Caroline Culp is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art History at Vassar College. She is a scholar of American art with specialties in colonial and early national painting and material culture, folk/outsider/self-taught art, and the history of portraiture. She recently completed her doctoral work at Stanford University.
Between 1753 and 1774, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) painted some 350 portraits depicting men... more Between 1753 and 1774, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) painted some 350 portraits depicting men, women, and children of the British-American colonies, where he lived. Though his portraits were painted two and a half centuries ago, still they strike contemporary viewers as compellingly immediate and eerily modern, somehow charged with energy despite the passing of time. While many have commented fleetingly on the uncanny realism of Copley’s colonial canvases, the origins and implications of these aesthetic effects have never been questioned. This dissertation argues that the painter’s portraits were made, viewed, and experienced as near-magical repositories of human presence, believed to carry some vital relic of their sitters into the future. Accordingly, the project explores the rich afterlives of Copley’s portraits—canvases that have “lived on” because their pulsating lifelikeness anticipates a future in which the sitter has passed on but the painting has not. Contributing to a growing body of scholarship on the afterlives of art and the history of enchantment, I demonstrate how these portraits and their reception during the long nineteenth century are evidence of the widespread cultural inclination to attribute inanimate portraits with the force of animation.
Across four chronological chapters, I examine the “afterlife” of Copley’s hyperreal pictures by (1) analyzing acts of iconoclasm against his paintings in 1760s Boston, (2) exploring how his portraits were viewed as inspirited with the afterlife or “soul” of the sitter in the first half of the nineteenth century, (3) interpreting their role in cementing white normativity during the American Civil War and the Colonial Revival, and (4) investigating the cross-temporal connections between Copley and John Singer Sargent’s Boston-based practice in the early twentieth century. In considering the aesthetic, phenomenological, religious, and cultural status of presence in Copley’s portraits, this dissertation reclaims the “magick” of this visual mode during the long nineteenth century.
Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 2020
How do we write histories for works of art that no longer exist? By revealing how an empty pedest... more How do we write histories for works of art that no longer exist? By revealing how an empty pedestal can be full of meaning and how destruction might grow into an act of creation, Wendy Bellion's new book offers answers to this quandary and forges fresh directions in American art scholarship along the way. Bringing together the longstanding interest in materiality and circulation within the field with more recent advances in the studies of iconoclasm and the afterlives of art, Bellion argues that over the course of the two-and-a-half-century history of the United States, iconoclasm has become inscribed within its creation story. Such is, she says, the "generative nature of iconoclasm" with its "capacity to beget new forms and to shape cultures long after the instance of destruction" (110). Framing iconoclasm in New York as a cultural impulse inherited from British traditions, Bellion further argues that iconoclasm was both "a destructive phenomenon through which Americans enacted their independence and a creative phenomenon through which they continued to exhibit English cultural identity" from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries (4).
Between 1753 and 1774, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) painted some 350 portraits depicting men... more Between 1753 and 1774, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) painted some 350 portraits depicting men, women, and children of the British-American colonies, where he lived. Though his portraits were painted two and a half centuries ago, still they strike contemporary viewers as compellingly immediate and eerily modern, somehow charged with energy despite the passing of time. While many have commented fleetingly on the uncanny realism of Copley’s colonial canvases, the origins and implications of these aesthetic effects have never been questioned. This dissertation argues that the painter’s portraits were made, viewed, and experienced as near-magical repositories of human presence, believed to carry some vital relic of their sitters into the future. Accordingly, the project explores the rich afterlives of Copley’s portraits—canvases that have “lived on” because their pulsating lifelikeness anticipates a future in which the sitter has passed on but the painting has not. Contributing to a growing body of scholarship on the afterlives of art and the history of enchantment, I demonstrate how these portraits and their reception during the long nineteenth century are evidence of the widespread cultural inclination to attribute inanimate portraits with the force of animation.
Across four chronological chapters, I examine the “afterlife” of Copley’s hyperreal pictures by (1) analyzing acts of iconoclasm against his paintings in 1760s Boston, (2) exploring how his portraits were viewed as inspirited with the afterlife or “soul” of the sitter in the first half of the nineteenth century, (3) interpreting their role in cementing white normativity during the American Civil War and the Colonial Revival, and (4) investigating the cross-temporal connections between Copley and John Singer Sargent’s Boston-based practice in the early twentieth century. In considering the aesthetic, phenomenological, religious, and cultural status of presence in Copley’s portraits, this dissertation reclaims the “magick” of this visual mode during the long nineteenth century.
Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 2020
How do we write histories for works of art that no longer exist? By revealing how an empty pedest... more How do we write histories for works of art that no longer exist? By revealing how an empty pedestal can be full of meaning and how destruction might grow into an act of creation, Wendy Bellion's new book offers answers to this quandary and forges fresh directions in American art scholarship along the way. Bringing together the longstanding interest in materiality and circulation within the field with more recent advances in the studies of iconoclasm and the afterlives of art, Bellion argues that over the course of the two-and-a-half-century history of the United States, iconoclasm has become inscribed within its creation story. Such is, she says, the "generative nature of iconoclasm" with its "capacity to beget new forms and to shape cultures long after the instance of destruction" (110). Framing iconoclasm in New York as a cultural impulse inherited from British traditions, Bellion further argues that iconoclasm was both "a destructive phenomenon through which Americans enacted their independence and a creative phenomenon through which they continued to exhibit English cultural identity" from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries (4).
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Across four chronological chapters, I examine the “afterlife” of Copley’s hyperreal pictures by (1) analyzing acts of iconoclasm against his paintings in 1760s Boston, (2) exploring how his portraits were viewed as inspirited with the afterlife or “soul” of the sitter in the first half of the nineteenth century, (3) interpreting their role in cementing white normativity during the American Civil War and the Colonial Revival, and (4) investigating the cross-temporal connections between Copley and John Singer Sargent’s Boston-based practice in the early twentieth century. In considering the aesthetic, phenomenological, religious, and cultural status of presence in Copley’s portraits, this dissertation reclaims the “magick” of this visual mode during the long nineteenth century.
Across four chronological chapters, I examine the “afterlife” of Copley’s hyperreal pictures by (1) analyzing acts of iconoclasm against his paintings in 1760s Boston, (2) exploring how his portraits were viewed as inspirited with the afterlife or “soul” of the sitter in the first half of the nineteenth century, (3) interpreting their role in cementing white normativity during the American Civil War and the Colonial Revival, and (4) investigating the cross-temporal connections between Copley and John Singer Sargent’s Boston-based practice in the early twentieth century. In considering the aesthetic, phenomenological, religious, and cultural status of presence in Copley’s portraits, this dissertation reclaims the “magick” of this visual mode during the long nineteenth century.