Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Britain
Author(s): Ann Bermingham
Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2 (June 2007), pp. 203-208
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2007.70.2.203 .
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introduction
Gainsborough’s Show Box: Illusion and
Special Effects in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Ann Bermingham
1. Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door, was a collaboration between
the Yale Center for British Art and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
It was curated by Ann Bermingham, and was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the Samuel Kress Foundation, and the Essick Foundation.
figure 1. Gainsborough’s show box (ca. 1871–82), wood and glass, 69.9 x 61 x 40.6 cm. Victoria and
Albert Museum, London.
understood by Reynolds in his Discourses as the “great style.” The box creates instead
an aesthetic experience that is private and individual, not general and universal.
In doing so it seems of a piece with the gradual privatization of the aesthetic
tracked by John Barrell in his magisterial study of the decline of civic humanism in
British art theory.5 In this context the box anticipates the coupling of individualism
and consumerism that Barrell and others have found to be the driving force in the
bourgeois art world of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this
world, works of art no longer speak to a shared communal vision of civic duty and vir-
tuous disinterestedness, but to individual pleasures, appetites, fantasies, and desires.
The obvious casualty of this change was history painting, the traditional rationale for
which had been to provide the public with virtuous civic examples. In the mundane
bourgeois world of market capital, heroism, as Martin Myrone explains in his essay on
Fuseli, became a conspicuous fantasy indulged in, if at all, as a pure spectacle.6
This privatization of the aesthetic also resulted in the production of “history
paintings” that instead of deriving from stories in the Bible, history, or literature had no
textual referent but that were instead pure inventions of the artist. As Myrone explains,
Fuseli was one of the most notorious in this regard, submitting a number of works to
the Royal Academy in the early 1780s that were based on wholly fabricated textual
sources. Just as Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto pretends to be an old manuscript
“printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529,”7 Fuseli’s imaginary subjects
claim to derive from literary sources that are in fact nonexistent. Not only are they self-
reflexive products of the artist’s imagination, but they are pure simulations, or signs
without referents—in the words of Jerrold Hogle, they are “ghosts of counterfeits.” 8
5. John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public”
(New Haven, Conn., and London, 1986).
6. See too Myrone’s groundbreaking Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art
1750–1810 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2006).
7. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Michael Gamer (London, 2001), 5.
8. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Ghost of the Counterfeit—and the Closet—in The Monk,” Romanticism
On the Net 8 (November 1997) <http://users.ox.ac.uk~scat0385/ghost.html>.
206 ann bermingham
9. On this strain of analysis see Andrea Henderson, “An Embarrassing Subject: Use Value and Ex-
change Value in Early Gothic Characterization,” in Mary Favret and Nicola J. Watson, eds., At the Lim-
its of Romanticism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind., 1994), 225–45.
10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald A.
Stauffer, 2 vols. (New York, 1951), 147.
11. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”in Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973), 178–79.
12. For a superb catalogue of these apparatuses and descriptions of their use and significance, see
Barbara Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen
(Los Angeles, 2001).
introduction 207
grated the actor into the scenic illusion, thus heightening the reality effect of the per-
formance and transforming the relationship between the actor and the audience. The
new realism of the stage meant that the audience became less actively involved with
the performance for fear of breaking the illusion. The basic tendency of eighteenth-
century visual spectacles, not just theater, is to absorb the spectator into the illusion.
Simon During explores the cultural significance of the erasure of the bound-
aries between reality and illusion and between art and life in the context of what he sees
as the period’s preoccupation with “secular enchantment.” His case study is William
Beckford and the extraordinary visual spectacle that Loutherbourg produced for him
on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday. Through his sceneographic art Louther-
bourg transformed Beckford’s Georgian mansion at Fonthill into a “demon temple.”
For several days guests wandered through dimly lit, heavily draped rooms perfumed
with exotic scents. Loutherbourg’s transformation of Fonthill was in Beckford’s own
words the “realization of romance,” and as such inspired his own gothic novel, Vathek.
Beckford’s rejection of public life—and his withdrawal from it into an artificial para-
dise of his own making—points again to the tendency in modern commercial culture
to embrace imagination and the irrational, by catering to private dreams and modes of
escapism.
In 1823 the landscape painter John Constable wrote to a friend that he had gone
to see a diorama. “It is very pleasing & has great illusion,” he observed; however, “it is
without the pale of Art because its object is deception.”13 By the time he was writing,
the thrill and fascination that eighteenth-century artists like Gainsborough had ex-
perienced in the presence of illusionistic technologies had diminished. What had been
a source of artistic excitement was now seen as machine-made deception, not art. Con-
stable’s reaction is indicative of a distinction established in the early nineteenth century
between art and the technologies of visual illusion. To understand this distinction
would involve tracking emerging attitudes toward the machine and its power to repro-
duce human consciousness, labor, and the appearances of reality. But even more it
would mean exploring what Terry Castle has called the “spectral politics” of modernity
and its alternating fear of and fascination with the uncanny, and with “machines that
mimic and reinforce the image-producing powers of consciousness.”14 Since Locke’s
use of the metaphor of the camera obscura, the human mind had been understood in
terms of an image-making machine. The illusion-producing machines of the eigh-
teenth century suggested that individual consciousness and the fantasies it manufac-
tured could now be mechanically reproduced and transmitted to others. To reproduce
these mental imaginings as “real” was to confound distinctions between the real and
the imagined, the rational and the irrational; distinctions that the Enlightenment had
sought to maintain.
Dioramas, which reproduced scenes of ruins and landscape so realistically that
spectators threw objects at the screen to test the reality of the illusions, were indeed
13. John Constable, John Constable’s Correspondence VI: The Fishers (Ipswich, Suffolk, U.K.,
1968), 134.
14. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny (New York and Oxford, 1995), 137.
208 ann bermingham
uncanny. While evolving from those mechanical devices of wonder, like the show box,
they also established the mechanism of popular visual culture whereby special effects
must become ever and ever more spectacular if they are to continue to enthrall their
audiences. It was against this technology of illusion, and the mode of spectatorship it
engendered, that art of the Romantic period would come to define itself. Gains-
borough’s show box straddles the line between art and the machine. Its appeal to imag-
ination, its privatization of the aesthetic, and its dependence on technology link it to
the mechanical illusions of the nineteenth century, while its rejection of “deception”
for a mode of painting that calls attention to itself as painting distinguishes it from
these spectacles. Its use of technology to anti-illusionistic ends can be seen to resist the
technological drive manifest in so much eighteenth-century visual spectacle to desta-
bilize the boundaries between psychic and material realities. In the end, it provides us
with a tool for thinking about the differences between art and technology and their
powers to realize imagination.
abstract
In the introduction to this special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, Ann Bermingham uses
Thomas Gainsborough’s show box to reflect on the major themes of the issue, including imagination,
the privatization of the aesthetic, the technologies of illusion, and the uncanny. The show box opens
onto the realm of visual magic and imagination, and in doing so anticipates many of the popular visual
spectacles that emerge at the end of the eighteenth century. The box embodies the period’s fascination
with art’s power to realize imagination, and imagination’s power to destabilize the boundaries between
psychic and material realities. Keywords: Thomas Gainsborough, Gainsborough’s show box, technolo-
gies of illusion, privatization of the aesthetic, art and technology