The subject of this thesis is the Bristol artist, Bartram Hiles (1872-1927) who lost both arms in a tram accident at the age of eight and subsequently taught himself to draw and paint by mouth. Using the themes of art, modernity and disability, this thesis recovers Hiles’ career as a mouth-painting artist, not as biography but as a focused study located in nineteenth and early twentieth-century culture. Using disability studies as a principle point of reference, it does not draw on traditional medical and social models associated with this discipline. Instead, it employs a culturally located framework as its point of departure that also gives historical context to Hiles’ disability within the late Victorian and Edwardian period in which he was active as a professional artist. Hiles is little known today and the study has been driven by primary archival research into his formal art education and professional career as a mouth-painting artist. Employing an inter-disciplinary approach, each chapter is structured as a specific historical, cultural and physical context in which to locate Hiles’ art practice and professional career. Such contexts include medicine and science, the periodical press, agency and support, art and design practice, celebrity culture and the Edwardian artists’ club. The thesis employs discourse and representation but also draws on material and visual cultures of both medicine and art for its analysis. The study frames Hiles’ art practice within the modernity of the late nineteenth century as a transforming space to locate him as a modern subject who sought to re-interpret the act of painting. The thesis argues for Hiles to be seen as a modern man who used the opportunities afforded by modernity for individuals to re-make and re-fashion themselves, and to pursue new pictorial forms and spaces to exhibit his art. Negotiating the complexities of strategy and self-presentation, it positions Hiles as a figure of an increasingly commodified celebrity culture rather than a disabled man who led a life of marginalization. From this analysis Hiles emerges as a man and an artist fully able to navigate the modern world, and whose disability and unconventional method of painting illuminates the ambivalences of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century towards difference, otherness and perceptions of normality.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The thesis is a demonstration of an integrated methodology in the investigation of Chinese paintings. Section I outlines methods of analysis used by specialists in China, Japan and the West, and proposes their integration. Section II implements the Integrated Methodology in the identification of prime objects in a group of works attributed to Wu Zhen now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Section III presents a systematic method of investigating the non-genuine works, and charts their respective relationships to the prime objects and/or to each other. The findings clarify fundamental issues regarding period styles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and challenge, by implication, long held assumptions of authenticity of a great many works labelled with Yuan dates. They invite a reconsideration of our methodology as well as our basic assumptions of style-images associated with particular masters.

This thesis examines the hitherto largely-overlooked multifarious response by British artists to early Italian art which pre-dated the activity of the Pre-Raphaelites and their greatest champion, John Ruskin. The title of this thesis does not endeavour to claim that the artists under examination consciously formed or naturally constituted a group with clearly defined common interests and aims, as was the case with their aforementioned successors. Rather, the collective ‘pre’ Pre-Raphaelites is intended to demonstrate that, contrary to the impression given by the standard scholarship on this area, there were British artists prior to the dawn of the Pre-Raphaelites who found worth in periods of art beyond what was conventionally considered both generally tasteful and also useful for an artist to imitate, and who indeed made many of the important steps which facilitated the Pre-Raphaelites’ rediscovery of early Italian art in the late 1840s. The temporal span of the main investigative thrust of this thesis is, approximately, 1770 - 1845. Its structure is intended to reflect the multiplicity of both the catalysts and then the subsequent responses of British artists to the Italian primitives. The first part of the thesis comprises a number of chapters which offer a broad contextual framework - encompassing analyses of taste, artistic education and historiography - within which the varied activities of the artists explored in the subsequent chapters are set. Parts two and three reveal the very different approaches taken by a series of artists in the decades either side of the turn of the century in their attempts to study, learn from and sometimes emulate the visual lessons of the past. Thus this thesis rescues the often marginalised contributions of a selection of British artists to the resurgence of interest in early Italian art, and demonstrates how fundamental their interpretive filter was for the nature of the quasi-revolution in taste in the last half of the nineteenth century.

