Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World

In Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, Zara Anishanslin uses a painting of a colonial woman in a silk dress to write a material history of the Atlantic world. An example of how the discipline of material culture is making the global turn, Anishanslin looks closely at the physical nature and life histories of objects, particularly silk, art, mahogany, and similar things that would have filled the colonial elite home. She considers how these things are made, used, displayed, and reused. She queries how prior meanings, broader categories, and cultural and social worlds inform the meanings surrounding objects. Anishanslin thus situates the home, the family, and the body at the center of analysis and importantly shows how consumers, many of whom were female, produced global histories. She does not fetishize social mobility but rather acknowledges that empires are made up of people who often do not move far from their local communities. Focusing on individuals and things, rather than states and political economies, Anishanslin argues that she has uncovered the hidden histories of Britain's commercial empire in the eighteenth century. She especially shows how luxury items were both local and global things, serving as commodities, gifts, status symbols, and objects of fascination and edification. Anishanslin organizes her study around twomen and two women involved in the making of a 1746 portrait of Anne Shippen Willing (1710 91) Specifically, Anishanslin writes the history of the artist and the sitter and the silk designer and the weaver who produced the gorgeous fabric that adorned Willing's body. None left an extensive personal archive, so Anishanslin turns to the objects that these people produced and consumed. These things, she argues, reveal the history of sericulture and silk weaving in the British Empire and the uses of art, fashion, and other commodities to display social and political status in the colonies, and the demonstrate how art and consumption also helped develop a distinctive "American" identity. This is not a comprehensive study of art, silk, or the British Atlantic, but it is an investigation of some of the men and women who held together this far flung world. The story begins in London with the silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688 1763) A woman in a man's profession, Garthwaite became one of the most successful designers in the mid eighteenth century, and an example of her work was the cloth used in Willing's dress. Anishanslin's creative analysis illustrates this unique woman's training and working life and her British and foreign influences, and she contemplates how it was possible a woman could be so successful in this trade. We then learn how Spitalfields' weaver Simon Julins (1686/8 1778) wove together Garthwaite's global designs to create the cloth that adorned bodies and decorated homes around the empire. Julins's history not only establishes the importance of the silk trade in the imperial economy but also demonstrates the impact of European culture on British history, as he most likely was a descendent of the French Huguenots who occupied a central place in the silk weaving profession. The narrative then crosses the Atlantic and moves from production to consumption with the biography of the Philadelphia born Anne Shippen Willing. The granddaughter of Philadelphia's first mayor, the Quaker merchant Edward Shippen, Anne was married to Charles Willing, one of colonial America's wealthiest merchants, whose trade in such things as lemons, grain, rum, textiles and other dry goods, and slaves helped finance the American Revolution. Anne's portrait, Anishanslin argues, displayed the social, economic and political position of this important merchant family. Finally, Anishanslin also writes about the painter, Robert Feke (c. 1707 c. 1751) who some art historians have identified as "'the first nativeborn genius' in colonial American art" (226) Feke and his colleagues were influenced by European traditions, were enmeshed in an intellectual community that stretched across the Atlantic, and yet were also architects of a distinctive "American" public culture. Throughout the book, 140 Book Reviews