Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Julie Wertz, Turkey Red (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-1350216518 (hardcover), $110 / ISBN: 978-1350216501 (paperback), $37.

This multi-disciplinary study examines the exceptional Turkey red textile dyeing process and product. Prized for its brilliant colour and durability, yet notoriously difficult to produce, the textile was consumed locally and exported around the world. Considered one of the first instances of industrial espionage, the expansion of the Turkey red industry is closely linked to the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of a new global economy. Significant technological advances in chemistry and dyeing were motivated by the demands of Turkey red dyers and printers, who were located primarily in the west of Scotland, the north of England, and around Mulhouse, Switzerland.

This book explores the arc of the Turkey red industry, the evolution of the process through key producers and technical developments, the complicated printing process, and finishes with an examination of significant Turkey red collections and a selection of object case studies. The chemistry of the process is described in an accessible, contextual manner, highlighting the significance of the distinctive technique that yielded the best red attainable on cotton. Drawing on both historical and contemporary study, Turkey Red presents significant new research on the material characterisation of this fascinating, eye-catching textile, and offers an in-depth historical example of the global effect of textile consumption.

Julie Wertz is Beal Family Postgraduate Fellow in Conservation Science at Harvard Art Museums.

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on the Text

Introduction

1  The Most Brilliant Color Dyed on Cotton
1.1  Defining Turkey red
1.1.1  A reputable red
1.1.2  A complicated process
1.2  Identifying Turkey red
1.3  Material record
1.4  Conclusion

2  Global Exchanges and Anthraquinone Dyes
2.1 The origin and dissemination of Turkey red
2.1.1 India
2.1.2 Indonesia
2.1.3 The Levant and the Ottoman Empire
2.1.4 The Hapsburg Empire
2.1.5 France
2.1.6 Britain
2.2 Madder
2.2.1 The cultivation of madder
2.2.2 Madder composition and derivatives
2.3 Synthetic alizarin
2.3.1 Understanding alizarin
2.3.2 Alizarin synthesis and patent disputes
2.3.3 Synthetic alizarin products
2.4 Conclusion

3  The Dyeing, Chemistry, and Technological Advances of Turkey Red
3.1 Oiling
3.1.1 Oiling in the old process
3.1.2 The chemistry of oiled cotton
3.1.3 Ruminant dung and tannins
3.1.4 Turkey red oil and the new process
3.1.5 The Steiner process
3.2 Aluminium
3.2.1 Precipitated aluminium soaps
3.3 Dyeing
3.3.1 Color complexes in Turkey red
3.3.2 Blood and albumen
3.4 Clearing
3.5 Conclusions

4  Printed Turkey Red
4.1 Textile printing methods
4.2 Discharge printing
4.2.1 Lead plate press discharging
4.2.2 Acid paste discharging
4.3 A bright palette
4.3.1 Black, blue, yellow, and green
4.3.2 Identifying colorants on Turkey red prints
4.4 Design
4.4.1 Industrial design and production
4.4.2 European design for the export market
4.5 Conclusions

5  Turkey Red in the Industrial Revolution
5.1 Turkey red industry by country
5.1.1 France
5.1.2 England
5.1.3 Scotland
5.1.4 Switzerland
5.1.5 The Netherlands
5.1.6 North America
5.1.7 Other locations
5.2 Working conditions and labor
5.3 Colonialism
5.4 Conclusions

6  Trade, Use, and Object Record
6.1 Documentary evidence of availability
6.2 How Turkey red was used
6.2.1 Bandanas
6.2.2 Domestic textiles, quilts and bedcovers
6.2.3 Accessories, garments, and tools
6.3 Conclusions

Conclusions

Glossary
References
Index

From Manchester UP (and currently discounted dramatically at Amazon). . . .

Marika Takanishi Knowles, Pierrot and His World: Art, Theatricality, and the Marketplace in France, 1697–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 264 pages, ISBN: 9781526174093, £85 / $130.

Pierrot, a theatrical stock character known by his distinctive costume of loose white tunic and trousers, is a ubiquitous figure in French art and culture. This richly illustrated book offers an account of Pierrot’s recurrence in painting, printmaking, photography and film, tracing this distinctive type from the art of Antoine Watteau to the cinema of Occupied France. As a visual type, Pierrot thrives at the intersection of theatrical and marketplace practices. From Watteau’s Pierrot (c. 1720) and Édouard Manet’s The Old Musician (1862) to Nadar and Adrien Tournachon’s Pierrot the Photographer (1855) and the landmark film Children of Paradise (1945), Pierrot has given artists a medium through which to explore the marketplace as a form for both social life and creative practice. Simultaneously a human figure and a theatrical mask, Pierrot elicits artistic reflection on the representation of personality in the marketplace.

