Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Andrei Pesic, The Enlightenment in Concert: Music, Markets, and Secularization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0300251579, $65.

A new interpretation of the Age of Enlightenment through the lens of music, institutions, and markets

The birth of public concerts changed Europe’s cultural landscape by introducing sacred music to secular spaces. The Concert spirituel in Paris is a landmark in this Enlightenment transition: the first long-lasting concert series, it began in 1725 with performances that mostly featured sacred music composed for the royal chapel in Versailles. By the time the Concert ended, in 1790, it was presenting a variety of musical genres, and its sacred repertoire had declined precipitously. The Concert had evolved from an institution dependent on the church calendar and the court into a business in a competitive market. Andrei Pesic explores the dynamics of secularization during the Enlightenment, including the unintended consequences of linking music to commerce, social hierarchy, and religious practices. He reveals the role of public concerts in a burgeoning marketplace for entertainment—and the expansion of secular customs and diminishment of religious constraints—in places as varied as Paris, Berlin, and Haiti.

Andrei Pesic is assistant professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. His research has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

From The Walpole Society:

The 2026 Berger Prize longlist was announced on 8 July at the Warburg Institute, by Dr Jonny Yarker, Chair of the Berger Prize judging panel. In addition, Laura Freeman, Chief Art Critic at The Times, and shortlisted author for the 2024 Berger Prize for her book Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, delivered a talk, “Doorstepping: House Museums and Shaking Hands with the Past.”

Here are the fifteen titles, with the winning title scheduled to be announced on December 3.

• Kate Anderson, Catriona Murray, Jemma Field, Anna Groundwater, Karen Hearn, and Liz Louis, Art & Court of James VI & I (National Galleries Scotland).

• Christine Casey, Architecture and Artifice: The Crafted Surface in Eighteenth-Century Building Practice (Paul Mellon Centre).

• Apurba Chatterjee, An Empire of Images: Visual Culture and the British in India (Cambridge University Press).

• Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi, Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso (Yale University Press).

• Amy Concannon, Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals (Tate Publishing).

• Alexis Goodin et al, A Room of Her Own: Women Artist Activists in Britain, 1875–1945 (Clark Art Institute).

• John Hilary, Magnates and Masterpieces: The German-Jewish Collectors of Edwardian Britain (Yale University Press).

• Peter Humfrey, Regency Collectors: Buying and Displaying Old Masters in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Paul Holberton Publishing).

• James King, ‘Our Little Gang’: The Lives of the Vorticists (Reaktion Books).

• Catherine Lampert and Toby Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings (Modern Art Press).

• Jonathan Marsden, European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty the King (Modern Art Press).

• Stephanie O’Rourke, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and Its Colonial Networks, 1780–1850 (University of Chicago Press).

• Sam Smiles, Turner and the Slave Trade (Paul Mellon Centre).

• Anne Stutchbury, Tessa Wild, Stephen Ponder, and Alice Strickland, Standen: Philip Webb, Morris & Co., and the Creation of an Arts and Crafts Home (Yale University Press).

• Ian Warrell, with a contribution by Gillian Forrester, Turner (Yale Center for British Art).

From Penguin Random House:

Thomas Laqueur, The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History (New York: Penguin Press, 2026), 400 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0593652794, $45.

From award-winning cultural historian Thomas Laqueur, an enlightening and unique meditation on the presence of dogs in art, from the Paleolithic era to the present, and what our intertwined human-canine relationship reveals about human nature

Long before the phrase man’s best friend became common parlance, dogs were already standing beside us in art as in life. In The Dog’s Gaze, the historian Thomas W. Laqueur invites us to explore why they feature more than any other animal in the ways in which we picture ourselves and our stories.

Dogs have been ubiquitous in the worldmaking of visual artists as far back as the Paleolithic age. Looking across the Western tradition, from Giotto to Goya and Rubens to Rego, Laqueur shows what their presence—as hunting partners, beloved friends, and even conduits to the afterlife—reveals about our own ways of seeing and how we want to be remembered. Far from being mere motifs, dogs are an integral and intentional element of the images in which they appear: They provide narrative coherence; they look out and bear witness, often on the artist’s behalf; they illuminate our understanding of morality and melancholy and some, like us, become celebrities. Indeed, as Laqueur reveals, dogs in art are our social doppelgängers, our companions in looking and being.

Richly illustrated and lovingly written, The Dog’s Gaze is a unique visual history that examines the remarkable social bond between two species, shedding new light on the human condition through the eyes of our canine companions.

Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. An internationally renowned cultural historian, he has published books on topics ranging from working class religion and education to the history of sexuality and the body. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and recipient of the 2007 Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award and the 2016 Cundill History Prize. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

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.