Exhibition: Preaching in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
A center of Jansenism in the seventeenth century, the schools at Port-Royal des Champs were closed in 1660. The nuns of the convent were turned out in 1709, and most of the buildings were then razed. Today the museum hosts various concerts and exhibitions. From the museum’s website:
Representer la Prédication aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles
Musée National de Port-Royal des Champs, 15 September — 13 December 2010
Jean-Bernard Restout (1732–97), "John the Baptist Preaching in the Desert," Musée du Louvre © RMN / Thierry Le Mage
Figure issue du Moyen-âge, le prédicateur est celui qui est chargé de diffuser la parole de Dieu pour le compte de l’Église. A partir du XVIe siècle, l’élan missionnaire mêle intimement instruction des fidèles, conversion des Protestants et évangélisation des terres nouvellement découvertes. Les ordres les plus actifs de la Réforme catholique, comme les Jésuites (fondés en 1540 par Ignace de Loyola), les Oratoriens (fondés en 1611 par Pierre de Bérulle) ou les Lazaristes (fondés en 1625 par Vincent de Paul), participent aux missions lointaines comme intérieures. L’importance de la prédication dans l’Église occidentale à l’époque des réformes marque l’art religieux de l’Europe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.
Les missionnaires prennent les fondateurs de leur Ordre comme modèles, et l’iconographie les montrent devant la foule des fidèles, aux portes d’une église comme pour la Prédication de François de Sales d’Eustache Le Sueur, ou plus généralement dans un paysage, comme pour la Prédication de Vincent de Paul d’Aureliano Milani. (more…)
Images of London: Workshop at York
London Scenes: An Interdisciplinary Workshop
Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, 4 December 2010
Organizers: Alison O’Byrne, John Barrell, and Mark Hallett
London Scenes will bring together academics from a range of disciplines – including English, History of Art, Cultural Geography, and Urban Studies – in order to examine sequences of images of the metropolis in the long eighteenth century. The workshop format will allow for maximum discussion, with speakers giving brief, 10-minute papers on a particular sequence, followed by 20 minutes for general discussion. Over the course of the day, we will be considering the representation of London in works by artists including Francis Place, William Hogarth, Samuel Scott, Paul and Thomas Sandby, Edward Pugh, JMW Turner, Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin, George Scharf, George Cruikshank, and John Tallis. In bringing together speakers and participants with a diverse range of interests from different disciplines, we hope to shed new light on how the city was represented in this period, and what broader implications this might have for our understanding of eighteenth-century culture. We are especially interested in considering whether or not we can begin to describe the development of a tradition of representing the city in visual sequences in this period.
Programme
9:45 Registration
10:00 Amy Todman ( Glasgow): “Vivarium Grenovicanum: Francis Place’s Views in and around the Royal Observatory”
10:30 Mark Hallett ( York): “Hogarth’s Vision of London”
11:00 Markman Ellis (Queen Mary): “Samuel Scott’s Thameside River Views, 1746-1764”
11:30 John Bonehill ( Glasgow): “‘The centre of pleasure and magnificence’: Paul and Thomas Sandby’s London”
12:00 coffee
12:15 John Barrell ( York): “Edward Pugh in Modern London”
12:45 Stephen Daniels (Nottingham): “The New Meridian: Turner and Greenwich”
1:15 Lunch
2:15 Jon Mee ( Warwick): “‘Mutual intercourse’ and ‘licentious discussion’ in The Microcosm of London, 1808-1811”
2:45 Alison O’Byrne ( York): “George Scharf’s London”
3:15 John Bowen ( York): “Cruickshank and Boz”
3:45 Elizabeth Grant (RIBA): “John Tallis’s London Street Views”
4:15 Closing comments and discussion
4:30 End of conference.
Registration is £12.00 including an informal sandwich lunch. A registration form is available on our website.
HBA Publication Grant
Historians of British Art 2010 Publication Grant
Due by 31 January 2011
The Historians of British Art (HBA) invites applications for its 2011 publication grant. The society will award up to $500 to offset publication costs of, or to support additional research for, a journal article or book manuscript in the field of British visual culture that has been accepted by a publisher. Applicants must be current members of HBA. To apply, send a 500-word project description, publication information (name of journal or press and projected publication date), budget, and CV to Renate Dohmen, HBA Prize Committee chair.
Reviewed: ‘James Barry’
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Tom Dunne and William L. Pressly, eds., James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 300 pages, ISBN: 9780754666349, $114.95.
Reviewed by Jonathan Rinck, Department of Art, Spring Arbor University; posted 10 November 2010.
The writing of ‘James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter’ was occasioned by the bicentennial of Barry’s death, an event commemorated by the exhibition ‘James Barry (1741–1806): “The Great Historical Painter”’ at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, in 2005, and followed by a related symposium in February 2006. This book contains fourteen papers given at that conference, presented by a uniformly capable cross-section of scholars ranging from the graduate student to the seasoned authority. The expressed intent of the collection is to help correct the regrettably scant corpus of scholarship devoted to this Irish painter. The topics of the essays are diverse, but the book is cohesive in its enlightening and informative narrative of Barry as, if not the greatest of British eighteenth-century history painters, then as one of its most fascinating and fervent proponents. . . .
For the full review, click here» (CAA membership required)
Exibition: Courtly Ephemera in Paris
From the INHA website:
Chroniques de l’éphémère: Le livre de fête dans la collection Jacques Doucet
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 15 September — 15 December 2010
Charles Nicolas Cochin, "The Funeral of Catherine Opalińska in Notre Dame de Paris," 1747
Dès la Renaissance, fêtes et cérémonies de cour ont donné lieu à la production de livres et d’estampes : décrire l’événement, le commémorer, exalter la majesté du prince, telles sont les fonctions de ces publications, des plus modestes aux plus luxueuses. L’illustration des grandes fêtes des cours européennes, par le livre, le texte et l’image, la diffusion de formes artistiques codifiées, expriment à l’époque moderne un jeu subtil entre l’art et le pouvoir.
À travers cette exposition, la Bibliothèque de l’INHA, riche de plus d’un millier de livres de fête, issus des collections exceptionnelles constituées par Jacques Doucet, propose un parcours illustrant la mise en livre de fêtes organisées à Paris et à Versailles aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Divers événements donnant lieu à la fête – des naissances princières aux pompes funèbres – sont évoqués, ainsi que les mises en scène qui peuvent y être associées : feux d’artifices, carrousels, ballets (tel que Le Ballet des singes et des autruches), représentations théâtrales…
Courts programmes, livrets explicatifs, brochures, placards, pamphlets, ou luxueux ouvrages commémoratifs, les livres de fête se présentent sous diverses formes, aux fonctions et publics différents. Les plus somptueux d’entre eux, objets d’art prestigieux, sont destinés à diffuser largement l’image de la grandeur monarchique auprès du public français, mais aussi des cours étrangères. Souvent illustrés par les dessinateurs de la Chambre et du Cabinet du Roi, comme le Carrousel des galans Maures de Jean Berain (1685), ces livres mettent particulièrement en valeur le rôle des institutions monarchiques, comme l’administration des Menus Plaisirs, dans la production et la diffusion du livre, élément parmi d’autres de la propagande et du mécénat royal.
Enfin, les traités de fête établissent des règles, mais aussi un répertoire européen de fêtes, dans lequel puisent artistes et érudits pour offrir au spectateur, courtisan, ambassadeur ou simple badaud, des spectacles grandioses, portraits de la puissance du souverain auxquels ils sont dédiés.
Forthcoming: ‘Hogarth’s Hidden Parts’
Out this month, as noted at the publisher’s website:
Bernd W. Krysmanski, Hogarth’s Hidden Parts: Satiric Allusion, Erotic Wit, Blasphemous Bawdiness and Dark Humour in Eighteenth-Century English Art (Hildesheim, Zürich and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2010), ISBN: 9783487144719, EUR 48.
