New Book | Eighteenth-Century Indian Muraqqaʿs
From Brill:
Friederike Weis, ed., Eighteenth-Century Indian Muraqqaʿs: Audiences, Artists, Patrons, and Collectors (Leiden: Brill, 2024), 442 pages, ISBN: 9789004715783, $162. Contents available digitally for free via open access.
Fourteen essays and one appendix discuss numerous eighteenth-century Indo-Persianate albums (muraqqaʿs) consisting of folios with paintings, calligraphic pieces, and elaborate decorative margins. These albums—now in Berlin, Baroda, London, Paris, and Manchester—were assembled for or collected by the Mughal nawabs of Awadh (Uttar Pradesh), local elites in Bengal and Bihar, as well as Europeans. The book not only presents hitherto rarely investigated material, but also provides general information and many new discoveries based on first-hand codicological study and historical research. It will significantly expand our knowledge of the production, collecting practices, and audiences of muraqqaʿs in eighteenth-century India.
Friederike Weis (PhD, Freie Universität Berlin, 2005), is a specialist in Islamic albums and manuscripts. She has published extensively on cross-cultural exchanges in Persian and Indian art history and co-edited The Diez Albums: Contexts and Contents (Brill, 2016).
c o n t e n t s
1 Introduction: Problems and Challenges in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Indian Albums — Friederike Weis
Part 1 | Albums Commissioned by Mughal Elites: Contents and Compilation Strategies
2 The Indian Paintings from the Collection of Archibald Swinton, Formerly at Kimmerghame House, Berwickshire — J.P. Losty, Malini Roy, and Friederike Weis
3 Obvious Narratives and Hidden Messages in the Large Clive Album — Axel Langer
4 Two Late Mughal Albums in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle: Further Evidence for the Collections of Nawab Asaf al-Dawla — Emily Hannam
5 Mughal Art on Its own Terms: Reflections on an Album Folio — Laura E. Parodi
Part 2 | Albums of Foreign Elites: Changes and Challenges
6 Three Albums of Seigneur Gentil and Colonel Polier: Cultural Exchanges in Late Eighteenth-Century India — Susan Stronge
7 To Be Viewed from Both Ends: The Surviving Polier Albums —Friederike Weis
8 A Newly Identified Muraqqaʿ Assembled for Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier in the British Museum — Malini Roy and Jake Benson
9 Like a Garden Bedecked: Floral Margins in the Muraqqaʿs of Antoine Polier — Isabelle Imbert
Part 3 | Masters of Calligraphy and Painting: Between Historicism and Innovation
10 The Earlier Calligraphies in the Berlin Albums: Reflections on their Origins and Purpose in a Muraqqaʿ — Claus-Peter Haase
11 Polier’s Posterior Album: Rylands Persian MS 10 — Jake Benson
12 Expanding the Canon: Mir Muhammad Husayn ʿAta Khan and the Polier Albums — Will Kwiatkowski
13 Mihr Chand’s Copies and Adaptations of Earlier Mughal Paintings — John Seyller
Part 4 | Spaces and Gazes: Reading Imagined Worlds
14 The Spaces in Between: A Yogini of Lucknow for Antoine Polier —Molly Aitken
15 Building Worlds: Reading Spatiality, Power, and Gaze in Eighteenth-Century Paintings — Parul Singh
Appendix | Inscriptions and Seal Impressions in the Berlin Albums I. 4589, I. 4591, I. 4592, I 5001, and I. 4600 — Will Kwiatkowski and Friederike Weis
Credits
Bibliography
Indexes
Online Conversation | Architecture’s Archive, 1400–1800
From the Society of Architectural Historians:
Architecture’s Archive: Paperwork in Early Modern Practice, 1400–1800
With Christine Casey, Farshid Emami, Eleonora Pistis, and Saundra Weddle
Online, An SAH Connects Session, Friday, 20 March 2026, noon EST
From drawings and invoices to maps, inventories, and account books, early modern architectural practice abounded with paperwork. These documents emerged from a historical moment beginning around 1400 that witnessed the rise of new technologies and regimes for the management of information. While essential to historical scholarship, documents have long been taken for granted merely as sources to mine for data. Towards a fuller view of paperwork, this SAH Connects event invites a reframing of documents as spatial objects whose form, use, content, and production merit critical consideration.
