Enfilade

Distributed by Yale UP:

Holly Shaffer, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910 (London: Paul Mellon Centre, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107284, £45 / $55.

Grafted Arts focuses on Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials who used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige, and generate devotion as they allied with (or fought against) each other to control western India in the eighteenth century. This book conceptualises the artistic combinations that resulted as ones of ‘graft’—a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, and losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among agents who assembled such materials. By tracing grafted arts from multiple perspectives—Maratha and British, artist and patron, soldier and collector—this book charts the methods of empire-building that recast artistic production and collection in western India and from there across India and in Britain. This mercenary method of artistry propagated mixed, fractured and plundered arts. Indeed, these ‘grafted arts’—disseminated across India and Britain over the nineteenth century to aid in consolidating empire or revolting against it entirely—remain instigators of nationalist agitation today.

Holly Shaffer is assistant professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University with a focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and South Asian arts and their intersections.

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Note (added 17 January 2024) — As announced in January 2024, Grafted Arts was awarded an HBA Book Prize, for a single-authored book with a subject between 1800 and 1960 (alongside Mark Crinson’s Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester).

From The Getty:

Philip Thicknesse, William Jackson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, with an introduction by Anthony Mould, Lives of Gainsborough (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2020), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1606066645, $13.

A collection of contemporary texts about Thomas Gainsborough, a leading British portraitist and landscape painter in the eighteenth century.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) was a leading English landscape and portrait painter, draftsman, and printmaker who is now considered one of the most important British artists of the eighteenth century. This volume illuminates his life, career, personality, and passions through three diverse character sketches by Philip Thicknesse, an eccentric British adventurer, businessman, and writer; William Jackson, an artist and close friend to Gainsborough; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, an English portrait painter and the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. An obituary published shortly after Gainsborough’s death lends insight into the artist’s impact. An introduction by Anthony Mould, a British art dealer and independent scholar, offers an overview of Gainsborough’s life and career.

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Dominic Janes, British Dandies: Engendering Scandal and Fashioning a Nation (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2022), 248 pages, ‎ ISBN: 978-1851245598, £30 / $45.

Reveals how the scandalous history of fashionable men and their clothes is a reflection of changing attitudes to style, gender, and sexuality.

Well-dressed men have played a distinctive part in the cultural and political life of Britain over several centuries. But unlike the twenty-first-century hipster, the British dandies provoked intense degrees of fascination and horror in their homeland and played an important role in British society from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. This book explores that social and cultural history through a focus on three figures: the macaroni, the dandy, and the aesthete. The first was noted for his flamboyance, the second for his austere perfectionism, and the third for his perversity. All were highly controversial in their time, pioneering new ways of displaying and performing gender, as demonstrated by the impact of key figures such as Lord Hervey, George ‘Beau’ Brummell, and Oscar Wilde. Illustrated with contemporary prints, portraits, and caricatures, this groundbreaking study tells the fascinating—and scandalous—story of fashionable men and their clothes.

Dominic Janes is professor of modern history at Keele University.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations

1  British Dandies
2  Dressing the Sexes in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
3  A Georgian Taste for Macaroni
4  Fine and Dandy in the Regency
5  Victorians and the Aesthetic Pose
6  Fashion and Scandal in the Twentieth Century

Notes
Bibliography
Picture Credits
Index

Published by the Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art:

Yuriko Jackall, Jean-Baptiste Greuze et ses têtes d’expression: La fortune d’un genre (Paris: CTHS / INHA, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-2735509393, €38.

La représentation de têtes dites d’expression a été initiée par Charles Le Brun au xviie siècle et s’inscrit dans la tradition académique. Les figures de Jean-Baptiste Greuze, principalement féminines, sont
d’abord le vecteur narratif des œuvres au sein desquelles elles ont vocation à s’intégrer. Toutefois, les émotions vont peu à peu constituer l’unique élément fictionnel des productions de l’artiste. L’autrice montre comment les têtes «greuziennes » — parfois jugées décadentes en raison de leur lascivité et leur volupté affichées — acquièrent finalement un statut autonome et deviennent un genre artistique à part entière entretenu par les collectionneurs et perpétué par une nouvelle génération d’artistes.

Spécialiste de la peinture française du xviiie siècle, Yuriko Jackall est conservatrice en chef de la Wallace Collection (London). Auparavant conservatrice à la National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), elle a participé à l’exposition Hubert Robert (1733–1808) (musée du Louvre / National Gallery of Art, 2016), puis a été commissaire des expositions America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting et Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures (National Gallery of Art, 2017).

