Eighteenth-century Art Research Articles

The Trip to Jerusalem

This essay engages with W. J. T. Mitchell’s writings on landscape, and their relations with the other concepts in the geographical imagination, country, region and world. It takes the form of a narrative of a field excursion to two sites, Lincoln and Alkborough, encountered during Mitchell’s Visiting Professorship to Nottingham in 2006–07. The discussion is framed by a central geographical imaginary in Mitchell’s work, the Holy Land, through its currency in British culture, especially eighteenth and nineteenth century art and literature, including the work of William Blake. It considers the scope of Mitchell’s conceptual triad of Space, Place and Landscape, as a schema of ‘vernacular’ theory, and how it maps on to concepts current in nineteenth century England, like Picturesque and Topography, and to a specific physical landscape, the Wolds, a range of hills in eastern England with panoramic vistas. The narrative involves some close, contextual analysis of two cultural texts in their historical moment, 1815, and place, the Wolds of Lincolnshire: an art work, The Cornfield, by Peter De Wint and a guide book The Terra Incognita of Lincolnshire by S Hatfield. The essay concludes with a discussion of the figure of the labyrinth as a landscape formation, arising from a turf labyrinth in the village of Alkborough.

The taming of a tragic heroine: Electra in eighteenth century art

The article explores two cases of the reception of the tragic heroine Electra in the visual culture of the eighteenth century. The British artist John Flaxman (1755-1826) created three drawings of the heroine, two based on Aeschylus’ Choephori (1795) and a third, unfinished one modelled on Sophocles’ Electra. Angelika Kauffman (1741-1807), a Swiss artist, portrayed Electra’s meeting with her sister in her painting Electra giving her sister Chrysothemis her girdle and a lock of hair from Orestes for the grave of Agamemnon (circa 1778). Flaxman’s drawings stress Electra’s devotion to her dead father Agamemnon and her love for her brother Orestes. Kauffman’s more unusual painting emphasizes instead the collaboration of the two sisters. As a female painter Kauffman chose to portray Electra in a more active role drawing on Sophocles’ source text in which she persuades her sister to replace her mother’s gifts with her own. Both receptions, however, chose to marginalise the more ambiguous aspects of Electra’s portrayal in Greek tragedy, especially her desire for revenge. Thus, in order for Electra to be acceptable to an eighteenth century audience she had to be ‘tamed’ and her passionate voice silenced.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Fine Arts by Morton D. Paley

1120 Reviews Samuel Taylor Coleridge and theFine Arts. ByMorton D. Paley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. xiv+276 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-0-19-923305-2. Morton Paley has again done his impressive record as a Coleridge scholar proud by giving us the firstsustained account of Coleridge's encounters with and myriad responses to the finearts. The absence of amonograph on the topic so far isnot all that surprising. The fineartswere not Coleridge's main interest;his total ignorance of Turner and Constable is striking, and his observations about the fine arts often merely replicate the polite commonplaces of the period. Paley's coherent, detailed presentation ofColeridge's translations of his visual experiences into plans for lec tures, notes, marginalia, essays, and lettershas now finallyprovided us with a far more nuanced view not only of Coleridge's extraordinary ability to find specific words to convey concrete meanings' (p. 20), but also of his wider artistic and intel lectual interests,which were channelled intohis thoughts about unifying principles. What I likemost about thisbook, however, is the greatly enhanced picture ofCole ridge's hitherto under-represented friendships with artists, patrons, and collectors. Coleridge's lifelong quest for a chosen, ideal family often translated into intense, often demanding, friendships. The portrayal of those friendships provides us with a compelling biographical picture ofColeridge's strengths and weaknesses. The most important local connection, begun in 1803, was with Sir George and Lady Beaumont, who also befriended the Wordsworths. The firstchapter isdevoted to their crucial influence on Coleridge's artistic tastes; lateron theBeaumonts would also be instrumental in introducing Coleridge toLondon's artworld. Chapters 3 and 5 elucidate Coleridge's encounters with the London and English artworld; striking among those is the acquaintance with Karl and Elizabeth Aders, who collected so-called northern primitives' (p. 83). Much of Coleridge's knowledge of the fine arts, however, was acquired in thewake of his employment inMalta. On a more general level this introduces us to amore cosmopolitan Coleridge, who frequented the artistic expatriate circles in Italy and who had access to priceless private art collections by virtue of these friendships. One of the strengths of Paley's book is how much we learn about the interactions in the civilized and artistic circles of early nineteenth-century Europe. After all, 'Coleridge had been one of thevery few British subjects to live inRome while it was under threat fromNapoleon' (p. 66). One friendship in particular, which Coleridge at one stage rated second only to his strong attachment to theWordsworths (p. 32), was forged in Rome and was themain reason for his extended stay in the city of five and a half months. The American Washington Allston, an accomplished painter in his own right,was a 'born teacher' and his gracious mentoring of Coleridge in the pictorial riches of Italy led to an intimate friendship. Chapters 2 (Italy) and 4 ('Allston Redux') are primarily devoted to connections with Allston, who also spent the years 1811-18 in London until lack of recognition, complicated by British anti-American feel ings, drove him back to America. Paley's fine evocation of Allston includes the incorporation of largely neglected passages of ekphrasis inColeridge's Notebooks regarding Allston's paintings, as in the case ofDiana and herNymphs, for instance. MLR, 104.4, 2009 1121 The fine description of the emotional significance of Coleridge's interactions with Mary Morgan, Charlotte Brent, andMary and Sara Hutchinson inhis discussion of Allston's The Sisters isparticularly moving (pp. 118-25). Finally, Iwas rather puzzled by the rather perfunctory delegation of Sir Joshua Reynolds to a brief comment in a Prefatory Note and Chapter 5.A more explicit description ofReynolds's immense significance would have benefited those readers who are not familiarwith eighteenth-century art theories. This isa ground-breaking, essential contribution toColeridge studies. Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Heidi Thomson Wordsworth and theWriting of theNation. By James M. Garrett. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2008. viii+2i4pp. ?55. ISBN 978-0-7546-5783-5. Previous Wordsworth studies have addressed thepoet's deliberate self-fashioning as both writer and thinker, a self-conscious process of presentation and preservation bywhich Wordsworth's authoring of the self?both literaryand autobiographical? informed and obfuscated his...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

Verzeichnis der verkauften Gemälde im deutschsprachigen Raum vor 1800 (review)

