Enfilade

From Brill:

Malcolm Baker and Inge Reist, eds., Sculpture Collections in Europe and the United States, 1500–1930: Variety and Ambiguity (Leiden: Brill, 2021), ISBN: 978-9004458468,  €62 / $75.

Exploring the variety of forms taken by collections of sculpture, this volume presents new research by twelve internationally recognized scholars. The essays delve into the motivations of different collectors, the modes of display, and the aesthetics of viewing sculpture, bringing to light much new archival material. The book underscores the ambiguous nature of sculpture collections, variously understood as decorative components of interiors or gardens, as objects of desire in cabinets of curiosity, or as autonomous works of art in private and public collections. Emphasizing the collections and the ways in which these were viewed and described, this book addresses a significant but neglected aspect of art collecting and contributes to the literature on this branch of art and cultural history.

This book evolved from the symposium Sculpture Collecting and Display, 1600–2000, organized by the Center for the History of Collecting and held at The Frick Collection, 19–20 May 2017. The book and symposium were made possible through the generous support of the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation. The book is published in association with The Frick Collection.

Malcolm Baker is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of California, Riverside. As both a curator and a university teacher, he has written widely on the history of sculpture; his most recent book is The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Inge Jackson Reist is Founding Director (now Emerita) of the Center for the History of Collecting, The Frick Collection. Reist’s edited and authored publications focus on Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and the history of art collecting.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword by Malcolm Baker and Inge Reist
Illustrations
Contributors

Malcolm Baker, Variety and Ambiguity: What Do We Mean by a ‘Sculpture Collection’?

Part 1. Sculpture in the Kunstkammer: Contexts, Formation, and Dispersal
1  Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Sculpture Collecting and the Kunstkammer
2  Jeremy Warren, The Collecting of Small Bronze Sculptures in Late Renaissance Italy: The Canonici Collection
3  Malcolm Baker, Shifting Perceptions and Changing Frameworks: The Case of Francis van Bossuit and the Place of Small-Scale Sculpture in Ivory in the Sculpture Collection

Part 2. Garden Sculptures as Collections
4  Julius Bryant, Gentlemen Prefer Bronze: Garden Sculpture and Sculpture Gardens in Britain, 1720–1860
5  Betsy Rosasco, The Sculpture Gardens of Versailles, Marly, and Dresden: Magnificence and Its Limits

Part 3. The Sculpture Gallery and Dedicated Spaces for Sculpture
6  Anne-Lise Desmas, The ‘Gallerie du S.r Girardon Sculpteur Ordinaire du Roy’
7  Michael Yonan, Porcelain as Sculpture: Medium, Materiality, and the Categories of Eighteenth-Century Collecting
8  Alison Yarrington, Art and Nature: The Country House Sculpture Gallery in the Post-Napoleonic Period

Part 4. The Changing Place of Sculpture in the Public Museum
9  Alex Potts, The Public Art Gallery as Arena for Modern Sculpture
10  Andrew McClellan and Marietta Cambareri, Displaying Deceit: Alceo Dossena’s Tomb of Maria Catharina Sabello at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
11  Alan Phipps Darr, The Legacy of William Valentiner in Shaping the Display and Collecting of European Sculpture in American Museums, 1900–Present: Case Studies

Bibliography
Index

From Macmillan:

David A. Bell, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0374207922, $30.

An immersive examination of why the age of democratic revolutions was also a time of hero worship and strongmen

In Men on Horseback, the Princeton University historian David A. Bell offers a dramatic new interpretation of modern politics, arguing that the history of democracy is inextricable from the history of charisma, its shadow self.

Bell begins with Corsica’s Pasquale Paoli, an icon of republican virtue whose exploits were once renowned throughout the Atlantic World. Paoli would become a signal influence in both George Washington’s America and Napoleon Bonaparte’s France. In turn, Bonaparte would exalt Washington even as he fashioned an entirely different form of leadership. In the same period, Toussaint Louverture sought to make French Revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality a reality for the formerly enslaved people of what would become Haiti, only to be betrayed by Napoleon himself. Simon Bolivar witnessed the coronation of Napoleon and later sought refuge in newly independent Haiti as he fought to liberate Latin America from Spanish rule. Tracing these stories and their interconnections, Bell weaves a spellbinding tale of power and its ability to mesmerize.

Ultimately, Bell tells the crucial and neglected story of how political leadership was reinvented for a revolutionary world that wanted to do without kings and queens. If leaders no longer rule by divine right, what underlies their authority? Military valor? The consent of the people? Their own Godlike qualities? Bell’s subjects all struggled with this question, learning from each other’s example as they did so. They were men on horseback who sought to be men of the people―as Bell shows, modern democracy, militarism, and the cult of the strongman all emerged together.

Today, with democracy’s appeal and durability under threat around the world, Bell’s account of its dark twin is timely and revelatory. For all its dangers, charisma cannot be dispensed with; in the end, Bell offers a stirring injunction to reimagine it as an animating force for good in the politics of our time.

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University and the author of several previous books, among them The First Total War and Shadows of Revolution.

From Macmillan:

Edmund de Waal, Letters to Camondo (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-0374603489, $28.

A tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moise de Camondo

Letters to Camondo is a collection of imaginary letters from Edmund de Waal to Moise de Camondo (1860–1935), the banker and art collector who created a spectacular house in Paris, now the Musée Nissim de Camondo, and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art.

The Camondos were a Jewish family from Constantinople, ‘the Rothschilds of the East’, who made their home in Paris in the 1870s and became philanthropists, art collectors, and fixtures of Belle Époque high society, as well as being targets of antisemitism—much like de Waal’s relations, the Ephrussi family, to whom they were connected. Moise de Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with art for his son, Nissim; after Nissim was killed in the First World War, the house was bequeathed to the French state. Eventually, the Camondos were murdered by the Nazis.

After de Waal, one of the world’s great ceramic artists, was invited to make an exhibition in the Camondo house, he began to write letters to Moise de Camondo. These fifty letters are deeply personal reflections on assimilation, melancholy, family, art, the vicissitudes of history, and the value of memory.

Edmund de Waal is an artist who has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. His bestselling memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, has won many prizes and has been translated into twenty-nine languages. The White Road, a journey into the history of porcelain, was published in 2015. He lives in London with his family.

From Yale UP:

James McAuley, The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0300233377, $30.

In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps.

In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d’Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of ‘invading’ France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.

James McAuley is the Paris correspondent for The Washington Post and a contributor to The New York Review of Books. He recently received his doctorate in French history at Oxford.

From Scala:

Jason Edwards, Amy Harris, and Greg Sullivan, Monument’s of St Paul’s Cathedral, 1796–1916 (London: Scala, 2021), 48 pages, ISBN: 978-1785513602, £8 / $10.

St Paul’s Cathedral is home to some of the finest sculptures by the foremost artists of the long nineteenth century. Memorials around the Cathedral represent giants of the arts, political and military figures and a range of other men and women of national importance, from Nelson to Florence Nightingale. Their memorials echo the tenor of their lives, some dramatic and impressive, others quieter and more reflective, but each story unique. The monuments of St Paul’s are also a record of 19th-century nationalist attitudes, giving this guide particular piquancy in light of current conversations about national identity and values.

Jason Edwards is a Professor of Art History at the University of York and a specialist in the global contexts of British sculpture from 1760 to 1914. Amy Harris is a sculptural historian who specialises in long-19th-century national collections of British sculpture. Greg Sullivan is a sculpture historian and co-author of the Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851.

First published in 2018, Colonial Complexions has just been released in paperback; from Penn Press:

Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 232 pages, ISBN 978-0812250060 (cloth), $45 / ISBN 978-0812224924 (paperback), $23.

In Colonial Complexions, historian Sharon Block examines how Anglo-Americans built racial ideologies out of descriptions of physical appearance. By analyzing more than 4,000 advertisements for fugitive servants and slaves in colonial newspapers alongside scores of transatlantic sources, she reveals how colonists transformed observable characteristics into racist reality. Building on her expertise in digital humanities, Block repurposes these well-known historical sources to newly highlight how daily language called race and identity into being before the rise of scientific racism.

In the eighteenth century, a multitude of characteristics beyond skin color factored into racial assumptions, and complexion did not have a stable or singular meaning. Colonists justified a race-based slave labor system not by opposing black and white but by accumulating differences in the bodies they described: racism was made real by marking variation from a norm on some bodies, and variation as the norm on others. Such subtle systemizations of racism naturalized enslavement into bodily description, erased Native American heritage, and privileged life history as a crucial marker of free status only for people of European-based identities. Colonial Complexions suggests alternative possibilities to modern formulations of racial identities and offers a precise historical analysis of the beliefs behind evolving notions of race-based differences in North American history.

Sharon Block is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Complicating Humors and Rethinking Complexion
2  Shaping Bodies in Print: Labor and Health
3  Coloring Bodies: Naturalized Incompatibilities
4  Categorizing Bodies: Race, Place, and the Pursuit of Freedom
5  Written by and on the Body: Racialization of Affects and Effects
Epilogue

Appendices
1  Advertisements for Runaways: Sources and Methodology
2  Graphic Overview of Advertisements for Runaways
3  Newspapers with Advertisements for Runaways, 1750–75

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

From Penn Press:

C. Dallett Hemphill, edited by Rodney Hessinger and Daniel Richter, Philadelphia Stories: People and Their Places in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 392 pages, ISBN 978-0812253184, $35 / £27.

