Enfilade

From Yale UP:

William R. Sargent, with an essay by Rose Kerr, Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics from the Peabody Essex Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press), 568 pages, ISBN: 9780300169751, $65.

Beginning in the sixteenth century when Portuguese traders started importing blue and white porcelain to Europe, Chinese ceramics manufacturers produced goods specifically for export to the West. The industry flourished through the early twentieth century as the market for fine porcelain expanded in Europe and the Americas. Among the Peabody Essex Museum’s founders in 1799 were sea captains and supercargoes involved in extensive trade with Asia, and many of the remarkable examples of export wares they brought back provided a foundation for the Museum’s world-renowned collection of Chinese export ceramics.

Written by William R. Sargent, a leading expert in the field, Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics is one of the most authoritative sources on this topic. Its scholarly entries on 287 representative objects that date from the fifteenth to the twentieth century are divided into sections by type of ware. Although these examples only hint at the Museum’s vast holding, together they encompass its broad range of Chinese export ceramics. An essay on Jingdezhen, the “Porcelain City,” by Rose Kerr, a glossary of ceramics terminology, and appendix on armorials, and an extensive bibliography all contribute to making this an invaluable resource.

William R. Sargent is the former H. A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum. Rose Kerr is Curator Emeritus of the Far Eastern Collection of Chinese Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Robert Bucholz, Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, has been teaching a thematic course on London for years (a version is available at The Great Courses). Long dissatisfied with the available options for texts, he finally decided — with his co-author Joseph Ward — to write one. With its emphasis on the experience of living in early modern London and the varied lives of the city’s residents, the book is good news for anyone trying to fit the city into a semester.  -CH

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From Cambridge UP:

Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward, London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 415 pages, ISBN: 9780521896528, $28.

Between 1550 and 1750 London became the greatest city in Europe and one of the most vibrant economic and cultural centres in the world. This book is a history of London during this crucial period of its rise to world-wide prominence, during which it dominated the economic, political, social and cultural life of the British Isles, as never before nor since. London incorporates the best recent work in urban history, contemporary accounts from Londoners and tourists, and fictional works featuring the city in order to trace London’s rise and explore its role as a harbinger of modernity, while examining how its citizens coped with those achievements. London covers the full range of life in London, from the splendid galleries of Whitehall to the damp and sooty alleyways of the East End. Readers will brave the dangers of plague and fire, witness the spectacles of the Lord Mayor’s Pageant and the hangings at Tyburn, and take refreshment in the city’s pleasure-gardens, coffee-houses and taverns.

Contents

Introduction: London’s Importance
1. London in 1550
2. The Socioeconomic Base
3. Royal and Civic London
4. Fine and Performing Arts
5. The Public Sphere and Popular Culture
6. The People on the Margins
7. Riot and Rebellion
8. Plague and Fire
Conclusion: London in 1750

From the Random House Group:

Jerry White, London in the Eighteenth Century: ‘A Great and Monstrous Thing’ (London: Bodley Head, 2012), 704 pages, 9781847921802, £25.

London in the eighteenth century was very much a new city, risen from the ashes of the Great Fire. With thousands of homes and many landmark buildings destroyed, it had been brought to the brink. But the following century was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty. Society was fractured by geography, politics, religion and history. And everything was complicated by class. As Daniel Defoe put it, London really was a ‘great and monstrous Thing’.

Jerry White’s tremendous portrait of this turbulent century explores how and to what extent Londoners negotiated and repaired these open wounds. We see them going about their business as bankers or beggars, revelling in an enlarging world of public pleasures, indulging in crimes both great and small – amidst the tightening sinews of power and regulation, and the hesitant beginnings of London democracy.

In the long-awaited finale to his acclaimed history of London over 300 years, Jerry White introduces us to shopkeepers and prostitutes, men and women of fashion and genius, street-robbers and thief-takers, as they play out the astonishing drama of life in eighteenth-century London.

As noted in Heidi Strobel’s review of The Look of Love from yesterday, Hanneke Grootenboer’s book on eye miniatures is scheduled for release in November. Here’s the description from the University of Chicago Press:

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Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), ISBN: 9780226309668, $45.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementoes, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one’s hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in Treasuring the Gaze, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures—and their abrupt disappearance—reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision.

Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject’s gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures—including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures—Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience.

With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, Treasuring the Gaze provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.

From Ashgate this fall:

Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400-1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 350 pages, ISBN: 9781409429159, £65.

Although much has been written on the aesthetic value of color, there are other values that adhere to it with economic and social values among them. Through case studies of particular colors and colored objects, this volume demonstrates just how complex the history of color is by focusing onthe diverse social and cultural meanings of color; the trouble, pain, and suffering behind theproduction and application of these colors;the difficult technical processes for making and applying color; and the intricacy of commercial exchanges and knowledge transfers as commodities and techniques moved from one region toanother. By emphasizing color’s materiality, the way in which it was produced, exchanged, and used by artisans, artists, and craftspersons, contributors draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation, and application as well as to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts.

This book captures color’s global history with chapters on indigo plantations in India and the American South, cochineal production in colonial Oaxaca, the taste for brightly colored Chinese objects in Europe, and the thriving trade in vermilion between Europeans and Native Americans. To underscore the complexity of the technical knowledge behind color production, there are chapters on the ‘discovery’ of Prussian blue, Brazilian feather techné, and wallpaper production. To sound the depths of color’s capacity for social and cultural meaning-making, there are chapters that explore the significance of black ink in Shakespeare’s sonnets, red threads in women’s needlework samplers, blues in Mayan sacred statuary, and greens and yellows in colored glass bracelets that were traded across the Arabian desert in the late Middle Ages.

The purpose of this book is to recover color’s complex–and sometimes morally troubling–past, and in doing so, to restore a sense of wonder and appreciation for our colorful world. With its nuanced and complex depiction of how color operated within local contexts and moved across the globe, this book will appeal to art historians, social and cultural historians, museum curators, literary scholars, rhetoric scholars, and historians of science and technology.

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C O N T E N T S

Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin — Introduction: The Value of Color

Part I: Color’s Social and Cultural Meanings

Jason LaFountain — Colorizing New England’s Burying Grounds

Maureen Daly Goggin — The Extraordinary Powers of Red in 18- and 19th-Century English Needlework

Molly H. Basset and Jeanette Favrot Peterson — Coloring the Sacred in 16th-Century Central Mexico

Mitchell Harris — The Expense of Ink and Wastes of Shame: Poetic Generation, Black Ink, and Material Waste in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding — ‘Luscious Colors and Glossy Paint’: The Taste for China and the Consumption of Colors in 18th-Century England

Part II: Producing and Exchanging Pigments and Dyes

Jeremy Baskes — Seeking Red: The Production and Trade of Cochineal Dye in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1750–1821

J.-F. Lozier — Red Ochre, Vermilion and the Transatlantic Cosmetic Encounter

Padmini Tolat Balaram — Indian Indigo

Andrea Feeser — The Exceptional and the Expected: Red, White, and Black Made Blue in Colonial South Carolina

Sarah Lowengard — Prussian Blue: Transfers and Trials

Part III: Making Colored Objects

Stéphanie Karine Boulogne — Glass Bracelets in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East: Design and Color as Identity Markers

Éva Deák — The Colorful Court of Gabriel Bethlen and Catherine of Brandenburg

Richard Blunt — The Evolution of Blackface Cosmetics on the Early Modern Stage

Amy Buono — Crafts of Color: Tupi Tapirage in Early Colonial Brazil

Elaine Gibbs — Colors and Techniques of 18th-Century Chinese Wallpaper: Blair House as Case Study

Beth Fowkes Tobin — Butterflies, Spiders, and Shells: Coloring Natural History Illustrations in Late 18th-Century Britain

Bibliography and Index

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Editors: Andrea Feeser is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Theory, and Criticism at Clemson University. Maureen Daly Goggin is Associate Chair in the Department of English, Arizona State University. Beth Fowkes Tobin is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia.