Exhibition | Picturing America
In addition to the exhibition, the Dixon has devised a truly-inspired plan to lure visitors to the museums on Fridays: food trucks in the parking lot!
Picturing America: Signature Works from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art
Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, 4 August — 6 October 2013
Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, Florida, 15 February — 25 May 2014
Over the past fifty years, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, has assembled a collection of works by significant American artists, concentrating on the mid-18th through the mid-20th centuries. Featuring works by John Singleton Copley, Charles Wilson Peale, and Mary Cassatt, Picturing America showcases the signature works from the museum’s collections, from preeminent American artists of the Hudson River School to modernists such as Milton Avery and Doris Lee.
Barbara Jones, Picturing America: Signature Works from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art (Greensburg, PA: Westmoreland Museum of American Art, 2010), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0931241376, $45.
New Books | Summer Reading
With the arrival of August, many of you begin thinking about syllabi and teaching loads. If, however, you’re looking for a bit more summer reading before it all starts again, you might consider one of these books: a trio of novels and a sampling of non-fiction that might even count as research for those of you working on topics in natural history. -CH
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From the Peepal Tree Press:
David Dabydeen, Johnson’s Dictionary (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2013), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1845232184, $20.
Manu, a revenant from Dabydeen’s epic poem “Turner,” leads us through 18th-century London and Demerara (in British Guiana), recounting experiences that might be dreamed or remembered. We meet slaves, lowly women on the make, lustful overseers, sodomites and pious Jews – characters who have somehow come alive from engravings by Hogarth and others. Hogarth himself turns up as a drunkard official artist in Demerara, from whom the slave Cato steals his skills and discovers a way of remaking his world. The transforming power of words is what enlightens Francis when his kindly (or possibly pederastic) master gifts him a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary, whilst the idiot savant, known as Mmadboy, reveals the uncanny mathematical skills that enable him to beat Adam Smith to the discovery of the laws of capital accumulation – and teach his fellow slaves their true financial worth. From the dens of sexual specialities where the ex-slave Francis conducts a highly popular flagellant mission to cure his clients of their man-love (and preach abolition), to the sugar estates of Demerara, Dabydeen’s novel revels in the connections of empire, art, literature and human desire in ways that are comic, salutary and redemptive.
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From Canongate:
Jonathan Grimwood, The Last Banquet (London: Canongate, 2013), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0857868794, £15. [due out in North America from Europa Editions in October]
Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout is many things. Orphan, soldier, diplomat, spy, lover. And chef. This is his story.
We meet Jean-Marie d’Aumout as a penniless orphan eating beetles by the side of a road. His fate is changed after an unlikely encounter finds him patronage and he is sent to military academy. Despite his frugal roots, and thanks to wit and courage in great measure, he grows up to become a diplomat and spy. Rising through the ranks of eighteenth-century French society, he feasts with lords, ladies and eventually kings, at the Palace of Versailles itself.
Passion, political intrigue and international adventure abound in Jean-Marie’s life, yet his drive stems from a single obsession: the pursuit of the perfect taste. Three-Snake Bouillabaisse, Pickled Wolf’s Heart and Flamingo Tongue are just some of the delicacies he devours on his journey toward the ultimate feast. But beyond the palace walls, revolution is in the air and the country is clamouring with hunger of a different kind.
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From Harper Collins:
Michael Irwin, The Skull and the Nightingale: A Novel (New York: William Marrow, 2013), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0062202352, $26.
Michael Irwin’s The Skull and the Nightingale is a chilling and deliciously dark, literary novel of manipulation and sex, intrigue and seduction, set in 18th-century England.
When Richard Fenwick, a young man without family or means, returns to London from a Grand Tour of Europe in 1761, his godfather, James Gilbert, has an unexpected proposition. Gilbert has led a sedate life in the country, but now, in his advancing years, he feels the urge to experience, if vicariously, the extremes of human feeling—love and passion, in particular—along with something much more sinister. He asks Richard to serve as his proxy and to write to him of his city adventures, and his ward believes he has no option but to accept. It quickly becomes clear that Gilbert desires correspondence of a titillating nature—tales of carousal, seduction, and excess—and so Richard begins to write of London’s more salacious side. For here is an invitation to hedonism and Richard, eager to taste all that a privileged life has to offer, rises to the challenge.