If you think of William Hogarth as a moralist who gave charitable support to foundlings and provided ethical guidance through his pictorial satires, then it is high time you changed your mind. This challenging, thoroughly researched and thought-provoking book reveals many new findings on Hogarth, showing us a different, hidden and immoral English artist: a carouser, a debauchee, and a spiteful joker who mercilessly attacked his contemporaries. Although a pictorial satirist and a successful print-dealer, Hogarth nevertheless wallowed in obscene amusement, frequented prostitutes, possibly had paedophilic tendencies, and seemingly died from the lingering effects of syphilis. Hogarth the popular painter and engraver is shown here as a dark humorist who dealt primarily in sexual double entendre and produced blasphemous motifs that satirically lambasted “high” religious art and debunked the eighteenth-century taste for Old Master work. This book ought to change the way we think about Hogarth.
New Title on Hubert Robert: ‘Futures & Ruins’
From the Getty’s website:
Nina Dubin, Futures & Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), 210 pages, ISBN: 978-1-60606-023-0, $50.
In this timely and provocative study, Hubert Robert’s paintings of urban ruins are interpreted as manifestations of a new consciousness of time, one shaped by the uncertainties of an economy characterized by the dread-inducing expansion of credit, frenzied speculation on the stock exchange, and bold ventures in real estate. As the favored artist of an enterprising Parisian elite, Robert is a prophetic case study of the intersections between aesthetics and modernity’s dawning business culture.
At the center of this lively narrative lie Robert’s depictions of the ruins of Paris—macabre and spectacular paintings of fires and demolitions created on the eve of the French Revolution. Drawing on a vast range of materials, Futures & Ruins understands these artworks as harbingers of a modern appetite for destruction. The paintings are examined as expressions of the pleasures and perils of a risk economy. This captivating account—lavishly illustrated with
rarely reproduced objects—recovers the critical significance of the eighteenth-
century cult of ruins and of Robert’s art for our times.
Nina L. Dubin is an assistant professor of art history at the University of
Illinois at Chicago.
Advance praise for Futures & Ruins
Nina Dubin’s incisive readings of Hubert Robert’s ruin pictures, seen through the lens of period financial fears and speculations, will completely alter the prevailing wisdom about these paintings. These artworks were hitherto interpreted exclusively via the rhetorics of “the picturesque,” but Dubin brings their salient modernities to life. The context of economic risk and the concomitant imagination of calamity that she evokes in this beautifully written book could not be more topical if she had invented the whole thing. And she did not!
—Hollis Clayson, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University
An astute reader of images and their cultural implications, Nina Dubin proposes in this beautifully produced study of Hubert Robert’s enigmatic apocalypses a new understanding of how late-eighteenth-century aesthetics responded to the precarious temporality of dislocations that redefined economic value, politics, urbanism, and the very sense of what history might be.
—Thomas Kavanagh, Augutus R. Street Professor of French, Yale University
Digital Resources, Part III: What Are the Best?
The 2011 BSECS Prize for Digital Resources
Nominations due by 1 December 2010
The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) is pleased to call for nominations for the 2011 Prize for the best digital resource supporting eighteenth-century studies. The prize is funded by Adam Matthew Digital, GALE Cengage Learning, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and ProQuest. It is judged and awarded by BSECS. This prize promotes the highest standards in the development, utility and presentation of digital resources that assist scholars in the field of eighteenth-century studies broadly defined. Nominated resources should meet the highest academic standards and should contribute in one or more of the following ways:
- by making available new materials, or presenting existing materials in new ways;
- by supporting teaching of the period at university level;
- by facilitating, or itself undertaking, innovative research.
The prize is intended to benefit the international research community, and the competition is open to projects from any country. Resources supporting any scholarly discipline are eligible. Websites or other resources and projects may be nominated by either creators or users. They must have been first launched on or after 1 January five years prior to the year in which the prize is awarded. The winner will be announced at the BSECS Annual Conference in January. The award of £200 is made annually. Nominations close on 1 December in any year. For a nomination form, visit the BSECS website.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Last year’s prize was awarded to Electronic Enlightenment. As noted at the Oxford University Press website:
Electronic Enlightenment, a unique website which reconstructs the vital web of correspondence that made the long 18th century the birthplace of the modern world, has won the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Digital Prize for 2010. Electronic Enlightenment (EE) is a scholarly research project of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and is distributed exclusively by Oxford University Press at www.e-enlightenment.com. With a unique collection of primary documents, based on scholarly critical editions and never-before-published materials, EE’s current offering of over 55,000 letters and 6,500 correspondents provides a new vision of the early modern world. Linking people and ideas across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century, EE recasts our understanding of the Enlightenment and ourselves in a more detailed and personal context than ever before. . . .
