Art history

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/34956

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(Dis)ability and the Making of the Early Modern Artist
(2025-08-01) Vallah Gabaev, Or; Lingo, Estelle; Lingo, Stuart
This dissertation examines the connections between (dis)ability, art, and identity in early modern Europe, questioning prevailing accounts that have formed biased narratives of disability history. As used in this dissertation, the term (dis)ability describes the fluid and socioculturally constructed norms that define disability experience, eliminating the binary division between disability/ability. Through an analysis of first-person visual and literary depictions of disability, this research investigates the experiences of three early modern artists: Hendrick Goltzius, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, and Jacopo Pontormo. Utilizing Critical Disability Theory, an interdisciplinary approach that analyzes disability as a cultural, historical, and social phenomenon shaped by power relations, this study uncovers the versatile aspects of disability during the early modern era, emphasizing themes of disability gain and pride, and illustrating how these artists navigated their embodied experiences and shaped their identities in varied professional environments. Ultimately, this research showcases the transformative influence of (dis)ability in reshaping the creative process, theoretical output, and self-fashioning. Plain Language Abstract:This dissertation explores how disability, art, and identity intersected in early modern Europe. It challenges common misconceptions about disability history by looking at the experiences of three artists who lived at the end of the sixteenth century: Hendrick Goltzius, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, and Jacopo Pontormo. Using a critical disability perspective, this research shows how these artists’ disability experiences influenced their creative work and sense of self. This study looks at the artists' own words and art to understand how disability affected them. It shows how disability can strongly and often positively impact an artist’s work and sense of self.
"Maestra mia": Artemisia Gentileschi, Diana di Rosa, and Women Artists in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Workshops
(2025-08-01) Barnes, Margaret M.; Lingo, Estelle
This thesis examines the artists Artemisia Gentileschi and Diana di Rosa to re-evaluate the fortunes of female painters in Naples during the first half of the seventeenth century. Using the methodology termed “Thinking from Women’s Lives,” the thesis aims to analyze previously known archival evidence and to address gaps within it concerning the lives and artistic education of these two women, particularly their role in teaching their daughters to paint. The thesis then challenges the persistent attribution of paintings to single artists in the context of the Neapolitan workshop. Based on the reconstruction of a highly familial and consolidated Neapolitan workshop structure, it appears likely that larger, multi-figure paintings were completed by many more artists than just the individual artists named or the occasionally noted “workshop” suggests. Through this examination, the thesis points to evidence for a proliferation of female artists in seventeenth-century Naples whose historical presence has been rendered absent by the structure of the archive and art history’s longstanding investment in the single-authored painting. The thesis concludes by calling for expanding methodologies to highlight the work and lives of these women.
From the Mountains to the “Plain”: A Linguistic Reconsideration of Coast Salish “Plain” Woven Wool Textiles
(2024-10-16) Palkovitz, Bethany; Bunn-Marcuse, Kathryn
This thesis examines linguistic and art-making traditions of Coast Salish Peoples around x̌ʷəlč / Puget Sound. It utilizes a Lushootseed language-informed research methodology to examine archives of words and ethnographic sources to question the category of “Plain” twilled mountain goat, woolly dog, and bird down blankets to shed light on the weavings’ numerous formal qualities and uses; and it presents naming conventions for female weavers. Most importantly, this paper offers a suite of names for these historic and revitalized woven garments. Intended for use by Salish weavers and language learners, these words challenge previously theorized attributions, and they expand and complicate Coast Salish weaving typologies. This Lushootseed-focused art historical analysis reveals a deeply relational Coast Salish way of regarding weaving materials and ceremonial textiles around x̌ʷəlč, which unravels their former label as “Plain.”
Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Between Dreams and Daily Work
(2024-02-12) Stowell, Laura; Rounthwaite, Adair
This dissertation is a monographic study of the sculptural work of artist Alina Szapocznikow (b.Kalisz, Poland, 1926, d. Paris, France, 1973). During her short but prolific career, Szapocznikow both expanded and dismantled the possibilities of figural sculpture, creating works that have been described through the frameworks of classical sculpture, socialist realism, existentialism, surrealism, art informel, assemblage, conceptual art, pop art, protofeminism, the part object, body/performance art, minimalist seriality, trauma and disability studies, and more. Her work, however, never easily fits into any of these characterizations and always moves just beyond strict categorization. This dissertation draws upon archival source material and existing scholarship to situate Szapocznikow’s work within the networks of artistic production in Poland and France in the post-war period, in so doing asking how the frameworks listed above do and do not provide useful means for analyzing her work, and, in turn, how her work can expand and add nuance to established art historical narratives.
