Exhibition | Johan Tobias Sergel: Fantasy and Reality
Johan Tobias Sergel, The Faun, 1774, marble, 46 × 46 × 84 cm
(Nationalmuseum, NMSk 357; photo by Viktor Fordell)
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From the Swedish Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, as noted at ArtNet:
Johan Tobias Sergel: Fantasy and Reality / Fantasi och Verklighet
Nationalmuseum Stockholm, 19 February — 9 August 2026
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 30 October 2026 — 31 January 2027
Curated by Daniel Prytz
In spring and summer 2026, Nationalmuseum will present a major exhibition on sculptor and draughtsman Johan Tobias Sergel (1740–1814) Sergel was a central figure in Swedish art during the late 18th century and is also considered one of the most important sculptors of his time on an international scale.
Johan Tobias Sergel, Passionate Lovers (Hetsigt kärlekspar), pen and brown ink with brown wash on paper, 21 × 18 cm (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, NMH A 45/1970; photo by Cecilia Heisser).
The exhibition offers a comprehensive view of Sergel’s life and art—from his early years in Stockholm in the 1760s, through his extended study trips to France and Italy, to his commissions for King Gustav III upon his return to Stockholm. One of the goals of the exhibition is to place Sergel’s life and work in a broader cultural and historical context. His relationships with leading Swedish cultural personalities and political authorities of the time are given significant attention, and his career is portrayed against the backdrop of life in 18th-century Stockholm, Paris, and Rome. Sergel maintained an extensive international network, and the exhibition highlights how important these connections were to his artistic development. In addition to his close friend, the Danish painter Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard, his circle of friends included renowned artists from the British Isles such as Henry Fuseli, Thomas Banks, Alexander Runciman, and James Barry.
A major focus is placed on Sergel’s more personal and private drawings. He left behind a large number of works depicting everyday life, family, friends, and erotic scenes—images that reveal the man behind the monumental sculptures: an artist who viewed his contemporaries with both sharp insight and warmth. Nationalmuseum holds an extensive collection of works by Sergel, which forms the foundation of the exhibition.
Johan Tobias Sergel: Fantasy and Reality is curated by Daniel Prytz. A smaller version of the exhibition, organized by John Marciari, will be shown in autumn 2026 at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
From The Morgan:
Johan Tobias Sergel, Self Portrait with a Bottle of Wine in Rome (Självporträtt vid en flaska vin i Rom), ink and graphite drawing, 22 × 16 cm (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, NMH 280/1891).
This exhibition—the first dedicated to Sergel outside Europe—will feature a selection of the artist’s drawings alongside sculptural works in terracotta, marble, and plaster. Trained initially in Stockholm, Sergel spent time in Paris and, more importantly, over a decade in Rome, where his associates included a dazzling international circle of artists and patrons. Sergel’s sculpture was an important model for a generation of Neoclassical artists, but the artist’s personality is most evident in the drawings that constitute a virtual diary of his life, often in caricature. An extensive corpus of self-portraits will be joined by scores of surviving sheets that explore his artistic friendships, his relationship with King Gustav III and other figures at the court in Stockholm, and his common-law marriage to Anna Rella Hellström. Sergel’s late drawings, made when he was in poor health and in a state of depression, have been compared to those of Francisco Goya. Although Sergel’s career spanned artistic movements from Rococo to Neoclassicism to Romanticism, he also seems at times a modern figure, one whose life can offer a rich story to contemporary audiences.
Exhibition | Badin: Beyond Surface and Mask
Gustaf Lundberg, Portrait of Adolph Ludvig Gustav Fredrik Albert Couschi, known as Badin, First Footman, Court Secretary, and Titular Assessor, 1775, pastel (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, NMGrh 1455).
From the Swedish Nationalmuseum in Stockholm:
Badin: Beyond Surface and Mask
Nationalmuseum, 19 February – 9 August 2026
Running alongside and partially integrated with the exhibition on artist Johan Tobias Sergel, Nationalmuseum presents a smaller-scale exhibition about Adolf Ludvig Gustav Fredrik Albrecht Couschi, also known as Badin (ca.1747–1822).
Badin is thought to have been born in 1747, seven years after Sergel, as a slave on the island of Saint Croix, a Danish colony in the Caribbean. He was later taken to Europe, where he was eventually presented as a ‘gift’ to Sweden’s Queen Lovisa Ulrika. The exhibition seeks to create a nuanced and multifaceted understanding of how a person of African descent rose to become a significant figure in Swedish society of the time.