For the average tourist, the history of Philadelphia can be like a leisurely carriage ride through Old City. The Liberty Bell. Independence Hall. Benjamin Franklin. The grooves in the cobblestone are so familiar, one barely notices the ride. Yet there are other paths to travel, and the ride can be bumpy. Beyond the famed founders, other Americans walked the streets of Philadelphia whose lives were, in their own ways, just as emblematic of the promises and perils of the new nation.

Philadelphia Stories chronicles twelve of these lives to explore the city’s people and places from the colonial era to the years before the Civil War. This collective portrait includes men and women, Black and white Americans, immigrants and native born. If mostly forgotten today, banker Stephen Girard was one of the wealthiest men ever to have lived, and his material legacy can be seen by visiting sites such as Girard College. In a different register, but equally impressive, were the accomplishments of Sarah Thorn Tyndale. In a few short years as a widow she made enough money on her porcelain business to retire to a life as a reformer. Others faced frustration. Take, for example, Grace Growden Galloway. Born to an important family, she saw her home invaded and her property confiscated by patriot forces. Or consider the life of Francis Johnson, a Black bandleader and composer who often performed at the Musical Fund Hall, which still stands today. And yet he was barred from joining its Society. Philadelphia Stories examines their rich lives, as well as those of others who shaped the city’s past.

Many of the places inhabited by these people survive to this day. In the pages of this book and on the streets of the city, one can visit both the people and places of Philadelphia’s rich history.

C. Dallett Hemphill (1959–2015) was Professor of History at Ursinus College. Rodney Hessinger is Professor of History at John Carroll University. Daniel K. Richter is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword, Daniel Richter

Introduction: Places and People, completed by Rodney Hessinger

Part I. For the Love of God: Three Colonial Men of Faith
Prologue, Daniel Richter
1  Anthony Benezet, completed by Jean Soderlund
2  Henry Muhlenberg, completed by Lisa Minardi
3  William White, completed by Sarah Barringer Gordon

Part II. Declaring Independence: Three Revolutionary Wives
Prologue, C. Dallett Hemphill
4  Grace Growden Galloway, completed by Judith Van Buskirk
5  Anne Shippen Livingston, completed by Susan Branson
6  Deborah Norris Logan, completed by Rodney Hessinger

Part III. Striving to Succeed: Three ‘Self-Made Men’ in the New Nation
Prologue, Rodney Hessinger
7  Charles Willson Peale, completed by Nenette Luarca-Shoaf
8  Stephen Girard, completed by Brenna O’Rourke Holland
9  Joseph Hemphill, completed by Sarah Rodriguez

Part IV. Pursuing an Inclusive America: Three Aspiring Antebellum Lives
Prologue, Rodney Hessinger
10  Francis Johnson, completed by Richard Newman
11  Sarah Thorn Tyndale, completed by Susan Klepp
12  William Darrah Kelley, completed by Andrew Shankman

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Joseph Bagley, Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2021), 248 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-1684580392, $30.

As Boston approaches its four-hundredth anniversary, it is remarkable that it still maintains its historic character despite constant development. The fifty buildings featured in this book all pre-date 1800 and illustrate Boston’s early history. This is the first book to survey Boston’s fifty oldest buildings and does so through an approachable narrative which will appeal to nonarchitects and those new to historic preservation. Beginning with a map of the buildings’ locations and an overview of the historic preservation movement in Boston, the book looks at the fifty buildings in order from oldest to most ­recent. Geographically, the majority of the buildings are located within the downtown area of Boston along the Freedom Trail and within easy walking distance from the core of the city. This makes the book an ideal guide for tourists, and residents of the city will also find it interesting as it includes numerous properties in the surrounding neighborhoods. The buildings span multiple uses from homes to churches and warehouses to restaurants. Each chapter features a building, a narrative focusing on its historical significance, and the efforts made to preserve it over time. Full ­color photos and historical drawings illustrate each building and area. Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them presents the ideals of historic preservation in an approachable and easy­-to-­read manner appropriate for the broadest audience.

Joseph M. Bagley is the city archaeologist of Boston, a historic preservationist, and a staff member of the Boston Landmarks Commission. He has worked for multiple local and state historic preservation offices, including the Maine Historic Preservation Commission and the Massachusetts Historical Commission.