Tricia Cusack

The reading figure has been a recurrent theme in Western art, especially from the nineteenth century. This book explores different values ascribed to reading and contemporary constructions of the reader in Ireland in the long nineteenth century. It examines Irish portraits in which figures are depicted reading or holding a book. 'Irish art' here refers to work framed in some way by experience of Ireland and its history, culture, and politics. The book argues that in a patriarchal society, imperial and nationalist ideologues alike tended to devalue reading, especially fiction, as an unmanly occupation and men shown reading may fail to embody a manly attitude. However, the spread of the novel, and the introduction of 'silent reading' allowed women of the middle and upper classes, often Anglo-Irish, to engage with a range of imaginative reading materials away from patriarchal surveillance. The book shows how visual images of such women readers in Ireland drew on and contributed to the transnational emergence of the “New Woman”.

Review:
"This engaging and erudite volume fizzes with ideas and originality and elsewhere: Cusack's engaging style makes light work of dense material, while never compromising on erudition, in a cohesive overview that integrates histories of literature and visual art".
Emer McGarry, in Irish Arts Review, Summer (June-August 2022), pp. 116-117.

The growth of nationalism from the nineteenth century created a demand for visual representations of the national territory and riverscapes like Claude Monet’s impressions of the Seine, Isaak Levitan’s Volga views, or Thomas Cole’s Hudson scenery, became iconic not least because they embodied nationalist ideas about place and culture. The riverscape could not only symbolize the nation’s physical character, but through aspects such as style, the figures portrayed, and the nature of the implied spectator, it could represent the nation’s cultural identity.
Powerful religious and political groups at different times, in diverse cultures have appropriated river mythologies. This book suggests that modern riverscapes similarly incorporated dominant, frequently religious conceptions of the nation. Drawing on the symbolic potential of rivers to represent life and time, the riverscape provided a metaphor for the mythic stream of national history flowing unimpeded out of the past and into the future. Simultaneously, it fixed and framed the river in a recognizable national imagery. Focusing on five examples, the Hudson, the Thames, the Seine, the Volga and the Shannon, this book shows how riverscapes transformed the abstract idea of the nation into a potent visual and cultural image.

Before the eighteenth century, the ocean was regarded as a repulsive and chaotic deep. Despite reinvention as a zone of wonder and pleasure, it continued to be viewed in the West and elsewhere as “uninhabited”, empty space. This collection, spanning the eighteenth century to the present, recasts the ocean as “social space”, with particular reference to visual representations. Part I focuses on mappings and crossings, showing how the ocean may function as a liminal space between places and cultures but also connects and imbricates them. Part II considers ships as microcosmic societies, shaped for example by the purpose of the voyage, the mores of shipboard life, and cross-cultural encounters. Part III analyses narratives accreted to wrecks and rafts, what has sunk or floats perilously, and discusses attempts to recuperate plastic flotsam. Part IV plumbs ocean depths to consider how underwater creatures have been depicted in relation to emergent disciplines of natural history and museology, how mermaids have been reimagined as a metaphor of feminist transformation, and how the symbolism of coral is deployed by contemporary artists. This engaging and erudite volume will interest a range of scholars in humanities and social sciences, including art and cultural historians, cultural geographers, and historians of empire, travel, and tourism.


CONTENTS

List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space
Tricia Cusack


PART I EXPLORING THE OCEAN: COLONIAL CROSSINGS

Chapter 1
From Mare Tenebrorum to Atlantic Ocean: A cartographical biography (1470-1900)
Carla Lois

Chapter 2
The Old World Anew: The Atlantic as the Liminal Site of Expectations
Emily Burns

Chapter 3
Second Encounters in the South Seas: Revisiting the Shores of Cook and Bougainville in the Art of Gauguin, La Farge and Barnfield
Elizabeth C. Childs


PART II SHIPS AS MICROCOSMS OF SOCIETY

Chapter 4
The Artist Travels: Augustus Earle at Sea
Sarah Thomas

Chapter 5
Sailors on Horseback: The Representation of Seamen and Social Space in Eighteenth-Century British Visual Culture
Geoff Quilley

Chapter 6
The “Other” Ships: Dhows and the Colonial Imagination in the Indian Ocean
Erik Gilbert

Chapter 7
Representation, Commerce, and Consumption: The Cruise Industry and the Ocean
Adam Weaver