But Gilbert’s elaborate and manipulative “experiments” into the most intimate workings of human behavior soon drag Richard into a vortex of betrayal, where lives may be ruined and tragedy is only a step away. And when Richard does the unthinkable and falls in love, the stakes are raised and he must make a defining choice. But what sort of man has he by now become?
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From Harvard UP:
Edward H. Burtt and William E. Davis, Alexander Wilson: The Scot Who Founded American Ornithology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 464 pages, ISBN 978-0674072558, $35.
Audubon was not the father of American ornithology. That honorific belongs to Alexander Wilson, whose encyclopedic American Ornithology established a distinctive approach that emphasized the observation of live birds. In the first full-length study to reproduce all of Wilson’s unpublished drawings for the nine-volume Ornithology, Edward Burtt and William Davis illustrate Wilson’s pioneering and, today, underappreciated achievement as the first ornithologist to describe the birds of the North American wilderness.
Abandoning early ambitions to become a poet in the mold of his countryman Robert Burns, Wilson emigrated from Scotland to settle near Philadelphia, where the botanist William Bartram encouraged his proclivity for art and natural history. Wilson traveled 12,000 miles on foot, on horseback, in a rowboat, and by stage and ship, establishing a network of observers along the way. He wrote hundreds of accounts of indigenous birds, discovered many new species, and sketched the behavior and ecology of each species he encountered.
Drawing on their expertise in both science and art, Burtt and Davis show how Wilson defied eighteenth-century conventions of biological illustration by striving for realistic depiction of birds in their native habitats. He drew them in poses meant to facilitate identification, making his work the model for modern field guides and an inspiration for Audubon, Spencer Fullerton Baird, and other naturalists who followed. On the bicentennial of his death, this beautifully illustrated volume is a fitting tribute to Alexander Wilson and his unique contributions to ornithology, ecology, and the study of animal behavior.
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From Harvard UP:
Peter Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 392 pages, ISBN 978-0674047990, $35.
The history of mountaineering has long served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. Once upon a time, the Alps were an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until heroic men—pioneers of enlightenment—scaled their summits, classified their strata and flora, and banished the phantoms forever. A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of Modern Man surveys the far-ranging significance of our encounters with the world’s most alluring and forbidding heights.
Our obsession with “who got to the top first” may have begun in 1786, the year Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an era in which Romantic notions of the sublime spurred climbers’ aspirations. In the following decades, climbing lost its revolutionary cachet as it became associated instead with bourgeois outdoor leisure. Still, the mythic stories of mountaineers, threaded through with themes of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western science and culture, seized the imagination of artists and historians well into the twentieth century, providing grist for stage shows, poetry, films, and landscape paintings.
Today, we live on the threshold of a hot planet, where melting glaciers and rising sea levels create ambivalence about the conquest of nature. Long after Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest, though, the image of modern man supreme on the mountaintop retains its currency. Peter Hansen’s exploration of these persistent images indicates how difficult it is to imagine our relationship with nature in terms other than domination.
New Title | Woods in British Furniture-Making, 1400–1900
Distributed by the University of Chicago Press:
Adam Bowett, Woods in British Furniture-Making, 1400–1900: An Illustrated Historical Dictionary (London: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2012), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0955657672, $180.
Bowett charts the species, sources, and history of the woods used in British furniture making from medieval times to the twentieth century. The main dictionary section of the book has 460 entries that cover 477 species of hardwoods and softwoods and detail the history of each wood, describe its uses, and provide cross references to other woods. Extensively illustrated with examples of historic furniture, this book also includes an introductory survey of the historic timber trade and several appendices, including over 160 illustrated wood samples from the Economic Botany collection at Kew Gardens. The layout and accompanying photographs make this a valuable and accessible read that will interest furniture and antique enthusiasts, collectors, restorers, curators, and botanists, among others.
