Visual Culture as Historical Document: Sir John Drummond Hay and the Nineteenth-Century Moroccan Pottery in the National Museum of Scotland

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-124
Author(s):  
Margaret S. Graves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Historical Document

scholarly journals DEPICTING THE INVISIBLE: WELWITSCH'S MAP OF TRAVELLERS IN AFRICA

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARA ALBUQUERQUE ◽  
SILVIA FIGUEIRÔA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Museum ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Historical Document ◽  
Historia Natural ◽  
Scientific Networks ◽  
Different Parts ◽  
The Invisible

ABSTRACT This paper addresses a nineteenth century African manuscript map which has hitherto remained ‘invisible’. This manuscript was produced by Friedrich Welwitsch (1806–1872), an Austrian botanist in the service of the Portuguese government, and held by the National Museum of Natural History and Science, University of Lisbon Museums/Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência, Museus da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal (MUHNAC). This historical document contains names of several travellers, many of them ‘invisible’ explorers, located in different parts of the African continent, depicting the relationships in both a visual and geographical way with notes and relevant historical observations. Welwitsch, as so many contemporary fellow botanists, was in contact with many scientists, exchanging not only correspondence but knowledge and collections. This map is a key document, a true hub of Welwitsch's network of knowledge in which the scientific networks, the types of actors, interactions, methodologies and practices of botany are revealed, providing insights into the botanical exchanges that contributed to the making of Welwitsch's African collections.

scholarly journals ‘Epidemics in a Mist’: Medical Climatology and Cholera in Victorian Visual Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-511
Author(s):  
Amanda Sciampacone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Tropical Environment ◽  
Atmospheric Conditions ◽  
Vital Force ◽  
Real Material ◽  
Climate And Health ◽  
Crucial Part ◽  
Epidemic Diseases

Abstract The article explores how Victorian visual culture was a vital force in the construction and dissemination of medical theories on the connection between climate and health. During the nineteenth century, the seemingly inexplicable and deadly nature of many epidemic diseases compelled British medics to investigate all possible reasons for their spread. Focusing on cholera, the article will examine how, in an effort to understand what was seen at the time as a mysterious disease, Victorian medics increasingly concentrated on the climate of India and unusual weather in Britain as propagators of the malady. Supplementing the dominant miasma theory, medics explained how the seemingly airborne sources of cholera resulted from a state of England’s air that resembled the tropical environment of the subcontinent. In an effort to highlight the correlation between cholera and the atmosphere, they produced medical climatology reports containing diagrams that juxtaposed the data on the disease’s mortality rates with measurements of meteorological phenomena. These images, rather than serving simply as illustrations, became a crucial part of medical arguments. As the article will demonstrate, in attempting to visualize the medical climatology of cholera, the diagrams mapped the disease to certain atmospheric conditions, suggesting that cholera could be quantified and controlled. Yet, in doing so, the images also implied that cholera had a real material presence in the air of Britain, powerfully evoking visual tropes of the disease as a substance that had the potential to contaminate the very landscape of the nation.

A nineteenth-century glyptic collection in the National Museum in Krakow

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-96
Author(s):  
Paweł Gołyźniak ◽  
Lucyna Natkaniec-Nowak ◽  
Magdalena Dumańska-Słowik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Museum

Freeze Frame: historic polar images

Polar Record ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 366-368
Author(s):  
Huw Lewis-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Research Project ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
The World ◽  
Iconic Images ◽  
Polar Research Institute ◽  
World Class ◽  
Research Institute

ABSTRACTSince the development of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, exploration has created iconic images of the polar regions. A new two-year research project, entitled Freeze Frame, using the world-class collections at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, will bring this remarkable visual culture forward for new audiences.

Scottish Nationality in the Nineteenth Century

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
National Institutions ◽  
National Monuments ◽  
National Architecture

Measured in terms of the symbols of nationality common across the rest of nineteenth-century Europe, there can be no doubt that the Scots held an assertive sense of themselves as a distinct nation. Rather than giving up their nationality in favour of British-national institutions, the Scots surrounded themselves with all the signs and symbols of a culturally and historically coherent nation. The Scots had a national museum and national gallery, national monuments, a national poet, national dress and national architecture, as well as a pantheon of national heroes, past and present. Indeed, Scotland in the nineteenth century suffered not so much from a lack of focal points for its nationality than from a surfeit. In the Victorian era there existed a collective pride bordering on collective egotism, an imperial arrogance bound up with landscape, industry, education and Presbyterianism.

Courtesan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
General Sense ◽  
High Class ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
French Art ◽  
The Way

La Parisienne is frequently associated with prostitution, whether in the narrow sense of the streetwalker or courtesan or the general sense of the object and subject of consumption. Tracing her development in nineteenth-century art and literature, this chapter examines the way the Parisienne as courtesan is re-presented in cinema in Charles Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), Alain Cavalier’s La Chamade (1968), and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001). Cinematic courtesans have their prefigurations in both real life courtesans of the Second Empire, as well as in representations in French art, literature, and visual culture (Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Balzac, Zola, Dumas fils). Motifs associated with the Parisienne courtesan include the familiar tropes associated with Paris as a demimonde: desire, pleasure, and consumption. Alongside these tropes are the visual and narrative motifs on which the iconography of the Parisienne courtesan is based: fashion or style (often conceived to denote luxury and leisure), transformation (usually from provincial to high class), ambiguity (insofar as her class origins, motivations, and emotional allegiances are generally obscure), and the ménage à trois (films featuring Parisienne courtesans often involve the choice between an earnest but poor lover and a rich benefactor).

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