Lecture on the Macclesfield Library
Seminar on the History of Libraries
University of London, Senate House, Room G37, Malet St WC1E 7HU, 2 February 2010, 5:30pm
The next seminar in this series held in London will take place on Tuesday February 2 in the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Paul Quarrie (Maggs Bros. Ltd.) will speak on “An Intellectual Library: The Library Built up between c. 1700 and 1750 by the Earls of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle.”
Paul Quarrie has been intimately involved in the discovery and documentation of this library since the mid-1990s, and since 2004 in its sad dispersal. He will discuss the nature, growth and composition of this remarkable library, and some of the figures involved in this.
The meeting will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Room G 37, Senate House, Malet St., London WC1E 7HU, UK. All are welcome.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
E. Henry Nicholls provides an introduction to the circumstances surrounding the sale of the Macclesfield library in an article from Endeavour 29 (March 2005), available here.
New York Ceramics Fair
At The Magazine Antiques (20 January 2010), Carolyn Kelly surveys a selection of English ceramics:
Ceramics 101: A Sampling of Antique English Wares
With the dizzying array of wares on display this week at the New York Ceramics Fair (20-24 January 2010), it seems like an opportune time to review some of the basics of the medium. Though most of our readers are familiar with names like Wedgwood and Grueby, we’ve rounded-up a few quintessential examples of English ceramics as an introduction to the widely varied styles that have been created in clay. . .
For the full article, click here»
CAA in Chicago
The 2010 College Art Association conference takes place in Chicago, February 10-13, at the Hyatt Regency. HECAA will be represented by two panels, as listed here. The following sessions may also be of interest for dixhuitièmistes.
HECAA EVENTS, THURSDAY, 11 February 2010
New Scholars: Transforming Traditions in Eighteenth-Century Art
Chair: Laura Auricchio (Parsons The New School for Design)
Thursday, February 11, 12:30-2:00; Grand CD South, Gold Level, East Tower
- Ryan White (independent scholar, Toronto), “Vision, Display, and Information: Chardin as Tapissier”
- Lyrica Taylor (University of Maryland, College Park), “Portrait of the Artist: John Francis Rigaud’s Vision of the Role of the Artist in Eighteenth-Century England”
- Hector Reyes (Northwestern University), “Classicism’s Secret Histories: On Jean-Germain Drouais’s Christ and the Canaanite”
- Amber Ludwig (Boston University), “Emma Hamilton as Grand Tourist”
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Representing the Psyche in Eighteenth-Century Art
Chair: Michael Yonan (University of Missouri, Columbia)
Thursday, February 11, 2:30-5:00; Grand A, Gold Level, East Tower
- Heather McPherson (University of Alabama, Birmingham), “Thinking Heads: Representing Mental Activity in Eighteenth-Century Portraiture”
- Emma Barker (Open University), “Figures of Pathos: Melancholy and Interiority in Late-Eighteenth-Century Art”
- Thomas Beachdel (Graduate Center, City University of New York), “Awestruck: Claude-Joseph Vernet and the French Sublime”
- Yuriko Jackall (Université de Lyon 2), “Divas, Nymphs, and Fallen Maidens: Greuze’s Experiments in Expression”
- Barrett Kalter (University of Wisconisn, Milwauke), “Romantic Stained Glass and the Formation of a Neomedieval Consciousness”
HECAA Reception
Thursday, February 11, 5:30-7:00, Ogden, West Tower at Silver Level
OTHER SESSIONS RELATED TO THE 18TH CENTURY
THURSDAY, 11 February 2010
Early Modern Globalization (1400-1700)
Chairs: Angela Vanhaelen (McGill University) and Bronwen Wilson (University of British Columbia)
Thursday, February 11, 9:30-noon, Grand EF, Gold Level, East Tower
- Susan Wight Swanson (University of Minnesota), “Cannibal Complexities: Metaphors of Incorporation and Early Modern Globalization”
- Sean Roberts (University of Southern California), “Globalism, Economy, and Early Modern Print”
- Emine Fetvaci (Boston University) “From Elogia to Physiognomy: Complicating Early Modern Globalization”
- Stacey Sloboda (Southern Illinois University), “Made in China? Networks of Exchange in Ming Dynasty Porcelain”
- Claudia Swan (Northwestern University), “Exoticism at Work: Dutch Culture in a Global Context (1600-50)”
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
British Art: Survey and Field in the Context of Glocalization (Historians of British Art)
Chair: Colette Crossman
Thursday, February 11, 8:00-10:30pm, Grand B, Gold Level, East Tower
- David Bindman, “British Art and the Uncertainties of Britishness”
- Sara N. James (Mary Baldwin College), “Art on the Margins: The Paradoxical Canon of Early British Art”
- Andrea Wolk Rager (Yale Center for British Art), “1870-1910: The Lost Decades of British Artistic Modernity”
- Alice Correia (University of Sussex and Gimpel Fils), “Zarina Bhimji: Broadening Definitions of Britishness?”
