Enfilade

Published last year by Rowman & Littelfield:

Jonathan Gross, The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist (Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2013), 410 pages, ISBN: 978-0739167656, £52 / $85.

The first biography of Anne Damer since 1908, The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist, by Jonathan Gross, draws on Damer’s notebooks and previously unpublished letters to explore the life and legacy of England’s first significant female sculptor. Best known for her portraits of dogs and other animals, Damer also created busts of England’s most important political heroes, sometimes within days or hours of their historical accomplishments.

This in-depth biography traces her life during the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Peace of Amiens and the Hundred Days. Damer was convinced that art could have significant political influence, sending her bust of Nelson to the King of Tanjore to encourage trade with India. Her art stands at the transition between neoclassicism and romanticism and provides a wealth of insight into nineteenth-century British sculpture. In the last twenty years, there has been a strong revival of interest in Damer’s life, particularly in gay and lesbian studies due to her famous relationship with author Mary Berry. This text serves as a deeper investigation of this fascinating and important figure of British art history.

The emotional ménage a trois of Anne Damer, Mary Berry, and Horace Walpole forms the heart of this new biography. Gross contends that all three individuals, had they led more conventional lives, would never have given the world the literary and artistic gifts they bestowed in the form of Strawberry Hill, Belmour, and Fashionable Friends. The struggles they faced will encourage modern readers to appreciate anew the fluidity of sexual identity and passionate friendship, as well as the restraints put in place by society to control them. Anne Damer’s life has much to teach a new generation concerned with the complex relationship between love, art, and politics. The Life of Anne Damer will interest historians of Georgian England, and readers in the fine arts, literature, and history.

Philip Rollos the Elder, Great Silver Wine Cistern of Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby, 1705–1706. On display at Temple Newsam House, Leeds. This enormous cistern sold for more than £2million at Sotheby’s in 2010.
More information is available here»

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This collection of essays grows out of a 2012 conference at Wentworth Castle, Yorkshire. From the New Arcadian Press:

Patrick Eyres and James Lomax, eds., Diplomats, Goldsmiths, and Baroque Court Culture: Lord Raby in Berlin, The Hague, and Wentworth Castle (Stainborough: Wentworth Castle Heritage Trust, 2014), 196 pages, ISBN: 978-1909837171, £20.

Lord Raby’s celebrated silver wine cistern was saved for the nation after a major appeal in 2011. It was part of the spectacular group of silver provided by the government for his important embassy to Berlin (1705–1711). He received even more silver as ambassador to the Dutch Republic (1711–1714) when he was Britain’s co-negotiator of the Peace of Utrecht. This book explores the political contexts to Lord Raby’s embassies; the craftsmanship, ritual function and cultural politics of Baroque court Goldsmiths’ work in England, Germany and Holland; as well as the influence of Prussia and peacemaking on the architecture, collections and gardening of Lord Raby’s Wentworth Castle estate in Yorkshire, which he had acquired in 1708.

“The book is particularly strong on the role of goldsmiths work in European diplomacy … [and] is delightfully wide-ranging, offering new scholarship on aspects of cultural politics and dining.” Susan Jenkins, The Art Newspaper (October 2014): 86.

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C O N T E N T S

• Patrick Eyres and James Lomax, Diplomats, Goldsmiths and Baroque Court Culture: Lord Raby in Berlin and at Wentworth Castle
• Alfred Hagemann, The Cultural Milieu of the Berlin Court of Frederick I
• Michael Charlesworth, Lord Raby’s Prussians: Art, Architecture and Amour, 1703–1713
• Patrick Eyres, Lord Raby’s Embassies and their Representation at Wentworth Castle
• James Lomax, The Ambassador’s Plate
• Jet Pijzel-Dommisse, Ambassadorial Plate, Embassies and the Dutch Court
• Philippa Glanville, Goldsmiths and Diplomats in Baroque Europe
• Ellenor Alcorn, Silver and the Early Hanoverians
• James Lomax, Baroque Silver Fountains, Cisterns, and Coolers in England
• Christopher Hartop, German Silver in England
• Jane Furse, Lord Raby and His Scientific Instruments

From Thames & Hudson:

Haydn Williams, Turquerie: An Eighteenth-Century European Fantasy (Thames & Hudson, 2014), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0500252062, £40 / $65.

At the end of the 17th century, the long-standing fear of the Turk in Europe was gradually replaced by fascination. Travellers’ accounts of the Ottoman lands, translations of works such as One Thousand and One Nights, and the magnificent spectacle of Ottoman ambassadors and their retinues were among the catalysts that inspired the creation of a European fantasy of this world for the delight of the ruling elite, a reverie that was only shattered by the French Revolution. Turbaned figures appeared in paintings, as ceramic figures, and on the stage; sumptuous boudoirs turcs were created; and crescent moons, palm trees and camels featured on wall panels, furniture and snuff boxes.

Turquerie was a theme that sparked varied responses in different places. Its most intense and long-lasting expression was in France, but its reach was broad—from a mosque folly in Kew Gardens to the Turkish tents erected along the Elbe to celebrate a royal marriage in Dresden in 1719, from an ivory statuette of a janissary created for King Augustus II of Poland to the costumes worn for a procession to celebrate carnival in Rome in 1748.

The subject is explored thematically within a broadly chronological framework, from early contacts between Europe and the Ottomans following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, through the great flourishing of turquerie in the 18th century, to the 19th century, when other interpretations, such as Orientalism, took hold. Focusing on categories, including painting, architecture, interiors and the theatre, Turquerie provides an engaging account of this whimsical European fantasy.

Haydn Williams, formerly a director and head of the objects of vertu and Russian works of art department at Sotheby’s, is now an independent fine art consultant. He was editor and principal author of Enamels of the World 1700–2000, and curator of the related exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, in 2009–10.

This book from Paul Monod (like John Fleming’s The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason, featured in the previous posting) appeared last year, but since I failed to note it and since we’ve just highlighted the Gothic Imagination and Witches, it seemed like a good time to backtrack.

And, I would note, after so many events to mark the Hanoverian anniversary, Coronation Day is finally here: George I was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 20 October 1714. –CH

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From Yale UP:

Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 440 pages, ISBN: 978-0300123586, $50.

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are known as the Age of Enlightenment, a time of science and reason. But in this illuminating book, Paul Monod reveals the surprising extent to which Newton, Boyle, Locke, and other giants of rational thought and empiricism also embraced the spiritual, the magical, and the occult. Although public acceptance of occult and magical practices waxed and waned during this period they survived underground, experiencing a considerable revival in the mid-eighteenth century with the rise of new anti-establishment religious denominations. The occult spilled over into politics with the radicalism of the French Revolution and into literature in early Romanticism. Even when official disapproval was at its strongest, the evidence points to a growing audience for occult publications as well as to subversive popular enthusiasm. Ultimately, finds Monod, the occult was not discarded in favor of ‘reason’ but was incorporated into new forms of learning. In that sense, the occult is part of the modern world, not simply a relic of an unenlightened past, and is still with us today.

Paul Monod is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of History at Middlebury College. He lives in Weybridge, Vermont.

From Norton:

John V. Fleming, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0393079463, $28.

In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment—generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion—were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the ‘darker’ pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic and alchemy.

Though we tend not to associate what was once called alchemy with what we now call chemistry, Fleming shows that the difference is merely one of linguistic modernization. Alchemy was once the chemistry, of Arabic derivation, and its practitioners were among the principal scientists and physicians of their ages. No point is more important for understanding the strange and fascinating figures in this book than the prestige of alchemy among the learned men of the age.

Fleming follows some of these complexities and contradictions of the ‘Age of Lights’ into the biographies of two of its extraordinary offspring. The first is the controversial wizard known as Count Cagliostro, the ‘Egyptian’ freemason, unconventional healer, and alchemist known most infamously for his ambiguous association with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which history has viewed as among the possible harbingers of the French Revolution and a major contributing factor in the growing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette. Fleming also reviews the career of Julie de Krüdener, the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic who would later become notorious as a prophet.

Impressively researched and wonderfully erudite, this rich narrative history sheds light on some lesser-known mental extravagances and beliefs of the Enlightenment era and brings to life some of the most extraordinary characters ever encountered either in history or fiction.

John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild, ’24 Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for forty years before retiring in 2006. Fleming graduated from Sewanee (the University of the South) in 1958, before spending three years in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After taking his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1963, he taught for two years at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). He has published widely in the fields of medieval literature, art history, and religious history.