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It is sometimes thought that the renowned essayist Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was incapable of writing a big book. But in fact he developed some of his most important essays - including "Two Concepts of Liberty" and "Historical Inevitability" - from a book-length manuscript that he intended to publish but later set aside. Published here for the first time, "Political Ideas in the Romantic Age" is the only book in which Berlin lays out in one continuous account most of his key insights about the h...

The East India Company at Home, 1757?1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses...

A fuller, richer picture of an artist at the height of his powers Thomas Gainsborough's (1727-88) London years, from 1774 to 1788, were the pinnacle and conclusion of his career. They coincided with the establishment of the Royal Academy, of which Gainsborough was a founding member, and the city's ascendance as a center for the arts. This is a meticulously researched and readable account of how Gainsborough designed his home and studio and maintained a growing schedule of influential patrons,...

This book addresses the unique and profound indeterminacy of "Creole," a label applied to white, Black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century. "Creole" implies that the geography of one's birth determines identity in ways that supersede race, language, nation, and social status. Paradoxically, the very capaciousness of the term engendered a perpetual search for visual signs of racial difference as well as a pretense to blindness about the intermingling of...

This book offers a renewed look at Emma Hamilton, the eighteenth-century celebrity who was depicted by many major artists, including Angelica Kauffman, George Romney, and Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun. Adopting an art historical and feminist lens, Ersy Contogouris analyzes works of art in which Hamilton appears, her performances, and writings by her contemporaries to establish her impact on this pivotal moment in European history and art. This pioneering volume shows that Hamilton did not attempt to p...

Celebrated connoisseur, drawings collector, print dealer, book publisher and authority on the art of antiquity, Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) was a pivotal figure in the eighteenth-century European art world. Focusing on the trajectory of Mariette's career, this book examines the material practices and social networks through which connoisseurs forged the idea of art as an object of empirical and historical analysis. Drawing on significant unpublished archival material as well as on histories...

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), a major figure in the German Romantic movement, painted sublime works representing nature at its most melancholic and desolate. One of his most famous motifs was that of two intimate figures, seen from behind, gazing at the moon. Friedrich painted three versions of this theme, one of which -"Two Men Contemplating the Moon" - has been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The text discusses the Metropolitan's painting in conjunction with the other two ver...

Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to "regain" Spanish heritage. As expressed in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish "citizens" the pictorial ideal of a shared national character. In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles' fascination with and appropriation of...

Philadelphia on Stone is the first work in over fifty years to examine the history of nineteenth-century commercial lithography in Philadelphia. The capstone to the Library Company of Philadelphia's multifaceted Philadelphia on Stone project, this heavily illustrated volume of thematic essays provides an analysis of the social, economic, and technological changes in the local trade from 1828 to 1878; biographies of premier lithographers P. S. Duval and James Queen; and new insights about genres...

Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media st...

James McNeill Whistler and France: A Dialogue in Paint, Poetry, and Music is the first full-length and in-depth study to position this painter within the overall trajectory of French modernism during the second half of the nineteenth century and to view the artist as integral to the aesthetic projects of its most original contributors. Suzanne M. Singletary maintains that Whistler was in a unique situation as an insider within the emerging French avant-garde, thereby in an enviable position to b...