- Neil Mulholland (Edinburgh College of Art), “Neomedieval Art after Britain”
- Discussant: Jennifer Way (University of North Texas)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
FRIDAY, 12 February 2010
HBA Business Meeting and Young Scholars’ Session (HBA)
Friday, February 12, 7:30-9:00am: Grand B, Gold Level, East Tower
- Georgina Cole (PhD candidate, University of Sydney), “Doors, Charity, and Genre: A New Reading of Thomas Gainsborough’s Charity Relieving Distress“
- Stassa Edwards (PhD candidate, Florida State University), ‘“Almost Sure to Mislead’: Oscar Rejlander, Charles Darwin and the Photography of Performance”
- Scott Gleeson (MA recipient, Southern Methodist University), “Viewing Belfast: Community Practice in a Divided City”
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Eighteenth-Century European Art
Chair: Nina Dubin (University of Illinois, Chicago)
Friday, February 12, 9:30-noon, Grand A, Gold Level, East Tower
- Amy Freund (Texas Christian University), “Pray, Sir, Whose Dog Are You? Nobility and Animality in Eighteenth-Century French Hunting Pictures”
- Rachel Lindheim (Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, City University of New York), “Sensibilite and Sociability: Antoine-Jean Gros’s Embodied Classicism”
- Mimi Hellman (Skidmore College), “Understanding Overdoors”
- Andrei Pop (Harvard University), ‘“Temples Became Theatres’: Henry Fuseli and the Cultural Politics of Antiquity, 1760-1800″
- Mark Ledbury (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute), “Not Being David: Eccentric History Painters of the D’Angiviller Generation”
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
War Stories: Violence and Narrative in Early Modern Europe
Chairs: Elizabeth Alice Honig (University of California, Berkeley) and Suzanne Walker (Tulane University)
Friday, February 12, 2:30-5:00, Grand CD, Gold Level, East Tower
- Christiane Andersson (Bucknell University), “Mercenary Warfare: Political and Satirical Narratives by Urs Graf ca. 1515-25”
- Vanessa Lyon (University of California, Berkeley), “Velazquez Breaking Breda: Typology as Ante-Narrative”
- Luke Nicholson (Concordia University), “Nicolas Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod: Narrating Unconventional Warfare”
- Douglas Fordham (University of Virginia), “Symbol and Allegory in the Many Deaths of General Wolfe”
- Discussant: James Clifton (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
SATURDAY, 13 February
The Materiality of Early Modern Prints, Part II: Plates, States, and Collections
Chairs: Suzanne Karr Schmidt (Art Institute of Chicago) and Lia Markey (Princeton University Art Museum).
Saturday, February 13, 9:30-noon, Water Tower, Bronze Level, West Tower
- Madeleine Viljoen (La Salle University Art Museum), “Prints and Precious Plates”
- Amy Frederick (University of Louisville), “Print, Interrupted: Tracing Rembrandt’s Etched Sketches”
- Audrey Adamczak (University of Paris-Sorbonne), “From Copper to Satin: Engraved Portraits Printed on Silk in Seventeenth-Century France and Their Preservation”
- Alessandra Baroni (University of Siena), “Examining Physical Evidence for the Medici Print Collection”
- Kristel Smentek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), “Improvising Art History: Three Eighteenth-Century Albums of Prints”
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Art Scandals and Scandalous Art in the Eighteenth Century (ASECS)
Chairs: Mark Ledbury (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute) and Angela Rosenthal (Dartmouth College)
Saturday, February 13, 12:30-2:00, Regency C, Gold Level, West Tower
- Melissa Hyde (University of Florida), “‘Quoi! c’est moi la?’ Wertmuller’s Portrait of Marie-Antoinette and Her Children”
- Bernadette Fort (Northwestern University), “Spreading Scandal: The Defamation of Women Artists in Pre-Revolutionary France”
- Laura Auricchio (Parsons the New School for Design), “Sex, Lies, and Caricature: Scandalizing Lafayette in the French Revolution”
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Aesthetic Culture in British India: The Amateur Arts of Brush, Pencil, and Camera in the Colonial Periphery (HBA)
Chair: Renate Dohmen (University of Louisiana, Lafayette)
Saturday, February 13, 12:30-2:00, Gold Coast, Bronze Level, West Tower
- Meredith Gamer (Yale University) “Bringing India to the British: The Making and Marketing of British India, 1770-1800”
- Beth Tobin (Arizona State University), “Sketchbooks and Scrapbooks: Aesthetic Collecting Practices in British India, 1770-1840”
