Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century

Wendy Bellion is Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History and Associate Dean for the Humanities at the University of Delaware, USA. Her research focuses on North American art and the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011) and Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019).Kristel Smentek is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Her research engages eighteenth-century European graphic and decorative arts in their transcultural contexts. She is the author of Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2014), co-editor of Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (2022), and co-curator of the accompanying exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums.

With ten vibrant studies that treat a striking array of media across an ambitious geographic scope, this volume charts some of the liveliest directions in today’s eighteenth-century art history, which has decisively embraced the everyday object and the dynamism of change as a generative critical lens.

• List of IllustrationsNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgementsIntroduction, “Things Change”, Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware, USA; Kristel Smentek, MIT, USA1. ‘A Sort of Picture or Image of my Self’: Amoy Chinqua’s Almost Ancestral Portrait of Joseph Collet, Winnie Wong, University of California, Berkeley, USA2. Shooting for Freedom: Examining the Material World of Self-Emancipated Persons, Tiffany Momon, Sewanee: The University of the South, USA3. Something Old, Something New: Repurposing and the Production of Ephemeral Festival Architecture in 18th-Century Paris, Matthew Gin, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA4. Botanical Fantasy in Silk: Transformations of A Rococo Floral Design from England to China, Mei Mei Rado, Bard Graduate Center, USA5. Making Marble Edible: Madame de Pompadour, Friendship, and the Multiple Lives of Porcelain, Susan M. Wager, University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA6. The Sovereign Betel in Eighteenth-Century Bengal and Bihar, Zirwat Chowdhury, University of California, Los Angeles, USA7. Isaiah Thomas’s Stamp Acts at the Halifax Gazette: Printers and Tacit Protest in Revolutionary America, Jennifer Y. Chuong, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA8. Between Art and Nature: The Dauphin’s Treasure at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, Tara Zanardi, Hunter College, CUNY, USA9. California Indian Basket Weavers, Spanish Imperialism, and Eighteenth-Century Global Networks, Yve Chavez, University of Oklahoma, USA10. British Prints between Caricature and Ethnography, Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia, USAIndex