Rare Books Workshop in Bloomington — Latin for Title Pages
RBMS Regional Workshop: Latin for Rare Materials Catalogers
Indiana University Bloomington, 22 October 2010, 9:00-4:30
Registration deadline: 1 October 2010
This Rare Books and Manuscripts Sections regional workshop is intended for rare materials catalogers with little or no familiarity with Latin. The workshop will provide tools for navigating the title page, including identifying the key verbs and inflected forms of nouns for persons, places, and things in order to accurately record title and remainder of title information, author(s) and other names, editions, and publication information (i.e. DCRM(B)/AACR2 descriptive areas 1, 2, and 4), and any related notes. Among the issues addressed will be identifying and expanding contracted forms, Latin terminology used for publishing, and other issues unique to Latin materials.
Presenters: Jennifer MacDonald (University of Delaware) and Jennifer Nelson (The Robbins Collection, University of California Berkeley School of Law). Registration materials are available online. Registration is limited to 30 participants. Fees: ACRL member – $189; Nonmember – $239. Join ACRL today to take advantage of valuable members-only discounts, professional connections, and community. Questions: Contact Tory Ondrla at tondrla@ala.org, or call 312-280-2515.
The Fabric of Their Lives
I’m delighted to welcome Courtney Barnes of Style Court as a guest contributor to Enfilade. With a B.A. in art history and an M.A. in education, Courtney has worked as a docent at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and has contributed to Southern Accents, among other publications. Established in 2006, Style Court has won praise from Time, Elle Decor, Domino, Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles, 1stdibs, Country Living, and Apartment Therapy L.A. Courtney’s site does a particularly good job of bringing together a wide variety of people interested in design and the arts. While Enfilade has previously included postings that were sparked by coverage at Style Court, it’s a treat to hear from Courtney directly – and on textiles, a topic that’s of special interest to her. As a HECAA member, Courtney (I hope) will have more postings to share from time to time in the future. -CH
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Threads of Feeling
The Foundling Museum, London, 14 October 2010 — 6 March 2011
B y C O U R T N E Y B A R N E S
In 2003 I ventured down into the densely packed textile and costume archives of the Atlanta History Center to meet with curator Susan Neill. At the time, she was preparing for the opening of Gone With the Girdle: Freedom, Restraint and Power in Women’s Dress, an exhibition that used the familiarity and allure of fashion to engage a general audience in the social, economic, and political history of women living in the southeastern United States from the nineteenth century up to the present.
In addition to the always crowd-pleasing couture, Neill brought into the galleries more common garments including a restrictive maternity corset, a domestic worker’s evening uniform, the first pantsuit designed for Delta Airlines flight attendants, a mini skirt half slip, and jeans — all to tell a story of radical change. Not surprisingly, such everyday articles of clothing worn on the job by waitresses and domestic workers were harder for Neill to obtain since they were typically discarded due to wear and tear or lack of interest. And examples of clothing worn by slaves during the antebellum era eluded Neill completely.
"Sleeves red and white speckl’d linen turn’d up red spotted with white." A baby’s sleeve made from linen © Coram
This simple but profoundly ironic rule of material culture — that the most common and mundane traces of the past, especially when associated with the working classes and the poor — are the least likely to survive makes an upcoming exhibition at The Foundling Museum in London all the more remarkable. Threads of Feeling showcases women’s and children’s textile tokens from the middle of the eighteenth century. The exhibition curator, John Styles, a specialist in the material culture of eighteenth-century Britain, has assembled a selection of fabric tokens that have survived some 250 years in the archives of The Foundling Hospital. Beginning in the 1740s, the institution served as a last resort for many of London’s impoverished, unmarried women who found themselves unable to care for their infants. A single identifying record, usually a clipping of fabric, was typically left at the
Foundling when the child was accepted.
"A bunch of 4 ribbons narrow – Yellow, Blue, Green, & Pink." Silk ribbons tied in a bunch with a knot © Coram
As noted at the Museum’s website:
In the cases of more than 4,000 babies left between 1741 and 1760, a small object or token, usually a piece of fabric, was kept as an identifying record. The fabric was either provided by the mother or cut from the child’s clothing by the hospital’s nurses. Attached to registration forms and bound up into ledgers, these pieces of fabric form the largest collection of everyday textiles surviving in Britain from the 18th Century.
Because the babies were essentially adopted by an institution (rather than a particular family) and were rarely reclaimed, Threads of Feeling provides both a material and emotional window into the past. Styles comments on his own website:
"Flowered lawn." Lawn printed with flowers © Coram
The textiles are tangible evidence of babies abandoned, many destined to die within a few days or weeks. To see them is a poignant, emotional experience. But the textiles are also beautiful objects in their own right. Most are colourful, patterned fabrics that served as tokens precisely because they were visually arresting. At the same time, they witness a rich social history. They show how ordinary people conducted their romances, clothed their babies, and engaged with fashion, providing a market for the cotton fabrics that were fundamental to the Industrial Revolution of the later 18th century.