Adam Bowett is an independent furniture historian. He has published widely in academic and popular journals and is the author of two books on English furniture. He works as a consultant to museums and auction houses, as well as to organizations such as the National Trust,
Historic Scotland and Historic Royal Palaces.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
How to use this book
Hardwoods
Softwoods
Appendix I: Map of the principal trade routes for imported timber 1400–1900
Appendix II: Woods named in the text, arranged by family
Appendix III: Woods named in the text, arranged by geographical region
Appendix IV: Wood specimens
Bibliography
Index of Botanical Names
General Index
Exhibition | Charakterköpfe: Portrait Busts in the Enlightenment
From the museum’s 2013-14 exhibition schedule:
Charakterköpfe: Die Bildnisbüste in der Epoche der Aufklärung
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, 6 June — 6 October 2013
Curated by Frank Matthias Kammel and Anna Pawlik
The portrait bust is one of the most fascinating genres of sculpture. It was particularly adaptable to the varieties of concurrent artistic styles prevalent at the end of the 18th century. Portraits of rulers, burghers, artists and intellectuals were oriented towards idealized images, towards the antique, or presented the subject in unidealized, haunting realism. Often they show consideration of the interconnectedness between physiognomy and personality. Through the presentation of sculptural masterpieces, this exhibition illuminates a major facet of a politically and spiritually fascinating era, and not least will convey a lively image of the Enlightenment’s novel interest in the individual.
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From the Germanisches Nationalmuseumm:
Die Porträtbüste ist eine der faszinierendsten Gattungen der Bildhauerkunst. Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts war sie von der Gleichzeitigkeit gegensätzlicher Stile bestimmt wie in kaum einer anderen Epoche zuvor. Bildnisse von Regenten, Bürgern, Künstlern und Gelehrten orientieren sich an Idealbildern, an der Antike oder stellen den Porträtierten ungeschönt, in einem packendem Realismus dar. Nicht selten spiegeln sie Überlegungen zur Abhängigkeit von Gesichtzügen und Charakter wider. Die Ausstellung präsentiert dieses breite Spektrum anhand plastischer Meisterwerke zahlreicher bedeutender Künstler wie Johann Heinrich Dannecker, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Johann Valentin Sonnenschein oder Johann Gottfried Schadow. Namhafte Geistesgrößen der Zeit, wie Goethe, Herder, Pestalozzi oder Winckelmann, erscheinen in Glanzleistungen früher realistischer und klassizistischer Strömungen der Bildhauerei. Flankiert von zeitgenössischer Graphik und Malerei vermittelt die Ausstellung eine lebhafte Vorstellung von einem damals neuartigen Interesse am Bild des Menschen.
Frank Matthias Kammel, Charakterköpfe: Die Bildnisbüste in der Epoche der Aufklärung (Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2013), 244 pages, ISBN: 978-3936688757, €33.
New Title | Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763–1813: ‘A Native Artist’
Distributed for the University of Wales by the University of Chicago Press:
John Barrell, Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763–1813: ‘A Native Artist’ (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 245 pages, ISBN: 978-0708325667, £65 / $100.
Born in Ruthin, Denbighshire, Edward Pugh (1763–1813) was a Welsh-speaking artist and writer who worked as a miniaturist in London, exhibiting frequently at the Royal Academy. But Pugh’s passion was the landscape, and he painted remarkable views of North Wales that not only captivate but also reveal the development of the Welsh economy and Welsh national consciousness. Pugh also wrote and illustrated a fascinating, informative, and humorous account of a tour of North Wales around 1800–one of the only travel books written at that time by someone who could actually converse with the inhabitants.
Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763–1813 is the first book to consider the work of this nearly forgotten Welsh artist and writer in detail, linking the history of art in Wales with the social history of the country. John Barrell shows how Pugh’s pictures and writings portray rural life and social change in Wales during his lifetime, from the effects of the war with France on industry and poverty, to the need to develop and modernize the Welsh economy, to the power of the landowners. Almost all of the pictures and accounts we have today of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North Wales were made by English artists and writers, and none of these, as Barrell demonstrates, can tell us about life in North Wales with the same depth and authenticity as does Pugh.
