Enfilade

New Book | Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians

Posted in books by Editor on March 31, 2025

Coming in April, from Penn Press:

Peter Conn, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society Press, 2025), 216 pages, ISBN: 978-1606180495, $40. Also available as an ebook.

book coverPhiladelphia’s early national history represented in Thomas Sully’s portraits

Thomas Sully (1783–1872) is widely regarded as perhaps the most important portrait painter of the antebellum years. Using those portraits, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America reconstructs many of the people, institutions, and events that combined to make Philadelphia—from the Revolution until the 1840s—at once the most cosmopolitan and most racially embattled city in America. The book approaches Sully’s portraits as visual documents in the history of Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Gathered here under headings that include individuals, institutions, professions, and contemporary events, Sully’s portraits offer points of entry into much that was going on in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Peter Conn explores education, politics, theater, medicine, journalism, commerce, philanthropy, religion, and the fierce debate over slavery. Drawing upon wide research, including previously unpublished archival material, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians brings to vivid life the men and women who were making the history of early national Philadelphia.

Peter Conn retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Vartan Gregorian Professor of English and Professor of Education and was a member of the graduate groups in the history of art and American civilization. His publications include The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898–1917 and Literature in America. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book. The American 1930s: A Literary History was published in 2009. Conn wrote and presented a video course on American Best Sellers for the Teaching Company. He has given talks at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutions, on a number of American artists, including Edward Hopper, William Christenberry, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Maxfield Parrish, Charles Sheeler, Winslow Homer, Wharton Esherick, and The Eight.

c o n t e n t s

1  Introduction

2  A Brief Biography

3  Pennsylvania Hospital
• Samuel Coates
• Benjamin Rush

4  The Second Bank of the United States
• Nicholas Biddle

5  The Theater
• George Frederick Cooke
• Fanny Kemble
• Charlotte Cushman

6  The Library Company of Philadelphia
• Zachariah Poulson

7  The Jews of Philadelphia
• Rebecca Gratz

8  The American Philosophical Society
• John Vaughan
• Peter Stephen Du Ponceau

9  Lafayette Returns to Philadelphia

10  The Historical Society of Pennsylvania
• William Rawle

11  Natural History
• William Wagner
• William Maclure

12  The University of Pennsylvania
• John Andrews

13  The Debate over Slavery
• William Henry Furness
• Benjamin Coates
• Daniel Bashiel Warner and Edward Roye

14  Epilogue: Thomas Sully and His Critics
• Jonathan Williams
• George Mifflin Dallas

Bibliography
Index

Eli Wilner & Co. Makes an 18th-C. Pier Mirror for Drayton Hall

Posted in marketplace (goods & services), on site, resources by Editor on March 31, 2025

Late-18th-century-style pier mirror; walnut, basswood, and parcel-gilt; created in 2024–25 by Eli Wilner & Company for Drayton Hall Preservation Trust, Drayton Hall Museum Collection. The mirror was unveiled at the 2025 Charleston Show (March 21–23).

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As noted at Art Daily:

With assistance from their partial funding program for museums, Eli Wilner & Company recently completed the creation of a late 18th-century style pier mirror for Drayton Hall Preservation Trust. March has been another successful month for Eli Wilner & Company’s frame funding initiative, with $125,000 in partial grants having been distributed to date. Nearly $50,000 in funding is still available. Exciting new projects are being submitted on a daily basis by museums across the country. Remaining funds will be committed to new projects by 30 April 2025 and can be used for frame restoration, historic frame replication, or mirror replication projects. Interested institutions can apply by emailing the details of their reframing or frame restoration needs to info@eliwilner.com. No project is too large.

Patricia Lowe Smith, Drayton Hall’s Director of Preservation, initially contacted Wilner in the spring of 2024 about the potential project after they had discovered telltale marks on the original moldings surrounding the drawing room windows, indicating a lost pier mirror. Since no other documentation was found to provide the specifications or origin of the object, Wilner presented Drayton’s team with period-appropriate replacement options based on historical photographs and hand-tracings of Drayton’s walls.

