Book and Display | Baroque and Later Ivories in the V&A
From the V&A:
Baroque and Later Ivories in the V&A
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 25 January — 28 September 2014
This is a display of a number of sculptures from the outstanding collection of baroque and later ivories in the V&A, including German, Austrian, Netherlandish, French, British and Hispanic works. A range of objects will be seen: portrait busts, tankards, statuettes, and devotional reliefs. Carved and turned ivories were highly treasured items throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They might render dramatic mythological scenes, present exquisitely carved portrait likenesses on a small scale, or depict religious narratives. This small exhibition celebrates the recent publication of a catalogue of these ivories at the V&A.
From the V&A Shop:
Marjorie Trusted, Baroque and Later Ivories in the V&A (London: V&A Publishing, 2013), 544 pages, ISBN: 978-1851777679, £85.
Over 500 baroque and later ivories from the V&A’s outstanding collection are illustrated and discussed in this scholarly catalogue. This publication includes every ivory sculpture made after 1550 from a collection comprising German, Austrian, Netherlandish, British, French, Italian, Scandinavian, Russian and Spanish pieces, as well as examples from the Philippines, Goa, Sri Lanka and South America. The range of objects is extensive: statuettes, reliefs, tankards, boxes, cabinets, snuff rasps and cutlery handles are all represented. These small-scale sculptures might render dramatic scenes from mythology, present exquisitely carved portrait likenesses on a small scale, or depict religious narratives. The high quality of the V&A’s holdings is readily apparent; leading ivory sculptors to be found here include Francis van Bossuit, Benjamin Cheverton, Balthasar Griessmann, Joachim Henne, Johann Christoph Ludwig Lücke, David Le Marchand, and Balthasar Permoser. In addition to detailed entries on each piece, the Introduction summarises the history and techniques of baroque and later ivory carving, while indexes of subjects and artists, in addition to a comprehensive bibliography, provide a full scholarly apparatus.
Marjorie Trusted is Senior Curator of Sculpture at the V&A. She has published and lectured widely, specializing in European art from the seventeenth century onwards, in particular British and Spanish sculpture. Her books include Spanish Sculpture (V&A 1996), British Sculpture 1470–2000 (co-author, V&A 2002), The Making of Sculpture (V&A 2007), and The Arts of Spain (V&A 2007).
New Book | Religieuses dans la ville, L’architecture des Visitandines
Available from Artbooks.com:
Laurent Lecomte, Religieuses dans la ville, L’architecture des Visitandines en France, XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Paris: Editions du Patrimoine, 2013), 304 pages, ISBN: 9782757701454, $110.
Fondé par François de Sales et Jeanne de Chantal en 1610 à Annecy, l’ordre de la Visitation Sainte Marie a connu une expansion fulgurante à travers toute la France (134 couvents et églises à la Révolution). Reflet de l’attractivité de la spiritualité salésienne, ce mouvement de création conventuelle s’accompagne d’un prodigieux élan constructeur dont l’ampleur et l’originalité résultent principalement de la spécificité du monachisme féminin de la période post-tridentine. Assujetties à la règle de la clôture la plus stricte, les Visitandines sont aussi tenues de s’installer en ville et de s’ouvrir partiellement au “monde” extérieur. Enfin, elles doivent bâtir selon un plan type dans le but de maintenir l’unité architecturale de l’ordre, reflet de son unité spirituelle. Leurs constructions résultent des tensions entre les valeurs traditionnelles de l’idéal monastique (pauvreté, renoncement, isolement) et les contingences topographiques, économiques et sociales de la réalité urbaine. Richement illustré et documenté, cet ouvrage de référence propose une étude fouillée des apports architecturaux et urbanistiques d’un ordre féminin original.
Exhibition | Fame and Friendship
From the YCBA press release:
Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac, and
the Portrait Bust in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 20 February — 19 May 2014
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, 18 June — 26 October 2014
Curated by Malcolm Baker
Louis François Roubiliac, Portrait Bust of Alexander Pope, 1741, marble (Yale Center for British Art)
Opening in February 2014, the Yale Center for British Art, in collaboration with Waddesdon Manor, will present an exhibition on the eighteenth-century literary figure and poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), whose sculpted portraits exemplified his fame at a time when the portrait bust was enjoying new popularity. Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac, and the Portrait Bust in Eighteenth-Century Britain will bring together paintings, sculptures, and materials that convey Pope’s celebrity status, high-lighted by a series of eight busts by Louis François Roubiliac (1702–1762), the leading sculptor of the period, to explore questions of authorship, replication, and dissemination.
