In 1713, the enterprising and resourceful Irish impresario and playwright Owen, or Eugene, McSwiny (1676–1754) found himself unable to pay the mounting debts in his London theatre and absconded to the Continent. Ultimately settling in Italy, he commissioned a cycle of twenty-four paintings, most about seven-feet high, and directed teams of artists from Bologna and Venice to execute them according to his conceptions. The series is unique, following no tradition in its genesis and subject matter. He referred to the works as depictions of “monuments,” each an allegorical commemoration of a major English political, military, or intellectual figure of the recent past; most had firm Whig links and several had been directly or indirectly con- nected with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Among these “worthies” were kings William III and George I, the Duke of Marlborough, Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Joseph Addison. Having successfully implemented his plan to sell the paintings to members of the English nobility, McSwiny later employed several leading Parisian printmakers to reproduce the paintings as engravings, probably in hopes of increasing the earnings from his project. This collective group of transnationally created paintings and engravings is known as the Tombeaux des Princes.

Teaching the Tombeaux series facilitates critical discussion of how visual artists engage adaptation and appropriation, and broadens students’ under- standing of the ways that scholarly discourse in the field of art history has itself adapted and changed. In the classroom, analysis of the various media employed in the Tombeaux series invites students to examine modes of rep- resentation and artistic practice comparatively. These comparisons can reveal the multiple rhetorical purposes to which images may be adapted. Teaching the Tombeaux series in this way illustrates a shift in scholarly approach to art history that parallels the shift in scholarly approach to adaptation stud- ies. Each field has moved away from a focus on attribution or imitation, or fidelity studies, and toward more intertextual and intermedial analyses. The discipline of art history has broadened to include visual culture stud- ies’ emphasis on technology and process as a way to understand historical as well as contemporary artifact creation.