The selected digital mockup was then printed to scale for Wilner’s master carpenters to begin construction of the walnut substrate and basswood blocks for the multiple hand carved elements. To get a better understanding of the depth proportions and construction methods that were not apparent in two-dimensional photographic images, they visited nearby institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New-York Historical Society, and the Museum of the City of New York to examine similar objects.

After several months of woodworking and carving, the basswood portions of the frame were prepared with layers of finely sanded gesso and bole (a liquid clay) and watergilded. These delicate elements were then burnished and patinated to a period appropriate character. Meanwhile, the walnut substrate sections were stained. Finally in February 2025, following an in-person studio visit with members from Drayton Hall’s preservation team, all portions of the frame were fully secured into position, and the glass and hanging hardware was installed.

Eli Wilner & Company has completed over 15,000 framing projects for private collectors, museums, and institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and The White House. Wilner was honored by the Historic Charleston Foundation with the Samuel Gaillard Stoney Conservation Craftsmanship Award, for their work in historic picture frame conservation. In 2024, Eli Wilner was presented with an Iris Award for Outstanding Dealer of the Year by the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.

New Book | Rebellion 1776

Posted in books by Editor on March 31, 2025

I’m a big fan of Anderson’s Seeds of America Trilogy (Chains, Forge, and Ashes) and Fever, 1793. Her latest is set to be published April 1, from Simon and Schuster. CH

Laurie Halse Anderson, Rebellion 1776 (New York: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-1416968269, $19.

From New York Times bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson comes a “thoroughly researched, emotionally resonant” (Booklist, starred review) historical fiction middle grade adventure about a girl struggling to survive amid a smallpox epidemic, the public’s fear of inoculation, and the seething Revolutionary War.

In the spring of 1776, thirteen-year-old Elsbeth Culpepper wakes to the sound of cannons. It’s the Siege of Boston, the Patriots’ massive drive to push the Loyalists out that turns the city into a chaotic war zone. Elsbeth’s father—her only living relative—has gone missing, leaving her alone and adrift in a broken town while desperately seeking employment to avoid the orphanage. Just when things couldn’t feel worse, the smallpox epidemic sweeps across Boston. Now, Bostonians must fight for their lives against an invisible enemy in addition to the visible one. While a treatment is being frantically fine-tuned, thousands of people rush in from the countryside begging for inoculation. At the same time, others refuse protection, for the treatment is crude at best and at times more dangerous than the disease itself. Elsbeth, who had smallpox as a small child and is now immune, finds work taking care of a large, wealthy family with discord of their own as they await a turn at inoculation, but as the epidemic and the revolution rage on, will she find her father?

Laurie Halse Anderson is a New York Times bestselling author known for tackling tough subjects with humor and sensitivity. She’s twice been a National Book Award finalist, for Chains and Speak; Chains also received the 2009 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. Laurie was chosen for the 2009 Margaret A. Edwards Award and received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2023, presented to her by the Crown Princess of Sweden.

Exhibition | Return to Turtle Island

Posted in exhibitions by Editor on March 30, 2025

Ancestral Great Lakes artist, Quilled headband, mid-18th century; hide, birchbark, porcupine quills, natural dyes, and linen thread; 6 × 32 × 9 cm (Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from The Joseph and Kathleen Magliochetti Fund, 2023.375).

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From the press release for the exhibition (the Rachel Ruysch show will also be on view at TMA starting April 12). . .

Return to Turtle Island: Indigenous Nation-Building in the Eighteenth Century

Toledo Museum of Art, 1 March — 29 June 2025

Curated by Johanna Minich, with the Great Lakes Research Alliance at the University of Toronto

The Toledo Museum of Art is pleased to present Return to Turtle Island: Indigenous Nation-Building in the Eighteenth Century, an exhibition that showcases recently acquired Eastern Woodlands objects and offers a rare exploration of early Indigenous artistry and diplomacy. This will be the first time these works, acquired by TMA in 2023, will be shown together by a public institution. The exhibition honors the remarkable journey of these cultural emissaries and welcomes them home.

