New Title | Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763–1813: ‘A Native Artist’
Distributed for the University of Wales by the University of Chicago Press:
John Barrell, Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763–1813: ‘A Native Artist’ (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 245 pages, ISBN: 978-0708325667, £65 / $100.
Born in Ruthin, Denbighshire, Edward Pugh (1763–1813) was a Welsh-speaking artist and writer who worked as a miniaturist in London, exhibiting frequently at the Royal Academy. But Pugh’s passion was the landscape, and he painted remarkable views of North Wales that not only captivate but also reveal the development of the Welsh economy and Welsh national consciousness. Pugh also wrote and illustrated a fascinating, informative, and humorous account of a tour of North Wales around 1800–one of the only travel books written at that time by someone who could actually converse with the inhabitants.
Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763–1813 is the first book to consider the work of this nearly forgotten Welsh artist and writer in detail, linking the history of art in Wales with the social history of the country. John Barrell shows how Pugh’s pictures and writings portray rural life and social change in Wales during his lifetime, from the effects of the war with France on industry and poverty, to the need to develop and modernize the Welsh economy, to the power of the landowners. Almost all of the pictures and accounts we have today of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North Wales were made by English artists and writers, and none of these, as Barrell demonstrates, can tell us about life in North Wales with the same depth and authenticity as does Pugh.
John Barrell is professor in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York. He is the author of numerous books, including The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s.
Call for Papers | James Logan and the Networks of the Atlantic
James Logan and the Networks of Atlantic Culture and Politics, 1699–1751
Philadelphia, 18–20 September 2014
Proposals due by 30 September 2013
The home of James Logan, Stenton was built between 1723 and 1730 in the (then) countryside near Philadelphia.
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies, The Library Company of Philadelphia, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Stenton Museum invite proposals for an international interdisciplinary conference in Philadelphia reconsidering early Pennsylvania culture in an Atlantic World context. James Logan (1674–1751), Provincial Secretary to the Penn family, and his vast political, trade and knowledge networks provide a lens for examination of the Atlantic World in the first half of the eighteenth century. This conference is an effort to consider Logan’s milieu in the widest possible way. James Logan studied the sexuality of plants, mentored Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram, served as Mayor of Philadelphia and Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, shaped his province’s relationships with Native Americans, traded furs, owned slaves, was a gentleman-merchant, book collector, and scholar. His nearly 3,000-volume library remains intact at the Library Company of Philadelphia. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania archives include numerous papers collections related to his activities, and The National Society of The Colonial Dames in America in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania preserves his house, Stenton.
Committed participants include Anthony Grafton of Princeton University, Bernard Herman of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Gary B. Nash of the University of California, Los Angeles. Among possible themes for paper proposals are intellectual history, knowledge networks, natural and moral philosophy; books, poetry and literature, collecting, and botany; religion, in particular Quakerism; material culture, archeology, architecture, houses, foodways, landscapes, land acquisition and urban development; economics, industry, commerce; gender, servitude, enslavement and social structure; and politics, imperialism, and European-Native American interactions.
This conference aims to engage an interdisciplinary dialog. Proposals are encouraged from literary scholars, historians, archeologists, material culture studies, and other disciplines. The organizers will consider both individual papers and panel submissions. Papers for many of the panels will be pre-circulated. PowerPoint presentations, especially those relating to visual and material culture, may also be pre-circulated. Non-traditional panels and presentations (such as tours, workshops, brief papers or demonstrations) will be considered.
Please submit 250-word proposals and a one-page c.v. via e-mail no later than 30 September 2013; proposals should be headed with the title of the paper and the presenter’s name, affiliation, and contact information. Submissions and queries may be directed to mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu.
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