Enfilade

From Harper Collins:

Hester Grant, The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire, and the Writing of Gulliver’s Travels (London: William Collins, 2026), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0008699987, £25.

A rollicking narrative history set during the extraordinary summer of 1726 when Jonathan Swift arrived in London from Dublin, with a draft of Gulliver’s Travels in his bag.

Jonathan Swift settled into his great friend Alexander Pope’s new house on the river at Twickenham (or Twitnam as they liked to call it), and joined by John Gay, the trio of Scriblerus Club writers spent a delightful and creative summer, pushing each other to new satirical heights (The Dunciad and The Beggar’s Opera also ensued), exploring the gardens and houses of their aristocratic friends and thinking up ways to torment Robert Walpole’s corrupt Whig administration without going to jail. An unlikely threesome in many ways — Swift was 20 years older, and Gay was as large and indolent as Pope was tiny and restless — ‘the three Yahoos of Twittenham’ were unmarried and took great emotional and intellectual succour from their friendship. The three of them added up to more than the sum of their considerable parts and, as well as being a brilliant evocation of the radical rage, the joy and stench of early eighteenth century life, The Twitnam Summer is also a very moving portrait of male friendship.

Hester Grant studied modern history at Christ Church, Oxford, where she was awarded the J. L. Field Exhibition and the Keith Feiling History Prize. She subsequently practised as a barrister in Nottingham and London, before giving up her legal career to pursue her interest in eighteenth-century British history. Her first book, The Good Sharps: The Eighteenth-Century Family that Changed Britain, was published in 2020.

From David Zwirner Books:

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Souvenirs (David Zwirner Books, 2025), 184 pages, ISBN: 978-1644231623, £11 / $15. With an introduction by Anne Higonnet.

A selection from the memoir of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, the renowned eighteenth-century French portraitist and one of the most important women painters in art history

In her memoir, Vigée Le Brun offers a candid and thoroughly enjoyable account of her life and art. She relates her encounters among the royalty and aristocracy she painted—including, most famously, her patron Marie Antoinette—and the effusive reception they extended to her across Europe. Forced to flee during the French Revolution, Vigée Le Brun traveled through Italy, Russia, Germany, and England, returning twelve years later to France under Napoleon I. These pages demonstrate her unflagging creativity during unstable times and her remarkable savvy. Her observations provide unique insight into the art world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a time when women were rarely allowed success. In the introduction, Anne Higonnet conveys Vigee Le Brun’s unique position at a turning point in the art world, as well as the larger world beyond, and navigates in particular how one retroactively reconstructs a relationship to a world-changing revolution.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) was a celebrated French painter at the turn of the nineteenth century and one of few women artists admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. She is well known for her portraits of the aristocracy and royal families, including her patron Marie Antoinette. She had contributed more than fifty pictures to the Salons, including history paintings and allegories, by 1789. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, she fled Paris and traveled across Europe and Russia, continuing to paint. Vigée Le Brun returned to Paris in 1802, and in 1825, settled in Louveciennes, she set out writing and publishing her memoir.

Anne Higonnet is a professor of art history at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Liberty, Equality, Fashion: the Women Who Styled the French Revolution (2024). She has written five other books as well as many essays, and has directed two book-scale digital projects. Her research has been supported by Getty, Guggenheim, Social Science Research Council, and Harvard-Radcliffe Institute fellowships, as well as by grants from the Mellon, Howard, and Kress Foundations.

From Brepols:

Ann Perrin, De l’avènement des « arts décoratifs »: Écrits et réflexions, 1693–1798 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2026), 364 pages, ISBN: 978-2503620220, €75. Also available via open access.

At the crossroads of the arts, commerce and knowledge, the field of ‘decorative arts’ emerged in the eighteenth century as a real social issue. This book traces its discursive and historiographical genesis, through a wide range of unpublished or little-known sources.

