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Jamie Boyd walks into the kitchen. He has the same intensely blue eyes as his father. He has the same gentle expression. His hospitality is ingrained. He immediately offers: Coffee? Cake? Tea? Bread? He has the same stammering, hesitant sentence patterns as his father, all commas, dots and dashes, the odd full point offering a rare conclusion. But when I say, "I would have liked to have known your father", his reply is swift and succinct. "There are the paintings." Arthur wrote a clutch of personal letters in his lifetime. He kept no diary. Loathed speech making. Avoided interviews. Mistrusted words. He revealed so little of himself that his youngest daughter, Lucy, confessed, "I'm not sure how well I really knew him". Jamie believed his father was "... a bit of a mystery ... reclusive by nature ... partly hiding something in himself'. Polly, his first born, labelled him "an enigma, probably one of the most secret people on earth". And his wife, Yvonne, admitted her husband would never tell her "how, or what, he felt". In the most revealing letters Arthur Boyd ever wrote, love letters to Yvonne in his early twenties, he warned her (and no doubt any future biographers) that his letters were "only a shadow of me, I'd hate any person to judge me by them, they are a weak shadow".l Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother, Theo, filled a book. But in Vincent's undelivered dispatch, found on his body after his suicide, he told Theo he had reached the conclusion, " ... the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak". Many would agree, believing that a painting tells us all we need to know about the artist. However, when we look at the wide-open, light-filled, last landscapes that Vincent painted from the window of his room in the sanatorium at Saint-Remy, it changes our perspective to discover that he deleted the bars. Biography, too, is based on distortion; the most brilliantly shining facts always clouded by perception, time and place. Peter Porter, in his 2004 National Biography Award lecture.' said he believed all appearance to be a mystery, all stories partial, and any biography, in the end, no more than a biopsy. A brush stroke transforms, a memory transforms, as a word transforms. Yet, despite the inadequacy of the words' jet down in the following pages, they are driven by a need to make connection. Just as we attempt to understand the land, sea and sky and make maps to find our way, we search for tracings in other lives to help us navigate our own.

Aiming to study the nature and significance of the modern home, this thesis examines in detail two major influences affecting the furnishing and decoration of the middle class home in Britain for the period 1890 to 1914. This project considers a variety of representations of the domestic interior to identify the furnishing ideals they embodied. It focuses on the two major producers of such representations: the furnishing industry, and the design reform and Arts and Crafts movement. The commercial and art spheres they stood for approached and expressed in opposing ways the possibilities opened up by modernisation. In trying to keep up with the growing demand of the middle class, the furnishing trade applied capitalist business methods, building a market and helping to create a consumer culture centred on the home and its equipment. Critical of the perceived ills of industrialization, reformers and Arts and Crafts designers contested the commercial sphere and promoted instead an artistic approach to design, responding mainly to aesthetic and social concerns. The resulting depictions of middle-class domestic interiors represented modern furnishing ideals, albeit contradictory ones. Piecing together diverse and fragmentary historical evidence, this thesis studies in detail the large furnishing firms of the period, and the images, narrative and strategies they used to promote their goods. It also examines the design reform discourse and particularly the genre of advice literature. This project aims to unveil the hidden agendas reformers and advisers were engaged with in the pursuit of the modern home. The analysis reveals the varied ways in which advice authors portrayed the domestic interior, reflecting stylistic, aesthetic, technological and commercial concerns. The approach and analysis are interdisciplinary, and are grounded in the assumption that these representations and discourses, and the ideals they embody, are an essential account of modernity.

This thesis explores and analyses the practices, role and significance of housekeeping in the royal bedchambers at Hampton Court in the period between 1689 and 1737. Specifically, it seeks to chart contemporary practices of care and maintenance and to situate this work within the context of the rooms that lay at the heart of the late-Stuart and early-Hanoverian courts. A broad range of primary sources have been used to inform the study, in particular the records of the Lord Chamberlain and the Great Wardrobe. These archives are considered in relation to the material culture of the interiors at Hampton Court and are placed within the broader framework of social and political histories of the period. The thesis is divided into two main parts, the first of which explores the context of the royal bedchambers at Hampton Court. Starting with the premise that the practices of housekeeping were shaped by the specific environment in which they operated, it provides an exposition of the dual significance of this area of the palace as a space for magnificent court ceremony and as a retreat for the rituals of royal private life. Developing these findings, the second part of the study discusses housekeeping practices and the servants who undertook this work. In particular, it focuses on the identity, role and status of the lower ranking female servants of the bedchamber department, the Keeper of the Standing Wardrobe and the Privy Lodgings and the craftsmen of the Great Wardrobe. Throughout the discussion of these individuals, and the practices of care and maintenance, is framed by an analysis of the motivations for good housekeeping at court, and the meanings that were ascribed to this work. The research contained within this thesis contributes to our knowledge of the royal bedchambers at Hampton Court, in a key phase of the palace's history. by offering a more complete picture of how these rooms were inhabited by domestic servants as well as the monarch. New light is also shed on the many long periods when Hampton Court lay empty and the spheres of activity that took place in the absence of the court. The findings of this thesis demonstrate the significant role played by housekeeping as an essential underpinning for the use of Hampton Court as a royal home and as a splendid place of court.