- Gary Sampson (Cleveland Institute of Art), “Samuel Bourne and the Amateur Divide in Photography under the Raj”
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Pictures That Pack a Punch: Violence in American Art, 1780-1917
Chairs: Ross Barrett (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Kevin R. Muller (Chabot College)
Saturday, February 13, 2:30-5:00, Regency D, Gold Level, West Tower
- Wendy Bellion (University of Delaware), “The Space of Iconoclasm: New York, 1776”
- Kenneth Haltman (University of Oklahoma), “Managing Death in Antebellum Representations of the Hunt”
- Maura Lyons (Drake University), “Wounded Trees: The Traumatic Landscape of Civil War Photography”
- Carol Troyen (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), “George Bellows and the Great War”
- Hannah Wong (University of Texas, Austin), “Females under Fire: Depictions of Women and Violence in Francis Picabia’s Violà elle and Other New York Work”
Sotheby’s Shines
As reported by Judd Tully for Art Info (28 January 2010):
NEW YORK—In sharp contrast to its arch rival Christie’s more subdued sale yesterday, Sotheby’s staged a rousing morning session of Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture today that realized $53,376,500, nicely within its pre-sale estimate range of $38 million to $55 million (Sale N08610). Top lot honors went to Jupiter and Antiope, a decidedly bawdy and large-scale mythological scene from 1612 by Hendrick Goltzius, which sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for a record $6,802,500 (est. $8–12 million). . .
For the full article, click here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In terms of surpassing expectations, ‘top honors’ might be better assigned to an Austrian ivory group of Pluto and Proserpina, attributed to Matthias Steinl (ca. 1700), which sold for $1.2 million — ten times its minimum estimate. Antonio Joli’s Death Leap of Marcus Curtius, sold by the L.A. County Museum, went for $122,500 (double its estimate). Greuze’s Portrait of Madame Van Westrenenen of Tremaat sold for $182,500 ($80-120,000 estimate), and whereas a large Robert canvas failed to sell earlier in the week at Christie’s, the painter’s more modestly scaled Garden Scene with a Canal sold at Sotheby’s for $482,500 ($150-250,000 estimate).– C.H.
For additional coverage at Artdaily.org, click here»
Early American Print Culture
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 568 pages, $24.50 (9780231139090)
Reviewed by Jennifer Roberts, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University; posted 14 January 2010
. . . Standard accounts of print culture in the early national period stress the role of print as a telecommunication device; print networks connected people in time and space, forged communities out of disparate groups of disconnected citizens, and permitted something like a coordinated nation-state to develop and persist. Loughran’s brilliant and counterintuitive argument overturns this assumption. She argues instead that the illusion of national unification (the “virtual nation,” as she puts it) could take hold in reality only because the actual capacities of print dissemination networks were severely limited. . . .
What can art historians take from Loughran’s study? While the book devotes considerable attention to visual culture (more on which in a moment), its most profound potential as an art-historical contribution lies in its broad realignment of traditional ways of thinking about media and materiality. First: Loughran persistently redirects the definition of “print media” from their typical scope—ink, paper, etc.—to the broader geographical field through which print artifacts had to move. She emphasizes this in order to overturn persistent models of telecommunicative print culture that tend to ignore the actual heft of printed texts, imagining that they disseminate themselves weightlessly and simultaneously through space. . . .
Second: Loughran elegantly probes the relationship between the virtual spaces evoked by printed texts and the real spaces that they occupied and through which they were hauled and handled. She demonstrates that much of the historical power of these texts as both representations and performances emerged precisely in the cleavage between their “two bodies”: “On one hand, they served as symbols of unity; on the other, they were actual objects with limited circulations” (22). . .
