Enfilade

From Musée du Louvre Éditions:

Xavier Salmon, Livre de Croquis de Gabriel de Saint-Aubin Peintre, 1760–1778 (Milan: Officina Libraria, 2017), 2 vols., 196 pages, ISBN: 978  889976  5385, £40 / €45.

En 1783, soit trois années après la mort de Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Pahin de la Blancherie indiquait que l’on n’avait jamais rencontré l’artiste « qu’un crayon à la main, dessinant tout ce qui se présentait à ses yeux ». Cependant, malgré cette passion du dessin, le chroniqueur de la vie parisienne fut bien vite oublié et il fallut attendre les Goncourt à la fin du XIXème siècle pour le redécouvrir. Chacun, dès lors, goûta l’art de Saint-Aubin et rechercha ses œuvres. Grand collectionneur du XVIIIe siècle français, Camille Groult entra en possession d’un exceptionnel carnet réunissant plus d’une centaine de pages sur lesquelles le maître avait griffonné son quotidien. Longtemps ce rarissime témoignage de l’art de Saint-Aubin demeura jalousement gardé. Edmond de Goncourt ne put en donner qu’un dépouillement incomplet. Quelques années après, Emile Dacier, grand spécialiste de l’artiste, ajouta quelques éléments nouveaux mais sans avoir obtenu de pouvoir examiner en détail le carnet. Le 20 novembre 1941, le Louvre en faisait l’acquisition. L’œuvre livrait enfin tous ses secrets. Dacier en reprit l’étude et publia en 1943 un opuscule de quarante planches.

Aujourd’hui, c’est l’ensemble du carnet qui est pour la première fois reproduit à l’échelle réelle et étudié de manière exhaustive. De petites dimensions (18 x 12,5 cm), et réunissant 108 pages dont 103 illustrées et annotées entre 1759 et 1778, l’ouvrage est un document inestimable. L’artiste nous invite à parcourir les rues de Paris, à découvrir certains de ses monuments, à partager avec lui quelques événements marquants ou bien encore à vivre le quotidien de son petit monde peuplé de si nombreuses jeunes femmes toutes occupées à la lecture, à la musique ou aux travaux d’aiguille. De sa fine écriture souvent si difficile à lire, il a couvert de jour comme de nuit les pages de nombreuses annotations, noms de collectionneurs, prix de denrées, maximes ou bien encore localisations. Pour qui aime le Paris du XVIIIe siècle, pour qui cherche à mieux connaître l’art de Saint-Aubin, le carnet du Louvre invite indéniablement à la plus passionnante des découvertes.

Distributed by ACC Publishing:

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (Paris, 1724–1780) was “never seen without a pencil in his hand, intent in sketching all that appeared in front of his eyes.” His Livre de Croquis (sketchbook) is a veritable chronicle of Parisian life in the 18th century. Compiled between 1760 and 1778, it contains views of the streets and monuments of the ville lumière, scenes at the theatre or of a grand ball, portraits of young workers writing, sewing or playing an instrument. Saint-Aubin’s minute annotations are deciphered and explained in the commentary volume. The sketchbook, acquired from the heirs of Saint-Aubin, was guarded jealously in a private collection—and was, therefore, almost unknown—until 1941 when it was acquired by the Louvre. It has never before been reproduced in its entirety. Text in French.

Xavier Salmon is the director of the Prints and Drawings Department at the Musée du Louvre. He has curated many exhibitions and edited their catalogues. His book Fontainebleau: Le temps des Italiens was awarded the ‘grand prix de l’Académie Française’ in 2014.

Volume 1: Reproduction
Same size as the Louvre’s album containing the drawings

Volume 2: Commentary
• Introduction: Across Paris Accompanied by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin
• Description of the Sketchbook
• Bibliography

Save

Save

Save

From Rizzoli:

Mary Miers, Highland Retreats: The Architecture and Interiors of Scotland’s Romantic North (New York: Rizzoli, 2017), 288 pages, ISBN: 978 08478 44760, $65.

Featuring breathtaking photographs of some of Scotland’s most remarkable and little-known houses, this book tells the story of how incomers adopted the North of Scotland as a recreational paradise and left an astonishing legacy of architecture and decoration inspired by the romanticized image of the Highlands. Known as shooting lodges because they were designed principally to accommodate the parties of guests that flocked north for the annual sporting season, these houses range from Picturesque cottages ornées and Scotch Baronial castles to Arts and Crafts mansions and modern eco-lodges. While their designs respond to some of Britain’s wildest and most stirring landscapes, inside many were equipped with the latest domestic technology and boasted opulent decoration and furnishings from the smartest London and Parisian firms. A good number survive little altered in their original state, and some are still owned by descendants of the families that built them.

Images from the famous Country Life Picture Library and specially commissioned photographs evoke the dramatic settings and arresting detail of these houses, making the book as appealing to decorators and architectural historians as it is to travelers and sportsmen.

Mary Miers commutes between her home in the Scottish Highlands and the London offices of Country Life magazine, where she works as fine arts and books editor. Her books include American Houses: The Architecture of Fairfax & Sammons and The English Country House.

Paul Barker was one of England’s premier interior and architectural photographers, whose books included English Country House Interiors, The Drawing Room, and English Ruins.

From Oxford UP:

Jon Stobart, ed., Travel and the British Country House: Cultures, Critiques, and Consumption in the Long Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 272 pages, ISBN: 978 15261 10329, $115.

Travel and the British Country House explores the ways in which travel by owners, visitors, and material objects shaped country houses during the long eighteenth century. It provides a richer and more nuanced understanding of this relationship and how it varied according to the identity of the traveller and the geography of their journeys. The essays explore how travel on the Grand Tour, and further afield, formed an inspiration to build or remodel houses and gardens, the importance of country house visiting in shaping taste amongst British and European elites, and the practical aspects of travel, including the expenditure involved. Suitable for a scholarly audience, including postgraduate and undergraduate students, but also accessible to the general reader, Travel and the British Country House offers a series of fascinating studies of the country house that serve to animate the country house with flows of people, goods and ideas.

Jon Stobart is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University.

C O N T E N T S

1  Introduction: Travel and the British Country House, Jon Stobart
2  From Rome to Stourhead and Thence to Rome Again: The Phenomenon of the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape Garden, John Harrison
3  Virtual Travel and Virtuous Objects: Chinoiserie and the Country House, Emile de Bruijn
4  Gentlemen Tourists in the Early Eighteenth Century: The Travel Journals of William Hanbury and John Scattergood, Rosie MacArthur
5  A Foreign Appreciation of English Country Houses and Castles: Dutch Travel Accounts on Proto Museums Visited en Route, 1683–1855, Hanneke Ronnes and Renske Koster
6  ‘Worth Viewing by Travellers’: Arthur Young and Country House Picture Collections in the Late Eighteenth Century, Jocelyn Anderson
7  ‘Enjoying Country Life to the Full—Only the English Know How To Do That!’: Appreciation of the British Country House by Hungarian Aristocratic Travellers, Kristof Fatsar
8  Magnificent and Mundane: Transporting People and Goods to the Country House, c. 1730–1800, Jon Stobart
9  On the Road (and the Thames) with William Cavendish, 1st Earl of Devonshire 1597–1623, Peter Edwards
10  ‘No Lady Could Do This’: Navigating Gender and Collecting Objects in India and Scotland, c. 1810–50, Ellen Filor

Index

From Routledge:

Helen McCormack, William Hunter and His Eighteenth-Century Cultural Worlds: The Anatomist and the Fine Arts (New York: Routledge, 2017), 208 pages, ISBN: 978 14724 24426, $150.

The eminent physician and anatomist Dr William Hunter (1718–1783) made an important and significant contribution to the history of collecting and the promotion of the fine arts in Britain in the eighteenth century. Born at the family home in East Calderwood, he matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1731 and was greatly influenced by some of the most important philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746). Hunter quickly abandoned his studies in theology for Medicine and, in 1740, left Scotland for London where he steadily acquired a reputation as an energetic and astute practitioner; he combined his working life as an anatomist successfully with a wide range of interests in natural history, including mineralogy, conchology, botany, and ornithology; and in antiquities, books, medals, and artefacts; in the fine arts, he worked with artists and dealers and came to own a number of beautiful oil paintings and volumes of extremely fine prints. He built an impressive school of anatomy and a museum which housed these substantial and important collections. William Hunter’s life and work is the subject of this book, a cultural-anthropological account of his influence and legacy as an anatomist, physician, collector, teacher, and demonstrator. Combining Hunter’s lectures to students of anatomy with his teaching at the St Martin’s Lane Academy, his patronage of artists, such as Robert Edge Pine, George Stubbs, and Johan Zoffany, and his associations with artists at the Royal Academy of Arts, the book positions Hunter at the very centre of artistic, scientific, and cultural life in London during the period, presenting a sustained and critical account of the relationship between anatomy and artists over the course of the long eighteenth century.

Helen McCormack is a Lecturer in Art, Design, History and Theory at Glasgow School of Art. She studied Art History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the History of Design and Material Culture at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art, London. She was the David Carritt Scholar in the History of Art at the University of Glasgow where she completed her PhD on the subject of William Hunter as a collector of the fine arts.

C O N T E N T S

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Art, Science, Curiosity and Commerce
1  Forming the Museum: Context and Chronology
2  The Great Windmill Street Anatomy School and Museum
3  Patronage and Patriots: Hunter and a National School of Artists
4  Collecting Ambitions (1770–83) The Grand Tour Paintings
5  Pursuing the Imitation of Nature in and beyond the Royal Academy of Arts
Conclusion

Bibliography
Index

Save

From Oxford UP:

John Levi Barnard, Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 248 pages, ISBN: 978 019066 3599, $75.

From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an “empire for liberty,” for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an “empire of slavery,” inexorably devolving into an “empire of ruin.” Washington architecture.

John Levi Barnard is an Assistant Professor of English at The College of Wooster.

Introduction
1  Phillis Wheatley and the Affairs of State
2  In Plain Sight: Slavery and the Architecture of Democracy
3  Ancient History, American Time: Charles Chesnutt and the Sites of Memory
4  Crumbling into Dust: Conjure and the Ruins of Empire
5  National Monuments and the Residue of History

Save

Save

Save