Exhibition | A Handsome Cupboard of Plate: Early American Silver
From ACC Distribution:
A Handsome Cupboard of Plate Early American Silver in the Cahn Collection
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1 December 2012 — 24 March 2013
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 20 April — 3 November 2013
Missouri History Museum, St Louis, 23 November 2013 — 2 March 2014
The DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, 3 May 2014 — 25 May 2015
Deborah Dependahl Waters, A Handsome Cupboard of Plate Early American Silver in the Cahn Collection (Cambridge: John Adamson, 2013), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-1898565116, $40.
Strength in design and fineness of craftsmanship unify the early American domestic and presentation silver assembled by Paul and Elissa Cahn and published together for the first time. Beginning in Boston with a caudle cup marked by Jeremiah Dummer, America’s first native-born silversmith, and objects from the shop of patriot silversmith Paul Revere, the book then focuses on New York, where a distinctive style reflecting the Dutch heritage of that region emerged, and afterward on Philadelphia, where generations of the Quaker Richardson family supplied goods of the “best sort, but plain.”
Pride of place is given to the work of New York Jewish silversmith Myer Myers and his shop, including a presentation waiter made for Theodorus Van Wyck. Accompanying a touring exhibition of the Cahn collection, the book encapsulates some of the ethnic, religious, and political diversity of early America and sets
the silver in its social and historical context.
C O N T E N T S
Foreword by Kaywin Feldman, Director and President, Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The Cahn Collection of Early American Silver – An Appreciation by David L. Barquist, The H. Richard Dietrich Jr. Curator of American Decorative Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art
A Handsome Cupboard of Plate: Early American Silver and Silversmiths – An Introductory Essay
Catalogue
I: Boston
II: New York
III: Philadelphia
Frequent Bibliographical References and Note on Digital Resources
Index
Deborah Dependahl Waters is an independent historian of American decorative arts, specializing in silver and furniture of the Mid-Atlantic region. Since 1987 she has been a member of the part-time teaching faculty for the Parsons-Cooper-Hewitt M.A. Program in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, and is currently president of New York Silver Society, Inc. She is the editor and an author of Elegant Plate: Three Centuries of Precious Metals in New York City (2000), and a contributor to Art in the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861 (2000), and Silversmiths to the Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808-1842 (2007), as well as lead author of The Jewelry and Metalwork of Marie Zimmermann (2011).
2013 Iris Awards
From the BGC:
Bard Graduate Center Announces Recipients of the Seventeenth Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Dr. Susan Weber, Founder and Director of the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, has announced the recipients of the Seventeenth Annual Iris Foundation Awards for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts.
This year’s honorees are Richard Jenrette, Morrison H. Heckscher, Glenn Adamson, and Adrian Sassoon. The awards will be presented at a luncheon at the Colony Club, 564 Park Avenue, on April 17, 2013. (more…)
At The Newberry | Jesse Molesworth, On the Orrery
From The Newberry:
Jesse Molesworth, Time and the Cosmos: The Orrery in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination
The Newberry Library, Chicago, 23 February 2013
Please join us on Saturday, 23 February 2013, 2-4pm for the Newberry Library Eighteenth-Century Seminar works-in-progress session with Jesse Molesworth of Indiana University, speaking on the orrery in the eighteenth century.
The first modern orrery, a mechanical device presenting the motion of the solar system, was produced in 1704 by the eminent English clockmakers George Graham and Thomas Tompion. Typically driven by a clockwork mechanism and featuring the planets and their moons revolving around the sun, such devices served throughout the eighteenth century as a crucial means of illustrating the new Copernican view of the cosmos. But it is in this capacity that they served the ulterior purpose of demonstrating precisely the smallness of the individual in relation to the vastness of the cosmos. This paper examines the ways in which those living in the eighteenth century—scientists, artists, writers—reckoned with this unwelcome and ultimately terrifying facet of modernity.
A reception will follow the seminar. This program is free and open to the public, but registration in advance is required. Register online at: http://www.newberry.org/renaissance.
Sponsored by the University of Chicago, DePaul University, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago; and organized by Timothy Campbell, University of Chicago; Lisa Freeman, University of Illinois at Chicago; John Shanahan, DePaul University; and Helen Thompson, Northwestern University.
Conference | Inter-Culture 1400–1850: Art, Artists, and Migration
From Liverpool Hope University:
Inter-Culture 1400–1850: Art, Artists, and Migration
Liverpool Hope University, 5-6 April 2013
While major exhibitions, such as Migrations – Journeys into British Art (January – August 2012) at Tate Britain, address the impact of migration on the cultural heritage and artistic production in a particular country, the conference seeks to investigate further this exciting topic by discussing thematically the latest research of international scholars. Instead of focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries and the strong consequences migration caused in modern and postmodern societies, we intend to look back and explore the effects of migration on art and artists in Europe and beyond before, during and shortly after the Industrial Revolution.
Why have artists left their comfort zone, travelled to faraway places and adapted to new living conditions when only very few had a noteworthy impact on local artistic production, such as Hans Holbein the Younger at Henry VIII’s court or El Greco, who is the prime example for intercultural artistic exchange in early modern times? How important was national identity for the artists and also for the reception of their work? What are the differences and parallels between pre- and post-Industrial Revolution migration of artists?
If you would like to register for the conference, please find a registration form on the website www.hope.ac.uk/inter-culture/
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F R I D A Y , 5 A P R I L 2 0 1 3
8.00 Registration/Refreshments
9.00 Welcome, Professor Kenneth Newport, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Liverpool Hope University)
9.30 Keynote Lecture, Professor Eberhard König (Free University Berlin)
10.15 Guest talk, Tim Batchelor (Tate Britain London, Co-curator of Migrations – Journeys into British Art)
11.00 Coffee Break
11.30 Section 1: Old versus New Society – Artists’ Perceptions
• Anette Schaffer (The Warburg Institute, London), El Greco: Reviewing the Question of Early Modern Artistic Eccentricity
• Stephanie Porras (Tulane University, New Orleans), The Real, Rejected and Virtual Travels of Marten de Vos
• Gitta Ho (Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris), German Art Pupils in Paris, 1793-1843
1.00 Lunch
2.00 Section 2: New Environments and Influences on Artistic Practices
• Silvia Ferreira (University of Lisbon), From Stone to Wood: Claude Laprade and His Journey from Provence to Portugal
• Clemence Matthieu (Clare Hall, Cambridge), Cultures of Exchange: The Architecture of the Low Countries and Southern England in the 16th century
• Matej Klemencic (University of Ljubljana), Venetian Sculptors of the 18th Century in Habsburg Lands: Francesco Robba, Antonio Corradini and Giovanni Marchiori
3.30 Coffee
4.00 Section 3: Cultural Confrontations
• Natasha Eaton (University City of London), Subaltern Colour? Between the Global and the Local in Britain and India
• Jessica David (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), Johan Zoffany’s Painting Practice in Kolkata and Lucknow: The Technical Exploration of an ad hoc Studio
• Katelyn Crawford (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington), John Greenwood, Portraiture, and Mobility in the British Atlantic, 1752-72
6.30 Conference Dinner
S A T U R D A Y , 6 A P R I L 2 0 1 3
9.00 Keynote Lecture, Professor Fintan Cullen (University of Nottingham), Migrating Objects: Ireland and Empire
10.00 Section 4: Forced Migration and Its Resistance
• Julia Crispin (University of Münster), French Manuscript Illumination between Propaganda and Pragmatism: The Talbot Workshop in Rouen and Its Patrons during the Last Stages of the Hundred Years’ War
• Frederica Van Dam (Ghent University), Tableau Poetique: A Recently Discovered Manuscript by the Flemish Migrant Painter-Poet Lucas de Heere (1534-84)
• Gerrit Walczak (Technical University Berlin), Mutual Irritations: Migrant Artists in London during the French Revolution
12.00 Visit the Walker Art Gallery
1.00 Lunch
2.30 Section 5: The Returned Artist
• Kathrin Wagner (Liverpool Hope University), Malversation, Escape, Return: The Sculptor Hans Hesse from Luebeck and His Temporary Migration to Dalarna, Sweden, 1457-58
• Fiona V. Salvesen Murrell (University of Aberdeen), The Returned Artist: American Lessons Learned: Shaping the New Scottish Academy from 1826
• Laura MacCulloch (Royal Holloway, University of London), Revaluating the Outsider: Ford Madox Brown and Cultural Dialogues in mid-19th-century Europe
3.30 Coffee
4.00 Final Remarks
Exhibition | Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s ‘Messiah’
From The Handel House Museum:
Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s Messiah
The Handel House Museum, London, 21 November 2012 — 14 April 2013
Curated by Ruth Smith
In a major new exhibition the Handel House Museum explores the life, work and character of Handel’s great collaborator Charles Jennens.
An enigmatic character, Jennens had an enormous influence on Handel’s life and work. As librettist for the oratorios Saul and Belshazzar, he provided the composer with words that inspired some of his most challenging and exciting music. His carefully chosen scripture selection for Messiah was to inspire Handel to even greater creative heights, and together these two men created one of the greatest musical works of all time.
