Enfilade

From CNRS:

Séverine Sofio, Artistes femmes: La parenthèse enchantée, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris, CNRS, 2016), 384 pages, ISBN: 978  2271  091918, 25€.

Entre 1750 et 1850, l’univers des beaux-arts connaît de profondes mutations, dont l’une des conséquences est la banalisation d’une image positive de la dame artiste. Progressivement, des barrières s’abaissent, des contraintes se desserrent et la pratique de la peinture est rendue plus accessible aux femmes. S’ouvre alors une période de créativité foisonnante associée aux noms—parfois oubliés aujourd’hui—d’Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Marguerite Gérard, Constance Mayer, Victoire Jaquotot, Lizinka de Mirbel, Rosa Bonheur…

Pourquoi les artistes femmes, à ce moment précis de l’histoire, ont-elles bénéficié de l’intérêt de leurs contemporains et de conditions de travail relativement égalitaires ? Pour saisir ce phénomène, Séverine Sofio réintègre les artistes des deux sexes dans la réalité quotidienne de leur travail de création.

Ni recueil d’analyses d’œuvres, ni histoire des femmes dans l’art, cet ouvrage traite de la pratique des beaux-arts, de son organisation et de ses réalités professionnelles, institutionnelles et économiques. Cette suspension relative de l’infériorisation des femmes dans les beaux-arts n’en demeure pas moins provisoire : si la parenthèse s’ouvre timidement dans les dernières décennies de l’Ancien Régime, elle se referme progressivement avant le milieu du siècle suivant.

Sociologue, diplômée de l’École du Louvre, Séverine Sofio est chargée de recherche au CNRS. Elle a notamment co-dirigé, avec Wenceslas Lizé et Delphine Naudier, Les Stratèges de la notoriété. Intermédiaires et production de la valeur dans les univers artistiques (2014).

The north facade and back gardens of Tudor Place, Washington, D.C. (Georgetown). The house was built in 1816–17 by Thomas and Martha Parke Custis Peter with William Thornton (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, December 2011).

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From The White House Historical Association:

Leslie Buhler, ed., with photography by Bruce White, Tudor Place: America’s Story Lives Here (Washington, D.C., The White House Historical Association, 2016), 304 pages, ISBN: 978  1931  917568  $50.

Released to mark the bicentennial of Tudor Place, this new title is the first comprehensive record of this important National Historic Landmark in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Two grand houses were under construction in the young Federal City in 1816: one the President’s House, reconstructed after it was burned by the British in 1814, and the other Tudor Place, an elegant mansion rising on the heights above Georgetown. The connection between these two houses is more than temporal, as they were connected through lineage and politics for generations. The builders of Tudor Place were Thomas and Martha Parke Custis Peter, Martha Washington’s granddaughter. In the 1790s George Washington had been a frequent guest at the Peters’ townhouse when he was in the nascent Federal City, attending to its planning and selecting sites for the U.S. Capitol and the President’s House. In 1817, when President James Monroe moved back into the reconstructed President’s House following the fire of 1814, the Peters were completing their own grand home, Tudor Place, designed in concert with their friend, Dr. William Thornton, architect for the first U.S. Capitol Building. The White House and Tudor Place each represent the spirit and aspirations of the early Republic. Little more than two miles apart, each survives as a national architectural landmark. While the White House is perhaps the most well known building in the world, Tudor Place remained a family home until 1983 and very private, although the Peters welcomed some of the nation’s foremost leaders as their guests and were themselves guests at the White House.

Now a historic house and garden museum (open to the public since 1988), the house remains as the Peters lived in it, preserving spaces and belongings of many eras while adapting their home and landscape to contemporary fashion and functions. This year, as Tudor Place turns 200, this lavishly illustrated book—the first definitive history of the house and its collection—takes us into the house to explore its rooms, gardens, archival collections, and such rare artifacts as one of only three surviving letters from George to Martha Washington.

Leslie L. Buhler served as Executive Director of Tudor Place for 15 years, retiring in 2015.

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C O N T E N T S

• Joseph Ellis, Introduction
• Leslie Buhler, The Custis-Peter Family of Georgetown
• William C. Allen, An Architectural History of Tudor Place
• Patricia Marie O’Donnell, The Landscape of Tudor Place
• Erin Kuykenall and Leslie Buhler, Living at Tudor Place

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From Georgetown UP:

Kathleen Menzie Lesko, Valerie Babb, and Carroll R. Gibbs, Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of ‘The Town of George’ in 1751 to the Present Day (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2016), 232 pages, ISBN: 978  1626  163263, $28.

