Enfilade

From McFarland:

John Fitzhugh Millar, The Buildings of Peter Harrison: Cataloguing the Work of the First Global Architect, 1716–1775 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 244 pages, ISBN: 978-0786479627, $75.

Perhaps the most important architect ever to have worked in America, Peter Harrison’s renown suffers from the destruction of most of his papers when he died in 1775. He was born in Yorkshire, England in 1716 and trained to be an architect as a teenager. He also became a ship captain, and soon sailed to ports in America, where he began designing some of the most iconic buildings of the continent.

In a clandestine operation, he procured the plans for the French Canadian fortress of Louisbourg, enabling Massachusetts Governor William Shirley to capture it in 1745. This setback forced the French to halt their operation to capture all of British America and to give up British territory they had captured in India. As a result, he was rewarded with commissions to design important buildings in Britain and in nearly all British colonies around the world, and he became the first person ever to have designed buildings on six continents.

He designed mostly in a neo–Palladian style, and invented a way of building wooden structures so as to look like carved stone—“wooden rustication.” He also designed some of America’s most valuable furniture, including inventing the coveted “block-front,” and introducing the bombe motif. In America, he lived in Newport, Rhode Island, and in New Haven, Connecticut, where he died at the beginning of the War of Independence.

Material-culture historian John Fitzhugh Millar has several books to his credit on architectural history, colonial ships, and historic dance; he also runs the historic Bed & Breakfast Newport House in Williamsburg, Virginia.

C O N T E N T S

Preface
1. Carl Bridenbaugh’s Account of Harrison
2. A New Narrative of the Life of Peter Harrison
3. The British Isles and Europe
4. Canada
5. New England
6. The ­Mid-Atlantic
7. The American South and Atlantic Islands
8. The Caribbean
9. Other Continents–South America, Africa, Asia and Australasia
10. Furniture

Appendices
A. Buildings Attributed to Harrison
B. Student to Teacher
C. Architectural Pattern Books in Harrison’s Library

Illustrated Glossary of Architectural Terms
Bibliography
Index

From Cambridge UP:

Pannill Camp, The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 299 pages, ISBN: 978-1107079168, $99.

In the late eighteenth century, a movement to transform France’s theatre architecture united the nation. Playwrights, philosophers, and powerful agents including King Louis XV rejected the modified structures that had housed the plays of Racine and Molière, and debated which playhouse form should support the future of French stagecraft. In The First Frame, Pannill Camp argues that these reforms helped to lay down the theoretical and practical foundations of modern theatre space. Examining dramatic theory, architecture, and philosophy, Camp explores how architects, dramatists, and spectators began to see theatre and scientific experimentation as parallel enterprises. During this period of modernisation, physicists began to cite dramatic theory and adopt theatrical staging techniques, while playwrights sought to reveal observable truths of human nature. Camp goes on to show that these reforms had consequences for the way we understand both modern theatrical aesthetics and the production of scientific knowledge in the present day.

Pannill Camp is Assistant Professor of Drama at Washington University, St Louis. His research examines points of intersection between theatre history and the history of philosophy, especially in eighteenth-century France. Before joining the faculty of Washington University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities Center at Harvard University and taught in Harvard’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture. At Brown University, he won the Joukowski Family Foundation’s Award for Outstanding Dissertation in the Humanities, and The Weston Award for theatre directing. His work has been published in journals including Theatre Journal, Performance Research, the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: The ‘first frame’ of Enlightenment theatre space
1. The divided scene of theatre space in the Neo-classical era
2. The theatrical frame in French Neo-classical dramatic theory
3. Enlightenment spectators and the theatre of experiment
4. Theatre architecture reform and the spectator as sense function
5. Optics and stage space in Enlightenment theatre design
Epilogue: Modern spectatorial consciousness
Appendix: Dedicated public theatres built in France, 1752–90.

From Yale UP:

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0300154382, $60.

This engrossing book chronicles one of the most exciting, controversial, and extravagant periods in the history of fashion: the reign of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in 18th-century France. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell offers a carefully researched glimpse into the turbulent era’s sophisticated and largely female-dominated fashion industry, which produced courtly finery as well as promoted a thriving secondhand clothing market outside the royal circle. She discusses in depth the exceptionally imaginative and uninhibited styles of the period immediately before the French Revolution, and also explores fashion’s surprising influence on the course of the Revolution itself. The absorbing narrative demonstrates fashion’s crucial role as a visible and versatile medium for social commentary, and shows the glittering surface of 18th-century high society as well as its seedy underbelly.

Fashion Victims presents a compelling anthology of trends, manners, and personalities from the era, accompanied by gorgeous fashion plates, portraits, and photographs of rare surviving garments. Drawing upon documentary evidence, previously unpublished archival sources, and new information about aristocrats, politicians, and celebrities, this book is an unmatched study of French fashion in the late 18th century, providing astonishing insight, a gripping story, and stylish inspiration.

From Ashgate:

Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo: Decor and Divinity from the Salons of Paris to the Missions of Patagonia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 454 pages, ISBN: 978-1409400639, $130.

