Enfilade

From the V&A:

Tessa Murdoch, Europe Divided: Huguenot Refugee Art and Culture (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1838510121, £40 / $55.

This richly illustrated book focuses on the extraordinary international networks resulting from the diaspora of more than 200,000 refugees who left France in the late 17th century to join communities already in exile spread far and wide. Indeed, George Washington (along with 20 other presidents) was a descendant of Huguenots. First-generation Huguenot refugees included hundreds of trained artists, designers, and craftsmen. Beyond the French borders, they raised the quality of design and workshop practice, passing on skills to their apprentices, sons, godsons, cousins, and to successive generations, who continued to dominate output in the luxury trades. Although silver and silks are the best-known fields with which Huguenot settlers are associated, their significant contribution to architecture, ceramics, design, clock and watchmaking, engraving, furniture, woodwork, sculpture, portraiture, and art education provides fascinating insight into the motivation and resolve of this highly skilled diaspora. Thanks to a sophisticated network of Huguenot merchants, retailers, and bankers who financed their production, their wares reached a global market.

Tessa Murdoch is research curator of the Gilbert Collection at the V&A.

C O N T E N T S

Author’s Preface
Introduction
Maps

1  The Huguenot Diaspora
2  The Reception of Huguenot Artists, Craftsmen, and Designers in the British Isles
3  The Huguenots as Educators
4  Decorative Painters
5  Huguenot Architects and Engineers
6  Huguenot Metalsmiths
7  Carvers, Gilders, Cabinetmakers, and Upholsterers
8  Huguenot Sculptors in France and Beyond
9  The Taste for Porcelain and Ceramic Manufacture in Britain and Ireland
10  Huguenot Goldsmiths and Silversmiths in the British Isles, 1550–1780
11  Huguenot Watchmakers and Jewellers: The Manufacture and International Market for Luxury Goods
12  Printmakers and Sellers: Design, Ornament, and Reproductive Prints
13  Huguenots and Portraiture: Allegiance, Identity, Loyalty, and Memory

Acknowledgments
Timeline
Notes & References
Bibliography

From Yale UP:

David Alexander, A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2022), 1120 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107215, $125.

This biographical dictionary of engravers working on copper encompasses both those who produced fine art prints, and also those who engraved book illustrations for medical, technical, and literary works, all of which played a more important part than is usually realised in spreading information in the age of Enlightenment. Some 3,000 biographical entries draw on much unpublished information, researched over four decades, notably records of apprenticeship, genealogy, insurance, and bankruptcy as well as newspaper advertisements and contemporary accounts.

This is the first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland 1714–1820. Many biographical entries describe celebrated engravers producing ‘fine art’ prints of paintings, which spread knowledge about living and dead artists. However, this book also builds up a more complex picture of the occupation of printmaking and includes engravers, many previously unresearched, who engraved ephemeral material, such as trade cards, bank notes, and satirical prints as well as the images that spread knowledge across literary, geographical, historical, topographical, medical, and technical fields.

David Alexander is a historian and honorary keeper of British prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and a member of the editorial board of Print Quarterly.

A new edition of this mainstay of eighteenth-century publishing was recently released by the Bodleian Library and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Sean Shesgreen, Hawkers, Beggars and Quacks: Portraits from ‘The Cries of London’ (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2021), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1851245512, $55.

Seventy-four striking portraits of men and women on the margins of London society in the seventeenth century—including street vendors and petty criminals.

“Buy my Dish of great Eeles, Any Old Iron take money for, Twelve Pence a Peck Oysters, Buy my fat Chickens, Fair Lemons & Oranges.”

At the end of the seventeenth century, Marcellus Laroon (1653–1702) became well known for a series of drawings that illustrated London’s marginal men and women: street vendors, hustlers, and petty criminals. This set of drawings came to be known as The Cries of London after the shouts and cries vendors used to hawk their wares. Hawkers, Beggars, and Quacks presents seventy-four of Laroon’s striking portraits. Following an illustrated introduction that contextualizes The Cryes of London, each portrait is beautifully reproduced with a commentary on the individual street-seller and their trade. These commentaries provide a wealth of detail about each seller’s dress, the equipment they used to ply their trade, their own diets, and the diets of those they served. Drawing on historic material found in the British Library’s Burney Collection of English newspapers, Hawkers, Beggars and Quacks provides a fascinating insight into the men and women who made their livelihood—legally and illegally—on the streets of England’s capital.

Sean Shesgreen is emeritus professor of English and formerly a Presidential Professor at Northern Illinois University.

From Rizzoli:

Jérôme Hanover and Gabriel Bauret, with photographs by Ambroise Tézenas, The French Royal Wardrobe: The Hôtel de la Marine Restored (Paris: Flammarion, 2022), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-2080261328, $85.

This volume goes behind the scenes to reveal the history and metamorphosis of the Hôtel de la Marine, a treasure of Parisian heritage.

The Hôtel de la Marine, an exemplary monument on Paris’s Place de la Concorde, is a superb architectural achievement constructed in the eighteenth century by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the official architect of King Louis XV. The institution it housed was charged with choosing, purchasing, and maintaining all of the king’s furniture—from beds to the simplest chair—and the crown’s treasures were stored here until 1789, after which it became the site of the Ministry of the Navy for more than two hundred years. An extensive four-year restoration was completed in 2021; the building reopened to the public and features a museum, conserved apartments that highlight the tastes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an exhibition hall, a bookshop, and three restaurants. Previously unpublished photography captures the splendor and majesty of the monument.

Jérôme Hanover is a fashion and luxury journalist; he regularly writes for Vogue Paris, GQ, and Le Figaro, and contributed to Dior in Bloom (Flammarion, 2020). Gabriel Bauret is a photography historian, independent curator, and author. Ambroise Tézenas’s photographs have been published in Presidential Residences in France (Flammarion, 2021), Be My Guest (Flammarion, 2020), and Beijing: Theatre of the People (2006), which won a best European book of photography prize. His work has been exhibited across Europe and Asia.