Reviewed: ‘The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century’
From The Art Bulletin 93 (March 2010): 101-04.
Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 368 pages, ISBN: 9780295986678, $60.
Reviewed alongside Cigdem Kafescioglu’s Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (2009) and Murat Gül’s The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City (2009).
Reviewed by Robert S. Nelson, Yale University.
. . . Hamadeh defines the character of a period through its buildings. Especially noteworthy is her use of poetry and building inscriptions. And, like Kafescioglu, she discusses vision, power, and the location of buildings . . . . she relies on the concept of ‘pleasure’ in the title and, behind it, a more fundamental notion of public space, adapted from Jürgen Habermas and others, that did not exist in the earlier centuries. Istanbul in the eighteenth century resembles John Brewer’s view of London from the late seventeenth century, in which ‘high culture moved out of the narrow confines of the court and into diverse spaces’ [The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 3]. Finally, while her book is firmly ensconced in Turkish studies, the author also situates it laterally in early modern studies and critiques Westernization theories of
Ottoman architecture, that is, the notion that it follows at a
distance fashions set elsewhere. . .
Book Review: ‘Thomas Roberts’ Catalogue
From the February issue of Apollo Magazine:
William Laffa and Brendan Rooney, Thomas Roberts (1748-1777): Landscape and Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, exhibition catalogue (Tralee: Churchill House Press for the National Gallery of Ireland, 2009), 416 pages, ISBN: 9780955024634, $110.
Reviewed by Toby Barnard, Hertford College, Oxford University; posted 1 February 2011.
Thomas Roberts (1748–77) blazed briefly across the Irish skies in the 1770s. Little in Irish painting before that decade prepared for his sudden appearance on the scene. At that time in 18th-century Ireland, the techniques and subjects of Claude, Poussin and Salvator Rosa appealed to artists and collectors alike. A succession of painters – Willem van der Hagen, Robert Carver, John Lewis and Joseph Tudor – assimilated the conventions and demands of pastoral landscape painting, and created decorative but generalised images. Roberts, in contrast, applied these classical dressings to recognisable Irish scenes. The results, seen in a revelatory exhibition at the National Gallery in Dublin in 2009, encompass the mansions and demesnes of Protestant grandees and remoter views of the west, notably the modest townships of Ballyshannon and Belleek. . . .
The full review is available here»
Reviewing for Enfilade
From the Editor
I recently received three books with requests that I consider publishing reviews of them here at Enfilade. Given that expanding the site’s original content is one goal, I’m certainly open to the idea. Consequently, I’m writing to solicit reviewers. In many ways, Enfilade remains a work-in-progress, and I would imagine this new direction (even if it succeeds) will call for adjustments along the way. I would like to propose the following ideas as a starting point. I welcome any feedback or advice readers might have.
A. Reviewers must be HECAA members in good standing.
B. Given that Enfilade is intended to serve as a newsletter for those interested in eighteenth-century art and architecture — as opposed to serving as an academic journal in its own right — it seems that the goal of a review at Enfilade is different than a review published in an academic journal. Description of contents and assessment of potential audiences are probably more important, for instance, than teasing out the nuances of a particular argument. An informed characterization premised on the scholarly expertise of the reviewer should still be an important goal, but the model for emulation might be more akin to a brief notice in The New York Review of Books or the TLS than The Art Bulletin or Eighteenth-Century Studies.
C. The blog format lends itself to relatively brief postings: 400-800 words might be an appropriate length. Prompt turn-around seems especially important for a newsletter format, and again the brevity should help in this regard.
D. One big problem: HECAA has no budget to fund the logistics of reviewing books (Enfilade costs absolutely nothing to produce). If publishers send me books, I have no money to send out copies to reviewers. In the case of the three books at hand, I’m happy to haul them to New York with me for CAA and distribute copies there (likewise with ASECS in Vancouver). Otherwise, I think the cost of shipping would have to be paid by the reviewer. It’s less than ideal, but given the cost of art books (easily ranging from $50 to 125), paying several dollars for shipping is perhaps not unreasonable.
The three books I presently have address two current exhibitions in the United States and the topic of eighteenth-century furniture. If you would like to be added to the list of potential reviewers, please send me an email outlining your particular areas of expertise (a brief CV would be helpful, too). Graduate students are encouraged to contribute, though any member of HECAA should feel free to volunteer. Again, I welcome your suggestions. -C.H.
Conference Review: Does the Picturesque Have a Future?
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Conference — Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation (London: University of Westminster, 25-27 June 2010).
Reviewed by Samantha L. Martin-McAuliffe, School of Architecture, University College Dublin; posted 11 January 2011.
