Search Results

In making a choral suite out of the poems for the Five Tudor Portraits of John Skelton, Ralph Vaughan Williams ventured to take some liberties with the text. Certain omissions have been made necessary, partly by the great length of the original, partly from the fact that certain passages did not lend themselves to musical treatment, and partly that certain lines that look well when read cannot conveniently be sung. Williams changed the order of the lines; this seems legitimate, as there does not appear to be an inevitable sequence in Skelton's original order. This fusion is, he hopes, justified by the fact that the character who sings the song in the play has immediately before quoted a line from “Jolly Rutterkin.” The setting is for baritone solo and chorus.

The epilogue shows how the democratization of photography allowed black people to produce images of themselves and their communities when a massive wave of racial caricatures flooded homes in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Visual technologies of the nineteenth century vastly expanded access to cameras which enabled more people to record African American communities and challenge racist ideas. W. E. B. Du Bois exhibited hundreds of photographs taken by Thomas Askew, the African photographer, at the Paris Exposition of 1900. These scenes of black life in Georgia conveyed the power of the ordinary and Du Bois himself wrote that they challenged “conventional American ideas” of black people.

Looks at portraits of the art world produced by Shanghai’s best-known artist, Ren Bonian (1840-1896). Unique for their near-exclusive focus on art world sitters, these are portraits in which the artist collaborated with their subjects to investigate an array of artistic identities, from conventional renderings of the artist as scholar and gentleman, to unexpected depictions of artists as men about town, failures, sell-outs and beggars. These are images that exceed portraiture’s usual purpose of documenting likeness and social status, instead seeking to comment on the modern Chinese artist’s engagement with a complex and demanding urban market and art world.

This chapter investigates the ways in which late nineteenth century concerns about the unauthorised publication of women’s portraits (in advertising, greeting cards and magazines) led to the legal formulation of a right to privacy in the US. It examines the history of this right within debates concerning the 1888 Bill to Protect Ladies, prior to Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’ seminal article, and connects claims to a right to privacy to the advent of the New Woman and women’s broader struggle for equal citizenship. It argues that despite its emphasis on ladylike “modesty” and “reserve”, the case of Roberson v Rochester Folding Box (which led to the enactment of the first privacy laws in the United States) can be read as the protest of a courageous young woman against the use of her photograph within advertising that transformed her into an anonymous “pretty” object of mass consumption. This chapter compares her objections to the masculine language of liberty and freedom espoused in Pavesich v New England Life Insurance Co. In most of the early cases, a right to privacy was employed by young women who objected to their images being handled and circulated by others.

From the first entry of two nebulae into the observational records of Lord Rosse, the chapter follows these objects until they are prepared for the engraver’s plate and thus, publication. The ever multiplying preliminary sketches for these two objects reveal strategies used by the Rosse project to consolidate the eyes and hands of many assistants. Central to these layered movements and accretion of visual information is the gradual familiarization that an observer gained with an object–a process that was vital in his coming-to-know. The second part of this chapter discusses the internal and external demands made for a new procedure of observation, one that was capable of incorporating both the measured and pictorial aspects in one image. The author argues that this shift was as much a reflection of a growing and hardening distinction between scientific and artistic work, as it was a reflection of a general discontent on the part of well known nebular observers outside the Rosse project. But even in the new procedures it remained a challenge to find new ways to coordinate the eyes and hands of many assistants.

To W. E. B. Du Bois, the slave church was African rather than Christian, thus allowing slaves of different backgrounds to find a common spiritual vision and a pan-African identity. His conception of double consciousness—the sense of being divided, an American, a Negro—was derived from Frederick Douglass's conception that “gloom” and “cheer” so burdened slaves that they were almost torn asunder. Yet Du Bois argues that the reliance of slaves on themselves yielded art that called into question the charge that they were inferior to whites. In addition, Du Bois added, in The Souls of Black Folk and elsewhere, that the slave contribution to the nation's economy was so great that any history of labor in America should begin with slave labor. Du Bois revealed a deep antagonism to capitalism and considered socialism, with its roots in ancient African communal societies, preferable.

Emily Engel considers how the early portraits of Simón Bolívar demonstrate the activation of visual imagery as a necessary component in the independence process during a pivotal moment in American history. Portraits of the Liberator built on existing colonial viceregal traditions while deviating from the past in order to articulate a distinctive iconography of political change. This heterogeneous body of military portraits connoted broad-reaching affiliations with nascent revolutionary ideologies. Bolívar used the images to position himself as an agent of international political change, while his supporters commissioned, collected, and displayed Bolivarian portraits as visual demonstrations of loyal allegiance designed to further emphasize the inevitability of his rise to power and the subsequent demise of Spanish imperial domination. Even less ardent allies temporarily displayed Bolivarian portraits as they negotiated their social positions in the liminal space between imperialism and nationalism. Collectively, Bolivarian portraits produced during the Liberator’s lifetime articulated the foundation for the transition of the hero into an icon in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This chapter addresses the role of mass-produced portraits of the Siamese King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868–1910) in a personality cult that emerged in the 1990s among the urban Thai middle class in response to hopes and anxieties about Thai identity in a globalizing world. The portraits are understood as having sought out their owners themselves, even though they are typically obtained as gifts or bought from door-to-door venders, and as capable of exerting agency and providing support and security.

