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…
In recent years, many American museums and their staff have staged revisionist interventions, urging general visitors and scholars to reframe, reimagine, and reinterpret European collections. In “Re-Presenting Art History: An Unfinished Process,” art historian Cristina Baldacci ruminates on the prefix “re-” as a hermeneutic tool strategically employed by curators to…
Jennifer Van Horn The bitter cold at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, during the Continental Army’s winter encampment of 1777–1778 has become part of American mythology. That brutal chill, borne by George Washington and the soldiers whom he commanded in the American Revolution, was immortalized as bodily sacrifice for the cause of…
Sylvia Houghteling In his dictionary of Persian words, written in Delhi around 1745, the writer and lexicographer Anand Ram Mukhlis pauses on the entry for takhta-i yakh, a word that means a “sheet of ice” (with takhta often referring to a flat plane, board, or surface and yakh meaning ice).…