Enfilade

From University of East Anglia Publishing Project:

Andrew Moore and Clive Scott, eds., Translating John Crome: Through Sight to Insight (Norwich: UEA Publishing Project, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1915812728, £30.

This book considers and translates the paintings and etchings of John Crome (1768–1821), founder of the Norwich School of Artists, through and into other ‘languages’ or media, verbal and pictorial. The word ‘translation’ is not used lightly. This is not an anthology of creative pieces by a variety of artists from different media ‘inspired by’ or ‘expressing a kinship with’ Crome’s paintings. Instead, these are translations in the sense of transformations into new languages designed both to incorporate the perceptual and existential responses of the ‘translator’ to examples of Crome’s work and to project those works into possible cross-medial futures. The book is as much about ‘looking’ across media, as about John Crome. What kinds of transformation do the landscapes and plant studies of John Crome, once considered the equal of J.M.W. Turner, undergo when translated into other ‘languages’ or media? The twenty contributors to this volume—from fields as diverse as travel-writing, poetry, painting, photography, and ceramics—provide a range of answers, and, in so doing, uncover new futures for Crome’s work.

Contributions and extracts from Georg Simmel, John Berger, Richard Mabey, Gerry Barnes, Tom Williamson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Rackham, Neil MacMaster, Jacques Rancière, Malcolm Andrews, Elizabeth Helsinger, Edmund Bartell, Frances Milton Trollope, Rose Miller, Nick Stone, John Craske, Richard Long, Tacita Dean, Tor Falcon, Anya Gallaccio, Chloe Steele, Katie Spragg, Daniel & Clara, Tim Dee, Esther Morgan, George Szirtes, Anna Reckin, Edward Parnell, Kit Young, Mark Edwards, Lawrence Sail, Jacques Nimki, and Simon Carter.

Andrew Moore has enjoyed a long association with the work of John Crome through his former position as Keeper of Art, based at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, home to the national collection of works by Crome and the Norwich School of Painters.
Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and an Emeritus Fellow of the British Academy. He specializes in the theory and practice of literary translation.

From Penn Press:

Lisa Minardi, ed., Americana Insights 2025 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 300 pages, ISBN: 979-8988533122, $65. With contributions by Johanna Brown, Laini Farrare, R. Erich Hess, Christopher Malone, Lisa Minardi, Karl Pass, Candace Perry, Jeffrey Pressman, Jean Renshaw, Justin Thomas, and Adam Zayas.

A comprehensive study of Pennsylvania German redware and a celebration of this vibrant folk art tradition

Americana Insights 2025 is the third volume in an annual series that presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional Americana, folk art, and material culture. In this volume the authors explore a beloved aspect of American folk art—Pennsylvania German redware. Focusing on redware’s production, use, and collecting in southeastern Pennsylvania from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth century, the authors provide fresh insights into renowned potters such as Georg Hubener and Samuel Troxel as well as lesser-known figures. Other essays delve into the work of twentieth-century potters like Jacob Medinger, considered the last of the traditional Pennsylvania German potters, and Mildred Keyser, a pioneering revivalist potter. The authors also explore broader themes, including the use of political imagery and hunting iconography, and redware’s role in cultural exchange between Anglo-Americans and Pennsylvania Germans. A celebration of this vibrant folk art tradition and a vital scholarly contribution, Americana Insights 2025 represents the most comprehensive study of Pennsylvania German redware in more than a century.

Lisa Minardi is a curator and scholar of Pennsylvania German art and culture. She has organized numerous exhibitions and published extensively and was assistant curator at Winterthur Museum from 2006 to 2016. Minardi currently serves as executive director of Historic Trappe and the Center for Pennsylvania German Studies. She is a PhD candidate in the History of American Civilization Program at the University of Delaware, where she is researching the German-speaking community of early Philadelphia for her dissertation. She holds an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and a BA in history and museum studies from Ursinus College.

From Westholme Publishing:

Paul Staiti, The Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier (Yardley, PA, Westholme Publishing, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1594164460, $30.

The killing of Jane McCrea on July 26, 1777, on the outskirts of a village in the northern Hudson Valley, would unexpectedly rupture the British advance from Canada that was meant to crush the American Revolution in one knockout blow. On that day, twenty-five-year-old McCrea, an unremarkable person preparing for an impending marriage, was assaulted, scalped, and killed by a group of Native Americans in the employ of British general John Burgoyne. Though the murder was but one of many civilian deaths in a fierce war zone, McCrea’s killing had far-reaching consequences for each of the three major parties involved in the Northern Campaign of 1777.

In America, McCrea became the great cause célèbre of the Revolution, the sympathetic female victim of the war symbolizing the righteousness of The Cause. In Britain, she was a human-rights tragedy that tarnished the polished surface of British honor and galvanized Whig politicians who shouted out her name in Parliament as an example of how low the nation had fallen. For Native peoples, recruited by both the British and the Americans, and caught in the middle of a war staged on ancestral grounds, McCrea’s killing was the opening salvo in a vicious chain of bloody retribution that led to the disintegration of the venerable Iroquois Confederacy and the obliteration of Native homelands. After the war, the nightmarish image of a young Jane McCrea slaughtered on the New York frontier would obsess white Americans who came to fear Native peoples as irredeemable savages. Her murder would help justify the expulsion of Indigenous tribes and open the doors for an expansionary United States that was fully intent on transforming the American continent into its own image.

The Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier by distinguished historian Paul Staiti undertakes for the first time a comprehensive investigation into McCrea’s life, death, and especially her long and strange afterlife. Using both visual arts and written records, the author reassembles the scattered fragments to illuminate a historical terrain long since shrouded in misinformation, mired in controversy, and relegated to mythology. Coming into view is a major portrait of the persons, cultures, actions, and motives that fatally converged on that hot July morning in 1777.

Paul Staiti is the author of Samuel F. B. Morse and Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters’ Eyes. The latter was Colonial Dames of America Book of the Year in 2018 and was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction. He has written on John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Winslow Homer, and William Michael Harnett, and has lectured widely at colleges, universities, and museums, including the National Gallery of Art and the Louvre. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, has been the recipient of two fellowships from the The Metropolitan Museum of Art and three from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Currently he is Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation at Mount Holyoke College.

From Princeton UP:

Thomas Crow, Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2025), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-0691274447, £25 / $30.

How an enigmatic masterpiece of the French Revolution became a talisman of the revolutionary spirit in our own time

Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat depicts the painter’s friend and fellow revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat collapsed in his bath after being fatally stabbed by a female assassin who stands just outside the frame. In this fascinating book, Thomas Crow traces the radical legacy of a painting that has been called the Pietà of the French Revolution, showing how David’s masterpiece captures the saga of that violent era in the single figure of Marat, and how it reveals itself anew today.

Crow begins by describing how the painting’s enduring power came to the fore during the countercultural tumult of the 1960s, discussing how his vocation as a scholar arose out of his own encounter with the work. He then takes readers back to 1793, telling the story of the painting’s creation through the eyes of David, his subject, and Marat’s charismatic assassin, Charlotte Corday. Charting the history of its impact across more than two centuries, Crow shows how this multilayered portrait surfaced in succeeding waves of political dissent as an enduring talisman of popular insurgency. Beautifully illustrated, Murder in the Rue Marat is an art historian’s disarmingly personal account of a painting whose hidden complexities bear witness to the promise and peril of revolution in Marat’s time and our own.

Thomas Crow is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. His many books include Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812–1820 and The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge.