Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Maura Flannery, In the Herbarium: The Hidden World of Collecting and Preserving Plants (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 336 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0300247916, $35.

Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries. These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time—including changes related to climate.

Maura C. Flannery tells the history of herbaria, from the earliest collections belonging to such advocates of the technique as sixteenth-century botanist Luca Ghini, to the collections of poets, politicians, and painters, and to the digitization of these precious specimens today. She charts the growth of herbaria during the Age of Exploration, the development of classification systems to organize the collections, and herbaria’s indispensable role in the tracking of climate change and molecular evolution. Herbaria also have historical, aesthetic, cultural, and ethnobotanical value—these preserved plants can be linked to the Indigenous peoples who used them, the collectors who sought them out, and the scientists who studied them.

This book testifies to the central role of herbaria in the history of plant study and to their continued value, not only to biologists but to entirely new users as well: gardeners, artists, students, and citizen-scientists.

Maura C. Flannery is professor emerita of biology at St. John’s University, New York, and research affiliate in the A. C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of two previous books and a blog, herbariumworld.wordpress.com. She lives in Aiken, SC.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Opening Hidden Gardens
1  Rooted in an Herbarium
2  Early Botany
3  The Technology and Art of Herbaria
4  Early Exploration
5  The Value of Collecting
6  Linnaeus and Classification
7  Botanical Exploration
8  Gardens
9  Managing Exploration and Collecting
10  Natural History and Botany
11  Evolution and Botany
12  Changing Botany
13  Useful Plants and Ethnobotany
14  Understanding and Conserving Biodiversity
15  Online Herbaria
16  A Broader Vision: Herbaria and Culture
Epilogue: Herbaria Blooming

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From The University of Chicago Press:

Kermit Roosevelt, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0226817613, $25.

Our idea of the Founders’ America and its values is not true. We are not the heirs of the Founders, but we can be the heirs of Reconstruction and its vision for equality.

There’s a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn’t working for us anymore—what’s more, it’s not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders. Instead, they were stated in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and were the hope of Reconstruction, when it was possible to envision the emergence of the nation committed to liberty and equality.

We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we’re not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order. This alternate understanding of American identity opens the door to a new understanding of ourselves and our story, and ultimately to a better America.

America today is not the Founders’ America, but it can be Lincoln’s America. Roosevelt offers a powerful and inspirational rethinking of our country’s history and uncovers a shared past that we can be proud to claim and use as a foundation to work toward a country that fully embodies equality for all.

Kermit Roosevelt III is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. A former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice David Souter, he is the author of The Myth of Judicial Activism, as well as two novels, Allegiance and In the Shadow of the Law.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Stories of America
2  Questioning the Standard Story: Dissenters
3  The Exclusive Declaration
4  The Ambiguous Revolution
5  The Geostrategic Constitution
6  The Story of Continuity
7  The March of the Declaration
8  Why We Tell the Standard Story
9  Why We Shouldn’t Tell the Standard Story
10  Magic Tricks and Revolutions
11  Why, How, and Who We Are
12  Redemption Songs: Inclusive Equality and Exclusive Individualism in Modern America
13  The Better Story

Bibliographical Essay
Acknowledgments
Notes

From Distributed by ACC Art Books:

Tessa Murdoch, ed., with a foreword by Toby Barnard, a preface by Leslie Fitzpatrick, inventory transcriptions by Jessica Cunningham and Rebecca Campion, and inventory preambles by Jessica Cunningham Rebecca Campion, Edmund Joyce, Alec Cobbe, and John Adamson, Great Irish Households: Inventories from the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: John Adamson, 2022), 436 pages, ISBN: 978-1898565178, £75.00 / $115.

Inventories of fourteen great Irish country houses, three Dublin town houses, and one London town house yield remarkable insights into the lifestyle of leading families across Ireland and the households that supported them. With startling directness, they record in detail the goods and chattels inherited, accumulated, or acquired for enjoyment or everyday use.

Two sections in colour feature likenesses of many of the owners or householders of the properties at the time, including portraits by Pompeo Batoni, Michael Dahl, Thomas Gainsborough, Godfrey Kneller, Thomas Lawrence, and Joshua Reynolds, as well as the Irish artists Hugh Douglas Hamilton and Charles Robertson.

The value of inventories in charting how houses were arranged, furnished and used is now widely appreciated. Typically, the listings and valuations were occasioned by the death of an owner and the consequent need to deal with testamentary dispositions. That was not always so. The inventory for Castlecomer House, Co. Kilkenny, for example, was drawn up to make a claim following the house’s devastation in the 1798 uprising. Mostly hitherto unpublished, the inventories chosen give new-found insights into the lifestyle and taste of some of the foremost families of the day. Above stairs, the inventories show the evolving collecting habits and tastes of eighteenth-century patrons across Ireland and how the interiors of great town and country houses were arranged or responded to new materials and new ideas. The meticulous recording of the contents of the kitchen and scullery likewise sheds light on life below stairs. Itemized equipment required for the brewhouse, dairy, stables, garden and farmyard reflects the at times significant scale of the communities the houses supported and the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency at some of the demesnes.

A comprehensive index facilitates access to the myriad items within the inventories, while the books listed at three of the houses are tentatively identified in separate appendices. A foreword, together with preambles to the inventories, sets the households in their historical context. Illustrated with historical engravings of the houses and with portraits of the owners of the time, the inventories will appeal to country-house visitors, historians of interiors, patronage, collecting and material culture as well as to scholars, curators, collectors, creative designers, film directors, bibliographers, lexicographers, and historical novelists.

The eighteenth century is the period onto which the Knight of Glin directed his penetrating gaze as art historian. The book is dedicated to his memory.

Tessa Murdoch, FSA, is Research Curator, Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Toby Barnard, FBA, is Emeritus Fellow in History at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and a specialist in the political, social and cultural histories of Ireland and England, c. 1600–1800. Leslie Fitzpatrick is the former Samuel and M. Patricia Grober Associate Curator, European Decorative Arts, at the Art Institute of Chicago.

C O N T E N T S

1  Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford, 1702/3
2  Kilkenny Castle, Co. Kilkenny, 1705
3  Dublin Castle, 1707
4  The Duke of Ormonde’s House, London, c. 1710
5  Bishop’s mansion house, Elphin, Co. Roscommon, 1740
6  Captain Balfour’s town house, auction sale, Dublin, 1741/2
7  Hillsborough Castle, Co. Down, 1746 and 1777
8  Kilrush House, Freshford, Co. Kilkenny, 1750
9  No. 10 Henrietta Street, Dublin (Luke Gardiner’s house), 1772
10  Morristown Lattin, Co. Kildare, 1773
11  Baronscourt, Co. Tyrone, 1782
12  Castlecomer House, Co. Kilkenny, 1798
13  Killadoon, Co. Kildare, 1807–29
14  Shelton Abbey, near Arklow, Co. Wicklow, 1816
15  Borris House, Co. Carlow, 1818
16  Carton House, Co. Kildare, 1818
17  Newbridge House, Co. Dublin, 1821
18  Mount Stewart, Co. Down, 1821

Glossary
Appendix I: Buyers at Captain Balfour’s Town House Sale, 1741/2
Appendix II: Books in the Second Duchess of Ormonde’s Closet at Kilkenny Castle, 1705
Appendix III: Books in the Study at the Bishop’s Mansion House, Elphin, Co. Roscommon, 1740
Appendix IV: Books in the Library at Newbridge House, Co. Dublin, 1821

List of Inventory Sources
List of Plates
Bibliography
Index of Personal Names
General Index

From Lund Humphries:

Sara Ayres, Danish-British Consort Portraiture, c.1600–1900 (London: Lund Humphries, 2023), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-1848225183, £60 / $100.

