The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750-1918 9789048542925

Citation preview

The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces 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

The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces 1750‒1918

Edited by Dominique Bauer and Camilla Murgia

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Louis-Pierre Pierson, La comtesse de Castiglione. Collodion glass-plate negative. Colmar: Archives départementales du Haut-Rhin, on long term loan from the Musée Unterlinden, gift by the Établissements Braun, 1968, 6 Fi caissette 268, n°30. © Musée Unterlinden, Colmar / Christian Kempf Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 080 9 e-isbn 978 90 4854 292 5 doi 10.5117/9789463720809 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: Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces and the Dynamic of Historical Liminalities Dominique Bauer

7

I  The Home 1. Panorama as Critical Restoration: Examining the Ephemeral Space of Viollet-le-Duc’s Study at La Vedette

21

2. An Ephemeral Museum of Decorative and Industrial Arts: Charle Albert’s Vlaams Huis

53

3. Expanding Interiors: Architectural Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione

77

Aisling O’Carroll

Daniela N. Prina

Heidi Brevik-Zender

II Bygone Nations and Empires under Construction: Political Imaginations 4. The Land that Never Was: Liminality of Existence and the Imaginary Spaces in the Archbishopric of Karlovci

113

5. The Theatre of Affectionate Hearts: Izabela Czartoryska’s Musée des Monuments Polonais in Puławy (1801–1831)

133

6. A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition”

161

Jelena Todorovic

Michał Mencfel

Inessa Kouteinikova

III England and the British Empire: Civil Society, Civil Service, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces 7. An Ephemeral Display within an Ephemeral Museum: The East India Company Contribution to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857

181

8. Julia Margaret Cameron’s Railway Station Exhibition: A Private Gallery in the Public Sphere

209

9. Paper Monument: The Paradoxical Space in the English Paper Peepshow of the Thames Tunnel, 1825–1843

241

Index

271

Elizabeth A. Pergam

Jeff Rosen

Shijia Yu



Introduction: Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces and the Dynamic of Historical Liminalities Dominique Bauer

Abstract The following study addresses ephemeral exhibition spaces between 1750 and 1918. The focus is placed upon the private home, the nation, and the empire as distinctive spaces or spatial concepts. These either function themselves as ephemeral exhibition settings, or they are exhibited and made discernable in settings that are fundamentally ephemeral, and sometimes literally mobile, from the more traditional museum, a variety of smaller and larger scale exhibits, to the foldable paper peepshow or text-image sources which also function as spaces. Firstly, all of these simultaneously challenge and communicate elusiveness, fragmentation, disappearance, and otherness within their cultural context. Secondly, as liminal spaces, they all testify to the ambiguous connections between identification and projection vis-a-vis objectification and otherness. Keywords: ephemerality, liminality, domestic spaces, nation, empire

This is the first of two volumes of essays concentrating on ephemeral exhibition spaces, between 1750 and 1918, in various European countries, Russia, and the United States. The term refers to a wide and stimulating variety of spaces, both public and private, the fixed, the portable, or the foldable. We shall see that the term also materialized in written and visual-textual sources, for example, catalogs, travel accounts, or politico-religious documents. As material spaces, they accommodated temporary shows or exhibits that were, either deliberately or otherwise, short-lived, quickly abandoned, or constantly under construction. They could function as alternative, unusual,

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_intro

8

Dominique Bauer

or unexpected exhibition venues. As ephemeral exhibition spaces, they represented and tried to stabilize realities that were explicitly elusive and fragile, on either a personal level or the level of “other,” vanishing cultures behind fragmentary museum objects, or political entities that tried to establish or imagine themselves in these spaces. Initially, studying these ephemeral exhibition spaces makes it possible, firstly, to recognize the role of ephemerality in exhibiting, collecting, and preserving as such in the period studied. Additionally, it also makes it possible to understand how these activities were embedded in a world that, on a much broader scale, had to deal with ephemerality, and that, moreover, had become fundamentally museal, as Alexandra Stara has shown for the iconic case of Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français.1 Jonathan Crary has furthermore argued that the world and reality had become an “extended exhibition space,” again outside the walls of its exhibition spaces, museums, collections, and the like.2 The chronological scope of these volumes goes from the aftermath of the Baroque movement to the end of the First World War. Admittedly, the choice of 1750 is relative and represents a much less clear break than 1918. It does, however, have the great advantage of providing a broad comparative framework and a longer-term perspective of continuities, discontinuities, and radicalizations within a shared cultural context of ephemerality that this evolutive topic may require. Juxtaposing, for example, early-modern political geographies of ephemeral lands and the modern constructions of the nation state makes it possible to assess more clearly how the changing dimensions of private and public space affected exhibiting, imaging, representing, or mise en scène. The majority of the essays study nineteenth-century cases in the context of a new relationship between the public and private realms of society. This context is characterized by an increasingly expanded bureaucracy and economy, a colonial culture, imperial and scientific aspirations, and a frenzy for collecting and exhibiting. This nineteenth-century evolution is subsequently followed by the more elaborately subjective and alternative exhibition spaces of the first decades of the twentieth century which announce and embody both new and radicalized museological and exhibitional views. The cases studied bear witness to a cultural historical context in which ephemerality played a fundamental role. Without neglecting connections 1 Alexandra Stara, The Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816. ‘Killing Art to Make History’ (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing), 147–162. 2 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001), 236.

Introduc tion

9

with pre-revolutionary and pre-modern developments and precedents in the aftermath of the Baroque movement, these cases are primarily addressed in a context of rapid change and (r)evolution that followed the closing decades and the fall of the Ancien Régime, a time in which an increasingly different historical awareness and sense of time emerged. Based on the legacy of Koselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, amongst others, Peter Fritzsche, in Stranded in the Present. Modern Time and the Melancholy of History, and François Hartog, in Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, have further addressed the historically determined awareness. Exploring the transition from the Ancien Régime to the modern world, of the ineluctable discrepancy between past and present, and of the fundamental otherness of the past. In recent years, the historicization of concepts of time and history, as well as the growing awareness of the importance of Benjaminian thought in this context, which reveals a deep affinity with the breakdown of aura, with the fragment, the old-fashioned, the trace, etc., has opened up interesting connections with museum and exhibition studies. Studies focused on the long-term development of exhibitions, museums, collections, and period rooms have also connected exhibiting with a sense of loss and fragmentation, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett robustly demonstrated in her groundbreaking Destination Culture. Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. The museum was embedded in a museal culture, while the museum object became what Krzysztof Pomian termed a “semiophore,” an object without use that signifies absent realities.3 The distinction between the living relic and the dead specimen highlighted the opposition between (a constructed) connection and the disconnection between past and present.4 Simultaneously, the experience of the visitor became increasingly more private, something that, amongst others, Dominique Poulot has studied in his influential museological work, and ultimately more subjective, fragmented, and volatile towards the end of the century. As Mark Sandberg has convincingly argued in his Living Pictures, Missing Persons. Mannequins, Museums and Modernity, this was the point at which the truly modern spectator emerged. This sense of loss, of absence and fragmentation, was simultaneously compensated for with the creation of new continuities and strategies of 3 Krzysztof Pomian. Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 30. 4 Stephen Bann, “Historical Text and Historical Object: The Poetics of the Musée de Cluny,” History and Theory 17 (3) (1978): 259.

10 

Dominique Bauer

presentification. That is, a fixed vivification in a stable here and now. The panoramic theatre and the diorama, as well as the historical novel and endeavors in scholarly fields, such as archeology to establish site-based historical continuities, are examples of this struggle.5 The exposition and preservation of things was the hallmark of a culture in which the world itself had become ephemeral in this respect.6 In the modern urban culture of fast impressions, spectators of exhibitions and museums also integrated ephemerality as a fundamental, positive dimension of their perception and experience of these spaces (Sandberg). Finally, the ideological and self-legitimizing, socio-political, or economic motives that permeated the grand-scale exhibits in the second half of the century, like studies by Paul Greenhalgh on the great expositions, and Pascal Blanchard and others on the so-called human zoos have demonstrated, can also be interpreted as ways to respond from various angles to the challenges of ephemerality as a much broader cultural challenge. The ephemeral exhibition space is thus a paradox. It reveals of a broader cultural awareness of ephemerality, whilst simultaneously being part of the attempt to create, often against all odds, new continuities and new forms of lasting vivification within the intellectual and experiential grasp of its spectator. This volume, The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750–1918, explores both domestic and public spaces of display, from grander scale exhibitions to smaller temporal ones, for example in a railway station, to the case of the portable and foldable London tunnel paper peep show. As will be seen, the portable paper peep show constitutes a hybrid and volatile space in terms of its material localization. Belonging to either the private domestic or the public ideological realm, and its denomination as either an interior or an exterior space. In fact, all the cases addressed in this volume concern hybrid, liminal, or threshold spaces in some way, in which transition, overlap, simultaneity, or sometimes uncanny friction on the frontiers between public and private, interior and exterior, play a fundamental role. They mix aspects of the domestic and the public or the 5 See in this respect the seminal studies of Martin Meisel, Realizations. Narrative, Pictorial, and Theoretical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), Stephan Oettermann. Das Panorama. Die Geschichte eines Massenmediums (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1980) and Gillen d’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real. Romanticism and Visual Culture 1760–1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 6 Dominique Bauer, “The Elusiveness of History and the Ephemerality of Display in NineteenthCentury France and Belgium. At the Intersection of the Built Environment and the Spatial Image in Literature,” in Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750-1918, eds. Dominique Bauer and Camilla Murgia, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 161-189.

Introduc tion

11

private and the political. They intersect either between the personal, contingent, and subjective and the ideal, objective and sometimes distinctively timeless world beyond the domestic frame, as the case of Viollet-le-Duc’s last house La Vedette will show. Or they conflate the national, the domestic, and the authentic, as in the Vlaams Huis (“Flemish House”) of the Belgian architect Charle Albert, which is also analyzed in this volume. They may show the visitor’s private itinerary, interests, and (decorative) tastes, which are plunged into the greater picture of the identitary, self-legitimating exhibitions of the colonial age. Finally, they may, on the contrary, also embody the secret and private existence of national identities in lands that never were or were no more. Domestic spaces of display and public exhibitions in national and imperial contexts share a dynamic of identity formation in which the boundaries between the public and private are often blurred. They therefore, constitute interesting cases of historical liminality, between the dweller’s sociability and the nation, or between the visitor’s increasingly subjective and isolated private gaze and the economic and ideological mechanism behind the endeavor to put things, products, artifacts, the “nation,” or “empire” on display. Boundaries are also simultaneously blurred in terms of a variety of other dimensions that are related to the public and the private, or exteriority and interiority. The essays in this volume, for example, address the transitions, coincidences, sometimes even uncanny confrontations between the creative and the scientific, the intimate and the personal vis-à-vis the aesthetic and the theatrical. These become comprehensible as situations of liminality that are spatialized and materialized in the ephemeral exhibition space that negotiates this dynamic. All of the cases studied ultimately show how this dynamic emerges as an attempt to deal with or resist the mentioned sense of loss, fragmentation, and elusiveness that marked the broader cultural context of ephemerality during the period studied. As has been noted, ephemeral exhibition spaces are, paradoxically, spaces that unfold continuity, stability, and presence, whether successfully or not. They do so as a means of identity formation, through the simultaneous representation of historical eras and forms of immersive, as-if-really-there experiences of absent or past worlds. From this perspective, the essays add a refreshingly new insight to a variety of scholarly fields, such as museum and exhibition studies, colonial and material culture studies, the history of architecture and design, of gardens and landscapes, art history, historiography and the experience of time and the study of the domestic space. The f irst part “The Home” presents three cases of domestic spaces: Viollet-le-Duc’s La Vedette; Charle Albert’s Vlaams Huis; and the Countess

12 

Dominique Bauer

de Castiglione’s domestic, architectural mise en scène of photographic self-portraits. These cases exemplify the paradoxical nature of the ephemeral exhibition space that both communicates the elusiveness of being and a strategy against that elusiveness. The cases of Viollet-le-Duc and Charle Albert, in this sense, display a discourse of fullness and of the simultaneous, exhaustive presence of either the strata of the natural world, or the historical eras of the national past. The negotiation of liminality and the establishment of continuity and presence emerge most saliently in the way these domestic exhibition spaces try to re-present historical evolutions simultaneously, or aim to render the original state of things or past eras in a kind of stable isolation, unaffected by the passing of time. The latter can be interpreted, quite literally, in the case of Viollet-le-Duc’s La Vedette, the architect’s final house in Switzerland from which Lake Geneva and the Alps could be viewed. In his study, Viollet-le-Duc realized a vast painting of Mont Blanc, which is analyzed by Aisling O’Carroll in her chapter “Panorama as Critical Restoration: Examining the Ephemeral Space of Viollet-le-Duc’s Study at La Vedette.” Against the backdrop of a totalizing geo-historical awareness and combining imaginative creation and preservation, Violletle-Duc restores the essential Mont Blanc as an act of both creativity and scientific understanding, as he had previously restored the essential gothic cathedral: “As an extension of his work in architecture, his investigation of the underlying geological order and its restoration demonstrates his effort to penetrate a totalizing historical experience through geological narrative.” The Vlaams Huis (“Flemish House”) near Brussels, designed by Belgian architect Charle Albert as his personal Buen Retiro, also served as an annex to the 1880 National Exhibition. It displayed a similar kind of immersive essentialism that is based upon a synthetic succession of eras. As Daniela Prina argues in her chapter “An Ephemeral Museum of Decorative and Industrial Arts: Charle Albert’s Vlaams Huis,” Charle Albert’s construction of this Neo-Renaissance domestic space was grafted upon the construction of Belgium’s self-image as a youthful, powerful nation that reclaimed “its history by engaging with its great artistic tradition.” Interestingly, for this kind of integration of the historical home and the modern nation into a sense of continuity and “present” history, is the fact that “the rooms were arranged following a staged progression retracing the historical evolution of Flemish Renaissance styles of decoration, from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century.” In this sense, the Vlaams Huis also offered a kind of stratified, simultaneous view. In contrast, the Countess de Castiglione’s photographic-architectural setting constitutes a hybrid scenographic space between intimacy and

Introduc tion

13

objectification, in which the boundaries between self-fashioning, estrangement and objects collapse. In her chapter “Expanding Interiors: Architectural Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione,” Heidi Brevik-Zender shows how the somewhat uncanny objectification of a self in terms of self-display simultaneously becomes a tool to critically tackle gender roles. The Countess’s “400 studio photographs taken of her in elaborately costumed and staged tableaus,” clearly develops this dynamic. Brevik-Zender argues that the Countess, and occasionally also her young son who appears in some of the photographs, the objects, photographic backdrops, props, and the architecture of the room, become elements in a hyperbolic narrative of “excess.” They become signifiers in the stage-home as a liminal space in the sense of a critical subtext, a subtext in which the boundaries between the interior and the exterior, and of the interior as a logic of confinement, are disrupted, uncovered, and surpassed. The dimension of liminality between mise en scène, on the one hand, and the realm of the intimate and personal on the other, is thus explored in a manner that runs counter to the creation of a kind of constructive fullness and meaningfulness. On the contrary, it raises poignant and uncanny possibilities of disruption, of sub-textual dissection of the museal, voyeuristic, imagined, gendered nature of spaces. Ephemeral exhibition spaces thus negotiate, alter, and redefine spaces in different ways and do so while engaging with fundamental cultural themes such as elusiveness, loss, absence, disappearance, displacement, identity, self, subjectivity, memory, imagination, and creativity. In the home, the nation, or the empire and in its spatial imageries, these themes emerge in comparable ways, often explicitly mixing the realms of the domestic and the public, as already shown in Prina’s chapter on the Vlaams Huis. As previously mentioned, the ephemerality of these spaces not only refers to the material fact that their occurrence itself was transient, elusive, or not meant to be preserved. These spaces are frequently the reflection of, or a way to deal with, realities that, in many respects, revealed themselves as ephemeral or disappearing, irrevocably gone, constantly changing or under construction. This perspective is central in the second part of this volume, “Bygone Nations and Empires under Construction. Political Imaginations.” Here the chapters concentrate on the representation of politico-cultural liminal geographies and on how they relate to the fiction of never having existed, of having disappeared, or of being under construction, through the examples of Poland as a land that was no more, the archbishopric of Karlovci as “the land that never was,” or Russia as an empire under construction. The cases of the archbishopric of Karlovci and its 1757 Festive Greeting, that of Princess Izabela Czartoryska’s Temple of the Sibyl at her estate in Puławy in

14 

Dominique Bauer

Poland, and of the Russian architect Aleksei Benois, show this mechanism on the level of nation building and political territorial fictions in a long-term perspective. These examples communicate how the ephemeral exhibition space is entwined with the ephemerality of the world it represents, a world it simultaneously wants to pervade with continuity, stability, and existence. Jelena Todorovic argues in her chapter, “The Land that Never Was: Liminality of Existence and the Imaginary Spaces in the Archbishopric of Karlovci,” that the eighteenth-century archbishopric of Karlovci, an Orthodox domain in the Catholic Habsburg Empire, led a liminal existence on the intersection of its actual geographic and confessional liminal position and the ideality of “the land of the lost past.” This liminality was, interestingly, infused with a symbolic, hidden, and secretive dimension of privacy, the hallmark of domesticity, exemplified by Zaharija Orfelin’s Festive Greeting to the new bishop Mojsej Putnik, an illustrated panegyric celebrating the investiture of the new bishop. This manuscript, at once a ritual space and liminal territory, only remained accessible to a limited, controlled audience and, in that sense, constituted “the ultimate invisible space,” thus taking ephemerality to its most radical limits. In the chapter “The Theatre of Affectionate Hearts: Izabela Czartoryska’s Musée des Monuments Polonais in Puławy (1801–1831),” Michał Mencfel analyzes the so-called Temple of the Sibyl as a lieu de mémoire. This museum was constructed as a patriotic response to the loss of Polish independence in 1795 and its disappearance from the map of European nations, at Izabela Czartoryska’s estate in Puławy, which had become a center of Polish sentimentalism. The objects collected were relics of the glorious history of Poland and monuments to memory. The experience of a visit to the place, caught in ritual, was both a “quasi-religious” and a “para-theatrical” experience that allowed for an emotional, “affective” experience of history. The elaborate rituals at Puławy in this sense “brought solace by offering a guarantee of continuance, an atmosphere of (only briefly questioned) permanence.” The continuity of the public realm in this sense connected with personal-affective involvement. In the chapter “A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a ‘Fantastic Exhibition,’” Inessa Kouteinikova studies the case of the Russian architect Aleksei Benois and the creation of an ideal exhibition space in Tashkent, the new capital of Russia’s Central Asia, in a world that was under construction. In its identity formation, the Russian Empire had to determine its own position vis-à-vis Western expositional models in a dynamic context of fascination for Central Asian architecture, while Russian and European styles were, in return, adopted in Central Asia. Here also, the logic of synthesis, of the microcosmos,

Introduc tion

15

for example in creating a “miniature image of old Moscow,” echoing the kind of historical simultaneity that is addressed in other chapters, of the full presence of past and present, surface in the 1890 Tashkent Exhibition, where “Aleksei Benois took aim at the entire edifice of old history and the new culture of Russian Central Asia that he strived to express in a single drawing or structure.” Western expositional models take us to the heart of the later nineteenthcentury public space which was determined by colonialism, industrialization, and big-city culture. This context is addressed in the last part “England and the British Empire. Civil Society, Civil Service, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces.” This f inal part of the volume presents three different cases of exhibition spaces in England, each of which maintain a different balance between the public and the private sphere, the public and personal or autobiographical, the exterior and the interior, and their shifting interconnections. In her reconstruction of Saloon G at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 in the chapter “An Ephemeral Display within an Ephemeral Museum: The East India Company Contribution to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857,” Elizabeth Pergam sheds light on cultural attitudes to non-European objects and what she refers to as their own “timelessness,” which also resonate in private homes and collections, as well as to the applied arts and how these related to theories of good design. Particular attention is paid to the perception of the items exhibited and, therefore, to the impact of the visit to the exhibition intended as a visual and cultural experience. In Jeff Rosen’s chapter “Julia Margaret Cameron’s Railway Station Exhibition: A Private Gallery in the Public Sphere,” the spatial multifacetedness and interconnectedness between the nation, the new public space, and the home takes a literal form. Studying Juliet Margaret Cameron’s unique exhibition of photographs “of the great men of our age” in the waiting room of Brockenhurst Junction Station, the railway as a binding force of national identity is knitted together with the importance of the railway in the colonies for the expansion of civil service. Crucially, at the same time, this connection entwines with Cameron’s personal life, in a waiting room that touches the domestic space, where time slows down and becomes more intimate and personal, and where one can reflect for a moment. It was at Brockenhurst Junction that Julia Margaret Cameron met her son, who was a governmental administrator in Ceylon, after an absence of four years. The intriguing case of the aforementioned paper peepshow, studied by Shijia Yu in her chapter “Paper Monument: The Paradoxical Space in the English Paper Peepshow of the Thames Tunnel, 1825–1843,” shows the

16 

Dominique Bauer

extent to which ephemeral exhibition spaces can intertwine and reflect the very ephemerality and liminalities that distinguish the surrounding historical context, in this case also in a highly palpable and material way. Analyzing the Thames Tunnel paper peepshow, Yu argues that this optical toy holds a threshold position, similar to the position of the actual Thames tunnel under construction that it represented and that was essentially “an underground arcade.” Like the arcade, the peep show establishes a liminal space between the “unruly public realm and the ordered private realm.” It is encapsulated, and thus “controlled and contained,” in the private realm of the home, where the fear for the tunnel’s fragility, which echoed the middle-class fear of industrialization, could be kept at bay. The ambiguities, but also the versatility of ephemeral exhibition spaces that determines their cultural-historical meaning, reside in their in-betweenness and liminality. It is there that ephemeral exhibition spaces develop themselves as pieces of sub-textual criticism and as creative strategies, in which personal worlds and the world beyond the home, the personal and the national, the world of scientific understanding, the gendered society or the industrialized public space, intertwine and confront each other.

Note on the use of translations All translations of sources in other languages into English are by the chapter authors, unless indicated otherwise.

Bibliography Bann, Stephen. “Historical Text and Historical Object: The Poetics of the Musée de Cluny.” History and Theory 17 (3) (1978): 251–266. Bann, Stephen. The Clothing of Clio. A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Bauer, Dominique. “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.” In Dominique Bauer and Camilla Murgia, eds. Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750-1918, 161-189. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Blanchard, Pascal and Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire, eds. Zoos humains et exhibitions coloniales. 150 ans d’inventions de l’Autre. Paris: La Découverte, 2011.

Introduc tion

17

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. D’Arcy Wood, Gillen. The Shock of the Real. Romanticism and Visual Culture 1760–1860. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Fritzsche, Peter. Stranded in the Present. Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Hartog, François. Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture. Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Koselleck, Reinhart. Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988. Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas. The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Meisel, Martin. Realizations. Narrative, Pictorial and Theoretical Arts in NineteenthCentury England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Oettermann, Stephan. Das Panorama. Die Geschichte eines Massenmediums. Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1980. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe– XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Poulot, Dominique. Musée, nation, patrimoine 1789–1815. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Sandberg, Mark. Living Pictures. Missing Persons. Mannequins, Museums and Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Stara, Alexandra. The Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816. ‘Killing Art to Make History.’ Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015.

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, art 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

18 

Dominique Bauer

recently established the series Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective 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.

1.

Panorama as Critical Restoration: Examining the Ephemeral Space of Viollet-le-Duc’s Study at La Vedette Aisling O’Carroll

Abstract La Vedette, the final home of French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-leDuc, was completed in 1874 in Lausanne, Switzerland. The house contained the architect’s most ambitious restoration project: the reconstitution of Mont Blanc. Spanning two walls of his study, Viollet-le-Duc constructed an idealized mountain landscape through a painted panorama. Rather than depicting an existing site, he composed the landscape by synthesizing his geological knowledge with artistic technique. The room entangled the space of restoration with the architect’s private, personal, and professional life. This chapter will examine Viollet-le-Duc’s use of drawing and representation as methods of restoration in order to understand the speculative nature of the panorama and its function as a critical tool for restoration: simultaneously an act of creation and reproduction. Keywords: geology, scientific imagination, reconstruction, representation, Mont Blanc

Introduction: Architecture and geology In September 1868, French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) made his first expedition to Mont Blanc. The trip lasted ten days, during which he traversed the Mer de Glace and the Bossons Glacier and climbed Brévent to complete his earliest panorama sketch of the celebrated peak. The voyage inaugurated a series of eight annual pilgrimages made by the architect-turned-geologist between 1868 and 1875.

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_ch01

22 Aisling O’Carroll

Over the course of these expeditions, Viollet-le-Duc produced over five hundred drawings and sketches of the mountain range.1 While his early drawings were characterized by a softness of line and shadow that molded the mass and presence of the mountain, on subsequent trips his drawing style transitioned towards a more analytical technique, dissecting the disintegrating landscape piece by piece to comprehend its underlying order.2 These later drawings, annotated with labels, extensive notes, and explanatory sketched diagrams, demonstrate a meticulous attention to detail and a concerted effort to understand morphological processes through drawing. Ultimately, his depictions turned not only towards analysis, but towards a process of synthesis. The geoscientific laws and relationships ascertained through his Alpine investigation were synthetically applied through artistic visualizations in order to render the primitive configuration of existing topographies at the moment of their formation. Additionally, these synthetic visualizations were used to produce new typological landscape configurations. The Alpine investigation culminated in the most ambitious, and most radical, restoration project of Viollet-le-Duc’s career: the reconstitution of Mont Blanc to its primitive form. This restoration was achieved first in a technical form, through orthographic drawings and written description in the first chapter of his treatise on Mont Blanc, published in 1876 together with his topographic map of the mountain, and subsequently in an immersive, experiential form, evoking the mountainous environment through a scenographic production in the study of La Vedette, the home he built for himself in Lausanne, Switzerland.3 Avoiding the dangers of the hypothetical, which he warned passionately against in any restoration work, the Alpine landscape was reconstituted through careful assimilation of the logical order and structure that he had determined to underlie the landscape. 4 Yet, as with any restoration of a lost condition or artifact, it remained unavoidably speculative. 1 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc: A Treatise on Its Geodesical and Geological Constitution; Its Transformations; and the Ancient and Recent State of Its Glaciers, trans. Benjamin Bucknall (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877), 11. 2 See Pierre Frey’s description of the itinerary of each expedition and description of drawings in Pierre A. Frey, “Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, itinéraires d’un architecte géologue,” in Viollet-le-Duc et la montagne, ed. Pierre A. Frey and Lise Grenier (Grenoble: Glénat, 1993), 54; Pierre A. Frey, “E. Viollet-le-Duc, itinéraire d’un dessinateur,” in E. Viollet-le-Duc et le massif du Mont-Blanc, 1868–1879 (Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 1988), 11–38. 3 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Primitive Configuration of Mont Blanc,” in Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc, 14–43. 4 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Restoration,” in The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné, trans. Kenneth D. Whitehead (New York: George Braziller, 1990), 226.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

23

Viollet-le-Duc’s intense geological focus between 1868 and 1875 at first appears to be a significant shift in a well-established career. By the time of his first expedition in 1868, his authority in matters of national heritage and restoration was widely recognized through his role as Inspector General of Diocesan Buildings for France and his work on the restoration of numerous buildings such as the Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine de Vézelay, the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, and the Cité de Carcassonne. Furthermore, the popularity of his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1854–1868) and the release of his Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863–1872) had cemented his eminence as an influential architect and theorist.5 Far from a career change, however, he saw the geological investigation as a continuation of his work begun with Gothic architecture, equating the restoration of ruined cathedrals to that of ruined peaks: To analyze carefully a group of mountains, the manner in which they were formed, and the causes of their ruin; to discover the order in which the phenomena occurred, the conditions in virtue of which they have resisted or endured the action of atmospheric agents, to note the chronology of their history, is to devote oneself to a work of methodical analysis which is, on a grander scale, analogous to that to which the practical architect and the archaeologist applies himself when drawing conclusions from the study of buildings.6

Set within a broader historical turn in science (and architecture) that recognized for the first time that the history of the earth extended beyond human history, Viollet-le-Duc’s work addressed in a serious way the historicity of the earth. As an extension of his work in architecture, his investigation of the underlying geological order and its restoration demonstrates his effort to penetrate a totalizing historical experience through geological narrative. In addition to their archaeological value as records of past events, and most likely in part due to this quality, both Gothic architecture and the eroding landscapes of mountains inspired powerful emotions in Violletle-Duc. In his introductory lecture to students in architecture, (“Lecture I” in his Entretiens), he recalled the vivid sensations triggered in him as a child while viewing the southern rose window in Notre-Dame de Paris as 5 Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879 (London: Routledge, 2016), 306. 6 Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc, 12–13.

24 Aisling O’Carroll

evidence of the capacity of architecture to rouse affect.7 The emotional nature of his attraction to medieval architecture mirrors in many ways his emotional attraction to the rugged, desolate expanses of mountainous landscapes.8 In 1836, while in Siena during his Italian tour, he described the personal effort and courage necessary to remain within the cold, wet, dark cathedral. Yet, despite this discomfort, he was overwhelmed with admiration for the building.9 Only a few years earlier, while writing to his father during his travels in the Pyrenees, he similarly described his disturbed attraction to the terrain: All around there is only rubble, snow, and forests; blocks of granite erupt in the midst of fir trees, all of this speaks of destruction, devastation, death. It is horribly sad, but what beautiful lines. I found myself at home in the midst of these beautiful horrors that I love so much.10

Over his various expeditions as a youth and adult, a deep, emotional impression was stirred in him in the presence of elevated peaks and Alpine landscapes. He noted that the observation of awe-inspiring phenomena on those summits had the power to inspire a calm sense of isolation as well as an intimate sadness. He was drawn to the mountains for the emotional respite he found in the raw nature and isolation of their desolate heights, to which he retreated at both the beginning and end of his career. Following the traumatic loss of his mother in 1832, Viollet-le-Duc embarked on a trip through the south of France, during which he immersed himself for two months in the mountainous landscape of the Pyrenees, finding solace in the solitary quality of the mountains. Similarly, his return to the peaks towards the end of his career followed a pair of consecutive traumatic events. The first of these was his disastrous experience teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1863. This failure bruised his spirits sufficiently that 7 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Lecture I,” in Discourses on Architecture, trans. Benjamin Bucknall, vol. 1 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1860), 22. 8 See writing by architectural historian Martin Bressani, who has extensively discussed the emotional nature of Viollet-le-Duc’s attraction to Medieval architecture, in particular Martin Bressani, “Architecture Painted,” chap. 2 in Architecture and the Historical Imagination, 45–89. 9 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres d’Italie (1836–1837) adressées à sa Famille, ed. Geneviève Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Léonce Laget, 1971), 170; Martin Bressani, “From Antique Italy to Medieval France,” in Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Internationales Kolloquium, Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin, Einsiedeln (Zürich: Gta Verlag; Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2010), 122. 10 Viollet-le-Duc to his father Emmanuel-Louis, Pau, June 28, 1833 and Gavarnie, July 18, 1833 in Geneviève Viollet-le-Duc, Les Viollet-le-Duc, 172, 189; trans. Martin Bressani, quoted in Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination, 74.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

25

he seriously considered retiring to Egypt, but instead he retreated shortly after to the Alps, beginning his annual routine of summer sojourns to the mountains.11 The second event was his four-month participation in the devastating Franco-Prussian war, where he served as lieutenant-colonel of an auxiliary corps of engineers, preparing the defenses of Paris until France’s defeat in 1871.12 During his service, he witnessed the collapse of the city and the death of several colleagues, as well as the loss of his close friend Prosper Mérimée, who passed away at the same time due to illness in Cannes, France. Following this war effort, Viollet-le-Duc withdrew more permanently to Switzerland, extending his visits and isolating himself again in the restorative mountainous setting. Viollet-le-Duc’s passion for geology, his desire to immerse himself in Alpine landscapes, and his drive to understand the underlying order of the rocky terrains paralleled his fixation with comprehending the underlying structure of Gothic architecture. In both cases, his rigorous analysis enabled him to rationalize an overwhelmingly affective system, allowing him to comprehend both the technical and sensitive qualities of these environments. Through his analysis, he demonstrated that the order of both the mountain and cathedral were calculated with scientific precision, offering a model of style and disposition to be emulated. He referred to the Gothic cathedral as a “delicate organism,” held in careful balance without anything excessive, superfluous, or purposeless.13 This surreptitious organic quality that he found in medieval architecture was mirrored in the apparently immobile solitudes of elevated peaks, where, despite the apparent chaos and lack of vegetal life, he noted that nature was working actively and incessantly in an ordered, balanced system.14 While the restoration of architecture was intended to “make the building live,” his analysis of Mont Blanc similarly brought to life the action and ongoing processes of the mountain.15 His approach to both followed the same analytical method, for, as he explained to an assembly of scientists from the Société géologique de France during an excursion to Brévent in 1875, certain points of geology and architecture were connected: “Mont Blanc is a ruin; one can find its primitive form 11 Robin Middleton, “Viollet-le-Duc et les Alpes: la dispute du Mont-Blanc,” in Viollet-le-Duc, centenaire de la mort à Lausanne, ed. Musée historique de l’ancien-évêché (Lausanne: Musée historique de l’ancien-évêché, 1979), 101–102. 12 “Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc,” Proceedings from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 15 (May 1879): 389. 13 Viollet-le-Duc, “Restoration,” 224. 14 Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc, 1–2. 15 Viollet-le-Duc, “Restoration,” 216.

26 Aisling O’Carroll

by following after ideas analogous to those applied in the restoration of a monument.”16 His methods, while precise, meticulous, and consistent, borrowed from both artistic and scientific technique. It was drawing and observation that enabled his scientific and restorative work across the scales of both architecture and geology.17

The functions of drawing Drawing features prominently throughout Viollet-le-Duc’s professional career and writing as a primary device of inquiry and expression – two distinct functions clearly evidenced in his work. Firstly, as an investigative tool, drawing offered a supplement to observation and was a generator of knowledge; and secondly, as a creative, synthetic act it served as the expression of a thought. The second function was only possible after the first, following his often-repeated sentiment that “synthesis follows analysis.”18 In both cases, drawing serves as a critical, rather than passive, activity: in the first case, the hand and pen operate as an extension of the eye of the observer; in the second, they extend the rational imagination of the mind that recomposes those elements traced in the former process. From a young age, under the tutelage of his uncle, the painter and art critic Étienne Delécluze (1781–1863), Viollet-le-Duc was indoctrinated into a visual tradition where art served as a quasi-scientific investigation of nature. Delécluze advocated the value of artistic technique as a scientific method, capable of generating new scientific knowledge and understanding: “The study and the practice of art lead to the scrupulous observation of nature, to the search for its underlying laws, to the hidden cause of all phenomena, to the search for truth, in short, to science and philosophy.”19 As a student of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), anatomical theory and drawings played a significant role in Delécluze’s own training. He carried this influence through in his teaching of Viollet-le-Duc and bestowed in his pupil a similar faith in the edifying capacity of technical representation. In particular, the 16 Alphonse Favre, “Compte-rendu de l’excursion du 6 Septembre au Brévent,” Bulletin de la Société géologique de France 3, no. 3 (1875): 793–794. 17 Françoise Véry, “À propos d’un dessin de Viollet-le-Duc,” in Frey, E. Viollet-le-Duc et le massif du Mont-Blanc: 1868–1879, 117. 18 Viollet-le-Duc, “Restoration,” 198; Viollet-le-Duc, “Lecture I,” 29. 19 Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Leonard de Vinci (Paris: Schneider & Langrand, 1841), 78; quoted in Martin Bressani, “Viollet-le-Duc’s Optic,” in Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, ed. Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), 131.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

27

anatomical drawing was upheld as a device for seeing – constructed by both the eye and mind, the pencil replaced the scalpel to reveal what existed in layers beneath the surface. These drawings required active engagement, critical reasoning, and a rational, scientific imagination to deduce the truth of what was not visible; be that the nervous system of the human torso, as depicted in the lavishly illustrated folios of Marc Jean Bourgery’s Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme (1831), a complete set of which Viollet-le-Duc held in his library, or the structural workings of an ancient monument, as illustrated in Viollet-le-Duc’s own drawing of the Thermes d’Antonin Caracalla (1867).20 Viollet-le-Duc used this technique of visually dissecting systems throughout his career, in both architectural details and geological drawings, constantly pairing critical observation with drawing and rational reflection. To draw was a way of learning through observation. Viollet-le-Duc developed his precision of sight such that rather than simply seeing an object, he visually penetrated it to understand its order. As described by one of his English translators and colleagues, Charles Wethered: His blue eyes were bright with ‘the truth and the fire of the Frank’; a glance from their clear, full depths discerned every detail of the object within view; oftener they seemed abstracted from surrounding things: he was looking within, as he would say of himself.21

Viollet-le-Duc emphasized this investigative capacity of drawing as a primary source of edification in both his technical, applied publications and notably in one of his fictional stories – architectural novellas, as he referred to them, which were intended to serve as a kind of educational text for the next generation.22 His final novella, Histoire d’un dessinateur. Comment on apprend à dessiner (“Learning to Draw: or, The Story of a Young Designer”), published posthumously in 1879, emphasizes the scientific, investigative capacity of 20 Item #1130 in Catalogue des livres composant la bibliothèque de feu M. E. Viollet-le-Duc, architecte, dont la vente aura lieu du mardi 18 au lundi 31 Mai 1880 (Paris: A. Labitte, 1880), 147; Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Thermes d’Antonin Caracalla. Analyse de la structure des thermes romains pour les élèves de l’Ecole spéciale d’architecture, March 1867, blacklead, watercolour, 0.758 x 0.595 m, Charenton-le-Pont, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine. 21 Charles Wethered, “Viollet-le-Duc: A Further Sketch of his Life and Works,” Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects IV (1888): 70. 22 Viollet-le-Duc emphasizes the importance of the skill in “Lecture IX” of the Entretiens, and in several entries to his Dictionnaire, including his articles “Restoration” and “Style”: EugèneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Lecture IX: On Principles and Branches of Knowledge with Which Architects Should Be Acquainted,” in Discourses, 388–389; Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Style,” in The Foundations of Architecture, 231–263; Viollet-le-Duc, “Restoration.”

28 Aisling O’Carroll

drawing and its importance as a tool for learning. The story follows the main characters, M. Marjorin and his young pupil, Jean, through the years of the latter’s apprenticeship as he begins to understand his surroundings through a series of lessons on topics including geometry, anatomy, and physics, each of which is conveyed and apprehended through the process of drawing.23 In one chapter, the pair spend twelve days traveling through the Alps, during which M. Marjorin explains the processes of erosion, glaciation, and upheaval to his eager pupil. Jean can only begin to perceive these explanations in the apparent disorder of the landscape once he begins carefully copying the mountains in his sketchbook.24 Similarly, Viollet-le-Duc used drawing as his primary method to ascertain geoscientific laws and relationships in his own Alpine investigation. His inexhaustible drive to observe and draw is evidenced by the immense collection of varied drawings produced during his Alpine excursions. As described by Wethered following a trip to visit the architect in Switzerland in the summer of 1876, Viollet-le-Duc would begin every day several hours before his guests, starting out into the landscape to sketch details of rock formations and glacial structures, composing perfect “transcripts of nature” that he would complete as color renderings in the evening hours preceding dinner.25 In producing these transcripts – observing and recording in detail what lay before him – he began to distill the underlying order of the landscape between the eye and the pencil. Through the process of recording countless views around the mountain, many of which were drawn and redrawn on multiple visits, he reinforced and affirmed his reading of the landform. Although every peak presented a different condition, it was possible for Viollet-le-Duc to observe the same underlying order in each through his mind’s eye. Many dozens of drawings record isolated fragments and elements of the Alpine landforms: peaks, moraines, glacial pools, and other details; while others tie the elements together, annotating their relations to one another. While the careful copying of visibly observable surroundings and phenomena demonstrates drawing as a tool for understanding, once layers unseen to the eye begin to be represented, drawing has already become an expression of thinking. In several analytical drawings, geometric linework is 23 M. Majorin explains the value of drawing and its role in education in a didactic conversation with his friend, M. Mellinot: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Contains a Memorable Conversation between MM. Mellinot and Majorin, and What Came of It,” in Learning to Draw; or The Story of a Young Designer, trans. Virginia Champlin (New York; London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1888), 60–74. 24 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Twelve Days in the Alps,” in Learning to Draw, 265–291. 25 Wethered, “Viollet-le-Duc: A Further Sketch of his Life and Works,” 63–64.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

29

Fig. 1.1. Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Rhomboèdres, sommets, structure ancienne reconstituée (pris dans le Val Ferret Suisse). Pencil on paper, undated, 159 x 249 mm. Charenton-le-Pont: Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. © Ministère de la Culture (France), Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, diffusion RMN-GP.

superimposed, providing a framework through which the process of erosion was re-traced. In contrast to the example of anatomical drawings where the pen incises the body to reveal what is concealed in layers below the surface, Viollet-le-Duc’s drawings of Mont Blanc rebuilt the former extension of the landforms in volumes above the present surface. Tracing overtop of the disintegrating peaks, he extrapolated lines and forms from the remaining faces and edges of stone to reveal their original extent and the enormity of erosion that had transpired since their initial uplift. In other drawings, pyramids and rhombohedrons are more determinedly superimposed to resolve the crumbling, angular profiles of the peaks and rubble into regular rhombohedral forms (Fig. 1.1.). Learning through observation was the central tenet of the analytical method that Viollet-le-Duc advocated within his design practice and historical investigations. A sincere adherence to this approach required neutral observation in order to truly draw only that which was seen without any bias towards its interpretation. However, there is evidence that Viollet-le-Duc developed his theory of the geometric order governing the earth’s crust prior to making his field observations in the Alps. In his article on “Style” in the eighth volume of his Dictionnaire raisonné (published in 1866, two years before his first Alpine expedition), he noted that the earth’s crust “is entirely in accordance with the laws of geometry,” and he explained

30 Aisling O’Carroll

the rhombohedron to be the basic geometric unit underlying its physical structure.26 The rationale for this explanation is provided purely through mathematical inductive reasoning. Beginning with the most irreducible geometric figure, the triangle, he produced pyramidal and rhombohedral volumes that were equally resistant and geometrically irreducible and, as he noted, quite adaptable to forming the crust of a sphere. The article demonstrates that his notion of the formal geometric order of geology was quite concretely established prior to his first expedition in 1868. Therefore, he arrived at the Alps already having an idea of what he expected to find and what he hoped to demonstrate through his observations. His observations and drawings, therefore, may be read as a deductive exercise in validating his earlier theory rather than as truly unbiased recordings of field observations. Thus, it is apparent that his interpretation of geological records and his study of landscape, although based on what was seen and existing in the ground, was the product of his own individual scientific and historical imagination. The influence of this perception carries through into his construction and reconstruction of the Alpine setting. The geometric order extracted through observations of the geological system, when paired with his understanding of the relationship between the physical elements of peaks, topography, glaciers, and snow, provided a geoscientific understanding of the mountain configuration that followed a set of rational rules. These rules, in turn, could then be reapplied in Violletle-Duc’s own reconstitutions.

Critical restoration and a modern style Rather than simply replicating what he observed – in Gothic architecture or Alpine geology – Viollet-le-Duc produced his “transcripts” not to copy but to make new. He endeavored to understand the governing laws and the order that inspired an emotional response in him, such that these laws could be applied in a new modern form and inspire similar sensations and ideas. The speculative nature of these reconstructions is what constitutes their status as art for Viollet-le-Duc, and what makes them so radical in the context of other more traditional practices. The panorama at La Vedette was an idealized construction, applying the laws of geology to a new geotectonic creation, just as the famous illustrations of the Gothic cathedral and the exploded spring point of an arch that accompany the 26 Viollet-le-Duc, “Style,” 237–240.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

31

articles “Cathédrale” and “Construction” in the Dictionnaire raisonné are fictive details of an idealized assembly.27 Both were constituted through the re-composition of principles of Gothic construction.28 Through these synthetic assemblies Viollet-le-Duc demonstrates his understanding of the existing Gothic system, as well as his ability to produce something new through its order. As he explains in the conclusion of “Lecture I” of the Entretiens, as time advances it becomes irrelevant to simply reproduce the structures of the past, however, the order and logic of these earlier forms can still guide the design of meaningful, inspiring art and architecture in the contemporary present: The past is past; but we must search into it sincerely and carefully; seeking not to revive it, but to know it thoroughly, that we may turn it to good account. I cannot admit that a reproduction of the forms of ancient art, of medieval art, or of that of the academies of Louis XIV, should be enforced upon the present,—simply because these forms were the expression of the manners of those times, and because our manners in the nineteenth century bear no resemblance to those of the Greeks or Romans, or to those of the feudal times, or of the seventeenth century; though the principles which guided the artists of the past are always true, always the same, and will never change as long as men are molded of the same clay.29

As a medium of expression, the forms of a period are directly tied to the manners, behaviors, and thinking of its particular moment in time. However, according to Viollet-le-Duc, the guiding principles that underpin the expression and order of a style are unchangeable and remain relevant to successive generations. An understanding of these underlying principles was essential to progressing new forms and a modern style as one must draw from true principles through modern capabilities. Through his meticulous copying of details of both geology and Gothic architecture, Viollet-le-Duc came to understand their respective order and internal relationships, a knowledge demonstrated in his synthetic construction of the panorama at La Vedette and the Gothic cathedral in his Dictionnaire raisonné.30 27 For the cathedral illustration, see: Viollet-le-Duc, “Cathédrale,” in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (Paris: B. Bance, 1854), 2:324; for the exploded arch detail illustration, see Viollet-le-Duc, “Construction: Voûtes,” in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (Paris: B. Bance, 1854), 4:93. 28 Véry, “Àpropos d’un dessin de Viollet-le-Duc,” 114–115. 29 Viollet-le-Duc, “Lecture I,” 32–33. 30 Véry, “Àpropos d’un dessin de Viollet-le-Duc,” 114–115.

32 Aisling O’Carroll

Earlier in “Lecture I,” Viollet-le-Duc noted the difficulty in finding a form that would be relevant for his present, given that the past already possessed the simple ideas of beauty that may otherwise have belonged to his own generation.31 He thus identifies the challenge of finding a meaningful form or style of modern art as the fundamental concern of students of architecture. In his own work, he appears to have provided a response to this challenge in his geological studies – offering a truly nineteenth-century style through his hybrid of artistic and scientific technique. Living in an era of rapidly increasing modern, scientific knowledge, such a hybrid approach was necessary to produce an order relevant to his time. In his article on “Style,” he describes the crystalline geometries of geological layers as the logical order or style present in all works, from mountains, to crystals, to human beings: “This is the example that nature has provided for us, the example we must follow when, with the help of our intelligence, we presume to create anything ourselves.”32 Following this logic, his Alpine investigation and his panoramic composition demonstrate his effort to understand an order specific to the capacities of his own modern generation. The works apply both artistic technique and geoscientific laws synthetically to produce a new, quasi-scientific style for the nineteenth century.

Scientific technique in the age of geohistory Viollet-le-Duc’s scientific interest in geological process and history was another motivation for his continued study and return to the peaks. His fascination with geology was supported by the discipline’s advances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that resulted from the sustained attention by scientific communities and popular culture.33 This interest was shared by others within the architecture profession. At a time when architects and the academy were collectively coming to terms with their own history and beginning to address the passage of time and the transition of styles, they simultaneously began considering these human-scale changes within the larger time frame of geohistory illuminated through 31 Viollet-le-Duc, “Lecture I,” 29. 32 Viollet-le-Duc, “Style,” 240. 33 For an in-depth discussion of the historical context of Mont Blanc and the shift of popular and scientific focus towards geohistory, see Martin J. S. Rudwick’s Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), especially the “Introduction” (1–11) and Chapter I: “1.1 A Savant on Top of the World” (15–22).

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

33

scientific study. While references to the longue durée were often integrated with architecture through didactic decoration and superficial adornments alluding to geology and science, Viollet-le-Duc attempted to integrate the logic of these geophysical processes with his own design method.34 He did not settle for simply an ornamental assimilation of natural references into architecture as a suggestion of geohistory, but rather he endeavored to base his architectural and archaeological science on the same principles that led to the discovery of the governing laws of the world.35 From a young age, Viollet-le-Duc possessed an interest in mineralogy and geology, stimulated perhaps by his own inclination, but certainly not without influence from his exposure to leading savants, including Alexandre Brongniart, a French chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist and friend of Viollet-le-Duc’s father, who would have been a regular presence at the weekly salons held in the family home.36 It was following a request from Brongniart for rock specimens that Viollet-le-Duc ascended Mount Etna during his Italian tour in 1836. The sublime environment of the slope and smoking crater left a powerful impression on the young architect. Additionally, Brongniart’s network of fellow savants provided further inspiration. The natural scientist, Georges Cuvier, with whom Brongniart collaborated on a study of the geology surrounding Paris, greatly influenced Viollet-le-Duc through his systemic approach to analysis and classification presented in his “Lectures on Comparative Anatomy,” while the French geologist, Élie de Beaumont, famed for his theory of the origin of mountain ranges and an obligatory reference in Viollet-le-Duc’s later study of Mont Blanc, is likely to be the “M. de Beaumont” who joined the young Viollet-le-Duc for part of his early trip through the Pyrenees.37

34 See Barry Bergdoll, “Of Crystals, Cells, and Strata: Natural History and Debates on the Form of a New Architecture in the Nineteenth Century,” Architectural History 50 (2007): 8–14 for his description of Henrich Gentz and Friedrich Gilly’s design for Berlin’s new mint, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s design for Berlin’s new Bauakademie. 35 Laurent Baridon, L’Imaginaire scientifique de Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1996), 74. 36 Armand Brulhart-Danna, “La Carte du massif du Mont-Blanc de Viollet-le-Duc, 1876,” in Frey, E. Viollet-le-Duc et le massif du Mont-Blanc: 1868–1879, 42. 37 Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart, Essai sur la géographie minéralogique des environs de Paris, avec une carte géognostique et des coupes de terrain (Paris: Baudouin, 1811); Georges Cuvier, Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, trans. William Ross (London: Wilson and Co., 1802); Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Letters from August, 1833, Voyage aux Pyrénées, 1833 (Lourdes: Les Amis du Musée Pyrénéen, 1972); Brulhart-Danna, “La Carte du massif du Mont-Blanc de Viollet-le-Duc, 1876,” 42.

34 Aisling O’Carroll

Although many of the books on the natural sciences listed in the catalog of Viollet-le-Duc’s library were second-hand sources and popularizations of scientific ideas, the works cited in his study of Mont Blanc – many of which are not included in his library catalog – clearly demonstrate that he was referencing first-hand, technical, scientific research.38 While an amateur himself, Viollet-le-Duc pursued his study of Mont Blanc with scientific rigor, meticulously measuring and recording the landscape with such precision that the work could make a relevant contribution to the sciences while remaining accessible to interested laymen. He also consulted on his work with expert scientists, including the famed Swiss geologist Alphonse Favre, whose study of Mont Blanc was cited in Viollet-le-Duc’s treatise and contained in his library.39 In a letter to Viollet-le-Duc in July 1875, Favre commented on the novelty and difficulty of Viollet-le-Duc’s ambitious restoration: “The reconstruction of the peaks of Chamonix! It was a new idea for me. Will you be able to reconstruct the domes from where the peaks came? Was there a single dome or more? Is it not very difficult to decide?”40 Favre suggested a few geological factors to consider in the reconstruction attempt and closed the letter with an invitation to continue the discussion in person. Favre’s interest and correspondence demonstrates that Viollet-le-Duc’s work was known and considered within the scientific community as well as within architectural spheres, and his response yet again reiterates the radical nature of the restoration effort.

A house and landscape In 1874, while working on the completion of his map and treatise, Violletle-Duc purchased a plot within a new subdivision drawn for the eastern 38 Catalogue des livres composant la bibliothèque de feu M. E. Viollet-le-Duc, architecte, dont la vente aura lieu du mardi 18 au lundi 31 mai 1880, 142–147; Laurent Baridon, “Bibliothèque,” in L’Imaginaire scientifique de Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1996), 72–74; Viollet-leDuc, Mont Blanc. 39 Alphonse Favre’s geological study of the Savoy Alps is recorded as Item #1088 in Catalogue des livres composant la bibliothèque de feu M. E. Viollet-le-Duc, 143, and is extensively referenced in Viollet-le-Duc’s treatise on Mont Blanc, particularly in Chapter I: “Primitive Configuration of Mont Blanc,” in Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc, 30, 34. 40 “La reconstruction des Aiguilles de Chamonix! C’était une idée nouvelle pour moi. Pourriez-vous arriver à reconstruire les dômes d’où les aiguilles sont prévenues? Y-avait-il un seul dôme ou plusieurs? N’est-ce pas fort difficile à décider?” Translation by author. Alphonse Favre to Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Letter to Viollet-le-Duc, from Geneva,” July 14, 1875, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

35

outskirts of Lausanne, Switzerland. Later that same year, he began construction on the modest house he designed for himself, which, set in the slope of the hillside, faced out over Lake Geneva towards the Alps beyond. Borrowing from military vocabulary, the house was aptly named “La Vedette,” meaning a mounted sentry or posted lookout. The home quite literally offered a lookout to observe the mountain range that had become the intense focus of his work. In addition to the direct observational quality inherent in the building’s visual orientation, La Vedette embodied the methodological approach that characterized Viollet-le-Duc’s career: observation being the central tool for learning and understanding the world around him. Within the home, his private life and daily affairs became intimately entangled with his work, his fascination with the Alpine landscape, and his theory of restoration. Facing south on the first floor of the building, the main room of the home served as his study as well as the public reception space and dining room. 41 Upon arriving at the home, visitors would climb a flight of thirteen granite steps, passing through a portico-like threshold to be welcomed at the front door into the entry hall. Inside the entry hall, to the right, a pair of double doors provided the public entrance into the main study.42 The prominence, size, and preferential situation of the study over other spaces of the home suggests the significance of the space and the centrality of work to Viollet-leDuc’s personal, private, and professional life. The room itself was optimally situated. Two tall doors with inset windows (each paired with a punched window with matching fenestration such that they appeared to be two sets of French doors) were set in alcoves, mirroring each other on the south wall and providing direct views of the Savoy Alps. Additionally, the doors opened onto a narrow balcony running the length of the façade. A bay window projected from the east façade, catching morning light and further mountain views. Along the north and west walls of the study, Viollet-le-Duc installed a stretched canvas on which he painted an expansive panorama depicting a mountain view from an elevated rocky outcrop. Painted canvas – or painted tapestry as it was also referred to – was employed by French architects and 41 Maurice Ouradou, “La Vedette, maison de Viollet-le-Duc à Lausanne,” in Encyclopédie d’architecture, vol. X (Paris: A. Morel, 1881), 49. 42 The configuration of La Vedette is determined through M. Ouradou’s written description, as well as the illustrations and plan drawings included with his article and an earlier publication of the house by E. Viollet-le-Duc. Ouradou, “La Vedette, maison de Viollet-le-Duc à Lausanne”; Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Lausanne, La Vedette, maison de Viollet-le-Duc, 1874–1876,” in Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Félix Narjoux, Habitations modernes, vol. 1 (Paris: A Morel, 1877), plate 161.

36 Aisling O’Carroll

decorators for interior adornment at the time due to its affordability and effectiveness at recreating the appearance of a woven tapestry. France led in the innovation of this novel technique. One manufacturer, M. Binant, developed a method of producing widths of canvas large enough that entire walls, like those in the study at La Vedette, could be spanned with a continuous, seamless surface. The weave and texture of the canvas was designed specifically to recreate most convincingly the texture of a woven tapestry.43 The manufacturer’s name became synonymous with the product: the Binant canvas. These large painted canvases were first brought into notice when they were displayed at the 1861 Exposition de l’union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie in Paris, which Viollet-le-Duc would certainly have known of if not attended, and then again at the Great Exhibition in London the following year. In both cases, the hangings attracted attention and received awards for their scale, effect, and seamlessness. Viollet-le-Duc was a vocal exponent of this form of interior decoration as a revival of the medieval practice of hanging woven tapestries. 44 He used painted canvases in his own projects and described the advantages of the technique in another of his architectural novellas, Histoire d’une maison (“The Story of a House” or “How to Build a House: An Architectural Novelette”). His high regard is highlighted in the following conversation between Paul, the youthful main character who is learning how to design and construct a house, and his cousin and mentor, Eugène, the architect, who further explains the benefits of painted canvas: “I never saw any hangings like this painted canvas before; they look very well; one might fancy they were tapestry.” “Yes; I cannot imagine why these kinds of hangings, which were formerly much used, should have been abandoned; for it is clear that everybody could not have Flemish or Gobelin tapestry, any more than Cordova leather. Those things are very costly; whereas, painted canvas hangings do not cost much more than wall papers, and less than upholstery hangings, chintz excepted.”45 43 Julien Godon, Painted Tapestry and Its Application to Interior Decoration: Practical Lessons in Tapestry Painting with Liquid Colour, trans. Benjamin Bucknall (London: Lechertier, Barbe, and Co., 1879), x–xi. 44 Nicholas Mander, “The Painted Cloths at Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire,” in Setting the Scene: European Painted Cloths from the Fourteenth to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Nicola Costaras and Christina Young (London: Archetype Publications, 2013), 25; Benjamin Bucknall, “Translator’s Note,” in Godon, Painted Tapestry, vi–viii. 45 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, How to Build a House, trans. Benjamin Bucknall, 2nd ed. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1876), 251–253.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

37

Fig. 1.2. Jean-Eugène Durand, Salon de la maison dite La Vedette avec des scènes de montagne peintes sur les murs par Viollet-le-Duc. Gelatin silver bromide print, 1890–1900, 300 x 400 mm. Charenton-le-Pont: Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. © Ministère de la Culture (France), Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, diffusion RMN-GP.

Eugène goes on to describe to Paul the texture and quality of the canvas, as well as the method of preparation, painting, and installation. His account matches with the advice given by French painter and decorative artist Julien Godon in his comprehensive book on the technique, La Peinture sur toile imitant les tapisseries et application à la décoration intérieure (“Painted Tapestry and Its Application to Interior Decoration”) published in 1877 and translated into English in 1878 by Viollet-le-Duc’s own translator, Benjamin Bucknall. (Viollet-le-Duc’s library contained only the English translation of the book.) Viollet-le-Duc’s Histoire d’une maison, written synchronously with the construction of his home in Lausanne, and Godon’s text offer a window into the assembly and installation of the stretched canvases in the study – likely adhered to the wall with marouflage application, though possibly also mounted on thin wooden frames, to create a seamlessly immersive effect. Passing from the entry hall into this study, a visitor would be transported to the remote landscape of Viollet-le-Duc’s Alpine world (Fig. 1.2.). The arrangement of the room framed the panorama in three panels, two panels on the north wall divided by a central column, and one panel on the west

38 Aisling O’Carroll

wall. Simultaneously, the mountain scene depicted offered a frame for the architectural elements set within it. As confirmed through the research of architectural historian Jacques Gubler, the scene does not represent an actual site, but rather it is Viollet-le-Duc’s own construction; a synthesis of geological knowledge and controlled tectonic restoration, translated through pigment and paint to the walls of the room. 46 Maurice Ouradou, Viollet-le-Duc’s son-in-law and professional colleague, described the represented site as having been painted according to drawings made of nature, reproducing the various elements of mountains, glaciers, forests, and lakes with an exactness and true harmony. 47 The only known study for the complete panorama is a 1:10 scale watercolor triptych of the scene, however, as a synthesis of his previously identified geotectonic principles, every one of Viollet-le-Duc’s Alpine transcripts serves as preparatory sketch for this idealized assembly.48 In the absence of construction drawings, Viollet-le-Duc’s analytical drawings of Mont Blanc and his studies for the configuration of his topographic map provide an understanding of the tectonic construction of the panorama. In an address to the French Société de géographie in 1874, Viollet-le-Duc stated that given the lack of writing on the subject, he had to rely solely on observation in order to understand the precise constitution of Mont Blanc.49 In fact, he also made use of the few earlier maps that existed by referencing their surveys, primarily relying on that of Captain Mieulet, published by the French Ministère de la guerre in 1865.50 The earlier maps, however, had gaps and inconsistencies in their surveys where they spanned areas that could not be reached or could not be accurately measured. Viollet-le-Duc’s ambition in the production of his own topographic map was to improve and correct these earlier examples. In order to verify the existing drawings 46 Jacques Gubler, “Architecture et géographie: excursions de lecture ainsi que deux manifestes de Viollet-le-Duc,” in Frey, E. Viollet-le-Duc et le massif du Mont-Blanc, 1868–1879, 105–106. 47 Ouradou, “La Vedette, maison de Viollet-le-Duc à Lausanne,” 49; Jacques Gubler, “Violletle-Duc et l’architecture rurale,” in Viollet-le-Duc, centenaire de la mort à Lausanne, ed. Musée historique de l’ancien-évêché (Lausanne: Musée historique de l’ancien-évêché, 1979), 119–120. 48 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, La Vedette, 1:10 Scale Study for the Mural Paintings in the Great Hall, n.d., watercolour on panel, 1.220m x 0.267m, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine. 49 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Nouvelle Carte topographique du massif du Mont-Blanc,” Bulletin de la Société de géographie 8 (December 1874): 59. 50 Brulhart-Danna, “La Carte du massif du Mont-Blanc de Viollet-le-Duc, 1876,” 49–53; M. Mieulet Capitaine d’État-Major, Massif du Mont Blanc, 1:40,000 (Dépôt topographique de la guerre, 1865).

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

39

and to collect new, more accurate information, he relied on observation and recording. To this end, he recorded hundreds of sketches and measured perspective views from various peaks, slopes, and vantage points throughout the mountain range. To ensure that the views were precise, accurate, and measurable, he made use of the téléiconographe, an instrument designed by his colleague, M. Révoil, that combined a camera lucida and telescope, allowing for the reproduction on a large scale of objects and scenes viewed at a great distance.51 Unlike other copying devices, such as the photographic camera, the téléiconographe required continued active engagement by the observer to record the viewed scene, thereby maintaining, and even enhancing through its accuracy, the edifying benefits of drawing and observation. Viollet-le-Duc used triangulation to translate his perspective views into planimetric polygons in order to produce a survey of the landscape for his map. The orthographic projections were iterated and adjusted in sketches on trace paper to achieve an exact configuration of the terrain.52 The geometric order of the landscape is evident in his working studies for the topographic map, where the arrangement of ridges and peaks was determined by first drawing them in their idealized rhombohedral structure. Layer upon layer of pencil outlines articulate the original geometric forms of masses, while fine black ink lines traced overtop record the present condition of the weathered profiles. In some sections of the projections, white watercolor is applied to give further form to the emerging topography, as though confirming the configuration of particular peaks through their rendering. In addition to delineating their existing configuration, Viollet-le-Duc used the topographic map to throw light on the geological phenomena that contributed to their production. Not only did he resolve the structural order of the landscape and relationship between physical elements in plan, but by meticulously recording the traces left by the movement of glaciers and the accumulation of snowfields at various times in the past, he developed the map as a figurative inventory of the history of glacial action on the landscape.53 In this way, he produced both an easily navigable device for orientation as well as a complete graphic record of the traces of glacial movement and geotectonic structure. His treatise, titled Le Massif du Mont Blanc, étude sur 51 Henri Révoil and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, “Le téléiconographe,” Gazette des architectes et du Bâtiment, no. 20 (1868): 203; Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc, 8–9; Paula Young Lee, “‘The Rational Point of View’: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and the Camera Lucida,” in Landscapes of Memory and Experience, ed. Jan Birksted (London; New York: Spon Press, 2000), 65–70. 52 Viollet-le-Duc, “Nouvelle Carte topographique du massif du Mont Blanc,” 45. 53 Viollet-le-Duc, 46.

40 Aisling O’Carroll

sa constitution géodésique et géologique sur ses transformations et sur l’état ancien et moderne de ses glaciers (“Mont Blanc: A Treatise on Its Geodesical and Geological Constitution; Its Transformations; and the Ancient and Recent State of Its Glaciers”), went into further detail on the glacial processes. While the first chapter of the treatise laid out a description of the original formation of the mountain, the penultimate chapter, titled “Description of the Massif of Mont Blanc,” offered a detailed account of the past movements of the mountain’s glaciers, noting the traces left by these movements on the surface of remaining rocks, the shape of the peaks and valleys, and the distribution of material across the landscape. This play-by-play account offers a legend for reading the record of time plotted in the topographic map, so that one can read the markings of the past elevation of the Glacier de l’Argentière in the hatched rendering of the slopes above the Aiguille de Chardonnet. Together, the map and treatise brought the mountain to life through the recollection of its history and the understanding of its ongoing processes and their governing order. The underlying geometry of the landscape was further elucidated in the didactic orthographic drawings and diagrams that illustrate the reconstitution of Mont Blanc in chapters one and four of the treatise. A series of drawings tentatively trace the invisible arcs of the original but long-eroded profiles, stretching from the edges of remaining fragments, while others draw out the crystalline geometry of rocks and peaks.54 Together, these works evidence Viollet-le-Duc’s tectonic and geoscientific understanding of the order of the Alpine landscape, a logic he imitated through interpretation in constructing the scene of the panorama. While the map and treatise offer a technical description and restoration of the landscape, the panorama offers a restoration of the experience and sensation of raw nature in these remote spaces.

