Browse Recent Book Reviews

The postcard reproduction of John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888) is a perennial bestseller at the Tate Britain gift shop. This popularity mirrors Victorian public response to the artist’s work, which was greeted with acclaim at the Royal Academy throughout the late nineteenth century. In the intervening years, however, Waterhouse's popular appeal has become divorced from artistic and scholarly opinion, and there has been little academic attention paid to his painting or his continued popularity. It is now his turn to be rescued from this critical oblivion by the rising tide of scholarly reappraisal of Victorian and Academic… Full Review

The twenty-first-century visitor to the gardens of Versailles has at least one thing in common with Louis XIV, the Bourbon king of France responsible for their creation in the third and fourth quarters of the seventeenth century: Upon leaving the chateau and proceeding into the gardens, one is unclear which route along the alleés and through the bosquets is optimal for experiencing the essence of the park. As Robert W. Berger and Thomas F. Hedin establish in Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV, the king himself was of many minds regarding how best to visit… Full Review

Images in Spite of All is devoted to four images, specifically, the only four of the one-and-a-half million surviving photographs of the Nazi camps to depict the actual process of mass killing. Shot within and immediately outside the gas chambers at Auschwitz’s crematorium V, the images show naked women prisoners herded into the gas chambers and the mass cremation of corpses. Smuggled out of Auschwitz by the Polish resistance, the photographs were taken under the most extreme conditions of prohibition by members of the Sonderkommando, the special squad of prisoners compelled in the face of their own impending death to… Full Review

Early on in John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, protagonist and Victorian scientist Charles Smithson spends a solitary morning hunting fossils along the coast of southwest England. An avowed follower of Charles Darwin, Smithson extracts an exquisite fossil-specimen from the flinty rock, aiming to gift it to his fiancée. Yet, as Fowles’s narrator wryly suggests, what our scientist is unable to perceive in this small, attractive object is the menace it portends to the conditions of his own existence. In this beautiful relic of extinguished life, Smithson is incapable of discerning any connection to the revolutionary implosions that… Full Review

G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary is not a catalogue raisonné of the work of Watts, the artist whose work was simultaneously both deeply eccentric from and superbly characteristic of Victorian painting and sculpture. Omitting major works in the collection of the Tate Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery among others, it is far from a complete survey. Yet because the volume documents (with lush color illustrations) the extensive collection of key works, preparatory and preliminary investigations, as well as personal artefacts that the artist and his wife collected for their own gallery of his work, it comes closer to being… Full Review

There is something of a difficulty in reviewing two such dissimilar publications—an edited collection and a monograph—yet they have a number of themes in common: both attend to the normative requirements of engaging with gender, race, and class (if not so much with sexuality); but they also intersect more particularly with issues that appear key for contemporary archival studies in the humanities. These issues might be opened with reference to the introduction to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), where Fredric Jameson noted that… Full Review

Art reproduction is seldom the focus of art-historical enquiry. In relation to the nineteenth century in particular, it remains largely uninvestigated despite the fact that the period was characterized by important changes in print technologies, including the invention of photography, the rise of intellectual property and copyright issues, the growing significance of a private art market that made extensive use of reproductive imagery, and the widespread increase in the public demand for art reproductions. These form the subject of Robert Verhoogt’s incisive and groundbreaking study, Art in Reproduction: Nineteenth-Century Prints after Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jozef Israëls and Ary Scheffer. The… Full Review

The History of British Art, Volume 3: 1870–Now is the final volume of three in a series edited by David Bindman and co-sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Tate Britain. Given the age of the Oxford History of English Art series, which dates from the 1950s (with the exception of Dennis Farr’s contribution on art produced between 1870 and 1940, which was published in 1979 as volume 11), and the dearth of British material usually included in comprehensive survey texts, a methodologically up-to-date historical survey of British art is long overdue. Yet those seeking a chronologically… Full Review

Judith Ostrowitz’s first book, Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), took as its subject the complex relationships to tradition maintained by contemporary native artists in the Pacific Northwest as they produce new artworks for a multicultural audience. Ostrowitz’s second book, Interventions: Native American Art for Far-flung Territories, pursues the related question of how contemporary native artists situate their work in global venues (which are by definition cross-cultural) and how contemporary native artists mediate between local tribal demands for the protection of indigenous knowledge and cultural property and the ravenous hunger… Full Review

A statue of Sir Hans Sloane stands at the center of London’s Chelsea Physic Garden where all variety of plants vie for attention. Sloane demonstrated his talent for gathering specimens (like those over which his statue presides) in his resplendently detailed title, Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles Etc. of the Last of those Islands (vol.1 ,1707; vol. 2, 1725) which serves as both travel log and visual natural history, a manifestation of the eighteenth-century desire to index the world… Full Review