Enfilade

From Cambridge UP:

Ian Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 242 pages, ISBN: 978-1107044210, £60.

Ian Haywood explores the ‘Golden Age’ of caricature through the close reading of key, iconic prints by artists including James Gillray, George and Robert Cruikshank, and Thomas Rowlandson. This approach both illuminates the visual and ideological complexity of graphic satire and demonstrates how this art form transformed Romantic-era politics into a unique and compelling spectacle of corruption, monstrosity and resistance. New light is cast on major Romantic controversies including the ‘revolution debate’ of the 1790s, the impact of Thomas Paine’s ‘infidel’ Age of Reason, the introduction of paper money and the resulting explosion of executions for forgery, the propaganda campaign against Napoleon, the revolution in Spain, the Peterloo massacre, the Queen Caroline scandal, and the Reform Bill crisis. Overall, the volume offers important new insights into the relationship between art, satire and politics in a key period of history.

Ian Haywood is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Romanticism at the University of Roehampton. He co-edited, with John Seed, The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and
Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University
Press, 2012).

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: The Recording Angel
1  Milton’s monsters | James Gillray, Sin, Death and the Devil (1792)
2  Lethal money: forgery and the Romantic credit crisis | James Gillray, Midas (1797), George Cruikshank and William Hone, Bank Restriction Note (1819)
3  The aesthetics of conspiracy | James Gillray, Exhibition of a Democratic Transparency (1799)
4  The spectral tyrant: Napoleon and the English dance of death | Thomas Rowlandson, The Two Kings of Terror (1813)
5  The spectropolitics of Romantic infidelism | George Cruikshank, The Age of Reason (1819)
6  The British inquisition | George Cruikshank and William Hone, Damnable Association (1821)
7  The return of the repressed: Henry Hunt and the Reform Bill crisis | William Heath/Charles Jameson Grant, Matchless Eloquence (1831).

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

The latest volume in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (previously SVEC) book series:

Reed Benhamou, Charles-Joseph Natoire and the Académie de France in Rome: A Re-evaluation (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015), 254 pages, ISBN: 978-0729411622, £60 / €83 / $89.

In 1752 Charles-Joseph Natoire, then a highly successful painter, assumed the directorship of the prestigious Académie de France in Rome. Twenty-three years later he was removed from office, criticised as being singularly inept. What was the basis for this condemnation that has been perpetuated by historians ever since? Reed Benhamou’s re-evaluation of Natoire’s life and work at the Académie is the first to weigh the prevailing opinion against the historical record.

The accusations made against Charles-Joseph Natoire were many and varied: that his artistic work was increasingly unworthy of serious study; that he demeaned his students; that he was a religious bigot; that he was a fraudulent book-keeper. Benhamou evaluates these and other charges in the light of contemporary correspondences, critics’ assessment of his work, legal briefs, royal accounts and the parallel experiences of his precursors and successors at the Académie. The director’s role is shown to be multifaceted and no director succeeded in every area. What is arresting is why Natoire was singled out as being uniquely weak, uniquely bigoted, uniquely incompetent. The Charles-Joseph Natoire who emerges from this book differs in nearly every respect from the unflattering portrait promulgated by historians and popular media. His increasingly iconoclastic students rebelled against the traditional qualities valued by the French artistic elite; the Académie went underfunded because of the effects of war and a profligate king, and he was caught between two competing institutional regimes. In this book Reed Benhamou not only unravels the myth and reality surrounding Natoire, but also also sheds light on the workings of the institution he served for nearly a quarter of a century.

Reed Benhamou is a Professor Emerita at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the educational programmes offered by royal, municipal and private art academies in Paris, Rome and the French provinces. Her many publications include Regulating the Académie: Art, Rules, and Power in Ancien Régime France, SVEC 2009:08.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction

Part I, 1700–1751
1  In the bosom of the family (Natoire, 1751)
2  His gift for painting (d’Antin, 1723)
3  The brilliant verve of Natoire and Boucher (Locquin, 1912)
4  Natoire is the most qualified (Tournehem, 1750)

Part II, 1752–1777
5  It seems necessary to pass some time in Rome (Perrault, 1664)
6  A deep understanding of what is required (d’Antin, 1708)
7  My position requires it (Natoire, 1755)
8  Completely inadequate for a difficult time (Lecoy, 1874)
9  This strayed lamb (Natoire, 1753)
10  Never a more singular case (Mémoires secrets, 1768)
11  I’ve been advancing money to the Academy for a long time (Natoire, 1773)
12  I must obey and conform (Natoire, 1775)

Appendix 1: Natoire and art (1737–1777)
Appendix 2: Natoire and money (1752–1777)
Bibliography
Index

From Cambridge UP:

Daniel Brewer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 265 pages, hardback ISBN: 978-1107021488, $80 / paperback ISBN: 978-1107626140, $30.

The Enlightenment has long been seen as synonymous with the beginnings of modern Western intellectual and political culture. As a set of ideas and a social movement, this historical moment, the ‘age of reason’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, is marked by attempts to place knowledge on new foundations.

The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment brings together essays by leading scholars representing disciplines ranging from philosophy, religion and literature, to art, medicine, anthropology and architecture, to analyse the French Enlightenment. Each essay presents a concise view of an important aspect of the French Enlightenment, discussing its defining characteristics, internal dynamics and historical transformations. The Companion discusses the most influential reinterpretations of the Enlightenment that have taken place during the last two decades, reinterpretations that both reflect and have contributed to important re-evaluations of received ideas about the Enlightenment and the early modern period more generally.

Daniel Brewer, Department of French and Italian, University of Minnesota, has published widely in the area of eighteenth-century French literature and culture. He is author of The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and co-editor of L’Esprit Créateur: The International Quarterly of French and Francophone Studies.

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C O N T E N T S

Chronology
1  Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Today?
2  Antoine Lilti, Private Lives, Public Space: A New Social History of the Enlightenment
3  Andrew Curran, Anthropology
4  Paul Cheney, Commerce
5  J. B. Shank, Science
6  Dan Edelstein, Political Thought
7  Julie Candler Hayes, Sex and Gender, Feeling and Thinking: Imagining Women as Intellectuals
8  Charly Coleman, Religion
9  Jennifer Milam, Art and Aesthetic Theory: Claiming Enlightenment as Viewers and Critics
10  Thomas DiPiero, Enlightenment Literature
11  Stéphane Van Damme, Philosophe/Philosopher
12  Downing A. Thomas, Music
13  Anthony Vidler, Architecture and the Enlightenment
14  Anne Vila, Medicine and the Body in the French Enlightenment
15  Charles W. J. Withers, Space, Geography, and the Global French Enlightenment
Further Reading