‘Mere adventurers in drawing’: engineers and draughtsmen as visual technicians in nineteenth-century Britain
- Submitting institution
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Glasgow School of Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 2754
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Art Versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- ISBN
- 9780719096464
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This chapter forms part of the edited volume Art Versus Industry?: New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in 19th-century Britain (2016) that set out to challenge established Ruskinian oppositions still current in histories of this period. Research for this chapter was founded on a broader sustained enquiry into ‘non-artistic’ drawing practices amongst artisans in crafts, trades, manufacturing and engineering in Britain at this period, with particular focus on ‘self-fashioning’ practitioners that cut across established histories and philosophies of drawing education. The chapter discussed the production of technical representations by jobbing designers and factory draughtsmen as a site of cultural and class conflict. Neither a celebration of the ‘art of the engineer’ nor an attack on the ‘coercive’ nature of worker education in drawing, this research examined the strategies of workers who aimed to exploit the ‘machine dreams’ of this period to claim professional and cultural status by acquiring and demonstrating drawing skills. Technical representations are under-researched because they do not readily fit into established academic categories; technical draughtsmen and engineers in Britain largely trained themselves, and because their drawing strategies were ambiguous and multivalent they have been addressed in a cross-disciplinary way, informed by art and design history and the study of representation in science and technology. Primary archival material from inside the artworld of technical drawing (e.g. library holdings from Government Schools of Design, Mechanics’ Institutes, ship-builders’ detailed plans for luxury steam liners) give a textured account of the ways in which practitioners sought to gain authority by visual means by appealing to both art and industry. The findings of this chapter are in sympathy with Patrick Joyce’s account of autodidact workers and narratives of ‘class’ (1994) but, more immediately, engage with histories and philosophies of art and design education in the shadow of Ruskin.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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