Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Pam Inder, Shirts, Shifts, and Sheets of Fine Linen: British Seamstresses from the 17th to the 19th Centuries (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-1350252967, $115.

In the 17th and early 18th centuries, seamstressing was a trade for women who worked in linen and cotton, making men’s shirts, women’s chemises, underwear and baby linen; some of these seamstresses were consummate craftswomen, able to sew with stitches almost invisible to the naked eye. Few examples of their work survive, but those that do attest to their skill. However, as the ready-to-wear trade expanded in the 18th century, women who assembled these garments were also known as seamstresses, and by the 1840s, most seamstresses were outworkers for companies or entrepreneurs, paid unbelievably low rates per dozen for the garments they produced, notorious examples of downtrodden, exploited womenfolk. Drawing on a range of original and hitherto unpublished sources, including business diaries, letters, and bills, Shirts, Shifts, and Sheets of Fine Linen explores the seamstress’s change of status in the 19th century and the reasons for it, hinting at the resurgence of the trade today given so few women today are skilled at repairing and altering clothes. Illustrated with 60 images, the book brings seamstresses into focus as real people, granting new insights into working class life in 18th- and 19th-century Britain.

Pam Inder is an independent scholar and was formerly Curator of Applied Arts at first Exeter and then Leicestershire Museums (specialising in dress history), after being an Assistant Curator at Birmingham City Art Gallery. She has also taught at Staffordshire and De Montfort Universities.

c o n t e n t s

List of Plates
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  ‘The Art and Mystery of Simistry’ in the 17th and 18th Centuries
2  ‘Well-handed Needlewomen’
3  The Development of Ready-to-Wear
4  ‘Linnen Drapery at Reasonable Rates’, 1720–1820
5  Slops and Slop-sellers
6  ‘Seam and Gusset and Band’
7  ‘Society Came and Shuddered’
8  Bespoke Needlework
9  Real Lives
10  The Seamstress in Art and Literature
Conclusion

From Bloomsbury:

Elisabeth Gernerd, The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear, and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-1350293380 (hardback), £85 ($115) / ISBN: 978-1350293373 (paperback), £28 ($38).

From rumps and stays to muffs and handkerchiefs, underwear and accessories were critical components of the 18th-century woman’s wardrobe. They not only created her shape, but expressed her character, sociability, fashionability, and even political allegiances. These so-called ephemeral flights of fashion were not peripheral and supplementary, but highly charged artefacts, acting as cultural currency in contemporary society.

The Modern Venus highlights the significance of these elements of a woman’s wardrobe in 1770s and 1780s Britain and the Atlantic World, and shows how they played their part in transforming fashionable dress when this was expanding to new heights and volumes. Dissecting the female silhouette into regions of the body and types of dress and shifting away from a broad-sweeping stylistic evolution, this book explores these potent players within the woman’s armoury. Marrying material, archival and visual approaches to dress history, and drawing on a rich range of sources—including painted portraiture, satirical prints, diaries, memoirs—The Modern Venus unpacks dress as a medium and mediator in women’s lives. It demonstrates the importance of these overlooked garments in defining not just a woman’s silhouette, but also her social and cultural situation, and thereby shapes our understanding of late 18th-century life. With over 125 color images, The Modern Venus is a remarkable resource for scholars, students, and costume lovers alike.

Elisabeth Gernerd is a historian of 18th-century dress, art, and material culture. She is a lecturer in design cultures at De Montfort University, and a former postdoctoral fellow at Historic Royal Palaces, UCLA, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Fashioning the Modern Venus
1. Head First: Brimmed Hats and Calashes on the Tides of Fashion
2  ‘Let Us Examine Their Tails’: The Material and Satirical Lifecycles of Cork Rumps and Bums
3  By Hand: Silk and Fur Muffs
4  Tight Lacing: The Motifs and Materiality of Stays
Conclusion: ‘The Fickle Goddess’

Bibliography
Index

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Note (added 27 October 2023) — This posting originally appeared on October 27, it was moved to October 24 to align with other related postings from that day.

From Bloomsbury:

Emile de Bruijn, Borrowed Landscapes: China and Japan in the Historic Houses and Gardens of Britain and Ireland (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1781300985, £35 / $45.

The art and ornament of China and Japan have had a deep impact in the British Isles. From the seventeenth century onwards, the design and decoration of interiors and gardens in Britain and Ireland was profoundly influenced by the importation of Chinese and Japanese luxury goods, while domestic designers and artisans created their own fanciful interpretations of ‘oriental’ art. Those hybrid styles and tastes have traditionally been known as chinoiserie and japonisme, but they can also be seen as elements of the wider and still very relevant phenomenon of orientalism, or the way the West sees the East. Illustrated with a wealth of new photography and published in association with the National Trust, Borrowed Landscapes is an engaging survey of orientalism in the Trust’s historic houses and gardens across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Drawing on new research, Emile de Bruijn demonstrates how elements of Chinese and Japanese culture were simultaneously desired and misunderstood, dismembered and treasured, idealised, and caricatured.

Emile de Bruijn studied Japanese at the University of Leiden and museology at the University of Essex. After working for the auctioneers Sotheby’s, he joined the National Trust, where he currently works as a decorative arts curator. Among his previous publications is Chinese Wallpaper in Britain and Ireland (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2017).

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  A Pattern Emerges, 1600–1690
2  Emblems of Aspiration, 1690–1735
3  Peak Chinoiserie, 1735–1760
4  Fictions Have Their Own Logic, 1760–1780
5  Competing Perspectives, 1780–1870
6  The Age of Japonisme, 1870–1900
7  New and Old Orientalisms, the 20th Century

Picture Credits
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Coming in November from Norton:

Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789 (New York: Norton, 2023), 576 pages, ISBN: 978-1324035589, $45.

