The presence of copley : animacy, magic, and afterlife in American painting, 1765-1925
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- 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.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Culp, Caroline Murray |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Nemerov, Alexander |
| Thesis advisor | Nemerov, Alexander |
| Thesis advisor | Kwon, Marci |
| Thesis advisor | Lubin, David |
| Thesis advisor | Troy, Nancy J |
| Degree committee member | Kwon, Marci |
| Degree committee member | Lubin, David |
| Degree committee member | Troy, Nancy J |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Caroline Murray Culp. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/mb147td7618 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Caroline Murray Culp
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
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