Beyond Propaganda and Realism in the New Deal Era: Modernist Negotiations of Artistic Style and Social Engagement in the Work of Northwest Women Artists Rapp, Helder, and Morgan
(2023-08-14) Block, Nicole; Sperling, Juliet
New Deal work relief programs empowered women, like Seattle-based artists and friends Ebba Rapp, Z. Vanessa Helder, and Blanche Morgan, to pursue art careers. These artists occupied unique subject positions that have been marginalized from the art world (as women, as queer, as Seattleites), but their work overtly supported a limited idea of liberalism and racial equality that protected whiteness. Yet, their work also reveals how artists across the United States were affected by circulating conversations about modernism, art’s role in society, and an “American” cultural identity, as well as controversies with New Deal politics and projects. Though histories of modernism often focus on abstraction, their figurative works demonstrate formal experimentation corresponding to the aesthetic debates of their time while also depicting relevant subject matter. This study reorients our perspective to examine how these women artists contributed to their region’s artistic legacy and engaged in conversations that cut across geographic boundaries and, ultimately, offers a more nuanced understanding of modernism across the nation, beyond a singular male-oriented definition of Northwest art. By paying attention to previously overlooked artists like Rapp, Helder, and Morgan, we can better understand the compromises between New Deal politics and aesthetics, and the identity factors and categories that have limited and shaped the canon of American art.
Breaking Bread: Piety, Poverty, and Praxis in Tintoretto's Last Suppers
(2023-04-17) Staley, Nicolas; Lingo, Stuart
Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto, completed nine paintings of the Last Supper during his lifetime. These works exhibit a stylistic and iconographic evolution that showcases a deep preoccupation with the impoverished, while versions completed after the Council of Trent also center the Eucharist as their primary subject. Concurrently, careful analysis of Tintoretto’s career during and after the 1570s reveals a developing pattern of gift giving and generosity that becomes counterproductive to maintaining a successful business and undermines the traditional view of Tintoretto’s business-driven character and artistic persona. These factors, coupled with the stylistic developments found in the post-Tridentine Last Suppers, emphasize that Tintoretto’s primary motive in his late career was the acquisition of piety through the act of painting.
The Akedah in Late Antique Synagogues: The Function of Figurative Art in the Expression of Localized Jewish Identity
(2022-04-19) Massarano, Abigail E; Lingo, Stuart
The three late antique Levantine synagogues at Dura-Europos, Sepphoris, and Beit Alpha all include within their elaborate decorative schemes a figurative depiction of the Binding of Isaac, or Akedah narrative. Analyzing the narrative depictions in the context of the rest of the synagogue’s artistic design, the local and regional visual culture, and known Jewish synagogue practices illuminates artistic variances within each community. These variances open the door for greater speculation on the function of art in late antique Jewish communities and demonstrate the rich, sophisticated visual culture of synagogue decoration throughout the Levant.
Lorenzo Costa’s ‘Triumphs’ in the Bentivoglio Chapel. The Journey of the Soul and Artistic Invention in Renaissance Bologna.
(2021-10-29) de Liberali, Gloria; Lingo, Stuart
This dissertation examines the pictorial decoration of the Bentivoglio chapel in the church of San Giacomo Maggiore, a space under the patronage of the de-facto ruling family of Bologna in fifteenth-century Italy. Specifically, my research offers the first, detailed analysis of two previously overlooked, albeit striking pictures, the so-called Triumph of Fame and Triumph of Death. These two paintings, realized by the Ferrarese artist Lorenzo Costa in 1490, draw their subject matter from the homonymous work by Italian poet Petrarch (Triumphi, or the Triumphs), and feature triumphal chariots, allegorical personifications, celestial visions, ancient characters, and portraits of Bentivoglio family members past and present. By conflating Christian and biblical iconographies with imagery drawn from vernacular poetry, classical mythology, history, and moral philosophy, these images disrupt our expectations about chapel decoration in Quattrocento Italy and resist traditional categories of artistic genres. Through a combination of close visual and textual analysis and the study of art criticism and theory, of the history of literature, and of the reception of the classical and medieval traditions, this dissertation situates Costa’s Triumphs in the lively cultural milieu of fifteenth-century Bologna, at the intersection of seignorial court, university, and artistic practice.
