Enfilade

Left: Partial view of the contents of Charlotte Martner’s paint box (Private collection; author’s photograph). Right: Caspar Schneider, Paint box on stand, ca. 1789, mahogany on oak structure, 75 cm high (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

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Recent pieces from J18′s Notes & Queries:

Conceived as pendants, these two essays by David Pullins and Damiët Schneeweisz unpack two paint boxes that belonged to Marie Victoire Lemoine (1754–1820) and Charlotte Daniel Martner (1781–1839), bringing out how these boxes tie the material history of painting to gender, colonialism, and enslavement.

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David Pullins, “Contained Assertions: Marie Victoire Lemoine’s Paint Box,” Journal18 (December 2023).

Marie Victoire Lemoine, The Interior of a Woman Painter’s Atelier, 1789, oil on canvas, 116.5 × 88.9 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Holding a loaded palette, brushes and maulstick, a standing woman represents the art of painting, while a second woman seated on a low stool embodies the foundational art of drawing (Fig. 1).[1] Their practices converge in the canvas underway on an easel, depicting a priestess presenting a young woman to a statue of Athena, goddess-protectress of the arts, in which chalk outlines have begun to be fleshed out in color. But the allegory has been dressed in contemporary terms, pointedly situating Marie Victoire Lemoine’s The Interior of a Woman Painter’s Atelier in the year it was executed, 1789, and boldly taking on the language of genre painting that was used more often to critique than to promote women artists. Michel Garnier’s A Young Woman Painter from the same year offers a counter-image (Fig. 2). A painter sets her canvases aside (literally turned to the wall, her easel reflected distantly in the mirror), while she is distracted by love (signaled by the dove, flowers, and book propped on an insubstantial table easel). In contrast to Lemoine’s somber, antique mise-en-abyme, Garnier chooses an unfinished “Greuze girl” as his gloss. . . .

The full essay is available here»

David Pullins is Associate Curator in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Damiët Schneeweisz, “Laboring Likeness: Charlotte Daniel Martner’s Paint Box in Martinique (1803–1821),” Journal18 (December 2023).

Charlotte Martner, Self-Portrait with Four People, 1805, watercolor on ivory and cardboard, 14.5 × 11.5 cm (Private collection).

In Charlotte Daniel Martner’s self-portrait miniature (1805), the classical tendencies of French eighteenth-century portraiture collide with a distinctive burgeoning Antillean visual culture of the early nineteenth century (Fig. 1).[1] The miniature is a contrast in colors: the artist’s luminous pale white skin and Empire dress, emanating from the portrait’s ivory ground like moonlight, set against the darker skin tones of the man, women, and child that surround her, each dressed in dulled shades of red, orange, blue, and beige. The precise status of the four Black individuals within this household is unclear, and they are yet to be identified, but their placement, each suspended in an act of domestic labor, suggests that perhaps they depict those then enslaved in Martner’s home. At the center of the portrait is a brisk loss, as if someone has pressed their thumb to the watercolor and swept away Martner’s features, leaving only a set of auburn eyes, the contours of a nose, dark-brown eyebrows, and loose curls pinned back with a bejeweled comb. . .

The full essay is available here»

Damiët Schneeweisz is a PhD Candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art currently on Doctoral Placement at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

The latest issue of J18:

Journal18, Issue #16 (Fall 2023) — Cold
Issue edited by Michael Yonan

Feeling cold is increasingly a privilege in our warming world. Regions of the world known for temperate, moderate climates are becoming accustomed to erratic weather. Cooler areas of the globe are warming, and warmer areas becoming too hot to occupy. Accompanying these climatological transformations are humanity’s attempts to control temperature, led by the invention of technologies (most prominently air conditioning) which help us live comfortably, but which come with substantial human, economic, and environmental costs. By creating pleasant temperatures in which to live and work, we exacerbate the problem that makes human intervention into the climate more urgent.

