Enfilade

Distributed by Yale University Press:

Esther Chadwick, The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2024), 248 pages, 9781913107437, $60.

The Radical Print argues for printmaking in Britain as the most exciting, innovative, and critically engaged field of artistic production in the late eighteenth century. Moving the print from the margins to the centre of the study of art history, this new critical study demonstrates how print responded to the acceleration of historical events, the polarisation of public discourse, and the sense of a world turned upside down in ways that traditional artistic media could not. Across five chapters, this book brings printmakers James Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, James Gillray, Thomas Bewick, and William Blake together as artists of the ‘Paper Age’ for the first time. From Barry’s experiments in aquatint at the time of the American Revolution to Blake’s visionary engravings of the post-Napoleonic period, Esther Chadwick shows how the print medium provided artists with special purchase on the major political issues of their age. The Radical Print assembles a rich array of material, from the period’s best-known prints to unpublished ephemera, revealing print’s dynamic role in one of the most turbulent periods of British history.

Esther Chadwick is Lecturer in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

From Amsterdam UP:

Carolina Brown, Comfortable Everyday Life at the Swedish Eighteenth-Century Näs Manor (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024), 320 pagers, ISBN: 978-9048562374, €136.

During the eighteenth century, comfortable everyday life becomes a new ideal. The good life was no longer about grand representation or the manifestation of material opulence. The new luxury was instead the comfortably arranged life at home. This book is about the traces of this change, its approach and consequences, and its anchoring in the material and social life of the Swedish manor. The comfort revolution of the eighteenth century was clearly associated with both new types of furniture and new ways of furnishing. An important aspect of the development of comfort was the new mobility and flexibility in form and function that the home and its interior now showed. Through the home of the Wadenstierna family on the country estate of Näs, north of Stockholm, the comfortable everyday life is set by their various tables—at writing desks, sewing tables, dressing tables, coffee tables, and games tables.

Carolina Brown is associate professor and senior lecturer in art history at Uppsala University. For over three decades in her teaching and research, she has addressed the arts and culture of the early modern period—focusing on portraiture, interior design, and fashion.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Carl Eric Wadenstierna and Nas Manor
2  At the Sewing Table
3  At the Writing Table
4  At the Dressing Table
5  At the Games Tables
6  At the Coffee Table
Concluding Words

Bibliography and Sources
Index

Forthcoming from Amsterdam UP, with a reminder that registration for September’s Therbusch conference in Berlin is due by August 4.

Christina Lindeman, The Art of Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024), 212 pages, ISBN: 9789463721486, €117.

The Art of Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782) is the first English-language monograph on this exceptional German artist that critically examines Therbusch’s artworks and career as a history and mythological painter, portraitist, and maker of synthetic pigments within the German and international milieu that both condemned and celebrated her accomplishments. Adding to the excellent scholarship on French, British, Italian, and Swiss eighteenth-century women painters, this book showcases the social and cultural practices of court cultures beyond France, with a focus on German-speaking Europe and how a provocative woman painter navigated within them. Meticulous archival and literary research sheds new light on the importance of the family atelier as a place of networking, collaboration, and experimentation in the eighteenth century and provides a fresh perspective on the growing Prussian intellectual and mercantilist cultures and their impact on Therbusch’s artistic production and the unavoidable fluency between painting, the minor or luxury arts, and the laboratory. Therbusch’s life and art enriches our understanding of female artistic agency and the complexities of pursuing a career in the male- and academy-dominated art world of the eighteenth century.

Christina K. Lindeman is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of South Alabama. Her research focuses on the art and material culture of eighteenth-century Germany. Her first book Representing Duchess Anna Amalia’s Bildung: A Visual Metamorphosis from Political to Personal in Eighteenth-Century Germany was published by Routledge in 2017. She has also contributed essays in Intimate Interiors: Sex, Politics, and Material Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Bedroom and Boudoir (2023), Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2015), Word and Image in the Eighteenth Century (2008), as well as published articles in Source (2013) and Journal 18 (2022).

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations

Introduction
1  A Woman Artist Painting Women
2  Collaboration as a Veil
3  Turning Back to the Dutch Masters
4  Arcanum, a New Red
Epilogue

Bibliography
Index

From UCL Press, where it’s also available as a free PDF:

Andrew Tierney and Melanie Hayes, eds., Between Design and Making: Architecture and Craftsmanship, 1630–1760 (London: University College London Press, 2024), 339 pages, ISBN: 978-1800086951 (hardback), £55 / ISBN: 978-1800086944 (paperback), £35.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a high point in the intersection between design and workmanship. Skilled artisans, creative and technically competent agents within their own field, worked across a wide spectrum of practice that encompassed design, supervision, and execution, and architects relied heavily on the experience they brought to the building site. Despite this, the bridge between design and tacit artisanal knowledge has been an underarticulated factor in the architectural achievement of the early modern era.

Building on the shift towards a collaborative and qualitative analysis of architectural production, Between Design and Making re-evaluates the social and professional fabric that binds design to making and reflects on the asymmetry that has emerged between architecture and craft. Combining analysis of buildings, archival material, and eighteenth-century writings, the authors draw out the professional, pedagogical, and social links between architectural practice and workmanship. They argue for a process-oriented understanding of architectural production, exploring the obscure centre ground of the creative process: the scribbled, sketched, hatched, and annotated beginnings of design on the page; the discussions, arguments, and revisions in the forging of details; and the grappling with stone, wood, and plaster on the building site that pushed projects from conception to completion.

Andrew Tierney and Melanie Hayes are post-doctoral research fellows of the European Research Council Advanced Grant project, STONE-WORK, and former research fellows of the Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate Project CRAFTVALUE at Trinity College Dublin.

c o n t e n t s

Foreword — Christine Casey

Introduction: Between Design and Making: Architecture and Craftsmanship, 1630–1760 — Andrew Tierney and Melanie Hayes

Part 1 | Practice
1  Architect and Mason-Architect: Inigo Jones, Nicholas Stone, and the Development of the Open-Well Suspended Stone Staircase in the 1630s — Gordon Higgott and Adam White
2  The Townesend Family and the Building of Eighteenth-Century Oxford — Geoffrey Tyack
3  Codes, Conventions, Circulations: Drawings as an Instrument of Collaboration in the Work of Nicolas Pineau — Bénédicte Gady
4  Architects and Artificers: Building Management at Trinity College Dublin in the 1730s and 1740s — Melanie Hayes
5  Artisans and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Saxony — Nele Lüttmann
6  Between Concept and Construction: Conservation Insights into the Building of Damer House — Mairtín D’Alton and Flora O’Mahony

Part 2 | Representation
7  Architects and Craftsmen: A Theme with Variations — Alistair Rowan
8  Classical Profiles: The ‘Alphabet of Architecture’? — Edward McParland
9  Allegorising the Space between Architecture and Craft: Mural Painting 1630–1730 — Lydia Hamlett
10  Material, Curiosity, and Performance: The Reception of Workmanship in Early Modern Britain and Ireland — Andrew Tierney

Curiously, this trade book has not (yet?) been properly published in the United States. The American version of the Penguin Random House website doesn’t list it, and it’s available through Barnes & Noble only as an ebook and audiobook (at Amazon, hardback copies are available from third-party vendors). In Britain, the book was widely reviewed in popular outlets by critics who didn’t typically engage the larger historiographical debates about the Enlightenment as a conceptual category. Among the more helpful is Linda Colley’s review for the Financial Times (13 December 2023). –CH

From the UK Penguin site:

Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (London: Allen Lane, 2023), 496 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0241523421, £30.

The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights, and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its centre, the Enlightenment was a profound failure.

By the early eighteenth century, hope was widespread that Enlightenment could be coupled with toleration, the progress of commerce, and the end of the fanatic wars of religion that were destroying Europe. At its heart was the battle to establish and maintain liberty in free states—and the hope that absolute monarchies such as France and free states like Britain might even subsist together, equally respectful of civil liberties. Yet all of this collapsed when states pursued wealth and empire by means of war. Xenophobia was rife, and liberty itself turned fanatic. The End of Enlightenment traces the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians, and polemicists around the world, including figures as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. They had strived to replace superstition with reason but witnessed instead terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess, and the continued growth of violent colonialism. Returning us to these tumultuous events and ideas, and digging deep into the thought of the men and women who defined their age, Whatmore offers a lucid exploration of disillusion and intellectual transformation, a brilliant meditation on our continued assumptions about the past, and a glimpse of the different ways our world might be structured—especially as the problems addressed at the end of Enlightenment are still with us today.

Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and co-director of the Institute of Intellectual History. He is the author of several acclaimed contributions to intellectual history and eighteenth-century scholarship, including The History of Political Thought (2022), Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans (2019), and Against War and Empire (2012).