Frequently used in antiquity to represent and celebrate writers, the portrait bust became the most familiar way of lauding famous writers in the eighteenth century, as the concept of authorship was being newly conceived. The signed and documented versions of Roubiliac’s busts of Pope, which span the years from 1738 to 1760, are among the most fascinating and iconic images of the poet. These early versions of Roubiliac’s bust are likely to have been made for Pope’s close friends, serving to articulate those friendships that were so important to him. Further, the comparisons of these related versions, together with copies from the period in marble, plaster, and ceramic, will provide a unique and unprecedented opportunity to understand the role of replication and repetition in eighteenth-century sculptural practice.
Adrien Carpentiers, Louis-Francois Roubiliac Modelling His Monument to Shakespeare, between 1760 and 1761 (Yale Center for British Art)
Complementing the sculptures of Pope will be busts of other sitters with whom Pope’s image was associated, reflecting the poet’s place in a developing literary canon, as well as a selection of painted portraits of the poet by artists such as Jonathan Richardson the Elder, Jean-Baptiste van Loo, and Sir Godfrey Kneller. Alongside these works will be a range of Pope’s printed texts. With their subtle changes in typography and their carefully planned illustrations and ornamental features, these early editions were produced under the watchful eye of Pope himself and were the outcome of the poet’s direct engagement with the materiality of the book and print.
Also presented will be lesser-known material about the Yale literary critic W. K. Wimsatt, who in the 1960s not only helped to make Yale a major center for the study of eighteenth-century literature (and Pope in particular), but spent twenty-five years researching the poet’s portraits, an achievement celebrated in this exhibition. As Wimsatt recognized, the relationship between Pope’s private persona and public fame was complex and ambiguous. Pope proved adept at managing the two while gradually establishing himself as an independent author, no longer dependent upon the support of noble patrons. Throughout his career, he astutely managed the presentation of his own image and reputation through both his published works and his portraits, especially those by Roubiliac.
Among the busts by Roubiliac will be a terracotta model (ca. 1738) from the collection of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, England, and four marble pieces that he carved between 1738 and 1741. These busts have been assembled from a number of locations: the Center’s own collection; Temple Newsam House, Leeds Museums and Galleries; and the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead (formerly in the possession of the eighteenth-century actor David Garrick). Another, from a private collection, was made for Pope’s close friend, the brilliant young lawyer, William Murray, later first Earl of Mansfield, with whom the poet shared an enthusiasm for both the classics and the visual arts, particularly sculpture. Also on view will be an earlier marble bust of Alexander Pope made in 1730 by the Anglo-Flemish sculptor John Michael Rysbrack (1694–1770), from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
When this exhibition travels to Waddesdon Manor, the core group of busts of Pope by Roubiliac and some of the contextual material from the Yale Center for British Art will remain the same, but there will be an additional selection of painted portraits, a different range of printed texts lent by the British Library, and material that will illustrate the reception of Pope and his works in France in keeping with Waddesdon’s superb French collections.
Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac, and the Portrait Bust in Eighteenth-Century Britain is co-organized by the Center and Waddesdon Manor (The Rothschild Collection), where it will travel in June 2014. It is curated by Malcolm Baker, Distinguished Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Riverside, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The organizing curator at the Yale Center for British Art is Martina Droth, Associate Director of Research and Education, and Curator of Sculpture; and at Waddesdon Manor, Dr. Juliet Carey, Senior Curator of Paintings, Sculpture and Works on Paper.
P U B L I C A T I O N S & S C I E N T I F I C S T U D Y
During the course of the exhibition, Yale University Press will be publishing The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Malcolm Baker’s study of the bust and the statue as genres [scheduled for release in August 2014]. Following the exhibition, a second book will appear as a volume in the series Studies in British Art, published by the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre in collaboration with Yale University Press. The latter will include essays based on papers presented at the conferences at Yale and Waddesdon organized by the Center, the Paul Mellon Centre in London, and the Rothschild Foundation. It will also incorporate the results of a related research program of detailed digital scanning using the world-class facilities under development at the Yale Digital Collections Center at Yale’s West Campus. By analyzing the busts both visually and technically, this study aims to discover similarities and differences in surfaces, dimensions, construction, and materials, thus shedding new light on the studio practices of eighteenth-century sculptors. These findings will be the focus of a workshop to which leading figures in the field of eighteenth-century sculpture will be invited.
