William Beckford and abolitionism

The paper on Beckford at the Huntington went very well I think. I gave it once before at Columbia and it was successful there too. Both times people remarked that my argument about the relation between slavery and libertine aestheticism was new (basically I suggest that Beckford internalises the aboltionist critique of slaveholding which attacked the slave trade as demonic and satanic by taking on board a certain demonism at the same time as he rejects the abolitionist ethic of sympathy etc). It's interesting when a paper goes really well: audience affirmation is articulated pretty clearly. This hasnt been the case for my papers on Disraeli and Conrad which I have to rethink. In the first case I am trying to write about Disraeli under a rubric (re-enactment) which isn't right; in the second case the argument just isn't clear and simple enough.

The paper I most enjoyed was Martin Myrone's on Fuseli (crammed with material new to me).... though I do have to say that the aestheticist and radical side of Fuseli kind of got lost in Martin's presentation. I must read the exhibition catalogue he's produced for the Tate though.

We went through the Gainsborough 'Sensation' show at the Huntington. It was better hung than at Yale, and the curator who took me through explained her choices for colour, lighting, hanging...there's a complex art to hanging an exhibtion of this kind. I knew that, but didnt know it too. The problem with the show is, of course, that it's centre pieces: Gainsborough's 'Cottage Door' painting and Sir John Leceister's tent room in which it was hung are the worst possible intersection between pastoral sentimentality and urban elite display. Nothing can change that. The interesting issue that these pictures of Gainsborough make us confront is: what is the relation between the painterly values he embraces (the play of the brushstoke) and the ideological work of the pictures themselves. Does John Barrell talk about that? (Barrell's line of thought is conspicuously absent in these (rather strange) North American quasi-academic celebrations of late 18thc british lorldly visual culture, come to think of it).