ONE OF THE TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES' BEST BOOKS FOR 2022 'Eye-opening and full of surprises . . . A treasure' Sunday Times 'A biography as rich with colourful characters as any novel' Telegraph John Constable, the revolutionary nineteenth-century painter of the landscapes and skies of southern England, is Britain's best-loved but perhaps least understood artist. His paintings reflect visions of landscape that shocked and perplexed his contemporaries: attentive to detail, spontaneous in gesture, brave in their use of colour. What we learn from his landscapes is that Constable had sharp local knowledge of Suffolk, a clarity of expression of the skyscapes above Hampstead, an understanding of the human tides in London and Brighton, and a rare ability in his late paintings of Salisbury Cathedral to transform silent suppressed passion into paint. Yet Constable was also an active and energetic correspondent. His letters and diaries - there are over one thousand letters from and to him - reveal a man of passion, opinion and discord, while his character and personality is concealed behind the high shimmering colour of his paintings. They reveal too the lives and circumstances of his brothers and his sisters, his cousins and his aunts, who serve to define the social and economic landscape against which he can be most clearly seen. These multifaceted reflections draw a sharp picture of the person, as well as the painter. James Hamilton's biography reveals a complex, troubled man, and explodes previous mythologies about this timeless artist, and establishes him in his proper context as a giant of European art.

Known as the master of French Romanticism for his energetic paintings, Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was also a consummate draftsman. This handsome book, one of the few to explore this topic in depth, provides new insight into Delacroix's drawing practice, paying particular attention to his materials and techniques and the ways in which the artist pushed the boundaries of the medium. The remarkable group of nearly 130 drawings featured here, many of which have been rarely seen, include academic and anatomical studies, sketches from nature, and preparatory drawings related to many of Delacroix's most renowned canvases, among them The Massacre at Chios and Liberty Leading the People.

The image of Eugene Delacroix as an august artist with an august oeuvre was initially frozen into place by posthumous tributes and it has continued to the present. He was one of the finest yet least understood painters of the nineteenth century, the golden age of the French Romantic movement. He is remembered best for his masterpiece, La Liberte guidant le people, but few of his works have received the kind of constant, fascinated revisiting that has sealed the iconic status of Theodore Gericault's Le Radeau de la Meduse, for example. This book is one of the first to look carefully at individual paintings by Delacroix, especially at one of his most important works - a key but often overlooked painting from early Romanticism's heyday, Scene des massacres de Scio.

'A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday We think we know the Romantic countryside: that series of picturesque landscapes familiar from paintings, poems and music that are still part of Britain's idea of itself today. But for the Romantics themselves, the countryside was a place where radical change was underway both within and around them. 'Romanticism isn't a cultural artefact; it's a way for thought to move,' writes highly acclaimed biographer and poet Fiona Sampson in this transporting and vividly evocative book, in which she spends a year walking in the Romantics' footsteps, from Kent to Kintyre. Setting out across ten landscapes, as the Romantics once did as they wrote, travelled, settled, or tried to define the rural environment, Fiona Sampson walks not with a sense of nostalgic cliche, but radically alive to interaction between the human and the natural world. So how were poets, writers, artists and philosophers of the time shaped by their natural environment? And how can we return to the vividness with which they experienced it? Starlight Wood is part group biography, part cultural history, and part an essay about place. In it, we find Percy Bysshe Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning using diet as a symbol of radicalism, and John Constable revealing the emptiness of the post-Enclosure British countryside; while the young William Wordsworth follows the ideal of radical sensibility into the heart of Revolutionary France, and the biggest military structure in Britain since Hadrian's Wall is engineered on Romney Marsh to keep Napoleon at bay. Moving intuitively between art, politics, agriculture, science and philosophy, and punctuated by the author's personal reflections - most movingly on the death during the pandemic of her artist father, whose line-and-wash drawings act as gateways through which we embark on each walk - Starlight Wood brilliantly examines the importance of the countryside in shaping Romantic attitudes, and offers a gripping insight into the lives of some of the most influential figures of the age.

