Sea Currents In Nineteenth Century Art Science And Culture

How did scientists, artists, designers, manufacturers and amateur enthusiasts experience and value the sea and its products? Examining the commoditization of the ocean world during the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates how the transaction of oceanic objects inspired a multifaceted material discourse stemming from scientific exploration, colonial expansion, industrialization, and the rise of middle-class leisure. From the seashore to the seabed, marine organisms and environments, made tangible through processing and representational technologies, captivated practitioners and audiences. Combining essays and case studies by scholars, curators, and scientists, Sea Currents investigates the collecting and display, illustration and ornamentation, and trade and consumption of marine flora and fauna, analysing their material, aesthetic and commercial dimensions. Traversing global art history, the history of science, empire studies, anthropology, ecocriticism and material culture, this book surveys the currency of marine matter embedded in the economies and ecologies of a modernizing ocean world.

Making Waves: Crosscurrents in the Study of Nineteenth-Century Art points the way toward futher appreciation and understanding of an era that still resonates strongly in our contemporary culture. Making Waves: Crosscurrents in the Study of Nineteenth-Century Art honours the life work of Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, who continues to lead the field in the study of the art of the nineteenth century. The twenty-eight essays in this book are authored by some of her many friends, students, and colleagues, including seasoned academics and those at the beginning of their careers; museum professionals and private-sector arts administrators; and American, European, and Chinese scholars. Following Petra Chu's example, and avoiding opaque theoretical language and extended technical analysis, authors present original ideas, based primarily on the study of objects and their documented historical contexts. Though their methodologies are diverse, their purposes are clear and their language straight-forward. The essays thoughtfully and respectfully address the solid reality of the nineteenth century in all of its complex (and sometimes repugnant) sensibilities. They disrupt traditional art historical categories and methodologies, and highlight topics that have been long ignored and overlooked. Making Waves demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, that art historians still have much to say to each other and to their readers, and that nineteenth-century art has only begun to be explored in all its complexity and variety. Laurinda S. Dixon is Professor Emerita of Art History at Syracuse University, New York. Her scholarship considers the intersection of art and science- particularly alchemy, herbalism, medicine, astrology, and music- from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. She is the author of many articles, book chapters, and ten books.

Before the eighteenth century, the ocean was regarded as a repulsive and chaotic deep. Despite reinvention as a zone of wonder and pleasure, it continued to be viewed in the West and elsewhere as ?uninhabited?, empty space. This collection, spanning the eighteenth century to the present, recasts the ocean as ?social space?, with particular reference to visual representations. Part I focuses on mappings and crossings, showing how the ocean may function as a liminal space between places and cultures but also connects and imbricates them. Part II considers ships as microcosmic societies, shaped for example by the purpose of the voyage, the mores of shipboard life, and cross-cultural encounters. Part III analyses narratives accreted to wrecks and rafts, what has sunk or floats perilously, and discusses attempts to recuperate plastic flotsam. Part IV plumbs ocean depths to consider how underwater creatures have been depicted in relation to emergent disciplines of natural history and museology, how mermaids have been reimagined as a metaphor of feminist transformation, and how the symbolism of coral is deployed by contemporary artists. This engaging and erudite volume will interest a range of scholars in humanities and social sciences, including art and cultural historians, cultural geographers, and historians of empire, travel, and tourism.

This edited collection re-examines the relationship between art and the sea, reflecting growing interest in the intersections between art and maritime history. Artists have always been fascinated by and drawn to the sea and this book considers some of the themes and approaches in art that have evolved as a result of this captivation. The chapters consider how an examination of art can provide new insights into existing knowledge of port and maritime history, and are representative of a ‘cultural turn’ in port and maritime studies, which is becoming increasingly visible. In Art and the Sea, multiple perspectives are offered as a result of the contributors’ individual positions and methodologies: some museological, others art historical or maritime-historical. Each chapter proposes a new way of building upon available interpretations of port and maritime history: whether this be to reject, support or reconsider existing knowledge. The book as a whole is a timely addition, therefore, to the developing body of revisionist texts in port and maritime history. The interdisciplinary nature of the volume relates to a current trend for interdisciplinarity in art history and will appeal to those with an interest in art history, geography, sociology, history and transport / maritime studies.

Introduction: The hungry ocean / Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas -- William Falconer and the Empire of the deep / Siobhan Carroll -- Scientists writing and knowing the ocean / Helen M. Rozwadowski -- Charles Francis Hall's Arctic researchers / Hester Blum -- Keeping up with the Morrells: sailors and the construction of American identity in antebellum sea narratives / Amy Parsons -- "The perils of crossings": nineteenth-century navigations of City and sea / Sophie Gilmartin -- Seeing through water: the paintings of Zach Pritchard / Margaret Cohen -- Pacific Ocean flowers: Colonial seaweed albums / Molly Duggins -- The sea as green fields: calenture and Wordsworth's Rural ocean / Frank Mabee -- Melville's "Brit": an etymological and ecocritical chomp into Moby-Dick / Richard J. King -- The ocean as quasi-object, or Ecocriticism and the doll from the deep / Patricia Yaeger

This volume examines the cultural importance of the coastline in Britain during a time of vast change.

Scottish zoologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's visionary ideas in On Growth and Form continue to evolve a century after its publication, aligning it with current developments in art and science. Practitioners, theorists, and historians from art, science, and design reflect on his ongoing influence. Overall, the anthology links evolutionary theory to form generation in both scientific and cultural domains. It offers a close look at the ways cells, organisms, and rules become generative in fields often otherwise disconnected. United by Thompson's original exploration of how physical forces propel and shape living and nonliving forms, essays range from art, art history, and neuroscience to architecture, design, and biology. Contributors explore how translations are made from the discipline of biology to the cultural arena. They reflect on how Thompson's study relates to the current sciences of epigenesis, self-organization, biological complex systems, and the expanded evolutionary synthesis. Cross-disciplinary contributors explore the wide-ranging aesthetic ramifications of these sciences. A timeline links the history of evolutionary theory with cultural achievements, providing the reader with a valuable resource.

The nineteenth century was the great age of landscape painting in Europe and America. In an era of rapid industrialization and transformation of landscape, pictures of natural scenes were what people wanted most to display in their homes. The most popular and marketable pictures, often degenerating into kitsch, showed a wilderness with a pond or a lake in which obtrusive signs of industry and civilization had been edited out. Inspired by Romantic ideas of the uniqueness of the nation, pictorial and literary art was supposed to portray the «soul» of the nation and the spirit of place, a view commonly adopted by cultural and art historians on both sides of the Atlantic. Arcadian Waters and Wanton Seas argues that nationalistic or exceptionalist interpretations disregard deep-rooted iconological traditions in transatlantic culture. Depictions and ideas of nature go back to the classical ideas of Arcadia and Eden in which fountains, ponds, lakes, rivers, and finally the sea itself are central elements. Following their European colleagues, American artists typically portrayed the American Arcadia through the classical conventions. Arcadian Waters and Wanton Seas adopts the interdisciplinary and comparative methodological perspectives that characterize American studies. The book draws on art history, cultural history, literature, and the study of the production and use of visual images, and will serve well as a textbook for courses on American studies or cultural history of the Western world.