Abstract
In two series in the 1880s, the Magazine of Art visually endorsed a relationship by contiguity between two entities, colonial landscape space in the white colonies and privileged English places in country homes, a para-heritage industry series. Through issues of perspective, boundaries, filled or empty spaces, scale and the material page, the magazine’s two series proposed to determine where culture resided, who controlled nature, and the hospitality of these two extreme domestic spheres to entire Britons to visit both of them. Pairing colonial space and English aristocratic place through specifics of habitability, imperial and national inscriptions on the picturesque and the sublime, the magazine presented aristocratic country homes as a national heritage for everyone and “wild” colonial landscape as tamed and inviting through shared anti-urban and anti-modernist nostalgic values. I argue that the visual organization of country houses and white colonies’ images and their texts independently and in conjunction were joined through the magazine’s illusion of its presumed aesthetic “neutrality” and service as offering these sites to the general public for consumption, travel and sociability. The magazine could deploy its cultural authority to represent these two spaces as unified and representative of the nation to stabilize these places’ dynamic social relations and erase their classed and colonial histories by invoking aesthetic principles: vast colonial landscapes (sublime) that symbolized domination of nature (including indigenous peoples) and country houses (picturesque) whose interiors’ prolific objets d’art symbolized accumulated English culture.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—The Art of Hospitality
KEYWORDS
Hospitality, White Colony, Country House, Magazine of Art, Nationalism
