Enfilade

From the University of Hertfordshire Press:

Malcolm Thick, William Ellis: Eighteenth-Century Farmer, Journalist, and Entrepreneur (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2022), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1912260492, £17 / $34.

William Ellis, who lived and farmed at Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire in the first half of the eighteenth century (d. 1759), is an important figure in English agricultural history. In his time the most prolific writer on agriculture in England, he authored many works that were read not only at home but also in the American colonies and continental Europe. Ellis was essentially an agricultural journalist, then a relatively new occupation. He wrote about his own life as well as those of the ordinary people of Little Gaddesden and further afield—he travelled extensively throughout the southern half of England. Most of his copy was derived from conversations he had had with farmers, their wives, and other rural folk, the sheer immediacy of his books outshining those of his rivals.

Ellis’s style was discursive, particularly so in The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (1750). As well as providing a compendium of household management, cookery, and medicine, Ellis delighted in relaying gossip. He included the activities of farmers, wives and maids, labourers, travellers, and beggars, as well as the gentry and aristocracy, rich pickings for social historians.

Ellis also used his books to advertise his business as a supplier of agricultural instruments, seeds, plants, trees, and fowls—an innovative approach. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm visited Little Gaddesden in 1748 to inspect Ellis’s farming and the various farm implements he advertised for sale. The two men didn’t warm to each other, but Kalm’s independent observations add to what we know about Ellis.

Piecing together the scant facts about Ellis’s early life, Malcolm Thick has uncovered new information on his time before he commenced farming and unravelled some of the complexities of his two marriages. The book’s central focus is on Ellis’s agricultural writings, which provide a fascinating picture of rural life in the period and shed light on the evolution of English farming. This is the first book about Ellis for over sixty years and the first to consider him fully in the round—as a farmer, an active member of his community, an innovative salesman, and a wonderfully curious mind.

Malcolm Thick is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a winner of the Sophie Coe prize for food history writing. He has published books and papers on early modern gardening, food, and agriculture, including a critically acclaimed biography of the early scientist Sir Hugh Plat and a history of market gardening around London. He also wrote the introduction to a new edition of Ellis’s Country Housewife’s Family Companion and has contributed a chapter on “Plants as Staple Foods” in volume 3 of A Cultural History of Plants (Bloomsbury, 2022).

C O N T E N T S

1  Introduction
2  Life before Little Gaddesden and at Church Farm
3  Agriculture
4  Advertising and Trading
5  Food, Drink, and Medicine
6  Ellis the Man
7  Other Matters
8  Conclusion

From Fonthill Media:

Iain Gordon Brown, Auld Greekie: Edinburgh as the Athens of the North (Fonthill Media, 2022), 368 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1781558928, £30.

Around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially in the years between about 1810 and 1840, Edinburgh—long and affectionately known as ‘Auld Reekie’—came to think of itself and to be widely regarded as something else. The city became ‘Modern Athens’, an epithet later turned to ‘the Athens of the North’. The latter phrase is very well-known. It is also much used by those who have little understanding of the often confused and contradictory messages hidden within the apparent convenience of a trite or hackneyed term that actually conceals a myriad of nuanced meanings.

This book examines the circumstances underlying a remarkable change in perception of a place and an age. It looks in detail at the ‘when’, the ‘by whom’, the ‘why’, the ‘how’ and the ‘with what consequences’ (for good or ill) of this most interesting, and extremely complex, transformation of one city into an image—whether physical or spiritual, or both—of another. A very broad range of evidence is drawn upon, the story having not only topographical, artistic and architectural dimensions, but also social, cerebral and philosophical ones. Edinburgh may well have been considered, for one reason or another, as ‘Athenian’. But, in essence, it remained what it had always been. Maybe, however, for a brief period it was really a sort of hybrid city: ‘Auld Greekie’.

Iain Gordon Brown FSA FRSE, whose academic career began as a student of ancient history and classical archaeology, was principal curator of manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, where he is now honorary fellow. He has held the office of curator of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s national academy, and has also been president of the Old Edinburgh Club and a trustee of Edinburgh World Heritage. He is consultant to the Adam Drawings Project at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.

