Day-light. A recent discovery in the art of painting Ein kunstkritisches Pamphlet des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-135
Author(s):  
Iris Wien
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Peculiar Form

Abstract Henry James Richter’s 1817 pamphlet Day-light. A recent discovery in the art of painting; With hints on the philosophy of the fine arts, and on that of the human mind, as first dissected by Emanuel Kant has been read as a plea for naturalism in the context of early-nineteenth-century pleinair painting. The tract prompts painters to take the recently discovered phenomenon of colored shadows into account instead of basing their painterly practice on pictorial conventions. Although noticed, the peculiar form of the little treatise – consisting of thirteen pages of a fictive dialogue between artists and extensive notes devoted to fundamental epistemological questions – has not been further scrutinized. In the light of the sociopolitical conflicts of the time, however, the pamphlet takes on an allegorical dimension exceeding its art-critical objective.

The Portrait's Subject

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Visual Theory ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Thomas Eakins

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject, Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during this era in paintings, photographs, and illustrations, as well as in literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Portraiture, the book argues, was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology. The Portrait’s Subject reveals the underappreciated connections between portraiture's representations of the material human body and developing modern ideas about the human mind. It encouraged figures like Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Eakins, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James to reimagine how we might see inner life, offering a rich array of metaphors and aesthetic approaches that helped reconfigure the relationship between body and mind, exterior and interior. In the end, Blackwood shows how nineteenth-century psychological discourse developed as much through aesthetic fabulation as through scientific experimentation.

Providential Naturalism and Miracles: John Fearn's Critique of Scottish Philosophy

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-94
Author(s):  
Giovanni B. Grandi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

According to Thomas Reid, the development of natural sciences following the model of Newton's Principia and Optics would provide further evidence for the belief in a provident God. This project was still supported by his student, Dugald Stewart, in the early nineteenth century. John Fearn (1768–1837), an early critic of the Scottish common sense school, thought that the rise of ‘infidelity’ in the wake of scientific progress had shown that the apologetic project of Reid and Stewart had failed. In reaction to Reid and Stewart, he proposed an idealist philosophy that would dispense with the existence of matter, and would thus cut at the root what he thought was the main source of modern atheism. In this paper, I consider Fearn's critique of Reid and Stewart in his main works: First Lines of the Human Mind (1820) and Manual of the Physiology of Mind (1829). I also consider Fearn's arguments against Hume and in favour of a renewed apologetics in An Essay on the Philosophy of Faith and the Economy of Revelation (1815).

Women Not Successful Here

2019 ◽  
pp. 98-108
Author(s):  
Carol Damian
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cuban Art ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Art Academies

Art historian Carol Damian laments the scarcity of Cuban women artists from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Damian explains that this trend was based on both women’s traditional exclusion from art academies and exhibition circuits and difficulties in traveling abroad and establishing their own studios. Yet she documents the work of eight major women artists during the first half of the twentieth century in Cuba, including Mirta Cerra and Gina Pellón. Most of these artists were associated with the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, participated in numerous exhibitions, and received critical acclaim during their lifetime. However, most critics now neglect them—except for Amelia Peláez—in favor of the canonized male leaders of the Cuban vanguardia. Damian concludes with a call for further research and reflection on the careers of lesser-known female figures and their contributions to Cuban art before and after the country’s independence in 1902.

scholarly journals Phrenologizing Opera Singers: The Scientific “Proofs of Musical Genius”

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Céline Frigau Manning
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physiological Conditions ◽  
French And English ◽  
The Media ◽  
Opera Singers ◽  
Illustrative Material ◽  
True Science

In some descriptions from the first half of the nineteenth century, scientific categories are used syncretically to explain opera singers' talents, including their innate and acquired dispositions, and their effects on audiences. Phrenology sought to read on the surface of skulls the developments of cerebral zones that corresponded to various instincts, or to affective and intellectual faculties. According to the partisans of this “only true Science of the Human Mind,” one could thus explain any aspect of human activity and life. Franz Joseph Gall's followers applied these theories to music and musicians, which constituted one of their privileged fields of observation, still largely unexplored by historians and philosophers of science. The singer united the qualities of the musician and actor, and stimulated abundant illustrative material—biographical and anecdotal, portraits, busts, and prints. Phrenologists thus fueled specific discursive models of observation and enunciation among early-nineteenth-century operatic audiences, which reflected and nourished the media doxa. A series of French and English texts highlight the phrenological and physiological “conditions” necessary to become an opera singer, and the combinations suited to a particular type of music. These sources contributed to the processes of operatic creation and reception, and to the forging of new interpretations of singers' public images, as both exceptional artists and socially normalized individuals.

A history of some fruit models in wax and other materials: scientific teaching aids and courtly table decorations

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teaching Aids ◽  
Scientific Teaching ◽  
Glass Marble ◽  
History Of ◽  
By Products ◽  
Wax Models

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document