Le pinceau Ã la main: The Intertwined Lives and Careers of Madeleine FranÃ§oise Basseporte and Marie-ThÃ©rÃ¨se Reboul Vien
(2021-08-26) Champion, Tori Elizabeth; Lingo, Estelle
Madeleine FranÃ§oise Basseporte and Marie-ThÃ©rÃ¨se Reboul Vien, two artists whose lives intertwined over the course of the eighteenth century in Paris, experienced careers which present fascinating case studies for Enlightenment-era artistic lineage and training, professional obstacles for women, and the placement of women artists in the context of the rococo. Basseporte was a portraitist and botanical illustrator who became the French king’s official plant painter at the Jardin du Roi, while Reboul Vien was a painter of natural history subjects and a member of the prestigious AcadÃ©mie royale de peinture et de sculpture. This thesis investigates existing source material and scholarship on these two artists, from their own lifetimes to the present day, and raises new questions regarding the hidden facets of their careers, including the possibilities that Basseporte’s early biographers intentionally altered the factual narrative of her early life, and that Reboul Vien actively contributed to her husband’s practice as a key collaborator for many years after her own exhibition career had ended. The assumption that Basseporte was Reboul Vien’s artistic instructor has been adopted by historians in recent years, but the hypothesis, though compelling, remains unproven. Through comparative examination of Basseporte and Reboul Vien’s work and singular professional trajectories, this thesis critically analyzes the theory of their connection and crucially increases the depth and breadth of scholarship on this pair of artists.
The Myth and the Mattress: Replications and Installations of the Borghese Sleeping Hermaphrodite
(2020-10-26) Harvey, Caroline; Lingo, Estelle C
The Borghese Sleeping Hermaphrodite largely exists in art historical scholarship within Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s career because of the hyper realistic marble mattress and pillow he created for the intersexual deity to rest upon. Bernini’s additions to the work reimagined the ancient figure in a domestic setting and amplified tactile nature of the work. The subsequent replications of the sculpture continued to maintain this collaboration between the early modern and ancient sculptors, while adjusting and reframing the iconography to accommodate its increasingly conservative audience throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Examining the evolvement in the display of the Borghese Sleeping Hermaphrodite and tracing its replications provides an opportunity to unpack perceptions of gender and nudity in early modern Europe, and how the result influences contemporary curation and artistic practices.
Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni: Drapery and the Permeability of the Body
(2020-08-14) Lark, Karen Marie; Lingo, Estelle
Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni has remained a footnote at the end of the artist’s long life, with scholarly treatment conveying a deep-seated discomfort with the sculpture and its possible meanings. Scholars’ inability to adequately identify the narrative moment has been compounded by a lack of direct engagement with the Ludovica’s turbulent drapery, particularly in areas which raise questions of sensuality and the body. The present examination returns to the sculptural work itself, seeking to interpret the Ludovica’s drapery with the same intensity offered to treatments of the body, and to demonstrate the centrality of permeability to Bernini’s representation of the Ludovica. Through a series of folds in the center of the sculpture which create a “cavernous opening” between the beata’s legs, Bernini engages with concerns of interior and exterior, death, dissection, wounding, and gender. Connected to the side wound of Christ and vaginal imagery, the “cavernous opening” becomes a site of Eucharistic significance through Bernini’s deeply drilled and intentionally executed drapery folds. Rather than simply providing an acknowledgement of the Eucharistic rite taking place before it, Bernini’s altarpiece can be recognized as a visual enactment of permeability, suggesting the penetration of Christ’s body and the resulting outpouring of salvation. Careful attention to the drapery enables a reinterpretation of the Ludovica in keeping with Bernini’s artistic skill and masterful execution, presenting the sculptor’s pinched folds as a crucial component of the work rather than a mere reflection of Bernini’s “style.”
