guest chair / Chinatsu Kobayashi, independent scholar
Chinatsu Kobayashi received her Ph. D. in art history (UQAM, 2019) with a thesis focusing on the role of Ruskin’s aesthetic theory on Arts and Crafts and early Belgian Art Nouveau. She also holds a Ph. D. in philosophy (University of Ottawa), with a thesis on R. G. Collingwood’s aesthetics. She has published a number of papers, including Heidegger, Japanese Aesthetics, and the Idea of a ‘Dialogue’ between East and West, British Idealist Aesthetics, Collingwood, Wollheim and the Origins of Analytic Aesthetics and (with M. Marion) Gadamer and Collingwood on Temporal Distance and Understanding. She is interested in interdisciplinary aspects of philosophy and art history.
C.9.1 The Old Masters and Gendered Spaces: The Duke and Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos and the ‘Rembrandt Room’ at Stowe
Andrea Morgan, PhD Candidate, Queen’s University
The history of collecting Rembrandt’s pictures in England is a subject of continual scholarly interest. However, just as there has long been an often-exclusionary canon of Western European artists, the same is generally true of those who collected their artworks. Indeed, historians so often turn to wealthy male aristocrats like Horace Walpole, or to celebrated artist-collectors such as Sir Joshua Reynolds in these sorts of pursuits, myself included. While there is undoubted value to this work, my paper will instead address certain underrepresented groups who are emerging from the margins of history — namely women, along with those outside the elite upper classes — by considering some of the ways that they too engaged with the fine arts.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos amassed an impressive collection of paintings and sculpture at Stowe house, Buckinghamshire. This included eleven pictures attributed to Rembrandt, making it one of the largest private collections of his work in England at that time. Yet, these pictures soon came to be displayed as a group in the Duchess’s dressing room, or the so-called ‘Rembrandt Room’ at Stowe. This odd choice is striking: why hang all of your ‘Rembrandts’ in the Duchess’s room and not a dining room or parlor, as was most common? Was it at the Duchess’ request and, if so, why did they appeal to her? And what does it mean to dedicate a specifically female and semi-private space to a collection of old masters? I will attempt an answer to these queries before moving on to briefly discuss early modern working-class Londoners who purchased and commissioned art during this period, and the difficult question of whether or not there was a certain aesthetic or artist who may have appealed to ‘middle-class taste.'
Andrea Morgan I am currently a PhD Candidate in Art History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where I am supervised by Dr. Stephanie S. Dickey, Professor of Art History and Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art. During the 2018 to 2019 academic year I was a Visiting Research Student at Birkbeck college, University of London, and I received my MA in Art History from Tufts University in 2016. My areas of research interest are Rembrandt’s critical reception and historiography, the history of collecting in early modern and nineteenth-century England, women and the lower classes as patrons and collectors, and museum studies.
C.9.2 Kate Reed’s Designer Collection: Collecting and Displaying Canadian National Identity
Isabel Luce, PhD Candidate, Queen’s University
In the early 1920s, Canadian-born collector and decorator Kate Reed (1856-1928) wrote about the affective power of the furniture she collected:
“[i]t is through its power to give back the past, and the quickening touch it lays on memory, recalling a sentiment here, a tragedy there, that makes furniture command our interest and our affection.”
Her book-length manuscript My Possessions serves as a love note to her faithful inanimate friends who accompanied her from home to home throughout her life. These collected possessions had heartbeats and lives, and her own interactions with them would leave further impressions on the objects. Reed detailed innumerable trips to antique shops (sometimes accompanied by friends and fellow collectors such as Ada Yates in Quebec City and Sir William Cornelius Van Horne in Montreal), on which she used her expert eye to seek out valuable treasures amidst piles of rubbish. Gaining clout for her sense of style and good taste, Reed was hired to decorate the interiors of prestigious hotels and lodges along the Canadian Pacific Railway, railway stations, chalets and homes around Canada, and was widely considered Canada’s first interior decorator.
Kate Reed’s granddaughter Kate Armour Reed published the definitive biographical account of Reed’s life in 2016 called A Woman’s Touch: Kate Reed and Canada’s Grand Hotels (2016). My paper builds on the recent biographical work of Kate Reed’s granddaughter, Kate Armour Reed, closely examining My Possessions to analyze Reed’s understanding of her personal relationship to objects in the context of her role as a settler colonialist, upper-class, white woman collector. Reed’s aesthetic choices in her collecting practices, largely informed by European design trends, and her placement of these affective collected objects in the very public spaces of hotel lobbies helped to shape what would be considered a Canadian colonial national look.
Isabel Luce is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Queen’s University currently based in Nova Scotia. She received her MA in Art History and Curatorial Studies at York University in 2014, with her thesis entitled Collaborative Portraits and Montreal’s Anglophone Elite: An examination of the artistic career of Gertrude Des Clayes (1879-1949), and her BA in Art History and Canadian Studies from McGill University in 2012. Her PhD dissertation, Picturing Victorian Domesticity: Kate Reed and the Professionalization of the Canadian Home, uses Kate Reed’s extensive archival documents in the McCord Museum in Montreal to analyze Reed’s role as a collector and the professionalization of decorating in Canada.
C.9.3 Large-scale Artifacts, Small-scale Evidence The Dilemma of Documentation
Dr. Bonne Zabolotney, Associate Professor, ECUAD
Using the work of Andrew King and King Show Prints as a case study, this presentation grapples with developing an understanding of historical large-scale graphic design work through a small-scale frame of reference, and the responsibility of the researcher to make historical work relevant to design practitioners. Andrew King, a printer, master carver, and proto-designer who practiced in Saskatchewan during the first half of the 20th century produced work at an unprecedented scale. His posters for circuses and other spectacles were printed at sizes large enough to cover the sides of barns, yet very little of his work was documented in context during its time. King also printed large dates, numbers, and other information to accompany existing posters, and some of these figures were carved and printed up to 7 feet in height.
Very few photos exist of King’s work in context, and they often display tiny and imperfect examples of his posters on sides of buildings, leaving design culture scholars to research King’s monumental work through extremely small documentation. These photos are also in black and white, leaving viewers to speculate the impact that colour and scale had on the average viewer. We can also view some of King’s original large prints in several gallery collections and archives, but this leaves us with pieces or examples of the letterforms out of context. Witnessing the large scale work at actual size and in situ seems to be an impossibility, and yet this would provide a profound understanding of large-scale work and its impact to contemporary design practices. How can scholars contend with the dilemma of studying this work in context, but with small and imprecise documentation, or at full size but without context? How can contemporary designers learn from this historical work?
Dr. Bonne Zabolotney is a designer, researcher, and educator from Vancouver, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Design from Alberta College of Art and Design, a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in Design from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She began working as a communication designer and art director in 1993, and began teaching at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2001. During this time she has held positions of Dean of Graduate Studies, Dean of Design and Dynamic Media, and Vice-President Academic and Provost. Her current research focuses on Canadian design culture, particularly anonymous and unacknowledged works, and the political economy of design.
