This lively and erudite cultural history of Scotland, from the Jacobite defeat of 1745 to the death of an icon, Sir Walter Scott, in 1832, examines how Scottish identity was experienced and represented in novel ways. Weaving together previously unpublished archival materials, visual and material culture, dress and textile history, Viccy Coltman re-evaluates the standard cliches and essentialist interpretations which still inhibit Scottish cultural history during this period of British and imperial expansion. The book incorporates familiar landmarks in Scottish history, such as the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in August 1822, with microhistories of individuals, including George Steuart, a London-based architect, and the East India Company servant, Claud Alexander. It thus highlights recurrent themes within a range of historical disciplines, and by confronting the broader questions of Scotland's relations with the rest of the British state it makes a necessary contribution to contemporary concerns.

Master Carver Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) is famous for his breathtakingly delicate, intricate and realistic carvings, both in wood and stone. Tantalising cascades of fruit and flowers, puffy-cheeked cherubs, crowds of figures and flourishes of architecture are all trademark features of his energetic, animated carvings that grace stately homes, palaces, churches and colleges across the country. His work can be found in some of Britain's most beloved buildings, including St Paul's Cathedral and Hampton Court Palace. From his early work in the Low Countries to his 'discovery' by the diarist John Evelyn in London, and his appointment as the king's Master Carver, this book celebrates Grinling Gibbons' unequalled talent, his visionary genius, and his ability to transform humble pieces of wood into some of the most exquisite artworks of his day.

Published to coincide with the exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, this fascinating book will re-introduce Joseph Highmore (1692-1780), an artist of status and substance in his day, who is now largely unknown. It takes as its focus Highmore's small oil painting known as The Angel of Mercy (1746, Yale), one of the most shocking and controversial images in 18th-century British art. The painting depicts a woman in fashionable mid-18th-century dress strangling the infant lying on her lap. A cloaked, barefooted fi gure cowers to the right as an angel intervenes, pointing towards the Foundling Hospital, the recently built refuge for abandoned infants, in the distance. The image attempts to address one of the most disturbing aspects of the Foundling Hospital story - certainly a subject that many (now as then) would consider beyond depiction. But if any artist of the period had attempted such a subject it would surely be William Hogarth, not the portrait painter Joseph Highmore? In fact, the painting was attributed to Hogarth for almost two centuries, until its reattribution in the 1990s. Even so, it is surprising that despite the wealth of scholarship associated with Hogarth and the `modern moral subject' of the 1730s and 1740s, The Angel of Mercy has received little attention until now. The book (and exhibition) seeks to address this, while encouraging greater interest in, and appreciation for, this signifi cant British artist. Highmore expert, Jacqueline Riding, will set this extraordinary painting within the context of the artist's life and work, as well as broader historical and artistic contexts. This will include exploration of superb examples of Highmore's portraiture, such as his complex, monumental group portrait The Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee and the exquisite small-scale `conversations' The Vigor Family and The Artist and his Family, juxtaposed with analysis of key subject paintings, including the Foundling Museum's Hagar and Ishmael and Highmore's `Pamela' series, inspired by Samuel Richardson's bestselling novel. Collectively they tackle relevant and highly contentious issues around the status and care of women and children, master/servant relations, motherhood, abuse, abandonment, infant death and murder.

First published in 2000, this is an examination of the collection of art works through an anthropological study of modes of exchange and the social roles of material culture. Focusing on the figure of Sebastiano Resta, Genevieve Warwick brings to light a shadowy, yet crucial chapter in the history of collecting, that of the great migration of art objects out of Italy to northern Europe in the early eighteenth century. Her study pins the history of collecting to broader changes in European economic history and analyzes the epistemological frameworks for viewing that accompanied this transfer of artistic wealth. Warwick also demonstrates how early modern art collecting was shaped by the social mores of elite 'arts of love'.

