New Book | Curating Transatlantic Slavery
From Bloomsbury:
Matthew Jones, Curating Transatlantic Slavery: Contesting Histories and Practices in the Museum (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1350444119, £85 / $115.
Following the watershed Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and the wider public awareness of the legacies of the British Empire that has followed, how have museums developed anti-racist and decolonial practices that engage more directly with slavery’s ongoing legacies?
Curating Transatlantic Slavery presents a timely intervention into this important work, examining the curating and decision-making processes that underpin the memorialization and display of Transatlantic Slave Trade histories. Questioning how contemporary curatorial practice has been shaped by wider processes of race and racialization, and how it can engage further with these issues, Matthew Jones argues that museums must be self-reflective: scrutinizing the ways in which they racialize those they collaborate with, be that artists or communities, and how their own histories are linked with historical structures of racialization.
Each chapter focuses on a distinctive aspect of contemporary museum practice in relation to colonial history and race, covering the varying approaches of museums in the UK and Europe. Museums discussed include the Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands, Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, and in the UK: the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Bristol Museums, and National Maritime Museum. Driven by comparative analysis, the chapters are grouped under the following themes, representing the core issues related to engaging with the Transatlantic Slave Trade and colonial histories on a curatorial basis: institutional history and memory; collaborative curatorial practice with communities, artists and academics; affect and the communication of trauma; and finally the impact of contemporary anti-racist movements on the displaying of slavery and anti-slavery resistance. In deconstructing these processes and histories in modern museum practice, Curating Transatlantic Slavery challenges the role of museums across the world, in the formation of racial representations and provides alternative paths towards instituting anti-racist practices.
Matthew Jones is an early career researcher with a PhD from the University Sussex. He is the co-founder of the Post-Colonial Heritage Research Group and works in museums in visitor engagement.
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Challenging History in the Contact Zone
1 | Institutional Memory and Slavery
Victoria and Albert Museum: Art, Design and Slavery
The British Museum: Racial Capitalism and the Universal Museum
2 | National Museums and Slavery
The National Portrait Gallery: Placing the Caribbean in white British History
Memory, Geography and Race in the Portrait Gallery
AfricaMuseum: Civilising Colonialism
3 | Collaborative Curating and Race
The National Maritime Museum: Questioning Practice
Bristol Museums: Frameworks of Collaboration
Representation, Racialisation, and Collaboration
4 | Challenging Racecraft
London Museum Docklands and the Economics of Whiteness
Tropenmuseum: Whiteness, Nation, and Neutrality
Subverting Racecraft
5 | Bearing Witness: Emotion and Trauma in the International Slavery Museum
The ISM and Memorialisation in 2007
The ISM Since 2007: History and Social Justice
The ISM and Affective Autonomy within Wider Museum Practice
6 | Whiteness, Abolitionism and Affect
The Wilberforce House Museum
The Legacies of Transatlantic Slavery at the Wilberforce House Museum
Whiteness and Affect
7 | Collecting Anti-Racism
Protests and Rapid Response Collecting
The Politics of Articulating Black Lives Matter
All Voices Will Be Heard: the Consultative Exhibition
The Permanent Exhibition: Who Narrates Protest?
Conclusion: A Way Forward?
Index
New Book | Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
With the first edition having appeared in 2010, the second edition was released earlier this year:
David Eltis, David Richardson, and Philip Misevich, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, second edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-0300278552, $65. Foreword by Toyin Falola and David Brion Davis, afterword David Blight. The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.
A monumental cartographic history of the African slave trade, updated and expanded in a new edition.
In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored details of the 350-year history of African slave traffic to the New World. They showed, with nearly 200 original maps, where the captives came from, how long the journeys lasted, how many died on the voyages, and what the ports and destinations were. They also presented details about the trade itself, including the economics. In this groundbreaking revised edition, 25 new maps locate the major language groups involved in the traffic and show the movement of Africans from the interior of the continent to the Americas, as well as from one part of the Americas to another. Accompanying the maps, as in the first edition, are revealing illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries. With up-to-date information drawn from the database Slave Voyages (www.slavevoyages.org), with its records of more than 36,000 voyages, the atlas provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history.
David Eltis is Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History, Emory University. His prizewinning books include The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas.
David Richardson (1946–2023) was the director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation and professor of economic history, University of Hull, England. His final book was Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition.
Philip Misevich is associate professor of history at St. John’s University. He is the author of Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790s to 1860s.
