Launch day for three new PMC publications

Today is the launch day for three new Paul Mellon Centre publications, distributed through Yale University Press.

Survey of London: Oxford Street, Volume 53 by Andrew Saint
This exceptional book is the latest in the famous Survey of London series, and the first to focus on a single street. It offers new insights into the growth of shops and shopping in the British capital, as well as a wealth of data, photographs and drawings illuminating the buildings and activities that have given Oxford Street character.

The Classical Body in Romantic Britain by Cora Gilroy-Ware
For many, the term ‘neoclassicism’ has come to imply discipline, order, restraint, and a certain myopia. Leaving the term behind, this book radically challenges enduring assumptions about the art produced from the late eighteenth century to the early Victorian period, casting new light on appropriations of the classical body by British artists. It is the first to foreground the intersections of gender, race and class in discussions of British visual classicism, laying bare artists’ alternately politicizing and emphatically sensual engagements with Greco-Roman art.

Christopher Wren: In Search of Eastern Antiquity by Vaughan Hart
In this revelatory study of one of the great architects in British history, Vaughan Hart considers Christopher Wren’s (1632–1723) interest in Eastern antiquity and Ottoman architecture, an interest that would animate much of his theory and practice.