The Burlington Press – förlag

This beautifully and thoroughly illustrated book, which constitutes the first serious investigation of the relationship between Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, will be of considerable interest to both British and American art historians, and appeal to art lovers from both countries. West and Copley have always and properly been viewed as the two pre-eminent eighteenth-century American artists, despite the fact that, at the age of twenty-one, West left his native shores in 1760, never to return. He went on to become immensely successful in England, becoming, among other things, the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Copley spent half his working life also in England. However, before making the move across the Atlantic, he made his mark as an exceptionally talented artist, who, without any real training, painted likenesses of fellow Bostonians, including ones of figures such as John Hancock and Paul Revere, that have become icons of American history. While those portraits remain his most widely admired works, after 1775 and his resettling in England, he started painting distinctly different types of pictures, initially showing modern historical subjects in emulation of the model provided him by West, following, for example, West's celebrated Death of General Wolfe, exhibited in 1771, with his own Death of the Earl of Chatham, begun in 1779. For a brief span of time, the two expatriate Americans had a close working relationship, that we can see substantiallyreflected in both the formal language and the subject matter of many of their best works, but it eventually and inevitably turned into rivalry. The book begins with a brief prologue discussing the earliest of West's depictions of recent historical events and of subjects set in America, painted prior to Copley's arrival in England. It then follows the year-by-year evolution of Copley's painting from 1775 to his death in 1815, with an underlying focus upon his ongoing give-and-take with West, and it ends with examination of hitherto little-known and unstudied major late paintings, from after 1800, by both artists.

‘Told with exceptional scholarship, wit and humanity; the book itself is a ravishingly beautiful object’ - World of Interiors ‘Geraghty excels in uncovering the allusions that added up to a patriotic statement about French culture’s ability to absorb and refine diverse European precedents’ - Apollo‘Beautifully illustrated book reconstructs what the house, collections and mausoleum were like before 1920’ - SpectatorThis absorbing book tells the story of Empress Eugénie (1826–1920), the wife of Napoleon III and the last Empress-Consort of France. Today she is remembered for her physical beauty, for her influence as a taste maker and for her glittering contribution to the second imperial court – but she outlived the Second Empire by half a century and lived in exile in England.The Empress bought the Farnborough Hill estate in 1880, following a decade of personal tragedy: the collapse of the Second Empire (1852–70), the death of Napoleon III, and the loss of her only child. The death of the Prince Imperial in 1879, aged 23, ended all hope ofa Bonapartist restoration. With the imperial succession removed to another branch of the family, Eugénie resolved to create a permanent monument to her husband and son. This was her primary reason for moving to Farnborough. This book describes the little-known assemblage of art and architecture that she created there in the 1880s.Geraghty analyses the principal buildings on the imperial estate: Farnborough Hill itself, which was extensively remodelled for the court-in-exile that Eugénie maintained there from 1880 to 1920; and St Michael’s Abbey, the spectacular domed mausoleum that the Empress built on an adjacent hill in 1883–88. These projects were entrusted to a French architect, Hippolyte Destailleur (1822–93), whose erudite designs situated the history of the Second Empire within the longer history of French architecture and design. Geraghty also provides the fi rst detailed account of the lost interiors of Farnborough Hill. He traces the origins of the collection back to the Second Empire, and – drawing upon historic photos, inventories, and sale catalogues – he shows how the collection was displayed in the principal rooms of the house. Primarily dynastic in purpose, the display included a major sequence of Bonaparte family portraits, including works by David, Gérard, Winterhalter, and Carpeaux. Eugénie also had an important collection of decorative arts, including Gobelins tapestries, Sèvres porcelain, and royal French furniture.Composed by the Empress herself, the display at Farnborough Hill was the last manifestation of the ‘Louis XVI-Impératrice’ mode of interior decoration that she had popularised in the 1850s. It was also, in its juxtaposition of modern and historic pieces, the final expression of the nouvelle sociabilité of the second imperial court. Finally, the book describes the breakup of the estate in 1927, when the house wassold to a convent school and the collection was dispersed at auction. Today, only the Mausoleum functions as Eugénie originally envisaged. Geraghty, however, recovers the totality of Eugenie’s vision for Farnborough. In so doing, he describes how the Napoleonic ideal, for one final time, was made visible through art, architecture, and collecting.

