Painting With Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object

Description

Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century&;and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today. As early as the 1670s, experimental philosophers at the Royal Society of London had studied the visual effects of dynamic combustibles. By the 1770s, chemical volatility became central to the ambitious paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, premier portraitist and first president of Britain&;s Royal Academy of Arts. Valued by some critics for changing in time (and thus, for prompting intellectual reflection on the nature of time), Reynolds&;s unstable chemistry also prompted new techniques of chemical replication among Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and other leading industrialists. In turn, those replicas of chemically decaying academic paintings were rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century and claimed as origin points in the history of photography. Tracing the long arc of chemically produced and reproduced art from the 1670s through the 1860s, the book reconsiders early photography by situating it in relationship to Reynolds&;s replicated paintings and the literal engines of British industry. By following the chemicals, Painting with Fire remaps familiar stories about academic painting and pictorial experiment amid the industrialization of chemical knowledge.   Contents Introduction: Slow-Motion Mobiles 1. “Pictures . . . in time petrify’d” 2. Joshua Reynolds’s “Nice Chymistry” in the 1770s 3. “Rend’rd Imortal”: The Work of Art in an Age of Chemical Reproduction 4. Space, Time, and Chemistry: Making Enlightenment “Photography” in the 1860s Conclusion: Art History in/as an Age of Combustion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index