Enfilade

From English Heritage:

Andrew Hann and Jon Stobart, eds., The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption (Swindon: English Heritage, 2014), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1848022331, £70.

This book presents a series of conference papers exploring the material culture of the country house and its presentation to the public. There is an academic interest in the consumption practices of the elite as well as in the country house as a lived and living space that was consciously transformed according to fashion and personal taste. Importantly there is also a concern amongst curators to present a coherent narrative of historic properties and their contents to the modern visitor.

The proceeding address a number of current academic debates about elite consumption practices and the role of landed society as arbiters of taste. By looking at the country house as lived space, many of the papers throw up interesting questions about the accumulation and arrangement of objects, the way in which rooms were used and experienced by both owners and visitors, and how this sense of ‘living history’ can be presented meaningfully to the public.

Andrew Hann is Properties Historians’ Team Leader at English Heritage; Jon Stobart is Professor of History at the University of Northampton.

From Artbooks.com:

Catherine Flood and Sarah Grant, Style and Satire: Fashion in Print, 1777–1927 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 80 pages, ISBN: 978-1851778034, £13 / $20.

From the sky-high coiffures of Marie Antoinette to Victorian hoop skirts, from the sheer gowns of Pride and Prejudice era to the flat-chested 1920s flapper, Style and Satire tells the story of European fashion and its most extreme trends through lavish fashion plates and the glorious satirical prints they inspired.

Beautifully printed, hand-colored fashion plates first appeared in magazines and for sale individually in the late 18th century. At the same time (and often by the same artists), satirical prints gloried in the absurdities of fashion, presenting an alternative, often humorously exaggerated, vision of the fash­ionable ideal. Both forms were a product of the same print market, and both documented modern life. Lavishly illustrated, Style and Satire presents a witty and original history of fashion trends.

Catherine Flood is a prints curator, and Sarah Grant is a curator in the Word and Image Department of the V&A.

A digital preview is available here»

As noted in Wallpaper News, Issue #5 (September 2014), an occasional newsletter edited by Robert Kelly, Churchill House Press has recently published this book by David Skinner, with proceeds benefitting the Irish Georgian Society:

David Skinner, Wallpaper in Ireland, 1700–1900 (Churchill House Press, 2014), 216 pages, ISBN: 978-0955024672, €45 / £35.

This lavishly illustrated book is the first devoted to the subject of the manufacture and use of wallpaper in Ireland. Drawing on his extensive experience both as a maker and a researcher of historic wallpapers, David Skinner has compiled a detailed survey of the patterns used to decorate Irish houses from the early eighteenth century until the demise of the Irish ‘paper-staining’ trade at the close of the nineteenth century. Journals, letters, invoices and newspaper advertisements are among the sources explored to chart the history of wallpaper in Ireland, the role of  emigrant Irish artisans in developing wallpaper manufacture in France and North America, the tax on wallpaper, and the trade in smuggled wallpaper between Ireland and Victorian England.

The book will provide an invaluable guide to researchers, architects and those involved in the study of historic interiors. Many of the rooms illustrated are published here for the first time, and include little-known examples of the sumptuous wallpapers imported from China and France, set alongside the
products of native ‘paper-stainers’.

Robert O’Byrne provides a brief review in The Irish Times
(5 July 2014).

From Manchester University Press:

Kate Smith, Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-0719090677, £70 / $105.

In eighteenth-century Britain, greater numbers of people entered the marketplace and bought objects in ever-greater quantities. As consumers rather than producers, how did their understandings of manufacturing processes and the material world change?

Material Goods, Moving Hands combines material culture and visual culture approaches to explore the different ways in which manufacturers and retailers presented production to consumers during the eighteenth century. It shows how new relationships with production processes encouraged consumers, retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers to develop conflicting understandings of production. Objects then were not just markers of fashion and taste, they acted as important conduits through which people living in Georgian Britain could examine and discuss their material world and the processes and knowledge that rendered it.

