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Grennan & Sperandio’s ostensible subject is Gwendoline and Margaret Davies’ travels in Italy in 1909. But we might say that the bigger subject of these paintings is history itself, and in particular the problematic history of the problematic assumption that there is stable truth in art. The trip to Italy – the sisters’ second - might be seen as continuing an education in art history that had earlier taken Margaret to study in Dresden. Although Gwendoline and Margaret were already collectors, these tours were very much concerned with learning. The Davies sisters were both the embodiment and the enactment of a significant historical shift. If the pillaging of Italian art treasures by Northern European margraves and baronets during the Enlightenment was, if tangentially, implicated in the founding of a philosophy of aesthetic judgement (in the writing of Emmanuel Kant) and a history of the production of images (developed in the eighteenth century through the work of Winkelmann) by the early twentieth century the discourses associated with philosophy and history had displaced the discourses of acquisition. Indeed, the haphazard gathering of objects that characterised eighteenth century ‘acquisition’ had been supplanted in the late nineteenth century by ‘collecting’, where historic and contemporary art was purchased on the basis of an already acquired knowledge and taste, instilled through formal tuition, and undertaken with the counsel of skilled advisors. Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, then, are part of that sea-change in human identity in the nineteenth century identified by Michel Foucault, where one’s identity is understood, by the self, and measured out, by others, in the quasi-scientific terms of ‘knowledge’. They belong to, indeed they help define, a culture in which knowledge of things may make a moral shift: exposure to, understanding of, culture will make you a ‘better’ human being. One collected truth the way one might collect paintings.
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