Enfilade

From the press release for the shortlist, as shared on 15 September; the winner will be announced 15 November.

The Walpole Society has recently announced the shortlist for the Berger Prize, the most prestigious book prize for art history, including a major publication on Gwen John, one of the most significant British women artists of the 20th century, and a book which explores the role that art played in destabilising the legitimacy of the one of the most powerful corporations in history: the East India Company.

A lifetime of knowledge is gifted to the reader in Steven Brindle’s monumental Architecture in Britain and Ireland 1530–1830 (Paul Mellon Centre). From its brilliant opening introduction this magisterial overview sets the national architectural story alight and the reader is struck by the scale and the sweep of history that Brindle handles with consummate skill, revealing a lifetime of practical and scholarly expertise in the field. This book will become an essential handbook and a classic study for future generations of scholars.

In her critical biography, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris (Thames & Hudson), Alicia Foster deftly dismantles the various myths surrounding John and ensures that she regains her full artistic stature; the author asks important theoretical questions about the status of a self-portrait and the artist-model relationship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Enriched by over 240 reproductions of paintings and contemporary photographs and through many excerpts of letters, the reader is immersed in the artist’s deeply personal aesthetic world.

Richly researched and beautifully written, Laura Freeman charts the story of one of the most fascinating figures of mid-century British art, the curator, patron and museum maker, Jim Ede. Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists (Penguin, Jonathan Cape), brings Ede’s Cambridge house to life, offering fresh insights into its familiar collection of paintings, sculptures and pebbles. Based on meticulous research, Freeman populates her narrative with a fascinating cast of characters from Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to T.E. Lawrence.

Highlighting an area which is gaining momentum and interest for scholars as well as collectors, Alun Graves’s Studio Ceramics (Thames & Hudson / V&A) presents the state of the national collection of Studio Ceramics and will have international impact. The exemplary writing, photography and design make this the unmissable reference work on the subject.

The complex world of post-colonial scholarship is nimbly traversed for a modern audience by Tom Young in Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c.1813–58 (Paul Mellon Centre). This revelatory book explores how the visual culture of members of the East India Company prompted significant structural change. Fresh material is explored from a compelling new angle, charting the ways in which new artistic forms and practices presaged shifts in the governance of the Company and its relationship with the people it governed. This is a dazzling and erudite intervention that will define the discipline for future generations.

The Berger Prize is the most prestigious award in art history, offering the largest cash prize in the field: £5,000 is awarded to the winner and £500 to each of the shortlisted authors. Named in honour of the late William B. Berger, whose collection of British art is on display at the Denver Art Museum in his native Colorado, the award was founded in 2001 by the Berger Collection Educational Trust (BCET) and The British Art Journal. This year, for the first time, The Walpole Society, which promotes the study of Britain’s art history, has partnered with the BCET to deliver the prize, which celebrates brilliant writing and scholarship about the arts and architecture of the United Kingdom.

From CEEH:

Paula Fayos Pérez, Goya’s Caprichos in Nineteenth-Century France: Politics of the Grotesque (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2024), 544 pages, ISBN: 978-8418760204, €56.

The impact of Goya’s oeuvre and particularly of the Caprichos (1799) on nineteenth-century French art was immense, long lasting, and multifaceted. Whereas in Spain Goya was associated with the work he produced as court painter, in France he became known as the author of the Caprichos, interpreted by the Romantics as a lampoon of late eighteenth-century Spain. This vision overlooked the fact that the true modernity of Goya’s work lies in its universalism, as a mirror reflecting the essence of humankind, unfettered by patriotism—this is also true of his monsters and witches, which are nothing more than the deformed reflection of humans. It could be argued that this was a two-way influence: Goya contributed to shape French Romantic art—and thus the beginning of modern art—and the Romantics in turn modelled his critical image. This study challenges the established interpretation of the Spanish artist that has dominated the scholarship until recently, based on Romantic stereotypes, many of which have been perpetuated to this day.