Marika Takanishi Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Antoine Watteau and the fête marchande
2  Pierrot-co-co
3  New Paris, Old Pierrot (New Pierrot, Old Paris)
4  Nadar Charlatan
5  Old Clothes and the Dreams of the Artist
Conclusion

Index

Part of the Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series from Cambridge UP (digital downloads are available for free until 25 January!).

Laura Engel, The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 75 pages, ISBN: 978-1009486811 (hardcover), $65 / ISBN: 978-1108977906 (paperback), $22. Also available digitally through Cambridge UP.

The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities considers how eighteenth-century visual materials across genres, such as prints, portraits, sculpture, costumes, and accessories, contribute to the understanding of the nuances of female celebrity, fame, notoriety, and scandal. The ‘art’ of the actress refers to the actress represented in visual art, as well as to the actress’s labor and skill in making art ephemerally through performance and tangibly through objects. Moving away from the concept of the ‘actress as muse,’ a relationship that privileges the role of the male artist over the inspirational subject, Laura Engel focuses instead on the varied significance of representations, reproductions, and re-animations of actresses, female artists, and theatrical women across media. Via case studies, this Element explores how the archive charts both a familiar and at times unknown narrative about female performers of the past.

Laura Engel is a Professor in the English Department at Duquesne University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and theater. She is the author of Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 (2019); Austen, Actresses, and Accessories: Much Ado about Muffs (2015); and Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011). She also co-edited, with Elaine McGirr, Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830 (2014).

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: The Art of the Actress in the Eighteenth Century
1  The Paradox of Pearls
2  The Actress as Artist and the Artist as Actress: Anne Damer and Angelica Kauffman
3  Mary Anne’s Muff: Actresses and Satire
4  Epilogue: Unfinished Business: Elizabeth Inchbald, Lady Cahir, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and the Aftermath of the Art of the Actress

References

The English description of the book from CEEH:

Gloria Martínez Leiva, with a foreword by Javier Jordán de Urríes, Mariana de Neoburgo, última reina de los Austrias: Vida y legado artístico (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2022), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-8418760082, €50.

Maria Anna of Neuburg (1667−1740), the second wife of Charles II (Carlos II), was queen consort of Spain for ten years and queen dowager for another forty. However, she is a little-known figure to whom historians have barely paid attention. This study takes a look at her life, her image and her artistic patronage, which was not unaffected by the heightened political tension that characterised European history around 1700 and resulted in a change of dynasty in Spain.

Against this turbulent international backdrop, the survey of the queen’s life explores in depth important aspects of court art such as the decoration of her apartments in the royal palaces and sites in which she lived, drawing on documents held in Spanish and foreign archives. It also examines the residences she occupied as a widow in Toledo and Guadalajara, as well as her homes and palaces in Bayonne during her thirty-two-year exile. The approximately one hundred known portraits of her help both unravel her personality and trace the artistic, stylistic and conceptual evolution of the genre over more than half a century, showing how her image—first as queen consort and subsequently as queen dowager—was shaped and publicly projected.

A comprehensive overview of the works of art she commissioned—especially from Luca Giordano—or owned, the portrait gallery she assembled, the paintings she sent to her brother the elector palatine, her richly stocked library and her exceptional founding of the chapel of Loreto in Chiusa (Italy) sheds new light on the patronage of Maria Anna, who is finally studied in her full dimension as the last Habsburg queen.

Gloria Martínez Leiva, who received a PhD in art history for her thesis on Maria Anna of Neuburg, has focused her research on the Spanish royal collections, on which she has published many articles. She is co-author of Quadros y otras cosas que tiene Su Magestad Felipe IV en este Alcázar de Madrid. Año de 1636 (2007) and El inventario del Alcázar de Madrid de 1666. Felipe IV y su colección artística (2015). She has pursued a career in cultural institutions such as Patrimonio Nacional and the Fundación Universitaria Española. She is director of the platform InvestigArt.

Largely a 17th-century story, but also entirely relevant to the 18th century with good 18th-century examples—and to my thinking, a really smart, helpful book for thinking about portraits of any sort (and incredibly well-written). –CH

From The Pennsylvania State UP:

Adam Jasienski, Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-0271093444, $120.

In Praying to Portraits, art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait.

Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to ‘true’ effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual’s relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies.

Highly original and persuasive, Praying to Portraits profoundly revises our understanding of early modern portraiture. It will intrigue art historians across geographical boundaries, and it will also find an audience among scholars of architecture, history, and religion in the early modern Hispanic world.

Adam Jasienski is Associate Professor of Art History in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Portraits and Sacred Images in Early Modernity
1  Sacrificing the Self
2  True Portraits, Lying Portraits
3  Repainting Portraits
4  Portraits as Sacred Images
Conclusion: The Life Histories of Sacred Portraits and the History of Sacred Portraiture

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Éditions Faton:

Christophe Huchet de Quénetain and Moana Weil-Curiel, Étienne Barthélemy Garnier (1765–1849): De l’Académie royale à l’Institut de France (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2023), 544 pages, ISBN: 978-2878443462, €74.

Étienne-Barthélemy Garnier, dont on connaît parfois la monumentale Consternation de Priam, ou certains très beaux dessins, est trop souvent considéré comme un élève de David. Dans une période complexe sur les plans politique et artistique, il saura tracer un chemin qui va le mener des Prix de l’Académie royale aux cimaises du Salon, des décors officiels aux plus hautes fonctions de l’Institut, dont il deviendra le doyen, sans cesser de plaire à une clientèle privée. Dans ce livre, le lecteur comme l’amateur vont découvrir un bel artiste qui perpétue dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle les préceptes reçus de ses maîtres (Durameau, Doyen et Vien), tous pleinement inscrits dans le XVIIIe siècle. Sa volonté de privilégier, quelle que soit la technique, la lisibilité de ses compositions face au lyrisme ou à l’emphase de certains confrères et la précocité (son Hippolyte quittant Phèdre, son portrait de Napoléon dans son cabinet de travail), sinon l’originalité (sa Charité romaine féminisée…), de certains sujets font assurément partie de ses qualités et nous font regretter que ses projets pour la tapisserie destinés à la manufacture des Gobelins n’aient pu être menés à bien.

Christophe Huchet de Quénetain est historien d’art et antiquaire. Docteur en histoire de l’art de l’université de Paris-IV Sorbonne, auditeur de The Royal Collection Studies et de l’Institut des hautes études de défense nationale, ancien élève de l’École pratique des hautes études, de l’École du Louvre et de l’École Boulle-Greta, il est qualifié aux fonctions de maître de conférences des universités. Il s’intéresse aux arts décoratifs et aux collectionneurs des XVIIe, XVIIIeet XIXe siècles.

Docteur en histoire de l’art de l’École pratique des hautes études, les principaux domaines de recherche de Moana Weil-Curiel sont la peinture et le décor en France et en Italie du XVIIe au XVIIIe siècle, ainsi que l’histoire du goût.

From The Pennsylvania State UP:

Robin Thomas, Palaces of Reason: The Royal Residences of Bourbon Naples (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2024), 212 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0271095219, $110.

Palaces of Reason traces the fascinating history of three royal residences built outside of Naples in the eighteenth century at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta. Commissioned by King Charles of Bourbon and Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony, who reigned over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, these buildings were far more than residences for the monarchs. They were designed to help reshape the economic and cultural fortunes of the realm.

The palaces at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta are among the most complex architectural commissions of the eighteenth century. Considering the architecture and decoration of these complexes within their political, cultural, and economic contexts, Robin L. Thomas argues that Enlightenment ideas spurred their construction and influenced their decoration. These modes of thinking saw the palaces as more than just centers of royal pleasure or muscular assertions of the crown’s power. Indeed, writers and royal ministers viewed them as active agents in improving the cultural, political, social, and economic health of the kingdom. By casting the palaces within this narrative, Thomas counters the assumption that they were imitations of Versailles and the swan songs of absolutism, while expanding our understanding of the eighteenth-century European palace more broadly.

Robin L. Thomas is Professor of Art History and Architecture at Penn State University. He is the author of Architecture and Statecraft: Charles of Bourbon’s Naples, 1734–1759, also published by Penn State University Press.