John Barrell is professor in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York. He is the author of numerous books, including The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s.
New Title | Ireland and the Picturesque
Due in August from Yale UP:
Finola O’Kane, Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting, and Tourism, 1700–1840 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2013), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0300185386, $85.
That Ireland is picturesque is a well-worn cliché, but little is understood of how this perception was created, painted, and manipulated during the long 18th century. This book positions Ireland at the core of the picturesque’s development and argues for a far greater degree of Irish influence on the course of European landscape theory and design. Positioned off-axis from the greater force-field, and off-shore from mainland Europe and America, where better to cultivate the oblique perspective? This book charts the creation of picturesque Ireland, while exploring in detail the role and reach of landscape painting in the planning, publishing, landscaping and design of Ireland’s historic landscapes, towns, and tourist routes. Thus it is also a history of the physical shaping of Ireland as a tourist destination, one of the earliest, most calculated, and most successful in the world.
Finola O’Kane is lecturer in the School of Architecture, Landscape and Civil Engineering, University College Dublin.
Exhibition | Quilts 1700–1945
From the QAG press release (14 June 2013) . . .
Quilts 1700–1945
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 15 June — 22 September 2013
Curated by Sue Prichard
Coverlet with sundial, cotton, 1797
(London: Victoria and Albert Museum)
An exhibition of historic British quilts from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is now on view at the Queensland Art Gallery, presenting enthralling social histories and personal stories of more than 200 years of quiltmaking and patchwork. The exhibition includes more than 35 hand-crafted textiles created to provide comfort and commemorate historical events and family occasions between 1690 and 1945, plus a host of associated material such as pin cushions, needlework tools and sewing baskets.
The works come primarily from the esteemed collection of the V&A, the world’s leading decorative arts and design museum. Select pieces have travelled from British regional museums and private collections, and there is the special addition of the much-admired Rajah quilt of 1841, sewn by convict women during transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, on loan from the National Gallery of Australia.
Divided into four thematic sections, the exhibition explores the domestic landscape of the wealthy bedrooms of 18th-century Britain; the private thoughts and political debates that emerged as patchwork spread to aspirational middle class homes in the early 19th century; the movement of quilts to the public sphere for exhibition and display in Victorian England; and the survival of quiltmaking in economically deprived areas in the face of the emergence of mass production in the early 20th century.
“The exhibition has been curated for QAG by Sue Prichard, Curator of Contemporary Textiles at the V&A, based on the popular exhibition Quilts 1700–2010: Hidden Histories, Untold Stories, presented in 2010 at the V&A,” explained Director Chris Saines.
The exhibition is accompanied by the 196-page publication Quilts 1700–1945, a co-edition from QAGOMA and the V&A.
Exhibition | Witches and Wicked Bodies
Press release (10 December 2012) from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art:
Witches and Wicked Bodies
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 27 July — 3 November 2013
The fascination for witches, which has gripped many Western artists from the sixteenth century to the present, will be the subject of a major new exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art this summer. Witches and Wicked Bodies, will delve into the dark and cruel origins of the classic image of the witch, and demonstrate how the now familiar old woman on a broomstick is just one part of a rich and very diverse visual tradition.
Witches and Wicked Bodies will highlight the inventive approaches to the depiction of witches and witchcraft employed by a broad range of artists over the past 500 years, with striking examples by famous names such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Salvator Rosa, Francisco de Goya, Henry Fuseli, John William Waterhouse and William Blake. The selection will also include more recent interpretations of the subject, by twentieth-century and contemporary artists including Paula Rego, Kiki Smith and Edward Burra. The exhibition has been curated by the National Galleries of Scotland with artist and writer Deanna Petherbridge and will contain major works on loan from the British Museum; the National Gallery (London); the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Tate; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, to be shown alongside key images from the Royal Scottish Academy and the Galleries’ own collections.
John Leighton, Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “We look to offer our public a world-class yet very distinctive programme of exhibitions. I believe that this is the first time that witchcraft across the ages has been the subject of a major art exhibition in the UK and we are delighted to be partners with the British Museum on this truly fascinating and compelling show.”
Europe has a long history of witchcraft and the persecution of witches was particularly widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, accounting for thousands of deaths of women and even children. Prints and drawings dating from this period will form a key part of the exhibition, showing how the advent of the printing press gave artists as well as writers the means to share ideas, myths and fears about witches from country to country. Engravings by Albrecht Dürer will be shown alongside woodcuts by Hans Baldung Grien and many other printmakers including Bruegel and de Gheyn.
Paul Sandby, The Flying Machine from Edinburgh in One Day Performed by Moggy Mackenzie at the Thistle and Crown, etching, 1762. The print satirizes Scottish emigration to England.
Photograph: National Galleries of Scotland
The exhibition will focus on six key themes. The centrepiece of Witches’ Sabbaths and Devilish Rituals is one of the most famous images of witches of all time – Salvator Rosa’s Witches at their Incantations on loan from the National Gallery (London). Unnatural Acts of Flying will include the origins of the image of the witch as an old woman riding a broomstick against a night sky, but rather than the cloaked figure wearing a pointy hat that has become so widely known to adults and children alike, this section features more sinister images of flying witches attending black masses.
In Magic Circles, Incantations and Raising the Dead, visitors will encounter glamorous witches cooking up spells as in Frans Francken’s 1606 painting Witches’ Sabbath. This powerful section also includes the luscious 1886 painting by John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle. Hideous Hags and Beautiful Witches will include the medusa-like witch with snakes for hair in John Hamilton Mortimer’s drawing Envy and Distraction. This introductory section will also feature unsettling works depicting old crones by Francisco de Goya – the exhibition contains a significant group of works by this major Spanish artist. Some of the images are genuinely frightening and disturbing, whereas others will reveal the negative attitudes towards women in periods when they were very much seen as the second sex. Due to the particular association of women with witchcraft, these works will highlight the ways in which a largely male-dominated European society has viewed female imperfections, highlighting the concerns created by women laying claim to special powers, or simply behaving in the ‘wrong’ way.
Daniel Gardner, The Three Witches from Macbeth (Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne; Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; Anne Seymour Damer), pastel on paper, 1775 (London: NPG)
Works depicting the various appearances of the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in Unholy Trinities and The Weird Sisters from Macbeth, will range from John Martin’s theatrical large-scale painting of Banquo and Macbeth lost on the blasted heath, with the turbulent skies swirling over exaggerated mountains, through to John Runciman’s striking drawing which here is interpreted as the Three Witches conspiring over Macbeth’s fate.
This fascinating thematic survey will culminate with The Persistence of Witches. Works by Kiki Smith and Paula Rego mark a sea-change with these high-profile contemporary artists’ own take on a subject that had previously been almost exclusively male-dominated. In Smith’s study Out of the Woods, the artist herself explores the expressions and attitudes of the ‘witch’, whereas Rego’s 1996 work Straw Burning relates to the famous Pendle Witch trials which took place in 1612 in Lancaster, 400 years ago.
The exhibition has been organised in partnership with the British Museum, whose loans will include William Blake’s magnificent drawing The Whore of Babylon which will be shown alongside the National Galleries’ own Blake drawing, once thought to depict Hecate, the classical witch of the crossroads. Witches and Wicked Bodies will be an investigation of extremes, exploring the highly exaggerated ways in which witches have been represented, from hideous hags to beautiful seductresses who ‘bewitch’ unwary men.
Writing for The Guardian (22 March 2013), Charlotte Higgins provides a useful introduction»
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From ACC Distribution:
Deanna Petherbridge, Witches & Wicked Bodies (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2013), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-1906270551, £15.
