An illuminating investigation of how aquatint travel books transformed the way Britons viewed the world and their place within it In the late 18th century, British artists embraced the medium of aquatint for its ability to produce prints with rich and varied tones that became even more stunning with the addition of color. At the same time, the expanding purview of the British empire created a market for images of far-away places. Book publishers quickly seized on these two trends and began producing travel books illustrated with aquatint prints of Indian cave temples, Chinese waterways, African villages, and more. Offering a close analysis of three exceptional publications--Thomas and William Daniell's Oriental Scenery (1795-1808), William Alexander's Costume of China (1797-1805), and Samuel Daniell's African Scenery and Animals (1804-5)--this volume examines how aquatint became a preferred medium for the visual representation of cultural difference, and how it subtly shaped the direction of Western modernism. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

How an ingenious printmaking technique became a cross-cultural phenomenon in Enlightenment Europe Driven by a growing interest in collecting and multiplying drawings, artists and amateurs in the eighteenth century sought a new technique capable of replicating the subtlety of ink, wash, and watercolor. They devised an innovative and versatile new medium—aquatint—which would spread in use across Europe within a few decades, its distinctive dark tones making possible a remarkable variety of ingenious imagery. In this illuminating book, Rena M. Hoisington traces how the aquatint technique flourished as a cross-cultural and cosmopolitan phenomenon that contributed to the rise of art publishing, connoisseurship, leisure travel, drawing instruction, and the popularity of neoclassicism. She offers new insights into sophisticated experiments by artists such as Francisco de Goya, Katharina Prestel, Paul Sandby, and Jean-Baptiste Le Prince. Marvelously illustrated with rare works from the National Gallery of Art’s collection of early aquatints, this engaging book provides a fresh look at how printmaking contributed to a vibrant exchange of information and ideas in Europe during the Enlightenment. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Exhibition Schedule National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC October 24, 2021–February 21, 2022

Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period.

Between the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the American Declaration of Independence, London artists transformed themselves from loosely organized professionals into one of the most progressive schools of art in Europe. In British Art and the Seven Years' War Douglas Fordham argues that war and political dissent provided potent catalysts for the creation of a national school of art. Over the course of three tumultuous decades marked by foreign wars and domestic political dissent, metropolitan artists—especially the founding members of the Royal Academy, including Joshua Reynolds, Paul Sandby, Joseph Wilton, Francis Hayman, and Benjamin West—creatively and assiduously placed fine art on a solid footing within an expansive British state. London artists entered into a golden age of art as they established strategic alliances with the state, even while insisting on the autonomy of fine art. The active marginalization of William Hogarth's mercantile aesthetic reflects this sea change as a newer generation sought to represent the British state in a series of guises and genres, including monumental sculpture, history painting, graphic satire, and state portraiture. In these allegories of state formation, artists struggled to give form to shifting notions of national, religious, and political allegiance in the British Empire. These allegiances found provocative expression in the contemporary history paintings of the American-born artists Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, who managed to carve a patriotic niche out of the apolitical mandate of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Due to the technological advances of the nineteenth century, an abundance of black drawing media exploded onto the market. Charcoal, conte crayon, and fabricated black chalks and crayons; fixatives; various papers; and many lifting devices gave rise to an unprecedented amount of experimentation. Indeed, innovation became the rule, as artists developed their own unique—and often experimental—processes. The exploration of black media in drawing is inextricably bound up with the exploration of black in prints, and this volume presents an integrated study that rises above specialization in one over the other. Noir brings together such diverse artists as Francisco de Goya, Maxime Lalanne, Gustave Courbet, Odilon Redon, and Georges Seurat and explores their inventive works on paper. Sidelining labels like “conservative” or “avant-garde,” the essays in this book employ all the tools that art history and modern conservation have given us, inviting the reader to look more broadly at the artists’ methods and materials. This volume accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from February 9 to May 15, 2016.

Penetrating biographies written by a group of distinguished travel writers, broadcasters, and historians reveal the lives, motives, and passions of forty major explorers in history. It has always been mankind’s gift, or curse, to be inquisitive, and through the ages people have been driven to explore the limits of the worlds known to them—and beyond. Here are the stories of forty of the world’s greatest explorers from Europe, America, Asia, and Australia. These are men and women who changed our perception of the world through their courageous adventures. Organized thematically, the book opens with the oceanic journeys of five hundred years ago, when the great era of recorded exploration began. The following sections look at The Land, Rivers, Polar Ice, Deserts, Life on Earth, and New Frontiers. Many of these explorers recounted their journeys in vivid firsthand accounts; others were superb artists or photographers. The book features quotes from their journals and reports, and it is illustrated with paintings, photographs, engravings, and maps, so that we can experience their adventures through their own eyes and in their own words. Featured explorers include: Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, James Cook, Lewis and Clark, Richard Burton, Samuel de Champlain, David Livingstone, Roald Amundsen, Gertrude Bell, Alexander von Humboldt, Yuri Gagarin, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau.