New Book | A Guide to Regency Dress
From Yale UP:
Hilary Davidson, A Guide to Regency Dress: From Corsets and Breeches to Bonnets and Muslins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-0300282412, $25.
An accessible, fun, yet authoritative guide to male and female Regency fashions.
Celebrated dress historian Hilary Davidson brings together nearly 20 years of research on Regency fashion in an illustrated guide for the first time. All the elements of the Regency wardrobe of both men and women—from coats, gowns and undergarments to shoes, accessories, beauty, hair and jewellery—are assembled, along with their textiles and trimmings. A Guide to Regency Dress is an essential companion to navigate the fashion world of Jane Austen or re-create the Regency look.
Hilary Davidson is associate professor and chair of MA Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. She has curated, lectured, broadcast, and published extensively in her field and is author of Dress in the Age of Jane Austen: Regency Fashion and Jane Austen’s Wardrobe.
Exhibition | Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture
Aimee Ng, the exhibition’s curator, is the subject of a recent feature by Alexandra Starr in The New York Times (20 December 2025). From the press release (3 November 2025) for the exhibition:
Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture
The Frick Collection, New York, 12 February — 11 May 2026
Curated by Aimee Ng
Thomas Gainsborough, Mary, Countess Howe, 1763–64, oil on canvas, 243 × 154 cm (English Heritage, Kenwood House, London).
Beginning 12 February 2026, The Frick Collection will present its first special exhibition dedicated to the English artist Thomas Gainsborough, and the first devoted to his portraiture ever held in New York. Displaying more than two dozen paintings, the show will explore the richly interwoven relationship between Gainsborough’s portraits and fashion in the eighteenth century. The works included represent some of the greatest achievements from every stage of this period-defining artist’s career, drawn from the Frick’s holdings and from collections across North America and the United Kingdom.
The trappings and trade of fashion filled the artist’s world—in magazines and tailor shops, at the opera and on promenades—and his portraits were at the heart of it all. This exhibition invites visitors to consider not only the actual clothing the painter depicted, but also the role of his canvases as both records of and players in the larger conception of fashion: encompassing everything from class, wealth, labor, and craft to formality, intimacy, and time. Recent technical investigations also shed light on Gainsborough’s artistic process, including connections to materials that fueled the fashion industry.
Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture is organized by Aimee Ng, the museum’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. She states: “The spectacular and at times, to modern eyes, absurd fashions in portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and his contemporaries continue to fascinate viewers today. The appeal of these demonstrations of taste, status, and wealth persists in tension with increased recognition, over the last few decades, of the injustices that often made such extravagance possible. This exhibition necessarily deals with clothing and personal attire, while exploring how fashion was understood in Gainsborough’s time, how it touched every level of society, and how portraiture itself was as much a construction and invention as a sitter’s style.”
Aimee Ng, Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2026), 200 pages, ISBN: 978-0847876235, $50. With an additional essay by Kari Rayner.
The exhibition is complemented by a richly illustrated catalogue authored by Aimee Ng, with an additional essay by Kari Rayner, Associate Conservator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Along with entries for each work in the show, the catalogue features essays on portraiture and self-fashioning in Gainsborough’s era, on materials and techniques that linked clothing and paintings, and on the roles of class and time in eighteenth-century style. The volume considers how and why Gainsborough and his sitters—from dukes and duchesses to the artist’s family members to the once-enslaved writer and composer Ignatius Sancho—shaped how they would be immortalized in paint. The book also touches on the longstanding appeal of Gainsborough’s art, particularly its renewed popularity a century after the painter’s death among American collectors such as the Fricks, Vanderbilts, and Huntingtons.
Major support for Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture is provided by an anonymous donor in honor of Ian Wardropper. Additional funding is provided by Barbara and Bradford Evans, Kathleen Feldstein, Michael and Jane Horvitz, Dr. Arlene P. McKay, The Helen Clay Frick Foundation, James K. Kloppenburg, David and Kate Bradford, Katie von Strasser – InspiratumColligere, the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, Edward Lee Cave, Mr. and Mrs. Hubert L. Goldschmidt, Jennifer Schnabl, the Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation, Bradley Isham Collins and Amy Fine Collins, Siri and Bob Marshall, Bailey Foote, Alexander Mason Hankin, Brittany Beyer Harwin and Zachary Harwin, and Otto Naumann and Heidi D. Shafranek. The exhibition catalogue is funded by Dr. Tai-Heng Cheng.
