Enlightened “Museums of Images” or Decorative Displays? Elizabeth Seymour Percy and the Eighteenth-Century Print Room

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-157
Author(s):  
Louise Voll Box
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Interior Decoration

In the second half of the eighteenth century, “print rooms”—created by pasting prints and paper ornaments directly onto walls—were a short-lived mode of fashionable English interior decoration. Concurrently, collections of prints continued to be bound into albums or stored in portfolios in private libraries. Although they took different forms, print rooms and print albums shared characteristics that marked them as “enlightened” cultural practices: both featured prints arranged in preconceived aesthetic or intellectual schemes that presented elite, pan-European cultural subjects, imagery, and ideas. Prints in albums or prints on walls could therefore operate as “museums of images”—each format ostensibly encouraged viewers to respond emotionally or intellectually to prints. Yet there is strong evidence to suggest that prints in print rooms and in print collections were perceived differently. This essay draws on the predominantly unpublished journals and correspondence of English collector Elizabeth Seymour Percy, first Duchess of Northumberland (1716–76), to reveal the very different ways in which she described prints in each setting. For her, albums or portfolios of prints were edifying “spaces of enlightenment,” while prints in print rooms performed merely a decorative function.

EVIDENCE OF THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOLFEGGIO PATTERNS IN THE MANUSCRIPT FOR THE 1707 NEAPOLITAN PERFORMANCE OF LA FEDE TRADITA E VENDICATA BY GASPARINI AND VIGNOLA

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-184
Author(s):  
ERIC BOARO
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Schema Theory ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Recent Contribution ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

The last two decades have seen the opening of several new paths in eighteenth-century musicology, and Robert O. Gjerdingen has opened one of these: schema theory. Schemata are ‘stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences’ that function as harmonic, melodic and rhythmic frameworks for musical passages. Evidence of such schematic thinking has emerged through related studies on partimento and solfeggio. Solfeggio practice of the time manifests a schematic way of thinking about music, being mostly based on simple hexachordal patterns which, as studies progressed, could be embellished in different ways. Vasili Byros has addressed the ‘archaeology’ of hearing through reception history, and offered strong evidence that eighteenth-century ears did hear schemata. Interweaving corpus studies on music of the long eighteenth century (1720–1840), contemporary music criticism and reception history, as well as didactic documents from that era, Byros sheds new light on the ways in which schemata were perceived at the time. A recent contribution by Gilad Rabinovitch uses a live improvisation in the style of Mozart by Robert Levin to demonstrate the importance of conventional schemata for historical improvisation.

scholarly journals The Gilded Interior: French Style and American Renaissance

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Laura C. Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Architectural Tradition

ABSTRACT In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, New York was seized by a passion for things French in interior decoration. The influx of French eighteenth-century decorative arts from London and Paris exerted a powerful influence over the imaginations of a new millionaire class, while the emergence of the professional dealer-decorator established channels for the incorporation of these materials into the luxury residence. While these interiors were developed in collaboration with leading US architects such as Richard Morris Hunt and George B. Post, they also posed a subtle challenge to the discourse of intellectualism developed on architects’ behalf. Governed by issues of taste and commerce as well as by artistic judgement, these French interiors presented a compelling vision of aristocratic stature that was at once in keeping, and in conflict, with the aspirations of an American Renaissance. This article considers the role of eighteenth-century French-style interiors in the articulation of a ‘civilised’ architectural tradition in the United States during the so-called Gilded Age. Focusing on the private mansion, it reconsiders the notion of the American Renaissance as a principally academic movement by calling attention to the ways in which it also responded to the requirements of the elite class as well as the commercial marketplace.

Cherokee Towns and Calumet Ceremonialism in Eastern North America

2014 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher B. Rodning
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Southern Appalachians ◽  
Eastern North America ◽  
Upper Midwest

Calumet ceremonialism was widely practiced by Native American and European colonial groups in the Great Plains and Southeast during the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. Cultural practices associated with smoking calumet pipes have roots in the prehistoric past, but the spread of calumet ceremonialism across the Southeast was associated with the spread of European colonists and colonialism. Calumet ceremonialism served the needs for groups to have a means of creating balance, and of setting the stage for peaceful interaction and exchange, during a period marked by considerable instability and dramatic cultural change. The presence of a redstone elbow pipe bowl fragment from the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina demonstrates the participation of Cherokee towns in calumet ceremonialism, despite the remote location of this site in the southern Appalachians, far from major European colonial settlements, and far from areas such as the Mississippi River Valley and the upper Midwest where such pipes are much more common.

scholarly journals The Lower Clergy and Popular Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dániel Bárth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Written Form

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of the Christian lower priesthood in local communities in eighteenth–twentieth century Hungary and Transylvania in cultural transmission. The author intends to map out the complex and changing conditions of the social function, everyday life, and mentality of the priests on the bottom rung of the clerical hierarchy. Particular emphasis is placed on the activity of priests active at the focus points of interaction between elite and popular culture who, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, often reflected both directly and in a written form on the cultural practices of the population of villages and market towns. The theoretical questions and possible approaches are centered around the complex relations of the priest and the community, their harmonious or conflict-ridden co-existence, questions of sacral economy, stereotypes of the “good priest” and the “bad priest” as shaped from above and from below, the subtleties of “priest-keeping”, the intentions related to preserving traditions and creating new customs, and the different temperaments of priests in relation to these issues.

Saving Souls on a Shoestring: Welsh Circulating Schools in a Century of Change

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 274-289
Author(s):  
Paula Yates
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Religious Education ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Social Climate ◽  
Limited Impact ◽  
Organizational Ability ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
School Movement

This article examines the phenomenon of Welsh circulating schools from those of Griffith Jones in the mid-eighteenth century, which over nearly fifty years brought the basics of religious education to thousands of poor children and adults, to their successors later in the century under Thomas Charles and, in the nineteenth century, the Bevan Charity. It compares Jones's success with the relatively limited impact of the later schemes and seeks to demonstrate the importance of his flair for publicity, his connections, his use of Anglican networks and his organizational ability. The article considers how the changed political and social climate in the last decades of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth affected the success of later schemes and describes how the schools had to adapt to changed expectations and new educational developments. It argues that the schools provide strong evidence against the view that the charity school movement was motivated primarily by the desire for social control.

Closer Still: The Total Artwork

Lyric Cousins ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter considers the Gesamtkunstwerk, which English musicologists translate as ‘total artwork’. Richard Wagner had used the expression to characterise his operas, though he had only ever used the term in two essays, both published in 1849: ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Moreover, the term did not originate from Wagner himself, and he did not even spell it in the conventional way. Since the late twentieth century ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has been applied to other artforms, particularly architecture, which like opera can unite a number of elements. (Architecture, for example, marries engineering, landscaping and interior decoration, among others.) But the term's origins are in the late eighteenth-century notion that all the arts could be unified in poetry.

Decorating houses: style, taste and the business of decoration

2018 ◽  
pp. 122-167
Author(s):  
Conor Lucey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Real Estate Markets ◽  
Key Topics ◽  
The Impact ◽  
House Building ◽  
Printed Sources

Reflecting on the separation of house building and house decorating in the historiography of the eighteenth-century town house, this chapter explores the role of the building artisan in determining the form and appearance of the urban domestic interior. Of particular importance here is the business of decoration: the impact of decorators, such as decorative plasterers and timber joiners, as speculative builders and property developers; and the standardization of interior decoration in the form of pre-fabricated ornament. Key topics include the dissemination of architectural tastes through the agency of immigrant artisan populations; the role of books and magazines in shaping vocabularies of decorative taste; and the creative adaptation from printed sources. Focusing on the artisan’s negotiation and interpretation of the neo-classical (or ‘Adam’) style, this chapter also considers how degrees of separation from the source of that ornamental language fostered distinct dialects in towns and cities across Britain, Ireland and North America. Collectively, the topics of chapter make a case for the artisan as a key agent of fashionable taste in elite real estate markets.

"Correspondence is equal to half a meeting": The Composition and Comprehension of Letters in Eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 172-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gagan Sood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Latin Script ◽  
Mécanismes Sociaux ◽  
Writing Culture

AbstractThis article details the social and cultural mechanisms by which correspondence in Arabic- and Latin-script languages was written, understood and preserved in mid-eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia. Aside from two major differences in letter-writing culture, which were embodied in the choice of script, the resident communities of Islamic Eurasia approached correspondence in a similar fashion. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no correlation between these practices and the author's ethnicity or nationality. This is strong evidence for the autonomy and universality of custom in a region on the cusp of massive changes in its relationship to Europe. Cette contribution détaille les mécanismes sociaux et culturels par lesquels la correspondance en langues et caractères arabes et latins fut rédigée, comprise et préservée en Eurasie Islamique au milieu du dix-huitième siècle. À l'exception de deux différences clés dans les pratiques épistolaires – exprimées dans le choix de l'écriture utilisée – les communautés de l'Eurasie Islamique abordèrent la correspondance d'une manière semblable. Qu'il n'y ait aucune corrélation entre ces pratiques et l'ethnicité ou la nationalité de l'auteur surprend; mais c'est une preuve notable de l'autonomie et de l'universalité des coutumes dans une région qui parvenait à l'apogée de transformations majeures dans ses relations avec l'Europe.

Le rococo, une construction historiographique : introduction

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-473
Author(s):  
Carl Magnusson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
French Painting ◽  
Ideological Background

Abstract In Rococo historiography, the first half of the eighteenth century is generally described as the golden age par excellence of decoration. The so-called major arts are often considered to have played a lesser role in its artistic development. The period is thus systematically associated with artefacts produced by artisans, hence belonging to a less dignified category in the artistic hierarchy. In order to investigate the ideological background of this assumption, the article focuses on the debates on art which emerged, mainly in France, in the 1740s. These highly biased discourses, targeting the so-called bad taste of contemporary French painting and interior decoration, shaped a vision of the first half of the eighteenth century of which many aspects were later inherited by Rococo historiography, especially in its relation to decoration.

scholarly journals Hidden in Plain Sight: The American Indian Movement and the Revival of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, 1969-1982

Perceptions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashton Dunkley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
American Indian ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Driving Factor ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
Native Identity

This paper explores the resurgence of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape of New Jersey in the latter half of the 20th century. This thesis argues that the American Indian Movement, with its strong advocation for Native existence and pride, along with Pan-Indianism, unity amongst all tribes, acted as a driving factor in the revival of the Eastern Woodland tribe, the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape. From the eighteenth century, tribes on the East Coast were forced westward and north, but the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape people remained hidden in plain sight on their native lands, to which they had been tied to for over 10,000 years. Parents taught their children to hide their native heritage in hopes that they would not be forced from their home as well. Generation after generation, fewer and fewer children were aware of their “Nativeness.” The Lenape traditions, language, and cultural practices which had only been passed down orally were beginning to fade away. By the 1960’s, what started off as a survival tactic to cope with white encroachment metamorphosed into an everyday part of life and as a result, this tight-knit community’s Native identity had been displaced. In the early 1970’s, a number of inspired Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape families worked to reverse the loss of their community’s traditions and identity, unify, and retain a collective recognition of being Native American and a pride in that ancestry.

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