Enfilade

From Palgrave Macmillan:

Matthew Sangster, Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-3030370466, £90 / $120.

This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. Using previously-underutilised archives, Matthew Sangster shows that during the Romantic period authorship operated principally as a relatively restricted social system, rather than a profession or mode of artistic practice. He discusses the careers of a diverse range of writers, including Robert Southey, Thomas Moore, Felicia Hemans, Robert Heron, Eliza Parsons, Robert Bloomfield, Hannah More, Walter Scott, and Lord Byron—establishing the crucial mediating roles played by larger assemblages, including the publishing industry, political coteries, periodical culture, and privileged families, along with regional, national, and global networks.

Matthew Sangster is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on Enlightenment libraries, literary institutions, Romantic metropolitanism, media culture, and the affordances of Fantasy.

C O N T E N T S

Preface: The Life of the Author
Introduction: What Was an Author in the Romantic Period?
1  Publishers, Book Production, and Profits
2  Sociable Alignments
3  Succeeding in ‘the Worst Trade’
4  The Working Writer
5  The Oligarchs of Literature: Authority and the Quarterly Reviews
6  Refashioning Authorship’s Purview
Coda: Print Proliferation and the Invention of the Artist

From ACC Art Books:

Anne Haack Christensen, Angela Jager, and Joyce Townsend, eds., Ground Layers in European Painting, 1550–1750 (London: Archetype Books, 2021), 150 pages, ISBN: 978-1909492790, £45 / $90.

Most of the papers in this volume were presented at the CATS international technical art history conference in June 2019 titled Mobility Creates Masters: Discovering Artists’ Grounds 1550–1700, which explored the introduction of, and change to, the colored ground layers in European paintings form the Early Modern period. The title of the conference stemmed from the desire to instigate new research projects within the topic of the influence of artists’ mobility on material choices and techniques related to the preparation of paintings. As well as contributions presented at the conference, this volume includes additional papers from recent research exploring the same topic. The volume begins with several studies on the documentation of grounds. The contributions are then arranged according to the country in which the painter was active, from southern Europe moving northwards. The lavishly illustrated contributions in this volume deal with the above questions and shed light on different methods of preparing painting supports, the purpose of preparatory layers, materials used in different countries, and influence of shifts in fashion or availability of materials on ground layers. This fifth CATS Proceedings will be of interest to scholars and students, and museum professionals including curators, conservators, art historians, and conservation scientists.

C O N T E N T S

• Moorea Hall-Aquitania and Lieve d’Hont — Troubleshooting coloured grounds: developing a methodology for studying Netherlandish ground colours
• Joanna Russell, Marta Melchiorre Di Crescenzo, Joseph Padfield, and Marika Spring — Experiments using image processing software (Nip2) to define the colour of preparatory layers in 16th-century Italian paintings
• Silvia A. Centeno, Dorothy Mahon, Federico Carò, and José Luis Lazarte Luna — New light on the use of ash in the ground preparations of baroque paintings from Spain, North and South America
• Mariana Aurora Calderón Mejía, Dolores González Pondal, Damasia Gallegos, Fernando Marte, and Marcos Tascón — European art in Argentina: the ground of a painting attributed to Salvator Rosa
• Cristina Morilla, Narayan Khandekar, Kate Smith, and Anne Schaffer — Coloured grounds and transfer techniques in 17th-century Spanish royal portraiture: the case of Pantoja de la Cruz’s portrait of Philip III at the Harvard Art Museums
• Maite Jover de Celis and Maria Dolores Gayo — Velázquez and his choice of preparatory layers: different place, different colour?
• Joanna Szpor, Katarzyna Górecka, and Marcin Kozarzewski — To reach the original: technique and materials of the late 17th-century Italian painter of large-scale battle scenes, Martino Altomonte
• Michela Fasce — White, red, grey and brown: colour in Genoese grounds from the mid-16th to the 18th century
• Loa Ludvigsen, David Buti, Anna Vila, and Eva de la Fuente Pedersen — Discovering patterns in Giralamo Troppa’s grounds
• Claire Betelu — Ground layers in French paintings from the second half of the 17th century: colour, stratigraphy, and function
• Lidwien Speleers, Margriet van Eikema Hommes, Ineke Joosten, Suzan de Groot, and Annelies van Loon — The effect of ground colour on the appearance of two paintings by Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert in the Oranjezaal, Huis Ten Bosch
• Jørgen Wadum — Are the changed appearances of Carel Fabritius’ paintings a consequence of mobility?
• Marya Albrecht, Sabrina Meloni, Annelies van Loon, Ralph Haswell, and Onno de Noord — Discovering trends in Jan Steen’s grounds using principal component analysis
• Claire Toussat — The grounds of Caravaggism? Case study of Theodoor van Loon
• Joyce H. Townsend and Rica Jones — Preparatory layers in British paintings from the 16th to the early 18th century

From Princeton UP:

Suzanne Marchand, Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 544 pages, ISBN: 978-0691182339, $35.

