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Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans; Orientalists; and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, by Mary Roberts

Buffon that animal species degenerated in the NewWorld. Moremetaphorically, actual size also stood firm against the rampant speculation, overextended credit, and inflations and contractions in the value of paper money that had precipitated the Panic of 1819 and led to the collapse of Audubon’s earlier career as a merchant. In an unstable paper-money economy, his prints insisted on the honest face value of their actual-size representations. Geography, commerce, and representation intersect again in the third chapter, devoted to Durand’s plein air nature studies, which Roberts wittily compares to “fresh produce” carted “from the forests to the city” (p. 3). She is the first scholar to treat Durand’s early work as a banknote engraver as an integral part of his artistic career, revealing the interconnections among his banknote designs, his reproductive engravings, and his landscape art, relating them all to the upheavals in transmission technology in the age of the telegraph. With startling insight she points out that with the advent of the telegraph, information and images no longer moved at the same speed. Words could be transmitted almost instantaneously over vast distances. Images lagged behind. They were slower, in Roberts’s word, “stickier,” in their insistent objecthood. The telegraph obliterated distances, leaping over the very spaces that were the substance of landscape art. As if in reaction against such annihilation, Durand created what Roberts terms “non-conducting images”: studies of rocks and forest interiors that do not lead us into pictorial space but fix our attention in the shallow foreground, entangling us in intricate lattices of natural detail, much as had the ornamental patterns of his banknote engravings (p. 118). They invite slow, absorbed, contemplative looking, their adhesiveness countering the accelerating pace of life in the era of steamships, railroads, and new communication technologies. My summaries here have done little justice to the dense intricacy and richness of Roberts’s arguments. The book deserves to be read in its entirety for its path-forging methodology, as well as for the imagination, wit, and intelligence that mark every page. It may be focused on early America, which has long stood on the periphery of art historical studies, but Roberts’s insights have implications and applications stretching far beyond the edges of the northern Atlantic. These ideas will travel well.