Enfilade

James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art will be launched at the Royal Society of Arts in London on December 9th and at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork on December 3rd. From Cork UP:

William L. Pressly, James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1782051084, €49 / $66.

Between 1777 and 1784, the Irish artist James Barry (1741–1806) executed six murals for the Great Room of the Society of Arts in London. Although his works form the most impressive series of history paintings in Great Britain, they remain one of the British art world’s best kept secrets, having attracted little attention from critics or the general public. James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts is the first to offer an in-depth analysis of these remarkable paintings and the first to demonstrate that the artist was pioneering a new approach to public art in terms of the novelty of the patronage and the highly personal nature of his content. Barry insisted on, and received, complete control over his subject matter, the first time in the history of Western art that the patron of a large, impressive interior agreed to such a demand. The artist required autonomy in order to present his personal vision, which encompasses a complex surface narrative as well as a hidden meaning that has gone unperceived for 230 years. The artist disguised his deeper message due to its inflammatory nature. Were his meaning readily apparent, the Society would have thrown out him and his murals.

Ultimately, as this book seeks to show, the artist intended his paintings to engage the public in a dialogue that would utterly transform British society in terms of its culture, politics, and religion. In making this case, the book brings this neglected series into the mainstream of discussions of British art of the Romantic period, revealing the intellectual profundity invested in the genre of history painting and re-evaluating the role Christianity played in Enlightenment thought.

William L Pressly is Emeritus Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Art at the University of Maryland. He is the author of James Barry: The Life and Art of James Barry (Yale University Press, 1981) and James Barry: the Artist as Hero (Tate Gallery, 1983).

From ArtBooks.com:

Florian Knothe, The Manufacture des meubles de la couronne aux Gobelins under Louis XIV: A Social, Political, and Cultural History (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 350 pages, ISBN: 978-2503553207, $150 / 100€.

The cultural importance, dependencies and mechanics of manufacture in Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution are understudied areas of research. In the case of French royal manufacture during the ancien régime, art-historical interest first awakened in the latter half of the nineteenth century with the publication of several descriptive texts that made archival sources available to a wider public. This volume on the Manufacture royale des meubles de la couronne aux Gobelins examines the current state of research on the royal workshops and indicates the manner by which this research can both extend and challenge the prevailing trends in the historiography of the Gobelins (Studies in Western Tapestry 8).

Florian Knothe is Director of the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong, where he also occupies a part-time appointment as Honorary Associate Professor.

From Birlinn Limited:

Peter Spencer Davies, Scottish Pewter, 1600–1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2014), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1906566722, £55.

Pewter was in common use in most households, churches and places of commerce in Europe for hundreds of years before it gradually fell out of favour as more modern materials became available. Scottish pewter wares have an intrinsic interest, being quite different from those of England. In particular, they have a simple beauty arising from the plain functionality of form, reflective of the Protestant culture of Scotland at the time. However, despite its historical importance Scottish pewter has remained one of the least understood areas of the country’s material heritage.

Now, expert Peter Spencer Davies has produced what will be the definitive guide to the subject. This engaging book takes the reader through the development of the craft from its sixteenth-century beginnings, and making extensive use of otherwise inaccessible archival material, brings to life the role of the pewterers and their wares in the socio-economic history of the country. Lavishly illustrated throughout, the book offers a comprehensive guide to the metal, the manufacturing procedures of the pewterers, and provides examples of all known types of object that they made. One of the objectives has been to facilitate the identification of any item, together with the name of the maker, date, and place of manufacture. To this end, the book has detailed appendices, which include illustrations of all known makers’ marks.

Peter Spencer Davies, PhD, FSA Scot, had a professional life as an academic (biologist) at the University of Glasgow. Now retired, he pursues a lifelong interest in English and Scottish pewter. He is a Past-President of the Pewter Society, and has had articles published in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities of Scotland, Journal of the Pewter Society, and Connoisseur magazine. He is an expert in the conservation and restoration of old pewter.

From Edinburgh UP:

Bob Harris and Charles McKean, The Scottish Town in the Age of the Enlightenment, 1740–1820 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 640 pages, (hardcover) ISBN: 978-0748692569, $165 / (softcover) ISBN: 978-0748692576, $50.

This heavily illustrated and innovative study is founded upon personal documents, town council minutes, legal cases, inventories, travellers’ tales, plans and drawings relating to some 30 Scots burghs of the Georgian period. It establishes a distinctive history for the development of Scots burghs, their living patterns and legislative controls, and shows that the Scottish urban experience was quite different from other parts of Britain.

With population expansion, and economic and social improvement, Scots of the time experienced immense change both in terms of urban behaviour and the decay of ancient privileges and restrictions. This volume shows how the Scots Georgian burgh developed to become a powerfully controlled urban community, with disturbance deliberately designed out.

This is a collaborative history, melding together political, social, economic, urban and architectural histories, to achieve a comprehensive perspective on the nature of the Scottish Georgian town. Not so much a history by growth and numbers, this pioneering study of Scottish urbanization explores the type
of change and the quality of result.

Bob Harris is a lecturer in British History at the University of Oxford. He is a prolific historian who has written on many aspects of British politics and social and cultural history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His publications include: A Patriot Press (Oxford, 1993); Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002); and Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution (Edinburgh, 2005).

The late Charles McKean was Professor of Scottish Architectural History at the University of Dundee and considered the pre-eminent historian of Scottish buildings and towns. He is author of: The Scottish Thirties: An Architectural Introduction (Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, 1987); For a Wee Country: Architectural Contributions to Scotland since 1840 (RIAS, Edinburgh, 1990); Edinburgh Portrait of a City (Century, London, 1993); and The Making of the Museum of Scotland (NMS, Edinburgh, 2000).

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction

Part I: Towns and Improvement
1  Scottish towns in context
2  Urban improvement
3  Urban embellishment and public buildings
4  A tale of five towns

Part II: Society and Culture
5  Middling ranks, homes and possessions
6  Cultural life: transformation and adaptation
7  ‘Community’, order, and the stability of the burgh

Conclusion

Appendix: Improvement Profiles
Bibliography
Index

Available from ArtBooks.com:

Neil De Marchi and Sophie Raux, eds., Moving Pictures: Intra-European Trade in Images, 16th–18th Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 340 pages, ISBN: 978-2503548081, $135 / 91€.

This collection examines the volume, contexts, and mechanisms of trade in visual images in Early Modern Europe. Focusing overtly on the internal dynamics and links between art markets in the Early Modern period, it presupposes that art objects—here visual images—are objects of desire. During this period, however, desire changed; a great deal more of these objects came to be made for ordinary domestic consumption, including devotional purposes, than as tokens of the magnificence, piety, cultivation, or learning of individual commissioners. Probably most still were commissioned, but to satisfy tastes that, though differentiated internationally, were widely shared within one country or region. Most too were commissioned at a distance, by agents, and were moved between maker and end-point distributor by specialised traders, many of whom—though far from all—were large-scale operators. The dominant focus of contributors here is therefore on the agents of this distance trade, its mechanisms, and its impacts in terms of both satisfying and subtly shaping tastes at a range of prices. Measurement and mappings are aspects of this traffic. Focus was sharpened by concentrating on three questions: what is currently known about the number of images, whether in the form of paintings, prints, small sculptures or woven textiles, that circulated in early modern Europe? Through what channels and networks were they distributed? And what were the economic, social and institutional contexts?

Neil De Marchi is Professor of Economics at Duke University. His recent writing has been on the circumstances in which key players in contemporary art markets operate and the behaviours that stem from these constraints.
Sophie Raux is Associate Professor of Early Modern Art History at the University of Lille (France). Her research focuses mostly on the circulation and consumption of images and art objects in the Southern Low Countries and France.

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C O N T E N T S

• K. Brosens, Quality, Risk and Uncertainty and the Market for Brussels Tapestry, 1450–1750
• N. De Marchi (et al), Supply-Demand Imbalance in the Antwerp Painting Market, 1630–1680
• M. Szanto, The Pont Notre-Dame, Heart of the Picture Trade in France, 16th–18th Centuries
• S. Raux, Circulation, Distribution and Consumption of Antwerp Paintings in the Markets of the Southern Netherlands and Northern France, 1570–1680
• C. Rasterhoff, The Zeeland Connection: The Art Trade between the Northern and Southern Netherlands during the Seventeenth Century
• N. Gozzano, From Flanders to Sicily: The Network of Flemish Dealers in Italy and the International Art Market in the Seventeenth Century
• I. Cecchini, Going South: The Space for Flemish Art Dealers in Seventeenth-Century Northern Italy
• P. Michel, Paris, Market of Europe: Russian and English Buyers on the Paris Market in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
• C. Guichard, Small Worlds: The Auction Economy in the Late Eighteenth-Century Paris Art Market
• B. Miyamoto, Bidding as a Guide to British Visual Preference: A Late Eighteenth-Century Case Study
• D. Lyna, Towards an Integrated Market? The Austrian Netherlands and the Western European Trade in Pre-Owned Paintings, 1750–1800

From Ashgate:

Christoph Vogtherr, Monica Preti, and Guillaume Faroult, eds., Delicious Decadence: The Rediscovery of French Eighteenth-Century Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 210 pages, ISBN: 978-1472449214, £55 / $100. 

