Paintings off the Peg: The Retail Sale of Paintings in Tudor and Early Stuart England

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Robert Tittler

Abstract The scholarly consideration of the marketing of luxury goods like paintings in Renaissance Europe has rightly concentrated on the Italian and Netherlandish experiences, while the discussion of an English retail market for paintings has focused on a later era. This article investigates the retail sale of painting in Tudor and early Stuart times. It asks what sorts of paintings were sold, who sold them, and what sorts of spaces accommodated such sales. Whereas conventional art historical research has concentrated on the production and sale of portraits, the discovery of an early seventeenth-century list of coat of arms painters holding retail shops in London adds additional support to the prominence of arms painting in such retail sales. This article considers the social context underlying the importance of displaying coats of arms and shows that arms painters engaged in the retail sale as well as the production of arms. The article proceeds to examine the varieties of retail spaces in which sales took place and concludes with a consideration of how retail sale of paintings contributed to London's role as a cultural center.

2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 949-984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Volpp

Actors were luxury goods traded among the elite in late Ming and early Qing China. Not only individual actors but entire troupes were sold, bestowed upon friends, and bequeathed upon relatives. Their circulation served to create and maintain networks of social exchange, in much the same manner as did gifts of fine ceramic ware, calligraphic scrolls, and ancient bronzes. The cultural prestige of the actor as a luxury good, in turn, was predicated on a highly refined discourse of connoisseurship. For example, the theater aficionado Pan Zhiheng's (1556–1622) disquisitions on the art of acting were collected in a volume entitledChongding xinshang pian(Recompiled texts on connoisseurship), published between 1600 and 1640 (Clunas 1991, 36). In this essay, I discuss the social significance of the connoisseurship of the actor, examining the exchange of actors and poems among a rarefied stratum of the mid-seventeenth-century elite.


Author(s):  
Erin Webster

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.


Author(s):  
Anthony Carty

The view that no form of international law existed in seventeenth-century France, and that this time was a part of ‘prehistory’, and thus irrelevant for international legal thought today is challenged. In addition, the traditional claim of Richelieu to be an admirer of Machiavelli and his Ragion di Stato doctrine to the detriment of the aim of concluding treaties and keeping them (as sacred), is refuted by careful historical research. In Richelieu’s thinking, there is a role for law to play but it is law as justice, law in the classical natural law tradition. Those who rule are subject to the rule of law as justice, the rule of God, or the rule of reason. In Richelieu’s world, kings and ministers are rational instruments of the practical implementation of God’s will on earth.


Global Jurist ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Giaconi ◽  
Lorenzo Giasanti ◽  
Simone Varva

Abstract The virtually immediate information propagation has reduced the gap of knowledge once existing between MNEs and customers (i.e. Rana Plaza collapse, 2013). Consumers begin playing an important role in supporting workers. Their growing social awareness has clear economic consequences. MNEs have tried to react to the loss of social reputation, mainly adopting (and imposing to their suppliers) codes of conduct and ethics providing a minimum standard for decent work standards. This article aims to analyze the social reputation and social sustainability that have recently attracted stakeholders’ interest, from different points of view (MNEs, consumers, government and non-government organizations, unions). Those “new” forms of social initiatives (code of conduct, social ranking, consumers campaign, boycotting) are informative and could help to spread ILO labour standards. Clearly, they can represent only an additional support for workers who are struggling in the typical conflict between Work and Capital. The tendency to use a single parameter for assessing the social sensitivity of the MNEs, valid both for the countries “in development” and for those “already developed” risks to lead to a “race to the bottom” trend.


2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN GUNNARSDÓTTIR

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.


Costume ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Robinson

A pair of embroidered seventeenth-century gauntlet gloves, reputedly presented by King Charles I to his courtier Sir Henry Wardlaw, was donated to the University of St Andrews in 2001. This article sets out to uncover the truth behind this nearly four-hundred-year-old family legend by investigating Sir Henry’s royal connections and the social significance of the gauntlet gloves as a high-status, luxury clothing accessory. Based on the study of historic gloves in museum and private collections, it endeavours to date the gloves by discussing their design and manufacture within the context of seventeenth-century clothing fashion. This article also explores the symbolism behind the gauntlet gloves’ decorative scheme by unravelling some of the hidden messages that are conveyed about cultural, religious, political and technological developments and perspectives through seventeenth-century embroidery.


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.


2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Plank

Quakers began arriving in the Caribbean and North America when their religious society was still new and struggling to define its core beliefs and institutional structure. There were tensions within the Society of Friends stemming from the Quakers’ validation of individual inspiration and their communal commitment to the Christian message as contained in the Bible. A bitter debate over scriptural authority wracked Quaker meetings for the remainder of the seventeenth century, and the controversy included arguments over the Quakers’ relations with Native Americans, Africans, and others outside of Europe beyond the reach of formal Christian teaching. On both sides of the Atlantic opponents of Quaker discipline challenged long-standing assumptions about the source and content of the Christian message and the social hierarchies that resulted when some groups claimed privileged access to truth. The ensuing argument influenced the Quakers’ plans for their colonies in North America, and their debate over slavery.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 108-137
Author(s):  
Carsten Sestoft

Romanens status i det 17. århundredes Frankrig The hesitations of a genre: The status of the novel in seventeenth-century FranceIn answering the question: What was the novel in seventeenth-century France? – this article provides insight into some important points of the early history of the genre. The contradiction between its non-existence in official (Aristotelian) poetics and its existence as a popular commodity on the book market was, in the course of the seventeenth century, reconciled in the emergent category of belles lettres as a plurality of genres mainly defined by their public of honnêtes gens, while attempts at legitimizing the novel as belonging to such Aristotelian genres as epic or history generally failed; and at the end of the century a number of convergences – between epic and novel, between the designations roman and nouvelle, and between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the novel – seem to point to the fact that the social existence of the genre had been strengthened, even if it was the English novel of the eighteenth century that could be said to reap the profits of this stronger position. Using historical semantics and cultural sociology to study the status of the novel in seventeenth-century France thus leads to a clearer understanding of the specificity of the novel as a literary and cultural genre.


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