Enfilade

The December issue of The Art Bulletin 91 (2009) includes the following items addressing the eighteenth century:

Emma Barker, “Imaging Childhood in Eighteenth-Century France: Greuze’s Little Girl with a Dog,” pp. 426-45.

Author’s Abstract: “During the artist’s lifetime, A Child Playing with a Dog was one of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s most admired and best-known works. The painting represent the physical, instinctual nature of the child in a manner unprecedented in French art. The image of childhood that it offers has close parallels in the scientific and medical discourse of the later eighteenth century. Like many contemporary commentators, Greuze evokes not simply the innocence of children but also their vulnerability, above all, that of little girls. He thereby implicates the viewer in the child’s fate, both for good and ill.”

Meredith Martin, review of Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles under Louis XVI by Robert Berger and Thomas Hedin (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)) and Carmontelle’s Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment by Laurence Chatel de Brancion (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), pp. 511-15.

“Both Diplomatic Tours and Carmontelle’s Landscape Transparencies attempt to shed light on an underexplored aspect of French gardens and how they were portrayed in the ancien régime. As in a growing number of garden history books, the authors foreground questions of reception and use and treat these landscapes as a dynamic field of social relations — in other words, as a contested terrain. Both books also share an inclination to animate the garden as a kinetic experience by way of descriptive texts and visual images. . .” (512).