Enfilade

From The Getty:

Katie Scott and Hannah Williams, Artists’ Things: Rediscovering Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2024), 374 pages, ISBN: 978-1606068632, $60. With free digital editions available.

Histories of artists’ personal possessions shed new light on the lives of their owners.

Artists are makers of things. Yet it is a measure of the disembodied manner in which we generally think about artists that we rarely consider the everyday items they own. This innovative book looks at objects that once belonged to artists, revealing not only the fabric of the eighteenth-century art world in France but also unfamiliar—and sometimes unexpected—insights into the individuals who populated it, including Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun.

From the curious to the mundane, from the useful to the symbolic, these items have one thing in common: they have all been eclipsed from historical view. Some of the objects still exist, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s color box and Jacques-Louis David’s table. Others survive only in paintings, such as Jean-Siméon Chardin’s cistern in his Copper Drinking Fountain, or in documents, like François Lemoyne’s sword, the instrument of his suicide. Several were literally lost, including pastelist Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s pencil case. In this fascinating book, the authors engage with fundamental historical debates about production, consumption, and sociability through the lens of material goods owned by artists.

The free online edition of this open-access publication, with zoomable illustrations, is available here. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

Katie Scott is professor of the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Hannah Williams is senior lecturer in the history of art at Queen Mary University of London.

From Unicorn:

Caroline Chapman, A Place Apart: The Artist’s Studio, 1400–1900 (Lewes: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2023), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-1911397687, £25.

Exotic lair, freezing garret, or convivial rendezvous, artists’ studios reflect their personalities, the way they work, their dreams, and obsessions. Some are battlegrounds where hopes are dashed and original concepts fail dismally in their execution. A few artists became celebrities and flaunted their success by furnishing huge studios with exotic objects, while others lived in a haze of opium in squalid tenements in Montmartre. Spanning 500 years of Western art history from 1400 to 1900, A Place Apart describes the skilful techniques employed in a Renaissance workshop, Michelangelo’s agony and ecstasy while painting the Sistine Chapel, the murky world of the artist’s model, the looting by Napoleon of Veronese’s masterpiece, Van Gogh’s wretched first studio, how Géricault painted his Raft of the Medusa, the way Rodin worked in his plaster-spattered environment, and the ateliers of the Impressionists in Paris.

Caroline Chapman worked as a picture researcher for many of the principal UK publishers before becoming an editor and an author. Her publications include Russell of The Times: War Dispatches and Diaries, Elizabeth and Georgiana: The Duke of Devonshire and His Two Duchesses, John and Joséphine: The Creation of The Bowes Museum, Eighteenth-Century Women Artists: Their Trials and Tribulations, and Nineteenth-Century Women Artists: Sisters of the Brush.

From the University of Washington Press:

Claudia Brown, Glorious Qing: Decorative Arts in China, 1644–1911 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2024), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-0295751917, $70.

With over 250 color illustrations, this companion volume to Claudia Brown’s Great Qing: Painting in China, 1644–1911 covers an array of superbly crafted objects of art produced during China’s last dynasty. It features ceramics, metalwork, textiles, lacquer, glass, jade, and works of bamboo selected from collections in North America, Europe, China, and Taiwan. Art historian Brown probes the materials, motivations, technologies, and skills of Qing period artists, along with trends in art patronage and collecting. She considers objects of private patronage, including snuff bottles and instruments for the scholar’s desk, alongside imperial commissions, palace furnishings, and pieces made for export in the flourishing East-West trade market. Moving chronologically from one emperor’s reign to the next, Glorious Qing offers a comprehensive survey of Qing decorative arts that will delight experts and novices alike, from collectors to students of art history.

Claudia Brown is professor of art history at Arizona State University and research curator for Asian art at the Phoenix Art Museum. She is author of Great Qing: Painting in China, 1644–1911.

From the University of Washington Press:

Michele Matteini, The Ghost in the City: Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-0295750958, $65.