First published in 1991, Black Georgetown Remembered chronicles and celebrates the rich but little-known history of the Georgetown black community from the colonial period to the present. Drawing on primary sources, including oral interviews with past and current residents and extensive research in church and historical society archives, the authors record the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and successes of a vibrant neighborhood as it persevered through slavery and segregation, war and peace, prosperity and depression.

This 25th anniversary edition of Black Georgetown Remembered—with a new introduction by Kathleen Menzie Lesko and a foreword by Maurice Jackson—is completely redesigned and features high-quality scans of more than two hundred illustrations, including portraits of prominent community leaders, sketches, maps, and nineteenth-century and contemporary photographs. Kathleen Menzie Lesko’s new introduction describes the impact of this book.

Black Georgetown Remembered is a compelling and inspiring journey through more than two hundred years of history. It invites readers to share in the lives, dreams, aspirations, struggles, and triumphs of real people, to join them in their churches, at home, and on the street, and to consider how the unique heritage of this neighborhood intersects and contributes to broader themes in African American and Washington, DC, history and urban studies.

Kathleen Menzie Lesko is a former scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library and current research scholar at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Valerie Babb is the Franklin Professor of English and director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia.
Carroll R. Gibbs is a professional historian, lecturer, and author of numerous works on African American history.

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This collection of essays grows out of the conference 2014, Workshops and Manufactures in the Years between the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, 1789–1815. From PUM:

Natacha Coquery, Jörg Ebeling, Anne Perrin Khelissa, Philippe Sénéchal, eds., «Les progrès de l’industrie perfectionnée»: Luxe, arts décoratifs et innovation de la Révolution française au Premier Empire (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2017), 200 pages, ISBN: 978  28107  04835, 22€.

À la charnière entre les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, entre la réunion des États généraux et la fin du Premier Empire, vingt-cinq ans s’écoulent pendant lesquels bouleversements politiques, économiques, sociaux et culturels créent un contexte d’instabilité pour le secteur du luxe et du demi-luxe français. Les ateliers et les manufactures sont confrontés à des conditions matérielles et organisationnelles difficiles. Le manque de matières premières, la détérioration des finances et la diminution du personnel en raison du départ des jeunes hommes aux armées ont un impact négatif sur la production artisanale. L’incertitude générale que représente cette période d’instabilité politique et de conflits armés n’empêche pourtant pas l’émergence de modes. De nouveaux marchés s’ouvrent et offrent de riches opportunités aux artistes et artisans pour diversifier et élargir leurs créations.

Souvent considérée comme un temps de rupture, en particulier dans le domaine du luxe dont elle remet en cause les fondements, la Révolution française apparaît au contraire comme le ferment d’une évolution vers l’innovation et l’industrialisation. Pluridisciplinaire, croisant l’histoire de l’art, l’histoire sociale, l’histoire économique, l’histoire culturelle et l’histoire des techniques, le présent ouvrage explore les conditions du changement et offre une approche plurielle des arts du décor.

T A B L E  D E S  M A T I È R E S

Remerciements

Introduction générale, Jean-François Belhoste, Philippe Bordes, Natacha Coquery, Jörg Ebeling, Anne Perrin Khelissa et Philippe Sénéchal

Partie I | L’État: Rôle et intervention
• Thomas Le Roux, La chimie, support du développement de l’industrie perfectionnée sous la Révolution et l’Empire
• Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère, Le luxe sous l’Empire, ou la question des matières premières « indigènes »
• Camilla Murgia, The Crafty Link: Fine Arts and Industrial Exhibitions under the Consulate and the Empire
• Justin Beaugrand-Fortunel, Le mobilier de campagne de Napoléon ier: L’artisanat au service de l’Empereur

Partie II | Les secteurs de production: Organisation et fonctionnement
• Marie-Agnès Dequidt, L’horlogerie parisienne pendant la Révolution et l’Empire: Continuer à tourner dans un monde en bouleversement
• Élodie Voillot, Des canons aux statuettes: Les fabricants de bronze parisiens au début du xixe siècle
• David Celetti, Filer le luxe. Travail domestique, manufactures et usines dans la France révolutionnaire
• Stéphane Piques, L’organisation de la production dans l’industrie céramique sous la Révolution et l’Empire: La nébuleuse faïencière de Martres-Tolosane (Haute-Garonne)

