The Canadian firm of Jacques & Hay was in business for fifty years, during which the company, if The Globe (Toronto) is to be believed, furnished the Province of Canada. This was a stunning and largely undocumented success. Jacques & Hay was one of the largest employers in the province and dominated the cabinet-making trade from 1835 to 1885. In 1871, Jacques & Hay employed 430 men and 50 women in a vertically-integrated operation that included a sawmill, two factories and a showroom. Jacques & Hay produced abundant furniture at reasonable prices. The availability of such household furnishings greatly enhanced domestic life in nineteenth-century Canada, providing scope for a more elaborate social life and allowing more people to achieve a greater sense of comfort and decency in their living arrangements.

No description available.

Consider the possibility of the remnants of our present day society being excavated and studied in centuries to come. Imagine the craftsmanship, the art, artifacts and architecture that will then be compared to those of the past centuries. Our entire culture will be labelled by the endless array of rubbish that has become an integral part of our lives. The increasing prevalence of kitsch in the society goes almost unnoticed where it should be causing concern. Few people are aware of its existence, or the permanent aesthetic scars induced by this prevalence. How has this cult of sheer awfulness come about and why has it become prevalent? It is impossible to pursue all the avenues of kitsch - so vast is it but it is the purpose of this study to try and answer some of the questions, in order to make people more aware of what has crept into our society, to help them become more discriminating, and not merely to level criticism at the perpetrators of kitsch.

This dissertation investigates Markgräfin Wilhelmine von Bayreuth’s (1709 – 1758) architectural patronage and the fashioning of her “body politic,” “body natural,” and the range of personas that inhabited the spaces between the public and private spheres. She used architecture and interior design to perform multiple roles, where the ornamentation of each built space enacted different facets of her royal identity. Central European social customs determined the arrangement and décor of palace architecture. The function, audience, and accessibility of a room were also connected to one’s rank and gender. Because of this, the representation of Wilhelmine’s “bodies” in art and architecture should have reinforced current social customs, which dictated that her visual identity play a subordinated role to that of her husband, Markgraf Friedrich. However, when considering the subtle claims made throughout Wilhelmine’s decorative program as a whole, it is clear that she used architectural splendor and theatricality to subvert these conventions and represented herself as her husband’s equal. The theatrical nature of ornament—as a social agent used to transfer meaning—allowed Wilhelmine to redefine the gender limitations of Magnificence gave her greater agency to perform roles that were often at odds with her limited social and political powers as a woman consort. Previous scholarship on Wilhelmine von Bayreuth has failed to recognize architectural space as an arena for contesting the limitations of social decorum or the differences between the Markgräfin’s public, natural, and semi-private bodies. This project contributes to the field of eighteenth-century studies by contextualizing Wilhelmine von Bayreuth’s commissions within a larger system of European Enlightenment architecture, design, and self-fashioing. Few authors have considered the architectural patronage of non-sovereign consorts in German courts, like Wilhelmine’s, or the prescribed boundaries that gender played in their commissions. This dissertation illustrates the significant contributions that minor courts and non-sovereign noblewomen made to the development of Rococo ornament and architecture. A layered methodological approach—which combines extensive archival research with literature on self-fashioning, orientalism, spatial theory, and gender performance—gives a greater understanding of Wilhelmine’s agency in crafting her range of public, private, and liminal identities. / Art History

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.