Jean-Baptiste Pierre LeBrun's life was marked by his intense interest in art, first as an artist, and then from 1770 until his death in 1813, as an art dealer/connoisseur and as a participant in the transformation of the Louvre into a national museum during the French Revolution. He managed to accommodate whichever regime assumed power, from monarchy to republic to empire. He married the artist Elisabeth Vigee in 1776 and together they figured prominently in the pre-revolutionary cultural world of Paris. LeBrun travelled widely, buying art for his gallery and contributing to a number of aristocratic collections. His expertise in attributions of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings was acknowledged internationally, while his reference work on the subject was considered the most comprehensive ever written. LeBrun, the grand-nephew of the illustrious artist Charles LeBrun, became one of the most successful art dealers in Paris. He played an active role in the politics of art between 1789 and 1802, serving as an expert-commissioner in restoration at the national museum. His inventories of artworks, confiscated from all over Europe by Napoleon's armies, have provided a valuable record of the development of the French national museum. In addition, his inventories have been useful in the identification and recovery of Nazi confiscations during World War II. LeBrun's accomplishments during a tumultuous period of political and artistic change present evidence of his contributions to the concept of the modern art museum, notably in the areas of conservation, restoration, and arrangement.

As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.

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.

An introduction to the raucous yet educational 'gap year' tours of Europe taken by wealthy British aristocrats in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For many young eighteenth-century aristocrats, the Grand Tour was an essential rite of passage. Spending many months travelling established routes through France and Italy, they would visit the great cultural sites of western Europe - from Paris, through to Venice, Florence and Rome - ostensibly absorbing art, architecture and culture. Yet all too often, it was a gateway to gambling and debauchery. In this beautifully illustrated guide, Mike Rendell shows how the tour reached its zenith, examining the young tourists' activities and how they acquired 'polish' and an appreciation for fashion, opera and classical antiquity. He also explores their passion for souvenirs and art collecting, and how these items made their way back to grand country houses, which were themselves often modelled to the rules of classical European architecture.

The part religion played in questions of national identity in early modern England is a familiar historical theme, yet little work has been done on how this worked culturally. Nowhere is this more visible than in the seeming contradiction of a militantly Protestant nation such as England, that had a high regard for Catholic art. It is this dichotomy, the tensions between art and anti-Catholicism, that forms the central investigation of this book. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, religious art was closely identified with idolatry, and the use of images was one of the most obvious markers of the boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism. This manifested itself in an unease about the status of the religious image in English society, which was articulated in religious tracts, anti-Catholic propaganda, polemical debate, court cases and numerous other places. In light of these attacks upon 'idolatry', the fact that a great deal of Catholic art was so highly regarded and sought after seems puzzling. By discussing English attitudes towards the works of Italian painters (including Raphael, Michelangelo and Domenichino) and the ways in which native artists sought appropriately Protestant ways of emulating them, this volume offers a fascinating perspective on the dichotomy that existed between English appreciation and disapproval of Catholic culture. By taking this cultural and artistic approach and applying it to the broader historical themes, a new and invigorating way of understanding religion and national identity is offered.

This title was first published in 2002: Draw ing on extensive primary research, Greg Smith describes the shifting cultural identities of the English watercolour, and the English watercolourist, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. His convincing narrative of the conflicts and alliances that marked the history of the medium and its practitioners during this period includes careful detail about the broader artistic context within which watercolours were produced, acquired and discussed. Smith calls into question many of the received assumptions about the history of watercolour painting. His account exposes the unsatisfactory nature of the traditional narrative of watercolour painting's development into a 'high' art form, which has tended to offer a celebratory focus on the innovations and genius of individual practitioners such as Turner and Girtin, rather than detailing the anxieties and aspirations that characterized the ambivalent status of the watercolourist. The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist is published with the assistance of the Paul Mellon Foundation.

Conflicting Visions: War and Visual Culture in Britain and France, c. 1700-1830 offers the first systematic reappraisal of the cultural representation of war in Britain and France during the 'long' eighteenth century. This radical collection of essays explores the relation of visual imagery and aesthetics to conflict during this important period, drawing upon a wealth of materials including paintings and prints, maps and topographical drawings, commemorative sculpture and historical artefacts. The intriguing case studies reveal that military conflict was not a sphere of social activity separated from artistic culture but rather a determining factor in cultural production, and that war itself was largely comprehended, debated and experienced through those products. Key themes and preoccupations - how differing ideas of the public were predicated by the representation of war; how such notions were shaped by the imperial contexts of war; the relations between conflict, national identity and historical memory - are addressed to show that war served as a primary vehicle for the representation of numerous associated and contested issues, including patriotism and the idea of the nation, loyalty and opposition, heroism and masculinity, sympathy and sensibility.

This is an in-depth study of the intellectual, technical, and artistic encounters between Europe and China in the late eighteenth century, focusing on the purposeful acquisition of information and images that characterized a direct engagement with the idea of "China." The central figure in this story is Henri-Leonard Bertin (1720-1792), who served as a minister of state under Louis XV and, briefly, Louis XVI. Both his official position and personal passion for all things Chinese placed him at the center of intersecting networks of like-minded individuals who shared his ideal vision of China as a nation from which France had much to learn. John Finlay examines a fascinating episode in the rich history of cross-cultural exchange between China and Europe in the early modern period, and this book will be an important and timely contribution to a very current discussion about Sino-French cultural relations. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, European and Chinese history.

The history of collecting is a topic of central importance to many academic disciplines, and shows no sign of abating in popularity. As such, scholars will welcome this collection of essays by internationally recognised experts that gathers together for the first time varied and stimulating perspectives on the nineteenth-century collector and art market for French eighteenth-century art, and ultimately the formation of collections that form part of such august institutions as the Louvre and the National Gallery in London. The book is the culmination of a successful conference organised jointly between the Wallace Collection and the Louvre, on the occasion of the acclaimed exhibition Masterpieces from the Louvre: The Collection of Louis La Caze. Exploring themes relating to collectors, critics, markets and museums from France, England and Germany, the volume will appeal to academics and students alike, and become essential reading on any course that deals with the history of collecting, the history of taste and the nineteenth-century craze for the perceived douceur de vivre of eighteenth-century France. It also provides valuable insight into the history of the art markets and the formation of museums.

In the rural plateaux of northern Ethiopia, one can still find scattered ruins of monumental buildings that are evidently alien to the country's ancient architectural tradition. This little-known and rarely studied architectural heritage is a silent witness to a fascinating if equivocal cultural encounter that took place in the 16th-17th centuries between Catholic Europeans and Orthodox Ethiopians. The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art presents a selection of papers derived from the 5th Conference on the History of Ethiopian Art, which for the first time systematically approached this heritage. The book explores the enduring impact of this encounter on the artistic, religious and political life of Ethiopia, an impact that has not been readily acknowledged, not least because the public conversion of the early 17th-century Emperor SusA-nyus to Catholicism resulted in a bloody civil war shrouded in religious intolerance. Bringing together work by key researchers in the field, these studies open up a particularly rich period in the history of Ethiopia and cast new light on the complexities of cultural and religious (mis)encounters between Africa and Europe.

In this new monograph, the latest in Phaidon's Art and Ideas series, Wayne Franits examines the work of Vermeer within the framework of his times, one of the most intellectually creative periods in this history of art. Written in a lively and accessible style, and incorporating the latest scholarship on the artist, Franits provides fresh insights into many of Vermeer's most famous works, uncovering the creative process behind them and their wealth of meanings.

By the end of the eighteenth century a distinctly modern vision of life was emerging. The revolutions in America and France revealed new beliefs about human nature, rights and duties, the natural and material worlds, and a new faith in science, technology and the idea of progress. As people began to change the way they thought about themselves and the world around them, a whole new way of thinking developed, which still has an overwhelming impact two centuries on.
The Enlightenment brings together the work of major Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Diderot and Kant, to illustrate the full importance and achievements of this period in history. Extracts are gathered thematically into sections on such aspects of the Enlightenment as
* political theory
* religion and belief
* art and nature.
All essays are introduced and a final section on 'Critical Reflections' provides a selection of modern critical opinions on the period by writers including Foucault, Habermas, and Lyotard.
Containing illustrations from the work of artists such as Hogarth and Gainsborough, a chronology of the Enlightenment, and a detailed bibliography, The Enlightenment is a rich source of information and inspiration for all those studying this great period of change.

