Association of Art Historians Annual Conference 2012 Session CFP

Conflicting Art Histories: Dialogues of Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

Session Convenors:
Freya Gowrley, University of Edinburgh
(f.l.gowrleygmail.com)

Viccy Coltman, University of Edinburgh
(viccy.coltmaned.ac.uk)

William Hogarth's traditional position as the stalwart of English
nationalism in the arts was drastically re-evaluated in 2007 with the
publication of Robin Simon's Hogarth, France & British Art. Published to
coincide with the Tate's major Hogarth exhibition of 2007, Simon's text
situates Hogarth, a renowned anglophile, within a firmly European
context of artistic theory and practice. How does the idea that Hogarth
gleefully propagated his anti-Gallic public image, but was in fact
greatly indebted to French art and theory affect our understanding of
apparently critical eighteenth-century works of art such as his
Marriage-à-la-Mode (c. 1743)? While historians Linda Colley and Gerald
Newman prioritised national identity as an evaluative tool for the
examination of aspects of eighteenth-century British culture, is it
appropriate to apply this label to broad cultural manifestations,
notably the consumptive behavioural patterns of the aristocracy and the
middling classes alike? This session will consider this intriguing
dichotomy of eighteenth-century British art - the underwritten and
unresolved conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism - and its
relation to the artistic practice, material culture and intellectual
history of the period.

Topics for discussion could include, but are not limited to:
- artistic response to the luxury debates
- landscape and nation
- the connoisseur and the Grand Tour
- the usefulness of labels (exotic, chinoiserie, rococo)
- the reception of Italy
- the creation of a British national school
- consumption & the meaning of goods
- the local and the global/the provincial and the metropolitan
- the issue of -isms (Englishness, Britishness, Scottishness)