The cause of these changes is the consumption of fossil fuels, which transformed human life profoundly in the pursuit of modernity. The origin of this transformation falls squarely within the long eighteenth century. The established scientific terminus post quem for measuring human effects on global temperatures is the year 1800. Moreover, the 1700s were the final century of the Little Ice Age, a climatological phenomenon characterized by lower global mean temperatures. With these conditions in mind, might temperature play a greater role in our discussion of eighteenth-century art? For this issue of Journal18, I have invited scholars to address this possibility. My goal is to encourage reflection on how eighteenth-century art might engage the scholarly literatures on historical climatology and the history of the senses. Do the conditions of eighteenth-century life, as filtered through artistic production, help us understand why the world became warmer? Can we find in the eighteenth century’s ideas about temperature the roots of our current beliefs, and perhaps locate in art ways of rethinking or undoing the assumptions that have brought us to this place?

The essays offered here address these concerns from multiple perspectives, engage varied works of art, and do so in diverse regions of the globe. Jennifer Van Horn examines an eighteenth-century plate warmer, made circa 1790, owned by George Washington and used in his residences, to reveal its place within a racially determined temperature-scape. She achieves this by analyzing not only how it mediated temperatures for its socially prominent owners, but also how it reveals the experiences of the enslaved individuals who tended it during dinners. She thereby locates the warmer’s effect on bodies, its thermoception, within the “complex entanglements of cold, race, unfreedom, and materiality” of early America to produce a “racialized thermal order.”

Sylvia Houghteling’s essay takes us to a different region of the globe, South Asia, and to a different problem, namely creating cool temperatures for inhabitants of a hot climate. Houghteling shows that South Asian societies produced sophisticated systems of cooling long before colonial occupation, but these early techniques often relied on creating the psychological effect of cold by stimulating other senses, notably smell and sight. She thereby produces a synesthetic framework for temperature modification, one in which the senses interconnect. This approach offers insight into how to produce art history that is sensually engaged, not just in an erotic dimension, but in the ability to imagine complex sensual entanglements through the past’s material remains.

Alper Metin leads us to the Ottoman Empire, where he investigates the history of a warming device appreciated across the world: the fireplace. Eighteenth-century Ottoman patrons adapted fireplace designs from Western models, and in so doing responded to substantial socioeconomic and cultural changes in Ottoman society. These included the desire for increased comfort in domestic interiors and the need to display wealth and sophistication through a fireplace’s decoration. Metin reflects on the Ottoman Turkish terminology for fireplaces, revealing both gendered and socio-ethnic dimensions to its language, and on morphological changes to fireplace design. Fireplaces emerge as more than just warming devices, but rather as creations that express changing conditions and mentalities in a society rethinking its international place.

Our shorter notices take up these themes in further directions. Kaitlin Grimes shows how the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway incorporated narwhal ivory into conceptions of royal power that both supported and materialized its colonial project in the Arctic Atlantic. Etienne Wismer demonstrates that melting glaciers in Switzerland (much in the news today) fascinated Europeans in the years around 1800, spurring scientific investigations, inspiring interior decoration, and generating new health regimens. Both Grimes and Wismer explore the relationship between what Wismer calls a “biotope” and the human beings who inhabited it. I would add that art mediates the relationship between humanity and biotope, and that temperature is a central force constituting their interconnection.

Issue Editor
Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis

a r t i c l e s

• Jennifer Van Horn — Racialized Thermoception: An Eighteenth-Century Plate Warmer

• Sylvia Houghteling — Beyond Ice: Cooling through Cloth, Scent, and Hue in Eighteenth-Century South Asia

• Alper Metin — Domesticating and Displaying Fire: The Technical and Aesthetic Evolution of Ottoman Fireplaces

s h o r t e r  p i e c e s

• Kaitlin Grimes — Narwhal Ivory as the Arctic Colonial Speciality of the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway

• Etienne Wismer — Making Sense of Ice? Engaging Meltwater in the Long Eighteenth Century in Switzerland and France

All articles are available here»