Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750-1918 9789048542932

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Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums

1750‒1918

Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective This series is looking for interdisciplinary contributions that focus on the historical study of the imagined space, or of spaces and places as sensorial, experiential or intellectual images, from the interior to the landscape, in written, visual or material sources. From (closed) gardens and parks to cabinets, from the odd room to the train compartment, from the façade to the prison cell, from the reliquary to the desk, a variety of spaces in the shape of imageries and images unveils historical attitudes to history, to the object, to the other and the self and presents a subject that experiences, acts, imagines and knows. Spatial imageries and images in this sense constitute a prominent theme in various fields within the Humanities, from museum studies, intellectual history and literature to material culture studies, to name but a few. Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective therefore addresses a broad audience of scholars that engage in the historical study of space in this sense, from the Early Middle Ages to the Recent Past in literature, art, in material culture, in scholarly and other discourses, from either cultural and contextual or more theoretical angles. Series editor Dominique Bauer, University of Leuven, Belgium

Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums 1750‒1918

Edited by Dominique Bauer and Camilla Murgia

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Unknown, Le Bon Genre, N°102. Promenades Aériennes. Etching, hand-colored, 1817, 259 × 348 mm. Paris: Musée Carnavalet Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 090 8 e-isbn 978 90 4854 293 2 doi 10.5117/9789463720908 nur 657 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Introduction: Staging the Temporary: The Fragile Character of Space Camilla Murgia

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I  The Department Store 1. “One Need Be Neither a Shopper Nor a Purchaser to Enjoy:” Ephemeral Exhibitions at Tiffany & Co., 1870–1905

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2. Enclosed Exhibitions: Claustrophobia, Balloons, and the Department Store in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames

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Amy McHugh and Cristina Vignone

Kathryn A. Haklin

II Spectacles 3. Jardins-Spectacles: Spaces and Traces of Embodiment Susan Taylor-Leduc

81

4. Parading the Temporary: Cosmoramas, Panoramas, and Spectacles in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris

107

5. Portable Museums: Imaging and Staging the “Northern Gothic Art Tour”– Ephemera and Alterity

131

Camilla Murgia

Juliet Simpson

III At the Intersection of Literature and the Built Environment 6. The Elusiveness of History and the Ephemerality of Displayin Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium: At the Intersection of the Built Environment and the Spatial Image in Literature Dominique Bauer

161

7. The “Phantasmatic” Chinatown in Helen Hunt Jackson’s“The Chinese Empire” and Mark Twain’s Roughing It Li-hsin Hsu

191

IV  The Museum and Alternative Exhibition Spaces 8. “Show Meets Science:” How Hagenbeck’s “Human Zoos” Inspired Ethnographic Science and Its Museum Presentation

221

9. The Last Wunderkammer: Curiosities in Private Collections between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

253

10. The Impact of Alternative Exhibition Spaces on European Modern Artbefore World War I

273

Index

297

Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel

Emanuele Pellegrini

Nirmalie Alexandra Mulloli



Introduction: Staging the Temporary: The Fragile Character of Space Camilla Murgia

Abstract This volume examines a varied number of exhibition devices that are ephemeral in terms of the precariousness of their structure, but also in terms of their capacity to adapt to the space in which they develop. Special attention will be paid to spaces such as curiosity cabinets, portable museums, show gardens, and a number of unconventional exhibition devices. These spaces often function as microcosms, small autonomous universes that operate individually, but also in relation to their environment. The aim of this volume is to examine their development and relationship to context. Keywords: spectacles, microcosms, museums, cabinets of curiosity, human zoos

This is the second of two volumes devoted to ephemeral exhibition spaces between 1750 and 1918. It deals with a wide range of exhibition spaces that were ephemeral owing to the precariousness of their structure and their ability to adapt to the changing environment in which they developed. Cabinets of curiosities, portable museums, spectacle gardens, cosmoramas, department stores, human zoos, dépôt museums and a number of alternative, unconventional exhibition spaces are discussed here in detail. Particular attention is paid to the fragility and versatility of the spaces that these entities have at their disposal. Indeed, in most cases, the space itself works as a microcosm, a small universe that evolves both independently and in relation to the environment in which it develops. This characteristic represents a common value for all these systems and makes it possible to understand, in each case, how the space is defined and how it oscillates between one reality and another, between a literary context for instance, and a fictional

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_intro

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dimension. Although these spaces are diverse, they nevertheless provide a coherent scope because they all are intended places of display. The variety of forms is revealing as regards their flexibility, their capacity to respond to a wide range of cultural contexts. The chronological frame of this volume goes from the early nineteenth century up to World War I, and shows to what extent the concepts of ephemerality, elusiveness, and temporality evolved through this period. This is the second of two volumes that, taken together, are set between 1750 and 1918. Particular attention is paid here to the versatile and changing character of ephemerality, both with regard to time and spatiality: indeed, these displays constantly adjusted according to the political, cultural, and social environment that they were confronted with. This volume studies the impact and structure of these manifestations within a dual perspective. On the one hand, particular attention is paid to the individual experience and the role that the different supports, such as locations, organization, and infrastructures of the exhibition spaces, generated. On the other, the ephemeral character of these shows allows a deep insight into the needs that are related to exhibitions. Indeed, the range of spaces bears witness to the dramatic necessity of spanning different registers of knowledge, visual references, and models. In doing so, these spaces define a series of microcosms that are evidently interrelated with the cultural contexts in which they developed. They work both independently, within an isolated environment, and as a catalyst for interaction, since they initiated an individual experience. The essays of this volume notably attempt to investigate the mechanisms through which these spaces functioned, their results as well as the patterns and the criteria that allowed their development. If we think that the main purpose of these ephemeral spaces is the exhibition and the display, intended as a practical and intellectual experience, it is evident that these manifestations importantly host a number of interactions, ranging from a simple visit to a show, to the appropriation of the space to which it corresponds. Considered from an exhibition point of view, the act of displaying is crucial to this development. In recent years, museologists have dealt with the issues related to these interactions, by attempting to trace, reconstruct, and contextualize the scale of the practices referring to the display. In particular, Dorothee Richter studied the impact of contemporary art on society and claimed that exhibitions place objects in a context, create a set of relations, and, in doing so, they are part of “communicative processes.”1 1 Dorothee Richter, “Exhibitions as Cultural Practices of Showing: Pedagogics,” Curating Critique 9 (2011): 47–52.

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Defined as cultural practices of showing, exhibitions attempt to fulfill an educational role, not only because of the ideas and contents they convey, but also because they propose a particular vision of a certain subject or issue. Within this context, the mechanism of viewing plays a pivotal role and is responsible for the valorization of the individual experience above all.2 These mechanisms also interact with the space by creating a multitude of responses, practices, and encounters that define the complex reality of these “microcosms.” These small universes are – and this is possibly their most fascinating characteristic – fluctuating, somehow unsettled, in the sense that their functions and functioning vary and span different roles and practices. Their fragility is, within this context, similar to the one that Dominique Bauer recently identified and studied with regard to the borders between interior and exterior space.3 We will see through this volume that studying the ephemerality of these small universes goes far beyond their primary role of a location for display, and casts light on a number of cultural mechanisms and experiences that constantly vary, adapt, and react to the context in which they are set. Historical research has focused on a number of these small systems, on their characteristics and on their functioning. For instance, Richard Taws has investigated the production of printed images and their use in a multitude of contexts, insisting on their transferability and their impact on revolutionary visual culture. 4 Through his numerous studies, Dominique Poulot has dealt with these small universes, focusing in particular on the revolutionary period and on the French situation.5 Works such as those by Taws and Poulot have extensively discussed the objects involved in this relation between space, temporality, viewers, and users. However, little has been done to date on the materiality of these interactions, on the impact they had on the space they relied on, and the processes of visual and cultural appropriation they generated. This volume intends to study precisely these aspects. Within these microcosms, reality was shown, simulated, staged, 2 Richter refers here to the work of Eva Sturm, who analyzed the behaviors and practices that exhibitions generated in Konservierte Welt. Museum und Musealisierung (Berlin: Reimer, 1991), quoted in Richter, note 9. 3 Dominique Bauer, “The Imagery of Interior Spaces and the Hazard of Subjectivity,” in The Imagery of Interior Spaces, ed. Dominique Bauer and Michael J. Kelly (New York: Punctum Books, 2019), 21–34. 4 Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). 5 See above all Dominique Poulot, ‘Surveiller et s’instruire’ : la Révolution française et l’intelligence de l’héritage historique (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996).

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imagined, and experienced. It therefore also embedded a recreational dimension. Against this background, the contributions to this volume will address a varied plethora of spaces and spatial installations: the Wunderkammer; the spectacle garden; the cosmoramas and the panoramas; the dépôt/ temporary museum; and the alternative exhibition space. Although there is much attention in the Humanities for spatial studies in historical context, and for particular spaces such as museums, portable cabinets, and installations such as panoramic theaters or dioramas, especially in the framework of today’s developments of the museum and virtual reality, there has not yet been a study that addresses their dimension of ephemerality, which nonetheless constitutes one of their fundamental characteristics. Ephemerality in this volume is closely connected with a historical context of change (on the socio-political level, on the economic level of consumerism and the object as a commodity, on the level of aesthetic awareness and experience, on the level of imagination, identification, and the organization of knowledge) and with the cultural significance of the various characteristics of ephemerality, such as temporality, elusiveness, or liminality. From this dual background, the contributions to this volume show overall that these small universes, although different from each other, all rely on ephemerality, which works as the main component of these spaces. Furthermore, despite its diversity, ephemerality pursues a common goal, which is to question the relationship between the use of the space and its perception as a catalyst for ideas and for “communicative processes,” to refer to Richter’s terminology. Within this context, the diversity of the spaces becomes a link, a connection between the practices of displaying and the structures, spanning physical entities such as the Musée des Monuments Français and literary configurations such as Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames. Furthermore, the contributions to this volume provide a detailed analysis of the functions of ephemerality and bring to the fore the skills of the exhibition practices. We will see that the investigation of the cultural context of the change determines the understanding of the display and the understanding of the cultural phenomena that these spaces initiated and supported. Nirmali Mulloli’s discussion of the practices of display in the early years of the twentieth century demonstrates that the cultural context is crucial to the process of perception and the ephemerality of the representation. Her chapter, entitled “The Impact of Alternative Exhibition Spaces on European Modern Art before World War I,” is based on the research project that the scholar managed at the University of Vienna and which established a database of the exhibition catalogs dealing with the notion of modern art

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in the period 1905 to 1915. The inclusion of around a thousand exhibitions allowed Mulloli to investigate the social dimension of the space and present its role as a generator of individual experience. To illustrate her purpose, Mulloli opposed two exhibitions, quite different from each other. The first one is the Internationale Jubiläums-Kunst-Ausstellung, which took place in 1888 at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. This exhibition, with its large space and decorations, directly referred to those of a conventional Salon. Such an approach appeared to be questioned by other displays, which Mulloli defines as “spatial constellations,” such as the Exposition d’Art Frieda Liermann & Cuno Amiet, which took place in 1902 in Geneva. The Geneva exhibition presented an innovative approach and questioned the space by introducing elaborate decorative wooden elements. Furthermore, this show also raised the question of the venue – Geneva’s Palais Electoral – which was not, at least initially, conceived as an exhibition space. The appropriation of the physical space is at the core of Emanuele Pellegrini’s essay on New Yorker collections staging cultural appropriation and mirabilia: “The Last Wunderkammer: Curiosities in Private Collections between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Pellegrini focused on one ensemble in particular, the collection of American entrepreneur William H. Vanderbilt, to which art critic Earl Shinn (1838–1886) – who often published under the pseudonym of Edward Strahan – devoted a one-volume study. Pellegrini focused on one object in particular, an ivory casket, which Shinn simply described as an artifact of the “Italian taste of the Giotto period,” and which was located in Vanderbilt’s New Yorker residence and, more precisely, in what was called the “Japanese parlor,” a sort of private cabinet featuring a number of objects from multiple backgrounds and serving several functions. Through his text, Shinn shows his interest in this reference and in the arrangement of the object in a space which was often described as a chamber of curiosities, of wonders – hence the reference to the Wunderkammer. Pellegrini insists on the process of cultural appropriation initiated by Shinn and essentially visible through the fact that the “Japanese parlor” had to be considered in itself a chamber of wonders, and that this perception provided both a line of argument and feeling of homogeneity, of coherence of the act of staging collected items. The issue of homogeneity is further explored in the case of spaces that are broadly defined and extensive, such as cities, but also voyages and tours of a given natural path or site. Juliet Simpson is concerned with this ephemerality and elusiveness in her chapter “Portable Museums: Imaging and Staging the ‘Northern Gothic Art Tour’: Ephemera and Alterity.” Simpson investigates both the impact of the vision of the space and its meaning,

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especially with regard to one coherent ensemble, the Northern European Gothic art. She pays particular attention to the impact of literature on the construction of the visual but also on the relationship to the past as staged by texts. Simpson further explores the role of these “portable museums” considering both the individual experience and discourse on art heritage. This question of the coherence of an ensemble stands as a constant concern of the ephemerality of these spaces. In their chapter, “‘One Need Be Neither a Shopper Nor a Purchaser to Enjoy’: Ephemeral Exhibitions at Tiffany & Co., 1870–1905,” Amy McHugh and Cristina Vignone deal precisely with the notion of unity in the context of a commercial enterprise such as the jewelry shop of Tiffany & Co, founded in New York in 1837. McHugh and Vignone’s contribution analyzes different groups of objects that were displayed in the flagship American store between 1870 and 1905. The exhibited items are divided into three categories: artifacts that did not belong to Tiffany, military memorabilia, and objects, such as silverware works, which were generated by a Tiffany commission. Although all three categories are tremendously representative of the company’s strategies and bear witness to its development within a socio-economic context, the ensemble of “non-Tiffany objects” possibly epitomizes the most the impact of ephemerality on the relation between viewers and objects “on view” that these spaces generated. Clearly, the presentation of each group responded to both an economic and an educational purpose, also raising the issue of the consumption of these objects. The long nineteenth century came across different stages of mass-production, from a limited development often relying on technicity, to the development of a series of industrial approaches aimed at increasing productivity. This attention to consumerism and the impact that its development had on society are well documented in a number of literary sources, which the present volume addresses. Kathryn Haklin contributed to this discussion through her study of Emile Zola’s perception of the rise of the department store in Paris, entitled “Enclosed Exhibitions: Claustrophobia, Balloons, and the Department Store in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames.” Haklin departs from the sale strategies of the department store, which Zola described, to analyze the ephemeral character of their structure and their capacity to fit in a socio-economic context. For instance, the author discusses the sale of summer novelties which is portrayed in Chapter IX of Zola’s text and links it to the number of sale strategies, such as the distribution of advertising balloons, which was organized on those occasions. Here, the process of appropriation of the space is critical because it makes it possible to consider different levels of interaction, such as the phenomenon of exposure/enclosure

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characterizing the department store, or the interior/exterior relationship that the balloons initiated and the subsequent “manipulation” of the space, which occurred through commercial strategies. Literary texts provide a further understanding of ephemerality because they offer multiple points of view and enable a punctual questioning of the cultural appropriation. The contribution of Li-hsin Hsu is representative of such an approach. Her chapter, “The ‘Phantasmatic’ Chinatown in Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘The Chinese Empire’ and Mark Twain’s Roughing It,” investigates the ephemeral character of a series of locations related to Chinatown in literary sources. The study essentially focuses on two texts: “The Chinese Empire,” written in 1878 by Helen Hunt Jackson, and Roughing it by Mark Twain, published in 1872. Hsu carefully discusses the perception of the condition of Asian immigrants in the United States, referring to the work of scholar Lisa Lowe and to her book Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Culture Politics (1996). Hsu is interested in the spatiality of the Asian community, which is understood, to borrow Lowe’s terms, as “a screen,” “a phantasmatic site” that allows the projection of a series of perceptions, linked, indeed, to the relation between Asian immigrants and the United States. This community of immigrants represents in itself a microcosm, and functions according to its own conventions and within a given space, which must be versatile because of its urban setting. The fact that ephemerality materializes a mechanism of projection helps us understand the scale of the individual experience that these spaces provided, but also their role of intermediary, between a real, material structure, and the comprehension of its role, functioning, and scopes. These aspects of projection, intermediacy, and communication between different cultural contexts are at the core of the chapters by Camilla Murgia and Susan Taylor-Leduc on the spatiality of entertainment. In her essay, Murgia attempts to discuss the nature of various spaces devoted to recreational activities that increasingly developed in early nineteenth-century Paris. The chapter, “Parading the Temporary: Cosmoramas, Panoramas, and Spectacles in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris,” highlights the versatility of the number of amusements, shows, and displays of these years, but also their capacity to quickly adapt to the context of the change they are confronted with. Their ability to span different visual levels and categories further helps in understanding the impact of ephemerality on the socio-economic structure and the patterns of culture consumption. These patterns are strongly related to the temporality, the elusiveness of the number of performances and shows that increasingly developed in Paris from the first decades of the nineteenth century. Taylor-Leduc’s

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chapter, “Jardins-Spectacles: Spaces and Traces of Embodiment,” discusses the cultural significance of ephemerality with regard to the fugacious, temporary character of the entertainment. Taylor-Leduc focuses on the jardins-spectacles of early nineteenth-century Paris, on their adjustable structure and on the kind of visual experience that they offered. As an open-air space, the jardins-spectacles took particular care to propose an individual experience that was diverse and unique, allowing space for projection and imagination. The recreational sphere that these locations represented is further linked to the consumerism and their cultural context. Indeed, these structures mainly developed in the post-revolutionary years and therefore catered to the need for entertainment and social activities that characterized the socio-cultural context of this period. The notion of vision and the role played by viewers is a critical element of ephemerality, especially when the displays consist of human beings, as discussed by Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel in her chapter, “‘Show Meets Science.’ How Hagenbeck’s ‘Human Zoos’ Inspired Ethnographic Science and Its Museum Presentation.” The author considers a group of photographs, which entered the collection of the Natural History Museum of Vienna in 2015, representing the Völkerschauen (“Peoples’ Exhibition”), organized by merchant Carl Hagenbeck in the late nineteenth century. The contribution investigates the question of the cultural appropriation and, more generally, the representation of the foreigner in a context of ephemerality that is brought to an extreme degree due to the staging of human beings. Some of the pictures stage the Inuit community from Greenland and appeared to serve as a visual model for at least two decorative sculpted elements of Vienna’s Natural History Museum. The transfer of references operates thanks to a mechanism of comparison, which largely applied to the process of observation and for which the experience of viewing represents a drastic hint. The elusiveness of displays, as well as their cultural context, are discussed in the essay by Dominique Bauer, “The Elusiveness of History and the Ephemerality of Display in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium. At the Intersection of the Built Environment and the Spatial Image in Literature.” Bauer studies how museums, exhibits, and collections respond to ephemerality in a society that was profoundly museal. From the interstices and overlaps between the built environment, the experience of spaces and their representation in literature – Balzac and Rodenbach – emerges a paradoxical ambition to vivify absent, past, or “other” worlds. Central to this “presentification” is the spectator, who is caught up in a dynamic of constant displacement and deferral and whose coherent perception is both determined and challenged by mechanism of fragmentation, composition, and temporal access.

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Finally, this volume attempts to show that the ephemerality, the elusiveness of exhibition spaces and spatial representations significantly refers to their hybrid character and to their ability to respond to a given cultural asset. These “constellations” evolved further in a context of changes that determined their development and their significance. The essays of this volume deal with these processes of change, visual transfer, and cultural appropriation. They cast light on the impact of these forms on society, on the modalities of consumption, and on the experiences they engendered. Note on the use of translations All translations of sources in other languages into English are by the chapter authors, unless indicated otherwise. We wish to thank Paula Freestone Mellor for her invaluable help.

Bibliography Bauer, Dominique. “The Imagery of Interior Spaces and the Hazard of Subjectivity.” The Imagery of interior Spaces, edited by Dominique Bauer and Michael J. Kelly, 21–34. New York: Punctum Books, 2016. ——— and Camilla Murgia, eds. The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750–1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Bourdieu, Pierre. Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champs littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Davidson, Denise Z. France after Revolution. Urban Life, Gender and the New Social Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Leaning, James R. The Melodramatic Thread: Spectacle and Political Culture in Modern France. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. Marrinan, Michael. Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Marchart, Oliver. “Die Institution spricht.” In Wer spricht? Autorität und Autorshaft in Ausstellungen, edited by Beatrice Jaschke, Charlotte Martienz-Turek and Nora Sternfeld, 9–11. Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2005. Poulot, Dominique. ‘Surveiller et s’instruire’ : la Révolution française et l’intelligence de l’héritage historique. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996. Richter, Dorothee. “Exhibitions as Cultural Practices of Showing: Pedagogics.” Curating Critique 9 (2011): 47–52. Sturm, Eva. Konservierte Welt. Museum und Musealisierung. Berlin: Reimer, 1991.

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Taws, Richard. The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Ziese, Maren. Kuratoren und Besucher. Modelle kuratorischer Praxis in Kunstausstellungen. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010.

About the Author Camilla Murgia is Junior Lecturer in history of art at the University of Lausanne. She studied history of art at Neuchâtel (MA) and Oxford (PhD) universities. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the works on the French painter, art critic and collector Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain (PierreMarie Gault de Saint-Germain (c.1752–1842). Artistic Models and Criticism in Early Nineteenth-Century France, Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009). She works particularly on 18th and 19th centuries French and British visual cultures, with a particular focus on artistic reception, display, art criticism, printmaking, and caricature. Camilla has been Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College (University of Oxford) and has subsequently taught at Neuchâtel and Geneva universities. As Junior Lecturer at the University of Lausanne, she is currently working on a research project on the relation between arts and theatre in the long nineteenth-century in France, paying particular attention to the transmediality of theatrical performances and arts.

1.

“One Need Be Neither a Shopper Nor a Purchaser to Enjoy:”Ephemeral Exhibitions at Tiffany & Co., 1870–1905 Amy McHugh and Cristina Vignone

Abstract Tiffany & Co. has been a shopping destination since its founding in 1837. It is much less well-known for the exhibitions that it staged in the nineteenth century. Accounts of these exhibitions abound in documents preserved in Tiffany’s archive. They range in subject from patriotic displays, to the pyramid atop the Washington Monument set on the floor so that visitors could step over it, to the hide of the circus elephant Forepaugh pinned in the store’s windows. Many reviews indicate that Tiffany’s staff encouraged idling through the shows with no expectation of purchases. This chapter explores how the flagship was simultaneously designed for shopping but also provided exposure to high jewelry and fancy goods, educational opportunities, and nineteenth-century popular culture. Keywords: exhibitions, New York, jewelry, fancy goods, popular culture

Tiffany & Co. Founded in 1837 by childhood friends Charles Lewis Tiffany (1812–1902) and John Burnett Young (1815–1859), Tiffany & Co. began as a small fancy goods store at 259 Broadway in lower Manhattan, where the partners imported and sold French, German, and Asian novelties. In 1842, the firm began selling gold jewelry, adding diamonds, precious gemstones, and silverware to their inventory in 1848. In 1853, Tiffany moved uptown to 550 Broadway and, in 1860, when Charles Tiffany obtained full ownership of the firm, it expanded to encompass the adjacent storefront at 552 Broadway.

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_ch01

20 Amy McHugh and Cristina Vignone

It was at this Broadway location that Tiffany held its first public exhibitions, focused primarily on military and sporting ephemera. In 1870, the store moved once again, when Charles Tiffany built a larger shopping emporium on Union Square, in the heart of the retail district known as “Ladies’ Mile.” With three floors devoted to diamonds, jewelry, silver, glass, pottery, and fancy novelties, the firm catered to the growing New York City elite. Once settled at Union Square, Tiffany began expanding the types and frequency of its exhibitions. For the purposes of this article, exhibitions are defined as ephemeral displays shown both on Tiffany’s main sales floor or second-floor sales room at Union Square and occasionally in the store’s windows. The exhibitions were most commonly on view for just a few days, with a small minority remaining for up to two weeks. Local newspapers heavily covered these exhibitions, encouraging readers to visit, documenting their turn-out rates, and detailing the objects on display. By all accounts, the firm used the exhibitions as opportunities to drive foot traffic to the store, but also to educate customers on various subjects. These findings suggest that three categories of ephemeral exhibitions were staged at Tiffany in the nineteenth century: 1. Collections of non-Tiffany objects, including decorative and fine artwork as well as cultural artifacts, scientific objects, and curiosities. 2. Patriotic and military memorabilia, predominately objects associated with New York City. 3. Commissioned goods comprised most commonly of silver hollowware trophies or prize cups, which were placed on display at the store for the public to view before they were shipped to their purchaser or winner. None of the ephemeral exhibitions mentioned in this article were photographed when they occurred, so newspaper accounts available to us in the archives are reproduced where possible, as well as images of the objects, artifacts, and collections to provide context. For an extended timeline of additional exhibitions at Tiffany, refer to Appendix A.

Collections of non-Tiffany objects Among the more interesting ephemeral exhibitions of non-Tiffany objects staged by Tiffany at their Union Square store are a wide variety of artistic and cultural displays. In 1887, one of the most famous works of sculptor Edward Kemeys, Jr. (1843–1907) was acquired by the firm for exhibiting. Kemeys is often considered America’s first animalier, creating realistic portrayals of

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animals in his bronze sculptures. On 3 March, an eight-foot tall model he crafted of a buffalo head was placed in the Tiffany store window. According to the account, it “was wrought with true art impulse into majestic effect. It looks indeed as though it might be a petrified head of a colossal buffalo of some past age.”1 The accuracy of the creation was a direct result of Kemeys’ travels in the American northwest, where he studied the large animals, living among American Indians and trappers, and even participating in hunting expeditions. Five months later the bronze casting of the model – at that point, the largest bronze casting ever attempted in America – attracted attention again in the Tiffany window, before it traveled cross country to be installed over the east portal of the Union Pacific Railroad Bridge spanning the Missouri River. Some years later, Tiffany again displayed Kemeys’ work in its window. According to the newspaper The Sun, “Broadway promenaders have had opportunities to judge of his work in the bronze statuette of a boy in a page’s costume of the fifteenth century Italian court, which was exhibited in Tiffany’s window for some time.”2 The company showed a variety of smaller artists’ works as well, including miniature portraiture created by English artist Ethel Webling (1860–1929) when she visited America in 1893. While Webling is perhaps best known for her miniature depiction of artist and art critic John Ruskin, her exhibition at Tiffany consisted chiefly of female portraits including a three-quarter length portrait of the famous Moravian violinist Wilma Neruda. The Collector, a semi-monthly periodical described as “A Current Record of Art, Bibliography, Antiquarianism, Etc.,” published a review of the exhibition in its “Art and Other Things” section. It discussed the exhibit at Tiffany much like any other museum exhibition, comparing Webling’s works, with their “accuracy of drawing and firmness of touch,” to the work of French Classicist painter and sculptor Ernest Meissonier.3 A year later, a sixteenth-century miniature of Mary, Queen of Scots was on exhibition for a few days in the Tiffany store window, lent to the firm by a descendant of David Seton, who, in the sixteenth century, was Scotland’s Revenue Comptroller and received the miniature directly from the Queen. Accounts of the display describe its great popularity among New Yorkers: Tiffany’s windows, on Union Square, New York, always attract attention. The firm are not given to lavish displays of any kind, but they are students 1 2 3

“Gotham Gossip,” The Times Picayune, 3 March 1887, 4. “Arthur Statue Not Good,” The Sun, 8 February 1893, 7. “Art and Other Things,” The Collector 4 (1893): 86.

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of contemporary events and their exhibits usually possess some special element of interest to the public. Last week, during the much discussed “Portrait Exhibit,” fashionable shoppers stood several rows deep in front of Tiffany’s window, anxious to get a glimpse of a famous miniature, over 300 years old, of Mary, Queen of Scots. 4

Tiffany had the honor of being the first institution ever to publicly exhibit the miniature, a similar copy of which is now housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Not everything displayed in Tiffany’s ephemeral exhibitions could be classed as decorative or fine art, and the firm seemed to have equal interest in displaying various cultural artifacts. In 1893, a cloak belonging to a Hawaiian chief was shown in the store window. The New York Times reported on the display, noting that the garment was constructed from the red and yellow feathers of a rare bird found on the island, and that the feathers themselves could only be found under the birds’ wings, meaning that it took years until enough were collected to make a cloak. The feather cloak described was likely an “‘ahu ‘ula,” with bright and velvet-like feathers plucked from honeycreeper birds, and the display of the garment in the window was connected with a paper presented by a scholar on Hawaiian folklore, containing information about the people of the island and their customs.5 Other popular non-Tiffany objects shown by Tiffany at their Union Square store include a wide variety of scientific displays. On 17 June 1875, an exhibition of shells and minerals opened at Tiffany, collected by celebrated chemist and physician Dr. James R. Chilton. According to the New York Times, the specimens were of “singular rarity and beauty,” including a crystal from Iceland containing over a quarter of a pint of pure water from the early period of the earth’s formation. The important collection was on display for a few weeks at the store before it was sold to various buyers, including the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.6 Four years later, carbonate lime formations from the Luray Caverns in Virginia were placed on exhibition inside Tiffany. The caverns were discovered just a year before, dazzling visitors with their naturally formed 4 “Tiffany’s Horse Show,” The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review (21 November 1894): 40–a. 5 “Facts About Hawaii: Dr. Coan’s Interesting Paper Before the Folk-Lore Society,” The New York Times, 18 March 1893, 5. 6 “A Collection of Shells and Minerals,” The New York Times, 17 June 1875, 10.

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columns, mud flows, stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, and mirrored pools. The collection sent to New York included Luray specimens of water crystal of calcite, nodular stalagmites, calcareous tufa, crystalline pavement, cave pearls, and several varieties of stalactites from what the newspaper accounts called a “wonderful subterranean museum.”7 The greatest attended of these scientif ic exhibitions, however, came near the turn of the century, with an imported French Gravity Clock. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted: “One of the most interesting objects placed in a New York show window for a long-time past is that of Tiffany & Co.’s recent importation from Paris, the Gravity Clock. It attracts large crowds daily to watch its wonderful mechanism and has caused many persons to think that the problem of perpetual motion has at last been solved.”8 Tiffany exhibited a number of curiosities in its windows and show rooms. One of the greatest oddities was the hide of giant circus elephant Forepaugh, who had a record of killing ten men and who was strangled to death because of his vicious behavior. According to newspaper accounts, the hide was cleaned and tanned in Philadelphia and then sent to New York, where it was exhibited in Tiffany’s window.9 The curiosity attracted considerable attention, enhanced by the fact that the russet-colored leather – described like the skin of an alligator but with deeper incisions – was also advertised to be utilized in the manufacture of valises, chatelaine bags, pocket books, card cases, and other small leather goods. This was not the first time Tiffany collaborated with the circus on a window display. Preceding the 1863 wedding of General Tom Thumb, a dwarf who achieved great fame as a performer under circus pioneer P.T. Barnum, and fellow circus performer Lavinia Warren, Tiffany created a miniature silver filigree chariot ornamented with rubies and a horse with garnet eyes. The creation was on view in Tiffany’s window weeks before the ceremony as the city prepared for what the New York Times classed a “most momentous” event.10 7 “A Study in Stalactites,” The New York Times, 22 July 1879, 3. 8 “Tiffany’s Gravity Clock. It Causes Many Persons to Think of Perpetual Motion,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 October 1897, 11. 9 “Trade Gossip,” The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review (1889), 86. “Hot New York: What People Do When They Sizzle,” Oakland Tribune, 3 August 1889, 1. 10 “The Loving Lilliputians; Warren-Thumbiana. Marriage of General Tom Thumb and the Queen of Beauty. Who They Are, What They Have Done, Where They Came from, Where They Are Going. Their Courtship and Wedding Ceremonies, Crowds of People. The Reception. The Serenade,” The New York Times, 11 February 1863, 8.

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Patriotic and military memorabilia Among the interesting novelties Tiffany displayed, a significant portion of the early ephemera was military themed. In the company’s first recorded history, Charles L. Tiffany and the House of Tiffany & Co. (1893), written by George F. Heydt, a list of important war testimonials under the section “Notable Productions” was included, suggesting that this product type was an important part of the firm’s business. Heydt declared that “the products of Tiffany & Co.’s workshops that could be classed under this heading are so numerous that only those associated with historic incidents or general interest are mentioned.”11 Many of the pieces that comprised Heydt’s list were presented in Tiffany’s military and patriotic displays. Staunch Union supporters during the American Civil War, the firm acted as a military supply depot for the United States government, importing firearms, swords and color sets, and manufacturing uniform decorations. Tiffany’s involvement in the war effort grew so large that, in 1861, the firm expanded their Broadway location with an additional storefront to accommodate the growing inventory. Their window displays were another platform for the firm to show their support for the United States government. The first noted display of military ephemera was in May 1862 when Tiffany exhibited in their windows the newly created field officer uniform of General Sickles. Daniel Edgar Sickles (1819–1914) served as an officer in the Union Army, reaching the command of Major General. A native New Yorker, he was instrumental in recruiting New York regiments that became known as the Excelsior Brigade – a key force in the Army of the Potomac. He received a full set of Brigadier-General’s equipment from his friends in New York, which included the Mayor and County Judge, for his service in elevating the Excelsior Brigade’s strength and leading them to victory at the Battle of Fair Oaks. Newspapers, including The New York Times and The Buffalo Commercial, reported on the articles displayed which included, “complete horse equipment, general’s sword, belt, and sash, a brace of Colt’s navy revolvers, epaulettes, spurs, &c. The saddle is of McClellan pattern, trimmed with gold lace; and the spurs, sword, and pistols are gold-plated.”12 While advertising the firm’s design and craftsmanship superiority, this lavish gift, which cost New York $425, also promoted patriotism and was a physical sign of New York City and Tiffany’s support of the war. 11 George F. Heydt, Charles L. Tiffany and the House of Tiffany & Co. (New York: Tiffany & Co., 1893), 36. 12 “A Handsome Testimonial,” The Buffalo Commercial, 24 May 1862, 2.

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Another popular genre of military display included the presentation of New York City regiments’ color sets. In January 1863, Tiffany exhibited the color sets of the 14th Regiment of New York Volunteers. The regiment’s six by four-and-a-half-foot flag was crafted from dark blue silk featuring a heavy yellow fringe boarder and intricate embroidery. The New York Times described the flag’s design: The device of the flag, elegantly embroidered, represents the military arms borne by our New York contingent, the shield containing one-half of the State arms, and the other the bars of the Federal coat. Over the shield is the State crest, the eagle perched on the globe, and beneath it a graceful garter inscribed Excelsior. Under this motto is the Regimental designation, Fourteenth Regiment, New York Volunteers.13

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that the regimental flag was accompanied by the regiment’s national flag.14 Newspapers did not note the location of this color set’s display, but it can be assumed that the flags were shown in Tiffany’s windows on Broadway because this was the case a year later, in 1864, when Tiffany exhibited the flag of the 2nd New York Calvary. Flown during the Atlanta Campaign, the commander of the 2nd Calvary, General Judson Kilpatrick, sent the flag and a silk handkerchief captured during the campaign home to his mother-in-law, who then loaned them to Tiffany. General Judson Kilpatrick, nicknamed “Killcavery,” was the commander in charge of the New York Calvary regiment that traveled to Savannah with General Sherman. The New York Times reprinted Kilpatrick’s letter that accompanied the war spoils in the newspaper when announcing Tiffany’s display.15 In addition to Civil War military goods, Tiffany also displayed items of civic and patriotic interest relating to New York and United States. One of the more iconic displays was in 1884 when the firm exhibited on the main floor the aluminum apex of the newly completed Washington Monument. The marble, granite, and blue-stone obelisk commemorating George Washington, the first President of the United States, was capped with an aluminum point which also served as a lightning rod for the tall structure. On 25 November, The New York Times reported that “[a]t present anyone in New York or vicinity wishing 13 “The Fourteenth Regiment,” The New York Times, 27 January 1863, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 14 “The Colors of the 14th Regiment,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 January 1863, 3. 15 “Letter from Gen. Kilpatrick,” The New York Times, 29 December 1864.

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to see a specimen of the product can do so by visiting Tiffany’s where the apex for the Washington monument at the National Capitol, manufactured by order of the Government, is now on exhibition.”16 Folklore states that the 22.6 cm height and 2.85 kg pyramid of solid aluminum was placed on the floor of the store. Visitors were invited step over point, allowing them to boast that they stepped over the top of the Washington Monument – the tallest monumental column in the world at that time and still today.

Commissioned goods Perhaps the largest and most frequent genre of exhibitions constructed in Tiffany’s stores was the display of commissioned goods. Featuring trophies, sporting goods, or presentation pieces manufactured by Tiffany for sporting or civic events, the pieces were placed on display in the window or on the main floor just prior to being sent to their final home. Constantly rotating and reported on by New York newspapers, these displays drove store foot traffic and demonstrated Tiffany’s silversmith superiority, as the pieces were not for sale. One of the earliest sporting trophies displayed was a chess set presented to chess genius Paul Morphy (1837–1884) in 1858. Morphy was considered the greatest chess master during his time and the unofficial World Champion of Chess from 1858–1862. A beautiful set, The New York Times reviewed its craftsmanship calling it a “work so perfect in design and execution as are those which compose [the] art [of chess].”17 Designed in gold, silver, rubies, cornelian, and other precious stones, the chess pieces were fashioned after bygone dynasties: a barbaric king and queen made from silver opposing an imperial army crafted in gold. The rosewood board was set with ebony and mother-of-pearl and inlayed with silver.18 Friends from New York and Brooklyn, probably members of the New York Chess Clubs, presented Morphy with this set upon his return from his last European tour. Announced in The New York Times, Tiffany invited their patrons and the public to view the board at their 550 Broadway location. A year later, in August 1859, Tiffany displayed testimonials commemorating the completion of the Atlantic telegraph cable. New York businessman and financier Cyrus W. Field (1819–1892) undertook the management of 16 “Apex of the Monument,” The Buffalo Commercial, 28 November 1884, 2. 17 “The Morphy Testimonial,” The New York Times, 24 May 1858, 5. 18 The New York Daily News, Testimonials to Paul Morphy (New York: J. W. Bell, 1859), 20–23.

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laying the first transatlantic cable, stretching from Newfoundland to Ireland. New York celebrated this technological fete with a parade and the New York Chamber of Commerce commissioned from Tiffany four snuff boxes and three medals to commemorate this event. Presented to Field and the other members on the project, both the boxes and medals depicting engraved scenes illustrating the mechanical ingenuity, the vessels used to lay the cable, and the crests of the United States and England. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper invited New Yorkers to come and see the pieces at Tiffany. Each piece was displayed their own jewel case made of rich purple velvet lined in white satin.19 This display was so popular police were needed to control the crowds pushing their way into the store.20 Tiffany’s most common sport-themed displays featured yachting and horse racing trophies, usually pieces relating to New York families or institutions. One example of such is the annual trophies Tiffany made for the New York Yacht Club regatta competitions and other races related to the institution. In 1895, The New York Times reported that “Messer Tiffany & Co. have just completed and notified the winners of five special two-hundred-dollar yacht prizes offered by Mr. John R. Drexel in connection with the New York Yacht Club regatta.”21 John R. Drexel (1863–1935), the son of Philadelphia financier Anthony J. Drexel of the firm Drexel, Morgan & Co., later J. P. Morgan & Co., hosted his own regatta competition annually and purchased the prizes from Tiffany. The Times article illustrated the five prizes – four loving cups and one punch bowl – made for that year, each sterling silver with chased and engraved nautical decorations. The loving cup won by Brooklyn resident Commodore B. Frank Sutton is now part of the Tiffany Archives collection. Along with sporting trophies, presentation pieces given to important foreign visitors were often exhibited. One of the most noteworthy was the 1886 silver centerpieces titled Liberty Enlightening the World Testimonial commissioned for French sculpture Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1904). Presented as a thank you from the American people for his sculptural vision – the Statue of Liberty – the New York newspaper The New York World and the statue’s Pedestal Fund asked Tiffany and the firm’s designer James Whitehouse to create a piece for Bartholdi.22 Now in the Musée Bartholdi, 19 “Description of the Atlantic Telegraph Testimonial Gold Boxes and Medals,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 12 August 1859, 13. 20 Clare Phillips, ed. Bejewelled by Tiffany 1837-1987 (London: Gilbert Collection, in association with Yale University Press and Tiffany & Co.), 125. 21 “The Drexel Cups,” The New York Times, 29 December 1895, 6. 22 “Bartholdi Called Home,” New York World, 13 November 1886, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives.

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the testimonial is composed of three sections, each one commemorating different aspects of the Statue of Liberty. The petrified wood base features four silver plaques depicting different scenes associated with Bartholdi and the Statue of Liberty. The plaques include a life-size head of Bartholdi framed in an oak and olive wreath, a miniature Statue of Liberty, sculptor’s tools, and Lady Liberty. A revolving silver globe with two inscriptions thanking Bartholdi and naming the parties who presented him with this token mounts the base. Lastly, rising from the globe is a life-size reproduction of a hand and torch modeled after the Statue of Liberty. This centerpiece was also included in Heydt’s list of Notable Testimonials, under the section “Other Presentation Pieces;” of the ten trophies listed by Heydt, documentation reveals that eight of the trophies were exhibited in the store.23

Conclusion The title of this article derives from an article entitled “Profitable Idling” that appeared in the New York Daily Tribune on 8 October 1872. It discusses the objects on display at Tiffany, arguing that “one need be neither a shopper nor a purchaser to enjoy” the “bronzes of historical, classical, and poetic kinds,” “the wonders of the Japanese world, and of China,” and the “ancient crystals of Venetian kind, with enamels as beautiful as mosaic” at the store.24 This idea was central to the conception of this article: while the objects on display in Tiffany’s windows and sales floors may have attracted potential customers, the actual purchase of Tiffany goods was not requisite to attending any of the exhibitions. Instead, as can be seen from the breadth of examples discussed here, the ephemeral exhibitions that Tiffany crafted for their stores kept pace with happenings in New York City and the world at large, offering all visitors and passersby the opportunity to engage with current events, art, science, and culture for free at their stores. This, moreover, is just a selection of the exhibitions held at Tiffany in the nineteenth century and the f irm continued to stage exhibitions when it moved uptown in 1905 to its 37th Street location. Perhaps driven by the success of the exhibitions at Union Square, the entire top floor of the 37th Street building was a dedicated exhibition hall, lit by a domed skylight. What was said about the f irm 23 Heydt, House of Tiffany, 38. 24 “Profitable Idling,” The New York Tribune, 1 January 1872, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives.

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in an 1894 review of an exhibition remained true through the twentieth century: “Tiffany & Co. rank among the oldest and most conservative houses in America, and one of the secrets of their continued success is that they keep abreast of the times in their advertisements as well as the general management of their business,” of which exhibitions like those included here were central.25

Appendix A: Timeline of Exhibitions at Tiffany & Co., 1857–1902 1857 26 May – “Messrs. Tiffany & Co., have still on exhibition the great ‘Jersey Pearl,’ found some months ago in a brook near Paterson, New Jersey, together with the four smaller but beautiful pearls from New Jersey, varying in values from $50–$500.”26 1858 29 May – Paul Morphy chess set was placed on display. Described as, “work so perfect in design and execution as are those which compose [the] art [of chess].”27 1859 28 January – “There is now on exhibition at Tiffany’s a magnificent silver candelabrum just received from China. It was to have been presented by the American residents of the Empire to the late Commodore Perry, as a recognition of his services in the East, but death overtook the gallant officer before he received this well-merited tribute.”28 13 August – “There are four boxes and three medals, all of pure gold and appropriately illustrated with artistic designs” to commemorate the Atlantic telegraph. “Each box and medal is enclosed in a rich purple velvet jewel case, lined with white satin, bearing the stamp, ‘Tiffany & Co.,’ on the inside of each case. These exquisite works of art are now on exhibition at Tiffany & Co.’s, where they may be examined together with the medals presented by the Chamber of Commerce.”29 25 “Tiffany’s Horse Show,” The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review 29 (1894), 41. 26 “American Pearl Fisheries,” Buffalo Weekly Republic, 26 May 1957, 2. 27 “The Morphy Testimonial,” The New York Times, 24 May 1858, 5. 28 “The Late Commodore Perry,” Alabama Beacon, 28 January 1859, 2. 29 “Description of the Atlantic Telegraph Testimonial Gold Boxes and Medals,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 13 August 1859, 13.

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29 October – “A Russian casque or military hat has attracted considerable attention for a day or two past at Tiffany’s windows in Broadway ”30 1860 25 July – “In proof of the oft-asserted fact that the great proportion of fair dealing English men unite in awarding Heenan the victory in the Farnboro’ fight, we mention that at Tiffany’s is now to be seen a beautiful silver vase, presented to Heenan by a number of English gentlemen.”31 1861 1 July – “There is now on exhibition at Tiffany’s a whole set of equipments used by the French soldier when in active service. The set was brought here by the last steamer, and well probably attract considerable attention from those who take an interest in the welfare of our troops.”32 15 September – “A novel exhibition is now open to the Public at the establishment of Tiffany & Co., the Broadway jewelers. Closely adjoining the well-known centre showcase, which encloses the richest and rarest gems and articles de luxe in the way of ornament, on the continent, is now placed another and larger case, containing the optima spolia of a ten years’ campaign in the field of magic. Hermann, the Prestidigitateur, fills this case, and it might, in legal parlance, be nominated the great case of “Hermann vs. a large part of crown heads, nobles, artists and less notorious dilettanti.” […] The number of distinct pieces of jewelry exhibited by Tiffany & Co., of which Hermann, the Prestidigitateur, and not the devil, has been the honored recipient, and of which, for the delectation and aggravation of our readers, we have designated a small part, considerably exceeds two score.”33 2 November – The trial of a new rifled cannon, invented by Mr. De Brame, and constructed by A. Brown & Co., of this city, took place yesterday afternoon on Wortman’s farm, near East New York in the presences of Generals Burnside and Hall, Colonel Lefferts and several civilians […] The model of this gun is now on exhibition at Tiffany’s, in Broadway, where those who wish to examine it can do so.”34 30 “Minor City Items,” New York Tribune, 29 October 1859, 10. 31 “Heenan, the Hittite,” Chicago Tribune, 25 July 1860, 1. 32 “Equipments of a French Soldier,” Evening Star, 1 July 1861, 2. 33 “General City News. The Spoils of Magic Exhibited at Tiffany’s,” New York Times, 15 September 1861, 8. 34 “Trail of a Rifled Cannon,” Cincinnati Daily Press, 2 November 1861, 4.

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1862 28 May – Tiffany & Co. places on display the newly created field officer uniform of General Sickles, which included “complete horse equipment, general’s sword, belt, and sash, a brace of Colt’s navy revolvers, epaulettes, spurs, &c. The saddle is of McClellan pattern, trimmed with gold lace; and the spurs, sword, and pistols are gold-plated.”35 1863 27 January – Tiffany exhibited the color sets of the 14th Regiment of New York Volunteers. It is described as, “The device of the flag, elegantly embroidered, represents the military arms borne by our New York contingent, the shield containing one-half of the State arms, and the other the bars of the Federal coat. Over the shield is the State crest, the eagle perched on the globe, and beneath it a graceful garter inscribed Excelsior. Under this motto is the Regimental designation, Fourteenth Regiment, New York Volunteers.”36 1864 29 December – “The following letter has just been received by Mrs. E. Shailer, of West Point, N.Y., mother-in-law of Gen. Judson Kilpatrick. She also received the battle-flag of his cavalry, and a silk revel pocket handkerchief captured at the sacking of Atlanta. The trophies can be seen in the window of Tiffany & Co.”37 1866 22 February – “One of the vice-presidents of the club will introduce the General, and in the course of the evening, one of the thirty gentlemen who purchased the full-length portrait of General Scott, by Page, will present it to General Grant. This picture has been on exhibition at Tiffany’s for the past few days.”38 19 July – “A very fine-marble bust of Dr. Lowell Mason is now on exhibition at Tiffany’s.”39 22 November – “Bartlett, the American sculptor, has on exhibition at Tiffany’s in New York, a marble bust of Longfellow’s ‘Evangeline,’ and a portrait of Miss Maggie Mitchell, for whom it is to be at once put in marble.”40 35 “A Handsome Testimonial” The Buffalo Commercial, 24 May 1862, 2. 36 “The Fourteenth Regiment,” The New York Times, 27 January 1863, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 37 “Letter from Gen. Kilpatrick,” The New York Times, 29 December 1864, 5. 38 “The Day We Celebrate,” The Sun, 22 February 1866, 1. 39 “Personal and Political,” Buffalo Courier, 19 July 1866, 4. 40 “Personal and Political,” Hartford Courant, 22 November 1866, 4.

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1867 25 January – “The medal is of gold, elegantly finished, and stamped with a head; whether intended to represent Shakespeare or Booth, I cannot tell, as I caught but a glimpse of it this morning, at Tiffany’s window, where quite a number of persons were intent upon its examination.”41 7 April – “Bartlett has on exhibition at Tiffany’s, in New York, a marble bust of Longfellow’s ‘Evangeline,’ and a portrait bust of Miss. Maggie Mitchell, for whom it is at once to be put in marble.”42 21 February – “There are in one of Tiffany’s windows, on Broadway, two specimens of the handicraft of citizens of Delaware, which surpass in beauty and ingenuity of construction anything I have ever seen from the hands of New England genius. These chef d’ouvres of mechanical skill are working models of the steamers Commonwealth and Vanderbilt.”43 1872 23 October – “The largest diamond in America, weighing eighty carats, is on exhibition at Tiffany’s, New York.”44 1873 21 January – “I think I may say that with one or two exceptions I know of no place where one can rest with any degree of profit mentally, without it be at a rather unpretending looking shop at Broadway, or at the more pretentious building owned by that very well-known firm, Messrs. Tiffany, in Union Square ”45 27 March – “Tiffany & Co. […] have now on exhibition at their extensive sores on Broadway three magnificent sold silver services, satin finished and parcel gilt, designed for Presentation by the United States Government to three of the Arbitrators at Geneva.”46 21 November – “Messer Tiffany & Co. have on exhibition the prize won by the Twenty-second Regiment at Creedmoor.”47 41 “Our New York Letter,” The Charleston Daily News, 25 January 1867, 1. 42 “Art Items,” Detroit Free Press, 7 April 1867, 3. 43 “Editorial Inklings,” Yorkville Enquirer, 21 February 1867, 2. 44 “News in Brief,” The Boston Globe, 23 October 1872, 4. 45 “A Visit to Two Art Galleries: The Treasures at Tiffany’s-Bronzes and China-Barbienne’s Work—Statuary—The New Working in Enamel-Some China,” Boston Daily Globe, 21 January 1873, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 46 “Designed for Presentation,” Pittsburg Mail, 27 March 1873, 245. 47 “The Creedmoor Prize,” Brooklyn Daily Argus, 21 November 1873, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives.

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1874 1 August – “You have heard of the grand “ovation” given to the Conquering Columbian crew. New Yorkers were about as much surprised at the result of the Saratoga boat race, as other people […] The colors of the winning crew have been placed on exhibition at Tiffany’s.”48 1875 8 January – “The window of Tiffany & Co., at Broadway and Fifteenth street, now exhibits a very valuable crayon drawing by Sarony of William Cullen Bryant and Peter Cooper, life sizes. Desiring to aid in a work of charity, these representatives of high literary and business circles consented to have their portraits taken together. Lots are to be drawn for this picture at the Academy of Music on February 22, the occasion of the Lady Washington reception. The tickets are to be sold at $5, and Mr. C.L. Tiffany will act as Treasurer of the fund raised, and which is to be applied to the permanent building fund of the Floating Hospital of St. John’s Guild, which was so successful in its operations during the past Summer.”49 11 January – “The handsome testimonial from the famous Fifth Maryland regiment, of Baltimore, to the Seventh regiment of New York is now on exhibition at Tiffany’s.”50 25 February – “Barlett’s sketch, in bronze, of Johnny Blemm, the famous ‘drummer boy of Chickamauga,’ on exhibition at Tiffany’s in New York ”51 20 March – “There are few more varied and attractive places in New York for the art-lover than Tiffany’s store on Union Square. […] But few persons comparatively know what a museum virtually is contained in the different stories of this edif ice. Here are the choicest selections of porcelain from every manufactory in Europe. Here are the most lovely Sèvres and specimens of the finest Dresden ware. Wedgwood vases of dark and light blue and pale sage-green afford a visitor the opportunity to study the peculiarities of this branch of manufacture. Vases, jugs, pitchers, and other household utensils, appear grouped by themselves, and there is a large and very varied collection of the most interesting kind of new English pottery, the Minton ware. Chinese, Japanese, and majolica, besides other varieties, are arranged separately; and in the new patterns, as well as in the modern reproductions of antique forms, the amateur has the opportunity in this 48 49 50 51

“Our New York Letter,” The Vermont Gazette, 1 August 1874, 2. “A Valuable Picture,” The New York Times, 8 January 1875, 8. “Testimonial to the Seventh Regiment,” New York Daily Herald, 11 January 1875, 5. “Johnny Clemm Done Up In Bronze,” Belmont Chronicle, 25 February 1875, 1.

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wonderful shop to get a very good idea of porcelain manufacture in its best estate. The display of various kinds of glass is also equally interesting and instructive. Before bright windows are long tables covered with the loveliest articles of the modern clouded Venetian glass. This manufacture, formerly so famous, and now revived after the lapse of centuries, copies the old models of which one sees rare specimens in cabinets and museums abroad. Vases of opaline hues, and of the irregular and graceful forms that are possible to blown-glass, are here. Others, with shades of color changeable under every light, resemble in their shifting hues the tints of sunset or the depths of water stirred by wind. Besides these varieties of this charming manufacture, there are vessels of single tints, of strange blues and greens, or gold-streaked glass. These are frequently ornamented by little twists, and curled bands of white glass, or flowers and leaves of the same material are tastefully scatted over their surfaces. English panes, white glass as clear as water-crystal, make beautiful vases, bowls, and other table-ornaments.”52 27 March – “Tiffany & Company have now on exhibition in their establishment on Union Square a model of the ice-boat Flying Cloud, owned by Mr. Irving Grinnell, commodore of the New Hamburgh Ice-Boat Club […] Mr. Grinnell has also on exhibition at Tiffany’s a very pretty flag, thirty feet long, which he has named the “Ice Yacht Challenge Pennant of America,” and which is offered by him as a prize to be sailed for by any ice-yacht club in this country or Europe.”53 27 March – “The fortunate possessors of Revolutionary relics, residing in New York or its vicinity, are earnestly requested to aid the most deserving charity by lending them for a few days to ‘The Sheltering Arms Tea Party’ […] Tiffany & Co have kindly offered to take charge of the relic room, and give assurance that all articles will be safely and carefully preserved and returned to their owners.”54 2 June – “Messer Tiffany & Co., of Union Square, have just finished several pieces of silver plate designed as prizes for competition at the several regattas which are to take place during the present summer and for other objects, which reflect great credit on their inventive skill as artworker in silver. The most imposing objects in the collection are two vases or cups ordered by 52 “The Arts,” Appleton’s Journal, vol. 13, 20 March 1875, 375. 53 “Ice-Boating,” The Evening Post, 27 March 1875, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 54 “Revolutionary Relics,” The Evening Post, 27 March 1875, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives.

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the Grand Union Hotel of Saratoga, to be awarded as first and second prizes to the victorious crews at the coming college regattas at Saratoga in July.”55 Additional descriptions of the prize cups included in article. 17 June – “A valuable collection of shells and minerals is on exhibition at the rooms of Messrs. Tiffany & Co., in Union Square. These specimens were collected by the late Dr. James R. Chilton, and include many of singular rarity and beauty. Amount them is a large crystal – nearly ten inches in diameter – of Iceland spar, containing over a gill of pure water—a wonderful relic of one of the very early periods of the earth’s formation. There is also a specimen of smoky quartz that is unique. It is penetrated by a perfectly-formed crystal of rutile, several inches in length and the thickness of large straws. A beautiful specimen of the spiny murex, with the thing fragile spinules in an unusually perfect condition, is among the shells, all of which are noticeably f ine. The collection will be sold intact for moiety of the amount expended in making it, and will probably be placed in the scientif ic department of some educational institution. It will remain on exhibition at Tiffany’s for some weeks, however.”56 7 July – “A prize cup, made by Messrs. Tiffany & Co. for the Royal Albert Yacht Club is on exhibition—the rooms of the makers, in Union Square.57 4 November – “The elegant gilt bronze figure of America given by the state of New York for competition at Creedmoor last month and won by the Seventh regiment together with the bust of Archiles offered by Mayor Wickham as the first prize in the mid-range match, and won by Mr. A. Anderson, and the silver cup presented by Messrs. Brooks Brothers, and won by the Twenty-third regiment of Brooklyn are on exhibition”58 1876 17 April – “Two ‘sacred drums’ and a pair of vases, said to be the largest pieces of Japanese ‘cloisonné’ enamel ever seen in New York are now in the sales room of Tiffany & Co.’s bronze department.”59 55 “Art Works in Silver,” The Evening Post, 2 June 1875, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 56 “A Collection of Shells and Minerals,” The New York Times, 17 June 1875, 10. 57 “American Yacht Prize for An Anglish Club,” New York Daily Tribune, 8 July 1875, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 58 “The Creedmoor Trophies,” The Evening Post, 4 November 1875, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 59 “Curious Japanese Work,” New York Daily Tribune, 17 April 1876, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives.

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26 April – “[H]ave on exhibition at their store, on Union Square, New York, a selection of electroplated nickel silver ware prepared for the Centennial.”60 On display in a “special room.” 23 November – “The brilliant and costly collection of works in bronze, silver and gold recently displayed by Messrs. Tiffany and Company at the Centennial Exhibition has been brought back to this city and place in a richly decorated apartment on the second floor of the building on Union Square. It will be one of the features of the establishment.”61 22 November – “Mr. E. Kemeys, the artist, has on exhibition the bronze room at Tiffany’s establishment on Union Square, three plaster studies, each about eighteen inches long, of the American panther. They are named.”62 25 November – “The silver plate made by MT&C for the new San Francisco hotel, ‘The Baldwin,’ is advertised as on exhibition at the establishment of the makers. The lavish expenditure of these Pacific Coast hotels is something astonishing, and we could hardly realize that such an elegant display of choice goods as this ware for the ‘Baldwin’ makes was to be used in a ‘public house,’ for it rather seemed the service of a prince.”63 11 December – “One of the great attractions of New York City has been for many years the establishment of Tiffany & Co., on Union square, and this season, and especially at this particular time, the attraction is enhanced, not only by special holiday exhibits, but by the display of many beautiful things designed for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and their own purchases at the colossal fair, which comprise the choicest articles sent in Limoges ware and artistic bronze. Tiffany’s is, and always has been, unique; it is the only house in the country at once so f ine and so comprehensive. Some persons think of it only as the repository of the diamonds which occupy the case at right angles with the main entrance. They drop in once in a while to feast their eyes on the rich necklaces, the gorgeous clusters, the glittering ornaments which they never expect to possess, but which it is something simply to have the opportunity to look at and go away, hardly caring to know that above the ground floor is a museum of rare 60 “For the Exposition,” Brooklyn A—, 26 April 1876, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 61 “Tiffany’s Centennial Collection,” The Evening Post, 23 November 1876, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 62 “Panthers in Plaster,” The Evening Post, 22 November 1876, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 63 “A splendid Display of Silverware,” Express, 25 November 1876, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives.

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and delicate art work before which diamonds lose their attraction. It may be remarked, however, that the diamond collection is just now well worth a visit. In it are the marvels of the Centennial exhibit, including the diamond feather, the centre of which is a marvelous straw-colored stone, once owned by the Duke of Brunswick. Then there is a wonderful set – necklace, cross, and earrings – composed of diamonds of similar size and purest water, worth $14,000, and diamond pendants, which blaze like a calcium light, and are resplendent enough for a gift to the ‘one fair woman.’ Still, a lover of any imagination would select a pendant containing two large and wonderful opals in preference – opals, which hold the brilliant colors so much desired in vivid specks which flash out on certain lights from the depth of the pale, mysterious heart. A very remarkable set of jewels consists of earrings and pendant, the central stones of which are known as ‘cat’s eyes.’ The color is greenish gray, and it is found in Ceylon. It looks something like onyx, but has more the nature of flint, and is very rare. Only a few of these stones are in existence in this country. […] From the lower floor we will take the elevator to the second floor, where we shall f ind, passing by magnif icent bronzes and various works of art in pottery and metal, a small room in which is a case containing the whole Centennial exhibit of the Limoges enamels. This was very much the f inest collection brought to the Exhibition and well repays close attention.”64 13 December – Limoges enamels on view.65 1877 16 April – “Messrs. Tiffany & Company have received a large, varied, and most interesting invoice of Japanese goods, selected in Japan, expressly for them by Dr. Christopher Dresser, of the South Kensington Museum in London. The interest of these wares centers in the fact that, unlike so many similar wares sent to this country, but for domestic use. The decorative pottery, which consists of specimens from the Satsuma, Awats, Kiyoto, Otta, Tokio, Amari, Kaga, and other factories, is exceedingly beautiful and rich, and so are the cloisonné enamels on porcelain and copper.”66 64 “Perfection of Modern Art Work: Unique and Novel Treasures for Holiday Gift Buyers,” The Daily Graphic, 11 December 1876, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 65 “Tiffany & Co.’s Holiday Treasures,” New York Daily Tribune, 12 December 1876, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 66 “An Extraordinary Invoice,” The Evening Post, 16 April 1877, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives.

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17 November – “In Tiffany’s windows is exhibited a monkey driving a turtle and using a serpent for reins, while a pet bull-dog and a terrier look on in amazement. These figures are all in porcelain.”67 1879 14 January – “Annual Report of the Prize Committee of the N.R.A. […] The Fall Meeting took place at Creedmoor, commencing on Tuesday, September 17th. The programme was very carefully prepared. The Prize Committee succeeded in obtaining a number of prizes from prominent firms. The Chairman selected very fine bronze statuettes at Tiffany & Co.’s for the principal prizes offered by the Association. They were exhibited in one of Tiffany’s windows and attracted much attention.”68 April – “No must we forget the proud achievement of the Columbia four, who won the Henley Cup against England’s representative college crews, and won it handsomely and decidedly, so there was no ‘if’s nor and’s’ about it, their competitors acknowledging their superiority. All honor to Captain Goodwin and his noble four, for being the pioneers in bringing a rowing prize from the other side, so we all could enjoy a good look at the grand trophy in Messrs. Tiffany’s windows. It is a pleasant coincidence that New York, whose sons, nearly a quarter of a century since, captured the America Cup – now the emblem of the world’s yachting supremacy – should also succeed in winning the first trans-Atlantic rowing trophy.”69 22 July – “Some rare carbonate of lime formations from the recentlydiscovered cave near Luray, in Page County, Va., have been placed on exhibition at Tiffany’s”70 24 August – “Washington was full of gossip about the untamed girl who refused to be kept down by the conventionalities of life. Then came the announcement of her engagement to the Rhode Island millionaire. Her father had always been and still was poor, and if Kate was fond of dress she had not been able to indulge in any extravagance. She now enjoyed making the costliest preparations for her wedding. Senator Sprague paid twenty thousand dollars for a tiara of diamonds, and it was on exhibition in Tiffany’s window after it was purchased ”71 67 “Fugitive Notes,” The Buffalo Commercial, 17 November 1877, 2. 68 “Annual Report of the Prize Committee of the N.R.A.,” in The National Rifle Association, Address, Annual Reports, 1878 (New York: National Rifle Association, 1879), 22. 69 Brentano’s Aquatic Monthly and Sporting Gazetteer, Devoted to the Interests of all Pastimes by Field and Water, April 1879, 201. 70 “A Study in Stalactites,” The New York Times, 22 July 1879, 3. 71 “Kate Chase’s Marriage,” The Times-Philadelphia, 24 August 1879, 5.

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1884 15 January – “A bronze group in Tiffany’s window attracts a great deal of attention. It is illustrative of the following couplet of La Fontaine ‘On se moque chez les antres de ses propes defauts / Mais, tournez vous de grace et on vous repondra,’ which, freely translated, means that before condemning the vaults of others we should first look at home. The salutary precept is enforced by the work of art in question by the busts of two hunchbacks, one of whom looks over the shoulder of the other and good humoredly reproaches him with his infirmity while the subject of his ridicule regards him and listens with a quizzical expression. The cast is from the workshop of Yeldo, of Paris, and is finished by hand. The pose of the figures, the expressions on the countenances and the reproduction of the aged hands of the pair are marvels of artistic skill. It is held at $400.”72 25 November – “At present any one in New-York or vicinity wishing to see a specimen of the product can do so by visiting Tiffany’s, where the apex for the Washington monument at the National Capitol, manufactured by order of the Government, is now on exhibition.”73 1885 8 July – “[T]here were nearly 2,000 members of the societies participating in the National Saengerfost, and all of them wanted to go into the Opera House free to hear the prize competition of seven of the societies, but they could not, such was the vigilance of the doorkeepers, ushers, and committeemen. […] The prizes for which the singers contested are wreaths of gold and silver, which the winners will put in frames or glass cases, and point to with pride and pleasure. They have been in Tiffany’s window and in Turn Hall in the Eastern District, where they have been looked upon with envious eyes by many of the hopeful and more of the hopeless.”74 30 August – “Interest in the coming international yacht race is warming up. It is helped on a little by the exhibition in one of Tiffany’s windows of the handsome silver trophy captured from our friends the Britishers ever so many years ago, by the America, and which the Britishers now hope their crack yacht, the Genesta, will recapture and take back to England. Constantly changing groups of Gothamites scrutinize it all day long through the plate glass of the Tiffany window and venture various comments and guesses on 72 “The Hunchback’s Reproach,” Morning Journal, 15 January 1884, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 73 “Rival to Older Metals A Process to Make Aluminum of General Use,” The New York Times, 25 November 1884, 3. 74 “Prize Singing. Competing Societies in the National Saengerfest,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 8 July 1885, 2.

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the trophy itself and the possibilities of the coming contest. Viewed with an eye that takes in merely the intrinsic value of things, this famous cup does not appear to be much of an object for two great nations to get excited about, yet in a very short time the struggle for it will overshadow everything else for the moment, and all the newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic will have fits of typographical hysterics over the probable issue.”75 1886 28 April – “Tiffany & Co. exhibited yesterday ten gold medals made by them for the American Art Association. At the close of the May exhibition these medals will be awarded by a committee of artists selected from among the exhibitors.”76 12 September – “The air is full of yacht talk till you can’t think. […] As the present particular paroxysm of the yachting craze will probably be all over by the time the compositors get through blessing this copy, if not sooner, and you will know for sure whether the Mayflower or the Galatea takes the Queen’s cup (which I saw yesterday in one of Tiffany’s windows, with a crowd gazing at it as if it was the most wonderful thing ever seen, though it has been exhibited in the same place several times before) – this, as I say, being probable, if not pretty certain, there is no need of my taking up space with any sort of dissertation on the subject now.”77 13 November – Liberty Enlightening the World Testimonial commissioned for French sculpture Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi is exhibited at Tiffany’s.78 1887 13 February – “The Englishmen who were here last summer and defeated the American players in the Newport games left their ponies, which were bought by Americans at pretty good figures, but they will get back something of more value, and that is the polo challenge cup, a massive piece of silver now on exhibition in Tiffany’s window. The cup is valuable not only as plate, but as a work of art. It is a challenge cup, and will be contested for many times yet.”79

75 “New York Notes: The Great Yacht Race and the Anglomaniacs,” Detroit Free Press, 30 August 1885, 4. 76 “Ten Gold Medals of Rare Beauty,” The New York Times, 28 April 1886, 8. 77 “Doings in New York: The Yacht Race,” Detroit Free Press, 12 September 1886, 16. 78 “Bartholdi Called Home,” New York World, 13 November 1886, Clipping Book Collection Tiffany & Co. Archives. 79 “Harvard College,” The Saint Paul Globe, 13 February 1887, 9.

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3 March – “In Tiffany’s window on Union Square there is a remarkable model of a buffalo’s head by Edward Kemeys, Jr. It is about 8 feet high and has been wrought with true art impulse into majestic effect. It looks indeed as though it might be a petrified head of a colossal buffalo of some past age. It is to be cast in bronze and placed over the east portal of the Union Pacific Railroad bridge spanning the Missouri between Council Bluffs and Omaha.”80 2 June – “In Broadway, N.Y., in Tiffany’s window, is a silver bust of Gladstone, the greatest living English statesmen. This is a tribute to the great Liberal leader from his American admirers. It was suggested last summer, and at once a fund was started and an order given for the work. The fund amounts to over $3,000, and represents nearly 11,000 contributors, the majority of the contributions being in small sums.”81 5 June – “The Gladstone testimonial has been attracting crowds to Tiffany’s window.”82 20 June – “In Tiffany’s window there is a bronze tablet ordered by the city council of Charleston, S. C., for the presentation to Mayor Courtney.”83 13 August – “The largest bronze casting ever attempted in America, says the New York Times of Aug. 10, was made at E. Kemeys works, on Forsyth street, yesterday, is the mammoth buffalo head designed by Kemeys, the sculptor, for the east portal of the new Union Pacific bridge across the Missouri at Omaha, the [unknown word] of which has long attracted attention in one of Tiffany’s windows.”84 15 September – “The America’s cup is now on exhibition in Tiffany’s window.”85 1889 20 July – “The hide of the giant elephant Forepaugh, who had a record of killing ten men, and whom it was found necessary to strangle to death, by reason of his vicious habits, is now exposed in Tiffany’s window, Union Square. It has been tanned and cleaned in Philadelphia, and will be made up by this enterprising concern into pocket-books and valises. Curiosity

80 “Gotham Gossip,” The Times-Picayune, 3 March 1887, 4. 81 “Testimonial to Gladstone: As American Present to the Greatest English Statesmen,” ArgusLeader, 2 June 1887, 6. 82 “From ‘Town Topics’,” Chicago Tribune, 5 June 1887, 17. 83 “Gotham Gossip,” The Times-Picayune, 20 June 1887, 8. 84 “The Railroads: An Immense Bronze,” The Times-Picayune, 13 August 1887, 4. 85 “New York City,” New-York Tribune, 15 September 1887, 10.

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hunters have, therefore, something to look forward to when these articles are manufactured.”86 3 August – “A curiosity which is attracting considerable attention is the hide of the great ‘Forepaugh,’ the next largest animal in size to the renowned ‘Jumbo.’ The tanned hide is exhibited in Tiffany’s window, and is of a beautiful russet color, marked something like an alligator’s skin, excepting that the incisions are much deeper and wider apart. This leather will be utilized in the manufacture of traveling and chatelaine bags, pocket books, card cases, etc.”87 1890 9 March – “Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the statuette, ‘The Minute Man,’ work is now on exhibition at Tiffany’s, in New York, and will be formally presented to the officers of the gunboat when she goes into commission with.”88 19 July – In reference to The Boston Globe’s sword, made for the ‘most popular Grand Army man in the country,’ displayed in Tiffany’s window. The Boston Globe reported, “This beautiful sword, which is without doubt the richest prize ever given away by a newspaper, is now on exhibition in Tiffany’s Broadway window and attracts universal attention of passerby, either for its exquisite workmanship or the patriotic idea embodied in it.”89 7 November – “There is now on exhibition at Tiffany’s a collection of previous stones of more than ordinary variety and beauty. Among them are fire opals of rare brilliancy, collected by Mr. George F. Kunz during a recent Trip in Mexico.”90 1891 1 October – “Messrs. Tiffany & Co., the celebrated silversmiths, have recently designed and completed a superb piece of plate for a club team trophy for pigeon-shooting contests. It is a punch bowl thirteen and a half inches high, fourteen inches in diameter, and weighs about 150 ounces. The body is decorated with a flock of pigeons and festoons of laurel growing from the upper edge, while the stem is divided in sections, where the names of the winners are to be inscribed. On the lower part of the base is etched 86 87 88 89 90

Jewelers’ Review, 20 July 1889, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Hot New York,” Oakland Tribune, 3 August 1889, 1. “The Concord Afloat,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 March 1890, 1. “The Sword in New York,” The Boston Globe, 19 July 1890, 2. “Rare and Beautiful Gems,” The Sun, 7 November 1890, 8.

