Material Cultures, 1740–1920

John Potvin is Assistant Professor of European Art and Design History at the University of Guelph, Canada. He is the author of Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1880-1914: Bodies, Boundaries and Intimacy (2008) and editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 (2009). Alla Myzelev is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Guelph, Canada. She has published on the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde and craft, the role of women in the Arts and Crafts Movement as well as the representation of material culture in museums and private collections.

• Contents: Introduction: the material of visual cultures, John Potvin and Alla Myzelev; Porcelain bodies: gender, acquisitiveness and taste in 18th-century England, Stacey Sloboda; Women's home-crafted objects as collections of culture and comfort 1750-1900, Clive Edwards; Spatializing the private collection: John Fiott Lee and Hartwell House, Anastasia Filippoupoliti; 'Everyone to his taste' or 'truth to material'?: the role of materials in collections of applied arts, Nadine Rottau; Collecting/painting harem/clothing, Joan DelPlato; 'Chinamania': collecting Old Blue for the house beautiful c 1860-1900, Anne Anderson; From specimen to scrap: Japanese textiles in the British Victorian interior, 1875-1900, Elizabeth Kramer; Indian crafts and imperial policy: hybridity, purification and imperial subjectivities, Julie F. Codell; Collecting peasant Europe: peasant utilitarian objects as museum artifacts, Alla Myzelev; Collecting intimacy one object at a time: material culture, perception and the spaces of aesthetic companionship, John Potvin; Collecting the sublime and the beautiful: from romanticism to revolution in Celtic revival jewellery, Joseph McBrinn; Index.

'John Potvin and Alla Myzelev's essay collection is informative and often intriguing in its particular approach to material culture and the role of collections and collectors - taken together it forms an erudite, well researched body of work.' Juliette MacDonald, Edinburgh College of Art, UK 'The essays fulfil their promise as fascinating case studies.' Winterthur Portfolio