New Book | Guide to the Sculpture in the Mansion House
From Paul Holberton Publishing:
Julius Bryant, ‘Magnificent Marble Statues’: A Guide to the Sculpture in the Mansion House (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2013), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1907372551, £20.
The Mansion House, the palatial city residence of the Lord Mayor of London, is home to one of the capital’s finest collections of British sculpture from the 18th and 19th centuries. Forming part of the spectacular setting for official functions, as well as the background to busy offices and the home of the Lord Mayor and his family, the sculpture ranges from handsome chimneypieces and elaborate stuccowork wall decorations to heroic single statues of figures from British literature and history.
Described by the architectural historian Nicolaus Pevsner as “magnificent marble statues,” the sculptures are almost unknown to the general public. Their significance, however, is much greater than as an example of the changing fortunes of Victorian sculpture and of the fluctuating attitudes of the Corporation of London to art patronage. Taken as a whole, the sheer range and variety is exceptional. After the monuments in Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral and the galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Mansion House presents the most extensive permanent exhibition of British sculpture in London. It differs from these rival collections in the range of its sculpture, from Palladian chimneypieces carved by City stonemasons and virtuoso Rococo plasterwork by anonymous stuccadors to heroic ideal statues made to rival the greatest works from antiquity and the Renaissance.
The time has come for a fresh appreciation of these “magnificent marble statues.” The first book on the sculpture ever published, this beautifully illustrated study reveals the subjects of the sculptures, the stories behind the commissions and the importance of the artists themselves. New photography highlights the qualities of the individual sculptures in their historic settings. A unique insight to the challenges and delights of living, working and raising a family in Mansion House is given in an introductory essay by the Lady Mayoress, Clare Gifford. The sculptures and architecture are described by Julius Bryant, Keeper of Word and Image at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This beautifully produced new handbook provides a companion volume to The Harold Samuel Collection, Dutch and Flemish Pictures at the Mansion House (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2012) by Michael Hall and Clare Gifford.
Fellowship | Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellowship at The Met
The Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Applications due by 15 October 2013
The Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellowship allows emerging scholars to become fully integrated into a curatorial department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and conduct research on a specific pre-determined curatorial project. Projects are available in European Paintings, Modern and Contemporary Art, Islamic Art, Musical Instruments, or The Robert Lehman Collection. Alongside departmental curators and with guidance from a supervisor, fellows gain comprehensive training through exposure to a full range of curatorial work and opportunities to conduct scholarly research within the Museum. One Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial fellow will be selected for 2014–2016.
Candidates must hold a doctoral degree (or international equivalent) in art history or archaeology in a field related to one of the areas listed above and conferred within five years from the start date of the fellowship (between September 1, 2008, and September 1, 2013). The fellow will receive an annual salary of $50,392 plus research and travel expenses up to a maximum of $6,000 and fringe benefits.
Further information is available here»
Fellowships | Art History Fellowships at The Met
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art History Fellowships, 2014–15
Applications due by 1 November 2013
Art History Fellowships are offered for PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and senior museum professionals interested in furthering their scholarly research within one of the Museum’s curatorial departments. Working with supervisors and departmental staff, fellows are able to utilize the Museum’s collections as a way to expand their own research and dialogue about art in their field. Throughout their time at the Museum fellows may contribute to departmental projects that complement their research. They will also share their research at the spring fellows’ colloquia in which they give a brief presentation on their work in progress. All fellowships must take place between September 1, 2014, and August 31, 2015. The stipend amount for one year is $42,000 for senior fellows and $32,000 for pre-doctoral fellows, with up to an additional $6,000 for travel. Health care benefits are included.
Further information is available here»
Lecture | Anne Lafont on Proposals for an Atlantic Portraiture
From the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU:
Anne Lafont | Proposals for an Atlantic Portraiture: Paris, Philadelphia, Saint-Domingue, ca. 1800
Institute of Fine Arts–NYU, New York, 8 October 2013
Anne Lafont will consider visual cultures of alterity in the era of Atlantic Revolutions (eighteenth and nineteenth century). First, she will identify an unrecognized body of works and discuss the opportunity of studying it as a whole. Next she will address the pictorial and academic category of portraiture when discussing images of Haitian heroes. Finally, she will consider how three stylistic communities – Paris, Philadelphia, Saint-Domingue – are working together across continents
Anne Lafont is an Associate Professor of Modern Art History at the University of Paris-Est Marne la Vallée and Chief Editor of Perspective, la revue de l’INHA (French National Institute of Art History). A former fellow at the Villa Medici, she devoted her thesis to the painter Anne-Louis Girodet and has since worked on artistic theory and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual arts, with a special attention to the revolutionary period, race and aesthetics, and gender issues.
Tuesday, October 8, 12:30pm
Institute of Fine Arts-NYU, Loeb Room, 1 East 78th Street, New York
Reservations are required; please click here.
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Rendez-vous
In Fall 2013, the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU inaugurates Rendez-vous, a seminar on French art (18th to 20th centuries) held monthly throughout the 2013–2014 academic year. International scholars are invited to present their research in an informal and creative setting for approximately 30 minutes, followed by an open discussion with students and colleagues. Rendez-vous focuses on French art in the broadest sense: ‘French’ is interpreted in an extensive way, including global exchanges, political dimension and colonial history, and ‘Art’ includes painting, architecture and sculpture, but also material and visual culture. Rendez-vous offers an occasion to learn about current innovative research by international and engaging scholars. The seminar aims to open up an exchange of methodologies, thoughts and ideas in a participatory atmosphere.
Rendez-vous is organized by Noémie Etienne, IFA/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2013–2015). These lectures begin at 12:30pm in the Loeb Room at the Institute of Fine Arts. They are open to the public, but RSVPs are required.
Upcoming Lectures
8 November 2013 | Chonja Lee, University of Zurich
L’Âme de Lotus: Floral Animations in French Art around 1900
9 December 2013 | Merel van Tilburg, Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris
Embroidery and Tapestry as History Painting in Belgium and France around 1900: Colonialist Exhibition Pieces by Hélène de Rudder and Georges Rochegrosse
17 February 2014 |Carole Blumenfeld, Palais Fesch-Musée des Beaux-arts d’Ajaccio
Marguerite Gérard: The Most Successful Genre Painter of her Time
Call for Papers | Collecting Prints & Drawings
Collecting Prints & Drawings
Kloster Irsee, 13–15 June 2014
Proposals due by 30 November 2013
Organized by Andrea M. Gáldy, Sylvia Heudecker, and Angela M. Opel
Cabinets of prints and drawings belong to the earliest art collections of Early Modern Europe. From the sixteenth century onwards some of them acquired considerable fame which necessitated an ordered and scientific display. This interdisciplinary conference brings together art historians, historians, curators and collectors and explores topics such as: when, how and why did cabinets of prints and drawings become a specialised part of princely and private collections? How important were collections of prints and drawings for the self-representation of a prince or connoisseur among specialists and social peers? Is the presentation of a picture hang in a gallery, for example by Charles Eisen for the Royal Galleries at Dresden, to be treated as documentary evidence? In how far do we find art historical approaches of systematisation or aesthetic concepts realised within the collections? Are there notable differences in the approach to collecting, presentation and preservation of prints and drawings in diverse parts of the world? What was the afterlife of such collections? What is the interest of institutions in pursuing the activities of art collecting and sponsorship today (banks, industry, foundations, universities)?
Please send your 250-word proposal on these and related themes together with a one-paragraph bio to the organisers at collecting_display@hotmail.com by 30 November 2013.
New Book | The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London
From Oxford University Press:
Hannah Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0199659005, $35.
Caricatured for extravagance, vanity, glamorous celebrity and, all too often, embroiled in scandal and gossip, 18th-century London’s fashionable society had a well-deserved reputation for frivolity. But to be fashionable in 1700s London meant more than simply being well dressed. Fashion denoted membership of a new type of society – the beau monde, a world where status was no longer determined by coronets and countryseats alone but by the more nebulous qualification of metropolitan ‘fashion’. Conspicuous consumption and display were crucial; the right address, the right dinner guests, the right possessions, the right jewels, the right seat at the opera.
The Beau Monde leads us on a tour of this exciting new world, from court and parliament to London’s parks, pleasure grounds, and private homes. From brash displays of diamond jewelry to the subtle complexities of political intrigue, we see how membership of the new elite was won, maintained – and sometimes lost. On the way, we meet a rich and colorful cast of characters, from the newly ennobled peer learning the ropes and the imposter trying to gain entry by means of clever fakery, to the exile banned for sexual indiscretion.
Above all, as the story unfolds, we learn that being a Fashionable was about far more than simply being ‘modish’. By the end of the century, it had become nothing less than the key to power and exclusivity in a changed world.
Hannah Greig is a lecturer in eighteenth-century British history at the University of York. Prior to joining York she held posts at Balliol College, Oxford, and the Royal College of Art. Alongside her academic work, Dr Greig works as a historical adviser for film, television and theatre. Recent credits include the feature film The Duchess (Pathe/BBC films 2008, directed by Saul Dibb) and Jamie Lloyd’s production of The School for Scandal (at the Theatre Royal in Bath).
Exhibition | Georgians Revealed
Press release from the British Library:
Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain
British Library, London, 8 November 2013 — 11 March 2014
Curated by Moira Goff
A view of the first Bridge at Paddington, and the
Accommodation Barge going down the Grand Junction
Canal to Uxbridge © The British Library Board
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Exploring the changing lives of the middle classes, from homes and gardens to entertainment and celebrity, Georgians Revealed will explore the myriad ways in which the Georgians influenced modern Britain between 1714 and 1830 and marks 300 years since the period began. Through over 200 fascinating and rare Georgian artefacts from the Library’s rich collections and other UK cultural institutions, the exhibition will reveal the roots of today’s popular culture as we know it, from theatre-going and a fascination with fashion, to celebrity scandals and gambling.
Curated by specialists from the History and Classics team at the British Library, the exhibition will feature iconic artworks and artefacts from the Georgian period, such as Jeremy Bentham’s violin and Joseph van Aken’s ‘An English Family at Tea’, alongside never before seen rare books, magazines and everyday objects, from the first fashion magazines to exquisite illustrations and designs of British landmarks and buildings still standing today, including the Brighton Pavilion and Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Moira Goff, lead curator of the exhibition, says: “We’re excited to uncover these objects that shed light on daily life in such an exciting time for cultural development. The parallels we can draw between Georgian Britain and today are astonishing and we’re delighted to be able to share these with a wider audience.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by an eclectic range of events celebrating the legacy of the Georgian period, including talks by celebrated chef Heston Blumenthal and historian and author Lucy Inglis.
The 300th anniversary of the accession of George I will be celebrated throughout the UK during 2014 with displays at Kensington Palace, the Handel House Museum and the Foundling Museum among other cultural institutions.
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E V E N T S
Historic Heston Blumenthal
Friday 8 November, 18.30-20.00, £10/£8 concessions
Heston Blumenthal, whose name is synonymous with cutting-edge cuisine, nonetheless finds one of his greatest sources of inspiration from the original and creative recipes from Britain’s rich culinary past. Join Heston for an evening exploring the lasting impact made during the Georgian era on the culinary history of Britain and to discover their influence on some of his creations.
The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour: The Romantics
Tuesday 12 November, 18.30-20.00, £7.50/£5 concessions
Josephine Hart’s passion for poetry and commitment to having it read live electrified the evenings she hosted at the British Library. The events continue on an occasional basis, with no less capacity to move and inspire. Tonight’s programme will be devoted to the great Romantic poets: Keats, Byron and Shelley.
Georgian Londoners: Into the Streets
Sunday 17 November, 14.00 – 15.15, £7.50/ £5 concessions
In 2009 historian Lucy Inglis began her award-winning blog on the lesser-known aspects of London during the eighteenth century. Monarchs, politicians and aristocrats grab the historical limelight, but Lucy’s Georgian Londoners are the men and women who rode the dawn coach to work, opened shops bleary-eyed and hung-over, fell in love, had risky sex in side streets, realized the children had head lice again, paid parking fines, cashed in winning lottery tickets, fought for good causes and committed terrible crimes. In this talk based on her new book, Lucy takes a journey back to a time that through fantastic highs and desperate lows, changed expectations of what life could be.
