The recent death of Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022), Britain’s most influential fashion designer of the last fifty years, gives us cause to reflect on the eighteenth-century art and fashion that inspired her designs. Taking a closer look at her collections from the 1990s reveals a deep and abiding love for eighteenth-century…
Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2022). 384 pp.; 157 color + b-w illus. Hardcover $55. (ISBN 9781913107291) Shortly after visiting the Paris Salon…
Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, Raleigh, NC, April 2022-2023. We are all by now aware of the immersive Vincent van Gogh exhibition phenomenon and have perhaps even encountered whispers of its many mysteries: Why do these immersive exhibitions differ so much in their quality? Exactly how many immersive van Gogh exhibition…
Aleksandr Bierig Early modern London was the planet’s first coal-fired city. While the causes and timing of its transition to fossil fuel are still debated, historians have argued that the change was initially triggered in the early seventeenth century, when apparent timber shortages began driving up firewood prices in the…
Stacey Sloboda Perched inside a window box, an artist in a loose smock and a skullcap bends over his unseen work, the head of sculpted putti peering over his shoulder (Fig. 1). The artist’s back is turned to an urban neighborhood dense with brick and plaster terraced buildings, older timber-framed…
Anne Hultzsch Introduction When Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), often referred to as the first female professional journalist writing in German, described Paris to her readers in 1787, she began with accounting for the role women had played in the history of this “Zauberort,” this “magical place”: “The love and…
Richard Wrigley Although the figure of the flâneur—the leisurely, urban male pedestrian observer—is associated with France’s July Monarchy (1830-1848), it was already current throughout the 1820s. Yet it is striking that texts from this decade are unequivocal that the phenomenon had its roots in the Revolution. For Beauregard and Pain…
Sigrid de Jong The eighteenth century saw an urge to draw comparisons between cities, most frequently between the two major European capitals, London and Paris. Their special relationship of rivalry, competition, and emulation found its vibrant expression in Louis Sébastien Mercier’s Parallèle de Paris et de Londres (ca. 1780): London,…
Shilpa Shah and Rosemary Crill, The Shoemaker’s Stitch: Mochi Embroideries of Gujarat in the TAPI Collection (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2022). 220 pages. ISBN 9789391125455. The detailed image of chain-stitch embroidery that wraps around the cover of The Shoemaker’s Stitch hints at the attention to technique and creative process that…
Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). 376 pages, 8 b&w halftones, 12 color images. $64.95. ISBN 978-1-5128-2263-2. This book’s striking cover design cites a costume print produced by…