. . . When the conference had seemingly reached the point where an obituary for the Picturesque seemed inevitable, Jonathan Hill (The Bartlett, University College London) delivered his keynote address, “Weather Architecture,” in which he called for a redemption of the tradition. Through a considered reflection on John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and J. M. W. Turner’s London studio, Hill explained how the Picturesque attended to important themes, such as mortality, history, and, notably, the environment. Because this tradition aligned with topics such as the seasons and the senses (and hence the weather), the places it qualified were never static, but always emerging and forever changing. From this stance, the Picturesque is seen not so much as a formal model for construction that is fixed to a particular historical period, but instead as a sensitivity toward the surrounding world and its manifold processes—time, temperature, narrative. Is it possible, therefore, to recast the role of the Picturesque within contemporary landscape studies? Can it help the invisible yet constantly present conditions of the environment rise into notice? . . .
For the full review, click here» (CAA membership required)
Reviewed: ‘The Marlborough Gems’
From the December issue of Apollo Magazine:
John Boardman, The Marlborough Gems: Formerly at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), ISBN: 9780199237517, $325.
Reviewed by Lucia Pirzio Biroli Stefanelli; posted 1 December 2010.
In the February 2008 issue of ‘Apollo’, Sir John Boardman described how he was devoting himself to the reconstruction of the most important 18th-century English private collection of cameos and intaglios, that of George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough (1739–1817). The result of this vast labour is a splendid and wonderfully rich volume written with the collaboration of Erika Zwierlein-Diehl, Claudia Wagner and Diana Scarisbrick, who contributed an analysis of the jewelled settings.
The Marlborough collection, comprising 800 intaglios and cameos covering all periods from antiquity to the late 18th century, became – along with telescopes – the duke’s main interest after he became disillusioned with the world of politics,
and retired. He kept his collection close at hand in Blenheim
Palace, where it remained until 1875 . . .
The full review is available here»
Punch’s Golden Age
The following feature drawn from David Wondrich’s new book on punch aired on NPR’s Morning Edition on 30 December 2010.
David Wondrich, Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl (London: Perigee, 2010), ISBN: 978-0399536168, $23.95.
. . . The punch cocktail has a long history that starts with British sailors (who drank a lot), says liquor historian David Wondrich. Sailors were entitled to 10 pints of beer per day — but when they sailed into the tropics, the beer spoiled, and that’s when they turned to punch.
“They made it with local ingredients in India and Indonesia in the early 1600s,” Wondrich tells NPR’s Linda Wertheimer. “They were 13,000 miles away from any source of English beer or wine, and they had nothing to drink. And English sailors . . . respond very poorly to that.”
Wondrich, who is also a mixologist, has paid homage to what he calls “the monarch of mixed drinks”; his book, ‘Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl’, features 40 historical punch recipes for the ambitious drink mixer. . . .
But even for Dickens in the mid-1800s, punch was something of a throwback. “By his day,” Wondrich explains, “punch had gotten kind of old-fashioned. Queen Victoria was very opposed to the lax moral standards that the upper classes in particular had held to in her predecessor’s days. And she didn’t like their habit of getting grossly drunk on punch and champagne and wine.”
So punch was out of style — but that was part of the fun. “[Dickens] was a great antiquarian,” Wondrich says. “He liked to collect all the old customs and habits of old England.” So he’d invite his friends over, concoct a big bowl of punch, and then describe the punch-making process for his guests.
The Dickens punch in Wondrich’s book (see the recipe here) is taken from a detailed letter the novelist wrote to his friend’s sister — and it’s a “classic 18th-century brandy rum punch,” Wondrich says. “This is punch from its golden age.” . . .
The full feature (including the audio version) is available at NPR’s website. In addition, Eileen Reynolds offers a charming discussion with the author for the online edition of The New Yorker (15 December 2010), while New York Magazine profiled Wondrich’s food and drink consumption for a week back in November for the feature “New York Diet.”
Reviewed: ‘Lustrous Images from the Enlightenment’
From Histara-les comptes rendus (a site useful, in particular, for reviews of European publications) . . .
William Eisler, Lustrous Images from the Enlightenment: The Medals of the Dassiers of Geneva (Milan: Skira, 2010), ISBN: 9788857205076, $60.
Reviewed by Jan Blanc, University of Geneva; posted 22 November 2010.
Ce livre, consacré aux artistes-médailleurs Jean Dassier (1676-1763) et à ses deux fils, Jacques-Antoine (1715-1759) et Antoine (1718-1780), représente sans nul doute une contribution essentielle à l’histoire des arts à Genève, au XVIIIe siècle, mais aussi, plus largement, à celle des arts européens, durant le Siècle des Lumières. Comme ne cessent de le souligner les auteurs de ce livre, William Eisler, assistant scientifique au Musée monétaire cantonal de Lausanne, et Matteo Campagnolo, conservateur du Cabinet de numismatique de Genève et chargé d’enseignement à l’Université de Genève, les Dassier ont construit une véritable carrière internationale qui, tout au long du XVIIIe siècle, les a amené à Genève, Paris, Amsterdam, Londres et Rome. L’édition bilingue (français et anglais) de cet ouvrage permettra, il faut l’espérer, une large diffusion et réception d’un ouvrage, qui s’ingénie, avec succès, à souligner la dimension européenne du travail des Dassier, et dont l’importance, de ce fait, dépasse, de loin, le strict cadre genevois des productions artistiques du XVIIIe siècle. . . .
The full review is available here»
Reviewed: ‘The Intimate Portrait’
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan, The Intimate Portrait: Drawings, Miniatures, and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence, exhibition catalogue (Edinburgh and London: National Galleries of Scotland and British Museum, 2009). 272 pages, ISBN: 9781844543984, £25.
Reviewed by Robin Nicholson, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; posted 1 December 2010.
The 2008 exhibition that this catalogue accompanied was instigated by the British Museum’s acquisition of an important drawing by Sir Thomas Lawrence, “Mary Hamilton” (1789). Cover-girl of the catalogue and an astonishing tour-de-force by the gifted nineteen-year-old artist, this work reminded authors Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan of just how ubiquitous miniatures and portrait drawings were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—particularly at the Royal Academy—and how central they were to the contemporary debates on the purpose and significance of portraiture. As Lloyd (of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery) and Sloan (of the British Museum) admit, this publication only begins to address some of the pressing issues of the genre. Their goal is “to open up the discourse . . . looking at them as physical objects as well as symbolic ones, asking how and why they were made, commissioned, whether for pleasure or as gifts, where they were kept or hung or worn—displayed, encased or bejeweled” (9). Although it can be deemed only a partial success, the catalogue is nonetheless a beautiful, erudite, and informative publication. . . .
For the full review, click here» (CAA membership required)
Reviewed: ‘James Barry’
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Tom Dunne and William L. Pressly, eds., James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 300 pages, ISBN: 9780754666349, $114.95.
Reviewed by Jonathan Rinck, Department of Art, Spring Arbor University; posted 10 November 2010.
The writing of ‘James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter’ was occasioned by the bicentennial of Barry’s death, an event commemorated by the exhibition ‘James Barry (1741–1806): “The Great Historical Painter”’ at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, in 2005, and followed by a related symposium in February 2006. This book contains fourteen papers given at that conference, presented by a uniformly capable cross-section of scholars ranging from the graduate student to the seasoned authority. The expressed intent of the collection is to help correct the regrettably scant corpus of scholarship devoted to this Irish painter. The topics of the essays are diverse, but the book is cohesive in its enlightening and informative narrative of Barry as, if not the greatest of British eighteenth-century history painters, then as one of its most fascinating and fervent proponents. . . .
For the full review, click here» (CAA membership required)
Reviewed: ‘Regulating the Académie’
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Reed Benhamou, Regulating the Académie: Art, Rules and Power in “ancien régime” France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 308 pages, ISBN: 9780729409728, $100.
Reviewed by Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Department of Art History, New York University; posted 27 October 2010.
Few institutions have influenced the course of European art or the writing of art history as decisively as the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Its pulse animated the visual extravagance of Versailles, the popularity of public art exhibitions, the emergence of art criticism, and the codification of an approach to arts instruction that persists to this day. The Academy’s legacy extends even to the enduring assumption that a centralized system of arts administration distinguishes a functioning nation-state. It is no surprise, then, that the Academy should cast a strong shadow in so many histories of post-Renaissance European art. Yet, for all this, art historians rarely allow the Academy to assume more than a vaguely adumbrated role as a monolithic force bent on enforcing conservative artistic values and practices. To be sure, some scholars have succeeded in bringing to life the Academy’s complex institutional operation. Thomas Crow’s ‘Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and ‘Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), for instance, exemplify the capacity for subtle institutional analysis to yield compelling art-historical interpretations. Reed Benhamou’s ‘Regulating the Académie: Art, Rules and Power in ancien régime France‘ offers both a prompt and an aid to scholars who seek to engage in a similarly careful study of the French Royal Academy. Drawing from archival as well as published sources, Benhamou has crafted a satisfyingly detailed account of the administrative history of the Academy. . . .
For the full review, click here» (CAA membership required)
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