Enfilade

Francisco Goya, Tan poco (So little), plate 36 of the Disasters of War, ca. 1810–13, etching and aquatint, 157 × 205 mm
(London: British Museum)

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

The eighteenth century in the current issue of Print Quarterly:

Print Quarterly 36.2 (June 2019)

A R T I C L E S

Natalia Keller, “On Goya’s Disasters of War, Plates 69 and 36,” pp. 139–45.

Francisco Goya (1746–1828) paid careful attention to both the visual and textual components of his compositions. The concise titles accompanying the images of his prints were an important reflection of their author’s intention. The article highlights how posthumous changes made by the Royal Academy to the Disasters of War series substantially changed their meanings. The change from Nada. Ello lo dice to Nada. Ello dirá has been noted and discussed. An explanation and interpretation of Goya’s hitherto overlooked original title Tan poco (‘So little’), which was erroneously changed to Tampoco, is here proposed.

N O T E S  A N D  R E V I E W S

Stephen Bergquist, “Reversed States of Two Landscapes by Crescenzio Onofri,” pp. 181–85.

“Onofri’s etches oeuvre consists of twelve landscape prints after his own series of paintings of 1696, five with mythological subjects, in larger format, and seven in pure landscape, in smaller format” (183). Bergquist corrects the misidentification in The Illustrated Bartsch (volume 45, 1990) of two states of two of the landscape prints: The Double-Arched Bridge and A Waterfall.

Caspar David Friedrich, Woman Seated under a Spider’s Web (Melancholy), ca. 1803, woodcut, 171 × 121 mm (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Elizabeth McGrath, Review of Temi Odumosu, Africans in English Caricature 1769–1819: Black Jokes, White Humor (Brepols, 2017), pp. 185–88.

Temi Odumosu’s book addresses the black figure in British satirical prints by artists such as Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, Isaac and George Cruikshank, and Richard Newton, some of it a low-point in the history of racist imagery. Odumosu demonstrates how the ultimate target of the satire is almost always white people, the black characters in the prints being there as agents, or simply elements, in the mockery of others. Through her dedicated researches, Odumosu has uncovered a mass of new information and teased out previously baffling contemporary references, including to popular songs, theatre, and opera. In short, the book is, according to McGrath, “a triumph of historical scholarship which has particular importance for and relevance to the understanding of society in Britain today” (188).

Peter Prange, Review of John Ittmann, ed., Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints, 1770–1850 (Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 226–31.

John Smith Philipps bequeathed his collection of about 8,500 German prints to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. “In 1985 it was purchased by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a first exhibition entitled Art and Nature: German Printmaking, 1750–1850 followed in 1992. It is now the subject of the extensive volume The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints, 1770–1850. . .” (227).

P U B L I C A T I O N S  R E C E I V E D

• Florian Knothe, Pascal-François Bertrand, Kristel Smentek, and Nicholas Pearce, Imagining Qianlong: Louis XV’s Chinese Emperor Tapestries and Battle Scene Prints at the Imperial Court in Beijing, exhibition catalogue (Hong Kong University Press, 2017), p. 208.

• The Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), p. 208.

• Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, et al., Ercolano e Pompei: Visioni di una scoperta / Herculaneum and Pompeii: Visions of a Discovery (Skira, 2018), pp. 208–09.

• Nicola Streeten and Cath Tate, eds., with contributions by Sheila O’Connell, Simon Grennan, Elizabeth Crawford, Carol Bennett, and Sofia Niazi, The Inking Woman: 250 Years of British Women Cartoon and Comic Artists (Myriad Editions, 2018), p. 209.