earliest purposes, places, and appearances. Material change occurs without regard for aesthetic hierarchies. And it happens across multiple temporalities: objects incorporate the time of their manufacture, the traces of their reception, and the moments in which we encounter them today. This book locates material objects at the heart of the eighteenth century. It argues that eighteenth-century cultures were defined by material change. Mobile, malleable, and conceptually flexible, objects functioned as indexes, effects, and catalysts of transformation in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period. Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change originated in a scholarly panel called “Things Change” that we organized in 2018 for the conference “HECAA at 25,” celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the professional organization Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA). Our panelists explored questions of reinvention, relocation, and remaking in Europe and North America. For this volume, we invited a dynamic roster of established and emerging scholars, including members of the HECAA panel, to help expand the geographical and cultural scope of our inquiry. How, we asked, might material appropriations—Indigenous, colonial, and diasporic—attest to phenomena undocumented in texts? What can the disand re-figurement of things reveal about subaltern resistances and asymmetries of power relations in the expanding worlds of the eighteenth century? In this volume, ten scholars respond to these questions in chapters that travel from the Qing court to Chumash communities, from Madrid cabinets to the Mughal Empire.

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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century

Material Cultures takes a broad approach to the study of “things,” encompassing elite and everyday objects, from porcelain and betel leaves to textiles and hats. We take our cue in part from Francesco Algarotti, who in 1737 hailed the eighteenth century as a “century of things,” arguing that the empirical study of natural things would advance knowledge for both women and men.1 We extend Algarotti’s claims in this volume to include the century’s underrepresented peoples and material histories. We also look to scholarship across a range of disciplines focused on material things: studies of things that talk, break, move, accumulate biographies, and have social lives.2 These investigations of shifts in meaning, function, and status across distance and over time also inform the capacious notion of “change” at the heart of this volume. Important as they are, these studies often assume that things maintain their material integrity across their artifactual life. By contrast, the contributors to this volume emphasize physical as well as semiotic alterations, focusing on materiality and matter in addition to the discursive understandings of the lives of things that propelled much earlier scholarship. They also bring the insights of art history to bear on the interpretation of material things: close attention to form, making, and iconographic analysis, all of which inform how things signify.3 The following chapters explore transformations within and between artistic media, trace objects as they migrate across territories, and show how physical manipulation and new contexts—such as a collection, a book, a performance—alter the meanings of images and artifacts. In so doing, this book contributes a new topical and chronological focus to the important body of scholarship that traces material cultures across the centuries of the early modern world.4 While every age witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations on a scope that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the globe. Change occasioned by conflict and conquest marked all parts of the world during this period, from the Ottoman Empire to the Mughal successor states to the kingdoms of subSaharan Africa. Uniting the contributions to this volume, however, are the far-reaching consequences of Western Europe’s commercial, missionary, and territorial ambitions in a century of improved navigation, aggressive scientific exploration, and proliferating trading companies. While European colonialism, armed trade, and missionary zeal were not unique to the eighteenth century, this era saw the extension of all three. Attracted by the prospect of riches, numerous European India companies challenged preexisting Dutch, British, and Spanish claims to hegemony over international trade. French and British explorers traversed the Pacific, expanding the reach of Europeans, their goods, and their

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diseases to ever more regions. At the same time, powerful new Protestant reform movements, such as Pietism and Methodism, sought, like their Catholic enemies, to convert the globes’ “heathen” souls.5 The effects of this multifaceted European expansionism on local Indigenous populations—from subjugation and enslavement to resistance and revolution—were profound. Though we frame our book within the long eighteenth century, a periodization that maps most closely onto European history, our contributors decenter the primacy of European actors by explicitly bringing different communities and their material cultures to the fore.6 The chapters in this volume explore how the dislocations and defiance of eighteenth-century European ambition are registered in the physical and conceptual transformations of material things, whether they moved across oceans or local terrains. Over the last two decades, material objects ranging from clay vessels to case furniture have moved from the margins of eighteenth-century art history to its core, paralleling the expansion of material culture studies in humanities and social science disciplines. Historians have examined how European textiles and furniture evidence the disavowal of Caribbean slavery; investigated the entanglements of furniture, commerce, and comportment in Yemen; analyzed local appropriations of Asian ceramics in New Spain and on the Swahili coast; and assessed the mediating role of diplomatic gifts across cultural distances.7 Much of this work emphasizes connections between far-flung geographies and complicates efforts to draw hard distinctions between decorative and material cultures, including studies of Mexico City biombos—folding screens derived from Japan that represented Spanish colonial history—and Indian madras cloth prized by people of African descent in French Louisiana.8 Significantly, new scholarship on the material cultures of enslaved and Indigenous peoples is also pointing to fresh ways of understanding material agency as well as problems of absence in collections and archives.9 Collectively, this scholarship has revealed the complexity of worlds knitted together by systems of colonization, creolization, and knowledge-production.10 It has also attended to the ways in which human and nonhuman worlds continually intersect, often to the detriment of natural worlds in the decades of nascent industrial development that marked the early centuries of the Anthropocene.11 As historians of eighteenth-century art embrace the study of objects that trouble familiar divisions between fine arts, decorative arts, and vernacular objects, they simultaneously dismantle the discipline’s hierarchies of value and its Euro-American focus. There is much to be gained from such nonhierarchical and nonhistoricist approaches to material objects. Processes of fabrication are

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important, but an object’s meaning is not fixed by the specific time and place of its manufacture. Moreover, the nonrepresentational aspects of human-made things—physicality and materials, surfaces and ornament—richly reward analysis.12 The chapters in Material Cultures investigate media and technological manipulations while attending to the human agents who actively instigated material change in a period of accelerating global contact and conquest. In the process, they expand the scope of eighteenth-century material culture studies to center the histories of people and things too often overlooked within traditional scholarship, including Indigenous makers in North America and Southeast Asia; enslaved and free people of African descent throughout the Atlantic World; and laborers in workshops as distant as Paris and the Pacific littoral. As the following chapters demonstrate, the turn toward material culture studies is closely intertwined with the humanities’ turn toward global histories. Both areas emphasize the transoceanic or overland movement of peoples and things and the corresponding impacts of mobility on local material and visual cultures. In her landmark edited volume, The Global Eighteenth Century (2003), Felicity Nussbaum called for a “widening” of the eighteenth century. She urged a movement away from the national focus that characterized eighteenth-century studies in the early 2000s, and a resituating of the field within a global paradigm attentive to the mobility of things, peoples, and ideas across geographical frontiers. Such a reorientation necessitated a refocusing of scholarly inquiry toward issues of race, Indigenous knowledge, religion, long-distance trade, and colonialism.13 Investigating the border-crossing circuits of things and the consequences of their travel, as numerous scholars have done since Nussbaum’s volume, entails a close attention to the particularity and historical specificity of the connections they forced and resistance they provoked.14 In art history, the disciplinary home of most of our contributors, the ambition to move beyond nation-based art histories entailed a simultaneous shift away from the Euro-American definitions of art structuring those histories. Here material culture and global studies converge. Art history’s traditional emphases on figural representation, perspectival space, and stylistic development, and its historical privileging of such media as oil paint and marble, begin to seem parochial in view of the multiple traditions of art making around the globe. By examining things composed of plaster, rock, and clay—and foregrounding objects traditionally excluded from art-historical analysis, such as printer’s marks and patterned textiles—our contributors reveal how the local and global were reconfigured and conjoined, sometimes tensely and often unpredictably.

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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century follows a chronological organization beginning in the early 1700s. The two chapters that commence and conclude the volume—Winnie Wong’s study of a Chinese clay figure representing a British East India merchant, shipped from Madras to England, and Douglas Fordham’s analysis of a British treatise on caricature, which illustrated figural carvings from the Pacific world—underscore the extent to which political, commercial, and epistemological systems of empire informed the production, reproduction, and circulation of material cultures throughout the long eighteenth century. The giant octopus that became the British Empire, linking Europe to the Americas, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific, also surfaces in Tiffany Momon’s research about the objects carried into freedom by self-emancipated people along the eastern seaboard of British North America, Mei Mei Rado’s mapping of botanical designs from silk manufactories in London to those in the lower Yangtze River, Zirwat Chowdhury’s exploration of the multifarious roles of betel in colonial Bengal, and Jennifer Chuong’s examination of a feisty printer’s protest against British taxes in Nova Scotia. The powerful imperial forces of France and Spain shaped and reshaped material cultures in the eighteenth century, too. Matthew Gin and Susan Wager demonstrate how practices of ornamental reuse and sculptural transmediation helped to sustain and reify French political authority across spaces as different as city streets and dining tables. Yve Chavez and Tara Zanardi show how artistic forms as distinct as the shape of a Chumash hat, fashioned at a California mission in the style of Filipino headgear, and mother-of-pearl encrusted paintings, sourced in Mexico, materialized the global reach of the Spanish empire throughout the Americas and Asia. Together, these chapters chart new directions for the fields of material culture and eighteenth-century art history. Many of the contributors foreground locations around the Pacific littoral, thereby enlarging the geographical scope of material culture research beyond the circum-Atlantic focus that has yielded so much exciting English-language scholarship of the past few decades. Others highlight individuals whose lives are buried or marginalized in historical scholarship: those who made, moved, and found meaning in things while surviving colonial violence or laboring anonymously in workshops. Throughout, our authors also advance timely issues in material culture studies. Translation emerges as a connective tissue across chapters that show how media from sculptures to textiles rendered matter and texts into new modes of representation. Agency features in chapters that analyze books, newspapers, and festival trophies as conduits of political change as well as nonhuman power. And a focus on ecology

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links contributions that reveal how sedge grass baskets preserved ecological knowledge, gemstones displayed imperial wealth, and betel leaves doubled as tools of diplomacy. Our volume opens with a rare and unusual object: a naturalistic, painted clay portrait of the British East India merchant Joseph Collet, measuring 33 inches tall and modeled by a Chinese artist known to us now as Amoy Chin Qua. Winnie Wong follows the portrait of Collet from its creation in Madras to the sitter’s daughters in England, where Collet hoped it would function as a stand-in for his absent authority, communicating his financial and personal health and reminding his children to marry well. Across a great distance, the portrait at once materialized and mediated changes in Collet’s fortunes and his daughters’ personal lives. On other occasions, Collet sent expensive goods and two enslaved persons named “Flora” and “Bacchus.” Tiffany Momon considers the entangled relations of enslavement, freedom, and things in an altogether different place: colonial North America. In newspaper advertisements seeking the return of self-emancipated people of African descent, Momon finds evidence of the books, guns, and tools that individuals carried when they fled their enslavers. For men like Curry Tuxent, a carpenter and cooper, tools were both agents and signs of change, keys to freedom and the realization of new material worlds. In the process, formerly enslaved individuals altered the uses of and meanings of everyday things. If self-emancipated people valued certain kinds of objects for their transformative political potential, however, Parisian workmen on the other side of the Atlantic worked in service of permanence, repurposing elaborate festival ornaments to continually reassert French state power as it was challenged from within and from abroad. Matthew Gin delves into the archives of the Paris Bureau de la Ville to reconstruct the elaborate processes of documentation, storage, and repair that enabled architects and painter-decorators to reuse decorations for ephemeral pageants in city streets and parks. Gin characterizes change, in this instance, as a deliberative “material strategy,” observing that the ostentation of grand temporary displays masked the political instability of the French Regime. Where Gin examines material transformations, Mei Mei Rado tracks the circulation of a popular floral design across media and around the globe, from its origins in London’s Spitalsfield district to silk garments in locations including Boston, Scandinavia, and Tibet. Rado demonstrates how different aesthetic paradigms and technological practices yielded subtle metamorphoses in the form and function of this design. These processes coalesced with particular force at the Qing court, where textiles woven with botanical imagery echoed the

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emperor’s appetite for foreign plant specimens—and the imperial power such acquisitiveness implicitly registered. In the networked worlds of the eighteenth century, Rado observes, “Objects rarely moved in a straightforward manner or followed a linear direction. Instead, circular, multi-directional transmissions often yielded to unforeseeable outcomes and imbued objects with rich and fluid meanings.” Susan Wager’s study of biscuit porcelain production in France illuminates the complexities of change on a different scale: the local. In 1755, Madame de Pompadour commissioned a set of nineteen identical biscuit figurines, each representing the patron herself as an allegory of friendship, as gifts for friends. Four were never distributed. What does it mean, Wager asks, when objects intended to move instead remain still—and when porcelain, a medium that was imagined to be protean in nature, is instead mechanically reproduced in identical multiple editions? Focusing on mid-eighteenth-century Bengal and colonial Nova Scotia, Zirwat Chowdhury and Jennifer Chuong investigate the agency invested in material things by makers and users at times of tense political contestation. Chowdhury explores the courtly comestible of betel quid and the precious boxes, or pandans, in which it was presented in Bengal. Both the betel and its boxes materialized the sovereignty of the Mughal court, in exile and on the move, during the years after the Battle of Plassey (Palashi) in 1757. As Chowdhury shows, betel brings into view “the changing material form of sovereign relations” in a time of uncertain, shifting alliances. As the extractive economy of the English East India Company took hold in Bengal, its traders transformed the courtly betel, now stripped of its ceremonial accouterments, into a profitable commodity and material marker of a new, aggressive power in the region. Moving to British North America, Chuong relates the fascinating history of Isaiah Thomas, a printer and self-identified American patriot who registered his disgust with the British Parliament’s Stamp Act (1765) through clever manipulations of print in the newspaper to which he was apprenticed, the Halifax Gazette. Thomas mobilized his command of the printing process to deliberately introduce irregularities into the paper and thereby express his dissent in a region less inclined to open defiance of the colonial government than his native Boston. For Chuong, these material acts of protest powerfully register the tacit knowledge of artisans whose subversive activities are often elided in narratives of the American Revolution. The last three chapters of the book consider the ways in which collecting and transcultural mobilities visualize processes of material change. Tara Zanardi

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illuminates the many facets of change operative across the formation of the “Dauphin’s Treasure,” a stunning collection of minerals, ores, and stones that were conjoined with specimens from the natural and classical worlds in Madrid’s Real Gabinete de Historia Natural (Royal Cabinet of Natural History). The sheer size of the Dauphin’s Treasure, and the exquisite rarities it contained, manifested the scale and extractive force of Spain’s empire between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries. Zanardi maps the further transformations in appearance and meaning these objects acquired as they changed owners and served the varied interests of art, science, and imperial economics. Yve Chavez explores related issues through a radically different lens, training our focus on a single object—a Chumash basket hat, collected by members of the Vancouver Expedition in California in the 1790s—as evidence of Indigenous resistance, adaptation, and survivance in the face of Spanish missionary oppression. Chavez foregrounds Chumash women’s knowledge of natural materials and their artistic agency as “overlooked catalyst(s) in the movement of goods” regionally and globally. An unusual wide-brimmed basket cap, now in the British Museum collection, evinces one maker’s creative response to Filipino salakot hats that may have reached California through the Manila Galleon trade, thereby suggesting “two layers of Indigenous agency at play” on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. Douglas Fordham’s concluding chapter links additional regions of the Pacific world and Indigenous material cultures to practices of collecting and visual deformation in Europe. British expeditions to the Sandwich (later renamed Hawaiian) islands and the northwest coast of North America, led by Captain James Cook during the 1770s, amassed objects including wooden figures and masks carved by Nuu-Chah-nulth and other Indigenous people. Some three decades later, artist James Peller Malcolm sketched a half-dozen of these carvings in the British Museum and reproduced them in the opening plate for An Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing (1813). Fordham unpacks the ways this volume slips between ethnography and caricature, showing how print culture produced, exaggerated, and naturalized racial and cultural differences at a key moment in the expansion of the British Empire. Collectively, the chapters in Material Cultures illuminate the local and global textures of eighteenth-century material cultures—worlds shaped by diverse communities of free, enslaved, and Indigenous people around the globe as well as the objects they made, valued, and set into motion. Much of the work for this volume transpired during the Covid-19 pandemic and the many changes it imposed on the normal rhythms of scholarly research, from travel bans and

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limited archival access to working from home, homeschooling children, and caring for family members affected by the virus. Inevitably, our investigations of art, mobility, and change have also changed along the way. Several of our original contributors had to adjust their proposed topics or put their intended chapters on hold. Looking ahead to a post-pandemic future, we hope this volume offers a model for new methodological approaches, new scholarly voices, and an even more expanded geographic scope in future publications, one that encompasses the dynamic material cultures of Africa, the Mediterranean world, and Central and South America over the course of the mobile eighteenth century.

Bibliography Adamson, Glenn and Victoria Kelley, eds. Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish, and the Meaning of Objects. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Algarotti, Francesco. Il newtonianismo per le dame ovvero dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori. Naples [Milan], 1737. Anderson, Christy, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith, eds. The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Andrews, Edward E. “Tranquebar: Charting the Protestant International in the British Atlantic and Beyond.” The William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 1 (2017): 3–34. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Betzer, Sarah and Dipti Khera, eds. “The ‘Long’ 18th Century?” Journal 18, no. 12 (Fall 2021), https://www​.journal18​.org​/category​/issue12/ Biro, Yaëlle and Noémie Étienne, eds. Rhapsodic Objects: Art, Agency, and Materiality (1700–2000). Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. Dacome, Lucia. “Women, Wax and Anatomy in the Century of Things.” Renaissance Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 522–50. Daston, Lorraine. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Daston, Lorraine, ed. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books, 2004. DeCunzo, Lu Ann. “Buried Archives.” In Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation, edited by Sandy Isenstadt and Martin Brückner, 181–3. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2021. Dobie, Madeleine. Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.

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Fennetaux, Ariane, Amélie Junqua, and Sophie Vasset, eds. The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 2015. Findlen, Paula, ed. Early Modern Things. New York: Routledge, 2003. Gaskell, Ivan and Sarah Anne Carter, eds. The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Gerritsen, Anne and Giorgio Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Hay, Jonathan. Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010. Igoe, Laura Turner. “Creative Matter: Tracing the Environmental Context of Materials in American Art.” In Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, edited by Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock, 140–69. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2018. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization and Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Mancini, JoAnne. Art and War in the Pacific World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Mazzotti, Massimo. “Newton for Ladies: Gentility, Gender, and Radical Culture.” British Journal for the History of Science 37, no. 2 (2004): 119–46. Meier, Prita. “Chinese Porcelain and Muslim Port Cities: Mercantile Materiality in Coastal East Africa.” In “Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World,” ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin. Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 702–17. Morrissey, Catherine. “Landscapes of Refuge: Recovering the Materiality of Underground Railroad Landscapes in Delaware.” In Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation, edited by Sandy Isenstadt and Martin Brückner, 145–55. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2021. Mundy, Barbara. “Moteuczoma Reborn.” In “Objects in Motion: Visual and Material Culture across Colonial North America,” ed. Wendy Bellion and Mónica Domínguez Torres, Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 2/3 (2011): 161–76. North, Michael, ed. Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400– 1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections. Burlington and Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010. Nussbaum, Felicity, ed. The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Sheriff, Mary D., ed. Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Sloboda, Stacey, and Michael Yonan, ed. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

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Um, Nancy. “Chairs, Writing Tables, and Chests: Indian Ocean Furniture and the Postures of Commercial Documentation in Coastal Yemen, 1700–40.” In “Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World,” ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin. Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 718–31. Um, Nancy, and Leah R. Clark, eds. “The Art of Embassy: Objects and Images of Early Modern Diplomacy.” Journal of Early Modern History 20, no. 1 (2016). Van Horn, Jennifer. “‘The Dark Iconoclast’: African Americans’ Artistic Resistance in the Civil War South.” Art Bulletin 99, no. 4 (2017): 133–67. White, Sophie. “Geographies of Slave Consumption.” In “Objects in Motion: Visual and Material Culture across Colonial North America,” ed. Wendy Bellion and Mónica Domínguez Torres, Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 2/3 (2011): 229–48. Yonan, Michael. “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2011): 232–48.

Notes 1 “[I]l secolo delle cose venga una volta anco per noi” (may the age of things come upon us), in Francesco Algarotti, Il newtonianismo per le dame ovvero dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori (Naples [Milan], 1737), xi. We owe our knowledge of this quote to Lucia Dacome, “Women, Wax and Anatomy in the Century of Things,” Renaissance Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 522–50. On Algarotti’s text, see Massimo Mazzotti, “Newton for Ladies: Gentility, Gender, and Radical Culture,” British Journal for the History of Science 37, no. 2 (2004): 119–46. 2 Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004); Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22; Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things (New York: Routledge, 2003); Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua, and Sophie Vasset, eds., The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2015); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization and Process,” in ibid., 64–91; Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 3 Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2011): 232–48; Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela

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5 6

7

8

9

10 11

Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century H. Smith, eds., The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Material Cultures complements recent studies that present a more expansive chronological study of material culture such as Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter, eds., The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). It also expands new approaches to the study of eighteenth-century people and places such as Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan, eds., Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019) through inclusive considerations of natural ecologies, Indigenous makers, enslaved individuals, and everyday things. Edward E. Andrews, “Tranquebar: Charting the Protestant International in the British Atlantic and Beyond,” The William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 1 (2017): 3–34. On the periodization of the long eighteenth century, see the special issue, Sarah Betzer and Dipti Khera, eds., “The ‘Long’ 18th Century?” Journal 18, no. 12 (Fall 2021), https://www​.journal18​.org/. Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Prita Meier, “Chinese Porcelain and Muslim Port Cities: Mercantile Materiality in Coastal East Africa,” and Nancy Um, “Chairs, Writing Tables, and Chests: Indian Ocean Furniture and the Postures of Commercial Documentation in Coastal Yemen, 1700–40,” in the special issue Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin, eds., “Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World,” Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 702–17 and 718–31; and the special issue Nancy Um and Leah R. Clark, eds., “The Art of Embassy: Objects and Images of Early Modern Diplomacy,” Journal of Early Modern History 20, no. 1 (2016). Barbara Mundy, “Moteuczoma Reborn,” and Sophie White, “Geographies of Slave Consumption,” in the special issue Wendy Bellion and Mónica Domínguez Torres, eds., “Objects in Motion: Visual and Material Culture across Colonial North America,” Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 2/3 (2011): 161–76, 229–48. Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Étienne, eds., Rhapsodic Objects: Art, Agency, and Materiality (1700–2000) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022); Jennifer Van Horn, “‘The Dark Iconoclast’: African Americans’ Artistic Resistance in the Civil War South,” Art Bulletin 99, no. 4 (2017): 133–67; Catherine Morrissey, “Landscapes of Refuge: Recovering the Materiality of Underground Railroad Landscapes in Delaware,” and Lu Ann DeCunzo, “Buried Archives,” in Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation, ed. Sandy Isenstadt and Martin Brückner (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2021), 145–55, 181–3. JoAnne Mancini, Art and War in the Pacific World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018); Sloboda and Yonan, eds., Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds. For example, Laura Turner Igoe, “Creative Matter: Tracing the Environmental Context of Materials in American Art,” in Nature’s Nation: American Art and

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Environment, ed. Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2018), 140–69. 12 Glenn Adamson and Victoria Kelley, eds., Surface Tensions: Surface, Finish, and the Meaning of Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010). 13 Felicity Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 2; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 14 Sloboda and Yonan, eds., Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds; Mary D. Sheriff, ed., Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Michael North, ed., Artistic and Cultural Exchanges Between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections (Burlington and Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010).

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“A Sort of Picture or Image of my Self ” Amoy Chin Qua’s Almost Ancestral Portrait of Joseph Collet Winnie Wong

I also send by the Governour in requitall for your Pictures a sort of Picture or Image of my Self. The lineaments and the Features are Esteemed very just but the complexion is not quite so well hit, the proportion of my body and my habit is very exact; I commit it to your custody till you see the original. —Joseph Collet, from Madras, to his daughter Elizabeth in England, December 14, 1716.1 It was 1716 and the British East India Company merchant Joseph Collet (1673– 1725) found himself at a crossroads that had brought him from the “lowest depth of adversity” to “an eminent height of prosperity.”2 He was departing the English East India Company’s Fort St. George at Bencoolen (present-day Bengkulu City in Sumatra) for Fort Marlborough at Madras (present-day Chennai), where he would soon ascend to the Presidency of the Madras Council, one of the most lucrative of the Company’s positions in the East.3 That was the prosperity he could look forward to, if a little sardonically. For the adversity that brought him to this point was the sudden death of his eighteen-year-old son, John, who had joined him in Bencoolen after years of effort but died of malaria after only a month after his arrival. Such was Collet’s despair that personal letters to his family ceased for nearly a year. It was at that moment, arriving in Madras to remain there indefinitely, that Collet must have gone to the shop of a Chinese craftsman known as Chin Qua, and had a clay portrait of himself made.4 This famous standing portrait of Collet, kneaded of unfired clay, decorated with paint and housed in a glass case, is today held at the National Portrait Gallery in London (Figures 1.1/Plate 1 and 1.2). It is

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Figure 1.1  Chin Qua (active in Chennai), Portrait of Joseph Collet, painted unfired clay, height 33 inches/838mm, 1716. Accompanied by a painted wooden case, inscribed “AMOY CHIN QUA 1716.” National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 4005. Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London.

“A Sort of Picture or Image of my Self ”

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Figure 1.2  Detail of Figure 1.1

the earliest dated unfired clay portrait of a European man by a Chinese portrait modeler—a niche genre that would increase in popularity among European merchant men throughout the eighteenth century, reaching its peak in England with the celebrated visit of Chit Qua to London from 1769 to his return to Guangzhou (Canton) in 1772.5 Much has been documented about Chit Qua’s brief celebrity among the artistic, intellectual, and scientific circles of London, where he and his craft were hailed as “ingenious” and “curious.”6 Indeed, the clay portraits that Chin Qua, Chit Qua, and other Chinese artisans made for European men throughout the eighteenth century remain enigmatic to scholars today. As of 2021, over forty such figures depicting English, Danish, Dutch, French, and American men are known among scholars of the Canton Trade (Figure 1.3).7 These portraits entice viewers with their uncanny verisimilitude, and counter the popular perception that “realism” was achieved in Chinese art only after contact with Western artistic and scientific conventions in the nineteenth century. As historians of Chinese art such as Richard Vinograd, Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, and Binbin Yang have shown, highly veristic facial portraiture may indeed have been a lesser-known aspect of Chinese art and derided as a professional craft for centuries, but its increasing appropriation by literati artists of the Ming and Qing dynasties portended a significant change in Chinese aesthetics.8 How do these clay three-dimensional portraits fit within the changing valuation of portraiture in high Chinese art? Why, for their part, did European merchant men judge Chinese clay portrait modeling to be so suitable a portraiture mode, if indeed Chinese and Western aesthetics were so

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Figure 1.3  Anonymous Chinese modeler in Guangzhou, Portraits of Captain Michael Tønder, Supercargo Pieter van Hurk, Supercargo Peter Muhle, and Supercargo Jochim Severin Bonsach. 1731. Unfired clay, hair, wood, cloth, and various materials. H: 39 cm, 32 cm, 41 cm, and 36 cm. Nationalmuseeets (Denmark). Photograph by Lennart Larsen.

diametrically opposed? In their three-dimensionality, full-length depiction of the human form, and the use of human hair, fabric clothing, furniture and other miniature accouterments, the clay portrait models complicate our popular historical narrative that “realism” was a global nineteenth-century achievement that culminated in photography. In the eighteenth century, and in the port cities of Canton, Madras, and London, where European merchant men and Chinese craftsmen encountered one another, these unfired clay portraits offered a representation of human appearance that was both mutual and simultaneous. For his part, Joseph Collet sent the clay portrait model of himself made in Madras by Chin Qua, along with four diamond rings, various lengths of muslin, a number of necklaces, aprons, fans, to his four unmarried and motherless daughters at home. He instructed them to choose their own husbands without his personal approval, transferring his authority to three men, one of whom was Edward Harrison (1674–1732), the outgoing governor of Madras, who conveyed Collet’s portrait to England. In this chapter, I take the opportunity afforded by Collet’s family letters to examine in detail this earliest-known Chinese clay portrait model of a European man. What was this “sort of Picture or Image of my Self ”? What did it become, and what could it have become? As Joseph Collet moved himself from one place to another, from one social station to another, what changes did this specific material object take on, anticipate, and enfold? Made out of a Chinese tradition of portraiture, of a particular representation of personhood, what did sending it across the oceans to England auger, offer, and portend?

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“My Dear, Keep Your Self Disengag’d”9 The loss of Collet’s only son followed two events that had spurred him to remake his fortunes in the East Indies: the death of his wife Mary, and the bankruptcy of the dyeworks business he had inherited from his father.10 He and his son John had set out to Fort York in 1711, but on the outward voyage his ship was seized by a French squadron in Rio de Janeiro. Collet was forced to relinquish the ship and leave his son and another officer as hostages, while he proceeded onward to secure funds for their ransom. At one point during this incident, he wrote to his close friend and brother-in-law John Bedwell (the husband of the stepsister of his deceased wife): I have lost all my best cloaths, wiggs and linnen and bedding. I have but one pair of shoes and one of them has a hole almost thro’. I have lain whole nights in an open boat, and that once when it rained without intermission. I have been without a bed in my Cloaths a fortnight together and not seen a bitt of bread in a week. I have been wet thro’ for 2 days together, and yet I thank God myself and son enjoy as perfect health as ever.11

It was only the death of his son, five years later, that left him without words. As a merchant, administrator, military commander, and erstwhile parson, Collet was considered a British success in the East Indies—“engaging” the “Natives,” “Sultans,” and the Company’s own “rebels” in various skirmishes, building Fort Marlborough (replacing Fort York) at Bencoolen, surviving diseases that devastated his personnel multiple times, and finally, crossing the Bay of Bengal and ascending to the position of Governor and Presidency of the Council of Madras. The position was rumored to be worth £10,000 per annum, and Collet soon found himself regularly investing £12,000 “in a morning at an outcry.”12 Throughout these enterprises, Collet worried constantly about his four daughters at home in England.13 The eldest of the four was only twelve years old when Collet had set out.14 He had entrusted them to his brother- and sister-inlaw John and Anne Bedwell, and wrote constantly to them and a circle of family and friends about their welfare. These letters provide penetrating insight into his extensive social network and his unceasing family concerns over the nine years of his absence from 1711 to early 1720. As W. H. Whitely wrote in 1934, in these letters Collet left a detailed record of inner thoughts which coordinate closely with his public actions as one of the early merchant-administrators of the British EIC in the nascent period of Britain’s imperial ambition.15 The private letters speak to what Emma Rothschild has described as the “intimate relations” of

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empire.16 In the case of the clay portrait, they detail how material things marked and maintained the futurity of those relationships, enabling Collet to look past his own death. By the time Collet ascended to the rank of governor of Madras, he had already discharged all of the debts from his bankruptcy and the ransom of his son, and he himself deemed that his daughters’ needs and education were sufficiently provided for. But now he was able to fund a dramatic elevation in his daughters’ social status: “a Gay Scene is now opening,”17 he wrote to them, as he increased their upkeep substantially and provided funds for a dedicated coach. He also provided permanent funds for his brothers, sisters, and nieces, and adopted his brother’s sons. Following exactly in the footsteps of his mentor Edward Harrison, he began a search for a “qualifying estate” in Herefordshire, eyeing a position in Parliament upon his return.18 The death of his son struck him very deeply, and he confided in his brother-in-law that the tragedy “destroy’d the little ambition I had of raising a Family.”19 While the word “Family” evidently did not include his daughters, Collet nevertheless occupied himself assiduously with their futures.20 Collet’s worries so occupied him that several of his subordinates, upon their deaths, provided legacies to his daughters without ever having met them, while others endeavored to make their matches via distant correspondence. It was as if everyone in Collet’s intimate circle was involved in the care and concern for his daughters. At that freighted moment of his arrival in Madras, with those mixed sentiments of grief and grandeur, Collet went to the shop of a Chinese portrait modeler we know as “Amoy Chin Qua.” Chin Qua produced the miniature portrait of him, standing and dressed in the fashionable habits of a European man soon to possess “superfluous wealth.” If our knowledge based on other descriptions of other Chinese modelers’ methods is correct, Chin Qua likely kneaded the head of the portrait out of unfired clay, fitting it into a pre-made body built around a bamboo armature. He painted the body, and finished it with two miniature insignia: a sword and a stick. He then housed the portrait in a rosewood case with a glass front. Dressed in a long dramatic wig, with an interwoven waistcoat and highly decorated overcoat so emblematic of the lucrative textile trade, the costume is finished with an overcoat, high silk stockings, and buckled boots in the European fashion of the 1710s and 1720s. One might even say that that particular outfit was fashion forward. Someone inscribed on the marbled base of the figure: “AMOY CHIN QUA FECIT 1716.” The figure is large, measuring around 33 inches, or 84 centimeters, in height. Housed in its even larger cabinet, it would have been difficult for one man to

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carry. Its relatively large size, however, likely made it suitable for display in a domestic setting—if a fairly spacious one. The face is lifelike: the features and expression appear to the contemporary eye with the individuality of a “real person,” and it is tantalizing to believe that it captures Collet faithfully, perhaps even gazing lovingly and longingly homeward (see Figure 1.2). In his letter to his daughter, Joseph Collet himself judged the features to be “just,” the costume and body posture of the portrait to be “exact,” but the “complexion” off. It is notable that Collet finds it necessary to remark on the accuracy of the pose, dress, and accoutrements of what we would see today as a “typical” eighteenthcentury fashion. His concern is suggestive of how meaningfully comportment and fashion signified his newly acquired identity. The “name” of the portrait’s maker, “Amoy Chin Qua,” can be variously interpreted. Amoy is a European name for Xiamen 廈門 (pronounced Ee-mui in Hokkien dialect), a port city in Fujian province on the Southwest coast of China where the Dutch had long traded. In the South China Coast trade pidgin that circulated around the port of Canton, “Qua” was a perfunctory honorific used for almost anyone with whom one did business, not unlike “Esq.” in eighteenth-century England. So the inscription could be interpreted as “Mr. Chin from Amoy,” or it could mean “the China man from Amoy.” Besides the possibility that Chin Qua’s Chinese surname was “Chen 陳” and that he hailed from Xiamen, no other biographical information is known about the maker of this—and most other—clay portraits. Not knowing whether he was literate, and if he was, in which languages, we cannot assume that he wrote the Latinate or pidgin inscription found on the sculpture’s base itself. It is reasonable to assume, though, that this craftsman or his forebears hailed from Fujian, China, and that he had at least worked long enough in the maritime trade to acquire the pidgin name “Chin Qua.” Perhaps not incidentally, the craft of clay portraiture remains active today among the Fujian diaspora communities of Southeast Asia.21 The standing portrait of Collet contrasts diametrically with a clay model of the outgoing governor Edward Harrison, a portrait known today only through a photograph.22 It shows Harrison lounging on a daybed with his wig off and wrapped in a silk orientalist robe the British called a banyan. He is reposed with one arm on a white overstuffed pillow, while another arm appears to be outstretched as if holding an object or gesturing (Figure 1.4). As Susan Broomhall has argued, this lounging portrait of Harrison, along with two others likely also made in Madras, was an adaptation of courtly depictions on the Coromandel Coast.23 As such, it represents a particular amalgamation of Chinese craft, European masculinity, and Coromandel Coast courtly gestures.24 Harrison had engineered

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Figure 1.4 Probably Chin Qua (active in Chennai), Portrait of Edward Harrison, painted unfired clay with missing cap, c. 1711–17. Current location unknown, formerly in the collection of Mrs. Sybil Weaver.

Collet’s rise to the Madras Presidency, advising him on negotiations with the EIC directors and then retiring early upon Collet’s arrival.25 Was it also Harrison who brought Collet to the portrait modeler Chin Qua?26 Given the timing and the surrounding circumstances, I propose that together they may have ultimately asked the artisan to produce two portraits: one, a formal, standing portrait of the incoming governor, dressed in the fashionable habits of an Englishman man soon to possess “superfluous wealth”; the second, a lounging portrait of a retiring governor, one who could now look forward to a life of orientalist leisure as a “Nabob” back home.27 Collet sent the portrait of himself to his daughters in the care of Governor Harrison, along with a letter to his eldest daughter Elizabeth. He wrote, I have told the Governor my sentiments very freely with respect to the marriage of your self and sisters. I neither expect nor desire you should live single till my return, and it is too far to write hither for my Consent; I have therefore transferred my authority to Sr Gregory Page, Governor Harrison and your Uncle Bedwell, and if any of you marry with their consent I will give you fortunes in proportion to my Estate which they will be able to guess at.28

Over and over, Collet made clear to his proxies as well as to his mother and sisterin-law, that he did not want his daughters to marry up into families of “quality” (a word he used disdainfully here), but rather to seek husbands from “the Rank of life

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in which they have been bred, and probably find more Happyness in that than in a higher Station.”29 His expectation tells us just what his new wealth signified to him: that his daughters would not need to marry for money but for their happiness.30 To the men in his family, Collet sent funds. To the women, he sent objects. Along with the portrait, Collet dispatched to his daughters many useful objects of material wealth: essence bottles trimmed with gold, four pieces of the finest muslin, twelve fans, a wrought silk morning Gown, a wrought muslin neckcloth and apron, and four diamond rings, “one for your self and each of your sisters.” As was typical of his concern for the most minute matters of value and family relations, he apologized that he “could not procure them of equall value and therefore you must choose according to seniority.”31 From the time of his arrival in Sumatra, Collet constantly sent things (especially textiles) to his female family members, with very careful consideration as to whom anything was for, how it should be presented, and sometimes what they might discuss on the occasion of the presentation of the gifts. He detailed the exact lengths of muslin to be given to each of his daughters or sisters, and how each piece might be equitably divided. Despite the evident affection and tenderness with which he treated his own family, Joseph Collet’s letters record that he was an intentional owner of at least two enslaved individuals—a Black girl named “Flora” and a Black boy named “Bacchus.”32 Collet often referred to all the non-white peoples he lived among as “Blacks” in both Sumatra and Chennai. Madras itself was divided between the “White Town” (in which he held authority) and the “Black Town,” which he described with racist and misogynist disdain. In the case of Flora, Collet told Elizabeth that he had “bought” her, and that he could have sold her for a “large profit.”33 Collet felt considerable compunction about the potential “scandal” of employing a woman in his household as a widower, and repeatedly writes that he would “never allow her into his house.”34 He reported to Elizabeth that he had elected to send Flora to her, and even sternly instructed Elizabeth to adopt the mindset of an enslaver herself: “You must consider her as your Slave, and consequently that you may employ or dispose of her as you please.” Collet was only slightly more humane to the boy he called Bacchus, whom he stated was “presented” to him by a Mr. White (no irony), whom, indeed, Collet contemplated as a suitable match for Elizabeth.35 He insisted that Bacchus must be taught to read, and that the family ought not to part with him. Collet’s purposeful circulation of enslaved people so early on in his Company career reminds us that, as a merchant-administrator, Collet was not only a circulator of things but also of people. Indeed, his letters themselves are a

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testament to the blurring of objects, capital, and people (free or enslaved) as they moved across great distances. In the openings and postscripts of his letters, their readers are consciously reminded that each one of Collet’s letters had to be carried by someone—sometimes trusted, sometimes unknown, and that each exchange of letters was also an introduction, a transaction, and a relation put into motion or settled by Collet. The material objects he sent to his daughters most significantly had to be brought home by a trusted network of men and women such as Edward Harrison, whose presentation of those gifts was the occasion for more sensitive communication that had long been prepared. This time, bringing the muslins and essence bottles (but not the diamond rings) was “a Widow Gentlewoman of this place, Mrs Benyon.” I surmise this was Grace Benyon, a new mother and the widow of Bernard Benyon, a member of the Madras Council who had died in 1715.36 Mrs. Benyon was to call on his daughters with muslins and gowns, and Collet advised his daughters that she could be a good friend to them. In this respect it was clear that the things he was sending via Mrs. Benyon were an excuse or an occasion to introduce her to his motherless daughters. Yet Mrs. Benyon was also possibly engaged in contraband import in Indian Chintz for Collet as well, a matter to which he alludes to several times in his letters. On another occasion he had sent such textiles to his daughters even as he warned them not to be caught holding them.37 The clay portrait was thus one only one of many tokens of gendered trust utilized in the increasingly large social network that Joseph Collet managed and administered through the exchange of letters, and whatever could not be written in them. Although this activity was “uncommercial,” it was closely tied to the relative values of the persons that made up Collet’s life purposes, as those themselves were changing with his rising power and wealth. His plans and desires for his daughters’ marriages, too, were an effort to manage and coordinate the relative values of the persons he considered under his “administration.” The particular place that his daughters had in Collet’s envisioning of his property, his legacy and his “family,” is what makes the clay figure a singular object. It likely did not cost as much as the diamonds and rings, and it may not have been as difficult to transport as many other commodities of the trade, but its symbolic value is especially complex. Collet sent friends, mentors, servants, and even enslaved people to care for his daughters. Among all these people, it was the inanimate clay portrait that was the closest thing to himself Collet could send. In his letter to Elizabeth, the normally eloquent Collet was not sure what to call the clay portrait. First he writes that he is sending it “in Requitall for your Pictures,”—that is, painted miniatures that Collet had asked each of his daughters

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to sit for the year before. One set was intended for him, but Collet politely requested an extra painted miniature of Elizabeth to serve a match-making purpose.38 Amoy Chin Qua’s clay portrait, in its three-dimensional, full-length form, was neither a miniature nor a painting, and it became “a sort of Picture or Image.” Here the word “Image” is fulsomely used in all the senses provided in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: “1. any corporeal representation, generally used of statues; 2. An idol; a false god; 3. A copy; representation; likeness.”39 The clay portrait was indeed a corporeal likeness, almost as large as a “statue,” but somehow it was also a little bit too close to “an idol, a false god.” Collet, a devout and publicly declared Baptist (who expounded on Christological matters at great length in his private correspondence, and even served informally as a parson during his time at Fort York), is anxiously deflecting the meaning of the term “Graven Image” in the King James Bible. The specter of “idolatry,” as Protestants like Collet ventured out of Europe, seems to have reanimated a religious discomfort with threedimensional likenesses for veneration or commemoration. And yet, he had the “Image” made. When Collet left home Elizabeth was twelve years old, and now receiving the clay portrait, she was seventeen. That distance, distended by his daughters’ childhoods, is perhaps why Collet felt the need to judge for them how well the portrait even resembles him: “The lineaments and the Features are Esteemed very just but the complexion is not quite so well hit, the proportion of my body and my habit is very exact.”40 But beyond assuring them this is what he looked like, the clay portrait was also an assurance of his current well-being. As Collet went on to affirm, “I enjoy as good health and as firm a constitution as in any part of my life, the only alteration is that I am grown fatter and it seems likely to increase so that tho my stay here should be somewhat longer than I expected yet I have a fair chance of seeing you again.” Its corporeal solidity and proportions thus also partially served to assure his daughters of their father’s health and the possibility of his return—for the unspoken contract was the very real possibility of his death before his return. It is perhaps to acknowledge and to defuse the dread of his mortality that Collet sums up, seemingly jokingly, “I commit it to your custody till you see the original.”41 Would his daughters ever see the “original” again? This was the greatest unknown in all of Collet’s careful arrangements. This lighthearted conclusion was thus also a poignant and fatherly promise (or indeed wish) to return at all. Collet did not mention it to Elizabeth, but he had also given Harrison a copy of his will.42 The portrait figure as a “copy,” made by an artisan from the Southeast coast of China working on Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal, and carried halfway across the globe for an “original” that was planning for his own potential death

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afar, thus served multiple purposes. First, it was brought back by a man— Edward Harrison—whom his daughters did not know and yet whom their father had “joyned with your uncle Bedwells in authority over and care of you.”43 So the correspondence in facial likeness (“lineaments”) between the model and Collet himself was very important: its facial similarity with the “original” would signal, like a password, the trust his daughters could place in Harrison as a proxy for himself. Collet had even written to his mother the day before, “I would have my daughters respect him as a Father.”44 Second, as the dramatic improvement of family finances for the purpose of their marriages was one of the key reasons for his remaining abroad, Collet also assured his daughters that Harrison would be able to “guess at” his future wealth so that they might make an appropriate marriage choice. In that sense, it was important that the portrait presented Collet in so formal and well-appointed of “habit” in his lucrative new post as governor: it was the most visible indicator of his (and thereby his daughters’) new wealth and social standing. Finally, since the portrait was sent after the death of their brother, and accompanied by the news that their father was staying away indefinitely (if not forever), the portrait was also intended to assure them of the possibility that he would return, while settling their futures in case he did not.45 The clay portrait was hence a proxy for Joseph Colley’s earthly life in its finality, or what he liked to sum up in his letters as: “Soul, Body and Estate.”46 In sum, this clay portrait reveals the capacity of a crafted object to speak poignantly to the intimate relations of one merchant-administrator of the British EIC, as he managed the future of his family across 12,000 miles, eight years of absence, and the death of an only son and a mother. The uncanny threedimensionality of this portrait, its striking likeness of facial appearance, its detailing of costume and bodily comportment, and its portability in scale and displayability in size all contribute to its futurity and command as an Image— in its secular meaning of fatherly authority and in its “idolatrous” function of managing for one’s descendants after one’s own death. Things had indeed changed in the lives of Joseph Collet and his four daughters. And those changes necessitated renewed preparation for his death.

“Soul, Body and Estate” In both the Western and Chinese artistic traditions, three-dimensional portraits of everyday individuals are relatively rare. But they are rare for different reasons. In

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China, there is much evidence that they were widely used for millennia in ancestral worship: made after the death of individuals for their families and descendants (via iteration and conversation with those who knew the subject), three-dimensional portraits were placed on family or lineage altars as consecrated objects.47 Such portraits and the practice of venerating them have largely been suppressed in the historical record, which abhorred the verisimilitude these portraits presented on aesthetic and philosophical grounds. The literati, too, derided the artisanal skill that produced realistic portraits, preferring instead the abstract expressiveness of monochrome brushwork. And yet, it is likely that such portraits were in fact widespread, even common, though they have survived as objects only rarely. In the West, two-dimensional portraiture of socially aspiring individuals was widespread and long established as an art form, and certainly reached an artistic apogee in the early modern period, particularly in eighteenth-century Britain. This “grand” tradition prized a high degree of verisimilitude and developed even greater aesthetic expectations that accurate outer features coordinated with the sitter’s true inner personality or “character.” However, the three-dimensional miniaturization of an individual down to the use of actual materials such as human hair, fabric clothing, or wood furniture, presents a degree of literal exactitude that is rarer in the figural arts of Europe. European merchant men venturing into the maritime ports of the China trade, it would appear, had the opportunity to commission such highly detailed miniaturizations of themselves from Chinese artisans. But this phenomenon seems to have disappeared in the nineteenth century, when oil-on-canvas portraits, including those painted by Chinese painters, became standard instead. Was it Protestant iconoclastic anxieties that ultimately drew them back from the extreme degree of realism of three-dimensional portraits, in favor of the “less realistic” media of painting and, eventually, photography? Chinese ancestral commemoration was indeed one of the central issues dividing the Catholic Church’s missionaries in China, and the “Rites Controversy” raged throughout the period that these European merchants were purchasing Chinese clay portraits of themselves.48 For their part, the Chinese artisans producing such portraits for living men appear to have expanded their market in a way that speaks to the hyper-commercialization and global reach of the Qing Empire as well. When Chit Qua ventured all the way to London in 1769, this was a sign of a craftsman’s entrepreneurialism and his willingness to adapt his craft and market to the furthest peripheries of his tradition. The eighteenth-century clay portrait models, then, are a sign of things dramatically but mutually changing in both the European and Chinese traditions of

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portraiture, propagated by a relatively small, but crucial, circle of mobile men. “Realism” in this transcultural context was thus reached through two opposite trajectories: one, the vulgar product of artisanal skill, the other, the secular limits of artistic achievement. The use of three-dimensional painted, unfired clay portrait figures for the purpose of commemorative and ancestral worship in China has a long, if marginalized, history. In the Song dynasty courts (960–1279), Neo-Confucian scholars who were responsible for institutionalizing ritual practices deemed painted portraits of ancestors “vulgar” and ritually inefficacious. Even painted portraits were advised against; for example, according to the philosopher Cheng Yi, even if only one hair was inaccurately painted, then the ritual sacrifice would be misdirected.49 Three-dimensional portraits, with real materials used for clothing, hair, and caps, were even more vulgar. And yet, as Patricia Ebrey has detailed, a “cult of imperial portraits” was a prominent feature of statecraft in the Song dynasty courts, where three-dimensional portraits of ancestors were not only made and worshiped but also consecrated in an extensive network of buildings, in rituals, and through institutional care and maintenance.50 Portraits in clay, jade, and bronze of ancestral and deified figures were commemorated and consecrated in rituals. While none of the statues are known to have survived to the modern period, successive generations of philosophers including Sima Guang (1019–86), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200) admonished against three-dimensional ritual portraits. In describing them at all,51 the philosophers record a struggle between the Confucian-textual tradition (in which names inscribed on tablets are preferred), and the sculptural figures preferred by religious, imperial, and vernacular practice.52 The historical record is likely thus the opposite of historical reality: while the textual admonitions against the use of three-dimensional portraiture are well documented, few historical examples of such portraits survive. In the literati artistic traditions, portraiture too was largely devalued and derided as a professional craft, and when discussed at all, often aligned with physiognomic fortune telling. While portraitists are not unheard of among the literati, they were rare specialists. And while portraiture does appear in literati painting, more often than not, it was a professional or specialist portraitist who painted the face, as part of an artist’s larger aesthetic or compositional scheme. The great artists of the Qing—whether “Orthodox” or “Individualist”—were not renowned as portraitists. For these reasons, it is another sign of dramatic change that the Palace Museum holds a clay portrait of the Qing Emperor Yongzheng.53 Dressed in

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princely, but informal, imperial robes of the Qing Manchu court, the unfired clay figure is molded with extraordinary facial naturalism, and adorned with exquisite material accuracy. The figure sits in a wooden round horseshoe armchair, clothed in embroidered blue cloud-patterned silk robes over an almond yellow under-gown, holding an ornamental boxwood scepter, and sporting court shoes and a winter hat with a red velvet knot surrounded with wine red silk fringes. The blue silk ties that hold the winter hat on are tightly tied under the chin. On the hands, each bone and knuckle are visibly rendered beneath taut muscle, while the smoothly modeled and painted clay face sports a glowing and a quiet inner smile. It is one of the earliest surviving examples of any clay portrait figure, the only known sculptural portrait of a Qing emperor, and possibly the only sculpture of any Chinese emperor acknowledged by himself.54 Because the figure appears youthful (in the face), and is dressed wearing the blue robes of the Prince of First Rank, it seems likely that the portrait was made in 1709 when Yongzheng, then aged thirty-two and named Prince Yinzhen, rose to that rank. After his death in 1735, the clay figure appears to have been converted into an ancestral portrait under the reign of his son, the Qianlong emperor.55 There is evidence dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it was used on the ritual altars of the Qing imperial family.56 If what this evidence suggests is accurate, then what we have here is a case in which a portrait, made in life, was later converted into a commemorative portrait. The portrait of Prince Yinzhen was made by a Suzhou artisan, who was called to the court in Beijing to produce the object. (No others seem to have survived.) He, like Amoy Chin Qua, appears to have traveled some distance to serve a new clientele, perhaps also adapting his practice to work on a subject from life. The ultimate fate of the portrait of Prince Yinzhen, then, presages what Joseph Collet’s clay portrait might also have become. Had Joseph Collet not returned to his daughters alive from Madras, his daughters would have had not a life portrait of their father, but for all intents and purposes, his “death portrait.” Amoy Chin Qua’s clay portrait would have been the last “Image” they would have of him, and one that had the potential to serve a commemorative purpose. Considered within this framework, Collet’s clay portrait figure would indeed have been a “Sort of Picture or Image”: it is a life portrait that held the potential or anticipation for its use after death. Given his origins in Fujian culture, in whose diaspora the practice of ancestral clay portraits continues to this day, it is reasonable to presume that Amoy Chin Qua may have been an artisan who produced ancestral portraits for a Chinese

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diasporic community in Madras. Did Englishmen like Harrison and Collet come upon such “portraitists” aware or unaware of the “idolatrous” function of their objects, while recognizing its application to European social functions of portraiture? I take Collet’s hesitation—“Sort of a Picture or Image of my Self ”— to be precisely a clue that he was aware. As they made their way around new worlds, eighteenth-century Europeans rarely recorded the realities of non-Europeans’ lives. Just as Collet feels free to rename “Flora” and “Bacchus” (these jaunty Latinate names are themselves a violent mechanism of enslavers), we should not presume that “Amoy Chin Qua” is the “real” name of the maker of his portrait. It may have been an adopted or appropriated trade name, or a name invented for the circumstances of his work for a European clientele. At any rate, Collet never felt the need to acknowledge Chin Qua’s existence, let alone record any name, in his copious letters: his entire description of the portrait is written in the passive voice, as though there was no maker or agency behind its production. We can today attach a craftsman to the portrait only because someone inscribed on its base “Amoy Chin Qua.” Circumstances dictate that this “name” likely only means “the Chinaman from Amoy,” and we might more equitably translate this today as “The Chinese Master of Amoy.” Regardless, we are left wondering if Chin Qua had a workshop or studio, if he had apprentices or assistants, if he made clay figures from death or from life, or if he made objects beyond portraits. If he was primarily a maker of ancestral portraits for a Chinese clientele in Madras, would he have found it strange to have “European” “sitters” before him to model them “from life”? Would he have worked as a British portraitist, studying his European sitters’ “character” as revealed by the facial features, performatively demanding conversation to instill ease during a lengthy sitting? Or would he have worked more like a Chinese ancestral portrait painter, glancing only briefly at Collet, recognizing the physiognomic types that made up his feature set, and producing a “likeness” that just happened to coincide with Collet’s needs?57 If the portraits of Europeans such as Joseph Collet were produced by Chinese craftsmen who otherwise produced ancestral portraits, then a striking transformation has occurred in the history of this craft and ritual practice: a plastic likeness intended for descendants of the deceased has been translated into a likeness made in the presence of the living himself. That momentary likeness, however, came to be suitable for use after death. The portrait of Prince Yinzhen, produced seven years before Collet’s, was such a thing that became another. In other words, perhaps Amoy Chinqua was able to adapt Chinese

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“death portraiture” to the conventions of European “life portraiture,” precisely because Collet was, in his own way, seeking a death portrait. Luckily for Collet, the almost ancestral uses of his portrait did not ultimately come to pass. He returned to England three years later, wealthy enough to purchase an estate in Hertfordshire, and to finally give each of his daughters a wedding gift of 5,000 pounds.58 The eldest, Elizabeth, married a Mr. Littell while he was away, and with consent of his proxies.59 The other three waited until his return.

Postscript Despite the close and moving detail with which we may examine the clay portrait model of Collet, it is not unique. A significantly smaller figure of an unidentified European man was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014 without clues to its provenance (Figure 1.5).60 At only 13.7 cm (roughly a

Figure 1.5  Chin Qua (active in Chennai), Unidentified English Merchant. Polychrome unfired clay and wood. Dated 1719. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest and several members of The Chairman’s Council Gifts, 2014. Acc No. 2015.569.

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third smaller than the portrait of Collet), the figure stands in a slightly different pose, with a slightly different brocaded vest and a less embellished overcoat. Otherwise, the two figures are strikingly similar. “AMOY CHIN QUA/FECIT 1719” is also inscribed on its marbled base in gold paint. Because of the date, inscription, and similarity in form to the portrait of Joseph Collet, I propose that it likely depicts one of the handful of men of the Madras Council serving in and around 1719. The Council of Madras was made up of men from a very close-knit group of families.61 Recent research on their estates in Berkshire and Herefordshire demonstrates that they shared similar tastes and lifestyles, and that they procured and sent home similar things. If my conjectures up to this point have been correct (that Amoy Chin Qua made the portrait models of Joseph Collet and Edward Harrison, each respectively as suitable representations of an incoming and outgoing governor), then perhaps this unidentified portrait—so similar in pose and style to Collet’s—represents Francis Hastings, who succeeded Collet as governor of Madras in 1720. Perhaps Hastings too went to Chin Qua in preparing for his ascension to governor and asked for quite a similar portrait. But Hastings was brought down from the post after only a year and a half, in a scandal involving investigations, an empty cash-chest, threatened arrests, and a late deposit of diamonds. He died almost immediately afterward in Madras and was buried in the Christian church built there.62 Somehow, eventually, it would seem Chin Qua’s clay portrait of Hastings was sent back to England, just as Collet’s portrait was.63 For now, one wonders how this object entered into the private market some 300 years later. We might well regard it as a lost ancestral portrait, “exported” to a culture that has lost its name and reveres it, not on a family altar, but in one of its secular temples of world art. Hastings’s untimely death, in this case, would appear to have irrevocably changed the meaning of this thing—his “life” portrait.

Bibliography Broomhall, Susan. “Face-Making: Emotional and Gendered Meanings in Chinese Clay Portraits of Danish Asiatic Company Men.” Scandinavian Journal of History 41, no. 3 (2016): 447–74. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/03468755​.2016​.1179829. Collet, Clara E. The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, Sometime Governor of Fort St. George, Madras (1717–1720). Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1924. Collet, Joseph. The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet. Edited by Henry Dodwell. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1933.

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Corsi, Elisabetta. “‘Idolatrous Images’ and ‘True Images’: European Visual Culture and Its Circulation in Early Modern China.” In Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization, edited by Rachel Sarah O’Toole, translated by Benjamin Cluff, 271–302. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020. Crill, Rosemary. Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West. London: V&A Publishing, 2008. Dresser, Madge, and Andrew Hann, eds. Slavery and the British Country House. Swindon: English Heritage, 2013. https://historicengland​.org​.uk​/images​-books​/publications​/ slavery​-and​-british​-country​-house​/slavery​-british​-country​-house​-web/. Ebrey, Patricia. “Portrait Sculptures in Imperial Ancestral Rites in Song China.” T’oung Pao 83, no. 1/3 (1997): 42–92. Finn, Margot, and Kate Smith. “Englefield House, Berkshire.” In The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, unpaginated. https://ucldigitalpress​.co​.uk​/v2​ -interactive​/Book​/Article​/44​/69​/3402/ (accessed September 13, 2021). Fong, Wen C. “Imperial Portraiture in the Song, Yuan, and Ming Periods.” Ars Orientalis 25 (1995): 47–60. Foulk, T. Griffith, and Robert H. Sharf. “On the Ritual Use of Ch’an Portraiture in Medieval China.” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 7, no. 1 (1993): 149–219. https://doi​.org​/10​ .3406​/asie​.1993​.1064. Gu, Yi. “What’s in a Name? Photography and the Reinvention of Visual Truth in China, 1840–1911.” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (March 2013): 120–38. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /00043079​.2013​.10786109. Hsi, Chu. Chu Hsi’s Family Rituals: A Twelfth-Century Chinese Manual for the Performance of Cappings, Weddings, Funerals, and Ancestral Rites. Translated by Patricia Ebrey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Jacobs, Irene. “Our Johannes, Seeking the Identity of a 18th-Century Chinese Portrait Statue of Clay.” Aziatsiche Kunst 44, no. 2 (2014): 2–14. Jeppesen, Chris. “Growing up in a Company Town: The East India Company Presence in South Hertfordshire.” In The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, edited by Kate Smith and Margot Finn, 251–71. London: UCL Press, 2018. https://doi​.org​/10​ .14324​/111​.9781787350274. Penny, Fanny Emily. Fort St. George, Madras: A Short History of Our First Possession in India. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900. Piper, David. The English Face. Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club Ltd, 1st ed. 1978. 2nd ed. 1992. Rothschild, Emma. The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Sargent, William R. “The Features Are Esteem’d Very Just.” In Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550–1800: Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700, edited by Tamara H. Bentley, 195–219. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Scheier-Dolberg, Joseph. “A Portrait of Ambition: Yu Zhiding’s Thatched Cottage at the Western Stream.” Arts Asiatiques 72 (2017): 59–80.

