Enfilade

The eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:

Print Quarterly 38.4 (December 2021) . . .

Matthew Darly, The Flower Garden, 1777, etching and engraving with watercolour, 35 × 25 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Elizabeth L. Block, Review of Luigi Amara, The Wig: A Hairbrained History, translated by Christina MacSweeney (Reaktion Books, 2020), p. 436.

Elizabeth Block gives an overview of the 33 brief chapters of Luigi Amara’s The Wig: A Hairbrained History. The chapter “Towering Hairdos” looks at the expensive and impractical styles of wigs in the years before the French Revolution, whilst “Dressing Up Justice” focuses on William Hogarth’s The Bench, 1758–64, an engraving depicting bewigged magistrates. Block praises this work for its entertaining and enjoyable qualities, but highlights its lack of academic rigour, suggesting at the end works to turn to for a more scholarly treatment of the subject.

Richard Taws, Review of the exhibition catalogue William Blake, edited by Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon (Tate, 2019), p. 438.

Reviewing the catalogue for the exhibition William Blake, held at Tate Britain in 2019–20, Richard Taws discusses the book’s five chapters covering the artist’s early artistic milieu, his career as printmaker, his relationship with patronage and display, and his reclamation by a younger generation of artists. It is noted that in the authors’ attempt to demythologise Blake, they are successful in creating a “Blake for all,” who satisfies both a specialist and popular audience.