Enfilade

Professor Gelbart will be discussing her book this Thursday, 27 May, at 6pm (ET), in an online session hosted by The Athenaeum of Philadelphia. From Yale UP:

Nina Rattner Gelbart, Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-0300252569, $40.

A fascinating collective biography of six female scientists in eighteenth-century France, whose stories were largely written out of history

This book presents the stories of six intrepid Frenchwomen of science in the Enlightenment whose accomplishments—though celebrated in their lifetimes—have been generally omitted from subsequent studies of their period: mathematician and philosopher Elisabeth Ferrand, astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, field naturalist Jeanne Barret, garden botanist and illustrator Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, anatomist and inventor Marie-Marguerite Biheron, and chemist Geneviève d’Arconville. By adjusting our lens, we can find them.

In a society where science was not yet an established profession for men, much less women, these six audacious and inspiring figures made their mark on their respective fields of science and on Enlightenment society, as they defied gender expectations and conventional norms. Their boldness and contributions to science were appreciated by such luminaries as Franklin, the philosophes, and many European monarchs. The book is written in an unorthodox style to match the women’s breaking of boundaries.

Nina Rattner Gelbart is professor of history and Anita Johnson Wand Professor of Women’s Studies at Occidental College. Her previous books include Feminine and Opposition Journalism in Old Regime France and The King’s Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Chronology
Actors in a Supporting Role

Introduction: A Sextet of Firsts, Variations on a Theme
Interlude: Letter to Elisabeth, Reine, Jeanne, Madeleine Françoise, Marie-Marguerite, and Geneviève
1  Mathematician and Philosopher: The ‘Celebrated Mlle Ferrand’ (1700–1752)
Interlude: Letter to Elisabeth
2  Astronomer and ‘Learned Calculator’: Nicole Reine Lepaute (1723–1788)
Interlude: Letter to Reine
3  Botany in the Field and in the Garden: Jeanne Baret (1740–1807) and Madeleine Françoise Basseporte (1701–1780)
Interlude: Letters to Jeanne and Madeleine Françoise
4  Anatomist and Inventor: Marie-Marguerite Biheron and Her Medical Museum (1719–1795)
Interlude: Letter to Marie-Marguerite
5  Chemist and Experimentalist: Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville and Her Choice of Anonymity (1720–1805)
Interlude: Letter to Geneviève

Epilogue
Notes
Index

Distributed by Paul Holberton Publishing and The University of Chicago Press:

Allen Staley, Copley and West in England, 1775–1815 (London: Burlington Press, 2021), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-1916237803, £35 / $45.

This beautifully and thoroughly illustrated book, which constitutes the first serious investigation of the relationship between Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, will be of considerable interest to both British and American art historians, and appeal to art lovers from both countries.

West and Copley have always and properly been viewed as the two pre-eminent eighteenth-century American artists, despite the fact that, at the age of twenty-one, West left his native shores in 1760, never to return. He went on to become immensely successful in England, becoming, among other things, the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Copley spent half his working life also in England. However, before making the move across the Atlantic, he made his mark as an exceptionally talented artist, who, without any real training, painted likenesses of fellow Bostonians, including ones of figures such as John Hancock and Paul Revere, that have become icons of American history. While those portraits remain his most widely admired works, after 1775 and his resettling in England, he started painting distinctly different types of pictures, initially showing modern historical subjects in emulation of the model provided him by West, following, for example, West’s celebrated Death of General Wolfe, exhibited in 1771, with his own Death of the Earl of Chatham, begun in 1779. For a brief span of time, the two expatriate Americans had a close working relationship, that we can see substantially reflected in both the formal language and the subject matter of many of their best works, but it eventually and inevitably turned into rivalry.

The book begins with a brief prologue discussing the earliest of West’s depictions of recent historical events and of subjects set in America, painted prior to Copley’s arrival in England. It then follows the year-by-year evolution of Copley’s painting from 1775 to his death in 1815, with an underlying focus upon his ongoing give-and-take with West. It ends with examination of hitherto little-known and unstudied major late paintings, from after 1800, by both artists.