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Shih, Yichieh. “Chitqua: A Chinese Modeller and His Portraiture Business in Eighteenth-Century London.” Fine Arts Journal (Kaohsiung: National Kaohsiung Normal University), no. 1 (December 2015): 71–106. Shih, Yichieh. “Modelling Handsome Faces: Chit Qua: A Chinese Artist and Chinese Art in Eighteenth-Century London.” PhD diss., University of Geneva, 2021. https:// archive​-ouverte​.unige​.ch​/unige​:158664 Smith, Kate. “Production, Purchase, Dispossession, Recirculation.” In The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, 68–87. London: UCL Press, 2018. Stevens, Keith G. “Portrait and Ancestral Images on Chinese Altars.” Arts of Asia (February 1989): 135–45. Stuart, Jan, and Evelyn Sakakida Rawski. Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits. Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 2001. Vinograd, Richard Ellis. Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Wang, Xueying. “The Concept of the Soul during the Chinese Rites Controversy: The Example of Xia Dachang.” Journal of Chinese Religions 49, no. 2 (November 2021): 169–90. Whitely, W. H. “A Baptist Governor of Madras in 1715.” The Baptist Quarterly 7, no. 3 (July 1934): 123–37. Whitley, William T. Artists and Their Friends in England, 1700–1799. 1st ed. Vol. 1. Medici Society, 1928. Williams, Clive. The Nabobs of Berkshire. Purley on Thames: Goosecroft Publications, 2010. Wu, Hung. “Enlivening the Soul in Chinese Tombs.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 55/56 (Spring–Autumn, 2009): 21–41. Yang, Binbin. “Drawings of a Life of ‘Unparalleled Glory.’” In Changing Chinese Masculinities, edited by Louie Kam, 113–34. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016. https://doi​.org​/10​.5790​/hongkong​/9789888208562​.003​.0007. Zhu, Lin. “Gugong shoucang yu dangan suojian Yongzheng huangdi (zhi yi).” Ziji Cheng 6 (2012): 40–51.

Notes 1 British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Joseph Collet’s three letter books are held at the British Library. They were edited and reproduced in Henry Dodwell, ed., The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1933). In this chapter, where I am citing from the original manuscript, I have provided the BL catalogue number. Where I have quoted from Dodwell’s (edited and abbreviated) transcription, I have cited the letter date and Dodwell. 2 “The Sudden change of my circumstances from the lowest depth of adversity to such an eminent height of prosperity, has made no change in my sentiment

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3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10

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concerning the value of this world or of that which is to come.” Joseph Collet to John Bedwell, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Clara E. Collet, The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, Sometime Governor of Fort St. George, Madras (1717–1720) (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1924). Chin Qua is inscribed in uppercase on Collet’s portrait, with irregular spacing. I utilize “Chin Qua” rather than “Chinqua,” to emphasize the function of “Qua” as a title, separate from a “name.” There is substantial scholarship on Chit Qua. For more recent syntheses, see Yichieh Shih, “Chitqua: A Chinese Modeller and His Portraiture Business in Eighteenth-Century London,” Fine Arts Journal (Kaohsiung: National Kaohsiung Normal University), no. 1 (December 2015): 71–106. Peter J. Kitson, “‘The Kindness of My Friends in England’: Chinese Visitors to Britain in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries and Discourses of Friendship and Estrangement,” European Romantic Review 27, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 55–70. David Clarke, “Chitqua: A Chinese Artist in Eighteenth-Century London,” in Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 15–84. Thomas Bentley to Josiah Wedgwood, 1769. Letter cited in William Whitley, Artists and their Friends in England 1700–1799, vol. 1 (London and Boston: The Medici Society, 1928), 269–70. William Sargent counted forty-two in his paper, “The Features are Esteemed very just,” paper presented for Global Interchange, October 8, 2021. Thirty-eight are inventoried by Irene Jacobs, “Johannes, Seeking the Identity of a 18th-Century Chinese Portrait Statue of Clay,” Aziatsiche Kunst 44, no. 2 (2014): 2–14. Yichieh Shih counted forty-five portraits in her unpublished dissertation, “Modelling Handsome Faces: Chit Qua: A Chinese Artist and Chinese Art in EighteenthCentury London,” PhD diss., University of Geneva, 2021. Maxwell K. Hearn, “Qing Imperial Portraiture,” in Portraiture (International Symposium on Art Historical Studies 6) (Kyoto: The Society of the International Exchange of Art Historical Studies, 1990), 109–32. Richard Vinograd, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, “A Portrait of Ambition: Yu Zhiding’s Thatched Cottage at the Western Stream,” Arts Asiatiques 72 (2017): 59–80. Also see: Binbin Yang, “Drawings of a Life of ‘Unparalleled Glory,’” in Changing Chinese Masculinities, ed. Louie Kam (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016) 113–34. Collet to Elizabeth Collet, May 5, 1714. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. W. T. Whitely, “A Baptist Governor of Madras in 1716,” The Baptist Quarterly 7, no. 3 (July 1934): 127.

36 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26

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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century Collet to John Bedwell, October 15, 1711. In Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 5. Collet to John Bedwell, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Anne was the half-sister of Collet’s deceased wife, Mary Ross. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 210–1. Whitely, “A Baptist Governor,” 131. Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Collet to Elizabeth, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Collet to John Bedwell, December 13, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Also Collet to the Rev’d Mr. Moses Lowman, August 28, 1718. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 193. Joseph Collet to John Bedwell, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Collet to John Bedwell, December 13, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3: “his death destroy’d the little ambition I had of raising a Family and disposed me to think of returning to England with my present Fortune.” Keith G. Stevens, “Portrait and Ancestral Images on Chinese Altars,” Arts of Asia (February 1989): 135–45. The portrait is known only through a photograph when it was brought to the National Portrait Gallery for examination by a descendant of the family. The photograph was reproduced in David Piper, The English Face (Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club Ltd, 1992). A fourth lounging clay portrait, depicting Captain John Blake (father of the Canton-based British naturalist John Bradby Blake), was identified by the author and Jordan Goodman after Broomhall’s publication, but fits perfectly with her hypothesis. Susan Broomhall, “Face-Making: Emotional and Gendered Meanings in Chinese Clay Portraits of Danish Asiatic Company Men,” Scandinavian Journal of History 41, no. 3 (2016): 447–74. Ibid. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, xviii. There are three other clay portraits of lounging European male figures (two of identified sitters) known to me; each is reposed on a wooden daybed. At least two of these sitters called officially at Madras but not at Canton. Harrison could conceivably have commissioned his portrait during his two voyages to Canton in 1704–5 and 1706–1710. My conjectures are based on the presumption that the lounging figures were made or first made in Madras, presumably by Chin Qua. Edward Harrison possibly began his EIC career as early in the 1690s. He captained at least two voyages to China 1704–175 and 1706–1710. He was appointed governor of Fort St. George, Madras 1710, resigning in 1716. He returned to England and established a career in Parliament from 1717 to 1728 and later re-established himself in the Company 1728–31, serving as deputy director and director. Harrison’s family seat was in Balls Park in Hertfordshire in 1726, where Collet

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28 29 30

31 32

33

34 35

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also settled upon their return. Kate Smith, “Production, Purchase, Dispossession, Recirculation,” in The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, ed. Kate Smith and Margot Finn (London: UCL Press, 2018), 74–5. Collet to Elizabeth, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Collet to his sister Mrs. Ann Bedwell, February 6, 1718/9. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 201. “I mean marry in their own rank of Life, and then the Addition of a Fortune will be a reall advantage to them.” Collet to his sister Mrs. Ann Bedwell, December 23, 1717. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 168. Collet to Elizabeth, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. As early as September 1712, just months after his arrival at Fort York at Bencoolen, Collet to Dic Ipse, September 23, 1712, in Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 25–6), “I have two servants and two slaves.” Dic Ipse was a small study club for theological debate founded by the Baptist pastor Nathaniel Hodges. Whitely, “A Baptist Governor,” 126. For deeper context on eighteenth-century British merchant families (such as Collet’s) and the Atlantic slave trade, see Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann, eds., Slavery and the British Country House (Swindon: English Heritage, 2013). Here I note that Collet’s case contrasts somewhat with the finding that slave ownership increased with wealth among British merchants, for it is surprising that Collet already “owned” two enslaved individuals so soon after his arrival in Bencoolen—before his administrative career or private wealth had progressed very far at all. It is also remarkable that he sent both enslaved individuals to England in 1712 and 1713, long before the prospect of the governorship and a country estate in Herefordshire was in his mind. “This comes by the Success, Capt. Page Keble, Commander, and will be brought you by Mr. Peter Caulier . . . by whom I have sent you a black Girl named Flora. I bought her in this place and send her a present to your Self. She talks English and can work a little. I have her hitherto in a marryed family in this place, which is now removing, and to avoid Scandal will not keep her in my house, and tho’ I could sell her to large profit, rather choose to send her to you, to whom she may be serviceable. But you must always carry the Authority of a Mistress, and let her know ’tis her Duty to Obey. You must consider her as your Slave, and consequently that you may employ or dispose of her as you please.” Collet to Elizabeth, November 6, 1713. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 38. Collet to Dic Ipse, September 23, 1712. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 25–7. Collet to Elizabeth, November 6, 1713. “I have wrote to you at large in your Unkle Bedwell’s packet by Capt. Pinnell; since which, Capt. Pinnell has offer’d me to bring you a black boy that I have. His name is Bacchus; he speaks a little English and I believe will never grow much bigger. He was formerly presented to me by Mr. White; I now present him to you. Let him be taught to read, and make him know you will be obey’d. He is a good temper’d Lad

38

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37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century and I would not have you part with him unless you should make a present of him to your Aunt Bedwell, which I leave to your own discretion.” Collet to Elizabeth Collet, May 16, 1714, Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 91. Collet later did write to a Mrs. Grace Benyon, August 28, 1718, remarking upon her arrival in England. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 180. Bernard Benyon was closely connected with the first governor of Madras, Thomas Pitt (1653–1726), and also a relative of Richard Benyon, who later became governor of Madras in 1735. Margot Finn and Kate Smith, “Englefield House, Berkshire,” in The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, unpaginated. Collet to his daughters, February 6, 1718/9. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 200. Imports of Indian Chintz were banned in England from 1701 until 1774 in order to protect the domestic wool and silk industries. Rosemary Crill, Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West (London: V & A Publishing, 2008). Joseph Collet to Elizabeth, May 5, 1714. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 88–9. The twenty-five-year-old whom Joseph Collet was introducing, via letters, to Elizabeth seems to have been Henry White, Chief at Bantall. It would appear that this was the same Mr. White who first “presented” the enslaved boy “Bacchus” to Collet, whom Collet then “presents” to Elizabeth two days after his request for her miniature portrait for White. Joseph Collet to Elizabeth, May 16, 1714. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 91. White died in 1718 in Sumatra. Samuel Johnson, “Image,” in A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755. https://joh​ nson​sdic​tion​aryonline​.com​/1755​/image​_ns. Collet to Elizabeth, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Collet to Elizabeth, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Collet to John Bedwell, December 15, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Collet to Elizabeth, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Collet to his mother, Mrs. Mary Collet, December 13, 1716. Dodwell, The Private Letter Books, 139. John Collet was close to his sisters. In his will left everything to Elizabeth and Anne. Joseph Collet to Anne Collet, September 18, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Collet used this line at the end of his most revealing letter to John Bedwell. “I conclude this with my Hearty Prayers for your prosperity in Soul, Body and Estate.” Collet to John Bedwell, December 14, 1716. British Library, Eur Ms D1153/3. Jan Stuart and Evelyn Rawski, ed., Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits. (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 2001). Klaas Ruitenbeek, Faces of China: Portrait Painting of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368–1912) (Berlin: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2017). On an aspect of the Rites Controversy that pertains specifically to ancestral portraits, see Xueying Wang, “The Concept of the Soul During the Chinese Rites Controversy: The Example of Xia Dachang,” Journal of Chinese Religions 49, no. 2 (November 2021): 169–90.

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49 Jan Stuart, “The Face in Life and Death: Mimesis and Chinese Ancestor Portraits,” in Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, ed. Hung Wu, and Katherine Tsiang (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center 2005), 195–228. 50 Patricia Ebrey, “Portrait Sculptures in Imperial Ancestral Rites in Song China,” T’oung Pao 83, no. 1/3 (1997): 42–92. 51 Sima Guang, Sima shi shuyi, ed. Conshu jicheng (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 54, translated in Wu Hung, “Enlivening the Soul in Chinese Tombs,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 55/56 (Spring–Autumn 2009): 39. Hsi Chu, Chu Hsi’s Family Rituals: A Twelfth-Century Chinese Manual for the Performance of Cappings, Weddings, Funerals, and Ancestral Rites, trans. Patricia Ebrey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 52 T. Griffith Foulk, and Robert H. Sharf, “On the Ritual Use of Ch’an Portraiture in Medieval China,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 7, no. 1 (1993): 149–219. Wen C. Fong, “Imperial Portraiture in the Song, Yuan, and Ming Periods,” Ars Orientalis 25 (1995): 47–60. 53 A photograph of the figure is reproduced in Zhu Lin, “Gugong shoucang yu dangan suojian Yongzheng huangdi (zhi yi),” Ziji Cheng 6 (2012): 40–51. A small black and white reproduction is included in: Shih Yichieh, “Modelling Handsome Faces: Chit Qua: A Chinese Artist and Chinese Art in Eighteenth-Century London,” PhD diss., University of Geneva, 2021. https://archive​-ouverte​.unige​.ch​/ unige​:158664 54 Lin, “Gugong shoucang,” 43. 55 Evidence from this comes from Tongzhi era (1856–75) documents, and a caption on a 1920s photograph stating that the sculpture was stored behind a curtain on the altar. 56 Lin, “Gugong shoucang,” 42. 57 On such a possibility, though in a later period, see Yi Gu, “What’s in a Name? Photography and the Reinvention of Visual Truth in China, 1840–1911,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (March 2013): 120–38. 58 Joseph Collet built a “Hertford Castle” in Hertfordshire, where many EIC merchants and directors also purchased estates and lived throughout the eighteenth century. Chris Jeppesen, “Growing Up in a Company Town: The East India Company Presence in South Hertfordshire,” in The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, 256. 59 Joseph Collet to Elizabeth Littell, July 4, 1719. Dodwell, The Private Letters, 204. 60 William R. Sargent, “The Features Are Esteem’d Very Just,’” in Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550–1800: Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700, ed. Tamara Bentley (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 195–219. 61 Clive Williams, The Nabobs of Berkshire (Purley on Thames: Goosecroft Publications, 2010).

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62 Fanny Emily Penny, Fort St. George, Madras: A Short History of Our First Possession in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900), 143–4. Francis Hastings had been in the Company’s service for twenty years at that point, and appears to have been a scion of the Hastings family. 63 The 1978 edition of David Piper’s The English Face mentions a figure, smaller than Collet’s but similar, in the possession of a “Capt. J. Duveen.” Piper, The English Face [1978], 140–1.

2

Shooting for Freedom Examining the Material World of Self-Emancipated Persons Tiffany Momon

When enslaver Timothy Keeler died on August 30, 1748, his last will and testament did not mention Mingo, an enslaved man who self-emancipated fourteen years earlier in June 1734, suggesting that, possibly, Mingo was never captured. In June 1734, Timothy Keeler placed an advertisement in the Boston Gazette seeking Mingo’s return. Of Mingo, Keeler wrote, “ran-away from Timothy Keeler of Ridgefield in the county of Fairfield in Connecticut, about the last of June, a Negro man named Mingo, a likely well grown fellow, thick set, speaks good English, can read and write.” Keeler continued, “He had (as I am inform’d) a false Pass, a Pocket Compass, and several books.”1 This advertisement ran in the Boston Gazette for several weeks, finally ending its run on August 19, 1734. It is unclear whether Keeler ever found Mingo and whether Keeler ever recovered the missing objects. But what is clear is that Mingo found value in the objects he took with him. For Mingo, those objects became part of his material world as he navigated the thin line between enslavement and self-emancipation. Self-emancipating was among the most drastic actions an enslaved person could take to resist their enslavement. Sometimes the act of self-emancipating was planned, and sometimes, it was spontaneous, spurred on by events such as an upcoming slave sale or abuse. The reasons behind Mingo’s selfemancipation are unclear, but neither his story nor the objects he took with him are unique. Eighteenth-century runaway ads provide evidence that self-emancipated individuals often took objects with them. Occasionally, newspapers included printer’s cuts of self-emancipated individuals carrying a walking stick and a sack, implying that they did not leave empty-handed. Additionally, these advertisements sometimes had lists of objects that enslavers

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believed self-emancipated individuals took with them on their journey. Among them were often various articles of clothing, but these advertisements often list other objects such as books, papers, tools, jewelry, musical instruments, and even guns. These objects represented past lives and new futures. They might be sold or traded, or put into use in self-emancipated individual’s new lives. Most importantly, these objects were part of a material world that was on the move and in constant transition governed by what self-emancipated people had access to, what they could take in a hurry or what they planned to take, and what they could physically carry. This chapter grounds its broad narrative of self-emancipated material worlds in case studies of books, guns, and tools taken by self-emancipated people on their journeys to freedom. The defiant act of self-emancipating altered the meanings of objects and set into motion considerable change that demonstrated how people used material objects as catalysts to dismantle oppressive power structures. By exploiting the malleable meanings of things, self-emancipated people made it evident that objects were subject to reinvention. While the material world of enslaved people has been the subject of many texts, those studies often focus on the material world of extant physical spaces such as slave dwellings.2 This chapter takes a different approach and seeks to explore the material world of self-emancipated people through the objects they carried with them and deemed essential to their new lives as freed people. To examine these stories thoroughly, this chapter uses runaway ads to explore the material world of self-emancipated people on the move. Not only did objects aid in the transformation of people from enslaved to free; self-emancipated persons were also catalysts of change aiding in creating a free world. Together with their objects, self-emancipated people changed and transcended their earliest states as they navigated the geographies of self-emancipated worlds defined by liberation and mobility. This study of self-emancipated people and the objects they took with them offers a fuller understanding of the shifting meanings of materials in a material world physically and conceptually in flux.

Books In March 1779, enslaver Captain John Postell placed an advertisement in The Gazette of the State of South Carolina seeking the return of an enslaved drummer named Quash. Postell noted that Quash had taken with him several objects, including his drummer’s suit of clothing (most likely worn during his service as

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a drummer during the Revolutionary War), a green coatee (or short coat), a gun, and a portmanteau (or suitcase) containing a few books, papers, and clothes. Postell concluded the advertisement by writing that if Quash were to return on his own that he would forgive him.3 Quash more than likely self-emancipated from the Postell family plantation in St. Bartholomew’s Parish, South Carolina. The Postell family was well known within the state, and Postell noted in the advertisement that Quash himself was well known in St. Bartholomew’s Parish. Quash’s act of taking the portmanteau and its contents suggests that he packed a bag of objects required to begin his new life. These objects would form the contents of his self-emancipated material world. Often, runaway ads included information about whether the self-emancipated person could read, write, and cypher (complete simple math). Quash’s taking of the books and papers suggests that he might have enjoyed reading. Historians such as E. Jennifer Monaghan have contended that throughout the colonial period, the public considered reading compatible with the institution of slavery. Monaghan argues that during the colonial era, people were taught to read before they were taught to write, thus separating literacy into two different skills. Reading came first and was an entirely oral activity, and learning to write came only after the student mastered reading. The teaching of writing was racialized and often not available to the enslaved.4 While enslaved individuals may not have been taught to write, they were often taught to read using common spelling books. The March 22, 1788, edition of the Georgia State Gazette or Independent Register included a runaway ad from John Lindsey. Lindsey wrote, “A Mulatto Boy, NAMED Jem, about sixteen years of age had on a blue plain jacket and overhalls [sic] of white plains, a small wool hat, bound round, and carried with him Dilworth’s Spelling Book”5 (Figure 2.1/ Plate 2). “Dilworth’s Spelling Book” was a copy of Thomas Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue. Dilworth was a British schoolmaster, and his book was extremely popular in Britain and the American colonies as an educator’s text. He organized A New Guide to the English Tongue into three parts. Part One of the book began with the alphabet, then moved to syllables and words, while Part Two included common words and definitions, and Part Three covered grammar.6 Following Monaghan’s assertions about colonial practices of reading education for the enslaved, Jem likely used Dilworth’s book to learn to read. Yet this begs the question: who was teaching Jem to read, and why? Monaghan suggests that religion was one of the motivating factors behind teaching enslaved people to read. An analysis of Georgia’s Slave Codes supports this argument. In 1788, when Jem took Dilworth’s book as an object of his self-

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Figure 2.1  “Run Away,” South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (Charleston, SC), April 3, 1770.

emancipated material world, Georgia law permitted enslaved people to learn to read printed texts such as books so that they could read the Bible. The 1770 Georgia revision to the 1755 Georgia Slave Code carried forth its provisions that it was against the law to teach an enslaved person to write, but it also announced that those who taught their enslaved people to write or read handwriting would be fined £20. This provision was necessary because it prevented enslaved people from learning to write and read handwriting, thus preventing them from forging freedom papers or documents that declared their status as free people.7 The connection between reading books and religion undoubtedly explains why self-emancipated people carried Bibles and hymn books on their journeys. Consider a runaway ad placed by Captain Benjamin Reed in the September 18, 1753, issue of the Boston Gazette. Reed sought the return of a self-emancipated man named Sambo, noting that Sambo carried away “a Bible with (Samuel Reed) wrote in it, with some other books.”8 Similarly, in August 1749, when a man named Samson self-emancipated from his enslaver, Samuel Lynch, he took a hymn book and a testament. Lynch wrote that Samson could read “middling well.”9 And when a woman named Rachel self-emancipated from her enslaver, Mary Deklyn, in 1775, she took a variety of clothing and a hymn book with her enslaver’s name written in it.10

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The prevalence of self-emancipated people carrying away books inscribed with their enslaver’s names suggests that these objects were, to some degree, accessible within the households where the enslaved lived and/or labored. Eighteenth-century cabinetmakers often built bookcases with locking glass front doors, permitting enslaved people to see volumes of books, but keeping them locked away from their touch.11 Enslaved people might have had easier access to religious books through religious groups and charitable organizations. Religious groups such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which sought to evangelize and educate the masses, opened schools for enslaved children and provided them with religious books and reading materials.12 As early as 1705, Elias Neau, a catechist for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, used his position to convert enslaved individuals to Anglicanism and rewarded them with books. Years later, Dr. Thomas Bray and the charitable group Dr. Thomas Bray & His Associates set up schools to educate enslaved children. Additionally, they provided Bibles, primers, spelling books, testaments, and other books to missionaries and enslavers to educate enslaved people. Some of the boxes sent to places such as Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1730s contained up to thirty primers, thirty spelling books, twenty testaments, and thirty psalters.13 In 1751, the trustees of Georgia legalized enslavement, and almost immediately, Dr. Thomas Bray & His Associates sent catechist Joseph Ottolenghe to Savannah. Ottolenghe taught whites, but he also educated enslaved individuals. In 1751, he reported to the Associates that he provided instruction to enslaved individuals three days a week and that many of his students were adults. By June 1752, Ottolenghe reported that several of his enslaved students “had begun to read tolerably well.”14 It thus seems more than possible that Jem might have received his copy of Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue through religious groups such as the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel or Dr. Thomas Bray & His Associates. This evidence suggests that some enslaved people not only had some type of access to books, but that they were also taking these books when they selfemancipated. Furthermore, most runaway ads did not often include the titles of books taken, only vague references to books or the specific type of book. Runaway ads featured language such as “Run away from the subscriber .  .  . a Negro fellow named Adam . . . he carried . . . some books,” “Run away . . . a negro man named Dick .  .  . carried a book with him,” and, in the case of Sambo, “he carry’d with him a Bible . . . with some other books.”15 Nonetheless, these advertisements illustrate a degree of literacy among eighteenth-century enslaved populations. As historian Antonio Bly discovered in his examination

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of self-emancipated people and literacy in colonial America, enslavers described fifty-five self-emancipated people as literate in the approximately 1,000 runaway ads that appeared in the Virginia Gazette between 1736 and 1770.16 Of those fifty-five, Bly’s research highlights three stories of literate self-emancipated people carrying books to freedom. The relationship between literacy, selfemancipated people, and books differed from region to region and over time, but what remained constant was the power of literacy in the material world of eighteenth-century self-emancipated persons. When literate self-emancipated people taught others to read, the power of literacy multiplied and ultimately became one of the tools used to dismantle slavery and bring about change.

Guns In workshops across the American colonies, enslaved people labored as gunsmiths to make guns that they would never have an opportunity to use. The allure of a gun would have been more than powerful as guns possessed the ability to potentially—if temporarily—end an enslaved person’s suffering with one shot to the head of an enslaver. Moreover, in the material world of a selfemancipated person, a gun was many things, including an object used to provide sustenance through hunting and an object of defense. It was a blatant signal to enslavers and those seeking the return of self-emancipated people that they would not return to enslavement easily. What remained consistent throughout the eighteenth century is that lawmakers sought every opportunity to keep guns out of the material worlds of self-emancipated people. As early as 1694, twenty years after the province’s creation, lawmakers in East Jersey prohibited enslaved people from carrying guns and pistols into the woods unless accompanied by their enslaver or by a white man with the consent of their enslaver. Additionally, no white person was to allow enslaved people to keep hunting equipment without the enslaver’s mark of identification, nor was anyone permitted to lend, give, or hire guns or pistols to enslaved people.17 This early colonial law suggests that whites in East Jersey had problems with, and sought to curtail, enslaved people carrying guns. Yet a close examination of New Jersey runaway ads reveals that this law and others governing enslaved people did not stop them from interacting with guns or taking guns when they decided to self-emancipate. Will, for example, self-emancipated on May 21, 1727, from Somerset County, New Jersey. James Leonard, his enslaver, placed an advertisement for his return: “’tis supposed that

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he has a Gun with him.”18 When New Jersey residents fully realized the threat posed by self-emancipated people and slave rebellions, they passed an act on October 22, 1751, intended “to restrain Tavern-keepers and others from selling strong Liquors to Servants, Negroes and Molatto Slaves, and to prevent Negroes and Molatto Slaves, from meeting in large Companies, from running about at Nights, and from hunting or carrying a Gun on the Lord’s Day.”19 But for many enslaved and soon-to-be self-emancipated people, becoming free and staying free required the power of a gun. When York self-emancipated in May 1759 from Bergen County, New Jersey, he took with him “a dog, a gun, and a fiddle.”20 Similarly, when Jack self-emancipated from Newark, New Jersey, in June of 1776, his enslaver Jacob Wilkins explained in a runaway ad that Jack took with him “several sorts of clothes, his Master’s gun, and a Grenadier’s sword with brass mountings.”21 The presence of guns in the material world of self-emancipated people suggests that self-emancipated people were indeed willing to shoot back when threatened with a return to bondage. And, they often did. With the fear of retaliation through gun violence threatening their safety, in 1701 South Carolina lawmakers passed an “Act for the better ordering of Slaves.” It included laws permitting the physical mutilation of enslaved people who selfemancipated and controlled enslaved people’s access to guns: “no Negro or slave shall carry out the limits of his master’s fenced ground any sort of gun, or firearm without a certificate.”22 Additionally, this act fined enslavers who did not keep their guns locked away and inaccessible to enslaved people. Despite lawmakers’ best intentions and hoped-for outcomes, enslaved and self-emancipated people still found ways to access guns, add them to their material worlds, and use them in the fight for freedom. On September 9, 1739, twenty self-emancipated Africans broke into Hutchinson’s store near the Stono River Bridge near Charleston, South Carolina. They armed themselves with guns and gun powder. Before they left the store, they executed the storekeepers and left their heads on the front steps. This event was the first event in a series of events for a group of self-emancipated people in what became known as the Stono Rebellion, and it is telling that the first thing they did after fleeing bondage was to break into a store and take guns. From this action, we can deduce that these twenty selfemancipated Africans were willing to shoot and kill anyone who interfered with their plan of reaching St. Augustine in Spanish Florida—where self-emancipated individuals were promised freedom from slavery in the British colonies.23 When they paused that afternoon, local whites who had been alerted of the uprising ambushed them. The self-emancipated people used the stolen guns from Hutchinson’s store to fire on the whites. As other self-emancipated people

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loaded their guns, some local whites dismounted their horses and attacked. Reports of the uprising included the tale of a self-emancipated man who saw his enslaver at the ambush that afternoon. The enslaver asked the self-emancipated man whether he intended to kill him, and the man responded with a resounding yes. When the self-emancipated man pulled out his pistol and shot, the gun misfired. Not surprisingly, the enslaver seized the moment and shot the selfemancipated man in the head, instantly killing him.24 Even after the Stono Rebellion and laws passed in response, such as the South Carolina Negro Act of 1740, the threat of enslaved and self-emancipated people arming themselves abounded. The December 19, 1750, edition of the Maryland Gazette included a story from Annapolis, Maryland, regarding the death of an enslaver at the hands of a self-emancipated man with a gun: The beginning of this Month, a Murder was committed in Cecil County, by a Mulatto Man. He had run away from his Master, Mr. Edward Taylor, and was pursu’d by him and another Man, who overtook and were just going to take him, but he having a loaded Gun, shot his Master dead on the Spot. He was afterwards taken and put into Prison, but is since broke out. This Mulatto is Brother to him who was hang’d some Years ago for shooting Mr. Aquilla Hall, in Baltimore County.25

Subsequent newspaper reports revealed that the mulatto man described in the previous article was named Joe and that authorities captured him a few weeks after the murder. According to the January 2, 1751, edition of the Maryland Gazette, “the Mulatto Man Joe, who murder’d his Master Mr. Edward Taylor, is again apprehended, and in that County Goal [sic]. A special Commission is gone up, appointing Col. Colvill, Mr. Veazy, Mr. Nathaniel Baker, Mr. Baxter, and Mr. Rock, to hold a Court of Oyer and Terminer, for his Trial.”26 By the end of January 1751, Maryland jurors found Joe guilty of petit treason, or murdering someone to whom he owed allegiance, and sentenced him to have his right hand cut off, to be hanged, to be decapitated, and his body quartered. Lastly, his punishment called for his severed head and body to be displayed in a public area in Cecil County, Maryland.27 Maryland court records indicate that Joe was indeed quartered and hanged on February 1, 1751.28 For those enslaved people who witnessed Joe’s hanging and quartering and the public display of his dead, mangled body, the message of “do not shoot and kill your enslaver” was clear. Despite Joe’s case and the public display of his dead body, self-emancipated people in Maryland still took guns as objects of their material world. Toney’s search for freedom began on May 18, 1754, when he self-emancipated from

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his enslaver Patrick Creagh, taking with him a silver hilted sword and pistols mounted with silver.29 In the case of Phill, who, like Joe, self-emancipated from Cecil County, Maryland, his enslaver Andrew Barratt wrote, “it is thought he has got an old Gun with him, but not certain.”30 The June 27, 1780, edition of the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser included the noteworthy runaway ad placed by John Payne seeking the return of twelve self-emancipated people. By the time Payne placed the ad, the self-emancipated group of twelve had been gone since the previous April. Payne provided a wealth of information to aid in their capture, including physical descriptions, skilled labor ability, and clothing descriptions. Payne also added that “they have stole some guns and many sorts of clothes.”31 The group of twelve self-emancipated people would pose a threat to anyone who attempted to apprehend them. Not only were they a large group, but they were also armed, and the number of guns they carried was unknown. By 1807, the General Assembly of Maryland had passed several laws preventing enslaved people and free Blacks from using guns. Titled “An Act to restrain the evil practices arising from Negroes keeping Dogs, and to prohibit them from carrying Guns or offensive weapons,” the law forbade enslaved people to keep any gun and forbade free Blacks from carrying guns and other offensive weapons.32 Caribbean enslavers faced the same threat of self-emancipated people using guns to retaliate against them as their counterparts faced in the American colonies. In October 1785, The Pennsylvania Packet newspaper reported an incident from that past August in Kingston, Jamaica, where a self-emancipated man shot and killed the man his enslaver hired him out to work for. When Richard Abbay encountered the self-emancipated man, he immediately demanded to know where he had been, because the self-emancipated man had been gone for ten months. According to the newspaper account, “the fellow gave him an impudent and insulting answer, and immediately seized a musket, that lay concealed among the bushes, and presented it to him. Mr. Abbay then asked him if he meant to shoot him; - the villain replied ‘for whara me stand here if na for dat,’ and instantly lodged the contents in his body.”33 Not every self-emancipated person used a gun to shoot enslavers or those seeking to capture them. The November 29, 1742, edition of the South Carolina Gazette reported an incident at the Charleston workhouse when a selfemancipated man named Jim was taken there. Newspaper reports indicated that Jim brought a gun along with him to the workhouse.34 It is unclear why Jim did not use the gun in his possession to fight off capture and return to enslavement. For enslavers, guns missing from their homes would need to be replaced. Some runaway ads indicate that enslavers not only wanted their enslaved

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people back, they also wanted their guns and other weapons back. In 1784, William Allason wrote a runaway ad seeking the return of a self-emancipated man named Mark who had taken objects including clothing, blankets, and “a smooth bored gun, pretty wide in the bore, and straighter than common from the breech to the butt.”35 Allason concluded the ad by stating, “whoever apprehends said negro, and delivers him to me, near the Court-house, with the gun, will be paid Eight dollars reward, besides what the Law allows.”36 Here, the specificity of the description of the gun underscored the value of the gun for Allason. Guns thus function as an excellent example of the dual meanings of objects. In these instances, they clearly meant different things to different groups of people. For enslavers, guns were objects to keep enslaved people under control. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, enslavers and slave patrols would organize themselves to retrieve self-emancipated people, often carrying guns to carry out their repulsive tasks. For self-emancipated people taking their freedom, guns functioned as both security and reassurance that they might be able to make it. For whites, no matter the laws passed and their attempts to curtail enslaved people’s access to guns, their efforts were futile. Knowing that the use of a gun against a white person would ultimately lead to their death, self-emancipated people still used them as part of their material world rather than return to a world of bondage. The conditions of mobility and selfemancipation destabilized and altered the meanings of such already powerful and deadly objects. By passing from the ownership of whites to the ownership of self-emancipated people, guns became a means by which change could be instantly realized.

Tools Rachel Dorsey, a white woman, arrived in Montgomery County, Maryland, about 1772 from Pennsylvania. About 1775, she began a relationship with an enslaved man named Leonard. In 1776, they had their first son, Samuel, and by 1779, they had their second son, Basil. The February 6, 1781, edition of the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser newspaper included a runaway ad from enslaver Barbara Williams seeking the return of Leonard. Williams wrote, “He is a carpenter by trade and took with him some carpenters and joiners tools. He was persuaded by a white woman who calls herself Rachel Dorsey. . . . It is supposed they will pass for man and wife, and make for Pennsylvania or the

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Eastern Shore.”37 Williams was more than likely correct about Leonard and Rachel’s plans as it is apparent that Leonard’s self-emancipation was precisely what they needed to live as a family in a free state, such as Pennsylvania. The presence of the carpentry and joinery tools among the objects Leonard took with him, objects that became essential pieces of his self-emancipated world, suggests that Leonard intended to continue work in the carpenter’s trade at his new home. The tools he once used to labor for Barbara Williams would transform into instruments that he would use to work for himself and to provide for his family. The presence of tools among self-emancipated individuals suggests that such individuals were skilled craftspeople and that they sought to continue in that line of work once self-emancipated. In the eighteenth century, tools also provided a specific type of protection. An enslaved person carrying tools would not have been an obvious signal that captors could have used to identify a self-emancipated person. Tools, unlike books and guns, gave the outward appearance that an enslaved person was perhaps hired out by his enslaver and walking to his next job site instead of fleeing from bondage. By taking tools, self-emancipated people gained the power to work for themselves and pass as free Black craftspeople. Furthermore, for Black craftspeople, tools were inextricably part of their identity. Historian Catherine Bishir has noted that craftspeople understood the utility of owning tools and were often attached to their tools. For them, possessing tools and mastering craft or trade skills contributed significantly to their artisan identity.38 Tools would have been among a self-emancipated person’s most prized and valued possessions because they endowed them with the status symbol of a skilled artisan and because they enabled economic freedom. Enslavers often hired out skilled, enslaved craftspeople. This practice enriched the pockets of enslavers, and in areas such as Charleston, South Carolina, the practice of hiring out was commonplace. The South Carolina Gazette, published in Charleston, frequently included advertisements warning people not to hire enslaved craftspeople without the prior permission of their enslaver. Charleston was somewhat unique in this regard, as many enslaved individuals sought to exploit the practice of “hiring out” and used their agency to hire themselves out and keep any money made.39 For example, the August 15, 1741, edition of the South Carolina Gazette included an advertisement placed by James St. John seeking the return of self-emancipated carpenter Limas, who had been hiring himself out. St. John wrote, “The said Negro for some Time wrought clandestinely about Town, and thereby defrauded his Master of several Sums of Money.”40

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Figure 2.2  “Run Away,” Georgia State Gazette or Independent Register (Augusta, GA), March 22, 1788.

Limas and other enslaved craftspeople like him often used their agency to find jobs for themselves while keeping their earned wages for themselves. Enslavers were well aware that self-emancipated people who left with tools intended to use those tools to pass as free people. In July 1768, an enslaved carpenter and cooper named Curry Tuxent self-emancipated from his enslaver Captain John Williams of Northumberland County, Virginia, carrying with him his tools. Williams noted, “He will expect to pass as a freeman.”41 When Sam, an enslaved carpenter and cooper, self-emancipated in March 1770, his enslaver John Davies noted, “It is supposed he will pass for a free negro, as he has formerly done: He is a good carpenter and cooper, and took with him some workman’s tools” (Figure 2.2).42 When Frank, an enslaved shoemaker, self-emancipated in March 1772, he left from the home of Mr. Henry Fletcher, who had hired him from his enslaver. Frank “carried several suits of cloaths with him, and his shoemaking tools, and is thought will make for the back parts of this province and pass for a free man.”43 When Stepney, an enslaved shoemaker, self-emancipated from Virginia in July 1773, his enslaver Joseph Bass speculated, “I imagine he will make for North Carolina and endeavor to pass as a Freeman, as he took his Shoemaker’s tools with him.”44 If enslavers were well aware of the signifying power of tools in aiding self-emancipated people to appear as free men and women, self-emancipated people were well aware too. When Simon and Ned self-emancipated in 1774, their enslaver wrote, “They carried their carpenter’s tools with them, in order to deceive people who may meet them.”45 The tools that self-emancipated people carried with them on their journeys were easy to access. Many rural plantations included work or shop areas where enslaved craftspeople had daily access to tools. Enslaved craftspeople in urban

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areas often had access to tools at their enslavers’ homes or at shops where enslavers hired them out to work. In 1778, Boston King, an enslaved carpenter, was placed in charge of the tools at a carpentry shop where he had been hired out to work. “When 16 years old,” King wrote in his memoirs, I was bound apprentice to a trade. After being in the shop about two years, I had the charge of my master’s tools, which being very good, were often used by the men, if I happened to be out of the way: When this was the case, or any of them were lost, or misplaced, my master beat me severely, striking me upon my head, or any other part without mercy.46

King’s experience suggests that tools were easy to access in shops, but if some were missing or perhaps taken, someone would face punishment. King’s memoirs also provide an excellent example of the necessity of tools to a selfemancipated person’s material world. Shortly after King self-emancipated from South Carolina with the British Army during the Revolutionary War, he found himself in New York and in need of work. As he recalled, “We stayed in the bay two days, and then sailed for New-York, where I went on shore. Here I endeavoured to follow my trade, but for want of tools was obliged to relinquish it, and enter into service.”47 Some enslavers raised concerns that self-emancipated people would sell tools instead of using them to work. In 1770, when Will, a self-emancipated carpenter and cooper, left his enslaver James Scott, Scott placed a runaway advertisement in the Virginia Gazette: “He has worked some time at the carpenters and coopers trade, though knows but little of either, but is a tolerable good turner, and has taken with him several of his tools, though as they may be troublesome to carry he probably may sell them.”48 Those carpenters’, coopers’, and turners’ tools may have included hammers, mallets, chisels, gouges, planes, squares, hand saws, and other instruments. While we may never know if Will sold his tools, as anticipated by his enslaver, what we do know is that they had a place in Will’s self-emancipated material world. For some self-emancipated people, those tools did more than provide them with a means to work; they also provided them with a means to live. Some self-emancipated African maroons planned to establish free communities, and, as historian Sylviane Diouf has explained, among the objects they took to do this were weapons, ammunition, food, tools, clothes, and bedding.49 The act of self-emancipating with tools, then using them to earn wages and build new worlds, was a political act that explicitly challenged the institution of slavery. Self-emancipated craftspeople used their skills combined with their tools to take control of their lives and change their worlds.

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Self-Emancipated New Worlds When Moses self-emancipated from his enslaver John Aylett on February 13, 1767, he took with him a horse and a portmanteau with three pairs of breeches inside.50 When an enslaved boy self-emancipated from Benjamin Fuller in May 1769, he took with him a bay horse and a great deal of luggage.51 When Jemmy, Charles, Charles’s wife, and a twelve- or fourteen-year-old boy self-emancipated in 1775, they took with them changes of clothes and “all the luggage.”52 In these examples, the packing of portmanteaus and luggage suggests that these selfemancipated people had no intention of returning. They were not leaving to see family for a few days or just to take a short break from the rigors of slavery. They were self-emancipating to claim a life of freedom, and they made a concerted effort to take along objects, such as books, guns, or tools, that they would need to create a new material world. Not only did runaway ads include objects taken, but they often listed possible final destinations. These advertisements included words and phrases such as “may make for John or James Island where she has a father and brother,” “may endeavor to make his escape to the northward,” “supposed he is gone to Indian-Land, where he has a mother,” or “it is supposed he will make for North-Carolina.”53 These potential final destinations connect starting points to possible ending points, thereby drawing conceivable maps of self-emancipated worlds.54 What makes a self-emancipated world unique is that it is transitional and in a constant state of flux. It was a world defined by liberation, movement, and socio-spatial resistance. By creating these new worlds, self-emancipated people produced space and challenged white understandings of space as these worlds were fluid and secret. Geographer Katherine McKittrick suggests that self-emancipated people subverted enslavement by “mapping a new and different understanding of geographic freedom . . . that is enacted outside white supremacist cartographic rules precisely because these rules cannot lead to ethical ways of being.”55 Through this lens, these new worlds and the objects within them enabled self-emancipated people to live ethical lives where they could embrace the power of literacy, fully defend themselves, and earn wages to survive. Though they would still face anti-Blackness, this new way of living pushed the world towards Black freedom. Within these new worlds, self-emancipated people used objects to join the collective identity of free Blacks, those who were freed, and those who freed themselves. In this sense, the objects became symbols and visual cues

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to distinguish between free and enslaved, but also sometimes to productively blur those differences, as in the case of tools. As seen through runaway ads, self-emancipated people wanted to make their new status and identity visible. In order to fully understand this visibility, we must understand the desires of self-emancipated people and what they hoped to achieve with these objects. Ultimately, the goal of self-emancipating was to achieve free Black status. Undoubtedly, the material objects they carried with them aided in meeting that goal. By freeing themselves from the bonds of enslavement and taking objects with them, self-emancipated people physically and materially declared their intentions to be free. Their story is about more than just the act of taking things: it is also about the intentions behind taking specific objects, the power that came with the possession of these objects, and the crafting of new free worlds. The material world of self-emancipated people would not have existed if enslaved people did not actively free themselves from the bonds of enslavement. Selfemancipating presented many dangers, including recapture and punishment, injury, or death. Nevertheless, every single person that self-emancipated dealt a blow to the institution of slavery. By crafting self-emancipated material worlds, each self-emancipated person displayed the specific goods they needed to make a free life. The objects they chose served as both daily reminders of the past and daily hopes for the future. By examining their choices, we are transported to a world where material things give voice to determined, self-emancipated people who sought to build new free lives with objects they valued and whose meanings they utterly transformed.

Bibliography American Weekly Mercury Boston Gazette Gazette of the State of South Carolina Georgia Gazette Georgia State Gazette or Independent Register Maryland Gazette Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser The New York Gazette and the Weekly Mercury Parker’s New York Gazette, Or, the Weekly Post-Boy Pennsylvania Gazette

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Pennsylvania Packet South Carolina Gazette South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Virginia Gazette Virginia Gazette or American Advertiser Virginia Gazette (Purdie) Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon) Virginia Gazette (Rind) Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998. Bishir, Catherine W. Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770–1900. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Bly, Antonio T. “Breaking With Tradition: Slave Literacy in Early Virginia, 1680–1780.” Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2006. Bly, Antonio T. “‘Pretends He Can Read’: Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730—1776.” Early American Studies 6, no. 2 (2008): 261–94. Bly, Antonio T. Escaping Bondage: A Documentary History of Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century New England, 1700–1789. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. Cushing, John D., and Michael Glazier, eds. The Earliest Printed Laws of the Province of Georgia, 1755–1770. 2 vols. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1978. Dilworth, Thomas. A New Guide to the English Tongue. Edited by Charlotte Downey. Reprint. Vol. 322. American Linguistics 1700–1900. Delmar, NY: T&W Bradford; Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1978. Diouf, Sylviane A. Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Gigantino, James. The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Kilty, William, ed. The Laws of Maryland from the End of the Year 1799, with a Full Index, and the Constitution of the State, as Adopted by the Convention, with the Several Alterations by Acts of Assembly . . . Volume III. Annapolis, MD: J. Green, 1820. http://aomol​.msa​.maryland​.gov​/megafile​/msa​/speccol​/sc2900​/sc2908​/000001​ /000192​/html​/am192-​-692​.html. King, Boston. “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, A Black Preacher.” The Methodist Magazine, March 1798. Maryland State Archives. “Capital Prosecutions and Their Outcomes. 20—Hanged— All Classes by Date, 1726–1775.” August 2, 2018. http://aomol​.msa​.maryland​.gov​/ megafile​/msa​/speccol​/sc2900​/sc2908​/000001​/000819​/pdf​/chart20​.pdf. McKittrick, Katherine. “‘Freedom Is a Secret’: The Future Usability of the Underground.” In Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, edited by Clyde Woods and Katherine McKittrick, 97–111. Toronto and Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007.

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Mereness, Newton Dennison, ed. “A Rangers Report of Travels with General Oglethorpe in Georgia and Florida, 1739–1742.” In Travels in the American Colonies, ed. under the auspices of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 218–36. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916. Monaghan, E. Jennifer. “Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy.” James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture. In Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 309–41. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1998. Monaghan, E. Jennifer. Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Robert, Olwell. Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Tomlins, Christopher. Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Van Horn, Jennifer. “‘The Dark Iconoclast’: African Americans’ Artistic Resistance in the Civil War South.” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 4 (2017): 133–67. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974. Wright, Marion Thompson. “Laws Passed From 1675 to 1776.” The Journal of Negro History 28, no. 2 (1943): 161–71.

Notes 1 Timothy Keeler, “Advertisement,” Boston Gazette, July 29, 1734. A “false pass” refers to a forged document giving the enslaved person permission to be mobile. It may also refer to a forged document declaring the enslaved person as free. 2 See, for example, Kym S. Rice and Martha B. Katz-Hyman, eds., World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2010). Additionally, many historical archaeology texts, such as Leland Ferguson’s Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004) and Patricia Samford’s Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia (Tuscaloosa, AL: University Alabama Press, 2007), discuss the material worlds of enslaved people. Digital humanities projects, such as the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (daacs​.o​rg), feature photographs and archaeological reports illustrating the material worlds of enslaved people. 3 John Postell, “Run Away,” The Gazette of the State of South Carolina (Charleston, SC), March 31, 1779.

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4 E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy,” in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1998), 309–12. 5 John Lindsay, “A Mulatto Boy,” Georgia State Gazette or Independent Register (Augusta, GA), March 22, 1788. 6 Thomas Dilworth, A New Guide to the English Tongue, ed. Charlotte Downey, Reprint, vol. 322, American Linguistics 1700–1900 (Delmar, NY, 1978), VII–IX. 7 Monaghan, “Reading for the Enslaved,” 313–8; John D. Cushing and Michael Glazier, eds., The Earliest Printed Laws of the Province of Georgia, 1755–1770, vol. 2 (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1978), 31. 8 Captain Benjamin Reed, “Ran Away,” The Boston Gazette, September 18, 1753; Antonio T. Bly, Escaping Bondage: A Documentary History of Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century New England, 1700–1789 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 91. Samuel Reed, the name inscribed in Sambo’s Bible, was Benjamin Reed’s son. 9 Samuel Lynch, “Run Away,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, August 17, 1749. 10 Mary Deklyn, “Twenty Shillings Reward,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, August 23, 1775; Antonio T. Bly, “‘Pretends He Can Read’: Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730—1776,” Early American Studies 6, no. 2 (2008): 278. 11 On related points, see Jennifer Van Horn, “‘The Dark Iconoclast’: African Americans’ Artistic Resistance in the Civil War South,” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 4 (2017): 133–67. Van Horn investigates objects in enslavers’ dwellings that enslaved people saw and experienced, but that remained largely out of reach. 12 Antonio T. Bly, “Breaking with Tradition: Slave Literacy in Early Virginia, 1680– 1780” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2006), 102. 13 E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book (Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 249–51. 14 Monaghan, Learning to Read, 252. 15 John Fox, “Run Away,” Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon) (Williamsburg, VA), February 22, 1770; Peter Royster, “One Hundred Dollars Reward,” Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg, VA), July 31, 1779; Reed, “Ran Away.” 16 Bly, “Pretends He Can Read,” 266. 17 Marion Thompson Wright, “Laws Passed from 1675 to 1776,” The Journal of Negro History 28, no. 2 (1943): 163. In 1674, the province that would later become the colony and state of New Jersey was divided into two sections, East Jersey and West Jersey. East Jersey lawmakers passed the province’s first laws governing slavery. In 1702, East Jersey and West Jersey united into the colony of New Jersey. 18 James Leonard, “Run Away,” The American Weekly Mercury, June 1, 1727.

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19 James Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 46. Gigantino shows that New Jersey residents felt threatened by self-emancipated people and slave rebellions, and lawmakers responded by implementing new laws and harsher punishments governing the behavior of enslaved people. 20 Nicholas Jones and Luke Ryerson, “Run Away,” Parker’s New-York Gazette, Or, the Weekly Post-Boy (New York, NY), May 28, 1759. 21 Jacob Wilkins, “Ten Dollars Reward,” The New York Gazette and the Weekly Mercury (Newark, NJ), June 25, 1776. 22 Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 440. 23 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 73. 24 Newton Dennison Mereness, ed., “A Rangers Report of Travels with General Oglethorpe in Georgia and Florida, 1739–1742,” in Travels in the American Colonies (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 223; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974), 314–7. 25 “Annapolis,” The Maryland Gazette (Annapolis, MD), December 19, 1750. 26 “Annapolis,” The Maryland Gazette, January 2, 1751. 27 “Annapolis,” The Maryland Gazette, January 30, 1751. 28 “Capital Prosecutions and Their Outcomes. 20—Hanged—All Classes by Date, 1726–1775,” Maryland State Archives, August 2, 2018, http://aomol​.msa​.maryland​ .gov​/megafile​/msa​/speccol​/sc2900​/sc2908​/000001​/000819​/pdf​/chart20​.pdf. 29 Patrick Creagh, “Fifty Pistoles Reward,” Maryland Gazette, April 4, 1754. 30 Andrew Barratt, “Ran Away,” Maryland Gazette, October 20, 1763. 31 John Payne, “Ten Thousand Dollars Reward,” Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, June 27, 1780. 32 William Kilty, ed., The Laws of Maryland from the End of the Year 1799, with a Full Index, and the Constitution of the State, as Adopted by the Convention, with the Several Alterations by Acts of Assembly . . . Volume III. (Annapolis, MD: J. Green, 1820), 692, http://aomol​.msa​.maryland​.gov​/megafile​/msa​/speccol​/sc2900​/sc2908​ /000001​/000192​/html​/am192-​-692​.html. 33 “America,” The Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia, PA), October 22, 1785. 34 John Hutchins, “Brought to the Work-House,” South Carolina Gazette (Charleston, SC), November 29, 1742. 35 William Allason, “Ran Away,” Virginia Gazette or American Advertiser (Richmond, VA), November 13, 1784. 36 Allason, “Ran Away.”

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37 Barbara Williams, “Four Thousand Dollars Reward,” Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, February 6, 1781. 38 Catherine W. Bishir, Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 78. 39 Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 158–66. 40 James St. John, “Run Away,” South Carolina Gazette, August 15, 1741. 41 Richard Edwards, “Run Away,” Virginia Gazette (Rind) (Williamsburg, VA), August 4, 1768. 42 James Richards, “Run Away,” The South Carolina Gazette, April 3, 1770. 43 Josiah Perry, “Run Away,” South Carolina Gazette, March 16, 1772. 44 Joseph Bass, “Run Away,” Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), July 22, 1773. 45 Samuel Wainwright, “Sixty Pounds Reward,” South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (Charleston, SC), June 28, 1774. 46 Boston King, “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, A Black Preacher,” The Methodist Magazine 21 (1798): 106. 47 King, “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” 109. 48 James Scott, “Run Away,” Virginia Gazette (Rind), November 15, 1770. 49 Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 59–61. 50 John Aylett, “Run Away,” Virginia Gazette (Rind), March 12, 1767. 51 Alexander Kerr, “Run Away,” Georgia Gazette (Savannah, GA), May 31, 1769. 52 Augustine Moore, “Run Away,” Virginia Gazette (Purdie), June 21, 1775. 53 John-Paul Grimke, “Five Pounds Reward,” South Carolina Gazette, August 14, 1762; Humphrey Sommers, “Run Away,” South Carolina Gazette, November 20, 1762; Benjamin Seabrook, “Run Away,” South Carolina Gazette, January 1, 1763; William Hopton, “Run Away,” South Carolina Gazette, August 24, 1767. 54 Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 73. Diouf refers to these routes as geographies of love, migration, and defiance, while suggesting that we must treat possible destinations listed in runaway ads with care because these are the enslavers’ assumptions; selfemancipated people may have had other plans. 55 Katherine McKittrick, “‘Freedom Is a Secret’: The Future Usability of the Underground,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. Clyde Woods and Katherine McKittrick (Toronto and Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 104.

3

Something Old, Something New Repurposing and the Production of Ephemeral Festival Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Paris Matthew Gin

On October 28, 1758, the city of Paris staged an elaborate festival to commemorate French victory at the battle of Lutzelburg. Part of the ongoing Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the clash was one of several early triumphs for France over its rivals England, Hannover, and Hesse. By order of Louis XV, the capital was given over to celebration for an entire day. Festivities began in the morning with artillery salutes fired from the banks of the Seine and a procession through the city to Notre-Dame Cathedral for the singing of the Te Deum. The event concluded with an elaborate fireworks display in front of the Hôtel de Ville. These pyrotechnics were launched from an elaborate temporary structure fabricated from wood, plaster, and canvas components painted in imitation of white and colored marble. The structure was subsequently immortalized in a print by Jacques-Philippe Le Bas (Figure 3.1). As shown in the engraving, the apparatus took the form of a hill upon which was mounted a triumphalist scene evocative of an ancient Roman tropaeum or trophy display. In the center, flanked by two divinities, likely Hercules and Minerva, sat a plinth stacked high with arms and armor. Framing this scene were eight obelisks composed of fasces and antique military trophies surrounded in turn by statues of soldiers in various poses. While festivals and entertainments staged at court were organized by the Menus-Plaisirs, a department of the Maison du Roi (the King’s Household), the public celebrations given in Paris for major dynastic events were a separate matter that fell under the jurisdiction of the Bureau de la Ville, the collective body that governed the capital.1 The Bureau exercised logistical, financial, and creative responsibility over public commemorations. This included everything from the coordination of street closures and the purchasing of pyrotechnic material to

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Figure 3.1  Jacques-Philippe Le Bas after a drawing by Jean Damun, Décoration du feu d’artifice tiré devant l’Hôtel de ville de Paris le 28 octobre 1758, en réjouissance de la Victoire remportée sur l’Armée combinée des Hessois et Hanovriens à Lutzelberg, 1758. Engraving. Photo: Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

the development of the event’s visual program, which included any decorations.2 Depending on their scale, festivals could require weeks of preparation, but on this occasion the necessary arrangements were completed in only five days. The process was expedited in large part by the repurposing of decorations from previous celebrations as pieces were either taken up again in their existing state or cobbled together from various leftover structural and decorative components. Reuse was a process that, while essential, needed to be concealed lest the artifice of the entire endeavor be exposed. By the middle of the eighteenth century, authorities in the capital had established normative procedures to manage the staging of festivals. This included protocols and dedicated facilities for the repurposing of decorations that are reconstructed here from previously unnoticed archival records. Among the most significant are inventories that detail the operation of a studio-warehouse where the labor- and resourceintensive work of creating and repurposing decorations was carried out away from the eyes of the public. Working within a hierarchical system in this facility, architects and painter-decorators, along with other kinds of artists and artisans, created new pieces from parts that were repaired and artfully reconfigured.

