Enfilade

Distributed for Modern Art Press by Yale UP:

Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in London (London: Modern Art Press, 2021), 412 pages, ISBN: 978-0956800787, £35 / $45.

Thomas Gainsborough’s (1727–1788) London years, from 1774 to 1788, were the pinnacle and conclusion of his career. They coincided with the establishment of the Royal Academy, of which Gainsborough was a founding member, and the city’s ascendance as a center for the arts. This is a meticulously researched and readable account of how Gainsborough designed his home and studio and maintained a growing schedule of influential patrons, making a place for himself in the art world of late-18th-century London. New material about Gainsborough’s technique is based on examinations of his pictures and firsthand accounts by studio visitors. His fractious relationship with the Royal Academy and its exhibition culture is reexamined through the works he sent to its annual shows. The full range of Gainsborough’s art, from fashionable portraits to landscapes and fancy pictures, is addressed in this major contribution, not just to the study of a great artist, but to 18th-century studies in general.

Susan Sloman is an independent scholar and curator specialising in eighteenth-century studies. Gainsborough in London is the follow-up to her previous book, Gainsborough in Bath.

For more information, see Dr. Sloman’s posting at the Yale Books Blog.

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

Geoffrey Bond and Christine Kenyon Jones, Dangerous to Show: Byron and His Portraits (London: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2020), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1912690718, £25 / $38.

“Don’t look at him. He is dangerous to look at,” said Lady Liddell to her daughter in 1817. Handsome, charismatic, aristocratic, and allegedly “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” Lord Byron (1788–1824) is one of the most captivating and recognizable figures of the Romantic Age. His face, figure, and appearance added to the appeal of his poetry, and the close association of the man with his poetic creations encouraged a wide range of artists to create portraits during his lifetime and to memorialize him after his heroic death in Greece.

The first work on the subjects of the portraits of the poet, and written by two authorities on the subject, Dangerous to Show explores Byron’s life through the intriguing stories behind one hundred of these images. Reproduced in color for the first time, we can explore the key paintings, miniatures, sculptures, drawings, and sketches, along with a selection of prints, cartoons, engravings, and other representations of the artist. The book uses Byron’s own wit with words to recount his attempts to manage his own image through the way he was presented in his portraits, as well as through fashion, weight control, and the disguise of his lameness.

Christine Kenyon Jones is a writer and lecturer, and an expert on Lord Byron and the Romantic period. She has been published widely on Byron’s image and his portraiture; on his politics and his pronunciation; on his disability and his dieting; on his relationship with his publisher John Murray, his religious background and his afterlife as a science-fiction character. Her book Kindred Brutes is a study of animals in the Romantic period, in which Byron figures largely. She has also written, lectured and broadcast widely about the Regency period and Jane Austen. She is a Research Fellow in the Department of English at King’s College London.

Geoffrey Bond is a polymath, having had careers as a solicitor, businessman, and broadcaster. His special interests now are the creation and promotion of education initiatives for young people in the heritage, law and engineering sectors. He has written and lectured on heritage matters and chaired a variety of heritage organisations at regional and national level. A collector and antiquarian, living in an historic house, he is a Fellow and former member of the council of the Antiquaries Society of London. He has one of the best collections of Byron first editions and Byron memorabilia in the country.

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.