This is the first book to address the long art history of dynastic marriage exchange between Denmark and Britain between 1600 and 1900. It explores an intersection of three themes trending in early modern studies: portraiture, gender, and the court as a centre of cultural exchange. This work re-evaluates the construction and staging of gender in Northern consort portraiture over a span of three hundred years, examining the development of the scientific and social paradigms inflecting consort portraiture and representation, with a view to excavating portrait images’ agency at the early modern moment of their conception and making. The consort’s liminal position between royal houses, territories, languages, and sometimes religion has often been equated with political weakness, but this new work argues that this position endowed the consort with a unique space for innovation in the representation of elite identity. As such, consort imagery drew upon gender as a generative resource of motifs and ideas. Each chapter is informed by new archival research and introduces the reader to little known, yet astonishing works of art. Collectively, they seek to trace a shift in practices of identity formation over time: the transition from an emphasis on rank to an increasingly binary emphasis on gender.

• The book builds on the recent interest around the quatercentenary in 2019 of Anna of Denmark’s death, and the burgeoning interest in Nordic history and art history.
• Anna of Denmark was born 12 December 1574; so the year 2024 will mark the 450th anniversary of that occasion.
• The tercentenary of Louise of Great Britain’s birth takes place in 2024.
• The centenary of Alexandra of Denmark’s death takes place in 2025.

Sara Ayres obtained her doctorate in Art History from Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2012. She has published in the Oxford Art Journal, the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, and the Court Historian. Between 2016 and 2018 she held the position of the Queen Margarethe II Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Recent publications include the co-edited volume Sculpture and the Nordic Region (2017).

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements
Figure List

Introduction
1  Anna of Denmark (1574–1619)
2  Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708)
3  Louisa of Great Britain (1724–1751)
4  Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (1751–1775)
5  Alexandra of Denmark (1844–1925)

Bibliography
Endnotes

Oberer’s first biography of Carriera appeared in 2020 from Amsterdam UP; her second is available from The Getty and Lund Humprhies:

Angela Oberer, Rosalba Carriera (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2023), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1606068601, $45 / (London: Lund Humprhies, 2023), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1848225190, £35.

This stunning new volume is the first accessibly written, illustrated, English-language biography of Rosalba Carriera, one of the most famous women artists in eighteenth-century Europe.

Born in Venice in 1673 to a lawyer and a lace maker, Rosalba Carriera began her career painting decorative objects and rose to international renown as a portraitist in Italy, Germany, France, and England. In 1757 she died nearly blind from cataracts, a tragic end for a painter acclaimed for exquisite miniatures and innovative pastels. During the 1700s she was deemed “the most talented female artist of our century,” so famous that she was referred to by her first name only. Today, however, she is little known outside Venice, despite the attribution to her of more than seven hundred surviving artworks.

This accessibly written, gorgeously illustrated biography surveys Carriera’s career, considering her miniatures alongside better-known works of larger scale. Interpreting her oeuvre against the historical context of her experience as a single woman in Venice, the book takes readers through the full arc of her life, including the people she met, her clients, and her artistic approach. Author Angela Oberer’s original iconographic analysis of some of Carriera’s work reveals that she was an erudite painter who drew on antiquity as well as Renaissance precedents such as Leonardo da Vinci and Paolo Veronese. Published in conjunction with the 350th anniversary of her birth, this book is a long overdue tribute to an important and prolific artist.

Angela Oberer is a lecturer in art history with a PhD from the Technische Universität Berlin. She has written and lectured extensively on the work of Rosalba Carriera.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements

1  Venice at the Dawn of the Eighteenth Century and the Beginning of Carriera’s Artistic Career
2  An Independent Single Female Painter
3  Carriera, the First Female Trendsetter in Technique and Style
4  Invitations Abroad and Carriera’s International Network
5  Pastel Painting: Carriera’s Greatest Success
6  An Exceptional Life Comes to an End

Notes
Bibliography
Index