Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Edited by Rolf Loeber, Hugh Campbell, Livia Hurley, John Montague, and Ellen Rowley, Architecture 1600–2000: Art and Architecture of Ireland (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2014), 600 pages, ISBN: 978-0300179224, $150.

Art and Architecture of Ireland is an authoritative and fully illustrated survey that encompasses the period from the early Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. The five volumes explore all aspects of Irish art—from high crosses to installation art, from illuminated manuscripts to Georgian houses and Modernist churches, from tapestries and sculptures to oil paintings, photographs and video art. This monumental project provides new insights into every facet of the strength, depth and variety of Ireland’s artistic and architectural heritage.

Architecture, 1600–2000 is the most complete survey of architecture in Ireland ever published. The essays in this volume cover all aspects of Ireland’s built environment, not only buildings but infrastructure, landscape development, public and private construction and much else. The volume challenges and expands the traditional understanding of Irish ‘architecture’, giving novel and exciting interpretations of the field and, by means of many striking illustrations, encourages us to think anew about the environment that surrounds us.

Rolf Loeber holds professorships at the University of Pittsburgh, where he oversees research on the causes of crime as well as mental health problems in young people. He has published extensively on Irish architecture, the history of fiction, and social, economic and plantation history. Hugh Campbell is professor of architecture at University College, Dublin, where he is currently head of the School of Architecture. He has published extensively on subjects from Irish architecture and urbanism to photography and urban space. Livia Hurley is an architect and architectural historian working in private practice in Dublin. Her research interests include urban history and the study of industrial sites and monuments. John Montague is assistant professor in the College of Architecture, Art and Design at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. His research interests include medieval and early modern architecture, and urban mapping. He is co-author, with Colm Lennon, of John Rocque’s Dublin: A Guide to the Georgian City (Dublin, 2010). Ellen Rowley is an architectural historian, researching 20th-century architecture in Ireland and beyond. She has written extensively on architectural modernism and edited a collection of Irish architectural writing: Patterns of Thought (2012). She is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

Published by Four Court Press and available from Artbooks.com  (the book launch takes place in Dublin on Thursday, 12 February 2015 at the Royal Irish Academy) . . .

Anthony Malcomson, Nathaniel Clements (1705–77): Politics, Fashion, and Architecture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015), 290 pages, ISBN: 978-1851829149, €55 / $75.

This book argues that Nathaniel Clements was an enlightened patron of architecture, not a practising architect, and that he influenced upper-class residential development in Dublin and popularised a particular form of Palladian ‘villa-farm’ (or modest country house) partly because of who he was—a high-ranking and well-connected government official and an arbiter of fashion and taste. The two places where his architectural influence is still strongly felt today are the high-fashion enclave of Henrietta Street, Dublin, of which he created about one-third in the period 1733 c.1740, and the Phoenix Park, of which he was Ranger, where he made important improvements to the landscape and where he built in 1752–57 a new Ranger’s Lodge which forms the nucleus of today’s Áras an Uachtaráin. The book provides a detailed analysis of these aesthetic achievements and (following Clements’ death) of the re casting of the Ranger’s Lodge as a British viceregal residence during the period 1782–c.1800. It concludes with a broader discussion of the ‘amateur’ tradition in British and Irish architecture and of Clements’ place among the ‘amateurs’ who dominated the art form in the decades before the coming-of-age of a fully-fledged architectural profession.

Anthony Malcomson was director of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland from 1988 until 1998, and during a career in archives which began in 1967 has sorted and listed the papers from c.75 Irish country houses. His publications, mainly based on the evidence of this material, include Nathaniel Clements: Government and the Governing Elite in Ireland, 1725–75 (2005), Virtues of a Wicked Earl: The Life and Legend of William Sydney Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim, 1806–78 (2009), and John Foster (1740–1828): The Politics of Improvement and Prosperity (2011).

Published by Arthena and available from Artbooks.com:

Dominique d’Arnoult, with a preface by Xavier Salmon, Perronneau, ca. 1715–1783: Un portraitiste dans l’Europe des Lumières (Paris: Arthena, 2015), 440 pages, ISBN: 978-2903239541, 130€ / $190.

Le portrait, particulièrement le portrait au pastel, connaît une vogue considérable dans une Europe du XVIIIe siècle où l’on ne dénombre pas moins de deux mille portraitistes. Succédant à Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743) et à Nicolas de Largillierre (1656–1746), puis à Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), deux grandes figures dominent la scène française au milieu de ce siècle : Maurice Quentin Delatour et Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, son cadet d’une dizaine d’années.

Perronneau reçoit sa formation de dessinateur à Paris où il se fait rapidement remarquer. Agréé à l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture en 1746, il y est reçu en 1753 avec ses portraits à l’huile du peintre Jean-Baptiste Oudry et du sculpteur Lambert Sigisbert Adam. Dans la tradition de l’Académie, Perronneau s’emploie à donner un prolongement à l’art de grands maîtres comme Van Dyck et Rembrandt, interprété dans un esprit nouveau.

Ses portraits vont être le plus souvent figurés en buste, peints au pastel ou à l’huile. L’enjeu alors est de concilier la ressemblance avec la science picturale propre à la grande peinture, tout en donnant une impression de facilité, voire une forme de désinvolture (la sprezzatura), qui doit dissimuler le travail de l’artiste. C’est un art qui doit de plus rencontrer la satisfaction du modèle. À la cour de Versailles comme à la ville, il est alors de bon goût de ne pas laisser paraître son rang sur son portrait : la simplicité est à la mode. Perronneau y excelle, sachant donner à des portraits travaillés au cours d’un grand nombre de séances l’impression qu’ils sont réalisés dans l’instant. Il devient ainsi l’un des peintres favoris du public du Salon du Louvre de 1746 à 1765.

La rivalité entre Perronneau et Delatour va s’afficher pendant plus de vingt ans au cours desquels l’un et l’autre vont exposer plus de cent portraits au Salon. Delatour ira même jusqu’à se confronter à son rival en 1750, en faisant exposer son autoportrait à côté de son propre portrait demandé à Perronneau. Les carrières des deux artistes restent cependant distinctes: Delatour peint la famille royale et la Cour, Perronneau préfère trouver une clientèle dans les capitales provinciales et étrangères. Ses modèles appartiennent à des milieux sociaux divers, aussi bien à la grande aristocratie qu’au monde du négoce ou à celui des arts.

C’est la vision d’une autre France, d’une autre Europe que celle habituellement représentée par ses rivaux qui apparaît sous les pastels et les pinceaux de Perronneau, celle d’un monde des Lumières en mouvement. En butte à la critique qui lui reproche notamment de choisir des modèles inconnus du grand public à partir de 1767 et voyant sa position à Paris compromise, Perronneau prend le parti de s’éloigner de la capitale et de la France où il ne revient plus qu’épisodiquement après 1773. Ses itinéraires le conduiront alors dans les villes européennes où résident les grands négociants et financiers, en Hollande et en Allemagne essentiellement. À la fin de sa vie, il entreprend un long voyage à Saint-Pétersbourg et Varsovie, avant de s’éteindre à Amsterdam en 1783.

From Yale UP:

James H. S. McGregor, Back to the Garden: Nature and the Mediterranean World from Prehistory to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-0300197464, $38.

The garden was the cultural foundation of the early Mediterranean peoples; they acknowledged their reliance on and kinship to the land, and they understood nature through the lens of their diversely cultivated landscape. Their image of the garden underwrote the biblical book of Genesis and the region’s three major religions.

In this important melding of cultural and ecological histories, James H. S. McGregor suggests that the environmental crisis the world faces today is a result of Western society’s abandonment of the ‘First Nature’ principle—of the harmonious interrelationship of human communities and the natural world. The author demonstrates how this relationship, which persisted for millennia, effectively came to an end in the late eighteenth century, when ‘nature’ came to be equated with untamed landscape devoid of human intervention. McGregor’s essential work offers a new understanding of environmental accountability while proposing that recovering the original vision of ourselves, not as antagonists of nature but as cultivators of a biological world to which we innately belong, is possible through proven techniques of the past.

James H. S. McGregor is the author of five books on world cities. He is emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of Georgia and lives in Cambridge, MA.