The panorama Viollet-le-Duc’s treatment of his study was strongly inspired by his interest for polychromy and frescoes, first sparked on his tour of Italy in 1836 and 1837. The painted architecture that he saw on tour was brought to life by the colors and scenes applied to its surfaces. Writing on restoration in 1866, Viollet-le-Duc quoted from Ludovic Vitet’s 1831 report on ancient monuments 54 See Fig. 5, 5 bis and 5 ter in Chapter I: “Primitive Configuration of Mont Blanc,” and Fig. 34–36 in Chapter IV: “Glaciers and their Action on the Rocks,” in Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc, 22–24, 103–109.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

41

where he regretted that the forgotten loss of color from whitewashed interiors since the sixteenth century had caused “our imaginations [to] become less lively and less natural; [to become] dulled so to speak.”55 In the interior of La Vedette, as in the interior of many of his architectural restorations, Viollet-le-Duc reinstated the life and imaginative potential of the space by building historical narrative through the painted treatment of the room. The use of canvas and scenographic production was also influenced by his earlier experience with theatrical set design. Between 1832 and 1836, he was periodically employed painting sets for staged productions by Pierre-Charles Cicéri, the leading French set designer of the period, while later in his career he continued to be called upon for scenographic theatre productions by Napoleon III.56 This experience clearly influenced his installation in the study at La Vedette through the integration of architecture and landscape and the evocation of atmosphere and drama through setting. The scale of the panorama panels, their painterly quality, and spatial configuration produced a synesthetic experience of entering the space of the landscape, evoking the desolate environment that so attracted Viollet-le-Duc to the peaks. On the west wall, a small hill with exposed boulders and deposited scree extends from the foreground with a scattering of pines, scrappy in appearance from their exposure and the extremity of their situation. In the distance, on this exposed ridge, a simple, stone building nestles between protruding rock faces. With a single-entry door facing obliquely away from La Vedette and a thin line of smoke winding from the chimney, the structure merges with its rugged surroundings, offering a mirror of the viewer’s own situation in the landscape. The hill overlooks a low-lying valley, beyond which emerge the elevated ridges of peaks. To the right, a sunlit slope rises gradually to the top corner of the room, terminating in a peak – the highest point in the west view – that sits squarely centered over the public entrance, forming an almost perfect pediment above the door. The edge of the peak’s profile intersects with the doorframe, just barely slipping past as it stretches upwards. The peak itself is the most clearly defined in the view, articulated by the dark shading of cracks and crevices on its south face. On the left side of the view, a lower ridge of peaks slopes steeply from the valley. Its smooth curving slope suggests erosion, and an accumulation of debris is visible at its base. A single snow-covered peak emerges in the distance from between the left and right ridges of peaks. In contrast to the smooth slopes of the 55 Viollet-le-Duc, “Restoration,” 203. 56 Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination, 45; “Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc,” 398.

42 Aisling O’Carroll

mountains in front, the angular geometry appears to have been preserved on this higher, more distant peak, with angular faces protruding from the snow. A scattering of clouds rest above this peak, gently touching its north side – the white cumulus softening the clarity of the mountain profile and echoing the undulating form of the peaks below, appearing as further layers of topography extending into the distance. The doorframe of the public entry hugs the right edge of the west wall, hinged to the corner of the room. The offset location of the door and relatively small scale of the peak that frames it downplay the significance of the entrance inside the room. In contrast, the private entry door sits prominently in the center of the northwest wall panel, framed by the largest peak of the panorama. The foreground of this view rises gradually towards the right of the frame as it moves away from the viewer and drops off in the distance. The view lacks any middle ground, and instead, the massive mountain rises beyond the edge of the foregrounded slope. Exposed boulders, suggestive of deposited erratics, scatter the foreground in continuation of that of the west wall and the scattered trees begin to accumulate, forming more protected clusters of hardy conifers. On the massif beyond, multiple peaks gently pull away from the primary, central summit, articulated through the contrast of accumulated snow and blue shadows. The central peak is impressive in its scale, rising to nearly touch the top of the wall, yet it remains gentle and rounded in its overall form, referencing the mamillated appearance of Mont Blanc in its primitive form, as described by Viollet-le-Duc in his treatise.57 On either side of the peak, the slopes descend in gentle arcs. The final section of the panorama, on the northeast wall panel, depicts a second massive peak. Like the panel just described to its left, there is one main summit in the view. This peak has sharper angles and features, with a curving ridge running forward, towards the viewer. A second, lower ridge pulls away to the left of the main peak, while an even taller peak lurks beyond to its right, cut off by the corner of the room. The profile of the peak is clearly distinguishable from the sky, with dark shaded layers and slabs in contrast to the accumulated snow in the valleys between ridges. The mass of snow between the main peak and lower peak to its left is suggestive of a small glacier, with a glacial stream forming at its tail and running down the slope. On either side, the slopes run gradually down to the left and right of 57 “The aiguilles, now so sharp, which surround the principal summit of the mountain, and whose flanks exhibit masses of disjointed prisms and frequently parallel strata, are only the ruins of the general cluster of rounded eminences which the upheaval of protogine presented.” Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc, 19–21.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

43

the view, terminating in soft masses of deposited scree. In the foreground, an undulating landscape appears to follow the movement of the ridges beyond. The scattered trees of the previous sections amass in this view to a denser Alpine forest extending into the distance. The fireplace, with its smooth stone surround, sits in the center of this wall, between exposed rock faces in the foreground and with the forest stretching above. The main peak sits slightly offset beyond, with the glacial valley winding down above the mantle. In each view, a calm surface of water is visible in areas between the foreground and the base of the mountains. Its still surface evokes the coldness of an Alpine lake. In the west panel, only a small section is visible in the distance to the right beyond the stone building, abruptly cut off at the edge of the public entry door. But in the corner of the room, one can easily imagine this waterbody continuing, wrapping the fold between walls before reappearing on the left edge of the northwest panel where the slope of the massif runs smoothly down to its banks. On the right side of the northeast panel, at the base of the main peak, the slope drops off steeply, with a shadowed face of rock and trees plunging to end in the final extension of the waterbody. While disconnected, the fragments of water suggest an Alpine lake collected at the base of the peaks and separating the viewer in La Vedette from the mountains beyond. Together, in the folded space of the room, the three panels create a continuous mountain scene, wrapping the viewer. From the elevated, rocky outcropping, the viewer observes the mountain landscape in an eroded, ruinous condition. Although, as Viollet-le-Duc demonstrated in his treatise, the mountain could be restored to an original primitive arrangement, the incessant activity and process of weathering was fundamental to the landscape’s structure and, in fact, revealed its order. By reconstructing the Alpine scene in a partially ruined state, he demonstrated his knowledge and control of the system while alluding to the long history and endurance of the earth. Through the use of representation, Viollet-le-Duc operated at a territorial scale, expressing complex relations between landscape and architecture, and between history and order. His use of representation in reconstruction was not exclusive to landscape, however. According to Viollet-le-Duc, “art” had a particular capacity to trigger recollection.58 This capacity made representation central to his method of historical investigation and restoration of the past. In his introductory lecture to students of architecture, he outlined art’s 58 Viollet-le-Duc, “Lecture I,” 18–20.

44 Aisling O’Carroll

capacity to stimulate the relations between the senses and our imagination. The sensorial experiences and natural phenomena presented in architecture and landscape produced an emotional impression within the observer. By recreating the harmony of form and effect that produced such impressions, art could transport the viewer back to the situation where the physical sensation was previously experienced. Far from an expression of philosophical or metaphysical ideas – a perverse suggestion according to Viollet-le-Duc – the ideas and memories triggered in the mind in relation to (re)constructed sights and sounds, “however wonderful, are nonetheless real.”59 Thus, in “Lecture I,” he gave credence and authenticity to the sensations and ideas generated by the imagination in response to art and architecture.60 In this way, restoration through representation had the capacity to reproduce not only the physical, formal qualities of a building or landscape, but more importantly the emotional impression stimulated in the imagination by the environment. For Viollet-leDuc, this concept of art as critical, creative production was the fundamental significance of the practice of the architect – a practice that extended well beyond the confines of buildings to include archaeology, landscape, and geology. The synthesis of restoration, scientific knowledge, and painterly technique applied to the mountainous landscape epitomized his theory of art and restoration and can be traced to his early architectural works as well, including his first ever restoration project of the Chambres des Comptes, completed and exhibited in the 1836 Salon in Paris. Rather than a technical, orthographic reconstruction, the building was embedded within a complete scenic tableau, allowing the viewer to penetrate the historical memory. As architectural historian Martin Bressani notes, the most striking thing about the work is its “wedding of archaeological concerns with painterly representation.”61 Viollet-le-Duc created a similar effect in his view of the restored theatre in Taormina, completed during his Italian tour, which also makes use of the popular vantage of aerial panorama, in vogue at the time following the work of Pierre Prévost and Jean-Nicolas Huyot.62 The same technique was used in a pair of watercolors from Viollet-le-Duc’s Alpine study, painted in 1874.63 The two paintings depict the Chamonix 59 Viollet-le-Duc, 20. 60 Viollet-le-Duc, 25–26. 61 Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination, 58. 62 Bressani, 80. 63 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Le Glacier Des Bois et La Vallée de Chamonix, Aiguille Du Dru, Aiguille Verte. Actuellement., August 1874, gouache, pencil, watercolour, 0.296m x 0.704m, August 1874, Charenton-le-Pont, Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine;

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

45

valley from the same oblique aerial perspective, looking west over the valley towards the Mer de Glace with the Aiguille du Dru and Aiguille Verte visible just beyond the glacier. One of the paintings presents the scene in the summer with the valley a lush green full of heavily foliaged trees. The village of Les Bois is visible at the base of the valley, clustered between the Arve river and a branch of the glacial stream running down from the Mer de Glace (or Glacier des Bois, as it is referred to in the title of the paintings). The glacier itself is barely visible, with only its tail end wrapping down between the ridge in the foreground and the Aiguille du Dru. The second painting presents an icy, wintery depiction of the valley. At first glance, it appears to be simply a change in season, but the title gives cause for a closer look: Le glacier des Bois… Durant la période glaciaire. In fact, the second painting restores the Chamonix valley to its condition a century earlier when, during the “Mini Ice Age,” the Mer de Glace extended far beyond its present range, obstructing the Arve river and blanketing the valley under forty meters of ice. The glacier covered the village of Les Bois, stretching nearly as far south as the village of Chamonix itself. Viollet-le-Duc restored the lost glacier – which had retreated safely clear of the valley well before his visit – by carefully reading the traces it left on the facing slopes and studying the characteristics of the existing glaciers. He reconstructed the glacier, its lateral and medial moraines, as well as the extent of snow and ice covering the remaining exposed fragments of peaks. Although the notion of a glacial period was fairly well established by the time Viollet-le-Duc was working – thanks to the efforts of a pioneering group of scientists a quarter-century earlier, led largely by Louis Agassiz – his reconstruction presented the scene for the first time as one would have experienced it, demonstrating the enormity of the ice and the dramatic power that it had in shaping the landscape both physically and experientially.64 The painting’s frozen landscape entombed in ice presented a far more desolate and inhospitable terrain than the weathered slopes and verdant valley he walked through on his summer tours and depicted in the first painting. The merging of archaeological concern and painterly technique that Bressani noted in the Chambre des Comptes reconstruction is applied Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Le Glacier Des Bois et La Vallée de Chamonix, Aiguille Du Dru, Aiguille Verte. Durant La Période Glaciaire., August 1874, gouache, pencil, watercolour, 0.296m x 0.704m, August 1874, Charenton-le-Pont, Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. 64 Louis Agassiz, Études sur les glaciers (Neuchâtel: Jent et Gassmann, 1840); Louis Agassiz, Nouvelles Études et expériences sur les glaciers actuels: leur structure, leur progression et leur action physique sur le sol (Paris: Victor Masson, 1847); Albert V. Carozzi, “Agassiz’s Amazing Geological Speculation: The Ice-Age,” Studies in Romanticism 5, no. 2 (Winter 1966): 57–83.

46 Aisling O’Carroll

equally in each of these reconstructions, whether restoring an architectural or geological monument. The synthetic, artistic technique and mastery is what makes each reconstruction so effective. While Viollet-le-Duc’s artistic skill as a painter ensured the aesthetic experience and emotional impression of the works, each scene was reconstructed through a careful analytical process using the scientific techniques of archaeology and geology to ensure an accurate reconstruction of architecture and landscape, and furthermore relying on the historical imagination carried through these scientific investigations to restore the ambiance and experiential quality. Through these reconstructions and those of his career more broadly, Viollet-le-Duc developed a design practice where imagination was returned to the experience of buildings and landscapes – expressed through art, representation, and built form. According to the power of art and imagination that Viollet-le-Duc advocated, the space of his study at La Vedette would have transported him to the situation of awe and inspiration experienced on his visits to the Alps. The panorama merged with the space of the room materially as well as visually. In addition to the three painted panels, the study’s interior was elaborately decorated – the painted ceiling and ceiling joists, decorated timber columns, and further trompe l’œil application of curtains, plants, and a stone plinth encircling the room transformed the space to an elaborate, otherworldly experience.65 The foreground of the scene, with exposed boulders and scattered stones, terminated at a timber chair rail. Below this rail and painted to appear rusticated, the stone plinth translated the irregular erratics found above to an organized, architectural layer, painted in the same tones. While the door frames, base board, and chair rail were dark wood, the ceiling molding and joists were painted in a lighter color, close to the color of the sky in the panorama, allowing the scene to appear to extend vertically in the space. Both were distinguished from the panorama through polychrome accents of crimson red highlighting the chamfers and flutings in their timber construction. Meanwhile, the ceiling itself was dramatically highlighted, being fully painted in the same bold crimson hue. The integration of architecture and landscape within the room recalls early illustrations Viollet-le-Duc produced for the chapter on the Pyrenees in Charles Nodier’s publication, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’Ancienne France (1837).66 These early illustrations depict an elaborate 65 Gubler, “Viollet-le-Duc et l’architecture rurale,” 119–120. 66 Charles Nodier and Alphonse du Cailleux, “Les Pyrénées,” in Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’Ancienne France. Languedoc, vol. 3 (Paris: Gide fils, G. Engelmann, 1835).

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

47

conflation of architectural frames and landscape settings, inspiring romantic interpretations of the study at La Vedette. While the painted panels on the north and west walls of the study depicted wide views of the elevated mountain scene set between columns, the south and east walls presented scenic views of the Savoy Alps set within the frames of the windows and doors. Through this interpretation, each individual view monumentalizes a distinct landscape element or configuration through the architectural frame, placing the importance on the relationship between architecture and landscape, and the specific elements contained in each view. Taken as a whole, the three panels of the panorama constructed a restored monument to the geological order and natural process at work in the Alpine landscape. This engrossing monument was set in direct dialogue with the reality of the weathered Alps to the south, where the same order and process was evident at a later stage of development. A transect through the space offers a chronological and methodological sequence: from the present condition of the Alps, to the reconstruction of its idealized form. At the center of the room, the working desk sat in the liminal space between the restored mountain landscape and the Alps beyond – the space between the past and present, the monument and the reality, the ideal and the actual. Finally, in the immersive environment of the study, it is easy to imagine how the surrounding Alpine views may have been interpreted as a continuous landscape, stitching together the chronologies and peaks in a seamless terrain, at the center of which the room sat as an elevated belvedere. In this way, Viollet-le-Duc recreated the raw nature and solace of the peaks in the space of his study, placing himself in the midst of geological history and in the comfort of isolated elevations. Set within this continuous landscape, the presence of the house becomes less significant while the room itself serves as the anchor of a much larger terrain. As architectural historian André Corboz writes, “[the belvedere] creates a fixed relation between a given point of land and all those other points which can be seen from it. [It] transforms the landscape into a shape.”67 At La Vedette, the belvedere of the study generated the surrounding landscape in relation to the room itself, bringing the viewer closer to the elevated Alps than to the foyer outside its doors. Of all his works, this monumental restoration was the most ambitious in scale, and the most intimate and private in experience. Contained in the space of his studio at La Vedette, where he led a very private life, the 67 André Corboz, “The Land as Palimpsest,” trans. R. Scott Walker, Diogenes 31, no. 121 (March 1, 1983): 27.

48 Aisling O’Carroll

restored landscape was produced for Viollet-le-Duc himself. While all of his works were the creation of his own peculiar imagination, this project appears to have been the ultimate self-indulgence. His study at La Vedette became the final culmination of his life and work and the place in which he came to penetrate and occupy the historical space of nature’s origins and the space of the monument itself, achieving the desire of which a younger Viollet-le-Duc could only dream. In a letter to his father from his trip in Normandy and the Pyrenees in 1833, Viollet-le-Duc wrote: [I wish] to penetrate the proportions [of the monuments], to enter within their ideas, to feel as they [once] have felt, and not just to limit myself to possess them materially on pieces of [drawing] paper.68

It seems appropriate then, that it was in this room, sitting at his work desk, that Viollet-le-Duc died on 17 September 1879. In the years following, the house went through various owners and renovations, during which the main study was divided into two rooms and the panorama was lost.69 In 1975, the home was demolished. The loss of the home and panorama determined the scenographic reconstitution’s legacy as an ephemeral restoration. The panorama embodied Viollet-le-Duc’s practice of combining faithful observation of evidence with speculative, creative interpretation. Through the use of drawing and painterly representation, these two modes of working – both scientific and speculative – were seamlessly entangled in his Alpine investigation to produce a reconstruction that oscillated between its original referent and something new, through both the making and reception of the painted panorama. The work was simultaneously an act of creation and a restoration of the largest monument of geohistory.

Bibliography Agassiz, Louis. Études sur les glaciers. Neuchâtel: Jent et Gassmann, 1840. ———. Nouvelles Études et expériences sur les glaciers actuels. Leur structure, leur progression et leur action physique sur le sol. Paris: Victor Masson, 1847. Baridon, Laurent. L’Imaginaire scientifique de Viollet-le-Duc. Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1996. 68 Viollet-le-Duc, Les Viollet-le-Duc, 124; trans. M. Bressani, quoted in Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination, 47. 69 Jacques Gubler, email correspondence with author, “La Vedette,” June 2018.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

49

Bergdoll, Barry. “Of Crystals, Cells, and Strata: Natural History and Debates on the Form of a New Architecture in the Nineteenth Century.” Architectural History 50 (2007): 1–29. Bressani, Martin. Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879. London: Routledge, 2016. ———. “From Antique Italy to Medieval France.” In Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-leDuc. Internationales Kolloquium, Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin, Einsiedeln, 112–127. Zürich: Gta Verlag; Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2010. ———. “Viollet-le-Duc’s Optic.” In Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, edited by Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte, 118–39. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003. Brulhart-Danna, Armand. “La Carte du massif du Mont-Blanc de Viollet-le-Duc, 1876.” In E. Viollet-le-Duc et le massif du Mont-Blanc, 1868–1879, edited by Pierre A. Frey, 39–60. Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 1988. Bucknall, Benjamin. “Translator’s Note.” In Godon, Julien. Painted Tapestry and Its Application to Interior Decoration: Practical Lessons in Tapestry Painting with Liquid Colour, by Julien Godon. London: Lechertier, Barbe, and Co., 1879. Carozzi, Albert V. “Agassiz’s Amazing Geological Speculation: The Ice-Age.” Studies in Romanticism 5, no. 2 (Winter 1966): 57–83. Catalogue des livres composant la bibliothèque de feu M. E. Viollet-le-Duc, architecte, dont la vente aura lieu du Mardi 18 au lundi 31 mai 1880. Paris: A. Labitte, 1880. Corboz, André. “The Land as Palimpsest.” Translated by R. Scott Walker. Diogenes 31, no. 121 (1 March 1983): 12–34. Cuvier, Georges. Lectures on Comparative Anatomy. Translated by William Ross. London: Wilson and Co., 1802. Cuvier, Georges, and Alexandre Brongniart. Essai sur la géographie minéralogique des environs de Paris, avec une carte géognostique et des coupes de terrain. Paris: Baudouin, 1811. Delécluze, Étienne-Jean. Leonard de Vinci. Paris: Schneider & Langrand, 1841. “Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.” Proceedings from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 15 (May 1879): 394–399. Favre, Alphonse. “Compte-rendu de l’excursion du 6 septembre au Brévent.” Bulletin de la Société géologique de France 3, no. 3 (1875): 793–794. ———. Letter to Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. “Letter to Viollet-le-Duc, from Geneva,” July 14, 1875. Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine. Frey, Pierre A. “E. Viollet-le-Duc, itinéraire d’un dessinateur.” In E. Viollet-le-Duc et le massif du Mont-Blanc, 1868–1879, 11–38. Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 1988. ———. “Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, itinéraires d’un architecte géologue.” In Viollet-leDuc et la montagne, edited by Pierre A. Frey and Lise Grenier, 54–70. Grenoble: Glénat, 1993.

50 Aisling O’Carroll

Godon, Julien. Painted Tapestry and Its Application to Interior Decoration: Practical Lessons in Tapestry Painting with Liquid Colour. Translated by Benjamin Bucknall. London: Lechertier, Barbe, and Co., 1879. Gubler, Jacques. “Architecture et géographie: excursions de lecture ainsi que deux manifestes de Viollet-le-Duc.” In E. Viollet-le-Duc et le massif du Mont-Blanc, 1868–1879, edited by Pierre A. Frey, 91–108. Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 1988. ———. Letter to O’Carroll. “La Vedette,” June 2018. ———. “Viollet-le-Duc et l’architecture rurale.” In Viollet-le-Duc, centenaire de la mort à Lausanne, edited by Musée historique de l’ancien-évêché, 111–120. Lausanne: Musée historique de l’ancien-évêché, 1979. Lee, Paula Young. “‘The Rational Point of View:’ Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and the Camera Lucida.” In Landscapes of Memory and Experience, edited by Jan Birksted, 63–76. London; New York: Spon Press, 2000. Mander, Nicholas. “The Painted Cloths at Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire.” In Setting the Scene: European Painted Cloths from the Fourteenth to the TwentyFirst Century, edited by Nicola Costaras and Christina Young, 24–32. London: Archetype Publications, 2013. Middleton, Robin. “Viollet-le-Duc et les Alpes. La dispute du Mont-Blanc.” In Viollet-le-Duc, centenaire de la mort à Lausanne, edited by Musée historique de l’ancien-évêché, 101–10. Lausanne: Musée historique de l’ancien-évêché, 1979. Mieulet, Capitaine d’État-Major, M. “Massif du Mont Blanc.” 1: 40,000. Dépôt topographique de la guerre, 1865. Nodier, Charles, and Alphonse de Cailleux. “Les Pyrénées.” In Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’Ancienne France. Languedoc. Vol. 3. Paris: Gide fils, G. Engelmann, 1835. Ouradou, Maurice. “La Vedette, maison de Viollet-le-Duc à Lausanne.” In Encyclopédie d’architecture, X: 49–51. Paris: A. Morel, 1881. Révoil, Henri, and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. “Le téléiconographe.” Gazette des architectes et du bâtiment, no. 20 (1868): 203. Rudwick, Martin J. S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago, IL/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Véry, Françoise. “À propos d’un dessin de Viollet-le-Duc.” In E. Viollet-le-Duc et le massif du Mont-Blanc, 1868–1879, edited by Pierre A. Frey, 109–18. Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 1988. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel. Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle. Vol. 2. Paris: B. Bance, 1854. ———. Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle. Vol. 4. Paris: B. Bance, 1854. ———. Learning to Draw; or The Story of a Young Designer, translated by Virginia Champlin. New York; London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1888.

Panor ama as Critical Restor ation

51

———. How to Build a House. Translated by Benjamin Bucknall. 2nd ed. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1876. ———. La Vedette, 1:10 Scale Study for the Mural Paintings in the Great Hall. n.d. Watercolor on panel, 1.220m x 0.267m. Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine. ———. “Lausanne, La Vedette, maison de Viollet-le-Duc, 1874–1876.” In Habitations modernes, by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Félix Narjoux, plate 161. Paris: A Morel, 1877. ———. Le Glacier Des Bois et La Vallée de Chamonix, Aiguille Du Dru, Aiguille Verte. Actuellement. August 1874. Gouache, pencil, watercolor, 0.296m x 0.704m. Charenton-le-Pont, Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. ———. Le Glacier Des Bois et La Vallée de Chamonix, Aiguille Du Dru, Aiguille Verte. Durant La Période Glaciaire. August 1874. Gouache, pencil, watercolor, 0.296m x 0.704m. Charenton-le-Pont, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine. ———. Discourses on Architecture, translated by Benjamin Bucknall. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1860. ———. Lettres d’Italie (1836–1837) adressées à sa famille. Edited by Geneviève Viollet-le-Duc. Paris: Léonce Laget, 1971. ———. Mont Blanc: A Treatise on Its Geodesical and Geological Constitution; Its Transformations; and the Ancient and Recent State of Its Glaciers. Translated by Benjamin Bucknall. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877. ———. “Nouvelle Carte topographique du massif du Mont-Blanc.” Bulletin de la Société de géographie 8 (December 1874): 42–60. ———. The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné, translated by Kenneth D. Whitehead, 195–227. New York: George Braziller, 1990. ———. Thermes d’Antonin Caracalla. Analyse de la structure des thermes romains pour les élèves de l’Ecole spéciale d’architecture. March 1867. Blacklead, watercolor, 0.758 x 0.595 m. Charenton-le-Pont, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine. ———. Voyage aux Pyrénées, 1833. Lourdes: Les Amis du Musée Pyrénéen, 1972. Viollet-le-Duc, Geneviève. Les Viollet-le-Duc. Histoire d’une famille, documents et correspondances. Genève: Slatkine, 2000. Wethered, Charles. “Viollet-le-Duc: A Further Sketch of his Life and Works.” Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects IV (1888): 62–76.

About the author Aisling O’Carroll is a doctoral candidate and Lecturer (Teaching), Year Coordinator in Landscape Architecture, at The Bartlett School of Architecture,

52 Aisling O’Carroll

UCL. Her PhD in Architectural Design addresses the relations between history, narrative, and representation in architecture, landscape, geology, and hybrids of the three – examining, in particular, critical approaches to reconstruction in design. She received her degree in architecture from the University of Waterloo and her Master in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). She has previously taught graduate design studios at Harvard GSD, The Bartlett School of Architecture, and the University of Toronto. She is co-founder and co-editor in chief of The Site Magazine.

2.

An Ephemeral Museum of Decorative and Industrial Arts: Charle Albert’s Vlaams Huis Daniela N. Prina

Abstract Around the 1870s, artists such as Charle Albert aimed to find a decorative unity of style through their personal homes, with the precise desire to repropose the original aspects of Flemish culture. The Vlaams Huis by Charle Albert was decorated in a variety of ancient Flemish styles ranging from late Gothic to Baroque. The interior pieces were organized in a sequence revealing the historical evolution of Flemish Renaissance decorative styles, thus illustrating the country’s ancient roots: they narrated national history and served as a model for Belgian artists. This chapter aims to give a new reading of the Vlaams Huis linking historical and artistic research, educational strategies, heritage promotion, and identity politics. Keywords: Decorative arts, Flemish Renaissance Revival, Belgium, design reform, Charle Albert

Introduction: Flemish neo-Renaissance and the construction of a “system of the arts” In 1868, the successful architect and decorator Charle Albert (born Albert Charle in 1821) bought a piece of land in Watermael-Boitsfort, on the outskirts of Brussels.1 The following year, he started construction of a small castle 1 For an exhaustive study on Charle Albert see Jean de Paepe, “Bijdrage tot de studie over Charle Albert, architect-décorateur (1821–1889),” (Master’s thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1986).

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_ch02

54 

Daniel a N. Prina

for his family. An autodidact, Charle Albert designed the castle entirely by himself, and modestly called it his “Vlaams Huis,” his “Flemish House.” The Vlaams Huis was not only his personal Buen Retiro and masterpiece, but also an outstanding example of Belgian Flemish neo-Renaissance architecture. This revival aimed to rejuvenate a local interpretation of the Greco-Roman tradition and the Italian Renaissance. 2 Flemish neo-Renaissance had started to be popularized in the 1840s, first as the subject of literary and artistic works such as El Maestro del Campo and Lord Strafford by Félix Bogaerts, illustrated by history painter Nicaise De Keyser with extremely accurate engravings showing the fashion trends and decorative arts of the period. Later, thanks to the publication of numerous books, manuals, and ornamental grammars, it began to be seen as a stylistically valuable model appropriate for industrial use due to its picturesque characteristics as well as for the intelligibility of its design, thus confirming the attribution of a certain educational vocation to the Renaissance period: its clear and innate harmonic rules easily lent itself to explicit decorative use.3 Indeed, models belonging to the various ancient and modern Flemish Renaissance variations, with particular reference to those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were used in the 1840s in Rubenesque ephemeral decorations and parades, and from the 1850s, especially in pieces of furniture, fixtures, and decorative accessories. 4 By reflecting the “Golden Age” of Flemish culture, 2 The most complete work to date on the Flemish Neo-Renaissance is: Alfred Willis, “Flemish Renaissance Revival in Belgian Architecture (1830–1930),” (PhD, Columbia University, 1983). 3 Examples of Flemish Renaissance appeared in various books from the 1860s onward. The publisher Charles Claesens edited in 1862 a work of Godefroid Umé, L’art decorative. Modeles de decoration et d’ornementation, which contained designs of architectonic character by artists like Vredeman de Vries, Frans Floris, and Rubens. In the 1870s, the most relevant model-books were published between 1869–1871 by G.A. Van Trigt: a series of reprints of designs by Paulus Vredeman de Vries such as Verscheyden Schrynwerk Als Portalen, Kleerkalen, Buffeten, Ledikanten, Tafels, Kisten, Stoelen, Bancken, Schabellen, Hantdoex-rollen, Glasborden en veel andere Soorten van Werken, and Hans Vredeman de Vries Recueil de cartouches, Recueil de caryatides, Recueil d’Arabesques and Variae Architecturae Formae, of which Charle Albert owned an authentic 1601 copy. Hans Vredeman de Vries, along with Cornelius Floris, was considered the most important architect of Flemish Renaissance style in its mature expression. Vredeman’s designs, therefore, were regarded with attention by nineteenth-century Belgian architects and decorators interested in the revival. Flemish Renaissance started to be historicized in the 1870, thanks mainly, to a series of studies written by Auguste Schoy, which culminated with the publication, in 1879, of his Histoire de l’influence italienne sur l’architecture dans les Pays-Bas, already awarded by the Académie Royale de Belgique in 1873. All these books were owned by Charle Albert. See Catalogue de la bibliothèque et de la collection d’estampes, de gravures, etc. de feu Charle Albert (Brussels: Imprimerie Victor Verteneuil, 1890). 4 Willis, “Flemish Renaissance,” 70.

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

55

the Flemish Renaissance embodied the values of the supremacy of Belgian crafts, techniques, and art. An evocative taste, more than a formal interest, was therefore present within the first manifestations of the Renaissance revival in Belgium, under the cultural and figurative influence of the local Flemish painting schools of Nicaise De Keyser, Gustaf Wappers, and Henri Leys, with specific attention to decoration and craft rather than the structure of the buildings.5 The neo-Renaissance style primarily became popular in two eminent centers: Antwerp, the Belgian cultural capital, and Brussels, the political and administrative capital of the fledgling nation-state. In Antwerp, the evocation of the Flemish “Golden Age” was instrumental in reinforcing the city’s identity as a prestigious economic and artistic center.6 Indeed, due to the reputation and great tradition of its painting school, Antwerp’s Academy of Fine Arts was the most important artistic establishment in the country at the time.7 In Brussels, not only did the revival mirror the ambitions of its entrepreneurial class, which aspired to be represented through a romantic stance as standard bearers of the civic values of the communal past, but it also interpreted the moral, artistic, and political ideals of a circle of liberal French-speaking intellectuals who aimed at building a new and progressive Belgian society.8 Most of them were involved in educational reforms and deemed it necessary to counter the problems posed by the new and intense challenges fermenting in the context of the economic, political, and institutional transformations that the young nation was facing at the time.9 Already a highly industrialized country towards the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, Belgium started to question professional education, and raised general reflections concerning the different local educational 5 Judith Ogonovszky-Steffens, La peinture monumentale d’histoire dans les édifices civils en Belgique (1830–1914) (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1999). 6 See Piet Lombaerde, “A la recherché d’une identité historique: l’architecture néo-Renaissance à Anvers au 19ème siècle,” in Le XIXe siècle et l’architecture de la Renaissance, ed. Fréderique Lemerle, Yves Pauwels, and Alice Thomine Berrada (Paris: Picard, 2010), 165–178 and Inge Bertels, “Expressing Local Specificity: The Flemish Renaissance Revival in Belgium and the Antwerp City Architect Pieter Jan Auguste Dens,” Architectural History 50 (2007): 149–170. 7 See Johan Pas et al., eds. Contradicties. Koninklijke Academie Voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen 1663–2013 (Ghent: MER, 2013) and Els De Vos and Piet Lombaerde, eds. Van Academie tot Universiteit. 350 jaar architectuur in Antwerpen (Antwerp: UPA, 2013), 70–87. 8 Benoît Mihail, “Un mouvement culturel libéral à Bruxelles dans le dernier quart du XIXe siècle, la ‘néo-Renaissance flamande,’” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 76/4 (1998): 979–1020. 9 Daniela N. Prina, “Les intérieurs bruxellois et les arts décoratifs dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Entre les modifications du goût et les enjeux didactiques, idéologiques et industriels,” Bruxelles Patrimoines 19–20 (2016): 66–77.

56 

Daniel a N. Prina

and productive initiatives that, in the past, had secured the prosperity of the different provinces. Indeed, the products of Belgian industrial production were regarded as imitations deprived of original qualities by contemporary commentators, and their lack of artistic merit limited their competitiveness on international markets.10 For this reason, following the foreign proposals made by Gottfried Semper and Léon de Laborde, formulated after the Great Exhibition of 1851, the myth of the medieval and renaissance workshop and the cultural, artistic, economic, and social value of “minor arts” were rediscovered. It was believed at the time that reviving the sources of Belgian national art would help the qualitative development of Belgian products. Some of the earliest examples of appreciated Flemish Renaissance revival decorative accessories and furniture were displayed at the annual exhibition of the Association for the Encouragement and the Development of Industrial Arts in Belgium.11 The Association was formed on the model of the English associations, under the leadership of the liberal burgomaster of Brussels, Charles de Brouckère, after London’s Great Exhibition. Supported by politicians, artists, producers, and Belgian industrialists, the Association aimed at improving the decorative production of the country through the organization of recurrent exhibitions, the formation of collections of objects of good taste, the introduction of measures to patent design models and inventions. The program of the Association was ambitious and very detailed; its exhibitions were held with a certain frequency (in 1853, 1854, 1856, 1857 and 1861) and included not only objects, but also projects of ornamentation and decoration for exteriors and interiors of all kinds of buildings, as well as for furniture, designs, models, procedures, devices and products related to the industrial arts. In 1853, Charle Albert received an honorable mention for the design of an imposing sideboard in neo-Renaissance style.12 At the 1854 exhibition, he was awarded in the architecture section.13 This endowment gave him the possibility to work for the Atelier Corman (later Compagnie des Bronzes) for almost a decade (from 1954 to 1963).14 He contributed a series of lamps designed for the Atelier Corman to the 1857 exhibition of the Association, 10 Léon De Laborde, De l’union de l’art et de l’industrie (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1856), 332–333. 11 For an overview of the Association’s activities, see the Catalogue de l’exposition et des concours institués par l’Association pour l’encouragement et le développement des arts industriels en Belgique, published in Brussels by Guyot, in 1854, 1856, 1857, and 1861. 12 Catalogue de l’Exposition instituée par l’Association pour l’encouragement et le développement des arts industriels en Belgique. Album de l’exposition de 1853 (Brussels: Van der Kolk, 1854), 9. 13 Thierry Lancelot, La Maison Flamande de Boitsfort (Brussels: Éditions d’art Laconti, 1993), 98. 14 For more information see Christine Dupont, Eliane Gubin, Serge Jaumain, and Jean-Pierre Nandrin, Fabrique d’art. La Compagnie des bronzes (1854–1979) (Brussels: La Fonderie, 2005).

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

57

thereby showing that the Flemish Renaissance revival’s versatility made the style adaptable to modern comfort. Indeed, he revealed the aspiration to establish a national tradition based on rational principles drawn from the study of past stylistic references that could be used to reconnect art to the present time. It was, therefore, no coincidence that the interest in this revival first developed in decorative arts: the association with the Flemish Renaissance revival offered scope for several typical nineteenth-century objectives as the reunification of major and minor arts, and the elimination of the conflict between conception and execution. The reasons for the rise of the Flemish Renaissance and for the support for new bodies from industrialists, artists, and architects such as Charle Albert, was indubitably related to the economic and political climate and to the new cultural exuberance associated with the consolidation of Belgian unity. As such, the Flemish Renaissance revival, recalling an age of prosperity and supposed civic liberty, began to be promoted as a secular national style, becoming an alternative to neo-Gothic, which had been previously rediscovered thanks to studies such as Mémoire sur l’architecture ogivale en Belgique (1840), written by Antoine Schayes. These studies were supported by newly formed institutional bodies connecting historical and artistic research, educational strategies, heritage promotion, and government cultural policies. Schayes’s study received an award from the Fine Arts Class (created in 1845) of the Académie Royale de Belgique, and acknowledged Gothic architecture as a national architectural expression. This standpoint was also supported by the work of the Commission Royale des Monuments (founded in 1835), which actively participated in the protection of national heritage. However, Gothic architecture was soon seized upon by Belgian Catholic factions, who used it as a political and ideological medium to support their programs and their societal vision.15 Flemish neo-Renaissance was adopted by liberals as an alternative to both Catholic neo-Gothic and Neoclassical architecture and design. Supporters of the Flemish neo-Renaissance believed it would give impetus to industrial production in the arts and architectural design. They saw it as an instrument aimed at building a broad modernity that could solve national, cultural, and social problems. Politicians, industrialists, designers, architects, and clients were all engaged in this enterprise, an all-encompassing societal project to reinterpret the Flemish Renaissance. Indeed, the non-specific solutions offered by the academies of fine arts to the problems posed by industrialization and the restricted popularity that 15 Jan De Maeyer and Luc Verpoest, De Sint-Lucasscholen en de neogotiek 1862–1914 (Leuven: Kadoc, 1988).

58 

Daniel a N. Prina

neo-Renaissance themes enjoyed in these institutions, led to the exploration of different and more appropriate places to build a “system of the arts.”16 Examples taken from books, inspired by Flemish Renaissance ornaments and crafts, were preferred in the drawing schools for artisans, industrial workers, and craftsmen, already active in Brussels’ outskirts in the 1860s in order to orientate future designers towards the application or the reinvention of a national style.17 These schools became the first vehicles for the rediscovery of the Flemish Renaissance. Theoretical courses with the aim of developing a student’s personal knowledge and taste insisted on observation and the comprehension of natural ornament and of the styles of the past.

Ephemeral exhibition spaces as mirrors of civic, ethical, and cultural values The growing attention to the art industry debate and the importance of its repercussions, first revealed through the Association’s exhibitions for the encouragement and development of industrial arts in Belgium, was further illustrated by several other significant events mirroring Belgium’s industrial, political, and artistic ambitions. Brussels’ 1874 Exposition des arts industriels, organized entirely by a group of liberal private entrepreneurs and sympathizers of the Flemish movement, headed by marble manufacturer Auguste Mignot-Delstanches, affirmed the nation’s dynamism through the presentation of artifacts linked to two major domains: industrial arts and architecture.18 Charle Albert was among the participants, and for the occasion displayed a series of neo-Renaissance tapestries.19 The exhibition aimed at promoting industrial arts and their development; it also encouraged the creation of a museum of industrial arts, a powerful instrument that would have implemented the development of Belgian design, thus completing the coveted reform projects launched by the government – through the work of a commission, the Conseil de perfectionnement de l’enseignement des arts du dessin, formed by the Minister of Internal Affairs Charles Rogier (1859) – and 16 Daniela N. Prina, “Design in Belgium before Art Nouveau: Art, Industry, and the Reform of Artistic Education in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Design History 23/4 (2010): 329–350. 17 Exposition des Académies et des écoles de dessin et Congrès de l’enseignement des arts du dessin (Brussels: Lelong 1869): 202–204. 18 Exposition nationale des arts industriels. Bruxelles 1874. Catalogue Officiel, vol. VIII (Brussels: Vanderauwera, 1874). 19 Exposition nationale, 58–59.

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

59

by private initiative.20 The development of a museum – a “Belgian South Kensington” – launched by Charles Buls, later burgomaster of Brussels and a pioneer in the development and promotion of Belgian decorative arts, was well-received but was not immediately realized.21 Belgium therefore remained deprived of a specialized museum of decorative and industrial arts for decades, whereas similar institutions were thriving in the most important cities across Europe.22 It was, therefore, mainly through the organization of various displays of industrial and historical decorative arts that attempts to educate artisans and artists, and elevate public taste, was acknowledged with renewed vigor. With Brussels’ 1880 Jubilee Exhibition, modeled on the World’s fairs, celebrating the fifty years of the country’s independence, the Belgian government sought to strengthen a progressive vision of the young but already powerful nation, and reclaim its history by engaging with its great artistic tradition. The government seized the opportunity to support the industrial arts, leveraging them to foster a national consciousness and encourage a sense of national “belonging.” The available funds were mainly destined for the fête industrielle, which included two exhibitions – one focused on contemporary industrial arts, the other on ancient decorative arts – both accompanied by detailed catalogs.23 Industrial arts were therefore presented at the Jubilee Exhibition as the past, present, and future of the nation, helping to valorize and revive the great Belgian artistic tradition. 20 For an in-depth analysis of Belgian reforms in artistic education during the second half of the nineteenth century, see Daniela N. Prina, “L’unité des arts avant l’Art nouveau. La réforme de l’enseignement artistique et industriel dans la deuxième moitié du dix-neuvième siècle,” (PhD, Politecnico di Torino/Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2009). 21 On Buls’ project, see Charles Buls, “Un projet de musée populaire,” La Revue de Belgique VI (Mai 1874): 45–69 and Charles Buls, Musée des arts industriels. Programme adopté par la Commission de l’Exposition des arts industriels de 1874 (Brussels: Vanderauwera, 1875). On the South Kensington Museum, see Anthony Burton, Vision and Accident: The Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publishing, 1999) and Julius Bryant, Art and Design for All, The Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publishing, 2011). On Buls, see Marcel Smets, Charles Buls et les principes de l’art urbain (Liège: Mardaga, 1995). On the creation of a Belgian decorative arts museum, see Daniela N. Prina, “Belgian Decorative Arts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth century. Needs for a National Museum and Debates surrounding Didactic Collections in Brussels,” Journal of the History of Collections 24/2 (2012): 257–274. 22 Similar museums were born in Vienna and Lyon in 1864, in Karlsruhe in 1865, in Berlin and Munich in 1868, in Nuremberg in 1869, and in Rome in 1874. 23 Exposition nationale de 1880. Catalogue officiel. Première section. Enseignement, arts industriels et décoratifs, (Brussels: Mertens, 1880); Exposition nationale de 1880. IVe section: Industries d’art antérieures au XIXe siècle. Catalogue officiel (Brussels: Vanderauwera, 1880); Les merveilles de l’art ancien en Belgique (Brussels: Rozez, 1890); and Théophile Fumière, Les arts décoratifs à l’exposition du Cinquantenaire belge (Brussels: Guyot, 1880).

60 

Daniel a N. Prina

For this special occasion, the organizing committee of the Jubilee Exhibition decided to officially display as an external annex two of the most emblematic examples of architecture of the neo-Flemish Renaissance, Jules Van Ysendyck’s Hotel de Ville in Cureghem (1879) and Charle Albert’s Vlaams Huis.24 The neo-Flemish Renaissance had, by that time, reinforced its presence in Brussels, thanks in particular to the Concours de façades organized in 1872 and 1876 to counter the monotony of the constructions of the new central boulevard.25 The embellishment of Brussels and its surroundings also offered the opportunity to the architects and politicians supporting the revival to continue their pedagogical mission through the erection, in the 1870s and 1880s, of building types imbued with a strong ideological charge, including schools, town houses, and public spaces, with the specific aim of embodying modern, civic, ethical, and cultural values. New techniques and local materials were used to express traditional forms. The facades combined resources found on Belgian soil, such as red brick stone, limestone, and blue limestone. These examples of architecture reflected the good taste, morals, character, and expectations of the nation and responded to a precise political program, in which the participation of all citizens in the civic and cultural life of the country reflected an educational and economic objective. For these reasons, Van Ysendyck’s Hotel de Ville in Cureghem and Charle Albert’s Vlaams Huis were both chosen as annexes of the National Exhibition in 1880. The two buildings indeed possessed indisputable educational value, where major and minor arts were reunited, together with the production of different artisans and artists, and displayed to the public without the filters imposed by academic education. The visits organized for the occasion aimed at emphasizing these buildings as examples of an authentic Belgian “national” art, in which invention and recognizable examples were instrumental in the research of models for industrial and artistic production.

A pedagogical model However, further emphasis was put on the Vlaams Huis, largely described in the pages of the exhibition catalog and for which a special guidebook 24 Exposition nationale de 1880. Catalogue officiel. Première section: enseignement, art industriel et décoratif (Brussels: Mertens, 1880), 184. 25 Album photographique des maisons primées aux nouveaux boulevards à Bruxelles, 1872–1876 (s.l., s.d). L’Architecture en Belgique. Suite de 20 façades des maisons primées construites aux nouveaux boulevards de Bruxelles, 1872–1876 (Liège: Claesens, 1881).

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

61

describing its exterior as well as its interior rooms, insofar as they had been finished by 1880, was written for visitors by Gustave Lagye, a colleague and close friend of Charle Albert.26 This choice was most likely made given that the Vlaams Huis presented a “reconstitution of the daily life” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.27 Charle Albert had indeed made a statement through his private house with the specific intention of re-proposing the original aspects of Flemish living culture. He wanted to build a strong national consciousness using art, through the scientific and philological study of Flemish decorative elements and motifs, as a means to shape a future national style in architecture and decorative arts. As such, the Vlaams Huis was designed as the result of an archaeological investigation based on Hans Vredeman De Vries’ works, which were reprinted during the 1870s (and were part of Charle Albert’s personal book collection), as well as on late medieval and early Renaissance sources such as Antonius Sanderus’ Flandria Illustrata (1641) or Jacques Leroy’s Castella et praetorian nobilium Brabantiae et Coenobia (1644).28 The Vlaams Huis thus offered a philological re-elaboration of the ideal Flemish house, created by the combination of stylistically diverse and colorful arrangements – such as the external staircase with the monumental entrance, the tower, the donjon, the belvedere overlooking the garden, the loggias – which were combined with great accuracy, harmony, and attention to the smallest details, thereby giving the illusion of having been built at different times: an “archaic renovation.”29 A commentator of the Society of Belgian architects referred to it as a “retrospective monument.”30 The exterior of the building was complemented by a garden designed following Vredemanesque models. It was largely completed by 1874, but efforts to finish its internal decoration and furnishing were still ongoing in 1880.31 In his guidebook, Lagye explained that the rooms were arranged following a staged progression retracing the historical evolution of Flemish Renaissance styles of decoration from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. The vestibule 26 Gustave Lagye, Fêtes nationales belges de 1880. Exposition de Charle Albert, artiste-décorateur. Notice explicative (Brussels: Imp. de F. Callewaert, 1880); Gustave Lagye, Maison flamande de Boitsfort. Le couronnement de l’œuvre de Charle Albert (Brussels: Verteneuil, 1887). 27 Exposition nationale de 1880, 184. 28 Catalogue de la bibliothèque et de la collection d’estampes, de gravures, etc. de feu Charle Albert (Brussels: Verteneuil, 1890). 29 “La Maison Flamande de Charle Albert,” L’Art Moderne 20 (1887): 154–155; quote on page 154. 30 “Excursion au château de M. Charles-Albert, à Boitsfort. Rapport,” L’Emulation (1977), col.11. The article was written after the second visit of the members of the Société Centrale des Architectes de Belgique (SCAB) to the Vlaams Huis. The author defined it “a real museum.” The value of the Vlaams Huis as an educational tool was acknowledged by the specialized press. 31 Lagye, Exposition de Charle Albert (1880), 3.

62 

Daniel a N. Prina

was designed in such a way as to mark the transition from late Gothic to early Renaissance. The heart of the house, the dining room, revived the style of the Flemish Renaissance at its peak in the mid-sixteenth century. This symbol of Belgian hospitality had become, as other prototypes also exhibited at the Jubilee exhibition revealed, the privileged field for the improvement of Flemish neo-Renaissance interior design.32 Its decoration turned around a few fixed elements: wainscoting; decorative panels; fixed furniture; mantelpiece; decorated stained glass; upholstered canvases, stuccoed ceilings; painted decorations; and large central candlesticks. The double drawing room was a piece for social representation intended to display the owner’s culture; it was decorated in a late sixteenth-century style, whereas the library was treated in the early seventeenth-century style of Rubens and evoked an aristocratic lineage: over the fireplace hung copies of Rubens’ portraits of Grand Duke Albert and Isabella. Undoubtedly, Charle Albert’s building was created to last; his aspiration to design a total work of art that could defy the fluctuations of fashion and fate would turn out to be fallacious. Charle Albert tried to anchor himself to an imagined noble past; however, as we will see below, his short-lived project failed precisely due to the lack of a personal family fortune and political support, and because the enormous resources that he invested in his ephemeral project led him to financial difficulties. The interiors illustrated how decoration had pervaded every aspect of life and depicted the evolution of Flemish arts: the gradual transition from medieval symbolism to antiquity and natural examples, the proliferation of sculptural ornaments, the increasing interplay of chromatic contrasts and the refinement of technical ability. Charle Albert had indeed disseminated authentic Renaissance objects from his collection and copies of such objects. By opening his house to the public, he intended to display the analogies between the ideals of the Renaissance and the nineteenth-century goal of extending the benef its of art, therefore instilling “good taste” in all members of society. Moreover, Charle Albert’s productions, displayed along with original pieces, addressed the ambitions and desires of the general public, who could admire and purchase symbols of status that it had never previously been able to afford. Charle Albert had actually built part of his professional activity on the fabrication of painted tapestries imitating the wares of the Gobelins factory, such as those displayed at the Exhibition of Industrial Arts in 1874 or the ones incorporated into the settings designed 32 For instance, the Salon Flamand by Van Ysendyck and Philippe Taelemaens the elder. Charle Albert collaborated in the project of the Salle Renaissance by George Houtstont. See Exposition nationale de 1880, 185–189.

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

63

by Van Ysendyck and Houtstont at the 1880 National Exhibition.33 The Renaissance workshop stood as a metaphor for quality and as a remedy for a present that could therefore recover from the anonymity of its industry, and emulate the ancient masters. The allusion to the Renaissance as “a time worthy of our admiration, when everything was so closely linked together in the world of art; when the architect, sculptor, painter, and craftsman were in perfect sympathy with one another’s ideas and obeyed the laws of logical harmony” responded to an ideal in which the arts, originating a virtuous circle, contributed to education, progress, and prosperity.34

The reception of the Vlaams Huis The Vlaams Huis condensed complex social, moral, and commercial ideals into visual images. The latter also responded to other contemporary issues, such as establishing efficient social communication, by displaying the personality of its owner. By building the Vlaams Huis in an area where the Dukes of Brabant used to own a castle, Charle Albert was not only rekindling contemporary artistic tendencies with the great Belgian artistic tradition, he was also trying to evoke a remote aristocratic past and attribute positive moral virtues to the house and the zealous industriousness of its owner. The Vlaams Huis was indeed the symbol of an enormous achievement for a self-taught man of very humble origins like Charle Albert, who had been propelled to celebrity and intended to offer a dignified self-representation to his future clients. As a sign of his accomplishment, Marchioness Arconati Visconti decided to hire Charle Albert as the restorer of her castle in Gasbeek after a visit to the Vlaams Huis. Overall, during these visits, the emphasis was on the importance of privacy and comfort, on the search for moral and aesthetic pleasure balanced with physical and functional well-being, as highlighted in the account written by Gustave Lagye: Charle Albert has respected the indications of Renaissance architects by including the search for comfort that they would certainly have brought 33 P. De Saint Robert, Souvenir de l’exposition nationale des arts industriels 1874 (Brussels: Vanderauwera, 1975), 87: “The Gobelins have until recently been the exclusive privilege of sovereigns or large municipal corporations. Soon the modest bourgeois will be able to afford the satisfaction of replacing in his living rooms the historiated paper or the leather of Cordova by upholsterers who, with a little goodwill, will easily be mistaken for the Gobelins.” 34 “La Maison Flamande de Charle Albert,” 155.

64 

Daniel a N. Prina

had they lived today. Everything is calculated and planned to make a stay in the house absolutely inviting. The concern for hygiene and light, the science of disengagement, the ease of all kinds could not be further developed. Not a single nook without its usefulness and function. The most demanding little mistress would feel at home, in this environment full of exquisite refinement and delicious intimacy; the housewife would find herself after an hour, in this luxurious gynoecium, carved with cabinets and cupboards, where nothing hangs out and everything has its specific place, sheltered from dust, moisture and wear.35

However anecdotal and idealized Lagye’s account may sound, the rooms of the Vlaams Huis were rationally conceived and adapted to practical use; the fitted furniture – the cabinets in particular – was modeled on functional and architectural principles: the distribution of volumes and the balance between full and empty spaces followed rational rules of distribution, inspiring the generation of architects to come. Furthermore, the care taken for hygiene (at that time a nascent architectural discipline) and the incidence of light and functionality both reflected an anti-academic approach.36 Charle Albert intended to prove that the ancient and glorious Flemish style could be adapted to all the requirements of modern comfort: “Here I cease to be an entrepreneur. What you see there is my Buen Retiro, my hermitage, my Sans-Souci windmill, where I try to make my stay as comfortable as possible, and I would be sorry if it were appreciated only for its market value.”37 The rational conception and the educational qualities of the Vlaams Huis were acknowledged by Charle Albert’s peers, including architect Théophile Fumière, author of one of the catalogs of the Jubilee exhibition and of numerous publications on the art-industry debate, and on exhibitions and decorative arts education.38 Fumière essentially insisted on one point: the unity between architecture and interior decoration. This synthesis had 35 Lagye, Maison flamande de Boitsfort (1887), 5. 36 The training of architects was perfected and widened in its technological aspects towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the addition of courses like Hygiène dans les habitations, in Antwerp as well as in other Belgian academies and at Ghent University. The addition of these courses responded to the need to redefine the architects’ competences, in order to satisfy the needs of public and private clients, fighting the competition between, on one hand, unscrupulous entrepreneurs who neglected buildings’ salubrity and comfort, and, on the other hand, qualified engineers. 37 Gustave Lagye, “Le Castel de Boitsfort,” La Fédération Artistique 3 (1874–1875): 215. 38 Théophile Fumière, Les Arts décoratifs à l’exposition du cinquantenaire belge (Brussels: Guyot, 1880).

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

65

to be based on a language that was perfectly adapted to the requirements of the contemporary age that was, so to speak, a simple and rational language in the manner of Belgians in the sixteenth century. Thus, in the pages of his essay on the exhibition, Fumière praised Charle Albert, for the Vlaams Huis gave a concrete demonstration of successful integration between different decorative disciplines – the ideal to which the critic (himself an architect and designer of interior projects in the same style) would have liked to see Belgian productions conform.39 To generalize this language, which remained “inaccessible to many purses,” one had to look for “simplicity and good taste, and consequently, the inexpensive.”40 “A thing may be beautiful, though very simple, […] the role of ornamentation is not to help the lack of resources or the lack of imagination of the artist.”41 Charle Albert’s work was indeed a fusion of historical elements adapted to meet the demands of a modern world: the stylistic model of the fifteenth century extended, therefore, its formal coherence and unity of style to the products of art and industry, thus becoming a point of comparison for the nineteenth century. The visits aimed at emphasizing the Vlaams Huis as an example of an authentic Belgian “national” art, in which invention and recognizable models were instrumental in the research of prototypes for industrial and artistic production. Furthermore, this project reflected the synthesis of the theories and the values shared by the intellectual and industrial powers of the country in the spheres of education, art, industry, and production. Architecture, decorative arts, industry, and culture formed the components of a project describing progress through technical and formal innovation, looking back at the old historic, artistic, and industrial roots of a country aiming to show itself economically and culturally liberal, modern, and politically united. The recourse to the Flemish Renaissance or the adoption of working and production methods seemingly distant from modernity were not in contradiction with Charle Albert’s objectives: the Vlaams Huis offered the possibility to test new semi-industrial construction methods as well as new levels of comfort, including electricity, bathroom appliances, running water, and hidden mechanical doors and safes (the electricity had been installed by the Compagnie des Bronzes; the walls were made of bricks and stones, but 39 On this subject, see Daniela N. Prina, “Converging Views: The Belgian Reception of Italy’s Section at the 1885 Antwerp’s World Exhibition. Artistic, Economic, and Political Strategies on Display,” in Expanding Nationalisms at World’s Fairs: Identity, Diversity and Exchange, 1855–1914, ed. Ethan Robey and David Raizman (London: Routledge, 2017): 50–70. 40 Fumière, Les arts décoratifs (1880), 23. 41 Fumière, 76.

66 

Daniel a N. Prina

the beams were made of steel and covered with painted stucco that imitated wood; the – now lost – sculptural details were made of natural stone and probably of artificial stone, etc.).42 The architect and decorator did not want to promote backward-looking attitudes: he possessed a deep awareness of the productive process experimented through the manufacture of common low-priced items (displayed at exhibitions) and other industrial products, having worked for almost a decade for the Compagnie des Bronzes, one of the most important Belgian industrial realities. The lack of a museum of decorative and industrial arts, and therefore of instruments capable of showing concrete three-dimensional examples that could stimulate the circulation of knowledge and models and their application in a variety of productive fields, contributed to the fortune of the Vlaams Huis in the late 1880s. The tours organized on the occasion of the 1880 exhibition (as well as during other important national exhibitions such as the Grand concours de l’Industrie in 1888) enabled visitors to broaden their consideration of Belgian artistic and cultural heritage through a sort of three dimensional Dictionnaire raisonné of the Flemish Renaissance that amalgamated architecture and a plethora of manufactured goods. It was indeed with the purpose of reconverting the Vlaams Huis into a museum, thus contributing to the debate on the usefulness of good examples and collections of decorative arts objects, that Charle Albert tried unsuccessfully to sell it a few years later. So far, that debate had generated a great number of press articles, some interesting proposals, and numerous failed attempts to create a Belgian museum of decorative and industrial arts. 43

The slow path towards abandonment and oblivion Charle Albert asked the city of Brussels to acquire his Vlaams Huis and transform it into a museum. He prepared a commemorative photographic album in which internal and external views presented the house in its full splendor (Figs. 2.1. and 2.2.). 44 Using this medium helped reinforce the identification of neo-Renaissance architecture with a modern style 42 Jos Vandenbreeden and Linda Van Santvoort, La Maison Flamande, 1869–1887, Charle Albert (Brussels: Sint-Lukasarchief, 1995), 9. 43 For the whole debate see Prina, “Belgian decorative arts.” 44 Charle Albert, Hommage de l’auteur de la maison flamande de Boitsfort à M. Buls, Bourgmestre de la ville de Bruxelles, Album VIII-20 (Brussels: Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles, 26/5/1887).

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

67

that embodied the spirit of the age, thus overcoming the limitations of the revival. This album was donated by Charle Albert to Brussels burgomaster, Charles Buls, who strongly supported design reforms and neo-Renaissance revival. An intellectual and a typical exponent of the European romantic liberal culture, like many other nineteenth century reformers, Buls, who had become burgomaster in 1881, was persuaded that the revitalization of Belgian art rested on the progress of industrial art: his vision superseded the traditional separation of art into categories, as well as the consideration of decoration issues as being extraneous to the debate on design, architecture, new structures and the city’s development. Buls also happened to be one of the members of the committee of the Jubilee Exhibition that had previously decided to incorporate the Vlaams Huis into the circuit of that crucial national event. We can suppose that Charle Albert hoped that Buls would have interceded in his favor after the Town Council meeting in which the destiny of the Vlaams Huis was initially sealed. At the Town Council meeting of 23 May 1887, alderman and engineer Béde filed a motion for the acquisition of the Vlaams Huis by the government and the city of Brussels, pleading for its transformation into a museum. In order to support his request, Béde insisted on the public opinion movement as well as on the broad press campaign that had been launched to support the acquisition of the Vlaams Huis, already on the market since 1885. 45 The debate, however, did not take the turn that Béde was expecting: during the meeting, Charles Buls revealed his opposition to the purchase of Charle Albert’s masterpiece. The burgomaster pointed out three main reasons that prevented the city from acquiring it: it was situated outside of the city’s boundaries; it lacked true historical value; and it was a contemporary work from a living artist. Some interesting remarks emerged from the discussion, concerning the building’s relevance for the education of designers, which Buls had always supported. Nonetheless, the burgomaster stressed the importance of two fledgling institutions for improving the education of craftsmen and designers, the École des arts décoratifs recently founded in Brussels, and the Musée Royal des arts décoratifs et industriels, located on the former site of the Jubilee Exhibition, which was being organized and would subsequently open in 1889. 46 Buls had initiated both projects, and their gestation had lasted several years; these accomplishments represented for him the final result of a long commitment to a world of applied art schools and evening courses for workers. 45 Bulletin communal de la Ville de Bruxelles. 46 Prina, “Belgian decorative arts.”

68 

Daniel a N. Prina

Fig. 2.1. Charle Albert, Interior of the Dining Room of the Vlaams Huis showing a mantelpiece inspired by the one in the “Maison des brasseurs” in Antwerp. Plate belonging to the album entitled: Hommage de l’auteur de la maison flamande de Boitsfort à M. Buls, Bourgmestre de la ville de Bruxelles. Photograph, 1887. Brussels: Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles, Album VIII-20.

The debate inside the council meeting proves that the interest in the Vlaams Huis as an essential pedagogic and operative vector had diminished towards the end of the decade, since other projects, aimed at finally giving Belgian artistic instruction the instruments to reform decorative arts education, had already started to be operational. Moreover, during the long construction

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

69

Fig. 2.2. Charle Albert, Interior of the Dining Room of the Vlaams Huis, in high Flemish Renaissance style. Plate belonging to the album entitled: Hommage de l’auteur de la maison flamande de Boitsfort à M. Buls, Bourgmestre de la ville de Bruxelles. Photograph, 1887. Brussels: Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles, Album VIII-20.

campaign in which Charle Albert’s masterpiece had been built, decorated, and furnished, many other Flemish neo-Renaissance architectural projects, including town houses, city halls, and squares, had also been developed and completed in Brussels and its surroundings. Some of these projects – such as Henri Beyaert’s Square of Petit Sablon (1876–1890) or Jean Baes’

70 

Daniel a N. Prina

Flemish Theater (1883–1887) – included some extremely innovative features and had benefited from Buls’ political support. 47 The Flemish Theatre, in particular, was defined by the search for technical and aesthetic avant-garde solutions, not only artistic but rational, in harmony with the alternative educational ideals countering academic education, that Baes, a pupil and ex-collaborator of Charle Albert, was promoting in the fledgling École des arts décoratifs in Brussels, where he served as director. 48 Baes reinvented the characteristics of the Flemish neo-Renaissance and applied them to a modern building. The open use of metal structures, the fluidity of spaces, and the remarkable decorative program in which all the most important craftsmen of Brussels were involved, made the building an original and fresh example of Gesamtkunstwerk. These new projects therefore exalted every aspect of sixteenth-century Belgian culture, arts, and trades; by evoking an ideal social order with fewer inequalities (like the one represented by the guilds system that ruled Brussels in the sixteenth century portrayed in the Petit Sablon) they became a point of comparison for the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding Charle Albert’s efforts, the Vlaams Huis was ultimately not purchased by the government despite the support of the city of Brussels. The advancements of decorative arts reforms as well as the creation of a constellation of neo-Renaissance buildings, easily accessible to the general public, proved fatal for the accomplishment of the architect-decorator’s personal project. His masterwork was, of course, appreciated by Buls and his associates, but without the support of the burgomaster, the acquisition was bound to fail, for the government’s artistic policies were often hindered by the constraint of classicism. King Leopold II did indeed have a penchant for French academic architecture, and wanted to give Brussels infrastructure, parks, gardens, boulevards, and monuments worthy of a prestigious cosmopolitan European center.49 In this context, the acquisition of a picturesque castle designed in the Flemish neo-Renaissance style in one of Brussel’s suburbs was certainly not a priority. The Vlaams Huis was therefore sold to a succession of private owners and started to sink into oblivion, the principal cause of its abandonment 47 On the Petit Sablon square see Daniela N. Prina, “ Beyaert’s Square du Petit Sablon: Architectural Sculpture, Identity, Artistic and Political Networks in late Nineteenth-Century Brussels,” Sculpture Journal 23/3 (2016): 329–342. On the Théâtre flamand see Daniela N. Prina, “Le Théâtre Flamand. Le progrès en scène,” in Les mondes du spectacle au XIX siècle, ed. Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, Sophie Lucet and Jean-Claude Yon (forthcoming). 48 Louis Charles Baes, “La carrière de Jean Baes, architecte et aquarelliste bruxellois 1848–1914,” Cahiers Bruxellois III, no.1 (1958): 59–84. 49 See Luisa Ranieri, Léopold II urbaniste (Brussels: Hayez, 1973).

