‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’: Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre,Art and Journalism in Victorian London

This article examines the vibrant cultural milieu inhabited by one of Victorian Britain's most famous cartoonists, Matthew Somerville Morgan. Morgan is well-known as the cartoonist who attacked Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life (and her associations with John Brown), and the lifestyle of Albert, Prince of Wales, in the short-lived rival to Punch: the Tomahawk. Likewise, his post-1870 career in New York as cartoonist of the ‘Caricature War’ over the 1872 Presidential elections, and involvement with ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody have been well-studied. However, his involvement with the world of the 1860s Victorian stage – and the social circles in which he moved – have not been given close attention. This broader social, cultural, and economic context is essential to understanding Morgan's role as a cartoonist-critic of politics, class, gender and art in Victorian Britain. Special attention is given to the ways in which Morgan's work as a theatrical scene-painter informed his other pursuits, including his political cartoons for Fun, the Comic News and the Tomahawk. So central was the theatre to Morgan's life story that he may be appropriately described as an ‘epitheatrical’ figure. Indeed he is one of the most spectacular exemplars of the interconnected worlds of journalism, high art and theatre in Victorian London. The theatre provided him with the artistic and journalistic connections needed to raise himself above his lower-class origins; to move in ‘clubland’ and fashionable bohemian society; and to win an influential place in the key political and cultural debates of his age.     

The Secret of England's Greatness

The Secret of England's Greatness is a portrait by Thomas Jones Barker of Queen Victoria meeting an African envoy and presenting him with a copy of the Bible. Painted around 1863, it has become an icon of British imperialism in this period and of the justification of colonial expansion in terms of the transmission of the values of the Bible. As such, the portrait appears confident and unambiguous: the secret of England's greatness is unravelled and the truth is exposed. This article seeks to disturb the apparent absence of mystery in this painted encounter and to examine what remains concealed in the meeting between the white sovereign and the black emissary. Moving from Barker's painting to William Mulready's The Toyseller, which was completed in the same years and depicts a black pedlar trying to sell a wooden toy to a white mother and child, the article uncovers, within the language of painting and its surrounding discourses, a different kind of disturbing and exhilarating secret, concerned with racial identity and mid-Victorian desire. Working from a reading of the surface of the paintings to related representations of blackness in nineteenth-century science and culture, the article considers how The Toyseller negotiates the proximity of the figures of the black pedlar and the white mother and child and the significance of the compositional gap between them and suggests that Mulready's painting visualizes many of the issues that were at the heart of British imperialism in the middle of the nineteenth century, following the abolition of slavery.     

The ‘Ungallant Silence of the Historian’: Elizabeth Stone,Esther Owen and the Art of Needlework

This essay explores the challenges of authorship for two women authors of important needlework books during the 1840s. Elizabeth Stone authored the first British history of needlework, the Art of Needlework (1840), and Esther Owen wrote an influential pattern book, the Illuminated Ladies' Book of Useful and Ornamental Needlework (1844), but both women were powerless over their work when authorial mis-attribution and financial mismanagement hindered their efforts to engage in professional careers. Countless anonymous writers of needlework articles and guidebooks provided scholars with a treasure of textual artifacts that contain valuable cultural and historical information about women's lives, whether the women were readers, editors or writers. Yet the lack of specific bibliographical and biographical details about needlework books and their authors often frustrate adequate scholarly reappraisal. The tradition of anonymity and a general lack of respect for domestic women's art from publishers and contemporaries outside the woman's sphere created a dearth of archival material, and careless reviewers spurred mistakes and omissions that sometimes began as early as the first printing and continue from that moment until now. The careers of Stone and Owen serve as case studies of complications for women working in the writer's trade, and of problems encountered by scholars writing nineteenth-century women's history.     

ART IN HOSPITAL SPACES

There is a keen interest in hospital design in the UK fuelled by the largest hospital building programme ever undertaken within the NHS. Architects and NHS planners are gaining advice and inspiration from the growing evidence‐based design movement. Part of this movement is interested in the role of artworks in creating soothing, therapeutic environments. This paper draws on the experience of a research project on the role of art in a new hospital in the North East of England to suggest that there might be an additional cultural role for art in hospitals, and for hospital buildings. The paper examines the wider evidence for this and the history behind it, and places the idea within an aesthetic framework with reference to research results from the study.     

Second Laws,Two Cultures,and the Emergence of an Ecosystem Aesthetics

Abstract

The appropriation of scientific concepts by the humanities and the visual arts exemplifies what many feel are both the pitfalls and possibilities of interdisciplinary engagement. The principle of entropy, which C. P. Snow claimed could serve as a litmus test of the ‘two cultures’ divide, provides an excellent starting point for exploring how artists have employed scientific concepts far beyond their original contexts. As a case study in interdisciplinarity, the use of entropy in the visual arts is also a lens to consider the evolution of an artistic proposal from the 1960s known as ‘system aesthetics’. As an early challenge to the clean demarcation of art and science, system aesthetics was a precedent for what might be described as the emergence of an ecosystem aesthetics within contemporary art and design today.     