The exhibition examines this relationship in detail, alongside other elements of Jennens’s life as a great landowner; the builder of a fine country house with extensive grounds; a major art collector; a Christian philanthropist; a devout defender of revealed religion; an encourager of other authors and composers; a loyal friend; and a forward-looking editor of Shakespeare.
Bringing together exhibits from throughout the UK and beyond, for the first time this landmark exhibition unites all known oil portraits of Jennens to stand beside Handel House’s own magnificent portrait by Thomas Hudson.
The exhibition’s curator is Dr Ruth Smith, author of Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge University Press), who has made a particular study of the life and work of Charles Jennens.
Ruth Smith, Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s Messiah (London: Gerald Coke Handel Foundation, 2012), 71 pages, ISBN: 978-0956099822, £8.50.
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Jonathan Keates provides a review for the TLS (11 January 2013):
. . . Unfolding the mystery of Charles Jennens for us, this fine new exhibition, which also has a related walking tour and a series of talks and concerts, is the best so far within the Handel House’s limited space; it was mounted under the guidance of Ruth Smith, whose illuminating survey of his achievement accompanies the show. Besides evoking our admiration for him as aesthete, connoisseur, charitable patron, landscape gardener or devoted friend, she celebrates his work as the earliest variorum editor of Shakespeare’s plays. . . .
ASECS 2013, Cleveland
2013 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Cleveland, 3-6 April 2013
The 2013 ASECS conference takes place in Cleveland, April 3-6, at the Marriott’s Renaissance Cleveland Hotel. This year’s annual HECAA luncheon and business meeting will be held on Friday at The Greenhouse Tavern. In terms of sessions, HECAA will be represented by two panels, just before lunch, chaired by Christopher Johns and Heather McPherson. In addition to these, a selection of sessions are also included below (of the 201 panels scheduled, many others will, of course, interest HECAA members). For the full program, see the ASECS website.
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H E C A A S E S S I O N S
Anne Schroder New Scholar’s Session
Friday, 5 April 2013, 9:45-11:15, Van Aken
Chair: Christopher M. S. JOHNS, Vanderbilt University
1. Katherine MCHALE, Independent Scholar, “The Madonnas of Settecento Venice: A Tradition Renewed”
2. Ji YOU, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Sèvres Porcelain during the French Revolution”
3. Lindsay DUNN, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Constructing an Imperial Identity: Marie-Louise, House of Habsburg-Lorraine and Dynastic Capital”
4. Karissa BUSHMAN, Augustana College, “Memorializing Fear and Abuse: Goya’s Depiction of the Inquisition in Los Caprichos”
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Interiors as Space and Image
Friday, 5 April 2013, 11:30-1:00, Halle
Chair: Heather MCPHERSON, University of Alabama, Birmingham
1. Elizabeth F. JUDGE, University of Ottawa, “Eighteenth-Century Court Interiors and the Architecture of Credibility”
2. Edward HOULE, McGill University, “Discriminating Dining: Louis XV’s Salles à manger at Versailles”
3. Sally GRANT, University of Sydney, “Questioning Interiority/Exteriority in the Decorative Design of Giandomenico Tiepolo’s ‘Room of the Carnival Scenes’ at the Villa Valmarana ‘ai Nani’”
4. Esther GABEL, University of Cambridge, “The Portego: Spaces of Presentation and Performance in Eighteenth-Century Venice”
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O T H E R S E S S I O N S R E L A T E D T O T H E V I S U A L A R T S (more…)
New Book | Atlas De Wit City Atlas of the Low Countries, 1698
From ACC Distribution:
Marieke van Delft and Peter van der Krogt, Atlas De Wit City Atlas of the Low Countries, 1698 (Tielt: Lannoo Publishers, 2013), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-9401401890, $175.
Discover the Google Earth of the Dutch Golden Age
• A historical atlas from 1698 with 151 city maps from the Northern and Southern Netherlands, from Groningen to Lille
• A book of great cultural and artistic importance. Only 5 copies of the original atlas are known worldwide
• Contains beautiful, originally hand-colored maps, drawn from a bird’s eye view
• A facsimile on true scale with a new introduction and a detailed description per map by Marieke van Delft and Peter van der Krogt
Atlas De Wit is a unique, historical atlas of cartographer Frederick de Wit with 158 city maps, city views and engravings from the Northern and Southern Netherlands (today’s Netherlands, Belgium and French Flanders). This facsimile contains full-size images of the beautiful, original hand-colored cards, which are drawn in perspective. The maps provide a visual perspective on the history of the 17th century, from Groningen to Cambrai. This title is completed with introductory and detailed descriptions that make this historical atlas map accessible to all lovers of history and old maps. Text in English, French & Dutch.
