Summary:
Medley prints, similar to a contemporary collage, were mixed-media objects that enjoyed an indeterminate period of popularity in the visual culture of eighteenth century England. One of the intriguing aspects of medley prints is that so little information survives about them and correspondingly little contemporary scholarship has been published about them. An exception is Mark Hallett’s “The Medley Print in Early Eighteenth-Century London,”? and I appropriate his description of a particular engraving called The May Day Country Mirth to formulate a workable definition of the genre of the medley print, which, Hallett writes, “. . . for clarity, fuses the mechanics of trompe-l’oeil with a sustained programme of representational juxtapositions and overlap. By means of an almost microscopically exact process of pictorial imitation, the engraver attempts to persuade us, however momentarily, that we are gazing at a scattering of printed and drawn objects, thrown together in front of our eyes. . . . The medley print . . . was a pictorial genre that meshed together a variety of materials circulating in graphic culture in order to produce a modern, hybrid art form”? (214 – 235). Although there is little scholarship on medley prints, there are a number of surviving examples, upon a few of which I will attempt quick readings today. (more…)