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Louis XIV, regency, rococo, neoclassical, empire, art nouveau, and historicist pastiche: furniture styles march across French history as regimes rise and fall. In this extraordinary social history, Leora Auslander explores the changing meaning of furniture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, revealing how the aesthetics of everyday life were as integral to political events as to economic and social transformations. Enriched by Auslander's experience as a cabinetmaker, this work demonstrates how furniture served to represent and even generate its makers' and consumers' identities.
The Last Plague in the Baltic Region, 1709-1713 offers a thorough description and analysis of the terrible plague epidemic that ravaged the Baltic region in the years between 1709 and 1713 ? at the same time when the region was razed by the Great Northern War (1700-?21). Sweden under Carolus XII had lost its supremacy, and Russia under Peter the Great emerged as the new major power in the region. With the marching armies came the plague and its effects, which were particularly devastating, since it hit a population already weakened by famines and desolation caused by the war. Drawing on substantial documentation in city and state archives, the study addresses a range of important discussions...
Rochelle Ziskin explores two remarkable private gatherings generating significant art criticism during the middle of the eighteenth century, assessing how the sites harboring them embodied and disseminated their judgments.
J. Paul Getty had a passion for the exquisitely made furniture and decorative objects of eighteenth-century France, which he began collecting in the 1930s. Gillian Wilson, curator of decorative arts since 1971, has broadened and strengthened the collection, adding Boulle furniture, mounted oriental porcelain, tapestries, clocks, ceramics, and more. In the 1980s and 1990s the Museum continued to enlarge its decorative arts holdings, creating a European sculpture department in 1984 and adding glass, maiolica, goldsmiths’ work, pietre dure, and furniture from Italy and Northern Europe. This book is a revised and expanded edition of Decorative Arts: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue of the Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum (1993). In addition to more than forty recent acquisitions—among these four wall sconces from Versailles that once belonged to Marie Antoinette and an elaborate upholstered bed from the collection of Karl Lagerfeld—it includes the results of years of research. Designed for scholars, students, and devotees of the decorative arts, this volume provides a comprehensive look at the Getty's fine collection.
An insightful look at how East Asian notions of space transformed Western painting. This volume offers the first critical account of how European imports of East Asian textiles, porcelain, and lacquers, along with newly published descriptions of the Chinese garden, inspired a revolution in the role of painting in early modern Europe. With particular focus on French interiors, Isabelle Tillerot reveals how a European enthusiasm for East Asian culture and a demand for novelty transformed the dynamic between painting and decor. Models of space, landscape, and horizon, as shown in Chinese and Japanese objects and their ornamentation, disrupted prevailing design concepts in Europe. With paintings no longer functioning as pictorial windows, they began to be viewed as discrete images displayed on a wall—and with that, their status changed from decorative device to autonomous work of art. This study presents a detailed history of this transformation, revealing how an aesthetic free from the constraints of symmetry and geometrized order upended paradigms of display, enabling European painting to come into its own.
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Between 1750 and his death in 1781, the Marquis de Marigny?brother of Madame de Pompadour, courtier to Louis XV, and one of eighteenth-century France's important patrons of art and architecture?amassed a collection that was broad in scope, progressive in taste, and exceptional in quality and provenance. This book offers a transcription of the exhaustive inventory of Marigny's estate together with an essay in which Alden R. Gordon not only sketches Marigny's life and times but also re-creates the interiors and grounds where the paintings, statues, books, household goods, and other property listed in the inventory were displayed and used. Also included are plans of Marigny's last four residences; lists of heirs, paintings, and auction sales; transcriptions of shipping manifests and sales catalogs; indexes; and a glossary.
This volume includes concise, illustrated entries on the more than 450 examples of furniture, porcelain, and silver from the Museum's collection. New to this expanded edition are sections devoted to maiolica and glass. An index of previous owners and updated bibliographies are of particular help to the scholar.
A further volume in this series, this year discussing not so much food or its preparation as its portrayal in any number of art forms such as popular music, crime novels, film, theatre, literature, and fine art. There are also some papers which concentrate on the art of food, or art relating to food: an instance is the art of tissue-paper orange wrappers (a recondite but riveting item). My impression, when this subject was first mooted, was that all contributions would revolve around paintings and high arts. I was mistaken, there is a remarkable spread: the arrangement of 18th-century desserts; cookery and the Cuban Santeria religion; drink in 19th-century English fiction; food in film noir; the cook as artist in 18th-century England; architectural food design in France and Italy; popcorn poetry; food and eating in Bronte novels; and much more. These volumes are sometimes indigestible fricassees if swallowed at once, but think of them as platters of oysters - each may contain a pearl. By the finish a bracelet at least, perhaps a necklace, is the consequence.