Enfilade

From Rizzoli:

John Phibbs, with photographs by Joe Cornish, Humphry Repton: Designing the Landscape Garden (New York: Rizzoli, 2021), 288 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-0847863549, $75.

Widely acknowledged as the last great landscape designer of the eighteenth century, Humphry Repton created work that survives as a bridge between the picturesque theory of Capability Brown and the pastoral philosophy of Frederick Law Olmsted. By turns inspired by and in opposition to the grandeur of Brown’s estates, Repton’s contribution to the British landscape encompassed a tremendous range, from subtle adjustments that emphasized the natural features of the countryside to deliberate interventions that challenged the notion of the picturesque. This remarkable book explores 15 of Repton’s most celebrated landscapes—from the early maturity of his gardens at Courteenhall and Mulgrave Castle to more adventurous landscapes at Stanage, Brightling, and Endsleigh that would point the way toward how we envision parkland today. With photography by Joe Cornish commissioned specially for the book, and including reproductions of key illustrations and plans for garden design from the famous red books that shed light on Repton’s vision and process, this book illuminates some of Britain’s most beautiful gardens and parks—and the masterful mind behind their creation.

John Phibbs is a renowned garden historian with more than 30 years’ experience in the management and restoration of historic landscapes. He is the author of Capability Brown: Designing the English Landscape. Joe Cornish is an award-winning landscape photographer and an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, with a studio and gallery in Yorkshire.

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Michael Fried, with an introduction by Stephen Bann, French Suite: A Book of Essays (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 356 pages, ISBN ‏: ‎ 978-1789146042, $45.

French Suite examines a range of important French painters and two writers, Baudelaire and Flaubert, from the brothers Le Nain in the mid-seventeenth century to Manet, Degas, and the Impressionists in the later nineteenth century. A principal theme of Michael Fried’s essays is a fundamental concern of his throughout his career: the relationship between painting and the beholder. Fried’s typically vivid and strongly argued essays offer many new readings and unexpected insights, examining both familiar and lesser-known French artistic and literary works.

Art critic, art historian, literary critic-historian, and poet Michael Fried is the J. R. Herbert Boone Emeritus Professor of Humanities and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His many books include The Moment of Caravaggio.

Stephen Bann, CBE, is professor emeritus of the history of art and a senior research fellow at Bristol University. His recent books include Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France and Stonypath Days: Letters between Ian Hamilton Finlay and Stephen Bann, 1970–72.

C O N T E N T S

Preface
Introduction by Stephen Bann

1  Being Seen and Seeing: Thoughts on the Le Nains
2  Hubert Robert and the ‘Pastoral’ Conception of Painting
3  The Hand on the Page: Three Works by Théodore Géricault
4  Painting Memories: On Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846
5  Facingness Meets Mindedness: Manet’s Luncheon in the Studio and Balcony
6  Degas and Antitheatricality
7  Chapter One of L’Education sentimentale as a Work of Writing
8  Corot’s Figure Paintings and the Apotheosis of Touch
9  Unknown Daubigny
10  The Moment of Impressionism
Coda: The House at Rueil

References
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Index

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Annette Richards, The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,) 336 pages, ISBN: 978-0226806266, $55.

One of the most celebrated German composers of the eighteenth century, C. P. E. Bach spent decades assembling an extensive portrait collection of some four hundred music-related items—from oil paintings to engraved prints. The collection was dispersed after Bach’s death in 1788, but with Annette Richards’s painstaking reconstruction, the portraits once again present a vivid panorama of music history and culture, reanimating the sensibility and humor of Bach’s time. Far more than a mere multitude of faces, Richards argues, the collection was a major part of the composer’s work that sought to establish music as an object of aesthetic, philosophical, and historical study.

The Temple of Fame and Friendship brings C. P. E. Bach’s collection to life, giving readers a sense of what it was like for visitors to tour the portrait gallery and experience music in rooms thick with the faces of friends, colleagues, and forebears. She uses the collection to analyze the ‘portraitive’ aspect of Bach’s music, engaging with the influential theories of Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. She also explores the collection as a mode of cultivating and preserving friendship, connecting this to the culture of remembrance that resonates in Bach’s domestic music. Richards shows how the new music historiography of the late eighteenth century, rich in anecdote, memoir, and verbal portrait, was deeply indebted to portrait collecting and its negotiation between presence and detachment, fact and feeling.

Annette Richards is Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and university organist at Cornell University, where she is also professor of music and director of the Cornell-Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She is the author of The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque; the editor of C. P. E Bach Studies; coeditor, with Mark Franko, of Acting on the Past; and the founding editor of Keyboard Perspectives.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Exhibiting: The Bach Gallery and the Art of Self-Fashioning
2  Collecting: C. P. E. Bach and Portrait Mania
3  Speculation: Likeness, Resemblance, and Error
4  Character: Faces, Physiognomy, and Time
5  Friendship: Portrait Drawings and the Trace of Modern Life
6  Feeling: Objects of Sensibility and the ‘Portrait of Myself’
7  Memorializing: Portraits and the Invention of Music History

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Richard Kramer, From the Ruins of Enlightenment: Beethoven and Schubert in Their Solitude (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 264 pages, ISBN: 9780226821634, $50.

Richard Kramer follows the work of Beethoven and Schubert from 1815 through to the final months of their lives, when each were increasingly absorbed in iconic projects that would soon enough inspire notions of ‘late style’.

Here is Vienna, hosting a congress in 1815 that would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the European community for a full century. A snapshot captures two of its citizens, each seemingly oblivious to this momentous political environment: Franz Schubert, not yet twenty years old and in the midst of his most prolific year—some 140 songs, four operas, and much else; and Ludwig van Beethoven, struggling through a midlife crisis that would yield the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, two strikingly original cello sonatas, and the two formidable sonatas for the “Hammerklavier,” opp. 101 and 106. In Richard Kramer’s compelling reading, each seemed to be composing ‘against’—Beethoven, against the Enlightenment; Schubert, against the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical imagination took full flight.

From the Ruins of Enlightenment begins in 1815, with the discovery of two unique projects: Schubert’s settings of the poems of Ludwig Hölty in a fragmentary cycle and Beethoven’s engagement with a half dozen poems by Johann Gottfried Herder. From there, Kramer unearths previously undetected resonances and associations, illuminating the two composers in their “lonely and singular journeys” through the “rich solitude of their music.”

Richard Kramer is distinguished professor emeritus of music at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of the award-winning Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song, as well as Unfinished Music and Cherubino’s Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment.

C O N T E N T S

Preamble: 1815 and Beyond

In the Silence of the Poem
1  Hölty’s Nightingales, and Schubert’s
2  Herder’s Hexameters, and Beethoven’s
3  Whose Meeres Stille?

Toward a Poetics of Fugue
4  Gradus ad Parnassum: Beethoven, Schubert, and the Romance of Counterpoint
5  Con alcune licenze: On the Largo before the Fugue in Op. 106

Sonata and the Claims of Narrative
Beethoven
6  On a Challenging Moment in the Sonata for Pianoforte and Violoncello, Op. 102, No. 2
Schubert
7  Against the Grain: The Sonata in G (D 894) and a Hermeneutics of Late Style

Last Things, New Horizons
8  Final Beethoven
9  Posthumous Schubert

Postscript: . . . and Beyond

Acknowledgments
List of Tables, Examples, and Figures
Works Cited
Index

From Fonthill Media:

Edward Geoffrey Stanley, with an introduction and notes by Angus Hawkins, A Grand Tour Journal, 1820–1822: The Awakening of the Man (Stroud: Fonthill Media, 2022), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1781558904, £25 / $35.

In December 1820, at twenty-one years old, Edward Geoffrey Stanley, the future 14th earl of Derby and three-times prime minister, began an extensive tour of continental Europe. By the time of his return to England twenty months later, he had visited many of the foremost centres for art and culture in Europe, and mostly in Italy. In his travel diaries he recorded his intensive social life, his visits to historical sites, his viewings of art collections, his comments on architecture, his admiration of landscapes, and his impressions of foreign societies. He was energetic, enthusiastic, and discerning: the bridge of Augustus in Umbria gave him “a stupendous idea of Roman grandeur”; the charm of the towns crowning the Tuscan hills struck him with the same delight that he felt when gazing at one of Poussin’s paintings; the waterfall at Terni, which dropped 370 feet into an abyss of spray, was “awfully magnificent”; while the ceremonies of the Italian Catholic Church he judged to be a blend of mummery, superstition, and bigotry. Sights and experiences like these influenced him for the rest of his life. This precious collection of diaries—found only recently and published here for the first time—reveal Edward Stanley to have been a young man of diligence, courage, and decisiveness: a future leader with a conspicuous and burgeoning sense of political and social justice. It was these characteristics, seen in early development within these pages, that shaped the man and the extraordinary career to come.

Edward Geoffrey Stanley (1799–1869), later Lord Stanley and the 14th earl of Derby, was the first British statesman to become prime minister three times and remains the longest serving party leader in modern British politics.