Published by Zone Books and distributed by Princeton UP:

Anthony Cascardi, Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique (New York: Zone Books), 376 pages, ISBN: 978-1942130697, $40 / £30.

Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique probes the relationship between the enormous, extraordinary, and sometimes baffling body of Goya’s work and the interconnected issues of modernity, Enlightenment, and critique. Taking exception to conventional views that rely mainly on Goya’s darkest images to establish his relevance for modernity, Cascardi argues that the entirety of Goya’s work is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds, of which it nonetheless remains an integral part. The book reckons with the apparent gulf assumed to divide the Disasters of War and the so-called Black Paintings from Goya’s scenes of bourgeois life or from the well-mannered portraits of aristocrats, military men, and intellectuals. It shows how these apparent contradictions offer us a gateway into Goya’s critical practice vis-à-vis a European modernity typically associated with the Enlightenment values dominant in France, England, and Germany. In demonstrating Goya’s commitment to the project of critique, Cascardi provides an alternative to established readings of Goya’s work, which generally acknowledge the explicit social criticism evident in works such as the Caprichos but which have little to say about those works that do not openly take up social or political themes. In Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique, Cascardi shows how Goya was consistently engaged in a critical response to—and not just a representation of—the many different factors that are often invoked to explain his work, including history, politics, popular culture, religion, and the history of art itself.

Anthony J. Cascardi is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including The Consequences of Enlightenment; Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics; The Subject of Modernity; and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Secularization and the Aesthetics of Belief
2  A Promise of Happiness?
3  Goya, Modernity, Aesthetic Critique
4  The Limits of Representation
5  Conflicts of the Faculties: Goya and Kant
6  Extremities
7  Freedom and the Face of Darkness
8  Beauty and Sympathy

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Image Credits

From Penn State UP:

Angela Vanhaelen, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022), 236 pages, ISBN: 978-0271091402 (hardcover), $115. Also available as an ebook, with a paperback edition scheduled for release in March 2023.

This book opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven.

Doolhoven were a type of labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest lodgings, these licensed public houses also housed remarkable displays of artwork in their gardens and galleries. The main attractions were inventive displays of moving mechanical figures (automata) and a famed set of waxwork portraits of the rulers of Protestant Europe. Publicized as the most innovative artworks on display in Amsterdam, the doolhoven exhibits presented the mercantile city as a global center of artistic and technological advancement. This evocative tour through the doolhoven pub gardens—where drinking, entertainment, and the acquisition of knowledge mingled in encounters with lively displays of animated artifacts—shows that the exhibits had a forceful and transformative impact on visitors, one that moved them toward Protestant reform.

Deeply researched and decidedly original, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam uncovers a wealth of information about these nearly forgotten public pleasure parks, situating them within popular culture, religious controversies, global trade relations, and intellectual debates of the seventeenth century.

Angela Vanhaelen is Professor of Art History at McGill University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic, also published by Penn State University Press.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  The Closed Door: Walking In

Ritual Routes
2  The Courtyard Fountain: Bacchic Rites
3  Into the Labyrinth: Containing the Human Monster

The Moving Statue Strikes
4  Automata: Activating Human Behavior
5  Strange Things for Strangers: Transcultural Automata

Protestant Paganism
6  Wax Portraits: Body Politics
7  Time Machines in the Golden Age: The Kairos of Clockwork

Epilogue: Obsolescence

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Arthena:

Rébecca Duffeix, with a preface by Barthélémy Jobert, Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (1780–1850) (Paris: Arthena, 2022), 520 pages, ISBN: 978-2903239688, €135.

Reconnu jusqu’aux années 1830 comme un artiste majeur, Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (1780–1850) a été injustement éclipsé au profit de son père, le célèbre Jean-Honoré.

Peintre d’Histoire en vogue, artiste ‘troubadour’, Alexandre-Évariste est un créateur au talent éclectique. Précoce—il présente son premier dessin au Salon à treize ans—il n’aura de cesse d’explorer avec succès tous les domaines : peinture, dessin, gravure et sculpture. Si ses scènes d’Histoire nationale—François Ier armé chevalier par Bayard, Jeanne d’Arc sur le bûcher ou La Bataille de Marignan—sont entrées dans notre imaginaire, Fragonard a également fourni de nombreux dessins pour des recueils de gravures, des modèles de formes et de décors pour la manufacture de Sèvres ou pour des costumes de l’Opéra. Fidèle aux leçons de son maître David, ‘Fragonard fils’, nous montre aussi ses dons de coloriste, aux effets de lumière audacieux et maîtrisés, hérités de son père, et ses évocations de Bradamante ou de la statue du commandeur de Dom Juan peuvent être qualifiées de romantiques.

Diplômée en Lettres modernes et docteur en Histoire de l’art à l’université Lumière Lyon 2, où elle a enseigné, Rebecca Duffeix a soutenu sa thèse en 2000 sur la vie et l’oeuvre d’Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard. Spécialiste de cet artiste, elle a notamment été commissaire de deux expositions qui lui ont été consacrées (Grasse en 2017 et Angoulême en 2020–21). Elle est actuellement en charge du centre de documentation et de la bibliothèque des musées Gadagne à Lyon.

From Yale UP:

Tim Clayton, James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2022), 408 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107321, £50 / $65.

A lavishly illustrated biography of James Gillray, inventor of the art of political caricature

James Gillray (1756–1815) was late Georgian Britain’s funniest, most inventive and most celebrated graphic satirist and continues to influence cartoonists today. His exceptional drawing, matched by his flair for clever dialogue and amusing titles, won him unprecedented fame; his sophisticated designs often parodied artists such as William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, and Henry Fuseli, while he borrowed and wittily redeployed celebrated passages from William Shakespeare and John Milton to send up politicians in an age—as now—where society was fast changing, anxieties abounded, truth was sometimes scarce, and public opinion mattered.

Tim Clayton’s definitive biography explores Gillray’s life and work through his friends, publishers—the most important being women—and collaborators, aiming to identify those involved in inventing satirical prints and the people who bought them. Clayton thoughtfully explores the tensions between artistic independence, financial necessity, and the conflicting demands of patrons and self-appointed censors in a time of political and social turmoil.

Tim Clayton is a historian and writer. He is a specialist in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century history and culture and a leading authority on the printed images of that period.

From Arthena:

Joseph Assémat-Tessandier, with a preface by Jan Blanc, Louis Lagrenée (1725–1805) (Paris: Arthena, 2022), 472 pages, ISBN: 978-2903239701, €99,

Peintre d’Histoire, à la belle carrière officielle, Louis Lagrenée (1725–1805) présente plus de 150 tableaux au Salon du Louvre de 1755 à 1789. Soulevant à plusieurs reprises l’enthousiasme de Diderot, sa peinture est appréciée des milieux financiers et aristocratiques, jusqu’à la Cour de Russie. Son succès au Salon de 1763 lui donne accès aux commandes pour les demeures royales. Il participe ensuite au programme d’encouragement de la peinture d’Histoire, organisé par le comte d’Angiviller de 1777 à 1789 (La Mort de la femme de Darius ou Les Deux Veuves d’un officier indien). De ses petits tableaux de cabinet (Vierge à l’Enfant, allégories ou scènes mythologiques) aux grands sujets inspirés de l’histoire ancienne (Annibal ayant trouvé le corps de Marcellus), son style épuré et raffiné au coloris délicat lui vaut le surnom d’ ‘Albane français’.

Les découvertes de ces dernières années (carnets de croquis, dessins préparatoires et réapparition d’oeuvres perdues), qui ont permis de doubler le corpus connu de Lagrenee l’aîné, ainsi différencié de son frère Jean-Jacques (1739–1821), apportent un nouvel éclairage sur son art, jalon précieux dans l’évolution de la peinture française vers le néoclassicisme naissant.

Joseph Assémat-Tessandier a soutenu en avril 2020 à l’université de Genève, sa thèse en histoire de l’art sur le peintre Louis Lagrenée. Diplômé de Sciences Po Paris et de l’Insead, il a travaillé auparavant dans des institutions financières américaine et française. Ses recherches se poursuivent à l’heure actuelle sur le peintre Jean-Jacques Lagrenée.