Historians of British Art Table of Contents summer newsletter 2018 Letter from the President 2 By Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Ph.D. British Art in American Collections: Catalogue excerpt: 4-8 Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters (Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA, 6/30–9/30) By Melissa Buron HBA Graduate Travel Award Report: ASECS 2018 9-11 By Sandra Gómez Todó HBA at CAA 2019 11 HBA Book Prize Long List 12-19 By the Book Prize Committee (Morna O’Neill, Chair) Book Review: Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 20-23 1660–1735, ed. Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewellyn, and Martin Myrone Review by Agnes Haigh Widder, A.M.L.S., M.A. Member News 24-26 Member News Spotlight: Anne Helmreich 27 HBA Funding Awards & Officers 28 Edited by Caitlin Silberman [email protected]An affiliate society of the College Art Association (CAA) in North America, HBA promotes scholarship and other professional endeavors related to British art and architecture, broadly conceived in terms of place and time.
Transcript
Historians of British Art
Table of Contents summer newsletter 2018
Letter from the President 2 By Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Ph.D.
British Art in American Collections: Catalogue excerpt: 4-8 Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters (Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA, 6/30–9/30) By Melissa Buron
HBA Graduate Travel Award Report: ASECS 2018 9-11 By Sandra Gómez Todó
HBA at CAA 2019 11
HBA Book Prize Long List 12-19 By the Book Prize Committee (Morna O’Neill, Chair)
Book Review: Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 20-23 1660–1735, ed. Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewellyn, and Martin Myrone Review by Agnes Haigh Widder, A.M.L.S., M.A.
An affiliate society of the College Art Association (CAA) in North America, HBA promotes scholarship and other professional endeavors related to British art
and architecture, broadly conceived in terms of place and time.
Letter from the President By Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Ph.D.
Dear HBA Members,
In Modern Painters, John Ruskin wrote that young artists “should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.” 1 As I thought about the Historians of British Art's forthcoming 2019 CAA session “Climate Change and British Art,” I wondered what “her meaning” and “her instruction” would be today when Nature is so politically fraught and the Anthropocene equals a narrative of decline and doom. Would Ruskin have thought that one day “believing all things to be right and good” sounds completely indefensible even in the context of euphoric celebration of nature-watching? Even Victorian exhortations to “rejoice always in the truth” feel almost obscene when a neologism like post-truth explains so much about our current relationship to Nature.
When too many accept fake news as facts, we perhaps need to reexamine how the word “facts” and their relationship to truth are understood in our scholarship. In his 2004 essay, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Bruno Latour argues for “a realism dealing with … matters of concern, not matters of fact”:
The mistake we made, the mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible. But this meant accepting much too uncritically what matters of fact were. … Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs. It is this second empiricism, this return to the realist attitude, that I’d like to offer as the next task for the critically minded. 2
It is curious to remember that Ruskin himself recommended turning direct observations of Nature into matters of concern—or in his Victorian lexicon, into matters of memories, imaginations, and fancy: after the walk with Nature, “when their memories are stored, and their
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imaginations fed, and their hands firm, let them [modern painters] … give the reins to their fancy, and show us what they are made of. We will follow them wherever they choose to lead; we will check at nothing.” 3
I will start as Associate Professor of Critical Studies / Art History and Theory in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University this fall; I plan to keep thinking with my students about the role of the critical mind for artmaking and ecology while seeking to better understand the nature of facts as “matters of concern.” I welcome you to join me in this endeavor.
- Jongwoo Jeremy Kim
Associate Professor of Critical Studies / Art History & Theory
The School of Art
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.art.cmu.edu/people/jongwoo-jeremy-kim/
1 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. 1. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1848), 416. 2 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004), 231. 3 Ruskin, Modern Painters, 416.
Membership & Renewal
Fee Structure: • Student $15
• Professional $25*
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For inquiries about HBA Membership please contact Courtney S. Long at: [email protected]
* Note: Professional level members can renew their membership for three years at the reduced rate of $20 by making a one-time payment of $60.
British Art in American Collections Excerpt from Forthcoming Exhibition Catalogue: Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA June 30–September 30, 2018
By Melissa Buron Director, Art Division, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The following is an excerpt from Melissa Buron’s introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue for Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters, which opened at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, CA on June 30, 2018. Buron’s essay is entitled “Truth and Beauty Reframed: The Pre-Raphaelites and their Sources of Inspiration.” It has been edited slightly to fit this format.
The catalogue also includes contributions from Susanna Avery-Quash, Joanna Banham, Elise Effmann Clifford, Jeremy Melius, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Jason Rosenfeld; and Robyn Asleson, Julian Cox, Donato Esposito, Margaretta S. Frederick, Nenagh Hathaway, Bryan C. Keene, Jonathan K. Nelson, Cassandra Sciortino, Rachel Sloan, and Abbie N. Sprague.
In 1848—a year of political revolution across Europe—seven young Englishmen formed a secret artistic alliance with aspirations to rebel against the contemporary art world. Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), the artists, including William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, defined a new visual language of truth and beauty against the backdrop of their rapidly industrializing world. Drawing on literary sources, poetry, and scenes from medieval and modern life, the Pre-Raphaelites established themselves as the most radical contemporary artists of the Victorian period by engaging in an aesthetic dialogue with art and artists from past centuries.
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Love and the Maiden (detail). Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 1877, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
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The self-proclaimed title “Pre-Raphaelites” can be credited as a source of persistent misconceptions about the artists’ aims and ambitions, because it seems to explain their agenda solely through the Brotherhood’s admiration for artistic precedents in Italy before the time of Raphael and his followers (the “Raphaelites”).1 “Pre-Raphaelite” might initially suggest a singular focus on early Italian art; however, as seen in our exhibition Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters, and in the catalogue essays, that definition only scratches the surface of their sources of inspiration. They were enthusiastic about paintings, of course—from the fifteenth-
century early Netherlandish works of Jan van Eyck to the sixteenth-century Venetian paintings of Paolo Veronese (which are more accurately termed “post-Raphaelite”)—in addition to genres and materials as varied as medieval illuminated manuscripts and stained glass, among others. Given the potential for confusion, it is not surprising that their early champion, the influential art critic John Ruskin, criticized “the unfortunate and somewhat ludicrous name of ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brethren.’”2 While this rather difficult moniker could be explained as a brash, misguided—even myopic—marketing tactic conceived by young men in their late teens and early twenties, it nonetheless provides a critical insight into the artists’ ambitious agenda to create a revolutionary new visual vocabulary. It is a frequently repeated trope that members of the PRB admired and were inspired by artists of the past, but this project is the first to explore visually, and in detail, the relationship between the Pre-Raphaelites’ art and their predecessors.
A curatorial explanation of Pre-Raphaelitism through pairings of PRB works with early Italian precedents is challenging because there are limited examples that clearly look like early Italian (“pre-Raphaelite”) art. Moreover, some important exceptions are considered too fragile for international travel, such as Millais’s Isabella (1848–49, Walker Art Gallery) and Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–49, Tate); the former work is represented in this exhibition by a smaller version titled Lorenzo and Isabella (1849, the Makins Collection). Identifying empirical evidence about which paintings the PRB artists saw and had access to in their formative years only complicates matters.3 When looking for candidates to explain the PRB’s relationship with old masters, it becomes evident that early Netherlandish artists (many of whom could also accurately be called pre-Raphaelites since they preceded the life of Raphael) were as important as the Italians, if not even more directly influential on the Brotherhood. The story becomes more
Left: Jan van Eyck, The Annunciation. Oil on canvas transferred from panel, c. 1434/1436. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Right: John Everett Millais, Mariana. Oil on panel, 1851. Tate, London.
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complex when Sandro Botticelli, and his “rediscovery” in the nineteenth century, is added to the narrative.4 Botticelli was born in 1444/1445, nearly four decades before Raphael (born 1483), yet the secular beauty that characterizes his aesthetic has nothing to do with the angular postures of the earlier Italian “primitives” Fra Angelico or Giotto. In addition, Rossetti’s mature compositions, created at the height of his career in the 1860s and 1870s, have more in common with sixteenth-century Venetians than with art before Raphael. Ultimately, these various connections across centuries serve as a rich and stimulating new framework to reconsider the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its impact.
There have been numerous exhibitions featuring the Pre-Raphaelites, many publications, and even, in 2009, a BBC miniseries (Desperate Romantics) based on their artistic and romantic exploits, yet the early artists who inspired the PRB have never been displayed with examples of their work in a focused exhibition on the PRB.5 In their native Britain, the name “Pre-Raphaelite” carries with it decades of complicated associations in the aftermath of the Victorian era. Yet these artists are relatively less well known by name (collectively or individually) in the United States, where their works frequently grace the covers of calendars and notecards but are more irregularly represented in public collections.6 Their impact on the history of art arguably remains more elusive, especially compared with their well-known French Impressionist contemporaries, whose own plein air avant-garde aesthetic made its public debut in the first Impressionist group exhibition of 1874, almost three decades later than the PRB. To the uninitiated, the name might connote saccharine Victorian paintings, and “Pre-Raphaelite” is sometimes used as a universal term for British art from the second half of the nineteenth century. To avoid confusion and to focus our exhibition’s parameters, only core members of the Brotherhood, members of the Pre-Raphaelite “sisterhood,”7 and a few artists closely aligned with PRB principles in successive generations of the movement were selected for presentation in Truth and Beauty.
Left: Titian, Woman at Her Toilet. Oil on canvas, ca. 1515. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Right: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Aurelia (Fazio’s Mistress). Oil on panel, 1863. Tate Britain, London.
The Victorian Pre-Raphaelites did not simply source a series of visual quotations; rather, their objectives had greater implications about how contemporary artists relate to and engage with
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their predecessors. By putting their works together with the early Italian, Netherlandish, and German art that inspired them, their complex conversation with history can be explored in greater depth than ever before. Although the Pre-Raphaelites’ fascination with the Italian old masters is evident in their name, Truth and Beauty will demonstrate that their Northern contemporaries—for example, Van Eyck and Hans Memling—had an equal if not more forceful impact on their visual vocabulary. Our exhibition traces the Brotherhood through the nineteenth-century “rediscovery” of Botticelli by the English art critics John Ruskin and Walter Pater, which paralleled the tempera revival executed by the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites. The visual affinities between these works create evocative juxtapositions that also demonstrate the influence of the late Renaissance artists, such as Titian and Paolo Veronese, on the Pre-Raphaelites and select contemporaries.
Hans Memling, Saint John Altarpiece. Oil on panel, ca. 1479. Memlingmuseum, Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges.
This attraction to the art of the past was not limited to paintings, however, and Truth and Beauty features examples of books, furniture, and stained glass, as well as tapestries that emulate sixteenth-century Flemish textiles. The varied sources that informed the Pre-Raphaelites’ aesthetic vocabulary demonstrate the importance of the work that inspired the PRB and redefine more broadly their unique style. This highlights the nuanced paradoxes of the Pre-Raphaelite mission—namely, their efforts to be fundamentally modern by emulating the past, as well as their dichotomous criticism and veneration of Raphael and his artistic impact. In the legacy of their work, we find questions and concepts that still provoke and incite artistic agendas in the twenty-first century.
[…] The core concepts of the Pre-Raphaelite mission remain relevant today, one hundred and seventy years after the movement’s inception in 1848. Contemporary artists still wrestle with how, when, and why to engage with art of the past, a dialogue that is evident in the conceptual photography of Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits series, and in the portraits of Kehinde Wiley, which suggest old master paintings in the poses and settings of their subjects, even evoking William Morris patterns in their intricate background foliage. The recent retrospective exhibition
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Bill Viola: Electronic Renaissance (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, March 10–July 23, 2017) brought the artist’s video installations into dialogue with the Italian Renaissance and Mannerist paintings that inspired him. The type of critical engagement with the past that was essential to the PRB is alive and well in contemporary art of the twenty-first century.
The Pre-Raphaelites were not the first group of artists to enter into a visual conversation with their predecessors and they will not be the last. From the farm-to-table rationale behind the Slow Food movement to the do-it-yourself impetus behind Etsy, the longing for a simpler and more authentic or sincere past seems to be endemic of modern and rapidly industrializing cultures. By reframing their own language of truth and beauty, the Pre-Raphaelites can teach us as much about their place in art history as they can about our own time and the universal questions about the meaning of art.
1 In her latest publication on the Pre-Raphaelites, Elizabeth Prettejohn coins their agenda “generous imitation.” See Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 2 John Ruskin, “Lectures on Architecture and Painting 1854. Lecture IV, Pre-Raphaelitism, Delivered on 18 November 1853.” Quoted in Stephen Wildman, “A New and Noble School”: Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Pallas Athene, 2012), 109. 3 See Alicia Craig Faxon, “Rossetti’s Images of Botticelli,” Visual Resources 12 (1996): 53–62; Béatrice Laurent, “An Inventory of the Pre-Raphaelite Mental Museum, October 1849,” in Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism, ed. Thomas J. Tobin (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 19–43; Leonée Ormond, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Old Masters,” Yearbook of English Studies 36, no. 2 (2006): 153–168; Malcolm Warner, “The Pre-Raphaelites and the National Gallery,” Huntington Library Quarterly 55, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 1–11; and Gail S. Weinberg, “‘Looking backward’: Opportunities for the Pre-Raphaelites to See ‘pre-Raphaelite’ Art,” in Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: The Anglo-American Enchantment, ed. Margaretta Frederick Watson (Aldershot, UK; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997), 51–63. 4 Michael Levey, “Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, no. 3–4 (July–December 1960), 291–306. For a more recent source, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Botticelli and the Pre-Raphaelites,” in Botticelli Reimagined, ed. Mark Evans and Stefan Weppelmann, exh. cat. (London: V&A Publishing, 2016), 76–81. 5 […] The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Botticelli Reimagined (2016) is an important example of an exhibition that considered old masters and nineteenth-century art. This presentation differed from Truth and Beauty, however, because the works were arranged chronologically; in Truth and Beauty, works by the Victorians are juxtaposed with precedents by Botticelli in the same galleries. Botticelli Reimagined was also framed around new interpretations of Botticelli’s art and was not about the Pre-Raphaelites specifically. See Mark Evans and Stefan Weppelmann, eds., Botticelli Reimagined, exh. cat. (London: V & A Publishing, 2016). 6 Notable exceptions are the concentrations of PRB material in the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, and the Fogg Museum/Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts. […] For more on these collections, see Stephen Wildman, Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Delaware Art Museum, exh. cat. (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 2004), and Stephan Wolohojian ed., A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003). 7 Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing, 1995).
The Legion of Honor has produced a website for Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters, where you can
HBA Graduate Travel Award Report Portraying the Female Masquerader in Georgian England: HBA Graduate Student Travel Awardee Sandra Gómez Todó on the 2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting
By Sandra Gómez Todó, Graduate Research Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate, University of Iowa
In May 1749, Elizabeth Montague attended a masquerade in celebration of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle: “…where I was to appear in the character of the Queen Mother, my dress white satin, fine new point
tuckers, kerchief and ruffles, and my hair curled after the Vandyke picture… Mr. Montague has made me lay by my dress to be painted in when I see Mr. Hoare again.”1 This account by the pre-eminent bluestocking led me to think about the purpose of such a portrait—which no longer survives—and which became the starting point for a reflection on female masquerade portraits and their role in shaping class and gender discourses in the fashionable but controversial world of eighteenth-century London entertainment. Part of the resulting research materialized in my paper, “Portraying the Female Masquerader: Fashionability, Public Legitimacy, and the Moralities of the Mask in Georgian Masquerade Portraits,” which focused on outdoor individual and marriage portraits set in London’s Ranelagh Gardens. The text was kindly accepted by Professors Heidi Strobel and Christina Lindeman to be presented at their panel Women, Portraiture, and Place at the 2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Annual Meeting in Orlando at the end of March.
I was fortunate to receive the HBA Graduate Student Travel Award, which generously supported my participation at this national conference. This allowed me not only to share my ongoing research and receive feedback at such an important venue, but to enrich the scope of my work in conversation with a highly specialized public and several papers that also addressed questions of gender in British eighteenth-century visual culture.
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The presented research stems from my dissertation project at the University of Iowa, entitled “Unmasking Georgian Femininities: The Visual and Material Culture of the Female Masquerader in England,” which demonstrates how the iconography of the female masquerader pervaded Georgian imagery and acted as a primary vehicle to formulate and to comment on models of femininity. Masked balls became major scenarios for the visibility and agency of women in the public sphere and entertainment culture of Georgian London. Nonetheless, the discourses surrounding women’s masquerading were highly ambivalent, which led to the production of an extensive visual and material culture that negotiated their increasing presence in urban and commercial spaces. As a result, the figure of the female masquerader became widely disseminated, creating a close association with moral corruption and libertinism.
Within this context, however, portraiture offered a significant visual counterpart, shaping the representation of these women as engaged in sophisticated and polite entertainment, and elucidating the discursive dichotomy of the moralities of the mask. My examination in this paper of the ambivalent reception of pleasure gardens – Ranelagh in particular – as masquerade venues, and their resignification as setting in female and marriage masquerade portraiture, entered in dialogue with other scholars’ exploration and reassessment of new contexts and media for female agency outside conventional artistic or visual fields in eighteenth-century Britain.
The subjects that I encountered at the conference included the role of portraiture and auctions as embodiments of the negotiation of female identity in the case of the Countess of Blessington; British printshops and printmaking as spaces of female artistic and commercial entrepreneurship for figures including Maria Cosway, Caroline Watson, and Hannah Humphrey; and the role of Anglomanie in transnational female friendships and court networks like those of Marie Antoinette and the Princesse de Lamballe. The exchange of ideas fostered in such a context, as well as the connections established with scholars from the network of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture, has greatly enriched my work.
The approaches and inquiries through the lens of gender studies present at ASECS—deeply impacted by the legacy and scholarship of feminist art historians such as the recently commemorated Linda Nochlin and Mary D. Sheriff—are now as necessary as ever. When women’s rights are threatened and cultural and professional visibility is still evolving, our task as art historians becomes even more urgent to bring to the foreground not only the ways in which cultural and visual mechanisms have shaped
James McArdell after Thomas Hudson, Mary (née Panton), Duchess of Ancaster. Mezzotint, 1757. National Portrait Gallery, London.
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the conception of womanhood in its plurality, but how women have appropriated them to renegotiate their agency and image in society. I am very grateful to Historians of British Art for enabling me to present part of my contribution to this project and for their support in recognizing the key role of gender studies in the practice of British art history. I am also appreciative of the ASECS Graduate Prize Committee and Executive Board for encouraging this work by selecting my paper as the winner of the 2018 ASECS Graduate Student Conference Paper Competition.
1 Elizabeth Montagu, Letter of May 8, 1749, in Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blue-Stockings–Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, Vol. 1, ed. E. J. Climenson (London: John Murray, 1906), 264.
HBA at CAA 2019 In addition to our annual Historians of British Art Affiliate Session, sessions proposed by several HBA members have been accepted for inclusion in the CAA 2019 Annual Conference. This year’s conference will be held in New York, NY from February 13–16, 2019.
Interested parties are encouraged to consider submitting individual paper proposals to HBA’s Affiliate Session or member-proposed sessions as outlined below. Paper proposals are due by August 6, 2018 and should be submitted directly to session organizers. This document (PDF) contains full details on the submission process and descriptions of all sessions.
Climate Change and British Art – Session Description (Historians of British Art Affiliate Session) Chair: Jongwoo Jeremy Kim - University of Louisville Email: [email protected]
Art and Justice: New Pedagogical Approaches – Session Description Chairs: Courtney Skipton Long, Risa Puleo Email: [email protected], [email protected]
The Studio as Market – Session Description (International Art Market Studies Affiliate Session) Chair: Julie F. Codell Email: [email protected]
Books Published in the Field of British Art in 2017
The Historians of British Art annually awards prizes to outstanding books on the history of British art, architecture and visual culture. The members of the Book Prize Committee are putting together the long list for the prize, and we are currently accepting nominations for books published in 2017. Anyone may nominate a book by emailing the committee chair, and we accept self-nominations. There is no limit on the number of books from a single publisher that may be considered in each category. Winners will be announced in January 2019, in advance of the annual meeting of the College Art Association in February, so that publishers can market prize-winners there.
We are pleased to announce that we will consider books in four categories: Pre-1800, 1600-1800, Post-1800, and multi-authored volume. The committee is currently welcoming nominations for this year’s prize. A list of previous winners can be found on the HBA website:
Natasha Awais-Dean. Bejeweled: Men and Jewelry in Tudor and Jacobean England. London: British Museum Publications.
Rhianydd Bierbrach. Church Monuments in South Wales, c. 1200-1547. London: Boydell and Brewer.
Herbert R. Broderick. Moses the Egyptian in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch (London, British Library Cotton MS Claudius B.iv). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Clifford Davidson. Studies in Late Medieval Wall Paintings, Manuscript Illuminations, and Texts. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
James Delbourgo. Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Vittoria Feola. Elias Ashmole: Founder of the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford: Bodleian Library. ISBN: 9781851244621
Richard Gameson, ed. The Lindisfarne Gospels: New Perspectives. Leiden: Brill.
Barbara Gribling. The Image of Edward the Black Prince in Georgian and Victorian England: Negotiating the Late Medieval Past. London: Royal Historical Society.
Angus Haldane. Portraits of the English Civil War. London: Unicorn Press.
Jessica Hodge. Chester Cathedral. London: Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers.
Nick Hodgson. Hadrian's Wall: Archaeology and History at the Limit of Rome's Empire. Ramsbury: Crowood Press.
Edward Impey. The Great Barn of 1425–27 at Harmondsworth, Middlesex. London: Historic England Publishing.
David Jacques. Gardens of Court and Country: English Design 1630-1730. New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Frederica C.E. Law-Turner. The Ormesby Psalter: Patrons and Artists in Medieval East Anglia. Oxford: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
Eleri Lynn. Tudor Fashion: Dress at Court. New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with Historic Royal Palaces.
David M. Mitchell. Silversmiths in Elizabethan and Stuart London: Their Lives and their Marks. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
Marc Morris. Castles: Their History and Evolution in Medieval Britain. New York: Pegasus Books.
Matthew Myrne. English Parish Churches and Chapels: Art, Architecture and People. London: Bloomsbury Shire.
Nicholas Orme. The History of England's Cathedrals. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
James Paz. Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Susan Powell. The Birgittines of Syon Abbey: Preaching and Print. Turnhout: Brepols.
Nigel Saul. Lordship and Faith: The English Gentry and the Parish Church in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Laura Varnam. The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Christopher Wakeling. Chapels of England: Buildings of Protestant Nonconformity. London: Historic England Publishing.
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Single Author, Eighteenth Century
Elizabeth Angelicoussis. Reconstructing the Lansdowne Collection of Classical Marbles. Munich: Hirmer.
Julius Bryant. Chevening: A Seat of Diplomacy. London: Holberton.
Max Bryant. The Museum by the Park: 14 Queen Anne’s Gate. London: Holberton.
Clare Lois Carroll. Exiles in a Global City: The Irish and Early Modern Rome, 1609-1783. Leiden: Brill.
Carolyn A. Day. Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease. London: Bloomsbury.
David Fallon. Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment: The Politics of Apotheosis. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Judith Goodison. The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale Junior. London: Philip Wilson.
Catherine Gordon. Croome: A Creation of Genius. London: Scala.
James Hamilton. Gainsborough: A Portrait. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
John McAleer. Picturing India: People, Places, and the World of the East India Company. London: British Library.
Heather McPherson. Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Peter N. Miller. History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Temi Odumosu. Africans in English Caricature 1769–1819: Black Jokes White Humour. Turnhout: Brepols.
John Phibbs. Place-Making: The Art of Capability Brown. London: Historic England Publishing.
Susan Rather. The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre.
Alice Rawsthorn. Wedgwood: A Story of Creation and Innovation. New York: Rizzoli.
Kate Retford. The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in 18th-Century Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Jacqueline Riding. Basic Instincts: Love, Lust and Violence in the Art of Joseph Highmore. London: Holberton.
Jennifer Van Horn. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia.
Matthew Walker. Architects, Builders, and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Single Author, Nineteenth Century
Christopher Baker. Edwin Landseer: The Monarch of the Glen. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland.
Roger Billcliffe. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Art of the Four. London: Frances Lincoln.
Julius Bryant. Designing the V&A: The Museum as a Work of Art (1857-1909). London: Lund Humphries.
Rachel Dickson. Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain - From Axentowich to Zulawski. London: Ben Uri Gallery & Museum.
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Single Author, Nineteenth Century (continued)
Stephen Duckworth. Victorian Staffordshire Pottery Religious Figures. Woodbridge: ACC Publishing Group.
Sarah Edge. The Extraordinary Archive of Arthur J. Munby: Photographing Class and Gender in the Nineteenth Century. London: Tauris.
Don Esposito. Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries.
Edward J. Gillin. The Victorian Palace of Science: Scientific Knowledge and the Building of the Houses of Parliament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sophie Gordon. Shadows of War: Roger Fenton’s Photographs of the Crimea, 1855. London: Royal Collection Trust.
Wendy Graham. Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Jennifer Green-Lewis. Victorian Photography, Literature and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Desna Greenhow, ed. The Diary of Mary Watts 1877–1904. London: Lund Humphries in association with Watts Gallery.
Lucy Hartley. Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Andrew Hemingway. Landscape Between Ideology and the Aesthetic: Marxist Essays on British Art and Art Theory, 1750–1850. London: Historical Materialism.
Dan Leers. William Henry Fox Talbot and the Promise of Photography. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art.
Anne M. Lyden. A Perfect Chemistry: Photographs by Hill and Adamson. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland.
Kieran McCarthy. Faberge in London: The British Branch of the Imperial Russian Goldsmith. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club.
Kajal Meghani. Splendours of the Subcontinent: A Prince's Tour of India, 1875-6. London: Royal Collection Trust.
Niamh O’Sullivan. In the Lion’s Den: Daniel Macdonald, Ireland and Empire. Cork: Cork University Press.
Elizabeth Prettejohn. Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War. New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Peter Raissis. Victorian Watercolours. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Nicholas Tromans. The Art of G.F. Watts. London: Holberton.
Single Author, Post-1900
Julia Beaumont-Jones. A Century of Prints in Britain. London: Hayward Publishing.
Jonathan Black. Winston Churchill in British Art, 1900 to The Present Day: The Titan With Many Faces. London: Bloomsbury.
M. Christine Boyer. Not Quite Architecture: Writing Around Alison and Peter Smithson. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Michael Bracewell. What is Gilbert & George?. London: Heni.
Roger Brown. Wynford Dewhurst: Manchester’s Monet. Bristol: Sansom & Company.
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Single Author, Post-1900 (continued)
Martin Caiger-Smith. Antony Gormley. New York: Rizzoli.
David Cole. Sir Edwin Lutyens: The Arts and Crafts Houses. Mulgrave: Images Publishing.
Ian Collins. Rose Hilton. London: Lund Humphries.
Tom Cross. The Shining Sands: Artists in Newlyn and St Ives 1880-1930. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press.
Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isolbel Baxter, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Patrick Elliott and Sacha Llewellyn. True to Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland.
Tanya Harrod. Leonard Rosoman. London: Royal Academy of Arts.
Simon Henley. Redefining Brutalism. Newcastle Upon Tyne: RIBA.
Ben Highmore. The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jonathan Jones. Tracey Emin: Works 2007-2017. New York: Rizzoli.
Eve Kalyva. Image and Text in Conceptual Art. London: Palgrave.
Monique Kerman. Contemporary British Artists of African Descent and the Unburdening of a Generation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
David Knight. Gerald Laing: A Catalogue Raisonne. London: Lund Humphries.
Paul Liss et al. David Evans (1929-1988). London: Liss Llewellyn Fine Art.
Simon Martin. The Mythic Method: Classicism in British Art 1920–1950. Chicester: Pallant House Gallery.
Robert Mills. Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern. London: Boydell and Brewer.
Geoffrey Munn. Southwold: An Earthly Paradise. Woodbridge: ACC Art Books.
Lynda Nead. The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain. London: Yale University Press, in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Victoria Noel-Johnson. De Chirico and the United Kingdom (c. 1916-1978). Falciano: Maretti Editore.
Mark Ovenden. Johnston & Gill: Very British Types. London: Lund Humphries.
Michel Remy. Eileen Agar: Dreaming Oneself Awake. London: Reaktion Books.
Phyllida Shaw. An Artist's War: The Art and Letters of Morris and Alice Meredith Williams. Stroud: History Press.
Richard Shiff and Catherine Lampert. Peter Doig. New York: Rizzoli.
Richard Slocombe. Wyndham Lewis: Life, Art, War. London: Imperial War Museum.
James Stourton. British Embassies: Their Diplomatic and Architectural History. London: Frances Lincoln.
James Stourton. Kenneth Clark: Life, Art & Civilisation. London: William Collins.
Alice Strang. A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900-1950. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland.
Leon Wainwright. Phenomenal Difference: A Philosophy of Black British Art. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
David Wilkinson. The Alfred Wallis Factor: Conflict in Post-War St Ives Art. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press.
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Multi-author, General
Christiana Payne and Gemma Brace. Air: Visualising the Invisible in British Art 1768-2017. Bristol: Sansom.
Multi-author, Pre-1700
John H. Astington, ed. Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance: The Mirror up to Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
P.S. Barnwell and Paula Henderson, eds. Architect, Patron and Craftsman in Tudor and Early Stuart England. Donington: Shaun Tyas.
Caroline Barron, Martha Carlin, and Joel T. Rosenthal, eds. Medieval London: Collected Papers of Caroline M. Barron. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications.
Peter Beacham, ed. Buckfast Abbey: History, Art and Architecture. London and New York: Merrell Holberton.
Rufus Bird and Olivia Fryman, eds. Charles II: Art and Power. London: Royal Collection Trust.
Margaret Coombe, Anne E. Mouron, and Christiania Whitehead, eds. Saints of North-East England, 600-1500. Turnhout: Brepols.
Michael Hall, et al. Farm Street: The Story of the Jesuits' Church in London. London: Unicorn Press.
Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson. A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material
Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Hoke P. Kimball and Bruce Henson. Governor's and State Houses in British Colonial America 1607-1783: An Historical, Architectural and Archaeological Survey. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Michael J. Lewis, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, and Dan Terkla, eds. The Bayeux Tapestry: New Approaches: Proceedings of a Conference at the British Museum. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
John Munns, ed. Decorated Revisited: English Architectural Style in Context, 1250-1400. Turnhout: Brepols.
Pamela A. Patton and Judith K. Golden, eds. Tributes to Adelaide Bennett Hagens: Manuscripts, Iconography, and the Late Medieval Viewer. Turnhout: Harvey Miller.
Susan Powell, ed. Saints and Cults in Medieval England. Proceedings of the 2015 Harlaxton Symposium. Donington: Shaun Tyas.
Multi-Author, Eighteenth Century Paola Bianchi and Karin E. Wolfe, eds. Turin and the British in the Age of the Grand Tour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Michael Carter, et al. Writing Britain's Ruins. London: British Library Publishing.
Myles Campbell, et al. Making Majesty: The Throne Room at Dublin Castle, a Cultural History. Newbridge: Irish Academic Press.
Janice Cliffe and Adrienne Rosen. The Making of Chipping Norton: A Guide to its Buildings and History to 1750. Stroud: History Press.
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Multi-Author, Eighteenth Century (continued)
Mark Crosby Eisenman, et al. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Arthur Gibney, Livia Hurley, and Edward McParland, eds. The Building Site in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
John McAleer and Nigel Rigby. Captain Cook and the Pacific: Art, Exploration and Empire. New Haven and London: in association with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Joanna Marschner, et al. Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World. New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Yale Center for British Art and Historic Royal Palaces.
Jon Stobart, ed. Travel and the British Country House: Cultures, Critiques and Consumption in the Long Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Multi-author, Nineteenth Century
Paul Fyfe, et al. Victoria's Lost Pavilion: From Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics to Digital Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Susan Grace Galassi, et al. Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with The Frick Collection.