Queer Masculinities and Spaces of Intimacy in the Work of Anwar Saeed
(2019-08-14) Asif, Noor Alainah; Khullar, Sonal
The bodies of same-sex loving men and women have been subject to state-sponsored oppression, censorship, and brutalities since Pakistan’s inception. These violences have been increasingly aggravated since the 1980s. This paper examines the work of contemporary Pakistani artist Anwar Saeed. In his paintings, Saeed interrogates conflictual intersections between sexuality, religion, love, violence, and the nation-state through representations of queer male bodies. By way of his references to sexuality and queerness, Saeed forges artistic intimacies between his practice, other Pakistani artists, and local religious and cultural histories. This paper suggests that Saeed's practice, then, works within the parameters of the Pakistani nation-state as a means of working against it. This is to say that Saeed’s work has developed through the subversive concept of disidentification, as informed by queer theorist JosÃ© Esteban MuÃ±oz. Keeping in mind the theory’s US based context, this paper seeks to consider disidentifications in the context of Saeed's practice; an analysis of this kind can possibly create an opening for a cross-border analysis of the effects of power on gender, sexuality, and queerness that departs from generalizing, Eurocentric accounts of inequality, patriarchy, and oppression.
States of Legibility: Mohammad Kibria’s Calligraphic Modernism, 1950-1970
(2019-08-14) Phoutrides, Maria; Khullar, Sonal
This paper focuses on the works of Bangladeshi artist Mohammad Kibria, particularly those created between the 1950s and 1970s, the decades around the time in which the artist studied in Japan at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. In doing so, this paper examines how the network of artistic exchange between Bengal and Japan has persisted and transformed through periods of decolonization and independence. The paper situates Kibria’s practice within the historical context of Pan-Asianism and engages more recent scholarship on calligraphic and global modernism. The paper proposes a reading of the artist’s work that considers the shifting relationship between the artist and the nation-state in postcolonial Bengal, as well as the hazy distinction between word and image in calligraphic modernism.
Of Her Substance: Dress and Fecundity in Renaissance Painting
(2019-08-14) Eagles, Lane Michelle; Lingo, Stuart
Garments do not merely adorn women’s bodies; dress shapes and crafts femininity. This dissertation centers a common Italian Renaissance female dress shape, a forward swell of skirts above the womb, usually mistaken by beholders as a visual indication of pregnancy. I term this silhouette gravid dress. I examine how early modern dress illustrated and tailored Renaissance gender norms, particularly in terms of promoting pregnancy and motherhood as the key womanly virtues. I argue early modern women’s clothing championed pregnancy through sartorial accommodation by encouraging Renaissance wives to fill their luxurious skirts with new life and imbue the expensive pleats with purpose. My study analyzes paintings, particularly portraits, surviving dress objects, and sixteenth-century costume books to examine how early modern fashion dictated the shape and scope of women’s bodies. It intertwines feminism and gender studies, fashion history and theory, art history, and book history.
Looking at Jacopo Ligozzi’s Daphne laureola in Three Ways
(2019-05-02) Schoening, Krista; Lingo, Estelle
Jacopo Ligozzi produced an extremely diverse body of work over the course of his life, but he is best known for the botanical and zoological illustrations he made for Francesco I de’ Medici between 1577 and 1587. This paper will consider one of these botanical works, his image of Daphne laureola, as it relates to three artistic genres: scientific illustration, still life, and miniature painting. I argue that Ligozzi’s work brings the visual qualities and cultural associations of still life and miniature painting into the service of the budding science of natural history. The appeal of works like Ligozzi’s played an important role in both the establishment of scholarly social networks through the exchange of images, and in the cultivation of courtly support for scientific research due to the desirability of nature studies as collectable objects. The emerging natural sciences benefitted from this desirability, which resulted in part from the artistic knowledge deployed in the making of such nature studies. The attractiveness of these images helped viewers to reframe their relationship to non-human organisms, enabling the viewer to see previously overlooked creatures as newly fascinating objects of wonder.
