Enfilade

Part of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History, from Yale UP:

Chloe Wigston Smith, Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-0300270785, $65.

The first sustained study of the vibrant links between domestic craft and British colonialism

In the eighteenth century, women’s contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artifacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism.

Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artifacts made by women, including makers of color, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm’s reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women’s material contributions to the home’s place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.

Chloe Wigston Smith is professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of York, where she teaches in the Department of English and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Entangled Forms
1  Making the Four Corners of the Globe, Oroonoko, and Euphemia
2  Small Marks in Thread: Samplers, Moll Flanders, and Material Expression
3  Global Domestic Objects: Embroidered Maps, Lydia, and The Female American
4  Pins, Needles, and Wampum in Mary Rowlandson and Hobomok
5  Companionship in Black Attendant Needlework, The History of Sir George Ellison, and The Woman of Colour
Coda: Material Entanglements, Then and Now

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

From Silvana Editoriale (and on sale until 10 March) . . .

Jean-Luc Bordeaux, François Le Moyne (1688–1737), Opera completa: New Findings and Legacy (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2024), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-8836652310, €95.

First Painter to the king in 1736 for only a few months before his tragic death, François Le Moyne had a career as short as it was prolific. A large number of works by this exceptional representative of French Rococo had been commissioned by the high clergy, the powerful Duke of Antin—official representative of King Louis XV—by members of the high aristocracy like the Prince of Conti or the Duke of Rohan or rich fermiers généraux like François Berger or Abraham Peyrenc de Moras, or even by the elite of great collectors or connoisseurs like Mariette, La Live de July, and Lempereur.

Teacher of Charles-Joseph Natoire and François Boucher and a contemporary of Antoine Watteau and Jean-François de Troy, Le Moyne reached the height of his glory with his Apotheosis of Hercules, painted between 1732 and 1736 on the immense ceiling of the Salon d’Hercule, located between La Chapelle Royale and the royal apartments of the Château de Versailles. After so many years spent in oblivion, Le Moyne is finally recognized today as one of the major artists of the 18th century, exerting a seminal influence on the following generations.

Unfortunately, only few of the works that Le Moyne realized at the beginning of his career, between 1710 and 1715, have been identified. Nonetheless, he left an important corpus of landscapes, religious works, and courtship scenes. He is considered one of the greatest draftsmen of all time and one of the best European artists of illusionistic ceiling painting since the time of Pietro da Cortona and Charles Le Brun. Moreover, Le Moyne contributed with his easel paintings and his technique to the creation of a new, more seductive model for the representation of the female nude in Europe. Lastly, on a technical level, he brightened the palette of French painting and realized sketches with a particularly quick and agile brushstroke.

Nearly forty years after his first monograph devoted to the painter, Professor Jean-Luc Bordeaux proposes a renewed survey of the oeuvre of François Le Moyne (1688–1737). Bordeaux analyses Le Moyne’s contributions to the French rococo as well as lesser-known aspects of his artistic production and career. With almost 140 paintings and 250 drawings, this new catalogue raisonné is an extended edition of the one published in 1984, with significant additions. It also includes an appendix of around twenty pages that describes a considerable amount of works by Le Moyne, now lost but attributed to him by famous collectors of the time and 18th century experts such as Gersaint, Mariette, Paillet, and Remy.

From De Gruyter:

Charlotte Guichard, Watteau – kolonial: Herrschaft, Handel und Galanterie im Frankreich des Régence / Colonial Watteau: Empire, Commerce, and Galanterie in Regency France (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2022), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-3422990463, €17 / $20. English and German.

What were the early visions of Empire in Regency France? The book offers a interpretation of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera (1717) by framing it in the context of French colonial expansion in the years of the Regency. Born in Louis XIV’s reign, galant aesthetics contributed to frame the colonial encounter in French America. Fantasies of maritime departure, embarkation and/or debarkation, also expressed a longing for colonial travel and exploration. The imperial imagination fueled with codes of galanterie was very developed in the circles of Watteau’s amateurs. From Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera (1717) to its visual reenactment in 1763, the book argues that galanterie served as a visual and conceptual model of French commercial and colonial relations.

Wie sahen die frühen imperialen Visionen im Frankreich der Régence aus? Das Buch bietet eine neue und auch provokative Deutung von Jean-Antoine Watteaus Pilgerfahrt zur Insel Cythera (1717), indem es das Werk in den Kontext der französischen kolonialen Expansion in den Jahren der Régence stellt. Die galante Ästhetik, die während der Herrschaft und im Imperium Ludwigs XIV. entstand, trug dazu bei, die koloniale Begegnung in Französisch-Amerika zu gestalten. Die Fantasien vom Aufbruch zur See, vom Einschiffen oder Ausschiffen, allesamt Merkmale des Gemäldes, drückten auch die Sehnsucht nach kolonialen Reisen und Entdeckungen aus. Die imperiale Imagination, die sich aus den Codes der Galanterie speiste, war in den Kreisen von Watteaus amateurs, die ihrerseits den Modernen nahestanden, die neue ästhetische Formen in Kunst und Literatur förderten, sehr ausgeprägt. Von Watteaus Pilgerfahrt zur Insel Cythera (1717) bis zu ihrer visuellen Nachstellung im Jahr 1763 diente die Galanterie als visuelles und konzeptionelles Modell der französischen Handels- und Kolonialbeziehungen.

Charlotte Guichard, Research Professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.

From Yale UP:

David Blight, with Yale and Slavery Research Project, foreword by Peter Salovey, Yale and Slavery: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 448 Pages, ISBN: 978-0300273847, $35.

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University

Award-winning historian David W. Blight, with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, answers the call to investigate Yale University’s historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. This narrative history demonstrates the importance of slavery in the making of this renowned American institution of higher learning.

Drawing on wide-ranging archival materials, Yale and Slavery extends from the century before the college’s founding in 1701 to the dedication of its Civil War memorial in 1915, while engaging with the legacies and remembrance of this complex story. The book brings into focus the enslaved and free Black people who have been part of Yale’s history from the beginning—but too often ignored in official accounts. These individuals and their descendants worked at Yale; petitioned and fought for freedom and dignity; built churches, schools, and antislavery organizations; and were among the first Black students to transform the university from the inside.

Always alive to the surprises and ironies of the past, Yale and Slavery presents a richer and more complete history of Yale, the third-oldest college in the country, showing how pillars of American higher education, even in New England, emerged over time intertwined with the national and international history of racial slavery.

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale. The Yale and Slavery Research Project was convened in 2020.