Icons and archives: the Orpen lithograph in the context of 19 -century depictions of rock paintings.

ROCK paintings; ORPEN, J. M. (Joseph Millerd), 1828-1923; EDWARD, James; BARROW, John; NINETEENTH century

Joseph Orpen's 1874 journal article, including a testimony by Qing, one of the last Bushmen in the region, has become a foundational 19th-century source for rock art research in southern Africa, and its illustrations have achieved iconic status. Against the backdrop of Orpen's images, I examine the pictorial qualities of four other 19th-century depictions of rock paintings, namely those by John Barrow (1801), James Edward Alexander (1837), Thomas Baines (1849) and Otto Mäder (1908). This comparative visual analysis entails an exploration of the archive in an extended archaeological sense – one that seeks to make connections between pictures, documents and sites in the landscape. Each of these depictions reflects different pictorial attributes of the originals, while also embodying different attitudes towards the art, but do not carry the textual ‘authenticity’ of Orpen's copies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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