The Borrowdale graphite mine in England's northern Lake District was constructed on an exceptional graphite deposit that was first excavated in the sixteenth century. The dense, dark, and smooth material found there drove an artistic innovation: the modern pencil. Cumbrian graphite was synonymous with the pencil which, in turn, helped popularise the sketching tour, predicating the presence of artists such as J. M. W. Turner in the Lake District on the mineral composition of its topography. Drawings of the striking rural landscape in the environs of the mine, however, belied the reach of its mineral deposits. While Turner's sketches of the area obscure industrial infrastructure, this article reads between the drawings' imprecise lines to reveal an encounter between artist and industrial landscape that was mediated through material. Through his experiments with the notational possibilities of graphite and his interest in industrial sites, Turner's approach to the landscape encompassed both the visible landscape and its subterranean components.
Limning is an art form traditionally associated with early modern portrait miniature painting. However, the term was used contemporaneously to describe a more extensive range of watercolour-based art forms, including botanical illustrations, heraldry, and landscapes. One type of limning can be found in the *alba amicorum* (meaning "friendship albums" or "books of friends") of travellers to London in the early seventeenth century. This article explores the German soldier Michael van Meer's album, which contains an extensive array of unusual and vivid limnings that capture aspects of the Jacobean court and include likenesses of James VI and I and Anna of Denmark. After considering the technical and theoretical relationship between *alba* limnings produced in London and other forms of limning, it then demonstrates how the limned illustrations of Jacobean London shed light on the dissemination of royal and courtly images and, in their depictions of James and Anna in public settings, project a sense of royal visibility and accessibility. Viewed as limnings, these *alba* illustrations reveal how English visual culture intersected with the northern European *album amicorum* tradition.
Closets played a prominent role in the devotional life of the early Stuart court, where they offered a small space for prayer, liturgy, and diplomatic engagement for the monarch and other members of the royal family. The chapel closet, overlooking the household chapel, was the most prominent of these spaces and regularly hosted the guests invited by the monarch and members of the royal family. Intimacy and access mattered in the early modern court. Being able to speak, touch, and hear the king was a mark of privilege and potential influence. This article examines surviving evidence from the Great Wardrobe Accounts, pictorial representations, and a handful of surviving eyewitness accounts of services to reconstruct the internal environment and appearance of James's chapel closet. James spent far more than Elizabeth I on the furnishings of his closet and limited its ceremonial use to members of the royal family. While the Jacobean chapel closet has been closely associated with the rise of prominent churchmen in favour of greater church beautification such as Richard Neile, clerk of the closet between 1603 and 1632, the article argues that this prominent courtly space reveals an energetic pattern of material splendour promoted from James's accession that was closely connected to his personal conception of his English kingship.
The marriage of Elizabeth Stuart to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in February 1613, offered a lavish counter-attraction to the solemn mourning that had accompanied the death of her brother, Henry, Prince of Wales, just a few months before. Amid dynastic rupture, the match fortuitously shifted the focus from its recent loss onto the future of the line. Indeed, following the birth of Prince Frederick Henry in 1614, and for the next sixteen years until the birth of a healthy son to King Charles I and his consort, Queen Henrietta Maria, the ever-growing Palatine brood represented the next stage in the Stuart succession. Separated by distance from their potential subjects, it was important that the electoral couple continued to cultivate ties with the British people and, as their family grew, a familiarity with the prospective royal line was encouraged. A steady stream of printed images was enlisted in this campaign, designed to introduce the public back home to the Palatine family. Tracing the development of their visual portrayal in line with the shifting fortunes of the royal couple and their children, this article explores how these representations sought to naturalise a foreign royal family while forging cross-European dynastic loyalties. Images of Elizabeth's family, whether portrayed as a lineal standby or even as an alternative, could endorse, or indeed complicate, dynastic rhetorics. As I shall argue, the affective bonds encouraged in word and image actually risked splitting Stuart allegiances.
In the final decades of the sixteenth century, King James VI of Scotland (later King James I of England and Ireland), with the support of his queen, Anna of Denmark, engaged in a rich programme of patronage and visual and material display that centred the themes of dynasty, unity, and Protestantism to promote and bolster James's claim as Elizabeth I's successor. This royal patronage of Scottish and European émigré artists saw the production, dissemination, and presentation of art, print, and luxury objects both at home and abroad. However, James and Anna's cultural programme has been overlooked, and no study to date has taken an overview of the output of the artistic activity that flourished in Scotland during this crucial period, when the question of the succession was at the heart of Scottish, English, and Irish politics. The article seeks to address this gap and brings together portraits, prints, jewellery, coins, and medallions dating from the years between about 1580 and 1604 to analyse the iconography and messaging devised during James's succession campaign. It also demonstrates how interconnected these art forms were and sheds light on the unique network of Edinburgh-based artists and makers working for the king and court in the late sixteenth century.
In *The Masque of Blackness*, written by Ben Jonson and performed on Twelfth Night in 1605, Anna of Denmark and eleven women of the court employed a novel mechanism of racial impersonation for a royal masque, performing not in black masks but with their faces and bodies painted black. This article contends that Inigo Jones's *A Daughter of Niger*, conventionally regarded as a generic costume design for the performance, is actually a portrait of Anna in blackface. Within the context of early modern ideas about Blackness and beauty, it attends to the dual material implications of painting the queen black---both her actual body during the masque's performance and its enduring graphic representation in Jones's picture.
*Mulld Sake* has been described by the British Museum as "perhaps the most famous of all English prints" during the nineteenth century. Despite its reputation, however, the only certainty about this engraving is its production in London between 1616 and 1621, the active dates of its publisher Compton Holland. This article examines existing conjectures about *Mulld Sake* and the interpretation of its visual and verbal content, based around the long-standing but problematic assertion that its dandyish subject is the seventeenth-century chimney sweep and highwayman John Cottington. This article presents alternative, overlapping interpretations of the dynamic and complex engraving, revealing the figure as a symbolic representation of favouritism, scandal, and societal ambiguities at King James VI and I's London court.
In recent decades, the topic of King James VI and I's sexuality has been discussed both more broadly and with less prejudicial bias than previously. However, while the idea of a gay James has become a familiar element in popular histories and cultural works, it continues to find some resistance in more academic history. This is at least partly because what might be sufficient evidence to convince a general audience is still seen as insufficient by many academic specialists. This has been followed by an unproductive division over the epistemic status of the king's words, behaviour, objects, and deeds as evidence for a knowable sexuality, which risks overlooking the significance of that conduct and its material traces in and as themselves. The article revisits this conduct and these traces to go beyond either defining or refusing to define James's sexuality. Instead, it proposes a reading of evidence as style, and in particular a queer style, that gives us a new way of looking at and understanding the distinctive erotics of James's kingship.
The article charts the European circulation of James's images from cradle to grave, elucidating their contexts and their ideological and commercial ramifications. Some, notably miniatures and full-length portraits made in Scotland and, after 1603, in England, served as diplomatic gifts. They attest to James's keen cultivation of his---and his dynasty's---visual brand. Others, mainly engravings by Dutch, German, and French artists originating on the continent, circulated individually or were inserted into printed compendia on royalty. Their proliferation and diversity, far exceeding those of James's Scottish and English predecessors, testifies to the international appetite for the king's likeness. Yet except for a brief interval in 1580--84, when a few continental engravings fuelled a cross-confessional contest over his future, James's visualisations did not court controversy. Rather, they bear witness to his success as dynast, ruler, and author.
This article focuses on a brief yet pivotal four-month period---November 1612 to February 1613---to examine how clothing and somatic display mediated grief, joy, and political expression at the Stuart court. Framed by two major events---the death of Henry, Prince of Wales, on 6 November 1612 and the marriage of Princess Elizabeth on 14 February 1613---the study explores how the royal family navigated public and private emotion through dress. Drawing particular attention to the three surviving Stuart children---Prince Henry, Princess Elizabeth, and Duke Charles---it brings together overlooked archival materials from the National Archives, Kew, with new readings of early Stuart portraiture, including two recently rediscovered images of Princess Elizabeth. Combining written, material, and visual evidence, the article interweaves the political with the personal to reveal how clothing and textiles could articulate and memorialise emotional experience, dynastic identity, and affective bonds at moments of profound transition.
