Melissa Hyde – författare

The eighteenth century is recognized as a complex period of dramatic epistemic shifts that would have profound effects on the modern world. Paradoxically, the art of the era continues to be a relatively neglected field within art history. While women's private lives, their involvement with cultural production, the project of Enlightenment, and the public sphere have been the subjects of ground-breaking historical and literary studies in recent decades, women's engagement with the arts remains one of the richest and most under-explored areas for scholarly investigation. This collection of new essays by specialist authors addresses women's activities as patrons and as "patronized" artists over the course of the century. It provides a much needed examination, with admirable breadth and variety, of women's artistic production and patronage during the eighteenth century. By opening up the specific problems and conflicts inherent in women's artistic involvements from the perspective of what was at stake for the eighteenth-century women themselves, it also acts as a corrective to the generalizing and stereotyping about the prominence of those women, which is too often present in current day literature. Some essays are concerned with how women's involvement in the arts allowed them to fashion identities for themselves (whether national, political, religious, intellectual, artistic, or gender-based) and how such self-fashioning in turn enabled them to negotiate or intervene in the public domains of culture and politics where "The Woman Question" was so hotly debated. Other essays examine how men's patronage of women also served as a vehicle for self-fashioning for both artist and sponsor. Artists and patrons discussed include: Carriera; Queen Lovisa Ulrike and Chardin; the Bourbon Princesses Mlle Clermont, Mme Adélaïde and Nattier; the Duchess of Osuna and Goya; Marie-Antoinette and Vigée-Lebrun; Labille-Guiard; Queen Carolina of Naples, Prince Stanislaus Poniatowski of Poland and Kauffman; David and his students, Mesdames Benoist, Lavoisier and Mongez.

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.

Thinking Women represents state-of-the-art feminist scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century French and British art and visual culture. Topics range from women and their activities in art and science, to gendered representations of childhood and animals to fashion, femininity and temporality. Some chapters center on individual genres like hunting portraits, or on specific paintings, such as David Martin's Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (ca. 1780) or Marie Guillemine Benoist's Portrait of a Young Black Woman (Madeleine) (1800). Others make contributions on the work of familiar actors like Jean-Siméon Chardin or Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. The volume also brings to the fore lesser-known figures including Marie-Thérèse Reboul, Madeleine Basseporte, Marguerite Le Comte, and Gabrielle Capet. Written by eleven distinguished (art) historians, the assembled essays engage with and honor the work of the late Mary D. Sheriff, whose unpublished chapter on women artists’ self-portraiture opens the book.

The first and highly-anticipated monograph on one of the most successful, collected, and exciting painters today Swiss-born Nicolas Party, one of the most successful and critically acclaimed artists working today, is known for his color-saturated paintings of everyday objects, with distinctly personal yet very accessible and recognizable imagery - bright, graphic patterns applied to canvases, ceramics, furniture, floors, ceilings, doorways, and walls.He captures the essence of his subjects in surprising ways, heightening their physical and emotional resonance. Fascinated by the power of paint to alter our perception of the built environment and, within a gallery context, how we experience art, Party regularly paints murals, either as stand-alone works or as carefully orchestrated settings for his practice.This is the first book dedicated to his practice and the first to examine in totality his career to date - it will be a must-read for collectors and followers of the contemporary art scene.