New Book | Portrait Miniatures
As noted by Adam Busiakiewicz, at Art History News; from Michael Imhof:
Bernd Pappe and Juliane Schmieglitz-Otten, eds., Portrait Miniatures: Artists, Functions, Manufacturing Aspects, and Collections (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2025), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-3731915096, €40.
Twenty-two renowned experts from nine countries present the miniature portrait from different perspectives, discussing the private use of miniatures, special depictions, and messages conveyed by miniatures. Significant but little-known museum collections are introduced alongside insightful information about the living conditions of the artists active at the time. Lastly, aspects regarding the production techniques for miniatures are examined.
This fourth volume publishes the presentations given at the 2024 conference held by the Tansey Miniatures Foundation. Interested individuals from all over the world come together in Celle every two to three years at these conventions on the portrait miniature to discuss this special genre of portrait painting.
The table of contents can be seen here»
Exhibition | Hercules: Hero and Anti-Hero
Exhibition photo with a mid-19th-century plaster cast after Balthasar Permoser’s ‘Saxon Hercules’. As noted on the SKD’s Instagram account, “The original crowned the Wall Pavilion of the Dresden Zwinger from 1718 to 1945, symbolising its patron, Augustus the Strong, with his astonishing physical strength and the Herculean efforts he undertook every day as the Saxon-Polish ruler. Where Hercules dwells with the vault of heaven, the Garden of the Hesperides cannot be far away. And so Permoser’s Hercules gazed upon the orange trees in the Zwinger courtyard, which bore the apples of the Hesperides, as it were, and promised Saxony a golden age.”
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From the press release for the exhibition:
Hercules: Hero and Anti-Hero
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Zwinger, Dresden, 22 November 2025 — 28 June 2026
Hercules (‘Heracles’ in Greek), the best-known hero of classical antiquity, is one of the most enduring and popular mythical figures anywhere in the world. His name is universally known, and the phrase ‘a Herculean task’ is an everyday expression for anything requiring extraordinary strength and effort.
The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections, SKD) is dedicating an exhibition to this demigod in the Winckelmann Forum of the Semper Gallery of the Zwinger. With Hercules: Hero and Anti-Hero, the Skulpturensammlung bis 1800 (Sculpture Collection up to 1800) and the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) present a wide range of depictions of this mythological character. Featuring 135 objects, including top-quality sculptures, paintings, prints, coins, armour, and works of the goldsmith’s art, the exhibition explores the question of why Hercules has been such a fascinating figure for millennia and continues to be so today—one need only think, for example, of some of the major films of recent years.
As the son of the supreme deity Zeus and the Theban queen Alcmene, Hercules was a demigod—with superhuman strength and human flaws. His popularity was revived during the Renaissance. In Rome, dozens of large-scale Hercules statues were already known in the sixteenth century, and these had a huge influence on early modern art. The exhibition showcases works of art from classical antiquity to the neoclassical period, with some glimpses into the present day. Alongside objects from the rich holdings of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, there are prestigious loans from such eminent institutions as the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Prado in Madrid, the Louvre in Paris, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.
In a prologue and five chapters, the exhibition explores the famous ‘Labours of Hercules’, his relationships with women, his anti-heroic escapades, and his role as a model of virtue for rulers such as Alexander the Great and August the Strong. Balthasar Permoser’s colossal Saxon Hercules, created for the Rampart Pavilion of the Dresden Zwinger, bears witness to this.
Hercules was evidently not only strong and virtuous. In some situations, he behaved dishonourably, succumbed to vice, or committed cruel injustices, even against his own children. He often fought against evil for the good of humanity, but he was also a murderer, rapist, drunkard, and thief. Through significant works of art and an extensive accompanying programme, the exhibition encourages reflection on the role of heroism in history and its relevance in our society today. Particular attention is paid to the extraordinary narrative richness of the myth.
Videos telling eight of the stories about Hercules have been created specially for the exhibition. Dresden-born actor Martin Brambach—known for his role as Chief Inspector Peter Michael Schnabel in the television series Tatort—relates important and amusing episodes from the life of the hero and anti-hero. A multimedia guide is available free of charge.
Holger Jacob-Friesen, ed., Herkules: Held und Antiheld (Dresden: Sandstein Kultur, 2025), 200 pages, ISBN: 978-3954988945, €38.
Print Quarterly, December 2025
Anonymous artist, Magdalen’s Hospital, or Public Laundry for Washing Blackmoores White, 1758, etching, trimmed within the platemark, 232 × 307 mm (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum).
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The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:
Print Quarterly 42.4 (December 2025)
a r t i c l e s
• Xanthe Brooke, “Spaignolet’s Drawing Book: An Album with Ribera Prints at Knowsley Hall,” pp. 379–89. This article focuses on an unpublished album containing 28 prints mainly by or after Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652). Brooke seeks to identify the sources and publishers of each impression, explores how the Earl of Derby used the album, and traces the growing taste for Ribera’s work among English collectors in the late seventeenth and the first decades of the eighteenth century.
Anonymous artist, The New and Entertaining Game of the Goose, ca. 1759–87, woodcut, 470 × 360 mm (London: British Library, Creed Collection volume 8).
• Emma Boyd, “The Advent of the Magdalen Hospital: A Rare Satirical Print,” pp. 390–401. This article examines an anonymous etching in the Ashmolean Museum depicting the Magdalen Hospital, a charity for ‘penitent prostitutes’. The author discusses the print’s satirical commentary in relation to the charity’s controversial formation and the debates surrounding it. She also examines the print’s authorship within the context of other satirical prints and depictions of London street figures.
• Susan Sloman, “Gainsborough’s Cottage Belonging to Philip Thicknesse near Landguard Fort,” pp. 426–31. This short article contextualises an early etching by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) from the 1750s, which the author proposes may have served as a subscription ticket for the engraving Landguard Fort, published in August 1754 by Thomas Major (1719–1799). The author also suggests that a painting by Gainsborough long assumed lost never existed.
• Felicity Myrone and Adrian Seville, “Two Unreported Games of the Goose in the Creed Collection in the British Library,” pp. 432–36. This short article describes two unknown examples of the Game of the Goose, one in printed form and the other in manuscript form. The provenance from the collection of London printseller Giles Creed (1798–1858), who specialized in ‘the history of ancient and modern inns, taverns, and coffee-houses’, is briefly traced.
n o t e s a n d r e v i e w s
Anonymous artist, published by Matthew and Mary Darly, Tight Lacing, or, Hold Fast Behind, 1 March 1777, etching and engraving, 351 × 247 mm (Farmington, CT: Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University).
• Andaleeb Badiee Banta, Review of Cristina Martinez and Cynthia Roman, Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 445–47.
• Jean Michel Massing, Review of Anna Lafont, L’art et la race: L’Africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières (Les presses du réel, 2019), pp. 447–48.
• Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, Review of Elizabeth Gernerd, The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear, and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024), pp. 448–49.
• Mathilde Semal, Review of Rolf Reichardt, Éventails symboliques de la Révolution. Sources iconographiques et relations intermédiales (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024), pp. 450–52.
• Robert Felfe, Review of Matthew Zucker and Pia Östlund, Capturing Nature: 150 Years of Nature Printing (Princeton Architectural Press, 2022), pp. 452–54.
• Sarah Thompson, Review of Timothy Clark, ed., Late Hokusai: Society, Thought, Technique, Legacy (British Museum, 2023), pp. 479–83.
Exhibition | Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760–1860
Opening soon at The Courtauld:
A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760–1860
The Courtauld Gallery, London, 28 January 2026 — 20 May 2026
Curated by Rachel Sloan
A View of One’s Own showcases landscape drawings and watercolours by British women artists working between 1760 and 1860 whose work represents a growing area of The Courtauld’s collection. These artists range from highly accomplished amateurs to those ambitious for more formal recognition. They have remained mostly unknown, and their works largely unpublished.
When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, its members included two women; yet there would not be another female academician until Dame Laura Knight was elected in 1936. Despite this institutional exclusion, women artists in Britain continued to train, practice, and exhibit during this period, particularly in the field of landscape watercolours. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue shed new light on these artists, working within a heavily male-dominated era in the arts. Some of the artists achieved recognition during their lifetimes while others’ work remained private. The ten artists featured include Harriet Lister and Lady Mary Lowther, who were among the first to depict the Lake District; Amelia Long, Lady Farnborough, one of the first British artists to travel to France following the Napoleonic Wars; and Elizabeth Batty, whose works appearing in the show were rediscovered only a few years ago.
Artists: Harriet Lister, Mary Lowther, Mary Mitford, Elizabeth Susan Percy, Mary Smirke, Eliza Gore; Fanny Blake, Amelia Long, Elizabeth Batty, and Richenda Gurney.
Rachel Sloan, ed., A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760–1860 (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2026), 72 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645977, £20. With contributions by Susan Owens, Rachel Sloan, and Paris Spies-Gans.
Rachel Sloan is Associate Curator for Works on Paper at The Courtauld Gallery. Paris A. Spies-Gans is a historian and art historian, with a focus on gender and culture in Britain and France during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries; she is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Susan Owens, formerly Curator of Paintings at the V&A, is an independent scholar; she has published widely on 19th-century British art and culture and has a particular interest in drawing and landscape.
New Book | Goya: The Disasters of War
From Rizzoli and Distributed Art Publishers:
Francisco de Goya, Goya: The Disasters of War (Madrid: La Fábrica, 2025), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-8410024632, $60.
Based on the original 1863 edition, this presentation of Goya’s 80 etchings decries the consequences of war through his bleak, gruesome, and unflinching imagery.
Following his tenure as court painter for the Spanish royal family, Francisco de Goya’s art took on darker subjects and a more expressive style, especially during the Peninsular War (1808–14). Much can be gleaned from the fraught and visceral work of this period, including his series of etchings known as The Disasters of War. Concerned about the state of the world as much as his own failing health, Goya spent 10 years on what he personally titled Fatal Consequences of Spain’s Bloody War with Bonaparte, and Other Emphatic Caprices. Starvation, sickness, looting, assault, torture, execution—each image confronts the shattered lives of everyday soldiers and civilians, accompanied by brief, ambiguous captions such as “Y no hay remedio” (“And there is no remedy”) and “Yo lo vi” (“This I saw”).
This clothbound book faithfully reproduces the first edition of the complete set of 80 works which was published in 1863, 35 years after Goya’s death. It features exquisite printing quality on paper that closely resembles the texture of the original engravings, in a similar format and scale. War is still a condition of human existence today; Goya’s etchings are timeless for their vehement denunciation of its atrocities committed by all combatants, regardless of their national affiliations.
Born in Fuendetodos, Spain, Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) trained in Zaragoza and later moved to Madrid. In 1789 he was appointed as a court painter by Charles IV. Considered “the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns,” Goya blended elements of Romanticism with a deeply personal and often critical vision of society.
New Book | Canova and His World
Coming in the spring from Lund Humphries:
Livio Pestilli, Canova and His World (London: Lund Humphries, 2025), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1848227354, £60.
A new examination of Canova’s life and work in comparison with his contemporaries
This kaleidoscopic study of Antonio Canova (1757–1822), one of the most celebrated sculptors of the Neoclassical era, reconsiders his life, work, and artistic legacy in the wake of the two-hundredth anniversary of his death. Pestilli here examines how critics such as Carl Ludwig Fernow and Quatremère de Quincy critically shaped both Canova’s work and its reception and delves into the striking similarities between Canova and his renowned predecessor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The narrative breathes new life into the sculptor’s art by placing it within the rich cultural context in which he and his contemporaries worked. Drawing from a wealth of sources—including hundreds of letters and original drawings—Pestilli examines a range of previously unexplored themes that will enhance the understanding of specialists and art enthusiasts alike. This study highlights Canova as a sculptor whose work will continue to resonate for years to come.
