Portrait of a woman in a silk dress: The hidden histories of aesthetic commodities in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic World

This dissertation explores the many hidden histories revealed by a single resonant object: a 1746 portrait of a woman in a silk dress. In this portrait, New England artist Robert Feke portrays Philadelphian Anne Shippen Willing wearing a Spitalfields flowered silk, a fabric woven in London by Huguenot Simon Julins after a pattern by English silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. Each chapter of my dissertation considers one of these four creators of this object (designer, client, weaver, and painter) and discusses transatlantic networks linked to them in the time (1688 to 1791) and space of their collective lives. Ranging from Philadelphia, London, and Newport, to Lincolnshire, Boston, and Bermuda, my work challenges scholarly models that privilege metropole over colony as it alternates between metropolitan and colonial perspectives of production, consumption, and use. Analysis of architectural spaces, decorative arts, and cultural landscapes as well as textiles, silk designs, and portraits---all tied together through this single portrait---reveals that the makers and users of these objects and images fashioned and displayed ideologies, from the personal to the political, through their material world.;My work contributes to scholarship on the consumer revolution by revealing the emotive, ideological power objects hold beyond consumer behaviorism or emulative refinement. In particular, this portrait of a colonial merchant's wife wearing a flowered silk dress highlights how people in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic World produced, used and consumed aesthetic representations of nature to express cultural fascinations, map changes in their landscapes, perform colonial merchant identity, fashion revolutionary political economy, and imagine America as an imperial New Eden. This single object reveals the importance of nature and landscape for creole and merchant identity formation, particularly how classical republicanism manifested materially and people used aesthetic commodities to wrestle with issues of commerce, consumption, and virtue in the British Atlantic World.