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in floriated letters the inscription ‘The Club-Team Trophy.’ The bowl is richly gilt inside, and circling around the lining the following names of the competing clubs are etched in harmony with the decorations: The Carteret, Westminster Kennel, Country Club, and Larchmont. The cup is now on exhibition in Tiffany’s windows, in Union square, and the illustration above is a reduced reproduction from the original.”91 6 December – “There were on exhibition at Tiffany’s Union Square yesterday, the prizes which the New York Yacht Club will give to boats that were winders in the club’s races last summer. The prizes are 36 in number, and cost about $8,000.”92 1892 29 July – “Attempts have been made, to a limited degree, to introduce agatized wood for ornamentation. The material, however, is so extremely hard as to require special machinery for cutting and polishing, and we do not know of any company that has undertaken this work on a large scale, except the Drake Company, of Sioux Falls, Dak., specimens of whose work are on exhibition at Tiffany, in New York City. The largest of these is a block 36 inches in height, 41 x 34 inches diameter, and weighing 2.1 tons.”93 16 October – “The souvenir testimonial of solid gold presented by the Chilian refugees to Patrick Egan, United State Minister to Chili, in testimony of their gratitude for his affording them asylum during the late revolution, has been completed and is now on exhibition at Tiffany’s.”94 1893 1 January – “In a conspicuous corner of one of Tiffany’s windows, standing upon a highly polished ebony pedestal, is a massive silver cup, valued at $500. For several days it has attracted the attention of the paraders on Union Square, New York. Especially interesting is it to college men, for it symbolizes the inter-collegiate chess championship, and is the bone of contention during the tournament which is being held in New York city. Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have participated in the tourney.”95

91 “A Beautiful Work of Art,” The Sun (New York, New York), 11 October 1891, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. 92 “Topics for Yachtsmen,” The Sun, 6 December 1891, 5. 93 “A Visit to Chalcedony Park, Arizona,” The Enterprise and Vermonter, 29 July 1892, 4. 94 “Testimonial to Mr. Egan,” The Times, 16 October 1892, 8. 95 “College Contestants: Chess Players Struggle for a $500 Silver Cup,” Star Tribune, 1 January 1893, 23.

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15 January – “In one of the cases at Tiffany’s is a delightful little group of miniatures, by Miss Ethel Webbling, of London, who is at present on a visit to this country. They consist chiefly of female portraits, one of especial excellence being a three-quarter length of Mme. Norman Neruda playing violin. In its accuracy of drawing and firmness of touch this little oval would do no discredit to a Meissonier. These miniatures of Miss Webbling are characterized by good drawing and color and a charming delicacy of execution, which recalls the great days of the art which a modern fashion now revives.”96 9 February – “Mr. Keyser was seen in his studio in Madison avenue yesterday by a Sun reporter, who informed him of the report of the Advisory Art Committee. The artist was rather dumbfounded at the news, but smiled at the committee’s opinion that his work is not ‘equal to the average of the sculpture in the Park.’ ‘It must be pretty bad, if it is as bad as that,’ was his comment. He said that he knew none of the committee, and had no knowledge of what standards of art they judged. Mr. Keyser studied in Munich and Paris, and was for a number of years at Rome. Broadway promenaders have had opportunities to judge of his work in the bronze statuette of a boy in a page’s costume of the fifteenth century Italian court, which was exhibited in Tiffany’s window for some time.”97 18 March – “Members of the New-York branch of the American Folk-Lore Society listened to an interesting paper on Hawaii and her people last evening at the home of Mrs. E.L. Youmann, 247 Fifth Avenue. The paper was read by Dr. Titus M. Coan, who was announced to speak on ‘Hawaiian Folk-Lore.’ Instead of dealing with this topic in particular, Dr. Coan gave a general outline of the people of the island and their customs. He told something of the chiefs, the big indolent fellows who did little but grow fat, of the moral side of the people, which was good according to their standard, of their manner of living, their games, etc. The portion of his paper devoted to these topics bore especially upon the people some years ago. The beautiful language of Hawaii was also touched upon, and some of the earlier writings and forms of religious belief. Of the wonderful cloak which has been shown in Tiffany’s window the doctor knew the history. It is true, he said, that such garments are put together from the feathers of a bird found on the island. Upon each of the birds only a tuft of the feathers desired is found under the

96 “Art and Other Things,” The Collector, vol. IV, no. 4, 15 January 15, 86. 97 “Arthur Statue Not Good,” The Sun, 9 February 1893, 7.

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wing. They are beautiful reds and yellows, and it would take many years before enough were secured to make a cloak.”98 29 November – “Tiffany & Co. are showing at their store a magnificent collection of old India jewelry carefully selected after many months’ researches in the principal cities of the East. The collection forms one of the most interesting exhibits they have ever gathered abroad, as it represents the higher class of early gold and silver work made in the East, among which are enamels from Jeypore, and gold ornaments from Rajputana, Punjab, and the Madras country.”99 20 December – “C. Oliver Iselin, one of the chief owners of the cup winner Vigilant, has presented to the New-Rochelle Hospital a sailing model of that famous yacht. The model is now on exhibition in Tiffany’s window, and will be sold for the benefit of the hospital. The miniature vessel is six feet long, and is thought to be capable of out sailing any miniature yacht of its size.”100 1894 6 February – “The original manuscripts of “Liber Scriptorum,” the book of poems, short stories and essays written by members of the Authors Club, a limited edition of which was recently published, are on exhibition in Tiffany’s window on Union Square. The manuscripts have been handsomely bound in three large volumes and are to be sold to the highest bidder. They will doubtless attract the attention of bibliophiles in all parts of the country.”101 13 June – “Tiffany & Co shortly will remove the offices in the exhibition department at the rear of their store to the floor above in order to obtain more space for stock.”102 October – “Among the many special collections shown at the Chicago World’s Fair, none attracted or deserved to attract more interested attention than the Zschille collection of ancient arms and armor. […] The appearance of such a collection as the Zschille collection in New York is an event of more than usual importance, and its exhibition by Messrs. Tiffany & Co., in Union Square, should render it a magnet of attraction to thousands to whim its 98 “Facts About Hawaii: Dr. Coan’s Interesting Paper Before the Folk-Lore Society,” The New York Times, 18 March 1893, 5. 99 “New York Notes,” The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review, vol. XXVII, no. 18, 29 November 1893, 34. 100 “Miniature Model of the Vigilant,” The New York Times, 20 December 1893, 12. 101 “The MS. Of the Book of the Authors’ Club,” The Publishers’ Weekly, vol. XLV, no. 6, 10 February 1894, 308. 102 Jewelers’ Weekly, 13 June 13, 1894, Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives.

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display at Chicago did not appeal. […] Properly, the collection belongs, in its integrity to a public institution, and it is to be hoped that it will ultimately find a permanent resting place at our own Museum.”103 1 November –“In the same manner, and upon the same lines, as those on which he built up his marvelous collection of arms and armor, which was described in the last issue of The Collector, Mr. Richard Zschille has created a no less interesting collection of a totally contrasting character, a collection devoted exclusively to the development of what most people, like our old friends Dr. Doran and Monsieur Brillat-Savarin, who both knew the subject well, will be inclined to consider the most delightful art of peace – that of the table. […] The result, as may be seen at Tiffany & Co.’s, in Union Square, is a collection unique in its completeness, and which must remain so, for to disperse it would be to destroy its value totally.”104 11 November – “Monsignor Seton has lent to Messrs. Tiffany & Co. to place on exhibition for a few days, an invaluable original miniature of Mary Queen of Scots. This miniature, a relic of the sixteenth century, is one of the historic portraits of the unfortunate Queen. […] Tiffany & Co. have just made another copy, an exact reproduction of the original miniature-frame, case, and every detail. It was made for Seton Gordon, of Orange, N.J., a cousin of the Monsignor. It is said Monsignor Seton received an offer of $10,000 for the original, but it is not for sale. The original miniature may be seen in Tiffany’s window, Union Square and Fifteenth-St., for the next few days.”105 21 November – “Tiffany’s windows, on Union Square, New York, always attract attention. The firm are not given to lavish displays of any kind, but they are students of contemporary events and their exhibits usually possess some special element of interest to the public. Last week, during the much discussed ‘Portrait Exhibit,’ fashionable shoppers stood several rows deep in front of Tiffany’s window, anxious to get a glimpse of a famous miniature, over 300 years old, of Mary, Queen of Scots, and this week their ‘Horse Show’ window is the subject of many flattering compliments. The present display, while thoroughly ‘horsey,’ bears that elegant touch of refinement so characteristic of the house. The articles shown represent a wide variety of the firm’s products of interest in connection with the ‘Horse Show.’ There are hand painted menus with hunt scenes; bronze hackneys and other horses, 103 “The Zschille Collection I The Pride and Pomp of War,” The Collector: A Current Record of Art, Bibliography, Antiquarianism, Etc., vol. V, nos. 16, 17, 18, 19, October 1894, 245–6. 104 “The Zschille Collection II The Fine Art of the Table,” The Collector, vol. VI, no. 1, November 1, 1894. 105 “A Miniature of Mary Queen of Scots,” New-York Tribune, 11 November 1894, 13.

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for cabinets, etc.; riding crops, whips, silver spurs and stirrups, dashboard watches, fans with painted scenes of coaching parties, etc.; boot-pulls and novelties in gold and silver jewelry with horsey designs, etc. Tiffany & Co. rank among the oldest and most conservative houses in America, and one of the secrets of their continued success is that they keep abreast of the times in their advertisements as well as the general management of their business.”106 1 December – Advertisement for the Zschille Collection: “The Zschille Collection. Messrs. Tiffany & Co. invite an inspection of the Zschille Collection of Antique Arms and Armor, which is now on exhibition on the third floor of their establishment. The collection is believed to be the most comprehensive in existence, and comprises a complete series dating from the 8th century B.C. to the 17th century A.D.”107 1895 25 July – “[W]hen an international yacht race is on it is sometimes exhibited for a day or two in Tiffany’s window […].”108 15 September – “Cup, cup, cup! It is nothing but the cup! […] there has sprung up out of the September winds a new creation, the cup girl, and so popular is she become in these Dunraven days that the summer girl is completely forgotten and even the pretty girl is extremely insipid compared to her. Two English girls now set the type for the cup girl. They are the Ladies Rachel and Aileen Dunraven. They are followers of the cup, literally chasing it over the ocean for the second time, and they hover around it as it stands in Tiffany’s windows for all to see, and they hurry along the Valkyrie’s crew to get it.”109 29 December – “Messer Tiffany & Co. have just completed and notified the winners of five special two–hundred-dollar yacht prizes offered by Mr. John R. Drexel in connection with the New York Yacht Club regatta.”110 1896 11 January – “Messrs. Tiffany & Co. have just placed on exhibition for a few days the silver trophies won by Howard Gould’s twenty-rater yacht Niagara 106 “Tiffany’s Horse Show,” The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review, vol. XXIX, no. 17, 21 November 1894, 40–a. 107 “The Zschille Collection,” The Collector: A Current Record of Art, Bibliography, Antiquarianism, Etc., vol. VI, no. 4, 15 December 1894, 72. 108 “Most Costly of All Known Cups,” The Winnipeg Tribune, 25 July 1895, 4. 109 “The Cup Girl Queen,” The Inter Ocean, 15 September 1895, 36. 110 “The Drexel Cups,” The New York Times, 29 December 1895, 6.

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in English waters during the season of 1895. The trophies shown, though they fill Tiffany’s entire window and are an extraordinary collection for one yacht club to capture in a single season, do not by any means represent the Niagara’s entire winnings abroad, but merely those races in which the prize was a cup or other silver trophy, and it is interesting to note that among those Mr. Howard Gould brought home with him are two prizes from the Castle yacht cup, one a challenge cup presented by the Earl of Dunraven in 1890 and won by Lord Dunraven’s own yacht, the Deirdre, in 1893, and the other is a special prize offered by his clubmate and American representative, H. Maltland Kersey.”111 1897 24 October – “Tiffany’s windows have been conspicuous for years as usually displaying single object, whose exceptional merit invariably attracts attention. Nothing displayed by the firm in many months has drawn such crowds of interested spectators as the now much-talked about gravity clock. The clock is one of Tiffany & Co.’s recent importations from Paris, and a very ingenious affair it is, made of gilded brass. The dial and clock case are entirely of glass, showing the whole mechanism of its most interesting features.”112 24 October – “Tiffany’s windows are never overburdened with exhibits; in fact, they have been conspicuous for years as usually displaying single objects whose exceptional merit invariably attract marked attention. Nothing, however, displayed by the firm in many months has attracted such crowds of intensely interested spectators as the now much talked about ‘gravity clock.’ The clock is one of Tiffany & Co.’s recent importations from Paris, and a very ingenious affair. It is made of brass and gilt. The dial and clock case are entirely of glass, showing the whole mechanism of its most interesting features.”113 1902 6 July – “With the revival of snuff taking by the men of fashion in London much interest has been attracted to the unique collection of jeweled snuff boxes recently put on exhibition at Tiffany’s, Manhattan. The collection consists entirely of boxes possessing individual merit, historic associations

111 “The Niagara’s Cups,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11 January 1896, 12. 112 “Clock Operated by Gravitation,” New-York Tribune, 24 October 1897, 28. 113 “Tiffany’s Gravity Clock,” The New York Times, 24 October 1897, 39.

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and artistic workmanship, qualities that collectors and connoisseurs are quick to detect, and some of the boxes are of considerable intrinsic value.”114

Bibliography “American Yacht Prize for An English Club.” New York Daily Tribune, 8 July 1875. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Apex of the Monument.” The Buffalo Commercial, 28 November 1884, 2. “Art and Other Things.” The Art Collector: A Journal Devoted to the Arts and the Crafts 4, no. 6 (January 15, 1893): 85–100. “Arthur Statue Not Good.” The Sun, 8 February 1893, 7. “Art Items.” Detroit Free Press, 7 April 1867, 3. “The Arts.” Appleton’s Journal 13, no.20 (March 20, 1875): 375. “Art Works in Silver.” The Evening Post, 2 June 1875. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Bartholdi Called Home.” New York World, 13 November 1886. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “A Beautiful Work of Art.” The Sun (New York, New York), 11 October 1891. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. Brentano’s Aquatic Monthly and Sporting Gazetteer, Devoted to the Interests of all Pastimes by Field and Water, April 1879, 201. “Clock Operated by Gravitation.” New-York Tribune, 24 October 1897, 28. “A Collection of Shells and Minerals.” The New York Times, 17 June 1875, 10. “College Contestants: Chess Players Struggle for a $500 Silver Cup.” Star Tribune, 1 January 1893, 23. “The Colors of the 14th Regiment.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 January 1863, 3. “The Concord Afloat.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 March 1890, 1. “Costly and Historic Snuff Boxes.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 6 July 1902, 11. “The Creedmoor Prize.” Brooklyn Daily Argus, 21 November 1873. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “The Creedmoor Trophies.” The Evening Post, 4 November 1875. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “The Cup Girl Queen.” The Inter Ocean, 15 September 1895, 36. “Curious Japanese Work.” New Daily Tribune, 17 April 1876. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “The Day We Celebrate.” The Sun, 22 February 1866, 1.

114 “Costly and Historic Snuff Boxes,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 6 July 1902, 11.

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“Description of the Atlantic Telegraph Testimonial Gold Boxes and Medals.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 12 August 1859, 13. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Designed for Presentation.” Pittsburg Mail, 27 March 1873, 245. “Doings in New York: The Yacht Race.” Detroit Free Press, 12 September 1886, 16. “The Drexel Cups.” The New York Times, 29 December 1895, 6. “Editorial Inklings.” Yorkville Enquirer, 21 February 1867, 2. “Equipments of a French Soldier.” Evening Star, 1 July 1861, 2. “An Extraordinary Invoice.” The Evening Post, 16 April 1877. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Facts About Hawaii: Dr. Coan’s Interesting Paper Before the Folk-Lore Society.” The New York Times, 18 March 1893, 5. “For the Exposition.” Brooklyn A—, 26 April 1876. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “The Fourteenth Regiment.” The New York Times, 27 January 1863. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “From ‘Town Topics.’” Chicago Tribune, 5 June 1887, 17. “Fugitive Notes.” The Buffalo Commercial, 17 November 1877, 2. “General City News. The Spoils of Magic Exhibited at Tiffany’s.” New York Times, 15 September 1861, 8. “Gotham Gossip.” The Times Picayune, 3 March 1887, 4. “Gotham Gossip,” The Times-Picayune, 20 June 1887, 8. “A Handsome Testimonial.” The Buffalo Commercial, 24 May 1862, 2. “Harvard College.” The Saint Paul Globe, 13 February 1887, 9. “Heenan, the Hittie.” Chicago Tribune, 25 July 1860, 1. Heydt, George F. Charles L. Tiffany and the House of Tiffany & Co. New York: Tiffany & Co., 1893. “Hot New York: What People Do When They Sizzle.” Oakland Tribune, 3 August 1889, 1. “The Hunchback’s Reproach.” Morning Journal, 15 January 1884. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Ice-Boating.” The Evening Post, 27 March 1875. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. Jewelers’ Review, 20 July 1889. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. Jewelers’ Weekly, 13 June 1894. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Johnny Clemm Done Up In Bronze.” Belmont Chronicle, 25 February 1875, 1. “Kate Chase’s Marriage.” The Times-Philadelphia, 24 August 1879, 5. “The Late Commodore Perry.” Alabama Beacon, 28 January 1859, 2. “Letter from Gen. Kilpatrick.” The New York Times, 29 December 1864, 5. “The Loving Lilliputians; Warren-Thumbiana. Marriage of General Tom Thumb and the Queen of Beauty. Who They Are, What They Have Done, Where They Came

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from, Where They Are Going. Their Courtship and Wedding Ceremonies, Crowds of People. The Reception. The Serenade.” The New York Times, 11 February 1863, 8. “Miniature Model of the Vigilant.” The New York Times, 20 December 1893, 12. “A Miniature of Mary Queen of Scots.” New-York Tribune, 11 November 1894, 13. “Minor City Items.” New York Tribune, 29 October 1859, 10. “The Morphy Testimonial.” The New York Times, 24 May 1858, 5. “Most Costly of All Known Cups.” The Winnipeg Tribune, 25 July 1895, 4. “The MS. Of the Book of the Authors’ Club.” The Publishers’ Weekly 45, no. 6 (February 10, 1894): 308. The National Rifle Association, Address, Annual Reports, 1878. New York: National Rifle Association, 1879. “News in Brief.” The Boston Globe, 23 October 1872, 4. “New York City.” New-York Tribune, 15 September 1887, 10. The New York Daily News. Testimonials to Paul Morphy. New York: J. W. Bell, 1859. “New York Notes: The Great Yacht Race and the Anglomaniacs.” Detroit Free Press, 30 August 1885, 4. “New York Notes.” The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review 27, no. 18 (November 29, 1893): 34. “The Niagara’s Cups.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11 January 1896, 12. “Our New York Letter.” The Charleston Daily News, 25 January 1867, 1. “Our New York Letter.” The Vermont Gazette, 1 August 1874, 2. “Panthers in Plaster.” The Evening Post, 22 November 1876. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Perfection of Modern Art Work: Unique and Novel Treasures for Holiday Gift Buyers.” The Daily Graphic, 11 December 1876. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Personal and Political.” Buffalo Courier, 19 July 1866, 4. “Personal and Political.” Hartford Courant, 22 November 1866, 4. Phillips, Clare, ed. Bejewelled by Tiffany 1837–1987. London: Gilbert Collection, in association with Yale University Press and Tiffany & Co., 2006. “Prize Singing. Competing Societies in the National Saengerfest.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 8 July 1885, 2. “Profitable Idling.” The New York Tribune, 1 January 1872. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “The Railroads: An Immense Bronze.” The Times-Picayune, 13 August 1887, 4. “Rare and Beautiful Gems.” The Sun, 7 November 1890, 8. “Revolutionary Relics.” The Evening Post, 27 March 1875. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Rival to Older Metals A Process to Make Aluminum of General Use.” The New York Times, 25 November 1884, 3.

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“A splendid Display of Silverware.” Express, 25 November 1876. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “A Study in Stalactites.” The New York Times, 22 July 1897, 3. “The Sword in New York.” The Boston Globe, 19 July 1890, 2. “Ten Gold Medals of Rare Beauty.” The New York Times, 28 April 1886, 8. “Testimonial to Gladstone: As American Present to the Greatest English Statesmen.” Argus-Leader, 2 June 1887, 6. “Testimonial to Mr. Egan.” The Times, 16 October 1892, 8. “Testimonial to the Seventh Regiment.” New York Daily Herald, 11 January 1875, 5. “Tiffany & Co.’s Holiday Treasures.” New York Daily Tribune, 12 December 1876. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Tiffany’s Centennial Collection.” The Evening Post, 23 November 1876. Clipping Book Collection, Tiffany & Co. Archives. “Tiffany’s Gravity Clock. It Causes Many Persons to Think of Perpetual Motion.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 October 1897, 11. “Tiffany’s Horse Show.” The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review 29, no. 16 (November 14, 1894): 32–40a. “Topics for Yachtsmen.” The Sun, 6 December 1891, 5. “Trade Gossip.” The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review 20, no. 7 (July 20, 1889): 7–94. “Trail of a Rifled Cannon.” Cincinnati Daily Press, 2 November 1861, 4. “A Valuable Picture.” The New York Times, 8 January 1875, 8. “A Visit to Chalcedony Park, Arizona.” The Enterprise and Vermonter, 29 July 1892, 4. “A Visit to Two Art Galleries: The Treasures at Tiffany’s-Bronzes and ChinaBarbienne’s Work—Statuary—The New Working in Enamel-Some China.” Boston Daily Globe, 21 January 1873. “The Zschille Collection I The Pride and Pomp of War.” The Collector: A Current Record of Art, Bibliography, Antiquarianism, Etc. 5, nos. 16, 17, 18, 19 (October 1894): 245–6. “The Zschille Collection II The Fine Art of the Table.” The Collector 6, no. 1 (1 November 1894).

About the authors Amy McHugh received her MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design from Parsons The New School. She is the Assistant Curator at the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement in St. Petersburg, Florida, where her work has centered on the jewelry and metalwork produced in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Formerly, she

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held the position of Assistant Curator for the Tiffany & Co. Archives, where she focused on exploring Tiffany’s legacy in watches, royal customers, and the creations of Jean Schlumberger. She contributed to the publications Drawn to Beauty: The Art and Atelier of Jean Schlumberger (2019) and The Splendor of Power (2018). Cristina Vignone is the Associate Archivist & Manager of Research Services at the Tiffany & Co. Archives, where her responsibilities include maintaining and managing the company’s historical design, manufacturing, and business records. She holds a Master of Archives and Public History degree, with a concentration in Archives, from New York University, and a Master of Library and Information Science degree from Long Island University’s Palmer School of Library and Information Science. Cristina is an experienced speaker on the blending of historical luxury initiatives with contemporary market demands, having presented at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, the Nouveau Reach: Past, Present and Future of Luxury Conference in Toronto, Canada, and the Fashion: Now & Then: Passé, Presente, Wèilái (未来)Conference. An article she wrote on the representations of Tiffany & Co. in cartoons and comic strips was published in Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption (Volume 5, 2018, Issue 1). Cristina served as President of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, Inc. and is also a member of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC), the International Council on Archives (ICA), and the Society of American Archivists, where she served as the Education Chair of the Business Archives Section (BAS).

2.

Enclosed Exhibitions: Claustrophobia, Balloons, and the Department Store in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames Kathryn A. Haklin

Abstract This chapter examines spatial confinement in the eponymous department store of Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames. A close reading of one of the novel’s sale chapters reveals that the store director mobilizes several strategies to engender a suffocating atmosphere at the temporary exhibition. Linking literary space and publicity, the chapter argues that the store’s promotional balloons act as ephemeral, yet dynamic advertisements that dismantle interior and exterior space. The balloons instantiate the ephemeral quality of the sales since, in spite of their brief duration, they produce a lasting visual effect that problematizes a spatial framework opposing interior and exterior spaces. This reading suggests that publicity contributes to the claustrophobia of commerce in Zola’s f ictional ephemeral exhibitions. Keywords: Zola, claustrophobia, advertising, balloons, crowd

Exposing novelties in Au Bonheur des Dames As Émile Zola famously records in his preliminary notes (“Ébauche”) for Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), the Naturalist author’s mission for the eleventh novel of the Rougon-Macquart series (1871–1893) was to “write the poem of modern activity” ( faire le poème de l’activité moderne).1 With the English 1 Emile Zola, Œuvres. Manuscrits et dossiers préparatoires. Les Rougon-Macquart. Au Bonheur des dames. Dossier préparatoire (Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1881), 2.

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_ch02

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title of The Ladies’ Paradise, one would expect this ‘poetic’ novel to portray the pleasant activity of browsing the aisles of a palatial Parisian department store. To be sure, Au Bonheur des Dames takes place in Paris during the Second Empire and dramatizes activity within the emerging commercial hub of the eponymous Bonheur des dames store. However, any reader familiar with the other nineteen novels from the Rougon-Macquart is aware that Zola uses enclosed spaces – such as the mine in Germinal (1885), the greenhouse in La Curée (1872), or the train tunnel in La Bête humaine (1890) – to depict and critique the decadence and moral decay of the Second Empire. We shall see that the department store in Au Bonheur des Dames is no exception. The present chapter will emphasize three main points. The first section will explore how Zola conflates the notions of exposure and enclosure within the department store, disrupting the typical spatial categories of openness and closure, and eventually, of inside and outside. The confusion of spatial categories occurs most noticeably during the novel’s three sales (Chapters IV, IX, and XIV), which Zola stages as temporary exhibitions, in the sense that they are exhibitions of new seasonal items: expositions de nouveautés (“exhibitions of novelties”). It is therefore not insignif icant that the word ‘exposition’ in French signifies both ‘exhibition’ and ‘exposure,’ for, as the novel demonstrates, the source of spatial tension is each exhibition’s ‘enclosure,’ rather than the exposure that the glass and iron architecture of the department store would seem to promote. In the second part of this chapter, we will take a closer look at one of the three temporary exhibitions – the sale of summer novelties, l’exposition des nouveautés d’été (Chapter IX) – since it is at this event that the store’s zealous director, Octave Mouret, deploys diverse strategies within the store to increase sales, and in so doing, creates a claustrophobic shopping environment. The entrapment of customers within the temporary sale exhibitions therefore directly contradicts the store’s (and novel’s) paradisal name, the ‘Bonheur des dames.’ In the third and f inal section, we will focus on the store’s advertising balloons distributed during the sale of summer goods, which, as we will argue, effectively dismantle the spatial categories of inside and outside by invading the city streets, bringing the claustrophobic exhibition into the Parisian cityscape. Thus, by conflating opposing spatial experiences, the department store of Zola’s “poem of modern activity,” as well as the temporary exhibitions staged inside it, demonstrate how space is manipulated in order to reap lucrative rewards, commercially speaking for the store portrayed, and as a literary space for the author.

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Claustrophobia and conflict in the department store Au Bonheur des Dames has come to be considered one of the greatest novelistic elaborations of commerce in Second Empire France. The drama unfolds in a memorable introductory scene in which the protagonist Denise arrives in Paris from the provinces. From the first time the soon-to-be shop girl lays her eyes on the glamorous Bonheur des dames department store, she, and by extension the reader, is captivated and seduced by its glistening exterior. Thus, from the opening pages, Zola establishes the majestic architecture of iron and glass as the predominant feature of the novel’s storyworld. The store’s innovative structure creates a lighter, seemingly weightless architecture enabling more divisions of space, as the text describes: On avait vitré les cours, transformées en halls ; et des escaliers en fer s’élevaient du rez-de-chaussée, des ponts de fer étaient jetés d’un bout à l’autre, aux deux étages. L’architecte, par hasard intelligent, un jeune homme amoureux des temps nouveaux, ne s’était servi de la pierre que pour les sous-sols et les piles d’angle, puis avait monté toute l’ossature en fer, des colonnes supportant l’assemblage des poutres et des solives. Les voûtins des planchers, les cloisons des distributions intérieures, étaient en brique. Partout on avait gagné de l’espace, l’air et la lumière entraient librement, le public circulait à l’aise, sous le jet hardi des fermes à longue portée. C’était la cathédrale du commerce moderne, solide et légère, faite pour un peuple de clientes.2

Yet, however open this commercial space – in which “air and light freely entered” (l’air et la lumière entraient librement) – appears, the spatial paradox will turn out to be that its grandiosity attracts shoppers in droves, subsequently generating the formation of an unbearably large crowd that overruns the store in the chapters to come. The distinctly modern architecture of iron 2 Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 297. “The courtyards had been glazed in and transformed into halls; and iron staircases rose from the ground floor, while iron bridges had been thrown across from one end to the other on both floors. The architect, who happened to be intelligent, a young man in love with modernity, had only used stone for the basements and the corner pillars, and then had used iron for the rest of the framework, with columns supporting the assemblage of beams and girders. The counter-arches of the flooring and the internal partitions were of brick. Space had been gained everywhere, light and air entered freely, and the public circulated with ease beneath the bold curves of the wide-spaced trusses. It was the cathedral of modern business, strong and yet light, built for vast crowds of customers.” Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, transl. Brian Nelson. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 233–34.

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and glass creates a seemingly airier and more illuminated interior space, though by the end of the novel, and as Andrew Hill has argued, the store more closely resembles a prison, trapping its customers within its overstuffed aisles.3 Hill elaborates on how the department store acts as a carceral space: “This emphasis on straight lines and right angles geometrically creates the image of cage, containing everyone who passes through the doors of the department store. This box-like quality paired with the hard materials used in the store’s construction render the store structurally similar to a prison.”4 We will further nuance the department store’s prison-like features by elaborating on how the formation and movement of the crowd contribute to the suffocation of the customers, to whom we will return shortly. Moreover, the transparent architecture of the department store permits the exposure of the store’s interior, and, in so doing, invites a comparison to the art of literature itself, as Philippe Hamon has argued in Expositions: “Contenant universel, l’architecture de fer et de verre – même si, bien sûr, elle ne constitue pas la seule forme d’architecture vivante de l’époque – devient apte à servir métaphoriquement de forme universelle de n’importe quel contenu littéraire.”5 For Hamon, the novel’s transparent architecture translates into a well-suited literary space, one in which all can be seen, or rather, one in which all is revealed. The vitreous space of the department store also aligns with the objectives of Naturalism as outlined by Zola himself in Le Roman expérimental, his theorization of the novel in which he considers the novelist as both an observer and experimenter, one who closely scrutinizes and experiments with his characters by placing them in a particular set of narrative circumstances.6 The highly exposed, yet entirely 3 It is worth noting two additional examples of iron and glass architecture from the RougonMacquart that possess many characteristics related to enclosures that we will not have the space to treat in this chapter: the greenhouse from La Curée and the market pavilion of Le Ventre de Paris. 4 Andrew Hill, “Iron and Glass: Imprisonment in Emile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames,” in Criminal Papers: Reading Crime in the French Nineteenth Century, ed. Rosemary Peters (Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 152. 5 Philippe Hamon, Expositions. Littérature et architecture au XIXe siècle (Paris: José Corti, 1989), 92. “A universal container, the architecture of iron and glass – even if, of course, it was not the only form of lively architecture at the time – became apt to serve metaphorically as the universal form of any literary content.” 6 “[N]ous voyons également que le romancier est fait d’un observateur et d’un expérimentateur. L’observateur chez lui donne les faits tels qu’il les a observés, pose le point de départ, établit le terrain solide sur lequel vont marcher les personnages et se développer les phénomènes. Puis, l’expérimentateur paraît et institue l’expérience je veux dire fait mouvoir les personnages dans une histoire particulière, pour y montrer que la succession des faits y sera telle que l’exige le déterminisme des phénomènes mis à l’étude. C’est presque toujours ici une expérience ‘pour

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enclosed, space of the department store in Au Bonheur des Dames therefore embodies the central spatial contradiction of the text since the intensity of enclosure occurs within an architectural aesthetic that purports openness. Although glass would seem to render the store entirely exposed, the interior of the store nevertheless retains the enclosed qualities of stuffiness and circumscription, which Zola, in turn, exploits, thereby exposing the ruthless commercial activity for which the novel is best known and subsequently generating some of the most dramatic moments of the Rougon-Macquart series. It is therefore the conflation of spatial experiences, those of exposure and enclosure, which allows Zola to reveal the inner workings of modern commerce in Au Bonheur des Dames. Although several critics have lingered on Zola’s epic crowd scenes, few have connected the formation and movement (or lack thereof) of the crowd to the department store’s architectural enclosure. Naomi Schor’s landmark study Zola’s Crowds establishes the role and functioning of the crowd throughout Zola’s œuvre. Whereas Schor examines the structural role of Zola’s crowd(s) in several novels from the Rougon-Macquart, for the present focus on enclosed space, the crowd in Au Bonheur des Dames occupies a prominent position since it is, in part, the unruly shoppers who engender the claustrophobia of commerce. To highlight one claustrophobic space within the store itself, the central staircase is essential to the operation of the boisterous crowd, as Heidi Brevik-Zender has compellingly shown.7 It voir,’ comme l’appelle Claude Bernard,” Emile Zola, Le Roman expérimental (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), 7–8. “[W]e also see that the novelist is made of an observer and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he observed them, poses the point of departure, establishes the solid earth on which the characters are to walk and the phenomena to develop. Then, the experimentalist appears and introduces the experiment, that is to say, makes the characters move through a particular story in order to show that the succession of facts will happen there as demanded by the determinism of the phenomena under examination. Here it is almost always an experiment ‘in order to see,’ as Claude Bernard calls it.” 7 “In Au Bonheur des Dames, the central staircase is a key narrative location,” Heidi BrevikZender, Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris (University of Toronto Press, 2014), 46. For a cogent reading of Au Bonheur des Dames, see Brevik-Zender’s first chapter in “Fashioning Spaces,” in which she argues that the staircase relates symbolically to the revolt incited by the Paris Commune: “Zola’s Bonheur staircases thus do more than simply call to mind the civil insurgency of 1871: they also stand as a literary testament to the long-term psychological effects of the Commune, a discursive “commemoration” of trauma [T]he department store staircase emblematized a larger point: that this infamous moment in Paris’s history was inextricably tied to what Zola depicts in Au Bonheur and other early 1880s novels as the subsequent domination, not by a new empire but by a culture of consumption that, for him, had exploded forth in the opening decade of the Third Republic.” Brevik-Zender, Fashioning Spaces, 60.

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is primarily during the novel’s three expositions de nouveautés (Chapters IV, IX, XIV) that the staircase assumes this enclosing quality since it is during these events that purchasers flood the store, making movement, and even breathing, increasingly onerous. A sense of enclosure results from the frenzy of the unruly crowd within a spatially delimited area: Ce n’était plus chose facile que de gagner l’escalier. Une houle compacte de têtes roulait sous les galeries, s’élargissait en fleuve débordé au milieu du hall. Toute une bataille du négoce montait, les vendeurs tenaient à merci ce peuple de femmes, qu’ils se passaient des uns aux autres, en luttant de hâte. L’heure était venue du branle formidable de l’après-midi, quand la machine surchauffée menait la danse des clientes et leur tirait l’argent de la chair. A la soie surtout, une foule soufflait, le Paris-Bonheur ameutait une foule telle, que, pendant plusieurs minutes, Hutin ne put pas faire un pas; et Henriette, suffoquée, ayant levé les yeux, aperçut en haut de l’escalier Mouret, qui revenait toujours à cette place, d’où il voyait la victoire.8

Zola represents the crowd gaining force within the cramped staircase as a wave of heads rolling into the commercial space like an overflowing river (s’élargissait en fleuve débordé). The frenzy over the goods on sale contributes to the notion of competition taking place within the enclosed space, a battle pitting the shoppers against each other (en luttant de hâte) in order to reach the prized items. In the span of a few words, the imagery then abruptly shifts from the flow of water imagery to the overheated machine of the store.9 Suddenly, an anxious crowd floods the staircase such that not a single step could be taken, and suffocation sets in as air becomes increasingly scarce. It is at the very moment of breathlessness that one shopper, Henriette Desforges 8 Zola, Au Bonheur, 165. “It was no longer easy to get to the staircase. A compact mass of heads was surging through the arcades, spreading out like an overflowing river into the middle of the hall. A real commercial battle was developing; the salesmen were holding the army of women at their mercy, passing them from one to another as if to see who could be quickest. The great afternoon rush-hour had arrived, when the overheated machine led the dance of customers, extracting money from their very flesh. In the silk department especially there was a sense of madness; the Paris-Paradise had attracted such a crowd that for several minutes Hutin could not advance a step; and when Henriette, half-suffocated, looked up, she glimpsed Mouret at the top of the stairs for he always came back to the same place from where he could watch the victory.” Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 108. 9 For a meticulous study of the machine metaphor, Jacques Noiray’s volume dedicated to Zola from Le romancier et la machine. L’image de la machine dans le roman français, 1850–1900 (Paris: J. Corti, 1981) remains immensely insightful.

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(who is, in fact, Mouret’s mistress) glances upwards to find the store director at the helm of machine populated with the sea of agitated shoppers. The predominance of Mouret’s elevated stance represents his domination over his clients – who are notably female and who trample each other for the discounted items within his store – as several critics have demonstrated.10 Similarly, scholars have also compared Mouret’s commanding presence within the store to Zola’s authority over the narrative. Schor relates store director’s control over the crowd to Zola’s authorial agency: “Just as it is essential for Mouret to master techniques of crowd manipulation in order for his ‘machine’ to function, Zola must devise methods of crowd formation, specifically literary devices which will insure the proper functioning of his ‘machine,’ his novel.”11 Indeed, the crowd ‘feeds’ the machine of Au Bonheur des Dames, just as Zola furnishes the reader with a formulation of the crowd that supplies the narrative punch in these crucial scenes. Succinctly stated, the sense of enclosure presented throughout the novel’s sales would be inconceivable without the crowd’s presence. What we witness in Zola’s remarkable crowd scenes is the summit of merciless commercial activity. There is competition in every conceivable way – shoppers against shoppers, shoppers versus the store itself, salesperson against salesperson, director versus clients, director against his staff – such that the tightened interior of the store, with its stairwells and overly populated galleries, even the staff’s sleeping corridors, bring the various groups into contact with one another and within the same confines. All of this further provides the narrative benefit of heightening the drama while allowing rivalries to ensue. On the subject of conflict, it is worth lingering on how the sense of confinement produced by the crowd incites a specific type of violence. As Vaheed Ramazani argues, even if the discourse on war surges to the forefront of the sale chapters, analyzing the numerous battles waged within the walls of the department store has gone relatively underdeveloped by scholars: “War discourse in Au Bonheur des Dames is perhaps too obvious – or 10 Andrew Hill remarks that Mouret’s positioning at the top of the staircase, where all can be surveyed, resembles that of the panopticon: “Mouret’s position of observer above the observed is a prime example of Foucault’s panoptical gaze,” Hill, “Iron and Glass: Imprisonment in Emile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames,” 164. For a profound and insightful analysis of Mouret’s domination of women, see Holly Woodson Waddell, “‘La misère en robe de soie’: Women’s Places and Private Spaces in Au bonheur des dames,” Excavatio 13 (2000): 59–68. “Mouret is able to maintain his homosocial reign of power and thus his ability to dominate women/objects in society because the woman’s fetishistic consumption is circumscribed by the four walls of the Bonheur des Dames’ glass palace – a battlefield over which he has eminent control.” Waddel, “La misère,” 60. 11 Naomi Schor, Zola’s Crowds (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 154.

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else too familiar, too much like the conventional business rhetoric of our day – to have sustained more than passing critical commentary.”12 Given the emphasis on the battle over commodities and status – social status for the shoppers, and status within the ranks of the store for the employees – a certain irony can be traced in the novel’s title, which could mislead an uninformed reader to believe that the department store relates to a uniquely idyllic locale.13 Conversely, the shoppers and the mannequins, symbolically posed on the battleground of the central staircase, are figured as soldiers, parading within the store like troops ready for war: Alors, précédée de Denise, Mme Desforges monta lentement l’escalier. Il lui fallait s’arrêter toutes les trois secondes, pour ne pas être emportée par le flot qui descendait. Dans la vibration vivante de la maison entière, les limons de fer avaient sous les pieds un branle sensible, comme tremblant aux haleines de la foule. A chaque marche, un mannequin, solidement fixé, plantait un vêtement immobile, costumes, paletots, robes de chambre ; et l’on eût dit une double haie de soldats pour quelque défilé triomphal.14

If, on the one hand, the formation of the crowd lends itself quite naturally to the use of military metaphors, then, on the other hand, the contrast between movement and fixation in this passage strikes us as equally significant. Struggling against the current, Denise and Henriette Desforges move slowly past the ceaseless flow of shoppers descending down the crowded staircase, every step of which trembles as if it were a war bunker. Clearly, ascending 12 Vaheed K. Ramazani, “Gender, War, and the Department Store: Zola’s Au bonheur des dames,” SubStance 36, no.2 (2007): 139–40. 13 Micheline Cambron and Holly Woodson Waddell have both noted that Au Malheur de Dames would perhaps be a more fitting title for the novel: “[E]n effet, à moins que la frénésie et la dépense nerveuse des clientes du magasin ne soient l’équivalent moderne du bonheur, c’est plutôt du ‘malheur des dames’ dont il serait question dans le roman.” Micheline Cambron, “Circulation narrative: du bonheur et des dames,” Excavatio 1 (1992): 31–32. “[I]n effect, unless the frenzy and nervous spending of the store’s customers are the modern equivalent of happiness, the novel is instead about ‘the ladies’ hardship.’” (My translation) See also: “The f irst wife’s blood inaugurates a sadistic project which could more accurately be named “Au Malheur des Dames” – and the violent flow of blood continues.” Waddell, “‘La misère,” 66. 14 Zola, Au Bonheur, 317–18. “Then, preceded by Denise, Madame Desforges slowly ascended the staircase. She had to stop every two or three seconds to avoid being carried away by the stream of people coming down. In the living vibration of the whole shop, the iron supports were perceptibly moving underfoot, as if trembling at the breath of the crowd. One each step, fixed to the floor, was a dummy displaying a motionless garment, a suit, or an overcoat, or a dressing-gown; they looked like a double row of soldiers lined up for some triumphal procession” Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 253.

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the staircase is anything but a simple feat. Yet, the image of an immobile mannequin on each stair conveys at once the notions of triumph (une double haie de soldats pour quelque défilé triomphal) as well as that of monotony, that regularity of the positioning becomes static and mechanical. If the mannequins can be likened to soldiers, then the department store represents the battlefield for their combat. However, the use of military metaphors does more than simply underscore the notion of battle amongst the various groups who circulate within the enclosed space. Moreover, military figures heighten the sense of isolation, as well as the loss of individuality, amongst shoppers and salespeople. The uniform of the sales personnel conveys the idea of sameness: the black silk dresses worn by protagonist Denise and the other saleswomen represent their homogeneity, in addition to their conformity to the codes of department store as part of its mechanical operation. La robe de soie noire worn by the workers effectively unites them, albeit uniquely in appearance since competition for sales nevertheless persists. An irony lingers in Zola’s repeated emphasis on the robe de soie, as the homophone soi meaning ‘self’ also reverberates in its repetition throughout the text. In effect, la robe de soie/soi paradoxically denotes a loss of the self, a relinquishing of one’s identity in favor of the uniformity of the store, just as wearing of a military signifies the loss of individuality in favor of the troop’s mass effort. In donning the silk dress as uniform, Denise and the other saleswomen therefore risk losing themselves in the military apparatus of the department store commanded by Mouret. And yet, the symbolism of silk pertains not only to the dresses worn by the female staff, as the text reminds us, on more than one occasion, that the galerie de soie remains one of the more densely packed departments within the store. During the first exposition de nouveautés (Chapter IV), a crowd fights its way into the silk department of the Paris-Bonheur: A la soie, la foule était aussi venue. On s’écrasait surtout devant l’étalage intérieur, dressé par Hutin et où Mouret avait donné les touches du maître. [D]es satins clairs et des soies tendres jaillissaient d’abord : les satins à la reine, les satins renaissance, aux tons nacrés d’eau de source ; les soies légères aux transparences de cristal, vert Nil, ciel indien, rose de mai, bleu Danube. Puis, venaient des tissus plus forts, les satins merveilleux, les soies duchesse, teintes chaudes, roulant à flots grossis. Et, en bas, ainsi que dans une vasque, dormaient les étoffes lourdes, les armures façonnées, les damas, les brocarts, les soies perlées et lamées, au milieu d’un lit profond de velours, tous les velours, noirs, blancs, de couleur,

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frappés à fond de soie ou de satin, creusant avec leurs taches mouvantes un lac immobile où semblaient danser des reflets de ciel de paysage. Des femmes, pâles de désirs, se penchaient comme pour se voir. Toutes, en face de cette cataracte lâchée, restaient debout, avec la peur sourde d’être prise dans le débordement d’un pareil luxe et avec l’irrésistible envie de s’y jeter et de s’y perdre.15

The numerous variations of silk found in the crowded silk department succeed in simultaneously alluring and disorienting the rowdy customers. In Naturalism Redressed, Hannah Thompson remarks that the homophone soie/ soi suggests a loss of the self within the silky materials themselves: “‘ [s]oie’ replaces ‘soi’ as the women’s narcissistic loss of selfhood is described with reference to the silk samples which seduce them.”16 Indeed, the variations of silk and satin described in the passage cited above coalesce to form a still lake (un lac immobile), creating a mirror into which the shoppers gaze. The narcissistic regard of the female clients within the luminescent fabrics symbolizes a loss of the self to the machinery of consumerism represented by the store. More broadly, Thompson goes on to argue that silk connotes excess – financial, emotional, and sexual – throughout the Rougon-Macquart series.17 Greater than excess however, the compilation of so many reflecting textiles within the delimited area creates the effect of a house of mirrors, a distorting spatial experience that provides shoppers with no sense of where to find an exit. The abundance of silk fabrics – the worker’s dresses joined with the congested space of the galerie de soie – effectively disorients shoppers, and thus also escalates the claustrophobia of the store’s interior. 15 Zola, Au Bonheur, 147–48. “The crowd had reached the silk department too. There was a tremendous crush before the interior display arranged by Hutin, to which Mouret had added the final touches. [F]irst, pale satins and soft silks were gushing out: royal satins and renaissance satins, with the pearly shades of spring water; light silks as transparent as crystal – Nile green, turquoise, blossom pink, Danube blue. Next came the thicker fabrics, the marvellous satins and the duchess silks, in warm shades, rolling in great waves. And at the bottom, as in a fountain-basin, the heavy materials, the damasks, the brocades, the silver and gold silks, were sleeping on a deep bed of velvets – velvets of all kinds, black, white, coloured, embossed on a background of silk or satin, their shimmering flecks forming a still lake in which reflections of the sky and of the countryside seemed to dance. Women pale with desire were leaning over as if to look at themselves. Faced with this wild cataract, they all remained standing there, filled with the secret fear of being caught up in the overflow of all this luxury and with an irresistible desire to throw themselves into it and be lost.” Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 103-04. 16 Hannah Thompson, Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Emile Zola (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2004), 77. 17 Thompson, 49.

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The piling up of textiles, combined with their reflecting potential, therefore directly contributes to the sensation of enclosure found within the diegetic world of Au Bonheur des Dames. However, the novel’s claustrophobia does not end there since a closer examination of the text reveals that the sense of enclosure equally pertains to Zola’s writing style. Accumulation, in this crucial passage describing the nuances of over twenty types of silk, is as persistent and captivating as the reflective force of the fabrics described. This account, with its endless, excessively detailed lists so typical of Zolian prose, matches the same sense of accumulation it describes. The piling of the various terms describing the fabrics, separated by commas and semicolons, flows like the waterfall (la cataracte lâchée) into which the shoppers feel urged to throw themselves. In short, the silk department produces a visual and spatial spectacle whose distinctive mirroring effect simultaneously incites both confusion and desire, which is reinforced through Zola’s hyperbolic writing style. The crowd, entranced within this silk house of mirrors, is seduced by the curious space and subsequently disoriented within it. The loss of self within the crowded silk gallery thus aligns with one primary characteristic of enclosed spaces throughout the Rougon-Macquart: their ability to captivate individuals, evoking desire, before ultimately destabilizing spatial perception.

Suffocating the crowd: Strategizing claustrophobia By the sale of summer goods, the exposition des nouveautés d’été (Chapter IX), Octave Mouret emerges as the principal overseer of the temporary exhibition, assuming the role as chief curator and commanding his army of employees from the elevated position of the central staircase. As we witnessed in the first sale (Chapter IV), a crowd of eager shoppers forms spontaneously. However, by this second sale, Mouret assumes a far more active role in generating the store’s claustrophobia by ingeniously devising a strategy for crowd formation in order to disrupt client purchasing patterns. Through the use of cluttered and crowded spaces, the calculating store director implements arrangements of goods that encourage buyers to make purchases, concocting layouts that are continually changed in order to prevent habitual shoppers from becoming too familiar with item location: Mais où Mouret se révélait comme un maître sans rival, c’était dans l’aménagement intérieur des magasins. Il posait en loi que pas un coin du Bonheur des dames ne devait rester désert ; partout il exigeait du bruit, de

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la foule, de la vie ; car la vie, disait-il, attire la vie, enfante et pullule. De cette loi, il tirait toutes sortes d’applications. D’abord, on devait s’écrasait pour entrer, il fallait que, de la rue, on crût à une émeute ; et il obtenait cet écrasement, en mettant sous la porte les soldes, des casiers et des corbeilles débordant d’articles à vil prix ; si bien que le menu peuple s’amassait, barrait le seuil, faisait penser que les magasins craquaient de monde, lorsque souvent ils n’étaient qu’à demi pleins.18

From this passage, we remark that Mouret’s modus operandi – La vie attire la vie (“life attracts life”) – is the positive notion driving his method for attracting customers. Yet, the conniving director overloads the store with goods on sale, goods that are intentionally placed near the doors, producing a profusion of desirable commodities that subsequently inspires a horde of shoppers to crush each other in order to secure them. The crowd is therefore the cause of enclosure within the store since the placement of goods forces shoppers to gather in tight corridors, blocking circulation. However, the shoppers who crush each other within the saturated store are not only the ‘cause,’ but also the ‘effect’ of this enclosure due to Mouret’s strategic positioning of goods. In essence, the tactic of attracting ‘life’ to the store relies on the principle that enclosure begets consumption. Put even more precisely, Mouret seizes the profitability of claustrophobia to ensure that the sale is lucrative. The phenomenon of enclosure inspires the sensation of suffocation, the air within the confined locale becomes scarce due to the dense mass of bodies, as the novel states that “two little girls nearly suffocated” (Deux petites filles manquèrent d’être étouffées).19 Therefore, what begins as the principle of life creating life ultimately ends by sucking the ‘life’ (read: air) out of the store. However, in spite of the suffocating environment, the shoppers are continuously pulled into the sale of summer goods. Zola’s descriptions combine asphyxiation and water imagery, creating a paradoxical tension 18 Zola, Au Bonheur, 299. “But it was in the interior arrangement of the shops that Mouret revealed himself to be an unrivalled master. He laid it down as a law that not a corner of the Ladies’ Paradise was to remain deserted; everywhere he insisted upon noise, crowds, life; for life, he would say, attracts life, gives birth and multiplies. He put this law into practice in a whole variety of ways. First of all, there should be a crush at the entrance; it should seem to people in the street that there was a riot in the shop; and he obtained this crush by placing bargains at the entrance, shelves and baskets overflowing with articles at very low prices, so that working-class people began to congregate there, barring the threshold, and giving the impression that the shop was bursting with customers, when it was only half full.” (Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 235–36). 19 Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 240. Zola, Au Bonheur, 304.

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between the lack of air and the overflow of customers. As the crowd gains momentum, aqueous imagery soon dominates the description: Ces dames, saisies par le courant, ne pouvaient plus reculer. Comme les fleuves tirent à eux les eaux errantes d’une vallée, il semblait que le flot des clientes, coulant à plein vestibule, buvait les passants de la rue, aspirait la population des quatre coins de Paris. Elles n’avançaient que très lentement, serrées à perdre haleine, tenues debout par des épaules et des ventres, dont elles sentaient la molle chaleur ; et leur désir satisfait jouissait de cette approche pénible, qui fouettait davantage leur curiosité.20

In the above excerpt, suffocation within the tight confines of the commercial space contrasts with the flowing imagery expressed by the water lexicon. The vocabulary noticeably shifts from free, flowing movement of water to inevitable engulfment. Taken in by a current (courant), as in a river flowing through a valley, the flow ( flot) of female shoppers streams into the store while drinking in (buvait, aspirait) passersby from the street. The image of the whirlpool, an unavoidable current taking in whatever approaches, then modulates in the span of a single sentence. Once inside the conf ines of the store, the customers become more stagnant (Elles n’avançaient que très lentement), the compounding of bodies nearly causing their loss of breath (serrées à perdre haleine). Thus, what started as an ineluctable flow of passersby transforms into a suffocating compression of shoppers. This transition from the exterior city (characterized by movement) to the interior of the store (characterized by entrapment) dizzies shoppers who enter the at once splendid and claustrophobic consumer palace. Customers are violently sucked into store, the whirlpool at the entrance consumes them, pulling them into the commercial palace where they will, in turn, consume the goods on sale. Shifting from unstoppable movement to cramped stagnation, Zola’s mixing of figurative language parallels the spatial confusion he communicates in descriptions of the crowd. 20 Zola, Au Bonheur, 304. “Caught in the current, the ladies were no longer able to turn back. As rivers draw together the stray waters of a valley, so it seemed that the stream of customers, flowing through the entrance hall, was drinking in the passers-by from the street, sucking in the population from the four corners of Paris. They were advancing very slowly, jammed so tightly that they could hardly breathe, held upright by shoulders and stomachs, whose flabby warmth they could feel; and their satisf ied desire revelled in this painful approach, which inflamed their curiosity even more.” (Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 240–241).

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Carried away: Enclosure, balloons, and advertising Up to this point, we have focused on the store’s ability to enclose its shoppers, principally through its cramped spaces, which is strategized by Mouret and reinforced through the figurative language Zola employs to depict the crowd’s seduction by, and subsequent infiltration of, the department store. Even so, this is only one side of the coin, for there is a double movement that occurs in the novel. At the same time, the shoppers are helplessly pulled inside the consumer palace, the store extends itself outwards and into the cityscape through its various promotional schemes. The use of advertising for the Bonheur des Dames and its relationship to spatial enclosure therefore merits some unpacking. Publicity is an essential component of Mouret’s selling tactics since he uses diverse methods of advertising to draw the rambunctious shoppers into the bustling consumer palace. A crucial part of his strategy involves appealing to female customers precisely through the children who accompany them to sale, “conquering the mother through the child” (conquérir la mère par l’enfant) as the novel states.21 Christian Denis has demonstrated how this sort of advertising campaign portrayed in Au Bonheur des Dames, published in 1883, foretells contemporary methods employed by advertisers today, citing the staggering statistic that 43 per cent of all household purchases are due to the influence of a child.22 In the novel, Mouret uses balloons in particular to attract children to the store: “Un trait de génie que cette prime des ballons, distribuée à chaque acheteuse, des ballons rouges, à la fine peau de caoutchouc, portant en grosses lettres le nom du magasin, et qui, tenus au bout d’un fil, voyageant en l’air promenaient par les rues une réclame vivante!”23 On the surface, the distribution of balloons could seem 21 Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 234. Zola, Au Bonheur, 298. 22 See Christian Denis, “La stratégie publicitaire au temps de Zola,” Communication et langages 103 (1995): 88–101. “Mais le prescripteur le plus important que connaissent les publicitaires, c’est l’enfant. En effet, l’enfant influe directement ou indirectement sur 43% des dépenses des ménages (aujourd’hui), d’où le grand cas que font les publicitaires de son image et les sollicitations de toutes sortes dont il est l’objet” (Denis, “La stratégie,” 91–92). “But the most important prescriber with which advertisers are familiar is children. In effect, children influence directly or indirectly on 43 per cent of household spending (today), hence the great case advertisers make with their image and the many solicitations of which they are the subject.” 23 Zola, Au Bonheur, 298. “Presenting a balloon as a free gift to each customer who bought something was a stroke of genius; they were red balloons, made of fine indiarubber and with the name of the shop written on them in big letters; when held on the end of a string they travelled through the air, parading a living advertisement through the streets!” (Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 234–35).

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to be an insignificant gesture, yet it is precisely these seemingly innocent parting gifts that directly relate to the enclosed spatial vocabulary of the text, which Zola deploys most prominently during the temporary sales. It is worth remarking in passing that a pronounced enthusiasm for rubber balloons as children’s toys dates precisely to the Second Empire, the production of which began haphazardly in a factory in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. An 1873 article from Le Petit Marseillais describes the production of rubber balloons, which began in 1857: “Les ballons en caoutchouc destinés à amuser les enfants sont plus à la mode que jamais. Voici sur la fabrication de ce jouet des détails curieux et peu connus : Disons d’abord que l’invention des ballons en baudruche ne remonte qu’à l’année 1857. Un fabricant de Saint-Denis, sur le point de faire faillite, les créa à tout hasard, et, dans huit mois gagna un demi-million.”24 By a similar token, balloons, which Hamon describes as “the absolute anti-architecture” (l’anti-architecture absolue), are a pervasive metaphor in nineteenth-century French literature, due in part to innovations and interest evoked by aerial photographs taken by photographer Félix Nadar as well as by the publication of Jules Verne’s Cinq semaines en ballon in the early 1860s.25 Although the “anti-architectural” balloons and the department store would seem to be diametrically opposed, we might notice that the two forms share a significant aesthetic feature: the balloons, like iron and glass architecture, are designed to appear weightless and seem to float, evoking a sense of enchantment in the children, as in the shoppers. As Hamon suggests, balloons are both empty and filled with air.26 To put it differently, balloons spatialize air by forming an enclosure around the otherwise uncontainable element. Subsequently, it is in fact these floating enclosures that originate in the store itself and are then carried outside by the customers’ children. 24 “Les ballons d’enfants,” Le Petit Marseillais, 24 September 1873, 3. “Rubber balloons destined to amuse children are more fashionable than ever. Here are some curious and little-known details on their fabrication: let us say first that the invention of fine rubber balloons only goes back to the year 1857. A manufacturer in Saint-Denis, on the brink of bankruptcy, created them by chance, and in eight months he reached a half million.” 25 “Arrêtons-nous un instant sur cette métaphore du ballon. Sa position logique dans le champ des enveloppes des corps est évidente. Machine fétiche du siècle (voir les ballons des Expositions universelles, ceux du siège de Paris ou celui de Nadar, ceux des tableaux du Douanier Rousseau, ceux de J. Verne ou de Maupassant – Le voyage du Horla), il est, dans ses acceptions négatives, l’anti-architecture absolue.” Hamon, Expositions, 180. “Let us stop for a moment on the metaphor of the balloon. Its logical position in the field of body envelopes is evident. The machine fetish of the century (see the balloons at the World’s Fairs, those of the Siege of Paris or that of Nadar, those in Douanier Rousseau’s paintings, those of J. Verne or Maupassant – Le voyage du Horla), it is, in its negative meanings, the absolute anti-architecture.” 26 Hamon, 180.

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What we would like to stress is that the red balloons floating throughout the streets are the dynamic objects that connect the imagery of enclosure that populates the interior of the store to the exterior space of the city. In a first step, the balloons create a visual spectacle within the store itself since they reflect the light produced by the display of parasols as customers exit the store: Mais, dès la porte, ces dames étaient perdues. Elles tournèrent à gauche ; et, comme on avait déménagé la mercerie, elles tombèrent au milieu des ruches, puis au milieu des parures. Sous les galeries couvertes, il faisait très chaud, une chaleur de serre, moite et enfermée, chargée de l’odeur fade des tissus, et dans laquelle s’étouffait le piétinement de la foule. Alors, elles revinrent devant la porte, où s’établissait un courant de sortie, tout un défilé interminable de femmes et d’enfants, sur qui flottait un nuage de ballons rouges. Quarante mille ballons étaient prêts, il y avait des garçons chargés spécialement de la distribution. À voir les acheteuses qui se retiraient, on aurait dit en l’air, au bout des fils invisibles, un vol d’énormes bulles de savon, reflétant l’incendie des ombrelles. Le magasin en était tout illuminé. —C’est un monde, déclarait Mme de Boves. On ne sait plus où l’on est.27

In the above passage, the promotional balloons directly contribute to the disorientation of shoppers inside the store. The rubber balloons reflect the light of the parasols, which form their own crowded display: “C’était l’exposition des ombrelles. Toutes ouvertes arrondies comme des boucliers, elles couvraient le hall de la baie vitrée du plafond à la cimaise de chêne verni.”28 The dizzying spell incited by the store’s interior therefore directly 27 Zola, Au Bonheur, 306. “But the ladies had hardly stepped away from the door before they were lost. They turned to the left; and, as the haberdashery had been moved, they found themselves surrounded by ruches, then by head-dresses. It was very warm under the covered galleries; the heat was that of a hothouse, moist and close, laden with the insipid smell of the materials; it muffled the trampling feet of the crowd. Then they went back to the entrance, where a stream of people on their way out was beginning to form, an interminable procession of women and children, above whom there floated a cloud of red balloons. Forty thousand balloons had been prepared; there were boys specially detailed to distribute them. To see the customers who were leaving, one would have thought that in the air above them there was a flight of enormous soap bubbles, on the end of invisible strings, reflecting the fire of the sunshades. The whole shop was lit up by them. ‘What a crowd,’ declared Madame de Boves. ‘You don’t know where you are any more.’” (Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 242). 28 Zola, Au Bonheur, 305. “It was the display of parasols. Wide open and rounded like shields, they covered the hall from the glazed ceiling to the varnished oak mouldings.” (Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 241).

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relates to the assemblage of enclosing elements – the balloons, the opened parasols, the crowd, the covered gallery spaces – all of which combine to create an overcrowded space thereby producing an overwhelming shopping experience. The reference to a “hothouse heat” (chaleur de serre) from the aforementioned quote connects the claustrophobic heat produced within the Mouret’s store to the famous greenhouse found in the second novel of the Rougon-Macquart, La Curée (1872), and could relate furthermore to an actual greenhouse that existed on the first floor of the Bon Marché department store in the decade preceding the publication of the novel.29 All these disorienting elements add up to a suffocating environment with greenhouse-like heat, producing, in turn, an intense visual spectacle with the reflection of the balloons illuminating the entire store. The result is that the shoppers are unable to recognize where they are: “You don’t know where you are any more” (On ne sait plus où l’on est). The department store therefore becomes another world once inside, destabilizing its customers who have been inexplicably drawn into the enclosed space, nearly suffocated while inside, and who depart from the store entirely baffled by the experience. In a f inal step, the children who accompany their mothers into the battlefield of commerce carry the balloons outside and into the streets of Paris: “Au comptoir de distribution, on entamait le quarantième mille : quarante mille ballons rouges qui avaient pris leur vol dans l’air chaud des magasins, toute une nuée de ballons rouges qui flottaient à cette heure d’un bout à l’autre de Paris, portant au ciel le nom du Bonheur des Dames!”30 Thus, by way of the air-filled advertisements, the name of the “Bonheur des dames” invades the city. The store not only overwhelms shoppers through its enclosure within the store: now it overruns the city due to the distribution of the portable advertisements, which extend the walls of the commercial machine into the Parisian cityscape. The balloons constitute at once a cynical parting gift symbolizing consumer duping, as well as a method of promoting the store to ensure that the system of consumption perpetuates. In this 29 In the 30 March issue of L’Univers illustré from 1872, an article on the new arrangement of the Bon Marché (“Les nouveaux magasins du Bon Marché”) mentions a greenhouse, a space exclusively for women: “Mentionnons seulement, en passant, une charmante petite serre exclusivement réservée aux dames, et un buffet de rafraîchissement placé au premier étage.” “Les nouveaux magasins du Bon Marché,” L’Univers illustré, 30 March 1872, 205. “Let us mention, only in passing, a charming little greenhouse reserved exclusively for women, and a buffet of refreshments placed on the first floor.” 30 Zola, Au Bonheur, 331. “At the distribution counter they were starting on their fortieth thousand: forty thousand red balloons had taken flight in the hot air of the shop, a whole cloud of red balloons which were now floating from one end of Paris to the other, carrying up to heaven the name of the Ladies’ Paradise!” (Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 266).

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way, Zola makes a subtle, yet incisive commentary on the consumerism of Second Empire society. In what might seem to be a light, weightless image of red balloons carried by children the author signals a dismantling of the interior and exterior spaces. The air-filled enclosure of the rubber balloon therefore emblematizes the larger enclosing forces at play during the Second Empire. As a method of advertising, the red balloons that originate within the stuffy atmosphere of the store, and which subsequently invade the city, extend the claustrophobia of the store into the streets. This inundation of the store into the city goes beyond the distribution of the infamous red balloons, since the machine of advertising assumes many forms: La grande puissance était surtout la publicité. Mouret en arrivait à dépenser par an trois cent mille francs de catalogues, d’annonces et d’aff iches. Pour sa mise en vente des nouveautés d’été, il avait lancé deux cent mille catalogues, dont cinquante mille à l’étranger, traduits dans toutes les langues. Maintenant, il les faisait illustrer de gravures, il les accompagnait même d’échantillons, collés sur les feuilles. C’était un débordement d’étalages, le Bonheur des Dames sautait aux yeux du monde entier, envahissait les murailles, les journaux, jusqu’aux rideaux des théâtres. Il professait que la femme est sans force contre la réclame, qu’elle finit fatalement par aller au bruit.31

The force of advertising that attacks by way of catalogs, posters, and announcements that circulate within Paris contributes to the store’s extension. As we learn in the novel’s final chapter, advertising causes the demise of old commerce with the rival store, Le Vieil Elbeuf, being mummified within the plethora of posters publicizing the Paris-Bonheur: Sur l’autre trottoir, depuis l’entrée de Baudu dans une maison de retraite, le Vieil Elbeuf était fermé, muré ainsi qu’une tombe, derrière les volets 31 Zola, Au Bonheur, 298–99. “Mouret’s greatest source of power was publicity. He spent as much as three hundred thousand francs a year on catalogues, advertisements, and posters. For his sale of summer fashions he had sent out two hundred thousand catalogues, of which fifty thousand, translated into every language, were sent abroad. He now had them illustrated with drawings, and even enclosed samples with them, glued on to the pages. His displays appeared everywhere. The Ladies’ Paradise was staring the whole world in the face, invading walls, newspapers, and even the curtains of theatres. He declared that Woman was helpless against advertisements; in the end she inevitably went to see what all the noise was about.” (Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 235).

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qu’on n’enlevait plus ; peu à peu, les roues de fiacres les éclaboussaient, des affiches les noyaient, les collaient ensemble, flot montant de la publicité, qui semblait la dernière pelletée de terre jetée sur le vieux commerce ; et, au milieu de cette devanture morte, salie de crachats de la rue, bariolée des guenilles du vacarme parisien, s’étalait, comme un drapeau planté sur un empire conquis, une immense affiche jaune, toute fraîche, annonçant en lettres de deux pieds la grande mise en vente du Bonheur des Dames.32

This attempt to invade the city by advertising finds its confirmation in print materials that circulated and promoted the Bon Marché department store, one of the sources of inspiration upon which Zola based his novel. If we base our judgments solely on images from nineteenth-century engravings – and to which Zola refers in the preceding quotation – the Bon Marché was synonymous with a crowd. Images were a crucial way in which Aristide Boucicaut’s store promoted itself.33 The representation of the crowd in illustrations found in promotional items, such as catalogs and posters, is striking since these visual examples foreground the gathering of people inside as well as outside the Bon Marché. Such images were distributed by the store itself in desk calendars, which included pages with engravings that were to serve as ink blotting papers. Representations depicting the famous staircases of the store in calendars dating to the late nineteenth century allow us to visualize the augmentation of the crowd following the publication of Au Bonheur des Dames. Images from calendars prior to the novel’s publication in 1883 highlight several staircases within the Bon 32 Zola, Au Bonheur, 459–60. “On the opposite pavement the Vieil Elbeuf, which had been closed since Baudu’s admittance into a home for the elderly, was walled up like a tomb behind the shutters which were no longer taken down; the wheels of passing cabs splashed them with mud, while in the rising tide of publicity they were being drowned under posters which glued them together and seemed to be the final act in the burial of the old way of business. In the middle of the dead shop-window soiled by the street, motley with the rags and tatters of the life of the city, a huge yellow poster was displayed like a flag planted on a conquered empire. It was still wet, and in letters two feet high it announced the great sale at the Ladies’ Paradise.” (Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 391). 33 “Perhaps more than anything else the Bon Marché conducted its self-promotion campaign through the immediacy of pictures,” Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 174. Miller goes on to include the agenda-buvards in his discussion of the tremendous diversity of images distributed by the Bon Marché: “In House pamphlets, House agendas (calendar books), House catalogues, free picture cards passed out to children in the hundreds of thousands in sets or series (so that cards became collectors’ items and return visits were obligatory), or even simply in children’s games, the Bon Marché used the medium of pictures to play up the monumental and spectacular side of its image” (Miller, The Bon Marché, 174–75).

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Marché, images in which, as we can see, anonymous figures gathered on the various floors of the store, with some figures ascending and descending the staircase. Yet, we can hardly say that we witness a visual representation of one of Zola’s crushing crowd scenes since even though the store is certainly populated with shoppers, some segments of the staircase remain clearly visible. However, an engraving published in the agenda-buvard from the Bon Marché in 1895 will shift this perspective. Figure 2.1. depicts the central staircase of the Bon Marché from an elevated angle. In this image, no empty space can be found on the staircase, which is teeming with unidentifiable figures whose outlines blur as the perspective deepens. Though the figures appear relatively calm – certainly not as hostile as in Zola’s descriptions – the crowd occupies not only the entirety of central staircase, but also all floors of the store as well. This visual example from 1895, twelve years after the publication of Au Bonheur des Dames, therefore helps to indicate a shift in the representation of crowds within the interior of the department store. Pairing the image with Zola’s novelistic portrayal of the hordes of shoppers might suggest that the novelist participates in the intensification of crowd representations within the confines of the department store at the close of the nineteenth century. Such engravings represent the growing nature of the crowd during the f inal decades of the nineteenth century, a growth that Zola depicts by adding the violent dimension of suffocation which is absent from the relatively pleasant images used to promote the Bon Marché store. In sum, the temporary exhibitions of goods on sale in Au Bonheur des Dames operate through the creation of a claustrophobic shopping experience, which is orchestrated by Mouret and staged in this way by Zola through the use of the exposed, yet enclosed space of the department store. The advertising balloons symbolize this aggressive sense of spatial enclosure, which originates in the store and extends outwards into the Parisian cityscape. Zola therefore mobilizes a field of imagery that relies upon ephemera to produce the lasting effect of a commercial take over. In other words, the temporariness of the sales, like that of the balloons, as well as that of the calendar images, produces destructive consequences for the surrounding competitors like the Vieil Elbeuf. In this way, Zola’s deployment of advertising for the department store and its temporary exhibitions urges us to question how similar advertising schemes play out in today’s commercial atmosphere. Given our analysis of Zola’s balloons, images from the Bon Marché’s Instagram account, which date to December 2017 and show the distribution of red balloons for the end-of-the-year holiday sales, demonstrate the crafty ways in which advertising schemes continue to beguile us in today’s

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Fig. 2.1. Escalier central. Conduisant aux Soieries et au Salon de Lecture, au comptoir des articles de Chine et du Japon, aux Vêtements pour Fillettes, etc.. Illustration from: Agenda-buvard du Bon Marché. 1895, p.93. Courtesy of the author.

