Tucker Speaks on Electro-Metallurgy at MET

Jennifer Tucker gave a talk on “An electric shock upon society: The British Association and electro-metallurgy,” during the Scholars’ Day Workshop on Victorian Electrotypes March 26 at the at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tucker is associate professor of history, associate professor in the Science in Society Program, and associate professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies.

The workshop was held in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s display of electrotypes, the metalwork reproductions that were among the first European decorative arts purchased by the Museum in the 1870s and 1880s. These highly sculptural and often monumental pieces were intended to represent to the American public the most ambitious examples of Mannerist and Baroque goldsmiths’ work and to serve as inspiration for artists and manufacturers. They were made by electroforming, a technology first developed in the 1840s that produced an extremely precise copy of an original by running an electrical charge through a solution to deposit metal into a mold.

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