Exhibition | White Gold: Meissen Porcelain
I’m afraid this one almost slipped by without notice, though you still have two months to see it. From The Frick:
White Gold: Highlights from the Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain
The Frick Collection, New York, 13 December 2011 — 6 January 2013
Teapot, Meissen porcelain, c.1729–31, The Arnhold Collection; photograph: Maggie Nimkin
New Portico Gallery Opens with Presentation of Sculpture and Selections from an Important Promised Gift of Meissen Porcelain from Henry H. Arnhold
Since December 13, visitors to The Frick Collection have been able to enjoy a new gallery — the first major addition to the museum’s display spaces in nearly thirty-five years. The inspiration for this initiative, which involves the enclosure of the portico in the Fifth Avenue Garden, comes from the intention of museum founder Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) to build an addition to his 1914 mansion for his growing Collection of sculpture. The project was postponed in 1917 following the United States entry into World War I, and Mr. Frick died before it could be resumed. In recent years, the institution has placed greater focus on sculpture through critically acclaimed exhibitions and several key acquisitions, while also evaluating the effectiveness of the display and lighting of such objects. Another area of increased focus has been the decorative arts. When talks began with renowned porcelain collector Henry H. Arnhold about a promised gift, the idea to create a gallery both for sculpture and the decorative arts was revisited. The architecture firm Aedas developed a plan to integrate the outdoor garden portico into the fabric of the museum, and groundbreaking occurred last winter. Aedas, formerly known as Davis Brody Bond Aedas, is one of the leading practices in the United States engaged in a range of museum and landmark structure commissions.
The Portico Gallery for Decorative Arts and Sculpture opened in late December with an inaugural exhibition of works drawn from Henry Arnhold’s promised gift of 131 examples of Meissen porcelain from the early years of this Royal Manufactory’s production. . . White Gold: Highlights from the Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain will feature approximately seventy of these objects, presented along with a group of eighteenth-century sculptures by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1740–1828). Among the latter works is the full-length terracotta Diana the Huntress, a signature work at the Frick that returns to view having been recently cleaned and treated. It finds a permanent home in the new portico gallery, while the ongoing display of other sculptures and ceramics will rotate periodically.
Fellowships | Residential Awards at the Yale Center for British Art
Visiting Scholar Awards, 2013-14
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Applications due by 4 January 2013
The Yale Center for British Art offers short-term residential awards to scholars undertaking research related to British art. The awards are intended to enable scholars working in any discipline, including history, the history of art, literature, and other fields related to British visual and material culture, to study the Center’s collections of paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts, as well as primary and secondary reference materials.
Awards are offered at both postdoctoral (or equivalent) and pre-doctoral levels. Postdoctoral awards may be held between one to four months. While all applications are given equal consideration, we are encouraging of stays of two or more months. Pre-doctoral awards may be held from one to two months and are intended for graduate students writing dissertations in the field of British art. Applicants from North America must be ABD to qualify.
One award per annum is reserved for a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In addition, scholars may apply to the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware, for awards in the same year; every effort will be made to offer consecutive dates.
The closing date for awards is January 4, 2013. Applicants should complete the online application and upload a cover letter, a curriculum vitae, and a statement of no more than 2,000 words (single-spaced) outlining the proposed research project and the preferred months of tenure. Applicants should provide a title for their research project and place their full name on each page of the application. Two confidential letters of recommendation should be emailed to Research (ycba.visitingscholars@yale.edu) under separate cover by the same deadline.
More information is available here»
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This fall’s visiting scholars:
Caroline Good
PhD Candidate, University of York and Tate Britain
Caroline Good’s research project is entitled, “Two Cultures: English Writers on Art and the Making of a National School, 1658–1719.” Good intends to provide an intensively researched and historically specific perspective on the theory and early historiography of British art between 1658 and 1719 through the written accounts of English art that were produced in these years. The Center’s collection contains the rare books and manuscripts that form the backbone of her thesis, from William Sanderson’s Graphice (1658) to Jonathan Richardson’s Two Discourses (1719).
Rivke Jaffe
Lecturer, Leiden University
Rivke Jaffe is researching the aesthetics of pollution in the context of Victorian-era sanitary reform in Kingston, Jamaica. Her project will explore how Victorian ideologies of cleanliness mapped onto the urban Caribbean, and how they articulated post-emancipation hopes and fears. Jaffe will use her time at the Center to access the historical and visual sources on pollution, disease, and sanitary reform in the British Empire, such as the Center’s extensive collection of illustrated periodicals, maps, prints, and drawings. Jaffe’s research will culminate in a chapter in the publication tentatively titled “Victorian Jamaica,” and a historical chapter in a larger monograph entiteld “Concrete Jungles: Environmentalism, Urban Space, and the Politics of Difference.”
