A Clark Symposium

BRITISH ART 1750–1919: REFLECTIONS AND FUTURES

Abstracts

Gülru Çakmak (University of Massachusetts Amherst) on “‘Cast into the Fiery Oven’: The Metaphysics of Lost Wax in Alfred Gilbert’s Sam Wilson Chimneypiece (Leeds Art Gallery, c. 1914)”

At the turn of the twentieth century, sculptors working with the method of modeling faced a problem: the finished sculpture, be it cast in bronze in a foundry or carved in marble by an assistant, was increasingly perceived as belonging to the subsequent stage of reproduction rather than to the temporally unfolding process of artistic invention. Scholars have extensively investigated how the supposed limitations of modeling eventually led to the emergence of direct carving as the predominant sculptural paradigm. This talk aims to contribute to discussions on a revisionist history of modern sculpture by problematizing the modernist narrative of a radical break. It argues that the disjunction between invention and finish was acutely experienced by an earlier generation of sculptors in England and France, including Alfred Gilbert, who sought for ways to address it from within the paradigm of modeling. Gilbert’s experimental bronze casting methods attest to his efforts to overcome the disconnection between the viewer’s experience of the finished work and the invisible layers of the artistic process. 

Natasha Coleman (Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts) on “À vendre in Darwin's London: Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Cleaving of the Divine Thumb”

Gülru Çakmak has described the “crisis of historical representation” that unfolded within French academic art during the first half of the nineteenth century. Discoveries in geology, paleontology, and linguistics had revealed the past as having been charted by invisible, insentient forces operating across unfathomable spans of time. Nineteenth-century theorists began questioning the capacity of visual modes of representation to depict history. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) found his solution to the problem of historical representation through science, the privileged instrument of his age for elucidating the past. Yet, as I will argue, the highly successful ethnographic realist vein of Orientalism that Gérôme developed came under threat in the winter of 1870 by a forgotten second crisis, precipitated by the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Although this second crisis has fallen out of art historical consciousness, the radical reorientation of the Orientalist idiom it provoked was on full display at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1871, where Gérôme exhibited his painting, À vendre, for the first and last time.  

Alexis Goodin (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts) on “A Room of One’s Own: British Women Artists at the Clark”

The Clark’s recent acquisition of The Garden Studio, a meticulously detailed, sumptuously rendered watercolor of an interior by Anna Alma-Tadema (British, born Belgium, 1867–1943), as well as the oil painting The Field of the Slain by Evelyn De Morgan (British, 1855–1919), a Pacifist’s meditation on the human cost of World War I, reveals a new interest in collecting the work of women artists. In her talk, Goodin will explore these objects and their makers, noting how the works complement other British works in the Clark’s permanent collection, and how they break new ground. She will preview her loan exhibition A Room of One’s Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1880–1945, scheduled for summer 2025 at the Clark, and inspired by these acquisitions.  

Ariel Kline (Princeton University, New Jersey) on “Paton in Fairyland”

Fairyland has seldom been a place for politics. It is too diffuse, too fantastic—too much of an escape from the demands of modern life. This talk, however, takes seriously Victorian fairy paintings as political propositions. Comparing works by the Scottish artist Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901), including The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1850) and Caliban (1868), I show that Paton was interested not only in individual monstrous figures, but also in the monstrous multiple, the double, or the many. Rooted in seventeenth-century sources that describe fantastical worlds, from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600) to his Tempest (1611), and from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) to Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth (c.1691), this paper charts the nineteenth-century British body politic in fairyland. After empire, I propose, sovereignty threatened to split and double like the many fairies whose proliferation marks their disunity. 

Jeremy Melius (eikones – Zentrum für die Theorie und Geschichtes des Bildes, Universität Basel, Switzerland) on “Ruskin’s Double Plots” 

This talk offers a new reading of the Victorian critic John Ruskin’s pairing of Turner and Giorgione in Modern Painters volume 5 (1860). Its famous chapter “The Two Boyhoods” set out an influential account of how artists come to be shaped by their social and material environments, and scholars have tended to focus on Ruskin’s vivid account of Turner’s formation within the dirt, misery, and deathliness of modern English life. But what happens if we also take the presence of Giorgione here more seriously? What re-articulations of “British” artistic vision and environmental receptivity might come into view? Conforming neither to a Pugin-style “contrast” nor a Wölfflinian historical-stylistic comparison, Ruskin’s doublings point towards less defined, more speculative forms of art-historical correlation. Attending to them, this presentation suggests the lineaments of another kind of art history within Ruskin’s writings, as it begins to surface in his binocular vision of historical worlds.  

Iris Moon (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) on “Black and Blue: The Wedgwood Antislavery Medallion”

This talk focuses on the antislavery medallion, a jasperware piece manufactured by Josiah Wedgwood in 1787 on behalf of the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, to draw attention to the central role that the decorative arts, ceramics in particular, played in shaping the visual and material culture of eighteenth-century Britain. Drawing upon new material from my forthcoming book, Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, January 2024), I look at how this small, artificial ceramic body with the figuration of a kneeling enslaved Black man embodied the conflicted abolitionist politics of sympathy. At the same time, it mobilized an alternative set of questions that bound the melancholy enterprise of making ceramics to the construction of new subjectivities: how do you invent a body? How do you make a self? How do you deal with loss? 

Sam Rose (University of St Andrews) on “Raeburn’s Buttons and Constable’s Clouds:  Looking at British Academic Painting with Ernst Gombrich and David Hockney”

For some mid-twentieth-century critics, British academic painting reached a height of naturalistic representation: the picture as transparent window on to the world created through incredibly careful brushwork that all but disappeared behind the glassy surface of the canvas. Looking back on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British painting in his 1960 book Art and Illusion, however, Ernst Gombrich took artists around the Royal Academy to be paradigmatic of the way that apparently naturalistic or illusionistic painting relied on artistic devices or “schemas” learned from previous works of art. According to Gombrich even in the most convincing portrait or vivid study of clouds, no painter had—or indeed could have—purely reproduced exactly what they saw in front of them. In 1960 David Hockney also began a journey back to representational art that led to his famous ‘naturalist’ works of the end of the decade. This paper examines some of Hockney’s works alongside British art from Raeburn to Constable to think about how naturalistic pictorial representation can operate as an art based on pictorial devices rather than the pure reproduction of appearance.

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