Often understood as primarily moral works, William Hogarth's oeuvre is in truth made up of innumerable interwoven strands of significance. By focusing on Hogarth's four greatest series, 'A Harlot's Progress', 'A Rake's Progress', 'Marriage-a-la Mode', and 'Industry and Idleness', Soulier-Detis tugs at one of the least-studied of these half-hidden threads - Masonic symbolism. Hogarth's many classical and biblical references, whose ambiguity and apparently paradoxical relation with the eighteenth-century situations depicted have often been underlined, gain coherence and unity when they are analysed in the symbolic framework of freemasonry and alchemy Hogarth was busy both using and concealing in his prints. The coded meaning that emerges is often entirely at odds with that on the surface, a dissonance frequently suspected but never conclusively proved by critics. Beneath the author's incisive eye, a veritable secret language of imagery emerges to form a coherent whole, offering an entirely new perspective on so familiar an artist. An original and titillating book for academic and general audiences alike, "Guess at the Rest" fascinates as it explores Hogarth's intricate mythological, biblical and Masonic symbols and the hidden codes they form. Even as she unearths this particular reading of the great painter and engraver, however, Soulier-Detis ultimately reminds us that though we may wish to think we know Hogarth well, his dictum at the end of the caption to The South Sea Scheme will always hold true - "Guess at the Rest you find out more." About the Author: Elisabeth Soulier-Detis has just retired from chair of British Eighteenth-Century Literature at the Paul-Valery University of Montpellier. She was director for France of a research network on eighteenth-century Europe. Her major academic interests are eighteenth-century British novelists (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne), as well as eighteenth-century British art. She also founded 'The European Spectator', a bilingual collection.

From c.1750 to c.1810 the paths of music history and the history of painting converged with lasting consequences. The publication of Newton's Opticks at the start of the eighteenth century gave a 'scientific' basis to the analogy between sight and sound, allowing music and the visual arts to be defined more closely in relation to one another. This was also a period which witnessed the emergence of a larger and increasingly receptive audience for both music and the visual arts - an audience which potentially included all social strata. The development of this growing public and the commercial potential that it signified meant that for the first time it became possible for a contemporary artist to enjoy an international reputation. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the career of Joseph Haydn. Although this phenomenon defies conventional modes of study, the book shows how musical pictorialism became a major creative force in popular culture. Haydn, the most popular living cultural personality of the period, proved to be the key figure in advancing the new relationship. The connections between the composer and his audiences and leading contemporary artists (including Tiepolo, Mengs, Kauffman, Goya, David, Messerschmidt, Loutherbourg, Canova, Copley, Fuseli, Reynolds, Gillray and West) are examined here for the first time. By the early nineteenth century, populism was beginning to be regarded with scepticism and disdain. Mozart was the modern Raphael, Beethoven the modern Michelangelo. Haydn, however, had no clear parallel in the accepted canon of Renaissance art. Yet his recognition that ordinary people had a desire to experience simultaneous aural and visual stimulation was not altogether lost, finding future exponents in Wagner and later still in the cinematic arts.

The unexpected story of an essential 18th and 19th century accessory This fascinating and enlightening study of the tie-on pocket combines materiality and gender to provide new insight into the social history of women's everyday lives-from duchesses and country gentry to prostitutes and washerwomen-and to explore their consumption practices, sociability, mobility, privacy, and identity. A wealth of evidence reveals unexpected facets of the past, bringing women's stories into intimate focus. "What particularly interests Burman and Fennetaux is the way in which women of all classes have historically used these tie-on pockets as a supplementary body part to help them negotiate their way through a world that was not built to suit them."-Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian "A riveting book . . . few stones are left unturned."-Roberta Smith's "Top Art Books of 2019," The New York Times "A brilliant book."-Ulinka Rublack, Times Literary Supplement

The world that shaped Europe's first national sculptor-celebrities, from Schadow to David d'Angers, from Flaxman to Gibson, from Canova to Thorvaldsen, was the city of Rome. Until around 1800, the Holy See effectively served as Europe's cultural capital, and Roman sculptors found themselves at the intersection of the Italian marble trade, Grand Tour expenditure, the cult of the classical male nude, and the Enlightenment republic of letters. Two sets of visitors to Rome, the David circle and the British traveler, have tended to dominate Rome's image as an open artistic hub, while the lively community of sculptors of mixed origins has not been awarded similar attention. Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital, c.1770-1825 is the first study to piece together the labyrinthine sculptors' world of Rome between 1770 and 1825. The volume sheds new light on the links connecting Neo-classicism, sculpture collecting, Enlightenment aesthetics, studio culture, and queer studies. The collection offers ideal introductory reading on sculpture and Rome around 1800, but its combination of provocative perspectives is sure to appeal to a readership interested in understanding a modernized Europe's overwhelmingly transnational desire for Neo-classical, Roman sculpture.

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. This book 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 phenomenon that demands investigation.

Wallpaper's spread across trades, class and gender is charted in this first full-length study of the material's use in Britain during the long eighteenth century. It examines the types of wallpaper that were designed and produced and the interior spaces it occupied, from the country house to the homes of prosperous townsfolk and gentry, showing that wallpaper was hung by Earls and merchants as well as by aristocratic women. Drawing on a wide range of little known examples of interior schemes and surviving wallpapers, together with unpublished evidence from archives including letters and bills, it charts wallpaper's evolution across the century from cheap textile imitation to innovative new decorative material. Wallpaper's growth is considered not in terms of chronology, but rather alongside the categories used by eighteenth-century tradesmen and consumers, from plains to flocks, from China papers to papier mache and from stucco papers to materials for creating print rooms. It ends by assessing the ways in which eighteenth-century wallpaper was used to create historicist interiors in the twentieth century. Including a wide range of illustrations, many in colour, the book will be of interest to historians of material culture and design, scholars of art and architectural history as well as practicing designers and those interested in the historic interior.

From its establishment in 1648 until its disbanding in 1793 after the French Revolution, the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was the centre of the Parisian art world. Taking the reader behind the scenes of this elite bastion of French art theory, education, and practice, this engaging study uncovers the fascinating histories - official and unofficial - of that artistic community. Through an innovative approach to portraits - their values, functions, and lives as objects - this book explores two faces of the Academie. Official portraits grant us insider access to institutional hierarchies, ideologies, rituals, customs, and everyday experiences in the Academie's Louvre apartments. Unofficial portraits in turn reveal hidden histories of artists' personal relationships: family networks, intimate friendships, and bitter rivalries. Drawing on both art-historical and anthropological frames of analysis, this book offers insightful interpretations of portraits read through and against documentary evidence from the archives to create a rich story of people, places, and objects. Theoretically informed, rigorously researched, and historically grounded, this book sheds new light on the inner workings of the Academie. Its discoveries and compelling narrative make an invaluable and accessible contribution to our understanding of this pre-eminent European institution and the social lives of artists in early modern Paris.

This title was first published in 2002: Draw ing on extensive primary research, Greg Smith describes the shifting cultural identities of the English watercolour, and the English watercolourist, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. His convincing narrative of the conflicts and alliances that marked the history of the medium and its practitioners during this period includes careful detail about the broader artistic context within which watercolours were produced, acquired and discussed. Smith calls into question many of the received assumptions about the history of watercolour painting. His account exposes the unsatisfactory nature of the traditional narrative of watercolour painting's development into a 'high' art form, which has tended to offer a celebratory focus on the innovations and genius of individual practitioners such as Turner and Girtin, rather than detailing the anxieties and aspirations that characterized the ambivalent status of the watercolourist. The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist is published with the assistance of the Paul Mellon Foundation.

The most famous 18th-century copper engraver, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) made his name with etchings of ancient Rome. His startling, chiaroscuro images imbued the city's archaeological ruins with drama and romance and became favorite souvenirs for the Grand Tourists who traveled Italy in pursuit of classical culture and education. Today, Piranesi is renowned not just for shaping the European imagination of Rome, but also for his elaborate series of fanciful prisons, Carceri, which have influenced generations of creatives since, from the Surrealists to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Loosely based on contemporary stage sets rather than the actual dingy dungeons of Piranesi's day, these intricate images defy architectural reality to play instead with perspective, lighting, and scale. Staircases exist on two planes simultaneously; vast, vaulted ceilings seem to soar up to the heavens; interior and exterior distinctions collapse. With a low viewpoint and small, fragile figures, the prison scenes become monstrous megacities of incarceration, celebrated to this day as masterworks of existentialist drama.

Animals were everywhere in the early modern period and they impacted, at least in some way, the lives of every kind of early modern person, from the humblest peasant to the greatest prince. Artists made careers based on depicting them. English gentry impoverished themselves spending money on them. Humanists exercised their scholarship writing about them. Pastors saved souls delivering sermons on them. Nobles forged alliances competing with them. Foreigners and indigenes negotiated with one another through trading them. The nexus between animal-human relationships and early modern identity is illuminated in this volume by the latest research of international scholars working on the history of art, literature, and of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, France, England, Spain, and South Africa. Collectively, these essays investigate how animals - horses, dogs, pigs, hogs, fish, cattle, sheep, birds, rhinoceroses, even sea-monsters and other creatures - served people in Europe, England, the Americas, and Africa to defend, contest or transcend the boundaries of early modern identities. Developments in the methodologies employed by scholars to interrogate the past have opened up an intellectual and discursive space for - and a concomitant recognition of - the study of animals as a topic that significantly elucidates past and present histories. Relevant to a considerable array of disciplines, the study of animals also provides a means to surmount traditional disciplinary boundaries through processes of dynamic interchange and cross-fertilization.

This collection brings together art historians, museum professionals, conservators, and conservation scientists whose work involves Rembrandt van Rijn and associated artists such as Gerrit Dou, Jan Lievens, and Ferdinand Bol. The range of subjects considered is wide: from the presentation of convincing evidence that Rembrandt and his contemporary Frans Hals rubbed elbows in the Amsterdam workshop of Hendrick Uylenburgh to critical reassessments of the role of printmaking in Rembrandt's studio, his competition with Lievens as a landscape painter, his reputation as a collector, and much more. Developed from a series of international conferences devoted to charting new directions in Rembrandt research, these essays illuminate the current state of Rembrandt studies and suggest avenues for future inquiry.

Woodland Imagery in Northern Art reconnects us with the woodland scenery that abounds in Western painting, from Albrecht Durer's intense studies of verdant trees, to the works of many other Northern European artists who captured 'the truth of vegetation' in their work. These incidents of remarkable scenery in the visual arts have received little attention in the history of art, until now. Prosperetti brings together a set of essays which are devoted to the poetics of the woodlands in the work of the great masters, including Claude Lorrain, Jan van Eyck, Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, amongst others. Through an examination of aesthetics and eco-poetics, this book draws attention to the idea of lyrical naturalism as a conceptual bridge that unites the power of poetry with the allurement of the natural world. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated throughout, Woodland Imagery in Northern Art strives to stimulate the return of the woodlands to the places where they belong - in people's minds and close to home.

Fully illustrated in colour, here is the first introduction in English to one of Korea's outstanding cultural assets - the banchado ('painting of the order of guests at a royal event') - relating to all those taking part (1800 people) in the eight-day royal procession to Hwaseong (Gyeonggi Province) organized by King Jeongjo in 1795 for the dual purpose of visiting his father's tomb and celebrating his mother's sixtieth birthday. The banchado is a fine example of the meticulous record-keeping of the period (known as uigwe - the subject-matter of this book being known as the Wonhaeng eulmyo jeongni uigwe) and the skills of the court artists at that time. In addition to the banchado illustrations, the Wonhaeng eulmyo jeongni uigwe contains extensive lists of all the participants in the procession, details of the workers and technicians involved, including their duties and wages. It even includes the different foods offered at meal-times, the quantity of ingredients and the costs. The author provides a full analysis of the context, planning, execution and significance of the event.