Thesis (Ph.D.)--Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 288-309).

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010. / Title from screen (viewed on July 28, 2010). Department of History, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Jason M. Kelly, Melissa Bingmann, Eric L. Lindseth. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-91).

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis reevaluates the role that women played in the collection and patronage of natural history, fine arts and antiquities in the long eighteenth century. While most scholarship that addresses early modern collecting and patronage operates within an androcentric framework, this project fills a historiographical gap by focusing its analyses on the experiences, activities, contributions, and achievements of female figures. Primary documentation provides evidence of a highly sophisticated, invested and functional network of enthusiastic and experienced female collectors and patrons who participated in activities that were at once parallel to that of their male peers and yet retained a distinctly feminine character. Influenced by prevailing intellectual movements and aesthetic trends, women throughout the period studied, accumulated, and commissioned items of scientific, artistic, and antiquarian value. Their meaningful engagement with naturalists, explorers, artists, statesmen, and colleagues is at the center of this study which situates female collectors and patrons within a wider socio-cultural context and confirms the broader historical significance of their work. In this way, this thesis may be understood as a restoration of women to their central place in the history of collecting and patronage and as a more complete historicization of the corresponding culture between the years 1715 and 1825.

This dissertation examines portrait production during the global Gilded Age in the United States, revealing an interplay between cosmopolitanism and revivalism. Using a transnational and multi-media framework, it broadens conventional definitions of portraiture, allowing American women to be centered within the study not only as subjects, but also as patrons of art. The project demonstrates that the apparently anti-modern strain of revivalism characteristic of late nineteenth century art emerged as a reflection of US expansionist ideologies. This goal is accomplished through a series of illustrative case studies, including a discussion of Gilded Age costume balls, organized by wealthy American women, that visualized the imperial courts of pre-industrial Europe in order to legitimize their social positions. Another investigation considers the Paris studio contents of American painter John Singer Sargent, which brought his iconic painting Madame X into exhibitionary dialogue with collected Japanese export goods, as emblems of the artist’s cosmopolitan brand of empire. An analysis of society leader Alva Vanderbilt’s Pompadour bedroom by French designer Jules Allard reveals a blend of pre-industrial style produced with modern technologies, making it a space worthy of her imperial ambitions. Finally, the study examines society matriarch Alice Vanderbilt’s paradoxical Victorianism and Modernism in the context of her portrait collection. Overall, the project illuminates new definitions of cosmopolitanism and its cultural significance during the Gilded Age and considers the collaboration between female patrons and artists, placing them within the context of media circulation and a global art market where women could curate and claim their own brand of identity, one expressive of a global reaching American empire in the late nineteenth-century. / Art History