Documents call attention to questions of process but also, more generally, the material realities of building in the early modern world. Panelists will speak about the historiographic and methodological stakes of a document that has animated their scholarship. Among the questions to be considered are: What do documents clarify or obscure? How did documents serve institutions, particular those that oversaw building activity? How did architectural documents circulate? What new possibilities do documents provide for uncovering non-elite figures or extra-architectural actors who shaped the built environment? Who is absent from documents? What temporal, material, or scalar slippages exist between documents and buildings? How do we wrestle with fragmentary or compromised documentary evidence? While anchored in the early modern world, this conversation will invite broad critical reflection on the documentary sources that underpin architectural history.
With the goal of highlighting new work, we have invited authors whose recently published books engage with a variety of building cultures at a range of scales from across the early modern world. Speaking from their books, each participant will discuss a single historical document that was central to their analysis of the actors, systems and processes that shaped the built environment.
• Christine Casey, Trinity College Dublin | Architecture and Artifice: The Crafted Surface in Eighteenth-Century Building Practice (Yale University Press, 2025).
• Farshid Emami, Rice University | Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State Press, 2024).
• Eleonora Pistis, Columbia University | Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (Harvey Miller, 2024).
• Saundra Weddle, Drury University | The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Penn State Press, 2026).
The session will be moderated by Matthew Gin (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Ann C. Huppert (University of Washington), and Kristin Triff (Trinity College).
Registration is available here»
SAH CONNECTS, a year-round series of virtual programs related to the history of the built environment, provides a platform for the SAH community to collaborate, share their work, engage in timely discussions, and reach worldwide audiences.
Exhibition | The Myth of Rembrandt in the Century of Fragonard
Now on view at the MBA Draguignan:
Le Phare Rembrandt: Le Mythe d’un Peintre au Siècle de Fragonard
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Draguignan, 15 November 2025 — 15 March 2026
Rembrandt Workshop (possibly Carel Fabritius), A Girl with a Broom, 1646–51 (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1937.1.74).
Le Phare Rembrandt invite le public à plonger dans l’univers de Rembrandt à un moment crucial : un demi-siècle après sa mort (en 1669), son nom devient un véritable mythe en Europe, et particulièrement à Paris, devenue capitale du marché de l’art. De plus en plus de tableaux du maître hollandais y sont importés, pour ensuite être exportés vers l’Allemagne, l’Angleterre ou la Russie.
L’originalité de l’exposition réside dans sa volonté de faire découvrir comment l’art de Rembrandt a été perçu au XVIIIe siècle en France, où ses œuvres influencent profondément les artistes et collectionneurs. À travers une sélection de cinquante œuvres visibles à l’époque, dont des peintures attribuées à Rembrandt ou réalisées par des artistes ayant étudié ou collectionné son travail tels que Chardin ou Fragonard, l’exposition explore les thèmes de l’imitation et de l’appropriation de son art.
Le Phare Rembrandt: Le Mythe d’un Peintre au Siècle de Fragonard (Paris: In Fine éditions d’art, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-2382032343, €35. With contributions by Jaco Rutgers, Jacqueline Carroy, Isabelle Arnulf, Jean-Pierre Maranci, Ivan Alexandre, Dominique Païni, Érick Desmazières, Gaëtane Maës, Anna Tummers, Jan Blanc, Quentin Buvelot, Dominique Brême, Ariane James-Sarazin, Yohan Rimaud, Laura Bossi.
From the CODART announcement:
This ambitious exhibition explores the undiminished aura of the Dutch master, focusing on two fascinating portraits seized during revolutionary confiscations and attributed to Rembrandt in the eighteenth century. . . .
Exhibition | Dealing in Splendour
Willem van Haecht, The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, 1628, oil on panel
(Antwerp, Rubenshuis, City of Antwerp Collection, Rubenshuis)
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Now on view in Vienna at the Liechtenstein Garden Palace:
Dealing in Splendour: A History of the European Art Market
Noble Begierden: Eine Geschichte des Europäischen Kunstmarkts
Gartenpalais Liechtenstein, Wien, 30 January — 6 April 2026
Curated by Stephan Koja, Christian Huemer, and Yvonne Wagner
With a history reaching back over four centuries, the Collections of the Princely Family of Liechtenstein are part of a long tradition of collecting that spans many generations. Essential to this at all times has been a policy of active collecting. In the past as in the present, new acquisitions shaped the appearance of the galleries. The art collection has thus been formed not only by the personal tastes of the various princes but also by the art market with its changing sales strategies, trend-setting individuals, and economic factors.
Against this background, Dealing in Splendor addresses the fascinating history of the European art market. Spotlights will be shone on structures, centres of innovation, influential personalities, and marketing methods from antiquity to the nineteenth century, revealing that many of these methods have changed very little up to the present day. Auctions were held in ancient imperial Rome. In Antwerp, art trade fairs were already attracting an international clientele in the sixteenth century, and the first catalogues raisonnés of Old Masters were compiled by art dealers in the eighteenth century.
These and other enthralling insights into the history of the European art market await you at the Liechtenstein Garden Palace in Vienna, with major works from the Princely Collections appearing alongside sensational loans in the largest annual temporary exhibition we have mounted to date. The extensive catalogue will boast essays by leading experts in the field of art market scholarship, bringing interdisciplinary approaches to bear in a volume that will provide a comprehensive overview of the subject.
Art as a Commodity: The Flourishing Art Market of Antiquity
Even in ancient Roman times, there was a flourishing art market, sustained by a network of collectors, connoisseurs, buyers, and agents. Early forms of serial production and market adjustment were already developed and continued to have an effect into the early modern age. The great demand for classical Greek works led to a burgeoning production of replicas, variations, and reduced-size copies, which Roman collectors acquired specifically for particular rooms and functions. Workshops all over the Mediterranean specialized in reproducing famous representational formulas in order to provide objects in various price ranges—from monumental copies in marble to small bronze statuettes.
International Trade: Forchondt
Prince Karl Eusebius I von Liechtenstein had a particularly long and intensive connection with the Forchondt family of dealers. They had an international presence with branches in Antwerp, Vienna, and the Iberian Peninsula, shipping works of art and furniture in all price categories to destinations as far afield as South America. Karl Eusebius’s son, Prince Johann Adam Andreas I, was likewise a client of the Forchondts, from whom he purchased many of his most important acquisitions, including paintings by Rubens and van Dyck. This business relationship with the Forchondts, holders of an imperial privilege as jewellers to the imperial court, lasted until the reign of Prince Joseph Wenzel I.
Serial Production in the Fifteenth Century
In the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century, the emergent ruling families, foremost among them the Medici in Florence, made systematic use of art patronage. By erecting imposing monuments, they shaped the appearance of the cities and demonstrated their power. They commissioned chapels and altarpieces, and alongside the Church were the most prominent and important patrons of the era. However, there were also classes of customers with smaller purses. The prices for works of art depended on the materials used, the time and labour involved, and the prestige of the masters who had made them. The workshops produced particularly popular motifs in various price ranges, some being offered for sale as ready-made works, without having been previously commissioned. Outlay and labour were reduced by turning out multiple copies of a work with just minor variations, or by serial production in suitable materials such as terracotta.
The Brueg(h)el Dynasty
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was one of the most important Flemish painters of his time. His compositions were so successful that copies of his works were made in his workshop and in those of his descendants. A whole dynasty of painters and numerous imitators drew on his works even after his death, continuing to sell them, often with only minimal changes, at a healthy profit.
The Beginnings of Large-scale Production in the Low Countries
One notable feature of Holland’s seventeenth-century Golden Age was the unusual wealth of art works, particularly paintings, in the homes of its burghers. In order to keep up with demand artists developed methods that shortened their working hours and increased their productivity. To achieve this, they specialized in particular genres, one such practitioner being Jan van Goyen, whose reduced palette both limited his material expenses and became his hallmark. His landscapes earned him international acclaim. Jan Davidsz. de Heem was famous for his opulent still lifes. Rachel Ruysch made a successful speciality of the flower still life.
Souvenirs from the Grand Tour
Baccio Cappelli and Girolamo Ticciati, Galleria dei Lavori, Badminton Cabinet, 1720–32 (Collection of the Princely Family of Liechtenstein, acquired in 2004 by Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein).
In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, journeys taking in the centres of European culture were an important part of the education of scions of the nobility. In British society in particular, the so-called Grand Tour was regarded as the height of fashion, with the result that in the countries visited, in particular Italy with Rome as its cultural centre, a veritable industry grew up to cater for these young tourists, with accommodation, cicerones, and guidebooks to the sights—and souvenirs of the sights to take back home. The most popular of these were the views known as capricci—compositions of various statues, ruins, and edifices that in reality stood nowhere near one another. In Rome, the most successful artists in this field were Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Giovanni Paolo Pannini. It was regarded as especially prestigious to have one’s likeness painted by a well-known portraitist, or best of all by Pompeo Girolamo Batoni. The phenomenon of the souvenir was possibly carried to its greatest extreme by Henry Somerset, third duke of Beaufort, who commissioned the monumental Badminton Cabinet from the grand-ducal Galleria dei Lavori in Florence.
