Street Signs of Libation and Liberation

Abstract

Chapter 19 offers a history of signboards. It pursues a dialectic between sobriety and insobriety that gave wit to the quarrel between philosophy and the arts from the very start. The history of commercial signs and painted boards raises subtle puzzles of social reformation and artistic reclassification in discourses of family and property. The history of signboards affords insight into the emerging modern market of art where artworks-on-sale fed into the first declared public exhibitions. When this happened in London, Hogarth had a particular role to play as a brother laughing and crying in-arms. It was a doubled-up role for a brotherhood later re-dressed by writers of la vie de bohème. By the chapter’s end, something new is known about the London brotherhood that inspired the Red Sea anecdote before the anecdote traveled to Paris.