When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions? In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton addresses these questions by drawing on decades of close study to conjure a past as vivid as today’s news. He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society much like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow. Through pamphlets, gossip, underground newsletters, and public performances, the events of some forty years—from disastrous treaties, official corruption, and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and new understandings of the nation—all entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. As public trust in royal authority eroded and new horizons opened for them, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution. Darnton’s authority and sure judgment enable readers to confidently navigate the passions and complexities of controversies over court politics, Church doctrine, and the economy. And his compact, luminous prose creates an immersive reading experience. Here is a riveting narrative that succeeds in making the past a living presence.

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He is the author of many acclaimed, widely translated works in French history that have won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A scholar of global stature, he is a Chevalier in the Légion d’honneur and winner of the National Humanities Medal. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Unicorn Publishing Group:

Vincent Pitts, Saint-Simon in Spain 1721–1722: An Odyssey (Lewes: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2022), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1914414305, £25 / $38.

The duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs of the last decades of Louis XIV’s reign and the regency of Philippe d’Orléans are considered a masterpiece of the genre and one of the glories of French literature. His accounts of the dramatic events he witnessed have informed historians for generations, while his literary portraits have influenced French authors from Sainte-Beuve to Proust. In 1721 Saint-Simon travelled to Spain as Ambassador Extraordinary to solicit the hand of a Spanish princess for the young king Louis XV. Although his mission comes very late in his long narrative, that experience looms large in his account of earlier events, hidden in plain sight, and enriched by it. The nineteenth-century essayist Sainte-Beuve dubbed Saint-Simon “the little duke with the penetrating eye.” Readers of this book can decide for themselves how penetrating an eye the little duke could bring to bear on his contemporaries, and on himself.

Vincent J. Pitts holds a PhD in European history from Harvard University. He has taught at several universities and currently teaches at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. His earlier books include Embezzlement and High Treason in Louis XIV’s France (2015); Henri IV of France, His Reign and Age (2009); La Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France (2000); and The Man Who Sacked Rome: Charles de Bourbon, Constable of France (1993).

c o n t e n t s

Foreword
Introduction
Persons Frequently Mentioned in the Text

1  The Making of an Ambassador
2  The Ambassador en Route
3  The Ambassador as Observer
4  The Ambassador at Work
5  The Ambassador at Large
6  The Ambassador Emeritus

A Note on Sources
Bibliography
Notes
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Index

The publication of this catalogue raisonné of Salvador Carmona’s drawings coincides with the the exhibition, From Pencil to Burin: Drawings for Printmaking in Goya’s Day, now on view at the Prado and co-curated by Pugh. From the CEEH:

Ana Hernández Pugh, Dibujos de Manuel Salvador Carmona (1734–1820): Catálogo razonado (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, Biblioteca Nacional de España, and Museo Nacional del Prado, 2023), 672 pages, ISBN: 978-8418760150, €58.

Manuel Salvador Carmona (1734–1820) fue el más destacado grabador de la España ilustrada. Desde su formación en París como primer pensionado de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando para el estudio de la talla dulce en la rama de retratos e historia, su compromiso con el arte calcográfico fue ejemplar. En París aprendió con Nicolas-Gabriel Dupuis (1698–1771) y fue el primer español en ser nombrado grabador del rey de Francia. De él se decía que siempre estaba «o con el lapicero o con el buril en la mano», y es que dedicó su larga vida al arte, ya fuera como director de grabado en la Real Academia de San Fernando, como grabador del rey o como maestro de sus discípulos y familiares.

Precisamente es su faceta dibujística—casi desconocida hasta la fecha—la que, con el apoyo de 499 imágenes, se estudia aquí en detalle. Artista meticuloso, conservó gran parte de sus obras, y en este catálogo razonado se reúnen casi trescientos dibujos y contradibujos, tanto preparatorios para el grabado como trazados del natural. Especial valor adquieren los retratos—muchos inéditos hasta ahora—que realizó de sus familiares más cercanos mediante la técnica «de los tres lápices» (negro, rojo y blanco de clarión), cuyo mayor exponente en el París de principios del siglo XVIII era Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721); su obra sirvió a Salvador Carmona para perfeccionarse. Este catálogo razonado contribuye significativamente al estudio del dibujo y el grabado en España al reunir por primera vez de forma sistemática el corpus de dibujos de un grabador y analizar con precisión los aspectos técnicos de los mismos como parte del proceso creativo de las estampas a las que sirvieron como punto de partida, atendiendo a los diferentes procedimientos y papeles empleados, así como a su tipología y su contexto histórico.

Ana Hernández Pugh es graduada en Historia e Historia del Arte por la Universidad CEU San Pablo de Madrid, donde obtuvo el Premio Extraordinario de Fin de Grado. Asimismo, posee el máster en Estudios Avanzados de Museos y Patrimonio Histórico-Artístico de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid y es diplomada en Artes Aplicadas a la Fotografía por el International College of Professional Photography de Melbourne. Gracias a distintas becas, completó su formación en la Biblioteca Nacional de España y en el Museo Nacional del Prado. Colaboró como investigadora en la exposición El maestro de papel. Cartillas para aprender a dibujar de los siglos XVII al XIX (2019) y, junto con José Manuel Matilla, es comisaria de la muestra Del lapicero al buril. El dibujo para grabar en la época de Goya (2023), ambas en el Prado.