The article presents the first full study of a significant illuminated book prepared as a gift for King James VI around 1581–82. The article uses analysis of the book's complex emblems and texts to argue that its decoration was designed and commissioned by agents of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in Paris. Examination of its illuminated title page reveals the Scotsman John Gordon's role in adapting Mary's most famous emblem into a new design that promoted her plan for joint rule, or "Association", with her son. The artistic and financial investment in this deluxe book shows that the teenage King James VI was expected to be capable of skilled engagement with visual media in an international courtly context.
From its early official sparks in the late 1960s, the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta) has taken shape as a profoundly geographic meditation on how the region had been and could be imagined, lived in, and seen. It materialized a vast cultural expression of dreams of sovereignty and of uniting a region fragmented by Danish, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial empires. This article examines its geographic imagination at its founding and in its two earliest iterations, in Guyana and Jamaica, alongside colonial conceptions of the region, arguing that the juxtaposition accentuates the stakes, dreams, and revolutionary nature of the Carifesta project from its early days. Further, through an interactive, diachronic map of the two iterations of the festival, it visualizes their spatial relations with colonial histories via three case studies, analyzing colonial legacies that haunted the festival. This article is part of the series "Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism" in British Art Studies, which is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Projects in the series consider the dispersed and difficult histories of Atlantic worlds, focusing on any aspect of visual and material culture that intersects broadly with the United Kingdom and the United States. The aim is to encourage transhistorical thinking by posing questions about histories and legacies of empire, networks of trade, transatlantic slavery, and creolisation. "Atlantic Worlds" initiated a virtual residency programme at the journal that ran from 2021 to 2022, where awardees shared ideas with each other and were supported by expert interlocutors. Awardees were Adrian Anagnost, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Mia L. Bagneris, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Christopher Maxwell, and Adrienne Rooney. Invited interlocutors were Gaiutra Bahadur, Pamela Fletcher, Aaron Kamugisha, Catherine Molineux, José Lingna Nafafé, and Kerry Sinanan.
This article traces the nineteenth-century circulation of Asante material culture from Kumase to the British Museum, exploring how the intersecting imperial strategies of the Asante and British empires are manifested in collecting practices. Rather than tracing object biographies *from* Africa *to* Europe, this text foregrounds Asante imperial collecting, which appropriated diverse visual and material forms from Akan, Dagomba, Hausa, and Islamic communities as a means of asserting imperial power and cosmopolitan identity. As diplomatic exchanges gave way to looting, the Anglo-Asante Wars, and colonial possession over the nineteenth century, European museums redefined Asante material culture. This article analyzes how early nineteenth-century European museum displays and publications, especially writings by the aspiring English diplomat Thomas Edward Bowdich, constructed a reductive narrative of "African art". Additionally, by centering Asante cosmopolitanism, the article underscores the dynamic and adaptive strategies that defined Asante imperial visuality. This article is part of the series "Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism" in *British Art Studies*, which is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Projects in the series consider the dispersed and difficult histories of Atlantic worlds, focusing on any aspect of visual and material culture that intersects broadly with the United Kingdom and the United States. The aim is to encourage transhistorical thinking by posing questions about histories and legacies of empire, networks of trade, transatlantic slavery, and creolisation. "Atlantic Worlds" initiated a virtual residency programme at the journal that ran from 2021 to 2022, where awardees shared ideas with each other and were supported by expert interlocutors. Awardees were Adrian Anagnost, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Mia L. Bagneris, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Christopher Maxwell, and Adrienne Rooney. Invited interlocutors were Gaiutra Bahadur, Pamela Fletcher, Aaron Kamugisha, Catherine Molineux, José Lingna Nafafé, and Kerry Sinanan.
In 1954 a Roman temple dedicated to Mithras was discovered in a bombsite in the City of London. The bust of Mithras that was uncovered drew national attention, with thousands coming to see the excavated remains. The history of the site, stretching from Roman London to its contemporary transformation into Bloomberg's European headquarters, testifies to the force of money in shaping urban space, while the sculptures discovered there demanded a cultic response, then and now, from their audience. The bust of Mithras became both a sign of the war dead, otherwise suppressed in official discourse, and a challenge to the idea that cities were ordered, controlled environments. Finally, Mithras emerges as a counterpoint to the growing financial capital that underpinned post-war London and presents a cyclical, ritualised conception of history that integrates the Roman origins of the city into its twentieth-century manifestation.
