AtDTDA 34: Fish Market Anarchy

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

The infamously coarse language of London fishmongers made 
"Billingsgate" a byword for crude or vulgar language. One of its 
earliest uses can be seen in a 1577 chronicle by Raphael 
Holinshed, where the writer makes reference to the foul 
tongues of Billingsgate oyster-wives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billingsgate_Fish_Market

 	What was the particular appeal of Bierstadt's Roman Fish 
Market to the trustees and visitors of the Athenaeum? How might 
he have planned it with a Northeastern audience in mind, and 
why might it have engaged viewers in Boston? Finally, what 
cultural message did the painting communicate in 1858 and 
over the next twenty years? This painting, whose ostensible 
subject is a fish market at the Portico of Octavia—the Arch of 
Octavius in the title is a misnomer—contains paradoxes that 
reveal Protestant attitudes about Catholic immigrants settling i
n the northeastern United States. Although it dramatizes a 
Yankee tourist couple surrounded by poor, swarthy Romans, 
Bierstadt's picture can be read as an allegory of anti-Catholic, 
anti-Irish sentiment. Virulent anti-Catholicism was rife in late 
antebellum America, and was spread especially by travel writers, 
newspaper editors, and politicians. Using the "picturesque" 
contrast between the ruins of antiquity and the squalor of 
contemporary Italians, Bierstadt reflected popular opinion and 
explored the tension between immigration and American 
republicanism. As Bierstadt's only known urban image, 
Roman Fish Market expresses the anxiety of the Northeastern, 
urban, Protestant elite regarding economic and political change, 
and its fear of the political and social impact of an Irish Catholic 
working class in the United States.



http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/winter_03/articles/mano.html