Partie III | Les œuvres et les décors: Création et aménagement
• Bernard Jacqué, Des décors de luxe en papier peint pendant la Révolution française
• Valeria Mirra, Labor omnia vincit: La manufacture Piranesi de vases et ornements en terre cuite de Mortefontaine
• Iris Moon, Immutable Décor: Post-Revolutionary Luxury in the Platinum Cabinet at Aranjuez
• Ludmila Budrina, Lapidaires parisiens au service de Nicolas Demidoff: La collection d’objets en bronze doré et malachite avec mosaïques en relief de pierres dures réalisés par Thomire (d’après des documents inédits et les collections européennes)
• Hans Ottomeyer, Innovation by Design as Strategy for Luxury Goods

Index général
Bibliographie
Présentation des auteurs

Due out in June from Bloomsbury Publishing:

Johanna Ilmakunnas and Jon Stobart, eds.,  A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe: Display, Acquisition, and Boundaries (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 304 pages, ISBN: 978  14742  58234, $112.

In the 18th century, debates raged about the economic, social and moral impacts of luxury, whilst taste was viewed as a refining influence and a marker of rank and status. This book takes a fresh, comparative approach to these ideas, drawing together new scholarship to examine three related areas in a wide variety of European contexts. First, the deployment of luxury goods in displays of status and how these practices varied across space and time. Secondly, the processes of communicating and acquiring taste and luxury: how did people obtain tasteful and luxurious goods, and how did they recognise them as such? Thirdly, the ways in which ideas of taste and luxury crossed national, political and economic boundaries: what happened to established ideas of luxury and taste as goods moved from one country to another, and during times of political transformation? Through the analysis of case studies looking at consumption practices, material culture, political economy, and retail marketing, A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe challenges established readings of luxury and taste.

Johanna Ilmakunnas is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Jon Stobart is Professor of Social History at the University of Northampton, UK and Founding Editor of the new journal History of Retailing and Consumption.

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C O N T E N T S

I. Displaying Taste and Luxury
1  The Fabric of a Corporate Society: Sumptuary Laws, Social Order and Propriety in Early Modern Tallinn – Astrid Pajur (Uppsala University)
2  New and Old Luxuries Between the Court and the City: A Comparative Perspective on Material Cultures in Brussels and Antwerp, 1650–1735 – Bruno Blondé and Veerle de Laet (University of Antwerp)
3  Luxury and Taste in Eighteenth-Century Naples: Representations, Ideas and Social Practices at the Intersection Between the Global and the Local – Alida Clemente (University of Foggia).
4  What About the Moorish Footman? Portrait of a Dutch Nabob as a Dedicated Follower of Fashion– Yme Kuiper (University of Groningen)
5  Fashion and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century Germany – Michael North (University of Greifswald)

II. Making and Acquiring Taste
6  Taste Inequalities in the Art Consumption of Prince Nicolaus I Esterházy ‘the Magnificent’ – Kristof Fatsar (Corvinus University of Budapest)
7  Making an English Country House: Taste and Luxury in the Furnishing of Stoneleigh Abbey, 1763–1765 – Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan University)
8  Between the Exotic and the Everyday: Sabine Winn at Home, 1765–1798 – Kerry Bristol (University of Leeds)
9  Books, Wine, and Fine China: Consumption Patterns of a Brukspatron in Early Nineteenth-Century Sweden – Marie Steinrud (Stockholm University)
10 To Buy a Plate: Retail and Shopping for Porcelain and Faience in Stockholm During the Eighteenth Century – Sofia Murhem and Göran Ulväng (Uppsala University)

III. Crossing Boundaries of Taste and Luxury
11 A Taste for French Style in Bourbon Spain: Food, Drink and Clothing in 1740s Madrid – Nadia Fernández-de-Pinedo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset (V&A Museum and Château de Versailles)
12 French Fashions: Aspects of Elite Lifestyle in Eighteenth-Century Sweden – Johanna Ilmakunnas (University of Helsinki)
13 English Luxuries in Nineteenth-Century Vyborg – Ulla Ijäs (University of Helsinki)
14 Luxury Goods Beyond Boundaries: The Parisian Market During the Terror – Natacha Coquery (University of Lyon 2)

Bibliography
Index

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From The Royal Mint (at Llantrisant, just outside of Cardiff), which incidentally just this past year opened to the public with a new visitor’s center.