Angus Hawkins (1953–2020) was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and director of the Research Centre in Victorian Political Culture at Keble College, University of Oxford. Professor Hawkins wrote an acclaimed two-volume biography of Edward Geoffrey Stanley, The Forgotten Prime Minister, published by Oxford University Press in 2007 and 2008.

From McGill-Queen’s University Press:

Joan Coutu, Jon Stobart, and Peter Lindfield, eds., Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), 344 Pages, ISBN: 978-0228014027, $95.

Politics has always been at the heart of the English country house, in its design and construction, as well as in the activities and experiences of those who lived in and visited these places. As Britain moved from an agrarian to an imperial economy over the course of the eighteenth century, the home mirrored the social change experienced in the public sphere. This collection focuses on the relationship between the country house and the mutable nature of British politics in the eighteenth century. Essays explore the country house as a stage for politicking, a vehicle for political advancement, a symbol of party allegiance or political values, and a setting for appropriate lifestyles. Initially the exclusive purview of the landed aristocracy, politics increasingly came to be played out in the open, augmented by the emergence of career politicians—usually untitled members of the patriciate—and men of new money, much of it created on Caribbean plantations or in the employ of the East India Company. Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800 reveals how, during this period of profound change, the country house remained a constant. The country house was the definitive tangible manifestation of social standing and, for the political class, owning one became almost an imperative. In its consideration of the country house as lived and spatial experience, as an aesthetic and symbolic object, and as an economic engine, this book offers a new perspective on the complexity of political meaning embedded in the eighteenth-century country house—and on ourselves as active recipients and interpreters of its various narratives, more than two centuries later.

Joan Coutu is professor of art history and visual culture at the University of Waterloo.
Jon Stobart is professor of social history at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Peter Nelson Lindfield is lecturer in history at Manchester Metropolitan University.

C O N T E N T S

Table and Figures
Acknowledgements

1  Introduction — Joan Coutu, Jon Stobart, and Oliver Cox

Part One: Political Positioning after the Glorious Revolution
2  Introduction — Oliver Cox
3  For Politics, Progresses, or Posterity? Some Alternative Reasons for Building State Apartments — Amy Lim
4  Holding Court at Marlborough House: The London Residence of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough — Juliet Learmouth

Part Two: The Question of Style
5  Introduction — Anne Bordeleau
6  Gothic Architecture and the Liberty Trope — Matthew M. Reeve
7  ‘Whig Gothic’: An Antidote to Houghton Hall — Peter N. Lindfield
8  The House with Two Faces: From Baroque to Palladian at Wentworth Woodhouse — Dylan Wayne Spivey

Part Three: The Social Politics of the Country House
9  Introduction — Jon Stobart
10  Burke’s Exemplum: The ‘Natural Family Mansion’ and Wentworth Woodhouse — Joan Coutu
11  House Painting: Place and Position in Estate Portraiture, circa 1770 — John Bonehill
12  The House and Estate of a Rich West Indian: Two Slaveholders in Eighteenth-Century East Anglia — Elisabeth Grass

Part Four: Houses and Homes
13  Introduction — Kate Retford
14  The Clives at Home: Self-Fashioning, Collecting, and British India — Kieran Hazzard
15  William Pitt the Younger, 1759–1806: Reshaping the Political Home — Rowena Willard-Wright

Afterword: Whose Country House? — Dana Arnold

Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Celia Fisher, The Story of Follies: Architectures of Eccentricity (London: Reaktion Books, 2023), 398 pages, ISBN: 978-1789146356, $50.

Are they frivolous or practical? Follies are buildings constructed primarily for decoration, but they suggest another purpose through their appearance. In this visually stunning book, Celia Fisher describes follies in their historical and architectural context, looks at their social and political significance, and highlights their relevance today. She explores follies built in protest, follies in Oriental and Gothic styles, animal-related follies, waterside follies and grottoes, and, finally, follies in glass and steel. Featuring many fine illustrations, from historical paintings to contemporary photographs and prints, and taking in follies from Great Britain to Ireland, throughout Europe, and beyond, The Story of Follies is an amusing and informative guide to fanciful, charming buildings.

Celia Fisher has lectured and written widely on the history of plants and gardens in art. Her books include Flower: Paintings by Forty Great Artists and Tulip, the latter also published by Reaktion Books.

C O N T E N T S

Preface

Introduction: A Taste of Follies
1  Seeking out the Origins
2  Some Names to Conjure with
3  Telling a Story
4  Concepts of Freedom and Victory
5  Hunting and Husbandry
6  Waterside Follies and Grottos
7  The Lure of the East
8  From Ruins to Gothic and Picturesque
9  Hermitages and Tree Hoses
10  Into the Future

References
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Photo Acknowledgments
Index