In the twenty-first century Hampton Court Palace is widely recognised as one of the UK's top historic visitor attractions. Historic Royal Palaces, the charitable trust responsible for the upkeep and display of the palace, has a strong organisational identity, with a purpose that is carefully coordinated to engage the visiting public through displays that focus on key events in the site's history. However, when Hampton Court was opened up free of charge in 1838, visitors were presented with a rather different public spectacle. The majority of rooms were set up to display paintings from the Royal Collection and the site was promoted by the social reformers of the day as a place where the public, particularly the working classes, could be educated and improved. This thesis will demonstrate how Hampton Court has developed from a public art gallery of the 1830s to the site of historic significance that we know today. It is a transition which features a significant duality. On the one hand, the palace has been periodically reinvented in line with changing ideas of what role it should perform in society; on the other, clear circular trends can be identified in successivea pproachesto the administration and display at Hampton Court, which often link the twenty-first century idea of the palace surprisingly closely to its historical characterisationsT. his thesis arguest hat Hampton Court Palace's development has been a chequered process, which paradoxically combines both innovative reinvention and significant continuity. Using significant episodes in the palace's history - the re-decoration of the Great Hall (1840-6), the removal of the Raphael Cartoons (1865), the excavation of the moat (1909-10), the refurbishment of the State Apartments (1938) and the introduction of admission fees (1914) - this thesis seeks to investigate the varied, and often conflicting, guises that Hampton Court has adopted between 1838 and 1938. The discussion will be set in the context of three broad themes, that of `control', `access' and `display'. Within this frame of reference, the thesis uses source material that illuminates both the creation of the palace's outward face and the public's response to it. The first category is largely dominated by the records of the Office of Works, the government department responsible for the site during the period in question. The second aspect of the study is informed by a rather more disparate group of sources, ranging from newspaper reports to advertising images. Together they build a picture of how an historic visitor attraction at Hampton Court Palace was `made'.

Alongside the telephone and camera, the typewriter is one of the most influential technologies of the late nineteenth century, often understood as being born fully formed and successful in 1874, with the arrival of the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer on the open market. Yet prior to this machine, there had been over 150 attempts at inventing a mechanised writing machine, stretching back to the early eighteenth century; and after this date, there were a large number of writing machines that presented significantly different design propositions to keyboard-typebar mechanism for the typewriter. This thesis sets out to explore the pre- and early history of the typewriter, beginning with the first recorded appearance of a writing machine in 1711 and ending in 1905 when, at a meeting of the Union Writing Machine Company, the design of the typewriter became stabilised. In its exploration, this thesis sets out to answer the double question: how has the body written and how has writing 'written' the body. Through these writing machines and alongside a history of writing and a history of machine-body relations, this question is answered through four tropes of mechanised writing: copying, fragmentation, dexterity, and agency. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, this thesis begins with a comparative analysis of automata, early typewriting machines, polygraphs, pantographs, physiognotraces and handwriting pedagogy to argue that the Enlightenment's writing technologies and techniques were expressive of and formative to a discourse of copying and imitation. It then argues that as the human body became discursively fragmented into discrete units, through physiognomy, phrenology, anthropometry and Bertillonage, writing itself transformed from a process of continuity to one of fragmentation. It also argues that this process of fragmentation was part of the late-nineteenth century's pursuit of media transparency. This thesis then examines the absorption of women's bodies into the labour market of late-nineteenth century Western capitalism as typewriter operators, arguing that the very domesticated dexterity ascribed to these bodies and articulated through the new theories of evolution and biological science, was a bodily skill through which women were able to subvert the cultural norm of 'angels of the home' to become commercial workers. Finally, this thesis turns to the question of agency and mechanised writing, though an analysis of an 'other' form of mechanised writing machine of the late nineteenth century, the index typewriter. Arguing that these machines are similar technologies to the Ouija Board, the thesis focuses on the phenomenon of nineteenth century Spiritualism, arguing that it can be understood not only as a deeply technological practice, but also one to which the act of writing was fundamental, as the inscription method through which a ventriloquism of agency could be performed. Through this analysis of pre-twentieth century typewriters and typewriting, this thesis argues that as writing is a bodily act, it is both formative to and a reflection of the key discourses of modernity.