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market. Taken from social media, such images not only confirm the Bon Marché’s continued use of red promotional balloons; they also reinforce the ephemerality of advertising tactics that invade our cities as well as our social media feeds. We are therefore being confronted with new forms of publicity for the ephemeral exhibitions of our time. Such temporary modes of expression, like the Instagram story, form an essential part the marketing machine that feeds the mind of the consumer in the twenty-first century. Indeed, we could look back at Au Bonheur des Dames as a piece critiquing the commercial landscape of the Second Empire, which it undoubtedly is. However, Zola’s novel and his dynamic advertising balloons equally prompt us to consider the ways in which current advertisements, like the Instagram story, disrupt our spatio-temporal relationship to commerce, thereby influencing how and why we make purchases, which often produces, in turn, lucrative results for the companies who make use of ephemeral marketing strategies today.

Bibliography Agenda-buvard du Bon Marché, 1895. Brevik-Zender, Heidi. Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late NineteenthCentury Paris. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Cambron, Micheline. “Circulation narrative. Du bonheur et des dames.” Excavatio 1 (1992): 31–43. Denis, Christian. “La stratégie publicitaire au temps de Zola.” Communication et langages 103 (1995): 88–101. Hamon, Philippe. Expositions. Littérature et architecture au XIXe siècle. Paris: José Corti, 1989. Hill, Andrew. “Iron and Glass: Imprisonment in Emile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames.” In Criminal Papers: Reading Crime in the French Nineteenth Century, edited by Rosemary Peters, 151–167. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. “Les ballons d’enfants.” Le Petit Marseillais, 24 September 1873, 3. “Les nouveaux magasins du Bon Marché.” L’Univers illustré, 30 March 1872, 205. Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Noiray, Jacques. Le romancier et la machine. L’image de la machine dans le roman français, 1850–1900. vol. I “L’Univers de Zola.” Paris: José Corti, 1981. Ramazani, Vaheed K. “Gender, War, and the Department Store: Zola’s Au bonheur des dames.” SubStance 36, no.2 (2007): 126–46.

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Schor, Naomi. Zola’s Crowds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Thompson, Hannah. Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Emile Zola. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2004. Waddell, Holly Woodson. “‘La misère en robe de soie’: Women’s Places and Private Spaces in Au bonheur des dames.” Excavatio 13 (2000): 59–68. Zola, Émile. Au Bonheur des Dames. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. ———. Le Roman expérimental. Paris: Charpentier, 1881. ———. Œuvres. Manuscrits et dossiers préparatoires. Les Rougon-Macquart. Au Bonheur des dames. Dossier préparatoire. Premier volume, 1881. Manuscript. From Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9079744m/f3.image.r=%C5%92uvres; last accessed 9 January 2020). ———. The Ladies’ Paradise. Translated by Brian Nelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

About the author Kathryn Haklin holds a PhD in French Literature from Johns Hopkins University. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Colorado College. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis where she taught French language, literature, and interdisciplinary cultural studies courses. Her research focuses on representations of claustrophobia and enclosed space in nineteenth-century France and explores a range of media – from poetry and prose, to painting and caricature, to fashion and film. She is currently working on her first book project, Before Claustrophobia: Enclosure in French Literature, 1857–1890, which examines how authors Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Émile Zola deploy a new conception of enclosed space in their texts, anticipating the first medical definitions for spatial phobias that emerge during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Other projects include an article on the aquarium displayed at the 1867 Exposition universelle and its literary legacy in Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer and Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, and an essay on experimental film narration in William Klein’s 1966 fashion satire Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo?

3.

Jardins-Spectacles: Spaces and Traces of Embodiment Susan Taylor-Leduc

Abstract During the French Revolution, resourceful entrepreneurs seized properties on the outskirts of Paris to create jardins-spectacles, urban pleasure grounds that merged the former aristocratic practices of picturesque strolling with popular entertainments. Visitors paid entrance fees to explore the artfully contrived sensorium and watch astonishing performances, including fireworks displays and hot-air balloon launchings, while strolling. Simon Charles Boutin’s development of Tivoli, one of the most popular of the approximately twenty jardins-spectacles built from 1795 until 1820, reveals how these venues became places to perform embodied spectatorship. The ephemerality of the jardins-spectacles has marginalized their contribution to the history of visuality in the long eighteenth century. Keywords: picturesque gardens, Tivoli, embodied spectatorship

Introduction In the closing decades of the Ancien Régime, princes, aristocrats and financiers invested staggering sums to create pleasure pavilions in suburban Paris; luxury retreats often associated with libertinage, these pavilions were notably surrounded by gardens.1 Simon Charles Boutin (1720–1794), Notes 1 Claire Ollagnier, Petites maisons. Du refuge libertin au pavillon d’habitation en Île-de-France au siècle des Lumières (Brussels: Mardaga, 2016), 17–55, 106, 126–132, and Bruno Centorame, “Folies et jardins,” in La nouvelle Athènes, Haut Lieu de Romantisme (Paris: Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris, 2001), 35–49.

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_ch03

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an immensely rich financier, allegedly invested over one million livres in his residence and garden then known as the Folie Boutin.2 The word “folie” intimated that Boutin’s lavish venture was eccentric and perhaps frivolous, but building a folie further indicated that Boutin’s garden was an extravagant financial investment.3 Unlike the majority of his peers, Boutin opened his 20–acre garden at the northwestern limits of the city to the public in 1771, issuing bi-weekly entrance tickets. Boutin effectively joined his cultural and financial clout with entrepreneurship, a carefully crafted gesture that would initiate the creation of a new type of garden experience—the jardin-spectacle. 4 Boutin’s folie, better known as Tivoli, serves as a case study to examine the evolution of jardins-spectacles as they materialized from elite pleasure grounds into liminal spaces during the Revolutionary decade.5 From 1795 until c.1830, approximately 20 Parisian 2 The garden was located at 76–78 rue Saint Lazare and 27 rue de Clichy, in today’s 9th arrondissement. There were three different incarnations of the Tivoli gardens: the Folie Boutin or Tivoli (1771–1793), the Tivoli (1795–1810), and a “Nouveau” Tivoli (1810–1826). A “livre tournois” is approximately 11.5 euros. 3 “Folie,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Vol. 7, 42–44, University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), ed. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, http://encyclopedie.uchicago. edu/, accessed August 27, 2018. Garden “fabriques,” or architectural buildings, were also called folies. See “Fabrique,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Vol. 6, 351, University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/, accessed 27 August 2018. 4 Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, “Tivoli,” in Le Censeur Dramatique, ou journal des principaux théâtres de Paris et des départemens Vol. 1 (Paris: Chez Desenne, 1797): 76–82; Gaston Capon, Les Tivolis, 1796–1841 (Paris: Impr. De Arrault, 1901); Gilles-Antoine Langlois, “Le Grand Tivoli,” in Folies, tivolis et attractions, les premiers parcs de loisirs parisiens (Paris: Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1991), 85–121, 178–86; Gilles-Antoine Langlois, “‘Les Charmes de l’égalité,’ éléments pour une urbanistique des loisirs publics à Paris de Louis XV à Louis-Philippe,” Histoire Urbaine 1 (June 2000): 7–24. 5 Baronne d’Oberkirch: “Il a donné à son jardin le nom de Tivoli, mais l’appellation populaire est la Folie-Boutin. Folie est le mot: il a dépensé ou plutôt enfoui plusieurs millions. C’est un lieu de plaisance ravissant, les surprises s’y trouvent à chaque pas.” Baronne Henriette Louise Oberkirch, Mémoires sur la cour de Louis XVI et la société française avant 1789, ed. Suzanne Burkard (Paris: Mercure de France, 1989), 257; Louis Petit de Bachaumont: “Le Sieur Boutin, receveur général des finances […] fait beaucoup parler de lui aujourd’hui. Il a entrepris de créer dans un faubourg de Paris un jardin singulier, où il rassemblera tout ce que la nature agreste et cultivée peut fournir de productions et de spectacles en quelque genre que ce soit. Il a nommé ce lieu « Tivoli » et quoique l’entreprise de ce chef d’œuvre ne soit pas à son point de perfection, on en parle avec emphase: la curiosité l’exalte; on se presse de l’aller voir, mais on ne peut entrer que par billet. On veut que M. Boutin ait déjà répandu 1 million dans l’établissement dont on parle.” Mémoires secrets pour servir l’histoire de la République des lettres en France, depuis 1762 jusqu’à nos jours, Vol. 3 (14 July 1771), ed. Christophe Cave and Suzanne Cornand (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009), 1540.

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Fig. 3.1. Aristide-Michel Perrot (text’s author). Panorama de la ville de Paris par A.M. Perrot pour servir à l’ouvrage intitulé Panorama de Paris de J.A. Dulaure. Engraving, 1824, 420 x 290 mm. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France. © Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

jardins-spectacles opened, closed, and reopened as entrepreneurs’ fortunes rose and fell with the quickly changing economic and political developments. Tivoli is visible in the northwest quadrant of a map designed for tourists visiting Paris in 1824 (Figure 3.1.). Establishing the fundamental connection between garden strolling and jardins-spectacles, I contend that despite their ephemerality, the jardins-spectacles left affective traces that continue to influence contemporary landscape design and the development of virtual landscapes.6 The surveyor and engraver Georges-Louis Le Rouge (1712–1790) included a view of Boutin’s garden in 1775 in one of his first notebooks dedicated to Jardins anglo-chinois à la mode (Figure 3.2.).7 The engraving reveals a rather eclectic space: upon exiting the residence, now lost, one stepped onto a narrow parterre lined by 12 bird houses (n), 6 on either side, punctuated by 6 On the notion of affective trace, see Dominique Bauer, Place-Text-Trace: The Fragility of the Spatial Image (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2018). See also William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 7 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 93–94; David L. Hays, “Mapping and ‘Natural’ Garden Design in Late Eighteenth-Century France: The Example of Georges-Louis Le Rouge,” Site/Lines 12, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 6–9; Véronique Royet, Georges Louis Le Rouge: Les jardins anglo-chinois. Inventaire du fonds français, graveurs du XVIIIe siècle, 15 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2004).

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a circular water basin that led to a belvedere (g). To the west of the central parterre, shielded by rows of chestnut trees, were service buildings, which included a menagerie (c) for exotic birds, stables for farm animals, and a pleasure dairy (i) for the tasting of cream and cheeses. A building known as the gladiator’s pavilion, named for the statue of a gladiator displayed under an oculus, roughly divided the space as a T at the cross-axis of the site. From the pavilion, one entered the so-called English garden where a serpentine water path diagonally traversed the space. Bridges crossed the water circuit, and clumps of trees were strategically planted at oblique angles. After exploring the English garden, one exited to the belvedere (g). From this point, which was elevated and afforded views across the gardens and over the city, one entered the designated “Italian” garden, built as a series of interlocked terraces.8 Returning to the residence, one viewed the fruits and flowers on display in the kitchen gardens, hothouses, and orchard. The location of Tivoli on a hill then outside the city limits enabled visitors to enjoy views of the garden as well as the surrounding cityscape. Boutin’s decision to market his garden as Tivoli explicitly recalled picturesque viewing practices. Travel accounts and landscape paintings had long promoted framed vistas of antique Roman temples, especially the temple of Sibyl at Tivoli in Italy, where visitors judged the relationship between art and nature, joining literary and historical associations to appreciation of la belle nature. Although Boutin did not create a mock temple at his garden, the naming of his garden as Tivoli, coupled with the vistas over the Parisian skyline, aped the codes of viewing associated with the picturesque travel and landscape painting.9 Boutin’s folie celebrated the pleasures of rus en urbe, bringing the joys of gardening to the city, where he entertained with the fruits from his garden. Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière (1758–1837), the celebrated epicurean, noted that the entire space aroused sensorial delights. Citing the exotic fruits cultivated in hothouses and the perfumed flowers imported from Holland, Grimod de la Reynière recounted that the garden enchanted the eye and scintillated the nose, imbuing the atmosphere with perfumed scents.10 Similarly, the painter and socialite Madame Elizabeth 8 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 90–94, reproduces three plans of Tivoli. 9 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Tivoli,” in Le nouveau Paris, Paris, 1799, ed. Jean Claude Bonnet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 611–615, precisely made the parallel between viewing the ancient Tivoli and the new space championing the Parisian garden. 10 Grimod de la Reynière, Le Censeur Dramatique, Vol. 1 77: “Un tableau dont les nuances, par leur éclat embaumé, enchantoient l’œil, en enivrant l’odorat ; des Bosquets remplis d’arbres rares, plantés avec cette irrégularité voluptueuse qui favorise si bien le Poète et l’Amant ; des

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Fig. 3.2. Georges-Louis Lerouge, Jardin de M. Boutin, Pavillon de la Grande allée à Chiswick; Pavillon près du pont à Chiswick. Etching, 1775, 207 x 324 mm. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France. © Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Vigée LeBrun (1755–1842) recalled in her Souvenirs that Boutin, a bel esprit, hosted weekly dinners with artists and savants, further suggesting that the garden was considered a place for aristocratic sociability.11 Yet, was Boutin’s garden a place of reverie? A retreat designed to evoke pastoral pleasures and cultivate gourmet palates? Or an attempt to market the most fashionable trends, presenting an innovative garden design that would enhance his reputation at the epicenter of avant-garde sociability? Horace Walpole, who visited the site the year it opened, quipped that the garden was ridiculous and did not reflect an English garden at all: English gardening gains ground here prodigiously—I have literally seen one, that is exactly like a tailor’s paper of patterns: there is a Monsieur Eaux ménagées avec art, qui circulant dans des canaux tortueux, n’en imitoient que mieux les caprices des Naïades fugitives ; tout concouroit à faire de cet asile un séjour enchanté.” 11 Élisabeth Vigée LeBrun, “M. Boutin,” in Souvenirs, 1755–1842, ed. Geneviève HaroucheBouzinac (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015), 303–304 and note 390. Vigée LeBrun further commented that the garden was isolated, framed by large trees that gave the illusion it was located in the countryside. Madame LeBrun was further moved to say that she counseled Boutin never to return home alone at night, implying that the site was so isolated it could be dangerous.

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Boutin, who has tacked a piece of what he calls an English garden to a set of stone terraces with steps of turf. There are three or four very high hills, almost as high and exactly the shape of a tansy pudding. You squeeze between these and a river, that is conducted at obtuse angles in a stone channel, and supplied by a pump; and when walnuts come in I suppose it will be navigable. In a corner enclosed by a chalk wall are the samples I mentioned: there is a stripe of grass, another of corn, and a third weeds, exactly in the order of beds in a plant nursery. They have translated Mr. Whately’s book, and the Lord knows what barbarism is going to be laid at our door. This new Anglomanie will literally be mad English.12

Despite Walpole’s acerbic critique, Boutin’s garden became one of the most sought-after spaces that championed picturesque strolling at a suburban venue. For the next 20 years, the Folie Boutin/Tivoli was a tourist site that attracted foreigners and Parisians alike to enjoy the pleasures of a picturesque garden stroll.

Boutin’s Tivoli: 1771–1793 Leaving aside the question about whether the Tivoli was one of the first “English”-style gardens in France or not, I contend that Boutin’s garden was a liminal space, where semiotic associations of gardens as pastoral retreats were joined to the recreational culture of urban entertainments.13 From the outset, Boutin conceived of his garden at the threshold of public and private spheres, a border zone, where elite leisure practices of viewing and strolling merged with opportunities to participate in collective moments of shared 12 Horace Walpole, “Letter to John Chute, Esquire, Paris, August 5, 1771,” in Correspondence of Horace Walpole, Vol. 3, 1770–1797 (London: Henry Colburn, 1837), 33. The history of the English garden in France is beyond the scope of this chapter. For an overview, see John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). 13 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 28–37. Langlois, 95, mentions that Abbé Delille in Les jardins, ou l’art d’embellir les paysages (Paris: Didot, 1782), claimed that Tivoli was the first English garden: “L’aimable Tivoli, d’une forme nouvelle/Fit le premier en France entrevoir le modèle.” For a listing of the many types of spectacles performed in Paris in 1787, see Almanach du voyageur à Paris et dans les lieux les plus remarquables du royaume (Paris: Hardouin, 1787), 216–220. Many of the spectacles became theatrical productions after 1820 as recorded by Galignani’s New Paris Guide (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1830), 558–569, which includes descriptions of Tivoli, Panoramas, and the Cirque Olympique. The circus emerged in the 1790s, but unlike the jardins-spectacles, it focused on equestrian events that could be mounted under a tent on a circular stage.

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astonishment. Boutin’s garden was a spatial entity that mitigated these two spheres, where corporeal mobility and mobilized gazing promoted sensorial affectivity—introducing diverse possibilities for emotional engagement.14 Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, visitors marveled at Boutin’s collections displayed in the garden; the rare birds, exotic species of trees, and the natural history objects in the pavilion of the gladiator, were all noted in contemporary guidebooks. Mobilizing the gaze in order to admire the patron’s collections certainly recalls the tradition of curiosity cabinets; however, at Boutin’s Tivoli, the range of objects presented in the interlocked areas of the garden were intentionally startling. Although the axial alignment of the parterres recalled the promenade de civilité associated with strolling at the Tuileries or Luxembourg gardens, at Tivoli, the manner in which one moved throughout the space required a major change in bodily comportment that significantly altered the way one both perceived and reacted to the objects on display as well as the perception of the space itself.15 Le Rouge, in a rare written addendum to his engraved view, detailed how one was expected to appreciate the space: “Upon entering the English garden, symmetry ceased, and one discovered the space by twisting paths, an artificial river in serpentine forms creates two islands and a cascade. Strolling diverse irregular bosquets, one encounters hills, bridges, an antique tomb accompanied by Cypress trees, a sheep fold, several rare shrubberies with flowers and foreign plants.”16 It is hard to imagine all these twists and turns squeezed into the area allocated on the plan, but clearly visitors either expected to see this catalogue of pastoral motifs or, at the very least, anticipated that they would encounter surprises when strolling there.17 Guidebooks noted that the garden presented an “enchanting disorder” prompting an ephemeral yet genuinely felt sense of excitement where visitors expected to enjoy both an emotional release and distinctly physical sensations as they confronted the unexpected. Furthermore, Boutin solicited all the senses: fragrances appealed to the nose; splashing water coupled with bird songs stimulated auditory delight; and, for the lucky few, invitations to taste exotic fruits stimulated taste. 14 Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (May 2012): 193–220. 15 Laurent Turcot, Le promeneur à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 25–89. 16 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 93–94, reprints Le Rouge’s description that included precise measurements, clearly indicating that Le Rouge surveyed the space. 17 Susan Taylor-Leduc, “The Pleasures of Surprise: The Picturesque Garden in France,” The Senses and Society 10, no. 3 (2016): 361–380.

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Boutin effectively designed his gardens as a series of spaces where one experimented with intersensoriality. Once inside the parameters of the jardin-spectacle, the visitor-stroller was solicited by visual, tactile, and auditory prompts requiring constant adjustments for gait, posture, and gesture so that the act of strolling became embodied.18 Embodied strolling implied that visitors were both “receivers and generators of sense experiences that were neither passive nor static, but possessed their own dynamic force […].”19 As one moved through the garden, the senses registered a range of physical reactions to the built and natural environments enabling strollers to explore how bodies “felt,” connecting sensate empiricism with emotional affectivity.20 Boutin’s prescient garden patronage coincided with a surge in publications dedicated to French picturesque theory; however, despite the proliferation of treatises, garden theory was rather inchoate in the 1770s. Although Le Rouge’s plan designates areas of the garden as “Italian” and “English,” neither the plan nor the description indicates that Boutin was particularly engaged in garden theory. By contrast, Boutin’s decision to issue tickets to Tivoli suggests that the gardenesque atmosphere of the Parisian fairs and boulevards, where paid entertainment was a well-established feature of the cityscape, was inspiration for his garden. As guidebooks to Paris in the 1770s and 1780s detail, when strolling the tree-lined boulevards, visitors could shop for luxury and populuxe goods while enjoying magic shows, card games, and burlesque performances that attracted mixed social classes.21 At the 18 My conception of embodied strolling is inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), and Carrie Noland, “Embodiment,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 465–470. 19 Arnold Berleant, “Aesthetic Embodiment,” in Rethinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 83–90, 88. 20 Roy Porter and Georges Vigarello, “Entre sciences fondamentales et théories de la vie,” in Histoire du Corps, de la Renaissance aux Lumières, Vol. 1, ed. Georges Vigarello (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 371–380; Georges Vigarello, Le sentiment de soi: Histoire de la perception du corps (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2014). Denis Diderot, reflected upon the mind-body connection in his entry “Affectation,” “Mais on ne peut douter que cela n’arrive quelquefois: c’est dans le mécanisme du corps qu’il faut chercher la cause de la différence de sensibilité dans différents hommes, à l’occasion du même objet.” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/, accessed 29 August 2018, Vol. 1, 158. 21 Turcot, “Boulevards,” in Le Promeneur à Paris au XVIII siècle, 135–127; Vigée LeBrun, “Lettre III, Mes Promenades,” in Souvenirs, 145–150; Robert M. Isherwood “Entertainment in the Parisian Fairs in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 53, no. 1 (March 1981): 24–48; William H. Sewell Jr., “Connecting Capitalism to the French Revolution: The Parisian Promenade and the Origins of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France,” Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 1

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annual Paris fairs, marionettes, acrobats, exotic animals, and mechanical and optical devices inspired both awe and marvel.22 The merging of garden culture and contemporary entertainment industries accelerated after 1783 when the Duc de Chartres (1747–1793, better known as Philippe Égalité), expanded his Parisian residence at the Palais Royal.23 Whereas the formal garden at the Palais Royal had offered Parisians opportunity to promenade since the seventeenth century, Chartres’s decision to develop arcades for shopping, cafés, theatrical performances, and burlesque spectacles suggests that the urban promenade was increasingly keyed to consumerism. Perhaps inspired by both Tivoli and the success of his business ventures at the Palais Royal, Chartres developed his own petite maison better known as the Folie Monceau located one kilometer from Tivoli.24 Like Tivoli, Chartres’s Folie Monceau was an explicitly playful realm, but it remained a princely venue, designed primarily to accommodate his pursuit of libertinage, gambling, and freemasonry.25

(Spring 2014): 5–46. The closure of the majority of jardins-spectacles after 1825 reflects expanding urbanism because many of the entertainments became more closely associated with theaters and equestrian displays. For a review of this latter period, see Alexis Donnet, Architectonographie des théâtres de Paris, ou parallèle historique et critique de ces édifices considérés sous le rapport de l’architecture et de la décoration (Paris: P. Didot l’aîné,1821), 223–226. 22 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 38, 71–84; Langlois, “‘Les Charmes de l’égalité,’” 15; Barbara M. Stafford, Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); and Daniel Roche, La France des Lumières (Paris: Fayard, 1993), have established the rise of entertainment culture. 23 For an introduction to the Palais Royal, see the exhibition catalog, Le Palais Royal, 9 May–4 September, Paris, Musée Carnavalet, 1998. To chart the changing fortunes of the Palais Royal in this period, see Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, Nouvelle édition, corrigée et augmentée, vol. 2, Amsterdam: [s.n.], 1783, 102–104. Mercier provides another description of the Palais Royal during the Revolution, Le Nouveau Paris, ed. Jean Claude Bonnet (Paris: Mercure de France, (1798) 1994), 377–399. 24 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 138–147. Langlois argues that Monceau became a jardinspectacles after Philippe Égalité’s death. In 1796, citizen Blanchard proposed “bals champêtres dans le genre de Ruggieri” at Monceau, which was particularly renowned for balloon ascensions. 25 On the Folie Monceau, see Joseph Disponzio, “From Eden to Seraglio: Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle’s Jardin de Monceau and the Persiflage of the Picturesque,” in Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished Essays Presented to Robin Middleton, ed. Barry Bergdoll and Werner Oechslin (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 245–66; David L. Hays, “‘This is not a Jardin Anglais’: Carmontelle, the Jardin de Monceau, and Irregular Garden Design in Late Eighteenth-Century France,” in Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, ed. Mirka Benes and Dianne Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 294–326; and Carmontelle, Garden at Monceau, eds. Elizabeth Barlow Rodgers and Joseph Disponzio (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Distributed for the Foundation for Landscape Studies at the Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, VA, 2020).

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Certainly, Boutin could not compete with Chartres’s financial and political capital; nonetheless, at Tivoli he delivered nontangible commodities, effectively guaranteeing that he could galvanize a range of emotions to enhance the pleasures of embodied strolling. The possibility that embodied strolling was a potentially marketable commodity fully emerged when Tivoli was reconfigured as a new type of urban recreation, the jardin-spectacle, during the Revolutionary decade. Boutin did not survive to see the metamorphosis of his garden into a new spatial zone. He left Paris to travel to Bath, England, in 1793, upon which he was immediately registered as an émigré and his properties confiscated. When he returned to France, he was imprisoned until he was executed on the guillotine in July 1794. Boutin’s heirs claimed the rights to Tivoli and managed the site from 1797 until the 1830s.26

Revolutionary Spectacles: 1795–1804 The transformation of Tivoli from a picturesque pleasure ground to a jardinspectacle was intertwined with the propagation of Revolutionary festivals.27 Conceived as didactic events, the politically orchestrated festivals promoted abstract values such as virtue, equality, and federation, staged to promote civic identity and elicit patriotic fervor.28 The failure of revolutionary festivals to sustain affective engagement was captured in the Journal de Paris on June 28, 1796: “Do you believe that it is royalism that makes the crowd run to Ruggieri’s (aka one of the jardins-spectacles)? The truth is that the revolutionary organizers have never really understood what a fête should be, you need to bring spectacle and rejoicing, otherwise there is no fête.”29 26 Langlois, “‘Les Charmes de l’égalité,’” 16–17; Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 95. 27 Langlois, “‘Les Charmes de l’égalité,’ 17-24; Mona Ozouf, La fête Révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 179–192. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 3: “The Revolution did not create a state, rather it created a new and sensitive public space.” 28 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 42–43; Antoine de Baecque, “Les ris et les pleures: Spectacles des affections, 1790–1791,” in Fêtes et Révolution (Paris: Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1989), 140–155; Tine Darmsholdt, “Staging Emotions: On Configurations of Emotional Selfhood, Gendered Bodies and Politics in Late Eighteenth Century,” in Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture, edited by Devika Sharma and Frederick Tygstrup (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 98–115. 29 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 43: “Croyez-vous que ce soit le royalisme qui fasse courir aux feux de Ruggieri ? La vérité est que nos instituteurs de fêtes n’ont jamais bien fixé leur pensée sur ce que c’était une fête […] Il faut que le spectacle amène les festins et les réjouissances, sinon la fête est manquée.”

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The jardin-spectacle thus emerged as one of many public spaces that were the antithesis of revolutionary festivals. Scholars of the French Revolution have attributed the popularity of jardins-spectacles to the fact that visitors came to these venues as an attempt to obliterate some of the traumatic memories of violence during the reign of Terror (1793–94).30 Dancing, seesaws, swings, and merry-go-rounds offered vertiginous physical sensations, aff irming the joie de vivre.31 Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1740–1814) went so far as to suggest that the gardens were a modern Cythera—places of Eros and regeneration—that helped the survivors sublimate the horrors of the Terror.32 Jardins-spectacles emblematized liminality; they were places of transition and invention, where strolling became an celebratory performance of the body and sensual pleasures that provoked deliberately playful forms of sociability. An aspiring entrepreneur, Gérard Desrivières, acquired Tivoli in 1795 and immediately decided to stage spellbinding events, such as balloon launches, pyrotechnical displays, and tightrope walkers at the Tivoli, promoting a venue that was already well entrenched in the public imagination as a site of elite entertainment.33 Desrivières hired performers and pyrotechnicians to imitate spectacles that were familiar from the annual fairs and boulevards, but he offered them on a weekly basis and for an entrance fee.34 Desrivières effectively integrated the desire to share astonishment, uniting the shock of surprise to embodied strolling.35 Clients strolled the garden and shared their delight watching performances, pausing to marvel at extravagant stunts, curiosities, and death-defying physical performances. Strolling in pursuit of new amusements, clients found that each turn offered the possibility to “feel” embodied sensations. 30 Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 315. 31 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 96, quoting Claude Ruggieri: “On fêtait d’un côté nos triomphes, tandis que de l’autre, la jeunesse abandonnait la politique pour la danse, le jeu de bague et la balançoire.” Jean-Gabriel Peltier, “Adieux aux Jardins-Spectacles,” in Paris, pendant l’année 1798 19, no. 163 (15 November 1789): 423–426, criticized the entry price to the garden as prohibiting a mixing of social classes. 32 Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris, “Les Bals d’hiver,” 400–419; “Bals à la Victime,” 337–340. Also cited in Grimod de la Reynière, Le Censeur Dramatique, 74. 33 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 95. Langlois details the lawsuits between Desrivières and Boutin’s family. 34 Grimod de la Reynière, Le Censeur Dramatique, Vol. 1, 78–79. 35 Pauline Hachette, “Émotions Collectives,” in Dictionnaire Arts et émotions, ed. Mathilde Bernard, Alexandre Gefen, and Carole Talon-Hugon (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015), 132–136.

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Grimod de la Reynière recorded a list of activities at Tivoli in 1797 that reveals how the praxis of strolling in the heretofore-designated “English” garden was expanded to encompass the entire site: “A tent, under which a large orchestra encourages dancing, ring games, a beautiful café, sometimes Physics Experiments, which many people see without understanding: such are the amusements offered in this place.”36 The following year, the spectacles included village dances, tastings from the dairy, views of farm animals that grazed on the hills, balloon launchings, and scientific experiments. One memorable event required a female actress, “voluptuously dressed as Venus,” swinging in the basket of a hot-air balloon tethered to the ground: when the balloon was released, the terrified Venus was safely parachuted onto the nearby Champs-Elysées.37 Different types of marionettes ( fantoccini) and puppet shows (escamoteurs) performed alongside magicians and prestigiteurs. A fairground offered souvenirs and card or dice games. Projected shadow exhibits—ombres chinoises and ombres palpables—enchanted nighttime visitors. The nighttime events championed the display of lanterns—illuminating the space—punctuated by astounding fireworks displays.38 These events were designed to evoke collective astonishment as individuals joined together to watch and share their appreciation of marvelous entertainments. While embodied strolling offered pleasant surprises and bodily frisson, thereby heightening appreciation of inter-corporeality and intersensoriality. Part of the appeal of these attractions, notably funambulists’ stunts, was that they called attention to the human body, admiring the extreme contortions. The stunts were death defying, exposing a fascination with the body. The competition to attract such spectacles among entrepreneurs was intense: Tivoli needed to up the ante, and in 1798, the owners commissioned actors and musicians from the Opera to perform the Descent of Orpheus to the Mouth of Hell, an event that ended in a pyrotechnical exhibition. This spectacular event was so expensive that it was offered only four times at the end of the season, which reveals the importance of

36 Grimod de la Reynière, Le Censeur Dramatique, Vol. 1, 79. 37 Grimod de la Reynière, quoted in Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 99. 38 On the history of f ireworks, see Kevin Salatino, Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). For the attractions of nighttime strolling in England see Frances Terpak, “Free Time, Free Spirit: Popular Entertainments in Gainsborough’s Era.” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no.2 (June 2007): 209–288. Visitors to jardins-spectacles commented on the number of lanterns during nighttime performances.

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shared astonishment as a means to animate the space and attract paying customers.39 The liminality of the jardins-spectacles can be located in the confluence of these social practices—embodied strolling, collective astonishment, and admiration of death-defying feats—all meant to mitigate the political, social, and economic instability that reigned in Paris from 1795 until 1804. At the same time, the mechanics of affectivity triggered palpable, albeit unclassifiable, pressures on gazing as an exclusive mode to evaluate the sensorium. Viewer-strollers were ready to take “leaps of faith” to be immersed in the jardins-spectacles, but some, of course, were not duped and criticized a fake sensorium. A critic advocating for the demise of the jardins-spectacles inadvertently revealed the appeal of collective astonishment and sensorial affectivity at four different jardins-spectacles sites: Adieu Paphos, Farewell Idalie, Farewell the Elysee, farewell especially nymphs, naiads, dryads, fauns, sylvans & satyrs, heavenly and infernal gods of Tivoli, farewell your fires of hell that are not eternal, & your rivers which do not really flow, & your painted canvas rocks & your wooden caves; Farewell your innocent volcanoes & your cascades of well water that fall so gently from the top of these rocks, adieu wonders of art forever inimitable for nature. 40

Clearly, fake attractions nonetheless stimulated real emotions for pleasureseeking Parisians. One of the ongoing authentic attractions at the jardins-spectacles was the gardens themselves. The appreciation of fruits and flowers was confirmed in the numerous leases and inventories that assessed the costs of maintaining the garden and the gardeners’ salaries. Perhaps the desire to maintain the garden was linked to an economic imperative: if the property was rented as an agricultural estate, it was exempt from urban taxes. 41 The trees, kitchen 39 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 102.Tivoli’s competitors, the Ruggieri brothers, commented on this event in 1798: “On offrit au public une des choses les plus extraordinaires qui aient été faites en aucun jardin, tant pour la dépense que pour la hardiesse de l’entreprise.” 40 Peltier, “Adieux aux Jardins-Spectacles,” 423: “Adieu Paphos, adieu Idalie, adieu l’Élysée, adieu sur-tout nymphes, naïades, dryades, hamadryades, faunes, sylvains & satyres, dieux célestes & infernaux de Tivoli, adieu vos feux d’enfer qui ne sont pas éternels, & vos fleuves qui ne coulent point, & vos rochers de toile peinte & vos cavernes de sapin; adieu vos volcans innocents & vos cascades d’eau de puits qui tombent si doucement du haut de ces roches […] adieu merveilles de l’art à jamais inimitables pour la nature.” 41 Langlois, Folies, tivolis et attractions, 126–135, provides garden inventories. The Idalie, or Jardin Marbeuf—a smaller garden of six hectares located in the present-day 8th arrondissement—also

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garden, and orchard were continually evaluated at market value, a whopping 10,000 francs attributed in 1798 for the fruits (that could be sold on the market), while in 1802 English visitors commented on the flowering shrubs (orange trees, honeysuckle, roses et eglantines) whose blooms perfumed the space. Given the constantly fluctuating economic imperatives, the desire to maintain the sensorial aspect—the fragrances and colors of the garden—was intimately linked to entrepreneurial success. The failure of several of the sites, notably Ruggieri and Torré, can be partially attributed to the fact that they prioritized gazing rather than embodied strolling. Grimod de la Reynèire noted that the most fascinating characteristic of jardins-spectacles was becoming a performer just by being a member of the crowd: While the events are always more numerous and more varied, it must be said, that the most beautiful sight of these kinds of festivals is the public itself. Each one serves a spectacle to each other, and this animated picture, renewed without ceasing and which is repeated until the end, is worth, in our opinion, the fleeting pleasures of the lamps of an immobile brilliance, or rockets whose existence is so fleeting. 42

Grimod de la Reynière’s commentary suggests a recognition of inter-corporeality: watching the bodies of others who were enjoying different kinds of pleasures in and of itself excited multisensorial interactions. Grimod’s rather mild commentary was more boldly stated in the “Adieux aux jardins-spectacles” that reiterated the importance of inter-corporeality in the garden space: What, indeed, is the pleasure we are going to seek & f ind there? The pleasure of being seen & seeing those who want to be seen too, because, in the end, the gardens are nothing but a spectacle that spectators give each other, & where effectively the entrepreneur supplies the land and the light, they pay him, and he acquits his debt, they improvise the theater of the day, pay for their clothes, perform all the necessary movements, come and go, walk, dance, talk, sing, get cold, get tired, and the money they bring augments the owner’s profits. 43 displayed a rich agricultural production as well as exotic plants that rivaled Tivoli. It is precisely this accent on gardening that distinguishes these jardins-spectacles from the fairs and boulevards that were primarily dedicated to astonishing stunts. 42 Grimod de la Reynière, Le Censeur Dramatique, 80. 43 Peltier, “Adieux aux Jardins-Spectacles,” 424-425: “Qu’est-ce, en effet, que le plaisir qu’on y va chercher & qu’on y trouve? Le plaisir d’être vu & de voir ceux qui veulent aussi l’être, car au fond,

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Although this critic decries economic gain, the pleasure at identifying oneself and others, whatever the price, was a fashionable exercise that occurred as one moved through the space, where physical interactions encouraged a range of sensate and deliberately affective thrills.

Embodied Strolling and Spectatorship After 1815, more complex rides were developed to enhance embodied sensationalism, including montagnes russes (roller coasters), which were predicated on the promise that one would be enraptured moving at high speed, thereby provoking physical and emotional glee. Certainly, the expansion of the jardins-spectacles as places of play can be considered a precedent for what one recognizes today as amusement parks. Whereas one can draw a teleological line from jardins-spectacles to amusement parks, it is nonetheless worth pausing to reflect upon how the sensorial affectivity and the embodied strolling so essential to the success of the jardin-spectacle influenced forms of visuality and affectivity at other venues in this period. 44 In 1799, Robert Fulton introduced a patent for panoramas in France as one of the entertainments at Frascati, a jardin-spectacle venue that rivaled Tivoli. 45 The panorama was first billed as an attraction within the garden where the praxis of embodied strolling and collective astonishment were combined to enhance visual engagement. A painted canvas was wound around the interior of a windowless rotunda. One entered and stepped onto an elevated platform where one could see a 360–degree painting of a city or landscape. This immersive viewing essentially collapsed the notion les jardins ne sont pas autre chose qu’un spectacle que les spectateurs se donnent l’un à l’autre, & auquel l’entrepreneur ne fournit que le terrain & la lumière ; ils le paient, & ils acquittent sa dette ; ce sont eux qui improvisent la pièce du jour, font les frais des habits, exécutent tous les mouvements nécessaires, vont, viennent, marchent, dansent, parlent, chantent, s’enrouent, s’enrhument, s’exténuent pour desservir l’argent qu’ils ont apporté à la recette de possesseur.” 44 A comparison to English Vauxhalls reveals that the French spaces offered attractions that were geared to elicit physical sensations. See Peter de Bolla, “The Visibility of Visuality: Vauxhall Gardens and the Siting of the Viewer,” in Vision & Textuality, ed. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 282–295. 45 See Barbara M. Stafford and Frances Terpak, “Panorama,” in Devices of Wonder from the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2002), 315–324, and Stephan Otterman, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone, 1997). For a contemporary description of the panorama at Frascati, see “Panorama,” in Panorama de Paris et ses environs ou Paris vu dans son ensemble, Vol. 2 (Paris: Antoine Bailleul, 1805), 223–225.

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of the framed view, requiring that one move around the space in order to incorporate all the views so that the boundaries between the real and represented, inside and outside, were intentionally blurred. Although the immersive viewing experiences of the panoramas are often cited as the advent of cinema, it is equally possible to argue that jardins-spectacles provided visitors with the visual skills and the experiential practices necessary to appreciate the panorama. 46 The panorama recalled the sense of suspended animation that had enlivened the jardin-spectacle when, for the duration of the stroll or viewing of a fireworks display, one “forgot” the time and place in order to enjoy a range of emotional delights from astonishment to gaiety to romantic reverie. Similarly, visitors to the panorama were expected to lose their sense of time and place so that they would be overwhelmed and absorbed in the work of art. I suggest that the diverse publics who attended the jardins-spectacles did not leave their viewing skills at the garden gates; rather, they could mobilize these same practices when confronted with displays at cultural institutions created after 1793: the Louvre, the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, and the Natural History Museum. 47 The foundation histories of these institutions do not need to be revisited here, but one can consider these venues as a network of viewing proficiencies that were juxtaposed to the embodied affectivity of jardins-spectacles. At these institutions, viewers were confronted with scientific taxonomies, a way of looking that valued intensive comparative analysis that legitimized the primacy of gaze. By contrast, the jardins-spectacles integrated viewing with corporeality, prompting the desire to respond both physically and emotively to objects and spaces. The attempt to reconcile embodied strolling with museological concerns can be studied in the development of the Elysée garden, part of a Revolutionary project dedicated to a Musée des Monuments Français. 48 In 1790, 46 Kimberly Mair, “Transitory Formations and the Education of the Senses: The Intersensorial Architectures of the Panorama and the Diorama,” Senses and Society 7, no.1 (2012): 53–71. For the impact of panorama on early nineteenth-century painting and viewing practices, see Jonathan Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Grey Room 9 (Autumn 2002): 5–25. For reading of gendered spectatorship of the panorama, see Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, “Gender in Perspective: The King and Queen’s Visit to the Panorama in 1793,” in Gendering Landscape Art, ed. Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 146–161. 47 Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 155–197. 48 Dominique Poulot, “Alexandre Lenoir et les musées des Monuments français,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, tome 2, 2: La Nation, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 497–531.

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following the confiscation of church properties, the young and ambitious artist Alexandre Lenoir (1761–1839) received a mission from his patron and art teacher, François Doyen (1726–1806), to oversee the transfer of stateconfiscated monuments from desacralized churches to a safe venue. Initially, Lenoir oversaw the transfer of sculptures and architectural fragments to the former convent of Queen Margot, at the Rue des Petits Augustins, which served as a depot for the works until Lenoir effectively succeeded in transforming the venue into a museum and sculpture garden. 49 Lenoir’s ambitious project was never assured state funding; he was, in fact, competing with the concurrent establishment of the Louvre, and Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français ultimately closed in 1816. Scholars have examined Lenoir’s project from a variety of perspectives, notably suggesting that the museum not only was one of the first monuments that offered a lieu de mémoire during the French Revolution but also proposed a systematic program dedicated to a pedagogical mission. While recognizing the significance of the Musée des Monuments Français as an ephemeral museum space, I suggest that Lenoir’s Elysée was inspired by the praxis of sensorial affectivity encoded in garden strolling at the jardins-spectacles.50 Further, I argue that Lenoir benefited from the liminality of jardins-spectacles to attract visitors to his Elysée. Casting himself as a curator, Lenoir acknowledged in 1798 (Year VI) the links between spectacles and what he called moral enlightenment: “In all times, images and spectacles influence public morality. Religions are accredited only by the splendor of their ceremonies and the representation of their mysteries. This is what gave birth to these fantastic characters to which the artist was forced to give a human form to deceive more gullible minds.”51 Lenoir noted that desacralization enabled the creation of his 49 Cécilie Champy-Vinas, “‘Faire un muséum d’un dépôt’: La constitution de la collection du musée des Monuments français (1790–1795),” in Un musée révolutionnaire: Le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir, ed. Geneviève Bresc-Bautier and Béatrice de Chancel-Bardelot (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2016), 87–95, and Alexandra Stara, The Museum of French Monuments, 1795–1816: “Killing Art to Make History” (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 50 Mary B. Shepard, “A Tomb for Abelard and Heloise,” Romance Studies 25, no.1 (2007): 29–42. Shephard explicitly links this tomb to the ancien régime garden practices that encouraged emotive, often melancholic reactions. In the post-Revolutionary context, Lenoir’s Elysée was a space where one could share emotions, notably melancholy, a praxis that was certainly linked to the embodied affectivity of jardins-spectacles. I would like to thank the anonymous reader who brought this article to my attention. 51 Alexandre Lenoir, Description historique et chronologique des monumens de sculpture, réunis au musée des monumens français. Suivie d’un traité historique de la Peinture en verre, par le même auteur (Paris, Au Musée, Rues des Petits-Augustins, 1798), 47: “Dans tous les tems, les

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museum, but his emphasis on the importance of spectacles by duping viewers is revelatory. While not underestimating the patriotic sentiments that motivated this museographic enterprise, one can argue that the Musée de Monuments Français and jardins-spectacles were cathartic promenades. Not surprisingly, Lenoir invoked nature to legitimize his project as a place of national regeneration, anchoring his museum to the concurrent debates about death and commemoration underway at the Pantheon and Père Lachaise cemetery. Yet, Lenoir needed to attract visitors, and jardinsspectacles provided a paradigm of how to seduce a wide audience.52 It is worth remembering that as Lenoir was mounting an extensive campaign to preserve the museum and adjoining Elysée garden as national monuments, Boutin’s family was marketing extravagant pyrotechnical feats that attracted over 3,000 visitors to Tivoli while at least three other jardins-spectacles were attracting similar crowds. Lenoir, by appropriating the praxis of embodied sensorial strolling that had been successfully deployed at the jardins-spectacles, would be able to entice visitors, thus sustaining and legitimizing his fledgling project.53 Lenoir carefully staged the entrance to his Elysée garden; one could enter it only after touring the displays of sculptures in what one would recognize today as proto-period rooms in the former convent. He lobbied and received authorization to procure a significant number of trees, shrubs, and flowers in order to create appropriate settings for his monuments, an allocation of funds that testifies to the desire to commemorate. He carefully chose his trees—yews, willows, and poplar trees long associated with death and the afterlife—that enhanced the romantic appeal of the now-fragmented tombs. Once in the Elysée, one moved from tomb to monument, the path recalling embodied strolling, yet he tried to give the impression that the space was larger as one meandered from one sculptural arrangement to the next. images et les spectacles ont influencé la morale publique. Les religions ne se sont accréditées que par le faste de leurs cérémonies et la représentation de leurs mystères. Voilà ce qui a donné naissance à ces personnages fantastiques auxquels l’artiste était obligé de donner une forme humaine pour tromper plus habillement les esprits crédules.” 52 Michel Baridon, Les Jardins: Paysagistes, jardiniers, poètes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), 840–947. For more information about the Père Lachaise, see Le Père-Lachaise, ed. Catherine Healey, Karen Bowie, and Agnès Bos (Paris: Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1998). 53 Laetitia Barrague-Zouita, “Le roman national au jardin: L’Élysée du musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir,” in Un musée révolutionnaire: Le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir, ed. Geneviève Bresc-Bautier and Béatrice de Chancel-Bardelot (Paris: Hazan, 2016),188–202.

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Lenoir went so far as to offer nighttime visits to the garden to increase the museum’s popularity and attract crowds. James Forbes recorded one of these nocturnal visits in 1803 when, invited by Lenoir himself, on a night planned to coincide with the full moon, Forbes described that when the assembled guests entered each room, musicians played funeral marches and torches were lit to highlight the fragmented sculptures, creating “indescribable sensations” until reaching the moonlit tombs in the Elysée.54 It seems that Lenoir understood the transformative possibilities of nocturnal lighting that recalled the marvels of the hundreds of lanterns that illuminated the jardins-spectacles. Lenoir’s museum and garden were alternative exhibition spaces that Louis-Sébastien Mercier commented had inspired a novel engagement with works of art. Mercier argued that the Musée des Monuments Français offered a distinctly sensorial means to appreciate works of art: The contemplative spectator is moved to appreciate the array of works! The result was a unique spectacle, the most curious, the most imposing, a most novel experience that struck both my eye and my imagination … it was the true mirror of our revolution, that contrasts games of chance and caprice in one site! What a singular chaos! Eight whole days could not satiate my eyes and my curiosity with those accumulated images, and what eloquence inspired of this fortuitous subject!55

Mercier stakes a claim for both sensorial affectivity and embodied astonishment to create an immersive museum experience. He complained that symmetric organization would destroy the venue: “The charm is broken, my imagination has been abandoned, for the ridiculous precept that I need to be instructed, rather than inspired to dream? Why do we have to frame sculptures within walls?”56 54 James Forbes, Letters from France: Written in the Years 1803 and 1804, Vol. 1 (London: J. White, 1806), Letter 39, Paris, 5 August 1803, 397–407. Forbes describes the museum and evokes the pleasures of the jardins-spectacles, notably Tivoli and Frascati, where he effused: “These gardens are much frequented, and afford the greatest variety of amusements: they are of some extent, the trees well grown, the walks tastefully illuminated and the whole frequently enlivened with fireworks. Frascati is one of the most elegant places of public amusement I ever saw, particularly on festival nights, when the gardens are illuminated by thousands of colored lamps, beautifully arranged on each side of the principal walk.” Letter 41, 20 August 1803, 416–428, especially 417–418. 55 Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris, 945–946. 56 Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris, 951.

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Mercier’s comments clashed with other savants, notably his contemporaries Dominique-Vivant Denon (1747–1825) and Antoine Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849), who debated the merits of Lenoir’s museum. While the cult of ruins and issues about the monuments as desecrated tombs disturbed some critics, Lenoir’s imagined past, collapsing time and place and mixing emotions with subjective judgments, echoed the affectivity of embodied strolling at the jardins-spectacles.57 Comparing Lenoir’s Elysée to jardinsspectacles suggests that, for a brief moment, the praxis of embodied strolling could be integrated to an institutional setting. As recent studies dedicated to the historiography of museums have demonstrated, the prioritization of visuality with its incumbent focus on self-control and social restraint would triumph as the primary mode for appreciating painting and sculpture; interior spaces favored immobility.58 As the city limits of Paris expanded, the memory of embodied strolling at the Parisian Tivoli not only was integrated to Parisian urban park planning at the end of the century, but also inspired international “Tivolis” such as the park in Copenhagen in 1842, modeled on the Parisian example.59 As jardins-spectacles became more ephemeral, the memory of the embodied strolling nonetheless contributed to new modes of sociability that ultimately informed the development of the theme park.60 The embodied strolling that animated the jardins-spectacles was not limited to theme parks; it has left an affective trace that continues to provide a matrix for digital landscape design.61 Today’s virtual realities no longer require physical displacement, but enable users to vicariously share affective experiences and sensorial pleasures both individually and collectively, effectively recalling Simon Charles Boutin’s innovative garden program at Tivoli. 57 After the Concordat of 1802, the reopened churches requested the return of their objects, thus squelching some of the religious appeal of the museum. See Geneviève Bresc-Gautier, “Denon et Lenoir, éternels rivaux, vieux complices,” in Les Vies de Dominique-Vivant Denon, ed. Daniela Gallo (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2001), 365–378. 58 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995). 59 The demise of the jardins-spectacles seems to have been due to f inancial reasons and expanding urbanism compared to the concurrent English Vauxhalls. See Jonathan Conlin, “Vauxhall Revisited: The Afterlife of a London Pleasure Garden, 1770–1859,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 4 (October 2006): 718–743. 60 Elisabeth Barlow Rogers, “The Theme Park as a Commercial Institution and Def iner of Place,” in Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 464–468. 61 Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012); Michael R. Curray, review of Digital Sensations: Space, Identity and Embodiment in Virtual Reality by Kevin Hills, by Ken Hillis, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 4 (December 2001): 771–772.

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About the author Susan Taylor-Leduc earned both her masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1992, she has worked as a teacher, curator and university administrator in Paris. She is currently affiliated with the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles. Her interests include landscape design and history, sensorial studies, and women’s studies. Her most recent articles include “The Pleasures of Surprise: The Picturesque Garden in France,” in the Senses and Society in 2016, and “Joséphine at Malmaison: Acclimatising Self and Other in the Garden,” in Journal18 in 2019.

4. Parading the Temporary: Cosmoramas, Panoramas, and Spectacles in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris Camilla Murgia

Abstract The revolution of 1789 prompted various socio-cultural changes that deeply affected French society. Alongside the sense of instability that these events provoked, there are a number of open-air amusements, shows, exhibitions, and theatrical representations, from the Directoire and through the Napoleonic era. This chapter aims to analyze the mechanisms that allowed the development of these spaces. Ephemerality and temporality are central to this investigation, often determining the development of the space, its construction and functions, but also the cultural practices this comprehension of the space engendered. My objective is to discuss the visual models and cultural references enabling the rearrangement of existing areas and the rise of new “spheres” devoted to the consumption of entertainment. Keywords: France, Napoleon, entertainment, theatre, shows

The diversity of shows: From hybridism to multiplicity of supports Outdoor theatrical shows, art exhibitions, performances, displays, and urban parties rapidly became extremely popular. The French had become progressively accustomed to an expanding variety of entertainment offering and, more importantly, establishing and managing their social status through it. Claude Ruggieri, who had been the king’s master of fireworks before the revolution, insisted on this pressing need for entertainment,

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_ch04

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describing the founding of the Paphos, one of Paris’ most famous garden attractions as follows: Paris, qui avait été trois ans plongé dans la tristesse et le deuil, ne songea plus, lorsque la terreur fut passée, qu’à se livrer à la joie. Bien que la satisfaction ne fût pas complète, au moins on commençait à respirer : les échafauds n’étaient plus en permanence ; le canon de la victoire avait succédé au canon d’alarmes ; on fêtait d’un côté nos triomphes, tandis que de l’autre, la jeunesse abandonnait la politique pour la danse, le jeu de bague et la balançoire.1

The increase in new shows is one of the key aspects of the development of the entertainment industry during this period.2 In parallel with the rise of public performances such as theatrical representations or scientific demonstrations, a plethora of shows developed, in various settings, ranging from open-air and semi-private spaces, to architectural structures “tailor-made” for a wide-range of individuals. These shows used different models and deployed a range of visual and literary references that aimed to simplify the representations – for example, a smaller number of actors and characters – and, at the same time, to focus on referential elements and/or figures from the theatrical world. A list of the secondary shows that the Ministry of Interior compiled for the police department in October 1816 (Appendix 1) provides evidence of the multiplicity and versatility of these phenomena. The locations of the Notes 1 Claude Ruggieri, Précis historique sur les fêtes, les spectacles et les réjouissances publiques (Paris: Bachelier, Delaunay et Barba, 1830), 91. “Paris, which had been for three years plunged in sadness and mourning, no longer thought, when the terror had passed, of anything but joy. Although the satisfaction was not complete, at least we started to breathe: scaffolds were no longer permanent; the cannon of victory had succeeded the cannon of alarms; on the one hand, we celebrated our triumphs, while on the other, the youth abandoned politics for dancing, ring games and swings.” 2 On the development of the theatrical industry after the revolution and on the impact of the political events on the repertoire, see Le théâtre sous la Révolution: politique du répertoire (1789–1799), ed. Martial Poirson (Paris: Desjonquères, 2008). André Tissier further provided an annotated list of the theatrical repertoire during the revolutionary period: Les spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution: répertoire analytique, chronologique et bibliographique (Geneva: Droz, 2002). For a study of theatrical performances in nineteenth-century Paris, see the seminal works of Jean-Claude Yon, and particularly: Une histoire du théâtre à Paris de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre (Paris: Aubier, 2012). In his works, Jean-Claude Yon identified crucial holdings of archival documents, such as the F21/ 1045 file of the Archives Nationales de France (hereafter ANF), from which many documents of this present article come from and which provided a wealth of material on theatrical research.

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amusements and the events themselves were, indeed, extremely fashionable, and provided a stage for social comparison and a venue for the consumption of culture. In some cases, drinks and refreshments were sold during theatrical performances, offering a comprehensive recreational experience. In an illustration for the Life in Paris, George Cruikshank depicted a pantomime representation in the Théâtre Montansier, clearly showing the dual function of theater and café.3 This interaction between mass entertainment and the diversity of its consumption is crucial to the boom in the amusement industry, as it enabled a constant confrontation between different social backgrounds, as well as the development of urban areas such as the Boulevard zone and the Palais Royal. This same division is apparent from the list of damages that the police prefect suggested from the government following the attack perpetrated against the Duke of Berry in February 1820 (Appendix 2). His death had a significant impact on public opinion and on the perception of the monarchy, especially since he was killed at a particularly delicate moment in political terms – France had just endured the fall of the Napoleonic regime and the monarchy had been restored. The Duke’s attack resulted in the closure of the entire city’s amusements. The income that these shows and performances generated was so significant that a request for damages was necessary even for only five days of suspended activity, to rehabilitate the businesses, especially in the instance of small-scale representations.4 The report commented on each show, providing useful information on the functioning and the perception that these events generated. A comparison of the 1816 list (Appendix 1) and the 1820 report (Appendix 2) clearly shows the growth of these displays, which in turn confirms both their diversity and their density in the areas of the Boulevard and the Palais Royal.

The space as catalyst for social and economic exchange Furthermore, the combination of shows, acrobatic performances, drama, and scientific experiments resulted in the use of different registers and 3 “Dick Wildfire and Jenkins in a theatrical pandemonium, or the café de la paix in all its glory,” handcolored etching and aquatint, 126 x 182 mm, illustration to Life in Paris: Or the Rambles, Sprees, and Amours, or Dick Wildfire, Squire Jenkins and Captain O’Shuffleton; With the Whimsical Adventures of the Halibut Family; And Other Eccentric Characters in the French Metropolis (London: John Cumberland, 1822), 122. 4 The ANF give evidence of the impact of this event on the shows of Paris. See in particular F21/ 1045.

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spectacle-related traditions. In many cases, these enterprises relied on the initiative of individuals who transformed their experience and careers into an entertainment business. This change and rearrangement also paved the way for the individual character of the development of the amusement industry in early-nineteenth-century Paris, and epitomizes the social issues of this growth.5 The case of the Franconi business is representative of this development and of the pivotal role of individual initiatives. The copy of a report compiled by the directors of the Théâtre de la Gaîté and the Ambigu-Comique in 1816 mentions, for instance, the Cirque Franconi, founded by officer Antoine Franconi (1737–1836) which proposed horse races and other entertainment. The document highlighted the dramatic development of the recreational offering proposed by the Franconi circus: “Autrefois Mss. Franconi s’en tenaient à leurs jeux équestres; à présent ils jouent des Pantomimes et dans la nouvelle salle qu’ils font construire Fab. Du Temple, on dit qu’ils ont la permission de donner des Pantomimes dialoguées.”6 Due to the increasing demand for entertainment, a career change in this direction was often a guarantee of success. In most cases this was because the shows directly related to the skills and backgrounds of the entrepreneurs who used their experience and skills to build and promote their business. It is therefore not surprising that the Franconi brothers organized horse races, owing to their military experience as horsemen. The success of the enterprise was evidently due to the fact that this activity offered a new type of entertainment, but also to the marketing strategies developed by the Franconi brothers. Indeed, the Franconi brothers’ father had come to Paris in the early 1780s and discovered the horse racing business through an Englishman based in the city, Philip Astley.7 During the immediate 5 On the development of the recreational industry in the nineteenth century, see in particular Pauline De Tholozany, “Panoramic Distraction(s): Entertainers and Entertained in NineteenthCentury Paris,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35, no.5 (2013): 445–462, and Jean-Pierre Perchellet, “Les spectacles parisiens et leur public,” in L’Empire des Muses. Napoléon, les Arts et les Lettres, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Belin, 2004), 153-171. Perchellet studied archival documents concerning the state of recreational venues subject to taxation (170-171). 6 Copy of the report of the directors of the Théâtre de la Gaîté and the Théâtre de l’AmbiguComique to the Minister of the Interior, the Minister of the Police and the Police Prefect, 21 November 1816, ANF: F21/ 1045, folder “Théâtres Secondaires Paris An III-1852.” “Once MM Franconi limited themselves to their equestrian games; today they play Pantomimes in the new room they are building in the Faub. du Temple, it is reported that they were given permission to give Pantomimes with dialogues.” On Franconi’s enterprise see the seminal study of Jean-Claude Yon, “Le Cirque Olympique sous la Restauration. Un théâtre à grand spectacle,” Orages. Littérature et culture 1760–1830 4 (Boulevard du Crime. Le temps des spectacles oculaires) (2005) : 83–98. 7 Biographie des écuyers et écuyères du théâtre national du cirque olympique (Paris: chez l’éditeur du répertoire dramatique, 1846), 8-9.

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post-revolutionary years, Franconi bought Astley’s business. Charles Hugues, a pupil of Astley, opened the Royal Circus in London, employing the word “circus” to indicate the circular shape of the stage and therefore creating a point of reference for the equestrian and theatrical shows to come all over Europe.8 Due to the proliferation of, and interest in, theatrical and operatic representations during the early nineteenth century, Franconi gradually thought about combining theater, ballet, and horse racing. According to contemporaries, this was the first time that these activities had been combined in one show, and the success was immediate. As his health deteriorated, Franconi entrusted his business to his two sons. A new venue was built – larger than anything previously built for this kind of entertainment – and the first show by the “Cirque Olympique” was performed on 28 December 1807, celebrating, as it were, the success of the Franconi family.9 The pantomimes of the Franconi brothers rapidly became popular, owing to the fashion for this kind of entertainment. One of the cornerstones of success, however, was the fact that the enterprise was organized as a family business. For instance, the costumes of the representations were made by the wives of brothers Laurent and Henry.10 The script of one of the equestrian pantomimes allows us to judge the scale of the family involvement in the business, given that four members of the Franconi family were acting in the show.11 The business was combined with much attention for the public demand for theatrical representations. By diversifying their market strategy and adapting it to include theatrical sub-genres that were in vogue, such as pantomime, the Franconi brothers created a successful economic and social model of entertainment that allowed them to act as protagonists of the recreational scene in Paris. This capacity of a business model to adapt to entertainment reflects the number of public cafés and tea rooms that flourished in Napoleonic Paris. 8 Sylvestre Barré-Meinzer, Le cirque Classique, un spectacle actuel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 20-21 and Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past. Popular History and the Novel in NineteenthCentury France (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press), 117. 9 Henry Audiffret, “Cirque Olympique,” in Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture, ed. William Duckett, Vol. 5 (Paris: Lévy frères 1853), 641–642 ; Yon, “Le Cirque Olympique sous la Restauration. Un théâtre à grand spectacle,” Orages. Littérature et culture 1760–1830, 84-85. On the Cirque Olympique see also Frédéric Hillemacher, Le Cirque Franconi. Détails historiques sur cet établissement hippique et sur ses principaux écuyers recueillis par une chambrière en retraite (Lyon: Alf. Louis Perrin & Martinet, 1875). 10 Audiffret, “Cirque Olympique,” Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture, 641. 11 Jean-Guillaume-Antoine Cuvelier, La Lanterne de Diogène, pantomime équestre, à grand spectacle, avec marches, évolutions et tournois, formant quatre petits tableaux de quatre grands siècles (Paris: Barba, 1808).

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They offered a range of amusements, thereby playing a pivotal role in the social growth of the city. The example of one of the most successful of these cafés, the Frascati (in the homonymous jardin-spectacle), founded by the Neapolitan Garchi, is representative of this functioning and adaptation of the space. The Frascati was opened in 1800, in order to sell ice cream.12 A few decades earlier Sabatino had done the same thing and opened the famous Café Corazza in the Palais Royal area. Sabatino had been situated directly in the wooden gallery buildings and Garchi in the Rue de Richelieu.13 It was not surprising to find several Italian, especially Neapolitan, cafés in late-eighteenth-century Paris, as this was a response to a growing demand for ice cream and ice-cream shops.14 The Frascati’s large patio and terrace functioned as a semi-open space and helped make the café a fashionable venue and a meeting point for the wealthy classes.15 Garchi paid particular attention to the space that the Frascati offered and seemed to take special care of its potential as a catalyst for social interaction. Not only did he propose a range of entertainments, including firework displays, but he also charged customers an entrance fee, a sort of ticket, ranging from five to six francs, which highlights the importance of the recreational offering.16 Bakery, balls, firework events, and concerts: Garchi considered his business to be a comprehensive package and proposed a wide range of products and activities, adapting and arranging the space accordingly. In his description of the Frascati, Sir John Carr highlighted this diversity of spaces and its multiple functionality. The reception room, at the core of the building, was beautifully decorated with 12 Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, Histoire de Paris depuis les premiers temps historiques, Vol. 8 (Paris: Legrad, Pomey et Crouzet, 1863), 262. 13 The Corazza café was an important venue for Paris political and social life. For instance, during the revolutionary period, it mainly served as a location for Jacobin meetings. The café apparently did not propose any wine or beer, focusing only on the ice-cream trade, which contributed to make the venue very popular. On Corazza’s history and business see Béatrice Malki-Thouvenel, Cabarets, cafés et bistrot de Paris. Promenade dans les rues et dans le temps (Lyon: Horvath, 1987), 36 and Victor Champier, Le Palais-royal d’après des documents inédits, 1620–1900 (Paris: Société de propagation des livres d’art, 1900), 123. 14 Edmond Texier, Tableau de Paris, Vol.1 (Paris: Paulin et Chevalier, 1852), 357. On the growth of cafés see Ulla Heise, Kafee und Kaffeehaus. Eine Kulturgeschichte (Hildesheim: Olms, 1987). 15 The café apparently served as a concert venue, as a gambling house and as meeting point. For a description of the Frascati’s activities and functioning, see George Cain, Les pierres de Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1915), 221–235. 16 Arthur Pougin, Dictionnaire historique et pittoresque du théâtre des arts qui s’y rattachent. Poétique, musique, dans, pantomime, décor, costume, machinerie, acrobatisme (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1885), 443.

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artificial flowers, a large number of mirrors and a copy of the Medici Venus. This main space led to six smaller, sumptuous rooms, functioning as mini-tea rooms which offered a semi-private, exclusive space for entertainment and social gathering.17 The main reception room was also adapted to the events proposed during the different seasons. For instance, while this large room served as a gathering point for receptions and fashionable meetings in the summer, during the winter it was turned into a dance venue. Men could have access exclusively through a season ticket and were entitled to bring women as guests.18 The possibility to combine a venue for consuming food and drinks together with entertainment was a crucial innovation in terms of marketing. It showed the intention of offering all aspects of the recreational industry and consequently fostering its economic power. Garchi imported this business model from Italy where similar establishments were well-known and widely popular.19 This model proposed, together with various refreshments, a range of pastries and baked products available at the cafe’s counter, as could be seen in Italian cafés. Following the model of many Parisian cafés during the Napoleonic period, the counter was staffed by a woman, known as the belle limonadière (“beautiful lemonade saleswoman”), referring to a popular character who attracted many visitors because of her beauty. This feminine figure was initially associated with the Café du Bosquet and de Mille Colonnes, where various foreign visitors evidently helped spread the success of the business.20 During the early years of the nineteenth century, theatrical dramas featured this character and newspapers regularly reported the impact of 17 Sir John Carr, Les Anglais en France après la Paix d’Amiens. Impressions de voyage (Paris: E. Plon, 1898), 181, quoted in Cain, Les pierres de Paris, 224. 18 François-Alphonse Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat, Vol. 3 (Paris: L. Verf, 1906), 558, quoted in Cain, Les pierres de Paris, 234. 19 Louis Lurine, Les rues de Paris. Paris ancien et moderne, Vol. 2 (Paris: Kugelmann, 1844), 378–379. 20 Delphine Christophe and Georgina Letourmy, Paris et ses cafés (Paris: Action artistique de la ville de Paris, 2004), 125 and François Fosca, Histoire des cafés de Paris (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1934), 101. The belle limonadière was so popular, that foreign travelers punctually referred to this character and her beauty as a key element for the success of the business, working in tandem with the arrangement of the space. Heinrich-August-Ottokar Reichard sharply described, in a comparison of Parisian cafés, this combination of a reference figure such as the belle limonadière and the appropriation of the space which so importantly contributed to the rise of this kind of business in early nineteenth-century Paris: “Der Café du bosquet, dessen schöne Limonadiere so viele Füsse und Federn, vielleicht auch Herzen, in Bewegung setzte, ist mit wolhriechende Pflanzen und Blumen geschmückt.” Der Passagiere auf der Reise in Deutschland, in der Schweiz, zu Paris und Petersburg, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Gädicke, 1811), 683.

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these cafés on society.21 For instance, on 21 May 1804, the Journal de Paris reported on the forthcoming spring season, writing that Parisians could soon return to the various open-air spaces, such as the promenades and entertainment locations, waiting for the opening of one of the city’s main attractions, the Frascati, which was designed to offer a social meeting venue at an affordable price: “De toutes les réunions à la belle étoile, celle de Frascati est à peu près la seule qui soit réputée de bonne compagnie, & quand Garchi donne un concert à 3f par tête, il attire tout Paris.”22 The need for a multi-functional space highlights the economic power of this business. The space served as a recreational location, but also as a social witness, and provided a wide range of customers with a shared experience of consumer culture.

Spaces of interaction The diversity of the shows that the Frascati offered, devised as a package that included refreshments and lunches, but also the fashionable events proposed by the Franconi brothers, are only a small insight into a process of diversification of shows and displays that the entertainment industry developed. This is possibly the most extraordinary innovation that the process of “mass production” generated, because it made it possible to rely on a variety of supports and visual references. More importantly, it fostered a perception of the space more in terms of the functionalities that they experienced, rather than with regard to its structure alone. Besides their role linked to the entertainment, these structures also enabled, for instance, communication, an exchange between different registers of cultural consumption and practice. The most representative example of this interaction is possibly the communication between a visual reference or experience and the entertainment, visible, for instance, through the hybridism of shows and the diversity of supports they applied to. In particular, the possibility of combining refreshments and entertainment in a space that was primarily seen as a café, highlighted the need for a multifunctional platform and how quickly it adapted to a variety of situations. 21 See, for instance Antoine Simonin and Nicolas Brazier, Arlequin au café du Bosquet, ou la Belle Limonadière, vaudeville épisodique (Paris: Fage, 1808). 22 “Nouvelles des sciences, des lettres et des arts,” Journal de Paris, 21 May 1804, 1576. “Of all the outside meetings, the Frascati is about the only one that is thought to be in good company, & when Garchi gives a concert with a 3 francs entrance fee, he attracts the whole of Paris.”

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The question of the consumption of culture is crucial to this process of rearrangement. For instance, in 1837, the head of the Police department, Jean-Joseph Lefevre, wrote to the Comte de Montalivet, Minister of the Interior, to support the request of Jacques Louzet to establish a café hosting a range of theatrical representations such as puppet shows.23 Lefevre insisted on the accessibility of the venue and on the fact that entry to the spectacles was free, like all the representations taking place in the café: Aucune retribution ne sera exigée pour l’entrée et dans aucun cas, et sous aucune forme, les spectateurs payeront les objets de consommation qu’ils prendront et voilà tout. Ainsi ces soirées amusantes ne peuvent porter ombrage ou nuire aux séances des théâtres des boulevards, car elles seront tout simplement composées de personnes qui ne peuvent y mener des enfants en bas âge.24

The intention to propose a free event demonstrates both an attention paid to all social layers and a constant concern for the complex relationship that these “minor” shows entertained with the most prominent theatrical representations, such as those of the Comédie Française. Part of this relationship must be ascribed to the economic status of the official theaters, which were often preserved to the detriment of minor performances, which the government often considered a threat to official drama. The popularity of these hybrid and reduced-scale events clearly relied on their variety, but also on their capacity to adapt and incorporate a range of spaces that were not, at least initially, devoted to performances. This flexibility is visible, for instance, through the arrangement of the Frascati, whose external terrace was used as an open-air space for entertainment, but also in more “official” spaces, which did not appear, at least initially, to be multifunctional. Functioning as a communicative platform, these manifestations furthermore acted as intermediaries between social layers and made a large contribution to linking different realities. Within this context, it is not surprising that, in the case of the Salon, art critic Fanny Tatillon insisted on the impact of the event was as social activity rather than as an artistic venue: “J’aime beaucoup à voir, je préfère peut-être 23 Letter from Paul Lefevre to Jean-Pierre Bachasson, Comte de Montalivet, 11 October 1837. ANF: F21/ 1037, Folder “Louizet.” 24 Letter from Paul Lefevre to Jean-Pierre Bachasson. “No charge will be required for admission and in no case will spectators pay for consumable items and that’s it. So that these amusing evenings cannot overshadow or damage the shows of the boulevards, as they only consist of people who cannot bring small children.”

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encore être vue ; d’après cela, Monsieur, vous pensez que je ne manque pas une exposition.”25 The case of the Salon must be considered in the light of the crucial impact that this event had on the artistic discourse and official artistic policy during the Napoleonic period; it is, nevertheless, useful to point out that concern for a social visibility was continually put forward. The role of mediator that these events epitomized is characteristic of early-nineteenth-century cultural events, spanning social exchange and demand for culture and entertainment. The periodic rearrangement of the spaces betrays a regular process of adaptation that these manifestations embedded, serving as a tool for culture consumption. Representative of this reorganization is, for instance, the Salon des Arts, a reading club located on the Quai Conti, near the Pont Neuf.26 The club was hosted by the more famous Au Petit Dunkerque, a jewelry and later grocery shop founded around 1767 by Charles Raymond Granchez, a salesman and jewelry merchant from Dunkerque.27 In 1789, the shop was sold to a wine merchant and, a few years later, it appeared that Camus installed a club offering the possibility to read and study various newspapers and a wide range of literary works and artistic literature. The scope of the venue was to function as an art library, mainly for people who were unable to pay for expensive books, and to provide a space allowing discussions and meetings, in a similar way to a café. The communicative aspect of this project clearly appeared through the scopes of the establishment, regularly advertising the possibility of displaying one’s drawings, machines, and various projects, to be discussed by the people in attendance: “On se propose d’y laisser exposer les Machines, Dessins et Projets que les auteurs voudront soumettre au jugement du public.”28 The interaction put forward through venues such as Au Petit Dunkerque further enabled an exchange and communication, which the number of 25 “Au rédacteur,” Journal des Dames et des Modes, 5 November 1808, 481. “I very much like to see, maybe I prefer even more to be seen; from that, Sir, you think I don’t miss an exhibition.” 26 On the Salon des arts, see “Salon des Arts,” Journal des Arts, de la Littérature et du Commerce, 5 February 1804, 193–195. 27 The sign shop of the Petit Dunkerque is held by the Musée Carnavalet. On this shop see Carolyn Sargentson, Merchant and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris (London/Los Angeles, CA: Victoria and Albert Museum in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 119–127. 28 Journal des Arts, 5 February 1804, 194. “It is proposed to exhibit Machines, drawings and Projects that the authors would like to submit to the public’s judgement.”

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events, minor displays, and representations conveyed under the Napoleonic period and that acted as a federating agent. Both the communicative space and the entertainment venue relied, in the case of these events, on the need for a space for culture consumption and creation that grew dramatically after the revolutionary years. The number of soirées amusantes described in the lists of indemnities compiled in 1816 and 1820 (Appendixes 1 and 2) somehow highlights the recreational aspect that these manifestations put forward. Clearly, many amusements referred, as some contemporaries pointed out, to the development of national kermesses and fairs, which arose in post-revolutionary years, mirroring, evidently, the need for national unity engendered by the political turmoil. Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, in his Histoire de Paris, insisted on the fact that a number of Jardins à Divertissements combined a visual recreation and the appropriation of an area for amusement, initiated already in the second half of the eighteenth century and often associated with national celebrations and carnivals.29 In 1779, Ruggieri took over the administration of the first jardin-spectacle of Paris, established in 1766, and later known as Jardin Ruggieri.30 The Italian fireworks manufacturer developed the business by gradually adding a range of attractions, which offered entertainment alongside his more famous firework displays. For instance, in 1813, after one of Ruggieri’s children took over the business, several roller-coasters, called Saut du Niagara, turned the garden into a highly sought-after recreational venue.31 The appropriation of the space, terrestrial or aerial, as in the case of fashionable roller coasters, enhanced the capacity of these entertainments to fit into a number of urban and open spaces, such as city gardens, but also to be moved from one place to another. The famous Montagnes artif icielles of the Populus, mentioned in the 1816 list (Appendix 1), became so popular that a patent was taken out to protect their creation and to promote their health benef its, apparently created by the difference, in altitude, that the course provoked.32 These fashionable venues developed alongside a range of movable and mobile attractions, including Franconi’s Voiture nomade. This vehicle consisted of a kind of portable apartment, arranged as a giant box mounted on a structure carried by several horses, similar to a modern caravan. The caravan was a miniature 29 Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, Histoire physique, civile et morale de Paris, depuis les premiers temps historiques, annotée et continuée jusqu’à nos jours par C. Leynadier (Paris: P.-H. Krabbe, 1854), 254. 30 Dulaure, 255–256. 31 Dulaure, 256. 32 For the patent of the Montagnes artificielles, see ANF: F12/ 1026A.

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house, including a kitchen and all the furniture necessary for daily life.33 Evidently, the Franconi built the vehicle to fulfil the need for mobility, but also to create an event with the goal of entertainment. Here, the appropriation and the adaptation of the space are essential to, and part of, the proposed amusement, as visitors could access the movable caravan by paying an entrance fee.

Projecting the invisible The creation of a link, a space of interaction between different registers of entertainment, such as the visual and the social, and their capacity to fit into a multitude of spaces, contributed to an important development of the shows involving the imagination. Presentations such as the Cosmorama, the Panorama de l’Univers, the displays of uranography and optical illusions, engendered a process of projection, of materialization of the imagination, which played a critical role in building the perception and somehow the discovery of the unknown. This process of “making the unknown visible” was also fostered with regard to its didactic scope as it offered the opportunity to learn a range of notions and visual models that would have not been accessible otherwise. The business of Abbot Constant Gazzera (1778–1859), who established the Cosmorama, located in the fashionable area of the Palais Royal, epitomizes this double perspective of discovery and teaching. The Cosmorama consisted of a display of paintings depicting views of different monuments and regions of the world behind magnifying lenses, in order to create a sense of spectacle.34 The focus was on European cities and monuments, such as Rome, with landscape views and church interiors on display, but also Middle Eastern attractions, which had recently been unearthed by archeological excavations like those in Palmyra. The exhibition enjoyed great success and was conceived with both an educational and recreational aspect. Students, children, and young artists only paid half price for entry, and visitors could 33 Robert Hénard, La Rue Saint-Honoré. De la Révolution à nos jours (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1909), 285–286. 34 Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle : répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts, avec la biographie de tous les hommes célèbres, Vol. 9 (Paris: Au bureau de l’Encyclopédie du XIXe siècle, 1846), 88. On the Cosmorama see Erkki Huhtamo, “Towards a History of Peep Practice,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 32-51, and particularly “The Cosmorama – An Urban Peeping Institution,” 39-41.

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visit the tea room, which offered, along with refreshments, a light lunch for young people and women.35 When the Parisian shows were temporarily canceled due to the murder of the Duke of Berry in 1820, Gazzera demanded indemnities from the government, insisting on the educational character of his business and on its primary role as a visual cultural model: Ce cours de géographie et d’histoire pratique a beaucoup servi sans doute pour les jeunes élèves; et les artistes plus distingués conviennent que c’est d’après les ouvrages exposés au Cosmorama qu’on a vu sur nos théâtres paraitre en architecture et en compositions pittoresques ces belles et savants productions qui ont tant charmé les yeux et nourri l’esprit des spectateurs.36

The request for indemnities submitted by Gazzera to the government helps us to understand how his shows functioned, and the scale of their organization. Indeed, a specific budget was allocated, among others, to a lampiste (i.e. a person in charge of the lights), to an officer, and to somebody in charge of explanations. A similar salary was allocated to a machiniste, an engineer explicitly appointed to help with all the practical infrastructure related to the material aspects of the show.37 As director, Gazzera himself evidently played a major role in his business and described his tasks in greater detail, spanning the compilation of articles and announcements for newspapers, the choice and the execution of the subjects to exhibit, and correspondence. Gazzera’s work appeared to be quite intense, given that, according to the prospectus of the Cosmorama, each exhibition had nine showings and changed every month.38 The purpose of the Cosmorama was to offer a visual course of world geography and architecture and to reach a wide range of visitors. The instructive scope undoubtedly strengthened the capacity of projection that these shows conveyed. Gazzera intended both to reach a 35 Duckett, William, ed. Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture, Vol. 17 (Paris: BelinMandar, 1835), 354. 36 Letter and report on the Cosmorama, from Abbot Gazzera to Baron Mounier, general director of the Paris Police, 22 April 1820, ANF: F21/ 1045. “This geography and practical history course has assuredly been very useful to young pupils; and the more distinguished artists agree that it is thanks to the works exhibited at the Cosmorama that we have seen appear in our theatres, with regard to architecture and picturesque compositions, these beautiful and scholarly productions which have so much fascinated the eyes and stimulated the spirit of the spectators.” 37 Letter and report on the Cosmorama. 38 Gazzera, Prospectus du Cosmorama, 7.

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wide audience, including travelers and scholars, but also children and artists, in order to give them an insight into different locations all over the world, which they could hardly visit due to their financial limitations and the cost of travel. The sites and cities featured in the Cosmorama were carefully designed, following the most recent works and visual sources. In the case of the views of Egypt for instance, the references had to be ascribed to the work of Denon and to a forthcoming, major publication on the subject.39 The prospectus also showed how this event impacted on the perception of a city’s view, by offering an overview of different destinations and replacing the experience of traveling to and directly visiting a country. Gazzera designed a presentation of paintings as a stage and did not hesitate to compare his exhibition to theatrical representations, such as the Spectacle pittoresque et mécanique de M. Pierre and the Panorama, insisting on the large-scale size of the paintings he exhibited and on his aim of providing an overview of a variety of cities and venues. 40 The reference to the theatrical representation contributed to the mechanism of substitution that the exhibition engendered and soon became a key to the success of the Cosmorama all over Europe.

Constructing a common experience Visiting the shows substituted another experience, that of traveling to a foreign country. This process of substitution functioned both as an educational tool and as a recreational event. The act of projecting, of materializing the invisible and the inaccessible, is central to this process of substitution 39 Gazzera, 5. 40 Gazzera, 1: “Cette exposition offrira aux amateurs des beaux arts le coup d’œil le plus important, sur-tout lorsque l’illusion présentera les objets selon leur véritable grandeur ; et sans avoir l’intention de déprécier le théâtre de l’ingénieux M. Pierre, qui est sans doute dans son genre un objet de curiosité presque inimitable, et le Panorama qui immortalise son auteur, on se convaincra que cette réunion majestueuse et complète de tout ce que la nature et l’art ont produit, dans le cours des siècles de plus rare et de plus imposant, surpassera pour l’intérêt et le coup-d’œil tout ce qui a été vu jusqu’à ce jour dans l’art enchanteur de la perspective.” “This exhibition will offer art lovers the most important glance, foremost when illusion will present objects according to their greatness; and without any intention to devalue M. Pierre’s ingenious theatre, which is assuredly in his genre an almost inimitable object of curiosity, and the Panorama which captures its author, one will be convinced that this grand and complete gathering of all that nature and art produced during the rarest and magnificent centuries, will overcome, with regard to interest and glance, all that has been seen up to the present day in the enchanting art of perspective.”

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since it provides a framework for the imagination. Ephemerality further strengthens this mechanism, allowing a flexibility with regard to the context and broadening the range of visual references on which these events relied. Displays such as the Panorama, the Panstereorama, but also all spectacles de curiosité, which staged the visual recreation of an environment or an action such as the marionettes – puppet shows – and the automates – robot-like animations – highlight the functioning of these models as visual and recreational experiences. They regularly captivated visitors through their rearrangements, adjustment, and adaptation to a variety of different spaces. The forms of these shows responded to the practicalities of the stage, which are characteristic of theatrical representations. In the case of the Panstereorama for instance, considerable attention was paid to combining the elements that accompanied the perspective views. Indeed, the Journal de l’Empire mentioned a number of robot-like figures, transparent prints, and cast elements that were arranged to compose a scene, a stage, and to recreate a sense of depth and perspective. 41 Here, it is the projection of the architectural elements that forms the core of the show and that becomes the attraction of the exhibition, almost seeming to be more important than the subject represented. 42 The notion of stage, of (re)creating a perception through a series of images, marked the development of the entertainment industry, which referred to the projection of forms and figures. This kind of representation grew significantly in the first years of the nineteenth century, partly to satisfy the demand for entertainment and partly to respond to the need for hybridism that the industry showed. In some cases, the act of projection that was part of these performances became a way of constructing the perception of the unknown, of apprehending the process of “making the unknown visible.” Practical experiments staging the projection under different forms are possibly the most representative examples of this strategy. For instance, the phantasmagoria by Robertson (Appendix 1) involved displaying a series of figures that were projected onto a wall in order to materialize the process of perception of one subject or another, substituting, as it were, the mechanism of creation and perception of an image with a 41 Journal de l’Empire, 23 November 1813, 3–4. 42 “Panstéréorama,” Journal de l’Empire, 28 January 1814, 1: “Les villes de Paris, Saint Petersbourg et Londres, exécutées en relief d’après nature, sur une même échelle, avec leurs embellissements projetés offrent un spectacle unique et de grand intérêt.” “The cities of Paris, Saint Petersburg and London, represented in relief from nature, on the same scale, together with their prospective embellishments, offer a unique and extremely interesting show.”

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“ready-to-consume” form available in any closed space.43 As the projection itself was part of the recreational context that the city offered, the whole experience relied on the entertainment industry while staging complex and articulated mechanisms and ranges of knowledge. The phantasmagoria enjoyed remarkable success during the Napoleonic period, developed in a range of diverse representations and, like the Cosmorama, paid particular attention to the educational aspect, which generally worked as the guarantee for ensuring a wide audience. The ability of these performances to captivate a lot of people was arguably due to the constant renewal of the shows. The Journal of Paris, advertising one of many representations of phantasmagoria, insisted on the experience provided to the public, claiming that the core of the show consisted of its newness, even though some figures were difficult to grasp at a glance. 44 This newness played a major role in the development of the process of the materialization of the image perception, by offering the projection of figures that were meant to span both material and immaterial spheres, relying upon the ability of optical illusions to materialize forms. In this way, the screening was used to propose a variety of figures: “Ce Spectacle sera suivi d’Illusions plus attachantes encore ; elles offriront aux regards des spectateurs des objets réels ou vivants & pourtant impalpables, tels que des Bouquets de fleurs, une Sphere céleste, une Pendule sonnant les heures, une Statue de Vénus.”45 The fictional character of these figures was nurtured through the animation created by the act of projecting, which 43 The phantasmagoria developed by Etienne-Gaspard Robert, known as Robertson, was among the most popular shows of early-nineteenth-century Paris. Robertson combined the projection of f igures with physical and optical experiments and described them with great detail: Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-aéronaute E.G. Robertson, Vol.2 (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1833). On Robertson’s phatasmagoria, see Françoise Levie, EtienneGaspard Robertson, la vie d’un fantasmagore (Longueuil; Bruxelles: Les Éditions du Préambule et Sofidoc, 1990). 44 “Nouveau spectacle de fantasmagorie,” Journal de Paris, 14 January 1809, 97: “Il [the show] commence par des objets de Fantasmagorie, exécutés d’une manière nouvelle & avec des sujets aussi intéressant que nouveaux. Il présentera ensuite des effets incompréhensibles de la Chambre Magique, qui offrira chaque jour de nouvelles scènes tirées de la mythologie & de l’histoire.” “It [the show] starts with Fantasmagoria objects, performed in a new way & with new and interesting subjects. It will then propose incomprehensible effects from the Magic Chamber, which will offer new stages from mythology and history every day.” 45 Journal de Paris, 97. “This show will be followed by a series of even more exciting Illusions; they will offer to the spectators’ eyes some real and living, yet untouchable, objects, such as Flower bouquets, a celestial Globe, a Pendulum striking the hours, a Statue representing Venus.”

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was also one of the key assets highlighted by contemporaries since the f irst representations at the end of the eighteenth century. The process of zooming, reducing, and moving the figures projected was at the core of the spectacle. It created an optical illusion which clearly resembled a “true” representation of reality. 46 Indeed, the possibility of changing the size of the forms represented, together with their alternation on the screen, created an illusion of movement which helped to regard phantasmagoria as a recreational activity. 47

Conclusion The multitude of supports, forms of entertainment, and the fast evolution of shows, performances, and displays in nineteenth-century Paris contributed to an unprecedented increase of the recreational industry on a large scale. Furthermore, the ability of these representations to adapt to the space and to the changing functions of these events is evidence of a well-articulated and organized structure that functioned both as a space of exchange and as a physical venue for culture consumption. This flexibility is a pivotal asset to the perception and the use of space, because it shows that its comprehension has to be a combination of multiple and changing interactions and purposes, ranging from a recreational to an educational aspect. Such an approach determined the use of and the relation to many events and architectural structures. It also allowed consumers to consider these spaces as a wholesale phenomenon touching on many issues of Parisian society and creating a sense of socio-cultural unity and awareness that was no longer dependent on economic status but, on the contrary, on the consumption of culture taking place in one specific space.

46 On the perception of this capacity of “manipulating” the projected images, see “La Fantasmagorie. Première Education,” in Jean-Baptiste Pujoulx, Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Brigite Mathé, 1801), 223–233. 47 The phantasmagoria has to be considered in the light of a number of representations staging moving images which preceded and somehow offered ground to develop the flourishing of cinema. On these representations and on this development see Laurent Mannoni, Le grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre. Archéologie du cinéma (Paris: Nathan, 1994), 135–168, and Patrick Désile, Généalogie de la lumière. Du panorama du cinéma (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000).

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Appendix 1 List of secondary theaters and shows compiled from the “Etat des théâtres secondaires, des petites spectacles, bals, soirées amusantes, curiosités et marionnettes ambulantes” (ANF : F21/ 1045) Noms des entrepreneurs

Demeures

Noms des Établissements

Théâtres secondaires : Desaugier Administrateurs St Romain Bourguignon Audinot fils

Rue de Chartres Boulevard Mont Martre Porte St Martin Boulevard du Temple Idem

Vaudeville Variétés Théâtre Porte St Martin Gaité Ambigu Comique

Petits spectacles : Comte

Hôtel des fermes

Pierre Robertson Seraphin Delaunay

Physique et scènes de ventriloquie Vues pittoresques Rue de la Fontaine Boulevard Montmartre Physique et fantasmagorie Palais Royal Ombres chinoises Aux Théatius Pantomimes et arlequinades

Soirées amusantes : Aller Barbey Bacqueville Bouthier Montensier

Palais Royal Galerie Montesquieu Boulevard des italiens Palais Royal Id

Fitz-James Lalanne Lunelle Patte Saqui Thillard

Id Boulevard du temple Au petit pont Palais Royal Boulevard du temple Palais Royal

Grands Bals en exercice : Abellard Bayard

Palais Royal Rue des Degrés St Etienne

musique Id Id Id et sauvage Musique et petites scènes à rire musique Id Id Id Id Id

Bal des étrangers Jardin des bosquets

Observations

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Noms des entrepreneurs

Demeures

Noms des Établissements

Benoiste Frossard

Mont Parnasse Rue des Marais (faub du tempe) Boulevard des invalides Rue de Bondi Rue Neuve des Bons Enfants n.28 Rue Castiglione Rue de Rivoli Boulevard du temple Rue neuve de Seine

Bal Bal des 4 saisons

Guillaume Nizard Populus Avisse Barreau Boar Bouillard

Observations

Jardin de Psyché Vaux-hall d’été Montagnes artificielles Crocodile Mécanique Jeux récréatifs Ombres chinoises

Caris Charigny Coutellier Delaigne Coclen Demmenie

Au Luxembourg Barrière du Maine Boulevard du Temple Rue Castiglione Id Rue neuve des petits champs

Automates Figures de Cire Automates Vaisseau ambulant Jeu de Carousel Vitrification

Dromal Dulout Fabien Faisan Franconi Garrick

Boulevard du temple Id Id Au Palais Royal Rue Castiglione Quay de Gêvres

Gazzera Giacomini Jean Cottru Jacques St Jor Hebert Merlière Mugot Pierre Saqui Pioche

Palais Royal Cour des fontaines Au Pont aux Choux Boulevard du temple Rue St. Martin, au Château d’Eau Rue Castiglione Id Boulevard St. Martin Place Louis XV

Vues maritimes Illusion d’optique Funambules Relief du Simplon Voiture nomade Marionnettes ambulantes Cosmorama Illusions d’optique Cheval extraordinaire Cabinet de figures Chambre noire

Prevost Réaux Roni

Boulevard du temple Rue Royale du Louvre Rue de Grammont

Vaisseau Royal Relief Point de vue Marionettes ambulantes Panorama de l’univers Ménagerie Mécanique uranographique

C’est Hurpy qui a eu la permission

Occupe la salle d’Olivier qui n’est pas à Paris

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Noms des entrepreneurs

Demeures

Noms des Établissements

Observations

Roussel

Rue des Boucheries n.13 Boulevard du temple A la Glacière Rue de Paradis

Phénomène

N’est pas autorisé.

St Jorn Thomas Thierry [Added outside and under the table] Salles de société comédie bourgeoise Doyen

Grommaire

Figures de cire Réunion de société Idem.

Rue Transnonain au marais Rue du Paradis Rue Chantereine

Appendix 2 List of secondary shows for which an indemnity is suggested following the suspension of shows due to the death of the Duke of Berry, compiled from the report of Jules Jean Baptiste Anglès (police prefect) to Baron ClaudePhilibert-Edouard Mounier (general director of the Paris police), 19 April 1820 (ANF : F21/ 1045) Owner/Director

Address

Show

Indemnity suggested (francs)

Petits spectacles de 1ère classe : Bertrand Saqui Comte, physicien Pierre Séraphin

Boulevard du Temple Boulevard du Tempe Rue de Grenelle St Honoré Passage Montesquieu Palais Royal

Funambules Acrobates Théâtre mécanique Ombres chinoises

1.990 1.760 720 330 500

Petits spectacles de 2ème classe : Jores Jacques Bolis Lefebvre et Dupont

Boulevard du Temple 54 Boulevard du Temple 88 Boulevard du Temple 58 Boulevard du Temple

Cabinet de curiosité Cabinet de figures Animaux savants Oiseaux savants

147 83 15 30

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Owner/Director

Address

Show

Indemnity suggested (francs)

Adrien, physicien Porcelet Mahault Lago Réaux Bécourt Gazzera

Boulevard du Temple 78 Boulevard du Temple 84 Boulevard du Temple 52 Passage du Panorama 25

Sujets sauteurs Cabinet de figures Illusions égyptiennes Salon cosmographique Animaux curieux Cabinet d’illusions Cosmorama

170 100 30 140 120 120 110

Cours des Fontaines Palais Royal

Bals publics : Aruaux

Rue Quincampoix, passage Molière Branche Rue de Province Barré Salle de Mont Thabor Carlier Rue Dauphine Rue des Marais Frossard Garin Cour Batave Guiet dite Vendôme Rue du Bac Leroi Rue St Honoré Lami Rue des Grès Nézard Boulevard Bondi Pontet Rue Grenelle St Honoré Velloué Venaut

480 Hermitage d’hiver Bal du Musée Bal Bal Bal de la rue du Bac Bal du Cirque des Muses Bal Vauxhall d’été Bal de la redoute Bal de la Galerie Pompée Bal du Prado

525 126 550 260 180 351 975 150 875 272 820 735

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About the author Camilla Murgia is Junior Lecturer in history of art at the University of Lausanne. She studied history of art at Neuchâtel (MA) and Oxford (PhD) universities. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the works on the French painter, art critic and collector Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain (PierreMarie Gault de Saint-Germain (c.1752–1842). Artistic Models and Criticism in Early Nineteenth-Century France, Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009). She works particularly on 18th and 19th centuries French and British visual cultures, with a particular focus on artistic reception, display, art criticism, printmaking, and caricature. Camilla has been Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College (University of Oxford) and has subsequently taught at Neuchâtel and Geneva universities. As Junior Lecturer at the University of Lausanne, she is currently working on a research project on the relation between arts and theatre in the long nineteenth-century in France, paying particular attention to the transmediality of theatrical performances and arts.

5.

Portable Museums: Imaging and Staging the “Northern Gothic Art Tour”– Ephemera and Alterity Juliet Simpson

Abstract During the early nineteenth century, the voyage to the past was to become a central destination for the discerning art tourist as for artists and writers. Yet, such voyages were as much ephemeral as actual, virtual creations of burgeoning antiquities tours in print and image. This chapter explores the pivotal, yet neglected significance of Northern European Gothic ‘tours’ flourishing between Britain and the Low Countries from the 1830s–1860s. It sheds new light on trailblazing accounts by Romantic tourists, Maria Graham (Lady) Callcott, Johann David Passavant, and the Gothic revivalist, W.H. James Weale, examining their fascination with Northern medieval Gothic architectures, art, and spaces of unseen heritage, constructed via ephemeral tour experiences as complex palimpsests of memory, modernity, and its other. Keywords: Gothic, art tour, Romantic, modernity, liminality

Traveling and Staging “North:” Romantic tours and exotic Gothics The “Gothic North” was the paradoxical creation, the virtual spectacle, and destination of post-Napoleonic upheavals. Along with “Waterloo tourism” and princely plunder, early nineteenth-century art travelers, especially to the Southern Netherlands and German lands, doubtless experienced frissons on a par with eighteenth-century Grand Tourists to the Roman Campagna and post-Vesuvius Pompeii, exposed to a cultural displacement of vertiginous

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_ch05

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proportions.1 In this panorama of spoliation, as Francis Haskell observes, travelers could hunt trophies from looted monuments, light upon art treasures piled high in transient spaces, visit backstreet antiquaries and auction houses, witness the churches and aristocratic treasure houses of continental Europe thrown open to the highest bidder.2 Ephemeral and precarious, in particular, the spoils of a Northern Gothic and Renaissance heritage were everywhere on display as war trophies: pre-1815, as educational showpieces in Dominique-Vivant Denon’s Musée Napoléon.3 But post-Waterloo, they were increasingly of fascination as “destinations” for collectors, writers and artists. 4 Indeed, Friedrich von Schlegel writing during the high-watermark of Napoleonic displacements in his Letters on Christian Art (1802–1804), was amongst the first of his generation to perceive in the scattered art of Northern Europe’s medieval Gothic past especially from the German Lands, “peculiar beauties” and “the hidden charms of soul and expression.”5 Associated with an awakening to an art that Schlegel avers, arises “from Notes: 1 On Waterloo battlefield tourism and its ephemera, particularly its commemorations and recreations for British travelers as a potent lieu de mémoire, see notably Stuart Semmel, “Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting and Memory after Waterloo,” Representations 69 (2000): 9–37. On the burgeoning battlefield relic trade, spectacles of memory (including grisly memorabilia) and the post-Waterloo travel itinerary, see Pieter Francois, “The Best Way to see Waterloo is with your Eyes Shut: British “Histourism,” Authenticity and Commercialisation in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22, no.1 (Spring 2013): 26–41. 2 See Francis Haskell, History and Its Images (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1993), 431–495 and Bénédicte Savoy and Nicolas Labasque, Patrimoine annexé. Les biens culturels saisis par la France en Allemagne autour de 1800, 2 Vols. (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2003). For Spoliations and impact on Old Master market; relations with Romantic and later Northern tour literature accounts of post-Waterloo patrimony restitutions and reception are not explored in these treatments. 3 As epitomised in celebrated art ‘confiscations’ conducted under the Revolutionary Agences d’Extraction in the Low Countries and Holland (from 1794–1795), including The Lamb of God, the central panel of Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, seized from St Bavo’s cathedral, Ghent; under Denon, this was to be exhibited as an educational center-piece in his “asylum of all human knowledge.” On Denon’s controversial program and its contexts, see David Gilks, “Attitudes to the displacement of cultural property in the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon,” The Historical Journal 56, no.1 (March 2013): 113–143 (this citation, 118). 4 See, for example, Francois, vis-à-vis the growing popularity of cultural tourism in the Southern Netherlands and Rhinelands, post-Waterloo, “The Best Way to see Waterloo,” (2013): 30–33. 5 First published in Sammtliche Werke, 2 vols. (Vienna: Jacob Mayer und Compagnie, 1822-25), disseminated in English in 1848 and 1860 in a collection of Schlegel’s aesthetic writings, translated with Preface by E.J. Millington, as The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Friedrich von Schlegel (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848, 1860); this citation, Schlegel, ‘Preface’ (Millington, 1848), xix–xx.

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what is near and peculiar to us,” its character, he contends, will be “infallibly local and national.”6 But while Schlegel’s perceptions would spark a developed Romantic taste for revivals of Northern European medieval and Renaissance cultures, as evoked in Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Wackenroder’s landmark Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), and later, Karl Schnaase’s Niederländische Briefe (1834) – of interest for this chapter is that such appetites were rich stimuli not only for expanded literary or historiographical insights, but for new kinds of cultural, artistic, and emotional encounters burgeoning in the wake of Napoleonic conflict. To Haskell’s contention that a manifest collecting interest, including in the heritage of Northern Europe’s scattered medieval and Renaissance past entwined with its nineteenth-century ephemeral “reinvention” via the Old Master exhibition, we should add the more neglected phenomenon of the “tour” – cultural, spatial, and virtual as its amplification.7 This is strikingly apparent in a post-Waterloo attraction from the late 1820s to a new engagement with the medieval architectural and artistic heritages of the Low Countries, Rhine- and German lands. Their draw was the appeal of a cultural past perceived as “purer,” more spiritual, and geo-culturally particular than the legacies of classical Greek and Roman Antiquity. Yet equally such interests were motivated by expanding ideas of nation via rediscovering a Gothic artistic patrimony of a shared, yet “other” memoryconstruction and modernity in which the virtualized allure of the Northern Gothic past would be determinant. The seeds of these interests are demonstrable in writings of early Romantic travelers – notably, by the German Nazarene artist, Johann David Passavant and the prodigious British art traveler and Germanophile, Maria Graham (Lady) Callcott (Fig. 5.1.). Both ardent readers of Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe, Tieck and Wackenroder, they became close friends. By the early 1830s, Callcott was also pivotal to the formation of a developed British-German circle of connoisseurs and intellectual networks, key amongst them Charles Eastlake, first Director of the National Gallery.8 Salient for this chapter are ways in which both Callcott’s and Passavant’s travels were stimulated as 6 Friedrich Schlegel, “Letters on Christian Art” (Millington, 1847), “Letter 1V,” 116. 7 Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000), 6. 8 On Eastlake’s German aesthetic interests and relations with the founding National Gallery collections, see Charlotte Klonk, “Mounting Vision: Charles Eastlake and the National Gallery of London,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 2 (June 2000): 331–47, although Callcott’s role in the development of a German spirit in British art and cultural taste-making at this period has not been explored in depth.

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much by the need to give visibility to and create a Northern past in object, word and image, transposing its fragmented cultural patrimony to mediate new nineteenth-century imaginaries, as to record and acquire it. Indeed, arguably, the central insight of these romantic “rediscoveries” is the new emphasis that both writers, following Friedrich Schlegel’s inspiration, accord to Northern medieval Gothic art as possessing attributes of distinctiveness and particularity. For each, these interests presage amplif ied ideals of nation-building, a growing appreciation of cultural diversity in shaping a new art history for the age and, with it, developed responses to and connections with a scarcely known medieval and early-modern past. Callcott’s artistic tour of the German lands and Italy detailed in her 1827–1828 Journal undertaken as a wedding voyage with her second husband Augustus Callcott, is a demonstrable, yet still under-explored case in point. Anticipating a pattern in Passavant’s English and Belgian Kunstreisen, Callcott follows a journey of “metempsychosis” – a new concept at this period – in two parts.9 But it is her travels in the German lands that would prove ground-breaking. Tracing first, Schlegel’s Rhinelands journeys – from Cologne to Augsburg, then from Munich north-east, to Nuremberg and Dresden – Callcott charts her unfolding, deepening interest in Gothic medieval and Northern Renaissance art. Indeed, her responses, to date neglected by scholars, are pioneering in perceptions arguably unique for Callcott’s period with far-reaching consequences for contemporary German tastemakers.10 Foremost amongst them were a group of adventurous women connoisseurs, notably Anna Jameson and Elizabeth Eastlake (née Rigby).11 As Susanna Avery-Quash points out, it was above all this circle 9 Relating to the ancient doctrine of the migration of souls: developed as a key strand within late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century French and German Romantic thought; Callcott’s interest in the transmission of a German spirit in early nineteenth-century British art and its connections with ideas of cultural rebirth aligns with a strain of Romantic philosophy in the 1820s and 1830s in the domain of historiography and reformist philosophy concerned with building a collective spirit of culture and nations; for an overview (on post-Waterloo France), see Lynn L. Sharp, Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth-Century France (New York [etc.]: Lexington Books, 2006), esp. 2–4. 10 Indeed, her interest in and concentrated exposure to so-called and German ‘primitive’ art has been characterized as “extraordinary” for this period, see David Blayney Brown and Christopher Lloyd, The Journal of Maria, Lady Callcott, 1827–28 (Oxford: Oxford Microf ilm Publications, 1981), 9; but detailed analysis of the significance of Callcott’s German journeys for her contemporaries remains to be investigated. 11 As recounted in her appreciation of German “Primitives” seen in the collections of the Vienna (Belvedere) and newly founded Frankfurt (Städel Institute) in Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834); on Jameson, Callcott and their role in advancing ‘connoisseurship’, see Caroline Palmer, “I will Tell Nothing that I did not See! British Women’s Travel Writing, Art

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Fig. 5.1. Sir Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Lady Callcott. Oil on canvas, 1819, 597 x 496 cm. London: National Portrait Gallery. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

who would play a significant role, building on Callcott’s, in developing and broadening nineteenth-century audiences for German art.12 The Callcotts extended stays in Munich (1827) were critical in this respect. It was here, and and the Science of Connoisseurship, 1776–1860,” Forum for Modern Languages Studies 51, no. 3 (1 July 2015): 248–268 (see especially, 255). 12 Especially in relation to their emphasis on disseminating a new ‘science’ of German connoisseurship modeled on Callcott’s empirical approach, see Susanna Avery-Quash, “Illuminating the Old Masters and Enlightening the British Public: Anna Jameson and the Contribution of British Women to Empirical Art History in the 1840s,” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long

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in Cologne, that they acquired developed first-hand knowledge of the art of the early Netherlandish and German “Primitive” artists via such influential contacts in the period’s continental European art world as Georg von Dillis, Royal art advisor to Ludwig I of Bavaria, through visits to the magnificent private art collections of Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée in Munich and at Schleissheim, and as witness to Von Dillis’s acquisition of the Boisserée collections in 1827 at a pivotal moment of European history-making.13 That is: the institutionalizing and public display of pre- and early-modern art from the German lands. During her travels, and exposed to the monumental spectacle of what she records as “the beautiful unfinished [Cologne] Cathedral,” Callcott had further, unparalleled opportunities to engage with its history, descriptions and panoramic print imagery.14 In particular, via the Boisserées’ near exhaustive studies (recently completed), it was presented to the early nineteenthcentury gaze as a suggestively unfolding, yet ever-present virtualized Gothic (1821–1824: Fig. 5.2.).15 And it was arguably via this deeper encounter with the Boisserées’ amplified projection of Cologne Cathedral, building on Goethe’s writings as a potently suggestive lieu de mémoire – a crossroads of Northern and Mediterranean art and cultural heritance – which was doubtless of deep significance for Callcott.16 Prescient, is her ability to perceive the synthetic “decorative principle” of early German architecture and art (on her visit in late July to the Dresden Gallery), for all the melancholy neglect Nineteenth Century (Spring 2019). https://19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.832/; last accessed 2 December 2019. 13 With the ambition of forming, “the fullest and most and most instructive collection of the world’s art ever seen.” Wolf-Dieter Dübe, The Munich Gallery (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), 60. 14 Maria Graham (Lady) Callcott, Journal (to Dresden/including 1st visit to Munich – May 12th 1827/to August 10th), Papers of Sir Augustus and Maria, Lady Callcott, 1768–c.1882, Bodleian Library (University of Oxford), Special Collections, MSS. Eng. 2275, 2276, 2278–79. Notebook 1 (MS Eng. 2275): 6–7 (hereafter, all citations are from the Bodleian Callcott Papers MSS collections). 15 Notably, Johann Sulpiz Boisserée, Histoire de description de la cathédrale de Cologne [with] vues, plans [&C], (1821-3); followed by his Mémoire sur l’architecture du moyen-âge (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1824) and Monuments d’architecture du septième au triezième siècle dans les contrées du Rhin inférieur (Munich and Stuttgart: Cotta, 1842). 16 As indeed highlighted in Goethe’s treatment of Strasbourg Cathedral and ‘Gothic’, in his “Von deutscher Baukunst,” which he re-baptizes as a source of ‘awakening’ to a German inheritance (first published: Frankfurt am Main, 1772), followed by his “Alt-Deutsche Baukunst” (1819) and his Über Kunst und Alterthum (“On German Art and Architecture,” 1823), which includes his response to Cologne Cathedral and the Boisserées’ engravings. On this, see Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca, NY/ London: Cornell University Press, 2000), esp.11–12.

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she observes at Cologne, and link this with what Goethe called the Gestalt character of Gothic architecture.17 That is, its complex totality as a body of art with its own internal life as variety in “unity;” unity within variety.18 Yet, echoing Goethe in her response to Gothic as a distinctly northern inheritance, Callcott also perceives this afresh through the immediacy of her on-site observations, which capture and distill new possibilities offered by the ephemeral, multiple optic of travel on a fragmented and conflicted past. She records, for example, that, “the view from the river is very fine and gives a high idea of what might have been;” inside, highlighting the salient detail, the Choir, “that part which is finished, is magnificent” in contrast to “the wretched state of the rest.”19 However short-hand, this palimpsest of many viewpoints is arguably the very stimulus – composing the view from the “notebook” – that enables Callcott to perceive in Cologne Cathedral its potency as both monument and unfolding image, identifying even in the interior’s ruinous aspects, a decorative system at work as the hidden source of its aesthetic unity. Even so, this perception is mediated through a series of tantalizing sensory and virtual projections of what it still might be, evoking a theme to which Callcott returns repeatedly: that the “decorative principle” of early-German art is a more than a traveler’s curiosity. Rather, it is a sensory and cultural touchstone, the embodied memory trace as a stimulus for both intellectual and imaginative expansion.20 17 Indeed, on their f irst visit to the Boisserées in Munich (June 1827), Callcott records her enthusiasm for the Boisserée engravings, noting: “We looked over Boisserées’ superb plates of the Cathedral of Cologne as it was intended to be from the ancient plans still preserved from the part actually finished.” Callcott, Journal (to Dresden/including 1st visit to Munich – May 12th 1827/to August 10th), Callcott Papers (Bodleian Library, Oxford), MSS. Eng. 2275, Notebook 1: 86. 18 His overwhelming illumination inspired by beholding Strasbourg Cathedral which, for Goethe, emerges as if from the shadows of a ‘barbarous’ Gothic into his perception of it as a living totality: “Wie in Werken der ewigen Natur, bis aufs geringste Zäserchen, alles Gestalt und alles zweckend zum Ganzen; wie das festgegründete ungeheure Gebäude sich leicht in die Luft hebt; wie durchbrochen alles und doch für die Ewigkeit.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Von Deutscher Baukunst” (1772), in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, Komplett, Vol.12, Schriften zur Kunst (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 7–15. 19 Callcott, Journal (to Dresden/including 1st visit to Munich – May 12th 1827/to August 10th), Callcott Papers (Bodleian Library, Oxford), MSS. Eng. 2275, Notebook 1: 6–7. 20 In the context of observations she notes while in Dresden with the Nazarene artist, Karl Christian Vogel, where again, echoing the Callcotts’ encounters in Cologne, she opines of the early German masters, that, “It was decoration that led them on to the end of the fifteenth century and produced [their? – hand-writing unclear] holy expansion and deep intellectual feeling.” Callcott, Journal (to Dresden/including 1st visit to Munich – May 12th 1827/to August 10th), Notebook 1: 138–139.

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Fig. 5.2. Christian Friedrich Traugott Duttenhofer (engraver), View of the cathedral of Cologne, engraving, ca.1821. Plate 3 from: Sulpiz Boisserée, Ansichten, Risse und einzelne Theile des Doms von Köln, mit Ergänzungen nach dem Entwurf des Meisters, nebst Untersuchungen über die alte KirchenBaukunst und vergleichenden Tafeln der vorzüglichsten Denkmale. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1821, vol.2. Getty Research Institute.

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Indeed, this creation of a multiple optic through the mobile gaze is a signal innovation of Callcott’s Journal, highlighted in her travels in the Rhinelands, at Coblentz, Augsburg, Frankfurt, and even more markedly in her encounters with the array of early Netherlandish and German masters in the Boisserées’ private galleries at Schleissheim. Here, the Callcotts’ first visit is striking for the economy of narration, which records the Schleissheim gallery’s sheer scale (Callcott notes: “in 37 rooms are 2024 numbered pictures, besides others not noticed [sic]”), while deft in showing this merely as a first sweep that anticipates the expanded “view.”21 Furthermore, Callcott’s perceptions are prescient in their adventurous temporal as well as aesthetic and cultural breadth in ways that make her account more than travel notations of picturesque places encountered, things seen or frissons stimulated by “romantic” ruins. And as salient is that while her Journal is thus not presented as a “guidebook” in any touristic sense, a central theme is its attentive sensitivity to suggesting the potency and emotive power of an incomplete past. A notable insight, building on her observations of Cologne Cathedral, is Callcott’s recognition of the unity between Gothic architecture and the pictorial art it contained, combining didactic messages with effects of decorative richness: as technically exquisite yet suggestively potent. In the recently founded Frankfurt Städel Institute, for example, she concentrates not on questions of attribution or style but highlights that, “the [visual] effect of the [early] German pictures with their gold grounds, brocaded stuffs and brilliant color is gorgeous in the extreme” [author’s emphasis].22 She develops this theme in Augsburg, drawing out suggestive resonances with Augsburg’s pivotal history as an empire of integrated craft as well as of images.23 Viewed thus through its deeper architectural and decorative relationships, she attributes to Holbein the Elder’s work a larger significance perceiving that it “accords particularly well with the Gothic architecture and should be considered as not so much an art in itself as part of the whole system of decoration which belonged to the buildings of that style.”24 21 Dated 23 June [1827]: “went to Schleissheim to see the gallery,” Callcott, Journal (Notebook 1: to Dresden…), 71. 22 Dated: “June 3 [1827] – to the Städel to see the collection,” Callcott, Journal (Notebook 1: to Dresden…), 31–32. 23 On the development of Augsburg’s flourishing print and art production and subsequent legacy, see Peter Stoll, “The Imperial City of Augsburg and the Printed Image in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” OPUS Augsburg 2016. https://opus.bibliothek.uniaugsburg.de/opus4/frontdoor/ deliver/index/docId/3705/file/Stoll_empire_of_prints.pdf; last accessed 16 February 2019. 24 Dated 17 June, referring to the collection in the Katherinenkloster (a former convent), housed within the Schaezlerpalais complex. See Callcott, Journal (Notebook 1: to Dresden…), 58.

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On the several visits to Schleissheim, and during the Callcotts’ extended sojourn in Munich in late July and August 1827, the Journal becomes even more expansive in its development of these themes. Yet, the treatment is also synthetic and selective, recomposing and unifying the scope and scale of the Boisserée collections as if a virtual, unfolding gallery of masterpieces for the beholder and traveler. Here, the approach suggestively mirrors Callcott’s mobile viewing experiments in her 1824 travels in South America with the “peepshow:” a folding paper cut-out modeling a panorama of the Chilean landscape as if could be held in the palm of the hand.25 In 1827, at Schleissheim, Callcott develops this potential of the staged view. As well as their magnificent center-piece: Rogier van der Weyden’s St Columba altarpiece (c. 1455 at this period incorrectly attributed by the Boisserées to the Van Eyck Brothers: now Alte Pinakothek, Munich: Fig. 5.3.), Callcott creates “spotlights,” emphasizing the Boisserées’ group of exquisite “Cologne School” works including Wilhelm “Meister” of Cologne, Stefan Lochner’s Madonna of the Rosebank, and the St Bartholemew Altarpiece by the Master thereof. Included in this group is Hans Memling [Hemling], described as a “delightful painter” and Dieric Bouts, highlighted as a “painter of powerful landscapes.”26 And key to this idea, is Callcott’s oscillation between notation, observation, and a more emotive register, saving the detailed inventorying work for another account.27 What this conveys is a thrilling new type of experience – as she observes, the sense that it [the collection and gallery] “occasioned great marvel.” Even so, this suggestively Romantic presentation of the connoisseur as explorer and curator, as composer of her own ephemeral collection, combines too with her ability for incisive perceptions. Of the observation that Memling’s life appears “romantic,” 25 Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824) and Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824); the watercolor peepshow model of a View of L’Angostura de Paine in Chile (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, d. 1835), appears to be based on Graham’s (Callcott’s) landscape illustrations and botanical drawings featured in her 1824 Journal of a Residence in Chile. On Graham’s South American travels and their visualization, see Katherine Manthorne, “Female Eyes on South America: Maria Graham,” Collección Cisneros (21 July 2017). https://www.coleccioncisneros.org/editorial/cite-site-sights/female-eyes-south-america-maria-graham; last accessed 19 February 2020. 26 Callcott, Journal, Callcott papers, MS Eng. d.2276 (Notebook 2: August 10th 1827/Dresden to Munich), 71–72. 27 Amongst the papers relating to the Callcotts’ 1827–8 tour are an additional small (handwritten) pamphlet entitled “Beginning of our Tour in 1827 by Lady Callcott,” containing a list by country and city of principal galleries and works of art viewed (MS Eng. d. 2278-2279), and a further notebook (MS Eng. 2280) with extensive and detailed notations on the Munich and Schleissheim gallery visits and ‘catalog’ of the works. Callcott’s observation that prior to their arrival (in Munich), “some eight thousand” pictures were already cataloged indicates both the magnitude of the collection and of Callcott’s undertaking (Pamphlet: MS Eng. 2278–2279), 3.

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Callcott briskly demolishes would-be rivals in the tart dismissal of Johanna Schopenhauer’s (that other “lady traveler”) “inventions.”28 Elsewhere, her formidable ability to project long historical insights is demonstrable, as in Dürer’s case, who, in contrast with the period’s prevailing view, is ranked by Callcott as “inferior to those of the low German School.” Yet, as she counters: “Following the wreck of art in Italy and Greece [he is] then the most polished [artist] in Northern Europe.”29 Indeed, Callcott here uses prolonged first-hand encounters, building scrupulously detailed on-site descriptions interspersing technical and color notations, to verbalize and virtually project the Boisserée collection as if the Journal has become the medium of its both its experience (“exhibition”) and panoramic recreation. In these ways, Callcott’s Journal serves as a portmanteau to distil the immediacy of her perceptions, interweaving a vivid sense of her encounters with pungent historical reflection. Her eye for local particularities: tables d’hôtes, agreeable Rhine waters, women’s costumes, mixes glimpses of a gothic finial, spires, tracery, and unusual headwear, many captured in tiny abbreviated vignettes.30 Intertwined with a flowing rapid hand, it is as if the body were in the voice, the very jolt of the diligence felt in the pen.31 Yet, such effects of local color are imaginatively re-presented to make present a conjoining of distant time, place, and image, seizing the possibilities of the traveling viewpoint to extract from details, unities of art and the Gothic architecture to which these relate. Although ravaged by Napoleonic conflict, plunder, and neglect, Callcott’s descriptions of these sites show and narrate. But they also order, recompose, and synthesize the potency of a Northern past mostly neglected, unseen, or dismissed as “primitive” by her contemporaries. By highlighting combinations of “peculiar richness of color” and clarity of expression that heightens storytelling potential, 28 Remarking, “I wish she had given more authorities,” most likely a reference to Johanna Schopenhauer’s Johann van Eyck und seine Nachfolger (Heinrich Wilmans: Frankfurt am Main, 1822), Callcott, Journal (Notebook 2: Dresden to Munich), 73. 29 Callcott, Journal (Notebook 2: /Dresden to Munich), 70–72 and 75. 30 En route from Cologne through the Rhinegau: “Rhine water certainly most agreeable.” Callcott, Journal (Notebook 1: to Dresden …), 27. Callcott’s interest in picturesque details of local women’s dress is repeatedly evoked as in Augsburg, noting Bavarian costume (Notebook 1: 56) and again in Munich in a prolonged description of the variety of women’s headwear and costumes (Notebook 1: 97). 31 The notebooks are interspersed with a number of small vignettes, ranging from architectural details, schematic altarpiece designs (as in Cologne Cathedral) and such eye-catching local details as the frequently recorded Bavarian bonnets (Journal, Notebook 1: 56); Callcott also refers to her ‘sketches’ (made on-site) accompanying her notes, as in Cologne (Cathedral, High Altar and St Séverin) (Notebook 1: 8).

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Fig. 5.3. Rogier van der Weyden, St Columba Altarpiece. Oil on oak panel, ca. 1455, 138 x 153 cm (central), 138 x 70 cm (each wing). Munich: Alte Pinakothek. © Bridgeman Art Library.

Callcott adduces to works by Stephan Lochner and Van der Weyden (aspects she sees reflected, but more unevenly in the so-called revivalist art of the Nazarenes, notably the work of Karl Christian Vogel), Callcott’s Journal also presents these seemingly fragmentary “archaisms” in a fresh light. Above all, it is through the expanded “tour” and its potency for new sensations and image-making linked to reflection –what Le Goff sees as “the seductiveness of memory” – that Callcott projects a larger, many-dimensional past and its suggestive implications for a Flemish-German spirit of renewal conceived as “modern.”32 Echoing these perceptions, Johann David Passavant’s 1836 Tour of a German Artist in England and Belgium (Kunstreisen durch England und Belgien) follows a reverse journey via a similar use of the tour optic. Combining the view of the connoisseur enlivened by personal souvenir, Passavant’s detailed on-site descriptions of art works recounted on visits to notable country seats, public and private London collections narrate yet recompose his tour into multiple “viewpoints” for the virtual traveler. Written ostensibly to prepare a study on Raphael’s art, Passavant presents a comprehensive “survey.” But whilst a far less detailed work of observation and aesthetic commentary than Callcott’s Journal, Passavant, however, adds to Callcott’s perceptions in two 32 La séduction de la mémoire: in the context of Jules Michelet’s translation of Vico’s De l’Antique sagesse de l’Italie (1835) and new-found romantic interest in the proximity of the Antique idea of memoria and reminscentia (vide Vico), which, for Michelet, according to Le Goff, connects “memory” (as “recording”) and “imagination” (as “reminiscence” or “image”), see Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 157.

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respects important for this discussion. First, is his account of the Liverpool lawyer, abolitionist, and polymath, the “celebrated” William Roscoe’s collection in Liverpool.33 Second is his detailing of his visit to the London-based German Merchant Carl Aders’s art and print collection.34 In both instances, Passavant is struck by the rich examples of Flemish-German “primitive” art (even if of uncertain attribution); and in both, as with Callcott’s perceptions in Cologne and Augsburg, even if details of place are scant, there is a sense of artistic possibilities just coming into view. In Roscoe’s case (whom he visited in 1831), he adduces this taste to Roscoe’s “unceasing cultivation of art, science and literature” and prodigious industry, particularly evident in Roscoe’s vigor in founding the Liverpool Institution – attributes that Passavant suggestively associates with Roscoe’s Liverpool roots as a great and adventurous northern capital of industry and trade.35 Albeit displayed to “educate,” it is in this spirit of adventure and an emerging optic that Passavant characterizes Roscoe’s collection of Netherlandish and German “Primitives,” drawing out their potential as both “specimens” yet “deep and serious” and poetical.36 And as striking, are Passavant’s experiences of Aders’s collection, which he elaborates, indeed, as experiences. There, Passavant was able to view several rarities: in his view a “superior” 1819 copy of the Van Eycks’ great Ghent Altarpiece that had suffered enormously from Napoleonic pillage; a very rare Virgin and Child by Jan van Eyck (incorrectly attributed by Passavant to Margaretha van Eyck); and a painting by the Colmar master, Martin Schongauer (a wing picture of “Pilate Showing Christ before the People”). And it is his comments on these two examples that are arguably most potent and prescient; again, like Callcott, using the touring viewpoint to create “spotlights.” The Jan van Eyck Virgin is 33 Largely self-educated, a leading political abolitionist as well as a botanist and poet, Roscoe amassed a substantial art and botanical science collection, including of early Netherlandish and German “Primitive” artists (many since re-attributed), first displayed in The Liverpool Royal Institution (which, with The Athenaeum literary society, he was active in founding), now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. On his collecting activities, see Dongho Chun, “Democratic Principles and Aristocratic Tastes: William Roscoe’s Patronage and Art Collecting,” Transactions: Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (September 2018), esp. 124–135, although the connection with Passavant and German taste-making is not developed. 34 Aders possessed one of the most important collections of early Netherlandish and Cologne School art seen as unique at this period, see Susan Foister, “Victoria and Albert: Art and Love: Prince Albert’s German Pictures,” Essays from a Study Day held at The National Gallery, ed. Susanna Avery-Quash (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2012), 10. 35 By his account, Passavant spent two days in Roscoe’s “excellent” company: Johann David Passavant, Tour of a German Artist in England, Vol. 2. (London: Saunders & Otley, 1836), 13. 36 Passavant, Tour of a German Artist in England, Vol. 2, 18.

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described as “very delicate and poetical” and of peculiar composition; its various countenances “more singular than beautiful.” The Schongauer is said to be “full of speaking heads,” spirited, and having a harmony of color that was seen as “peculiar to Flemish painting.”37 Passavant’s response to early Netherlandish and German art here suggests a breadth and curiosity beyond a single artist(s) taste (the Van Eycks) and amplified cataloging. Rather, it points to an enlarged perception of a Flemish-Germanic spirit and suggestive cultural awakening – stressed in the repeated intensifiers – “singular,” “poetic,” “peculiar,” “spirited” – linked to a new visibility of British-Low-Countries-German art interests. But it is via the tour that the suggestive outline of this imaginary is presented as an alternative space of potential nation-building and cosmopolitan encounter. Indeed, albeit romanticizing and limited to an élite circle of tastemakers, Callcott’s and Passavant’s tours emerge as seminal in this production of a past-ness, pivoting on potently transforming perceptions of Northern medieval, specifically Gothic architecture and art as an expression of new national particularity and cosmopolitan connection. But more than this: they distil a specific connection between an emerging history and memory of this artistic inheritance and potential via enlarging the personal viewpoint, to multiply images of this past. And this accelerates in the context a newly independent Belgium from 1830, sparking a flourishing Northern art tour literature between Britain and the Low Countries. Anticipated by romantic tours, by the mid-1830s this momentum had greatly developed in scope, reach, and emerging markets highlighted by Passavant’s near British contemporary, John Hoppus’s 1836 The Continent in 1835: Sketches in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Savoy and France.38 In key ways, Hoppus’s Northern and Rhinelands “tour,” wholly overlooked by scholars, is a trailblazer of its time. Traveling by steamboat (to Ostend) and canal to join the first newly opened European mainland rail route at Brussels, Hoppus’s tour exemplifies an expanding geo-cultural optic on “discovering” Northern European architectural and artistic treasures framed by the Gothic cities of Bruges, Ghent, and Cologne. It is in these respects both “romantic” 37 Passavant, Vol.1, 209–210. 38 Both published by Henry Colburn’s Saunders & Otley, by the 1830s, established as the leading London publisher of literary tours and ‘fashionable’ interest artist-writer biographies; the marked focus on continental travel and thought indicated in the 1836 new ‘publication’ highlights, including J.B Robertson’s translation of F. Schlegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (with a “Life of the Author”); Anna Jameson’s Visits and Sketches Abroad and at Home, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi (Passavant, Tour of a German Artist, Vol. 1, under “Messrs. Saunders and Otley’s New Publications”).

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and “modern,” reveling in the thrill of water voyages powered by steam and imposing canal ships; both history-making and about the future. But it also has further significance for this argument, highlighting what David Lee calls in another context, the persistent “bichromatism” of the period, oscillating between increasing positivist confidence in progress yet flight from its certainties.39 For while, on the one hand, Hoppus – a philosopher and evangelical Protestant reformer – conceives his tour for rational and reformist purposes, in short, in the spirit of Protestant education for the nation; on the other, his travels are also about encounters with spaces and experiences evoking the darkly exotic. So, a journey that starts with the express aim, as he avers, to expose continental Europe’s backward corners steeped in Catholic despotism and “Romish superstition [sic],” is shadowed, notably in Hoppus’s sojourns in Bruges and Ghent, by his pervasive attraction to their picturesque, more ambiguous aesthetic charms. 40 The text is unillustrated. Yet, the use of the epistolary form and literary sketch, drawing on a nexus of romantic art tropes, creates an intimacy of visual mood and place replete with melancholy and suggestively layered architectural and interior-view images, as conjured, for example, in Hoppus’s experiences in Bruges. On first sight, it seems thriving – to Hoppus’s eyes “very fine […] with a considerable appearance of business.”41 Yet, his encounter with Bruges’s principal monuments evoke in him quite different sentiments, as the Belfry with its “brilliant carillon, continually telling of the lapse of time [which] unite with the antiquated and somber grandeur of many of the buildings.”42 Or, viewing the works by Hans Memling in the St John’s Hospital, its “Romish dominion,” Hoppus opines, propelling him back “into the midnight depths of superstition,” even though we hear little about the Memlings. 43 Rather, what fascinates Hoppus is experiencing the hospital, its cavernous interior and inhabitants, as a series of unfolding images and moods. Still, in this period until 1839, a functioning hospital and convent, Hoppus’s treatment, however, prolongs a sense of its fanciful melancholy and chiaroscuro – of a place lost in time’s recesses, as in viewing the hospital’s “gloomy chapel” filled with chanting “inmates” and the dolorous shapes of receding nuns. Similarly, in Ghent, Hoppus is drawn to “the peculiar solemnity and grandeur” of Ghent’s skyline, to the splendor of 39 40 41 42 43

David C. Lee, Ernest Renan: In the Shadow of Faith (London: Duckworth, 1996), 273. John Hoppus, The Continent in 1835: Sketches (London: Saunders & Otley, 1836), 5. Ibid., 10. Ibid. Ibid.

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its monuments; its canals, where, for Hoppus, “the Burgundian and Spanish dynasties (their “cruelties”) seemed present to the imagination” – and all abounding, he observes, as with Bruges, “in images and memorials of decayed grandeur.”44 In these ways, Hoppus’s oscillation between itinerary, observation, and evocation builds a Romantic imagery of virtual past-ness via tropes of sketch and vignette, turning what is merely ephemeral into a suggestively heightened emotive lexicon and sensory register of Gothic monuments and sites, and, above all, their experience.

Ephemera and alterity: Northern Gothics – Bruges and its uncanny reverberations Turning to my second theme: Hoppus’s trajectory would be pivotal for more developed “tour” experiences, notably those offered by W.H. James Weale in his compendious 1859 guidebook, Belgium, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, critically involved with his focus on artistic site as well as his 1860s Bruges School art revivals. 45 Weale’s animating passion was Gothic, particularly Flemish revivals. His activities as an historian and restorer of Northern Gothic monuments and art were prodigious. 46 He was also a Catholic – a factor that drew him to Belgium in particular to Bruges where he settled in 1855 in Bruges’s growing “English colony.”47 There, he became reputed as a “Flemish” Ruskin, pioneering if also contentious for his contemporaries.48 Of interest here, is Weale’s more neglected Belgium, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, where exploiting the now extensive railway network from London across 44 Ibid., 16. 45 William Henry James Weale, Belgium, Aix-la-Chapelle and Cologne: An Entirely New Guidebook for Travellers (London: W. Dawson and Sons, 1859), published as the first in a series of “Weale’s Handbooks for Tourists.” 46 For an overview of his prodigious activities as the leading exponent of the period’s Flemish art and architecture revivals, see Lori van Biervliet, Leven en werk van W.H. James Weale, een Engels kunsthistoricus in Vlaanderen in de 19de eeuw (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1991), esp. 91–172; on the broader reception of his ‘rediscovery’ of the Flemish Primitives, see Haskell, History and Its Images (1993), 431–495. In the development of these interests, however, Weale’s guidebook has received very little attention (Van Biervliet mentions it briefly but only in the context of the publisher’s economic demise; 50). 47 Resident until 1878, Weale mentions that by 1859, there were 500 British residents (Weale, Belgium, 166); on the ‘colony’, see Lori van Biervliet, “De Engelse kolonie in Brugge in de 19de eeuw,” Biekorf 88 (1988): 150–166; 262–281. 48 Vide as in H. Keryvn de Lettenhove’s account, following Weale’s shaping role in the 1902 Bruges Exhibition, “Les Primitifs Flamands.” “W.H. James Weale, Esq. Souvenirs,” La Revue belge (15 June 1926): 518–534.

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Belgium to Cologne, he builds on the image of Bruges, Belgium, and the Rhinelands depicted by such earlier travelers as Callcott, Passavant, and Hoppus. But he does so in far more compendious terms, even boasting of his “authoritative” itineraries as far surpassing his predecessors and better than his rival Bradshaw’s. 49 Weale’s “Preface” is instructive in this respect: The writer, while travelling in Belgium during the past year, experienced the want of a tolerably correct Guide book to the treasures of art preserved in the Churches, Museums and other institutions of that country. The idea then suggested itself to the writer to publish a volume […] to contain such information as should enable students in the various branches of archaeology, architecture and painting to make the best use of their time.50

The tone, if bland, betrays Weale’s deeper sense of mission. In 1861, as “Member Correspondent” addressing the Belgian Royal Commission on Public Restoration, he would defend vraie restauration against what he denounced as the “vandalism” carried out in the name of rescuing medieval architectural and artistic patrimony.51 This, Weale perceives to be threatened as much by modern “restorations” and their “whitewashing” as by Napoleonic ruination – and of which he cited Bruges’s and Leuven’s Hôtels de Ville as among the most shocking examples.52 In both, as he lamented, even the Gothic flamboyant decorative façade sculptures were now Greco-Roman.53 And it is giving visibility to a distinctive yet connected vision, especially of Belgium’s vanishing medieval patrimony (by implication absent from Bradshaw, despite its copious notes and thumb-nail “views”), which provides the animating impetus of Weale’s “Guidebook,” underpinning its claim to be both “authoritative” and modern. 49 Bradshaw’s Illustrated Handbook for Travellers in Belgium, on the Rhine and Through Portions of Rhenish Prussia (featuring maps and illustrations) (London: W.J. Adams, 1856), arguably the most comprehensive of its type catering for a post-1830 surge (in Britain and continental Europe) in Belgian and Rhinelands tours, copiously illustrated, but without the streamlined ‘routes’ vaunted in Weale’s Guide. 50 Weale, Belgium-Aix-la-Chapelle, “Preface,” 10. 51 With the purpose of exposing “[les] défenseurs des prétendues restaurations de nos monuments publics” and what he terms ensuing “ravages.” See Weale, Restauration des monuments publics en Belgique: Mémoire (“suivi d’une correspondence avec M. Jean Dugniolle”) (Bruges: Edw. Gailliard; Brussels: A. Decq, 1862), iv–vi. 52 “badigeonnées, plâtrées et dénaturées.” Weale, Restauration des monuments publics, v. 53 Highlighting Weale’s efforts, in his terms, to “expose” the denaturing of a complex and varied medieval artistic patrimony, thereby to efface it. See Weale, Restauration, 6.

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Indeed, its novelty and originality lies in Weale’s emphasis on “systematic” arrangements of his tour itineraries by principal monuments, classification by type – employing a new, uniform short-hand (capitals, italics, and small type), with capital-letter identifiers for principal sights, main routes, and residences of Sacristans, incorporating plans and maps, and extensive biographies of architects and artists.54 But key is the use of the new rail routes to create a portable map and joined-up experience of virtual “networked travel.” The compact hardback volume measuring 17 cm (width) by 11.2 cm (length) and 4 cm (thick) (priced at five shillings), which, as Weale emphasizes, could be tucked into an overcoat pocket, was published with a fold-out map showing the entire route network across Belgium to the Rhine.55 For the first time, it was possible to grasp a synthetic cultural panorama – far beyond the Romantic art traveler’s scope – framing a connected patrimony and expansive routes to the past for the discerning art tourist. Weale’s introductory sections build on this innovation, in Section I, detailing itineraries, customs, and moeurs; in Section II, providing an overview of Belgium’s history, geography, and climate; Section III dealing respectively with Fine and Decorative Arts, of which the longest piece is on Architecture, but with significant sections on “Metalwork,” “Painted Glass,” “Embroideries/Tapestries,” and “Chimes.” In these ways, although not illustrated, Weale turns absence of illustrations to new purposes. Dispensing with the ready-made touristic image (as used by Bradshaw), places heightened emphasis for the imaginative traveler on the appeal of the “route” by offering manifold potential images and expanded virtual encounters. Similarly, the itineraries are marked by this focus on the systematic and sensitively palimpsestic, recreating the outlines of vanishing pasts as at Furnes and Nieuwport (Route 10), or the still-visible, if melancholy splendor of Ypres’s Gothic Cloth-Hall (Route 12), and of which Route 15: Ostend to Bruges (including Ghent, Termonde, and Mechlin sic), is noteworthy for its length and close-focused attention on Bruges.56 Here, Weale devotes lengthy sections to Bruges’s Gothic architecture and works of art, detailing the elegance and sumptuously ornamental Hôtel de Ville (c.1377), his evocation, filling-in the void following Revolutionary plunder and recent 54 Weale, Belgium, “Preface,” 1–11. 55 “The writer has been at great pains to render his work as accurate and complete as possible without swelling its dimensions so as to make it inconvenient either for the pocket or pouch of the tourist.” Weale, “Preface,” Belgium, 10. 56 Weale, Belgium, 111–112.

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“restorations;” of the majestic Belfry and its carillon, as if experienced in its multiple medieval and later Gothic manifestations. But it is the Cathedral (St Saviour’s) and the Churches that command the most attentive treatment. Again, Weale supplies the virtual architectural substance and color to relics lost to Revolutionary and post-1800 depredations: to recreating the lost magnificence of the Cathedral choir stained-glass windows with their twelve peers of France.57 He goes on, highlighting more sensitive Gothic restitutions – the Burgundian tombs returned to the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Church of our Lady) although still in fragments.58 Added to these are the restorations in the Chapel of the Holy Blood (c.1134–1157), with its polychrome Chancel walls “in richly diapered patterns,” its High Altar and reredos in the fifteenth-century style designed by his compatriot, Jean-Baptiste Bethune.59 And there are evocations of other principal monuments and their art treasures, notably the St John’s Hospital, housing Memling’s Saint Ursula Shrine (1489), and a focus of earlier Romantic interest.60 But the hospital’s great attraction for Weale, enlarging on Hoppus, is his enhanced perception of it as both an Hôtel-Dieu and a gallery with “its rich and rare collection of early Flemish paintings […] by John Memling [sic].”61 This interest and his developed architectural, artistic, and cultural vision expanded via Weale’s structuring of his tours as palimpsests, is critical to what follows. In effect, the Guidebook functions as a way of networking a virtualized, ephemeral, yet more “complete” Flemish Gothic past into the present – to create a musée imaginaire of histories, absent, suppressed, or effaced – stimulating 57 Ibid., 140. 58 Ibid., 145. 59 Ibid., 150: drawing attention to Bethune, who with Jules Helbig, were the leading figures in a developed network of Gothic revivalists and proselytizers of A.W. N. Pugin’s True Principles (1841) in Belgium, active in Bruges, and with substantial links to an expanding circle of English Catholics committed to the union of the medieval and modernity, notably including Weale, the architect, Thomas Harper King (who also worked with Bethune and his contemporaries on the Holy Blood restorations), and the artist-designer, Sir John Sutton; on Bethune and Pugin, see Gilles Maury, “The True Disciple: Jean-Baptiste Bethune and A.W.N. Pugin: A Summary of a Complex Relationship,” A.W.N. Pugin’s Global Influence: Gothic Revival Worldwide, eds. Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Jan De Maeyer and Martin Bressani (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016), 43–51. 60 As the stimulus for a ‘romantic’ book, Ursula Princesse britannique, d’après la légende et les peintures de Memling (1818), by Baron (Charles Louis Guillaume) de Keverberg; on Keverberg and the nineteenth-century emergence of a Memling ‘canon’, see Jenny Graham, “Picturing Patriotism: The Image of the Artist-Hero and the Belgian Nation State, 1830–1900,” in The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries, eds. Hugh Dunthorne and Michael Wintle, 174–177 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 61 Weale, Belgium, 152.

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corresponding ideas of expanded national patrimony for British art tourists, while differencing it, as well as making a play for Catholic readers. Arguably, the Guidebook thus acts a frame for Weale’s developed vision of a Bruges, along with those of Jules Helbig and Jean Bethune, as a revitalized sacred Capital and cosmopolitan Catholic art community. It amplifies his “tour” as a touchstone for envisioning Bruges as a burgeoning center of restoration, transcendent spirituality, and exquisite new art, at the crux of an extending network of inter-arts creation.62 At its core is an ambitious vision of its monuments revealed afresh for Weale, dans leurs états primitifs; of his Flemish “Primitive School” revivals, unveiled in 1861, as he claims, from obscurity, and culminating in the 1867 exhibition, Tableaux de l’ancienne école néerlandaise exposés à Bruges, with Memling at its head.63 Significantly, Bruges thus emerges not only as a route but as a suggestive work of art. Amplified in his 1862 Bruges et ses environs, and for which Weale cites his 1859 guide as the template, Bruges becomes projected as a Symbolist Gesamtkunstwerk avant la lettre, distilling its history, geography, and patrimony, but conjured most potently by its architecture and monuments as the glory of the “Hanse Towns,” the keystones of its integrated cultures of art.64 It is also the guidebook view that supplies Weale’s 1867 portrait of Memling, framed by a vision of Bruges’s transcendently restored virtual fifteenth-century splendor. Memling, indeed, emerges through Weale’s larger evocation of Bruges’s past and present potency, with its panoply of statuary, fountains, gilding, and polychrome beauty; as he observes, “its squares adorned with fountains; private houses with statuary and carved work, the beauty of which was heightened by gilding and polychromy,” composing its artistic unity as the sacred locus of Memling’s art.65 Again, 62 Developed through Weale’s creation with Bethune and Helbig of their Bruges-based “Guild of St. Thomas and St Luke” (1863) and connections with an extensive circle of collectors and Catholic patrons in London, Ghent, Antwerp, and the Rhinelands, including of rare tapestry, brasses; makers of English and Flemish stained-glass (notably, the Birmingham-based Chance brothers), further developed in Bethune’s stained-glass atelier (established, Ghent 1859), see Van Biervliet, 51–53. 63 Weale, Restauration des monuments publics (1862), 5. Relating to the first published catalog of ‘Primitives’, Weale aff irms: “Nous estimons fort heureux, pour l’histoire de l’art, qu’à une complète obscurité ait déjà succédé un peu de clarté.” Weale, Catalogue du Musée de l’Académie de Bruges (Bruges and London: Bayaert-Defoort; Barthes and Lowell, 1861), 2. 64 Conceived as he states in the spirit of his 1859 guide, “le guide, le plus complet,” but also to amplify and improve on its discoveries. See Weale, Bruges et ses environs. Déscription des monuments, objets d’art et antiquités (Bruges: Bayaert-Defoort; London: Barthes & Lowell, 1862), ii. 65 Weale, Hans Memlinc: A Notice of his Life and Works (London: The Arundel Society, 1865), 3–4.

