Mark Ledbury – författare

Fictions of Art History, the most recent addition to the Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series, addresses art history’s complex relationships with fiction, poetry, and creative writing. Inspired by a 2010 conference, the volume examines art historians’ viewing practices and modes of writing. How, the contributors ask, are we to unravel the supposed facts of history from the fictions constructed in works of art? How do art historians employ or resist devices of fiction, and what are the effects of those choices on the reader? In styles by turns witty, elliptical, and plain-speaking, the essays in Fictions of Art History are fascinating and provocative critical interventions in art history.Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

The artistic accomplishments of James Northcote (1746–1831) have tended to be overshadowed by his role as a biographer of Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, with whom Northcote apprenticed for five years. Here, Mark Ledbury constructs a very different image of Northcote: that of a prolific member of the Royal Academy and an active participant in the cultural and political circles of the Romantic era, as well as a portrait and history painter in his own right. This book pays particular attention to Northcote’s One Hundred Fables (1828), a masterpiece of wood engraving, and the unconventional, collaged manuscripts for the volume, now at the Yale Center for British Art. Along with another series of collages now at The Morgan Library & Museum and a second volume of fables published posthumously in 1833, these collages and printed works constitute the most ambitious project of the artist’s later years. An underappreciated and courageously eccentric masterpiece, the Fables were an early experiment in what is now a familiar multimedia practice and are extensively published here for the first time. Idiosyncratic, personal, and visionary, the Fables serve as a lens through which to examine Northcote’s long, complex, and fruitful artistic career.Distributed for the Yale Center for British ArtExhibition Schedule:Yale Center for British Art(10/02/14–12/14/14)

Originally published in 2000, this book highlights the interst Sedaine's life and work is now, belatedly, provoking in many scholarly disciplines. If Sedaine speaks today to literary history, theatre history and opera studies, it is because he possessed a multivalent vision, one which accounts for both his past neglect and is present rediscovery. Like many others, he believed that the established, 'official' genres needed to be reformed; unlike many, he made it his business to transform the actual language and operation of the theatre arts he practised. Until late eighteenth-century opera and drama in France become better understood, Sedaine's immense importance for the development of Romantic opera and theatre risks remaining generally concealed; to reveal something of this importance is one main reason for publishing the present volume.This book includes chapters on Sedaine and the question of genre, the representation of the female in the dramas of Sedaine, and the words, gestures and other signs in the era of Sedaine.

Originally published in 2000, this book highlights the interst Sedaine's life and work is now, belatedly, provoking in many scholarly disciplines. If Sedaine speaks today to literary history, theatre history and opera studies, it is because he possessed a multivalent vision, one which accounts for both his past neglect and is present rediscovery. Like many others, he believed that the established, 'official' genres needed to be reformed; unlike many, he made it his business to transform the actual language and operation of the theatre arts he practised. Until late eighteenth-century opera and drama in France become better understood, Sedaine's immense importance for the development of Romantic opera and theatre risks remaining generally concealed; to reveal something of this importance is one main reason for publishing the present volume.This book includes chapters on Sedaine and the question of genre, the representation of the female in the dramas of Sedaine, and the words, gestures and other signs in the era of Sedaine.

This volume reinterprets the work of the dramatist Michel-Jean Sedaine and the artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in the context of their innovative engagement with discourses of genre in eighteenth-century France, and in the light of new archival evidence. It reveals the complexity and audacity of both men's work, and restablishes the less well-known as a figure of major importance.

Francois Boucher (1703 - 1770) has suffered a curious fate: to have been so identified with the French Rococo as to have lost his visibility as an artist in his own right. "Rethinking Boucher" reclaims the artist's individuality, revealing not only the diversity of his talents but also the variety of visual and intellectual traditions with which he engaged. In part one, "The Various Boucher," Melissa Hyde, Colin Bailey, and Martin Schieder examine the artist's identity in relation to his portraits and self-portraits, his ingenious genre scenes, and his overlooked religious paintings. In part two, "The Unexpected Boucher," Katie Scott, Mark Ledbury, and Mary D. Sheriff focus on the network of social and cultural contexts in which the artist functioned, including the commercial print market, the theaters of Paris, and the contemporary textual explorations of the exotic. In the final part, "The Enlightened Boucher," Rene Demoris, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, and Thomas M. Kavanagh discuss Boucher's work as a vehicle for Enlightenment visions of the body, whether conjured by Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Madame de Pompadour, Boucher's most famous patron.

The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will reshape—or even radically redefine—our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity.

This volume's essays focus on the relationships between texts and readers, images and viewers, performance and audience during the Enlightenment in France, England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and North America. The essays range from exploring the effects of rococo space on religious experience to analyzing the transmission of texts across national and temporal boundaries. Contributors and Contents include: Michael Yonan, The Wieskirche: Movement, Perception, and Salvation in the Bavarian Rococo; Sandro Jung, Thomas Stothard, Illustration, and the Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, 1779-1826; Hector Reyes, Drawing and History in the Comte de Caylus' Recueil d'antiquites; Marc H. Lerner, William Tell's Atlantic Travels in the Revolutionary Era; Katrin Berndt, Civic Virtues in the Restless Polity: Sir Walter Scott's Fergusonian Vision of British Civil Society in Redgauntlet (1824); and, Danielle Spratt, Gulliver's Economized Body: Colonial Projects and the Human/Animal Divide in the Travels. Contributors and Contents also include: Julie Henigan, Print and Oral Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Irish Ballad; David A.Brewer, Print, Performance, Personhood, Polly Honeycombe; Zeina Hakim, Whose Story? The Game of Fiction in Early Eighteenth-Century French Literature; Dorothee Birke, Between Direction and Diversion: Chapter Titles in English Novels of the Mid-Eighteenth Century; Catherine Keohane, Ann Yearsley's Clifton Hill and Its Lessons in Reading; and, Jennifer Germann, Tracing Marie-Eleonore Godefroid: Women's Artistic Networks in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris.

The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will reshape—or even radically redefine—our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity.

This book is a fresh, archivally nourished study of creative practice and exchange in theatre and the visual arts in eighteenth-century France. It focuses on moments of intense collaboration between artists, actors and writers, and on the ways in which entrepreneurship, innovation and aesthetic partnership worked between theatrical and visual arts across the long history of the eighteenth century. It breaks with traditional accounts by emphasizing not the theories of Tableau or even overlaps in subject matter between visual art and theatre, but instead on innovation, risk, community and knowledge transfer in the context of an enlightenment thirst for innovation and for commercial and reputational success. It re-examines the work of familiar figures such as Boucher, Favart and David, in the context of their networks and their relations with less familiar figures from Gillot and Charles-Antoine Coypel to Ignazio Degotti and Prince Hoare, and draws on theories of innovation transfer and mutuality to re-examine the nature of the relationship between theatre and the visual arts, painting a vivid new story of ambitions, friendships, triumphs and disasters, a story which binds theatre and the visual arts in a tight, complex and highly productive mesh.