Page, MSJ (2022) Numbering The Ladies Waldegrave: Questions of Status and Display. History of Photography, 46 (1). pp. 9-19. ISSN 0308-7298
Abstract
At first glance, it appears as though Sir Joshua Reynolds’s The Ladies Waldegrave (1780) is in two places at once: Strawberry Hill House and the National Gallery, Edinburgh. Despite their visual indistinguishability, however, the former is a copy of the latter created by Factum Foundation in 2018. In this article, I discuss the ontological relation between paintings and their visually indistinguishable facsimiles, along with certain consequences that relation has for display practices. Traditionally, paintings are understood to be ontologically singular; no copy, however faithful, can ever stand in as the work itself. Using The Ladies Waldegrave, I defend ontological singularity while maintaining that these visually indistinguishable facsimiles can be used to promote engagement with, and a better understanding of, originals. Drawing on the philosophical idea that objects have temporal parts, I suggest that what I call suitable facsimiles – copies that are visually indistinguishable from originals – are representations of particular temporal parts of those originals. My proposal allows paintings to maintain their singularity while acknowledging that some copies share a special relationship with the originals such that the former can stand in for the latter. I conclude by considering issues concerning the display of both originals and suitable facsimiles.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
Keywords: | Factum Foundation, The Ladies Waldegrave (1780), visually indistinguishable copy, display, original, facsimile |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) > School of Philosophy (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 20 Apr 2023 08:58 |
Last Modified: | 08 Nov 2023 16:20 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/03087298.2022.2102287 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:198394 |
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