LATE at the Library: Vice and Virtue
Friday 6 December, 19.30 – 23.00, £12.50
An evening of decadent pleasure and entertainment awaits. Celebrate the legacy of the Georgian era with guest DJ sets, live performance, circus, installations, bar and food and a late night opening of the exhibition. Join the rogues and gents, vamps and ladies for a night of splendour and spectacle.
In association with Georgian Townhouse Parties and Circus Space
Call for Essays | Terra Foundation for American Art Essay Prize
Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize
Submissions due by 15 January 2014
The Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize recognizes excellent scholarship by a non-U.S. scholar in the field of historical American art. Manuscripts should advance understanding of American art, demonstrating new findings and original perspectives. The prize-winning essay will be translated and published in American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s scholarly journal. The winner will receive a $1,000 cash award and a $3,000 travel stipend to give a presentation in Washington, D.C., and meet with museum staff and fellows. This prize is supported by funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
The aim of the award is to stimulate and actively support non-U.S. scholars working on American art topics, foster the international exchange of new ideas, and create a broad, culturally comparative dialogue on American art. Ph.D. candidates and above (or equivalent) are eligible to participate in the competition. Essays may focus on any aspect of historical (pre-1980) American art and visual culture; however, architecture and film studies are not eligible. Preference will be given to studies that address American art within a cross-cultural context and offer new ways of thinking about the material. A strong emphasis on visual analysis is encouraged. Manuscripts previously published in a foreign language are eligible if released within the last two years (please state the date and venue of the previous publication). Essays that have been published in English will not be considered. Authors are invited to submit their own work for consideration. We also urge scholars who know of eligible articles written by others to inform those authors of the prize.
The length of the essay (including endnotes) should be between 7,000 and 8,500 words and should include approximately 12 to 14 illustrations with figure references in the text. The essay should be submitted by e-mail as a Word file, accompanied by a PDF file containing all of the illustrations, along with captions that provide each object’s title, artist, date, medium, dimensions, and current location. All manuscripts should be accompanied by an abstract of 500 to 1,000 words written in English that: 1) clearly states the author’s thesis and the essay’s contribution to the field of American art, and 2) outlines the essay’s basic structure and methodology. A curriculum vitae should be included.
Submissions must be sent to TerraEssayPrize@si.edu by January 15, 2014. Questions or comments may be addressed to the same address.
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Note (added 20 June 2014) — The Smithsonian American Art Museum is pleased to announce that John Fagg, a lecturer in the school of English, drama, and American & Canadian studies at the University of Birmingham in England, is the winner of the 2014 Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize. Fagg’s award-winning essay, “Bedpans and Gibson Girls: Clutter and Matter in John Sloan’s Graphic Art,” will appear in the 2015 volume of American Art (volume 29).
Exhibition | The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints
Though primarily a nineteenth-century show, this exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will appeal to many readers; it comes on the heels of Landscape, Heroes, and Folktales: German Romanticism at The British Museum last year. From the press release:
The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 21 September — 29 December 2013
Curated by John W. Ittmann
Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder, Large Oak Tree Enclosed by a Plank Fence, ca. 1802–4, etching with masked plate tone, 13 x 17 inches, in the manner of the Dutch artist Anthonie Waterloo, 1609–1690 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prints became widely available to growing and increasingly enthusiastic audiences throughout Europe and the United States. The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints tells an important chapter in this story. This exhibition, comprising 125 etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, will explore prints by artists from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from 1770 to 1850, and how printmaking reflected the profound cultural changes that swept across the German-speaking regions of Central Europe during this period. The works in the exhibition represent the many artistic enthusiasms of the age: the Romantic fascination with wild, untamed landscapes teeming with life; the intimate pleasures of family scenes and friendship portraits; the rediscovery of ancient Nordic sagas and traditional fairy tales; and the synthesis of visual art, poetry, and music. The Museum’s encyclopedic collection of prints from this period is the finest in the country and includes rare prints unseen even in the finest European collections.
German Romantic Prints will feature major prints by important artists of the German Romantic era such Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder, and Philipp Otto Runge. The revival of interest in regional folk culture and fairy tales provided a rich source of material for artists of the time, including Ludwig Emil Grimm, the younger brother of the famous Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. His print The Boy Turned into a Fawn, Comforted by His Sister and Watched over by an Angel (1819) was used as the frontispiece of an early edition of his brothers’ famous tales. By the 1830s advances in technology allowed for the printing of large editions, and local art societies began to issue annual prints for members. Two large and elaborate etchings by Eugen Napoleon Neureuther illustrate the tales of Sleeping Beauty (1836) and Cinderella (1847) and attest to the continuing popularity of these stories throughout the era.
Caspar David Friedrich, one of the most important German artists of his generation, made only a handful of prints in his career. German Romantic Prints will include his rare woodcut, Woman Seated under a Spider’s Web (1803–4), a quintessential image of the Romantic era: a young woman seated between a pair of barren trees in dense undergrowth, seemingly lost in melancholy meditation on the brevity of life.
In the early 1800s, German artists and art lovers flocked to Dresden to admire Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, a painting represented in this exhibition by an engraving that was once as widely admired as the painting itself. The Sistine Madonna provided the inspiration for Runge’s visionary masterpiece, The Times of Day (Morning, Day, Evening, Night) (1805). This ambitious allegorical series depicting the cycle of life was originally conceived of as a set of mural-sized painted panels, but was realized only in the form of four large etchings, a rare first edition of which will be displayed. These large prints are bordered by delicate ornamental arabesques composed of intricate plant forms, music-playing infants, and cherubs.
An overview of a vital chapter in the history of European printmaking, German Romantic Prints illuminates one of the richest yet least known areas of the Museum’s collection. A selection of prints presented in display cases will permit enjoyment of the more finely detailed prints up close.
Review | A Selection of Digital Humanities Projects
The current issue of Renaissance Quarterly includes Michael Ullyot’s assessment of five digital resources, several of which are relevant to eighteenth-century studies:
Michael Ullyot, “Review Essay: Digital Humanities Projects,” Renaissance Quarterly 66 (Fall 2013): 937–47.
“Are databases the defining genre of the twenty-first century? This question was at the core of a debate in 2007 over the nature of the Walt Whitman Archive in PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America). With digital resources now firmly established as an essential scholarly research tool, the question remains: what status do we afford databases relative to other forms of publication, like editions or monographs? The question is pertinent not just to tenure and promotion decisions, as the MLA Committee on Information Technology recently advocated, but more fundamentally to the circulation and provocation of ideas.1 If databases help us to interact with texts and cultural objects differently, enabling us to interpret them in ways we
could not otherwise do, how do they differ from monographs or journal articles? . . .” (937)
1. “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media.” http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital; accessed 17 January 2013.
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· Mapping the Republic of Letters, which draws on the University of Oxford’s Electronic Enlightenment data, a collection containing over 50,000 letters.
· The Map of Early Modern London, a digital atlas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London (Ullyot references, in passing, Locating London’s Past, which is based on John Rocque’s 1746 map).
· 1641 Depositions Project, which collects 8,000 manuscript accounts of the 1641 Irish rebellion of Catholic gentry against Protestant settlers from England and Scotland.
· The Medici Archive Project, which aims to catalog the Medici Archival Collection (Mediceo del Principato), a collection of over four million letters written between 1537 and 1743. To date, approximately 10 percent of the archive is included within the database, though Ullyot explains a number of new, “promising” features aimed at making the platform more efficient and more interactive.
· Early English Books Online, a collection of texts published between 1473 and 1700. “What makes EEBO truly innovative and interesting is the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), under which the University of Michigan and Oxford University began in 1999 to convert these PDFs [created from microfilm copies of the books] into fully searchable texts. The TCP has focused on transcribing all 70,000 of the unique monographs in EEBO’s collection. These transcriptions are cross-linked to the page images they are taken from, so they are fully integrated into EEBO. At present, only members of the TCP consortium of libraries are able to access this resource, but it will ultimately pass into the public domain [starting in 2015 and finishing up in 2020]” (945).
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