Turtle Island, a name given to the North American continent by Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and other Indigenous peoples, references the origin story of a landmass built on the back of a great turtle, symbolizing the interconnectedness of land and life.

Ancestral Great Lakes artist, Quilled and beaded finger-woven pouch, mid-18th century; wool, birchbark, glass beads, silk, porcupine quills, natural dyes, tin, deer fur, and hide, 38 × 38 × 1 cm (Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 2023.357).

Return to Turtle Island offers a unique window into a period of dynamic interaction between Indigenous and European communities in North America,” said Johanna Minich, the museum’s consulting curator of Native American art. “These objects represent far more than material goods—they serve as symbols of artistic knowledge, cultural exchange, and diplomacy that shaped early American history.”

Featuring 24 objects, including quillwork, beadwork, moosehair embroidery, and birchbark artforms acquired by TMA in 2023, this exhibition examines how Indigenous nations used these objects as tools of cultural expression, political alliance, and commerce during a time of dynamic interaction with European settlers.

“This exhibition exemplifies the Toledo Museum of Art’s strategy: That a relentless commitment to quality results in global and inclusive art history.” said Adam Levine, Edward Drummond and Florence Scott Libbey Director, President, and CEO. “By showcasing these extraordinary objects, we are fostering a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of cultures and their enduring contributions to our shared history.”

The exhibition highlights the artistic skills of women and how their creative output was an integral part of nation-building, diplomacy, and economic sustainability. Indigenous leaders exchanged gifts and knowledge with their French and English allies during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, which had lasting implications for both Native and European communities.

Highlights include
• A quilled and beaded finger-woven pouch, a testament to the artistry of its makers.
• Beaded and quilled fingerwoven pictorial garter pendants, symbolizing the significance of proper attire when forming alliances.
• A birchbark model canoe and three dolls with assorted equipment, showcasing the cross-cultural artistic exchanges of the era.

The objects were originally collected through gift exchanges and purchases during the 18th century by Scottish officer Alexander Farquharson during his military travels through New York and Canada. For centuries, they remained in his family estate in Scotland before returning to North America in the early 2000s. TMA acquired the collection in late 2023.

To ensure the ethical conservation and presentation of these objects, TMA is collaborating with the Great Lakes Research Alliance (GRASAC) at the University of Toronto. Drawing on a network of Indigenous scholars and knowledge keepers, GRASAC provides guidance on the care and contextual display of these significant artworks.

“This collaboration with GRASAC ensures that the legacy of these objects is preserved with the utmost respect,” Minich added. “By working with descendants of their makers, we honor the original purpose of these works: sharing knowledge and strengthening relationships.”

Return to Turtle Island: Indigenous Nation-Building in the Eighteenth Century is made possible with the generous support of Presenting Sponsors Susan and Tom Palmer; Season Sponsors Taylor Automotive Family and the Rita Barbour Kern Foundation; Platinum Sponsor AGC of Northwest Ohio; and additional funding from the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

New Book | Beautiful Shells

Posted in books by Editor on March 29, 2025

From Bodleian Library Publishing, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Mark Carnall, Beautiful Shells: George Perry’s Conchology (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2025), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1851246168, £25 / $40.

In 1811, architect, stone mason, and shell obsessive George Perry published his lavishly illustrated volume, Conchology or the Natural History of Shells. The work featured 348 beautifully illustrated mollusk shells with descriptions of species, many of which were new to science. Despite the effort that went into producing it—and at a time when conchophilia, or shell fancying, was at its height—Perry’s Conchology disappeared from scientific literature, after being suppressed by the leading conchologists of the day and then cruelly mocked for decades after. Beautiful Shells reproduces the stunning, exquisitely drawn, and sometimes fanciful shell illustrations from this extraordinary forgotten volume. Following an introduction exploring our fascination with shells and their impact on human history, culture, and science, each of the sixty-one color illustrations is included alongside a description of notable shells and what is known of the mysterious organisms that make them. From the common limpet and razor clam to the valuable cowry and spectacular divine conch, the wide range of featured shells form a treasure trove of natural beauty from our oceans and shores.

Mark Carnall is collections manager of human remains and non-insect invertebrate collections at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
The Shells

Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Picture Credits
Index

New Book | Catesby’s Natural History

Posted in books by Editor on March 29, 2025

From Bodleian Library Publishing, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Stephen Harris, Catesby’s Natural History (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2024), 304 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1851246397, £50 / $75.

A beautiful reproduction of naturalist Mark Catesby’s flora and fauna illustrations of North America and the Caribbean.

Mark Catesby was an eighteenth-century naturalist and artist whose work on the natural history of North America and the Caribbean still resonates today. During several perilous trips, Catesby collected specimens and made extensive observations in the field, gathering material that would eventually become The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, which featured 220 elaborate, distinctive hand-colored illustrations.

With their striking combinations of animals and plants paired together with the first-hand observations he made, Catesby’s stunning illustrations were widely appreciated in their time and catalyzed interest in the natural history of Colonial America. Ultimately, his work was established as a key reference for the scientific understanding of natural history. As an artist, Catesby meticulously recorded the environment, sifting fact from fiction about the lives of the plants and animals he observed. As a collector, he introduced many living plants to Britain, thereby changing European gardens forever. Catesby’s Natural History reproduces all the original plates and shows how Catesby’s practical field experience shaped his work in all areas. Whether through the now-extinct species he recorded or the cultural changes he witnessed, his research continues to be relevant, demonstrating the vulnerability and fragility of the natural world.

Stephen A. Harris is Druce Curator of Oxford University Herbaria.

c o n t e n t s

1  Natural History in the Thirteen Colonies
2  Who was Mark Catesby?
3  On Habitats and Uses
4  On Indigenous and Enslaved Peoples
5  On Collection and Cultivation
6  On Illustrations
7  On Publishing the Natural History
8  Legacy

Call for Essays | Rethinking the Material Afterlives of Animals

Posted in Calls for Papers by Editor on March 28, 2025

From ArtHist.net:

Essay Collection | Rethinking the Material Afterlives of Animals, 1500–1800

Edited by Catherine Girard and Sarah Grandin

Proposals due by 30 April 2025; final essays due February 2026

Do animals introduce a material difference to objects from the early modern period? Should scholars think differently about objects that include animal remains than they do about other materials? The editors of this volume invite essays that examine human and non-human animal relations through objects made of animal remains in the early modern period to investigate this possible difference. This era saw intensified zoological research alongside the expansion of armed trade, overland and maritime travel, and extractive industries dependent on biotic materials. These shifts shaped the ways in which animal remains were preserved, transformed, and recontextualized within artistic and economic networks. Rather than treating these materials in terms of visual encounters alone, contributors to this volume are asked to foreground the visceral and tactile engagements generated by objects crafted with materials such as fur, skin, quills, feathers, shells, ivory, and bones.

We encourage essays that stem from diverse epistemologies and that explore alternative approaches to thinking about artistic materials. How might perspectives that emphasize reciprocity and relationality, for instance, reshape art historical approaches to objects made with and from animals? How does animal presence both ‘construct and disrupt’ human culture? How are the material ‘affordances’ of biomatter—their ability to alert, lubricate, protect, join, support—preserved, distorted, or deferred in human-made objects? How do such materials maintain continuity with their former life and how are they fundamentally altered? We invite contributors to reflect on how their work can be a site of reconciliation, acknowledging both the original contexts of these materials and the contemporary responsibilities of their material, intellectual, and spiritual caretakers.

The book seeks full-length essays that examine moments of transformation in the lives of these animal materials: from the deep ecological knowledge of those who sourced these materials, to the artisans and artists who processed them, to the wearers and collectors who recontextualized them. How do the acts of sourcing, crafting, and collecting materialize particular worldviews? How do these objects navigate tensions between organic and inorganic, sentient and non-sentient entities? What are the limits of such categories?