Kate Smith was a Research Fellow on The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, a 3-year Leverhulme Trust-funded research project based in the Department of History at the University of Warwick (2011–12) and University College London (2012–14).
She is now Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at the
University of Birmingham.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1. New ways of looking
2. Visual access to production
3. Listening in to the manufacturing world
4. Picturing production and embodying knowledge
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

From Oxbow Books:

James Ayres, Art, Artisans, and Apprentices: Apprentice Painters and Sculptors in the Early Modern British Tradition (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), 536 pages, ISBN: 978-1782977421, £35.

Before the foundation of academies of art in London in 1768 and Philadelphia in 1805, most individuals who were to emerge as artists trained in workshops of varying degrees of relevance. Easel painters began their careers apprenticed to carriage, house, sign, or ship painters, whilst a few were placed with those who made pictures. Sculptors emerged from a training as ornamental plasterers or carvers. Of the many other trades in a position to offer an appropriate background were ‘limning’, staining, engraving, surveying, chasing, and die-sinking. In addition, plumbers gained the right to use oil painting and, for plasterers, the application of distemper was an extension of their trade. Central to the theme of this book is the notion that, for those who were to become either painters or sculptors, a training in a trade met their practical needs. This ‘training’ was of an altogether different nature to an ‘education’ in an art school. In the past, prospective artists were offered, by means of apprenticeships, an empirical rather than a theoretical understanding of their ultimate vocation.

James Ayres provides a lively account of the inter-relationship between art and trade in the late 17th to early 19th centuries, in both Britain and North America. He demonstrates with numerous, illustrated examples, the many cross-overs in the ‘art and mystery’ of artistic training, and, to modern eyes, the sometimes incongruous relationships between the various trades that contributed to the blossoming of many artistic careers, including some of the most illustrious names of the ‘long 18th century’.

More information is available here»

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C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements
Introduction

I. Crafts, Trades, Artisans, and Guilds
1. Art and mystery
2. The guilds and livery companies
3. Guild regulation and training
4. Indentured apprenticeships
5. The craft trades and the visual arts

II. Painters
6. The art of picture craft
7. The materials of painters
8. Painter stainers
9. The painters: mechanic and liberal
10. Easel painting
11. The trade of painting in oil: House and decorative painting, Sign painting and making, Coach painting, Marine painting
12. Size painting: Stained hangings, Stained transparencies, Scene painting for the theatre, The plasterers
13. Limning and watercolour painting

III. Sculptors, Carvers, and Related Trades
14. Sculpture
15. Modelling and casting in plaster: Modelling in clay, Casting in plaster
16. The pointing machine
17. Carving: Woodcarving, Stone and marble carving
18. Metalwork and related trades: The foundry, Chasers and chasing, Die-sinking and seal-cutting

IV. Academies of Art and the Foundations of Artistic Professions
19. The origin and function of academies of art
20. Conclusion

Appendices
I. Indenture of 1788: Isaac Dell
II. Advertisement for a Stationer and Picture Dealer, c. 1750–1759
III. Samuel Wale (?–d. 1786) as sign painter
IV. Charles Catton (1728–1798) ‘The Prince of Coach Painters’
V. John Baker RA (1736–1771), coach painter
VI. Luke (Marmaduke) Cradock (1660–1717) the ‘Ornamental Painter’
VII. Sign painting in Colonial and early Federal America
VIII. Prices of house painters’ work of 1799
IX. Stained hangings: early seventeenth and eighteenth century
X. A sampling of individual painters or sculptors who left the English Provinces for Apprenticeships in London, Westminster, or Southwark
XI. Some of the many woodcarvers who later worked in stone and marble
XII. The construction of an armature in John Flaxman’s studio
XIII. Prices in 1797 for ship-carving on Royal Navy vessels in relationship to tonnage
XIV. Price list for lead statuary
XV. Some members of the St Martin’s Lane Academy
XVI. Proposed accommodation and prospectus for the Royal Academy Schools
XVII. Part of Gustav Waagen’S (1794–1868) evidence before the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1834, on the value of Academies of Art

Glossary
Bibliography
Index