Enfilade

In the book’s final chapter, Richard Johns, curator of prints and drawings at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, addresses, “‘The British Caesar’: John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and the Visual Arts.” From the publisher:

John Hattendorf, Augustus Veenendaal, and Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier, eds., Marlborough: Soldier and Diplomat (Zutphen: Karwansaray Publishers, 2012), 408 pages, ISBN: 978-9490258047, € 75.

The subject of numerous books in English, Marlborough has typically been seen only in terms of British political and military history. In this book, twelve leading specialists of the period broaden the perspective by assessing Marlborough in the wider and more diverse contexts of the European situation, the common soldier in the British army, the complementary activities of navies, the differing perspectives of the Austrians, Dutch, French, and Germans as well as in the context of the British popular press and the visual arts.

John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, is perhaps now best known for his role in the War of the Spanish Succesion. His victories at battles such as Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenaarde, and Malplaquet have firmly established him as one of Britian’s greatest military heroes. His success also brought his family unprecedented wealth, power and influence. Physically handsome, he rose to power not only thanks to his military genius, but also his personal service as a very successful courtier. It was his interrelated personal, political, and family connections, combined with those his wife developed, that were the key elements in reaching and sustaining his positions of power. While the 1st Duke of Marlborough is firmly established in the British historical canon, far less has been said about him in a broader European context. Marlborough: Soldier and Diplomat attempts to address this disparity through a series of articles writen by noted international historians and experts. In this new book, the Duke is not only examined from the perspective of his enemies and allies, but also for his influence on social, military, and art history as a whole.

Edited by John B. Hattendorf, Augustus J. Veenendaal and Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier, Marlborough: Soldier and Diplomat is lavishly illustrated with contemporary artwork and photographs of important places in Marlborough’s world. Each of its twelve chapters are dedicated to forming a complete but multi-faceted view of this important figure in European

From Wordwell Books:

Lynda Mulvin, ed., The Fusion of Neo-Classical Principles (Dublin: Wordwell, 2012), 200 pages,  ISBN: 978-1905569557, €35.

Our understanding of Neo-Classicism is currently in an interesting phase of development, a progression to which this volume will make a significant contribution. As Kathleen James-Chakraborty’s keynote paper argues, scholarly attention is shifting from a focus on the production of works of art and buildings to a focus on consumption. The only chapter in the book that deals with painting, Brendan Cassidy’s on the reputation of Gavin Hamilton, neatly exemplifies the polarities of production and consumption. Hamilton painted his pictures in Rome where they were admired by travelling British patrons but, upon their arrival in England, they were consumed by the public with far less enthusiasm. Cassidy advances a very particular reason for this: that Grand Tourists tended to be very young men who took pleasure in identifying Hamilton’s historical subjects whilst on the sacred territory of Rome by reference to their schoolboy steeping in classical texts but, on their return to more distant northern Europe, were happy to conform with the predominant taste for landscape painting and portraiture.

Conor Lucey’s chapter, on the architectural pattern books that can be identified as having been in the hands of Dublin artisans, is a good contribution to the theme of diffusion of design ideas from one place to another, as is John Wilton-Ely’s on the design revolution of Robert Adam. As Wilton-Ely argues, the targeting and marketing of a ‘style’ is a sign of economic modernity. Another aspect of economic modernity in the eighteenth century is the quasi-professional organisation of the means of production, and Barbara Arciswewska’s essay on the reform of the English Office of Works instigated by the new Hanoverian dynasty is a very important contribution to scholarship in this respect.

In this volume the chapters of Michael McCarthy and Toby Barnard deal explicitly with the problem of when Neo-Classicism begins and ends. McCarthy argues that the fierceness of the nineteenth-century ‘battle of the styles’ has caused us to lose sight of the more gentlemanly basis on which the debate took place in the eighteenth century, but Barnard explores the religious disputes in Ireland that saw the Gothic commandeered by the Protestant community and the Catholics turning to classicism – and perhaps not unwillingly, given that their sense of civic duty was modelled on their classical educations like the young English aristocrats who, as we have seen, form the basis of Cassidy’s chapter.

The issue of the thoroughgoing Greek Revival, which would have hardly any place if this volume were circumscribed in chronological terms by the dates 1750-1800, is vigorously dealt with in this volume by three essays. Susan Pearce looks back to that first truly great phase of archaeological discovery in Greece that followed the Napoleonic Wars and in particular at the extraordinary understandings of Greek architecture and architectural sculpture of C.R. Cockerell.  Lynda Mulvin’s own chapter on Cockerell’s work in Ireland pursues these ideas into built form are, while Patricia McCarthy deals with the much more extensive Irish projects of Richard and William Morrison. Also in this connection, Joe McDonnell through the works of the Irish sculptor Christopher Hewetson and Paul Caffrey with a collection of miniatures examine the emergence of Neo-Classicism in other media in Ireland.

A final strand to this rich volume can be found in the transference of design ideas between different artistic media. This is explored in the essays of Tracy Watts and Eddie McParland.

These essays will make a wide-ranging and stimulating contribution to current scholarly debates about the nature of Neo-Classicism, that critical cultural development that signals the arrival both of recognisable modernity and of internationalism in the western tradition. Moreover the essays have been written by some of the leading experts on the subject.

An invitation from Dave Mazella of The Long Eighteenth:

Simon Gikandi’s book Slavery and the Culture of Taste has just received a James Russell Lowell prize at MLA, and I thought that C18L, Long 18th, and other 18th-century scholars/readers might be interested in doing a collaborative reading of this book in the spring. Right now I’m trying to gauge the level of interest in the book, and seeing when might be a good time to do it.

We would probably do it over about a week or so, with one respondent per chapter posting a 500-800 word response every day or so, depending on the level of traffic. Then hopefully we can get Gikandi to respond to our posters at the end. For those interested in the process, we’ve done this with books by Joe Roach, Michael McKeon and Richard Sher in the past. Here’s the link to our announcement. If you’d like to participate, or better yet, help organize, please contact me at dmazella@uh.edu. It would also be helpful if you could give me an idea of the best week or weeks this spring for me to schedule.

Thanks,

Dave Mazella
The Long Eighteenth

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Recent postings at The Long Eighteenth offer numerous items of potential interest Enfilade readers including: 1) Soren Hammerschmidt‘s new course blog, Eighteenth-Century Media; 2) ‘Jeffersongate’ and the controversy surrounding Henry Wiencek’s treatment of Thomas Jefferson in Master of the Mountain; and 3) thoughts on synthesis. -CH