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When it came to these processes of reuse, change as a material strategy was neither haphazard nor instantaneous. Rather, it was a deliberate orderly artistic and technical operation that unfolded over time. Through their making and remaking, then, ephemeral festival decorations reveal how objects come to maintain, lose, and reclaim material integrity across their artifactual lives. Moreover, as momentary structures fabricated from enduring components that were translated from one occasion to another and from one form to another, temporary pageant decorations destabilize fundamental notions of ephemerality and permanence not just within architecture but material culture more generally. Focusing on the example of the Lutzelburg celebration, this chapter traces the processes by which components were reused to create new, or rather seemingly new, decorations. The people and systems that enabled the transformation of the ephemeral into the enduring constituted, this study contends, a durable, highly developed, multiscale infrastructure that, by enabling the public performance of royal power, sustained both the dynastic state and absolutism as an ideology. More crucially, this investigation addresses reuse as a strategy of material change that illuminates paradoxes at the very heart of the absolutist political and artistic project. Through these temporary decorations, change itself came to be vital for the maintenance of political stability and continuity. Although the monarchy sought through pageantry to present itself as enduring, immutable, and monolithic, the temporary decorations that it relied on for its public display reveal that the regime was, in actuality, fragile and highly contingent. Temporary structures erected for public celebrations, like the artificial hill built in Paris in 1758, were referred to by many names. In regard to their pyrotechnic function, these constructions were referred to in the press, festival books, and treatises as feux d’artifice (fireworks), corps du feu (body of fire), or décoration du feu d’artifice (fireworks decorations) with the terms being, it seems, more or less interchangeable. Such ephemeral structures were also described as architecture feinte or, literally, “fake architecture.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, architectural treatises and dictionaries described the genre as distinct from more durable forms of building based on various factors like material composition and the deployment of particular illusionary effects. As the architect Augustin-Charles d’Aviler explained in the Explication des termes d’architecture . . . (1691): What one calls architecture feinte is that which is built of lightweight wood and painted canvas draped over scaffolding such that columns, pilasters and other forms seem to be in relief. Cornices are sometimes real but ordinarily

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The architect and theorist Jacques-François Blondel offered a similar definition in the Encyclopédie: What one calls architecture feinte are those objects which possess the planes, projections, and reliefs of real architecture by color alone, as is seen on façades in Italy and the twelve pavilions of the Château of Marly, or in theatrical decoration or triumphal arches, painted in either perspective or geometric projection on canvas or wood for processions, public festivals, funerals, fireworks, etc.4

In another text, Cours d’architecture ou traité de la décoration, distribution, et construction des bâtiments (1771), Blondel wrote at some length on the practice of repurposing ephemeral decor. Specifically, he advocated for the reuse of materials as a matter of cost: Why not conserve certain portions of architecture, to be made readily available, composed piece by piece. . . .Let there be no mistaking, there is a certain economizing in what we propose. Having spent money once on decorations, it would not be necessary it do it again.5

To that end, Blondel proposed infrastructural solutions to facilitate the reuse of materials, including the establishment of warehouses and studios to enable the storage of material and the restoration of components. He also advocated for the construction of permanent foundations at designated sites so that temporary structures could be erected more quickly. That Blondel could speak with such specificity is not a surprise. As an accomplished designer of ephemeral festival decorations, he would have understood in a very real way not just the factors that motivated reuse but also the logistical requirements that it entailed.6 What is striking, though, is how, by including these strategies for repurposing in a treatise on building, Blondel codified reuse as a type of material and spatial change within a larger formalized body of architectural knowledge.

Controlling Costs and Conserving Material As Blondel made clear in his Cours d’architecture, the reuse of materials was driven not by environmentalist concerns (at least not in a contemporary sense) but by the need for greater expediency and economy. This was certainly true for the

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Bureau, which, throughout the eighteenth century, increasingly sought reuse as a way to mitigate the high cost of staging festivals.7 While temporary decorations were made from less durable materials like plaster and canvas, they were still expensive to construct.8 Costs varied widely depending on the size and quantity of the structures.9 For smaller celebrations with more modest decorations, like the annual commemoration of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, expenditures for décor alone ranged between 700 and 1,200 livres according to the figures given in contracts issued by the city during the 1740s and 1750s.10 This is a significant sum—especially given that, according to calculations by Jean Sgard, the laboring poor in eighteenth-century France earned only between 100 and 300 livres annually.11 For larger commemorations with more elaborate decorations, like the Lutzelburg victory celebration, the city of Paris spent some 14,212 livres, a figure that included the cost of the artificial hill.12 Spending on décor could reach staggering levels. This was the case with a pair of partially unrealized festivals planned in 1750 to mark the birth of a prince.13 Proposed for this celebration was an elaborate display staged on the Seine that included a Temple of Glory constructed of wood and plaster situated atop an artificial island fashioned from colored paper, a pair of floating artificial grottos, and triumphal arches erected on Pont Royal and the Pont Neuf. According to the Bureau’s accounting, the projected costs of decorations for these two celebrations totaled 738,533 livres. This amount was roughly equal to what the entire region of Burgundy paid to the crown around this same time as part of the vingtième—a direct tax levied on net income from industry, offices, and land.14 Certain materials used in the fabrication of temporary decorations were simply too precious to dispose of after a single use. Wood, which was commonly employed to construct the frames of ephemeral structures, is a good example. As Paul Bamford explains in his history of forest management and French naval power, forest depletion was a significant concern in France throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the middle part of the 1700s, domestic forests came under increased pressure both from efforts by the government to build up the navy and promote manufacturing and from the crown’s failure to properly administer France’s forests.15 The wars at midcentury also greatly expanded the exploitation of domestic forests, especially as rival powers like Austria used their influence to deny France access to foreign sources of timber.16 Shortages resulted: during the Seven Years’ War, domestic harvests, particularly of oak trees, simply could not keep up with the French navy’s growing demand.17 Competition over dwindling supplies of timber at this time had larger destabilizing political effects, as in Franche-Comté, where the crown’s assertion

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of authority over the region’s forestlands inspired armed rebellions.18 Nothing in the historical record suggests that municipal authorities in Paris were in direct competition with the navy or other entities over the same supplies of wood. It is clear, however, that this was a moment of dire shortage when it simply would not have been prudent to waste a resource that was vital to economic development and national security. The sheer frequency of celebrations that involved decorations in Paris during the middle of the eighteenth century compounded issues of cost and scarcity. In this period, festivities were staged to mark everything from exceptional occasions, such as royal births and marriages, to smaller annual events, such as saintly feast days. City records from 1730 to 1760 attest in numerical terms to the regularity of public commemorations. They reveal that the number of celebrations held in the capital in a single year ranged from as few as seven (in 1739) to as many as twenty-five (in 1746), with anywhere between 5 and 25 percent involving some kind of ephemeral structure. Within this period, the 1740s and 1750s represented a high watermark of sorts for festivals as France celebrated a string of major dynastic events all in quick succession.19 In 1758, the festival for the victory at Lutzelburg was one of nineteen public commemorations staged in the capital that year and the second within a month’s time that required decorations. Given the great expense and relative frequency of these celebrations as well as the ongoing crisis of scarcity, reuse offered a practical and economical solution to the various logistical challenges posed by the staging of pageants.

Physical Infrastructure The systematic reuse and repurposing of decorations was a complex operation that necessitated its own physical infrastructure. Central to the process were various facilities that the Bureau used specifically for the conservation of decorations and other materials used for public celebrations.20 Initially the city relied on more ad hoc storage sites like the Collège des Bernardins, a Cistercian school in what is now the fifth arrondissement, whose large Gothic close had been repurposed as a warehouse and studio.21 Material was also stored in the attic of the Bureau’s own offices in the Hôtel de Ville. This included objects, likely used as part of illuminations, such as armatures in the shape of dolphins and trees, as well as structural components, such as wooden planks. These components were not removed until 1760, and so vast was their quantity that the operation required no less than thirty-three carts.22

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It was only later that the storage and production of decorations was concentrated in a single dedicated facility: a warehouse located on the city ramparts immediately adjacent to the Porte Saint-Martin in what is currently the tenth arrondissement. It was here that the systematic reuse of decorations and other materials began and ended. What is known about the facility, its operations, and contents comes from a number of historical sources. Of particular significance are the records generated by the Bureau itself, including cost estimates (dévis) and contracts (marchés) as well as the registry of its deliberations and acts. Most exceptional, though, is a master inventory of decorative and structural components that was completed in August 1753. The seventy-two-page document is likely the only surviving example of its kind, and it is accompanied by more than a dozen supplementary inventories from the 1750s and 1760s. These records, which have gone unnoticed by historians until now, provide an invaluable account of the warehouse’s operations and the essential role that it played in the systematic repurposing of decorations. The Bureau decreed the establishment of the facility on December 15, 1727, but this initial order contains only vague plans for the facility. At that point, the Bureau envisioned a lean operation with only a single employee who would be responsible for conducting a regular inventory of the facility’s contents and maintaining them in good order.23 That person, the plans specify, would live in lodgings located on the premises and be compensated at a rate of 400 livres per year. Unclear from extant records is precisely when construction on the warehouse began and ended. It seems, though, that the facility was finished by the late 1720s or early 1730s, as it appears both in the Plan de Roussel (1730) (Figure 3.2) and in the Plan de Turgot (1734–9) (Figure 3.3). These maps, which offer what are likely the only pictorial representations of the storage complex, show an extensive facility situated on a long triangular plot of land that consists of several buildings and courtyards of various sizes enclosed by as wall. The representations found in these maps are confirmed by the 1753 inventory whose lists of locations confirm that the facility consisted of numerous indoor and outdoor spaces used for storage. These include several warehouses with one specifically dedicated for components constructed from cardboard (cartonage), two depots for pyrotechnic material, and an underground storage area in one of the courtyards used to store lengths of chain. Around 1753, the Bureau issued a mémoire explicitly stating the primary objectives that the facility was to serve. These underscore, once again, an economic motivation for reuse. The first objective was “le conservation des effets” or, literally, the conservation of assets. The second was “l’économie

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Figure 3.2 Paris, ses fauxbourgs et ses environs où se trouve le détail des villages, châteaux, grands chemins pavez et autres, des hauteurs, bois, vignes, terres et prez, levez géométriquement, 1730. Detail showing the warehouse [marked “Magin”] in plan. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Figure 3.3  Louis Bretez, Plan de Paris, 1739. The warehouse is situated immediately to the left of the Porte Saint-Martin. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

dans les travaux relatifs aux fêtes”—greater economy relative to the staging of festivals.24 As the inventory from 1753 and its supplements illustrate, the facility achieved these goals by conserving for future use a large and diverse collection of objects and materials. Flipping through the pages of these accounts, it is possible to get a sense of the great material wealth that the Bureau had at its disposal when it planned the victory celebration in 1758. Listed, among other things, are 5,240 metal lanterns, 80 boxes of fuses, 600 pieces of heavy timber left over from the celebration of the dauphin’s second marriage in 1747, various wooden planks measuring a total of 1,750 feet, 119 wooden trellises used to illuminate buildings, three dragons fabricated from cardboard, each measuring about 5 feet in length, 11 wooden globes, as well as dozens of plaster figures of varying heights in the form of Greek divinities, allegories, and palm trees.25 Added to this were wooden and iron parts for the boats that officers of the Bureau used

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to inspect waterborne decorations. These quantities emphasize both the sheer magnitude of the operation and the fact that virtually anything and everything was saved with the expectation that it might be used again one day. In this way, reuse constituted an exercise in anticipating the form, iconography, and material requirements of future celebrations. Maintaining control over such an enormous collection was clearly a challenge, and in its early years, the facility suffered from neglect and mismanagement. One of the most significant problems during the first decades of the magazine’s operation, as described in the 1753 mémoire, was a lack of coordination and oversight, which resulted in instances of decorations deteriorating after they were left outside in the wind and rain.26 This situation was not formally remedied until 1746 when the Bureau established stricter protocols for operations and inventory control.27 In doing so, as the 1753 mémoire explains, the city sought to ensure that everything in the magazine was “properly known, properly detailed, and properly conserved.”28 One of the most significant changes involved the storage of materials within the facility. Previously, as detailed in the same mémoire, it was common for decorations to be brought into the magazine and stored whole. Subsequently, however, the Bureau, as part of its reform efforts, required that decorations brought into the facility be broken down into their component parts with each individual piece stored according either to its material composition or to its type such that the collection could be most easily and effectively surveyed—an arrangement reflected in the organization of the inventory made in 1753.29 While the documentation does not say so explicitly, it is easy to imagine that this new system made more efficient use of the existing space and facilitated reuse by making parts more readily accessible.

Repurposing Labor and Expertise The new policies set forth by the Bureau in 1746 also address the human resources required for the proper management of the facility. While the city had initially planned for only one employee, the Bureau later established several positions to aid in the facility’s operation. By 1753, the magazine had a permanent staff of four people organized hierarchically with each having a specific set of duties to perform.30 Paramount in this system was an inspecteur-générale (inspector general) assisted by an inspecteur-particulier (inspector particular).31 Together they oversaw the daily operation of the magazine, and their main responsibilities involved conducting regular inventories and maintaining a register that

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accurately reflected the state of the collection. They were also expected to liaise with the Bureau when planning public celebrations and to provide the city with a regular accounting of the facility’s contents. The repurposing of parts was thus a material process that was managed hierarchically within the structures of municipal government. In this way, the transformation being effected was not just of old decorations into new displays but of pageant architecture into the enduring material expression of an emergent fiscal-administrative state that would ultimately outlast the monarchy. Working below them was a contrôleur (controller), a unique position that carried out a wide range of managerial, technical, and creative duties, which included working with the inspecteurs to organize the warehouses by identifying spaces where materials could be stored most efficiently. The contrôleur also directed the design and fabrication of new decorations with the Bureau covering the cost of materials related to any drawing done as part of the position.32 Accordingly, it appears that the contrôleur was usually a person with some kind of artistic or architectural training, as was the case in the 1740s and 1750s when the position was held by the architect Jean Damun.33 Finally, there was the garde-magasin (warehouse guard).34 While ranked below the other officers and paid substantially less, the position was of critical importance. As the facility’s designated gatekeeper, the garde-magasin protected the collection against theft. In addition to conducting his own regular inspections of the magazine to verify that the actual stock matched the quantities recorded in the register, the gardemagasin ensured that nothing left the warehouses without the express written consent of the inspecteurs or the Bureau’s officers. As mandated by the municipal authorities, the warehouse staff maintained extensive records that speak not only to the quantity of materials in the city’s possession but also their use over time. To supplement the inventory of 1753, accountings of the facility’s contents were made after every festival that involved decorations and these are especially valuable as they make it possible to trace histories of reuse. In the inventory made after the victory celebration in 1758, for example, larger decorations are grouped by the events for which they were initially made while smaller components are listed by materials with annotations regarding when they were made or repainted. Similarly illustrative are the ledgers used by the inspecteur-général and garde-magasin to monitor the movement of materials in and out of the warehouse. These ledgers include lists of components followed by columns where staff recorded the number of pieces that had been taken from the warehouse, their condition, and whether they had been returned, used up, or augmented in some way. Beyond ensuring proper inventory control,

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basic information like this would have been essential if the city was to have an accurate sense of an object’s lifespan and condition over successive celebrations. In addition to necessitating specific protocols and forms of infrastructure, the actual reuse and transformation of decorations required specialized labor. This work was carried out by a special group of artists and master craftsmen commissioned by the city. Collectively known as entrepreneurs (contractors), their specializations reflect the technical complexity of ephemeral festival architecture. For the festival in 1758, the decorations were executed by a team that included a painter-decorator, a carpenter, a menuisier (woodworker), a serrurier (locksmith), a peinture d’impression (painter), and an échellier (scaffolder).35 While the entrepreneurs in the city’s employ tended to vary from one festival to another, a number were recycled in the sense that they were repeatedly given commissions by the Bureau. Some were already in the city’s employ. Such was the case with the painter-decorator Pierre-Louis Dumesnil (1689–1781), who served as the city’s official painter (peintre ordinaire de la ville). In addition to creating decorations for the festival in 1758, he executed throughout the course of his tenure projects for temporary décor on nearly fifty other occasions. It was also common with larger commissions, though not in this particular case, for the city to draw upon the services of artists and artisans from other institutions in Paris such as the Opéra or the Gobelins, the royal manufactory that produced tapestries and other decorative objects. The relationship between the Bureau and the entrepreneurs was formally established through written contracts. It was also through these prosaic commercial agreements that the city codified the practice of reuse as they state precisely how those in their employ were to use and dispose of components. Typical is the contract issued by the city to a Monsieur Desormeaux, the scaffolder hired to mount the decorative wooden trellises from which lights would be hung during the illumination of the city.36 In addition to identifying the trellises to be used and the exact buildings to which they were to be affixed, the contract mandated that Desormeaux, at the conclusion of the festival, return the pieces to their customary place in the warehouse. Especially significant are the drawings that often accompanied the contracts issued to specific entrepreneurs as they make it possible to not only identify components that had been reused on a particular occasion but also to visualize their repeated usage. Consider, for instance, the trellises installed by Desormeaux on the façade of the house belonging to the Prévôt des Marchands, the official who functioned as the city’s mayor (Figure 3.4). Contractual drawings show this one piece mounted on that same building on three different occasions: first on October 1, 1758, then again

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Figure 3.4  Contractual drawing for the illumination of the house of the Prévôt des Marchands for a celebration staged on October 1, 1758, 1758. Pen and ink on paper. Archives nationales, France, K 1013, 220.

Figure 3.5  Contractual drawing for the illumination of the house of the Prévôt des Marchands for a celebration staged on October 23, 1758, 1758. Pen and ink on paper. Archives nationales, France, K 1013, 250.

a few weeks later on October 23, and finally once more in April 1759 (Figures 3.5 and 3.6). As a spatialized practice, then, reuse involved not just particular forms and materials but also specific politically significant sites. The Bureau’s records offer an equally vivid portrait of the various structural and decorative parts used to assemble the artificial hill. Contracts issued to successive carpenters and woodworkers reveal the reuse and transformation of the machine’s underlying wooden armature. In 1758, wooden components were taken from a chassis first constructed in 1755 for the celebration staged in Paris to commemorate the birth of Louis XV’s third grandson, which was itself assembled from pinewood components salvaged from older pyrotechnic machines. On that occasion, the armature served as the basis for an ephemeral temple dedicated to Lucina the Roman goddess of childbirth.37 Documents describe how pieces from that armature were subsequently used again two years later in August 1757.38

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Figure 3.6  Contractual drawing for the illumination of the house of the Prévôt des Marchands, 1759. Pen and ink on paper. Archives nationales, France, K 1014, 23.

Other forms of reuse involving these armatures also occurred: as in 1756 when the Bureau commissioned the construction of a second chassis that was an exact replica of the one built in 1755. And while documents refer to the frame as being “new,” it was in fact constructed using parts taken from older machines.39 For the decorative components, the process of reuse and transformation is detailed in the contract issued to the painter-decorator Dumesnil where the text makes frequent use of verbs like “repaint,” “retouch,” and “refresh.”40 Wooden panels used to conceal the machine’s underlying armature were repainted to give the appearance of stone while the statues of soldiers were repainted in more vivid colors. The contract also notes that a significant number of components were repurposed from a celebration given in 1756, including military trophies and several obelisks that were subsequently repainted with faux white marble. Subsequently in 1762, a new structure appears to have been fabricated using the obelisks from the artificial hill built in 1758 (Figure 3.7). The transformation of individual components, though, was not merely a matter of aesthetics. Rather, such modifications were essential to the festival’s efficacy as an instrument of royal representation. On the one hand, such interventions were likely necessary to conceal the unavoidable damage that came with repeated use and transport through the streets of Paris. On the other hand, repainting would have been necessary to protect the artifice of these displays— faux marble lent to these decorations the image of solidity while different paint schemes created the illusion of novelty. It is no surprise, then, that repainting was an important contractually mandated part of the repurposing process—as evident in this sketch attached to the contract issued to the painter-decorator Dumesnil, where annotations specify exactly how particular parts were to be painted anew (Figure 3.8/Plate 3).

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Figure 3.7  Dessein du feu d’artifice tiré . . . devant l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris le jeudi 9 septembre 1762, 1762. Pen and ink on paper. Archives nationales, France, K 1014, 151.

Figure 3.8  Contractual drawing for the feu d’artifice erected for the victory celebration staged on October 28, 1758, 1758. Pen, ink, and pencil on paper. Archives nationales, France, K 1013, 2452.

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As the decorations constructed for the festival in 1758 demonstrate, change was a practice that encompassed at varying scales material and non-material forms of reuse. At a micro level there was the actual repurposing of components and the reuse of specific sites from one festival to another while at a macroscale were the protocols and infrastructures that the city relied on repeatedly over decades to facilitate the transformation and repurposing of decorations. Through these various practices, the ephemeral became the enduring as plaster sculptures and wooden armatures were transformed from mere decorations into a veritable infrastructure for the public performance of royal power. Soon, though, this system would break down. Although the monarchy was ultimately deposed, festivals and ephemeral decorations lived on in the Revolution as instruments repurposed to serve republican power.

Archival Sources Archives nationales, Paris Series H: Administrations locales et comptabilités diverses Series K: Monuments historiques

Bibliography Bamford, Paul. Forests and French Sea Power, 1660–1789. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956. Blondel, Jacques-François. Cours d’architecture ou traité de la décoration, distribution, et construction des bâtiments, vol. II. Paris: Chez Desaint, 1771. Blondel, Jacques-François. “Architecture.” In Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project. Spring 2016 Edition. Edited by Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe. http://encyclopedie​.uchicago​.edu/. d’Aviler, Augustin-Charles. Explication des termes d’architecture . . . Paris: Chez Nicolas Langlois, 1691. Description des Festes données par la Ville de Paris à l'occasion du mariage de Madame Louise-Elisabeth de France et de Dom Philippe, Infant les vingt-neuvième et trentième août mil sept cent trente-neuf. Paris: P. Nottin, 1739. Gallet, Michel. Les Architectes parisiens du XVIIIe siècle: Dictionnaire biographique et critique. Paris: Mengès, 1995. Kwass, Michael. Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Lemaigre-Gaffier, Pauline. Administrer les Menus Plaisirs du Roi: l'État, la cour, et les spectacles dans la France des Lumières. Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2016. Matteson, Kieko. Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669–1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Monin, Eric. “Ephemeral Urban Planning Design in France during the Eighteenth Century: A Connection Between Dream and Reality.” In Conference Proceedings: Fifth Australian Urban History Planning History Conference: University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, April 13–15, edited by Christine Garnau and Stephen Hamnett, 307–331. Adelaide, S. Australia: University of South Australia, 2000. Potofsky, Allan. Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution. London: Pallgrave MacMillan, 2009. Potofsky, Allan. “Recycling the City, Paris 1760s-1800.” In The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua, and Sophie Vasset, 71–88. London: Routledge, 2015. Robiquet, Paul. De l'organisation municipale de Paris sous l'ancien régime. Paris: BergerLevrault, 1881. Rombouts, Steven A. “The Celebration of Public Events in Eighteenth-Century France.” PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1986. Saupin, Guy. “Finances, the State and the Cities in France in the Eighteenth Century.” In Taxation and Debt in the Early Modern City, edited by José Ignacio Andrés Ucendo and Michael Limberger, 111–29. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Schneider, Robert A. The Ceremonial City: Toulouse Observed, 1738–1780. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Sgard, Jean. “L’écelle des revenus,” Dix-huitième siècle 14 (1982): 425–44, https://www​ .persee​.fr​/doc​/dhs​_0070​-6760​_1982​_num​_14​_1​_1412 (accessed September 19, 2021). Sonenscher, Michael. Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the EighteenthCentury French Trades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Zysberg, André. La Monarchie des Lumières (1715–1786), vol. 5. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002.

Notes 1 This was the case not only in Paris but also in most all French towns during the eighteenth century. The records of municipal governing bodies in places like Bordeaux, Marseille, Lille, Grenoble, and Lyon attest to the large degree of local autonomy that existed with regard to the staging of festivals. There are few works either in English or in French that treat the organization of public celebrations in provincial centers. A notable exception is Robert A. Schneider’s The Ceremonial City: Toulouse Observed, 1738–1780 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

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2 While the Bureau exercised other administrative functions such as managing traffic on the Seine, it devoted a significant amount of time to planning and/or participating in various ceremonial functions or public festivals. For a more general description of the Bureau’s obligations with regard to civic rituals see Steven A. Rombouts, “The Celebration of Public Events in Eighteenth-Century France” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1986), 4–7. On the history of the Bureau and municipal government in Paris see Paul Robiquet, De l'organisation municipale de Paris sous l'ancien régime (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1881). On other logistical matters related to the staging of festivals in urban contexts see Eric Monin, “Ephemeral Urban Planning Design in France during the Eighteenth Century: A Connection between Dream and Reality,” in Conference Proceedings: Fifth Australian Urban History Planning History Conference: University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, 13–15 April, ed. Christine Garnau and Stephen Hamnett (Adelaide, S. Australia: University of South Australia, 2000), 307–31. 3 Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, Explication des termes d’architecture . . . (Paris: Chez Nicolas Langlois, 1691), 385–6. Unless otherwise indicated, this and all other translations are my own. 4 Jacques-François Blondel, “Architecture,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2016 Edition). Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, ed. http://encyclopedie​.uchicago​.edu/. 5 Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’architecture ou traité de la décoration, distribution, et construction des bâtiments, vol. II (Paris: Chez Desaint, 1771), 275. 6 Some of the significant and famous examples of ephemeral festival architecture from the eighteenth century are attributed to Blondel. These include the decorations for a festival given in Paris in 1739 to commemorate the marriage of Louis XV’s oldest daughter, which was subsequently immortalized in a lavish festival book, Description des Festes données par la Ville de Paris à l'occasion du mariage de Madame Louise-Elisabeth de France et de Dom Philippe, Infant les vingt-neuvième et trentième août mil sept cent trente-neuf (Paris: P. Nottin, 1739). 7 And this is to say nothing of the disruptive and potentially negative impact that public celebrations often had on the local economy given that the Bureau often mandated the closure of businesses for the duration of festivals. See Rombouts, “The Celebration of Public Events,” 129. 8 On the recycling and repurposing of building materials as it was practiced in the construction of more durable edifices during this period, see Allan Potofsky, “Recycling the City, Paris 1760s–1800,” in The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua, and Sophie Vasset (London: Routledge, 2015), 71–88. 9 The money that the Bureau spent on festivals and their temporary decorations likely came directly from the city’s own coffers. The greatest sources of income

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10

11

12 13 14

15

16 17 18

19

Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century at this time were patrimonial incomes (usually rents on properties and financial assets own by the city) and taxes (specifically the octroi) that were leveled on goods as they entered and exited that city. On public finance and municipalities in the ancien régime, see Guy Saupin, “Finances, the State and the Cities in France in the Eighteenth Century,” in Taxation and Debt in the Early Modern City, ed. José Ignacio Andrés Ucendo and Michael Limberger (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 111–29. These are the sums spent in 1742 and 1744, respectively. See the contracts in Archives nationales (AN), K 1006, 93 and K 1007, 12. These are, I caution, only rough figures. Determining precisely what materials cost based on the information provided by records can be tricky. These particular documents, for instance, give only a final total without distinguishing between the costs of labor or materials. And while the estimates and contracts do sometimes contain itemized lists of components, this is not always the case. Jean Sgard, “L’écelle des revenus,” Dix-huitième siècle 14 (1982): 425–44, https:// www​.persee​.fr​/doc​/dhs​_0070​-6760​_1982​_num​_14​_1​_1412 (accessed September 19, 2021). This figure is derived from the sums listed in the contracts issued by the city. See AN, K 1013, 236–47. Preparations for the festival were abruptly halted and the celebration cancelled after the expected child was born female. This amount is based on the list of expenditures given in account made by the Bureau. See AN, K 1010, 1151 and 1154. By the time that the Bureau ceased construction on the decorations, they had already spent 89,090 livres on materials and labor with any completed or partially completed decorations put into storage. AN, K 1010, 1154, 53. Calculations for the vingtième can be found in André Zysberg, La Monarchie des Lumières (1715–1786), vol. 5 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 179. On the vingtième see Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 88–9. On the growth of the French navy and forest depletion see Paul Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power, 1660–1789 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956), 95–112. Ibid., 102–3. Ibid. On the fraught politics of forestry management in early modern France see Kieko Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 20–49. These include the marriages of the dauphin in 1745 and 1747 and subsequently the eight royal births as well as the victory and peace celebrations staged during the War of Austrian Succession (1740–8) and later the Seven Years’ War.

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20 Here there is a close parallel between the Bureau and the Menus-Plaisirs. The latter operated its own system of warehouses and studios in Paris and at Versailles. On the facilities of the Menus-Plaisirs, see Pauline Lemaigre-Gaffier, Administrer les Menus Plaisirs du Roi: la Cour, l'État et les spectacles dans la France des Lumières (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2016), 260–80. 21 AN, K 1010, 1571, 2. 22 État des effets prevenant du grand grenier au dessus de la gtand salle de l’Hôtel de Ville, AN, H 2166, n.f. The documents in this particular series lack folio numbers. When possible I include the title of the document. 23 AN, H 1852, 222. 24 Mémoire sur le Magazin, AN, H 2166, n.f. 25 Inventaire des Effets deposes au Magazin du Rempart, Commencé à la fin de 1752 clos en aoust 1753. AN, H 2166, n.f. 26 Mémoire sur le Magazin, AN, H 2166, n.f. 27 For a complete set of policies and procedures established by the Bureau see AN, H 1861, 633–646. The text briefly mentions a second magazine located on the Rue Neuve Saint-Paul, but no other record of it exists as far as my research has revealed. See specifically, AN, H 1861, 640 and 646. Michael Gallet also describes a magazine for decorations on the Rue de la Mortellerie but I have not been able to locate any archival evidence that confirms its existence. See Michel Gallet, Les Architectes parisiens du XVIIIe siècle: Dictionnaire biographique et critique (Paris: Mengès, 1995), 167–8. 28 “[B]ien connus, bien détaillés, et bien conserves,” Mémoire sur le Magazin, AN, H 2166, n.f. 29 Ibid. 30 Scribbled in the margins of one document are the four different positions and what appear to be their annual salaries, which totaled 9,100 livres. See Project sur les différentes fêtes de la ville . . ., AN H 2166, n.f. 31 On the establishment of these positions, see AN, H 1861, 642 and 646, respectively. For the Bureau’s deliberations, a fuller description of the posts, and their specific qualifications see AN, H 1861, 633–46. 32 AN, H 1861, 644. 33 On Damun’s life and career see Gallet, Les Architectes parisiens, 167–8. 34 AN, H 1861, 641. 35 On the construction trades in early modern France see Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 99–129 and Allan Potofsky, Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (London: Pallgrave MacMillan, 2009), 22–62. 36 États des échelles nécessaires pour le service des illuminations, October 23, 1758. AN, K 1013, 242. 37 On the construction of the chassis see État des ouvrages des menuiserie à faire . . . pour les preparatifs du jour du feu d’artifice, signed November 29, 1755. AN, K 1012, 270.

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38 The chassis is described in État des ouvrages des menuiserie à faire . . . à l’occasion des rejouissances pour la Victoire remportée à Hastembeck, signed August 19, 1757. AN, K 1013, 110. 39 AN, K 1013, 48. 40 Ibid., 2451.

4

Botanical Fantasy in Silk Transformations of a Rococo Floral Design from England to China Mei Mei Rado

Widely circulated in the eighteenth-century world, live species and botanical images of flora occupied a prominent place in maritime expansion, colonization, trade, diplomacy, and cross-cultural exchanges. From England to Spain, European empires shared zealous efforts in collecting, classifying, and documenting plants from Asia, Africa, and America, which not only constituted a part of Enlightenment pursuits of natural history but also fulfilled imperial ambitions of controlling natural resources and governing distant lands.1 Meanwhile, in China, although the Qing Empire (1644–1911) did not send scientific expeditions or undertake taxonomic botany on a massive scale, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) engaged in parallel projects of cultivating and depicting foreign plants with the aid of Jesuit missionaries serving at his court. Imported plants grew in palaces and gardens, and court paintings featured European and South American species in naturalistic style with scientific annotations.2 These projects signified the Qing Empire’s participation in the global network of botanical exploration and imperial competition. The plants and images dispersed across this network found more popular and liberal representations in textiles and porcelains, which, as major trade goods and taste markers, acutely reflected the new visual interests in commercial, intellectual, and political trends. In these media, innovative designs often combined realistic depictions of exotic species with familiar types and fantastical inventions, which were further subjected to aesthetic stylization. For example, English silk patterns from the early to mid-eighteenth century constantly drew inspiration from imported plants and botanical illustrations;3

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and the Qing court’s porcelain and copper vessels bearing overglaze enamel designs—a recently introduced Western technique itself—incorporated foreign flowers newly populated in the imperial gardens.4 Floral patterns in early modern textiles and decorative objects encapsulated global enthusiasm for botany and exotic things, turning scientific knowledge of natural history into quotidian visual and material culture, while also offering their wearers and owners channels of topographical imagination beyond geographical boundaries. In this historical framework, my essay examines the disseminations and transformations of one mid-eighteenth-century English floral design that appears in over twenty known versions of silks in British, continental European, North American, and Chinese collections (see Appendix).5 Extant pieces were made either in England or in China, ranging from uncut lengths to fragments and whole garments. Although textile patterns often traveled far and wide, no other early modern examples have survived in such impressive quantity and variation, indicating the design’s immense popularity and widespread adaptation across cultures. There are no textual documents about the production, transmission, and uses of individual silks in this group, but object-based analysis reveals much information. This chapter begins with a contextualization of this one floral pattern in the English silk weaving center Spitalfields near London, and then discusses its diffusions as fashion in England, colonial America, and northern Europe, often via the intermediary of Chinese exports, which enabled the wider reach and further transformations of the design. Next, shifting the focus to China, it traces the very different trajectories of this pattern in court textiles and Tibetan Buddhist adornment in the Qing Empire. Close analysis of the physical properties, design features, and weaving techniques of extant pieces with divergent provenances helps illuminate the itineraries and strata of these changes that are undocumented in texts. As a visual and material agent in the global network of trade, luxury, and natural science, this intriguing design engaged the botanical imagination of users in different locales for various cultural, political, and religious purposes. Moving from one cultural context to another, the design underwent a series of changes through aesthetic translations and technical reinterpretations, while at each turn also acquiring new sets of meanings. Its metamorphoses in China, far removed from its original function, unfold a story of exoticizing and domesticating—themselves botanically related terms—that characterized early modern global encounters and exchanges.

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Wearable Floral Fashion in Europe and America The pattern in most of the surviving silks is consistent, although the colors and details vary. In some versions, the pattern appears as the mirror image of others, a fact that indicates repeated copying and reweaving of the original design. Take one length with a cream ground as an example: in a very large pattern repeat that extends horizontally across the selvedges (the fabric’s side borders) and vertically slightly longer than the width, a sinuous stem carries alternating luxuriant floral branches and smaller tendrils (Figure 4.1). The imagery may be best described as a Rococo botanical fantasy. In full, three-quarter, or profile views, the flowers appear realistic, but it is difficult to identify the specimens exactly—some resemble peony, chrysanthemum, periwinkle, green hellebore, and anemone, whereas others are purely imaginative. The oversized curling branches are ornamental, composed of Rococo motifs of rocaille-like sculpted forms, acanthus leaves, and some irregularly serrated foliage. Smaller motifs

Figure 4.1  (left) Panel from a skirt, c. 1742, Spitalfields, England. Silk plain weave brocaded with silk threads. Textile loom width: 52 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1992.244. Gift of Gertrude Sturgis Eaton via her daughter Katharine Eaton Dreier. Figure 4.2 (right) Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688–1763), design drawing for a silk, 1742, Spitalfields, England. Victoria and Albert Museum, 5980:5.

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occupying the interstices or dangling from the branches include strawberries and fringed bleeding hearts. The pattern has close affinities with those created by English silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688–1763) in the early 1740s. A prolific and successful designer in the silk weaving center of Spitalfields, Garthwaite’s legacy can be seen in a large number of her design drawings dated from the 1720s through 1756 in the collections of Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).6 In eighteenth-century Europe, the fashion of silk patterns changed completely about every decade, and since the late seventeenth century, France had long been the trendsetter. Yet in the 1740s French and English styles diverged. Moving away from heavy and fantastical foliage in the 1730s, the fresh English style was characterized by asymmetrical trailing branches and clusters of quasi-realistic flowers on an airy ground in light color. Spitalfields silks designed by Garthwaite represented this new fashion.7 Scholars have discussed how Garthwaite benefited from the vibrant botanical culture in London and incorporated newly imported species, such as Turk’s cap lily from North America and aloe from Africa, into her designs.8 However, her flower patterns in the 1740s were not straightforward realistic representations. She created a botanical fantasy by blending exotic and domestic plants as well as imaginary flora into hybrid clusters, while rearranging them with decorative motifs and a curvilinear rhythm that reflected the Rococo aesthetic. Although no extant drawing by Garthwaite matches our pattern, several of her works dated to 1742 show comparable compositions and rendering. One closely related example by her features the similar device of rocaille-style coiling leaves with a sculptured effect progressing in an alternating diagonal line, interspersed with flower heads and sprouting buds (Figure 4.2). This compositional structure, known as à un chemin suivi (“in one continuous path”), in both Figure 4.1 and Garthwaite’s drawing, was also a hallmark of English silks in the 1730s and 1740s, but it was rare in France.9 Most of the eighteenth-century examples bearing our design share a similar weave structure featuring brocaded patterning wefts bound in twill. The supplementary, discontinuous patterning weft threads have more pronounced thickness than the ground warps and wefts, thus forming an effect of slight relief. The points rentrés technique, introduced from France in the early 1730s, is employed for rendering the motifs. In this technique, wefts of different colors overlap with one another to create an optical effect of half-tone that emulates three-dimensional modeling. Based on the different loom widths (selvedge-toselvedge), color schemes, foundation weaves, and renditions of motifs, we can

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divide the extant examples into three groups—silks produced in England, in China for export, and in Chinese workshops for use in the Qing Empire. Despite some exceptions, loom width, when combined with other stylistic and technical traits, is crucial in determining the manufacturing location of eighteenthcentury silks. English dress silks varied from 48 to 53.5 centimeters and never reached the regulated half ell wide (23 inches = 58.4 centimeters).10 By contrast, Chinese silks for export or domestic use were usually wider, ranging from 58 to 78 centimeters. Other features, such as the choices of colors and weave structures and the nuances in executing motifs, betray culturally specific tastes and visual sensitivities. The first group of silks—English productions—is exemplified by three nowseparated fragments taken from one dress dated to c. the 1870s. This dress was remade from an earlier gown: one skirt length in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (see Figure 4.1); and a bodice and a skirt panel in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg. This cream silk has a plain foundation weave and measures about 52 centimeters across selvedges, consistent with the typical English loom width. English taste preferred light to dark ground colors in dress textiles. Like this silk, many other floral designs by Garthwaite and finished pieces based on her works from the 1740s also feature a white or cream ground. The weaving of this silk shows sophisticated execution of the points rentrés technique: the carefully controlled shading effect applies to major flower heads and small buds, large branches and thin vines alike. The northern colonies of British America were the most important market for Spitalfields silks outside London in the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, but floral silks woven on a drawloom—the most complex and costly type—constituted merely a small portion of exported English textiles, and even wealthy colonial elites possessed few of them.11 Katherine Eaton Dreier (Mrs. Theodore Dreier Jr.) donated both the Boston and Williamsburg fragments, which she inherited from her female ancestors in the prominent Sturgis family of Boston. The provenance record traces the dress only to her maternal grandmother, daughter of the renowned architect John Hubbard Sturgis (1834–88), but given its alteration in the 1870s, which demonstrates a continued appreciation of this silk long past its fashionable heyday, the original garment could have been in the family for much longer. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several generations of Sturgises were powerful Boston merchants in overseas trade. The family’s mercantile wealth and maritime connection during the mid-eighteenth century would have given them the access to finest English brocaded silks.

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The second group of silks share a similar soft, pastel ground color and a plain foundation weave. The light color conformed to English taste, but these pieces differ from the first group in their larger loom widths that range from 58 to 63.5 centimeters. Like the first group, several of these silks functioned as dress textiles and have survived as refashioned garments. Alteration and reuse were very common practices for precious silks during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even among the wealthiest elites. In this group, a pale blue version exists in the Fashion Museum, Bath, made as a woman’s robe à l’anglaise— an open gown with fitted bodice back—dated to c. 1775, which was likely remodeled from an earlier robe à la française featuring loose back pleats (Figure 4.3). As seen in the skirt panels that use the full width of the fabric, the silk measures 58 centimeters wide and the pattern repeat extends to 70 centimeters in the warp direction, an enlarged scale compared to the English silk in the first group. Another example with a cream ground at the V&A has survived as a man’s fancy dress coat with a built-in waistcoat; tailored around the late nineteenth century, it was probably altered from a man’s banyan with an integral waistcoat dated about 1800–10, and the silk may have originally been used for

Figure 4.3  Detail of a robe à l’anglaise (textile), c. 1740s, China. Silk plain weave brocaded with silk threads. Textile loom width: 58 cm. Bath Fashion Museum, BATMCIII.09.1.

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a woman’s gown of an earlier date.12 Compared to the Boston and Williamsburg silk, the Bath and V&A pieces feature the design in reverse and a different colorway for flowers and leaves. Notably, the large foliage is rendered in green to distinguish it from the brown rocaille motifs with which it is intertwined, and the dangling flower in profile and small buds, resembling bleeding hearts in shades of purple and white, have changed to yellow. The points rentrés technique is employed throughout, but shading has become more decorative than descriptive, a probable sign of further copying of a design directly from finished silks, instead of from the original drawing or a mise-en-carte (weaving draft that translates the design on graph paper), so the subtlety of the initial intention was misinterpreted or gradually lost. One detail in particular—the dangling flower in profile—illustrates this change: whereas the purple version in the first group (see Figure 4.1, lower-right detail) shows subtle transitions from black to dark purple and white, which clearly suggests the volume of the petals, the yellow version shows an abrupt contrast between the black outline (now deteriorated significantly due to the self-destructive dyestuff) and rather undistinguished shades of orange and bright yellow, which makes the blossom appear flat (see Figure 4.3, lower-left detail). Some of these silks have been attributed to Spitalfields,13 but their widths and visual clues clearly point to Chinese production. Several other comparable lengths, each with a secure Chinese provenance, help support this proposition. For example, a version in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a pink plain ground weave and measuring 63 centimeters in the loom width, was acquired in China in the early twentieth century.14 Like the Bath and V&A silks, this length has green foliage and brown rocaille ornaments—features that also characterize all other known versions made in China. The light pink color, rather unusual for silks used in China, betrays an adaptation to the European taste. These three silks may have been woven for English customers during the eighteenth century, but the pink length somehow remained in China until the early twentieth century. Several other silks in the third group geared toward the Qing domestic market, which will be discussed later in this chapter, also have a similar loom width of about 58–60 centimeters. Chinese woven silks with elaborate patterns reached England in very small numbers. British navigation laws and prohibition acts regulated that all silks brought back by the East India Company be reexported to continental European cities, the West Indies, and British colonies in North America.15 Nevertheless, Chinese silks were still present in Britain as a result of smuggling and private purchases of East India Company crews. Most of the imported woven pieces were

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plain silks or had small and abstract patterns; among figured silks, monochrome damask predominated. Brocaded floral silks, like those discussed above, whether reexported or individually acquired, would be made-to-order commissions, with samples provided as weaving instructions instead of regularly supplied in a large quantity. Beyond England, silks featuring the same pattern exist in a number of other European collections, including Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, and France. They vary from Spitalfields productions to Chinese export works.16 Based on published sources, their ground colors ranged from pink (now faded to grey) to blue and yellow. For instance, the record in the Kunstindustrimuseet in Oslo shows that a spectacular fancy dress made of a yellow version of the silk, probably altered from an eighteenth-century robe à la française, was registered at a costume parade at in 1933. According to Anne Kjellberg, this particular fabric reflected the Norwegian taste for “strong colors and dynamic floral pattern.”17 The Nordic countries were one of the main markets for English silks (supposedly including Chinese silks reexported by the English East India Company), and all silks worn in Norway were foreign made.18 Sweden had a silk industry, and from 1739 the Estate of the Realm permitted its subjects to dress only in fabrics made in Sweden. Nevertheless, foreign silks still entered the country in a considerable quantity, including patterned Chinese silks imported from Canton and overland through Russia.19 There is no clear information about the provenance of these extant pieces. The silks found in Britain, colonial North America, and continental Europe demonstrate how a widespread and deeply interconnected trading system created a synchronized network of fashion, engaging their widely dispersed wearers in the same global flow of botanical fascination and Rococo taste. While facilitating the spread of this fashion in the West, Chinese silks that were woven with this pattern, initially ordered by foreign merchants for export, also embarked on a very different journey in the Qing Empire.

The Botanical Imagination at the Qing Court Three variations of the same silk design, dated to the mid-eighteenth century during the Qianlong reign, have survived in the Palace Museum, Beijing, the depository of the former Qing imperial collections. Two uncut lengths, both measuring 60 centimeters in the loom width and woven with a satin foundation, feature a ground color of dark blue (shiqing 石青, lit. “slate blue”) and bright yellow (minghuang 明黃) respectively (Figure 4.4 and 4.5/Plate 4).

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Figure 4.4  Textile length, mid-to late eighteenth century, China. Silk satin weave brocaded with silk threads and gold metallic threads. Textile loom width: 60 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing, gu25478.

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Figure 4.5 (left) Textile length, mid-to-late eighteenth century, China. Silk satin weave brocaded with silk threads and gold metallic threads. Textile loom width: 60 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing, gu17952; Figure 4.6 (right) Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining, 1688–1766), “Tree Peony,” album leaf from Immortal Blossoms in an Everlasting Spring 仙萼長春, 1723–35. Ink and color on silk. 33.3 × 27.8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei, guhua 001222.

One sky blue (yuebai 月白, lit. “moon white”) version with a plain ground weave was made as a theatrical costume for a primary female role type. There are no records documenting the production and acquisition of these silks. At the eighteenth-century Qing court, they would have belonged to the category of “Western/foreign [brocaded] silks,” a group of finely woven silks with elaborate patterns that, though constituting a very small quantity among imperial textiles, possessed exceptional importance. In Qing court documents, the same nomenclature applied indistinguishably to original European imports, imitative works made by the Qing imperial workshops, and Western-style pieces that circulated in the markets and entered the palaces through various channels. The so-called Western silks, among other precious and fanciful foreign curios, appeared frequently in the gifts presented by Canton governors to the emperor.20 These silks may well have included pieces woven after foreign samples originally sent for export commissions. Chinese export silks, especially figured ones that required a drawloom, may not have necessarily been woven in the Canton

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region: Chinese officials and merchants there would have administrated and outsourced such tasks, most likely to the silk weaving centers in the regions of the lower Yangtze River. This process may have led to further distributions of the design and resulted in multiple weavings by different workshops with uneven qualities and diversified interpretations, to which the various surviving versions clearly attest. Once entering the Qing palaces, European silks or their designs transmitted into local Chinese weavings became unmoored from the time and place of their production in Europe. The Qing emperor was likely unaware of European cycles of fashion. Neither was he knowledgeable or interested in these textiles’ countries of origin, as no Qing court documents mentioned French, Italian, or English attributions. Instead, these textiles came to represent a homogenous, timeless Western style in Qing imperial eyes. The foreignness and exoticism of these textiles, coupled with extraordinary material splendor, engaged the Qing imperial imagination in two ways. First, Western silks introduced new patterning logics, visual repertoires, and weaving techniques. The Qing court’s dress and furnishing silks, inheriting the M ­ ingdynasty Chinese tradition, subscribed to an elaborate system of imperial symbolism and auspicious signs. Formal imperial dress and officials’ rank garments featured restricted motifs of cosmological elements, natural and mythical creatures, and special plants and objects that denoted the wearer’s political status. Informal wear and interior textiles were adorned with a range of stylized animals, plants, and objects carrying implications of earthly delight, virtue, and achievement. The repertoire of the Qing court’s textile patterns changed very little until the end of the dynasty. Unlike Qing court textiles, however, symbolism was never an underlying design principle in eighteenth-century European woven silks. The patterns unfolded as surface ornaments and evolved according to the capricious logic of fashion, reverberating with contemporary tastes and artistic trends. Although individual motifs might evoke particular meanings in a specific context, a floral or decorative motif rarely contained a coded message embedded in an established semiotic system of ideologies and values, and any meanings they might have conjured in European contexts would be completely opaque to Qing imperial viewers. Compositionally, European silks through the 1760s were more dynamic compared to Chinese designs, their patterns extending in serpentine movement or built up with multiple elements, while the Qing counterparts had a penchant for formulaic frameworks, such as roundels and staggered horizontal rows. Thus when the Qing emperor encountered European silks, an aesthetic and semiotic dissonance would have

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elicited a new visual and psychological experience, which in turn allowed these textiles to acquire new significance in the Qing imperial contexts. No evidence shows that European silks or Chinese weavings adopting their patterns were used for Qing imperial garments. Documents from the imperial workshops, extant objects, and visual materials reveal that Western silks at the Qing court primarily functioned as the emperor’s military regalia on two occasions with high political significance—the annual autumn hunt in the imperial resort in Rehe and the Grand Military Review.21 Both events were pivotal to maintaining the Manchu martial heritage and propagandizing Qing imperial power. Some of the most magnificent European silks with flamboyant designs and rich metallic threads were used for the Qianlong emperor’s personal military trappings, including bow cases, arrow holders, and blankets draped over his horse. Surviving examples show some of the finest French silks, for instance, a c. 1733 naturalistic silk depicting luxuriant flora resembling grape hyacinths, berries, and exotic flowers with a corn-shaped core.22 The Qing imperial workshops made these military accessories around the mid-eighteenth century at the Qianlong emperor’s behest, much later than the time in which the textiles were originally woven. The silks’ unfamiliar, fanciful patterns and shiny metallic threads would have made an impressive spectacle. In Qing imperial visual environments suffused with symbolic motifs, these splendid foreign textiles, with opaque meanings, created a zone of ornaments that operated in unprecedented but potentially powerful ways. Immediately surrounding the emperor in politically charged military events, they functioned as salient visual markers of imperial glory and helped project the emperor’s power. In addition to their dazzling visual effects, the lifelike botanical images constituted the second aspect of these foreign silks’ enchantment for the Qing monarch. The vivid depictions of exotic flowers and fruits in the French naturalistic silk and in the pieces featuring the English botanical design would have resonated with the emperor’s rising scientific interests in European plants. Jesuit missionaries serving at the Qing court were instrumental in introducing foreign species to the Qing imperial gardens and transmitting European botanical knowledge. The Jesuit library affiliated with the Beitang church in Beijing contained a substantial list of European publications on botany, agronomy, and landscape gardening, including Eden, or a Compleat Body of Gardening (1757) by English botanist John Hill (1714–75). Curious to learn more about the Western flowers illustrated in the book, Qianlong ordered the French Jesuit Michel Benoist (1715–74) to translate their names for him.23 Father Pierre-Noël Le Chéron d’Incarville (1706–57), a versatile French scientist with training

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in botany, was in charge of the landscaping of Qianlong’s European Palaces in the Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuan Ming Yuan 圓明園). D’Incarville corresponded with well-known European botanists and agriculturalists, notably French naturalist Bernard de Jussieu (1699–1777) of the Jardin du Roi (the French king’s garden).24 In 1742, he asked de Jussieu to send him a range of flower seeds of popular Mediterranean and South American species that could potentially interest Qianlong and engage him in further discussions of botany. The list included huge poppies of different colors, tulips, ranunculus, anemones, small and large nasturtiums, bush basils, lilies, among others.25 Many of the seeds later bloomed in the gardens of the European Palaces and the Jesuit church in Beijing. D’Incarville noted that the emperor was principally attracted to the flowers’ variations of colors and then the fruits.26 This focus on live plants may equally explain Qianlong’s fascination with European silk designs, which abound with colorful flora and succulent fruits. Foreign textile patterns constituted a part of the Qing imperial visual projects focusing on botanical images. There was a long native Chinese tradition of naturalistic depictions of botanical subjects, dated back to the “flowers and birds” genre in Song dynasty (960–1279) Academy painting. Flower paintings continued to flourish in Qing court art, and European pictorial techniques of perspective and three-dimensional modeling introduced by Jesuit missionaries, especially Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), injected a new lifelike quality to this genre. Adapting Western techniques to suit Chinese visual conventions that rejected dramatic shadow, Castiglione used the Chinese painting medium of ink and color on silk and invented a soft modeling style of highlights on a light surface. His undated album Xian’e changchun 仙萼長春(Immortal Blossoms in an Everlasting Spring), likely completed in the Yongzheng reign (1723–35), showcases his novel style and extraordinary skill. The sixteen leaves represent flowers ranging from tree peony, peach blossom, to cockscomb and tiger lily—all native Chinese species—and feature compositions and accurate botanical studies quite different from traditional Chinese flower paintings. Castiglione’s album dates to a period before the English botanical silk designs discussed in this article, but visual affinities between the two may well explain the successful appeal of the silks to the Qing imperial taste. For example, the graceful stem of the tree peony in Castiglione’s image (Figure 4.6) bends in the same angle as the curvilinear vines in the silks (see Figures 4.4 and 4.5/ Plate 4), and the cluster of purple lilacs in another album leaf is reminiscent of the dangling small floral buds on a trailing branch in the English design (see,

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for example, the detail in the left center in Figure 4.5/Plate 4). There are other circumstantial similarities between Garthwaite’s botanical-inspired patterns and the Qing court’s Western-style flower painting. For instance, the Turk’s cap lily, vividly represented in profile in several of Garthwaite’s drawings, closely resembles the tiger lily, also rendered in profile, in Castiglione’s painting.27 These coincidental clues in different media, from distant locales and belonging to unrelated contexts, offer a window into a large wave of botanical visual interests that permeated many parts of world, cultures, and artistic forms, linking unconnected patrons to a network of knowledge and imagery. This web in turn generated an epistemological and cognitive ground for the Qing court to search for and adopt new botanical species and images. Traveling from England to Canton and to the Qing court, our silk design is a valuable visual and material vestige of this network. During the Qianlong reign, newly commissioned images of foreign flowers documented some of the exotic species cultivated in the palace gardens and attested to the increasing imperial interests in botany beyond the Qing territories. The 1757 album Haixi jihui 海西集卉(Assorted Flowers from the West Ocean) by court painter Yu Sheng 余省 (1692–1767) provides a notable example. It depicts eight kinds of flowers—buttercup, nasturtium, white and red anemones, red and yellow ranunculus, as well as white and purple bush basils—all but one of which appeared on d’Incarville’s list for de Jussieu in 1742.28 Yu’s paintings lack the vivid three-dimensionality and dynamic compositional arrangement of Castiglione’s album, but his depiction of the entire plant, rather than a close-up of the flower, stressed empirical observation and produced images that functioned more as illustrated scientific manuals than aesthetic images. The facing page of each image bears Chinese transcription of the plant’s French name and explains the flower’s color, the features of its leaves and stems, and its fragrance. Qianlong valued foreign flowers, regarding them in a way as rare tributes from the far west. From the Qing imperial perspective, the movement and acquisition of these species glorified the Qing Empire’s superiority and far-reaching power over all other regions.29 In addition, the pictures of exotic plants complemented another two contemporary Qing imperial projects of compiling illustrated zoological manuals, which constituted part of a larger agenda of constructing the empire’s universal power through encyclopedic images. From 1750 to 1761, the Qianlong emperor commissioned court artists to compose two massive albums—Niaopu 鳥譜 (Manual of Birds) and Shoupu 獸譜 (Manual of Beasts)— consisting of hundreds of images, which combined empirical depictions of native species gathered from the vast land of the Qing territories, illustrations

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of fantastic and mythical creatures drawn from ancient Chinese classics, and images of foreign species adapted from European scientific history of animals, such as the famed publication Historiae Animalium by Swiss naturalist Conard Gessner (1516–65).30 As art historian Lai Yu-chih argues, these albums of birds and beasts signified the Qing Empire’s connection to global currents in the maritime age. Through their eclectic realistic style, which itself assimilated the European model, these albums constructed a “reality” of the empire’s possession of all things under the universe, signifying an idealized imperial order.31 Interestingly, Qianlong never commissioned encyclopedic plant images at the same grand scale of manuals of birds and beasts. The number of these images remained small. It is tempting to argue that the extraordinary Western textiles at the Qing court partially fulfilled this purpose. European floral patterns in silks contributed an array of fantastical and realistic flowers, whereas the French tapestry suite Tenture des Indes (Tapestries of the Indies), representing the wildlife of Dutch Brazil (four pieces of the cycle entered the Qing court in 1771), also added a rich spectrum of exotic plants and fauna to the Qing imperial botanical collection.32 At the Qing court, the striking English botanical patterns in the Chinese silks would have gratified the imperial visual desire for botanical imagery. Notably, as the extant examples show (see Figures 4.4 and 4.5/Plate 4), the modification of pastel ground colors in the English taste to saturated hues echoed the palette of Qing imperial costume and furnishing textiles. Bright yellow was an imperial color exclusively reserved for the emperor, empress, and high-ranking consorts, while dark blue and sky blue appeared often in formal and informal court dresses. These conventional shades would have enabled the silks to be harmoniously integrated into the Qing court’s textile visual environment. The satin weave, which brings out the maximum shine of silk threads, was also the most common ground weave in Chinese silks in general. It is not seen in the English productions or Chinese exports bearing this design and only appears in those pieces used in the Qing territories. Likewise, metallic threads (the Chinese type made of gilt paper wrapped over a silk core), not present in the original English productions and Chinese exports featuring this design, are found in several examples for the domestic Qing markets. Gold and silver added an extra dimension of luxury and magnificence. In the Qing imperial pieces, the color shading rendered in the points rentrés technique has become even more abstract and decorative compared to the export versions. The Qing court domesticated this English Rococo botanical design, but the pattern remained saliently exotic to fulfill the politically charged imperial agenda of natural science.

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Western Flowers in Tibetan Buddhist Spaces Beyond the court, this design moved further in the Qing Empire and reached as far as its subjugated and governed lands. Two versions in the collections of the Abegg-Stiftung—both coming from an unspecified Buddhist monastery in Tibet—reveal yet another context and function of silks with this design. One of them, with a deep red satin ground, contains Chinese gold threads and has four Chinese characters written in ink on the back, which are partially legible as “respect” (or “respectably”) and “receive” (Figure 4.7).33 Similar to some other Qing court textiles found in the Palace Museum, this piece is only woven as a short length with two repeats and has complete top and bottom selvedges, suggesting it is a sample weaving. The other small fragment, of an orange satin ground color, shows a triangular folding mark, indicating that it was once part of a banner for a Buddhist hall.34 Such banners are usually patchworks consisting of an assortment of small floral silks with the ends folded in a triangular shape. The Abegg silks may well have come from the Qing court as an imperial offering or a commissioned sample for review. The practice of using Western floral silks for adorning Tibetan Buddhist space originated in the Qing court and spread to other court-sponsored monasteries through imperial gifting and donation. Multiple entries in the archives of the Qing imperial workshops also record that the emperor bestowed gifts on the spiritual leaders of Tibetan Buddhism and other Tibetan dignitaries.35 These gifts often included imperial textiles, and possibly Western silks, given their special function as “imperial bequests.” This channel would have thereby helped disseminate Western textiles to remote, but prestigious, temples in Tibet. Scholars of Qing history generally share the view that Tibetan Buddhism played a major part in Qing imperial strategies in keeping control over the territories of Inner Asia, especially the regions populated by Mongols and Tibetans.36 Although this accounts for the Qing imperial devotion to Tibetan Buddhism, it does not fully explain the visual hybridity and complexity of Tibetan Buddhist art and material culture during the Qianlong period, which were not simply political by-products. The use of Western silks in Qing imperial Tibetan Buddhist spaces figured as one such hybrid component. The particular visual power of this design for religious engagement seems to have derived from its distinctive ornament rather than any specific iconographic meaning. Banners, valances, and covers made of Western floral silks for embellishing religious spaces helps convey the Buddhist doctrinal concept of zhuangyan 莊嚴, which is typically translated as “adornment.”37 Splendid display functions as a visual and material apparatus of transcendence, showing veneration to the icons

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Figure 4.7  Textile sample length, mid- to late eighteenth century, China. Silk satin weave brocaded with silk threads and gold metallic threads. Textile loom width: 57 cm. Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, inv. no. 3995 a. © Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, 2001 (photo: Christoph von Viràg).

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while bringing into existence the celestial Buddha’s realm. Beautiful flowers, as painted motifs on ceilings and beams and as woven or embroidered decorations in textiles, have long permeated Buddhist built environments to create zhuangyan and facilitate worshippers’ visualization of Buddha’s sacred realm. One such flower, the lotus blossom, is a long-standing Buddhist symbol signifying purity, wisdom, and enlightenment; most others, however, such as the stylized treasure medallion (baoxianghua 寶相花), do not possess particular Buddhist symbolism and instead contribute more generally to the creation of a blissful, divine atmosphere. In a similar way, the inclusion of opulent Western silks in the eighteenth century was unlikely to have been predicated on the flowers’ specific meanings, if any, for a Buddhist audience. Rather, exotic botanical patterns introduced a new dimension to the splendid, miraculous sites of Tibetan Buddhist spaces. Their foreignness and identification with the “West” may have also helped evoke the geographic West aligned with the Western Paradise 西方極樂世界—the Western Pure Land of Amitābha, the celestial Buddha.

Conclusion Focusing on the movements and transformations of an enduring, versatile Rococo botanical silk design, this object-centered study reconnects a group of now isolated, decontextualized textiles scattered around the world and remaps them in a transcultural historical framework. Allowing the objects to tell the stories of shifting contexts and multiple cultural perspectives, the case studies illuminate how a particular design changed its appearances, functions, and cultural evocations when moving across vast geographical regions, driven by economic, aesthetic, intellectual, political, or religious causes. These trajectories reflect some of the general forces and patterns that characterize the way things changed when set in motion in early modern global networks. Objects rarely moved in a straightforward manner or followed a linear direction. Instead, circular, multidirectional transmissions often yielded to unforeseeable outcomes and imbued objects with rich and fluid meanings. The lens of change enables a new understanding of the resilience and adaptability of eighteenth-century objects and imagery, challenging the notions of authenticity and originality bound to one specific territory and defying our modern attempts to classify things as exclusively East or West, European or Chinese. Although this chapter focuses on the eighteenth century, the changes to this silk design did not stop then. In Europe and America, the textiles in refashioned garments during the following centuries continued to shape fashion cycles or

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Figure 4.8  Textile panel, nineteenth century, China. Silk velvet brocaded with silk threads. Overall: 151 × 239 cm. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 33-844. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust.

acquired a new life in theatrical stages. In China, during the nineteenth century, this pattern was modified with native decorative grammar and became fully Sinicized. One telling example—a polychrome velvet in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art— has retained the original composition and the basic structure of the large foliage and rocaille, but the leaves and flowers are significantly stylized, and the naturalistic botanic representation has given way completely to the two-dimensional decorative schemes familiar to traditional Chinese aesthetics (Figure 4.8). In particular, all the tendrils have become formalized scrolls similar to those prevalent in late imperial Chinese textiles and porcelains. In its long and multidirectional journey, this design has inhabited manifold temporalities and continues to evolve and fascinate.

Appendix: Currently Known Silks Bearing This Design in Public Collections Britain Fashion Museum, Bath: BATMC III.09.1 Victoria & Albert Museum: T.740-1974

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National Museum of Scotland, Edinburg: A.1937.384 National Museum, Dublin: NMIDT1908.566

Continental Europe Musée des Tissus, Lyon, France: Nr. 30879 Röhsska Museum of Applied Art and Design, Gothenburg, Sweden: RKM 206.42 Kunstindustrimuseet, Oslo, Norway: recorded 1933, current whereabouts unknown Abegg-Stiftung, Riggisberg, Switzerland: 3995a, 3995b, and 5172

United States Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 1992.244 and RES.32.26 Colonial Williamsburg: 1992-85, A and B Philadelphia Museum of Art: 1928-24-3 Metropolitan Museum of Art: 2010.500.7 Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: 33-844

China The Palace Museum, Beijing: gu25478, gu17952 gu18218, and gu215980 China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou: 2842

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edited by Pascal-François Bertrand and Audrey N. Maupas, 119–38. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017. Rothstein, Nathalie. “Nine English Silks.” Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club 48, no. 1 and 2 (1964): 4–35. Rothstein, Nathalie. “Silks for the American Market.” Part II. The Connoisseur 169 (1967): 150–6. Rothstein, Nathalie. Silk Designs of the Eighteenth Century. Boston: Little Brown, 1990. Rothstein, Nathalie. Flowers-Blumen-Fleurs: English 18th-Century Silks. Riggisberg: Agegg Stiftung, 1998. Stavenow-Hidemark, Elisabet. “The Silk Industry in Sweden in the 18th Century.” In Eighteenth-Century Silks: The Industries of England and Northern Europe, edited by Regula Schorta et al., 163–72. Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2000. Teiser, Stephen F. “Ornamenting the Departed: Notes on the Language of Chinese Buddhist Ritual Texts.” Asia Major, third series 22, no. 1 (2009): 201–37. Wang, Lian-ming 王廉明. “Beijing Yesuhui Beitang huayuan zongkao: qiyuan, gongneng, jiqi yinyu 北京耶穌會北堂花園綜考：起源、功能及其隱喻”[Jesuit Beitang Garden Revisited: Origin, Function, and Political Imagery]. Fu-Jen lishi xuebao 輔仁歷史學報 [Fu Jen Historical Journal] 36 (2016): 197–244. Zhang, Xiangwen 張湘雯. “Haixi jihui: Qinggong 海西集卉：清宮院囿中的 外洋植物” [Assorted Flowers from the West Ocean: Foreign Plants in the Qing Palaces]. Gugong wenwu yuekan 故宮文物月刊 [National Palace Museum Monthly] 396 (March 2016): 106–19.

Notes 1 See Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 2 See Wang Lianming 王廉明, “Beijing Yesuhui Beitang huayuan zongkao: qiyuan, gongneng, jiqi yinyu 北京耶穌會北堂花園綜考: 起源、功能及其隱喻” [Jesuit Beitang Garden Revisited: Origin, Function, and Political Imagery], Fu-Jen lishi xuebao 輔仁歷史學報 [Fu Jen Historical Journal] 36 (2016): 197–244; Zhang Xiangwen 張湘雯, “Haixi jihui: Qinggong 海西集卉: 清宮院囿中的外洋植物” [Assorted Flowers from the West Ocean: foreign Plants in the Qing Palaces], Gugong wenwu yuekan 故宮文物月刊 [National Palace Museum Monthly] no. 396 (March 2016): 106–19; Che-bing Chiu, “Vegetal Travel: Western European Plants in the Garden,” in Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ding Ning (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015), 95–110.

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3 Clare Browne, “The Influence of Botanical Sources on Early Eighteenth-Century English Silk Design,” in Regula Schorta et al., Eighteenth-Century Silks: The Industries of England and Northern Europe (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2000), 25–38. 4 Zhang, “Haixi jihui,” 117–8. 5 For discussions on some of these silks in European and American collections, see Anna Jolly, “Une soierie chinoise d’après un dessin anglais du XVIIIe siècle,” CIETA Bulletin 80 (2003): 75–83; Anna Jolly, Seidengewebe des 18. Jahrhunderts II, Naturalismus (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2002), 184–7; Natalie Rothstein, Flowers-Blumen-Fleurs: English 18th-Century Silks (Riggisberg: Agegg Stiftung, 1998), 20. 6 On Garthwaite’s biography and designs, see Nathalie Rothstein, Silk Designs of the Eighteenth Century (Boston: Little Brown, 1990), especially 42–53, 117–247; Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), Part One, 25–103. 7 Rothstein, Silk Designs of the Eighteenth Century, 48. 8 Browne, “The Influence of Botanical Sources,” 33; Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk, 91–5. 9 Jolly, “Une soierie chinoise,” 75. 10 Natalie Rothstein, “Nine English Silks,” Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club 48, no. 1 and 2 (1964): 12. 11 Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk, 82; Nathalie Rothstein, “Silks for the American Market,” Part II, The Connoisseur 169 (1967): 155. 12 See https://collections​.vam​.ac​.uk​/item​/O140031​/coat​-unknown/. The pattern repeat is estimated as 71 centimeters based on the visible parts, which suggests a loom width of approximate 58–60 centimeters based on the known proportion of the design. 13 For example, the silks of both the Bath and V&A pieces are attributed as English in respective museums’ cataloguing information. 14 Horace J. F. Jayne, former director of the University of Pennsylvanian Museum and historian of East Asian art, acquired and donated this piece. See the object’s credit line and Jolly, “Une soierie chinoise,” 79. This piece also has an early-twentiethcentury “Made in China” stamp on the back lining. 15 Leanna Lee-Whitman, “The Silk Trade: Chinese Silks and the British East India Company,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982): 21; Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2002), 84. 16 I have not gained access to study these pieces at first hand.

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17 Anne Kjellberg, “English 18th-Century Silks in Norway,” in Schorta et al., Eighteenth-Century Silks, 143. The current whereabouts of this dress is unknown. 18 Ibid., 135–6. 19 Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark, “The Silk Industry in Sweden in the 18th Century,” in Schorta et al., Eighteenth-Century Silks, 164. 20 See The Palace Museum, Beijing, Qingdai Guangdong gongpin 清代廣東貢品 [Tributes from Guangdong to the Qing Court], exh. cat (The Palace Museum, Beijing and Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1987), 10–30. 21 See Mei Mei Rado, “Encountering Magnificence: European Silks at the Qing Court during the Eighteenth Century,” in Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ding Ning (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015), 58–75. 22 See ibid. 23 Wang, “Beijing Yesuhui Beitang huayuan zongkao,” 217. 24 Ibid., 218–21, Chiu, “Vegetal Travel,” 98. 25 For the full list in French, see Chiu, “Vegetal Travel,” 108, note 23. 26 Ibid., 98. 27 The two flowers, of North American and East Asian origin respectively, are very similar in appearance. 28 For a study of this album, see Zhang, “Haixi jihui.” Yu Sheng also created another botanical album Jiachan jianxin 嘉產薦馨 (Fine Produce and Excellent Flavors), recording the plants in the old Manchu capital of Mukden (Shenyang). 29 Yu-chih Lai, “Overview of the Network of European Botany in the Imperial Palace of Qing Dynasty via Giuseppe Castiglione’s ‘Time-telling Plant from the West,’” Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures E-Newsletter no. 6 (June 10, 2015), online publication. 30 Yu-chih Lai 賴毓芝, “Tuxiang, zhishi, yu diguo: Qinggong de shihuoji tuhui 圖像, 知識與帝國: 清宮的食火雞圖繪” [Images, Knowledge, and Empire: Depicting Cassowaries in the Qing Court], Gugong xueshu jikan 故宮學術季刊 [The National Palace Museum Research Quarterly] 29, no. 2 (2011): 1–75; Yu-chih Lai 賴毓芝, “Qinggong dui Ouzhou ziranshi tuxiang de zaizhi: yi Qianlong chao Shoupu weili 清宮對歐洲自然史圖像的再製: 以乾隆朝《獸譜》為例” [Reproducing Renaissance Naturalist Images and Knowledge at the Qianlong Court: A Study of the Album on Beasts], Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan 中央研究院近代史研究所集刊 [Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica] no. 80 (June 2013): 1–75. 31 Lai, “Tuxiang, zhishi, yu diguo,” 44–7; Lai, “Qinggong dui Ouzhou ziranshi tuxiang de zaizhi,” 48–50. 32 On these tapestries that went to the Qing court, see Mei Mei Rado, “Qing Court’s Encounters with European Tapestries: The Tenture Chinoise and Beyond,” in

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33 34 35

36 37

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Arachné: un regard critique sur l’histoire de la tapisserie, ed. Pascal-François Bertrand and Audrey N. Maupas (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017), 125–8. Jolly, Seidengewebe des 18. Jahrhunderts II, 184–5; Jolly, “Une soierie chinoise.” Jolly, Seidengewebe des 18. Jahrhunderts II, 186. For example, see Qinggong neiwufu zaobanchu dang’an zonghui, Yongzheng— Qianlong 清宮內務府造辦處檔案總匯, 雍正-乾隆 [Collected Files of the Workshops of Qing Imperial Household Department, 1723–1795] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2005, 55 vols.), facsimile, v. 18, 308–9; v. 44, 539–41; v. 47, 673–5. Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 223–62. For discussions of this concept, see Bai Huawen 白化文, “Jiang zhuangyan 講莊嚴” [On zhuangyan], Zhongguo dianji yu wenhua 中國典籍與文化 [Chinese Classics and Culture] (1996:4): 105–10; Stephen F. Teiser, “Ornamenting the Departed: Notes on the Language of Chinese Buddhist Ritual Texts,” Asia Major, third series 22, no. 1 (2009): 201–37.

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Making Marble Edible Madame de Pompadour, Friendship, and the Multiple Lives of Porcelain Susan M. Wager

In the summer of 1769, Denis Diderot dreamt of eating a marble sculpture. The first dialog in his D’Alembert’s Dream (written in 1769 but published posthumously in 1830) demonstrates his belief in philosophical materialism by means of a thought experiment. Attempting to prove to his eponymous interlocutor the material basis of life, Diderot claims that one could turn an inanimate statue into sensate flesh by “making it edible.”1 He hypothetically places a marble sculpture in a mortar, pulverizes it into a fine powder, composts the powder to yield arable soil, plants seeds, and then eats the produce. As Diderot begins to crush the marble “with great blows from the pestle,” D’Alembert interjects: “Easy there: that’s Falconet’s masterpiece.”2 D’Alembert’s objection to Diderot-the-philosophe ventriloquizes Diderot-the-art-critic, who had written effusively about Falconet’s Pygmalion and Galatea (Figure 5.1)—a depiction of marble-become-flesh—in his review of the 1763 Salon exhibition where it debuted.3 Posterity, a topic debated extensively by Diderot and Falconet, looms quietly over the dialog in D’Alembert’s Dream.4 In response to D’Alembert’s protest, Diderot defends his choice, insisting that “Falconet won’t be affected by this; the statue is paid for, and Falconet cares little about the present, and not at all about the future.”5 Falconet’s indifference notwithstanding, Diderot had ensured the work’s survival by translating it into text in his “Salon of 1763.” A visual record of the marble also would have been preserved through its reproduction in a medium associated with actually edible sculpture: the unglazed, or “biscuit,” porcelain figurines first introduced at the Vincennes (later Sèvres) manufactory in 1752.6 Biscuit’s matte white surface bore a striking resemblance to sugar paste, making these figurines a popular substitute for the edible sugar sculptures

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Figure 5.1  Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1763, marble, 59.5 × 40 × 29 cm. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Photograph licensed under a CC0 License.

Figure 5.2  Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Pygmalion and Galatea, c. 1780, porcelain, 44.6 × 27.4 × 21.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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used in eighteenth-century dessert presentations.7 Falconet became director of sculpture at the manufactory in 1757, and reproductions after Pygmalion were among the biscuit figurines issued during his tenure (Figure 5.2).8 Falconet’s first foray into porcelain design was in 1755, when he was recruited by Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (chief mistress to King Louis XV from 1745 until her death in 1764) to help design a set of nineteen biscuit porcelain figurines representing Pompadour as the personification of Friendship (Figures 5.3 and 5.4/Plate 5).9 When Pompadour died, four of the biscuit figurines were found in an armoire in her Paris hôtel (townhouse).10 As virtually identical casts from a single mold, the Friendship figurines were not meant to stay together, stashed away in a cabinet. Their homogeneity and chasteness are at odds with the iconoclasm and fluidity staged by Diderot’s thought experiment. Instead of form yielding organically to the transformative power of nature, in the figures form was repeated semi-mechanically to produce cold, lifeless replicants. Indeed, it is unlikely that Diderot would have deemed a porcelain figurine suitable for his thought experiment. When D’Alembert objects to the

Figure 5.3 Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Madame de Pompadour in the Guise of Friendship of the Heart, 1755, soft-paste biscuit porcelain, 26.5 × 15.5 × 11.3 cm. Sèvres, Manufacture et musée nationaux. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 5.4 Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Friendship (L’Amitié), 1755, biscuit porcelain, 30.5 cm (height including base). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan. Photo: Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum

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cannibalizing of Falconet’s sculpture, he suggests that a work by the sculptor Jean-Baptiste d’Huez be sacrificed in its place.11 In his review of the Salon of 1769 (the year he penned D’Alembert’s Dream) Diderot wrote that a work by D’Huez had “as much force as one of those porcelain or sugar figures that decorate our tabletops.”12 D’Huez’s work, in other words, lacked the animation neatly doubled by the mechanical force at the center of the thought experiment. Falconet’s Pygmalion, in contrast, was a virtuosic demonstration of artistic force. Just as Pygmalion (through divine intervention) brings Galatea to life in Ovid’s mythological tale, Falconet—by all accounts including Diderot’s—brought both Pygmalion and Galatea to life through the power of his own sculptural touch.13 Sugar and porcelain figurines—Diderot’s benchmark for measuring D’Huez’s lack of “force”—were produced semi-mechanically through molds; they were divorced from the animating power of an original artist’s touch. If they promised posterity it was through material multiplication, not conservation in a molecular economy. Casting also implied a finality of form inhospitable to Diderot’s fantasy of mutable sculpture. The excess Friendship figurines in Pompadour’s armoire dramatize this multiplication and fixity. They invoke the concept of “thingness,” as theorized by Bill Brown: “we begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.”14 Pompadour disseminated the other fifteen figurines as gifts over at least five years, apparently individualizing them through the addition of specially made mounts or pedestals. With her death, the circuit of distribution closed. The potential movement of the figurines was arrested; they became surplus, even waste. Instead of confronting this thingness, scholars have relied on iconography and biography to interpret the Friendship figurines, looking through rather than at them: as iconographic expressions tied to Pompadour’s transition from lover to friend of King Louis XV, or as skeuomorphic derivatives of the marble sculptures she commissioned around the time of that transition. By attending to the thingness of the leftovers—situating them more precisely in the context of their commission, production, and exchange—we can begin to delineate the contours of an artistic project that challenges assumptions about Pompadour’s patronage and the material meanings of porcelain. While the objects examined here—in contrast with many others explored in this volume—embodied change at a profoundly local level, biscuit porcelain

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figures were a product of the global eighteenth century. They were invented amid efforts to staunch the flow of wealth from France to Asia, a key source of porcelain in an era of expanded trade. They found favor on dessert tables as a substitute for sugar sculpture, a “subtlety” made possible by the brutal labor of enslaved peoples on plantations in the Caribbean.15 On European tables, sugar manifested colonialist command over transatlantic space, over laboring bodies, and over matter: the complex refinery process transformed crude cane into delicate sugar, or “white gold”—a term also used to refer to porcelain in early modern Europe. The European quest for porcelain was similarly fueled by a nationalist desire to demonstrate a kind of alchemical power over earth: the ability to transform base clay into an elegant, sonorous, semi-translucent substance through the blazing heat of the fiery kiln. One surviving example of the Friendship figurines, now in the Bowes Museum, bears the scar of this unpredictable and contingent process—a firing crack running through its central axis. The figure was finished after firing, suggesting that it was meant for public consumption, even if it perhaps was one of the four left behind in Pompadour’s armoire. Like the blows of Diderot’s pestle, the fissure in the figure’s structural integrity was part of a material transformation marking not an end but a rebirth. In the eighteenth-century imagination porcelain was protean, malleable, and constantly in motion. This fluidity and iconoclasm existed not because of, but in opposition to, the force of singular authorship that turned Diderot’s/ Falconet’s marble into flesh.

The Fluidity of Porcelain In early modern Europe, “true” hard-paste porcelain was a highly sought-after commodity. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was imported in droves from East Asia; European attempts at replicating the unique substance— achieved in China by the seventh century—were not successful until the first quarter of the eighteenth century.16 Compared to low-fired European ceramics, porcelain was quite strong—it could hold hot beverages without breaking—yet delicate and lightweight. Its natural whiteness signified purity, and its semitranslucence and sonorous response to tapping gave it an almost ethereal quality.17 The European passion for porcelain was fueled in part by its mysterious origins in China, a land so distant it seemed to exist outside of time, in a remote,

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unreachable past.18 In France, the primary sources of information about porcelain production were letters written in 1712 and 1722 by the Père d’Entrecolles, a Jesuit missionary stationed in China.19 D’Entrecolles’s account interested not only porcelain manufacturers but also collectors, connoisseurs, and members of the learned public. It was adapted and reprinted in encyclopedia entries, treatises, and even sale catalogs.20 Although limited by a lack of technological knowledge, D’Entrecolles carefully and methodically relays his observations and experiences in an attempt to dispel popular misconceptions about porcelain, even as his letters construct a mythology of their own. He conjures, for example, the drama of approaching the center of porcelain manufacture Jingdezhen, or “King-te-ching,” by night, when it looks like “a vast city entirely engulfed by flames or a large furnace with several vents.”21 He wonders if its position in a mountain enclosure “creates a location peculiar to works of porcelain,” as if to suggest that the topology of the city itself were a giant kiln out of which porcelain magically emerged. This theory is not so different from the origin story of the Chinese god of porcelain, also recounted by D’Entrecolles: a desperate worker, unable to fulfill an exacting commission from the emperor, flung himself into a blazing kiln, and the kiln yielded porcelain of unprecedented beauty.22 The transformative power of fire was an important element in porcelain’s mythology: it was through the blazing heat of the kiln that crude, raw earth was turned into a beautiful, artificial substance.23 The inexplicable magic of this process contributed to porcelain’s ambiguous position between nature and artifice. Porcelain was closely associated with shells—the porcellana shell was an immediate point of reference for Europeans—and its material composition was a subject of interest for mineralogists and geologists, even after the mysteries of its production were solved.24 For eighteenth-century collectors and connoisseurs, porcelain fascinated for its protean fluidity, moving not only between nature and artifice but also between physical states and temporalities. A sense of fluidity or vagueness registered in artistic discourse on porcelain, particularly through use of the term flou (literally “blurry” or “blurriness”). Writers sometimes described particular pieces of porcelain as having a “tact flou” or simply “flou,” a term strictly attached to the context of painting and defined as a softness of touch with the brush.25 When applied to porcelain, flou usually referred to the colors or painted decoration applied to the surface—one writer praised the “coloris flou” of ancient Japanese porcelain; another the “flou” of celadon porcelain’s “noble and inimitable color.”26 On at least one occasion, however, the connoisseur Edmé-François Gersaint used the term in reference to a white porcelain teapot, which, he asserted, “could satisfy the hardest to please,

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through the beauty of its whiteness, and le flou that is found there.”27 Here, flou does not describe the application of color, but rather the porcelain’s intrinsic whiteness, as if the material itself appeared inchoate, hazy, or indistinct. Flou was used to modify both hue and touch, evoking an indeterminacy between the visual and tactile.28 In all usages of the term flou, moreover, its odd syntactical character—an adverb employed as a noun—suggests that porcelain, even when still, seemed to be constantly in motion, in a state of becoming. If Diderot looked at marble sculpture and imagined its physical transformation into flesh, perhaps others saw in porcelain sculpture a protean mutability, one that aligns with eighteenthcentury conceptions of porcelain’s physical instability. Porcelain was understood to occupy an intermediate position between ceramic and glass: it was an “imperfect vitrification, a demi-vitrification, because of which it is less transparent than glass, and more [transparent] than simple fired clay.”29 The characterization of true porcelain as “white and demi-transparent” similarly suggests an oscillation between opacity and transparency, between being seen and being seen through.30 Porcelain was also temporally fluid. The Vincennes/Sèvres manufactory was at the cutting edge of technological development within France. It employed chemists from the Académie royale des sciences and presented its findings during the Académie’s regular conferences. And yet the substance these academicians sought to emulate was understood as extremely old, as having been invented in China by the year 442 CE, if not earlier.31 Asian porcelain often was identified simply as “ancient porcelain,” even if produced in the modern period—a slippage that conflated the spatial distance of its place of origin with temporal distance.32 In the French imagination, porcelain was simultaneously new and old. Porcelain seemed to slip fluidly between nature and artifice, glass and ceramic, and antiquity and modernity. It also was semiotically fluid—it served as a substitute for other materials, particularly in the context of the dining table. Its protean nature was marshaled to evoke silver—designs for tureens and other serving wares often originated in silver—and sugar, alternately or synchronously.33 The tradition of decorating princely feast tables with sugar, almond paste, or other edible sculpture dated to at least the Renaissance.34 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the once princely custom of dining among edible sculpture had spread to a broader array of classes, often in the form of the so-called garden dessert: fruit and sweets served on a long, mirrored plateau decorated to look like a formal garden or landscape (Figure 5.5). Gravel pathways, parterres, flowers, statues, and trees were confected out of dyed sugar and candies.35 The vulnerability of sugar to moisture and other environmental

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Figure 5.5  Sieur Gilliers, Le cannameliste français, ou, Nouvelle instruction pour ceux qui désirent d'apprendre l'office, 1751, p. 116, plate 5. Photo: Typ 715.51.426. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

contingencies increasingly made sugar sculpture seem impractical. Sets of glazed porcelain figurines were developed at Meissen by the 1730s to accompany dinner services. Porcelain presented an attractive, reusable substitute; it also added slippage between edible and inedible to the garden dessert’s playful erosion of the distinction between nature and artifice. That porcelain could stand in for sugar reminds us that the appeal of edible sculpture lay primarily in its spectacular transience—“created for the magic moment and not meant to endure or be collected.”36 The visual magnificence of the display undoubtedly was heightened by the knowledge that its form was temporary—the mutability of its organic substance meant that the sculpture would degrade, dissolve, fracture, and soon disappear. Although porcelain was not organic, it was associated with mutability and fluidity, as we have seen.

Friendship Porcelain’s fluidity is at odds with the fixity assigned to Madame de Pompadour’s porcelain Friendship figurines in modern scholarship. Since the publication of

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a highly influential article by Katherine K. Gordon in 1968, the figurines have been understood as part of a monolithic “iconographic program” conceived by Pompadour and her circle of artists to announce the redefinition of her sexual relationship with the king as a pure, platonic love or friendship.37 The shift occurred around 1750, when Pompadour commissioned Jean-Baptiste Pigalle to carve two marble sculptures: Friendship (Figure 5.6) and The Education of Love; only the former was completed. Pigalle’s Friendship draws on Cesare Ripa’s Iconology, an emblem book first published in 1593 and translated into French in 1636 (Figure 5.7). The marble depicts a woman dressed loosely in a robe, standing in front of a tree trunk, presumably Ripa’s “elm encircled with a gnarled vine.” A garland of “interlaced myrtle leaves and pomegranate flowers” symbolizing “the union of passions” appears by her bare feet—an emblem of her willingness to suffer “in the service of her friend.”38 The intended pendant statue, The Education of Love, likely would have depicted Venus and Mercury—surrogates for Pompadour and the king—and Cupid, the embodiment of their carnal love. Displayed together, these marbles would have conveyed that the couple’s physical love had been civilized or “educated,” transcending into the platonic love of friendship.39

Figure 5.6  Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Friendship (in the Guise of Madame de Pompadour), 1750–1753, marble, 166.5 × 62.8 × 55.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 5.7 Cesare Ripa, Iconologie, ou Explication nouvelle de plusieurs images, emblèmes et autres figures hyérogliphiques des vertus, des vices, des arts, des sciences . . . Tirée des recherches et des figures de César Ripa, moralisées par J. Baudoin, 1644, p. 2. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg. Photo: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg/ Iconologie/2.

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In the years following this commission, Pompadour continued to generate works of art around the theme of friendship in a range of media: prints, engraved gems, and porcelain figurines. The Vincennes/Sèvres Friendship figurines draw on Ripa, but in a more straightforward and less graceful way than Pigalle’s marble. The loosely draped female figure (her features said to be those of Pompadour) twists in contrapposto, tilting her head to her right along the diagonal formed by her weightbearing left leg. Part of a tree trunk protrudes from behind her, but its iconographic labor is largely displaced onto the truncated classical column positioned more prominently beside her. She extends both arms toward the column, upon which she places a heart-shaped object. Pigalle had achieved a more poetic and graceful interpretation of the heart attribute: his marble Friendship leans gracefully forward, gesturing with one hand toward her chest—the location of her actual heart—and reaching out with the other, palm upturned as if to offer the heart’s contents to an imaginary interlocutor. Gordon and others have read the less nuanced porcelain figurine as an extension of the original marble commission, fixing its meaning unilaterally to the 1750 decommissioning of Pompadour’s sexual body.40 The transition from lover to friend was undoubtedly a consequential moment in Pompadour’s life, but friendship had a broader set of meanings in the eighteenth century. The topic was of interest to several writers, including Louis de Sacy and Madame de Lambert; Pompadour owned treatises on friendship by both.41 Although these authors accounted for the possibility of love transitioning into friendship, their overwhelming focus was on friendship outside of love.42 (The treatises also portrayed friendship as unbefitting of an effective ruler, because it requires flexibility or weakness.43 One might wonder why Pompadour would identify the king with friendship at a moment when she was trying to shore up her position in his good graces.) It is also worth noting that Pompadour initiated the porcelain commission in 1755; five years had passed since her body had officially lost its sexual power.44 Her friendship with the king continued, of course, but he was not her only friend. Pompadour developed other important relationships in this period, including one with the Vincennes/Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory. She supported the manufactory’s technological and artistic endeavors, notably the innovation of biscuit porcelain.45

Biscuit Porcelain The ambition to replicate true porcelain at Vincennes/Sèvres was not realized until the late 1760s, but in the meantime the French manufactory produced what

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is known as soft-paste porcelain. Soft-paste was naturally white like hard-paste, but it fired at a lower temperature and was thus not as heat-resistant.46 Despite its status as a substitute, the soft-paste porcelain produced at Vincennes/Sèvres quickly became prized for its own material qualities as well as its decoration. It also contributed a new layer of semiotic fluidity to conceptions of porcelain, particularly after the innovation of biscuit. During its early years, the Vincennes Manufactory produced flowers, useful wares, and sculptural figurines. These figurines often depicted mythological, allegorical, or genre subjects and were, like those produced at the rival Meissen Manufactory, covered in enamel glaze. Around 1750–1, Vincennes seems to have become dissatisfied with its sculptural production, which consequently came to a halt.47 Scholars have attributed this rupture to the loss of crispness caused by the thickly applied enamel glaze, which collected in crevices and muddled the details of the figures.48 These problems could be avoided by leaving the porcelain unglazed, in its “biscuit” state.49 Biscuit figurines were put into production by 1752, and by 1755 they had overtaken their enameled predecessors in sales.50 Among the first and most popular were those based on François Boucher’s designs of “country children” playfully performing various rustic activities, such as hoeing or gathering eggs.51 The development of biscuit is usually associated with a slightly later period at the manufactory: the years between 1757 and 1766, when Falconet served as director of sculpture. Falconet’s arrival is often seen as an important turning point in the history of Vincennes/Sèvres, when biscuit figurines came closest to the artistic status of sculpture.52 This assumption is based in part on a superficial resemblance between biscuit porcelain and marble. While it is true that this parallel would later be consciously exploited, and that Falconet eventually would reproduce some of his own marble sculptures in biscuit porcelain, marble was not the medium’s original referent.

Connoisseurs and Non-connoisseurs When biscuit figurines first appeared, they were compared not with marble but with sugar figures. In contrast with the shiny and luminous surfaces of glazed figurines, the matte white surfaces of biscuit figures made them a deceptively convincing substitute for sugar paste. The thematic content of the early biscuit figures—the fleetingness of youth, play, and love—would have underscored the fragility of the porcelain and the ephemeral sweet pleasures of the dessert course.

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Almost immediately after Boucher’s biscuit children were introduced, one critic, the Abbé Leblanc, highlighted their appeal to “non-connoisseurs” as a perfect substitute for sugar sculpture in the dessert service.53 Leblanc also identified their more serious, artistic appeal to connoisseurs of painting and sculpture. The innovation of biscuit challenged assumptions about authorship and process. The actual process of casting porcelain figurines was extraordinarily drawn out: between the artist’s original design and the finished porcelain cast, a long series of recursive steps and hands intervened. Because of the delicacy of porcelain, figures could not be cast as a single unit.54 An initial clay model was chopped into a dozen or more pieces, from which individual molds were produced. Plaster casts were pulled from each partial mold, then assembled to re-create the original model. The re-assembled plaster model was preserved for reference, and the process was repeated to make a second plaster cast. The second cast was dissected, in different places than before, and a new set of molds was created from its parts. These molds were used to cast the porcelain components of the figurine. Once assembled, the unified figure was retouched by hand, using the first plaster model as a guide. In the end, that first plaster model effectively becomes the “original” to which the porcelain figurine—far removed from the original artist’s conception—refers.55 The form of the figurine has been determined not by the inventive force or spirit of the original artist, but rather impressed onto the material piecemeal by inanimate molds. Despite the reproductive, semi-mechanical status of Boucher’s biscuit figurines, Leblanc wrote that they were “like works of sculpture.” By “sculpture,” he referred not to a superficial resemblance to marble, but to the process of sculpting, of an artist shaping matter—whether marble, clay, or wax—to make visible his mental design or conception, or “the spirit of the original.” The sharp, crisp details of biscuit conjured the freshness and vivacity of an original work of art, before it has been attenuated through multiple phases of translation, fragmentation, and reassemblage. By seeming to elide those phases and the various hands that intervened to execute them, biscuit porcelain had the effect of shoring up singular authorship, hence its appeal to connoisseurs.56

Pompadour’s Patronage Pompadour initiated her Friendship commission in 1755—a moment when the medium was still new. As a stand-alone work, her figure likely was not intended specifically for the dessert table. Nor did the project appear to cultivate the

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authorial effect described by Le Blanc. In the connoisseurial discourse that continues to inform art-historical ideas about originality, the spiritual force of a work of art diminishes as one moves further away from the original conception. In mechanical reproduction, the original design needs to be fully developed, so that it can be accurately captured by the mold and equally distributed across each cast. Pompadour took measures to exacerbate the distance between conception and execution of the model. She asked Boucher to create the original drawing, but instead of using the manufactory’s own modelers to adapt Boucher’s touch into a three-dimensional model, she unconventionally brought in another well-known artist, Falconet, to create the model. Are we to recognize Boucher’s hand or Falconet’s hand as the source of the porcelain casts? The sculptor was certainly better trained for the three-dimensional medium, so why not have Falconet design the original drawing? Falconet himself found it loathsome to have to create sculptures based on designs by painters; in his extensive writings on the paragone, or contest between painting and sculpture, he argued that sculptors required competence in the skills of the painter, but that the reverse was not true.57 Boucher’s original drawing is lost, but its existence can be deduced from a print by Louis-Marin Bonnet (Figure 5.8). The figural attitude and overall composition are quite similar to those of the porcelain figurine, with the exception of the tree, which is more visible in the two-dimensional medium. Comparison between the print and porcelain registers the difference between Boucher’s and Falconet’s characteristic styles: in translating the drawing, Falconet tamed the drama and volume of the figure’s turbulent drapery, making her seem slightly more slender, elongated, and elegant. The fire of Boucher’s lively mind and hand are packaged for reproduction in three dimensions by Falconet. Instead of consolidating authorship, Pompadour diffused it.58 The project was shaped by Pompadour’s desire not for one singular cast, but multiples. The goal was not to claim descendance from a single author’s original conception, but to resolve that conception into a fully realized form in order to yield a mold. Just as Diderot’s dream of destroying Falconet’s marble was necessary to imagine mutable form, destruction of Falconet’s clay model was necessary to multiply form in the “mutable” material of porcelain. As it turns out, the porcelain manufactory would assign the author function to Pompadour herself. The Friendship figurines might have lacked the authorial force of an original marble, but the particular circumstances of the commission inflected the mechanically reproductive process with a tincture of human mutability.

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Figure 5.8 Louis-Marin Bonnet, after François Boucher, Offrande sincère (Sincere Offering), before 1767, red chalk in crayon manner, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Gifts, Interrupted The fact that four figurines were left over in Pompadour’s estate indicates that the decision to produce nineteen porcelain figurines must have been, to some degree, arbitrary. It has been suggested that nineteen was the number required to wear out the mold.59 It is easy to imagine Pompadour requesting that the mold be used up, as she made a similar request for singularity in a commission from the Gobelins tapestry manufactory.60 The stipulation undermines the manufactory’s commercial ambitions. If Pompadour had requested only fifteen (or however many she thought she needed), then the manufactory could have re-used the mold to produce and sell more copies of the sculpture. Instead, the commercial nature of mechanical reproduction is rendered private and personal. Each of the nineteen figures is simultaneously multiple and singular. Each cast (beyond the quantity requested by Pompadour) was made not to multiply the first, but to guarantee the set’s uniqueness by exhausting the mold’s creative potential. The figures were completed by the end of December 1755 and are listed in the manufactory’s sales register.61 Although originally commissioned as a purchase, however, the manufactory refused payment, noting: “The figures of Friendship

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ordered by Madame de Pompadour being her portrait, the company believed it should not receive payment for [it] and entreats Madame de Pompadour to find it satisfactory.”62 The manufactory used this commission as an opportunity to express gratitude for Pompadour’s support of its ambitious efforts to make France a leader in porcelain production. To acknowledge that motivation would be to undermine the purity of the gift; the accounting entry attributes it instead to the very personal, almost indexical, nature of the sculptural project.63 The gesture maps the tradition of portraiture as a private phenomenon onto the commercial structure of the manufactory. As Katie Scott has observed, portraits traditionally existed outside the world of commodities—they were not given values in estate inventories and artists frequently gave portraits as gifts to the sitter as tokens of friendship.64 In the eighteenth century, as portraits were increasingly integrated into the commercial print market, concerns arose over who should profit from the marketing of portraits.65 Legal arguments turned on the question of whether a portraitist is a mechanical imitator of a person’s exact likeness, or an artist who contributed his or her own creativity and intellect to the work. If the former, then the true author was the sitter, whose physiognomy generated the portrait, like wax imprinted with the face of a corpse in death masks. Like the portrait authored indexically by its sitter, the quantity of figurines comprising Pompadour’s singular set was determined by the number of impressions needed to wear out the mold. The nineteen figurines were an organic extension of the mold—an index of its creative potential. The manufactory thus gave Pompadour two gifts: first, the creation of the mold and its potential to produce figurines; second, the destruction of the mold and the quantity of figurines needed to accomplish that. Both gifts are attributed to the personal nature of the commission. The mold was imprinted by her face; the nineteen figurines were imprinted by the lifespan of the mold. Pompadour becomes author not only of the mold shaped by her likeness, but of the nineteen figurines shaped by the mold. Little is known about how or when Pompadour customized the fifteen figurines, nor to whom she gave them. In early January 1756, she ordered a gold square base for “a porcelain figure”—probably for the king—and four others in gilt bronze “for similar figures.”66 More than a year later, in June 1757, Pompadour gave an example mounted on a gilt-bronze base to Nicolas René Berryer, lieutenant général du police.67 In December 1760 she acquired two pedestals from Sèvres for Friendship figures; one of these might be the example now in Hartford (see Figure 5.4/Plate 5).68 The Hartford version sits atop a square porcelain pedestal, echoing the square base of the figure itself. In contrast with the bare figurine, the base is elaborately adorned with the bleu lapis ground

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color overlaid with vermiculé or honeycomb gilding and ornamented with four different trophies in reserves: a shield with two hearts pierced by an arrow; two doves kissing beside a treatise on friendship; a copy of the play Anacreon; and musical symbols.69 The overdetermined precision of these trophies suggests that the meaning of the figurine itself was not fixed. The Hartford Friendship is the only known surviving mounted example. One unmounted figure is in the Bowes Museum, and another is in the museum at Sèvres (see Figure 5.3).70 The conceptual fluidity of biscuit porcelain suggests that the figurines were primed to take on many new material meanings, independent of any connection to the durable marble sculptures that held firm at Bellevue, nor to the physical body that had failed Pompadour sexually and would only continue to deteriorate, as all bodies do. It was not the fetishized sensuousness of porcelain, nor specifically its resemblance to marble that Pompadour exploited, but rather its openness to conjugation. The four figurines inventoried in Pompadour’s armoire signal a breakdown in the gift economy for which she conceived the project. But rather than look through them for discursive answers found outside of the armoire, we should press on their status as leftovers, excess, waste. Four figurines remained because they were a pure gift, produced and received in the absence of calculation, balance, and reciprocity. They were never meant to stay still as surplus value or capital, but to keep moving, flowing within a gift economy.71 Gifts, Derrida tells us, disrupt the logos.72 When we try to use logos—the discourse and reason of iconology, biography, authorship—to interpret the Friendship figurines, it fails us. The nineteen figurines were not tethered to a single event in Pompadour’s history or a single textual or authorial origin; as gifts they were perpetually in motion. Pompadour had nothing to gain by keeping them; they could only derive value by flowing outward, away from her, as gifts sent into a future as fluid and changeable as the medium itself. If it is difficult to assess the material legacy of Pompadour in biscuit porcelain, the historical legacy should be obvious. It might have been Falconet who elevated the sculptural status of porcelain, but it was Boucher’s designs that set him on that path, and it was Pompadour—friend to painter, sculptor, and manufactory—who put them together.

Bibliography Adamson, Glenn. “The Real in the Rococo.” In Rethinking the Baroque, edited by Helen Hills, 143–57. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.

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Préaud, Tamara, and Antoine d’Albis. La Porcelaine de Vincennes. Paris: Adam Biro, 1991. Préaud, Tamara, and Guilhem Scherf. La Manufacture des Lumières: La Sculpture à Sèvres de Louis XV à la Révolution. Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2015. Pullins, David. “The Individual’s Triumph: The Eighteenth-Century Consolidation of Authorship and Art Historiography.” Journal of Art Historiography 16 (2017): 1–26. Réaumur, René-Antoine Ferchault de. “Second mémoire sur la porcelaine.” Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences (November 12, 1729): 325–44. Reed, Marcia. The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015. Ripa, Cesare. Iconologie, ou Explication nouvelle de plusieurs images, emblèmes et autres figures hyérogliphiques des vertus, des vices, des arts, des sciences . . . Tirée des recherches et des figures de César Ripa, desseignées et gravées par Jacques de Bie, et moralisées par J. Baudoin. Paris: Baudoin, 1636. Roth, Linda H., and Clare Le Corbeiller. French Eighteenth-Century Porcelain at the Wadsworth Atheneum: The J. Pierpont Morgan Collection. Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 2000. Sadde, Guilhem. “Jean-Claude Duplessis; la liberté du style rocaille.” L’Estampille / L’Objet d’Art 392 (2004): 42–51. Schwartz, Selma. “A Feast for the Eyes: 18th-Century Documents for the Creation of a Dessert Table.” The International Ceramics Fair and Seminar (London, 2000): 28–35. Scott, Katie. Becoming Property: Art, Theory, and Law in Early Modern France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Sheriff, Mary D. Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in EighteenthCentury France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Smentek, Kristel. Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East. New York: Frick Collection, 2007. Standen, Edith A. “Madame de Pompadour’s Gobelins Tapestries.” In Studies in the History of Art, vol. 42, Conservation Research: Studies of Fifteenth- to NineteenthCentury Tapestry, edited by Lotus Stack, 15–34. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1993. Standen, Edith A. “Country Children: Some Enfants de Boucher in Gobelins Tapestry.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 29 (1994): 111–33. Tillerot, Isabelle. “Du ‘tact flou et séduisant des couleurs’ chez Jullienne ou l’art de marier tableaux, porcelaines, laques, statuettes, meubles et autres effets.” In Corrélations: les objets du décor au siècle des lumières, edited by Anne Perrin Khelissa, 149–81. Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2015. Weinshenker, Anne Betty. Falconet: His Writings and His Friend Diderot. Geneva: Droz, 1966. Wunsch, Oliver. “Diderot and the Materiality of Posterity.” Early Modern French Studies 40, no. 1 (2018): 63–78.

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Notes 1 Denis Diderot, “Entretien entre D’Alembert et Diderot,” in Œuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 2: Philosophie, ed. J. Assézat (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 2:105–21. 2 Ibid., 2:107–8. 3 Denis Diderot, “Salon de 1763,” in Salons: Textes choisis, présentés, établis et annotés par Michel Delon, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 96. 4 See Denis Diderot, “Le pour et le contre ou lettres sur la postérité,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 15, ed. Emita Hill, Roland Mortier and Raymond Trousson (Paris: Hermann, 1986). See also Oliver Wunsch, “Diderot and the Materiality of Posterity,” Early Modern French Studies 40, no. 1 (2018): 63–78. 5 Diderot, “Entretien,” 108. 6 The Manufacture de Vincennes moved to Sèvres in 1756 and was renamed the Manufacture royale de porcelaine de Sèvres. When discussing the long history of the manufactory, I will refer to it as Vincennes/Sèvres. 7 See Ivan Day, “Sculpture for the Eighteenth-Century Garden Dessert,” in Food in the Arts: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1998, ed. Harlan Walker (Devon: Prospect Books, 1999), 57–66; Selma Schwartz, “A Feast for the Eyes: 18th-Century Documents for the Creation of a Dessert Table,” The International Ceramics Fair and Seminar (London, 2000): 28–35. 8 One might also note the parallel between the miniaturized scale of porcelain figurines, and the diminution Falconet’s life-size sculpture appears to undergo in Diderot’s thought experiment. For Diderot to smash it with a pestle, it would presumably be small enough to fit in a mortar. For the scale of porcelain figures and their dialectical relationship with large-scale sculpture, see Anne Perrin Khelissa, “Menace sur le ‘grand’ art. Le peuple des magots et des statuettes en porcelaine au siècle des Lumières,” in Penser le ‘petit’ de l’Antiquité au premier XXe siècle. Approches textuelles et pratiques de la miniaturisation artistique, ed. Sophie Duhem, Estelle Galbois and Anne Perrin Khelissa (Lyon: Fage, 2017), 88–98. 9 See Tamara Préaud and Antoine d’Albis, La Porcelaine de Vincennes (Paris: Éditions Adam Biro, 1991), cat. no. 40. 10 Jean Cordey, Inventaire des biens de Madame de Pompadour, rédigé après son décès (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles Français, 1939), cat. no. 434. 11 Diderot, “Entretien,” 108. 12 Denis Diderot, “Salon de 1769,” in Œuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 10: Salons (Paris: Brière, 1821), 3:152. 13 See especially Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 14 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4.

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15 I employ this term deliberately to invoke Kara Walker’s brilliant “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” (2014), a site-specific installation centered on a monumental sugar-coated sculpture of a black woman-sphinx in the former Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn. 16 See Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). 17 See Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan, ed., The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). 18 Ibid., 7. 19 “Lettre du Père d’Entrecolles, Missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus au Père Orry de la même Compagnie . . .. A Jao tcheou ce 1 Septembre 1712,” in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères, par quelques Missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus, vol. 12 (Paris: Nicolas Le Clerc, 1717), 253–365; “Lettre du Père D’Entrecolles, Missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus . . .. A Kim te tchim le 25 Janvier 1722,” in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères, par quelques Missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus, vol. 16 (Paris: Nicolas Le Clerc, 1724), 318–67. 20 See, for example, Edmé-François Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné des bijoux, porcelaines, bronzes, lacqs, lustres de cristal de roche et de porcelaine . . . provenans de la Succession de M. Angran, Vicomte de Fonspertuis (Paris: Prault et Barrois, 1747), 20–6. 21 Lettres édifiantes, 12:267. 22 Ibid., 12:346–7. 23 For the association between porcelain production and alchemy, see Glenn Adamson, “Rethinking the Arcanum: Porcelain, Secrecy, and the Eighteenth-Century Culture of Invention,” in Cavanaugh and Yonan, ed., Cultural Aesthetics, 19–38. 24 Michael E. Yonan, “Igneous Architecture: Porcelain, Natural Philosophy, and the Rococo cabinet chinois,” in Cavanaugh and Yonan, ed., Cultural Aesthetics, 65–85. For porcelain and shells, see Kristel Smentek, Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East (New York: Frick Collection, 2007); Glenn Adamson, “The Real in the Rococo,” in Rethinking the Baroque, ed. Helen Hills (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 143–57. 25 In the 1762 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française the entry for “flou” reads: “Sort of adverb[;] Painting Term. One says, Peindre flou, to mean, Paint in a soft, light, liquid [noyée] manner, as opposed to hard and dry Painting.” Dictionnaires d’autrefois, The ARTFL Project, University of Chicago, 2021 (https://artfl​-project​.uchicago​.edu​/ content​/dictionnaires​-dautrefois). 26 C. F. Julliot, Catalogue raisonné, faisant partie des Effets de feu M. de Jullienne (Paris: Vente, 1767), 8; C. F. Julliot, Catalogue raisonné, faisant partie des Effets de feu M. Randon de Boisset (Paris: Musier, 1777), 66. 27 Gersaint, Fonspertuis, 98.

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28 For “tact flou” see Julliot, Jullienne, 6. See also Isabelle Tillerot, “Du ‘tact flou et séduisant des couleurs’ chez Jullienne ou l’art de marier tableaux, porcelaines, laques, statuettes, meubles et autres effets,” in Corrélations: les objets du décor au siècle des lumières, ed. Anne Perrin Khelissa (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2015), 149–81. 29 René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, “Second mémoire sur la porcelaine,” Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences, November 12, 1729, 326. 30 Fortuné Barthélemy de Félice, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire universel raisonné des connoissances (Yverdon: [F.B. de Félice], 1774), 34:595–6. 31 Lettres édifiantes, 12:258. 32 When referring to Asian porcelain, Gersaint sometimes specified “ancien Japon” or “ancienne porcelaine de la Chine” but at other times, he simply wrote “ancienne Porcelaine.” See also Tamara Préaud, “Sèvres, la Chine et les ‘chinoiseries’ au XVIIIe siècle,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 47 (1989): 39–52. 33 See Guilhem Sadde, “Jean-Claude Duplessis; la liberté du style rocaille,” L’Estampille / L’Objet d’Art 392 (2004): 42–51. 34 See Marcia Reed, ed., The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015). 35 Day, “Sculpture,” 59–60. 36 Reed, Edible Monument, 14. 37 Katherine K. Gordon “Madame de Pompadour, Pigalle, and the Iconography of Friendship,” The Art Bulletin 50, no. 3 (1968): 249–62. 38 Cesare Ripa, Iconologie, ou Explication nouvelle de plusieurs images, emblèmes et autres figures hyérogliphiques des vertus, des vices, des arts, des sciences . . . Tirée des recherches et des figures de César Ripa, desseignées et gravées par Jacques de Bie, et moralisées par J. Baudoin (Paris: Baudoin, 1636), 1:11–12. 39 Gordon, “Madame de Pompadour,” passim. 40 Gordon’s article continues to inform nearly every art-historical discussion of the figurines. See, for example, Tamara Préaud, “Les révolutions de la mode: madame de Pompadour et la sculpture en céramique,” in Madame de Pompadour et les arts, ed. Xavier Salmon (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), 479–83, cat. no. 207; Linda H. Roth and Clare Le Corbeiller, French Eighteenth-Century Porcelain at the Wadsworth Atheneum: The J. Pierpont Morgan Collection (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 2000), cat. no. 176; Howard Coutts, “No Sex Please, We’re Just Good Friends!,” The Bowes Museum’s Blog, December 7, 2015, https://thebowesmuseum​ .wordpress​.com​/2015​/12​/07​/no​-sex​-please​-were​-just​-good​-friends/. 41 See Jean-Thomas Hérissant, Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feue Madame la marquise de Pompadour, dame du palais de la reine (Paris: Hérissant, 1765), nn. 184, 2275. She also owned Pernety’s Les Conseils de l’Amitié (1746) and De Bouflers’ De l’Amitié (1761). A recent dissertation disputes Gordon’s claim that the iconography of

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friendship in eighteenth-century art began and ended with Madame de Pompadour. See Emily T. Everhart, “The Power of Friendship: Amity and Politics in European Art and Gardens of the Eighteenth Century,” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2015). Madame de Lambert compares love negatively to friendship but concedes that virtuous love between a man and woman can become friendship. Madame la marquise de Lambert, Traité de l’amitié (La Haye: J. Neaulme, 1746), 9; 21–2; 53–4. Louis de Sacy, Traité de l’amitié (La Haye: Louïs & Henry Van Dole, 1703), 185–89; Lambert, Traité, 26–7. This is not to say that the relationship between friendship and love did not continue to interest Pompadour. In 1754 she commissioned L’Amour et l’amitié from Pigalle. See Préaud, “Les révolutions,” 482. See Antoine d’Albis, “Methods of Manufacturing Porcelain in France in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in Discovering the Secrets of Soft-Paste Porcelain at The Saint-Cloud Manufactory, ca. 1690–1766, ed. Bertrand Rondot (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 1999), 35–42. Tamara Préaud, “La sculpture à Vincennes ou l’invention du biscuit,” Sèvres: Revue de la Société des Amis du Musée National de Céramique 1 (1992): 30–7. Préaud, “La sculpture,” 34; Préaud and D’Albis, Porcelaine de Vincennes, 89–90. In his memoir, the painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier took credit for the idea to produce biscuit figurines, although the veracity of this claim has been called into question. Jean-Jacques Bachelier, Mémoire historique sur la manufacture nationale de porcelaine de France, rédigé en 1781, ed. Gustave Gouellain (Paris: Raphael Simon, 1878). Préaud, “La sculpture,” 33–5. See also Antoine d’Albis, Traité de la porcelaine de Sèvres (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2003), 115. See Edith Standen, “Country Children: Some Enfants de Boucher in Gobelins Tapestry,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 29 (1994): 111–33; Françoise Joulie, “Le rôle de François Boucher à la manufacture de Vincennes,” Sèvres: Revue de la Société des Amis du Musée National de Céramique 13 (2004): 33–52. For a recent example, see Suzanne L. Marchand, Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 146–7. Jean Bernard Le Blanc, Observations sur les ouvrages de MM. de l’Académie de Peinture et de sculpture, exposés au Sallon du Louvre, en l’Année 1753 (1753), 52. See Véronique Milande and Fabien Perronnet, “La sculpture et ses techniques à Sèvres,” in La Manufacture des Lumières: La sculpture à Sèvres de Louis XV à la Révolution, ed. Tamara Préaud and Guilhem Scherf (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2015), 33–41. Ibid., 39. For a fuller treatment of the connoisseurial appeal of biscuit, see Susan M. Wager, “Boucher’s Spirit: Authorship, Invention, and the Force of Porcelain,” The Art Bulletin 104, no. 3 (2022): 55–83.

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57 Étienne-Maurice Falconet, “Quelques idées qu’une gazette allemande a occasionnées,” in Œuvres d’Étienne Falconet, statuaire (Lausanne: La Société Typographique, 1781), 158. Falconet laments having to work from designs by Boucher or under the direction of the painter Charles Coypel. See also Anne Betty Weinshenker, Falconet: His Writings and His Friend Diderot (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 58–82; Françoise Joulie and Selma Schwartz, “Falconet dans l’orbite de Boucher ou une amicale admiration,” in Falconet à Sèvres 1757–1766, ou l’art de plaire, ed. MarieNoëlle Pinot de Villechenon (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), 48. 58 See David Pullins, “The Individual’s Triumph: The Eighteenth-Century Consolidation of Authorship and Art Historiography,” Journal of Art Historiography 16 (2017): 1–26. 59 Préaud, “Les révolutions,” 489. 60 See Edith A. Standen, “Madame de Pompadour’s Gobelins Tapestries,” Studies in the History of Art, vol. 42, Conservation Research: Studies of Fifteenth- to Nineteenth-Century Tapestry, ed. Lotus Stack (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1993): 15–34. 61 Archives de la manufacture de Sèvres, série Vy, entry dated December 29, 1755. “Présents. A Mad de Pompadour. 19. Figures de l’amitié en biscuit.” 62 Marginal note in the sales register, cited by Roth and Le Corbeiller, French Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, 356nn11–12. 63 See Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (New York: Vintage Books, 2019), 11. 64 Katie Scott, Becoming Property: Art, Theory, and Law in Early Modern France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), esp. chapter three. 65 See Scott, Becoming Property, 211–39. 66 Louis Courajod, ed. Livre-journal de Lazare Duvaux, marchand-bijoutier ordinaire du roy, 1748–1758 (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles Français, 1873), 2:269, n. 2369. 67 Ibid., 2:318, n. 2799. 68 Cited in Roth and Le Corbeiller, French Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, 355. 69 Roth and Le Corbeiller, French Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, 355. Anacreon is a reference to the birth of the future Louis XVI. 70 The Bowes example has a large firing crack running down its center. One more surviving example, from the Firestone Collection, was sold at Christie’s, New York in March 1991. 71 As Hyde writes, “the gift must always move.” When property is removed from circulation or kept as capital for future returns, then it has lost its status as gift. Hyde, The Gift, 4. 72 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 35.

6

The Sovereign Betel in EighteenthCentury Bengal and Bihar1 Zirwat Chowdhury

Londoners learned fairly quickly about the East India Company’s revolutionary defeat in 1757 of the young nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, at the Battle of Plassey (Palashi). But they had to wait a few more years to gaze upon a visual commemoration of that event. At Vauxhall Gardens, artist Francis Hayman installed four paintings on the subject of Britain’s triumphs during the Seven Years’ War, including that at Plassey, from 1761 to 1764. British accounts generally attributed the victory at Plassey to the military acumen of the leader of the Company’s forces, Robert Clive. Yet, as historians contend, it relied also on the nawab’s loss of support on the battlefield from one of his generals, Mir Jafar, one of the many subjects dismayed at his conduct and rule.1 When the Company and the nawab’s detractors forged an alliance against him on the eve of Plassey, they also agreed on Mir Jafar as his successor. As two surviving modelli and a textual description from a guidebook indicate, Hayman’s now lost painting of the meeting between Clive and Mir Jafar (Figure 6.1) did not quite portray a scene of triumph. Instead, as commentators noted, it hinted with its rendering of Mir Jafar’s hesitant gesture of submission and conciliation at the uncertainty underlying this new relationship between the Company and the nawab of Bengal.2 Indeed, before Hayman had installed his painting at Vauxhall in c. 1762–3, Mir Jafar, too, was deposed for his alleged failures as a ruler and, more importantly, for his inability to meet the payments of compensation, tribute, and military protection that he had agreed to make to the Company. I am grateful to Lyneise Williams for her feedback on this chapter, and especially to the editors of the volume and Amy Torbert for their incisive comments on its earlier drafts. My thanks to the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies for funding support for a Research Assistant for this project, and to Cynthia Fang for her excellent assistance with the research. Special thanks to Wendy Bellion for her support with two of the image licenses, and to Radhika Gupta, without whose generous assistance it would have been impossible to secure the permission for Figure 6.5.

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Figure 6.1  Francis Hayman, Modello for Robert Clive Meeting with Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, c. 1760. Oil on canvas. Photo: National Portrait Gallery. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Mir Jafar was replaced by his son-in-law, Mir Qasim, but not for long. News of Mir Qasim’s deposal following his rebellion against the Company, especially his massacre of all but one in a cohort of Company residents in Patna (then Azimabad), including several high-ranking officials, in October 1763 arrived in London within a few months of its occurrence, and soon after the installation of Hayman’s painting of Plassey. Contrary to its conventional assessment by scholars as the inaugural scene of British imperialism in South Asia, Hayman’s painting conveyed a sense of the Company’s unstable footing in Bengal, even as its rendering of the glimmering gold costume of Mir Jafar also materialized the region’s financial allure and promise.3 Hayman’s painting, however, omitted a crucial detail in its representation of this purported scene of submission, conciliation, and treaty: a pandan or betel box (for a representative example, see Figure 6.2). This was a noteworthy erasure given that in the years surrounding Plassey, Londoners could not stop talking about betel, a word frequently identified in eighteenthcentury travel glossaries and trade dictionaries as a food item offered as a gesture of hospitality and protection in South Asia.4 This English word (Figure 6.3) was

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Figure 6.2  Pandan, c. 1780, Lucknow. Enameled gilded silver. Photo: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Figure 6.3  Betel quid, betel leaf, and betel or areca nut. Photo: Sarwath Chowdhury. Reproduced by permission of Sarwath Chowdhury.

