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…
Editor’s Note: The last of three installments, this intervention by L’nu interdisciplinary artist, poet, and scholar Michelle Sylliboy offers an Indigenous perspective on the ongoing impact of Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie (Paris, 1691) by French missionary Chrestien Le Clerq, which is part of the eighteenth-century colonial archive of Indigenous-settler relations on…
Exhibition: Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 16, 2022 – January 15, 2023. Pictures produce knowledge. The premise is uncontroversial, but the role that visual representation has played in intellectual transformations throughout history is often difficult to pinpoint. Diagrams…
Rosalind Savill, Everyday Rococo: Madame De Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain. 2 vols. Norwich: Unicorn Press, 2021. 1211 pp. $275. ISBN 978-1916495715 Dame Rosalind Savill’s Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour & Sèvres Porcelain is a magnificently produced two-volume study of the early development of the Sèvres Porcelain Factory, from its origins in…
Dani Ezor In 1739, the seventeen-year-old Henriette Julie Gabrielle de Lorraine, daughter of Louis de Lorraine, prince de Lambesc, was sent to Portugal to marry the 55-year-old Jaime de Melo, duc de Cadaval. While the two families were tied by a previous marriage, this union was of paramount importance. The…