With a collection of more than 100 paintings, drawings and sculptures by David, Girodet, Gericault, Ingres and Delacroix, Faces of Terror presents French forms of fantastical Romanticism. This darker part of 19th-century art reveals a certain strength of spirit and provides a fascinating perspective on imagination during the romantic period.
For more than one-fifth of his life, Benjamin Franklin lived in London. He dined with prime ministers, members of parliament, even kings, as well as with Britain’s most esteemed intellectuals—including David Hume, Joseph Priestley, and Erasmus Darwin—and with more notorious individuals, such as Francis Dashwood and James Boswell. Having spent eighteen formative months in England as a young man, Franklin returned in 1757 as a colonial representative during the Seven Years’ War, and left abruptly just prior to the outbreak of America’s War of Independence, barely escaping his impending arrest.
From the Middle Ages to the present day, parsonages—vicarages, rectories, and later manses, presbyteries, and chapel houses—have been among the most significant dwellings in every kind of British community. Their roles have been wide and varied. Architecturally important, and ranging from medieval vernacular buildings to the bespoke house designs of leading architects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the more modest homes of today’s clergy, parsonages are important not only as buildings but for the part they—and their occupants—have played in the life of local communities, and in their links with the wider world. The parsonage, a hub of activity and connection, a place of change and continuity, provides fascinating historical insights both general and local. This study draws on the evidence of architecture, official documents, private records, literary accounts, and contemporary and modern images to build a picture of parsonages and their occupants. It includes a section on tracing the history of a parsonage.
Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author’s own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture.
The British passion for landscape—already present in the literary works of Milton, Shakespeare, and even Chaucer—began to dominate the visual arts at the time of the Industrial Revolution. In his poem “Jerusalem” (1804), William Blake wrote of both “England’s green and pleasant land” and the “dark satanic mills” of its new industrial cities. Drawn from the remarkable collections of the National Museum Wales, Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape will offer audiences a rare opportunity to follow the rise of landscape painting in Britain, unfolding a story that runs from the Industrial Revolution through the eras of Romanticism, Impressionism, and Modernism, to the postmodern and post-industrial imagery of today.
Showcasing masterpieces by artists from Constable to Turner, to Monet working in Britain, the exhibition offers new insights into the cultural history of Britain as it became the world’s first industrial nation late in the eighteenth century. Cities—where the nation’s new wealth was generated and its population concentrated—mills, and factories started to challenge country estates and rolling hills as the defining images of the nation, and artists tracked, recorded, and resisted these changes, inaugurating a new era of British landscape painting which both celebrated the land’s natural beauty and a certain idea of Britain while also observing the feverish energies of the modern world.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The catalogue is published by Giles:
Tim Barringer and Oliver Fairclough, Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape (London: Giles, 2014), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-1907804342, £40 / $60.
Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills recounts the story of British landscape painting from the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century to the present day. Examining 88 paintings from the National Museum of Wales, this volume traces the history of landscape art through romanticism, impressionism and modernism right up to the postindustrial imagery of the 21st century.
The book presents two major essays: one by Tim Barringer on the tradition of British landscape painting and its position within an increasingly industrialized society, the other by Oliver Fairclough on the significance of the Welsh landscape within the British tradition. Loosely chronological and divided into six thematic sections, this new volume demonstrates the strong continuity between the British art of today and that of over 250 years ago: contemporary works, such as conceptual artist Richard Long’s photo pieces based on hiking in the Welsh mountains echo the poetics of place as deeply as Richard Wilson’s landscapes of the 1740s.
Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University. His recent publications include Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2013), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design (2013) and Landscape, Innovation, and Nostalgia: The Manton Collection of British Art (2012). Oliver Fairclough is Keeper of Art, National Museum of Wales, and the author of A Companion Guide to the Welsh National Museum of Art (2011) and Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection (2009).
Rediscovering a Baroque Villa in Rome: Cardinal Patrizi and the Villa Patrizi, 1715–1909 draws on a large body of archival material to reconstruct in detail the creation of the Villa Patrizi outside Porta Pia from 1715 to 1727 and its afterlife. This material includes building documentation, inventories, and above all the letters written by Cardinal Giovanni Batista Patrizi, papal legate in Ferrara, to his brothers in Rome, both dilettante artist-architects. These letters provide a unique insight into the decision-making processes involved in such a large-scale enterprise, in particular the hiring of artists and the decoration of individual rooms. These rooms included a Gallery inspired by the Galleria Colonna, a romitorio, or fictive hermitage, a Mirror Room anticipating those created later in the century, and one of the first Chinoiserie interiors in Rome.
Antonio Bonazza è esponente di spicco di una delle più operose famigliedi scultori del Settecento veneto: insieme al padre Giovanni eai fratelli Francesco e Tommaso ha lavorato in moltissime chiese diPadova e del territorio, oltre che nei giardini delle ville di campagna dinobili famiglie veneziane.Le sue opere si collocano spesso ben al di sopra del livello di quelle deisuoi contemporanei, e raggiungono esiti di eleganza e leggerezza tra ipiù alti della scultura veneta del Settecento.La giornata di studi, organizzata dal Museo Diocesano di Padova inoccasione dei 250 anni dalla morte dell’artista (12 gennaio 1763), è stata occasione per aggiornare il catalogo delle opere, precisare la cronologia, mettere a fuoco la personalità umana e artistica di Antonio e i suoi rapporti con quella del padre Giovanni e dei fratelli Francesco e Tommaso, indagare modelli e fonti visive ed esplorare le relazioni tra la sua arte e quella dei suoi contemporanei.
Having worked at Ashgate Publishing since 2011, Margaret Michniewicz recently joined Bloomsbury’s New York office as Visual Arts Acquisition Editor. In addition to welcoming proposals for book projects, she is currently focused on launching new series and invites inquiries and ideas from prospective series editors. Open to a wide array of subject matter, including interdisciplinary approaches and work addressing issues of gender and race, Michniewicz will be commissioning projects in art history and visual culture from the eighteenth century onward.
Enfilade 
leave a comment