PART III NARRATIVES OF SHIPWRECKS, RAFTS, AND JETSAM

Chapter 8
Shipwrecks, Mutineers and Cannibals: Maritime Mythology and the Political Unconscious in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Carl Thompson

Chapter 9
The Sea as a Repository: Tacita Dean’s Teignmouth Electron, 1999 and Sean Lynch’s DeLorean Progress Report, 2010
Kirstie North

Chapter 10
Reconstructing the Raft, Semiotics and Memory in the Art of the Shipwreck and the Raft
Yvonne Scott

Chapter 11
Plastic as Shadow: The Toxicity of Objects in the Anthropocene
Pam Longobardi


PART IV NATURAL AND UNNATURAL HISTORIES: OCEANIC IMAGININGS

Chapter 12
A “Dreadful Apparatus”: John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark and the Cultures of Natural History
Emily Ballew Neff

Chapter 13
Mermaids and Metaphors: Dorothea Tanning’s Surrealist Ocean
Victoria Carruthers and Catriona Mcara

Chapter 14
“Something Rich and Strange”: Coral in Contemporary Art
Marion Endt-Jones

Chapter 15
“No Fancy So Wild”: Slippery Gender Models in the Coral Gallery
Pandora Syperek

INDEX
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This collection shows how the marginal territory of the water’s edge has been represented in art in different places at various times and how such art contributed to the formation of cultural and national identities. Essays explore visual cultures of the Jordan and Vltava Rivers; the South African seaside resort of Durban; post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans; and the French Riviera, among other margins of river and sea.


Contents:

Introduction: exploring the water’s edge, Tricia Cusack;

Part I The Nation at the Edge:
Our English Coasts: defence and national identity in 19th-century Britain, Christiana Payne; The Baltic’s edge: architecture and art in the service of Polish maritime policy, 1918–1939, Malgorzata Omilanowska; Hurricane Katrina as visual spectacle: Hurricane On The Bayou and the reframing of American national identity, Anna Hartnell.

Part II Heritage by the Coast:
The architecture and exhibits of Australian maritime museums: changing
views at the water’s edge from Sydney and Perth, William Taylor;
To the Lighthouse: sentinels at the water’s edge, Teresa Costa.

Part III Conflicts of Identity at the Water’s Edge:
The Jordan river in ancient and modern maps, Rachel Havrelock; The fractured embankment: modernity and identity at the edge of the Vltava,
Glyn Newman; Struggling for a day in the sun: the emergence of a
beach culture among African people in Durban, Heather Hughes.

Part IV Regions of Liminality:
Zone of transition: visual culture and national regeneration on the French Riviera, c.1860–1900, Tania Woloshyn; The edge of reason? Dockside and riverbank in J.A. McNeil Whistler’s The Thames Set (1859–1861) and James Tissot’s
paintings of the Thames, 1871–1882, Vicky Greenaway; An der Oder:
river romance in Breslau, Deborah Ascher Barnstone.

Part V The Edge as a Tourist Setting:
Constructing the Donegal seaside at Rosapenna:
imagining Norway in Victorian and Edwardian Ulster, Kevin J. James;
Sunny snaps: commercial photography at the water’s edge, Colin Harding.
Index.

The article considers how women writers and artists in the patriarchal society of turn of the century Dublin connected with, and supported one another, through correspondence, salon culture and female portraiture. Women were prominent both in contemporary political campaigns and in the arts, in which the writer Jane Barlow and the artist Sarah Purser were well-known figures. This article considers their work and careers, focusing on a close correspondence between Barlow and Purser which demonstrates their personal and professional interdependence and traces the emergence of collaborative projects. Their friendship and collaboration are embodied in an oil portrait of Barlow painted by Purser in 1894, in which Barlow sits with an open book and another nearby. It is suggested that this portrait, which brought together two creative women, helped break fresh ground in Ireland, not by simply picturing a writer, but by depicting a new kind of female subject, a woman as intellectual.