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Note (added 31 May 2014) — A more tightly focused catalogue will also be published by Paul Holberton:
Malcolm Baker, Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2014), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-0954731052, £15 / $25.
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Note (added 13 June 2014) — Waddesdon will host a study day (with a visit to Stowe) on July 10 and a conference on July 12.
New Title | India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century
From the publication flyer:
Simon Davies, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, eds., India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, previously SVEC, January 2014), 341 pages, ISBN 978-0729410809, £65 / €85 / $115.
The long eighteenth century was a period of major transformation for Europe and India as imperialism heralded a new global order. Eschewing the reductive perspectives of nation-state histories and postcolonial ‘east vs west’ oppositions, contributors to India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century put forward a more nuanced and interdisciplinary analysis. Using eastern as well as western sources, authors present fresh insights into European and Indian relations and highlight:
• how anxieties over war and piracy shaped commercial activity
• how French, British and Persian histories of India reveal the different geo-political issues at stake
• the material legacy of India in European cultural life
• how novels parodied popular views of the Orient and provided counter-narratives to images of
India as the site of corruption
• how social transformations, traditionally characterised as ‘Mughal decline’, in effect forged new
global connections that informed political culture into the nineteenth century
C O N T E N T S
• Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Introduction
• Anthony Strugnell, A view from afar: India in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes
• Claire Gallien, British orientalism, Indo-Persian historiography and the politics of global knowledge
• Javed Majeed, Globalising the Goths: ‘The siren shores of Oriental literature’ in John Richardson’s A Dictionary of Persian, Arabic, and English (1777–1780)
• Deirdre Coleman, ‘Voyage of conception’: John Keats and India
• Sonja Lawrenson, ‘The country chosen of my heart’: the comic cosmopolitanism of The Orientalist, or, electioneering in Ireland, a tale, by myself
• Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Orientalism and ‘textual attitude’: Bernier’s appropriation by Southey and Owenson
• Felicia Gottmann, Intellectual history as global history: Voltaire’s Fragments sur l’Inde and the problem of enlightened commerce
• James Watt, Fictions of commercial empire, 1774–1782
• Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, The Spanish translation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s La Chaumière indienne: its fortunes and significance in a country divided by ideology, politics and war
• John McAleer, Displaying its wares: material culture, the East India Company and British encounters with India in the long eighteenth century
• Mogens R. Nissen, The Danish Asiatic Company: colonial expansion and commercial interests
• Lakshmi Subramanian, Whose pirate? Reflections on state power and predation on India’s western littoral
• Florence D’Souza, A comparative study of English and French views of pre-colonial Surat
• Seema Alavi, The Mughal decline and the emergence of new global connections in early modern India
Summaries
List of contributors
Bibliography
Index
“Adopting multi-disciplinary approaches, contributors stress the complexity, subtlety and intricacy of the remarkable global connections between India and Europe in the eighteenth century. This book will undoubtedly provoke not only lively debate, but also much further research.”
–Maria Misra (Keble College Oxford), author of Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India since the Great Rebellion.
Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford
Exhibition | The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden
Press release (20 September 2013) from the High Museum:
The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 3 November 2013 — 19 January 2014
Toledo Museum of Art, 13 February — 11 May 2014
Portland Art Museum, 14 June — 28 September 2014
Antoine Coysevox, Faun, 1709
The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden features more than 100 works, some of which have never traveled outside of Paris. These include large-scale sculptures from the garden that were created in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries by sculptors including François-Joseph Bosio, Antoine Coysevox, and Aristide Maillol along with paintings, photographs, and drawings that depict the Tuileries. Thirty-five works in the exhibition are from the collections of the Louvre.
The exhibition also explores how the 63-acre garden influenced and inspired French and American Impressionists such as Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Childe Hassam and photographers such as Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and André Kertész. As part of the exhibition’s presentation in Atlanta, the High has turned the museum’s piazza into a landscaped park, inspired by the Tuileries Garden.
The ‘Paris on Peachtree’ experience begins as visitors arrive on the High’s piazza to find a dozen holly trees in planter boxes similar to those in the Tuileries Garden, installed to create a path to the exhibition entrance. Two sculptures by Maillol have been placed among the trees. The immersive experience continues in the galleries, where six sculptures that have never before left France and for centuries resided in the Tuileries Garden will greet visitors on the first level of the exhibition. The High is also devoting an entire gallery in the exhibition to a video titled “A Day in the Tuileries Garden,” featuring footage from the Garden projected on three walls.
