Enfilade

In the current issue of the Oxford Art Journal:

Clare Walcot, “Hogarth’s The South Sea Scheme and the Topography of Speculative Finance,” Oxford Art Journal 35 (December 2012): 413-32.

William Hogarth’s elaborate graphic satire The South Sea Scheme (1721) stages a moral tale of speculation run riot and a capital in thrall to ‘mony’s magick power’. Published in response to the failure of the eponymous scheme, Hogarth offers a satirical commentary on all forms of government-sanctioned speculation and illicit gambling. The scene is set in an imagined topography comprised of London landmarks, public buildings and temporary structures; places of authority, commerce and finance. His rearrangement of the Monument to the Great Fire and Guildhall brings into conjunction sites of cultural memory, which allude to the tense relationship between City and Crown during the post-Restoration period and rebuilding of the capital after 1666. Hogarth draws on the links these sites have with the theatre of the street, in the form of popular protest and pageantry, as it appeared on the ground and on paper. This essay examines the spectacular use of urban space and how it shaped Hogarth’s early graphic satire, as well as continental imports adapted to a London market, such as Bernard Baron’s (after Bernard Picart) A Monument Dedicated to Posterity (1721), often taken to be the model for The South Sea Scheme.

Clare Walcot’s research interests focus on financial innovation in the eighteenth century and its impact on the visual arts, and develop out of her PhD thesis entitled ‘Figuring Finance: London’s New Financial World and the Iconography of Speculation, c. 1689–1763’ (University of Warwick, 2003).

In the current issue of The Art Bulletin, the “Notes from the Field” feature addresses the theme of contingency. Making a strong case for the proposition that it is possible to say something worthwhile in less than two pages, many of the essays are insightful and stimulating. The following two particularly address the eighteenth century. -CH

Gloria Kury, “On Contingency,” The Art Bulletin 94 (September 2012): 352-54.

Invoking Charles Le Brun, Emma and William Hamilton (“the first spell-binding teacher of art history was . . . a husband-wife duo”), and Dr. James Graham (famous for his sexual prescriptions involving the Celestial Bed at his Temple of Health and Hymen), Kury urges “scholars to start giving due heed to the significance of the spellbinding lecturer and / or master of the slide show, from the Hamiltons through Leo Steinberg and T. J. Clark, in the establishment and vitality of their discipline” . . . (354).

Mark Ledbury, “On Contingency,” The Art Bulletin 94 (September 2012): 354-55.

Addressing the “brilliant, but infuriating essay,” Charles Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life,” Ledbury draws readers’ attention to the critic’s coupling of “the contingent” with “the other half of art . . . the eternal and the immovable,” arguing that, in fact, modernity “has no monopoly over the contingent: wherever specialists look, the eternal and the immutable are thin on the ground” (354). Turning his attention then to eighteenth-century France (with reference to Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), Ledbury contends “that compelling history is always aware of the gravitational forces of contingency tugging it from its lofty heights. . . . Certainly, in my own scholarship, to even begin to chart the fortunes of the Neoclassical generation is to appreciate both the force and unpredictability of contingency in the making of lives, works, and careers” . . . (355).

In the latest issue of Past and Present (August 2012), Michael Sonenscher responds to a recent article by William H. Sewell, “The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 206 (February 2010): 81-120. Sewell then weighs in with his own reply (access to full texts will require institutional subscriptions).

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Michael Sonenscher, “Debate: The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 216 (2012): 247-58.
[Full Text] [PDF]

‘Fashionable consumption’, Bill Sewell writes, ‘played a constitutive role in the development of French capitalism not only in the eighteenth century but also over the long term’. The claim goes with the grain of the many recent publications on eighteenth-century French trade and manufacturing industry that Sewell has expertly synthesized. But two further aspects of his article invite fuller comment. The first is an examination of the relationship between fashionable consumption and capitalist development that involves a modified version of Marx’s concept of surplus value. The second is a suggestion about the bearing of this fashion-oriented characterization of French capitalism on the subject of the origins and attributes of the French Revolution. Together they add up to an ambitious argument about the history of consumption as the way to overcome the neglect of social and economic considerations that, according to Sewell, has been one of the effects of the revisionist historiography of the French Revolution. . . .

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William H. Sewell, “Reply to Michael Sonenscher,” Past and Present 216 (2012): 259-67.
[Full Text] [PDF]

I would like to thank Michael Sonenscher for his learned and respectful comments on my article. In his comments he has filled out an aspect of the topic of ‘fashion’s empire’ that I made no sustained effort to cover in my own essay: varying contemporary opinions about the economics of fashion and about fashion’s relationship to France’s monarchical and aristocratic constitution. However, I think that his reflections on these eighteenth-century (or, in the case of Jean-Baptiste Say, early nineteenth-century) arguments about fashion have little bearing on what I take to be the central points of my essay. These are: (1) that fashion played a central role in French (and European) capitalist development in the eighteenth century; (2) that the dynamism of the fashion sector was based to a significant extent on harnessing the desires and labour of consumers; and (3) that certain consequences of the rise of fashion in eighteenth-century France ‘were … conducive to notions of equality of the sort specified in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789’ and were therefore ‘a key source’ of the French Revolution’s ‘epochal political and cultural transformations’. . .

As noted at CAA News (2 July 2012):

CAA has joined JSTOR’s new Register & Read program, which offers free, read-online access to a wide-range of academic journals to independent scholars and researchers. The service is designed to make scholarship available to those not affiliated with a subscribing institution by allowing them to register for a MyJSTOR account.

CAA is pleased to contribute the full back run of The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, through 2008, to an expanding, eclectic list that includes BOMB Magazine, Film Quarterly, Modern Law Review, and American Journal of Sociology. All articles from The Art Bulletin and Art Journal during this time will be available for individuals to read and, in some instances, to download and purchase as a PDF file.

Since JSTOR launched Register & Read in January 2012, approximately forty publishers have contributed material from seventy-seven journals to the beta site. The user-friendly program mimics the experience of a library by allowing visitors to store up to three articles on a virtual shelf for two weeks before exchanging items. Feedback is key to improving the borrowing service that Register & Read provides. JSTOR plans to perfect the functionality of the program and enlarge its scope to meet the unique research needs of the scholarly community.

The Walpole Society 74 (2012)

• Rodney Griffiths, “The Life and Works of Edward Haytley (1713-1762),” pp. 1-60.
• Jason M. Kelly, “Letters from a Young Painter Abroad: James Russel in Rome, 1747-53,” pp. 61-164.
• Andrew Graciano, “The Memoir of Benjamin Wilson FRS (1721-1788): Painter and Electrical Scientist,” 165-244.
• Hugh Brigstocke, “The Journals and Accounts of James Irvine in Italy (1802-1806): Art Dealing and Speculation for William Buchanan, Arthur Champernowne and Alexander Gordon,” 245-432.

General information about The Walpole Society is available here»