Reviewed by: Verzeichnis der verkauften Gemälde im deutschsprachigen Raum vor 1800 Alessa Johns and Michael Yonan Thomas Ketelsen and Tilmann von Stockhausen , Verzeichnis der verkauften Gemälde im deutschsprachigen Raum vor 1800, edited by Burton B. Fredericksen and Julia I. Armstrong, assisted by Michael Müller. 3 volumes (Los Angeles: The Provenance Index of the Getty Research Institute, and Munich: K. G. Saur, 2002). Pp. 2397. $600.00. Although they'll rarely confess it, most art historians concern themselves only parenthetically with the provenance of artworks. Exactly how a painting became associated with Watteau despite its tenuous links to the artist's circle, or how another shifted from being a David to a Drouais, are problems generally addressed by museum professionals instead of their university-based colleagues. Yet the reception and distribution of art have important histories, crucially so for understanding their cultural significance over time and the interpretations they supported. For these reasons provenance indices should be a more vital part of the art historian's library, yet books like Thomas Ketelsen and Tilmann von Stockhausen's colossal Verzeichnis der verkauften Gemälde im deutschsprachigen Raum vor 1800 are precisely the kind that are overlooked. The authors offer a cross-referenced compendium of listings from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German auction catalogues with a full critical introduction. Perusing this work yields plentiful insights into the economic dimension of art in eighteenth-century Germany, including how paintings were assessed and evaluated, the marketplaces through which they traveled, notions of taste and value, and how collections correlated with social, political, and cultural developments. The Verzeichnis presents a rich picture of a vibrant artistic world whose extent and complexity will likely surprise many scholars accustomed to thinking of art in Central Europe as strictly second tier. As Burton Fredericksen notes in his foreword, the art market cannot be defined as easily for German-speaking Europe as it can for England and France. In contrast to Paris and London, where exceptionally concentrated populations [End Page 347] enabled a thriving art trade, German-speaking Europe remained too politically disorganized and fragmented to develop a wide-scale, centralized public art discourse. The most vibrant local art markets emerged through trade with and in geographic proximity to major foreign cities; Hamburg's art market, for example, developed through sustained engagement with Amsterdam, while Frankfurt am Main relied heavily on nearby Paris to infuse it with goods. The development of localized proto-marketplaces like these paralleled the rise of the auction as a mode of distribution. Auctions in Germany originally were reserved for books, but by the late seventeenth century came to include diverse luxury objects including paintings. Since auctions generated a paper trail in the form of catalogues, public announcements, and protocols, we are generally better informed about them than other kinds of German artistic practices, an important fact since German artistic culture is comparatively poorly documented. The information assembled by Ketelsen and von Stockhausen is therefore of great interest to scholars of eighteenth-century art, and not just those researching provenances. The Verzeichnis is a coproduction of the Getty Research Institute's Provenance Index and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, one of Germany's major museums and home to an extensive library of early auction catalogues. It is the latest in a series of provenance publications sponsored by the Getty and the first to focus on Germany; their goal is nothing less than to publish the contents of every known auction catalogue in German-speaking Europe issued between 1600 and 1800. In casting their net this wide, the authors have updated our knowledge of the German art market well beyond that provided by Frits Lugt's four-volume Répertoire des catalogues de ventes (1938), the longtime standard resource for researchers. Their activities have brought to light some 200 additional catalogues, many of them unexamined since the eighteenth century. The authors' decision to concentrate on German-speaking territories has allowed them to include all known auctions that occurred within the modern boundaries of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, as well as a number of auctions in Warsaw and Prague. For reasons of space, however, the authors abandoned their original plan to include Scandinavia, although a fully searchable...

The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth-Century Art, History, and Literature

JULIA V. DOUTHWAITE AND MARY VIDAL, eds. The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth-Century Art, History, and Literature. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005. 312 pp.Reviewed by Denise Amy BaxterInterdisciplinarity is a keyword for contemporary scholarship and teaching practices across academe. Universities tout their programs; journals publicize their scopes; academics are urged from all directions to think outside disciplinary boundaries and to embrace approaches. The mission statement for this journal explains that Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies provides a venue for exchange between scholars in . . . traditionally diverse and that it boundaries that separate such traditional scholarly disciplines while also bringing those disciplines into contact with each other. In their edited volume, The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth- Century Art, History, and Literature, Julia V. Douthwaite, Professor of French at University of Notre Dame, Mary Vidal, an art historian in Department of Visual Arts at University of California at San Diego, and their fine American, French, and British contributors work toward definitions of this oft-used term, its implications for contemporary scholarship, and its origins in eighteenth-century intellectual practices.Rising out of panels that Douthwaite chaired at annual meetings of American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Modern Language Association, and that Douthwaite and Vidal chaired together at College Art Association, volume challenges its readers to rethink nature of what may be most broadly termed interdisciplinary scholarship. Taking as their premise that approaches to eighteenth are desirable, necessary, and inevitable, Douthwaite, Vidal, and scholars from fields of literature, history, and art history who were ultimately commissioned to participate in volume demonstrate in various ways that eighteenth or, more broadly speaking, Enlightenment era-long perceived of as originating site of division of knowledge that would develop into disciplinary practices, whipping boy of Postmodernism-was truly itself an interdisciplinary century (xiv). The volume should therefore be seen in conjunction with other recent engagements with relationship between Enlightenment era and Postmodernism: Daniel Gordon's Postmodernism and Enlightenment (2000); Hugo Anthony Meynell's Postmodernism and New Enlightenment (2000); and Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill's What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (2001). Yet its explicit focus on disciplines of art, history, and literature also makes it an excellent teaching text for humanities classroom.The book is comprised of both position papers and case studies, yet editors have chosen to organize essays thematically rather than by genre, with intention of revealing the breadth of opinions and practices that mark scholarship today (xxv). A quick examination of book's six sections will indeed demonstrate wide range of approaches to concept and practice of interdisciplinarity among contemporary scholars of eighteenth century. The essays by Daniel Rosenberg, James D. Herbert, Isabelle Michel-Evrard, and Mimi Hellman in first section, Knowledge networks and 'undisciplined objects,' engage with what has long been perceived as Enlightenment's ultimate disciplinary text, Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopedie, only to complicate canonical text's status yet again. In Rescuing trivial, art historians Mary Sheriff and Jennifer Milam demonstrate ways in which rococo style, with its associations with femininity and ludic, has been coded as frivolous, and they point to new modes of interpretation. …

