Academic literature on the topic '1688-1704'

The decades immediately following the Glorious Revolution in 1688 witnessed a variety of political, social and structural responses to this cataclysmic event. In Ireland, religious conflict and economic under-development, as well as the devastation of war from 1689 to 1691, combined to ensure that the Anglo-Irish body politic found it difficult to capture the fruits of success from an English polity that had gradually accreted to itself much of the political power and economic wealth of the country. By 1704, however, the Anglo-Irish had managed to appropriate to themselves some of the economic and constitutional benefits of the Revolution by exploiting various parliamentary practices and structures. One of their strategies centered around developing and leveraging the role of the Public Accounts Committee as a means of imposing accountability on the executive and its officials. To achieve this the members were required to understand, contest and reconfigure official accounting information.

Several di- and tri-substituted amides of the general formula, 2,6-X2C6H3NHCOCH3−iXi and 2,4,6-X3C6H2NHCOCH3−iXi (X = Cl or CH3 and i = 0, 1, 2, or 3) are prepared, characterised, and their infrared spectra in the solid state and 1H and 13C NMR spectra in solution are studied. The C=O stretching vibrations of N-(2,6-dichlorophenyl)- and N-(2,6-dimethylphenyl)-amides appear as strong absorptions in the ranges 1707 - 1658 cm−1 and 1700 - 1647 cm−1, respectively, while the N-H stretching vibrations of N-(2,6-dichlorophenyl)- and N-(2,6-dimethylphenyl)-amides appear as strong vibrations in the ranges 3271 - 3209 cm−1 and 3285 - 3214 cm−1, respectively. The N-H stretching vibrations of N-(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl)- and N-(2,4,6-trimethylphenyl)- amides also appear as strong absorptions in the ranges 3370 - 3212 and 3283 - 3225 cm−1, respectively, while those of the C=O vibrations appear in the ranges 1688 - 1617 and 1704 - 1647 cm−1. The analysis of the C=O and N-H absorption frequencies of all amides of the general formula XiC6H5−iNHCOCH3−iXi (where X = Cl or CH3, and i = 0, 1, 2 or 3) indicates that their variations do not show regular trends with substitution either in the phenyl ring or in the side chain. The chemical shifts of both the aromatic protons and the aromatic carbons of all the amides are calculated in two ways, either by adding the incremental shifts due to -COCH3−iXi groups and the substituents in the benzene ring to the chemical shifts of the corresponding aromatic protons or carbons of the parent aniline, or by adding the incremental shifts due to -NHCOCH3−iXi groups and the substituents in the benzene ring to the chemical shift of the benzene proton or carbon. The calculated chemical shifts of the aromatic protons and carbons of all the substituted amides by both methods lead to almost the same values in most cases and agree well with the observed chemical shifts, indicating that the principle of additivity of the substituent effects is valid in these compounds.

In February 1704, a Boston laborer named Thomas Lea found himself surrounded by townspeople as he lay on his deathbed. These spectators had gathered hoping to hear a much anticipated confession of the crimes they believed Lea had committed fifteen years earlier during the Dominion of New England. In Suffolk County, many townspeople had long maintained that Lea and others had used the confusion and chaos generated by the unsettling political and legal transformations introduced to New England during the 1680s to surreptitiously gain legal title to the estate of a prosperous Braintree, Massachusetts, landowner named William Penn. Standing by Lea's bedside, one witness, who believed Lea had perjured himself at the 1689 probate administration of Penn's estate, demanded: “Thomas can you as you are going out of the World answer at the Tribunal of God to the Will of Mr Penns, which you have sworn to[?]” “Was Mr Penn living or Dead when this Will was Made?” In the presence of assembled witnesses, Lea acknowledged, “he was dead.” Other townspeople pressed Lea to reveal the role he played in what many believed had been a murder for inheritance scheme. They reminded Lea that Penn's corpse had been found covered “in blood, in his own dung” with “a hole in his back, that you might turn your two fingers into it” and, even more disturbing, “one of his [Penn's] stones in his codd [scrotum] was broken all to pieces.” Averting the onlookers' gaze, Lea “turned his head aside the other way, saying what I did I was hired to do.” For these witnesses, the death-bed confession confirmed the rumors of Lea's crimes and strengthened their belief that a wave of corruption introduced in the 1680s had sabotaged New England's distinctive Puritan jurisprudence. Indeed, townspeople had labored for years to overturn the 1689 probate of Penn's estate in an effort forestall the crown's efforts to bring New England into political and legal conformity with the dictates of the growing English empire.

In the first half of the 19th century in literature on art the term ‘Old Masters’ was disseminated (Alte Meister, maître ancienns, etc.), this in relation to the concept of New Masters. However, contrary to the widespread view, it did not result from the name institutionalization of public museums (in Munich the name Alte Pinakothek was given in 1853, while in Dresden the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister was given its name only after 1956). Both names, however, feature in collection catalogues, books, articles, press reports, as well as tourist guides. The term ‘Old Masters’ with reference to the artists of the modern era appeared in the late 17th century among the circles of English connoisseurs, amateur experts in art (John Evelyn, 1696). Meanwhile, the Great Tradition: from Filippo Villani and Alberti to Bellori, Baldinucci, and even Winckelmann, implied the use of the category of ‘Old Masters’ (antico, vecchio) in reference to ancient: Greek-Roman artists. There existed this general conceptual opposition: old (identified with ancient) v. new (the modern era). An attempt is made to answer when this tradition was broken with, when and from what sources the concept (and subsequently the term) ‘Old Masters’ to define artists later than ancient was formed; namely the artists who are today referred to as mediaeval and modern (13th–18th c.). It was not a single moment in history, but a long intermittent process, leading to 18th- century connoisseurs and scholars who formalized early-modern collecting, antiquarian market, and museology. The discerning and naming of the category in-between ancient masters (those referred to appropriately as ‘old’) and contemporary or recent (‘new’) artists resulted from the attempts made to systemize and categorize the chronology of art history for the needs of new collector- and connoisseurship in the second half of the 16th and in the 17th century. The old continuum of history of art was disrupted by Giorgio Vasari (Vite, 1550, 1568) who created the category of ‘non-ancient old’, ‘our old masters’, or ‘old-new’ masters (vecchi e non antichi, vecchi maestri nostri, i nostri vecchi, i vecchi moderni). The intuition of this ‘in-between’ the vecchi moderni and maestri moderni can be found in some writers-connoisseurs in the early 17th (e.g. Giulio Mancini). The Vasarian category of the ‘old modern’ is most fully reflected in the compartmentalizing of history conducted by Carel van Mander (Het Schilder-Boeck, 1604), who divided painters into: 1) oude (oude antijcke), ancient, antique, 2) oude modern, namely old modern; 3) modern; very modern, living currently. The oude modern constitute a sequence of artists beginning with the Van Eyck brothers to Marten de Vosa, preceding the era of ‘the famous living Netherlandish painters’. The in-between status of ‘old modern’ was the topic of discourse among the academic circles, formulated by Jean de La Bruyère (1688; the principle of moving the caesura between antiquité and modernité), Charles Perrault (1687–1697: category of le notre siècle preceded by le siècle passé, namely the grand masters of the Renaissance), and Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi writing from the position of an academic studioso for connoisseurs and collectors (Abecedario pittorico, 1704, 1719, 1733, 1753; the antichimoderni category as distinct from the i viventi). Together with Christian von Mechel (1781, 1783) the new understanding of ‘old modernity’ enters the scholarly domain of museology and the devising of displays in royal and ducal galleries opened to the public, undergoing the division into national categories (schools) and chronological ones in history of art becoming more a science (hence the alte niederländische/deutsche Meister or Schule). While planning and describing painterly schools at the Vienna Belvedere Gallery, the learned historian and expert creates a tripartite division of history, already without any reference to antiquity, and with a meaningful shift in eras: Alte, Neuere, and lebende Meister, namely ‘Old Masters’ (14th–16th/17th c.), ‘New Masters’ (Late 17th c. and the first half of the 18th c.), and contemporary ‘living artists’. The Alte Meister ceases to define ancient artists, while at the same time the unequivocally intensifying hegemony of antique attitudes in collecting and museology leads almost to an ardent defence of the right to collect only ‘new’ masters, namely those active recently or contemporarily. It is undertaken with fervour by Ludwig Christian von Hagedorn in his correspondence with his brother (1748), reflecting the Enlightenment cult of modernité, crucial for the mental culture of pre-Revolution France, and also having impact on the German region. As much as the new terminology became well rooted in the German-speaking regions (also in terminology applied in auction catalogues in 1719–1800, and obviously in the 19th century for good) and English-speaking ones (where the term ‘Old Masters’ was also used in press in reference to the collections of the National Gallery formed in 1824), in the French circles of the 18th century the traditional division into the ‘old’, namely ancient, and ‘new’, namely modern, was maintained (e.g. Recueil d’Estampes by Pierre Crozat), and in the early 19th century, adopted were the terms used in writings in relation to the Academy Salon (from 1791 located at Louvre’s Salon Carré) which was the venue for alternating displays of old and contemporary art, this justified in view of political and nationalistic legitimization of the oeuvre of the French through the connection with the tradition of the great masters of the past (Charles-Paul Landon, Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain). As for the German-speaking regions, what played a particular role in consolidating the term: alte Meister, was the increasing Enlightenment – Romantic Medievalism as well as the cult of the Germanic past, and with it a revaluation of old-German painting: altdeutsch. The revision of old-German art in Weimar and Dresden, particularly within the Kunstfreunde circles, took place: from the category of barbarism and Gothic ineptitude, to the apology of the Teutonic spirit and true religiousness of the German Middle Ages (partic. Johann Gottlob von Quandt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). In this respect what actually had an impact was the traditional terminology backup formed in the Renaissance Humanist Germanics (ethnogenetic studies in ancient Germanic peoples, their customs, and language), which introduced the understanding of ancient times different from classical-ancient or Biblical-Christian into German historiography, and prepared grounds for the altdeutsche Geschichte and altdeutsche Kunst/Meister concepts. A different source area must have been provided by the Reformation and its iconoclasm, as well as the reaction to it, both on the Catholic, post-Tridentine side, and moderate Lutheran: in the form of paintings, often regarded by the people as ‘holy’ and ‘miraculous’; these were frequently ancient presentations, either Italo-Byzantine icons or works respected for their old age. Their ‘antiquity’ value raised by their defenders as symbols of the precedence of Christian cult at a given place contributed to the development of the concept of ‘ancient’ and ‘old’ painters in the 17th–18th century.

Although James Theobald’s background is somewhat complex, documentary sources help to place it in perspective. He was baptised on 21 June 1688 at St Mary’s Church, Lambeth, and later served an apprenticeship to his father Peter as a Barber- Surgeon from 1704 until 1712. However, the family’s real business was that of major timber merchants, importing supplies from Norway for Peter Theobald’s timber yard at Narrow Wall in Lambeth. A Chancery Proceedings case shows that both James and his younger brother Peter (born in 1694) were actively engaged in the timber trade by 1721, or even earlier. James Theobald was living at Belvedere House, near the present Royal Festival Hall site, when he wrote in 1724 to Sir Hans Sloane, requesting medical advice for a sick workman. They were evidently on friendly terms, as an entry in Sloane’s catalogue of ‘Fishes’ records: ‘Two carps from Norway given me by Mr. Theobald who hath some of them alive at his house at Belvedere near Lambeth’. It was on Sloane’s recommendation that Theobald was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 4 November 1725. A year later, on 23 November, he became a member of the Society of Antiquaries, having been proposed by Johann Caspar Scheuchzer, Sloane’s amanuensis and the translator of Kaempfer’s classic, the History of Japan , to which both James and his brother Peter subscribed in 1727. In the same year he and his brother were made freemen of the Barber-Surgeons Company, and James was appointed Secretary, or Co-adjutor, of the Society of Antiquaries, a post which he held from 1728 until about 1735.