State Bed at Calke Abbey
Yesterday’s posting at Style Court includes exceptionally good photos of the Calke State Bed. I’ve included one here, but for the much larger images, you’ll have to visit Courtney Barnes’s stimulating site:
For a long time now I’ve been contrasting grand centuries-old canopied beds with some of the more lavish beds that occasionally pop up in the pages of Elle Decor. After my recent post about Marla Mallett’s Chinese textiles, a very kind person from the National Trust shared these colorful, wonderfully detailed images of the silk-laden 18th-century Calke State Bed. . . .
Homecoming for Reynolds
From the City of Plymouth’s exhibition website:
Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius
Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, 21 November 2009 — 20 February 2010
Exhibition catalogue edited by Sam Smiles, ISBN: 9781906593407
Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius is a major art exhibition that celebrates the life and work of a man who was born in Plympton in 1723 and went on to become one of Britain’s finest and most fashionable portrait painters. This, the largest exhibition on Reynolds ever held outside London, showcases new research by the University of Plymouth as well as works of art from Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery’s own collections, major loan items from regional, national, public and private collections and fascinating personal objects.
Learn about Reynolds’s career from his earliest commissions in and around Plymouth to his pre-eminence in the London art world of the late 18th century. Re-discover his significance to Plymouth and the South West. Find out about his
achievements as both an artist and a collector.
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Hugh Belsey reviews the exhibition for Apollo Magazine (February 2010). Coverage can also be found at the BBC.
Peering into the Peer Review Process
At The Long Eighteenth, Laura Rosenthal (Professor of English at the University of Maryland) reviews Michèle Lamont’s How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, which studies how grants in multi-disciplinary committees are assessed:
In this well-written and relentlessly object study (in the sense that Lamont has no ax to grind as far as I can tell and treats her subjects with respect), the author mainly I think is offering a counterpoint to Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that academic awards constitute a system of self-reproduction. Instead, Lamont finds that even though evaluators certainly see the application through particular lenses, they nevertheless in general make a sincere effort to discover quality. This process, however, takes place contextually through a series of negotiations in which a variety of factors shape decisions. . .
For Rosenthal’s full review, click here»
Enfilade 
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