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This groundbreaking study investigates the close and paradoxical relationship of art and race during the Enlightenment.

In this text, French art historian Anne Lafont examines the complexities and contradictions in Enlightenment-era ideas about race, focusing on the figurations of Africans and other people of color. Through studies of a wide range of eighteenth-century art, Lafont grounds her analysis in the objects themselves and, by doing so, highlights how visual works can reveal the values of the culture that produced them.

While Lafont locates—unsurprisingly—instances of the marginalization and objectification of Black people, she also draws attention to depictions that present African sitters as subjects in their own right. For example, Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley (1797) offers a dignified, individualized representation of this formerly enslaved French politician from Saint-Domingue; and portraits of anonymous sitters show them as actual persons whose costumes and poses demonstrate their agency.

Ultimately, Lafont moves beyond artworks to consider the broader intellectual context of the Enlightenment, particularly ideas about freedom, equality, and universal human rights, which were anchored in visual culture and indexed by it. She reveals how these ideals often conflicted with the realities of colonialism and the shifting status of Black people during this era.

Histories of artists’ personal possessions shed new light on the lives of their owners.

Artists are makers of things. Yet it is a measure of the disembodied manner in which we generally think about artists that we rarely consider the everyday items they own. This innovative book looks at objects that once belonged to artists, revealing not only the fabric of the eighteenth-century art world in France but also unfamiliar—and sometimes unexpected—insights into the individuals who populated it, including Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun.

From the curious to the mundane, from the useful to the symbolic, these items have one thing in common: they have all been eclipsed from historical view. Some of the objects still exist, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s color box and Jacques-Louis David’s table. Others survive only in paintings, such as Jean-Siméon Chardin’s cistern in his Copper Drinking Fountain, or in documents, like François Lemoyne’s sword, the instrument of his suicide. Several were literally lost, including pastelist Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s pencil case. In this fascinating book, the authors engage with fundamental historical debates about production, consumption, and sociability through the lens of material goods owned by artists.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is at www.getty.edu/publications/artists-things/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

Social clubs as they existed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland were varied: they could be convivial, sporting, or scholarly, or they could be a significant and dynamic social force, committed to improvement and national regeneration as well as to sociability. The essays in this volume examine the complex history of clubs and societies in Scotland from 1700 to 1830. Contributors address attitudes toward associations, their meeting places and rituals, their links with the growth of the professions and with literary culture, and the ways in which they were structured by both class and gender. By widening the context in which clubs and societies are set, the collection offers a new framework for understanding them, bringing together the inheritance of the Scottish past, the unique and cohesive polite culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the broader context of associational patterns common to Britain, Ireland, and beyond.

This book deals with changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period often said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. It focuses not on authorial self-presentation or self-revelation but on an author’s interactions with booksellers, collaborators, rivals, correspondents, patrons, and audiences. Challenging older accounts of the development of authorship in the period as well as newer claims about the “public sphere” and the “professional writer,” it engages with recent work on print culture and the history of the book. Methodologically eclectic, it moves from close readings to strategic contextualization. The book is organized both chronologically and topically. Early chapters deal with writers – notably Milton and Dryden – at the beginning of the long eighteenth century, and later chapters focus more on writers — among them Johnson, Gray, and Gibbon — toward its end. Looking beyond the traditional canon, it considers a number of little-known or little-studied writers, including Richard Bentley, Thomas Birch, William Oldys, James Ralph, and Thomas Ruddiman. Some of the essays are organized around a single writer, but most deal with a broad topic – literary collaboration, literary careers, the republic of letters, the alleged rise of the “professional writer,” and the rather different figure of the “author by profession.”

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.