Art and the British Empire

by Barringer, Tim; Quilley, Geoff; Fordham, Douglas

• ISBN13: 9780719081934
• ISBN10: 0719081939
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-09-01
• Publisher: OXFORD UNIV PR

Summary

This pioneering study argues that the concept of 'empire' belongs at the centre, rather than in the margins, of British art history. Recent scholarship in history, anthropology, literature and post-colonial studies has superseded traditional definitions of empire as a monolithic political and economic project. Emerging across the humanities is the idea of empire as a complex and contested process, mediated materially and imaginatively by multifarious forms of culture. The twenty essays inArt and the British Empireoffer compelling methodological solutions to this ambiguity, while engaging in subtle visual analysis of a previously neglected body of work.

Author Biography

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Geoff Quilley is Curator of Maritime Art at the National Maritime Museum, London. Douglas Fordham is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Settlers and travellers: * The expanded field of the picturesque: Contested identities and empire in Sydney Cove 1794 -- Ian MacLean * The picturesque and the Palawa: John Glover’s Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point -- David Hansen * John Septimus Roe and the art of navigation, c. 1815-1830 -- Luciana Martins and Felix Driver * Colonial illusions: Australasian trompe-l’oeil drawings -- Roger Blackley * Ideas of ‘Home’ in South African landscape paintings by Thomas Bowler and Thomas Baines -- Michael Godby Metropolitan views: * Scalping: Social rites in Westminster Abbey -- Douglas Fordham * “Conquest, usurpation, wealth, luxury, famine”: Mortimer’s Banditti and the anxieties of empire -- David H. Solkin * Ships of the line:  The Royal Academy exhibition of 1784 -- Eleanor Hughes * Uranian imperialism: Boys and empire in Edwardian England -- Michael Hatt * Homo-exoticism: John Minton in London and Jamaica, 1950--1 -- Simon Faulkner * Roles and reversals: * Critical cosmopolitanism:  Gifting and collecting Art at Lucknow, 1775-1797 -- Natasha Eaton * Storm in a teacup? Visualizing tea consumption in the British empire -- Romita Ray * The politics of portraiture behind the veil -- Mary Roberts * A veil of truth and the details of empire: John Frederick Lewis’s The Reception -- Emily M. Weeks
 * Imperial masculinity, mimicry, and the new woman in Rhodes of Africa -- Julie F. Codell * Subject formation: * Savage marks: Engraving and empire in Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report -- Michael Gaudio * Always there: Aboriginal people and the consolation of miniature portraiture in British North America -- Kristina Huneault * Fractured families:  John Davis’s photo-portraits of Robert Louis Stephenson and family in Samoa -- Leonard Bell * Gentlemen at leisure: Riding breeches in the photographic portrait images of Black South African men -- Sandra Klopper * ‘A paralysis of perspective’: Image and text in the creation of an African chief -- Jeff Guy