Portrait of a Woman in Silk

Using a single material object, a portrait of a woman wearing an English silk damask gown in a North American colony, Zara Anishanslin lays out four biographical narratives to illustrate a ‘kind of additional empire’ within the British Atlantic World, showing how material objects left behind are evidence of a visual sensus communis (p. 11). The portrait reveals many things: the subject’s status as a ‘colonial woman of quality’ (p. 7); the role of women as both producers and consumers in the eighteenth century; the interconnectedness of metropolitan and colonial commerce; and the interactions between politics, economics, status and emulation during this period. The book is broken up into four main biographies, with the first two detailing the lives of the gown’s silk designer and weaver, and the second two parts discussing the portrait’s artist and sitter. But the book goes beyond the four individual stories; Anishanslin uses ‘the hidden histories captured within this portrait [to] tell tales of what wove the British Empire together, how it unraveled, and how new empires—on both sides of the Atlantic—came to be’ (p. 312). Although the designer and weaver had no personal contact with the wearer and the painter, the four are used to embody the breadth of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, and the ways in which commerce was wrapped up in imperial and social politics

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Atlantic World · British Empire · Colonialism · Empire · Object (grammar · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Subject (documents · Australian History and Society · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy