Painting Manuals Research Articles

Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China by J. P. Park (review)

Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China by J. P. Park (review)

Art by the book: painting manuals and the leisure life in late Ming China

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary publications. Focusing on Zhou's work, Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and shows how painting manuals functioned as a form in which everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary cliche was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of a growing reading public. As a special commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person's command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital.

The Publisher's Dilemma: A Study of “Editorial Statements” on Late Ming Book Illustrations (1550-1644)

Some time before 1579, Zhou Lüjing (1542–1633), a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of heavily illustrated books entitled Huasou. Printed from woodblocks, this series was the first multi-genre painting manual in Chinese history, and it covered all the major genres–landscape, figure, bamboo, orchid, plum, and bird-and-flower paintings. Its popularity was immediate and its contents and format were widely disseminated and reprinted in a number of contemporary painting manuals. As a special commodity of early modern China, when people's cultural standing was measured by their command of literati taste and lore, Huasou and other painting manuals provided a growing reading public with a device for enhancing their social capital.

Accelerated exposure tests as evaluation tool for estimating life of organic coatings on steel bridges

The present study performed accelerated exposure tests on 5 types of painting systems, which are commonly used for steel bridges in Japan, and discussed corrosion degradation from initial defects on the paintings. The structural steel plates were surface treated and painted conforming to the 'Japanese painting manual', and circular defects with 0·2, 1·0 and 2·0 mm in diameters reaching the steel substrate were created on each of the painted plate. The painted steels were exposed into an environmental testing chamber controlled by the S6 cycle test condition, which is a laboratory cyclic accelerated exposure test condition of spraying/wetting/drying, for up to 600 days. The corrosion degradation curve of the each painting system was evaluated based on rusting area from the circular defects, which was measured by using laser focus measuring instrument at 250 μm intervals. The proposed degradation curves were applied to evaluating remaining lifetime of the painted steels with initial defects to the future conditions. The evaluation procedure for field environments was also presented based on the acceleration coefficient of the S6 cycle tests and the amount of flying salt.

Paint Driers Discussed in 19th-Century British Oil Painting Manuals

Information on artists' oil paint driers was gathered from sources published in Britain from 1758 to 1900. The sources included oil painting instruction books, varnish or pigment manuals, compendiums of the arts, and encyclopedias and dictionaries on arts and manufactures. A number of American texts from the 19th century were included as well. In addition, a study was made of a series of ledgers from the British artists' colormen firm Roberson, which recorded the purchase of its supplies between 1828 and 1900. Included in the Roberson Archive was a limited selection of recipe books that also yielded useful information. Catalogs from the colormen firms of Winsor & Newton, Reeves, Rowney and Roberson were studied to establish a correlation between oil painting instruction books and the materials available commercially throughout the 19th century. This article summarizes the information on artists' driers from these sources and explores the routes by which driers entered artists' materials, from commercially prepared products to those added on the palette at the time of painting. Paint film defects are frequently seen on paintings from this period. Thus it is hoped that this historical information will be useful when the role of paint driers is examined in relation to these film-formation defects.

Paint Driers Discussed in 19th-Century British Oil Painting Manuals

Information on artists' oil paint driers was gathered from sources published in Britain from 1758 to 1900. The sources included oil painting instruction books, varnish or pigment manuals, compendiums of the arts, and encyclopedias and dictionaries on arts and manufactures. A number of American texts from the 19th century were included as well. In addition, a study was made of a series of ledgers from the British artists' colormen firm Roberson, which recorded the purchase of its supplies between 1828 and 1900. Included in the Roberson Archive was a limited selection of recipe books that also yielded useful information. Catalogs from the colormen firms of Winsor & Newton, Reeves, Rowney and Roberson were studied to establish a correlation between oil painting instruction books and the materials available commercially throughout the 19th century. This article summarizes the information on artists' driers from these sources and explores the routes by which driers entered artists' materials, from commercially prepared products to those added on the palette at the time of painting. Paint film defects are frequently seen on paintings from this period. Thus it is hoped that this historical information will be useful when the role of paint driers is examined in relation to these film-formation defects.

