Exhibition | Witches and Wicked Bodies
Press release (10 December 2012) from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art:
Witches and Wicked Bodies
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 27 July — 3 November 2013
The fascination for witches, which has gripped many Western artists from the sixteenth century to the present, will be the subject of a major new exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art this summer. Witches and Wicked Bodies, will delve into the dark and cruel origins of the classic image of the witch, and demonstrate how the now familiar old woman on a broomstick is just one part of a rich and very diverse visual tradition.
Witches and Wicked Bodies will highlight the inventive approaches to the depiction of witches and witchcraft employed by a broad range of artists over the past 500 years, with striking examples by famous names such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Salvator Rosa, Francisco de Goya, Henry Fuseli, John William Waterhouse and William Blake. The selection will also include more recent interpretations of the subject, by twentieth-century and contemporary artists including Paula Rego, Kiki Smith and Edward Burra. The exhibition has been curated by the National Galleries of Scotland with artist and writer Deanna Petherbridge and will contain major works on loan from the British Museum; the National Gallery (London); the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Tate; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, to be shown alongside key images from the Royal Scottish Academy and the Galleries’ own collections.
John Leighton, Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “We look to offer our public a world-class yet very distinctive programme of exhibitions. I believe that this is the first time that witchcraft across the ages has been the subject of a major art exhibition in the UK and we are delighted to be partners with the British Museum on this truly fascinating and compelling show.”
Europe has a long history of witchcraft and the persecution of witches was particularly widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, accounting for thousands of deaths of women and even children. Prints and drawings dating from this period will form a key part of the exhibition, showing how the advent of the printing press gave artists as well as writers the means to share ideas, myths and fears about witches from country to country. Engravings by Albrecht Dürer will be shown alongside woodcuts by Hans Baldung Grien and many other printmakers including Bruegel and de Gheyn.
Paul Sandby, The Flying Machine from Edinburgh in One Day Performed by Moggy Mackenzie at the Thistle and Crown, etching, 1762. The print satirizes Scottish emigration to England.
Photograph: National Galleries of Scotland
The exhibition will focus on six key themes. The centrepiece of Witches’ Sabbaths and Devilish Rituals is one of the most famous images of witches of all time – Salvator Rosa’s Witches at their Incantations on loan from the National Gallery (London). Unnatural Acts of Flying will include the origins of the image of the witch as an old woman riding a broomstick against a night sky, but rather than the cloaked figure wearing a pointy hat that has become so widely known to adults and children alike, this section features more sinister images of flying witches attending black masses.
In Magic Circles, Incantations and Raising the Dead, visitors will encounter glamorous witches cooking up spells as in Frans Francken’s 1606 painting Witches’ Sabbath. This powerful section also includes the luscious 1886 painting by John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle. Hideous Hags and Beautiful Witches will include the medusa-like witch with snakes for hair in John Hamilton Mortimer’s drawing Envy and Distraction. This introductory section will also feature unsettling works depicting old crones by Francisco de Goya – the exhibition contains a significant group of works by this major Spanish artist. Some of the images are genuinely frightening and disturbing, whereas others will reveal the negative attitudes towards women in periods when they were very much seen as the second sex. Due to the particular association of women with witchcraft, these works will highlight the ways in which a largely male-dominated European society has viewed female imperfections, highlighting the concerns created by women laying claim to special powers, or simply behaving in the ‘wrong’ way.
Daniel Gardner, The Three Witches from Macbeth (Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne; Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; Anne Seymour Damer), pastel on paper, 1775 (London: NPG)
Works depicting the various appearances of the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in Unholy Trinities and The Weird Sisters from Macbeth, will range from John Martin’s theatrical large-scale painting of Banquo and Macbeth lost on the blasted heath, with the turbulent skies swirling over exaggerated mountains, through to John Runciman’s striking drawing which here is interpreted as the Three Witches conspiring over Macbeth’s fate.
This fascinating thematic survey will culminate with The Persistence of Witches. Works by Kiki Smith and Paula Rego mark a sea-change with these high-profile contemporary artists’ own take on a subject that had previously been almost exclusively male-dominated. In Smith’s study Out of the Woods, the artist herself explores the expressions and attitudes of the ‘witch’, whereas Rego’s 1996 work Straw Burning relates to the famous Pendle Witch trials which took place in 1612 in Lancaster, 400 years ago.
The exhibition has been organised in partnership with the British Museum, whose loans will include William Blake’s magnificent drawing The Whore of Babylon which will be shown alongside the National Galleries’ own Blake drawing, once thought to depict Hecate, the classical witch of the crossroads. Witches and Wicked Bodies will be an investigation of extremes, exploring the highly exaggerated ways in which witches have been represented, from hideous hags to beautiful seductresses who ‘bewitch’ unwary men.
Writing for The Guardian (22 March 2013), Charlotte Higgins provides a useful introduction»
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From ACC Distribution:
Deanna Petherbridge, Witches & Wicked Bodies (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2013), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-1906270551, £15.
Witches & Wicked Bodies provides an innovative, rich survey of images of European witchcraft from the sixteenth century to the present day. It focuses on the representation of female witches and the enduring stereotypes they embody, ranging from hideous old crones to beautiful young seductresses. Such imagery has ancient precedents and has been repeatedly re-invented by artists over the centuries, to include scenes with corpses and cauldrons, caverns and kitchens, and the dead being raised through demonic or satanic rites – all inversions of an ordered and religious social world.
Petherbridge introduces this fascinating subject and includes catalogue entries on each of the exhibited works. The illustrations primarily feature drawings and prints as well as a group of important paintings. A wide range of artists is represented including Dürer, Goya, Fuseli, Blake, Burra and Rego.
Deanna Petherbridge CBE is an artist, curator and writer. Her book The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (Yale University Pres)s, was published June 2010. She was Visiting Professor of Drawing at the University of the Arts London from 2009 to 2012 and was Professor of Drawing at the Royal College of Art from 1995 to 2001 where she launched the Centre for Drawing Research. Between 2002 and 2006 Petherbridge held a post as Arnolfini Professor of Drawing at the University of the West of England, Bristol and a two year Research Professorship at the University of Lincoln from 2007 to 2009.
Exhibition | Northern Vision: Master Drawings
From the Soane’s Museum:
Northern Vision: Master Drawings from the Tchoban Foundation
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 21 June – 28 September 2013
Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann (1662–1736), Project for the Orangerie
of the Peterswalsky von Peterswald Palace, Silesia, undated
(Berlin: Tchoban Foundation)
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From Schinkel’s earliest attributed drawing to designs for the Palace of the Soviets, Moscow, this exhibition draws on the highlights of the Tchoban Foundation collection, Museum für Architekturziechnunung, Berlin. Amongst the architects represented will be seldom seen works by Matthias Daniel Pöppelmann (1662–1736), Leo von Klenze (1784–1864), Herman Giesler (1898–1987) and Boris Iofan (1891–1976). The Tchoban Foundation has been set up by the Russian Berlin-based architect Sergei Tchoban and the collections reflect his personal, architectural interests.
The exhibition includes drawings by Sergei Tchoban illustrating his practice’s interest in the continued use of architectural draughtsmanship. Many of these drawings also reflect the distinctive and historical cityscapes of Berlin and Sergei Tchoban’s native St Petersburg.
The 41-page guide (with wall text and images) is available as a PDF file here»
The catalogue is available from the museum shop»
Eighteenth-Century Studies 46 (Summer 2013)
Eighteenth-Century Studies 46 (Summer 2013)
A R T I C L E S
Patrick C. Fleming, “The Rise of the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature, the Novel, and The Governess,” pp. 463–77.
Sarah Fielding’s The Governess has been called the first children’s novel. But by conflating two separate genres, critics risk oversimplifying both the novel and children’s literature. This article brings together children’s literature studies and novel studies in order to address the narrative form of The Governess, and to suggest that the term “moral tale” better captures the complex origins of the eighteenth-century children’s novel.
Mark Koch, ” ‘A Spectacle Pleasing to God and Man’: Sympathy and the Show of Charity in the Restoration Spittle Sermons,” pp. 479–97.
In the 1670s the long-standing Spittle sermons became almost exclusively charity sermons, many of which argued that almsdeeds are accompanied with a sensual pleasure and articulated principles of sympathetic response involving an affective theatricality. This paper considers the place of these sermons and their ancillary children’s processions in the London public sphere, how they worked as spectacle to evoke pity from spectators, and how, despite the Latitudinarian tendency toward rationalism, they often contained elements of what was deemed an empirically nebulous “show” or “fiction.”
Catherine Packham, “Cicero’s Ears, or Eloquence in the Age of Politeness: Oratory, Moderation, and the Sublime in Enlightenment Scotland,” pp. 499–512.
This paper argues that Hume’s essay, “Of Eloquence,” should be read as part of a Scottish Enlightenment attempt to accommodate the sublime to commercial modernity. Hume inherits the sublime of ancient oratory not as a matter for narrow stylistic regulation—to be rejected in a new age of politeness, as some have argued—but as a moral problem at the heart of modern subjectivity. Hume looks to taste to regulate and contain the sublime, but it is Adam Smith who solves the problem of the sublime by recouping its excess as a mark of the possibilities for virtue in the modern age.
Lisa T. Sarasohn, ” ‘That Nauseous Venomous Insect’: Bedbugs in Early Modern England,” pp. 513–30.
Bedbugs were perceived as a new entry in the rich range of vermin that plagued eighteenth-century England, and the way they were viewed and treated reveals much about the mentality, prejudices, assumptions and aspirations of society at that time. Their presence increasingly elicited repugnance and even hysteria. The reaction to bedbugs during the eighteenth century serves as an indicator of modernity and emerging attitudes towards the body, class, nature and science.
Ryan Whyte, “Exhibiting Enlightenment: Chardin as tapissier,” pp. 531–54.
This essay addresses the work of Jean-Baptiste Chardin as tapissier to show his design of the Salon du Louvre functioned as an ideological system that derived meaning from Enlightenment discourses of epistemology and taxonomy. First, this essay explores how the Salon design answered the Académie’s need to represent its structure to the Salon public, and to guide the public in judging the individual works comprising it. Second, this essay examines points of contact between Chardin, the Académie, Carl Linnaeus and the authors of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert as intellectual context for the Salon design.
Abigail Zitin, “Thinking Like an Artist: Hogarth, Diderot, and the Aesthetics of Technique,” pp. 555–70.
In The Analysis of Beauty, William Hogarth advocated an unusual kind of formalism based in artistic practice: not form distilled into a rule for judgment but rather derived from the artist’s techniques for perception and composition. Denis Diderot, too, embraced an aesthetics of technique, particularly in the Paradoxe sur le comédien, in which he contends that what appears impassioned in an affecting dramatic performance is in fact calculated. Diderot, however, had the extra burden of reconciling the ideal of illusion with his demystification of the practitioner’s perspective, a reconciliation he could only conceive as a paradox.
R E V I E W S
Mark K. Fulk “Travel And/As Enigma: Review of Ian Warrell, ed., Turner Inspired in the Light of Claude (National Gallery Company, 2012) and Yaël Schlick, Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment (Bucknell University Press, 2012),” pp. 571–73.
Recent work on travel by scholars Nicola Watson (The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain [2008]), Zoë Kinsley (Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 [2008]), and Ann C. Colley (Victorians in the Mountains [2010]) has added markedly to our understanding of British travel in the latter eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through its foregrounding of issues of class, gender, and the changing understanding of landscape aesthetics and theories of the sublime. The books in this review supplement this discussion by their emphasis on Anglo-French experiences of travel in the period. . .
Jennifer Milam, “Review of Michael Yonan, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011),” pp. 575–77.
. . . Thanks to Yonan’s interpretive approach, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art is a ground-breaking study in the history of Austrian art and architecture. His book is a substantial contribution to the study of women as powerful agents in the production and reception of visual culture in European court circles during the eighteenth century. Moreover, Yonan’s wide-ranging choice of material—portraiture, decorative objects, architecture, interior decoration, and garden sculpture—provides the reader with a comprehensive understanding of Maria Theresa’s individualized approach to the representation of her personal authority in the visual arts. This is complemented by a number of quality illustrations that allow readers to consider the details of many works that are rarely discussed in depth. . .
Mark K. Fulk, “Review of Adrian J. Wallbank, Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute: Literary Dialogue in an Age of Revolution (Pickering and Chatto, 2012),” pp. 578–79.
In his postscript, Adrian J. Wallbank explains that his project was meant to “open up multiple avenues for further research . . . into this seriously neglected literary genre” of the written dialogue, gesturing toward the beginnings of a history of “dialogic didacticism” in the Romantic era (217). The book meets these expectations well by revealing in elaborate detail this overlooked genre, and suggesting ways that Wallbank’s readings can help complement our approach to already canonical markers of the period. . .
Exhibition Catalogue | Paper Palaces: The Topham Collection
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Adriano Aymonino with Lucy Gwynn and Mirco Modolo, Paper Palaces: The Topham Collection as a Source for British Neo-Classicism (Windsor: Eton College, 2013).
Exhibition on view from May until November 1, 2013 at The Verey Gallery, Eton College Library.
I’m delighted to announce that the 56-page catalogue for Paper Palaces is available free of charge for download as a PDF file here. Warm thanks to the exhibition organizers for their generous cooperation. -CH
Call for Articles | Service and Servants, 1500–1750
Call for Papers from The Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS) . . .
JEMS 4 (2015) | Service and Servants in Early Modern Culture, 1500–1750
Proposals due by 1 October 2013, Final Drafts due by 31 January 2014
The Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS) is an open access peer-reviewed international journal that promotes interdisciplinary research and discussion on issues concerning all aspects of early modern European culture.
We are now inviting contributions for volume 4, to be released online in March 2015. Jointly edited by William C. Carroll (Boston University) and Jeanne Clegg (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice), JEMS 4, entitled Service and Servants in Early Modern Culture, 1500-1750, aims to bring together scholars from across a wide disciplinary spectrum to inquire into differences and similarities, continuities and changes in the ethics, representation and practice of service and servitude in different countries and contexts. The issue will be open to contributions on oral and visual forms of cultural expression as well as textual, and we invite studies of emerging voices and works intended for and by, as well as about, servants and service. Contributions addressing issues of class, gender, and ethnic/national representations are particularly encouraged.
Main deadlines
• 1 October 2013: adhere to project and send working title and short abstract to William Carroll (wcarroll@bu.edu) and Jeanne Clegg (jfclegg@unive.it).
• 31 January 2014: finalize paper for submission to referees. Articles must comply with the editorial norms and must not exceed 12,000 words, including endnotes and bibliography.
All articles are published in English. Please be so kind as to have your paper revised by a native speaker.
Call for Papers | Ateliers et Manufactures, 1789–1815
From the Call for Papers (the PDF includes the French version) . . .
Workshops and Manufactures in the Years between the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire (France, 1789–1815)
Institut national d’histoire de l’art and Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 13–14 June 2014
Proposals due by 30 September 2013
The twenty-five years between the assembly of the États généraux and the end of the Napoleonic Empire saw political, social, cultural and economic changes that created a context of instability for the luxury industries and fine arts in France. Workshops and manufacturers were confronted with material and logistical challenges. The shortage of materials, the collapse of the financial system and the loss of a significant number of skilled workmen to the army, had a direct impact on French productivity. In spite of these difficult conditions, the insecurity and instability of social upheaval and war in this period, creativity and the invention of new trends and fashions were by no means halted in Paris. New markets quickly offered plenty of opportunities for inventive craftsmen to extend and diversify their activities.
Up until now the revolutionary period has mainly been considered as a period of disruption, especially in the field of luxury industries, which were considered to be at odds with the values of the new emerging social system. It is now possible to show that contrary to this general assumption, continuity can be found in this pivotal period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The quick re-awakening of the production of luxury goods followed the establishment of the Directoire and its flowering during the Napoleonic years is proof of great flexibility and adjustment to social change and the new paradigms of labor. A number of questions emerge from these observations: what events and changes confronted former royal and later national manufacturers, famous workshops and regional producers in the years between the Ancien Régime and the Bourbon Restoration? In what ways were artists and artisans able to adapt or resign themselves to the new challenges? But also – to what extent did these events stimulate new modes of creativity and production which would have an impact on the development of industrialization in France?
This symposium aims to shed light on a pivotal period in the history of material culture and the decorative arts in France. One of its goals is to provide a better understanding of and insight into what exactly happened during these years and into the impact of the transformation of every aspect of civil and industrial life on Parisian and regional production in this period, which is generally recognized as one of cataclysmic change. Organized as an interdisciplinary event, this symposium will study the period from the point of view of art, social, economic and technological histories. Its main objectives are to define and shed light on the specific characteristics of the period and its production, in order to generate new insights and conclusions which complement the field’s well-established stylistic analyses, while also providing new tools for the broader analysis of objects.
Contributions of 20 minutes should approach the following pivotal points:
The Organization of Production: Actors and places of production – The management of workshops before and after the abolition of the guilds in 1791 – The institutional and legal context for production – Creators and makers in different trades linked to the luxury industries – Supply and suppliers of materials – Competition between national and private industries.
Forms and Materials: Tools, techniques and materials – Fashion and trends – The relation of stylistic evolution and industrialization- Professional schools and academic institutions for the industries – Iconographies and style for manufactured goods – Know-how and the evolution of style
Distribution: Industrial exhibitions from 1798 onwards – Methods of distribution – Producers of manufactured goods – Commercial networks – Press and publicity – Franchising and dealers – Places of sale – Diplomatic gifts – Commercial challenge and competition
Papers may be given in French or English language. Proposals for papers of one A-4 side length and a short biography in French or English should be sent to the following address before Monday, September 30th 2013: AteliersManufactures1789-1815@dt-forum.org.
Organisational Board
Natacha Coquery (université Lumière Lyon 2, LAHRA)
Jörg Ebeling (Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris)
Anne Perrin-Khelissa (université de Toulouse 2 Le Mirail)
Philippe Sénéchal (Institut national d’histoire de l’art)
Scientific Board
Marc Bayard (Mobilier national, Paris) ; Jean-Francois Belhoste (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) ; Andreas Beyer (Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art) ; Philippe Bordes (université Lumière Lyon 2) ; Anne Dion (musée du Louvre) ; Daniela Gallo (université Pierre Mendès France Grenoble 2) ; Liliane Hilaire-Pérez (université Paris 7) ; Ulrich Leben (Bard Graduate Center, New York) ; Lesley Miller (Victoria & Albert Museum, London) ; Jean-Michel Minovez (université de Toulouse 2) ; France Nerlich (université de Tours) ; Odile Nouvel (Paris) ; Jean-Michel Olivier (université de Toulouse 2) ; Hans Ottomeyer (Berlin) ; Daniel Roche (Collège de France, Paris) ; Bénédicte Savoy (Technische Universität, Berlin) ; Patrick Verley (Geneva).
Happy Birthday, Sir Joshua!
Joshua Reynolds, Self-portrait, ca. 1747–49 (London: National
Portrait Gallery). Image from Wikimedia Commons
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To mark the birthday of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), who would turn 290 today, I draw readers’ attention to this blog posting from the material culture seminar series organized by CRASSH at the University of Cambridge. Katy Barrett summarizes presentations made by Matthew Hunter and Mark Hallett on June 11, each of whom addressed Reynolds’s output under the larger rubric of ‘painted things’. Audio is available here»
Recent TLS Reviews (5 July 2013)
The eighteenth century in The Times Literary Supplement (5 July 2013). . .
Angus Trumble, “Six Half-Lengths: Review of James Stourton and Charles Sebag-Montefiore, The British as Art Collectors, From the Tudors to the Present (Scala, 2012),” TLS (5 July 2013), pp. 3-4.
. . . The British as Art Collectors, liberally and beautifully illustrated, sets out the history of the art-collecting impulse in Britain from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present. Shaping it into four densely packed, chronological sections, James Stourton and Charles Sebag-Montefiore deal, first, with “Royalty” (in other words, collecting at Court, above all the assembly and dispersal of the superb collection of King Charles I at Whitehall); “Aristocracy” (the principally eighteenth-century Whig Grand Tour and country-house phenomena which Quatremère de Quincy had in mind); “Plutocracy” (the transitional period brought about by the displacement effects of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars); and, finally, “Democracy” (which concerns the arrival of the public art museum in the early nineteenth century, its proliferation, and the gradual institutionalization, professionalization and broadening of the collecting impulse into our time).
But this is an over-simplification, for the history of collecting is really the history of individual shoppers, and, occasionally, partnerships or syndicates such as that of the coal and canal magnate the third Duke of Bridgewater, with budgets ranging from the merely large to the positively obscene, and not necessarily husbanded with corresponding degrees of wisdom. It is also the history of sweatypalmed acquisitiveness, of rapacious greed, and also of processes of dissolution and loss – an invariably human story in which mostly anonymous crate-makers, removalists and shipping agents must figure prominently, while debt, disease, dispossession and death often interrupted grand schemes. . .
