Robbins, Nicholas; (2025) The Circumference of the Subject: Figuring Race at Egyptian Hall. Huntington Library Quarterly , 87 (2) pp. 183-205. 10.1353/hlq.2024.a964271.

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Abstract

This article examines several exhibitions staged at William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly in the years around 1820. It argues that the complex spatial interplay of the exhibition space reshaped figurations of race across media. Taking as its center the exhibition of Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Christ’s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem (1820), the article explores problems of figure and ground, stasis and movement, and arrival and return that shaped racial ideology in this moment. Ultimately, it explores how such exhibition spaces articulated “race” not only as a perceivable property of an embodied subject, but as a set of spatial relations. Haydon’s figuration of the triumphant body’s arrival—and its failures—comes into view in relation to Bullock’s own natural-historical displays, his “museum” of Napoleonic relics (1816), the disturbing exhibition of a Sámi family (1822), and the display of paintings by James Ward and Théodore Géricault.

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