Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire and Will Slauter

Reviewed by: Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire and Will Slauter Julie Codell (bio) Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire and Will Slauter, eds., Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021), pp. 524, $49.95/£38.95 hardcover, $39.95/£28.95 paperback. This book, also available in a free download, addresses legal and cultural conflicts in nineteenth-century visual culture. This burgeoning visual culture was disseminated by photography and new, constantly developing techniques that opened images to a global periodical circulation in many and often contested forms, such as autograph replicas, photographs, engravings, and print of all kinds. The conflicts described here focus on issues of ownership, reproduction, and appropriation of artworks identified as a form of intellectual property through copyright, patent, and trademark. Attempts to control the rampant dissemination of images via copyright were undermined by the pirating of novels, newspapers’ scissors-and-paste reprintings of each other’s content, forgeries, and copies of artists’ works. Covering an amorphous, heterogeneous, and contentious range of issues, including business, aesthetics, and cultural practices of collecting and marketing art, this interdisciplinary book contains essays by scholars in law, publishing history, and art history across several media. It follows on the heels of legal scholar Elena Cooper’s marvelous study of Victorian copyright debates in Parliament and in the press over the rights of artists to replicate works and attempts by collectors to stop replication by claiming ownership of both the material artwork and its conception. In their introduction, editors Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire and Will Slauter survey the history and techniques of the rapid and radical changes in visual technologies, such as lithography, photography, and the offshoots [End Page 294] of these processes that affected the arts, the press, and science. These processes made cheap reproductions available to a mass public but also affected ways in which traditional fine arts of painting and sculpture were envisioned and read. The editors draw out problems and consequences of the tensions between artistic production, its global dissemination, and conflicts over controlling that circulation. Artists, collectors, and dealers attempted to define the many categories of reproduction and replication: authentic, forgery, copy, and original. These conflicts also exposed issues of valuation in the market’s fusion of commercial and aesthetic tenets. From the eighteenth century on, artists were concerned about the status of their work as property and whether their conception for an artwork had an independent legal and ownership status distinct from the material object produced. The five essays in part 1, “Who Owns What? Images and Copyright Law,” cover ownership of images and copyright law from 1735 to the early twentieth century. Isabella Alexander and Cristina S. Martinez examine the first court case under the first British statute designed to protect visual works, the Engravings Act of 1735. Elizabeth Blackwell and her husband Alexander brought suit against London printsellers, a case that ended in only a partial victory for her. Disputes raised questions about terms such as “copy,” “invention,” and “design.” In her chapter, Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire explores how this question motivated Gilbert Stuart to try to control the reproduction of his portrait of George Washington in the United States. Simon Stern extends these issues to consider copyright when a reproduction does not include the whole work, but only part, and when the copy is in a different medium. Will Slauter examines a case of a photographer making a stereoscopic reproduction of Henry Wallis’s painting The Death of Chatterton (1856) from a tableau vivant reenacted in the photographer’s studio, provoking a lawsuit by a publisher who insisted he had exclusive rights to engrave the painting. Oren Bracha, writing on textual and visual iterations of Ben-Hur (1880), asks if a copyright owner of a novel could prevent a magic lantern show from illustrating scenes from the novel, approaching a metaphysics of the law by questioning the meaning of ownership of expressive works. Authors in part 2 pay more attention to the press and book history in three chapters that focus on agents of circulation, entrepreneurs, and rivals. Regarding prints and lithographs...

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