Katharine Eustace, Britannia: Icon on the Coin (Llantrisant: The Royal Mint Museum, 2016), 144 pages, ISBN: 978 18699 17029,  £35.

At a time when the idea of Britain is being debated more than ever, a book that reveals the rich history of British identity has been published. The story of Britannia on the coinage is also the story of Britain. Katharine Eustace charts Britannia’s history and explores the shifts in art and politics, technology and popular culture that have influenced the icon’s image. For two years, Eustace immersed herself in the subject of Britannia, and the result is a fascinating story revealed in this compelling new book. Her new history of Britannia on the coinage is an enlightening illustration of how studying one object can reveal a bigger picture. Britannia’s appearance on coins may have evolved over the centuries, but she has remained a popular symbol of the nation.

Katharine Eustace is an expert in eighteenth-century sculpture, with an extraordinary knowledge of decorative art and sculpture in Britain. She was a curator in the Ashmolean Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, and editor of the Sculpture Journal for ten years.

Christopher Eimer provides a helpful review at 3rd Dimension, the online newsletter of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association.

My heading is something of a misnomer. This publication isn’t a codex and doesn’t work the way even a digital book typically does. And yet, it also is different from a collection of essays, such as one finds in a journal (whether with paper or digital formats). I don’t think we (yet) have a name for this sort of publication. Perhaps it’s simply a catalogue, but that seems to suggest something grander than this entirely focused scope. I would welcome suggestions. Looking too casually at the Tate’s website where the publication is hosted, one might think it comparable to the sorts of entries often available on museum websites. And it may be akin in some ways, but it is conceived as a coherent, discreet publication, complete with an editor and peer review. The default word (for almost everything) now seems to be ‘project’. Whatever we call it, I’m looking forward to using it in class later this spring. –CH

From Tate:

John Chu, ed., “A Tate In Focus Project: Peter Darnell Muilman, Charles Crokatt and William Keable in a Landscape c. 1750, by Thomas Gainsborough, ca. 1750,” with essays by John Chu, Huw David, Hannah French, Alexandra Gent, Rebecca Hellen, and Peter Moore, and a recording and interview by Hannah French (London: Tate Research Publication, 2017).

Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of Peter Darnell Muilman, Charles Crokatt, and William Keable in a Landscape, ca.1750 (Tate T06746 / Gainsborough’s House).

Offering a multi-disciplinary discussion of Gainsborough’s early triple portrait, this project considers the painting as a depiction of polite and refined society, as a reflection of the growing wealth of a global mercantile elite, and as a ‘painting within a painting’ by an artist as renowned for his landscapes as he was his portraiture.

The mid-eighteenth-century ‘conversation piece’ Peter Darnell Muilman, Charles Crokatt and William Keable in a Landscape was painted by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) when he was still making a name for himself as landscape and portrait painter. It was acquired jointly by Gainsborough’s House and Tate in 1993 and is regarded as a masterpiece of this early phase of his career. This project draws together expertise from the fields of art history, conservation, history of commerce and musicology to throw light on the social and cultural milieu that gave rise to the commission. It asks as many questions about the financial and social privileges of the portrait’s sitters as it does about Gainsborough himself, proposing new ways of understanding why Muilman, Crokatt and Keable presented themselves making music in the midst of a remote rustic landscape.

C O N T E N T S

• John Chu—The Painting and ‘Early Gainsborough’
• Huw David—Patronage: Mercantile Sitters
• Rebecca Hellen and Alexandra Gent—Painting the Picture
• John Chu—Portraiture, Conversation, Politeness
• Hannah French—Music, Refinement, Masculinity
• Hannah French and John Chu,—Baroque Flute Recording and Interview with Hannah French
• John Chu—Landscape, Imitation, Cosmopolitanism
• Peter Moore—Mercantile Culture and National Identity
• Acknowledgments

Contributors
John Chu, Assistant Curator, Pictures and Sculpture, National Trust
Huw T. David, Director of Development, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford
Rebecca Hellen, Paintings Conservator, Tate
Alexandra Gent, Paintings Conservator, Tate and Courtauld Institute of Art
Hannah French, musicologist and baroque flautist, Royal Academy of Music
Peter Moore, Research Curator, Gainsborough’s House

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