Shan Lancaster, ed. Constable and Brighton: Something Out of Nothing. London: Scala.
Jenny Lister, et al. May Morris: Arts & Crafts Designer. London-New York: Thames and Hudson.
Amanda Maddox and Sara Stevenson. Thomas Annan: Photographer of Glasgow. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum.
Kathleen M. Morris and Alexis Goodin, eds. Orchestrating Elegance: Alma-Tadema and the Marquand Music Room. New Haven: Yale University Press, for the Clark Art Institute.
Kate Nichols and Sarah Victoria Turner, eds. After 1851: The material and visual cultures of the Crystal Palace of Sydenham. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray. Sargent: The Watercolours. London: Giles.
Susan Pearce and Theresa Ormrod. Charles Robert Cockerell in the Mediterranean: Letters and Travels, 1810-1817. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
Joanna Selborne and Christina Payne. William Henry Hunt: Country People. London: Holberton.
Kim Sloan, et al. Places of the Mind: British Watercolor Landscapes 1850-1950. London: Thames and Hudson.
Sam Smiles, et al. Capture the Castle: British Artists and the Castle from Turner to Le Brun. Bristol: Sansom.
Alison Smith, et al. Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites. London: National Gallery.
Toby Wilkinson and Julian Platt. Aristocrats and Archaeologists: An Edwardian Journey on the Nile. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.
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Multi-author, Post-1900
Glenn Adamson, et al. Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, in association with the Yale Center for British Art and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Elaine Andrews, Margaret Bear, Brian Foss and Paul Liss. WWII War Pictures by British Artists. London: Liss Llewellyn Fine Art.
Joseph Black, Stephen Bann, and John Dixon Hunt, et al. Garden at War: Deception, Craft and Reason at Stowe. London: Holberton.
Eleanor Clayton, et al. Howard Hodgkin: Painting India. London: Lund Humphries.
Riann Coulter, et al. William Crozier: The Edge of the Landscape. London: Piano Nobile.
Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra, eds. Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Okwui Enwezor, ed. Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi. Munich-New York: Prestel.
Andy Friend and Alan Powers. Ravilious & Co.: The Pattern of Friendship. London: Thames and Hudson.
Elena Geuna, et al. Damien Hirst: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. London: Other Criteria/White Cube.
Tim Knox and Olivia Horsfall Turner. Ed Kluz: The Lost House Revisited. London and New York: Merrell.
Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson. Bomberg. London: Ben Uri Gallery.
Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson. William Rothenstein & His Circle. London: Ben Uri Gallery.
Simon Maidment, et al. David Hockney: Current. London: Thames and Hudson.
Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser. Charles Tunnicliffe: Prints, a Catalogue Raisonne. London: Royal Academy of Arts.
Richard Schulman, et al. New Architecture London. Munich-New York: Prestel.
Chris Stephens and Andrew Wilson, eds. David Hockney. London: Tate.
Mark Thompson and Jonathan Black. War in the Sunshine: The British in Italy 1917–18 through the Eyes of Sydney Carline, Ernest Brooks and William Joseph Brunell. London: Estorick Foundation.
Missing a favorite new book? If you wish to nominate a book published in 2017—including self-nominations—please contact Morna O’Neill ([email protected]), Book Prize Committee chair. Winners will be announced in January 2019.
John Keyse Sherwin, based on a sketch by William Hogarth, The Politician. Engraving and etching, 1775.
Book Review Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735. Ed. Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewellyn, and Martin Myrone. New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016. ISBN: 9780300214802.
Review by Agnes Haigh Widder, A.M.L.S., M.A., Libraries, Michigan State University
Given the revolutionary changes in politics, society, and culture in the late Stuart and early Georgian period, it is incumbent upon art historians to analyze the overlapping aspects of visual culture associated with the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the city through the objects of life, materials, and places of that time. The editors of this volume indicate that the period has been under-studied in the last forty years, frequently overlooked, sandwiched between the better-studied ages of Hogarth and Van Dyck. Yet it was an artistically fertile era. Architecture, sculpture, painting, graphic art, drawing, tapestry, and furniture-making drew upon each other; native-born and immigrant artists, many from the Netherlands, intermingled; and public notices of artistic solidarity and success arose in the form of artists’ clubs and academies,
as well as knighthoods for the most famous practitioners of the arts.
As new methodological approaches and research methods from within the digital humanities are transforming the writing of art history, the contributors to this volume seek to apply these new approaches to their period. From 2009 to 2012, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council supported a research project entitled The Art World in Britain: 1660 to 1735. The project was
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based at the University of York and Tate Britain, and the three editors of this volume were the lead investigator (Professor Mark Hallett, University of York) and co-investigators (Professor Nigel Llewellyn and Dr. Martin Myron, both Tate Britain.) The research project led to three academic conferences on the period from 1660–1735, and the Tate curated three exhibitions on the period. Scholars also developed an accompanying database, http://artworld.york.ac.uk. The essays in Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735 also have their origins in this project. Many chapters here originated as papers given at the 2009–12 conferences.
Co-editor Mark Hallett sets the stage with his introduction that discusses Gawen Hamilton’s A Conversation of Virtuosis (1735), a painting portraying a group of thirteen artists, architects, and connoisseurs who regularly met at the King’s Head Tavern in New Bond Street, London. The artists depicted in A Conversation each paid Hamilton four guineas and entered their names in a raffle, the winner of which won the completed portrait. (The winner was the painter and etcher Joseph Goupy, standing sixth from the left, in brown.) This raffle was a way for artists to assist one of their fellows, Hamilton. This painting is an example of an artists’ club supporting one of their own and points to the vibrancy of the local art scene. Possibly, Hamilton also painted it to achieve greater visibility for his work, existing as he did amidst a great number of portrait painters.
The book is organized into five sections: Spaces, Stages, Arenas; Kings, Queens, Commanders; Networks, Shared Practices, Communities; Prospects, Print, Empire; and Theory, Artworlds, Periodization. The first part deals with highly charged spaces: the Palace of Westminster, the rebuilt Royal Exchange and livery halls after the Great Fire, history of the State Bedchamber in the English royal palace, and Castle Howard. Part two is on portraiture of leading figures of the period: King Charles II and Queen Anne, John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough and his wife Sarah Churchill, and Louis Laguerre’s murals at Marlborough House. Part three covers artistic networks and shared forms of artistic practice that developed in this period. Part four deals with art “beyond London,” including chapters on the houses of the gentry, the world of estate ‘prospects’ or ‘views’ that celebrate and justify the land and activities of the rural gentry, British forts on the
Gawen Hamilton, A Conversation of Virtuosis…. Oil on canvas, 1735. Tate, London.
