2024-2025 AGAS Lecture Series | Courtney Wilder

Fonts of Inspiration: Foreign Characters in European Printed Textile Design, 1800-1850

Lecture Abstract

British and French designers faced enormous pressure during the second quarter of the nineteenth century to generate a continuous font of new patterns for printed dress textiles. One source of inspiration was actual fonts —— that is, letters, characters, and symbols found in calligraphy and typography. This phenomenon can be linked to a concurrent growth in the illustrated press; publishers and typographers were experimenting with novel modes of graphic “writing,” emboldened by the possibilities offered by new media such as lithography. Textile designers then subjected these typographic and graphic elements to varying degrees of abstraction. In doing so, they partially or fully emptied the characters of their original meanings and instead rendered them symbolic elements in the language of fashionable novelty. These acts of formal translation —— and purposeful mis–translation —— between what we might call “press and dress” are particularly noteworthy in the case of characters from ancient and modern non–Latinate alphabets. The use of such characters opened a new dimension in the fascination with the “foreign” that had influenced European fashion for well over a century. This talk explores this expanded design vocabulary as a microcosm of the period’s dramatic expansions in publishing and commerce, and the corresponding impulse to access and re–write (or re–deign) the “other.”

Lecturer Bio

Dr. Courtney Wilder’s scholarship explores the intermediality of print, with a particular interest in early nineteenth-century textile printing. She is currently the Sullivan Collection Curator at the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art in Nashville, where she is working on a multi-year project to catalog a recently rediscovered trove of over 6,000 prints. She has held fellowships, internships, and research positions at a variety of institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Research Institute; she received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2021.