Enfilade

The 18th century in the latest issue of Art History:

Art History 48 (February 2025)

a r t i c l e s

• Oliver Wunsch, “The Aesthetic Redemption of the Black Body in Eighteenth-Century France,” pp. 14–44.
Audiences in eighteenth-century France felt little compunction about admiring African people in art while denigrating them in life. They reconciled this apparent contradiction through a belief in the ameliorative effects of art, yielding what is described here as a theory of aesthetic redemption. This essay argues that the theory of aesthetic redemption that developed in eighteenth-century France gave art a unique position in the construction of race. Because those who believed in the possibility of aesthetic redemption distinguished between art’s content and its manner of representation, they created the conditions for artists to depict people of colour using materials, techniques, and formal structures whose qualities would otherwise be considered at odds with the subject. The resulting art often strikes audiences today as progressive, yet it did little to challenge the biases of the original viewers, who admired aesthetic departures from stereotypes precisely because they took those stereotypes for granted.

• Diarmuid Costello, “Die Schönheit des Mittelmenschen: Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘Everyday Beauty’,” pp. 132–61.
This essay considers Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘everyman and woman’ sculptures through the optic of Kant’s ‘ideal of beauty’ (§17, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 1790). I take a pair of miniature figures as my test case. Despite minor variations, all these sculptures depict the same generic man and woman, a man or woman who average or middling in every way. What could make depictions of average everydayness so compelling? For a clue, I turn to Kant’s ‘ideal of beauty’. This comprises a ‘standard aesthetic idea’ and an ‘idea of reason’: the former is a (culturally specific) ‘model image’ of the human being; the latter implicates Kant’s (universal) conception of ‘humanity in the person’, where the latter manifests itself through the former. I ask whether this illuminates Balkenhol’s work, suggesting that although the relevance of the former is clear, and the latter less so, there is reason not to rule it out.

• Viccy Coltman, “Travelling Knick-Knacks and Picturesque Points of View: Reverend James Plumptre’s Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey … to the Highlands of Scotland … in the Summer of the Year 1799,” pp. 162–84.
This essay revisits later eighteenth-century picturesque aesthetics in Britain as they were articulated in theory, applied in practice, and reproduced in travel literature and art. It considers the sometimes congruent, at other times contested, relationship between the natural landscape, written descriptions of that landscape, and its pictorial representation. Focusing on unpublished extracts from Reverend James Plumptre’s manuscript travel journal, Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey […] to the Highlands of Scotland […] in the Summer of the Year 1799, it argues for an original interpretation of the pedestrian picturesque as a suite of practices which entailed travelling by foot, viewing the landscape with a range of hand-held implements or ‘knick-knacks’, and representing nature ‘as seen’ without remedial artistic correction or improvement. According to this account, ‘people, places, and things’ becomes a useful rubric for conceptualising Plumptre’s 1799 pedestrian tour of Scotland which included visits to the Edinburgh studios of artists Alexander Nasmyth, Henry Raeburn, and Hugh William Williams.

r e v i e w s

• Brigid von Preussen, “A Woman’s Work,” Review of Paris Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 (Yale UP, 2022) and Rosalind Blakesley, Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great (Lund Humphries, 2023), pp. 186–92.