18th century trash

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

This is maybe a dumb question, but looking at the portraits of Hervey, I have a hard time noticing anything about how he's dressing that seems out of the ordinary or especially more 'feminine' for the time period (barring that one where he just has his coat buttoned super low and his whole shirt out?). Am I missing some obvious detail (material they were made out of maybe?) or was the his effeminacy/the perception of him as effeminate just more based on behavior than 'presentation'?

Not a dumb question at all. It was combination of his sexuality, his diet, his androgyny as well as his clothes & makeup. While Hervey's femininity was almost certainly exaggerated in satire written by his enemies there was some basis to this satire.

Sexuality

In the 18th century there was an association between effeminacy and sodomy. I don't think we can discount the role the rumours surrounding Hervey's sexuality played in the public's perception of him. William Pulteney's 1731 pamphlet A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel satirises Hervey as Mr. Fainlove. Pulteney describes Fainlove as a "delicate Hermophrodite", a "pretty, little, Master-Miss" and insinuates that he's a pathick who "enjoys every Moment and Fruits of his Guilt". The 1739 pamphlet The State of Rome, Under Nero and Domitian satirises Hervey as Sporus (an allusion to Pope's satire of Hervey) describing him as a "Male-female Thing," who is "Fit only for the Pathicks loathsome Trade".

Pope's choice to satirise Hervey as Sporus in An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) was itself a comment on Hervey's sexuality. Sporus being the boy that Nero is said to have castrated and taken as a wife.

Diet

Hervey was epileptic and suffered from a chronic colic. He details his medical history in An Account of My Own Constitution and Illness. At the recommendation of his doctor's George Cheyne he adopted a milk and vegetable diet. Cheyne believed that such a diet was "absolutely necessary for the total Cure of the Epilepsy” and also prescribed milk and vegetable diets in cases of “extreme Nervous Cholicts”. (The English Malady, p167 & 254) Hervey ate no meet for three years before reintroducing white meet. This diet was seen as effeminate by his contemporaries. Lady Louisa Stuart cites his refusal to eat beef as an example of the “extreme to which Lord Hervey carried his effeminate nicety”. (Stuart wrote this anonymously in the introductory anecdotes included in the 1837 edition of The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.)

Hervey also drank "ass’s milk with powder of crab’s eyes and oyster-shells" for his heath. This is mocked in the poem The Lord H-r--y's First Speech in the House of Lords (1733-4) that calls him "a perfect curd of ass's milk." Alexander Pope included a similar line in An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) describing him as a "mere white Curd of Ass's milk".

[Certain City Macaronies drinking Asses Milk, print, c.1772, via The British Museum.]

The association between effeminacy and asses milk features in the satirical dialogue The City Macaronies drinking Asses-milk, at the Lacteum, in St. George's-fields published in the November 1772 edition of the Oxford Magazine which was accompanied by the above illustration. The dialogue mocks macaroni for drinking asses-milk as a treatment for "nervous cases" and "hysterics" claiming that it's "delicate men" such as the macaroni "whose fine feelings are sensible of the slightest pressure, that are acquainted with hysterics". The son of the milk woman wonders aloud whether the macaroni are men or women. His mother tells him "they're neither, they are a kind of half and half breed."

Androgyny

With his slim figure and a bit of a baby-face Hervey was considered to be naturally androgynous. When Lady Deloraine said to him and Miss Fitzwilliams that "in her opinion a woman could never look too much like a woman, nor a man too much like a man" Hervey admitted that "considering the two people she said this to, it was certainly well said; and I can forgive her having bragged of it to every creature she has seen since" (Hervey to Stephen Fox, 18 September 1731)

Satirical descriptions of Hervey liken him to a cherub or a fairy describing him as pretty, little, soft, dainty, delicate.

In A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel (1731) Pulteney satirises Hervey as "pretty Mr. Fainlove" who he describes as a "delicate Hermophrodite", a "pretty, little, Master-Miss", a "pretty, little Scribbler", and comments that he shouldn't "sully those pretty Fingers with Ink" that "a Fan would become them much better than a Pen."

The Lord H-r--y's First Speech in the House of Lords (1733-4) describes him as "the softest, prettiest thing". In An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) Pope describes him as having a "cherub's face". Tell-tale Cupids (1735) satirises him as the "pretty baby fac'd Lord Dapper".*

In A Fairy Tale (1743) by Horace Walpole depicts Hervey as a literal fairy describing him as a "Dainty little Figure", "most delicately Fair and light" who "would have been vastly Pretty if it’s cherry-lips had ‘nclos’d any Teeth".

*quoted in Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier by Robert Halsband

Clothes & Makeup

Pope didn't describe Sporus as a "bug with gilded wings" and a "Fop at the toilet" because of Hervey's natural androgyny, clothing & makeup absolutely played a role in the public perception of him.

The Duchess of Marlborough described Hervey as a having "a painted face, and not a tooth in his head". Pope described him as "painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings". And the The Court Garland refers to him as "Thou powder-puff, thou painted toy". (see The Opinions of Sarah Duchess-Dowager of Marlborough p42, An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot & Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier by Robert Halsband p138)

The fashionable look of the period required pale clear skin, flushed red cheeks and dark eyebrows. While washes and creams were used to achieve clear pale skin, white cosmetic paint could also be used to lighten and smooth the skin. Rouge was used to give colour to the cheeks. Burnt cloves could be used to darken the eyebrows. While some of these cosmetics contained lead or mercury not all of them did.

[Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, c.1741–1742, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo, via Art UK.]

It's hard to know how reliable the accounts of Hervey's makeup use are however his portraits do depict him with this fashionable look (in particular the rosy cheeks of the Jean-Baptiste van Loo portraits and the Enoch Seeman portrait). While modern depictions of 18th century fops will sometimes exaggerate makeup depicting men with pure white faces and almost perfectly round red circles on their cheeks, Hervey's portraits are more accurate to the look these cosmetics were trying to achieve.

The use of cosmetics are highlighted in satirical depictions of effeminate men throughout the 18th century century. As early as 1691 Mundus Foppensis: or, the Fop Display’d was mocking men for the "wanton use" of "Spanish Red, and white Ceruse". In 1773 The Old Beau in an Extasy depicts a "Fop at Sixty two" who uses "Chinese Paint for Artificial Bloom". In 1812 Regency A la Mode depicts the Prince Regent applying rouge to his cheeks while he gets laced into stays. The Court Garland's satire of Hervey is just another example of a satirical depiction of a fop in makeup:

[Left: The Old Beau in an Extasy, print, c.1773, by John Dixon, via Lewis Walpole Library.

Right: 1812, or, Regency A la Mode, print, c.1812, by William Heath, via Lewis Walpole Library]

As for clothing I have to admit I'm better at late-18th century menswear. That being said material and colour seem to have played a role in what was considered effeminate.

A letter to the Read's Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer published on the 8th of May 1731 complains; "Rich and coloured Silks are in themselves effeminate, and unbecoming a Man; as are in short, all Things that discover Dress to have been his Study- 'Tis in vain for a Fop of Quality, to think his Title will protect him." In particular the article criticises poke sleeves and green waistcoats. While poke sleeves are absent from Hervey's portraits the Seeman portrait depicts him wearing a green waistcoat.

Green waistcoats are also mentioned in a story published in the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal on the 18th of October 1729 describing and effeminate man's clothing as follows:

This green waistcoat is laced with silver. In the Jean-Baptiste van Loo portraits you can see a embroidered silver waistcoat peeking out from beneath Hervey's coat.

[Left: Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, c.1737, by John Fayram, via Art UK.

Right: Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, by Enoch Seeman, via The Collected Verse of John, Lord Hervey]

While the quality of the photo leaves much to be desired I wonder if the coat from the Seeman portrait is supposed to be silver. The coat he wears in the The Hervey Conversation Piece could also be silver but it might simply be grey. Sarah Osborn thought that silver coats looked effeminate. She wrote to Robert Byng on the 2nd of June 1722:

Hervey wears a "prodigiously effeminate" pale blue, possibly paduasoy, coat (possibly a long sleeved waistcoat?) in the Fayram portrait.

The low buttoned waistcoat is somewhat interesting and consistent throughout his portraits, buttoned particularly low in the Fayram portrait. The effeminate Captain Whiffle from The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) is described wearing his waistcoat "unbuttoned at the upper part to display a brooch set with garnets" but Hervey is broochless and looking at other portraits from this period the low buttoning doesn't seem to be unusual.

[Left: Detail of The Hervey Conversation Piece, oil on canvas, c.1738-40, by William Hogarth, via Fairfax House.

Right: Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, c.1741, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo, via Art UK.]

Fur-lined suits like that worn by Hervey in the Jean-Baptiste van Loo portraits were imported from France or Italy and could be very costly. Mary Delany describes Lord Baltimore wearing "light brown and silver, his coat lined quite throughout with ermine" at a ball where "finery was so common it was hardly distinguished". (Mary Delany to Ann Granville, 22 Jan, 1739/40)

Fur-lined suits were somewhat of novelty in England and would become a feature in Grand Tour portraits. Peter McNeil explains in Pretty Gentleman (p123):

(see Benjamin Lethieullier 1752, Lord Archibald Hamilton 1755-56 & John Scott 1774 all by Pompeo Batoni an artist well know for his Grand Tour portraits)

Hervey's buckles in the Jean-Baptiste van Loo portraits look to be set with paste (glass) or gems (buckles could even be set with diamonds). While it's impossible to tell what Hervey's buckles are set with these buckles could get very expensive. Later in the century macaroni were mocked for their expensive taste in similar buckles. (see McNeil p90)

[Left: Shoe buckle, metal & paste, 18th century, British via The MET (83.1.103).

Right: Detail of Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, c.1741, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo, via Art UK.]

While Hervey was certainly a fashionably dressed man he doesn't take it to the extent you might imagine of the archetypal fop. Satire exaggerates. Hervey's enemies chose their words deliberately to humiliate him. The amphibious thing of Pope's poetry was in reality a chronically ill queer man with a taste for fashion.

... Milk ejaculating dildo????

In the 17th & 18th centuries people would put warm milk in squirting dildos to simulate ejaculation. I have a post on it and a more general one about dildos in the period if you're interested.