Taking the Women's Weekend Conference held at Ruskin College, Oxford as my starting point, this thesis identifies and critically investigates the representation of specific concerns of the Women's Liberation Movement in British feminist artistic practice between 1970 and 1978. These concerns relate in particular to the personal experience of childraising and domesticity, namely, loss of identity and issues surrounding marriage, domestic labour, childcare, motherhood and female isolation. Approached as a reclamation project based upon the examination of feminist publications, feminist archives, the papers of the Women's Liberation Movement, and oral histories, this thesis establishes the importance of personal issues that were central to the politics of experience adopted by the Women's Liberation Movement. Through a study of the work of feminist artists aligned to the Women's Liberation Movement, this thesis explores their engagement with these issues and the differing ways in which they sought to represent and express them through their work. This thesis argues that their work was - and remains largely unacknowledged - for its representation of liberation politics and its role in raising consciousness of female oppression. However, the more recent publication of feminist and feminist art critiques have provided important insights with which to revisit and re-assess the work. Locating the work within a micro-history of socialist feminism, the research focuses on the work of Feministo, in particular its three founding members, Su , Richardson, Monica Ross and Kate Walker and participants Tricia Davies and Cathy Nicholson. It also examines the work of Alexis Hunter, Pen Dalton, Mair Davies, Margaret Harrison, Elona Bennett and the Hackney Flashers, with particular reference to Michael Ann Mullen. The films of Sue Crockford, the Camden Film Collective, Wages for Housework Campaign and The London Women's Film Group as well as the Berwick Street Collective are also discussed. All of these artists and groups were affiliated to the Women's Liberation Movement and fought oppression by raising awareness of domestic issues through their work. The influence of American feminist art, avant-garde film and socially aware conceptual art is assessed as well as the impetus of collective action alongside the adoption of craft methods in challenging modernist art practice and contributing to an emerging post-modem era. Acknowledging a recent interest in domestic issues, in craft, and the importance of collective artistic strategies associated in the 1990s in Britain with the phenomenon of the 'YBA's (Young British Artists), this thesis proposes a reclamation and re-assessment of the role and work of the artists associated with the Women's Liberation Movement in Britain.

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This thesis acknowledges the role of the designer and design in constructing and communicating the meanings that become attached to materials. This critically engaged study of wood is informed by Roland Barthes's semiological analysis and seeks to expose the myth of wood as a natural material. It demonstrates that complex technical and cultural processing result in a series of connoted meanings becoming attached to wood. By referring to Jean Baudrillard's distinct 'Phases of the image' (in Simulacra and Simulation, 1981) it is able to question critically examples that include the use of wood in the work of twentieth century and contemporary artists and designers. It asks whether the role of wood in the examples presented is to reflect reality, mask reality, mask the absence of reality or ultimately to reject reality altogether. The thesis is organised into a series of eight interconnected thematic chapters that present an essentially industrialised understanding of wood. It concludes that wood is a tremendously varied material, able to describe its substance at its surface. In spite of its variety, a simplified graphic depiction of wood benefits from the cultural understanding of the material that has been developed over a lengthy period of time, during which the product of the natural landscape has become cultivated and commodified.

Italy's post World War II art and artisan produce and her small and medium scale ceramic production between 1945 and 1958 has been characterised I by an apparent aesthetic synthesis of avant-garde ideals, craft traditions and popular culture. This thesis examines this particular occurrence through a multi and interdisciplinary approach. It has profited from the application of methodologies deriving from the different fields of history, ceramic-, art-, applied art-, design and architectural history and from information obtained from economic and naval histories and tourist guides. This has enabled on the one hand to explain this phenomenon and to situate the ceramic manufacturing sector and the objects within their socio-historical, economic and cultural framework and on the other to employ the objects themselves to challenge dominant ideas within contemporary design-, art-, craft- and ceramic history. The majority of the data that informs this work derives from the analysis of primary sources collected and researched in Italy such as the objects and works themselves, contemporary magazines, archives and interviews. Whilst the time-span has been defined by the perceived birth and decline of the synthesis phenomenon, the period studied in this thesis includes a brief introduction to the tradition and revival of Italy's post-unification ceramic culture and industry and the general aesthetic and artistic developments which have significantly influenced the post 1945 developments. This is followed by an in-depth account of the aesthetic panorama of Italian ceramics between 1945 and 1958 through the works of its protagonists and an analysis of ceramics used as an ornamental medium in architectural structures and modem interior decorating schemes and exteriors. Another part analyses the ceramic industry from a production, economical, commercial and consumption point of view and establishes its significant role not only in relation to Italy's overall economic reconstruction efforts but in the creation of the image that constituted the ideals associated with the 'Made in Italy' label. The last part examines Italian ceramic culture between 1945 and 1958 in its contemporary design, art and craft context. It will present the history of Italian material culture and design as based on an evolutionary model which is incompatible with modernist-lead design histories. In addition, this thesis challenges the under-representation of Italian ceramics within 20th century British ceramic, art, craft and design history and the British approach to ceramic writing and aims to incite further multi and interdisciplinary approach to the history of design.