African coast in the early eighteenth century, and the British model of portraiture in the North American colonies. Part five offers a series of chapters on the critical and theoretical texts about art and aesthetics of the time and on the kinds of evaluative vocabulary developed by the emerging population of connoisseurs and virtuosi. Subjects in this section include a new text on painting published on the eve of the Restoration, the practice of copperplate engraving, and a discussion of the ways that Stuart and Georgian writers described tomb monuments. The remainder of this review will provide discussions of examples from some of the sections of the book.
From the Prospects, Print, and Empire section, Emily Mann’s chapter on William Smith’s Thirty Different Drafts of Guinea: A Printed Prospectus of Trade and Territory in West Africa (1729) shows how printed visual culture was drawn into one of the longest, bitterest, economic and political controversies of the time, that of the slave trade. Those in the so-called “Guiney trade”—slave traders, merchants, mariners, moneylenders, and insurers—might use Smith’s images for information about West Africa, as well as to hang on the wall at home. Architectural historian A.W. Lawrence, who later wrote about Smith’s work, was critical because they were not accurate representations. Mann argues, however, that the works were intended as vehicles to communicate ideas about British interests in Africa, rather than presentations of correct details of buildings. Smith’s goal was to influence public opinion and political discussion about the English presence in West Africa through the Royal African Company, chartered in 1672. Control of the settlements built by the Company was at stake. Thirty Different Drafts of Guinea is thus an early example of topographical imagery born of British imperial initiatives.
The book’s third section contains chapters on Networks, Shared Practices, and Communities. Tim Batchelor’s essay “‘Deceives in an Acceptable, Amusing, and Praiseworthy Fashion’: Still Life, Illusion, and Deception” touches on all of these themes. A quote from Samuel Pepys about his appreciation of a still life of flowers by Simon Verelst (Dutch, 1644–1710), begins an analysis of the growing popularity of still lifes in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Affordable to the middle classes, unconnected to any particular privileged family or place, this genre also fed the nation’s fascination with depiction of minute, realistic details of the newly discovered plant and animal worlds seen under a microscope and brought home by explorers
William Smith, “The South West Prospect of Williams Fort at Whydah, 1727.” Plate 28, Thirty Different Drafts of Guinea…, 1729.
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from abroad. To feed the English still life market, many artists emigrated from the Netherlands; they brough with them a new method of selling art, the auction, which allowed for a broader public knowledge of the range of art available for purchase.
Caroline Good's chapter “A Royal Subject: William Sanderson's Guide to Painting on the Eve of the Restoration” is an offering from the Theory, Artworlds, Periodization section. Good discusses Sanderson's (c. 1586–1676) text called Graphice, The Use of the Pen and Pensil, Or the Most Excellent Art of Painting, published 1658. Sanderson was a Royalist historian; this was his last book. As Good asserts, Sanderson had multiple goals with this work. He wanted to persuade people of the power of art, to guide them in collecting, judging, and displaying art, and to inform his readers about the practicalities of painting itself. For this last goal, he pirated some material from a previously-unpublished manuscript by courtier and painter Edward Norgate (1581–1650). Sanderson also drew upon his own experiences observing artisans at home and abroad, and what he gleaned from the literature on art-making from the previous 60 years. The result was a guidebook for those who enjoyed the art of painting but who knew little of the social expectations or critical concepts for its appreciation. In teaching his readers about taste and sensibility, Sanderson promoted a critical vocabulary about the field of art intimately linked with Stuart court culture.
Court, Country, City, British Art and Architecture, 1660-1735 is a valuable anthology of articles on the English art of this era. It is also a handsome book, with extensive color illustrations and produced on the fine, heavy, coated paper we have come to expect from the Yale University Press. It is to be hoped that in the future, we will see many more articles on this period in the pages of the digital journal British Art Studies now that there is the Art World in Britain database of resources for scholars to draw upon for primary sources. The reviewer is looking forward, in particular, to learning more on the social aspects of the period: more on art collectors, on how artists connected with their publics, and on how the English learned about the arts and collecting.
Call for Reviewers HBA is seeking reviews for the Winter newsletter, to be published in January 2019. If you have a book in mind that you would like to review, please contact HBA Newsletter Editor Caitlin Silberman at [email protected].
Jocelyn Anderson is pleased to announce the recent publication of her book, Touring and Publicizing England's Country Houses in the Long Eighteenth Century. It was published in February by Bloomsbury Academic. Drawing on travel books, guidebooks, and dozens of tourists' diaries and letters, Anderson’s book explores what it meant to tour country houses such as Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth, Wilton, Kedleston and Burghley in the tumultuous 1700s. More information is available on the publisher’s website.
Susan Ashbrook has contributed a co-authored book chapter, with Alison Syme, entitled “Beautifying Books and Popularizing Posters in Europe and America, 1855-1910,” for the forthcoming History of Illustration, edited by Susan Doyle, Jaleen Grove, and Whitney Sherman. The volume will be published by Fairchild Books, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, in 2019. For more information, see the publisher’s website.
Michael Charlesworth announces the publication of his book, The Modern Culture of Reginald Farrer: Landscape, Literature, and Buddhism (Legenda: Modern Humanities Research Association: March 2018). The British plant-collector Reginald Farrer (1880–1920) became a Buddhist in Ceylon, and his published works contain lively and uninhibited critiques of British society and civilisation partly informed by this alternative perspective. Charlesworth explores all Farrer’s activities, particularly his involvement with two strong forces within the cultural dynamics of the early twentieth century: modernism and Buddhism. Further details can be found here.
Margaretta Frederick, Curator of the Bancroft Collection at the Delaware Art Museum, draws our attention to the museum’s 2019 Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship. This one-month Fellowship, awarded annually, is intended for scholars conducting significant research in the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends, associates, and followers. The deadline for applications is November 1, 2018. See website for more information.
David Getsy has curated the retrospective Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble, which will be on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art from September 29, 2018–January 27, 2019. In support of this work, Getsy received a 2018 Research Grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He has also been named the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the Freie Universität, Berlin, for the 2020-21 academic year.
Monica Hahn received her PhD in art history from Temple University in May 2018, with a dissertation entitled Go-Between Portraits and the Imperial Imagination circa 1800. Her essay “Dramatizing the encounter: the performative body in John Webber’s A Man of the Sandwich Islands, Dancing” appears in Artistic Responses to Travel in the Western Tradition, ed. Sarah J. Lippert, Routledge Research in Art History, 2018.
