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This doctoral dissertation explores the transcultural use of the material of blue paper for figure studies and figural compositions by artists working in sixteenth-century Venice and seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The research focuses on artists’ use of blue paper made with blue fibres, or that which is coloured blue during its production, rather than neutral papers that are prepared with a coloured wash. Blue paper provided a readily available mid-tone and its texture allowed friable drawing implements like chalk and charcoal to be absorbed into the paper at varying degrees. This interplay contributed to the achievement of rilievo, or the ability to model three-dimensional forms in space on a flat surface. Understanding the broader artistic, cultural, and theoretical frameworks that led to the employment of blue paper in these two centres of commercial and artistic exchange is central to our understanding of the material’s role in early modern artistic practice, as well as to our interpretations of the drawings themselves. Through object-based, technical, and archival research, as well as analyses of contemporary texts on art, this research is inherently interdisciplinary in examining the significance of the role of blue paper in Italian and Dutch artistic practice and stylistic development. "Research for this project has been generously supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Italian Art Society, the Catherine and Alfred Forrest Trust Research Bursary, University of St Andrews, The Elizabeth Gilmore Holt Research Scholarship, Department of Art History, University of St Andrews, and the Association for Art History." -- Acknowledgements

This thesis examines early-twentieth century Certificates of Registration produced in New Zealand to document Chinese migrants. These identification documents were created to track sojourners who were temporarily returning to China, proving upon their return to New Zealand that they were legal residents and had already paid the expensive poll tax that was imposed under Chinese exclusion policies. Through the Certificates of Registration, the state sought to control Chinese immigration and, by extension, New Zealand’s racial and cultural identity as a White settler colony. These documents imposed a scrutinizing and alienating gaze over the individual Chinese body; they registered physical identity through textual descriptions, fingerprints, and studio photographs which the subjects were responsible for providing. These methods of registering the human body, influenced by developments in anthropology and criminology, naturalized a racial hierarchy where Chinese migrants were continuously alienated in New Zealand as unnatural, foreign entities. Because the Chinese were pictured as an inscrutable and identical hoard in the popular imagination, documentation relied upon miniscule “particularities” and still-developing fingerprint technology. However, both the physical descriptions of “particularities” and the often-smudged or irregularly applied fingerprints had very little practical use. Often vague and illegible, these technologies (and the process of documentation as a whole) can be understood as a punitive social ritual. The photographs provided by the migrants create a startling contrast with the state’s construction of Chinese identity. The collected photographs exhibit a stunning amount of variety in composition, poses, and backdrops that contrasts with the highly standardized ID photos used in government documents today. These honorific studio portraits frame the subjects as Westernized, affluent potential citizens—a striking form of self-fashioning that defies the New Zealand ideology of Chinese exclusion.

This article explores the digitalization of traditional funeral joss paper into digital commodities through the case study of the Chinese online cemetery 00tang.com. Joss paper are paper replicas o...

For almost 40 years, the British jurist and Fellow of the Royal Society Taylor White (1701–1772) actively engaged in commissioning artists to paint plants and animals for his ‘paper museum’. White amassed a collection of almost 1000 drawings of birds, mammals, fish, amphibians and reptiles, acquired by McGill University in 1927. His first recorded purchase was a watercolour by George Edwards (1694–1773). He also acquired works from Eleazar Albin ( fl. 1690– ca 1742) and Jacob van Huysum ( ca 1687–1740), but the majority of the watercolours were painted by two artists, Charles Collins ( ca 1680–1744) and Peter Paillou ( ca 1712–1782). In 2018 a research group at McGill University Library received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the project ‘Undescrib'd: Taylor White's paper museum’. The project produced a complete catalogue of the White collection, including attribution of all unsigned works, and digitized all paintings and notes. This paper documents the process surrounding the original creation of the collection, reviewing the careers of the artists and White's relationship with them, the value of the commissions and the challenges of painting natural history subjects. It also describes the mechanics of painting, including pigments, papers used and artists' techniques.

A scrapbook compiled between 1660 and 1687 by Gesina ter Borch (1631–1690), a female artist from the small town of Zwolle in the Netherlands, contains an intriguing painting on paper of a full-length portrait of a young Iranian. Although the figure wears the attributes in vogue at the Safavid court of Isfahan, certain elements seem rather incongruous and peculiar. The general composition appears static and rigid, an impression reinforced by an unusual black painted background. Stylistic differences within the painting were also observed, hinting at alterations to the original painting. To investigate the history of the painting and to reconstruct the original composition and identify the later additions, perhaps made by Gesina herself, the painting was examined with different imaging and analytic techniques available at the Conservation and Science Department of the Rijksmuseum. This allowed the research team to discriminate between pigments used for the original composition and pigments used to conceal damaged areas of the painting and added pictorial elements. After interpreting scientific results, as well as historical findings, it was possible to shed light on the use of specific pigments, namely lead white and smalt, and on the possible misinterpretation of some details, such as the cup held by the young man. The results of macro X-ray fluorescence scanning (MA-XRF) and lead isotope analysis, viewed in the light of information about the economic and cultural exchanges between Iran and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, fed new theories about the origin and history of this painting. The painting, originally made in Iran in the style of Riza Abbasi, the head of the Emperor Shah Abbas’ library, ended up in Gesina ter Borch's workshop and may have been ‘restored’ by the artist to improve its condition and to match her tastes.