At Christie’s | Jan van Huysum Pendant Still Lifes
Jan van Huysum, Left | A Vase of Flowers, including roses, tulips, and a crown imperial, with a bird’s nest on a marble ledge, a statue of Flora and columns behind, in a landscape, signed and dated 1731/32, 80 x 59.3 cm. Right | Fruits, including grapes, peaches, figs and a pineapple, with hollyhocks and poppies in a sculpted vase, in a landscape, signed and dated 1732 and 1733, 79.9 x 60.3 cm. Estimate: £6,000,000–8,000,000.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the press release (9 November 2026) . . .
Old Masters Evening Sale during Classic Week
Christie’s, London, 8 December 2026
A Vase of Flowers and Fruit with Flowers are the only known large-scale fruit and flower pendants by the peerless still-life painter Jan van Huysum in private hands. These magnificent panels (estimate: £6–8million) will lead Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale in London on 8 December, during Classic Week.
Painted with dazzling skill at the height of the artist’s career in the early 1730s, their exceptional quality is matched by distinguished provenance spanning three of the most notable European art collecting dynasties in history: the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel, the Barings, and the Rothschilds. Remarkably, they have remained together since their creation. Part of a private English collection for the last eighty years, the sale of these pictures presents the market with a unique opportunity. The paintings are on tour to New York (until 16 November), ahead of being on public view in London for the pre-sale exhibition (4–8 December).
Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s Global Head of the Old Masters Department commented: “In terms of quality, condition and visual impact these are amongst the finest eighteenth-century still lifes I have come across and they perfectly exemplify the refinement and ambition of Van Huysum’s mature style. We are thrilled to be handling their sale, following the record prices achieved for the artist earlier this year at Christie’s.”
Pendant Pictures within the Genre of Still Life
As the genre of still life emerged in its own right, so too did collectors’ taste for pendant fruit and flower pieces, uniting two complementary expressions of nature’s bounty: the ephemeral splendour of flowers with the rich abundance of fruit. This tradition reached its zenith in such sumptuous pendants by Jan van Huysum (1682–1749), whose meticulous technique, brilliant colouring and sophisticated compositions elevated the genre to new heights. He included an astonishing array of forms, colours, and textures. In A Vase of Flowers, a splendid bouquet rises above an elegant terracotta vase, bringing together roses, hyacinths, gentians, peonies, blossom, and other flowers in an arrangement that transcends the blooms of a single season; in Fruit with Flowers, peaches, grapes, figs, plums, redcurrants, and a pomegranate spill across a marble ledge, before hollyhocks and a terracotta vase of poppies. Such variety provided the artist with an opportunity to display the range of his technical brilliance, from the smooth surfaces of plump grapes, to the velvety, soft skin of the peaches, and the challenging textures of seeds and pulp. Van Huysum’s mastery of light animates these pictures, which are both illuminated by an unseen source from the left.
A Celebration of Nature’s Bounty
The brief flowering and inevitable decay of fruit and flowers is frequently read as a reflection on the transience of earthly life. Yet in these pendants, van Huysum appears equally intent on celebrating nature’s bounty in all its richness, breadth, and scale. This spirit is underlined by the animated reliefs that decorate the terracotta vases. In A Vase of Flowers, a putto suspends himself playfully from a garland of flowers, whilst in Fruit with Flowers, three dancing nymphs, perhaps an allusion to the Three Graces, evoke harmony and abundance.
Famously Secretive
The dates inscribed by the artist reveal a key feature of his famously secretive working method. Both paintings are dated twice: A Vase of Flowers is dated 1731 and 1732, while Fruit with Flowers is dated 1732 and 1733. This is not uncommon in van Huysum’s work, and underlines his preference for painting specimens from life, even waiting months for the right flower to bloom so that he could paint it from nature. In order to capture varieties from life, these pictures may have been started in the summer months, when the right flowers were in bloom. Van Huysum likely continued work during the winter months before completing them in the spring or summer of the following year. This laborious process allowed him to observe each flower and fruit at its peak. The resulting compositions are therefore not exact records of a particular time, but carefully orchestrated inventions in which varieties from different seasons are observed from life and ‘live’ together on the canvas in a harmonious composition.
Distinguished Provenance
Whilst many of van Huysum’s fruit and flower paintings were not necessarily conceived as pendants, and were only paired up by later collectors, these remarkable works appear to have always remained together in a succession of exceptional collections. They are first recorded in a 1783 inventory of the celebrated Hesse-Kassel collection during the reign of Landgrave Frederick II, possibly acquired by his predecessor and father, Landgrave Wilhelm VIII who formed one of the finest picture collections in pre-revolutionary Europe having spent his youth in the Netherlands, which ignited a lifelong passion for Dutch and Flemish painting. The pre-Kassel history continues to be the subject of debate, on account both of the generic descriptions in eighteenth-century inventories and sale catalogues as well as the artist’s penchant for using standard-sized panels. They have traditionally been identified with the pictures acquired from the Counts Zinzendorf und Pottendorf of Vienna in 1762 by the renowned Swiss artist and collector Jean Étienne Liotard (1702–1789). At Kassel, they passed by descent from Frederick II to his eldest son, Wilhelm IX, and remained in the collection until they were seized by French forces in 1806 and gifted to Empress Josephine Bonaparte, who probably took them to Château de Malmaison. Not listed in either the 1811 or 1814 inventories of Malmaison, they were presumably selected as gifts, or sold in untraced sales before 1811.
By the time John Smith published his famous Catalogue of van Huysum’s work in 1835, the paintings were recorded in the distinguished collection of banker, politician, and connoisseur, Alexander Baring, later 1st Baron Ashburton. They then passed through several generations of the Baring family, before the collection was acquired en bloc in 1907 by Thomas Agnew & Co. and a consortium of other dealers. These pictures were bought by Alfred de Rothschild, scion of another eponymous banking family, who was a formidable connoisseur and collector. Alfred bequeathed Halton House to his nephew, Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (1882–1942), who later sold the property and moved much of the contents—including these paintings—to his own home, Exbury House. Lionel Nathan’s passion for botany is well-known from the renowned rhododendron and azalea gardens at the world-famous horticultural estate at Exbury, where the pendants found an especially fitting new home. According to Lionel’s probate valuation of April 1942 (Rothschild Archive, London, 000/920), the present paintings were sold to Partridge for £1,250 each, from whom Sir Edward Mountain, the founder of Eagle Star Insurance, purchased them in 1946. These superb pictures have passed by descent in the family ever since.
New Book | Gainsborough and Reynolds: The Art of Rivalry
From Yale UP:
Jacqueline Riding, Gainsborough and Reynolds: The Art of Rivalry in Georgian London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2027), 408 pages, ISBN: 978-0300284904, £25 / $35.
When two ambitious young Englishmen arrive in the metropolis, their rivalry changes the course of Western Art.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) and Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) were viewed as bitter rivals throughout their lifetimes and beyond. Despite similar upbringings in English counties far from the capital, they had completely different characters, opposing attitudes to life and art, and distinct career paths. Even when neighbours in London they were rarely seen in the same room at the same time, to the bewilderment of mutual friends and professional colleagues. Their common ground was the Royal Academy of Arts, of which Reynolds was founding president, with its annual showcase of contemporary art as the crucible of their shared competitiveness and personal animosity.
For the first time, three hundred years since they were born and with the Gainsborough tercentenary imminent, Jacqueline Riding explores the lives, loves and loathing of these two formidable artists side-by-side and in the round: venturing behind the closed doors of home and studio, alongside the hallowed halls of the Royal Academy and the civic and public realms. Structured around significant episodes and themes, she paints a vibrant double portrait that is fresh, captivating and surprising.
Jacqueline Riding specialises in eighteenth- and nineteenth century British history and art. She is author of Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion (Bloomsbury, 2016), Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre (Head of Zeus, 2018), Hogarth: Life in Progress (Profile, 2021) the Sunday Times Art Book of the Year, and Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London (Profile, 2026).
Exhibition | Thomas Gainsborough: Painter of Life
Thomas Gainsborough, Rocky, Wooded Landscape with a Dell and Weir, detail, ca. 1782/83, oil on canvas, 70.5 × 91 cm
(The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1984.59)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Looking ahead to Gainsborough’s 300th anniversary year in 2027, from the SMB:
Thomas Gainsborough: Painter of Life / Maler des Lebendigen
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, 14 May — 12 September 2027
Curated by Sarah Salomon
To commemorate the 300th birthday of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), the Gemäldegalerie will present a special exhibition of the highest calibre, based on Berlin’s unique collection of British painting and outstanding international loans. Featuring some 50 works, this show is the leading continental European contribution to the Gainsborough anniversary year.
Alongside Gainsborough’s works and several by his British contemporaries, artworks by the painter’s predecessors, including Rubens, van Dyck and Watteau, will also be on view. The exhibition focuses on the poetic connection between a portrait and nature, a hallmark of the artist’s oeuvre. Using lively brushstrokes, Gainsborough created visual worlds full of lightness and expressiveness that seem to foreshadow the Impressionists’ plein air painting style. Under the overarching theme of “taking a stroll,” the exhibition invites visitors to encounter the painter and his models.
Gainsborough in Berlin
Thomas Gainsborough, The Marsham Children, 1787, oil on canvas, 243 × 182 cm (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie).
Why Berlin? Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie owns five of Gainsborough’s notable individual and group portraits, including the early portrait of his wife Margaret (c. 1759), a life-sized portrait of steel manufacturer John Wilkinson (c. 1775), and the monumental group portrait of The Marsham Children (1787). The latter is among the most free-spirited imagery of his late work. A fondness for Gainsborough and his British contemporaries can be traced back to a cultural event in Prussian history:
In 1908, an extensive loan exhibition of more than 100 English paintings, mainly from British private collections, was held at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. The exhibition resulted from cultural and diplomatic efforts intended to improve the strained relationships between the dynastically closely related royal houses of Great Britain and Prussia. Numerous spectacular works by the British School, then little known on the European mainland, were shown there.
The popularity and success of the exhibition led Wilhelm von Bode and his successors to build up a first-rate collection of British painting from the 18th and early 19th centuries, which remains unparalleled in Germany to this day. In addition to Gainsborough’s art, the collection includes significant works by Joshua Reynolds, Johan Zoffany, and Richard Wilson, some of which will also be on view in the special exhibition.
A Walk in Greenery
Thomas Gainsborough is today likely the most popular English painter of his time, because of his free-spirited style. He transformed the dignitaries of the Baroque era, who had been positioned like statues before massive columns and heavy velvet curtains, into casually elegant people strolling outdoors. Gainsborough drew inspiration from his great role model, Anthony van Dyck, among others, and initiated a new look in portrait painting, which can be considered the most popular genre of the 18th century.
His strollers are in motion, but pause, and meet viewers at eye level. They exude a natural immediacy and presence. Gainsborough understood his models not only as representatives of society, but rather as individuals within a wider natural context. While doing so, he touched on fundamental questions of the Enlightenment and developed a pictorial language whose modernity still resonates today.
Tradition and a New View
Gainsborough’s depictions of trees and gently winding forest paths are not by-products of his artistic oeuvre. He was the first painter of his time to elevate the English landscape into an autonomous subject in its own right, thereby marking the beginning of a profound interest in the genre among subsequent generations of British artists.
His intense study of nature has come down to us through countless drawing studies that were made during excursions in his native South England. Like his portraits, Gainsborough also incorporated painterly influences into his landscape paintings, which, thanks to the Gemäldegalerie’s outstanding collection, can be illustrated through meaningful juxtapositions with works by Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter Paul Rubens, and Gaspard Dughet.
Free Brushstrokes
With his free, almost impetuous brushstrokes, Gainsborough transforms the canvas into a shimmering cosmos of colour, light and air, already pointing the way to Impressionism’s plein air painting. Drawing studies from the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) ‒ Staatliche Museen zu Berlin make it possible to discover the artist as a virtuoso draughtsman of landscapes and figural studies, and to watch him at work during the creative process, as if looking over his shoulder.
The exhibition is curated by Sarah Salomon, curator of 18th-century European and 17th-century German painting.
Conference | Faces of Physiognomy, 1750–1850
From ArtHist.net:
Gesichter der Physiognomik, 1750–1850
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, 27 November 2026
Organized by Léna Pican and Mechthild Fend
Die deutsch-französische Tagung, die am 27. November 2026 an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt stattfindet, widmet sich der Physiognomik – von ihrer Ausformulierung im 18. Jahrhundert um Johann Caspar Lavaters Physiognomische Fragmente bis zu ihren späteren Wiederaufnahmen. Sie untersucht ihre Entstehungsbedingungen und ihre Rezeption in Frankreich, ihre kritische Auseinandersetzung bei Kant, die Materialien und Bildtechniken, die sie tragen – vom Porträt bis zur Silhouette –, sowie ihre Aneignungen bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Die Tagung bringt Forscherinnen und Forscher aus verschiedenen Disziplinen zusammen (Kunstgeschichte, Philosophie, Rechtsgeschichte und Wissensgeschichte). Die Vorträge werden auf Französisch, Deutsch oder Englisch gehalten.
Organisation: Léna Pican und Mechthild Fend, mit Unterstützung des IFRA-SHS und der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.
p r o g r a m m
9.30 Begrüßung / Accueil
9.45 Einführung / Introduction — Léna Pican
10.00 Panel 1 | La physiognomonie et la France
Moderation: Andreas Mayer (CNRS / Centre Alexandre-Koyré, EHESS)
• Edern de Barros (Université de Mayotte, online) — Du tempérament à la « physionomie nationale ». Lire le caractère sur les corps et sur les peuples dans la pensée française (1746–1802)
• Nina Eckhoff-Heindl (Universität Bonn) — Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthes Anmerkungen zur Physiognomik kognitiver Behinderung
11.30 Panel 2 | Kant und die Physiognomik
Moderation: Mirja Beck (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
• Luc-Étienne de Boyer (Saint-Étienne) — L’attitude de Kant envers la physiognomonie : de la tentation naturaliste à la disqualification esthétique
• Ousmane Mballo (Toulouse) — Kant et la physiognomonie : les limites et la fonction pragmatique de la connaissance de l’être humain
12.40 Mittagspause / Déjeuner
14.15 Panel 3 | Les matériaux de la physiognomonie
Moderation: Mechthild Fend (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
• Martina Sitt (Universität Kassel) — Kontur gewinnen: Lavaters Physiognomien und Tischbeins Porträts 1781/1782
• Bulkhia Panalondong, M.A. (Oldenburg) — From Silhouette to Silver Gelatin: The 18th-Century Physiognomic Gaze in Fedor Jagor’s Reisen in den Philippinen
15.45 Panel 4 | Appropriations et physiognomonies
Moderation: Andreas Häckermann (IFRA-SHS, Frankfurt)
• Alice Vincent (Université de Franche-Comté / IFRA-SHS, Frankfurt) — Adorno et la physiognomonie
16.30 Abschlussdiskussion / Discussion générale et synthèse
Attingham Courses in 2027
Attingham Park, Shropshire
(Wehha, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
As the Attingham Trust marks its 75 anniversary in 2027, they are delighted to announce three courses taking place throughout the year, with a limited number of scholarships. Applications are welcomed from academics and museum professionals worldwide.
The Study Programme | The Historic House in Wales
Led by Elizabeth Jamieson with Rita Grudzień , 5–11 June 2027
Applications due by 29 January 2027
Wales’s country houses and estates have distinctive stories to tell, yet their place in the wider history of the British country house has often been overlooked. This intensive seven-day programme, based in North Wales, explores their rich heritage through visits, lectures and discussion, examining the architecture, landscapes, collections, patronage and people that shaped them. Highlights include Penrhyn Castle, Plas Newydd, Portmeirion, and the gardens of Plas Cadnant. Directed by Elizabeth Jamieson and coordinated by Rita Grudzień, the programme offers fresh perspectives on the history and significance of the Welsh country house.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The Attingham Summer School
Led by David Adshead and Tessa Wild, 26 June — 11 July 2027
Applications due by 29 January 2027
Founded in 1952, the Attingham Summer School celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2027. This renowned 16-day residential programme offers an in-depth study of Britain’s historic houses, collections, gardens and landscapes, exploring their architectural and social history through visits, lectures, and discussion, alongside the opportunity to exchange ideas and perspectives with fellow participants and build connections with heritage professionals from around the world. Directed by David Adshead and Tessa Wild, the programme will visit houses across seven English counties, including Petworth House, Parham, Hardwick Hall, Chatsworth, Boughton House, Weston Park, and Attingham Park, where the first Summer School took place in 1952.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Royal Collection Studies
Led by Helen Jacobsen, 5–14 September 2027
Applications due by 12 February 2027
Organised in partnership with the Royal Collection Trust, this 10-day residential course offers a rare opportunity to explore one of the world’s great collections of fine and decorative art at close quarters. Through visits to royal palaces, lectures, tutorials and object study, participants will discover five centuries of royal collecting, gaining insight into the remarkable works of art, the architecture and interiors of the palaces, and the evolving questions of display, interpretation and stewardship. Directed by Dr Helen Jacobsen, the programme brings together heritage professionals from around the world, offering a valuable opportunity to exchange ideas and perspectives, learn from leading curators and specialists, and forge new professional connections.