Allen Staley is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Columbia University, where he taught for more than thirty years. Prior to Columbia he worked at the Frick Collection in New York and as an assistant curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His engagement with Benjamin West began in Philadelphia with an article about an oil sketch by West, published in the museum’s bulletin in 1965. In 1975 he took on the task of completing the monumental catalogue of West’s paintings begun by the late Helmut von Erff, which led him to think about the artist’s influence upon the work of his compatriot and exact contemporary Copley. The book, after a decade’s labor, saw publication in 1986. His other significant books are The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, published in 1973 with a second edition in 2001, and The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement, published in 2011, both products of long-standing love and study of English Victorian painting. In addition to writing countless reviews and articles—the first in The Burlington Magazine in 1963—he has organized or shared in organizing and writing the catalogues of numerous exhibitions.

Distributed in the US and Canada by The University of Chicago Press:

David Stacey, Art and Industry: Seven Artists in Search of an Industrial Revolution in Britain (London: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2021), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-1913491291, £25 / $38.

In seven linked essays, the author discusses paintings of industrial scenes by seven artists working in the period 1780–1830. Their unique and distinct responses to the subject-matter reveal a surprisingly coherent message. Joseph Wright of Derby invites us to consider the lives of the men, women and children working in Arkwright’s cotton mills at Cromford. John Opie, in his painting of a Cornish entrepreneur and a miner, acknowledges the value of new technology but leads us to reflect on class and the use of capital. Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg responds to the sublimity of the industrial landscape at Coalbrookdale but reveals the impact of an industry no longer subject to nature’s diurnal rhythms. Joseph Mallord William Turner presents an evolving response to the changes that Britain was undergoing. He observes with delight the opening up of pastoral scenery along the new canal routes but prompts the viewer to consider the environmental impact of industrial development. William Havell finds copper-mining employees in a place between heaven and hell in an industry subject to competition and the vagaries of demand. Penry Williams, in his paintings of ironworks at Merthyr Tydfil, raises the issue of the conditions that ironworkers and miners were facing as the gap widened between employer and employee. And the little-known and often-derided Henry Hawkins produces an image which lifts the lid on his slave-owning patron’s enterprise through an image of a slate quarry which suggests parallels with Dante’s Divine Comedy. Seven artists in search of an industrial revolution in Britain respond in their works with a coherent message on the impact of new technology, the use of capital and on conditions that saw the emergence of new social classes in Britain.

David Stacey is an independent art historian with a lifelong interest in British paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has contributed articles to The British Art Journal, The Burlington Magazine, and other art history journals. He graduated with a degree in engineering science from the University of Oxford and has a postgraduate degree in the history of art from Birkbeck College, University of London. He has worked as an international water resources consultant in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East and is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He has two children and lives in London.

Distributed by Yale University Press:

Joseph Viscomi, William Blake’s Printed Paintings: Methods, Origins, Meanings (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2021), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107208, £40 / $50.

An in-depth examination of William Blake’s glorious and acclaimed series of twelve monoprints

Among William Blake’s (1757–1827) most widely recognized and highly regarded works as an artist are twelve color printed drawings, or monoprints, conceived and executed in 1795. This book investigates these masterworks, explaining Blake’s technique—one he essentially reinvented, unaware of 17th-century precursors—to show that these works were produced as paintings, and played a crucial role in Blake’s development as a painter. Using material and historical analyses, Joseph Viscomi argues that the monoprints were created as autonomous paintings rather than as illustrations for Blake’s books with an intended viewing order. Enlivened with bountiful illustrations, the text approaches the works within the context of their time, not divorced from ideas expressed in Blake’s writings but not illustrative of or determined by those writings.

Joseph Viscomi is James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.