Joseph Litts Awarded Research Support Grant

Joseph Litts, PhD candidate at Princeton University, received a Research Support Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) in 2024. Joseph describes the activities he was able to conduct as a result of the grant and the impact it had on his research:

I am extraordinarily grateful for my Support Grant as it enabled me to undertake vital research for my PhD dissertation entitled, “Natural Disaster in the Atlantic World: Aesthetics, Delight and Risk in the Long Eighteenth Century”. My project investigates representations of real disasters, imagined catastrophes and rebuilding processes. My research traces how these representations of worst-case scenarios acted as aesthetic forms of risk management that paralleled nascent insurance industries. Disasters had many spiralling (after)lives, and those involved in managing the risks of increasingly global – and transient – life in the eighteenth century turned to multiple media. My grant thus enabled me to track several very significant research leads across a number of British collections and even two country houses.

For example, at the British Museum, thanks to the graciousness of their staff, I was able to spend several days in the Prints and Drawings Study Room. Close examination of art works revealed many details in Caribbean landscapes that interested me for the ways they depicted the weather and its variability. Overseers in Thomas Hearne’s landscapes of Antiguan plantations had collage alterations or repairs that indicated changes in how to represent plantation surveillance within the larger series of Antiguan landscapes, including one of a hurricane in process. So many of these watercolours of the British Caribbean are minutely detailed and I now have a much better understanding of their composition. I had a similar experience during my appointment at the Victoria and Albert Museum. There, with the help of the staff in the Prints and Drawings Study Room, I examined another of Hearne’s Antiguan watercolours. This painting had never been photographed in colour, so I was surprised to see that what I had thought was a pile of rubble was actually sprawling shrubbery. I had a series of related insights during my visits to these study rooms, which emphasised again the importance of looking closely at original works of art, especially when making arguments about the ways margins of images anticipate future disasters.

I am taking this line of thought furthest in my arguments about portraiture’s connections to risk management, where I am examining how artists such as Kneller or Lely painted sitters in surroundings that evoke caves, a preferred site of shelter following natural disasters in period novels. Time in the galleries and in the stores at the National Portrait Gallery, enabled me to clarify my list of who was painted in a cave, usually complete with rocky niches, versus those painted against a very large, grey beech tree, as darkening of varnish and pigment shift over time frequently obscures many of the backgrounds to these portraits.

My Research Support Grant enabled me to make meaningful progress with research for my dissertation across multiple avenues. I have a much better understanding of the scale, materials, conservation state and formal details of the artworks and landscapes I am discussing. I am excited to be sharing more about my discoveries and insights at upcoming conferences in Lausanne and in Paris, and of course for how they will help me complete my dissertation.