We also invite shorter contributions that explore the specific ethical and methodological challenges that museological care and conservation raise. How does the field of conservation reckon with biotic materials’ instability and latent animacy? What are the ethical implications of working with such materials? How do artists, scholars, curators, and knowledge-keepers participate in the care of historical objects that include animal substrates?

As a whole, this volume aims to chart new methods for engaging with animal materials in the archive, interrogating how anthropocentrism and colonialism have shaped art history’s disciplinary practices and omissions. We welcome contributions from scholars in art history, visual and material culture, museum studies, and related disciplines who are interested in rethinking the material afterlives of animals from diverse cross-cultural, temporal, and methodological perspectives.

Please submit a 500-word abstract to Catherine Girard (St. Francis Xavier University, cgirard@stfx.ca) and Sarah Grandin (The Courtauld Institute of Art, Sarah.Grandin@courtauld.ac.uk) by 30 April 2025, specifying whether you are planning to write a full-length essay of up to 8000 words or a shorter contribution of up to 4000 words, including notes. Final essays will be due in February 2026.

Lecture | Jessica Riskin on Lamarck

Posted in lectures (to attend) by Editor on March 28, 2025

Upcoming at Yale University:

Jessica Riskin

Professor of Insects and Worms: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his Life-Made World

27th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture
Yale University, New Haven, 30 April 2025, 5.30pm

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) was the Professor of Insects and Worms at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Living through the storms of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period, he founded biology, coining the term to name a new science devoted to all and only living things, and authored the first theory of evolution. Lamarck’s science was foundational to modern biology, yet its radicalism—he usurped God’s monopoly on Creation and re-assigned it to mortal, living beings—brought him and his ideas plenty of trouble. During Lamarck’s lifetime, Napoleon and his scientific inner circle hated him and did what they could to undermine him. Charles Darwin then adopted central elements of Lamarck’s theory, but after Darwin’s death, his most influential followers re-interpreted his theory to eradicate all traces of Lamarckism, rendering organisms once again the passive objects of outside forces, allowing room for an omnipotent God working behind the scenes. This conception of living organisms as passive in the evolutionary process has remained dominant since the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, in Lamarck’s theory, living beings were active, creative, self-making and world-making. Elements of this very different conception of living organisms have recently, gradually been returning to mainstream biology in fields such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance.

The lecture will present Lamarck’s radical, embattled, and perhaps re-emerging approach to living things, their evolutionary and ecological agency, and the science that studies them. The event is free and open to the public, with no registration required.

Jessica Riskin, the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, teaches modern European history and the history of science. Her work examines the changing nature of scientific explanation, the relations of science, culture and politics, and the history of theories of life and mind. Her books include The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which was awarded the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society, and Science in the Age of Sensibility (2002), which received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major prize for best book in French history. She is a regular contributor to various publications including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.

Exhibition | Andrea Appiani (1754–1817)

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions by Editor on March 27, 2025

Now on view at the Château de Bois-Préau in Rueil-Malmaison (as noted at Art History News) . . .

Andrea Appiani (1754–1817): Napoleon’s Painter in Italy

Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau, 16 March — 28 July 2025

Curated by Francesco Leone, Fernando Mazzocca, and Simone Ferraro

Une centaine d’oeuvres—peintures, dessins, gravures, médailles appartenant à des collections européennes publiques et privées—sont réunies pour la première rétrospective organisée en France sur cet artiste, considéré comme le plus important peintre de la période néo-classique au nord de l’Italie. L’exposition révélera un portraitiste attachant et un fresquiste brillant, malgré la destruction d’une partie de ses décors peints au Palais Royal et dans certains hôtels particuliers milanais durant les bombardements de 1943.

