Zara Anishanslin Bernhardt,
Barra Foundation Fellow in Art and Material Culture
zab@UDel.Edu
“Lines of Beauty: American Portraits, Spitalfields Silk, and Atlantic World Networks in the Eighteenth Century”
In 1746, New Englander Robert Feke, the first American born artist of note, painted wealthy Philadelphia matron, Anne Shippen Willing, wearing a Spitalfields silk woven in London by Huguenot Simon Julins, after a pattern drawn by famed female silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. The visual codes of this portrait and its silk dress illuminate how eighteenth-century Americans used Atlantic World material culture to visually express identity. Each chapter of my dissertation takes one of these enigmatic, little-studied, people (artist, client, weaver, designer) as the departure point for discussing networks of visual and material culture related to them. Whether producer, distributor, or consumer, as these people and others like them around the Atlantic World created and used objects, they also fashioned and displayed personal, political, cultural and aesthetic identities. My dissertation explores the power of objects and the cultural resonance of Atlantic World material culture in America: a powerful resonance forever captured in this single portrait.
zab@UDel.Edu
“Lines of Beauty: American Portraits, Spitalfields Silk, and Atlantic World Networks in the Eighteenth Century”
In 1746, New Englander Robert Feke, the first American born artist of note, painted wealthy Philadelphia matron, Anne Shippen Willing, wearing a Spitalfields silk woven in London by Huguenot Simon Julins, after a pattern drawn by famed female silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. The visual codes of this portrait and its silk dress illuminate how eighteenth-century Americans used Atlantic World material culture to visually express identity. Each chapter of my dissertation takes one of these enigmatic, little-studied, people (artist, client, weaver, designer) as the departure point for discussing networks of visual and material culture related to them. Whether producer, distributor, or consumer, as these people and others like them around the Atlantic World created and used objects, they also fashioned and displayed personal, political, cultural and aesthetic identities. My dissertation explores the power of objects and the cultural resonance of Atlantic World material culture in America: a powerful resonance forever captured in this single portrait.