Call for Papers | Colonial Objectscapes, ISECS 2027
From ArtHist.net (with more information about the 2027 ISECS Congress available here) . . .
Colonial Objectscapes of the Global 18th Century
Panel at the 17th International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Congress
Zaragoza, Spain, 12–16 July 2027
Proposals due by 30 November 2026
Expanding on Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys’ (2021) concept of an objectscape as “the material and stylistic properties of a repertoire of objects in a given period or geographic range,” this session explores the material cultures generated and shaped by European colonial networks, exploitation, ideologies, and resistance over the long eighteenth century. Though the globalisation of many commodities and artistic traditions has occurred since long before this period, the eighteenth century saw marked changes to the nature and scale in the movement of objects. Such changes resulted from various factors including but not limited to the establishment of new trade routes; the reorganisation of labour via African and indigenous American chattel slavery; and technological developments relating to transport, farming, and manufacturing. Without discounting pre-colonial histories as well as concurrent local and indigenous histories of objects affected by the shifting dynamics of the early modern period, the framework of the objectscape takes as a point of departure the connected or shared cultural meanings and identities that are accrued within a specific context—here being the colonial.
We invite papers that consider how materials and objects function within their historical context as an assemblage, rather than individual units of analysis. In practice, this involves studying interactions between different objects and materials as well as with their makers and consumers, the spaces they inhabit, or the ways that they are visually and aesthetically represented. This framework approaches material culture studies holistically by combining object-based research with art, labour, and environmental histories among others. The panel especially emphasises the global scope of such objectscapes, involving a multitude of agents beyond the elite, European, and human. We thus also welcome ecocritical perspectives which ask how objectscapes are shaped by indigenous ecologies and environmental agencies.
Panel convenor: Alisha Ma (London School of Economics and Political Science). Please submit a 200-word abstract and/or any questions to the panel convenor at: a.e.ma@lse.ac.uk.
New Book | Landscape Drawing in Europe, 1500–1800
From Paul Holberton, with distribution from Yale UP:
Camilla Pietrabissa and Elisa Spataro, eds., Landscape Drawing in Europe, 1500–1800: The Experience of Place (London: Ad Ilissum, 2026), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1915401205, £60 / $75.
The first book devoted to the history and theory of landscape drawing in early modern Europe, this study traces the practice of drawing from nature across three centuries, exploring how artists experienced, interpreted and transformed the landscape—and arguing for these works as independent achievements rather than mere preparatory studies. Bringing together art history, theory, and material culture, this richly illustrated volume explores artists’ engagement with the landscape and the fascinating creative process of producing views, offering new perspectives on how landscape forms and meanings were understood through drawing. Its contributors—scholars and drawing specialists from universities, museums, and private collections—examine diverse geographical and cultural contexts through original case studies of artistic practice.
The essays range widely, from Italian to Northern European art, from close material study to historiographic narratives. They include analyses of large panoramas by Pozzoserrato and of small sketchbooks by Tuscan artists in the 16th and 17th centuries; studies of the techniques used by Rembrandt to depict wetlands and of his landscape practice across different media; and explorations of the exchange between Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Hubert Robert in their rendering of organic textures and temporal effects. Further chapters consider the practices of Federico Zuccari, Federico Barocci and Nicolas-Didier Boguet, as well as artificial landscapes devised for 17th-century court performances for Christine of Bourbon-France and the watercolours by British artists for early 19th-century design firms.
This volume seeks to foreground the autonomy of landscape drawing and to challenge the traditional assumption that early modern drawings of nature were conceived primarily in relation to painting. It will offer new tools to study the materiality of works on paper as it relates to drawing practices, helping readers reflect on the early modern experience and perception of landscape, and on the way it has shaped the artistic canon of pictorial genres and the representation of nature.
Camilla Pietrabissa is Adjunct lecturer in Art History at Università Ca’ Foscari and Università IUAV in Venice.
Elisa Spataro is an Adjunct lecturer in Art History at Sapienza University of Rome.
New Book | Images of the Plant Humanities
From Bloomsbury:
Danielle Sands and Daniel Whistler, eds., Images of the Plant Humanities: Theory, Art, and the Botanic Gaze (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1350502611, $120. Also available as an ebook.