The history of collecting is a topic of central importance to many academic disciplines, and shows no sign of abating in popularity. As such, scholars will welcome this collection of essays by internationally recognised experts that gathers together for the first time varied and stimulating perspectives on the nineteenth-century collector and art market for French eighteenth-century art, and ultimately the formation of collections that form part of such august institutions as the Louvre and the National Gallery in London. The book is the culmination of a successful conference organised jointly between the Wallace Collection and the Louvre, on the occasion of the acclaimed exhibition Masterpieces from the Louvre: The Collection of Louis La Caze. Exploring themes relating to collectors, critics, markets and museums from France, England and Germany, the volume will appeal to academics and students alike, and become essential reading on any course that deals with the history of collecting, the history of taste and the nineteenth-century craze for the perceived douceur de vivre of eighteenth-century France. It also provides valuable insight into the history of the art markets and the formation of museums.

Christoph Martin Vogtherr has been Director of the Wallace Collection since 2011 and was previously Curator of Pictures pre-1800. Before joining the Collection he was Paintings Curator at the Foundation of Prussian Palaces and Gardens, Potsdam, Germany (1998–2007). In 2010 he published the catalogue raisonné of paintings by Watteau, Pater and Lancret in Berlin and Potsdam and, more recently, on Antoine Watteau, French eighteenth-century collecting and the Fête galante.

Monica Preti is an art historian who received her PhD in History and Civilization at the European University Institute (Fiesole, Florence). She is a former Research fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), and since 2006 she is Head of Academic Programs (History of Art and Archeology) at the Louvre’s Auditorium. Her research focuses on the history of taste, collections and museums in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Guillaume Faroult is Senior Curator at the Musée du Louvre in charge of French Paintings of the Eighteenth Century and British Paintings. He has curated many major exhibitions in these fields and in 2007 edited a catalogue raisonné of the paintings (mostly French of the eighteenth century) from the collection of Louis La Caze, now at the Louvre. He has published extensively about David, Fragonard and French eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collecting.

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C O N T E N T S

• Introduction, Christoph Martin Vogtherr
• The ‘rediscovery’ of 18th-century French painting before La Caze: Introductory notes, Monica Preti
• The taste for 18th-century painting and art market between 1830 and 1860 as regards the La Caze collection, Marie-Martine Dubreuil
• Watteau and Chardin, ‘the two most truly painters of the entire French School’: The rediscovery of Watteau and Chardin in France between 1820 and 1860, Guillaume Faroult
• Collectors of 18th-century French art in London: 1800–1850, Jon Whiteley
• ‘Elegant depravity and irresponsible gaiety’: The Murray of Henderland Collection and the Scottish taste for French 18th-century art, Frances Fowle
• ‘Ah! Que c’est francais!’: Thoré-Bürger and 18th-century French art, Frances Suzman Jowell
• Aesthetic, economic and political issues of the 1860 exhibition: Paintings of the French School from private collections, Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy
• Early exhibitions of French 18th-century art in Berlin and the birth of Watteau research, Christoph Martin Vogtherr
• The National Gallery in the 19th century and French 18th-century painting, Humphrey Wine
• French 18th-century painting in England and the opening of the Wallace Collection, Stephen Duffy

Now available in the UK from the Paul Mellon Centre with US publication scheduled for January:

Ruth Guilding, Owning the Past: Why the English Collected Antique Sculpture, 1640–1840 (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2014), 412 pages, ISBN: 978-0300208191, £55 / $85.

In a lively re-examination of the British collectors who bank- rupted themselves to possess antique marble statues, Owning the Past chronicles a story of pride, rivalry, snobbery, and myopic obsession with posterity and possession. Analyzing the motives that drove ‘Marble Mania’ in England from the 17th through the early 19th century, Ruth Guilding examines how the trend of collecting antique sculpture entrenches the ideals of connoisseurship and taste, exacerbates socioeconomic inequities, and serves nationalist propaganda. Even today, for the individuals or regimes that possess them, classical statuary performs as a symbol of authority or as the trophies of a ‘civilized’ power. From Adolf Hitler posing for the press beside an ancient copy of Myron’s Discobolus to the 2002 sale of the Newby Venus for a record price of about $13 million to the Emir of Qatar, marble mania remains unabated. With insider access to private collections, Guilding writes with verve and searing insight into
this absorbing fixation.

Ruth Guilding is an independent scholar and critic.