Key works featured in the exhibition include:
• Antoine Coysevox, Faun, 1709
• François Joseph Bosio, Hercules Battling Achelous as Serpent, 1824
• Édouard Manet, Children in the Tuileries Garden, ca. 1861–62
• Childe Hassam, Tuileries Gardens, ca. 1897
• Camille Pissarro, The Tuileries Gardens in the Snow, 1900
• Aristide Maillol, Mediterranean or Latin Thought/Contemplation, 1923–27
• Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Terrace and Tree-lined Path, 1975
The exhibition examines how the Tuileries, which extends from the Musée du Louvre to the Place de la Concorde, evolved from its beginnings as an outdoor museum for French royalty to its role as one of the first public gardens in Europe, after which it served as both subject and inspiration for artists working in Paris.
Presented on the occasion of the 400th birthday of André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden also celebrates the man commissioned by Louis XIV in 1664 to expand and transform the Tuileries into a formal French garden. One of the first public gardens in Europe, the Tuileries Garden was originally created in 1564 by Catherine de Medici as the garden for the Tuileries Palace, a palace that was originally part of the Louvre but which was destroyed following the Franco-Prussian War. Each monarch who lived in the palace left his or her own indelible mark on the Tuileries. Under the reign of Louis XV, the garden became known for its monumental outdoor sculpture collection. In 1667, just three years after Le Nôtre was hired, the Tuileries Garden became Paris’ first public park. The garden is still open to the public today.
The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden is co-organized by the High Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum, with the exceptional collaboration of the Musée du Louvre.
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From Yale UP:
Laura Corey, Paula Deitz, Guillaume Fonkenell, Bruce Guenther, Sarah Kennel, and Richard H. Putney, The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-0300197372, $50.
The Tuileries Garden is a masterpiece of garden design and one of the world’s most iconic public art spaces. Designed for Louis XIV by landscape architect André Le Nôtre, it served the now-destroyed Tuileries Palace. It was opened to the public in 1667, becoming one of the first public gardens in Europe. The garden has always been a place for Parisians to convene, celebrate, and promenade, and art has played an important role throughout its history. Monumental sculptures give the garden the air of an outdoor museum, and the garden’s beautiful backdrop has inspired artists from Edouard Manet to André Kertész.
The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden brings together 100 works of art, including paintings and sculptures, as well as documentary photographs, prints, and models illuminating the garden’s rich history. Beautifully illustrated essays by leading scholars of art and garden studies highlight the significance of the Tuileries Garden to works of art from the past 300 years and reaffirm its importance to the history of landscape architecture.
Laura D. Corey is consulting curator at the High Museum of Art. Paula Deitz is editor of The Hudson Review. Guillaume Fonkenell is curator of sculpture and museum historian at the Musée du Louvre. Bruce Guenther is chief curator and Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum. Sarah Kennel is curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Richard H. Putney is an art historian and head of the Art Museum Practices program at the University of Toledo and Consulting Curator of Medieval Art at the Toledo Museum of Art.
New Book | Gardens of a Chinese Emperor
From Lehigh UP:
Victoria M. Cha-Tsu Siu with the posthumous assistance of Kathleen L. Lodwick, Gardens of a Chinese Emperor: Imperial Creations of the Qianlong Era, 1736–1796 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2013), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-1611461282, $85.
The Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanming Yuan) in the western suburbs of a Qing capital, Beijing, was begun by the great Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722), expanded by his son, the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1722–1736), and brought to its greatest glory by his grandson, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1796). A lover of literature and art, the Qianlong emperor sought an earthly reflection of his greatness in his Yuanming Yuan. For many years he designed and directed an elaborate program of garden arrangements. Representing two generations of painstaking research, this book follows the Qianlong emperor as he ruled his empire from within his garden. In a landscape of lush plants, artificial mountains and lakes, and colorful buildings, he sought to represent his wealth and power to his diverse subjects and to the world at large. Having been looted and burned in the mid-nineteenth century by Western forces, it now lies mostly in ruins, but it was the world’s most elaborate garden in the eighteenth century. The garden suggested a whole set of concepts—religious, philosophical, political, artistic, and popular—represented in landscapes and architecture. Just as bonsai portrays a garden in miniature, the imperial Yuanming Yuan at the height of its splendor represented the Qing Empire in microcosm.
Victoria M. Siu (1935–2010), a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, U.S. province (RSCJ), held a Ph.D. from Georgetown University where her dissertation was on U.S.-Chinese relations.