Exploring the words and images used to represent plants, this interdisciplinary book examines how vegetal life has been theorised both in the contemporary plant humanities, a developing field of research which aims to rectify the traditional neglect of plants as a model for thinking, and in Western modernity more generally.
Focusing on the varied ways that the vegetal has been represented, misrepresented, or even hidden, during modernity, it studies how philosophical, scientific and environmental theories, as well as colonial histories, have determined these representations, as well as how these representations have themselves influenced theory. Bringing aesthetic depictions of plant life into conversation with philosophical, cultural, literary, and scientific thinking, it looks to return our attention to vegetal life, and to challenge traditional assumptions regarding plant intelligence, agency, and communication.
Danielle Sands is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Daniel Whistler is Professor of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity (2013) and co-author of The Right to Wear Religious Symbols (2013).
c o n t e n t s
Part One | Understanding Plant Monsters
1 ‘What a Strange Prodigy’: The Welwitschia mirabilis — Katherine Arnold (University of Liverpool)
2 No Monsters Here: Vegetable Teratology and Plant Horror — Stella Sandford (Manchester Metropolitan University)
3 Abnormal Plants and Anomalous Arts: Troubling the Non/Human Norm — Aliya Say (Independent scholar)
4 The ‘Plant Horror’ of Turpin’s Urpflanze and Hooker’s Welwitschia: Narratives of Monstrous Proliferation and Grotesque Hybridity — Caroline Harris (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Part Two | Narrating Plant Desires
5 Thinking Sex with Plants: The Speculative Sexualities of Enlightenment Botany — Natania Meeker (University of Southern California)
6 Fern Tongues: A Pteridomaniac’s Imagination of Vegetal Time and Desire — Solvejg Nitzke (Ruhr-University Bochum)
7 Dragon Arum: A Phytopoetic Gaze on Vegetal Violence and Eroticism — Joela Jacobs (University of Arizona)
8 The Quest for the Blue Flower: The Legacy of German Romanticism in Three Contemporary Novels — Isabel Kranz (University for Applied Arts, Vienna)
Part Three | Rediscovering Plant Agency
9 The Temporality of Titan Arum — John C. Ryan (University of Notre Dame, Australia)
10 Prickly-Pairs: On Humans, Plants, and Technicity — Ed Thornton (Independent Researcher)
11 Extending the Botanical: Agency, Abstraction, and Contemporary Plant Drawing — Danielle Sands (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Part Four | Resituating Plants Ecologically
12 Undoing the Hollow Space of Representation: Margaret Mee’s Plant Portraits in the Kew Collection — Yota Batsaki (Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University)
13 Papa and Kuka: A Biocultural Exploration of Two Andean Crops — Nataly Allasi Canales (University of Copenhagen, Denmark/Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) and Kim Walker (Royal Holloway, University of London/Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
14 Lacebark and the Interior Décor of the Jamaican Slave Cottage — Steeve Buckridge (Grand Valley State University)
15 Humboldt and Bonpland’s Essay on the Geography of Plants: The Other Side of the Physical Tableau of the Andes — Quentin Hiernaux (Université libre de Bruxelles)
Part Five | Redrawing Plant Boundaries
16 ‘Here Nature stopped half-way’: Waterlilies and the Foliar Theory of the Flower — Ulrich Stegmann (University of Aberdeen)
17 The Place of Algae in Experimental Natural Histories — Joan Steigerwald (University of York)
18 A ‘Funeral Oration’ for Lichenology? — Lydia Azadpour (University of Nottingham)
Part Six | Representing Plants Otherwise
19 This Is Not a Brugmansia — Giovanni Aloi (Independent Researcher)
20 Ginkgo and Dark Botany — Prudence Gibson (University of New South Wales, Sydney) and Maya Martin-Westheimer (University of New South Wales)
21 Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes: Gestures for Hands Driven by Sunlight — Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London)
22 The Ecology of Plant Iconography — Laurence Hill (Independent Artist)
Part Seven | Reimagining Plant Forms
23 Blue So Deep — Ben Woodard (Independent Researcher)
24 Containing Nature in the Leaves of a Book: Botany, Bibliography, and the Embodiment of Thought — Thomas Moynihan (University of Cambridge)
25 Drawing the Urpflanze: Goethe, Arber, Grothendieck — Sophie Gerber (University of Bordeaux)
Afterword: The Library and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Julia Buckley (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
leave a comment