Book Description
Whoever said “Everything old is new again” could have been talking about French Pompadour Style. The flamboyant, opulent, refined aesthetic—so characteristic of the eighteenth century—has enjoyed a spectacular revival in recent years. In The New Eighteenth-Century Style, journalist Michèle Lalande and photographer Gilles Trillard, both experts in the field of interior décor, survey 30 examples of this quintessential blending of exquisite detail and ostentatious affluence. From lush velvet upholstery to the emblematic use of turquoise with gold accents, these perfectly captured interiors beguile the reader with well-worn extravagance. In an era of “shabby chic” the more refined, more pristine accents of Pompadour may be just what the world of interior décor needs—and this beautiful book provides an indispensable guide.
Customer Reviews:
Love that shabby chic French style!.......2007-06-01
An absolutely smashing book, full of details. After all, it is the details that make the room finishesd and unique. This is a classic look in my way of thinking, but then again, it is my style! A decorator by trade, I am always open to new concepts, and I found the book to offer many different perspectives on the same style, pages after pages of them. Excellent book layout and design, and wonderful photography.
Lovely book.......2007-04-04
I'm an artist & antique collector and not an interior designer by trade, so I am totally enjoying this book. I find it to be a lovely book full of great photography and many interesting details to spark one's imagination. Regardless of the fact that all the styles are not necessarily my own taste, the book as a whole is great fun to look at and I found it inspiring. Each time I looked at a room, I found some new little detail that I'd missed the first time around. It made me itch to re-vamp a room, stat, and I consider anything that inspires me or makes me feel creative money well spent.
Dangerous Liasons.......2007-02-09
This is a pretty, pretty book with lots of great stuff to look it, lots of interesting vignettes. It's French shabby, chippy _hit, uh, I mean chic. This was a great trend in the mid 1990's here in the USA before Rachel A. made shabby and chic a brand. Big style on a budget using detrius no one wanted. And it was cheap back then. Just took a can of white paint to chic up everything.
These French 18th century and 18th century inspired objets in this book, are not cheap. They are shabby and they are beautiful. The vignettes look like the Broadway stage set for the play Dangerous Liasons - decay, messy, artful, romantic, monochromatic and mad.
Like many decor books, the vignettes are impossible to see as life like - like does anyone really live in these vignettes. Still, they are beautiful to look at. The new 18th century style is a little like the new emperor's clothes. Smoke and mirrors to the highest degree of accomplishment. Get this book for the fun of it.
Fabulous Book! .......2006-11-18
If you're style is that of a Paris flea market, the bazaar in Bombay or a eclectic old shop somewhere in Eastern Europe, you'll love this book. Great photography; the individualism of each space comes through with color and texture. My new favorite. The highlight is more photos of the Stockholm attic apartment, which is a true style icon.
French Flea Market (if you like that look).......2006-11-02
More like Madame Pompadour is probably rolling over in her grave. I hope to goodness gracious that this isn't the new 18th century style. If you like 18th century style on a seriously tight budget then you may enjoy this book. It's full of pages of colorless 'schemes', seriously abused furniture and icy cold lighting. Was it all photographed in rooms with Northern exposure? The editors of Veranda will love this book. I am an interior designer who collects period 18th century furniture and art. I have truly studied 18th century furniture, decorative arts and customs for years and this is a popular look although I find it horribly depressing. On the positive side - the photography in this book is very well done. If you like French flea market 'junk' then you'll love this. I gave it a 4 vs. a 2 because the quality of the book is excellent and the photography is excellent but much of my disdain for this book is from this horrendous & prevalent style that I wish would go away.
Book Description
'No one can write a man's life except himself.' In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyses with unique insight the relationship between an elusive but essential inner self and the variety of social identities he was led to adopt. The book vividly illustrates the mixture of moods and motives that underlie the writing of autobiography: defiance and vulnerability, self-exploration and denial, passion, puzzlement, and detachment. Above all, Confessions is Rousseau's search, through every resource of language, to convey what he despairs of putting into words: the personal quality of one's own existence.
Download Description
An autobiography of tortured honesty that set the stage for Romanticism and revolution.
Customer Reviews:
It is a work of a genius!!!.......2007-04-08
There will never be another Jean-Jacques Rousseau and since he lived in a period without radio and television, he is talking to us through his books. While being hailed as one of the intellectual fathers of modern democracy, Rousseau also has a very interesting personality.
I highly recommend Confessions, many lovely short stories are so vivid that a reader almost feels being there with Rousseau.
A classic autobiography.......2007-03-11
Prior to the appearance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'Confessions,' there existed very few real autobiographies. The few that did exist were like St. Augustine's 'Confessions,' designed to impart a religious or moral lesson instead of to exhibit or try to justify one's life. By the time Rousseau came along, however, people had begun to see themselves as individuals, not members of a society governed based on religious or monarchical precepts. So though writing one's autobiography may be old hat now, this was a revolutionary thing in the 18th century. This autobiography is also special in that Jean-Jacques reveals himself warts and all. He doesn't gloss over faults or embarrassing incidents; he exhibits all of himself, both the good and the bad.
This book was highly recommended by the wonderful History of the Enlightenment professor I had my senior year of college, and I was thrilled to find a copy (for only 50 cents!) about 5 years later. I'd been eager to read it based on the professor's lurid descriptions of it. He told us that, among other things, Rousseau revealed that he liked to be spanked, he described his sex life, and he had a very interesting problem centered in his midsection, manifested in how he had urinary problems that always seemed to crop up whenever he was about to be integrated into society, such as one time when he was going to be given some money by the king to further his writing, but his problem struck, and he excused himself and went out into the hall, where he ended up urinating on the floor, unable to hold himself, and was laughed at by the servant-women. I was kind of disappointed that the book didn't turn out as spicy as my professor had made it out to be, but I still loved every moment of it just the same. My professor's teasers of what the book contains were just the tip of the iceberg. Among many other fascinating stories and tidbits, we also learn about such things as his extreme shyness with women he was attracted to, how he was a late bloomer who didn't lose his virginity till he was in his early twenties, how several of the women he was attracted to and had relationships with were older women (among them his first lover, Mme. de Warens, who was far more than just a lover but also his teacher, his mentor, and his patron), how he was beaten horribly by the man he was apprenticed to in Geneva as a teenager, the real story behind why he gave all 5 of his kids away to foundling hospitals, the increasing persecutions and exiles he endured, how he engaged in self-gratification, and how, as a young man, he had advances made to him by two other men (one of them a priest). Although one wonders how much paranoia might have played into these growing conspiracies against him he laments. While there is ample evidence that a number of his former friends turned against him (to say nothing of how he was thrown out of a lot of places he tried to find refuge in after 'The Social Contract' and 'Émile' were banned), it also seems kind of weird that so many people would form all of these vast far-reaching conspiracies against him out of nowhere. Still, Jean-Jacques comes across as such an interesting likeable person, whom just about anyone can relate to, that this obsession with these alleged conspiracies can be overlooked. One wishes that the book covered his whole life and not just from 1712 to 1765, since he's just such an interesting character!
My translation is the one by J.M. Cohen, which is over 50 years old now, but gets the job done in spite of a few dated spots. The basic story remains the same in spite of some dated phrases and language (e.g., does anyone under the age of 100 still use diminutive words like "authoress" or "patroness" anymore?). I also wish there had been an index, particularly since what with so many people coming and going in Jean-Jacques's life (he knew so many famous and prominent people in Enlightenment Europe!), it can be kind of hard to keep track of just who's whom. Still, minor quibbles aside, he was a truly fascinating person, and this classic work of autobiography and the Enlightenment is not to be missed.
'Feelings can only be described in terms of their effects'.......2007-01-04
My feelings when reading this unusual autobiography was one of identification with the writer - I suspect that there are behavioural and biological reasons for this, not ones that can be explained by psychology. The effect on me of the feelings Rousseau generated are indeed strange. I have immense sympathy with the man and yet I have a total lack of understanding of how he could give up his five children shortly after their births - and impose that on his partner too! He certainly fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for me. (Unless, of course, there simply weren't any children but he was unable to confess to that!)
I also felt (feelings again!) that at times Rousseau was quite paranoid. Repeatedly the disasters he presaged were less troubling than I had feared. Over and over we come across what he describes as some of his best times of life. He did have a remarkable way of holding on to the light, even when regrets and threats existed, which tended to lighten some of the darkest times.
His love of women was truly extraordinary - perhaps it was generated by his own childhood experience of being propositioned by a man; perhaps not. It was certainly love - if we believe these are true confessions - and not lust, despite what was going on in the French high society he hovered around.
Perhaps the most interesting thing for me is that a very gifted philosopher can be wracked by self doubts and uncertainties.
Other recommendations:
'Diaries' - Alma Schindler (Mahler-Werfel)
'Memoirs' - Hector Berlioz
'Memoirs of a Revolutionist' - Peter Kroptkin
'Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman' - William Godwin
How to understand your life-- the best autobiography ever written.......2007-01-01
Maybe you read Rousseau in college and your teacher mentioned EMILE. If you were lucky, he or she mentioned this, perhaps the greatest autobiography ever written. I read it when I was in my early twenties; it helped me to understand my feelings of loneliness, helplessness, and alienation. Years later, when I went to work for a large corporation, we had weekly meetings nominally about legal and regulatory issues, but the real "issues" on the participants' minds were the things they were talking about with each other before and after the meetings. I started reading excerpts from this book at our meetings. Everyone wanted to know what I was reading from. This was way before "book groups" became fashionable.
Rousseau was one of the most influential philosophers of the "Enlightenment", but he was also a humanitarian in the sense that he always looked for the good in others. Sometimes he found it. You will feel this when reading this wonderful book. My copy from thirty years ago has my handwritten notes in the back that I have trouble reading now,
but I know what the notes refer to, still recall the feelings I had when I made those notes, and remember how I wondered if I would ever understand how to live my life, how to relate to friends and family, how to figure out what is going on, most importantly how to deal with feelings. This book will not give you the answers, but it will give you the reassurance that your wonder and bewilderment are normal for thinking, sensitive persons. And that helps a lot. All this from one of the greatest literary artists since Plato.
You will want to read passages to your friends. Just as I did all those years ago. And compared to some celebrated "coming of age" novels, this is
the "Holy Bible".
The authenticity of a personal fiction.......2006-11-30
In his essay "On Rhetoric", Stanley Corngold addresses the rhetorical signs of autobiographical elements, and the use of language to create disruption, confusion, clarity or a sense of authenticity in the text, whether or not it actually is autobiographical or "a fictive chronicle of memory". Written elements of fiction can still function as an authentically constructed memory, and here Corngold makes a distinction between the lie and the fiction; an all important distinction for reading autobiographies like Rousseau's The Confessions. Figurative writing that refers to certain authentic emotions or personal imaginations of the writer, is considered fiction, whereas the conscious addition of a written element that does not belong to the memory or experiences of the author, is a lie.
Corngold considers the imagination to be superior over fulfillment. However, when a text is confessional in nature, the justification of the own identity and self by showcasing its sincerity and integrity, and thus its contrast to the imagination, is at stake. Corngold states that the rhetoric as Rousseau uses it in his Confessions, promises a truthful description of emotions. Corngold points out that abstractions like emotions and sensations are impossible to accurately describe in words, especially when one considers the possibility of the narrator's own memory deceiving him. He discusses the Rousseau's intent when he wrote his autobiography, and concludes that the question of whether this was a cognitive or confessional intent is problematic but can be analyzed by studying Rousseau's use of rhetoric.
Rousseau focuses mainly on his memories of moods in his autobiography The Confessions. One of the defining personal aspects that guide him in this is a sense of self-loss, and Rousseau seems to attempt to find and present himself by as accurately and truthful as possible describing his past actions and the sensation that caused and were caused by them.
An air of a self-indulgent narcissitic, yet apologetic and insecure personality surrounds Rousseau's autobiography, but nevertheless it is this underlying sense of this personality that the reader gets from this work that may very well be the most truthful autobiographical element of The Confessions.
Rousseau makes a distinction between his moods at the time of writing his autobiography and the past emotions he describes in his work, but doesn't openly acknowledge the likely possibility of the present mood influencing the memory of past sensations. However, I do value Rousseau's autobiography as authentic, as the emotions that he describes in his work were indeed descriptive of the sensations he must have felt while writing down his memories. In this regard, I think that the authenticity I perceive in Rousseau's work may not be the authenticity he intended to be perceived by a reader. In my opinion, it is impossible to narrate one's memories and past emotions as they actually were, without any influence of the present perceptions and moods of the narrator, and without taking into account that moods and moments sometimes last only seconds. However, I do agree with Corngold when it comes to prioritizing the imagination over the actual fulfillment and am convinced that Rousseau's imaginations about himself were not lies, but authentic fictions of and about himself.
Book Description
'Why does he write those ghastly plays that the whole of Paris flocks to see? And why does he paint such lifelike portraits that everyone recognizes themselves?' Moliere, The Impromptu at Versailles This volume brings together four of Moliere's greatest verse comedies covering the best years of his prolific writing career. Actor, director, and playwright, Moliere (1622-73) was one of the finest and most influential French dramatists, adept at portraying human foibles and puncturing pomposity. The School for Wives was his first great success; Tartuffe, condemned and banned for five years, his most controversial play. The Misanthrope is his acknowledged masterpiece, and The Clever Women his last, and perhaps best-constructed, verse piece. In addition this collection includes a spirited attack on his enemies and a defence of his theatre, in the form of two sparkling short plays, The School for Wives Criticized and The Impromptu at Versailles. Moliere's prose plays are available in a complementary Oxford World's Classics edition, Don Juan and Other Plays.
Customer Reviews:
Amusing.......2007-05-23
The book contains two of Moliere's best known works, "Tartuffe" (about a religious hypocrite) and "The Misanthrope." Clever and incisive, these works provoke commentary and poke fun at human qualities that everyone can relate to. Well worth reading for its humor and social commentary.
Book Description
Imagined scenes of daily life by Watteau, Chardin, Fragonard, Greuze, and other 18th-century French artists are the subject of this important new study. The wide range of these artists’ works encompasses domestic subjects, portraits and fashion plates, and depictions of stylish entertainments, seductions, and sentimental tales. Examples span the century, from the time of Louis XIV to the French Revolution.
Fifteen distinguished scholars present their latest research into the contexts and meanings of French genre painting during this period. The authors offer a variety of critical and historical perspectives, covering such topics as the relationship of genre painting to contemporary life and to sexuality, sentiment, and sensibilité; its patrons and collectors; its popularization through reproduction in the print trade; its contemporary critical reception; and its resonances through subsequent centuries, continuing to our own time.
Average customer rating:
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Watteau and His World: French Drawing from 1700 to 1750
Alan Wintermute , and
Colin B. Bailey
Manufacturer: Merrell
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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Watteau, Antoine
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ASIN: 1858940796 |
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French Bronze Clocks: 1700-1830
Elke Niehuser , and
Clemens Von Halem
Manufacturer: Schiffer Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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The French Marble Clock
ASIN: 0764309439 |
Book Description
These pendulum clocks not only tell time but also depict magnificent bronze and gilded sculptures which more or less relate to time, especially of Greek and Roman mythology, American Indian or African origin, and inhabitants of exotic countries. The author explains the underlying stories and scenes of everyday life in panels which represent the new, post-revolutionary era of the middle class in 19th century France.
Customer Reviews:
Very informative!.......2007-05-14
Great book. Very detailled describing the beginning of french clockmakers and their history. Helped me just today in finding a wondeful original french clock at an antique market. Highly recommend.
Average customer rating:
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Tradition and Innovation in French Garden Art: Chapters of a New History (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture)
Manufacturer: University of Pennsylvania Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0812236343 |
Book Description
In the absence of any modern history of French garden art, this volume offers twelve chapters that review some of the most interesting and innovative moments of French garden history. This series of studies traces a progression from what is taken as the golden age of French garden art, in the late seventeenth century, up to the present, when a renaissance of French design theory and practice is clearly visible.
By exploring the contributions of such important designers as Jean-Marie Morel and Claude-Henri Watelet, these essays argue for a tradition that includes, but is by no means exclusively influenced by, Andre Le Notre, long considered the dominant figure in French garden history. Even a glance at the wealth of garden theory and practice during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must call into question the conventional neglect of post-Le Notrean work. Each author reads a significant moment of garden art in relation to a whole cluster of cultural concerns, which change with the time and place of the garden discussed; overall, this has meant invoking town planning, engineering, optics, scientific and philosophic movements, bourgeois ethics, foreign imports, vernacular workings of the land, the rise of professional landscape practice, even the modernist refusal to recognize the garden itself as the prime site of intervention in the landscape.
Book Description
The Galerie des Modes has been called the "most beautiful collection in existence on the fashions of the 18th century." Published over a 10-year period, its plates were elegantly drawn, accurately engraved, and exquisitely hand colored. Here are 64 of the finest plates, reproduced faithfully from the originals and selected by costume historian Stella Blum.
Customer Reviews:
late 18th century fashions at their best.......2005-02-24
A lovely collection of 64 period fashion plates from Galerie des Modes. The plates cover the years from 1778-1787 and give a good representation of French high fashion in the years leading up to the French Revolution. The plates include court gowns, undress gowns, stays, day ensembles, riding habits, children's frocks and more. Complete with translated descriptions of each outfit and a decent glossary of terms.
Drool-worthy does not begin to describe in the goodies contained within. This lovely and inexpensive resource is a must for anyone interested in late century fashions. Get one for research and one to take apart and frame for your sewing room walls.
A helpful visual overview of late 18th century fashion.......2001-08-08
Stella Blum has selected plates of 18th century fashion from the Metropolitan Museum's collection and reproduced them here in full colour.
You certinally don't get all the plates produced in the 18th century but what you get is a helpful and representitive selection. This is one of the few books where you can see actual colour plates all reproduced in a sequence like this.
If you have any interest in 18th french fashion this book is both [inexpensive] and invaluable.
Customer Reviews:
Decidedly helpful, after digestion.......2005-07-13
After a long while of chewing on Crow's hundreds of proper names and knot of labyrinthine politics, I can now reflect upon the text with 20/20 hindsight and testify to its utility. Though I certainly didn't find it an easy read, or even a particularly enthralling one, Crow did lay the foundation now supporting my knowledge of French painting. The professor I had who required this book (and whose own book is a marvel: see Grigsby's _Extremities_) told us to forget about the names and focus on the general motions. That is sound advice for any bravehearted soul reading this book. All in all, Crow only rarely waxes pompous, vague, or self-contradictory (his analysis of a Rubens-Watteau parallel seems a bit heavy even for him). This text is dense and shoots to a high level of reader: I commend Crow for having with any success managed to navigate his way through sentences of such length and complexity. Not for the faint of heart, but a vital groundbreaker for the student of French revolution, politics, and painting.
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