In Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, Zara Anishanslin uses a painting of a colonial woman in a silk dress to write a material history of the Atlantic world. An example of how the discipline of material culture is making the global turn, Anishanslin looks closely at the physical nature and life histories of objects, particularly silk, art, mahogany, and similar things that would have filled the colonial elite home. She considers how these things are made, used, displayed, and reused. She queries how prior meanings, broader categories, and cultural and social worlds inform the meanings surrounding objects. Anishanslin thus situates the home, the family, and the body at the center of analysis and importantly shows how consumers, many of whom were female, produced global histories. She does not fetishize social mobility but rather acknowledges that empires are made up of people who often do not move far from their local communities. Focusing on individuals and things, rather than states and political economies, Anishanslin argues that she has uncovered the hidden histories of Britain's commercial empire in the eighteenth century. She especially shows how luxury items were both local and global things, serving as commodities, gifts, status symbols, and objects of fascination and edification.
Anishanslin organizes her study around two men and two women involved in the making of a 1746 portrait of Anne Shippen Willing (1710–91). Specifically, Anishanslin writes the history of the artist and the sitter and the silk designer and the weaver who produced the gorgeous fabric that adorned Willing's body. None left an extensive personal archive, so Anishanslin turns to the objects that these people produced and consumed. These things, she argues, reveal the history of sericulture and silk weaving in the British Empire and the uses of art, fashion, and other commodities to display social and political status in the colonies, and the demonstrate how art and consumption also helped develop a distinctive “American” identity. This is not a comprehensive study of art, silk, or the British Atlantic, but it is an investigation of some of the men and women who held together this far-flung world.
The story begins in London with the silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688–1763). A woman in a man's profession, Garthwaite became one of the most successful designers in the mid-eighteenth century, and an example of her work was the cloth used in Willing's dress. Anishanslin's creative analysis illustrates this unique woman's training and working life and her British and foreign influences, and she contemplates how it was possible a woman could be so successful in this trade. We then learn how Spitalfields' weaver Simon Julins (1686/8–1778) wove together Garthwaite's global designs to create the cloth that adorned bodies and decorated homes around the empire. Julins's history not only establishes the importance of the silk trade in the imperial economy but also demonstrates the impact of European culture on British history, as he most likely was a descendent of the French Huguenots who occupied a central place in the silk weaving profession.
The narrative then crosses the Atlantic and moves from production to consumption with the biography of the Philadelphia-born Anne Shippen Willing. The granddaughter of Philadelphia's first mayor, the Quaker merchant Edward Shippen, Anne was married to Charles Willing, one of colonial America's wealthiest merchants, whose trade in such things as lemons, grain, rum, textiles and other dry goods, and slaves helped finance the American Revolution. Anne's portrait, Anishanslin argues, displayed the social, economic and political position of this important merchant family. Finally, Anishanslin also writes about the painter, Robert Feke (c. 1707–c. 1751), who some art historians have identified as “‘the first native-born genius' in colonial American art” (226). Feke and his colleagues were influenced by European traditions, were enmeshed in an intellectual community that stretched across the Atlantic, and yet were also architects of a distinctive “American” public culture. Throughout the book, we also meet many side characters and explore several subplots that add to this rich portrait of life in eighteenth-century England and North America.
Though balanced and straightforward, Anishanslin's organization of her material nevertheless inadvertently privileges production and the metropole over consumption and the colonies, leads to repetition, and introduction key ideas and people rather late in the text. The narrative is also focused on comfortable people and not on less fortunate “hidden” figures that built this world. There is some mention of the slaves, but not much investigation of those who actually worked in American sericulture. We learn about the designer and weaver, but not the sempstress or tailor who worked very long hours for low wages in miserable conditions. We also learn almost nothing about the Chinese workers who produced the goods and the merchants and artists who cultivated global tastes for silk and other luxury goods. While no book can do everything, these and other oversights and the book's organization leave us with a relatively conflict-free, comfortable, white, and elite Atlantic world. Anne Shippen Willing might have experienced the world this way, but to what degree did luxurious silk and beautiful portraits hide as much as they reveal about the class, gender, and racial inequities that were developing on a global scale in the eighteenth-century Atlantic?
