Enfilade

Published by Paul Holberton and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Becky MacGuire, with essays by William Sargent and Angela Howard, Four Centuries of Blue and White: The Frelinghuysen Collection of Chinese and Japanese Export Porcelain (London: Ad Ilissvm, 2023), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-1915401090, £90 / $110.

This beautifully illustrated book presents the Frelinghuysen Collection of Chinese and Japanese export porcelain. It is the first major publication to consider Chinese and Japanese blue and white together.

This extraordinary collection, assembled carefully over fifty years, features an exceptionally wide array of Asian blue and white porcelain—the most ubiquitous and influential of all ceramics. Ranging from Chinese pieces specially made for Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century to late nineteenth-century commissions for the Thai royal court, the collection also includes numerous Chinese classics from the era of the European trading companies and a notable selection of Japanese export porcelain. In its vast scope, it speaks of the diverse impulses and historical forces that propelled the trade in Asian porcelain and provides a lens to view the interaction of East and West from the early modern age to the dawn of the twentieth century. More than 300 pieces from the collection are illustrated and discussed in full and another 250 are illustrated in a compendium, all divided into thematic chapters that reflect the many ways Chinese and Japanese porcelain has been traded, collected, and used around the world.

Essays by William R. Sargent, former Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and noted armorial porcelain authority Angela Howard, precede the thirteen chapters, which include Faith, Identity, For the Table, To European Design, and Made in Japan. Great rarities are featured alongside small, amusing pieces and the many export porcelains made to elevate the practices of daily life.

With its strict adherence to blue and white porcelain, the collection intensifies our focus on forms, patterns, and designs, gathering together wares that are often considered only separately for study while also covering areas of little recent scholarship, such as the Thai market material. The specialized reader will find references to the latest research while the more general reader will appreciate a comprehensive overview of Asian export porcelain. There has not been a significant survey of either Chinese or Japanese blue and white since the 1990s, and they have never been considered together in a major publication.

Becky MacGuire is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the Study Centre for the Fine & Decorative Arts at the Victoria & Albert Museum. She was the longtime Asian export art specialist at international auction house Christie’s.

From The University of Chicago Press:

Aleksandra Prica, Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0226811314 (hardcover), $105 / ISBN: 978-0226811598, $35. Also available as a PDF.

Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins.

Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.

Aleksandra Prica is associate professor of German literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures
List of Abbreviations

Introduction

I  | Foundations
1  Among Ruins: Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud
2  Afterlife: Hans Blumenberg and Walter Benjamin

II  | The Propitious Moment
3  Petrarch and the View of Rome
4  Poliphilo and the Dream of Ruins

III  | Living On
5  Ferdinand Gregorovius, Hildebert of Lavardin, and the Rupture of Continuity
6  Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Martin Opitz, and the Overcoming of Vanity

IV  | The Battleground of Time
7  Johann Jacob Breitinger, Andreas Gryphius, and the Reconsideration of Allegory
8  Thomas Burnet, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the Realignment of Discourses

V  | Futures and Ruins
9  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Simmel, and the Provisionality of Forms

Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

From Yale UP:

Cynthia Roman, Jill Campbell, and Jonathan Kramnick, eds., Staging ‘The Mysterious Mother’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 376 pages, ISBN: 978-0300263657, $65.

Horace Walpole’s five-act tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768), a sensational tale of incest and intrigue, was initially circulated only among the author’s friends. Walpole never permitted it to be performed during his lifetime except as a private theatrical. He described his play as a “delicious entertainment for the closet” and claimed that he “did not think it would do for the stage.” Yet the essays in this volume trace a history of private readings, amateur theatricals, and even early public performances, demonstrating that the play was read and performed more than Walpole’s protests suggest. Exploring a wide variety of topics—including the play’s crypto-Catholicism, its treatments of incest, guilt, motherhood, orphans, and scientific spectacle, and the complex relations between print and performance—the essays demonstrate the rich relevance of The Mysterious Mother to current critical discussions. The volume includes the proceedings of a mini-conference hosted at Yale University in 2018 on the occasion of a staged reading of the play. Also included are the director’s reflections, an abridged script, a facsimile of Walpole’s own copy of the full-length play, and reproductions of the illustrations he commissioned from Lady Diana Beauclerk.

Cynthia E. Roman is curator of prints, drawings, and paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library. Jill Campbell is professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University. Jonathan Kramnick is the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University and the director of the Lewis Walpole Library.

Distributed by Yale University Press:

Donald Fennimore and Frank Hohmann, David Rittenhouse: Philosopher-Mechanick of Colonial Philadelphia and His Famous Clocks (Winterthur, Delaware: Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, 2023), 272 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-0300272956, $75.

A lush and in-depth celebration of the clocks of David Rittenhouse, one of eighteenth-century America’s greatest scientists and engineers.

David Rittenhouse: Philosopher-Mechanick of Colonial Philadelphia and His Famous Clocks brings a completely new focus on the life and works of the American astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, and inventor David Rittenhouse (1732–1796). A brilliant autodidact who would become the first director of the United States Mint, Rittenhouse was a pivotal figure of the cultural scene in Colonial Philadelphia. This publication expands the body of knowledge surrounding Rittenhouse and his brother Benjamin, as well as the era in which they lived. His masterful clocks are the principal subject matter, but the book also addresses Rittenhouse’s broader works, such as orreries, telescopes, surveying compasses, and other scientific equipment. These objects are all lushly illustrated with new photography, including rarely seen pieces in private collections. Providing a more complete and accurate view of Rittenhouse’s genius, this volume highlights the breadth of his talent and importance to both science and art in early America.

Donald L. Fennimore, curator emeritus, served as metalwork specialist at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware for 34 years. Frank L. Hohmann, a retired Wall Street executive, is a collector of eighteenth-century furniture, with a concentration on brass dial clocks.

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

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

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.