Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735, edited by Mark Hallett, director of studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Nigel Llewellyn, former head of research at Tate, and Martin Myrone, lead curator of British art before 1800 at Tate Britain, focuses on the rapid development—and in some cases “false starts and disappointments” (18)—of British art, architecture, and overall visual culture from the Restoration of Charles II, a moment cited as an era of new opportunities for makers of visual objects and designers of buildings, to the establishment of Hogarth's Academy in St Martin's Lane in 1735, a critical moment “in the development of a distinctive corporate identity for British art and artists” (19).

The volume is published as the twenty-fourth in the series Studies in British Art, a series overseen through the collaboration of the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and distributed by Yale University Press. Incidentally it is also the last to be in print, as the series moves to dissemination in digital form. As always with these volumes, production quality is exceptionally high, with the addition of numerous fine color reproductions. The book's origin can be traced back to an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant administered by the editors between 2009 and 2012 and which, between the University of York and Tate Britain, orchestrated three significant conferences, a major online database devoted to British art in the period 1660–1715, and three important exhibitions at Tate Britain.

The book's twenty-one essays are organized into five areas of interest, beginning with spaces, in which one finds essays by such scholars as Richard Stephens on the significant role that the Palace of Westminster played in the picture market in London, and Christine Stevenson on the claims for empire suggested Grinling Gibbons' statue of Charles II as a Roman Caesar placed at the center of the Royal Exchange rebuilt after the Great Fire in 1666. Portraiture follows, where the reader encounters five essays in a section devoted primarily to paintings and sculptures representing aristocratic bodies and communicating courtly interests (for example, Richard Johns on Antonio Verrio's allegorical sea triumph of Charles II; Matthew Hargraves and Lydia Hamlett on the representation of military accomplishments in the patronage of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough; and Tabitha Barber analyzes Godfrey Kneller's portraits of Queen Anne) and then a final piece, by David Solkin, devoted to exploring the contradictions of the visual language of elevated history painting dealing with the life of Charles I as it is communicated through a medium (print) with a decidedly different form of public address.

In the third part, the reader will find a selection on networks and shared artistic practices, in which scholars such as Diana Dethloff and Helen Pierce explore aspects of artistic training and communities of virtuosi in this era, with Tim Batchelor and Jacqueline Riding taking up, respectively, the emergence of new genres and markets (still-life) and issues of emulation in portrait painting after Kneller. A group of essays on prospects and colonial images in print makes up the fourth part, a section that includes John Bonehill's discussion of estate landscapes in word and image, Emily Mann's examination of the motives behind the publication of a series of prints representing different views of Guinea, and Peter Moore's essay on mezzotint portraiture and “intermedial” exchange (a notion that I return to below). A group of essays on theory and periodization closes the volume; these essays deal mostly with texts written about the visual arts during the seventeenth century, including Martin Myrone's thoughtful piece on John Evelyn's Sculptura: or the History, and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper (1662) and engraving's “third dimension,” with the addition of Nigel Llewellyn's essay on a largely ignored category of sculpture, the English funeral monument.

The title of this volume, incorporating the terms court, country, and city, seems to cleverly play on significant works of British cultural history such as Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), and even revisions of the latter, such as Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph Ward, eds., The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850 (1999). Although such works are not cited in Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735, thinking about what separates such spaces in these earlier texts, and what makes their boundaries permeable, is present. This volume seems to suggest that on one hand, although Williams did not separate court from city, differences in the kinds of artworks or structures intended for these sites were crucial in establishing contrasting identities between courtly and urban interests. On the other hand, though, as Mark Hallett notes in the introduction to the collection, the “intermedial” nature of the objects and spaces taken up by the different authors and, one might also add, the analytical approaches brought to bear on them, reveals the constantly permeable borders between a variety of materials, or novel fusions of media and genres. This is significant, he writes, because “this interchange and identification between media might be said to be one of the defining characteristics of British art, architecture, and design in this period” (23). In sum, Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735 is a lavishly illustrated collection of consistently excellent essays, and the volume should appeal not only to historians of British art but also to political, cultural, and literary historians of this period.