8:00 a.m. |
Continental Breakfast, Bookout Reception Hall
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9:00 a.m. |
Welcome and Introductions
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9:15 a.m. |
Free versus Will: Craftspeople in Early Maryland Brittany Luberda
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American Art galleries, one name—often a white male—is usually listed as the artist, but this belies the diversity of artistic production during the period of slavery and indentured servitude in the United States. In spring 2024, the Baltimore Museum of Art reopened the c. 1773 parlor room of Haberdeventure, the plantation of Declaration signer Thomas Stone, with a display of artworks by free, enslaved, and indentured artists from Colonial and Federal Maryland. The exhibit takes the parlor’s builders and painters, likely enslaved, as its inspiration. Disrupting histories that privilege workshop owners and formally educated painters, the display conveys how artists in early Maryland came from all economic, gender, racial, and national backgrounds through the biographies of hitherto underacknowledged artists. From this, a new body of Maryland makers are restored to the forefront of Chesapeake object, furniture, and painting histories.
Sleuthing Out a Portrait: From Mount Vernon to the British Island of Dominica Dorinda Evans
A bust-length, oil portrait of an African man in white attire, dating from about 1780, surfaced mysteriously in London by 1940 with a false provenance. The art dealer involved jumped to assign it to the English-trained, American Gilbert Stuart, and, because the sitter's strange hat resembled a cook's toque, a second leap was made to identify him as George Washington's cook. But the portrait is not convincing as by Stuart, the hat is not a toque, and Washington's cook (later a run-away slave) was unlikely to have sat to a prominent artist. Although the hat resembles headgear worn only on a Caribbean island conquered by Britain, it could also be otherwise explained.
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10:30 a.m. |
Break
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11:00 a.m. |
Drawing the Lines of Revolution: Pastel Portraits, Boycotts, and American Independence Megan Baker
During the 1760s, pastel—or crayon—images attained immense popularity, becoming a prominent medium for portraits of colonial Americans. Despite barriers preventing access to necessary imported supplies, the medium experienced explosive growth as political tension grew. Why did pastel portraits rise and fall in different places across British and French North America, and subsequently in the new American nation? As ideas of race and national identity were promulgated, contested, and reformed across the Atlantic, the ephemeral pastel sketch provided an ideal vehicle for recording shifting ideas and allegiances. This paper reconstructs the early history of the pastel in North America to emphasize the politics of media specificity, demonstrating the different ways pastel contributed to the making and breaking of empire.
Disasters in the Eighteenth-Century North Atlantic: Art, Gardens, and Novel Joseph Litts
Encountering hurricanes and shipwrecks was not unique to the eighteenth century. However, images of destruction became widespread as period garden designs, paintings, and novels featured both natural disasters and their aftermaths. The surge of artistic interest in catastrophe intersected with the growth of real bodies exposed to tragedy through increased circulation—coerced or voluntary—around the Atlantic. In landscape designs, literature, and paintings, representations of disasters and their aftermaths brought calamity into everyday existence. Why did those exposed to the vulnerabilities of the Atlantic world routinely create and enjoy representations of the destructive forces that could end their life or fortunes? I argue this fascination with imagining destruction was a form of risk management adjacent to the growing insurance industry, and both art and finance offered a perverse means of naturalizing settler colonialism.
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12:15 p.m. |
Lunch, Founders' Terrace
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1:45 p.m. |
The Endless Round: The London Town House, Politics and Society in the 1770s Jeremy Musson
In this paper, Jeremy Musson explores the architectural and aesthetic character of the aristocratic London houses of the Georgian period. Among these houses were the homes of the leading political figures of the British establishment at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the war which followed. Located close to the all-important Court of St. James, and also to Parliament, and westward of the financial centre of the City, these town houses, funded by landownership, property and mineral exploitation as well as investments in international commerce, were expressions of wealth, fashion and power. A constellation of prestigious glamour around the Court, these houses were designed for the endless round of social and cultural interaction which helped reinforce attitudes about Britain’s place in the world. While a number of the famous country houses of the Georgian aristocracy remain to illustrate political and special prestige of the age, the London houses - or town palaces - are less well known and understood today as few survive in their former splendour, but it is the town houses that should perhaps be regarded as the real ‘power houses’ of the age.
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2:45 p.m. |
Break
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3:15 p.m. |
Enlightened Eclecticism: The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland Adiano Aymonino
The central decades of the eighteenth century in Britain were crucial to the history of European taste and design. One of the period’s most important campaigns of patronage was that of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland. This lecture examines their houses—Stanwick Hall, Northumberland House, Syon House, and Alnwick Castle—alongside the innumerable objects they collected and their persistent engagement in Georgian London’s public sphere. Over the years, their commissions pioneered styles as varied as Palladianism, rococo, neoclassicism, and Gothic revival. Patrons of many artists and architects, they are revealed, particularly, as the greatest supporters of Robert Adam. Their development sheds light on the eclectic taste of Georgian Britain, the emergence of neoclassicism and historicism, and the cultures of the Grand Tour.
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4:15 p.m. |
The Transatlantic Design Network: Thomas Jefferson, John Soane, and Agents of Architectural Exchange Danielle S. Willkens
Political, economic, and literary historians have studied the transatlantic connections between America, England, and the European continent. More consideration, however, needs to be given to how transatlantic exchange influenced architectural culture. The contours and impact of the Transatlantic Design Network on architectural culture can be traced through a detailed study of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Sir John Soane (1753-1837). Although they never met, they were connected by key figures, such as Maria Hadfield Cosway (1760- 1838), an artist, designer, and educator who corresponded with each man for over four decades. The architectural pilgrimage sites of Monticello and Soane’s Museum are at the heart of this JefferSoanean study, yet the book contextualizes the house museums beyond their nationalistic lenses by uncovering forgotten places, designers, and attributions.
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5:45 p.m. |
Reception, Mount Vernon Wharf
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7:00 p.m. |
Dinner, Mount Vernon Wharf
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