Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction, “Things Change”, Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware, USA; Kristel Smentek, MIT, USA

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

Index

Promotional Information

Material Cultures of the Global 18th Century collects ground-breaking essays by a diverse roster of art historians to showcase innovative research on understudied objects that illuminate the global material worlds of eighteenth-century art.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

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.
*Nancy Um, Associate Director for Research and Knowledge Creation, Getty Research Institute, USA*

A new history of eighteenth-century art is being written in books like Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century. Ten highly original, meticulously researched, and conceptually exciting essays encourage us to think expansively about material culture’s role in shaping global history.
*Stacey Sloboda, Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA*

This important volume puts material culture and its protean meaning-making at the center of eighteenth-century art history. Bellion's and Smentek's lucid introduction, and the innovative scholars they bring into conversation, are united by their admirable attentiveness to objects and voices from around the globe.
*Amy Freund, Associate Professor and The Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History, Southern Methodist University, USA*