Enfilade

From Yale University Press:

Matthew Craske, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2020), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107123, £45 / $60.

A revelatory study of one of the 18th century’s greatest artists, which places him in relation to the darker side of the English Enlightenment

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797), though conventionally known as a ‘painter of light’, returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, and he had an enduring concern with death, ruin, old age, loss of innocence, isolation, and tragedy.

In this long-awaited book, Matthew Craske adopts a fresh approach to Wright, which takes seriously contemporary reports of his melancholia and nervous disposition, and goes on to question accepted understandings of the artist. Long seen as a quintessentially modern and progressive figure—one of the artistic icons of the English Enlightenment—Craske overturns this traditional view of the artist. He demonstrates the extent to which Wright, rather than being a spokesman for scientific progress, was actually a melancholic and sceptical outsider, who increasingly retreated into a solitary, rural world of philosophical and poetic reflection, and whose artistic vision was correspondingly dark and meditative. Craske offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist’s paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces. In doing so, he recovers Wright’s deep engagement with the landscape, with the pleasures and sufferings of solitude, and with the themes of time, history, and mortality. Joseph Wright of Derby emerges not only as one of Britain’s most ambitious and innovative artists, but also as one of its most profound.

Matthew Craske is reader in art history at Oxford Brookes University.

From Bookshop Dominović:

Katrina O’Loughlin, Ana Šverko and Elke Katharina Wittich, eds., Discovering Dalmatia: Dalmatia in Travelogues, Images, and Photographs (Zagreb: The Institute of Art History, 2019), 382 pages, ISBN: 978-9537875466, 180KN / £22.

This book is the second to emerge from the conferences organised as a part of the Croatian Institute of Art History research project Dalmatia as a Destination of the European Grand Tour in the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Century (Grand Tour Dalmatia), a project funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. Although this three-year project, which began in 2014, has officially concluded, this wonderful scholarly journey through histories of travellers’ perceptions of Dalmatia only continues—through the organisation of annual conferences under the collective title of Discovering Dalmatia, and in the ongoing conversations and discoveries of our research community. Our first publication, in 2017, was dedicated to Diocletian’s Palace through the prism of Robert Adam’s book Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian in Spalatro in Dalmatia (London, 1764). In this volume we are pleased to present twelve essays which offer fragments for assembling a wider and richer picture of Dalmatia through maps, travelogues, images, and photographs from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

• Ana Sverko, Preface: A Collage of Fragments
• Elke Katharina Wittich, On Towns and People: Traditions of Describing and Depicting Dalmatia and South-Eastern Europe from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
• Jean-Pierre Caillet, A French Humanist’s First Impressions of Istria and Dalmatia: The Account of a Voyage by Jacob Spon, 1678
• Colin Thom, ‘This Knotty Business’: The Making of Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian (1764), Revealed in the Adam Brothers’ Grand Tour Correspondence
• Cvijeta Pavlović, Correctio descriptionis: Lovrić vs. Fortis
• Magdalena Polczynska, Who is Observing and Who Describing?: Travels to the Slavic Lands by Aleksander Sapieha
• Nataša Ivanović, Framed Views of Dalmatia
• Irena Kraševac, Views of Dalmatian Cities and Architectural Monuments for the Publication The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Words and Pictures – Volume Dalmatia
• Sanja Žaja Vrbica, Archduke Ludwig Salvator von Habsburg’s Travel Writing from the Region of Dubrovnik
• Hrvoje Gržina, Nineteenth-Century Dalmatia Inverted in the Camera: Photographic Glass Plate Negatives by Franz Thiard de Laforest
• Dragan Damjanović, Politics, Photography, and Architecture: The University of Vienna’s First Study Trip (Erste Wiener Universitätsreise) and Monuments on the Eastern Adriatic Coast
• Katrina O’Loughlin, Ana Šverko, Gertrude Bell’s Spring in Dalmatia, 1910
• Joško Belamarić, Ljerka Dulibić, Bernard Berenson’s Journey to Yugoslavia and along the Dalmatian Coast, 1936

Index
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors