The Portrait's Subject

Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood

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.

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-135
Author(s):  
Iris Wien

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.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin J Morris

Modern history has looked on the United States of America as a country with a very distinct and proud national heritage and identity, though this was not always so. When founded in 1776, America was a nation that had not yet developed the identity and customs that would soon come to define the country nationally and internationally. The articulation of this distinct identity fell to the artist class and, in particular, first and second generation American painters. Painters such as Thomas Eakins, Thomas Cole, and the Hudson River School of artists pulled from their natural surroundings to create art that would foster pride in the values of peace, liberty, and freedom. Without these early painters, the United States would not have the strong identity that is so well known today.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


Metahumaniora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ari J. Adipurwawijdana

ABSTRAKRiwayat yang disajikan penulis Britania era Viktorian tentang perjalannnya ke Amerikamengasumsikan adanya sebuah jaringan prasarana transportasi. Sistem transportasiterkait dengan riwayat perjalanan (travel narrative) dalam tiga hal, yaitu (1) sebagaibasis material bagi perjalanan, (2) sebagai substruktur riwayat, dan (3) sebagai pokokpembicaraan dalam riwayat itu sendiri. Buku Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)merupakan model bagi cara infrastruktur transportasi menentukan aspek naratologis,yaitu urutan dan perspektif dalam struktur naratif riwayat perjalanan. Karya tersebut jugamenyajikan transportasi sebagai pokok pembicaraan dalam teksnya itu sendiri walaupun tidaksejauh sebagaimana yang tampak pada The Amateur Emigrant (1895) karya Robert LouisStevenson. Dalam hal ini, The American Scene (1907) karya Henry James juga relevankarena, walaupun tidak secara gamblang membicarakan transportasi sebagai topik dantidak pula menampakkan ciri-ciri riwayat perjalanan, karya tersebut merepresentasicara wawasan Britania-Amerika trans-Atlantik dianggap sebagai sesuatu yang lumrah.Wawasan ini juga memandang menganggap perjalanan trans-Atlantik sebagai semacamperjalanan menembus waktu, yang menunjukkan ketidaknyaman para penulis Britaniaabad kesembilanbelas terhadap transformasi sosial ke masyrakat demokratis yangdirepresentasi secara metaforis oleh pemahaman mereka tentang Amerika.Kata kunci: catatan perjalanan Viktorian, transportasi, wisataABSTRACTNarratives presented by Victorian British writers about their travels to America assume theavailability of a transprtation infrastructure system. Such a system is related to the travelnarrative in three things, namely, (1) as a material base for travel, (2) as a narrative substructurehistory, and (3) as the subject-matter of the narratives. Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Mannerof the Americans (1832) is a model for the way transportation infrastructure determinesnarratological aspects, namely order and perspective in the structure of the travel narrative.The piece also presents transportation as a subject-matter in its text although it does notgo so far as do Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (1895). In discussingtransportation Henry James’ The American Scene is also relevant because, despite it’s notexplicitly speaking of transportation as a topic nor does it show the convential characteristicsof the travel narrative, the work represents a British-American trans-Atlantic world viewas a given. This world view also considers trans-Atlantic travels as a kind of voyage acrosstime, implying the discomfort of nineteenth-century British writers concerning the socialtransition into a democratic society represented by America as a metaphor.Keywords: Victorian travel narrative, transportation, tourism


1983 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Boockholdt

The paper explores the origins of the auditing profession in the United States. It is suggested that the development of the audit function in this country can be traced to reporting by internal and shareholder auditors in the American railroads during the middle of the nineteenth century. Evidence is presented that a recognition of the need for audit independence existed, and that the provision of advisory services and reports on internal control by American auditors have been an inherent part of the auditor's role from that time.


1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Tyson

Several authors have suggested that a particular managerial component was needed before cost accounting could be fully used for accountability and disciplinary purposes. They argue that the marriage of managerialism and accounting first occurred in the United States at the Springfield Armory after 1840. They generally downplay the quality and usefulness of cost accounting at the New England textile mills before that time and call for a re-examination of original mill records from a disciplinary perspective. This paper reports the results of such a re-examination. It initially describes the social and economic environment of U.S. textile manufacturing in New England in the early nineteenth century. Selected cost memos and reports are described and analyzed to indicate the nature and scope of costing undertaken at the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The paper discusses how particular cost information was used and speculates why certain more modern procedures were not adopted. Its major finding is that cost management practices fully measured up to the business complexities, economic pressures, and social forces of the day.


Author(s):  
Patricia Wittberg ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt

This chapter briefly describes the history of religious institutes in the United States. It first covers the demographics—the overall numbers and the ethnic and socioeconomic composition—of the various institutes during the nineteenth century. It next discusses the types of ministries the sisters, brothers, and religious order priests engaged in, and the sources of vocations to their institutes. The second section covers changes in religious institutes after 1950, covering the factors which contributed to the changes as well as their impact on the institutes themselves and the larger Church. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.


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