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Weale’s vision serves to create a seductive double optic: as a stimulus for British Gothic revivalists inspired by Pugin, while projecting a new role for Tractarians and cosmopolitan Catholic taste-making, and for which Belgium’s medieval patrimony had become a compelling inspiration. As Frederick Oakley, an intimate of Weale attested: “We endeavored, especially the younger and less occupied of our society, to improve our relations with foreign Catholics by occasional visits to the Continent. For this purpose Belgium was preferred to France.”66 In fact, Oakley understates the interest. Weale’s dedication to Helbig and Bethune in 1867 puts it more pungently; it envisages nothing less than Bruges and its “Primitive” artists as trailblazers of a re-imagined community, a different modernity: “qui à une époque où l’art s’affaisse dans le pire des réalismes cherchent à le relever et à le faire rentrer dans le vrai.”67 And pivotal to this vision of differencing is Weale’s treatment of Bruges – and of his broader Gothic trajectory – as both archaeological rediscovery and uncanny “other,” as restoration and artistry. On one level, as shown, this makes savvy use of a new panoramic scale for print ephemera: of maps, railway schedules, plans, and “skeleton routes:” Weale’s version of “distance reading.” Described on its frontispiece as “An Entirely new Guidebook for Travellers,” Belgium, Aix-la-Chapelle-Cologne features sixteen plans and four maps, detailed travel itineraries, and, as it advertises, “copious” historical and architectural notes: a model that would inform his 1867 “Primitives” catalog presentation, and claims for its authority and breadth. Yet, on another level, Weale presents his vast compendium from the perspective of the anti-tourist; as informed by erudition, sensitivity, and exquisite manners, exploiting both the compression afforded by the mobile cultural aide-mémoire and the expansiveness of the virtualized imaginary developed by earlier romantic travelers. Of note, is a substantial section on appropriate “pedestrian’s outfit,” itemizing the ultimate compact wardrobe with recommended accessories (“polyglot washing book […] a scent bottle; a small pocket telescope, or a powerful double opera-glass”), in short, as an extension of a complete style 66 Frederick Oakley, Historical Notes on the Tractarian Movement (London: Longman, 1865). On Weale’s links with Tractarianism, see Van Biervliet, Leven en werk van W.H. James Weale (1991), 43; on relations between the Bruges circle and its cosmopolitan connections with the spread of Catholic art networks, especially in Belgium and the German lands, see Jan de Mayer, “Pro Arte Christiana: Catholic Art Guilds, Gothic Revival and the Cultural Identity of the Rhine-Meuse Area,” in Historism and Cultural Identity in the Rhine-Meuse Region, eds. Wolfgang J. Cortjaens et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008), 159–173. 67 Weale, “Dédicace” (title page), Tableaux de l’ancienne école Néerlandaise exposés à Bruges (Bruges: Edw. Gailliard, 1867), dedicated “à mes frères d’armes, Helbig et Bethune.”

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de vie.68 And portability is a recurrent theme in Weale’s “Special Requirements,” mirrored by inside-cover adverts for portable outerwear: the “pocket siphonia” [sic], traveler’s “knapsack,” folding boats, and even folding bath.69 Moreover, it is also a staging of “tours” conceived as artistry. Mixed with the portable paraphernalia are notices for select continental purveyors of rare (but affordable) medieval antiquities, ecclesiastical vestments, and objets d’art, turning reader as much as author into a potential Gothic collector and virtual restorer, and thus a creator and owner of this past. Indeed, Hoppus’s oscillating perspectives of observation and evocative image-making supply the template: in particular, of a Bruges of “antiquated monuments,” steeped in religiosity, pervaded by its carillons, furnishing inspiration for Weale’s amplified promotion of it as a contemporary lodestar: a citadel of lost and re-found art, near and far; of the actual as virtual. What this suggests is a production of the tour as a springboard for expanded encounters: that is, moving between an ephemera of touristic production and imagery and its scope within the virtual spatialization and compression of the “skeleton route” to be other, as a voyage to more liminal experiences of converging spaces of memory and the present. Indeed, Weale’s Guide is demonstrable in projecting many other such Gothic Capitals as well as Bruges, as exerting this growing appeal – for example, Ghent, Tournai, Leuven, Lille, Liège – and further afield into the German lands with Cologne as a portal. That “Bruges” thus resonates beyond limits in space and temporality has a two-fold suggestiveness for my conclusions. First, in Weale’s Guidebook, via the heightened role given to visual encounters and types of art writing suggesting perspectives for more systematic, in-depth understanding to enrich the traveler’s experiences beyond the merely touristic (for example, in appreciating distinctive characteristics of Scheldt Gothic in the Flemish cities of Bruges and Ghent, or early Rhenish art in Cologne). Yet these, too, draw out aesthetic sensitivity to and image multiple emotive connections with a Northern European medieval artistic and cultural past evoked as dark and brilliant, splendid and consumable, mystic and pure, yet complex – and portable. Weale’s example, indeed, points to a pivotal enlargement of the ephemerality of the “Guide.” That is, between Northern journeys and travel motivated by discovery, curiosity, novelty, and tourism, to the Northern Gothic city experienced as a multivalent pilgrimage – as a journey of devotion, emotion, and artistic transformation – to find, lose, or reimagine oneself. 68 Weale, Belgium (1859), ‘Introduction’, xvii. 69 Ibid., viii.

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A striking inclusion in Weale’s 1859 essential reading, is Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 Pilgrims of the Rhine: a Belgian and Rhenish sight-seeing tour with a difference.70 Evoked through the lens of Rhineland myths as “history,” twinned with atmospheric engravings of principal sights, the appeal is to the virtual as much as actual pilgrim as a way of poetically inhabiting, in Bulwer-Lytton’s words, “the imbuing influence of that wild German spirit.”71 While Lytton’s is, in spirit and conception, a Romantic journey, his use of a poetic register in word and image transforms an historical experience of Rhineland monuments into an artistic “pilgrimage” conjuring a heightened state of mood to project, visualize, and stage as present, an occulted medieval Rhenish world. In these ways, Bulwer-Lytton’s Pilgrims shadow Weale’s tourists, suggesting an uncanny, intertextual imaginary expanding within Weale’s “routes” in new directions. This resonates with other such palimpsestic distillations and suggestive recreations of a tantalizing medieval past, seen and imaged, but in other respects mysterious and elusive, as evoked in the case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s and William Holman Hunt’s 1849 Paris and Belgian Kunstreisen, including to Bruges. It would seem that Bruges, even though by the late 1840s a crowded tourist hot-spot, stimulated in Rossetti’s visual art and poetry further potential for transposing and hybridizing a heightened sensory response to the many Gothic artworks and monuments they doubtless saw.72 Yet, Rossetti appears to have left no “account” of his Belgian tour. Rather, his poem The Carillon (1850) evokes a perception of experiences and encounters that emerge obliquely, enigmatically recreating the memory and sensations of a Northern medieval city. But these are conjured by the delicate synesthetic music of the Flemish carillons – a sound conjoining distant and present time, loss and presence, haunting yet brimming with affect – as the virtual embodiment of that lost experience. Indeed, that such tours of Northern medieval and Renaissance art might be reconceived from the perspective of the artist – an idea intimated by Callcott and Passavant – to embody alternative perceptions 70 Ibid., xviii. 71 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Pilgrims of the Rhine (London: Saunders & Otley, 1834), 3. 72 Rossetti records of that amongst the works they saw in Paris was Jan van Eyck’s The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (c.1430–1434), which he described as “tremendous;” of the Belgian part of the tour, however, there are few details, although they note that on their visit to Antwerp, they viewed the Florent van Ertborn bequest, comprising works by the Van Eycks and German Primitives; further, Rossetti’s two sonnets inspired by works by Memling and Rogier van der Weyden in Bruges, indicates that they would have seen the Memlings in the St John’s Hospital, and visited other major monuments, Dante-Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2003), 109, 128.

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of modernity, memory, and of altered identities of place and “belonging” in which the very ephemera of their means becomes the stimulus for a deeper seeing, anticipates the pivotal significance of the productive alterity of the Gothic “North” for fin-de-siècle writers and artists. Weale’s Belgium-Aix-la-Chapelle-Cologne was to prove an ephemeral production; the vaunted “New Handbook Series” never materialized, owing to the collapse of William Dawson and Sons, its publisher, leaving tantalizing questions as how the series would have evolved. Yet, in effect, by the early 1860s, Weale had already absorbed his Guidebook within his larger ephemeral vision of Bruges – and Belgium. Indeed, his case has exemplary implications. It points to significant ways in which the Northern “tour,” as Weale develops it, contributes to a new perception of past-ness at this period and, via modernity and mobility, to framing its manifold images and recreations as a production and liminal space of the contemporary present. And its pivotal stimulus is the rediscovery of a Northern medieval Gothic artistic and cultural heritage perceived as fragmentary, incomplete, and often “barbarous.” Yet, as demonstrable in Callcott’s efforts to capture it, or Passavant’s and Hoppus’s to poeticize it, this is about bringing a past into visibility entwined with the expansively modern and particular; but equally as work of memory and encounter, with the personal and suggestive. Within Weale’s more streamlined optic, the potency of the Northern tour becomes ineluctably associated with ephemerality: with new technology and rail travel as vectors of nation-building and progress, turning the handbook souvenir into an indispensable part of the modern traveler’s perception of their mobile modernity. But the suggestiveness of Weale’s virtual Gothic recreations is as much to do with their enlargement of the personal, “portable” viewpoint, with staging the potential, hidden image as narrating or illustrating it, for, as André Malraux suggests, the museum is beyond things or storage for relics, a creation of image-making.73 In sum: Weale’s treatment of his revivals within a larger projection of Bruges (and its cognates Ghent, Cologne, Munich, and Dresden) as a revitalized “sacred Capital” – a nexus of liminal and uncanny artistic potential – gives heightened prominence to the “tour” and its evocations as portable museums shaping not only the Gothic rediscoveries these excited, but the larger imaginaries to be built from them. 73 For Malraux, indeed, the nineteenth-century museum is a creation of presence as image and of souvenir: “Il y a avait alors dans les connaissances artistiques, une zone floue, qui tenait à ce que la confrontation d’un tableau de Florence, de Rome, de Madrid, était celle d’un tableau et d’un souvenir.” André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 15.

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Bibliography Avery-Quash, Susanna. “Illuminating the Old Masters and Enlightening the British Public: Anna Jameson and the Contribution of British Women to Empirical Art History in the 1840s.” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (Spring 2019). https://19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.832/; last accessed 2 December 2019. Blayney Brown, David, and Christopher Lloyd. The Journal of Maria, Lady Callcott, 1827–28. Oxford: Oxford Microfilm Publications, 1981. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: Papers of Sir Augustus and Maria (Graham), Lady Callcott, 1768–c.1882, Special Collections, MSS. Eng. 2275, 2276, 2278–2279. Boisserée, Johann Sulpiz. Histoire et description de la cathédrale de Cologne [with] vues, plans [&C]. Stuttgart : Cotta, 1821–3. ———. Mémoire sur l’architecture du moyen-âge. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1824. ———. Monuments d’architecture du septième au treizième siècle dans les contrées du Rhin inférieur. Munich and Stuttgart: Cotta, 1842. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. The Pilgrims of the Rhine. London: Saunders & Otley, 1834. Bradshaw, George. Bradshaw’s Illustrated Handbook for Travellers in Belgium, on the Rhine and Through Portions of Rhenish Prussia. London: W.J. Adams, 1856. Chun, Dongho. “Democratic Principles and Aristocratic Tastes: William Roscoe’s Patronage and Art Collecting.” Transactions Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 162 (2013): 107–135. Crane, Susan A. Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2000. Dübe, Wolf-Dieter. The Munich Gallery. London: Thames and Hudson, 1970. Foister, Susan. “Victoria and Albert: Art and Love: Prince Albert’s German Pictures.” In Essays from a Study Day held at The National Gallery, edited by Susanna Avery-Quash. London: Royal Collection Trust, 2012. Francois, Pieter. “The Best Way to see Waterloo is with your Eyes Shut: British ‘Histourism,’ Authenticity and Commercialisation in the Mid Nineteenth Century.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22, no.1 (Spring 2013): 26–41. Gilks, David. “Attitudes to the Displacement of Cultural Property in the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon.” The Historical Journal 56, no.1 (March 2013): 113–143. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Werke. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998. Graham, Jenny. “Picturing Patriotism: The Image of the Artist-Hero and the Belgian Nation State, 1830–1900.” In The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries, edited by Hugh Dunthorne and Michael Wintle, 174–177. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

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Graham, Maria (Lady Callcott). Journal of a Residence in Chile. London: printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824. ———. Journal of a Voyage to Brazil. London: printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824. Haskell, Francis. History and Its Images. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1993. Hoppus, John. The Continent in 1836: Sketches. London: Saunders & Otley, 1836. Klonk, Charlotte. “Mounting Vision: Charles Eastlake and the National Gallery of London.” The Art Bulletin 82, no.2 (June 2000): 331–347. Keverberg, Charles Louis Guillaume de. Ursula princesse britannique, d’après la légende et les peintures de Memling. Ghent, 1818. Lee, David C. Ernest Renan: In the Shadow of Faith. London: Duckworth, 1996. Le Goff, Jacques. Histoire et mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Lettenhove, H. Keryvn de. “Les Primitifs Flamands,” “W.H. James Weale, Esq. Souvenirs.” La Revue belge 6 (15 June 1926): 518–534. Malraux, André. Le Musée imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Manthorne, Katherine. “Female Eyes on South America: Maria Graham.” Collección Cisneros (21 July 2017). https://www.coleccioncisneros.org/editorial/cite-site-sights/female-eyes-south-america-maria-graham; last accessed 19 February 2020. Maury, Gilles. “The True Disciple: Jean-Baptiste Bethune and A.W.N. Pugin: A Summary of a Complex Relationship.” In A.W.N. Pugin’s Global Influence: Gothic Revival Worldwide, edited by Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Jan De Maeyer and Martin Bressani, 43–51. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016. Mayer, Jan de “Pro Arte Christiana: Catholic Art Guilds, Gothic Revival and the Cultural Identity of the Rhine-Meuse Area.” In Historism and Cultural Identity in the Rhine-Meuse Region, edited by W.J. Cortjaens et al., 159–173. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008. Oakley, Frederick. Historical Notes on the Tractarian Movement. London: Longman, 1865. Palmer, Caroline. “I will Tell Nothing that I did not See! British Women’s Travel Writing, Art and the Science of Connoisseurship, 1776–1860.” Forum for Modern Languages Studies 51, no. 3 (1 July 2015): 248–268. Passavant, Johann David. Tour of a German Artist in England, 2 vols. London: Saunders & Otley, 1836. Rossetti, Dante-Gabriel Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Jerome McGann. London/ New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Savoy, Bénédicte, and Nicolas Labasque. Patrimoine annexé. Les biens culturels saisis par la France en Allemagne autour de 1800. 2 vols. Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2003.

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Schopenhauer, Johanna. Johann van Eyck und seine Nachfolger. Frankfurt am Main: Heinrich Wilmans, 1822. Semmel, Stuart. “Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting and Memory after Waterloo.” Representations 69 (2000): 9–37. Sharp, Lynn L. Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in NineteenthCentury France. New York [etc.]: Lexington Books, 2006. Schlegel, Friedrich. Sammtliche Werke. 2 vols. Vienna: Jacob Mayer und Compagnie, 1822–1825. ———. The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Friedrich von Schlegel. Translated by E.J. Millington. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848. Stoll, Peter. “The Imperial City of Augsburg and the Printed Image in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” OPUS Augsburg 2016. https://opus.bibliothek.uniaugsburg.de/ opus4/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/3705/file/Stoll_empire_of_prints.pdf; last accessed 16 February 2019. Van Biervliet, Lori. “De Engelse kolonie in Brugge in de 19de eeuw.” Biekorf 88 (1988): 150–166. ———. Leven en werk van W.H. James Weale, een Engels kunsthistoricus in Vlaanderen in de 19de eeuw. Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1991. Weale, William Henry James. Belgium, Aix-la-Chapelle and Cologne: An Entirely New Guidebook for Travellers. London: W. Dawson and Sons, 1859. ———. Bruges et ses environs. Description des monuments, objets d’art et antiquités. Bruges: Bayaert-Defoort; London: Barthes & Lowell, 1862. ———. Catalogue du Musée de l’Académie de Bruges. Bruges: Bayaert-Defoort; London: Barthes & Lowell, 1861 ———. Hans Memlinc: A Notice of his Life and Works. London: The Arundel Society, 1865. ———. Restauration des monuments publics en Belgique. Mémoire. Bruges: Edw. Gailliard; Brussels: A. Decq, 1862. ———. Tableaux de l’ancienne école néerlandaise exposés à Bruges. Bruges: Edw. Gailliard, 1867.

About the author Juliet Simpson is Full Professor of Art History, Chair of Art and Cultural Memory and Research Director of the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University, UK. She studied Art History at the University of St Andrews and gained her doctorate (DPhil.) in the History of Art from the University of Oxford (Trinity College) on French Symbolist art and art criticism. She is an internationally recognized expert in nineteenth- and

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early twentieth-century European art and visual culture, cosmopolitanism, symbolism, spaces of display, art criticism and memory, and the reception and afterlives of Northern medieval and Renaissance art and visual culture. She has published extensively in these areas, including books on Aurier, Symbolism and the Visual Arts (1999), with Carol Adlam, Critical Exchange: Art Criticism in Russia and Western Europe (2009), and numerous articles on fin-de-siècle visual, literary, print and exhibition cultures. Her most recent articles include: on “Hodler’s Cosmopolitanism” (2019), “J.-K. Huysmans’s Nordic Gothic Devotions” (2019) and “Lucas Cranach’s Legacies” (2020). Current projects include her two edited books forthcoming on Primitive Renaissances (Routledge: 2021) and Gothic Modernisms (Peter Lang: 2021). Professor Simpson has held awards from the Royal Netherlands Academy as Visiting Full Professor of Art History, University of Amsterdam (2017–18), as Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford, and as Visiting Fellow (2019–21) at the Warburg Institute, University of London. She is guest curating and principal investigator for an international exhibition and publication, Gothic Modern, 1880–1920s: Munch to Kollwitz (2024) with the Finnish National Gallery-Ateneum, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin and the National Museum, Oslo; a second exhibition is in planning with the Musea Brugge on Bruges: Art Capital of the Uncanny. Professor Simpson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

6. The Elusiveness of History and the Ephemerality of Displayin NineteenthCentury France and Belgium: At the Intersection of the Built Environment and the Spatial Image in Literature Dominique Bauer

Abstract This chapter explains how the ephemeral dimension of nineteenth-century exhibition spaces testifies to the awareness of a highly elusive past and present. Such an awareness underlies a historical, museal society, also beyond the walls of museums, exhibits, and collections. Responding to the particular historical dimension and sense of elusiveness of the culture of their day, exhibition spaces emerge as problematic settings of coherence and “presentification.” In this context, an analysis of the interstices between spaces in literature (Balzac, Rodenbach, and Mallarmé), and the experience of the built environment throughout the century, shows how the interplay of ephemerality and presentification communicates a particular experience of temporal deferral, fragmentation, and composition from the part of the spectator. Keywords: temporality – museum – Balzac – Rodenbach – Mallarmé

Introduction Mille causes réunies, […] ont concouru à faire de l’Italie une espèce de muséum général, un dépôt complet de tous les objets propres à l’étude des arts.1 Notes: 1 Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres à Miranda (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1989), 83. “A thousand causes combined have contributed to turn Italy into a kind of general museum, a warehouse full of all the objects suited for the study of the arts.” Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_ch06

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Removed from their utilitarian purpose, objects in the pre-modern cabinet of curiosities functioned as what Krzysztof Pomian referred to as sémiophores, “des objets qui n’ont point d’utilité, mais qui représentent l’invisible, c’està-dire sont dotés d’une signification.”2 Curious objects from faraway places are “ramassés […] à cause de leur signification, en tant que représentants de l’invisible: des pays exotiques, des sociétés différentes, des climats étranges.”3 From the outset, the spatial organization of cabinets, museums, or exhibits embodied an ambition to represent the invisible in a comprehensive context. As Francis Bacon wrote in Gesta Grayorum, “and so you may have in small compass a model of universal nature made private.”4 This was the role the cabinet had to play, together with the library and the garden, in the encapsulation of “universal nature.” Display contexts were thus managed, on the one hand, through a process of removal and displacement of objects, of cutting and separation, or, of “making fragments,” as Barbara KirshenblattGimblett argued.5 On the other hand, exhibition spaces also constituted new settings of coherence, significance, and re-enactment. Contexts of display, therefore, negotiated an ambiguous tension between absence and presence, elusiveness, mobility, and fixation. It is the aim of this chapter to analyze this tension at the intersection of the spatial image in literature and the built environment. Against the background of changing attitudes to past and present and the development of a historical and museal culture, the chronological scope addressed stretches from Alexandre Lenoir’s short-lived Musée des Monuments Français (1796–1816) to the great exhibitions of the second half of the century. The chapter focuses on the context of the cabinet-collection, the historical and ethnographical museum, and the later nineteenth-century diorama. Emphasis is placed on the relation between the exhibition space and the spectator and its evolution, in which the themes of ephemerality and subjectivity turn out to be inseparable. 2 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVI–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 42. “Semiophores, objects which were of absolutely no use […] but which, being endowed with meaning, represented the invisible.” Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities. Paris and Venice, 1500-1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 30. 3 Pomian, Collectionneurs, 49. “Collected […] because of their significance as representatives of the invisible comprising exotic lands, different societies and strange climates.” Pomian, Collectors, 36. 4 Quoted in Oliver Impey and Arthur McGregor, eds. The Origins of Museums. The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 1. 5 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture. Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 3, 18–19.

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The elusive present The tension between absence and presence, elusiveness, mobility, and fixation becomes especially acute when the culture shock of the French Revolution resulted in a new, gradually developing historical awareness. Through the acceleration of time and the radical separation between the present and the past, the past’s traditional, much more exemplary function is challenged, while the present becomes an elusive, fragile future past. Instead of being an exemplum for the present, the past is confined, as history, to a fundamental contingency and otherness.6 The work of François Hartog or Peter Fritzsche in particular, following Reinhart Koselleck, shows how, in this context of rupture between past and present, past events are anchored in their own particular time frame. Unlike the pre-modern succession of exempla that remained forever present and in essence identical, the past becomes a succession of unique, contingent events that could no longer function as an obvious magistra vitae. Koselleck calls this evolution the “temporalization of history” (Verzeitlichung der Geschichte).7 His thesis is expanded in the influential work of François Hartog, who goes into the increasingly problematic nature of history as an exemplum, among others through the analysis of Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand was very much aware of the acceleration of time, of the present slipping through one’s fingers, and of the past as a process, without completely relinquishing the prior attitude to the past, as something that one recognizes in the present.8 The past had become a foreign country, irrevocably gone and different from the new, modern world. Moreover, the ethnographical museum and, above all, exoticist literature would soon show how non-modern cultures and societies were, in the same vein, locked into the otherness of the past. Consequently, new contexts of continuity, connection, meaning, and identity had to be found. Benoît de L’Estoile mentions in this respect the example of Luigi Pigorini’s Museo preistorico etnografico. Pigorini brought together Italian prehistoric finds with those of modern non-civilized peoples, in order to learn something about the former. “Ainsi, les ‘sauvages’ sont alors conçus non pas comme étant nos contemporains, mais plutôt comme nos 6 For a more elaborate discussion of this theme, see Dominique Bauer, Place-Text-Trace. The Fragility of the Spatial Image (Leuven: Peeters, 2018), esp. 35–52. 7 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2017), 58–59 and Reinhart Koselleck, Futures past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 37. 8 François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012), 124.

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ancêtres.”9 Primitive societies were studied and recovered through the lens of a prehistoric past, or via concepts of childhood against the background of a uniform development of culture. As Ernest-Théodore Hamy, the curator of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, argued in his Précis de paléontologie humaine: “Les sables de l’Orléanais nous avaient conservé les témoignages de l’existence, en France, d’une sorte de Tasmanien.”10 They are the place of the Miocene “epoch.” According to Peter Fritzsche, Chateaubriand connects the awareness of the otherness and uniqueness of history with the importance of the original site of the remains of the past. He for example asks himself, in his Voyage en Italie, why excavated utensils, furniture, etc. were “promiscuously carried to the Portici Museum […] Instead of their removal, they should have been preserved on the spot.”11 The original site becomes both a model for the ideal museal context, and, in this sense, a symptom of the museal dimension of culture in the emerging modern world, beyond the walls of its cabinets, museums, and exhibits. Other in situ arguments elsewhere in the work of Chateaubriand emphasize how the paradigmatic nature of the original site discloses a culture of objects, debris, bits and pieces of architecture that are already museal and historical. Chateaubriand attacks Alexandre Lenoir’s iconic Musée de Monuments Français for displacing the “debris of our ancient tombs” (les débris de nos anciens sépulcres), more precisely the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, to the cramped space (resserrés dans un petit espace) of the museum. There, Lenoir displayed them century by century. He thus deprived them of the organic link with the antiquity of their original architectural setting and with Christian liturgy. He claims that, in Lenoir’s museum, they only present the history of art, and not, and this is crucial, the history of “customs and religion” (des moeurs et de la religion).12 Contrary to museal display, in situ placement functioned for Chateaubriand as a type of comprehensive composition. It was about 9 Benoît de L’Estoile, Le goût des autres (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 299–300. “In this sense, the ‘savages’ are conceived of not so much as our contemporaries, but rather more as our ancestors.” As to the exotic, its otherness was caught in terms of a spatio-temporal distance. As Dominique Marcil argues, “l’exotisme du temps” and “l’exotisme de l’espace” […] “sont souvent imbriquées l’une dans l’autre.” Dominique Marcil, “Salammbô: exotisme et altérité,” Postures, Dossier Espaces inédits. Les nouveaux avatars du livre 8 (2006): 143, http://revuepostures.com/fr/articles/marcil-8. 10 Ernest-Théodore Hamy, Précis de paléontologie humaine (Paris: Baillière, 1870), 59. “The sands of the Orléanais had preserved for us the testimonies of the existence, in France, of a kind of Tasmanian.” 11 Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present. Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 100. 12 Chateaubriand, François-René de, Génie du Christianisme, vol. 2 (Paris: Flammarion, 1966), 98.

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“harmonies,” not being resserrés or divisés. It was a mise en scène that was able to re-enact that which already pertains to history (moeurs and religion) and that which is no longer part of actual worship or liturgical service which Chateaubriand simultaneously craves for, in vain. Its ritual nature now resides in a scenography of vivification of what is lost or what is an object of nostalgic distancing. There is always a distance.

The world as a museum Chateaubriand’s work testifies to a historical, deeply museal world, in which the past consists of traces. As elusive negotiations, neither completely past, nor completely present, traces display a fundamental dimension of otherness and absence. They are, in this sense, always under threat of disappearance. The trace does not express a moment of a stable, fixed presence. On the contrary, the trace entails, as Derrida states, the erasure of its own presence.13 Therefore, its spurious present state is only a reference to a future past and a future disappearance. In this context, historical fragments and objects that fill museums, collections, and exhibits operate within frameworks of display that pause the threatening disappearance and muteness of the world they re-present. Therein lies a tension. The museum, on the one hand, presupposes an ephemeral world beyond its walls. On the other hand, it operates as a context of continuity, of connection, of vivification in overwhelming effets de réel, in which the trace’s movement of absentification and the fleeting of time is halted. The case of the Rue du Caire at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris beautifully illustrates this mechanism. The street was acclaimed for its effet de réel, with its seemingly worn buildings, its donkey drivers and their animals, its Turkish coffee and belly dancers, and the sense of displacement to an Oriental world. The Rue du Caire did, however, not really simulate an existing street in Cairo. As its creator Alphonse Delort de Gléon explains, it was rather the (re)construction of a complete old street that no longer existed, in a city that he describes as highly elusive, that was deteriorating and in which some of the pieces reproduced at the exhibition had become very rare.14 It was this re-presented Cairo that the traveler pasted over the 13 As Derrida states, an ineffaceable trace would not be a trace at all, but a pure presence: “Une trace ineffaçable n’est pas une trace, c’est une présence pleine.” Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 339. 14 It was not an exact reconstruction. What the architect wanted to show was a street of the kind that did not exist anymore in Cairo, with houses with finely worked doors that become unfindable. Cairo itself is fragile, its monuments are poorly maintained and degraded, all its

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real place in Egypt, as a presentifying mise en scène and wholeness that established the visitor’s threshold space of experience and knowledge. Other worlds, mixing the past and the non-modern, had become, in this sense, museal worlds of disciplined otherness.15 The earlier nineteenth century had already offered a picture of a museumworld that consisted of elusive, contingent traces of an alien world that were integrated in evocative frameworks of relative stability. In the often mind-boggling chaos of loss, dispersion, and degradation that followed the turmoil of the Revolution, numerous examples illustrate the initial, rapidly growing muteness of trace-fragments, the contingency of which bordered on sheer meaninglessness.16 The initial displacement, the out-of-placeness, and the dispersion of things and buildings produced the need to construct the display space as a new and comprehensive context of presentification, which, later in the century, would amount to the popular dioramic settings and in-situ-like re-enactments, such as the Cairo street. This ambition, for example, resonates in the correspondence of Alexandre Lenoir, the curator of the aforementioned Musée des Monuments Français (1796–1816). This short-lived museum, both criticized and lauded in its own time, started off as one of the dépôts (Dépôt des Petits-Augustins) for the transit of confiscated art and objects from nationalized Church property. It was ultimately closed down under the Restauration as a relic of a time of terror and destruction. As the first project of a national museum in France, it was also a historical museum, a museum of identity, a museum that would be remembered for its medieval pieces, for saving the tombs of the French kings that were removed from Saint-Denis, and for its much appreciated Jardin Elysée. Its impact on the popular imagination and on the development of later museums cannot be underestimated. Owing to its importance for a new relation between spectator and (the) display (space), the spectator’s constructions are built on sand, while the bad plaster of the country is used for the interiors. When it rained very hard, Delort de Gléon claims, half of the city would collapse. Alphonse Delort de Gléon, La Rue du Caire (Paris: Plon, 1889), 10. 15 Timothy Mitchell refers among various other examples to Gautier’s account of Egypt, which opens with a general view that is actually a detailed description of the Egyptian exhibit at the World Fair in Paris; or, to Flaubert’s statement that the attentive European rediscovers more than he discovers. Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (1989): 234–235. 16 When objects, art or architecture were not suited for a museum, part of an ensemble, or provisionally stored in a dépôt, its valeur intrinsèque was only its material worth as stone or bronze etc. See Ministère de l’instruction publique, Inventaire général des richesses d’art de la France: Archives du Musée des monuments français, vol. 1 (Paris: Plon, Nourrit, 1883–1897), 37 (hereafter, A.M.M.F).

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imagination, wholeness and history, the role of the walk-through and its embryonic subjectification, aspects of this fascinating museum will emerge at various points throughout this chapter as crucial points of reference and historical orientation.17 Lenoir’s rich correspondence gives a lively and colorful picture of his attempts to acquire pieces for his museum. The letters give a clear idea of the often-harrowing state these pieces were in and of the importance of preserving or constructing an ensemble in a situation of detachment (détachement) and displacement (déplacement). In this context, an abandoned sculptured lectern for example, lying somewhere in a corner of the Chartreux convent, could become “un morceau précieux […] digne de tenir une place remarquable dans le Dépôt des Petits-Augustins.”18 Turned into “morceaux précieux,” mutilated pieces of debris could become spatiotextual documents that were saved from muteness. Set in a comprehensive display, whether in context or in situ,19 they spoke, became readable, and decipherable. In the new world after the fall of the Ancien Régime, however, the museum did not just find the fragments it made, out there beyond its walls. As Chateaubriand on Lenoir’s museum showed, out there was already a world 17 The Musée des Monuments Français has been thoroughly studied in a number of publications. The work of Dominique Poulot needs to be mentioned first and foremost, see for example Dominique Poulot, “Alexandre Lenoir et les musées des monuments français,” in Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 2, tome 2, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Flammarion, 1983–1994), 496-531 and Musée, nation, patrimoine 1789–1815 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Two doctoral dissertations have been devoted to Lenoir’s museum: Stara, Alexandra. The Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816. ‘Killing Art to make History’ (New York: Routledge, 2013) and Carter, Jennifer. “Recreating Time, History, and the Poetic Imagery. Alexandre Lenoir and the Musée des Monuments Français (1795–1816).” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2000). http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=18473&silo_library=GEN01’; last accessed 23 September 2020. Recently, an extensive edited catalogue has been published by Geneviève Bresc-Bautier and Béatrice de Chancel-Bardelot, eds. Un musée révolutionnaire. Le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir (Paris: Hazan, 2016). 18 A.M.M.F. 1, 11. “A precious piece […] worthy of a prominent place in the Dépôt des petits-Augustins.” 19 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett makes a distinction between in situ and contextual display. In situ display refers to “dioramas, period rooms, and other mimetic recreations of settings,” whereas in-context displays concern object arranged according to such conceptual frames of reference as a taxonomy, evolutionary sequence, historical development, set of formal relationships. See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 3, 19–23. As Kischenblatt-Gimblett states, these two approaches are, however, not mutually exclusive. It must be pointed out that they often appeared side by side in the same museum or exhibit. Furthermore, whereas in-context display points more to a narrative coherence and the in-situ display more at a documentary coherence, both types of coherence constitute a kind of re-enactment, and in both types the imagining spectator is part of that coherence.

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made of fragments-as-traces and layers of traces. This world was profoundly museal, historical, and contingent, caught in a logic of threatening disappearance, like the disappearing Cairo that would be simulated at the Expositions Universelles. Antoine Quatremère de Quincy’s view of Rome and Italy is, in this respect, highly illustrative: as a whole, Italy is a general museum. The fact that Quatremère calls out to its wholeness illustrates how the world beyond the walls of museums was equally entangled in a museal logic. Furthermore, it is interesting to refer, in the same context, to Alexandra Stara’s discussion of the criticism of Lenoir’s museum by Quatremère and by the sculptor Louis-Pierre Deseine. Whereas, at first glance, both appear to attack the concept of the museum and, in particular, that of Lenoir, they both think within the presupposition of a museal world, not unlike Lenoir. When Deseine pleads for the restitution of objects of worship in situ, he does so not because he is interested in their actual worship as sacred objects, but because placing these objects back in their original position “was only a step in the ultimate goal […] of their rendering useful in the communication of meaning, which included first and foremost history.”20 This background is also that of Quatremère, whose nostalgia for in situ placement actually corresponds with what he would deem the ideal museum, or the ideal unity, like Rome as its paradigmatic model. His resentment towards the museum “as one of the means through which his ideal unity of culture was abolished” reveals his own failure “to detect that this unity was itself largely museal.”21

The antiques shop in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin as a critical subtext In the post-revolutionary museal world, the present itself had become historical. It had become a contingent and ephemeral trace, a future past in a chain of layers. In the exhibition space, this chain of layers becomes a simultaneous spatio-temporal vision of all of history. Presentified in simultaneous vision, it opposes the very elusiveness, absence, and contingency of the trace-like present of a museal, historical world. In literature, the reality of the ephemeral present surfaces, a contrario, in the critical, disruptive logic of exhibition spaces as a strategy of presentification that is constantly undermined. The museum-like magasin d’antiquités (antiques shop) that Nathalie Preiss called the last avatar of the cabinet, in the opening pages 20 Stara, The Museum, 125. 21 Ibid., 155.

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of Balzac’s iconic novel La Peau de chagrin, is a case in point.22 Balzac was, as Stephen Bann argues, very “skilled at detecting the tastes of his fellow citizens at the time of the Restauration.” In his imagery of cabinets, collections, and museums figures the visitor of the 1830’s, who, when visiting Du Sommerard’s iconic Musée de Cluny, was invited “to extend his or her imaginative capacity […] to encompass a site that claimed to resuscitate past history.”23 This is also the case for the depiction of the antiques shop in La Peau de chagrin. This interesting and rich passage in one of Balzac’s most acclaimed novels shows, as will be explained, how in a context of display, the ephemeral critically emerges in and against a dynamic of presentification, of making the past present, in “a time without thickness” (un temps sans épaisseur), as Dominique Poulot referred to it in the case of Lenoir. This time enlivens what would otherwise be lost.24 “Soudain les marbres s’animalisent, la mort se vivifie, le monde se déroule!”25 This dynamic is disrupted in a narrative that not only reveals the fundamental ephemerality behind the museum. It also situates the tension between presentification and elusiveness, immersion and absence within the very experience of the shop’s visitor. Precisely the latter mimetic connection between space and spectator that thus arises, offers vital clues for understanding ephemerality as a constructive part of the modern visitor’s experience of exhibition spaces. Against the background of these binaries and their exploration, Balzac comes forward as the sharp-eyed analyst of the ambiguities, even of the anomaly of display as a strategy of presentification. Presentification in the antiques shop passage is closely intertwined with the already concisely mentioned need for a unified, coherent framework in which the fragment-object finds its place. As “une espèce de fumier 22 Nathalie Preiss, “La curiosité n’est pas un vilain défaut. La cabinet de curiosités,” in Honoré de Balzac, architecte d’Intérieur, ed. Jean-Jacques Gautier (Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2016), 222. 23 Stephen Bann, “Alternative Paradigms for the Historical museum: Lenoir’s Monuments français and Du Sommerard’s Cluny,” in Great Narratives of the Past. Traditions and Revisions in National Museums. Conference Proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Paris 29 June–1 July & 25–26 November 2011, ed. Dominique Poulot, Felicity Bodenstein, and José María Lanzarote Guiral (Linköping University Electronic Press). http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp_home/index.en.aspx?issue=078; last accessed 23 September 2020. 24 Poulot, Musée, 333. 25 Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin (Lausanne: Éditions Rencontre, 1959), 53. “And suddenly the marbles are teeming with creatures, the death come to live again, the world turns!” Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, trans. Helen Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 19.

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philosophique auquel rien ne manquait,” the shop in La Peau de chagrin expresses and already critically tackles this hermeneutical need.26 Its three initial rooms are, in this respect, like “un miroir plein de facettes dont chacune représentait un monde.”27 The connection between presentification and the ambition to constitute whole and coherent worlds is made explicit in a particularly radical way by linking the evocative dynamics of the objects in the shop with Georges Cuvier’s paleontological reading of an entire animal from a bone fragment. The worlds that are evoked by the piled-up objects mix with the worlds that are contained in earth layers: “Notre immortel naturaliste a reconstruit des mondes avec des os blanchis. [Cuvier] […] a repeuplé mille forêts de tous les mystères de la zoologie avec quelques fragments de houille.”28 Cuvier “réveille le néant.”29 This is also what the antiques shop does: it is a machine that re-enacts the past through various ways of direct expression, hinting more at simulation than at actual representation: A marble statue “speaks” to the spectator Raphael. Raphael “sees” the conquests of Alexander the Great on a cameo.30 In connection to Balzac’s deployment of Cuvier’s spatial stratigraphy of time, it is important to point out that Cuvier not only had the ability to reconstruct an animal from a bone fragment, but also to present the world as a world of layers, whose temporalities could be folded out spatially in a framework of simultaneous presence. The shop incorporates Cuvier’s coherent soil as a spatial framework in which past eras are brought back to life and which embodies what Alain Schnapp called “Le but ultime de la stratigraphie [qui] consiste à mettre en évidence la succession dans l’espace de structures dans le temps.”31 Cuvier, interestingly, in the “Discours préliminaire” of his Les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes 26 Balzac, 47. “It was a kind of philosophical midden in which nothing was missing.” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 14. 27 Balzac, 47. “A mirror of many facets, each one representing a different world.” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 14. 28 Balzac, 53. “Our immortal naturalist has reconstructed whole worlds out of bleached bones […] repopulated thousands of forests with all the mysteries of zoology from a few pieces of coal.” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 19. 29 Balzac, 53. “He brings the void to live again.” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 19. 30 Balzac, 48: “Une statue de marbre assise sur une colonne torse et rayonnant de splendeur lui parla.” “A shining white marble statue on a wreathed column spoke to him.” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 15 and 49: ”Il vit les conquêtes d’Alexandre sur un camée.” “He saw the conquests of Alexander on a cameo.” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 16. 31 Quoted in Andreas Wetzel, “Reconstructing Carthage: Archeology and the Historical Novel,” Mosaic 21, no. 1 (1988), 17. “The ultimate goal of stratigraphy [which] consists of showing successive temporal structures in space.”

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(1812), called himself “a new kind of antiquarian:” “Antiquaire d’une espèce nouvelle, il m’a fallu apprendre à déchiffrer et à restaurer ces monumens, à reconnoître et à rapprocher dans leur ordre primitif les fragmens épars et mutilés dont ils se composent; à reconstruire les êtres antiques auxquels ces fragmens appartenoient […] à les comparer enfin à ceux qui vivent aujourd’hui à la surface du globe.”32 Fragments are re-presented, juxtaposed in a setting of simultaneous presence. This simultaneity expresses how, in the broader framework of Cuvier’s endeavor, decipherment, restoration, reconstruction, and comparison imply a continuity between past and present. In that sense, they can be set up as strategies of presentification. Thus, instead of a fragile present, the exact opposite seems to be the case: the simultaneous presence of all the eras of history, alive in front of our eyes. Balzac’s shop suggests a sort of endless architecture in which objects from the past or from exotic countries are piled up. The images they provoke, like the conquests of Alexander the Great that can be read from a cameo, overwhelm the protagonist Raphael. Raphael’s experience is one of simultaneous vision, in which the various moments of history, including the beginning of the world, coincide: “le commencement du monde et les événements d’hier se mariaient avec une grotesque bonhomie.”33 In Balzac’s novel, the “commencement du monde” recalls the need for a foundation, for an ultimate origin as the keystone of any framework of presentification, and as a guarantee for the latter’s completeness. A sense of wholeness already characterized the ambitions of the pre-modern cabinet as a microcosmos, just like it also applied to the emerging ethnographic museums.34 The search for origin and simultaneous vision equally characterized encompassing museal projects like that of 32 Georges Cuvier, Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes, vol. I (Paris: Deterville, 1812), 1. “As a new kind of antiquarian, I had to learn how to decipher and restore those monuments, to know and to approach in their primal order the scattered and mutilated fragments of which they consist; to reconstruct those antique beings to which those fragments belonged; […] and finally to compare them with those who dwell today on the surface of the globe.” Martin J.S. Rudwick points out that this antiquarian metaphor was “commonplace in the discussion of fossils since the late seventeenth century. But they may have been unfamiliar to Cuvier’s audience, and in any case, he was exploiting them with a new intensity of meaning.” Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes, New Translations & Interpretations of the Primary Texts, ed. Martin J.S. Rudwick (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 35. 33 Balzac, La Peau, 46. “The origins of the world and the events of yesterday became grotesquely jolly bedfellows.” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 14. 34 As Dias argues, the setup of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878) enabled an overall, exhaustive view: “un aperçu général,” “une vision d’ensemble,” “la totalité dans laquelle l’objet s’inscrit.” Nina Dias, Le musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, (1878–1908). Anthropologie et muséologie en France (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 2004), 200.

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Lenoir.35 The Musée des Monuments Français again constitutes an exemplary case in this context. With Lenoir, as Dominique Poulot has clearly shown, the various representations of history constitute a palimpsest that eventually leads to “identifying an original image” (identifier une image originelle).36 In this sense, Lenoir communicates the “ethnographic” conviction of his age, that remains or old customs carry “derrière leur ridicule, la pertinence de valeurs oubliées, voire la présence occulte d’un passé originaire.”37 Yet, this movement of presentification is undermined. The antiques shop passage constitutes simultaneously a critical discourse on that ambition, and brings the irreducible ephemerality of the trace to the fore. Jan-Henrik Witthaus argument concerning Balzac’s layered antiques shop is that, when the ruin becomes the point of departure of the here and now, the present crumbles under the weight of the past, while displacing itself in the future. This movement defines the trace in an unescapable dimension of absence.38 A succession of traces, first and foremost, reveals the fragility of the present as a future past, a fragile present state of constant displacement and near-absence. Balzac’s antiques shop shares this spatio-textual dimension with other, similar settings, like the museum or the city, which also become constructions of layers of traces. In line with Cuvier’s stratif ication, Théophile Gautier, for example, states in the introduction to Edouard Fournier’s Paris Démoli that “l’écorce terrestre n’est qu’une superposition de tombeaux et de ruines […] tout édifice qui s’élève a dans ses substructions les pierres d’un édifice démoli, et le présent, quoiqu’il en est, marche sur le passé. Que de Paris se sont déjà stratifiés l’un sur l’autre […] s’enfonçant couche sur couche au-dessous de la croûte où nous vivons aujourd’hui !”39 Gautier’s 35 Poulot, Musée, 332. Jennifer Carter also points out the importance in this respect of Lenoir’s involvement in the Lodge, and the production of a longing “for the recovery of the rites and rituals of forgotten civilisations” that were thought to be “at least partially re-enacted in the elaborate ritual processes of Masonic initiation ceremonies.” Carter, “Recreating Time,” 97. 36 Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine, 331. 37 Ibid., 332. “Behind their ridiculousness, the relevance of forgotten values, indeed the occult presence of an original past.” 38 Jan-Henrik Witthaus, “Raum der Überreste. Zur literarischen Inszenierung des Zeit-Raums bei Balzac,” In Die Neuvermessung romantischer Räume: Raumkonzepte der französischen Romantik vor dem Hintergrund des ‘Spatial turn,’ ed. Maria O. Hertrampf and Dagmar Schmelzer (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2013), 234–235. 39 Théophile Gautier, “Préface,” in Paris démoli, Nouvelle édition revue et augmenté, ed. Edouard Fournier (Paris: Dentu, 1883), IV. “The earth’s crust consists of nothing but piled up tombs and ruins […] every new edifice carries the stones of a demolished edifice in its foundations, and the present, whatever it is, walks on the past. How many Parises have already been stratified one on top of the other […] sinking layer by layer under the crust where we live today!”

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museal sense of layers, stratification, and positively integrated destruction exemplifies the awareness of pastness and of a present consisting of traces, with Paris as an exemplary museal city. Balzac also depicts the city as a construction of layers in a process of degeneration as an historical dynamic in “Ce qui disparaît de Paris” (1845). In this work, places and old professions of the capital, like the cocoa seller, are described in the light of their imminent disappearance, bientôt. 40 These explorations of the stratified city-museum underline its ambiguity and multifacetedness. Stratification serves as a tool of presentification. Yet, at the same time, its appearance in the modern world is paradoxically founded in the strong awareness of the elusiveness and ephemerality of the present as an imminent, next past moment. Highly significant is that Balzac integrates the tension between presentification and the deferral of presence towards a future past in Raphael’s experience of the shop that mimetically connects with the evocative power of the objects. Against the background of a heightened sense of subjectivity and sensitivity, bordering on a maddening, overstretched imagination, dans les palais enchantés de l’Extase, Raphael is overwhelmed by images.41 He sinks away in a subjective, vertiginous state, which reflects the same vertiginous dimensions of the shop itself he is about to enter. 42 Raphael’s experience seems to reflect the sometimes-troubling experiences of the visitors of the museum. For example, Thomas Jessop noted in his 1820 Journal d’un voyage à Paris: “La vue se perd dans cette vaste et originale perspective, les sens s’égarent […] les idées se bousculent.”43 Most significantly, however, Raphael “marchait dans les enchantements d’un songe. Enfin, doutant de son existence, il était comme ces objets curieux, ni tout à fait mort, ni tout à fait vivant.”44 In the subjective realm of the dream, which qualifies Raphael’s experience of the shop, Raphael seems to share the hybrid status of the objects. The countless objects that pass before Raphael’s eyes re-enact absent worlds as though they were present. Yet, in a world of layers, in which, as the 40 Honoré de Balzac, “Ce qui disparaît de Paris,” in Le Diable à Paris. Paris et les Parisiens (Paris: Hetzel, 1845–1846), 176. 41 Balzac, La Peau, 48. “The enchanted palaces of Ecstasy,” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 15. 42 Balzac, 45: “Il retomba bientôt dans ses vertiges, et continua d’apercevoir les choses sous d’étranges couleurs.” “He sank once more into a state of dizziness and continued to see things in bizarre colours.” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 13. 43 Quoted in Poulot, Musée, 350. “The sense of sight loses itself in that vast and original perspective, the senses get lost […] ideas scramble.” 44 Balzac, La Peau, 51: “He walked as in the enchantment of a dream. Indeed, doubting his very existence, he resembled these curious objects, neither completely dead, nor completely alive.” Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 17.

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city imagery showed, the present is constantly deferred and displaced to a future disappearance, they also remain objects and fragments that embody a constant displacement, as if chasing a present state that can never be reached. Conversely, and like the objects, Raphael himself is not a pure presence, pure subjectivity, in front of these objects. He has, while ni tout à fait vivant, integrated aspects of object-likeness that precisely consist in not being alive, present, or conscious, characteristics that would ideally define an untainted subjectivity. This integration, which is driven to hyperbolic proportions, points to an important aspect of the ephemerality of display: the modern spectator seems to have integrated, in the very core of its subjectivity, displacement as a part of experience itself.

The spectator and the exhibition: Mirroring mobilities, between immersion and retreat Before turning to the spectator of museums or the exhibit itself, it is important to underline that Raphael’s embryonic internalization of a fundamental objectivity addresses a theme that, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century, gained interest in various fields of culture, from literature to psychiatry. The visitor’s experience of the exhibition space is illustrative of the fact that the notion of subjectivity as presence with reality and with the self becomes increasingly problematic. The increasing interest in the unconscious, in absent-mindedness, in attention and distraction, undermined the plausibility of conceiving the subject in terms of this constant, full presence with reality and with the self. This background creates the possibility for the visitor to experience the museum in the modern world as a walk-through of moments of provisional, ephemeral immersion that breaches fixation in a dynamic of alternating absence and presence of mind. In f in-de-siècle European literature and its aftermath, absence and presence of mind are again explored in an interesting imagery of exhibition spaces. The problematic nature of fixed thoughts and experiences is poignantly put forward in the work of the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898). In his œuvre, the themes of absence with reality, of the unconscious, and the deferral of presence, gain momentum. In a piece on the symbolist painter Eugène Carrière (1849–1906), for example, he depicts the painterly image as a reflection that incorporates a temporal distance to things: “Elles apparaissent dans un recul. Sont-elles en exil ou déjà posthumes ? Le peintre les voit comme on voit les êtres dans l’absence,

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comme on les voit dans la mort.”45 Images contain a presence that is always deferred to a next image mentioned that transports one to the past. In Rodenbach’s poem “Les Malades aux fenêtres,” fading window reflections project the faces and people that have been seen in them, and therefore only render what was already a memory, a reflection of a reflection.46 There never appears to be a fixed point, a halt, or pause in which the reflection comes to a standstill. This movement of the present’s constant displacement and deferral is given a sharp existential twist in later psychological novels, in which the invasive otherness of objectification that had already surfaced in La Peau de chagrin, is taken to a much more radical level. The exemplary cabinetcase of a voyeuristic, invasive self-scrutiny in Arthur Schnitzler’s Flucht in die Finsternis constitutes a highly relevant instance in this respect. In this novel, the pathological protagonist Robert increasingly sees his own face as an alien visage: “War das überhaupt sein eigenes Gesicht?” Disconnected from his own subjectivity, he scrutinizes his objectified face through the observing eyes of his brother Otto, which he seems to have internalized. 47 In a piling-up ad infinitum of snapshots, the present moment of observation is infinitely deferred, as with Rodenbach, to the next gaze. The next gaze, however, is really only the next past gaze, objectified and observed by another future past gaze. Reality, the present state of things, is essentially sand slipping through the contemporaries’ fingers. 48 45 Georges Rodenbach, L’Élite (Paris: Charpentier), 241. “They appear in hindsight. Are they in exile or already posthumous? The painter sees them as one sees beings in absence, as one sees them in death.” For this and other examples, see Dominique Bauer, “Pastness and Enclosed Space as a Disruptive Subtext in the Work of Georges Rodenbach,” Dix-Neuf 22, 3–4 (2018): 175–190. DOI: 10.1080/14787318.2019.1586170; last accessed 23 September 2020. 46 “Les glaces sont les mélancoliques gardiennes/ Des visages et des choses qui s’y sont vus.” Georges Rodenbach, “Les Malades aux fenêtres,” in Les Vies encloses (Paris: Charpentier, 1896), 99. “The windows are the melancholy guardians/ of the faces and the things that have been seen in them.” 47 Arthur Schnitzler, Flucht in die Finsternis (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006), 13. “Was this his own face at all?” When Robert, in the beginning of the story, returns from a mental asylum, arrives in his hotel room and looks into the mirror, he is caught by an alien eye (ein fremdes Auge) and furthermore discovers that his left eyelid lies deeper than his right eyelid. Both at this point and further in the story, Robert’s own analyzing gaze is transferred to the investigating gaze of his brother, the psychiatrist Otto: “daß ihn der Gedanke durchzuckte, ob es nicht wirklich das Bild seines Bruders und nicht sein eigenes gewesen war, das ihm damals warnend oder drohend aus dem Spiegel entgegengeblickt hatte.” “The thought flashed through him, that this was not really his image, but that of his brother that had stared at him, warning and threatening, from the mirror.” In his self-analysis, Robert identifies so strongly with Otto that he considers his brother and himself as the two sides of the same coin. 48 For a more elaborate exposition on this cultural background and the importance of the trace, see Bauer, Place-Text-Trace, 35–48.

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The constant displacement of the gaze in literature communicates the status of the present as a constantly deferred future past. This process of deferral and absentification appears perhaps most saliently in the growing emphasis on attention in studies of perception. As Jonathan Crary underlines in his seminal Suspensions of Perception, from the 1870s onward, perception was widely studied in psychology in terms of “attention,” a “narrowing and focusing of conscious awareness,” which meant, as Crary argues, that perception became both absorption and absence or deferral. It was “an activity of exclusion, of rendering parts of a perceptual field unperceived.”49 An active movement of absentification is at play in the spectator’s gaze; not everything is conscious anymore. Especially when turning to the increasingly popular diorama in the second half of the nineteenth century, the interaction between absent places and people and their subsequent vivification allowed for, and necessitated, an ephemeral immersion on the part of the visitor. As Mark Sandberg argued in his Living Pictures, Missing Persons, on the late-nineteenth-century Scandinavian diorama, this immersion was only provisional, elusive, and also required distance, i.e., absence from. Authentic immersion in an absent world that was evoked through visual and textual means could only work when the visitor to the museum was also absorbed in a dynamic of distancing and displacement that defined the mobility of the modern age. The spectator found himself in an in-between or threshold space, the space also of the imagination, between the modern world outside and the non-modern world in the museum, in front of and away from the show, and in passing from tableau to tableau. People looked “first this way, then that.”50 That action in itself already cut off the modern spectator from what would be a “real,” immobile experience of a “truly” authentic in situ situation. Sandberg shows how the museum experience concerns the negotiation of distance and proximity, access and mobility, of temporal alienation and of the vivification of distant times and places. The museum experience is enwrapped, in this sense, in the “as if” experience that “provides the potential to be in multiple places and times.”51 If that potential was stopped, as in the fantasy of being trapped in a dioramic setting, the place, Sandberg argues, could become too 49 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 24–25. I am much indebted to Jonathan Crary whose work inspires to revisiting sources such as Mallarmé or Marx that also pass in review in this chapter. 50 Mark Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons. Mannequins, Museums and Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 235. 51 Sandberg, Living Pictures, 234–235.

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authentic for comfort, and turn from comforting or nostalgic to downright claustrophobic or horrific.52

When displacement becomes erasure. The mirror collection in Rodenbach’s “L’Ami des miroirs” Modern mobility, as implied by this continuous displacement, was a continuous stream of moments of absence and pastness between elusive present moments in a still coherent experience of the world. Modern mobility was in this sense revealing of the deep awareness of the ephemerality of the present, which had become trace-like and thus incorporated a fundamental dimension of absence and deferral. Modern mobility was, in this sense, closely connected with the historical awareness of the fragility of the present moment as a postponed past. The active role of non-conscious movements in the spectator’s perception, as studied by Crary, as well as the examples of displaced perception and deferred presence in literature, underlined how modern mobility and the ephemerality of the present moment go against an understanding of the subject in terms of a conscious self-presence. The exploration of the potentially radical outcome of this evolution, one that breaches the subtle balance between distance and immersion, absence and presence, in the spectator’s threshold space, comes to the fore in a number of literary exhibition spaces. A salient example, taken from the work of the aforementioned Georges Rodenbach, illustrates just how far this logic can go. The short story “L’Ami des miroirs,” published in Le Rouet des brumes (1901) shows how displacement can turn into erasure, into the complete loss of presence with reality and with the self. “L’Ami des miroirs” tells the story of a collector who goes mad by purchasing mirrors and cramming his apartment with them, piling up endlessly his own mirror reflections, on a voyage of deferral.53 He imagines that the mirrors connect like streets and constitute a whole city, filled with women he cannot catch. The constant displacement of images eventually erases his subjectivity, his self-presence, when he no longer recognizes his own image in the mirror as himself.54 Rodenbach’s exploration of a space of displacing reflections ad infinitum is driven to the point where displacement becomes erasure. Re-presentation, as an act of presentification, fails and results in its complete opposite, the 52 Sandberg, 249-250. 53 Georges Rodenbach, “L’ Ami des miroirs,” in Le Rouet des brumes (Paris: Séguier, 1997), 25. 54 For a more detailed analysis, see Bauer, “Pastness.”

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anemic trace disappears as reflection: the realities reflected remain absent and self-presence reveals itself as absence. With its streets and the city and the old mirrors that contain all the elusive imprints of those who once looked into them, ephemeral reflections always seem to escape. Rodenbach echoes the modern city and the museum. “L’Ami des miroirs” scrutinizes, in a hyperbolic manner, the modern city-dweller’s mobility as a subtle rhythm of presence and retreat that fuses with the interaction between immersion and distance from past and absent worlds in exhibition spaces. Finally, Rodenbach’s short story equally underlines the effects of objectification that are produced by distancing, to the point where the subject, through self-distancing, becomes completely objectified as an image and eventually ceases to be a presence with reality and with the self. Rodenbach’s piece thus explores a link between loss of consciousness and objectification, a link that results from a sense of continuous deferral of the presence with the self.55 The present has become a fragile, elusive moment to such an extent that it might actually disappear. This fundamental aspect of Rodenbach’s short story opens a window not only to the strong sense of objectification that pervades the great exhibitions, but also to elusiveness of the present in the machines of deferral and distancing that these exhibitions were.

The Great Exhibitions and the limits of a balance “non, un présent n’existe pas.”56 “Cette démonstration […] se fera d’elle même par les objets et les choses. Cette section consistera en une Leçon de choses.”57 55 One of the most salient examples of such deferral, with a long time lapse between the moment in which a protagonist acts and the moment when the protagonist becomes aware of his act, is in Alfred Döblin’s short story Die Ermordung einer Butterblume. In this story, the pathological protagonist Michael feels he is persecuted by a buttercup from the moment he sees himself cutting off the buttercup’s head: “Plötzlich sah Herr Michael Fischer, während sein Blick leer über den Wegrand strich, wie eine untersetzte Gestalt, er selbst, von dem Rasen zurücktrat, auf die Blumen stürzte und einer Butterblume den Kopf glatt abschlug.” Alfred Döblin, “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,” in Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (München: Deutsche Taschenbuchverlag, 2001), 64–65. “Suddenly Mister Michael Fischer saw, while his empty gaze caressed the wayside, like a stout shape, himself, stepping back from the lawn, throwing himself at the flowers and smoothly beheading a buttercup.” 56 Stéphane Mallarmé, “L’action restreinte,” in Divagations (Paris: Fasquelle, 1879), 260. “No, a present does not exist.” 57 Charles Yriarte, “Les origines et le plan de l’exposition,” L’exposition de Paris de 1889 3 (1889): 18. “This demonstration […] will establish itself through objects and things. This section will consist of a Lesson of Things.”

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In a very telling piece, “Les origines et le plan de l’exposition” in the journal L’exposition de Paris de 1889, Charles Yriarte highlights the fact that the section Exposition rétrospective du travail et des sciences anthropologiques will show progress par les objets et les choses. Furthermore, there will be nothing “vague” about this section, as it will be une leçon de choses.58 Yriarte depicts in great detail a fascinating panorama in which the exhibition’s planning, its construction, and the objects on display are all interconnected manifestations of progress as an ongoing process, as movement, and as the unwinding of administrative and technological procedures. As Paul Greenhalgh argues in his Ephemeral Vistas, the “fetishisation of the machine” at the great exhibitions, which is also exemplified in Yriarte’s piece, showed itself in the construction of the machine’s glorious past and its promise for a bright future.59 The exhibition space as a comprehensive whole, as an environment of stability, which embodied an exhaustive, unfragmented ideal of overview en un clin d’œil, is absorbed, paradoxically, at the moment when the ideal of the exhaustive microcosm is approached most literally, in a process of deferral in which the past and the future as a future past reflect each other.60 At the great exhibitions of the second half of the century, which married science, production, and colonial economic expansion, the present seemed to have become ephemeral and volatile as never before. In this global economic context, it is interesting to see that this dynamic of deferral, of postponing presence, has the same structure as the accumulation of capital that Marx described in his Grundrisse. Capital never is, but constantly moves, disappears, exchanges, “remains in circulation, as medium of circulation.” Money does not represent “value as such,” but only a “constant amount of fluctuating value.”61 Likewise, the great exhibition, paradoxically, in the first 58 Yriarte, “Les origines,” 18. 59 Yriarte’s description clearly illustrates Paul Greenhalgh’s argument (on the Great Exhibition of 1851) that what bound all the amazing variety of objects was “the awesome power of technologies that had taken them there. The Great Exhibition, like virtually all its successors around the world, fetishised the machine, choosing exclusively to see in it a glorious past and the chance of a blemishless future.” Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas. The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 13. 60 This ambition to create a simultaneous vision, as exhaustive as possible, is for example expressed in Lenoir’s statement that the introductory hall of his Musée is indispensable for the artist or amateur to see d’un coup d’œil the infancy, progress, perfections, decadence and return to perfection again, of art throughout the subsequent stages of French History. Alexandre Lenoir, Musée impérial des monumens français (Paris, 1810), 8. 61 Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 333–334.

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place does not show something that is, but shows itself as the very dynamic of a postponed being here. In Rodenbach’s “L’Ami des miroirs,” the collector’s loss of subjectivity corresponds with the mobility of an imaging-forward of reflections and selfrepresentations in which presence is always deferred to the next reflection. Like capital, the collector in the mirror never is. The erasure of the present comes forward as the objectification of the subject in its self-representation. Rodenbach’s short story is revealing of how the accumulation of objects, that in a context of exhibition and collection precisely have a fundamental referential value, embodies a sense of experiential deferral that is guided by and reflected in the full flight of the spectator’s sensorial impressions. At the Expositions Universelles, the Great Exhibitions, and the World’s Fairs, the deferral of presence and objectification are fully played out. The spectator’s immersion in, or presence with the signifié, is constantly put to the test. The coherence of the objects is undermined along the spectator’s physical and mental journey, and is subjectified within the spectator as an incomplete and over-instantaneous synthetic gaze. It is illuminating in this respect to read accounts of the international exhibition in London in 1871 and 1872 from this viewpoint of experiential deferral and objectification. Against the backdrop of piled-up objects that rapidly pass before the spectators’ eyes, the exhibition in Mallarmé’s account unfolds the break-up of the comprehensive whole that is absorbed and fragmented in representations that materialize the elusive steps throughout the optical journey. The break-up of the comprehensive whole as a context of presentification aligns with the fact, stressed on various occasions in Mallarme’s texts, that the ephemerality of the present time, of the present of modern culture is postulated as a cultural problem. “Non loin de ces émaux […] hasardons un regard d’entière satisfaction vers ces deux femmes fellahs […] vous grouperez du regard […] vous aurez à rapprocher. Immédiatement, passons aux bijoux. À côté du maître ciseleurs […] nos yeux se sentaient invinciblement attirés […] une large surface blanche ou jaune qui nous captive.”62 Stéphane Mallarmé, takes the reader on a fast ride through incomplete object-impressions, crammed with names of manufacturers, a list that is also an incomplete nomenclature.63 62 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 670–676. “Not far from those enamels […] lets us risk a look of full satisfaction at those two female fellahs. You will group by looking. You will have to draw near. Immediately, let’s pass to the jewels […] next to the master expert in fine découpage […] our eyes feel irresistibly drawn […] a big white or yellow surface that attracts our attention.” 63 Mallarmé, Œuvres, 670.

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The objects take precedence over a missing overall view of the exhibition. The architectural shell of the Albert Hall, in which exhibitions took place, is in various ways objectified and absorbed into what has been described above as the deferral of presence in an ongoing process of progress.64 Elements of architectural coherence not only become very much like objects, like the transparent ceiling of the exhibition hall that is “le spécimen le plus parfait” (“the most perfect specimen”) of modern industrial science. In line with the build-up of objects in the exhibition space, the transparency of the building recalls the imagery of glass constructions, such as cages and above all hothouses that in literature precisely testify to an external, objectifying, even dehumanizing point of view.65 From this background, the transparency of the exhibition’s architecture, with its view of the grey sky, matches the strong objectif ication that takes place inside. This objectification reflects the spectator’s very movement of absentification and the problematic nature of his or her immersion in, or, presence with. Following up on the reciprocity between the objects, the architecture as object, and the problematic immersion from the part of the spectator, exhibition venues themselves are furthermore understood in terms of a stage of progress that does not differ from the description of objects that are also set in this scheme: “Que de progrès 64 Another element of the objectification of the architecture of the buildings constructed for the Great Exhibitions, one that cannot be treated in full within the scope of this chapter, is its eclecticism. The exhibitions were an opportunity for eclectic architects, like for example Jean Louis Pascal who designed the Rue des Nations at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, to engage in eclectic montage of façades and panoramic effects. See Maria Helena Souto and Ana Cardoso de Matos, “The 19th-Century World Exhibitions and their Photographic Memories. Between Historicism, Exoticism and Innovation in Architecture,” Quaderns d’Història de L’Enginyeria 13 (2012): 65. Eclectic architecture, that combined various styles from various historical periods in a space of simultaneous temporalities, very much identified with a simultaneity of layers through which the past was presentified. This not only recalls the vivification in Balzac’s antiques shop, but is also explicitly phrased in these terms by Garnier in his 1892 L’Habitation humaine (together with Auguste Ammann), where he described his 44 typological dwellings that were crammed in a historical trajectory at the foot of the Eiffel tower at the 1889 Exposition Universelle and that he conceived as a project of vivif ication: “une sorte de musée donnant toutes les phases de la civilisation et faisant ainsi l’histoire vivante de nos ancêtres,” (“a kind of museum that displayed all the stages of civilization, and by doing so re-enacted the living history of our ancestors”) quoted in Béatrice Bouvier, “Charles Garnier (1825–1898) architecte historien de L’Habitation humaine,” Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture 9, no. 1 (2005): 45. 65 As Philippe Hamon demonstrated, glass cages or glass houses operate as images of objectification or dehumanization with authors like Zola, Verne, or Balzac: Philippe Hamon, Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 173–174.

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accomplis, notamment par la manufacture de Gien.”66 Finally, as Jonathan Crary notes, the polychrome exterior of the Albert Hall comes forward “as the sign of a dematerialized architecture bereft of foundations and which corresponded to the exorbitant insubstantiality of the exhibits it enclosed.”67 It is this insubstantiality that spatially aligns with radical ephemerality of the spectator’s experience. As has been mentioned, the mobility of the modern spectator was caught between mechanisms of deferral and the possibility of a provisional, unmediated immersion in, for example, dioramic re-enactments of Oriental or exotic settings. Mallarmé argues that it really would have been as if we were transported “aux temps où le potier ninivite ou babylonien construisait, seul, les palais,” if it was not for the modern, industrial, transparent roof above it.68 Mallarmé’s fascination for the accomplished re-enactment of a past Oriental world seamlessly fits in with the similar admiration for a fine piece of industrial achievement. This effortless admiration is reminiscent of the modern city dweller, who, to recall Sandberg’s analysis and similar examples, has the potential to be in multiple places and times. This potential is stretched to its limits at grand scale exhibitions. The spectator’s experience as an increasing movement of deferral reciprocates the exhibition space as the embodiment of the same mechanism of deferral in which no present moment is ever reached. The radically ephemeral nature of the spectator’s experience thus reflects the ephemerality of the present in the objects that are shown to the public. At various moments in his account, Mallarmé highlights the fact that “notre époque composite […] se montre uniquement et absolument rétrospective, et quelquefois exotique,” or, “Tout est rétrospectif; et les nouveautés, ce sont les importations maritimes, celles du Japon, notamment, que nous imitons maintenant de main de maître.”69 Today, we find ourselves in the age of reproduction and imitation, where what is authentic is antique or exotic, is disappearing and is becoming very rare. Furthermore, what used to be unique pieces, enjoyed by a rare few, are now to be enjoyed by all, thanks to the industries that set their sights on “popular multiplication” (multiplication populaire). New furniture perpetuates “cette 66 Mallarmé, Œuvres, 676. “What progress has been made, especially by the factories of Gien.” 67 Crary, Suspensions, 122. 68 Mallarmé, Œuvres, 681. “In the days when the Ninevite or Babylonian potter constructed, single-handed, the palaces.” 69 Mallarmé, 681.“Our eclectic age […] shows itself to be uniquely and absolutely retrospective, and sometimes exotic.” “Everything is retrospective, and the novelties are maritime imports, those from Japan, especially, which we imitate masterfully.”

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apparence un peu fanée et si charmante des nobles pièces anciennes” and in the decorative arts, inventions ceased at the end of the last century.70 The present modern culture seems to lack identity and substance. It is filled up, either with reproductions that represent the constant displacement of an original model, the presence of which remains, however, beyond grasp. Or, the things that are authentic, belong to the past that relates to the modern world in terms of an otherness that needs to be bridged.71 The elusiveness of the present in Mallarmé’s account intimately connects with the way in which the spectator’s walk-through functions. Mallarmé’s impressions are organized through the movement and the flight of the spectators’ eyes that rapidly pass from object to object. The space of the exhibition is this optical, high-speed sensory flight that constantly visually fragments in ephemeral moments of a highly volatile presence, that is expressed in the immediacy with which one turns to the next object. The present moment remains incomplete and does not really allow for the spectator and the object to meet. The immediacy of the experience of an object is replaced by the immediate movement of the spectator’s gaze. This shift radicalizes the historically immensely important relationship between the spectator, who pauses his or her step in a moment of immediate contemplation, and the object. It is precisely in the later eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century evolution of pause and contemplation that resides, paradoxically, a crucial step towards the entwinement of mobility and absentification in the later nineteenth century. One can refer in this respect to Jennifer Carter’s argument, when discussing Lenoir’s Jardin Elysée and garden treatises, that, through fragmentation, the visual field in the garden and in these treatises shows not a whole, but “a glimpse, a scene, a limited or fragmented view of the landscape.”72 This earlier relationship played a distinctive role in the gradual construction of a fragmented, subjective view that challenged the dominant coherence of the overall, en-un-clin-d’œil-picture of the exhibition space. With Lenoir, too, one can find the embryonic presence of this progression 70 Mallarmé, 681. “That slightly withered and so charming appearance of noble ancient pieces.” 71 Mallarmé’s sensitivity for the absent present of modern time seems to point forward to his “L’action restreinte.” In this plea, abstention and inaction are interestingly connected with the conviction that there is no present. Mallarmé here expresses his aversion for the obsession of the age with what Leo Bersani called “grasping presence in the present.” Léo Bersani, The Freudian Body. Psycholanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 26. Against this obsession Mallarmé claims that there is no present: “non – un présent n’existe pas.” Mallarmé, “L’action restreinte,” 260. 72 Carter, “Recreating Time,” 209-210.

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that shifts away from the en-un-clin-d’oeil spatial organization in his own museum. Lenoir states that one can see the Jardin Elysée from the Salle d’introduction, “ce qui donnera du mouvement à l’architecture et produira une perspective agréable. De la verdure et des arbres feront les fonds du bâtiment et laisseront encore des percées propices à multiplier les points de vue.”73 In this passage, Lenoir moves towards a subjectification that zooms in, focuses, creates visual angles and views of unseen parts in the picture. At the London exhibition in 1871, in contrast with the possibility of an overall coherent and objective view also Lenoir had already departed from, experience remains incomplete. In front of the objects on display, we really only have two options, Mallarmé claims, “songer une demi-journée devant chaque œuvre exquise, ou promener un de ces regards ravis et sagaces qui contiennent toute la somme de vision dont notre œil est capable pendant un instant, pour ne conserver, ensuite, que quelques notions exactes et générales.”74 The one element which in the end remains of a fixed comprehensive whole in Mallarmé’s account, toute la somme de vision, is eventually shifting from the comprehensive exhibition space to the spectator’s own ephemeral subjectivity of the fragile instant.

Conclusion “But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent- minded, as you say.”75

The antiques shop in La Peau de chagrin showed how a subjective dynamic was at play in the experience of exhibition spaces. From the outset, the discussion of ephemerality entails a discussion of subjectivity and its hybridity. Raphael, ni tout à fait mort, ni tout à fait vivant, incorporates the elusiveness of the trace that is neither completely past, nor completely present. In that respect, Raphael’s hybridity explicitly matched that of the 73 Lenoir, Musée, 216. “Which will give movement to the architecture and will create a pleasant perspective. Greenery and trees will constitute the background of the building and will leave openings suitable for multiplying the points of view.” 74 Mallarmé, Œuvres, 683. “To reflect half a day in front of every exquisite work, or, to let wander one of those delighted and clever gazes, that holds all the completeness of vision our eye is capable of during an instant, in order to retain, subsequently, only a few exact and general notions.” 75 Herbert G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: Penguin Classics, 1895), 6.

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objects in the antiques shop. These were, on the one hand, highly evocative; on the other hand, they also indicated, precisely as objects, a fundamental anemia in Raphael’s being, which also becomes object-like. Raphael de Valentin’s likeness to the objects in the shop highlights a dimension of absence, of blanking out, of the unconscious and absent-mindedness that enabled the visitor of exhibitions and museums to be “in multiple places and times.”76 Paradoxically, it was this absent-mindedness that allowed one to be transported back in time or to non-modern cultures that were absorbed in the same pastness, in what was sensed as a provisional, and yet genuine moment of immersion, of presence with an invisible, absent reality. Authentic immersion, as Sandberg’s analysis of the Scandinavian dioramas showed, was only possible when provisional. Immersion was, in this sense, part of the mobility of modernity. As Mallarmé’s account shows, in the hyper-mobility of the international exhibition, the provisional immersion in absent worlds not only fine tunes with the elusiveness of subjective experience, but also with the ephemerality of the present in modern culture, in which the authentic object is either old or exotic. The grand scale exhibition was an emanation of the industrialized world and its emerging consumerism, in which, in Marx’s view, capital never is but always moves and changes. It incorporated a sense of up-scaled mobility. It did so in a way that connected the exhibition space, the subject, and the objects. The exhibition space embodied the very movement of immediacy with which the spectator turned to the next object. The modern object of reproduction embodied the same movement of constant deferral. For, every reproduction displaced an original model, the authenticity, the presence of which, however, remained beyond grasp. The reproduction, the exhibition space, and the spectator’s experiential landscape thus behaved like the perpetual reflections that abounded in literature. They reveal a distance between the subject and reality that in modern culture produced possibilities of experiential coherence and genuine immersion, on the unstable boundaries between fragile presence and absence in deferral.

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Preiss, Nathalie. “La curiosité n’est pas un vilain défaut. Le cabinet de curiosités.” In Honoré de Balzac, architecte d’Intérieurs, edited by Jean-Jacques Gautier, 217–237. Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2016. Quatremère de Quincy. Lettres à Miranda. Paris: Éditions Macula, 1989. Rodenbach, Georges. Les Vies encloses. Paris: Charpentier, 1896. ———. “L’ Ami des miroirs.” In Le Rouet des brumes, 21–26. Paris: Séguier, 1997. Sandberg, Mark. Living Pictures, missing Persons. Mannequins, Museums and Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Schnitzler, Arthur. Flucht in die Finsternis. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006. Stara, Alexandra. The Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816. ‘Killing Art to make History.’ New York: Routledge, 2013. Souto, Maria Helena, and Ana Cardoso de Matos. “The 19th Century World Exhibitions and their Photographic Memories. Between Historicism, Exoticism and Innovation in Architecture.” Quaderns d’Història de l’Enginyeria 13 (2012) 58–80. Witthaus, Jan- Henrik. “Raum der Überreste. Zur literarischen Inszenierung des Zeit-Raums bei Balzac.” In Die Neuvermessung romantischer Räume: Raumkonzepte der französischen Romantik vor dem Hintergrund des ‘Spatial turn,’ edited by Maria O. Hertrampf and Dagmar Schmelzer, 221–243. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2013. Wells, Herbert G. The Time Machine. London: Penguin Classics, 1895. Wetzel, Andreas. “Reconstructing Carthage: Archeology and the Historical Novel.” Mosaic 21, no. 1 (1988): 13–23. Yriarte, Charles. “Les origines et le plan de l’exposition.” L’exposition de Paris de 1889, 3 (1889): 18–19.

About the author Dominique Bauer is Assistant Professor of History at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Leuven, Belgium, and a member of the Centre d’Analyse Culturelle de la Première Modernité at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Her research focuses on spatial images and interiority in literature and scholarly discourses, mainly in long nineteenth-century France and Belgium. She published Beyond the Frame. Case Studies in 2016, a long-term analysis of the interior and anemic subjectivity. Taking this framework further, she currently studies notions of absence, presence, and temporality communicated through spatial images in context. On this theme, she published a number of book chapters and articles and a monograph Place-Text-Trace. The Fragility of the Spatial Image in 2018. She recently established the series Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective

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with Amsterdam University Press and co-edited, with Claire Moran, a Special Issue of Dix-Neuf, Inside Belgium. In March 2019, she was invited as a research fellow at the Council for Research on Religion at McGill University, Montréal, for her work on the transformation of pre-modern devotional space in fin-de-siècle Belgian literature and modernity.

7.

The “Phantasmatic” Chinatown in Helen Hunt Jackson’s“The Chinese Empire” and Mark Twain’s Roughing It Li-hsin Hsu

Abstract This chapter explores Chinatown as an ephemeral site of visual indeterminacy in the 1870s by looking at a number of Californian Chinatown accounts in Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Chinese Empire” (1878) and Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872). Late-nineteenth-century Chinatown as an exhibitory locus of authentic Chinese-ness for Western tourists is paradoxically characterized by its mutability rather than realism. By examining the accounts of Jackson and Twain about the Chinese in the 1870s, the decade before the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the paper rethinks the “virtual” existence of Chinatown, its contested nature as a “phantasmatic site” for Western projections and visual consumption, which manifests the potential realization of national transformation in the mythic Orient of the new West. Keywords: Californian Chinatowns, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mark Twain, Virtuality, Orientalist Discourse

Introduction Before the popularity of urban ethnic tourism in the 1880s, Californian Chinatowns were often considered as a political difficulty as well as an ethnic curiosity, positioned haphazardly halfway between Oriental fantasy and authentic “Chineseness.”1 In his groundbreaking 1978 book Orientalism, 1 Marquerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 6.

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_ch07

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Edward Said explains the philosophy of orientalism as “a form of radical realism:” “Anyone employing orientalism […] will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality. The tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength.”2 The systematic operation of repetitive and stereotypical images in orientalist discourse is elaborated by Homi K. Bhabha in “The Other Question,” in which Bhabha argues that colonial discourse as “the site of both fixity and fantasy” is deeply problematic, in which “a repertoire of conflictual positions” is played out and led onto “a continual and repetitive chain of other stereotypes,” giving “the stereotype both its fixity and its phantasmatic quality.”3 Late nineteenth-century Californian Chinatowns complicated such a “phantasmatic quality” of “fixity and fantasy” for its Western viewers. Characterized by both myth and reality, visual authenticity and semiotic indeterminacy, accounts of Californian Chinatowns emerged in the late-nineteenth-century US as a mobilized form of aesthetic “realism,” with its geographical concreteness paradoxically containing a plastic, ephemeral quality and pointing toward the arbitrariness, opacity, porosity, and contingencies of historical and political positioning. As a racialized space in the late-nineteenth century, Californian Chinatowns were mostly located outside the cultural comfort zone of many American visitors. In particular, they were positioned in a threshold space between fiction and reality. They were actual places inhabited by or quarantining Chinese immigrants, but they were also perceived as an exhibition site of oriental fantasy. In her 1996 book Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe remarks that, throughout the twentieth century, Asian immigrants were seen as “a screen,” “a phantasmatic site,” onto which America “projects a series of condensed, complicated anxieties regarding external and internal threats to the mutable coherence of the national body.”4 As Lowe explains, the “unfixed liminality of the Asian immigrants” in America “has given rise to the necessity of endlessly fixing and repeating such stereotypes;” “Stereotypes that construct Asians as the threatening ‘yellow peril,’ or alternatively, that pose Asians as the domesticated ‘model minority,’ are each equally indices of these national anxieties.”5 In a way similar to the 2 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1979), 72. 3 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” Screen 24, no.6 (November 1983), 29. 4 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 18. 5 Lowe, 19. Recent scholars have noted the “representational uncertainty” of China – the “elasticity” of oriental representations in the eighteenth and nineteenth century West. See, for example, Colleen Lye’s America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature 1893–1945 (Princeton,

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mobile status of Asian immigrants in America, Chinatowns in California also serve as such a liminal space of ephemeral existence. Michael Haldrup and Jonas Larsen comment on the “plastic quality” of orientalist discourse that “the Orient emerges as a material and theatrical space, which in turn enables Orientalist fantasies and imaginations to emerge and be played out.”6 Californian Chinatowns in the late-nineteenth-century present such a “material and theatrical space,” exerting “plastic” Orientalist authority through its alleged cultural and racial authenticity. If, as Said has powerfully argued, the notion of the Orient is a Western construct, based upon its essentialism, otherness, and absence, Chinatown occupies a geo-symbolic middle ground in the process of Western projection. This paper draws upon the notion of the “phantasmatic site” of Asian America, and proposes examining a number of accounts about Chinatowns in California in Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Chinese Empire” (1878) and Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872). It explores how their spatial depictions evoke Californian Chinatowns as an immersive exhibition site of both ethnographical observations and oriental projections, a problematic locus of both authenticity and mutability that magnified the constructedness of racial and national anxiety at a time when American writers were traveling westward in pursuit of their American dreams in the mythical “West.”7 Written a few years before the Exclusion Act, the accounts of Jackson and Twain allow us to rethink the East–West encounter as a racial contact zone with their temporal and multi-layered spatial existences. Their Californian Chinatowns were experiential sites of “authentic” Chineseness, in which NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Hope, Chang’s Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Chi-ming Yang’s Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Peter J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Andrew Warren’s The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 6 Michael Haldrup and Jonas Larsen, Tourism, Performance and the Everyday: Consuming the Orient (London: Routledge, 2010), 80. 7 In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner would still remark that American development could be explained through “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement, westward.” Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The American Frontier: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Mary Ellen Jones (San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1994), 25. Critics have pointed out the importance this mythical West plays in the formation of American literature. See, for example, Myra Jehlen’s American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) and William G. Robbins, Colony & Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994).

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their orientalist discourses were mobilized, projected, contradicted, and contested. It was also through their visual (and virtual) consumption of Chinatown these two writers participated in the wider national debate about the Chinese question, respectively. Indeed, Californian Chinatowns in the 1870s were treated as an ethnographic site and a racial laboratory for “the Chinese question,” a nationwide debate about the restriction of Chinese immigration to the US.8 The late-nineteenth-century depictions of San Francisco Chinatown in particular were fraught with issues of racial anxiety and labor tension. In her discussion of the rise of urban tourism in late-nineteenth-century United States, Catherine Cocks notes that writing about San Francisco Chinatown “apart from a more or less impassioned discussion of ‘the Chinese question’ had been nearly impossible in the 1870s.”9 The decade before the legalized discrimination against Chinese immigration by the national congress witnessed the embittered intensification of such a social-political entanglement, from the 1868 treaty of Burlingame guaranteeing equal treatment between China and the US, to the 1875 Page Act prohibiting Asian women from immigration to America, to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act against Chinese immigration. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Californian Chinatowns gradually became one of these cultural 8 For recent scholarships on the Asian American history in the nineteenth century, see, for example, John Kuo Wei Chen’s New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and David Palumbo-Liu’s Asian-American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). For more on the Chinese question, see, for example, Stuart Creighton Miller’s The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), Roger Daniels’s Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1995); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2000); Moon-Ho Jung, “Outlawing ‘Coolies’: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation, American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 677–701; Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007) and Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). On the shifting Sino-American immigration policies, see, for example, Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) and Gregory Blue, “Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the ‘Yellow Peril,’ and the Critique of Modernity,” Journal of World History 10, no.1 (1999): 93–139. 9 Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850–1915 (Stanford, CA: University of California Press 2001), 189. See also K. Scott Wong, “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain,” Melus 20 (Spring 1995): 3–15.

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(and commercial) institutions that informed the American public about the “real” China.10 However, at the completion of transcontinental railroads and the inception of “westward” tourism, Californian Chinatowns stood for an opaque (and somehow more disorderly) type of exhibition site and an almost unknowable space of shifting shapes and mirages. In the 1860s and 1870s, in particular, Californian Chinatowns were undergoing a transitional phase in the midst of radical urban development. In the 1850s and the 1860s, Chinatowns were, as Anthony W. Lee remarks, “construed as an effect” since “what seemed to bring the small quarter into existence was the promise of wealth elsewhere in the state.”11 Most Chinatown residents were “birds of passage” and “so-journers” in America, who intended “to stay a little while, save a little money, and return to the nest.”12 Chinatowns in the 1850–1870s remained a temporary makeshift for many Chinese immigrants. It was not until the 1880s, as Marquerite S. Shaffer observes, with “the expansion of the railroad network” and “the development of packaged tours,” that transcontinental travel started to emerge, potentially bringing in more eastern tourists to the West and contributing to the popularity of Chinatown tourism.13 In his 1904 guidebook To California and Back, C. A. Higgins would still describe Chinatown as “a panopticon of peep shows.”14

Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Chinese Empire” (1878) It was around this time that Jackson and Twain published their Chinatown accounts, which show these two writers negotiating their aesthetic and political positions with regard to what they saw as authentic “Chineseness.” A few years after the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869, Jackson took a one-year trip, from 1872 to 1873, to the American West. In her travelogue Bits of Travel at Home (1878), Jackson devoted one chapter, titled “The Chinese Empire,” to her experience in San Francisco Chinatown. 10 Critics such as John Kuo Wei Chen in New York before Chinatown and John Rogers Haddad in The Romance of China: Excursions to China in US Culture: 1776–1876 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) explore the roles of museums and fairs of foreign objects and curiosities in nineteenth-century US. 11 Anthony W. Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 38. 12 Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 17. 13 Shaffer, See America First, 21. 14 Charles A. Higgins, To California and Back: A Book of Practical Information for Travelers to the Pacific (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1904), 242.

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It began the East–West / West–East encounter with a sense of familiarity and condescension. “The sight had nothing novel in it,” Jackson noted, since the supposedly “spectacular” sight of SF Chinatown appeared more mundane than sensational: Those who are unable to visit it in person, as we did, can learn just about as much by a careful and imaginative study of Chinese fans and the outsides of tea-chests. Never did an indefatigable nation so perpetuate faithful facsimile of itself, its people, customs, and fashions as the Chinese do in the grotesque, high-colored, historical paper with which they line, cover, and wrap every article of their merchandise.15

Here, Jackson prioritizes art, imagination, and virtual travel over authentic experiences proffered by real travel. The mimetic effect of Chinese art, through its “faithful facsimile of itself” in its artifacts, rendered traveling to the actual site banal or even obsolete. Not only did the Chinese “act” of image reproduction “in the grotesque, high-colored, historical paper” seem more realistic than “the real thing,” but its “grotesque” artisanship was devalued, commercialized, trivialized, (and even vulgarized) in Jackson’s quotidian practice as a white, middle-class, female consumer of oriental goods: “In my seventh year, I possessed his portrait. It was done on rice-paper, and set in the lid of a box. Afterward, I had him on the outside of a paper of crackers, and fired him off to celebrate our superiority as a nation.”16 Jackson celebrated her sense of national “superiority” through this act of “performing” and “consuming” Chinese products – in the case, Jackson literally burned and set the Chinese firecrackers into the sky, turning the consumption of oriental goods into an American spectacle (“celebrate our superiority as a nation”).17 Jackson’s initial impression of Chinatown not only speaks to the materiality of orientalism as a cultural performance, but it further reveals the prevalence of “mass-media visuality” – the “aesthetic environments marked by convergence, immersion, illusion, and virtuality” that Shelly Jarenski analyzes in the era of technological advancement after 1839 in America; examples of visual convergence include “panoramic daguerreotype 15 Helen Hunt Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890), 62. 16 Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home, 62. 17 In Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17–18, Mari Yoshihara observes that white upper-middle-class women in America between 1870s and 1920s developed a special relationship with Asia through their collection and consumption of Asia as “spectacle” and “commodity.”

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photographs and advertisements, as well as narrative sketches, ekphrasis, and textual portraits.”18 Gillen D’Arcy Wood also notes how the mimetic effect of the technological wonder, especially panoramas, became “the shock of the real” for many nineteenth-century viewers.19 The immersive illusion created by virtuality, predicated upon the absence of the real, radically transformed the aesthetic experience of the modern viewer. Peculiarly, this sense of “technological wonder” that mass-media visuality brought about was associated by Jackson not with the emergence of technological development or modernity, but with the “indefatigable” perpetuation, objectification and reenactment of Chinese tradition and antiquity. San Francisco Chinatown appeared for Jackson as a uniquely spectatorial combination of pictorial fixity and oriental virtuality, in which the repetition of cultural stereotypes (“faithful facsimile”) intermingled with the fantastic (“the grotesque, high-colored, historical”) oriental fable. Her initial account thus asserted the Saidian radical form of realism, in which the hybrid accumulations of stereotypical images on display in one’s everyday practice was solidified into a firm sense of reality for white, middle-class, female consumer-tourists like Jackson. However, this perpetuated visuality of Chineseness, embedded in these artifacts, was also predicated upon their consumability and dispensability. While these Chinese fans, tea chests, rice papers and wrapping papers provide a seemingly “faithful” visual rendering of Chineseness, their ubiquity and permeation in her everyday practice were characterized by their collectability, portability and commodifiability, and thus also point to the fragility and temporality of San Francisco Chinatown as a consumer-oriented theatrical spectacle rather than an inhibited, actual living space. Not only were the fabrics of fans and rice papers extremely delicate and inflammable materials, but the reference to “fir[ing] him off” in Jackson’s account also evoked an objectified and effigy-like existence of Chinese presence, foreshadowing its almost martyr-like endurance of brutal racial attack in the 1860s and 1870s, and its eventual exclusion in the 1880s. Jackson’s apparent elation about American supremacy, with its subornation of Chinese culture through the consumption of oriental firecrackers, was thus embraced not without its underlying tension, of which Jackson was aware. When responding to the comment of her policeman-tour guide on 18 Shelly Jarenski, Immersive Words: Mass Media, Visuality, and American Literature, 1839–1893 (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2015), 3–4. 19 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

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the suspicious attitudes the local residents held towards foreign visitors, Jackson replied sympathetically that “[t]hey have been so hardly treated, it is no wonder.”20 The eternal “self-duplicability” of Chineseness through its self-Orientalized facsimiles and duplications came into conflict with the mutable materiality and consumable vulnerability embodied by these merchandises and artifacts. The duplicability and banality of San Francisco Chinatown soon morphed into spectatorial fascination for Jackson. The “dignity and equilibrium” of Chinese shoes, the “general neatness and cleanliness” of Chinese attires, and the “Christian patience under the insulting and curious gaze of many strangers” compelled her to exclaim that “I did not feel so sure of our superiority when I came to walk behind” a Chinese man.21 When Jackson found herself observed by a Chinese woman on the street with “a quick look of such contempt,” she took revenge by laughing at the “hideous” and “grotesque” fashion of her hair, which was never seen even “on the heads of peasant women in the German provinces,” the “queer black, junk-like shoes, turned up at the toes, and slipping off at the heel at every step,” and the “monstrosity” of her children.22 The clothes of the Chinese woman and her children became part of the oriental objects on display, and yet they served as one of those funhouse mirrors that reflected Jackson’s own sense of unease back onto herself: “In the sunless recesses of Quong Tuck Lane, I trust thou hast had many a laugh with thy comrades over the gown and hat I wore on Dupont Street that day.”23 The chimerical visions of San Francisco Chinatown ricocheted into a proliferation of images accommodating Jackson’s self-deprecation as well as oriental projection. The “dignity and equilibrium” of the Chinese attires contrast with the “monstrosity” of the appearance of the Chinese woman and her children, Jackson’s own sense of superiority in juxtaposition with the imagined absurdity of her western gown. Christine Holbo calls this double consciousness of Jackson her “modern perspectivalism,” a technique employed to cater for the “cosmopolitan sophistication” of her reader.24 In the context of her Chinatown visit, this multi-perspectivalism can also be seen as forming a multi-layered textual site of “phantasmatic” orientalism, which is unsettling and yet transient (“when” and “that day”). While these conflicting images speak to Bhabha’s 20 Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home, 63. 21 Jackson, 62. 22 Jackson, 64. 23 Jackson, 64. 24 Christine Holbo, “‘Industrial and Picturesque Narrative’: Helen Hunt Jackson’s California Travel Writing for the Century,” American Literary Realism 42, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 245, 250.

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so-called “hybridity,” which threatens to undermine colonial discourse, they are presented in such a prescribed, well-contained exhibitionary manner that they seem securely “cosmopolitan” and thus less disruptive. The sheer physicality of San Francisco Chinatown evokes a further sense of virtual reality for Jackson once she stepped onto Jackson street: “The street was suddenly becoming like a street of Pekin, and that the trades of Hong Kong, Canton, and their suburbs were buzzing on either hand of me.”25 The proximity of Chinatown to downtown San Francisco disoriented Jackson’s sense of place: “There we are in America again. We turn back in bewilderment, and retrace our steps a little way into the Empire again, to make sure that it was not a dream!”26 This delayed sense of shock deepened when she struggled for words to describe one of the “picturesque” shops on Jackson Street: “It is neither grocer’s, nor butcher’s, nor fishmonger’s, nor druggist’s; but a little of all four. It is […] part cellar, part cellar-stairs, part sidewalk, and part back bedroom.”27 This spatial hybridity of the store’s architectural structure corresponded with the visual ambiguity of its contents: “There are things that look like games, like toys, like lamps, like idols, like utensils of lost trades, like relics of lost tribes, like – well, like a pawnbroker’s stock, just brought from some other world!”28 This cognitive “likeness” of these mental analogies escalated into a moment of panic. Jackson was “seized by horror” when she touched a piece of artefact hanging outside the shop and imagined that it might be “a piece of an ancestor of Moo’s, doing ghostly duty at his shop-door:” “It is not paper; it is not cloth; it is not woolen, silk, nor straw; it is not leather; it is not cobweb; it is not alive; it is not dead: it crisps and curls at my touch; it waves backward, though no air blows it.”29 Vacillating between amazement, confusion and terror, Jackson’s Chinatown experience foregrounded a highly mutable site of both hyperreality (“the sight had nothing novel in it”) and unreality (“We turn back […] to make sure that it was not a dream!”), normative repetition (“faithful facsimile”) and uncanny otherness (“like […] like […] it is not […] it is not”).30 San Francisco Chinatown in Jackson’s account transforms from a manageable and reproducible spectacle of oriental fixity into a more dynamic, 25 Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home, 63. 26 Jackson, 69. 27 Jackson, 63. 28 Jackson, 63. 29 Jackson, 67. 30 I borrow the term hyperreality from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations (Semiotext[e], 1983), in which he discusses the connection between reproduction of the real and the potential absence of truth.

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transient, and disorderly existence that speaks to the experience of modernity. While these shops might seem quaint, ghostly, or “picturesque,” when Jackson tried to classify what she saw, the images became visually jarring, confronting the epistemological limitation on the part of its Western visitor to decipher what appeared to be indecipherable. Her attempts to produce a systematic depiction of these oriental commodities by recreating an immersive, virtual experience and an encompassing view deteriorated into a sequence of repeatedly parallel analogies and linguistic negations (“nor,” “part,” “like” and “not”). These repeated syntactic patterns of negation revealed multiple visual difficulty in distinguishing the original from the copy, the real from the unreal (“We turn back in bewilderment, and retrace our steps a little way into the Empire again, to make sure that it was not a dream!”).31 Visiting Chinatown became an alternative type of virtual travel that is both consumable and unsettling. Its physical and visual stimulation mentally transports Jackson across the Pacific Ocean to Pekin, Hong Kong, and Canton spontaneously. The materiality of the oriental goods, the nearness of these unknown objects and Jackson’s touching of the piece of Moo’s artifact further excavated the ancestral past of China in a gothic manner that disrupted one’s sense of temporal continuity (“utensils of lost trades,” “relics of lost tribes,” “a piece of an ancestor of Moo’s”). Leonard Cassuto notes that the cultural grotesque “occurs when an image cannot be easily classified even on the most fundamental level” and thus “has a peculiar disruptive power.”32 In the case of Jackson, the grotesque “monstrosity” of these artifacts works along with the hallucinating hyperreality of the street views to shock Jackson into a psychological state of temporal and spatial disorientation. While such a chaotic moment of temporality points to the emerging condition of modernity, with which many contemporary visitors of Jackson’s time might become increasingly familiar, it harkens back more to the “shock of the real” for many nineteenth-century museum visitors. In his discussion of the impact of panoramas in the early nineteenth century, Wood notes that “the shock effect of the panoramas lay not with the scope and variety of their marvelous scenes – which could, conceivably, be experienced by a conscientious traveler over time but with their instantaneous viewability.”33 Jackson appears to experience an alternative kind of “shock effect,” since 31 Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home, 69. 32 Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 6, 8, 27. 33 Wood, The Shock of the Real, 106.

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the “instantaneous viewability” of the spectacle is not produced by the realism of its representation, but by her physical proximity to the replica of “the real thing.” Such a “reverse” shock effect is, nevertheless, similar to the one produced by these panoramas in the sense that the very nearness of these objects, their closeness to the “original,” and their unnameability make this “viewability” startling. In this case, seeing is not believing, but disbelieving. Despite their tangibility and accessibility, such closeness through sight and touch only reaffirm the spatial and semiotic opacity of oriental commodities as if they were “just brought from some other world!” Ralph O’Connor remarks on how panoramas “embodied a dominant Enlightenment attitude to nature” and thus “ended up providing a metaphorical resource for natural science.”34 Jackson’s intent to draw a scientific picture of a panoramic Chinatown shows a similar enlightenment attempt to cope with the “viewability” (and accessibility) of the oriental spectacle by categorizing, labeling, and even touching the specimen she saw, to no avail. Michael Foucault’s exploration of spatial order in The Order of Things (1966) might still be useful in reading this spectatorial fuzziness and cognitive ambiguity of Jackson’s Chinatown account. In his preface, Foucault discusses the spatial fixity of China by dividing locality into utopias and heterotopias: “Utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias […] desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.”35 For Foucault, the notion of China is emblematic of such a utopic fabula, since “the Chinese culture is the most meticulous, the most rigidly ordered, the one most deaf to temporal events, most attached to the pure delineation of space.”36 While Foucault associates Chinese culture with “the most rigidly ordered” and “most attached to the pure delineation of space,” Jackson’s spatial depiction of Chinatown presents an epistemological shift from the static, “eternal” utopic space of China as a picture and a piece of commodity, towards a heterotopic space of contradiction, inconsistence, and paradox that defies linguistic inscription and syntaxial coherence. Foucault explains that “heterotopias are disturbing, 34 Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago, IL/ London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 271. 35 Michael Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge 2005), 19. 36 Foucault, The Order of Things, 20.

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probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together.’”37 Jackson’s repeated pronouncement of her inability to name what she saw or heard shows such a linguistic-spatial movement from the knowable to the unnamable that “desiccate speech,” “stop words in their tracks,” thwarting her attempt to textually (and visually) reconstruct a real Chinese vision. Jackson’s Chinatown account thus exposes more cognitive gaps than the “faithful facsimile” could initially placate; it also shows the disturbingly reversible relationship between the imagined and the real in a hyperstimulating environment of image, sound, and touch. Towards the later part of her trip, Jackson’s notion of Chineseness, which seemed duplicable and repetitive, evolved into a mobile and non-representable (or even antirepresentational) space of heterotopia, resisting her static, “picturesque” linguistic inscription. Jackson’s Chinese theater visits further such spatial disorientation and temporal disorder. The orchestra the Chinese played was compared to “one frog-pond, one Sunday school with pumpkin whistles, one militia training, and two gongs for supper, on a Fall River boat, all at once.”38 As Jackson complained about the noise on the stage: “It was so loud we could not see; it was so loud we could not breathe; it was so loud there didn’t seem to be any room to sit down!”39 One’s sense of space was distorted, or even eliminated by the loudness of the sound. Another “fierce spectacular play” was similarly described as “dazzling as a gigantic kaleidoscope and deafening as a cotton-mill.”40 Jackson’s technological references such as “a gigantic kaleidoscope” and “a cotton-mill” were explicitly associated with 37 Foucault, 19. 38 Jackson, Bits of Travels at Home, 69. 39 Jackson, 70. Jackson’s reaction towards Chinese theatre was not uncommon among her contemporaries. As Raymond Schwab explains, “China’s linguistic instrument appeared in a formidable solitude, bewildering the mental habits of the West, rendering the problem of equivalences among languages almost absurd, and refusing to allow its closed system to be drawn into the comparative school.” See Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 6. See also Donald Riddle, Flying Dragons, Flowing Streams: Music in the Life of San Francisco’s Chinese (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983) and Daphne Pi-Wei Lei, “The Production and Consumption of Chinese Theater in Nineteenth-Century California,” Theater Research International 28 (2003): 292–298. 40 Jackson, Bits of Travels at Home, 74.

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optical illusions and industrial advancement common in a time of “the emergence of media ubiquity.”41 The hyper-sensorial stimulation of the Chinese operas created an environment of multi-medium convergence that, ironically, disrupted her experience of sound, sight and space to the point that “words and things” couldn’t “hold together.”42 It was not surprising that Jackson’s Chinatown journey ended with her being speechless when she was asked to take charge of a Chinese Sunday school class and explain the word “tradition” (spelled as “tradition” by Jackson phonetically in a local color fashion) in the fifteenth chapter of Matthew in The New Testament: “What are tradition? Arx-play-in!”43 Finding herself “in so utterly desperate a dilemma,” Jackson wished “the floor of that Sunday-school chapel would open and swallow me up.”44 Jackson concluded the episode with a temporary solution – her metaphoric (and virtual) escape from that pedagogical space and the question of “tradition.” Linguistic definition appears problematic in a space where mediation and negotiation between cultural difference fall apart. The “mass-media visuality” or “viewability” of Jackson’s Chinatown experience unsettled the nationalist narrative that she initially pursued as delineating the US “superiority as a nation.” In “The Chinese Empire,” Jackson claimed herself to be a “uncommercial traveler” that “had not come to buy, but simply to look at, to lift, to taste, or to smell the extraordinary commodities offered for sale in the empire.”45 And yet, this seemingly disinterested attitude towards materialistic transaction and her enthusiasm in the “genuine” experience of Chineseness spoke to a more abstract type of commodification – consumptions that confirmed her republican vision. When she saw a “poor, wrinkled, forlorn old creature, sewing away on the hopelessly ragged garment,” Jackson called it “a Chinese toga;” while the old woman chanted a few words, Jackson again evoked the picture of a political imagination: “If there is such a thing in the Chinese Empire as a constitution, and if they have a Woman’s Rights party, perhaps some wag has taught her to call. ‘Here’s your Sixteenth Amendment.’”46 However, when Jackson was 41 Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley, eds. Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 1. 42 Foucault, The Order of Things, XIX. 43 Jackson, Bits of Travels at Home, 75. 44 Jackson, 75. 45 Jackson, 64. 46 Jackson, 67–68. Critics have shown how Jackson negotiates between the public and the private as a while middle-class female writer. See, for example, Bryan Wagner, “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Errant Local Color,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 58,

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asked to explain what defined the English word “tradition” in the Chinese Sunday school, her earlier patriotic conviction about American superiority was shaken facing the potentiality of Chinese assimilation. Shaffer notes that towards the end of the nineteenth-century tourism was seen as “a kind of virtuous consumption” that “promised to reconcile this national mythology, which celebrated nature, democracy, and liberty, with the realities of an urban-industrial nation-state dependent on extraction, consumption, and hierarchy.”47 Jackson’s Chinatown account showed this underlying tension between the American celebration of republican values and the asymmetrical power relation that Chinatown embodied as a contested site of ideological as well as visual hierarchy. Jackson’s observation anticipated what Shaffer calls “mobile citizenship that redefined political rights in consumer terms, celebrating seeing over speaking, purchasing over voting, and traveling over participating.”48 However, Jackson became “immobile” with the “desperateness” she felt in her inability to account for “tradition” in a heterotopic transcultural space like San Francisco Chinatown. Her “visual consumption” of Chinatown highlighted the irreconcilability between Chinese “authenticity” and the “virtuality” of her own white middle-class national fantasy. Jackson might have set out to “virtuously” affirm the hierarchal order of the US through her subordination of the “virtual” China, but her Chinatown account subverted such a nationalist affirmation.

Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) Mark Twain’s Chinatown account informs an alternative spatial and temporal imagination towards the “phantasmatic” site of Californian Chinatowns, with its focus on the mundane details of these Chinatown residents. Twain had been vocal about his sympathy towards the ill-treatment of Chinese immigrants early on. 49 In his 1872 Roughing It, he reminisced about the no.4 (Winter 2002): 1–23; John M. Gonzalez, “The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘Ramona’,” American Literary History 16, no.3 (Autumn, 2004): 437–465 and Kimberly E. Armstrong, “A Failed Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Indian: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and the Power of Paratext,” Western American Literature 52, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 129–156. 47 Shaffer, See America First, 5. 48 Shaffer, 6. 49 Critics have shown how Twain’s anti-imperialistic sentiment was formed during his Californian stay in the 1860s, and how the racial violence he witnessed there shaped his later career as a satirist. See, for example, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1985) and “Mark Twain and Race,” A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002);

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brutal attack against Chinese immigrants on the street and accounted for racial oppression and social immobility imposed upon them. Depicted more as an ethnographic site of Chinese quotidian existence rather than a spectacle of “incomprehensible” oriental goods, Chinatowns in Twain were characterized by their daily practices, such as gardening, laundry, and mining business, the worshipping habits of local residents, opium-smoking, and “the genius” of Chinese book-keeping.50 Twain commented on the frugality and pragmatism of Chinese daily practice thus: “In California they rent little patches of ground and do a deal of gardening. They will raise surprising crops of vegetables on a sand pile. They waste nothing. What is rubbish to a Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or another.”51 Twain emphasizes the industrious side of Chinese cultural behavior, speaking implicitly to the prevalent public perception of Chinatown’s density, enclosure and its labyrinth – all of which were considered a threat to the public health of American urban environment.52 Twain’s observation shows the effective use of the land resources (“They waste nothing”) in Chinatown, which ties into the stereotype of Chinese workers as being economical, and yet it also makes the perceived visual opacity of Chinese spatial practice appear more transparent. Twain’s depiction of Chinese opium-smoking further evoked layered cultural imageries that mobilize the Foucauldian “pure delineation” of Chineseness. His opium scene was associated not simply with the spectacle of the leisurely or the depravity of the poor, but more with the “comfortless” chores these Chinese laborers had to put up with in order to momentarily escape from their misery and poverty. The opium house was a “little coopedup, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning Josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle.”53 The operation of opium-smoking was repulsive: “The stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a statue.”54 Exercising some form of “cultural voyeurism,” Hsin-yun Ou, “Mark Twain’s Racial Ideologies and His Portrayal of the Chinese,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 2, (September 2010): 33–59; Hsuan L. Hsu, Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (New York: New York University Press, 2015) and Selina Lai-Henderson, Mark Twain in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 50 Mark Twain, Roughing It (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 369-374. 51 Twain, Roughing It, 370. 52 In Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Nayan Shah points out three characteristics of Chinatown in the American office Health report in the 1850s–1880s – its density, its enclosure, and its labyrinth (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 17–44. 53 Twain, Roughing It, 372. 54 Twain, Roughing It, 373.

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Twain peeped into the domestic realm of the “little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut” and dreamed with “the soggy creature” about a brighter future: “Possibly in his visions he travels far away from the gross world and his regular washing, and feasts on succulent rats and birds’-nests in Paradise.”55 Speculating on behalf of the Chinese smoker for “succulent rats and birds’nests,” Twain’s visual consumption of the narcotic spectacle turned that “dingy cavern of a hut” into a “virtual” experience – his imagined dreamland of the eastern “Paradise.” Undeniably, Twain’s “virtual” dreaming through the eyes of the opiumsmoker is replete with stereotypes about the unsanitary conditions of Chinese food. In a later section of the same chapter of Roughing It, Twain described Mr. Ah Sing’s hospitality by bringing up rats and birds’-nests again: “He offered us a mess of birds’-nests; also, small, neat sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse, and therefore refrained.”56 Images like “a mess of birds’-nests” and “several yards” of sausages with “the corpse of a mouse” pointed towards consumable goods that are largely of speculative nature and potentially Orientalized. By mapping this half-shown, half-conjectured oriental “feast” onto the opium dream of the Chinese smoker, Twain re-enforced the fixity of oriental fantasy and enacted his own oriental fantasy simultaneously. Such a projection posed as an interface between his empirical observation and reality, materiality, and virtuality. It further manifested an exoticized American dream, since “succulent rats and birds’-nests in Paradise,” displayed in the food products of Mr. Ah Sing’s store, also suggested synecdochally the American promise of materialistic success that the opium-smoking Chinese laborer might have longed for. Susan Nance remarks that oriental tales in The Arabian Nights were “not in effect a protest against materialism or industrialism or capitalism but a way of participating in these developments in ways that seemed creative and authentic to the emerging identities of many individuals” in nineteenthcentury America.57 In a similar way, by conjuring up “succulent rats and birds’-nests in Paradise,” Twain’s orientalist discourse also participated in the capitalist fantasy of American dreams by mediating between the oriental other and the occidental viewer, between Eastern luxury and American success through his virtual enactment of a “spectacular” Chinese banquet. 55 Twain, Roughing It, 373. 56 Twain, Roughing It, 373. 57 Susan Nance, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 20–21.

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Twain experimented with the multi-layered theatrical space of Chineseness in an earlier short story “John Chinaman in New York,” in which dreaming with the Chinese other was exposed as a cultural imposition and oriental performance misconstrued.58 In the article, Twain encountered a Chinaman “acting in the capacity of a sign” in front of “one of those monster American tea stores in New York.” Feeling indignant towards his maltreatment, Twain wrote that “Is it not a shame that we who prate so much about civilization and humanity are content to degrade a fellow-being to such an office as this? Is it not time for reflection when we find ourselves willing to see in such a being, in such a situation, matter merely for frivolous curiosity instead of regret and grave reflection?”59 In a way similar to his account of the opium-smoker in Roughing It, Twain evoked an oriental dreamland elsewhere, in the case of this story, the hometown of the Chinaman across the Pacific Ocean, to account for the experience of displacement for the Chinese stranger in the US: “Were his thoughts with his heart, ten thousand miles away, beyond the billowy wastes of the Pacific? And now and then, rippling among his visions and his dreams, did he hear familiar laughter and half-forgotten voices, and did he catch fitful glimpses of the friendly faces of a bygone time?”60 This contemplative, orientalist projection was soon shattered when the true identity of the Chinaman was revealed in the end as an Irishman, not only turning the moral lesson of the story on its head, but also satirizing the widespread contemporary complaint made by Irish laborers about “cheap Chinese labor” in the 1860s and 1870s. The performativity of racial stereotypes was foregrounded here, in which Chinese identity became a disembodying experience to be masqueraded and enacted rather than authenticated and essentialized. Like Jackson’s account, Twain’s Chinatown also exhibited conflicting images between a reproducible pictorial presentation of oriental exoticism and an ethnographical claim to cultural truth. While Jackson was confounded, embarrassed, and then paralyzed by her Chinatown experience, Twain’s account demonstrated a more explicit investment in the social and emotional immobility experienced by Chinatown residents. In his portrayal of Virginia City Chinatown, Twain observed the shabby and makeshift situation of its narrow streets “scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through” and one-story wooden buildings “set thickly together.”61 The Chinese quarter 58 Mark Twain, “John Chinaman in New York,” The Galaxy Magazine (September 1870), 426. 59 Twain, “John Chinaman in New York,” 426. 60 Twain, “John Chinaman in New York,” 426. 61 Twain, Roughing It, 369.

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was “a little removed from the rest of the town” and the Chinese immigrants were “penned into” the small space without given much choice.62 While Twain remarked backhandedly that this spatial confinement was “a thing which they [the Chinese] do not particularly object to, as they are fond of herding together,” in the previous paragraph Twain framed his ethnological observation with his editorial voice through the reportage of a racial hate crime in San Francisco at the moment of his writing: “As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered.”63 Twain might be referring to the event he wrote for New York Tribune on the racial attack in San Francisco, 2 June 1871: “The police are endeavoring to arrest a gang of boys who stoned to death an inoffensive Chinaman on Fourth St. yesterday afternoon. Dozens of people witnessed the assault, but did not interfere until the murder was complete. No attempt was then made to arrest the murderers.”64 Since Chinese immigrants were banned from state courtroom testimony, along with the black, mulatto and Indian, against a white man from the 1850s to the 1870s, Twain invited his readers to virtually “witness” the assault with him.65 Here, Twain introduced an alternative “shock of the real,” not through “the mimetic effect” of Chinese images, but by synchronizing the news reportage with the act of writing to produce a temporal space of visual protest (“witnessed the shameful deed”). Rather than impose “an imperial gaze” upon the racial other, Twain turned onlookers’ (and by extension his readers’) eyewitness into public testimony against the racial injustice conducted “in broad daylight.” In accounts like this, Twain brought one’s attention to writing as a medium itself and added a physical and temporal dimension to his ethnographic depiction with his inter-textual intervention. He incorporated the seemingly 62 Twain, Roughing It, 369. As Hsuan L. Hsu notes, the institution of vagrancy laws in southern and western states in the postbellum United States was “removing or imprisoning racialized groups to more prof itable locations, such as southern chain gangs, urban Chinatowns, and Indian reservations.” Hsu, Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 53–54. 63 Twain, Roughing It, 369. 64 On Twain’s newspaper reference, see Hsin-yun Ou’s “Mark Twain’s Racial Ideologies and His Portrayal of the Chinese,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 2 (September 2010): 33–59. 65 Hsu, Sitting in Darkness, 28. More on the banning of Chinese immigrants to testify in state courts, see, for example, Hsu’s Sitting in Darkness, 28–30. See also Charles J. McClain’s In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 20–42.

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abrupt declaration (“As I write”) into his Chinatown account, creating a linguistic tension to accentuate the moral urgency of its racial protest. Twain’s stress on the simultaneity of his writing this – the happening of the news – established a sense of veracity to the account and potentially corrected (or even subverted) his later racialized pronouncement about Chinatown’s density and enclosure in the next paragraph (“they are fond of herding together”). In the footnote to “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” Twain mentioned a similar report he wrote in 1864, “where the Brannan street butchers set their dogs on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on his head; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the hilarity of the occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman’s teeth down his throat with half a brick. This incident sticks in my memory with a more malevolent tenacity.”66 Memoranda like this on “the hilarity of the occasion” added poignancy (and potency) to the “disgraceful persecution” of Chinese immigrants despite its pastness, since the condition evoked in Twain’s memory persisted to the present moment of his writing. Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space might be helpful in understanding Twain’s aesthetic strategy to produce a dramatic textual space, in order to “interfere” with the condition of racial oppression. In Everyday Life in the Modern World, Lefebvre states that the study of everyday life “exposes the possibilities of conflict between the rational and the irrational in our society and our time” and reveals “how the social existence of human beings is produced.”67 Through his evocation of those earlier witness accounts about street violence, Twain created a new editorial space to combat the “hilarity of the occasion.” In this way, Twain’s Chinatown was not simply an ethnographical site of scientific observation or a “phantasmatic” site of mirroring and projection that so dazzled and confronted Jackson. It also pointed to the radical possibility of producing new spatial practices for social and racial freedom through Twain’s writerly intervention, through the transformation of curious gazes into virtual witness. When Jackson visited San Francisco Chinatown between 1872–1873, it was also the time when Twain’s Roughing It was published.68 In fact, Jackson also made a brief comment on the act of writing in her travelogue. Jackson relied on the assistance of “a very short policeman,” a local friend, and a number of Chinese 66 Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Sketches New and Old (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1875), 119. 67 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (London: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 23. 68 Although, as Kate Phillips notes, Jackson did not seem to be influenced much by Twain’s work about Europe, she might have read Twain’s sympathetic depictions of the Chinese in the 1870s. See Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life, 161, 312.

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interpreters to help her understand what she saw, and she digressed briefly to observe how the physical trait of her local policeman was part of the conditions of writing: “I have been impressed with the fact that good writers, in giving accounts of city experiences, invariably meet a tall policeman.”69 In contrast to Jackson’s “cosmopolitan,” lighthearted, facetious remark, Twain syncopated the transient act of editorial writing with that of news reporting, bringing his reader to the scene of violent assaults to enhance the immediacy and authenticity of this virtual experience. During his visit to the Chinatown in Virginia City, Twain was also impressed with the display of oriental goods and objects. The store of Mr. Sing, for example, contained “a thousand articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and beyond our ability to describe.”70 The artifacts of Mr. See Yup were like “fans of white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like Lim-burger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the inner coat of a sea-shell.”71 However, it seems to be the everyday spatial practice of the Chinese immigrants – particularly their physical and mental vulnerability as a “persecuted race” in the “land of the free” – that drew most of his attention. While Jackson was paralyzed by the heterotopic disorder of San Francisco Chinatown and became speechless towards the end of her Chinatown trip (“I wished the floor of that Sunday-school chapel would open and swallow me up”), Twain’s Chinatown writing was galvanized by the social and material immobility as well as symbolic “(self)-immolation” that the Chinese immigrants had to endure to survive, either through their avoiding racial violence by “herding together” or their mental escape “in their opium-dreams” (“in his visions he travels far away from the gross world.”).72

Conclusion Jackson and Twain experienced nineteenth-century Chinatowns as either a temporal exhibition site of spectacles and commodities, with mutable materiality and porous boundaries, or ephemeral street acts to be witnessed, memorized and eventually “intercepted.” Jackson’s immersive Chinatown 69 Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home, 63. 70 Twain, Roughing It, 373. 71 Twain, Roughing It, 374. 72 Twain, Roughing It, 369, 373.

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experience unsettled her understanding of “authentic” Chineseness and the constructiveness of national supremacy, revealing the multilayered, prism-like effects of her own “phantasmatic” duplication and projection of the oriental otherness. Twain’s Chinese account demonstrated an alternative approach towards Chinatown by presenting it as a space of imposed social enclosure, physical immobility, and emotional paralysis. In particular, Twain’s Chinatown accounts were mobilized through its connections with scenes elsewhere, whether it was the public streets in San Francisco and New York, where physical or social aggression inflicted upon Chinese immigrants were sighted (“in broad daylight in San Francisco;” “one of those monster American tea stores in New York”), or imaginary lands elsewhere or across the Pacific Ocean (“succulent rats and birds’-nests in Paradise;” “ten thousand miles away, beyond the billowy wastes of the Pacific”).73 Through his virtual dreaming with and for the Chinese immigrants, Twain’s Chinatown writing spoke to the transient and performative nature of his own oriental-American fantasy. His evocation of witness memory and syncopation of writing with seeing further showed an attempt to erase the mediating trace of writing to shock his reader into visualizing and believing the “actuality” of domestic injustice and racial violence in the US. With what James Weaver calls the “anti-imperial impulses” in Bits of Travel at Home, Jackson’s encounter with San Francisco Chinatown epitomized the intellectual ambivalence experienced by her contemporary Americans in the 1870s.74 Although Jackson did not seem prepared to answer the Chinese question, in which racial assimilation played a central part in the early 1870s (“What are tradition? Arx-play-in!”), she was moved by the plight of Native Americans later, writing works like A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona (1884) to defend Native American rights and promote their assimilation into American society. Joshua Paddison remarks that different racial and cultural perceptions about the Indians and the Chinese led to divergent governmental solutions in the 1880s – “exclusion and expulsion for the Chinese” because of their stagnancy and unassimilability, and “cultural extermination campaigns in the form of allotment and re-education for Indians” because of their “mutable” receptiveness of “Euro-American Christianity.”75 Indeed, Jackson’s Chinatown account showed her hesitation to consider the possibility of Christianizing the 73 Twain, Roughing It, 373 and “John Chinaman in New York,” 426. 74 James Weaver, “Being In and Not Among: The Anti-Imperial Impulses of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Bits of Travel at Home,” 221. 75 Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 4.

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seemingly uncontainable Chinese. Her shifting perceptions of San Francisco Chinatown exemplified such an experiential disruption that made visible the tension between the imposition of visual order and the ephemeral material presence of Chinese ‘tradition’ against Western inscription. Around the time Jackson published Ramona (1884), a romantic novel that boosted southern Californian tourism and established her literary reputation as a popular writer, Twain also published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 in the UK and 1885 in the US), a regionalist novel challenging the preconceived notion of Christian “silvilization.” Both books were set in a pre-Civil War era in the South and criticized post-war racial exploitation. They both incorporated local dialects in their writings, which, as Bryan Wagner suggests, “enabled certain types of political criticism, especially among those who were alienated from centers of power.”76 Both novels also shared the tradition of American protest novel that, according to Brian Norman, was characterized by “an awareness of and ability to address divided audiences within a nation that promises inclusion but enacts exclusion.”77 Despite their shared interest in the activism of minority right, the major difference of their aesthetic style – romantic novel vs. social satire – were already taking shape in their Chinatown encounter. It was not surprising that Jackson’s Ramona, in a way similar to her Chinatown account, turned Southern California into a picturesque destination for visual consumption. Its literary and commercial success (and yet political “failure”) depended upon the commodification of its virtual stimulation.78 Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn took an alternative route by employing local dialects to excavate the antebellum memory of slavery and stimulate its readers to reflect upon the present-day persistence of racial oppression as an everyday occurrance.79 76 Bryan Wagner, “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Errant Local Color,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 58, no.4 (Winter 2002): 14. Wagner remarks on the changing function of local color writing in the postbellum years that “dialect generally lost its satirical edge and gained the luster of a tourist commodity (15).” 77 Brian Norman, “The Addressed and the Redressed: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Protest Essay and the US Protest Novel Tradition,” Canadian Review of American Studies 37, no.1 (2007): 114. 78 Wagner notes that “Ramona produces the nation […] as a scripted encounter between a mobile consumer and a commodified local culture” (“Helen Hunt Jackson’s Errant Local Color,” 4). On the political “failure” of Ramona to promote and preserve Native American right and land, see also Kimberly E. Armstrong, “A Failed Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Indian: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and the Power of Paratext,” Western American Literature 52, no. 2, (Summer 2017): 129–156 and Norman, “The Addressed and the Redressed: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Protest Essay and the US Protest Novel Tradition.” 79 More on “spatial possibilities” and Huckleberry Finn’s “negative freedom,” see Hus’s Sitting in Darkness, 55–73.

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Californian Chinatowns in the 1870s were the meeting places between Chinese “Tradition” and Western “silvilization.” Their virtual reality (formalistic realism) for Jackson and Twain illuminated the social and aesthetic function of oriental fantasy as both an embodied and fabricated exhibition site for temporal spatial practice. Their early sketches spoke to the contested nature of Chinatowns as a “phantasmatic site” of Western projections and visual consumption, and their aesthetic attempts to write their ways into, as much as “out of” the textual space of “cultural grotesque,” to quote Cassuto’s words, in order to address the enmeshed issue of national values and racial inequality.80 The Chinatown accounts of Jackson and Twain highlighted the spatial practice of Orientalism in the late-nineteenth-century US as both a palimpsest-like exhibition site of material and virtual consumption, and a mobilized temporal space for the cultural enactments of their own political agendas – in Jackson’s case, rethinking the formation of the US nationhood, and in Twain’s case, witnessing the immediacy of racial violence. The “viewability” of panoramic Chinatown played a crucial role in reshaping their conceptualization of racial encounters in the 1880s. Their accounts, opaque and multi-layered as they are, shed some light on how, in the decade before the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Californian Chinatowns were imagined and performed, witnessed, and reshaped by the two American writers in their search for a potential realization of national transformation in the mythic Orient of the new West.

Bibliography Armstrong, Kimberly E. “A Failed Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Indian: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and the Power of Paratext.” Western American Literature 52, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 129–156. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Barth, Gunther. Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850–1870. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Blue, Gregory. “Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the ‘Yellow Peril,’ and the Critique of Modernity.” Journal of World History 10, no.1 (1999): 93–139. Bhabha, Homi K. “The Other Question.” Screen 24, no. 6 (November 1983): 18–36. Cassuto, Leonard. The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 80 Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 17.

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Chang, Elizabeth Hope. Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Chen, Yong. Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Cocks, Catherine. Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850–1915. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Colligan, Colette, and Margaret Linley, eds. Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1995. Foucault, Michael. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2005. Gonzalez, John M. “The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘Ramona.’” American Literary History 16, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 437–465. Haddad, John Rogers. The Romance of China: Excursions to China in US Culture: 1776–1876. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Haldrup, Michael, and Jonas Larsen. Tourism, Performance and the Everyday: Consuming the Orient. London: Routledge, 2010. Higgins, Charles A. To California and Back: A Book of Practical Information for Travelers to the Pacific. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1904. Holbo, Christine. “‘Industrial and Picturesque Narrative’: Helen Hunt Jackson’s California Travel Writing for the Century.” American Literary Realism 42, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 243–266. Hsu, Hsuan L. Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Jackson, Helen Hunt. Bits of Travel at Home. Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1890. Jarenski, Shelly. Immersive Words: Mass Media, Visuality, and American Literature, 1839–1893. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2015. Jehlen, Myra. American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent. New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 1986. Jung, Moon-Ho. “Outlawing ‘Coolies’: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation.” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 677–701. Kitson, Peter J. Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Lai-Henderson, Selina. Mark Twain in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Lee, Anthony W. Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Lei, Daphne Pi-Wei. “The Production and Consumption of Chinese Theater in Nineteenth- Century California.” Theater Research International 28 (2003): 289–302.

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Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. London: Transaction Publishers, 1994. Lew-Williams, Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 2018. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature 1893–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. McClain, Charles J. In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Miller, Stuart Creighton. The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969. Nance, Susan. How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790–1935. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Norman, Brian. “The Addressed and the Redressed: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Protest Essay and the US Protest Novel Tradition.” Canadian Review of American Studies 37, no. 1 (2007): 111–134. O’Connor, Ralph. The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856. Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Ou, Hsin-yun. “Mark Twain’s Racial Ideologies and His Portrayal of the Chinese.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 2 (September 2010): 33–59. Paddison, Joshua. American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian-American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pfaelzer, Jean. Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans. New York: Random House, 2007. Phillips, Kate. Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. Berkeley,CA: University of California Press, 2003. Riddle, Donald. Flying Dragons, Flowing Streams: Music in the Life of San Francisco’s Chinese. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1979. Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971. Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Shaffer, Marquerite S. See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

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Shelley, Fisher Fishkin. From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. ———, “Mark Twain and Race.” In A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, 127–162. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Tchen, John Kuo Wei. New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The American Frontier: Opposing Viewpoints, edited by Mary Ellen Jones, 24–40. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1994. Twain, Mark. “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy.” The Galaxy Magazine (May 1870): 717–718. ———. “John Chinaman in New York.” The Galaxy Magazine (September 1870): 426. ———. Mark Twain’s Sketches New and Old. Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1875. ———. Roughing It. Edited by Harriet E. Smith, Edgar Marquess Branch, Lin Salamo and Robert Pack Browning. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011 (1872). Yang, Chi-ming. Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in EighteenthCentury England, 1660–1760. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Yoshihara, Mari. Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Wagner, Bryan. “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Errant Local Color.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 58, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 1–23. Warren, Andrew. The Orient and the Young Romantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Weaver, James. “Being In and Not Among: The Anti-Imperial Impulses of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Bits of Travel at Home.” Legacy 32, no. 2 (2015): 214–235. Wong, K. Scott. “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain.” Melus 20 (Spring 1995): 3–15. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

About the author Li-hsin Hsu is Associate Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a PhD in Transatlantic Romanticism from the University of Edinburgh. She has published in a number of international journals, such as the Emily Dickinson Journal, Symbiosis, Cowrie and Romanticism. She

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is currently editor-in-chief of The Wenshan Review (“Wenshan” means “the Literary Mountain” in Chinese), an international academic journal devoted to the promotion of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to literary and cultural studies. Her research interests include Dickinson studies, Romanticism, Transatlantic studies, Orientalism, and Ecocriticism. She conducted a one-year visiting fellowship at UC Berkeley (2018–2019) and has been serving the Emily Dickinson International Society board since 2018. Her current projects include the representations of San Francisco Chinatown in the nineteenth century, Ecogothic, contemporary Taiwan poetry, and Dickinson in Asia.

8. “Show Meets Science:”How Hagenbeck’s “Human Zoos” Inspired Ethnographic Science and Its Museum Presentation Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel Abstract This chapter attempts to explain the role of “human zoos” in the emergence of scientific ethnography and its display in museums by examining the case of the private portfolio of the first director of the Natural History Museum Vienna, Ferdinand von Hochstetter.1 This vast portfolio includes photographs of the first Völkerschauen (“peoples’ exhibitions”) by Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913). Some of the pictures of the Greenland Inuit appear to have been the templates for at least two sculptures of “native types” that the Austrian sculptor Viktor Tilgner used for his Inuit caryatids in the exhibition hall. This discovery sheds new light on the complex relation between “human zoos” and early ethnographic science. Keywords: Human Zoos, Hagenbeck, Inuit, NHM Vienna, Tilgner

Introduction: Science in public, “human zoos” and in scientific museums In the late-nineteenth-century Europe, the popularity of a specific kind of ephemeral exhibition, the so-called “human zoos” reached its zenith.2 In these shows, indigenous people were displayed in their costumes, 1 which was donated to the institution. 2 The term ‘human zoo’ will be used here in the broad def inition introduced by Pascal Blanchard, “Les zoos humains aujourd’hui?” in Zoos humains: de la Vénus hottentote aux reality shows, ed. Nicolas Bancel et al. (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 417–427.

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_ch08

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re-enacting their customs alongside animals from their home countries. Like museums, they presented “foreign” artifacts and “cultural aliens,” albeit in a live theatrical context.3 As such, these shows filled a gap that museums were unable to: they presented the “other” in the flesh. 4 The phenomenon of “human zoos” was extremely successful and spread rapidly across Europe, especially after Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913) developed it into a thriving business model in his Thierpark (“zoo”), which opened in 1866.5 Ethnographic shows, Hagenbeck called them Völkerschauen (“peoples’ exhibitions”), like these became an integral part of world fairs, colonial exhibitions, and other ephemeral exhibitions. Over time, the character of these shows negatively transformed: they changed from presentations with a serious claim of authenticity, to attention-seeking circus spectacles.6 By demonstrating a seemingly natural polarity between European civilizations, with technological advancement and modernity on the one hand and primitivism on the other, they reinforced a sentiment of European superiority.7 Simultaneously, a wave of romanticization set in, in which indigenous people were perceived as being “purer” and uncorrupted by civilization and industrial culture. 8 In his book, Carl Hagenbeck emphasized the innocence and authenticity of the people he hired and called them “natural men.” For Hagenbeck, they embodied “noble savages,” not yet distorted by phony politeness.9 3 Britta Lange, Echt. Unecht. Lebensecht. Menschenbilder im Umlauf (Berlin: Kadmos, 2006), 57–59 and A. Dana Weber, “Vivifying the Uncanny: Ethnographic Mannequins and Exotic Performers in Nineteenth-Century German Exhibition Culture,” in Fact and Fiction, Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain, ed. Christine Lehleiter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 304. 4 Lange, Echt. Unecht. Lebensecht. Menschenbilder im Umlauf, 57–59. 5 Pascal Blanchard et al., “Human Zoos: The Greatest Exotic Shows in the West,” in Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, ed. Pascal Blanchard et al. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 1–49 and Hilke Thode-Arora, “Hagenbeck’s European Tours: The Development of the Human Zoo,” in Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle, 165–173. 6 The research group around Pascal Blanchard extensively discussed this aspect in Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle (see note 5). 7 Katharina von Hammerstein, “‘Imperial Eyes’: Visuality, Gaze and ‘Racial’ Differentiation in Texts and Images around 1900,” Colloquia Germania 43, no. 4 (January 2010): 24–48. 8 This wave of romanticization of the ‘foreign’ was also mirrored in popular fiction of the late nineteenth century. Dime novels like Ann S. Stephens’ Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860) or Eward S. Ellis’s Seth Jones or, The Captives of the Frontier are examples for this mass fascination in expansion, adventure, and native peoples. For further information, see “Dime Novel Collection,” University of South Florida Libraries. http://digital.lib.usf.edu/dimenovels; last accessed 6 September 2018. 9 Carl Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen. Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen (Leipzig: Paul List Verlag, 1952), 50.

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Concurrently with the success of “human zoos,” new scientific museums sprung up all over Europe, including anthropological and ethnographic museums.10 Both phenomena, “human zoos” and scientif ic museums, were based on the same learning paradigm that prevailed in the nineteenth century: visual scrutiny was seen as the means of gaining knowledge.11 Vision was seen as the way of understanding the world. Scientists and non-professionals could learn by observing and visually comparing. This belief in Anschauungsunterricht (“object lessons”) shaped the concept of nineteenth-century science museums and of “human zoos.” Museums were built as “walk-in textbooks” filled with thousands of specimens to be seen and compared by visitors.12 Tools and artworks of native cultures were displayed in detail but their creators, the living natives, were not on show. These museums opened as repositories of scientific knowledge. Unlike the “human zoos,” nineteenth-century museums mostly tried to veer away from encroaching theatricality, fearful of losing their scientific reputation. This put the museums in a certain predicament, because apart from being irreproachable science institutions, they also had to attract new and diverse audiences. Their aim was to reach beyond the learned to non-professionals and the working classes. The function and target groups of natural history museums were questions that were intensively discussed during the nineteenth century. In most museums, like in Vienna, London, and Berlin, it was agreed that natural history museums had to serve two purposes simultaneously: scientific research and public education, which meant that there was no separation in the exhibition. Still, many scientists favored a division between research and exhibition. After the completion of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, for instance, the Director of the Zoological Collections, Karl August Möbius (1825–1908), introduced a separation in the collections, with an area for “laymen” and an area for “experts.”13 In Vienna, by comparison, it was decided that the museum should serve 10 Carsten Kretschmann, Räume öffnen sich, Naturhistorische Museen im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 14–32 and Jovanovic-Kruspel, The Natural History Museum. Construction, Conception & Architecture (Vienna: Natural History Museum, 2017), 17–43. 11 Carla Yanni, Nature’s Museums. Victorian Science & the Architecture of Display (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 14–32. 12 Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel and Omar Olivares, “The Primeval World by the Austrian Painter Josef Hoffmann (1831–1904): A Cross Over between Art and Science and its Export to Mexico,” Jahrbuch der Geologischen Bundesanstalt 157, nos.1–4 (2017): 269–299. 13 Wilhelm Ernst, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: Das Museum für Naturkunde der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, 5 and Kretschmann, Räume öffnen sich, 200 ff.

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both target groups at the same time: the public exhibition should address scientists as well as non-professionals.14 Today, the simultaneous emergence of scientific museums and “human zoos” is often perceived as separated and even as opposed to one another. But this is an incorrect perception in hindsight. The same enthusiasm and curiosity that sparked the rise of the “human zoos” led to the foundation of ethnography as a research subject. How closely related the perception of these two phenomena must have been during the nineteenth century becomes clear when looking at “human zoos” as a source of museum collections.

Collections from the “human zoos” The interest in indigenous peoples was intensified by the notion of the “dying races.” The historical narrative put forth by Europeans predicted the decline and, in some cases, extinction of indigenous cultures.15 The fear that these cultures were doomed when exposed to “superior races,” sparked the wish to document, collect, and investigate them. Paige Raibmon, an expert in colonial history, referred to it as follows: “The government, museums, and universities funded various ethnographic research ventures on the cultures, oral literature, languages, and especially the material culture (arts) of various American Indian tribes with hopes to document and capture the “last glimpses” of raw Indian life before it disappeared.”16 In this context, the “human zoo” shows played an important role as a form of confrontation with these cultures. The impact of Hagenbeck’s exhibitions on museums around the world is still underestimated. As several statements by Carl Hagenbeck show, the number of ethnographic objects collected and distributed to museums in the wake of “human zoos” must have been enormous.17 Adrian Jacobsen (1853–1947) was for a long time Hagenbeck’s main supplier of 14 Ferdinand von Hochstetter, “Das k. k. Hof-Mineraliencabinet in Wien,” Jahrbuch der kaiserlichköniglichen Geologischen Reichsanstalt 34 (1884): 286. 15 Blanchard et al., Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle, 16. 16 Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 328 and Zachary R. Jones, “Images of the Surreal: Contrived Photographs of Native American Indians in Archives and Suggested Best Practices,” Journal of Western Archives 6, no. 1 (2015). http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/ westernarchives/vol6/iss1/6; last accessed 5 March 2018. 17 Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, 43–65.

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people-groups.18 The f irst venture Adrian Jacobsen undertook for Carl Hagenbeck was a trip to Greenland to hire a group of Inuit.19 This enterprise soon turned out to be more complicated than expected. Hagenbeck wrote about Jacobsen’s difficulties: Already the ministry of the interior of Denmark was rejecting as they did not want anything to do with human trafficking. Only thanks to the intervention of Professor Rudolf Virchow, the founder of the anthropological society in Berlin who guaranteed that the Inuit had to fear no harm Jacobsen was able to sail to Greenland. Close to the town Ilulissat Jacobsen hired a group of Inuit, men, women, and children and accomplished an ethnographic collection including huskies, household tools, tents, two kayaks, and all sorts of clothes, snow knifes, traps for seals, and weapons.20

As this statement illustrates, Hagenbeck was in close contact with the leading scientists of the time. Not only did the intervention by the renowned physician and anthropologist Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) make the “import” of the Inuit people possible in the first place, but Virchow and other scientists from the newly founded anthropological societies also used the shows as a chance to carry out varied research and examinations.21 Hagenbeck himself became a member of the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory. He organized extra performances of each show for its members.22 By doing so, he emphasized their authentic character and bestowed upon the shows a scientific aura. Authenticity in itself is an aspect still not fully recognized in its nineteenth-century meaning and in its importance for scientific museums and their collecting strategies. In the understanding of the time, authenticity could be accomplished in many ways. As Britta Lange analyzed, a direct connection to the source was not always necessary.23 The fact that there was a relation between the object displayed and the original, even in an indirect and mediated way, was enough to provide authenticity and make the object worth being collected and scientifically researched. 18 Kirsten K. Kotte Holiman, Adrian Jacobsen, fra polarkulden og inn i varmen? (Tromsø: Univ. Tromsø, 2012). http://www.hugooien.no/upload/galleri/1351799477.pdf; last accessed 5 March 2018. 19 Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, 48. 20 Ibid., 49. 21 Ibid., 49–51. 22 Thode-Arora, “Hagenbeck’s European Tours,” 165–173. 23 Lange, Echt. Unecht. Lebensecht. Menschenbilder im Umlauf, 78–80.

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It has to be underlined that the cachet the shows gained from their relation to museums’ experts and scientists made them not only attractive for bourgeois society, but also for royal visitors. Emperor Wilhelm I visited the Inuit from Greenland and he was not the only sovereign to attend these shows. This royal interest not only gave an additional boost to the general popularity of the shows, but also led to international interest. Hagenbeck noted the success of the Inuit exhibition: Soon also my old friend monsieur St. Hilaire [Albert Geoffroy SaintHilaire 1835–1919, director of the Jardin d’Acclimatation] arrived to recruit my guests for Paris. There the sensation was even greater: scientists did all kinds of measurements on the Greenlanders. Linguists let them talk into the newly invented phonograph by Edison.24 The man named Ukubak was painted and photographed but when they tried to take a plaster cast he resisted. His wife instead allowed this for some nice clothes in return.25

According to Hagenbeck, after this show in Paris, the people’s exhibitions reached a new level of acceptance. This was described by Hagenbeck as follows: Now finally all the zoological gardens in Germany opened their gates for my peoples shows. Dr. Bodinus, the director of the Berlin Zoo, could not resist any longer and so my group moved to Berlin in 1878, where the success exceeded all expectations. From Berlin the tour went on to Dresden, later again to Berlin and then back to Hamburg. For a small entrance fee of 4 Shillings the interest was very high. 44,000 visitors were counted, they all wanted to see the Inuit before they left for their home country. With a fortune of 8000 crowns and 2 carriages full of gifts they returned to Greenland. As I heard later from my ice-sea traveler the reception of the group was enthusiastic in Greenland. Ukubak invited all inhabitants from his bay to a big celebration. Almost 3000 guests helped him use up all the fortune they had gained.26

24 For more about the recordings, see Lange, “Archive, Collection, Museum: On the History of the Archiving of Voices at the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University,” Journal of Sonic Studies 13, Acoustic Ephemeralities (January 2017). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/ view/326465/326466/0/28; last accessed 3 March 2018. 25 Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, 51. 26 Ibid.

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Although this sounds like a happy conclusion to this adventure, not all Hagenbeck’s exhibition groups were so fortunate. Indeed, some members lost their lives, e.g. due to illness.27 Apart from hiring the people for the shows, Adrian Jacobsen also became an important collector of ethnographic material. Hagenbeck stated in 1908: “From his journeys mainly in the northern sea but also in the South Pacific he brought home hundreds of thousands of ethnographic objects.”28 The ethnographic museum in Berlin alone acquired 14,230 specimens from Jacobsen. Jacobsen’s objects were f irst used in Hagenbeck’s exhibitions and performances. They subsequently became part of the Trading Company Handelshaus Umlauff, founded by Hagenbeck’s brother-in-law Johann Gustav Friedrich Umlauff.29 In 1871, the enterprise was officially registered and specialized in the trade of natural specimens and ethnographic objects. Thanks again to Rudolf Virchow and the founding director of the ethnographic museum in Berlin, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), Jacobsen became an official ethnographic collector for the royal ethnographic museum in Berlin.30 In 1885, Jacobsen was in British Columbia, Canada, where he and his brother Bernard Filip hired a group of Bella Coola. They brought them back to Europe and traveled with them until 1887. They performed in numerous cities and exhibited a significant collection of ethnographic artifacts: The Ethnology Museum in Leipzig bought five hundred ethnographic objects from this group, thereby acquiring the largest individual sub-collection of its North America inventory.31 Jacobsen’s collections can be found not only in Berlin and Leipzig, but also in the museum of Cultural History in Oslo and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. For his work, Adrian Jacobsen received the Norwegian king’s fortune medal in gold, and in 1890 he was appointed a Knight of the 1st grade of the Order of St. Olav.32 According to a 2003 statement from the former director of the ethnographic museum in Hamburg, Wulf Köpke, 27 For further reading on the dehumanizing excesses of the ‘human zoos’, see Pascal Blanchard et al., Menschen Zoos. Schaufenster der Unmenschlichkeit. Völkerschauen in Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz, UK, Frankreich, Spanien, Italien, Japan, USA (Hamburg: Les Éditions du Crieur Public, 2012), 393. 28 Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, 52. 29 Lange, Echt. Unecht. Lebensecht. Menschenbilder im Umlauf, 78–80. 30 Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, 53. 31 Weber, “Vivifying the Uncanny,” 317. 32 “Adrian Jacobsen,” Norsk Biograf isk Leksikon. http://nbl.snl.no/Adrian_ Jacobsen; last accessed 3 September 2018.