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Figure 6.4  Now unknown artist, Jahangir Seated on the Balcony of a Terrace with his son, Prince Khurram, and a Falconer, c. 1615. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Photo: Rijksmuseum. © H. Rowen Bequest, Hilversum.

used interchangeably to refer to two ingredients that came from a different plant and tree respectively: the betel leaf, and the betel or areca nut. To add to this semantic confusion, the two were typically eaten together in the form of a betel quid, a comestible made by folding the betel leaf into a cone-like container for the betel nut and some additional ingredients. Betel quid was widely consumed across South and Southeast Asia as a breath sweetener and digestive.5 Indeed, offerings or chewing of betel quid, as well as displays of betel-nut crackers and pandans, are common in scenes of pleasure or courtly ceremony in Mughal, Rajput, and wider South Asian painting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6 For example, in a painting from c. 1615 of the Mughal emperor Jahangir and his son prince Khurram with a falconer (Figure 6.4/Plate 6), the pandan in the foreground is partially uncovered to reveal the beautifully folded betel quid that it holds. The pairing of pandan and betel quid in such paintings illuminates the former’s artifactual importance in transforming the latter from a natural object into a courtly one. Drawing on the semantic slippage of betel as quid, leaf, and nut in the English language, this essay retells the early history of British coloniality in South

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Asia through the lens of betel’s singular transformation, indeed, its material disintegration, from a powerful courtly matter into a lucrative commodity in the mid-eighteenth century. Weaving together episodes from Mughal histories and Company archives with examples of Mughal painting and material culture that pertain to the gifting and taxing of betel, it illuminates how this wrapped comestible materialized with its refreshing qualities and portability both the vulnerability and continuing power of the Mughal court in the critical years of Mughal imperial exile. The essay further highlights how the courtly form of the betel was stripped of its value, as the Company recognized and prioritized the betel nut’s profitability in the South Asian inland trade. In so doing, it demonstrates how the betel’s “physical as well as semiotic alterations”—to borrow an expression from the volume’s editors—from quid to nut materialized the changing relations of sovereignty in eighteenth-century Bengal and Bihar as the Company forged an extractive colonial economy in these years through its entwined cultures of debt and insatiable commerce.6

The Courtly Betel Comparing betel consumption with that of tobacco and wine for its pervasiveness and habit-forming qualities, English dictionaries and glossaries variously exclaimed that “Indians are perpetually chewing” it, and that “the rich and the poor are never without their box of betel” (see Figure 6.2).8 The digestive and mildly intoxicating qualities of betel not only made it widely consumed but also gave it critical import within the social lives of many South and Southeast Asians. In his foundational study of how the production and consumption of sugar was both constitutive and a product of industrial capitalist modernity, Sidney Mintz coined the expression “sociality of ingestion” in order to describe food’s transformative cultural power. Challenging the understanding of food consumption primarily in terms of subsistence or taste, he emphasizes instead the forms of sociality engendered by what we eat and how we eat it. In this vein, he translates industrial—specifically, plantation-grown—sugar’s expedient provision of sustenance into the time management necessary for creating the forms of productive labor at the heart of capitalism.9 By discerning in the material forms of edible commodities the social processes that both produce and are produced by them, Mintz’s concept offers an instructive method for tracing betel’s materialization of sovereign relations within Bengal’s eighteenth-century political landscape.

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Within the historiography of the British Empire, the Battle of Plassey continues to mark the Company’s transformation into an imperial power within South Asia, even though scholars have demonstrated that, however powerful and ascendant, the Company remained one of multiple contenders within this arena.10 Indeed, sovereignty still emanated from and was mapped in relation to the corporeal and courtly body of the Mughal emperor, no matter its desecration through acts of regicide and other forms of violence across the eighteenth century.11 Which person embodied such sovereignty, however, was increasingly a matter of contention. Emperor Shah Alam II (r. 1759–1806), known for granting the keys to the treasury of Bengal to the Company in 1765, was in the initial years after Plassey a precarious contender to the Mughal throne. This seat of power was already weakened from violent succession disputes, as well as the invasions of Delhi in 1739 and 1757 by the Persian king, Nadir Shah, and Afghan chief, Ahmad Shah Durrani, respectively. Known by the name of Ali Gauhar or as the “Shahzada” (as he is named in Company records) prior to his recognition as emperor, this prospective heir to the Mughal throne fled the imperial capital on the eve of his father’s assassination in 1759. He then traveled to Bihar and Bengal, where Mir Jafar was still nawab, in the hope that commanding the fealty and revenues of this prosperous region could pave his way to the imperial throne.12 Behind Ali Gauhar’s flight from Delhi was a dissimulating gift to him of a pandan by the powerful kingmaker in Delhi, Imad-ul-Mulk.13 Because it nourished the health of those who consumed it, a betel embodied the benefactor’s protection of the recipient to whom it was gifted. By chewing betel, ingesting some of its juices, and spitting out the rest, the recipient selectively incorporated such protection into their person. Imad-ul-Mulk’s gift, however, concealed the ambush that awaited the prince. Although the prince was able to escape, this instance of failed courtly ceremony diminished the betel’s value in materializing sovereign relations. After receiving the news of his father’s assassination in 1759, the exiled prince proclaimed himself emperor at his camp amid his journey to Bengal.14 Between such self-declaration and the formal recognition of a new sovereign, however, was an imperial worldmaking through ceremony that still evaded the aspiring emperor. Mughal imperial proclamations required, in the name of the new emperor, both the reading of the khutbah (or Friday sermon) and the minting of coin across the imperial landscape. The Mughals’ creation of an imperial administration through the incorporation of both allies and former foes meant that such proclamation required the endorsement—voluntary, acquiescent, or coerced—of the emperor’s diverse realm of courtiers. While

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the prince-emperor galvanized many in Bihar and Bengal into supporting him, several among them did so in the hope that he would challenge the escalating injustices of the Company and Mir Jafar. Early glimmers of military success by the prince-emperor were, however, soon followed by defeat at the hands of the Company and nawab’s joint military forces from mid-1760 to early 1761.15 In the intervening months, the Company installed a new nawab, Mir Qasim. Together, they opted to await confirmation from whomever prevailed as kingmaker in Delhi, before reading the khutbah in Shah Alam II’s name.16 It was not until the powerful Afghan chief Ahmad Shah Durrani signaled his recognition of Shah Alam II as the new emperor that the Company and Mir Qasim finally did the same in June 1761.17 Hosting the prince-emperor at an entertainment for nowruz, or the Persian New Year, a few months earlier in April 1761, Mir Qasim had the honor of receiving a gift of betel from him.18 It is likely that such a presentation would have included a pandan like the one that appears next to the nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daula, in a mid-eighteenth-century portrait of his meeting with two officers (Figure 6.5). The painting is attributed to Nidha Mal, a prominent artist

Figure 6.5  Attributed to Nidha Mal, Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, Receiving Two Officers in a Garden, mid-eighteenth century. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Photo: National Museum, New Delhi. © National Museum, New Delhi.

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from the Mughal imperial atelier who, like (and possibly with) Shah Alam II, fled the conflicts ravaging Delhi.19 Portraits of both Shah Alam II and Mir Qasim (Figure 6.6) from these years show them seated before pandans. Typically circular, rectangular, or octagonal in shape and often dome-like in their structure, pandans take on the appearance of miniaturized architecture. Pandans made for more elite patrons, such as one from Awadh in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (see Figure 6.2), were often fabricated from enameled silver. The surfaces of courtly pandans were, like examples of Mughal architecture, typically decorated with idealized forms of flora and fauna meant to evoke the realm of paradise.20 As Stephen Markel has noted, Mughal ornamental forms became more densely spaced over the course of the eighteenth century, and more intricately interwoven in their emulation within, for example, the workshops of Awadh. This neighboring and rival court of the nawab of Bengal held a more prominent role within the eighteenth-century Mughal imperial bureaucracy, including the power of directing imperial workshops at one time.21 The LACMA pandan comprises a saucer and lid in the shape of an ogival dome, both made of enameled silver. The dome evokes the meeting of sky and

Figure 6.6  Attributed to or after Dip Chand, Portrait of Mir Qasim, Nawab of Bengal, c. 1760–3. Opaque watercolor on paper. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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land in its portrayal of a celestial realm. It is capped with an enameled finial, from which descends, over a dark blue ground, a band of sheath-like leaves, followed by garlands of idealized flowers. The base of the dome brings us down to the ground, where a gathering of symmetrically organized birds is interspersed across a landscape of lush, brightly colored vegetation of poppies, dianthus, lilies, and acanthus leaves. On opening the lid, one would have found a spread of betel quid on the plate, another ornamental garden of orderly flora and birds. The pandan’s domed-shape is echoed, both as mise-en-abime and as projection, by the circular frame at the plate’s center: a canopy-like rosette with a blue ground that is surrounded by densely packed leaves, flowers, and birds. The crushed, painted glass with which this pandan is enameled gives its surface, especially the blue sky–like dome and canopy, a luminous quality. Two green, leaf-like bands that circle the edge of the plate and the rosette at its center mirror the folded conical shape of the betel quid (see Figure 6.3). The ubiquitous betel, transported from its natural environment to the enclosure of the pandan’s celestial garden, emerged from it elegantly folded and transformed into courtly matter.22 Materializing the space of a court with its architectural miniaturization and portability, a pandan could serve as a powerful courtly object for an emperor who had not only been displaced from the official site of his sovereignty but who was now also visiting a courtier who refused to acknowledge his imperial status.23 Refreshing the breath and attractively staining red the lips and teeth of those who chewed it, betel quid was desirable as a social lubricant that eased conversation. Although the nawab of Bengal was still a representative of the emperor within the Mughal imperial administration, this office and region had, since the early eighteenth century, increasingly declared its autonomy from Delhi. As Mughal emperors knew well, acts of incorporation into Mughal administration rarely suppressed the tendency of courtiers to turn recalcitrant and rebellious.24 Whereas scholars of Mughal, and more broadly Indo-Persian kingship, have focused on robes of honor as the materials for imperial incorporation, betel’s salience at darbars, or formal courtly audiences, foregrounds the gesture of ongoing conversation as an integral component of this courtly relation. Indeed, if robes of honor enacted incorporation, then the gifting of betel with its cleansing of breath and slow, gentle chewing promised the commencement and continuation of conversation. The importance of an aesthetic of refreshment to such conversation is underscored by the decorative ornamental program of the pandan from Awadh (see Figure 6.2). The interplay of the incised silver surface and the bulbous,

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enameled figures of birds and foliage endows the garden scenery with a quality of liveliness. The pandan’s surface also reverberates with a playful echoing of forms, such as that at the top of the plate where a peacock’s tail gently transforms into the bushy leaf neighboring it. The open mouths of some of the mirroring birds, such as those on the base of the dome, amplify this effect of conversation as a reorganization of form through its repetition. The pandan’s proliferation of chatty birds calls to mind the twelfth-century Persian poet Attar’s poem The Conference of the Birds, which was well known to eighteenth-century IndoPersian audiences. The poem’s mysticism about a quest for oneness with the divine appears here to be transformed into formalist acts of endless visual pleasure. With his offering of betel, the prince-emperor may have sought to initiate such ceaseless conversation with the nawab of Bengal.

Indebted to the Company It was not only the prince-emperor, however, who sought recognition through his gift of betel in 1761. Given the prince-emperor’s multiple invasions of Bengal in previous months, Mir Qasim’s exchanges with the Company prior to the reading of the khutbah underscore not only his concern about the visitor’s intentions toward him but also his concerted efforts to discourage the reading of the khutbah in Shah Alam II’s name. While the Company withheld its support from the prince-emperor, it nonetheless encouraged the nawab to maintain communication with him. Yet, a closer look at the events surrounding the betel ceremony illuminates why the new nawab might himself have been interested in entering into conversation with the emperor in early 1761. Histories of the British Empire, echoing the rhetoric of Company records and British public discourse from that decade, emphasize the Company’s multiple revolutions in Bengal: its deposing of Siraj-ud-Daula and replacement of him with Mir Jafar in 1757; then replacement of the latter with Mir Qasim in 1760; and, finally, its restoration of Mir Jafar as nawab in 1763. Even if the authority of the Company’s military forces had been responsible for placing Mir Qasim on the seat of Bengal, the latter still needed the formal—documentary and ceremonial—authorization of the Mughal emperor. In other words, whatever the Company’s revolutionary force, it could not circumvent the authority of the Mughal emperor, especially when the likely claimant to that title was present nearby. Although such recognitions required authorization with an imperial farman, or grant—which the nawab eventually received from the emperor in September 1761—the prince-emperor’s

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offering of betel provided some legitimacy for Mir Qasim’s title beyond that authorized by the Company. The nawab’s reorientation toward the emperor within a triangulation of power shared with the Company is especially of note when viewed alongside the continuing financial burdens imposed on him by the Company. Mir Qasim’s appointment by the Company as nawab was made on the understanding that he would expediently secure the payments on which the Company had pronounced his predecessor Mir Jafar delinquent. He promptly designated the revenues of the regions of Midnapur, Burdwan, and Chittagong to the Company at his succession as indemnity for Siraj-ud-Daula’s earlier attacks on it.25 In addition, Mir Qasim also submitted a collection of jewels in payment of his outstanding debt in December 1760 shortly after his accession. The exchange of letters that ensued between him and the governor of Bengal, Henry Vansittart (Clive’s successor), in the following months reveals their disagreement about the value of the jewels, a topic to which historians have paid little attention. At first, the Company deferred agreeing to the value of the jewels until after they had been opened in front of and assessed by a trusted interlocutor. Once this was done and the jewels found to be of adequate value, the Company pronounced that it was unlikely that their full value could be realized at auction. In other words, against Mir Qasim’s repeated insistence that the jewels were equivalent in value to the sum owed, the Company responded after nearly seven months of delay that the jewels were not of sufficient value to close out the Nawab’s debt.26 It was on the heels of the protracted debate with the Company about the payment of his debt that the nawab celebrated the onset of a new year by accepting the prince-emperor’s offering of betel. The Company’s prolongation and escalation of its financial demands on the nawab, as Sudipta Sen has astutely noted, were an early instantiation of the extractive relation with South Asian rulers that both safeguarded its presence and enabled its military expansion in the region.27 As Robert Travers has observed in his examination of the policies of Warren Hastings, governor-general in the 1770s and 1780s, the Company deployed murky distinctions between grants and treaties in order to insert its military within Indian polities over which it desired to ascend against the wishes of the Crown.28 Natasha Eaton has similarly outlined the contours of debt and coercion within the Company’s cultures of art patronage, especially its gifting of portraits, in the 1780s. In her study of artistic patronage in Awadh and Karnataka, she has shown that British artists who had traveled to India from the 1770s to 1790s in pursuit of artistic and financial success were in many instances sent by the Company to provincial courts with

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which it had established military treaties. Offering protection to the nawabs in exchange for payment, the Company regularly pronounced insufficient payment from its clients for the wars it claimed to wage in their names but in practice conducted for its own territorial expansion. Sending artists to these courts with the (coercive) expectation that the nawabs would commission artworks from them, the Company then seized revenue holdings (tankhwahs) from them in the event of a failure to pay. The Company thus set into motion forms of repayment that not only further indebted its clients, but also threw the artists (who rarely received payment) into debt in the process.29 In February 1762, over a year after the nawab first submitted his jewels, the Company finally acknowledged receipt of the full payment of his debt. Debt repayment, however, did not result in the settling of his account with the Company, which promptly identified new debts from him. Already in the closing months of 1761, the nawab and Company were in conversation about mounting an attack on the rival Marathas in Cuttack, a town in neighboring Orissa. The Marathas had directed their military attention to Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa during the time of Siraj-ud-Daula’s predecessor Alivardi Khan in the 1740s and 1750s. In a subsequent agreement with Alivardi Khan, they agreed to serve as the nawab’s representative in the region of Cuttack in exchange for the right to its revenue. Cuttack was near the town of Midnapur, the revenues of which Mir Qasim had granted to the Company at his accession. Both nawab and the Company were thus interested in removing the Maratha threat in the region. The Company’s concurrent handling of the jewels and response to the Marathas appear to have illuminated for the nawab the system of debt that the Company created through its mechanism of military support. He increasingly voiced his reluctance to deploy Company troops without necessity. When Ahmad Shah Durrani defeated the Marathas at Panipat in 1761, the Company was eager to take advantage of their weakness. Considering the Marathas’ weakened condition sufficient, Mir Qasim expressed reluctance to proceed on Cuttack against the Company’s insistence. In January 1762, he protested the Company’s demand of payment for the maintenance of additional troops. In March 1762, when the nawab reconsidered the attack on the Marathas, the Company appears to have confirmed his suspicions about the nature of its relationship with him by informing him that Cuttack had long been in Maratha possession and would therefore now count as a new conquest on his behalf and thus require additional payment to the Company.30 Accepting the prince-emperor’s betel amid the Company’s continuing refusal to acknowledge payment of his debt, Mir Qasim appears to have resorted to

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positioning himself in relation to the Mughal sovereign, whose conversation, in spite of myriad vulnerabilities, remained the likeliest means for overriding his escalating debts with the Company.31 As a portable Mughal court, the pandan may have had its advantages for an errant prince. However, its miniaturization also underscored, in a landscape of political fragmentation, the scale of an emperor’s distance from the throne.32 Shah Alam II, himself, recognized the importance of his return to Delhi, and his actions throughout this decade were entirely focused on this one goal. Indeed, he even considered the Company a stronger and more reliable source of support than the nawab for his campaign to return to Delhi and offered it the revenues of Bengal in 1761 in exchange for it.33 The Company’s refusal of these overtures was in large part tied to the Crown’s and its metropolitan Directors’ wishes to not get too deeply involved in South Asia beyond the immediate concerns of its commerce.34 In addition to courting the support of the Company, Shah Alam II also promptly demanded the tribute owed to him by the nawab following the reading of the khutbah in his name. The courtly betel may have carried the promise of a new conversation between emperor and nawab, but it eventually succumbed to another regime of value. For an already indebted nawab, an exiled emperor was increasingly a source of financial burden rather than a powerful interlocutor of courtly conversation. Indeed, with his debt continually rising, Mir Qasim embarked on his own regime of coercion by forcefully extracting payment from zamindars (landowners) and, in so doing, turned his own back on conversation with his subjects, as the contemporaneous South Asian historian Ghulam Hussain Khan observed.35

Free Trade, Broken Conversation In addition to noting the widespread consumption of betel and the forms of sociality that it forged, period dictionaries also highlighted the valuable revenue that the Company earned from its right to distribute the farming of the intoxicating betel nut in Madras (present-day Chennai).36 This privilege within a lucrative domestic trade, however, was not available to the Company in Bengal. A conflict with Mir Qasim quickly surfaced during his reign about the Company’s indiscriminate use of the dastak (permit) that exempted it from paying duty on items bound for export abroad. Company ships were authorized to carry flags that announced the dastak to the custom officials posted along the trading routes. As Sen has shown in his study of the British colonial transformation of north

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Indian marketplaces, the Company disputed and, once sovereign in the region, sought to eliminate the micro-geographies of sacred and secular spaces along which trade was conducted in South Asia. Merchants paid custom duties on their goods as they moved along multiple and overlapping market geographies; typically, only special guests of the emperor were authorized exemptions. The Company, however, interpreted the dastak as a flat exemption from all payments of duty and any demands for inspection. It also declared any checks on its trade by the nawab’s customs officers as instances of harassment. Such uninterrupted, even if custom-exempt, movement was not the convention.37 Of particular concern was the Company’s trade, and the private trade of its officers, in three commodities—betel nut, tobacco, and salt—typically controlled by the nawab’s officers. Indeed, by 1763, the tables had turned between the Company and the nawab, and it was now the former that was found evading its responsibilities of payment to the latter. The dispute that ensued between the nawab and the Company illuminates the process by which the betel nut was increasingly separated from the betel quid’s ceremonial value and transformed into profitable trade commodity. An agreement in January 1763 between the governor and nawab that the Company’s private traders would pay a duty of 9 percent on the inland trade of all three commodities was rejected outright by the Company’s Council in Calcutta (Kolkata today). Instead, Company merchants and servants continued to trade in them without paying the requisite custom. The nawab, although increasingly severe himself in demanding revenue payments from his subjects, pleaded with the Company that the incursion of its servants in the inland trade of these commodities and their refusal to pay the requisite customs duty had greatly diminished his revenues, not to mention harmed his subjects. He noted, in particular, how the Company was deploying its military force in order to seize command of the trade.38 In March 1763, he leveled the trading ground by abolishing all customs on the commerce in these commodities, thereby eliminating the privilege that the Company had coerced from him.39 The Company’s Council, which already had a fraught relation with the nawab, prepared to defend the participation of Company officials in the lucrative inland trade—many Councilmembers were themselves its beneficiary—by directing its military force to remove him. As altercations escalated between the Company and nawab, the latter captured and took hostage the Company’s residents in the city of Patna, eventually massacring all but one of them. Mir Qasim’s attack on the Company is typically understood as an example of his descent into paranoid violence and/or his desperate last effort against its seizure of Bengal’s land and commercial revenue. Attending to the importance

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of tobacco, salt, and betel nut within this history, Sen argues that they carried both social and economic value. He astutely observes that the nawab’s monopoly of the trade of these commodities ensured their ceremonial status as “prestige goods,” and the Company challenged it in the name of liberal trade. Examining all three commodities as a group, he focuses on ceremonial uses and discursive meanings.40 A close look at a portrait of a Company official (Figure 6.7) from the collection of William Fullerton, the sole survivor of Mir Qasim’s massacre of Company residents in Patna, offers an opportunity for interweaving Sen’s insights about “prestige goods” with Mintz’s “sociality of ingestion.”41 The portrait, most likely of Fullerton himself, is by Murshidabad artist, Dip Chand.42 It shows the surgeon seated per South Asian social conventions on the ground, a pandan at his side in the foreground and a hookah or water pipe in his hand. One of the painting’s rather unusual details is the open casket of betel nut shown next to the pandan. Among the other portraits of Fullerton’s friends from this period, possibly by Dip Chand, at least two show sitters in similar poses on the ground, smoking hookahs in the company of guests

Figure 6.7  Dip Chand, Portrait of a Company Official, likely William Fullerton, c. 1760–4. Opaque watercolor on paper. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 6.8  Attributed to or after Dip Chand, Portrait of Mirza Himmat Ali Khan, c. 1760–3. Opaque watercolor on paper. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

or attendants, with pandans placed before them.43 A portrait of Fullerton’s friend Mirza Himmat Ali Khan (Figure 6.8), an aristocrat who, along with the historian Ghulam Hussain Khan, had pleaded for the surgeon’s life with the nawab, shows him seated upright with his legs folded under him. Himmat Ali Khan’s posture and portrayal in profile accord with prevailing portrait conventions. He appears to address someone beyond the frame of the painting by offering them the pipe in his hand. Within Indo-Persian courtly discourse, akhlaq (ethics) and adab (manners) underscored the virtues of ethical conduct in the world, wherein, as Rajeev Kinra has shown, polish in one’s manners could mirror a similar transformation both in oneself and in the world around them.44 As Mana Kia has argued, the way in which adab’s bearer behaved had less to do with how they felt about the object of their interaction, than with the meaning it generated about themselves. Grasp over a poetic language of expression, dress, bodily comportment, and the rules of epistolary conduct were not symptoms of excess but the means through which a life of ethical conduct could be led even within the false representation of the material world and across the particularities of local difference.45 Throughout their

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correspondence, Mir Qasim and the governor often noted social transgressions by pointing out breaches in rhetorical expression.46 Once their relationship became particularly strained, the nawab described it in terms of the governor’s refusal to remain in conversation with him.47 Fullerton’s portrait stages a similar refusal of conversation. It offers a striking contrast to that of Himmat Ali Khan: less so for Fullerton’s attire in Company uniform and more for his awkward posture’s breach in decorum. While other paintings also portray sitters in the act of smoking a hookah, Fullerton’s reclining posture and jutting left leg appear to foreclose the possibility of any exchange with the figure before him who invites it with the gesture of his right hand. The open casket of betel nut that appears prominently next to the pandan amplifies this silencing of conversation by foregrounding the intoxicating trade that flourished as its result. This trade not only enriched men like Fullerton, but it also ennobled them into subjects of portraiture.

The Case of Betel Following the trail of the missing betel in Hayman’s painting to Patna, this essay has traced its journey to Dip Chand’s portrait of the Company official (see Figure 6.7) where it appeared in its new form.48 Like the transformations that English dictionaries tracked across their changing definitions of betel, the open case of betel nut in Dip Chand’s portrait foregrounded betel’s extraction from a comestible (betel quid) that materialized sovereign relations through its offering, into a commodity (betel nut) whose intoxicating quality promised— however impoverishing and deleterious its consequences—high profits for the Company.49 Indeed, it was on the heels of the Company’s dispute with Mir Qasim that it was granted the diwani or right to collect the revenues of Bengal on the Mughal emperor’s behalf in 1765. In the years that followed, the Company’s insatiable appetite for this revenue initiated the famine that ravaged Bengal in 1770. The people of Bengal, whom British audiences might have imagined as always chewing betel and never seen without their pandans, were now left, in the wake of the Company’s seizure of the inland trade, without any subsistence. Whereas scholars have directed their attention to Hayman’s painting as the inaugural image of British imperialism in South Asia, it is in Dip Chand’s portrait of his immodest sitter that coloniality appears as the changing material form of sovereign relations.

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Bibliography Alam, Muzaffar. The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1704–1748. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. “Introduction: Coercion, Communication, and the East India Company.” In Calendar of Persian Correspondence: Being Letters, Referring Mainly to Affairs in Bengal, Which Passed between Some of the Company’s Servants and Indian Rulers and Notables, vol. 1, ix–xli. New Delhi: National Archives of India, 2013. Allen, Brian. “From Plassey to Seringapatam: India and British History Painting, c. 1760–c. 1800.” In The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947, edited by C. A. Bayly, 26–37. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990. Cambridge, Richard Owen. An Account of the War in India, between the English and French. London: printed for T. Jefferys, the Corner of St. Martin’s-Lane, Charing-Cross, 1761. Chatterjee, Partha. The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport, The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, and Caroline Dinenage, MP. “Press Release: Clive of India’s Durbar Set at Risk of Export.” January 15, 2021. https://www​.gov​.uk​/government​/news​/clive​-of​-indias​-durbar​-set​-at​-risk​-of​-export Eaton, Natasha. Mimesis and Empire: Artworks and Networks, 1765–1860. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Fordham, Douglas. British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Graves, Margaret. Arts of Illusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Haider, Navina Najat and Marika Sardar, eds. Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015. Jasanoff, Maya. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. New York: Random House, 2005. Kaicker, Abhishek. The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Kee, Joan and Emanuele Luigi. “Scale to Size: An Introduction.” Art History 38, no. 2 (2015): 250–66. Khan, Ghulam Hussain. A Translation of the Seir Mutaqharin, or, View of the Modern Times. Translated by Nota Manus, 3 vols. Calcutta: Printed for the Translator, 1789. Kia, Mana. “Adab as Ethics of Literary Form and Social Conduct: Reading the Gulistan in Late Mughal India.” In “No Tapping Around Philology:” A Festschrift in Celebration and Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday, edited by Alireza Korangy and Daniel J. Sheffield, 281–308. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014.

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Kinra, Rajeev. Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian Secretary. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Koch, Ebba. The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Losty, J. P. “Towards a New Naturalism: Portraiture in Murshidabad and Avadh, 1750– 80.” In After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, edited by Barbara Schmitz, 35–55. Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2002. Losty, J. P. “Murshidabad Painting, 1750–1820.” In Murshidabad: Forgotten Capital of Bengal, edited by Neeta Das and Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, 82–105. Mumbai: The Marg Foundation, 2013. Markel, Stephen. “‘This Blaze of Wealth and Magnificence’: The Luxury Arts of Lucknow.” In India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow, edited by Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude, 199–225. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Pluche, Noël Antoine. Spectacle de la Nature: or, Nature Display’d . . . . Translated from the original French, Vol. 4. London: printed for R. Francklin et al., 1757. Ramos, Imma. “Private Pleasures of the Mughal Empire.” Art History 37, no. 3 (2014): 408–27. Ray, Romita. “Baron of Bengal: Robert Clive and the Birth of an Imperial Image.” In Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930, edited by Julie Codell, 21–38. New York: Routledge, 2016. Rohel, Jaclyn. “Turning a New Leaf in London? Paan Culture in the Metropole.” In Wrapped and Stuffed Foods: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012, edited by Mark McWilliams, 28–37. Devon: Prospect Books, 2013. Rolt, Richard. A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce. London: printed for T. Osborne et al., 1756. Roy, Malini. “Origins of the Late Mughal Painting Tradition in Awadh.” In India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow, edited by Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude, 165–85. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010. Salmon, Thomas. A New Geographical and Historical Grammar, 4th ed. London: printed for William Johnston, at the Golden-Ball in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1756. Savary des Brûlons, Jacques. The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce. Translated by Malachy Postlethwayt, Vol. 1. 2nd ed. London: printed for John Knapton, in Ludgate-Street, 1757. Sen, Sudipta. Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

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Sen, Sudipta. “Rebellion of the Puppet Nabob: Mir Qasim’s Desperate Campaign Against the East India Company.” In Envisioning Empire: The New British World, 1763–1773, edited by James Vaughn and Robert Olwell, 129–49. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020. Shaffer, Holly. “An Architecture of Ephemerality between South and West Asia.” Journal 18, no. 4 East-Southeast (2017). https://www​.journal18​.org​/2054. DOI: 10.30610/4.2017.1 Sims-Williams, Ursula. “Nasir Shah’s Book of Delights.” Asian and African Studies Blog, November 21, 2016. https://blogs​.bl​.uk​/asian​-and​-african​/2016​/11​/nasir​-shahs​-book​ -of​-delights​.html Sinha, K. K. “Dr. William Fullerton and the Patna Massacre of 1763.” Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 25 (1995): 279–93. Stern, Philip J. The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in South Asia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Travers, Robert. “A British Empire by Treaty in Eighteenth-Century India.” In Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion 1600–1900, edited by Saliha Belmessous, 132–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Vansittart, Henry. A Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal, from the Year 1760, to the Year 1764, 3 vols. London, 1766. Vaughn, James M. The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Wilson, Jon. The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India. New York: Public Affairs, 2016.

Notes 1 For comprehensive histories of the Company’s ascent within the South Asian political geography, especially the events around Plassey, see Jon Wilson, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), 93–103; William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 111–33, though each has errors pertaining to dates and some historical actors. For a more critical account of Plassey and its aftermath, see Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 2 I discuss how Hayman’s painterly sources translated the disturbances wrought by the Company’s revolution into the painting’s composition in my current book project, Enlightened Relations: Art without Common Sense in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

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3 Brian Allen, “From Plassey to Seringapatam: India and British History Painting, c. 1760–c. 1800,” in The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947, ed. C. A. Bayly (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990), 27–32; Romita Ray, “Baron of Bengal: Robert Clive and the Birth of an Imperial Image,” in Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930, ed. Julie Codell (New York: Routledge, 2016), 23–7; Douglas Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 121–6. Hayman’s painting is also the cover illustration for James M. Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 4 See, for example, Thomas Salmon, A New Geographical and Historical Grammar, 4th ed. (London: printed for William Johnston, at the Golden-Ball in St. Paul's Church-Yard, 1756), 453; Jacques Savary des Brûlons, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 2nd ed., Vol. 1. trans. Malachy Postlethwayt (London: printed for John Knapton, in Ludgate-Street, 1757), 248; Henry Vansittart, A Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal, from the Year 1760, to the Year 1764, Vol. 1 (London: printed for J. Newbery; J. Dodsley; and J. Robson, 1766), xxii. 5 The word is used to describe all three in English, while in Bengali, the word paan refers only to the betel quid and leaf. For an overview of betel’s aphrodisiac properties, the Ain-i-Akbari’s discussion of betel’s refreshing properties, and the appearance of betel and betel boxes in Mughal and Rajput paintings of scenes of sexual pleasure, see Imma Ramos, “Private Pleasures of the Mughal Empire,” Art History 37, no. 3 (2014): 417. For betel’s use in medieval and early modern South Asian cuisine, see Ursula Sims-Williams, “Nasir Shah’s Book of Delights,” Asian and African Studies Blog, November 21, 2016, https://blogs​.bl​.uk​/asian​-and​-african​/2016​ /11​/nasir​-shahs​-book​-of​-delights​.html 6 For a portrait of a red-lipped ruler from the Deccan and one featuring an attendant offering a betel quid, see: Navina Najat Haider, “Portrait of a Ruler or Musician, c. 1630, Bijapur or Golconda,” in Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy, ed. Navina Najat Haider and Marika Sardar (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), 129–30, and Haider’s discussion of the “Paris” Painter’s Portrait of an Ahmednagar Ruler, c. 1565–95, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in ibid., 65. This detail also appears in ragamala paintings and court paintings from Rajasthan. 7 Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek, “Introduction: Things Change,” in Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change, ed. Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek (London: Bloomsbury, 2023). 8 See, for example, Noël Antoine Pluche, Spectacle de la Nature: or, Nature Display'd . . . . Translated from the original French, Vol. 4 (London: printed for R. Francklin et al, 1757), 269; Richard Rolt, A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce

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9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22

Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century . . . (London: printed for T. Osborne et al., 1756). For a discussion of betel’s reception by British consumers, see Jaclyn Rohel, “Turning a New Leaf in London? Paan Culture in the Metropole,” in Wrapped and Stuffed Foods: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012, ed. Mark McWilliams (Devon: Prospect Books, 2013), 32. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). See note 1. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1704–1748 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Abhishek Kaicker, The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 208–11. For earlier attempts by Mughal princely contenders to seize Bengal in their accession bids for the Mughal throne, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: Coercion, Communication, and the East India Company,” in Calendar of Persian Correspondence: Being Letters, Referring Mainly to Affairs in Bengal, Which Passed Between Some of the Company’s Servants and Indian Rulers and Notables, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: National Archives of India, 2013), xxv. Dalrymple, The Anarchy, 94. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 149–67. “No. 968: February 26, 1761,” in Calendar of Persian Correspondence, 67–8. “No. 1235: June 24, 1761,” in ibid., 109. “No. 1083: April 11, 1761,” in ibid., 85. Malini Roy, “Origins of the Late Mughal Painting Tradition in Awadh,” in India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow, ed. Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010), 165, 170–1. For an extensive discussion of Mughal architectural ornament, especially its idealized representation of flora and invocation of paradise, see Ebba Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006). Stephen Markel, “‘This Blaze of Wealth and Magnificence’: The Luxury Arts of Lucknow,” in India’s Fabled City, 199–212. The nawab of Awadh was the primary challenger, along with Mir Qasim (with whom he would also fall into dispute) and the Mughal emperor (who pleaded later that he only reluctantly joined forces with them) against the Company at the Battle of Buxar (Baksar) in 1764. One might recall here Igor Kopytoff ’s discussion of “singularization” in “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91.

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23 For an incisive discussion of architectural miniaturization (distinct from architectural models), see Margaret Graves, Arts of Illusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 13–23. For an account of ceremonial practices in South Asia that instantiate distant (or lost) spaces and monuments, see Holly Shaffer, “An Architecture of Ephemerality between South and West Asia,” Journal 18, no. 4 East-Southeast (2017), https://www​ .journal18​.org​/2054. DOI: 10.30610/4.2017.1 24 Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India. 25 Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 84. 26 See, for example, Nos. 726, 752, 804, 871, 954, 1009, 1031, 1047, 1074 in Calendar of Persian Correspondence. 27 Sudipta Sen, “Rebellion of the Puppet Nabob: Mir Qasim’s Desperate Campaign against the East India Company,” in Envisioning Empire: The New British World, 1763–1773, ed. James Vaughn and Robert Olwell (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020), 129–49. 28 Robert Travers, “A British Empire by Treaty in Eighteenth Century India,” in Empire by Treaty. Negotiating European Expansion 1600–1900, ed. Saliha Belmessous (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 132–60. 29 Natasha Eaton, Mimesis and Empire: Artworks and Networks, 1765–1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 162–78. 30 See, for example, Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Introduction” and Nos. 1006, 1323, 1349, 1359, 1417, 1418, 1463, 1476, 1482, 1614 in Calendar of Persian Correspondence. 31 Mir Qasim also moved his capital to Monghyr (Munger) from Murshidabad in 1762 to create more distance with the Company. 32 For a lucid distinction of scale and size (especially the former’s dimensions of affect and embodiment), see Joan Kee and Emanuele Luigi, “Scale to Size: An Introduction,” Art History 38, no. 2 (2015): 250–66. 33 Philip Stern notes that the Company was offered the diwani on three other occasions before 1765 in The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 206. 34 For two important reevaluations of the Company’s “commercial” focus in South Asia and in metropolitan political debates respectively, see Stern, The Company State and Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III. 35 Dalrymple, The Anarchy, 165. 36 See, for example, the glossary of Richard Owen Cambridge, An Account of the War in India, between the English and French (London: printed for T. Jefferys, the Corner of St. Martin’s-Lane, Charing-Cross, 1761).

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37 At the heart of this dispute was the interpretation of a farman that the Mughal emperor Farukhsiyar granted to the Company in 1717 to exempt its exports from custom duty. The Company insisted that the farman applied to all trade and remained valid across changing reigns. For a summary of this disagreement, especially its founding of the Company’s colonial commerce, see Sen, Empire of Free Trade, 75–9. 38 See, for example, “No 1695: March 1763” in Calendar of Persian Correspondence, 194, and “No. 1736: April 21, 1763,” in Calendar of Persian Correspondence, 208–9. See also Wilson, Chaos of Empire, 106. 39 “No 1719: March 22, 1763” in Calendar of Persian Correspondence, 203–4. 40 Sen, Empire of Free Trade, 81–8. 41 As historians have noted, Fullerton had a few years earlier in 1760 also emerged as the sole survivor among the Company’s forces in one of its battles with the princeemperor. K. K. Sinha, “Dr. William Fullerton and the Patna Massacre of 1763,” Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 25 (1995): 279–93. 42 J. P. Losty, “Towards a New Naturalism: Portraiture in Murshidabad and Avadh, 1750–80,” in After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. Barbara Schmitz (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2002), 37–42 and J. P. Losty, “Murshidabad Painting, 1750–1820,” in Murshidabad: Forgotten Capital of Bengal, ed. Neeta Das and Rosie Llewellyn-Jones (Mumbai: The Marg Foundation, 2013), 82–105. 43 For another Murshidabad painting from this period showing an Indian nobleman with a tray of betel quid, see now unknown artist, Seated Prince Smoking Hookah on a Terrace, Accompanied by an Attendant, c. 1760, Harvard Art Museums. https:// harvardartmuseums​.org​/collections​/object​/217170​?position=0 44 Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian Secretary (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). 45 Mana Kia, “Adab as Ethics of Literary Form and Social Conduct: Reading the Gulistan in Late Mughal India,” in “No Tapping around Philology”: A Festschrift in Celebration and Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday, ed. Alireza Korangy and Daniel J. Sheffield (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), 281–308. 46 See, for example, Nos. 1049, 1114A, 1663, 1721 in Calendar of Persian Correspondence. 47 In addition to his description of Mir Qasim’s transgressions against his subjects as a renunciation of conversation, the historian Ghulam Hussain Khan would repeat the expression to indict the Company’s general approach in its government in India in A Translation of the Seir Mutaqharin, or, View of the Modern Times, trans. Nota Manus, 3 vols. (Calcutta,1789), 1:545.

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48 Interestingly, Clive himself possessed a pandan among the courtly objects that he was likely gifted in the events surrounding the emperor’s grant of the diwani to the Company in 1765. For Clive’s collection, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Random House, 2005), 42–3. For the British government’s recent decision to declare these courtly objects British patrimony in order to retain them in Britain, see Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport, The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, and Caroline Dinenage, MP, “Press Release: Clive of India’s Durbar Set at Risk of Export,” https://www​.gov​.uk​/ government​/news​/clive​-of​-indias​-durbar​-set​-at​-risk​-of​-export (accessed January 15, 2022). 49 Rohel makes reference to betel nut’s incorporation into nineteenth-century English toothpastes in “Turning a New Leaf in London?” 32.

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Isaiah Thomas’s Stamp Acts at the Halifax Gazette Printers and Tacit Protest in Revolutionary America Jennifer Y. Chuong

On the thirteenth of February 1766, a reader of Halifax’s weekly paper might have found a small, but striking, surprise on the interior page of his morning reading (Figures 7.1 and 7.2/Plate 7): an inverted British revenue stamp, stabbed by a crude woodcut devil wielding a pitchfork and overprinted with the following message: Scorn and Contempt of America pitching down to Destruction. D—ils clear the way for B———s and STAMPS.1

The date of the paper, the word “STAMPS,” and, most importantly, the revenue stamp itself certify that the “Scorn and Contempt of America” was directed toward the 1765 “Act for Granting and Applying Certain Stamp Duties in the British Colonies and Plantations in America,” better known as the “Stamp Act.”2 Intended to help the British government recoup their expenses from the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the Stamp Act applied a tax to printed and written papers of many kinds, including newspapers. And because newspapers were a crucial source of revenue for printers struggling in the developing economy of colonial America, the Stamp Act drew the particular ire of colonial printers. This collage of printed elements is generally attributed to the printer Isaiah Thomas, self-identified patriot and eventual founder of the American Antiquarian Society. Thomas carefully arranged his words and images so as to emphasize their interdependence: the woodcut was placed such that the devil’s pitchfork is aimed at, and in fact “pierces,” the revenue stamp, and the block of text is split and printed around the stamp, so that the object of its displeasure is unmistakable. The interlocking composition of these elements thus invites us to

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Figure 7.1  [Attributed to Isaiah Thomas], [collage of printed and stamped elements], Halifax Gazette, February 13, 1766. Letterpress and woodcut. Reproduced by permission of American Antiquarian Society.

consider them as a unity, to direct our attention to deciphering the significance of these interrelated parts, and, in so doing, to confirm Thomas’s agency as the author of a meaningful statement. Yet when we examine the printer’s work closely, we find more confusion than clarity. Thomas represents his protesting faction with a devil—a reference to a printer’s devil, most likely, but nevertheless an inauspicious representative. The message of his caption is also confusing, with America’s “Scorn and Contempt” leading, not to “Liberty” or another desirable outcome but rather to “Destruction.” Last but not least, word and image work against each other: whereas the textually referenced “D—ils” clear the way for stamps, the pictured devil attempts to clear the page of the printed stamp. These infelicities, as well as the crudely formed quality of Thomas’s additions, recall the printer’s youth (he had turned seventeen a month prior) and rudimentary education, obtained mostly through his labors in the printshop.3 Approached in this way, Thomas’s collage reinforces a prevailing impression of the artisan as a subsidiary entity of the Revolution: someone who, lacking the knowledge and articulacy of his more well-read contemporaries, played a supporting role in fanning the flames of Revolutionary feeling. Thomas’s use of the printer’s devil is notable in this regard: a term for apprentices whose faces

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Figure 7.2  Detail of Figure 7.1

and hands were often blackened by their work at the press, the printer’s devil is a reminder that printing is dirty, manual labor. As Stephen Botein has noted, the perception of the printer as a “meer mechanic” “was likely to undercut whatever efforts he made to influence his neighbors.”4 Extending this historical power dynamic, scholars have often relegated artisans to the margins of Revolutionary narratives. One of Thomas’s biographers, for example, dismissively characterized the printer as “no politician or policy maker, but a useful agent” among the revolutionaries, and it is in a similar vein that one historian, while acknowledging that Paul Revere’s engravings were valued by his colleagues as important agents of political propaganda, contrasts the silversmith’s “vivid depict[ions]” to the

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“more refined language” of learned gentlemen like John Adams and Dr. Joseph Warren.5 In keeping with the theme of this volume, this chapter explores the nature and meaning of material change. Specifically, I argue for the importance of considering changes in technique—and consequently, material form—as a means of attending to the historical contributions of marginalized subjects. Thomas and other artisans may have lacked the formal education necessary to translate their feelings of oppression into sophisticated textual arguments, but they could wield their own clever means of protest. Their actions invite us to consider protest as something whose meaning lies in its making—in acts of material change—rather than in its finished form and consequent effects. In particular, Thomas’s varied activities at the Halifax Gazette in the months surrounding the enactment of the Stamp Act offer a survey of the kinds of tacit protest that could be effected by those with a practical knowledge of printed matter: in addition to experimenting with different print techniques, like collage, the printer also utilized unexpected formats and sliced and rotated sheets of paper in meaningful ways. By tacit protest I mean to indicate a form of political contestation that is restrained, subtle, and even ambiguous, as well as one whose significance lay more in the act of making than in its material effects.6 In Nova Scotia, where the royal government wielded significant power, Thomas’s actions had little or no effect on the enactment of the Stamp Act. Furthermore, as a young journeyman printer and newcomer to Halifax, it would have been foolhardy for him to directly critique the ruling government. Rather, Thomas chose to protest the Stamp Act with strategic acts that allowed him to articulate his discontent without risking serious reprisal. Tacit protest, as I define it here, relies upon the manipulation of technique. In referencing technique I draw on a robust literature that has argued for the knowledge that inheres in bodily actions. We readily recognize that skilled activities—a clean tennis serve, for example, or a smooth draw of a violin’s bow—require long, arduous training to perfect. However, in his classic essay, “Techniques of the Body,” Marcel Mauss argues that technique is not just the province of skilled actions, but all actions.7 Our cultures teach us to perform even everyday actions in specific ways that we take to be generic and unremarkable. Such actions are carried out by individuals but embody a knowledge that has accumulated across time (from generation to generation) and space (from individual to individual).8 You can teach yourself to move through water, but to learn to “swim” is to partake of a collective knowledge—to enter a current, so to speak, whose source and mouth lie beyond your singular existence. At

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the same time, the very fact that technique is, as Mauss puts it, “traditional and efficient,” raises the question of what it means to perform techniques in ways that repudiate, or at least call into question, their culturally shaped forms and aims. By considering technique’s potential for resistance, we open the possibility of addressing how people without access to forceful language can express dissent. Most historical subjects lacked the “more refined language” that has classically been understood as a key means of effecting change. But many of these subjects— indeed, Mauss argues, all of these subjects—possessed a broad and deep store of embodied techniques by which they carried out both everyday practices, like carrying a torch or walking, and specialized practices, like setting type or sewing a hem. And, as has been well documented in the scholarship on popular protest, through simple transformations, like walking together or spinning yarn for homespun, people can and have used these actions to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the ruling order. They can turn ordinary technique into charged political statements.9 The kinds of change that I examine here are twofold. First I argue that, for all of their variety, Thomas’s acts of manual protest were undergirded by the “leakiness” of the print process, which allows the prints to be altered at various steps in their production. As the upside-down revenue stamp evidences, the printer began by rotating and flipping the paper against its expected orientation before printing it. He used the existing conditions of his material (the previously printed revenue stamp) as a springboard for his own creation, carefully arranging his added elements so as to create a visual and physical relationship between the devil’s stabbing pitchfork and the official emblem. And as the slightly askew angle of his antagonistic caption, as well as its untidy overlap with the column text, suggests, Thomas did not print his collage simultaneous to the printing of the newspaper body text; rather, he ran the paper through the press a second time.10 While these are diverse operations, they are unified by their strategic manipulation of printing’s temporality: they assert that print is an open-ended and relatively malleable process whose intervals allow for inversion, alteration, and customization. By disrupting the straightforward reproducibility of print, Thomas used his artisanal understanding of the medium to contest British government’s ability to implement its policies across the Atlantic. In addition to emphasizing the importance of material change, this chapter argues that, in developing a fuller account of historical resistance, we need to reconsider our notion of what kinds of change matter—and when. Notably, Thomas’s actions engaged not only the changeability of things in the moment of their making but over the long moment of their historicization. In the decades

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following the Revolution, he published a written account of his actions in his foundational work, The History of Printing in America (1810). In the telling, Thomas revised and dramatized his actions to suit a very different political context. Whereas his acts of protest had been carried out in a context of royal dominance, his narrative was published in a context of American victory and self-governance. One of the brilliant aspects of Thomas’s acts is the way in which they accommodated this shift, being on the one hand subtle enough to prevent his being charged with sedition, while on the other hand, explicit enough to stand for his early loyalty to the Revolutionary cause. Thomas’s acts thus delicately straddle a thin line between intention and accident, deliberate act and contingent by-product: a conundrum for the British officials who wanted to chastise him, as well as historians who might want to summarily characterize him. They thus speak to the changeability of history itself, even within the lifetime of an object’s original maker, as well as to the fluidity of objects’ meanings when examined against different contexts, and in the light of different commentaries.

Exploiting Print’s Gaps The Stamp Act of 1765 was based on the Stamp Act of 1712, which applied similar duties to documents within the British Isles. To fulfill the earlier Stamp Act, a network had been developed to convey the stamped paper, which was produced at a central office, to local distributors and thence to printers and stationers. This system ensured that the Board of Stamps maintained control over the printing matrices and dies. Presented with the 1765 Stamp Act, the commissioners of the Board conceptualized America as yet another British locale: they would simply prepare more paper at the central office and ship it to the colonies, where a local distributor (a designated stamp agent) would supervise its purchase by printers and other persons. This approach made use of the existing bureaucratic infrastructure and maintained the Board’s control over the stamping implements, but it failed to consider the great physical and political expanse that separated the colonies from the British Isles. By stamping the sheets in London, the commissioners were relying on an idealized construct that I term the material integrity of print. They assumed that, having stamped the paper in London, it could be packaged and shipped to America, distributed via the proper channels (and accompanied by the proper payments), and then printed in a manner that respected the stamp’s authority. The notion of print’s material integrity was tightly bound up with ideas of

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imperial control. Throughout the colonial period, printed texts and images had kept close the ties that linked Britain to its American colonies. Colonists read British-printed books, admired the beauties represented in British-printed mezzotints, and drew their ideas of fashionable furniture from British-printed pattern books. Even as local presses began to operate in the eighteenth century, they often drew their content directly from British sources.11 Both as imports and as copies, printed material supported a schema in which the metropole produces culture and transmits it to its periphery—not unlike the way a print matrix is understood to produce faithful copies of an image for dissemination among a broad audience. This is print understood as a tool of mechanical reproduction, or, in a more general version of William Ivins’s famous phrase, as a series of “exactly repeatable . . . statements.”12 The idea of print’s material integrity is also important to understanding how print, especially in the form of newspapers, establishes the “homogenous, empty time” through which different members of a modern nation, however far-flung, are understood to be simultaneous travelers.13 And yet: whether by accident or design, print is never homogenous. Printing involves a significant number of steps, and each one offers numerous opportunities for both alteration and mishap. Indeed, the very method of stamp production used by the Board introduced a first, large disruption in print’s material integrity. To create the cheap penny stamps for newspapers and pamphlets, the Board commissioned eight copper matrices, each engraved with twenty-five stamps, each stamp identical except for their serial number14 (Figure 7.3). To print the stamps, a corresponding twenty-five sheets were carefully laid on top of the matrix, offset from one another in a staggered stack so that each engraved stamp printed onto a different sheet of paper (Figure 7.4). Printing the stamps in this way significantly reduced the number of pulls, or passes through the press, needed to create the large numbers of sheets required. This method of printing also introduced a radical disjunction between matrix and print. While there are obvious differences between a matrix and a print (copper versus paper, left-right reversal, etc.) the printed image is usually conceived of as a simple copy of the image engraved on its matrix. To put it simply: the print looks like the matrix, and prints from the same matrix look like one another. In the case of the Stamp Act stamps, however, the matrix and its prints are noncongruent. Whereas the matrix features twenty-five stamps or so arranged in orderly rows across its surface, each print features one stamp located near a corner of the sheet of paper. Along similar lines, this method of printing destabilizes the foundational notion that print is a method for creating identical copies—and not just because

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Figure 7.3  Thomas Major, A Proof Sheet of 26 One-Penny Stamps, 1765. Engraving. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

Figure 7.4  Barry English, “Fig. 10,” in John Chandler and H. Dagnall, The Newspaper & Almanac Stamps of Great Britain and Ireland (Hempstead: Great Britain Philatelic Publications, 1981). Printed Drawing. Reproduced by permission of the Great Britain Philatelic Society.

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each print features a semi-unique stamp in a slightly different location. Whereas print usually creates a similar relationship between each sheet of paper and the matrix (i.e., the sheet of paper is laid directly onto the matrix), this method of printing introduced variable relationships between the sheets and the matrix. Each sheet of paper printed according to a single pull existed at a different place within the staggered stack, and the height of the stack of twenty-five sheets meant that, at the very least, the top and bottom sheets received the ink with significantly different degrees of pressure and even at different angles. Of course, in the creation of penny stamps the print quality was not a major concern, and the time-savings posed by the stacked printing outweighed any unevenness in print quality that it introduced. Nevertheless the fact that such a method was conceived and used is an important reminder that print’s materials and processes are not by any means wedded to the straightforward, unbroken transmission of an original message. When the stamped paper was shipped across the Atlantic, the material integrity of print was stretched to its breaking point. In the colonies that would become part of the future United States of America, none of the stamped paper was used as intended. Most of the consignments simply did not make it off their ships. Some of the paper was burned. These acts of refusal and destruction were accompanied by other acts of direct confrontation with the royal government: colonists took to the streets, hanging effigies of the stamp distributors and attacking their homes, while newspapers printed aggressive critiques of the Stamp Act. Such acts of open disobedience were possible in the mainland colonies, where revolutionary sentiment ran high and posed a real threat to the outnumbered representatives of the king. In Nova Scotia, where Thomas was based, the social and political contexts were quite different. Though the colony was populated by many New Englanders, drawn north by the promise of inexpensive land grants, its economy, less developed than that of Philadelphia, Boston, or New York, was largely supported by the royal government. Nova Scotia was one of the few provinces in which stamped paper was used, and the only public protest of note was an effigy hanged under the cover of darkness and promptly removed.15 As Thomas quickly learned, he would need to take a different tack if he wanted to protest the Stamp Act.

The Problem with Content When the Stamp Act was announced in the spring of 1765, Thomas was apprenticed to the Boston printer Zechariah Fowle, and he must have witnessed

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firsthand the ensuing debates and protests. Political excitement, however, did not stop the young printer from pursuing his own interests: in September of that year, Thomas decided to break his indenture and travel to England, where he hoped to “acquire a more perfect knowledge” of his craft.16 His journey cut short by a lack of funds, Thomas found employment as a journeyman printer at the Halifax Gazette. The master printer, Anthony Henry, was an indolent and careless printer (so Thomas claimed), only too happy to give over his responsibility to another. During his time at the Gazette, Thomas thus had significant license, and the newspaper issues leading up to, and following, the implementation of the Stamp Act were peppered with revolutionary statements that eventually led to the Gazette’s loss of government sponsorship and Thomas’s departure from Halifax.17 Thomas described these events in his History of Printing in America, which includes a surprisingly long account of his six months at the Gazette (it accounts for about one-third of his autobiographical entry). The account is unreliable for a number of reasons, including Thomas’s penchant for self-aggrandizement (as evidenced by his dismissive descriptions of both his masters). Yet it is worth analyzing not only because it is one of the only narrative accounts of the Stamp Act’s reception in Halifax but also because the changes introduced by Thomas into his narrative offer insights into the printer’s understanding of political protest and historical significance. “Fresh from the debates of Boston,” where colonists openly and violently opposed the Stamp Act, Thomas may not have initially understood how different were the political conditions in Halifax, not to mention the relationship of the newspaper to the royal government.18 Soon after he began work in Henry’s shop, “a paragraph appeared in the Gazette, purporting that the people of Nova Scotia were, generally, disgusted with the stamp act.”19 In making this statement Thomas may have considered himself to be making a commonplace observation, since many colonial newspapers and their readers had immediately taken a definitive stance against the Act. In Nova Scotia, however, the royal government held stronger sway. As a printer in a small town, Henry was dependent on official goodwill: his shop was heavily subsidized by public print jobs and, according to one nineteenth-century source, the Gazette was edited by the secretary of the Province, Richard Bulkeley.20 Given these conditions it is no surprise that, upon the publication of Thomas’s comments—brief though they were—Henry was promptly reprimanded and threatened with the loss of government support. With a greater awareness of the risks involved in printing “seditious” editorials, Thomas adjusted his tactics. Subsequent weeks of the Gazette featured

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no editorial paragraphs on the subject of the Stamp Act; rather, until March 6, 1766, one-quarter to one-half of each issue comprised accounts of protests that had been published in colonies to the south.21 In adopting this tactic Thomas was utilizing a common printer’s strategy for claiming political neutrality: he was simply “reporting” the events of the day, rather than himself authoring any rebellious remarks. Nevertheless, Henry was again called to task; and this time, Thomas was also brought before Bulkeley and threatened with punishment. Temptation soon rose again: on the day before the Stamp Act was to take effect, the Pennsylvania Journal and several other colonial papers published their own death notices. Rather than simply announcing their intention to terminate publication, the printers of these papers dramatically adopted the format of the funeral broadside, lining their front pages with dark, heavy borders and illustrating them with mournful woodcuts (Figure 7.5). When copies of the Pennsylvania Journal’s “tombstone edition” arrived in Halifax, Thomas was deeply struck by the visual statement it presented and wanted to replicate the effect in the Halifax Gazette’s own pages. However, Bulkeley’s repeated threats had made an impression: the young journeyman was conscious that any moves he made were likely to be regarded with deep suspicion. But Thomas was nothing if not resourceful: An expedient was thought of to obviate that difficulty, which was to insert in the Gazette an article of the following import: “We are desired by a number of our readers, to give a description of the extraordinary appearance of the Pennsylvania Journal of the 30th of October last, 1765. We can in no better way comply with this request, than by the exemplification we have given of that journal in this day’s Gazette.”22

In his History, Thomas claimed that his interpretation of the Pennsylvania Journal “made no trifling bustle in the place,” and that soon after, an effigy of the stampmaster was hanged on the gallows. As a “Newenglander” with known antipathy to the Stamp Act, Thomas was suspected of having had a hand in this mischief, and a sheriff was sent to threaten him with imprisonment, “unless he would give information respecting the persons concerned in making and exposing the effigy of the stampmaster.”23 Dissatisfied with Thomas’s reticent responses, the sheriff ordered him to go with him before a magistrate. It was in this moment that Thomas was struck by inspiration. “He told the sheriff he did not know him; and demanded information respecting the authority by which he acted.” Though the sheriff blustered, Thomas held fast to his position, refusing to accompany the sheriff “unless he produced a precept, or proper authority for taking him prisoner.”24 The encounter ended triumphantly

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Figure 7.5  William Bradford, Pennsylvania Journal, October 31, 1765. Letterpress and woodcut. Reproduced by permission of American Antiquarian Society.

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for Thomas, with the sheriff leaving and, despite his threats, never returning. In his autobiography, the incident with the sheriff is crucial to Thomas’s dramatic presentation of himself as a defender of liberty. It marks a moment when he realizes the importance of material things, and of paper specifically, in a constitutional-bureaucratic society. The sheriff has no power without a precept or other written authorization, for a properly marked piece of paper channels the will of the government through its human agents and also serves to protect subjects by documenting due process.25 Without the proper kind of paper, we may find ourselves at a standstill. In Thomas’s account, his encounter with the sheriff serves as a narrative hinge. It marks the culmination of his earlier acts: the paragraph describing the Nova Scotians’ dissatisfaction with the Stamp Act, a “similar incident,” and the mourning edition—acts that we might categorize as protest by content. Following the account of his encounter with the sheriff, Thomas leaps backward in time, noting that “a short time before the exhibition of the effigy of the stamp master,” the stamped paper had arrived in Halifax. Explaining that, though it was but six or eight reams, it was sufficient for twelve months, Thomas then catapults forward, noting that “not many weeks after the sheriff made his exit . . . it was discovered that this paper was divested of the stamps; not one remained; they had been cut off, and destroyed.”26 The incident with the sheriff, which hinges on the crucial absence of a piece of paper, thus initiates a different kind of attention to the material presence of the stamped paper, as well as introducing a different mode of protest: tacit protest. Rather than describing or picturing dissatisfaction with the Stamp Act, Thomas’s subsequent acts of protest sought to undermine the authority of the stamped paper by manipulating the material itself.

Flipping the Stamp Though Thomas tied up his narrative neatly by claiming that he “trimmed” all of the sheets, thus eradicating the hated stamp in one act, the extant evidence suggests that the sheets were sliced in half, rather than trimmed. Between December 19, 1765, and March 6, 1766, two-thirds of the Gazette’s issues were printed on half-sheets and one-third on full-sheets. Slicing the sheets in half makes more sense from an economic and practical standpoint, as it means that no paper was wasted, either by trimming or by a full-sheet newspaper being issued in the absence of a full-sheet’s worth of news. And as one would expect of a stamped sheet cut in half, some of the half-sheet ones feature a revenue stamp

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and some do not.27 On the one hand, the mixed pattern of the half-sheet and full-sheet issues suggests that this stratagem had more to do with the quantity of news, rather than a political agenda.28 On the other hand, it may be that it was just in this slippage between pragmatics and politics that Thomas explored the parameters of tacit protest. In addition to being sometimes two, sometimes four, pages, the Gazette issues from December 19 onward feature other notable irregularities. In at least two instances, two-page issues that are missing the official stamp instead feature a small skull-and-crossbones (Figure 7.6). And in one known instance, described earlier, the stamp appears upside-down on the inside of the paper and is surrounded by textual and visual annotations that make the printer’s antagonism toward the new duty abundantly clear (see Figure 7.2/Plate 7). Curiously, Thomas’s narrative in the History of Printing is silent on these creative additions. This silence—another kind of “tacitness”—is part of a larger misalignment between the material evidence and Thomas’s account and will be discussed further herein. First, though, I want to focus on the strategic ambiguity of these acts, and in particular, of the flipped and annotated stamp. By requiring printers to purchase pre-stamped paper, the Stamp Act forced them not only to pay the duty but also to purchase the specific kind of paper that the Board had chosen to stamp. And because the Board was located in London, this paper was, naturally, British paper. This fact almost certainly didn’t strike either the lawmakers or the Board as noteworthy: according to British mercantile policy, colonists were always supposed to purchase and use Britishmade paper. But colonial printers, hard-struck not only by the expense but irregular availability of British paper, had long ignored these strictures as much as they were able. Paper was one of a printshop’s primary expenses, and simple business sense led printers to seek out the cheapest source at any given moment. By the second half of the eighteenth century, there was thus a healthy trade in both illegally imported and domestically produced papers, and the Stamp Act’s forcible restriction of this market only heightened its unpopularity.29 Beyond restricting the expressive and economic freedoms to which colonial printers (and colonists in general) had grown accustomed, the pre-stamping of the paper exerted a third form of control over paper and colonial printers’ use of it: the presence of the revenue stamp pre-ordained the paper’s orientation. For the purposes of booklet-printing, the idea of paper as an undifferentiated surface is critical to the printer’s art. Though the laid paper used by Thomas and other eighteenth-century printers does possess a discernible texture, as well as distinct sidedness, early modern printing intentionally ignored these material

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Figure 7.6  [Attributed to Isaiah Thomas], “America,” Halifax Gazette, November 26, 1765. Letterpress and woodcut. Reproduced by permission of American Antiquarian Society.

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Figure 7.7  Noel Rooke, book printing layouts, in Douglas Cockerell, Bookbinding, and the Care of Books (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901). Printed Drawing. Public Domain.

differences. To make the most efficient use of their equipment, materials, and time, printers had developed a method for printing differently sized books on the same printing bed (Figure 7.7). A sheet folded in half results in a four-page signature known as a folio. The same sheet folded twice makes an eight-page quarto, each of its pages half the size of a folio page; and, folded four times, an octavo, or sixteen-page signature. To facilitate the printing of signatures in this manner, the sheet of paper is conceptually understood to have no absolute orientation: no up or down, no left or right, no front or back. For all of the text blocks in the finished signature to end up in their proper orientation and sequence, the pages have to be carefully laid out in a variously oriented, non-sequential arrangement according to their intended format (folio, quarto, octavo, etc.). Examined in its unfolded state, the printed sheet is a muddle of pages whose authorial sense will be articulated only once it has been properly cut and folded (Figure 7.8). Some areas of the original uncut sheet will become rectos, others versos; in some areas the “head” of the printed page points toward the outer edge of the sheet; in others it points toward its center. In other words, though the blank sheet of paper is not materially

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Figure 7.8  Noel Rooke, “A Duodecimo Sheet,” in Douglas Cockerell, Bookbinding, and the Care of Books (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901). Printed Drawing. Public Domain.

isotropic it is functionally so. Only after printing does the sheet of paper become a differentiated body. Following the advent of the Stamp Act, the Halifax Gazette was supposed to be issued as a folio: a sheet of paper folded in half to yield four pages. In a logic that echoes its exertion of control over the kind of paper that was used to print colonial news, the presence of the revenue stamp imparted an “official” orientation to blank (directionless) sheets of paper. Properly printed, the Halifax Gazette was supposed to feature the revenue stamp on the lower right-hand margin of its front page, where officials could ascertain its legitimacy at a glance. But, short of placing an official in every printshop, this could not be mandated. On at least one occasion, Thomas took a stack (or at least a sheet) of stamped paper, flipped it upside-down and rotated it 180 degrees, and ran it through the press. The paper thus printed would appear, at first glance, to be illegally printed—but the joke would be on any official who attempted to censure Henry’s printshop, or his journeyman, without first checking its interior pages. What was ingenious about Thomas’s act was just how fast and unthinking of an act it was. It was something that could happen in the blink of an eye, especially

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in the hurried, chaotic environment of a printshop putting out a weekly paper. If it were not for Thomas’s added text and woodcut, in fact, it would be easy to claim that the inversion and interiorization of the stamp was an innocent mistake—one that the printshop could not afford to correct, given the expense and scarcity of paper (an expense and scarcity only compounded by the Stamp Act). Thomas’s joke did not recover the cost of the stamp, or the higher cost of English paper. But, given that a year’s supply of the paper had to be used, the journeyman’s intervention was a canny one. It recognized that the stamp was an agent of imperial control and that that control depended not just on execution but also on verification. It further recognized that the strength of imperial control was also bound up in the efficiency of these acts, and that Thomas could disturb this bureaucratic efficiency without technically breaking the letter of the law. And finally, perhaps most importantly, Thomas’s inversion recognized and exploited the gap—a space of potential change and transformation—that existed between Parliament and the Stamp Bureau, on one side of the Atlantic, and the protesting American colonists on the other.

After the Fact As an act of tacit protest, Thomas’s flipping of the stamp was brilliant. But we don’t know if he realized how brilliant it was, or what kind of impact it had, if any, on the Gazette’s readers. It’s even possible that the extant single copy was in fact a unique copy; a mistake that Thomas saved and then altered for his own amusement. In this regard it is notable that he does not mention it in his account of his time at the Halifax Gazette. Nor does he mention the times that he replaced a missing stamp with a hand-cut skull-and-crossbones stamp. These omissions don’t seem to have been driven by ethical scruples or fear of reprisal: cutting off the stamps, which Thomas does mention, was a more dramatic and more clearly illegal act. Rather it may be that, decades after the fact, an older, more sober Thomas looked back on these graphic and material antics and deemed them to be trifling, even somewhat embarrassing. It may also be that the flipped stamp did not fit as neatly into the narrative of strong causality that Thomas wanted to tell. In the introduction to the History of Printing, Thomas justified his lengthy accounts of printers, and specifically of printers’ prosecutions, with the claim that “the press, and particularly the newspapers to which it gave birth, had a powerful influence in producing the revolution.”30 Thomas’s commitment to a vigorous narrative

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of influence is suggested not only by the omissions mentioned earlier, but by other misalignments between Thomas’s narrative and the material evidence. For example, Thomas’s narrative places significant emphasis on the fact that he abnegated responsibility for the tombstone edition by publishing a paragraph that explained the edition as a response to reader requests—even going so far as to print said paragraph in the History of Printing. Yet no such paragraph was printed in 1765. Even in cases where the basic facts of Thomas’s account is borne out by the printed newspapers, his description exaggerates their forcefulness: he says that his initial editorial described the Nova Scotians’ “disgust” for the Stamp Act, but the actual editorial is much milder in tone, merely relating that the Act is “much against the Inclination of the People in general.”31 Last but not least, the only known effigy relating to the Stamp Act in Halifax was hanged two weeks before the Act’s enactment—rather than, as Thomas’s narrative suggests, two months afterward.32 The misdating of the hanged effigy is key to understanding the printer’s authorial interest and interventions. In his narrative, Thomas emphasizes that his encounter with the sheriff occurred shortly after the appearance of the effigy; and that, because of his prior actions, it was assumed that he had participated in its making. In other words, the effigy and acts mentioned in relation to it are presented as links in a tight chain of causality, one in which Thomas’s actions triggered responses by government officials; and conversely, one in which Thomas was actively prosecuted by those officials. In actuality the timeline was much looser and ordered differently, such that Thomas’s actions should have been and probably were understood to pose no real threat to the ruling government. Thomas’s carefully composed narrative of direct conflict aligned him with fellow printers who protested the Stamp Act in cities that would become part of the future United States. Yet in 1765 Thomas, whatever the strength of his political feelings, was not working in one of those cities. Rather, he was working in one of the few places in which the royal government wielded enough power that stamped paper was actually used. He was also seventeen, a journeyman, and a newcomer to the city. Out of these unfavorable conditions he developed a form of protest that balances the line between “act” and “not-act.” In this regard he was following a long tradition of canny artisanship. As mentioned earlier, printers, and especially colonial printers, had long maintained a professional stance of political neutrality by distancing themselves from the content of their papers: they were just the printers, so to speak. Thomas’s most interesting acts at the Halifax Gazette extend this logic by utilizing the deep material knowledge

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of a “meer mechanic” to disrupt the smooth enactment of the Stamp Act with actions that seem accidental or “merely” pragmatic. While his peers were forced to choose between complicity and direct protest, Thomas engaged in subtle acts that, despite his claims, did not create a “bustle” in the moment.33 Yet it is also not accurate to say that such acts were wholly insignificant. First of all, Thomas’s acts clearly answered some personal need of the young printer’s. Second, even if they did not actually help overturn the Stamp Act, his actions underscored the ways in which print’s materiality exceeds the letter of the law. Third—in addition to whatever impact they may have had on Thomas and his readers in 1765, his “stamp acts” served as useful seeds for a later time. When the war was won, and Thomas found himself writing for an audience of victors, the printer was able to reach back into the past and hold up these acts as evidence of his early commitment to the revolutionary cause. In this regard Thomas’s acts resemble those optical illusions that oscillate between two images: look at it one way and you see a duck, or a printing accident; look at it the other way and you see a rabbit, or an act of revolutionary protest. So far I have discussed Thomas’s acts as political acts, but we can also frame them in other terms. Western modernity places non-pragmatic, open-ended, and materially experimental acts in a special category that we term “art.” Art may well effect change in the world, but that is not its overriding purpose. A comprehensive definition of art is beyond the scope of this essay, but, whatever else it does, art’s visual and material investigations often expose the limits of logocentric thinking and control. Usually we think of this kind of investigation as belonging to the domain of people who devote their lives to it: that is to say, artists. But Thomas’s acts suggest that we should consider how artisans and other mechanics, that is to say, people who work with their hands, also possess a deep store of material knowledge that can be mobilized toward similar ends. Through his stamp acts, Isaiah Thomas lays bare the brittleness of imperial and legal schemas that overlook the myriad transformations materials can and do undergo.

Bibliography Adelman, Joseph M. “Trans-Atlantic Migration and the Printing Trade in Revolutionary America.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11, no. 3 (2013): 516–44. Anderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. New York: Verso, 2006.

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Botein, Stephen. “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers.” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 127–225. Brebner, John Bartlet. The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony During the Revolutionary Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937. Breen, Thomas H. “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776.” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (1986): 467–99. Bushman, Richard L. “Caricature and Satire in Old and New England Before the American Revolution.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 88 (1976): 19–34. Dunsmore, Kate. “On the Edge of the American Revolution: The Nova Scotia Gazette in 1775.” American Journalism 37, no. 4 (2020): 522–45. Fleming, Patricia Lockhart. “First Printers and the Spread of the Press.” In History of the Book in Canada, edited by Yvan Lamonde, Patricia Fleming, and Gilles Gallichan, 61–9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Hall, David D. “On Native Ground: From the History of Printing to the History of the Book.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 93, no. 2 (1984): 313–36. Ivins, William Mills. Prints and Visual Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969. Kamensky, Jane. A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016. Kerr, Wilfred B. “The Stamp Act in Nova Scotia.” The New England Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1933): 552–66. Mauss, Marcel. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 70–88. McDonnell, Michael A. “War Stories: Remembering and Forgetting the American Revolution.” In The American Revolution Reborn, edited by Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman, 9–28. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Mellen, Roger. “The Press, Paper Shortages, and Revolution in Early America.” Media History 21, no. 1 (2014): 23–41. Perry, Molly. “Buried Liberties and Hanging Effigies: Imperial Persuasion, Intimidation, and Performance During the Stamp Act Crisis.” In Community Without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act, edited by Zachary McLeod Hutchins, 36–66. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016. Rigal, Laura. The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Roberts, Jennifer L. Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014. Sapelly, Laura Elizabeth. “Spinning, Sewing, and Soliciting for the American Revolution.” In Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats, edited by Hinda Mandell, 47–61. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

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Shipton, Clifford Kenyon. Isaiah Thomas, Printer, Patriot and Philanthropist, 1749–1831. Rochester, NY: Hart, 1948. Skeehan, Danielle C. The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Spatz, Ben. What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research. New York: Routledge, 2015. Stewart, John J. “Early Journalism in Nova Scotia.” Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society 6 (1888): 91–122. Thomas, Benjamin Franklin. “Memoir of Isaiah Thomas.” In The History of Printing in America, Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1874. Thomas, Isaiah. The History of Printing in America. Worcester, MA: From the Press of Isaiah Thomas, Jun., 1810. Thomas, Isaiah. Three Autobiographical Fragments (1812), Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1962. Tremaine, Marie. A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1952. Triber, Jayne E. A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Wroth, Lawrence C. The Colonial Printer. Charlottesville, VA: Dominion Books, 1964.

Notes 1 “B———s” most likely signified “Bastards.” Other applicable eighteenth-century pejoratives beginning with the letter B include “bravo” and “bandog” (“a bailiff or his follower”). For the last, see Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London: Printed for S. Hooper, 1785), n.p. 2 Though in 1765 “America” was still part of “Britain,” in this chapter I follow Thomas in referring to the British North American colonies as “America,” as distinguished from “Britain.” 3 Thomas was apprenticed to the Boston printer Zechariah Fowle at the age of six. He described his education “at the case” in some autobiographical fragments that were incorporated into a memoir by his grandson, Benjamin Franklin Thomas, in the nineteenth century and included in the second edition of Thomas’s History of Printing in America. The fragments were also published separately by the American Antiquarian Society. Benjamin Franklin Thomas, “Memoir of Isaiah Thomas,” in The History of Printing in America (Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1874); Isaiah Thomas, Three Autobiographical Fragments (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1962). 4 Stephen Botein, “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975):

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158; also see 145–59. Lawrence Wroth similarly notes that printers were “important, if not always eminent, among the citizens of their respective communities.” Lawrence C. Wroth, The Colonial Printer (Charlottesville, VA: Dominion Books, 1964), 188. And Joseph Adelman notes that, despite their literacy, “conversing and conducting business with elites rarely enabled printers to join their ranks.” Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 22. Clifford Shipton, Isaiah Thomas, Printer, Patriot and Philanthropist, 1749–1831 (Rochester, NY: Hart, 1948); Jayne E. Triber, A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 63. An important counterpoint to this logocentric narrative, albeit for the post-Revolutionary period, can be found in Laura Rigal’s American Manufactory, which asserts the importance of production in the cultural construction of American federalism. Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). It is also worth noting, as David Hall does, that it may have precisely been Thomas’s “unlearnedness [that] made him sympathetic to materials that others would ignore” and resulted in the American Antiquarian Society’s irreplaceable founding collection of early American print. David D. Hall, “On Native Ground: From the History of Printing to the History of the Book,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 93, no. 2 (1984): 316. By using the term “tacit” I also refer to a large body of important literature on “tacit knowledge,” which, following Michael Polanyi, theorizes the unconscious and/or inarticulate forms of knowledge that exist alongside more recognized forms. Yet here I also interrogate the idea that manual and material knowledge is unconscious or inarticulate: rather, I suggest, tacitness can also be a strategic silence, a deliberate form of “un-knowing” that the marginalized use to protect themselves. In this regard tacit protest bears some important similarities to what James Scott has termed “everyday forms of resistance,” though (at least in Thomas’s case) it is both less pragmatically oriented and less effective than these other “weapons of the weak.” James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 29–36. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body (1935),” Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 70–88. For the theorization of technique as transmittable knowledge, see Ben Spatz, What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (New York: Routledge, 2015), 29–31. Molly Perry, for example, argues that British traditions of performance and public display, like toasting the health of the monarch or parading through streets, offered “opportunities for subversion” in a time of political unrest. Perry, “Buried Liberties and Hanging Effigies: Imperial Persuasion, Intimidation, and Performance During the Stamp Act Crisis,” in Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp

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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century Act, ed. Zachary M. Hutchins (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016), 38. For women’s politicization of household chores like spinning, see Laura Elizabeth Sapelly, “Spinning, Sewing, and Soliciting for the American Revolution,” in Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest From the American Revolution to the Pussyhats, ed. Hinda Mandell (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 49–54. And though the making and use of homespun may have been largely symbolic, Breen argues that it was nevertheless politically significant. T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (1986): 484. Because there are so few extant issues of the Gazette, it is difficult to ascertain the exact number Thomas transformed in this way. I will return to the implications of this uncertainty at the end of the essay. The possibility that the counter-stamped issue did not circulate generally was also raised by John Brebner. John Bartlet Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony During the Revolutionary Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 162. For the strength of print transmission, its (inevitable) manipulation by colonists, and impact on colonial life see, for example, Richard L. Bushman, “Caricature and Satire in Old and New England Before the American Revolution,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 88 (1976): 19–34, and Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 46–8. William Mills Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 25–37. Anderson borrows this phrase from Walter Benjamin. The plates were engraved by Thomas Major, the first engraver to be elected to the Royal Academy. Esther Chadwick has astutely noted the divergence between the absolute identity required by this bureaucratic project and the coincident ambition, among academic artists, to works characterized by distinctive gestures. Esther Chadwick, “Material Sinews of the Paper Age” (paper presented at Ecologies of Paper in the Early Modern World: Virtual Conference, The Huntington, November 5–6, 2020). W. B. Kerr, “The Stamp Act in Nova Scotia,” The New England Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1933): 556–7. Though I emphasize the political implications of Thomas’s actions in this chapter, politics may not have been his sole, or even primary, motivation. Shipton suggests that Thomas was first a businessman, and only adopted a revolutionary identity when neutrality proved untenable (and unprofitable). In this regard it is also useful to consider recent scholarship on “disaffected citizens,” a group to which, Jane Kamensky has suggested, artists like John Singleton Copley belonged. Shipton, Isaiah Thomas, 18–22. For some of the questions raised by attending to the

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“disaffected,” see Michael A. McDonnell, “War Stories: Remembering and Forgetting the American Revolution,” in The American Revolution Reborn, ed. Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 9–28; and for Copley in particular, Jane Kamensky, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016). This narrative has been questioned by Kate Dunsmore, but given Henry’s “longstanding and close relationship” with Provincial Secretary Richard Bulkeley, it seems likely that responsibility for these acts were attributed to Thomas, even if they were jointly conceived. Kate Dunsmore, “On the Edge of the American Revolution: The Nova Scotia Gazette in 1775,” American Journalism 37, no. 4 (2020): 527. For more on Halifax and the Stamp Act, see J. J. Stewart, “Early Journalism in Nova Scotia,” Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society 6 (1888): 91–122; Kerr, “The Stamp Act in Nova Scotia”; Marie Tremaine, A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), 599–601; and Patricia Fleming, “First Printers and the Spread of the Press,” in History of the Book in Canada, ed. Yvan Lamonde, Fleming, and Gilles Gallichan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 61–70. See Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia and Kerr, “The Stamp Act in Nova Scotia.” Thomas, The History of Printing in America (Worcester, MA: From the press of Isaiah Thomas, Jun., 1810), 1:370. Stewart, “Early Journalism in Nova Scotia,” 100. It may be that the protests continued until the repeal of the Act on March 18, 1766, but I have not been able to locate copies of the March 12 or March 18 issues. Also see Tremaine, A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 600. Thomas, History of Printing in America, 1:372. Ibid., 1:374. Ibid. This is a realization that would stand Thomas well—further on in his narrative he describes another, similar incident in which a Loyalist council, upset by a Patriotic essay published in Thomas’s Boston newspaper, The Spy, was frustrated by the fact that they could not issue a written demand for his appearance, because “they were not now, as formerly, licensers of the press.” Ibid., 1:382. Ibid., 1:374. It is important to note that, in trimming the sheets, Thomas ignored an important difference between a warrant and a stamped sheet of paper. Whereas the warrant is an agent of official power, the stamp is simply a receipt. Cutting the stamps off the paper did not recover the additional cost of stamped paper and so did not address any patriotic customers’ concerns about paying what they saw as an unjust duty. For example, see the two copies of the December 26, 1765, issue that are in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society. Each is a half-sheet, and one has

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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century an official revenue stamp while the other has the skull-and-crossbones replacement described in the following. Halifax Gazette, December 26, 1765, NewsC NS Hali Gaze, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. This possibility is reinforced by a note in the December 19, 1765, issue (the first two-page issue after November 1), which explains that “As News is very scarce we cannot oblige the public with more than half a Sheet this Week.” Such a message may also have been meant to deflect official censure for publishing an issue on a half-sheet, with the attendant confusion of some issues featuring stamps and some not. Halifax Gazette, December 19, 1765, NewsC NS Hali Gaze, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. Roger Mellen, “The Press, Paper Shortages, and Revolution in Early America,” Media History 21, no. 1 (2014): 23–41; for an insightful analysis of paper’s “interwoven material economies” in the context of the American Revolution, see Danielle Skeehan, The Fabric of Empire (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), 57–71. Thomas, The History of Printing in America, 15. Halifax Gazette, November 21, 1765, NewsC NS Hali Gaze, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. Kerr dates the effigy by a report in the Newport Mercury, November 4, 1765. Kerr, “The Stamp Act in Nova Scotia,” 556–7. For a discussion of the dilemma faced by printers, see Adelman, Revolutionary Networks, 59–66.

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Between Art and Nature The Dauphin’s Treasure at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid Tara Zanardi

This chapter tells the story about a group of multimedia objects, made of minerals, ores, and stones, that underwent aesthetic modifications, conceptual transformations, and changes in ownership and function over the course of many decades. Known in Spain as the Dauphin’s Treasure and held at the Prado Museum since 1839, these objects originate in the collection of Louis XIV’s (r. 1643–1715) heir, the Grand Dauphin (1661–1711), whose son Philippe d’Anjou became Philip V (r. 1700–46), the first Bourbon King of Spain. When the Grand Dauphin died in 1711, the Sun king divied up his son’s collections. The Treasure was sent to Philip V in Spain as part of his inheritance. The Treasure provided a material means to strengthen the bonds of the two Bourbon dynasties: an alliance Louis XIV saw as advantageous for France, especially after defeating the Habsburgs for the Spanish Crown. In addition to endowing Philip V with dynastic legitimacy in the early eighteenth century, the Treasure was later employed to showcase Spain’s imperial might. Thus, the Dauphin’s collection took on multiple roles in Spain as it was transformed and appropriated in its new home. In 1776 Charles III (r. 1759–88), Philip V’s son, donated the Dauphin’s Treasure to the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural (Royal Cabinet of Natural History; hereafter, RCNH), two months before it opened to the public. In this site, the cabinet’s director, Pedro Franco Dávila, whose sizable collection formed the foundation for the museum, placed the Treasures in dialogue with a global array of minerals, gems, botanicals, butterflies, shells, stuffed and mounted animals, antique vases, and objects that championed Spain’s colonial conquests and trade networks. Arranged according to taxonomic classifications of kingdom (animal,

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Figure 8.1  Diego de Villanueva, plan for the second floor of the former Goyeneche Palace, now the Royal Academy of San Fernando and the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, Madrid, eighteenth century. Hall of the Treasures (Letters K and M). Pencil, ink, gray, and pink wash. Courtesy of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.

vegetable, mineral) and type, the various objects and specimens illustrated enlightenment methods of display under the guise of serious “science.” At the same time, the museum’s exhibitions shared a close relationship to the early modern Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosity) with its emphasis on a diverse assemblage that highlighted the collection’s rarest and most beautiful examples. Dávila installed the Dauphin’s objects in the Hall of Treasures (Figure 8.1, letter M), which also included prints, medals, vases, weapons, and bronzes. Located at the heart of the museum and surrounded (in adjacent rooms) by minerals, ores, and stones, the very materials that artists used to create the objects, the Dauphin’s Treasure exemplified the processes by which nature is manipulated and transformed. As works that blur the artistic and the scientific, the marvelous and the natural, and the dynastic and the imperial, the Dauphin’s Treasures on display at the RCNH offer an exceptional case study to consider the political dexterity of monarchs as disseminators of taste, dynastic authority, enlightenment ideas, and territorial grandeur. Their exhibition at the RCNH points to the fluidity,

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complexities, and inconsistencies of scientific practices of the mid-eighteenth century and signals the commingling of art and natural history during the Spanish Enlightenment.1 Throughout their history, the tensions between their artfulness and their “marvelous” and “scientific” value have been central to their identity as objects that had both pleasurable and didactic purposes. Scholars tend to read their history as objects first belonging to the realm of art and then, with their move to the cabinet, as belonging to the realm of “science.” My chapter, instead, examines their placement at the RCNH as a nuanced metamorphosis, one that was both material and conceptual in nature. The locational shift of the Treasure to a public venue, I propose, represented more than a mere “scientific” gesture. Within the cabinet’s galleries, it afforded a link to their multifaceted origins as early modern collectibles at Louis XIV’s court and, at the same time, promoted Charles III’s imperial agenda to unite botanical, mineralogical, zoological, ethnographic, and archaeological objects. Together, these specimens and objects formulated a microcosm of Spain’s vast domains with its ample material wealth. The Dauphin Treasure’s integration into this colonial microcosm suggests their utility as illustrative examples of European artistry: they pointed to the transformative possibilities of raw goods, many of which derived from Spain’s territories, that were collected, catalogued, and exhibited. I address the repurposing of these decorative objects from a courtly context with a privileged audience to a natural history museum open to the public. Charles III’s decision to relocate these works to the cabinet suggests their re-imagining as material goods that lauded the diversity, rarity, and legacy of Spain’s resources. The objects’ placement, in tandem with materials from which they were carved, adorned, or fired, engendered novel aesthetic and material juxtapositions, celebrated the intimate relationship between art and science at the Spanish court, and highlighted the crown’s promotion of mineralogical inquiry. Over time, the objects were treated as works of art, works of science, works with mystical powers, diplomatic and familial gifts, war booty, and stolen property. The collection’s multiple modifications and appropriations demonstrate significant shifts in how such works could be employed for royal purposes, political agendas, and imperial goals, often simultaneously. Throughout its conceptual transmutations, however, this collection consistently retained its symbolic charge as a model of French and, later, Spanish Bourbon sovereignty. Within the exhibition halls of the cabinet in which the Crown endorsed Spain’s colonial supremacy, the Dauphin’s Treasure showcased Spain’s material

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riches and foregrounded Charles III’s ancestral connection to French royalty. The objects’ juxtaposition to antique vases, enconchados (mother-of-pearl encrusted paintings) depicting the conquest of Mexico, and mineralogical specimens from Spain’s territories engendered a multiplicity of associations; ones that pointed to Spain’s historic lineages and its immense imperial reach. Transformed from raw minerals, stones, and metals into exquisitely ornate vases, trays, and vessels, these multimedia objects celebrate human manipulation of natural materials. With these objects, lapidaries simultaneously highlight the materials’ “natural” state and their potential for transmutation. At the RCNH, these objects embodied not the realm of art or the realm of science but the intimate connections between them—as treasures that were simultaneously referential to their mineral, organic, and metallic derivations and their metamorphosis into refined works. The constant influx of specimens, ethnographic objects, and art from around the globe to the RCNH throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries exemplifies the dynamic nature of the collection. Thus, the museum’s displays were never static, but under perpetual scrutiny and undergoing infinite transformation. The Dauphin’s Treasure, therefore, generated everchanging relationships to the newly arrived objects in the museum. As works that engaged both the natural and the artful, they made ideal points of reference for the continually expanding cabinet. This essay’s aim, then, is to establish the twofold nature of the Treasure’s role at the RCNH: to legitimize Charles III’s royal authority by establishing his ancestral ties to the Grand Dauphin and Louis XIV and to promote the monarchy’s imperial agenda that united the arts and sciences. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, Spain sought to flex its sovereign muscles in a context of increasing competition and the expansion of European superpowers. The Treasure’s public presence at a museum in the nation’s capital, therefore, sought to educate visitors about Spain’s colonial domains and to highlight the country’s influence on the global stage. Considering the volume’s scholarly premise of “change,” I interrogate how the Dauphin’s Treasure experienced and embodied geographical, material, and conceptual metamorphoses. This collection, transported to Spain from France in the early eighteenth century, represented vital political and artistic links between the French and Spanish Bourbon courts. Moved to the RCNH in 1776 and installed alongside colonial specimens, works of art, and ethnographic objects, the Dauphin’s Treasure took on new life as models of human artistry, alchemical processes, and pedagogical tools in an environment that lauded Spain’s imperial magnificence.

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Early Modern Collecting: Louis XIV and the Grand Dauphin Despite their original integration into a collection owned by the Dauphin, these disparate objects hail from myriad temporal, geographic, and material sources. The Dauphin’s Treasure comprises objects made of precious and semi-precious stones, like rubies, diamonds, and emeralds; rock crystal (Figure 8.2); minerals, like jasper and jade; gold; and silver. Most of the objects were made in early modern ateliers throughout Europe. The collection also includes treasures from antiquity and the medieval era; the Ottoman Empire; India; and China, many of

Figure 8.2  Workshop of the Miseroni (?), rock crystal vase with handles in the form of fantastical creatures, 1590–1610. Rock crystal (hyaline quartz), enamel, gold. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

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which were modified with gold or silver mounts or integrated into ensembles to correspond to changing tastes. A few of the Treasures have retained identifiable markings made by Parisian silversmiths linked to the French court, including Josias Besle and Michel Debourg. As Letizia Arbeteta states, the metallic enhancements are important to the overall aesthetic of the objects even if they are not the primary material featured.2 The Duchy of Milan, which was under Spanish Habsburg jurisdiction with the ascension of Philip II (r. 1556–98) until the War of Spanish Succession (1700– 14), was one of the most important production sites where artisanal families, including the Miseroni, created luxurious items. Milanese lapidaries specialized in hardstones and rock crystal (hyaline quartz). The rock crystal vase with handles in the form of fantastical creatures (see Figure 8.2) from the Dauphin’s collection is attributed to the Miseroni workshop and dated to 1590–1610. It exemplifies the artistry associated with these early modern ateliers. Techniques involving the carving of rock crystal underwent experimentation with the artists working in a collaborative method.3 Rock crystal was highly valued for its transparency, rarity, and delicacy. The rock crystal vase showcases the crystal’s clarity complemented by intricate, scrolling, botanical motifs and geometric patterning. Both the base and the top of the vase use organic and curvaceous forms while the two handles are exceptional in their representation of fantastical creatures—almost marinelike in their depiction and stunning in their carving. These S-curved handles weave together human and decorative elements that embody a constant state of transformation and visual trickery. The work comprises multiple pieces of individually sculpted rock crystal and enameled gold mounts.4 In antiquity, rock crystal was referred to as “dry ice” and ascribed magical powers.5 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was a common material used for sacred objects, like crosses, to suggest the divine as light filtered through the translucent crystal bodies.6 In the early modern period, rock crystal’s transparency still retained some of its mystical associations but was also valued for its aesthetic appeal as artists shaped, carved, and decorated the uncooperative material in innovative ways. The dual appreciation of rock crystal—prized for its magical powers and its transformation into elegantly sculpted objects—had important implications for such works on display at the RCNH where they could be appreciated for their mineralogical value and their illustration of human ingenuity. In addition to the objects themselves, the cases that protected them were works of extravagance. Produced in Parisian bookbinding workshops for the

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Figure 8.3  Case for rock crystal vase with handles in the form of fantastical creatures, 1690–1711. Leather, wood, metal, cloth. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Dauphin, custom-made cases were crafted in wood with interiors featuring wool or silk. The exterior was covered in red Moroccan leather and adorned with gilt dolphins, rosettes, fleurs-de-lis, and crowns, and each case matches the shape of the matching object.7 The case for the rock crystal vase (Figure 8.3) replicates the vase’s silhouette, offering a cushioned space with metal brackets for fastening. These ornate cases were manufactured specifically for their corresponding objects, making them easily recognizable. The decorative motifs relate to the Dauphin’s heraldry, in particular the dolphins (i.e., Dauphin or Delfín).8 These objects typify early modern collecting practices in France. Louis XIV displayed his collection at the Hall of Abundance in Versailles and the Dauphin exhibited his collection at his Versailles apartments and his chateau at Meudon.9 The king and his son placed these treasures alongside medals and gems or as part of curiosity cabinets that emphasized the wonders of the natural world, pointing to their integration into collections that emphasized material prosperity, fine craftmanship, and the reciprocity between the marvelous and the natural. The French court prized the objects’ prestige, rarity, and supernatural aura with many vessels valued more than gold.10

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Both Louis XIV and his son obtained these objects via similar methods— as presents from family and friends, purchases from estate sales, commercial contacts, and gifts from visiting embassies, such as those from Siam in the 1680s (Figure 8.4).11 When Louis XIV’s minister Cardinal Mazarin (Giulio Raimondo Mazarino) died in 1661, the king acquired the majority of his collection, which included paintings, furniture, sculpture, gems, jewelry, and decorative treasures.12 This notable collection significantly increased the king’s possessions particularly in the realm of gems, rock crystal, and hardstones, many of which had been fashioned into exquisite objects similar to the ones Louis XIV owned.13 For these reasons, the collections located at the Prado, which originated in the

Figure 8.4  Michel Debourg (mount), Qing dynasty (jade carving), Chinese jade vessel with a silver-gilt foot, 1684–7. Silver-gilt, nephrite. © Museo Nacional del Prado.

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Dauphin’s collection, and the Louvre, which derived from the Sun King’s, are closely linked since they share similar histories.14 Upon the Grand Dauphin’s death, Louis XIV distributed the Dauphin’s goods among his heirs and auctioned a portion of them to pay off the Dauphin’s debts. Arriving in Spain in 1716, the decorative objects, along with furniture, porcelain, clocks, and bronzes, provided Philip V with a worthy inheritance. Louis XIV wanted to foster ties between the two Bourbon courts, a tactical move since Philip V and the French were engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession at the time of the Dauphin’s death. The last Habsburg king, Charles II (r. 1665–1700), named Philippe d’Anjou as his successor, a wish contested by the Habsburgs since the loss of Spain meant the loss of Spain’s global territories and access to trade routes and natural resources. Louis XIV’s political objective was to lend legitimacy to the young monarch in Spain via military support and through objects that epitomized French Bourbon patrimony.15 Once in Madrid, the objects were destined to decorate the Sala de las Furias at the Real Alcázar (royal palace).16 French court architects, including René Carlier, under Robert de Cotte’s direction, began work on an interior to display the objects and, as Arbeteta states, to harmonize the Spanish court’s aesthetic with that of the French Crown’s.17 Carlier’s design included walls punctuated by mirrors and Chinese lacquer with shelving for porcelain. The Chinese screens employed had been sent to Spain as part of Philip V’s inheritance.18 Thus, Carlier devised a modern chinoiserie design for the placement of the Dauphin’s Treasure. Such an interior would have updated the objects’ display according to contemporary fashion, juxtaposing disparate materials and artistic traditions in one unified room. However, the objects were never installed. The monarchs disliked the Real Alcázar. Instead, the couple brought the objects to their newly constructed palace, San Ildefonso de La Granja, in the 1720s. The objects were housed in a large storage area, known as the Casa de Alhajas. This depository held the abundant overflow of objects obtained by both monarchs, through familial connections, gifts, the procurement of Spanish royal patrimony, and Queen Isabel de Farnesio’s (1692–1766) active acquisition of paintings, sculpture, lacquer, and porcelain. Hence, the Dauphin’s Treasure became assimilated into a strategic collecting practice cultivated by the monarchs. Since the decorative works were never installed at La Granja, Arbeteta suggests that these objects may have held great symbolic value for the pair, but perhaps they did not align with the couple’s taste, proposing they were politically important but aesthetically old fashioned.19 As an astute queen,

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Isabel would have appreciated the collection’s dynastic significance on display at La Granja. Situated outside Segovia, the palace of San Ildefonso de La Granja began as a humble residence for Philip’s retirement. He had abdicated in 1724 due to his severe depression. Luis I (1707–24), his son from the marriage to his first wife, assumed the throne but died seven months later. His death forced Philip out of seclusion, and La Granja took center stage. The relocation of the Dauphin’s Treasure to La Granja suggests that this collection was meaningful for legitimizing the king’s second reign. Even if the objects remained in storage, their presence at the palace indicates that they intended to be integrated into the many unfinished, decorative programs Isabel commissioned. Upon Philip V’s death in 1746, court officials conducted an inventory, which records a total of 171 objects in the collection.20 It was updated in the mid-1770s under Charles III, who wanted to assess the palace’s collections. The Dauphin’s Treasure appealed to Charles III and provided part of his donation to the cabinet, which also included a collection of 300 Chimú earthenware ceramics in the form of animals, fruits, and people as well as examples of silver and wood21 and twenty-four enconchados of the conquest of Mexico (Figure 8.5), suggesting that these various sets could be employed in the monarchy’s promotion of its

Figure 8.5  Miguel and Juan González, Conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés, no. 21, 1698. Oil and mother-of-pearl on canvas. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

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wealth through lineage and empire in a museological context.22 The ceramics, silver, and wood had been excavated in 1764 in the northern coast of Peru (part of the Viceroyalty of Peru) and were gifted by Viceroy Manuel de Amat (1704– 82) to Charles III in 1765.23 As objects tied to a particular site under Spanish authority, they make an instructive parallel to the archaeological digs Charles III initiated at Herculaneum and Pompeii when he was king of Naples and Sicily (r. 1734–59 as Charles VII). Although he assumed the Spanish throne upon his half-brother’s death (Ferdinand VI, r.1746–59), he received regular updates about the excavated antiquities. The presence of antique objects of former empires, whether Roman or Pre-Columbian, brought into Spanish collections, lauded Charles III’s cultural and material power. The paintings of the conquest of Mexico were signed by Juan and Miguel González in 1698 and sent to the last Habsburg king, Charles II. Both the enconchados and the pre-Columbian pottery foreground the presence of imperial material culture as fundamental to the celebration of the Crown in a public forum. Like the Dauphin’s Treasure, these mixed-media paintings had been moved to La Granja in the early 1700s, which is fortunate, considering much of the Habsburg collections from the Americas had been destroyed in palace fires, including that of the Madrid Alcázar in 1734. The Bourbons claimed what was left of the imperial collection and sought to rebuild it, now with an archaeological bent. From scientific expeditions to Pedro Franco Dávila’s 1776 “Instruction,” specimens and artifacts were methodically assimilated into Spanish collections, some for private contemplation or cultivation and others for public display, a point I return to in the following. The Crown sought to expand control of their colonies through the gathering of specimen and objects, exploration of new territories, and reform measures. By bolstering the royal collections with objects from the Americas, gifting them to the royal cabinet along with the Dauphin’s Treasure, the king recast the Americas as under Bourbon jurisdiction. These gifts by Charles III to the RCNH wove together the material narrative of Spain’s imperialism and complemented the cabinet’s collection brought to Spain from Paris by Dávila. The inclusion of the Treasure as part of Charles III’s bequests positions them in direct relationship to the products of empire. Charles III’s contributions represent a global emphasis. Although Diego Angulo argues that “for Charles III, the [Dauphin’s] objects . . . held greater interest in the nature of the materials themselves than in their artistic value,” their appeal was not based solely on their material worth.24 The collection’s ancestral ties to his grandfather, the Grand Dauphin, and to his great-

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grandfather, Louis XIV, imbued it with dynastic splendor. By moving them to a public space that encapsulated contemporary ideas about natural history, collecting, and display, Charles III employed these objects in his project to modernize the Spanish capital and, in turn, to glorify the Crown’s domain, which was methodically studied for its economic potential. The new taxonomic methods popular across Europe and the Americas used at the RCNH benefited the king’s agenda to fashion Madrid into an imperial city.

Pedro Franco Dávila, Charles III, and the Royal Cabinet of Natural History Before Pedro Franco Dávila (1711–86) donated his collection to the Spanish Crown and served as the museum’s first director, he established his reputation as a premier collector and naturalist in Paris, earning memberships in European scientific societies, including the Royal Society in London. Dávila’s earliest encounters with trade networks occurred with his family’s commercial business, located in Guayaquil (present-day Ecuador), which was part of the Viceroyalty of Peru and a major shipyard and port.25 Dávila’s father, who was originally from Spain, had international connections, which expanded the family’s trading network and facilitated Dávila and his father’s trip to Cádiz in 1731. The family primarily sourced cacao, which they brought with them to Spain. During their many years of commercial activities in Andalusia, Dávila’s father died. Dávila moved to Paris in 1745, where he attended scientific lectures, rubbed shoulders with the intellectual and social elite at salons, and began his studies in natural history. It was in Paris that he put his knowledge of mercantile ventures to use as he formulated his own cabinet. As Juan Pimental argues, Dávila first experienced the fluidity common to natural history collections in Paris. When Dávila arrived in France, there were already more than 200 cabinets.26 GeorgesLouis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon opened the Royal Cabinet of Natural History to the public, providing an important precedent for the burgeoning naturalist about the types of disparate objects on display.27 Traveling throughout Europe, Dávila assembled an eclectic collection that rivaled any in Paris. Dávila’s cabinet featured fossils, zoological specimens, botanicals, scientific instruments, maps, books, prints, antique vases, and paintings; particularly notable was his collection of shells and minerals. His cabinet drew praise from countless experts, including Antoine-Joseph Dezallier D’Argenville. Dávila’s cabinet typified the intimate and complicated connections among the arts and

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Figure 8.6  Amethyst. Museo de América, Madrid. Fotografía: Joaquín Otero.

sciences. When paired, the arts and sciences elicited debate about the different, yet shared, relationships between them. Thus, the placement of raw minerals that originated in Dávila’s collection near the Dauphin’s Treasures at the RCNH promoted elasticity between objects despite the enlightenment’s emphasis on taxonomic divisions and the display of specimen by kingdom and type. For example, the Dauphin’s Treasure activated comparisons between things located in adjacent rooms: the antique vases whose forms they shared and the minerals (Figure 8.6) from which they were created. In 1753 Dávila offered his collection to a sympathetic Ferdinand VI. During his reign, Ferdinand VI established the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (hereafter; RABASF) in 1752 and the Real Jardín Botánico (Royal Botanical Garden) in 1755. His death in 1759, however, meant the end of negotiations conducted between the Crown and Dávila. Determined to impress the new king, Charles III, Dávila published a three-volume Catalogue systématique et raisonné des curiosités de la nature et de l'art, qui composent le cabinet de M. Davila (Briasson, Paris: 1767). The catalogue enticed buyers to purchase some of Dávila’s objects and afforded him the finances to broaden his collection. According to Javier Sánchez Almazán, the catalogue was more than just a description of his collection, but a scientific treatise.28 Its primary goal, to gain Charles III’s support for the cabinet’s creation and employment of Dávila as its director, was successful. Negotiations concluded in 1771. When Charles III agreed to the cabinet’s foundation, he did so as part of projects he sponsored to modernize Madrid. One of the main thoroughfares in Madrid, the Paseo del Prado, received the king’s attention. Trees were planted along the street and grand sculptural fountains were constructed at major intersections. The Botanical Garden was moved to the Paseo del Prado next to the planned Academy of Sciences, a building under design by Juan de Villanueva

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beginning in 1785 (now the Prado Museum) and meant to house the RCNH upon its completion. It would have eventually coordinated with institutions, like the Chemical Laboratory, the Royal Mineralogical School, and the Astronomical Observatory, along with the Botanical Garden.29 All of these establishments fostered scientific practice in Spain and helped the Crown reap the benefits of its colonies’ resources, which were collected, studied, cultivated, and displayed. The short-term solution was the unification of the cabinet with the RABASF on Alcalá street, close to the Paseo del Prado. The Latin text, “King Charles III/ united nature and art under one roof/for the public good/in the year 1774,” carved on the entrance “alludes” to the two institutions’ “cohabitation.” As Andrew Schulz states, “the visual arts were aligned with the natural sciences as servants of the Enlightenment,” and both were “mobilized to fulfill the ends of Spanish imperial ambition.”30 While the art academy occupied the basement and first floor, the natural history cabinet inhabited the second floor.31 The union of these two institutions provided an interdisciplinary background for which the Dauphin’s Treasures were perfectly aligned. From the beginning, the royal cabinet was plagued by a lack of space, with only ten halls created for the display of minerals, birds, quadrupeds, reptiles and insects, marine specimens, shells, plants, fossils, textiles, weapons, scientific instruments, and art, plus a library and office. The Dauphin’s collection provided star power and earned a prime location in the Hall of Treasures (see Figure 8.1, Letter M). Although Dávila arranged the specimen according to type and kingdom (animal, vegetable, mineral), he typically exhibited objects based on their beauty and rarity, pointing to the inconsistencies of scientific practice in the mid-eighteenth century and the cabinet’s close identification with Wunderkammern. As Lisa Camille Ruud observes, “The classificatory systems of natural history materialized in the Cabinet were secondary to splendor, art, and taste.”32 Such a multifarious approach to the curation of specimen offered an appropriate space for the Dauphin’s Treasures as liminal objects that shared affinities to both their mineralogical beginnings and their artful transformations. Taxonomic arrangements did not negate the emphasis on the display’s marvelous and aesthetic traits—the two coexisted much like they did at other natural history cabinets. The RCNH’s lack of space—its halls brimmed with overwhelming quantities of “things”—compounded the bureaucratic tensions that existed between the director and the court. The government granted Dávila a full-time taxidermist and dissector, Juan Bautista Bru, an artist trained at the Royal Academy, who assisted the director in his efforts to catalog and exhibit new objects. In 1776, Dávila sent the “Instruction to Augment the Collections of the Natural History Cabinet”

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to Spanish colonial officials throughout the Crown’s territories as per the king’s decree.33 The “Instruction” detailed the desired specimen and the proper methods to prepare and deliver them to Madrid. Once the instructions were sent, Dávila was constantly inundated with new shipments. Dedicated storage space accommodated the arrival of items that had to undergo inspection before exhibition.34 Dávila’s “Instruction” was complemented by “The Report of Different Curiosities from the Philippines, China, and the Indies, Requested for the Royal Cabinet of Natural History” directed to the Governor-General of the Philippines, Simón de Anda y Salazar.35 Anda responded to the mandate for art “curiosities” by sending Qing dynasty alabaster figurines (Figure 8.7), Chi-fu robes, and silver filigree objects, some of which were placed in the Hall of Treasures with the Dauphin’s objects. The large influx of items was made possible because of Dávila’s memorandum and with Charles III’s initiation of a direct trade route between Manila and Cádiz in the 1760s. This route greatly benefited Spain’s access to goods manufactured and cultivated throughout Asia because it bypassed the Manila Galleon route via Mexico.

Figure 8.7  Qing dynasty, China, masculine figurine, eighteenth century. Alabaster and soapstone. Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid.

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Both of these mandates suggest that the RCNH prioritized objects that highlighted Spain’s imperial strength and global reach. They emphasized a wellrounded cabinet, one that consistently expanded the original collection with scientific, archaeological, and artistic examples. Dávila and other naturalists in Spain, like José Clavijo y Fajardo, belonged to an extensive scholarly network, which facilitated the entrance of objects to the RCNH via academic connections. In addition, when animals in the king’s collections died, like an Indian elephant held at the Aranjuez Palace, their remains were typically brought to the cabinet for preservation and display. The shipments of goods arriving to the cabinet via these different mechanisms complemented the royally sponsored scientific expeditions conducted on behalf of the Crown. These expeditions, like the Botanical Expedition to Peru and Chile (begun 1777) led by botanists Hipólito Ruiz and Antonio Pavón, sought to record the flora, fauna, and geography of the region and gather specimens for shipment to Spain, generating a transatlantic network of scientific study. As Paula de Vos argues, the goals of botany coincided with the goals of empire, making these expeditions advantageous for the overall practice of natural history. She uses the term “economic botany” to examine the study of plants whose properties could be implemented to benefit humankind and for profit.36 This dual strategy was carried out in multiple sites, from the cultivation of botanicals in the Philippines and Americas to experimentations performed in Madrid. Botanists played the starring role on the expeditions, but these individuals were equipped with full teams, including engineers, cartographers, and artists. Daniela Bleichmar notes that in the same building that housed the RCNH, “artists received training before joining the natural history expeditions.” This coordination was a “result of a Spanish Enlightenment understanding of the practical applications of art.”37 As a public institution that exhibited an international array of objects, the RCNH promoted natural history and art-historical studies in its exhibition halls. By doing so, it trained its audience to observe—to use its senses to consider, classify, and compare the items on display. Indeed, as Bleichmar discusses, the commingling of art and natural history was typical of enlightenment practices that sought to teach visual learning and collecting. The two often coordinated, as in the case of Dezallier D’Argenville, whose expertise in gardening, shells, and art is typical of eighteenth-century collectors. For Bleichmar, it is the reconsideration of Dezallier D’Argenville’s two “personalities” (as a naturalist and connoisseur of art) that allows for a more complete understanding of the ways in which “notions of connoisseurship, taste, and order were central to the collecting of both naturalia and art.”38 Thus, Davila’s accumulation of myriad goods and

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their placement in the RCNH, an institution that shared its space with the art academy, embody mid-eighteenth-century practices. Fitted into this cabinet, the Dauphin’s Treasure, as objects that straddle the natural and the artful, made for exceptional examples for close scrutiny by the well-trained eye. For example, in 1783, Charles III sent a crate containing several hundred butterflies and beetles from Peru and Brazil to Dávila, who commented on the specimens’ rarity and brilliant coloring. Dávila used the Hall of Treasures to prepare the specimens since it had exceptional light.39 Dávila invited the prime minister, José Moñino, count of Floridablanca, who served as the protector of both institutions, to observe these incredible specimens set against the backdrop of the decorative objects, scenes of Mexican conquest, and other works of art.40 In such a context, the butterflies’ and beetles’ wings’ iridescence and textured surfaces complemented the rich colors and veining of the minerals and stones in the Dauphin’s collection. Opening its doors on November 4, 1776, the museum witnessed an impressive number of visitors. German tourist Christian A. Fischer observed that “Every body, high or low, is freely admitted,” although rules applied as to proper dress and conduct.41 Besides the museum’s regular visiting hours, it also reserved time for special tours for important dignitaries or naturalists. Since it was a public museum, the Spanish government had to consider curatorial issues, such as display cases, lighting, and organization, and logistical ones, such as crowd control. Less than one month after it opened, Dávila informed the court that many objects had already suffered damage and requested the assistance of soldiers. Because the soldiers were suspected of stealing, however, they were prevented from entering the room in which the Dauphin’s Treasure was located.42 As Ruud suggests, the cabinet was considered an “obligatory” place for all visitors, many of whom proclaimed the metals and minerals as exceptional.43 Irish tourist John Talbot Dillon stated that “the mineral part of the cabinet, containing precious stones, marbles” and “ores” “is very perfect.” The former French ambassador to Spain Jean-Francois Bourgoing agreed with this assessment, stating that the cabinet comprises “one of the completest collections in Europe in metals, minerals, precious stones, [and] corals.”44 Joseph Townsend, an English traveler who explored the collection privately with the scholar Antonio Ponz, stated, “The collection of the king of Spain is truly magnificent, but far from being well-chosen, or well arranged. For intrinsic value in silver, gold, and precious stones, perhaps no cabinet ever equalled this; but for science, I had rather be master of the more humble collections of Mr. Charles Greville, or of M. Besson.”45 Regardless of this assessment, Townsend placed Dávila in line with the famed naturalists Sir Hans Sloane and Buffon. Such observations illustrate the seemingly incongruous, but, in reality, quite harmonious,

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nature of scientific practices common to enlightenment cabinets. They attest to the collection’s taxonomic bent and, simultaneously, demonstrate the cabinet’s correlation to the Wunderkammer, a location associated with eclectic displays meant to extol the wonders of the world. Indeed, as Pimental proposes a cabinet of curiosities is a space for “disorder and transformation” and a place for “mediation,” arguing that the RCNH acted as the “locus where the beautiful mixed with the profitable and intellectual capital was translated into cold cash.”46 Despite the emphasis on enlightenment “science” and “economic botany,” the Madrid cabinet, like many such institutions, did not fully shed its connection to earlier exhibits of marvel and wonder. Indeed, at the RCNH, the monarchy mobilized magnificence to convey its sovereign power and expansive, imperial reach. Because of the RCNH’s pedagogical mission to educate visitors about the global scope of Spain’s wealth with its wide-ranging collection, the cabinet produced various publications, including the periodical Anales de Historia Natural (1799–1804) and Bautista Bru’s Collection of Prints That Represent the Animals and Monsters of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Madrid, 1784–1786. These publications and others disseminated information about the cabinet, placing its collection in the dynamic world of similar museums. Ruud proposes the cabinet “formed part of the centralizing efforts and extensive reforms implemented by the Bourbon crown .  .  . to assist scientific progress; to educate the public; to restore imperial dignity and royal glory.”47 Its didactic purpose, along with its promotion of Spanish patrimony, confirms Charles III’s mission to remake Madrid into a modern, cosmopolitan, and scientific capital.

The Dauphin’s Treasure The Dauphin’s objects, installed by Dávila, coordinated with Charles III’s desire to celebrate Spain’s empire and Bourbon lineage. Chilean author Nicolás de la Cruz commented on these dual goals. He describes the Dauphin’s Treasures as “antiques” featuring rock crystal, “Oriental stones,” and cameos, and notes their lengthy history. He lists objects housed in the same room, including a Chinese sword with enameling and precious stones. The juxtaposition of the sword to the Dauphin’s collection enabled the comparison of like materials refined into artful objects. Cruz states that the scenes of Mexican conquest and statues of “Indians” from the Philippines were also located in the same hall, making this room richly instructive in imperial symbolism and dynastic authority.48 Dávila saw the value in the Dauphin’s Treasures and attempted to acquire similar works.49

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But how exactly did the Treasure undergo change at the RCNH? What forms of metamorphosis did the collection experience? Was it the objects’ positioning— next to specimens and works of art of Spain’s global network, conquest, and antiquities of former empires and their correlations to minerals in the adjoining rooms—that enabled novel relationships to form and that made discernible their liminal state between art and nature? Were these relationships merely conceptual as visitors observed the Treasure and associated it with like objects and materials? By placing the Dauphin’s Treasure at the center of the museum next to art works, like the Mexican enconchados or the Chinese sword, adjacent to rooms that included minerals, stones, and ores from which they originated, the objects illustrated in material form the potential of raw ingredients when they are carved, polished, and fired. The Treasure embodied the transformations possible when artists intervened and the command over natural resources, rendering them useful, artful, and “civilized,” even profitable. Located in the museum’s physical and metaphorical center, the Treasure perfected the natural ingredients viewed in the nearby spaces in exquisite, decorative ways. Such transformative notions paralleled the ideals of empire on display with specimens and objects lauding Spain’s dominance over its territories. Thus, the Treasure embodied change itself, metaphorically and physically, as visitors contemplated connections among the formal qualities, material properties, and surfaces of distinct objects. The Dauphin’s Treasure married these vastly different “things.” It thereby aligned with eighteenth-century collecting practices, which often paired objects like shells and porcelain as a playful reciprocity between the artful and the natural. This juxtaposition was not only seen in elite collections, but also in rococo interiors with disparate objects forming a unified assemblage. Although the Treasures were created before the rococo’s zenith, considering them in connection to this style is helpful for exploring the objects’ complex commingling of art and nature, a critical concept of eighteenth-century thought. The mounted jade (Figure 8.4) and the lapis lazuli goblet (Figure 8.8/Plate 8) make for exceptional examples as objects that blur the artful and the natural. Although the jade is seated on an ornate base, its form is sinuous and organic to emphasize its stylized imitation of nature. The jade’s curves and folds refract light, creating a structure that looks vaguely floral, marine-like, yet abstract. Jade is a silicate mineral that is typically found in green with subtle veining; here it has been polished and made malleable to create asymmetrical shapes. It thus retains its original qualities and showcases its essence while its curvaceous structure and sheen highlight the artists’ modulations and skill. For the goblet,

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Figure 8.8 Italian Workshop (Goblet), Pierre Delabarre (Adornment), lapis lazuli goblet with enameled dragons and boy, sixteenth century (goblet); 1625–45 (adornment). Enamel, lapis lazuli, opal, gold. © Museo Nacional del Prado.

the artists underscored the smoothed and articulated surface of the lapis, a metamorphic rock made glossy with a wide shape and egg and dart patterning. The deep-blue coloring and gold veining of the lapis evoke a marbleized effect, providing a strong contrast to the chinoiserie embellishments of shells, dragons, vegetation, cupid-figure, and dolphins, potentially a reference to the Grand Dauphin. These lavish, enameled adornments add material complexity to the lapis goblet. Both the jade and the lapis embody the idea of metamorphosis via artistic manipulation without losing their essential “natural” qualities. They also evoke the exotic East from which these minerals originate, pointing to the two goals of the monarchy, to promote its dynastic lineage and its global authority.50 In many respects, these objects exemplify a form of disciplined excess, which was a central idea to rococo interiors that unified elaborate designs and disparate materials in seemingly untamed, yet fully structured, compositions. Pairing minerals and gemstones with metallic mounts typified early modern luxuries and pointed to essential connections between natural and fabricated things commonly seen in eighteenth-century collections, like porcelain, derived from

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clay and minerals. But porcelain also embodied the transformative possibilities of these natural elements made possible through fire and the shaping and decorating of clay bodies. In a natural history cabinet, the Treasure epitomized the inconsistencies of elite collections and scientific practices of the mid-1700s in which the desire for delineating boundaries and classifying things based on their kingdom and type were simultaneously undermined and blurred by pairing seemingly contrasting materials. Thus, the Dauphin’s objects are neither natural nor artful in that they are perpetually caught in between, continually illustrative of metamorphosis. This tension is essential to the enlightenment practice of “science” and to the identity of these objects. Dávila’s utilization of modern scientific practices did not negate the seemingly incongruous methods for choosing objects for display—they were typical of enlightenment cabinets and collections. The specimens and objects offered visitors pleasure and served the Crown’s didactic goal to make the empire available and materially present to the public and engender patriotic sentiment. Within a “science” museum with close affiliation to the fine arts, the placement of the Dauphin’s collection near minerals and precious stones and paintings, sculptures, and antiquities, suggests they performed well as instructive works that united the scientific and artistic. This placement, however, also points to the ambiguities of display in which taxonomic systems were inconsistently applied. At the museum, the Treasure maintained its important roots in the French Bourbon monarchy but was now interwoven in a narrative that celebrated Spanish Bourbon patrimony, Charles III’s urban projects, dynastic authority, and Spain’s imperial conquests. Despite the locational change the Dauphin collection experienced when it was moved to the cabinet, it performed a far more important transformation during its tenure as a star in the Hall of Treasures. Unlike the Treasure’s private displays in royal palaces for the enjoyment of privileged audiences, at the museum, the collection occupied a distinctly public space meant to engender patriotic spirit and educate visitors about Spain’s territories. This conceptual employment of the Treasure as a pedagogical tool endowed it with a new imperial mission, one in which the fluid relationship between art and science was made manifest.

Bibliography Alcouffe, Daniel. “The Collection of Cardinal Mazarin’s Gems.” The Burlington Magazine 116, no. 858 (September 1974): 514, 516–26.

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Angulo Iñiguez, Diego. Catálogo de las alhajas del Delfín. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1989. Arbeteta Mira, Letizia. “Las Alhajas del Delfín, ¿un tesoro dinastico?” Reales Sitios 144, no. 2 (2nd Trimester, 2000): 38–57. Arbeteta Mira, Letizia. El tesoro del Delfín: Alhajas de Felipe V recibidas por herencia de su padre Luis, gran Delfín de Francia. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2001. Arbeteta Mira, Letizia. Arte transparente: la talla del cristal en el Renacimiento milanes. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2015. Arbeteta Mira, Letizia, and Leticia Azcue Brea. The Dauphin’s Treasure. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2018. Bleichmar, Daniela. “Learning to Look: Visual Expertise across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 85–111. Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Bottineau, Yves. “Philip V and the Alcázar at Madrid.” The Burlington Magazine 98, no. 636 (March 1956): 68–75. Cabello Carro, Paz. “Spanish Collections of Americana in the Late Eighteenth Century.” In Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, 217–35. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Calatayud, Maria de los Ángeles. Pedro Franco Dávila. Primer director del Real Gabinete de Historia Natural fundado por Carlos III. Madrid: CSIC, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, 1988. Cruz y Bahamonde, Nicolás de la. Viage [sic] de España, Francia, é Italia. Cádiz: la Imprenta de Manuel Bosch, 1812. De Vos, Paula. “The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire.” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 399–427. Dunlop, Anne. “On the Origins of European Painting Materials, Real and Imagined.” In The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, 1250–1650, edited by Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith, 68–96. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Gerevini, Stefania. ““Sicut Crystallus Quando Est Obiecta Soli.” Rock Crystal, Transparency and the Franciscan Order.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 56, no. 3 (2014): 255–83. Lavalle-Cobo, Teresa. “El coleccionismo oriental de Isabel de Farnesio.” In Oriente en Palacio: Tesoros asiáticos en las colecciones reales españolas, edited by Mariana Alfonso Mola and Carlos Martínez Shaw, 211–4. Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 2003. Martin, Meredith. “Mirror Reflections: Louis XIV, Phra Narai, and the Material Culture of Kingship.” Art History 38, no. 4 (September 2015): 652–67. Martínez Arranz, Raúl. “Collecting the New World: America and the Development of Museums in Early Modern Spain.” MA thesis, New York University, 2011.

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Museo del Prado, “Jarra de cristal con asas en forma de bichas.” https://www​ .museodelprado​.es​/coleccion​/obra​-de​-arte​/jarra​-de​-cristal​-con​-asas​-en​-forma​-de​ -bichas​/299c20b9​-759d​-4aa8​-99fb​-f234f6d78f88 Pimental, Juan. “Across Nations and Ages: The Creole Collector and the Many Lives of the Megatherium.” In The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, edited by Simon Schaffer, 321–53. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009. Ruud, Lise Camilla. “Doing Museum Objects in late Eighteenth-Century Madrid.” PhD diss., University of Oslo, 2012. Sánchez Almazán, Javier. “La Creación del Real Gabinete de Historia Natural.” In Una colección, un criollo erudito y un rey, edited by Cristina Cánovas Fernández and Javier I Sánchez Almazán, 13–55. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2016. Schulz, Andrew. “Spaces of Enlightenment. Art, Science, and Empire in EighteenthCentury Spain.” In Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492–1819, edited by Chiyo Ishikawa, 189–227. Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum; Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Townsend, Joseph. A Journey through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787: with Particular Attention to the Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Population, Taxes, and Revenue of that Country, and Remarks through a part of France, vol. 1. London: C. Dilly, 1792.

Notes 1 For further information on the enlightenment in Spain, see The Spanish Enlightenment Revisited, ed. Jesús Astigarraga (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015). 2 Letizia Arbeteta Mira, “Las Alhajas del Delfín, ¿un tesoro dinastico?” Reales Sitios 144, no. 2 (2nd Trimester, 2000): 44–5. 3 Letizia Arbeteta Mira and Leticia Azcue Brea, The Dauphin’s Treasure (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2018), 25. 4 According to the Prado Museum website, the base of this work was originally adorned with gold enameling, which was stolen in the 1918 museum robberies. See https://www​.museodelprado​.es​/coleccion​/obra​-de​-arte​/jarra​-de​-cristal​-con​-asas​-en​ -forma​-de​-bichas​/299c20b9​-759d​-4aa8​-99fb​-f234f6d78f88 5 Letizia Arbeteta Mira, El tesoro del Delfín: Alhajas de Felipe V recibidas por herencia de su padre Luis, gran Delfín de Francia (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2001), 47. 6 Stefania Gerevini, “‘Sicut Crystallus Quando Est Obiecta Soli.’ Rock Crystal, Transparency and the Franciscan Order,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 56, no. 3 (2014): 255–6. 7 Arbeteta Mira, El tesoro del Delfín, 25–6.

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8 These cases are so highly praised that the Prado Museum recently dedicated an exhibition to them: “‘The Other Treasure’: The Dauphin’s Cases,” Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (March 2020–February 2021). 9 Arbeteta Mira, “Las Alhajas del Delfin,” 42. 10 Arbeteta Mira, El tesoro del Delfín, 19. 11 Meredith Martin, “Mirror Reflections: Louis XIV, Phra Narai, and the Material Culture of Kingship,” Art History 38, no. 4 (September 2015): 652–67. 12 Arbeteta Mira, El tesoro del Delfín, 19. 13 Daniel Alcouffe, “The Collection of Cardinal Mazarin’s Gems,” The Burlington Magazine 116, no. 858 (September 1974): 514. 14 Arbeteta Mira, “Las Alhajas del Delfín,” 38. 15 Arbeteta Mira makes the assertation for their dynastic value in “Las Alhajas del Delfín.” 16 Letizia Arbeteta Mira, Arte transparente: la talla del cristal en el Renacimiento milanes (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2015), 16. 17 Yves Bottineau, “Philip V and the Alcázar at Madrid,” The Burlington Magazine 98, no. 636 (March 1956): 68–75. 18 Teresa Lavalle-Cobo, “El coleccionismo oriental de Isabel de Farnesio,” in Oriente en Palacio: Tesoros asiáticos en las colecciones reales españolas, ed. Mariana Alfonso Mola and Carlos Martínez Shaw (Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 2003), 211. 19 Arbeteta Mira, El tesoro del Delfín, 24 and “Las Alhajas del Delfín,” 38–40. 20 Arbeteta Mira, El tesoro del Delfin, 17. 21 Paz Cabello Carro, “Spanish Collections of Americana in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 218. 22 Maria de los Ángeles Calatayud, Pedro Franco Dávila. Primer director del Real Gabinete de Historia Natural fundado por Carlos III (Madrid: CSIC, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, 1988), 134. 23 Raúl Martínez Arranz, “Collecting the New World: America and the Development of Museums in Early Modern Spain” (MA Thesis, New York University, 2011), 35. 24 Diego Angulo Iñiguez, Catálogo de las alhajas del Delfín (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1989), 3. 25 Juan Pimental, “Across Nations and Ages: The Creole Collector and the Many Lives of the Megatherium,” in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, ed. Simon Schaffer (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009), 325. 26 Javier Sánchez Almazán, “La Creación del Real Gabinete de Historia Natural,” in Una colección, un criollo erudito y un rey, ed. Cristina Cánovas Fernández and Javier I Sánchez Almazán (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2016), 15.

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27 Pimental, “Across Nations,” 331. 28 Sánchez Almazán, “La Creación del Real Gabinete,” 15. 29 Lise Camilla Ruud, “Doing Museum Objects in Late Eighteenth-Century Madrid” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oslo, 2012), 48. 30 Andrew Schulz, “Spaces of Enlightenment. Art, Science, and Empire in EighteenthCentury Spain,” in Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492–1819, ed. Chiyo Ishikawa (Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum; Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 189. 31 Ángeles, Pedro Franco Dávila, 102. 32 Ruud, “Doing Museum Objects,” 175. 33 Ángeles, Pedro Franco Dávila, 95. 34 Ruud, “Doing Museum Objects,” 65. 35 Sánchez Almazán, “La Creación del Real Gabinete,” 51. 36 Paula de Vos, “The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 400. 37 Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 26. 38 Bleichmar, “Learning to Look: Visual Expertise across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 85–7. 39 Ruud, “Doing Museum Objects,” 138. 40 Ibid., 138–9. 41 Ibid., 68. 42 Ángeles, Pedro Franco Dávila, 112–4. 43 Ruud, “Doing Museum Objects,” 172. 44 Ibid. 45 Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787: With Particular Attention to the Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Population, Taxes, and Revenue of that Country, and Remarks through a part of France, vol. 1 (London: C. Dilly, 1792), 284. 46 Pimental, “Across Nations,” 338–9. 47 Ruud, “Doing Museum Objects,” 7. 48 Nicolás de la Cruz y Bahamonde, Viage [sic] de España, Francia, é Italia (Cádiz: la Imprenta de Manuel Bosch, 1812), 42–3. 49 Arbeteta Mira, El tesoro del Delfin, 30. 50 Lapis lazuli was found predominately in Asia, but also in present-day Georgia, Armenia, and Afghanistan. See Anne Dunlop, “On the Origins of European Painting Materials, Real and Imagined,” in The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, 1250–1750, ed. Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 78.

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California Indian Basket Weavers, Spanish Imperialism, and EighteenthCentury Global Networks Yve Chavez

Through a case study of a wide-brimmed hat-shaped basket made at one of southern California’s missions, this chapter underscores the role of Indigenous basket weavers in the global movement of goods and ideas in the late eighteenth century. Members of the Vancouver Expedition that reached California in 1792 acquired Native-made objects, including a hat-shaped basket that is modeled after coiled basket hats Native women typically wore in coastal southern California before and after Spanish colonization.1 However, in a Chumash hat now in the British Museum collection, the weaver changed the standard basket hat shape by giving it a wide brim. Beyond its shape, which reflects the weaver’s ingenuity in combining established and imported forms, the basket’s construction embodies the weaver’s knowledge of native plants and environmental stewardship practices that Spanish colonists suppressed after their 1769 arrival in California. Ecological shifts, global movement, Indigenous survivance strategies, and adaptations in material practice are highlighted as markers of change that would reshape California’s inhabitants and their culture. This chapter considers the basket hat as a work of art, within an Indigenous sense of the term, to dignify its maker and other weavers who produced innovative baskets that combined Native and foreign design concepts, including imported Filipino headgear.2 Drawing upon settler colonial studies and Indigenous theory, this case study centers California Indian cultural survivance and refusal to abandon established practices despite radical transformation of changes in eighteenth-century California3 (Figure 9.1/Plate 9). The volume’s theme of change is explored through an unprecedented basket shape that signaled a trend among late-eighteenth-century weavers toward

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Figure 9.1  Unknown Chumash weaver, basket hat, late eighteenth century. Sedge root, bulrush root. H 2.76 cm × D 40 cm. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.

adapting California Indian basketry to foreign shapes while using established weaving techniques. Taking the volume editors’ explanation that things “have social lives,” this chapter treats its main subject as more than an object that now sits in museum storage; rather, it is the embodiment of Indigenous agency and the environmental shifts weavers witnessed as a by-product of foreign colonization. Whereas other authors in the volume focus on the impacts that imperial powers had on subjugated populations’ material culture, this chapter asserts that Indigenous communities in California also reshaped things colonizers circulated and that they introduced new ideas to the global trade network. This chapter’s social art-historical analysis of basketry practices repositions California Indian weavers as active participants in eighteenth-century global interactions. It also calls for a re-assessment of the basket hat in connection to established trade networks and practices. We may never know the names of all the weavers whose baskets European explorers acquired, but the skill and knowledge that went into making these finely coiled baskets must not go overlooked. Through close investigation of the basket hat’s construction, I argue that its maker actively disseminated Chumash cultural knowledge, perhaps as a tactic to preserve that information in a time of rapid social and ecological change while also adapting an imported hat shape into the local visual lexicon. As an index of change, we might view the basket hat as part of a system of Indigenous reactions against asymmetries of power relations in the global eighteenth century. To subvert the colonial hegemony that dominates narratives about

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California, it is crucial to first situate this study within the context of Indigenous power relations and exchange networks that existed prior to colonists’ arrival. I begin with an overview of Chumash trade practices and the movement of valued material culture in the form of shellwork and basketry. Then, I take a settler colonial studies approach to the discussion of Spanish missionization and its disruption of Indigenous trade and power structures and ecological practices. This foregrounds an investigation of Indigenous and Spanish interactions with outside explorers, specifically members of the Vancouver Expedition. I locate Indigenous agency, an overlooked catalyst in the movement of goods, at the center of a critical analysis of early modern collecting practices which include the relationship between Chumash basketry and imported hats introduced to weavers at the missions. Through examination of the basket hat and a Filipino woven hat type or salakot that circulated within Spain’s Pacific Empire, this chapter argues that California Indian artists accommodated Asian imported goods through the missions. By adopting outside shapes, Indigenous weavers expanded their practice and awareness of foreign objects that circulated through late-eighteenth-century California. A comparison of the Chumash basket hat and the Filipino salakot also highlights a pattern of Indigenous resistance to imposed change and assimilation throughout the Spanish empire.

Indigenous Autonomy The transportation corridor famously known as El Camino Real was not a colonial construct but a system of roads that California’s first peoples carved out well before Spanish colonists stepped foot in the place they would rename California. These roads allowed Native peoples to travel long distances for trade and to access materials unavailable in their home villages. Natale Zappia explains, “Before Spaniards arrived, trails not only provided goods from distant places but also served as outlets for migration if and when resources became scarce in a particular place—a relatively frequent occurrence in a parched landscape.”4 California’s inhabitants also used these inland trails to transport shells to interior communities like the Pueblos of New Mexico and north to the Columbia River region.5 California Indians engaged in an established practice of trade to access limited and desired resources. For California Indians, shell was a favored form of personal adornment and a signifier of one’s status and wealth. The Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel region were known as one of the greatest shell-bead-producing communities

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of California. Spanish zoologist José Longinos Martínez noted in 1792 how the Chumash traded shell beads for goods found outside their homelands, such as fox skin and seeds found among mountain-based communities.6 The Chumash and other Native communities’ members also wore strings of shell beads for personal adornment that likely represented one’s status.7 The production of shell beads used as currency and those processed for personal adornment required specialized skills, though the former are the product of a greater degree of time and energy.8 These regionally specific materials set the Chumash apart from other inland groups that did not have easy access to shells, which proved to be an asset in colonial exchanges before silver pesos circulated widely in California.9 Whereas currency changed from shell beads to pesos after colonization, finely coiled baskets remained valuable trade goods that colonists exploited for their own ends. Before launching into a critical discussion of colonial economics, however, baskets ought to be considered in light of pre-contact exchanges and their place as valued items alongside shell beads. Hats were one type of basket that held significance to individuals. Worn today for special occasions, basket hats also served a practical function for older generations of Chumash and their neighbors who wore them as protection against the chafing of burden basket straps that gatherers placed against the forehead. Weavers make baskets hats with specific wearers in mind, creating them to fit specific head sizes and imbuing them with specific patterns, further adding to the personalized dimension of such baskets. Basket hat patterns and structures also reflect the influences that southern California’s weaving communities had on one another. Like the Chumash, other southern California communities such as the Tongva, Yokuts, Kitanemuk, and Kawaiisu “placed their single coil band just two coil rows from the hat’s rim,” signaling the cross-cultural exchange of ideas that converged as an established practice.10 The Northern Chumash, however, were known for making coiled baskets that differed from those of their southern neighbors, most notably in their construction. Whereas the southern Chumash and their Tongva neighbors are known for making coiled baskets with juncus foundations, the Northern Chumash used sedge in their foundations, or wefts.11 This regional variation is a critical indicator of natural resource dependency and cultural variation that existed prior to Spanish colonization and which, as exemplified by the British Museum basket hat, continued during colonization. Aside from basket hats, southern California’s first peoples wove a variety of coiled basket types that would also end up in museum collections. Knowing the basic structure of coiled baskets is crucial for understanding why the basket

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cap in the British Museum is unique, not just in terms of its shape but also its regional specificity. In California there are two main types of baskets: coiled and twined. The communities from the Pomo region, located north of San Francisco, and southward to the Kumeyaay who inhabit the western region bisected by the US-Mexico border, are best known for coiled baskets. The communities north of the Pomo and beyond the border with Oregon typically make twined baskets. Coiled basketry is characterized by warps and wefts. Warps refers to the bundle of materials that form the foundation of a coiled basket that begins with a knot that moves in a spiral bound together by outer wefts. Both warps and wefts can consist of juncus, tule, willow, or sumac.12 Warps may also consist of sedge or yucca. It appears that this material specificity did not translate overseas following the basket hat’s removal to England as evidenced by the object record. The British Museum label, which identifies the basket hat’s material as grass, belies the complexity of Chumash coiled basketry that often consists of two or more plant types.13 The term “grass,” while correct as a generic descriptor, does not adequately account for the specific species native to the region of California, specifically San Luis Obispo County, where the weaver likely made the basket. Ralph Shanks states that the basket hat “has a sedge root background wefts, bulrush root black designs and herringbone over-stitching at the rim.”14 Sedge is a type of grass related to bulrush root, both of which are native to California. It is important to note that the specific plants used in the basket’s construction signal the weaver’s knowledge of native plants found in the region where they made the basket. This was not something the weaver made from imported plants or materials but a reflection of local ecological knowledge and weaving practice. At the missions, the Franciscans expected California Indians to harvest imported crops such as wheat, corn, and beans to provide food for the mission inhabitants.15 Weaving, which required weavers to first cultivate native plants during specific seasons, may have provided an outlet for mission inhabitants who would otherwise have been occupied with harvesting the crops competing with native plants.

Spanish Conquest and Franciscan Missions California was one of the last regions in North America colonized by Spain. After Jesuit missionaries established their presence in the Baja California peninsula beginning in the late seventeenth century, Spain expelled the order from its territories in 1767 and called upon the Franciscans to take control over

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the missions. Fray Junípero Serra, who had been working in the Sierra Gorda region of Mexico, made his way to Loreto on the southeastern side of the Baja peninsula in 1768. The following year, Serra oversaw the establishment of one Franciscan mission, San Fernando Velicatá in Baja California, and subsequently prepared to move north to Alta California, where he established Mission San Diego within the homelands of the Kumeyaay people.16 San Luis Obispo was the first mission established in the Chumash region in 1772. The other four Chumash-area missions are San Buenaventura (1782), Santa Barbara (1786), La Purísima Concepción (1787), and Santa Inés (1804). These missions along with the other seventeen in Alta California, hereafter referred to as California, disrupted a Native sense of place, connection to their homelands, and California’s ecology. The Franciscans introduced foreign plants and animals that competed with local flora and fauna. By disturbing California’s ecosystem, which provided sustenance and materials for shelter and clothing, these colonists forced Native people to adapt to new food sources and lifestyles introduced at the missions. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang explain that land is central to the settler colonial structure of asserting presence and authority. “Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence.”17 Farming was a specific method the Franciscans implemented to exert their control over California’s land and its inhabitants. This settler tool of exploitation conflicted with California Indians’ established land management practices aimed at allowing native plants and animals to thrive while providing for the human population. Cattle that overgrazed California’s grasslands and other resources have been cited as key factors driving Chumash people to the missions.18 The destruction of California’s ecology through cattle ranching and the clearing of trees for crops allowed the settler population to expand and Indigenous lifestyles changed in response.19 When confronted with violent threats to their land and lifeways, California’s first peoples implemented anti-colonial strategies of resistance in the form of fugitivism, revolts, and religious disobedience (by practicing in secret), among others. Weavers at the missions responded by seizing limited opportunities to make baskets for non-Native audiences. As native plants became scarce at the missions, weavers likely would have needed to venture further afield to collect basket plants that were appropriate for their work.20 Working with the same plant species as their predecessors was evidently a priority for weavers like the maker of the basket hat who stayed true to the Northern Chumash practice.

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The basket hat’s material indicates the weaver made it within the Northern Chumash region, likely near Mission San Luis Obispo, but someone later relocated the basket to Santa Barbara, where the Vancouver Expedition members visited. The British Museum’s Google Arts and Culture page for the basket hat, which it describes as a “coiled rush hat (sumulelu),” claims that Vancouver may have “transported it from Santa Barbara to Ventura on his way south along the California coast in 1793.”21 That is not improbable but does not account for the appearance of a Northern Chumash basket in Santa Barbara. The Franciscans were known to use baskets as diplomatic gifts and payment for other goods, the latter of which the head Franciscan at Mission San Buenaventura did in 1812.22 It would not have been unusual for the Franciscans to relocate the basket hat from Mission San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara, given their practice of appropriating Indigenous items for their own needs and moving art from one mission to another, as was common in the early days of the California missions.23 Though perhaps less likely given that the Franciscans relocated Native peoples away from their families to other missions to punish them, another possibility is that the weaver traveled from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara, bringing the basket hat with them.24 Despite their participation, either directly or indirectly, in cross-cultural exchanges with foreigners, California Indians have received little credit for their negotiation of settler colonial structures. The absence of Indigenous voices from the eighteenth-century archive has led to a disregard for Native agency in global contact, but through examination of the material record I argue it is possible to uncover evidence that suggests the Chumash weaver reworked the non-Native interest in her or his visual practice to their advantage. In other words, the weaver seized the opportunity to resist settler violence by continuing to cultivate native plants, exercise weaving skills being replaced by European trades, and assert their ingenuity by adapting a foreign object into a local format. In order to situate this analysis, I deconstruct the accounts written by the expedition members and other explorers to identify their limitations and the authors’ priorities. While valuable, non-Native accounts are limited and overlook the creativity of Indigenous peoples who actively appropriated foreign objects to meet their own needs.

The Vancouver Expedition While surveying the northwest coast of North America, members of the Vancouver Expedition (1791–5) stopped in California in 1792. As a British naval

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officer, George Vancouver had to receive special permission from the Bourbon monarch to visit Spanish territories.25 California was then part of the northern provinces of the viceroyalty of New Spain, known today as Mexico. During their visit to the Santa Barbara region, surgeon’s mate George Goodman Hewett acquired the basket hat and other Native-made items that are also part of the British Museum’s collection. Baskets clearly appealed to the British explorers as evidenced by Hewett’s collection and his colleagues’ accounts. During the explorers’ California visit, surgeon Archibald Menzies observed weavers making baskets in a variety of shapes and designs at Mission San Buenaventura. In his diary he wrote: But the most curious article we observed amongst these Natives were their Baskets which are of various shapes & sizes & so closely workd [sic] as to hold/ water, but by means of tinging the Materials of various colours they work in them figures & ornaments of the most complicated kind; We have seen the representations of different animals, the Arms of Spain, & long inscriptions worked in these Baskets by these illiterate people with a degree of exactness that was really astonishing & this we believe is chiefly performed by the Women.26

Menzies was referring to Chumash baskets with Spanish text and the Bourbon coat of arms. Like the British Museum basket, the baskets with coin designs are unique and have led scholars to ponder the literacy of the weavers who incorporated Spanish words into some of the baskets’ rims. Dana Leibsohn, for instance, acknowledges in her study of a basket in the University of California, Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum collection that the weaver “may well have learned to read and write Spanish letters, but we cannot be sure. Her woven words may have been copied from a text set out for her by a friar or other literate person.”27 There was no written Native language, Chumash or otherwise, in California at that time. Menzies noted that the illiterate weavers achieved “a degree of exactness that was really astonishing.”28 Even to the untrained eye, when viewing the baskets with coin-inspired patterns and the British Museum hat, it is apparent that their makers, regardless of their literacy, were highly skilled individuals. Weavers possessed extensive botanical knowledge. They knew when and where to gather native plants, how much to take, and how to plan a basket shape and its patterns. Weavers conducted controlled burns to prevent wildfires, eliminate dead plants, and encourage new growth that was ideal for cultivating materials used in basketry.29 Spanish colonists and, later, the US Forest Service prevented Indigenous Californians from exercising this vital land management

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practice for cultivating materials that served a range of purposes.30 Cordage, for instance, is typically derived from native plants or roots. Though sometimes used in basketry, cordage was also an element of dance regalia dancers wore in ceremonies conducted at the missions that members of Vancouver’s Expedition would have seen. Firsthand accounts of dances at the northern missions reveal a curiosity about these California Indian rituals, but such written sources provide little explanation regarding the significance of the dancers’ body adornments. An account from 1769 describes dancers in the Santa Barbara region wearing feathers: In the afternoon the leaders and caciques of each town came, one after the other, adorned according to their custom—painted and decked with feathers, having in their hands some split canes with the motion and noise of which they marked time for their songs, and the rhythm for the dance, so regularly and so uniformly that there was no discord.31

The author of this statement did not point out that depending on the type of dance performed, the dancers would wear headdresses made from down, owl, eagle, or egret feathers. The Chumash also used flicker, raven, and woodpecker feathers in their dances.32 Not unlike the object record for the basket hat, the British Museum’s records for hair pins and ceremonial items are lacking in material specificity, signaling a missed opportunity for scientific study regarding the species native to California; in this case, avian species. The placement of such materials in overseas collections de-contextualized the objects’ intended purpose and further obscured their cultural relevance for audiences unfamiliar with California’s native plants and animals. Whereas Chumash dancers likely wore the hair ornaments, primary accounts indicate that a non-Native recipient received the basket, and it may not have been the only basket hat of its kind (Figure 9.2). Weavers at Mission San Luis Obispo made a basket in the shape of a hat for Juan Bautista de Anza in 1776 during his second expedition through California. Fray Pedro Font, who was the chaplain of the expedition, wrote about the Chumash and Tongva women he saw weaving baskets during his travels between Mission San Gabriel and Mission San Luis Obispo. At the latter, he observed the weavers made baskets in a variety of shapes, including one in the shape of a sombrero upon Anza’s request.33 The British Museum basket hat seems to match Font’s description. Unfortunately, Font’s diary offers the last account of Anza’s basket hat and its current location remains unknown.

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Figure 9.2  Unknown Chumash (?) maker, hair pin, eighteenth century. Cloth, reed, fiber, feathers. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum

According to the British Museum, George Goodman Hewett acquired the hat-shaped basket in 1792. This may be the same basket Font saw at Mission San Luis Obispo, though that remains unconfirmed. The basket hat at the British Museum is the only known basket of its kind from the Chumash region. If weavers made other brimmed basket hats during the late eighteenth century, then either they have not survived or have not yet come to the surface. Even so, many questions remain unanswered. Was it the weaver’s decision to make a basket in the shape of a wide-brimmed hat? Was she or he commissioned to weave the basket? And, if so, was she or he compensated in any way for their work? In addition to trading baskets and other items with neighboring communities, the Chumash also gifted baskets within and beyond their community, which they continued doing after colonization. Vancouver Expedition members recounted Chumash individuals visiting the ship anchored in the Santa Barbara Channel. For instance, Vancouver wrote: “They all came in canoes made of wood, and decorated with shells like that seen on the 8th. They brought with them some fish, and a few of their ornaments; these they disposed of in the most cheerful manner, principally for spoons, beads, and scissars [sic].”34 In a similar tone, Menzies also observed that a group of Native people met the explorers on friendly terms. “In their manners they seemed to be remarkably friendly & docile readily parting with any thing [sic] they had which they thought would be any wise acceptable to us.”35 Both Menzies’s and Vancouver’s accounts indicate the Chumash met the explorers on positive terms with giftlike items in hand. While it is possible that the received items were indeed gifts, it is unclear what the Chumash motivations were for such an interaction. It is quite likely the explorers misunderstood the intentions behind the items the Chumash offered, assuming them to be gifts when perhaps there was an

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expectation that the explorers would give something in return to the Chumash as would be customary in the locally established trade system. Vancouver and Menzies may not have thought twice about taking something from a Native person. Menzies’s condescending description of the Chumash as docile lends little credence to the possibility that he saw them as equals, a sentiment the Franciscans shared. By the time of the Vancouver Expedition’s 1792 arrival in the Santa Barbara region, the Chumash had seen the Franciscans impose oppressive labor systems at Mission Santa Barbara for six years. Mission San Luis Obispo, the first of the Chumash-area missions, had been impacting Native lives for twenty years at that point. Whether or not they lived at a mission, Native peoples would have known that Europeans brought foreign tools, food, and other items. Having adapted to changes in the local ecology and diet, California Indians may have seen interactions with outsiders as opportunities to obtain desired foreign goods. In exchange, baskets, which met collectors’ interests, were valued products of skilled artistry that might buy the weavers something typically unavailable in California. I raise this speculation because of the documented, punishing reality California Indians encountered in the missions where the Franciscans exploited their labor as justification for providing Native people with minimal essentials for human existence such as food and shelter.36 Ironically, Native people, not the friars, were responsible for harvesting much of the resources that provided for their daily meals at the missions. Meanwhile, the monjeríos (literally, nunneries) where unmarried women resided, were sites of violence rather than respite from the already violent conditions of mission life. The situation California Indians experienced at the missions has been described in a range of ways, from a “semi-captive labor force” to “slavery” to “peonage.”37 Using the term unfree labor, Benjamin Madley has explained that “Franciscans could not legally buy and sell California Indians. Thus the system cannot be strictly defined as legalized chattel slavery. Still, as missions spread, Franciscans came to hold California Indians as unfree laborers while seeking to morally transform them.”38 The dishonoring of Native lives left them with limited opportunities to exercise their culture within mission spaces, unless it met the friars’ needs and interests. California Indians at the missions did not receive monetary compensation for their work, placing them at a disadvantage in global contact networks. For those who fled or remained outside the missions, opportunities to interact with outsiders who were not missionaries may have presented a rare prospect to continue asserting their authority and status within their homelands. For mission-bound Natives, the explorers’ infrequent

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visits meant some could demonstrate their skills and culture, even if under the surveillance of domineering Franciscans. Basket weaving in the missions was most likely done at the behest of the Franciscans. It is unlikely that either Anza or Hewett commissioned the basket hats during their visits since they would have taken months to weave. The British Museum claims that “this unique Chumash priest’s hat may have been made for a favoured father, possibly Vincent Santa María, whom George Vancouver called an ‘excellently-good man.’”39 The hat’s interior shows signs of wear, so it is probable that someone did use the hat before Menzies acquired it. Or, perhaps one of the friars at that mission knew these explorers would be traveling through the region and requested, or ordered, the weaver to make the hat in anticipation of their arrival. In that case, Menzies may have worn the hat. Native peoples traded goods and materials with other communities well before European colonization and imperial expansion, so the idea of California Natives sharing their baskets and other materials with foreign explorers would not have been new to them. However, a greater motivation appears to be at play than simply engaging in transcultural trade.

Indigenous Knowledge and Artistic Ingenuity By continuing to make baskets at the missions, weavers passed on their awareness of native plants and weaving techniques that may have otherwise diminished as Chumash peoples adopted foreign lifestyles. Studying the basket hat within the context of late-eighteenth-century globalization provides a window for understanding the accommodations that the weaver made for outside influences while exercising established Indigenous knowledge. Though described as a padre’s hat, the basket hat has yet to be linked to a specific source of inspiration. The inventory of goods that Fray Pedro Cambón procured in Manila for California’s missions in 1781 lists “7 rattan hats, of the kind worn by the Reverend Fathers of the Philippines.”40 At least one of these rattan hats may have reached Mission San Luis Obispo, assuming that is where the unknown Chumash weaver made the basket hat. With a 1772 establishment date, San Luis Obispo is more logical than Santa Barbara, which the Franciscans founded after Cambón’s shipment arrived in California. Specific items from Cambón’s shipment can be found at Mission Dolores (San Francisco de Asís), though it is possible others were disbursed among other missions like San Luis Obispo.

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The disbursement of goods from Manila would have furthered Cambón’s goal, as JoAnne Mancini proposes, “not only to introduce Asian objects in order to complement an existing visual and material culture, but also to build Asian materials into new images, objects, and buildings created through the interaction of Indians and Europeans in New California.”41 If a rattan hat reached Mission San Luis Obispo, then it is quite possible this was the weaver’s source of inspiration for changing the Chumash basket cap by giving it a wide brim. Based on personal observation, the hat appears to be one complete construction. Rather than adding the brim to an existing basket cap, the weaver made the entire basket with the brimmed hat shape in mind. The final product that is now in the British Museum represents not just an established basket shape, but also a Chumash version of a Filipino hat type that reflected Spanish interests (Figure 9.3). The Filipino salakot, roughly translated as “native hat” is a common type of headgear found among the Indigenous communities of the Philippines, specifically the Tagalog and Kapampangan.42 Salakot makers use a variety of locally derived materials such as rattan, palm, and bamboo, which are sometimes

Figure 9.3 Unknown Badjao/Bajau/Bayao [Sama/Samah] maker, basketry hat, collected 1899–1902. Palm (rattan), bamboo, paper, cotton. Reproduced by permission of Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History

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“coated in a resin to make them waterproof.”43 These Indigenous hats likely appealed to Spanish Franciscan missionaries who also introduced Catholicism to the Philippine islands beginning in 1577.44 The wide-brimmed hats, which farmers and fishermen used for sun protection, evidently appealed to the friars as evidenced by the inventory from Cambón’s shipment. Recognizing their practicality, perhaps Cambón wanted to share the salakot with his fellow Franciscans in sunny California. Considering that Indigenous people in the Philippines made this type of hat, which is characterized by a bulb-like crown and wide brim that extends downward around the wearer’s head, it is unsurprising that the Franciscans would expect California Indians to make something similar. The parallel between the Filipino salakot and the Chumash basket hat signals not just the extent of Spain’s imperialism across the Pacific but also a shared Indigenous resistance to abandoning established local weaving practices. This survivance, unfortunately, has not been adequately acknowledged or investigated. Previous studies of the Chumash basket hat attribute its unprecedented shape to Spanish influence without considering the possibility that the Chumash had changed another Indigenous culture’s headgear to fit southern California–based weaving technology and materials.45 By changing the salakot into a coiled basket hat made of sedge and bulrush root rather than rattan, the basket hat’s weaver reworked a foreign object to fit their skills and resources. Even if California Indian peoples were not crossing the oceans in great frequency during the late eighteenth century, they were connected to the global systems of trade that California entered through Spanish colonization.46 Building on previous trade networks, California Indians like the basket hat’s maker seized the opportunity to expand her or his weaving practice through the manipulation of an imported hat type. While it remains unconfirmed if a Franciscan friar did indeed wear the hat Menzies acquired, its visual clues demonstrate an Indigenous resistance to abandoning established practices. If a Filipino salakot was indeed the source of inspiration for the basket hat’s wide brim, then two layers of Indigenous agency are at play. Rather than ceasing their weaving practices, Indigenous peoples on both sides of the Pacific continued to make hat types that appealed to non-Native interests.

Conclusion It is challenging to gain a full picture of Indigenous and foreign interactions in California from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries since most

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accounts are told from a non-Native perspective. As this study has shown, however, objects ought to be considered as testaments to their makers’ ability to change foreign forms to meet local abilities and resources. Indigenous people throughout the Spanish empire acted as agents of change; they adapted to outside influences but resisted assimilation that would replace their customs. This adaptation is visible in the material record, which demonstrates the dynamism of weavers and other artists who changed the patterns, shapes, and materials they used to produce innovative works like the basket hat. Though it ended up in a museum built from the private collections of individuals like Menzies, the hat already had a life before it was boxed up in the storerooms of the British Museum. It emerged from the roots of bulrush and sedge plants the weaver had cultivated. After the roots were ready, together they took on a new form as the warps and wefts of a coiled basket. This basket hat, which also embodies the lived experiences of the weaver, whose name Menzies failed to record, would leave the hands of the weaver and travel by land across missions and ultimately overseas to its current home in England. Despite its global movement, the basket remains a powerful index of Chumash ecological knowledge, weaving techniques, and Indigenous resistance to European imperialism.

Bibliography Anderson, M. Kat. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. Aviles, Brian A. and Robert L. Hoover. “Two Californias, Three Religious Orders and Fifty Missions: A Comparison of the Missionary Systems of Baja and Alta California.” Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1997): 1–28. The British Museum. “Coiled Rush Hat (Sumulelu).” Google Arts and Culture. https:// artsandculture​.google​.com​/asset​/coiled​-rush​-hat​-sumulelu​/hgEqlv425danGQ (Accessed May 18, 2021). Castillo, Edward D. “Gender Status Decline, Resistance, and Accommodation among Female Neophytes in the Missions of California: A San Gabriel Case Study.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 18, no. 1 (1994): 67–93. Chavez, Yve. “Basket Weaving in Coastal Southern California: A Social History of Survivance.” Arts 8 (2019): 1–15. Costansó, Miguel. The Portola Expedition of 1769–1770: Diary of Miguel Costanso. Edited by Frederick John Teggart and translated by Manuel Carpio. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1911. Dartt-Newton, Deana, and Jon Erlandson. “Little Choice for the Chumash: Colonialism, Cattle, and Coercion in Mission Period California.” American Indian Quarterly 30, no. 3&4 (2006): 416–30.

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Dillon, Richard. “Archibald Menzies’ Trophies.” British Columbia Historical Quarterly 15 (1951): 151–9. Font, Pedro. Font’s Complete Diary: A Chronicle of the Founding of San Francisco. Translated by Herbert Eugene Bolton. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1933. Galvin, John. “Supplies from Manila for the California Missions, 1781–1783.” Philippine Studies 12, no. 3 (1964): 494–510. Gamble, Lynn H. “Shell Beads as Adornment and Money.” In First Coastal Californians, edited by Lynn H. Gamble, 83–7. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2015. Hackel, Steven W. “Land, Labor, and Production: The Colonial Economy of Spanish and Mexican California.” In Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush, edited by Ramon A. Gutiérrez and Richard Orsi, 111–46. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Hackel, Steven W. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California: 1769–1850. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Hudson, Travis, and Thomas C. Blackburn. Material Culture of the Chumash Interaction Sphere. Volume III, Clothing, Ornamentation, and Grooming. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press Anthropological Papers, 1985. Lasuén, Fermin Francisco de. Writings of Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, V. II. Edited and translated by Finbar Keneally. Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1965. Leibsohn, Dana. “Exchange and Value: The Material Culture of a Chumash Basket.” In Writing Material Culture History, edited by Anne Gerritson and Giorgio Riello, 101–7. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Longinos Martínez, Jose. Journal of Jose Longinos Martínez: Notes and Observations of the Naturalist of the Botanical Expedition in Old and New California and the South Coast 1791–1792. Translated and edited by Lesley B. Simpson. San Francisco, CA: John Howell Books, 1961. Madley, Benjamin. “California’s First Mass Incarceration System: Franciscan Missions, California Indians, and Penal Servitude, 1769–1836.” Pacific Historical Review 88, no. 1 (2019): 14–47. Mancini, J. M. “Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach to EighteenthCentury California,” American Art 25, no. 1 (2011): 28–51. Mancini, J. M. Art and War in the Pacific World: Making, Breaking, and Taking from Anson’s Voyage to the Philippine-American War. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Menzies, Archibald. “Archibald Menzies’ Journal of the Vancouver Expedition.” Edited by Alice Eastwood. California Historical Society Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1924): 265–340. Mithlo, Nancy Marie. “No Word for Art in Our Language?: Old Questions, New Paradigms.” Wicazo Sa Review 27, no. 1 (2012): 111–26.

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Morales, Maya. “The Filipino Salakot: Filipino history told through the cultural costume.” Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. https://nhm​.org​/stories​/ filipino​-salakot (Accessed May 24, 2021). Palóu, Francisco. Francisco Palóu’s Life and Apostolic Labors of the Venerable Father Junípero Serra, Founder of the Franciscan Missions of California. Translated by C. Scott Williams. Pasadena: George Wharton James, 1913. Phillips, George Harwood. Vineyards and Vaqueros: Indian Labor and the Economic Expansion of Southern California, 1771–1877. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Schneider, Tsim D. “Placing Refuge and the Archaeology of Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California.” American Antiquity 80, no. 4 (2015): 695–713. Shanks, Ralph. California Indian Baskets: San Diego to Santa Barbara and Beyond to the San Joaquin Valley, Mountains and Deserts. Novato, CA: Costaño Books, 2010. Thomas, Megan Christine. Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Timbrook, Janice. “Native American Arts in the Spanish Missions: Chumash Basketry.” In The Arts of the Missions of Northern New Spain: 1600–1821, edited by Clara Bargellini and Michael Komanecky, 327–32. Mexico City: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2009. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. Vancouver, George. Vancouver in California, 1792–1794: The Original Account of George Vancouver. Edited and annotated by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur. Los Angeles: G. Dawson, 1953. Vancouver, George. A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1791–1795. Edited by W. Kaye Lamb. London: Hakluyt Society, 1984. Vizcaíno, Juan. The Sea Diary of Fr. Juan Vizcaíno in Alta California 1769. Translated by Arthur Woodward. Los Angeles: G. Dawson, 1959. Vizenor, Gerald, ed., Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Whyte, Kyle. “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 9 (2018): 125–44. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. Zappia, Natale A. Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Notes 1 By conducting a search for “Chumash basket hat” through “The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology” online collection database, the reader will find an example of a coiled basket hat without a brim.

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2 The work of Nancy Marie Mithlo, who challenges the colonialist assumption that “Native artists are unreflective about their own art production or that they lack clear aesthetic criteria,” guides my analysis of Chumash basketry as part of established aesthetic criteria. Nancy Marie Mithlo, “No Word for Art in Our Language?: Old Questions, New Paradigms,” Wicazo Sa Review 27, no. 1 (2012): 115. 3 I take Patrick Wolfe’s foundational work on settler colonialism as a guide for critically analyzing conquest. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. On the impacts of conquest on ecological practice, I turn to Kyle Whyte, “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice,” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 9 (2018): 125–44. As part of the critique of colonization, I draw on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. For Indigenous theory, I use Anishnaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s term “survivance,” which references Indigenous survival and resistance. Gerald Vizenor, ed., Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 4 Natale A. Zappia, Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 14. 5 Lynn H. Gamble, “Shell Beads as Adornment and Money,” in First Coastal Californians, ed. Lynn H. Gamble (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2015), 86. 6 José Longinos Martínez in Gamble, “Shell Beads as Adornment,” 5; José Longinos Martínez, Journal of Longinos Martínez: Notes and Observations of the Naturalist of the Botanical Expedition in Old and New California and the South Coast 1791–1792, ed. and trans. Lesley B. Simpson (San Francisco, CA: John Howell Books, 1961), 54. 7 Travis Hudson and Thomas C. Blackburn, The Material Culture of Chumash Interaction Sphere. Volume III: Clothing, Ornamentation, and Grooming (Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1985), 270; Gamble, “Shell Beads as Adornment,” 7; Longinos Martínez, Journal of Longinos Martínez, 55. 8 Gamble, “Shell Beads as Adornment,” 11. 9 Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California: 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 88; Fermin Francisco de Lasuén, Writings of Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, V. II, ed. and trans. Finbar Keneally (Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1965), 201–2. 10 Ralph Shanks, California Indian Baskets: San Diego to Santa Barbara and Beyond to the San Joaquin Valley, Mountains and Deserts (Novato, CA: Costaño Books, 2010), 24.

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11 Ibid., 15, 31. 12 Yve Chavez, “Basket Weaving in Coastal Southern California: A Social History of Survivance,” Arts 8 (2019): 4. 13 The British Museum, “Coiled Rush Hat (Sumulelu),” Google Arts & Culture, https:// artsandculture​.google​.com​/asset​/coiled​-rush​-hat​-sumulelu​/hgEqlv425danGQ (accessed May 18, 2021). 14 Shanks, California Indian Baskets, 22. 15 Francisco Palóu, Francisco Palóu’s Life and Apostolic Labors of the Venerable Father Junípero Serra, Founder of the Franciscan Missions of California, trans. C. Scott Williams (Pasadena: George Wharton James, 1913), 120. 16 Brian A. Aviles and Robert L. Hoover, “Two Californias, Three Religious Orders and Fifty Missions: A Comparison of the Missionary Systems of Baja and Alta California,” Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1997): 13. 17 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 5. 18 Deana Dartt-Newton and Jon Erlandson, “Little Choice for the Chumash: Colonialism, Cattle, and Coercion in Mission Period California,” American Indian Quarterly 30, no. 3 & 4 (2006): 423. 19 For more on agriculture as a settler colonial method, see Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 395. 20 Tsim Schneider has pointed out that “During the mission period, decisions made by Franciscan missionaries supported periodic furloughs and nuanced residency options.” Though more research is needed on what furloughs may have meant for weavers, it seems like a strong possibility for them to gather materials and weave. Tsim D. Schneider, “Placing Refuge and the Archaeology of Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California,” American Antiquity 80, no. 4 (2015): 706. 21 The British Museum, “Coiled rush hat (sumulelu).” 22 For more on the bartering of baskets for church goods, see José Señán, The Letters of José Señán, O. F. M. 1796–1823, trans. Paul D. Nathan, ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Ventura: Ventura County Historical Society, 1962), 63. One of the baskets with Spanish coin designs, which Chumash weavers made at Mission San Buenaventura, has a dedicatory inscription specifying the recipient. 23 In the late eighteenth century, Fray Pedro Cambón moved art and furnishings from the Jesuit missions in Baja California to Alta California. J. M. Mancini, Art and War in the Pacific World: Making, Breaking, and Taking from Anson’s Voyage to the Philippine-American War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 110–1. 24 In a well-known example, the leaders at Mission San Gabriel in the Los Angeles area banished Tongva leader Toypurina to Mission San Carlos in Carmel. Edward D. Castillo, “Gender Status Decline, Resistance, and Accommodation among

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26

27

28 29

30 31

Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century Female Neophytes in the Missions of California: A San Gabriel Case Study,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 18, no. 1 (1994): 81. On Vancouver’s Expedition: “Madrid had reacted strongly to the news of his departure.” Apparently, Vancouver’s predecessor, Captain Cook had infringed on Spanish territorial rights. In 1789, Spaniards seized British ships at Nootka Sound. George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1791–1795, ed. W. Kaye Lamb (London: Hakluyt Society, 1984), 14. Richard H. Dillon noted, “In 1789 the British Admiralty had projected a scientific expedition to the South Seas and the Pacific Northwest under Captain Henry Roberts, who had accompanied Captain James Cook, R. N., on his last two voyages. To this end, arrangements were made to acquire the sloop Discovery, then under construction, and by April, 1790, she was evidently ready for sea. But at that very time difficulties with Spain flared into prominence, largely as a result of the memorial presented to the British parliament by John Meares. The resulting ‘Spanish Armament,’ although an impressive demonstration of British naval strength, forced the abandonment of the projected scientific expedition. Later, after the signing of a treaty with Spain on October 28, 1790, a new expedition to the Pacific Northwest was organized, the purposes of which were to ‘receive back, in form, a restitution of the territories on which the Spaniards had seized, and also to make an accurate survey of the coast, from the 30th degree of north latitude north-westward toward Cook’s river; and, further, to obtain every possible information that could be collected respecting the natural and political state of that country.’” “Archibald Menzies’ Trophies,” British Columbia Historical Quarterly 15, no. 3 & 4 (1951): 151–2. Archibald Menzies, “Archibald Menzies’ Journal of the Vancouver Expedition,” ed. Alice Eastwood, California Historical Society Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1924): 326. Dana Leibsohn, “Exchange and Value: The Material Culture of a Chumash Basket,” in Writing Material Culture History, ed. Anne Gerritson and Giorgio Riello (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 101–7. Menzies, “Archibald Menzies’ Journal,” 326. M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 136. Ibid., 119. Miguel Costansó, The Portolá Expedition of 1769–1770: Diary of Miguel Costanso, ed. Frederick John Teggart and trans. Manuel Carpio (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1911), 43.

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32 Arthur Woodward, “Introduction,” in Juan Vizcaíno, The Sea Diary of Fr. Juan Vizcaino in Alta California 1769, trans. and ed. Arthur Woodward (Los Angeles: Dawson Books, 1959), xxix–xxx; and Hudson and Blackburn, Material Culture of the Chumash Interaction Sphere. Volume III, 170. 33 Pedro Font, Font’s Complete Diary: A Chronicle of the Founding of San Francisco, trans. Herbert Eugene Bolton (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1933), 272. 34 George Vancouver, Vancouver in California, 1792–1794: The Original Account of George Vancouver, ed. and ann. Marguerite Eyer Wilbur (Los Angeles: G. Dawson, 1953), 148. 35 Menzies, “Archibald Menzies’ Journal,” 304. 36 Hackel writes, “Indians were not paid a daily wage for working in the missions; rather, they were provided with food, housing, religious instruction, and an occasional change of clothing.” Steven W. Hackel, “Land, Labor, and Production: The Colonial Economy of Spanish and Mexican California,” in Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramon A. Gutiérrez and Richard Orsi (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 122. 37 Phillips cites other scholars’ descriptions of the workforce at the missions, noting “the difficulty in defining it.” George Harwood Phillips, Vineyards and Vaqueros: Indian Labor and the Economic Expansion of Southern California, 1771–1877 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 325–7. 38 Benjamin Madley, “California’s First Mass Incarceration System: Franciscan Missions, California Indians, and Penal Servitude, 1769–1836,” Pacific Historical Review 88, no. 1 (2019): 15. 39 The British Museum, “Coiled rush hat (sumulelu).” 40 Mancini, Art and War, 111; J. M. Mancini, “Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach to Eighteenth-Century California,” American Art 25, no. 1 (2011): 30; John Galvin, “Supplies from Manila for the California Missions, 1781–1783,” Philippine Studies 12, no. 3 (1964), 498. 41 Mancini, Art and War, 111–2. 42 Maya Morales, “The Filipino Salakot: Filipino history told through the cultural costume,” Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, https://nhm​.org​/ stories​/filipino​-salakot (accessed May 24, 2021). Speaking of the nineteenthcentury Philippines, Thomas notes that peasants typically wore the salakot, but it was also “a style sometimes worn by petty officials.” Megan Christine Thomas, Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 48. 43 Morales, “The Filipino Salakot.”

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44 Mancini, Art and War, xvii. 45 Previous studies that discuss the basket hat include: Janice Timbrook, “Native American Arts in the Spanish Missions: Chumash Basketry,” The Arts of the Missions of Northern New Spain: 1600–1821, ed. Clara Bargellini and Michael Komanecky (Mexico City: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2009), 327–32; Shanks, California Indian Baskets. 46 Aside from two young Acjachemen men (Pablo Tac and Agapito Amamix) from Mission San Luis Rey who traveled to Rome to study for the priesthood in the early nineteenth century, instances of California Indians traversing the Pacific or Atlantic are undocumented during the mission era.

10

British Prints between Caricature and Ethnography Douglas Fordham

Sitting in the Lewis Walpole Library in the summer of 2016, I requested a copy of An Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing, published in London in 1813, only to find a baffling etching that I took to be the book’s frontispiece (Figure 10.1). Where I expected a history of English caricature, I was greeted by six sculpted heads from a variety of distant cultures. What on earth did these ritual objects, some of them clearly from the Hawaiian Islands, have to do with the art of caricaturing? It has taken me half a decade to venture an answer, and to realize that this odd juxtaposition belonged to a widespread, and often disconcerting, conflation between caricature and ethnography in late Georgian England. Far from being an outlier, An Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing resides at the intersection of two significant developments in Georgian culture. First, it belongs to an ethnographic mode of inquiry that was still in its infancy, trying out new methods, and playing with new forms of evidence as objects, personal accounts, and representations poured in from the imperial periphery. Second, it was part of an equally remarkable increase in printed images of cultural and ethnic difference, which took the form of illustrated voyages, costume books, caricatures, and more. What interests me here are prints that confused caricature with ethnography, or, in some cases, played with formal and conceptual overlaps between the two. The “things” that marked intercultural exchange in this period, including clothing, gifted objects, trade goods, and loot, were changed through the mediation of print to marks on a page and to visual stereotypes. The philosopher Simon Critchley writes that “jokes are like small anthropological essays,” for they “revise and relativize the categories of Western culture by bumping them up against cultures hitherto judged exotic.”1 Like jokes,

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Figure 10.1  J.P. Malcolm, Plate I and title page, An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, 1813. Etching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

the prints in this essay pinpoint how and where representation faltered in the description and categorization of cultural difference. An Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing has been cited in numerous studies on Georgian caricature, where it is often described as “the first history of English caricature.”2 None of these studies prepared me, however, for the weirdness of the book’s opening pages or its use of illustrations. The book was written and illustrated by James Peller Malcolm, who gained limited recognition in his day for antiquarian publications such as Londinium redivivum (4 vols., 1802–7) and Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London (3 vols., 1808). Born in Philadelphia in 1767, Malcolm was educated at the Quaker school, and then made his way to London in 1787 where he enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools. It was a trajectory pioneered by Benjamin West, who appears to have given Malcolm some encouragement. Prior to his departure Malcolm may have also consulted Charles Willson Peale, who made a two-year visit to England in the 1760s before returning to Philadelphia to become one of America’s preeminent artists and printmakers.3 As Malcolm progressed in his London training, he decided to specialize in etching and engraving, exhibiting two landscape prints at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1791. Subsequently his career ran along dual tracks: to make a living, he contributed illustrations to the Gentleman’s Magazine, and to pursue his ambitions, he produced laborious antiquarian publications.

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A fellow antiquary described Malcolm tirelessly making notes and sketches from manuscripts in the British Museum reading room.4 While impressed by his diligence in the archives, book reviewers faulted Malcolm’s dull prose and disorganized arguments. In agonizingly long prefaces Malcolm fought back against his reviewers.5 Despite these efforts he died penniless in 1815. To this brief biography we should add that Malcolm made meticulous sketches in the British Museum of art objects from around the world. As Malcolm states in the early pages of An Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing [henceforth An Historical Sketch]: “The British Museum contains ample illustrations of the total departure of savage sculptors or carvers from the outlines of man and beast, when attempting to represent bipeds and quadrupeds.”6 The care with which Malcolm sketched and etched these objects makes it easy to identify works that are still in the British Museum’s collection today. Printed on the same page are at least three objects from the Hawaiian Islands, including two feathered heads and a carved standing figure (Figure 10.2).7 To this are added two objects, a humanshaped club and a mask (Figure 10.3), from the Nuu-Chah-nulth peoples of the Northwest coast of America. These objects came to London, evidence suggests,

Figure 10.2  Unknown maker, Hawaiian standing figure (akua ka'ai), before 1780. Wood, 77.5 × 20 × 12.5 cm. Courtesy of the British Museum.

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Figure 10.3  Unknown maker, human face mask from the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples of the Northwest coast, before 1780. Cedar wood, hide, hair, gum, mica, bird quills, sinew, and leather, 24 × 23 × 14 cm. Courtesy of the British Museum.

from the Captain Cook expeditions, with the third and final expedition taking place from 1776 to 1780.8 Malcolm offers us an intriguing glimpse into the reception of ethnographic collections in London at this moment. In addition to voyages of exploration, individual British soldiers collected Indigenous art as curiosities, souvenirs, and sometimes through peace treaty or ritual adoption. As Ruth Phillips noted, these collections were often sold and dispersed in Europe, and their provenance was frequently lost in the process.9 Malcolm cared very little, it seems, about the who, when, where, or why of these collections. As he gathered illustrations for An Historical Sketch he focused exclusively on human figuration, and particularly on objects with facial distortions. This brought him to the cedar wood mask from Nootka Sound (Figure 10.3). In Malcolm’s etching we find the general shape of the mask well-described, if somewhat flattened (Figure 10.1). The shape of the eyes and eyebrows, and the exposure of teeth are easily recognizable in the original. Malcolm takes some liberties with the hair, making it somewhat fuller and shorter, which is also true of his representation of the hair on the head of the club on the same plate. Malcolm writes, “Several heads and figures

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procured on the Western coast of America North of California are, indeed, complete caricatures of man: the heads, particularly, have features monstrous in the extreme; and that they might not be deficient in effect, tufts of coarse hair are fasted on them (see Plate for these carvings); and the teeth of animals appear through the lips.”10 For Malcolm’s readers, the term “monstrous” was both familiar and highly charged. As Andrew Curran and Patrick Graille have argued, the eighteenth-century monster was “a fluctuating beast, a hybrid occupying an ambiguous position in Enlightenment thought somewhere between the limits of empirical knowledge and the territory of fantasy.”11 Malcolm conveyed an empirical approach to these works by arranging these objects on the page in a manner similar to recent travel publications. Take, for example, a print from the 1785 account of the Cook expeditions, which arranges six objects from the Sandwich Islands, later named the Hawaiian Islands (Figure 10.4). In a compelling analysis of prints of this type, Nicholas Thomas writes, “the absence of shadow, the deemphasis of tone associated with any particular light source, the frequent lack of any framing or border on the page, and the inclusion of a variety of implements of quite distinct sizes presupposes an

Figure 10.4  James Record after John Webber, Various Articles, at the Sandwich Islands, in James Cook and James King, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1785), plate 67. Etched. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

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abstract, nonspatial field in which weightless things might equally be standing vertically or laid out on a surface.”12 This is true for both of these prints, as is their extreme decontextualization, which leaves the viewer with no clues about the use or purpose of the objects. Malcolm’s print is even more abstract since it combines objects from around the world on the same page, hinting at a kind of global primitivism. Malcolm’s print is also distinctive for its emphasis on the human face, with two sets of eyes looking directly out at the viewer. Without knowing the size of these objects, or seeing the obverse of the Nuu-Chah-nulth face, which reveals it to be a mask, we are left with a study in visual expressions. Thomas notes that in most illustrated travel books “both textually and visually, things are represented in a rigorously objective fashion, yet also in the most radically uninformative way; their uses may be obvious or may be referred to in captions. . ., but relevant comment is almost always rigidly neutral.”13 Malcolm too is silent on the objects’ original human function, but that is incidental, since he focuses on facial expression. This enables him to venture interpretations that are bolder than most illustrated travel books of the period. With a panoply of Eurocentric and racially charged arguments, Malcolm described how and why he thought these “caricatures of man” were produced. Indigenes can have “proportions that might be mistaken for European,” Malcolm suggested, but most are “generally caricatures of human nature.”14 And even if a beautiful model was selected for representation, “a savage cannot transfer just conception to wood or stone.”15 And here we arrive at another charged term; while monstrosity could be found close to home, “a savage” evoked a human being fully displaced in time and/or space.16 Malcolm then arrived at a universal conclusion, albeit one in which European art was viewed as the culmination of a long process of development. Comparing the objects in this print to sculptures on early Saxon buildings in England, Malcolm stated that “the first native conceptions of genius at all times and in all places are a confused chaos, which may be compared to the frightful dreams that sometimes torture our minds when the body is at rest . . . but the unfortunate savage, or half-civilized sculptor or carver, appears to act under some powerful impulse, and perpetuates his waking dreams.”17 As misguided as this explanation may be, it acknowledged the visual potency of the objects in question. Assuming that the aim of fine art was mimetic realism, Malcolm seized on “caricature” as a catch-all category to describe arts from different times and places that pull in different directions. What I took to be the frontispiece to the Lewis Walpole Library’s copy of the book is actually “Plate 1” illustrating Malcolm’s discussion on page 8 of the text.