Livio Pestilli is the former Director of Trinity College, Rome, where he currently teaches seminars on Michelangelo and Bernini. He is the author of Bernini and His World: Sculpture and Sculptors in Early Modern Rome (Lund Humphries, 2022), Picturing the Lame in Italian Art from Antiquity to the Modern Era (Ashgate/Routledge, 2017), and Paolo de Matteis: Neapolitan Painting and Cultural History in Baroque Europe (Ashgate 2013).
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
Prologue
1 Zoilus
2 The French Connection
3 ‘A [Neo]classical Bernini’
4 Cantilevering
5 The Artist at the Service of the State
Epilogue
New Book | Baroque Architecture in Bohemia
Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Petr Macek, Richard Biegel, and Jakub Bachtík, eds., Baroque Architecture in Bohemia, translated by Anna Bryson, Branislava Kuburovic, and Lea Bennis (Prague: Karolinum Press, Charles University, 2026), 767 pages, ISBN: 978-8024655185, $95.
A complete history of Bohemian architecture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries forms one of the most important chapters in the cultural history of Bohemia. In this period, art attained a remarkably high level, with Bohemia emerging as a rival to the other cultural centers of Europe. This was especially true in terms of architecture, which not only transformed the appearance of towns and villages in Bohemia but also played a part in the creation of the phenomenon known as the Baroque, which to this day remains an essential part of Czech cultural identity.
The monumental Baroque Architecture in Bohemia brings together multiple generations of art historians from Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences to offer the single most comprehensive examination and exploration of Bohemian architecture during this extraordinary period. The book begins with the Renaissance roots of Baroque Bohemia: it introduces readers to the influence of the cultured and eccentric Rudolf II, who moved the seat of the Holy Roman Empire back to Prague, inviting foreign artists, architects, and alchemists with him; it shows the importance of Albrecht von Wallenstein, whose military success in the Thirty Years’ War heralded a massive building campaign that helped usher in the Baroque age. When the book moves to the period commonly understood as the Baroque, it discusses leading Czech architects, such as Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel and Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer, but also focuses on lesser-known regional architects and the important Italian architects and artists that left their mark on Bohemia. The architectural and artistic developments are all set among the broader cultural and social context of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book contains extensive pictorial documentation—most impressively Vladimír Uher and Martin Micka’s gorgeous architectural photographs.
c o n t e n t s
Prologue: The Renaissance Roots of the Architecture of the Modern Era in Bohemia
1 The Architecture of the Rudolfine Court
2 Art in the Thirty Years’ War: Lost and Found
3 From Lurago to Mathey: The Crystallization of an Architectural Language in the Later 17th Century
4 The Era of Great Themes and Groundbreaking Innovators
5 Architectural Synthesis in the Work of Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer
6 Between the Baroque and the Neoclassical: The Era of Architectural Plurality
7 Art, Life, Culture: Contexts of Baroque Architecture
New Book | Kant: A Revolution in Thinking
From Harvard UP:
Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, translated by Peter Lewis (Cambridge: Balknap Press, 2025), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0674296107, $30.
Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the global order decisively influenced both intellectual history and twentieth-century politics, shaping everything from the German Constitution to the United Nations Charter.
Renowned philosopher Marcus Willaschek explains why, three centuries after Kant’s birth, his reflections on democracy, beauty, nature, morality, and the limits of human knowledge remain so profoundly relevant. Weaving biographical and historical context together with exposition of key ideas, Willaschek emphasizes three central features of Kant’s theory and method. First, Kant combines seemingly incompatible positions to show how their insights can be reconciled. Second, he demonstrates that it is not only human thinking that must adjust to the realities of the world; the world must also be fitted to the structures of our thinking. Finally, he overcomes the traditional opposition between thought and action by putting theory at the service of practice.
In Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, even readers having no prior acquaintance with Kant’s ideas or with philosophy generally will find an adroit introduction to the Prussian polymath’s oeuvre, beginning with his political arguments, expanding to his moral theory, and finally moving to his more abstract considerations of natural science, epistemology, and metaphysics. Along the way, Kant himself emerges from beneath his famed works, revealing a magnetic personality, a clever ironist, and a man deeply engaged with his contemporary world.
Marcus Willaschek is Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science, where he is responsible for the German standard edition of Kant’s works. The author of four books, he is also coeditor of the three-volume Kant-Lexikon.
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