Exhibition | From Veronese to Casanova: Italian Paintings from Brittany
From the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes:
De Véronèse à Casanova: Parcours italien dans les collections de Bretagne
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, 19 April — 30 September 2013
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, 14 December 2013 — 2 March 2014
Curated by Mylène Allano
Les musées des beaux-arts de Rennes et de Quimper présentent successivement une grande exposition des peintures italiennes conservées dans la région. La manifestation a pour vocation de mettre en valeur et de faire connaître le patrimoine de la Bretagne historique, en exposant les fleurons des collections italiennes des musées de Brest, Dinan, Morlaix, Nantes, Quimper, Rennes, Vannes et ainsi que les plus belles œuvres des églises bretonnes ; soit 85 peintures de tout premier ordre offrant un panorama représentatif de la peinture italienne des XVIe au XVIIIe siècles.
Didier Rykner provides an exhibition review at La Tribune de l’Art (13 May 2013). . .
. . . L’exposition s’est basée sur une thèse de Mylène Allano—commissaire scientifique de cette exposition—qui cataloguait toutes les peintures italiennes conservées en Bretagne. Le parcours aurait pu être chronologique, par école ou par thèmes. C’est cette dernière présentation qui a été choisie. . .
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The catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:
Mylène Allano, ed., De Véronèse à Casanova: Parcours italien dans les collections de Bretagne (Lyon: Lieux Dits, 2013), 199 pages, ISBN: 978-2362190742, $47.50.
Italian paintings held in Brittany are well known and appreciated by art specialists, and are characterised by their quality and by the variety of places represented (Venice, Rome, Naples…). This exhibition enables access to a remarkable set of works collected by museums, which have never previously received such attention. There are no less than eighty works which, for the first time, are the subject of an original display underlying the extraordinary vitality of artistic creation in Italy from the 16th century until the end of the 18th century.
New Book | Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain
From the University of Delaware Press:
Christine A. Jones, Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 216 pages, 978-1611494082, $85.
Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of ‘bodies’ treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, stylish patterns, and accessories. These practices crossed paths in the work of artisans, whose luxury objects reflected and also influenced the curves of fashion in the eighteenth century.
French artisans began trials to reproduce fine Chinese porcelain in the 1660s. The challenge proved impossible until they found an essential ingredient, kaolin, in French soil in the 1760s. Shapely Bodies differs from other studies of French porcelain in that it does not begin in the 1760s at the Sèvres manufactory when it became technically possible to produce fine porcelain in France, but instead ends there. Without the secret of Chinese porcelain, artisans in France turned to radical forms of experimentation. Over the first half of the eighteenth century, they invented artificial alternatives to Chinese porcelain, decorated them with French style, and, with equal determination, shaped an identity for their new trade that distanced it from traditional guild-crafts and aligned it with scientific invention. The back story of porcelain making before kaolin provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of artisanal innovation and cultural mythmaking. To write artificial porcelain into a history of ‘real’ porcelain dominated by China, Japan, and Meissen in Saxony, French porcelainiers learned to describe their new commodity in language that tapped into national pride and the mythic power of French savoir faire. Artificial porcelain cut such a fashionable image that by the mid-eighteenth century, Louis XV appropriated it for the glory of the crown. When the monarchy ended, revolutionaries reclaimed French porcelain, the fruit of a century of artisanal labor, for the Republic. Tracking how the porcelain arts were depicted in documents and visual arts during one hundred years of experimentation, Shapely Bodies reveals the politics behind the making of French porcelain’s image.
Christine A. Jones is associate professor of French and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah.
New Book | Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context
Due out this month from Ashgate:
Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu, eds., Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 386 pages, ISBN: 978-1472413307, $130.
Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collection offers a geographically wide-ranging perspective on what the eighteenth century looked like beyond British or British-colonial borders. To highlight trends, fashions, and cultural imports of truly global significance, the contributors draw their case studies from Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This survey underscores the multifarious ways in which new theoretical approaches, such as thing theory or material and visual culture studies, revise our understanding of the people and objects that inhabit the phenomenological spaces of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on a particular geographical area, or on the global as a juxtaposition of regions with a distinctive cultural footprint, this collection draws attention to the unforeseen relational maps drawn by things in their global peregrinations, celebrating the logic of serendipity that transforms the object into some-thing else when it is placed in a new locale.