Women, Art, and Culture in Eighteenth-Century France

Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam, eds., Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Pp.310 + xviii. $99.95. Gita May, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). Pp. 256. $30. Mary Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Pp. 303 + xiv. $35.00 The diversity of contemporary feminist approaches to the study of eighteenth-century art is well represented by the three books under consideration here. Their different concerns are signalled by their contrasting formats; they are, respectively, an essay collection, a biography, and a thematic monograph. Whereas the biography recounts the life of an individual woman artist, the essay collection offers a series of detailed investigations into women's engagement with the visual arts, addressing the activities of female patrons as well as artists. The thematic monograph, by contrast, is primarily concerned not with art produced or commissioned by women but with the gendering of the discourses surrounding the production and viewing of art. However, they share a common focus on French art (the subject of the majority of the essays in the edited volume). It is a focus that has particular resonance for feminist art history, given that women in eighteenth-century France (or rather Parisian polite society of the period) were said to enjoy a status and influence unrivalled by their counterparts elsewhere. Gita May's biography looks back to an earlier stage of feminist art history, when the life and work of neglected women artists were rediscovered by pioneering scholars. In typical fashion, the introduction characterizes Vigée Le Brun as a "great artist" (2, 6), whose achievements were made in face of the obstacles presented by her gender and whose work has until recently been unfairly disdained by art historians and critics. In fact, on the face of it, Vigée Le Brun is today anything but a neglected artist, having been the subject of two other books in English in less than a decade: Mary Sheriff's The Exceptional Woman (1996), a theoretically-informed study that focuses on a number of key works, and Angelica Goodden's The Sweetness of Life (1997), a biography by a literary scholar rather than a work of art [End Page 144] history. This latest biography, also by a literary scholar, is somewhat more scholarly in tone than Goodden's (which refers to its subject as "Louise" throughout), but far less substantial. May presents Vigée Le Brun in a light calculated to make her sympathetic to the general reader, characterizing her as generous, loyal, fearless, resourceful, etc., whilst also regretfully acknowledging less attractive qualities, such as a lack of concern for the poor. Inevitably, discussions of the artist's work are mostly brief and rather bland; her remarkable Bacchante is merely referred to as "eclectic" (55). Like previous accounts of Vigée Le Brun's life, May's relies heavily on the artist's memoirs, first published as Souvenirs in 1835–7. However, the ready availability of this source presents something of a trap for biographers, given that it dates from long after most of the events that it describes. Moreover, there is some doubt as to how far Vigée Le Brun actually wrote the Souvenirs herself (at least according to Pierre de Nolhac's 1912 biography). Although aware that the text cannot be taken on trust as a transparent record of the life, May underestimates the artifice involved. She quotes without comment, for example, Vigée Le Brun's account of how Marie-Antoinette picked up some brushes that the heavily pregnant artist had dropped (38), a story clearly derived from the famous anecdote about the Emperor Charles V picking up Titian's brush for him, modified to draw attention to the shared womanhood of queen and artist. Relying on the Souvenirs also...

