Vibrant Art on the Grand Tour in Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée

Abstract

Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée, first published in 1826, follows an unnamed narrator, a dispirited female traveller, who moves through the locales of France and Italy, surveying the objects of the Grand Tour. In the reflective space of her diary, the ennuyée begins to synthesize this material world she moves in, to understand herself as part of that world of objects, and to challenge the art viewers and artists who instead perceive materiality from a distance. Following Jane Bennett’s proposition of the ‘active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness’ of matter, this essay argues that the diarist recognizes and contemplates the unexpected vibrancy of the materials that she encounters. The narrator demonstrates that art writing should be more than an absolute formal assessment of quality; instead, she shows how artifacts reveal their capacity to unsettle human viewers in unexpected ways and to shape networks composed of things from diverse spaces and times.