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

71

and consequent fall into a deep state of decay.50 In 1983, it became home to squatters, was looted, defaced by graffiti, and suffered a first fire. The building (excluding the interior) was belatedly listed in 1988 by the Royal Commission of Monuments and Sites, after several attempts to ensure the preservation of what remained had been launched by the Sint-Lukasarchief, until it was finally restored by its new owner when repurchased, between 2012 and 2015. Today, the exterior of the Vlaams Huis has been restored to its former appearance, while the irrevocably lost interior can still be admired thanks to a collection of vintage postcards, photos, and drawings published by Charle Albert. The restoration works revealed that the latter was an experimenter, a cultivated innovator, one of the first examples of a complete artist who mastered the most audacious decorative techniques as well as the aesthetic sense of the entirety of his work.51 As such, he has to be placed amongst the pioneers of Belgian nineteenth-century architecture.52 Charle Albert can therefore be listed among the liberal partisans of the Flemish neo-Renaissance, who sought to reunite Belgium under the aegis of cultural, artistic, and industrial excellence. However, despite their intentions, the ideal of a unified Belgium rapidly vanished: the creation of a political and cultural unity failed due to the complexity of Belgium, characterized by the vigorous protection of local interests and the rise of initiatives connecting Flemish political and cultural claims, which, especially from the 1880s, led to the gradual dissolution of this project. After 1890, the Flemish Renaissance therefore failed to represent the composite Belgian identity. Moreover, during the last decade of the nineteenth century, the rapid spread of Art Nouveau, celebrating the progressive Belgian bourgeoisie through the 50 The other main cause, as Jos Vandenbreeden has correctly pointed out (1995), being the historians and critics’ disinterest – the latter caused by the rise of modernist culture as well as of wrongful interpretations of the contribution of Charle Albert to the history of architecture and the decorative arts of the nineteenth century. These interpretations ranged from the consideration of the Vlaams Huis as a curiosity, a fantasy, to the contempt for an architecture considered to be false or merely decorative and picturesque. Pioneering studies conducted by Vandenbreeden, Van Santvoort, Willis, De Maeyer and Verpoest in the 1980s and 1990s have contributed to the rediscovery of the Belgian revivals; other, more recent investigations, have focused on Flemish neo-Renaissance networks of actors (Mihail) and on the design reform movement in Belgium (Prina) have conf irmed and clarif ied Vandenbreeden’s intuition and inserted in a more complex framework Charle Albert’s contribution. 51 The Vlaams Huis has been recently sold to a new owner and at the moment is undergoing another restoration, conducted by the Atelier d’Architecture CAZ founded by Carmen Azevedo, who had already worked on the first restauration campaign. We thank her for the insight on Charle Albert’s building ground practices. 52 We share here the opinion of Jos Vandenbreeden, who has comprehensively studied the Vlaams Huis and fought for its safeguard and protection.

72 

Daniel a N. Prina

poetical elaboration of the images of the industrial world, drastically reduced the impact of the Flemish neo-Renaissance on architecture and design production. The vicissitudes of the Vlaams Huis are therefore emblematic of the ephemeral nature and lack of consistency of both Charle Albert’s personal project and of the unifying political process carried out in the last decades of the nineteenth century by the liberal segment of Belgian society. Nevertheless, the support for the decorative arts reform movement, as well as the active participation in both public and private initiatives, played a fundamental role in the development of Belgian architecture and design, thanks to the presence of a strong alliance of all the arts. These elements subsequently led to the emergence of great talents and undoubtedly contributed to the advent of Art Nouveau.

Bibliography Album photographique des maisons primées aux nouveaux boulevards à Bruxelles: 1872–1876 (s.l., s.d). L’Architecture en Belgique. Suite de 20 façades des maisons primées construites aux nouveaux boulevards de Bruxelles, 1872–1876. Liège: Claesens, 1881. Anonymous. “La Maison Flamande de Charle Albert.” L’Art Moderne 20 (1887): 154–155. Baes, Louis Charles. “La carrière de Jean Baes, architecte et aquarelliste bruxellois 1848–1914.” Cahiers Bruxellois. Vol. III, n°1 (1958): 59–84. Bertels, Inge. “Expressing Local Specificity: The Flemish Renaissance Revival in Belgium and the Antwerp city Architect Pieter Jan Auguste Dens.” Architectural History 50 (2007): 149–170. Bryant, Julius. Art and Design For All, The Victoria and Albert Museum. London: V&A Publishing, 2011. Buls, Charles. “Un projet de musée populaire.” La Revue de Belgique VI (15 mai 1874): 45–69. ———. Musée des arts industriels. Programme adopté par la Commission de l’Exposition des arts industriels de 1874. Brussels: Vanderauwera, 1875. Burton, Anthony. Vision and Accident: The Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: V&A Publishing, 1999. Catalogue de la bibliothèque et de la collection d’estampes, de gravures, etc. de feu Charle Albert. Brussels: imprimerie Victor Verteneuil, 1890. Catalogue de l’exposition et des concours institués par l’Association pour l’encouragement et le développement des arts industriels en Belgique. Brussels: Guyot, 1854.

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

73

Catalogue de l’exposition instituée par l’Association pour l’encouragement et le développement des arts industriels en Belgique. Album de l’exposition de 1853. Brussels: Van der Kolk, 1854. Catalogue de l’exposition et des concours institués par l’Association pour l’encouragement et le développement des arts industriels en Belgique. Brussels: Guyot, 1856. Catalogue de l’exposition et des concours institués par l’Association pour l’encouragement et le développement des arts industriels en Belgique. Brussels: Guyot, 1857. Catalogue de l’exposition et des concours institués par l’Association pour l’encouragement et le développement des arts industriels en Belgique. Brussels: Guyot, 1861. Charle Albert, Hommage de l’auteur de la maison flamande de Boitsfort à M. Buls, Bourgmestre de la ville de Bruxelles. Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles, Album VIII–20 (Brussels, 26/5/1887). De Laborde, Léon. De l’union de l’art et de l’industrie. Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1856. De Maeyer, Jan, and Luc Verpoest. De Sint-Lucasscholen en de neogotiek 1862–1914. Leuven: Kadoc, 1988. De Vos, Els, and Piet Lombaerde. Van Academie tot Universiteit. 350 jaar architectuur in Antwerpen. Antwerp: UPA, 2013. Dupont, Christine, et al. Fabrique d’art: la Compagnie des bronzes (1854–1979). Brussels: La Fonderie, 2005. de Paepe, Jean. “Bijdrage tot de studie over Charle Albert, architect-décorateur (1821–1889).” MSc diss., Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1986. De Saint Robert, P. Souvenir de l’exposition nationale des arts industriels 1874. Brussels: Vanderauwera, 1975. “Excursion au château de M. Charles-Albert, à Boitsfort. Rapport.” L’Emulation (1877) col.11. Exposition des Académies et des écoles de dessin et Congrès de l’enseignement des arts du dessin. Brussels: Lelong 1869. Exposition nationale des arts industriels. Bruxelles 1874. Catalogue Officiel. Brussels: Vanderauwera, 1874. Exposition nationale de 1880. IVe section: Industries d’art antérieures au XIXe siècle. Catalogue officiel. Brussels: Vanderauwera, 1880. Exposition nationale de 1880. Catalogue officiel. Première section: enseignement, art industriel et décoratif. Brussels: Mertens, 1880. Fumière, Théophile. Les arts décoratifs à l’exposition du Cinquantenaire belge. Brussels: Guyot, 1880. Lagye, Gustave. Fêtes nationales belges de 1880. Exposition de Charle Albert, artistedécorateur. Notice explicative. Brussels: Imp. de F. Callewaert, 1880.

74 

Daniel a N. Prina

———. Maison flamande de Boitsfort. Le couronnement de l’œuvre de Charle Albert. Brussels: Verteneuil, 1887. ———. “Le Castel de Boitsfort.” La Fédération Artistique 3 (1874–1875): 215. Lancelot, Thierry. La Maison Flamande de Boitsfort. Brussels: Éditions d’art Laconti, 1993. Les merveilles de l’art ancien en Belgique. Brussels: Rozez, 1890. Lombaerde, Piet. “A la recherché d’une identité historique: l’architecture néoRenaissance à Anvers au 19ème siècle.” In Le XIXe siècle et l’architecture de la Renaissance, edited by Fréderique Lemerle, Yves Pauwels, and Alice Thomine Berrada, 165–178. Paris: Picard, 2010. Mihail, Benoît. “Un mouvement culturel libéral à Bruxelles dans le dernier quart du XIXe siècle, la ‘néo-Renaissance flamande’.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 76/4 (1998): 979–1020. Ogonovszky-Steffens, Judith. La peinture monumentale d’histoire dans les édifices civils en Belgique (1830–1914). Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1999. Pas, Johan, et al. eds. Contradicties. Koninklijke Academie Voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen 1663–2013. Ghent: MER, 2013. Prina, Daniela N. “L’unité des arts avant l’Art nouveau. La réforme de l’enseignement artistique et industriel dans la deuxième moitié du dix-neuvième siècle.” PhD diss., Politecnico di Torino/Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2009. ———. “Design in Belgium before Art Nouveau: Art, Industry, and the Reform of Artistic Education in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Design History 23/4 (2010): 329–350. ———. “Belgian Decorative Arts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth century. Needs for a National Museum and Debates surrounding Didactic Collections in Brussels.” Journal of the History of Collections 24/2 (2012): 257–274. ———. “Les intérieurs bruxellois et les arts décoratifs dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Entre les modif ications du goût et les enjeux didactiques, idéologiques et industriels.” Bruxelles Patrimoines 19–20 (2016): 66–77. ———. “Beyaert’s Square du Petit Sablon: Architectural Sculpture, Identity, Artistic and Political Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Brussels.” Sculpture Journal 23/3 (2016): 329–342. ———. “Converging Views: The Belgian Reception of Italy’s Section at the 1885 Antwerp’s World Exhibition. Artistic, Economic, and Political Strategies on Display.” In Expanding Nationalisms at World’s Fairs: Identity, Diversity and Exchange, 1855–1914, edited by Ethan Robey and David Raizman, 50–70. London: Routledge, 2017. ———. “Le Théâtre Flamand. Le progrès en scène.” In Les mondes du spectacle au XIX siècle, edited by Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, Sophie Lucet, and Jean-Claude Yon (forthcoming).

An Ephemer al Museum of Decor ative and Industrial Arts

75

Ranieri, Luisa. Léopold II urbaniste. Brussels: Hayez, 1973. Smets, Marcel. Charles Buls et les principes de l’art urbain. Liège: Mardaga, 1995. Vandenbreeden, Jos, and Linda Van Santvoort. La Maison Flamande, 1869–1887, Charle Albert. Brussels: Sint-Lukasarchief, 1995. Willis, Alfred. “Flemish Renaissance Revival in Belgian Architecture (1830–1930).” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1983.

About the author Daniela N. Prina, PhD, is an architectural and design historian and scientific researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She has lectured extensively in Italy (PoliTo, 2004–2006 and USAC, 2006–2008) and Belgium (ULiège 2015–2019) and is a former FRS-FNRS post doctoral fellow (2011–2015) and an invited professor at the Design Lab, Kyoto Institute of Technology (2018). Her studies are mainly focused on the relationship between architecture and decorative arts and their historical, artistic, didactic, cultural and productive aspects in the XIXth and XXth centuries, on the training of architects and industrial designers and on the transmission of architectural culture in museums of applied arts. The outcomes of her research are published as chapters in books such as Made in Italy. Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (Bloomsbury 2013), Expanding Nationalisms at World’s Fairs (Routledge 2017) and in high-ranked peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Design History, the Journal of the History of Collections, and Sculpture Journal. She has recently edited a book on nineteenth century Belgian architecture: L’architecture et l’urbanisme en Belgique au long XIXe siècle. Lieux, protagonistes, rôles, enjeux et stratègies professionnelles (Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2020).

3.

Expanding Interiors: Architectural Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione Heidi Brevik-Zender

Abstract Over the last five decades of the nineteenth century, Italian-born Virginia Verasis, the Countess de Castiglione (1837–1899), had French photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson take more than 400 studio photographs of her in elaborately costumed and staged tableaus, mises en scène that the Countess had a strong hand in designing. This chapter examines the Countess’s photographs through the lenses of architecture, gender, and interior design. Considering the term “architect” metaphorically and literally, and drawing on trends in interior decoration from the period as well as on feminist theory related to space, this study focuses on the Countess’s taste for aesthetic excess in costuming and furnishings, and how the interiors that she designed using these tools upended traditional conceptions limiting women’s presence in space. Keywords: architecture, photography, Countess de Castiglione, excess, interior design

Introduction The photographic project of Virginia Verasis, the Countess de Castiglione (1837–1899) can be deemed a form of exhibition, both in its proclivity towards display and in its ambition to present its creator as an extraordinary work of art.1 Described by those who knew her as a striking beauty, the Countess 1 The majority of the photographs analyzed in this chapter are located at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1975 (1975.548.1–275). This archive

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_ch03

78 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

arrived in Paris from her native Italy in 1855, newly wedded to Francesco Verasis, the Count de Castiglione. Immediately, she made a grand entrance onto the stage of French imperial society, her story punctuated by an alleged affair with Emperor Napoleon III in 1856, and, later, a rumored diplomatic intervention on France’s behalf leading to the end of the Prussian siege of Paris. In the intervening years, the Countess, estranged from her husband and fallen from the court’s favor, began frequenting the Parisian photography studio of Mayer and Pierson. Over a period of five decades, she arranged for Pierre-Louis Pierson to take more than 400 photographs of her in elaborately costumed and staged tableaus, mises en scène that the Countess herself had a strong hand in designing. Towards the end of her life, she sequestered herself in her apartment at the Place Vendôme, reportedly emerging mainly at night or to attend photography sessions with Pierson where she modeled extravagant, fantastical outfits and set herself within psychologically complex, occasionally dark, and frequently surprising spatial compositions. Ambiguity over the intended viewership for these photographs increases their intrigue. Although at least one example, the painted “Queen of Hearts” composition, was put on public display, there is no evidence that the photographs were intended for mass production, and if some of them did circulate it was generally only to those who were personally close to Castiglione. In her ground-breaking article “The Legs of the Countess,” Abigail Solomon-Godeau focuses on the series of curious images that Castiglione had Pierson take of her bare feet and legs, considering them against the backdrop of the period’s burgeoning market for pictures of dancers and erotic nudes (Fig. 3.1.).2 Solomon-Godeau’s analysis centers on the body and inserts the Countess’s photographs into the broader history of mass-circulating representations of the commodified female form. Others have read the images by way of Freudian narcissism.3 Or, they have focused on contextualizing the relationship between Castiglione and Pierson, as well as on the legacy of the Countess as her story was perpetuated and mythologized in

has been digitized by the Metropolitan Museum and is available freely on their website. Other collections of photographs of Castiglione can be found in the Archives du Haut Rhin in Colmar, at the Museo di storia della Fotographia in Florence, and at the Museo nationale del Risorgimento italiano in Turin. 2 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (1986): 65–108. 3 Elisabeth Lyon, “Unspeakable Images, Unspeakable Bodies,” Camera Obscura 8, no.3 (24) (1990): 168–194.

Expanding Interiors

79

Fig. 3.1. Pierre-Louis Pierson, Le Pé (Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione, 1835–1899). Albumen silver print from glass negative, August 1, 1894, 144 x 100 mm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005.

France and Italy.4 The present chapter examines the Countess’s photographs through the intersecting lenses of architecture, gender, and interior design. 4 Pierre Apraxine and Xaiver Demange, eds. “The Divine Countess”: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

80 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

It takes a cue from scholars of nineteenth-century photography including Geoffrey Batchen, who argues that, in this period, “the power of creation was transferred from the photographer, who was often no more than an operator behind a fixed camera, to the subject who got to make all sorts of choices about how to appear.”5 I view Castiglione as not simply a model but as an “architect of her own representations,” to quote Solomon-Godeau.6 Moreover, as will be discussed here, Castiglione’s agency informed not merely how she was depicted, but also how the spatial arrangements of her compositions were engineered.7 Considering the term “architect” both metaphorically and literally, and drawing on visual depictions and trends in interior decoration from the second half of the nineteenth century as well as on feminist theory related to space, this study will focus on the Countess’s taste for aesthetic excess in costuming and furnishings, and on how the interiors that she designed using these tools upended traditional conceptions about women’s presence in space. To be explored is how these photographs trouble, in interesting ways, the normally fixed notions of interiority and exteriority, and how this troubling relates to the broader question of how women participated in the architecture of France in the second half of the nineteenth century. We will examine how the Countess manipulated her clothed body and furnishings, such as tables, chairs, and curtains, to create imaginative, palimpsestic locales. Her novel images of modern rooms in this way suggested alternatives to normative understandings of how women could construct and inform interior space. In Architecture from the Outside, a collection of essays on the gender of virtual and real space, feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz devotes one chapter to what she titles “Architectures of Excess.” Calling upon Luce Irigaray, whom she names one of the great theorists of excess, Grosz summarizes her work on space, place, and dwelling, noting that: Irigaray discusses a perverse exchange at the origin of space, and thus, as the archaic precondition of architecture itself: in exchange for the abstract space of scientific and technological manipulation that man extracts from 5 Geoffrey Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J.J. Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch (London: Routledge, 2009), 82. 6 Solomon-Godeau, “Legs,” 67. 7 Monique L. Johnson refers to Castiglione as an “insistent subject” (as opposed to simply an object of the gaze) who infused her photographic compositions with autobiographical elements and a “productive playfulness.” See “An Insistent Subject: The Countess de Castiglione Facing the Lens,” (PhD, University of Michigan, 2014), 54.

Expanding Interiors

81

the maternal-feminine body from which he comes, he gives woman a container or envelope that he has taken from her to form his own identity, and to ensure that she continues to look after and sustain it. The container: the home, clothes, jewels, things he constructs for her, or at least for the image of her, that allow him to continue his spatial appropriations with no sense of obligation, debt, or otherness. The exchange: she gives him a world, he confines her in his (emphasis added).8

To combat this scenario of feminine confinement within a male-constructed container, Grosz imagines an antidote in architectural excess, wherein femininity is “that which the architectural cannot contain within its own drives to orderliness and systematicity.”9 This would be a conception of space, she continues, in which the “more” is not cast off but made central, in which expenditure is sought out, in which instability, fluidity, the return of space to the bodies whose morphologies it upholds and conforms, in which the monstrous and the extrafunctional, consumption as much as production, act as powerful forces.10

Grosz thus proposes that we reconsider architectural space “in terms of multiplicity, heterogeneity, activity and force.”11 For “space,” she concludes, “is not simply an ether, a medium through which other forces, like gravity, produce their effects; it is inscribed by and in its turn inscribes those objects and activities placed within it.”12 I would like to suggest that Castiglione’s photographs model a form of architectural excess to which Grosz gestures. As such, the images constitute a critique against woman’s confinement in space, an experience familiar in the nineteenth century, when, as we know, patriarchal attitudes towards woman’s proper role as la femme au foyer were the norm. These photographs, moreover, engage with, comment on, and anticipate concerns that are fundamentally architectural. Strategically deploying garments and accessories – the clothes mentioned above by Grosz that for some scholars of gender have traditionally signaled feminine containment – Castiglione subverts the most common 8 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from The Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2001), 159. 9 Grosz, Architecture, 156. 10 Grosz, 163. 11 Grosz, 163–164. 12 Grosz, 164.

82 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

nineteenth-century photographic format for a room, the carte de visite, which simulated the domestic environment through its staging of what Elizabeth Anne McCauley calls “complete interiors” featuring carpets, curtains, chairs, tables, and plants.13 Rather than submitting to expected spatial structures, though, the Countess inscribes the reconceived “rooms” of her photographs with her presence through, among other things, sartorial excess, or, to cite Grosz, she constructs scenarios “in which the ‘more’ is not cast off but made central.” We see this clearly in one of Castiglione’s favorite compositional layouts (Fig. 3.2.), a mise en scène to which she returned repeatedly, which features her swathed in massive skirts that, though their overabundance, threaten to overwhelm the limits of the camera frame. Solomon-Godeau rightly deems these enormous garments “extravagant even by the bloated and parvenu standards of the Second Empire court.”14 What is also striking in some of these compositions, though, is Castiglione’s emphasis on unsettling the expected functions of items of interior decor in the simulated rooms that the photography studio sought to evoke. These efforts to shape the built interior indicate an intrinsic architectural sensibility. Design historian Anca I. Lasc has shown that, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the line between architect and interior decorator had become blurred, as evidenced by the rise of professions such as the architecte d’ameublement, or “furnishing architect,” whose job it was to conceptualize designs for whole furnished interiors, which were then disseminated in illustrated magazines, department store catalogs, and decorating advice books to trade specialists and the public alike.15 Ideal room schemes and carefully selected furniture items typically remained in accordance with conservative bourgeois gendered ideals in that, Lasc indicates, they “targeted a female population whose main purpose in life should have been the bearing and rearing of children and the tasteful arrangement of private interiors.”16 The work of the furnishing architect was distinct from but related to the practice of room staging, not for private dwellings but for photography 13 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1985), 31. In addition to McCauley’s ground-breaking study on the carte de visite, see “Dreams of Ordinary Life,” photography historian Geoffrey Batchen’s original discussion of nineteenth-century mass photography and the unique potential of this frequently disparaged medium of the middle class to lay bare capitalism’s contradictions. 14 Solomon-Godeau, “Legs,” 77–78. 15 Anca I. Lasc, “Angels and Rebels: The Obsessions and Transgressions of the Modern Interior,” in Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, ed. Anca I. Lasc, Georgina Downey, and Mark Taylor (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 53–55. 16 Lasc, “Angels,” 53.

Expanding Interiors

83

Fig. 3.2. Pierre-Louis Pierson, Le peignoir plisié [sic]. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1860s, 102 x 102 mm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005.

studios. Historically, furniture had been included in proto-photographic works to address a need specific to this new technology: sitters for daguerreotypes in the 1840s had to remain motionless for up to ten minutes in order to be rendered clearly, and thus props on which they could lean were indispensable for sharp exposures.17 The presence in later nineteenth-century photography of interior furnishings that did not support immobilization of the body – such as potted plants – suggests, among other things, an impetus on the part of commercial photographers and their clients to continue constructing sites for these images that corresponded to middle-class interior design conventions. As McCauley notes, photographers had available to them a “range of furniture marketed solely for commercial photographic 17 McCauley, Disdéri, 13.

84 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

studios” including “objects such as potted plants, curtains or balustrades,” which “provid[ed] the sitter with a ready-made ‘home’.”18 Props conjuring up “home” projected the implicit separation of spheres for men and women that characterized domestic dwellings. Flying in the face of these implicitly gendered design conventions, the Countess uses furniture in her photographs not to project domestic orderliness and the restriction of the female body to predetermined spatial arrangements but rather, in unconventional ways, such as when she sprawls, startlingly, on the floor instead of sitting on a chair (Fig. 3.3.), calling attention to this destabilization of a room’s typical arrangement by using the chair instead as a rest for her arm. In another image (Fig. 3.4.) she holds a chair in front of rather than behind her body and swivels the chair around, tipping it onto its front legs and pulling it into the flounces of her skirts while leaning on its frame. It is possible that this composition references a chair pose seen more typically in images of dancers or in erotica.19 Intriguingly, it may even be an allusion to an 1858 self-portrait by the father of the carte de visite himself, A. A. E. Disdéri, in which the photographer is shown in nearly the exact same pose as Castiglione’s, hand under chin with index finger pointed at his face, the other arm bent and gesturing to the floor, and his torso “coyly leaning on a chair.”20 Whatever its inspiration, the awkward, bent position of the Countess’s body, coupled with the hollowing out of the skirt’s normally exaggerated amplitude by the chair, underscores the eccentric, transgressive placement of woman and furniture piece in space. This image exemplifies the Countess’s general flair for confronting interior design conventions through a combined deployment of fashion and furniture. Particularly telling are photographs in which furnishings are used to extend the Countess’s own clad morphology in space, to use Grosz’s vocabulary. As we see in this photograph, for example (Fig. 3.5.), a table or chair, the legs of which are clearly visible, is here reappropriated, not to function conventionally as a table or chair but instead to serve as a prop to expand the Countess’s clothed body in the room. The important impact of the furniture piece to bolster the size of her skirts can be discerned through a comparison with other, less successful compositions from the same sitting that feature the same garment but in which there is no table, the skirt’s drapery is limp, and the dress does very little to fill the room. 18 McCauley, 149. 19 Solomon-Godeau notes that “dancers and demimondaines were frequently shown with their legs straddling the backs of chairs.” Solomon-Godeau, “Legs,” 97. 20 McCauley, Disdéri, 50. See p. 51 in McCauley’s book for this self-portrait of Disdéri.

85

Expanding Interiors

Fig. 3.3. Pierre-Louis Pierson, Le Chapelet. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1860s, 89 x  124 mm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1975.

Fig. 3.4. Pierre-Louis Pierson, Mathilde. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1860s. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1975.

Fig. 3.5. Louis-Pierre Pierson, La comtesse de Castiglione et un enfant (Georges de Castiglione?). Collodion glass-­plate negative. Colmar: Archives départementales du Haut-Rhin, on long term loan from the Musée Unterlinden, gift by the Établissements Braun, 1968, 6 Fi caissette 268, n° 34. © Musée Unterlinden, Colmar / Christian Kempf.

86 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

In another photograph from the 1860s, the Countess is shown next to an ornate potted houseplant (Fig. 3.6.). We again note the legs of the furniture piece on the right, which bolsters and broadens her spread-out skirts. But it is the plant feature that draws attention, for, rather than appearing to cultivate it, or, simply allowing it to exist in the frame as a prop piece symbolizing the domestic interior, the Countess rests her hand directly on top of it, appearing to crush its leaves and ivy tendrils under the weight of her hand. How are we to interpret this unusual stance? The plant itself provides a possible clue. It may have called to mind works by Anna Atkins and Julia Margaret Cameron, two female British photographers of this same period who had been manipulating plant leaves in photographic compositions starting in the 1840s and continuing through the 1860s. Atkins’s and Cameron’s pioneering images of ferns and other plant life brought into relief that women were joining men in breaking new ground within the burgeoning medium of photography. Moreover, by manipulating objects from nature – a realm with which women were traditionally associated – Atkins and Cameron demonstrated their own original contributions to both science and art, positing new creative roles for women in restrictive Victorian society beyond that of procreating mother.21 Likely channeling Roland Barthes’s famous eulogy to his mother in his book on photography Camera Lucida, Edouardo Cadava writes that, for some, “mothers are always another name for photography – mothers and photography are both means of reproduction.”22 Given Castiglione’s penchant for defying conventions in her photographic compositions, and the ingenious work with fauna by known women photographers of her day, we might interpret the Countess’s disregard for the plant pressed beneath her hand as a challenge to this notion that motherhood and photography (should) align, fundamentally, because both are defined by their reproductivity.23 21 See this argued persuasively by Jordan Bear in “The Silent Partner: Agency and Absence in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Collaborations,” Grey Room 48 (Summer 2012): 82–83. 22 Eduardo Cadava, “Nadar’s Photographopolis,” Grey Room 48 (Summer 2012): 66. See also Elissa Marder’s The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction, especially chapters 8 and 9, for an exploration of Roland Barthes on photography and the figure of the mother. 23 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, Castiglione’s photographic expression of motherhood could be examined next to that of another female British contemporary, the Viscountess Clementina Maude Hawarden (1822–1865). In the 1850s and 60s, Lady Hawarden took hundreds of photographs of her daughters in intriguing compositions highlighting clothing and furnishings and in poses that were both conventional for young ladies of this period and against the grain. Lady Hawarden’s images of her daughters were taken in the family’s London mansion, which she converted into a makeshift photography studio by emptying rooms and

Expanding Interiors

87

Fig. 3.6. Louis-Pierre Pierson, La comtesse de Castiglione. Collodion glass-plate negative. Colmar: Archives départementales du Haut-Rhin, on long term loan from the Musée Unterlinden, gift by the Établissements Braun, 1968, 6 Fi caissette 268, n° 30. © Musée Unterlinden, Colmar / Christian Kempf.

There is archival support for interpreting the Countess’s poor treatment of the organic fern as an ironic reversal of the stereotype of the nurturing, life-giving mother. This evidence can be found in the numerous photographs in which Castiglione makes use of her own young son Giorgio, staging scenarios in which she dresses the little boy in costumes and relegates him to accessory roles, such as pageboy to her grande dame. The photograph with her son examined above (see Figure 3.5.)24 can be read in dialog with the challenge to normative ideals of motherhood put forth in the potted plant image: clutching her skirts, and tasked primarily with rearranging furniture, thus transforming the domestic interior into an artistically generative space for women. 24 Apraxine and Demange suggest that the child in this photograph is not Castiglione’s son Giorgio but give no reason for this interpretation. Among scholars there is otherwise consensus that the boy is Giorgio, which is reasonable given the strong resemblance between this child and photographs known to be of the Countess’s son.

88 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

the job of extending his mother’s dress and body to their full grandeur, Giorgio’s role is less that of a child cherished by a devoted mother, a scenario that would have corresponded to the day’s expectations that women should have “natural” maternal instincts. Instead, he functions more like the chairs and tables that the Countess transforms into props in support of her own spatial expansion. He seems, we might say, more chair than child. In other photographs we see that, with some frequency, Castiglione’s costume is blurred through motion. As early as 1853, Disdéri wrote that exposure times for portrait photographs taken in his commercial studio were down to four seconds or less.25 When we observe movement in Castiglione’s images, then, we can understand it as motion in something approximating real time. This visual evidence of the female body’s “activity” and “force” within space, to quote from Grosz’s description of architectural excess, produces through clothing’s dynamism the optical effect of the Countess’s further growth and expansion inside the room. As scholars of women and photography at the fin de siècle in Paris will be quick to recognize, these images of Castiglione are not unlike those of another savvy and artistically inventive women from the turn of the century: the experimental dancer Loie Fuller, who famously choreographed her own fabric-swathed body into massive, space-filling movements, staging performances that, whether intentionally or not, fundamentally defied the principle of women’s spatial confinement. Rhonda K. Garelick has insightfully analyzed the dancer’s ability to retain a spatial sensibility by way of her costumed form rather than through more common means of conveying locations, such as by attempting to represent them as realistic background sets. Garelick notes that “Fuller did not eradicate the concept of locale; instead, she subsumed it with her body,” adding that “Fuller’s dances transformed her into place and occupant at the same time.”26 Precursors to Fuller’s frequently photographed dances, which similarly featured garments that stretched the performer’s body beyond its corporeal limits, Castiglione’s images were already upending the gendered limits of rooms several decades earlier. As Fuller would later transpose to 25 A. A. E. Disdéri, Manuel opératoire de photographie sur collodion instantané (Paris: Alexis Gaduin, 1853): 18. 26 Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 114. Garelick is specifically discussing Fuller’s practice of eschewing exoticized backdrops in favor of stages absent of scenery during her orientalist dance performances at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. However, Garelick’s perceptive remarks can apply more generally to the ways in which Fuller and Castiglione both used props and clothing to simultaneously inhabit and represent the spaces that they sought to depict.

Expanding Interiors

89

the dance stage, in the Countess’s works, her excessively clothed body – or, the “more” – is recast as central, to recall Grosz’s terms. The very capacity of the photography studio, a simulacrum for interior middle-class space, to support the confinement of an ever-expanding feminine presence is thereby called into question. Presaging the postmodern architectural concept of the built space as an envelope, the Countess highlights clothing’s role as an envelope for the body and takes this idea a step further, styling garments into capacious sheaths through which spatial volume for an uncontainable female presence is reclaimed.27 In addition to shaping such types of inventive interactions among woman’s bodies, garments, and furniture in a room, Castiglione’s mises en scène frequently relate clothing to another common interior object of decor, namely the curtain. Curtains, McCauley notes, were typical to the carte de visite, a fact that links Castiglione’s images to quintessential photographic renderings of the bourgeois living room.28 Yet, as a robust body of scholarship on drapery informs us, curtains are complex, even highly contested, objects of interior architecture. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential modernist writer on the architecture of nineteenth-century Parisian modernity, reportedly coined the French term rideaulogie to denote a discipline devoted to the study of curtains.29 Benjamin’s concept of “curtainology” may seem at first glance facetious – the name for the “discipline” did, after all, come about following his intense contemplation of curtains during an opium-induced reverie. However, countering some of this playfulness, la rideaulogie is referenced again by Benjamin more thoughtfully in a letter describing the carefully planned night he spent smoking opium with his friend Jean Selz. In this letter Benjamin reports, “Today I’ve obtained significant results in my study of curtains – for a curtain separated us from the balcony that looked out on the city and the sea.”30 Here, the curtain operates as mediator: the membrane that at once separates from and leads to the outside world. It is thus an apt metaphor for the opium trance that simultaneously enables introspection and a new perspective on one’s external surroundings. But the curtain is also spatial, and it enables Benjamin to construct a symbiotic relationship of his balcony to both city and sea, echoing architecture’s 27 The concept of the envelope is a favorite theme in the theory and design projects of contemporary architect Bernard Tschumi, for example. 28 McCauley, Disdéri, 13. 29 Jean Selz, “An Experiment by Walter Benjamin,” trans. Maria Louise Asher, in On Hashish, written by Walter Benjamin, ed. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 152. 30 Quoted by Tillman Rexroth, “Editorial Note,” in On Hashish, 15.

90 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

ongoing project to interpret in physical form the constant interplay among domestic built construction (balcony), social space (city) and natural landscape (sea). Given the complexity of Benjamin’s curtain metaphor, not to mention his keen interest elsewhere in ornament, interiors, and material objects of everyday life, la rideaulogie was perhaps not as trivial to him as the somewhat absurd term might first imply. Art historians after Benjamin have explored the serious aesthetic issues at stake in draped fabrics, showing for instance that drapes were common in eighteenth-century interiors and in artworks depicting these spaces but that by the nineteenth century, particularly in professions relating to spatial aesthetics such as interior design, curtains had become controversial. On the one hand, as Lasc carefully documents, popular print venues that straddled the line between architecture and interior design, such as architect César Daly’s successful Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics, published lavish illustrations of interiors in which “designs impress[ed] by their use of drapery as an integral component of interior architecture.”31 On the other hand, they were derided by some of the most influential architectural writers of the day, including John Ruskin, Augustus Pugin and Charles Eastlake in Britain, who associated draped fabrics with extravagance, ugliness, and a lack of hygiene (as they were considered magnets for dust and vermin).32 In 1872, Eastlake equated draped cloth unflatteringly with the feminine, asserting that the use of too much fabric in an interior was the practice of female milliners who had the poor taste to think it attractive.33 In France, Paul Bichet, author of L’Art et le bien-être chez soi (1890), brought women and drapes apparently more neutrally into dialogue, seeing them as potentially complementary to one another. When it came to decorating a salon or living room, he wrote, “for hangings, you have the choice of the richest: plush in traditional fabrics, or, in modern fabrics, silk or velvet; the mistress of the house should also take care to choose fabrics which are kind to her coloring: blue if she is blonde, cherry-red if she is dark.”34 Although Bichet might have surmised that he was simply offering sound advice to a readership searching for practical decorating tips, the conceptual conflation of women and their drapes 31 Anca I. Lasc, Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018): 138. 32 Gen Doy, Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 11. 33 Doy, Drapery, 11. 34 Quoted in Diana Periton, “The Interior as Aesthetic Refuge: Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un artiste,” in Tracing Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, ed. Mari Hvattum and Christian Hermansen (London: Routledge, 2004), 138.

Expanding Interiors

91

could have the consequence of reinforcing ingrained patriarchal attitudes that women, like ornaments on clothing or in interior spaces, were merely decorative or superficial. Architect and historian Joel Sanders summarizes this pejorative attitude, noting the unfortunate perception that “draped with fabrics and finery, the decorated room calls to mind the decorated woman whose allure derives from superficial adornment.”35 Benjamin’s poetic declaration that “[c]urtains are interpreters of the language of the wind. They give to its every breath the form and sensuality of feminine forms” beautifully translates the kinesthesis of drapes into lyrical language but continues the dubious tradition of viewing parallels between women and objects of domestic decor.36 Offering up an even more problematic point of view in terms of gender politics, Emile Zola dramatized supposed links among corrupt women shoppers, draped fabric, and the new glass-and-steel architecture of the modern department store, famously juxtaposing these three elements in his 1882 novel Au Bonheur des Dames. As occurs in the novel, and was equally true at the Bon Marché, the real-life Parisian department store that served as the model for Zola’s fictional setting, textiles were regularly draped on interior architectural features such as banisters and columns as well as in window displays facing out to the street.37 If one goal of this luxurious “window dressing” was to seduce the store’s largely female clientele into purchasing clothing and other commodities, in the novel it also reflected Zola’s conflation of draped fabric, women, and questionable morality. In contrast, for the Countess, curtains, like clothing, blur the boundary between the female body and interior decor but do so in spatially innovative ways that seem to upend rather than reinforce restrictive gender norms. The image seen above of Castiglione and her son (Fig. 3.5.), one selected from many possibilities, exemplifies not only the ubiquity of curtains in the Countess’s photographs, but also her creative use of drapes to interrogate how subjects might both inform and be informed by space. We note here that the thickly contoured cloth hanging down the right side of the composition seems deliberately arranged to flow directly into the rich folds of the Countess’s cape, the draping of garment and room dressing lining up so perfectly that the distinction between the two is obscured. If one 35 Joel Sanders, “Curtain Wars,” Harvard Design Magazine 16 (2002): 16. 36 Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, trans. Maria Louise Asher, ed. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 82. 37 Doy, Drapery, 76–77.

92 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

possible reading of this synergy between female occupant and furnishing might be that of woman’s objectification as room ornament, when taken within the broader context of Castiglione’s decades-long involvement in the conceptualizing of her photographs, it is not the objectification of woman but rather woman’s artistic appropriation of interior space that seems to be her overall point. Unlike Benjamin, who, in another non-rideaulogie context, attacked the curtain in studio photographs as an object of “nonsense” that signaled bourgeois pretention and crassness, the Countess embraces drapery, making it transcend its banal presence in cartes de visite and transforming it from a furnishing representing feminine domestication into a marker of women’s spatial expression and significance.38 Any discussion of curtains cannot fail to raise the question of the stage, and indeed, in this regard it is not at all surprising that Castiglione was attracted to curtains given her obvious affinity for the theater. This affinity is substantiated broadly across the Countess’s photographs, wherein we see her masquerading as a host of characters from fisherwoman to nun to historical and mythical queens. In addition, she frequently adopts (melo)dramatic, stagey poses, and, in a double nod to theatricality, she dresses up both as celebrity actresses of the day and in the roles they were famous for playing. Anne Hollander references a type of excess associated specifically with the theater, a space that is certainly brought to mind by the thick and lavish drapery that we have observed in the Countess’s compositions. Referring to symbolic meanings of theater curtains that endured well into the age of cinema, Hollander writes, “[e]ven if a curtain does not rise or part but only surrounds the action, the plenteous folds on either side indicate the presence of magic and myth, with the emotionally nourishing suggestion of luxury and excess.”39 As much as the theater is one inspiration for Castiglione’s luxurious, excessive, curtains, however, I would suggest that there is also another aesthetic of excess at work in them, one that can help us think beyond stereotypes that were, and continue to be, perpetuated of the Countess as nothing more than a narcissistic diva. Expanding beyond a theatrical point of view reveals new ways of understanding Castiglione’s 38 In “A Short History of Photography” Benjamin has no love for what he views as an overabundance of cheap, aura-less props used in carte de visite photography, describing the 1860s as a period when “studios appeared with draperies and palm-trees, tapestries and easels, looking like a cross between an execution and a representation, between a torture chamber and a throne room.” Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” reprinted in Screen 3, no. 1 (March 1972): 18. 39 Anne Hollander, “The Fabric of Vision: The Role of Drapery in Art,” The Georgia Review 29, no. 2 (1975): 455.

Expanding Interiors

93

spatial sensibilities and her engagement with the gendering of architecture in her day. To do this, though, we must first think about what a curtain is from an architectural standpoint. As architect and historian Açalya Allmer observes, for the architect a curtain inhabits the line between an ephemeral item of furniture, which, by def inition, is an object that can be moved (and removed), and an architectural feature that is installed with some degree of permanency. Curtains have practical, non-decorative roles as well: they partition space and provide barriers to sight, cold, heat, light, and sound. As Allmer submits, “curtains stand midway between furniture and an architectural member.”40 It is perhaps this in-between character of the curtain – that it is neither strictly architectural, nor merely decorative – that inspired Castiglione to return time and again to its creative spatial potential. In this photograph, for instance (Fig. 3.7.), the Countess tugs at a draped curtain, her motion through the room and inhabitation of it suggested by the slight blurriness of the shot and the active diagonal lines created by body position and fabric. The importance of the curtain, and the special interest that it seemed to hold for Castiglione’s overall conception of the setting, is suggested in several companion pieces in which eye-catching teal-hued paint has been added. 41 Liberating the curtain from the status of mere backdrop, the layer of color calls attention to its draped folds and elevates this element of the room’s decor to a visual focal point on par with the only other painted presence in the photograph: the Countess herself. To return to the first image in black and white (Fig. 3.7.), the hybrid condition of the curtain as both a stable architectural feature and as an ephemeral, movable object is emphasized by the tension between the fabric’s heavy, sculptural appearance and its yielding to the pull of Castiglione’s hand. Once again, there is continuity between dress and setting, as the sleeve of the Countess’s arm leads with no break directly into the lines of the folds in the hanging fabric, giving the appearance of feminine garment and interior space merging into one another. We recall Grosz’s argument that space is not simply an ether, but rather, it is “inscribed by and in its turn inscribes those objects and activities placed within it.”42 It is this dynamic, reciprocal nature 40 Açalya Allmer, “Soft or Modern? Delineating Curtains in Domestic Interiors of Modern Architecture,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 2008. https://digitalcommons. unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=tsaconf; last accessed 1 July 2017. 41 The companion photographs which include brightly colored painted accents on the curtain and on Castliglione can be found at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1975 and are viewable on the museum’s website. 42 Grosz, Architecture, 164.

94 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

Fig. 3.7. Pierre-Louis Pierson, Judith. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1860s. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1975.

of the body to its locale that is suggested by the Countess’s architectural curtain and its interplay with the clothed female form. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, in France, curtains emblematized tensions between the all-male field of contemporary architecture and the subordinate realm of interior design, which was still associated with femininity through the notion of domesticity, although with the rise of the

Expanding Interiors

95

male-dominated profession of the architecte d’ameublement, this, too, was becoming the purview of men. 43 As Sanders points out in his provocatively titled article “Curtain Wars,” tensions between architecture and design would eventually lead, ironically, to their fusion, by way of the early-twentiethcentury modernist invention of what was named the “curtain wall.” Allmer describes the curtain wall as follows: The essential idea in a curtain wall is to separate the exterior wall from the primary structural system. Although curtain walls are non-load-bearing, they must still carry their own weight and transfer the wind loads to the supporting structure of the building. By far the most commonly used system in curtain walls is the combination of glass and a metal. The light-weight quality and availability of these materials make the building construction economical and thus many architects, since the turn of the twentieth-century, preferred to use the curtain wall system. 44

Architectural historian David Yeomans notes that one early term for the curtain wall was the “window wall.”45 Window walls revolutionized architecture when they were first brought to the world’s attention at the Crystal Palace, the pioneering transparent edifice erected by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to house the 1851 Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park. The prominence of the non-load-bearing glass panes that comprised the exterior of the entire Crystal Palace, and their impact on the history of architectural development, are reflected in the fact that the striking “crystal” building became a metonym for the event itself. One subtext in Castiglione’s photographs may have been this hallmark of architecture that radically altered the visual relationship between inside and outside, namely the glass-and-metal non-load-bearing window wall. In a trio of photographs dated 1856–57 (Figs. 3.8., 3.9., 3.10.), five years after the 43 Lasc’s book Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France studies the vast corpus of visual materials that were produced by interior designers as this rising profession established itself both in relation and in opposition to the discipline of architecture. The division between designers and architects became especially blurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, with many successful architects, not least famous names such as Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Henri Labrouste, working actively on interior decorations and furnishings in the structures that they had built. Meanwhile, trained decorators such as upholsterers and cabinet makers were increasingly involved with the practices of conceptualizing and modeling complete rooms and entire multi-room dwellings, their projects thus overlapping with work that had previously been carried out by architects. 44 Allmer, “Soft.” 45 David Yeomans, “The Origins of the Modern Curtain Wall,” APT Bulletin 31, no. 1 (2001): 13–15.

96 

Fig. 3.8. Pierre-Louis Pierson, The Gaze (Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione, 1835–1899). Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1856–57, 90 x 66 mm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005.

Fig. 3.9. Pierre-Louis Pierson, Béatrix (Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione, 1835–1899). Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1856–57, 105 x 70 mm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005.

Heidi Brevik-Zender

Fig. 3.10. Pierre-Louis Pierson, L’accoudée. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1856–57, 111 x 76 mm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1975.

Expanding Interiors

97

Crystal Palace Exhibition, Castiglione is pictured inclining her head onto or towards a glass-paned door, the transparent partition to which she tips her head conjuring echoes of the window wall. In these photographs, the centrality of the glass-paned door is emphasized by the fact that the Countess is shown in a variety of different of poses, from sitting to standing, and in various stages of déshabille, but the slant of her head and body pointing to the windows remains consistent throughout. Behind her, and on the surface of her dark skirt, we see shimmers of what appears to be natural light. This luminous effect is reminiscent of one widely remarked by visitors to the Crystal Palace, who marveled at the generous flood of natural light within the exhibition space that had been made possible by the technological advancement of using glass, rather than opaque stone or wood, for the building’s roof and walls. Naturally, in photography sources of illumination are always crucial for a successful exposure, regardless of the image’s subject matter. However, when we consider these photographs in the context of 1850s building construction developments, the architectural resonances of the window panes, the shimmers of light, and Castiglione’s experiments with both can be appreciated. For it was during the same years that launched the Countess’s photographic meditation on how a woman could expand beyond the interior that architects were prioritizing the building of natural light and the opening up of space through glass-and-steel window-wall and roof technology. Not only was this a hallmark of high-profile nineteenth-century buildings being erected in European cities and urban centers across the globe, but it was also a major concern for architectural theorists, a concern that Meredith L. Clausen characterizes as these architects’ ongoing “quest for light.”46 An iconic example in France of the “quest for light” during this period can be found in the works of architect and author Henri Labrouste (1801–1975). When the Countess began posing before Pierson’s lens, Labrouste was one of the most famous architects in France, celebrated for his pioneering designs for metal-and-glass upper walls and domes at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in the 1840s, and Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, which he worked on from the 1850s until his death in 1875. The preoccupation with light in nineteenth-century architectural theory and construction continued to evolve in the generation after Castiglione. In the 1920s, architect 46 Meredith L. Clausen, “Frank Lloyd Wright, Vertical Space, and the Chicago School’s Quest for Light,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44, no. 1 (1985): 66. Clausen outlines the Chicago School’s preoccupation with inventing new ways to build light sources into modern structures in this instructive article.

98 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

Le Corbusier accorded light a primary role in his modernist designs and writings about them, describing light as though it was itself an architectural element having three-dimensional form. In Toward an Architecture (1923), he wrote: “Our eyes were made for seeing forms in light; shadow and light reveal forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders and pyramids are the great primary forms that light reveals well.”47 For the architect, not only does light “reveal” the geometric shapes that constitute volume, but by calling up this list of “primary” forms – cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, and pyramids – Corbusier bestows upon light a structural dimensionality of its own. It is through this idea of light-as-form, an idea germinating in architecture in Castiglione’s day, that we might consider this extraordinary photograph of the Countess from the 1860s (Fig. 3.11.), which depicts her standing with her back to the camera and is shot from a slightly elevated point of view. The self-conscious pose of the Countess from behind, the mirror tilted perfectly to reflect her gaze back to the viewer, the structural, geometric repetition of framing rectangles by way of the mirror, the window panes, the decorated wall panels, and even the floor vent; all of these elements call attention to spatial relationships, to design, to the architecture, that is, of the room. Due to overexposure the bright glare from the windows saturates the room, glowing like a wall of light. Light-as-form, the radiant plane of windows lends as much interest to the composition as Castiglione’s equally luminous gown, the straight right angles of the former set into a spatial dialogue with the contoured curves of the latter in a harmonious interchange among voluminous shapes of light. Returning to the trio of portraits of Castiglione leaning against transparent panes of glass (see Figs. 3.8., 3.9., 3.10.) there is another spatial point to be made, which relates to the addition of color to Castiglione’s images. Apraxine and Demange indicate that, in some instances, the Countess herself applied the paint, while inscriptions in her handwriting on the backs of some photographs suggest in certain cases that coloring was carried out by others but according to her instructions. 48 The most successful examples of painted enhancements appear to have been executed by the

47 Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2007): 102 48 Apraxine and Demange, Divine, 173. Discussing the crudeness of some of these hand-colored images Solomon-Godeau argues convincingly that “Since a number of these photographs are annotated in the countess’s hand (usually specifying the colors, accessories, and jewelry she wore with the depicted outfit), it seems reasonable to suppose that it was she who painted them.” “Legs,” 73, note 11.

Expanding Interiors

99

Fig. 3.11. Pierre-Louis Pierson, [Countess de Castiglione as Elvira at the Cheval Glass]. Salted paper print from glass negative, 1861–67, 145 x 154 mm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005.

Mayer and Pierson studio’s regular painter Aquilin Schad. 49 Occasionally, Schad, commissioned by Castiglione, created original compositions out of the photographs by inserting backgrounds and painting different garments over the ones worn by the Countess in the studio. The standing pose in the panes of glass series that we have been analyzing was one such photograph. Schad transformed it from an image of Pierson’s light-filled studio to a darkly haunting rocky nature scene representing the tomb of Romeo and Juliet (Fig. 3.12.), a scene inspired by a play by Ernest Legouvé about the tragic heroine Béatrix, a role that had been played in Paris in 1861 by Adelaide Ristori, one of Castiglione’s favorite actresses.50 In the colored version, Schad makes minor alterations to Castiglione’s expression and costume, but it is 49 Apraxine and Demange, Divine, 162. 50 Apraxine and Demange, 173.

100 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

Fig. 3.12. Pierre-Louis Pierson. Béatrix (Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione, 1835–1899). Salted paper print from glass negative with applied color, 1856–57, printed 1861–67, 232 x 178 mm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005.

obvious that the painting of the Countess as Béatrix has been layered over a copy of the original studio photograph. It might be tempting to consider Schad’s overpainting as the “f inal” version of the work and Pierson’s unadulterated photograph as merely a penultimate step in the process towards the “intended” image showing

Expanding Interiors

101

Béatrix/Castiglione leaning, not on a wall of glass, but rather on a boulder designating the Verona lovers’ burial place. However, I would like to suggest that the various versions of this composition (and numerous others also painted over that exist among the Countess’s photographs) are to be privileged equally insofar as they lay bare nineteenth-century conceptions about the photographic process itself and, relatedly, the medium’s unique ability to render the spaces that it fixed to paper in a mode that was neither strictly realist nor speculative but something of both. In his analysis of the memoirs of nineteenth-century celebrity portrait photographer Nadar, (the name adopted by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), Cadava perceptively draws attention to an idea found in Balzac and in Benjamin, which, summarized, intimates that “all bodies are made up entirely of layers of ghostlike images. Every time someone is photographed, a spectral layer is removed from the body and transferred to the photograph.”51 Thus, “the photographic portrait is also a palimpsest to be read, a kind of archive; it always bears several memories at once; it is never closed.”52 Cadava is writing about bodies in portraits, but the Countess shows us that the thought can also apply to the spaces in which bodies are depicted. Through the palimpsestic procedure of layering paint on photographic print to make of the portrait studio an entirely other place, photography allows multiple locales, whether built or imagined – the window-wall room in Paris, the domestic interior for which the studio is a simulacrum, the mournful Italian countryside – to exist simultaneously. Consisting of palimpsestic strata of paint and albumen silver on salt paper, and representing numerous copies and versions of the same compositional idea, the Countess’s photographic project both conceptualizes and literalizes the way in which these manifestations of space are “spectral layers,” to quote Cadava, that can be peeled away to form separate but interrelated prints. We remember Grosz’s comment that architectural space is not merely an ether, but that “it is inscribed by and in its turn inscribes those objects and activities placed within it.” To consider Schad’s painted photograph beside the versions in Pierson’s studio is to see this in black and white (and color): the glass-paned door to which Castiglione inclines her head is as much a part of the rendering of the Verona landscape as the boulder in the Italian countryside, which in turn can be imagined as a spectral layer of the Paris domestic interior. The gendered implications of this expression of spatial heterogeneity and multiplicity are noteworthy. For, as a female designer of these images 51 Cadava, “Photographopolis,” 61. 52 Cadava, 63.

102 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

Castiglione seems to confront expectations for reproduction represented by the women who typically populated nineteenth-century carte de visite portraits. Instead of representing woman as implicitly “at home” in a single formulaic domestic setting, she draws on photographic, rather than biological, reproducibility to liberate architectural space into multilayered iterations. In what remains, we will analyze two recurring elements in the Countess’s photographs that might not seem to connect to architecture but that I believe do, the first of which has caught the interest of scholars for other reasons, and the second of which has gone uncommented. It is thus that we return to where we began by addressing first the curious photographs that the Countess had Pierson take of her exposed legs and feet (Fig. 3.1.), images that are among the most puzzling and audacious in the entire collection. Because these photographs by their semi-nudity seem different from the images that we have been examining of the clothed Countess and her use of draped fabrics, curtains, and other furnishings, it is tempting to view them as part of a separate aesthetic agenda. However, if we consider them from an architectural point of view, these body-part images can be understood as more consistent with Castiglione’s spatially informed photo-architectural project than they at first appear. To begin with, not unlike her fully clad self-portraits, the bare-leg images use furniture against the grain, as seen in the ambiguity of the furnishings that background the Countess’s white limbs. Solomon-Godeau speculates, for instance, that the furniture piece pictured on the left might be a chair or perhaps an ottoman-like hassock; regardless, she is right to point out, one overall impression is that of a body in a coffin.53 Through the combination of strange camera angles and the bizarre compositional choice to center on calves and feet, the limbs complicate the very space that they furnish, rendering it unrecognizable and indeterminate, even uncanny, as Cadava, following Balzac and Benjamin, might point out. What is intriguing from an architectural perspective is the way in which these images echo trends in the illustrated publications of many contemporary interior designers. As Lasc has shown, for instance, the influential upholsterer and proto-designer Jules Deville (1825–1890) produced drawings of whole interiors characterized by unconventional perspectives that drew on distortion and unusual viewing angles of items of furniture. Describing Deville’s “daring spatial constructions” Lasc writes, “inspired by contemporary views of interiors, and possibly also by photography, Deville 53 Solomon-Godeau, “Legs,” 80.

Expanding Interiors

103

often used abstruse angles to foreground his compositions.”54 In addition to carte de visite photography, then, another visual intertext for the spaces in the Countess’s images, particularly those of her legs taken from “abstruse angles,” may have been the innovative diagrams by interior decorators like Deville and others like him that were in wide circulation during these years.55 Indeed, the unsettling, strange-but-familiar otherworldliness of the Countess’s uncanny body parts actually resonates with a specific interior design trend of this period. Studying decorating manuals and pattern books from the 1880s, Lasc has documented a vogue for displays in homes of famous classical sculptures, such as the Venus de Milo and Diana the Huntress, sculptures housed then, as now, at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Although the popularity of displaying copies of well-known artworks as furnishing in bourgeois interiors is hardly a surprise given middle-class desires to project the notions of good taste and refinement associated with fine art, in reality a full-sized reproduction of a statue could be prohibitively expensive for a household to acquire. In response, the Louvre offered disembodied pieces of sculptures at more affordable rates, so that at least select limbs amputated from the full-sized work could be featured in a room’s overall design. As Lasc explains it: The Louvre museum itself was selling by 1883 plaster casts after its famous ancient sculpture Diana the Huntress, with Her Doe. At prices ranging from 300 for a full-sized copy to two francs for one of the sculpture’s detached members, be that an arm or a leg, such casts made it possible for Parisians to bring the illustrated schemes reproduced in the public press or advice literature to life within their private interiors (emphasis added).56

It is with this interior-decor context in mind that I would like to consider the Countess’s nude-limb photos, not in relation to pornography or to ballet dancers, as has already been cogently argued, but in relation to classical-statue-parts-cum-furniture that contemporary decorating 54 Lasc, Interior, 77–78. 55 Design historian Stefan Muthesius addresses the influence of photography on the visual representations of rooms by interior designers in European print culture. He writes, “It was photography which revolutionized the depiction of the complete interior during the 1870s. Wide-angled, well-detailed and yet picturesquely lit representations became abundant, helped also by advances in reproduction methods.” Stefan Muthesius, “Communications Between Traders, Users and Artists: The Growth of German Language Serial Publications on Domestic Interior Decoration in the Later Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Design History 18, no. 1 (2005): 13. 56 Lasc, “Angels,” 51.

104 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

professionals were integrating into designs for bourgeois rooms. Put simply, the photographs of the Countess’s pure white, sculpture-like legs parallel the period’s vogue for such limbs in interior decor schemes. We may then think of the Countess here assuming multiple roles: that of an architecte d’ameublement who composes designs for spaces and also that of the ivorycolored, human-limb furnishings themselves. To justify this interpretation it is worth mentioning that Castiglione’s physical beauty was repeatedly described by admirers as “sculptural,”57 and that her biographer Robert de Montesquiou owned molds made of her feet and arms and displayed them in his home.58 We might thus entertain the idea that the Countess, drawing on her own reputation as a flawless, idealized beauty, much like the Louvre’s marble Diana, engendered in her photographs what Grosz describes as “the return of space to the bodies whose morphologies it upholds and conforms.” That is, Castiglione engaged in an architecture wherein she was simultaneously designer, body, and furnishings in the room, an approach to styling interiors that seems to anticipate Grosz’s later call for a female-informed architecture of excess. The manifestations of excess in the Countess’s photographs on which we have been concentrating pertain to her clothed body and her expansion and manipulation of decor, furnishings, and light in ways that, I have been arguing, are architectural. Building on this, the term “excess,” has, I submit, great potential as a critical concept when it is understood as a spatial category that enables the breakdown of the concepts of inside and outside that normally define the architecture of a room. This breakdown can be seen in a particular feature of Castiglione’s images that has only recently been contemplated by scholars, likely because it is not, in some respects, actually a “part” of them. I am referring to the sections framing the outer limits of the photographs, the borders wherein backdrop screens end, where hems of skirts trail off, and where the room outside the room begins (Fig. 3.13.). These edges are, literally, “excessive” in that, as would have generally been the case for studio photographs of the period, they are not meant to be highlighted, and would have eventually been cropped out or covered by a frame, as we see a number of times in Castiglione’s case. But even if we can rationalize away these excessive zones in this manner, they 57 Solomon-Godeau, “Legs,” 76–77. 58 There are a number of images in which Pierson’s camera zooms in on the Countess’s sandals – clad versions of the barefoot pictures. These evidence on the one hand Castiglione’s awareness of the captivating power of (her) isolated body parts. But also, following an interior-decor line of thinking, perhaps they can be viewed as pictorial meditations by the Countess-as-architecte d’ameublement on how an ornamental foot could be displayed in a given interior.

Expanding Interiors

105

Fig. 3.13. Pierre-Louis Pierson, Funerale. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1860s. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1975.

are present in much of the photographic documentation that we have of the Countess. Moreover, they are evidence of a larger spatial context that photographs reference, but never explicitly show. We might thus consider them extensions of what Kate Flint, following art critic James Eakins, terms the “surround” in photographs. According to Flint, “the surround […] very frequently contains the stray, the unintended, the accidental, or the serendipitous […] with a photograph, although there may be an artificial

106 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

border – a window, a shot taken through railings or tree branches, or […] a backcloth – some kind of surround may be presumed to continue outside the image’s edges.”59 As Batchen notes, it was not uncommon for edges of backdrops and props such as headrests to remain discernible within carte de visite images.60 In the Countess’s photographs this practice extends to the entire photographic plane, including the surround and the “extra” edges, and is taken to a remarkable degree. As many examples indicate, for instance, there seems to be no impetus to dissimulate the fasteners by which layers of backdrop screens hang to walls, the unfinished trimming of the backdrops themselves, or any extra unused props that accumulate on the side, intruding into the borders. Finally, and here is where they resonate with the bare-limb images: there is something odd and disquieting about these edges, as “excessive” things often are. One thing that renders these excessive edges strange is what they represent in terms of space. For these are the sections of the photographs in which the outside and the inside visually collide, where the relationality of outside to inside that architecture must confront is both constituted and laid bare.61 In a passage worth citing at length, Grosz addresses some of the perplexities inherent to the relationship of inside to outside and highlights the positional strangeness of this relationship, theorizing that: The outside is a peculiar place, both paradoxical and perverse. It is paradoxical insofar as it can only ever make sense, have a place, in reference to what it is not and can never be – an inside, a within, an interior. And it is perverse, for while it is placed always relative to an inside, it observes no faith to the consistency of this inside. It is perverse in its breadth, in its refusal to be contained or constrained by the self-consistency of the inside. The outside is the place one can never occupy fully or completely, for it is always other, different, at a distance from where one is. One cannot be 59 Kate Flint, “Surround, Background, and the Overlooked,” Victorian Studies 57, no. 3 (2015): 442. 60 Batchen, “Dreams,” 74. For Batchen the props left sometimes visible in carte de visite photographs underscore the artif iciality of their settings. From this he advances the intriguing argument that mass photography made its own methods of production evident and thus, in its own formulaic banality, it actually transferred the task of imagination to the main beholders of photographs, that is, to the middle class. 61 For a thought-provoking study of modernist relationships among inside, outside and gender in the architecture of Le Corbusier and his contemporary Adolf Loos, see Beatriz Colomina, “The Spit Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992): 72–128.

Expanding Interiors

107

outside everything, always outside: to be outside something is always to be inside something else. To be outside (something) is to afford oneself the possibility of a perspective, to look upon this inside, which is made difficult, if not impossible, from the inside (emphasis added).62

To my mind, the Countess’s photographs, and, especially, the peculiar edge zones of excess that we have been examining, enact what Grosz summarizes as “outsideness.”63 We might, on the one hand, relate the outsideness of Castiglione’s images to the fact that she was in many ways an outsider: although she was an aristocrat, famous and wealthy, she was also shunned by society and died poor and alone; she had a creative practice producing photographs of herself, but rather than recognizing her endeavors as artistic, contemporaries (followed by her fawning but mythologizing biographer Montesquiou) relegated her to the extra-ordinary roles of diva, narcissist, or courtesan; as a mother she was an outsider, rejected by her son Giorgio, who, as an adult, estranged himself and appears to have threatened legal action against her for control of his inheritance.64 The photographs themselves also fall outside of basic categorizations: they resemble the carte de visite, but, as we have seen, they rebel against its standard(izing) tropes. The images also model themselves on photographs of famous actresses that were sold to mass audiences, but as far as we know, the Countess’s photos were not, during her lifetime, circulated for payment. Beyond these biographical glimpses into her social outsideness, though, the aesthetic project that these hundreds of images constitute draws on a basic spatial outsideness, or a “refusal to be contained or constrained by the self-consistency of the inside,” as Grosz puts it. This refusal to be constrained is literalized in the excesses that could have been (but have not been) cropped from the edges of the photos, where the Countess’s garments and room furnishings are not contained and instead expand beyond prescribed limits. For Grosz, if there is a strangeness there is also a “joy” to outsideness in that it allows one “to see what cannot be seen from the inside.”65 We have little in Castiglione’s own words about her photographs or the act of making them, so we cannot know whether she found pleasure in producing 62 Grosz, Architecture, xv. 63 Grosz, xv. 64 Xavier Demange, “A Nineteenth-Century Photo-Novel,” in “The Divine Countess”: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione, eds. Pierre Apraxine and Xaiver Demange (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000), 69. 65 Grosz, Architecture, xv.

108 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

them. However, we can be more confident that the images evince a clearly articulated, decades-long spatial perspective that depended upon referencing and then breaking rules, particularly gendered rules governing women’s bodies in interior space. As Grosz explains above, “to be outside (something) is to afford oneself the possibility of a perspective, to look upon this inside, which is made difficult, if not impossible, from the inside.” It is the point of view of outsideness that may have been a crucial factor in the original designs for modern rooms that Castiglione created, rooms that challenged prevailing conceptions of interior space by giving woman a central role both as subject and conceptual architect.

Bibliography Allmer, Açalya. “Soft or Modern? Delineating Curtains in Domestic Interiors of Modern Architecture.” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 2008. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=ts aconf; last accessed 1 July 2017. Apraxine, Pierre, and Xaiver Demange, eds. “The Divine Countess”: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Batchen, Geoffrey. “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination.” In Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, edited by J.J. Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch, 80–97. London: Routledge, 2009. Bear, Jordan. “The Silent Partner: Agency and Absence in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Collaborations.” Grey Room 48 (Summer 2012): 78–101. Benjamin, Walter. “A Short History of Photography.” Reprinted in Screen 3, no. 1 (March 1972): 5–26. Cadava, Eduardo. “Nadar’s Photographopolis.” Grey Room 48 (Summer 2012): 56–77. Clausen, Meredith L. “Frank Lloyd Wright, Vertical Space, and the Chicago School’s Quest for Light.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44, no. 1 (1985): 66–74. Colomina, Beatriz. “The Spit Wall: Domestic Voyeurism.” In Sexuality and Space, 72–128. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992. Le Corbusier. Toward an Architecture. Translated by John Goodman. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2007. Demange, Xavier. “A Nineteenth-Century Photo-Novel.” In “The Divine Countess”: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione, edited by Pierre Apraxine and Xaiver Demange, 52–73. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000. Disdéri, André Adolphe Eugène. Manuel opératoire de photographie sur collodion instantané. Paris: Alexis Gaduin, 1853.

Expanding Interiors

109

Doy, Gen. Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002. Flint, Kate. “Surround, Background, and the Overlooked.” Victorian Studies 57, no. 3 (2015): 449–461. Garelick, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from The Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2001. Hollander, Anne. “The Fabric of Vision: The Role of Drapery in Art.” The Georgia Review 29, no. 2 (1975): 414–465. Lasc, Anca I. “Angels and Rebels: The Obsessions and Transgressions of the Modern Interior.” In Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, edited by Anca I. Lasc, Georgina Downey, and Mark Taylor, 47–58. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Lasc, Anca I. Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Lyon, Elisabeth. “Unspeakable Images, Unspeakable Bodies.” Camera Obscura 8, 3 (24) (1990): 168–194. Marder, Elissa. The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1985. Muthesius, Stefan. “Communications Between Traders, Users and Artists: The Growth of German Language Serial Publications on Domestic Interior Decoration in the Later Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Design History 18, no. 1 (2005): 7–20. Periton, Diana. “The Interior as Aesthetic Refuge: Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un artiste.” In Tracing Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, edited by Mari Hvattum and Christian Hermansen, 137–155. London: Routledge, 2004. Rexroth, Tillman. “Editorial Note.” In On Hashish, written by Walter Benjamin, edited by Howard Eiland, 13–16. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Sanders, Joel. “Curtain Wars.” Harvard Design Magazine 16 (2002): 14–20. Selz, Jean. “An Experiment by Walter Benjamin.” Translated by Maria Louise Asher. In On Hashish, written by Walter Benjamin, edited by Howard Eiland, 147–155. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “The Legs of the Countess.” October 39 (1986): 65–108. Yeomans, David. “The Origins of the Modern Curtain Wall.” APT Bulletin 31, no. 1 (2001): 13–18.