Ileana Baird is a Postdoctoral Preceptorship Fellow at the University of Virginia, and Christina Ionescu is an Associate Professor of French Studies at Mount Allison
University in Canada.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
• Peregrine things: rethinking the global in 18th-century studies, Ileana Baird
• Through the prism of thing theory: new approaches to the 18th-century world of objects, Christina Ionescu
I. Western European Fads: Porcelain, Fetishes, Museum Objects, Antiques
• Caution, contents may be hot: a cultural anatomy of the tasse trembleuse, Christine A. Jones
• Cultural currency: Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea and the material shape of 18th-century celebrity, Kevin Bourque
• Feather cloaks and English collectors: Cook’s voyages and the objects of the museum, Sophie Thomas
• Imagining Ancient Egypt as the idealized self in 18th-century Europe, Kevin M. McGeough
II. Under Eastern Eyes: Garments, Portraits, Books
• Frills and perils of fashion: politics and culture of the 18th-century Russian court through the eyes of La Mode, Victoria Ivleva
• From Russia with love: souvenirs and political alliance in Martha Wilmot’s The Russian Journals, Pamela Buck
• ‘The battle of the books’ in Catherine the Great’s Russia: from a jousting tournament to a tavern brawl, Rimma Garn
III. Latin American Encounters: Coins, Food, Accessories, Maps
• From Peruvian gold to British Guinea: tropicopolitanism and myths of origin in Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, Mauricio E. Martinez
• Eating turtle, eating the world: comestible things in the 18th century, Krystal McMillen
• The fur parasol: masculine dress, prosthetic skins, and the making of the English umbrella in Robinson Crusoe, Irene Fizer
• Terra Incognita on maps of 18th-century Spanish America: commodification, consumption and the transition from inaccessible to public space, Lauren Beck
IV. Imagining Other Spaces: Trinkets, Collectibles, Ethnographic Artifacts, Scientific Objects
• (Re-)appropriating trinkets: how to civilize Polynesia with a jack-in-the-box, Laure Marcellesi
• Images of exotic objects in the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire Générale des Voyages, Antoine Eche
• Souvenirs of the South Seas: objects of imperial critique in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Jessica Durgan
Select Bibliography and Index
New Book | Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories
Collected here are papers that originated from the Early Modern Things Workshop (Stanford, 29–30 January 2010). From Routledge:
Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-0415520508 (hardcover), $160 / ISBN: 978-0415520515 (paperback), $45.
What can we learn about the past by studying things? How does the meaning of things, and our relationship to them, change over time? This fascinating collection taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c.1500–1800).
Divided into six parts, this book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, empires of things, consuming things, and lastly the power of things. Spanning across the early modern world, from Ming dynasty China to Georgian England, and from Ottoman Egypt to Spanish America, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves.
Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects—ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made—came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world.
C O N T E N T S
Paula Findlen, Introduction: Early Modern Things: Setting Objects in Motion, 1500–1800
Part One: The Ambiguity of Things
1. Carla Nappi, Surface Tension: Objectifying Ginseng in Chinese Early Modernity
2. Marcy Norton, Going to the Birds: Animals as Things and Beings in Early Modernity
3. Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock
Part Two: Representing Things
4. Julie Hochstrasser, ‘Stil-staende dingen’: Picturing Objects in the Dutch Golden Age
5. Giorgio Riello, ‘Things Seen and Unseen’: The Material Culture of Early Modern Inventories and Their Representation of Domestic Interiors
6. Chandra Mukerji, Costume and Character in the Ottoman Empire: Dress as Social Agent in Nicolay’s Navigations
Part Three: Making Things
7. Pamela H. Smith, Making Things: Techniques and Books in Early Modern Europe
8. Corey Tazzara, Capricious Demands: Artisanal Goods, Business Strategies, and Consumer Behavior in Seventeenth-Century Florence
Part Four: Empires of Things
9. Erika Monahan, Locating Rhubarb: Early Modern Russia’s Relevant Obscurity
10. Mark A. Peterson, The World in a Shilling: Silver Coins and the Challenge of Political Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic World
11. Alan Mikhail, Anatolian Timber and Egyptian Grain: Things That Made the Ottoman Empire
Part Five: Consuming Things
12. Morgan Pitelka, The Tokugawa Storehouse: Ieyasu’s Encounters with Things
13. Anne E.C. McCants, Porcelain for the Poor: The Material Culture of Tea and Coffee Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam
14. Amanda Vickery, Fashioning Difference in Georgian England: Furniture for Him and for Her
Epilogue: The Power of Things
15. Renata Ago, Denaturalizing Things: A Comment
16. Timothy Brook, Something New: A Comment
17. Erin K. Lichtenstein, Identities through Things: A Comment
Enfilade 
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