Featuring works by Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein and Robert Longo, Proof offers insight into the singularity of vision through which artists can reflect the social, cultural and political complexities of their times. Spanning eras and continents, each of these artists witnessed the turbulent transition from one century to another, experiencing the seismic impacts of revolution, civil rights movements and war. While Goya served church and king, Eisenstein the state, and Longo emerged during the rise of the contemporary art market--the dominant benefactors of each period--they all rose to prominence through developing nuanced practices that challenged expectations. With commissioned essays by journalist, activist and author Chris Hedges, artist Vadim Zakharov and Garage Chief Curator Kate Fowle, plus an interview with Longo, this book is published to accompany the exhibition of the same name.

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." Edgar Degas Covering every era and over 650 artists, this comprehensive, illustrated guide offers an accessible yet expansive view of art history, featuring everything from iconic works and lesser-known gems to techniques and themes. Offering a comprehensive overview of Western artists, themes, paintings, techniques, and stories, Art: A Visual History is packed full of large, full-colour images of iconic works and lesser-known gems. Exploring every era, from 30,000BCE to the present, it includes features on the major schools and movements, as well as close-up critical appraisals of 22 masterpieces - from Botticelli's Primavera to J. M. W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire. With detailed referencing, crisp reproductions and a fresh design, this beautiful book is a must-have for anyone with an interest in art history - from first-time gallery goers to knowledgeable art enthusiasts. What makes great art? Discover the answer now, with Art: A Visual History.

Gregory Dart expands upon existing notions of Cockneys and the 'Cockney School' in the late Romantic period by exploring some of the broader ramifications of the phenomenon in art and periodical literature. He argues that the term was not confined to discussion of the Leigh Hunt circle, but was fast becoming a way of gesturing towards everything in modern metropolitan life that seemed discrepant and disturbing. Covering the ground between Romanticism and Victorianism, Dart presents Cockneyism as a powerful critical currency in this period, which helps provide a link between the works of Leigh Hunt and Keats in the 1810s and the early works of Charles Dickens in the 1830s. Through an examination of literary history, art history, urban history and social history, this book identifies the early nineteenth-century figure of the Cockney as the true ancestor of modernity.

"Damaged Romanticism" features 15 internationally recognised contemporary artists whose work, in painting, sculpture, installations, and photography based media, belongs neither to a style nor a traditional 'school', but is thematically linked by a visual representation of how stubborn optimism, rather than utopianism, triumphs in the face of daily adversity. In her opening essay "Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion", Terrie Sultan offers an overview of the concept behind the exhibition and explains how the chosen works give form to contradictory sentiments of disillusionment, and defiance.David Pagel, in Romanticism's Aftermath, considers the role of Romanticism and Neoclassicism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how 'damaged romanticism' is a reinterpretation of this. The links between art and film are further explored by Colin Gardner in the third essay, From here to eternity. Preceding the main catalogue is a short story by Nick Flynn, a crystal formed entirely of holes, a new work of fiction written especially for this exhibition.

In "The Roots of Romanticism," one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures are a bravura intellectual performance. Isaiah Berlin surveys the many attempts to define romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how it still permeates our outlook. He ranges over a cast of some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, the Schlegels, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. The ideas and attitudes of these and other figures, Berlin argues, helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art.

This new edition, illustrated for the first time, also features a new foreword by philosopher John Gray, in which he discusses Berlin's belief that the influence of romanticism has been unpredictable and contradictory in the extreme, fuelling anti-liberal political movements but also reinvigorating liberalism; a revised text; and a new appendix that includes some of Berlin's correspondence about the lectures and the reactions to them.

Philosophy, art, literature, music, and politics were all transformed in the turbulent period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Communist Manifesto of 1848. This was the age of the 'Romantic revolution', when modern attitudes to political and artistic freedom were born. When we think of Romanticism, flamboyant figures such as Byron or Shelley instantly spring to mind, but what about Napoleon or Hegel, Turner or Blake, Wagner or Marx? How was it that Romanticism could give birth to passionate individualism and chauvinistic nationalism at the same time? How did it prefigure the totalitarian movements of the 20th century? Duncan Heath and Judy Boreham answer these questions and provide a unique overview of the many interlocking strands of Romanticism, focusing on the leading figures in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and America.

A comprehensive presentation of the important collection of Barbizon School painting at the National Gallery, London The significant collection of 19th-century French paintings at the National Gallery, London, includes many important works by artists associated with the Barbizon School. In addition to paintings by Courbet, Millet, and Rousseau, there are over twenty works by Corot, including the monumental Italian Woman, or Woman with Yellow Sleeve (L'Italienne) recently acquired from the estate of Lucian Freud. Works by Corot range from an early oil study made in Italy to late studio landscapes. This meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated volume contains entries that examine all aspects of the paintings, from subject and stylistic significance to physical condition and conservation history. Setting the individual works within a broader context, essays explore the impact of plein-air practice; examine the relationship of the Barbizon School to the academic landscape painters and the Impressionists; and trace the history of the passionate collecting of these pictures in Britain well into the 20th century. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press

Scottish and Irish Romanticism is the first single-author book to address the main non-English Romanticisms of the British Isles. Murray Pittock begins by questioning the terms of his chosen title as he searches for a definition of Romanticism and for the meaning of "national literature." He proposes certain determining "triggers" for the recognition of the presence of a national literature, and also deals with two major problems which are holding back the development of a new and broader understanding of British Isles Romanticisms: the survival of outdated assumptions in ostensibly more modern paradigms, and a lack of understanding of the full range of dialogues and relationships across the literatures of these islands. The theorists whose works chiefly inform the book are Bakhtin, Fanon and Habermas, although they do not define its arguments, and an alertness to the ways in which other literary theories inform each other is present throughout the book.
Pittock examines in turn the historiography, prejudices, and assumptions of Romantic criticism to date, and how our unexamined prejudices still stand in the way of our understanding of individual traditions and the dialogues between them. He then considers Allan Ramsay's role in song-collecting, hybridizing high cultural genres with broadside forms, creating in synthetic Scots a "language really used by men," and promoting a domestic public sphere. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the Scottish and Irish public spheres in the later eighteenth century, together with the struggle for control over national pasts, and the development of the cults of Romance, the Picturesque and Sentiment: Macpherson, Thomson, Owenson and Moore are among thewriters discussed. Chapter 5 explores the work of Robert Fergusson and his contemporaries in both Scotland and Ireland, examining questions of literary hybridity across not only national but also linguistic borders, while Chapter 6 provides a brief literary history of Burns' descent into critical neglect combined with a revaluation of his poetry in the light of the general argument of the book. Chapter 7 analyzes the complexities of the linguistic and cultural politics of the national tale in Ireland through the work of Maria Edgeworth, while the following chapter considers of Scott in relation to the national tale, Enlightenment historiography, and the European nationalities question. Chapter 9 looks at the importance of the Gothic in Scottish and Irish Romanticism, particularly in the work of James Hogg and Charles Maturin, while Chapter 10, "Fratriotism," explores a new concept in the manner in which Scottish and Irish literary, political and military figures of the period related to Empire.

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and concretely embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical 'likenesses' connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Human reason and the principle of rationality realized objectively in Nature were both regarded as finite effects of God's seminal Word. Although Coleridge intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a 'mirror' of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were 'mirrors' of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own skeptical doubts.
Coleridge and Scepticism examines the nature of these skeptical doubts, as well as offering a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. Ben Brice situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first, a tradition of epistemological 'piety' or 'modesty', informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second, a tradition of theological voluntarism, emphasizes the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. Brice argues that Coleridge's detailed familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions, ultimately served to undermine hisconfidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature.

Nicholas Capaldi's biography of John Stuart Mill traces the ways in which Mill's many endeavors are related and explores the significance of his contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of education. Capaldi shows how Mill was groomed for his life by both his father James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the two most prominent philosophical radicals of the early 19th century. Mill, however, revolted against this education and developed friendships with both Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who introduced him to Romanticism and political conservatism. A special feature of this biography is the attention devoted to Mill's relationship with Harriet Taylor. No one exerted a greater influence than the woman he was eventually to marry. Capaldi reveals just how deep her impact was on Mill's thinking about the emancipation of women. Nicholas Capaldi was until recently the McFarlin Endowed Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa. He is the founder and former Director of Legal Studies. His principal research and teaching interest is in public policy and its intersection with political science, philosophy, law, religion, and economics. He is the author of six books, including The Art of Description (Prometheus, 1987) and How to Win Every Argument (MJF Books, 1999), over fifty articles, and editor of six anthologies. He is a recent recipient of the Templeton Foundation Freedom Project Award.

A radical, lively departure from received notions about art of the Romantic period For many, the term "neoclassicism" has come to imply discipline, order, restraint, and a certain myopia. Leaving the term behind, this book radically challenges enduring assumptions about the art produced from the late 18th century to the early Victorian period, casting new light on appropriations of the classical body by British artists. It is the first to foreground the intersections of gender, race, and class in discussions of British visual classicism, laying bare artists' alternately politicizing and emphatically sensual engagements with Greco-Roman art. Rather than rely exclusively on subsequent scholarship, the book takes up the poet John Keats (1795-1821) as a theoretical framework. Eschewing the "Golden Age" narrative, which sees J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) as the pinnacle of the period's artistic achievement, the book examines overlooked artists, such as Henry Howard (1769-1847) and John Graham Lough (1798-1876). The result is a fresh account of underappreciated works of British painting and sculpture.

Like his Renaissance predecessors Raphael, Michelangelo and Dürer, the young Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) was considered to be a boy genius. This survey of Lawrence’s first twenty-five years tells the story of an exceptional artist growing up at the end of the century when Britain created its own unique artistic voice. The book accompanied a major exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath and includes previously unpublished works as well as some of Lawrence’s most brilliant masterpieces. Lawrence first came to public attention when he was cited in a scientific paper on ‘early genius in children’; shortly afterwards his family moved to Bath where the eleven-year-old was kept busy making likenesses of the spa town’s fashionable visitors. By 1790, his spectacular portraits were the most applauded works in the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition, which opened days before his twenty-first birthday. This book considers the young artist’s self-image as a prodigy, the impact of Bath’s rich cultural life on his formation, the rapid development of his painting technique following his move to London, and his use of celebrity, print media and the Royal Academy to grow his reputation. Particular attention is given to Lawrence’s perceptive depictions of old age and bold celebrations of youthful energy. His portraits from this time present a fascinating glimpse of British high society at the turn of a memorable century: they include celebrities such as the Duchess of Devonshire, Emma Hamilton and actresses Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Farren, as well as political leaders, members of the Bluestocking circle and the Royal Family.

In 1865, the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church and his wife, Isabel, traveled to Jamaica on a sojourn of recovery after the tragic deaths of their two young children Herbert and Emma. A time to mourn and escape from the constant reminders found at their home, Olana, the Churches' trip to Jamaica also provided ample inspiration for Frederic.

The Olana Collection includes eight oil sketches, an ink drawing, and a pencil drawing Church made in Jamaica. Five of these oil sketches on paper Church chose to mount to canvas and frame for his and Isabel's enjoyment; over the years they have hung in different rooms at Olana. From these works, and others held by the Cooper-Hewitt, Church created two major studio oils, The Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867 (the Wadsworth Atheneum) and The After Glow, 1867 (the Olana Collection). Within Church's oeuvre the studies of Jamaican sunsets, mountains, and foliage are particularly lovely. Church wrote of Jamaica: "The scenery is superb. . . . I have accomplished a great amount of work but there is so much to do that I am at a loss to decide day by day what to paint."

The 2010 exhibit at Olana will help explain Church's working process by showing Sunset Jamaica and the resulting studio work The After Glow together; it will include five works never before exhibited and reveal Church's interesting use of his photography collection both as an aide-memoire and as substrate for sketching. Fern Hunting among Picturesque Mountains includes forty-eight color illustrations, as well as essays by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser (on Church's Jamaica work) and Katherine Manthorne (about Church's friends and fellow artists who also traveled to Jamaica to paint)."

A comprehensive review of art in the first truly modern century A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art contains contributions from an international panel of noted experts to offer a broad overview of both national and transnational developments, as well as new and innovative investigations of individual art works, artists, and issues. The text puts to rest the skewed perception of nineteenth-century art as primarily Paris-centric by including major developments beyond the French borders. The contributors present a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the art world during this first modern century. In addition to highlighting particular national identities of artists, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art also puts the focus on other aspects of identity including individual, ethnic, gender, and religious. The text explores a wealth of relevant topics such as: the challenges the artists faced; how artists learned their craft and how they met clients; the circumstances that affected artist's choices and the opportunities they encountered; and where the public and critics experienced art. This important text: Offers a comprehensive review of nineteenth-century art that covers the most pressing issues and significant artists of the era Covers a wealth of important topics such as: ethnic and gender identity, certain general trends in the nineteenth century, an overview of the art market during the period, and much more Presents novel and valuable insights into familiar works and their artists Written for students of art history and those studying the history of the nineteenth century, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art offers a comprehensive review of the first modern era art with contributions from noted experts in the field.

A compelling and persuasive account of how the Romantic Movement permanently changed the way we see things and express ourselves. Three great revolutions rocked the world around 1800. The first two - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution - have inspired the greatest volume of literature. But the third - the romantic revolution - was perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching. From Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Burns, to Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz, Rossini and Liszt, to Goya, Turner, Delacroix and Blake, the romantics brought about nothing less than a revolution when they tore up the artistic rule book of the old regime. This was the period in which art acquired its modern meaning; for the first time the creator, rather than the created, took centre-stage. Artists became the high priests of a new religion, and as the concert hall and gallery came to take the place of the church, the public found a new subject worthy of veneration in paintings, poetry and music. Tim Blanning's sparkling, wide-ranging survey traces the roots and evolution of a cultural revolution whose reverberations continue to be felt today.

This revelatory book traces how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their close associates put scientific principles into practice across their painting, poetry, sculpture, and architecture. In their manifesto, The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelites committed themselves to creating a new kind of art modeled on science, in which precise observation could lead to discoveries about nature and humanity. In Oxford and London, Victorian scientists and Pre-Raphaelite artists worked together to design and decorate natural history museums as temples to God's creation. At the same time, journals like Nature and the Fortnightly Review combined natural science with Pre-Raphaelite art theory and poetry to find meaning and coherence within a worldview turned upside down by Darwin's theory of evolution. Offering reinterpretations of well-known works by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and William Morris, this major revaluation of the popular Victorian movement also considers less-familiar artists who were no less central to the Pre-Raphaelite project. These include William Michael Rossetti, Walter Deverell, James Collinson, John and Rosa Brett, John Lucas Tupper, and the O'Shea brothers, along with the architects Benjamin Woodward and Alfred Waterhouse. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

An original and breathtakingly beautiful perspective on how art developed through the ages, this book reveals how new materials and techniques inspired artists to create their greatest works. The Story of Painting will completely transform your understanding and enjoyment of art. Covering a comprehensive array of topics, from the first pigments and frescos to linear perspective in Renaissance paintings, the influence of photography, Impressionism, and the birth of modern art, it follows each step in the evolution of painting over the last 25,000 years, from the first cave paintings to the abstract works of the last 100 years. Packed with lavish colour reproductions of paintings and photographs of artists at work and the materials they used, it delves into the key paintings from each period to analyse the techniques and secrets of the great masters in detail. Immerse yourself in the pages of this stunning book and find yourself dazzled by new colours; marvel at the magic of perspective; wonder at glowing depictions of fabric and flesh; understand cubism; and embrace abstraction. You will look at paintings in a whole new light.

Smell loomed large in cultural discourse in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the midcentury fear of miasma, the drive for sanitation reform, and the rise in artificial perfumery. Meanwhile, the science of olfaction remained largely mysterious, prompting an impulse to “see smell� and inspiring some artists to picture scent in order to better know and control it. This book recovers the substantive role of the olfactory in Pre-Raphaelite art and Aestheticism. Christina Bradstreet examines the iconography and symbolism of scent in nineteenth-century art and visual culture. Fragrant imagery in the work of John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, George Frederic Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, and others set the trend for the preoccupation with scent that informed swaths of British, European, and American art and design. Bradstreet’s rich analyses of paintings, perfume posters, and other works of visual culture demonstrate how artworks mirrored the “period nose� and intersected with the most clamorous debates of the day, including evolution, civilization, race, urban morality, mental health, faith, and the “woman question.� Beautifully illustrated and grounded in current practices in sensory history, Scented Visions presents both fresh readings of major works of art and a deeper understanding of the cultural history of nineteenth-century scent.

Dazzling works on paper from a vast and celebrated collection The Harvard Art Museums house one of the most significant collections of works on paper in North America. Among its many strengths are sheets by draftsmen of the French School, including notable masters such as Simon Vouet, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Following an introductory essay that charts the formation of this group of drawings, this catalogue provides thorough entries on more than 100 outstanding examples from the 16th to 18th century that encompass a range of genres and motifs—from landscapes and figure studies to historical and mythological scenes—many of which were produced for major commissions or mark key moments in the development of style and taste in early modern France. Alvin L. Clark Jr. marshals his decades-long engagement with these works, pairing a discerning eye with perceptive readings that deepen our understanding of the drawings and their makers. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums

Framed by tensions between figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations, Animating the Antique explores enthralling episodes in a history of artistic and aesthetic encounters. Moving across varied locations-among them Rome, Florence, Naples, London, Dresden, and Paris-Sarah Betzer explores a history that has yet to be written: that of the Janus-faced nature of interactions with the antique by which sculptures and beholders alike were caught between the promise of animation and the threat of mortification. Examining the traces of affective and transformative sculptural encounters, the book takes off from the decades marked by the archaeological, art-historical, and art-philosophical developments of the mid-eighteenth century and culminantes in fin de siecle anthropological, psychological, and empathic frameworks. It turns on two fundamental and interconnected arguments: that an eighteenth-century ontology of ancient sculpture continued to inform encounters with the antique well into the nineteenth century, and that by attending to the enduring power of this model, we can newly appreciate the distinctively modern terms of antique sculpture's allure. As Betzer shows, these eighteenth-century developments had far-reaching ramifications for the making and beholding of modern art, the articulations of art theory, the writing of art history, and a significantly queer Nachleben of the antique. Bold and wide-ranging, Animating the Antique sheds light upon the work of myriad artists, in addition to that of writers ranging from Goethe and Winckelmann to Hegel, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee. It will be especially welcomed by scholars and students working in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art history, art writing, and art historiography.

This book addresses the unique and profound indeterminacy of “Creole,� a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century. "Creole� implies that the geography of one’s birth determines identity in ways that supersede race, language, nation, and social status. Paradoxically, the very capaciousness of the term engendered a perpetual search for visual signs of racial difference as well as a pretense to blindness about the intermingling of races in Creole society. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby reconstructs the search for visual signs of racial difference among people whose genealogies were often repressed. She explores French representations of Creole subjects and representations by Creole artists in France, the Caribbean, and the Americas. To do justice to the complexity of Creole identity, Grigsby interrogates the myriad ways in which people defined themselves in relation to others. With close attention to the differences between Afro-Creole and Euro-Creole cultures and persons, Grigsby examines figures such as Théodore Chassériau, Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, Alexandre Dumas père, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, the models Joseph and Laure, Josephine Bonaparte, Jeanne Duval, and Adah Isaacs Menken. Based on extensive archival research, Creole is an original and important examination of colonial identity. This essential study will be welcomed by specialists in nineteenth-century art history, French cultural history, the history of race, and transatlantic history more generally.