Bound Antiquity: Fore-Edge Painting and Classical Reception in Britain, 1660-1830

Fore-edge paintings are watercolor images painted on the edges of books that become visible only when the pages are fanned at an angle; when closed the image disappears completely. My thesis argues that hidden fore-edge paintings on British books participated centrally in how English elites in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries understood beauty, knowledge, and their relationship to classical antiquity. The central question driving my research is: how did a seemingly minor decorative practice transmit and shift complex cultural understandings about classical antiquity, aesthetic theory, and elite social distinction? Existing scholarship on fore-edge painting remains primarily descriptive and focused on the book as a rare object. No sustained analysis examines how these objects functioned culturally or what their formal transformations reveal about changing aesthetic ideologies. By applying new theoretical frameworks to material culture studies, I reveal how aesthetic objects participate in constructing social worlds. I trace systematic changes in compositional strategies, color harmonies, and iconographic choices across the period, treating these visual transformations as evidence of broader cultural shifts. This research shows how fore-edge paintings participated actively in constructing the cultural frameworks through which educated audiences understood beauty and knowledge. In addition, it examines why seemingly minor objects deserve scholarly attention, demonstrating that their smallness and hiddenness were not limitations but deliberate strategies that encoded specific cultural meanings. The broader purpose of my research is to reveal how aesthetic objects offer insights to classical reception in the cultural context. These insights are highly relevant for thinking about how visual culture continues to participate in maintaining social distinctions today.