Bodybuilding: reforming masculinities in British art, 1750-1810

This ambitious and original book explores the radical transformation of the heroic male body in late eighteenth-century British art. It ranges across a period in which a modern art world was established, taking into account the lives and careers of a succession of major figures - from Benjamin West and Gavin Hamilton, to Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman and William Blake - and influential institutions, from the Royal Academy through to the commercial galleries of the 1790s. Organized around the historical traumas of the Seven Years' War (1756 - 63), the Wars of American Independence (1775 - 83) and the French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars (1789 - 1815), Body-building places the visual representation of the hero at the heart of a series of narratives about social and economic change, gender identity and the transformation of cultural value on the eve of modernity. In the course of the 1750s and 1760s, British culture was overhauled, with the introduction of public art exhibitions, a booming print market and the establishment of new art institutions. Younger painters and sculptors were deceived into believing that by pursuing the 'Grand Manner' and creating images of heroes engaged in noble acts, they could rival the greatest masters of the past and embody society's highest values. In responding, however, to the needs of a highly diversified art public and to profound historical doubt around the validity of heroic masculinity, they in fact created weird and volatile images, forging an uncompromising new ideal of the artist as heroic outsider. Martin Myrone offers a fresh analysis of this phenomenon, demonstrating complex relationships with the Gothic, the cult of sensibility and the politics of empire. Combining visual analysis, social history and masculinity studies, Body-building offers a vivid image of this critical period in Britain's cultural history and establishes an ambitious new framework for the study of late eighteenth-century art and gender.

The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth-Century Art, History and Literature

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Julia V. Douthwaite and Mary Vidal, Introduction: the history and current polemics of interdisciplinary work I. Knowledge networks and 'undisciplined objects' Daniel Rosenberg, We have never been interdisciplinary: encyclopedism and etymology in the eighteenth century and since James D. Herbert, Looking at Louis XIV looking: the unity of the disciplines under an absolute monarch Isabelle Michel-Evrard, Les ressources interdisciplinaires de l'etude de l'illustration au dix-huitieme siecle Mimi Hellman, Object lessons: French decorative art as a model for interdisciplinarity II. Rescuing the trivial Mary Sheriff, Disciplinary problems in the history of art, or what to do with rococo queens Jennifer Milam, Play between disciplines: the problem of the ludic in rococo art and Enlightenment culture III. The politics of interdisciplinarity Joan B. Landes, Trespassing: notes from the boundaries Mark Ledbury, But is it art history? Some thoughts on disciplines, tensions and territories in studies of eighteenth-century art IV. Defamiliarising the familiar Gregory S. Brown, Beaumarchais, social experience and literary figures in eighteenth-century public life Amy S. Wyngaard, Literary texts or historical documents? Revisiting the debates on Retif de La Bretonne V. Literature and law Joan I. Schwarz, Evidence and analysis for interdisciplinary research in eighteenth-century law and literature Miriam L. Wallace, 'Doing' history, or what I learned from the 1794 London Treason Trials Lisa Jane Graham, Scandal: law, literature and morality in the early Enlightenment VI. Centres and margins, on past and future Laurent Loty, Pour l'indisciplinarite David Andress, Can culture really explain politics? Interdisciplinary historiography, enlightenment and revolution Joan DeJean, On becoming a historian... Summaries List of works cited Index

Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America, and: Benjamin West: Allegory and Allegiance (review)

Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America. By Margaretta M. Lovell. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. x, 341. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95.)Benjamin West: Allegory and Allegiance. By Derrick R. Cartwright. (San Diego, CA: Timken Museum of Art, 2004. Pp. ix, 45. Illustrations. Paper, $19.95.)Matthew Pratt's painting The (1765) will retain its privileged status in the canon of eighteenth-century art history if only by virtue of its depiction of British-American colonial artists who came to London to study in the studio of their countryman, the successful expatriate Benjamin West. In the painting, Pratt (the cousin of West's wife) is seated in front of an easel and canvas and holds a palette, maulstick, and paintbrush. He pauses in his activity, as do the other artist-students, to listen to West's critique of a work-in-progress. Facing the viewer is Pratt's canvas, upon which only the faintest outlines of a figure are discernible. Recently identified by one scholar as an imagined muse, her representation, it is argued, suggests the American School students' aspiration to become history painters. More generally, this painting is interpreted as exemplary of provincial Americans' eagerness to imbibe the aesthetic techniques, styles, and theories codified in the metropolis by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses. Reynolds's treatises on art theory positioned history painting as the most prestigious branch in the hierarchy of painting, with other genres, including portraiture, falling well beneath it. In a chapter devoted to the study of artists' portraits that include a smaller portrait or work embedded within the format of the larger, actual portrait, Lovell challenges the widely accepted notion among scholars that these early artists relied wholesale on British models of art theory. Instead, she argues that these portraits, when viewed as objects to be studied when the written record is nonextant or where it yields a thin harvest (27), reveal a unique theory of art.Using an abstract and concrete vocabulary readily by their contemporaries, these artists challenged Reynolds's dicta via the canvas rather than the written word, thus wittily positioning the project of portraiture (synchronically and diachronically) on an equal footing with history painting. She writes that despite their transatlantic experience-[these artists] theorized the act of painting differently than their English peers, but like them, understood portraits to be primarily social agents as well as records that participated actively in power hierarchies, family obligation, and the construction of memory (26-27). Lovell's analysis prompts further tantalizing questions. For example, how did West's professional rivalry with Reynolds influence the content of other paintings under consideration in this chapter, specifically West's Self-Portrait (1806), which Lovell positions as another example of his defense of the portraiture genre?Whether examining single paintings or objects, or working with them as sets, Lovell's stated goal is to depart from the standard trajectories applied to studies of art and material culture. Looking to the ordinary zones of private life rather than to the stage of public events (vii), she places these highly codified objects within the larger framework of the Atlantic world and focuses on the eastern seaboard urban settlements of Boston, Salem, and Newport. Lovell counters much recent scholarship such as that which claims artists during the prerevolutionary period had venues for public exhibition-such arguments she finds problematic since envy is key to their social psychological readings (3). She shows instead that such artworks typically circulated within the private, domestic sphere. Examining the objects (paintings, silverware, cabinets) in their most microscopic as well as their most macroscopic connections to culture, Lovell would also see these artworks staged and restaged within both local and vast interdependent social networks (270) that relied on transatlantic trade and the burgeoning consumer revolution. …

Art as Self-Origination in Winckelmann and Hegel

Eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) shared with Hegel a profound admiration for the art and culture of ancient Greece. Both viewed ancient Greece as, in some sense, an ideal to which the modern world might aspire—a pinnacle of spiritual perfection and originality that contemporary civilization might, through an understanding of ancient Greek culture, one day equal or surpass. This rather competitive form of nostalgia suggests a paradoxical demand to produce an original and higher state of culture through the imitation of another. In Hegel’s writings, this paradox goes beyond the relation of the modern world to the ancient world—he exposes the same paradox in ancient Greece’s relation to its own predecessors. The solution to the latter paradox—the possibility of the realization of ancient Greece as an original and self-contained civilization despite its cultural debts—would also, then, be the key to repeating the success of the ancient world in the modern, the overcoming of modern Europe’s cultural debt to the ancient world. The present essay examines how this paradox is revealed and resolved in the writings of Winckelmann and Hegel, and shows how this strategy of culture production—as imputed to the ancient world and aspired to in the modern—simultaneously attempts to justify and conceal a self-deceptive practice of cultural and political conquest. My focus will be on the two writers’ interpretations of ancient Greek art since, as I will suggest, their solution to the paradox of culture production turns out to be modeled upon the role of ancient Greek art in the invention and actualization of a cultural ideal of beauty, unity, and self-containment.

