Print Publications

Throughout the Centre’s history, our print publications have represented a wide range of research topics, interests and approaches in the field of British art studies. This year’s publications are indicative of this breadth, and also give a sense of new directions and concerns. Garden history, Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture, the ‘great houses’ built on the Strand in London between 1550 and 1650, British and Irish engravers, art making and diplomacy in eighteenth-century western India, and Victorian photography, are just a few of the areas discussed in the books we published this year. Each book project is the product of years of deep research. Mark Girouard’s magisterial A Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, 1540–1640 draws on a lifetime of experience in the study of architectural history to assess the impact of some 600 master craftsmen, surveyors, designers and patrons. We were delighted to celebrate the publication of this book and Girouard’s 90th birthday at a special event at the Centre in October 2021. Another dictionary project was David Alexander’s A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820 Researched over four decades, this is the first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland between 1714 and 1820. Meanwhile, Volumes 54 and 55 of the Survey of London, edited by Peter Guillery, present a chronicle of the buildings of Whitechapel. A number of our authors published their first monographs with the Centre. Sean Willcock’s book Victorian Visions of War and Peace; Holly Shaffer’s Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910; Paris A. Spies-Gans’s A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830; and Andrea Wolk Rager’s The Radical Vision of Edward BurneJones, were all developed from PhD research topics into compelling monographs. Sometimes our books take us to some surprising places. This is certainly the case with Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries. Illustrations and discussion in this text encompass topiary, excavated caves, archaeological fragments and exotic animals.