Enfilade

Coming this December, as noted at Ashgate:

Melissa Percival, Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 304 pages, ISBN: 9781409401377, $124.95.

A fresh interpretation of the group of Fragonard’s paintings known as the “figures de fantaisie,” Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination reconnects the fantasy figures with neglected visual traditions in European art, and firmly situates them within the cultural and aesthetic contexts of eighteenth-century France. Previously discussed in connection with portraiture, this study relocates Fragonard’s paintings within a tradition of fantasy figures, where resemblance was ignored or downplayed. The book defines Fragonard as a painter of the imagination, and foregrounds the imaginary at a time when Enlightenment rationalism and classical aesthetics contrived to delimit the imagination. The book unravels scholarly writing on these Fragonard paintings, and examines the history of the fantasy figure from early modern Europe to eighteenth-century France. Emerging from this background is a view of Fragonard turning away from the academically sanctioned “invention,” towards more playful variants of the imaginary: fantasy and caprice. Melissa Percival demonstrates how fantasy figures engage both artists and viewers, allowing artists to unleash their imaginations through displays of virtuosity, and viewers to use their imagination to explore the paintings’ unusual juxtapositions and humour.

Contents: Introduction; Fact and fantasy: demystifying Fragonard’s fantasy figures; The fantasy figure in European painting; Fragonard, ‘pasticheur inspiré’; Departures from resemblance; Fictional identities; Fantaisie and caprice; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Melissa Percival is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter, UK

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In this smartly written, thoroughly researched work, Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure, Melissa Percival explodes the myth that Fragonard’s fantasy figures are dazzling but impenetrable images; she offers instead a wide range of interpretive perspectives that provides the ground for a renewed appreciation of these works. In a book that is a model of scholarly clarity, Percival has made a valuable contribution to Fragonard studies.

–Julie-Anne Plax, University of Arizona

Charlotte Yeldham, Maria Spilsbury Taylor (1776-1820): Artist and Evangelical (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 230 pages, ISBN: 9780754669913, $124.95.

Maria Spilsbury Taylor (1776-1820) lived and worked in London and Ireland and was patronized by the Prince Regent. A painter of portraits, genre scenes, biblical subjects and large crowd compositions – an unusual feature in women’s art of this period – she is represented in major museums and art galleries as well as in numerous private collections. Her work, hitherto considered on a purely decorative level, merits closer attention.

For the first time, this volume argues the relevance of Spilsbury’s religious background, and in particular her evangelical and Moravian connections, to the interpretation of her art and examines her pervasive, and often inovert references to the Bible, hymnody and religious writing. The art that emerges is distinctly Protestant and evangelical, offering a vivid illustration of the mood of patriotic, Protestant fervour that characterized the quarter century succeeding the French revolution. This focus may be situated in the general context of increasing interest in the religious faith of historical actors – men and women – in the eighteenth century, and in the related contexts of growing acknowledgement of a religious aspect to “enlightenment” art, as well as investigations into Protestant culture in Ireland. The book is extensively illustrated and contains a list of all of Spilsbury’s known works.

Contents: Introduction; Family background; A Moravian childhood; Early career; Themes 1798–1813; Exhibition and marriage; Ireland 1813/14 to 1820; Reputation; List of works; Bibliography; Index.

Charlotte Yeldham is an independent scholar based in the UK.

Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, ed., Reading the Royal Monument in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 232 pages, ISBN: 9780754655756, $99.95.

Reading the Royal Monument in Eighteenth-Century Europe is the first in-depth study of the major role played by royal monuments in the public space of expanding cities across eighteenth-century Europe. Using the royal public statues as the basis for its examination of modern European cities, the book considers the development of urban landscapes from the creation of capital cities to the last embers of the Ancien Régime and at how the royal politics of the arts affected the cityscapes of the time. The focus of the book thereby intersects across a spectrum of disciplines, including the social and architectural history of cities, the politics of urban planning, the history of monumental sculpture, and the material culture of the eighteenth century.

• Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, Introduction
• Etienne Jollet, The king and others: multiple figures in French royal monuments of the modern era
• Daniel Rabreau, Statues of Louis XV: illustrating the monarch’s character in public squares whilst renewing urban art
• Godehard Janzing, ‘Levez-vous, citoyens!’ Military reforms and the fate of the pedestal slaves in 18th-century France
• Miguel Figueira de Faria, 6 June, the king’s birthday present: an insight into the history of royal monuments in Portugal at the end of the ancien régime
• Basile Baudez, The monument to Peter the Great by Falconet: a place royale by the Neva?
• Johan Cederlund, Two royal monuments in Stockholm
• David Bindman, King of the new republic: Houdon’s equestrian monument to George Washington
• Alexander Grönert, Independence in the imperial realm: political iconography and urbanism in 18th-century Palermo
• Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, Originals or replicas? Royal equestrian monuments in 18th-century Great Britain and Ireland,
• Philip McEvansoneya, Royal monuments and civic ritual in 18th-century Dublin

Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau received a PhD in history of art from the Université Paris I- Panthéon- Sorbonne on “Royal monuments and public space in Great-Britain and Ireland, 1714-1820” in 2005. After ten years spent in England, in Oxford, London, and Leeds, she now lives in Paris and works in the Musée du Louvre for the art-historical programmes in the auditorium. She has mainly written on eighteenth-century British and French monumental sculpture and town-planning and is currently particularly interested in the circulation of artistic models and ideas in a European cultural space from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century.