Paradox of Pearls

Introduction

Follower of Jean-Etienne Liotard
Portrait of Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry, not after 1760
Oil on canvas
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Pearls figure prominently in pictures of celebrated figures throughout the eighteenth century. Adorning royalty, celebrities, and servants, and appearing in fashion plates, the mysterious, opaque, and gleaming white accessory aligns with the mutable, seductive, and threatening emergence of new modes of identity. Worn as jewelry, as embellishments of the body and clothing, or embedded in the settings of precious objects—pearls illuminated, colonized, and performed. As one of the most sought-after commodities of the early modern colonial enterprise, this precious jewel was secured through bondage and violence, and its history is both baroque and complex. Fictions of wealth, fame, whiteness, sexuality, and beauty are legible through pearls, and they became concretized through depictions of adorned bodies. Drawing from the Lewis Walpole Library’s eighteenth-century collections, this exhibition explores the “paradox of pearls” by considering how the varied, often contradictory meanings attributed to this jewel appear in period images and the ways in which self-fashioning practices from the past connect us to the powerful presence of pearls today.

Curated by Laura Engel, Duquesne University

This online exhibit was produced in Omeka by Kristen McDonald, Public Services, The Lewis Walpole Library

For questions/comments, please contact The Lewis Walpole Library, walpole@yale.edu

Published October 2024