Enfilade

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Lise Funder, Danish Silver, 1600–2000 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2021), 292 pages, ISBN: ‎978-8763545853, $60.

An illustrated catalog of Denmark’s cutlery through the ages. Replete with nearly four hundred images, Danish Silver 1600–2000 is the first international collection to showcase the rich artistry of Danish cutlery.

C O N T E N T S

Preface
About the Catalogue

Danish Silver: 17th, 18, and 19th Centuries
Silver Marking

Catalogue
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century

Danish Silver: 20th Century

Catalogue
20th Century

Select Bibliography
Exhibitions of Danish Silver in the Danish Museum of Decorative Art
Index of Names

From Yale UP:

Clive Aslet, The Story of the Country House: A History of Places and People (Yale University Press, 2021), 256 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0300255058, $25.

The Story of the Country House is an authoritative and vivid account of the British country house, exploring how they have evolved with the changing political and economic landscape. Clive Aslet reveals the captivating stories behind individual houses, their architects, and occupants, and paints a vivid picture of the wider context in which the country house in Britain flourished and subsequently fell into decline before enjoying a renaissance in the twenty-first century. The genesis, style, and purpose of architectural masterpieces such as Hardwick Hall, Hatfield House, and Chatsworth are explored, alongside the numerous country houses lost to war and economic decline. We also meet a cavalcade of characters, owners with all their dynastic obsessions and diverse sources of wealth, and architects such as Inigo Jones, Sir John Vanbrugh, Robert Adam, Sir John Soane, and A.W.N. Pugin, who dazzled or in some cases outraged their contemporaries. The Story of the Country House takes a fresh look at this enduringly popular building type, exploring why it continues to hold such fascination for us today.

Clive Aslet is a writer, commentator, historian, editor, and academic. He has written around twenty books on architecture and history and was editor of Country Life magazine from 1993 to 2006.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue

1  Medieval
2  Tudor and Elizabethan
3  Early Stuart
4  Commonwealth to Queen Anne
5  Early Georgian
6  Mid-Georgian
7  Regency to William IV
8  Early and High Victorian
9  Turn of the Century
10  Between the Wars
11  Post-War: Recovery and Boom
12  Now

Further Reading
Index

This book was published in the UK in the fall by Penguin, with a US release scheduled for March from Rizzoli. (I’m always interested in the decision to use different covers for British and American audiences. -CH)

John-Paul Stonard, foreword by The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, with photographs by Victoria Hely-Hutchinson, Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now: Seven Scenes from the Life of an English Country House (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2022), 420 pages, ISBN: 978-0847871414, $65.

No place embodies the spirit of the English country house better than Chatsworth. From best-selling books such as Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire and Chatsworth: The House by Deborah Mitford, the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, American audiences have long been transfixed by this remarkable place and its extraordinary collection of art and decorative objects.

Today, Chatsworth’s facade is newly cleaned and its windows freshly gilded. The forward-looking current Duke of Devonshire, who likes to say that “everything was new once,” has redone the public and private rooms. This tour-de-force volume is his telling of the story of Chatsworth through seven historical periods accompanied by stunning photo-graphic portraits of the house, its collections, and the grounds.

Chatsworth contains countless treasures from Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego and Antonio Canova’s Endymion to seminal modern works by Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Though filled with works from different time periods, the collection represents the very best of the “new” from each artistic era.

John-Paul Stonard is an art historian educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art and contributes to the London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire reside at Chatsworth, home to the family since 1549. Victoria Hely-Hutchinson is a photographer whose work has appeared in Dazed & Confused, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine.

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press and Paul Holberton:

A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature: Volume I, Earlier Renaissance (London: Ad Illisum, 2021), 500 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-1912168255, $60 / Volume II, Later Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassicism (London: Ad Illisvm, 2021), 500 pages, ISBN: 978-1912168262, $60.

A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature is an unprecedented exploration of the pastoral through the close examination of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature, and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, and English, as well as of a wide range of visual imagery. The book is an iconographic study of Renaissance and Baroque pastoral and related subject matter, with an important chapter on the eighteenth century, both in the visual arts, where pastoral is poorly understood, and in words and performance, about which many false preconceptions prevail.

The book begins with Virgil’s use of Theocritus and an analysis of what basis Virgil provided for Renaissance pastoral and what, by contrast, stemmed from the medieval pastourelle. Paul Holberton then moves through a remarkable range of works, addressing authors such as Petrarch, Tasso, Guarino, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and artists such as Giorgione, Claude, Poussin, Watteau, Gainsborough, and many more. The book serves simultaneously as a careful study, an art book full of beautiful reproductions, and an anthology, presenting all texts both in the original language and in English translation.

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Sarah Goldsmith, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour (London: University of London Press, 2021), 200 pages, ISBN: 978-1912702213 (cloth), $55 / ISBN: 978-1912702220 (paper), $35.

The Grand Tour, a customary trip through Europe undertaken by British nobility and wealthy landed gentry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, played an important role in the formation of contemporary notions of elite masculinity. Through an examination of testimonies written by Grand Tourists, tutors, and their families, Sarah Goldsmith argues that the Grand Tour educated young men in a wide variety of skills, virtues, and vices that extended well beyond polite society.

Goldsmith demonstrates that the Grand Tour was a means of constructing Britain’s next generation of leaders. Influenced by aristocratic concepts of honor and inspired by military-style leadership, elite society viewed experiences of danger and hardship as powerfully transformative and therefore as central to constructing masculinity. Scaling mountains, volcanoes, and glaciers, and even encountering war and disease, Grand Tourists willingly tackled a variety of perils. Through her study of these dangers, Goldsmith offers a bold revision of eighteenth-century elite masculine culture and the critical role the Grand Tour played within it.

Sarah Goldsmith is a lecturer in urban and material culture history at the University of Edinburgh, having previously held a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at the University of Leicester.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  Hazarding Chance: A History of Eighteenth-Century Danger
2  Military Mad: War and the Grand Tour
3  Wholesome Dangers and a Stock of Health: Exercise, Sport, and the Hardships of the Road
4  Fire and Ice: Mountains, Glaciers, and Volcanoes
5  Dogs, Servants, and Masculinities: Writing about Danger and Emotion on the Grand Tour
Conclusion

Appendix
Bibliography
Index

From Yale UP:

Henrietta McBurney, The Art and Science of Mark Catesby (London: Paul Mellon Centre, 2021), 384 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1913107192, $50.

The life and art of the 18th-century naturalist Mark Catesby, and his pioneering work depicting the flora and fauna of North America, are explored in vibrant detail

This book explores the life and work of the celebrated eighteenth-century English naturalist, explorer, artist and author Mark Catesby (1683–1749). During Catesby’s lifetime, science was poised to shift from a world of amateur virtuosi to one of professional experts. Working against a backdrop of global travel that incorporated collecting and direct observation of nature, Catesby spent two prolonged periods in the New World—in Virginia (1712–19) and South Carolina and the Bahamas (1722–6). In his majestic two-volume Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–43), esteemed by his contemporary John Bartram as “an ornament for the finest library in the world,” he reflected the excitement, drama, and beauty of the natural world. Interweaving elements of art history, history of science, natural history illustration, painting materials, book history, paper studies, garden history and colonial history, this meticulously researched volume brings together a wealth of unpublished images as well as newly discovered letters by Catesby, which, with their first-hand accounts of his collecting and encounters in the wild, bring the story of this extraordinary pioneer naturalist vividly to life.

Henrietta McBurney is a freelance curator and art historian. She was previously curator in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Her publications include studies on the florilegium of Alexander Marshal and the natural history drawings for Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum.

From Yale UP:

Clare Hickman, The Doctor’s Garden: Medicine, Science, and Horticulture in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0300236101, $40.

A richly illustrated exploration of how late Georgian gardens associated with medical practitioners advanced science, education, and agricultural experimentation

As Britain grew into an ever-expanding empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new and exotic botanical specimens began to arrive within the nation’s public and private spaces. Gardens became sites not just of leisure, sport, and aesthetic enjoyment, but also of scientific inquiry and knowledge dissemination. Medical practitioners used their botanical training to capitalize on the growing fashion for botanical collecting and agricultural experimentation in institutional, semipublic, and private gardens across Britain. This book highlights the role of these medical practitioners in the changing use of gardens in the late Georgian period, marked by a fluidity among the ideas of farm, laboratory, museum, and garden. Placing these activities within a wider framework of fashionable, scientific, and economic interests of the time, historian Clare Hickman argues that gardens shifted from predominately static places of enjoyment to key gathering places for improvement, knowledge sharing, and scientific exploration.

Clare Hickman is a senior lecturer in history at Newcastle University. She lives in Whitley Bay, United Kingdom.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Quick Guide to the Key Medical Practitioners and Their Gardens

Introduction, Illuminating the Doctor’s Garden
1  Educating the Senses: The Botanic Garden as a Teaching and Research Center
2  Creating a Perpetual Spring: Tracing Private Botanic Collectors and Their Networks
3  For ‘Curiosity and Instruction’: Visiting the Botanic Garden
4  ‘Hints or Directions’: Reading the Doctor’s Garden
5  For Dulce and Utile: The Garden as Both Ornament and Farm
6  This ‘Terrestrial Elysium’: Sociability and the Garden
Epilogue, The Stories We Tell: Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Forthcoming from UVA Press:

Anna Sagal, Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0813946955 (cloth), $115 / ISBN: 978-0813946962 (paper), $45. Also available as an ebook.

To this day, women face barriers in entering scientific professions, and in earlier eras the challenges were greater still. But in Botanical Entanglements, Anna Sagal reveals how women’s active participation in scientific discourses of the eighteenth century was enabled by the manipulation of social and cultural conventions that have typically been understood as limiting factors. By taking advantage of the intersections between domesticity, femininity, and nature, the writers and artists studied here laid claim to a specific authority on naturalist subjects, ranging from botany to entomology to natural history more broadly.

Botanical Entanglements pairs studies of well-known authors—Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith—with authors and artists who receive less attention in this context—Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Jacson, Elizabeth Blackwell, Henrietta Maria Moriarty, and Mary Delany—to offer a nuanced portrait of the diverse strategies women employed to engage in scientific labor. Using socially acceptable forms of textual production, including popular periodicals, didactic texts, novels, illustrated works, craftwork, and poetry, these women advocated for more substantive and meaningful engagement with the natural world. In parallel, the book also illuminates the emotional and physical intimacies between women, plants, and insects to reveal an early precursor to twenty-first-century theorizing of plant intelligence and human-plant relationships. Recognizing such literary and artistic ‘entanglement’ facilitates a more profound understanding of the multifaceted relationship between women and the natural world in eighteenth-century England.

Anna K. Sagal is Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Caterpillars in the Garden
2  From Native Blooms to Monster Plants
3  Pedagogies and Possibilities
4  Sketching Vegetality
5  Collecting and Creating
Coda