Jennifer Chuong

In this dissertation, I argue that art in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British transatlantic world was marked by a consciousness of surfaces in both spatial and temporal terms. While art historians have long debated the representational status of painting’s richly portrayed surfaces in this period, the significance of surfaces as sites of temporal transformation has received little scholarly attention. Yet in this period agricultural writers discussed the earth’s “chargeable” surface, housewives dipped eggs in waxy mixtures to preserve them, well-heeled dinner guests admired polished mahogany’s flickering glow, painters experimented with the composition of their varnishes, and military spies made use of both invisible and indelible ink in their communications. These practices and discourses identify surfaces as spatial boundaries, but they also address the surface’s ability to transform in time.

This dissertation examines four areas of visual and material culture—the decorative arts, print, painting, and the book arts—in order to recover the temporal significance of surfaces in the British transatlantic world, and especially in early America. These chapters demonstrate first, that the temporality of surfaces was a central, wide-ranging issue across the useful, decorative, and fine arts; second, that the later part of the eighteenth century marked a concerted shift away from governing models of stability and permanence towards models of mutability and contingency; and third, that the interest in surfaces as sites of transformation prompted practitioners to hypothesize their generative potential. As material and technical experiments foregrounded the mutability of surfaces, artists like Alexander Cozens, Washington Allston, and “Thomas Matteson” (the name associated with a furniture grainer from Shaftesbury, Vermont) explored ways in which surface transformations might contribute to the projective power of their works. Especially in the colonial context, the productive instability of surfaces offered suggestive models for cultural growth; and consequently, surfaces came to figure heavily in broader American preoccupations with progress, development, and futurity.