Souvent considérés à l’aune de l’historiographie des beaux-arts avec lesquels ils sont mis en concurrence, les « arts décoratifs » sont rarement étudiés des points de vue théorique et discursif. C’est l’objectif de ce livre, qui défend l’idée selon laquelle les « arts décoratifs », en tant que « champ » autonome constitué – au sens bourdieusien –, émergent progressivement durant une période charnière de l’histoire, au moment précis où se mettent en place une large culture de la consommation et une grande diffusion des connaissances relatives aux arts de la décoration et à la mode. Anne Perrin montre que l’indicateur majeur de cette évolution culturelle se situe dans une efflorescence d’écrits et de réflexions qui firent débat parmi les contemporains, attestant une considération nouvelle acquise pendant un ample XVIIIe siècle par ce champ des « arts décoratifs » alors en construction.

Afin de reconstituer un tel processus historiographique et épistémologique, l’ouvrage rassemble un vaste corpus de sources anciennes, dont la plupart sont méconnues ou jamais incluses dans les bibliographies abordant le sujet. Ont été retenues celles qui se démarquent par leurs qualités critique, réflexive et exploratoire au sein d’une grande diversité de formes textuelles (discours, traités, précis, leçons, annonces, dictionnaires, etc.). Ces textes sont analysés depuis leur contexte d’énonciation, par des hommes et femmes de terrain, qui s’emparèrent du secteur et contribuèrent à le développer, étant artistes, artisans, marchands, pédagogues, philosophes, critiques d’art, amateurs, historiographes, journalistes, économistes, naturalistes ou officiers de l’administration royale. Parmi ces sources imprimées, la production écrite de Jean-Jacques Bachelier, fondateur de la plus importante école de dessin appliquée aux manufactures de la monarchie française (actuelle ENSAD), se distingue autant qu’elle fait écho aux autres voix de son temps.

Anne Perrin est professeure des universités en histoire de l’art moderne à l’Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès – Laboratoire FRAMESPA-UMR 5136. Ses recherches portent sur les arts du XVIIIe siècle, qu’elle aborde sous l’angle de leurs interrelations et dans des approches autant théoriques que pragmatiques. Elle est l’auteure de plusieurs livres et articles sur la culture de la décoration et de la mode, ainsi que sur la pédagogie artistique.

c o n t e n t s

Avertissement
Introduction

Première partie | Prendre la parole
1  Définitions
2  Tensions

Deuxième partie | Défendre une vision
1  Personnalité
2  Formation

Troisième partie | Incarner le changement
1  Économie
2  Mode

Conclusion
Postface de Melissa Hyde — available as a PDF here»

Sources manuscrites et imprimées relatives à Jean-Jacques Bachelier
Sources manuscrites éditées après le XVIIIe siècle
Sources imprimées
Bibliographie
Crédits photographiques
Index des noms propres

From Princeton UP:

Jeremy Popkin, The First Emancipation: The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026), 440 pages, ISBN: 978-0691246925, $40.

The First Emancipation is a dramatic account of how slavery and race profoundly influenced the course of the French Revolution and had a central impact on the lives of key leaders, including Mirabeau, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon. Acclaimed historian Jeremy D. Popkin brings this often-forgotten story to life, highlighting the arguments put forward by French abolitionists and their opponents and the profound repercussions of the first abolition of slavery in a Western empire.

When the French revolutionaries passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, they immediately faced a burning question: did that document’s first article—“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—apply to the 800,000 enslaved Black people in the country’s colonies? Over the next dozen years, revolutionary leaders fought over this question. The First Emancipation tells how French lawmakers initially protected slavery in their constitution but reversed themselves in 1794, making France the first western country to abolish slavery throughout its empire. Yet only eight years later, in 1802, Napoleon tried to force the emancipated Black populations of the colonies back into slavery. His decision led to his first major military defeat and to the proclamation of the independence of the Black nation of Haiti, but also to the reestablishment of slavery in other French colonies, where it would not finally be abolished until 1848. The story of how France emancipated its enslaved people and declared them full citizens only to return many of them to bondage, The First Emancipation reveals that the course of abolition in the modern world was more winding and halting than is often remembered.

Jeremy D. Popkin is the William T. Bryan Chair Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Kentucky. His many books include A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution and You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery.