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This lavishly illustrated book establishes the towering influence of the scientist Victor Regnault (1810-1878) in the earliest decades of photography, a period of experimentation ripe with artistic, commercial, and scientific possibility. Regnault has a double significance to the early history of photography, as the first leader of the Société Française de Photographie (S.F.P.) and as the maker of more than two hundred calotype (paper negative) portraits and landscapes. His photographic and scientific careers intersected a third field with his appointment in 1852 as director of the Sèvres porcelain works. Readers are treated to Regnault's own beguiling pastoral, garden, and forest scenes...
This is the first book in many years about the nineteenth-century French artist Henri Regnault. Controversial and celebrated in his day, Regnault did not live long. He died at the age of 28 in the Franco-Prussian War, becoming a hero of the French nation. What sets him apart from the more conventional members of the French academy is his great skill in painting "Oriental"--exotic--subjects and doing so in a highly materialistic vein designed to produce, through elements like gold paint, garish colors, and odd details, blatant amusement for the eye. In a word, his images are both delightful and awful. Gotlieb's book combines biography, history, and comparative readings of works by Regnault with those by other French artists such as Delacroix, Fromentin, and Renoir. It also, importantly, explores the afterlives of Regnault as a cultural and artistic figure, as well as his diminishment during the rise of modernism and his eventual demise in the history of art.
A compelling and innovative account that reshapes our view of nineteenth-century chemistry, explaining a critical period in chemistry’s quest to understand and manipulate organic nature. According to existing histories, theory drove chemistry’s remarkable nineteenth-century development. In Molecular World, Catherine M. Jackson shows instead how novel experimental approaches combined with what she calls “laboratory reasoning” enabled chemists to bridge wet chemistry and abstract concepts and, in so doing, create the molecular world. Jackson introduces a series of practice-based breakthroughs that include chemistry’s move into lampworked glassware, the field’s turn to synthesis and...