The thesis formulates a theory of Gypsy visuality based on the identification of key elements within Gypsy visual arts, crafts and décor. This is achieved through the analysis of Romany artefacts using the combined theories of anthropologist Alfred Gell (1945-1997) and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). The research highlights the social significance of Gypsy visual culture and argues its potential impact upon Romany/non-Romany social relations. Findings in relation to Gell’s theory of the Art Nexus: Gell’s theory of the Art Nexus has limited potential for application in its current form due to the lack of a method with which to analyse artefacts themselves. The links between Gell’s theory of the Art Nexus and Peirce’s Semeiotic theory have been strengthened during this research. Combining Gell’s theory with elements from Peirce’s Semeiotic theory increases the potential application of both methods by offering both social and semeiotic interpretations of the artefact. This combined method generates findings that offer a more precise account of the distribution of social agency via the artefact than Gell’s original theory allows. A combined Gellian and Peircean method of analysing artefacts makes Gell’s notion of agency more widely available for application by artists. Implications in relation to Gypsy visuality: By using a combined Gellian and Peircean analysis I have established some significant recurrent elements that constitute Gypsy visuality for the first time. These elements include; flashiness, allure, enchantment, entrapment, ornament, diversion, discordance, contingency, functionality, performance, community, family, home, traditional skills, wildlife, countryside and gender. The constituent elements of Gypsy visuality both reflect and inform Gypsy culture. This new understanding of Gypsy visuality offers a new understanding of the social relations that surround Gypsy culture. Gypsy visuality both reflects and informs the behaviour of Gypsy communities and in so doing articulates a set of relations that characterise Gypsy social agency. Implications in relation to art practice: Using painting as method to research Gypsy visuality in its constituent elements has generated new interpretations of Gypsy visuality. These are; Western art practices, glamour, interruption, disorientation and reflection. These new interpretations allow new access to the meanings inherent in Gypsy visuality and therefore new access to the meanings inherent in Gypsy culture.

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This thesis presents and contextualises a distinct cluster of fresco cycles depicting the life of Mary Magdalen in the central-eastern Alpine regions of Trentino, Tyrol and the Swiss Grisons from the late middle ages to the early Renaissance. Located for the most part in the marginal rural parish ambit and reflecting the agenda of the local patron, these cycles offer an alternate manifestation of the popularity and relevence of a major saint at this time. As such my thesis is a corrective to the precedence placed on the role of the mendicant orders in the development and transmission of the Magdalen cult and its visual canon. Through a series of interrelated case study chapters, I examine the narrative mural paintings found in the churches of Dusch, Rencio, Vadena, Seefeld, Cusiano and Pontresina, with three further appendices presenting relevant comparative works and restoration details. Each chapter sheds light on a neglected but crucial area of late medieval painting, drawing to the fore their individual interpretations of the Magdalen cult but also their affinities to one another. In particular, my thesis establishes the possibility of diverse patronage sources, modes of image reception and access. Moreover, it documents the sophisticated handling of issues such as gender, religious drama and the relevance of the life cycle liturgies, all of which contribute to the many iconographical innovations. In the absence of mendicant association, I suggest that the transmission of the visual cult of Mary Magdalen was made possible by itinerant artists and workshops, as well as a generational network of influence radiating from regional centres. As a result, my thesis contributes to a growing interest in the organisation, life and relevance of rural parish churches and communes and particularly those in remote areas.

The aim of this essay is to focus on and analyse the romantic aspects of De Stijl theory. It is argued that these romantic aspects have received less detailed analysis than the classicising tendencies within this movement’s underlying theory. The terms ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’, as used within the context of De Stijl theory, will be clarified for the purposes of this analysis. The article focuses on De Stijl theory, as reflected in the writings of the founding members of the movement, with specific reference to artist Piet Mondrian. Examples of De Stijl art and design are mentioned in order to contextualise certain ideas as formulated by Mondrian in particular, but this article does not focus on a discussion of the artworks themselves. Careful analysis of (as argued here) neglected aspects of De Stijl thought, makes a broader, more inclusive contextual interpretation of De Stijl art and design possible. Whilst acknowledging the existence of Western romantic thought and its influence on early twentieth-century abstract painting, this article focuses on a more specifically Eastern romantic notion of monism and antimaterialism as the basis for the formulation of De Stijl abstraction.

This report is a compilation of the influences that shape my current work. In this written representation of my process I mimic how ideas overlap and collide, rather than taking a chronological approach to my development over the past three years. The role of ornament to engage contemporary viewing is a dominant theme, in both my work and the report. I approach painting as an attempt to understand contemporary visual culture and how we look at objects today. My paintings rely on ornament as an entrance into exploring aesthetics and my personal history. / text

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Arts