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David Pullins on ‘Robert Adam’s Chinoiseries’
From The Soane Foundation:
David Pullins — Robert Adam’s Chinoiseries
Union Club, New York, 11 February 2013
Robert Adam, Chinoiserie looking-glass design for the state bedchamber, Harewood House (detail)
Feb. 1769. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (20:73)
Robert Adam is celebrated today as the leading proponent of neoclassicism in England. If we follow conventional stylistic categories, he would be among the least likely architects to venture into the exoticism of the rococo or baroque; however, in three projects dated between 1766 and 1772, Adam produced designs in the Chinese taste, modifying the existing decorative vocabulary of chinoiserie in accordance with the new neoclassical aesthetic he was so pivotal in promoting. A seeming contradiction in terms, Adam’s neoclassical chinoiserie challenges our assumptions not only about the architect but also stylistic categories.
Apart from a chimneypiece at Kenwood House that incorporates panels from a Chinese marble screen, Adam’s chinoiserie works either do not survive or have been greatly modified. His dressing room for Elizabeth Montagu in Mayfair was quickly reconceived by Adam’s competitor James Stuart and his looking-glass designs for Harewood House were probably never executed due to the discouragement of Thomas Chippendale. In the absence of extent work, an important group of drawings in Sir John Soane’s Museum provides the principal source of information about this unexpected facet of Adam’s career. Through a close examination of these drawings in conjunction with archival research conducted in London, Leeds, Edinburgh and Los Angeles made possible by the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation, this lecture attempts to reconstruct what we can know about Adam’s chinoiserie designs and his motivation and tactics in producing them.
Time: Monday, 11 February 2013, at 6:30 pm (doors open 6:15)
Location: Union Club, 101 East 69th Street at Park Avenue
Attire: Business- Jacket and Tie required for mene
Tickets can be purchased online at The Soane Foundation’s website
David Pullins is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and currently a David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. David received a B.A. in art history from Columbia University and a M.A. as a Peter Jay Sharp Scholar at The Courtauld Institute of Art, where he began his work on Robert Adam. With the support of a Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation Traveling Fellowship in 2011, David was able to return to work begun in his M.A. and complete the necessary archival research in London and Edinburgh to prepare a forthcoming article on the subject of Adam and chinoiserie.
Exhibition | The Westminster Treasure: History in Silver, 1713–2013
From The Wallace:
The Westminster Treasure: History in Silver, 1713–2013
The Wallace Collection, London, 7 February — 28 April 2013
The Rosewood Cabinet 1827–77 © The Past Overseers’ Society, Westminster
The Wallace Collection will be displaying a unique set of silver inscribed boxes belonging to the Past Overseers’ Society, Westminster. The collection began in 1713 and, as ever larger cases were commissioned to hold the previous case, they were each covered with etchings of historical events, royal engagements and portraits. The silver is beautiful and the inscriptions are fascinating, intriguing and compelling. Come to the Porphyry Court to see three hundred years of idiosyncratic history continuing up to 2012 with the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics.
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On Monday, 18th February, 2013, Joan Reid from Past Overseers’ Society, Westminster will talk about the unique set of silver inscribed boxes belonging to the Society currently on display in the Porphyry
Court. This special lecture will take place in the Lecture Theatre. Free,
no need to book.
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London’s Inner Temple Records, 1505-1845, Now Online
The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple is pleased to announce that its Calendars of Inner Temple Records, 1505 to 1845, are now available online and may be accessed via the Inner Temple’s website.
The Calendars detail the administrative decisions made by the Inn’s Bench Table and Parliament, and also publish many of the other series of documents contained in the Inn’s archive, including account books from 1682, account receipt books 1682 to 1870 and other miscellaneous documents. Genealogists will be able to search for ancestors admitted to the Inn and its Chambers as well as any that were called to the bar using a document wordsearch. The first volumes are edited by F.A. Inderwick Q.C. a former Treasurer of the Inn in 1898 and include his own excellent
introductions. This also contains the Register of Burials at the Temple Church from 1660 to 1715. The editorship is then taken over by R.A.Roberts in 1933 who continues with the introductions to each volume until 1800. More recently Celia Charlton has transcribed our records to produce the volume 1836 to 1845.
The volumes take some time to load due to their size and we thank you for your patience and hope that soon we will be able to split the size of the files and thereby speed up the process. Any enquiries should be addressed to the archivist Celia Pilkington, cpilkington@innertemple.org.uk
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