Exhibition and Conference on Louise Élisabeth of France
Fuochi di gioia e lacrime d’argento: An Exhibition Commemorating Louise Élisabeth of France
on the 250th Anniversary of Her Death
Palazzo Bossi Bocchi, Parma, 11 April — 16 May 2010
Louis-Michel Van Loo, "Louise Élisabeth, Duchess of Parma"
The oldest daughter of King Louis XV, Louise Élisabeth of France (1727-1759) was married in 1739 to Prince Philip of Spain (son of Philip V) at the age of 12 (she gave birth to her first child at 14). Following the War of the Austrian Succession, Philip and Élisabeth became Duke and Duchess of Parma. The exhibition includes a posthumous portrait of Élisabeth painted by Jean-Marc Nattier (now in a private collection), along with the more familiar portrait by Louis-Michel van Loo and a selection of prints and drawings from the Cariparma Foundation.
In addition to the exhibition, in September Parma will host an international conference dedicated to Louise Élisabeth and the first decade of Bourbon rule in Parma from 1749 to 1759. Organized by Professors Charles Mambriani (University of Parma) and Gianfranco Fiaccadori (University of Milan), the conference will explore the deep historical, artistic, and cultural ties between Parma and France.
New Resource for Slavery and Abolition Studies
As recently noted at H-Albion:
It is our pleasure to announce the launch of the Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal. The site is designed to help researchers and Yale students find primary source material related to slavery and its legacies within the university’s many libraries and galleries. Users can browse a small catalog of noteworthy collections, learn how to search for additional material, or explore a growing list of external resources. The portal is still in its early stages, and we welcome input and suggestions from researchers, students, and staff. Future improvements will include an interactive teaching component, dynamic tags, user-submitted material, and more.
Developed in cooperation with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, this portal shares the Center’s interest in the global history of slavery and its legacies, broadly defined. Items featured on this website are not confined to the United States or the Atlantic world or the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even if these places and periods tend to form the focus of the sources we have included.
Collection descriptions were copied or adapted from those in the Finding Aid Database, the Orbis Libary Catalog, and other relevant sites. In some cases, we have added text to alert researchers to additional information about a collection. At this stage, we have decided to limit our focus to original manuscripts, material artifacts, and other rare or unpublished material. With a few exceptions, we have excluded printed books and pamphlets and material that is readily available elsewhere online.
Although we hope this portal will provide a springboard for future research, it is hardly exhaustive, and we welcome suggestions of new content from researchers, students, and staff. Information about how to locate primary source material in Yale archives can be found on the research page.
New Online Art History Publication — ‘RIHA Journal’
RIHA, the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, is pleased to announce the launch of RIHA Journal, the new international online-journal for the history of art, on April 14, 2010. A joint project of 27 institutes in 18 countries, the journal provides an excellent medium for fostering international discourse among scholars. Funding is provided by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, BKM). RIHA Journal (ISSN 2190-3328) features research articles in either English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish, and invites submissions on the whole range of art historical topics and approaches. Manuscripts undergo a double blind peer review process and are published within few months from submission. A not-for-profit e-journal committed to the principles of Open Access, RIHA Journal makes all articles available free of charge. RIHA Journal welcomes submissions at any time; for details, please contact the RIHA institute in your country and/or field of expertise.
Richard Wilson Exhibition in New York
From a press release from Richard Feigen:
Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia
Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York, 29 April – 25 June 2010
Richard Wilson, "View of Caernarvon Castle, Wales," 1744-45 (Detroit Institute of Arts)
Richard L. Feigen & Co. will present Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia, a loan exhibition dedicated to the first great British landscape artist, Richard Wilson (c.1713-1782). This will be the first exhibition to be devoted to the artist in North America in over 25 years.
Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia will feature approximately a dozen of the painter’s works from both public and private US collections. One of the highlights of the exhibition will be the great Destruction of the Children of Niobe, the key picture of Wilson’s career and a landmark in the history of British landscape paintings, which is being loaned by the Yale Center for British Art. Also included will be Wilson’s earliest known view of his native Wales, Caernarvon Castle, on loan from the Detroit Institute of Arts, as well as several seminal pictures painted during the artist’s sojourn in Italy, among them, The Temple of Clitumnus from a private US collection.