Table des matières

Liste des abréviations
Remerciements
Préface
Avertissement

Introduction
• Greuze peintre
• Deux approches de Greuze peintre
• Un nouveau regard sur les têtes de Greuze
• Greuze éclipsé ?
• Greuze et Diderot
• Le sens du dessin de Denon

I. Un lexique pour la tête isolée
• Une tête d’après nature
• Tête et tête d’après nature
• Tête de fantaisie
• Tête de caractère
• Tête d’expression
• Tête d’étude
• Transformations de la tête isolée

II. Les identités académiques de Greuze
• Greuze et l’Académie
• Greuze selon Gougenot
• Peintre d’expression
• Peintre de nature
• Nature et expression
• Greuze entre nature et expression

III. La tête autonome : découper, isoler, extraire, remplacer
• Corrège, Coypel et le recadrage
• Mettre le tableau en morceaux
• Couper les têtes
• L’image du sentiment
• Le visage métonymique
• Greuze et le comte de Caylus
• Caylus et Watteau : dess(e)ins et jeux de fonds
• Caylus et Vien : sculpter la tête

IV. Morceler Greuze
• La question de matérialité
• Greuze, dessinateur
• Surfaces
• Greuze, peintre
• Du dessin à la peinture
• D’un tableau à l’autre
• Faire de la tête un condensé de l’oeuvre

V. Exprimer le désir et l’admiration
• De l’allégorie
• La Tête d’une jeune fille, exprimant l’admiration et le désir
• Abondance
• Interchangeabilité
• Expressions symboliques
• La part du spectateur : une lecture libertine
• La part du spectateur : un choix féminin

Conclusion: De l’expression au caractère
• La place de Greuze
• Évolutions lexicales

Bibliographie
Index
Crédits photographiques

From The University of Chicago Press:

William Sewell, Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), 416 pages, ISBN: 9780226770321 (cloth), $105 / ISBN: 9780226770468 (paper), $35.

There is little doubt that the French Revolution of 1789 changed the course of Western history. But why did the idea of civic equality—a distinctive signature of that revolution—find such fertile ground in France? How might changing economic and social realities have affected political opinions? William H. Sewell Jr. argues that the flourishing of commercial capitalism in eighteenth-century France introduced a new independence, flexibility, and anonymity to French social life. By entering the interstices of this otherwise rigidly hierarchical society, expanded commodity exchange colored everyday experience in ways that made civic equality thinkable, possible, even desirable, when the crisis of the French Revolution arrived. Sewell ties together masterful analyses of a multitude of interrelated topics: the rise of commerce, the emergence of urban publics, the careers of the philosophes, commercial publishing, patronage, political economy, trade, and state finance. Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France offers an original interpretation of one of history’s pivotal moments.

William H. Sewell Jr. is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, published by the University of Chicago Press.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: The French Revolution and the Shock of Civic Equality
1  Old Regime State and Society
2  The Eighteenth-Century Economy: Commerce and Capitalism

I. The Emergence of an Urban Public
3  The Commercial Public Sphere
4  The Empire of Fashion
5  The Parisian Promenade

II. The Philosophes and the Career Open to Talent
6  The Philosophe Career and the Impossible Example of Voltaire
7  Denis Diderot: Living by the Pen
8  The Abbé Morellet: Between Publishing and Patronage
9  Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Self-Deceived Clientage

III. Royal Administration and the Promise of Political Economy
10  Tocqueville’s Challenge: Royal Administration and the Rise of Civic Equality
11  Warfare, Taxes, and Administrative Centralization: The Double Bind of Royal Finance
12  Political Economy: A Solution to the Double Bind?
13  Navigating the Double Bind: Efforts at Reform

Conclusion: The Revolution and the Advent of Civic Equality
Epilogue: Civic Equality and the Continuing History of Capitalism

Acknowledgments
References
Index

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Philip Kelleway and Tristan Sam Weller, Figures of the Enlightenment: A Catalogue of Eighteenth-Century Meissen from a Private Collection (London: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2022), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-1913491857, $45.

A compelling record of eighteenth-century taste through pieces of Meissen porcelain.

This book presents more than one hundred specially commissioned photographs of eighteenth-century Meissen porcelain from a significant private collection, illuminating what elite consumers of that era valued, aspired to, and found entertaining. With an expert eye, each object is showcased in the round and up close, highlighting all important features. Detailed entries accompany each item and an introductory essay helps to place them in their proper historical context. Anyone with an interest in the decorative arts of the eighteenth century will find this book a feast for the eyes.

Philip Kelleway is an art historian who has written widely on eighteenth-century porcelain, illustration, and landscape painting. Tristan Sam Weller is a photographer based in the United Kingdom.