An Art Book and its Viewers: The "Recueil Crozat" and the Uses of Reproductive Engraving

The hybrid nature of works such as the so-called "Recueil Crozat," a bound compendium of engravings reproducing paintings and drawings, often results in their being ill-served by the specialized modern historical disciplines. With this in mind, the Recueil Crozat is here considered in light of the development of the recueil of prints as a distinct book type, as well as in the context of eighteenth-century art pedagogy and print culture. The essay argues that the book should be considered as a pedagogical system, with volume I (Roman paintings) and volume II (Venetian paintings) presenting the reader with the academic dyad of line (I) and color (II). I contend, moreover, that the book was not instructive merely on the level of content, but of technique as well: using line-valorizing gravure rang�e (ordered) to reproduce the Roman paintings, and the greater coloristic effects of gravure libre (free) to reproduce the Venetian paintings, the book's authors sought to provide engravers with a model of reasoned engraving. In considering overlapping aspects of contemporary art history and pedagogy, book design, and printmaking, the essay aims to present an integrated critical approach in order to recover the fullness of early modern print culture.

Les Petits romantiques et le rococo : éloge du mauvais goût

In the 19th century, the very pejorative term rococo was associated with everything outdated, ridiculous, and obsolete. However, under the July Monarchy, eighteenth century art would occasionally arouse more positive commentary; enamoured with the liberty of an art hostile to the rules of classicism, some writers appear naturally attracted by the joyful and twisted forms of rococo. Thus, fanciful romanticism finds in eighteenth-century decoration, architecture, and literature the expression of values that it had recouped as its own and which would characterise it in the minds of critics. Surprisingly, this vision of past aesthetics reveals the new directions of literature; the transition from a negative representation of eighteenth-century art to a distinct interest in rococo style relates to the evolution of conventional romanticism towards an aesthetic favouring liberty, irregularity and caprice.

Fragonard in Detail

ewa lajer-burcharth is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She is the author ofNecklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (Yale University Press, 1999) and of numerous articles on French eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and visual culture. She is currently completing a book on the self and the private sphere in eighteenth-century art and culture. The current essay is part of a longer chapter in this book.

Reconsidering Romney

Two hundred years after his death, George Romney (1734-1802) offers a fascinating case study of the vicissitudes of fame and reputation, the impact of the art market and collecting on the art-historical canon, changing ideas about artistic creativity and practice, and the particular interpretive problems posed by society portraiture. Long relegated to the margins of late eighteenth-century art, Romney has recently reemerged as a multifaceted artistic personality whose innovative paintings and drawings encapsulate the complexities of Enlightenment thought and straddle the line between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. The exhibition George Romney 1734-1802: British Art's Forgotten Genius, organized to mark the bicentenary of Romney's death, provides a useful springboard for reevaluating Romney's artistic career and critical reputation.

Looking Past the Mirror: Genre Painting Taken Seriously

Three new publications on French eighteenth-century art are distinguished by their productive strategies for reconsidering and interpreting genre painting (Here I am consciously using the term "genre" in its more inclusive and etymological sense as comprising all categories of subject matter, with the exception of history painting, such as portraiture, animal painting, landscape, and still life.) Although each of the volumes discussed here focuses on a single painter, none is a monograph in the traditional sense. Colin Bailey studies one painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, an image of a maidservant, proposing artistic and social contexts through which the work could be interpreted in eighteenth-century terms. Paula Radisich selects four sets of varied works by Hubert Robert, and not his most familiar landscapes, considering the subjects of individual images with reference to the series, setting, patronage, and artistic values and ideologies shared by the artist and his viewers. Julie Plax uses a rich combination of approaches for the study of several of Antoine Watteau's paintings of contemporary society, offering new historical information and ideological contexts related to cultural politics at the end of the reign of Louis XIV.

Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, and: French and English Drawings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries from the National Gallery of Canada, and: Drouais's Portrait of Madame de Pompadour from the National Gallery, London (review)

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, and: French and English Drawings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries from the National Gallery of Canada, and: Drouais’s Portrait of Madame de Pompadour from the National Gallery, London Sarah R. Cohen Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2 February–25 April 1999); French and English Drawings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries from the National Gallery of Canada, Frick Collection, New York (9 February–25 April 1999); Drouais’s Portrait of Madame de Pompadour from the National Gallery, London, Frick Collection (26 January–25 April 1999). Early spring in New York City offered rich viewing opportunities for those interested in eighteenth-century art, particularly drawings. An outstanding exhibition of French drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art provided a small survey of eighteenth-century French art, and joined works from New York City museums with much-lesser-known drawings from private collections. At the Frick Collection, one could study François-Hubert Drouais’s riveting portrait of Madame de Pompadour on loan from the National Gallery in London, as well as a judicious selection of French and English drawings from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Since many of the drawings at both museums were new to New York audiences, the opportunities for imaginative study afforded by the curators’ careful selections and juxtapositions opened new pathways for considering the complex visual language of eighteenth-century graphic art. The exhibition at the Metropolitan was organized by Perrin Stein, Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints, and the independent scholar Mary Tavener Holmes; they also jointly authored the informative and fully-illustrated catalogue that accompanied the exhibition. The works selected by the two curators exemplified the many genres and styles practiced by eighteenth-century French artists. In addition to the familiar contrast between the Rococo and Neoclassicism, one could observe the variety of drawings produced toward different ends throughout the century—fête galante fantasies, domestic genre scenes, portraiture, still life, decorative designs, figural studies, and compositional arrangements for history and religious paintings. The three rooms were laid out roughly chronologically: in the first room appeared works by Antoine Watteau, his followers, and early practitioners of the Rococo style, as well as artists associated with the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in the first half of the century; the second room contained midcentury history, landscape and genre scenes, including many works by Jean-Honoré Fragonard; the third featured drawings by artists working late in the century, with a strong emphasis upon Neoclassicism and Revolutionary themes. [End Page 125] Leading off the whole exhibition was, comically enough, Claude Gillot’s Stalled Procession, a new purchase by the Metropolitan featuring a group of strikingly believable satyrs attempting to dislodge a wood nymph’s triumphal chariot from the mud. Gillot’s feathery treatment of the vegetation in this drawing would have a century-long resonance in both French and English landscape; here it was combined with a jittery use of the point of the brush to define the gregarious satyrs. Watteau was represented by several drawings, reflecting the long-standing popularity of this artist among curators and private collectors. The Study of a Man’s Head and Hands from a private collection, a drawing new to this reviewer, neatly exemplified Watteau’s interest in the decorative interconnections of his studies on the page: one hand, executed in red chalk, seemed to grow like a branch from the fluffy contour of the man’s black chalk periwig, while another hand, subtly fusing red and black, parried the outward thrust diagonally on the other side. To see Watteau’s drawings juxtaposed with those by his immediate followers often brings out distinctions, rather than similarities, and here was no exception; the white highlights in Nicolas Lancret’s Seated Couple on the Ground, for example, seemed less to define the figures structurally than to have fallen upon them as gentle snow. Intriguing juxtapositions elsewhere encouraged visitors to note the variety of approaches that characterized French art in the first half of the century. The nervous energy and sensuous watercolor washes of the Fortune Teller, a drawing recently...

Michael Baxandall and the Shadows in Plato’s Cave

Shadows usually lie on the periphery of our visual awareness and yet they constitute visual appearances. Starting from Michael Baxandall’s discussion of this paradox in his recent work on painting and visual cognition in the Enlightenment, this article explores the kinds of shadowing that occur in eighteenth‐century art and also the ambiguous status of shadow effects in contemporary art. It argues that Baxandall’s concerns have significant affinities with those of one of the more important Minimalist artists, Donald Judd. The way Baxandall in his study of shadows seems to abandon the social and cultural historical ambitions of his earlier analysis of Renaissance art, and to adopt a more phenomenological approach, focusing on a viewer's immediate visual engagement with a work, is seen here as symptomatic of a larger shift in the discipline – namely the demise of the systematically historicising imperatives previously more or less taken for granted in serious art historical scholarship.

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century

The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English high in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.

The Dodge collection of eighteenth-century French and English art in the Detroit Institute of Arts

The Dodge collection of eighteenth-century French and English art in the Detroit Institute of Arts