For the full review, click here»
Auction Results from Christie’s
The enormous canvas by Hubert Robert, Le pont sur le torrent , found no buyer at Christie’s sale of Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings, and Watercolors (sale 2282); nor did works by Pater and Gainsborough. But there certainly were some bright spots: a lovely painting by Jean Baptiste Oudry of The Watchful Doe (Biche aux Augets) sold for over $1 million, surpassing its high-end estimate of $900,000, and Panini’s View of Piazza del Popolo, Rome went for $1.2 million (well beyond its $800,000 estimate). Most of the media attention, however, goes to the Getty Museum, which acquired Boilly’s Entrance to the Turkish Garden (1812).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
As reported by Art Info:
NEW YORK—This morning’s auction at Christie’s of Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings, & Watercolors, a rather selective affair, was given a bit of high drama thanks to buyers at Los Angeles’s Getty Museum. The museum, which also set tongues wagging earlier this month with its announcement that director Michael Brand would be stepping down, turned heads by acquiring the auction’s cover lot, Louis Leopold Boilly’s lively Paris street scene The Entrance to the Turkish Garden Café (1812), for a record-shattering $4,562,500. The work had been estimated at $3 million to $5 million. The sale crushed the previous auction mark for Boilly, set at the same house in January 1994, when Carnival on the Boulevard du Crime (1832) made $937,500. “It is arguably the artist’s greatest picture,” said Scott Schaefer, senior curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, moments after the sale, “and we paid the same price the seller did 20 years ago.” . . .
For the full article, click here»
Rethinking the Rococo within the Social History of Art
Histoire sociale de l’art, histoire artistique du social / 1680-1730: Amsterdam, Paris
Institute national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, Thursday 29 January 2010
Under the direction of Philippe Bordes, France’s INHA (Institute national d’histoire de l’art) has embarked upon a program to reconsider the relationship between art and society within the context of the social history of art. An anthology of key texts will be published later this spring (along with an extensive bibliography to be made available online), and in December 2010 the INHA will host a final symposium to wrap up the project. This week the fourth workshop in the series tackles the subject through the eighteenth century, 1680-1730: Amsterdam, Paris (the site includes a PDF with useful bibliographies).
Session A
2:00 Philippe Bordes (INHA), Introduction
2:10 Mary Sheriff (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), “What is the Interpreter’s Desire? Rococo Art, Society, and the Social History of Art”
2:40 Discussion with Jean-François Bédard (Syracuse University), Magnus Olausson (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), and questions from the audience
3:10 Charlotte Guichard (laboratoire IRHIS de l’Université de Lille 3), “Coquilles: objets frontières et communautés de goût”
3:25 Anne Perrin-Khelissa (Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris), “le miroir: objet de luxe, objet de consommation privée, objet soumis à la critique artistique”
3:40 Malcolm Baker (University of California, Riverside), “Histories and Societies in the plural : Francis van Bossuit and the endurance of art”
4:10 Discussion with Jean-François Bédard, Magnus Olausson, and questions from the audience
Session B
5:00 Melissa Hyde (University of Florida), “Rosalba Carriera and Quentin de la Tour, or What is the Matter with Rococo Pastel Portraiture?”
5:20 Jan Blanc (Université de Lausanne), “Réflexions sur les espaces sociaux dans la Hollande du XVIIème siècle: le cas des maisons de poupées”
5:35 Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute), “Histoire rocaille du social?”
5:55 Discussion with Jean-François Bédard, Magnus Olausson, and questions from the audience
London Conference Addresses Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
From the website of the Paul Mellon Centre:
Antiquity at Home
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and The British Museum, London, 28-29 January 2010
Thursday, 28 January, BP Lecture Theatre, British Museum
- 6:30 Keynote lecture by David Watkin (Professor Emeritus in the History of Architecture, Department of Art History, University of Cambridge), “From Antiquity to Enlightenment: The Origins of the British Museum” — In this wide-ranging lecture, beginning with galleries and museums in the ancient world, Professor Watkin will locate the Enlightenment origins of the British Museum in the pioneering collections of the English seventeenth-century. The Strand palaces of London are now largely forgotten but were once a prominent feature of the Thames shoreline. These royal and aristocratic houses vied with one another in flaunting their taste for art and antiquity, acquired in Rome and along the coast of the eastern Aegean, in public displays of ‘vertu’. Against such a backdrop the British Museum first opened its doors in Montagu House doors in 1759, just over 250 years ago.
Friday, 29 January, The Paul Mellon Centre, 16 Bedford Square
- 9:40 Welcome by Brian Allen (Director of Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre)
- 9:45 Tribute to Ilaria Bignamini by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Master of Sydney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, former Director of the British School at Rome)
Morning Session: ‘Objects’
- 9:55 Introduced and chaired by Kim Sloan (Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours before 1800, Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum)
- 10:00 Ian Jenkins (Senior Curator, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum), “The Townley Discobolus”
- 10:20 Elizabeth Angelicoussis (Independent Researcher), “The Hope Dionysus”
- 10:40 Eloisa Dodero (Dipartimento di Discipline Storiche “Ettore Lepore”, Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”), “Clytie before Townley: The Gaetani d’Aragona Collection of Sculptures and Its Neapolitan Context”
- 11:00 Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui Alpañés (Senior Research Fellow, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art), “Sculptures onboard The Westmorland: A Cross-section of Grand Tour Collecting”
- 11:20 Coffee
- 11:50 Jonathan Yarker (PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge, research assistant for Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome), “The ‘Paper Museum’ of Charles Townley”
- 12:10 Thorsten Opper (Curator of Greek and Roman Sculpture, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum), “Lyde Browne – The House Museum as Sales Room”
- 12:30 Lunch
Afternoon Session: ‘Collections’
- 2:00 Introduced and chaired by Edward Chaney (Professor of Fine and Decorative Arts and Chair of the History of Collecting Research Centre, Southampton Solent University)
- 2:05 Jason Kelly (Assistant Professor of History, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis), “The Society of Dilettanti and the Planning of a Museum”
- 2:25 Anna Seidel (PhD Candidate, Humboldt University Berlin), “Display and Dispersal of the Montalto-Negroni Marbles”
- 2:45 Adriano Aymonino (University of Venice Ca’ Foscari), “A Roman Columbarium on the River Thames: The Long Gallery at Syon House”
- 3:05 Ruth Guilding (Art Historian and Curator), “Sir Richard Worsley, Connoisseur of the Parthenon”
- 3:25 Tea
- 3:55 Clare Hornsby (Research Fellow, British School at Rome, co-author of Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome), “Collecting or Accumulation? Some Thoughts on Motivation”
- 4:15 Tim Knox (Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum), “Soane and the Antique, and Some Reflections on House Museums Then and Now”
- 4:35 Panel and audience discussion chaired by Frank Salmon (Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Cambridge)
- 5:30 Wine Reception
Call for Papers: Medievalizing Britain
DeBartolo Conference on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies: ‘Medievalizing Britain’
Tampa, Florida, 2 April 2010
Paper proposals due by 5 February 2010
Back by popular demand, the DeBartolo Conference will return in 2010 as a one-day Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference on Medievalizing Britain. Our event will feature a keynote lecture by Professor Antony Harrison, Distinguished Professor of English and Department Head at North Carolina State University. Dr. Harrison is a leading scholar on Christina Rossetti and the author of five books and numerous articles, editions, and reviews on Victorian poetry, culture, and medievalism. In addition, the day’s activities will include single-session panels, a roundtable discussion, a catered lunch, and an evening wine and cheese reception. This event is free to participants, guests, and the public at large. (more…)
Courtly Frames in Munich
From The Art Newspaper:
The Art of the Frame: Exploring the Holdings of the Alte Pinakothek
Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 28 January — 18 April 2010

Johann Christian Sperling, "Markgraf Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Brandenburg-Ansbach as a 13-year-old Boy," 1726, frame by Cuvilliés, 1755
The Alte Pinakothek was a pioneer in exhibitions devoted to picture frames and framing when it showed Italian Frames from the 14th to the 18th Centuries in 1976. Now the museum resumes its investigations with this more closely focused exhibition that presents ‘court’ frames dating from between 1600 and 1850. In the baroque period, frames were made by cabinetmakers rather than woodcarvers or sculptors as was the case elsewhere.
The majority of frames were made of ebony or ebonised wood with wave and ripple ornaments referred to as flammleisten—flame moulding—alluding to the effect caused by the flickerings of candlelight on the broad, black surfaces. The most significant change came with the return of the Elector Maximilian II Emanuel from exile in the Netherlands and France in 1715, with his architect Joseph Effner. Vast, three-dimensional sculptural frames with a range of gold leaf were used for the display of ceremonial scenes, portraits and old masters.
Effner was succeeded as court architect by François de Cuvilliés, the central figure in Munich of the pan-German enthusiasm for the rococo, the taste for which lasted up to 1780 (shown here, Johann Christian Sperling, Markgraf Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Brandenburg-Ansbach as a 13-year-old Boy, 1726; frame by Cuvilliés, 1755).
In 1779 Carl Albert von Lespilliez was commissioned to frame the Electoral picture collection in the Hofgarten Galerie which he did using the up-to-date neo-classical frame, with leaf, frieze, beading and scotia. The Napoleonic wars spelled the end of the craftsman-made frame along with other luxury items, and the Industrial Revolution ushered in the period of mass-produced products. . .
For the full article click here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
As noted in a press release for the exhibition, there is an accompanying catalogue, edited by the show’s curator, Helge Siefert, Rahmenkunst: Auf Spurensuche in der Alten Pinakothek (Munich: Prestel, 2010), ISBN: 9783775726061
leave a comment