Repicturing the Past

Seeking to establish “psychical history” as a category of Victorian occult science, this paper explores the consequences that emerge when belief in spirit phenomena converges on the historical imagination. To do so, a study of the Bygone Days watercolour series by Scottish Spiritualist and artist, Jane Stewart Smith (1839–1925), explores the shifting layers of meaning in her paintings by looking at three important inter-related aspects of her career: her artistic efforts to picture Edinburgh’s old town, her belief in Spiritualism and her interests as a psychical investigator. Rather than viewing these watercolours as simply illustrating the social reality of the nineteenth-century old town, this paper explores the ways in which Smith was deeply concerned with esoterically perceiving and engaging history. In playing with the boundaries of history and the present, the seen and the unseen, Smith’s images engage questions about how to connect with the past and reveal complex relations between her art-making, spirituality and historical inclinations. Establishing psychical history as an important category provides the theoretical framework for the discussion of Smith’s idiosyncratic worldview in relation to the occultural context of scientific ideas originating from the field of psychical research. I argue Smith’s deepening esoteric interests in psychical history inspired her own endeavours at both history-writing later in her career as a form of generative knowledge production and repicturing her series not only as illustrative material but also as simulations of clairvoyant insights.