Witches & Wicked Bodies provides an innovative, rich survey of images of European witchcraft from the sixteenth century to the present day. It focuses on the representation of female witches and the enduring stereotypes they embody, ranging from hideous old crones to beautiful young seductresses. Such imagery has ancient precedents and has been repeatedly re-invented by artists over the centuries, to include scenes with corpses and cauldrons, caverns and kitchens, and the dead being raised through demonic or satanic rites – all inversions of an ordered and religious social world.
Petherbridge introduces this fascinating subject and includes catalogue entries on each of the exhibited works. The illustrations primarily feature drawings and prints as well as a group of important paintings. A wide range of artists is represented including Dürer, Goya, Fuseli, Blake, Burra and Rego.
Deanna Petherbridge CBE is an artist, curator and writer. Her book The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (Yale University Pres)s, was published June 2010. She was Visiting Professor of Drawing at the University of the Arts London from 2009 to 2012 and was Professor of Drawing at the Royal College of Art from 1995 to 2001 where she launched the Centre for Drawing Research. Between 2002 and 2006 Petherbridge held a post as Arnolfini Professor of Drawing at the University of the West of England, Bristol and a two year Research Professorship at the University of Lincoln from 2007 to 2009.
Exhibition | Northern Vision: Master Drawings
From the Soane’s Museum:
Northern Vision: Master Drawings from the Tchoban Foundation
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 21 June – 28 September 2013
Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann (1662–1736), Project for the Orangerie
of the Peterswalsky von Peterswald Palace, Silesia, undated
(Berlin: Tchoban Foundation)
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From Schinkel’s earliest attributed drawing to designs for the Palace of the Soviets, Moscow, this exhibition draws on the highlights of the Tchoban Foundation collection, Museum für Architekturziechnunung, Berlin. Amongst the architects represented will be seldom seen works by Matthias Daniel Pöppelmann (1662–1736), Leo von Klenze (1784–1864), Herman Giesler (1898–1987) and Boris Iofan (1891–1976). The Tchoban Foundation has been set up by the Russian Berlin-based architect Sergei Tchoban and the collections reflect his personal, architectural interests.
The exhibition includes drawings by Sergei Tchoban illustrating his practice’s interest in the continued use of architectural draughtsmanship. Many of these drawings also reflect the distinctive and historical cityscapes of Berlin and Sergei Tchoban’s native St Petersburg.
The 41-page guide (with wall text and images) is available as a PDF file here»
The catalogue is available from the museum shop»
Eighteenth-Century Studies 46 (Summer 2013)
Eighteenth-Century Studies 46 (Summer 2013)
A R T I C L E S
Patrick C. Fleming, “The Rise of the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature, the Novel, and The Governess,” pp. 463–77.
Sarah Fielding’s The Governess has been called the first children’s novel. But by conflating two separate genres, critics risk oversimplifying both the novel and children’s literature. This article brings together children’s literature studies and novel studies in order to address the narrative form of The Governess, and to suggest that the term “moral tale” better captures the complex origins of the eighteenth-century children’s novel.
Mark Koch, ” ‘A Spectacle Pleasing to God and Man’: Sympathy and the Show of Charity in the Restoration Spittle Sermons,” pp. 479–97.
In the 1670s the long-standing Spittle sermons became almost exclusively charity sermons, many of which argued that almsdeeds are accompanied with a sensual pleasure and articulated principles of sympathetic response involving an affective theatricality. This paper considers the place of these sermons and their ancillary children’s processions in the London public sphere, how they worked as spectacle to evoke pity from spectators, and how, despite the Latitudinarian tendency toward rationalism, they often contained elements of what was deemed an empirically nebulous “show” or “fiction.”
Catherine Packham, “Cicero’s Ears, or Eloquence in the Age of Politeness: Oratory, Moderation, and the Sublime in Enlightenment Scotland,” pp. 499–512.