This article combines archival research with scientific imaging and analysis to illuminate the materials and methods of Joan Eardley's painting practice during the post-World War II period. At a time of enormous diversification in the look, feel, chemistry, and application of materials used by artists, Eardley's toolkit blended experimentation with tradition and environmental symbiosis. From two distinct studios in Scotland---one in central Glasgow and the other in the coastal fishing village of Catterline---she wrestled a gestural language from oil paint, recycled canvases, and industrial boards that flexed with seasonal humidity or gale force winds. She is thought to have augmented her palette with house paint and boat paint. Focusing on three paintings from the Hunterian collection, this article presents a series of vignettes exploring Eardley's studios, supplies, and paint application against the historical backdrop of art technologies in transition.
This article is the first sustained examination of Ben Nicholson's short-lived engagement with architectural painting. It analyses the three commissions he completed between 1949 and 1952 for large abstract panel paintings in new, distinctively modern forms of public or quasi-public interior space, which, it is suggested, collectively contributed to the post-war, social-democratic reform of ideas of Britain and Britishness. The article traces the development of Nicholson's thinking about the ideal relation of modern painting to modern architecture from the 1930s through to the execution of his panels, and further into the 1950s, when, during years of significant artistic and political change, he called for new architectural painting to be given greater independence from architecture. His changing attitudes are compared to the diverse views of his commissioning architects and shown to owe more to his understanding of early Italian wall painting and American abstract expressionism than to the British mural revival or the international architect-led campaign for a new "synthesis" of the arts. After illuminating his early awareness of large-scale American painting and of Clement Greenberg's concept of "a genre of painting located halfway between the easel and the mural", the article argues that Nicholson's panels exemplified a similar concept of a hybrid genre that side-stepped the heightened Cold War associations of easel painting with capitalism and mural painting with various forms of socialism, and presaged both the modernist retreat from the integrated mural and the ostensible depoliticisation of large-scale abstract painting.
In 1692 a young Black boy known as Peregrine Tyam was painted alongside Mary Lawley in a portrait commissioned by her husband, John Verney, to mark their marriage. It is very likely that Peregrine Tyam was enslaved, as indicated by the silver collar he wears around his neck in the picture. In 1689 he was baptised at around six years of age on the Verney family estate at Middle Claydon church, and he lived with John Verney until his death in 1707. By the end of the seventeenth century, the depiction of a Black attendant alongside a White sitter was a fashionable format in British portraiture, directly reflecting Britain's rise to dominance in the transatlantic trade in enslaved African people and the growing number of enslaved people living and working in elite British households. The portrait of Peregrine Tyam and Mary Lawley is a rare example of a picture of this type where the identity of the Black sitter is known and is accompanied by a body of documentary evidence that allows for the partial reconstruction of their biography. In this case, it includes a letter written by Tyam himself that provides an even rarer glimpse into the experience of a young Black man in early modern England in his own voice. The depiction of Tyam in the portrait served a symbolic purpose, sending a message to the viewer about the Verney family's status and John Verney's involvement with the Royal African Company. However, this article argues that Tyam's portrait should be understood as more than a symbolic stock representation. Analysed alongside documentary sources from the Verney family archive, it provides us with an insight into Tyam's life with the family. The portrait is evidence that in some cases it is possible to restore the identities of the numerous unknown Black sitters in early modern British portraits, along with their voices and a sense of their experiences.
For perhaps as long as they have been the focus of scholarly attention, periodicals as objects have always posed a challenge to those trying to convey their understanding of them to an audience, be it in the three-dimensional space of a museum display or in the two-dimensional context of a photographic reproduction printed on a page. Conventionally, in each instance only a single opening---two facing pages of a magazine---can be presented to the viewer at any one time, a condition determined by the physical nature of the codex format: the bind of the bound. Charting the range of strategies that have been employed to try to overcome---or at least compensate for---this furnishes us with the chance to reflect on what producing periodicals means today, both as a historical subject and as a contemporary practice. As part of this historiographical endeavour, the intersection of the fields of periodical studies and digital humanities provides a useful opportunity to think through the various questions that such printed material engenders. How were periodicals used in the past? How are those same periodicals used today? And how are they employed now to understand how they were then? How too might such layers of use (and meaning) be captured and conveyed? In this article I seek to address such issues through looking at a single case study, the photographic magazine *Camerawork*, which was produced in Britain between 1976 and 1985 by members of the Half Moon Photography Workshop.