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Jacobsen’s material is regarded as an understudied “national treasure.”33 The number of objects derived from the “human zoos” illustrates how scientific activities and exotic entertainments overlapped.

From heroic images to scientific “native/race types” In the wake of the “human zoos,” a great number of images, drawings as well as photographs, was created. All these images, as Elizabeth Edwards states, “both constructed the spectacles themselves and positioned them in different discourses in the fluid relations between ‘science’ and the ‘popular.’”34 In terms of content, the pictures can be divided approximately into two different categories: 1. romanticized/heroic images; and 2. scientifically categorized images. They therefore reflected the two perspectives (romanticized and documentary) of foreign cultures that formed the basis for the rise of both “human zoos” and ethnographic museums. Looking back at his life, in 1908, Carl Hagenbeck described in his book Von Menschen und Tieren how the idea of the “human zoos” developed. He reports that he wrote to his friend the animal-painter Gottlob Heinrich Leutemann (1824–1905) in 1874 that he intended to import a herd of reindeer from Norway. Leutemann suggested that this would be even more interesting if the reindeer were accompanied by a family of Laplanders together with all their tents, weapons, sleighs, and household. As Hagenbeck stated in his book, Leutemann was obviously “imagining a picturesque northern depiction of men and animals in self-contained integrity within a winter scenery.”35 Hagenbeck points out that this painterly thinking led him to the idea of what he termed Völkerausstellungen. His early shows were motivated by curiosity combined with an aestheticized romantic perception of the other.36 The descriptions of the arrival of the Lapland group by Hagenbeck reflect this romanticized perception. In September 1874, a group of six Laplanders, a 33 Claudia Sewig, “Der Mann, der die Indianer holte,” Genealogic website of Hugo Oin. http:// www.hugooien.no/?go=arkiv&id=22&start=5; last accessed 5 March 2018. 34 Elizabeth Edwards, “Evolving Images: Photography, Race and Popular Darwinism,” in Endless forms. Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, ed. Diana Donald and Jane Munro (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2009), 174. 35 Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, 44. 36 A very good analysis of how Hagenbeck tries to distance his shows from simple entertainmentspectacles can be found in Werner Schwarz, “Konsum des Anderen, Schaustellungen ‘exotischer’ Menschen in Wien,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 1 (December 2001): 15–29.

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baby, and the reindeer arrived on a steamboat in Hamburg, for the first “peoples’ exhibition.” While still in the harbor, two of the reindeer escaped and it transpired that this incident was perfect publicity for the show.37 The six nomads and their way of life fascinated the citizens of Hamburg. They watched with awe how the Laplanders set up their tents, observed them crafting snowshoes, or carving parts of their sleighs. They enjoyed watching them lassoing the reindeer, wearing their pointed fur hats and long fur coats. Of special interest was the milking of the reindeer and, of course, the Lapland mother breastfeeding her baby.38 Hagenbeck’s friend, the painter Heinrich Leutemann, visited the exhibition every day with his easel, despite the cold weather. He sat down restlessly to portray the Laplanders in his drawings.39 Leutemann’s images are examples of the romantic/heroic category. Based on the sketches and drawings created at the shows, he published prints in the popular journal Gartenlaube.40 These prints are evidence of how Leutemann and Hagenbeck wanted the audiences to perceive “the guests” from the North. Leutemann’s drawings fueled the cliché of the heroic hunter in his hostile but picturesque northern world. This aestheticizing perspective on the Laplanders had, of course, two sides. On the one hand, it further fueled the already existing prejudices and sense of European cultural superiority over other cultures. On the other hand, by satisfying European curiosity, the romantic/heroic pictures also served an educational purpose. 41 As an aside, it should be noted that provided its authenticity, being picturesque and beautiful as well as being extraordinary were the characteristics that made the phenomenon worth looking at. These are the same properties essential for almost all objects and specimens presented in museums. Against this background, the images created by Leutemann can be understood as “teaching” material, something that becomes even more evident in the images of the Inuit from Greenland, which Leutemann produced for the so-called Münchener Bilderbogen, published by Braun & Schneider. 42 Every fortnight between 1848 and 1898, these single prints came out and were sold. The pictures were used for “object lessons” in schools and as collector’s items. They were inexpensive, and this meant that children could put together a pictorial atlas. Again, as with the images 37 Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, 45. 38 Ibid., 45. 39 Ibid., 45-46. 40 Leutemann, “Nordische Gäste,“ Die Gartenlaube, 44 (1875): 742–744. 41 Further reading on the aspect of vision: Hammerstein, “‘Imperial Eyes’,” 23–48. 42 Leutemann, “Die Welt in Bildern,” 34, 1878, “Die Eskimos.” http://www.uni-regensburg.de/ bibliothek/bilderbogen/muenchener-bilderbogen/serien/index.html; last accessed 5 March 2018.

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of the Laplanders, the images of the Inuit were presented in manner the audience was supposed to see the indigenous people. They were depicted as heroic warriors braving the rough northern sea and fierce polar bear attacks in the icy world of permanent winter. How strongly these pictures shaped the general perception of the Inuit in the public becomes clear in another statement by Hagenbeck regarding the publication of an Inuit woman’s image in popular reference books: “The younger readers just have to open one of the bigger lexica. There she is depicted with her baby under the name “Eskimo.” She was rather tall than small, slim and she wore her hair in a plait in the middle of her head. Like all Inuit women she wore fur trousers and dainty sewn shoes.”43 Apart from these widespread romanticized pictures during the second half of the nineteenth century, the so-called carte de visite photographs (formats of 2 × 3.5 inches, mounted on a card) became very popular. According to Elizabeth Edwards, between 1855 and 1880, millions of them were in circulation.44 Due to their reasonable prices, this form of photography became the perfect way to express middle-class self-representation.45 A substantial number of these carte de visite pictures represented “native types.”46 In the wake of Hagenbeck’s “peoples’ exhibitions,” a great number of such photographs were taken of the participants. These pictures were part of the professional merchandizing machinery Hagenbeck had developed and were sold by his Thierpark as souvenirs and collector’s cards to visitors.47 Compared to Leutemann’s romanticized/heroic images, these photographs convey a completely different atmosphere. According to Edwards, they already follow a completely different style in their compositions: “The positioning of the body in front of the camera and the presentation of full face or profile constituted a form of ‘scientific reference’ which drew on the traditions of anatomical drawing. At the same time the use of objects, weapons, body ornament, feathers, and animal skins and, on occasion, pose suggested ‘the primitive.’”48 43 Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, 51. 44 Elizabeth Edwards, “Evolving Images: Photography, Race and Popular Darwinism,” 167–193. 45 Also the new profession of scientists used this form of self-presentation. For further reading see Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel et al., “Die historische Portraitsammlung der LepidopteraSammlung im Naturhistorischen Museum Wien—Vom Standesportrait bis zum ‘EntomologenSelfie’ des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Quadrifina 12 (December 2015): 37–238. 46 Elizabeth Edwards, “Evolving Images: Photography, Race and Popular Darwinism,” 167–193. 47 In 1907, Adrian Jacobsen and his wife Hedwig even opened a restaurant in Hagenbeck’s Tierpark in Stellingen. See Claudia Sewig, “Der Mann, der die Indianer holte,” Hamburger Abendblatt, 9 October 2003 and genealogic website of Hugo Oin. http://www.hugooien. no/?go=arkiv&id=22&start=5; last accessed 3 March 2018. 48 Edwards, “Evolving Images,” 174.

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Given that the medium of photography provided an intensive effect of authenticity and that the form of representation was very standardized, these pictures had the aura of being almost “scientific” and the persons presented thereby had the status of “type-specimens.” This tendency of producing photographs as a tool for scientific work culminated in the introduction of anthropometric photography developed by John Lamprey (Assistant Secretary of the Ethnological Society in London): the subject had to be photographed against a plain background, divided into two-inch squares by silk threads.49 Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1925) made a similar attempt in 1869 as President of the Ethnological Society. According to his standards, the body had to be photographed full-face and in profile, carefully arranged with a measuring rod.50 The German Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg also published an anthropological album with similar “race-type” photographs from the South Seas in 1881.51 Photography in itself, even without the inclusion of a measuring rod, was perceived as being capable of providing reliable facts. Thus, enabling the viewer to read the pictures scientif ically. The photographic lens pretended to create impartial images. Today, this kind of photographic representation is resented by the majority of Native American communities as an “authentic” documentation of their past.52 The non-anthropometric photographs are considered very sensitive and controversial. They are viewed as examples of racism and cultural appropriation by those who recorded them.53 Nevertheless, the importance of this type of image in the public discourse on scientific information is still not entirely acknowledged. As Elizabeth Edwards has pointed out, these images were a fundamental factor in the dissemination of “Darwinistic ideas” in popular culture. By stressing the physical differences, these images emphasized the perception of human variation within an evolutionary framework, echoing Darwin’s ideas. Edwards states: “Few scientific theories have made so great an impact on the popular imagination as Darwin’s. But above all, photographs, however problematic, gave solidity and the possibility of an empirical basis to abstract theories of the human development. While Darwin might not have recognized 49 Ibid., 189. 50 Ibid., 190. 51 Ludwig Friedrichsen, Süd-See Typen. Anthropologisches Album des Museums Godeffroy in Hamburg (Hamburg: L. Friedrichsen & Co. 1881), 175 photographs and 28 plates. 52 Zachary R. Jones, “Images of the Surreal: Contrived Photographs of Native American Indians in Archives and Suggested Best Practices,” Journal of Western Archives 6, no. 1 (2015): 1–18. 53 Ibid.

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it, photography lent coherence and helped to further the awareness and understanding of his work in a broader context.”54 “Native type” photographs were, therefore, seen as documents in their own right. They were often used as didactic supplements in ethnographic museum exhibitions. Displayed alongside ethnographic objects on show, they could provide the visitor with additional information, for example, about the creators of the objects, but also about the way the objects were used.55 The photographs had to compensate for the absence of the real research subject of ethnography, the living human, which could not be presented in the museum. However, these two-dimensional representations were unable to close the gap sufficiently. The desire for life-like forms of presentation led to the creation of ethnographic manikins.

Like real: Ethnographic manikins Many museums decided to display ethnographic manikins in order to make their exhibitions visually more attractive to the public. As an audiencefriendly technique of museum display, these figures were either presented in “ethnographic groups” or as single figures furnished with ethnographic artifacts and wearing traditional costumes.56 In 1797, Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) had already created wax figures for “a group of contrasting races of mankind,” including natives from North and South America, the Sandwich Islands, Otaheite, and China.57 With authentic clothing and artifacts, their faces seem to have been modeled from life casts. In addition, the Chinese Collection of Nathan Dunn (1782–1844) in Philadelphia, displayed life-sized figures executed in clay, which were portraits of individuals dressed in appropriate costumes.58 Between 1853 and 1869, Reimer’s Anatomical and Ethnological Museum (London) featured “the 54 Edwards, “Evolving Images,” 191. 55 This finds its reflection in contemporary critics. See Emil Deckert,”Die ethnographischen Museen,” Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 March 1878, 9. 56 Hilke Thode-Arora, “Representation of Cultural Differences in German Ethnic Shows,” in Embodiments of Cultural Encounters, ed. Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthun, 141–161 (Münster [etc.]: Waxmann, 2011). 57 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 17–79. 58 Ibid., 37–39 and Aaron Caplan, “Nathan Dun’s Chinese Museum,” American Philosophical Society Library. http://www.amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.069.C17n-ead.xml; last accessed 5 March 2018.

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varied types of the Great Human Family.”59 In 1853, the anthropologist Robert Latham (1812–1888) had developed life-sized wooden models of the varieties of mankind that made up a major part of the displays of the Natural History Department at the re-erected Crystal Palace at Sydenham in London.60 These figures, made from wood, were based on body casts of indigenous people brought to London in ethnological shows.61 In Vienna, Präuscher’s Panopticum (opened in 1871) also included wax manikins of indigenous people.62 The question of whether portraits of individuals were suitable for creating ethnographic manikins was intensely debated among anthropologists. The British anthropologist Alfred Cart Haddon (1855–1940) criticized figures representing individuals, created by using plaster casts as models: Life masks, as ordinarily taken, convey no clear notion of the people; the mask serves chiefly to misrepresent the native countenance and disposition; besides, the individual face is not necessarily a good type of a group. Good types may, however, be worked out by the skillful artist and sculptor, who alone can adequately present these little-understood people as they really are and with reasonable unity pose and expression.63

This refusal of the individual as suitable reference material is connected again to the fact that this would bring science too close to showmanship. The representation of individuals remained a phenomenon of the waxworks (here, the authentic portrayals of individual people, such as celebrities, politicians, or criminals, had their home), whereas the ethnographic manikin should represent a supra-individual “type.” In 1884, some years after its foundation, the aforementioned Umlauff enterprise, opened an additional museum and in 1889 Johann Umlauff’s son, Heinrich Umlauff, began to produce and sell life-sized “ethnographic manikins.”64 These f igurines became a very successful retail item and 59 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, Tourism, Museums and Heritage, 37–39. 60 Edwards, “Evolving Images,” 167–193, esp. 174. 61 Ibid., 167–193, esp. 176. 62 Sabine Hutter, “Von ‘Präuscher’s Panopticum mit Menschenmuseum’ bis von Hagens’ ‘Körperwelten’ Nachgebildete, lebende und tote Menschen als Schauobjekte” (Master’s thesis, University Vienna, 2012), 11–18 and Anonymous, “H. Präuscher’s Museum im k. k. Prater, ” Morgen-Post, 30 June 1885, 5. 63 Alfred Cort Haddon, “The Popularisation of Ethnological Museums,” Nature 70 (1904): 8, quoted by Lange, Echt. Unecht. Lebensecht, 166. 64 This museum had the name “Weltmuseum,” which means world museum. As a side remark it should be mentioned that the former Völkerkundemuseum Vienna was renamed Weltmuseum Wien in 2013.

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were sold to museums all over Europe.65 The f igures were created in a similar way to the ones by Latham but from wax, plaster, and, subsequently, papier mâché. Umlauff always emphasized that his figures were lifelike and, at the same time, artistic. He commissioned, as Alfred Cart Haddon had demanded, an artist, in this case a sculptor, to produce a general “race-type” based on individual information provided in plaster casts taken from living people or from photographs or sketches. This “supra-individual type” had to be able to represent a whole indigenous population, like a biological type-specimen represents a special species. From these “race-types,” a mold was produced from which an infinite number of castings could be made. The figures were assembled from parts: the head, the torso, and the limbs were produced separately and then assembled. For museums, it was also possible to purchase only single parts. The amount of original equipment (costumes, tools, weapons) included with the manikin determined the price of the figure.66 The suitability of the introduction of whole ethnographic groups in the context of museums was also a matter intensively discussed at the end of the nineteenth century. The question was whether these kinds of life-groups could be considered appropriate for scientific museums at all. Only a few German museums presented such groups, for example, the Städtische Museum für Natur-, Völker- und Handelskunde in Bremen displayed them in its courtyard in 1896. This installation was criticized for making the museum a panopticon or a show booth. As such, many ethnographic museums were reluctant to introduce such groups and decided instead to use only single manikins or only body parts as a means of presenting original artifacts, such as clothing or tools.

The National History Museum Vienna and Hagenbeck’s “human zoos” As already mentioned, the two- and three-dimensional images, echoing the “human zoos,” played an important role in the dissemination of evolutionary and Darwinistic ideas in the public realm. The concept of the new Natural 65 Although the NHM Vienna has no figurines by Umlauff in its possession, there are about 300 other kinds of masks, busts, and figurines that also served mainly an educative and exhibition purpose. Apart from this, the sculptural decorations in the former ethnographic department, which is discussed later, fulfilled a similar task. 66 Lange, Echt. Unecht. Lebensecht, 167.

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History Museum (NHM) in Vienna, designed by the renowned scientist and fervent proponent of Darwin in Austria, Ferdinand von Hochstetter (1829–1884), was based on the same ideas. When the museum was designed, it was assumed that the development of humankind could be studied by researching pre-industrial peoples. Hochstetter considered, for instance, the inhabitants of the Solomon Islands “nearest akin to the aborigines of Australia and Tasmania, and like these seem to be the remnants of a very ancient race, possibly the oldest branch of the human family.”67 It was assumed that studying these cultures would open a window on the history of civilized peoples. Hochstetter, who was a proponent of public education, reached the summit of his career in his role as director of the new NHM Vienna. The museum was planned as a leading scientific research institute, but also as the most important public educational institute for natural sciences in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was Hochstetter’s aim to design the exhibition in such a way that it was a visual instruction for everyone.68 Hochstetter introduced a completely new, and, for the time, radical organization of the collections. Instead of three galleries (botany, mineralogy, zoology), which had hitherto existed, he proposed five sections, adding paleontology and an anthropological-ethnographical collection, including prehistory. This inclusion of humankind in the framework of a Natural History Museum made the NHM Vienna the first and only museum in Europe at the time that resolutely accepted Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Hochstetter was well aware of this innovation and he stated in 1884: “The Viennese Natural History Court Museum will be the only one, which combines collections of all-natural history disciplines, including man and his prehistory, under one roof.”69 The NHM Vienna, therefore, distinguished itself significantly from the other natural history museums in Europe. In other cities, like London, Berlin, and Paris, the ethnographic collections formed museums of their own. The integration of humankind in the new natural history museum was a clear expression of Hochstetter’s acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Therefore, the new Viennese museum can be understood as a public “Darwinian Classroom.”70 67 Hochstetter, New Zealand. Its Physical Geography, Geology and Natural History with Special Reference to the Results of Government Expeditions in the Provinces of Auckland and Nelson (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta 1867), 199. 68 Hochstetter, “Das k. k. Hof-Mineraliencabinet in Wien,” 285. 69 Ibid. Hochstetter, 285. 70 Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel and Omar Olivares, “The Primeval World by the Austrian Painter Josef Hoffmann (1831–1904).”

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To set up the basis for his new anthropological and ethnographic department, Hochstetter acquired the collections and the library of the Anthropological Society in Vienna and transferred them to the museum. Ferdinand von Hochstetter, who was also one of the founding members of the Viennese Anthropological Society (1870), convinced the society to donate their museum collections to the NHM Vienna.71 This offer was accepted gratefully by the society in 1877 as the growing collections, which had already been presented to the public during the Vienna World Fair 1873, had no proper home and were stored in unsuitable conditions.72 From the moment of the organizational integration, Hochstetter also started to launch a number of scientific enterprises, such as excavations and research projects. This, and a very generous acquisition policy, had the aim of raising the standard and the volume of the new disciplines presented at the museum. In this context, it should be highlighted that the NHM Vienna was also in contact with Carl Hagenbeck and the Umlauff enterprise. Both contributed to the museum collections: archival resources show that there were multiple contacts between the NHM Vienna and Hagenbeck. In the Hagenbeck archive in Hamburg, three transactions with the NHM Vienna can be verified.73 In 1883, material from Tierra del Fuego for 500 Marks and Somali-material for 300 Marks was sold to NHM Vienna, Singhalese material was sent back in 1885. According to the NHM archive, in 1879, the museum received a donation of 54 objects from Sudan (worth 4000 fl.) from Hagenbeck. The items had been presented before at an exhibition in Viennese Prater organized by Carl Hagenbeck.74 The NHM Vienna also had trading relations with Johann Gustav Friedrich Umlauff, as shown in documents from the museum’s archive.75 Umlauff clearly offered antiquities 71 Like Rudolf Virchow Hochstetter championed Anthropology and supported the foundation of scientific societies focusing on these disciplines. Virchow and Hochstetter definitely knew each other from the assemblies. See Anonymous, “Deutsche Anthropologen-Versammlung II,” Allgemeine Zeitung, August 21, 1883, 10–11. 72 Angelika Heinrich, “Vom Museum der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien zur Prähistorischen Sammlung im k. k. Naturhistorischen Hofmuseum (1870–1876–1889–1895),” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien (MAGW) 125/126 (1995/96): 11–42. 73 Information via e-mail from archivist Klaus Gille, Hagenbeck-Archiv Hamburg, 14 May 2018. 74 In 1879, Hochstetter reported to the Lord Chamberlaine that Hagenbeck donated 54 objects from Sudan shown 1878 in an exhibition in the Rotunde [exhibition building in the Viennese Prater; note from the author] to the museum, Archive for the History of Science, NHM Vienna: ID 5808 Z.80/1879. 75 Material regarding the relation between Johann Gustav Friedrich Umlauff and the director of the museum Ferdinand von Hochstetter at the Archive for the History of Science, NHM Vienna: ID 3849 Z 39 c/1877, ID 3860 Z. 39n/1877, ID 3850 Z.39d/1877, ID 3859 Z. 39m/1877, ID 3851 Z. 39e/1877, ID 3857 Z. 39k/1877, ID 3853 Z.39g71877, ID 3848 Z.39b/1877.

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from Peru to the museum. The objects, including a mummy, were found in winter 1876/1877 at a site an hour from Lima. As proof of their authenticity, the dealer had to provide detailed information on the provenance of the objects. Britta Lange showed that the evidence of authenticity was a crucial question for the acquisition of collections.76 Frequently, the guarantee was shifted to authorities like the finder of the objects, who had to provide a plausible “provenance” of the items offered. One letter held in the archive of the NHM Vienna sheds some light on this aspect. Upon request, Umlauff referred to the man who brought the artifacts from Peru to him. Umlauff offered to ask for further information as soon as he came back from his journeys.77 As this shows, the question of how authenticity was proven cannot be answered unequivocally. Rather, authenticity was largely related to the authority of individual persons and the plausibility of the facts delivered by them. In any case, Umlauff’s information must have been convincing because, according to the inventory of the Weltmuseum Wien, from 1878, the collection of artifacts from Peru was acquired by the NHM Vienna.78 When the NHM Vienna opened in 1889, nine out of nineteen halls on the mezzanine were dedicated to the new disciplines of anthropology, prehistory, and ethnography. This shows the immense importance attributed to these collections by Hochstetter. (Although the integration of these disciplines formed the core of Hochstetter’s innovative concept, the ethnographic department soon moved out to form today’s Weltmuseum Wien (opened 1928) and is, therefore, no longer part of the NHM Vienna. Hochstetter’s new museum concept proved to be immediately successful with the public. Only one year after its official opening, the museum had already welcomed 406,000 visitors, even though it was only open for four days a week. Compared to this, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin only had 12,000 visitors in the first year after its opening (1890–1891).79 This clearly shows that the new museum in Vienna somehow struck the mood of the century. But, apart from the new collections-concept, the main factor that made the NHM Vienna so successful and interesting was surely its architectural and decorative layout. More than any other nineteenth-century nature museum, 76 Lange, Echt. Unecht. Lebensecht. 77 Johann Gustav Friedrich Umlauff to the director of the museum Ferdinand von Hochstetter, Archive for the History of Science, NHM Vienna: ID 3853 Z. 39g/1877. 78 Weltmuseum Wien, Department archive, Inventarband 1878. Information from the archivist Mag. Ildikó Cazan-Simányi, 10 September 2018. 79 Albrecht Brauer, “Das zoologische Museum,” in Geschichte der Königlichen Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität zu Berlin, Vol. 3 (Halle an der Saale, 1910), 385, quoted in Kretschmann, Räume öffnen sich, 128. Later (in 1905/1906) it recovered to approximatively 60,000 visitors.

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the NHM Vienna is a real Gesamtkunstwerk, a total piece of Art. Architecture, collections, and decorations had to form a thematic and artistic whole, which means that the decorative program was intended to convey the museum’s narrative to the visitor.80 All the paintings and sculptures had to match the collections and simultaneously fulfill an educational purpose. This is the reason why Hochstetter worked closely with the architects Gottfried Semper (1803-1879) and Carl Hasenauer (1833-1894). Ferdinand von Hochstetter was responsible for selecting the topics of the paintings and sculptures.81 He and his scientific staff provided the artists with templates they could work with.82 All the halls of the mezzanine of the museum were adorned with more than a hundred huge oil paintings, all thematically linked to the exhibitions on show. Of course, the NHM Vienna is not the only museum in which paintings were used to extend the collections presented, but there are only a few (nature) museums in which the paintings really formed part of the museum’s furnishings. One earlier example was the former Elizabeth Marsh Museum of Geology and Archaeology at the College of New Jersey (1877, now Princeton University). Seventeen huge murals by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins representing geological eras adorned this museum.83 In museums without these kinds of furnishings, paintings were often hung up alongside the collections to interpret and complement them. A statement from the German professor of geography Friedrich Karl Emil Deckert (1848–1916) illustrates the importance paintings had in the didactic mission of ethnographic museums. He noted that the paintings by Albert Eckhout (1610–1665) at the Ethnographic Museum Copenhagen: “Eckhout’s paintings […] show nicely how the art of the painter can help ethnography, by depicting people in their natural surrounding especially in the genuine world of colors in which he lives, in advantageous opposition to photography [since photography was then still limited to black-and-white; note from the author].”84 The fact that the paintings were colored, intensified their liveliness but, as will be shown, this was not enough for the NHM Vienna. 80 Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel (text) and Alice Schumacher (photos), The Natural History Museum. Construction, Conception & Architecture (Vienna: The Natural History Museum, 2017). 81 Franz Ritter von Hauer, “Notizen,” Annalen des k. k. naturhistorischen Hofmuseums 1, no. 1 (1886): 27. 82 Jovanovic-Kruspel and Schumacher, The Natural History Museum, (2017), 162 ff. 83 Anne Gossen, “The Victorian’s Dinosaurs.” GardenStateLegacy.com, New Jersey, 10, (2010), 1–8. http://gardenstatelegacy.com/files/The_Victorians_Dinosaurs_Gossen_GSL103.pdf; last accessed 3 July 2018. 84 See Emil Deckert, “Die ethnographischen Museen,” Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 March 1878, 10–12.

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Apart from the oil paintings that decorated all the exhibition halls of the mezzanine, the corner halls and the central hall in the NHM Vienna had an additional sculpture program. The sculptures, which are placed in the frieze zones of the exhibition halls, are half figures, half pilasters, they were named “caryatids” at the time of their creation. The two corner halls of the former ethnographic collections (halls XIV and XVI) were decorated by the famous Austrian sculptor Viktor Tilgner (1844–1896). He was commissioned to create 40 caryatids “of North Americans, Mexicans, South Sea Islanders and New Zealanders.”85 In fact, it can be shown that, although not on the list, there are also several South American ethnicities, such as the Inca, Mundurucus and Botocudos, among the caryatids.86 The figures feature different indigenous peoples of whom the museum possessed important ethnographic collections. With regard to the thematic connection between objects on display and the artistic furnishings of the rooms, the ethnographic department formed an exception within the museum: compared to other exhibitions, where the connection between picture/sculpture was close and matching specimens in the same room, it was deliberately relaxed in order to give the rapidly growing collections freedom and flexibility for future expansion.87 The presentation of the Inuit of Greenland is a good example of this. There are three references to the Inuit in the NHM Vienna and all are in different halls: 1. the Inuit caryatids in hall XIV; 2. the oil painting Eskimo at Godthaabs Fjord, Greenland by the artist H. von Dordernek-Holmfeld showing the bay of Nuuk on the west coast of Greenland, originally in hall XVII; and 3. the Greenland objects, like hunting weapons (harpoons, tools for catching sea animals), models of boats and clothes made of fur and snowshoes in hall XVIII (these items did not stem from Hagenbeck’s shows but from the renowned Collection Giesecke, which had been part of the imperial collection since 1818).88 As the sources show, Ferdinand von Hochstetter wanted to acquire plaster casts that could be used as models by the artist Viktor Tilgner.89 However, 85 Austrian State Archive, AVA, StEWF, HBC, Fasc. 77, 147. session, 6 February 1884. 86 Georg Schifko, “Zur Identifizierung der ‘Ethnizität’ von Karyatiden im Naturhistorischen Museum in Wien anhand von dargestellten Waffen,” in Dinge als Herausforderung. Kontexte, Umgangsweisen und Umwertungen von Objekten, ed. Hans Peter Hahn and Friedemann Neumann (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2018), 305–314 and Georg Schifko and Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, “Anmerkungen zur plastischen und malerischen Darstellung von Munduruku-Kopftrophäen (pariua-a) im Naturhistorischen Museum Wien,” Archiv Weltmuseum Wien 67 (2018): 118–131. 87 Hauer, “Jahresbericht für 1888,” Annalen des k. k. naturhistorischen Hofmuseums, 11 ff. 88 Nachlass Franz Heger: Notizen bezüglich der alten Sammlungen, undated, in Department Archive, Weltmuseum Wien 89 Austrian State Archive, AVA, StEWF, Fasc. 77, 149. session, April 30, 1884.

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this idea was considered too expensive and was, therefore, put aside by the building committee. In a protocol, Tilgner stated that he could also work on the basis of photographs and again it was Hochstetter who was responsible for providing them to the artist.90 Owing to Hochstetter’s bad health during his final two years (1882–1884), he had to pass over many of his duties to his two assistants, Franz Heger (1853–1931) and Josef Szombathy (1853–1943). As the archival sources show, Franz Heger also helped provide information to the artists who worked on the furnishing of the ethnographic exhibition.91In 1884/1885, Tilgner’s sculptures had already been installed in the exhibition halls.92 Until recently, it had been impossible to locate the photographic templates that Tilgner used. Research in the NHM’s archives and in the photo-archive of the Weltmuseum Wien had not been successful. In 2016, the Hochstetter Collection, Basel was donated to the NHM Vienna. Among this vast portfolio, consisting of diaries, correspondence, and writings, was a disorganized collection of a large number of photographs. Among these pictures were 26 “native-type” photographs. Twenty-two pictures out of the 26 derived directly from the earliest “people’s exhibitions” by Carl Hagenbeck. All are albumen pictures in carte de visite formats. Eleven of them picture the very first “people’s exhibition” of the Laplanders in 1874 and the remaining eleven reveal a visiting group of Inuit from Greenland in 1877 and 1878.93 The reverse of the images reveal that they were produced and sold by a photographer called J. M. Jacobsen (most likely the brother of Adrian Jacobsen) at Hagenbeck’s Thierpark. In the following section, the amazing similarities between the Inuit photographs and two of the museum’s caryatids will be discussed in detail.

A “human zoo” in plaster: The case of the Inuit Two caryatids, featuring a man and a woman with a baby, located in hall XIV (at the wall to hall XV) can be easily identified as Inuit. At first sight, the similarities between the photographs of the Greenland Inuit from 90 Ibid. 91 He helped the painter Julius von Blaas with the painting Mundurucu Indians in hall XV. See Schifko and Jovanovic Kruspel, “Anmerkungen zur plastischen und malerischen Darstellung von Munduruku-Kopftrophäen (pariua-a) im Naturhistorischen Museum Wien:” 118–131. 92 Franz Ritter von Hauer, “Jahresbericht für 1885,” Annalen des k. k. naturhistorischen Hofmuseums, 3. 93 E-mail information from archivist Klaus Gille, Hagenbeck-Archive, Hamburg, 14 May 2018. Only three photographs of Inuit can be found in this archive.

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Hagenbeck’s “human zoos” and the NHM Vienna Inuit caryatids are striking (see Figs. 8.1. and 8.2.). Especially the hairstyle and the head dress of the woman, and the posture of the baby, match with the photograph in the Hochstetter collection at the NHM Vienna (Fig. 8.1.). The caryatid of the male Inuit shows several similarities (Fig. 8.2.), although not as strikingly as in the female caryatid. The manner in which the figure holds the prop resembles the photograph. However, whereas the man in the photograph clearly has a kayak paddle in his hand, the caryatid’s prop cannot easily be identified. It resembles something between a (too short version of) a paddle or (a too long version of) a spoon.94 The interpretation as a spoon could arguably correspond with the young seal in the other hand of the figure, emphasizing the fact that seals were among the Inuit’s main food sources. It seems as though the sculptor Viktor Tilgner left the decision deliberately unclear. The beard style of the male caryatid also appears to be the result of the artist’s imagination as it cannot be found in the photographs. Regarding the clothing of the caryatid, it looks like a compound of the elements of the costumes the man wears in both pictures. Obviously, the artist created a free and somewhat European variation of the person shown in the photographs. Considering the apparent similarities, and the fact that the pictures were in Hochstetter’s possession at the time when the caryatides were designed, it seems likely that these are the long missing templates Viktor Tilgner used for the Inuit sculptures. It should be acknowledged that the importance photographs had as artistic templates in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century art is a factor still insufficiently studied by art history. Recent research on other parts of the decorative program of the NHM Vienna prove that photography was used as medium to export picture motives directly to other countries.95 All the caryatids in the ethnographic halls of the NHM Vienna are presented like their counterparts in the “human zoos,” in their traditional clothing, while most of them have a typical prop in their hands. The props had the function of making the figures identifiable. One example is that of the caryatid of a Fiji man in hall XVI who holds a typical Totokia Club.96 94 According to the expertise (given in an e-mail Dec. 2017) of the ethnologist and art historian Verena Traeger it could be a cooking spoon, used for stirring meat soup. 95 Jovanovic-Kruspel and Olivares, “The Primeval World by the Austrian Painter Josef Hoffmann (1831–1904):” 269–299. 96 Georg Schifko and Hermann Mückler, “Keulentragende ‘Südsee-Karyatiden’ als Dekorationsobjekte—Zur plastischen Darstellung von Maori und Fidschianern im Naturhistorischen Museum in Wien,” Annalen Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Series A, 119 (15 February 2017): 33–46.

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Fig.8.1. Left and right: Inuit-woman, Hagenbeck’s “people’s exhibition” from the Hochstetter Collection Basel at the NHM Vienna (right, detail). Photograph, 1877–1878, 60 × 90 mm (each). Middle: Inuit-caryatide by Viktor Tilgner, hall XIV. Photograph © Vienna: National History Museum / A. Schumacher.

Fig. 8.2. Left and right: Inuit-man, Hagenbeck’s “people’s exhibition” from the Hochstetter Collection Basel at the NHM Vienna (details). Photograph, 1877–1878, 60 × 90 mm (each). Middle: Inuit-caryatide by Viktor Tilgner, hall XIV. Photograph © Vienna: National History Museum / A. Schumacher.

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It can be assumed that most of the objects that were used as templates for these props were part of the ethnographic collections of the museum. This can be shown, for example for the male Mundurucu caryatid in hall XIV: he holds a mummified head from the famous Natterer collection in his hands (Weltmuseum Wien, inventory number 1232).97 The choice of identifying props was surely influenced by the objects held in the collections, but also by “native type” images disseminated by Hagenbeck and by the publications of the renowned Museum Godeffroy, a predecessor of Umlauff’s Weltmuseum.98 The challenge for the artist, in this case Viktor Tilgner, and the curator Franz Heger, was to find props that were distinctive or even unique for the ethnic group presented.99 In their attempt to be as authentic as possible Viktor Tilgner’s caryatids are very similar to the previously mentioned ethnographic manikins by Umlauff. Britta Lange’s description of these figures, therefore, also matches Tilgner’s caryatids: They could be considered as true to life because they were made on the basis of photographs, which were taken in situ. For legitimization, it was sufficient to move the contact with the original to a medium: photography. After all, the photographer had set foot on the place where everything happened […] crucial was only that the contact to the original – through whichever detours– could still be made.100

Whereas the caryatids’ authenticity seemed limited to the fact that they were modeled true to the photographic templates, the museum manikins were bestowed with another level of authenticity by adding genuine collection 97 Schifko and Jovanovic-Kruspel, “Anmerkungen zur plastischen und malerischen Darstellung,” Archiv Weltmuseum Wien 67 (2018): 118. Georg Schifko, “Zur Identifizierung der ‘Ethnizität’ von Karyatiden im Naturhistorischen Museum in Wien anhand von dargestellten Waffen,” in Dinge als Herausforderung. Kontexte, Umgangsweisen und Umwertungen von Objekten, ed. Hans Peter Hahn and Friedemann Neumann (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag 2018), 305–314. 98 The publication by Ludwig Friedrichsen, Süd-See Typen. Anthropologisches Album des Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg, (Hamburg: Verlag L. Friedrichsen & Co. 1881) included race-type photographs that also might have been used as templates for single aspects of the Tilgnercaryatides. One example is the photo of a Viti-islander holding a Totokia-like the Fiji caryatide in hall XVI. But also the photograph from a Solomon islander in this publication might have been inspiring the male caryatid representing the Solomon islanders in hall XVI. 99 Georg Schifko, “Zur Identifizierung der ‘Ethnizität’ von Karyatiden im Naturhistorischen Museum in Wien anhand von dargestellten Waffen.” 100 Lange, Echt. Unecht. Lebensecht. Menschenbilder im Umlauf, 78.

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artifacts, like weapons, tools, or clothes. But as the latest research shows, this difference is also something to be called into question: in at least one case the object chosen for the caryatid’s prop is a genuine collection item.101 For the caryatid of the Solomon Island warrior, it could be shown that a genuine collection object, a spear from the Novara expedition, is integrated in the caryatid as a spolium, thus blurring the distinction between the artistic framework and the museum collections. With this spoliation, the sculpture was bestowed with a new dimension of authenticity. In the original concept of the museum the caryatids were much more prominent in their expression than they appear to us today. Although located high above the exhibition cases, in the frieze zone of the halls, the figures originally attracted more visitor attention because they were colored.102 After the Second World War, most likely in the 1960s, they were overpainted with white chalk paint. In 1889, the year of the opening, they must have appeared quite lifelike and were described as follows, “Thanks to their discretely polychromed robes and weapons they seem to be transplanted here live from their homeland.”103 Recent conservatory research showed that especially the faces (eyes and lips) were colored with great accuracy.104 The figures would have appeared to gaze back at the visitors. This is confirmed by a description by the art-critic Alfred Nossig in 1889: “Body tone, eye and hair coloring are precisely indicated, while clothing and weapons show a single, less nuanced tone, which set them off from the forms of the bodies.”105 As the conservatory research showed, many of the ethnographic figures seem to have had a bronze-like surface. Maybe this is the “less nuanced tone” mentioned by Nossig. It seems possible that the figures were similar to the ethnographic busts at the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris created by the French sculptor Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier (1827–1905). Both Cordier’s 101 Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel and Reinhard Blumauer, “The Magic of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Museums – The Solomon-Islands-caryatide by Viktor Tilgner and the discovery of the Novara spear,” Annalen Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Series A, 122, (in print). 102 Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, “Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik des Historismus. Eine Spurensuche zur vergessenen Farbigkeit des plastischen Schmuckes im Naturhistorischen Museum Wien,” Kunstgeschichte. Open Peer Reviewed Journal (30 August 2017). https://www.kunstgeschichte-ejournal.net/504/1/Jovanovic-Kruspel%20-%20 Polychromie_30.08.2017.pdf; last accessed 7 February 2020. 103 Alfred Nossig “Die Schausäle des naturhistorischen Hofmuseums,” Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik 13, no. 17 (1889): 479–483, esp. 482. 104 Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel and Hans Hoffmann, “Buntes Lehrbuch der Natur?—Zur Farbigkeit der Stuckplastiken in den Schausälen des NHMW,” Annalen Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Series A, 121 (2019): 327–351. 105 Alfred Nossig,“Die Schausäle des naturhistorischen Hofmuseums,” 483.

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and Tilgner’s sculptures had to unite scientific information and lifelike appearance in an artistic way within a museum’s context.106 It seems valid to interpret Tilgner’s figures as a “human zoos” cast in plaster. Tilgner’s decorative sculptures brought the real research object of ethnography, the indigenous peoples as silent, but lifelike guests into the museum. It has already been pointed out that the polychromy of these figures was a phenomenon not unusual in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was linked to a general and very heated debate about the use of color and naturalism in sculpture at the time.107 Especially the resulting illusion of the liveliness of figures which have been colored and their disturbing effect of appearing “too real” were seen as highly controversial. For both the ethnographic manikins, by Umlauff, and the artistic figurines, by Tilgner et al., the similarity to the disturbing realism of the waxworks was an issue. The NHM Vienna’s architect, Gottfried Semper, who supported the use of color in sculpture, wanted the artists to find the right balance. For him taste and convention should help in this matter: The wax figures arouse horror. Quite naturally, for not by artists but by barkers and, which often meant the same thing, by physicians, the most effective levers of art were handled here. Even if one can become too natural (which perhaps cannot be denied) does not the convention still rule in painted plastic? Convention and taste are the two salutary counterweights of boundless freedom in art!108

In all human figures, authenticity and bold realism were often perceived as irritating and uncanny.109 This effect was one reason why many museums refrained from using manikins, like the ones produced by Umlauff, in their exhibitions. However, Tilgner’s ethnographic caryatids in the NHM Vienna 106 Jovanovic-Kruspel and Hoffmann, “Buntes Lehrbuch der Natur?—Zur Farbigkeit der Stuckplastiken in den Schausälen des NHMW.” 107 Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, “Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik des Historismus. Eine Spurensuche zur vergessenen Farbigkeit des plastischen Schmuckes im Naturhistorischen Museum Wien,” Kunstgeschichte. Open Peer Reviewed Journal (30 August 2017). https://www.kunstgeschichte-ejournal.net/504/1/Jovanovic-Kruspel%20-%20 Polychromie_30.08.2017.pdf; last accessed 7 February 2020. 108 Gottfried Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten (Altona: Bei Johann Friedrich Hammerich, 1834), 25. 109 Weber, “Vivifying the Uncanny: Ethnographic Mannequins and Exotic Performers in Nineteenth-century German Exhibition Culture,” in Fact and Fiction, Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain, ed. Christine Lehleiter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 313.

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avoided this feeling of discomfort. Thanks to the fact that these figures were only half-human, they avoided an excess of realism. Compared to Umlauff’s ethnographic manikins, Tilgner’s caryatids, and also Cordier’s busts, found a middle ground. They brought life into the museum without creating an irritating sense of hyperrealism typical for the ethnographic manikins. The theatricality of the “human zoos” was transformed into a representation appropriate for a scientific museum. Tilgner’s ethnographic caryatid program satisfied and balanced the desire for contextualization on the one hand and for liveliness on the other.

Conclusion It can be shown that the ephemeral exhibitions of the “human zoos” contributed significantly to the constitution of ethnography as a museum discipline and also to its museum representation. Vast amounts of ethnographic material in many European museum collections derive from these shows. Their reflections in the form of images and f igurines distinctly influenced the public discourse on scientific topics such as Darwin’s theory of evolution. The original concept of the NHM Vienna was an expression of such Darwinistic ideas. Ferdinand von Hochstetter, who created the new exhibition program, incorporating ethnography, anthropology, and prehistory, shaped the museum’s furnishings according to this content. The sculptural decorations of the former ethnographic exhibition halls by Viktor Tilgner can be interpreted as a “human zoo” cast in plaster. Hochstetter used the decorative program to satisfy two purposes: on the one hand, the museum should serve as an instruction for everyone, which meant that it had to attract the lay public; on the other hand, the museum should be a reputable top-tier scientific institution. To achieve both tasks, Hochstetter had to find a way to make the museum intuitively accessible without getting too close to the theatricality, of the then extremely popular but also controversial, “human zoos.” By including lifelike, but not too realistic, figures and positioning them at the margins of the rooms, Hochstetter and Tilgner tried to create a popular, but not blatant, way of including indigenous people in the exhibition. By attempting to be as authentic as possible, Tilgner’s figures form an integral part of the collection display. The Inuit caryatids are, therefore, a unique document of science history. They illustrate the historic attempt to transform the directness of the “human zoos” into a form suitable for a nineteenth-century scientific and educative institution.

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Acknowledgements Special thanks go to the archivist of the Weltmuseum Wien, Mag. Ildikó Cazan-Simányi and to archivist Klaus Gille from the Hagenbeck-Archiv in Hamburg for providing important information on this subject, but also to Dr. Karina Grömer (Prehistory Department, NHM Vienna) and Dr. Christa Riedl-Dorn (archive for the history of science, NHM Vienna). I am grateful to Dr. Andreas Kroh, Dr. Sabine Gaal-Haszler, Mag. Eva Bertalan, and Harald Eckmüller for editing support.

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Sewig, Claudia. “Der Mann, der die Indianer holte.” Hamburger Abendblatt, 9  October  2003. Hugo Oiens Skletssider. http://www.hugooien. no/?go=arkiv&id=22&start=5; last accessed 5 March 2018. Schifko, Georg, and Hermann Mückler. “Keulentragende ‘Südsee-Karyatiden’ als Dekorationsobjekte—Zur plastischen Darstellung von Maori und Fidschianern im Naturhistorischen Museum in Wien.” Annalen des Naturhistorischen Museums Wien, Series A, 119 (February 2017): 33–46. ———. “Zur Identifizierung der ‘Ethnizität’ von Karyatiden im Naturhistorischen Museum in Wien anhand von dargestellten Waffen.” In Dinge als Herausforderung. Kontexte, Umgangsweisen und Umwertungen von Objekten, edited by Hans Peter Hahn and Friedemann Neumann, 305–314. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018. ———. and Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel. “Anmerkungen zur plastischen und malerischen Darstellung von Munduruku-Kopftrophäen (pariua-a) im Naturhistorischen Museum Wien.” Archiv Weltmuseum Wien 67 (2018): 118–131. Schwarz, Werner. “Konsum des Anderen, Schaustellungen ‘exotischer’ Menschen in Wien.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 1 (December 2001): 15–29. Thode-Arora, Hilke. “Hagenbeck’s European Tours: The Development of the ‘Human Zoo.’” In Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boёtsch, Éric Deroo and Sandrine Lemaire, and Charles Fordsick, 165–173. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. ———. “Representation of Cultural Differences in German Ethnic Shows.” In Embodiments of Cultural Encounters, edited by Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthun, 141–160. Münster [etc.]: Waxmann, 2011. University of South Florida Libraries. Dime Novel Collection. Weber, Dana A. “Vivifying the Uncanny: Ethnographic Mannequins and Exotic Performers in Nineteenth-Century German Exhibition Culture.” In Fact and Fiction, Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain, edited by Christine Lehleiter, 298–332. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Weltmuseum Wien. Department archive: bequest Franz Heger: Notizen bezüglich der alten Sammlungen, undated; and inventory (Inventarband) 1878: Acquisition of ancient artefacts from Peru (Firma Umlauff) Wilhelm, Ernst. Das Museum für Naturkunde der Königlichen Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität in Berlin, Zur Eröffnungs-Feier. Berlin: Verlag von Ernst & Korn, 1889. Yanni, Carla. Nature’s Museums. Victorian Science & the Architecture of Display. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1999.

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About the author Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel studied Art History and Communication Science at the University Vienna, where she received her PhD. She is staff scientist and deputy director of the department “Archive and History of Science” at the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM Vienna). She is responsible for the architecture and history of the museum. She is also subject editor for science/art- history of the NHM Vienna’s scientific journal Annalen des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien, Serie A. She is a founding member of the international interdisciplinary scholarly network “Symbiosis” (https:// www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/symbiosis/index.aspx), which is set up to research and develop the role of the arts and the humanities in natural history museums and collections. Her research interests concentrate mainly on the relationship between natural science and art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For her dissertation project, she focused on the architecture of the NHM Vienna and its unique position among other nineteenth-century European museums. Furthermore, she examined the decorative programs of the Viennese and other Nature museums, focusing on architectural forms, paintings and sculptures in the light of the scientific theories of the time. Jovanovic-Kruspel is interested in the reflections of scientific knowledge in art and how museums contributed through their visualizations to the creation and establishment of collective images and stereotypes. She tries to examine how on the one hand artworks interpret and visualize scientific topics and theories and on the other hand, how the confrontation with science-topics sparked new stylistic developments in art.

9. The Last Wunderkammer: Curiosities in Private Collections between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Emanuele Pellegrini

Abstract In his description of the magnificent Vanderbilt collection located on Fifth Avenue in New York, Earl Shinn pointed out the presence of a medieval Venetian ivory casket in the Japanese parlor. Wonder serves as the guiding principle for the display of objects selected according to their provenance and for their very different chronologies. In this context, eclecticism concerns more than a mere display of heterogeneous artifacts, it is a way to create resplendent interiors and to allow visitors sink into a sense of wonder. This chapter reconsiders the key concepts of curiosity and eclecticism, not just as a fashion or as display modes, but as new steps in the long-term history of the Wunderkammer. Keywords: art collecting, curiosity, Wunderkammer, eclecticism, art market

In 1883, Edward Strahan (the pseudonym of Earl Shinn), one of the keenest observers of the emerging American fashion for collecting during the period known as the Gilded Age, published an important book on the collection of the wealthy magnate William H. Vanderbilt. Among various art objects, Strahan noted a small “ivory hexagonal casket,” simply referring to as a work of “Italian taste of the Giotto period” but without any additional details.1 This small ivory artifact was situated in the “Japanese parlor” (Fig. 9.1.) Notes: 1 Edward Strahan, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (Boston, MA: G. Barrie, 1883), 72–73.

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of Vanderbilt’s house on Fifth Avenue in New York, which was home to one of the most important American collections of the period. Interestingly, Strahan did not disapprove of this casket’s position, even though it was apparently out of sync with both the historical period of the cabinet and, more importantly, the geographical setting. He considered this to be entirely coherent, insofar as the room in question had a special identity. In the progression of rooms making up the Vanderbilt mansion, opulently depicted in the book’s numerous images, this particular room served as a sort of chamber of curiosities. In fact, the words “curiosity” or “curiosities” appear repeatedly in this part of his description: The curiosities which find a shelter in this room are of the most varied kinds, -lacquers, cloisonné enamels, bronzes, potteries; as a rule, they are of Oriental origin, as befits the local genius of the place. Objects in ivory are admitted, although carved in Europe-no more appropriate repository being found in the house than the Japanese parlor; we may imagine that the presiding genius has lodged them here on account of the Oriental origin of the material; or that, as is often found in a Japanese palace, they have been left by the Dutch traders in exchange for rarities of the country.2

In reality, it is Strahan himself who created this logical connection between the oriental cabinet and objects which are not oriental and have nothing to do with Japan or its history. While the mandatory Japanese vases are present, in this case they are in the minority in the rooms named after them, overwhelmed by a heterogeneous collection of objects. Although the positioning of the objects is described as being coherent, based on both very concrete (the material objects are made of, i.e. ivory which generically points to the East and Middle East) and historical associations (Dutch merchants sailing to Asia), the items listed in the description do not conf irm this supposed coherence. Strahan mentions a series of seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch works that evoke the thread of traders and trade “with the West Indies,” such as little Dutch bells and 2 Strahan, 65; Elizabeth Bradford Smith, ed. “The Earliest Private Collectors. False dawn Multiplied,” in Medieval Art in America. Patterns of Collecting 1800–1940 (University Park, PA: Palmer Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania State University, 1996), 30–31; Leanne Zalewski, “Art for the Public: William Henry Vanderbilt’s Cultural Legacy,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 2 (2012): 1–25 and Anca I. Lasc, Designing the French Interior. The Modern Home and the Mass Media (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 2–3.

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Fig. 9.1. Japanese parlor in Vanderbilt house. Illustration from E. Strahan, Mr. Vanderbilt’s house and collection, Boston: George Barrie, 1883–1884. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

oriental-style vases of various shapes that have no internal or external connections with Japan.3 However, these items are followed by a nautilus mounted on an elaborate bronze base, that was identified as a product of German handicraft. The nautilus, and not the Japanese items, is the object that truly gives this room its specific character of wonder, as a room of curiosities. Indeed, it is not 3

Strahan, 74.

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the generic example of oriental taste throughout the Western world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a trend which many European and American collections exemplify so well.4 While many more or less celebrated collectors of oriental objects made little distinction between Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic objects, and scattered them throughout their domestic interiors, during the last decades of the nineteenth century there was also a vogue for the creation of Japanese rooms. During this period, Japanese arts and crafts were admired for many different reasons. Not only did Japanese art objects offer a novelty at a time when the European art world was increasing its connection with global art, including non-Western cultures and civilizations (i.e. Africa, Oceania), but Western artists and art collectors started to admire Japanese items not because of their exoticism, but mainly for their aesthetic values, as was the case a century earlier with Chinese wares and porcelain. Japan was viewed with a sort of nostalgia by those living in the industrialized West. Just like idealized European perceptions of China had fueled a fashion for chinoiserie in the eighteenth century, a mythical image of an exotic and innocent, pre-modern society was projected onto Japan in the nineteenth century.5 Japanese rooms and items were quite common in the global art collecting world between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When considered in this context, the Vanderbilt collection is not a unique example. It is not my intention to focus on the Japanese fashion in art collecting during this period, but rather to underline how a single location in which various 4 William N. Hosley, The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum,1990); Guth, Christine. “The Exotic, the Aesthetic, the Spiritual: Japanese Art in the Eyes of Early American Collectors,” in Crosscurrents: Masterpieces of East Asian Art from New York Private Collections, ed. Amy G. Poster (New York: Japan Society New York in association with the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1999), 28–43. Among the many publications concerning American collectors and collections between the nineteenth and twentieth century, see William George Constable, Art Collecting in the United States of America. An Outline of a History (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1964); Steven Conn, Museum and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); William R. Johnston, William and Henry Walters, The Reticent Collectors (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Flaminia Gennari Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces. Old Masters Painting in America 1900–1914 (Milan: Five Continents, 2003) and Dealing Art on both Side of the Atlantic 1860–1940, ed. Lynn Catterson (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 5 See in particular Clare Pollard, “Lo splendore orientale. La collezione Wurts di arte asiatica,” in Voglia d’Italia. Il collezionismo internazionale nella Roma del Vittoriano, ed. Emanuele Pellegrini (Naples: Artem, 2017), 255–265; Anca I. Lasc, “Museum of Souvenirs. Adolphe Thiers, Collector of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Collections 1 (2016): 1–15 and Giapponismo. Suggestioni dell’Estremo Oriente dai Macchiaioli agli anni Trenta, ed. Vincenzo Farinella and Francesco Morena (Florence: Sillabe 2012), 16–45.

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objects are mixed can be interpreted as a place of wonder or a place where curiosity takes precedence over the general display of such different items. Strahan’s description of this outstanding collection shows how wonder and curiosity are two possible keys for interpreting the display of objects in one room, as not simply a hybrid mixture of things covering the walls and tables, but rather as making possible a more intimate sense of preciousness that harked back to medieval treasure rooms or, more consistently, to the Renaissance Wunderkammer. What is striking in the case of the Vanderbilt Japanese parlor is that Japanese items are mingled not only with objects reminiscent of East–West commerce – following Strahan’s interpretation – but also with German objects, which are the symbol of the Wunderkammer. Even if the room is labeled as Japanese, and the objects’ inner connection is based on Dutch trade (an idea that can be found in other coeval collection descriptions), its content was far removed from a Japan-centric set of items. Rather, this room seems to be a chamber of curiosities; that is, a cabinet of curios, of hidden preciousness, and it is telling that this particular room is associated with the part of the Vanderbilt collection that is most evocative of exoticism. In this case Japan and a grouping of oriental objects. Here, curiosity and curios do not simply represent an ensemble of bibelots. Observers are amazed by the expression of something exotic, but also unexpected – due to the nature of the individual objects themselves, but also, and probably more importantly, because of the logic of combination that governs the philosophy of this room’s display. Hence, an ivory casket of the Giotto period could find its place there, and not just because of its intrinsic value, i.e. being precious or because it can be dated to the Middle Ages.6 Thus, this parlor is granted a specific role when compared to the other rooms in the house, and, with its embodiment of preciousness and unexpected beauty, it became one of the most important spaces in this magnificent house. The German nautilus with its elaborate gold or silver mounting is arguably one of the most prominent objects of curiosity in the European art collecting tradition. Moreover, in the preface to his book, Strahan explains that his description of the Vanderbilt house was written at the precise moment when the United States had begun to develop its own taste in architecture, 6 Flaminia Gennari Santori and Charlotte Vignon, “From Private Homes to Museum Galleries: Medieval Art in America from 1890 to 1940,” in Gothic Art in the Gilded Age. Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling collection, ed. Virginia Brilliant and Paul F. Miller (Sarasota, FL: The John and Mable Ringling Museum, 2009), 43–64; Alan Chong, “Émile Gavet: Patron, Collector, Dealer,” in Gothic Art in the Gilded Age, 1–21 and Bradford Smith, “The Earliest Private Collectors.”

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combined with “connoisseurship and a choice in the appliances of luxury, society, culture.”7 Architecture on the one hand and appliances of luxury on the other: the pairing of these two terms could not be more evident. Collectors’ items were part and parcel of dwellings, with the latter often built to house the former. The Vanderbilt’s American house, described in minute detail, comes at the culmination of a series of different types of houses that represent different and precise cultural units and chronological periods (Sallustio’s villa on the slopes of the Vesuvio, the house of a Venetian merchant, of a Tudor gentleman or of a Flemish banker).8 Strahan indicates not only potential models, but also styles, or rather ideas of styles, cultures, and historical periods that might easily have served as sources of inspiration. The same criterion was also applied to many of the other rooms in the house, starting with The Great Hall, or Atrium, an ideal space for displaying sculptures, thanks to the natural light shining in from above: The busts in white marble by Palmer, Tony Noel’s golden figure of a lampbearer at the stair-foot, the German bronze of a Female Falconer, the fine Japanese Neptune, as well as the chimney-supports by Germain Pilon, though these last are much in the shadow of the gallery, and depend upon night effect and artificial illumination to be well seen.9

In this case, a Japanese Neptune is married with European and North American sculptures ranging from the Renaissance to the present, but Strahan does not mention any sense of wonder, nor does he make any reference to the world of curiosity. Indeed, this kind of display was quite common among collectors. In Goncourt’s memorable account, the brilliant description of the atmosphere of an artist’s house documents exactly this 7 Strahan, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House, v. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 9. Facing a plethora of Louis XII and Louis XIV salons, Strahan wrote that one “Louis more or less makes small difference. Only the lens of the curiosity-shop merchant is f it to discriminate a science in their vain distinctions and dry-rotten efflorescence. A distant Western world should surely keep away from the pundit upholsterer, and rather try, by melting all styles into its crucible, to hit upon something new.” Strahan, vii. On different view on style mixing in interior decoration see Anca I. Lasc, Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Anca I. Lasc, ed. Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home (London: Routledge, 2016); Donata Levi, “Beautiful houses. Spazi e arredi tra mercato e collezionismo,” in Voglia d’Italia, ed. Emanuele Pellegrini (Naples: Artem, 2017), 81–97 and The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century / Le XIXe siècle renaissant, ed. Yves Portebois and Nicholas Terpstra (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2003).

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accrochage, that is, precisely this sought-after mixture of genres and bold combinations, recalling the interiors painted by Hans Makart in those years.10 During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, many other examples, both in Europe and in the United States, testify to the spread of this philosophy in the interior displays of houses and villas.11 The Rothschild family, whose members can be counted amongst the greatest collectors between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gave a specific name to this kind of display, the so-called Goût Rothschild: millions of precious and curious objects from all over the world crowded the walls of their Parisian hôtels particuliers.12 Also, thanks to a massive production of magazines and issues dedicated to the decoration of interiors, mainly in English, German, French, and Italian, many collectors followed their example, displaying their rich collections inside their house or palace and cramming them with different items in a context of horror vacui.13 It is exactly this general trend that makes Strahan’s reference to the sense of wonder extremely interesting and provides us with a possible new interpretation of this kind of display. In fact, in no other parts of the book does Strahan give the same relevance to the concept of wonder, only the reference to the “Japanese Parlor.” In similar cases, this hybrid mix of styles and objects of varying backgrounds and history, originals and copies, such as the one in the Vanderbilt house, would be defined as eclecticism or bric-a-brac mania, as indeed was true of much of the collecting and artistic production at the turn of the century. However, this definition functions only at a very superficial level. It fails to do justice to either the intimate diversity of the various collections and, consequently, their specific features, often stemming from 10 See Edmond de Goncourt, La maison d’un artiste (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), in particular the Preface; Ernst Seibel, Der grossbürgerliche Salon, 1850–1918. Geselligkeit und Wohnkultur (Berlin: Reimer, 1999), 215–232 and Janell Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 11 Particularly interesting is the example of Capri, where many artists and collectors coming from different countries chose to live between nineteenth and twentieth century, filling their houses and villas with collectibles, reshaping them as small museums. See Il collezionismo di antichità classiche a Capri tra fine Ottocento e primo Novecento, ed. Luca di Franco and Gennaro di Martino (Rome: Erma di Bretschneider, 2018). 12 A complete overview of the collection and its history in Les Rotschild. Une dynastie de mécenès en France, ed. Pauline Prevost-Marcilhacy, 3 vols. (Paris: Somogy, 2016); Michael Hall, “‘Le gout Rothschild’: The Origins and Influences of a Collecting Style,” in British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response. Reflections across the Pond, ed. Inge Reist (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 101–115 and Levi, “Beautiful houses,” 85–88. 13 Levi, 89–94.

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the biographical trajectories of the collectors.14 It fails to explain the reasons which lie behind collectors’ choices and the combination of items in differing rooms of the houses, palaces, or villas. The common thread between these display choices and collections of strange or rare objects designed to amaze the viewer is precisely an emphasis on the concept of curiosity, of wonder, an emphasis that can also be seen in the way objects are displayed in the various rooms where, frequently, multiple styles are juxtaposed. Such logic of display constitutes a deeply rooted tradition of collecting in the Western world in which studioli but also and especially Wunderkammer formed the cornerstones of a specific tradition.15 At the end of the nineteenth century, the central pillar of this tradition still stood. The presentation of the curious, the desire to elicit amazement through unexpected combinations of objects, remained one of the main reasons for displaying them.16 Stylistic mingling is the lifeblood that generates innovation, and this is why I would like to return to the nautilus with its display in the Vanderbilt collection. This is the object which epitomizes the concept of curiosity more vividly than any other, and its meaning is quite different from the concept of curious that fills books and treatises, such as Blondel’s Grammaire de la curiosité, where the notion is connected with the concept of art (accessible only to few) and industrial art (accessible to everyone).17 According to a certain collecting tradition, we could even argue that the nautilus can be defined as the very symbol of curiosity. Created at the intersection between nature and art, these shells and their elaborate silver or gold decorations evoke precisely the aristocratic tradition of studioli and Wunderkammer. Nautiluses played a key role in art collecting in Early Modern Europe. In fact, this German nautilus in the Japanese Parlor of the Vanderbilt mansion was not a unique case. There are various other 14 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. MacLaughlin (Cambridge, MA/ London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 8–9 and Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London: Routledge, 2007). 15 Wolfgang Liebenwein, Studiolo. Die Entstehung eines Raumtyps und seine Entwicklung bis um 1600 (Berlin: Mann, 1977); Franz Adrian Dreier, ed. Die Kunstkammer im 19. Jahrhundert, in Die Brandenburgisch-Preussische Kunstkammer. Eine Auswahl aus den alten Beständen, 35–44 (Berlin: Staatlichen Museen Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1981) and Seibel, Der grossbürgerliche Salon. It is interesting to note that the seminal study of Schlosser about Wunderkammer was published in 1908 exactly when ‘modern Wunderkammer’ were flourishing. See the seminal study by Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sammelwesens (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1908). 16 Seibel, 214–233. 17 Spire Blondel, Grammaire de la curiosité. L’Art intime et le goût en France (Paris: Flammarion, 1884) and Lasc, Interior Decorating, 5–6.

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examples of this specific object in American homes from the same period. Let us consider perhaps the most relevant case: John Pierpont Morgan’s prestigious collection. This collection started being crammed into the collector’s London home and later, when the American government eliminated tariffs on artwork, it was relocated to New York. It makes up the core of the so-called Morgan Collection, which remains until today, one of the most famous museums in New York, and Morgan’s former private house. Some of the objects in the collection were placed in the house, which was subsequently transformed into the museum that is now visited by thousands of people every year. Another set of objects that Morgan had acquired in the course of his life was donated to the Hartford Museum in Morgan’s hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. This museum came to house the sets of objects, sometimes grouped by type (silver, porcelain, or woodwork), that represented the true connective theme of collections in that period, together with furniture.18 Currently split into two different museums, the collection was originally conceived, if not preserved, as a whole. Today, the Morgan collection is not known for German nautiluses or for those many small objects composing the bric-a-brac side of this unique collection. And yet, considering the collection in its entirety, it is easy to see that Morgan’s nautilus was not unusual; rather, it indicated a precise and even systematic choice on the part of the collector. John Pierpont Morgan’s omnivorous appetite as a collector discourages us from trying to identify specific areas of interest. Indeed, given its universal scope, it is difficult to even point to a sector of key importance. In other words, whether we are talking about archeology or contemporary art (a very traditional, academic art), there is no category of objects that is not represented in John Pierpont Morgan’s collection. At the same time, it is equally clear that the positioning of the objects that make up the Morgan collection – a museum open to the public with its standards and amenities – has deeply distorted our view of the collector’s choices, not to mention the collection itself and its display criteria. There is a tendency to pick out the masterpieces or best pieces of the so-called major arts (painting and sculpture) from the rest of a collection, separating them from their fellow objects. This tendency not only breaks up the natural continuum that determined every collection, 18 J. Pierpont Morgan Collector. European Decorative Arts from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, ed. Linda Roth (Wadsworth, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1987). See also Jeremy Coote, “Joseph Porter’s ‘Treasury of Antiquities and Curiosities’ in Boston, Lincolnshire. The Collection as Described by Nathaniel, Sophia, and Julian Hawthorne, 1857,” Journal of the History of Collections 1 (2017): 129–141 and Gennari Santori and Charlotte Vignon, “From Private Homes to Museum Galleries: Medieval Art in America from 1890 to 1940,” 281–291.

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but also keeps us from fully exploring the relationship between these pieces and less-valuable objects, that is, objects that could be described specifically as curious rather than as masterpieces of Western or non-Western art. The fact that these heterogeneous items co-exist, and that they live side by side with, for example, Flemish or Italian Renaissance or Baroque masterpieces, Egyptian idols, nineteenth-century Italian painters, or Japanese vases, suggests that the collector’s goal was to assemble a set of purchased items, not just to fill a gap in a collection that was meant to be universal, or, not only because they were prestigious or ancient – perhaps once owned by kings or wealthy European aristocrats – not only because other collectors already had the same choice, but also because they belonged to a special kind of objects that truly represents “curiosity.” These pieces made it possible to create original juxtapositions with other objects in the collection. They were made to surprise the visitors, and transformed the room in which they were preserved, one next to the other in impressive contrast, in a room of wonder.19 Moreover, they belonged to a precise tradition in high-level art collecting. A comparison with other collectors’ houses can help us in defining a trend. I would like to add one more example, probably less well-known if compared to a very famous collection like Vanderbilt’s or Morgan’s, but of the utmost interest given its relevance. George Washington Wurts, another wealthy American, who lived in Rome from 1898 until his death in 1928, except for some short trips in Europe and back to the United States. Originally from Philadelphia, George Wurts worked for the American diplomatic corps, first in Spain and then in Italy. His extensive collection of art objects was housed in two residences in Rome, Palazzo Antici Mattei (where he rented the main floor) and Villa Sciarra (which he donated to the Italian state after his death).20 It is interesting to note that the keyword curiosity appears in the history of this huge collection, albeit in a slightly different context and in a different type of document. Wurts’ second wife, Henriette Tower, was a scion of one of the wealthiest East Coast families of the Gilded Age. When she wrote her last will in 1933, donating the entire collection to the Italian State, she referred to her husband’s assemblage as 19 Gennari Santori and Vignon, 281–291. 20 Grazia Maria Fachechi, “George Washington Wurts, Henriette Tower, una collezione di ‘curiosità e opere d’arte’ e una villa ‘magnificent, the handsomest ever bestowed on Rome’,” in Riflessi del collezionismo tra bilanci critici e nuovi contributi, ed. Giovanna Perini Folesani and Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari (Florence: Olschki, 2014), 339–357 and Voglia d’Italia, ed. Emanuele Pellegrini (Naples: Artem, 2017), 111–121.

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a “collection of curiosities.”21 Fortunately, in addition to the inventory of the objects compiled when the collection made its way into the Palazzo Venezia museum, as a gift to Italy and its duce, Benito Mussolini, a series of photographs had also been preserved. These photographs are now collected in a large, dark-green album held in the library of Palazzo Venezia National Museum, and some of these were clearly taken before 1907, the year in which the photographer Lodovico Tuminello (born in 1824), whose mark is stamped in some of them, died. These images provide a record of the interior furnishings of the palazzo, which, at the time, still belonged to the Antici Mattei, an important Roman family in whose long lineage were included the first collectors of Caravaggio’s work. Moreover, if not exactly the Caravaggio paintings, part of the outstanding Antici Mattei collection was probably still preserved in the palace, in some cases mingled with the Wurts collection itself. Among the collection of antiquities recorded in some photographs, preserved in a loggia transformed into a small antiquarium, it is possible to recognize some Antici Mattei items stored together with a few of Wurts’ Roman sculptures. As a setting, the palazzo was anything but neutral, and these precious photographic accounts clearly document the way in which the collection was arranged throughout its various rooms. Indeed, the collection was perfectly integrated into and in keeping with this particular building, with its distinct character as the long-standing noble residence of an aristocratic Roman family. A glance at the photographs preserved in the album make observers immediately think of the Goût Rothschild, so similar is the display, with those full and crowded walls. The collector’s goal was to elicit a sense of amazement at the rich furnishings in each of the various rooms and the wide variety that characterized the pieces in the collection, also diverse, both in terms of provenance of the objects (from Japan to Russia) and their chronology (from Roman art to nineteenth-century Spanish masters). The point was not the pursuit of a masterpiece, but rather the excitement deriving from the context, from the juxtaposition of things displayed along the apartment walls, one room after another. Wurts had a direct knowledge of Japan, having experienced Japanese culture during the various excursions he made during his stay in Russia as a representative of the American embassy, and during his honeymoon with his second wife Henriette Tower at the end of nineteenth century. George 21 Fachechi, “George Washington Wurts,” 111–112, 339–341 and Daria Brasca, “I Tower. Dalle miniere americane alle corti d’Europa,” in Voglia d’Italia, ed. Emanuele Pellegrini (Naples: Artem, 2017), 123–142.

