Novel Impressions: Prints, Textiles, and the Visual Economy in Europe, 1815-1851
Creators: name: Wilder, Courtney
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Printed Textiles
subject: Printmaking
subject: Design History
subject: Industrial Revolution
subject: France
subject: Britain
subject: Art History
subject: Arts

description: During a key transitional period within the Industrial Revolution between the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the 1851 opening of the Great Exhibition of All Nations, British and French textile designers generated a stunning variety of experimental designs for printed dress fabrics. Often garishly colored, curiously arranged, or filled with bizarre, abstracted forms, the novel designs demanded new modes of perception from viewers and challenged conventional aesthetic standards for ornamentation. Such designs were vehemently rejected by the mid-century design reform movement, and they remain little-known today. Taking these adventurous designs for inexpensive dress fabrics seriously, this dissertation argues that such textiles should be understood not only as objects of visual interest in their own right, but also as powerful visual distillations of an interconnected web of phenomena that scholars have associated with the emergence of modernity in nineteenth-century Europe, particularly the period’s explosion of new graphic media, its fascination with technology, and the increasingly volatile circulation of capital encouraged by expanding demand for novel manufactured goods. To facilitate new perspectives on what has been seen as a chaotic period in design history (while also bringing order to a diverse range of primary sources drawn from eighty archives in six countries), the dissertation is arranged into three parts. Eleven individual chapters explore how translations of print media, broadly conceived, informed the creation and reception of three key styles of textile design: the eccentric style, what I am calling the “manual” style, and the rainbow style. While the eccentric style privileged cutting-edge applications of intricate and precise machine-engraving, the manual style evoked the casual mark-making and elegant calligraphic flourishes associated with the human hand. The rainbow style, meanwhile, was rooted in explorations of hazy ombré shading, while also highlighting a new array of brightly prismatic dyes. The conceptual framework of the dissertation positions these printed textiles as key actors in an international visual economy that was also conditioned by issues of class and gender. New forms of print media emerged during the same years as printed textiles and in the same regions, targeting new consumers. Emergent print technologies were also closer to commerce than other visual art forms, creating a space for mutual interaction. Intermedial connections considered in the dissertation include shared representational strategies and iconography, but also material convergences in modes of making. As visual ideas and imagery moved across and through this visual economy, from paper to cloth and back again, and from male producers to female consumers, their meanings could shift dramatically, inflecting the implicated media and those who consumed them. I explore relationships between, for example, engine-turned designs for paper banknotes and the eccentric style; lithographic printing and the manual style; and early experiments in photography and the rainbow style, to cite only a few. The dissertation ultimately reveals the extent to which novel styles of printed textiles exceeded the conventions and capabilities not only of contemporary “fine” art, but also those of the very media on which the textiles depended for visual inspiration as well as visual representation. These textiles have, in other words, been lost in translation many times over; this dissertation underlines their importance in facilitating a fuller understanding of early nineteenth-century European visual culture.