Nationalmuseum has commissioned a new film about Badin by artist Salad Hilowle that will appear in the exhibition.
Exhibition | Longing: Painting from the Pahari Kingdoms
From the press release (3 December 2025) for the exhibition:
Longing: Painting from the Pahari Kingdoms of the Northwest Himalayas
Cincinnati Art Museum, 6 February — 7 June 2026
Curated by Ainsley Cameron
Krishna Playing with the Gopis in the Yamuna River, ca. 1770, India, Himachal Pradesh, Nurpur, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, (Cleveland Museum of Art, purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection and Millikin Purchase Fund, 2018.118).
Featuring more than 40 works of art, Longing: Painting from the Pahari Kingdoms of the Northwest Himalayas will present colorful court paintings from present-day India dating between the 17th and 19th centuries. Practicing unique techniques, artists produced these small, portable paintings primarily for royal, noble, and priestly patronage. The paintings were often given as gifts between regional nobility, families, and political allies creating large networks of artistic exchange.
Influenced by the region’s culture and politics, the artworks portray longing in several ways: through paintings of devotees who long to connect with the divine, through individuals and couples who yearn for romance, and through rulers and noblemen who longed to be at the center of political control. The exhibition encourages visitors to experience art as multisensory. Select paintings will be paired with scent or touch opportunities, while others are paired with musical soundscapes, to heighten the works’ bhava (emotion or mood) and encourage multiple ways to physically, intellectually, and emotionally connect with the art.
“This exhibition explores paintings through the lens of a shared human emotion,” reflects Ainsley M. Cameron, PhD, Curator of South Asian Art, Islamic Art & Antiquities at CAM. “Through color, form, and composition, paintings that portray devotional and cultural values, amorous alliance, or political gain also reveal an emotive force reflective of the region in which they were produced. I’m excited to share the vibrant painting histories of the Pahari region with Cincinnati audiences, to encourage our visitors to actively participate in their museum experience, to interact with art in multiple ways, and to forge new connections with the works on display.”
Longing is part of a larger research project connecting the South Asian art collections at the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), and the National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) in Washington, DC. Alongside scholars based in India, curators from these three museums are working collaboratively to research, publish, and display works from the Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim Collection. Beginning in April 2026, the CMA and the NMAA will also present exhibitions of paintings from the Pahari kingdoms. These three distinct thematic exhibitions are presented in the publication Pahari Paintings: Art and Stories, a lavishly illustrated volume that foregrounds recent research in paintings from this mountainous region. Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art and Yale University Press, the volume celebrates both the Benkaim Collection and this cross-institutional collaboration.
Sonya Rhie Mace, Sarang Sharma, and Vijay Sharma, eds., Pahari Paintings: Art and Stories (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0300286489, $65. With contributions by Catherine Glynn Benkaim, Ainsley Cameron, Debra Diamond, and Vrinda Agrawal
Exhibition | Of the Hills: Pahari Paintings
Attributed to an artist from the generation (ca. 1725–ca. 1785) after Nainsukh and Manaku, Krishna and His Family Admire a Solar Eclipse, from a Bhagavata Purana (Ancient Tales of the Lord), canto 10.82 (detail); India, Himachal Pradesh state, 1775–80; opaque watercolor on paper (Washington DC: National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Collection, Purchase from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F2017.13.5).
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Opening this spring at the National Museum of Asian Art:
Of the Hills: Pahari Paintings from India’s Himalayan Kingdoms
National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC, 18 April — 26 July 2026
Curated by Debra Diamond
The tallest mountains on earth rise from the plains of northern India in a series of steep hills, snowy peaks, and narrow valleys. From the same Himalayan region arose some of the world’s most beautiful—yet least understood—works of art. Discover the extraordinary beauty and unique history of paintings made for Hindu kings in India’s Pahari (hill) region between the 1620s and 1830s. Pahari artists worked in radically different styles ranging from lyrical and naturalistic to boldly colored and abstracted. Of the Hills: Pahari Paintings from India’s Himalayan Kingdoms illuminates new scholarship on the collaborative artist communities in which most painters worked. Learn about the political, cultural, and religious contexts of these forty-eight exquisite works, and look closely to enter a world of fine detail that delights and astounds.
