New Book | Reynolds: Portraiture in Action
Forthcoming in September from Yale UP:
Mark Hallet, Reynolds: Portraiture in Action (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2014), 496 pages, ISBN: 978-0300196979, £50 / $75.
A deeply researched and elegantly written study on Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)—Georgian England’s most celebrated portraitist and the first president of the British Royal Academy of Arts—this lavishly illustrated volume explores all aspects of Reynolds’s portraiture. Mark Hallett provides detailed, compelling readings of Reynolds’s most celebrated and striking works, investigating the ways in which they were appreciated and understood in his own lifetime. Recovering the artist’s dynamic interaction with his sitters and patrons, and revealing the dramatic impact of his portraits within the burgeoning exhibition culture of late-18th-century London, Hallett also unearths the intimate relationship between Reynolds’s paintings and graphic art. Reynolds: Portraiture in Action offers a new understanding of the artist’s career within the extremely competitive London art world and takes readers into the engrossing debates and controversies that captivated the city and its artists.
Mark Hallett is director of studies at The Paul Mellon Centre
for Studies in British Art.
Exhibition | Swedish Wooden Toys
On view this summer at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the exhibition comes to the Bard Graduate Center next fall:
Swedish Wooden Toys / Les jouets en bois suédois
Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 19 June 2014 — 11 January 2015
Bard Graduate Center, New York, September 2015
Patins à glace pour enfants, 1800-1850, Suède
Focusing on the Swedish tradition of wooden playthings derived from abundant forests of fir, pine, spruce, and birch and the rural pursuits of woodworking and carpentry, curators BGC Founder and Director Susan Weber and Professor Amy F. Ogata investigate their histories of manufacture, consumption, and representation from the seventeenth century to the present. Although Germany, Japan, and the United States have historically produced and exported the largest numbers of toys worldwide, Sweden has a long and enduring history of designing and making wooden toys—from the simplest handmade plaything to more elaborate forms reflecting the computer age. For the presentation in Paris, Swedish Wooden Toys features more than 250 toys and related objects drawn primarily from the collections of the Sovrintendenza ai Beni Culturali di Roma Capitale, Italy, the BRIO Lekoseum in Osby, Sweden, and Les Arts Décoratifs.
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Catalogue published by Yale UP:
Amy F. Ogata and Susan Weber, eds., Swedish Wooden Toys (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0300200751, $65.
The Swedish toy industry has long produced vast quantities of colorful, quality wooden items that reflect Scandinavian design and craft traditions. This superbly illustrated book, including specially commissioned photography, looks at over 200 years of Swedish toys, from historic dollhouses to the latest designs for children. Featuring rattles, full-size rocking horses, dollhouses, and building blocks to skis, sleds, and tabletop games with intricate moving parts, Swedish Wooden Toys also addresses images of Swedish childhood, the role of the beloved red Dala horse in the creation of national identity, the vibrant tradition of educational toys, and the challenges of maintaining craft manufacturing in an era of global mass-production.
Amy F. Ogata is professor of 19th- and 20th-century architectural and design history, Bard Graduate Center, New York. Susan Weber is founder and director of the Bard Graduate Center, New York, and Iris Horowitz Professor in the
History of the Decorative Arts.
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