Enfilade

Distributed by Rutgers UP:

Jennifer Milam and Nicola Parsons, eds., Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2022), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1644532324 (cloth), $120 / ISBN: 978-1644532331 (paperback), $35. Also available as an ebook and PDF.

This volume considers how ideas were made visible through the making of art and visual experience occasioned by reception during the long eighteenth century. The event that gave rise to the collection was the 15th David Nochol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, which launched a new Australian and New Zealand Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Two strands of interest are explored by the individual authors. The first four essays work with ideas about material objects and identity formation, suggesting how the artist’s physical environment contributes to the sense of self, as a practicing artist or artisan, as an individual patron or collector, or as a woman or religious outsider. The last four essays address the intellectual work that can be expressed through or performed by objects. Through a consideration of the material formation of concepts, this book explores questions that are implicated by the need to see ideas in painted, sculpted, illustrated, and designed forms. In doing so, it introduces new visual materials and novel conceptual models into traditional accounts of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment.

Jennifer Milam is the Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic Excellence) at the University of Newcastle in Callaghan, Australia. Her books on rococo art include Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art, Fragonard’s Playful Paintings, and an edited collection Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

Nicola Parsons is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney in Australia. She is the author of Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Jennifer Milam (University of Newcastle) and Nicola Parsons (University of Sydney), Introduction: The Potential Visibility of Ideas in Enlightenment Art and Aesthetics
1  David Maskill (Victoria University of Wellington), A Good Address: Living at the Louvre in the Eighteenth Century
2  Jessica Priebe (University of Sydney), Inventing Artifice: François Boucher’s Collection at the Louvre
3  Matthew Martin (University of Melbourne), Continental Porcelain Made in England: The Case of the Chelsea Porcelain Factory
4  Jennifer Milam (University of Newcastle), Planting Cosmopolitan Ideals: Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest
5  Jessica L. Fripp (Texas Christian University), Growing Old in Public in Eighteenth-Century France: Marie-Thérese Geoffrin and Marie Leszczynska
6  Wiebke Windorf (University of Düsseldorf), French Funeral Monuments of the Ancien Régime as Products of Individual Artistic Solutions
7  Melanie Cooper (University of Adelaide), Meeting the Locals: Mythical Images of the Indigenous Other in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
8  Jennifer Ferng (University of Sydney), Infernal Machines: Designing the Bomb Vessel as Transnational Technology

Notes on the Contributors
Index

From the V&A:

Tessa Murdoch, Europe Divided: Huguenot Refugee Art and Culture (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1838510121, £40 / $55.

This richly illustrated book focuses on the extraordinary international networks resulting from the diaspora of more than 200,000 refugees who left France in the late 17th century to join communities already in exile spread far and wide. Indeed, George Washington (along with 20 other presidents) was a descendant of Huguenots. First-generation Huguenot refugees included hundreds of trained artists, designers, and craftsmen. Beyond the French borders, they raised the quality of design and workshop practice, passing on skills to their apprentices, sons, godsons, cousins, and to successive generations, who continued to dominate output in the luxury trades. Although silver and silks are the best-known fields with which Huguenot settlers are associated, their significant contribution to architecture, ceramics, design, clock and watchmaking, engraving, furniture, woodwork, sculpture, portraiture, and art education provides fascinating insight into the motivation and resolve of this highly skilled diaspora. Thanks to a sophisticated network of Huguenot merchants, retailers, and bankers who financed their production, their wares reached a global market.

Tessa Murdoch is research curator of the Gilbert Collection at the V&A.

C O N T E N T S

Author’s Preface
Introduction
Maps

1  The Huguenot Diaspora
2  The Reception of Huguenot Artists, Craftsmen, and Designers in the British Isles
3  The Huguenots as Educators
4  Decorative Painters
5  Huguenot Architects and Engineers
6  Huguenot Metalsmiths
7  Carvers, Gilders, Cabinetmakers, and Upholsterers
8  Huguenot Sculptors in France and Beyond
9  The Taste for Porcelain and Ceramic Manufacture in Britain and Ireland
10  Huguenot Goldsmiths and Silversmiths in the British Isles, 1550–1780
11  Huguenot Watchmakers and Jewellers: The Manufacture and International Market for Luxury Goods
12  Printmakers and Sellers: Design, Ornament, and Reproductive Prints
13  Huguenots and Portraiture: Allegiance, Identity, Loyalty, and Memory

Acknowledgments
Timeline
Notes & References
Bibliography

From Yale UP:

David Alexander, A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2022), 1120 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107215, $125.

This biographical dictionary of engravers working on copper encompasses both those who produced fine art prints, and also those who engraved book illustrations for medical, technical, and literary works, all of which played a more important part than is usually realised in spreading information in the age of Enlightenment. Some 3,000 biographical entries draw on much unpublished information, researched over four decades, notably records of apprenticeship, genealogy, insurance, and bankruptcy as well as newspaper advertisements and contemporary accounts.

This is the first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland 1714–1820. Many biographical entries describe celebrated engravers producing ‘fine art’ prints of paintings, which spread knowledge about living and dead artists. However, this book also builds up a more complex picture of the occupation of printmaking and includes engravers, many previously unresearched, who engraved ephemeral material, such as trade cards, bank notes, and satirical prints as well as the images that spread knowledge across literary, geographical, historical, topographical, medical, and technical fields.

David Alexander is a historian and honorary keeper of British prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and a member of the editorial board of Print Quarterly.

A new edition of this mainstay of eighteenth-century publishing was recently released by the Bodleian Library and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Sean Shesgreen, Hawkers, Beggars and Quacks: Portraits from ‘The Cries of London’ (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2021), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1851245512, $55.

Seventy-four striking portraits of men and women on the margins of London society in the seventeenth century—including street vendors and petty criminals.

“Buy my Dish of great Eeles, Any Old Iron take money for, Twelve Pence a Peck Oysters, Buy my fat Chickens, Fair Lemons & Oranges.”

At the end of the seventeenth century, Marcellus Laroon (1653–1702) became well known for a series of drawings that illustrated London’s marginal men and women: street vendors, hustlers, and petty criminals. This set of drawings came to be known as The Cries of London after the shouts and cries vendors used to hawk their wares. Hawkers, Beggars, and Quacks presents seventy-four of Laroon’s striking portraits. Following an illustrated introduction that contextualizes The Cryes of London, each portrait is beautifully reproduced with a commentary on the individual street-seller and their trade. These commentaries provide a wealth of detail about each seller’s dress, the equipment they used to ply their trade, their own diets, and the diets of those they served. Drawing on historic material found in the British Library’s Burney Collection of English newspapers, Hawkers, Beggars and Quacks provides a fascinating insight into the men and women who made their livelihood—legally and illegally—on the streets of England’s capital.

Sean Shesgreen is emeritus professor of English and formerly a Presidential Professor at Northern Illinois University.