The exhibition celebrates the remarkable collection of Pahari paintings the museum acquired from renowned art historian Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim. Some of these artworks have never been exhibited publicly before. We’ve brought these rare pieces into conversation with our historic collections and paintings on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Of the Hills is accompanied by the major publication Pahari Paintings: Art and Stories and runs concurrently with Pahari exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Sonya Rhie Mace, Sarang Sharma, and Vijay Sharma, eds., Pahari Paintings: Art and Stories (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0300286489, $65. With contributions by Catherine Glynn Benkaim, Ainsley Cameron, Debra Diamond, and Vrinda Agrawal
Exhibition | Epic of the Northwest Himalayas: Pahari Paintings
Rama and Lakshmana with the sage Vishvamitra, from the ‘Shangri’ Ramayana, ca. 1700, Northern India, Pahari kingdoms, gum tempera and ink on paper; page: 22 × 32 cm (Washington, DC: National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection—Funds provided by the Friends of the National Museum of Asian Art, S2018.1.9).
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Opening this spring at The Cleveland Museum of Art:
Epic of the Northwest Himalayas: Pahari Paintings from the ‘Shangri’ Ramayana
The Cleveland Museum of Art, 19 April — 16 August 2026
Curated by Sonya Rhie Mace
Forty paintings are reunited from a widely dispersed pictorial series that presents the story of the Hindu divine hero Rama. The timeless tale, more than 2,000 years old, remains a cultural force across southern Asia. Potent themes of righteousness, vengeance, and loyalty are explored through dramatic episodes in which demons are vanquished, lovers are separated, and monkeys, bears, and a man-eagle save the day. Magic abounds, and emotions fly with warriors’ arrows. Three digital stations present more than 100 gently animated images of paintings from multiple collections reassembled into their original episodic sequences.
Created with blazing colors for a royal collection around 1700, the ‘Shangri’ Ramayana has been a beloved and enigmatic series among scholars and collectors for the past century. New evidence from previously unpublished paintings reveals many more artistic styles and triple the number of total folios than have been previously recognized. It argues in favor of a collaborative model of production involving artists from across the alpine region of Pahari India, which straddles the present-day state of Himachal Pradesh and that of Jammu and Kashmir. Twelve lenders generously contributed to this focused exhibition. The unbound pictorial series began to be divided as early as the 1760s, suggesting that its spiritual merit was intended to be shared among multiple owners. Its title derives from the kingdom of Shangri, where a member of the royal family sold his 275 folios to a dealer in Delhi, beginning in 1962. Hundreds more paintings, however, have been in other royal collections.
The exhibition celebrates the publication of the Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim Collection of Pahari paintings, which includes three pages of the ‘Shangri’ Ramayana that are on view and contextualized in Epic of the Northwest Himalayas. The exhibition runs concurrently with Pahari exhibitions at the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. and the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Sonya Rhie Mace, Sarang Sharma, and Vijay Sharma, eds., Pahari Paintings: Art and Stories (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0300286489, $65. With contributions by Catherine Glynn Benkaim, Ainsley Cameron, Debra Diamond, and Vrinda Agrawal
New Book | Eighteenth-Century Indian Muraqqaʿs
From Brill:
Friederike Weis, ed., Eighteenth-Century Indian Muraqqaʿs: Audiences, Artists, Patrons, and Collectors (Leiden: Brill, 2024), 442 pages, ISBN: 9789004715783, $162. Contents available digitally for free via open access.
Fourteen essays and one appendix discuss numerous eighteenth-century Indo-Persianate albums (muraqqaʿs) consisting of folios with paintings, calligraphic pieces, and elaborate decorative margins. These albums—now in Berlin, Baroda, London, Paris, and Manchester—were assembled for or collected by the Mughal nawabs of Awadh (Uttar Pradesh), local elites in Bengal and Bihar, as well as Europeans. The book not only presents hitherto rarely investigated material, but also provides general information and many new discoveries based on first-hand codicological study and historical research. It will significantly expand our knowledge of the production, collecting practices, and audiences of muraqqaʿs in eighteenth-century India.