Abstract: From the late nineteenth century, the
changing pace of “modern life”, with faster forms of
transport and growing urbanisation, created a particular
emphasis on motion, which some avant-garde artists sought
to incorporate in painting. This project helped engender
novel modes of representation such as Impressionism,
Expressionism and Cubism, which became known
collectively as “modernist”. This paper examines how
modernist pictures of repasts and even “still lifes” were
animated by a sense of the movement that was seen to be
characteristic of modern life. It examines how a sense of
movement in art could be generated by the interactions of
figures, through formal means like the strategic use of
brushstrokes, or how it might be influenced by perceptual
tendencies. According to Gestalt psychology, perception
involved a predisposition for orderly, balanced images.
Gestalt theory could imply a need for imaginary
adjustments to the image in order to regain balance, but
this could also create a sense of movement. Food has long
been a ubiquitous theme of art. In the modern period,
when the experience of movement entered painting, food
items previously represented as static became unstable. This
paper shows how food demonstrates the innovatory
character of modernist art in creating a sense of movement.

this article argues that tea drinking in nineteenth-century Ireland became interwoven with ideologies of gender and social class that resulted in the production of distinct “tea cultures.” these cultures were shaped within a discourse of moderation and excess, order and disruption, dividing along class and gender lines. the article focuses on how visual art and literature helped form and also contest such cultures. thus the Irish tea table was a primarily female space. For upper- and middle-class women, taking tea was associated with values of moderation, order, and respectability, although some, especially among the leisured class, resisted tea- table conformity. by contrast, women in the poorest classes, although increasingly dependent on tea, were deemed ignorant of its correct preparation, and accused of drinking it to excess resulting in ill health and family breakdown. Meanwhile, the Irish temperance movement assigned tea drinking among the poor an alternative meaning as a desirable dietary habit, replacing alcohol consumption.

"Travellers of various kinds have long been a salient feature of Irish society.  Whether tinkers, tramps, seasonal workers or emigrants, they occupied positions outside of an increasingly settled and bourgeois population.  Their histories are contested and inevitably bound up with colonialism.  This article considers how the figures of travellers in landscape depicted in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings of the 1930s-50s might be related to the constitution of national and cultural identities in Ireland in the post-colonial period.  Particular attention is given to Yeats’s own marginal position as Anglo-Irish. 
    Since the representation of landscape, imagined with its ‘natural’ inhabitants, contributes to the construction of national and cultural identities, colonialism produces contesting, and sometimes ambivalent, representations of the land and its occupants.  In a period of social change and ‘re-positioning’ for both the Irish and Anglo-Irish, Yeats’s travellers are found to be located within the rural idyll of ‘Gaelic Ireland’ rather than the rural idyll of anglicised Ireland / England.  However, I propose that they do not quite form part of this idyll.  Furthermore, the depiction of both travellers and landscape is seen to be ambivalent, questioning the security of Yeats’s relation to the ‘Irishness’ represented. 
    I suggest that the figure of the traveller cannot be isolated from anti-modern discourses of poetic wandering originating outside Ireland.  Yeats’s landscape represents a touristic idyll marked as ‘Irish’ but also as utopian and timeless.  The viewer’s imagined occupancy of the role of tourist-traveller in this idyll is disturbed however by Yeats’s depiction of the traveller as unromanticised, poor and migrant.  In post-colonial Irish culture, the figure of the traveller accumulated diverse connotations associated with the needs for identity and identification generated by cultural shifts towards national definition and exclusions, as well as by the ongoing changes of modernity.
"

This paper discusses some of the circumstances of the introduction and establishment of reinforced-concrete framing in Britain [I]. Reinforced concrete existed by the early 1900s as a collection of patented, and a few unpatented, 'systems', with varying dispositions of reinforcement; some systems were designed only for specific structural elements, such as floors or pipes, while others were adapted, not always appropriately, to entire building frames. These systems were commercially exploited by their patentees, but technical details were guarded from public knowledge and protected by vigorous litigation. In 1904, there were over 50 such systems [2]. Among the most flexible and the most widely used was Fran~oisHennebique's system, developed in Belgium and France and extended world-wide through a specialist commercial and technical organisation, which was in turn imitated by other major system specialists such as Coignet [3].
The introduction of reinforced-concrete framing in Britain at the turn of the century was a result of Hennebique's business policy of international expansion. Existing commercial exchanges between Nantes, where Hennebique had an agent, and Swansea, may have facilitated the contacts which led to the commissioning and erection in 1897 of the first fully framed and entirely reinforced-concrete building in Britain, Weaver & Co.'s provender mill in Swansea [4]. During the construction of the mill Hennebique selected a General Agent for his system in Britain, L. G. Mouchel, whose work, until his death in 1908, effectively established reinforced concrete in Britain and especially its use for framed buildings, albeit as a private, commercial product.
This commercial aspect, also the existence of competing methods and self-interest, prompted architects and others to start investigations into reinforced concrete, to broaden professional interests in it and to end the specialists' monopoly [5].

