Re-viewing history: antiquaries, the graphic arts and Scotland's lost geographies, c.1660-1820

This thesis examines topographical art depicting Scotland’s natural scenery and built environments, architecture, antiquities and signs of modern improvement, made during the period 1660 to 1820. It sets out to demonstrate that topography and topographical art was not exclusively antiquarian in nature, but ranged across various fields of learning and practice. It included the work of artists, geographers, cartographers, travel writers, poets, landscape gardeners, military surveyors, naturalists and historians who were concerned with representing the country’s varied, and often contentious, histories within an increasingly modernising present. The visual images that are considered here were forms of knowledge that found expression in drawings, paintings and engravings, elevations, views and plans. They were made on military surveys and picturesque tours, and were often intended to be included alongside written texts, both published and unpublished, frequently connecting with travels, tours, memoirs, essays and correspondence. It will also be argued that topography was a social practice, involving networks of artists, collectors, publishers and writers, who exchanged information in drawings and letters in a nationwide, and often increasingly commercial enterprise. This thesis will explore some of the strands of such a vast network of picture-making that existed in Scotland, and Britain, between 1660 and 1820, as visual images were circulated, copied, recycled and adapted, and topographical and antiquarian visual culture emerges as a complex, synoptic form of inquiry.

Graphic satire and the rise and fall of the First British Empire: political prints from the Seven Years' War to the Treaty of Paris, c. 1756-1783

This thesis examines the early stages of the transformation of emblematic political prints into political caricature from the beginning of the Seven Years' War (1756) to the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War (1783). Both contextual and iconographical issues are investigated in relation to the debates occasioned by Britain's imperial project, which marked a period of dramatic expansion during the Seven Years' War, and ended with the loss of the American colonies, consequently framing this thesis as a study of political prints during the rise and fall of the so-called 'First British Empire'. Previous studies of eighteenth-century political prints have largely ignored the complex and lengthy evolutionary process by which the emblematic mode amalgamated with caricatural representation, and have consequently concluded that political prints excluded emblems entirely by the end of the 1770s. However, this study emphasizes the significance of the Wilkite movement for the promotion and preservation of emblems, and investigates how pictorial political argument was perceived and received in eighteenth-century British society, arguing that wider tastes and opinions regarding the utilization of political prints gradually shifted to accept both modes of representation. Moreover, the marketplace, legal status, topicality, and manufacturing methods of political prints are analyzed in terms of understanding the precarious nature of their consumption and those that endeavoured to engage in political printmaking. The evolution, establishment, and subsequent appropriation of pictorial tropes is discussed from the early modern period to the beginning of the so-called Golden Age of caricature, while tracing the adaptation of representational models in American colonial prints that employed emblems already entrenched in British pictorial political debate. Political prints from the two largest print collections, the British Museum and the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale are consulted, along with a number of eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, to develop the earlier research by M. Dorothy George, Charles Press, Herbert Atherton, Diana Donald, Amelia Rauser, and Eirwen Nicholson.