Apprentice Painters and Sculptors in the Early Modern British Tradition

摘要

Our understanding of the relationship between art and trade in the long eighteenth century has traditionally focused on the relationships between prominent patrons, professional architects and iconic interiors. At times conventional art histories of the period seem to offer little to the student of vernacular architecture. James Ayres' new volume, Art, Artisans & Apprentices, makes a distinctive and original contribution to this study, focusing on the organisation, regulation and lives of craftsmen during the period, and exploring the inter-relationships in particular of painters and sculptors between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Britain and North America. The volume is engagingly written in accessible style, which will be familiar to readers of Ayres' previous volumes The Artist's Craft (1985) and Building the Georgian City (1998). It emerges from Ayres' personal and professional knowledge of art and craftsmanship and is illustrated with vignettes and quotations that bring the text to life, but supported by useful end-notes to each chapter which enable readers to appreciate the extent of the secondary literature and the wealth of (often published) primary sources on the subject.