From Dilettante to Connoisseur: Edme-François Gersaint
During the eighteenth century, Paris and London became centres of innovation in the art market. There the auction scene was given fresh impetus with the arrival of influential experts and auctioneers, elegant auction rooms, printed sale catalogues, and exhibitions that became veritable social spectacles. A pioneering role in these developments was played by Edme-François Gersaint, who blazed new trails with his shop on the Pont Notre Dame, his auctions, and his detailed auction catalogues.
Art Historians, Expertise, and the Establishment of Canons of Works
Attributions and provenances—which had assumed increasing importance over the previous century—now lay in the hands of scholars, whose opinions as proclaimed in catalogues raisonnés influenced contemporary tastes and above all the price of works included in these publications. The value of the works increased or decreased depending on their purported authenticity (or lack of it). In many cases the criteria for authenticity were necessarily limited to stylistic characteristics. These were duly contested, in scholarly circles and elsewhere. This can be seen particularly clearly in the case of Rembrandt, whose body of works expanded or contracted depending on the scholar surveying his oeuvre.
Art for the Masses: The Revolutionary Art Market of the Nineteenth Century
In the nineteenth century the art market was revolutionized. New forms of presentation and serial production and the reproduction of images in huge numbers made art into a mass medium that circulated all over the world. Firms such as Goupil et Cie professionalized these mechanisms by systematically providing reproductions of famous works of art for various categories of buyer. At the same time dealers such as Charles Sedelmeyer established the phenomenon of the art spectacle, which—accompanied by deliberately dramatic presentation, advertising, and skilful use of media—attracted huge crowds. Thus, in the nineteenth century various innovative strategies directed at a wide sector of the public came together to shape the art market of the time, forming the basis for the present-day art business.
Curators
Stephan Koja, Director of the Princely Collections of Liechtenstein
Christian Huemer, Head of the Belvedere Research Center
Yvonne Wagner, Chief Curator of the Princely Collections of Liechtenstein
Christian Huemer and Stephan Koja, eds., Dealing in Splendour: A History of the European Art Market (Berlin: De Gruyter Brill, 2026), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-3689241063 (German) / ISBN: 978-3689241070 (English), €59 / $65.
New Book | Noble Beasts
From Yale UP:
Amy Freund, Noble Beasts: Hunters and Hunted in Eighteenth-Century French Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-0300282702, $75.
How visual fantasies of violence, animality, and political agency offered an alternative image of masculinity during the Enlightenment.
Centering on animal bodies and assertive masculinity, the visual strategies of hunting art may appear incongruent with our understanding of Rococo aesthetics and the early Enlightenment. But these themes, embraced with enthusiasm by artists and patrons, inspired artworks in every genre and medium in eighteenth-century France. As the country expanded its colonial empire, the absolute monarchy existed in tension with ambitious elites, and the Enlightenment eroded old certainties about selfhood and society, hunting art provided a visual language of personal and national sovereignty written with bodies of men and animals. Amy Freund revises our received notions of eighteenth-century French art and culture, confronting us with a visual culture of animality, violence, and death: a Rococo of dogs and guns.
Noble Beasts highlights the work of François Desportes, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and others who, operating from the heart of institutions such as the Royal Academy and the Gobelins manufactory, produced an astonishing volume of highly accomplished work. The book draws on the critical frameworks of human-animal studies and on Enlightenment philosophical debates to explore how and why hunting art’s aesthetic and political claims blurred the lines between human and animal.
Amy Freund is associate professor and Kleinheinz Family Endowment for the Arts and Education Endowed Chair in Art History at Southern Methodist University.
New Book | The Anatomy of the Horse
The paperback edition appeared in 2024; the hardback is scheduled for publication in April:
George Stubbs, The Anatomy of the Horse (London: Pallas Athene, 2024), 76 pages, ISBN: 978-1843682479 (paperback) / ISBN: 978-1843682486 (hardback), $30. With essays by Constance-Anne Parker and Oliver Kase.
George Stubbs (1724–1806) was one of the most original artists Britain has produced, and it is easy to forget how much his success was based on rigorous scientific observation. In 1756 he rented a farmhouse where he erected scaffolding to hold the cadavers of horses as he dissected and drew. After eighteen months, Stubbs produced the drawings for The Anatomy of the Horse, which he later etched. The result was sensational. Scientists from all over Europe sent their congratulations, amazed at the perfection of the work. The Anatomy remained a textbook for artists and scientists for over a century, and its strange, spare beauty continues to fascinate. This edition is taken from the 1853 printing, the last to use Stubbs’s original plates. The artist’s full commentary is included for the veterinarially minded. Essays by Constance-Anne Parker and Oliver Kase place Stubbs’s work in the context of his life and times, and of 18th-century medical science.
Constance-Anne Parker (1921–2016), a distinguished sculptor and painter, was the Librarian and Archivist of the Royal Academy, where she also lectured. She was the author of Mr. Stubbs, the Horse Painter (1971) and George Stubbs: Art, Animals, and Anatomy (1984).
Oliver Kase is Director of Collections at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich where he oversees the Max Beckmann Archive. In 2011–12 he was assistant curator for The Art of Enlightenment, a major international exhibition organized between Germany and China. He lectures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and is the author of numerous publications on the art of the 18th to 21st centuries.
New Book | Animal Modernities
From Leuven University Press, with distribution by Cornell UP:
Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein, eds., Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2025), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-9462704589, €60 / $69.
Animal Modernities challenges the traditional human-centered focus of art history and explores how modern art, visual culture, and modernity itself emerge from relationships between humans and animals. The essays in this volume reveal histories of exploitation and domination, as well as confusion and ambivalence, and occasional moments when affinities between humans and animals have been embraced, and animal agency asserted and acknowledged. The authors collectively point to the importance of thinking about animal–human relations for addressing today’s ecological challenges.
This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more here.
Daniel Harkett is associate professor in the Department of Art at Colby College.
Katie Hornstein is professor in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College.
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction — Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein
1 Rethinking the Animal in Art History: Charles Darwin, Karl Woermann, and the Bowerbird — Nina Amstutz
2 Photography Needs Animals: Materials, Processes, and the Colonial Supply Chains of Gelatine Dry Plates — Rosalind Hayes
3 Shooting Elephants and the Performance of Imperial Power — Niharika Dinkar
4 A Tale of Two Serpents — Laura Nüffer
5 Mourning across Species: Ivory Miniatures and Elephant Death — Katherine Fein
6 War Horses, Commemoration, and Mutilation: Copenhagen (1808–1836) and Marengo (ca. 1793–1831) — Katie Hornstein
7 To Fool a Fish: Exploring Interspecies Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Fly-Fishing — Emily Gephart
8 Feline Creativity on the Eve of Modernity — Amy Freund and Michael Yonan
9 The Bird that Cuts the Airy Way: William Blake’s Avian Modernity — Alysia Garrison
10 Bovine Ubiquity — Maura Coughlin
11 Against the Visual: Seals, Indigenous-Settler Relations, and the Material Culture of Sealing since 1697 — Catherine Girard
12 Mr. Crowley’s Signature: Race, Resistance, and the Queerness of American Animal Portraiture — Annie Ronan
13 Memory and Materiality: Commemorating Canine Companions in Eighteenth-Century Britain — Sean Weiss
14 Herd Mentality: Animal Relationality and QueerKinships in the Life and Work of Anton Braith — Stephanie Triplett
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
New Book | Pictures of Cotton in Eighteenth-Century China
From Routledge:
Roslyn Lee Hammers, Pictures of Cotton in Eighteenth-Century China (New York: Routledge, 2025), 170 pages, ISBN: 978-1032888019, $160. Also available as an ebook.
Pictures of Cotton in Eighteenth-Century China narrates cotton’s journey from a little understand material to a cherished commodity ennobled by associations with the classical heritage of China. In the 12th century, cotton, an imported crop, was plucked from the fields and entered the margins of agricultural treatises. The material was eventually ‘acknowledged’ as cotton, an object distinct from silk, worthy of representation. By the late 16th century, representations of the plant and of the labor used to process it were incorporated into agricultural publications. During the 18th century, cotton imagery and discussions were situated in imperial encyclopaedias, further consolidating its classical legacy. Governor-general Fang Guancheng (1696/8–1768) deemed cotton a worthy subject for ambitious painting. In 1765, he designed the Pictures of Cotton, a series of sixteen paintings complete with commentary that delineated the processes of growing cotton and manufacturing fabric. He presented the Pictures of Cotton to the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796) who inscribed his imperial verse on each scene. Knowledge about the fiber became a means to collaborate at the highest level of the court and bureaucracy. Fang replicated the series, complete with imperial verses into carved stone to enable replication. The Jiaqing emperor (r.1796–1821) likewise published the series as woodblock prints. Upon domestication, cotton advanced political legitimacy, becoming a commodity that attained canonical status. Cotton was represented in a scopic regime formulated by the Qing imperium, and in the process, the Imperially Inscribed Pictures of Cotton became the authoritative vision of cotton.