A groundbreaking approach to Rococo religious décor and spirituality in Europe and South America, The Spiritual Rococo addresses three basic conundrums that impede our understanding of eighteenth-century aesthetics and culture. Why did the Rococo, ostensibly the least spiritual style in the pre-Modern canon, transform into one of the world’s most important modes for adorning sacred spaces? And why is Rococo still treated as a decadent nemesis of the Enlightenment when the two had fundamental characteristics in common? This book seeks to answer these questions by treating Rococo as a global phenomenon for the first time and by exploring its moral and spiritual dimensions through the lens of populist French religious literature of the day-a body of work the author calls the ‘Spiritual Rococo’ and which has never been applied directly to the arts. The book traces Rococo’s development from France through Central Europe, Portugal, Brazil, and South America by following a chain of interlocking case studies, whether artistic, literary, or ideological, and it also considers the parallel diffusion of the literature of the Spiritual Rococo in these same regions, placing particular emphasis on unpublished primary sources such as inventories. One of the ultimate goals of this study is to move beyond the cliché of Rococo’s frivolity and acknowledge its essential modernity.

Thoroughly interdisciplinary, The Spiritual Rococo not only integrates different art historical fields in novel ways but also interacts with church and social history, literary and post-colonial studies, and anthropology, opening up new horizons in these fields.

Gauvin Alexander Bailey is Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1. ‘The Dream of Happiness’: The Literature of the Spiritual Rococo and the Christianity of Reason
2. ‘As Bizarre a Style as Ever Occurred’: Rococo in France
3. ‘Bright Shining as the Stars’: Spiritual Rococo in Central Europe
4. ‘Irregular Ornament in the Finest French Taste’: Spiritual Rococo in Portugal and Brazil
5. ‘O Happy Vision!’: Spiritual Rococo in Spain and Spanish South America
Epilogue: ‘Superfluous Stucco and Laughable Decoration’: Rococo, Religion, and the Global Enlightenment

Appendix A: French Spiritual Literature in Central European Collections
Appendix B: French Spiritual Literature in Luso-Brazilian Collections
Appendix C: French Spiritual Literature in the Spanish Southern Cone
Bibliography
Index

The latest volume of SVEC:

Melissa Lee Hyde and Katie Scott, eds., Rococo Echo: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014), 398 pages, ISBN: 978-0729411585, £65 / €82 / $102.

Intermittently in and out of fashion, the persistence of the Rococo from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first is clear. From painting, print and photography, to furniture, fashion and film, the Rococo’s diverse manifestations appear to defy temporal and geographic definition. In Rococo Echo, a team of international contributors adopts a wide lens to explore the relationship of the Rococo with time.

Through chapters organised around broad temporal moments—the French Revolution, the First World War and the turn of the twenty-first century—contributors show that the Rococo has been viewed variously as modern, late, ruined, revived, preserved and anticipated. Taking into account the temporality of the Rococo as form, some contributors consider its function as both a visual language and a cultural marker engaged in different ways with the politics of nationalism, gender and race. The Rococo is examined, too, as a mode of expression that encompassed and assimilated styles, and which functioned as a surprisingly effective means of resisting both authority—whether political, religious or artistic—and cultural norms of gender and class. Contributors also show how the Rococo, from its birth in France, reverberated through England, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the South American colonies to become a pan-European, even global movement. The Rococo emerges from these contributions as a discourse defined but not confined by its original historical moment, and whose adaptability to the styles and preoccupations of later periods gives it a value and significance that take it beyond the vagaries of fashion.

Melissa Lee Hyde is Professor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art at the University of Florida, and her work focuses on gender and visual culture in France. She is writing a monograph on Marie-Suzanne Roslin and is co-authoring a book with Mary D. Sheriff on women in French art.
Katie Scott is a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has written widely about the Rococo in relation to issues of class, race and gender and is currently writing a book on the origins of intellectual property in France before the 1793 Act of the Rights of Genius.

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C O N T E N T S

Foreword. Rococo Echo: Style and Temporality, Katie Scott

I. Rococo Revivals: The Nineteenth Century
1. The Uncomfortable Frenchness of the German Rococo, Michael Yonan
2. Rococo Republicanism, Elizabeth Mansfield
3. Scavenging Rococo: Trouvailles, Bibelots and Counter-Revolution, Tom Stammers
4. Vive l’amateur! The Goncourt House Revisited, Andrew McClellan
5. Pierrot’s Periodicity: Watteau, Nadar and the Circulation of the Rococo, Marika T. Knowles
6. Remembrance of Things Past: Robert de Montesquiou, Emile Gallé and Rococo Revival during the Fin de Siècle, Meredith Martin
7. Irregular Rococo Impressionism, Anne Higonnet

II. Rococo: The Eighteenth Century
8. Was There Such a Thing as Rococo Painting in Eighteenth-Century France?, Colin B. Bailey
9. ‘A Wild Kind of Imagination’: Eclecticism and Excess in the English Rococo Designs of Thomas Johnson, Brigid von Preussen
10. Out of Time: Fragonard, with David, Satish Padiyar
11. Rococo and Spirituality from Paris to Rio de Janeiro, Gauvin Alexander Bailey

III. New Rococo: The Twentieth Century and Beyond
12. Sedlmayr’s Rococo, Kevin Chua
13. Warhol’s Rococo: Style and Subversion in the 1950s, Allison Unruh
14. The New Rococo: Sofia Coppola and Fashions in Contemporary Femininity, Rebecca Arnold
15. Post-Colonial Rococo: Yinka Shonibare MBE Plays Fragonard, Sarah Wilson
16. The Rococo Revival and the Old Art History, Carol Duncan
Afterword. The Rococo Dream of Happiness as ‘a Delicate Kind of Revolt’, Melissa Lee Hyde

List of illustrations
Summaries
Select bibliography
Index

Details for ordering a copy are available (as a PDF file) here»
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