Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object by Matthew C. Hunter (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object by Matthew C. Hunter Rebecca Marks Matthew C. Hunter, Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2019). Pp. 304; 20 color and 68 b/w illus., 1 table. $54.00 cloth. "Elemental art history": this is how Matthew C. Hunter, in the closing pages of Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object, describes the scope of his book (184). Painting with Fire offers a [End Page 134] multifaceted and enthusiastic study of the science behind British art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. While Hunter's work centers around Reynolds, its remit is much wider, starting with the discovery of artificial phosphorus in the 1600s and progressing chronologically all the way to the rise of photography in the 1800s. It is "elemental" not only because of Hunter's interest in "Chymistry," but also because of the technical nature of his research, which breaks down his sources into their most elementary mechanics (43). Painting with Fire is certainly a history of art, if not a conventional work of "art history," since it pays closer attention to techniques and methodologies than it does to critical or visual analysis. This is certainly not a bad thing, for Hunter's interdisciplinary approach reflects the thematic purview of his thesis, which—like previous publications by Jon Klancher (2013), Magdalena Bushart and Freidrich Steinle (2015), Hunter himself (2013, 2015), and most recently Stephanie O'Rourke (2021)—explores the interplay between sciences and the humanities in the Enlightenment period. While Hunter's book broadly falls into the category of history, it also has a philosophical undercurrent. Throughout, Hunter sustains a close focus on the eponymous theme of "temporality," and the various questions which it might raise about the preservation of paintings. For example, the front cover of the book—a close up of Reynolds's decayed, flaking Portrait of James Coutts (1771)—exemplifies what Hunter means by the "temporally evolving chemical object" named in his title. The corrosion of this particular work, Hunter tells us, is the result of chemical experiments Reynolds undertook in his studio and used on his canvases, in the hope of creating new painterly effects and, ironically, ensuring their longevity. It is a painting that reflects the ways in which Enlightenment artists looked to the sciences in order to advance and legitimize their discipline, even though such efforts were not always successful. Informed by publications by Jordan Bear (2015), Robin Kelsey (2015), and Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón (2015), another one of Hunter's goals in Painting with Fire is to disrupt how we think about the history of photography, a medium which, more than any of the other fine arts, relies on chemical and mechanical processes. He argues, against conventional thought, that the mechanics of photography found their true origins long before the nineteenth century, tracing them back to Reynolds, and even further, to the workshops of the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century. Also, against the usual chronology, Hunter poses the question of where painting might have ended and photography might have begun. The transition, he argues, is not so simple as previously thought, and it is obfuscated by a number of proto-camera and proto-photographic forms like the camera-obscura (one of which Reynolds owned and frequently used), "mechanical pictures" (136), and other forms of reproductive image-making. By the end of the work, Painting with Fire is certainly successful in proving that the Enlightenment period marked a change in how the art of painting was conceptualized. Similar to how we think of photography, painting in this period became understood in increasingly scientific and mechanical terms, reflecting wider changes in intellectual and political discourse in advance of the Industrial Revolution. Painting with Fire has a chronological quadripartite structure, each section beginning with a historical anecdote that introduces the themes of the chapter. The first section covers a number of chemical and visual experiments which were conducted at the Royal Society from around 1680. Here, Hunter is especially interested in the discovery of artificial...