In Brief
TERZIAN, PHILIP
In Brief Some holiday suggestions for the thinking man’s coffee table. BY PHILIP TERZIAN Houses of the Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America and the Way They Lived by Hugh Howard,...
...Philip Terzian is literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...George III: A Life in Caricature by Kenneth Baker (Thames & Hudson, 192 pp., $45...
...Kenneth Baker, a veteran of Tory cabinets and collector of political art, has the insider’s knowledge of British politics, and requisite dry humor, to make this volume irresistible...
...Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery by David Attenborough, with Susan Owens, Martin Clayton, and Rea Alexandratos (Yale, 224 pp., $37.50...
...This is the natural world as seen through the eyes of the late Renaissance, wonderfully vivid, perceptive, and exotic...
...Not everyone may share the vision of Kemp, an Oxford art historian, but it is an arresting one...
...BY PHILIP TERZIAN Houses of the Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America and the Way They Lived by Hugh Howard, photographs by Roger Straus III (Artisan, 354 pp., $50...
...King George III (17381820) had the luck, or misfortune, of sitting on the throne during the golden age of caricature, and his 60-year reign was faithfully chronicled by such skilled assassins as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and Isaac Cruikshank...
...This is a thoroughly delightful, and hypnotic, collection of scienceasart, skillfully annotated...
...The Art and Science of William Bartram by Judith Magee (Pennsylvania State, 264 pp., $45...
...In the mid-1770s he embarked on a long tour of the southern back country, notably the Cherokee lands of Georgia and the Carolinas and Florida, recording his stunning observations and master drawings of birds, fi sh, snakes, and plants—and one Seminole chief—now housed in London’s Natural History Museum...
...The Human Animal in Western Art and Science by Martin Kemp (Chicago, 320 pp., $40) begins with some arresting depictions of the four humors, and proceeds to demonstrate, in fi ve centuries of high and low art, the common themes of the animal and human worlds, in appearance, perception, and behavior...
...The Federal simplicity of John Jay’s homestead in New York is as strikingly different from Arthur Middleton’s sumptuous Middleton Place in South Carolina as Puritan New England is from Cavalier Virginia...
...This is a rich and intelligent combination of informative text and beguiling pictures...
...The world of late 18th-century America is intriguingly antique and endlessly diverting, and while the Founders were hardly representative of the citizenry, they were surely characteristic of their time and place...
...Their cruel, deft, pointed, and hilarious depictions of their sovereign are reproduced here in glorious color, along with the works of lesser, but no less entertaining, lights such as William Dent, whose comic taste for vomiting, fl atulence, and other bodily functions will startle modern readers...
...William Bartram (1739-1823), son of a pioneering Philadelphia botanist, and a traveler, diarist, gardener, and student of wildlife, may be said to be America’s fi rst great naturalist...
...Strictly speaking, this is not all that different from the Bartram portfolio described above—plates of fl ora and fauna, beautifully reproduced—but Attenborough, public TV’s nature impresario, and his colleagues have assembled a sterling collection of drawings and watercolors by artists (Leonardo Da Vinci), explorer/ naturalists (Mark Catesby, Maria Sibylla Merian), and scientifi c illustrators (Alexander Marshal) in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 12