Porcelain was invented in medieval China—but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony’s revered Meissen factory could not keep porcelain’s ingredients secret for long, however, and scores of Holy Roman princes quickly founded their own mercantile manufactories, soon to be rivaled by private entrepreneurs, eager to make not art but profits. As porcelain’s uses multiplied and its price plummeted, it lost much of its identity as aristocratic ornament, instead taking on a vast number of banal, yet even more culturally significant, roles. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became essential to bourgeois dining, and also acquired new functions in insulator tubes, shell casings, and teeth.

Weaving together the experiences of entrepreneurs and artisans, state bureaucrats and female consumers, chemists and peddlers, Porcelain traces the remarkable story of ‘white gold’ from its origins as a princely luxury item to its fate in Germany’s cataclysmic twentieth century. For three hundred years, porcelain firms have come and gone, but the industry itself, at least until very recently, has endured. After Augustus, porcelain became a quintessentially German commodity, integral to provincial pride, artisanal industrial production, and a familial sense of home. Telling the story of porcelain’s transformation from coveted luxury to household necessity and flea market staple, Porcelain offers a fascinating alternative history of art, business, taste, and consumption in Central Europe.

Suzanne L. Marchand is the Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University. Her books include German Orientalism in the Age of Empire and Down from Olympus.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations and Tables
Note on Currencies and Other Abbreviations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  Reinventing the Recipe
2  The Challenge of Wedgwood and the Rise of the Private Firm
3  Making, Marketing, and Consuming in the ‘Golden Age’
4  Surviving the Revolutions
5  The Discrete Charms of Biedermeier Porcelain
6  Of Capitalism and Cartels: The Glory Days of the Private Producer, 1848–1914
7  Porcelain, the Whilhelmine Plastic
8  The Fragility of Interwar Porcelain
9  From Cold War Wonder to Contemporary White Elephant: Does the Story End Here?

Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index

From Cambridge UP:

Anne Gerritsen, The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 354 pages, ISBN: 978-1108499958, $35.

We think of blue and white porcelain as the ultimate global commodity: throughout East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean including the African coasts, the Americas and Europe, consumers desired Chinese porcelains. Many of these were made in the kilns in and surrounding Jingdezhen. Found in almost every part of the world, Jingdezhen’s porcelains had a far-reaching impact on global consumption, which in turn shaped the local manufacturing processes. The imperial kilns of Jingdezhen produced ceramics for the court, while nearby private kilns manufactured for the global market. In this beautifully illustrated study, Anne Gerritsen asks how this kiln complex could manufacture such quality, quantity and variety. She explores how objects tell the story of the past, connecting texts with objects, objects with natural resources, and skilled hands with the shapes and designs they produced. Through the manufacture and consumption of Jingdezhen’s porcelains, she argues, China participated in the early modern world.

Anne Gerritsen is Professor of History and directs the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick. Since 2013, she has also held the Chair of Asian Art at the Universiteit Leiden where she teaches at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) and the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).

C O N T E N T S

Figures
Maps
Table
Acknowledgements

1  The Shard Market of Jingdezhen
2  City of Imperial Choice: Jingdezhen, 1000–1200
3  Circulations of White
4  From Cizhou to Jizhou: The Long History of the Emergence of Blue and White Porcelain
5  From Jizhou to Jingdezhen in the Fourteenth Century: The Emergence of Blue and White and the Circulations of People and Things
6  Blue and White Porcelain and the Fifteenth-Century World
7  The City of Blue and White: Visualizing Space in Ming Jingdezhen, 1500–1600
8  Anxieties over Resources in Sixteenth-Century Jingdezhen
9  Skilled Hands: Managing Human Resources and Skill in the Sixteenth-Century Imperial Kilns
10  Material Circulations in the Sixteenth Century
11  Local and Global in Jingdezhen’s Long Seventeenth Century
12  Epilogue: Fragments of a Global Past

Notes
Bibliography
Index