In 1771 the artist Luo Ping (1733–1799) left his native Yangzhou to relocate to the burgeoning hub of Beijing’s Southern City. Over two decades, he became the favored artist of a cosmopolitan community of scholars and officials who were at the forefront of the cultural life of the Qing-dynasty (1644–1911). From his spectacular ghost paintings to his later work exploring the city’s complex history, compressed spatial layout, and unique social rituals, Luo Ping captured the pleasures and concerns of a changing world at the end of the Qing’s ‘Prosperous Age’. This study takes the reader into the vibrant artistic and literary cultures of Beijing outside the court and to the networks of scholars, artists, and entertainers that turned the Southern City into a place like no other in the Qing empire. At the center of this narrative lie Luo Ping’s layered reflections on the medium of painting and its histories and formal conventions. Close reading of the work of Luo Ping and his contemporaries reveals how this generation of experimental artists sought to reform ink painting, paving the way for further developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a vast range of textual and visual sources, The Ghost in the City shares groundbreaking research that will transform our understanding of the evolution of modern ink painting.

Michele Matteini is assistant professor of art history at New York University and associate faculty at the Institute of Fine Arts.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments
Note on Romanization

Introduction
1  The Dream of the Southern City
2  Luo Ping from Yangzhou
3  Textures of Samsara
4  Landscapes of Culture
Epilogue Luo Ping’s Returning Home

Dramatis Personae
Glossary of Chinese Characters
Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Primavera Pers:

Pamela Fowler and Piet Bakker, Carel de Moor (1655–1738), His Life and Work: A Catalogue Raisonné (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2024), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-9059973930, €89.

Carel de Moor (1655–1738), His Life and Work, a monograph and œuvre catalogue, is the first scholarly study of one of the most important Dutch portrait painters of his time. The book includes a comprehensive biography, which explores Carel de Moor’s life and multi-faceted career within the context of the economic, political, and social history of the Dutch Republic. As a result of the authors’ thorough investigation of De Moor’s client networks, several hitherto unknown sitters have now been identified, and other sitters have been provided with new identities. The catalogue raisonné—arranged chronologically within the categories of portraits, history, pastoral scenes, genre, and still life— allows us to view De Moor’s œuvre in its totality, to compare his work with that of his predecessors and contemporaries, and to evaluate the development of his artistic style. Given that De Moor’s career mostly took place in the eighteenth century, this publication also adds significantly to the corpus of studies of Netherlandish art produced between 1680 and 1750—a period largely ignored by art historians. As De Moor’s work convincingly demonstrates, this lack of interest is entirely unjustified.

From Primavera Pers:

Charles Dumas, Gerard Melder (1693–1754): Eertijds beroemd, thans vrijwel vergeten (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2023), 160 pages, ISBN: ISBN 978-9059973985, €30.

De in Amsterdam geboren Gerard Melder (1693–1754) behoort tot een groepje kunstenaars die in de achttiende eeuw alom werd geprezen en tot over de landsgrenzen beroemd was, maar die later zo goed als geheel werd vergeten. Melder was werkzaam als miniaturist, schilder, tekenaar, en graveur. Hij was autodidact, leerde zichzelf tekenen en schilderen door oude prenten te bestuderen en na te tekenen.

Van Melder is geen omvangrijk oeuvre bewaard gebleven. Het merendeel van zijn werken is eclectisch: hij absorbeerde elementen uit het werk van voorgangers en maakte zich die eigen. Zijn arcadische landschappen zijn in de stijl van Isaac de Moucheron en zijn Rijngezichten in die van Herman Saftleven. Voor de stoffering ervan ontleende hij motieven aan bijvoorbeeld Jan van der Meer de Jonge en Abraham Rademaker. Het meest bijzonder binnen zijn oeuvre is een reeks van twaalf etsen, die wel ‘Het leven der bacchanten’ wordt genoemd. Met hun expliciet erotische karakter vormen deze landschappen, rijkelijk gestoffeerd met naakte mannen, nimfen, saters en kinderen, een grote uitzondering binnen de nogal brave Nederlandse prentkunst van de achttiende eeuw. Bacchanalen werden toen wel vaker afgebeeld, maar de wellustige handelingen werden slechts gesuggereerd en niet zoals bij Melder onverbloemd uitgebeeld.

Gerard Melder was een veelzijdig kunstenaar, die zich veel moeite had getroost om zichzelf als schilder, tekenaar en graveur te ontwikkelen. Hoewel hij beslist geen originele of vernieuwende geest kan worden toegedicht, werd hij in zijn tijd, vooral als miniatuurschilder, hogelijk gewaardeerd, totdat hij vanaf de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw geheel in vergetelheid raakte. In dit boek wordt voor het eerst een overzicht van zijn oeuvre gepresenteerd.