110 

Heidi Brevik-Zender

About the author Heidi Brevik-Zender is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, US. Her research interests are in French literature and visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present, and her published work has focused on fashion in relation to diverse topics including gender, urban space, exile, post-colonialism, and social protest. Author of the book Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (2015) she is also editor of the volume Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco (2018). Her current book project, which has been supported by a US-UK Fulbright Award, investigates women and architecture in nineteenth-century France.

4. The Land that Never Was: Liminality of Existence and the Imaginary Spaces in the Archbishopric of Karlovci Jelena Todorovic

Abstract The realm of the Orthodox Archbishopric of Karlovci in the Austrian Habsburg Empire was like no other founded on the concept of liminality. Established in 1690, the archbishopric was, from its outset, a highly peculiar space-in-between. This Orthodox domain in the Catholic Empire was never truly its own master and constantly threatened to be dissolved into the Catholic majority. The archbishopric had to perpetually re-invent itself and forge new legitimacies that were as ephemeral as its transient glory. Its liminal existence emerged saliently in ceremonial spaces, staged to celebrate the domain’s fragile power. From liminal landscapes depicting forlorn glory, to processions staged upon its cities’ disowned spaces, the archbishopric’s political propaganda was deeply marked by spatial ambiguities. Keywords: The Archbishopric of Karlovci, ephemerality, fluidity, liminality, imaginary spaces

Introduction If any eighteenth-century realm was founded primarily on the concept of liminality, it was surely the Orthodox Archbishopric of Karlovci in the Austrian Habsburg Empire. Established in 1690 when the Serbian Orthodox populace fled the Ottoman Empire, from the outset, the archbishopric of Karlovci was a very peculiar space-in-between. An Orthodox domain in a Catholic Empire, whose space was never truly its own, and an ethnia

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_ch04

114 

Jelena Todorovic

constantly on the verge of assimilation into the Catholic majority, it had to perpetually re-invent its existence, and to forge new legitimacies that would prove as ephemeral as its transient glory.1 The archbishopric was founded in the Austrian Habsburg Empire as a specific domain and populated by the Orthodox Serbs who, in their exodus in the face of Ottoman oppression, took refuge under Habsburg protection. After years of negotiations, Patriarch Arsenije III Čarnojević, the ecclesiastical leader of the Serbs under Ottoman rule, led one of the greatest exoduses of seventeenth-century Europe that together would re-draw it comprehensively. Such momentous movements of peoples were defining events of the age. This was the great age of movement, while Baroque man was often referred to as homo viator, a man in constant flux. Although situated at the very end of the seventeenth century, the exodus of Orthodox Serbs formed an inseparable part of other migrations that re-drew the map of early modern Europe. The Patriarch Arsenije III gathered a large number of Serbian high clergy and more than 40,000 of his compatriots undertook a journey fraught with peril and uncertainty before settling in the territories bordering the Danube and, over the ensuing decades, even more distant parts of the empire.2 Throughout its history, the newly established ethnia was ruled by the archbishop, who acted as a political-religious head of the Orthodox Church. His position and the fate of his people depended to a large extent on his diplomatic skills, and the favors of Habsburg emperors. Despite the legal boundaries, their existence would be as fluid and uncertain as the changing course of the imperial politics. Thus, the entire history of the archbishopric was defined by the diplomatic struggle to defend the little autonomy they were originally granted and, more importantly, to preserve the faith and their sense of integrity in the Orthodox ethnia.3 Formally and legally, the Serbs had been granted not only this virtual duality of power, but, moreover, a true sacred and temporal autonomy for the archbishopric in the territories of the Most Catholic Sovereign. Its position in the empire was legally defined by a set of imperial documents 1 An elaborated and extended discussion of this topic was published in Jelena Todorović, Spaces that Never Were in Early Modern Culture: Exploration of Edges and Confines (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 133–167. 2 For the subject of the Great Exodus, see Jovan Tomić, Srbi u velikoj seobi (Beograd: Prosveta, 1990), 180–190 and Dinko Davidov, Srpske Privilegija doma Habzburskog (Novi Sad: Galerija Matice Srpske, 1994), 15–16. 3 On the subject of ethnia see Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

The L and that Never Was

115

known as the three Privileges that were promulgated in 1690 and 1691. The very foundation was charted in the document known as The First Privilege, issued by Leopold I in 1690 as a form of imperial guarantee, in whose opening clauses the Habsburg emperor confirmed all the Serbs’ demands and legitimized their newly acquired position in the empire: The Patriarch thus elected is entirely free to manage the churches under his jurisdiction, he has the right to build their own churches and appoint priests to their parishes; therefore, they will stay leaders of the Serbian Orthodox Church and its congregation; [the Serbian Orthodox Church] has the jurisdiction, according to these privileges and the former ones […] over the entire Greece, Raška, Bulgaria, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Jenopolj and Herzegovina, as well as Hungary and Croatia. And everywhere where the Orthodox Serbs exist, and as long as they are humble and loyal. 4

The First Privilege formed the essential foundation upon which the new ethnia would be established in the Habsburg lands. However, the issuing of this document would also mark the onset of the great age of uncertainty. Soon after their arrival in the empire, the Orthodox Patriarch and the high clergy became aware that their protection was partly virtual, a generous but false promise of the emperor.5In addition, their position and confessional rights were constantly jeopardized, since throughout the history of the archbishopric, the Orthodox Church faced diverse and fierce attempts of conversion to Catholicism, and perpetual diminishing of their legal boundaries. The existence of the archbishopric was thus utterly liminal, forever poised on the boundary between liberties promised and liberties granted. Not unexpectedly, such a delicate political situation engendered a profoundly unstable sense of space, the ambiguity of which would permeate all archiepiscopal formulations and visualizations of space in the decades to come. From the very beginning, the Privileges regulated the possession and usage of the Empire’s land, but only the land proper. A parallel process charted a different territory, the virtual spaces of power as conceived of by the senior Orthodox clergy. Considering the very limited number of loci within the empire that the Orthodox Serbs could claim as undoubtedly theirs (palaces, churches, and lands granted by the emperor), the only spaces available for the flourishing of their political dreams were liminal indeed. 4 Taken from the First Privilege of Leopold I. The original is kept in the Archiepiscopal Archive of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Scencies Sremski Karlovci 1690–1691 (B-21-1690). 5 Davidov, Srpske privilegije, 18–19.

116 

Jelena Todorovic

Moreover, this political liminality was inseparably intertwined with the more factual, geographical liminality of the realm that had been offered to the Orthodox Church by the imperial charters. The entire existence of the Serbs in the empire was greatly defined by the concepts of boundaries, margins, confines, and borders. Indeed, it was the border itself that became their essential territory, and was deeply inscribed into their perception of themselves.6The physical space where the Serbian populace settled was described as ad confinum, a true military frontier, the border lands of the Habsburg Empire facing the Ottomans. It was thus that the Serbs fulfilled the promise they had given to the emperor in 1690: that they would serve as the protectors of the imperial borders “until their last drop of blood.”7

The sense of impermanence The fact that the Archbishopric of Karlovci resided in a dual liminal space–on the empire’s frontier against the Ottomans, and on the fragile boundary between space possessed and dispossessed – marked its profoundly fluid sense of existence. This was further enhanced by the vivid, but unrealizable hope of the entire Orthodox populace in the empire for a timely return to their fatherland in Serbia. Throughout their first decade under Habsburg protection, the leaders of the Orthodox Church perceived their time in the Habsburg lands as temporary, a mere interlude. But there was to be no return. They remained under the Habsburg eagle for decades to come, striving to legitimize their precarious position and preserve their national integrity. During the first years of their settlement in the empire, neither Arsenije III, nor the Serbian populace viewed their position in the empire, or indeed their exodus itself, as the final chapter of their journey. Despite the sufferings of their exodus, which might easily have formed the nucleus of a new identity (as, for example, among the English of English North America in the same period), they could not accept the notion that the desertion of their homeland, and, more significantly, of their historical ecclesiastical see in Peć, was permanent. The desire to return was evident in the diplomatic work of Arsenije III who, until his death in 1706, strove to lead his people 6 See Drago Roksandić, Triplex Confiniumili o granicama i regijamahrvatskepovjesti 1500–1800 (Zagreb: Barbat, 2003). 7 Taken from the First Privilege of Leopold I. The original is kept in theArchiepiscopal Archive of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Scencies Sremski Karlovci 1690–1691 (B-21-1690).

The L and that Never Was

117

back to their fatherland. In a letter written towards the end of his life, the patriarch poetically expressed his longing for this final return: Day in, day out, like a vessel on the vast ocean, we wander with our impoverished people from one place to another awaiting our return, waiting for the Sun to set and for the dark night to pass together with the misery of winter lying in front of us. The only one who would console us and advise us is not present.8

Due to the firmness of their belief that their exile was only temporary, the Serbian populace– almost until the peace of Karlovci in 1699– maintained a kind of nomadic lifestyle, in perpetual hope that the next journey would be the one of return. Their first houses and churches were built of wood, mud, and other perishable materials, clearly expressing their feelings about the impermanence of their sojourn in the empire. It was only long after the death of Arsenije III, with the final constitution of the Serbs’ capital, primarily in the monastery of Krušedol and subsequently in Karlovci in 1718, that the Orthodox Serbs gradually invested the concept of their existence with a sense of permanence.9 Except for the principal decrees concerning the freedom of confession, a wide array of political liberties inscribed in the three Leopoldian Privileges remained mere empty promises.10 Shortly after the exodus, the status of the Orthodox ecclesiastical leader became the subject of a major dispute between the imperial court and the Orthodox high clergy. The patriarchal title that was guaranteed by the Privileges and that was the prerequisite of Arsenije III’s status, implied far greater importance than the emperor and his court chancellors were ready to acknowledge in reality. Although Arsenije III held the title until the end of his life and reign, the Emperor Joseph I abolished it shortly afterwards: We can grant this liberty to the old Patriarch during his lifetime, but after his death we must abolish this custom together with the title of Patriarch; we must make sure that they never elect another Patriarch since it is against the Catholic Church and the doctrine of the Fathers of 8 The letter of Arsenije III to Boyar Alexander Vasilievich Golovin is published in Djordje Trifunović, ed. Očevici o velikoj seobi Srba (Kruševac: Bagdala, 1990), 48. 9 For the relevance of promised liberties see Davidov, Srpske privilegije, 39–43. 10 Radoslav Grujić, Problemi istorije Karlovačke mitropolije (Novi Sad: Istorijsko Društvo, 1929), 2–14; Davidov, Srpske Privilegije, 18–20 and Radoslav Grujić, “Pećki patrijarsi i karlovački mitropoliti u XVIII veku,” Glasnik istoriskog društva u Novom Sadu (GIDNS)4/8-1 (April, 1931): 13–34.

118 

Jelena Todorovic

the Church. We must prevent the Patriarch from naming his successor during his lifetime, but delay that matter after his death until the whole matter is entirely forgotten. Since after his death there would be no one to invest the new bishop, they [Orthodox Serbs] would themselves join the Catholic Church, and hopefully they would be followed by their abbots, monks and priests. In such a way, due to the passage of time and without any use of force, all of them would gradually join the Catholic Church, while the populace would be treated according to our current needs.11

The emperor used all the means available to him to abolish this historic Orthodox title and replace it with the far less distinguished one of archbishop or metropolitan, which indeed would be perpetuated throughout the eighteenth century.12 Publicly, this process began with a decree of 1708, proclaimed in the Serbian Orthodox assembly in the Monastery of Krušedol, that the spiritual leader of the Serbs in the empire would be officially renamed as both metropolitan and archbishop. Although in practice there were no differences between these two titles, in the sphere of official imperial protocol they reflected distinct positions of power.13 In any case, pursuant to this devaluation of the spiritual hierarchy, the entire Orthodox dominion in the empire came to bear the name “Archbishopric,” instead of “Patriarchate” that it was rightfully due. As such, the history of the Orthodox Church in the Austrian Empire was a perpetual struggle for legitimation and re-legitimation. With the accession of each Habsburg monarch, the Privileges had to be re-confirmed, the Serbs’ loyalty re-endorsed, and their rights reasserted. The whole community’s success relied heavily upon their archbishops’ skills at negotiating with the imperial court, constantly striving to enlarge the virtual confines of archiepiscopal authority in the empire. Their quest for space, real and virtual, regularly re-drew the boundaries of the Archbishopric of Karlovci, and enhanced even further the shadowy existence of this Orthodox ethnia. 11 This quote from Kolonić’s correspondence was published in Latin and in Serbian translation in Radoslav Grujić, “Prilozi za istoriju Srba u doba austrijske okupacije (1718–1739),” Zbornik radova SAN, Institut za proučavanje kniževnosti 2/17 (February, 1914): 64. 12 Grujić, Problemi istorije Karlovačke mitropolije, 2–4. 13 While the leader of the Orthodox Church in Austria was by his own high clergy always primarily denominated as metropolitan, the Austrians preferred to use the title of archbishop in order to bring it closer to their Catholic intitulations. The only exception to this firm Imperial rule was the case of Patriarch (of Peć and later of Karlovci and Belgrade) Arsenije IV Jovanović Šakabenta (1737–1741) who derived his title, like his illustrious namesake, directly from the historic see of Peć.

The L and that Never Was

119

Fluidity of a visual idiom An overwhelming sense of fluidity – of land, of locus, and of the self – imbued all forms of political and artistic expression in the Archbishopric of Karlovci. It defined the entire visual idiom of Baroque art in this domain, making it a hybrid cultural phenomenon in its own right. Moreover, the qualities of fluidity and fluctuation, which, as we have seen, were inherent in Baroque culture itself, tended to be at their most apparent in territories as liminal as those of the archbishopric. Thus, the land and the style perfectly complemented each other, fostering an art whose primary quality was its liminal, transitory, fluid, and shifting nature. In the history of culture, the Baroque was the first style that possessed an unparalleled power of mutability, a quality that enabled its transformation from a merely European into the first distinctively global phenomenon. As part of this, the established relationship between periphery and center was irrevocably changed. Instead of one dominant capital, it was marked by a plurality of centers, which rendered the map of Baroque art as polycentric as the Baroque sense of space. From Rome to Vienna, Karlovci and Mexico, the Baroque idiom took on diverse semblances and a multitude of shapes as it seamlessly adapted to new cultures, territories, and confessions. This process engendered works of conspicuous cultural bilingualism, including the Ukrainian, English, and Serbian Baroque. Indeed, Baroque culture was one of perpetual metamorphoses, a world of boundless peripheries, devoid of a dominant capital.14 In this polycentric universe of perpetual metamorphoses and boundless peripheries, the Archbishopric of Karlovci became one of the capitals. Since, prior to their exodus, the Orthodox Serbs under the Ottoman Empire had not had any direct contact with Baroque culture, their translocation into the Austrian Empire marked a pivotal change. In the land of the Habsburgs, the Serbs found full recognition of their religion – though, as we have seen, this did not mean that attempts at conversion were not constantly made – but not for their national identity. Even the earliest Archbishops of Karlovci began to adapt to the new political situation and engaged in wide-ranging reform of their people’s religious and political life. The reforms spanned a thorough reform of the Church, extending even to language and visual arts. From their settlement in the Austrian lands the leaders of the Orthodox realized 14 Further on the concept of the universal Baroque see Davidson, The Universal Baroque, 1–12 and Jelena Todorović, The Hidden Legacies of Baroque Culture in Modern Literature: The Realms of Eternal Present (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 2–10.

120 

Jelena Todorovic

that they had to conform to the new political situation and appropriate the language of authority and political presentation that would enable a successful dialogue of power with the Empire. Through the adaption of the existing, post-Byzantine cultural models, to the Baroque cultural idiom, the Serbs of Karlovci created art of unique vividness and vitality. Their eighteenth-century churches were curiously bilingual creations with a pronounced sense of liminality, in which time-honored post-Byzantine Orthodox iconography was grafted into novel Baroque forms, while, conversely, some completely new Baroque iconographic schemes were introduced into Serbian culture. The Baroque style of the Orthodox archbishopric was created through a dual source: through the art present in the empire, but, more importantly through the Baroque art from Kievan Russia.15 The second source proved to be of considerable importance as it already presented to the Orthodox Serbs a successful hybrid Baroque creation that could be used for their own reform of religious arts and iconography. It is from Kiev that models of religious art, together with artists and teachers, were imported into the Orthodox Archbishopric of Karlovci in the first decades of the eighteenth century.16 The choice of Kievan Russia, as a model for hybrid Baroque art that would develop in the archbishopric, was not only made on the basis of confessional closeness connecting the two Orthodox entities. Both Orthodox Serbs and Ukrainians shared the same liminal existence, they were, as the Orthodox in the Empire, defined by “U-krajina,” (denoting the country on the border, the borderland). They were ultimately shaped by borders. While Orthodox Serbs inhabited the realm of dual confines – the physical and confessional one, Ukrainians were defined by their proximity to Poland and the implicit threat of conversion by the Polish Jesuits. Jesuit missionaries frequently went to Ukraine hoping to successfully spread Catholicism among the neighboring Orthodox populace. The Jesuits used their system of education 15 On the role of Kiev and Ukrainian Church and artists, see Miroslav Timotijević, Srpsko barokno slikarstvo (Novi Sad: Galerija Matice Srpske, 1989); Jelena Todorović, Entitet u senci. Državni spektakl i mapiranje moći u Karlovačkoj Mitropoliji (Novi Sad: Platoneum, 2010) and Monika Fin, Centri srpske kulture u 18. Veku. Kijev, Budim, Venecija (Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga, 2013). 16 In order to implement this spirit of the Militant Church cultivated in Kiev and raise the level of education in their own domain, the Karlovci Archbishops invited (starting from MojsejPetrović (1726), Vikentije Jovanovic (1734) and later Arsenije IV Šakabenta (1741)) f irst scholars and subsequently artists to introduce the cultural and visual idiom of the Baroque in the Karlovci Archbishopric. The first artists to arrive from Ukraine were also teachers and had a significant influence on the formation of the bilingual style of the Serbian Orthodox Baroque.

The L and that Never Was

121

to successfully spread Catholic dogma and diminish the powers of the Orthodox Church.17To that end, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, high clergy in Kiev commenced to create their own ecclesia militans and founded an academic institution, the Spiritual Academy of Kiev that would enable their spiritual and artistic reform and subsequent transformation into an important capital of the Baroque world. Thus, their course of metamorphoses could have acted as an ideal precursor, and a suitable model for the Karlovci archbishops to follow. Although the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and their congregations inhabited their own land, their existence was nonetheless one of disquiet. They also confronted the uncertainty of confessional integrity and perpetually strove to overcome the prevailing sense of impermanence. In the 1620s, the Spiritual Academy established the path of formation that the archbishops of Karlovci would follow closely a century later. The common point of reference for both institutions was the concept of modernization of the Church and development of the Orthodox Church Militant through profound spiritual and educational reform. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the state of knowledge and scholarship in Russia was very poor and the only active centers were attached to the Russian imperial court. It was thus that in southern Ukraine, in Kiev, the notion of equaling the Jesuits in their knowledge emerged for the f irst time. Lacking the necessary institutions of their own, the Kiev scholars secretly enrolled in the Polish colleges of the Society of Jesus where they could receive an education at the highest level. Their quest for knowledge occasionally led them even further, to the Jesuit colleges in Rome, Venice, and Paris.18 In this process, the Orthodox scholars often converted to Catholicism on their way to Rome and slipped back into Orthodoxy on return to their homeland. Enriched with the knowledge they acquired in the Roman and Polish colleges, this first generation of scholars, led by the notable Peter Mohyla, laid the foundations of the Spiritual Academy in the 1620s.19 From the very beginning, the Academy was modeled after the Jesuit example. Not only was the curriculum almost identical, but Latin was proclaimed the official language of scholarship. Established on such a novel ground, the Spiritual Academy was not without strong opponents, but by the mid-eighteenth 17 Josip Badalić, “Strašni prikaz drugoga dolaska Gospodnjeg na zemlju. Prilog za povjest ruske školske drame epohe Petra Velikog,” Spomenik SAN 24–42 (1924): 24–28. 18 Badalić, “Strašni prikaz,” 24. 19 Badalić, 24.

122 

Jelena Todorovic

Fig. 4.1. Stefan Tenecki, The presentation of the Virgin. Tempera on wood, 1760. Private collection. Courtesy of the author.

century, and the development of education in Karlovci, it was already firmly established in the Orthodox world. An icon representing the Presentation of the Virgin (today in a private collection) by the notable Baroque painter from Arad (Romania) from the first half of the eighteenth century, Stefan Tenecki, fittingly exemplifies this deeply liminal style (Fig. 4.1.). Stefan Tenecki, similarly to his contemporaries

The L and that Never Was

123

in the Archbishopric, employed the bilingual Baroque visual idiom that reflected both Western and Eastern pictorial models appropriated through the Baroque art of Kievan Russia. While the composition of the painting and the architecture of the temple in the Presentation firmly belong to the style of the Western Baroque, the figures that enact the religious narrative were rendered in the style of postByzantine representation. The positioning of the temple at an angle, the well-balanced grouping of the protagonists, and particularly the twilight sky glimpsing through the columns above the priest Zachariah, all echo visual schemes used throughout the Baroque world. The feathery clouds tinged with rose and purple were previously an unthinkable background in Orthodox religious painting. This fragment of crepuscular horizon also offered a merging of inner and outer space in a painting and thus introduced a rather innovative element into Serbian Baroque art. It truly opened a new understanding of the pictorial space and gave the entire scene a greater depth, which enhanced the religious drama acted out in front of the spectator. The protagonists, although clothed in a fashion resembling the New Testament figures of numerous Baroque creations, preserved the echo of their Byzantine predecessors in the rigidity of their bodies. The space and the figures belonged to two cultures and two different visual traditions, but their combination created a powerful Baroque piece that was, in its essence, as liminal as the culture and the land that engendered it.

The land of the lost past The sense of liminality present in the religious art analyzed above was further enhanced in the ceremonial spaces of the archbishopric staged to celebrate a fragile power that this Orthodox domain possessed. From the liminal landscapes depicting the long-faded glory, to the processions staged upon the dispossessed spaces of its cities, the entire political propaganda of the archbishopric was deeply marked by the ambiguity of spaces. Only the disowned territories throughout the Baroque world offered such instability of space that is found in the festival culture of the arch­bishopric.20 Their ceremonial loci were transitory and revolved either around the renounced territory of the imperial cities, or around the absolute borderlands

20 See also Davidson, Universal Baroque, 10–24 and Todorović, Entiet u senci, 18–23.

124 

Jelena Todorovic

of memory. The ceremonial place of the archbishopric was at its most fluid in the triumphal entries of the archbishops to their see of secular power. Other curious categories of dispossessed spaces were mnemonic landscapes that adorned prints depicting archiepiscopal pastoral visitations. These liminal landscapes were inscribed into a particular form of devotional imagery representing, respectively, the Orthodox monasteries in the empire and the pastoral visitations of the archbishops performed on their grounds. They were composite works of art, pious and propagandistic at the same time. They recorded the administrative and political event that one pastoral visitation presented, and offered a particular utopian dream, a vision of the land and the past now lost forever.21 From the sixteenth century, a considerable number of Serbian Orthodox monasteries were built above the Danube in the Habsburg Empire. The majority of these monasteries were the bequests of the Serbian nobility, who escaped the Ottoman invasion towards the end of the fifteenth century and settled in Southern Pannonia. Situated on the Fruška Gora, a hill above Sremski Karlovci, 35 monasteries formed a specific spiritual cluster.22 Since they were founded well before the Orthodox archbishopric was established in the empire, their primary task was the dissemination of Orthodoxy in the Habsburg lands. With the arrival of a large Serbian populace in the empire, these monasteries acquired a new spiritual significance. At the same time, the need for their mythical status increased. In their omnipresent striving for a spiritual and ideological stronghold, Orthodox Serbs perceived the monasteries on the Fruška Gora in a new light. These ex-votos of the Serbian nobility became places ideally suited to reinforcing their national integrity.23 Through episcopal veneration of the last monuments of medieval aristocracy, the temporal gap between the fifteenth and mid-eighteenth century could be virtually erased. Crucial elements in the assertion of the ecclesiastical power over these monasteries after the exodus were the pastoral visitations performed every year by the archbishop, and the prints that recorded the event. However, they were far from being a simple depiction of the visitation; they were multifaceted symbolic devotional objects, and spaces in between in their 21 For the concept of Utopia see Mircea Eliade, “Paradise and Utopia: Mythical Geography and Eschatology,” in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston, MA: Boston University Press, 1967), 260–281. 22 See Davidov, Srpske Privilegije, 15–27. 23 For further information on this problem see Timotijević, Srpsko barokno slikarstvo, 330–343.

The L and that Never Was

125

own right. Each visitation print presented a very precise topographical rendering of the monastery situated in an elaborate densely wooded landscape with rich vineyards and idyllic pastures. The visitation ceremony was carefully illustrated, in the countryside, in front of the monastery, thereby confirming the pastoral authority of the leader of the Orthodox Church in the empire. Although the pastoral visitation was an exercise of power within the boundaries of the Privileges, the way in which it was presented greatly surpassed the limitations of the imperial charter. The archbishop was greeted in a manner resembling the reception of the monarch, with the entire population of the monastery and the abbot in front of the gates gathered for the official welcome. Moreover, the archbishop was presented arriving in a carriage drawn by six horses and accompanied by fore-riders, a privilege only granted to the emperor and the highest members of the Habsburg court. Above the monastery, high in the clouds, appeared the image of the patron saint of the monastery and this transformed each print into a devotional piece, into an icon that the pilgrims visiting the monastery would be able to take as a pious memento.24 While the monastery and the images of the saints above it demonstrated the religious authority that the archbishopric legitimately possessed in the empire, the lands around the monastery depicted a space of longing and an unattainable political dream. These prints encompassed several intertwining concetti: the concepts of the Golden Age and heavenly realm, so common to ecclesiastical and political visions in the Baroque age. But there was a hidden symbolic meaning beyond the classical notion of the ideal landscape. These undulating hills and ripe vineyards were also the projections of the lost vistas of their fatherland: the visitation prints depicted both the real and the mythical realm of the national history. Such an enhanced vision of the past was necessary to legitimize the position of the Serbian archbishopric in the Austrian Empire. Residing in the shadow of the Habsburg power, the Orthodox Church had to perpetually re-assert its position, both on the level of the present and on the level of the past. Using the established Baroque mechanism of historicism, they strove to constantly remind the Habsburgs of the heroic times of the Serbian kingdom in the Middle Ages, of the past upon which an equally glorious present could have been built. Thus, this complex liminal landscape offered a plurality of idealized loci to the contemporary beholder 24 See Miroslav Timotijević, “Vizitacije manastira Šišatovca,” in Manastir Šišatovac, ed. Dinko Davidov (Beograd: Prosveta, 1989), 341–361.

126 

Jelena Todorovic

– the verdant Arcadian land that ideally should be, and the forlorn land of their past that could be no longer.25 These images of nature in this and other visitation prints were the same territories for which Arsenije III yearned in his elegiac lament. This was the land that the Serbs in the empire still longed for, the land that was inexorably receding into oblivion. Each passing year, each new arrival of exiled Serbs, each reinforcement of Ottoman power on the borders, imperceptibly distanced the outlines of the desired homeland. As if with the passing of time, the shores of their fatherland became increasingly invisible. Everything passed, only the perpetuity of the exodus remained.

The paper triumph: The invisible territory of the episcopal installation One of the most curious and symbolically rich works created in the Archbishopric of Karlovci was both a literary and visual essay on the uncertainty of spaces. Zaharija Orfelin’s Festive Greeting to the new bishop Mojsej Putnik (1757) (Fig. 4.2.) is a profoundly liminal work, a spectacle without performance and a political manifesto without manifestation – a glorified paper triumph devoted to the installation of the new bishop. Only through careful concealment could the political message of this “paper triumph” be presented to its Orthodox audience. When Zaharija Orfelin created his festival book, an illustrated panegyric celebrating the investiture of the new bishop, pages of the manuscript became his ceremonial space, but it was an equally liminal territory – a labyrinth – that became the principal conveyor of notions presented in the panegyric.26 Orfelin’s book presented the ultimate invisible space – a realm that was not to be seen or distributed outside its strictly controlled audience. Its primary beholder was the honorand, Mojsej Putnik himself, and a chosen few members of the Orthodox high clergy. Hence the choice of the highly ornate calligraphic manuscript for the medium of Orfelin’s 25 On the visitation prints in the Archbishopric see Todorović, Entitet u senci, 105–123 and also Jelena Todorović, “The Borrowed Spaces,” in Die Erschließung des Raumes. Konstruktion, Imagination, und Darstellung von Raumen im Barokzeitalter, ed. Karin Friedrich (Wolfenbuttel: HAB, 2014), 757–780. 26 For the furhter reading on the Festive Greeting see Jelena Todorović, An Orthodox Festival Book in the Habsburg Empire: Zaharija Orfelin’s Festive Greeting to Mojsej Putnik in 1757 (Harmondsworth: Ashgate, 2006). See also the facsimile edition and analysis by Jelena Todorović, Svečani pozdrav Mojseju Putniku Zaharija Orfelina, fototipsko izdanje sa studijom (Novi Sad: Platoneum, 2014).

The L and that Never Was

127

Fig. 4.2. Zaharija Orfelin, Festive Greeting to Bishop Mojsei Putnik, 1757. From the facsimile edition Platoneum Publishing, Novi Sad, 2014. Wroclaw: Wroclaw University Library. © Platoneum Publishing.

128 

Jelena Todorovic

festival book, and not a more easily distributed printed book, despite the fact that the author was an accomplished engraver. For the same political reason, the entire manuscript was envisaged as a projection of the ideal installation and not the record of the particular event that took place. While the installation of Mojsej Putnik as the Bishop of Bačka did not differ from the similar rites in the Serbian Orthodox church, in Orfelin’s interpretation it became the glorif ication of the Orthodox sacred and secular powers embodied in the figure of the new bishop. From Heavenly Jerusalem to the conqueror of the labyrinth, as would be explained further, Zaharija Orfelin bestowed the entire vocabulary of the Baroque princely triumph upon his honorand. He was presented as a “star of Bačka and the Sun of Novi Sad,” unimaginable epithets for anyone except Habsburg rulers in the Austrian Empire. Thus, the entire work had to remain utterly liminal, its too-daring and too-audacious meanings carefully concealed between the verses of the texts and the curves of the labyrinth. For the same reasons, such an investiture could never be performed in the reality of the imperial domain, and Orfelin`s festival book had to remain the work in the shadows, a concealed paper triumph. The sense of liminality pervaded the Festive Greeting on several levels. On the first level, the level of language, this festival book presented a specific linguistic realm. It was written in Russian Slavonic – a language appropriated from the Ukraine together with literary and pictorial models of Baroque culture. Before the eighteenth century, while still in Serbia under the Ottoman Empire, Russian Slavonic was never used by the Orthodox clergy; they used a medieval version of Church Slavonic and the people spoke in vernacular. After the exodus to the empire, with the imminent threat of religious conversion, the clergy had to use a language that was not already present in the Habsburg propaganda. From the early 1720s, Ukrainian professors were invited to the archbishopric, as explained at the beginning of the chapter, and brought with them not only Baroque iconographic models, but also their language and literature. Fairly quickly, Russian Slavonic became the official language of the clergy, but also the language of the learned and of contemporary Serbian literature. In their search for the ultimate educational model, the archbishops turned towards the Ukraine and the celebrated Spiritual Academy (or The Spiritual Academy of Peter Mohyla). Thus, when composing his panegyric for the festival book of Mojsej Putnik’s investiture, Orfelin’s chosen language was doubtlessly Russian Slavonic. More importantly, he introduced some new vocabulary and elaborated on the existing syntax, turned his occasional poem into one of the masterpieces of Serbian Baroque poetry.

The L and that Never Was

129

The entire poem is composed as one grand palindrome, which made the content even more opaque and the space of the poem even more impenetrable for the non-Orthodox reader. The use of palindromes was introduced by Manuil Kozachinskii as early as the 1730s and was a traditional element of festival books. When read correctly, the palindrome announced many years of glorious reign to the new bishop. While the language and the use of palindrome presented the first level of ambiguity in the Festive Greeting, the other equally important element was the literary form of visual poetry or carmina figurata that permeated the entire work. The use of pattern poetry in a ceremonial context was particularly pronounced in the two areas of influence important for the Karlovci Archbishopric: the Orthodox Ukraine and the Catholic Habsburg lands. It was a common element of European festival books, employed to present a visual and linguistic riddle to the privileged reader. But it was also a highly liminal genre, existing on the boundary between the image and the text. Presenting a peculiar space-in-between, it offered endless forms of interpretations while concealing the too-dangerous or too-audacious message.27 In his Festive Greeting, Zaharija Orfelin employed pattern poetry in order to present the ultimate liminal literary form – the word and letter labyrinth. These poetic labyrinths stand at the beginning and at the end of Orfelin’s panegyric, symbolically opening and closing the narrative, outlining the invisible confines of the archiepiscopal power. A labyrinth, that most ambiguous of spaces in the history of culture, was indeed a suitable choice for domains whose borders were perpetually on the verge of vanishing. Being one of the oldest symbolic forms, the labyrinth conveyed in and of itself a panoply of meanings and potential interpretations. From the Cretan myth to Orfelin’s time, labyrinths were deployed to denote the lands of Arcadia, damnation, and various things in between. While a liminal space par excellence, however, the labyrinth also possessed all the prerequisites of physical space –length, width, and depth – and, in the case of garden versions, it could even be inhabited, albeit temporarily. In the course of his book, Orfelin takes his reader through different forms of labyrinthine spaces, each representing one facet of liminal existence, and of the fluid future he envisioned for the Karlovci Archbishopric and its illustrious new bishop. At the beginning of the book stands the magical square in which the title and the promise of a long and fruitful reign of Mojsej Putnik were inscribed. While the portraits of the Habsburg emperors and the Orthodox 27 See Todorović, An Orthodox Festival Book, 113–145.

130 

Jelena Todorovic

archbishop preside over the square and acknowledge the rightfulness of this ecclesiastical installation, the form of the magical square communicates an entirely different message. By the shape of its path, Orfelin’s “magical square” belongs to the category of unicursal labyrinths where a straight continuous path leads the beholder directly to the center. All versions of letter labyrinths are centrally constructed, usually with the first letter of the poem placed in the center of the labyrinth, the place that Orfelin reserves to the essence of these carmina aquadrata– the monogram of Mojsej Putnik. The key symbolism of the magical square was that of the Golden Age and the Arcadian existence. The preservation of peace was a common theme in the panegyric literature, as it was in the state spectacles used to celebrate both temporal and sacred rulers in the Baroque age, even those in such shadowy realms as the Archbishopric of Karlovci. Not unlike the visitation prints with the images of the perfected realms, the peculiar territory mapped in Orfelin’s magical square belongs to the same category of the lands that only existed in memory or in dreams. This invisible geography is further elaborated in the image closing the manuscript. An intricate word labyrinth, composed of the last verses of the panegyric bewilders the reader of the book. The verses present a complex invocation of peace, abundance, and prosperity that a new bishop, Mojsej Putnik, will bestow with his reign.28Additionally, the last labyrinth denoted the summation of the ideas that form the Orthodox concept of spiritual sovereignty and acted as an additional confirmation of the archbishopric as a utopian place. Thus, an image of the idealized future that would unravel in the Orthodox bishopric through Mojsej’s rule also closes the book, the panegyric, and the ceremony itself. But the future depicted in Orfelin’s Greeting was as fluid as the lines of his labyrinths and the confines of the world that created it, a mere shadow of a political dream. In his Festive Greeting, Orfelin created a panoply of interlocking spaces that presented the greatest level of ambiguity in Serbian Baroque culture. These were spaces within spaces, opening and closing only in front of the well-informed and carefully selected reader. From the borrowed language and invented syntax to the spatial riddles of his labyrinths, Orfelin also implicitly charted the true territory of his homeland. The veritable space of the archbishopric was as perpetually uncertain as the fluctuating lines of pattern poetry, forever poised on the borders of two empires and confines of reality and unreality. It was the place that constantly strove to become a land it never was, and never could have been. 28 For more on the concluding labyrinth, see Todorović, 113–145.

The L and that Never Was

131

Bibliography Badalić, Josip. “StrašniprikazdrugogadolaskaGospodnjeg na zemlju. Prilog za povjest ruske školske drame epohe Petra Velikog.” Spomenik SAN 24–42 (1924): 24–28. Davidov, Dinko. Srpske Privilegije doma Habzburskog. Novi Sad: Galerija Matice Srpske, 1994. Eliade, Mircea. “Paradise and Utopia: Mythical Geography and Eschatology.” In Utopias and Utopian Thought, edited by Frank E. Manuel, 260–281. Boston, MA: Boston University Press, 1967. Fin, Monika. Centri srpske kulture u 18. Veku. Kijev, Budim, Venecija. Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga, 2013. Grujić, Radoslav.”Prilozi za istoriju Srba u doba austrijske okupacije (1718–1739).” Zbornik radova SAN, Institut za proučavanje kniževnosti 2/17 (February, 1914): 64. ———. Problemi istorije Karlovačke mitropolije. Novi Sad: Istorijsko Društvo, 1929. ———. “Pećki patrijarsi i karlovački mitropoliti u XVIII veku.” Glasnikistori­ skogdruštva u NovomSadu(GIDNS)4/8–1 (April, 1931): 13–34. Roksandić, Drago. Triplex Confiniumili o granicama i regijamahrvatskepovjesti 1500–1800. Zagreb: Barbat, 2003. Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Timotijević, Miroslav. “Vizitacije manastira Šišatovca.” In Manastir Šišatovac, edited by Dinko Davidov, 341–361. Beograd: Prosveta,1989. Todorović, Jelena. An Orthodox Festival Book in the Habsburg Empire: Zaharija Orfelin’s Festive Greeting to Mojsej Putnik in 1757. Harmondsworth: Ashgate, 2006. ———. Entitet u senci. Državni spektakl i mapiranje moći u Karlovačkoj Mitropoliji. Novi Sad: Platoneum, 2010. ———. “The Borrowed Spaces.” In Die Erschließung des Raumes: Konstruktion, Imagination, und Darstellung von Raumen im Barokzeitalter, edited by Karin Friedrich, 757–780. Wolfenbuttel: HAB, 2014. ———. The Hidden Legacies of Baroque Culture in Modern Literature: The Realms of Eternal Present. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. Tomić, Jovan. Srbi u velikojseobi. Beograd: Prosveta, 1990. Trifunović, Djordje, ed. Očevici o velikojseobi Srba. Kruševac. Bagdala: 1990.

About the author Jelena Todorovic holds a PhD from University College London and is a Full Professor at the University of the Arts at Belgrade where she also holds the position of Vice-Dean for International Cooperation since 2014. She held visiting professorships at the University of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad,

132 

Jelena Todorovic

Serbia, and at the Universita degli Studi di Trieste in Italy. Since 2006, she has been Keeper of the State Art Collection in Belgrade. Although an art historian by training, her interests have always been more directed towards early modern cultural history, including the broad areas of festival culture, art and propaganda, concepts of time and transience, and the understanding of liminal spaces in the visual arts. She has published in Serbia and abroad and has received important local awards for projects and publications, like the Ranko Radovic Award for Invisible Cities in 2013 and the Pavle Vasic Award in 2015. In 2018, she received the most important European award for cultural heritage, the Europa Nostra Award for the work on the project of the State Art Collection. She has among others published The Realms of Eternal Present: The Hidden Legacy of Baroque Culture in Modern Literature with Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017, and, in 2019 with the same editor, Spaces that Never Were in Early Modern Culture: Exploration of Edges and Confines.

5.

The Theatre of Affectionate Hearts: Izabela Czartoryska’s Musée des Monuments Polonais in Puławy (1801–1831) Michał Mencfel Abstract This chapter discusses the so-called Temple of the Sibyl, the first Polish museum, opened in 1801 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska in Puławy. The idea of the creation of the temple originated from the reaction to the loss of Polish independence in 1795. The temple offered an exceptional, very emotional way of experiencing history, which here is called affective. It is argued that this manner of experiencing is the key to understanding the remarkable success of the Puławy museum among Poles. The intensity of feelings that visitors experienced was achieved by appealing to religious rhetoric and through theatrical references. Making it similar to a religious ritual ensured a sublime, solemn atmosphere, the theatrical nature of which allowed guests to freely express their feelings. Keywords: historical collecting in the nineteenth century, collections of historic memorabilia in the early 1800s, the Temple of the Sibyl in Puławy, the Czartoryski collection

Introduction: Musée des Monuments Polonais Just a few years after establishing the famous Musée des Monuments Français in 1795, another, relatively similar museum, was created on the other side of Europe.1 Just like Alexandre Lenoir’s establishment, it collected the 1 See Dominique Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine, 1789–1815 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); Alexandra Stara, The Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816. ‘Killing art to Make History’ (Farnham:

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_ch05

134 Michał Mencfel

memorials of the past, and was an answer to a great historical turmoil. Also like the Musée, it aimed at evoking memories of and sentiments about the national history.2 Finally, similarly to the French museum, although it was doomed to ephemeral existence, surviving only thirty years, memory of it remained vivid and reverberated for many decades. This museum was the Temple of the Sibyl (Fig. 5.1.) opened in 1801 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska (1746–1835) at her estate in Puławy, around 100 kilometers south of Warsaw, which was then part of Russia.3 The analogy with the Parisian Musée des Monuments Français should not lead us too far, however, as there were significant differences between the two sites. The museum in Puławy was a private aristocratic initiative on a smaller scale. On the other hand, the collections were displayed in a specially created building, originating from a unique, individual historical experience, namely the reaction to the loss of Polish independence in 1795. That year, after the so-called Third Partition, Poland was ultimately divided among three powerful neighboring countries, Russia, Austria and Prussia, and for the next 120 years remained invisible on the map of sovereign European states. Most importantly, however, the Temple of the Sibyl offered an exceptional, more emotional way of experiencing history, which one might call affective. This manner of experiencing will be the focus of the present discussion as the key to understanding the remarkable success of the Ashgate, 2013) and Geneviève Bresc-Bautier and Béatrice de Chancel-Bardelot, eds. Un musée révolutionnaire. Le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir (Paris: Hazan, 2016). 2 On the birth of the concept of patriotism and nationalism in France and the process of constructing a sense of common heritage see David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France. Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 3 Within the fairly extensive body of on the Temple of the Sibyl see especially Zdzisław Żygulski Jr., “Dzieje zbiorów puławskich. Świątynia Sybilli i Dom Gotycki,” Rozprawy i Sprawozdania Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie 7 (1962): 5–265 [English version, slightly modified: The Princess Czartoryski Museum: A History of the Collections (Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe, 2001)]; Zdzisław Żygulski Jr. et al., Muzeum Czartoryskich: historia i zbiory (Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe, 1998); Alina Aleksandrowicz, “Z problematyki nowego wieku (Wokół Świątyni Sybilli),” Wiek Oświecenia 16 (2000): 9–33; Adam Labuda, “Musealisierung und Inszenierung patriotischer Sammlungen in polnischen Adelsresidenzen Puławy i Kurnik” in Klassizismus. Gotik. Karl Friedrich Schinkel und die patriotische Baukunst, ed. Annette Dorgerloh (München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007), 201–220; Hanna Jurkowska, Pamięć sentymentalna. Praktyki pamięci w kręgu Towarzystwa Warszawskiego Przyjaciół Nauk i w Puławach Izabelli Czartoryskiej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2014) and Adam Labuda, “Ich versammelte die polnische Vergangenheit in dem Gedächtnistempel. Izabela Czartoryskas national-patriotische Sammlung und ihre Inszenierung in der Residenz von Puławy,” in Izabela Czartoryska. Mancherlei Gedanken über die Art und Weise, Gärten anzulegen, ed. Michael Niedermeier (Berlin: Pückler-Gesellschaft, 2018), 35–46.

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

135

Fig. 5.1. Julian Cegliński, The Temple of Sibil in Puławy. Lithography, 1859. Illustration from: Adam Lerue, Album lubelskie, Warszawa: Jan Jaworski, 1859. Warsaw: National Library of Poland.

Puławy Museum among Poles. The Temple of the Sibyl, which contemporary writing has called the Ark, Jerusalem, Pantheon, and Mecca, became the most important center of Polish patriotism and a destination for actual pilgrimages of Poles, even after the building itself was devastated and the collections scattered. “Like a Turk who travels to Mecca, every righteous Pole should venerate the only collection of national antiquities by paying it an homage visit,” wrote Konstancja Biernacka in 1823. 4 The memory of the Sibyl lived on in reminiscences, literature, and poetry, but also in collection ventures that followed suit, either modeled upon the Sibyl or influenced by it to some degree.5 4 Konstancja Biernacka, Podróż z Włodawy do Gdańska i z powrotem do Nieborowa w roku 1816, opisana w listach Wandy, Eweliny i Leokadii (Wrocław: Korn, 1823), 71. 5 See, among others Jerzy Kazimierczak, “Realizacje architektoniczno-plastyczne w obrębie porozbiorowej rezydencji ziemiańskiej w Polsce i ich wymowa ideowa,” Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 40 (1978): 52–57; Zofia Ostrowska-Kębłowska, “Siedziby-muzea,” in Sztuka XIX wieku w Polsce. Naród, miasto, ed. Halina Lisińska (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1979), 69–108 and “Polish Residences-Museums in the XIXth Century,” in Studies in Art History (Polish

136 Michał Mencfel

How was this intensity of feelings that visitors experienced in the museum achieved? Francis Haskell, a prominent expert on European collecting culture, stated in his discussion of the Temple of the Sibyl that it was “more of a giant reliquary than a museum.”6 There is much truth in these words. Appealing to religious rhetoric was one of the two most important modes of persuasion used in Puławy. The other was theatrical references. A visit to the Sibyl was both a quasi-religious and a para-theatrical experience. Making it similar to a religious ritual ensured a sublime, solemn atmosphere, while its theatrical nature allowed the guests to freely express their feelings. As a result of these two forces, every visit to the Puławy collection resembled a ritual.

Puławy of the Czartoryski family: Sentimentalism and patriotism In 1783, following an argument with King Stanisław August Poniatowski, Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski, and Princess Izabela Czartoryska née Fleming, representatives of a powerful and influential family with rich traditions, left Warsaw to settle permanently in their palace in Puławy.7 It was their ambition to turn the estate not only into a political capital, an alternative to the King’s residence, but also a cultural center.8 While classical tendencies dominated art and literature in Warsaw at the time, the residents of Puławy were inclined to follow pre-Romantic currents, which were gaining popularity in Europe. Thus, thanks to the artists associated with Puławy, especially the poets Józef Szymanowski, Franciszek Kniaźnin, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Jan Paweł Woronicz, and Ludwik Kropiński, the Art Studies No 2), ed. Aleksander Kumor and Stefan Morawski (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1980), 59–82. 6 Francis Haskell, History and its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1993), 280. 7 For information on Adam Kazimierz and Izabela Czartoryski see Alina Aleksandrowicz, Izabela Czartoryska. Polskość i europejskość (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 1998) and Tadeusz Frączyk, Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski. Biografia historyczno-literacka na tle przemian ideowych polskiego Oświecenia (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2012). 8 The primary study on Puławy in the times of Princess Czartoryski is the four-volume monograph by Ludwik Dębicki, abundant in archive material, Puławy (1762–1830). Monografia z życia towarzyskiego, politycznego i literackiego (Lwów: Gubrynowicz i Schmidt, 1887–1888). Towards the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century many studies about Puławy were published by Alina Aleksandrowicz. See especially Różne drogi do wolności. Puławy Czartoryskich na przełomie XVIII i XIX wieku (Puławy: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Puław, 2011).

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

137

Czartoryskis’ residence became the main center of Polish sentimentalism. But the Puławy sentimentalism was expressed not only in the literature created within the Czartoryskis’ sphere of influence, but also in the layout of the estate and the park in particular. It was one of the earliest and finest English landscape parks in Poland, arranged by Izabela with the help of the architect James Savage, who had been specially brought over from England.9 Finally, the sentimentalism of Puławy was exhibited in the lifestyle of the prince, princess, and their circle where an emotional attitude and openly manifested feelings (as in the case of Izabela towards her children, for example, an extremely rare sight in aristocratic milieus of the time) were no longer confined to the private realm, but became an important element of palace life.10 After 1795, Puławy became one of the most important centers of pro-independence ideas. The year 1795, which is considered symbolic for the whole tragic period of the Partitions and loss of the state’s independence, was a turning point both in the life of Izabela and in the history of Puławy. Izabela, the heiress of an enormous fortune from her father Jerzy Fleming, the great under-treasurer of Lithuania, spent her youth indulging in refined courtly diversions, social games and – despite marrying Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski in 1761 – love affairs, the most notorious of which was a fling with the Russian Ambassador in Warsaw, Nikolai Repnin. In the face of great political events: a failed attempt at reforming the political system of the Commonwealth and the misery for the state and the nation that ensued, Izabela Czartoryska abandoned her lifestyle as a frivolous lady. Her contemporaries soon agreed that having adopted a new attitude of steadfast and fervent patriotism she became the embodiment of these qualities and a role model to follow. It was not long before the Puławy residence fell victim to this patriotic fever. The estate was seized and devastated by the army of Empress Catherine II as a punishment for supporting the anti-Russian uprising, known as the Kościuszko Insurrection. The Prince and Princess could return to their heavily damaged residence more than a year later, in 1796, in return for sending both their sons, Konstanty and Adam Jerzy, to St. Petersburg (the latter would soon play an important role, first in the court of Alexander 9 It may be added that Izabela Czartoryska was the author of a widely read treatise on garden art, Myśli różne o sposobie zakładania ogrodów (Wrocław: Korn, 1805). See Agnieszka Whelan, “Izabela Czartoryska and the designed landscape in Poland 1772–1831,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 28 (2008): 281–302. 10 Jurkowska, Pamięć sentymentalna, 277–288.

138 Michał Mencfel

I and later, following a period of exile, as the leader of the largest Polish emigration party in Paris).11 From the very start of Puławy’s restoration after 1796, Izabela had a precise intention of creating a memorial center to honor the glorious past of fallen Poland, an exceptional “trophy place” or a memory space, a lieu de mémoire (to use Pierre Nora’s famous term).12 Kajetan Koźmian, a state official and poet inspired by Classicist trends, who can be regarded as a credible witness, since he was not in Czartoryski’s zone of influence, accurately portrayed Puławy at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When compared to the estates of other Polish noblemen, it emanated a peculiar atmosphere; patriotic and sentimental: These grounds charming by nature, these gardens, these buildings, these delightful sanctuaries, splendid, beautiful by themselves and by their residents, were enveloped in a different ambiance: teasing, amorous, enticing, enchanting. Anyone who felt it must have sighed; and, let us be reminded, all of this was not foreign, it was Polish, national, but in a manner unique to Puławy, that would be very difficult to emulate or recreate so as not to feel ill at ease. When the moments of charm, love and enchantment had elapsed, the love of the country remained, perhaps because it burned with a greater flame than other sentiments. Memories and memorabilia remained, and thus the patriotism after losing Poland became the only life there was, the sole purpose of life.13

Such an image of the Czartoryski residence, undoubtedly idealized, dominated the public reception of the place in Poland from the end of the eighteenth century. It was this sentimentalism, the cult of the bygone and fervent patriotism that formed the ideological backdrop to the Temple of the Sibyl. The Gothic House, its complement, opened ten years later (which will not be discussed here, however).14 11 Jerzy Skowronek, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski 1770–1861 (Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1994). 12 The notion of the “trophy place,” which made a huge career in Polish historiography, not only with regard to Puławy but also nineteenth-century collections of memorabilia as such, has been adopted from Zdzisław Żygulski. See Zdzisław Żygulski Jr., “Nurt romantyczny w muzealnictwie polskim,” in Romantyzm. Studia nad sztuką drugiej połowy XVIII i wieku XIX, ed. Jan Białostocki (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1967), 43–55 and Pierre Nora, ed. Les Lieux de mémoire, Vol. I–III (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992). 13 Kajetan Koźmian, Pamiętniki, Vol. II, ed. Artur Kopacz and Juliusz Willaume (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1972), 54. 14 For further reading on the Gothic House, see Żygulski, Dzieje zbiorów puławskich, 94–222.

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

139

The Temple of the Sibyl In the years 1798–1801, Princess Izabela Czartoryska commissioned the construction of a building for the museum in the form of an ancient temple in a secluded part of the park surrounding the palace, on a slope descending steeply to the River Vistula (Fig. 5.2.). The basic concept was formulated by the founder herself, while a detailed project was created by Chrystian Piotr Aigner, a Polish architect inspired by Classicism, who was born in Puławy and educated in Italy. The temple was modeled on the famous temple in Tivoli near Rome, at that time believed to have been dedicated to Vesta. Izabela had never managed to visit Italy and see the temple, but she knew it from various descriptions and illustrations. The f inal effect was an elegant monopteros: a circular building surrounded by a colonnade in the composite order, set on a fairly high pedestal. It differed from the ancient original in that it was about twice the size (f ifteen meters in diameter and over ten meters in height in the main hall) and had an additional floor, a kind of starkly decorated crypt visible and accessible only from the side of the Vistula. The part intended for the museum was located in the upper main chamber covered with a dome with skylight made of amethyst glass, the only source of natural light. The lower chamber, dimly lit, as there were only a few narrow windows, served as a meeting place for a Masonic lodge and after 1813 it was additionally used as a mausoleum in memory of Prince Józef Poniatowski, a Polish hero of the Napoleonic wars, who had died in battle that year. The museum’s interior was simple and modest: the walls of the chamber were white and undecorated apart from a single stucco frieze with griffin motifs around the upper part; the dome was adorned with simple coffers, evidently referring to the motifs on the dome of the Roman Pantheon; the floor was laid with white marble slabs. The only other architectural feature was a semi-circular niche located on the room’s axis, opposite the entrance. This space contained relics of the glorious history of Poland: regalia and memorabilia connected with monarchs, war trophies and battle flags, weapons and military equipment, relics of famous Poles (rulers, military leaders, poets), jewelry, documents, coins, etc. The niche facing the entrance was partly veiled by a curtain of crimson velvet that was the background to a royal panoply made up of King Jan III Sobieski’s so-called augury shield, two swords believed to have belonged to King Władysław Jagiełło and Grand Duke of Lithuania Witold (Vitautas), and the sabers of King Jan III and King Stephen. The most precious objects connected

140 Michał Mencfel

Fig. 5.2. Johann Friedrich Franz Bruder, The Temple of Sibil in Puławy seen from the Vistula river. Steel engraving, after 1830, 113 x 74 mm. Warsaw: National Library of Poland.

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

141

with the rulers of Poland were placed in the Royal Casket (now lost) on a stone plinth resembling an altar.15 Other artifacts were kept in two large mahogany cabinets, hung on the walls and laid on the floor in spectacular displays.16 To understand the effect that the Puławy collection must have had on visitors, we can quote just one diary entry – of many others that are available – written by Franciszek Gajewski, a soldier in Napoleon’s army. It does not matter that many passages in the description are inaccurate, that the mental images remembered from the Temple of the Sibyl and the Gothic House overlap with one another; ironically, this makes it all the more authentic. Many details have been distorted or blurred, but as a result we see the broad picture, reduced to a general impression: [In 1811] I looked with admiration at the revered national mementos collected in the Sibyl, the building of which had already been finished at the time. The external walls were decorated with remnants of old Polish castles; here you saw a few bricks from the Żółkiewski’s castle, next to them a great tombstone of the Szujski family, yonder different bullets collected from battlefields where Polish armies covered themselves in glory, elsewhere chipped pieces from castles besieged by the Swedes and from gravestones of renowned statesmen. There were also mementos from the hapless Praga [a quarter of Warsaw defended to the last man by Polish insurgents against Tsar forces in 1794, transformed into a symbol of staunch resistance and the highest sacrif ice for the country – M.M.]. In the middle of the Sibyl, arranged in Byzantine Style you saw old mementos of great value, Sobieski’s broadsword, the crown of the Szujskis, banners won from the enemy, royal vestments, maces, standards, busts of eminent figures, bows and quivers, and everything with a proof of authenticity, everything placed in chronological order. Truly, the Sibyl was one of a kind in Europe. And what a beautiful monument it is!17

15 The casket went missing during World War II. For more information on its history, together with rich photographic documentation from the pre-war period, see Ewa Czapielowa and Zdzisław Żygulski Jr., “Losy Szkatuły Królewskiej z puławskiej Świątyni Sybilli,” Cenne/bezcenne/utracone 2/8 (1998): 14–21. 16 Detailed information on the arrangement of the collection: Żygulski, Dzieje zbiorów puławskich, 66–85. 17 Franciszek Gajewski, Pamiętniki pułkownika wojsk polskich (1802–1831), Vol. I, ed. Stanisław Karwowski (Poznań: Rzepecki i Ska, 1913),166.

142 Michał Mencfel

The memorabilia collection It is interesting to examine the significance of the word “monument” used by Gajewski in the quote above, as one encounters this term very often in descriptions of Puławy. The objects gathered in the Temple of the Sibyl were above all monuments to memory. This fact was also well recognized by the nineteenth-century author Lucjan Siemieński, who wrote: The Temple was a repository of memorabilia; it was an archaeological museum, the only one on the territory of Poland at that time, distinguished, however, from ordinary museums by the fact that every relic had a great tradition behind it. Every sword, every suit of armor, every battle flag, every jewel reminded the viewers of a great historical figure, a victory or an important fact, and brought sorrow to their hearts.18

The memento status of the objects gathered in the Temple of the Sibyl had far-reaching consequences. In the most general terms, a memento is an object that exists in relation – the more direct the relation, the better – to a person or event from the past. Therefore, a memento is a sign (or, following Krzysztof Pomian, a semiophore, an intermediary between the visible and the invisible) referring to an external entity.19 It is this entity, rather than the object’s internal characteristics, which constitutes its value. Consequently, the key aspect of a memento is the context from which it originates and, to quote Siemieński, the “great tradition” associated with it. Here, it must be added that this inseparability of an object and its tradition both guarantees the object’s value and is its biggest potential threat. The object has to pay a price for its memento status, namely, it eventually needs to be nullified as an object in itself, as a material entity. The process of such dematerialization of a memento may also be observed in Puławy. Among the many narratives in which Izabela Czartoryska enveloped her creation one should mention Opis niektórych pamiątek zachowanych w Świątyni Sybilli w Puławach (“Description of Some of the Memorabilia Preserved in the Temple of the Sibyl in Puławy”). 20 This 18 Lucjan Hipolit Siemieński, Dzieła. Varia z literatury, historyi, archeologii i przyrody, Vol. I (Wrocław: Unger, 1881), 126–127. 19 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs, et curieux. Paris, Venise, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 30–47. 20 Biblioteka Czartoryskich, Kraków, rękpis nr. Rkps. 3033; Opis niektórych pamiątek zachowanych w Świątyni Sybilli w Puławach, ed. Alina Aleksandrowicz and Artur Timofiejew (Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich, 2010).

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

143

unf inished work of many authors, was until recently preserved only in manuscript. However, the fact that the book was bound, its pages were painstakingly calligraphed and it had illustrative vignettes, suggests that it must have been presented, or perhaps even read out loud, to guests in the Temple of the Sibyl. In spite of what the title might suggest, the book was not a catalog or inventory of the collection, but rather an anthology presenting biographies of prominent Polish historical f igures, whose memorabilia were found in the Sibyl. 21 The material exhibits from the Puławy Museum were hardly mentioned. They were merely a pretext for a historical narration, relevant only inasmuch as they directed the thought towards the non-material – all that belonged to the glorious and magnificent past. Yet, without them the narration would be meager. The material objects ascertained its truth and a certain tangibility enhanced its emotive potential. We may therefore observe a dialectical connection: the object and the word, existing in a complex relationship, support one another. While memorabilia have a great emotional potential, activating it, especially when the object is intended to be meaningful for a community, depends on external factors, namely narrative structures within which they are placed. Otherwise a memorial stone will be only a stone, a memorial piece of cloth only a piece of cloth, a memorial lock of hair only a lock of hair. As Susan Stewart incisively put it referring to a souvenir: “It will not function without the supplementary narrative discourse that both attaches it to its origins and creates a myth with regard to those origins. What is this narrative of origins? It is not a narrative of the object; it is a narrative of the possessor.”22 We can understand now why Izabela Czartoryska devoted so much attention to the manner in which the artifacts where exhibited in the Temple of the Sibyl, creating a special architectural frame, arranging them in semantically effective displays, adding inscriptions and mottoes, and finally constructing a detailed plan of their reception. All these efforts were to activate the commemorative value of the artifacts, because only then could they have a desired impact on the visitors by evoking strong emotions in their affectionate hearts. Ludwik Dębicki was correct when 21 There was also an annotated collection catalogue Historyczne opisanie Świątyni Sybilli w Puławach, prepared by Łukasz Gołębiowski in 1825 (manuscript in the Czartoryski Library in Cracow with reference number Rkps. Ew XVII/2338) and a topographic inventory of the collection Rejestr pamiątek polskich złożonych w Świątyni Pamięci Puławskiej by Franciszek Kozłowski (not preserved). 22 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 136.

144 Michał Mencfel

writing (more than fifty years later, in different circumstances, i.e. mostly to justify the now unacceptable affected behavior of Izabela Czartoryski) that “the character of these collections is mostly sentimental. No one verified the historical authenticity or artistic value of a given object, what mattered was whether it possessed the charm of a memento.” However, in Dębicki’s opinion, it was exactly the kind of exhibit that Poles needed at the time and “perhaps the memorabilia had even stronger effect on contemporaries as they appealed to the heart, evoked love of the bygone.”23 We must remember that 1801 was only the beginning of the “museum age,” as Germain Bazin referred to the nineteenth-century in his seminal work, although the process of turning private collections into public ones had commenced some fifty years earlier.24 There were already discussions on the order and aim of museum exhibitions and, as aesthetics became an independent field of knowledge, people contemplated concepts such as beauty, but the standards of behavior in museums were not yet developed.25 The emerging audience was only just learning the rules of conduct and reactions appropriate for a modern museum, and an emotional attitude was one of those that were permissible. (On a side note it might be added that Daniel Chodowiecki’s print entitled “Connoisseurship in art” from the series “Natural and affected life attitudes” [Natürliche und affektierte Handlungen des Lebens, 1778–1780] in which an emotional attitude was derided and dismissed in favor of calm and focused contemplation, provides a very interesting testimony of the contemporaneous discussion on the viewer’s attitude towards a work of art).26

Puławy imagined Already before entering the Temple of the Sibyl, the visitor was being prepared for seeing and experiencing the collection of memorabilia. There 23 Dębicki, Puławy, Vol. II, 258–259. 24 Germain Bazin, The Museum Age, trans. Jane van Nuis Cahill (Brussels: Desoer, 1967). 25 For beginnings of the museum as an institution, see especially Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment. Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2007) and Carole Paul, ed. The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in the 18th- and Early-19th-Century Europe (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012). 26 Regarding the series, see Werner Busch, “Daniel Chodowieckis Natürliche und affektierte Handlungen des Lebens,” in Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801). Kupferstecher, Illustrator, Kaufmann, ed. Ernst Hinrichs and Klaus Zernack (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 77–99.

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

145

were at least three reasons for this, connected with family, topography, and discourse. Firstly, the future visitor was affected by the great prestige of the Czartoryskis as one of the most powerful Polish families, leading an influential political faction, the “Familia” [Family]27. Had it not been for Izabela Czartoryska’s social position and eminence, the museum in Puławy would never have taken on its final shape: there would have been no such influx of artifacts from the vaults of related and befriended noble families, nor would it have been possible to obtain relics from royal tombs and the treasury of the cathedral in Cracow. Moreover, the high status of the Czartoryski family guaranteed the seriousness and renown of their initiative. Secondly, this family aspect was reinforced by the location of the museum as an element of residential architecture. Its center was occupied by a monumental late Baroque palace from the 1730s, preceded by a large courtyard with annexes on both sides. A gate and a broad tree-lined alley led towards the courtyard. Near the palace, the alley crossed at right angles with another, slightly narrower road which, if taking the left turn (that is to the East), would lead the visitor to the Temple of the Sibyl, and when taking the right turn – to the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Built almost at the same time as the Sibyl and according to plans of the same architect (Chrystian Piotr Aigner), it was situated almost symmetrically to the temple and to a large extent corresponded in terms of architectural features. Similar in size, it was also a rotunda modeled on an ancient structure, in this case the Roman Pantheon. Thus, the museum, despite being located in a picturesque remote corner of the park around the palace, stood in close spatial relation to both the palace and the church, which was a kind of counterpart to the palace, intended to function as a family mausoleum (“The oppositeness of the Sibyl and the church […] can surely not be accidental,” remarked Konstancja Biernacka sensibly in 1823).28 In this way, the history of Poland’s past intertwined with the history of the Czartoryski family.29 Thirdly and finally, the viewer was influenced by the literature on Puławy, which provided a model of interpreting the culture of this place. Puławy, in particular the Temple of the Sibyl from the very beginning of its existence, became the subject of a distinctive sentimental and patriotic discourse. At first, it was created by authors directly associated with the court of 27 The last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski belonged to this party; Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski, Izabela’s future husband, was not chosen as king, probably only because he refused to stand as a candidate for the crown. 28 Biernacka, Podróż, 76. 29 Labuda, Musealisierung und Inszenierung, 212.