For anyone who would like to learn more about the antique textile tokens, the September-October 2010 issue of the British-based textile magazine, Selvedge, features a terrific, in-depth cover story on the exhibition written by Shelly
Goldsmith. Selvedge is available at select bookshops in the
U.S. and by subscription, in digital or traditional paper formats.
French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794
From Mark Curran at the University of Leeds:
As we are now less than a year away from the public release of our database, we would like to draw your attention to the existence of the AHRC-funded French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794 project. Our team would be especially grateful if you could take the time to look at our project website and post feedback on our blog at c18booktrade.wordpress.com.
Our project uses the archives of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN) to trace the passage of over 400,000 copies of around 4,000 books across eighteenth-century Europe, from London to Lisbon, Moscow to Rome. It reconstructs, where possible, the STN’s entire trade with its vast network of clients. We hope that it will be a major research and teaching tool of interest to all eighteenth-century and book-history scholars, especially those interested in the dissemination of works and ideas, the comparative history of the book and cross-cultural transfer.
Moreover, we have extensive plans to expand our platform to a broader c18 book history resource that would be extensively collaborative. Between now and the public release of the database in the summer of 2011, we are especially keen to forge links with specialists in the field with competences in online c18 databases (especially those looking to develop c18 book history platforms) and GIS in the historical context, as well as scholars working on the late-eighteenth century book trade, and particularly the Société typographique de Neuchâtel or their many clients. Because of the scale and richness of this project, we are keen to assist research already in progress, and have already been able to give extensive assistance to other scholars. So if you are interested in any of aspect of our project or plans, please get in touch,
Thanks in advance,
Mark Curran, m.d.curran@leeds.ac.uk
Research Fellow, University of Leeds
CASVA Fellowships Announced
A selection of projects in the (long) eighteenth century to be pursued by this year’s CASVA Fellows, as noted in a press release from the National Gallery:
Samuel H. Kress Professor
Joseph J. Rishel — The position of Samuel H. Kress Professor was created in 1965. It is reserved for a distinguished art historian who, as the senior member of CASVA, pursues scholarly work and counsels predoctoral fellows in residence. Rishel, the Gisela and Dennis Alter Senior Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture and curator of the Rodin Museum, has been at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1972. He received a BA from Hobart College and earned his MA at the University of Chicago. He has served as the chairman of the Barnes Foundation College Assessment Advisory Committee and has been a member of the American Federation of Arts Exhibitions Committee since 2000. Rishel is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was made an officier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2010 and has been an editor, author, and contributor to many exhibition catalogues specializing in 18th- and 19th-century art.
Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor
Victor I. Stoichita — The position of Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor was established in 2002 through a grant from the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation. The Safra Professor serves for up to six months, forging connections between the research of the curatorial staff and that of visiting scholars at CASVA. At the same time, the Safra Professor advances his or her own research on subjects associated with the Gallery’s permanent collection. The Safra Professor may also organize colloquia for predoctoral fellows and for emerging scholars and curators. The Safra Professor’s area of expertise varies from year to year, spanning the Gallery’s permanent collection—from sculpture, to painting, to works on paper of all periods. Victor Stoichita is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at Université de Fribourg in Switzerland. He earned a Doctorat d’état from the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and his PhD from the University of Rome. He was the Rudolf Wittkower Visiting Professor at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut, in Rome in 2005 and received a fellowship from the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2002. Stoichita is the author of The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (2008), Goya: The Last Carnival (with Anna Maria Coderch, 1999), A Short History of the Shadow (1997), Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (1995), and L’instauration du tableau: Métapeinture à l’aube des temps modernes (1993), all of which have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, among other languages.
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellows, Fall 2010
Heather McPherson (University of Alabama at Birmingham), The Artist’s Studio and the Image of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellows, Fall 2010
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Limited, Landscape Design), The London Square, 1580 to the Present
Predoctoral Fellows (in residence)
Christina Ferando (David E. Finley Fellow, 2008–2011, Columbia University), Staging Canova: Sculpture, Connoisseurship, and Display, 1780–1822
Dipti Khera (Ittleson Fellow, 2009–2011, Columbia University), Picturing India’s “Land of Princes” between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and Its Environs
Jason David LaFountain (Wyeth Fellow, 2009–2011, Harvard University), The Puritan Art World
Predoctoral Fellows (not in residence)
Razan Francis (Twenty-four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2010–2012, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Secrets of the Arts: Enlightenment Spain’s Contested Islamic Craft Heritage
Meredith Gamer (Paul Mellon Fellow, 2010–2013, Yale University), Criminal and Martyr: Art and Religion in Britain’s Early Modern Eighteenth Century
Anna Lise Seastrand (Ittleson Fellow, 2010-2012, Columbia University), Praise, Politics, and Language: South Indian Mural Paintings, 1500–1800
Manuscript Prize Competition
From the University of Virginia Press:
2010 Walker Cowen Manuscript Prize Competition in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Proposals due by 1 November 2010
We invite submissions for the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize. The prize is awarded to the author of a scholarly book-length manuscript in eighteenth-century studies, including the Americas and the Atlantic world. Submissions may be in history (including history of science), literature, philosophy, or the arts. The competition is held annually. The winner of the Cowen Prize will receive a $5,000 award and will be offered an advance publishing contract by the University of Virginia Press. The prize honors the late Walker Cowen, second Director of the Press from 1969 until his death in 1987. Click here for an official application form
Request an application form or send queries to:
Angie Hogan
The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400318
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318
arh2h@virginia.edu
To be considered for the 2010 award, manuscripts should be submitted no later than November 1, 2010. Manuscripts will not be returned. Foreign-language works first published in Europe will also be considered for the prize and for translation into English. Announcement of the winning manuscript will be made in March 2011.
At The Frick Next Summer: The French Court à la Turc
Press release (PDF) from The Frick:
Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette
The Frick Collection, New York, 8 June — 11 September 2011
Curated by Charlotte Vignon
Small Console Table with Supporting Figures of Nubians (one of a pair), c.1780, gilded and painted wood and marble slab (NY: The Frick Collection), photo by Michael Bodycomb
By the late eighteenth century, France had long been fascinated by the Ottoman empire. Trade with Turkish territories had gone on for centuries, bringing precious velvets, brocades, carpets, arabesque-decorated leathers, and metalwork to the Continent. In the fall of 1776, a performance of Mustapha and Zeangir, a tragedy in five acts by Sebastien-Roch Chamford that played in Paris, seems to have launched a taste for interiors “à la Turc,” or “in the Turkish style.” Soon after, boudoirs turcs were created in several royal residences, especially in the circle of Marie-Antoinette and the comte d’Artois, Louis XVI’s younger brother. This taste seems to have been confined largely to the royal court and the French aristocracy, and few objects from such rooms survive today. In the summer of 2011, the Frick will present a dossier exhibition on the subject, bringing together several examples that have rarely—or, in some cases never—been on view in New York City.
This exhibition was inspired by a pair of French console-tables at the Frick, whose exceptional quality suggests a royal origin. The tabletops are supported by two Nubian slaves who wear pearl-bedecked turbans; each figure holds a floral garland surrounding a medallion depicting a Sultan. The Turkish iconography is complemented by a frieze of crossed crescents, a symbol of the Ottoman empire. Such objects were not literal copies of Turkish models. Rather, they were created by interior decorators, architects, designers, and craftsmen inspired by an imaginary Ottoman empire, such as that depicted in A Thousand and One Nights and in the aforementioned tragedy Mustapha and Zeangir. Although the objects often featured turbaned figures, camels, palm trees, cornucopias, arabesques, crossed crescents, pearls and jewel-like ornaments, elaborate draperies, and heavy garlands of fruits and flowers, their form and function remained essentially French. Having been made for the royal family or wealthy aristocrats, the objects were usually of the highest quality, and can be attributed to the best artists and craftsmen of the time. Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette is being organized by Charlotte Vignon, the Frick’s Associate Curator of Decorative Arts.
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The exhibition might bring to mind the forthcoming book by Nebahat Avcioglu, Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1728-1876 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), a description of which is available here»
Prints of the Rustic Life at The Huntington
From The Huntington:
Picturesque to Pastoral
The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, 31 July — 1 November 2010
Thomas Gainsborough, "Wooded Landscape with Herdsman Driving Cattle over a Bridge, Rustic Lovers, and Ruined Castle," ca. 1780, soft-ground etching (The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens)
Many of the greatest practitioners of landscape painting in Britain also were actively engaged in printmaking. Picturesque to Pastoral explores the graphic side of landscape in British art from the 18th through the 20th century. From the rustic countryside depicted by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) to the visionary dreamscapes of Graham Sutherland (1903–1980), this focused installation of about a dozen prints showcases the variety of techniques the medium affords—wood engraving, etching, aquatint, drypoint, and mezzotint—as well as the many ways the view of landscape changed over time. In their shift from rural to urban subjects and from poetic description to interior vision, these rarely seen items from The Huntington’s art collections reveal how artists reworked this subject matter to express their own sensibilities.
Graduate Student Conference at Yale
The Substance of Painting: Graduate Student Symposium
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Saturday, 26 February 2011
Proposals due by 15 November 2010
What painting shows is its material cause, which is to say paint —Georges Didi-Huberman, 2005
This one-day graduate student symposium explores the materiality of paint and the processes of painting both historically and in contemporary practice. It invites the consideration of paint as a substance, technically, as well as in terms of meaning. How have the ways in which paint has been used and interpreted developed over time? How are paint and painterly processes considered in today’s art studios and in art history? This symposium seeks to bring together the rich historiography on painting techniques with innovative recent art-historical methodologies for analyzing painting, investigating how paint has been interpreted and exploited by artists, scholars, critics, conservators, and audiences.
The symposium coincides with two major exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art, a mid-career survey of the work of the British abstract artist Rebecca Salter (b. 1955), and an exhibition of the portraiture of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), organized jointly with the National Portrait Gallery, London. This juxtaposition provides a valuable opportunity to explore the versatility of paint and painterly processes by examining the work of two artists, an academic painter active at the turn of the nineteenth century, and a contemporary artist, both sharing a highly experimental approach to the use of media. Lawrence’s complex process of creating a chalk drawing on prepared canvas, which he then covered over with bravura strokes of paint, and Salter’s technique of applying, scraping away, and reapplying pigment, both challenge the canonical notion of painting’s flatness, as does Salter’s view of her practice as “making an object” rather than a two-dimensional surface. Both exhibitions include not only paintings but also works in other media, such as pastels, watercolors, and prints, highlighting the technical innovations and methods of both artists and inviting us, in different ways, to consider the complex relationships and often porous boundaries between media, such as painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• paint texture
• facture and finish
• painterliness
• painting as performance
• flatness
• color
• techniques and methods
• the historiography of materials
• drawing and painting
• painting conservation
We invite proposals for 25-minute papers on this theme from graduate students working in any discipline. Special consideration will be given to papers examining the topic in relation to British art and culture. Cross-disciplinary and comparative studies are particularly welcome. Travel funds for speakers are available upon application. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by November 15, 2010.
by e-mail lisa.ford@yale.edu
by mail Lisa Ford
Associate Head of Research
Research Department
Yale Center for British Art
P.O. Box 208280
New Haven, CT 06520–8280
Bibliography for National Trust Properties
As reported by Emile de Bruijn at the ever useful Treasure Hunt, the National Trust has recently released a massive bibliography for its properties. It’s an immensely valuable research guide and — one hopes — a model for other such institutions. . . .
The Rotunda, with the Temple of Venus in the distance, at Stowe, Buckinghamshire. ©NTPL/Andrew Butler
Our curatorial and publishing teams have been collaborating on a bibliography listing all the books and articles about the properties of the National Trust. This bibliography has just been made available online. It currently contains over 4,000 entries – the earliest one is a record of a visit by Queen Elizabeth I to Melford Hall in Suffolk in 1578. The property with the most entries is Stowe in Buckinghamshire. This very grand garden full of pavilions and monuments has inspired texts and interpretations almost from its inception. Even in the mid eighteenth century it had its own guidebook explaining the monuments to visitors. . . .
Raphael Tapestries and Cartoons Briefly Reunited at V&A
For the implications of the Raphael cartoons during the eighteenth century, see Arline Meyer, Apostles in England: Sir James Thornhill & the Legacy of the Raphael’s Tapestry Cartoons, exhibition catalogue (New York: Columbia University, 1996); and more recently, Cathleen Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael’s Paintings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially chapter 5, “The English Reception and Restoration of Raphael’s Cartoons, c. 1525-1800” (this latter text is also useful for Raphael’s reception in France and Germany). The following description of the exhibition in London comes from the V&A’s website:
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Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 8 September — 17 October 2010
This is a display of four of the ten tapestries designed by Raphael for the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. These are the original tapestries from the only series designed by Raphael of which examples survive, and are comparable with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling as masterpieces of High Renaissance art. The tapestries are displayed alongside the full-size designs for them – the famous Raphael Cartoons . This is the first time that the designs and tapestries have been displayed together – something Raphael himself never witnessed. The tapestries have not been shown before in the UK.
The tapestries of the Acts of St Peter and St Paul, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Christ’s Charge to Peter, The Healing of the Lame Man, and The Sacrifice at Lystra, were made for the Sistine Chapel almost 500 years ago. Raphael was commissioned by Pope Leo X to design these great tapestries, which were woven in Brussels, Europe’s leading centre for tapestry-weaving, and then sent to Rome for display. As the cartoons remained in Brussels, Raphael himself never saw the cartoons beside the tapestries woven from them. Several European monarchs, including Henry VIII, later commissioned copies of the tapestries which were made from the cartoons in Brussels. In 1623 Charles I, while Prince of Wales, had the Cartoons brought to England to have his own set woven in the Mortlake tapestry workshops, and they have remained in England ever since. (more…)
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