Friederike Weis (PhD, Freie Universität Berlin, 2005), is a specialist in Islamic albums and manuscripts. She has published extensively on cross-cultural exchanges in Persian and Indian art history and co-edited The Diez Albums: Contexts and Contents (Brill, 2016).
c o n t e n t s
1 Introduction: Problems and Challenges in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Indian Albums — Friederike Weis
Part 1 | Albums Commissioned by Mughal Elites: Contents and Compilation Strategies
2 The Indian Paintings from the Collection of Archibald Swinton, Formerly at Kimmerghame House, Berwickshire — J.P. Losty, Malini Roy, and Friederike Weis
3 Obvious Narratives and Hidden Messages in the Large Clive Album — Axel Langer
4 Two Late Mughal Albums in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle: Further Evidence for the Collections of Nawab Asaf al-Dawla — Emily Hannam
5 Mughal Art on Its own Terms: Reflections on an Album Folio — Laura E. Parodi
Part 2 | Albums of Foreign Elites: Changes and Challenges
6 Three Albums of Seigneur Gentil and Colonel Polier: Cultural Exchanges in Late Eighteenth-Century India — Susan Stronge
7 To Be Viewed from Both Ends: The Surviving Polier Albums —Friederike Weis
8 A Newly Identified Muraqqaʿ Assembled for Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier in the British Museum — Malini Roy and Jake Benson
9 Like a Garden Bedecked: Floral Margins in the Muraqqaʿs of Antoine Polier — Isabelle Imbert
Part 3 | Masters of Calligraphy and Painting: Between Historicism and Innovation
10 The Earlier Calligraphies in the Berlin Albums: Reflections on their Origins and Purpose in a Muraqqaʿ — Claus-Peter Haase
11 Polier’s Posterior Album: Rylands Persian MS 10 — Jake Benson
12 Expanding the Canon: Mir Muhammad Husayn ʿAta Khan and the Polier Albums — Will Kwiatkowski
13 Mihr Chand’s Copies and Adaptations of Earlier Mughal Paintings — John Seyller
Part 4 | Spaces and Gazes: Reading Imagined Worlds
14 The Spaces in Between: A Yogini of Lucknow for Antoine Polier —Molly Aitken
15 Building Worlds: Reading Spatiality, Power, and Gaze in Eighteenth-Century Paintings — Parul Singh
Appendix | Inscriptions and Seal Impressions in the Berlin Albums I. 4589, I. 4591, I. 4592, I 5001, and I. 4600 — Will Kwiatkowski and Friederike Weis
Credits
Bibliography
Indexes
Call for Papers | Thinking with Materials across Histories and Practices
From ArtHist.net:
Thinking with Materials across Histories and Practices
Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design, Prague, 1–2 October 2026
Proposals due by 31 March 2026
The Centre for Doctoral Studies UMPRUM is pleased to announce an international doctoral conference focused on materials and materiality in the methodology of art history. We invite participants to join us in October for a two-day conference at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.
Referring to the material, linguistic, or pictorial turn has become a convenient way for art historians to register methodological change. However, such labels risk smoothing over more gradual transformations or historiographical precedents. If we understand the objects of our inquiry as silent messengers (Dupré, 2011), it is their material that underpins their communicative force. In what is ostensibly an object-oriented discipline, one might expect material to be a fundamental point of inquiry. As Ernst Gombrich observed, even the most ordinary object, such as a teacup, opens questions rooted in its substance, physical behaviour, and mode of production (Gombrich, 1988). An object may invite multiple avenues of analysis, yet it is the material itself that first sets these questions in motion.
However, as the material turn itself demonstrates, the interest in material has gradually slipped into the background, overshadowed by approaches that tended to privilege formal or iconographic concerns. If the material turn may be understood as an invitation to re-examine the discipline’s own history (Fricke and Lehmann, 2024), the forthcoming conference seeks to pursue it with more horizontal perspectives and microhistories in mind.
We aim to explore the following thematic areas:
Voices from beyond the Canon
In the historiography of material-oriented art history, figures such as Michael Baxandall and Henri Focillon are frequently invoked, while less canonical voices whose work engaged with materials still await fuller inclusion into this discussion. During the conference, we aim to recover perspectives from diverse linguistic and regional traditions, as well as voices that may have been overlooked or forgotten in existing historiographical frameworks.
Potential avenues of inquiry include, but are not limited to, the following questions:
• How have local art-historical discourses responded to and expanded upon the work of canonical art historians—such as Baxandall—when accounting for material and technical specificities?
• To what extent have art historians historically challenged the long-standing privileging of form over matter (material) in their interpretations of artworks?
• How has the primacy of disegno interno, or the inner idea, shaped the understanding of matter (material) as subordinate in artistic creation?
• How have art historians reflected philosophical conceptions, such as hylozoism, that treat matter as an active agent in creation?
• To what extent did modern vitalist notions of matter—as lively, self-organizing, or possessing formative capacities—shape the emergence of art history and its early approaches to objects?
