Enfilade

From The Paul Mellon Centre and Yale UP:

Arthur MacGregor ed., The Cobbe Cabinet of Curiosities: An Anglo-Irish Country House Museum (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for British Studies, 2014), 480 pages, ISBN: 978-0300204353, $125 / £75.

This lavishly produced volume presents a survey and analysis of a fascinating cabinet of curiosities established around 1750 by the Cobbe family in Ireland and added to over a period of 100 years. Although such collections were common in British country houses during the 18th and 19th centuries, the Cobbe museum, still largely intact and housed in its original cabinets, now forms a unique survivor of this type of private collection from the Age of Enlightenment.

A detailed catalogue of the objects and specimens is accompanied by beautiful, specially commissioned photographs that showcase the cabinet’s component elements. Reproductions of portraits from the extensive collection of the Cobbe family bring immediacy to the narrative by illustrating the personalities involved in the collection’s development. Scholars contribute commentary on the significance of the objects to their collectors; also included are essays outlining, among other topics, the place of the cabinet of curiosities in Enlightenment society and the history of the Cobbe family. Extracts from the extensive family archive place the collection in its social context.

Arthur MacGregor is a former senior assistant keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

From Palgrave Macmillan:

Sebastian Mitchell, Visions of Britain, 1730–1830: Anglo-Scottish Writing and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1137290106, $90. 

Visions of Britain is an inquiry into the literary and visual representation of Great Britain in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. The book considers the inter-relationship of text and image for the purposes of national projection. It analyses an extensive range of poems, novels, journals, drawings, satirical prints, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings. The study follows recent discussions of Anglo-Scottish writing in this period in the attempt to determine the salient characteristics of the imaginative depiction of the Kingdom of Britain, but challenges their more confident claims for the development of a progressive integrated nationhood. It argues instead that the most engaging literary and visual accounts of Britain in this era subject their imagery to extensive artistic pressure, threatening to dismantle the national vision at the moment of its construction.

Sebastian Mitchell is Lecturer in English Literature at the University or Birmingham.

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C O N T E N T S 

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Thomson’s Vision of Britannia
3. Smollett and Dialectical Nationalism
4. Ramsay, Hume, and British Portraiture
5. Ossian, Wolfe, and the Death of Heroism
6. Boswell: Self, Text, Nation
7. Scott, Turner, and the Vision of North Britain
Bibliography
Index

Anyone anticipating a proper Fourth of July posting might have a look back at the notice posted in May for Magna Carta: Cornerstone of Liberty, which just opened at Boston’s MFA. Less directly, this book from Ashgate might stimulate broader thoughts on issues of heritage interpretation, a field that in the United States too rarely comes into art historical conversations. In any case, a happy Fourth of July to all of you who mark the day. -CH

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Russell Staiff, Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation: Enchanting the Past-Future (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 202 pages, ISBN: 978-1409455509, $110.

This book challenges traditional approaches to heritage interpretation and offers an alternative theoretical architecture to the current research and practice. Russell Staiff suggests that the dialogue between visitors and heritage places has been too focused on learning outcomes, and so heritage interpretation has become dominated by psychology and educational theory, and over-reliant on outdated thinking. Using his background as an art historian and experience teaching heritage and tourism courses, Russell Staiff weaves personal observation with theory in an engaging and lively way. He recognizes that the ‘digital revolution’ has changed forever the way that people interact with their environment and that a new approach is needed.

Russell Staiff holds a PhD in art history from the University of Melbourne where he was the foundation lecturer in the postgraduate visual arts and tourism program. He began his life in heritage and tourism as a guide in Italy. Currently, he teaches in the heritage and tourism program at the University of Western Sydney and Silpakorn University, Bangkok. He researches the various intersections between cultural heritage, communities and tourism with a particular emphasis on Southeast Asia.

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C O N T E N T S

Prologue: the known, the unknown and other ruminations
1  Anecdotes and observations
2  Tilden: beyond resurrection
3  The somatic and the aesthetic: embodied heritage experiences
4  Visual cultures: imagining and knowing through looking
5  Narratives and narrativity: the story is the thing
6  Digital media and social networking
7  Conversing across cultures
8  Enchantment, wonder and other raptures: imaginings outside didacticism

From the V&A:

Joanna Gwilt, Vincennes and Early Sèvres Porcelain from the Belvedere Collection (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1851777730, £60 / $80.

The opulent wares of the renowned Sèvres manufactory are prominently displayed in palaces and art galleries throughout the world. By contrast, the comparative delicacy and simplicity of the beautiful wares of the Vincennes porcelain works, from which the Sèvres factory evolved, remain relatively unknown, even to porcelain experts, who will find much that is alluring and surprising in this remarkable book. Detailed photographs and lavish illustrations reveal the rich variety of styles and increasingly complex gilding that mark out the products of Vincennes and early Sevres, including such innovations as the introduction of sculptural figures during the late 1740s. Much of these novel designs were initially inspired by the work of leading artists of the time—including François Boucher. The ebook that accompanies the printed version contains additional photographs, showing every piece in close detail, making it perfect for scholars, collectors and enthusiasts.

Joanna Gwilt is a specialist in eighteenth-century French decorative arts and formerly the Assistant Curator at the Royal Collection and also of the Wallace Collection, London. She is the author of French Porcelain for English Palaces: Sèvres from the Royal Collection (2009).

A digital preview is available here»

From Ashgate:

Marion Harney, Place-making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 326 pages, ISBN: 978-1409470045, £50 / $100.

Drawing together landscape, architecture and literature, Strawberry Hill, the celebrated eighteenth-century ‘Gothic’ villa and garden beside the River Thames, is an autobiographical site, where we can read the story of its creator, Horace Walpole. This ‘man of taste’ created private resonances, pleasure and entertainment—a collusion of the historic, visual and sensory. Above all, it expresses the inseparable integration of house and setting, and of the architecture with the collection, all specific to one individual, a unity that is relevant today to all architects, landscape designers and garden and country house enthusiasts. Avoiding the straightforward architectural description of previous texts, this beautifully illustrated book reveals the Gothic villa and associated landscape to be inspired by theories that stimulate ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ articulated in the series of essays by Joseph Addison (1672–1719) published in The Spectator (1712). Linked to this argument, it proposes that the concepts behind the designs for Strawberry Hill are not based around architectural precedent but around eighteenth-century aesthetics theories, antiquarianism and matters of ‘Taste’.

Using architectural quotations from Gothic tombs, Walpole expresses the mythical idea that it was based on monastic foundations with visual links to significant historical figures and events in English history. The book explains for the first time the reasons for its creation, which have never been adequately explored or fully understood in previous publications.

The book develops an argument that Walpole was the first to define theories on Gothic architecture in his Anecdotes of Painting (1762–71). Similarly innovative, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (1780) is one of the first to attempt a history and theory of gardening. The research uniquely evaluates how these theories found expression at Strawberry Hill. This reassessment of the villa and its associated landscape reveals that the ensemble is not so much a part of the conventionally-conceived linear progression of eighteenth-century architectural style but, rather, is an original essay in contemporary aesthetics.

Marion Harney is Director of Studies, Conservation of Historic Gardens and Cultural Landscapes at the University of Bath.

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C O N T E N T S

Preface: Walpole Moves from Strawberry Hill to Connecticut
Introduction: ‘Things Come to Light’: Experiment and Experience, The Philosophical and Cultural Context
1. ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’: Tropes of Taste
2. ‘Giving an Idea of the Spirit of the Times’: Anecdotes and Antiquarianism
3. ‘I Am Going to Build a Little Gothic Castle at Strawberry Hill’: Creation of a Seat, part 1
4. ‘The Art of Creating Landscape’: Creation of a Seat, part 2
Epilogue: ‘A Genius is Original, Invents. Taste Selects, Perhaps Copies with Judgement’