HBA Past President Craig Hanson would like to draw attention to a newly-launched website, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018. This beautifully-designed website includes catalogues and images from each the Royal Academy’s annual summer exhibitions, along with in-depth scholarly profiles. These profiles are authored by over ninety specialists from within the field of British art, including a number of HBA members. A joint effort of the Royal Academy and the Paul Mellon Centre, the RA Chronicle is part of RA250, the year of celebrations and programming surrounding the Academy’s 250th anniversary.
Imogen Hart would like to draw members’ attention to an upcoming conference that she has co-organized, British Art and the Global, to be held September 17–18, 2018, at the University of California, Berkeley. Hart (History of Art Department, UC Berkeley) co-organized this two-day, international conference with David Peters Corbett (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). The keynote speakers are Tim Barringer (Yale University), Dorothy Price (University of Bristol), and Mary Roberts (University of Sydney). The conference program will be posted here later in the summer. HBA members are warmly invited to attend!
HBA First Vice President Keren Hammerschlag has accepted a position as Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University in Canberra and will begin in that position in October 2018.
HBA President Jongwoo Jeremy Kim has been newly appointed as Associate Professor of Critical Studies / Art History & Theory in the School of Art, Carnegie Mellon University.
Deborah Lewittes announces the recent publication of her book, Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint II and the Jewish Contribution to Modern English Architecture. Lewittes explores Lubetkin’s work within the context of wider Jewish emigration to London during the interwar years as well as the anti-Semitism that pervaded Britain during the 1930s. As Lewittes demonstrates, this decade was
anything but quiet. Please see the publisher’s website for more information. Support for this work included an HBA Publication Grant.
HBA Treasurer & Membership Chair Courtney Skipton Long would like to announce her upcoming exhibition, Captive Bodies: British Prisons, 1750-1900, which will be on view at the Yale Center for British Art from 27 August to 25 November 2018. Drawing on objects from across the Center’s collections, this exhibition of captive bodies, and the prisons that confined them, will chart the evolution of debates about incarceration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Heather McPherson, Professor of Art History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the recipient of the 2018 Ireland Prize for Scholarly Distinction, presented annually by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Sarah Meschutt has curated a newly-opened exhibition, Blast from the Past: Artillery in the War of Independence for the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown (Yorktown, VA.) From June 10, 2018, through January 5, 2019, the special exhibition explores a range of topics from innovations in artillery design and technology to the individual roles of an artillery crew. Of particular interest to HBA members are the rarely-seen British historical paintings of arms manufacturing drawn from the art collections of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the Musee de l’Armee at Les Invalides, Paris, and other European private and museum collections.
In September, Laurel O. Peterson will join the Morgan Library & Museum as the Moore Curatorial Fellow in the department of Drawings and Prints. She received her PhD from Yale University in May 2018. Laurel is also the outgoing HBA Student Representative and her service has been much appreciated by all.
Catherine Roach’s Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate and Routledge, 2016), a winner of the HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800, is now available in paperback. If you purchase through the publisher’s website, enter code FLR40 for an additional 20% discount.
Kathleen Stuart, curator of the Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum, announces the gift of 65 paintings from the Berger Collection, the largest gift of European Old Masters since the museum received the Kress Collection in the 1950s. The press release is available here. Additionally, the Berger Collection traveling exhibition, Treasures of British Art 1400–2000: The Berger Collection, opened June 1, 2018, at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NE, where it will run until September 9, 2018. An exhibition celebrating the Berger Collection gift is being planned for 2019 at the Denver Art Museum.
Member News Spotlight: Anne Helmreich Anne Helmreich will be joining the Getty Research Institute as Associate Director for Digital Initiatives. In this newly-created position, Anne will oversee digital art history, the Getty Provenance Index, and the Getty Vocabularies. She will play a leading role in all aspects of digital scholarship and be a member of the senior leadership of the GRI.
Anne is a leading figure in the digital humanities in the United States and is a distinguished art historian and administrator. She is currently the Dean, College of Fine Arts, Texas Christian University, but her return to the Getty is a homecoming, as she was previously Senior Program Officer at the Getty Foundation. Prior to that position, she was Associate Professor of Art History and Director, Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, Case Western Reserve University.
Anne received her B.A. from Dickinson College (History), her M.A. from the University of Pittsburgh (Art History), and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University (Art History). She is a scholar of modern art, specializing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British art and the built environment. Her most recent monograph, investigating the relationship between art and science, is Nature’s Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain (The Penn State University Press, 2016). Her current research focuses on the history of the art market and the productive intersection of the digital humanities and art history. She recently co-edited The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850-1939 (Manchester University Press, 2011), with Pamela Fletcher, and co-authored with Pamela Fletcher, “Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market,” the first article in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide’s “Digital Humanities and Art History” series, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and which won the ARIAH 2015 prize for best online essay. Her scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Clark Library, the Harry Ransom Center, the Huntington, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.
Anne will start her new position at the GRI on August 27.
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HBA Funding Awards & Officers President Jongwoo Jeremy Kim Associate Professor of Art History Hite Art Institute University of Louisville [email protected] First Vice-President Keren Hammerschlag Assistant Teaching Professor and Researcher Department of Art and Art History Georgetown University [email protected] Second Vice-President Emily Talbot Assistant Curator Norton Simon Museum [email protected] Treasurer & Membership Chair Courtney Skipton Long Postdoctoral Research Associate Yale Center for British Art [email protected] Newsletter Editor Caitlin Silberman Collections Cataloger, Bell Museum University of Minnesota [email protected] Travel and Publication Grants Chair Kimberly Rhodes Associate Professor Art History Department Drew University [email protected] Book Prize Chair Morna O’Neill Associate Professor, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century European Art Department of Art Wake Forest University [email protected]
HBA Travel and Publication Grants
Applications due by 1/15/2019
Each year HBA awards two grants: a $600 award to offset publication costs for a book manuscript or peer-reviewed journal article in the field of British art or visual culture that has been accepted for publication, and a $750 travel grant designated for a graduate student member of HBA who will be presenting a paper on British art or visual culture at an academic conference between September 2018 and August 2019. Applicants must be current members of HBA who can demonstrate that an HBA grant will replace their out-of-pocket costs. Applications are not accepted from institutions. For details on how to apply, please consult the HBA website. All applications should be directed to the Grants Committee Chair, Kimberly Rhodes, at [email protected].
Mark Gertler, Summer (poster design for the Empire Marketing Board). Oil on canvas, 1931, Victoria and Albert Museum.