Portraits of some of the YEPP Local Programme Sites give a fuller picture of how YEPP works on the ground. Information on five of the original YEPP sites is updated and some of the new sites are presented to show YEPP's versatility in three ways: expansion within a country; co-operation across frontiers and including Roma young people. An interim evaluation report demonstrated YEPP's success in increasing youth participation through e.g. youth councils, youth banks, the YEPP Transnational Youth Fund, local and regional advocacy and by involving them directly in the evaluation process. This evaluation also showed that the YEPP cross-sectoral ‘Local Support Group’ is a ‘best practice tool’ for promoting and sustaining cross-sectoral partnerships and mutually beneficial inter-generational cooperation. Advocacy has been effective in some sites leading to refocusing on doing something for young people to doing something with young people or to providing funds for initiatives by young people for young people. Despite many improvements achieving high quality evaluations still remained a challenge and seemed to depend on different levels of experience in evaluation across the sites thus identifying where additional support is needed. Overall YEPP continues to grow and demonstrates significant and sustainable positive change.

This introduction explores the circulation and appropriation of Charlotte Brontë’s image, from her professional portrait sketched by George Richmond in 1850, through to the re-discovery of Branwell’s family portraits in the early twentieth century and a host of subsequent discoveries, forgeries and adaptations. Recognisable iconography is a valuable commodity, but Brontë portraiture must (re-)construct Charlotte’s image from the evidence and narratives of a dual biographical tradition, caught between competing claims and representations of private domesticity and public authorship. Brontë’s face may now seem familiar to public audiences, but she is a mutable and malleable icon: she is constantly seen anew, bespeaking our persistent desire to re-imagine her life and work. Brontë’s bicentenary in 2016 provides the cue and occasion for a critical re-assessment of these legacies and cultural afterlives, and this introduction concludes with a survey of research themes identified and explored by the collection’s contributors.

Chapter 1 analyzes the representation of the worker figure. This was the class that was created in the Maoist period to develop the nation and serve as the “vanguard” of the Maoist state, but now its members are wretched and are in the process of being replaced by migrant workers (mingong) without the former worker figure’s previous status, skills, or power. It examines the feelings that the figures stimulate in the films, which range from pride to shame, adulation to pity, development to ruin, and progress to decay, and notes how their previous status as “builders” of the nation is juxtaposed with the films’ depictions of the ruin, a motif that is attached specifically to this class. It argues that the film 24 City commemorates the factory and the worker class through its use of “portraits in performance” and “memories in performance,” arguing that, although they commemorate the factory and its members, they produce a structure of feeling of nostalgia that ultimately elegizes this group’s irreversible decline and disappearance in the Reform era and resigns them to the past.

This chapter considers how pearls’ subjective beauty, their complex and mysterious origins, and their powerful association with mastery of the seas allowed them to remain a powerful heuristic device for the expression of ideas about mutability, worth, and the nature of different places and peoples around the world. As empires moved to objectify profit and regulate the role of subjects in new ways, pearls continued to serve as a useful index (elenco in Spanish, a word Pliny the Elder employed to denote an elongated pearl but that, by the early seventeenth century, had come to stand for the very impulse to order and compartmentalize that the jewel provoked) of peoples’ highly independent and contingent calculations of worth. Through a consideration of crown-sponsored pearl-fishing interventions in the Scottish Highlands and along Swedish rivers close to the city of Gothenburg, this chapter traces how pearls continued to facilitate the expression of distinct approaches to resource husbandry at scales personal and imperial. The chapter further explores the late-seventeenth-century market for pearls in London and the jewel’s unstable political and economic value as expressed in private correspondence as well as in portraits of women and enslaved bodies whose value was considered impermanent and for purchase..

Vaughan Williams’s close relationships with Hubert Foss at Oxford University Press and Adrian Boult at the BBC raised his public profile and likely emboldened him to take greater creative risks, reflected in such works as the Piano Concerto, Riders to the Sea, Dona Nobis Pacem, Five Tudor Portraits, Job, and the Fourth Symphony. Yet these coexisted with far more demure compositions like The Poisoned Kiss, the Hymn Tune Prelude on “Song 13” by Orlando Gibbons, a host of folk arrangements and sacred pieces, and occasional works written for amateur musicians and community celebrations. Still, many of these compositions extended his streak of writing works that defied obvious formal or generic conventions, often balancing complicated juxtapositions of unconventional pitch collections against streams of diatonic parallel triads and complex chromatic counterpoint. The Fourth Symphony and the Piano Concerto arguably represent the high points of such an approach, and may reflect something of the unsettled personal and cultural conditions Vaughan Williams faced at the time. Such assertions, however, should be tempered by the fact that many of the pieces written during this period met with both critical and popular acclaim, despite his own pessimistic assessment of his abilities.

George, at the apex of his career, is habitually on the financial brink. Monie is elevated at MOMA to director of publications and exhibitions. Glenway’s The Pilgrim Hawk is well received. Russell and Mildred become parents. Young George Tichenor is hired at 640 Madison. George is smitten, so “Tich” occasionally models. Hitler marches into Poland in September 1939. France falls by June 1940. In March 1941, George vacations in the Bahamas at wealthy lesbian eccentric Marion “Joe” Carstairs’s island paradise. America’s 1941 Lend-Lease Act aids Britain. “Tich” joins the American-British Ambulance Corps (ABBC). Sailing aboard the Zamzam to South Africa, he and fellow volunteers are shelled by the Germans. Tich’s fate is unknown for weeks, though ultimately the Americans are repatriated. In November 1941, George shows “two hundred portraits” at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, consolidating his reputation as a premier photographic portraitist. Soon after, the bombing of Pearl Harbor brings America into World War II.