This paper argues that Hume’s essay, “Of Eloquence,” should be read as part of a Scottish Enlightenment attempt to accommodate the sublime to commercial modernity. Hume inherits the sublime of ancient oratory not as a matter for narrow stylistic regulation—to be rejected in a new age of politeness, as some have argued—but as a moral problem at the heart of modern subjectivity. Hume looks to taste to regulate and contain the sublime, but it is Adam Smith who solves the problem of the sublime by recouping its excess as a mark of the possibilities for virtue in the modern age.
Lisa T. Sarasohn, ” ‘That Nauseous Venomous Insect’: Bedbugs in Early Modern England,” pp. 513–30.
Bedbugs were perceived as a new entry in the rich range of vermin that plagued eighteenth-century England, and the way they were viewed and treated reveals much about the mentality, prejudices, assumptions and aspirations of society at that time. Their presence increasingly elicited repugnance and even hysteria. The reaction to bedbugs during the eighteenth century serves as an indicator of modernity and emerging attitudes towards the body, class, nature and science.
Ryan Whyte, “Exhibiting Enlightenment: Chardin as tapissier,” pp. 531–54.
This essay addresses the work of Jean-Baptiste Chardin as tapissier to show his design of the Salon du Louvre functioned as an ideological system that derived meaning from Enlightenment discourses of epistemology and taxonomy. First, this essay explores how the Salon design answered the Académie’s need to represent its structure to the Salon public, and to guide the public in judging the individual works comprising it. Second, this essay examines points of contact between Chardin, the Académie, Carl Linnaeus and the authors of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert as intellectual context for the Salon design.
Abigail Zitin, “Thinking Like an Artist: Hogarth, Diderot, and the Aesthetics of Technique,” pp. 555–70.
In The Analysis of Beauty, William Hogarth advocated an unusual kind of formalism based in artistic practice: not form distilled into a rule for judgment but rather derived from the artist’s techniques for perception and composition. Denis Diderot, too, embraced an aesthetics of technique, particularly in the Paradoxe sur le comédien, in which he contends that what appears impassioned in an affecting dramatic performance is in fact calculated. Diderot, however, had the extra burden of reconciling the ideal of illusion with his demystification of the practitioner’s perspective, a reconciliation he could only conceive as a paradox.
R E V I E W S
Mark K. Fulk “Travel And/As Enigma: Review of Ian Warrell, ed., Turner Inspired in the Light of Claude (National Gallery Company, 2012) and Yaël Schlick, Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment (Bucknell University Press, 2012),” pp. 571–73.
Recent work on travel by scholars Nicola Watson (The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain [2008]), Zoë Kinsley (Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 [2008]), and Ann C. Colley (Victorians in the Mountains [2010]) has added markedly to our understanding of British travel in the latter eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through its foregrounding of issues of class, gender, and the changing understanding of landscape aesthetics and theories of the sublime. The books in this review supplement this discussion by their emphasis on Anglo-French experiences of travel in the period. . .
Jennifer Milam, “Review of Michael Yonan, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011),” pp. 575–77.
. . . Thanks to Yonan’s interpretive approach, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art is a ground-breaking study in the history of Austrian art and architecture. His book is a substantial contribution to the study of women as powerful agents in the production and reception of visual culture in European court circles during the eighteenth century. Moreover, Yonan’s wide-ranging choice of material—portraiture, decorative objects, architecture, interior decoration, and garden sculpture—provides the reader with a comprehensive understanding of Maria Theresa’s individualized approach to the representation of her personal authority in the visual arts. This is complemented by a number of quality illustrations that allow readers to consider the details of many works that are rarely discussed in depth. . .
Mark K. Fulk, “Review of Adrian J. Wallbank, Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute: Literary Dialogue in an Age of Revolution (Pickering and Chatto, 2012),” pp. 578–79.
In his postscript, Adrian J. Wallbank explains that his project was meant to “open up multiple avenues for further research . . . into this seriously neglected literary genre” of the written dialogue, gesturing toward the beginnings of a history of “dialogic didacticism” in the Romantic era (217). The book meets these expectations well by revealing in elaborate detail this overlooked genre, and suggesting ways that Wallbank’s readings can help complement our approach to already canonical markers of the period. . .
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