This richly illustrated book is a history of the upholstery trade in Britain over three hundred years. It surveys the changing styles that affected this art form, the crafts-men who made the furniture and the kings and courtiers who purchased it, and the events—from coronations to funerals—at which upholstery played a leading role. Geoffrey Beard, an eminent authority on the lives and work methods of craftsmen in the decorative arts, brings his wide knowledge of the historical background of furniture making and usage in England to bear on this new branch of furniture history. Drawing on the texts of 44 important contemporary manuscripts, he moves chronologically, setting the activities of upholsterers and their patrons against the wider panoply of English history. He discusses, for example, the early upholstery done on the instructions of the important agency controlling work for the crown, the Great Wardrobe; the archaic traditions of the London craft guilds that grounded the upholsterer’s work prior to the restoration of Charles II in 1660; the extensive refurbishing of royal palaces after 1660; the sudden rise in popularity of needleworked upholstery in the beginning of the eighteenth century; the change from rococo style to neoclassicism in the 1760s; the introduction of Egyptian motifs in the early nineteenth century; and the subsequent change to the ornamental excesses of Gothic, Louis Quatorze, or one of the fashionable revivals. With its 376 illustrations, 220 of which are in color, this volume is an authoritative and gorgeous chronicle of the production of fine furnishings in England.

Upholsterers and Interior Furnishing in England, 1530-1840 (Bard Studies in the Decorative Arts)

BEARD, Geoffrey

Arts & Photography

Bard Graduate Center

From ceramics to silversmithing, calligraphy to textiles, hot glass to bookbinding, crafts have played a rich and complex role in the social, cultural, and artistic history of twentieth-century Britain. This all-encompassing book is the first to survey the full range of individual craft disciplines and key practitioners from the pre-World War I years of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the 1990s. Tanya Harrod shows how the crafts movement emerged in response to generalized anxiety about the production, commodification, and consumption of objects in a highly industrialized society. Caught between the more powerful disciplines of fine art, architecture, and design for industry, crafts have defined and redefined themselves throughout the century. The book begins with the craft revival of the early 1900s, tracing the complex legacy of John Ruskin and William Morris. The author then discusses how the Arts and Crafts Movement was forced to reexamine its aims during the Great War; how the development of the crafts was closely connected to the development of modernism between the wars; and how during World War II the idea of the handmade, often in the form of vernacular craft discovered in remote pockets of England, played a significant part in propagandizing a national culture worth defending. The book also explores the postwar beginnings of a countercultural workshop-based craft movement led by Bernard Leach and the continuing redefinition of crafts as the government-funded Crafts Council pushed them toward the fine arts and then the government attempted in the 1980s to recast them as exemplars of enterprise culture. Harrod describes the increasingly blurred division between craft and design for mass production at the conclusion of the book. Along with historians, educators, artists, craftspersons, and collectors, readers with an interest in British cultural history will find in this book much to delight and fascinate. This book accompanies an exhibition of British crafts, “The Pleasures of Peace: Craft, Art and Design in Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s,” that will open at the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia in spring 1999.

The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century

Harrod, Tanya

History & Criticism

Victorian architect-designer E. W. Godwin (1833–1886), tying himself neither morally nor aesthetically to a single style, approached design with what he called "judicious eclecticism." Seeking to design furniture appropriate to the needs of modern living, he grappled with the problems of affordability, utility, and function and experimented with modular and fitted furniture decades before it became popular in the mid-twentieth century. This book is the first comprehensive study of Godwin’s furniture designs. Taking the form of a catalogue raisonné, the book documents and reproduces all known examples of his secular furniture and related furniture designs. Susan Weber Soros traces the development of Godwin’s style, examines its sources, and assesses the historical importance of his work. She discusses how Godwin combined antiquarian interests with the study of more recent design traditions from different parts of the world, including Japan. Godwin worked in six major styles: Gothic revival, Anglo-Japanese, Anglo-Greek, Anglo-Egyptian, Queen Anne or Cottage style, and Old English or Jacobean. Soros also describes his work for leading art manufacturers; the work he exhibited at great international exhibits in Vienna, Philadelphia, and Paris; and his role as designer of choice for such leading artists of his generation as James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde.

The Secular Furniture of E. W. Godwin: with Catalogue Raisonné

Biographies & Memoirs

Weber, Susan

Arts & Literature

When the ancient sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii were excavated in the eighteenth century, the objects found there renewed artistic interest in classicism. Neoclassical style and imagery permeated paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts of the period, and a central element of design in all these art forms was the vase. This beautiful book is the first to focus on the vase as an artistic and ornamental form in a variety of media. It presents and discusses about one hundred hidden treasures from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s reserve collection―not only vases but also wine and water urns, knife boxes, ink wells, perfume burners, fabrics, carved paneling, marquetry furniture, silver, works on paper, and paintings―all using the vase motif. Vase imagery ranged from austere to fantastic to romantic, say the authors of this book, and the vase became a new paradigm of artistic achievement and a central symbol of European Neoclassicism.

Vasemania - Form and Ornament in Neoclassical Europe

The firm of Parker and Wakelin was the foremost silversmith in London for much of the eighteenth century, supplying royalty, aristocracy, and gentry with both domestic and ceremonial plate. This fascinating book draws on the firm’s records for this period to provide a remarkable account of patrons and their purchases and to investigate the social and economic structures on which the firm depended, revealing new information about the complex web of out-workers with specialist skills and raising questions of authorship.
Beautifully illustrated, the book is both a social history of consumption in Georgian London and an investigation into the world of working men and women at that time.

Silver in London: The Parker and Wakelin Partnership, 1760–1776

Clifford, Helen

The technique of applying brilliant enamel ornament to metalwork, known as cloisonné, reached its peak in China from the fourteenth century on. This sumptuously illustrated survey, which accompanies an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center, situates these remarkable pieces in their context with a survey of the historical, political and sociological milieu in China during the period. Research recently undertaken in China and published here for the first time has resulted in the redating of a number of objects with significant implications for the overview of Chinese cloisonné production. Shapes, functions, pattern, and symbolism in cloisonné objects are all examined and explored. And the final section of the book reviews the impact of developments in China on later production in Europe, as well as the acquisition of cloisonné pieces by the major American museums and private collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Cloisonné: Chinese Enamels from the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties

The power of Christmas derives from the appeal of its repeated rituals, the presumed antiquity of its traditions, and its ability to adapt to changing cultural conditions. Christmas cards seemed inevitable and ubiquitous, but in recent years the genre has been visibly in decline. It is now evident that the Christmas card was a culturally specific artifact, a distinctive way in which a fundamental human gesture could be expressed within a commercial, materialistic, and rapidly changing society. 
This stylish book explores the imagery, graphic forms, subject matter, and significance of Christmas cards in their chronological timeframe to reveal an important area of American material culture. There is much to surprise and delight.

American Christmas Cards 1900-1960

Ames, Kenneth L.

Although Jane Hading (1859–1940), Lily Elsie (1886–1962), and Billie Burke (1884–1970) gained fame as stage actresses, their popular appeal also rested on their ability to cultivate a glamorous appearance. Their careers illustrate the early transformation of actresses into marketable commodities whose celebrity status depended on the consumption of their images. This celebrity, in turn, was used to market an array of beauty and fashion goods to women striving to emulate them.
The three women featured in Staging Fashion exemplify the factors that ensured success for 20th-century actresses. Each of these women was dressed by a leading couturier (or several couturiers), both onstage and offstage. In major cities such as New York, Paris, and London, actresses depended on exquisite, custom-made gowns both to secure principal roles and to maintain popularity. Their physical beauty, which was consistent with elite notions of class and race, was depicted on postcards and in popular fashion and theatre magazines and newspapers. Finally, these actresses developed distinct "personalities," which were conveyed by their stage roles and in numerous photos and articles.

Staging Fashion, 1880-1920: Jane Hading, Lily Elsie, Billie Burke

Graphic Design

Over the past few decades, the "pictorial turn" in the natural sciences, prompted by the computer's capacity to produce visual representations, has generated considerable theoretical interest. Poised between their materiality and the abstract level they are meant to convey, scientific images are always intersections of form and meaning. Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010), one of the best-known producers of digital images in scientific and industrial research, was particularly curious about the ways in which the materiality of scientific representation was able to influence the development of the ideas and abstractions the images embodied.
Using images and objects found in Mandelbrot's office, this book questions the relationship between the visual and scientific reasoning in fractal geometry and chaos theory, among the most popular fields to use digital scientific imagery in the past century. These unpublished materials offer new connections between the material world and that of mathematical ideas. Work by Adrien Douady and Otto Rössler provides historical depth to the analysis.

The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking

At the turn of the 20th century, the circus was the most popular form of American entertainment, and New York City was the hub of circus-related activity. Featuring superb archival photography, this book documents a wide variety of ephemera, images, and artifacts relating to the history of the circus in the city, from the seminal equestrian displays of the 18th century to the iconic railroad circuses of the late 19th century. Matthew Wittmann offers a thorough history of the circus in New York City, including stories of P. T. Barnum's triumphant entry into the circus business, the famous dwarf General Tom Thumb, and Jumbo, the African elephant that touched off a craze known as "Jumbomania." The histories of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum &amp; Bailey Circus, the WPA Circus of the Great Depression, and the Big Apple Circus are testaments to the enduring popularity of this American pastime.

Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010

History

Wittmann, Matthew

Americas

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