Forthcoming

“The House on Belle Isle and its Appearance in Picturesque Media, 1774-1805” in Behind the Scenes of Object-Based Art Histories. Edited by Tracee Ng and Carl Schmitz. Vernon Press.

Built in 1774, the house on Lake Windermere’s Belle Isle has long been a picturesque emblem of the English Lake District. Featuring prominently in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artistic accounts of the area, the house has accordingly been assigned a number of different meanings that scholarship has yet found cause to investigate within a single study. Shortly after construction, documentation of the house appeared in a pattern book assembled by its architect, John Plaw. Isolated from its surrounding environment, orthographic drawings describe the home’s internal layout, structural features, and neoclassical appearance; empirical proof of Plaw’s architectural sensibilities among an otherwise unbuilt body of work. Later, the house appears in a drawing by landscape designer and arboriculturist, Thomas White. Here, it is depicted as a found object in need of literal and conceptual framing in order to become part of a forty-acre network of picturesque landscape improvements. Later still, the house appears in countless paintings and aquatints, each offering conflicting conceptual treatments of the house. Among others, artists Philip James de Loutherbourg and George Romney read the house symbolically, assigning to it a number of performative attributes in service of various aesthetic, cultural and political agendas. In sum, the house on Belle Isle resists the singular and conclusive meanings typically assigned to it by artists and scholars alike. Through object-based study, this essay repositions the house on Belle Isle as an unstable and mercurial object participating in a multitude of competing and even contradictory picturesque ideals in the years between 1774 and 1805.