Wilson’s second English period will be represented by his perhaps most famous landscape, The White Monk, loaned by the Toledo Museum of Art, and a magnificent view of Tivoli from the Kimbell Art Museum. The exhibition will also feature several pictures by some of the seventeenth-century landscape masters whose work influenced Wilson’s. Claude Lorrain’s exquisite Pastoral Landscape, a small copper being lent by the Yale University Art Gallery, and Aelbert Cuyp’s idyllic Landscape with the Flight into Egypt from the Metropolitan Museum will be among the pictures shown in this context.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, to which the distinguished scholar of British art, Andrew Wilton, has contributed the introductory essay. Mr. Wilton is Visiting Research Fellow at Tate Britain, having formerly been Keeper of the British Collection and Curator of the Turner Collection in the Clore Gallery. The most recent of his many publications are Turner in His Time, Turner as Draughtsman, and Five Centuries of British Painting: From Holbein to Hodgkin. All proceeds from the sale of the catalogue will be donated to the Richard Wilson catalogue raisonné project, which is being undertaken by Dr. Paul-Spencer-Longhurst on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, the sister institution to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.
Liotard Tome Reviewed at ‘Apollo Magazine’
From Apollo Magazine:
Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche, Liotard: catalogue, sources et correspondance, 2 vols. (Doornspijk: Davaco, 2008), ISBN 907028808, £503.
Reviewed by Robert Oresko.
On 30 September 1762, 24-year-old Bostonian John Singleton Copley wrote to Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789), by then aged nearly 60, whom he had previously met in London, asking for help in procuring ‘a sett of the best Swiss Crayons for drawing of Portraits’. Liotard’s cosmopolitanism was a hallmark of his career as an artist, but a request from pre-revolutionary Boston indicates how widely his fame had spread. This telling anecdote emerges from the section – of nearly 150 pages – of Liotard’s letters in the second volume of Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche’s “Liotard,” a monumental, archivally-based study of the Genevan-born artist’s life and work.
Over 900 folio pages of text, spread over two volumes, document the career of one of the greatest of painters in pastel and establish
his position as a key figure in 18th-century cultural life. . . .
The full review can be found here»
Palladio and His Legacy at the Morgan
From The Morgan’s website:
Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey
The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 2 April — 1 August 2010
Villa Rotunda, from “The Architecture of A. Palladio,” 1715-20 (RIBA Library)
Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey features thirty-one original Palladio drawings from the Royal Institute of British Architects. These exquisite drawings, which were exhibited only once before in America and never in New York, will be on view to the public for the first time in over thirty years. They are being presented with rare architectural texts to illustrate the journey from Italy to North America of Palladio’s design principles of proportion, harmony, and beauty.
Palladio’s work has significantly influenced American architecture from colonial times to the present day. Focusing on the artist’s original drawings and following the trajectory of his ideas, the show also traces the story of American Palladianism. The drawings are supported by numerous architectural models. Three large examples—the Pantheon, Villa Rotunda, and Jefferson’s unrealized design for the White House—programmatically illustrate the journey from Rome to America. Smaller models, along with rare architectural texts and pattern books through which Palladio’s ideas were primarily transmitted, reinforce the themes of the exhibition.
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This book has been written to accompany the exhibition Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey and shows drawings, books and images from the peerless Palladio collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects. It shows how Palladio studied and reinterpreted the architecture of antiquity, how he developed his ideas, how his message spread, and how Palladianism developed and spread across America, where Palladio’s legacy has remained longest and most widespread. Andrea Palladio lived and worked some 500 years ago in the Veneto. Yet his international influence, and particularly his impact on American architecture, has been greater than that of any architect since. Simplicity and proportion formed the basis of his idea of architecture; the villas he created in the Veneto around Venice, together with his writings, which were widely disseminated after his death, have helped shape European and American buildings for more than 400 years.
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As noted by The Art History Newsletter, the exhibition was reviewed in The New York Times by Nicolai Ouroussoff on 8 April 2010. There’s also an interview by Suzanne Stephens and William Hanley at Architectural Record.
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