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Most book binders would have followed the instructions at the back of the book, and on the plate itself, to bind this plate opposite page 8.18 Each of the additional thirty plates is marked with the page number to which they refer. The plate corresponding to page 9 in the text represents “very curious and extremely well-executed diminutive figures, preserved in one of the apartments [of the British Museum] in a case marked ‘Asia’”19 (Figure 10.5). The selection principle, once again, is figural sculptures with expressive or distorted faces. Malcolm represents each object fully, and these carefully described works of art might appeal to readers for a great many reasons besides facial expression. This was the first time many of these objects had been published or reproduced in print, and their specimen-like presentation encouraged comparison, speculation, and analysis.20 Idiosyncratic as the textual interpretations in An Historical Sketch may have been, the book joined a flood of publications that illustrated the arts and material cultures of distant peoples. Malcolm’s print of Asian figurines formed a natural complement to William Alexander’s The Costume of China (1800) and Rudolph Ackermann’s cheaply priced World in Miniature series, begun in 1821.21 These publications were on the cutting edge of the “Illustration Revolution” in which

Figure 10.5  J.P. Malcolm, Plate IV from An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, 1813. Etching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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the cost of paper and image-printing plummeted due to mechanical advances in production and distribution. This enabled publishers to include etchings, engravings, and wood engravings in a much wider array of publications.22 Previously reserved for high-end books and elite subscriptions, illustrations now filled the pages of moderately priced books. Travel authors were particularly quick to turn these developments to their advantage, producing an array of illustrated publications, from massive elephant folios of hand-colored aquatints to the hastily printed travelogues at Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts in London. Just as the British Museum brought together an unprecedented variety of arts and crafts into a single building, so too did the London print trade make a new world of artifact illustration and comparison possible. It is little wonder that Georgian Britons drew conclusions from this vast visual storehouse that can strike us as odd or idiosyncratic today. Modern universities have developed effective disciplinary means, over the past two centuries, to organize objects such as these into their respective culture, language group, and use. A book like An Historical Sketch recalls a more fluid and “undisciplined” moment of object analysis. The founding of the Ethnological Society of London in 1843 is often cited as an originary moment for anthropology in England. Even so, the James Cook expeditions of the eighteenth century remained a touchstone for the field. Cook and Joseph Banks were pioneering “participant observers” who made detailed notes about South Pacific customs and ceremonies that they witnessed.23 Likewise, the objects collected on all three Cook expeditions contributed significantly to London’s early ethnographic museums, including the Leverian Museum, Bullock’s London Museum at the Egyptian Hall, and the British Museum. As David Bindman noted, “By the mid-1770s the expeditions of Bougainville and Captain Cook had created a major shift in European perceptions of humanity beyond its borders . . . they raised in novel forms questions of human origin, savagery and civility, and of the relationship between appearance and moral character among peoples ‘uncontaminated’ by outside influences.”24 Bindman notes that these questions informed early conceptions of race, the publications of physiognomists like Johann Caspar Lavater and Pieter Camper, and the aesthetic tug-of-war between classical ideality and human variety. Like many of his contemporaries, Malcolm had a passing familiarity with these debates, although his use of the new vocabularies of race and aesthetics was haphazard at best, and misleading at worst. In a book about London manners over the centuries, Malcolm suggested that the physical appearance of Britons improved dramatically over time. This was due, he suggested, to the expansion of political

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liberty and a willingness of upper-class women to nurse their own children rather than send them out to low-born wet nurses: “we find thousands of males and females, who appear to have been nursed by the Graces, and as far surpass the celebrated statues of the Venus de Medicis and the Apollo Belvedere, as the works of the Creator ever will those of man.”25 Throughout An Historical Sketch Malcolm acknowledged the cultural relativity of taste, noting that “whole nations appear to others assemblages of caricatures.”26 And yet Classical European forms remained in the background as normative and superior exemplars, the standard by which all else was described as caricature. Whereas Bindman analyzed the literary and philosophical evolution of race and aesthetics, I am concerned with the demotic and fundamentally visual conflation of caricature and ethnography, emphasizing the role that print played in this process. Ethnographic representation occasionally appeared in the Royal Academy Art exhibitions in London, albeit heavily modulated by academic conventions of portraiture, landscape, and narrative painting. Well-documented examples include Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Omai, William Hodges’s largescale landscapes from Tahiti, and Thomas and William Daniell’s Indian temples set into a picturesque landscape. These paintings tended to pull their subject matter toward classical standards of taste and generalization. In 1804, Benjamin West critiqued the Indian paintings of Thomas Daniell by saying that they “deserve their value from being faithful portraits of remarkable places; but they have little feeling for Art in them. Were He with the same powers to take up subjects that did not excite curiosity, they would be of so little value that He would not be able to get His bread by painting such.”27 This is a particularly notable critique coming from Benjamin West, since he established his reputation in London with a painting of The Death of General Wolfe in 1771, which drew from his own collection of Woodland Indian objects.28 While West’s painting was described as a “Revolution in History Painting,” by 1800 it looked more like a short-lived revolt against academic standards; even by West himself.29 As ethnographic collections and published accounts of cultural difference turned from a trickle into a flood by the turn of the nineteenth century, English painters produced surprisingly few works for public exhibition that was informed by this material.30 As painting demurred, print culture jumped joyfully into the breach, offering a wide array of visual responses to imperial expansion and crosscultural encounter. Whereas painting pulled ethnographic representation toward classical idealism, print culture pulled in the opposite direction, toward exaggerated difference and even caricature. In the decades around 1800, printed

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images of cultural difference grew exponentially, at precisely the same moment that London entered the “golden age of English caricature.” James Gillray, one of England’s greatest caricaturists, drew heavily on written and visual accounts of cultural difference in his prints. While his primary targets were English politicians and fashions, his visual jokes also came at the expense of subaltern peoples in the path of imperial expansion. In Britain, popular conceptions of race and difference were forged in this crucible of print, and this makes the slipperiness between ethnography and caricature both significant and troubling. In 1794, Hannah Humphrey published thirteen prints that represented Turkish, Armenian, and Greek men and women. In one of these prints we see “A Colonel of the Janizaries,” which is to say a military leader in the Ottoman emperor’s personal security force (Figure 10.6). The print claims to be drawn by “Bierworth,” although no such artist has been identified. This was almost certainly a nom de plume for James Gillray, who worked with the printseller Humphrey to capitalize on the growing demand for “costume studies” of distant cultures. The sensitive use of etching and aquatint places this print solidly in that visual tradition, and the handwriting on the print further confirms Gillray’s

Figure 10.6  [James Gillray], A Colonel of the Janizaries, 1794. Etching and aquatint, plate mark 35.0 × 24.9 cm. Courtesy of Yale University Library Digital Collections.

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expert skills.31 The focus in these prints is on dress, rather than portraiture, as this example suggests with its ermine trimmed gown and extraordinary headpiece with cascading plumage and flag-like extension. These Ottoman costume prints appear to have been a commercial failure.32 By the 1790s Humphrey’s printshop on New Bond Street was famous for Gillray’s caricatures, and it may have been difficult for Londoners to look at costume studies, made in a similar style, with a straight face. These prints also lacked an explanatory text, or a written traveler’s account, which could have guided interpretation. Gillray and Humphrey can be excused, however, for thinking that costume prints offered a profitable line of work. Four years later, Hannah Humphrey published another print with a questionable attribution (Figure 10.7). According to the etched label, this was “Supposed to be a correct representation of a Mamaluke Chief; from a Sketch by a French Officer by whom he was taken Prisoner.” Mamluks were a mercenary military class of skilled cavalrymen who provided staunch resistance against the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. This particular print is in the British Museum, where it was “formerly attributed to James Gillray.” The museum’s description

Figure 10.7  Attributed to James Gillray, Supposed to be a correct representation of a Mamaluke Chief; from a Sketch by a French Officer by whom he was taken Prisoner, 1798. Hand-colored etching, sheet 20 × 31 cm. Courtesy of Yale University Library Digital Collections.

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of the “ill-drawn galloping horse” notes that “the horse is curiously flecked in a manner which resembles a leopard-skin under the saddle.”33 Essentially, the British Museum is suggesting that the print is too ugly and clumsy to be by Gillray. But given that the print was published by Humphrey, and the lettering is similar to Gillray’s, it is worth asking if the caricaturist was being deliberately awkward here. The outline of the horse and rider are bold and confident, while the shading is farcically bad. Look at the parallel lines running up the blade of the dangling sword, or the schematic shading on the Mamluk’s left arm. There is a mismatch between graphic concision and shaded effects that looks fishy, and it makes the spotted pattern on the horse’s flank appear to be a visual joke. Even funnier is the leopard’s tiny head with its tongue sticking out. If this is by Gillray, as I suspect, then the crudeness of the etching disguised his authorship, validated the eyewitness sketch on which it was ostensibly indebted, and ridiculed the quality of French drawing, all in one blow. Whatever the attribution, this is yet another “costume study” that tips precariously into caricature. I am inclined to view the “Colonel of the Janizarries” and the “Mamaluke Chief ” as test runs for what would become Gillray’s masterpiece of counterfeit ethnography, The Egyptian Sketches. The six-print series was published in 1799 with a title page claiming that the drawings were “extracted from the Portfolio of an ingenious young Artist, attached to the Institut National at Cairo, which was found on board a Tartane intercepted on its Voyage to Marseilles.” The British government had, in fact, intercepted letters from French soldiers to loved ones back home. Some of those letters conveyed the despair that they felt over conditions in Egypt. George Canning, the British under secretary for foreign affairs, made sure to publish English translations of these excerpts. The idea of an intercepted portfolio of drawings, however, was pure invention. On the prints themselves, Gillray acknowledged partial involvement; “Etched by Js. Gillray from the Original Intercept’d Drawing” (Figure 10.8/Plate 10). This enabled Gillray to fully deploy graphic powers that were unmistakably his own, while pretending that the images were taken from life. The humor of the series lies in the tension between subtle ethnographic details, such as the Mamluk’s furtrimmed gown, reins clinched in teeth, and animal pelt under the saddle, with the humiliating defeat of French forces. Caricature is traditionally defined as a portrait which shows the features of a subject in comic distortion without losing the resemblance.34 This definition applies perfectly well to Gillray’s caricatures of Prime Minister William Pitt, Napoleon, King George III, and a great many others. But what did Britons call the representation of an unidentified individual marked by class, profession,

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Figure 10.8 James Gillray, Mamlouk, et Hussard Republicain, General result of Buonaparte’s Attack upon Ibrahim Bey’s Rear Guard, 1799, hand-colored etching, 260 × 378 mm. Courtesy of the British Museum

or ethnicity? William Hogarth offered the term “character,” which described a fictionalized individual drawn from a close observation of group traits, but distinct from the “caricaturas” of real people. Like characters in a Henry Fielding novel, these aristocrats, milkmaids, and wayward sons were “true to life” without incriminating specific individuals.35 By the late Georgian period, the single-sheet satires of Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and others were generally referred to as “caricatures” whether they illustrated recognizable individuals or representatives of a group, like that of Gillray’s Mamlukes. Yet to emerge was the term “stereotype,” which is still used today to attribute individual characteristics to a group. Borrowed directly from the world of printmaking, stereotyping was a means of replicating either copper plates or woodblocks to minimize the wear-and-tear of repeated printing. Stereotyping was invented around 1800, although it did not become widespread in England until the 1830s.36 The first use of “stereotype” as a figurative term appears in 1850, according to the OED, where it simply meant an accurate copy. It was only in the 1920s that the term started to pick up negative connotations now associated with the word, with stereotyping referring to the perpetuation of a “preconceived or oversimplified

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idea.”37 No stable terms existed in Gillray’s day, therefore, for either ethnography or stereotyping, leaving “caricature” to carry a great deal of water. The Egyptian Sketches mimicked more than just individual ethnographic prints, but also a new format in British publishing, the hand-colored travel book. Like Thomas and William Daniell’s Oriental Scenery or William Alexander’s Costume of China, Gillray’s Egyptian Sketches opened with an exotic title page that promised distant views of the world rendered with “Impartiality and Fidelity.”38 The publication then moved through a series of “views” that were anything but picturesque. The series included French savants devoured by crocodiles, forced conversions to Islam, and French cavalrymen riding on asses. It was the implicit contrast between French misadventure in Egypt and travel books with genteel, picturesque illustrations that lent the Egyptian Sketches its humor and force. Throughout the eighteenth century, etched and engraved prints were relatively expensive items that could be purchased individually or in sets. Typically, these prints were stored in portfolios or on library shelves after the purchaser took them to a bindery. The professional segregation of image printing (produced on rolling presses) from book printing (produced on letter presses) made it easy for consumers to “extra-illustrate” personal copies, tipping-in printed images into their own books, and then paying to bind them together.39 By the end of the eighteenth century, book publishers began to take over the work of illustration, publishing pre-bound books with standard sets of images. This process accelerated with the use of “wood engravings,” images carved onto wooden blocks that were then printed in the same matrix as words on a letterpress. Gillray and Humphrey published Egyptian Sketches at a moment when illustrated travel books proliferated, but before book illustration had broken free from the constraints of single-sheet intaglio printing. This transitional moment in the book and illustration trade, I am suggesting, further blurred the line between caricature and ethnography, between a serious travel book and a farcical print series. A great many other examples could be given to demonstrate the slipperiness between ethnographic illustration and caricature in the late Georgian period. One painful and poignant example can be found in the representation of Sara Baartman. Displaced from her Gonaqua homeland in Southern Africa (where her family was given the colonial name Baartman for “bearded man,” or “wild man”), she was displaced yet again from Cape Town to England in 1810.40 Put on public display as “the Hottentot Venus,” Sara was objectified for her physical form and denigrated for her departure from classical standards of beauty. She appeared in a great many printed images in the second and third decades of

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the nineteenth century. “The Hottentot Venus” began as a stage name and then it came to be taken “seriously” as a mark of inassimilable difference. Likewise, printed images merged ethnographic description with vicious, racist parody.41 Ultimately, it was a conjunction that enabled English consumers to view images saturated with cultural bias as natural descriptions. These examples suggest that Malcolm’s An Historical Sketch was a product of its times, but also an outlier in key respects. When caricature employed ethnography in the late Georgian period, it tended to draw on racial “science” for its visual tropes. Satires by John Boyne, James Gillray, and others helped to frame debates around abolitionism in ways that were disconcerting to both sides. Regardless of their political intent, these satires reinforced visual contrasts between Black, enslaved bodies and idealized, classical, and free Europeans. As Kay Dian Kriz argues, many of these satires posed a double-edged question: would the corruption of the West Indian plantation system produce Englishmen who were so depraved that they assumed the debased, animalized forms of the very “savages” they brutalized? If the answer was yes, then perhaps we can discern a note of urgency, even equivocation . . . in the attempts of artists and physiognomists to secure the superiority of the white Anglo-European body via the imitative ideal embodied in the classical figures of Apollo and Venus.42

We heard similar rhetoric from Malcolm, when he bragged that contemporary Britons “surpass the celebrated statues of the Venus de Medicis and the Apollo Belvedere” in their appearance. Malcolm is distinctive, however, in the use of Indigenous material culture as formal evidence for his claims. Malcolm’s antiquarian approach made An Historical Sketch peculiar, in terms of both its illustrations and its analysis of caricature as an art form. In addition to plates representing Indigenous arts (Figure 10.1) and Chinese figures (Figure 10.5), An Historical Sketch reproduced illuminated manuscripts, psalters, and mass books from the British Museum, before proceeding to Dutch caricatures from the seventeenth century. As Malcolm’s narrative moves into eighteenthcentury Britain he illustrates heads from a variety of different caricatures on a single plate (Figure 10.9). Many of the figures represented here would have been recognizable to Malcolm’s readers, and a few of them may have had the printed satires readily at hand. The scraggy figure labeled “fig. 4” is reproduced from the frontispiece of Charles Churchill’s satirical poem, The Prophecy of Famine. A Scots Pastoral, from 1763. She is identified in that poem as an allegory of “Famine” from Scotland, where “half-starv’d spiders prey’d on half-starv’d flies.”43 Just as Malcolm illustrated many of the objects from the South Pacific for

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Figure 10.9 J.P. Malcolm, Plate XXX from An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, 1813. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

the first time, so too does he appear to be one of the first to reproduce relatively popular and inexpensive caricatures. These “copies of copies” feel decidedly modern and self-referential, as even popular, ephemeral culture came to be viewed as a material culture with a history. As an antiquarian at heart, Malcolm was largely indifferent to questions of quality and taste, seizing instead on rarity and historical detail. This placed Hawaiian statues, illuminated manuscripts, and satirical prints on a relatively even footing. This antiquarian urge clashed, however, with the stated aim of Malcolm’s book: “the Art of Caricaturing having reached a degree of perfection which has rendered it one of the means for the correction of vice and improper conduct, it became a fit subject for an historical sketch of its progress.”44 Caricature, as Malcolm defined it, could be found at both ends of the civilizational spectrum; first as an index of primitivism and superstition, and then as an index of English political liberty. “The History of Caricaturing, although even intended to be general, would naturally narrow into that of English Caricatures; for the obvious reason, that in no other country has the art met with equal encouragement, because no other portion of the globe enjoys equal freedom.”45 The first iteration of caricature was determined by biology and circumstance, while the latter

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iteration was the pride of English civilization, demonstrating a freely chosen mode of personal expression. One could argue that Malcolm was a century ahead of his time with this argument, for echoes of it return in a history of caricature produced by Ernst Kris and E. H. Gombrich in the 1930s. Drawing heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis, Kris and Gombrich argued that caricature emerged in the West only once representation was freed from primitive associations with magic. Their work on caricature was interrupted by the Second World War, and on the other side of that trauma Gombrich came to see their theory as too neat and facile. As Gombrich later noted, “Like Freud himself, and also like Aby Warburg, Kris had been under the spell of an evolutionist interpretation of human history which was conceived as moving from primitive irrationality to the triumph of reason.”46 Caricature’s proximity to crude humor, overt symbolism, de-skilling, and antinaturalism sat awkwardly in the progressive narratives that Art History seemed to require. As an antiquarian working in the early nineteenth century, Malcolm witnessed the collision of new worlds with new media. Concurrent with the expansion of the British Empire there was an expansion of printed images, and this rendered nearly limitless the material history of mankind. Costume prints, to take one example, recorded culturally specific clothing from distant lands, as we have seen earlier. At the same moment printmakers began to represent British fashions from recent decades. As Timothy Campbell has noted, prints of English costume described a “new curiosity about the very recent past as well as new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be known.”47 Malcolm made his reputation as an antiquarian of English history, and it is surprising that he turned to caricature at all. Perhaps he was drawn to print culture by its representation of fashionable dress and other time-bound objects, which produced a host of historical surprises. Unlike Gombrich, Malcolm never doubted that he could tame caricature into a polite and progressive narrative. And as unsatisfying as we may find that narrative today, An Historical Sketch offers a telling glimpse into a unique media environment. In a volume dedicated to the ways in which things change, I want to conclude with a note about the specific copy of An Historical Sketch that I encountered in the Lewis Walpole Library. On the inside cover is a bookplate bearing the name John Howard Galton and a Latin motto which translates, “He rejoices to be seen in the light” (Figure 10.10). John Howard was the son of Samuel John Galton, who was a successful gunmaker and influential Quaker from Birmingham. Priya Satia explored the elder Galton’s life as part of “the violent making of the Industrial

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Figure 10.10 Unknown maker, John Howard Galton bookplate, pasted in An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, 1813. Engraving. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Revolution,” and she traces the moral contortions needed to defend this Quaker merchant of death from his critics.48 His son, John Howard Galton, was born in 1794, which made him nineteen when An Historical Sketch was published. He is remembered for little, passing away in Rome in 1862 and leaving a respectable estate to four sons. The Galtons were not done with history, however, for John Howard’s nephew, Francis, gained fame as an African explorer and, notoriously, as the originator of the term eugenics, for which he was a vocal proponent. There is nothing to suggest that Francis Galton availed himself of his uncle’s library, or that his subsequent ideas were informed by an antiquarian book on caricature. That said, the Galtons, like so many English families in the period, were shaped by the shifting forces of empire, and they intrinsically understood that cultural description could shift into caricature. While on family holiday in Wales, a young Francis Galton shot some birds and wanted them cooked for dinner, but the family’s Welsh cook refused. Francis soon got his revenge, for a large bull got loose from a farm enclosure and caused havoc among the locals. Francis turned the episode into a caricature that he titled, “All the Taffies put to

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flight by one John Bull.”49 The derogatory term “Taffies” comes from an English nursery rhyme that begins: “Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief; Taffy came to my house and stole a leg of beef.” With a wicked sense of humor, Francis gave his drawing to the Welsh cook who responded angrily to his joke. Francis knew that caricatures drew cultural distinctions, established hierarchies, and put people in their place. Just as importantly, it enabled caricaturists to “say” all of this obliquely, with a smile, and with impunity. Priya Satia’s work on the gunmaker Samuel Galton ultimately led her to examine other “tortured moments in which the management of conscience became very difficult.”50 Historians, Satia suggests, helped Britons manage their imperial conscience, offering progressive narratives and calculated degrees of personal agency to justify British expansion, exploitation, and violence around the globe. “Stringing these disparate events into a single story of conscience and history wrings new kinds of truth from them about how the modern historical imagination shaped the unfolding of empire.”51 In the overlapping concerns of ethnography and caricature we find that visual description, humor, and irony were not simply incidental to historical thinking. As the first history of English caricature, An Historical Sketch provided compelling visual images to stimulate Britain’s historical imagination, and clever new resources to assuage its troubled conscience.

Bibliography Bindman, David. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Campbell, Timothy. Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Crais, Clifton and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Critchley, Simon. On Humour. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Curran, Andrew and Patrick Graille. “The Faces of Eighteenth-Century Monstrosity.” In Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought, edited by Andrew Curran, Robert P. Maccubbin, and David F. Morrill. Special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies Life 21, no. 2 (1997): 1–15. Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III. New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 1996.

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Elingson, Ter. The Myth of the Noble Savage. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Farington, Joseph. The Diary of Joseph Farington. Edited by Kathryn Cave. Vol. 6. New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 1979. Force, Roland W. and Maryanne Force. Art and Artifacts of the 18th Century: Objects in the Leverian Museum as painted by Sarah Stone. Honolulu, HI: Bishop Museum Press, 1968. Fordham, Douglas. British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Fordham, Douglas. “Hogarth’s Act and the Professional Caricaturist.” In Hogarth’s Legacy, edited by Cynthia Ellen Roman, 23–49. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. Fordham, Douglas. Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire, 1770–1820. London and New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2019. Gombrich, E. H. “Magic, Myth and Metaphor: Reflections on Pictorial Satire.” In The Essential Gombrich, edited by Richard Woodfield, 331–54. London: Phaidon Press, 1996. Griffiths, Antony. The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550–1820. London: British Museum Press, 2016. Hill, Draper. Mr. Gillray, The Caricaturist: A Biography. London and Greenwich: Phaidon, 1965. Hutchison, Elizabeth. “‘The Dress of his Nation’: Romney’s Portrait of Joseph Brant.” Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2011): 209–228. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. ‘Artificial Curiosities’ being an exposition of native manufactures collected on the three Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook, R.N. Honolulu, HI: Bishop Museum Press, 1978. King, J. C. H. First Peoples, First Contacts: Native Peoples of North America. London: British Museum Press, 1999. Knoppers, Laura Lunger and Joan B. Landes, eds. Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Kriz, Kay Dian. Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement. New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2008. Kuklick, Henrika. “The British Tradition.” In A New History of Anthropology, edited by Henrika Kuklick, 52–78. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Malcolm, J. P. Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1810. Malcolm, J. P. An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, with Graphic Illustrations. 2nd ed. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1813. Neff, Emily Ballew. “At the Wood’s Edge: Benjamin West’s “The Death of Wolfe” and the Middle Ground.” In American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World,

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edited by Neff, Emily Ballew, Martin Postle and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 64–103. Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2013. Pearson, Karl. The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (1914). Vol. 1. In the Cambridge Library Collection—Darwin, Evolution and Genetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Peltz, Lucy. Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Cutlure, and Society in Britain, 1769–1840. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2017. Peltz, Lucy. “Malcolm, James Peller (1767–1815), Antiquary and Topographical Draughtsman.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://www​.oxforddnb​ .com​/view​/10​.1093​/ref​:odnb​/9780198614128​.001​.0001​/odnb​-9780198614128​-e​ -17863 (accessed September 24, 2021). Phillips, Ruth B. “Reading and Writing between the Lines: Soldiers, Curiosities, and Indigenous Art Histories.” Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 2/3 (2011): 107–23. Prown, Jules David. “Charles Willson Peale in London.” In New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, edited by Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward, 29–50. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. Rauser, Amelia. Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Rose, Louis. Psychology, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E.H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Caricature. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. Satia, Priya. Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. New York: Penguin Press, 2018. Satia, Priya. Time’s Monster: How History Makes History. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. Thomas, Nicholas. “Objects of Knowledge: Oceanic Artifacts in European Engravings.” In Empires of Vision: A Reader, edited by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, 141–58. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Thomas, Nicholas, Julie Adams, Billie Lythberg, Maia Nuku, and Amiria Salmond, eds. Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016. Twyman, Michael. “The Illustration Revolution.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, edited by David McKitterick, 117–43. Vol. 6: 1830–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Notes 1 Simon Critchley, On Humour (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 65. 2 Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale

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3

4

5

6 7

8

9 10 11

12

13

Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century University Press, 1996), 36. See also Amelia Rauser, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 19. Jules David Prown, “Charles Willson Peale in London,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 29–50. Lucy Peltz, “Malcolm, James Peller (1767–1815), Antiquary and Topographical Draughtsman,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://www​.oxforddnb​ .com​/view​/10​.1093​/ref​:odnb​/9780198614128​.001​.0001​/odnb​-9780198614128​-e​ -17863 (accessed September 24, 2021). See J. P. Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1810), vii–xxix. J. P. Malcolm, An Historical Sketch on the Art of Caricaturing, with Graphic Illustrations (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1813), 7. Adrienne Kaeppler notes that at least eight feather images were collected on Cook’s third voyage. “Feather images are usually referred to as Kuka’ilimoku, a representation of the god of war . . . this appears unlikely for those images collected on Cook’s voyages.” Adrienne L. Kaeppler, “Artificial Curiosities” being an exposition of native manufactures collected on the three Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook, R.N. (Honolulu, HI: Bishop Museum Press, 1978), 53. For more on the objects collected by Cook now in the British Museum, see Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories, ed. Nicholas Thomas, Julie Adams, Billie Lythberg, Maia Nuku, and Amiria Salmond (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), and J. C. H. King, First Peoples, First Contacts: Native Peoples of North America (London: British Museum Press, 1999), 122–45. Ruth B. Phillips, “Reading and Writing between the Lines: Soldiers, Curiosities, and Indigenous Art Histories,” Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 2/3 (2011): 107–23. Malcolm, An Historical Sketch, 7. The teeth on the mask are actually crafted from quills. Andrew Curran and Patrick Graille, “The Faces of Eighteenth-Century Monstrosity,” in Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought, ed. Andrew Curran, Robert P. Maccubbin, and David F. Morrill, special issue of EighteenthCentury Life 21, no. 2 (1997): 4. See also Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004). Nicholas Thomas, “Objects of Knowledge: Oceanic Artifacts in European Engravings,” in Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed. Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 151. Ibid., 147.

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14 Malcolm, An Historical Sketch, 5. 15 Ibid., 6. 16 “Noble” is not appended to “savage,” even implicitly here. Malcolm evokes unreformed difference rather than prelapsarian grace with his use of the term “savage,” coinciding with Ter Elingson’s thesis about the term in The Myth of the Noble Savage (Oakland, CA: UC Press, 2001). 17 Malcolm, An Historical Sketch, 7. 18 Copies of Malcolm’s An Historical Sketch at the University of Michigan and the Getty Research Institute bind the plates across from the prescribed page of text. At least one other copy, which sold at Heritage Auctions in 2014, also bound plate 1 as the book’s frontispiece. 19 Malcolm, An Historical Sketch, 9. 20 In the 1780s Sir Ashton Lever commissioned Sarah Stone to make watercolor copies of objects in his collection, including a great many of the objects that he purchased from the third Captain Cook expedition, which were subsequently dispersed by auction in 1806. It took until 1968, however, for these remarkable watercolors to be reproduced in print; see Roland W. Force and Maryanne Force, Art and Artifacts of the 18th Century: Objects in the Leverian Museum as Painted by Sarah Stone (Honolulu, HI: Bishop Museum Press, 1968). 21 For more on these two publications see Douglas Fordham, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire, 1770–1820 (London and New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2019), 1–22, 119–60. 22 Michael Twyman, “The Illustration Revolution,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. David McKitterick, vol. 6: 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 117–43. See also Antony Griffiths, The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550–1820 (London: British Museum Press, 2016), 9–10. 23 Henrika Kuklick, “The British Tradition,” in A New History of Anthropology, ed. Henrika Kuklick (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 52–3. 24 David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 123. 25 Malcolm, Anecdotes, 3. 26 Malcolm, An Historical Sketch, 4. 27 Joseph Farington recorded this conversation with West in his diary for May 31, 1804; The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kathryn Cave, vol. 6 (New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 1979), 2336. 28 See Emily Ballew Neff, “At the Wood’s Edge: Benjamin West’s ‘The Death of Wolfe’ and the Middle Ground,” in American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World, ed. Neff, Emily Ballew, Martin Postle and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, HI: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2013), 64–103.

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29 Joshua Reynolds was the first to describe The Death of General Wolfe as a “Revolution” in the art, according to West’s first biographer John Galt. It was the art historian Edgar Wind, in 1938, who mounted a full-fledged argument about West’s “Revolution of History Painting.” See Douglas Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 201–38. 30 Portraits of a significant number of Native Americans were painted in the long eighteenth century, and a few of these were exhibited at the RA, but many more were reproduced in print. See, for example, Elizabeth Hutchison, “‘The Dress of his Nation’: Romney’s Portrait of Joseph Brant,” Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2011): 209–28. 31 For a more detailed discussion of costume publications in England at this moment, see Fordham, Aquatint Worlds, 119–59. 32 This according to Gillray’s first biographer, Draper Hill, in Mr. Gillray, The Caricaturist: A Biography (London and Greenwich, CT: Phaidon, 1965), 53. 33 BM 1851,0901.948. https://www​.britishmuseum​.org​/collection​/object​/P​_1851​-0901​-948 34 This is the definition that Kris and Gombrich would offer in their unpublished history of caricature. See Louis Rose, Psychology, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E.H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Caricature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 93. 35 See Douglas Fordham, “Hogarth’s Act and the Professional Caricaturist,” in Hogarth’s Legacy, ed. Cynthia Roman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 23–49. 36 Antony Griffiths notes that “stereotypes were widely used from about 1830 and were in turn replaced by electrotypes from 1839.” Griffiths, The Print before Photography, 493. 37 “Stereotype, n. and adj,” OED Online, September 2021. Oxford University Press. https://www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/189956​?rskey​=iWxe2S​&result​=1​&isAdvanced​ =false (accessed October 25, 2021). 38 Fordham, Aquatint Worlds, 12–8. 39 See Lucy Peltz, Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Cutlure, and Society in Britain, 1769–1840 (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2017). 40 See Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009). 41 For a more extended discussion of these prints see Fordham, Aquatint Worlds, 203–11. 42 Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement (New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2008), 115.

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43 For a reproduction of Churchill’s frontispiece and a discussion see Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War, 194–5. 44 Malcolm, An Historical Sketch, iii. 45 Ibid., iv. 46 E. H. Gombrich, “Magic, Myth and Metaphor: Reflections on Pictorial Satire,” in The Essential Gombrich, ed. Richard Woodfield (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 336. For a description of Kris and Gombrich’s project and the crises to which it responded, see Rose, Psychology, Art, and Antifascism. 47 Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740– 1830 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 80. 48 Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin Press, 2018). 49 Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (1914), vol. 1, Cambridge Library Collection—Darwin, Evolution and Genetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 82. 50 Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 10. 51 Ibid.

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Index Abegg silks  96 Abegg-Stiftung collections  96 absolutism  63 Academy painting  93 Ackermann, Rudolph  239–40 “Act for the better ordering of Slaves”  47 adab (manners)  148 Adams, John  162 Advertisements, self-emancipated individuals  41–3, 54 agency, Indigenous  212–13, 217, 224 akhlaq (ethics)  148 Alam, Shah, II  138–40, 142, 145 Alexander, William  239, 246 Algarotti, Francesco  2 Almazán, Javier Sánchez  197 American Revolution  164 Anales de Historia Natural (1799– 1804)  202 Ancestral worship, China  27–8 Anthropocene  3 Apollo Belvedere  241 Arbeteta, Letizia  190 architects  6, 62–75 art histories  2–5 artisans  7, 17, 27, 62, 71, 161–2, 177–8 artistic ingenuity  222–4 artists  62, 71, 117, 123, 178, 186, 190, 203, 225, 234 British  143–4 court  94 Indian  213 of Qing Court  28 Asian porcelain  114 à un chemin suivi (“in one continuous path”)  84 Austria  65 Awadh  139–40 Aylett, John  54 Bacchus (enslaved person)  6, 23, 30, 37–8 n.35, 38 n.38

Bamford, Paul  65 Banks, Joseph  240 Barratt, Andrew  49 basket hats  211–25 basketry practices  211–25 California Indian  211–13 Chumash basketry versus imported hats  213 hats  211–25 social art-historical analysis of  212 weaving  211–25 Bass, Joseph  52 Battle of Plassey (Palashi; 1757)  7, 133, 138 Bedwell, Anne  19 Bedwell, John  19 Bengal betel  5, 7, 137–9 Company’s multiple revolutions in  142–5 invasions of  142 Benoist, Jesuit Michel  92 Benyon, Bernard  24 Benyon, Grace  24 Berryer, Nicolas René  123 Besle, Josias  190 Besson, M.  201 betel  5, 7, 133–49, 150 n.4 areca nut  135–6 Bengal  5, 7, 137–9 case of  149 Company and  142–5 consumption  137, 145 courtly  137–42 as gift  138–9, 142 leaf  135–6 Mughal histories of  136–7 pandans (betel box)  7, 134–5 quid  135–6 trade  145–9 value in materializing sovereign relations  137–8

260 Bible  44, 45 Bihar  138–9 Bindman, David  240 biography  111 biombos  3 biscuit porcelain  107–9, 111–12, 118–20 figurines  107–9, 111–12, 118–20 France  7, 107–12 Bishir, Catherine  51 Black Town, Madras  23 Bleichmar, Daniela  200 Blondel, Jacques-François  64 Bly, Antonio  45–6 Bonnet, Louis-Marin  121 Bonsach, Jochim Severin  18 botanical designs  5–7 botanical exploration, in Qing Empire  81–2 botanical imagination  88–95 Botein, Stephen  161 Boucher, François  119–21 Bourgoing, Jean-Francois  201 Boyne, John  247 Bray, Thomas  45 British East India Company  7, 15, 87–8, 133, 138–9, 142–5 cultures of art patronage  143 dispute with Qasim  145–7 indebted to  142–5 nawabs, protection to  143–4 Qasim’s attack on  146–7 revenue  145 revolutions in Bengal  142 British Empire  5, 138, 142, 249–51 Britons, Georgian  240 Broomhall, Susan  21 Brown, Bill  111 Bru, Juan Bautista  198 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de  196 Bulkeley, Richard  168 Bull, John  251 Bureau de la Ville  61 California  211–25 ecology  211, 216, 221 Franciscan missions and  215–17 Indigenous autonomy  213–15 Indigenous basket weavers  211–25

Index Indigenous communities in  211–15 Spanish conquest and  215–17 Spanish missionization  8, 211–25 Vancouver Expedition in  217–22 Campbell, Timothy  249 Camper, Pieter  240 Canning, George  244 Canton Trade  17–18 capitalism  137 caricatures  5, 233–5, 237, 248–50 as catch-all category  238–9 definition  244–5 Gillray’s  243 of man  238 Carlier, René  193 carvings  7–8, 237 Castiglione, Giuseppe  93 century of things  2 ceramic paintings  195 Chand, Dip  147–9 character  245 Charles III (r. 1759–88)  185, 187, 194–8 Charleston, South Carolina  45, 47, 49, 51 Chavez, Yve  5, 8 Cheng Yi  28 Chi-fu robes  199 China  21, 25, 27, 28, 81–99, 199, 239, 246 alabaster figures  199 clay portrait  5, 15–32 export textiles  85–8, 90, 95 flower paintings  93–4 paintings  28, 81, 93–5 porcelain  112–17 silks  85, 88–95 weavings  92 Chin Qua, Amoy  6, 15–22, 29–32 Chit Qua  17, 27 Chowdhury, Zirwat  5, 7 Chumash basketry  213 coiled baskets  214–15 hats  211–25 trade practices  213–14 Chumash basket hat  5, 8 Chuong, Jennifer  5, 7 Churchill, Charles  247 clay portraits  15–32

Index Clive, Robert  133–4 coiled basketry  214–15 Collection of Prints That Represent the Animals and Monsters of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Madrid, 1784–1786 (Bru)  202 Collet, Joseph  6, 15–32 costume  21 daughters  19–20, 22–5 death of son  20 family  19–26 as governor of Madras  19–20 intimate relations of empire  19–20 letter to Elizabeth  24–5 portrait  15–32 posture  21 colonialism  2–4 Conference of the Birds, The (Attar)  142 Confucian-textual tradition  28 connoisseurs  119–20 constructions, history of  63–5 contracts  71–3 contrôleur (controller)  70 Cook, James  8, 240 Cook expeditions  236–7, 240 cordage  219 corps du feu (body of fire)  63 Costume of China, The (Alexander)  239, 246 Council of Madras  19, 32 Creagh, Patrick  49 creolization  3 Critchley, Simon  233 Curran, Andrew  237 Cuttack  144 D’Alembert’s Dream (Diderot)  107 Damun, Jean  70 Daniell, Thomas  241 Daniell, William  241, 246 d’Anjou, Philippe  185, 193 D’Argenville, Dezallier  200 dastak (permit)  145–6 Dauphin’s Treasure  8, 185–205 as antiques  202 arts and sciences, relationships between  188–9, 197 Charles III collection  194–5, 197–8 Dávila collection  196–201

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Grand Dauphin collection  189–96 to La Granja  193–5 Louis XIV collection  189–96 objects  189–90 precious/semi-precious stones, objects made of  189 rock crystal vase  189–91 role at RCNH  188, 198–202 transformation  188 Davies, John  52 Dávila, Pedro Franco  185–6, 195–200 d’Aviler, Augustin-Charles  63–4 The Death of General Wolfe (1771)  241 Debourg, Michel  190, 192 décoration du feu d’artifice (fireworks decorations)  63 decorative arts/decorations  3 collection  189–205 colors/painted  113 festival  6, 62–73, 75 fireworks  63–4 labor/expertise, repurposing  69–75 momentary structures  63 in Paris  66 repurposing of  62–9 temporary  63–5 woven/embroidered  98 de Cotte, Robert  193 de Farnesio, Isabel (1692–1766)  193 de Jussieu, Bernard  93 Deklyn, Mary  44 de la Cruz, Nicolás  202 d’Entrecolles, Père  113 de Sacy, Louis  118 Desormeaux, Monsieur  71 de Villanueva, Juan  197–8 de Vos, Paula  200 d’Huez, Jean-Baptiste  111 diaspora  29–30 Diderot, Denis  107–13 Dillon, John Talbot  201 Dilworth, Thomas  43–5 d’Incarville, Pierre-Noël Le Chéron  92–3 Diouf, Sylviane  53 Dorsey, Rachel  50–1 Dreier, Katherine Eaton  85 Duchy of Milan  190 Dumesnil, Pierre-Louis  71 Durrani, Ahmad Shah  138–9, 144

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dynastic state  63 Eaton, Natasha  143 Ebrey, Patricia  28 ecology  5–6, 211, 216, 221 economic botany  200 Eden, or a Compleat Body of Gardening (Hill)  92 edible sculpture  107, 114–15 Education of Love, The  116 Egyptian Sketches, The (Gillray)  244, 246 El Camino Real  213 enamel designs  82 enconchados (mother-of-pearl encrusted paintings)  188, 194–5, 203 English caricature  233–5, 242, 251 English silk patterns  81–2 enslavement  3–4, 6, 41–55 entrepreneurs (contractors)  71 ephemeral festival architecture  61–75 ethnography  233, 241–51 Explication des termes d’architecture . . . (d’Aviler)  63–4 fabrication, processes of  3–4 Fajardo, José Clavijo y  200 fake architecture  63–4 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice  107–10, 119–24 foray into porcelain design  109 Friendship figurines  109–12, 123–4 Pygmalion and Galatea  107–9, 111 sculpture  107–11 farman  142–3, 156 n.37 farming  216 Ferdinand VI  195, 197 festivals  61–75 decorative arts/decorations  6, 62–73, 75 ephemeral architecture  61–75 labor/expertise, repurposing  69–75 Lutzelburg celebration  63–75 feux d’artifice (fireworks)  63 Fielding, Henry  245 figurines  118–24 biscuit porcelain  107–9, 111–12, 118–20 Friendship  109–12, 115–18 Filipino headgear  5, 211 Filipino salakot  8, 213

Fischer, Christian A.  201 Fletcher, Henry  52 Flora (enslaved person)  6, 23, 30 floral design/fashion  6, 82 in America  83–8 in Europe  82–8 at Qing Court  88–95 in Tibetan Buddhist spaces  96–8 wearable  83–8 flou  113 flower paintings  93–4 food consumption  137 Fordham, Douglas  5, 8 Fowle, Zechariah  167 France  65–6, 113 Franciscan missions  215–17, 222–3, 229 n.20 freedom  6, 41–55 free trade  145–9 French Bourbon patrimony  193 Friendship figurines  109–12, 115–18, 120–4 Fuller, Benjamin  54 Fullerton, William  147, 149, 156 n.41 Galton, Francis  250 Galton, John Howard  249–50 Galton, Samuel  249, 251 garde-magasin (warehouse guard)  70 Garthwaite, Anna Maria  84–5, 94 Gauhar, Ali  138 Georgia Slave Code (1755)  43–4 Gersaint, Edmé-François  113 Gessner, Conard  95 gifts  122–4, 138–9, 142 Gillray, James  242–7 Gin, Matthew  5, 6 Global Eighteenth Century, The (Nussbaum)  4 Gombrich, E. H.  249 González, Juan  195 González, Miguel  195 Gordon, Katherine K.  116, 118 Graille, Patrick  237 Grand Dauphin (1661–1711)  185, 188–96 Graven Image  25 Greville, Charles  201 guns  46–50

Index Habsburgs  193 Haixi jihui 海西集卉 (Assorted Flowers from the West Ocean)  94 Halifax Gazette  7, 159–60, 162, 168–78 Harrison, Edward  18, 20–2, 24–6 Hartford Friendship  123–4 Hastings, Francis  32 Hastings, Warren  143 Hawaiian Islands  233, 235, 237 Hayman, Francis  133–4, 149 HECAA; see Historians of EighteenthCentury Art and Architecture (HECAA) Henry, Anthony  168 Hewett, George Goodman  218, 220 Hill, John  92 Historiae Animalium (Gessner)  95 Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA)  1 Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing, An (Malcolm)  8, 233–41, 247–51 History of Printing in America (Thomas)  164, 168–9, 172, 179 n.3 Hodges, William  241 Hogarth, William  245 hookah (water pipe)  147 Hottentot Venus  246–7 human face mask  235–6, 238 Humphrey, Hannah  242–3 iconography  111 Iconology (Ripa)  116 idolatry  25 Imad-ul-Mulk  138 Indian paintings  241–51 Indigenous agency  212–13, 217, 224 Indigenous autonomy  213–15 Indigenous knowledge  4, 222–4 Indigenous peoples  3–4, 211–15 Indigenous survivance strategies  211, 224 infrastructure  66–9 inspecteur-générale (inspector general)  69–70 inspecteur-particulier (inspector particular)  69–70

263

Jafar, Mir  133–4, 138–9, 142 Jahangir  136 Jardin du Roi (French king’s garden)  93 jewels  143–4 Jingdezhen  113 Johnson, Samuel  25 jokes  233 Kawaiisu community  214 Keeler, Timothy  41 Khan, Alivardi  144 Khan, Ghulam Hussain  145, 148 Khan, Himmat Ali  148–9 Khurram  136 khutbah (Friday sermon)  138, 139, 142 Kia, Mana  148 King, Boston  53 King-te-ching (Jingdezhen)  113 Kinra, Rajeev  148 Kitanemuk community  214 Kjellberg, Anne  88 Kris, Ernst  249 Kriz, Kay Dian  247 Kumeyaay community  215, 216 La Granja (San Ildefonso de la Granja)  193–5 Lai, Yu-chih  95 La Purísima Concepción  216 Lavater, Johann Caspar  240 Le Bas, Jacques-Philippe  61 Leblanc, Abbé  120 Leclerc, Georges-Louis, comte de Buffon  196 Leibsohn, Dana  218 Leonard, James  46–7 Lindsey, John  43 Literati  17, 27, 28 long-distance trade  4 Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715)  185, 187–96 Luis I (1707–24)  194 Lutzelburg celebration  61, 63, 65, 66, 68, 71–5 Lynch, Samuel  44 McKittrick, Katherine  54 Madley, Benjamin  221 Madras  5, 6, 15–32 Madras cloth  3

264

Index

Mal, Nidha  139–40 Malcolm, James Peller  8, 234–41 Mamluks  243–5 Marathas  144 marble sculptures  107–24 Markel, Stephen  140 Martínez, José Longinos  214 material change/transformations  1, 4, 6–9, 63, 112, 162–3 material culture/cultures  2–5, 8–9, 137, 195, 212, 213, 223, 239, 247, 248 of betel  133–49 books  42–6 of enslaved  3, 41–55 guns  46–50 of Indigenous peoples  3, 211–25, 235–8, 247 tools  50–3 Mauss, Marcel  162–3 Mazarino, Giulio Raimondo (Cardinal Mazarin)  192 Meissen Manufactory  115, 119 Mémoire sur le magazin (1753)  69 Menus-Plaisirs  61 Menzies, Archibald  218, 220–1 Methodism  3 Mintz, Sidney  137, 147 Miseroni workshop  190 mixed-media paintings  195 mobilities  4, 7–8 momentary structures  63 Momon, Tiffany  5, 6 Monaghan, E. Jennifer  43 Moñino, José, count of Floridablanca  201 monjeríos (nunneries)  221 mother-of-pearl encrusted paintings (enconchados)  5, 188, 194, 195 Mughal emperor  136, 138, 141, 142–5 Mughal painting  136, 137, 139–40 Muhle, Peter  18 Murshidabad painting  147–8, 153 n.42 New Guide to the English Tongue, A (Dilworth)  43, 45 newspapers  6, 7, 41–55, 159, 163, 165–8, 171, 176–7 Niaopu 鳥譜 (Manual of Birds)  94–5

non-connoisseurs  119–20 Nova Scotia  159–78 nowruz (Persian New Year)  139 Nussbaum, Felicity  4 Nuu-Chah-nulth face mask  8, 235–6, 238 Oriental Scenery (Daniell)  246 ornamental reuse  5, 61–75 Ottolenghe, Joseph  45 paan; see betel pageantry  63 paintings  5, 28, 81, 93–5, 133–7, 139–40, 147–9, 188, 192, 193, 195, 196, 205, 241 China  28, 81, 93–5 of Conquest of Mexico  194–5 enconchados (mother-of-pearl encrusted paintings)  5, 188, 194–5, 203 flower  93–4 literati  27, 28 mixed-media  195 Mughal  136, 137, 139–40 Murshidabad  147–8, 153 n.42 of Plassey  133–4, 149 Rajput  136 pandans (betel box)  7, 134–6, 138–42, 145, 147, 149 architectural miniaturization  141 from Awadh  140–2 celestial garden  141 as gift  138–40 portability  141 surface  142 paragone  121 Pavón, Antonio  200 Payne, John  49 Peale, Charles Willson  234 Perry, Molly  180 n.9 Philip II (r. 1556–98)  190 Philip V (r. 1700–46)  185, 193, 194 Phillips, Ruth  236 Pietism  3 Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste  116, 118 Pimental, Juan  196, 202 Plan de Roussel (1730)  67, 68 Plan de Turgot (1734–9)  67, 68

Index

265

points rentrés technique  84, 85, 87, 95 polychrome velvet  99 Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de  7, 107–24 Friendship figurines  109–12, 118, 120–4 patronage  120–2 portraiture  122–4 Ponz, Antonio  201 porcelain  107–24 Asian  3, 114 biscuit  107–9, 111–12, 118–20 characterization of  112–14 D’Entrecolles on  113 European passion for  112 flou  113–14 fluidity of  113–15 in France  112 manufacture  112–13 mythology of  113 physical instability  113–14 Pompadour’s Friendship figurines  109–12, 120–4 porcellana shell  113 portrait of Collet  6, 15–32 portrait of Omai  241 Postell, John  42–3 Prévôt des Marchands  71–2 printers  159–78 printmaking  245–50 prints/printing  159–78, 233–51 gaps  164–7 by J.P. Malcolm  234–9 material integrity of  164–5 steps  165–7 Prophecy of Famine, The. A Scots Pastoral (Churchill)  247 protest  5, 7, 160–4, 167–72, 176–8 Protestant reform movements  3 Pygmalion and Galatea (Falconet)  107– 9, 111

Rado, Mei Mei  5, 6–7 Rajput painting  136 Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (RABASF)  197–8 Real Gabinete de Historia Natural (Royal Cabinet of Natural History, RCNH)  8, 185–205 realism  17–18, 27–8, 238 Real Jardín Botánico (Royal Botanical Garden)  197 Reed, Benjamin  44 religion  4, 25, 27, 44–5 repurposing of decorative arts/decorations  62–9 labor/expertise  69–75 of materials  62–5 reuse of materials  62–5 to conserve material  64–6 to control costs  64–6 physical infrastructure for  66–9 revenue stamp  159–60, 163, 171, 172, 175 Revere, Paul  161–2 Reynolds, Joshua  241 Ripa, Cesare  116, 117 Rites Controversy  27 ritual portraits  28–30 robe à la française  86, 88 robe à l’anglaise (textile)  86 rock crystal vase  189–91 Rococo botanical fantasy  83; see also floral design/fashion Rothschild, Emma  19–20 Rowlandson, Thomas  245 Royal Cabinet of Natural History (RCNH)  8, 185–205 Ruiz, Hipólito  200 Ruud, Lisa Camille  198, 201, 202

Qasim, Mir  134, 139–40, 142–5, 146–7 Qing court  16, 82, 88–95, 96 Qing Empire (1644–1911) in botanical exploration  81–2, 89–95 emperor  28–9 history  26–9 imperial collections  88–95

St. John, James  51–2 Salazar, Simón de Anda y  199 salt  146–7 San Buenaventura Mission  216, 218 San Diego Mission  216 San Fernando Velicatá Mission  216 San Ildefonso de La Granja  193–4, 195

in imperial competition  81–2

266 San Luis Obispo Mission  216, 217, 219–23 Santa Barbara Mission  213, 216–22 Santa Inés Mission  216 Satia, Priya  249–51 Scheier-Dolberg, Joseph  17 Schulz, Andrew  198 Scott, James  53 Scott, Katie  123 sculptural transmediation  5 self-emancipation  41–55 material world of people  41–55 new worlds  54–5 self-emancipation of people/persons  6 books and  42–6 guns and  46–50 literacy and  43–6 material world of  41–55 religion and  43–5 tools and  50–3 Sen, Sudipta  143, 147 settler colonialism  211, 213, 216–17 Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory  107–9, 114, 117–19, 123–4 Shah, Nadir  138 shell beads  214 Shoupu 獸譜 (Manual of Beasts)  94–5 Shuja-ud-Daula  133, 139–40 silks  5, 81–99 Abegg-Stiftung  96 in America  85–8 Chinese  85, 88–95 in eighteenth-century Europe  84–8 floral design/fashion  83–8 weaving of  84–8 silver filigree objects  199 Sima Guang  28 Siraj-ud-Daula  133, 142–4 slave dwellings  42 slavery  41–55 Sloane, Hans  201 sociality of ingestion  137, 147 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel  45 Song dynasty (960–1279)  93 Song dynasty courts (960–1279)  28 South Carolina Negro Act (1740)  48 sovereignty  137, 138, 141 Spain  5, 8, 81, 185–205, 211–25

Index Enlightenment  187 missionization  8, 211–25 Spitalfields silk  82, 84, 85, 87, 88 Stamp Act (1765)  7, 159, 162, 164, 166, 172 Stamp Act stamps  159, 160, 163–5 content, problem with  167–71 flipping of  171–6 in Halifax  168 Nova Scotians’ dissatisfaction with  171 print/printing  164–7 Thomas’s narrative  164, 168–71, 176–7 stereotyping  245–6 Stono Rebellion  47–8 Sturgis, John Hubbard  85 survivance  8, 211, 224 tacit protest  162–4, 171, 176, 181 n.6 “Techniques of the Body” (Mauss)  162–3 Temple of Glory  65 temporary structures  63–4 Tenture des Indes (Tapestries of the Indies)  95 thingness  111 Thomas, Isaiah  7, 159–78, 179 n.3 actions  159–70, 182 n.16 biographers  161–2 as defender of liberty  171 flipping of stamp  171–6 History of Printing in America  164, 168–9, 172, 176, 177, 179 n.3 as journeyman printer  162, 168, 169 narrative  164, 168–71, 176–7 printer’s devil, use of  159–61 tacit protest  162–4, 171, 176 Thomas, Nicholas  237 three-dimensional portraiture  15–32, 109–12, 116–18, 120–4 Tibetan Buddhism  96–8 tobacco  137, 146–7 Tønder, Michael  18 Tongva community  214 tools  6, 42, 46, 50–5, 188, 221 Townsend, Joseph  201 translation  5, 82, 244

Index Travers, Robert  143 treasure medallion (baoxianghua 寶相花)  98 Tuck, Eve  216 Turk’s cap lily  84, 94 Tuxent, Curry  6, 52 twined baskets  215 two-dimensional portraiture  27, 28, 123, 241 Vancouver Expedition (1791–5)  211, 213, 217–22, 230 n.25 van Hurk, Pieter  18 Vansittart, Henry  143 Venus de Medicis  241 vernacular objects  3 Vincennes/Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory  107–9, 114, 118–19, 122–4 vingtième  65 Vinograd, Richard  17 visual culture  4 Wager, Susan  5, 7 Warburg, Aby  249 warehouses  64, 67 warps  215, 225 Warren, Joseph  162 wearable floral fashion  83–8 West, Benjamin  234, 241

267

Western flowers in Tibetan Buddhist spaces  96–8 Western/foreign silks  90–2, 96, 98 white gold; see porcelain Whitely, W. H.  19 White Town, Madras  23 Wilkins, Jacob  47 Williams, Barbara  50–1 Williams, John  52 Wong, Winnie  5, 6 wood  20, 27, 29, 61, 63–6, 68, 71–3, 75, 191, 194, 195, 220, 236, 238 World in Miniature (Ackermann)  239 Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosity)  186, 198, 202 Xian’e changchun 仙萼長春 (Immortal Blossoms in an Everlasting Spring)  93–4 Yang, Binbin  17 Yang, K. Wayne  216 Yokuts community  214 Yongzheng reign (1723–35)  28–9, 93 Yu Sheng  94 Zanardi, Tara  5, 7–8 Zappia, Natale  213 zhuangyan 莊嚴  96–8 Zhu Xi  28

Plate 1  Chin Qua (active in Chennai), Portrait of Joseph Collet, painted unfired clay, height 33 inches/838mm, 1716. Accompanied by a painted wooden case, inscribed “AMOY CHIN QUA 1716.” National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 4005. Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London

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Plate 2  “Run Away,” South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (Charleston, SC), April 3, 1770

Plate 3  Contractual drawing for the feu d’artifice erected for the victory celebration staged on October 28, 1758. Pen, ink, and pencil on paper. Archives nationales, France, K 1013, 2452

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Plate 4 Textile length, mid-to-late eighteenth century, China. Silk satin weave brocaded with silk threads and gold metallic threads. Textile loom width: 60 cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing, gu17952

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Plate 5  Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Friendship (L’ Amitié), 1755. Biscuit porcelain, 30.5 cm (height including base). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan. Photo: Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum

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Plate 6  Now unknown artist, Jahangir Seated on the Balcony of a Terrace with his son, Prince Khurram, and a Falconer, c. 1615. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Photo: Rijksmuseum. © H. Rowen Bequest, Hilversum

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Plate 7  Detail of printed image from [Attributed to Isaiah Thomas], [collage of printed and stamped elements], Halifax Gazette, 13 February 1766. Letterpress and woodcut. Reproduced by permission of the American Antiquarian Society

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Plate 8  Italian Workshop (goblet), Pierre Delabarre (adornment), lapis lazuli goblet with enameled dragons and boy, sixteenth century (goblet); 1625–45 (adornment). Enamel, lapis lazuli, opal, gold. © Museo Nacional del Prado

Plate 9  Unknown Chumash weaver, basket hat, late eighteenth century. Sedge root, bulrush root. H 2.76 cm × D 40 cm. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum

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Plate 10  James Gillray, Mamlouk, et Hussard Republicain, General result of Buonaparte’s Attack upon Ibrahim Bey’s Rear Guard, 1799, hand-colored etching, 260 × 378 mm., courtesy of the British Museum

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