146 Michał Mencfel

the Czartoryski family. Among such poetic works are: Świątynia Sybilli. Poema historyczne w czterech pieśniach (“The Temple of the Sibyl. Historical Poems in Four Songs”) by Jan Paweł Woronicz (1800/1801); Puławy. Poemat w czterech pieśniach (“Puławy. A Poem in Four Songs”) by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1803); Do Księżny Izabelli Czartoryskiej (“For Princess Izabela Czartoryska”) by Franciszek Kniaźnin; Wezwanie do Świątyni Sybilli przy jej otwarciu w Puławach (“A Call to the Temple of the Sibyl at its Opening in Puławy”) by Aleksander Linowski, and many others. Although the majority of these works have never been published, they circulated as handwritten copies or in oral transmission and they could reach a wide audience, successfully creating the legend of Puławy. Izabela herself also strove to make Puławy present in Polish and European literature; as a result of her efforts, a lengthy description of the park with the Temple of the Sibyl and the Gothic House (which had not been built yet!) appeared in the second edition of the famous Les Jardins by Jacques Delille in 1801.30 The significance of this event cannot be diminished by the fact that the French author had shown scant interest and understanding for the Princess’s museum project.31 However, the Puławy discourse quickly became independent, showing a remarkable tendency for self-reproduction. It was co-created by numberless reports in diaries, descriptions, panegyrics, word of mouth, anecdotes, a phenomenon neatly captured by Ludwik Dębicki in a biological metaphor: “Just as the temple walls have grown moss and bindweed on the outside, so has it been adorned and surrounded by a thick vegetation of literature.”32 All of this had a significant effect on the way Puławy was seen and thought about. Viewers who entered the Temple of the Sibyl had already formed an image of it in their minds and understood the code of communication that was to be used.

The audience of the Puławy Museum The first thing to be understood about the Puławy museum is to whom it was addressed, in other words who the intended audience was. Guest books from the Temple of the Sibyl, thankfully preserved in the collections of Warsaw libraries, except for the earliest book documenting visits in 1806–1817, are the 30 Jacques Delille, “Chant premier,” in Les Jardins. Poëme, nouvele édition, considérablement augmentée, 1–40 (Paris: Levrault, 1801). 31 Aleksandrowicz, Izabela Czartoryska, 29–79. 32 Dębicki, Puławy, Vol. II, 297.

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

147

most comprehensive source of information on the subject.33 Without going into a detailed analysis, it is plain to see that throughout the thirty years of the museum’s existence it was visited by thousands of people.34 “During our stay,” writes Ksawery Prek, who spent a few weeks in the Czartoryski estate during the summer of 1825, “there was not a day without a few visitors coming with the sole purpose of seeing Puławy.”35 This was indeed the case. Throngs were attracted to the Puławy museum. Among the visitors were major players in European politics such as Alexander I, who visited Puławy twice, in 1805 and 1814, and Frederick Augustus I, king of Saxony and Duke of Warsaw, who saw the Temple of the Sibyl in 1810; there were representatives of the Polish political, social and intellectual elite: high-ranking civil servants, officers, writers and poets; visitors from abroad: Germany, Russia, France and England. However, the overwhelming majority of visitors to Puławy were individuals from all parts of the old Commonwealth whose names are little remembered now, mostly representatives of the large Polish nobility and the military (the latter had a separate guest book), clerks, the clergy, university students, and pupils. Bearing in mind the standards of the time and the nature of the museum which, after all, was a private initiative created on the periphery of an occupied state – the doors of the museum were open very wide and it was more or less accessible to representatives of all social classes. It should also be noted that there were special tours of the Sibyl for the local peasantry. The widespread accessibility of the Puławy Museum was the result of at least three forces: the personal convictions, ideals, and willpower of Princess Izabela Czartoryska; the tradition of a Polish nobleman’s house where openness and hospitality were one of the highest virtues and obligations; finally, the particular political atmosphere after the fall of the state when, after a period of blaming, grievances, and arguments, a new ideal of national concord transcending social and political divisions started to dominate public life. Of course, we cannot speak of egalitarianism understood as the conviction that all social classes should be equal in status – this was still a deeply 33 The book from 1815 is in the National Library in Warsaw (shelf mark 9570), books from 1809–1823, 1823–1830, and 1827–1830 are in the University of Warsaw Library (shelf mark Rkps 143 and 144). The book from 1806–1817 disappeared during the war, but it is known from the article by Zof ia Ameisenowa: Zof ia Ameisenowa, “Księga zwiedzających Świątynię Sybilli w Puławach. Jej historia i dekoracja,” Przegląd Biblioteczny 4, 3 (1930): 310–327. 34 The books of visitors were carefully analysed by Hanna Jurkowska; Hanna Jurkowska, Pamięć sentymentalna, 444–470. 35 Franciszek Ksawery Prek, Czasy i ludzie, ed. by Henryk Barycz (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1959), 43.

148 Michał Mencfel

estate-based society. The attitude of Izabela Czartoryska may be described as enlightened feudalism, where feudalism meant not only an acknowledgment of what was understood as a natural hierarchic social structure, but also a system in which the strong feel obliged to take care of the weak. Without intending to blur class distinctions, the Princess was sincerely devoted to uplifting the Polish folk to a new level of civilization. At this point it is worth reminding the reader that it was Izabela Czartoryska who wrote the first handbook of Polish national history for the lower layers of society: Pielgrzym w Dobromilu, czyli nauki wiejskie (“A Pilgrim in Dobromil or Rural Teachings”), published for the first time in 1818 and repeatedly reissued throughout the nineteenth century.36

The religious experience and theatre: A visit to the Temple of the Sibyl A visit to the Temple of the Sibyl followed a predetermined pattern.37 Guests came in groups under the direction of a guide, who was either Izabela Czartoryska herself or a specially appointed curator, Franciszek Gniewkowski (occasionally also Izabela’s daughter, the novelist Maria Wirtemberska). Visitors would be led through the park surrounding the palace towards the Temple of the Sibyl, gradually recognizing its antique shape and the inscription on the portico, brilliant in its brevity and power: przeszłość przyszłości – “For Future, the Past.” They waited for the guide to open the door of the building with a special key in the shape of a caduceus (an attribute of the ancient god Hermes/Mercury and also a popular symbol in Masonic iconography), made of gilded brass, with a Greek inscription MNEMEZ ANOIGO HIERON (“I open the doors of memory.”) Then, having climbed rather high stairs, since 1805 guarded by statues of lions, they went inside. The room basked in delicate, purple light coming through the skylight. Each of the two guides would create a unique atmosphere for the visit. To be guided by the creator of the museum was a privilege in itself. Apart from having the aura of a great lady and patriot, Izabela was believed by her contemporaries to possess an exceptional talent for acting. Her recitation was beautiful, she could modulate her voice appropriately, she engaged in dialogue with the guests and enlivened her stories with expressive 36 Izabela Czartoryska, Pielgrzym w Dobromilu, czyli nauki wiejskie (Warszawa: Zawadzki i Węcki, 1808). 37 Extensively on the subject: Jurkowska, Pamięć sentymentalna, 366–401.

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

149

gestures and visible affection. “The charm of her words was accompanied with the countenance and expression in her eyes that was always suitable to the subject of her speech.”38 “Her eyes, already misted with age filled with life […] her crouched figure slightly erected at the sight of […] some relic of national fame.”39 “Her pleasant voice, the eloquent flow of carefully chosen words, the glamour in every minute detail of her speech, a mind combining the freshness and keenness of youth with the gravity, the learning and experience of seniority, an inconceivable tenderness and her tireless courtesy increase the value and preciousness of each and every item twofold.” Even after the visit, wrote one of the guests, “this pleasant voice rang in our ears, we saw that delightful smile, those tears she shed so easily, we heard the words full of wit.”40 Lacking such oratory skills, Franciszek Gniewkowski compensated for them with his appearance and solemnity. The custodian of the collection, Franciszek Morawski, left such a portrait of him: A giant of a man, handsome, grey-haired, wearing a Polish costume, he could assume the dignity and solemnity worthy of an archpriest of that temple. He would open the iron gate with a loud clank and take the visitors to the upper rooms. When the doors of this enormous edifice were opened, he would precede the rest and walk to the main altar […] whence he turned around and spoke in a thoughtful tone: ‘Here would I usually begin’.

and then in a low, dignified voice, he would recite stories about the memorabilia, prepared by professional historians, which he had learned by heart. 41 On special occasions, this routine would be expanded to a great ceremony, with a parade of young girls, tableaux vivants and ceremonial speeches. “The newly built Temple of the Sibyl provided a rationale for a series of memorial tours, events and performances, inspired by love of what is close to home, and full of references and analogies to current happenings.”42 In such cases, the relics were sometimes carried out of the Temple of the Sibyl and became props in real performances. A particularly spectacular celebration took 38 Prek, Czasy i ludzie, 184. 39 Sabina Grzegorzewska, Dziesięć dni w Puławach w roku 1828. Urywek z pamiętnika Sabiny z Gostowskich Grzegorzewskiej (Kraków: Kluczycki i Spółka, 1898), 71–72. 40 Klementyna Hoffmanowa, Opisy różnych okolic Królestwa Polskiego, Vol. I (Wrocław: Korn, 1833), 99. 41 Dębicki, Puławy, Vol. II, 262. 42 Dębicki, 116.

150 Michał Mencfel

place in November 1809 when Puławy welcomed the Polish army under the leadership of Prince Poniatowski. An arch of triumph was erected on the soldiers’ route, people threw flowers at them, there were performances and illuminations (fireworks). The climax of the celebration was a solemn march to the Temple of the Sibyl, where a vigil and patriotic meditation took place among the national memorabilia. The theatrical character of a visit to the Temple of the Sibyl was intended to allow the visitors to experience the national history evoked by the relics in an unhindered and emotional way. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as is the case today, there reigned a certain “emotional regime,” to use the term invented by William Reddy, defined as “the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them.”43 In other words, there were social norms which prescribed restraint in showing one’s emotions in public. The civilizing process that occurred in Western culture during the era of modernity was interpreted by Norbert Elias as a process of self-discipline, suppression of urges and emotions, ever tighter control of emotional outbursts in the name of long-term goals, a process that grew and intensified with time, spreading further and further within society: The general direction of the change of conduct, the ‘trend’ of the movement of civilization, is everywhere the same. It always veers towards a more or less automatic self-control, to the subordination of short-term impulses to the commands of an ingrained long-term view, and to the formation of a more complex and secure “super-ego” agency. And broadly the same, too, is the manner in which this necessity to subordinate momentary affects to more distant goals is propagated; everywhere small leading groups are affected first, and then broader and broader strata of Western society. 44

There were, however, public spaces where this restriction was not in force, or where at least a more lenient approach was acceptable. The coffee house, the drawing room, the learned society of the eighteenth century have become, as we know from the classic study by Jürgen Habermas, formative spaces for modern public opinion, i.e. one that could not be entirely controlled by the rigid apparatus of the feudal-absolutist state. 45 They have also become 43 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129. 44 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilisation, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford; Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 458. 45 Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand, 1962).

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

151

spaces for intimate relationships and emotional expression. 46 One of the most important of such spaces was the theatre. If a theatre-goer from the twentieth century could witness the behavior of theatre audiences in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries he would be, as a Reiner Ruppert writes, “astounded, deeply aggrieved or even completely terrified. He would have the impression of being in a lunatic asylum.”47 This is because despite emotional regimes and pressure from cultural trends, the audience behaved in a highly expressive, spontaneous, rowdy and uncontrollable manner. Not only did people vividly react to what was happening on the stage but actually participated in the play: weeping copiously over a dead hero, hollering at the killer, flying into a rage or squealing with delight in response to political allusions, noisily demanding a repetition of a particularly favored scene, etc. As Richard Sennett argues, in theatre you could express your emotions to the point of being embarrassing – without feeling embarrassed.48 Rather than being a violation of the social norm, expressive behavior in the theatre was an opportunity to exercise the right to spontaneous affection guaranteed by the theatrical space. This feature of the theatre was brilliantly characterized by August Wilhelm Schlegel, writing in his second of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809–1811): In ordinary intercourse men exhibit only the outward man to each other. To speak with anything like emotion or agitation of that which is nearest our heart is considered unsuitable to the tone of polished society. The orator and the dramatist find means to break through these barriers of conventional reserve. While they transport their hearers into such lively emotions that the outward signs thereof break forth involuntarily, every man perceives those around him to be affected in the same manner and degree, and those who before were strangers to one another, become in a moment intimately acquainted. Almost inconceivable is the power of a visible communion of numbers to give intensity to those feelings of the heart which usually retire into privacy, or only open themselves to the confidence of friendship.49

It may be added that Prince and Princess Czartoryski both showed a keen interest in the theatre. Adam Kazimierz made a significant contribution to 46 See Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings, 147–154. 47 Rainer Ruppert, Labor der Seele. Funktionen des Theaters im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Sigma, 1995), 117–125, quote at 117–118. 48 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977), 73–80. 49 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7148; last accessed 1 September 2018.

152 Michał Mencfel

the opening of the National Theatre in Warsaw in 1765. Another theatre in a Warsaw cadet corps opened under his supervision a couple of years later. He was himself the author of several drama pieces successfully staged in Warsaw and Puławy. Lastly, he published extensive theoretical works on the nature of comedy and tragedy, one of the most comprehensive works on the subject at the time. As for Izabela, the Puławy court theatre, which she organized with the utmost care, was one of the most important stages in Poland; plays that where premiered there earned themselves a place in the history of Polish playwriting (one example may be Matka Spartanka [“The Spartan Mother”] by Franciszek Kniaźnin, staged in Puławy on 15 June 1786, with Izabela Czartoryska in the lead role, other members of the family and the court playing supporting roles). Generally, a certain theatricalization of behavior was a characteristic feature of the Puławy reality. Of course, the theatrical-emotional outburst in the Temple of the Sibyl was toned down by another element, sacralization and religious sublimity. Nevertheless, here, too, visitors of both sexes – although judging from diary entries women reacted more affectively – could allow themselves a public display of sorrow, trembling, sighs and finally tears. Such behaviors were desired and somewhat inherent to the logic of the visit. “The sight of the collected mementos, the thought of the past, the solemnity of the ritual and grave silence […] had something splendid, yet tender and pitiful in it. Tears sprang violently to your eyes and many a one wept honestly, thinking about the past” – this is how the visit was related in 1806 by one of the guests.50 Konstancja Biernacka achieved a yet higher level of agitation in a fictionalized narration, when describing the experience of looking at the memorabilia in the Sibyl: The cry-hinge gives you the shivers, the feeling transports you into the past with a melancholic tenderness, elevated by national pride you feel glory in being a Pole, and when the strength of conviction that tells your heart you cannot ever cease to be one, raises your eyes, brimming with tears of hope, to heaven, the light streaming through the dome and reflected from the noble reliquaries of merit refracts the beam of light in your dewy eyes into the light of a rainbow of the covenant.51

A great number of similar accounts could be quoted. 50 In a letter quoted by Leon Dembowski in his journal: Leon Dembowski, Moje wspomnienia, Vol. I (Petersburg: Grendyszyński, 1898), 264. 51 Biernacka, Podróż, 74.

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

153

VIII. Reunification, continuation and consolation: Puławy rituals When analyzing the course of a visit to Izabela Czartoryska’s Puławy museum, it is plain to see that it exhibited all the features of a ritual, and thus a very specific form of community behavior. The visits were highly formalized and repetitive; appropriately selected, semantically strong objects, words and gestures played a particular role. Thus, their nature was performative; a specific bond originating from strongly felt collective emotions was formed between the participants.52 The ritual quality imparted to visits in the Temple of the Sibyl had very important consequences, both for its memorabilia and for the guests coming to Puławy. It accorded a special status of symbols to the memorabilia, while offering the guests a sense of unification, continuation and consolation. Perhaps it was Emile Durkheim who observed for the first time in his classic study, published over a hundred years ago, that one of the most important effects of ritual activities is conferring an exceptional status to selected items by the community participating in the ritual, that is recognizing them as symbols, objects treated with special reverence and affection. They are indispensable to the community because they condition its continuance: Without symbols, social feelings could only have a precarious existence. Those feelings are very strong while men are assembled and subject to mutual influence, but they survive later only in the form of memories that gradually fade if left to themselves. Since the group is no longer present and active individual temperaments easily take over again. But if the movements by which these feelings were expressed are inscribed on lasting things, then they become lasting themselves. These things perpetually call these feelings to mind and keep them alive, as if their initial cause were still operating. Thus, while creating emblems is necessary for society to become aware of itself, it is no less indispensable to assure the continuity of this awareness.53 52 Randal Collins considers vital “ritual ingredients” to be “group assembly (bodily co-presence); barrier to outsiders; mutual focus of attention; and shared mood.” Randal Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 48–49. According to Axel Michaels, “Ritual acts must be a) formal, stereotypical, and repetitive (therefore imitable); b) public; and c) irrevocable; in many cases they are also d) liminal. So they may not be spontaneous, private, revocable, singular or optional for everyone.” Axel Michaels, “Performative Tears: Emotions in Rituals and Ritualized Emotions,” in Emotions in Rituals and Performances, ed. Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf (London: Routledge, 2012), 29–40, quote at 30. 53 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, transl. Carol Cosman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 176.

154 Michał Mencfel

Precisely such was the role of memorabilia collected in the Temple of the Sibyl: they were to cement the community spirit in a nation whose existence was in peril. Communities cannot function without rituals as they are created maintained and renewed by ritual practices.54 A “sort of electricity” as Durkheim put it, or “emotional energy,” to use a more contemporary expression employed by Collins, gives a sense of “commonality, belonging and togetherness.” Furthermore, rituals play a special role in moments of trauma, crisis and danger. It must be remembered that the Temple of Sibyl was created in response to a political tragedy of losing one’s state. This origin was frequently indicated by Izabela Czartoryska, for instance in her memoirs: “In 1793 [the year of the so-called Grodno Sejm, controlled by Russians, which confirmed the Second Partition of Poland – M.M.] Poland perished! Neither valor nor bravery could restore it. The most remarkable efforts to protect the fatherland would not suff ice. It was then that the idea came to me for the f irst time to collect the Polish memorabilia, which I entrust to posterity.”55 Since political and military means failed and it was impossible to maintain Poland as a state entity, it was necessary to focus efforts on maintaining it as an imagined one. By cherishing and reviving the memory of the glorious past, which at the same time was a promise of a glorious future (“For Future, the Past” was the Sybil’s motto after all), the Puławy rituals formed a bridge between the past and the future over the troubled waters of the present. This was succinctly and accurately summarized by Ludwik Dębicki: “The past became everything in a time when the nation was denied its present. The love of monuments and the spirit of the past was the only guarantee of a future.”56 As such, the Puławy rituals brought solace by offering a guarantee of continuance, an atmosphere of (only briefly questioned) permanence. As all rituals do, by maintaining some memories and eradicating others, the Puławy rituals helped to create and control social memory.57

54 Christoph Wulf and Jörg Zirfas, “Performative Welten. Einführung in die historischen, systematischen und methodischen Dimensionen des Rituals,” in Die Kultur des Rituals. Inszenierungen. Praktiken. Symbole, ed. Christoph Wulf and Jörg Zirfas (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), 19. 55 Izabela Czartoryska, Mémoires et petits diverses, 65–66, manuscript in the Czartoryski Library in Cracow, ref. Ew XVII/986; quoted after Opis niektórych pamiątek, 6. 56 Dębicki, Puławy, Vol. II, 257. 57 Wulf, Zirfas, Performative Welten, 21–22.

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

155

Epilogue The history of the museum in Puławy ends with the fall of the so-called November Uprising of 1830–1831, a Polish rebellion for independence against Russian domination during which the palace, the park, the Temple of the Sibyl and the Gothic House were seized and devastated by the Russian military. However, most of the artifacts were rescued. They were hidden in other residences of the Czartoryskis, estates of other befriended families, in convents and then, in the 1840s and 1850s, gradually transported to Paris, where the family located their new headquarters. There, in Hotel Lambert on the Island of St. Louis, the artifacts were kept under the care of Izabela’s grandson Władysław Czartoryski for more than twenty years. In the early 1870s, they were sent to Cracow with the intention of creating a public museum, which was indeed established in 1876 as the Princes Czartoryski Museum.58 The granddaughter of Izabela Czartoryska, Iza Czartoryska, a great collector herself, was brought up among the Puławy memorabilia. Assembling her own collections on the basis of entirely different principles and ideas drawn from the age of Enlightenment and science, she described her grandmother’s collections bluntly and a little derisively as a “morgue.” In Poland, however, the grateful memory of Puławy, vivid and warm, lingered on throughout the nineteenth century.

Bibliography Aleksandrowicz, Alina. Izabela Czartoryska. Polskość i europejskość. [“Polishness and Europeanness”] Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 1998. ———. “Z problematyki nowego wieku (Wokół Świątyni Sybilli).” [“Problems of the New Epoch (Temple of the Sibyl)”] Wiek Oświecenia 16 (2000): 9–33. ———. Różne drogi do wolności. Puławy Czartoryskich na przełomie XVIII i XIX wieku. [“The Many Paths to Freedom: Puławy of the Czartoryskis at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”] Puławy: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Puław, 2011. Ameisenowa, Zof ia. “Księga zwiedzających Świątynię Sybilli w Puławach. Jej historia i dekoracja.” [“The Book of Visitors to the Temple of the Sibyl in Puławy, its History and Decoration”] Przegląd Biblioteczny 4 (1930): 310–327. Bazin, Germain. The Museum Age. Translated by Jane van Nuis Cahill. Brussels: Desoer, 1967.

58 Żygulski, Muzeum Czartoryskich, 96–122, 150–196.

156 Michał Mencfel

Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995. Bresc-Bautier, Geneviève, and Béatrice de Chancel-Bardelot, eds. Un musée révolutionnaire. Le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir, Paris: Hazan, 2016. Biernacka, Konstancja. Podróż z Włodawy do Gdańska i z powrotem do Nieborowa w roku 1816, opisana w listach Wandy, Eweliny i Leokadii. [“A Journey from Włodawa to Gdańsk and Back to Nieborów in 1816, Described in the Letters of Wanda, Ewelina and Leokadia”] Wrocław: Korn, 1823. Busch, Werner. “Daniel Chodowieckis Natürliche und affektierte Handlungen des Lebens.” In Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801). Kupferstecher, Illustrator, Kaufmann, edited by Ernst Hinrichs and Klaus Zernack, 77–99. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Carole, Paul, ed. The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in the 18th- and Early-19th-Century Europe. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012. Collins, Randal. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Czapielowa, Ewa and Zdzisław Żygulski Jr., “Losy Szkatuły Królewskiej z puławskiej Świątyni Sybilli.” [“The Fate of the Royal Casket from Puławy’s Temple of the Sibyl”] Cenne/bezcenne/utracone 2/8 (1998): 14–21. Czartoryska, Izabela. Pielgrzym w Dobromilu, czyli nauki wiejskie. [“A Pilgrim in Dobromil, or Rural Teachings”] Warszawa: Zawadzki i Węcki, 1808. ———. Myśli różne o sposobie zakładania ogrodów. [“Various Reflections on Creating Gardens”] Wrocław: Korn, 1805. Delille, Jacques. Les Jardins. Poëme, nouvele édition, considérablement augmentée. Paris: Levrault, 1801. Dembowski, Leon. Moje wspomnienia [My Memoirs]. Vol. I. Petersburg: Grendyszyński, 1898. In Klementyna Hoffmanowa, Opisy różnych okolic Królestwa Polskiego. [“Descriptions of Various Areas of the Kingdom of Poland”]. Vols. I–II. Wrocław: Korn, 1833. Dębicki, Ludwik. Puławy (1762–1830). Monografia z życia towarzyskiego, politycznego i literackiego. [“Monograph on Social, Political and Literary Life”] Lwów: Gubrynowicz i Schmidt, 1887–1888. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Carol Cosman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Frączyk, Tadeusz. Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski. Biografia historyczno-literacka na tle przemian ideowych polskiego Oświecenia. [“Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski:

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

157

Historical and Literary Biography against the Backdrop of Ideological Changes during the Polish Enlightenment”] Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2012. Gajewski, Franciszek. Pamiętniki pułkownika wojsk polskich (1802–1831). [“Diaries of a Colonel of the Polish Army (1802–1831)”] Vol. I, edited by Stanisław Karwowski. Poznań: Rzepecki i S-ka, 1913. Grzegorzewska, Sabina. Dziesięć dni w Puławach w roku 1828. Urywek z pamiętnika Sabiny z Gostowskich Grzegorzewskiej. [“Ten Days in Puławy in the Year 1828: An Excerpt From a Diary of Sabina Grzegorzewska née Gostowska”] Kraków: Kluczycki i Spółka, 1898. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand, 1962. Haskell Francis. History and its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1993. Hoffmanowa, Klementyna. Opisy różnych okolic Królestwa Polskiego. [“Descriptions of Various Areas of the Kingdom of Poland” ] Vol. I. Wrocław: Korn, 1833. Jurkowska Hanna. Pamięć sentymentalna. Praktyki pamięci w kręgu Towarzystwa Warszawskiego Przyjaciół Nauk i w Puławach Izabelli Czartoryskiej. [“Sentimental Memory. Memory Practices in the Warsaw Society of the Friends of Sciences and in the Puławy of Izabela Czartoryska”] Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2014. Kazimierczak, Jerzy. “Realizacje architektoniczno-plastyczne w obrębie porozbiorowej rezydencji ziemiańskiej w Polsce i ich wymowa ideowa.” [“Architectural and Artistic Realizations within the Post-Partition Gentleman’s Residence in Poland and their Ideological Significance”] Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 40 (1978): 52–57. Koźmian, Kajetan, Pamiętniki [“Memoirs”]. Vol. II, edited by Artur Kopacz and Juliusz Willaume. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1972. Labuda, Adam. “Musealisierung und Inszenierung patriotischer Sammlungen in polnischen Adelsresidenzen Puławy i Kurnik.” In Klassizismus. Gotik. Karl Friedrich Schinkel und die patriotische Baukunst, edited by Annette Dorgerloh, 201–220. München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007. Labuda, Adam, “Ich versammelte die polnische Vergangenheit in dem Gedächtnistempel. Izabela Czartoryskas national-patriotische Sammlung und ihre Inszenierung in der Residenz von Puławy.” In Izabela Czartoryska. Mancherlei Gedanken über die Art und Weise, Gärten anzulegen, edited by Michael Niedermeier, 35–46. Berlin: Pückler-Gesellschaft, 2018. MacGregor, Arthur. Curiosity and Enlightenment. Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2007.

158 Michał Mencfel

Michaels, Axel. “Performative Tears: Emotions in Rituals and Ritualized Emotions.” In Emotions in Rituals and Performances, edited by Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf, 29–40. London: Routledge, 2012. Opis niektórych pamiątek zachowanych w Świątyni Sybilli w Puławach. [“Description of Some of the Memorabilia Preserved in the Temple of the Sibyl in Puławy”] Edited by Alina Aleksandrowicz and Artur Timofiejew. Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich, 2010. Ostrowska-Kębłowska. Zofia. “Siedziby-muzea.” [“Residences-Museums”] In Sztuka XIX wieku w Polsce. Naród, miasto [“Nineteenth-Century Art in Poland. Nation, City”], edited by Halina Lisińska, 69–108. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1979. ———. “Polish Residences-Museums in the XIXth Century.” In Studies in Art History (Polish Art Studies No 2), edited by Aleksander Kumor and Stefan Morawski, 59–82. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1980. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectionneurs, amateurs, et curieux. Paris, Venise, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Prek, Franciszek Ksawery. Czasy i ludzie. [“The Times and the People”] Edited by Henryk Barycz. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1959. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feelings: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ruppert, Rainer. Labor der Seele. Funktionen des Theaters im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Sigma, 1995. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Translated by John Black. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/ ebooks/7148; last accessed 1 September 2018. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Knopf, 1977. Siemieński, Lucjan Hipolit. Dzieła. Varia z literatury, historyi, archeologii i przyrody. [“The Works. Miscellaneous Texts in Literature, History, Archaeology and Nature”] Vol. I. Wrocław: Unger, 1881. Skowronek, Jerzy. Adam Jerzy Czartoryski 1770–1861. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1994. Stara, Alexandra. The Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816. ‘Killing Art to Make History.’ Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Stewart Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Whelan, Agnieszka. “Izabela Czartoryska and the Designed Landscape in Poland 1772–1831.” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 28 (2008): 281–302. Wulf, Christoph, and Jörg Zirfas, “Performative Welten. Einführung in die historischen, systematischen und methodischen Dimensionen des Rituals.” In

The Theatre of Affec tionate Hearts

159

Die Kultur des Rituals. Inszenierungen. Praktiken. Symbole, edited by Christoph Wulf and Jörg Zirfas, 7–45. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2004. Żygulski, Zdzisław Jr. “Dzieje zbiorów puławskich. Świątynia Sybilli i Dom Gotycki.” [“History of the Puławy Collection. The Temple of the Sibyl and the Gothic House”] Rozprawy i Sprawozdania Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie 7 (1962): 5–265. ———. “Nurt romantyczny w muzealnictwie polskim.” [“The Romantic Current in Polish Museology”] In Romantyzm. Studia nad sztuką drugiej połowy XVIII i wieku XIX, edited by Jan Białostocki, 43–55. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1967. ———. The Princess Czartoryski Museum: A History of the Collections. Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe, 2001.

About the author Michał Mencfel is Professor of Art History at the Institute of Art History of the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. His research and teaching interests focus on the history of collections, art and art theory between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries and European aristocratic culture in the nineteenth century. His current research is on the life and work of the Polish-German aristocrat, diplomat, art collector and art writer Athanasius Raczynski (1788–1874). He is the author of an extensive monograph about Raczynski (Polish edition 2016, the English version will follow in 2021) and the editor of Raczynski’s monumental diary (2018–2019).

6. A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition” Inessa Kouteinikova

Abstract This chapter focuses on the case of the Russian architect Aleksei Benois (1838–1902), who designed “many beautiful establishments,” as his critics tell us, both in Russia and in Central Asia. As one of the first noticeable Russian architects in Turkestan, Benois left behind fascinating sketches for the First Turkestan Exhibition (1890) that is considered here. His oeuvre revolved around one single theme: the creation of an ideal exhibition space in Tashkent, the new capital of Russia’s Central Asia. This study addresses Benois’s immersive vision and spatial aesthetics, up against the clichés of the late nineteenth-century colonial and Orientalist exhibition landscape. Keywords: Benois, Turkestan Exhibition, orientalist fantasy, colonial display

Closed circle: Exhibitions that need politics and politics that require exhibitions The Russian expansion project in Central Asia can be seen as a historical “impulse” to preserve the status of the Great Russian Empire as well as the desire to reach, establish, and secure the frontiers with the Russian orient by boosting their civilizing mission in Central Asia. Apologists for empire acknowledged the importance of the national line, recognizing the investment opportunities: raw materials; the markets; and handling of Central Asia, but more commonly they traded in euphemisms masquerading as concepts – imperial destiny, state responsibility, the mission of civilization, the progress of modernity, and industrial growth. This habit of mind arose from a faith in a providentially decreed Russian objective to regenerate the

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_ch06

162 Inessa Kouteinikova

Turkestan world, accompanied by an equally fervent belief that the Central Asian world desired regeneration. With colonization, Central Asian history, culture, and life, in general, was investigated in more detail by the Russians.1 Army officers, colonial officials, members of the scientific elite, and artistic circles became keen observers, explorers, and ethnographers or, at the very least recognized the rare value of the culture that was sent to Russia. As the collecting mood expanded with territory, the museum collections progressively expanded. At the time of its relocation from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1861, a large part of the Rumiantzev Museum was dedicated to non-Slavic art and artifacts. The entire notion of unification and questions of co-existence of the smaller and bigger Russian nations found a remarkable expression in the exhibition format. In her article “Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalism,” Vera Tolz tells us about the public exposure as a crucial factor: In the 1870s, the Russian press began publishing articles which argued that, to develop the Russian population’s national loyalty to the entire state-framed community, one should first develop among them a thorough knowledge and love of the history and cultural tradition of their place of birth and permanent residence.2

She argued further that “local identities and their links with a pan-Russian identity should be fostered by a local history component in the school curriculum, the creation of local museums, and the involvement of the public in collecting information about their localities.”3 Over twenty major expositions, along with a host of others, were held in Russia between 1867 and 1900. 4 All were designed not to conform with the familiar, but to suggest a clear affinity allied with hope for the peaceful coexistence between the nations. “Whereas in Germany and France people had a developed sense of pride and knowledge of the traditions of their 1 The literature on the Russian conquest of Central Asia is vast. In the past three decades, scholars working within fields such as political history, the history of society, anthropology, material culture studies, gender, and religious studies have produced ground-breaking works on Central Asian culture and society under Russian rule. 2 Vera Tolz, “Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalisms in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, 2 (Spring 2009): 268. 3 Vera Tolz, “Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalisms,” 269. 4 N.P. Melnikov, “O Vystavkakh voobshche i istorii Vustavok,” quoted in Svetlana A. Korepanova, “Vystavochnaya deyatelnost v Rossii v XIX veke. Promyshlennye i nauchno promushlennye vystavki,” (PhD, Ural State University of Aleksei M. Gorky, 2005), 97.

A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition”

163

regions, in Russia this sense of regional identification was weak, argued the Russian activists, assigning to themselves the task of rectifying the situation,” concludes Tolz.5 It is only a century and a half ago that the word ethnographica was used in the studies of Central Asia. Museums in Russia were not yet competitive enough to possess Central Asian antiquities as they were preoccupied with other geographies of the Orient.6 The first Central Asian collections of the future Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography and the Imperial Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg marked the beginning of the systematic collections. Numerous scientific expeditions to the region got wind of the discovery of large numbers of monuments in Semirechie (seven rivers region of the North-Eastern Kazakhstan) and Zeravshansk (with the major Uzbek cultural centers of Bukhara and Samarkand and Panjikent in Sogdia). They hastily recovered them for the museums, for they believed that there are many ways to conserve a site while building a collection. One is to document and exhibit it. Whatever the merits of this theory, this was a heavy mud out of which a remarkable array of scientists, travelers, artists, architects, writers, scholars, and political figures lifted the Central Asian culture in the half-century between 1860 and 1915, hoping to set up a promising Russian foundation in Turkestan. Having made several prolonged journeys to Central Asia, the members of the Archaeological Committee (February 1859) set up an agenda to separate ethnography (the collection of natural history) that was to be housed in St. Petersburg in the new Russian Museum (April 1895) under the name of Alexander III. Like the British paleontologist Richard Owen (1804–1892), a superintendent of all the natural history departments in the museum in Bloomsbury, the Russians decided that the ethnographical collection should be housed in a separate building.7 Central Asia only became the subject of public displays in Russia in the late nineteenth century. By 1865, Russians had simultaneously created a continental settler and nomadic empire. In the minds of the academic patricians, who wished to secure the patronage of the Romanovs and receive the European recognition, the next move was to effectively display the 5 Vera Tolz, “Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalisms,” 269. 6 Since the reign of the f irst “White Tsar” of the Romanov dynasty, Mikhail Feodorovich (1596–1645) the Russian army conquered large territories in the Eastern Siberia, Yakutsk, and Irkutsk regions, moving further to the Amur region, the Ussurijsk (Alexander II, 1818–1881), the Far East and the Kamchatka peninsula. 7 Owen moved his collection into the British Museum (natural history) that became the Natural History Museum in London.

164 Inessa Kouteinikova

content of the new territories – the raw materials and mechanical inventions, manufactures and art and crafts. By 1867, the organizers of the first Moscow Ethnographic Exhibition had been experimenting with the large mock background and diorama effect, some of the new techniques they learnt from the London International Exhibition several years earlier (1862).8 The exhibition featured the first extended panoramic photographs using electric spark illumination and the hand-painted backgrounds of photographic “drops” for the life models and mannequins, a technical device soon used in dioramas. The exhibition was divided into several main sections, one with a focus on Turkestan.9 Large quantities of ethnographical objects were transported from Central Asia to Moscow. Photographs, models, architectural installations, and other props were the supporting subjects of the first exhibitions on the region, where they were displayed together with flora, fauna, and objects d’art in the Turkestan pavilion. The works of Theodor Mitreiter from his Moscow-based “Vienna Atelier,” commissioned by Vasily Dashkov (director of the Rumiantzev Museum since 1867 and one of the exhibition’s patrons), highlighted the exhibition’s predilection for a historical narrative that eschewed questions of the nationalist and imperialist framework of Russia’s new subjects.10 Russian promoters of the “Exhibiting Empire” program shared a pragmatic tendency to judge ideas and exhibition proposals by their likely impact on both the empire and its subjects, which can be inferred from historical as well as contemporary evidence. Apologists for “Exhibiting Empire” acknowledged the importance of international exposure, investment opportunities, scientific display of a new kind of ethnographic material, and building the museum network, but more commonly they traded in euphemisms masquerading as concepts – destiny, responsibility, civilization, progress – the ancestors of such contemporary banalities as “globalization.” 8 Vserossijskaya Etnograficheskaya Vystavka i Slavianskii S’ezd v Mae 1867 goda, ed. A.N. Ivanov (Moscow: Institut russkoi zivilizazii, 2017), 607. 9 The Russian imperialist arguments were rooted in the immediate experiences of promoting colonies abroad they cited as historical examples. Whether or not they considered themselves pragmatists, they remained true to the fundamental exhibition principles common throughout the international age of Orientalism: a concern to evaluate the ethnographic material with respect to their subjects. 10 The content of the Exhibition was described in the papers of the Organizational Committee of the Izvestiya Obshchestva Liubitelei Estestvoznaniya, antropologii i etnografii, Vol. 29, Part ii, 93 (with 32 illustrations) (Moscow: izdatelskii Dom M.N. Lavrova I Ko, 1878) and accounts for 300 mannequins in national costumes, 1100 every day, and miscellaneous objects including musical instruments, and over 1600 photographs. In two months’ time, 83,048 visitors went to see it.

A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition”

165

This habit of mind arose from a faith in a providentially decreed Russian mission to “civilize” peoples that entered the Russian Empire, to regenerate the Russian world, accompanied by an equally fervent belief that the newly conquered Russian world desired regeneration. Nevertheless, many of the objects, installation techniques, and institutional principles were rooted in the nineteenth-century systematic colonial displays of what was considered ethnographically or aesthetically valuable by Russian academic and scientific standards. Oriented towards building a domain for the accumulation of culture and technology, these standards answered the nineteenth-century scientific typology and Russia’s political motivations towards museums as ideologically minded institutions. In just a few ethnographic exhibitions set up throughout Europe, the selection, presentation, and arrangement of objects, in tandem with props and settings, usually evoked an image of a mysterious culture filled with luxury and sensual delight, yet frozen in the past. Following the example of the London international exhibition, Russia wished to adopt similar “soft” display rules. The international reviews of the Turkestan department at the Moscow 1867 Exhibition staged at the Manezh Building, endlessly alluded to the Silk Road, while the exhibition in London inspired myriad interpretations of the Arabian nights. The multi-volume review of the Great Exhibition by the honorary John Thallis, for example, described an apartment featured in the Exhibition, “in the style of an Indian palace” in which, he claimed, “was realized all that the Arabian Nights, and other orientalist romances have detailed with respect to their gorgeous and costly luxury.”11 The Russian press praised the new Russian Empire that was yet to be seen, understood, and documented. Most of the 1867 Exhibition objects formed the ethnographic collection at the Rumiantzev Museum in Moscow.12 Architecture of the first 11 The honorary secretary John Thallis (1817–1876), a cartographic publisher and the founder of the Illustrated London News. His illustrated geographical publications such as Street Views and Pictorial Dictionary (1847) and a wide spectrum of illustrated maps of British cities, including London (1851), turned him into a formidable source of knowledge on the British urban industry. Tallis published several works in relation to the Great Exhibition (1851). For more information of his activities as a publisher and reviewer, please see Anthony Hamber, Photography and the 1851 Great Exhibition (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: V&A Publishing, 2018). 12 One of the first museums to systematically acquire and exhibit objects from Central Asia was the Russian Imperial Museum, presently the Russian Museum of Ethnography, founded in 1896 by the Emperor Alexander III whose interests in archeology surpassed the mild curiosity of his crowned predecessors. It was opened in 1903 by his son, Nicolas II. Its vast collection of ethnographic paraphernalia stemmed from expeditions, between 1870 and 1902 in the direction of Central Asia by the anthropological and geographical societies in St Petersburg, both under the aesthetic and scientific control of the Russian Imperial Academy. The museum’s mission

166 Inessa Kouteinikova

ethnographic exhibitions in Russia also played a fundamental role – the location, size, the shape of rooms and their mental routing, set up a sequence of spaces that helped to establish the relationship between the objects and visitors, region and Empire, people and Nation.

Master of Turkestan, a tragic architect There is no evidence to suggest that the young student of classical architecture Aleksei Benois was among the visitors to the Moscow Exhibition in 1867. He lived in St Petersburg with his affluent, cultivated family attending classes at the Imperial Art Academy, in order to gain the title of a free artist. This would enable him to receive design commissions of his own choice. Since virtually all educated Russians in the period considered in this paper were schooled in the humanities, it is those who excelled in and continued that education throughout their lives whom we properly distinguish as humanist architects. Humanism gave Benois a broad-based interest in everything that touched his life, a confidence in the potential of human achievement derived from an appreciation of the canon of past achievements, and a common historical narrative repertoire about Central Asia that could sustain a rich, accessible mythological tradition. Benois’ humanist culture was the seedbed of these ideas about the cities in which he lived and worked. Immediately after graduation, Benois submitted a request to the Russian Emperor Alexander II to be sent to the remote Syr-Daria region, placing him at the disposal of the Turkestan Governor-General as a civil architect. In February 1874, the first Governor-General of Russian Turkestan, Konstantin P. von Kaufman (1818–1882), obtained a confidential report with Benois’s recommendation from Aleksandr I. Rezanov, rector of the Russian Art Academy in St. Petersburg. The letter described Benois “as an exceptional architect was to improve the public taste, sharpen knowledge, and to educate craftsmen. The museum then consulted the leading scholars of Orientalist culture, but not the craftsmen or artists, thus making room for the very general displays of Islamic art. Nevertheless, Russia’s romantic and national interests in the past informed this enthusiasm for ornament and decoration in objects of utility. For sources on the First Ethnographic Exhibition of 1867, please see http://russiahistory. ru/e-tnograficheskaya-vy-stavka-1867-goda-v-moskve/; last accessed 3 December 2020, on the question of “image-exhibition-collection” in this particular context, see Liudmila Koval, ‘N.V. Isakov – osnovatel’ i director pervogo publichnogo muzeya Moskvy (Moscow: Pashkov Dom, 2008) and Galina Dluzhnevskaya, Arkhiologicheskie issledovaniya v Tzentral’noi Azii i Sibiri v 1859–1959 gg po dokumentam Nauchnogo Arkhiva IIMK RAN. (St Petersburg: Russian Academy of Science: 2011)

A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition”

167

and honest person” who will do well under von Kaufman’s command.13 The official request was granted on 20 June 1874, and in February the following year Benois started service. In a timely and persuasive way, he tapped into the modern mania for Central Asian history, religion, and culture, or what has been called “Turkestanomania,” which the scientific committee unleashed through the First Ethnographic Exhibition in Moscow.14 Benois’s Turkestan career started at the Department of Construction and Road Services in the Syr-Daria region that covered the city of Tashkent, the capital of Russian Turkestan. Just after three months, in May 1875, Benois left for Verny (today Almaty) to serve the Governor of Semirechensk where he stayed for two years, but little is known of his activities in Kazakhstan. He supervised work on public gardens, planned an ideal village in UzunAgach, designed a church for the locals, a school, and migrant house. He was interested in infrastructure, irrigation systems, supportive structures against the dangerous alpine rivers.15 Benois returned to Tashkent with the title of minor architect and a damaged reputation following several incidents of personal nature. He eventually resigned from the state services in April 1879. Most of Benois’s Turkestan colleagues were military engineers and the atmosphere encouraged little artistic aspiration. The ideas and principles of the Russian Art Academy he cherished were inherited from the eighteenthcentury humanists, who, in turn, found their inspiration in Renaissance principles of design. Among Benois’s supporters was the Great Prince Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov (1850–1918), an exiled member of the Tsarist family and the youngest brother of Alexander II. The Great Prince spent almost forty years in Turkestan, exiled from his privileged life in St Petersburg.16 As a tenacious officer, he participated in the Khiva military campaign. When he left the army, Nikolai Romanov initiated a whole spectrum of business ventures, investing in a soap-making fabric and the local photographic 13 Eduard Zhdanov, “Turkestanskii Benua,” Nashe Nasledie Zhurnal 98 (2011): 6–10 and Nashe Nasledie 98 (2011): 113–117. 14 The two publications by Yuri Elagin, Pravoslavnoe Tzerkovnoe Zodchestvo Uyga Kazakhstana (Tashkent: Arkhitektura Uzbekistana, 1989) and Iz Istorii Khristianstva v Srednei Azii (Tashkent: Izdateslstvo Uzbekskoi USSR, 1988), 65–87, provide a polemical choice of sources. Elagin’s central aim was to revise the distorted views of Christian architecture in the heart of the Islamic world that many in the Russian North had absorbed from popular press and culture at the time. 15 See “Aleksey Benois,” in Nemzy Rossii. Enciklopediya, Vol. I. (Moscow: ERN, 1999). 16 Among many versions of this scandal story, a love affair with an American commoner, Fanny Leer, is most probable. She lived in Paris at the time of the first meeting with the Great Prince.

168 Inessa Kouteinikova

industry.17 His entrepreneurial skills and cultural endeavors went as far as designing the first picture houses in Tashkent and Khiva, and installing an extensive irrigation system in the Hunger Steppe. For a long time, the Great Prince’s art collection was a subject of envious discussion among Russian art collectors. A passionate collector, he enjoyed historical portraiture, hunting objects, armory, and sculpture. Following his mysterious death in January 1918, the collection was nationalized and turned into the first Art Museum in Central Asia (1919).18 In 1890, Nikolai Romanov approached Benois and the civil engineer Wilhelm Solomonovich Heinzelmann to design a residence for him in the heart of the Russian quarters of Tashkent.19 Benois understood the importance and prestige of the commission: it was to become a home to the first European-quality art collection gathered by one of the Romanovs, in the capital of Central Asia. It had also raised troublesome questions for 17 Before 1865, Tashkent did not exist except as a handful of streets. With the Russian conquest, it became the temporary production center for photographs, dominated by the Russian residents of means and connections, none of them were professional photographers. Two of the most important photographers were Nikolai Nekhoroshev and Grigori Krivtzov, but the Great Prince never worked with them directly. This lack of information on their origins is typical. Dates of birth and death are unknown, as are parents and countries of origins. They appear like actors on a stage with only their entrances and exits known. Nekhoroshev would have started in or about 1870 when Konstantin von Kaufmann, Turkestan’s first governor-general of vast ambitions and with likely interests for photography, commissioned him to join the team working on the production of the Turkestan Album. He is certainly the author of many photographs of the archeological and ethnographic parts of the Album. He is possibly the author of a large number of portraits of local traders and trades. The evolving struggle between the Russian and Asiatic Tashkent ran deeper than resentment. On the cultural life in Tashkent, see Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 2007. Krivtzov, whose name appears in countless prints, seems to have used a studio often but also traveled widely with a horse-drawn darkroom. He was a contemporary of Nekhoroshev and he disappeared off the stage at about the same time, before the end of the century. Either he sold his negatives or had them pirated, although I have not yet been able to identify who used them. Thus, the early photographic history of Central Asia can only be interpreted by seemingly unrelated events. 18 However, the old photographs of Romanov’s former home, his art collections of ceramics, textiles and paintings reveal a much more elaborate and sophisticated decorative panorama and personal program at play throughout the entire house. All the objects from the Romanov collection were viewed equally, and his own identity was at odds with normative, gendered associations emblematized by the “china closet,” viewed from St Petersburg by his royal relations. 19 A graduate of St. Petersburg Institute of the Civil Engineers, Heinzelmann accepted the position of a civil officer for special construction projects at the Chancellery of the Turkestan Governor-General in Tashkent.

A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition”

169

him: what was a national style? What style of architecture should a recently established territory have? How to combine the past with the present and secure the future through architecture? The design of the Prince’s residence necessarily ran the full gamut of expressions and experiences. It exposed shifting tastes and trends, material conditioning, and the moral implications of aesthetic interventions. It was also tied into inchoate or particularized expressions of class, gender, race, and sexuality. In the Residence, as Benois envisaged it, identities and interior spaces play off each other, each informed by and informing the other. Like Asia, Russia is itself not a homogenous or monolithic entity, but an untidy assortment of at times overlapping and yet differing expressions and histories, and the Prince involved himself in different life stages. As such, his Residence shows how perceptions, conceptions and lived expressions of Nationalism and Orientalism must be cared for through their unique articulations rather than as symptoms of a univocal self-other relationship. For the Prince, the Orient and Asia contributed to his self of self-worth, especially at the moment he was stripped of his status and privileges. Painting, collecting, and interior design were not separate enterprises for Benois, but together served as beliefs of a new future, enthusiasm, opportunities for creating selves and a setting of aesthetic appeal and social charisma. He needed to reinvent his life in Central Asia. For a Russian, or European nineteenth-century aristocrat, “[t]he Orient is characterized as irrational, exotic, erotic, despotic, and heathen thereby securing the West in contrast as rational, familiar, moral, just and Christian,” to borrow Reina Lewis’s apt description.20 Aleksei Benois’s personal “orientalization” was seen to be confined to, or localized in the form of his deeds for his new country. Benois remained ambivalent to straightforward “orientalist” vocabulary in architecture. His tone and choice of sources for the Tashkent exhibition are sometimes polemical. He uncritically speaks of the local politics around the Tashkent exhibition, and does not discuss other developments during its preparations. To mark the 25 years of the Russian presence in Turkestan, the Russian government invited the Russian merchants and local traders to join in a jubilee exposition that would demonstrate the significant progress in all areas. The Governor of Turkestan was put in charge of planning and organization, as he had been for the Turkestan departments at the ethnographic and polytechnic 20 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1996), 16.

170 Inessa Kouteinikova

exhibitions.21 The Turkestan government, having come to regard international, or all-Russian expositions as essential in maintaining the Russian Empire as a center of invention and the arbiter of taste, decided to invite the Russian architect to design the pavilions on the vast grounds in the center of Tashkent. Benois’s plan, with all its many architectural innovations, not only proved that a Russian could be a designer and a landscape architect, but also a thinker and an engineer, ensuring that the structures devised for all subsequent expositions would be taken seriously by the critics and discussed in terms of their relation and application to conventional exhibition architecture. Benois uses an impressive body of economic, military, social, and cultural data to show how the Russian vision merges with the local. At the event of the exhibition, Benois really expected Tashkent residents of the Russian and Asiatic areas to say something important about who they were, and what their collective values were. By sewing the city fabric together, he also stitched together the imperial narrative, the Russian story with the Asiatic. Exposition pavilions presented special problems, but they were at first regarded as constituting a Russian story. Within their compass these pavilions developed their own internal narrative about Russia’s Central Asia, Benois himself and his image of Tashkent. Any urban resident, knowing the connections between the parts of the city, could interpret the whole Exhibition as a comprehensive story. Towards the opening of the exhibition, in tandem with the engineer E.P. Dubrovin, Benois designed the entry gate in the main façade of Konstantinov Park. The gate had a three-part structure with a wide path in between. The red brick was the chief material, combining nicely with the white porticos and the delicate stucco. The wrought-iron lanterns made the entire fairy-tale picture complete, and the newspapers announced that Tashkent was turned into another illustration of A Thousand and One Nights.22 Benois appeared to reconstruct a miniature image of old Moscow, the image of architecture as an art of embodied ideas, perfecting a memory technique that relied on images of forms to remember ideas. Aleksei Benois took aim at the entire edifice of old history and the new culture of Russian Central Asia that he strived to express in a single drawing or structure. In doing his job as a civil officer “with a right to build 21 See Inessa Kouteinikova, “Tashkent in St. Peterburg. The Constructed Image of Central Asia in Russia’s Nineteenth-Century Ethnographic Exhibitions,” in A l’Orientale: Collecting, Displaying and Appropriating Islamic Art and Architecture in the 19th and early 20th centuries, ed. Francine Giese, Mercedes Volait, and Ariane Varela Braga (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2019): 151–165. 22 See N.A. Maev, Turkestanskaya Vystavka predmetov selskogo khoziistva i promyshlennosti v Tashkente 1890 goda (Tashkent: S.I. Lakhtin, 1890).

A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition”

171

and design” in the vast territory of Russian Turkestan, he turned to the imagination, sometimes putting his career at risk, raising major questions of local identity, as well as modern claims of a presumed cultural heritage from antiquity that were part of a political agenda. His work is purely and unauthoritatively documented.23 Sadly, it is not free of ideological prejudices; the domain of architecture and planning was closely observed by the Tsarist authority who saw it as a communication tool between the power and people. The Russian government wished to see Benois as a Russian Boulée, whose perspective design of public monuments, prisons, legislative halls, local libraries, and cathedrals ultimately created an unquestionable and opinionated system, providing an unfailing grid of functionality in the new colony to some of the vapid theorizing of his contemporaries and posterity. All the phases of Benois’s activities in the field of exhibition-making reaffirm the importance that he attached to images, whatever their relationship to the place, and as such, always continued to add to his imaginary space, his “space” of reproductions. Benois clearly put huge energy into his work with concepts and images, which went largely unnoticed by his public, even if it must have often been painfully obvious to him to see his designs cropped and retouched to suit the general tastes. In many ways, Benois’s life was one of astounding contradictions – between the great success as a single Russian architect practicing on the outskirts of the Russian Empire on the one hand and his loss of esteem among his own original peer groups, the military officers and bohemians, on the other; between his huge productivity as the author of so many designs and the scant recognition he received from fellow architects; between his public life in Tashkent and the tragedies of his private life and his untimely death in 1902 in Krasnovodsk. Epiphany became Benois’s favorite mode, his instinct, even as he struggled to satisfy each design’s competing demands of originality and necessity.

Invention of an illusion Benois was closely involved in promoting Central Asia at world and national fairs, acting as a designer to the Tashkent Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition; he was also an ethnographer of minor note. In several short descriptions to his designs, he left an attractive and intelligent account of the Turkestan customs and way of living, art, methods of warfare, and other characteristics 23 Eduard Zhdanov, “Turkestanskii Benua,” Nashe Nasledie Zhurnal 98 (2011). http://nasledie-rus. ru/podshivka/2011–98.php; last accessed 12 December 2019.

172 Inessa Kouteinikova

Fig. 6.1. Paul Nadar (Paul Tournachon called Paul Nadar), Tashkent International Exhibition, commemorative monument. Paul Nadar’s travel to Russian Turkestan in 1890. Gelatin-bromide film, 1890, 90 x 120 mm. Photo © Ministère de la Culture -Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Paul Nadar.

both mental and physical. Benois was a deeply learned man more interested in intellectual pursuits than administration – a temperament the Russian campaign was happy to exploit. The idea of a colonial exhibition in Tashkent was intrinsically appealing to Benois because it seemed easier for an architect to present a well-ordered, wide range of pavilions in the open domain of a park than imprisoned in an actual city. Photographs taken by Paul Nadar (1820–1910), a famous French photographer and a European celebrity at the Tashkent exhibition, make it possible to directly compare spaces that are scattered all across Russia (Fig.6.1.). Benois wanted it to be all-Russian, including the smaller nations.

A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition”

173

The triumph of ideas over the weighty pavilions was thus a triumph over the contingency of the architectural world that Russia wished to impose upon Central Asia. Benois described the new ideas for the exhibition so compellingly in his sketches and notes that his successor, Dubrovin, may well have drawn on some of Benois’s insights and formulations when he was finishing the design. However, it is possible to look at this in another way altogether: in the early 1890s, Benois may have been one of the few people who immediately grasped the point the other designers and architects of the colonial exhibitions abroad were making in their work in London, Paris, or Antwerp. Indeed, Benois may have seen them and assessed the importance of new forms of reproduction to architecture and the material world of mediating colonies. His experience in designing architecture of all sorts – the Lutheran Cathedral in Tashkent, the Samarkand Gymnasium – alone makes this entirely plausible.24 In 1879, when Benois was only 29, he had already become an authorized signatory for the Urban planning committee of Turkestan, and, as its assistant architect, was responsible for the major civil constructions. Moreover, in the 1880s, besides working on his public projects, he had started to devote particular attention in his talks and diary notes to matters concerning exhibition art and architectural composition. It could well be that Benois regarded the deliberations of previously seen colonial exhibitions as not quite so original as they appeared to later admirers; on the contrary, it may have seemed to him that other designs had “merely” taken the concept formula through its ubiquity in the press and had applied that same concept to the more advanced colonial exhibition plans.25 Indeed, the suggestion that Benois had usurped the European ideas for the colonial fairs is an example of precisely the concept of the history of ideas that Benois wanted to change with his work; that is to say, it is an entirely unmaterialistic response. The history of universal exhibitions, in general, can be characterized as one prolonged, continuous competition between the two legitimate

24 Benois was a graduate of the Petrischule at the Paul and Peter Church in St Petersburg and knew very well the city’s Lutheran community. 25 Aleksey Benois’s cousin, an influential Russian critic and a member of the famous St. Petersburg group World of Art, Aleksandr Benois, was extremely critical of the universal exhibitions because they did not hold “an authentic expression of our creator’s [artists] lives,” but also for their “mediocre design ideas,” in Mir Iskusstva (St. Petersburg: M.K. Tenisheva, C.I. Mamontov, December 1898), 58.

174 Inessa Kouteinikova

ownerships of commissioner and architect, knowledge and production.26 The fact is that Benois was not only a beneficiary of the new culture of reproduction, but also its ongoing diagnostician. That alone secured him a place of his own in the architectural history of exhibition making. In his article, “The Turkestan Benois,” Eduard Zhdanov persuasively makes the case for respecting Benois as an architectural theorist in his own right. Benois is more than a mere disciple of the Russian Art Academy, the dominating school of the European tradition designed around Russian conservative vision. If he had not finished it, he would not be in Turkestan. Benois was acutely aware of and reflected the evolution of various reproduction practices in which he was actively involved. After all, Central Asia was supposed to be a smaller reproduction of Russia, architecturally speaking. While the format of the colonial exhibition provided the perfect formula for the apotheosis of modern architectural ideas, Nadar’s photographs became the perfect icon. At the time, they served little use to Benois, but for us they reconstruct an important period of his life during the work on the exhibition. With the detailed coverage of the first two ethnographic and polytechnic exhibitions (1867 and 1872), the camera had become an indispensable technology in a number of museums in the Russian Empire. A wide range of cultural forms conveyed the Russian fascination with discovering and exposing the previously unknown and not-yet-seen. It was no coincidence that the conquest period coincided with the great promise in the rise of the modern museums. The strong scientific foundation of anthropology, archeology, geography, and geology next to the social sciences and the ethnographic studies was coming to light under the public gaze in a revealing and unprecedented way. With the popularization of photography, the role of ethnographic studies and the necessity of sending off more expeditions to the colonies opened the new directions that reflected the ways in which imperial and colonial science was being transformed. Photography ranged from scientific research to architectural measurement of the important monuments, to naturalistic portraits of the new subjects and everyday life activities in situ. Photography took on a role of the cultural crossroads and encounters, despite the limiting technological equipment and largely idiosyncratic formulas of chemicals used in the desert climate. A new chain-relationship emerged between individuals, the scientif ic world, museums, and audiences in different parts of the Russian Empire 26 See A.I. Mikhailovskaya, “Iz istorii promushlennyjh vystavok v Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX veka,” in Ocherki Istorii Muzeinogo dela v Rossii, Vyp. 3 (Moscow: Redakziya Nauchnogo Instituta Muzeinogo Dela, 1961), 79–154.

A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition”

175

(and across the globe). By alternating between Russian imperial and global colonial structure, the Tashkent exhibition absorbed the “side effects” of these relationships by trying to offer a new perspective on photography’s indispensable role in Russian scientific and museological histories. Colonial exhibitionomania, in addition to strengthening the structure of Russian ethnographic museology, helped create both the demand for particular kinds of ethnographic images and the political context within which they were consumed during the golden age of the International Orientalism. These images, both photographic and material, provided a visual affirmation of nineteenth-century Russian Turkestan, which had been interpreted as a folly, a fairytale land of ancient customs and exotic paraphernalia by the Russian arm-chair travelers. What makes the Tashkent Exhibition of 1890 particularly relevant to this discussion is its near-urban scale and richly complex plan, allowing it to become an ideal civic model. In fact, it justified what was, even in those days, the apparent chaos of Tashkent’s Asiatic street network as something that indeed could be a potentially enriching formal model: a city that was not a grid, with all of its potential paths, was one most analogous to the nature of narrative. While the Russian Empire continued to establish new examples of practical, straightforward, regular and gridded military compounds from Britain to North America in imitation of an ideal Rome that never really was, Tashkent after 1865 evolved its palimpsest nature more deliberately, and imposed its formal regula only locally. The history of such exhibitions is key to an understanding of the birth of the Russian national museums. These enormous events were frequently undiscerning in their choice of objects; they combined the desire to instruct and amuse with a commercial impetus that challenged the accepted distinction between an “exhibition” and a “bazaar,” defined as a sale intended to raise funds for particular objects, or goods, to increase human curiosity towards the unknown territories. The officials obsessively chronicled daily attendance figures, ticket sales, weather conditions, and exhibitors’ prizes and attitudes; they provided for the body as well as the mind, with graded refreshment rooms. Additionally, the organization of temporary displays often served as an argument to persuade city fathers to establish a permanent gallery. The novel character of these events was underlined by their iron and glass buildings, which abandoned the classical and aristocratic language associated with the traditional art museum in favor of the forms of the industrial age, the railway station and the market hall. Curiously but steadily, exhibitions in Turkestan were to follow this pattern. Just as the Russians were fascinated by Central Asian architecture and absorbed its influence

176 Inessa Kouteinikova

in Orientalist buildings in Russia, Central Asian rulers adopted Russian and European styles to reflect their allegiance or pursue diplomatic and strategic advantage.

Bibliography Dluzhnevskaya, Galina. Arkhiologicheskie issledovaniya v Tzentral’noi Azii i Sibiri v 1859–1959 gg po dokumentam Nauchnogo Arkhiva IIMK RAN. [“Archeological Research in Central Asia and Siberia between 1859–1959 according to the documentation from the Archive of the Institute of History for the Material Culture”] St Petersburg: Russian Academy of Science: 2011. Elagin, Yuri. Pravoslavnoe Tzerkovnoe Zodchestvo Yuga Kazakhstana. 19 –nachalo 20 vekov. [“The Orthodox Architecture of Kazakhstan’s South, Nineteenth- Early Twentieth Centuries”] Tashkent: Arkhitektura i Stroitelstvo Uzbekistana, 1989. ———. “Iz Istorii Khristianstva v Centtral’noi Azii.” [“On the History of Christianity in Central Asia”] Tashkent: Izdatelstvo Uzbekskoi SSR, 1988. First Ethnographic Exhibition of Russia, see http://russiahistory.ru/e-tnograficheskaya-vy-stavka-1867-goda-v-moskve/; last accessed 3 December 2020. Hamber, Anthony. Photography and the 1851 Great Exhibition; with a Foreword by Tristam Hunt. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: V&A Publishing, 2018. Ivanov, A.N. ed. Vserossijskaya Etnograficheskaya Vystavka i Slavianskii S’ezd v Mae 1867 goda. [“All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition and the Slavic Congress of May 1867”] Moscow: Institut russkoi zivilizatzii, 2017. Izvestiya Obshchestva Liubitelei Estestvoznaniya, antropologii i etnografii. [“News of the Society of Amateurs in the Fields of Ethnography, Natural History and Anthropology”] Vol. 29, Part 2, 93. Moscow: Izdatelskii Dom M.N. Lavrova I Ko, 1878. Karev, V., A. Eisfeld, S. Bobyleva, D. Brendes, and N. Wardenberg, eds. Nemzy Rossii. Enciklopediya. [“Germans of Russia. Encyclopedia”] Vol.1. Moscow: ERN, 1999. Kouteinikova, Inessa. “Tashkent in St. Peterburg. The Constructed Image of Central Asia in Russia’s Nineteenth-Century Ethnographic Exhibitions.” In À L’orientale: Collecting, Displaying and Appropriating Islamic Art and Architecture in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries, edited by Francine Giese, Mercedes Volait, and Ariane Varela Braga, 151–165. Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2019. Koval, Liudmila. ‘N.V. Isakov –osnovatel’ i director pervogo publichnogo muzeya Moskvy. (“Nikolai Isakov, founder and head of the first Moscow Public museum”) Moscow: Pashkov Dom, 2008. Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation. London/ New York: Routledge, 1996.

A Burning Mind, a Dream Space, a “Fantastic Exhibition”

177

Maev, N.A. Turkestanskaya Vystavka predmetov selskogo khoziistva i promyshlennosti v Tashkente 1890 g. [“Turkestan Exhibition of Agriculture and Industry in Tashkent, 1890”] Tashkent: S.I. Lakhtin, 1890. Mikhailovskaya, A.I. “Iz istorii promyshlennyjh vystavok v Rossii pervoi poloviny 19 veka.” [“On the History of Industrial Exhibitions in Russia during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century”] In Ocherki istorii muzeinogo dela v Rossii [“Essays on the Museological History in Russia”], 3–12. Moscow: Redakziya Nauchnogo Instituta Muzeinogo Dela, 1961. Mir Iskusstva Almanakh. [“World of Art Magazine”] St. Petersburg: M.K. Tenisheva and C.I. Mamontov, 1898. Nilsen, Vladimir A. U Istokov Sovremennogo Gradostroitelstva Uzbekistana konca 19 nachala –20 vv. [“At the Beginning of the Modern Urban Development of Uzbekistan in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”] Tashkent: Izdatelstvo Literatury i Iskusstva, 1988. Sahadeo, Jeff. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. Svetlana A. Korepanova. “Vystavochnaya deyatelnost v Rossii v XIX veke. Promyshlennye i nauchno promushlennye vystavki.” [“Exhibition Activities in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Industrial and Scientific Exhibitions”] PhD, Ekaterinburg, Uralsii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet Alekseya M. Gor’kogo [“Ural State University of Aleksei M. Gorky”], 2005. Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851: Illustrated by Beautiful Steel Engravings. London/ New York: John Tallis and Co., 1852. Tolz, Vera. “Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalisms in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, 2 (Spring 2009): 261–290. Zhdanov, Eduard G. “Turkestanskii Benois.” [“The Turkestan Benois”] Nashe Nasledie Zhurnal 98 (2011). http://nasledie-rus.ru/podshivka/2011-98.php; last accessed 12 December 2019.

About the author Inessa Kouteinikova holds a PhD from the TU Delft in the Netherlands. She is an independent historian of art & architecture and photographic researcher. She works on colonial Central Asia, Russian and International Orientalism, and on the development of the photographic industry in Russian Turkestan, the Caucasus, and the Crimea from 1860–1917. She was a convener of the first international conference on “Russian and Soviet Orientalism

178 Inessa Kouteinikova

through Artistic Production and Education” at Cambridge University (2014), which was jointly organized with the Central Asian Forum (UK). Working closely with a number of the Australian, European, American, and Russian museums, she has also curated or co-authored various exhibitions in Europe and Australia, like “The Stroganoffs: The Noble Russian Family” (The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 2000), “Cold War Modern” (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2006), and “Russia’s Unknown Orient, 1850–1920” (The Groningen Museum, 2010–11). In 2019, she published a book chapter on “Tashkent in St. Peterburg. The Constructed Image of Central Asia in Russia’s Nineteenth-Century Ethnographic Exhibitions” in À l’orientale: Collecting, Displaying and Appropriating Islamic Art and Architecture in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries with Brill. She is currently writing a monograph on the emergence of photographic industries and practices, reception, representation, and display of Russia’s 19th-century colonies on the international exhibitions, and on the rise of the Islamic collections in 19th-century Russian museums.

7.

An Ephemeral Display within an Ephemeral Museum: The East India Company Contribution to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 Elizabeth A. Pergam

Abstract This chapter seeks to reconstruct Saloon G at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. Devoted primarily to objects from the Indian subcontinent, this section of the ground-breaking, blockbuster exhibition was drawn mostly from the holdings of the Honorable East India Company. India and Manchester were linked through their common interest in cotton; however, there was surprisingly little commentary at the time about the connections. The turmoil in India that began days after the opening Art Treasures Palace had a decided impact on the objects that were on view to the public. With little extant documentation about the specific works on view, this chapter confronts mid-Victorian attitudes to the applied arts, as well as objects produced in the “colonies.”1 Keywords: Manchester, East India Company, cotton, textiles, jewelry

Introduction: Manchester and Meerut in May 1857 It is an understatement to describe the Indian Mutiny (also known as the Indian Rebellion or the War of Independence) that began in Meerut, Notes: The research for this paper was made possible by the generosity of friends and colleagues in London and Geneva. Many thanks to the Maggos, Wilson, and Wright families, and Cindy Elden and Julia Latchford.

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_ch07

182 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

Uttar Pradesh, on 10 May 1857, as a turning point in British Imperial administration.1 Thousands of miles away and on a seemingly opposite pole of concern, the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition that Prince Albert had inaugurated just days before on 5 May in Britain’s industrial north was a pathbreaking event for art in Britain and the history of art more generally. These two events shared space on the pages of British newspapers, which were filled with reports of the violence in South Asia, as well as laudatory accounts of the grand opening of the Art Treasures Palace and the priceless works inside. Surprisingly, although cotton was a common thread that formed an important trading and manufacturing bond between Manchester and India, and the exhibition included a dedicated space for works of art lent by the Honourable East India Company, contemporary commentators made little connection between the horrors of colonial rule and the cultural philanthropy that was celebrated in Lancashire. The absence of commentary at that time continues through today. Noticeably missing from the extensive but ever-growing recent scholarship on the Company, the events in India in that year, or British colonialism, is any in-depth discussion of the Art Treasures Exhibition and the Indian objects on display there through October.2 Even in Ray Desmond’s very useful history of the East India Company Museum, there is no mention of the Art Treasures Exhibition.3 This omission is especially glaring given the importance of the exhibition to the history of art. As the first blockbuster exhibition devoted to the fine arts in Britain, the five-month event was an unprecedented opportunity for more than 1.3 million visitors to examine over 16,000 works of art, many of which had never before been exhibited publicly, listen to the Charles Hallé orchestra, take refreshment, and read any number 1 For a useful discussion of the Victorian insistence on the term “mutiny” to describe the eighteen-month uprising against British rule, see Denis Judd, The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600–1947 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86. 2 Arthur MacGregor is, as yet, the only scholar to discuss the Art Treasures Exhibition in connection with the East India Company. I am extremely grateful to him for sharing in advance of publication these pages of Company Curiosities: Nature, Culture and the East India Company, 1600–1874 (London: Reaktion Books, 2018), 206–208. William Dalrymple’s long-awaited volume on the East India Company – The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) – makes no mention of the Art Treasures Exhibition or the connections between Indian cotton and Manchester. In Margot Finn and Kate Smith’s edited volume, The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 (London: UCL Press, 2018), none of the essays mentions the Art Treasures Exhibition and the East India loans. 3 Ray Desmond, The India Museum, 1801–1879 (London: HMSO/India Office Library and Record, 1982).

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

183

of guidebooks – all for the price of sixpence. 4 Because of the quantity and quality of Old Master paintings, such as Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna, Annibale Carracci’s Three Maries, or Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, it is not surprising that a great deal of discussion was generated about these works in a variety of types of publications.5 Similarly, the then-radical pictorial statements of contemporary artists such as John Everett Millais’ Autumn Leaves, William Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience, or the still-controversial later works of Turner, such as his Pluto Carrying away Proserpine, provided scholars, critics, and the public with a unique opportunity to compare the achievements of British painters with their predecessors.6 In many ways, the case of the East India Company (EIC) and the “oriental” objects it contributed to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition epitomizes the difficulties inherent in the reconstruction of ephemeral exhibitions – in this instance, a room within a much larger temporary loan exhibition. The problem is not merely in determining which objects were lent and how they were displayed. Rather, in this study, we will see the ramifications of external events on the historical record, or lack thereof. To attempt to identify works of decorative art that the public attending the exhibition would have seen exemplifies the complex nature of the challenge. Objects lent to the Art Treasures Exhibition for this department suffered the fate of all the nearly 10,000 works representative of the so-called ornamental arts that constituted the majority of the works on display. Too many to be catalogued individually, an official, printed record does not exist for those works installed in the Central Nave and Saloon G. Added to the 4 The sixpence Saturday afternoon admission fee was instituted in August; two tiers of season tickets were available, as were daily tickets. The Executive Committee outlined the ticket pricing structure in their final report and included an Appendix of the “Monthly Return of the Sale of Season Tickets,” see Exhibition of Art Treasures of the United Kingdom held at Manchester in 1857. Report of the Executive Committee (Manchester: George Simms, 1859), 42, Appendix XVI. 5 The f inal report of the Executive Committee gives an account of the total numbers of works of art in each department: 1,173 Old Master paintings; 689 modern paintings; 386 British portraits; 969 watercolors and drawings; 260 Old Master drawings; 597 photographs; 1,475 engravings; and 10,000 works of decorative arts. Report of the Executive Committee, 23. Henry Labouchère, the Earl of Carlisle, and the Earl of Derby lent these three paintings; they are all now in the collection of the National Gallery, London. For more on the discrepancy between public and scholarly opinion, see Elizabeth Pergam, “‘Creating a Furore.’ Annibale Carracci’s The Three Maries, Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy and Henry Wallis’s Death of Chatterton at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition,” Apollo 155 (June 2002): 48–53. 6 John Miller lent the single Millais on view; Thomas Fairbairn contributed Hunt’s modern life subject; John Chapman lent the Turner mythological subject that had first been viewed at the Royal Academy in 1839. These paintings are now in the collections of the Manchester Art Gallery, Tate, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

184 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

difficulties associated with cataloguing works considered decorative – in contradistinction to fine – art were administrative challenges particular to this department. The organization of this gallery was the responsibility of Dr. John Forbes Royle (1798–1858) of the East India Company Museum. Born and raised within Company culture, Royle’s entire career was closely connected with the EIC, an association that came to an end only with his death less than three months after the close of the Art Treasures Exhibition. His passing occurred in the midst of the year-long military struggles on the subcontinent. Following the traumas of the Mutiny-Rebellion and the passage of the Government of India Act in 1858, the Company’s role in the governance of India was severely reduced with major consequences for its position back in London. Both these events undoubtedly contributed to the loss of documentation of the objects of Asian origin that were on view in Saloon G between May and October 1857. Nevertheless, I will show that a careful examination of the evidence that does exist concerning the organization of Saloon G – often referred to as the “Oriental Court” – and its reception allows us to draw conclusions about the status of these objects in the mid-nineteenth century. By attempting to reconstruct what was exhibited, how these objects were displayed, and how they were understood, this chapter will elucidate mid-Victorian British attitudes to objects whose origin was believed to be India, how those attitudes related to theories of good design, and the implications for the fate of those works of art and their future study. While today the adjective “oriental” is considered outdated at best or racially insensitive at worst, in 1857 it was the standard terminology applied products, people, and works of art originating from the continent of Asia.7 By looking closely at an under-studied episode, this chapter will contribute to the interrogation of the origins of the European discourse on works created in a non-European context. Because the main focus of this chapter centers on the display in 7 It is now de rigeur for art historians considering art created in Asia to address the question of terminology. As Craig Clunas points out in the former introduction to the subject, “‘Chinese art’ is quite a recent invention,” which he dates to the nineteenth century. See Craig Clunas, Art in China, 2nd ed. (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9. In his Indian Art, Partha Mitter makes the highly relevant point that in India, “the distinction between fine and decorative arts” was not pronounced and that this circumstance necessarily impacts the way in which a survey of the field must be approached. Partha Mitter, Indian Art (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1. Any discussion of the term must, of course, reference Edward Said’s Orientalism, first published in 1978. The fact that nineteenth-century usage of “Oriental” encompassed cultures ranging from Arab Middle East to Japan is, in itself, indicative of the very broad and loose understanding of these diverse artistic traditions.

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

185

Manchester, inevitably it is the colonizers, rather than the colonized that take center stage.8

The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 The organizational challenge to arrange effectively an exhibition of such scale, in just over a year, was, by all accounts, successfully met by the Executive Committee. This Committee was composed of the merchant princes of the city known to many as “Cottonopolis.” The chairman, Thomas Fairbairn (1823–1891), had followed in his father William’s footsteps as an engineer; of the five other members, three were active in the cotton industry.9 That the exhibition was meant as a testament to the philanthropic efforts of the citizens of Manchester better known for its radical politics, non-conformist religion, as well as its smoke-spewing cotton factories is encapsulated by the fact that non-Mancunians were dissuaded from contributing to the Guarantee Fund that made the exhibition possible.10 The mercantile, banking, and engineering backgrounds of the Executive Committee and their guarantors provided financial and logistical expertise that was matched by the art expertise of those they hired to lead the various departments. Thus, although Fairbairn, Prince Albert, and the Earl of Ellesmere were key figures in the conception and masterminding of a temporary exhibition assembled almost entirely from the private collections of British royalty, aristocracy, landed gentry, and antiquarians, as well as the newly enriched industrialists, it was art world professionals, such as George Scharf Jr. (1820–1895) and John Burley Waring (1823–1875) who were hired to organize the departments of Ancient Masters and the Ornamental Museum respectively.11 8 Here, I borrow Partha Mitter’s phrasing in the “Prologue” – subtitled “The Phenomenon: Occidental Orientations” – to his Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7. 9 Thomas Ashton, Edmund Potter, and Sigismund Stern were all involved in the cotton industry. See Elizabeth Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 15. William Edward Armytage Axon’s Annals of Manchester (Manchester: John Heywood, 1886) is a useful source of information on the citizens active in public and private spheres of Manchester politics, commerce, and culture. 10 The organization of and concept behind the exhibition is covered extensively in the first chapter of Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. 11 Crucially for Scharf, who had the seemingly impossible task of vetting of potential loans of old master paintings, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the director of Berlin’s museum and author of several volumes on the paintings in British collections, was brought on as an advisor, completing the triumvirate of Germans that led Haskell to deem the exhibition “the first Old Master

186 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

Waring and the Department of Ornamental Art The early hiring of Waring, who signed on to the enterprise in early October 1856, together with the physical centrality (Fig.7.1.) of the Department of Ornamental Art, as well as the volume of objects displayed in the cases of the Central Hall are good indications of the significance the Executive Committee attributed to the decorative arts.12 Indeed, this display would rival the embryonic exhibit of the collections of the South Kensington Museum (SKM) installed temporarily at Marlborough House while the dedicated structure for the museum was being built in the location that gave the institution its first name.13 An architect by training, Waring had written a description of the Byzantine and Romanesque period courts at the Crystal Palace when the structure erected for the Great Exhibition was dismantled and rebuilt in Sydenham.14 Even more recently, he had contributed to Owen Jones’s seminal consideration of design, The Grammar of Ornament, first published in 1856.15 Waring was certainly well positioned to assemble an extensive group of objects of all types and media – furniture, ceramics, and metalwork – and periods – Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque. His task was made easier in that he was able to draw sizeable numbers of objects from a smaller number of collections than the organizers of the galleries of painting – ancient or modern. The complete list of contributors is printed on three pages at the end of the section in the official catalogue describing the “Museum of Ornamental Art.”16 Notably, the Soulages Collection was purchased en bloc immediately before the exhibition. The Queen, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and individual collectors such as the renowned collector of arms and exhibition to have been directed by qualified experts open to the influence of German erudition and scholarship.” Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000), 85. 12 Manchester Central Public Library, Local Studies Unit, Royal Manchester Institution Archives [hereafter MCL] “General Out-Letter Book,” M6/2/4/1/738. 13 See A Catalogue of the Articles of Ornamental Art of the Department (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1852). The SKM was renamed the Victoria & Albert in May 1899 when Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone for the new buildings along Cromwell Road. 14 Matthew Digby Wyatt and J. B. Waring, The Byzantine and Romanesque Court in the Crystal Palace: Described by M. Digby Wyatt and J. B. Waring (London: Bradbury and Evans, Printers, 1854). 15 Julius Bryant has called The Grammar of Ornament “the most influential attempt to articulate the lessons from India for modern design.” Julius Bryant, “India in South Kensington, South Kensington in India: Kipling in Context,” in John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London, eds. Julius Bryant and Susan Weber (New York: Bard Graduate Center Gallery and Yale University Press, 2017), 14. 16 Catalogue of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom. Collected at Manchester in 1857. Definitive Edition (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857), 174–176.

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

187

Fig. 7.1. Ground Plan of Building. Engraving, 1857. Illustration from: Catalogue of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom Collected at Manchester in 1857, London: Bradbury and Evans. Provisional Edition. Courtesy of the author.

armor, Colonel Meyrick of Goodrich Court, lent extensively. Even so, the total number of three-dimensional works of art was so daunting that the extent of his responsibilities to organize these objects (selecting, packing, labeling, and arranging in cases) necessitated a deputy of sorts to manage the space that eventually was dedicated to non-Western objects. Equally clear, however, is that the notion of having a gallery specifically devoted to this category of decorative arts was an afterthought.

Dr. Royle, the Honourable East India Company, and the Oriental Museum While the Executive Committee recognized early on that the general museum of objects staged within an exhibition meant to illustrate the history of art needed expert guidance and sufficient time to solicit and vet the contents, from the evidence of their correspondence, a display of Asian objects had not been envisioned from the outset. Dr. John Forbes Royle was

188 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

one of the last experts to be hired, accepting Fairbairn’s invitation to organize the Oriental Museum early in January 1857.17 The curator of the East India Company Museum located at their headquarters on Leadenhall Street in the City of London, Royle was a logical choice given that the Company’s collections would furnish the majority of Saloon G. Thus, Fairbairn notes, in typical Victorian fashion, that “it is no compliment to say that your knowledge position and experience alike entitle you to the invitation.” He offers Royle “the entire control and arrangement” of works illustrative of “Oriental Art.” As a further enticement, Fairbairn speculates that “the oriental museum will undoubtedly prove one of the most attractive features of the Exhibition”; and he flatters Royle by saying he is the best candidate to give “its arrangement […] the highest educational value.”18 Royle’s whole life had been connected to the EIC: born in 1800 in Cawnpore, Uttar Pradesh, to a Captain of the Company (William Henry Royle); he received medical training before joining the Bengal Army as Assistant Surgeon in 1819. His life-long interest in Natural History led to his being appointed Superintendent of the Botanical Garden at Saharunpore. On his return to Britain in 1831, he continued his research into the natural resources of India, publishing numerous reports.19 Most notably, his On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and Elsewhere (1851) would have been required reading for many of Manchester’s textile manufacturers.20 This volume was connected to the display he arranged as commissioner for the India Department of the Great Exhibition of 1851, a role he reprised for the first Parisian Exposition Universelle in 1855. The goods on view at these first world’s fairs have rightfully been positioned as a turning point in British and Western European interest in objects from the subcontinent. Scholars, such as Peter H. Hoffenberg, have devoted a great deal of attention to the ways in which India (as part of the British Empire) was represented on these occasions.21 And the literature on 17 Fairbairn to Royle (29 December 1856) “General Out Letter Book,” M6/2/4/2/445; Fairbairn to Royle (12 January 1857) “General Out Letter Book,” M6/2/4/2/577. Peter Cunningham was appointed by July 1856 and Scharf by mid-August. 18 Fairbairn to Royle (29 December 1856), “General Out Letter Book,” M6/2/4/2/445. 19 A biographical article on Royle was published in the Journal of Indian Art 2 (23) 1888 and is amongst the India Office Records at the British Library. 20 J. Forbes Royle, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and Elsewhere; With an Account of the Experiments made by the Hon. East India Company up to the Present Time (London: Smith, Elder, 1851). 21 See, for example, Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

189

Indian materials and manufactures generated by these exhibitions provides significant insight into early understanding and interpretation of fine and decorative arts of the region.22 Indeed, they are often considered the cause for the exponential growth of attendance at the East India Company’s Museum in the City of London. However, the Manchester exhibition does not figure in these considerations, very possibly because we do not know exactly what was exhibited at that time.23 Significantly, Royle’s statement that the objects lent by the institution he represented were “selected chiefly as displayed artistic skill in the art of decoration” fits within the wider remit of an exhibition intended to show the British public the best examples of fine art.24 The privileging of artistic achievement in this department distinguishes the display he had organized on behalf of the Company from those in London and Paris earlier that decade, which, given their industrial emphasis, had paid particular attention to the relationship between natural resources and manufactures of the Indian subcontinent.25 Even so, we will see that the works in Saloon G were viewed and interpreted less as objects of fine art than as models for contemporary designers.

Reconstructing Saloon G Unlike its predecessors in London and Paris, the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition was intentionally devoted exclusively to the visual arts, defying expectations of the type of display Britain’s most important industrial city might organize. As I have noted elsewhere, the business-like approach of 22 See Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art, rev. ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Renate Dohmen, ed. Empire and Art: British India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 23 A recent example of this lacuna is the magisterial volume on Jewellery in the Victorian Age (2010). In the chapter devoted to jewelry displayed at international exhibitions, Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe begin with the Great Exhibition of 1851, followed by the understudied Dublin exhibition of 1853, through Paris in 1855, skipping Manchester to continue with the London exhibition of 1862. Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe, Jewellery in the Victorian Age (London: The British Museum), Chapter 6: “Britain and the World,” 251–264. Even though a section of this chapter is devoted to Indian jewelry, the Art Treasures Exhibition is not mentioned (Jewellery in the Victorian Age, 294–304). 24 Catalogue, 167. MacGregor observes that Royle’s catalog essay presents a “different perspective” of the applied arts from that conveyed by the EIC’s contribution to the Great Exhibition in 1851. See MacGregor, Company Curiosities, 207. 25 Desmond relates how the East India Company’s presence at these exhibitions actually created a crisis of space for the institution’s permanent collection in London and led to the establishment of a separate museum under Royle’s supervision. See Desmond, The India Museum, 42.

190 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

the Executive Committee and the organizers of the different departments is evidenced in the extensive records of their correspondence now held in the Local Studies Unit of the Manchester Central Public Library. The letters Fairbairn and Scharf sent to lenders, advisors, and supporters form the bulk of the archive. Although all of Scharf’s correspondence was copied into “Letter Books,” there is no such volume for Royle’s solicitation letters; the only correspondence we have are the letters written by the Executive Committee to the curator of the India House museum. In the first letter Fairbairn addresses to Royle, he notes that although it is his association with the East India Company that led the Executive Committee to him, they expect him to obtain “many treasures of interest which ought to be brought to light” from private collectors, as well.26 A subsequent letter from the chairman of the Executive Committee asks Royle to send a list of the objects that the EIC museum will lend; however, there is no evidence that the curator ever did so.27 Nor is such a list held in the India Office Records of the British Library.

The Catalogue The most complete account of the gallery is provided in the “Note” (Fig. 7.2.) written by Dr. Royle for the official catalogue, which forms the last nine pages of Waring’s nearly forty-page description of the contents of the Ornamental Museum.28 Crucially, however, neither Waring, nor Royle provide entries on any of the individual works of art. In the Catalogue, Waring explains why the decision had been made to give historical background to the objects under his care without including a list of each object: As labels giving a brief description of the several works of Art contained in the Museum are affixed to most of the articles, the following short notices of the nature and history of the particular branches of Art exhibited in 26 The other lenders Royle references are: Rev. Frederick Leicester; Messrs. Hunt and Roskell; R. Gough; General Lygon; Lord Delawarr; Sir Robert Hamilton; Lord Hastings; Mr. J. P. Fischer; J. Pulsky; E. Falkener; J. P. Dudden and Co. 27 Fairbairn to Royle (17 February 1857), “General Out Letter Book,” M6/2/4/3: 24. 28 Royle’s note in the final version of the catalog expanded upon that published in the Provisional Edition, providing more historical context as well as subheadings devoted to the various types of works displayed. In their final report, the Executive Committee praise this text as a “very able article,” which shows that “the Oriental Court presented a very complete and instructive representation of almost every branch of Art for which the Eastern nations are celebrated, or in which they excel.” Report of the Executive Committee, Appendix XIX: Report on the General Museum of Art.

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

191

Fig. 7.2. Saloon G: Note by Dr. Royle. Engraving, 1857. Illustration from: Catalogue of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom Collected at Manchester in 1857, London: Bradbury and Evans. Provisional Edition. Courtesy of the author.

the glass cases, are intended to point out the more salient features of each class of work, so that some slight aid may be given to the visitor’s appreciation of individual specimens, in studying which, admiration for the genius, patience, varied ability and fine workmanship shown in many of these reliques of past ages, can hardly fail to be excited amongst those who are at the present day engaged in similar pursuits, and who may here find endless suggestions for fresh ideas and important adaptations fitted to the requirements and usages of the time in which we live.29 [emphasis mine]

Significantly, Waring emphasizes the lessons that historic material had for Victorian visitors to the exhibition. That is – to give just one example – he explains that seeing and learning about how a Venetian glassblower of the fifteenth century created a goblet would necessarily interest and instruct a designer of tableware in mid-century Britain. This philosophy of the contemporary relevance of the lessons of historical applied arts underpinned 29 Waring, “Museum of Ornamental Art,” Catalogue of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom. Collected at Manchester in 1857. Provisional Edition (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857), 137.

192 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

the ideals of the South Kensington Museum and design theorists who supported that institution. Considering that the objects on display numbered in the thousands, the decision not to have individual catalog entries is understandable. In the case of Saloon G, however, there is no evidence that labels were placed near corresponding objects.30 Furthermore, where Royle’s narrative includes a description of an object, it is usually too vague to allow us to connect objects in these pages to works that are known today.31 For example, when referring to examples of Indian jewelry, Royle notes that they have been chosen not because of their intrinsic value, but “to show the nature and style of ornaments worn by the natives of India”; rather than describe the features of the “bangles, bracelets, and armlets […] anklets and toe-rings […] Nose-rings and ear-rings,” Royle is more concerned with explaining how they are worn, pointedly using the present tense: The necklaces are often in several rows, and cover the bosom, some in elegant pattern, with intermingled rows of drooping pearls, jewels, and gold. The natives do not hesitate to place a common bead near pearls to obtain the charming effect of color.32

This reference to how these objects were currently employed or worn by South Asians points to the distinction between the ways in which objects 30 Royle does not indicate in his text that he had included labels, nor did any labels remain with the objects. According to the curators of the V&A, there are no Manchester labels connected to any of the objects that came from the India Museum. I am very grateful to Dr. Debby Swallow, Director of The Courtauld Institute of Art, who facilitated an introduction to the Victoria & Albert’s Department of Asian Art and to Sue Stronge, Divia Patel, and Anna Jackson who responded so generously to my inquiries (Sue Stronge to EAP, 22 January 2018, via email). 31 The vagueness of the descriptions has been confirmed in consultation with curators in the Department of Asian Art at the V&A and the Royal Collections Trust. Rebecca Lyons graciously introduced me to Kajal Meghani, who, together with Rachel Peat, provided essential information about objects in the Royal Collections. Dr. Jackson was able to identify the jade “sceptre of good fortune” mentioned by Royle as having been “presented by the Emperor Kien-lung [sic] to Sir G. Staunton, when as a little boy he accompanied his father and was present at the audience of the British Embassy in 1792,” as the V&A’s Ruyi scepter (A.17–1925). She observes that Royle’s narrative about how Staunton received the jade scepter is not accurate: it was given to George Staunton, who was Lord George Macartney’s deputy and minister plenipotentiary of the first British embassy to the court of the Qianlong Emperor. Staunton gave it to his son. It eventually became part of the collections of the Royal Asiatic Society who lent it to the East India Company’s museum from which it was transferred to the South Kensington Museum in 1879 and given a new accession number in 1925. See “V&A A17–1925,” Victoria and Albert Museum, (http:// collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O101179/ruyi-sceptre-unknown/; last accessed 16 August 2018. 32 Catalogue, 170.

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

193

of decorative arts under Waring’s care and those assembled by Royle were understood. While Venetian glass and Limoges enamels were seen to hold lessons of good design for contemporary British craftsmen, Royle presents the objects of Indian origin as timeless. Put differently, according to Royle’s understanding, Indian artisanal practices of mid-century were based upon centuries-old traditions. Thus, Royle writes about these objects without defining the date they were created. We will see that Royle’s concern with Indian employment of color – whether dyes or gemstones – is a prominent theme in his treatment of the works under his care.33 Following the pattern that would become familiar in museums of applied arts, the department was broadly organized according to medium. Thus, cases positioned in the Central Hall of the Art Treasures Palace were devoted to Goldsmiths’ art and Metalwork, Majolica ware, and Enamels, among other categories.34 The vitrines in Saloon G similarly contained examples of the same medium or type, whether jade, jewelry, or silks. Although there were some non-Western objects displayed among the cases in the Central Nave, the fact that the works under the management of Royle were installed in a separate room was consequential. Given that the placement of the three saloons that composed the Gallery of Modern Pictures in a side aisle parallel to the three rooms of the Gallery of Ancient Pictures set up a comparison between the Ancients and Moderns, it is clear that the organizers were conscious of the message conveyed by the location of the departments within the architectural configuration of the Palace (see Fig. 7.1.). Sharing a wall with the First-Class Refreshment Room and perpendicular to the Organ, Saloon G could be entered from the northern arm of the Transept or the galleries devoted to Watercolor. It mirrored the location of Gallery H, 33 For the continued importance of colour in writings connected with India, see Natasha Eaton, “Swadeshi Color: Artistic Production and Indian Nationalism, ca. 1905–ca. 1947,” The Art Bulletin 95, 4 (December 2013): 623–641, as well as her “The Industry of Colour: Art, Design and Dyeing between Britain and India, 1851–96,” in Art versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, eds. Kate Nichols, Rebecca Wade, and Gabriel Williams (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 217–234. 34 The best visual rendition of the layout of the Central Hall was published as part of the Executive Committee’s f inal report on the f inancial results of the exhibition. This report includes several fold-out maps, including the colour-coded “Ground Plan of Central Hall, Showing the Arrangements of the Museum of Ornamental Art” in which the glass cases are indicated in lavender, the sculpture in red, groups of furniture by octagons, and armour with a shaded rectangle. See Report of the Executive Committee, Appendix XIX: Report on the General Museum of Art. The Manchester Central Library’s Archive division has set up a flickr page, on which images associated with the exhibition can be viewed: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ manchesterarchiveplus/26819397130/in/album-72157666091669333/.

194 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

the room devoted to the 44 paintings lent by the Marquess of Hertford, the only collector who was allowed to stipulate that his loans would be hung together rather than subsumed within the chronological display. Both these galleries measured 72 feet by 48 feet, among the smallest spaces in the Art Treasures Palace whose central hall measured 632 feet long by 56 feet wide.35 On the one hand, having a room dedicated to artworks from India and China lent primarily by one institution (or individuals connected to it) denoted a special status given these textiles, jewelry, and arms and armor. On the other hand, by placing them away from the other objects that composed the Museum of Ornamental Art, these works were isolated from European examples made from similar materials.36 This physical separation allowed both Waring and the French curator Alfred Darcel (1818–1893) to ignore these objects in the two most extensive published reports of the decorative arts. Concentrating on the works on view in the Central Nave their articles in The Manchester Guardian and the Revue française respectively that appeared during the run of the show give no indication that there were other objects on view in Saloon G.37 As can be seen in a number of engravings published in various newspapers of the day, the area of the transept was an important focal point for special events such as the grand opening.38 For example, the engraving of the opening ceremonies printed in the Illustrated Times four days later depicts Fairbairn, who stands at the foot of a raised platform and surrounded by throngs of official-looking men. As the caption indicates, the Chairman is “Reading the Address” to Prince Albert, who stands on top of this dais along with other dignitaries.39 Additional evidence to identify specific objects 35 These measurements are included in the “Introduction” to Waring’s Art Treasures of the United Kingdom (London: Day & Son, 1858), 15. 36 There were non-Western objects in the Central Hall. For example, Case D on the South Side of the Hall was filled with “Oriental China,” Catalogue, 144–145. In addition, Case Q on the North Side included works of non-Western origin lent by the “Government” from the “British Museum and Marlborough House,” Catalogue, 161–162. 37 Waring’s Handbook, drawn from articles first published in the Manchester Guardian, does not address the works assembled in Saloon G. A Handbook to the Museum of Ornamental Art in the Art Treasures Exhibition to which is Added The Armoury by J. R. Planché. Being a reprint of critical notices originally published in “The Manchester Guardian” (Manchester: Bradbury and Evans, 1857). Nor does Alfred Darcel in his series of articles on “Les Arts Somptuaires” for Revue française. “Les Arts Somptuaires à l’Exposition de Manchester,” Revue française 100, 102, 105, 109 (1857): 40–55; 177–182; 362–369; 560–566. 38 See for example, the engraving “The Opening of the Art-Treasures Exhibition, at Manchester: Presentation of the Address to H.R.H. Prince Albert,” Illustrated London News, 16 May 1857, 462. 39 “The Opening of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. The Chairman of the Executive Committee Reading the Address,” Illustrated Times, 9 May 1857, 296–7. This Address and others

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

195

can be found in a number of both photographs and engravings that were produced during the run of the show record overall views of the galleries. Although the galleries of paintings both modern and ancient garnered the most attention both in print and in illustrations, photographs exist of some of the cases of decorative arts.40 In some instances, these photographs served as the basis for engravings published in illustrated journals such as the Illustrated Times or the Illustrated London News. 41 However, none of these images includes Saloon G or its contents. This lack of visual evidence of overall installation views also stands in contrast to those rendered of the East India Company’s section at the Great Exhibition. 42 Nor is there any evidence that Royle, in the manner of George Scharf, made any sketches of the layout of the gallery under his supervision either in preparation for the installation or to document the result. 43 Royle’s description in his “Note” allows us to generate some sense of the overall layout of the gallery. Thus, we know that the walls were hung with textiles, miniatures, and views of Indian architecture. Religious type governed Royle’s organization of architectural views; he grouped representations of Muslim architecture on the eastern wall with Hindu and Buddhist examples across the room. According to Royle, the views had been commissioned by the Company’s Court of Directors to ensure a permanent record of these ancient buildings. 44 Textiles of different functions – floor mats or carpets – that given on the opening day are reprinted in the final report. See Report of the Executive Committee, 24–33. 40 See, for example, https://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/26819397130/in/ album-72157666091669333/; last accessed 16 August 2018. See also https://manchesterarchiveplus. wordpress.com/2016/05/27/the-art-treasures-exhibition-1857/; last accessed 16 August 2018. 41 The Illustrated London News, for example, in their 2 May 1857 issue captioned an engraving of crates being unpacked. “The Art-Treasures Exhibition Building, Manchester: End View: From a Photograph by McLachlan,” Illustrated London News 30: 856, 2 May 1857, 406. 42 See, for example, views of the Indian Court in Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: Dickinson Brothers, 1852). The original watercolours for this publication are held by the V&A. 43 Scharf’s notebooks, held in the Heinz Archives of the National Portrait Gallery, the institution at which he spent the remainder of his long career, include sketches of the installation of the Ancient Masters and British Portrait Gallery. He did not record the layout of any other department. 44 Catalogue, 167–168. Although it is impossible to identify the views exhibited in 1857, there was a long tradition of applying the European topographic landscape to the South Asian environment. First executed by British artists such as the Daniells (Thomas and William) and William Hodges, this mode of depicting Indian architecture was adopted by so-called “Company School” artists and eventually photographers such as Linnaeus Tripe. For examples of such architectural records, see catalog numbers 73 and 74 and 80 through 89 in William Dalrymple, ed. Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2019), 132–133, 148–155.

196 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

covered the north and south walls were also mostly on loan from the East India Company, though Sir John McNeill also lent at least one example of a “small carpet of Serrakhs.”45 A double-pole tent containing a chess table, pillows, and even examples of native costume in the form of turbans and slippers, stood in the center of the court.46 Included in this tent was a table identified as “possibly Persian,” lent by the Reverend Frederick Leicester, who had contributed eight, mostly Dutch or Flemish, paintings to the Ancient Masters department.47 Eleven cases filled with silks, calicoes, lacquerware, and jewelry were positioned about the room. These objects were lent primarily by the East India Company, but also a variety of collectors, such as Queen Victoria and Colonel Meyrick, as well as commercial enterprises, such as the London jewelers and silversmiths Hunt & Roskell.48 More broadly, Royle’s text reveals the state of scholarship of the works under his supervision. His need to set out the function, geographic origin, and techniques of the textiles and metalwork, as well as a history of the countries that compose the “East,” demonstrates that British understanding of these “specimens” as works of art was in a nascent phase. The incorrect identification of the geographic origins of some of the objects provides further evidence of how much more remained to be learned. For example, an armlet and a necklace identified as Persian in the volume edited by Waring and published after the close of the exhibition are now known to be Indian.49

Textiles Manchester-India: Cotton and textile manufacturing Royle’s introduction to the objects in Saloon G is notable both for its interest in these works as products of craftsmanship and manufacturing, but 45 Catalogue, 168. Sir John McNeill (1795–1883) was Lord Palmerston’s envoy to Persia in the 1830s. 46 For a description of the tent that was in the centerpiece of the 30,000 square feet space dedicated to the East India Company at The Great Exhibition of 1851, see Bryant, “India in South Kensington, South Kensington in India: Kipling in Context,” 12. 47 Catalogue, 173. Leicester’s contribution to the Ancient Masters galleries included works by Teniers, Cuyp, Ruysdael (2), Sassoferrato, Canaletto, Gonzales Coques, and Mieris. 48 Catalogue, 170. 49 The armlet was lent to the exhibition by Sir John McNeill (1795–1883), an officer of the East India Company; Sue Stronge has noted that the armlet is categorized as from Bengal in Thomas Holbein Hendley’s volumes on Indian jewellery. See Hendley, Indian Jewellery (Delhi: Cultural Publishing House, 1984), Plate 106, no. 739.

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

197

also for what seems to twenty-first century scholars as its superficiality. Equally apparent is that Royle was limited in the language available to him to describe the objects under his care or to categorize them as works of fine art worthy of the same consideration as a painting by Claude, a watercolor by Turner, or even a dish representative of Palissy-ware.50 The deficiencies that we see in his employment of the language of art and art history should come as no surprise: his early professional training was as a doctor and his later professional experiences were as a botanist not as an artist or a curator of art.51 Even so, what emerges from these pages is that textiles, their manufacture and design, held a particular fascination for Royle, as well as the few other commentators who discussed any of the objects displayed in Saloon G. Given his earlier study of cotton, by focusing on the textiles Royle was able to bridge the scientific and aesthetic aspects that were of concern to this industry, an industry that was central to Britain’s economic prosperity, especially in Lancashire. The connection between the location of the exhibition – “Cottonopolis” – necessarily lent significance to this display. A gauge of the extent to which the city of Manchester embodied the nineteenth-century cotton industry can be seen in Sven Beckert’s recent, acclaimed Empire of Cotton: A Global History, which opens with the Manchester Chamber of Commerce meeting in 1860 and the address of its president, Edmund Potter, known to us as one of the members of the Art Treasures’ Executive Committee.52 In many ways, the exhibition that the Mancunian Executive Committee might have been most expected to have organized was one that focused on manufacturing with an emphasis on examples of what could be considered the highest standards of design and execution. That is, to assemble a temporary exhibition that followed the remit of the newly established South Kensington Museum with Henry Cole at its helm. I have previously argued that the Executive Committee used the format of an exhibition of fine art drawn from the entire spectrum of British private collections 50 It is important to note that in 1857, the language of art criticism was itself the subject of dissatisfaction. See Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, especially ch. 3. 51 For a consideration of the emergence of the art museum professional at this period, see the special section of Journal of Art Historiography, The Emergence of the Museum Professional in Nineteenth-Century Britain, guest ed. Elizabeth Heath (June 2018). 52 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), ix–x. Beckert convincingly argues that the cotton industry’s exponential growth in the eighteenth century and its equally rapid decline in the twentieth are good indices of the advantages and disadvantages of global capitalism. For his treatment of the development of the cotton industry in Britain, see especially ch. 3: “The Wages of War Capitalism,” 56–82.

198 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

to attempt to dispel the associations – almost entirely negative – of the predominantly industrial Manchester of the 1850s.53 To prove that these citizens, who had recently acquired wealth and the vote, could see beyond the proverbial bottom line of commercial profit, it was essential that they present not only the works of art to which they gravitated – for example, Fairbairn was a very active patron of William Holman Hunt and the PreRaphaelites – but also the areas traditionally associated with aristocratic taste.54 It was equally crucial that they should be seen to be providing opportunities for the visual enrichment of the working classes who labored at the cotton mills, printing works, and other factories that provided the capital for this unprecedented fine arts exhibition. As can be seen in the layout of the galleries of paintings, the organizers confidently made the case that their patronage of modern, living artists was of fundamental benefit to the state of the arts in Britain. If medieval and renaissance models of craftsmanship could be integrated into the evolving vocabulary of art historical scholarship and related to theories about the role of the fine arts in the historical periods in which they were created, the objects in Saloon G presented the challenge of all contemporary design: how to explain their relevance to industries such as textile production and printing. From Royle’s introduction to his department, the evidence points to the fact that the objects on view were not examples of historical Indian art; rather, they were representative of the manufactures of the complex culture of the subcontinent. Further, they could serve as models of good design applied to contemporary products. As the geographic location to which the trading company that was chartered by Queen Elizabeth owed its name, India as both a commercial partner, and a resource-rich, highly stratified society was of particular fascination to many in Britain. This chapter is not the place to retread the long history of British interactions with India; however, it is important to explore the ways in which Royle and the few other commentators on the Indian objects on view in 1857 were representative of a particular understanding and approach to the subject of Indian art and artifacts. 53 Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, 3–4. 54 The Reform Bill of 1832, in effect, recognized that wealth from capital and not just land should qualify a man for the right to vote; Manchester was made a city in 1853 and in the elections of March 1857, politicians allied to the Palmerston’s Liberal party defeated the well-known Radicals John Bright and Thomas Milner Gibson. In addition to Holman Hunt’s Awakened Conscience, Fairbairn lent eight other paintings to the Modern Masters galleries, representative of contemporary painting in Britain at this period. These included Holman Hunt’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (now Birmingham) and Thomas Uwins’s Saint Shop (now Leicester).

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

199

Color in textile design It is in his treatment of textiles, especially calico printing, that Royle most clearly enunciates a philosophy of good design familiar to those in the arts and industry of mid-Victorian Britain. Central to his understanding of what constitutes such a qualification is Royle’s focus on questions of color. Whether it is in his description of embroidery or weaving, Royle repeatedly draws attention to the evidence of what he describes as “harmony of color.” Introducing the section on “Calico Printing,” Royle underscores that the Indian capacity for color is applied to a wide range of objects: “The East has long been famed not only for the brilliancy of, but for the skill with which color is employed, for the decoration of everything employed, whether for clothing or for furniture, for trappings for horses or elephants.”55 In fact, this reliance on characterizing Indian designs for their “harmony of color” was a recurring trope in British discussions of Indian objects from the time of the Great Exhibition onwards.56 Royle’s comments on issues of color recall those of Ralph Wornum and the conclusions he drew from the objects on view at the Great Exhibition; in his chapter on “The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste,” the SKM’s librarian noted “a general harmonious effect of the whole, and such a choice and disposition of detail that the part never interferes with the whole by attracting any particular attention to itself.”57 Similarly, Owen Jones notes that the SKM’s Indian textile collection is characterized by “the most brilliant colors perfectly harmonised.”58 It is clear, though, that his medico-botanical training was insufficient for Royle to be able to present a more sophisticated assessment of the decorative art objects under his supervision. Rarely does Royle go beyond formulaic phrases to expound in greater detail upon what would qualify for praise. The closest he comes to doing so is again in the context of calico printing. Having claimed that European manufacturing has caught up with the technical side of textile production, Royle explains that “eastern” 55 Catalogue, 169. 56 This association of India and the production of colour and dyes continues to this day. For example, the Indian contribution to the 2018 London Design Biennial focuses on the pigment indigo. See London Design Biennale. http://www.londondesignbiennale.com/countries/india/2018; last accessed 7 September 2018. 57 Wornum, quoted in Bryant, “India in South Kensington, South Kensington in India: Kipling in Context,” 14. 58 Jones, quoted in Bryant, “India in South Kensington, South Kensington in India: Kipling in Context,” 14. See also Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 33.

200 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

examples remain lauded for both the vibrancy of the color and overall composition so that the “proportion [of] the ground to the pattern” produces “a good effect […] both at a distance, and on a near inspection.”59 Although what that “good effect” might be is not elaborated upon, Royle’s statement leaves us with a sense that the readability of the pattern was an important consideration. Mid-century theories of good design in relation to textiles The well-known experts Owen Jones (1809–1874) and Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877) contributed essays on textiles published in Waring’s Art Treasures of the United Kingdom (1858). This luxurious volume, generously illustrated with chromolithographic plates, as well as black-and-white line engravings embedded into the text, was meant to be the definitive record of the Museum of Ornamental Art. However, it was available only after the exhibition closed. As the author of the recently published Grammar of Ornament, Jones was the most well-known proponent of the doctrine of good design. His treatment of Indian materials in his essay titled “Textile Art” is confined to the history of their manufacture and the trading relationship between the East India Company and the region.60 While Jones’s essay is a more general consideration of textiles, the title of Wyatt’s essay – “On the Principles of Design Applicable to Textile Art” – makes clear his emphasis.61 And he alone draws attention to the connection between the cotton industry for which Manchester is known and the models of Indian textile production, citing the “glowing and gorgeous” calicos and muslins not just as worthy examples for local artists, but as correctives to false principles.62 Wyatt writes: “It is to be hoped that the opportunity 59 Catalogue, 169. 60 Owen Jones, “Textile Art,” in Art Treasures of the United Kingdom, ed. J. B. Waring (London: Day & Son, 1858), 66–68. 61 Wyatt also mentions non-Western objects in his essay on “Metallic Art.” He comments that “This concurrent strength and weakness is especially apparent in much of even what is most generally excellent in Oriental design. Thus, among the very graceful set of Indian jewels which form the subject of Plate No. XII., we may look in vain, among those which are simply geometrical, alike for great beauty and any signal defect in good taste. In the two little green and gold enamels, however, an appeal of a higher order is made to our imaginations, and the native ‘sonar,’ or goldsmith, rises into that plenitude of poetry with which the lands of Hafiz and Firdusi are ever teeming.” Matthew Digby Wyatt, “Metallic Art,” in Art Treasures of the United Kingdom, ed. J. B. Waring (London: Day & Son, 1858), 20. 62 Wyatt had noted in a similar fashion that “The Venetians no doubt profited to some extent by the study of the forms and ornaments of such Oriental vessels in silver and copper as they

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

201

so afforded to the local designers of studying the glowing and gorgeous but invariably beautiful Oriental stuffs, may not fail to have imparted to the artists of Lancashire and Yorkshire some considerable portion of that sensibility of taste and eye, upon which […] probably more than upon any regularly recognized rules, the native designer relies for his happiest effects.”63 Interestingly, Wyatt’s esteem for the untrained and unregularized Indian application of design seems at odds with the mid-Victorian emphasis on artisanal training developed by the Department of Science and Art and its schools of design, such as the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry which had been established in Bombay in 1856.64 The only visual evidence that we have of the objects shown in Saloon G are the ten chromolithographic plates published in Waring’s volume – two appear with Wyatt’s essay on Metalwork. Eight – that is half – of the sixteen plates published to illustrate the section on “Textiles” are given to examples lent by the East India Company.65 The printing technique of chromolithography is particularly suited to convey the color and patterns applied to saddle cloths, muslins, and velvets that are praised in essays by Jones and Digby Wyatt. Even these fairly detailed images are difficult to connect to known examples in museum collections. I have been able to identify only the embroidered scarf now in the V&A Museum. The thirteenth color plate by Day & Son reproduces an “Embroidered Bobinet Scarf from Delhi.” The image of the oblong textile on the museum’s website shows the portion of the scarf in exactly the same way as that from 1858 only in higher resolution by virtue of the digital image.66 The connection between the two has been made purely on a visual basis as the museum has no record that their scarf was the one exhibited at the Art Treasures Exhibition. Indeed, there is no doubt that the paucity of the visual evidence and the lack of imported in great quantities from the East […] Many beautiful objects in the Indian Court at Manchester would afford equally useful suggestions if our manufacturers, our beaters of copper, and our spinners of pewter, would but study their grace and simplicity.” Wyatt, “Metallic Art,” 31. 63 Wyatt, “On the Principles of Design Applicable to Textile Art,” in Art Treasures of the United Kingdom, ed. J. B. Waring (London: Day & Son, 1858), 72. 64 For more on the connection between Indian schools of design and the Victoria & Albert Museum, see Bryant, “India in South Kensington, South Kensington in India: Kipling in Context,” 3. 65 The Getty Research Institute’s copy is divided into two volumes with the sections on Metallic Art and Textiles in the second. These are available at https://archive.org/details/ gri_33125008563518. 66 It is cataloged as Scarf (Delhi), c. 1855. Cashmere, woven, embroidered with silk and silverwrapped thread. See “V&A 0241 (IS),” Victoria and Albert Museum. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/ item/O477144/scarf-unknown/; last accessed 23 August 2018.

202 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

detail of the individual objects in the official catalogue have contributed to the inattention given to those works of art displayed in Saloon G even if they eventually entered public collections. At the time of the exhibition, we know they attracted the attention of famous visitors, including Prince Napoleon, who is recorded having spent “considerable time” in “minute inspection” of the contents.67

After-life of the East India Company objects Compounding the ramification of the near absence of documentary evidence, the fact that the Art Treasures Exhibition took place concurrently with the Indian mutiny all but ensured that the East India Company’s contribution to the first blockbuster would be overlooked.68 The upheaval that spread throughout India from May 1857 through to the following year led directly to the revocation of the East India Company’s political and military position in India. The untenable situation of having a commercial enterprise exert both military and political control over a continent many times the size of the island nation had been recognized as early as 1783, when Charles James Fox introduced to Parliament an India Bill curtailing the Company’s power.69 By the 1850s, India was already understood by Britons as the most important of their country’s dependencies. The uprising of the Sepoy members of the Company’s army and the Company’s harsh response ultimately led to complete government control over what had been under the supervision of what was essentially a centuries-old private trading interest. Not surprisingly, the political and military fate of the EIC had direct consequences on its cultural holdings. The Company’s majestic London headquarters were demolished in 1861 and its museum was moved to the India Office at Fife House on Whitehall. A final dispersal took place in 1879 when its contents were divided between the South Kensington, Natural History, and British Museums.70 With this division, the history of the objects and their place at the first blockbuster exhibition was irretrievably lost. 67 Art Treasures Examiner, 111. 68 Royle’s death in January 1858 exacerbated the situation. 69 For a thorough consideration of the history of the East India Company, see Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600–1834 (London: The British Library, 2002). 70 See Desmond, The India Museum and MacGregor, Company Curiosities.

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

203

Dispersal of the East India Company Museum The seventh of one hundred facts about the V&A in an article on their website states, “The […] South and South-East Asian collections began life as the East India Company’s India Museum, founded in 1801. The India Museum was transferred to the control of the South Kensington Museum in 1879.”71 Thanks to Julius Bryant’s chapter on the role of John Lockwood Kipling and the Indian department at the South Kensington Museum, it is unnecessary to write more than a brief outline of the position objects from India held at the museum in the first years of its existence and which of the objects the EIC lent in 1857 are now at the V&A.72 As I have indicated earlier, there are no records at the museum today that include information about the exhibition history of the works that were transferred from Fife House in 1879. Thus, a keyword search on the otherwise thorough on-line collection catalogue yields no results. Nor does the museum’s internal database or actual object files provide any additional information. The absence of information has a long history: the 1880 inventory of Indian objects on display at the SKM does not include any exhibition history.73 This lack of documentation seems out of character both for a company that prided itself on its bureaucratic procedures and for a public institution founded on a philosophy of following the most up-to-date museological procedures. Leaving aside the reasons for the absence of evidence of the history of these objects, the result, together with Royle’s generalized descriptions in 1857, is that except for the very few cases where visual evidence can provide proof of the object’s exhibition history, we cannot know definitively which objects the East India Company lent and the reasons behind their inclusion beyond Royle’s broad statement that they were considered the best of their kind. Objects lent by Queen Victoria, however, are better documented and 71 “100 Facts about the V&A,” Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/ articles/0-9/100-facts-about-the-v-and-a/; last accessed 18 August 2018. 72 Julius Bryant, “India in South Kensington, South Kensington in India: Kipling in Context,” 1–35. See also Robert Skelton, “The Indian Collections: 1798–1978,” Burlington Magazine 120, 902 (May 1978): 296–305. 73 See Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education, South Kensington, Indian Museum. Inventory of the Collection of Examples of Indian Art and Manufactures Transferred to the South Kensington Museum (London: HMSO, 1880). Documents relating to the transfer of the objects to the museum are kept in the archives at Blythe House but do not include any information about the Art Treasures Exhibition. See, for example, “ED 84/8/10: Copy of the resolution or resolutions of the Secretary of State for India in Council respecting the transfer of the Indian Museum to South Kensington, with the opinions of the Members of Council recorded thereon, 1876.”

204 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

the Royal Collections have been able to maintain the connection between the objects and their exhibition history.74 There are many reasons behind this circumstance and the next stage of this project will be to unpack the differences in approach to maintaining individual objects’ exhibition records in public and private collections.

Conclusion Even in the absence of complete documentation, it is possible to draw significant conclusions from this study. The display in Saloon G and the ways in which the objects were discussed in print would have been familiar to visitors who had also attended the Great Exhibition and the Exposition Universelle earlier in the decade. Therefore, although the Art Treasures Exhibition was unique and groundbreaking in many significant respects – the range of works of art brought together, the way that Western art was displayed, and its emphasis on the philanthropic efforts of a small group of businessmen in northern England – the Indian objects were presented in a way that reflected mid-Victorian understanding of and attitudes towards decorative arts from the subcontinent. Viewed from a perspective that takes into consideration the inevitable power relationships between colony and colonizer, the display of Saloon G must now be seen as a reflection of the highly problematic triumphalist appropriation of objects whether received as gifts, seized as trophies, or even purchased on the market.75 A stark contrast emerges between the well-documented (and heralded) provenances of such famous works as Titian’s Rape of Europa – on loan to Manchester from the collection of the Earl of Darnley – and the architectural representations of Indian temples or the floor mats from Kashmir or Scinde that lined the walls of Saloon G. This 74 Thanks are again owed to Kajal Meghani and Rachel Peat of the Royal Collections Trust (RCT). Some of the many paintings and objects in the Royal Collection that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert lent to the Art Treasures Exhibition can be found by searching “Manchester 1857” on the RCT’s website. Thus, it is possible to identify a famille vert wine pot and lid produced by the Jingdezhen kilns as one of the Chinese porcelains on view to the public in 1857. See “Wine Pot and Lid,” Royal Collection Trust. https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/search#/38/ collection/58477/wine-pot-and-lid; last accessed 8 September 2018. 75 For a useful approach to rethinking objects now in British public collections acquired during the country’s imperial phase, see the essays in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds. Colonialism and the Object (London: Routledge, 1998). Barringer and Flynn’s anthology has a broader geographic reach, but builds upon Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

205

contrast is heightened when comparing the extensive body of art historical literature of Titian’s acknowledged icon of the Venetian Renaissance with the superficial understanding of objects created in the subcontinent. Just as Britain’s relationship with India would be transformed in the ensuing decades, so too would scholarship of the art forms produced in the Empire’s Jewel in the Crown.

Bibliography Anonymous. “The Opening of the Art-Treasures Exhibition, at Manchester: Presentation of the Address to H.R.H. Prince Albert.” Illustrated London News, 16 May 1857, 462. Axon, William Edward Armytage. Annals of Manchester. Manchester: John Heywood, 1886. Barringer, Tim, and Tom Flynn, eds. Colonialism and the Object. London: Routledge, 1998. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage Books, 2014. Bryant, Julius, and Susan Weber, eds. John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London. New York: Bard Graduate Center Gallery and Yale University Press, 2017. ———. “India in South Kensington, South Kensington in India: Kipling in Context.” In John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London, edited by Julius Bryant and Susan Weber, 1–35. New York: Bard Graduate Center Gallery and Yale University Press, 2017. Catalogue of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom. Collected at Manchester in 1857. Definitive Edition. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857. Catalogue of the Art Treasures of the United Kingdom. Collected at Manchester in 1857. Provisional Edition. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857. Clunas, Craig. Art in China, 2nd ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cohn, Bernard, S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. London, Bloomsbury, 2019. ———. ed. Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2019. Darcel, Alfred. “Les Arts Somptuaires à l’Exposition de Manchester.” Revue française 100, 102, 105, 109 (1857): 40–55; 177–182; 362–369; 560–566. Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851. London: Dickinson Brothers, 1852.

206 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

Desmond, Ray. The India Museum, 1801–1879. London: HMSO/India Office Library and Record, 1982. Dohmen, Renate, ed. Empire and Art: British India. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Eaton, Natasha. “The Industry of Colour: Art, Design and Dyeing between Britain and India, 1851–96.” In Art versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Kate Nichols, Rebecca Wade and Gabriel Williams, 217–234. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. ———. “Swadeshi Color: Artistic Production and Indian Nationalism, ca. 1905–ca. 1947.” The Art Bulletin 95, 4 (December 2013): 623–641. Exhibition of Art Treasures of the United Kingdom Held at Manchester in 1857. Report of the Executive Committee. Manchester: George Simms, 1859. Farrington, Anthony. Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600–1834. London: The British Library, 2002. Finn, Margot, and Kate Smith, eds. The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857. London: UCL Press, 2018. Gere, Charlotte, and Rudoe, Judy. Jewellery in the Victorian Age. London: The British Museum, 2010. Haskell, Francis. The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000. Hendley, Thomas Holbein. Indian Jewellery. Delhi: Cultural Publishing House, 1984. Hoffenberg, Peter H. An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. India Office Records. British Library. Jones, Owen. “Textile Art.” In Art Treasures of the United Kingdom, edited by John Burley Waring. Vol. II: 49–69. London: Day & Son, 1858. Judd, Denis. The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600–1947. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Malik, Salahuddin. 1857: War of Independence or a Clash of Civilizations: British Public Reactions. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. MacGregor, Arthur. Company Curiosities: Nature, Culture and the East India Company, 1600–1874. London: Reaktion Books, 2018. Manchester Central Public Library. Local Studies Unit. Royal Manchester Institution Archives. Mitter, Partha. Indian Art. Rev. ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

An Ephemer al Displ ay within an Ephemer al Museum

207

———. Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pergam, Elizabeth. The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. ———. ‘“Creating a Furore.’ Annibale Carracci’s The Three Maries, Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy and Henry Wallis’s Death of Chatterton at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition.” Apollo 155 (June 2002): 48–53. Royle, J. Forbes. On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and Elsewhere; With an Account of the Experiments made by the Hon. East India Company up to the Present Time. London: Smith, Elder, 1851. Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education, South Kensington. Indian Museum: Inventory of the Collection of Examples of Indian Art and Manufactures Transferred to the South Kensington Museum. London: HMSO, 1880. South Kensington Museum. A Catalogue of the Articles of Ornamental Art of the Department. London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1852. Skelton, Robert. “The Indian Collections: 1798–1978.” Burlington Magazine 120, 902 (May 1978): 296–305. Waring, John Burley. ed. Art Treasures of the United Kingdom. London: Day & Son, 1858. ——. A Handbook to the Museum of Ornamental Art in the Art Treasures Exhibition to which is Added The Armoury by J. R. Planché. Being a Reprint of Critical Notices Originally Published in “The Manchester Guardian.” Manchester: Bradbury and Evans, 1857. Wyatt, Matthew Digby, and John Burley Waring, The Byzantine and Romanesque Court in the Crystal Palace: Described by M. Digby Wyatt and J. B. Waring. London: Bradbury and Evans, Printers, 1854. Wyatt, Matthew Digby. “Metallic Art.” In Art Treasures of the United Kingdom, edited by J. B. Waring, Vol. II: 17–48. London: Day & Son, 1858. ———. “On the Principles of Design Applicable to Textile Art.” In Art Treasures of the United Kingdom, edited by John Burley Waring, Vol. II: 71–82. London: Day & Son, 1858.

About the author Elizabeth A. Pergam received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research focuses on the fields of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, the history of museums, exhibitions, collecting, and the art market. She has published widely, including The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public (2011) and Drawing in the 21st Century: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary

208 

Elizabeth A. Pergam

Practice (2015). Her essays ‘Selling Pictures: The Illustrated Auction Catalogue’ and ‘John Charles Robinson in 1868: A Victorian Curator’s Collection on the Block’ have appeared in the Journal of Art Historiography. She teaches at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York (and London) and is currently working on a project on collecting in America.

8. Julia Margaret Cameron’s Railway Station Exhibition: A Private Gallery in the Public Sphere Jeff Rosen

Abstract On 11 November 1871, Julia Margaret Cameron mounted a gallery of eleven photographs in the waiting room of Brockenhurst railway station to commemorate a reunion with her son Hardinge, who was on leave from his Civil Service position in Ceylon. In England, railways knitted together the nation’s identity, while in Britain’s colonies, they promoted economic growth and reinforced governmental control. Cameron’s gallery was timely in depicting men who supported the expansion of the Service by reforming its selection process to encourage broad participation, a reflection of her own support for the colonial mission. By displaying photographs at Brockenhurst Junction, Cameron symbolically joined Britain’s colonial periphery to its imperial center and united national pride and good government in the public sphere. Keywords: British Civil Service, railway station exhibition, private gallery, Victorian public sphere, colonial Ceylon, Julia Margaret Cameron

Introduction I thought that artists were such jolly people – always dressing up and hiring coaches and going for picnics and drinking champagne and eating oysters and kissing each other and – well, behaving like the Rossettis.1 ‒ Virginia Woolf, Freshwater: A Comedy (1923). 1 Virginia Woolf, Freshwater: A Comedy, ed. Lucio P. Ruotolo (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1976), 69.

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_ch08

210 

Jeff Rosen

Lampooning the stereotype of the eccentric Victorian artist in her play, Freshwater: A Comedy, Virginia Woolf drew upon anecdotes of the cultured society associated with Little Holland House, the London home of Thoby and Sara Prinsep, Julia Margaret Cameron’s sister. In 1859, when Cameron moved to Freshwater, a village on the Isle of Wight, to join Alfred Tennyson and his family, the small town became a new cultural destination for the artistic elite. Cameron, the woman whom Virginia Woolf called her “Aunt Julia,” seemed to personify the conceits of an artist’s passionate, unpredictable personality, and although she feigned gentle mockery, Woolf clearly admired Cameron’s buoyant disposition, endless energy, and single-minded activity, particularly in relation to her creative pursuit of photography. In the words of Anne Thackeray, who lived briefly with the Camerons in Freshwater during the 1860s following her famous father’s death, Mrs. Cameron was “generous, unconventional, loyal and unexpected.”2 But she was not indefatigable; the year 1871 interrupted the seemingly uncomplicated disposition of Freshwater. In that year, Julia Margaret Cameron registered only two new photographs for copyright protection, a conspicuous decline from her usual enthusiastic steady output. Since 1864, when she emerged as a photographer, Cameron produced new photographs on a regular basis and assiduously registered each new subject at Stationers’ Hall. In that first year, for example, she recorded 109 photographs; from 1864 to 1870, a total of 463 unique works. Copyright was important to Cameron because it safeguarded her authorship and secured her rights to produce multiple copies for sale at Colnaghi’s, her print dealer; to participate in photographic exhibitions and competitions, both at home and abroad; and to circulate her imagery in reduced-size formats, such as cabinet cards. These market-based activities nearly ceased in 1871, when Cameron embarked upon a distinctly uncommercial project: she mounted and framed ten autographed photographs and created a unique exhibition in a railway station waiting room (see Table 1). She chose Brockenhurst Junction, the station that travelers from London would use to transfer to Lymington and thereby reach the ferry to the Isle of Wight. Cameron’s waiting room photographs must have been viewed by thousands of travelers over the years, despite the fact that their presence was not recorded until the twentieth century, when Helmut Gernsheim “discovered” Cameron’s gallery

2

Anne Ritchie Thakeray, From Friend to Friend (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1920), 4.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

211

while completing research for his 1948 study of the photographer.3 In his monograph, Gernsheim reproduced the dedication that Cameron posted to explain her exhibition to travelers: This gallery of the great men of our age is presented to this room by Mrs Cameron in grateful memory of this being the spot where she first met one of her sons after a long absence of four years in Ceylon. 11th November 1871.

Cameron’s statement is revelatory: she does not promote this exhibition as commercial and instead advances the idea that the photographs represent individuals to be admired. As a curated “gallery,” she infers that the assembled portraits share a common bond, although one that is not explicitly spelled out. She also explains for viewers that the physical setting of the exhibition is important, as the photographs have been presented formally “to this room” because of its symbolic associations and material importance, “this being the spot” where she reunited with her son Hardinge after his long voyage home from Ceylon. If Cameron did not exhibit her photographs to be coveted as collectibles, we might ask if she conceived her display as a kind of gift to travelers or intended her exhibition as a personal offering, because it was made “in grateful memory” to commemorate a deeply felt personal event. Was her “gallery of the great men of our age” intended to inspire and motivate travelers, to provide a respite from some other activity, or to establish some kind of claim? Or was Cameron’s dedication made as a political statement, one that transcended her expression of motherly yearning for an absent son and gratitude for his safe return, or that embodied national and international connections that extended beyond the railway station itself? In selecting a railway station waiting room, Cameron could have only imagined her exhibition would remain temporary, yet it outlasted her lifetime and still exists today. 4 Cameron offered travelers something truly unanticipated: Firstly, she created a novel place where passengers could pause during the course of their journey so that they might contemplate the contributions of illustrious men to the nation. Secondly, she assumed control over a public space and reimagined the station as an exhibition 3 Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work, 2nd ed. (New York: Aperture, 1975), 15, 174. See also G.T. Harris, “The “Little Gallery” at Brockenhurst (South Western) Station,” Letter to the Editors, British Journal of Photography LVI (29 October 1909), 850. 4 Kirsty Stonell Walker has described and photographed what remains of the gallery at Brockenhurst in her blog: Kirsty Stonell, “Raising the Spirits of a Weary Traveller,” The Kissed Mouth (blog), 17 October 2016, http://fannycornforth.blogspot.com/

212 

Jeff Rosen

hall, f ixing it in time by literally marking “the spot” where she and her son reunited. In redef ining this public space of transitory activity in personal but also modern terms, she also reinvented the space, turning it from a place of commotion to one where time could be slowed down, where travelers could appreciate a framed work of art or reflect upon modern railway travel or the happy union of mothers and sons. And thirdly, by explicitly linking Brockenhurst Station to the island colony of Ceylon, where her son was stationed as a governmental administrator, located across the globe at the outer reaches of the empire, Cameron repurposed this space to collapse two disparate sites together through the metaphor of the railway. In doing so, she effectively cemented together the national and colonial context in which she presented her photographs, turning Brockenhurst Junction into an allegory of connected geography, intersecting lines that embodied national identity, civil administration, and colonialism. In mid-century Britain, the railway station emerged as a new kind of public space, a physical site in which the social classes mingled, enabling new kinds of social interaction. But the new stations were places of transit, not locations designed for the public to engage in cultural discussion or political debate. For this reason, when Jürgen Habermas theorized that the emergence of the public sphere created new “sites of discourse,” he did not consider railway stations ideal examples, because in these transient spaces social interactions were avoided rather than encouraged, and the public entered and departed from them at will.5 Nevertheless, growth of the British railroad reshaped the physical landscape of the nation, created new and redistributed markets, and symbolically expressed the broadening reach of the state. Moreover, the increasing familiarity of the railway experience might be said to have created its own “common culture” by fostering broad public awareness about such matters as timetables, maps, ticketing, and acceptable waiting room behavior.6 William Powell Frith’s sensational painting, The Railway Station (1862), captured the chaos of the whole experience, but as early customers and critics of the railway both agreed, what appeared to be social anarchy amidst the bedlam of the platform did not last for long, as each social group soon re-segregated itself into its own class-based train compartment prior to departure, thereby stabilizing the status quo while undermining the notion 5 Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Pres, 1989), 141–151. 6 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 71–73.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

213

of a single, univocal public sphere.7 Nevertheless, in spite of this ritual of confusion and social self-sorting, the railway grew emblematic of the expansion of governmental power and intrusion of state bureaucracy. Habermas recognized the importance of this connection, writing: “only at this time was a modern central administration – the Civil Service – created in Great Britain.”8 Through the common experience of railway travel, then, passengers formed public social bonds because of their shared activity; each station along the journey expressed the expanding power of the state; and in the background, the English civil service helped to control and regulate the nation’s business. Although Julia Margaret Cameron continued her regular participation in annual photographic competitions, these activities were largely routine, and she chiefly recirculated subjects made years earlier. Virtually all of Cameron’s biographers have noted that her productivity waned in 1871, but none have found a compelling reason to account for what seems like an abrupt decline. Gernsheim minimized this period as a short interlude before the photographer embarked upon making new photographs for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, when she again found renewed vigor.9 Brian Hill, Colin Ford, and Mike Weaver entirely avoided examining the years 1870 through 1872, effectively excising this period from Cameron’s timeline.10 To Joanne Lukitsh, Cameron’s diminished public activity was a retreat from hostile critics in the press who derided her works or were unreceptive to her choice of subjects.11 Most recently, Julian Cox posited that during this year, Cameron focused inwardly on her children and family, and Victoria Olsen claimed this period marked a “career dilemma in which Cameron faced the unhappy prospect of choosing between a photographer’s amateur and professional status, resulting in an unresolved impasse.”12 7 On “counter-spheres,” see Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Caloun (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1992), 289. On Frith, see Caroline Arscott, “William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station: Classification and the Crowd,” in William Powel Firth: Painting the Victorian Age, ed. Mark Bills and Vivien Knight (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2006), 79–94. 8 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 138. 9 Gernsheim, Julia Margeret Cameron, 82–83. 10 Brian Hill, Julia Margaret Cameron; Mike Weaver, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815–1879 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 12 and Colin Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2003), 69–72; 77. 11 Joanne Lukitsh, Cameron: Her Work and Career (Rochester, NY: International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1986), 74. 12 Julian Cox, ‘“To… startle the eye wih wonder & Delight’: The Photographs of Julia Margeret Cameron, “ in Julia Margeret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, ed. Julian and Colin Ford (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2003), 68ff and Victoria Olsen, From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 222.

214 

Jeff Rosen

Art history’s biographical model traditionally places a premium on the influence of the domestic sphere, often separating it from the political realm, even when household activities were also present in the public sphere. Cameron’s biography has been divided in this way, with the result that her domestic relationships have been elevated over her intellectual commitments, the books she read and discussed, and the political opinions she held with respect to their effect upon her photography. But Cameron was an intellectual who was actively engaged in the political world: she read Plato’s Republic, Grote’s History of Greece, and Seeley’s Ecce Homo, and discussed these philosophical works with her friends.13 Writing in 1876 from Ceylon to her friend Henry Taylor, she claimed to have read “all the works of Sophocles in Freshwater,” and at the time was preoccupied by “reading for two often three hours every day a Polyglott [sic] given by dear Agnes Weld to my husband,” as well as a wide array of literature in four languages: English, French, German, and Italian.14 By shifting focus to assess how Cameron interpreted worldly ideas and political conflicts, we might understand how her family dynamic and its participation in the public sphere were intertwined rather than cordoned off from each other. As I demonstrated earlier, Cameron was well aware of the power of her solo exhibitions to express her take on world events. For example, she carefully selected both portraits and allegories in her German Gallery exhibition of 1868 to address Britain’s recent overseas conflicts, notably the Jamaican uprising of 1865 and the Abyssinian conflict of 1868.15 Three years later, in her railway station waiting room photographs, she again intertwined the personal and the political, just as she collapsed the symbolic spatial separation of Freshwater and Ceylon. Why did Cameron assemble her photographic gallery and consider Brockenhurst railway station a suitable exhibition hall? Since Cameron dedicated her photographic exhibition to her son Hardinge, I shall begin by considering the nature of their family bond in relation to Hardinge’s placement in the Ceylon Civil Service. Then, I turn to examine Cameron’s relationship to the individuals portrayed in her photographs and their connection to each other. Finally, I analyze how those images functioned in the public sphere of the railway station itself. Cameron’s written comments to her son and to others about 13 Jeff Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 66–104. 14 Julia Margaret Cameron to Sir Henry Taylor, 21 May 1876, Henry Taylor Correspondence, Ms. Eng Litt d.13, (70–87), Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 15 Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron’s “fancy subjects,” 196–229.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

215

the civil service and her thoughts about her son’s administrative career in Ceylon inform this analysis. The railroad, otherwise called the “lines of the nation,” connect these three sections.

Governing the empire Hardinge Hay Cameron was a child of the colonies.16 Born on 5 August 1846, in Calcutta, he was Julia Margaret’s fourth child. Hardinge’s father, Charles Hay Cameron, served on the Council of India, which controlled all civil matters for the colony under the terms of the Government of India Act of 1833, which had transferred the East India Company’s lands and administrative control to the British Crown. Cameron senior also served as a member of the Indian Law Commission under Thomas Babington Macaulay, architect of Britain’s famous “civilizing mission” to the colonies. The Camerons named their son for Sir Henry Hardinge, then Governor General of Bengal. Julia Margaret Cameron was invested in the activities of colonial government and envisioned her son’s future as one in service to the British administration of India.17 This commitment is evident from her correspondence with Sir John Herschel, the scientist whom she had befriended in Cape Town during a brief stay in 1836. In a letter written to Julia Margaret dated 18 August 1846, Herschel congratulated the Camerons on the birth of their son and then advanced a dialogue from their earlier correspondence about England’s future role in India as a colonial power. Herschel then introduced the personal ambitions he held for his own young son, thoughts he offered in relation to what he clearly understood to be Julia Margaret’s positive opinions about the opportunities of a career in Britain’s administrative government, otherwise known as the civil service. At the time, the India Civil Service was administered by the East India Company, and entry-level positions were known as “writers.” Herschel wrote: Our thoughts are much and frequently turned of late towards India by the prospect which has opened to us through the kindness of an old friend of Lady H[erschel] of seeing our eldest son in the fulness of time placed 16 Rosen, “Cameron’s Child of the Colonies,” in Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815–1879, Pioneer of Photography, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 2015), 194–214. 17 See Olsen on Cameron’s correspondence with Major George Broadfoot: Victoria Olsen. From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 50–76.

216 

Jeff Rosen

as a writer in the Company’s service. Independent of the advantageous position in which an appointment of this nature places a young man, there is something in the nature of the Service itself which falls in with all y[our] ideas of what is most desireable [sic] and most calculated to call into action all the powers of the individual. Assuredly there is no government on earth which not only so well rewards its servants, but also knows how to apply their abilities, each in the most available manner and according to what they are best fitted for.18

Herschel’s letter went on to affirm the correctness of the “civilizing mission” that animated British colonialism, that is, the principle that Britain shouldered the moral duty to elevate and modernize “primitive” societies as opposed to ruling over them for profit or power. In his letter, Herschel referred obliquely to Lord Hardinge’s successful prosecution of the first Sikh War, and then exclaimed, “What an excited state of feeling of alarm and hope these marvelous events in Northern India must have held you in. […] They have made India a more integrated part, not of British Empire but of English feeling.” From these comments, Herschel apparently shared sentiments Cameron had expressed in earlier letters, in which the two downplayed the political and economic control associated with imperialism (“British Empire”) and endorsed in its place the paternalistic commitment to improve Indian society through the spread of English laws, education, and literature (“English feeling”). In 1871, the same principled sentiments that Herschel expressed years earlier emanated from a letter Julia Margaret wrote to her son Hardinge, now aged 25 and stationed, since February of that year, as an Assistant Government Agent in Kandy, the ancient capital of Ceylon. In earlier letters to Hardinge, Cameron apparently had asked him to take a brief hiatus from his administrative duties and pay a visit home. Writing on 19 October, one month prior to Hardinge’s actual voyage, she closed her letter by saying she intended to write again in November, when Hardinge actually sailed for England; the timing here suggests that in October she might have been unaware of his definite plans. Nevertheless, amidst recounting the dramas of everyday life in Freshwater, Julia Margaret offered her son some worldly advice that focused on the actual circumstances of his administrative service to the colony: I have been reading carefully two books which I will send to you next mail. They will put before you plainly all the [Civil] Service that is now 18 Sir John Herschel to Julia Margaret Cameron, 18 August 1846, Cameron Papers, Box 11, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, J. Paul Getty Museum.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

217

thrown open to the whole World for open competition[,] the various ages at which one may compete[,] the salaries to be acquired[,] etc. etc. If you can get no correspondingly good pay in Ceylon and are so tied by the leg that leave is impossible[,] query[:]. Is not the English C.[ivil] S.[ervice] better. When you [i.e., Hardinge and his three brothers] all [were] young you would none of you choose clerkships in Govt. office and each in turn resisted my appeal to you to try for these[;] […] now you see that from a Colonial office clerkship Irving gets a pick appt.[;] from a Colonial office clerkship Birch is sent out as a governor.19

Julia Margaret here inserted her own careerist ambitions for Hardinge by directly comparing her son’s livelihood to two of his immediate contemporaries: “Irving” is Henry T. Irving, who was appointed in May 1869 to serve as a colonial secretary in Ceylon, and “Birch” is Arthur N. Birch, who had been appointed acting lieutenant governor of Penang and Province of Wellesley (now Malaysia) in February 1871. Both of these men had apparently crossed paths with Hardinge Cameron in the past, but after 1871, their careers diverged and Irving and Birch went on to more illustrious careers: in 1873, for example, Irving was called on to serve as Governor of the Leeward Islands and in 1874 was appointed Governor of Trinidad; in 1873, Birch was appointed colonial secretary of Ceylon and then lieutenant-governor of the colony in 1876. Both men were also honored by receiving the Order of St. Michael and St. George, a distinction that eluded Hardinge Cameron throughout his career.20 Julia Margaret’s letter of October 1871 also demonstrates her familiarity with the decisive debates in Parliament, now several decades old, that concerned the question of reforming admission to and promotion within the British Civil Service, both at home and abroad. Cameron was familiar with two key parliamentary reports on this question, the first from 1854, commonly called the Northcote-Trevelyan Report, the second in 1855, a Report to Sir Charles Wood on recruitment to the Indian Civil Service, which had been authored principally by her husband’s mentor from their days in India, 19 Julia Margaret Cameron to Hardinge Hay Cameron, 19 October 1871, Cameron Papers, Box 11, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, J. Paul Getty Museum. Reprinted in full in Mike Weaver, Whisper of the Muse: The Overstone Album and Other Photographs by Julia Margeret Cameron (Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1986), 65–66. 20 The Colonial Office List for 1878: Comprising Historical and Statistical information respecting the Colonial Dependencies of Great Britain, an account of the services of the officers of the several colonial governments, a transcript of the colonial regulations, and other information, with maps, ed. Edward Fairfield (London: Harrison, 1878), 325 (Birch), 330 (Cameron), 360 (Irving).

218 

Jeff Rosen

Lord Macaulay.21 The two documents were united in proposing to reform the Service by selecting candidates by means of competitive examinations, thereby ending a system based on patronage, nepotism, and preference. Benjamin Jowett, who contributed a letter to the Northcote-Trevelyan Report and influenced the writing of Wood’s, championed these reform efforts throughout the 1860s and engaged Cameron and Tennyson on these topics during his annual visits to the Isle of Wight. In proposing to introduce competition, however, the two reports did not recommend that access should be equal. Rather, they endorsed a different kind of elitism. In fact, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report argued in favor of dividing civil service tasks, broadly speaking, between “superior” intellectual assignments (in areas like policy, administration, law, education, and enforcement of the penal code) and “inferior” mechanical occupations (such as copying, filing, and security).22 In addition, the competitive examinations were structured to benefit those who possessed a background in classical education and the liberal arts and sciences, the privileged foundation based in the university curriculums of Oxford and Cambridge. This proposed structure aligned well with Jowett’s efforts to modernize the university system by replacing a curriculum based largely in religion with one on reason and rationality. Consequently, Jowett helped to ensure that men of letters would score best on the competitive examinations.23 The two reports of 1854 and 1855 did not bring about immediate change. Cameron’s letter to her son suggests she knew that Parliament had debated the proposals for years and that Gladstone’s order in council of 4 June 1870 would enact the desired reforms. As she wrote enthusiastically to her son, “all the Service […] is now thrown open to the whole World for open competition.” In the new system, promotions would also be based on merit, not the preference of supporters or time served. In her letter to Hardinge, Julia Margaret went on to observe that Henry Taylor, the poet who was her longtime friend but more importantly in this context, an administrator in 21 Stafford H. Northcote and C.E. Trevelyan, Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, together with a letter from the Rev. B. Jowett (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1854), 1–23 and Thomas Babington et al., Macaulay, The Indian Civil Service; Report to the Right Hon. Sir Charles Wood (London: W. Thacker and Co., 1855), 1–31. 22 Northcote and Trevelyan, Report, 17. For a useful summary, see R.K. Kelsall, Higher Civil Servants in Britain from 1870 to the Present Day (Abingdon: Routledge, 1955); Edward Barratt, “Governing Public Servants,” Management and Organizational History 4, 1 (2009): 67–84 and Robert E. Sullivan, Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power (Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 423–427. 23 David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 62–63.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

219

the Colonial Office, had also offered Hardinge some long-distance career advice: “Henry Taylor is very much averse to changing one’s line of life and there is Instability if it proceed fr[o]m restlessness.” She also hastened to include her own guidance along with Taylor’s, adding: “but if it proceeds ­f r[o]m experience & sober trial I think the case is quite different.” She concluded this section of her letter with artful motherly pressure: “There can be no harm in my sending you the Books in question.”24 It is both fitting and ironic that she invoked Taylor, as he had received his administrative post on the personal recommendation of Sir Henry Holland years earlier. Without knowing the exact titles of the two books she posted to Ceylon, it is unlikely that one of them would have been Henry Taylor’s own book about his experience in governmental administration, The Statesman. Upon its release in 1836, Taylor’s volume received sustained criticism for representing the administrative services as rife with insincere and deferential fawning over superiors; critics found Taylor either cynical or satirical. Nevertheless, Taylor recognized the importance of administrative experience and the need to build a corps of civil servants whose primary functions were instrumental and not political.25 Years later, amidst the “open competition” debate, Taylor confirmed his opinion that the careful selection and promotion of men to serve in the civil service was essential to the success of colonial governments. In a letter of 1855 to W. R. Greg, for example, he wrote, “[w]here to find men and how to choose them is an art which none of our statesmen have acquired, and I very much fear that they have not studied it as they ought.”26 Julia Margaret Cameron admired Taylor for his honesty and his poetry, both of which contained sober reflections on public duty and public morals. The proposed reforms to the civil service that were evidently discussed by Cameron and Taylor were intended to “modernize” the service, and, as Julia Margaret’s letter to her son demonstrates, she interlaced concerns that were personal, national, colonial, and modern.27 Cameron’s discussions with Taylor about how a young man could succeed in the colonial civil service were also timely, as they took place during an unstable time in Parliament regarding 24 Julia Margaret Cameron to Hardinge Hay Cameron, 19 October 1871 (cited n. 19, 66). 25 G. Kitson Clark, “‘Statesmen in Disguise’: Reflexions on the History of Neutrality of the Civil Service,” The Historical Journal 2, 1 (1959): 25. 26 Henry Taylor to W. R. Greg, 9 March 1855, in Correspondence of Henry Taylor, ed. Edward Dowden (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888), 204. 27 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104. For Ceylon, see David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Autumn 1995): 191–220.

220 

Jeff Rosen

Britain’s commitment to its colonies.28 We do not know whether she and Taylor discussed the Royal Commission that was then proposed to establish colonial policy, nor how long Hardinge’s furlough in November 1871 allowed him to stay in Freshwater. But whenever Julia Margaret began contemplating which photographs she would display in her waiting room exhibition, she was faced with a familiar choice: would she exhibit an assortment of portraits, a selection of the allegorical works she called “fancy subjects,” or a combination of the two? What principle, if any, would form the basis of the photographic collection she intended to display? The following section examines the context of this exhibition in Brockenhurst Station.

Cameron’s photography gallery In 1848, Helmut Gernsheim itemized the ten photographs Cameron initially displayed (see Table 8.1.). Beyond identifying the individual sitters (i.e. two versions of Henry Taylor; two versions of Tennyson, one called The Dirty Monk; an anonymous woman; another photograph added later, in 1872, bringing the total to eleven photographs), Gernsheim made no effort to contextualize the portraits, the setting, or the timing of this unique exhibition. But because Cameron herself referred to her display as a “gallery of great men,” and because George Frederick Watts, her friend and mentor, was creating his own “Hall of Fame” at nearly the same time, Cameron’s waiting room gallery has been connected to Watts and the production of Victorian celebrity.29 After all, Cameron’s social circle was inherited from the company of Little Holland House, where “all the women were graceful, and all the men were gifted,” as Ellen Terry, the famous actor who was married briefly to Watts, characterized this elite society.30 28 On fears that Gladstone would abandon the colonies and the proposal to establish a royal commission to establish colonial policy, see W. David McIntyre, The Imperial Frontier in the Tropics, 1865–1875: A Study of British Colonial Policy in West Africa, Malaya and the South Pacific in the Age of Gladstone and Disreali (London: Macmillan, 1967), 46–79 and Hansard Parliamentary Debates, “Motion for a Select Committee,” May 1871, Vol. 206, cc.750–70. Taylor’s support of British colonial interests was well- established by this point, confirmed by his articulation of Crown interests in the aftermath of the Jamaican insurrection of 1865. See Rosen, “Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects,” 210–211. 29 Charlotte Boyce, ‘“She Shall be Made Immortal’: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photography and the Construction of Celebrity,” in Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle, ed. Charlotte Boyce, Paraic Finnerly and Anne-Marie Millim (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 97–135. 30 Woolf, “Julia Margaret Cameron (1926),” in Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Woman, ed. Tristam Powell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 14.

221

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

Table 8.1. Photographs Exhibited in 1871 in Brockenhurst Station, recorded by Helmut Gernsheim (1948). Portrait Subject

Date of Cameron’s photograph

Cox/Ford catalogue raisonné number31

G.F. Watts’ “Hall of Fame”; National Portrait Gallery accession number

1.

Robert Browning

589

NPG 1001

2. 3. 4. 5.

Charles Darwin Sir John Herschel Lord Justice James Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Sir Henry Taylor Sir Henry Taylor Alfred Tennyson (“The Dirty Monk”) Bishop of Winchester Unnamed Female34 Added in 1872:35 Bishop of Winchester

May 1865; copyright July 18, 1865 Copyright August 24, 1868 Copyright April 9, 1867 1870 or 1871 Copyright July 23, 1868

645 674 or 675 692 712

Copyright October 10, 1864 Possibly 1865 Copyright May 3, 1865

77732 78433 796

Copyright August 18, 1871

830

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

NPG 1014 NPG 1015

Unknown October 1872; Copyright July 23, 1873

831

Julia Margaret’s letter to Hardinge of October 1871 provides several clues about the celebrated men represented here that suggest she drew upon a personal bond to each sitter and imagined the nine men portrayed in the photographic gallery formed a defined community, one that Cameron assembled to represent their shared commitment to Britain’s civil service and to what Herschel had called the expression of “English feeling” in administering 31 The numbering system was adopted by Julian Cox and Colin Ford, eds., Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2003. 32 Identification based upon Kirsty Stonell Walker’s installation photographs of the exhibition, published online: http://fannycornforth.blogspot.com/; accessed 1 December 2017. 33 Identif ication based upon the fact that Cameron had Taylor sign his autograph to these prints; see Cox, above. 34 In spite of the fact that a hand-drawn image that is based upon Cameron’s photograph, Beatrice (1866), is now on view in the station, Gernsheim never identif ied the actual model, calling it a portrait of an ‘unidentified female’. Gernsheim certainly was familiar with Cameron’s oeuvre and would have identified Beatrice had this photograph been originally exhibited. 35 Because of the actual date of this image, Cameron could not have included it in the original exhibition of 1871.

222 

Jeff Rosen

the affairs of the colonies.36 In fact, the waiting room photographs represent diverse strands of a social circle that ran through Freshwater and that embodied a shared connection – specifically, the relationship of Britain to its colonies and the most effective ways of managing them in the best interests of the nation.37 Tennyson was a central figure, and his interest in these topics, in particular, was shared broadly among the Freshwater circle. As his wife Emily recorded in her diary entry for 1 September 1871, for example: [Alfred] has read and given me to read Fraser’s Magazine with suggestive articles on colonial federation, and against the inclosure of commons, against which he has always protested. A general Colonial Council for the purposes of defence sounds to us sensible. He advocated inter-colonial conferences in England; and was of the opinion that the foremost colonial ministers ought to be admitted to the Privy Council or to some other Imperial council, where they could have a voice in Imperial affairs.38

In 1870, under the editorship of James Anthony Froude, Fraser’s Magazine shifted its focus from general interest to one that addressed national and international affairs, both historical and contemporary. The articles for January 1871 are representative, as they focused distinctly on England’s relations abroad and critically examined the connection of the nation to its colonies. These essays included an assessment of the historical causes of the Crimean War; an examination of the Indian Deficit, seen through an imagined look into the future; an outline of the consequences of the Irish Land Bill; a declaration of praise for Canada and its system of free land-grants as an incentive for emigration; a description of the challenges of teaching a national curriculum to primary school children in a foreign land; a reflection on the national costs of losing the HMS Captain, a naval warship, off Cape Finisterre; a rumination on the ancient crossroads of cultures in present-day Herefordshire, which it called a “border county”; and an assessment of the historical resilience of Scotland in the sixteenth century. Only one essay of the nine did not address colonial or foreign affairs, and that concerned the moral temptations and reflections of an Anglican minister. Each of the men portrayed in Cameron’s gallery were absorbed by the subjects of the interconnected essays in Fraser’s Magazine because 36 Julia Margaret Cameron to Hardinge Hay Cameron, 19 October 1871 (cited n. 19, 64–67). 37 Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 136. 38 Quoted in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, Vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1897), 109.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

223

they concerned the relationship of the colonies to the nation’s identity and self-interest. Since the years of the “Hands all round!” and “Britons, guard your own,” Tennyson’s own nationalist sentiments were known well to all. His long friendships with Browning, Froude, Jowett, and Taylor, among others, are recorded by both sides of the correspondence between these men, and most of the relationships combined well-documented interplays between the personal and the political. Like Cameron herself, whose adult sons were in Ceylon, either on the family’s plantations or in the civil service, the men portrayed in her waiting room gallery similarly shared the experience of intertwined colonial and family connections: for example, Henry Taylor, represented by two portraits, was an esteemed administrator in the Colonial Office, but also a regular visitor to Freshwater and friendly participant in Cameron’s home theatre performances. During these years, Browning idealized the colonist’s life abroad but also expressed his own difficult personal loss when a close friend of his emigrated to New Zealand, an outcome that sentimentally bound him to both Tennyson and Cameron.39 And Longfellow’s international renown, which brought him to the Isle of Wight for an audience with Queen Victoria at Osborne as well as to an extended visit with Tennyson in Freshwater, was cemented by the popularity of his romantic colonialist poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Cameron herself was also on intimate terms with the personal family life and political ambitions of these men and their children’s fortunes: As Hardinge followed in the footsteps of his own father to serve in colonial government abroad, so too did Sir John Herschel’s eldest son, William James Herschel. As Sir John had wished, his son did in fact join the Indian Civil Service and became a well-regarded administrative officer in Bengal. 40 Samuel Wilberforce, the Lord Bishop of Winchester, also had a son serving overseas: Reginald Wilberforce was in the 52nd Light Infantry and fought in the retaking of Delhi during the suppression of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, a fact that must have cemented bonds with Julia Margaret, as her own relative Major Herbert Clogstoun had fought in the assault on Madras at the same time. And although the exact interaction between Cameron and Longfellow is unknown, perhaps the poet shared his recent news that his eldest son 39 Helen Lucy Blythe. The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Chapter 3, and Joe Phelan, “Robert Browning and Colonialism,” Journal of Victorian Culture 8, 1 (2003): 81. 40 Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India (London: Pan Macmillan, 2004), 55–92.

224 

Jeff Rosen

Charles was making plans to take an extended visit to Japan, where he was to live as an expatriate between 1871 and 1873. 41 Of the nine men whose portraits Cameron selected to display in the waiting room, three of the prominent individuals were directly associated with the legal, religious, and scientific justifications for colonialism that grew in influence across civil society, especially in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857: William Melbourne James, whom the Camerons had known since their days in India as a confidant of Macaulay, was elevated in 1870 by Queen Victoria as a Privy Councillor and simultaneously named to the appeals court as Lord Justice. As Tennyson expressed to his wife Emily, he ardently approved in seeing men like James appointed to such positions. Years earlier, in 1861, James was appointed to the Third Indian Law Commission, where he worked with Sir Edward Ryan, a former Chief Justice of India and former colleague of Charles Cameron on the India Supreme Council. By 1866, the work of the Commission produced an important report on Indian contract law. This new code joined the Indian penal code, produced earlier by Macaulay and Charles Cameron, as two of the essential “legal reforms” that the British imposed on Indian civil life. 42 Samuel Wilberforce, then the Bishop of Winchester, was active for many years in trying to inflect Indian society with the values and traditions associated with the Anglican church: Earlier, as Bishop of Oxford, for example, Wilberforce worked with Gladstone to advance the Colonial Church Government Bill in Parliament. Although the bill failed to pass the House of Commons in 1853, Wilberforce supported its many iterations through the 1860s; in 1867, it was revised once more at the first Lambeth Conference, but was withdrawn before it reached Parliament.43 And, in February 1871, Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, where, for the first time, he addressed the question of the spiritual evolution of “godless savages,” in print, concluding that advanced societies, like the religious beliefs established in Britain, demonstrated Western society’s clear superiority over both animals and non-religious humans. As 41 Christine M.E. Guth, “Charles Longfellow and Okakura Kakuzo: Cultural Cross-Dressing in the Colonial Context.” Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique 8, 3 (2000): 606. 42 Warren Swain, “Contract Codification and the English: Some Observations from the Indian Contract Act, 1872, in The Transformation of European Private Law: Harmonisation, Consolidation, Codification, or Chaos? ed. James Devenny and Mel B. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 177–193 and David Skuy, “Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The Myth of Inherent Superiority and Modernity of the English Legal System Compared to India’s Legal System in the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 32, 3 (1998): 553. 43 Reginald G.Wilberforce, The Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D.D., Lord Bischop of Oxford and Afterwards of Winchester, with Selections from His Diaries and Correspondence, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1881), 188–198.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

225

Matthew Day wrote recently, “[c]onsidered in this light, the relationships between savages and the British empire, gods and their followers, and dogs and their masters all share one straightforward trait: they were all established on the asymmetry of power.”44 Cameron made and registered her portrait of Darwin in 1868, and corresponded with him throughout 1869 about this image; when he remarked, “I like this photograph much better than any other which has been taken of me,” she used his comment to promote her other portraiture.”45 In 1871, she photographed both Wilberforce and Lord Justice James, and she registered these two photographs for copyright protection that year; several years later, in 1875, she arranged with the Autotype Company to print her portrait of Darwin in carbon for mass production. The intellectual pursuits of the men represented in Cameron’s photographic gallery further united the collection of portraits. In 1869, Tennyson and James Knowles, a learned architect who was also editor of the Contemporary Review, together formed The Metaphysical Society to debate the pressing religious and political questions of the day. 46 Like these men, Cameron supported the free interchange of contrasting views, as this outlook was consistent with the Utilitarian support for religious toleration and freedom of thought that she embraced. She read the works of Seeley and Hinton, two of the Society’s earliest members, and through her correspondence with Herschel, debated the merits and shortcomings of their ideas. Although she was not a member and did not participate in the Society’s readings or meetings, she was familiar with the positions of other members, like Mark Pattison, Frederic Harrison, and Dean Stanley, all of whom were responsible for bringing out Essays and Reviews. When Sir Alexander Grant and Dr. Henry Ackland came to the island for the Society’s discussions, she had them sit for their photographic portraits, and she was on familiar terms with her Freshwater neighbor, William George Ward, also an early Society member. Given Cameron’s intellectual curiosity and clearly expressed theological interests, it is likely she read or had access to the Society’s published Papers through her friendship with Tennyson and others in the group. 47 Although 44 Matthew Day, “Godless Savages and Superstitious Dogs: Charles Darwin, Imperial Ethnography, and the Problem of Human Uniqueness,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, 1 (2008), 65. 45 Julian Cox, ‘“To… startle the eye with wonder & delight’: The Photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron,” in Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, ed. Julian Cox and Colin Ford (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2003), 317 (notes to photograph #645). 46 Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, 166–168. 47 Papers of the Metaphysical Society, 1869–1880, ed. Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman, and Richard England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), http://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions. com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780199643042.book.1/actrade-9780199643042-work-1.

226 

Jeff Rosen

no evidence suggests that Julia Margaret constructed her photographic gallery to represent the interests of the Metaphysical Society, she nevertheless adopted a similar acceptance of multiple and contrasting views with the individuals she chose to represent. For example, Darwin’s theory of evolution was the first subject taken up by the Society, as his ideas sharply divided the group. The year before, when Darwin visited the Isle of Wight and Cameron made his portrait, Tennyson asked whether or not his theory excluded Christian belief, and Darwin assured him it did not. 48 But Darwin and Tennyson had earlier parted ways politically over the fate of Edward John Eyre, the deposed Governor of Jamaica. While Darwin contributed to John Stuart Mill’s Jamaica Fund, which collected monies in order to prosecute Eyre for his crimes, Tennyson contributed to Eyre’s defense. The common theme that bound Cameron’s portrait collection together, then, was a constructed social bond that united the personal and the political among these men, an expression of class cohesion and national feeling. As an imagined community that was united under Cameron’s inscription that paid homage to the overseas civil service, these men were represented as emissaries for the legal, cultural, religious, and scientific legitimations of the colonial enterprise. Elevated to the public sphere in a railroad station waiting room at the very moment that governmental service was made open to all through competitive examinations, Cameron’s photographs affirmed the importance of serving the nation, where the rule of law was used to protect religious tolerance and contractual agreements, where science was used to confirm social and class divisions, and where Britain’s economic superiority and governmental organization was used as a rationale to dominate and “improve” other societies. 49

From Brockenhurst Station to the Outer Reaches of the Empire Cameron’s decision to display her photographs in a railway station waiting room had no precedent in 1871. By that date, Victorians had invested the nation’s railroad network with state authority, largely because the railway system represented national interests and ambitions, and in spite of the 48 Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, 57. 49 Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 134–135. For the commercial art world, see Diane Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 4: “Money and Mainstream mid-Victorian Values” and Susanna Avery-Quash and Julie Sheldon, Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World (London: National Gallery Company, 2012), 81–133.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

227

fact that its network was comprised of separate private companies.50 By boldly taking over the public space in Brockenhurst as a suitable place to display her portrait photographs, Cameron defied the belief that works of art should only be exhibited in museum-like spaces designed specifically for that purpose. Beyond the museum model, Victorian exhibition spaces were typically organized in five recognizable forms: the international exposition; the ephemeral loan exhibition; the home exhibition; the commercial gallery; and the city art museum. The international exhibition was conceived in 1851 at the Crystal Palace; its aim was to glorify mass-produced materialism in a grand public display. Cameron’s friend Henry Cole, director of the South Kensington Museum, was an enthusiast of the form and supported the creation of another such exhibition in 1871.51 1870 also saw the first loan exhibition of Old Master paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts, although this model was established years earlier in the Dulwich Picture Gallery.52 By contrast, home exhibitions opened a private collector’s artworks to the public. The designation of literary houses with commemorative plaques, beginning in 1867 with Byron’s house in London, was an important offshoot of this trend. By the end of the century, “house museums” devoted to their former inhabitants’ literary accomplishments created a new trend called literary tourism.53 In London, commercial galleries took many forms, with many fashioned on the aristocrat’s picture gallery and others modeled on retail shops. In such a marketplace, which was defined by business and profit, professional dealers manipulated artists, art critics, and the

50 Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 2, 28 and Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), see esp. ch. 11: “Publicity and Public Relations.” 51 Cole was not correct, and the International Exhibition of 1871 was not a success; in fact, the population that attended in 1871 was a fraction of the numbers that visited the Paris expositions of 1855 or 1867. See Peter H. Hoffenberg, “1871–1874: The South Kensington International Exhibitions,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. http://www.branchcollective. org/?ps_articles=peter-h-holenberg-1871–1874-the-south-kensington-international-exhibitions; last accessed 1 August 2018. 52 Lea Schleiffenbaum, “The first loan exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, 1870,” The British Art Journal 14, 3 (2013–14), 68–74. On the Dulwich Picture Gallery, see Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Museum (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000), 68. 53 Emilie Oleron Evans, “Housing the Art of the Nation: The Home as Museum in Gustav F. Waagen’s Treasures of Art in Great Britain,” Ninteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17, 1 (Spring 2018). https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2018.17.1.2; last accessed 4 December 2019; John Nash, “Exhibiting the Example: Virginia Woolf’s Shoes,” Twentieth-Century Literature 59, 2 (Summer 2013): 283.

228 

Jeff Rosen

marketplace, creating and satisfying demand.54 Away from London, cities founded independent institutions to display art, and while these spaces might have been created to improve the public good, they also depended upon a wealthy elite to finance and sustain their operations.55 The railway station waiting room stood outside these conventional display spaces for the exhibition of works of art.56 Although Cameron’s gallery drew upon her own private collection, it was not comprised of precious objects. Her framed prints were photographic, but they were unlike the popular sale of cartes-de-visites in London or the modern vogue for reproductions of Old Master paintings.57 Her patronage and privilege certainly made this exhibition in a public space possible, but those elements did not produce any commercial advantage. Rather, Cameron’s photographic gallery was displayed in an open public space, free of admission charges or restrictive hours and even open on Sundays, unlike other private or city museums or commercial galleries. William Allingham, a poet, was friendly with both Tennyson and Cameron and made his living in Lymington as a Customs House official; in his diary, Allingham recorded his regular rail travel to and from Freshwater, where Brockenhurst Station figured prominently as both a transfer point and unique destination. The following entries are emblematic: July 16, 1866 – I pack up and go down the Brockenhurst Road, A[lfred] T[ennyson] having started before me. June 10, 1867 – To Brockenhurst by invitation to the Bowden Smiths, croquet, roses, hot sun. Field-path to station, red campions and kingcups. Down train comes in with Mrs. Cameron, queenly in a carriage by herself 54 Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, eds. The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press): 1–12. 55 Woodson-Boulton, “The City Art Museum Movement and the Social Role of Art,” in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. http://www.branchcollective. org/?ps_articles=amy-woodson-boulton-the-city-art-museum-movement-and-the-social-roleof-art; last accessed 1 August 2018. 56 The decision to move the Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to Sydenham in 1854, in fact, was predicated upon extending the railways to the new location to accommodate the crowds. See Helmreich, “On the Opening of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854,” in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=annehelmreich-on-the-opening-of-the-crystal-palace-at-sydenham-1854; last accessed 1 August 2018. 57 For cartes-de-visites, see Annie Rudd, “Victorians Living in Public: Cartes-de-Visite as 19th-Century Social Media,”Photography and Culture 9, 3 (2016): 195–217. For reproductive engravings, see Brenda Rix, “Branding the Vision: William Holman Hunt and the Victorian Art Market,” in Fletcher and Helmreich, The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 246–249.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

229

surrounded by photographs. We go to Lymington together, she talking all the time. September 20, 1867 – D[ante] G[abriel] R[ossetti] and I take a short walk to Pennington, then early dinner, and he departs by the 5.45 train, I going with him to Brockenhurst. January 21, 1868 – Fine; Steamer brings Mr. Cameron, white-haired Mrs. Prinsep, etc. for London. I go with them as far as Brockenhurst, pleasant.58

To Allingham, Brockenhurst Station was much more than a simple rail transfer; it became a locus of entertainment, gossip, and social climbing. Henry Taylor also described hectic moments experienced in Brockenhurst Station after completing a journey with Julia Margaret Cameron from Waterloo Station in London to the Isle of Wight; describing another occasion at the Station, he wrote of meeting Tennyson by chance at Brockenhurst on his way home, then how the two shared a meal together and awaited the ferry.59 As a distinct form of Victorian architecture, railway stations occupied a discrete category of building type that defined how travelers organized and experienced space, which, in turn, affected how they encountered Cameron’s photographs in Brockenhurst Station.60 Early stationhouses of the 1850s typically separated the reception building, built of stone, from the train hall, built of iron and glass, the two structures facing in opposite directions. Reinforcing this distinction, train halls guided moving foot-traffic, while station waiting rooms formed protective enclosures. As railways expanded during the next decade and train networks grew larger, greater numbers of people used these facilities and travelers often described a disjointed spatial transition. Consequently, “Waiting rooms lost their function as gateways and became peripheral to the main stream of traffic. The reception hall assumed the function of both waiting rooms and midway and became a ‘concourse,’ a vast mixing chamber.”61 Travelers used these rooms to gather their wits and pause to regroup. As the astute French observer Hippolyte Taine noticed in 1860, social conventions that guided English morality 58 William Allingham, William Allingham’s Diary, intr. Geoffrey Grigson (Fontwell: Centaur Press, 1967), 134, 152, 163, 170. 59 Hill, Julia Margaret Cameron, 142–143. 60 On the railway station, see Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 171–176; Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, 76 and Simmons, The Victorian Railway, ch. 2: “Structures.” For an analysis of late-Victorian debates about Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, see Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 88. 61 Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 176.

230 

Jeff Rosen

were also expected to govern public behavior in these stations: “At the railway-station there are large Bibles fastened to chains for the use of the passengers while waiting for the train.”62 The railways functioned economically but also symbolically as a uniting force that joined Britain to its colonies, especially India. Beginning in 1850, Lord Dalhousie encouraged private investors to construct railways based on the English model, and in 1869, consolidated the railways into a single State-sponsored enterprise. Consequently, the need for dedicated civil servants also expanded. Directors were appointed in England and made accountable to the Board of the Railway Companies and the Public Works Department of the India Office, while Consulting Engineers were appointed throughout India. In 1846, William P. Andrew was among the first to write about Indian Railways as Connected with British Empire in the East, documenting these important changes and calling the introduction of railways “[t]he great civilizing power in India. Where they have penetrated jungle has disappeared, and the cultivated plains ‘begin to laugh and sing’.”63 In 1866, George Otto Trevelyan (son of Sir Charles, who wrote the 1854 Report on the civil service with Stafford Northcote) affirmed the extended relationship of Britain to India by means of the railway in his book, The Competition Wallah. Written after he joined the Indian civil service, Trevelyan intended his book to guide others in how to succeed in governmental service abroad. Consequently, he devoted a large section to the prominence of the railway in the colony, unintentionally echoing William Andrew’s sentiments: “Those two thin strips of iron, representing as they do the mightiest and most fruitful conquest of science, stretch hundreds and hundreds of miles across the boundless Eastern plains. Keep to the line, and you see everywhere the unmistakable signs of England’s handiwork. Stroll a hundred yards from the [railway] embankment, and all symptoms of civilization have vanished.”64 Trevelyan advised new civil servants that they would find the Indian railway familiar, despite being far from home. In the railway station, for example, he noted: “There is the Bible provided by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, for the edification of people who may have missed the train – a circumstance not generally conducive to a devotional state of feeling.”65 62 Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England (1860), trans. W.F. Rae (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1885), 15. 63 William P. Andrew, Indian Railways as Connected to British Empire in the East, 4th ed. (London: W.A. Allen & Co., 1884), xxxv. 64 George Otto Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London: Macmillan and Co., 1866), 22–23. 65 Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah, 30.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

231

The railway came to Ceylon in 1864, when the first locomotive landed in Colombo and the colony allocated funds to begin constructing the rails, although years earlier, in 1858, the colony acquired private lands for this purpose and broke ground for a terminal building. Even earlier, in 1845, the colony formed a nationalized company, ensuring that the British model would be adopted overseas. National rail service in Ceylon actually began in 1867 and linked the port city of Colombo to Kandy on the mountainous interior, providing superior access to the island’s coffee plantations and improving the plantation economy.66 Having adopted the British system, Ceylonese railway stations were also constructed to duplicate the same architectural features that had been established as the preferred model in England, with a waiting hall built of masonry connected to an open train shed.67 But unlike the Indian system comprised of separate, private companies, Ceylon’s was conceived from the start as centralized under the authority of a colonial administration determined to forge together the nation’s identity by uniting the island through the rails.68 Having served in the Ceylon civil service since 1868, when he was first appointed as a writer, Hardinge Cameron witnessed first-hand the many structural transformations in the colony that resulted from Britain’s expansion of the railway. As a critical example, the island’s English planters preferred to use Colombo harbor to export their goods over its rival to the south, the Port of Galle, in large part because the new railway terminus was constructed in Colombo. Consequently, during the 1860s, civil administrators decided to invest in Colombo’s harbor to adapt to those economic interests, and in 1870, new construction began to accommodate modern steamships that were designed for extended travel through the Suez Canal. Colombo’s harbor was therefore expanded to accommodate their increased size and bulk in the harbor.69 The government supported this expansion to improve Colombo’s harbor, ensuring that new steamships would not have to anchor in the open roadstead as they did presently, where they had to contend with 66 G.F. Perera, The Ceylon Railway: The Story of its Inception and Progress (Colombo: Ceylon Observer, 1925), 99, and K. Dharmasena, “The Decline of Galle and the Rise of Colombo in the Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of Maritime History 5, 1 (June 1993): 179–192. 67 Perera, The Ceylon Railway, 99. 68 See Perera, 50–54; 81–88. See also Sharika Thiranagama, “‘A Railway to the Moon’: The Post-Histories of a Sri Lankan Railway Line,” Modern Asian Studies 46, 1 (January 2012): 221–48 and Ian J. Kerr, “Representation and Representations of the Railways of Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 37, 2 (May 2003): 287–326. 69 Dharmasena, “The Decline,” 187. See also Our Ocean Highways: A Condensed Universal Hand Gazetteer and International Route Book, ed. J. Maurice Dempsey and William Hughues (London: Edward Stanford, 1871), 120.

232 

Jeff Rosen

rough seas. Prior to 1870, large ships had to rely upon small hand-powered boats, called lighters, to ferry both passengers and cargo from the shore to the ship, a process that was considered costly and inefficient.70 Hardinge Cameron secured approval for his administrative leave in 1871, but if he recorded the specifics of his voyage, the actual timing of his trip to England, or the name of the steamship on which he traveled, these details do not survive. However, photographs depicting Hardinge departing a train in Ceylon and transferring to a waiting steamship have recently come to light (See Fig.8.1. and Fig. 8.2.).71 In the first image, the young civil servant is shown exiting the train’s first-class cabin, the car reserved for Europeans on the Ceylon Government Railway. In his left hand, he holds a cane and a sheaf of papers. The railway’s national insignia is affixed to the train car to his left, while an attendant poses to his right. The second photograph depicts several small flat-bottomed boats laden with passengers on the shore, as these travelers appear to be making their way to the large steamship at anchor in the background. The ship’s three sailing masts and one funnel, tilted at a slight angle, along with its distinctive profile (that is, having a straight bow as opposed to a clipper bow), resemble the new iron ships designed to go through the Suez Canal. In particular, the ship at anchor could very likely be the S.S. Mirzapore, a vessel first launched in May 1871 for the P & O, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, although this cannot be confirmed conclusively from the evidence in the photograph alone.72 However, given the apparent need for lighters to transport passengers to the ship, it is reasonable to conclude that this photograph was taken in Colombo harbor prior to the construction of its new physical improvements, which were not completed until 1875. These two photographs depicting scenes from Hardinge’s departure from Ceylon therefore likely represent the start of his travels homeward. They form an originating bookend to Julia Margaret’s heartfelt dedication to her son in Brockenhurst Station that marked Hardinge’s administrative leave in England. 70 Dharmasena, “The Decline,” 186; 189. 71 I am grateful to Mr. Palinda de Silva for sharing these photographs from his personal collection and providing permission for their reproduction. 72 On the general history of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, see Boyd Cable, A Hundred Year History of the P. & O., Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, 1837–1937 (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1937). On the S. S. Mirzapore, in particular, see “P&O Heritage. History of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company,” P&O Heritage. http://www.poheritage.com/our-history; last accessed 6 April 2018; Duncan Haws, Merchant Fleets in Profile, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Patrick Stevens, 1978), 59–60. On the absence of passenger lists in the P. & O. archives prior to 1890, I thank Martin Salmon, archivist, National Maritime Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

233

Fig. 8.1. Unknown, Page from a photographic album depicting Hardinge Cameron departing the first-class cabin of a Ceylon National Railway train car. Photograph, c. 1871. Collection of Mr. Palinda de Silva. © Palinda da Silva.

Fig. 8.2. Unknown, Page from a photographic album depicting boats transporting passengers to a steamship in a Ceylon harbour, likely Colombo harbor. Photograph, c. 1871. Collection of Mr. Palinda de Silva. © Palinda da Silva.

234 

Jeff Rosen

A “higher calling” in public service Following his furlough in Freshwater, Hardinge returned to Ceylon to resume his career in the civil service, but within two years, his mother wanted him to take yet another administrative leave to England. Writing from Freshwater in May 1873, Julia Margaret appealed directly to Hardinge’s new superior, Sir William Gregory, the new Governor of the colony, with whom she had earlier formed a long friendship in England. She urged the Governor to grant Hardinge another leave at his earliest opportunity, a request that Gregory ultimately denied.73 With Hardinge stationed in Ceylon and his brothers managing the family’s coffee and tea estates on the island, Charles and Julia Margaret Cameron decided to move permanently to Ceylon in October 1875 to join their sons. Upon their arrival, the Camerons initially resided on their sons’ plantations, but by 1877, Julia Margaret and Charles briefly relocated to St. Regulus, Lindula, before joining their son Hardinge in the southern village of Kalutara, where Governor Gregory had assigned him, having promoted him in October 1873 to the position of Acting Second Assistant Colonial Secretary. From this new location, Julia Margaret wrote to Governor Gregory once more to express her admiration for his colonial government’s plans to extend the national railway system south from Colombo, and how that expansion would benefit the Kalutara district in particular. With enthusiasm, she described recent construction in her area of a new iron bridge, a modern hospital and a new marketplace, “and just beyond this a [Railway] Station is to be built, so that next year the rail may steam more and more of civilization towards us and around us,” she added.74 In that same letter, dated 26 November 1877, Julia Margaret once again remarked upon the internal workings of the civil service, with the ultimate aim of helping her son’s career. Complaining to Governor Gregory that “outsiders” to the Ceylon civil service were recently promoted to higher office over long-serving and devoted members of the corps who stayed in place, she asserted that this practice, while common, created a grave injustice because it thwarted the ambitions of loyal civil servants. To support her case, she invoked the influence of her friend Henry Taylor once more, claiming that Taylor had “argued that men outside the service were less likely to be influenced by local interests (might almost have said corrupt motives).” Cameron then added for emphasis: “Such is not the stuff our men our 73 Julia Margaret Cameron to Sir William Gregory, 14 May 1873, Gregory Family Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript Archives, Collection No. 624, Box 25, Folder 7, Emory University. 74 Julia Margaret Cameron to Sir William Gregory, 26 November 1877, Gregory Family Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript Archives, Collection No. 624, Box 26, Folder 13, Emory University.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

235

made of!” Then, with apparent reference to her son Hardinge, she concluded, “[w]hat the men who love this work here and love the interests of their Island look to is promotion in the service.” Finally, Julia Margaret could not resist comparing Hardinge’s career to that of another colleague in the service, first noting that a new opportunity for his advancement would soon arise, and then making an overt effort to promote Hardinge to fill the soon-to-be-vacant post: “Mr. Birch [who was then serving in the administrative role of Colonial Secretary] is to go home in April – must an outsider succeed him?,” she wrote.75 The comings and goings of men in Britain’s civil service preoccupied Julia Margaret Cameron. For her, governmental work was a high calling, because the civil service not only expressed national pride, but it was also indispensable to good government and the spread of England’s influence abroad. Cameron’s persistent attention to her son’s administrative career and her attempts to improve his standing in the civil service were undisguised declarations of her maternal ambition, but also emblematic of her belief in the system and her confidence in the justice of Britain’s colonial mission. The “great men” depicted in 1871 in her photographic gallery in Brockenhurst Station upheld that same high calling by celebrating individuals who helped to underwrite and justify colonial rule, and the railroad station in which she displayed those photographs reinforced the social message of national cohesion and colonial service that is commemorated in her reunion with her son. Cameron’s photographic gallery in Brockenhurst Station physically connected England to its colonies through the rails, a message that was reinforced figuratively by the men represented in the waiting room and that was expressed symbolically by its very presence in the railway station. Cameron did not merely want to provide a respite for weary travelers or to praise Victorian celebrities. Rather, she used the station to demonstrate that, like a life devoted to a career in the civil service, her photographs also embodied a significant public purpose: to elevate and to inspire, certainly – but more pointedly, to provide enlightened examples of public service to the nation.

Bibliography Allingham, William. William Allingham’s Diary. Introduction by Geoffrey Grigson. Fontwell: Centaur Press, 1967. Andrew, William P. Indian Railways as Connected to British Empire in the East. 4th ed. London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1884. 75 Julia Margaret Cameron to Sir William Gregory, 26 November 1877.

236 

Jeff Rosen

Arscott, Caroline. “William Powell Frith’s The Railway Station: Classification and the Crowd.” In William Powell Frith: Painting the Victorian Age, edited by Mark Bills and Vivien Knight, 79–94. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2006. Avery-Quash, Susanna, and Julie Sheldon. Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World. London: National Gallery Company, 2011. Barratt, Edward. “Governing Public Servants.” Management and Organizational History 4, 1 (2009): 67–84. Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Blythe, Helen Lucy. The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Boyce, Charlotte. ‘“She shall be made immortal:’ Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photography and the Construction of Celebrity.” In Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle, edited by Charlotte Boyce, Paraic Finnerly, and Anne-Marie Millim, 97–135. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Cable, Boyd. A Hundred Year History of the P. & O., Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, 1837–1937. London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1937. Cameron Papers. Special Collections. Getty Research Institute. J. Paul Getty Museum. Correspondence of Henry Taylor. Edited by Edward Dowden. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888. Cox, Julian. “‘To … startle the eye with wonder & delight:’ The Photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron.” In Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, edited by Julian Cox and Colin Ford, 41–80. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2003. Day, Matthew. “Godless Savages and Superstitious Dogs: Charles Darwin, Imperial Ethnography, and the Problem of Human Uniqueness.” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, 1 (2008): 49–70. Dharmasena, K. “The Decline of Galle and the Rise of Colombo in the Nineteenth Century.” International Journal of Maritime History 5, 1 (June 1993): 179–192. Eley, Geoff. “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 289–339. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1992. Evans, Emilie Oleron. “Housing the Art of the Nation: The Home as Museum in Gustav F. Waagen’s Treasures of Art in Great Britain.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17, 1 (Spring 2018). https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2018.17.1.2; last accessed 4 December 2019. Fletcher, Pamela, and Anne Helmreich, eds. The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Ford, Colin. Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2003.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

237

Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Freeman, Michael. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1999. Gernsheim, Helmut. Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work. 2nd ed. New York: Aperture, 1975. Gilmour, David. The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. Gregory Family Papers. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript Archives. Emory University. Guth, Christine M. E. “Charles Longfellow and Okakura Kakuzo: Cultural CrossDressing in the Colonial Context.” Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique 8, 3 (2000): 605–636. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1989. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, “Motion for a Select Committee.” Vol. 206 (May 1871): 750–770. Haskell, Francis. The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Museum. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000. Haws, Duncan. Merchant Fleets in Profile. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Patrick Stephens, 1978. Henry Taylor Correspondence. Bodleian Library. University of Oxford. Harris, G. T. “The ‘Little Gallery’ at Brockenhurst (South Western) Station.” Letter to the Editors. British Journal of Photography LVI (October 29, 1909): 850. Helmreich, Anne. “On the Opening of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. http://www. branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anne-helmreich-on-the-opening-of-thecrystal-palace-at-sydenham-1854; last accessed 1 August 2018. Hill, Brian. Julia Margaret Cameron: A Victorian Family Portrait. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973. Hoffenberg, Peter H. “1871–1874: The South Kensington International Exhibitions.” BRANCH:Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. http://www. branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=peter-h-holenberg-1871–1874-the-southkensington-international-exhibitions; last accessed 13 January 2020. Kelsall, R. K. Higher Civil Servants in Britain from 1870 to the Present Day. Abingdon: Routledge, 1955. Kerr, Ian J. “Representation and Representations of the Railways of Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 37, 2 (May 2003): 287–326. Kitson Clark, G. “‘Statesmen in Disguise:’ Reflexions on the History of the Neutrality of the Civil Service.” The Historical Journal 2, 1 (1959): 19–39.

238 

Jeff Rosen

Lukitsh, Joanne. Cameron: Her Work and Career. Rochester, NJ: International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1986. Macaulay, Thomas Babington, et al., The Indian Civil Service; Report to the Right Hon. Sir Charles Wood. London: W. Thacker and Co., 1855. Macleod, Diane Sachko. Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. McIntyre, W. David. The Imperial Frontier in the Tropics, 1865–75: A Study of British Colonial Policy in West Africa, Malaya and the South Pacific in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli. London: Macmillan, 1967. Nash, John. “Exhibiting the Example: Virginia Woolf’s Shoes.” Twentieth-Century Literature 59, 2 (Summer 2013): 283–308. Northcote, Stafford H. and C. E. Trevelyan, Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, together with a Letter from the Rev. B. Jowett. London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1854. Olsen, Victoria. From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Our Ocean Highways: A Condensed Universal Hand Gazetteer and International Route Book, by Ocean, Road, or Rail. Edited by J. Maurice Dempsey and William Hughes. London: Edward Stanford, 1871. P & O Heritage. “History of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company.” http://www.poheritage.com/our-history; last accessed 6 April 2018. Papers of the Metaphysical Society, 1869–1880: A Critical Edition. Edited by Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman, and Richard England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. http://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/ actrade/9780199643042.book.1/actrade-9780199643042-work-1. Perera, G. F. The Ceylon Railway: The Story of its Inception and Progress. Colombo: Ceylon Observer, 1925. Phelan, Joe. “Robert Browning and Colonialism.” Journal of Victorian Culture 8, 1 (2003): 80–107. Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. From Friend to Friend. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1920. Rix, Brenda. “Branding the Vision: William Holman Hunt and the Victorian Art Market.” In The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939, edited by Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, 237–256. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Rosen, Jeff. Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. ———. “Cameron’s Children of the Colonies.” In Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815–1879, Pioneer of Photography, edited by Catherine de Zegher, 194–213. Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 2015.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s R ailway Station Exhibition

239

Rudd, Annie. “Victorians Living in Public: Cartes-de-Visite as 19th-Century Social Media.” Photography and Culture 9, 3 (2016): 195–217. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. Schleiffenbaum, Lea. “The First Loan Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, 1870.” The British Art Journal 14, 3 (2013–14): 68–74. Scott, David. “Colonial Governmentality.” Social Text 43 (Autumn 1995): 191–220. Sengoopta, Chandak. Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India, London: Pan Macmillan, 2004. Simmons, Jack. The Victorian Railway. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Skuy, David. “Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The Myth of Inherent Superiority and Modernity of the English Legal System Compared to India’s Legal System in the Nineteenth Century.” Modern Asian Studies 32, 3 (1998): 513–557. Sullivan, Robert E. Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power. Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Swain, Warren. “Contract Codification and the English: Some Observations from the Indian Contract Act, 1872.” In The Transformation of European Private Law: Harmonisation, Consolidation, Codification, or Chaos?, edited by James Devenney and Mel B. Kenny, 172–195. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Taine, Hippolyte. Notes on England (1860). Translated by W. F. Rae. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1885. Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. 2 Vol. London: Macmillan, 1897. The Colonial Office List for 1878: Comprising Historical and Statistical information respecting the Colonial Dependencies of Great Britain, an account of the services of the officers of the several colonial governments, a transcript of the colonial regulations, and other information, with maps. Edited by Edward Fairf ield. London: Harrison, 1878. Thiranagama, Sharika. “‘A Railway to the Moon:’ The Post-Histories of a Sri Lankan Railway Line.” Modern Asian Studies 46, 1 (January 2012): 221–248. Trevelyan, George Otto. The Competition Wallah. London: Macmillan and Co., 1866. Walker, Kirsty Stonell, “Raising the Spirits of a Weary Traveller.” The Kissed Mouth (blog), Monday 17 October 2016. http://fannycornforth.blogspot.com/; last accessed 1 August 2018. Weaver, Mike. Whisper of the Muse: The Overstone Album and Other Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron. Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1986. ———. Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815–1879. Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, 1984. Wilberforce, Reginald G. ed. The Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D.D., Lord Bishop of Oxford and Afterwards of Winchester, with Selections from His Diaries and Correspondence. 3 Vol. London: John Murray, 1881.

240 

Jeff Rosen

Woodson-Boulton, Amy. “The City Art Museum Movement and the Social Role of Art.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. http:// www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=amy-woodson-boulton-the-city-artmuseum-movement-and-the-social-role-of-art; last accessed 1 August 2018. Woolf, Virginia. “Julia Margaret Cameron (1926).” In Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, edited by Tristram Powell, 13–19, London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. ———. Freshwater: A Comedy (1923). Edited by Lucio P. Ruotolo. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

About the author Jeff Rosen is a historian of photography and a higher education administrator. He received his PhD in art history from Northwestern University. His book, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2016) was nominated for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History in 2017. His essay, “Cameron’s Children of the Colonies,” anchored the international exhibition catalogue, Julia Margaret Cameron: 1815–2015, edited by Catherine de Zeghers (Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 2015). Both studies argue that Cameron produced a coherent narrative in her photography by using allegorical subjects to define “national identity” in relation to Britain’s control of its colonies, and that she did so to contribute to Victorian debates about the expanding British Empire. Rosen has also authored numerous essays about the history of photomechanical reproduction in France. Rosen is Vice President for Accreditation Relations and Director of the Open Pathway at the Higher Learning Commission in Chicago, the largest of the regional accreditors of higher education in America. With expertise in governance, graduate study, civic engagement, and strategic planning, he advises institutional leaders on matters of policy and guides the process of peer review. Prior to joining the Commission, he was Associate Professor of art history in the College of Arts and Sciences and Dean of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at Loyola University Chicago. He previously held associate dean positions at The University of Chicago’s Graham School and at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies.

9. Paper Monument: The Paradoxical Space in the English Paper Peepshow of the Thames Tunnel, 1825–1843 Shijia Yu

Abstract A nineteenth-century optical toy, the paper peepshow is often considered to be the perfect medium to represent the Thames Tunnel. Yet, this perception overlooks the contradictory sentiments evoked by using the paper peepshow. This chapter, focusing on the period when the tunnel was under construction, seeks to analyze these paradoxes. Admittedly, various features of the paper peepshow can indeed render it a fitting medium to represent the tunnel. Yet, the expanded paper peepshow constitutes a space that is ephemeral, because of its brief existence and its fragility. While the ephemeral quality appears to contradict the monumental impression of the tunnel, this contrast would speak to the nineteenth-century English middle classes’ ambivalent attitude towards technological advancement, embodied in the tunnel. Keywords: paper peepshow; Thames Tunnel; technological sublimity; consumer culture; embodied viewing

Introduction: A popular new paper toy During the 1820s and 1830s in England, S. F. Gouyn’s A View of the Tunnel under the Thames must have been familiar to many.1 Collapsed flat, it 1 I am very grateful for the generous support of Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, whose Research Support Grant has enabled me to conduct essential archival trips in the United States of America. A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, As It Will Appear when Completed, S. F. Gouyn, 1828, Gestenter 208, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. This work corresponds to A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, As It Will Appear when Completed [b] in the Appendix.

Bauer, D. and C. Murgia (eds.), The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces: 1750‒1918. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463720809_ch09

242 

Shijia Yu

Fig. 9.1. S.F. Gouyn (publisher), A View of the Tunnel under the Thames. Slipcase and front-face, 1828, 11.5 x 14.5 x 62 cm (open). London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner 208. © Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Paper Monument

243

Fig. 9.2. S.F. Gouyn (publisher), A View of the Tunnel under the Thames. Peep-view, 1828, 11.5 x 14.5 x 62 cm (open). London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner 208. © Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

measures slightly larger than a piece of A6-size paper. Encompassed by a pink border, the front-face carries an oval vignette of the Thames Tunnel under construction, although the title promises a view of this subterranean passage in its future finished state on the inside (Fig. 9.1.). As we lift the frontface, the vignette, which turns out to be two shutters covering a peephole, retracts, revealing five cut-out panels and a backboard lining up one behind another, connected by paper bellows. Looking through the peephole, we see miniature figures, carriages, and carts promenading through the bright archways under the Thames (Fig. 9.2.). Gouyn’s work is an example of a type of optical toy that was first produced in England by S. & J. Fuller in London in 1825 and which also emerged on the market in Austria, France, and Germany around the same time.2 This 2 Ralph Hyde, Paper Peepshows: The Jaqueline & Jonathan Gestetner Collection (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2015), 10–65. As observed by Teresa Michals in “Experimenting Before Breakfast: Toy Education and Middle-Class Childhood,” in The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, ed. Dennis Denisoff (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 32, the word “toy” was transformed into a synecdoche for childhood in the nineteenth century. But here “toy” is used to refer to an object that can be played with by both children and adults. Although some works were advertised specifically for young people, there is also evidence that indicates that adults

244 

Shijia Yu

optical toy was not given a general name in the nineteenth century, and it was only by the beginning of the twentieth century that collectors and scholars started to label it under various broad terms, one of which is “paper peepshow,” the phrase adopted in this chapter.3 While the word “peepshow” has tantalizing associations today, the peepshow device, which appeared already in the eighteenth century, did not actually always contain erotic scenes.4 The term “paper peepshow” should thus be considered appropriate for describing the optical toy discussed here, which has nothing to do with any sexual fantasies, but depicts the picturesque landscape, urban scenes, and various types of spectacles for the amusement of the middle classes in their private realm with family and friends.5 Judging from what has survived, also found amusement in this optical toy. In particular, some Thames Tunnel examples come with an explanatory text that ends with the following note, which does not give the impression of addressing children: “It is hoped that this humble attempt at a representation of this great and most novel undertaking will be kindly received and encouraged by the public.” Therefore, this chapter argues that it is reasonable to consider that the nineteenth-century user for this optical toy included both adults and children. 3 Apart from the one adopted here, “peepshow,” “concertina peepshow” and “tunnel book” are also commonly used (the last one more often in the United States of America). The name used here takes inspiration from Hyde’s Paper Peepshows, the catalog on the paper peepshow collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which is the world’s largest. The term “paper peepshow” appears most fitting in its emphasis on the paper materiality, which is important to the function and meaning of the object. 4 Erkki Huhtamo, “The Pleasures of the Peephole: An Archaeological Exploration of Peep Media,” in Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium, ed. Eric Kluitenberg (Rotterdam: NAI, 2006), 90–91. 5 There is hardly any evidence about users of the paper peepshow in England during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Its typical price during this period was between five and eight shillings, with the Thames Tunnel works being cheaper, between two and three shillings. In The Early Victorians, 1832–1851 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 24–25, J.F.C. Harrison notes that between the 1830s and early 1850s, the labor aristocracy, a small group at the top end of the working classes, earned thirty to forty shillings a week, and the wage for those one level below ranged from twenty to thirty shillings a week. Combining these factors, it is reasonable to consider the upper and middle classes as main users of the paper peepshow. As Linda Young argues in Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 14–15, despite the multiple strata within the middle classes and the imitative elements of aristocratic culture in middle-class culture, the middle classes can be identified as a totality with shared ideals and values, distinct from other classes. Therefore, to achieve a focused argument, this chapter deals only with the consumption of the paper peepshow in the middle-class environment. To stress the multiple strata within this class, it uses “middle class” in its plural form. It also borrows from Young’s def inition of the middle classes by the culture of gentility that its members shared (with the basis of a minimum amount of income, restriction of work type, and other broad criteria). For more on the discussion of the definition of nineteenth-century middle classes, see Young, Middle-Class Culture, especially 1–94.

Paper Monument

245

works relating to the Thames Tunnel appeared to be particularly popular, as there are plenty of examples dating between 1825, right after the start of the tunnel’s construction, and the 1860s, twenty years after its official opening in 1843.6 There are also some English manuscript works, often copied after published examples, which further indicate the popularity of Thames Tunnel paper peepshows in England.7 Within its interior, this optical toy houses an interesting example of an ephemeral exhibition space in two senses. On the one hand, the space between the peephole and cut-out panels is transient, as it can only exist when the paper peepshow is expanded. On the other hand, the fragility of the paper medium adds another layer to the ephemeral nature of this space. This chapter looks at English Thames Tunnel paper peepshows between 1825 and 1843, with Gouyn’s work as a typical example. It argues that the exhibition space in the optical toy effectively offered its users the simulated sensation of being in the tunnel as a commodity to be possessed and consumed for their private pleasure. It also points out a few parallels between the paper peepshow and the Thames Tunnel, which render the optical toy a fitting medium to represent the feat of engineering. At the same time, the ephemeral quality of the exhibition space appears to contradict the sturdy and monumental impression of the tunnel. As will be demonstrated, this contrast would appeal to the ambivalent attitude of the early nineteenthcentury English middle classes towards technological advancement, as embodied in the tunnel. The restriction on the date is intentional, as the completion of the Thames Tunnel brought very different meanings to the paper peepshow, whose structure and content also underwent changes. Also worth mentioning is that the work by Gouyn is a particularly apt example. Not only do all but two English Thames Tunnel paper peepshows before 1843 have a very similar structure and content, but the Gouyn example is also a work that was published in at least five editions – in 1827, February 1828, August 1829, August 1830, and August 1834 – with many surviving copies.8 6 There are also many Thames Tunnel paper peepshows produced in France and Germany during this period. Due to limited scope of this chapter, and the fact that the social-historical background for those produced on the Continent differed from that of English works, only English paper peepshows will be analyzed here. 7 See Appendix for a complete list of published and homemade English Thames Tunnel paper peepshows (1825–1843) that I have so far identified. 8 The only exception that I have found is Thames Tunnel, Anonymous, c.1835, Gestetner 230, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. This work depicts the archways as they have been in reality. This work corresponds to Thames Tunnel [c] in the Appendix. Some of the Gouyn works bear the publisher’s name M. Gouyn, presumably a family member to S. F. Gouyn. See Appendix for all the Gouyn works I have so far identified.

246 

Shijia Yu

It is, therefore, a typical work whose popularity among nineteenth-century users can be demonstrated, and thus is a suitable case for the discussion below.

History of the Thames Tunnel Before we start the in-depth analysis of Gouyn’s work, it is first worth going through the history of the tunnel’s construction. In 1798, Ralph Dodd had already initiated the idea of building a tunnel beneath the Thames, and he had intended his work to enable quick deployment of British troops, should Frenchmen cross the Channel.9 He failed soon thereafter, and in 1802, the team of Robert Vaizey and Richard Trevithick took over, but they also hit a dead-end six years later.10 Nonetheless, Britain’s interest in a tunnel did not appear to wane, partly because, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the ancient way of crossing the Thames using ferrymen had caused significant traffic congestion.11 Therefore, when the French engineer Marc Brunel proposed a tunnel under the Thames, connecting Rotherhithe and Wapping, his idea was met with great enthusiasm. The Thames Tunnel Company was founded in 1824, and an Act was passed in Parliament to ensure the smooth progress of the construction.12 On 2 March 1825, a grand ceremony inaugurated the actual construction of the tunnel on the Rotherhithe side, in Cow Court. As it turned out, construction of the Thames Tunnel was eventful, to say the least. Brunel had predicted that the work would be finished in three years; in the end, it took eighteen years.13 For seven of the eighteen years (between 1828 and 1835), construction was suspended as the Tunnel Company had run out of money. The tunnel project was on the verge of being abandoned once again, only to be rescued and continued thanks to a Treasury Loan.14 Accidents were also common in the tunnel, as multiple major floods and minor instances of leakage disturbed the progress of

9 David Lampe, The Tunnel: The Story of the World’s First Tunnel under a Navigable River Dug Beneath the Thames, 1824–42 (London: Harrap, 1963), 11. 10 Lampe, The Tunnel,12–20. 11 Antony Clayton, Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London (London: Historical Publications, 2000), 85. 12 Lampe, The Tunnel, 36. 13 Ibid., 37. 14 Ibid., 146.

Paper Monument

247

the work.15 Finally, the Thames Tunnel opened on 25 March 1843, with a ceremony attended by Queen Victoria, although due to lack of funds, the ramp originally intended for carriages was never built, and it remained a passage for pedestrians only.16 Despite, or maybe because of all the drama, the Thames Tunnel attracted much interest throughout its construction period and also after its completion.17 Within days of the commencement of construction, tourists flooded into Cow Court, including important names and royalty, even foreign visitors.18 Soon, the Tunnel Company realized the commercial potential in the public’s enthusiasm, and, despite Brunel’s objection, started to capitalize on this interest. In March 1827, the Company opened the finished part of the tunnel for visitors, at the price of one shilling per person, as a means to raise more funds.19 Upper- and middle-class visitors who could afford the entrance would be allowed to descend the shaft and walk the 300 feet of the finished tunnel, up to a barrier where they could see the tunneling shield, 200 feet away, almost halfway across the Thames.20 The opening of the unfinished tunnel made it a unique site in nineteenthcentury England, where a working engineering space could be observed in an organized manner, and, as such, put the experience of being in the tunnel on sale as a commodity.21 For non-expert sightseers, the significance of the specially designed machines that they saw in the tunnel would have mattered little. Instead, what they sought to purchase was the excitement over the prestige and novelty of entering the engineering feat at the center of the world’s attention, before its official opening. The Tunnel Company was obviously aware of this and issued various souvenirs, which even 15 For details of these incidents, see Michael M. Chrimes, “History of the Tunnel and Chronology,” in The Triumphant Bore: A Celebration of Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, written and compiled by Michael M. Chrimes, Julia Elton, John May, and Timothy Millett (London: Institution of Civil Engineers, Archives Panel, 1993), 18–19. 16 Lampe, The Tunnel, 205–206. 17 For discussion about the situation of the Tunnel after its completion, including its decline, see David L. Pike, “‘The Greatest Wonder of the World’: Brunel’s Tunnel and the Meanings of Underground London,” Victorian Literature and Culture 33, no. 2 (2005): 349–362. 18 Lampe, The Tunnel, 50. 19 Ibid., 76–77. 20 Ibid., 77. The tunneling shield is the key piece of machine in the construction of the Tunnel and was specif ically devised by Brunel for the project. For details on the mechanism and importance of the shield, see Chrimes, “History of the Tunnel and Chronology,” 5–6. 21 David Pike identifies the Thames Tunnel as an early example of a type of a tourist attraction that was both a site of labor and a transportation network. For details, see David Pike, Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 261.

248 

Shijia Yu

included special tickets made of genuine ivory.22 Not only could visitors pay to experience being in the tunnel, they could also purchase objects metonymic of the experience and bring it back home. The paper peepshow would also allow the tunnel experience to be encapsulated in a purchasable item. Yet, it is not a souvenir in the conventional sense, which functions, as argued by Susan Stewart, to authenticate and distinguish actual experiences.23 The scene depicted in the paper peepshow could not have been experienced as reality, but would remain an idealized projection of what the tunnel would look like. Whereas those publishing works before the opening of the finished part of the tunnel in 1827 had valid reasons for incorporating artistic license in their portrayal, it is rather strange that those producing paper peepshows between 1827 and 1843 did not appear to feel the need to update their depiction according to reality. Yet, as the following passages argue, this insistence on the idealization of the tunnel, despite the discrepancy from reality, in combination with the paper peepshow’s unique structure, had an important role in molding the meanings of the optical toy’s representation of the underground passage.

An exhibition space on sale The paper peepshow is a more than adequate medium with which to represent the tunnel due to various factors. Like the tunnel, which was opened to the public as a commercialized attraction, this optical toy was first and foremost a commodity, whose emergence would have been closely tied to consumer culture’s constant demand for novelty. John Plumb has observed that such expectation for the new could already be felt in eighteenth-century England, and it certainly continued to grow in the early nineteenth century.24 The scene of visual and optical entertainments, to which the paper peepshow belong, was also influenced, as can be clearly observed from the speed with which each new type of entertainment appeared on the market and lost its popularity. Within just a few decades after the invention of the phenomenally successful panorama and the diorama, they were soon 22 Lampe, The Tunnel, 77. For discussion of souvenirs about the Tunnel after its completion, see John May, “The Brilliant Bazaar,” in The Triumphant Bore (see note 14), 21–23. 23 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 132–151. 24 John Plumb, “The Acceptance of Modernity,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England, eds. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (London: Europa Publications, 1982), 316 and 332.

Paper Monument

249

succeeded by the cosmorama and the cyclorama in the public realm, and the polyorama panoptique and the stereoscope for private use. Therefore, during the late 1820s and the 1830s, as the new product on the market, the paper peepshow would have been a good match with the novelty of the tunnel and the experience in it. Also of relevance is the paper peepshow’s commodification of the visual experience. For a few shillings, the scenery and figures could be packed between panels and put within easy reach and consumption of anyone capable of paying. In this sense, what happened in the Thames Tunnel paper peepshow was not so different from the experience of the actual tunnel. With both, the (simulated) experience of being in the tunnel was given a price and turned into a commodity, and in the case of the optical toy, this experience was even polished into an idealized version. Apart from these two parallels, the paper peepshow’s uniqueness as a medium to represent the Thames Tunnel also lies in the exhibition space the former constructs. The resemblance between the paper peepshow’s elongated structure and that of the tunnel is obvious, although this optical toy was not the only one that had such an advantageous form. In 1834, for example, a model of the Thames Tunnel was set up in central London, with the scale of “one-eighth of an inch to a foot […] and […] lighted up throughout,” being “an exceedingly accurate representation in miniature of what the tunnel will be when finished.”25 There are several key differences, however. The paper peepshow does not just showcase the tunnel structure – it does so in a dramatic manner. Instead of making visible the tunnel at all times, it reveals nothing when closed flat, and arouses curiosity. When the front-face is lifted, the magical feeling that this action helps the formation of the space exhibiting the archways would have resonated well with nineteenth-century visitors’ feeling of incredulity when they witnessed the construction of the tunnel. More importantly, unlike the model, which would only allow being looked at from the outside, the paper peepshow provides an immersive sensation that invites its users to go inside. The space constructed between the bellows and the cut-out panels is hidden behind the front-face and can only be accessed when the user looks into the peephole. Casting the eye through the peephole thus generates the sensation of being absorbed into another world, one that separates the vision from the surrounding environment. Therefore, while the user physically envelops the paper peepshow with their hands, their vision is immersed in the world behind the front-face. Furthermore, the work of imagination also helps the user to shrink her- or 25 “An Exhibition of Models of the Thames Tunnel,” The Times, 31 January 1834, 2.

250 

Shijia Yu

himself virtually and enter the miniature world. As a result, the paper peepshow’s exhibition space not only represents (or imagines, to be more accurate) the interior of the Thames Tunnel, but also allows the user to experience strolling in this engineering miracle. Compared to the model, the paper peepshow also has the advantage of providing a personal experience. Admittedly, the structure of many paper peepshows means that collaboration would be necessary in stabilizing the expanded optical toy to facilitate appreciation, and depictions on the cut-out panels can also be seen by more than one person from the side. Yet, the peep-view remains the privilege of the person who looks through the peephole.26 The sense of the isolated viewing experience is further enhanced by the connotation of the act of peeping. As Erkki Huhtamo comments, two of the cultural meanings of peeping are voyeurism and control, both of which suggest feelings associated with the individual.27 Hence, the experience of being in the tunnel, after being turned into a commodity, is presented as accessible to and possessed by individuals only, not to be shared by anyone. By offering the simulated experience of the tunnel as purchasable goods, while adding the luster of exclusivity to it, the exhibition space constructed inside the Thames Tunnel paper peepshow would prove particularly attractive among its consumers.

Arcade in the East End, arcade for private use Yet another important nature of the exhibition space inside the paper peepshow is that similar to the Thames Tunnel, it occupies a threshold space. A working site underground, the tunnel should not be expected to have much more light than sufficient for the engineering operation, or to have tidy and cleanness as its priority when the toiling workers shed dirt and sweat every day. Yet, in the part of the tunnel opened to the public during its construction period, these expectations proved wrong. In the public section, the floor was lime-washed, and, as commented by Fanny Kemble, the famous actress who went down into the tunnel in 1827, “[t]he whole [archway was] lighted by a line of gas lamps, and as bright, almost, 26 Many Thames Tunnel paper peepshows produced in Germany do have two or more peepholes. However, the size of the optical toy would mean that multiple holes were intended to give users different views, instead of being a design to facilitate multiple people using the optical toy at the same time. 27 Huhtamo, “The Pleasures of the Peephole,” 74–155.

Paper Monument

251

as if it were broad day.”28 The light effect must have appeared even more impressive after August 1828, when the tunnel was bricked up temporarily and mirrors were placed in front of the shield, reflecting and amplifying the gaslights.29 As if more evidence was still needed to demonstrate how the Tunnel was a space distant from the usual underground associations, a truly singular banquet was staged by the Tunnel Company directors in the tunnel in late 1827, which was probably the climax of an attempt to portray the underground space as something else. With carpeted floor, walls draped with velvet, and gas candelabra, the tunnel was transformed into a space that differed little from an aboveground realm of wealth and prestige.30 As David Pike points out, such attempts by the Tunnel Company’s publicity campaign to portray the underground space’s resemblance to the respectable life above ground placed the tunnel in a threshold space.31 Not only was it a man-made entity surrounded by the natural environment, but it is also a space for high societies transplanted into the middle of the working classes’ world. In the nineteenth century, the East End of London, where the Thames Tunnel construction was based, was a place of poverty and crime, where the privileged would not normally go voluntarily.32 Indeed, the tunnel was originally intended to facilitate the daily commute of local residents, not to serve as a promenade for the affluent classes. Yet, associations with the poor were all conveniently hidden in the shadows – those who lived in the area of Cow Court would probably not be able to afford the entrance price, while the Tunnel Company also made sure that workers would stay obscured from the view of visitors. The privileged sightseers, as if parachuted from above, could remain segregated from the working classes, and continue to enjoy the life of respectability and glamour that they were used to in the more affluent areas of London. Specifically, the atmosphere in the arcade in the West End would probably be the model for the Thames Tunnel.33 Apart from having the similarities in the elongated form and the well-lit interior to the tunnel, the arcade would be a suitable analogy to the latter because of the threshold position both were in. Originated in Paris, the arcade emerged in London as a type of new shopping venue for the rich in the early decades of the nineteenth century. 28 Lampe, The Tunnel, 77; Frances Ann Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, 1883), 121. 29 Lampe, The Tunnel, 138. 30 Ibid., 117. 31 Pike, “The Greatest Wonder of the World,” 349–350. 32 Ibid., 341. 33 Pike, Metropolis on the Styx, 260–261.

252 

Shijia Yu

One of the arcade’s main selling points was that its customers could be separated and protected from the street. In the case of the Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly, for example, the interior was presented as a safe place, with security features and the space designed in a way to make hidden corners and secret activities impossible, as well as regulated opening and closing times and control on the kind of movement and noise level permitted.34 Compared to the chaotic and loud city in which arcades were situated, these shopping venues were thus rendered as a privatized sphere of order and control for the privileged, while squarely located in the public space. As if to mark its distance from the rest of the city more clearly, the Burlington Arcade even hired beadles and colonnades to form a barrier that both physically controlled entrance into the shopping passage and functioned as a psychological screen that marked the difference between the arcade space and the city.35 Therefore, decoration of the tunnel interior and the price barrier used to moderate entrance drew parallels with the arcade; the tunnel is essentially an underground arcade, an artificially created space that enclosed and separated visitors from the surrounding environment into which it did not fit. The projection of the Thames Tunnel as another version of West End arcades was not a casual decision, for such desire for the middle classes to maintain distance from those lower on the social ladder grew during this period, when the “disturbing novelty of living surrounded by strangers” was much felt.36 As many have already observed, unlike the Victorian period that witnessed society starting to face the so-called troubles on the street directly and address them, the 1820s and 1830s were marked instead by the wish to suppress anxieties about the city and its poor, to control and obscure them from a distance.37 While Pierce Egan’s Life in London brilliantly displays the desire of the privileged to observe the city in a safe environment, to see 34 Jane Rendall, “Thresholds, Passages and Surfaces: Touching, Passing and Seeing: The Burlington Arcade,” in The Optic of Walter Benjamin, ed. Alex Coles (London: Black Dog, 1999), 174. The most classical work on arcades is of course Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). Although Benjamin focuses on Parisian arcades, the essence of his argument is applicable to London arcades as well, as agued by Rendell. For more on the history and architecture of London arcades, see Margaret MacKeith, The History and Conservation of Shopping Arcades (London: Mansell, 1986), 1–28 and 65–140 and Johann Friedrich Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1983), 310–349. 35 Rendall, “Thresholds, Passages and Surfaces,” 74. 36 Alan Robinson, Imagining London, 1770–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 4. 37 Deborah Epstein Nord, “The City as Theater: From Georgian to Early Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 31, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 159–188.

Paper Monument

253

without being seen, another obvious materialization of such sentiments was the series of metropolitan improvement works that aimed to beautify the city, and resulted in a building boom of various architectural facelift projects in Regency London.38 Among these, John Nash’s design of Regent Street and Regent’s Park was perhaps the best known and most ambitious scheme. Focusing on the West End area of London, one of the main aims of this project was to tackle the problem of congestion in central London (which, incidentally, was also an aim of the Thames Tunnel), while the other was social segregation – new streets were designed to function as boundaries and agents of separation, so that the respectable ones would be distanced from the “bad” ones.39 If as depicted in such publications as Metropolitan Improvements, which celebrate how these projects function to better the city, the traditionally prosperous parts of the city were envisaged as a series of picturesque plates, the Thames Tunnel could then be counted as a somewhat odd addition to the scene, an outpost in the East End. 40 But urban planning would not necessarily guarantee separation from the working classes, and just as Egan told his readers, to sit at home and observe the outside with the “camera obscura” he provided would be the safer option. The “cult of domesticity” would only reach its peak in England in the midVictorian period, but ideas and ideals about the private home and the public and the increasing separation between the two were already prevalent in the early nineteenth century.41 The nineteenth-century middle classes regarded their domestic interiors as their private haven, which should protect them not only from the ideological vices of the world outside but also the very real threats, be them crime or disease. 42 The same discourse also encouraged 38 Gregory Dart, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 146–150. 39 Dart, Metropolitan Art, 146. For more details of Nash’s project, see J. Mordaunt Crook, “Metropolitan Improvements: John Nash and the Picturesque,” in London World City, 1800–1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1992), 77–96. 40 James Elmes, Metropolitan Improvements; Or London in the Nineteenth Century (London: Jones & Co., 1827). For more discussion on this type of publications, see Lucy Peltz, “Aestheticizing the Ancestral City: Antiquarianism, Topography and the Representation of London in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Art History 22, no. 4 (November 1999): 489 and Alex Potts, “Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Images of London in the Nineteenth Century,” History Workshop, no. 26 (Winter 1988): 28–56. 41 Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6–7. 42 Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, “Introduction,” in Domestic Space: Reading the NineteenthCentury Interior, eds. Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 2–8 and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 357.

254 

Shijia Yu

respectable families to seek recreation at home in order to stay away from the harsh environment outside, and many public exhibitions and entertainments were quick enough to promote domestic versions of their shows.43 Although the paper peepshow’s consumption might not necessarily always take place at home, its portable design, miniature size, and fragile materiality would indicate that it was an optical toy intended to be used in private, intimate settings among family and friends, and would belong to this group of domestic pastimes. As the exhibition space it opens up displays almost exclusively public sites and spectacles, the paper peepshow is a medium that negotiates the relationship between the internal and external. Just like the Thames Tunnel, it held a threshold space between the unruly public realm and the ordered private realm, although the roles between the internal and the external in the paper peepshow are reversed. Placed in the private environment, the optical toy constructs an exhibition space displaying views of the outside. The exteriority is therefore enveloped by the interiority, and further controlled and contained. Yet, in the case of Thames Tunnel paper peepshows, this negotiation between the two spaces is further complicated. While in the private realm, the tunnel would be considered as the public, the external factor, in the East End, it was actually the tunnel that was positioned as the internal. Therefore, when it comes to the Thames Tunnel paper peepshow, both the in- and outside of the optical toy’s exhibition space are essentially about a private and ordered middle-class space in different forms. Compared to other representations, such as the model in central London, the paper peepshow would hence appeal more consciously to the carefully maintained threshold identity of the Thames Tunnel by offering its users a safe and undisturbed experience of the tunnel in the paper-constructed space.

Technological sublimity or fear of industrial advancement While it has been demonstrated that the exhibition space inside the paper peepshow is a perfect agent for capturing the experience in the Thames Tunnel, the seemingly odd contrast between this space’s ephemeral nature – its brief existence and fragile texture – and the impression of the sturdy monument, remains unresolved. To explain this apparent opposition, attention first needs to be turned to the mixed attitude of nineteenth-century English middle classes towards technological projects such as the Thames Tunnel. 43 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 231.

Paper Monument

255

Despite its resemblance to a West End arcade, the tunnel was nevertheless a piece of engineering work, and, as such, would evoke the sensation of technological sublimity. As an aesthetic category, sublimity is probably most influentially defined by Edmund Burke. In his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, he defines the feeling of the sublime as closely related to the emotions of the observer, with terror at its foundation. 44 According to Burke, “[w]hatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger […] or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.”45 He emphasizes that sublimity is a balancing act. When pain and danger are too close, “[t]hey are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.46 In other words, the sublime is experienced with the precondition of the observer’s safety, not exposure to real pain or danger. The sublime was initially more closely associated with scenes of nature, but it gradually extended into the vocabulary of describing the industrial environment. Leo Marx argues that in the nineteenth century, just like those of magnificent natural landscapes, images of industrial and technological developments of grand scales and towering presence also started to evoke the vocabulary of sublimity. 47 He phrases this use of the aesthetic concept in describing the process of industrialization as the “rhetoric of the technological sublime,” and argues that the technological sublime was used to promote the middle-class ideology of industry as a sign of progressive development. 48 The Thames Tunnel under construction, which shared with metropolitan improvement schemes’ identity as a sign of progress while also embodying industrial ingenuity, would be a good example of 44 Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII–Century England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 87. 45 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36. 46 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 36–37. 47 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 197. 48 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 194–209. Marx focuses his discussion on the American industrialization process. For a similar argument in the English context, see for example Paul Dobraszczyk, “Sewers, Wood Engraving and the Sublime: Picturing London’s Main Drainage System in the Illustrated London News, 1859–62,” Victorian Periodicals Review 38, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 352–354. See also Rosalind H. Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1990), especially 82–120, for an examination of the technology sublimity in the context of the underground world, which is particularly relevant to the Thames Tunnel.

256 

Shijia Yu

technological sublimity. Particularly relevant to the tunnel is the aspect of the artificial infinite in the concept of the sublime, which was explained by Burke in his original theorization. He observes that the artificial infinite contributes to the sensation of sublimity because when the eyes encounter an object of great dimensions, the continuing effect of tension and vibration in the retina produces in the mind the idea of the sublime.49 Situated in the dark underground space, the tunnel thus illustrated the artificial infinite perfectly as it extended seemingly into the darkness towards the invisible end-point on the other side of the river. While this aspect could evoke fear among visitors, the impregnable sturdiness and monstrous size of the tunnel that was on its way to conquer the Thames could unleash even much more delight and excitement over this man-made wonder. For the privileged visitors to the Thames Tunnel between 1827 and 1843, what they experienced would precisely be such sensation of technological sublimity, and nothing illustrates this better than the aforementioned letter from Fanny Kemble. Her description truly captures the essence of such a sensation: You […] find yourself on a circular platform which surrounds the top of a well or shaft, of about two hundred feet in circumference and five hundred in depth. This well is an immense iron frame of cylindrical form, filled in with bricks; it was constructed on level ground, and then, by some wonderful mechanical process, sunk into the earth. In the midst of this is a steam engine, and above, or below, as far as your eye can see, huge arms are working up and down, while the creaking, crashing, whirring noises, and the swift whirling of innumerable wheels all around you, make you feel for the first few minutes as if you were going distracted. I should have liked to look much longer at all these beautiful, wise, working creatures. On turning round at the foot of the last flight of steps through an immense dark arch, as far as sight could reach stretched a vaulted passage, smooth earth underfoot, the white arches of the roof beyond one another lengthening on and on in prolonged vista. It was more like one of the long avenues of light that lead to the abodes of the genii in fairy tales, than anything I had ever beheld.50

In this passage, the dark underground world or the workings of the gigantic machine is not to be feared because Kemble was certain of her safety. 49 Monk, The Sublime, 97. 50 Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, 120–121.

Paper Monument

257

Instead, the machines appeared like “beautiful, wise, working creatures,” while the tunneling shield is compared to the abodes of the genii in fairy tales. The tunnel was not only experienced as an alternative arcade but also an example of the technological sublime, an industrial miracle and testament to human progress. Up to this part, what Kemble experienced would be shared by other middle-class visitors, but, significantly, she was also offered an unusual favor by Brunel and went to where the workers were. Her comment there reveals much about a crucial element that made possible the sublime sensation in the appreciation of the tunnel, which is that the human presence and labor would need to stay hidden, along with their suffering in the dark and hazardous environment that is very different from the brightly lit underground passage:51 So we left our broad, smooth path of light, and got into dark passages, where we stumbled among coils of ropes and heaps of pipes and piles of planks, and where ground springs were welling up and flowing about in every direction, all which was very strange. [T]he appearance of the workmen themselves, all begrimed, with their brawny arms and legs bare, some standing in black water up to their knees, others laboriously shovelling the black earth in their cage (while they sturdily sung at their task), with the red, murky light of links and lanterns flashing and flickering about them, made up the most striking picture you can conceive.52

The stark contrast between the “broad, smooth pat of light” and “dark passages” makes clear Kemble’s repulsive attitude towards the latter, all of which, as she described, was “very strange.” For the ordinary sightseers, they would not see the actual toils of the laborers and the dangerous and poor working conditions, so that the image of the technological sublime could be maintained. As Kemble succinctly puts it, it would be better for the middle-class visitors like herself to “look at the trees, and the sun, moon, and stars,” the public side of the Tunnel, and stay safe and distant from the working site and its potential dangers.53 Except that such distance could not always be maintained, which also means that the pre-requisite for the formation of the technological sublime – the confirmed safety of the spectator – could not be met. Although the nineteenth-century English middle classes turned away from the plight 51 Williams, Notes on the Underground, 97. 52 Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, 121. 53 Ibid.

258 

Shijia Yu

of the workers involved in industrial constructions, they could not always escape the dangers and accidents brought by these projects, and this situation contributed to their ambivalent attitude towards technological progress. While sometimes they marveled at and took delight in it, they also mistrusted it in other circumstances. The case of the development of railways probably illustrates this point most aptly. In his classical The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch discusses that whereas in the preindustrial age, accidents were primarily “grammatical and philosophical,” in the nineteenth century they started to be associated increasingly more with industrial and technological misfortune, especially those related to railways.54 This mattered to the middle classes because only those with wealth like them (and the upper class) could be the first to enjoy the railways, yet the technology that they wondered at and benefited from could turn against them at any moment. Schivelbusch also argues that, in the case of the railway, the less pleasant experience with industrial advancement also came from the fact that going down the railway tunnel would mean that passengers’ contact with nature was severed.55 The dark tunnel could be understandably terrifying, as one could not tell if there would be any obstacles ahead, or if escape would be possible should an accident happen. Such thoughts probably concerned visitors to the Thames Tunnel less – as discussed before, the separation from the East End surrounding in the Tunnel was much desired, and the gas lights would also drive the fear of darkness away. Yet, the threat of the Thames flowing above was nothing less terrifying. On 18 May 1827, the first major flood occurred with no casualties. The second followed on 12 January 1828, and this time the water took its toll, killing six workers and severely injuring Brunel’s son Isambard, then the resident engineer.56 Another three major floods subsequently hit the Tunnel under construction, and a total of seven lives were lost in these accidents.57 The Thames Tunnel Company went out of their way to try to maintain the public’s confidence in the safety of the project. In various publications and guidebooks about the tunnel, the stress was always on its absolute safety. When the tunnel was re-opened for visitors at the end of July in 1827 after the first flood, Marc Brunel secured a report from The Times that assured 54 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 131. For more on the theorization of railway accidents, see 129–133 in the same volume. 55 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 23. 56 Chrimes, “History of the Tunnel and Chronology,”18. 57 Chrimes,18–19.

Paper Monument

259

its readers of the strong brickwork of the tunnel that could support much more than the Thames’s weight.58 Perhaps the best way conceivable by the Tunnel Company directors was the banquet that they held inside the tunnel in 1827 – after all, it would be quite unlikely that so many important figures would be willing to risk their lives, and the soundness of the tunnel work should thus be amply demonstrated in this way.59 For Kemble, these measures had probably worked, for in her letter she very calmly recalled the 1827 accident.60 Not showing much concern for the safety in the tunnel, she did not refuse to go to where the workers were and appeared to be confident in the improvement work done to prevent further flooding. Yet, for the general public, nothing the company did could seem to sufficiently regain the same confidence in the project, as visitor numbers to the tunnel inevitably dropped, while various criticisms against the engineering project abounded. These accidents made the tunnel the perfect example that illustrated the fact that the middle-class mistrust in industrial advancement was not baseless. It should be noted that none of the casualties resulting from these accidents were visitors, and the public part of the tunnel always remained safe and dry. Nevertheless, for the agitated onlookers, and for the media that fed them misleading information, this detail was too minor to be noted. All that mattered was that while the tunnel was perceived with technological sublimity by its visitors, the basis of this perception – guaranteed safety – became questionable when accidents occurred, and the tunnel would quickly become a target onto which the middle classes projected their fear of industrial advancement. Examples of such projections are numerous, and they often take an exaggerated form. Just one day after the 1827 flood, for example, The Times wrote inaccurately but graphically that “[t]here were two or three visiters [sic] in the tunnel at the time [of the flooding], one of whom was a female, whose feet, in their retreat, were actually washed by the water.”61 The imagination of encountering flood in the tunnel was soon picked up by satires. For instance, C. Williams published the caricature “THE TUNNEL!!! or another BUBBLE BURST” in 1827 to poke fun at the same flood accident. Among the people fleeing from the Thames, apart from some workers dressed in ragged shirts, the majority of those caught in the flood were depicted as elegantly attired men and women with their top hats and fancy dresses, one 58 Lampe, The Tunnel, 107. 59 For details of the banquet, see Lampe, 113–118. 60 Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, 121. 61 “The Thames Tunnel,” The Times, 19 May 1827, 3.

260 

Shijia Yu

of whom actually fainted at the sight of the water. A summer pantomime The Thames Tunnell; or, Harlequin Excavator premiered in June 1827, putting the spotlight on the “destruction of the machinery” by the “irruption of the river.”62 And while all of these are more or less immediate reactions to the first flood, plenty of other examples followed in the ensuing years, as the shadow of the inundation continued to hover above people’s mind. Even when the construction work had been suspended, which meant the danger of flooding should be significantly reduced, the trope of the Thames breaking in was chewed repeatedly. The most famous example of all is probably in Pierce Egan’s Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry and Logic published in 1830. George Cruikshank’s illustration in the book shows Jerry and Logic, along with others, running out from the tunnel, and two of them are even swimming in the water. While the image brilliantly visualizes the paranoid that was probably on the minds of many middle-class visitors to the tunnel, in the text, with Egan’s usual satirical style, Jerry gives his verdict of the tunnel: “It is really a noble undertaking; and in my humble opinion, calculated to be of great service to the country, and also prove a monument of the spirit, industry, and enterprise of Englishmen. I think its completion is practicable; and I hope the workmen will not stand still for the tools.”63

The Ephemeral and the monumental: The paradox in the paper peepshow It is such a paradoxical sentiment, torn between the technological sublime and what undermines this feeling – the fear of industrial accidents – that was captured in the paper peepshow’s ephemeral exhibition space. The Gouyn example is a particularly fitting case here, for it was produced after the second flood that claimed six lives in 1828 and during the period when construction on the tunnel was suspended, which makes the contrast between the idealization of the tunnel, the actual state of the construction, and the ephemeral quality even more obvious. The two feelings are already mingled on the exterior of the paper peepshow. The slipcase packages the paper peepshow as if a faithful reflection of the Thames Tunnel, with the title A View of the Tunnel under the Thames 62 David Pike, Metropolis on the Styx, 265–266. 63 Pierce Egan, Pierce Egan’s Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry and Logic, in Their Pursuits through Life in and out of London (London: Printed by C. Baynes . . . for G. Virtue, 1830), 125–126. Emphasis original.

Paper Monument

261

(Fig. 9.1.). The vignette presents the archways in their finished state and makes explicit that the tunnel is a man-made wonder by juxtaposing it with the River Thames running above it. The actual paper peepshow, however, has quite a different look. The title on the front-face states that the optical toy is actually only about a vision of what the tunnel “will appear when completed,” while the shutter image showcases the tunnel as under construction when the water broke in. The text explains that this is the representation of the first flood, and reassures the user that it was successfully stopped by “bags of clay &c.” Interestingly, the second flood, which was also the more serious one, is not mentioned at all. The fact that the project was already suspended does not make its appearance either. While this is probably not an intentional design but a result of the publisher’s lack of concern for updating the front-face from the 1827 copy, with statistics about the tunnel and predictions of how it would be used, this image nonetheless gives the impression that everything was still on the right track. As such, on the slipcase and the front-face, although concerns about industrial advancement are represented in the depiction of the flood, they are overwhelmed by much more portrayal of the project as the embodiment of progress, the spectacular technological sublime. When the paper peepshow is expanded, the ephemeral nature of the exhibition space in the optical toy comes through much stronger, forming a more obvious paradox to the perfect image of the tunnel. In the space between the cut-out panels, the imagery is not much different from that in other publishers’ works: pedestrians promenading in a well-ordered manner in the tunnel archways, which due to the flesh-tone color of the paper, appear to be particularly bright. Carriages, which could not have appeared in reality in the tunnel, carried more sightseers to enjoy a ride under the Thames. No sign of accidents or setbacks, no machinery or dirty workers, only the expanding archways that embody the essence of the artificial infinite of the technological sublime. At the same time, this image is undermined by the ephemeral quality of the space. As mentioned above, expanding the paper peepshow creates the sensation of the tunnel magically being built up. On the flip side of the coin, however, such features of the optical toy also mean that the tunnel representation exhibited in the paper peepshow is transient, only existing in the space between cut-out panels and could not be recorded or preserved. While the underground passage can be built swiftly, it can be collapsed flat in an equally quick manner. Therefore, this ephemeral impression does not comply with the discourse of a solid and forever-standing enterprise, which is the signature of the technological sublime image of the Thames Tunnel. Instead, such brief moments of exhibiting a perfect tunnel image would only bring to mind the public’s anxiety over the fate

262 

Shijia Yu

of the tunnel, which, as proven by the inundations, could not maintain its structure in the face of the raging Thames, and ultimately went into a seemingly unceasing pause, and would face abandonment. This impression would be further reinforced due to the fragile quality of the paper. During my archival research, almost no Thames Tunnel paper peepshows that I handled could remain expanded when left standing independently, not as a result of deterioration of the material, but because the original paper used is not thick enough. This means that the expansion of the space that showcases the tunnel depends on the users’ hands, and would literally collapse without support. Moreover, this feature of the paper peepshow also means that due to the instability of the user’s hands, the peep-view would inevitably be shaking, while the paper tunnel structure would be subject to constant changes of length and form. Hence, the wobbly structure of the paper archway could result in reminding the user of the danger of being in the defective tunnel in real life. Presented in this way, through the paper peepshow, the tunnel archways, representative of the technologically sublime, would be exposed as no longer qualified as a sight to marvel at. Instead, the optical toy would highlight that they were not so strong and indestructible as they appeared and that they had become a site onto which mistrust towards industrial development would be projected. The ephemeral exhibition space in the paper peepshow promises a dreamland, but cannot hide the danger of disasters either.

Conclusion Between 1825 and 1843, the Thames Tunnel under construction attracted much attention in society. It inspired numerous types of representations of the project, ranging from ordinary prints and broadsheets to guidebooks with movable parts and optical entertainments such as protean views and transparencies.64 In addition to the part of the tunnel open to the public, these “spin-off” products, as it were, satisfied in their individual ways the public’s imagination and fantasy of a man-made wonder that could conquer the Thames. Although the paper peepshow appears to be a trivial item among them, its apparently simplistic structure and straightforward idealization of the tunnel actually hold several layers of meaning, most of which were embedded in the ephemeral exhibition space between the cut-out panels. 64 For detailed discussion of these “spin-off” products, see Chrimes, “History of the Tunnel and Chronology,” 33–96

263

Paper Monument

On the one hand, as a commodity that emerged out of the market’s demand for novelty, the paper peepshow forms a parallel with the part of the tunnel that opened to the public as a new attraction, since both commercialized the user/visitor experience and offered it at a price. To be consumed in the private realm, the optical toy opened up an exhibition space that occupied a similar threshold position to the tunnel, with the added appeal of exclusivity. On the other hand, the ephemeral nature of this space makes the paper peepshow a type of Thames Tunnel representation that would appeal to the middle classes’ ambiguous attitude towards industrial development, of which the tunnel was an example. While the idealization of the tunnel in the paper peepshow presents the underground passage as a magical land of pleasure that could evoke the sensation of the technological sublime, the transient and fragile existence of the paper structure alludes to the fear of the potential danger and disasters brought by such industrial development, which destabilized the sublimity. Nonetheless, as suggested in the announcement for the tunnel model in central London, the middle classes could simply choose another way of experiencing the underground passage if they “have not time, or […] inclination to travel so far eastward as the Tunnel itself.”65 Similar to the model, the paper peepshow functioned as such an alternative with which the middle classes could keep their fear at bay. Unlike the workers, they could maintain a distance from the Tunnel, and only admire its technological sublime after making sure of their own safety. Sitting in their private domain and immersed in the paper peepshow’s ephemeral exhibition space, these users could be assured that the description of floods or the unstable structure of the paper would not actually hurt them, and they could simply enjoy themselves in the brightly lit, dry and broad archways of the Thames Tunnel.

Appendix Published and Homemade English Tunnel Paper Peepshows (1825–1843) Letters in square brackets are assigned by the author. Published English Tunnel Paper Peepshows (1825–1843) The Tunnel [a]

5 Copies

Hand-colored etching. 12 x 15 x 66 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole, in a slipcase. Published on 16 June 1825 by T. Brown, 23 White Hart Place, Kennington Cross, London.

65 “An Exhibition,” 2.

264 

Shijia Yu

Quantity

Collection

Reference No.

1

Indiana University Libraries, Lilly Library

DA685.T36

1

Museum of London

30.90a

1

Oxford University Libraries, Bodleian Library, Opie Collection of Children’s Literature

Opie E 73

1

Smithsonian Libraries, The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology

TA820.L8T92 1825

1

Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection

Gestetner 195

The Subaquarama

1 Copy

Hand-colored etching. 11.6 x 14.2 x 64 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole, in a slipcase. Published on 16 June 1825 by T. Brown, 23 White Hart Place, Kennington Cross, London. Quantity 1

Collection Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection The Tunnel [b]

Reference No. Gestetner 196 1 Copy

Hand-colored etching and steel engraving. 12 x 14.5 x 66 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole, in a slipcase. Published in June 1825 in London. Attributed to Silvester & Co. Sc., 27 Strand, London. Quantity 1

Collection Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection The Tunnel [c]

Reference No. Gestetner 198 2 Copies

Hand-colored etching. 11.8 x 14.5 x 66 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole, in a slipcase. Published in June 1825 in London. Anonymous publisher. Quantity

Collection

Reference No.

1

Yale Center for British Art

GV1199. P4

1

Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection

Gestetner 199

The Tunnel [d]

1 Copy

Hand-colored etching. 11.5 x 15 x 62 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole, in a slipcase. Published in c.1825 in London. Anonymous publisher. Quantity 1

Collection Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection

A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, as It Will Appear when Completed [a]

Reference No. Gestetner 200 1 Copy

Slipcase title A View of the Tunnel under the Thames. Medium unknown. 11.3 x 14.3 x 62 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peep hole, in a slipcase. Published in November 1827 by S. F. Gouyn in London. Priced 2s or 3s (superior edition).

265

Paper Monument

Quantity 1

Collection Museum of London Docklands

A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, as It Will Appear when Completed [b]

Reference No. 29.116 5 Copies

Slipcase title A View of the Tunnel under the Thames. Hand-colored aquatint. 11.5 x 14.5 x 62 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole, in a slipcase. Published on 1 February 1828 by S. F. Gouyn, 7 Fish St. Hill, London. Priced 2s or 3s (superior edition). Quantity

Collection

Reference No.

1

Library Company of Philadelphia

No. 000312483

1

Morgan Library & Museum, Pierpont Morgan Library Department of Printed Books

PML 86111

1

Oxford University Libraries, Bodleian Library, Opie Collection of Children’s Literature

Opie E 74

1

Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection

Gestetner 208

1

Yale Center for British Art

GV1199. V53

A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, as It Will Appear when Completed [c]

6 Copies

Slipcase title A View of the Tunnel under the Thames. Hand-colored aquatint. 11.5 x 14.5 x 62 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole, in a slipcase. Published on 1 August 1829 by M. Gouyn, 7 Fish St. Hill, London. Priced 2s or 3s (superior edition). Quantity

Collection

Reference No.

1

Princeton University Library, Cotsen Children’s Library

2010–0864N

1

Middlebury College Libraries, Special Collections

TF238.T47 V54 1829

1

Oxford University Libraries, Bodleian Library, Ryder Archive

Opie E 74

1

Smithsonian Libraries, The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology

TA820. L8V66 1829

1

Toronto Public Library, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books

1946355

1

Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection

Gestetner 213

A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, as It Will Appear when Completed [d]

1 Copy

Slipcase title A View of the Tunnel under the Thames. Hand-colored etching. 11.8 x 14.3 cm (closed), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peep hole, in a slipcase. Published on 1 August 1830 by M. Gouyn in London. Priced 2s or 3s (superior edition).

266 

Shijia Yu

Quantity 1

Collection Morgan Library & Museum, Pierpont Morgan Library Department of Printed Books

A View of the Tunnel under the Thames, as It Will Appear when Completed [e]

Reference No. PML 88506 2 Copies

Slipcase title A View of the Tunnel under the Thames. Medium unknown. 11.3 x 14.3 x 62 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peep hole, in a slipcase. Published on 1 August 1834 by M. Gouyn, in London. Priced 2s. Quantity

Collection

Reference No.

1

Richard Balzer, Private Collection

No. 0671

1

V&A Museum of Childhood

E.2520–1924

Thames Tunnel [c]

2 Copies

Hand-colored aquatint and steel engraving. 12 x 14.5 x 23.5 cm (expanded), 1 cut-out panel, 1 peephole. Published in c.1835 in London. Anonymous publisher. Quantity

Collection

Reference No.

1

Princeton University Library, Cotsen Children’s Library

Oversize 2007–0169Q

1

Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection

Gestetner 230

Homemade English Tunnel Paper Peepshows (1825–1843) [The Thames Tunnel] [a]

1 Copy

Pen and ink and watercolor. 11 x 14 x 62 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole. Made in c.1825. Anonymous maker. Quantity 1

Collection Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection [The Thames Tunnel] [b]

Reference No. Gestetner 201 1 Copy

Pen and ink and watercolor. 11.5 x 15 x 62 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole. Made in c.1825. Anonymous maker. Quantity 1

Collection Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection The Thames Tvnnel [sic]

Reference No. Gestetner 202 1 Copy

Pen and ink and watercolor. 10.5 x 13.5 x 68 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole. Made in c.1825. Anonymous maker. Quantity 1

Collection Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection

Tunnel under the Thames as It Will Appear when Finished, 600 Feet already Completed

Reference No. Gestetner 203 1 Copy

267

Paper Monument

Ink wash and watercolor. 11.5 x 13.7 x 61 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole. Made in c.1828. Anonymous maker. Quantity 1

Collection Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection Thames Tunnel [a]

Reference No. Gestetner 209 1 Copy

Pen and ink and watercolor. 13 x 14.8 x 43 cm (expanded), 4 cut-out panels, 1 peephole. Made in c.1830. Anonymous maker. Quantity 1

Collection Victoria and Albert Museum, Gestetner Collection Thames Tunnel [b]

Reference No. Gestetner 217 1 Copy

Medium unknown. 11.9 x 14.7 x 60 cm (expanded), 5 cut-out panels, 1 peephole. Made in c.1830. Anonymous maker. Quantity 1

Collection Camera Obscura mit dem Museum zur Vorgeschichte des Films

Reference No. Not available.

Bibliography Altick, Richard. The Shows of London. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978. Anonymous. “An Exhibition of Models of the Thames Tunnel.” The Times, 31 January 1834, 2. Anonymous. “The Thames Tunnel.” The Times, 19 May 1827, 3. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Bryden, Inga, and Janet Floyd. “Introduction.” In Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, edited by Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, 1–17. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Chase, Karen, and Michael Levenson. The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chrimes, Michael M. “History of the Tunnel and Chronology.” In The Triumphant Bore: A Celebration of Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, written and compiled by Michael M. Chrimes, Julia Elton, John May, and Timothy Millett, 5–20. London: Institution of Civil Engineers, Archives Panel, 1993. Clayton, Antony. Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London. London: Historical Publications, 2000.

268 

Shijia Yu

Crook, J. Mordaunt. “Metropolitan Improvements: John Nash and the Picturesque.” In London World City, 1800–1840, edited by Celina Fox, 77–96. New Haven, CT/ London: Yale University Press, 1992. Dart, Gregory. Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London: Hutchinson, 1978. Dobraszczyk, Paul. “Sewers, Wood Engraving and the Sublime: Picturing London’s Main Drainage System in the Illustrated London News, 1859–62.” Victorian Periodicals Review 38, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 349–378. Egan, Pierce. Pierce Egan’s Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry and Logic, in Their Pursuits through Life in and out of London. London: Printed by C. Baynes . . . for G. Virtue, 1830. Elmes, James. Metropolitan Improvements; Or London in the Nineteenth Century. London: Jones & Co., 1827. Geist, Johann Friedrich. Arcades: The History of a Building Type. Cambridge, MA/ London: MIT Press, 1983. Harrison, J.F.C. The Early Victorians, 1832–1851. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Huhtamo, Erkki. “The Pleasures of the Peephole: An Archaeological Exploration of Peep Media.” In Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium, edited by Eric Kluitenberg, 74–155. Rotterdam: NAI, 2006. Hyde, Ralph. Paper Peepshows: The Jaqueline & Jonathan Gestetner Collection. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2015. Kemble, Frances Ann. Records of a Girlhood. 2nd ed. New York: Holt, 1883. Lampe, David. The Tunnel: The Story of the World’s First Tunnel under a Navigable River Dug Beneath the Thames, 1824–42. London: Harrap, 1963. MacKeith, Margaret. The History and Conservation of Shopping Arcades. London: Mansell, 1986. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. May, John. “The Brilliant Bazaar.” In The Triumphant Bore: A Celebration of Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, written and compiled by Michael M. Chrimes, Julia Elton, John May, and Timothy Millett, 21–23. London: Institution of Civil Engineers, Archives Panel, 1993. Michals, Teresa. “Experimenting Before Breakfast: Toy Education and Middle-Class Childhood.” In The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, edited by Dennis Denisoff, 29–42. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008. Monk, Samuel Holt. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960.

Paper Monument

269

Nord, Deborah Epstein. “The City as Theater: From Georgian to Early Victorian London.” Victorian Studies 31, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 159–188. Peltz, Lucy. “Aestheticizing the Ancestral City: Antiquarianism, Topography and the Representation of London in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Art History 22, no. 4 (November 1999): 472–494. Pike, David L. Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2007. ———. “‘The Greatest Wonder of the World”: Brunel’s Tunnel and the Meanings of Underground London.” Victorian Literature and Culture 33, no. 2 (2005), 341–367. Potts, Alex. “Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Images of London in the Nineteenth Century.” History Workshop 26, no. 1 (Winter, 1988): 28–56. Plumb, J. H. “The Acceptance of Modernity.” In The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, 316–334. London: Europa Publications, 1982. Rendell, Jane. “Thresholds, Passages and Surfaces: Touching, Passing and Seeing: The Burlington Arcade.” In The Optic of Walter Benjamin, edited by Alex Coles, 168–195. London: Black Dog, 1999. Robinson, Alan. Imagining London, 1770–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Williams, Rosalind H. Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1990. Young, Linda. Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

About the author Shijia Yu has recently been awarded PhD in History of Art from Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis examines the English paper peepshow, a type of optical toy, between c.1825 and c.1851. It is particularly interested in the paper peepshow’s emergence and evolvement in the wider socio-cultural context of England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, as well as the intermedial relationship this medium had with other visual entertainments. Responsible for digitally cataloguing the Gestetner Paper Peepshow Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, she seeks to integrate empirical research in the archives in the theoretical analysis. Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Research

270 

Shijia Yu

Support Grant and the Birkbeck School of Arts Postgraduate Research Scholarship, she was able to conduct archival research in the United States of America and discover several paper peepshows that could shed new light on the origin and development of the paper peepshow. Also interested in the afterlife of the paper peepshow in the twenty-first century, she has organized a paper peepshow making workshop and a roundtable discussion during the Birkbeck Arts Week 2018, supported by the Birkbeck Lorraine Lim Postgraduate Fund and Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association’s Educational Trust Award, and co-organized a peepshow counter at the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association Book Fair in 2018.

Index Ackland, Henry, Dr. 225 Aiguille de Chardonnet 40 Aiguille du Dru 45 Aiguille Verte 45 Agassiz, Louis 45 Aigner, Chrystian Piotr 139, 145 Alexander I, Emperor of Russia 47, 137‒138, 147, 166 Alexander II, Emperor of Russia 163, 166‒167 Alexander III, Emperor of Russia 165 Allingham, William 228‒229 Allmer, Açalya 93, 95 Alps 12, 25, 28‒30, 34‒35, 46‒47 Andrew, William P. 230 Antwerp 55, 64‒65, 68, 173 Apraxine, Pierre 87, 98‒99 Arad 122 Arconati-Visconti, Marie-Louise, Marchioness 63 Ark 135 Arsenije III Čarnojević, Patriarch 114, 116‒117, 126 Arve 45 Atkins, Anna 86 Austria 134, 243 Austrian Habsburg Empire 113‒114 Baes, Jean 69‒70 Balzac, Honoré de 101‒102 Barthes, Roland 86 Batchen, Geoffrey 80, 82, 106 Bazin, Germain 144 Béatrix (Countess Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione as Béatrix) 99‒101 Beaumont, Elie de 33 Beckert, Sven 197 Béde 67 Belgium 12, 53, 55‒56, 58‒59, 71 Bengal 188, 196, 215, 223 Benjamin, Walter 252 Benois, Aleksandr 173 Benois, Aleksei 14, 161, 166‒167, 169‒174 Beyaert, Henri 69‒70 Bichet, Paul 90 Biernacka, Konstancja 135, 145, 152 Binant, M. 36 Birch, Arthur N. 217, 235 Bishop of Bačka 128 Blanchard, Pascal 10 Bogaerts, Félix 54 Bosnia 115 Bossons see Glacier des Bossons 21 Bourgery, Marc Jean 27 Bressani, Martin 24, 41, 44‒45

Brévent 21, 25‒26 Bright, John 198 Brockenhurst (Junction) Station 15, 209‒210, 212, 220‒221, 226‒229, 232, 235 Brongniart, Alexandre 33 Brouckère, Charles de 56 Broun-Ramsay, James, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie, known as Lord Dalhousie 230 Browning, Robert 221, 223 Brunel, Marc 246‒247, 257‒258 Brussels 12, 53, 55‒56, 58‒60, 66, 67, 69‒70 Bryant, Julius 203 Bucknall, Benjamin 37 Bukhara 163 Bulgaria 115 Buls, Charles 59, 67‒68, 70 Burke, Edmund 255‒256 Burlington Arcade (London) 252 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron, known as Lord Byron 227 Cadava, Edouardo 86, 101‒102 Calcutta 215 Calico 196, 199‒200 Cambridge 186, 218 Cameron, Charles Hay 215, 224 Cameron, Hardinge Hay 215‒217, 219, 222, 231‒232 Cameron, Julia Margaret 209‒229, 234‒235, 240 Cannes 25 Cape Finisterre 222 Cape Town 215 Caracalla, Baths of 27 Carcassonne 23 Carracci, Annibale 183 Castiglione, Countess see Oldoini Catherine II, known as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia 137 Cawnpore 188 Ceylon 15, 209, 211‒212, 214‒217, 219, 223, 231‒234 Chamonix 34, 44‒45 Chapman, John 183 Charle Albert 11, 12, 53‒54, 56‒58, 60‒72 Chodowiecki, Daniel 144 Cicéri, Pierre-Charles 41 Claude see Lorrain Clausen, Meredith L. 97 Clogstoun, Herbert, Major 223 Cole, Henry 197, 227, 252 Colombo 231‒234 Colnaghi 210 Corboz, André 47

272 

THE HOME, NATIONS AND EMPIRES, AND EPHEMERAL EXHIBITION SPACES 1750–1918

Cordova 36, 63 Cow Court 246‒247, 251 Cox, Julian 213, 221, 225 Cracow 143, 145, 154‒155 Crary, Jonathan 8 Croatia 115 Cruikshank, George 260 Cureghem 60 Cuvier, Georges 33 Czartoryski, Adam Kazimierz, Prince 133, 136‒138, 143, 145‒146, 151, 155 Czartoryska, Iza 155 Czartoryska, Izabela, Princess 134, 136‒139, 143, 144‒148, 152‒155 Dalhousie, Lord, see Broun-Ramsay 230 Dalmatia 115 Daly, César 90 Daniell, Thomas 195 Daniell, William 195 Danube 114, 124 Darcel, Alfred 194 Darwin, Charles 221, 224‒226 Dashkov, Vasily 164 David, Jacques-Louis 26 Day, Matthew 225 Dębicki, Ludwik 136, 143‒144, 146, 149, 154 De Keyser, Nicaise 54‒55 Delécluze, Etienne-Jean 26 Delhi 201, 223 Delille, Jacques 146 Demange, Xaiver 79, 87, 98‒99 De Montesquiou, Robert 104, 107 Desmond, Ray 182, 189, 202 Deville, Jules 102‒103 Disdéri, André-Adolphe-Eugène 84, 88‒89 Dodd, Ralph 246 Dubrovin, E.P. 170, 173 Durkheim, Émile 153‒154 Eakins, James 105 East End (London) 250‒251, 253‒254, 258 Eastlake, Charles 90 Egan, Pierce 252, 253, 260 Egypt 25 Elias, Norbert 150 England 204, 209, 215‒216, 222, 230‒232, 234‒235, 241, 243‒245, 247‒248, 253, 269 Europe 7, 59, 114, 133, 136, 141, 144, 165, 178 Eyre, Edward John 226 Fairbairn, Thomas 183, 185, 188, 190, 194, 198 Favre, Alphonse 34 Fleming, Jerzy 137 Flint, Kate 105 Ford, Colin 213, 221, 225 Fox, Charles James 202 France 17, 23‒25, 36, 78‒80, 90, 94, 97, 134, 147, 162, 240, 243, 245 Frederick Augustus I of Saxony 147

Freshwater 210, 214, 216, 220, 222‒223, 225, 228, 234 Frith, William Powell 212‒213 Fritzsche, Peter 9 Froude, James Anthony 222‒223 Fruška Gora 124 Fuller, Loie 88 Fumière, Théophile 64‒65 Galle, Port of 231 Garelick, Rhonda K. 88 Gajewski, Franciszek 141‒142 Gasbeek 63 Geneva 12, 35, 181 Germany 147, 162, 243, 245, 250 Gernsheim, Helmut 210‒211, 213, 220‒221 Gibson, Thomas Milner 198 Glacier de L’Argentière 40 Glacier des Bois 44‒45 Glacier des Bossons 21 Gladstone, William Ewart 218, 220, 224 Gniewkowski, Franciszek 148‒149 Godon, Julien 36‒37 Goodrich Court 187 Gouyn, S. F. 241‒243, 245, 246, 260, 264‒266 Grant, Alexander, Sir 225 Greece 115, 214 Greenhalgh, Paul 10 Greg, W. R. 219 Gregory, William 234‒235 Grodno Sejm 154 Grosz, Elizabeth 80‒82, 84, 88‒89, 93, 101, 104, 106‒108 Grote, George 214 Habermas, Jürgen 150, 212‒213, 222, 226 Hallé, Charles 182 Hardinge, Henry 215 Harrison, Frederic 225 Hartog, François 9 Haskell, Francis 136, 185‒186 Heinzelmann, Wilhelm Solomonovitch 168 Herefordshire 222 Herschel, John 215‒216, 221, 223 Herschel, William James 215, 223, 225 Herzegovina 115 Hill, Brian 213 Hodges, William 195 Hoffenberg, Peter H. 188 Holland, Henry, Sir 219 Hollander, Anne 92 Houtstont, Georges 62‒63 Huhtamo, Erkki 244, 250 Hungary 115 Hunt, William Holman 183, 198 Huyot, Jean-Nicolas 44 India 15, 181‒184, 186‒190, 192‒196, 198‒205, 215‒217, 223‒224, 230 Irving, Henry T. 217

273

Index

Irigaray, Luce 80 Isle of Wight 210, 218, 223, 226, 229 Italy 40, 78‒79, 132, 139 Jamaica 226 James, William Melbourne 224 Jan III Sobieski, King of Poland 139 Japan 184, 224 Jenopolj 115 Jerusalem 128, 135 Jones, Owen 186, 199‒201 Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor 117 Jowett, Benjamin 218, 223 Kalutara 234 Kandy 216, 231 Karlovci, Archbishopric of 13‒14, 113, 115‒120, 122, 126, 129‒130 Kashmir 204 Kazakhstan 163, 167 Kazimierz, Adam 136‒137, 145, 151 Kemble, Fanny 250‒251, 256‒257, 259 Khiva 167‒168 Kiev 120, 121 Kipling, John Lockwood 186, 196, 199, 203 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 9 Kniaźnin, Franciszek 136, 146, 152 Knowles, James 225 Kozachinskii, Manuil 129 Koźmian, Kajetan 138 Koselleck, Reinhart 9 Krasnovodsk 171 Krivtzov, Grigori 168 Kropiński, Ludwik 136 Krušedol 117‒118 Laborde, Léon 56 Labouchère, Henry 183 Labrouste, Henri 95, 97 Lagye, Gustave 61, 63‒64 Lake Geneva 12, 35 Lancashire 182, 197, 201 Lausanne 21‒22, 35, 37‒38 La Vedette 11‒12, 21‒22, 30‒31, 35‒37, 41, 43, 46‒48 Lasc, Anca I. 82, 90, 95, 102‒103 Le Corbusier, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier 98, 106 Leeward Islands 217 Legouvé, Ernest 99 Leicester, Frederick, Reverend 190, 196, 198 Lenoir, Alexandre 8, 133‒134 Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor 115‒116 Leopold II, King of Belgium 70 Leroy, Jacques 61 Les Bois 45 Leys, Henri 55 Lewis, Reina 169 Lindula 234 Linowski, Aleksander 146

Longfellow, Charles 223‒224 Lord Macaulay see Macaulay Lorrain, Claude, known as Claude 197 Lukitsh, Joanne 213 Lymington 210, 228‒229 Macartney, George, Lord 192 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1 st Baron Macaulay 215, 218, 224 Madras 223 Malaysia 217 Manchester 15, 181‒183, 185, 187‒194, 196‒198, 200‒201, 204 Marjorin, M. 28 Marx, Leo 255 McCauley, Elizabeth Anne 82‒84, 89 McNeill, John, Sir 196 Mecca 135 Meerut 181 Mer de Glace 21, 45 Mérimée, Prosper 25 Mexico 119 Meyrick, Colonel 187, 196 Michelangelo Buonarroti, known as Michelangelo 183 Mieulet, Captain 38 Mignot-Delstanches, Auguste 58 Mill, John Stuart 226 Millais, John Everett 183 Miller, John 183 Mitreiter, Theodor 164 Mont Blanc 12, 21‒22, 25, 29, 32‒34, 38‒40, 42 Montesquiou 104, 107 Mohyla, Peter 121, 128 Morawski, Franciszek 149 Moscow 15, 162, 164‒167, 170 Mount Etna 33 Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) 101 Nadar, Paul (Paul Tournachon) 172, 174 Napoleon I 141 Napoleon III 41, 78, 202 Nash, John 253 Nekhoroshev, Nicolai 168 New Zealand 223 Nicolas II 165 Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn 136, 146 Nikolai Konstantinovitch Romanov, Great Prince 167, 168 Nodier, Charles 46 Northcote, Stafford Henri, 1 st Earl of Iddesleigh 217‒218, 230 Notre-Dame de Paris, Cathedral 23 Oldoini Verasis, Virginia, Countess de Castiglione 12, 13, 77‒82, 84‒89, 91‒93, 95‒102, 104, 107‒108 Olsen, Victoria 213, 215 Orfelin, Zaharija 14, 126‒130

274 

THE HOME, NATIONS AND EMPIRES, AND EPHEMERAL EXHIBITION SPACES 1750–1918

Osborne 223, 265 Ottoman Empire 113, 119, 128 Ouradou, Maurice 35, 38 Owen, Richard 163 Oxford 186, 218, 224, 264‒265 Panjikent 163 Paris 23, 25, 33, 36, 44, 78, 88, 99, 101, 103, 121, 138, 155, 173, 189 Pattison, Mark 225 Peć 116‒118 Penang 217 Pennington 229 Petit Sablon 69‒70 Piccadilly 252 Pierson, Pierre-Louis 77‒79, 83, 85, 87, 94, 96‒97, 99‒102, 104‒105 Pike, David 247, 251 Place Vendôme 78 Plato 214 Plumb, John 248 Poland 13‒14, 120, 134, 137‒139, 141‒142, 145, 152, 154‒155 Pomian, Krzysztof 9, 142 Poniatowski, Józef Antoni, Prince 139, 150 Poniatowski, Stanisław August, King of Poland 136, 145 Potter, Edmund 185, 197 Poulot, Dominique 9, 133 Praga 141 Prek, Ksawery 147, 149 Prévost, Pierre 44 Prince Albert, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, known as Prince Albert 95, 182, 185, 194, 204 Prinsep, Thoby and Sara 210, 229 Prussia 134 Pugin, Augustus 90 Puławy 13‒14, 133‒147, 150, 152‒155 Putnik, Mojsej 14, 126‒130 Pyrenees 24, 33, 46, 48 Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, known as Elizabeth II 198 Queen Victoria, Victoria Alexandrina, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, known as Queen Victoria 95, 186, 196, 203-204, 223-224, 247 Raška 115 Reddy, William 150‒151 Regent Street (London) 253 Regent’s Park (London) 253 Rembrandt Van Rijn 183 Repnin, Nikolai 137 Révoil, M. 39 Rezanov, Aleksandr I. 166

Ristori, Adelaide 99 Rogier, Charles 58 Romania 122 Rome 119, 121, 139, 175 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 209 Rotherhithe 246 Royle, John Forbes 184, 187‒193, 195‒200, 202‒203 Royle, William Henry 188 Rubens, Peter Paul 54, 62 Ruppert, Reiner 151 Ruskin, John 90 Russia 7, 13‒14, 120‒121, 123, 134, 147, 161‒165, 169‒170, 172‒174, 176, 178 Russian Empire 14, 161, 165, 170‒171, 174, 175 Ryan, Sir Edward 224 Saharunpore 188 Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Basilica 23 Samarkand 163, 173 Sandberg, Mark 9‒10 Sanders, Joel 91, 95 Sanderus, Antonius 61 Savage, James 137 Savoy Alps 34‒35, 47 Schad, Aquilin 99‒101 Scharf, George Jr. 185, 188, 190, 195 Schayes, Antoine 57 Schivelbush, Wolfgang 229, 258 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 151 Scinde 204 Scotland 222 Seeley, John Robert 214, 225 Selz, Jean 89 Semirechensk 167 Semirechie 163 Semper, Gottfried 56 Sennett, Richard 151 Serbia 116, 128, 132 Siemieński, Lucjan 142 Siena 24 Sikh War 216 Sogdia 163 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 78, 80, 82, 84, 98, 102, 104 Sophocles 214 Southern Pannonia 124 Sremski Karlovci 115‒116, 124 Stara, Alexandra 8, 133 Stanley, Dean 225 Staunton, George 192 Stephen, King 139 Stewart, Susan 248 St. Petersburg 137, 162‒163, 166, 168, 173 St. Regulus 234 Switzerland 12, 21‒22, 25, 28, 35 Sydenham 186, 228 Syr-Daria 166‒167 Szymanowski, Józef 136

275

Index

Taine, Hippolyte 229‒230 Tashkent 14‒15, 161, 167‒173, 175, 178 Taormina 44 Taylor, Henry 214, 218‒221, 223, 229, 234 Tenecki, Stefan 122 Tennyson, Alfred 210, 213, 218, 220‒226, 228‒229 Terry, Ellen 220 Thackeray, Anne 210 Thallis, John 165 Titian see Vecellio Tivoli 139 Tolz, Vera 162‒163 Trevelyan, George Otto 230 Trevithick, Richard 246 Trinidad 217 Tripe, Linnaeus 195 Turkestan 161‒175 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 183, 197 Ukraine 120‒121, 128‒129 United States 244, 270 Ursyn, Julian 136, 146 Uttar Pradesh 182, 188 Vaizey, Robert 246 Van Ysendyck, Jules 60, 62‒63 Vecellio, Tiziano, known as Titian 204‒205 Venice 121 Verasis di Castiglione, Francesco 78 Verasis di Castiglione, Giorgio 91 Verny (Almaty) 167 Verona 101 Vienna 101 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel 11‒12, 21‒48, 95 Vistula 139‒140 Vitet, Ludovic 40 Vlaams Huis 11‒13, 53, 54, 63‒72

von Kaufman, Konstantin P. 166‒168 Vredeman De Vries, Hans 54, 61 Waagen, Gustav Friedrich 185, 227 Wappers, Gustaf 55 Wapping 246 Ward, William George 225 Waring, John Burley 185‒186, 190‒191, 193‒194, 196, 200‒201 Warsaw 134, 136‒137, 141, 146‒147, 152 Waterloo Station (London) 229 Watermael-Boitsfort 53 Watts, George Frederick 220‒221 Weaver, Mike 213 Wellesley, Province of (now Malaysia) 217 West End (London) 251‒253, 255 Wethered, Charles 27‒28 Whitehall 202 Williams, C. 259 Wilberforce, Reginald 223‒224 Wilberforce, Samuel, Lord bishop of Winchester 223‒225 Wirtemberska, Maria 148 Witold, Grand Duke of Lithuania 139 Władysław Jagiełło, King of Poland 139 Wood, Charles 217‒218 Woolf, Virginia 209‒210, 220, 227 Wornum, Ralph 199 Woronicz, Jan Paweł 136, 146 Wyatt, Matthew Digby 186, 200‒201 Yeomans, David 95 Yorkshire 201 Zachariah 123 Zeravshansk 163 Zola, Émile 91 Żółkiewski Castle 141