The Making of Landscape in Modernity
James Koranyi and Tricia Cusack (eds)


Introduction

Mythscapes and literary constructs

1. Celestial Landscapes: the Supranational Imagination in Luxembourg’s Pre-World War I Press
Anne-Marie Millim

2. The Icelandic Mythscape. Sagas, Landscapes, and National Identity
Simon Halink


Tourism and travel

3. ‘In the Beginning There Was the Coal Pit’: Discovering Industrial Landscapes in Interwar Britain and Weimar Germany in the Travel Writings of Henry Morton, J. B. Priestley, and Heinrich Hauser
Martin Walter

4. A Landscape Reshaped by Transport: The Austrian Salzkammergut from Salt Economy to National Leisure Region
Bernd Kreuzer


Envisaging political landscapes

5. Harmonising Environmentalism and Modernity: Landscape Advocates and Scenic Embedding in Germany, c.1920-1950
Axel Zutz

6. Nature into a Socialist Landscape? The case of the Polish Tatra Mountains after 1945
Bianca Hoenig

... Plan of grounds showing the 'All Red Tour' and the buildings of the overseas dominions, Festival of Empire and Imperial Exhibition, Crystal ... From William Robinson, The English Flower Garden (seventh edition, London, 1899) 209 35 A North British locomotive on its way to the ...

This paper considers a large mural of "The Modern Woman" painted in France by the American artist Mary Cassatt for the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It focuses in particular on the large central panel of the mural titled Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science that depicts women and girls apple-picking. Cassatt's mural drew on various traditions and myths. Apple harvesting was a common sight in America. Cassatt's title though points to the story of Eve and forbidden fruit, in which Eve seeks knowledge, but is severely punished for it. Cassatt employs the historical tradition of allegory to subvert the biblical message. In Cassatt's mural, the women and girls are all part of a symbolic appropriation of knowledge as they pluck the apples. Her mural depends on carefully balanced forms, so that the viewer perceives the scene as more like a tableau than as a representation of labour. The painted figures are modernised through a contemporary visual language that draws on Japanese prints and Impressionist art, so distancing them from the narratives of the early scriptures as well as from classical art. Cassatt's Modern Woman also wears loose and comfortable garb that references the contemporary dress reform movement, unlike the Exposition visitors who still displayed their corseted waistlines. Cassatt's mural sadly is now lost and we are left only with traces of her Modern Woman..

p. 805). However, the Victorian Britannia seems a more urban figure, unconnected with the earth or its produce. In the Victorian period, classical imagery was appropriated to represent modern civic values in the guise of powerful ancient civilisations. Britannia was typically portrayed in ancient dress. Ironically, the early images of Britannia appeared on the reverse of coins minted to celebrate the victories of the second century Roman Emperor Hadrian: Hadrian’s portrait is on one side and Britannia’s profile on the reverse represented the conquered island (Matthews 2000, p. 800). Ancient Greek and Roman gods and goddesses were regarded as ‘the protectors of citizens and community’ (Matthews 2000, p. 800). By the mideighteenth century, Britannia was modelled on Athena, the Greek goddess of warfare and wisdom. On British coinage from 1821, Britannia wears Athena’s helmet and she retained military garb over the nineteenth century (Warner 1987, p. 48). Britannia’s trident derived fro...

This article considers nineteenth-century riverscapes of the Hudson in relation to the formation of American identity. It argues that riverscapes in the United States contributed to welding a national identity to a Christian one, although officially the identities were distinct. I examine the role of the Hudson River School in the creation of the ‘wilderness’ as an image of American homeland, and how this construct incorporated the iconic figure of the Euro-American Christian ‘pilgrim-pioneer.’ America looked more to the future than to the past for its national narrative, and an orientation to the future was symbolized in art by the flow of the Hudson toward distant horizons, while the pioneer identity was extended to embrace the entrepreneur-developer. The pioneer has remained an iconic figure for American nationalism, but is now more firmly located in the nation’s past; Janus’s gaze has been adjusted, demonstrating the potentially fluid character of nationalist discourse.