Old New Media: Print, Paint, and the Early Eighteenth-Century Media Revolution

Dror Wahrman’s latest book presents the reader with an interlocking set of puzzles regarding the identity, technique, and motivations of an eccentric Dutch painter who emigrated to London in the 1690s and produced an astonishing series of trompe l’oeil compositions. In Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks, Wahrman assembles more than forty of Edward Collier’s letter-rack paintings—a trompe l’oeil subgenre consisting of painted letters and printed documents attached to a board with facsimile cloth strips—to argue that this unknown artist was a sophisticated media commentator. Wahrman unearths an astonishing array of apparently inconsequential details, from altered dates to unstable spellings and hidden monograms, and shows how they add up to “an extraordinary experiment in the painted critique of an emergent information revolution” (22). The book is thus its own kind of puzzle box: an engaging personal journey down the archival rabbit hole that is, at the same time, a convincingly argued analysis of a turn-of-the-eighteenth-century media shift.

Wahrman employs a straightforward narrative style and short chapters to make the work accessible to a range of audiences, from art historians and scholars of print culture, to those with a special interest in 1690s London, and to Defoe enthusiasts (he sees Defoe and Collier as kindred spirits in their almost obsessive attention to changing conditions of publication). Wahrman’s key insight is that the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century media environment exhibited a turn to “Print 2.0,” a qualitatively and quantitatively different system of printing than that which had been in place since the fifteenth century. Likening the shift to our own Web 2.0 moment, Wahrman argues that the main innovation was the rise of ephemerality and seriality, spurred by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. “Collier witnessed what can be described as a new information age, one with distinctive characteristics and novel preoccupations,” Wahrman writes. “What made Collier’s work so rich was the fortuitous coincidence of the skill of the illusionist artist with this new media regime that to his trained eye was brimming with illusionist possibilities” (8). For example, by changing the date on a pamphlet or the coat of arms on a royal proclamation, Collier revealed the instability in new conditions of printing, such as mass circulation, serial publication, and ephemeral news transmission. Wahrman’s attention, as a literary scholar, to Collier’s media sensibility allows him to show that what art historians and restorers may have considered mistakes or defects were actually careful observations on the authenticity, trustworthiness, and durability of print.

Collier’s letter-rack paintings—which Wahrman shows were much more numerous than previously thought—repeatedly include among the painted letters key periodical publications of the period, principally The London Gazette and the royal proclamations of William and Mary, and of Queen Anne. The opening chapters of the book focus on the details of these sorts of painted ephemera to demonstrate Collier’s overarching “concerns with fixity versus volatility, stability versus change, and form versus content” (18). Wahrman argues that Collier’s paintings should be read almost like a periodical, as a series, so that the individual details make less sense on their own than as part of a cumulative commentary. Take this example, explored in the introduction and chapter 1: a Collier letter-rack painting from ca. 1696 that contains a copy of The Flying Post, a printed royal speech, a comb, a watch, and a sealed letter, as well as letter-writing tools, including a quill, a penknife, and a stick of sealing wax, and, most importantly, a well-thumbed almanac entitled Apollo Anglicanus. A magnifying glass painted on top of the almanac draws the viewer’s eye to a curious feature: the date at the top of the title page appears to have been changed from 1696 to 1676, with the bowl of the 9 whitewashed over...