Sad Purple and Mauve: A History of Dye-MakingSeptember 2023—January 2024Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State This exhibition grew out of a book. Two years ago, the Center for Virtual/Material Studies (CV/MS), housed in the Department of Art History at Penn State, approached the university’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library…
Our exhibition, Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories, was held at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Bucks County, Pennsylvania from September 9, 2023 to January 14, 2024. The first room featured a salon-style hang of prints, paintings, and textiles incorporating images of Penn’s Treaty, also known as the Treaty…
The cover to Jennifer Van Horn’s Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art under Slavery (Yale University Press 2022) features a striking portrait of an aging Black woman, shoulders draped in shining stripes and head wrapped in a madras tignon (Fig. 1). While it is virtually impossible not to be captivated by…
Andrea Feeser First issued in 1787, Josiah Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion appears in several versions: black figure on a white or cream ground, white figure on a blue ground, and copper red figure on a black ground, the second color combination now synonymous with Wedgwood (Figs. 1, 2, and 3). In…
Caroline Culp In 1767, the Boston-born portraitist John Singleton Copley debuted Young Lady with a Bird and a Dog in London at the Society of Artists of Great Britain annual exhibition (Fig. 1).[1] As a self-taught artist working in New England, Copley (1738–1815) was eager for feedback from the distant…
Tong Su The eighteenth-century Qing court is renowned for its extensive array of colorful artifacts, reflecting a deep-rooted fascination with color that is mirrored in the Manchu language. This attention also extends to color’s absence. Within the Manchu linguistic paradigm, numerous adverse conditions are linked to the loss of color.…
Melissa Hyde “Why am I Mr. Pink?” — Reservoir Dogs (1992) Pink was a color so fashionable and beloved in the eighteenth century—in painting, dress, decorative arts, and even literature—that it has been said to have been invented by that century.[1] In France, it was the color par excellence of…
Tori Champion When the French artist Catherine Perrot authored Les leçons royales (The Royal Lessons), her treatise on the art of painting in miniature, in 1686, she became one of the only known women in the early modern period to publish a technical manual on art theory or practice (Fig.…
Philippe Colomban While much scholarly attention has been paid to the early modern European quest to discover and master the technologies of Chinese porcelain, Chinese attempts to mimic European surface effects remain relatively unexamined. Within this complex technological competition, China became the “workshop of the world” for producing enameled objects…
A functional truism of eighteenth-century French cartography is that it enshrined a topographical way of understanding space—that it mapped with growing precision the features and dimensions of land surfaces.[1] The famous Cassini Map, under way for much of the century, was the first project to use triangulation to survey all…