Emperor Qianlong’s Pictorial and Physical Sites for Western Paradises
(2019-05-02) Zheng, Shiyu; Wang, Haicheng
In the twenty-second year of his reign, Emperor Qianlong, an ardent devotee of Tibetan Buddhism, commissioned his court artist Ding Guanpeng 丁觀鵬 (active 1708-1771) to create a work modeled after Guanxiu 貫休 (832-912)’s painting of the Western Paradise. Ding’s painting, Supreme Bliss World (1758), was later sent to the Imperial Weaving Bureaus in Jiangning (modern Nanjing) and Suzhou as the source painting for various copies in kesi 緙絲 (cut-silk tapestery), embroidery, and Songjin 宋錦 (Song brocade). Ding’s painting and the textile reproductions of the same subject can be seen as part of the Qianlong Emperor’s larger project of incorporating jile shijie anyang daochang 極樂世界安養道場 (bodhimaṇḍas for the World of Supreme Bliss) into the imperial palace. Envisioning the World of Supreme Bliss across the Forbidden City, the emperor regarded the Pure Land Western Paradise both as a carrier of the cherished wish for longevity and an essential component of a unified Buddhist system. This study means to explore Ding’s Supreme Bliss World and the various textile copies in light of the transformation of the imperial palace into the sacred site of the Western Paradise during Emperor Qianlong’s reign. While Qing scholars have made great contributions to the understanding of the political significance of Tibetan-inspired visual culture at the Qing court, Emperor Qianlong’s commissions of art works in the Pure Land tradition have received little scholarly attention. This study attempts to provide an alternative perspective in illuminating Emperor Qianlong’s interest in and his engagement with Pure Land Buddhism.
A Sign in the Pattern: The Creation of Mary Seton Watts’s Ideal Design in the Compton Mortuary Chapel (Surrey, England, 1898)
(2018-11-28) Tuft, Katie Anderson; Casteras, Susan P
This dissertation addresses the hierarchal categorization and canonization of the arts as influenced by dominant power structures through the work of turn of the century artist Mary Seton Fraser-Tytler Watts and the Compton mortuary chapel, or Watts Chapel, project in the Guildford district of Surrey, UK. The built environment of the Compton mortuary chapel and cemetery was largely conceived and designed by Mary Watts. It evades strict categories separating decoration from architectural design just as it also evades stylistic categorization. The chapel project confuses and resists boundaries, demonstrating that categories are often arbitrary and lead to privileged hierarchies. The Compton chapel project resides outside of the traditional economy of commissioned artwork and participates in the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement through the emphasized use of local materials and a community of labor. Mary Seton partnered with artist husband, George Frederic Watts, in forwarding the cultural philanthropy movement in a belief that artistic creation is an essential element of human nature within the context of a perceived de-humanization of labor through industrialization and colonization. The Compton mortuary chapel project participates in a social movement through the Home Arts and Industries Association (HAIA) to enable individuals living in rural areas access into the arts and crafts economy while also disrupting commercialization. The stylistics of the chapel designed by Mary Watts are inspired from multiple sources including Neo-Romanesque, Celtic Revival, “Second Phase” Pre-Raphaelitism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau. The changes from one style to another are understood as communicating an evolution of ideas concerning the economy of labor and gender roles at a moment of transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Mary Watts utilizes an artistic grammar of traditional symbolic types selected and juxtaposed with varying styles to create a new language of images. Decorative motifs are attached to intellectual ideals with social and political implications in what might be called Ideal Design. Through the creation of symbolism drawn from multiple cultures across time alongside powerful, feminized, non-denominational figures within a spiritual space, the Compton chapel provides a vision of human equality across boundaries of gender, nationality, and religious belief.
Kindred Spirits: Communal Making and Religious Revival in Arts and Crafts Movements, 1870-1920
(2018-07-31) Wager, Anna A; Casteras, Susan P; Lingo, Estelle
Communal work, community support, and collaborative art production defined William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, and these tenets were also central to late-nineteenth-century religious practices. My dissertation chronicles the relationship between religious patronage and Arts and Crafts production in the United Kingdom and United States, by examining designers, artists, and their spaces, including convents, embroidery schools, architectural firms, and printing houses. Practitioners often worked in shifting media: book designers also made stained glass, architects supplied embroidery designs, and typographers also devised architecture. Such fluid, collective practices are key to understanding this networked artistic exchange. These communities were practicing a resistance both radical and conservative, pushing for dignity in labor through an almost archaic aesthetic, within a seemingly conventional, medievalist, and patriarchal structure—yet this structure also allowed for dissident behavior. By focusing on the communal, we can examine these spaces and their connections between religious artmaking, subversion, and understudied but vital aspects of Arts and Crafts production, engaging art history, material culture studies, gender studies, and scholarship on print culture and book arts. Religious fervor driving artistic production is more commonly associated with earlier centuries, yet it was just as potent at the turn of the twentieth century, when religious vocation, Arts and Crafts communities, and communal living were all tinged with revolutionary and anti-industrial assumptions. Gothic Revival was championed as inherently conservative and pure, but these religious spaces also allowed for homosocial living and greater opportunities for female artists. Communal activities and the Gothic Revival also became associated with Anglo-Catholicism, a form of High Church Anglicanism that was widespread but controversial. High Anglican Gothic was sensorially grand and overwhelming: incense, embroidered vestments, and heavy ornamentation created a glittering, refracted environment. These immersive aspects relate to Arts and Crafts medievalism, as well as the Decadent movement, a literary practice tied to Aestheticism. I argue that the integration of art and architecture in Arts and Crafts production led to intense, encompassing experiences, possible only through a sophisticated transatlantic networking and collaboration: a combination of direct experience and diffuse systems of actors. This dissertation examines three Anglo-American communities: the Society of St. Margaret, the Merrymount Press, and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s bookmaking and architectural firms. Centering on embroidery, bookmaking, and architecture, these communities all contributed to Gothic Revival church design and decoration. The activation of their art objects in these spaces created meaning for both the makers and the viewers.
Shadows and Light: Seeing Senescence in British and American Genre Painting, ca.1850-1910
(2016-04-06) Palmor, Lauren; Casteras, Susan P
This study suggests the potential benefits of enhanced sensitivity towards aging in the history of art. Cultural representations of senescence in nineteenth-century genre painting, whether drawn from scenes of the hearthside, chaperonage, age-disparate coupling, or cross-generational play, provide the visual material from which a general perception of the life course can be drawn. The argument at the center of this study is that something is to be gained for Anglo-American art history from age studies and its related phenomena. Age articulates difference, and abandoning mono-generational research perspectives might sharpen our awareness of the role this difference plays in visual culture. There are unique challenges that one must responsibly address when prying into the omissions and oversights within a discipline, and the thematic image groupings which comprise the chapters of this study were selected to present a survey of the signifiers of old age without adhering to a simple story line. Both American and British visual culture demonstrate instances of lack and plenty in relation to the complex notions of Victorian aging, and ageism in the historiography of art can be made much clearer by reading this evidence with intention and respect. By electing to use the life cycle to appraise and navigate Victorian genre painting, historians of British and American painting would acknowledge the basic notion that ageism is perhaps the most neglected and socially permitted discriminatory system. An assessment of nineteenth-century visual culture designed by this supposition is bound to reveal significant and instructive truths.
Her Representation Precedes Her: Transatlantic Celebrity, Portraiture, and Visual Culture, 1865-1890
(2016-04-06) Henneman, Jennifer R.; Casteras, Susan P
Analysis of representations of London’s professional beauty and the tomboy heroine of the American West reveals the centrality of female celebrities to debates regarding feminine labor, gendered consumer behavior, and racial right to imperial rule during the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain and the United States. In the first three chapters of this dissertation, a consideration of the development of commercial photography and album culture leads to an analysis of how professional beauties, including Lillie Langtry, Mary “Patsy” Cornwallis West, Margaret Wheeler, and Lady Lonsdale harnessed representational tools to create a powerful sense of public intimacy that motivated celebrity culture, threatened expectations of gendered consumer behavior, and risked a visual miscegenation with colonized subjects in the minds and hands of indiscriminate viewers. The final two chapters analyze reports of frontier women such as Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary) and sensational dime novel fiction, out of which grew the figure of the tomboy heroine of the American West. A symbol of possibility on an expanding frontier, the Western tomboy heroine found a welcome a home in the popular imagination and was successfully performed by Annie Oakley in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. While a short-skirted sharp shooter would seem a transgressive female figure for Victorian-era audiences, analysis of her positive reception in Britain during the American Exhibition of 1887 reveals that a return to a more “natural” womanhood was considered a viable alternative to the negative effects of an industrialized urban environment. Utilizing sensitive attention to object materiality, consideration of socio-historical context drawn from primary sources, and examination of various modes of public performance, this dissertation implements a hybrid methodology to interrogate the imaginative fantasies required of and sustained by celebrity and consumer culture. Analysis of these case studies amidst London’s visual ecosystem during the second half of the nineteenth century demonstrates the ways in which representations of women were utilized to illustrate the hopes and anxieties of an imperial era.

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