J. Cabelle Ahn From whatever country moral lessons should come to us, it is always welcome; but should we have to turn to the Savages to seek lessons in paternal and maternal tenderness?—Anonymous, Galimatias: anti-critique des tableaux du Salon (1781) [1] At first glance, the Salon of 1781 of the…
Katherine Calvin While describing Senegal in his 1797 illustrated book, Tableaux des principaux peuples de l’Europe, de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, de l’Amérique, et les découvertes des capitaines Cook, La Pérouse, etc., the white, Montreal-born author, artist, and former diplomat Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (1757-1810) explicitly condemns Europeans’ brutal treatment of…
Les Animaux du Roi, Château de Versailles, Versailles, France, October 12, 2021 – February 13, 2022. Curated by Alexandre Maral and Nicolas Milovanovic. Scenography: Guicciardini & Magni Architetti. Lighting: Lionel Coutou. You are allowed to enjoy this exhibition. Cast off your critical baggage and just relax. It’s okay. Forget your…
Exhibition: In Sparkling Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, May 22, 2021 – January 2, 2022. In Sparkling Company, a ground-breaking exhibition curated by Christopher Maxwell at the Corning Museum of Glass, invites us into the…
Sussan Babaie This essay focuses on the representations of architecture from the lands of Islam in two picture-rich narratives of the history of architecture and on their historiographic significance. One is a picture book, first published in 1721 in Vienna, by Fischer von Erlach (1656–1723), Entwurf einer historischen Architektur in…
Andrei Pop One way to formulate the question of a “long” eighteenth century, one not just stretching to include the Napoleonic Wars, but to claim eighteenth-century influence on later history, is not in terms of quantity (what’s a good stopping point?) or explanatory power (is this an “eighteenth-centuryish” development?) but…
Meredith Gamer The Past—or, more accurately, pastness—is a position.Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past.— Michel-Rolphe Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1997)[1] On December 1, 1783, London’s Gentleman’s Magazine presented its readers with a precisely executed picture of the city’s newest execution machine (Fig. 1). Jutting out…
Maggie M. Cao On long voyages that spanned from the Aleutians to the Cape of Good Hope, American whalers introduced a new industrial waste product into global circulation: whale teeth. For the whalemen themselves, the teeth became an artistic material for the novel art of scrimshaw. Scrimshaw describes the transformation…
Bart Pushaw In a woodcut printed in 1724, white polar bear pelts, tanned sealskins, and brown caribou hides billow like great sails from the masts of ships, as trumpets blare and thunderous timpani drums resound across choppy waters (Fig. 1).[1] Pictorial banners depicting Arctic fauna from cod and salmon, to…
Chanchal Dadlani and Holly Shaffer This dialogue was prompted by the call to consider—and contest—the “long eighteenth century” as a theoretical and methodological frame, particularly in art history. As scholars of South Asia and Europe, we began to see that the notion of the long eighteenth century refracts when seen…