Trompe L'oeil and Financial Risk in The

Carrington Bowles (publisher). The Bubblers Medley, or a Sketch of the Times: Being Europe’s Memorial for the Year 1720, 1721. Engraving. © Trustees of the British Museum. Carrington Bowles (publisher). The Bubblers Medley, or a Sketch of the Times: Being Europe’s Memorial for the Year 1720, 1721. Engraving. © Trustees of the British Museum. 6 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00287 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 Trompe L’oeil and Financial Risk in the Age of Paper MAGGIE M. CAO Three hundred years ago, in the summer of 1720, the bursting of the South Sea Bubble marked the first recorded stock market crash. The ensuing financial crisis provided great fodder for the British satirical press, which took to caricaturing both the company’s gullible victims and manipulative executives. Among the rich material trove of that historical moment are a pair of prints published by the London shop of John Bowles and Carington Bowles.1 Titled The Bubblers Medley, or A Sketch of the Times: Being Europe’s Memorial for the Year 1720, the prints depict a scattered array of paper artifacts in collage-like, random fashion. Sheets overlap and furl on the edges, creating a trompe l’oeil effect that encourages viewers to misread the artwork as a collection of the actual ephemera it represents. Trompe l’oeil–style prints like these, also called medley prints, developed in 1700s London, and in the century that followed they enjoyed episodic popularity, often at moments of fiscal uncertainty. As Mark Hallett argues, this print type, like other satirical images referencing public discourses and debates, was meant to be read as well as viewed. The prints used the conceit of illusionism—a literal “fooling the eye”—to bring political and economic deceptions to the fore.2 The Bowles’s prints, which include an image of a South Sea Company director behind bars and a Jonathan Swift poem describ- ing the company’s false promises, adopt a satirical tone but do not produce satire so much as appropriate it. Like an archivist, the unnamed print designer memorialized the crash by replicating the very material culture it generated. His accumulated array of artifacts includes newspaper clippings, ballad sheets, and visual representa- tions of the crisis, all of recent circulation in London or abroad. Featured prominently in one composition is a scaled-down and reversed copy of Antoine Humblot’s print depicting the Parisian exchange on rue Quincampoix. By so meticulously copying Humblot and other printmakers, the medley artist fashions himself less an inventor of new images and more a mechanical reproducer and peddler of works on paper. The inclusion of objects unrelated to the crash—a card handwritten with the address of the print seller and an anamorphic image of a horse and rider—showcases the artist’s Grey Room 78, Winter 2020, pp. 6–33. © 2020 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 bravura in mimicking a diverse range of techniques and subject types: the very media diversity presented in one of the publisher’s print catalogues, also executed in a trompe l’oeil style. Hallett’s account of the eighteenth-century medley print—as a conjunction of pictorial illusionism and political deception—merely scratches the surface of a more complex story about economic risk in the age of paper.3 By better accounting for the laborious chore of imitation and quotation that is so central to such artworks, I suggest that trompe l’oeil prints engaged the material and managerial para- doxes of a changing economic landscape. Read through the history of financial innovation and upheaval, trompe l’oeil emerges as an important marker of the unstable intimacy between financial admin- istration and works on paper in eighteenth-century London and beyond. Following this art form into the nineteenth century, I locate the ultimate realization of this intertwining in the uncertain logic of money itself at the peripheries of the Anglophone world. At the center of this story are common clerks, bureaucratic func- tionaries, and professional copyists—the engine of a commercial revolution in the Anglophone world. These were men responsible for the material execution of economic transactions—who designed, wrote, and signed bills, receipts, invoices, and other documents.4 Illusionistic prints were an extension of their day jobs, making them a form of “document art.” In categorizing trompe l’oeil prints as a document-based practice, I am deliberately highlighting the role of the mundane, procedural, and bureaucratic in these artworks—the very qualities that led conceptual artists in the twentieth century to inaugurate the document as an artistic medium. Like more recent conceptual artists using archival and materialist strate- gies, trompe l’oeil printmakers turned to logistics and paper trails to engage the institutional logics that generated them.5 In the eighteenth century, documents rarely appeared as art in the sense that they do today. The maps, charts, or half-penned let- ters regularly included in portrait or genre pictures served only as props supporting human-centered narratives. But the paper- filled prints addressed in this article are invested in the archive instead of the biog- raphy, the ephemeral remainders rather than the event itself. 8 Grey Room 78 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 The “document,” according to media historian Lisa Gitelman, is a medium defined by its “know-show” function. Appearance and proof are intertwined in the use of documents, making them a pow- erful means for articulating structures of knowledge and control.6 While the range of materials featured in eighteenth-century trompe l’oeil prints includes artworks not typically termed documents, they appear archival when displayed alongside more mundane papers. Most of all, what connects the diverse artifacts in trompe l’oeil prints of the period is their shared materiality: ink on paper—a medium that despite its visual diversity often fell under common methods of production and means of circulation. Among the printed materials sold by large printshops like the Bowles’s were technical, industrial, and scientific documents, including maps, architectural designs, engineering diagrams, and treatises of various kinds. Trompe l’oeil prints thus emerged from a graphic culture with significant crossover and overlap between art and information—one in which an inter- secting group of engravers, printers, and sellers made and distrib- uted both artistic and functional works on paper.7 The maker of trompe l’oeil prints was primarily the text specialist of this graphic arts milieu: the writing master, the most accom- plished of London’s clerks. Writing masters taught penmanship as well as drawing and arithmetic, and they designed and engraved satires, maps, and, most important, writing instruction manuals called “copybooks,” in the pages of which visual deception also lurks. Situated at the intersection of writing, drawing, and printing, document trompe l’oeil tested the boundaries and distinctions between ink and paper technologies in what has variously been dubbed the “paper age” or the “papered century.”8 Trompe l’oeil allowed these scrivener-printmakers deeply embedded in the record-keeping demands of mercantilism to engage with the papered foundations of a global financial revolution through “intermedia play.” That is, these men were coming to terms with a new media - scape, though it consisted of familiar, old technologies. Through their illusionistic renderings of paper artifacts, they engaged with the new financial ubiquity of ink on paper, materials with which they were intimately acquainted. Using the trompe l’oeil, they visualized the risks of a papered economy by imitating and rehearsing its short- comings and failures. The Burin and the Brush Document trompe l’oeil grew out of a history of penmanship rather than of painting. I am not alone in linking trompe l’oeil to forms of writing. In his essay on seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting, Bernhard Siegert proposes that the trompe l’oeil emerged in the course of differentiating independent still life painting from manu- Baston (design) and J. Clark (engraving) for John Bowles and Son (publisher). Catalogue of Maps, Prints, Copy-Books, &c. from off Copper-Plates, 1731. © Trustees of the British Museum. Cao | Trompe L’oeil and Financial Risk in the Age of Paper 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00287 by guest on 28 September 2021 script illumination.9 Whereas a manuscript’s hybrid environment allows for the two-dimensional space of the picture to coexist with the three-dimensional space of the book (an illuminated plant spec- imen, for example, might be shown with its stem illusionistically penetrating the page), oil painting distinguishes the pictorial space from our physical space. Thus, when the ambiguous spatial order of trompe l’oeil invades still life painting, extending such objects as knife handles or lemon peels from the pictorial field of the tabletop into the viewer’s space, it signals for Siegert a conflict between the cultural techniques of gazing and reading, which became newly distinct with the decline of manuscript illumination.10 Siegert’s proposition—that ontological distinctions can be under- stood through a study of material operations—also informs my own interest in trompe l’oeil, but the “writing” about which I refer is less connected to the cultural technique of reading than to the physical practice of putting pen to page, ink to paper. Trompe l’oeil prints mediate the written documents they depict in ways that analogous trompe l’oeil paintings on canvas do not. Put another way, trompe l’oeil prints are metapictures: ink on paper representing itself.

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