Stephanie O’Rourke
PhD Candidate, Columbia University
Stephanie O’Rourke will spend her time at the Center researching for her project, “Impressed upon the Countenance: Fuseli and the Physiognomic Body.” Her project revisits the relationship between Henry Fuseli and Johann Lavater, who collaborated in the production of numerous French and English editions of Lavater’s seminal text on physiognomy, “Physiognomische Fragmente” in the 1780s. Through this project, O’Rourke seeks to contribute to contemporary scholarship and its compelling reevaluation of Fuseli’s work by revisiting the role of physiognomy in terms of the spectatorial body. O’Rourke’s work will involve a detailed examination of Lavater’s multivolume text as well as the Center’s materials on Henry Fuseli, Horace Walpole, physiognomy, and the display and reception of painting at the Royal Academy.
Morna O’Neill
Assistant Professor of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century European Art, Wake Forest University
Morna O’Neill’s project, “This Place: Attributing the Inscription of ‘English Landscape Scenery,’” seeks to re-examine John Constable’s collaboration with David Lucas known as “English Landscape Scenery” (1830–32) in light of her discovery of the source of the Latin verse included on the frontispiece. O’Neill’s attribution of the Latin inscription to Constable’s print series prompts a reconsideration of his goals for “English Landscape Scenery,” as well as for his larger project and formation of his artistic identity. O’Neill will research the specific and broader questions raised by the allusions to William Camden’s Britannia and Alexander Neckam’s poetry using the Center’s extensive collection of Constable-related material.
Celina Fox
Independent scholar and museums advisor
On the basis of previous research, Celina Fox conjectures that tours of northern Europe, which extended beyond the realms of improvement and amusement to serve professional ends, were more pragmatic in their core purpose than tours to Italy and the Mediterranean. Fox’s project will be to explore the material at the Center relating to the Northern Grand Tour—British travellers to the Low Countries, Germany, the Habsburg Empire, Switzerland, Poland, Russia, and Scandinavia—from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Fox will spend her time at the Center studying its collection of manuscript travel journals, watercolor albums, drawings, and prints of the tourists of Northern Europe who travelled from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. In addition, Fox will benefit from consulting resources at the Lewis Walpole Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Grace Brockington
Lecturer in History of Art, University of Bristol
Grace Brockington’s scholarship concerns Vanessa Bell (1876–1961), an artist of international stature who operated at the forefront of the British avant-garde. Historians have failed to give an adequate account of her critical, cosmopolitan practice, accepting at face value her portrayal as a Bloomsbury bohemian on the one hand, and as a withdrawn, even inarticulate artist on the other. Brockington’s study of Bell is based on a close examination of her work and its visual references; her work is a reaction against the prevailing biographical approach and a response to Bell’s own practice of talking about art in the gallery. As a visiting scholar at the Center, Brockington will examine the collection of works by Bell (including drawings, paintings, and manuscript letters) in relation to the larger holdings of British art. She will also study the work of associated modern artists such as Duncan Grant and Walter Sickert as well as the eighteenth-century Conversation Piece, a genre which Bell reinvented in her group portraits of 1912–13 (e.g., Conversation at Asheham House, 1912).
Matthew Craske
Reader in History of Art, Oxford Brookes University
Dr. Matthew Craske visits the Center as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Senior Visiting Scholar, to undertake research on the employment of images in churches in the English Protestant tradition, focusing on St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. He will also work on his book-length project, Wright of Derby: The Art of Friendship, which is supported by a Senior Research Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Andrew W. Mellon Senior Visiting Scholars are invited to spend two months at the Center, pursuing their research and participating in the intellectual life of the Center and Yale University.
Kathleen Wilson
Professor of History and Cultural Analysis and Theory, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Kathleen Wilson will be working on a book project entitled “Strolling Players of Empire: Theatre, Culture and Modernity in the English Provinces, 1700-1820,” which considers the role of theater and performance of difference in provincial and colonial towns.
Cora Gilroy-Ware
PhD Candidate, University of Bristol and Tate Britain
Cora Gilroy-Ware will conduct research on a project entitled, “Thomas Stothard and Henry Howard: In Search of Grace and Elegance,” related to her doctoral dissertation, “The Classical Nude in Romantic Britiain.”
Molly Duggins
PhD Candidate, University of Sydney
Molly Duggins will explore the visual discourse on seaweed in the Center’s Rare Books and Manuscripts collections for a project entitled “From Scientific Specimen to Civilising Medium: Seaweed and the Art of Arrangement in Nineteenth-Century British Visual Culture.”
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