A sweeping three-volume exploration of the life and work of the Italian architect Francesco BorrominiOne of the greatest and most idiosyncratic architects of the Roman Baroque, Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), is above all remembered for his major commissions, such as San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, the Oratorio dei Filippini, Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, and Sant’Agnese in Agone—spectacular buildings that brilliantly shaped the fabric of the Counter-Reformation city. Over three volumes, Joseph Connors outlines Borromini’s life and buildings, from his youth and early Roman work, his early maturity, his rise to fame, and his mature work, under the patronage of a succession of powerful popes. Connors considers the early biographies of Borromini, the fate of his drawings, reactions to his work, and revivals in his reputation. Themes of the architect and society in seventeenth-century Rome are organized around the architect’s collections of drawings, models, books, natural wonders, antiquities, and his friendships.This elegant and scholarly monograph will form the fundamental basis of all future scholarship in the field. Thoroughly illustrated with archival material and new photography, the book also includes specially commissioned photography by Edward Burtynsky, widely recognized as one of the world’s leading photographers and honoured as Master of Photography at Photo London in 2018, and awarded in 2022 the Outstanding Contribution to Photography by the World Photography Organisation.

This fascinating volume presents a wide-ranging overview of one of the lesser known yet fundamental disciplines of Art History: conservation. What happens when art ages? By bringing together some of the leading experts in the field, the essays chart a journey through the theoretical, aesthetic and technical debates surrounding the conservation of Old Masters. The problem of how to look after paintings as they grow old is a historically complex one. Should they be ‘restored’ to their original glory, or should the patina of time be acknowledged? What is to be done with damp and dirt, with rotten panels and yellowing varnishes? The development of conservation is profoundly entwined with the development of Art History itself, as both deal in the interpretation of the past and its preservation for the future. The seventeen essays collected by editors Jane Martineau and David Bomford, which originally appeared in The Burlington Magazine, explore how these questions have been answered from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day. Masterpieces like Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece or Rembrandt’s Night Watch have been treated and mis-treated many times in their long lives. By the nineteenth century, the growing knowledge of the techniques employed by the old masters had a profound influence on the treatments applied to their works. In the same period, the birth of national galleries as public institutions entrusted with the collective heritage led to the need to preserve large numbers of paintings and establish conservation departments rooted in scientific research. By the mid-twentieth century, the materials and techniques of painting were utterly transformed, demanding fresh approaches to their preservation. A discipline that sits uniquely at the crossroads of art, science, philosophy and technology, modern conservation is the result of an ongoing collaboration between conservators, scientists and art historians following rigorous ethical standards and training programmes.

Maini is one of the most important and accomplished, although least known and appreciated of late Baroque sculptors. This new monograph will provide an authoritative, scholarly and beautifully illustrated survey of all his principal commissions. Maini was born in Lombardy and had moved to Rome by 1710. His prestigious projects in the city included the funerary monument for Pope Innocent X in Sant’Agnese in Agone and the two majestic tombs in the family chapel of Pope Clement XII in San Giovanni in Laterano. Maini also worked in Santa Maria Maggiore and was involved in the design for the iconic Fontana di Trevi. These works are set in the context of the Roman art scene: the struggle for commissions, payment and reputation.

The first book on the English sculptor, designer, and painter Alfred Stevens  Few people were aware of Alfred Stevens’s art during his lifetime (1817–1875), but following his early death while still at work on the Wellington Monument in St Paul’s Cathedral, this changed. There was a furious outcry that a man of such genius should have been treated so harshly by the Office of Works during the protracted course of that project. As a result of a campaign, largely led by fellow artists, he became widely known, and between then and the outbreak of the Second World War he was hailed as one of greatest Humanist artists Britain had ever known, a judgement largely based on his grander works of figurative art and his superb draughtsmanship. But then, with the rise of Modernism in the early twentieth century, he came to be seen as someone who had merely aped the art of the Italian Renaissance. His work was dismissed as the last gasp of a movement that was now dead.  What those who extolled his work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as those who denigrated it in the years that followed, failed to see, however, was that he was a great innovator, someone who had played a crucial part in the development of British art in the nineteenth century. This was achieved in two ways: on the one hand, by designing objects such as stoves, painted decoration, and monumental sculpture whose form was linked to that of the surrounding architecture, he pointed the way to the New Sculpture that was to emerge at the end of the century; on the other, by blurring the line that was then universally drawn between “fine” and “decorative” art, he acted as a precursor of the Arts and Crafts Movement.  The study of his work has been hampered by the paucity of documents, scattered in archives in England and Italy, which is one reason why there has been no monograph since Hugh Stannus’s Alfred Stevens (1891).