Roslyn Lee Hammers is Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong.
c o n t e n t s
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Coming to Terms with Cotton in Chinese Visual Culture and Literature
1 Bringing Cotton into the Fold of Ming-dynasty Visual Culture
2 The Qing Imperium and the Classified Production of Knowledge
3 Presenting the Pictures of Cotton
4 Recasting the Qing Reign: Imagining Cotton in a Scopic Regime
Coda to the Imperially Inscribed Pictures of Cotton: Speculations on Visualizing Cotton
Appendix: Texts and Poems of the Yu Ti Mian Hua Tu (Imperially Inscribed Pictures of Cotton) and of the Qin Ding Shou Yi Guang Xun (Imperially Approved Magisterial Guidance on the Bestowing of Clothes)
Selected Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin
The exhibition recently closed in Dublin with the catalogue available from Churchill House Press and Centro Di:
Artists and Pirates: Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin
Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, 13 November 2025 — 8 January 2026
The Driehaus Museum, Chicago, 15 May — 13 September 2026
Curated by Silvia Beltrametti and William Laffan
Single-sheet satire emerged in the louche milieu where politics and high society of late Georgian London intersected. Artists such as James Gillray (1756–1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) combined devastating wit with graphic brilliance to lampoon the great and the good, the vain and the vacuous, creating timeless images inspired by moments of fleeting controversy or scandal. Availing of a legal loophole under which copyright law protecting images did not apply to Ireland, a business of pirating caricatures by London satirists also flourished in Regency Dublin. The work of these Dublin plagiarists—which though derivative is paradoxically inventive and vibrant—as well as prints of Irish subject matter by English caricaturists such as Gillray, is the subject of this exhibition and the accompanying publication. Caricature dealt with the great political issues of the day, including religious toleration and contested concepts of liberty, but was also a vehicle to explore less elevated and often risqué (sometimes scatological or pornographic) subject matter. Single-sheet satire, Georgian England’s greatest artistic innovation, and its smaller but still dynamic offshoot in early nineteenth-century Dublin offer a fascinating—and very funny—chronicle of the human comedy.
Silvia Beltrametti and William Laffan, eds., Artists and Pirates: Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin (Fenit, County Kerry: Churchill House Press with Centro Di, 2025), 184 pages, ISBN: 978-8870385939, €30. With additional contributions by James Kelly (Professor of History at Dublin City University), David Fleming (Professor of History at the University of Limerick), and Ben Casey (PhD candidate, University of Maynooth).
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Note (added 15 February 2026) — The original posting omitted the Chicago venue, though a note suggested the possibility, with reference to the Centro Di website. At The Driehaus Museum, the show will be titled Ink and Outrage: 18th-Century Satirical Prints in London and Dublin.
New Book | Let the Oppressed Go Free
From Penn Press:
Nicholas Wood, Let the Oppressed Go Free: Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1512828320, $45.
Tenacious activism by Quakers, African Americans, and antislavery evangelicals made antislavery central to the American Revolution.
In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view that slavery was a sinful form of oppression that would provoke God’s wrath against slaveholding societies. These principles were first advanced by a handful of Quakers and Puritans as early as the 1600s, but they did not become widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century. Quakers embraced antislavery theology during the French and Indian War, which they interpreted as divine chastisement for the sin of colonial slavery. Citing the prophet Isaiah, they pledged to please the Lord by letting the oppressed go free.
Antislavery theology became even more prominent during the American Revolution. When Parliament provoked an imperial crisis in the 1760s, abolitionists argued it was further evidence of God’s anger over slavery. The outbreak of war in 1775 made these arguments increasingly persuasive. Let the Oppressed Go Free demonstrates that antislavery activism during the Revolution by Quakers, African Americans, and evangelical patriots was more sophisticated and influential than historians have recognized. The northern states that began abolishing slavery during the Revolution did so in response to tenacious agitation and generally described their actions as designed to earn God’s blessing.
Let the Oppressed Go Free challenges many common assumptions about abolitionism and the American Revolution. Wood demonstrates that religion remained central to abolitionism rather than being displaced by ‘secular’ arguments about natural rights. And whereas some have argued that the Revolutionary War hindered antislavery progress and fueled racism, Wood shows that the war accelerated reform.
Nicholas P. Wood is Associate Professor of History at Spring Hill College.
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