Victorieux à la bataille du Pont de Lodi le 10 mai 1796, le général Bonaparte fait son entrée dans Milan le 15. Il y rencontre Appiani dont le talent est reconnu pour des décors de théâtre, d’hôtels particuliers et d’églises ainsi que des portraits. La manière de l’artiste a déjà perdu de la relative raideur de ses débuts et le peintre-décorateur sait combiner la précision et la fermeté du trait avec la délicatesse du modelé et la suavité de la matière. Trois ans plus tard, au retour des Français, à l’occasion de la Deuxième campagne d’Italie, Appiani se voit confier par Napoléon la charge de sélectionner les oeuvres d’art prélevées dans les églises et les couvents pour enrichir et faire rayonner les musées du Nord de la péninsule.

L’ascension d’Appiani, iconographe de la république puis du Royaume d’Italie est consacrée par le nombre important de commandes publiques et privées qu’il reçoit alors. En cinq séquences chronologiques et thématiques, l’exposition permet de montrer l’oeuvre de l’artiste à la fois fresquiste et peintre de chevalet : La carrière pré-napoléonienne, Les Fastes de Napoléon, Portraits publics et privés, Décors à fresque et, Fortune artistique d’Appiani.

Présentée dans les salons du château de Bois-Préau, l’exposition révèle au public le talent et la richesse de l’oeuvre de cet artiste au service de l’Empereur. L’exposition présente la manière sensible, monumentale ou intimiste du plus grand artiste milanais de son temps : les débuts d’un peintre formé au dix-huitième siècle, les scènes de la geste napoléonienne et de la république naissante, les effigies de Napoléon et Joséphine, les études et dessins préparatoires pour les décors des hôtels particuliers et des églises.

Exposition produite par le GrandPalaisRmn.

Rémi Cariel, ed., Andrea Appiani: Le peintre de Napoléon en Italie (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2025), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-2711880737, €40.

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At the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris:

Rémi Cariel and Alessandro Morandotti | Andrea Appiani et la tradition artistique de la Lombardie
Institut culturel italien, Paris, 31 March 2025, 6.30pm

A l’occasion de l’exposition temporaire Andrea Appiani (1754–1817): Le peintre de Napoléon en Italie, l’Institut Culturel Italien rend hommage à ce grand peintre italien avec une conférence autour de sa figure. La conférence explorera sa vie et sa carrière avec une attention particulière aux racines de sa culture. Avec Rémi Cariel, conservateur en chef du patrimoine en charge des collections de peintures, sculptures et arts graphiques du Musée Malmaison et Alessandro Morandotti, professeur d’histoire de l’art moderne et président du cursus d’Histoire de l’Art de l’Université de Turin.

Book tickets here»

New Book | The Soldier’s Reward

Posted in books by Editor on March 27, 2025

From Princeton UP:

Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-0691262574, £38 / $45.

book cover

A sweeping history of intimacy and family life in France during the age of revolution

The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars devastated Europe for nearly a quarter of a century. The Soldier’s Reward recovers the stories of soldiers and their relationships to family and domestic life during this period, revealing how prolonged warfare transformed family and gender dynamics and gave rise to new kinds of citizenship.

In this groundbreaking work combining social, cultural, gender, and military history, Jennifer Ngaire Heuer vividly describes how men fought for years with only fleeting moments of peace. Combatants were promised promotion, financial gain, and patriotic glory. They were also rewarded for their service by being allowed to return home to waiting families and love interests, and with marriages that were arranged and financially supported by the state. Heuer explores competing ideas of masculinity in France, as well as the experiences of the men and women who participated in such marriages. She argues that we cannot fully understand the changing nature of war and peace in this period without considering the important roles played by family, gender, and romantic entanglements. Casting new light on a turbulent era of mass mobilization and seemingly endless conflict, The Soldier’s Reward shows how, from the Revolution through the Restoration, war, intimacy, and citizenship intersected in France in new and unexpected ways.

Jennifer Ngaire Heuer is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 and the editor (with Mette Harder) of Life in Revolutionary France.