Rethinking Hierarchies
The recent fascination with materiality has drawn renewed attention to objects made from diverse materials, long relegated to the category of craft, such as glass, ceramics, metalwork, or textiles. Objects historically excluded from canonical art-historical narratives, particularly those grounded in artisanal knowledge, are now becoming central to emerging efforts to rethink the canon.
Possible questions for contributors may include:
• How have art historians specializing in objects relegated to the realm of craft navigated within a scholarly discourse and jargon originally shaped by the highest-ranked genres and media, such as painting or sculptures?
• Practitioners bring processual and materially grounded forms of knowledge that can redirect theoretical questions, yet their expertise often remains marginal in methodological debates. How have practitioners of art and craft—past and present—thought about materials? What insights do they contribute to reenactments and reconstructions, particularly with regard to material intelligence?
Logistics
The conference will be held in person, but online participation is also possible. The main language of the event will be English, and papers should not exceed 20 minutes. PhD students and early career researchers are particularly encouraged to apply. To be considered, please submit a proposal of 200–300 words along with a short bio (up to 150 words) to monika.drlikova@umprum.cz and david.blaha@umprum.cz by 31 March 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of April 2026.
Meals for all presenters during the conference will be covered, and we hope to offer travel support, depending on pending funding arrangements. We will update participants when funding is confirmed.
Organizing Committee
David Bláha, Denisa Dolanská, Monika Drlíková, Tomáš Klička, Veronika Králíková Červená, and Veronika Soukupová
CAA 2026, Chicago
HECAA events at this year’s CAA conference, with a full listing of panels available here. And please feel free to add additional talks and sessions in the comments section below. –CH
114th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Hilton Chicago, 18–21 February 2026
t h u r s d a y , 1 9 f e b r u a r y
9:00–10:30am | Hilton Chicago—3rd Floor—Marquette Room
Hybridity, Adaptability, and Exchange during the Long Eighteenth Century: Producing Global Aesthetics in Decorative Art and Design (HECAA session)
Chaired by Zifeng Zhao and Alisha Ma
• From Senegal to Parisian Salons: The Shiny Invisibility of Gum Arabic — Carole Nataf (Courtauld Institute)
• Versailles in Beijing: French ‘Cabinet du Roi’ Prints in Late Seventeenth-Century Qing Court and Society — Niko Ruijia Ma (KU Leuven)
• Sugarcoating Colonial Violence: Material Culture and Courtly Displays of Sugar in Ancien Régime France, 1670–1730 — Loïc Derrien (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
• Global Encounters: Imported Chintz in Early Modern Japan — Vidhita Raina (Colorado State University)
f r i d a y , 2 0 f e b r u a r y
Join HECAA members for lunch on Friday! Catch up with other HECAA members over a buy-your-own lunch at a nearby restaurant. The group will meet at the lobby of the Hilton Chicago between 12:45 and 1:00. Please be in touch with Sarah Lund (hecca.emergingscholarsrep@gmail.com) so we can know how many people to expect.
s a t u r d a y , 2 1 f e b r u a r y
2:30–4:00pm | Hilton Chicago—3rd Floor—Waldorf Room
Bad Government: Art and Politics in the Eighteenth Century (ASECS session)
Chaired by Amy Freund
• Liberty and Death — David Ehrenpreis (James Madison University)
• Risky Business: Female Artists and High-Stakes Print during the French Revolution — Sarah Lund (Harvard University)
• Sketching Fragile Authority: Pierre Eugène du Simitière and Revolutionary Visual Culture — Megan Baker (University of Delaware)
• The Art of Revolutionary Colonialism: Drawing and the Orientalist Guillotine in French-Occupied Egypt — Thadeus Dowad (Northwestern University)
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Note (added 10 February 2026) — There are plenty of other talks and panels worth noting (and please feel free to add them below!), but I especially want to highlight this session sponsored by the Historians of British Art. –CH
Thursday, 19 February, 9:00–10:30am | Hilton Chicago—8th Floor— Lake Erie
Let’s Get Metaphysical: Rethinking the Empiricism of British Art (HBA session)
Chaired by Douglas Fordham
• C. Oliver O’Donnell (University of California, Berkeley) — Contingently Enigmatic Pictures and the Metaphysics of British Empiricism
• Meredith J. Gamer (Columbia University) — Taken from Life: Hunter, Rymsdyck, and the Anatomical Portrait
• Susie Beckham (Yale Center for British Art) — Illusion of Truth: The Im/materiality of Cayley Robinson’s The Close of the Day (1896)
• Clarissa Pereira de Almeida (USP Universidade de São Paulo) — Metaphysical Metaforms: Roy Ascott’s Love–Code–Cloud–Change
Seminar | Douglas Fordham on Joseph Wright and Metaphysical Images
Joseph Wright of Derby, The Old Man and Death, 1773, oil on canvas
(Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum)
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This Newberry seminar is hosted by Alicia Caticha, with Meredith Gamer providing a response:
Douglas Fordham | Joseph Wright of Derby and the Metaphysical Image
Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar
The Newberry Library, Chicago, Friday, 20 February 2026, 3–5pm
In a recent monograph on Joseph Wright of Derby, Matthew Craske locates the artist in a genteel Midlands culture where he cultivated a melancholic temperament and a preference for seclusion. Craske describes Wright as a “painter of darkness” who sought to “stimulate sympathetic emotions” and produce a pleasurable discomfort in viewers through sublime contrasts of light and shade. Drawing on Craske’s insights, this talk raises metaphysical questions about Wright’s representation of life, death, and afterlife. Was it possible in Georgian England for painting to serve as “a catalyst of focused attention and a source of open-ended reflection”? That is how Thomas Pfau defines the metaphysical image, and we will consider just how fitting that phrase may be in relation to Wright. Were Wright’s paintings able, and were Georgian viewers willing, to grasp a radical alterity separate from oneself?
Douglas Fordham is a historian of British art and the chair of the Art Department at the University of Virginia. He co-edited Art and the British Empire (2007), which helped to place empire at the center of the study of British art. His first monograph, British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (2010) examined the relationship between imperial politics and artistic organization in eighteenth-century London. His second monograph, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (2019) considered how the newly discovered medium of aquatint printmaking conditioned the representation of cultures beyond Europe. Douglas is currently working on a book about metaphysics and Georgian painting.
This event is free, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend. Register and request paper»
The Eighteenth-Century Seminar is designed to foster research and inquiry across the scholarly disciplines in eighteenth-century studies. It aims to provide a methodologically diverse forum for work that engages ongoing discussions and debates along this historical and critical terrain. Each year the seminar sponsors one public lecture followed by questions and discussion, and two works-in-progress sessions featuring pre-circulated papers.
Online Conversation | Architecture’s Archive, 1400–1800
From the Society of Architectural Historians:
Architecture’s Archive: Paperwork in Early Modern Practice, 1400–1800
With Christine Casey, Farshid Emami, Eleonora Pistis, and Saundra Weddle
Online, An SAH Connects Session, Friday, 20 March 2026, noon EST
From drawings and invoices to maps, inventories, and account books, early modern architectural practice abounded with paperwork. These documents emerged from a historical moment beginning around 1400 that witnessed the rise of new technologies and regimes for the management of information. While essential to historical scholarship, documents have long been taken for granted merely as sources to mine for data. Towards a fuller view of paperwork, this SAH Connects event invites a reframing of documents as spatial objects whose form, use, content, and production merit critical consideration.
Documents call attention to questions of process but also, more generally, the material realities of building in the early modern world. Panelists will speak about the historiographic and methodological stakes of a document that has animated their scholarship. Among the questions to be considered are: What do documents clarify or obscure? How did documents serve institutions, particular those that oversaw building activity? How did architectural documents circulate? What new possibilities do documents provide for uncovering non-elite figures or extra-architectural actors who shaped the built environment? Who is absent from documents? What temporal, material, or scalar slippages exist between documents and buildings? How do we wrestle with fragmentary or compromised documentary evidence? While anchored in the early modern world, this conversation will invite broad critical reflection on the documentary sources that underpin architectural history.
With the goal of highlighting new work, we have invited authors whose recently published books engage with a variety of building cultures at a range of scales from across the early modern world. Speaking from their books, each participant will discuss a single historical document that was central to their analysis of the actors, systems and processes that shaped the built environment.
• Christine Casey, Trinity College Dublin | Architecture and Artifice: The Crafted Surface in Eighteenth-Century Building Practice (Yale University Press, 2025).
• Farshid Emami, Rice University | Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State Press, 2024).
• Eleonora Pistis, Columbia University | Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (Harvey Miller, 2024).
• Saundra Weddle, Drury University | The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Penn State Press, 2026).
The session will be moderated by Matthew Gin (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Ann C. Huppert (University of Washington), and Kristin Triff (Trinity College).
Registration is available here»
SAH CONNECTS, a year-round series of virtual programs related to the history of the built environment, provides a platform for the SAH community to collaborate, share their work, engage in timely discussions, and reach worldwide audiences.
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