Goya became known in the French market—the main receptor of his work—through his graphic oeuvre. This was promoted by artists, critics and collectors such as Charles Yriarte, Paul Lefort, and Eugène Piot, most of them in association with the Spanish artist and dealer Valentín Carderera. Goya’s influence can be divided into two broad categories: aesthetics and politics. On the one hand, artists of the Romantisme noir—focusing on the taste for the grotesque and the literary vision of Spain—saw Goya as the last representative of the Spanish School. On the other, the political impact of his work can be appreciated in the satirical prints produced by artists such as Honoré Daumier and J. J. Grandville, who held him to be a politically engaged caricaturist who fought against censorship and mocked the aristocracy and the clergy. The case of Eugène Delacroix offers the richest example of Goya’s impact on nineteenth-century French art, here backed up by a catalogue of forty of his copies after the Caprichos, some of them hitherto unpublished.

Paula Fayos Pérez received a PhD in History of Art from the University of Cambridge in 2019 with a dissertation on the influence of Goya on nineteenth-century French art and literature. She worked as a researcher in the Duke of Wellington’s private collection at Apsley House (London) and Stratfield Saye House (Hampshire). Before receiving a ‘Leonardo’ scholarship from the BBVA Foundation she held a ‘Margarita Salas’ postdoctoral fellowship to teach and conduct research at the Universities of Strasbourg and Madrid (Complutense). In 2023 she organised the international seminar Goya: grotesco / coleccionismo. She has written articles for The Burlington Magazine (2019, 2020), Boletín del Museo del Prado (2022), and Print Quarterly (2023).

c o n t e n t s

Note to the Reader
Acknowledgements

Introduction

I | The Spread of Goya’s Œuvre in the French Art Market: Presentations, Viewers, and Collectors
• First Period (1799–1828): Goya’s Lifetime
• Second Period (1828–1854): The Dealing of Javier Goya
• Third Period (1854–1870): The Dealing of Valentín Carderera
• Fourth Period (1870–1900): Major Auction Sales and Collections

II | The Caprichos and Romantic Aesthetics: Goyaesque Spain and the Grotesque in Prints and Literature
• The Romantic Interpretation of Goya
• Romantic Literature and Illustration Inspired by Goya

III | Political Bigotry and Social Mœurs: Caricature, Censorship, and Democracy
• Goya as a Political Artist
• Political Caricature, Censorship and Democracy
• From Political to Social Criticism

IV | ‘Tout Goya palpitait autour de moi’: The Case of Eugène Delacroix
• A Self-proclaimed Classicist
• Goya’s Influence on Delacroix
• Delacroix’s Copies after the Caprichos
• Quotations or ‘Inspired Originals’ after the Caprichos
• Original Works Indirectly Influenced by Goya

V | Conclusion
• The Everlasting Influence of Goya
• Censorship and the Power of Caricature
• Future Research Threads
• The Fine Line between Admiration and Fabrication

Appendices
1  Goya’s Etchings and Lithographs: Series and Single Prints
2  Goya Mentions in French Literature (1771–1900)
3  Catalogue of Eugène Delacroix’s Works after Goya’s Caprichos (c. 1819–1827)
4  Copies by Capricho

List of Illustrations
Bibliography
Goya Works
Index
Illustration Credits

From Yale UP:

Mark Laird, The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art and Global Plant Relations (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2024), 277 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107451, £35 / $50.

How a wave of exotic botanical imports from across Britain’s empire shaped its gardens and psyche

Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britain’s empire and were lavishly depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises as specimens collected alongside other objects of natural history. Mark Laird’s provocative new book—part art history, part polemic—weaves fine art, botanical illustration, and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain’s heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and Victorian eras but also to British culture more broadly. The Dominion of Flowers shines with captivating cross-cultural plant stories. The book opens with the Seymers’ exotic Butterflies and Plants and Pulteney’s catalogue of Dorset’s native wildflowers. It then moves to the German artist John Miller and his illustrations for Lord Bute’s Botanical Tables and concludes by tracing Britain’s fascination with New Zealand’s unique flora, first depicted in Mary Delany’s collages. Copiously illustrated with almost two hundred works, and drawing on Laird’s genealogical research into his own family’s colonial past, this volume foregrounds Indigenous ideas about ‘plant relations’ in a study that brings the trans-oceanic movement of plants and people alive.

Mark Laird is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and former faculty member at Harvard University. He is the author of The Flowering of the Landscape Garden and A Natural History of English Gardening—recipient of an Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award. He has been historic planting consultant to Painshill Park Trust, English Heritage, and Strawberry Hill Trust.