Visualising Human-Animal Relations: Animals in Visual and Material Culture 1750-1900
The “animal turn” has gained traction in the humanities and social sciences, bringing animals to the forefront of academic discourses. Visual culture can offer new insights into the animal turn, opening up new ways of reading animals in art, and revealing nuanced human-animal relations. 1750-1900 was a crucial period in human-animal relations, yet representations of animals in visual and material culture remain underexplored.
This session aims to reevaluate animals in eighteenth and nineteenth-century artworks to shed light on human-animal relations through interdisciplinary perspectives. It encourages papers which integrate perspectives from the animal turn to critically rethink how animals are represented, understood, and treated. We invite art historians, researchers and museum professionals to explore ways of challenging anthropocentric perspectives and empowering animal narratives.
The session will comprise of three 20-minute papers, following by an invited roundtable discussion exploring future directions in historical animal-art history.
Session Convenors:
Kate Nichols, University of Birmingham UK
Luba Kozak, University of Regina, Canada
Speakers:
Somdatta Guha Bakshi, Partition Museum, Delhi
Textured Scales, Shiny Feathers, and Brushed Fur: A Study of the Depictions of Animals from Mansur to Sheikh Mohammad Amir
The Company Qalam or Company School of Painting from the Indian subcontinent is characterized by a negotiation between Indian courtly traditions and Western European ones. Patronized by wealthy officials of the British East Company, and later the British Raj, these paintings consider a wide range of subjects, including fauna. Some of the most well-known among them are a series of paintings of birds attributed to Shaikh Zain ud-Din from the Impey Album (1778 C.E), and the paintings of horses and pet dogs (1845 C.E) by Shaikh Mohammad Amir of Karriah. Shaikh Mohammad Amir, in particular, has been compared to the famed Ustad Mansur from the atelier of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, in their ability to convey the animal’s individuality (Dalrymple, 2017).
This paper aims to examine the veracity of this argument by situating the work of Shaikh Mohammad at the tail end of a spectrum, with the paintings of Shaikh Zain ud-Din following closely and the works of Mansur situated at the onset. Each painter’s work is contextualised to understand the effects of patronage on the painter’s vision of the animals. Further, the paper concludes with remarks on how Enlightenment values, propagated through colonisation, transform the animal in the eyes of the artist.
Chenchen Yan, Princeton University
The Becoming Chinese of the Pekingese Dog
It has been well recognized that the looting of the Summer Palace in 1860 by the Anglo-French Alliance Forces in the aftermath of the Second Opium War led to the emergence of a new notion of “imperial provenance,” which fundamentally changed how Chinese art was valued and perceived. This paper explores a special case of the loots from the Summer Palace—five Pekingese dogs, one of which was presented to Queen Victoria and was unabashedly named “Looty.” Considered the smallest dog that had ever appeared in England at the time, the Pekingese soon attracted the attention of the British upper class and became one of the most popular and fashionable breeds of toy dogs. By examining its representations in visual and material culture, I argue that the Pekingese became Chinese as dog fanciers constructed the supposedly ancient and pure pedigree of the breed. The process of becoming Chinese of the dog resulted in the peculiar confusion between the canine and the feline––the ubiquitous stone guardian lion became evidence of the imperial provenance of the breed. The invention of the Pekingese pedigree demonstrated new modes in which Westerners related themselves to Chinese pets and objects. Mediating and translating imperial domination into emotional animal-human relationships, the Pekingese blurred the epistemic boundaries between objects and subjects, animating a series of cultural and social transformations.
Rosalind Hayes, Durham University
Creating “strength”: byproducts and advertising in Imperial Britain
When it comes to modernity, the role of animal substances in the creation and circulation of visual culture has been underexplored in comparison to the recent increased interest in creaturely subjects. While scholars have explored the material proliferation of animal matter in twentieth-century mechanical reproduction methods, the previous century’s foundational experiments with the same techniques have been less systematically researched. This paper addresses the animal materiality of late nineteenth-century photomechanical print production, which were largely supported by gelatine-based processes which helped to increase the speed and accuracy of otherwise manual work. I focus on a photogravure distributed in 1900 by beef extract manufacturers Bovril Ltd during an advertising campaign which centred on depictions of the Boer War (1899-1902), part of the brand’s wider publicity strategy to foreground an association between bodily strength and self-declared imperial dominance. Often at the forefront of commercial trends, Bovril’s art director promulgated the ‘creation of strength’ within professional advertising which entailed a detailed knowledge and diverse application of contemporary print production methods. In a crowded field of reportage on the Boer War, Bovril’s “War Picture” is, therefore, a locus for analysing the material and ideological significance of animal byproducts to the self-fashioning of British imperial identity at the end of the Victorian period. Moreover, the print also offers ways of thinking about the interspecies nature of gelatine-based print processes, which opened up a tactile relationship between engravers and their animal materials upon which the aesthetic and topical value of such patriotic prints depended.
Roundtable: The Animal Turn in Visual Culture
Laura Gelfand, Utah State University
Halina Suwalowska, Oxford University
EvaMarie Lindahl, Independent Artist