Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College

Session I
Friday, October 26th 2007, Wren Room, Sanborn

• Frédéric Ogée, Art History, Université Paris VII – Denis Diderot, Paris, 'The Extreme Different Face': Hogarth, Otherness, and France
  In this paper, I would like to argue that William Hogarth’s representation of the French has too often been conveniently reduced to hilarious bouts of Gallophobia and never properly examined as part of his aesthetic conceptio--and artistic grasp--of otherness in human nature. While his line of beauty invites the eye to a form of meandering progress‚ between extremes, his art is a constant attempt to offer total‚ images of reality, in which extreme‚ forms play a crucial part in creating variety (for him the highest quality in a picture) and in suggesting a conjectural middle‚ province that carried/carries strong political implications. His pictures of the French could therefore be looked at more as rich (if opportunistic) contributions to a visual catalogue of extremes, somehow rich in otherness, than as mere xenophobic clichés.

• Peter Wagner, English Studies, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Germany, The Aesthetics of Hogarthian Humour
  I will explore, in a first step, what kind of humour is at work in the satirical art of William Hogarth. This humor was, to some extent, decidedly different from that of the 20th century, grounded as it was in plebeian entertainment and carnival but seen and projected for a new audience. In a second step, I will try to inquire into the aesthetics that inspired the particular variety of Hogarth's visual humor as part of a new bourgois and enlightened world view discursively established by Hogarth's contemporaries Swift, Fielding and Sterne.
• Romita Ray, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University, Nabobery Galore
  This paper will examine the highly contested figure of the nabob, the eighteenth-century British man settled in India who became the target of caricatures, a play at the Haymarket Theater, and in one particular case, the defendant of an infamous trial in London that dragged on for eight long years. My analysis will focus on how humorous representations of nabobs published in England, poked fun at both real and fictitious characters and simultaneously categorized a colonial community of men who seemed Indianized in the eyes of their fellow citizens. In doing so, I hope to unmask the deep-seated fear of the loss of Christian identity in the colonies and the prevailing disdain for the rise of a newly moneyed class of successful colonial settlers. Fascinating yet repulsive, nabobery toppled expectations of British character and sensibility. As such, my paper will investigate the ways in which nabobs were laughed at, vilified, and in some cases, heroized, even as Britons acknowledged the advantages of their presence in an increasingly imperial India.
• Kathy Hart, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Charles Fox and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform
  Charles Fox and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform. This talk will look at caricatures about Charles Fox, civil liberties, and reform by Gillray and others and discuss how the subtext of slavery appears within certain visual satires and their accompanying texts. It will examine how sublimated images of race and "other" are apparent in the context of the larger debate about free speech and reform.
• Respondent: David Bindman, Morton Senior Fellow, Dartmouth College

Session II
Saturday, October 27th 2007, Wren Room, Sanborn

• Sarah Betzer, Department of Art, The University of Virginia, Androgyny, Ideality, and Anxiety on the Grand Tour
  This paper takes as its focus image making in the context of border-crossing – and boundary crossing more broadly – within the framework of the Grand Tour, conceived as a process of transformation and acculturation. Within the topography of Grand Tour experiences, the aesthetic encounter was understood as instrumental for European travelers to Italy, particularly as theorized in the writing of Johann-Joachim Winckelmann. In part due to the popularity of Winckelmann’s widely circulated enthusiasms, the aesthetic experience focused primarily upon sculptural objects from antiquity that thematized the ideality of androgynous human form. The paper examines representations of the Grand Tour high and low, taking off from important work by Chloe Chard, Richard Wrigley and others who have revealed the Grand Tour as a site for the consolidation of national and cultural identities through the anxious and pleasurable processes of tourism and exploration. It is my contention that a series of eighteenth-century images of dilettanti, “bear-leaders” (the paid tutors of Grand Tourists), and antiquarians reveal an anxiety attendant to the aesthetic education through which the Grand Tour was constituted. Through analysis of satiric images by Gillray and Rowlandson, we will examine how an aesthetics of androgyny advocated by Winckelmann and embraced by Grand Tourists at once isolated a canon of ideal sculptural form and engaged in threatening ways with period discourses on sexual deviancy and national identity.
• Melissa Hyde, School of Art and Art History, University of Florida, Gainesville, Humoring the Subject: Women and the Painted Self-Portrait
  Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Adelaide Labille-Guiard and Angelica Kauffman are artists familiar to most eighteenth-century specialists. Yet, before any of these women rose to prominence in the art world, they were preceded by the pastelist, and académicienne Marie-Suzanne Roslin (née Giroust). Roslin produced what must surely be counted as one of the most stunning, original and ground-breaking self-portraits of the eighteenth-century. It is effectively a double portrait, as she shows herself copying Maurice Quentin de La Tour's famous self-portrait of 1737, entitled The Artist Laughing - a work that itself plays with the idea of the artist as Democritus, the laughing philosopher. While Mme Roslin shows herself with a kind of Mona Lisa smile, rather than laughing, her self-portrait with that of Quentin de La Tour, is rife with visual puns, visual play and humor, even. This paper will offer a close reading of Giroust-Roslin's stunning and sophisticated self-portrait, taking into account the special problems that artistic practice, identity and self-representation presented for one of the first ambitious French femme-peintres of the eighteenth century. One of the central aims will be to think about how visual humor, play and women's relationship to laughter factored into this and other self-representations by eighteenth-century women artists.
• Todd Porterfield, Department of Art History, Université de Montréal, Theorizing Visual Satire: Caricature and Hate Speech
  The endeavor of this paper is to question the very reasonable assumption that guides this session on visual humor in the global eighteenth century and that also is the inspiration for the most important and progressive caricature studies over the last decade. I would name that assumption as caricature's brief to characterize, essentialize, divide, and rank. According to this productive working hypothesis, caricature functions to make distinctions that subtend national boundaries and serve imperial and racist agendas. My paper will take the opposite tact. It will attempt to wedge open the inquiry by reading caricature's brief against Judith Butler's model of hate speech. It will examine the shifting dominance in visual satire from engraving, to etching, to lithography, and it will ask to what extent particular printmaking techniques were well equipped (or not) to carry out caricature's brief. Finally, it will also explore theories of laughter in which le rire, serves to dissolve rather than affirm boundaries, as in Baudelaire's narration in which at some imagined moment of the long eighteenth century Bernardin de Saint Pierre's Virginie's alights in Paris from Arcadie, where she sees her first caricature, laughs for the first time, loses her angelic wings and merges with the fallen state of the modern city.
• Respondent: Patricia Crown (University of Missouri-Columbia)
  Patricia Crown is Professor Emerita of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Art History and of Women's Studies at the University of Missouri. Her research is primarily on British visual culture between 1750 and 1850 dealing with women artists, book illustration, theories of the Rococo and comic art and Hogarth. She has curated exhibitions: British Comic Art 1730-1830 From the Yale Center for British Art and Hogarth and Images of Women at the Huntington Art Galleries. Her publications on comic art include British Comic Art and the Rococo, Visual Music: E.F. Burney and a Hogarth Revival, and Sporting with Clothes: John Collet's Prints in the 1770s. She is currently working on an essay about E.F. Burney (who was contemporary with Rowlandson and Gillray, and the creator of such important comic paintings as The Waltz and The Elegant Establishment for Young Ladies) for the Walpole Society.