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      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2018

        The challenge of the sublime

        From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic art

        by Hélène Ibata, Anne Dunan-Page

        This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. This interdisciplinary study addresses researchers in the fields of art history, visual studies and aesthetics alike.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2018

        The challenge of the sublime

        From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic art

        by Hélène Ibata, Anne Dunan-Page

        This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. This interdisciplinary study addresses researchers in the fields of art history, visual studies and aesthetics alike.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2017

        Colouring the Caribbean

        Race and the art of Agostino Brunias

        by Mia L. Bagneris, Amelia Jones

        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2017

        Colouring the Caribbean

        Race and the art of Agostino Brunias

        by Mia L. Bagneris, Amelia Jones

        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        History of art & design styles: c 1600 to c 1800
        October 2014

        Material goods, moving hands

        Perceiving production in England, 1700–1830

        by Kate Smith

        In eighteenth-century Britain, greater numbers of people entered the marketplace and bought objects in ever-greater quantities. As consumers rather than producers, how did their understandings of manufacturing processes and the material world change? Material goods and moving hands combines material culture and visual culture approaches to explore the different ways in which manufacturers and retailers presented production to consumers during the eighteenth century. It shows how new relationships with production processes encouraged consumers, retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers to develop conflicting understandings of production. Objects then were not just markers of fashion and taste, they acted as important conduits through which people living in Georgian Britain could examine and discuss their material world and the processes and knowledge that rendered it.

      • Trusted Partner
        History of art & design styles: c 1600 to c 1800
        July 2014

        Chinoiserie

        Commerce and critical ornament in eighteenth-century Britain

        by Stacey Sloboda

        In a critical reassessment of chinoiserie, a style both praised and derided for its triviality, prettiness and ornamental excesses, Stacey Sloboda argues that chinoiserie was no mute participant in eighteenth-century global consumer culture, but was instead a critical commentator on that culture. Analysing ceramics, wallpaper, furniture, garden architecture and other significant examples of British and Chinese design, this book takes an object-focused approach to studying the cultural phenomenon of the 'Chinese taste' in eighteenth-century Britain. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the critical history of design and the decorative arts in the period, and students and scholars of art history, material culture, eighteenth-century studies and British history will find a novel approach to studying the decorative arts and a forceful argument for their critical capacities.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2013

        The face of the city

        Civic portraiture and civic identity in early modern England

        by Robert Tittler, Peter Lake, Anthony Milton, Jason Peacey, Alexandra Gajda

        Our conventional understanding of English portraiture from the age of Holbein and Henry VIII on to Reubens, VanDyck and Charles I clings to the mainstream images of royalty and aristocracy and to the succession of known practitioners of 'Renaissance' portraiture. In almost every respect, the 'civic' portraits examined here stand in sharp contrast to these traditional narratives. Depicting mayors and aldermen, livery company masters, school and college heads, they were meant to be read as statements about the civic leaders and civic institutions rather than about the sitters in their own right. Displayed in civic premises rather than country homes, exemplifying civic rather than personal virtues, and usually commissioned by institutions rather than their sitters, they have yet to be considered as a type of their own, or in their appropriate social and political context. This fascinating work will appeal to both art historians and historians of early modern Britain. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2017

        Colouring the Caribbean

        Race and the art of Agostino Brunias

        by Mia L. Bagneris, Amelia Jones

        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        August 2011

        Vertiginous Mirrors

        The animation of the visual image and early modern travel

        by Rose Marie San Juan, Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

        In early modern Europe, the visual image began to move, not only as it traveled across great distances but also due to the introduction of innovative visual formats that produced animation within the image itself. This book traces the arduous journeys of visual images through evidence of their use and reproduction along missionary routes from Europe to India, Japan, China, Brazil and Chile. It argues that missionary world travel was crucial to the early modern re-animation of the image through devices such as the reflection of the mirror, the multiple registers of vision of the anthropomorphic image, the imaginative and disorienting possibilities of the utopic image, and even the reconstitution of the sacred image with memories of the relation of travel to life and death. Within the journeys traced in the book, the visual image forged new connections between different locations and across different cultures, accumulating increasingly entangled histories. Even more intriguingly, these images frequently returned to Europe, changed but still recognisable, there to be used again with an awareness of their earlier travels. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2018

        Building reputations

        Architecture and the artisan, 1750–1830

        by Conor Lucey, Bill Sherman

        Taking a cue from a burgeoning revisionist scholarship devoted to early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood building typology - the eighteenth-century brick terraced house - and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, subsequent chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. It is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of architectural design and interior decoration specifically, and of eighteenth-century society and culture generally.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2018

        Building reputations

        Architecture and the artisan, 1750–1830

        by Conor Lucey, Bill Sherman

        Taking a cue from a burgeoning revisionist scholarship devoted to early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood building typology - the eighteenth-century brick terraced house - and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, subsequent chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. It is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of architectural design and interior decoration specifically, and of eighteenth-century society and culture generally.

      • Trusted Partner
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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2018

        Bellies, bowels and entrails in the eighteenth century

        by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, Sophie Vasset, Anne Dunan-Page

        This collection of essays seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment, by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. Moving beyond recent studies of luxury and conspicuous consumption, where dysfunctional bowels have been represented as a symptom of excess, this book seeks to explore other manifestations of the visceral and to explain how the bowels played a crucial part in eighteenth-century emotions and perceptions of the self. The collection offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France, and Germany.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2018

        Building reputations

        Architecture and the artisan, 1750–1830

        by Conor Lucey, Bill Sherman

        Taking a cue from a burgeoning revisionist scholarship devoted to early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood building typology - the eighteenth-century brick terraced house - and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, subsequent chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. It is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of architectural design and interior decoration specifically, and of eighteenth-century society and culture generally.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2019

        Bellies, bowels and entrails in the eighteenth century

        by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, Sophie Vasset, Anne Dunan-Page

        This collection of essays seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment, by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. Moving beyond recent studies of luxury and conspicuous consumption, where dysfunctional bowels have been represented as a symptom of excess, this book seeks to explore other manifestations of the visceral and to explain how the bowels played a crucial part in eighteenth-century emotions and perceptions of the self. The collection offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France, and Germany.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Building reputations

        Architecture and the artisan, 1750–1830

        by Conor Lucey, Bill Sherman

        Taking a cue from revisionist scholarship on early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood building typology - the eighteenth-century brick terraced house - and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of architectural design and interior decoration specifically, and of eighteenth-century society and culture generally.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2020

        Bellies, bowels and entrails in the eighteenth century

        by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, Sophie Vasset, Anne Dunan-Page

        This collection of essays seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment, by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. Moving beyond recent studies of luxury and conspicuous consumption, where dysfunctional bowels have been represented as a symptom of excess, this book seeks to explore other manifestations of the visceral and to explain how the bowels played a crucial part in eighteenth-century emotions and perceptions of the self. The collection offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France and Germany.

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