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Wurts bought some of the Japanese and oriental items of his collection directly in Eastern countries. However, like many refined art collectors and art lovers of his day, Wurts bought many objects at international exhibitions and in the oriental shops he could find in many Italian cities, including Florence, Turin, and especially Rome, where he had lived since the early twentieth century. Some of the stamps of these shops are still visible on the back of the oriental items preserved in his rich collection. The celebrated poet, writer, and aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio, who paid careful attention to depicting the behavior of Roman upper-class society and its attitude toward the arts, describes some of the roman interiors as rooms full of harmoniously arranged objects, including Kurdistan carpets on the walls, Japanese and, more generally, Oriental silk screens and embroideries representing flowers and animals, wooden furniture with Satsuma ceramic vases, bronzes, ivories, metal monsters, and cranes.22 If considered in the context of Roman society and its well documented interest in Japanese culture, which was particularly strong in the last decades of nineteenth century, George Wurts represents a unique case. His direct knowledge of Japan, and the fact that he bought some of the items of his collection directly in Japan, shed new light on his unruly passion for collecting. But this passion is not conf ined to an interest in Japanese art and culture. In the same vein as Vanderbilt and Morgan, Wurts’ collection includes numerous examples of silver from Germany. In this case, Wurts’ choice was not a mere question of taste, but rather stemmed from the Swiss-German origins of the Wirtz/Wurts family, a legacy that was constantly highlighted and vigorously pursued by George Wurts and his wife, sister of Charlemagne Tower Jr, American ambassador to Germany and close friend of the Kaiser.23 As is the case in the Vanderbilt and Morgan collections, these curious pieces of German art – ivory mugs, crystal, silver or gold glasses, important Renaissance wooden sculptures, and tapestries – were displayed alongside Japanese art, Russian objects (dating from George Wurts’ time in Russia, 1882 to 1893), and eighteenth-century Neapolitan silver, or eighteenth or nineteenth-century ivory objects made in the style of Embriachi workshop pieces (exactly in the style of the Vanderbilt’s ivory casket). The collector did not prioritize the display of individual objects, rather he pursued an overall effect in his house, even if, in some rooms of the Palazzo Mattei, 22 Farinella and Morena, Giapponismo, 27–28, 51–53. 23 Princeton University Library, General Manuscript [bound] C0199 no 1051 AM 16782; C. Tower, Diary of a European Trip 1872–1873.

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a particular style seems to be predominant, such as several impressive Japanese hangings and Satsuma vases located mostly in one part of the palace illustrated. Indeed, because of this low priority, some of the pieces were actually partially hidden from view. The main objective was to furnish a living space that illustrated the collector’s life, his activities, and travels, arousing the curiosity and interest, not of visitors but of guests, by creating a physical setting that evoked the narrative space of its owner’s biography. It was less a space to collect and more a space to inhabit. This could explain the choice to “spread” the various items throughout the rooms, invent decorative schemes such as hanging a pair of Veit Stoss German angels from hooks on either side of the Venetian-area Renaissance chest (partially original) holding a German sculpture representing the Death of the Virgin, with both chest and Virgin sitting on the mantle of the large fireplace in a hall. Or the idea of creating a wooden structure resembling a tree branch with leaves made of oriental plates, predominantly from Japan. We also find several Satsuma vases in the Wurts collection whose design echoes the ref ined Art Nouveau taste of that period. The underlying criterion driving these choices was not some disjointed eclecticism, but rather the need to furnish each space in the house with objects that, as one observer noted in the 1870s, came “from the five corners of the world:” these pieces represented the biography of the collector, his interests and travels, the set of curiosities that he decided to arrange inside his home to spark the interest of visitors.24 In fact, travel represents another parameter governing the choice of furnishing. For example, the Italian commander Enrico Alberto De Albertis collected different specimens (naturalia, artificialia) from different regions of the world where he traveled, for his castle, located in the slopes of Genoa. De Albertis was not a wealthy collector but a passionate traveler. He furnished his living room with exotic objects that formed part of a home decorated in a neo-medieval style. The discrepancy between the building’s external appearance and its interior spaces enhances the surprising character of this collection, combining distant worlds into a cohesive whole. If we extend our analysis to consider the furnishing of many of the houses from this period, it becomes clear that there are extraordinary similarities in both the choice of objects and the relationship between spaces and things. Taken together, these living rooms were brimming with objects from the most diverse of places. In some cases, those standards for combining 24 Ugo Pesci, I primi anni di Roma capitale 1870–1878 (Rome: Officina edizioni, 1971), 129, 246, 278.

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elements were explicitly indicated by observers, such as the Vanderbilt living room with its uniting logic of trade between East and West – as Strahan suggested. Even when such standards were abandoned in favor of a display approach based on the fashionable mixing of disparate genres and origins, it is the sense of wonder that provides the collection with its own identity. This tendency to mix things and genres went beyond the interiors of private homes and the personal space of collecting. A set of images (photographs or in some cases paintings) show that the walls of the rooms of some artists contained collections of objects characterized by the same horror vacui and mixing of objects and genres that were found in private homes. In many cases, these same artists also worked as art dealers and their rooms served as commercial showrooms, so objects on display were not merely collectibles. There was a continuous movement of objects among different owners and spaces. Ivory caskets, wooden sculptures, Japanese hangings, medieval swords, keys, and knives, etc., were also found in private collections from the same period. This situation characterized the period between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, at which point certain factors prompted tastes to radically shift and the practice of seeking out and displaying curiosities gradually disappeared. How and why did this change occur? Of course, it is very difficult to fully answer such crucial questions, but I would like to point out two possible reactions to this kind of interior display, involving, on the one hand, the world of antique dealers and, on the other hand, the production of contemporary art. Indeed, the amazing community of antique dealers, that was very proactive between the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, represented one of the first arenas for developing new ways of displaying art objects for potential buyers. In order to arouse the interest of possible buyers in a single item, art dealers began to isolate objects, highlighting and contextualizing them in settings that emphasized their originality and authenticity. A particularly clear example is that of the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence. The building that the art dealer Elia Volpi (whose New York auctions caused a tremendous sensation in the art market) bought and restored as a true showroom, while also introducing a register for visitors to sign. Palazzo Bardini, also in Florence, with its collection organized by the “prince of antiquarians,” Stefano Bardini, equally illustrates the nearly museological approach to displaying works, including the famous blue color of its rooms. In these contexts, there was no space left for oriental artifacts or shells on elaborate mountings. The orderly arrangement of the artworks against the blue walls of Palazzo Bardini, where sculptures and

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paintings – mostly Old Masters – hung side by side in a geometrical order governed by perfect symmetry. This provided the impetus for transferring this type of philosophy of display to the world of museums when Wilhelm Bode renovated the space that later became the Bode Museum.25 There was no space left for curiosity, just a one-on-one relation between buyer (or visitors) and masterpiece. In the same period, Marcel Proust would have had an easy job criticizing the loss of the concept of masterpiece in these accrochages of objects from different parts of the world and with different chronologies, even when collectors sought to create a sense of context through supposed philological rules (Savonarolian chairs placed in front of Old Masters of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries). A coeval, refined observer and museum visitor like Proust saw the problem from an opposite point of view. According to him (whose opinion was slightly different to Paul Valéry’s in his celebrated museum visit around the same time), a masterpiece is best appreciated in the quiet solitude of the museum, the ideal space to grant value to art objects.26 This general trend in object appreciation requires a completely different approach, based on reducing the density of objects in both private and public spaces. But there is another, perhaps more intriguing aspect associated with this change in taste, one that has more to do with the Copernican revolution sweeping over the figurative arts between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than with the history of collecting per se. All things considered, this particular aspect has not received a great deal of attention in relation to the space of collecting. Did contemporary art (i.e. avant-garde artists at the turn of the century) affect this way of reassembling objects? And if it did, as one could presume, how did this real revolution in the visual arts change 25 Malcom Baker, “Bode and Museum Display: The Arrangement of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum and the South Kensington Response,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 38 (1996): 143–153; Roberta Ferrazza, Palazzo Davanzati e le collezioni di Elia Volpi (Florence: Centro Di, 1994); Anita Fiderer Moskowitz. Stefano Bardini ‘Principe degli Antiquari’ (Florence: Centro Di, 2015); Adriana Turpin, “Objectifying the Domestic Interior: Domestic Furnishings and the Historical Interpretation of the Italian Renaissance Interior,” in The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400–1700. Objects, Spaces, Domesticities, ed. Erin J. Campbell, Stephanie R. Miller and Elizabeth Carroll Consavari (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 207–225 and Jennifer Celani and Brunella Teodori, eds. 1916–1956–2016. Dall’Asta al Museo. Elia Volpi e Palazzo Davanzati nel collezionismo pubblico e privato del Novecento (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2017). See also Seibel, Der grossbürgerliche Salon, 232–235. 26 Francesca Baldry, “Allestimenti Volpi e Acton a confronto. Il modello rinascimentale e le sue interpretazioni,” in 1916–1956–2016. Dall’Asta al Museo, ed. Jennifer Celani and Brunella Teodori, 229–247.

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the way of organizing the space of collecting? It is telling that Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto of Futurism called for the destruction of antique dealers (antiquari, i.e. scholars, but also men like Bardini and Volpi), responsible for keeping countries (i.e. Italy) anchored in their past – much-celebrated, but past. Unfortunately, we do not know exactly how the works of Cézanne were displayed in the homes of his early collectors, such as Loeser, Johnson, or Havemajers. Photographic evidence is scant, and the inventories do not adequately provide us with a view of the original display. However, I highly doubt that artwork that made such a radical break with the prevailing tastes of the time, artwork that demanded to be viewed all by itself, on a blank wall, could have been displayed on the basis of the horror vacui that characterized the dwellings examined above. It is possible to imagine a Marina of Capri by the Spanish nineteenth-century master Francisco Pradilla hanging on the overcrowded walls of the Wurts residence, and a Roman scene by Scipione Vannutelli would, of course, be at home in Morgan’s house together with nautiluses and Renaissance masters. On the contrary, it is more difficult to imagine a painting by Picasso or Cézanne being included in these impressive accrochages, put together with Japanese vases and medieval ivory caskets. Although this hypothesis still needs to be confirmed, I would suggest that the shift in figurative art was one of the factors that led to the rationalization of exhibition spaces, both public and private. Curiosity was not merely a result of juxtaposition, but something to be found in the artwork itself, as an object to be considered hanging isolated on a white or neutral painted wall. The astonishing display of the Albert C. Barnes collection in Philadelphia, in which paintings by Old Masters share the same wall not only with Renoirs and Matisse, but also with metal objects such as European Renaissance or Baroque keys, locks or horse garments, represents a clear attempt to show the object of curiosity in a more rational display.27 When Adolf Loos advocated the death of the ornament, a shift that also entailed the end of the approach that had characterized later nineteenth-century studies. New figurative horizons were emerging that offered new possibilities for the space of collecting and for musealization. Vanderbilt’s nautilus and the chamber of curiosities thus came to represent the last act in a centuries-long tradition of collecting curious objects, the swan song of the Wunderkammer. 27 Judith F. Dolkart, “To See as the Artist Sees. Albert C. Barnes and the Experiment in Education,” in Judith F. Dolkart and Martha Lucy, The Barnes Foundation. Masterworks (New York/ Philadelphia, PA: The Barnes Foundation, 2012), 9–29; Christopher Reed, Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London/New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996) and Lasc, Visualizing.

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Bibliography Baker, Malcom. “Bode and Museum Display: The Arrangement of the KaiserFriedrich Museum and the South Kensington Response.” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 38 (1996): 143–153. Baldry, Francesca. “Allestimenti Volpi e Acton a confronto. Il modello rinascimentale e le sue interpretazioni.” In 1916–1956–2016. Dall’Asta al Museo. Elia Volpi e Palazzo Davanzati nel collezionismo pubblico e privato del Novecento, edited by Jennifer Celani and Brunella Teodori, 229–247. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2017. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by H. Eiland and K. MacLaughlin. Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Blondel, Spire. Grammaire de la curiosité. L’Art intime et le goût en France. Paris: Flammarion, 1884. Bradford Smith, Elizabeth. “The Earliest Private Collectors. False Dawn Multiplied.” In Medieval Art in America. Patterns of Collecting 1800–1940, 23–33. University Park, PA: Palmer Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania State University, 1996. Brasca, Daria. “I Tower: dalle miniere americane alle corti d’Europa.” In Voglia d’Italia. Il collezionismo internazionale nella Roma del Vittoriano, edited by Emanuele Pellegrini, 123–142. Naples: Artem, 2017. Campbell, Erin J., Stephanie R. Miller and Elizabeth Carroll Consavari, eds. The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400–1700. Objects, Spaces, Domesticities. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Catterson, Lynn, ed. Dealing Art on Both sides of the Atlantic 1860–1940. Leiden/ Boston, MA: Brill, 2017. Celani, Jennifer, and Brunella Teodori, eds. 1916–1956–2016. Dall’asta al museo. Elia Volpi e Palazzo Davanzati nel collezionismo pubblico e privato del Novecento. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2017. Chong, Alan. “Émile Gavet: Patron, Collector, Dealer.” In Gothic Art in the Gilded Age. Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection, edited by Virginia Brilliant and Paul F. Miller, 1–21. Sarasota, FL: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2009. Conn, Steven. Museum and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926. Chicago, IL/: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Constable, William George. Art Collecting in the United States of America. An Outline of a History. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1964. Coote, Jeremy. “Joseph Porter’s ‘Treasury of Antiquities and Curiosities’ in Boston, Lincolnshire. The Collection as Described by Nathaniel, Sophia, and Julian Hawthorne, 1857.” Journal of the History of Collections 1 (2017): 129–141. Di Franco, Luca, and Gennaro di Martino, eds. Il collezionismo di antichità classiche a Capri tra fine Ottocento e primo Novecento. Rome: Erma di Bretschneider, 2018.

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Dolkart, Judith F. “To See as the Artist Sees. Albert C. Barnes and the Experiment in Education.” In Judith F. Dolkart and Martha Lucy, The Barnes Foundation. Masterworks, 9–29. New York/Philadelphia, PA: The Barnes Foundation, 2012. Dreier, Franz Adrian. Die Kunstkammer im 19. Jahrhundert, in Die BrandenburgischPreussische Kunstkammer. Eine Auswahl aus den alten Beständen. Berlin: Staatlichen Museen Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1981. Fachechi, Grazia Maria. “George Washington Wurts, Henriette Tower, una collezione di ‘curiosità e opere d’arte’ e una villa ‘magnificent, the handsomest ever bestowed on Rome.’” In Riflessi del collezionismo tra bilanci critici e nuovi contributi, edited by Giovanna Perini Folesani and Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari, 339–357. Florence: Olschki, 2014. ———. “I Wurts e Roma: arte, mondanità e potere.” In Voglia d’Italia. Il collezionismo internazionale nella Roma del Vittoriano, edited by Emanuele Pellegrini, 111–121. Naples: Artem, 2017. Farinella, Vincenzo, and Francesco Morena, eds. Giapponismo. Suggestioni dell’Estremo Oriente dai Macchiaioli agli anni Trenta. Florence: Sillabe, 2012. Ferrazza, Roberta. Palazzo Davanzati e le collezioni di Elia Volpi. Florence: Centro Di, 1994. Fiderer Moskowitz, Anita. Stefano Bardini ‘Principe degli Antiquari.’ Florence: Centro Di, 2015. Gennari Santori, Flaminia. The Melancholy of Masterpieces. Old Masters Painting in America 1900–1914. Milan: Five Continents, 2003. ———. and Charlotte Vignon. “From Private Homes to Museum Galleries: Medieval Art in America from 1890 to 1940.” In Gothic Art in the Gilded Age. Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection, edited by Virginia Brilliant and Paul F. Miller, 53–64. Sarasota, FL: The John and Mable Ringling Museum, 2009. ———. “Medieval Art for America. The Arrival of the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Journal of the History of Collections 1 (2010): 81–98. Goncourt, Edmond de. La maison d’un artiste. Paris: Charpentier, 1881. Guth, Christine. “The Exotic, the Aesthetic, the Spiritual: Japanese Art in the Eyes of Early American Collectors.” In Crosscurrents: Masterpieces of East Asian Art from New York Private Collections, edited by Amy G. Poster, 28–43. New York: Japan Society New York in association with the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1999. Hall, Michael. “‘Le gout Rothschild’: The Origins and Influences of a Collecting Style.” In British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response. Reflections across the Pond, edited by Inge Reist, 101–115. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Hosley, William N. The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America. Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum,1990.

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Johnston, William R. William and Henry Walters, the Reticent Collectors. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Lasc, Anca I. “Interior Decorating in the Age of Historicism: Popular Advice Manuals and the Pattern Books of Édouard Bajot.” Journal of Design History, 1 (2013): 1–24 ———. Designing the French Interior. The Modern Home and the Mass Media. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. ———. “Museum of Souvenirs. Adolphe Thiers, Collector of the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the History of Collections 1 (2016): 1–15. ———, ed. Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. Levi, Donata. “Beautiful houses. Spazi e arredi tra mercato e collezionismo.” In Voglia d’Italia. Il collezionismo internazionale nella Roma del Vittoriano, edited by Emanuele Pellegrini, 81–97. Naples: Artem, 2017. Liebenwein, Wolfgang. Studiolo. Die Entstehung eines Raumtyps und seine Entwicklung bis um 1600. Berlin: Mann, 1977. Pellegrini, Emanuele, ed. Voglia d’Italia. Il collezionismo internazionale nella Roma del Vittoriano. Naples: Artem, 2017. Pesci, Ugo. I primi anni di Roma capitale 1870–1878. Rome: Officina edizioni, 1971. Pollard, Clare. “Lo splendore orientale. La collezione Wurts di arte asiatica.” In Voglia d’Italia. Il collezionismo internazionale nella Roma del Vittoriano, edited by Emanuele Pellegrini, 255–265. Naples: Artem, 2017. Portebois, Yves, and Nicholas Terpstra, eds. The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century / Le XIXe siècle renaissant. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2003. Prevost-Marcilhacy, Pauline, ed. Les Rotschild. Une dynastie de mécènes en France. 3 vols. Paris: Somogy, 2016. Reed, Christopher. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Rice, Charles. The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity. London: Routledge, 2007. Roth, Linda, ed. J. Pierpont Morgan Collector. European Decorative Arts from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Wadsworth: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1987. Sadighian, David. “The Renaissance Inside Out: Historical Reference and Financial Modernity in the ‘Rothschild Style’ interior, c. 1820–1860.” In The Italian Renaissance in the 19th Century. Revision, Revival, and Return, edited by Lina Bolzoni and Alyna Payne, 157–188. Milano: Officina Libraria, 2018. Schlosser, Julius von. Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sammelwesens. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1908. Seibel, Ernst. Der grossbürgerliche Salon, 1850–1918: Geselligkeit und Wohnkultur. Berlin: Rei mer, 1999.

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Strahan, Edward. Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection. Boston: G. Barrie, 1883. Turpin, Adriana. “Objectifying the Domestic Interior: Domestic Furnishings and the Historical Interpretation of the Italian Renaissance Interior.” In The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400–1700. Objects, Spaces, Domesticities, edited by E.J. Campbell, S.R. Miller, and E. Carroll Consavari, 207–225. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Watson, Janell. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Zalewski, Leanne. “Art for the Public: William Henry Vanderbilt’s Cultural Legacy.” In Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 2 (2012): 1–25.

About the author Emanuele Pellegrini holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Pisa. He is Associate Professor in Art History at the IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy, and responsible for the PhD track in Analysis and Management of Cultural Heritage. He was Researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, post doc at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and at the University of Udine. He has been Chercheur Invité at INHA, Paris, visiting professor at University of Siena, Scuola di Specializzazione in Storia dell’Arte and at Renmin University Beijing. He was a member of Ancient Itineraries research project, led by the Getty Institute Los Angeles and King’s College London. He is co-director of the international peer reviewed magazine Predella. Rivista di storia delle arti (http://predella.it).

10. The Impact of Alternative Exhibition Spaces on European Modern Art before World War I Nirmalie Alexandra Mulloli

Abstract Exhibitions of modern art at the beginning of the twentieth century help to signify, in structured and identifiable nodes, the points at which the evolving visual forms of modernism were societally sanctioned and integrated into an accepted notion of what constituted art. Limited consideration has been given to examining the broader acceptance of alternative exhibition venues, previously peripheral or ephemeral, as social spaces and to considering the affect these alternative socio-spatial constellations had on the reception of the art being exhibited. By analyzing the shifting social conditions of art reception that these exhibiting spaces represent, this chapter presents a novel contextual view of how modern European artists flourished during this time in unprecedented ways. Keywords: exhibitions, exhibition rooms, modern art, art market

Examining modern art through its exhibitions It is clear that the modern movements at the beginning of the twentieth century represent a significant break of artistic form from previous traditions. One cannot understate the significance of what artists during this period achieved in such a short space of time. There was more than artistic genius at play to secure modernism’s success, however. At the turn of the century, alternative exhibition spaces began to appear in abundance around

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720908_ch10

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the world as a reaction to the outdated and failing system of the Academies.1 This chapter focuses on the innovative exhibiting practices during this time in relation to the use, design, and shifting social dynamic of exhibition space. It is the contention here that these spaces were fundamental elements in enabling the propagation of modern art by widening access to the arts and by rewriting and challenging the very nature and social fabric of the art viewing space. Reimagining the exhibition space as something specific to contemporary modern art, while at the same time retaining elements of institutional exhibition practices to assure the public of its place in history, allowed modern art to be embraced by the growing middle-classes, eager to cement the status of their new-found wealth through cultural investment. Tellingly, early-twentieth-century exhibition catalogs feature not only photographs of exhibited works, but often, images of the exhibition space and its interior. If exhibition spaces were important enough to document, present, and preserve as part of exhibition catalogs across Europe and North America, what was their significance to the modern movements in the time before World War I? Many of the spaces represent seismic, if short-lived, shifts in the practices of exhibiting art. What was their impact? How might connections between the spaces and the art shown be made? With these thoughts, it is intended not necessarily to consider the impact of the space on the “art” and therefore the viewer, but rather the effect of the space on the “viewer” and therefore the art. Approaching the topic of modern art through the spaces that exhibited it allows us to transcend the focus on canonized exhibitions, groups, or individual artists. As such, it subverts the centers-and-peripheries dichotomy to instead present an opportunity to examine connections. This perspective brings forward a foundation from which nodes of development in this short period can be tied together and a view of the wider contextual conditions that enabled modern art to flourish can be gained. In so doing, it also challenges some established notions about the developments underpinning the propagation of the modern movements, such as those revolving solely around innovations of artistic form. Today, we do not consider it strange to see an art exhibition in a building with a non-art related purpose such as an old warehouse. The lack of evidence for such a practice prior to the beginning of the twentieth century, however, indicates a shift in custom, when spaces considered peripheral and ephemeral became more widely

1 A Modern Painter, “The Case for Modern Painting. IV–The Royal Academy and the New English Art Club,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 11, no. 52 (July 1907): 204–207.

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accepted.2 While this shift is well-acknowledged and documented, little consideration has been given to how social dynamics within these new spaces may have changed quite drastically and what impact this shift in convention had on the art shown.3 Indeed, most theoretical contributions around ritual and social customs revolve predominantly around the Salon, museum, Academy, or post-war art spaces. 4 As Bruce Altshuler states succinctly, “the serious study of exhibitions is new.”5 Yet, exhibitions signify, in structured and identifiable nodes, the points at which the developing

2 Andrew Graciano, ed. Exhibiting Outside of the Academy, Salon and Biennial, 1775–1999 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008). 3 The closest being Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven, CT/ London: Yale University Press, 2009). 4 Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 25–32; C. Duncan, “The Art Museum as Ritual,” in The Art of Art History, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 473–485; Donald Preziosi, “Collecting/ Museums,” in Critical Terms in Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 407–418; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: 20th-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988), particularly Chapter 10: “On Collecting Art and Culture: Collecting Ourselves,” 215–229; Stephen Deuchar, “Whose Art History? Curators, Academics, and the Museum Visitor in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s,” in The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2002), 3–13; Chon A. Noriega, “Conceptual Graffiti and the Public Art Museum: Spray Paint LACMA,” in ASCO: Elite of the Obscure: A Retrospective, 1972–1987, ed. C. Ondine Chavoya, Rita Gonzales, et al. (Berlin;/Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 256–261; Sandra de la Loza, “La Raza Cósmica: An Investigation into the Space of Chicana/o Muralism,” in L.A. Xicano, ed. Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo and Pilar Tompkins Rivas (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011); Guisela Latorre, Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008); Sandra de la Loza, The Pocho Research Society, Field Guide to LA: Monuments and Murals of Erased and Invisible Histories (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011); Sarah Schrank, “The Art of the City: Modernism, Censorship, and the Emergence of Los Angeles’s Postwar Art Scene,” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004): 663–691; David McCarthy, “Andy Warhol’s Silver Elvises: Meaning through Context at the Ferus Gallery in 1963,” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 2 (June 2006): 354–372; Leah Dickerman and Matthew Affron, Investing Abstraction 1910–1925. How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York; London: Thames & Hudson, 2012); Abstraction. Towards a New Art. Painting 1910-1920 (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1980); Brian O’Doherty, Thomas McEvilley, ed. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 7–81; Deborah Cherry and Fintan Cullen, eds. Spectacle and Display (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Bruce J. Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (New York: Abrams, 1994) and Bruce J. Altshuler, Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, Vol. I: 1863–1959 (London/New York: Phaidon, 2008). 5 Bruce J. Altshuler, “A Canon of Exhibitions,” Manifesta 11 (2011): 5.

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visual forms of modernism were societally sanctioned and integrated into an accepted notion of what constituted art. To begin to explore what the impact of alternative exhibition spaces was on the modern movements, a conceptual and theoretical framework is presented to provide a lens through which to understand how the spaces discussed will be considered. In the following sections, both the early historical precedent of spatial developments impacting the art market and the parallels at the turn of the twentieth century will be laid out. This presents a contextual foundation from which the proceeding examples of alternative exhibition spaces in Vienna, Geneva, New York, and Budapest can be understood. Whilst only a fraction of the several hundred spaces that exhibited modern art during this time, these examples demonstrate the international nature of the spatial developments that accompanied the progression of modern art.6 The case studies will be followed by a discussion consolidating the theoretical framework laid out and the examples brought forward.

Exhibitions spaces as social environments In the case of exhibition spaces, both commercial and non-commercial, it is important to reflect that whilst these spaces were intended to display art, they were also, crucially, designed for people as social spaces – spaces intended to accommodate and even elicit specific behaviors. Although the social codes and trends governing an art viewing space are often not explicit, the space itself is never neutral. Henri Lefebvre’s definitions of abstract and social space in La production de l’espace (1974) are helpful to understand here.7 Abstract space, according to Lefebvre, is governed by a hierarchical structure, exercised by consolidated power and knowledge and its ability and efficacy to control social organization. Conversely, social space is routine, lived experiences that transcend regulated boundaries, which abstract space largely tries to control. With these definitions, especially as the art being shown in the exhibitions examined was often known to be for sale, it is logical to consider that the spaces of exhibitions themselves can and indeed were intended to affect behavior, therefore ultimately influencing the reception of the art being shown. 6 Database of Modern exhibitions (DoME) https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/location; last accessed 10 December 2019. 7 Translation used here is Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell 1991).

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It is proposed here that within the art viewing abstract space, the control of social organization is exercised by a panoptic culture.8 The art viewing space as a socio-panoptic environment here is an enclosed space using ocular mechanisms of control. In this environment, one is observed and is known to be observed by an unseen central actor that enforces adherence to a nonexplicit social code of practice; shaping behaviors of audiences within it and also dictating who can take part. The observer here, the nucleus of power, is the institution of the art viewing space itself. The rules are enforced by room attendants, who provide a constant feedback loop to the central institution. These attendants can be thought of as the counterpart of the state informants in Foucault’s description of the city besieged by plague. Furthermore, other audience members, who, in turn, expect certain (historically specif ic) social conformities of each other provide additional visual mechanisms of control. This social and institutional authoritarian presence, coerced by an awareness of being observed within the gallery space, constitutes a hierarchical constant. It is argued here that this is a fundamental element to the control of social organization within the art viewing environment. Through the nature of the social norms which govern the art viewing space, a highly selective socio-panoptic environment is created. It is suggested here that this dynamic can be considered as affecting the reception of the artworks within it through its socially exclusionary nature. The friction of these social dynamics touches upon the singular environment of the art viewing spaces as a publicly accessible but strictly socially controlled space. In this way, the gallery or museum is different to other public spaces such as a park. One cannot touch things, run, eat or drink, bring a pet, or take photographs. Furthermore, it is polite to speak in a lowered voice and room attendants in every room vigilantly monitor every visitor to ensure absolute conformity to the rules of the space. Yet, as an abstract space, these norms are cultivated rather than naturally occurring as a result of everyday social interactions. In 1850, 26 years after its opening, the National Gallery Keeper, Thomas Uwins, came across a family having an impromptu picnic in the gallery.9 The offenders proceeded to offer Uwins a glass of their gin when he suggested that their behavior was improper. Whilst mostly amusing, Uwins’ complaint demonstrates that the non-explicit 8 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 9 Sarah Quill, “Lighting up the Darkness: The National Gallery, London,” in From Darkness to Light: Writers in Museums 1798-1898, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Katherine Manthorne (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019), 167–176.

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social conformities often expected in art viewing spaces, despite the space being “public” are not natural or intuitive and are therefore often alien and inaccessible to those not versed in its cultural code. The concept of exhibition spaces as a panoptic environment can be applied to the art viewing environment as a mechanism through which we can analyze constellations of power dynamics enforced within it.10 Crucially, the more institutional the space or venue is, the more established the panoptic environment dynamic, the more highly selective and exclusionary the space becomes. Thus, art viewing spaces that were non-institutional were able to redefine the social dynamics of the space, which, in turn, made their exhibitions more accessible both economically and socially.

The historical precedent of spatial developments affecting the art market The precedent of an art market boom as a result of spatial innovations is at least as old as the first purpose-built art exhibition and sales space in Europe. The establishment of the Pand market at Our Lady’s church in Antwerp in 1460 marked a break from the institutions that, at the time, held a monopoly on exhibiting art – the Painters’ Guilds. Guilds formed primarily in such a way so as to protect the economic interests of master craftsmen. As a production authority, the majority of practicing painters prior to 1460 were subject to their control with little exception.11 The guild regulations, which were sanctioned by civic authorities, decreed, for example, that the right to practice in one’s own name was reserved only for master painters of the Guild. Furthermore, “the care with which the Guild regulations defined the right to exhibit work for sale indicates that this was an important privilege.”12 As a requisite institution to be considered an artist, the Guild’s restrictions around art production enforced a bureaucratic culture that maintained monopolies and restricted competition. Furthermore, the municipally sanctioned restrictions reveal an important power dynamic 10 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, trans. Dennis Redmond (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974). http://folk.uib.no/hlils/TBLR-B/Benjamin-History.pdf; last accessed 11 November 2018. 11 Sylvia L. Thrupp, “The Gilds,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol III: Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages ed. M. M. Postan, E. E. Rich, and Edward Miller (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 230–280. 12 Lorne Campbell, “The Art Market in the Southern Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century,” The Burlington Magazine 118, no. 877 (April 1976): 194.

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to consider between exhibitions rights, art production, and the State. The similarities to the environment prior to the break of the modern movements from the institutional Academies at the end of the nineteenth century is unmistakable. More significant is what followed after Our Lady’s Pand opened its space for exhibiting to the public. Dan Ewing demonstrates not only the revenue increase in the church’s accounts, but how some sixteen novel public structures, consisting of art showrooms, auction areas, and specially designated sales areas, were purpose-built as a response to the increasing activity of the art market once exhibitions were embraced as a public affair.13 These expansions resulted in the formation of what became the largest centralized art market in Europe for the better part of a century. So successful were the Pand’s art fairs that “to the extent that rental income is an accurate index of the level of exhibition activity, these statistics indicate that art was the preeminent growth industry at the fair markets run by the church during the period 1465–1540.”14 In 1540, a Painters’ Pand in the second-floor gallery of the Bourse opened. These galleries in Antwerp became the first permanent art market in Europe and Antwerp during this period became the continent’s largest center for artistic production.15 The significance of these developments in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, clearly demonstrate the correlation between creating alternative spaces for exhibiting art that are accessible to a wider audience and a boom in the art market. Indeed, fin-de-siècle Europe saw parallel transformations of alternative spaces appearing in response to its art institutions failing to accommodate to artistic supply and demand.

Institutional exhibition spaces in the late nineteenth century To illuminate how the dramatic shift in the practice of art exhibitions at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century can be considered in similar terms, and to position the distinction of the alternative spaces that began to appear, it is important to understand the nature of the institutions that the alternative spaces were diverging from. Exploring the social character of traditional institutions will establish a 13 Dan Ewing, “Marketing Art in Antwerp, 1460–1560: Our Lady’s Pand,” The Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 558–584. 14 Ewing, “Marketing Art in Antwerp, 1460–1560: Our lady’s Pand,” 565. 15 Ibid., 578.

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basis from which to understand the origins of the social norms and control mechanisms governing the art viewing space prior to the development of the new exhibition practices at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. The Exhibition Room at Somerset House (1808) by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin is a wonderful example of a traditional Salon. Since the opening of Academic art exhibitions to the public in the seventeenth century, large rooms were filled from the floor to the ceiling, often with enormous paintings so as to catch the eye of an audience member who might purchase the work, or, even better, become a patron of the artist. This is known as the connoisseur’s or collector’s hang.16 The rooms of the Salon were decorated with statues, flora and seats were draped with carpets. All in all, one received the impression of a refined and elegant space. This design was intended to reflect the nature of the Salon as well as the culture and traditions of the demographic that frequented this art viewing space most. That the sensibilities and philosophies of the elite minority became the underpinning fabric of the Salon social dynamic was not a coincidence. The Salon and exhibiting Academies were intrinsically linked to the ruling sovereign and, thus, form and subject matter were controlled and limited to that which was agreed within the Academies to reflect a standard “fit for a king;” any form of artistic expression that deviated from the Academic standard was not considered or accepted as art. As such, the exhibition rooms of the Salon were conceived and considered as an elite high society space. With control over artistic form and to a large extent, over artistic careers, the Academies retained power over the art market as the institutional mechanism and space through which art was produced, presented, and sold. Renoir, famously one of the founding members of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers, later known as the Impressionists, who first exhibited outside of the Salon as a protest in 1884, lamented that his reason for leaving the group and returning to the Paris Salon in 1886 was because nobody in Paris would purchase an artwork without the stamp of the Salon on the back of the canvas. This indicates the level of control the Salon had as a space through which the exhibiting and purchasing of art was controlled for over 200 years in what was, after all, the global cultural capital of this era. In summary, the design of the Salon interior reflected the social environment and social nature of an elite space making it an excellent example of 16 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 24–25.

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a highly socially controlled abstract space. This elevated social dynamic was also the basis of the first national museums in the nineteenth century, as anecdotally implied by Uwins’ frustration at the picnic offenders in the National Gallery and is reflected in the grandeur of their architectural design. Research into the demographics of museum attendance as late as the end of the twentieth century attest to the fact that, even recently, art viewing spaces were still frequented most by the highly educated and the elite, despite their minority numbers in the general population.17 It is in this context that we consider the following examples of spatial innovation at the beginning of the twentieth century and their possible impact as alternative spaces not beholden to strict social conformities of traditional institutions on the audiences attending and therefore the art being shown.

Alternative modern exhibition spaces in early-twentiethcentury: Vienna Contemporaneously with the Impressionists in Paris in the late nineteenth century, concerns of the Avant-Garde in Vienna regarding the display and availability of space for contemporary modern art were carving out new paths for art to evolve. Up until the end of the twentieth century, control of the visual arts in Vienna was held primarily by two conservative organizations – an official body, namely that of the Akademie der Bildenen Künstler (“Academy of Visual Arts”) and that of a private exhibiting society, the Künstlerhausgenossenschaft (“Artists Cooperative”). Disenchanted with the Künstlerhaus (“Artists House”), Gustav Klimt along with a handful of colleagues, left the Cooperative in 1897 to establish the Vienna Secession, with the aim of exhibiting modern art and encouraging avant-garde aesthetics. It was Klimt’s vision to build an institution free from commercial interests. The building of the Secession was something to behold both from outside and within. The space was stripped of ornate decoration in favor of minimalist designs painted onto the physical components of the room itself such as an entrance way. The harmonious design details and the integration of the artworks into these spaces suggested that the room itself was part of the artwork. The rooms even had movable interior exhibiting walls, which could 17 Pierre Bourdieu, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public; Peter M. Blau, Judith R. Blau, Gail A. Quets and Tetsuya Tada, “Social Inequality and Art Institutions,” Sociological Forum 1, no.4 (Autumn 1986): 561–585; Jan Gehl, Life Between Building: Using Public Space, trans. Jo Koch (Copenhagen: The Danish Architectural Press, 2010), 11–31.

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be adjusted to the exact needs and specifications of each exhibition. The Secession’s revolutionary use of art viewing space was even transported to Paris for the World Exhibition in 1900, creating an enormous media storm. However, Klimt’s vision of a pure space free from the contamination of commercial interests did not last as colleagues within the Secession wanted to partner with Galerie Miethke to sell their work. Unwilling to compromise on his principles, Klimt left the Secession in 1905 and in the years 1908/1909, mounted an enormous exhibition called the Kunstschau (“Art Show”) in response to what he perceived as a lack of space to exhibit contemporary art in Vienna. Klimt’s frustrations were not unfounded. According to the Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME), for the period between 1905–1915, Vienna had only eight exhibition venues that exhibited European modern artists, compared to nineteen venues in London and the thirty-nine venues in Paris during the same time.18 Yet, what Vienna lacked in space, it made up for in the volume of exhibitions. For while London’s nineteen venues held one hundred and thirty modern art exhibitions between 1905 and 1915, Vienna, across its eight venues, held one hundred and forty-nine in the same time frame.19 The Kunstschau had fifty-four exhibition spaces – rooms in wooden structures, gardens, interior courtyards, a small cemetery, a café, a theatre, and a completely furnished two-story house.20 The exhibition became the springboard for artists like Kokoschka and the exhibition was by most standards, considered a huge success. On reflection, Klimt’s journey was not only a quest for the freedom of artistic expression, it was also a pursuance of creating a dramatically new kind of space to accommodate contemporary modern art. It is my contention that his success in realizing the ambitions of avant-garde aesthetics was largely due to his deep understanding of the effect of space on the artworks presented within it and the limits that institutional venues presented. Even after Klimt’s departure, the popularity of the Vienna Secession as a space free of convention, by all intents and purposes, replaced the Künstlerhaus as the leading venue of contemporary modern art exhibitions in Vienna at 18 Database of Modern exhibitions (DoME). https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/place/tgn/7003321; last accessed 14 December 2019. Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME). https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/place/exhibiting; last accessed 12 December 2019. 19 Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME). https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/place/tgn/7003321; last accessed 14 December 2019 and Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME). https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/place/exhibiting; last accessed 12 December 2019. 20 Rosa J. H. Berland, “The Radical Work of Oskar Kokoschka and the Alternative Venues of Die Kunstschauen of 1908–1909, Vienna, Austria,” in Exhibiting Outside of the Academy, Salon and Biennial, 1775–1999, ed. Andrew Graciano, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 184.

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the beginning of the twentieth century. Whether intentional or not, the example of Klimt’s success in reimagining the fabric of exhibition venues demonstrates in clear terms that alternative spaces outside of institutional settings had great appeal to the public and that this broad and sustained appeal secured the modern movement in Vienna a signif icant level of success.

Geneva The exhibition of Frieda Liermann and Cuno Amiet (1902) in Geneva presents an altogether different character of artistic display to institutional traditions (Fig. 10.1.). Here, the space has an unpretentious spatial conf iguration; seen for example by the use of simple wooden benches decorated with muslin cloth, or the tree as an icon used to decorate the furniture, the divider walls, and the exhibition poster, giving a connotation of a modern, earthly image as opposed to the grand and lofty air of the Salon. This exhibition is an early indicator of Liermann and Amiet’s own established sensibilities of challenging fashionable art trends, and it is not difficult to see how this philosophical underpinning, which strongly evokes ideas of the Nietzschean Übermensch, brought Amiet together with similar-minded artists in Germany to form the group Die Brücke three years later in 1905. From the images of the exhibition, we can see that the paintings were hung on makeshift dividers of plain fabric, most likely nailed to and supported by a wooden structure. One can see in Figure 10.1. by peering through the gap next to the room divider, that all works were hung in a single row at eye level or lower, in contrast with the Salon hang of floor to ceiling pictures. The iconographic use of trees as part of the poster design, as well as the design of the seating arrangements, which are carefully decorated with images of trees, present a deliberate simplicity, stripped of ornate decoration, in contrast to the staid opulence of a Salon. The simplified decoration of the Liermann/Amiet exhibition, which embraces a minimalist presentation and brings to life the material qualities of the space itself, such as the wood of the divider walls and benches, echoes Otto Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk philosophies seen embodied in the rooms of the Vienna Secession. Indeed, it is possible that the designs seen on the temporary walls and seating arrangements were influenced by the Vienna Secession, which was completed five years prior to the Liermann/Amiet exhibition in Geneva. One can observe the same attention to spatial details in the upper dado

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Fig. 10.1. Unknown, Exposition d’Art Frieda Liermann & Cuno Amiet, in Salle de l’Institut, Palais Electoral, Geneva. Photograph, 1902. Vienna: Künstlerhaus Archiv. © Vienna: Künstlerhaus Archiv.

rail of the temporary walls of the Liermann/Amiet exhibition. What is evident in these modern spatial endeavors is a careful consideration of the design of the space itself, its material quality and its connection to the work shown. Equally striking is a marked contraction of open space through the use of room dividers. In the Liermann/Amiet exhibition, the use of wall dividers purposefully splits the room into the smaller segments, thus making each part a more intimate space, as opposed to the vast open ones of the Salon. This also enables more works to be exhibited within a smaller space. The contrast of the Liermann/Amiet exhibition with that of the European Salon in terms of the approach to the design of space, is a good starting point to observe how drastically the design of exhibition space changed at the beginning of the twentieth century. It begins to lay a foundation for considering how the deliberate shift away from a space socially dictated by the upper echelons of society to a spatial design removed of those conformities, could change the experience and appeal of the space itself and thus, the art being shown. It presents an opportunity to use this novel lens to consider a canonical exhibition such as the Armory show in New York, which took place just over ten years after the Liermann/Amiet exhibition. Or for example, the Paul Cassirer exhibition rooms in Berlin, used to exhibit the works of the Berlin Secession at the beginning of the twentieth century. Importantly, in the case of the Cassirer exhibition, old masters were displayed in the same rooms as modern works, so nuance is required to peel apart the specific role the space played on the successful espousal of modern art to avoid generalization. This is a point we will return to later.

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New York The Armory Show in 1913, considered a blockbuster exhibition of modernism and a vital chapter of modern art’s story was an unexpected and extraordinary success. This exhibition presents a fitting example of combining traditional elements of the Salon with a remodeling of the space, which was a quintessentially modern practice. The hall in which the Armory Show exhibition took place was enormous. Yet, there was a striking simplicity to its design. While the space was populated with statues and Christmas ferns, the arrangement and decoration of the space was far from ornate, nor was it particularly luxurious. Furthermore, the space was divided into smaller segments, again creating more intimate, closed, and secluded spaces, as opposed to maintaining the open space of the large room. The seating provided was not upholstered like the seating often found in Salon’s, nor were carpets draped over the seats in this show. Instead, simple benches were provided in and around the larger segments of the hall, more similar to those seen in the Liermann/Amiet exhibition (Fig. 10.1.) for example. The hanging of the exhibition also conformed to modern artists’ preference for one or two rows of artworks hung at eye level, first proposed to the Paris Salon by Degas but ultimately rejected at the end of the nineteenth century.21 In sum, the exhibition presents itself as substantial but rather unpretentious. Coincidentally, as with the Liermann/Amiet exhibition, a tree is used as the logo for the Armory Show on its tickets, posters, and catalogs. Removal of ornate elitist signifiers from the spaces of the Vienna Secession, Liermann/Amiet exhibition and the Armory Show, which would imbue expectations of a socially exclusive space, relieves the space of the behavioral conformism that accompany elitist spaces. These exhibition rooms move away from highly selectively controlled abstract social spaces, toward a space with the potential to appeal to a much wider audience. This allows for a reimaging and ultimately a broadening of who can feel invested to take part, thus increasing the reach of the space to a wider market and audience. Indeed, there are many more examples which are interesting in this respect, such as the first exhibition of Die Brücke in 1906, which took place in the showroom of lamp factory in Dresden. By positioning modern art exhibition spaces as social environments and in contrast to institutional venues, it becomes clear that the currents of modernism were redefining the very nature of the art viewing space, not just the 21 Martha Ward, “Impressionist Installations and Private Exhibitions,” The Art Bulletin 73 (Dec. 1991), 559–622, p.600

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formal qualities of art.22 The broader acceptance of which forms constituted art therefore went hand-in-hand with a reimagining of the exhibition space to include, appeal, and thus be accessible to wider audiences, bolstering its market. Stark distinctions of exhibition practice can be drawn from the examples presented so far, however, there are less obvious examples that can also be taken into account when considering the shifts in practices we are exploring.

Budapest From exhibition catalog information, it is possible to see that Budapest at the beginning of the twentieth century had a huge amount of modern art activity. Although Budapest had only five venues exhibiting modern art between 1905–1915, which was less than Cologne, Rome, and Prague, each of which had seven, the number of exhibitions held, and the volume of works exhibited ranks comparatively high. In this ten-year window Budapest held seventy-four exhibitions, almost double that of the forty held in New York and the thirty-eight held in Saint Petersburg. Further still, there were 17,296 works exhibited during this time in Budapest, a volume coming behind only to Paris with 24,559, and Berlin with 21,772 works.23 These numbers indicate a huge amount of modern art production in Budapest during this time. As Budapest is largely considered a peripheral actor in the modern movements, its exhibiting activity based on the catalog information still available from modernisms crucial development years, makes it a pertinent case study to bring into this argument. At the turn of the twentieth century, an international modern trend of designing exhibition spaces to appear as a bourgeois domestic interior began to materialize. This development first became vogue with the Impressionists, who used small private venues, but it was soon adopted by galleries and art institutions alike.24 An exemplar of this is the Művészház (“Artists House”) in Budapest (Fig. 10.2.). Opening in 1909, after fissures and disagreements about the presentation of modern art in the equivalent of the Hungarian Salon, the Művészház operated seemingly with a modern art market in mind. We 22 Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 23 Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME). https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/place/exhibiting?sort=count_itemexhibition; last accessed 12 December 2019. 24 Martha Ward, “Impressionist Installations and Private Exhibitions,” The Art Bulletin 73 (Dec. 1991), 559–622.

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Fig. 10.2. Unknown, A Művészház első csoportos kiállitása (The first group exhibition of the Artists’ House). Photograph, 1909. Budapest: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai. © Budapest: Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery.

know from the exhibition catalog of their first exhibition that the exhibited paintings were priced around 100–200 krona, even for oil paintings, which is particularly low, compared to other exhibitions of modern art in Budapest at the time.25 For example, at Nemzeti Szalon in 1909 the average price of an oil painting was 943 krona, making the difference quite significant.26 Figure 10.2. shows the interior of the opening exhibition at Művészház. We see carpets, chairs, and small tables decorated in a way which evokes a bourgeois interior. Again, we can also see the commonly adopted practice of a division of space using room dividers to create a more intimate atmosphere, distinct to the exhibitions that broke away from the Salon.27 Művészház, helmed by the godfathers of the Hungarian modern movements, although ultimately doomed and short-lived, provided a platform for young modern 25 Exhibitions of Modern European Painting 1905–1915: available at Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoMe). https://exhibitions05-15.kugb.univie.ac.at/data/exhibition/925; last accessed 17 September 2018. 26 Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME). https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/search?entity=It emExhibition&filter%5Bexhibition%5D%5Bdate%5D%5Bfrom%5D=1909&filter%5Bexhibit ion%5D%5Bdate%5D%5Buntil%5D=1909&filter%5Bcatentry%5D%5Btype%5D%5B0%5D= 3&filter%5Bcatentry%5D%5Bprice_available%5D=Y&page=1; last accessed 10 December 2019. 27 Ward, “Impressionist Installations and Private Exhibitions.”

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artists who were being excluded from other institutions and it also created a market of small collectors.28 Significantly, this tendency of using bourgeois interiors was very short lived and continued only until the beginning of World War I, after which we see a continuation of simplification; bringing us to the white cube synonymous with galleries today. The exhibition spaces in Vienna, Paris, and Geneva were selected as case studies for their deliberate efforts to move away from a highly selective elite space. In the following section a discussion will present how both the Művészház as a space seemingly retaining some elitist traditions of display and the previous examples, which distanced themselves from as many traditional signifiers as possible can be reconciled and considered as part of the same trends promoting modernism’s uptake.

Discussion Considering the case of the Művészház: why was the bourgeois interior chosen as the vehicle through which to present anarchic art forms? The design was of course, a deliberate marketing tool. Not one aimed at the elite but one aimed instead at the growing and aspiring middle classes, who could be tempted to celebrate their arrival in the bourgeois echelons, with cultural investments. Trends of class traditions were utilized to speak to these aspirations by evoking high culture, yet works were priced very low, thus making the art and therefore the space more accessible. This enabled the growing middle classes to buy into the image of the cultural elite, as opposed to just observing it. The narratives of presenting modern art spoke to ideals that a broader spectrum of potential patrons ultimately wanted to and for the first time could participate in. This is even reflected in the opening hours of the exhibitions. With later opening hours, people who were working also had an opportunity to see the artworks on show. Rather than an elitist social dynamic, which was exclusionary on both social and economic levels, this new constellation embraced the middle classes and enabled them to participate, whilst always maintaining the highly moral principle of furthering the development of art and young artists as their underlying motivation. Addtionally, being only at the beginning of its incorporation as an accepted art form and crucially, having been largely rejected by the wardens 28 Jeffrey Taylor, In Search of the Budapest Secession: The Artist Proletariat and Modernism’s Rise in the Hungarian Art Market, 1800–1914 (Budapest: Helena History Press, Central European University Press, 2014).

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of artistic taste – the Academic institutions, modern art could not yet claim as having or belonging to an established tradition or history of its own. Therefore, although artists and their dealers were convinced of their ideals, they still had to persuade the general art-buying-public of the artworks’ worth and develop mechanisms of achieving legitimacy in the eyes of the public. I would like to suggest that the reconstructed bourgeois interior within the gallery space served not only to create aspirational environments for people to escape to; the design of the space also acted as a legitimizing measure to reassure prospective buyers of modernisms place in history. Indeed, this marketing inclination was something that early investors in modern art can be seen actively participating in. Exhibition catalogs from this time often listed works already owned by patrons alongside those that were for sale.29 The names of the owners given alongside the works, offered prospective buyers yet another reassurance of the artist’s and artwork’s legitimacy by signaling their place within the homes of the cultural elite. The pre-owned works were sometimes also offered for sale, but often they were only included to be shown alongside those which were available to buy, acting in one instance to give a broader view of an artist’s oeuvre and in another to market the legitimacy of the other works which were for sale. In this new modern exhibition environment, the ocular dynamics of the socio-panoptic environment, detailed earlier, become relevant to understand how the social dynamics of the space were utilized to promote the art within. The nature of the art viewing environment as a space one sees, is seen in and is also known to be seen, creates a dynamic of heightened social awareness.30 While the approaches varied wildly, modern art spaces redefined the social fabric of exhibitions by removing, each to its own degree, the elitist cultural signifiers and thus the expectations within the spaces to improve accessibility. It is the contention here that the reception of art cannot be separated from the social dynamic of the spatial design in which it was exhibited. As such, one can see how the various alternative spaces discussed, although materially different, shared a socially orientated philosophy which connects how and why the spaces and thus the art appealed to such an extraordinary 29 Filtered search in DoME of artworks with listed owner, Database of Modern Exhibitions. (DoMe) https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/search?entity=Exhibition&filter%5Bcatentry%5D%5 Bowner_available%5D=Y; last accessed 10 December 2019. 30 Indeed, the dynamic of not only seeing but also being seen at an exhibition is so integral to the art viewing environment that artists such as Rembrandt, Manet, and Degas, to name but some of the most obvious examples, experimented with its utility in the topics of their artworks. In so doing, these artists did not just play with the gaze of the viewer, but with the nature of the space in which the viewer would encounter the artwork.

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number of people across the world in such a short space of time. It is for this reason that the example of Paul Cassirer and his exhibiting of both modern art as well as old masters in the same space can still be assessed within the same framework being proposed. For Cassirer was still a part of the movement aiming to appeal to the masses not just the elite and operating in competition with established art institutions. It is precisely the non-institutional nature of his enterprise and the non-institutional nature of the space which negate the restrictive power and social dynamics that allowed for the fluidity of such different styles to be accommodated together.

Conclusion In conclusion, the necessity to sell artworks in the pursuit of pure form manifested itself in both the themes of the modern artworks and their display. Conversely, the context of the extraordinary success of the art market as a result is brought into clear focus when one considers the restrictions governing art exhibition from which it diverged. The nature of the alternative spaces as well as the sheer number of spaces which opened to cater to the modern market, resulted in increased access to the arts and spurred modernism to be as culturally signif icant as it became at this particular period in time; when the appetite and market of the middle classes was waiting to be exploited. The idea that a more accessible participatory environment around modern art created favorable conditions for its success does not challenge, but rather broadens the scope of understanding for this time period, bringing nuance to prevailing ideas of the success of modern art being attributable simply to artistic genius. Instead, we should consider that the democratization of artistic form may have been enabled because of the democratization of exhibiting space and the right socio-economic conditions. Fortunately, a remarkable amount of information pertaining to exhibitions and exhibiting activity still exists today. These records consist of exhibition catalogs, letters and correspondence, photographs, and exhibition announcements. The archives and increasing number of databases holding this material present a trove of information to explore the topic of spatial development further, shedding new light on the now well-revised period of the fin de siècle beyond established narratives.31 DoME ranks the eleven 31 Christina Bartosch, Nirmalie Mulloli, et al. “The Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME): European Paintings and Drawings 1905–1915,” in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities

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cities with the most venues exhibiting European modern artists between 1905–15 as follows: 1. Paris (39); 2. London (19); 3. Moscow (17); 4. Saint Petersburg (16); 5. Berlin (13); 6. New York (10); 7. Munich (9); 8. Vienna (8); 9. Cologne (7); 10. Prague (7); 11. Rome (7). With the added nuance of considering how influential spaces were to the modern movement’s success, this list seems a good place to start to explore the topic further and to reconsider the relationships of the places commonly considered central or peripheral to the transmissions of modern art.

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About the author Nirmalie Alexandra Mulloli is a PhD candidate in the Art History Department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Nirmalie studied her Bachelors in History of Art & Anthropology at Durham University and completed a Masters in History of Art & Visual Culture at the University of Oxford. She was the Database Development Manager of the Exhibitions of Modern European Painting 1905–1915 (DoME) research project at the University of Vienna from 2017–2019. Recent publications include a chapter written together with her project team about DoME in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History (2020).

Index Abellard 124 Aders, Carl 143 Adrien 127 Aix-la-Chapelle 146‒147, 151, 154 Alexander the Great 170 Aller 124 Amari 37 America 21, 29, 32, 34‒35, 38‒41, 47, 140, 192‒196, 199, 204, 206, 227, 232, 274 Amiet, Cuno 11, 283‒285 Anderson, A. 35 Antici Mattei 263 Antwerp 150, 153, 278‒279 Aruaux 127 Astley, Philip 110‒111 Atlantic 25, 29, 38, 40 Audinot 124 Augsburg 134, 139, 141, 143 Australia 235 Avisse 125 Awats 37 Bacon, Francis 162 Bacqueville 124 Balzac, Honoré de 14, 161, 168‒173, 181, 259 Barbey 124 Barlett 31‒33 Barnes, Albert C. 268 Barnum, P.T. 23 Barré 127 Barreau 125 Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste 27‒28, 40 Bastian, Adolf 227 Basel 240 Bath 90 Bayard 124 Bécourt 127 Belgium 5, 14, 142, 144, 146‒149, 151‒152, 154, 161, 188 Bella Coola 227 Benoiste 124 Berlin 286 Bertrand 126 Bethune, Jean-Baptiste 149‒151 Blemm, Johnny 33 Blondel, Spire 260 Bodinus 226 Boar 125 Bode, Wilhelm 267 Boisserée, Melchior 136 Boissérée, Sulpiz 136‒141 Bolis 126 Booth, John Wilkes 32 Botocudos 239 Bouillard 125

Bourguignon 124 Bouthier 124 Boutin, Simon Charles 81‒88, 90‒91, 98, 100 Bouts, Dieric 140 Bradshaw 147 Branche 127 Braun & Schneider 229 Bremen 234 Brillat-Savarin 46 British Columbia 227 Broadway (New York) 19‒21, 24‒26, 30, 32‒33, 41 Brooklyn (New York) 26 Brooks Brothers 35 Brown & Co. 30 Bruges 144, 148‒154, 158 Brunswick, Duke of (Charles William Ferdinand) 37 Budapest 276, 286‒288 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (Sir) 144, 153 Burlingame 194 Burnside (General) 30 Cairo 165‒166, 168 Californian Chinatowns 191‒195, 204, 213 Callcott, Augustus 134 Callcott, Maria Graham (Lady) 131, 133‒144, 147, 153‒154 Canton 199‒200 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi, known as 263 Caris 125 Carlier 127 Carr, John (Sir) 112‒113 Carrière, Eugène 174 Carteret 43 Cassirer, Paul 284, 296 Ceylon 37 Cézanne, Paul 268 Champs-Elysées (Paris) 92 Charigny 125 Charleston 41 Chartres 89‒90 Chateaubriand, François-René de 163‒165, 167 Chickamauga 33 Chicago 45‒46, 227 Chilton, James R. 22, 35 China 28‒29, 194‒202, 232, 256 Chinatown 191-213 Chiswick 85 Coan, Titus M. 44 Coblentz 139 Coclen 125 Colmar 143

296 

EPHEMERAL SPEC TACLES, EXHIBITION SPACES AND MUSEUMS 1750 -1918

Cologne 134, 139‒141, 143‒144, 146‒147, 151‒152, 154, 286, 291 Columbia 33, 38, 43, 227 Comte 126 Connecticut 261 Copenhagen 100, 238 Cooper, Peter 33 Cordier, Charles-Henri-Joseph 244, 246 Country Club 43 Coutellier 125 Creedmoor 32 Cruikshank, George 109 Crary, Jonathan 176‒177, 182 Crystal Palace (Sydenham, London) 233 Cullen Bryant, William 33 Cuvier, George 170‒172 Cythera 91 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 264 Danube 63‒64 Darwin, Charles 228, 230‒231, 234‒235, 246 Dawson, William 154 De Albertis, Enrico Alberto 265 De Brame, Mr. 30 Deckert, Friedrich Karl Emil 238 Degas, Edgar 285, 289 Delaigne 125 Delaunay 124 Delaware 32 Delort de Gléon, Alphonse 165‒166 Demmenie 125 Denon, Dominique-Vivant 100, 120, 132 Desaugier 124 Desforges, Denise 57, 62 Desforges, Henriette 60, 62 Desrivière, Gérard 91 Die Brücke 283, 285 Dillis, Georg von 136 Doran 46 Dordernek-Holmfeld, H. von 239 Doyen 126 Doyen, François 97, 126 Drake Company 43 Dresden 33, 134, 136‒137, 139‒141, 154, 226, 285 Dresser, Christopher 37 Drexel, Anthony J. 27 Drexel, John R. 27, 47 Dromal 125 Dürer, Albrecht 141 Duke of Berry 109, 119, 126 Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine 83, 112, 117 Dulout 125 Dunkerque 116 Dunn, Nathan 232 Dunraven, Aileen 47 Dunraven, Rachel 47 Du Sommerard 169 Duttenhofer, Christian Friedrich Traugott 138

Eastlake, Charles 133 Eastlake, Elizabeth (née Rigby) 134 Eckhout, Albert 238 Edison, Thomas 226 Edward Strahan, pseudonym of Earl Shinn 11, 253 Egan, Patrick 43 Egypt 120, 166 Elysée 93 England 27, 32, 38‒39, 90, 142 Eros 91 Eskimo 230, 239 Eyck, Jan van 132, 140, 143‒144 Fabien 125 Faisan 125 Field, Cyrus W. 26‒27, 38 Fiji 241 Fitz-James 124 Florence 154, 264, 266 Forbes, James 99 Forepaugh 19, 23, 41‒42 Forsyth street 41 France 14, 57, 86, 90, 95, 107, 109, 134, 149, 151, 161, 164, 166, 188 Franconi, Antoine 110‒111, 117‒118, 125 Franconi brothers, Laurent, Henry 111 Frankfurt 134, 139 French, Daniel Chester 42 Frossard 125 Fulton, Robert 95 Furnes 148 Galatea 40 Garchi 112‒114 Garin 127 Garrick 125 Gautier, Théophile 166, 172 Gazzera, Constant (Abbot) 118‒120, 125‒126 Genesta 39 Geneva 11, 276, 283‒284, 288 Godeffroy 231 Ghent 143‒145, 148, 150, 152, 154 Giacomini 125 Giotto di Bondone, known as Giotto 11, 253, 257 Gladstone 41 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 133, 136‒137 Goncourt, Edmond de 258‒259 Goodwin, Captain 38 Granchez, Charles Raymond 116 Grant (General) 31 Greece 141 Greenland 14, 221, 225‒226, 229, 239‒240 Grimod de la Reynière, Alexandre-BalthazarLaurent 82, 84, 91 Grinnell, Irving 34 Grommaire 126 Godthaabs Fjord 239

297

Index

Gould, Howard 47, 48 Guiet dite Vendôme 127 Guillaume 125 Haddon, Alfred Cart 233‒234 Hagenbeck, Carl 14, 221‒222, 224‒230, 234, 236, 239‒243 Hall, Albert 181‒182 Hall (General) 30 Hamburg 226‒227, 229, 231, 236 Hamy, Ernest-Théodore 164 Hartford 261 Harvard 43 Hasenauer, Carl 238 Haskell, Francis 132‒133 Hawaii 22, 44 Hawkins, Benjamin Waterhouse 238 Hebert 125 Heenan 30 Heger, Franz 240, 243 Helbig, Jules 150‒151 Hermann 30 Higgins, Charles A. 195 Hill, Andrew 58 Hochstetter, Ferdinand von 221, 235‒242, 246 Holbein, Hans, known as Hans Holbein the Elder 139 Holman Hunt, William 153 Hong Kong 199‒200 Hoppus, John 144‒147, 154 Hugues, Charles 111 Hunt Jackson, Helen 13, 191, 193, 195‒198, 203‒204, 212 Huxley, Thomas Henry 231 Idalie 93 Inca 239 India 45 Inuit 14, 221, 225‒226, 229‒230, 239‒242, 246 Ilulissat 225 Iselin, Olivier 45 Italy 84, 113, 134, 141, 161, 168, 262‒263, 268, 272 Jacobsen, Adrian 224‒225, 227‒228, 230, 240 Jacobsen, Bernard Filip 227 Jameson, Anna 134‒135, 144 Japan 37, 182, 227, 254‒257, 263‒265 Jacques 126 Jacques St Jor 125 Jean Cottru 125 Jessop, Thomas 173 Jeypore 45 Jores 126 Kaga 37 Kemeys, Edward Jr. 20‒21, 36, 41 Kersey, Maltland 48 Kilpatrick, Judson (General) 25, 31, 50

Kiyoto 37 Klimt, Gustav 281‒283 Köpke, Wulf 227 Kokoschka, Oskar 282 Koselleck, Reinhart 163 Kunz, George F. 42 Kurdistan 264 Lago 127 Lalanne 124 Lami 127 Lamprey, John 231 Lapland 228‒229 Larchmont 43 Latham, Robert 233‒234 Lefebvre et Dupont 126 Lefevre, Jean-Joseph 115 Leipzig 227 Lefferts (Colonel) 30 Lenoir, Alexandre 96‒100, 162, 164, 166‒169, 172, 179, 183 Leroi 127 Le Rouge, Georges-Louis 83, 87‒88 Leutemann, Gottlob Heinrich 228‒230 Leuven 147, 152 Le Vieil Elbeuf 72‒74 Liège 152 Liermann, Frieda 11, 283‒283, 285 Lille 152 Lima 237 Limoges 36‒37 Liverpool 143 Lochner, Stefan 140, 142 Longfellow 31, 32 London 22, 37, 44, 48, 111, 121, 142‒144, 146, 150, 158, 180, 184, 223, 231‒233, 235, 261, 282, 291 Loos, Adolf 268 Low Countries 131‒134, 144 Lowell Mason, Dr. 31 Ludwig I of Bavaria, King 136 Lunelle 124 Luray 38 Luray Caverns (Virginia) 22‒23 Luxembourg 87, 125 Madras 45 Mahault 127 Makart, Hans 259 Mallarmé, Stéphane 161, 176, 178, 180, 182‒185 Malraux, André 154 Manhattan (New York) 19, 48 Marinetti, Tommaso 268 Marsh, Elizabeth 238 Marx, Karl 176, 179, 185 Matisse, Henri 268 Maupassant, Guy 69 Mayflower 40 Mechlin 148

298 

EPHEMERAL SPEC TACLES, EXHIBITION SPACES AND MUSEUMS 1750 -1918

Meissonier, Ernest 21, 44 Memling, Hans 140, 145, 149‒150, 153 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 84, 89, 91, 99‒100 Merlière 125 Mexico 42 Minton 33 Missouri 41 Missouri River 21 Mitchell, Maggie 31‒32 Möbius, Karl August 223 Montalivet, comte de, Jean-Pierre Bachasson 115 Montensier 124 Moo 199‒200 Morgan & Co. 27 Morgan, John Pierpont 261 Morphy, Paul 26, 29 Moscow 291 Mouret, Octave 56, 60‒61, 63, 65‒66, 68, 71‒72, 74 Mugot 125 Mundurucu 239‒240, 243 Munich 44, 134‒137, 140‒141, 154, 291 Mussolini, Benito 263 Művészház 286‒288

Passavant, Johann David 131, 133‒134, 142‒144, 147, 153‒154 Patte 124 Peale, Charles Willson 232 Pekin 199‒200 Perrot, Aristide-Michel 83 Peru 237 Philadelphia 22‒23, 27, 36, 41, 232, 262, 268 Picasso, Pablo 268 Pierre, M. 120, 126 Pigorini, Luigi 163 Pioche 125 Pompeii 131 Pontet 127 Porcelet 127 Pradilla, Francisco 268 Prague 38, 286, 291 Prevost 125 Princeton 43, 238 Proust, Marcel 267 Pugin, Augustus 149, 151, 280 Punjab 45

Neruda, Wilma 21, 44 Nézard 127 New England 32 New Jersey 238 New-Rochelle 45 New York 12, 19‒21, 23‒39, 42‒47, 53, 207, 211, 253‒254, 261, 266, 276, 285‒286, 291 Newport 40 Nieuwport 148 Nil 63 Nizard 125 Nossig, Alfred 244 Nuremberg 134 Nuuk bay 239

Rajputana 45 Raphael, Raffaello Sanzio, known as Raphael 142, 170‒174, 184‒185 Raphael de Valentin 185 Réaux 125, 127 Renoir, Auguste 268, 280 Rhine 141, 148, 151, 153 Rhineland 132, 134, 139, 144, 147, 150, 153 Rhode Island 38 Robertson, Gaspard Etienne Robert, known as Robertson 121‒122, 124 Rodenbach, Georges 14, 161, 174‒175, 177, 178, 180 Rome 44, 118, 168, 262, 264, 286, 291 Roni 125 Roscoe, William 143 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 153 Rothschild 259, 263 Roussel 126 Rowlandson, Thomas 280 Ruggieri, Claude 89‒91, 93‒94, 107‒108, 117 Ruskin, John 21, 146 Russia 263‒264

Oakley, Frederick 151 Oceania 256 Omaha 41 Oslo 227 Ostend 144, 148 Otaheite 232 Otta 37 Queen Margot, Margaret of Valois, Queen of France, known as Queen Margot 97 Queen Mary, Mary Stuart, Mary I of Scotland, Queen of Scotland, known as Queen Mary 21-22, 46 Palmyra 118 Paris 12‒14, 23, 39, 44, 48, 56‒60, 63, 67, 69, 71‒72, 81, 83, 86, 88‒90, 93, 100, 108‒114, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125‒126, 153, 165‒166, 172‒173, 181, 226, 235, 244, 280‒282, 285‒286, 288, 291

Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostome 100, 161, 168

Sabatino 112 Saint-Hilaire, Albert Geoffroy 226 Saint Petersburg 121, 286, 291 Sallustio 258 Sandwich Islands 232 San Francisco Chinatown 194, 197‒199, 204, 209‒212 Saqui 124, 126 Saqui, Pierre 125

299

Index

Saratoga 35 Sarony, Napoleon 33 Satsuma 37 Séraphin 124, 126 Shailer, E. 31 Shakespeare, William 32 Schlegel, Friedrich von 132‒134, 144 Schleissheim 136, 139‒140 Schnaase, Karl 133 Schongauer, Martin 143‒144 Schopenhauer, Johanna 141 Scotland 21 Scott (General) 31 Semper, Gottfried 238, 245 Seton, David 21, 46 Seton, Gordon, of Orange 46 Sèvres 33 Shinn, Earl, see Edward Strahan 11, 253 Sibyl (temple of) 84 Sickles, Daniel Edgar 24, 31 Sing, Ah 206 Sioux Falls 43 Solomon Island 235, 243‒244 Sprague, Senator 38 St Jorn 126 Sudan 236 Szombathy, Josef 240 Tasmania 164, 235 Tatillon, Fanny 115 Termonde 148 Thierry 126 Thillard 124 Thomas 126 Thumb, Tom (General) 23, 50, 147 Tieck, Ludwig 133 Tierra del Fuego 236 Tiffany & Co. 19‒49 Tiffany, Charles Lewis 19‒20 Tilgner, Viktor 221, 239‒246 Tokio 37 Torré 94 Tournai 152 Tower, Henriette 262‒263 Tower Jr, Charlemagne 264 Tuileries 87 Tuminello, Lodovico 263 Turin 264 Twain, Mark 13, 191, 193, 195, 204‒213 Ukubak 226 Umlauff, Heinrich 233‒234, 236 Umlauff, Johann Gustav Friedrich 227, 233, 236‒237

United States of America 13, 24‒25, 27, 32, 52, 194, 208, 257, 259, 262 Uwins, Thomas 277, 281 Valéry, Paul 267 Valkyrie 47 Vanderbilt, William H. 11, 32, 253‒260, 262, 264, 266, 268 Vannutelli, Scipione 268 Veit Stoss 265 Velloué 127 Venaut 127 Verne, Jules 69 Vesuvio 258 Vienna 11, 14, 134, 221, 223, 233‒241, 245‒247, 251, 276, 281‒283, 285, 288, 291 Vigée LeBrun, Elizabeth 85, 88 Vigilant 45 Virchow, Rudolf 225, 227, 236 Virginia City Chinatown 207 Vogel, Karl Christian 137, 142 Volpi, Elia 266‒268 Wackenroder, Wilhelm 133 Wagner, Otto 283 Walpole, Horace 85‒86 Warren, Lavinia 23 Washington 19, 25‒26, 33, 38‒39 Waterloo 132‒133 Weale, William Henry James 131, 146‒154 Webbling, Ethel 21 Wedgwood 33 Westminster Kennel 43 Weyden, Rogier van der 140, 142, 153 Wickham, William (Mayor) 35 Wilhelm I von Hohenzollern, German Emperor 226 William of Cologne, known as Meister Wilhelm 140 Wirz 264 Wurts, George Washington 262‒265, 268 Yale 43 Yeldo 39 Youmann, E.L. 44 Young, John Burnett 19 Ypre 148 Yriarte, Charles 178‒179 Yup, See 210 Zola, Émile 10, 12, 55‒76 Zschille, Richard 45‒47