Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848 – May 9, 1903) was a leading Post-Impressionist artist. Best known as a painter, his bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. Though less well known today, he was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.[http://rubens.anu.edu.au/htdocs/surveys/prints/bysubject/display00087.html

Life

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Born in Paris, he was descended from Spanish settlers in South America and the viceroy of Peru, and spent his early childhood in Lima. He was the grandson of Flora Tristan, a founder of modern feminism. After his education in Orléans, France, Gauguin spent six years sailing around the world in the merchant marines and then in the French navy. Upon his return to France in 1870, he took a job as a broker's assistant. His guardian Gustave Arosa, a successful businessman and art collector, introduced Gauguin to Camille Pissarro in 1875.

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Volume 21, number 2: Emerging Themes, Emerging Voices
Mills Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Considering the Copy
Moss Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Beyond English
LaFountain Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Collapsing Boundaries
Bailly Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Objects, Contexts, and the Space Between
Jordan Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Copley's Cargo
Roberts Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500
In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

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