Les Fauves (French for wild beasts) were a short-lived and loose grouping of early Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities, and the use of deep color over the representational values retained by Impressionism. Fauvists simplified lines, made the subject of the painting easy to read, exaggerated perspectives and used brilliant but arbitrary colors. They also emphasized freshness and spontaneity over finish.

One of the fundamentals of the Fauves was expressed in 1888 by Paul Gauguin to Paul Sérusier,

"How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion."

The name was given (humourously) to the group by art critic Louis Vauxcelles. In French, "Fauves" means "wild beasts." The painter Gustave Moreau was the movement's inspirational teacher, and a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris who pushed his students to think outside of the lines of formality and to follow their visions.

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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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