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.
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.
Matthew C. Hunter is associate professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
"Painting with Fire outlines new points of departure for historical
research and encourages to investigate the various layers of the
image, such as the material, the making, and the network of
practices. In doing so, it offers a fresh and new perspective on
cross-disciplinary encounters with chemical materials during the
British Enlightenment."-- "Nuncius"
"Matthew C. Hunter's Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Object offers a
scintillating, unexpected, and original intervention in some of the
most established and comfortable narratives of modernity, and what
is more, it does so convincingly and even delightfully."--
"Isis"
"Painting with Fire is a startlingly original piece of work,
weaving together the history of art, science, and technology to
great and surprising effect. Ostensibly centered on the familiar
figure of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the book leads us excitingly through
a long, volatile history of scientific and creative
experimentation, from the Royal Society to the early history of
photography, showing the painter - and eighteenth-century art - in
an entirely new light. As impressive in its mastery of archival and
literary sources as it is attentive to questions of materiality,
technique, and visual effect, Hunter's book opens our eyes to
unexpected new possibilities for art history as a discipline."--
"HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between
1600 - 1800 judges' citation"
"Painting with Fire is a strikingly original account of the
relationship between art and science--or, more particularly,
between chemistry, painting, and photography--in the British
Enlightenment. It reveals a series of uneasy entanglements that our
own disciplinary restrictions have hitherto rendered invisible.
Deeply rooted in primary source research, the book is peopled with
an extraordinary array of figures familiar and unfamiliar. It is
well illustrated with much previously unpublished visual material.
Hunter's lively prose leads the reader from Joshua Reynolds's
studios to Matthew Boulton's Birmingham manufactory, from early
modern experiments with light and pigment to photography's
Victorian heyday. By drawing attention to the chemical instability
of the artwork and documenting the profound experimentation with
pigment and light that fundamentally expanded the possibilities of
both art and industry in this period, Hunter reveals the
intellectual unsustainability of established accounts of
eighteenth-century painting and of the emergence of photography.
This is an incendiary contribution to art history."--Tim Barringer,
Yale University
"Painting with Fire is scholarship of signal vision, intellectual
force and literary panache. Transforming our understanding of even
the most canonical of geniuses such as Joshua Reynolds, it urges
with passion and penetration an original interpretation of painting
as a chemical and ecological enterprise, where understandings of
time itself unfold through the natural materials of artistic
practice. It is bravura, breathtaking, and sometimes breathless
work, powerfully confirming Hunter's voice as one of the most
vibrant and virtuosic on early modern art and science
today."--James Delbourgo, author of Collecting the World: Hans
Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum
"Painting with Fire offers an original and transformative
interpretation of the 'British Enlightenment' and challenges some
of the fundamental assumptions underlying the historiographies of
modern painting, print, and photography. The book is deeply, indeed
voraciously, researched, both in the archives and in the secondary
literature. It brings British art into a central position within
Western modernism, overturns the standard interpretation of the
work of Joshua Reynolds, and offers a radically new interpretation
of the history of photography, presenting this thing we call a
'photograph' as one among many other kinds of experimental visual
chemical operations."--Jennifer Roberts, Harvard University
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