Enfilade

Distributed by Yale University Press:

Joseph Viscomi, William Blake’s Printed Paintings: Methods, Origins, Meanings (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2021), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107208, £40 / $50.

An in-depth examination of William Blake’s glorious and acclaimed series of twelve monoprints

Among William Blake’s (1757–1827) most widely recognized and highly regarded works as an artist are twelve color printed drawings, or monoprints, conceived and executed in 1795. This book investigates these masterworks, explaining Blake’s technique—one he essentially reinvented, unaware of 17th-century precursors—to show that these works were produced as paintings, and played a crucial role in Blake’s development as a painter. Using material and historical analyses, Joseph Viscomi argues that the monoprints were created as autonomous paintings rather than as illustrations for Blake’s books with an intended viewing order. Enlivened with bountiful illustrations, the text approaches the works within the context of their time, not divorced from ideas expressed in Blake’s writings but not illustrative of or determined by those writings.

Joseph Viscomi is James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

From Cork UP:

Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Country Furniture and Furnishings, 1700–2000 (Cork University Press, 2020), 576 pages, ISBN: 978-1782054054, €39 / $45.

This major illustrated study investigates farmhouse and cabin furniture from all over the island of Ireland. It discusses the origins and evolution of useful objects, what materials were used and why, and how furniture made for small spaces, often with renewable elements, was innate and expected. Encompassing three centuries, it illuminates a way of life that has almost vanished. It contributes as much to our knowledge of Ireland’s cultural history as to its history of furniture.

This is a is a substantially different book from Kinmonth’s Irish Country Furniture, 1700–1950, published by Yale UP in 1993 and reprinted several times. The new book incorporates the findings of a lot of recent research. Nearly all the black and white pictures in the 1993 book are now in colour, or have been changed for the better, and now include different examples (except archive pictures). Many of the author’s fieldwork photographs from the late 1980s, have been digitised and will now be published for the first time. The extent has almost doubled; there are an extra 120 illustrations; the main text has been fully updated and revised; there is a new chapter ‘Small Furnishings and Utensils’, and there is a new preface by Louis Cullen. Reflecting the considerable addition of new material, the time scale is also broadened to include discussions of objects and interiors up to 2000.

The book looks at influences such as traditional architecture, shortage of timber, why and how furniture was painted, and the characteristics of designs made by a range of furniture makers. The incorporation of natural materials such as bog oak, turf, driftwood, straw, recycled tyres or packing cases is viewed in terms of use and durability. Chapters individually examine stools, chairs and then settles in all their ingenious and multi-purpose forms. How dressers were authentically arranged, with displays varying minutely according to time and place, reveal how some had indoor coops to encourage hens to lay through winter. Some people ate communally or slept in outshot beds, in the coldest north-west—all this is illustrated through art as well as surviving objects.

Claudia Kinmonth is Research Curator (Domestic Life), Ulster Folk Museum and a Visiting Research Fellow, Moore Institute, NUI Galway. She is the author of Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale UP).

From Cork UP:

Richard Butler, Building the Irish Courthouse and Prison: A Political History, 1750–1850 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2020), 652 pages, ISBN: 978-1782053699, €39 / $45.

This book is the first national history of the building of some of Ireland’s most important historic public buildings. Focusing on the former assize courthouses and county gaols, it tells a political history of how they were built, who paid for them, and the effects they had on urban development in Ireland.

Using extensive archival sources, it delves in unprecedented detail into the politics and personalities of county grand jurors, Protestant landed society, government prison inspectors, charities, architects, and engineers, who together oversaw a wave of courthouse and prison construction in Ireland in an era of turbulent domestic and international change. It investigates the extent to which these buildings can be seen as the legacy of the British or imperial state, especially after the Act of Union, and thus contributes to ongoing debates within post-colonial studies regarding the built environment. Richly illustrated with over 300 historic drawings, photographs, and maps, Building the Irish Courthouse and Prison analyses how and why these historic buildings came to exist. It discusses crime, violence, and political and agrarian unrest in Ireland during the years when Protestant elites commissioned such extensive new public architecture. The book will be of interest to academic and popular audiences curious to learn more about Irish politics, culture, society, and especially its rich architectural heritage.

Richard J. Butler is a Lecturer in the Historic Built Environment, Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester.