Enfilade

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).

Forthcoming from Yale UP:

Brycchan Carey, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650–1807 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0300224412, $65.

A look at the origins of British abolitionism as a problem of eighteenth-century science, as well as one of economics and humanitarian sensibilities

How did late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as unnatural, a ‘dread perversion’ of nature? Focusing on slavery in the Americas, and the Caribbean in particular, alongside travelers’ accounts of West Africa, Brycchan Carey shows that before the mid-eighteenth century, natural histories were a primary source of information about slavery for British and colonial readers. These natural histories were often ambivalent toward slavery, but they increasingly adopted a proslavery stance to accommodate the needs of planters by representing slavery as a ‘natural’ phenomenon. From the mid-eighteenth century, abolitionists adapted the natural history form to their own writings, and many naturalists became associated with the antislavery movement. Carey draws on descriptions of slavery and the slave trade created by naturalists and other travelers with an interest in natural history, including Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, Griffith Hughes, Samuel Martin, and James Grainger. These environmental writings were used by abolitionists such as Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, and Olaudah Equiano to build a compelling case that slavery was unnatural, a case that was popularized by abolitionist poets such as Thomas Day, Edward Rushton, Hannah More, and William Cowper.

Brycchan Carey is professor of literature, culture, and history at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published numerous books and articles on the cultural history of slavery and abolition.

From the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, published by Liverpool UP:

Suzanne Desan, Bryant Ragan, and Victoria Thompson, eds., Everyday Politics and Culture in Revolutionary France: Essays in Honor of Lynn Hunt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1802073812, $99. Also available as a PDF and epublication.

The French revolutionary era produced surprises. Why did the French revolutionaries decriminalize sodomy? How did the Revolution alter fundamental attitudes toward time and progress? How did it change people’s interactions with outdoor spaces and with material objects, from playing cards to holy cards? How did it leave a lasting footprint on personal identity, family relationships, and religious belief? Addressing diverse topics like these, the essays in this volume showcase exciting new research about the revolutionary era. Written to honor the historian Lynn Hunt, the essays rethink our understanding of the French Revolution by exploring three central themes: the multifaceted nature of grassroots politics; the pervasive and personal impact of the Revolution on daily life; and its long-term influence on memory, identity, and sense of self. From the October Days to dechristianization and beyond, the authors probe the precarious invention of democracy, analyze how intimately and intently the French Revolution influenced people’s lives, and examine how it shaped nineteenth-century memory, female religiosity, and political culture. Embracing contingency, diversity of experience and perspective, and the multifarious nature of change, the essays document the power and complexity of the revolutionary era as a lived experience.

Suzanne Desan is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France and co-editor of The French Revolution in Global Perspective. She is currently writing a book on the October Days in the early French Revolution.
Bryant T. Ragan teaches early modern European history and the history of sexuality at The Colorado College. He presently participates on a research team that is developing an interactive website and relational database that focuses on the policing of male sodomy in eighteenth-century Paris.
Victoria E. Thompson is Chair of the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is completing a book entitled King and Public in the Parisian Royal Square, 1748–89 that examines the relationship between the design, representation, and use of urban space and socio-political transformation.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Suzanne Desan and Victoria Thompson
1  Victoria Thompson — A Perpetually Agitated Place: Politics in the Tuileries Garden, 1789–1792
2  Suzanne Desan — Military Men, Violence, and Gender in the October Days of 1789
3  Jeff Horn — Dechristianization and Terror in Champagne
4  Bryant Ragan — Same-sex Sexual Relations and the French Revolution: The Decriminalization of Sodomy in 1789
5  William Max Nelson — Leaping into the Future: Enlightenment Ideas of Progress and French Revolutionary Time
6  Jeff Ravel — ’Plus de rois, de dames, de valets’: Playing Cards during the French Revolution
7  Denise Z. Davidson — ‘Notes et souvenirs … sur la vie politique de mon père’: Memory, Mourning, and Politics in the Revolutionary Era
8  Jennifer Popiel — Martyred Virgins, Embattled Women, and Mass Culture: Sentiment and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Religious Images, 1830–60
Epilogue: Lynn Hunt — Why the French Revolution Continues to Matter

Bibliography

From Silvana Editoriale:

François Marandet, Louis Galloche (1670–1761): Un peintre de poesie au XVIIIe siècle (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2023), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-8836656165, €28.

Oublié par l’histoire de l’art, Louis Galloche (Paris, 1670–1761) fut pourtant l’une des figures majeures de la peinture française au cours de la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Il décora des résidences aussi importantes que les châteaux royaux de Versailles, de Fontainebleau et du Trianon. Couronné par le titre de chancelier de l’Académie royale de peinture et sculpture, Louis Galloche eut des élèves voués à devenir célèbres tels François Lemoyne et Charles-Joseph Natoire. Ayant conçu des poesie semblables à celles du Titien, Louis Galloche avait surtout un sens de la beauté particulièrement prononcé. Les tableaux, dessins, et multiples documents d’archives qui ont été retrouvés par François Marandet font ainsi redécouvrir, à travers cette toute première monographie consacrée à Louis Galloche, l’œuvre et l’itinéraire d’un des meilleurs artistes français de sa génération.

c o n t e n t s

Préface
Introduction
Chronologie

Un Élève de Louis de Boullogne, 1690–1711
• Premières études
• Grandes peintures à petits prix
• Un retour du pays des morts

Le Temps des Poesie, 1712–1731
• À la manière du Titien
• Nouvelles études
• Un concours truqué

Le Doyen de l’Académie Royale, 1732–1761
• Des tableaux pour la reine
• Les Salons de la concurrence royale
• Un concours sans vainqueur
• Louis Galloche: stéréotypes et réalité

Bibliographie