Culture does not become 'culture' until it is consumed. This is the radical new interpretation of early modern social history presented in The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800.
Leading specialists from North America and Europe explore topics such as the formation of a culture consuming public, the development of a literary canon, the role of consumption in the formation of the modern state, elite and popular forms of cultural consumption and the place of women as consumers of culture. The result is an important and rich new approach to the study of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Culture does not become 'culture' until it is consumed. This is the radical new interpretation of early modern social history presented in The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800. Leading specialists from North America and Europe explore topics such as the formation of a culture consuming public, the development of a literary canon, the role of consumption in the formation of the modern state, elite and popular forms of cultural consumption and the place of women as consumers of culture. The result is an important and rich new approach to the study of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Over the past century, The Huntington has collected more than 12,000 drawings and watercolors by British artists from the late 16th to mid-20th century. Excursions of Imagination showcases 100 stunning works on paper from this "hidden museum", many of them never published before. This generously illustrated volume features landscape and figurative subjects by the acknowledged masters of the medium-J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Girtin, John Constable, and Henry Fuseli-as well as artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement and such modernists as David Bomberg and Paul Nash. An introduction by curator Melinda McCurdy discusses the formation of The Huntington's British drawings collection. An essay by Ann Bermingham, a historian of British art, places The Huntington's collection within the context of the historical practice of drawing in Britain.

Mum goes out for the day and Dad is left in charge of twins Katie and Ted. That means anything could happen. Tuffy the dog tries to keep order. Katie and Ted play at dressing up. This is OK until they decide they need to go into Mum and Dad's room. Tuffy knows something BAD is about to happen. But what can he do? Then disaster strikes when they lose Mum's best necklace...

Despite this famous protestation in a letter to his friend William Jackson, Gainsborough was clearly prepared to make an exception when it came to making portraits of his own family and himself. This book, and the major exhibition it accompanies, features a dozen portraits of his daughters Mary and Margaret, the same number of himself and his wife Margaret (though, perhaps tellingly, only one of the couple together), as well as works depicting four of his five siblings, his handsome nephew Gainsborough Dupont (who became his studio assistant) , an aunt and uncle, several in - laws and - last, but not least - his beloved dogs, Tristram and Fox. Spanning more than four decades, Gainsborough's family portraits chart the period from the mid - 1740s, when he plied his trade in his native Suffolk , through his time in Bath ( 1758 - 74 ), when he established hi mself with a rich and fashionable clientele , to his most successful latter years at his luxuriously appointed studio in London's We st End. Alongside this story of a provincial 18th - century artist's rise to fame and fortune runs a more private narrative, ab out the role of portraiture in the promotion of family values, at a time when these were assuming a recogni s ably modern form. In the first of three introductory essays, David H. Solkin writes on Gainsborough himself, placing his family portraits in the context of earlier practice - including that of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and British portraitists from Mary Beale to Joseph Highmore . Ann Bermingham explores Gainsborough's portraits of his daughters, with particular reference to two finished double portraits painted seven years apart and the tragic story arising from them. Susan Sloman discusses Margaret's role as her husband's business manager, its effect on the family dynamic and hence the visual representation of its members.

Business leader and arts patron Sir Edwin A. G. Manton (1909-2005) and his wife Florence, Lady Manton, assembled an outstanding collection of 18th- and 19th-century British art. A gift to the Clark Art Institute from the Manton Foundation in 2007, their collection features more than three hundred oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, including works by John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, and William Blake. In a series of wide-ranging essays, prominent scholars consider the major works and themes in the collection, relating them to larger issues within the field of British studies. Individual essays are devoted to Constable's oil sketches, cloud studies, and magisterial painting The Wheat Field; the growth of the watercolor tradition; print portfolios and narrative series; Thomas Rowlandson's satiric drawings; and Gainsborough's use of experimental materials as revealed through recent scientific analysis. The volume concludes with an illustrated checklist of the works in the collection. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

The chapters constituting this book are different in subject and method, striking testimony to the range of Paulson's interests and the versatility of his critical powers. In his prolific career he has produced extensive analysis of art, poetry, fiction, and aesthetics produced in England between 1650 and 1830. Paulson's unique contribution has to do with his understanding of "seeing" and "reading" as closely related enterprises, and "popular" forms in art and literature as intimately connected-connections illustrated by literary critics and art historians here. Every essay shares some of the concerns and methods that characterize Paulson's wonderfully idiosyncratic thought-except for the final essay, an attempt systematically to analyze Paulson's critical principles and methods. Recurrent themes are a concern with satire in the eighteenth century; a connection between verbal and visual reading; an insistence on the importance of individual artistic choices to the history of culture; an attention to the aims and motives of individual makers of art; and a sensitivity to the crucial links between high and low art. This volume offers rich explorations of a range of subjects: Swift's relationship to Congreve; Zoffany's condemnation of Gillray and Hogarth, and broader implications for the role of art in public discourse; the presentation of mourning in the work of the Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh; G. M. Woodward's "Coffee-House Characters," representing a turn from satire on morals towards satire on manners; Adam Smith's evolving aesthetic program; Samuel Richardson's notions of social reading. The discussions represent a variety of exemplifications of the Paulsonesque, showing a concern with satiric representation in mixed media, with different forms of heterodoxy and iconoclasm, and with the values of producers of popular and polite culture in this period.