The heyday of pastels in the Eighteenth Century

Summary This paper is dedicated to the memory of Maria Bohusz (1950–1996), a Polish paper conservator and teacher of conservation, who lived and worked in Paris for the Central Laboratory of the Service de Restauration des Musées de France, based at Versailles. She was an inspiration to me in the pursuit of the study of pastels, and, more importantly, she was a friend. This paper looks at the emergence and development of pastel as a recognized artists' technique in its own right in the second part of the Eighteenth Century. The novelty of these pastels was their softness, which offered artists a swifter and more economical medium to obtain the painterly effects previously limited to oil painting. New extenders and binding media were employed in pastel production, and the growing demand for high-quality soft sticks was undoubtedly responsible for the broad range of artists' materials which was soon advocated in contemporary painting manuals. The trade in pastels responded quickly to the demands of artists who were competing to satisfy the popular demand for private portraiture. The particular predilection for pastel at this period is only explained by the favourable aesthetic context of rococo painting. The colours which were popular in textiles, interior decoration, and art were bright and lively, and white and ‘pastel’ hues were particularly fashionable. The finish then in vogue was matt and opaque, and the texture of pastels was ideal to depict the notorious eighteenth-century cosmetic make-up. In its heyday, the status of pastel paintings seems to have matched that of oils, and one finds that oils strove to achieve effects which were natural to pastels.

Mapping the Landscape in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination"

Mapping the Landscape in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" Anne F. Widmayer University of Michigan In "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson coins the term "cognitive mapping" to express the need for individuals in a postmodern society to position themselves in regard to seemingly chaotic social and political structures. A cognitive map enables "a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole" (51). An individual's cognitive map can provide a reassuringly stable physical definition of self in a rapidly changing society, such as that of the twentieth century, or that of England in the eighteenth century. Joseph Addison's use of the trope of landscape and landscape gardening in his "Pleasures ofthe Imagination," I will argue, serves as a cognitive map of the social , political, and cultural attributes of the landed aristocracy that the primarily merchant class readers of the Spectator were attempting to acquire. The rage for landscape painting and landscape gardening was in full force during June and July of 1712, when the Spectator published Addison's essays on the sublime. As Edward Malins notes, the types of landscape gardening most favored during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century in England were closely tied to the origins of the monarchs on the throne at the time. Thus, following the Restoration of Charles II, who had spent most of his life at the French court at Versailles, the French taste for geometric parterres featuring magnificent fountains and separated by radiating walkways was in vogue throughout England (5-6). William and Mary brought with them the even more formal Dutch style of landscape gardening. Closely clipped hedges, fantastical topiary, and groves of trees planted in the quincunx layout, affording ordered prospects from any point of view, were modeled at Hampton Court for the rest of the country (14-15). Under Anne, the native Englishwoman, the finicky attention paid to the royal gardens waned, and she is said to have "parsimoniously neglected [them]" (15), though she was careful to root out the distinctly Dutch box parterres upon the death of William (Clifford 98). Landscape gardening in England was never a politically neutral pursuit, for the previous style was quickly discarded in favor of the present monarch's taste. 19 20Rocky Mountain Review Painting manuals during the eighteenth century mirror the importance royal and aristocratic taste in landscapes had upon landscape painting. William Salmon's widely influential Polygraphice, which went through eight editions from 1672 to 1701, instructs a gentleman-painter to create landscapes that, like the French and Dutch parterres favored by Charles II and William and Mary, are meant to be viewed from above: "Make your Landskip to shoot (as it were) away, one part lower than another, making the nearest hill or place highest, and those that are farther off, to shoot away under that, that the Landskip may appear to be taken from the top of an hill" (35). Jonathan Richardson, the most important portrait painter of the early eighteenth century after Sir Godfrey Kneller's death, in his Theory ofPainting (1715) describes the pleasure a gentleman derives from simultaneously appreciating a painting and his own highly cultivated taste in approving it: "The pleasure that painting, as a dumb art, gives us, is like what we have from musick. . . in both we are delighted in observing the skill of the artist in proportion to it, and our own judgment to discover it. It is this. . . which gives us so much pleasure at the sight of natural pictures, a prospect, a fine sky, a garden, &c. . . ." (3). The aristocratic taste of the viewer is mapped upon the physical, whether it be a painting, a prospect, or a garden. As Addison notes in his earlier essay on taste, Number 409, natural aristocratic taste must be educated in order to be useful: "But notwithstanding this Faculty [taste] must in some measure be born with us, there are several Methods for Cultivating and Improving it, and without which it will be very uncertain, and of little use to the Person that possesses it." Late in the century, William...

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