In response to the award, Dr Robert McNamee, Director of the Electronic Enlightenment Project, said: “There are a growing number of extraordinary resources being offered to scholars in the period; to have EE’s hard work and scholarship recognized as ‘best in class’ by one of the key learned societies in the field is a great honour. Our small but dedicated team works hard to provide students and researchers with an imaginative yet scholarly recreation of the Republic of Letters within a broad social context, with the opportunity for our users to contribute to the growth in depth and breadth of the resource through digital publication of annotations, biographies and editions of further primary documents. We are sure that this seal of approval will further raise EE’s profile and encourage participation by the scholarly community.” . . .
Digital Resources, Part II: ‘The Grand Tour’
I recently stumbled across the following digital resource, though I’ve not yet had the opportunity to use it (relatively few libraries seem to have yet picked it up). Comments are especially welcome from anyone who has begun to explore it. -CH. The following description comes from the website of Adam Matthew Digital:
The Grand Tour, a collection of research materials from Adam Matthew Digital
Editorial Board: Jeremy Black (University of Exeter), Melissa Calaresu (University of Cambridge), Edward Chaney (Southampton Solent University), Rosemary Sweet (University of Leicester), Emma Winter (Columbia University)
Source Libraries: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, British Library, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Private Library of Edward Chaney, Birmingham Art Gallery, Durham University Library, Surrey History Centre, Southampton University, Cornwall Record Office, Northumberland County Archive, Buckinghamshire Archives, West Yorkshire Archive, Devon County Record Office
Nature of the Material
This collection of manuscript, visual and printed works allows scholars to compare a range of sources on the history of travel for the first time, including many from private or neglected collections. Printed texts have been double-keyed enabling full text-search; manuscript items have been indexed. A good number of images are in full colour, including all paintings. We include:
- Letters
- Diaries and journals
- Account books
- Printed guidebooks
- Published travel writing
- Paintings and sketches
- Architectural drawings
- Maps
Scope of the Collection
Taking the phenomenon of the Grand Tour as a starting point, this resource explores the relationship between Britain and Europe between c1550 and c1850, exploring the British response to travel on the Continent for pleasure, business and diplomacy. The Grand Tour includes the travel writings and works of some of Britain’s greatest artists, writers and thinkers, revealing how interaction with European culture shaped their creative and intellectual sensibilities. It also includes many writings by forgotten or anonymous travellers, including many women, whose daily experiences offer a vivid insight into the experience and practicalities of travel over the centuries. This collection of manuscript, visual and printed works allows scholars to explore Anglo-European relations during this period from every angle. Topics covered include:
- European political and religious life
- British diplomacy
- Material culture, taste and collecting
- Everyday life
- Life at court and social customs on the Continent
There is a wealth of detail about cities such as Paris, Geneva, Venice, Rome, Florence and Naples, that will excite both urban and architectural historians. The Grand Tour is also wonderful source of information about daily life between 1550 and 1850, highlighting such everyday issues as transportation, money, communications, food and drink, health and sex. The collection has a very broad appeal, and will be of great interest to: social, cultural and political historians interested in the period 1550-1850; literary scholars; and art history or fine art departments. (more…)
‘The NY Times’ on Electronic Resources in the Humanities
In yesterday’s NY Times, Patricia Cohen addresses the rise of digital research tools, including Mapping the Republic of Letters:
Patricia Cohen, “Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches,” The New York Times (16 November 2010)
A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in “isms” — formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism — grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.
Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have. . . .
Last year the National Endowment for the Humanities spent $2 million on digital projects. One of the endowment’s grantees is Dan Edelstein, an associate professor of French and Italian at Stanford University who is charting the flow of ideas during the Enlightenment. The era’s great thinkers — Locke, Newton, Voltaire — exchanged tens of thousands of letters; Voltaire alone wrote more than 18,000. . . .
The full article is available here»
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