I’m thrilled that my paper ‘Representational revolutions: Trompe l’oeil still life paintings, medley prints, and collage in the long seventeenth century’, was recently accepted for the panel ‘Changing Approaches to Histories of British Art, 1660–1735’. You can read my abstract below.
‘Representational revolutions: Trompe l’oeil still life paintings, medley prints, and collage in the long seventeenth century’
This paper will examine the interrelationships between trompe l’oeil still life paintings and medley prints in Britain in the long seventeenth century, arguing that the representational qualities of these works can be profitably understood when considered as, and in relation to, forms of collage. Following Norman Bryson’s tantalising yet unrealised provocation from Looking at the Overlooked (1991) that still life, trompe l’oeil, and collage should be ‘considered as a single category’ (7), this paper will therefore seek to situate British art of the seventeenth century within a longer and broader trajectory of European works which actively sought to engage with, and ultimately undermine, ideas of representation. Arguing that this visual tradition culminated with the Cubist ‘invention’ of collage in 1912, the paper will thereby demonstrate the importance of these early works to an artistic tradition that is often problematically presented in terms of revolutionary Modernist intervention and radical breaks with tradition. At the same time, the paper will seek to firmly place these works within their own historical context, specifically the consumer and print ‘revolutions’ that characterised the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. In so doing it will show how works such as the anonymous painting The Paston Treasure (1670), should be understood in terms of the unprecedented transformation of the material world that occurred during this period, arguing that such images utilised these dynamic representational strategies in order to process this new material wealth.
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