D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form and the Concept of Dynamic Form in Postwar Avant-Garde Art Theory

Abstract

The impact is considered of D’Arcy Thompson’s notion of biological form as set out in On Growth and Form on postwar avant-garde experimental art practices associated with the Independent Group, Nigel Henderson’s photography, and László Moholy-Nagy’s post-Bauhaus art theory. How Thompson’s insistence on the importance of physical forces in shaping biological form, and of distortion as a component of symmetrical systems, influenced the writings and practices of these artists, is explored, linking abstraction to legacies concerned with materiality and technique encountered earlier in Constructivism. Henderson’s photograms and ‘stressed photography’ are shown to be directly inspired by Thompson’s conception of form as a diagram of forces, and attest to a novel understanding of rules of symmetry in abstract form that may be seen in the dynamic processes at play in complex natural phenomena. How Moholy-Nagy explored these notions theoretically is examined, for example in his definition of drawing in Vision in Motion, which cites Thompson directly as a source of inspiration.     

Digital imaging technology and experimental archeology: a methodological framework for the identification and interpretation of fire modified rock (FMR)

This paper presents the results of a series of experiments for the identification and analysis of fire modified rock (FMR). FMR is a common but frequently overlooked artifact type. Experiments were conducted simulating the effects of different hypothetical burning scenarios on rocks similar to those found in a South African Middle Stone Age site. A digital imaging method was then used to quantify FMR color values, designed to limit intra-analyst bias. Statistical tests and a blind test suggest that unburned rocks and experimental FMR can be separated statistically based on physical appearance. Two burning scenario models, based on measured experimental data were applied to archaeological FMR from a South African Middle Stone Age site named Pinnacle Point 5-6 (PP5-6) and show that the archaeological samples are not statistically different from a simulated campfire and possibly a lithic raw material heat-treatment fire.     

An Experimental Technological Study of Upper Paleolithic Kostenki-type Figurines

Principal stages in the manufacture of zoomorphic, polyiconic, and anthropomorphic Upper Paleolithic figurines are reconstructed. General factors determining their characteristics include universal conventions of representation and the limited set of technological operations available, whereas local factors include specific ways of processing materials and combining artistic techniques, the manner of individual masters, technological faults and accidents, as well as taphonomic processes.     

Analyzing Fertility and Attraction in the Paleolithic: The Venus Figurines

Countless hypotheses have focused on the enigmatic “Venuses”, but most are not testable. The current authors investigate a hypothesis suggested by R.D. Guthrie involving the waist-to-hip ratio. This measurement determines fertility, beauty, and health in modern females; a 0.7 indicates cross-cultural beauty and fertility. Guthrie argued that the statuettes share an average waist-to-hip ratio of 0.655, indicating that Paleolithic males preferred curvier women. We sought to test this and analyze regional data. Our mean was significantly different than Guthrie's and we found evidence for regional differences. While some statuettes may have served as Paleo-erotica, it seems unlikely that they all did.     

The Unhelpful Notion of ‘Renaissance man’

The current journalistic use of the term ‘Renaissance man’ to describe someone whose work straddles boundaries between today's specialisms is a hindrance to understanding almost any aspect of the culture of the Renaissance — a culture within which both ‘art’ and ‘science’ had meanings different from those they have now, the most significant intellectual division being between the learned and the practical traditions. We look first at the learned tradition of the universities (where teaching was in Latin). The people considered include William Harvey, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Regiomontanus and (very briefly) Isaac Newton. Within the practical tradition, centred on workshops, we consider the state shipyards in Venice (where Galileo claimed to have learned much), workshop practices in general and the emergence of the notion of ‘Fine Arts’. The individuals considered include Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael, as well as the famous clockmaker Jost Bürgi (who taught Kepler about algebra). We conclude by considering the transfer of skills between these two traditions. There are several areas of overlap, but here we concentrate attention on the story of algebra. Algebra was invented by al-Khwarizmi (whose name gives us the term ‘algorithm’) in the ninth century, within learned mathematics, in Baghdad. In the West, elementary algebra, derived from al-Khwarizmi's work but in the simplified form of problems, became part of ‘practical mathematics’. Slowly, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, developed forms of algebra crossed over into the learned tradition. This is as much a matter of crossing social barriers as of crossing intellectual ones. Eventually, the practical tradition as a whole became absorbed as an elementary part of the learned one.