Walpole
Walpole

Author: Walpole Historical Society

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 1998-03-01

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738564814

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Walpole, Massachusetts, located about 20 miles southwest of Boston, has undergone an interesting transformation from a rural community dotted with farms, to an industrial landscape dominated by factories and plants, to a modern bedroom suburb of Boston. This volume of over two hundred photographs, many published for the first time, presents a well-rounded view of Walpole from the late eighteenth century into the mid-twentieth century. Readers will see a Walpole that has mostly disappeared and will have the opportunity to stroll down Main Street before it and other roads were paved, to observe and peek into forgotten, antiquated homes and government buildings, and to walk in the shadows of the great mills. Two of the nationally known industries that this book touches upon are Kendall's Curity, which produced diapers, band aids, and other medical supplies; and Bird and Son, which manufactured roofing shingles, siding products, floor coverings, and cardboard boxes.

Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole
Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole

Author: Matthew M. Reeve

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-05-08

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0271086599

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Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole shows that the Gothic style in architecture and the decorative arts and the tradition of medievalist research associated with Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and his circle cannot be understood independently of their own homoerotic culture. Centered around Walpole’s Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Walpole and his “Strawberry Committee” of male friends, designers, and dilettantes invigorated an extraordinary new mode of Gothic design and disseminated it in their own commissions at Old Windsor and Donnington Grove in Berkshire, Lee Priory in Kent, the Vyne in Hampshire, and other sites. Matthew M. Reeve argues that the new “third sex” of homoerotically inclined men and the new “modern styles” that they promoted—including the Gothic style and chinoiserie—were interrelated movements that shaped English modernity. The Gothic style offered the possibility of an alternate aesthetic and gendered order, a queer reversal of the dominant Palladian style of the period. Many of the houses built by Walpole and his circle were understood by commentators to be manifestations of a new queer aesthetic, and in describing them they offered the earliest critiques of what would be called a “queer architecture.” Exposing the role of sexual coteries in the shaping of eighteenth-century English architecture, this book offers a profound and eloquent revision to our understanding of the origins of the Gothic Revival and to medievalism itself. It will be welcomed by architectural historians as well as scholars of medievalism and specialists in queer studies.

Dilettanti
Dilettanti

Author: Bruce Redford

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2008-08-07

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0892369248

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Bruce Redford re-creates the vibrant culture of connoisseurship in Enlightenment England by investigating the multifaceted activities and achievements of the Society of Dilettani. Elegantly and wittily he dissects the British connoisseurs whose expeditions, collections, and publications laid the groundwork for the Neoclassical revival and for the scholarly study of Graeco-Roman antiquity. After the foundation of the society in 1732, the Dilettani commissioned portraits of the members. Including a striking group of mock-classical and mock-religious representations, these portraits were painted by George Knapton, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. During the second half of the century, the society’s expeditions to the Levant yielded a series of pioneering architectural folios, beginning with the first volume The Antiquities of Athens in 1762. These monumental volumes aspired to empirical exactitude in text and image alike. They prepared the way for Specimens of Antient Sculpture (1809), which combines the didactic (detailed investigations into technique, condition, restoration, and provenance) with the connoisseurial (plates that bring the illustration of ancient sculpture to new artistic heights). The Society of Dilettanti’s projects and publications exemplify the Enlightenment ideal of the gentleman amateur, which is linked in turn to a culture of wide-ranging curiosity.