Perhaps the principal pleasure of The British as Art Collectors . . is the intelligence and effectiveness with which a mass of contemporary illustrative material is marshalled to open a window onto cultural worlds. If at times the text is weighed down by lengthy descriptions of who owned what when, there is also a wealth of information, current and historical, in purely visual form. . .
The full review is available here (subscription required)
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Albert Rivero, “Truths to Life: Review of John Bender, Ends of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2012),” TLS (5 July 2013), p. 12.
The publication of Imagining the Penitentiary in 1987 established John Bender as a compelling critic of eighteenth-century British literature and culture. That book, written in imitation of Michel Foucault, connected novels by Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding to the panoptic model of incarceration that was then emerging. Since then, Bender has published a number of important and groundbreaking essays, ranging widely and often brilliantly over various topics and disciplines. Ends of Enlightenment gathers ten of those essays, grouped under three headings (Enlightenment Knowledge, Enlightenment Novels and Enlightenment Frameworks), with a framing introduction elucidating their common themes and concepts. . .
Novelistic realism has a dark ideological side, but not all essays here cast a suspicious eye on Enlightenment. In its ideal quest for universal and objective knowledge, available in conversation and in print to men and women from every walk of life (Jürgen Habermas’s “public sphere,” a construct Bender invokes frequently), the Enlightenment had many salutary effects. Some of these, in fragmentary and surprising ways – Bender regards the democratically composed Wikipedia as today’s version of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie – are still very much with us.
It is in fact the sceptical David Hume who has displaced Foucault as Bender’s principal point of reference, and who inspires the modes of inquiry and ordering knowledge in Ends of Enlightenment. . .
The full review is available here (subscription required)
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James Hall, “Fade to Grey: Review of the exhibition Paper Palaces: The Topham Collection as a Source for British Neo-Classicism, Eton College Library,” TLS (5 July 2013), pp. 17-18.
. . . Expertly curated by Lucy Gwynn and Adriano Aymonino, Paper Palaces explores the influence exerted on architect-designers by illustrations of antique decorative painting commissioned by Richard Topham (1671-1730), Old Etonian antiquary and MP for Windsor. . .
The exhibition suggests Topham was rather more single-minded and original than Pope would have us believe, even if he did use agents in Italy to amass his roughly 2500 documentary drawings of Roman antiquities. Topham’s was the largest and most systematic collection of its kind in England, unique in being organized by location like a tourist guidebook, with every drawing clearly indexed in his own
hand. . .
New Acquisition | Portrait by Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller
Press release (July 2013) from Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum:
Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, Henri Bertholet-Campan at Age Two, exhibited at the Salon of 1787 (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, NM 7133)
Nationalmuseum’s collection of Swedish-French paintings from the 18th century now includes a portrait of the two-year-old Henri Bertholet-Campan (1784–1821), painted by Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller. The boy was the son of Marie Antoinette’s First Lady of the Bedchamber Henriette Genet-Campan. The portrait depicts him with his dog Aline in the English landscape garden at the family’s summer house in Croissy outside Paris. The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1787, but under the rather anonymous title of A Child Playing with a Dog.
Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller (1751–1811) trained under his second cousin Alexander Roslin in Paris and studied at the French Academy in Rome. When Wertmüller returned to the French capital in spring 1781, he found it difficult to obtain work as a portraitist and instead earned his keep as a copyist at Roslin’s studio. Here he was discovered by the Swedish Ambassador Gustaf Filip Creutz, who made several important commissions. This in turn resulted in Gustav III convincing France’s Queen Marie Antoinette, during his stay in Paris in the summer of 1784, to let Wertmüller paint her portrait as a gift to the Swedish King. The portrait is currently held in the collections of Nationalmuseum.
King Gustav III had intended this to be Wertmüller’s ticket to a successful career in Paris, but jealousies abounded. When the portrait of Marie Antoinette was exhibited in August 1785, it was attacked by the critics. The Queen was also unimpressed. The artist fell into a deep depression, but recovered enough to make the necessary changes before the portrait was dispatched to Sweden the following year. It was Wertmüller’s friend Henriette Genet-Campan who came to his aid. The fact that Wertmüller even got paid was largely down to Mme Campan, since she managed the Queen’s purse and was intimately involved in the royal finances. For security reasons a mutual friend, Gabriel Lindblom, acted as a go-between in contact between the two. Lindblom had been governor to Mme Campan’s younger brother Edmond Genet and served as an interpreter at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Versailles. This explains why Wertmüller was so well informed and why he came to paint almost a dozen portraits of various members of the Genet-Campan family.
As a show of gratitude to his friend Mme Campan, Wertmüller painted a portrait of her two-year-old son Henri in autumn 1786. He had already immortalised the child as a new-born baby and would continue to paint other relatives of Mme Campan. These include the portrait of her sister Adélaïde Auguié dressed as a milkmaid in the royal dairy at Petit Trianon-Le Hameau, painted in 1787. This painting has been part of the museum’s collection since 1951 as a gift from the Friends of Nationalmuseum. A study for the portrait of the French Crown Prince Louis has also since been purchased. Now this latest acquisition adds another piece to the fascinating puzzle of how Wertmüller came to paint his portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette.
Exhibition | The Male Nude: Drawings from the Paris Academy
From Paul Holberton Publishing:
The Male Nude: Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Paris Academy
The Wallace Collection, London, 24 October 2013 – 19 January 2014
Including artists such as Rigaud, Boucher, Nattier, Pierre, Carle van Loo, Gros and Jean-Baptiste Isabey, this catalogue of nearly forty French drawings of male nude figures, all drawn between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries, accompanies an exhibition that is unprecedented in Britain. All from France’s equivalent of the Royal Academy, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, many of the extraordinary drawings are by artists represented in the Wallace Collection.
Painting in eighteenth-century France before the Revolution was centred on the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which had been founded in 1648. The purpose of the Academy was to train the most important artists and to provide them with the raw materials for successful history painting, which was by far the most esteemed genre for an artist to practise. Budding painters or sculptors would be apprenticed to a master, but much of their training would take place at the Academy where the drawing of the male human figure was at the core of the curriculum. Only after mastering the copying of drawings and engravings, and then casts of antique sculptures, would the student be allowed to progress to drawing the nude figure in the life class. The drawings they produced there were so associated with the Academy that they came to be known as ‘académies’.
The male human figure was regarded as the very foundation of painting and sculpture; it had to be mastered by any aspiring artist of the highest class. No female artists were admitted to the Academy and all models were male. This practice in itself went on to create problems for artists, who lacking the necessary training to portray the female form, were compelled to search out models, not always in the most respectable and salubrious settings. Classes were complemented by courses on anatomy, perspective, geometry, literature and history. The Academy’s training was learned and structured, and, although it was sometimes criticized for its rigour and its insistence on discipline and uniformity, it produced superb draughtsmen. Some of the artists featured became painting Masters of their generation, focusing on historical and allegorical pictures. Others utilised their training in a variety of artistic fields, including Bachelier, who went on to assume the role of Director of Design and Decoration at the Sèvres porcelain factory, influencing many of the pieces exhibited in the Wallace Collection.
Variety and beauty are omnipresent in The Male Nude. The works show figures – sometimes single, sometimes two together – in an enormous variety of poses and in various degrees of light and shade. The study of physiognomic expression was also taught at the Academy, and the facial expressions of the figures always complement the poses they adopt, whether they show, say, serenity, exertion, pleasure or anger.
As a descendant of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts owns an incomparable collection of these académies which have come down to it directly from the Academy’s teaching classes. It also owns an outstanding collection of drawings, second only to the Louvre in France, comprising not only a superb group of French drawings, but many works by some of the other great draughtsmen of European art, such as Raphael, Dürer and Michelangelo. This exhibition at the Wallace Collection will be an excellent opportunity for collections at ENSBA – which are open to anyone to visit – to become much better known to a British audience, as well as allowing visitors an insight into this influential, but now non-existent world.
The Wallace Collection displays one of the greatest collections of eighteenth-century French paintings in the world, and these drawings from Paris will make an excellent complement to them. The Hertfords collected almost no academic, or historical, works for which these drawings were the basis, favouring ‘pleasing pictures’: portraits and landscapes. In many ways, The Male Nude will offer the visitor a new dimension and complete the jigsaw. Seen alongside our world-class holdings of eighteenth-century furniture and decorative arts, they will provide a thorough understanding of the period.
Catalogue edited by Emmanuelle Brugerolles with Georges Brunel and Camille Debrabant, The Male Nude: Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Paris Academy (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2013), 144 pages, £25.
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