Through both longer essays and shorter case studies, this book examines the relationship of European women from various countries and backgrounds to collecting, in order to explore the social practices and material and visual cultures of collecting in eighteenth-century Europe. It recovers their lives and examines their interests, their methodologies, and their collections and objects-some of which have rarely been studied before. The book also considers women's role as producers, that is, creators of objects that were collected. Detailed examination of the artefacts-both visually, and in relation to their historical contexts-exposes new ways of thinking about collecting in relation to the arts and sciences in eighteenth-century Europe. The book is interdisciplinary in its makeup and brings together scholars from a wide range of fields. It will be of interest to those working in art history, material and visual culture, history of collecting, history of science, literary studies, women's studies, gender studies, and art conservation.

One of Britain’s most important and influential painters, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 size=1 color=black>–1792) is justly celebrated for his dynamic portraiture, his poignant ‘fancy pictures’, his ambitious history paintings and his role as the first President of Britain’s Royal Academy. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London (12 March size=1 color=black>–7 June 2015), and the result of the four-year research project, this catalogue focuses on Reynolds's innovative, often highly experimental approaches to the practice and materials of painting. It investigates his radical manipulation of pigments, oils, glazes and varnishes, and traces his experiments with colour, tone and handling. It reveals his continual temptation to rework and revise his pictures, illuminates his highly creative responses to the new exhibition culture of his day and explores his continual adaptations of the art of the Old Masters. In doing so, it encourages us to look at the work of this famous eighteenth-century British artist in a new and often surprising light. Technical analysis of some of Reynolds's most important paintings will be revelatory, and close-up photography and detailed examination of a range of pictures size=1 color=black>– at the centre of which are the Wallace Collection’s own outstanding collection of works by the artist size=1 color=black>– will shed light on the fascinating and ongoing process of experimentation that spanned Reynolds’s entire career. The book situates Reynolds’s practice of experimentation, of both technique and of subject, in relation to that conducted at leading societies of science and learning at the time, and specifically to Josiah Wedgwood, one of Enlightenment Britain’s greatest experimentalists in the arts. Finally, it demonstrates how Reynolds’s innovations as a painter were often the product of collaboration size=1 color=black>– in part, with his assistants and his students, but, more importantly, with his patrons and subjects, with whom he continually explored the possibilities of gesture, expression, performance and role-play.

A desire for intimacy in domestic spaces - motivated by a growing sense of individualistic expression, an incentive to conceal the labor or enslavement taking place, and an appetite for solace and comfort - led to interiors taking on more specific roles in the eighteenth century. By examining the architectural, visual, and material culture of eighteenth-century spaces, Intimate Interiors foregrounds the interrelated concepts of intimacy, privacy, informality, and sociability in order to show how these ideas played an increasingly integral role in the period's architectural and material design. Across eleven innovative chapters that explore issues of gender, politics, travel, exoticism, imperialism, sensorial experiences, identity, interiority, and modernity, this volume demonstrates how intimacy was a fundamental goal in the planning of private quarters. In doing so, the political nature of private spaces is uncovered, whilst highlighting the contradictions and complexities of these highly performative "private" interiors. Employing distinct methodological perspectives across various geographical sites, from Turkey to Versailles, Britain to Benin, Intimate Interiors draws as-yet untraced connections between Enlightenment Europe, imperial outposts, and major metropolitan centers across the globe.

This title was first published in 2000: In their stunning simplicity, George Romney's portraits of eighteenth-century gentry and their children are among the most widely recognised creations of his age. A rival to Reynolds and Gainsborough, Romney was born in 1734 on the edge of the Lake District, the landscape of which never ceased to influence his eye for composition and colour. He moved in 1762 to London where there was an insatiable market for portraits of the landed gentry to fill the elegant picture galleries of their country houses. Romney's sitters included William Beckford and Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton. An influential figure, one of the founding fathers of neo-classicism and a harbinger of romanticism, Romney yearned to develop his talents as a history painter. Countless drawings bear witness to ambitious projects on elemental themes which were rarely executed on canvas. Richly illustrated, this is the first biography of Romney to explore the full diversity of his oeuvre.

First published in 1977. The purpose of this study is to locate the sources for the American style of painting characterised by measure and design - the representation of the specific and familiar according to principles of pictorial order. The reader shall see that there were a variety of conventions available to the artist and that his selection of one or another of them depended upon pragmatic, philosophical, and aesthetic considerations.

Even during the artist's lifetime, contemporary art lovers considered Rembrandt van Rijn to be an exceptional artist. In this revelatory sequel to the acclaimed Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, renowned Rembrandt authority Ernst van de Wetering investigates precisely why the artist, from a very early age, was praised by prominent connoisseurs. He argues that Rembrandt, from his very first endeavors in painting, embarked on a journey past all the foundations of the art of painting that, according to (up until now misinterpreted) contemporary written sources, were considered essential in the seventeenth century. Rembrandt never stopped searching for solutions to the pictorial problems that confronted him; this led over time to radical changes in course that can't simply be attributed to stylistic evolution or natural development. In a quest as rigorous and novel as the artist's, van de Wetering reveals how Rembrandt became the best painter the world had ever seen. Gorgeously illustrated throughout, this groundbreaking exploration reconstructs Rembrandt's closely guarded theories and methods, shedding new light both on the artist's exceptional accomplishments and on the practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age. Published in association with Amsterdam University Press.

Over the course of the long 18th century, many of England’s grandest country houses became known for displaying noteworthy architecture and design, large collections of sculptures and paintings, and expansive landscape gardens and parks. Although these houses continued to function as residences and spaces of elite retreat, they had powerful public identities. Increasingly accessible to tourists, and extensively described by travel writers, they began to be celebrated as sites of great importance to national culture. Touring and Publicizing England's Country Houses in the Long Eighteenth Century examines how these identities emerged, repositioning the importance of country houses in 18th-century Britain and exploring what it took to turn them into tourist attractions. Drawing on travel books, guidebooks, and dozens of tourists’ diaries and letters, it explores what it meant to tour country houses such as Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth, Wilton, Kedleston and Burghley in the tumultuous 1700s. It also questions the legacies of these early tourists: both as a critical cultural practice in the 18th century, and an extraordinary and controversial influence in British culture today, country-house tourism is a topic of rich debate for students, scholars and patrons of the heritage sector.

The northern Italian artist Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767) was born in Milan and active in Brescia and Bergamo. For his distinctive, large-scale paintings of low income tradespeople and individuals experiencing homelessness, whom he portrayed with dignity and sympathy, Ceruti came to be known as Il Pitocchetto (the little beggar). Accompanying the first US exhibition to focus solely on Ceruti, this publication explores relationships between art, patronage, and economic inequality in early modern Europe, considering why these paintings were commissioned and by whom, where such works were exhibited, and what they signified to contemporary audiences. Essays and a generous plate section contextualize and closely examine Ceruti’s pictures of laborers and the unhoused, whom he presented as protagonists with distinct stories rather than as generic types. Topics include depictions of marginalized subjects in the history of early modern European art, the career of the artist and his significance in the history of European painting, and the period discourses around poverty and social support. A detailed exhibition checklist, complete with provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, provides information critical for the further understanding of Ceruti’s oeuvre.

This innovative study reappraises the Edwardian Baroque movement in British architecture, placing it in its wider cultural, political, and imperial contexts The Edwardian Baroque was the closest British architecture ever came to achieving an "imperial" style. With the aim of articulating British global power and prestige, it adorned civic and commercial structures both in Britain and in the wider British world, especially in the "white settler" Dominions of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. Evoking the contemporary and emotive idea of "Greater Britain," this new book by distinguished historian G. A. Bremner represents a major, groundbreaking study of this intriguing architectural movement in Britain and its empire. It explores the Edwardian Baroque's significance as a response to the growing tide of anxiety over Britain's place in the world, its widely perceived geopolitical decline, and its need to bolster confidence in the face of the Great Power rivalries of the period. Cross-disciplinary in nature, it combines architectural, political, and imperial history and theory, providing a more nuanced and intellectually wide-ranging understanding of the Edwardian Baroque movement from a material culture perspective, including its foundation in notions of race and gender. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Examining the literary career of the eighteenth-century Irish painter James Barry, 1741-1806 through an interdisciplinary methodology, The Writings of James Barry and the Genre of History Painting, 1775-1809 is the first full-length study of the artist's writings. Liam Lenihan critically assesses the artist's own aesthetic philosophy about painting and printmaking, and reveals the extent to which Barry wrestles with the significant stylistic transformations of the pre-eminent artistic genre of his age: history painting. Lenihan's book delves into the connections between Barry's writings and art, and the cultural and political issues that dominated the public sphere in London during the American and French Revolutions. Barry's writings are read within the context of the political and aesthetic thought of his distinguished friends and contemporaries, such as Edmund Burke, his first patron; Joshua Reynolds, his sometime friend and rival; Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, with whom he was later friends; and his students and adversaries, William Blake and Henry Fuseli. Ultimately, Lenihan's interdisciplinary reading shows the extent to which Barry's faith in the classical tradition in general, and the genre of history painting in particular, is permeated by the hermeneutics of suspicion. This study explores and contextualizes Barry's attempt to rethink and remake the preeminent art form of his era.

This book explores the cultural exchange between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth century, examining Spanish collectors' predilection for Italian painting and its influence on Spanish painters. Focused on collecting and using a novel methodology, this volume studies how the painters of the Sevillian school, including Francisco Pacheco, Diego Velazquez, Alonso Cano and Bartolome Esteban Murillo, perceived and were influenced by Italian painting. Through many examples, it is shown how the presence in Andalusia of various works and copies of works by artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Guido Reni inspired famous compositions by these Spanish artists. In addition, the book delves into the historical, political and social context of this period. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, and Italian and Spanish history.

A brand-new perspective on early modern art and its relationship with nature as reflected in this moving account of overlooked artistic genius Adam Elsheimer, by an outstanding writer and critic. Seventeenth-century Europe swirled with conjectures and debates over what was real and what constituted 'nature', currents that would soon gather force to form modern science. Natural Light deliberates on the era’s uncertainties, as distilled in the work of painter Adam Elsheimer – a short-lived, tragic German artist who has always been something of a cult secret. Elsheimer’s diminutive, intense and mysterious narrative compositions related figures to landscape in new ways, projecting unfamiliar visions of space at a time when Caravaggio was polarizing audiences with his radical altarpieces and circles of ‘natural philosophers’ – early modern scientists – were starting to turn to the new ‘world system’ of Galileo. Julian Bell transports us to the spirited Rome of the 1600s, where Elsheimer and other young Northern immigrants – notably his friend Peter Paul Rubens – swapped pictorial and poetic reference points. Focusing on some of Elsheimer's most haunting compositions, Bell drives at the anxieties that underlie them – a puzzling over existential questions that still have relevance today. Traditional themes for imagery are expressed with fresh urgency, most of all in Elsheimer's final painting, a vision of the night sky of unprecedented poetic power that was completed at a time of ferment in astronomy. Circulated through prints, Elsheimer’s pictorial inventions affected imaginations as disparate as Rembrandt, Lorrain and Poussin. They even reached artists in Mughal India, whose equally impassioned miniatures expand our sense of what 'nature' might be. As we home in on artworks of microscopic finesse, the whole of the 17th-century globe and its perplexities starts to open out around us.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have had a lasting impact upon the intellectual landscape of the post-classical world. As well as provoking historical debate and reflection, they have proved an enduring yardstick by which succeeding generations have measured the architectural and cultural accomplishments of their own eras. Focusing particularly upon the Renaissance and Baroque periods, this book looks at how the Wonders of the World were represented in art, architecture and sculpture, and the ways that European courts could evoke them as a useful image of power. Within this artistic culture, special attention is paid to the recreations and constructions generated between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in the sphere of ephemeral art, especially those linked to court celebrations in the principal European states. This approach provides a framework to analyse and evaluate the claims of other European Renaissance and Baroque architecture to Wonder status, an approach bolstered by the use of the Palace of El Escorial as a case study of a modern 'Eighth Wonder'.

Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the Noli me tangere) and that of Christ's post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed, over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry, and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings, sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief. Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the period.

First published in 1953, Artemisia is a classic of 20th century Italian literature. From its first publication in 1953, Artemisia, a novel about Artemisia Gentileschi, an iconic 17th century painter, by Anna Banti, a brilliant Italian art historian, established itself as a feminist masterpiece. Like Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Artemisia is a book about the process of artistic creation. Much in Gentileschi's life marked her out as a victim - rape at the age of 18, a forced marriage to a man she did not love and, a powerful, patriarchal father, Orazio Gentileschi, who failed to value her artistic genius. But Gentileschi did not accept the status of victim, in the years between 1610 and 1650, she produced over 50 paintings that have established her as one of the great painters of all time. She gave up everything - "all tenderness, all claim to feminine virtues" to dedicate herself solely to painting. Sacrifices that Anna Banti, herself an artist, fully understands and captures in this amazing novel.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of the Italian Baroque, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial, violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Though famed for his dramatic use of color, light, and shadow, it was above all Caravaggio's boundary-breaking naturalism which scorched his name into the annals of art history. From the dirtied soles of feet to the sexualized languor of bare flesh, the artist allowed even sacred and biblical scenes to unfold with a startling, often visceral humanity. This vivid pictorial world was accompanied by an equally intense personal biography, scored by gambling, debts, drunken brawls, and even a murder charge. This book brings together more than 50 of Caravaggio's most famous and revolutionary works to explore how and why this artist is now considered the most important painter of the early Baroque period and one of the defining influences of art history, without whom Ribera, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet could never have painted the way they did. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

In recent years, art historians have begun to delve into the patronage, production and reception of sculptures-sculptors' workshop practices; practical, aesthetic, and esoteric considerations of material and materiality; and the meanings associated with materials and the makers of sculptures. This volume brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to investigate how sculptors in early modern Italy confronted such challenges as procurement of materials, their costs, shipping and transportation issues, and technical problems of materials, along with the meanings of the usage, hierarchies of materials, and processes of material acquisition and production. Contributors also explore the implications of these facets in terms of the intended and perceived meaning(s) for the viewer, patron, and/or artist. A highlight of the collection is the epilogue, an interview with a contemporary artist of large-scale stone sculpture, which reveals the similar challenges sculptors still encounter today as they procure, manufacture and transport their works.

Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History is a significant contribution to the fields of theory, Darwin studies, and cultural history. This collection of eight essays is the first volume to address, from the point of view of art and literary historians, Darwin's intersections with aesthetic theories and cultural histories from the eighteenth century to the present day. Among the philosophers of art influenced by Darwinian evolution and considered in this collection are Alois Riegl, Ruskin, and Aby Warburg. This stimulating collection ranges in content from essays on the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory on Darwin and nineteenth-century debates circulating around beauty to the study of evolutionary models in contemporary art.

Searing disputes over caricature have recently sparked flames across the world"the culmination, not the beginning, of the story of one of modernity's definitive artistic practices. Modern visual satire erupts during a period marked by reform and revolution, by cohering nationalisms and expanding empires, and by the emerging discipline of art history. This has long been recognized as its Golden Age. It is time to look anew. In The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759-1838, an international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational team of scholars reconfigures the geography of modern visual satire, as the expansive narrative reaches from North America to Europe, to China and the Ottoman Empire. Caricature's specific visual cultures are also laid bare, its iconographic means and material support, as well as the diverse milieu of its making"the military, the art academy, diplomacy, politics, art criticism, and popular entertainment. Some of its greatest practitioners"James Gillray and Honore Daumier"are seen in a new light, alongside some of their far flung and opportunistic pastichers. Most trenchantly, assumptions about the consequences of caricature's rise come under intense scrutiny, interrogated for its cherished and long-vaunted civilizational claims on individual character, artistic supremacy, political liberty, and global domination.

Despite the tremendous number of studies produced annually in the field of Dutch art over the last 30 years or so, and the strong contemporary market for works by Dutch masters of the period as well as the public's ongoing fascination with some of its most beloved painters, until now there has been no comprehensive study assessing the state of research in the field. As the first study of its kind, this book is a useful resource for scholars and advanced students of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and also serves as a springboard for further research. Its 19 chapters, divided into three sections and written by a team of internationally renowned art historians, address a wide variety of topics, ranging from those that might be considered "traditional" to others that have only drawn scholarly attention comparatively recently.

Peter Paul Rubens was one of the most productive and exciting painters of his time, noted for his expressive, emotive and sensual paintings which are now instantly recognizable. Indeed, his voluptuous female figures have given rise to the word 'Rubenesque'. This book explores the life and times of Rubens, from his early studies in Italy through to his apprenticeship in Antwerp and his subsequent outstanding accomplishments as 'the prince of painters and the painter of princes'. It also contains a gallery of 300 of his paintings and drawings, revealing his unparalleled position as an artist, diplomat, scholar, linguist, teacher, art collector and devoted family man.

During the second half of the eighteenth century British architecture moved away from the dominant school of classicism in favour of a more creative freedom of expression. At the forefront of this change were architect brothers Robert and James Adam. Kondo's work places them within the context of eighteenth-century intellectual thought.

Portraits of Queen Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768) were highly visible in eighteenth-century France. Appearing in royal chateaux and, after 1737, in the Parisian Salons, the queen's image was central to the visual construction of the monarchy. Her earliest portraits negotiated aspects of her ethnic difference, French gender norms, and royal rank to craft an image of an appropriate consort to the king. Later portraits by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Carle Van Loo, and Jean-Marc Nattier contributed to changing notions of queenship over the course of her 43 year tenure. Whether as royal wife, devout consort, or devoted mother, Marie Leszczinska's image mattered. While she has often been seen as a weak consort, this study argues that queenly images were powerful and even necessary for Louis XV's projection of authority. This is the first study dedicated to analyzing the queen's portraits. It engages feminist theory while setting the queen's image in the context of portraiture in France, courtly factional conflict, and the history of the French monarchy. While this investigation is historically specific, it raises the larger problem of the power of women's images versus the empowerment of women, a challenge that continues to plague the representation of political women today.

This book focuses on key monuments of the Baroque style, which varies in different European contexts. It is intended to affirm the existence of individual genius, identifiable styles of art, and historical periods that produced them.

First published in 1951 Arnold Hauser's commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age through to the Film Age. Exploring the interaction between art and society, Hauser effectively details social and historical movements and sketches the frameworks in which visual art is produced. This new edition provides an excellent introduction to the work of Arnold Hauser. In his general introduction to The Social History of Art, Jonathan Harris asseses the importance of the work for contemporary art history and visual culture. In addition, an introduction to each volume provides a synopsis of Hauser's narrative and serves as a critical guide to the text, identifying major themes, trends and arguments.