HIST 231: Imagining Enlightenment in 18th-Century Europe (HC)

The Tuileries Garden is a masterpiece of garden design and one of the world's most iconic public art spaces. Designed for Louis XIV by landscape architect André Le Nôtre, it served the now-destroyed Tuileries Palace. It was opened to the public in 1667, becoming one of the first public gardens in Europe. The garden has always been a place for Parisians to convene, celebrate, and promenade, and art has played an important role throughout its history. Monumental sculptures give the garden the air of an outdoor museum.

In the playhouses of 18th-century France, clerks and students, soldiers and merchants, and the occasional aristocrat stood in the pit, while the majority of the elite sat in loges. These denizens of the parterre, who accounted for up to two-thirds of the audience, were given to disruptive behavior that culminated in full-scale riots in the last years before the Revolution. This history of French theater audiences demonstrates how problems in the parterre reflected tensions at the heart of the Old Regime.

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, born in 1724, never left his native Paris. He studied at the prestigious Royal Academy but failed to win the coveted Prix de Rome. He is often said to have reacted to this disappointment by throwing aside all hopes of a traditional artistic career and hastening out into the thoroughfares of Paris to sketch everything in sight, living an errant, bohemian existence and succumbing increasingly to an obsession with drawing. But despite his personal eccentricities he was employed as an illustrator all his life.

This is a book about the French Revolution in taste and of the table--a book about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, thereby changing their own social life and that of the world. During the 1760s and 1770s, those who were sensitive and supposedly suffering made public show of their delicacy by going to the new establishments known as "restaurateurs' rooms" and there sipping bouillons. By the 1790s, though, the table was variously seen as a place of decadent corruption or democratic solidarity.

French garden history is explored with reference to artworks spanning the time period 1770 to 184. They convey visions of picturesque and romantic gardens depicted by famous painters of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Beginning with the simple question, "Why did audiences grow silent?" Listening in Paris gives a spectator's-eye view of opera and concert life from the Old Regime to the Romantic era, describing the transformation in musical experience from social event to profound aesthetic encounter. Woven into the narrative is an analysis of the political, musical, and aesthetic factors that produced more engaged listening.

This study of ephemeral architecture and design examines the spectacular displays created for large-scale celebrations in the Georgian period. The book focuses on a number of specific occasions - including elegant country fetes, lavish galas, royal events and historical commemorations - that employed elaborate decorative measures. Drawing on primary sources including personal letters, diary entries, bills and newspaper accounts, this book investigates how these fanciful designs had lasting impact and popular appeal.

Written by specialists from a range of disciplines, its forty essays introduce the key texts and contexts of the Georgian theater and also push the boundaries of the field. Gives equal attention to the range of dramatic forms and to the occasions, communities, and materialities of theater production. It includes sections on historiography, censorship and regulation, women and the stage, and the performance of race and empire. I

This original book examines how the ambitions of artists in eighteenth-century France were affected by public opinions about the arts—the tastes of the art critics, of the state, and of the crowds who visited art salons. Among the many artists whose work is discussed and portrayed are Watteau, Greuze, and David.

Summers at the Vauxhall pleasure garden in London brought diverse entertainments to a diverse public. Walks and arbors offered a pastoral retreat, while at the same time the garden's attractions indulged distinctly urban tastes for fashion, novelty, and sociability. High- and low-born alike were free to walk the paths; the proximity to strangers and the danger of dark walks were as thrilling as the fountains and fireworks. Nine essays explore the mutual influences of human behavior and design: landscape, painting, sculpture, and even transient elements such as lighting and music tacitly informed visitors how to move within the space, what to wear, how to behave, and where they might transgress.

John Brewster's landmark book shows us how British artists, amateurs, entrepeneurs, and audiences created a culture that is still celebrated for its wit and brilliance.

From the civility of Westminster's newly paved streets to the dangerous pleasures of Vauxhall Gardens and the grand designs of the Universal Register Office, this book examines the identities, practices, and power relations of the modern city as they emerged within and transformed the geographies of eighteenth-century London. Ogborn draws upon a wide variety of textual and visual sources to illuminate processes of commodification, individualization, state formation, and the transformation of the public sphere within the new spaces of the metropolis.

The street is the social arena that we share above all with our forebears, forcing some startling juxtapositions. Here, historians bring to life a variety of people and behaviour which would have been found in the London streets.

Accompanying the first major exhibition of Thomas Rowlandson's work in North America for some 20 years, this volume reflects the growing emphasis on the social and political context of the satirical watercolours, drawings and prints of the 18th and 19th century and in doing so rescues Rowlandson from what co-author Vic Gatrell calls "the immense condescension of posterity". This book explores Rowlandson's unique perspective on Georgian society, and opens up the whole subject of Georgian leisure and social life and the crossing of class boundaries.

"The entire town is disguised," declared a French tourist of eighteenth-century Venice. And, indeed, maskers of all ranks--nobles, clergy, imposters, seducers, con men--could be found mixing at every level of Venetian society. Even a pious nun donned a mask and male attire for her liaison with the libertine Casanova. In Venice Incognito, James H. Johnson offers a spirited analysis of masking in this carnival-loving city. He reconstructs their logic: covering the face in public was a uniquely Venetian response to one of the most rigid class hierarchies in European history.

Between 1770 and 1830, London was the world's largest and richest city, the center of hectic social ferment and spectacular sexual liberation. City of Laughter chronicles the rise and fall of a great tradition of ridicule and of the satirical, humorous, and widely circulated prints that sustained it. Focusing not on the polished wit upon which polite society prided itself, but rather on malicious, sardonic and satirical humor--humor that was bawdy, knowing and ironic--Vic Gatrell explores what this tradition says about Georgian views of the world and about their own pretensions. City of Laughter offers a brilliantly original panorama of the era, providing a ground-breaking reappraisal of a period of change and a unique account of the origins of our attitudes toward sex, celebrity and satire today.