Published to mark the reopening of the spectacular baroque interior of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich after a landmark conservation project, The Painted Hall is a wonderful celebration of what has been called `the Sistine Chapel of the UK'. The ceiling and wall decorations of the Painted Hall were conceived and executed by the artist Sir James Thornhill between 1707 and 1726 - years that witnessed the Act of Union during the reign of Queen Anne and Great Britain's rise to become a dominant Protestant power in a predominantly Catholic Europe. The accessions to the throne of William III and Mary II in 1688 and George I in 1714 form the central narrative of a scheme that also honours Britain's maritime successes and mercantile prosperity. The artist drew on a cast of around 200 figures - a mixture of historical, contemporary, allegorical and mythological characters - to tell a story of political change, scientific and cultural achievements, naval endeavours, and commercial enterprise against a series of magnificent backdrops. In the first part of the book, Dr Anya Lucas describes the history and architecture of the building and the background to Thornhill's commission. The grandeur of his composition, which covers 40,000 square feet, reflects the importance of the space that the paintings adorn: the hall of the new Royal Hospital for Seamen. The Hospital was established in 1694 at Queen Mary's instigation for men invalided out of the Navy, and was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. The Painted Hall was originally intended as a grand dining room, but it soon became a ceremonial space open to paying visitors and reserved for special functions. The last naval pensioners left the site in 1869, when it became home to the Royal Naval College, an officers' training academy. The passage of nineteen years from the start of the commission to its completion, and the need to navigate contemporary political events, meant that Thornhill was required to rethink the design of his paintings several times. His preparatory sketches for the Painted Hall reveal how carefully he experimented with and planned the content. When he had finished his work, Thornhill wrote An Explanation of the paintings, which was published by the Hospital directors and sold to visitors. This guide is the subject of the second part of our book, by Dr Richard Johns. Johns also explores image and meaning in Thornhill's decorative scheme, which stretches across three distinct but connected spaces: the domed Vestibule, the long Lower Hall, and the Upper Hall, together presenting a vivid and compelling picture of Britain's place in the world according to those who governed it at the start of the 18th century. During the last 300 years, smoke and dirt built up on the fragile painted surfaces of the Hall, and varnish layers fractured under the effects of heat and humidity. In the final part of the book, the specialist conservators Sophie Stewart and Stephen Paine consider historic restorations of the Painted Hall from the 18th century to the Ministry of Works campaign of the late 1950s. The spring of 2019 sees the completion of a ground-breaking conservation programme that has reversed decades of decay and ensured the long-term preservation of the paintings. Now that every inch of decorated surface has been lovingly cleaned and conserved, new photography brings the colour, clarity and vibrancy of Thornhill's masterpiece to life.

The first comprehensive study of William Ince and John Mayhew's famous eighteenth-century cabinetmaking partnership, complemented by high-quality photographs of their work. The partnership of William Ince (1737-1804) and John Mayhew (1736-1811) ran from 1758 to 1804, and was one of the most enduring and well-connected collaborations in Georgian London's tight-knit cabinetmaking community. The partners' clientele was probably larger, and their work was arguably more influential over a longer period, than most other leading metropolitan makers - perhaps even than that of their older contemporary, the celebrated Thomas Chippendale. Despite their considerable output and an impressive tally of clients and commissions, much of Ince and Mayhew's work has remained unidentified until recent times. The authors' substantial research in private family archives, county record offices and bank archives has allowed them to uncover much new evidence about the business and its influence within cabinetmaking circles. In Industry and Ingenuity, the results of these new investigations are presented alongside an impressive selection of more than 500 colourful, vibrant photographs of Ince and Mayhew's works, many previously unpublished, which together emphasise the partnership's proper position in the pantheon of great eighteenth-century cabinetmakers.

Inspired by the recent identification of a third autograph version of Gainsborough's masterpiece The Cottage Door, this book examines the significance of the multiple versions of designs that the artist produced during the 1780s. It demonstrates that without the pressure of exhibiting his work annually at the Academy and without a string of sitters waiting for their finished portraits, Gainsborough's work became more personal, more thoughtful. This study of the last phase of the artist's work is a totally fresh interpretation of not only The Cottage Door but other key works such as Mrs Sheridan and Diana and Acteon. Gainsborough's creative energies changed around 1780. He became restless and wanted to promote his landscape painting more effectively. He started to paint coastal scenes using an innovative painting technique to depict the water and he embarked on a series of`fancy' pictures that he would position him as a descendant of an Old Master tradition. He was never happy with the constraints of the Royal Academy and he was at odds with the dictatorial opinions promoted by its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Removing himself from the Academy enabled him finally to do what he wanted. He began to turn to portrait compositions that he had developed and refined over a number of years. With subtle alterations they could be made suitable for a variety of sitters. The subtlety of his skilled observation was less easy to accommodate in standard-sized full-length canvases and in these portraits he sometimes resorted to rhetoric gesture that fought against the closely observed likenesses in his best portraits. The margin between`fancy' pictures and portraits became blurred and the categorization of some of these paintings changed while they were on the easel. Always finding composition difficult, rather than begin something new he often revisited earlier designs that had pleased him. He would paint them again and make slight changes of tone and emphasis that would radically change the concept and intention of the design. The subject matter in some of his late paintings veers towards the autobiographical and shows a certain rift between him and his family.

The popularity of the comic performers of late-Georgian and Regency England and their frequent depiction in portraits, caricatures and prints is beyond dispute, yet until now little has been written on the subject. In this unique study Jim Davis considers the representation of English low comic actors, such as Joseph Munden, John Liston, Charles Mathews and John Emery, in the visual arts of the period, the ways in which such representations became part of the visual culture of their time, and the impact of visual representation and art theory on prose descriptions of comic actors. Davis reveals how many of the actors discussed also exhibited or collected paintings and used painterly techniques to evoke the world around them. Drawing particularly on the influence of Hogarth and Wilkie, he goes on to examine portraiture as critique and what the actors themselves represented in terms of notions of national and regional identity.

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.

The volume examines the mutually constitutive relationship between the materiality of objects and their aesthetic meanings. Its approach connects material culture with art history, curation, technologies and practices of making. A central dimension of the case studies collected here is the mobility of objects between Europe and China and the transformations that unfold as a result of their transcultural lives. Many of the objects studied here are relatively unknown or understudied. The stories they recount suggest new ways of thinking about space, cultural geographies and the complex and often contradictory association of power and culture. These studies of transcultural objects can suggest pathways for museum experts by uncovering the multi-layered identities and temporalities of objects that can no longer be labelled as located in single regions. It is also addressed to students of art history, of European and Chinese studies and scholars of consumer culture. " This eagerly awaited volume offers deep and extensive insights into the fast-growing field of material culture studies. Its fresh approach to Eurasian objects and materialities will serve as useful reading for all scholars interested in transcultural and global studies. A very helpful introductory essay. " Sabine du Crest, University of Bordeaux Montaigne, Former Fellow, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

By the early 17th century the Scientific Revolution was well under way. Philosophers and scientists were throwing off the yoke of ancient authority to peer at nature and the cosmos through microscopes and telescopes. In October 1632, in the small town of Delft in the Dutch Republic, two geniuses were born who would bring about a seismic shift in the idea of what it meant to see the world. One was Johannes Vermeer, whose experiments with lenses and a camera obscura taught him how we see under different conditions of light and helped him create the most luminous works of art ever beheld. The other was Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, whose work with microscopes revealed a previously unimagined realm of minuscule creatures. By intertwining the biographies of these two men, Laura Snyder tells the story of a historical moment in both art and science that revolutionized how we see the world today.

Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.

The authors in this illustrated volume explore how art historical and technical examination of 15th-18th century European paintings conducted in tandem not only address key subjects such as meaning, materials, and manufacturing techniques, but also allow fresh perspectives on the prevailing workshop practices of copying, replicating, and emulating paintings.

Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias's intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of colour - so called 'Red' and 'Black' Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race - made for colonial officials and plantocratic elites during the late-eighteenth century. Although Brunias's paintings have often been understood as straightforward documents of visual ethnography that functioned as field guides for reading race, this book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. The book offers provocative new insights about Brunias's work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. -- .

Originally published in 1929, this book contains an edited collection of the letters of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. The letters included cover the period between October 1740 and November 1791, and Hilles includes an appendix at the back of letters that he was not able to include in the collection. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the life of one of Britain's most famous painters.

This monograph examines the most prestigious political paintings created in Britain during the High Baroque age. It investigates a period characterized by numerous social, political, and religious crises, in the years between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy (1660) and the death of the first British monarch from the House of Hanover (1727). On the basis of hitherto unpublished documents, the book elucidates the creation and reception of nine major commissions that involved the court, private aristocratic patrons, and/or civic institutions. The ground-breaking new interpretations of these works focus on strategies of conflict resolution, the creation of shared cultural memories, processes of cultural translation, the performative context of the murals and the interaction of painted images and architectural spaces.

Originally published in 1945, this book contains a comprehensive list of the portraits executed by engraver Jean Morin. Morin's subjects included such celebrated figures as the French kings Henri II and IV, as well as Cardinal Richelieu, and Hornibrook and Petitjean note the various states of the engraving plates, as well as a note on the watermarks on the paper that Morin used. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the works of this little-known artist.

Hans Holbein the Younger's life is discovered through his artworks, his family, his patrons and the people who met him. Born into a family of talented artists, Holbein learnt to be a draughtsman, a painter, a portraitist, and a designer for woodcuts. What could not be taught was his remarkable skill as a portrait painter. From an Augsburg workshop as a youth, he would achieve high status as Painter to the King at the English court of Henry VIII. Holbein had a talent to engage with his clients, proven by repeated commissions. He could capture a moment in time, from Erasmus sitting in his study in Basel, to rich Hanseatic merchants seated in their London offices. His gift as a painter was grounded in a sound knowledge of pigments, practical costings and time required to complete a work. In his lifetime he created a unique portfolio of ground-breaking art, predominantly in portraiture. This glorious and comprehensive volume is both a biography and gallery of his work

While the connected, international character of today's art economy is well known, the 18th century too had global systems of artistic production and consumption. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to create a global map of the art world of the 18th century. Fourteen case studies from distinguished experts explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the 18th century. Capturing the full material diversity of 18th-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of 18th-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on a global art map. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for studies in global art history.

Originally published in 1940, this book charts the origins and evolution of academies of art from the sixteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Pevsner expertly explains the political, religious and mercantile forces affecting the education of artists in various countries in Western Europe, and the growing 'academisation' of artistic training that he saw is his own day. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the various historical schools of art instruction and the history of art more generally.

In this book, Caroline van Eck examines how rhetoric and the arts interacted in early modern Europe. She argues that rhetoric, though originally developed for persuasive speech, has always used the visual as an important means of persuasion, and hence offers a number of strategies and concepts for visual persuasion as well. The book is divided into three major sections - theory, invention, and design. Van Eck analyzes how rhetoric informed artistic practice, theory, and perception in early modern Europe. This is the first full-length study to look at the issue of visual persuasion in both architecture and the visual arts, and to investigate what roles rhetoric played in visual persuasion, both from the perspective of artists and that of viewers.

Synonymous with finely crafted wood engravings of the natural world, Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) perfected an instantly recognisable style which was to influence book illustration well into the nineteenth century. Begun in November 1822, at the behest of his daughter Jane, and completed in 1828, Bewick's autobiography was first published in 1862. The opening chapters recall vividly his early life on Tyneside, his interest in the natural world, his passion for drawing, and his apprenticeship with engraver Ralph Beilby in Newcastle, where he would learn his trade and then work in fruitful partnership for twenty years. Later passages in the work reveal Bewick's strongly held views on religion, politics and nature. The work also features illustrations for a proposed work on British fish. Bewick's General History of Quadrupeds (1790) and History of British Birds (1797-1804), the works which secured his high reputation, are also reissued in this series.

Bringing together more than 100 items of clothing, this book reveals the intricacies of Japanese dress from the 18th century to the present. Including garments for women, men and children, the details have been selected both for their exquisite beauty and craftsmanship, and for how much they impart about the wearer's identity, be it age, status or taste. A comprehensive introduction, illuminating the main periods and key themes of Japanese fashion history, is followed by thematic chapters that cover all aspects of clothing, from hair accessories and necklines to hemlines and shoes. Each garment or object is accompanied by a short text exploring its structure and the fascinating range of decorative techniques employed, including embroidery, weaving, lacquering, stencilling, dyeing and digital technology. Specially commissioned detail photography and line drawings provide an invaluable resource for Japanophiles, students, collectors, designers and lovers of fashion and world dress.

First published in 1909, this illustrated study considers the work of the artist and satirist William Hogarth (1697-1764), focusing on his depiction of London and its inhabitants. A devoted Londoner, Hogarth won great acclaim in his lifetime for the wit displayed in his many paintings and engravings. His work explored the many facets of London life, from the highest to the lowest social classes, from scenes of politics and business to churches, hospitals and prisons. Bibliographer, editor and prolific author, Henry Benjamin Wheatley (1838-1917) places Hogarth's work in the context of the artist's background and early life. Wheatley's attention to detail complements the selected examples of Hogarth's work, providing a portrait of eighteenth-century manners as seen through the eyes of one of the most acute observers of the age. Several of Wheatley's other works, including London Past and Present (1891), are also reissued in this series.