A Proximate Violence: Madame Tussaud's Chamber Of Horrors
by Lela Graybill
Arriving in London in 1802, Madame Tussaud's waxworks show presented visitors with a viscerally engaging fantasy of trauma in the form of her "Chamber of Horrors," a singular collection of deathly figures drawn from the annals of the French Revolution. This essay considers the specific rhetorical and aesthetic modes that developed as Tussaud increasingly commodified not only contemporary history and society, but also individualized experiences of violence.
Layered Encounters in the Cross-Cultural Text: Demidov's Voyage dans la Russie méridionale
by Lauren M. O'Connell
 Analysis of a lavish lithographic album documenting an 1837 expedition to the Crimea untangles multiple strands of signification in a particularly intriguing case of cross-cultural representation. Attention to the voices that speak through its images and to the complex meanings they may have produced in the midst of Russian annexations on the Black Sea and French incursions in Algeria exposes contradictory messages about civilized centers and exotic peripheries. The artistic legacy of this Russian-sponsored and French-staffed voyage inflects received models of "orientalist" representation for application to extra-European contexts and hybrid cases where self and other interwine.
Whistler's La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine: Painting Re-Oriented
by Aileen Tsui
 When James McNeill Whistler's La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865, many critics reacted unfavorably to its implied collapsing of the distinction between an oil portrait and the designs on East Asian porcelain. This article explores how, in the conception and execution of La Princesse, Whistler drew on the uncanny allure of Japanese and Chinese objects for Victorian viewers to facilitate his Aestheticist aim of locating pictorial meaning in the visual itself.
"Crowned, and Discrowned and Decapitated": Delacroix's Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero and its Critics
by Marijke Jonker
(Publication of this article was made possible by a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation)
 Delacroix's Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1826) was the subject of reviews by the painter's political allies Auguste Jal and Ludovic Vitet, which bordered on the openly hostile; Delacroix had conjured up a vision of Charles X's recent pompous, theatrical Sacre in this depiction of an equally theatrical Medieval execution ritual, known from Byron's tragedy Marino Faliero. Delacroix's irreverent, menacing blend, realized with the help of excessive theatre and color effect, was seen by both critics to undermine the elevating character of history painting, which they defended even while sharing Delacroix's anti-royalist feelings. --
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